Executive Box Lunch
John:
would any executive who had other options ever choose to eat a box lunch like well it's like anything that's executive it's always the name is always two levels of status up from the thing otherwise it wouldn't be a marketing name you know so executives would never have an executive box lunch 17 year olds don't read 17 magazine and on and on aspirational i don't think executives have any form of lunch that comes in a box
John:
They should call it Executive Sack Lunch.
Marco:
There was nothing they could put in that box that would make that name seem reasonable.
Marco:
It's just filled with caviar.
John:
Sack Lunch, the famous movie from Seinfeld.
Casey:
To begin with follow-up today, a friend of the show, Daniel Jalkit, has spent what seemed to be a surprising amount of time doing research on Moscone lunches.
Casey:
And I'm glad that Daniel did it so we don't have to.
Casey:
He has looked up some information about the Moscone box lunches.
Casey:
We will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
there's a few highlights that i wanted to call everyone's attention to uh the quote executive box lunch quote is 39 and 25 cents in the year 2017 according to daniel um i love so much that this is called the executive box yes the executive box lunch i am not kidding
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, Craig Federighi was allegedly eating one of these things backstage before Talk Show Live, and he is an executive.
Marco:
And so, therefore, I guess that's aptly named.
Marco:
But I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
When all of us are eating it in the big dining hall, I sure don't feel like an executive.
John:
Well, keep going, Casey, because $39 does not include all the pricing and options included in this special Porsche lunch if you want the floor mats and all four wheels and also a transmission.
John:
It costs more.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
So continuing on, this is the description of the executive box launch, which Daniel notes.
Casey:
It's what he remembers from Dub Dub, and it sounds the same to me.
Casey:
So the description is as follows.
Casey:
Four compartment includes compostable service, because California, 25 guests minimum.
Casey:
Sandwich wrapper entree salad includes a choice of side salad, dessert, and fruit.
Casey:
To accompany your box lunches, we suggest adding assorted soft drinks and bottled water.
Casey:
Okay, so let's talk about soft drinks and bottled water.
Casey:
Soft drinks and water are not included.
Casey:
A 22% service fee, as well as sales tax, which is almost 10%, are also added to the price.
Casey:
So that $39.25 box lunch comes out to around $52, and you haven't had anything to drink yet.
Casey:
And this is this is Daniel writing.
Casey:
Want to really lose your lunch?
Casey:
Each bottled water is five dollars and twenty five cents coming to seven dollars after service and taxes.
Casey:
And this is, again, still Daniel and Marco's long lost strawberry sea monster at Walla, which is probably classified as assorted juices, would set Apple back an additional eight dollars a bottle.
Casey:
Add it all up.
Casey:
And it's not hard to imagine that meals and snacks are coming to one hundred dollars a day or five hundred dollars a week.
Casey:
per person.
Casey:
Nearly a third of the $1,600 WWDC admission fee likely pays for food.
Casey:
Are you kidding me with this garbage?
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
I don't know how the people who do it in San Jose, how their box launches compare.
Casey:
But the good news is the, quote, gourmet box lunch from the caterers in San Jose comes in at only $22.
Casey:
Mineral waters, soft drinks, juices, and bottled water are a mere $4.50 each.
Casey:
So a considerable savings once they move to San Jose on lunches alone.
Casey:
How can you spend one spend $500 a week on those lunches?
Casey:
Like I was sitting here mostly defending them the last couple episodes.
Casey:
Yeah, they're not that bad.
Casey:
You know, they're passable.
Casey:
They work.
Casey:
Not at $500 for the week.
Casey:
Are you frigging kidding me with this insanity?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Hard pass.
Casey:
No.
John:
So if they drop the price of the tickets by $500, like maybe they gave that $500 back to the people, and we all had to leave the building and find someplace else to eat and then come back...
John:
I'm actually not sure that that would be better for the conference.
John:
You're like, oh, just give me that 500 bucks.
John:
I could spend that in San Francisco.
John:
But then you got to go find someplace to eat.
John:
And I'm not sure the eateries that you can get to and back to the conference center in time to get the after lunch sessions can support that many people or are any better.
John:
So, oh, no, they're better, but they probably can't support the people.
Marco:
You're probably right about that, but they are definitely better.
John:
i don't know like it depends like you can go to the whatever the little mall thingy that's over there and i mean yeah i mean the mall food court is better than than the body it is better but you gotta wait in these long lines and then you get your thing and you gotta find someplace to eat it and you gotta get back and that's like the closest possible choice uh i'm i'm wondering i would actually mostly be willing to pay for the convenience of
John:
not having to leave the uh the conference center uh while eating lunches that i don't really like because that convenience is i mean and obviously the the ideal choice would be to be able to get food from someplace else but as daniel points out that is in their rules you can't get food from any place else in case it wasn't clear yeah there is no choice apple can't say oh we're just gonna we're gonna bring in uh you know someone else to cater nope not not even an option
Casey:
It's just insanity to me, like how they can get fleeced that badly.
Casey:
It's not Apple's fault.
Casey:
It's just the way of the world.
Casey:
But oh, my goodness, it is just barbaric that that's the answer.
John:
Well, the way of the world in Apple, Apple world is like if Apple, if this bothered Apple all that much.
John:
Just buy Moscone.
John:
I saw a tweet as I was catching up on my far behind on Twitter.
John:
Someone saying that with its cash, Apple could buy all of the Major League Baseball, NFL, and NHL teams and still have $100 billion left over.
Casey:
It's so crazy.
Casey:
And then somebody well-actuallyed that person and was like, well, actually, that doesn't account for taxes.
Casey:
But still, the point stands.
Casey:
It's preposterous.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about next iPhone rumors.
Casey:
We talked in the past that there may be a Touch ID button on the back of the phone, which...
Casey:
Some people think is the end of times.
Casey:
A lot of people like myself think, whatever.
Casey:
But somebody, a couple of people actually pointed out, well, what does this mean for the home button then?
Casey:
Because a home button on the back does not seem good.
Casey:
So, how does that work?
Casey:
And I don't know is the answer, but I would guess that there is some sort of home button, even a faux home button on the chin of the front of the phone.
Casey:
I think that's what they've probably started down the path of with the immobile or non-movable, whatever the word I'm looking for is, home button on the iPhone 7.
Casey:
and maybe the whole thing becomes a home button i'm not really sure but it's certainly an interesting point i hadn't considered that you know today touch id and home button are you know kind of co-located but in the future maybe they won't be so john what do you think about this
John:
Yeah, I think they will be separate because it is more awkward to press a button on the back of the phone, even a fake, like, non-button.
John:
I mean, they can have it there in addition, I suppose, because, again, it doesn't move.
John:
It's not as if they have to make room for some kind of mechanism, and it's already going to be this little cutout area.
John:
But I think they will continue to have...
John:
a home button on the front of the phone now whether that home button is virtual kind of like the touch bar where it's just a bottom section of the screen or something like that there's lots of been lots of rumors in the past although i haven't heard any recently about how the touch bar technology of having this little separate accessory screen controlled by the os and you know accessible perhaps accessible to applications through an api kind of like all you know the android soft buttons and stuff like that might be a thing that would appear on a phone but even if that it doesn't exist at all
John:
uh the idea of there being a that you can squeeze the bottom part of your phone to go home like whether you can want to consider that a button and especially if it's completely embedded in the screen and there is no it's just a flat featureless piece of glass with no little cutout or circle or whatever we're still going to call that the home button and i'm thinking that they're not going to get rid of that no matter where the touch it essentially goes so it's basically a divorce of home button and touch id where the home button can stay on the front but because of the because of the way it's done and the edge to the screen and everything
John:
Uh, the touch ID sensor goes on the back and we just squeezed the bottom of our phones.
John:
And I think I would mostly be okay with that too.
John:
Like, again, I'll have to see, have to try it for a while to see, uh, if I missed the little indented circle, a lot of, uh, listeners wrote in to express love for the little indented circle as a way to feel like which end of your phone is up or like exactly where you have to squeeze.
John:
But if you can squeeze anywhere along the bottom edge of the phone, uh,
John:
I guess then your only problem is if you have your thing upside down, but I suppose you have the lightning port to check whether that's the case.
John:
Anyway, it's pretty weird that all of these rumors about the next phone surround actual important physical changes.
John:
to the exterior of the phone because all the past phones including like this you know six and seven generations where it's kind of the same on the outside have been about like what does it look like and what are the materials but the the design of it's a you know a rectangle with a circle button on the bottom that you press in to go home and then i guess the addition of touch id have been so constant this is the first phone that's like that the story on this phone is
John:
it may be differently shaped differently proportioned and functionality on it may be moving around in ways that has never moved around before so that's that's kind of exciting uh and you know kind of also risky and that like they have a model that works here with this rectangle with the home button on the bottom and they've iterated and iterated and refined and iterated and
John:
But the basic functions and stuff have been the same, aside from, you know, like Casey mentioned in the last show, that the power button moved to the side, which is somewhat explicable by the increasing size of the phone and difficulty people would have reaching a lot up to the top.
John:
But other than that...
John:
the phone design of the phone has been pretty oh yeah and the headphone the headphone jack moving from top to bottom but the the physical design of the phone has been pretty constant and i'm kind of excited to see them you know say all bets are off we're moving things around and we're going to try something new so i actually had a chance to play with the galaxy s8 a couple days ago in a best buy
Marco:
with the exception of it feeling way too tall for its width and it being hard to reach things as a result, I actually really enjoyed the general look of the edge-to-edge on the sides screen and everything.
Marco:
And the way they did the home button, I just kind of instinctively force-touched the lower area where the home button would be on an iPhone, and it turns out that's exactly what they want you to do.
Marco:
And it just clicked, and it recognized any firm press in that area as a home button click.
Marco:
And so the very first thing I tried worked and was correct.
Marco:
And then as I was playing with it over a few minutes, I did that here and there a few more times.
Marco:
And every time it just worked exactly as expected.
Marco:
And even when there was something on screen there, you know, something from the foreground app that is in that spot that, you know, if it misinterprets it as a touch, it would have activated that thing.
Marco:
But every time it interpreted it correctly and it was great.
Marco:
It was totally fine.
Marco:
So, you know, if Apple is going to go in a direction like that, where part of the screen just becomes the home button,
Marco:
I think they totally can.
Marco:
We've seen with the iPhone 7 force touch button that that's a possibility.
Marco:
That's totally fine.
Marco:
And now we see with the S8 that it actually really does work.
Marco:
The only major question I would have for it is, how do they show this to people?
Marco:
How is it handled in the UI?
Marco:
Does the usable area of the screen for apps actually extend that far like it does on the S8?
Marco:
Or is there that little reserve or like you were saying, John, maybe like a touch bar like...
Marco:
you know, API area down there where like, you know, apps would only actually take up like the middle 80% of the height and, you know, maybe not the very top and bottom or something like that, you know.
Marco:
But anyway, you know, having the just bottom area of the screen accept a firm touch as a home button, that works just fine.
Casey:
I was going to ask if there are any accessibility implications for that.
Casey:
But I would suppose with that, I forget what you call it, but we talked about it a lot, like several months ago, where you have a little on screen button that lets you do the home button and like, and all sorts of other gestures.
Casey:
What's the name of that thing?
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking?
Casey:
Assistive touch, I think.
Casey:
Yeah, assistive touch, something like that.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I was about to ask, you know, is this an accessibility issue?
Casey:
But I would suppose assistive touch would fix any of those problems.
Casey:
I'm not sure, but it's a change.
Marco:
Well, the issue would be that you could no longer feel the button.
Marco:
Like, because, you know, now you can feel that ring, you know, so, you know, like John was saying, you can more easily tell, like, which direction the phone is oriented.
Marco:
So without like a physical depression on the front surface where the home button goes, it's harder to tell which way is up by feel alone.
Marco:
So that would be an issue for sure.
Marco:
And I don't know how they would solve that.
Marco:
Maybe you would just start getting used to feeling for like the camera bump or other features in the outside.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
If it is a dedicated area, they could do haptics to make it do the tiniest little jiggle when your finger is over the reserved bottom section of the phone.
John:
There's all sorts of things they can do.
John:
That's interesting.
John:
Playing Switch games with its little... There's been a couple articles recently about the...
John:
the haptic engine in the nintendo switch which is looks like the same tech that apple's been using in its phones what i figure what they're called linear something or other or whatever but it's it's better than the old vibrators and more precise and they're using it in games uh to make it feel like things on screen have some kind of physical presence and it's surprisingly easy to fool us i mean just we just talked about the home button last time like it doesn't feel like a button
John:
But it feels like a thing that we rapidly get used to and come to accept as the physical reality of the phone.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think the best thing would be like if you could turn off.
John:
I mean, I suppose you can.
John:
Isn't there some way to turn off vibration?
John:
Can you turn off the haptic engine entirely?
Casey:
I would assume so, but I don't know.
John:
Yeah, but anyway, if it did turn off, our devices would feel broken in a different way because we'd be like, this is not how my glass rectangle is supposed to move or feel.
John:
So adding something like, oh, when your finger physically touches the correct bottom part of the phone, it gives the tiniest little jiggle, and that would be a physical way for you to feel with your hands which side is the top or bottom of my phone.
John:
It wouldn't activate anything yet because you haven't actually pressed, but basically when you're feeling for that little circle, you want to know which side is up.
John:
You need that information to be provided physically.
John:
That little circle is about as subtle as the little jiggle could be.
John:
And once you find which side is up, if the whole bottom of the phone functions as one giant button, it's even easier to hit than that little circle.
John:
So that problem is solved.
Casey:
So real-time follow-up to turn off System Haptics, which has a subtitle of Play Haptics for System Controls and Interactions.
Casey:
That's in settings, sounds, and haptics.
Casey:
And then there's options for vibrate on ring, vibrate on silent, sound and vibration patterns.
Casey:
And all the way at the bottom is system haptics, which is a switch yes, no.
John:
Does that turn off the home button?
John:
Just switch them all and find out.
Casey:
No, the home button still does a haptic click.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I presume because it would be really, really eerie if it didn't.
Casey:
It would feel broken.
John:
I mean, to us, if you're used to it, it's like it's whatever you get used to, but it would feel like it's not the same physical device anymore.
John:
right that's the thing about haptics like oh it's it's faking a physical this this is it gets an odd to my pet peeves that my uh uh you know things being done in hardware on video cards which is like now an increasingly dated peeve from the 80s uh mechanical keyboards that phrase drives me nuts because you know like please show me the non-mechanical keyboards um
Casey:
I can do that.
Casey:
Do you remember when they used to have the ones that they would shine?
Casey:
It looked like a laser keyboard, but it wasn't actually lasers, I'm sure.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And how did you use those keyboards, Casey?
Casey:
You put your fingers on a surface.
John:
Ah, you take your finger and you move it.
John:
No, no, no.
Casey:
No, you're missing the point.
Casey:
You're just shining light on a surface, say, like on a desktop.
John:
no john's saying your finger's the machine i know what thing you're talking about but you can't activate it with your mind you have to physically move your hands and press them into certain areas you don't have to press but you have to place your fingers into the zone where the keys are that is a physical action but the keyboard itself is not moving john wait so like when when a conductor waves the stick around in front of a band is that considered a mechanical device
John:
you know yeah i i would say i don't know it's it's difficult to say when you consider mechanical because it's not like that light is just being emitted naturally from the desktop we need an episode of mechanical or not this is this is definitely a pretty broad definition of mechanical that you're using here right yeah but when people talk about really in the context i'm saying when people talk about mechanical keyboards they're they're saying as compared to the keyboard that i'm sitting in front of which is the apple aluminum extended
John:
which is 100 mechanical the keys move at you know making contact with a thing that causes a signal but it's not a quote-unquote mechanical keyboard it's a it's a very strange interpretation can i nitpick your definition of 100 mechanical
John:
yeah what part of it is a mechanical i'm pretty sure there's like there's like a usb controller in there and a bunch no i mean the keyboard part of it i mean it's the same thing with mechanical keyboards when you're just activating a switch it's still electronic it's not like it's steam powered it's not like a typewriter where you're hitting a lever that's causing a big thing to whack into a piece of paper that makes your key
Casey:
Jason Snell, can you fix this for us so we don't have to do it?
John:
I know what people mean when they say mechanical keyboards.
John:
It's just a silly phrase.
John:
It is a term that has taken on this alternate meaning that doesn't really make sense if you think about it, but it is accepted as a term of art, so we all just say it and don't think about it.
Casey:
Help me, Jason Snell.
Casey:
You're my only hope.
John:
But what I was getting at before I derailed myself... I get that reference.
John:
...was the idea that haptics are a replacement for things like the physical home button, right?
Right.
John:
when they're not you know they they work by doing a physical thing something in your phone is moving causing you to feel that motion it's just an entirely different motion than the surface that you pressed moving downwards relative to the surface surrounding it but something is moving and it is and you are feeling it
John:
as a physical sensation so it is an alternate physical action to replace other physical actions is not the removable of like physical buttons with non-physical buttons because i would say the iphone 7 button is still a physical button when haptics are turned on because you press
John:
as a physical action and you tell that your press has been registered as successful because you feel a response the response is not your finger getting lower inside the thing but it is a physical sensation um and so this distinction between physical and non-physical controls as haptics get better like i mean maybe it'll be like mechanical keyboards it's just that that's the way we'll describe it and you know we won't bother thinking about whether it makes sense or not but
John:
it is a clever way to make a device more reliable while still doing the thing that works best with humans we have you know hands and fingers that are sensitive and you know that are sensitive to motion and it's a good way to tell how things are happening without looking at them so you can put feel in your pocket just like a physical you know physical buttons as opposed to those non-physical buttons i can feel where the volume controls are i can feel where the power button is
John:
I can feel where the home button is.
John:
I can feel that it has been activated.
John:
I can physically press it.
John:
All that stuff plays to the strengths of our hands and fingers, which is how we use our iPhones.
John:
And so anything Apple does related to that is wise to leverage those abilities.
John:
In the same way the touch bar tries to do that, but because it has no haptics, you are left with kind of a surface that you have to look at more than you would otherwise.
John:
And you can press on it, but it's more like a touchscreen in that
John:
it doesn't do anything when you press any of those things, which is another reason a lot of people have difficulties with the touch bar is that it is replacing buttons with something that is less button like.
John:
Um, whereas I feel like the iPhone seven home button replaced the button with something that is, it's like an alternate take on a button, but it is, you know, it's, it's like, it's like they replaced the function keys on the Mac book with the screen from the iPhone.
John:
The screen is not the same kind of a button because they don't know where the buttons are going to be.
John:
But on the touch bar, it seems like you could know they were kind of, you know, anyway, um,
John:
this is just my, uh, mild musings on haptics, but I, I think they are longterm.
John:
I think there's, there's legs to this whole haptic thing.
John:
I mean, you know, as Apple has been so excited and proud to show it's a little, uh, you know, how much better the vibration is in each phone and this haptic engine that they, they, uh, brand with this haptic stuff.
John:
Um, I think they're actually onto something there.
John:
And I think we'll just see more and more of that from Apple and other companies because it works with humans.
John:
That could be Apple's slogan since they're not doing the computer with the rest of us anymore.
John:
It works with humans, TM.
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Casey:
Let's talk about WikiTribune, of which I know basically nothing and I am failing at my job as chief summarizer in chief.
Casey:
So, Marco, I feel like I saw you tweeting about this when it first broke.
Casey:
Do you want to kind of fill us in as to what WikiTribune is about?
Marco:
Honestly, I barely know.
Marco:
I just signed up because I wanted to support this cause.
Marco:
So, John, can you give a better summary than I can?
John:
This has been in the notes for like three weeks, people.
John:
But I think one place we can start is Marco with his lack of knowledge.
John:
Why did you decide to sign up for that?
John:
What did you do by signing up?
John:
Did you have to give money or pledge to give money?
John:
What was the sign-up thing that you did?
Marco:
It's some kind of pre-commitment type system like Kickstarter, but I don't think they're going to charge me until they hit their minimum or unless they hit their minimum, something like that.
Marco:
But it is a money thing.
John:
You're supporting this effort with money, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I sign up to make a monthly donation or whatever it is.
John:
All right.
Marco:
So what led you to do that?
Marco:
Well, basically, there's a lot of things about journalism these days that I think are really dysfunctional or broken.
Marco:
And this seems like it could fix some of them.
Marco:
Not all of them.
Marco:
I don't think it's probably possible to fix all of them.
Marco:
But this could fix some of them in a fairly big way.
Marco:
So if it works, that'll be great.
Marco:
If not, I lost a little bit of money along the way and then I'll stop losing it when I cancel it.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
It seems like a good cause.
Marco:
I feel like...
Marco:
All of the Wikipedia donation prompts that I've ignored over the years and closed over the years without giving, I feel like maybe I owe something to Jimmy Wales' causes.
Marco:
So here I'm going to finally make that good, I guess.
John:
So to go back and give a vague summary of what the heck this thing is, it is from the Wikipedia guy.
John:
You've seen his face on top of Wikipedia asking for money.
John:
Now you can see his face on a different website asking you for money for a different thing.
John:
So it has the pedigree of Wikipedia, which is a tremendously successful community platform for Wikipedia.
John:
doing whatever his people do on wikipedia um and this is about trying to make the news better like marco said he's got the same some of the same complaints about news and and the incentive structures and how it doesn't lead to good information being disseminated and there's lots of all anti-patterns and with uh how it's funded and uh what gets published and how it's published and
John:
versus what people want to read and what sells ads and so on and so forth.
John:
So this is a sort of Wikipedia-style approach to news where it's very open and transparent so everyone who's reading can see what's going on.
John:
There's no ads, so you don't have to worry about the entire thing being made to drive ad views, which is a problem in the web in general, not just on news and everything like that.
John:
And like Wikipedia, it is community-oriented where it's not just like these people produce the content and the rest of the world reads it.
John:
everybody participates in in theory making the things better although there are professional journalists involved as well so it's not just like hey make up whatever you want and publish whatever you want because that's just called the web that's not that's not anything um uh and trying to uh you know uh be transparent to the people who are giving money like you know how are they going to fund all this through people like marco the same way wikipedia is funded how does wikipedia exist jimmy wales head asks you for money every once in a while
John:
And there are, I'm assuming they're investors or stuff like that.
John:
And they have this, this kind of Venn diagram at the top where it shows, uh, three circles and the three circles are community facts and journalists and wiki wiki tribune.
John:
is the confusing diamond shaped intersection of three of those circles when i see the intersection between three circles i don't get a diamond shape but it's a logo there's some creative license there it's fine um yeah and so i think marco's explanation of why he gave money is is probably why a lot of people gave money it's like
John:
Or, you know, because it is like a Kickstarter.
John:
It's like, you know, you pledge money.
John:
And if everything goes well, you will get charged for your money or whatever.
John:
And it probably will because this is very popular.
John:
But it seems like a small amount.
John:
And just like a Kickstarter, you're like, I don't know if they'll ever ship this damn cooler.
John:
but it looks cool so yeah spoiler alert so like it's not a big deal like if they never go anywhere or if i fund it for a few months and it's not that good whatever uh but i think there is an appetite for an attempt to find a solution to the fix all of you know journalism finds itself in at this moment in transition between the old world of
John:
newspapers and the way that they were funded and the barriers to entry in this new world where it's much easier for more people to publish but it's much harder to find ways to fund content that isn't sort of lowest common denominator you know because people go what people want to read and what
John:
What would be most beneficial to society if people were to read are two very different things.
John:
The incentives are not aligned.
John:
If the only way you can get money is by attracting people to read things, you will inevitably end up giving people what they want, which is not always what they need, which is a paternalistic view that people hate.
John:
Like, oh, the people in the ivory tower are going to determine what I need to see.
John:
Why can't people just pick what they need to see?
John:
there's a balance like i mean even even in the bad old days of my childhood when there was no internet there were things called tabloids that provided you same stuff that you can find on the internet now it's not like that stuff is like oh that didn't exist before the internet of course it did like you know bat boy found uh the national inquirer like you know aliens are everywhere right that stuff has always and will always exist
John:
And I'm not even sure if it's any more prevalent than it is today.
John:
The difference today is that the sort of slow motion decline of the ivory tower.
John:
We know what's best for you.
John:
We're going to apply a bunch of reasoning and rules that you don't know about or agree with to try to.
John:
provide what we think is you know the news that's fit to print and that has been in slow decline mostly rightfully so because it's kind of a a concentration of power that is not you know that is artificial you know technological barriers to distribution information causing it to exist but i would also say that in this new world where it's easier to distribute information a lot of people like marco and and me and i
John:
less satisfied with how things are going not that we want to go back to the old ways because that was bad in a different set of ways but that there there are pathologies in in the new uh structure of news uh that we wish we could get rid of it's like i you know we all want to read really good high quality uh you know journalism according to the the you know the system of journalism is i think is something that most of us can agree upon kind of like the scientific method it's just the question of
John:
It is, uh, you know, how is it executed by fallible humans and how do we provide the resources for it to be executed?
John:
Um, and that's what this thing is trying to, uh, provide.
John:
Now my, my personal, uh,
John:
grudge against disagreement with uh indifference to wikipedia as an institution depending on how you want to uh phrase it gave it caused me to have a little snarky chuckle when i saw this this venn diagram here it's like community journalist and facts right underneath jimmy wales i was like oh oh now you care about facts jimmy wales i thought it was just all about verifiability
John:
Wait a second.
John:
And maybe they don't mean facts.
John:
Maybe they actually mean verifiability.
John:
But that's the thing about journalism.
John:
Journalism, you know, like they are pursuing the truth of what happened.
John:
It's not enough for a journalist to say, you know, one thing is for reporters to say, let me just tell you what somebody said.
John:
But journalists try to uncover the truth.
John:
If they can find out what really happened by talking to more people and gathering evidence, that's part of journalism, too.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
And that is an important part of journalism.
John:
That is not an important part of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia doesn't care what the hell the facts are, because that's not what it is.
John:
It's a tertiary source.
John:
I don't want to go off on all my rants about Wikipedia again.
John:
So it's kind of exciting to see this taking a different slant on things.
John:
But as I scroll down through their plan and see like journalists and community and community cooperating, all I can think about is like this is like a battle arena for edit wars.
John:
It's like edit wars distilled.
John:
Because if you think there are edit wars on the Wikipedia page for, you know, insert favorite controversial political figure.
John:
Can you imagine what the edit wars will be like on literally any actual current event news story in the current political climate?
John:
Like there's almost nothing you can put in there.
John:
You know, articles being, you know, fact checked and verified by journalists and community members working side by side as equals.
Marco:
and i just i just picture a giant arena with like people with boards with nails sticking out of them like i don't i'm not sure how it can work and you can say well look at wikipedia it works yeah i mean like you know that's the biggest example like wikipedia has the same issue you know any any kind of you know political topic also has a wikipedia page and they you know they've built systems and policies and norms up around controlling that problem there too and
Marco:
And so I think if anybody has shown that they have the ability to manage that part of this, it's the people who made Wikipedia and who built that whole community up.
Marco:
So that I think... I'm actually not concerned about the whole edit war problem.
John:
I also don't think... Don't you think Wikipedia is a counterexample?
John:
No.
John:
The fact that so many pages on Wikipedia are incredibly locked down because of the edit wars...
John:
almost to the point where they become frozen in time, which is kind of okay for historical things, but for pages that are ongoing, they become the sole domain of a very small number of people who have even the ability to edit page, and everybody else is completely locked out, and yet still they have edit wars and arguments about what goes on.
John:
You can't do journalism in that environment.
John:
I feel like the controversial pages on Wikipedia are, A, not the best source for information on their topics,
John:
and B, do a terrible job of staying up to date, and C, do not allow the input from the community because they have to be walled off.
John:
They have to be cemented, set in stone, guarded night and day, incredibly protected.
John:
They become ossified.
John:
I think the best pages on Wikipedia are the pages that few people care about.
John:
but you know the classic example of being like lists of pokemon and stuff right because oh a lot of people care no one well maybe there are edit wars in pokemon sorry if i'm big but like but pages that are on more obscure topics because the only people who edit and contribute to them are the people who really are interested in the topic no one cares enough to vandalize it or edit them and no one is there telling them what they can and can't add and especially if they don't have any kind of political or factional angle again pokemon may not be a great example
John:
um they end up being filled with all sorts of interesting and useful information whereas the stories in any topic that has any controversial any part of it that's controversial you're better off just scrolling to the bottom looking all the references and reading all those than actually reading the wikipedia page so i mean i get what you're saying about they have systems in place but i think the systems negate the advantages they're trying to do which is fine for wikipedia because every page on wikipedia is not a super duper controversial page in fact very few of them are so the vast majority of wikipedia is awesome when you just want to
John:
get a quick plot synopsis of a particular episode of dr hue in a particular season that's on wikipedia and you'll find it quickly and the web page won't be gross or filled with ads and it's a reliable source for that because no one cares enough about to screw with it or as reliable as any source could be but when you go do any page having to do with any controversial topic i feel like like when's the last time you read a wikipedia page on a controversial topic like i don't even bother going to them anymore like
John:
I would, again, rather just scroll right down to the references and read the primary and secondary sources than this tertiary summary because it doesn't speak to me as a great source of information.
Marco:
Well, I mean, keep in mind that these days every fact is a controversial topic, even those basic things that you would think wouldn't be.
Marco:
And also that WikiTribune is, I think, largely probably not going to have this problem because it's probably not going to be that big of a deal.
Marco:
If it does become a big deal, if it does actually start attracting large amounts of traffic, then I think it will rise to the levels of, you know, these kinds of challenges that Wikipedia has.
Marco:
Because Wikipedia has been, you know, such a massive, you know, traffic getter for so long.
Marco:
So, you know, it's ranked so well everywhere.
Marco:
But like, WikiTribune is starting from zero.
Marco:
It's starting from no audience, basically.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It might be a while before there's even enough people to matter.
Marco:
And honestly, I disagree with you.
Marco:
I think Wikipedia is as good as something like this could be about dealing with controversial things like that.
John:
You know, it's a hard problem, but it depends on the country.
John:
I mean, the main controversy having to do with Wikipedia controversial pages is the idea that the people who hold the keys to power to the controversial pages themselves tend to be homogenous and have various biases, let's say.
John:
Yeah, that's a problem.
John:
paying us to read our webpages everyone's been trying to do that it's really difficult the whole paywall thing right wiki tribune is like we're open and free to everybody man fast forward five years if they get super popular and they lock everything down and eventually it's like wait a second this is just a newspaper
John:
where professional journalists do things and people pay them and it's not a giant community published thing it is like a bunch of articles that nobody can edit because every single story about the president is super duper controversial and every one of them is super locked down and the only people who get edited are the professional journalists who get money from the contributors and the five people who all happen to be uh the same type of person with the same type of background who has the time and inclination to spend all day on wiki tribune
John:
And now it is just a weirdly organized newspaper that people pay for, which wouldn't be the end of the world.
John:
Because again, that's things that people have been looking for.
John:
Hey, can we get people to pay money to support news?
John:
Like, as opposed to wanting everything for free and wanting every article to be, you know, a clickbaity, tabloidy, celebrity news kind of thing.
John:
I guess if they do that, then they're kind of a success.
John:
But I have a hard time envisioning...
John:
A future where they are wildly successful and yet still even open to the degree that Wikipedia is open.
John:
Because unlike Wikipedia, pretty much everything a news organization will report will attract factions.
John:
Like you said, Marco, they could report on the weather and people will...
John:
will leave nasty comments about climate denial and stuff.
John:
I can't think of a topic.
John:
There's not even a human interest story.
John:
If I try to put something about dogs and people won't like it, nothing is safe in this climate.
John:
So they have their work cut out for them.
John:
But all this said, I don't feel like I'm slamming the potential of what it could be,
John:
i didn't donate any money uh but i wish them well because i also like marco want somebody to address this problem and no one has tried this approach no one of this caliber has tried this approach so we're not going to find out if it works unless somebody does it and so i'm like all right you know go for it like i certainly the fact that facts with a little arrow is a big circle in the
John:
By all means, go for that.
John:
The other aspect of this is, say they succeed in producing what they say they're going to produce, and their system produces good content, do people read it?
John:
I would guess.
John:
Like, is that something people want to do?
John:
I want to go to WikiTribune because they got their facts straight?
Casey:
I mean, everyone wants a non-partisan news source, right?
John:
No, they don't.
John:
No, everyone wants to hear their own biases reflected to them and reinforced.
John:
That's what people want.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
How do they get people to come and read this?
John:
It was easier when you only had a few choices, and all those choices...
John:
had, you know, had systems in place that constrained what could be talked about, which perpetuated, you know, tons of systems of power in terms of whose stories got to get told with what angle on them.
John:
So it was terrible in many, many ways.
John:
But the good aspects of it were in the areas where the system wasn't completely aligned against hearing about things that, you
John:
There was an expectation that, for example, the news department and advertising were separated from each other in some way.
John:
Like that was part of the principles that they worked based on.
John:
And that only works if the news department isn't responsible for bringing in more money year after year after year.
John:
And that ship has long sailed.
John:
So now it's like, got to make more money, got to get more viewers.
John:
How do we do that?
John:
Tell them what they want to hear.
John:
And the cycle just goes around and around.
John:
That's what this is trying to resolve.
John:
So say it resolves it and they make real quality news, but no one ever comes and reads it.
John:
Are they still a success?
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think I really think this could be very popular because I think somebody like the two of you guys and myself, somebody like us who wants to be informed, but wants a very level headed take as to what's going on.
Casey:
I think this is a potentially, well, maybe not perfect, but really great answer to that need.
Casey:
I agree with you that I shouldn't have said everyone wants this because a lot of people probably don't want this.
Casey:
But I also think there's a lot of people that do want this, that do want a level headed take on things.
Casey:
That's why, for example, in my RSS reader that I rarely look at anymore, my source of news is the BBC.
Casey:
Because I have the BBC's U.S.
Casey:
coverage, and I feel like that is the least politically motivated news source that I can find.
Casey:
I don't need to hear of better ones.
Casey:
I don't really care if the BBC isn't perfect.
Casey:
I'm not trying to start a fight here.
John:
Well, they're just reinforcing your biases.
John:
That's why you like them.
Casey:
It could be.
Casey:
It very well could be.
John:
That's the situation I think we find ourselves in.
Marco:
Wait, wait.
Marco:
What if your biases are true and facts?
John:
Well, see, yeah.
John:
The idea... Here's the problem with polarized marketplace is that things don't exist in isolation.
John:
Say there was...
John:
news source that did a really good job did a really good job of executing journalism classic journalism the rules of journalism which you know like the traditional rules of journalism in terms of what you're supposed to do as a reporter and what your job is and isn't um all separate from you know editorial and opinion which is a whole separate thing but just like the plain straight up journalism uh reporting thing uh there's still an editorial function deciding
John:
what should and shouldn't you cover how many stories in topic a how many stories in topic b how many how many stories uh about this aspect of whatever like it's impossible to ever pull yourself entirely away from that and it's also impossible to think about what your publication is doing in isolation you exist as a publication in an ecosystem with tons of other publications and a lot of the ecosystem is defined by how many people
John:
uh read or you know watch or whatever consume these different publications and in that environment that's why you see a lot of like uh you know people in our side of the world liberals or whatever being drawn to liberal leaning publications because they see it as the only possible way to counterbalance uh
John:
the things leaning in the other direction because we know those things that lean in the other direction exist we know we all think they're terrible and we know tons and tons of people use them as their exclusive source of news and so by providing it a neutral thing it's like well
John:
that's all well and good if we just want to know what's happening but if we want to balance the scales and that we have to have a left-leaning publication and eventually you're like i want to read the left-leaning thing because all i hear all day from you know people who i disagree with is them citing their super duper right-leaning things and so don't we and that's how you end up with polarization super duper left-leaning super duper right-leaning
John:
And so I don't feel like I want that.
John:
I try to find something that I think is in the middle.
John:
But like Casey with the BBC, I'm sure what I think is in the middle is not actually in the middle.
John:
And really what I'm seeking is some, you know...
John:
some uh it's not in the execution of the journalism but in the choice of what they're reporting about right or in the choice of like uh you know what the editorials are about and how they apportion their coverage because that in itself is is a political stance right so when i read the washington post i feel like here's good reporting here they're still executing journalism according to the old ways but what the washington post decides to cover is decidedly left-leaning in terms of the number of stories on topic a b c and d right um
John:
And I'm okay with that, but I would still say the Washington Post and even the New York Times are examples of good executions of classic journalism.
John:
But I would also agree that both of them are quote-unquote left-leaning as compared to the choices of things and headlines that the right-leaning publications choose to cover.
John:
And they're a counterbalance, right?
John:
So...
John:
If there was something that was really straight up the middle, I'm not sure that would be doing much of a service, because especially if the polarized ends continue to be what they are, unless everybody at the ends kind of agrees, like the Wikipedia, Wicked Tribune is like the tiebreaker, right?
John:
And as Marco pointed out before, and we'll keep going back to, that is impossible in a world where we can't agree on the facts.
John:
There is no that's like, well, we have we have, you know, this left leaning editorial selection and we have this right reading editorial selection.
John:
But we all agree that the facts are what are on WikiTribune, right?
John:
And be like, no, no, the right will say we don't agree on facts at all.
John:
And so what function is WikiTribune even serving there?
John:
Unless it starts getting cited by other newspapers, which would be funny, but we'll see.
John:
i mean at this point there are people actually arguing whether to let people die in our country who were sick once because they don't have enough money and they should therefore die that is that is literally what we are arguing about i would like to better in the 80s when they had like sophisticated sophisticated ideological arguments but they they've abandoned those now it's just like why should you get to live it's like good point there evil person why should i get to live
Marco:
what right do i have to life or liberty or any kind of uh you know looking for happiness that sounds crazy to me yeah well i mean it was your fault that you got you know sick when you were a teenager or something so therefore you know the penalty for that should obviously be death right why don't you try living right marco you ever think of that yeah i mean look we all did it right why can't you
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, the Jimmy Kimmel's son.
Casey:
Did you guys watch that monologue?
Casey:
Oh, I couldn't.
Marco:
I heard enough about it that I couldn't watch it.
Casey:
So I saw it fly by.
Casey:
I've been doing a couch to 5K lately.
Casey:
And during one of the walking parts, I was like, you know, cruising through Twitter as I was power walking, probably look like a moron.
Casey:
But be that as it may.
Casey:
whatever day it was this this popped in the morning onto my you know my world and i watched it or listened to it i should say i didn't watch any of it i listened to it as i was like going between walking and running and walking and running and basically i was on the verge of bawling the entire time but if you're one of those monsters that thinks that a pre-existing condition is something that you know just that's enough to disqualify you that's cool
Casey:
You should read or you should listen to this story about Jimmy Kimmel's son who was born with a terrible heart defect.
Casey:
And were it not for some of the protections – we shouldn't be getting this political – but here we are without some of these protections that –
Marco:
Politics or other world events do bleed into relevance to all people.
Marco:
And I think this is one of those times.
Marco:
This is a topic that is, among many things, so politicized more than I think it probably should be.
Marco:
And I think a lot of that is...
Marco:
intentionally artificial to hide the things that the politicians really want to get accomplished, which mostly have to do with money for themselves and their class of people and their associates and lobbyists and everything else.
Marco:
So there's lots of that stuff going on in the background here.
Marco:
And we're arguing about whether people who have not been as lucky as some of us should go bankrupt and die because of that.
Marco:
And that is unconscionable.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, so this Jimmy Kimmel thing, it's a little under 15 minutes.
Casey:
It's worth every second, in my personal opinion.
Casey:
And like I said, I was on the verge of bawling the entire time I listened to it.
Casey:
But the short, short version is his son had a terrible heart defect.
Casey:
He is now fine.
Casey:
And if some of the changes to American health care that have been proposed pass...
Casey:
then his son would never be able to have health insurance for the rest of his life because he was born with a problem with his heart.
Casey:
So, yeah, I guess his son should have been living in the womb better and made better choices in utero, and then he wouldn't have this problem, right?
Casey:
That's how this works?
Marco:
Yeah, maybe he listened to too much heavy metal music.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I mean, and the thing, like, this isn't...
Marco:
It's not like this is a theoretical.
Marco:
It's not like, you know, we think people will go bankrupt and die because of this.
Marco:
No, we know because that's how it was before the ACA.
Marco:
A lot of people went bankrupt and died.
Marco:
This is not a small thing.
Marco:
This is not an unknown.
Marco:
It's very much known.
Marco:
We were there.
Marco:
It was horrible.
Marco:
We tried to fix it as best as we could, and it wasn't perfect, but the right fix is not to go back to that.
Marco:
We've seen it already.
Marco:
We've tried that.
Marco:
I don't know why this is even possibly a point of contention.
Marco:
Well, I do know why, really, but it's not a good reason.
Casey:
And one of the things that was fascinating about having this tweet that I'd sent in January about the Affordable Care Act, which we'll link all this in the show notes, but one of the fascinating things about having a tweet that gets retweeted 16,000 times is that everyone and their mother comes and tells you about why you're right, why you're wrong.
Casey:
And in the tweet that I tweeted read opposition, I've heard to the Affordable Care Act.
Casey:
Number one, it costs me money.
Casey:
Number two, it's not perfect.
Casey:
Support for the Affordable Care Act.
Casey:
Number one, I would have died without the coverage guaranteed.
Casey:
which is what we're talking about.
Casey:
And man, so many people came out of the woodwork and were like, no, you don't get it.
Casey:
It's about this.
Casey:
It's about that.
Casey:
One person had said, I forget how he phrased it, but it was something along the lines of, I shouldn't have to pay for people who eat McDonald's all the time to deal with their diabetes.
Casey:
So, OK, I live health.
Casey:
I live a healthy life.
Casey:
I shouldn't have to pay for all these unhealthy people.
Casey:
Well, aren't you a winner?
Casey:
But anyway, after just hundreds of stories about the Affordable Care Act, why it's great and why it's terrible, the only good.
Casey:
good or in my estimation anyway the only good answer i heard about why the affordable care act was bad was that some people said well i make enough that i'm priced out of all the subsidy tiers and i'm way oversimplifying here but i i make enough money that i'm priced out of all the like super cheap tiers but i don't really make enough to afford like the um the whatever the opposite scenario was i forget what what it is but basically they were in this like negative this really terrible middle of the road um
Casey:
Here's an example.
Casey:
This is somebody that tweeted, I pay more than I can afford for insurance with a deductible too high to matter.
Casey:
That's pretty crummy.
Casey:
And that should get fixed.
Casey:
But everything else was like just people who basically are looking for their fellow man to die because they didn't want to pay for them to live.
Casey:
And that's just, I don't understand how this is a question.
Casey:
How is this a question right now?
Casey:
I don't get it.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
There's that sentiment of, why should I pay for the people who are unhealthy?
Marco:
That is such a toxic way to think because, okay, well, let's follow that through.
Marco:
If that's what you think, that you shouldn't have to pay for people who do things that you don't like or whatever, and that makes them unhealthy, even though a lot of times they can't help what has made them unhealthy.
Marco:
But anyway, suppose you don't want to pay for it.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
what should the penalty be for someone who does this thing you don't like who can't afford it is that punishable by death is is that an appropriate you know penalty like literally like that's like is that is that your actual position like if that's what you think don't ask questions you don't want the answers to because they would say yes of course they're getting what they deserve that's exactly what they say
Marco:
I mean, if these people actually think that way, I think they should own that.
Marco:
I think they should come right out and say, yes, I think all these people who can't afford their health care should die.
Marco:
Like, if that's what they think, let's bring that discussion.
Marco:
Let's see how that discussion goes in the open.
Marco:
We have people in Congress owning that at this point.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I don't think it's a position people are shrinking from.
Marco:
And the thing is, you can apply that kind of thinking, why should I have to pay for that, to everything that government provides.
Marco:
That's kind of the whole nature of government.
Marco:
It provides a bunch of services with people's tax money
Marco:
most of which you know like any given person probably doesn't directly use a lot of these services but they also benefit from lots of other ones and it's a different pool for each person you know and that's the role of government like why should i pay for a giant military that starts wars i don't want well i just that's just part of the government like it's it it's part of our system we vote for things and you know this is what happens and and sometimes our votes even are
Marco:
This is so toxic, and I wish I knew what it was that made people so hateful of everybody else, really.
Marco:
Maybe it's just because everyone else listens to way less fish than I do, but I just cannot possibly understand why.
Marco:
what it is that makes someone think to themselves, oh, those people don't deserve to live.
Marco:
Like, I don't get that at all.
Marco:
And that makes me really sad that that is such a prevalent attitude.
John:
That's why I was saying I harken back to the days of the 80s when it was commonly accepted that the goal was to make people healthier.
John:
And the only argument was about how best to do that.
John:
The free market can do it.
John:
No, the government can do it.
John:
No, the government is inefficient and bloated and we will have a better system if we allow competition and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like that was the level of the argument that was going on.
John:
Right.
John:
And these days, that is not the accepted premises of trying to get everybody as healthy as possible.
John:
People barely make feints in that direction.
John:
They're not even interested in saying, you don't understand.
John:
This way, people will actually be healthier.
John:
Fewer people will die.
John:
Yeah.
John:
everyone will you know they'll say that at the broad level but they will not make they will not actually show how the numbers add up they will not show their math they'll not say look here's what we say even if it's just bs predictions bs sort of trickle-downy predictions if we get all this to happen and this competition happens here and there what's going to happen you know let me show you my bs model with bs predictions they don't even do that they're like we don't need to do that we just wave our hands and and
John:
you know pit one person against the other and get what do what it takes to get this past uh and then you know then we end up with what we end up with i i miss i miss the uh the pretend intellectual debates is what i'm saying
Casey:
i just i don't get it it just makes me so sad like it's just it just i don't understand how any intelligent human being with three brain cells to rub together can think that the affordable care act is bad i just don't get it like oh it's not perfect oh it is bad i mean it's but but it's you know it's like uh what should we move to something worse i'm gonna say no
John:
I'm going to say, no, we shouldn't do that.
John:
Right.
Marco:
It's the whole like, you know, perfect enemy of the good thing.
Marco:
Like, you know, health care is is a hard problem.
Marco:
It's really expensive to provide health care for people that has to be paid for somehow, whether you're you know, whether it's people paying themselves or whether it's government single payer kind of things or some kind of weird thing in between like what we have now.
Marco:
Like it's just it's a hard problem.
Marco:
It's a really hard problem.
Marco:
But that, you know, the ACA took this really hard problem that was really in a bad state before and made it less bad.
Marco:
And yeah, the cost went up.
Marco:
We're all paying more now for worse coverage.
Marco:
But that was happening anyway.
Marco:
Anybody who was actually paying for their coverage before the ACA saw that trend already.
Marco:
In fact, with the ACA, I'm still now paying less than what I paid the year before the ACA went into effect.
Marco:
And the coverage isn't as good, but I'm actually still netting less per year in expenditure for it.
Marco:
And also, I'm way less worried about hitting some crazy limit, or a lifetime limit, or pre-existing conditions all of a sudden, excluding everyone from everything.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is a better system and it still sucks.
Marco:
And that's why people are so mad because it is still really expensive and coverage still does really suck.
Marco:
And we all have high deductibles now and we all have like having to go through crappy mail order pharmacies for our prescriptions.
Marco:
But that was happening before.
Marco:
Whatever the Republicans get through, whatever they do to this.
Marco:
I guarantee you, your coverage is still going to be really expensive.
Marco:
And you're still going to have to deal with BS from mail-order pharmacies and having to fill all these different referrals and everything else.
Marco:
That's all going to still be there.
Marco:
And your costs are going to go up the year after that, and the year after that, and every year after that.
Marco:
Your costs are going to keep going up and up and up.
Marco:
Whatever they pass is not going to solve that.
Marco:
It can't.
Marco:
All they're trying to do is go back to the way it was before the ACA, which sucked.
Marco:
And yeah, the ACA sucked, but that sucked way more before.
Marco:
And that's what they want to go back to.
Marco:
It is really hard to talk about this because literally thousands of additional people will die every year because of this.
Marco:
This is not a small thing.
Marco:
This isn't just like, oh, I'll have an extra $200 a month.
Marco:
It's just like, no, thousands of people will die.
Marco:
And like, you know, you look at things that change in our country, policies, laws, liberties that change in our country as a result of, say, September 11th.
Marco:
Lots of things change because of that.
Marco:
And then if you look at like how many people are dying unnecessarily because of not having proper health care, it is such a massive problem.
Marco:
And so many people...
Marco:
go bankrupt or die or both unnecessarily, it is unconscionable to me that we still continue to try to go back to the way it was because it was worse.
Marco:
And again, I know why people are so mad at the ACA because they see those bills coming in every month for the health care.
Marco:
And, oh, yeah, my premium keeps going up.
Marco:
My coverage keeps getting worse.
Marco:
Yeah, but that was happening before.
Marco:
This made it a little bit less crappy for everybody.
Marco:
And now we're going to go back to that.
Marco:
I just, it's awful.
Casey:
It's a cut off your nose to spite your face situation.
Casey:
And after tomorrow, you won't be able to get your nose put back on.
Casey:
And then it'll be a pre-existing condition if you try to switch coverage.
Casey:
So you're just screwed the whole way down.
Casey:
But don't worry, guys.
Casey:
At least the figurehead of the new system won't be a black guy.
Casey:
So it's all good now.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or a woman.
Marco:
Heaven forbid.
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Casey:
show amazon releases the echo look uh here again i don't know a lot about it except in this case it's because i really don't care um but apparently it's an echo with a camera that will tell you if you look good or not or something along those lines so what's going on here and are we enthusiastic about it john you get in one
John:
I don't think I'm going to get one of these, but I actually am.
John:
I'm not going to say I'm enthusiastic about it, but I think what it is doing is a natural thing to do, and I think we're going to see more of it, not less.
John:
Like, in the same way that I was...
John:
strangely or at least not uniquely but it was i think i had more enthusiasm for the amazon echo when they first showed that little ad with the cylinder more more optimism let's say that that this could potentially be a cool useful thing uh than most people who saw it because they were like this looks dumb it's never going to work and i had the same kind of this looks dumb and it's not going to work as well as they show a working reaction too but
John:
i was also kind of like this class of device seems like it could be a thing and now i see this which is like essentially a little camera so imagine combining with an echo with a camera it's a camera that you can talk to that has some awareness of who and where you are and it has some specific functionality having to do with fashion and amazon trying to sell you clothes and yada yada like i don't think the details matter that much um except that this is like because it's amazon and because they have the pedigree of the echo
John:
And because they're going to push it like crazy on their website, this product has as good a chance as any to be the first product to get any kind of traction in this category.
John:
And the category is simply a computer that you can talk to that also can see you.
John:
right the amazon echo and the dot and and uh and google home and all those things are like a computer that you can talk to a computer that you can talk to that can also see you natural evolution the number of things that you can do with that ability with all of our even just current technology for like facial recognition and and
John:
identifying things in scenes and uh you know uh connect xbox style understanding gestures and your position uh the position of your body and stuff like that that is a a rich vein of interaction with computing devices that we should begin to tap and if it has to be a weird fashion camera that spies on you and uploads pictures of you to amazon to sell you more clothes
John:
I mean, the cylinder ended up being an Amazon thing to let you buy paper towels by talking to it.
John:
Like, things come in weird packages, right?
John:
I mean, I suppose it beats the old way, which is everything had to be attached to porn in some way to get any traction.
John:
Although this potentially could be as well.
John:
But I am enthusiastic about the future of devices that are computers that can hear and see you.
John:
And so I think there needs to be more of these things and they need to get better and they will be cool and make our lives better, provided we can avoid all the pitfalls that which is basically all people are talking about, all the privacy and security and just general creepiness implications.
John:
But I think I think the foundation is sound.
John:
So I wish them I wish them some success and I hope they learn from it and branch out.
Casey:
I'm just now watching the video quickly with no audio.
Casey:
I'm just looking at the video as you're talking.
Casey:
And I think I would have noticed, but certainly it was called out in one of the podcasts I listened to this week, that there isn't a man in this video until like the last 10 seconds.
Casey:
Which is actually pretty cool that they're, you know, pitching this directly at women.
Casey:
And I think it stands to reason that your average woman would be more enthusiastic about this than your average man.
Casey:
Obviously, that's not a universal truth.
Casey:
But I think that's kind of cool.
Casey:
And I personally am not in love, partially because I haven't really lived it.
Casey:
I'm not in love with the idea of an echo in general, let alone an echo with eyes.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But again, just because I'm not really gaga for it doesn't mean it's not a good idea and not a good device.
Casey:
It's just it's not something that I feel like I need right now.
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
So first of all, there was a great discussion about this, especially by Lisa Schmeiser, who knows a lot about retail, on the first episode of the new Relay podcast called Download.
Marco:
This is like Jason Snell's kind of new hosted show called
Marco:
Almost like an expanded clockwise, but more broad and even more produced and even more wide audience.
Marco:
I'm guessing over time this might become the biggest show on Relay and one of the biggest tech shows, period.
Marco:
So I would suggest getting it on the ground floor and going to subscribe to Download Now at relay.fm slash download.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
They didn't pay me or even ask me to say that, but I think you should because it's really good.
Marco:
Anyway, great discussion on episode one by Alicia Schmeiser, especially about this from the retail point of view, from a lot of good knowledge that we don't personally have, but I greatly enjoyed.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm with you.
Marco:
Obviously, this is being marketed heavily towards women, and it's hard for me to fully understand it as both a man and also a man who doesn't care at all about his own personal fashion.
Marco:
um and so it's except on your wrist except on my wrist i care very much about that but i don't need a camera to tell me which watch to wear every day i i just put on the one that i feel like wearing and i enjoy it um but you know that's if there was one that took a wrist shot for me every day and compare you know like and gave me like a wrist book of uh of shots of how i looked over time
Marco:
Maybe that might do something interesting.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Bottom line, this isn't for me.
Marco:
And so I don't want to make large proclamations about it either way because it's fundamentally a product I don't understand.
Marco:
And this is made very clear to me.
Marco:
by the reactions on Twitter when this was announced.
Marco:
It was extraordinarily polarized.
Marco:
Tech dudes like us largely made fun of it and said, why would anybody want to buy this?
Marco:
Oh my god, Amazon is nuts.
Marco:
And a lot of people who were not tech dudes, I would venture to guess that most of us, myself included, probably wear a basic t-shirt every day that we don't have to wear something for work.
Marco:
T-shirt and jeans, maybe.
Marco:
That's kind of the uniform of tech.
Marco:
A hoodie, if it's cool or if you live in San Francisco.
Marco:
That's kind of the uniform of tech geeks.
Marco:
So all of us looked at this and said, this is crazy.
Marco:
Why would we let Amazon put a camera in our bedroom to do this thing we don't care about?
Marco:
But people who were really into clothing and fashion really enjoyed this.
Marco:
The reaction from most of them... And this wasn't all women, I should say.
Marco:
I'm very carefully trying to dance around the women angle here because I don't want to be sexist.
Marco:
But it is very clear that this is how this is being targeted.
Marco:
And I did see very different reactions from most women compared to most men in my timeline.
Marco:
But I really don't want to say anything...
Marco:
More than that, because I don't know what I'm talking about.
Marco:
It is not at all for me, but I think this will probably succeed.
Marco:
You know, when the original Echo Cylinder first came out, we all made fun of it.
Marco:
Because first of all, the way it was presented, the video it was presented in was awful.
Marco:
I mean, it was comically bad.
Marco:
And it was pretty soon after the Fire Phone.
Marco:
And so we were pretty sure, like, yeah, Amazon really is nuts with their hardware.
Marco:
They don't know what they're doing.
Marco:
It did indeed sound crazy that you're going to put a microphone in your house that listens all the time and is owned by Amazon.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
But then it only takes like one friend to get it and for you to be at their house for a little while.
Marco:
And, you know, with them using it to kind of see like, oh, actually, that's pretty cool.
Marco:
And so it is the kind of thing where, like, it does sound kind of ridiculous up front, but it might succeed anyway.
Marco:
And I think all you need to know to know whether it will succeed or not is, like, is there any group of people right now, right up front, who are saying, oh, my God, yes, give me that right now?
Marco:
And the answer, from what I can see, is yes.
Marco:
My wife wants one.
Marco:
I know a bunch of other people on Twitter who said they wanted one.
Marco:
Again, it isn't for everyone, but it is probably definitely for some people.
Marco:
And so even though it seems creepy to me as a nerd, it's going to be a thing.
Marco:
I would not discount Amazon in this.
Marco:
I would not assume they're crazy.
Marco:
I will occasionally make funny tweets about it.
Marco:
But I do think they're probably going to sell this.
Marco:
And it's probably going to become part of a bigger thing.
Marco:
And it's probably going to have its own little weird oddities, just like every Amazon product always does.
Marco:
But I think it'll work long term.
John:
I don't think you need to have any weird speculation and say like, oh, this will be for some people because like it is so right down the middle of things that we know people already like to do in massive numbers.
John:
People like to take pictures of themselves.
John:
The word selfie is known to far and wide for a very good reason.
John:
If you look at how people use social media and how many times they're taking pictures of themselves or what they're wearing very often on a regular basis, right?
John:
This is merely an automation of that in the same way that the Amazon Echo is an automation of all the things you have other ways to do.
John:
This is not speculative that people might want to take pictures of themselves or their outfits.
John:
There's so clearly a marketing.
John:
The only question is, does this product automate it in a way that actually makes it easier to do a thing that we know people want to do?
John:
We know they want to do it.
John:
They do it like crazy now manually the hard way.
John:
uh having something that's you know this again as the first application of a computer that can also see you right having something that can do that with the smarts that we have developed for cameras to find where the heck you are and you know take good pictures of you it is easier for a computer to do that than to you to try to do it yourself with a mirror holding out your phone or doing other sorts of stuff like that especially if it becomes in the same way that the echo does like
John:
This becomes so easy.
John:
It just becomes part of my routine.
John:
Right.
John:
The people who meticulously catalog their outfits each day that they are proud of their outfits.
John:
That is a big effort that most people don't want to go through.
John:
But it's like Marco said, if Marco didn't have to think about it, but just went through his day and put on his watch and at some point his his, you know, some point in 20 years in the future.
John:
when you know his grandchildren are visiting in his super duper fancy smart home he just wakes up in the morning picks out a watch he wants to wear puts it on and then at the end of the month can view beautiful in focus close-up shots of every watch he wore on every day how did those pictures happen because the the cameras that are all over his house invisibly can always find him and take these amazing photographs and in low light perfect focus and he doesn't have to pose for them and he doesn't have to do anything
John:
In the same way that the magic checkout counter, you know, barcode scanner, just bring the food by and you kind of twirl it and, you know, spin it by the little scanner and the little lasers will find it right in that same type of technology.
John:
If you had a bunch of smart cameras in your house that eventually will be so cheap and so good.
John:
that they will be able to do this without you having to stand in a certain place or do a certain thing.
John:
That is the future that, you know, that is coming to the questions about it are all legit questions in terms of who owns this data.
John:
Is it okay for Amazon for us to upload it to Amazon and for them to keep it forever?
John:
And how is this funded?
John:
If the hardware isn't profitable itself is entirely funded about as a way to sell us, uh,
John:
you know clothes or whatever and what are the security implications and how hackable are these all these are going to be there's going to be terrible disasters in all these areas but there is no denying that the amount of computery things in our house will only increase with time and that it is kind of a ratcheting mechanism that
John:
And that this first one, aiming to be a mechanization of a thing that we know people already love to do is very smart and builds on their Echo stuff.
John:
As for the things I talk about in terms of technology and privacy, I think Amazon is probably terrible in them.
John:
I think their security is probably crap.
John:
I think their privacy policy is probably terrible.
John:
I think if they're hacked, people are going to get tons of data and people will regret getting these things if that ever happens.
John:
If it doesn't, Amazon gets lucky.
John:
If it does, we will all just regret it together as people...
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
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Casey:
Okay, so in the last, what was it, 24, 48 hours as we record, Microsoft has released basically a Surface Book Air.
Casey:
They've taken what basically all of us wanted from the new MacBook Air that we have yet to receive and made a Surface laptop out of it.
Marco:
I love that you assume that a new MacBook Air is something that is coming.
Marco:
It just isn't here yet.
Casey:
Fair, fair.
Casey:
But yeah, so the thing that we all wanted, which would effectively be a new Retina MacBook Air with better internals and better ports and whatnot, Microsoft seems to have just released it.
Casey:
So I think they're pre-ordering soon, if memory serves.
Casey:
As we record, I don't believe it's available for purchase.
Casey:
But
Casey:
The very little bit that I've looked into it, it looked really nice.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting, first of all, that the Microsoft Surface branding was originally for, well, first it was for the giant table.
Marco:
And then it went away for a few years.
Marco:
And then it came back as this consumer convertible laptop tablet thing.
Marco:
And then it slowly became closer to regular computers.
Marco:
And now they're just like, all right, screw it.
Marco:
Here's just a laptop.
Marco:
And we're going to call it the Surface laptop.
Marco:
And it's like, they did all these crazy things, and they could kind of slowly work their way back to what most people actually want in their computer, which is a traditional-style laptop.
Marco:
And it does have a touchscreen, so bonus points for that.
Marco:
I do want to also point out, like, we Apple people...
Marco:
We keep following the company line of like, no, we shouldn't have touch screens on computers.
Marco:
Nobody wants that.
Marco:
But meanwhile, touch screens have become very prevalent on PCs.
Marco:
And most people who use them seem to kind of like them.
Marco:
They might not use them all the time or they might not use them for a lot of things.
Marco:
But people who use them seem to enjoy them largely.
Marco:
So I do think that is something that should not be totally discounted as a thing.
Marco:
And maybe Apple's right, but there sure do seem like a lot of people are using them.
Marco:
Anyway, but I also think it's interesting that...
Marco:
When the original Surface, not the table, but the very first weirdo, bizarre tablet laptop thing, when that first came out, it really seemed like this really niche, low-volume, low-selling device.
Marco:
But over time, Microsoft has been persistent and has just kept iterating and iterating.
Marco:
And now, Surfaces are actually pretty common.
Marco:
I see them out all the time.
Marco:
And I don't know if I just don't recognize most other PC hardware, so maybe I don't visually notice it or count it.
Marco:
and like like whenever whenever like people on twitter do like coffee shop surveys like like gruber likes to do sometimes or like you know i see some other people doing it where like like all right number of like you know macbooks in this coffee shop at 10 a number of you know surfaces three number of ipads two stuff like that services tend to be represented pretty well just like anecdotally out in the world there seem to be a lot of them in coffee shops and in airports and on planes and stuff like and like on commuter trains stuff like that like
Marco:
So I do think that it is worth... I hope Apple is noticing, and they probably are.
Marco:
They're smart over there.
Marco:
I hope they are noticing that these experiments that Microsoft has been doing with the Surface over time seemed outlandish at first.
Marco:
Not only are they getting less outlandish over time, as we all realize that some of those things are good ideas, but also they're getting pretty popular.
Marco:
And so I think that is something that we should not be ruling out.
Marco:
And some things are popular that are terrible.
Marco:
I mean, Dave Matthews band, right?
Marco:
But their popularity, I think, should not be overlooked.
Marco:
And we should not assume that everything about the service and its line of products is Microsoft being weird and wacky because a lot of it's sticking.
Marco:
So that is worth pointing out.
Marco:
So this particular computer...
Marco:
It looks pretty compelling for a lot of people.
Marco:
I mean, in a lot of ways, its specs are lower end than the MacBook Air.
Marco:
It can be, although it is much newer, the MacBook Air still has, I think, like three generations old now, parts, something like that.
Marco:
And this, I believe the Microsoft Surface laptop is Kaby Lake, so it's like really current.
Marco:
If the MacBook Air had Skylake or Kaby Lake,
Marco:
It would get way better battery life.
Marco:
And it's already amazing, which means they could do some pretty cool things.
Marco:
But they're not.
Marco:
But they made the MacBook Pro instead.
Marco:
And we'll talk about that in a minute, like the Escape.
Marco:
But this laptop looks really good because when the MacBook Air first came out, it was like the specialized thing.
Marco:
But over a pretty short time, it pretty quickly became like the mainstream laptop to have.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And now it's the low-end laptop to have, but they still sell a ton of them.
Marco:
Because the 13-inch MacBook Air especially, that form factor, that combination, as I talked about before in this show, that's a really good sweet spot for a lot of people.
Marco:
It's an incredibly compelling overall package.
Marco:
There's a reason why everyone has MacBook Airs, and almost everyone who has them loves them.
Marco:
It's no coincidence that when Apple introduced the new MacBook Pros and kind of made it clear that the MacBook Air was on its way very slowly out, and that the new MacBook Air replacement was this 13-inch MacBook Escape that is more expensive and in some ways more limited,
Marco:
A lot of people were very upset about that.
Marco:
It's like, no, you took this formula that we liked so much and now you're telling us that it's over and you're replacing it with something that's more expensive and more limited.
Marco:
So Microsoft comes along and says, all right, well, you know what?
Marco:
Here, this computer that you wanted here, we just made it.
Marco:
We made like a up-to-date, basically, version of a Retina MacBook Air shaped and sized computer.
Marco:
And in most ways, it looks a lot like the MacBook Air.
Marco:
it you know again like if you if you match it spec for spec it's it's is about the same price as the air and although newer um and and it is a few hundred dollars cheaper than the macbook escape for similar specs again i think they're going to sell a lot of these now they aren't the first pc maker to make a macbook air clone you know the pc makers have been making these for a while
Marco:
largely i think one of the reasons why services have taken off so well is that pc hardware is largely total crap like it is really bad like the designs are crappy like in their cheap plastic builds and just designs with very poor taste you know and and microsoft's designs have largely been pretty good like for for the surface hardware like they've had a couple of you know weird little missteps here and there but you know so is apple like no one's perfect
Marco:
So Microsoft's actually, I think, doing pretty well here.
Marco:
And if I were buying a Windows PC for some reason, it would almost certainly be a Surface product of some kind.
Marco:
Or I'd build my own if it was a desktop, probably.
Marco:
But let's say if I was buying a PC laptop for some reason, I would almost certainly get one of these.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
The thing is, obviously, my career prior to my current job was on the Microsoft stack.
Casey:
And so, though I don't have any particular love for Microsoft in a nostalgic sense, I have admired the way they've really changed themselves and really kind of adjusted the way they operate with Satya Nadella at the helm.
Casey:
And I think they've been doing a really good job and have been doing really fascinating stuff.
Casey:
For the San Franciscans, they pivoted.
Casey:
So anyway, the funny thing is, though, you can't really make Microsoft lose all of its old bits because as I'm trying to get the URL for the Surface laptop to put in the show notes.
Casey:
I arrive at microsoftstore.com slash store slash MSUSA slash ENUS slash PDP slash product ID dot 5102691100.
Casey:
Then as I load that page, the page itself has been dimmed and I have a modal.
Casey:
Don't miss out.
Casey:
Sign up to receive special deals, new offers, and more.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
The answer is no.
Casey:
So you can make Microsoft a lot better in general, but you can't ever really make Microsoft forget that they're Microsoft, can you?
Marco:
Well, but what's the actual name of the MacBook Escape?
Casey:
Oh, the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
I believe it's the late 2013 13-inch MacBook Pro without touch bar.
Casey:
Fair point, fair point, fair point.
Marco:
Delete me in all caps at the end.
Casey:
So anyway, but no, other than that, I think this looks really great.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
If I were to buy a PC, it would either be a Lenovo or very, very likely a Surface laptop or something like this.
Casey:
I agree with you that everything I've heard from people who have touchscreen laptops, they swear by them.
Casey:
I think that seems really kooky, but it's probably one of those things that I just haven't tried it, and so I don't get it.
Casey:
And certainly for iOS Simulator, that would be super helpful.
Casey:
So in that sense, I do get it.
Casey:
I do like that there are different colors available.
Casey:
I don't recall what colors there are, but there's certainly several shades that you can get them in, which is really kind of stupid, but I like it, and I think that's kind of neat.
Marco:
Look, Apple sells the pink, gold, and dark gray 12-inch MacBook.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
There's nothing wrong with a little bit of color in your life, tech people.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Color is nice.
Casey:
Although, here again, the marketing copy is preposterous.
Casey:
If you look at the bullets under Surface Laptop, luxurious a la contra fabric-covered keyboard is bullet number two.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
I mean, Apple has their moments.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
Apple is not innocent in this department.
Casey:
But luxurious a la contra fabric-covered keyboard, really, guys?
John:
I'm glad you can't pronounce that word either, despite reading it in car magazines for the past year.
John:
several decades i thought it was alcantara i don't know you never have to say it out loud when it's in car magazines and all of a sudden you're faced with this word you got to do it a syllable at a time alcantara there we go yeah it's like bizel in any case john what do you think about this so so the the narrative for this is like marco said oh apple wouldn't make this laptop this is the retina macbook era that we have all wanted but as marco already pointed out
John:
um it's not like there haven't been a million pcs that that are similar that are like small thin use the macbook air class of processor but are newer and have a retina screen and so on and so forth um for this computer specifically though this is not the retina macbook air that i would want assuming it ran mac os and not just because it's got a fuzzy top which is kind of weird and i think will get kind of gross um
John:
this if apple made this computer i would right now be complaining about the ports and the ram four gigabytes ram that you shouldn't even offer a computer with that much is stupid don't do that uh and the ports one big usb one mini display port thingy headphone like no usb c
John:
that's not a modern computer like i'm not saying you have to have all the ports in the world but especially if you're going to be a pc like provide me utility the utility that apple won't add would be you know like like what this thing has except for usbc instead of plain usb maybe throw on one regular usb because it's not like there's not room like this is not a macbook size super duper skinny thing it's big enough that you could fit some more ports on there and if i'm looking for anything in a pc it's to do the port stuff that apple won't do so you
John:
Give me my ports, put some USB-C on there, put one regular USB, put an SD card slot.
John:
Don't give me one big USB and one mini display port and that's it.
John:
Like, I feel like it is RAM starve and port slim.
John:
And form factor wise, if I'm going to buy into the Surface brand, I know this is just like, this is a Surface laptop.
John:
Like they do have a touchscreen on it, but just like they do on the Surface book and everything.
John:
But those can sort of transform into tablet-y things where all of a sudden the touchscreen is much more viable.
John:
I'm not saying you don't want to have a touchscreen because they should leverage the advantages they have, which is they have created an OS that is touch accessible, right?
John:
That's the whole thing that they've done.
John:
They have one combined OS that it is usable with your finger.
John:
You're not, you know, in theory, the interface that is on the screen has some chance of being used by your big computer.
John:
you know 44 point in apple parlance fingertip surface right and that's what they're telling people to make make an application that is usable in that way we'll make controls and buttons and widgets and things that are usable in that way mac os is not like that so one of the advantages that uh that microsoft has when it comes to directly competing against the mac not ios but the mac is that they have an interface that is available for touch but
John:
touch on a plain old upright laptop screen like this you're right the pc has been doing it forever and you're right that people do like it because they can touch the screen but i think apple's also right that it is a it is not a great experience um so i don't say there's a reason they shouldn't have put touch in here but i wouldn't chalk it up as much of an advantage it's more of a well we can do it anyway and we got to do it but it makes me wish almost that this was a straight up laptop but that the hinge went all the way around and you could just bend it back on itself right you know like the convertibles that they made a million different varieties of
John:
if it's not gonna i can get on board with them not disconnecting it but if it's going to be a touch screen what if there is some application that i really want to use a touch screen with it is extremely awkward to use a very touch centric interface when you're when it's in a laptop configuration so
John:
I put that down mostly as a neutral.
John:
And so now I'm just left with a laptop that is kind of middle of the road, kind of strange, not a good complement of ports, and the low-end model has terrible specs.
John:
So I'm not impressed with it as a laptop, but I do agree that Microsoft has been...
John:
been trying everything that you can conceivably try and that they are putting in the work to make an operating system that embodies their vision for how computing how a single operating system can span multiple form factors and all that other good stuff styling wise the fur aside or the fuzzy fabric aside i still think microsoft surface and pcs in general are
John:
are sticking too closely to the apple uh design formula like they have their own twists they have their own colors you know fabric and the weird hinge and all stuff like that but apple has so dominated the aesthetic for laptops basically from the power book days when they defined the current shape of laptop keyboard goes there pointing device goes here screen goes there
John:
And it took a while for PC to get on board with that, but that defined it in the same way that the iPhone defined the smartphone form factor.
John:
And when Apple came out with the modern MacBook lines with the big flat square keycaps and this little perfect rectangle that Johnny Ive loves and the big touchpad and like...
John:
all the quote-unquote high-end pc laptops have been following along with that aesthetic as if it is the one and only true way to make laptops and i don't think it is uh there are there are there is variety out there and a lot of variety is ugly you could like oh i'm glad microsoft is sticking with the apple design school because it looks good and it does
John:
but it also doesn't allow them to stand out very often speaking of coffee shop surveys i'm in a coffee shop and i have to squint to make sure i can make out from the front is that a macbook air or is it you know it's easier from the back because you can see the little windows logo which is uh you know better than the old windows logo but whatever anyway
John:
Apple says that you have to have your company logo dead center in the back of your screen.
John:
So that's what they do.
John:
But from the front, it's like you could mistake it for a MacBook Air.
John:
And I think that is leaving money on the table style wise that I believe there can be a different aesthetic that they could be pursuing instead of what they're currently doing, which is like Apple style, but with a twist.
John:
So I'm not particularly impressed by this product.
John:
I was much more impressed by the Surface Studio Pro product.
John:
and i uh but all these products all microsoft hardware products and even you know to some degree the software products uh reveal reveal gaps in apple's lineup i'm not going to say they're necessarily weaknesses but they reveal gaps like their operating system reveals the fact that they're you know the things fall through the gaps between ios and mac os whether one os two s is the right strategy either way it shows gaps and all these variety of surface books and service studio reveal gaps in apple's lineup and that like
John:
If you want a really big touchscreen that runs pro apps, the biggest you can go on Apple is 12.5-inch.
John:
And if you want an OS that's touch-accessible, that's iOS.
John:
And there's this big gap between pro hardware that, in theory, is coming to the Mac soon and touch OS.
John:
And Apple has separated those two from each other, whereas Microsoft has a combined OS and a combined hardware strategy.
John:
So I find that the most interesting thing about the Surface efforts.
John:
And I suppose it's interesting that they're extending the brain to a plain old laptop, but...
John:
This plain old laptop does not seem to be a particularly compelling product beyond the fact that it is a Surface-branded laptop, but I applaud Microsoft for taking the Surface hardware and software brand and extending it outwards, and hopefully they have some success.
John:
We haven't even talked about Windows 10 S. I don't know if we have time for it, but that is a whole other aspect of this.
Marco:
We'll get to that.
Marco:
But also, and I think this ties into that too, keep in mind, as you criticize this laptop's mediocrity in certain areas, it's a low-end product.
Marco:
This is a value product.
John:
In the world of PCs, it's probably mid-range.
John:
It's a low-end Mac.
John:
It's a high-end PC.
John:
A low-end PC laptop is 180 bucks.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
It's a mid-range PC laptop, but it uses those kind of mid-range parts and everything, and it's in a pretty small case and everything.
Marco:
Anyway, this is a value product, and it's competing against Apple's value products.
Marco:
And it is interesting to see the two very different ways that Microsoft and Apple are tackling this problem.
Marco:
Apple is...
Marco:
largely addressing the very old, unupdated MacBook Air towards the same market.
Marco:
I mean, some of the people we pushed up into a new MacBook Pro, but I think a lot of people... This is aimed at things like schools, businesses, college students, people who need either a lot of computers at the lowest possible price, like a school, or people who are buying a computer who need a lot of value and can't spend a lot more.
Marco:
So people like college students, things like that.
Marco:
And the MacBook Air has done very well for these people.
Marco:
But Apple is basically just telling them to just keep buying really old hardware.
Marco:
And Microsoft is showing them a new option.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple really has a direct answer to this.
Marco:
I mean, I guess technically Apple's answer is spend more for one of our new computers or tolerate one of our old ones.
Marco:
But I really... I think the MacBook Air is kind of an embarrassment right now because...
Marco:
It's not like this is some narrow little product that they don't sell many of.
Marco:
They sell tons of them.
Marco:
And so it makes me kind of sad for Apple that they are happy to sell so many of an ancient product that they have refused to update out of what seems like a combination of laziness and greed.
Marco:
Because they're making good money on it, so why update it?
Marco:
That's...
Marco:
That's a crappy reason, but that seems to be the reason they're using.
Marco:
And the new MacBook Pro will eventually, I assume, will eventually get lower in price, and eventually the 12-inch and the Escape line will replace the MacBook Air.
Marco:
But it doesn't seem like that's happening soon.
Marco:
It seems like that might be still maybe three years out or something like that.
Marco:
So for this time, are they just going to keep selling this ancient MacBook Air while things like this are coming out from the PC industry and kind of embarrassing it?
Marco:
I don't think I like that strategy.
John:
Don't we have like five years before they have a special meeting to talk about the MacBook Air at Apple's campus that they invite us to say, we know we haven't updated the MacBook Air in four years.
John:
And people were wondering if we were going to discontinue it.
John:
But we've just decided last week that we're going to make a new MacBook Air.
John:
And it won't be out this year.
John:
But we are going to rethink the MacBook.
John:
We've heard you that you want the MacBook Air.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
This specific Microsoft Surface thing, like...
John:
PC laptops have been embarrassing the air for a long time.
John:
It's not just this one.
John:
Like, oh, they finally made it.
John:
Like you said, there's been tons of PCs that use the MacBook Air class of chip, but they actually stay updated of varying degrees of build quality and style.
John:
So maybe the Microsoft one is notable in that they have a good reputation for hardware build quality.
John:
And if you like the style, that's fine.
John:
But yeah, I mean, it's revealing gaps in Apple's lineup, like that Apple wanted the combination of the new MacBook and the new MacBook Pros to span the same range that the old combination of the Airs plus the Pros plus the weird MacBook-y thing in the middle span.
John:
And...
John:
It does kind of span the same range, just with gaps in different places, but because of the way they're priced and the way their capabilities spread, it ends up being less satisfying.
John:
And the Air still is very popular.
John:
I don't know if I mentioned this about my UK trip, but I did a, because I was actually in a Starbucks, I think for the first time in my entire life.
John:
Because my wife went in there to get a drink and I came in with her.
John:
And I did a laptop count just because I was, you know, I glanced around and I was stunned at what I saw.
John:
What I saw was like, I think it was like eight MacBook Airs, one HP laptop and one MacBook Pro.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I was like, MacBook Airs, like what's going on?
John:
I talked to some people in the UK and they said, oh, schools buy them a lot.
John:
Like when you go to school, you get a laptop and they all buy MacBook Airs.
John:
so like are these people going to i mean are these all old macbook airs they got as hand-me-downs are people going to apple stores and continuing to buy macbook airs yes they are but yeah i mean i don't know i mean if you look at the asps of the i was thinking of this when you say oh the macbook pro prices will come down like not at those asps stay up because the new macbook pros that are all super you know more expensive than their old models
John:
tremendously increased, uh, revenues and average selling price for Apple.
John:
So because I get pent up demand, right.
John:
Or whatever, but I'm not so sure that they're going to be in a big darn hurry to lower the price.
John:
And honestly, I'm okay with Apple jacking up the price on its top end models.
John:
As long as the top end models like justify that price, not linearly, obviously where it's like, is this $500 better?
John:
No, of course it's not going to be $500 better, but if anything, you're going to fleece people on make it the super duper high end ones.
John:
Um, if they actually introduced a, uh,
John:
macbook air replacement sort of a worthy macbook air replacement that fills that same role like has the same trade-offs of battery life screen size and ports and capability as the old macbook air but has all updated internals and his retina if they ever made such a machine i mean that could lower their asps but i think it would sell like hotcakes and honestly i feel like i made the joke about the whole mac mac pro meeting like oh we've decided we're going to do this i feel like that decision is inevitable because it seems like
John:
the range of capabilities and apple's limited range from the super duper skinny macbook to the much more expensive pros that doesn't seem to be the right distribution of price points and capabilities to satisfy the market right whereas the air has proven itself to be a you know and not the first air because the first day was a crappy mix right but like the 2011 and on air like that was a really great sweet spot
John:
for capability size and price uh and i think apple has proven with their experiment that the super duper skinny one
John:
it's a little bit too far down the capability ladder.
John:
It sacrifices too much capability for other stuff.
John:
They just, by all means, keep it, because you should have a model that's the lightest possible thing you can have.
John:
It's awesome for that, right?
John:
But it doesn't... Whatever the curve looks like of demand for laptop sizes and capabilities, that one is also towards the edge.
John:
So I think Apple will eventually come around to making a machine that has...
John:
this the balance of the macbook air doesn't have to be the same exact size and shape as the macbook air because things change and usbc is smaller and so on and so forth and whether that's because the macbook evolves or they introduce a new model in the middle or the 13 inch macbook pro as marco has talked about so many times eventually shrinks down to the point where it basically is a macbook air but that hasn't happened yet um and so looking over at the pc side of the windows side of things and seeing all these macbook air equivalents seeing how popular you know again coffee coffee uh shop surveys
John:
A lot of the PCs that I see are MacBook Airy sized form factors.
John:
I see less of the giant battleships that you still see in corporate environments.
John:
And I see more of the, you know, HP Lenovo MacBook Airy sized machines.
John:
So hopefully Apple will get on that in, you know, T minus two and a half years.
Marco:
Yeah, because that's the thing.
Marco:
That's what I'm saying.
Marco:
The strategy of what they're doing, what they seem to be doing now, which is basically just never update the air and just keep selling it until the other ones come down in price.
Marco:
I don't think that necessarily works unless there's other changes in mind because, like what you said, the 12-inch...
Marco:
Assume that comes down in price and becomes a new entry.
Marco:
That's kind of not good enough to replace the MacBook Air.
Marco:
It is so much of a compromise in so many more areas.
Marco:
It has way fewer ports and things.
Marco:
It is way slower than MacBook Air in a lot of things.
Marco:
It gets worse battery life by a good amount.
Marco:
uh and and those you know it will presumably improve over time like maybe maybe the second generation 12 inch macbook whenever that comes out um maybe that one will be a better air replacement but the current one really isn't i mean maybe the answer is that the 13 inch macbook escape ends up going down in price eventually or it has a very low end configuration um
Marco:
But the problem is the base model is already a pretty low-end model for Apple standards.
Marco:
Compared to the service book, it's kind of mid-range to high-end.
Marco:
So again, I'm not entirely sure that strategy makes sense, but it seems like Apple is doing a pretty poor job
Marco:
addressing what is probably by far their most popular model of laptop like that seems weird to me although that that being said looking at the surface laptop if you had if you were buying one of these things which of these four colors would you get because i saw the video the colors looked okay in the video but now i'm seeing this page like all four of these colors look hideous to me they all look like cubicle walls
John:
the texture is the problem not the color I think either one of the two grays the darker gray or the lighter gray they're fine but I'm not on board with the texture thing both because I think it'll get dirty and gross and it'll be harder to clean and also because the edge treatment
John:
like when the fabric runs to the edge and you know joins up with the metal that's just asking for it to fray the last thing i want is a frayed laptop that's not an aesthetic i like i can imagine people finding it attractive right but i'm not i'm not into that word uh i don't know it's hard to say i on the configurator the the colors in the image is just microscopic and
Casey:
It's very hard to say.
Casey:
I would probably take a look at the cobalt blue, but in all likelihood end up with the boring platinum.
John:
Yeah, the colors.
John:
And you're right that their website, like... I know you just made fun of their website for a while before, but like...
John:
If you have beautiful hardware, like they made the really cool intro video that I think Gruber linked to and a couple other people did that shows like all, you know, it looked like an Apple video showing how beautiful all the parts are even on the inside and how they all assemble and fly together.
John:
And we've seen stuff from like Apple.
John:
But then if you go to their website...
John:
Apple, the entire page would just be like incredibly close-up, high-resolution, beautifully shot photographs slash renders of their hardware, right?
John:
Whereas here, we're squinting at these little blurry JPEGs.
John:
We can't even... You know, I was trying to look for a picture to show me all the ports.
John:
Apple would have a shot that's like...
John:
your ports fill your entire screen and they're impossibly clean because they're probably computer renders and here it's like i can't even get a shot where i can make out what the ports are on the side the color picker changes the color on this one inch by one inch postage stamp like microsoft you are not you're not selling your hardware you got look good looking hardware you have to show it off we want to see it want to see it up close
John:
Alas.
Marco:
That's Microsoft.
Marco:
I will say also, the MacBook Escape, the late 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro without touch bar, two ports, that continues to impress me as a machine.
Marco:
When Phil Schiller got on stage and talked about it during the introduction, he did say something on the lines of, like, this is kind of the new MacBook Air.
Marco:
And even though it starts at $1,500 and has fewer ports and things, I think that is largely correct.
Marco:
I hope in whatever the next version of the MacBook Escape is, presumably maybe this fall or next spring, whenever new MacBook Pros come out, I hope that they make a few changes that will make that more correct, that will make this more of a MacBook Air replacement.
Marco:
I think for me, having used this thing now,
Marco:
I miss the SD card slot.
Marco:
I will not accept any argument that that's the past because it simply is not true.
Marco:
You can argue with me all you want about legacy ports, but the SD card is not a legacy port.
Marco:
It is something else and it is still necessary for lots of people.
Casey:
Oh, I could not disagree with you more.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
So I would say bring back the SD card reader, and I would also really like one more USB port.
Marco:
I don't care whether it's C or A. Most of the computers, like in this class before, you've been able to have them plugged in, and you've been able to plug in two devices to them.
Marco:
And you can't do that with this without using hubs and stuff.
Marco:
And every USB-C hub that's out there on the world right now is a total piece of garbage.
Marco:
And the MacBook One has been out for, what, two years now?
Casey:
Something like that.
Marco:
And they're still all garbage.
Marco:
It's a similar problem of a lot of hubs and things like hubs that eventually... I mean, it took me something like three years to find a decent USB 3.0 hub that didn't disconnect constantly and caused problems.
Marco:
Every USB-C hub out there is a total piece of garbage.
Marco:
And the fact is, what if I don't want to buy a USB-C hub?
Marco:
Or what if I don't want to buy Apple's $75 thing or whatever it is?
Marco:
That's just more additional cost for people who are buying this thing to do something fairly basic.
Marco:
I really would love one additional USB port and an SD card reader.
Marco:
And if that happens to come with them also maybe dropping the price by a couple hundred bucks on the entry point so that it makes it more MacBook Air range, I think that would help a lot.
John:
And then make it a little bit thinner and you've got a random MacBook Air.
Marco:
No, it doesn't need to be thinner.
Marco:
It's already thinner than the MacBook Air.
Marco:
Physically, in so many ways, it's great.
John:
It really is really nice.
John:
It's not thinner than the MacBook Air in all dimensions.
John:
It doesn't do the taper, which, again, I say is a great idea for not doing the taper because you can get tons more battery life.
John:
But it doesn't change the fact of how it feels in your hand and how it fits into your backpack or whatever.
John:
The taper was there for a reason, for a perception reason.
John:
And that perception is a real thing.
Marco:
No, I'm telling you, I disagree very strongly on the physical side.
Marco:
To me, physically, this is a MacBook Air.
Marco:
It is exactly the right size and feels exactly right in the hand.
John:
You may feel like it's the right size, but it feels chunkier than the Air.
Marco:
I disagree.
John:
I can just go get an Air.
John:
It just does, because it doesn't have the thin end.
John:
That's the perception angle that I'm talking about.
John:
I'm not saying the thin end is the right choice, because I think the right choice is for right now for it to be thicker.
John:
But you're saying in the future, eventually.
John:
Like I said, the question is, does the fanless MacBook expand its capabilities to fill in the role of the Air?
John:
Or does the 13-inch MacBook Pro...
John:
slim down essentially to become to come to the map okay and lower its price to come to the macbook air from above and i i agree that it's probably more likely that eventually the 13 inch macbook pro if not in price in all other ways will fill that same role but i i disagree that right now that fit form factor wise that it feels the same because it just doesn't we have them at work and pick them up and it's just not it's just not like that actually we don't have them alert the important people who have their own machines at work have them work sorry
John:
so excited like did work give that to you no this is my personal machine oh never mind do we want to we are running long but do we want to talk about the uh windows 10 s or whatever it's called i mean we can i think this is a quick one so windows 10 s is the uh cut down in terms of pricing version of windows that you can get with these laptops that uh wants you to get all the applications from microsoft's version of the app store
John:
And, you know, it's a model we're all familiar with.
John:
Microsoft has been pushing real hard on the App Store model thus far.
John:
They have not been as successful as Apple, but in theory brings all the same benefits of a controlled selection of software that's approved by Microsoft that conforms to presumably better conforms to the ideals that Microsoft wants it to conform to and that Microsoft gets, you know, control of how the money flows and yada, yada, yada.
John:
The interesting thing about Microsoft 10 S is that if you want to get applications from someplace other than the Microsoft app store, or I don't know what they call it.
John:
I keep saying app store.
John:
You can pay them an additional 50 bucks and now you can load programs from anywhere, which is probably making a long time PC windows.
John:
People freak out because this is, you know, like,
John:
a lockdown pc that i have to pay money to put stuff on that's terrible don't worry guys you'll be able to hack it all that stuff is cracked anyway um uh it's an interesting uh business model trying to have your cake and eat it too where it's like we're we want to give people the capability of uh using it as a regular pc but we actually want to discourage that so we can discourage it and by the way we can make our cheap models cheaper
John:
by you know presumably microsoft is reducing whatever its license fee is by saying if you if you use windows 10s you'd have you pc manufacturer won't have to pay us quite as much for the windows license because we hope we're going to make some more by selling apps through our store um but as gruber pointed out this is kind of a weird pitch for people that like you have to pay money to are you paying money to make your thing better
John:
Or are you paying, or is it just there as a deterrent to try to encourage people to use the App Store?
John:
And the Microsoft App Store is pretty grim and doesn't have the apps that you want in it, so does everybody just have to pay that fee?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like many things they do in the modern Microsoft service world, it's like...
John:
i don't know let's try this and you know they don't have too much to lose it's not like they're the microsoft app star is setting the world ablaze so if this is what it takes to encourage more people to get into the microsoft app store to say you know if they sell a lot of these and they can say hey look at all these customers the only place they can buy stores is through the microsoft store that's why you software developer should put your stuff in the microsoft store
John:
But, you know, good luck getting the big names in there.
John:
The same reason Apple couldn't get them in.
John:
Microsoft's going to have trouble getting them into the store.
John:
And then it just ends up being as a weird free version of Windows that you can pay $50 to unlock and presumably to remove all the weird ads that are apparently in Windows these days.
Marco:
Yeah, this whole thing is kind of a weird segmentation thing.
Marco:
I mean, it is obviously this effort to create a low-end Windows, but Windows RT was kind of a more severe version of that, and that didn't do so well.
Marco:
I really don't see Microsoft's customers being a big fan of this.
Casey:
It doesn't seem like the thing that deserves a $50 charge.
Casey:
It seems to me to be like the gatekeeper switch in Mac OS, where you just kind of say, yes, I understand the risks.
Casey:
I'm good with it.
Casey:
Just let me sideload whatever I want.
John:
Yeah, that was a group's analogy, too.
John:
And it's like it doesn't feel good to it feels like a ransom.
John:
It's like unlock the full capability you perceive.
John:
But that's just from our perspective, because we're like, oh, we just expect to be able to load any software we want on our PCs.
John:
And of course, from our perspective in the walled garden of Apple, it's like we would gladly pay 50 bucks to be able to sideload arbitrary applications onto our iPhones, or at least that was.
John:
I think all the geeks would have agreed on that many years ago.
John:
These days, people make less of a fuss about that.
John:
But I think it still exists for all sorts of applications that Apple doesn't allow on the App Store that might potentially be useful, so on and so forth.
John:
But trying to bring that to the Windows world...
John:
I don't know what kind of demand is there for that, and I'm not sure how much power Microsoft has, even within its own ecosystem, to make that happen.
John:
Apple obviously took the easy way out and said, we're introducing a new platform.
John:
This is how it is from day one.
John:
So then it's like, it is what it is.
John:
And guess what?
John:
That platform was wildly successful, so they made it happen.
John:
But trying to retroactively apply that to a platform that was previously opened
John:
Apple, on its own little private world of the Mac, has had much difficulty doing that with Mac App Store and sandboxing and major applications that were either never in the Mac App Store or left the Mac App Store.
John:
I think Microsoft's going to have an even harder time.
John:
But I think the main innovation here seems to me as...
John:
a way that Microsoft can allow even cheaper Windows-based computers while still hopefully not losing that much money on them, like giving Windows licenses, lowering the price of Windows licenses for computers that are incredibly cheap and hoping they're going to make it up with the App Store purchase.
John:
I don't think the math will work out for them, but it's an interesting strategy.
John:
And from a user's perspective, I think Windows users are just used to, by now,
John:
the business model of windows and how many different versions there are and how much they cost and what you really have to pay and what they're capable of doing being a confusing mess.
John:
And so, you know, this is par for the course.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment and Indochino.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
Casey:
I have some thoughts about the switch.
Casey:
Oh, it's okay.
Casey:
It'll be fairly quick.
Casey:
Uh, this week, uh, or really last week, Mario cart eight deluxe came out.
Casey:
This is the first Mario cart that I have played since Mario cart for the Wii.
Casey:
And, uh, it came out on Friday.
Casey:
I got my copy on Friday and,
Casey:
On Monday, I had already arranged with a few co-workers at work who also have Switches.
Casey:
We were all going to bring our consoles in and our copies of Mario Kart and play over lunch.
Casey:
And so there were six of us gathered around a kind of a bar, if you will, at work, playing local multiplayer against each other and with each other on Mario Kart 8.
Casey:
And it was unbelievably fun and cool and a miracle that HR didn't come down and yell at us for the language that we were all using as we were hollering at each other to, you know, effectively go die in a fire, but with much more colorful words than that.
Casey:
It was unbelievably fun, just like Apple.
Casey:
Well, like Apple used to be anyway.
Casey:
It just worked, and it was great.
Casey:
Just an unbelievable amount of fun in a way that I haven't since I did LAN parties when I was in high school or college or null modem cable parties when I was a grade schooler.
Casey:
And this is the first console that I am aware of where that sort of thing can happen in person really, really easily and without six associated TVs as well.
Casey:
I just thought it was extremely cool.
Casey:
Yes, well, actually, yes, I'm aware that the original Game Boy had like four player games and things like that.
Casey:
But you know what I mean.
Casey:
where six people show up with no cables whatsoever and just start playing a game together it was awesome and tremendously fun and if you happen to know a couple of people or even better a handful of people who all have all have switches and all have Mario Kart or maybe an equivalent game I cannot recommend it enough it is so much fun have you done any of this yet John
John:
I looked for you online at Mario Kart this weekend, but you weren't around.
John:
I've played all these tracks and done all these things already, but I played it to just see the new frame rate and the high-res graphics and the new features of the game.
John:
What game was it again?
John:
Mario Kart 8.
John:
Oh.
John:
What was it again?
John:
are you trying to get me to say mario over and over again so you can soundboard me still mario card 8 um deluxe mario card 8 deluxe um indeed but yeah and to try out the new the few new features they added with the double item boxes and the pink sparks and the dreaded auto steer thing which you must disable because it's terrible um well it's terrible for me it is good for the people who it's intended for um
John:
I would have loved to have... Speaking of the auto drive thing, it's not auto drive.
John:
It's preventing you from going off the edge of the map.
John:
And I used to try to play Mario Kart with my kids probably before they were quite old enough to be able to do it.
John:
And it was very frustrating for them because they couldn't stay on the course, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think they would have had more fun with this version, which has auto-accelerate so you don't have to hold down A, and also they can drive all over the course however they want, they just can't go off the edge.
John:
It's as if there are guardrails on the entire track, and that would have really helped them be guided along.
John:
But if you are an experienced Mario Kart player, you don't want this feature on because if you...
John:
barely get close to or touch the edge and you weren't going to go off the edge but you just happen to touch it it slows you down tremendously it's like you know it's like sandpaper so i would encourage everyone to turn this feature off if you're going for good lap times or trying to compete in 200 cc or whatever you can't turn it off from the main interface you have to actually start the race and then once the race has started go to the option screen and then you can turn it off and i'm pretty sure that setting persists between launches the game once you have turned it off
Casey:
Now, the thing, though, with this is that it's very different than playing online against each other because, you know, when you're playing online against each other, you can't, unless you have, like, a phone line open, you can't really yell and scream at each other like you can when you're face-to-face.
Casey:
And you can't see...
Casey:
You know, the people who are steering their switches, even though they're not using tilt controls, they're steering their switches like steering wheels because they can't help themselves.
Casey:
You can't see the just delightfully taste, just delicious frustration when you nail the person in first place with a blue shell.
Casey:
You can't see all that online.
Casey:
And so although the online play is also very good and also generally just works...
Casey:
It is just magnificent to have a big group all in person.
Casey:
So if we do a podcaster family New Year's again this year, I will pretty much demand everyone bring their Switches and Mario Kart because it is extremely fun.
Casey:
Also, I noticed buried deep within Nintendo's Mario Kart site, and I will not put a link in the show notes because I will forget and I'm too lazy to find it.
Casey:
You can actually play 12-player local Mario Kart over Ethernet only, which I didn't even realize was the thing.
Casey:
Wait, it has an Ethernet port?
Casey:
No, that's the thing.
Casey:
You would have to get 12 USB to Ethernet adapters and a router and 12 TVs because you have to be docked to do it.
Casey:
But you could play 12-player Mario Kart in a LAN party scenario.
Marco:
That sounds like an incredibly ridiculous amount of setup, but that sounds awesome.
Marco:
How fun would that be?
Casey:
That would be so much fun.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
But to go back a sec, John, you were saying you were looking for me over the weekend and didn't see me.
Casey:
One of the complaints I do have about the online setup with the Switch, and maybe it's user ignorance, so maybe I'm dead wrong about this, but...
Casey:
I don't see any way where you can notify somebody else, I would like to play this game with you.
Casey:
You can say in Mario Kart that you're looking for a friend that's online and you can start a room that's intended, or I guess maybe the only two people that can go into that room are, say, me and you.
Casey:
But there is no mechanism that I'm aware of where you can like ping or notify a person.
Casey:
So let's say I'm playing Mario Kart.
Casey:
I'm actively playing Mario Kart.
Casey:
And John starts up his Switch and sees me online and says, oh, I'd like to play Casey.
Casey:
I don't think I am ever notified that you are asking to play with me, which is a real bummer because then you have to go to some other device to orchestrate the thing and then back to the Switch to actually play.
Casey:
And I feel like that's a real shortfall, which really bummed me out.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Other than that, it's worked really well.
Casey:
Now, that being said, yesterday, we also did a group game, this time with seven players.
Casey:
And I don't know if it was because it was over lunch and we were standing relatively close to Microwaves, which is the same story it was on Monday.
Casey:
But
Casey:
But either way, the local LAN was not working well at all, and the online multiplayer actually worked pretty much flawlessly.
Casey:
So even though we were all sitting within at most 10 feet of each other, and even when we moved away from the microwaves, it still just didn't work for Beans for some reason.
Casey:
But once we all went online, it actually worked great.
Casey:
But so much fun to have it in person.
Casey:
And one of the things that appealed to me about the Switch, which I think I mentioned last week or the week before, was that intro video where they showed all the Switches all in a circle and they were all playing basketball or maybe Splatoon or something like that against each other.
Casey:
And I thought, man, that looks so much like so much fun.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
It's so much fun.
Casey:
So, John, you really need to try that out.
Casey:
Or, you know, if one of your kids, if their friends all have switches and they do a slumber party or something, you should just be that creepy old dad that invites himself to play along because it is super duper fun.
John:
Yeah, I have ergonomic issues, though, with using the Switch handheld, which I have tried a few times with so many people raving about it, but that's just for me personally.
John:
I always prefer to have it docked and use a controller and sit on the couch and look at the big TV.
John:
And unlike with the Wii U, where I actually thought I did it a little bit better with you playing on the gamepad,
John:
maybe because of lag or whatever.
John:
The Wii U gamepad is way better for me ergonomically than the little tiny Switch.
John:
It's just too small and too... I do worse when I race with it in that way than I do on the TV.
John:
I've been playing Mario Kart mostly on the TV.
John:
If I had to do a Land Party type thing, it's nice that we could all...
John:
be in person and do the things but i i would prefer to be in a scenario where the ridiculous scenario where there are 12 televisions and ethernet things because that's the way i prefer to play the game i mean i suppose you still have fun playing it playing it not at peak level with me trying to play at the hand handheld thing and doing terribly badly but uh
John:
yeah i'm and going back to it i was surprised that i felt like oh i haven't played marakite aid in so long i'm gonna fire this game up and i'm just gonna see how awful i am but i still had it like i went directly to 200 cc which i had unlocked in the wii u version already and i just pulled up a bunch of courses and i was doing pretty well like plus or minus the insanity of uh rubber banding and item bombardment that you get at 200 cc with the incredible cheating computer players um
John:
I did okay, except for a couple of the tracks that were in, like, I guess they were in the most recent DLC that I had only done a little bit.
John:
I realized I just don't know those courses, but I tend not to like the SNES tracks anyway.
John:
What?
Casey:
You monster!
John:
I mean, like, they were good in SNES, but I, you know, I prefer the other tracks that are more dynamic, that are, you know, ports from, like, GameCube and the Mario Kart 8 ones, uh,
John:
So I had fun.
John:
I don't know if I'm going to go through and like three star everything like I did on the Wii U one, because I find that incredibly frustrating at the upper levels because three starring at 200 CC will literally drive you mad.
John:
If you, if you do not have much better skills than I do, because I can do it.
John:
Uh, but it takes me a long time and it's incredibly frustrating to have to three star because that doesn't mean just that you come in first at the end of the thing.
John:
That means you basically come in first in every race, except for one.
John:
Like there's, there's very little more, or maybe it's all of them.
John:
There's very little margin of error.
John:
And in 200 CC in a world of Mario Kart, it seems to me that almost no amount of driving skill.
John:
can protect you from an unfortunate series of events that leads you to, after an entire Grand Prix, getting blown up 10 feet from the finish line and watching one person zip by you.
John:
And then, oh, sorry, you didn't get three stars.
John:
It's a rough world out there, America.
John:
I went back to Zelda to relax.
John:
I played a bunch of America.
John:
I'm like, I need to wind down.
John:
I need to relax.
John:
I went back to Zelda, where I've already beaten the game, and I'm just like...
Casey:
you know doing the fun side quests and furnishing my home and doing all sorts of exciting things and that was that was much better you know it's funny you bring up zelda again because um i found that since i've gotten uh mario card 8 deluxe i am far less less likely to play zelda not because i don't enjoy it just as much not because it's not by pretty much any measure a
Casey:
Because with Mario Kart, I can pick it up for like a three minute or 10 minute, you know, round and just kind of play for a few minutes, put it back down.
Casey:
Whereas for me anyway, with Zelda, I have to be like concentrating and paying attention and thinking about things and everything.
Casey:
And I understand that I'm a noob and maybe other people like you, John, that have played Zelda for forever in a day don't have to concentrate as much.
Casey:
But for me, it's a much more deliberate act.
Casey:
And so I found myself playing a lot more Mario Kart than Zelda since Friday, even though in many ways I enjoy Zelda more.
Casey:
And in many ways, I do think it is more relaxing or at least a slower pace, if nothing else.
John:
I think the Zelda is one of the games that is the easiest to pick up and do something.
John:
One of the easiest Zelda's perhaps ever to have a tiny short gaming session because you'll pick up and like there are so many things that you can choose to do within two or three minutes.
John:
You don't have to.
John:
go and do a shrine or advance the story you can just pick a point on the map and you know fast travel there or like pick a point close by and just go to it and along the way you will find enemies to defeat new things especially if you haven't opened up the entire map yet and you're just exploring interesting things to see just look and say i wonder what's over there and go over there and when you get there you find out what's over there it's an interesting thing and you're done like i've
John:
When I was super duper into playing Zelda, like when I was only like 10 or 20 hours in, it was, you know, normally we just play games on weekends, but I was at the point where, you know, after dinner on weekdays, I was like, let me just get in five or 10 minutes of Zelda because there was always something to do.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So you should like maybe if you're going into it and saying, I need to advance the story, I need to get closer to finishing the game that there is some sort of like, oh, where was I in my project, my project of finishing this game?
Casey:
That's exactly that's exactly what I run into is I lose my context and then it takes me like 10 minutes just to remember where I was.
Casey:
And a lot of that is just because I have a terrible memory and I forget.
Casey:
But I think you're right.
Casey:
If I don't worry about what I was actively in the midst of working on, it probably would be a lot more approachable.
John:
Yeah, like save that for the longer sessions and for the shorter ones, like...
John:
just gather up some food and cook it or go you know beat up some bad guys and take their stuff or see what's over on the other side of that hill right and then only if you're going to have a longer gaming session say okay now how am i how am i going to progress what area of the map am i going to open up and conquer next what story thing am i going to go on am i going to pick a side quest for my adventure log and do that one side quest that's for the longer sessions
Casey:
Marco, you still haven't really played the Switch at all?
Casey:
Are you still with us?
Marco:
Yeah, I bought Mario Kart, I think, yesterday, the day before.
Marco:
But I haven't been able to play it yet on my Switch because I was told by Tiff that I couldn't play with her Switch.
Marco:
And I suggested maybe I should bring it to WWDC.
Casey:
You absolutely should, but she'll kill you.
Marco:
And then we could all play on our Switches.
Marco:
But then I was also informed, what would she do that week without her Switch?
John:
And also, I would never bring mine.
John:
why are you afraid of scratching the screen that you never look at no it's not a portable device for me i'm gonna bring it do i need more i'm not even bringing i don't even bring laptops anymore i just bring my ipad i don't travel light i would it would take a lot for me to to bring the switch because then you have to bring all the stuff to you know at the very least the charging cable and i would want to bring the pro controller and then it's like i would never play it i don't have to bring all the stuff i just bring the switch and i use the cable for my macbook pro to charge it if i need to
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
And it's actually, I'm glad you brought all this back up because when you had said, you know, you only want to play it against the TV and you don't like it in handheld mode, blah, blah, blah, that's totally fair, totally reasonable.
Casey:
For what it's worth, when we were set up at work, a handful of people did bring their pro controllers.
Casey:
But what I did, for example...
Casey:
is I, because I didn't have a pro controller until about four hours ago, I put it in kickstand.
Casey:
I put the kickstand up and then popped out the Joy-Cons.
Casey:
And in my case, I slid them into the little sheath.
Casey:
I don't know what the term is for that, the holstery thing.
Casey:
So it was kind of like a poor man's pro controller.
Casey:
But what a couple of people did was just hold their Joy-Cons.
Casey:
They just held them, you know, with their sides or whatever.
John:
Yeah, I tried playing like that too to see how it was.
John:
And I think that was better than holding the whole thing up.
John:
But then I had the problem of,
John:
uh what to do with the screen if you have a table then you can use a little kickstand but if you're trying to do it like on your lap then you have some problems oh it's still not for me and same thing with zelda i also tried playing zelda in all these arrangements hand help with the joy cons on hand help with the joy cons off on a table i'm not then it's just like tv wins for me i have two pro controllers now i'm committed to the pro controller lifestyle
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And I mean, again, I'm not at all trying to argue.
Casey:
All I'm saying is that I think for a friendly and lightly competitive match at WWDC, I really think you'd be fine with just having the Joy-Cons in your hands, perhaps without the...
Casey:
holstery thing and presumably we'd all be around a table or something like that uh and and just playing in that way although i will say that would be a pretty fun way to pass the time while we're waiting both outside and inside uh whatever the convention center is called moscone for the sake of discussion that would be a pretty good way to to deal with just sitting there for hours just saying