Personal Body Chemistry
real-time follow-up as of approximately 10 or so minutes ago i am now an uncle hey congratulations hey do you intend to be a creepy uncle or a fun uncle or some other kind of uncle i hadn't even thought about it but uh i mean you got to think about these things casey's gonna try to be the cool uncle we already know that the question is the question is what is he going to be
Oh, that's true.
That is 100%.
That is 100% accurate.
I wish I could deny it, but that is absolutely accurate.
Yeah.
So I wanted to spend a moment and talk about the somewhat political section of our last episode.
And we got a lot of feedback.
We got a lot of good feedback.
We got a lot of bad feedback.
But one thing that was common that I think was on me that I wanted to apologize to the listeners for is...
At one point in the heat of getting fired up or in the midst of getting fired up, I had said, in so many words, you know, if you disagree with me, you're a monster.
And name calling is not really a constructive way to have a reasoned debate, not to say that that debate was terribly reasoned anyway, but...
Name-calling does not really help the scenario.
And, you know, if I'm going to be grumpy about other people name-calling, then I should be grumpy about me doing it.
And so no snark intended.
I really do apologize for name-calling.
I stand by the general premise of what I said, which is to say I think that some of the behaviors of those who want to take away health care, that is a monstrous behavior, but that does not, by necessity, make somebody a monster.
So...
um i don't know you guys can either confirm or deny everything i've just said but for for what it's worth i feel bad about that and and i wish i had handled that a little bit better despite by and large sticking by pretty much everything i said but the name calling doesn't help i think you undercut yourself with the monstrous behaviors thing because i'm not sure that distinction is uh particularly important but that like
we don't usually talk about politics in the show and i think we kind of accidentally talked about it which is fitting because it was not on the topic list and we sort of slid right into it from wiki tribune which was on the topic list um and it ended up staying in the show unlike many other similar discussions but one of the main problems with any time that we get into politics is that for the most part the three of us are coming from the same place like we we agree on the issues and it's actually surprisingly difficult to talk about
uh, a controversial political issue amongst three people who all agree with each other.
And it's, it's why we get the complaints of like, you know, echo chamber, so on and so forth.
The good thing.
And the, the bad thing about podcasts is even though it's just the three of us talking about it and we all agree, uh,
in aggregate it's not an echo chamber because believe me the opposing opinions are presented to us right so we just don't get them in real time it is delayed um but that's not you know we're not doing a political debate show but but yeah so when we're all talking about and we all more or less agree we're just like saying things that each one of us agrees about there's not even that much nuance to our disagreement and it just kind of spirals off from there and i don't i don't it's difficult to
It's difficult to clarify our thinking on it when there's essentially no opposition on the podcast itself.
So that's a difficulty I always feel when engaging those and when listening to them, always trying to look for an angle that is illuminating rather than just the three of us venting, which occasionally happens.
Occasionally we got to vent and occasionally we're feeling bad about things.
I'm surprised after the presidential election, we didn't have a similar show.
Somehow we avoided it, but it came out last week.
I have no regrets.
I had a feeling.
But like In-N-Outland says in the chat, saying that people are monsters is counterproductive and makes the argument sound dumb.
And I would agree with that.
So I am sorry for that portion of the discussion.
The rest of it, I pretty much stick by.
I think one thing that is really badly missing in our culture is the ability to agree on some kind
cause and effect norms or like being able to talk about cause and effect without it being assumed to be or without being politicized.
Because like, you know, if we you know, like the health care debate, it's like, you know, like when I was saying last week about how like I want people to actually think through their arguments of, you know, like, well, how how do we think people in society should be treated?
And how do we think, you know, the government should take care of people or not take care of people?
I wish we could talk about that in we as a society.
I wish we could talk about that without it being so politically charged and people immediately jumping down each other's throats about their identities.
Because what we need to instead be able to talk about is like...
How do we want to treat people in our society who need some kind of help?
Do we want the standard of that to be that we should just let people fail and die and starve or not?
And if the answer is not, then how do we allocate these resources?
How do we pay for them?
And I wish we could actually talk about that.
But the second you give an opinion either way on that, whether you say, I think society should help those less fortunate, whether you think we should provide for people and we should not let people fail too badly or starve or die –
Or whether you think that we should just let people do all those things.
That shouldn't be a U.S.
Republican versus Democrat thing, but it is.
And so it's hard to say, like, oh, we should stay away from political topics or that every view is valid when some of these views...
People on both sides think that it's not just politics, that it's the basics of their identity or of human standards of decency and obligations to each other.
And it's not just political.
It's not like, I think we should vote for the person in the red versus the person in the blue or whatever else.
It's like...
I want people who aren't like me to die, or I want to help people.
And those shouldn't be political opinions.
Those should be like, this is the one that we teach ourselves and that we value because we're good people, and this is the other one.
But apparently that's not what these things are.
But nobody wants people to die.
No, no.
They very much do.
I don't want to get into it again because we're just supposed to be touching on this topic.
I feel like I can argue the other side pretty decently to the old other side.
Again, I alluded to the 80s when they used to make arguments.
To say that actually we all agree on what we want to accomplish is just a difference of opinion on how to best accomplish it.
Right.
That debate is a lot easier to have.
What you're getting at is it doesn't feel like we're even unified on the goal.
But even though the consequences of these decisions may be real, it's not connected in a straight line in terms of I want people who aren't like me to die.
Like, I don't think you will get anything.
anybody to own that opinion anywhere.
Well, that's true.
But the problem is that people will very strongly own opinions that precede that.
But if you actually follow them through to the conclusions, then that is a penalty.
So suppose somebody has a life-threatening illness that is treatable.
But they can't afford the treatment.
What should happen in this case?
Should our society find a way to pay for people in these kinds of conditions to get treatment?
Or should we let them die?
That is a fundamental argument that we have seemingly about every 10 years.
And if you're on the side of we should help people...
it seems like you'd be a total monster to use casey's word right it seemed like you'd be a total monster to argue the other side of that to say like you know actually no we we should let people die like no that's but but that actually want them to die they don't want them they're not wishing them ill they wish that if they could snap their fingers and cure them they would say yes you're cured we should totally do that uh it's just an unfortunate situation and there's just you know debating the best way to allocate scarce resources and
to incentivize the right behaviors and blah, blah, blah.
Like we start shifting to the more intellectual argument towards it.
But when you connect it up to like malice, like to say that people have malice towards that, like it's not, and ignoring the specifics of this thing, more generally, the other general topic on the political stuff is...
This happens to me.
This happens to everybody when you're listening to someone talk about something, whether it's political or technological or anything on a podcast.
They will, especially things with two sides, red, blue, Mac PC, whatever it may be, you know, the two sided debate.
they will address a thing like, people who support X are wrong because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And if people that support X are on a particular team, and you are also on that team, but you don't support X, they'll say, people who support X, here's what I don't like about it.
And people will get offended to say, well, I don't support X, but I'm on the same team as the people who support X. And because you're yelling at that person, I feel you're yelling at me.
And it's very difficult to hold on to the thread that says, look,
If they are complaining about something that you don't believe, they're not talking to you.
You know what I mean?
But when there are two teams, it's like, well, if they're saying anything about my team, even though I agree with them on this specific point, it's like they're attacking my team and I feel attacked.
Like, are you trying to say that I believe X?
It's like, well, if you don't believe X, we're not talking to you.
And so, like...
this is not addressed with you but when there's two teams when there's two teams and it's on your team you can't help but get pulled into it and again that happens that happens with everybody and especially with two-sided debates or you know actual sports teams as the case may be uh where you can't can't wrap your mind around a player on your favorite sports team maybe uh did something bad but you really do love the sports team and you try to square that circle so when someone says hey that that person that smart scene did a bad thing you say you be quiet he didn't do a bad thing and really in your heart of hearts you also agree you did a bad thing but you love the sports team
Right.
So anyway, that's a difficulty.
And when I'm listening to people talk about, you know, whether it's to like or dislike a particular movie or a director or a TV show or, you know, Mac versus PC things, it's very easy to think that they're talking about you or to you.
uh ascribing to you beliefs that you don't have when you have to realize it's a broadcast medium and no one is saying you specifically there believe these things and if you don't then don't uh don't take on the burden of thinking that you're you're being reprimanded for something that you don't believe
The good news, though, is that there are some universal truths in the world.
And speaking of sports, there are universal truths like Bill Belichick is a cheater and Tom Brady really should not be playing football.
So anyway, let's talk about the back of the iPhone.
Adam Mork writes in to say, my take on that rumor image with Touch ID in the back is that it's a real schematic for a real prototype, but it's only for testing.
There have been more leaked schematics with no Touch ID on the back, and I'm surprised that this has been debated in two episodes as an inevitability.
In my opinion, this is Adam, there is zero chance Apple releases a phone with Touch ID on the back.
It's too big of a paradigm shift in form and function.
Apple has done more work for far less in the past.
I'd bet a lot of money it's under the screen at launch.
It really feels like a deal-breaking feature they would wait for.
So I think to be clear, none of us were saying there was inevitability, merely that this was a supposed leak thing and that we could all conceive of Apple releasing such a thing.
Obviously, it would not be ideal.
And obviously, you know, plan A is the thing under the screen.
But we were discussing it was like, what if they did?
What if they couldn't get under the screen?
Would they put it on the back?
Like, obviously, Apple doesn't want to.
They want to do that thing on the screen.
It's totally cool.
Right.
But I, you know, as I said, when we first started talking about this, I believe it is a thing that Apple would do.
because if the choice is between doing that and not having a new phone form factor at all uh they would totally do that um but i also totally buy this you know this is not a slam dunk this is just a random drawing that could be totally fake and as i said we'll find out when the real phone is released and we look at the millimeter sizing and if they got it down to three decimal points chances are that it was at the very least a real leak or something manufactured uh based on the
but yeah it could be a prototype could be just a testing thing it's hard to think of it being a prototype like that because it would take a lot of stuff to move around the touch id to the back even just for testing because there's a bunch of other crap there in the phone um but anyway for my part um i'm not tied to any one of these particular rumors and obviously the the the plan a
in both terms of rumors and in terms of what what apple would want to do is a thing in the screen and so that's what i'm certainly hoping for uh but if it doesn't arrive and the thing is on the back we won't all be flipping out because i feel like we will be acclimated to that idea through these leaks
All right.
Let's talk about dirty fabric on laptops.
Sure, let's.
This is a little bit of an odd, well, more than a little bit of an odd thing.
So to set some context, the Surface laptop has Alcantara.
Is that how you pronounce it?
Just avoid it.
Just avoid it.
Like we avoid all the words we can't pronounce.
Just avoid it.
And so it has some sort of fabric-y, leather-y something or other on it.
And that is, to my understanding, including where your wrists sit.
And that seems to me to be a really poor choice for any human being of any kind.
Because I remember having a poly book, Hi Stephen Hackett, which is to say a white polycarbonate MacBook.
And I had to take a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to that thing like once every couple weeks or deal with all of my wrist damage.
gunk and sweat and whatever and oils turning that thing brown and it was gross and that's plastic imagine fabric and so there's a link uh to what does this be a boy genius report or something like that i don't remember what bgr stands but it's pronounced booger oh fair enough so uh we have a link to something and uh they show an example of a surface with or it appears to be a surface keyboard with some really gross wrist oils all over it because clearly it's been used a lot
And that just strikes me as a poor choice.
But I don't know.
Maybe I'm missing something.
What do you guys think?
When we talked about the fabric on the Surface laptops last show, I was concerned about the edges fraying and like the difficulty of sort of mating that material.
But more broadly, as this dirty fabric issue brings up,
A laptop is something that gets a lot of contact, even though you're not supposed to rest your wrists when you're typing.
People do.
And people's hands and wrists are going to be in contact with this thing very, very frequently during use.
And for anything like that, it's a good idea to make it out of a material that is durable or washable or ideally both.
Because there is gunk on our hands and it is going to come off and go on to the thing that we're touching.
And there needs to be some plan for that.
So on the iPhone screens, A, they're made of glass, which is very, you know, hard material, easy to clean.
And B, they have that coating that tries to repel oil so that when you do try to wipe all your gunk off, it will come off easily.
And that's a good plan for the front of a cell phone that you're going to be touching all the time.
Similarly, for the trackpads on Macs, I think we all remember the original trackpads before they were glass.
They were, you know, various kinds of plastic.
And over time, the trackpads would get kind of shiny and slippery and worn down and discolored on the particular parts that you touch them.
Moving to the glass trackpad really helped solve that problem to keep it sort of uniformly colored and textured, easy to clean.
Because it is a part that you're touching all the time.
Same thing with keycaps, making them out of hard plastic, figuring out how to make keycaps so that the letters and numbers don't come off.
I'm sure we have all met somebody who is some strain of X person, which means that they secrete oils from their bodies that wear the letters off of the keycaps, right?
Some people just have, I don't know if it's,
uh acidic or otherwise solvent based secretions from their fingertips that will defeat almost any keyboard and leave their keycaps perfectly smooth and featureless but it's a challenge to wait people have acid fingers that's awesome i don't know if it's actually acid all i know is that some you know if you look at some people's keyboards they will have the exact same keyboard as you and all the letters will be gone from like the home row or like the e key and the return and stuff
And you're like, look, I'm using the same keyboard as you for the same period of time.
There's obviously some difference in our body chemistry that is causing this to happen, which is fine, like whatever.
But the job of making a keyboard is to make it easy to clean and make the little, you know, letters resist wearing off.
For a laptop, to cover it in fabric, fabric falls down in almost all these categories.
It is...
It's not easy to clean because anything that gets in there goes down to the weave or whatever.
And to really wash fabric, you put it in the washing machine.
If you're lucky, that does a good job.
But you're not putting your laptop in the washing machine.
So you've got a problem already.
To wash fabric, you need moisture.
You need like liquid, which unless you're Casey, that's not going anywhere near your laptop.
Yeah.
and it still needs to pass through it like it wasn't it's not just going to go on the surface and you want to make it so that whatever does get on it comes off easily you know and the the the surface stays the same if you have it from year to year and the fabric fabric wears down and frays and can get thin and you know rub through and spots and so on and so forth so it is not a great solution for anything that you're going to handle that much
i mean even even clothes wear out because they're made of cloth we put on our body eventually you get holes in the knees and holes in the pockets and you know they just fray and like so it is definitely a material that you can't treat the same way you would treat even even casey's plastic ibook and one of the problems with that with the plastic ibooks was they were white and
and they had some discoloration issues that may not have been noticeable if they were like a boring gray or if you know if they could if the plastic could be formulated differently if it was a different color but they were like very white and translucent and that was a problem i i think they probably could be cleaned pretty easily i don't know if they were porous or what but um and even for the very what the black book also had similar problems with the texture uh the surface texture going eventually apple set it on materials that
are pretty darn resilient.
The aluminum and the finish they put on the aluminum, it's not super glossy.
It's a finish that will stay looking the same for pretty much the life of the thing, and combined with the glass trackpad and good keycaps and the glass screens, you can have an Apple laptop that looks more or less the same
plus or minus dents and maybe scratches but in terms of color discoloration and finish many many years later one of these fabric covered things i think no matter how careful you are depending on your personal body chemistry and amount of crap on your hands not literally but maybe literally uh like it's going to be very difficult very very difficult to keep this thing looking like new with unwashable fabric coating the surface where your hands are going to be um
so perhaps not a wise choice it is a differentiator is it a style difference as i mentioned last show i think it's a style difference that doesn't go far enough because it essentially looks like an apple laptop that someone put put a bunch of felt on top of which i a i think is not a good look and b i think is apes apple's design cues still too strongly despite the fabric um anyway be careful out there with your fabric covered laptops
One thing I will also point out, I was thinking about this earlier today, and as Casey's talking about the plastic MacBook, it kind of reminded me of this, that it wasn't that long ago that most of Apple's lower-end or consumer-grade products were plastic.
And you had to pay more to get the premium Pro ones that were metal.
And for all the complaining I do about some of Apple's product decisions or apathy or various things nearby there, the move to pretty much everything being made out of premium materials is appreciated.
That is something that not every brand does.
In fact, no other brand does it as far as I know in computing.
every laptop like every every mac that apple sells is now made of metal every phone now like is made of you know decent metal and has a decent industrial design like there are no more like cheap plastic options that unless i'm forgetting something big but as far as as far as you can tell there aren't any uh everything now is made of the nice materials that you know for the most part that age well and things like that so apple tv is plastic right
oh yeah but you don't touch that or move it anywhere it's nice looking plastic and you totally don't touch it yeah same deal with time capsule thanks tipster yeah i forgot about the time capsule everybody forgot about the time capsule yeah apple forgot about the time capsule but they don't sell it they're out of the router business i think they still are for sale i think they just weren't going to make more of them really anyway it doesn't matter anyway so yeah just nice little note that it's nice that now everything is made of good materials
Someone in the chat mentioned the iPhone 5C, which is my immediate thought with plastic.
I think the iPhone 5C shows that plastic can look and feel premium because I think the 5C was a great design, a great external design for a phone.
Every time I see them in public, they look like they're brand new.
It's just a very...
hard durable shiny probably really easy to clean plastic that doesn't get dirty right uh so it can be done um and you know you mentioned the apple tv it's a similar type of thing that even if people were handling that i think it would be very resistant because if you just make it out of like plastic is not just one material it's a million different formulations and apple sort of learned the hard way
which formulations do and don't work from the soft plastic on the screen of the first uh ipod nano you know to the discoloring uh macbooks and and other materials they tried like the titanium uh power book that had problems with the paint staying on like they eventually set it on a solution that works well and they've spread it throughout their line which is a good idea but i i'm not going to count out plastic entirely but i think i'm going to kind of count out fabric entirely as something that you want to put on the quote-unquote wrist rest area of a laptop because i
Like, no matter how, you know, you go to the furniture store and they say, we've got the magic coating that repels water and you can throw like jello pudding on this couch and nothing will happen.
And that's true until that coating wears away.
And then, you know, then, you know, it's.
anything that you're going to rub something up against it's just it's not going to last so uh i suppose they could work on was that simonizing or whatever like all sorts of super duper waterproofing coating for fabrics but a that they make the fabric feel more like plastic at that point and b even those wear off eventually
Can I pay the extra 50 cents at the car wash to get it re-simonized?
I don't even know what that... I'm just pulling that word out of my head.
I don't know where that came from.
I believe that's wax at the car wash, but I'm not positive.
Yes, I go through drive-thru car washes.
Don't at me, bro, or whatever.
I can't believe you do that.
I wouldn't do that.
I'm sure Casey wouldn't.
I decided a few years ago after first doing it for cars where I didn't know better or didn't care.
And then I started getting nicer cars and people like you guys scared me into not going through automatic car washes and I didn't want to get my clear coat all swirly or whatever.
And the result of that was I had really nice cars that were always incredibly embarrassingly dirty.
You live in upstate New York.
That's what you're supposed to have.
So instead, I decided, starting with my current car, I decided I'm not going to care anymore.
I'm just going to go through the car wash when I feel like it.
And my car has been way cleaner as a result.
And I don't care.
Yeah.
uh my car looks better now that i'm going through car washes whenever i feel like it rather than when i would go like five months without getting a car wash because i i had to wait until i could go to the place that took an hour or when casey visited pretty much oh to be blissfully ignorant again and you know it turns out maybe the black cars weren't such a good idea
Moving on.
Oh, man.
Amartya Banerjee, and I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong, asks, do you folks think that the popularity of touch input on Windows laptops could just be attributed to the terrible trackpads?
That given a good trackpad, having a fridge toaster OS in a laptop form factors unnecessary.
It's very hard for me to say because I've never had a touchscreen laptop, and I've only ever used them a couple times, and I found them very frustrating because I wasn't used to
being able to touch the screen and maybe I grazed it accidentally and all of a sudden my cursor moved or maybe I was stabbing at it like a monster.
Who knows?
But anyway, because I've never really understood the appeal of it, I don't think that it's a trackpad problem, although I do know that Windows computers have just woefully terrible trackpads.
I think that people just genuinely do like having touchscreen laptops.
Like anyone who I've ever spoken to who has a touchscreen Windows laptop is
Yeah.
Yeah.
As long as they don't touch my screen.
I know.
I agree with Casey that, yes, they have travel trackpads, but this is a separate issue.
People like to touch the screen.
And I don't think they do it super duper often.
They just like the option of being able to do it because, I mean, just think of the generation that's going to grow up with the expectation that every screen is touchable.
To have one that's not just seems broken.
It doesn't mean that you're going to spend...
the vast majority of your time on your your traditionally laptop shaped piece of hardware stabbing at the screen i mean you're going to be typing on the keyboard you're going to be using the trackpad and every once in a while you're going to stab at the screen and it's just all of a piece um and i think it mostly comes down to software like if the touch targets are frustratingly small as i think they would be if you just slapped a touch screen on a mac
That won't be a good experience, but if you're using something like a modern version of Windows where a lot of the applications and parts of the OS make an effort to have touchable targets, whatever.
I think it's fine, and I don't think it has to do with the bad trackpads.
Because honestly, we trackpad connoisseurs, Marco in particular with his hatred of the Force Trust trackpad, may be picky about these things.
Regular people cannot distinguish between the worst Windows trackpad and the best Apple one.
This because I mean, I think I think most people have trackpad skills that are more in line with mine.
I'm not a tactical wizard.
I am not particularly graceful with the trackpad.
I think I'm closer to the average and being a closer to the average trackpad person.
i know how clumsy it feels and that is the overwhelming factor in trackpad use not the quality of the trackpad like or the mouse tracking or the size of the trackpad or how sensitive it is or whatever no matter how good the trackpad is i feel clumsy so i think that's how most people feel and that's why if you were trying to put the two trackpads maybe they would notice the apple one is bigger but other than that they're like yeah whatever they're both trackpads so no that's not the reason that like touchscreens
I think that's a little bit aggressive.
I think that certainly not everyone notices how far improved the Apple trackpads are.
But I think a lot of quote unquote normal people do notice.
Certainly they notice the size, just like you said.
But I think that it's noticed more often than most.
I've heard people that are not like super nerds say to me, oh, you know, I got this Mac and man, that trackpad is much better.
It doesn't happen a lot to your point, but it does happen for sure.
Sure.
It's kind of one of those things where if they haven't tried the better one, they're not sitting there using their Windows laptop and you come up to them, man, how can you use that trackpad?
They're like, well, it's fine.
Now, if you were to give them an Apple laptop for a week and they had to go back, maybe they could tell the difference.
But I don't hear it as a pain point.
I don't hear it as a reason people don't like their computers.
Or if I go to have to use someone's Windows computer at work and I say to the person, I don't know how you work on this trackpad, they'll be like, what?
What's wrong with it?
It's fine.
Because they don't have anything to compare it to.
And it is it is the same awkward little thing that they're just used to using or they just use the keyboard all the time.
Don't forget the culture of being a Windows user, which is like everything kind of doesn't work.
And so you just like that's what you expect as normal.
Like you don't even realize how much better things can be when things work and are thoughtfully designed.
Because on Windows, you're just constantly like lying on a bed of nails and you don't even notice it after a while.
i like that sometimes i go to some use someone's windows laptop at work and they have like like four buttons like two above and two below the trackpad or some other weird arrangement where there's basically redundant left and right mouse buttons on the surface of the laptop and i'll try to do it and like nothing will happen like oh yeah that set of buttons doesn't work use these ones you can continue to tolerate and use this thing you consider it not broken when some of the buttons and some of the major buttons on the front of it don't work you just get around you just have to use that button
Well, no, no, no.
What probably is happening there is it probably has both an inferior trackpad pointing device and the unequivocally superior trackpoint style pointing device.
And the buttons above the trackpad are for the trackpoint.
Yeah, that's probably it.
And oftentimes that'll get turned off because people are wrong and they use the trackpad instead.
Before the entire world, well, actually is me.
Remember that I'm basing this opinion on a pre-gesture time.
Now the gestures are a thing and trackpads honestly are the better approach.
But before gestures were a thing, I tell you, all you people who laugh at that little nubbin mouse, you're wrong.
It was way better.
Anyway, Corey Floyd wrote in to say that they work at Wikimedia and heard our latest show discussing the Wicked Tribune project, and they wanted to kind of, not necessarily correct, but bring up a few things.
Wicked Tribune isn't affiliated with Wikipedia or Wikimedia in any way, which has been causing some confusion in the media.
This is Corey still.
I think this mostly came across in your episode, but I also wanted to include a few other interesting specifics below.
wiki tribune is based on wordpress not media week wiki like wikipedia and its sister projects additionally it is not actually developed or otherwise maintained by existing wikimedia or wikipedia community and finally wikimedia also has an existing albeit unsuccessful project called wiki news which is in some ways a competitor to wiki tribune in the first place and that's it wiki news.org we'll put all these links in the show notes
So I've got Jimmy Wales.
That is the connecting thread.
But don't be confused about the fact that this is a Wikipedia spinoff because it's not.
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So another Amazon cylinder that isn't a cylinder thing came out, and I really don't care.
So does somebody who actually gives a crap want to talk about this?
Marco?
And this is more of a three-dimensional trapezoid.
Fair enough.
Yeah, good point.
This is what Marco said.
We've got a quote from someone named Marco who wrote into the show to say...
i'd upgrade our kitchen echo to this in a heartbeat he says looking at a then rumored picture of the actual echo show yeah so uh marco have you upgraded your kitchen echo to this now that your heart has beaten no i haven't because it isn't out yet but i did place a pre-order and it will be here on allegedly june 28th so we will see when that comes uh basically the so the gist of it is you know the the amazon echo is is uh quite wonderful to many people myself included
And my family has really gotten into it.
We use it all the time.
And it lives in our kitchen.
And it is wonderful for playing music around the house, for setting timers, especially while cooking.
Tiff uses it all the time for things like checking the weather in the morning when running around getting Adam ready for school.
um so there are a number of use cases during the day where it would be nice to have a screen uh for instance the timers that i just mentioned it would be nice to see how much time is left to see them counting down if there ever becomes a way to set multiple named timers right now you can set multiple timers but you can't name them i'm pretty sure the google home you can name them uh but the echo does not support that at the moment and
but again like when you have multiple timers going it would be nice to see them visually and maybe to have little touch buttons to pause or cancel them individually because right now it's kind of you kind of can't do it very well via voice if you have multiple ones going um when tiff checks the weather in the morning first of all these pictures show it kind of always having like this home screen that has the clock and the current weather conditions uh on the screen all the time so that would be nice too to just not even have to
ask at certain things.
If you're just walking by, you can glance at it and see the weather.
So there's all sorts of wonderful things like that where many of the uses that we currently use the Echo for would be nicer sometimes or all the time with a screen.
Now, there is a fair argument to be made
Why don't you just put an iPad right there and just use an iPad all the time and enable the Hey Dingus feature on it and just use that?
And that is a fair argument.
I have an iPad that sits right next to it that I take around the first floor and plays a podcast while we do things.
But we really enjoy the Amazon Echo ecosystem.
We enjoy the way the product works.
It works very well for us.
To have another Echo come out that has a screen, I am willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt on this.
When the first Echo came out, we all made fun of it because they released this horrible video and it seemed so weird and creepy.
Not that different, as we mentioned last week, from the new Echo look, the weird dressing room camera thing.
But I will give them the benefit of the doubt because as weird as the first Echo seemed, because they were very bad at selling it or at promoting it and giving us an idea of what it would be like,
It turned out to be pretty great for a lot of people, myself included and my family included.
Also to point out, too, so there have been increasing rumors and increasing rumblings that Apple is probably going to release something similar to this.
Rumors are that it might even come as soon as like next month at WBDC.
Keep in mind that if Apple does something like this, which would be like a premium speaker with some kind of screen and some kind of built in, you know, Siri thing, how much is that going to cost?
Because this Amazon thing is $230.
And if you buy two of them, you get $100 off.
That's what I did.
I ordered two.
I figured we'll have a use for the second one.
Maybe we'll give it to our parents or whatever else.
There is no way that Apple is going to release a standalone speaker with a screen that is very iPad-like, possibly, for $200.
That's not going to happen.
So this will be interesting to see how Apple plays in this market.
And also, again, going back to previous discussions about it, a lot of what makes the Echo so good are things that Apple's not historically been so great at.
Things like having a really easy-to-use open ecosystem to integrate really well with it.
Things like having a really reliable voice service that is fast, that is very consistent, that works the same way every single time.
and hears you very, very well every single time.
These are things that Apple so far has struggled with.
So we'll see how that goes.
But I am optimistic about this Amazon thing.
And to have this only be like 50 bucks more than the one without the screen is pretty impressive.
And yeah, so I'm looking forward to when it arrives in June.
And look, it might be terrible.
We don't know yet.
Nobody has a review of it yet.
No one outside of Amazon, as far as I know, has gotten a chance to use one yet.
But
So again, I think Amazon's track record in this particular area has actually been proven to be pretty good.
So we'll see what happens.
You mentioned before you thought it was a fair argument that why don't you just have an iPad in your kitchen instead of this.
I don't think that's a particularly good argument because the iPad...
even setting aside software issues in terms of how well siri understands it can respond to what you can do and how open the ecosystem is for adding you know various skills and actions that connect other devices in your house even just setting that aside just in terms of the hardware an ipad can't compete with this type of device in two of the three areas that are most important
one speakers ipad the new ipads have very good speakers but this device is dedicating way more room for speakers so in theory again we haven't seen one of these in theory you can put way way way better speakers in this thing because there's just so much more room for quote unquote real speakers instead of very clever little cavities in your skinny little thing and playing audio to fill the whole kitchen or whatever is an important function of these types of devices and
and the second one is microphones the ipad has i think it has multiple mics probably for noise cancellation but i think it has two the strength of the echo is whatever weird five microphone beam forming bs it does to be able to how many eight eight i know anyway
There's way more room for more microphones in this type of thing.
And again, we don't know how many microphones this thing has, but based on the echoes that they have put out, this is one of the most important functions of this thing is to be able to hear you no matter where you are.
And the current iPads just don't dedicate that much hardware for that.
The third area where I feel like it can match it is in the camera, because you didn't mention this, but it doesn't just have a screen, it has a camera.
And they're selling the kind of video conferencing thing.
Who knows how that will go?
That's a whole sort of network effect ecosystem type thing.
We may just still end up
end up facetiming each other on our phones i do see why they added this and i think people will use it just not me yeah you get one to grandma who doesn't who doesn't have an iphone doesn't know how iphones work and if she can just come in front of this especially the drop-in feature like where you don't actually where there's a certain time where your thing is open to just suddenly seeing seeing these people on the screen you know like if you set this up with uh with relatives who are not tech savvy uh
to just to be able to do video conferencing where you could you could never get them to use an ipad even that was too much for them if you just plop this down on their counter like i think that could be effective for for that particular purpose yeah but for regular people i don't know but the camera again getting back to the the what i call the look or the the echo look or what the hell is it called uh the echo screen what's it called echo echo look echo show echo show that's because everyone thinks it's a podcast but no no the other one i'm talking about the look the fashion camera thing
these are the worst names okay yeah that's that's called the look yeah so uh i was saying last week uh that this uh this device category of computing devices in your home that have cameras that can see you has legs and here we have within the next week another device of granite from the same company that puts a camera in your house that can see you and does something with it
Both of them look like they have tiny little, you know, tablet type cameras.
So I think that's a wash in terms of the iPad competing with this.
But I would be looking for these type of devices, the look and the show and other things like this.
to get increasingly sophisticated cameras that can follow you that made multiple cameras to synthesize an image with you know depth sensors and stuff like that because that's where these things are going to have more sort of awareness of what's going on they can project sound and video to you and they can be aware of where you they can hear you no matter where you are and they can see you no matter where you are as far as i can tell from this one it only sees you when you're in front of it um and that that leads me to the all the things i don't like about this particular hardware product like
if it is a fixed camera camera that's kind of crappy you'd hope it'd be smarter but again cost you know whatever this is the first version will wait this thing is homely it's not it's not an attractive device yeah i will agree with you on that i mean but to be to be fair like the echo cylinder is also not very attractive
I think that's pretty sleek, and I think the cylinder has a thing going for it where it would be unobtrusive, and you could put it off to the side.
Although, that's another reason why I like the Google Home, now that I think about it, because I was thinking about, you know, if we got an Echo, where would I put it?
The Home is smaller than the Echo, and it is less obtrusive in the place where I have it.
But you can't make this unobtrusive, because it has to be a place where you can see the screen.
And it's not particularly attractive, black or white.
it looks kind of like a sort of retro 70s piece of hardware it's very it's very strange it just certainly doesn't look elegant it doesn't look like an apple device anyway and it doesn't you know it has kind of sort of it's kind of like a brutalism kind of like a rugged you know 80s soviet era hardware yeah i mean i guess it has has a certain appeal but um and then finally this this thing is
I can't really tell from the pictures, but it's slanted back in all the pictures I see.
It's tilted backwards, like the shape dictates the tilt.
It doesn't seem to have an adjustable tilt.
And for something that you're going to be looking at, that's going to be looking back at you, that seems just, ergonomically and practically speaking, very limiting.
Because the echo you can put literally anywhere that it can hear you, like high, low, left, right, just whatever, it's fine.
This thing, you need sight lines, and you need to be able to see it, and it needs to be able to see you, and...
depending on how tall you are or how tall most of the people are even just being able to see kids and adults like how would you get that thing in a position where it can both where grandma can both see your you know kids that are half your height and you and even just if you're you know just living by yourself you have to put it on a surface where the camera can see you and you can see the screen which just like it seems it seems like
that it would have been better to design this to have a little bit more flexibility about angle and stuff again costs i understand like you can't have an adjustable stand or any kind of tilt thing that is any reasonable quality for this price point so like i'm willing to to give a lot of leeway there but um this definitely it kind of reminds me of the first kindle remember what a monster the first kindle was oh that was that was something but
weird angular white thing with the weird terrible hardware keyboard on and it's like they took a lot of shots of that until they kind of settled down onto like the paper white which is kind of the epitome of the old style kindle and now they've gone with that weird thing it's like thick on one edge and thin on the other they need to iterate on this one i'm sure they will although i say i'm sure they will but what have they done to the amazon echo it's still the same black cylinder it always was maybe they just nailed that one on the first try but
I worry about their software ecosystem, too, because once they start getting into the realm of video calling and stuff like that, I think it's going to be difficult for them to compete with FaceTime.
This is basically what they've got here.
They've got their own little version of FaceTime.
And FaceTime, for all of the wonkiness of the weird patent thing that caused them to have to restructure the way it's done and the fact that Steve Jobs impulsively said it was going to be opened up to the world and it never was and all those other things...
i use it for its intended purpose frequently and it works you know i mean i i can successfully send video and audio to people the only limiting factor is ever uh crappy internet connections which is really nothing you can do about right because if you're trying to communicate with somebody who has a crappy internet connection or you have a crappy internet connection it's not great but it will gracefully degrade to a black screen with just audio and also other things um it basically works and i
amazon as far as i'm aware this is kind of their first foray into this i think did they do like kind of video support for one of the the color uh fire tablets maybe so maybe it's not not their very first thing yes yeah they had some kind of thing where it was it was like a screen sharing thing where you could where like their support rep could like log into your tablet and show you how to do things or do things for you because did you see them or did they see you
I don't know.
I don't think I ever heard of anybody actually using this feature, but they did have that kind of thing.
And again, I think this is one of those things like Amazon, similar to the drop-in thing, is that what they call it on this?
Where you can kind of force call someone.
Yeah, it's the same as the Google knock-knock thing that we thought was a dangerous thing for abuse, but this is opt-in.
But at least the way they're doing it, yeah, it's opt-in, it's whitelist only, and it seems like it's pretty well controlled.
But like...
I do give Amazon credit.
They have, for years, on their tablets and other products, you know, other, like, you know, mainstream consumer products, for years they have been adding features like that or, like, very good, you know, parental controls and, like, kid scheduling and everything else.
Like, features that...
that you really would expect a company like Apple to do.
Because, you know, Apple's so considerate and innovative and cares a lot about the customer experience and everything.
Amazon has really made a lot of these features over the years.
And they can kind of get away with it because their scale is so much smaller.
Like, imagine the staffing required if Apple were to do one of those things where they will log into your computer with you and show you how to do things.
Like,
They would never in a million years be able to handle that on any kind of scale.
But Amazon can do it because they're really at a much smaller scale for most of these products.
As far as we're aware.
Well, that's true.
No labels in the waxes.
They make a bunch of weird stuff and not all of it works.
But it does seem like I think they have earned the benefit of the doubt in that some of their weird stuff is actually really good.
It's also weird that, like, I mean, setting aside Apple, which has a strange history with these type of devices and just, like, being almost, like, stubbornly unwilling to enter markets even after it's proven that they're viable just because it doesn't seem big enough to Apple or they have different plans or they're pursuing other strategies and just in the meantime we get nothing.
And now maybe they're finally going to come out with one.
But...
like an apple that was doing the opposite of what it's actually doing the current apple is reducing the number of things that it's making getting rid of the the you know the the routers and reducing trying to simplify its computer and phone lines and you know it's it's going the other direction but if it wasn't going in that direction and it was expanding there's a lot of categories of devices that you feel like apple could make a good one of and also google both of these companies
have all the pieces to be able to make a really good Bluetooth speaker, a really good thing that listens to you.
I would argue that I don't think we have seen great hardware from Google.
I mean, Google Home is fine.
We've seen lots of things that come kind of close and they always kind of fall down on the support or they don't follow through or the products end up being delayed and not shipping or they have weird shortcomings or they only get an OS for like six months.
I think Google has shown that they are really not set up to be a company that sells and supports their own hardware.
They don't follow through, but they have all the pieces to make it.
They have the server side component.
They can make reasonable hardware, even if it's just a broken apart Chromecast shoved in a cylinder, which is the Google Home.
And the Chromecast, for that matter, like that little dongle-y thing.
I agree with you that the follow-through isn't there, but...
They have the pieces to make it happen.
Like any company can make a Bluetooth speaker, but once you start connecting it up to services, not everybody has services.
Google has tons of services.
Apple has enough services that, you know, you get Siri and Google now.
And so like, what's on the other end of this making it work, right?
And so those simple categories of like, wouldn't we have all, you know, loved if Apple made a good Bluetooth speaker and had been revising it over the years, we would all give them an extra 50 bucks for the Apple one because it would be nice in some way if it was actually nice.
And the same thing for Apple.
uh you know essentially a bluetooth speaker with a screen with siri that you can ask the weather that you know like the cheapest possible ipad shoved into a bluetooth speaker thing with much better like apple could have made this is what i'm saying apple could make the exact echo show and who knows the wwc they may announce the thing they've made that is like this but better and as marco said twice as expensive whatever um but they haven't been participating in this market at all leaving other people to try all sorts of things and i suppose to gain loyalty and to build their ecosystems
And so on and so forth to the point where I feel like Google saw it happening and they're like, oh, we should have a cylinder.
And so they do.
And maybe Google will try to come out with something like this, too.
And just to see Apple sit on the sidelines, it's it's fine if they are working on the next big thing.
But it may turn out that these little things build up the next big thing.
And if Apple's going to sit it out for much longer, I think it's a mistake.
I'm curious to see what happens, and I'll use me as an example.
Let's say at WWDC they announce the Apple equivalent of this tube thing.
I'm stumbling because I don't want to say any of the trigger words and have to have you bleep them later.
But anyway...
It's called the Apple Alexa Hey Siri.
Yeah, well, you did this to yourself.
So anyway, if Apple releases a lady in a canister equivalent, I'm curious to see what my reaction will be because sitting here now, like, again, I don't doubt that the Echo is very nice and that it serves a purpose for a lot of people and that, you know, I have no doubt, Marco, that you guys use it constantly and love it.
Like, there's nothing wrong with that.
Me, I don't feel like this is solving a problem that I have in my life.
I've said that many times before.
I'm curious as kind of a litmus test to how susceptible I am to whatever Apple tells me to do.
I'm curious to see what happens if Apple releases their own lady in a canister and what my reaction is to that.
Because if I'm like, well, holy crap, I've got to have one of these.
How could I have lived without it?
And it's really just a Echo but Apple branded.
Then apparently I really am a lemming and it's all downhill from here.
in reality it would most likely be three hundred dollars and you would say oh i don't want to buy this one i'll get the next one maybe yeah and then inevitably i'll buy it anyway yeah right it's six months later you'll have three of them speaking of a google home a minor google home update they added a thing that like lets you distinguish people by voice and so they can ask for you know tell me what my day is like and it will tell you your calendar by recognizing who you are uh so it's basic multi-user functionality unfortunately
no one ever asked google home what's on their calendar uh because it's just not a thing that we do and so distinguishing us by voice is not particularly useful i think the only two voices that knows that distinguishes mine and my daughter's because we are like the most frequent users but all that said i continue to be impressed by i mean it's basically just google search behind the scenes because i'm always impressed by google search when you do when you type in something in that search box and it somehow figures out what you mean and gives you relevant results that's the magic of google um
most recent one is we were talking about something at the dinner table and we were talking about a movie and, and we're like, was that released then?
Or, you know, what year was that released?
We could ask the Google home, what year was the movie, blah, blah, blah released.
And I didn't have to think about how do I have to phrase this in a way that can understand.
I don't even remember how I phrased it.
I just asked it the same way.
I would ask a, a person with encyclopedic knowledge of movie releases who's sitting in the corner of the room.
Um,
And the thing spoke out.
The movie Blah Blah Blah was released in March.
Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah.
That to me is still magic.
Because...
it's exactly like Google search.
Like I probably just turned it into, into text and typed into Google search and then read me the top hit or something like that.
But the bottom line is it answered my question.
It wasn't just like a, a general purpose.
Like what's the weather?
What does my day look like?
I had a specific question about a movie about the release date.
And it just didn't just tell me the movie and list off like all the metadata.
Let me tell you everything about this movie, starring this person, directed by this person, released it.
And I had to wait for the, it just told me the release date of the movie.
And that, I love that, right?
And that's something that I feel like you can't do if you aren't backed by Google.
Because the hard part is not hearing me and translating it as a text.
The hard part is figuring out what did you say and what did you mean and how do I answer you?
Now, for all I know, that's a canned thing that they expect people to ask or whatever.
But the more of those I have, the less I think I'm just getting lucky and happening to hit upon something they anticipated and specially coded support for.
And it's just like the magic of Google.
What was the movie?
I don't remember.
It was too long ago.
uh but despite despite google home i feel like it's still it's still not being revised as quickly as i would have hoped and its capabilities are not expanding in the way that i hoped but just for the basic functionality of answering my questions we have the dinner table and quickly settling arguments uh it's money well spent all right name a movie hunt for october there you go alexa what year was the hunt for red october released the movie the hunt for red october was released in 1989
It's magic.
There's been a lot of these queries where I will ask the Echo a question like this, and things that I will say that I think there's no way that it's going to be able to help me with this.
Well, it didn't because it's wrong.
It's the 2nd of March, 1990.
Really?
Oh, minor points.
According to IMDB, that was the American release.
Is that international versus U.S.
release?
Okay, well, hold on, though.
I thought to myself, that didn't sound right to me.
You can ask similar questions about albums and songs and artists or who sings the song, whatever.
And all the lyrics search where you can name any lyrics in the song and it will figure it out.
I mean, there's a lot of overlap between these things.
But, like, that I think is amazing.
And, like, ask the same question.
Say, you know, what is the release date for?
What year was it released?
You know, when was it put out?
Like, just try different phrasings and see, like, eventually if you can stump it.
But it's pretty good.
Well, basically, so my point is I have asked it questions like this a number of times thinking that it would get it wrong.
Thinking that there would be no chance that it'll get it right.
And it gets it right about maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of the time when I ask a weird question like that, which is not only better than I expect, but is probably fairly similar to most of these things.
Probably even fairly similar to how often Google gets it right.
In my experience, the accuracy of search results between different search engines – I still use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine instead of Google –
It turns out this kind of stuff is actually not that rare to be decent at.
It is not just Google that can do these things.
It is possible for other companies, and in the case of DuckDuckGo, way smaller companies, to be able to be competent at search.
Just not Apple most of the time, unfortunately.
But it is very possible for other companies.
remember when amazon had its own search what was that called a3 it was called alexa or no yeah no alexa was the rank right a3 right a a9 was was their search engine but it was anyway there's not a lot of them there's bing there's duck duck go there's google there's a9 which i know still exists apple has never dipped its toe into this field i don't think there need to be that many people especially if it's the app store god
Apple can't search a domain way smaller than the web in an efficient manner.
Well, look, Siri searches things, right?
Especially in contexts like Apple TV or Apple Music.
It's like Wolfram Alpha.
No, but Apple TV, Apple Music, it's searching libraries of content.
And the App Store is really just a really big version of that that should be way better than it is.
But it's not, yes.
No, it's so isn't.
you know what just occurred to me doesn't amazon own imdb now yeah they sure do yeah they do so how could they have gotten this wrong if imdb says it's 1990 you can't find anything on the imdb website with your own eyes and hands so i it's like whatever imdb is now uh at work hard at work obscuring the information you want to know about movies because i go to that website page and i'll be like
just who played the main character and i'm just scanning and seeing if i have to disclose something or click on something and it's just tons of you know sound and fury signifying nothing i miss the old imdb yeah i mean chances are like the alexa was trying to find the answer on this page and just got blocked by all the ads oh oh yeah one more one more thing on the echo show um
marco is lucky because he has a fairly long kitchen i would have no room for this thing in my kitchen as much as i would like to have a thing like this that is i think another limitation for a device i can't really tell how big it is from the pictures but certainly it is both wider than the echo and you can't like put it behind or nestled into a corner or whatever it has to be somewhere where you can see it well i think it actually might be fairly small because didn't people say it's a seven inch screen
yeah maybe it's i mean it's hard to tell maybe it's smaller than it looks like um but anyway you can't you can't nestle it in a corner hide it somewhere you do need the space and the line of sight for the thing which makes me think that it could replace like a kitchen tv so if this thing started getting live tv if if amazon wanted to pull a youtube what is the youtube one youtube tv and hulu has a live tv everyone about apple has a skinny bundle and a live tv offering um
that would be a great thing to incorporate this because people do like little tvs in their kitchen to like watch cooking shows or whatever with like voice activated dvr functionality they already showed it like cooking cooking up to your like uh you know baby cam to show your baby in your crib and stuff the potential for a smart screen with good speakers and a camera that's internet connected with good software in your kitchen uh that that feels like a fruitful like it's a device that has been made a million times over if you're old and remember all like the uh
the audrey or the that three com maybe that's the audrey that i'm thinking of but that sony has made with the sony uh was it the e villa i don't know this there's been tons of like things like this and they were just they were gonna say they were ahead of their time they were ahead of the tech they weren't ready there was no ecosystem there wasn't the smart search behind it there wasn't the speech recognition there there wasn't so often there wasn't the internet for the really old ones
I feel like the time is now, and I really hope that we see more of these devices from the big three or four, however many, however you want to count it, Apple, Amazon, Google, and whoever else, not fewer.
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All right, so somebody has put something that I find actually somewhat terrifying in the show notes.
The show notes reads, Brief Quiz.
yeah i saw that earlier too and got a little bit scared of what i i knew immediately that it was john i mean come on yeah there was an article going around that hopefully you two were too busy this evening to read and follow the link for that involves a brief quiz that i think we should all take i have already taken it takes two seconds um
And so I will paste the URL into the chat room.
Now, it is a thing that asks you to make a bunch of selections.
So just don't read the whole article.
Don't scroll down.
Just go to the part where you make the selections and make the selections.
Do not share your comments.
And then when we have all done it, come back and we will discuss our choices.
So here you go.
It's in the chat room.
Okay, so... What the hell is Alphabet?
That's Google, right?
That's Google's parent company.
If an evil monarch forced you to choose, in which order would you give up these inescapable giants of text?
Okay, I'm done.
I've got to think about this for a second.
Jeesy peasy people.
Casey's got to mull it over just a little.
y'all done yes all right so now i'll explain the premise uh they list the big tech companies alphabet basically google apple microsoft facebook and amazon and it asks you in what order you would you be willing to give them up so if there's one company that you're like i don't care if that company goes away tomorrow that's obviously your number one pick you'd pick that one and like and you keep working your way down at the end you'll be left with the company you would least like to see depart this earth like if they just disappeared or whatever
So who wants to go first?
Let's go through our top four style.
First of all, the question of how many people do you think arrived at this article and knew what Alphabet was?
And then every time they mention it, they have to say the parent company of Google.
Because nobody knows what that is.
Because Google is so bad at everything branding-wise, everything human, they can't do.
I would have just called it Google.
Yes.
Google uses the Google brand.
Can you think of something that is in Alphabet but not in Google that you care about, like I guess Nest stuff or something?
Anyway, let's now do our number one choice, sort of backwards top four, the company that we would all be willing to get rid of first.
I'm willing to bet we all have the same one for this one.
Yes.
Facebook?
facebook nope whoa no all right what did you pick microsoft microsoft hmm what has microsoft done for me lately and by lately i mean in the last year and no more than that well they did like uh provide your livelihood for many years right no but yeah that's why i said only in the last year and and you're absolutely right but now you have now you have a grudge like in the style of my microsoft grudges
No, no, no.
I will never be a grudge.
It will never be a grudge like you.
But, you know, what has Microsoft done for me lately?
Nothing, really.
I mean, I do love Visual Studio Code.
Yes, people are mentioning Visual Studio for the Mac, but that's just a rebranded Xamarin MonoDevelop, whatever it's called.
I don't think that there's anything that Microsoft has given me in the last 12 to 18 months that really affects me day to day.
And maybe I'm just missing something, but I do get some value out of Facebook, believe it or not, whereas I don't think I actively get any value out of Microsoft today.
What value do you get out of Facebook?
Oh, shit.
Instagram.
Oh, shoot.
I didn't even think about that at all.
Oh, that might change my tune.
Yeah, I just realized.
But see, I can't throw Microsoft under the bus either because I use their keyboard.
And also they own Skype, which we don't love, but we use it every week.
And there's nothing good to replace it.
These are all hard choices.
I factored this into my choice for Facebook as number one, despite Oculus, which you also forgot about, and Instagram or whatever.
that facebook is the one i get rid of um and bring it this evil monarch it doesn't necessarily say which one of these affects you that's that's the framing device that you're bringing to it in case he's decided the way he's going to pick this is like which one affects his life but there are many other factors that you could use in determining which one do you want to depart this earth magically
And Facebook, I want to depart for so many reasons, despite Instagram, which I enjoy, and despite Oculus, which may or may not be an interesting thing that I use someday.
Almost everything else they do, I don't like.
And I believe that the need they fill could be filled equally or better by some other company if they were to just poof out of existence.
So Facebook is my number one.
I don't like them.
Yeah, I'm going to stick with that, too.
As much as I love Instagram, the other things on this list are more important to me.
And the omission of Facebook from the world, I think I agree with you, I think would have a better effect on the world, not just me, than the removal of any other ones here.
Flickr could rise again to fill the Instagram.
If Instagram didn't exist, I feel like something else would have done a similar thing because what it does is not as revolutionary as the fact that it was able to do it and gather this network of people and so on and so forth.
I mean, honestly, it's kind of amazing that Tumblr didn't do that.
I know I'm biased here, but looking back on it, I think that Tumblr had a big opportunity to be what Instagram was, but their timing to mobile was all wrong because it was a similar case as what almost...
made Facebook pretty irrelevant in the mobile age.
When you have a big desktop browser web service, it's hard when mobile comes around to realize that you have to change everything and be mobile first.
Facebook realized it almost too late.
Tumblr got in on it eventually too.
But by that point, a lot of the ground was already taken and including things like Instagram.
All right, so number two, Facebook.
Yeah, for me, it's Microsoft.
Yeah, Microsoft for me as well.
And, you know, like Casey, they haven't done a lot for me recently.
However, again, these companies are all really big.
They do own a lot of stuff.
Like, you know, none of us had anything nice, except for Casey, had anything nice to say about the Facebook product itself.
But Instagram is owned by it.
So we have to consider that Oculus and things like that.
With Microsoft, they own a lot of stuff, too.
as i mentioned they own skype we're all using skype right now and as much as we hate it uh there's there's no clear better thing for podcasters to use um except whatever the germans are using with that studio link thing uh but i don't know anything about that i can't read german i can't understand the page and it looks like it's some kind of weird plugin for another app i don't use so oh well well i guess i'll figure out some other time i hope but uh so far so far you can still use google translate uh because you haven't gotten rid of google yet so yeah right so
I actually did use that to read the page.
I opened a page in Chrome so I could use the built-in translate thing.
But yeah, ultimately, Microsoft doesn't have a large role in my life.
So that would be my number two.
And it's not...
I don't really dislike Microsoft.
I kind of feel bad for them these days because they're playing catch up on so many major important fronts in the industry.
But they just don't provide a lot of value for me compared to the other ones above it on this list.
Yeah, I picked Microsoft for a bunch of reasons, most of which are not evil grudges.
There is the evil grudge in the back of my mind.
But I can think of a lot of reasons why I actually wouldn't want them to go away, which is why they're not number one.
Xbox, even though I don't like it, is an important counterbalance to PlayStation.
It's only real competitor in the same sort of level playing field because Nintendo is always off doing its own weird thing.
So I think it's good that it exists.
The they did buy Bungie, which we'll hate them for forever.
But on the other hand, we would not have the Bungie that we have today if it was not for Microsoft.
Right.
So there's some credit there.
The cloud stuff they're doing, I think, is interesting.
And again, is a counterbalance to both Amazon and Google.
And so I'd like to see more competition there.
Um, but I don't like a word or Excel or office.
I think all those programs, the world will be better if those programs disappeared and we should, you know, come up with modern alternatives.
They're dinosaurs.
We can't get rid of them because they've always been here and you know, like it's a self-perfetuating cycle.
Um, and you know, all those products that I listed, I either don't use them or would love to use something else.
So I don't, I don't say goodbye to them with a grudge, but out of this group, they are my number two.
All right.
So number three.
Google for me.
Yep.
Ditto.
Excuse me.
I selected alphabet, whatever that means.
But I'm going to say it means Google.
And this is, again, tricky because this includes things like YouTube, which is, you know, that's a major.
Yeah, I didn't consider that.
I think I stick by it, but... That's the thing.
All of these companies, they have major acquisitions and major properties that you don't think of necessarily.
But Google owns YouTube, and that's a major thing.
So that's hard to give up in a lot of ways for a lot of people.
But like...
There are other ways to find videos online.
Just none of them are very big, I guess.
But that doesn't mean somebody else couldn't make one.
I don't know.
It's a weird calculus.
But I don't use Google's web apps for anything other than the show notes for this show.
Again, we've decided that's the best for us to just use Google Docs for our shared notes for the show.
But there are other options.
We've all decided they aren't as good, but we could go to one of them.
um and i don't use google web search uh the vast majority of the time i'm almost always using duck.go i only occasionally jump into google when i'm not finding the answer i want um so it's that would be fairly easy for me but for a lot of other people that would be really hard because they they have a lot of tie-ins to things like gmail that are really important to them um so it's kind of an easy one for me to say google but i wouldn't think that would be very common i did not say google i said amazon
Interesting.
You know, as we were talking, I started to wonder if me choosing Google for number three was a poor choice because specifically of YouTube.
I don't contribute to YouTube very often, although I have once.
But I I feel like I am on YouTube almost every day to look at something or look up something or something like that.
So my answer was to put Google as number three.
But I wonder if maybe I should have swapped that with Amazon.
So how did you land on Amazon as the next one to go, John?
Well, Google, stuff that Google does is, you know, going back to the Casey framing of like just things that are important to your life that you use.
I use it for my email.
There is no alternative for Gmail that has the same properties.
Like I don't like using my own server or using IMAP is not the same as Gmail.
I am a Gmail user at this point, not an email user.
I use Google search all the time and I, the alternatives are differently able to do things, but I'm used to the way Google works and I just use it so extensively that I wouldn't want to have to try to get you something else.
YouTube was a big factor in my decision as well.
I spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos and I believe that it's not a matter of if they went away, someone else can make a video service because it's
even before google owned youtube youtube is very good at what it what it does in terms of you know making video that plays when you hit the play button that uh the recommendation engine to figure out things you might be interested in and you know there's all sorts of terrible things about youtube as well inevitably as the big dominant player in a field but i think they do a good job at what they do um and if you if uh
You know, Google went away tomorrow.
It would take a long time for those ecosystems to reform around another set of services.
So I wouldn't want to say goodbye to that as well.
And then all the other stuff that Google does, all the wacky things that it does, for the most part, I like them.
The translation engine that was translating that German webpage for you.
Google has really good translation and it gets better all the time.
Uh, all their weird projects with hot air balloons and wifi and self-driving cars.
And like, I love all that stuff about Google and I think the world would be lesser for them not to be there.
So that's why an Amazon, why did I, why did I pick Amazon as my number three?
Um,
Amazon is great.
I use it like crazy.
Like that's what I was thinking about.
Like if Amazon went away, where would I order all my stuff?
Cause I order so much stuff from there.
Right.
But I've used other places that sell you stuff over the internet and
and they're not that much worse than amazon now maybe they don't have as much selection and maybe they don't have as cheap shipping and so on and so forth but i feel like i beg to differ here i i've used enough of them to know i mean even just like as simple as like when i you know camera stuff i can buy it from amazon or i can buy it from bnh photo and bnh photo is not a titan of the internet industry but it's fine lensrentals.com is not amazon but but it was fine you know like i've
I bought enough stuff online from non-Amazon places that I feel like I could live with that.
And often the defaulting of Amazon that we all do, like I've got to buy something, I've got to go to Amazon, that defaulting runs me into trouble more often these days because I will accept...
amazon selection as well if amazon doesn't have it it must not exist which is not true or if amazon has a price it must be a reasonable price which is not true because sometimes something on amazon is insanely highly priced and you need to do some comparisons elsewhere for a variety of weird reasons so i do use it i do value and rely on the service but i believe that it is not as impressive and because i don't have an echo and don't do i'm not in that ecosystem either and also i believe that other people can do similar things
It was my number three.
This was probably my most difficult choice between these two, Amazon and Alphabet slash Google.
But I came down on Amazon.
Interesting.
All right.
So that makes number four next.
Is that right?
This is where I picked Amazon for my number four.
I saved it for this.
Same here.
My reasoning for saving it for so long throughout this elimination is
is basically that you know there are lots of places like you know you mentioned bnh uh there are lots of other online retailers for that and by the way again amazon owns a lot of stuff including if you're a programmer aws which is kind of important for a lot of stacks um and and not always easy to replace the components you're using depending on what you're using uh but anyway for for retail alone
Whenever I buy anything from other places, I very often wish I would have bought it from Amazon for various reasons.
There's a lot of parts of it that other people can do reasonably well sometimes, but it's rare that you get any other vendor anywhere else online that has the combination of everything Amazon offers.
And this is...
not only like the the kind of fundamentals of buying stuff online which is you know get it for a good price i mean now a lot of places offer the same price on things as amazon or similar price close enough pricing but also be able to ship to you quickly and for not that much money uh and be able to accept returns really easily if it doesn't work out for you if it arrives broken and
be able to provide basic order tracking and things like that.
Many of the other online retail things that are good, Amazon actually owns them.
Things like Zappos and Soap.com, which is now merged into Amazon, Diapers.com, all this stuff.
A lot of those things, Amazon actually owns them all.
So it would rule out a bunch of that stuff.
And it's also just really nice to have somewhere where I've been buying...
I've bought large quantities of things from Amazon for so many years now, for well over a decade now, that I can go back and search my order history whenever I need to know what was that thing I bought or when did I buy this thing that might be about to break and I want to know how long its warranty is.
When did I buy this?
How much did I pay for it back then?
How do I, if I want to get another one of these things, because the one I have just wore out or broke or ran out or whatever, what exactly was that so I can just go buy the same thing again?
Amazon's great when you have a big history like that.
And so there are other vendors or other retailers that provide some of these parts.
But to have it all in one place like Amazon is really very, very convenient.
There are lots of things about Amazon retail that are bad.
Things like the conditions in their warehouses for some of the workers.
There have been various reports over time about how those are less than great conditions.
So it's not wonderful in all ways.
Being a seller on Amazon apparently has a lot of issues because of things like their incredibly overly generous return policy for the customer, which is very problematic for a lot of the sellers.
But...
For the most part, as a user of Amazon, I really, really greatly, greatly enjoy it.
Again, it isn't perfect.
Like, for example, I recently got a... I needed to get a SanDisk memory card, a fairly fast, decent one that was like 60 bucks.
And any memory card is kind of a risk to buy from Amazon because they have such a problem with counterfeit products being in their stock.
And memory cards are very commonly counterfeited.
So anything like that, I'll buy from B&H because they're much more reliable in that way.
And things like pro audio gear, I'll buy from B&H most of the time too.
But with those few exceptions, anything I can buy from Amazon, I usually will buy from Amazon.
You should also remember AWS, S3, EC2, and all the other services that Amazon that's powering tons of startups.
I know there are equivalent cloud offerings from Microsoft and Google, but if they were to disappear the next day, it would probably kill like half the internet startups and a bunch of other companies.
It's like when S3 goes down, you find out how many companies are relying on it.
So it is a tough one.
But yeah, I had a number three instead of number four.
And I had Google in number four, but I already talked about that.
Fair enough.
So we all chose Apple last?
Yeah, I mean, surprise.
Like, obviously, we're going to do that.
But I suppose this is a good litmus test.
This quiz doesn't give you much guidance.
You could use any criteria you want to remove it, and we're all talking about the different things we thought about.
But I would guess that for the reason we kept Apple until last is...
mostly based on the fact that we use Macs and iOS devices.
So it's suddenly a very personal decision that factored in like, oh, I use Gmail or I order lots of stuff from Amazon or, you know, I get some value from Facebook and not from Microsoft because I don't use their stuff.
But for Apple...
i think it would actually be harder to argue about like if apple is gone no one will be able to do x right and i think at least for me it more comes down to i use them like the mac and there is no alternative that i would want to use and i use them like ios devices and there's probably no alternative that i would want to use and so
i don't want those things to go away for me it is less about if apple is gone they'll never be self-driving cars because that's not true if apple is gone no one will ever make vr or ar not true like if apple is gone no one will ever make a you know a handheld touch operating system again actually we have those now you know so it's not it's not based on future stuff like i think in the past if we were sort of in the in the beginning phases like
just after the ipod and when apple was making a series of uh you know computers that were really impressive and weird and you know setting the world on fire and then the ipod the surprise success the surprise overnight five-year success um i think i would have said at that time i'm saving apple for last because i want to see what they do next because they're just doing hit after hit after hit and even the duds like the cube are still awesome right you know what what is that apple going to do next and
These days, I have less of what is an Apple going to do next thing, and it's more just like, please, Apple, you make many products that I like and enjoy that are an important part of my life, and I wouldn't like the alternatives.
Please keep making them and improving them, which is a lesser thing, but I did save it for last, and for me, it's for very selfish reasons.
I mean, I make my living off of Apple, no matter how you slice it, be it this show or my jobby job.
It's all because of Apple at this point.
So I would be pretty sad and broke if they disappeared.
For me, it's all about Beats.
I just don't want to give up my Beats.
My Beats Solo 2 Studio X headphones.
And Apple Music Connect, right?
Is that really a big part of your life?
Yes.
Yes, definitely.
I really love connecting with my engaged... I don't even know what it does.
It's a big part of finding the setting to remove that from your toolbar in iOS.
So like Casey, I also make my living off of Apple stuff.
Whether it's through my iOS app, which could not exist anymore if Apple went away.
And yes, Overcast does have a web player, which is used by something like 1% of the user base.
So that's probably not much of a business there.
Granted, it does suck, but it's still not much usage there.
so my living would go away or most of it at least we could theoretically keep podcasting and we could make money that way but a large part of what we talk about would go away especially if we eliminated the other five companies or the other four companies here also we'd all be using windows or linux and android so i think we'd have a lot of things to talk about
That's true.
So that would be a problem.
And also, I will go one step further, speaking of that, John, that you mentioned that without Apple, you couldn't really say, oh, without Apple, nobody would ever do X, or this thing would never exist.
I would say that there are many of those things in practice, but the one that I will point out here is I think without Apple...
Nobody would ever make a great personal computing platform again.
And there's lots of reasons why.
And this could be a bigger discussion.
I don't know.
But this is part of the reason why I'm so defensive of Apple continuing to make pro hardware and keeping the Mac healthy.
Because without that...
And many slices of people have to go to Windows or Linux or whatever future options might come about.
And I honestly do not believe that anyone else, any other company, will ever make a good general purpose computer operating system as we know it today, besides Apple.
Well, you put a lot of qualifiers on that because you're saying as we know it, like I think that if Apple was to go away and you're waiting for the next great one of those things, it would be an OS that is not, quote unquote, as we know it today.
Like to give an example from the past that didn't quite do it, but I feel like could have WebOS.
I don't remember WebOS.
It was a little bit of a mess, had some bad ideas, but it's not a desktop operating system or general purpose operating system as we know it, right?
And you can even argue Android.
I feel like what you'd be waiting for is the next great computing platform after Android, essentially, because we've already got Android and iOS.
We've already erased Google, so Android is gone.
And then we erased Apple, so Apple is gone.
So we're left with this void, right?
And I feel like the next thing to emerge would be more like WebOS, iOS, and Android.
You're right that there would never be
uh with all your qualifiers a great personal computing general personal computing platform as we know it because i feel like that time has passed and so it is true that we'd be losing we'd be losing a category of things right um and that would be sad for us because we're old but i there would indeed be a new great a new great computing platform it just wouldn't be recognizable to us as like a general purpose computing platform i mean surely in this day and age it would be entirely like
locked down and filled with an app store and all sorts of other stuff exactly and probably be touch-based or vr-based or whatever and like an ad based you know well we'll see i mean i thought you were gonna say privacy that's what i thought you were gonna say because if you look at all these companies which one of these even makes like most of them don't even make feints in the direction of privacy right i mean google i feel like is is kind of good on the security of its own data but that's just so it can data mine it for itself doesn't want to lead to the outside world right
But Apple is by far the strongest on data privacy for, you know, and even things like, you know.
Energy, sustainability, and stuff like that.
Things that Apple's core values, under Tim Cook or otherwise, these other companies don't express in the same strong way.
And so data privacy could be without Apple.
How long would it take for another company of that size to actually...
care about the privacy and security of your data to the point where it's fighting the government to prevent it from turning stuff over that is not a value that is spread very far and wide in tech so it would be a shame to lose that as well it's an interesting quiz for sure
So now we can scroll down on the thing and see what everyone else picked.
So 57% pick Facebook is number one, which I think is interesting.
I mean, who knows?
This is a self-selecting thing.
Who's going to click on these things?
Probably a bunch of tech nerds.
And I know there's a lot of hatred of Facebook among tech nerds.
But this is the New York Times, by the way, if it's on its thing.
So I'm thinking that maybe the audience is broader than I might imagine.
Maybe it's not entirely tech nerds.
And the, what I want to believe is that it shows that Facebook is popular because Facebook is popular, but you know, people don't really have that much love for it.
Right.
They're like, you have to be on Facebook because everyone's on Facebook and everyone's on Facebook because everyone's on Facebook, but not universally beloved, uh, for whatever reason, whether it's the software platform itself or the things people associate with it, or they resent the fact that they have to be there or whatever, you know, uh, Microsoft and second, um,
you know microsoft is is not on the way up i'm gonna say it's on the way down but it is it is in transition so it doesn't surprise me transition down amazon third yeah amazon third kind of surprises me because i thought i would think more people would frame this as here's a service that i use all the time and if i couldn't order from amazon but maybe maybe only tech nerds with uh
more money than time order everything on amazon um i don't know uh alphabet assuming people knew what the hell alphabet was alphabet is third i think people like google i think people like youtube especially youtube i think people you know in the general population don't want to they just think of google as the way you search things they don't know what the duck duck go exists they maybe heard the word bing once google's an essential thing everything is googling and then youtube if they're even aware that youtube was part of it they're gonna be like i'm not giving up youtube youtube is basically my tv
um and then apple um most people wanted to drop that last because i don't know like they apple apple customer sat and brand recognition and good feelings you know people have a lot of good feelings about this is not a strict ranking uh because it really just tells you you know 32 chose to drop it last and 26 uh percent chose to drop alphabet first so to slice and dice this data it would be difficult but anyway if you look at the little bar graphs at the bottom
drop first is just the runaway winner and then drop last oh actually no uh google was that had a higher percentage of drop last so you go 40 for google and 32 for apple so two companies with a recognizable brand that people really really like and facebook nobody likes them
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Marco, you want to talk to us about how you don't believe in Dropbox anymore, and that would have been your first one to go if you had the option?
Yeah, so maybe about a month or two ago now, I forget exactly when it was, about a month ago maybe, I decided to try a life without Dropbox, basically.
I still have my account now.
But I uninstalled it from all my computers and I stopped using it for anything except I logged into the website to download the audio files that you guys give me every week for this podcast.
And there were a number of reasons why I wanted to drop Dropbox.
Their software on the Mac has gotten increasingly invasive of the system.
It does creepy things like trying to hack the accessibility database and installing kernel extensions and things, all in the name of features that I don't want.
The accessibility thing I think was about sucking in photos or something.
And the kernel extensions are for things like their project infinite file system thing that I don't need or want.
And there's no good options to just say, no, please don't do this, thanks.
Just give me the basic thing that uses the supported API in macOS to do this, the stuff that you're doing for syncing a folder.
All I really want is a synced folder.
That's all I really want out of this thing.
Basically the thing it used to be.
So all these features, I figure like all this stuff that I don't want or use that are part of Dropbox now, let's see what else I can get away with.
And what I've settled on at the moment is I just moved everything to iCloud Drive because I already pay for iCloud storage for all my photos.
I already have all Apple devices that I'm running this on with one important exception, which is my server that runs my blog engine, which I'll get to.
But for the most part, iCloud Drive should work fine for me.
So let's see how this goes.
So far, it's mostly fine.
But I think I'm going to go back anyway.
In everyday use, everything's fine with iCloud Drive.
To make the transition easier with some of my muscle memory of running shell scripts in my Dropbox folder, I symlinked.
home slash Dropbox to whatever the crazy path is, like mobile documents, whatever the path is to the actual iCloud Drive folder on your Mac, I simlinked home slash Dropbox to that.
So everything is kind of where I expect it to be if I get into a muscle memory of going to the Dropbox folder or running a script from there or whatever else.
So that was actually a very easy progression.
As far as I can tell, doing that has not caused anything really weird to happen.
Although I do keep running out of file descriptors.
But it's probably not that.
L-S-O-F.
Anyway.
So for sharing my own files between my computers, like the basic synced folder...
iCloud Drive has been totally fine for me.
I haven't noticed any kind of weird data loss.
Everything is always right there when I want it.
One of the interesting things about it is because it kind of has like infinite background privileges on iOS, I was out working today out in the world on my iPad.
Not something I actually do very often, but I was doing it today for various reasons.
Number one, cellular Macs don't exist.
But anyway, I was doing this and I went to the iCloud Drive app on my iPad for the very first time.
I have never launched it before.
And all my stuff was there.
And all the files that I wanted to access were already there.
Because it is always working in the background.
It is privileged.
It has Apple's blessing to do whatever it wants.
So unlike Dropbox, which can only work...
if I had already ever launched it, first of all, and then, you know, whenever it gets a background update, but then the system controls that and limits it, and if I never use it, it won't really get any.
So it has privileges on Apple platforms that Dropbox can't have.
I mean, on the Mac, I guess it can, but on iOS, it can't.
So for the most part, for just that purpose of sharing your own files between your own devices, iCloud Drive has been totally fine for me.
The main areas that hurt are, number one, I built my blog engine on Dropbox.
Now, I don't blog very often anymore, and that's a separate discussion, and I want to change that.
But one of the main problems with this is that now I don't have a way to edit my blog except for...
SSH-ing into my server and using Vim in the terminal to edit text files.
The old ways are best.
Stick to that.
Which is clumsy, to say the least.
I could also just switch to a regular CMS, but you know I'm not going to do that.
It's great to talk.
Yeah, exactly.
You know me.
I know me.
That's not going to happen.
And so that has been a pain.
And a bigger pain has been our shared folder for this show.
The way we do the show is that this is a common thing.
You guys give me audio files every week from your recording.
I take them out of the Dropbox folder.
I make a project, record it, sync it all up and edit it and everything else and publish it.
We also work together on certain files and folders within that shared folder.
So when we're doing things like t-shirt designs, we're working often with shared files in that folder.
And this is an area that, as far as I know, iCloud Drive has nothing to offer.
There are no... As far as I know, right?
There's no collaborative iCloud Drive folder syncing options.
And maybe at WBDC, maybe they'll change that.
So maybe I should wait.
But for the most part, as far as I know, that doesn't exist.
So...
collaborating with other people and working with other people in a shared folder uh i don't that seems like it's i'm gonna have to either go without that or do what i do now which is just download stuff off the web interface but that makes it it's much less convenient to actually like work in the folders with you guys i guess one thing if you're if you're just giving me files and i just have to download them that's fine
But if we are working together on something where we're all kind of editing stuff in a folder together, the web interface is going to suck royally for that.
I should not be using that.
So basically, I'm probably going to go back to Dropbox because of those two big things of shared folders.
And it isn't just you guys.
I occasionally need it for other things.
But this show is the one that happens most often.
So basically, Dropbox shared folders.
And the blog engine problem.
Now, I could install another cloud service to do these things.
I could, for instance, use something like whatever the new name is for BitTorrent Sync.
Resilio.
Yeah, I could do that.
There's a bunch of other things that are kind of like that.
Other various services and products that will behave like Dropbox.
So maybe I should try some of those first.
But it's probably going to be hard to ever address the shared folder problem with those things because... Google Drive will do it.
Well, I'm not on that.
Google Drive is fine.
I trust Google even less than Dropbox.
I have a terabyte of Google Drive stuff and I'm like, I'll stop paying for that when I don't need it anymore.
But I don't.
It's nice to have.
I mean, I still prefer Dropbox, but Google Drive and OneDrive, which is not as terrible as you think it is,
Speaking as someone who has had it forcibly installed on their Mac at work.
Yeah, I don't know.
The problem I have is that all the other options sound worse to me.
The ones that are from big companies like Google Drive or I think even Amazon has something like this and Box.
Box is worse.
You're right about that.
I think all of these things are worse in some way.
And to address the shared folder problem, I pretty much need to use what everyone else around me is using.
And around our community and around these parts, that's Dropbox.
No question.
It's always Dropbox.
I basically have to decide how much am I willing to fight Dropbox or to fight not having Dropbox?
How much is that worth to me versus how annoying is it to just have it and tolerate its crappy Mac client?
And I'm leaning more towards reinstalling it just because not having it has been a pain in those two big areas.
But we will see.
I don't know.
I haven't made any final decisions yet.
What do you guys think?
Didn't you disable the privileged accessibility blah, blah, blah thing?
I just say no every time it boots up and it says, we need your password to work properly.
I'm like, no, you don't.
I know you're lying to me, Dropbox.
So I just say no.
I just say cancel every time I reboot.
But that pisses me off.
Like, why should I have to say that?
You should let it.
It's probably dumb enough that you can let it install and then modify the thing such that the OS will refuse to run them.
And so the check to see that it is successfully installed will return true, but then they'll never actually run and you'll get some errors in your console.
Like you just chmod the files too, because it's especially with the kernel extension.
Mac OS is super picky about the permissions of every single thing having to do with the kernel extension for good reasons.
Yeah.
if you just flip on the right bit on like group or other on one file, the OS will refuse to load it and it'll just show an error log.
And I bet you that Dropbox is dumb enough that when it tries to see whether it needs to prompt you, it will just look to see if like a file exists and it's not getting down to the permission level.
Who knows?
Anyway, there are possible ways to hack around that, or you can just let it do what it does.
Cause I let it do what it does.
I don't use the infinite thing.
I don't think I ever will.
Um,
Dropbox is occasionally gets flipped out because it tries to drink from the fire hose of file system events.
Yep.
Right.
And I wish it would drink from a smaller fire hose of just the file system events that happen inside the Dropbox folder.
But my impression, based on the activity of DBFS event D or whatever the hell that thing is called, is that...
it's flipping out when stuff is going on on the file system that is not inside the dropbox folder and i wish it would just chill out but other than that which i can solve by quitting dropbox which by the way is the thing i can't do as easily with the icloud drive thing i prefer and i'm still terrified of icloud drive because of the weird behaviors that i've seen with weird locked files that can't be opened or deleted anywhere and and no recourse and no ability to turn it on and off and
No way to control the indication of download state or force things to download.
No way to pin files to my iOS devices.
I don't know if that's even true, but I'm assuming it is.
All features that I have with Dropbox, I just find Dropbox so much more tractable because it is a third party thing.
And I am concerned about the increasing invasiveness, but...
as long as practically speaking it doesn't do anything bad to my computer and if i need to turn it off i can i'm still definitely sticking with that and i do have google drive installed and one note and a bunch of other things and occasionally i fire up google drive and i think it's fine google drive is fine i just prefer dropbox for now and and as you said the network effect it's the reason you know you're using it because everyone else is using it it's just the way people collaborate and uh that's this difficult to overcome okay see what should i do
I think you should take off your tinfoil hat.
You should reinstall Dropbox.
And when we all get all of our data stolen and leaked, then you can blame me.
Cool.
Thanks for our three sponsors this week.
Warby Parker, Squarespace, and Away.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental.
Accidental.
so what's the drama with your switch scenario at home because we were talking in the relay chat it seems as though you are in an impossible predicament where you would like to buy another switch but there are deep penalties for doing so yet if you don't buy another switch you will never play the switch because tiff basically has taken it over i
I thought you were going to talk about him putting the little slidey thing on the Joy-Con the wrong way.
Well, there's that too.
I was setting up Mario Kart for kids and I was trying to do it quickly.
This is why you can't have nice things.
Yeah.
Why does it go on the wrong way if it blocks it there?
Plus goes to plus.
Minus goes to minus.
Match the shapes.
I didn't notice that at first, though, in Marco's defense.
I did eventually notice that plus and plus and minus and minus, but at first I did not notice.
Well, and I wasn't using the wrong one for the controller.
I was using the correct one, but backwards.
I know, but you didn't match up the symbols.
They go next to each other.
Why does it go on backwards?
I like the fact that you had to resort to a YouTube video to get out of it.
Basically, if there was no internet, you would be at home staring at your broken toy.
Do you want to rethink your ordering from earlier now?
No.
Maybe.
I really was about to get a screwdriver out and start disassembling it to try to get this thing off.
I forget which one.
There were two or three Samsung phones ago where if you put the stylus in the slot the wrong way, it would just get stuck in there forever.
Why is the Switch designed in such a way that you can so easily attach these two very commonly attached parts in the wrong direction?
And when you do, it gets stuck really hard.
I think the Switch hardware is not Nintendo-like in so many ways, that it is delicate and fragile and you can easily do the wrong thing.
And it is weirdly not... And it's not like Nintendo doesn't have a history of making portable devices.
Just look at the huge history of portable devices, and almost all of them are rugged to the point of Fisher-Price-ness and...
very difficult to do something wrong with like the original firewire connector is supposedly was inspired by the game boy connect thing of having you know what was novel at the time a connector that can only go in correctly one way and it can be plugged and unplugged lots of times and still be sturdy uh and then the switch comes along and it's
I mean, it kind of started switching to it in the Wii U with making stuff glossy to try to make it look more sort of pro and fancy.
I'm not going to say Apple-like, but like less Fisher-Price-like, let's say, for the Wii U and like the Wii U Pro controller, especially the glossy black model being the high-end.
And the Switch is just like...
what is this, a Sony device?
Like, it looks Sony-ish.
It looks like, you know, a PSP.
Right down to the delicate little bits that seem like they could break off and the ability to put things on backwards.
It should never be possible to do that.
It should be super rugged, but, you know.
But it is fun to make fun of Margo for doing that.
But he doesn't follow gaming websites, so he didn't see the 8,000 stories when the Switch was launched about putting those things on backwards.
Yeah, you're right.
Exactly.
So I just did it tonight as I was trying to set up these controllers for two kids to play Mario Kart with us.
Yeah, it was tough.
Anyway, but besides that, I am greatly enjoying the Switch because now Mario Kart came out.
And I'm having so much fun with this such incredibly fun game.
And if you are the kind of video game person who has already played it on the Wii U, like John, it's not much new for you.
60 frames per second.
But as somebody who hasn't played Mario Kart since the Nintendo 64 version... Hey, buddy.
Right.
It is so much fun.
And so I really am quite enjoying this.
And...
It really literally is fun for the whole family.
Now Adam's playing and the auto steer or the bumper cars version of it that John was complaining about last week is indeed a problem when adults are playing and you don't realize the little antennas in the back of their car, but...
the the combination of that and the automatic acceleration is awesome for having small children play because they can play with the whole family and not be too too far behind not get themselves stuck and have to try to show them how to reverse uh and like it's it's really nice um and and in addition to it just being a really fun you know Mario Kart racing game for for adults when they're playing it in like the normal or hard modes
uh i'm just having so much fun with this game the only downside to this game is that i'm going to have to buy more pro controllers probably so it's going to cost a lot of money that way and also um the switch is still mostly being dominated by tiff and adam playing zelda
As it should be.
And I also thought, there will be times when I want a second Switch dock.
So, for instance, when we go to a beach house in the summertime, or we have a second TV in our playroom, so maybe somebody's using the main TV, but I don't want to play on a small screen.
Maybe I want to play on it back there.
Let me see if I can get a second dock.
How much could it cost?
40 bucks?
Nope, 90 bucks.
LAUGHTER
Another story that if you had read the gaming press, you would have seen a million of around launch time.
Or when the prices were announced, people were shocked.
People also are shocked, by the way, with how much the Pro Controller costs.
Yeah, because that's like $70, right?
I have two of them now, and I paid way too much.
So it's like...
So I started doing some research of like, you know, if I want a second dock and it's $90 and a new Switch is only $250 that comes with it.
$300.
Oh, is it $300?
I don't know.
It's hard to know what the real price is.
This is the jump that Marco makes very quickly.
uh 90 300 they're basically the same right nears makes no difference well it's like well you know do i need more joy cons i i thought i was going to need one a few hours ago because i thought i broke one of mine so so uh so i started adding stuff like actually this isn't that ridiculous that maybe we should just get a second switch that way tiff can play zelda on the main tv and i can go in the back and play mario kart
And then I can take one when I travel to WBDC and Tiff can stay here and play with Adam and everything else.
So I started asking around with friends like John of like, how does that actually work with like game transfers?
And like, I bought all these games digitally.
I don't have cartridges for any of them on John's advice, which in most cases is good.
And that was the right decision.
No, no, no, no.
The carts won't save you.
Like even if you had a Zelda on a cart and you plugged into the other thing, the save data is not on the cart.
So it's not helping you.
Right.
So I'm basically running into all of the issues of being a Nintendo fan that Nintendo fans have been yelling about for like 10 years.
And I was just never really a part of it because I was out of I was kind of out of the game, so to speak, for all that time.
And now that I come back in from Mario Kart and I'm like, man, wouldn't it be great if I had a second system?
Or first, let me just get a second HDMI dock.
Wow, that's expensive.
Oh, okay, let me get a couple more controllers.
My God, those are expensive.
Oh, well, I bought my games digitally.
Let me see if I can just download them to a second console.
Wow, that system kind of sucks and is very limited.
Okay, how about our save game?
Will that transfer?
Nope, that won't.
It's like...
all the things again like nintendo fan this is not news to anybody who's been a nintendo fan forever uh but because i haven't been this is this is all new to me yeah well i take issue with one thing john just said though that the cart wouldn't help it would help in getting the software between the two devices i agree it will not help in any way shape or form with the save but it will absolutely help with getting the game in between the devices quickly and easily without any without any sort of fuss
Well, it can only be activated on one device, but I bet if you download it onto both, you could just, like, activate, deactivate.
I don't know.
I've never tried it.
In theory, it might be better.
But I really would not relish the idea of taking those tiny little cartridges in and out and walking them back and forth from even just within your house.
Because talk about something that could easily get, like...
vacuumed up or eaten by a dumb dog or all sorts of other things that can happen to dogs aren't smart um especially when it comes to things that should or shouldn't be eaten let's say having a my dog particularly loved cat poop so you know the the bad tasting nintendo cartridge forget it they also don't chew and apparently don't taste things so it's like one swallow and it's gone um yeah i wouldn't relish doing that um and
i yeah i don't know what's worse is is the having it downloaded on both of them but only active on one versus carrying a cart back and forth uh oh you are way overblowing the difficulty of the cartridge i have cartridges for both zelda and mario kart and i have to swap between them when i want to play different games and you are way way way overblowing how difficult it is to keep track of no i'm saying if you're walking across the house like which room is it in from one from one side to the other and just wait until declan needs one of those cards i mean i i think you're you're making a mountain out of a molehill
My house isn't that big.
No, the transfer between the two places means you're not sure which location it is, which means you're not sure where it is, period, which means it can get lost.
They're very tiny.
I mean, if it was an N64 cart, you'd be okay.
But these are not N64 carts.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I don't know.
I will say, though, that I've been deeply enjoying both Mario Kart and Zelda.
And much to my own surprise, I have almost as much time in Mario Kart as I do in Zelda.
Yeah.
And I think that comes back to what I believe I was saying on this show, it might have been analog, that I just find it much easier to just kind of pick up Mario Kart and play, where to me, yeah, we were talking about it on this show, where to me Zelda's not quite so simple because I am not good at video games and so I need the context.
You don't have what it takes to save Hyrule is what you're getting at.
Basically.
The world is just going to go unsaved.
Yeah, that's correct.
You're going to say, well, it seems like a lot of work to save the world.
Why don't I just go around in circles a few times in this car racing game?
Right.
Yeah.
To me, as somebody who's only watched Zelda and not actually played it, because I really am not into that kind of game at all, to me, it's like sitting down for watching an epic film versus watching a quick YouTube video for fun.
But what?
Like I said, this Zelda is incredibly easy to pick up and do a small amount of things.
I don't think you'll actually ever finish the game by sitting down in a small amount of things, but it doesn't force you to say, I'm going to do the next dungeon like the old Zelda games.
You can do a very small amount of things, pick up at any time, do a little thing, and stop.
This is one thing Nintendo has actually finally gotten right.
the way you can put the system to sleep and it wakes back up and you're like literally back at the exact second you put it to sleep yeah it sounds like you something you would take for granted but it has taken in 10 minutes long to successfully do that that makes it so much easier to pick up i mean even just for me like i will pick up the switch uh this is the main time i use it in portable mode like and do my amiibo random reward thing
because it's just easy to do turn it on i'm exactly where i left off hit a button hit the hit the little nfc thing open up my chest see what i got put it back to sleep there's no way i would do that if i had to boot it up or load a game or wait for a long turning on sequence or something like that and again this sounds like stuff you should take for granted the other modern consoles have done forever uh but now nintendo has finally done that aspect we're just still waiting for them to understand how the hell this crazy online thing works because they haven't figured it out yet
Do you guys have your Switches nearby by chance?
No.
It's in the other room.
Ah, you suck.
What, are you going to play now?
No, I would never do that.
You need to hone your games.
200cc comes auto-unlocked in this, right?
Yeah, almost everything is unlocked from the start.
Like all the tracks, as far as I know, right?
It's too easy for you.
All the characters.
The only thing is like some of the tires and stuff you need to unlock.
Yeah, although that is disappointing.
I haven't spent enough time in it to unlock my favorite.
The card I usually use is the F-Zero one.
They have like a little F-Zero looking thing.
Oh, yeah, I have that one.
The Blue Falcon, I think.
Yeah, that's a lot of the ones I like, and I think I haven't unlocked it yet.
But no, in the original Mario Kart 8, you had to slowly unlock things.
And a lot of the things were DLC, like a lot of the additional tracks.
But this has all the DLC and everything unlocked except for some of the card stuff and 200cc.
200cc didn't even exist in Mario Kart 8 for a long time.
That was, I think, part of a DLC pack.
150 was the top.
So I three-starred all of 150 and 200cc came out and I was like, no, I'm not doing that.
But I've three-starred a couple of them in 200cc.
I don't think I'm going to do all of them.
One of my favorite things about Mario Kart, as somebody who was out of it for so long...
is that if you are familiar with the Nintendo 64 version and its mechanics and the way the vehicles handle and the controls and how the weapons handle, how you can hold on to stuff behind you and how you do the jump and skid thing and how you can hold the skid and everything else...
all of that muscle memory translates perfectly.
Like everything still handles pretty much the exact same way.
It still feels like that game.
And so you're able to, at least I was able to jump in and, and pretty much know how to play immediately.
And actually I can say the same thing for, for TIFF and for some of our friends who have played it.
Like everyone I've seen pick up this game has just immediately gotten it because we all played the N64 version back in the day and it just, it's, it's, it handles the same way.
Like it's,
It's new, but familiar.
It does not handle the same way.
It totally does.
By any stretch of the imagination.
No, I mean, it is the same conceptually, but I don't know.
You have to be a Maricard connoisseur, but Maricard's handling is so unlike the N64 one, which in turn is unlike a double dash.
Maybe the closest you could say is that Maricard is a little bit like the Wii version, but I find the handling...
very very different shockingly different between those different versions of mario kart so much so that it's almost hard to believe that they're the same game it's you know that they have like the same graphics and everything you're right the concepts are all the same the things you're doing are more or less the same but uh mario kart is a nice compromise between uh well i don't know it double dash is my favorite in terms of handling that's how i wish all of them handled uh the wii version was a little bit floaty
the n64 version was a little imprecise and you had sprites going on there so it was a little bit of mess and there was a lot of hopping so it was very different there's no hopping don't you remember n64 hopping no hopping and vaguely right um but yeah maricard 8 doesn't feel as floaty as the wii version it's not as snappy and precise as double dash but i it is a nice compromise it is like all round in the middle like
nicely uh i don't know nicely rounded handling but it doesn't it doesn't feel as precise to me in terms of the racing as my as my favorites yeah my only complaint about it is that when i first started playing it i i was able to immediately figure out how to handle the cars and everything but i i had a lot of trouble figuring out like you know what do all these different tires do and what are the different air foils do and what is the deal with that because i still haven't really figured that out
And also, I didn't even realize, what are the coins for?
What do the coins do?
You need so much help with your gameplay.
Right, and so I went online and just searched for it, because the first thing I wanted to know is, what are the actual weight classes of these characters that I don't recognize?
Oh, weight classes, that's not how it works.
Well, and so I went and found, like, there's this IGN, like, wiki kind of thing that has all these numbers.
They have iOS apps you can download, actually.
So now I finally understand.
Like, I took, like, 20 minutes to read all that stuff, and I read about the thing.
I, like, you know, if you hop off of a jump, you get a little boost.
And I figured out what the little antigrav things were and how they worked and, like, all the stuff that, like...
that everyone who's playing it just kind of knows because this is probably introduced over the last seven years and various iterations of this game but i've you know i the last one i played was n64 version so that was a long time ago that didn't have things like coins and and jump you know jump boost and any grav wheels and things like that so what is the deal with like the different wheels and in sales and whatnot like how does that empirically expect
Do you guys both know how to show the stats, which they frustratingly don't show by default and don't remember your preferences about?
No, I didn't know that.
When you're picking a car, you hit the plus button.
Say what?
Another thing that annoys you about Mario Kart 8 is they don't remember your preference for that.
So every time you go to that screen, you have to hit it.
The other thing, I don't know if this is true of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but I'm pretty sure it is.
When you hit the plus, you will see the stats for the things, and you'll notice that the wheels change your stats.
I don't know if wings change your stats, but anyway.
Not all.
Some of the wings change your stats, but it's in very minor ways.
but anyway like really you shouldn't obsess too much about that because it a lot of it comes down that here's the two things here's my advice for picking stats when you are not good at the courses or not good at the game pick acceleration over anything else because if you will get are going to get hit or or make a bad turn or whatever the most important thing is to get up to speed faster
Um, and if you also have difficulty and fall off the course ladder, aren't familiar with whatever, uh, prefer handling, right?
So the fastest cars are the ones that have bad acceleration, high top speed and handle slowly.
And those are the hardest to race and it will make you feel like you're worse at the game.
Um, I've never really built up to the point where I liked using those, um,
And seeing speedrunners use high acceleration, low top speed things for the handling purposes leads me to believe that those are a sucker's bet.
So a lot of them are like, wow, great speed.
Look at the top speed.
I'll use this thing like I think the big Mercedes car, like the shiny gold one from one of the earlier mirrors.
Huge top speed, cruddy handling.
You will never get a good time with that.
You'll never win a race, especially when a million items are flying at you.
Yeah.
Those are the stats I would look at handling acceleration and ignore speed because if you have decent handling acceleration and you use your boosts, that's a winning formula.
Interesting.
I'll have to check that out.
I didn't know you could do that.
And yeah, hop one of your off jumps.
Yeah, it seems like the character matters the most.
And then the car is like a small multiplier on that.
And then the tires seem to be a smaller multiplier on that.
And then the wing has like a very slight modifier.
And don't forget about bikes.
Yeah, so why should I use bikes or not use bikes?
I haven't tried one yet.
I have never taken a shine to bikes, but my impression is that bikes have potentially different or better handling characteristics than cars.
I'm not sure what they give up.
I've just never... Whatever is different about bikes in Mario Kart 8...
i have not it has not worked with me i so i just ignore them pretend they don't exist and i just do everything on cards but your mileage may vary usually i go the opposite way usually i play as bowser and some kind of big heavy thing because i i appreciate the high top speed that you were just telling me not to not to go for but you're handling this crap though yeah well i i run off the track a lot but then i i my top and then you take so long to get back up to speed
but my top speed is ridiculous and i get to crash into anybody i want and nothing bad ever happens to me well bad things happen to you if you get hit with a shell i mean it's not anyway bowser is probably good for like a non if you don't we're not racing with computers it was just a bunch of people because then you do have a lot of defense about like bumping people off the track and stuff like that but i still i don't go in for that what do you play luigi you seem like a luigi person
No, I'm a Yoshi man.
Same here.
I've always been a Yoshi man.
Same here.
I mean, Yoshi was the obvious choice for the N64 because he was clearly the best character.
But I feel like now maybe we have not only more balance but also more options.
Yeah, I mean, really I'm just picking like a mid-range type of thing.
And it's because of the N64 that I'm picking, honestly.
And I've carried Yoshi through all the way, whether he's the best character or not.
Yoshi's my thing.
You get Yoshi in different colors now.
So how does that work if you pick your own Mii as your player?
I don't do that.
I don't know.
I've got outfits for myself, though.
The Mii's actually, it says that apparently the Mii's figure out their weight class based on the Mii's size and weight.
Yeah.
You've got to use Wii Fit to try to change your weight class.
You've got to fatten up so you can be Bowser.
So sitting here now, Marco, what do you think you're going to do?
You're going to get another Switch at some point when you can actually get one?
Nah, probably not.
We'll probably just stick with what we have and just fight over it.
That's a very Casey answer to the problem and not a very Marco answer to the problem.
Normally, you'd be right.
So if the game sinks work, he would already have bought one.
Well, if I could get a hold of one, yeah, probably.
But yeah, if there was a better sync solution in place for both purchases and for save game data, that would make that a lot more compelling option, especially considering how much the accessories cost and how much comes with the Switch when you buy it.
So that would be a more compelling option in that case.
But because there's no good solution there,
um that then instead i will most likely just stick what we have and just hope that tiff gets bored of zelda pretty soon but i don't think that's on the horizon so we'll see how close is she to finishing i can't tell you for sure i believe she has just defeated the last like big fire monster thing that you have to defeat and return to their saviors or whatever
So it appears that they're fairly far in the game.
Well, so because it's open world, you don't have to do anything.
You could go right to the final boss battle as soon as you get off of the tutorial area.
Essentially, you'd probably die, but you could.
So she could go and she could have gone before to quote unquote finish the game and she could go now to quote unquote finish the game.
But merely doing that does not mean you are done with the game by a long shot.
I finished the game a long time ago and I've put in, you know, tens of hours since then.
and continue to put hours into the game so just because she finishes the game don't expect that you're going to get the thing back eventually she probably will get tired of it she's not going to find all 900 korok seeds or anything but um i she might uh spend some more time trying to get uh trying to crank up her number of shrines and if she's paranoid about uh going into the final end game with enough attributes she might spend some time you know increasing her number of hearts and stuff like that but
are there any other games coming up that i'm gonna want to play besides mario kart like like are there any 2d mario games on the horizon or am i just going to convert to 3d because now i'm apparently into nintendo stuff well there's the 3d mario coming out i think you will get that and play it and you probably like it um i don't i don't remember what's on the schedule i mean splatoon which uh you may or may not like yeah i've actually i've never played it i i don't even all i know is that everyone loves it but i don't know i can't even tell you what kind of game it is
it's a you run around and shoot paint on people in different areas it's kind of like a friendly shooter game instead of shooting bullets you're shooting paint and painting areas it's it's neat okay so like and this is like i'm sure like all these characters in mario kart that i don't recognize are probably all from these different franchises that i've missed right like some of them appear to be wearing paint smocks yeah like the squid the squid people are from are from splatoon uh arms is coming out
which is a new IP, which is kind of like a weird boxing game with stretchy arms, which I really don't know how that's going to be.
It's literally arms.
A-R-M-S.
I figured maybe it was like, you know, armaments, but no, it's actually arms.
That's fantastic.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So I shouldn't get a second one.
I'll just, I'll be patient with this one.
The patience is not in your vocabulary, sir.
No, it's not.
It's only a matter of time.
You're probably right.
It is.
I'm telling you, what's going to happen is I'm going to call you one day from Target and say, hey, I'm looking at a switch.
Do you want me to send it to you?
And you're going to say yes.
And then I'm going to say, well...
How fast would you like me to ship it?
And you're going to say overnight.
And I'm going to say, really?
That's going to be like another $50 or $100.
And you're going to say, yeah, that's fine.
Just do it.
That's exactly how this entire conversation will go.
I can guarantee it.
If you were Amazon, I could get it the next day for $3.
I am not Amazon, unfortunately.
It looks like Rime might be coming out for Switch, unless I'm misreading this article.
I just Googled just to see the lineup, and it's showing a bunch of games.
Like, yeah, yeah, fighting game.
Alex Marco, that other person, is not into this.
Rime?
Is this coming for Switch?
What's Rime?
It's a third-person little boy running around in a weird, mysterious, ancient world kind of thing.
okay yeah uh like there's a lot of indie games coming is what i'm getting at um yeah i think they're saying it's coming to switch f-zero uh no zero is coming no it's uh don't mess with my emotions man come on red out is f-zero but not but mark already has an f-zero but not
yeah i have the other one the fast rmx is that it yeah i haven't played it once since getting mario card there's a bunch of a little little indie games that you might look at yeah and honestly marco i think probably what you're really interested in isn't probably the next year when virtual console stuff ramps up
Yeah, I would like to see that too.
It's funny, seeing Zelda, which is basically a game that was obviously intended for the Wii U first, and then seeing Mario Kart being released for the Switch that is really just a repackaging and slightly expanded version of a Wii U game.
It seems so new to people like me and Casey who totally ignored the Wii U. And I feel like Nintendo is probably, like, screaming, like, why didn't you care about these games before as they rake in all the money?
I think they're happy to say, like, we have a ready game library of, like, basically already completed games that we just have to port that most people haven't seen.
And they're like, wow, this is great.
And so I think it's a great, you know, I don't think they're angry about it.
I think they're happy that they don't have to develop all these games from scratch.
They're sort of shovel-ready games to just chuck over there, and they're all new to you, and everyone's happy to have them.
I think it really speaks to not only how big of a flop the Wii U was, but also just the difference in reception between these two platforms.
I think being somebody who has been on the outside of it and who's only casually seen in here and there...
The Wii U, I was never tempted to get a Wii U. The Wii U seemed profoundly uncool and uncompelling in a lot of ways.
And some of that might not have been warranted, but that's how it seemed on the outside.
And the Switch just seemed like the cool new thing that you have to get in on, and it's so nice, and you get it, it's so fun, and like...
I know the Wii U was probably that much fun also when it came out, but for whatever reason, I was never tempted to get a Wii U. Because it just seemed like such a bad idea for no good reason.
Again, it seemed uncool and uncompelling.
And you make a few changes to the hardware, and you release basically the same games, and now it's the coolest thing ever.
If you can find one for cheap, it is worth getting the Wii U just to play Nintendo Land.
I mean, it's not a reason to buy the entire console.
What's that?
It's their pack-in... I don't remember if it was a pack-in game, but it's their game that basically demonstrates, here's what you can do with this wacky hardware that no one really picked up on, but there are...
There are games in there that give you that kind of Wii Sports type experience where I have never played a game like this in this way before.
It is super fun, especially for family games, very often with young children.
For many, many years when we had the Wii U, whenever my son would have his friend come over, of all the gaming hardware we have in the house, they would choose to play one of the mini games in Nintendo Land.
which it was an okay mini game but of all really of all the things that we have this is what you want to play that we play for hours just you know week after week month after month um and i don't even think that's the best mini game nintendo land is all mini games essentially um and a lot of them are really fun and really interesting and i will tell you that you have never played a game
you know never played because it's a different hardware arrangement you have multiple screens a tv a handheld thing playing in the same environment with these very strange mechanics with motion controls and cameras and so many good ideas in there none of which obviously is a full-fledged game they're all mini games but totally worth it just to have that experience if you can find one cheap somewhere yeah probably won't it's so uncool