These Arms Are Coming Off
Casey:
I looked at the show notes for this week.
Casey:
A lot of it is shit I really don't care about.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
So I might not have a lot to say this week.
Marco:
Well, you can adjust it to be things you do care about.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
The thing is, so the thing that's in the show notes that I think that I don't care about that I expect to talk, that we'll be talking about for a while is the Echo.
Casey:
And the thing with the Echo is that
Casey:
I'm the one that doesn't care about it.
Casey:
It's not like the world doesn't care about it.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Nobody cares about the Mac Pro except you two numbskulls, but everyone cares about the Echo.
Casey:
So it's not one of those things like the Mac Pro that I would at least attempt to railroad you to and change the subject.
Casey:
This one I know is worth talking about.
Casey:
I just don't have anything to say.
Marco:
I mean, if it would make you more interested, we could talk about the new Google rectangles of whatever they launched.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, we should maybe make passing mention of that.
Casey:
In fact, I guess we can do it now.
John:
I don't know about any of those things.
John:
What did they announce today?
Casey:
Some new phones and laptops no one's going to buy.
Casey:
I didn't know about the laptops, but I knew about the phones.
Marco:
It's a new Chromebook that no one's going to buy because it's way too expensive, just like their previous Pixel book or whatever it was.
Yeah.
Casey:
So they also announced the Pixel 2, I believe it is, which is their rough equivalent.
Casey:
I would say more equivalent to the iPhone 8 than the iPhone 10.
Casey:
What is the official ATP stance on 10 versus X?
Casey:
Are we ignoring the official ruling?
Casey:
I'm assuming John is not.
John:
I don't know why people are rebelling against this.
John:
Just say 10.
John:
I don't like it.
John:
We did it for like a decade and a half with Mac OS X and somehow now we've just lost that ability.
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm going to try really hard to just avoid saying it for a while because I do not like that it's called 10.
Marco:
I really think it should have been called X if they were going to spell it like that.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
And there are so many better reasons to call it X. And the fact is the entire world is going to call it X. Like, I bet you could go into an Apple store and ask people about this thing and not a single person there, including the staff, would say 10.
Okay.
Marco:
i bet everybody calls it x so it's going to be like this pedantic thing that apple nerds are going to be battling for the next year or more depending on how long this name is relevant uh and we're just going to be sitting here saying it's 10 don't you know it's 10 and like no no one knows everyone's going to say x like we we are we will we probably already have lost this battle
Marco:
on such a massively bigger scale than we ever were even trying to battle on mac os x or 10 and the fact is most people didn't ever really have to say os 10 you know but everyone says the name of the iphone and a lot more people have them than have ever had macs um so
Marco:
I think calling it the 10 was a bad move, and also they're going to lose the public perception of this name if they haven't already.
Marco:
I don't think we're ever getting convinced, John, to have the show have an official position other than 10.
Marco:
However, I will file a dissenting opinion that...
Marco:
I believe it should be called X. And I might occasionally call it X because that's what I call it in my head.
Marco:
And I'll try to say 10 around you guys just like I appreciate when people try to say online instead of in line in front of New Yorkers.
Marco:
But I don't think I'm going to be able to do it.
Marco:
I'm going to slip up and we're going to have to be okay with that because the entire world is going to call it iPhone X.
John:
I don't see how this is any different than macOS 10 except for by scale.
John:
The whole world called it X for the macOS too, but that didn't stop everyone who knows the difference in the Mac community from saying 10.
John:
I think it should be the same way.
John:
Of course, yeah, you slip up every once in a while, but to take a contrary stance and to purposely say X instead, that's silly.
John:
And all the reasons everyone else is going to say X instead of 10 don't apply to us because we know.
Marco:
how it's said well but it's a little different too because like it's when you like almost no one ever has to give the full name of the os of their computer that they have where like but if they're if they were all called power books and like people would always say power book and we'd be like you know it's power book like that that would be way more ridiculous seeming you don't have to correct people though like just because you say 10 doesn't mean you have to be the person who corrects other people
John:
Right.
John:
Just all we're just talking about is what will you say or try to say?
John:
Because obviously you slip up and say X, whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
That's it.
John:
It doesn't mean when people say X, you're going to correct them or be obnoxious about it or whatever.
John:
But it's just what about what we're going to say.
John:
And again, I don't think this is we didn't have this discussion about Mac OS X. I heard who's going to say X. No, we just.
John:
We just all said 10.
John:
And if you messed up and said X, oh well.
John:
But it has nothing to do with what other people say or whether you should correct them.
John:
So I don't think there's any debate to be at.
Casey:
But macOS is not... macOS is a terrible analogy for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
Number one...
Casey:
It was established before most people came to the Mac.
Casey:
And yes, I know, John, you've been using the Mac since 1912, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But for like Marco and I, we came to the Mac when it was already clearly established and a couple of versions in to OS X. So this train had already left the station.
John:
But it was clearly established that everyone said X. The only people who said 10 was like Apple nerds.
John:
That's it.
John:
Everyone else said X. Because it was literally never said.
John:
It's like the 10 commercials.
John:
They just show the text.
John:
They don't really have an announcer talking about it.
John:
So it's the same situation.
John:
Anyway, it'll be fine.
John:
Just say 10.
John:
You'll be fine.
Marco:
Well, the other thing is if you were communicating to somebody who thought that it was X...
Marco:
If you say Mac OS X, I think they can figure that out pretty easily.
Marco:
If you say iPhone X to a person who thinks it's iPhone X, they're not going to know what you're talking about.
John:
That'll be fine.
John:
It's like GIF GIF.
John:
They'll figure it out.
Casey:
Oh, don't even start with that.
John:
And like GIF GIF, I feel like if you surrender to the other person's incorrect pronunciation, that is you lose, right?
John:
So just you say it the right way and eventually they'll bend to your will.
John:
Yeah, that always works.
John:
In a conversation, it will.
John:
Like, in a gif-jif conversation, the first person to give and to use the other person's pronunciation loses.
Casey:
I see what you're saying there.
Casey:
But the other thing I was going to say earlier, you know, other than OS X having already been established by the time Mark and I got there, is that nobody really gives a crap about Mac OS.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
You two do.
Casey:
But nobody in the grand scheme of things gives a crap about Mac OS.
Casey:
Whereas there are many, many, many, many people who give a crap and many more people who give a crap about iPhones.
John:
But they don't give a crap about iPhone names.
John:
Believe me.
John:
Eh.
John:
5c 5s 6s 6s plus only we know those names that people once you they buy those phones it's like whatever i got the plus do you have the plus no everyone knows which iphone they have they all know that believe i don't know about that people know it's like oh i have i have a successor like people know that
John:
I don't think they do.
John:
I think they, especially since they all look the same, you know, anyway, it'll be fine.
John:
We should set an example for everybody else by saying 10.
Marco:
I do not agree.
Casey:
So anyway, so Google released the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.
Casey:
And let me start by saying that I did not watch any of the keynote because I was in meetings.
Casey:
And I...
Casey:
All I knew was that this this thing happened.
Casey:
And, you know, most of my coworkers that are local in my office are all Android users, the coworkers on the mobile team.
Casey:
And so I get a lot of like the the bleed from them being enthusiastic.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Like, you know, just because they're enthusiastic, I'm interested in what's going on.
Casey:
And so.
Casey:
I asked one of them, what's the executive summary?
Casey:
And they actually linked me to The Verge, which I am not the biggest Verge fan, but it's a pretty good executive summary of what's going on here.
Casey:
And I'll talk about it in a minute.
Casey:
But what was most fascinating and frustrating to me was that one of my coworkers, one of the QA guys...
Casey:
He's the iOS QA person, but his personal phone is an Android phone.
Casey:
And he sent me a screenshot of his reservation or order or whatever it was for his brand new Pixel 2.
Casey:
He sent this to me like 10 minutes after the keynote.
Casey:
Imagine that, gentlemen.
Casey:
Imagine moments after the keynote, you could go to a company that actually understands that the Internet is a thing and you could order your device right then and there in the middle of the day, like an adult, instead of having to wake up like a frigging animal at three in the morning, just throw money at Apple because we're all idiots that just need it pulsing through our veins.
Casey:
It made me so angry when I found out that he could just order.
Casey:
Right then and there, like it was nothing.
Casey:
So grumpy.
Marco:
Well, I mean, in all fairness, A, nobody comparably buys these things or wants them.
Marco:
And B, Google screws up lots of other stuff about selling phones directly.
Marco:
Things like support, returns.
Marco:
There's no retail angle, really.
Marco:
I mean, there's all...
Marco:
apple's way ahead of google when it comes to the business of selling people phones and then supporting them by so many miles that it's comical to even compare them but yeah i mean really what this really comes down to ultimately is that they can open up pre-orders for this thing immediately and sell it you know and start selling them immediately because the the numbers are so much dramatically smaller than what apple sells and
Marco:
so comparably few people are even paying attention, let alone ordering these things and using them and owning them, that it's a totally different game.
John:
You know who's paying attention?
John:
I'm paying attention to the fact that you tried to skip follow-up and ask ATP.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
This is pre-show.
John:
This is pre-show.
John:
We're going to do the Google I.O.
John:
in a pre-show?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I need you to send me links to these things.
John:
I Google for them.
John:
I don't see what you're talking about.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I will put a link in the show notes, in the chat, in the robot.
Casey:
It will be everywhere.
Casey:
But the reason that this ran long was because we got talking about names and how stupid iPhone X is.
Casey:
And then we're getting sidetracked with me moaning about having to wake up at 3 in the morning to spend an absurd amount of money that I should be so lucky as to have on a phone that I don't need.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Moving on from first world problems.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Casey:
Moving on from my first world problems.
Casey:
The most fascinating thing to me, well, there's a couple interesting things to me about these Pixel 2 devices.
Casey:
One is the aesthetic look of them.
Casey:
So if you go to the Verge post and they have this tremendous video right up front, and then you scroll down a little bit and you see these phones.
Casey:
And in a lot of ways, they remind me of older iPhones when you look at the top half.
Casey:
And I can't really put my finger on why.
Casey:
I guess it's because it's more rectangular, I guess.
Casey:
But then as you scroll down the page, maybe it's just because my window is smaller.
Casey:
But anyway, as I scroll down, I see the bottom of the phone.
Casey:
I realize, is it upside down?
Casey:
Because the top and bottom look exactly the same.
Casey:
And that's a little bit peculiar to me.
Casey:
Now, in the defense of this phone, I believe both of these are certainly speakers.
Casey:
And having stereo speakers that are pointed at you rather than having the bottom speaker pointed down...
Casey:
and the top speaker pointed at your face that's kind of cool but aesthetically this looks odd to me you can squeeze it to get google assistant yes that's right i forgot about that that's a good point i wouldn't have brought that up and so i'm glad you reminded me but yeah what do they call it they had some truly terrible marketing name for it like active something or something like that i don't remember what it was active squeeze force squeeze who knows it active edge squeezable sides there you go
Casey:
that's awful active edge how truly terrible is that that's even worse than apple's modern like undiscoverable gestures that's that's like what do you think is worse like squeeze for assistant or shake to undo i don't know that's a tough call but uh the thing that was most interesting to me about this uh was the way they're doing portrait mode and i mean this genuinely i'm not i'm not trying to snark
Casey:
The way they're doing portrait mode is, and I'm probably going to get the details slightly wrong, but in the single rear lens, they don't do a two lens setup like Apple does or 16 lens setup like our friends at Light do, but they do a single lens.
Casey:
But what's interesting is each of the pixels in the sensor is apparently two different pixels.
Casey:
And I know that doesn't make sense.
Casey:
And that's the best I can do to explain it without really going into nuance.
Casey:
But suffice to say, they've effectively got a two lens system or really, I guess I should say a two sensor system because the actual single sensor does a two for one.
Casey:
It's I guess to close out sale on pixels or
Casey:
But anyway, it has two pixels for, I guess, one pixels worth of data, if that makes any sense at all.
Casey:
So what they do is they kind of have the two, I'm saying lens, and I don't mean that, I guess, literally, but they have a similar setup to the two-lens system that Apple has.
Casey:
But they have it with only one lens and then they use, you know, machine learning, which is Google's favorite thing.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
I don't blame them because they actually can do it pretty well.
Casey:
They use machine learning to kind of extrapolate and interpret what these two pixels are seeing in order to get their own portrait mode, which coincidentally they've literally called portrait mode.
Yeah.
Casey:
I just thought that was kind of cool and a clever approach because having the two lenses on the back, I mean, it doesn't offend me, but I don't think it looks particularly great, especially with the camera bump, which this does not have.
John:
It has a fingerprint sensor on the back too, right?
Casey:
Yes, it does.
Casey:
And I apologize, you're absolutely right about the camera bump.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, these phones, like, and, you know, just superficially, the Pixel, the regular Pixel 2, like the regular-sized one, not the plus-sized one, the top and bottom bezels look comically large by today's standards.
Marco:
Like, it's funny, like, the iPhone...
Marco:
10 comes out and immediately do it and immediately ruins the look of all previous iphone proportions forever right and and like the pixel 2 has pretty much old iphone proportions and and it looks just impossibly old now um the two the pixel 2 10l uh has much more of like a an s8 style proportion and
Marco:
where it's almost it's it's kind of like what people want apple to do with the iphone 10 where they lop off the top and bottom and just make it black and just give like a curved thing in the middle and i don't i don't think it's that attractive honestly so maybe this is kind of why apple didn't do that like maybe they found the same thing they tried it and it's like oh it just doesn't look as good i don't know but anyway it
Marco:
Every time a new Google official phone comes out, back when they were called Nexuses and now they're called Pixels, here's what's going to happen.
Marco:
All the gadget nerds are going to fawn all over certain features of this.
Marco:
They're all going to say, man, this is the best phone at feature X, Y, or Z, or this is the best Android phone ever made.
Marco:
And then in three months, Samsung's going to come out with a better one.
Marco:
And no one will actually keep using this phone long-term.
Marco:
Everybody will tell you how great it is, and they're so glad Google's making these awesome phones, and this is the best at these certain things.
Marco:
But none of them will actually switch to it permanently.
Marco:
They're all going to either go back to their iPhones, or they're going to go to whatever Samsung launches next, or go back to what Samsung launched recently.
Marco:
Because Google just does not...
Marco:
They make this great hardware that's good in reviews, but it's usually not class-leading in the big picture.
Marco:
And also, they never sell very many of them, comparably speaking, because their retail distribution game is crap compared to all their competitors, or at least compared to Samsung and Apple.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So it's funny.
Marco:
It's fun to me to look at these things when they come out and to say, oh, that's interesting, just like everyone else.
Marco:
But it's hard for me to ever see Google's launches like this having a major impact in the market, really.
Marco:
They have a major impact on reviews that make it seem like they're going to have a major impact on the market, but they never do.
Casey:
I don't know if that's entirely true, though, because I think these are the darling phones of the people that are like us but like Android.
Casey:
And so your point is 90 percent true, I think.
Casey:
But these certainly do make a big splash and I think are held on to by the people who really, really, truly love Android.
Casey:
Now, I won't make any snarky comments about how many people that is.
Casey:
And I won't guess publicly that it's about 10.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I do think it's important.
Casey:
Do they all work for the Verge?
Casey:
Potentially.
Casey:
The other thing about this phone, like the front, I agree with you that the proportions look wrong now that I've seen an iPhone 10.
Casey:
But the back, this two-tone thing, do not want.
Casey:
Like if you scroll down the Verge article, it's almost all the way at the bottom.
Casey:
This two-tone that they've had for two years running now does not work for me at all.
Casey:
I think it looks like garbage.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, no one's buying this phone for the looks, let's be honest.
Marco:
Same as other Google stuff in the past.
Marco:
The people who buy this are reviewers and people who really... Tech nerds who very closely follow Google and the Android world.
Marco:
It's not going to be a lot of normal consumers.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I thought it was worth bringing up.
Casey:
And I'm sorry that we have an extended pre-show this time, Mr. Syracuse.
John:
I kind of like the black and white one with the little orange button on the side.
John:
It's kind of stormtrooper-y.
John:
It's always a good look.
John:
The most offensive thing about the back of it is that terrible G logo.
Casey:
Yeah, I noticed that too.
Casey:
It's pretty bad.
John:
And I guess the touch sensor.
John:
How does the squeeze part work if you have a case?
John:
Does that impair squeezability?
John:
Do you have to get a squeezable case?
John:
Do they have little cutouts for both the belly button and the squeeze sides?
John:
Can you imagine a case that's rigid all around but then has squishy areas for the squeeze?
Marco:
Everything I said earlier, I don't want this to be the case.
Marco:
I want...
Marco:
somebody in the Android world to make phones that are really, really nice and that really kick Apple in the pants and make everyone compete on a higher level.
Marco:
Samsung doesn't do that.
Marco:
Samsung makes phones that have great specs but usually have lots of downsides.
Marco:
I got to say, they are getting better at the physical design side.
Marco:
But they still always have a lot of weird, bizarre, dumb features and downsides and weird decisions.
Marco:
I think Google is coming closest to being able to compete with really nice stuff in the Android world.
Marco:
But they're just so far from actually being on the same level that I don't think Apple looks at this at all and is threatened by this.
Marco:
I also think that, again, their lack of having much retail power or distribution power to get these things sold in large volumes...
Casey:
i think that just doesn't intimidate apple at all i wish there was higher level competition here but there just isn't yet yeah i agree all right 20 minutes later we're done with the pre-show i'm sorry john oh man all right so let's let's quote unquote start with some follow-up john how's your fan do you hear the fan in your apple tv
John:
And that's the thing.
John:
Just one follow-up item this week.
John:
It's just poor planning.
John:
It's just poor planning.
John:
It could have gone into topics.
John:
And like I said, what about Ask ATP?
John:
It's coming, John.
John:
How soon we all forget.
John:
Anyway, one follow-up item this week.
John:
Just one.
John:
I do have my Apple TV 4K.
John:
I rotated my Apple TVs.
John:
A couple of notes about the thing.
John:
First, just to confirm about the output format thing, the person who wrote in to tell us that you can change to 24 hertz
John:
uh but only in 4k i found that also to be the case despite the fact that my television can accept 24 hertz input the apple tv will not send it because it's not a 4k tv so if i had a 4k tv i could do 24 hertz but because i have a 1080p tv i can't um second thing is setting up the apple tv it's got the thing where you bring the phone near it was that in the old one or is that the new home pod thing i thought it was it was in the old one oh
John:
Anyway, that was nice.
John:
But then I realized, oh, I have to re-download all my purchased apps and then remember how they were arranged and stuff like that.
John:
If you're setting up a new Apple TV 4K and find yourself in that situation, stop because there is a setting somewhere in settings in the settings app.
John:
that i figure what it's called like home screen sync or something you can tell it to make this apple tv like all your other apple tvs in other words keep the home screens in sync with each other and you turn that on and it will i think it'll automatically download the apps but certainly it will rearrange them to be in the same order as they were on your other apple tv which saves a lot of time
John:
um unfortunately you still have to log in with all your applications and doing that is a super pain like uh there's this feature i don't know if it's new because i haven't set up an apple tv in forever but when you're launching an app and it wants you to like log in like not log into the netflix app right
John:
And you have to log in with your email address and password, which is how you just log into Netflix everywhere.
John:
And when you do that, Apple TV tries to remember the email address you entered because it's such a pain to enter things with a remote so that the next time you go to a different app to log in, it will give you a choice of recently used email addresses.
John:
There's actually a section in settings that shows all your recently used email addresses, which sounds like a good idea because, hey, I don't want to type that email address more than one time.
John:
Um, but since I use the remote app on my phone to type things in, instead of using the terrible Apple TV remote, there's some weird interaction.
John:
Apparently no one at Apple ever did this because I enter the email address, and you know, it works fine.
John:
And I sign in and everything like that.
John:
And then I go to the second app and it says, choose from your recent email addresses.
John:
And it shows my iCloud email because it knows that one because I'm signed into iCloud on my old TV.
John:
And then the other choice is the first letter only of my previous email address, like a single letter.
John:
And as I entered in multiple email addresses to sign into multiple services, it would only save the first letter.
John:
And I think it's because I was typing it all on my phone, like the phone remote app.
John:
That's a stupid, terrible bug.
John:
I'm like, all right, well, I'll go into settings and I'll be able to edit those.
John:
Nope.
John:
All you can do is delete them in settings.
John:
So I had to delete all the single character email addresses, but that's a dumb bug and they should fix that.
John:
but I do like the idea of it remembering the future.
John:
For the other things, there's like the, please select your television provider, right?
John:
And my television provider is on the list.
John:
I'm like, oh, this is great.
John:
This is that single sign-on thing.
John:
I'm not quite sure what it's doing with my provider, like what part of the process it's streamlining, but having signed into umpteen applications for all the services that I subscribe to and being bounced from webpage to application to, you know, around and around in circles and going to like youtube.com slash activate and all these other URLs and typing in four-letter codes,
John:
I don't think there was any single sign-on that entering my television provider saved me from.
John:
In fact, the worst offender was, I think it was Showtime or something.
John:
As far as I could tell, they want you...
John:
They launch the app and it says, please go to like showtimeanytime.com slash activate.
John:
And you're like, okay, I'm going to do that.
John:
I'm going to type in this code.
John:
When you go there, as far as I can tell, it demands that you download their iOS app just so you can activate their Apple TV.
John:
You download the iOS app and that's the only time you get to type in the code.
John:
Logging into television apps is the worst thing ever.
John:
So home screen sync is great.
John:
I wish it also synced the fact that I'm logged into a million of these services.
John:
Um, and someone added, uh, one final item here about remote improvements.
John:
As far as I can tell, there are none that I can detect other than the raised ring, which helps less than I thought it would because I think my main complaint, I mean, I, I guess I don't pick it up backwards as much as most people because I look at it.
John:
And the reason I look at it is because it's like, I said, like, it's like a mousetrap or like a game of operation.
John:
Like you just, you have to look at it to gingerly pick it up so that you don't accidentally cause something to happen.
John:
People are saying that it is better about accidental input, but
John:
I don't like it when the progress bar comes up and like overlays the show that people are watching.
John:
Frequently, I will pick it up to just, you know, use the volume or something like that and accidentally graze the touchpad.
John:
And now you got to do a five count for the, you know, the progress bar to disappear off the screen.
John:
I don't like that remote.
John:
It's still bad.
Marco:
I mean, I will say that the ring around the menu button does help.
Marco:
Because it is noticeably raised.
Marco:
And so it now does feel different if you hold it wrong.
Marco:
And you can orient yourself by feel with that button.
Marco:
But that's the only problem it solves.
John:
This remote has lots of other problems.
John:
It doesn't really solve that problem, though, because if you grab it upside down and you go, oh, I don't feel the ridge, so I know I'm holding it upside down.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
Your palm has been all over that touchpad by this point.
John:
And it has done, it certainly has brought up the progress bar.
John:
And who knows what else it might have done, especially if you gripped it firmly instead of gingerly like the beautiful, delicate little insect that it is, right?
John:
If you actually grab the remote, you probably not only grazed the touchpad, but activated the pressure-sensitive button.
John:
And who knows what you did?
John:
It's the worst.
Marco:
yeah i mean i'm not quite as hard on it as you in this regard however uh the white the white circle the raised white circle on this button does help but the remote is still a terrible remote and i wish they would have done substantially more to actually redesign this thing instead of basically digging in and saying no this is fine here take a stupid white ring like that's basically what this what this revision says
John:
Oh, and I was frequently faced with the prompt that says, hold down the speaker button to speak.
John:
Like very often, you know, it's like, let me just speak this thing that I have to enter here instead of typing.
John:
Because even just typing on your phone gets tedious after a while.
John:
Like I'm not very good with the phone size keyboard or whatever.
John:
So I'm like, okay, it's prompting me with the little speaker on it.
John:
It says, hold down the button and talk into your microphone.
John:
And that often works if you just want to say, like, watch Game of Thrones.
John:
It will do that.
John:
Like, that part of the Apple TV experience is great.
John:
Anytime you don't have to use the remote, you're like, yes, right?
John:
And so I'm in a text field of some kind, and it's telling me, hold down the remote and talk.
John:
And I would hold down the remote and start to talk.
John:
And as soon as I started to talk, it would just go bloop, and it would, like, stop listening to me.
John:
And then it would say, hold down the remote and try to talk.
John:
And I would hold down the remote and start to talk, and it would go bloop and stop listening to me.
John:
Like, maybe I'd get, like, one character out, or I wouldn't type anything.
John:
It was just like, why?
John:
Why?
John:
What is happening?
John:
Why do you hate me?
John:
You're a brand new thing out of the box.
John:
You're presenting me a native text field with the native, you know, the little picker with the alphabet and the three things.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And during the setup experience, they had this crazy onscreen prompt.
John:
They're asking me a bunch of questions and a series of like sort of wizard type screens of asking you questions.
John:
There would be a thing highlighted and below it, like the corners of a triangle, like were two buttons.
John:
And your highlight would be on like the top point of the triangle, like that button.
John:
And there would be a button, you know, sort of southwest and a button southeast.
John:
And I couldn't for the life of me figure out which direction it wanted me to swipe to get to the southwest or southeast button.
John:
Because swiping south did nothing, right?
John:
And you're like, I don't swipe west to get southwest.
John:
And as far as I could tell, it was like...
John:
Any direction you swipe to do anything would always bring you to the default button.
John:
And then if you didn't want the default, you could swipe right because the default button was on the left.
John:
But it was like this weird puzzle game of figuring out how I moved the selection basically down and to the left.
John:
It was the worst.
John:
I don't know how that... Did you experience this when you were setting it up, Marco?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
My setup experience was pretty flawless.
Marco:
And in fact, I was actually also going to compliment that my keep the home screens in sync thing worked great.
Marco:
I mean, probably because I use far fewer apps than it sounds like you do, and I have far fewer accounts for things that I need to sign into.
Marco:
For me, it's basically just like Netflix and HBO Now Go thing.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I don't really have anything else on there.
John:
you did have to re-sign into those but i thought i thought it was like a wizard at the beginning that forced you to pick all the things that i was picking it that gave you the triangle buttons where i forget what the highlight is on but yeah the dragging southwest i would like swipe what i would think was southwest and the selection would just not move it would just not move and so i would do south it wouldn't move i think it wanted you to go like dead west to to select an item on the screen southwest infuriating i should have taken pictures of the screen
Marco:
no i did not have those issues but um i mean a lot of this ui has been like three quarters baked for two years now and doesn't seem to be getting put back in the oven so wouldn't surprise me and anyway that's it i've got my 4k apple tv i rotated all the apple tv so now i have one free one like my apple tv 3 is now like the yep the travel tv oh and i i usually use this is a tivo complaint i usually use the uh
John:
I have an old TiVo remote that I use with an old Apple TV, and I trained it on the TV that rotated up to the bedroom.
John:
But the problem is the new stupid bent TiVo that I have up there, like they're top of the line box, essentially.
John:
As far as I can tell, there is no way to get it to not receive signals from my TiVo remote.
John:
I even have the technique I used before.
John:
TiVo remotes used to have a one-two switch on them.
John:
You could switch it to the one side or the two sides.
John:
You could have two TiVos hooked up to your TV, and you'd have one remote set to one and one remote set to two so they wouldn't interfere with each other, which was a great idea.
John:
tivo is really smart but the new tivos no matter what i set any of the remotes to this bent tivo sees obeys the commands of any tivo remote so you can't use the tivo remote with the apple tv or you can but you will realize that you are blindly going through menus accidentally who knows possibly you know deleting stuff or recording things you don't want because every time you press a button the tivo registers the command in addition to the apple tv so
John:
That's kind of crappy, so we have to use the crappy Apple TV remote upstairs now.
John:
I'm sorry, John.
Marco:
I know that's hard for you.
John:
I think you can turn off the IR on the thing and then just make it do Bluetooth only, but then you can't do the volume control because the volume control is IR.
John:
It's a complicated situation.
John:
I also have a piece of tinfoil covering the other TiVo that's up there.
John:
I have two TiVos and an Apple TV up there.
John:
The tinfoil works great, though, by the way.
John:
It's like, where is the IR sensor?
John:
How do I stop the IR?
John:
Guess what?
John:
Tinfoil over the whole front of it.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Solves that problem.
Casey:
That's incredible.
Casey:
And when you don't need it to block your TiVo, you can wear it as a hat.
John:
Yeah, no.
John:
I wanted to just get rid of it, but we have tons of prerecorded stuff on there, so we're slowly and painfully transferring it from the old TiVo to the new TiVo, which takes forever for a variety of dumb reasons, most of which have to do with the weak Wi-Fi signal that I have in that corner of the house where the TV is.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the fact that I think it's like 802.11b or something, like it doesn't even have Wi-Fi built in the old one.
John:
So it's like got a little adapter hanging out the end.
John:
So the Wi-Fi speeds are super slow.
John:
Anyway, eventually we will get rid of that box in the...
John:
And someone in the chat room is asking me if I heard of Eero.
John:
We do have Eero.
John:
We have five bars, five, you know, full signal strength in there.
John:
But like the Wi-Fi adapter dongle thing is bad.
John:
And in general, TiVo's got really bad transfer speeds, not even limited by the network.
John:
So who knows what its problem is, but it takes a long time.
John:
Oh, I forgot about the fan.
John:
Yeah, I just looked at the thing.
John:
All right.
John:
So I actually forgot.
John:
I did forget about the fan.
John:
I hooked it up.
John:
I'm doing CV setup and everything like, oh, I forgot I should do go look at the fan.
John:
So by this point, it's connected to my television and I've been using it to like set up all the applications and do all the setup stuff.
John:
And I actually, you know.
John:
played a few games with it and to see if the performance was better and stuff like that.
John:
Then I had to go over the TV, grab the little thing.
John:
And of course I can't pull it away from the entertainment center very far because it's got an HDMI cable in the back and the power cord and stuff like that.
John:
And if I unplug the power cord, obviously the fan will be off.
John:
And on my television, I have at the very least a TiVo with the fans are on.
John:
My television itself has fans in it.
John:
So this is a pretty noisy environment.
John:
Nevertheless, held that thing up to my ear.
John:
I can hear the fan.
John:
And I'm like, oh, that's not fair.
John:
I did a lot of setup.
John:
I was playing games.
John:
I just let it sit.
John:
So the next morning, after the Apple TV had been sleeping all night long, I came, activated the Apple TV so the little light turns on, put it up to my ear.
John:
I can still hear it.
John:
So you can hear it if you shove it up to your ear.
John:
But I guarantee you, get...
John:
four inches away and you cannot hear it even if it was in a dead sound room and it's not it is in my entertainment center with my tivo fan and my television fan so noise is absolutely not a concern with this i think the fan is always spinning you can hear it if you put it up to your ear and if you have better hearing than apparently jason snell and marco um
John:
i don't i don't understand how you couldn't hear it it wasn't even close like you can hear it i didn't put it i didn't put my ear right against the case i just moved my ear close to it no you have to pick it up and hold it to your ear like you're like you're uh you know what do you call like when you ever see in the movies where some some uh record producer is trying to listen to some music and get into the groove and takes a pair of headphones up but he only holds one ear of the headphones against his ear oh yeah do that yep do that
John:
no anyway if you have any concerns about this fan it gets the john syracuse a seal of approval it is inaudible to humans you're fine wow can we get like an actual seal made to that effect i don't put stickers on things
John:
also did you just imply that you're not human did we just get confirmation that you are a robot it's inaudible to humans unless you're holding it to your ear you're not supposed to use the hells of you hold literally holding it to your ear like a like a seashell you know you can hear the ocean and shell marco has anyone taught you this now that you're a beach bum yes i yeah yeah all right good anyway uh that's there you go do that
Marco:
Maybe he's a superhero.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me.
John:
Maybe I just don't have it.
John:
Last time, I just had my yearly physical.
John:
And the last time I had my yearly physical.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Are we really going here?
John:
They did the hearing test, you know, where they did the different tones in your ears.
John:
And last year, I failed a bunch of the tones in my right ear.
John:
And she's like, oh, it's probably just because you have a cold.
John:
Like, oh, my God, I'm going deaf.
John:
I'm old.
John:
But it turns out just because I had a cold this year, I got them all.
Casey:
The long national nightmare is over.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Betterment, rethink what your money can do.
Casey:
So let's move on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
And the curiously named Null wrote in to ask, what do Marco and Casey use for iOS error logging?
Casey:
Existing frameworks or something homegrown?
Casey:
Hashtag noob.
Casey:
And it looks like this was spelled correctly with two zeros.
Casey:
So I applaud you, Null.
Casey:
Anyway, noob iOS dev.
Casey:
Since I'm talking, I will go ahead and start.
Casey:
The company I work for uses Fabric, which was...
Casey:
I don't even know the relationship with Crashlytics.
Casey:
It either was Crashlytics or Crashlytics is now considered a product within... Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter.
Marco:
Twitter rolled it into a larger thing called Fabric.
Marco:
Then Google bought Fabric from Twitter.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So that is what we are currently using.
Casey:
It is sufficient.
Marco:
I don't really have any emotional... For error logging?
Marco:
Is this just crash reporting?
Marco:
I took this to mean like NSLog kind of error logging.
Casey:
Oh, that is not how I took this.
Casey:
I took this to mean crash reporting, which is exactly what you expected.
Casey:
And for that, we use Fabric.
Casey:
For like NSLog sort of thing, we don't do anything.
Marco:
You just use NSLog?
Casey:
Yeah, well, I mean, we don't have any mechanism by which that's reported anywhere is what I mean.
Casey:
Like we use...
Casey:
Well, really, we use print because we're not stuck in 1987 on Objective-C.
Casey:
But anyway, we just use effectively NSLog for local debugging and development and stuff like that.
Casey:
But that never gets reported to a server anywhere, or not knowingly anyway.
Casey:
I'm sure somebody's going to write in and tell me, no, you idiot, CrashLytics is getting all that too.
Casey:
And that very well may be the case, but I've never seen it.
Casey:
Probably.
Marco:
Yeah, I use NSLog in development.
Marco:
In production, I don't think my app logs much of anything.
Marco:
I usually remove them or I use macros to have a debug log that calls NSLog in development but not in production, stuff like that.
Marco:
And then I don't have any mechanism for...
Marco:
the instances of the app out in the field to be reporting back to me what they have logged.
Marco:
I don't have that.
Marco:
Um, right.
Marco:
Same here.
Marco:
I haven't really just had the need for it ever.
Marco:
That seems like a lot of data to deal with.
Marco:
I also, I know that, uh, that last year they introduced this whole like unified logging framework thing among all the systems.
Marco:
And I honestly have, I don't know anything about it.
Marco:
I never saw the session.
Marco:
I haven't looked at it, um, at all.
Marco:
And, um,
Marco:
all the only thing I see from that is that ever since they introduced that new logging system console app is completely useless the phone console is covered in garbage when I look in Xcode and that when I even when I do a build and run in Xcode all the system crap still logs to that console and makes it very hard for me to use NS logging for anything else so
Marco:
The new system has not made a good impression on me having not used it because now it just seems like everything in the OS is constantly spewing crap into the logs.
Marco:
And that can't be good no matter how lightweight they've made it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Alex writes in, is there any meaningful difference between the $50 Qi?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Is that how you pronounce this?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Qi Chargers Apple's promoting and the $15 No Name Ones on Amazon.
Marco:
It's pronounced $10.
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't have the faintest idea what the answer to this question is.
Casey:
I understand the question, but I don't know.
Casey:
I don't have any Qi capable devices in my house right now.
John:
So the reason I put this in here is because a bunch of people have been using their iPhone 8s with the non-Apple Qi chargers and having varying experiences with exactly how carefully you have to position the phone on the mat.
John:
both orient and position it.
John:
And the basic tale of woe is I woke up and my phone was 10% charged because I didn't put it on the mat quite the right way.
John:
And a lot of people are saying that this is the reason why... This is the space for Apple to innovate.
John:
They already said that they have some...
John:
Things that you can do with the air power mat that you can't do with a regular Qi charger, like charge multiple devices at once and have them, you know, do all the things they showed in the keynote, right?
John:
That's what air power will do.
John:
But another possible thing that the air power mat might do.
John:
is uh you know be better about positioning now i think this question is about what about the ones that you know from belkin or whoever that apple's promoting 50 bucks versus the 15 dollar ones i would imagine that one possible difference is exactly how picky they are about how you place your thing on it right it's probably very easy to make a technically chi compatible charger that is super finicky about
John:
where you put your phone and maybe the more expensive ones have either larger areas where you can put them or have multiple orientation things or something like that.
John:
That would be my guess, having not used any of these things and not torn any of them apart.
John:
But at the very least, I wanted to bring this up because I hope that that's exactly what Apple does.
John:
That regardless of the possible difference between 50 and $15, it could just be one's Belkin branded and you pay, you know, an extra $35 for that or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
But Apple, we already know that they're doing multi-device.
John:
One of the things that they... One of the attributes of their fancy air power mat, which I'm sure won't cost $50, is that it should be able to charge in lots of different positions.
John:
And with them showing multiple phones and a watch...
John:
all in the same pad surely that means that you can put them more or less anywhere on the pad and they'll be fine because it's not as if there's three preset division positions you have to put them exactly on that especially since as far as i can tell the surface of the air power is completely featureless like there's no red x that says put your phone here and put your watch here and put your whatever here so that is my hope and that is a possible reason to
Casey:
maybe wait for the air power thing to come out before you take a dive into the uh wireless charging world finally mike bolton you know is that your real name yeah it's too bad that no talent ass clown ruined it for everyone uh mike bolton writes in who's the fastest typist if you guys play for the best two out of three on type racer or a similar head-to-head typing thingy i'll donate a hundred dollars to the charity of your choosing
Casey:
We didn't yet do an actual like simultaneous head to head thing, which I am willing to do right now if Marco's willing to edit it all out.
Casey:
But we each, well, two thirds of us, those of us who believe in homework, did the homework and filled out the appropriate entry in the show notes indicating what our scores were.
Casey:
Marco, have you done this?
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
I just didn't put my entry in the show notes because, of course, when you ask me for a list with a certain number of items in it, in this case one, I can't give my top one list.
Marco:
It has more than one entry.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
John:
He's trying to build suspense.
John:
And by the way, going into this, I assume that I would have the slowest typing speed.
John:
And even though Marco hasn't entered his time, I'm going to say that I will have the slowest typing speed, mostly because I don't type correctly.
John:
Like, the correct way with the fingers on the home keys, I took typing courses on...
Casey:
on ibm selectric typewriters in my youth i took many years of typing courses and i apparently successfully resisted everything they had to teach me and i type totally the wrong way and so i'm slow i uh i used to hunt and pack for the longest time and when i was still pretty young i think before i started taking like keyboarding class in school um i decided one day i was going to force myself to learn to touch type and i basically forced myself to use the home row and after
Casey:
Given how much time I spent on a computer, even my youth, it took me all of a couple of weeks to get okay.
Casey:
And now, well, for a long time now, I've been in the just truly tremendous position where I don't have to think about where to put my fingers.
Casey:
Words just magically appear on the screen.
Casey:
And I know I'm not unique in that way.
Casey:
It's just getting to that point is amazing.
Casey:
So anyway, so what I did was I took the test.
Casey:
I did the little typing thing once, and then they ask you to, like, verify that you're a human by taking another little test.
Casey:
And the second test that I took, so the verification test, indicated that I could type at 125 words per minute.
Casey:
If I had seen Marco's score, which I'm assuming is higher than 125 words per minute, I assure you I would have spent hours getting to the point that I beat it.
Casey:
But based on one time and one time, or I guess really two times, I scored 125 words per minute.
Casey:
That was without any sort of warm up.
Casey:
I think it was early in the morning.
Casey:
I would blame it on coffee, but coffee is evil.
Casey:
And so I don't drink coffee.
Casey:
But that was my score.
Casey:
John, what was your score?
John:
so i did a couple of runs to get warmed up uh and i put 79 down even though that wasn't my very best run because i did a little bit after that and i can you can especially once you learn the passages that they're having you type uh half of my problem typing these things is like i wouldn't put a comma there i wouldn't word it that way and get hung up on that right but once you've done that sometimes they repeat or whatever so 79 is what i'm entering here i think that is representative of my typing skill i can go faster by like hammering away at that and get into the 80s or 90s but realistically speaking i'm not typing that fast
John:
i only kind of wish they asked us to write i was cheating but if they asked us to write pearl code i think i would do a pretty good job despite the fact that uh that i my hands are not in the right place i'm really good at dollar signs at signs curly braces and square brackets fastest dollar sign in the east you guys because i type them so much i spent 20 years typing tremendous amount of dollar signs and uh parentheses and at signs and curly braces um
John:
And despite the fact that I'm only at 79 more minutes, which is not fast in the grand scheme of things, I can also type without looking at the keyboard and words just come out and code just comes out very often.
John:
I will just, you know, you're staring at the screen and code is just coming out.
John:
And not just that, I'm going to the arrow because I type incorrectly.
John:
I'm going to the arrow keys, home, and my hands are all over that keyboard, and I'm just looking at the screen.
John:
I'm selecting, you know, command, option, shift, up, down, arrow, selecting, text, cut, pasting, you know, like, you get in the zone.
John:
I'm not fast when I'm doing it, but it's not as if I'm staring at the keyboard, you know, hunting and pecking.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, Marco, tell me how much faster you were than the two of us.
Marco:
So my first test, just cold, was 91 words per minute.
Marco:
It was not that accurate.
Marco:
Basically, I got slowed down a lot if I ever made any mistakes because, like John, if a passage was written in a way that I wouldn't write it, it would kind of trip me up a little bit.
Marco:
I'd have to go back and be like, wait a minute, that didn't make sense.
Marco:
If it was something that flowed the way I would write something, I was way faster.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I took a second test a few minutes later at 125.
Marco:
Then I got prompt for that human qualifier thing.
Marco:
That one was 132.
Marco:
Then I took two more.
Marco:
I got 116 and 122.
Marco:
So it's kind of all over the place.
Marco:
I would consider that a draw.
Marco:
Yeah, it seems like me and you were in the same range.
John:
Yeah, I think you guys are even.
John:
You had to correct mistakes, right?
John:
I was never quite clear on that.
John:
You weren't allowed to just blindly continue on, right?
John:
Because I lost a lot of time realizing that I had missed a comma or something like that, and then having to backspace and make sure I'm getting the right... That really ate up my time.
Marco:
the other thing is like typing typing speed tests are a fun little thing like this but i don't really i don't get a lot of value out of this because like there is very little time that i'm at my computer that i am typing at full blast for more than a few seconds um because like i'm not like transcribing things or or like spewing out tons of paragraphs that that's the thing about these tests um
John:
They're asking you to transcribe, which is something I never do on a computer and find incredibly tedious.
John:
I'm always either writing words from my brain or writing code from my brain.
John:
I'm never transcribing.
John:
So it is actually a very foreign skill for me to be typing some words that I'm reading off of the screen.
John:
That's what copy and paste are for.
John:
I'm a strong, strong proponent of copy and paste.
John:
I'm going to give my few nuggets of copy and paste advice for people listening.
John:
I think I already gave Merlin some of these.
John:
Never type a process ID.
John:
because you're just asking to kill the wrong if you like root on a system and you want to kill a process id never type it now i just ran ps let me just transcribe that process id you know you only have to like kill kill the process id belonging to some kernel thing to like halt your entire machine like you don't have to do that once you just just always copy and paste it um always copy and paste any any piece of information you're you're entering like
John:
uh email addresses or the type of thing that's authentication information copy and paste it obviously not passwords because you shouldn't be copying and pasting those but everything else copy and paste in code variable names copy and paste the way you can tell if you're correctly using copy and paste is if you initially misspelled the variable it should be misspelled consistently through your entire file because you never typed it again you either auto completed it or copied and pasted it from elsewhere so copy and paste is your friend don't transcribe and i feel that
John:
People who are really fast typists resist that.
John:
They're like, I can retype it faster than I can copy and paste it.
John:
You probably can.
John:
You can also accidentally type it the wrong way because there's nothing that's going to highlight red for you like it does in these typing tests.
Casey:
So what we've learned today is if you want us to do something stupid, just swear that you'll donate $100 to charity.
Casey:
And we never defined which charity...
Casey:
Somebody put the show notes, St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
I am totally fine with that.
Casey:
I would also like to pitch as an option the Brady Center to prevent gun violence, which seems to be a pretty pertinent thing to donate a little money to these days.
Marco:
Or maybe Puerto Rico relief efforts.
Casey:
Or Puerto Rico relief efforts.
Casey:
So actually, so yeah, how about we'll go with those three?
Casey:
Mike Bolton, take your pick amongst whatever one of those three you would like to donate to.
Casey:
And I will put at least me on the spot and say, send me a receipt and I'll match it.
Casey:
Me too.
Casey:
No pressure, John.
Casey:
Anyway, I'll move on so you don't have to answer.
Casey:
Let's talk some topics.
John:
Yeah, I'll do it too.
John:
We usually save our charity stuff towards the end of the year, but no problem moving it up.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by HelloPillow at HelloPillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
hullo makes these pretty cool buckwheat hull pillows so this is totally different from regular pillows that are filled with some kind of like soft springy material it's almost like a giant bean bag full of buckwheat hulls so it supports your head and neck however you set it up and it kind of just stays there it doesn't like slowly collapse over the course of the night or squish around it just stays where you put it it's also
Marco:
really cool like it helps you keep cool at night it doesn't get hot the way most pillow fill does and so it is by far in my opinion they sent me a couple and it is by far the coolest feeling pillow i have ever used i i love that part of it it's really nice you can also add and remove buckwheat holes as you see fit so like if you if it's a little bit too big for you you want like a smaller or kind of looser filled pillow you can just unzip the side and pour some out
Marco:
Or if you want more or if you want to kind of rejuvenate an old HelloPillow over time, you can go to their website and just order more fill and just dump it in.
Marco:
It's kind of amazing.
Marco:
People have been sleeping on buckwheat pillows for centuries.
Marco:
They've been used extensively in Japan and they remain relatively popular to this day.
Marco:
And it's really a more natural way to sleep.
Marco:
Because what are you laying your head on every night?
Marco:
Perhaps it's a bag of bird feathers or sometimes they're petroleum-based foams.
Marco:
That's no good.
Marco:
Hullo is made in the USA with quality construction and quality buckwheat hulls and materials.
Marco:
They have certified organic cotton cases.
Marco:
It's cut and sewn for durability, and the buckwheat is grown and milled in the United States.
Marco:
So here's the deal.
Marco:
You can sleep on a HelloPillow for 60 nights.
Marco:
If it isn't for you, just send it back and it will give you a refund.
Marco:
Go to HelloPillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you want to get more than one, you can get a discount of up to $20 per pillow depending on the size.
Marco:
And every order comes with fast and free shipping.
Marco:
And 1% of all profits are donated to the Nature Conservancy.
Marco:
So check out Hello today at HelloPillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hello for sponsoring our show.
Hello.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So this is the portion of the show wherein I take a little power snooze.
Casey:
Tell me about the new Amazon Echo stuff.
Casey:
And I say I'm going to take a power snooze because I bet you if I had an Echo, I would really like it.
Casey:
But because I've never experienced it, I don't really care.
Casey:
But there's new Echo news and there's new Sonos news as well.
Casey:
So one of you take it away.
Casey:
Tell me what's going on.
Marco:
Alright, so basically Amazon held the secret event where the existence of the event itself was embargoed, which is hilarious, the other day.
Marco:
And they announced a whole new line of Echo products, which is pretty cool.
Marco:
I've been a big fan of the Echo not since it came out, but since our friends got one and I saw it and used it myself at their house, which is a big important distinction here for any kind of Echo announcement.
Marco:
When the Echo first came out, it came kind of out of nowhere.
Marco:
And it had this really weird, creepy promo video on Amazon's site.
Marco:
And we all, the entire tech world, relentlessly made fun of them for it.
Marco:
And because it really did seem like the creepiest thing advertised and promoted in the creepiest way.
Marco:
And it seemed like, you know, oh, another crazy thing from the company that brought you the Fire Phone.
Marco:
It turned out that it was actually really awesome and that the Echo ends up being surprisingly useful and just fun and very satisfying to have in our houses.
Marco:
And as a result, over the last couple of years, I think it came out two years ago, maybe even three years,
Marco:
But as a result, in the last couple of years, many people around these parts have gotten them, and they're quite fun.
Marco:
Last Christmas, I know many of us gave them as gifts to family and stuff, and only great things have reviews from family and everything about the Echoes.
Marco:
So, very good product line.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
Amazon also releases a whole bunch of garbage.
Marco:
They release a whole bunch of weird products.
Marco:
They are kind of taking the spaghetti against the wall approach to new Echo hardware.
Marco:
So they have all sorts of crazy things.
Marco:
They launched the Echo Show, which is the weird ugly thing with the screen.
Marco:
They launched the Echo Look, the weird bedroom camera where you're supposed to take pictures of yourself getting dressed every day.
Marco:
And those kind of fell on their face.
Marco:
I don't know a lot of people who really enjoy those.
Marco:
So you kind of don't know when Amazon announces something new in the Echo world.
Marco:
The initial reaction to things has very little bearing and the initial appearance of things really has very little bearing on how good they'll end up being and how much we'll end up liking them or how well they will sell.
Marco:
So Amazon announced a whole bunch of new Echo stuff the other day.
Marco:
And so now there is... They finally revised the core product line.
Marco:
There is finally a second generation of the tall cylinder version of the Echo that used to be the only version of the Echo.
Marco:
There is now a kind of
Marco:
shorter stubbier optionally cloth covered cylinder that looks almost like a tiny home pod and now there's also this little alarm clocks thing with a circular screen that can sit on your nightstand but also has a camera so it's kind of like a mini echo show
Marco:
That can also be an alarm clock, which is kind of interesting.
Marco:
And there's a whole bunch, right?
John:
Echo Connect, the thing that connects to your phone lines so you can make telephone calls.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like a bridge to your landlines that you can make calls using your Echo that are routed over your hardwired landline if you actually have a landline.
Marco:
I think that's going to go down into the weird category that we're probably never going to hear about again, but I'm sure somebody will use it.
John:
Got the Fire TV 4K.
Marco:
right yeah and the new stick that hangs diagonally off your tv uh so so this is these are very different things i mean so the the fire tvs i don't know much about the fire tv world i bought a fire tv box like two years ago didn't really care for its ui at all so i ended up just selling it um do you know do you use them at all john i forget
John:
now i've seen my uh friend who has them and i looked at them they're not bad like the you know the the ui is very amazon-y but the performance is okay the remote is better than apple's like it is it well that's not right it is very similar to the old one and it's got like a ring on it but uh at least my recollection of the old uh fire tv thing it's not flat on the bottom it's more like shaped like a triangle so it actually sits in your hand a little bit like an actual remote
John:
right and it doesn't have a touchpad on the whole top of the thing um anyway it's fine um it is it has always been cheaper than the apple tv and i would say like almost as good but of course you can't watch itunes content on it so it's it was never anything that i was going to get even maybe if it did 24 hertz output i would have considered it to run like plex on it or whatever but it doesn't seem like it never seemed like a speed demon certainly the apple tv 4k feels faster um
John:
The new one doesn't support Dolby Vision, which is kind of a shame, but maybe they'll add that after the fact.
John:
It does support Dolby Atmos, which Apple TV 4K doesn't, but Apple TV 4K is supposed to get that support.
John:
But remember, this is $100 cheaper than the Apple TV 4K.
John:
It's not just like $15 cheaper.
John:
It's significantly cheaper.
John:
The form factor, what Marco was alluding to before, that it dangles off your TV,
John:
It is like an HDMI connector, a ribbon cable, and then a box hanging from its corner off of the ribbon cable.
John:
And the ribbon cable is like three inches long.
John:
So this is not a box you put in your entertainment center.
John:
It is a thing that you hang off the back of your TV, which is kind of interesting.
John:
I actually have a Google...
John:
what is it called the the google thing that hangs off the back of your tv the chromecast right the hang off your back of the back of your tv thing it's neat it's like an acknowledgement that we can make this thing so small there's no reason it has to be in your entertainment center but it's also not neat in the
John:
neat and tidy sense and that you have this little thing hanging off your tv and just always hangs awkwardly and you're hoping that no one has a view of that television like what if your television is in a place where someone walking to the room can see the side of it now you got this thing hanging off it it's just it's just not tidy it's unseemly it's like a wart like purposely adding a wart to your thing never mind that you know the idea of hanging even a small amount of weight off of the end of your hdmi port i suppose it's probably weighs less than a very long cord but either way thumbs down on that form factor but
John:
As far as people who don't have any investment at all in the iTunes world, this versus Roku and stuff, they're all reasonable choices.
John:
I would have no problem recommending a Fire T for someone who wants to have...
John:
to look at amazon content and to have access to be able to watch youtube on their tv and netflix if they happen to have one of the televisions that doesn't have that crap all built in or if they have a television where that's all built in but the built-in apps are terrible the fire tv apps are better than the built-in ones on most televisions so it's an okay product i don't think it'll change things up i think it's just you know status quo
Casey:
I have a Fire TV stick.
Casey:
I think it's the original generation.
Casey:
And I hadn't used it in probably a year and then wanted to get it all updated and whatnot before we went to the beach a couple months back.
Casey:
And doing that update took like a day because I had to do an update, wait, reboot, do an update, wait, reboot.
Casey:
It was like updating Windows, for goodness sakes.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
The new revamped UI that came with it was very nice.
Casey:
And as a portable thing that's easy to travel with, I love my Fire TV Stick.
Casey:
As something that's an alternative to, say, an Apple TV, no thank you.
Casey:
I'd much rather have an Apple TV.
Casey:
But the user interface is fine.
Casey:
It got a lot better with this revamp that happened sometime in the last 12 months.
Casey:
And it's fast enough to do the sorts of things I want to do.
Casey:
But if I was living with it every day, like especially your situation, Marco, where all of your TV consumption happens via some sort of box, I would not recommend a Fire TV stick.
Casey:
Now, that is very different than the 4K, which presumably is considerably faster, better, etc.
Casey:
But in terms of UI, it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, the whole Amazon Fire TV thing is not an area that I play in, but the Echo very much is.
Marco:
And so all of these new Echoes, I'm really glad that Amazon's finally...
Marco:
doing more with like just the base model echo, like not just making new weird accessory versions and different things that are different that serve different roles, but also just finally revving the main speaker.
Marco:
The main problem the echo has always had for me.
Marco:
Well, it's not the most attractive thing in the world, but the main problem for me has always been that it doesn't sound very good.
Marco:
It doesn't get that loud, and the sound quality is not very good, because it really is just one speaker.
Marco:
pointed downwards above a second driver for being a woofer.
Marco:
It's just like a single tweeter and single woofer.
Marco:
They point down and they don't sound very good.
Marco:
The microphones have always been excellent.
Marco:
It doesn't seem to have trouble hearing me compared to anything else, but the sound quality is just...
Marco:
really poor um and it really says a lot about how convenient the echo is and how compelling the whole package is that we listen to by like with the exception of like my desk with headphones like while i'm working while we're out in the house we listen to far more music on the echo and
Marco:
even though it sounds like crap than any other mechanism by which we have to play music and that includes like we have a whole like nice speaker setup with an apple tv that could feed it through airplay if we wanted to um or the apple tv playing music itself um we have sonos which we'll get to um and we never use these things to play music comparably speaking because
Marco:
the Echo is just so much more convenient to just say, hey, name of thing, play Fish, and that's it.
Marco:
Or play a song from the 90s.
Marco:
It's just really, really nice and compelling to use that, so much so that we've been willing to overlook the relatively poor sound quality, because most people simply don't care.
Marco:
And even I, who do care, I would rather just have it be easy than to have to set up some fiddly thing on a better, nicer system.
John:
To Echo that, ha ha.
John:
Um, we have the Google home, but it's the same thing.
John:
It's got a terrible speaker in it.
John:
Like it's probably worse than the echo.
John:
It's so, you know, the Google home is actually even smaller than the big echo.
John:
And I think it's probably just got one terrible speaker in there.
John:
It does not sound good.
John:
And yet, uh, when my daughter has her friends over,
John:
All they do is, I think, to play music.
John:
That is their favorite activity.
John:
More music has been played on that thing than any other device in their house easily.
John:
Because, again, I've got my television speakers, and you can play things through the Apple TV on the television or through the receiver on the television without even turning the television on.
John:
But they just wanted to talk to the thing and make it play songs.
John:
Because...
John:
They just say words in the air, speculatively, and it finds the song that they want and plays it.
John:
And they love it, even though it sounds like crap.
Marco:
And I will say, too, I have been trying to give Siri more chances in my life.
Marco:
Because everyone keeps saying how good it is, how good it's getting, how it's so much better than it used to be.
Marco:
And so I have tried in many occasions recently to have Siri play me music as well to just kind of get a sense.
Marco:
So I'll issue it similar queries like play songs by cake or whatever.
Marco:
I'll issue it a fairly simple music query.
Marco:
And Siri gets it right about a quarter of the time.
Marco:
And it's really frustrating.
Marco:
Whereas the Echo gets it right almost every time.
Marco:
how different the two are in reliability and speed and just the sensibility of responses for things like music.
John:
Yeah, similarly, Google Home, like my daughter and her friends say things like, play song whatever, but the one with whatever in it.
John:
Like there are variants of songs or multiple artists cover them and they will say a sentence describing the song they want and it will find the thing for them.
John:
And not only that, it will say, okay, I found blah, blah, blah, featuring blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like...
John:
i don't know if it's just doing fuzzy word matching of finding like song title plus the name of the person they said but they ramble on these whole sentences and i listen i'm amazed it finds the song that they were asking about when i don't think a human could have found it a google search probably maybe that's what they're doing they're just like literally doing google search and taking the first hit but the fact that it works is all is magic like and i
John:
saying that to siri it would just be this word salad of misheard you know you know it does when you say stuff and doesn't understand what you say it would assemble that and then it would be like i'm sorry i can't help with that because it doesn't i don't think it has the fallback of can't make heads or tails this throw it into the magic that is google and try the number one hit
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And the assistant, like the Amazon assistant, I don't know if Google does this too, it probably does, but it even does lyric search.
Marco:
You can say, play the song that goes blah, and it will search for those lyrics.
Marco:
It's just incredible how good it is.
Marco:
Honestly, one of the reasons why I am not that excited about the HomePod is that
Marco:
I know, just judging on how Siri does, if you have an iPhone or an iPad or an Apple TV, giving it these same queries, I know that these other systems are going to be better than it in that regard, at least.
John:
You got to do the chained, a lot of YouTube videos showing this, chaining the assistants to talk to each other.
John:
So be like, you know, dingus, tell the other dingus to play songs by whatever, you know, or just like have this big chain.
John:
Let the smart ones figure out what song you want and convey to the one with the good speaker to play it now.
John:
So that is actually a great segue into this other thing.
Marco:
Thanks, Sean.
Marco:
So today, you know, we've had a couple days to digest this Echo stuff, but today there was a Sonos announcement.
Marco:
Sonos has made wonderful sounding speakers and very, like...
Marco:
They're basically products that are designed to be sold in Apple stores.
Marco:
I know they weren't officially, but they are really, really high-end speakers.
Marco:
Well, they're high-priced speakers that sound pretty good.
Marco:
They don't sound amazing and incredible compared to high-end audiophile speakers, but for consumer...
Marco:
grade i guess gear they sound very good um and you know compared to all these other like you know smart cylinders they sound great um and sonos has been around for a very long time and and they've they have focused mainly on multi-room audio and and and this kind of like library management of things and in fact much of the benefit of airplay 2 uh is what sonos has been doing all this time where basically like it hands off the playback of
Marco:
to the speaker itself so like you're not just playing a constant stream from the phone like you're telling the speaker here's this file play it or here's the next you know 15 minutes of audio play it or go to this url and just play what you find there because they're all networked which is nice it has lots of benefits like you know if you if you like if one person like leaves the house with the phone that was controlling it the music doesn't stop
Marco:
um and it doesn't skip if you like you know bend over and your your waist is blocking your pocket or something like it's a really nice architecture and it also makes things like multi-room audio significantly easier to do um and so anyway sonos has had this for years and years and years and and they really have owned the like high-end multi-room audio uh market
Marco:
The main problem with Sonos in recent years is that when the Echo came out, everyone's like, well, it's a lot easier to do this.
Marco:
I mean, playing stuff through Sonos is cumbersome because their app is really quite poor.
Marco:
It's unintuitive.
Marco:
It's incredibly complicated because it can do so much, and it's laid out in a not-that-intuitive way.
Marco:
Honestly, it feels like an Android app, and I don't mean...
Marco:
Much disrespect by that, but it just feels like an app designed by the Windows and Android aesthetic.
Marco:
And so it's just very cumbersome to play stuff on a Sonos system, even though when you finally do, it sounds great, and you can do multi-room stuff really easily and stuff like that.
Marco:
So the Echo comes out, and it's really...
Marco:
crappy at sound quality and initially doesn't have multi-room audio support uh but it's really really really really easy to get stuff playing you can say what you want it just starts playing and it turns out that's incredibly compelling as we said earlier and so many sonos owners myself included uh our sonos stuff has basically been gathering dust ever since the echo came out
Marco:
So today, Sonos announced that they have partnered with Amazon at some seemingly fairly deep level.
Marco:
And they announced a partnership like months ago, but who knew if anything was ever going to come out of it?
Marco:
Well, now it is.
Marco:
They now have a version of what used to be called the Play 1 speaker, their lowest end, smallest little, like, it's like a little cube, almost, speaker.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They now have a version of that that is basically also an Echo inside of it.
Marco:
It has a little microphone ring up top and a couple of extra buttons.
Marco:
And now they basically have a Sonos Echo.
Marco:
And they also have integration with the Echo Assistant platform so that you can tell your Echoes to play things on your Sonos and stuff like that.
Marco:
Forgive me, I haven't looked into too many details on that yet because I haven't had time yet because this all came out today.
Marco:
So some of the finer details of this might be wrong or incomplete.
Marco:
But basically, they announced what looks like surprisingly deep and comprehensive integration between the Echo products and Sonos products, along with this new Sonos speaker that has a built-in Echo.
Marco:
And if this works as they are advertising, it's going to be awesome.
Marco:
And it's actually not that ridiculous of a price, too.
Marco:
Like, the new Sonos One, which is their new version of the Play One speaker, is $200.
Marco:
And it's positioned roughly, like, market-wise, roughly where, like, the tall echo cylinder is positioned.
John:
it's not supposed to be a home pod competitor the the home pod competitor is it's kind of supposed to be their next one up which they haven't updated with with alexa yet sorry with the amazon assistant yet uh so why is it not supposed to be a home pod competitor because it looks like a home pod to me it is a single thing with one speaker you know with you know one set of speakers in it it's about the same size of the home pod is it just because it's like a hundred and something bucks cheaper like it seems like a home pod competitor to me
Marco:
Well, it's going to serve as a HomePod competitor, effectively.
Marco:
But one of the reasons why Apple, when they were doing price comparisons, they positioned the HomePod against the Sonos Play 3, the next speaker up that's more expensive.
Marco:
And I think part of that is because...
Marco:
the play one only has one driver or it's just like the echo it has it has two drivers that it's just like forming one channel um whereas the home pod has like that didn't the home pod have like tweeters and a big circle around the whole top of it and maybe and like one big woofer in the middle or something like that yeah but but like how does how does that change the sound like it's still you're not getting stereo out of it let's we talked about this before about how it's doing all the channels through the single location so you're not getting a right channel a left channel that's separated by six feet from either one of these devices
Marco:
Well, when you only have a single driver set pointing in one direction, you can't really do anything with stereo imaging.
Marco:
It's going to be mono.
Marco:
But the HomePod is kind of this weird hybrid where because it has drivers pointing all around it, it can do things by bouncing stuff off the walls and everything to try to simulate things in different directions because it actually is firing sound in multiple directions.
Marco:
Whereas...
Marco:
The Sonos 1 series only fires it straight ahead, and the Echo fires one set of drivers straight down, so it kind of has a ring effect, but it can't control what goes left, what goes right.
Marco:
So these other things are effectively mono, whereas the HomePod and the higher-end Sonos models have multiple speakers that they could adjust and direct in different ways.
Marco:
So I think in practice, this is a HomePod competitor in the same way the Echo is a HomePod competitor.
Marco:
But if you ask Apple marketing, like, what is the HomePod competing against?
Marco:
They're going to go with the higher-end models in part because of those technicalities, in part because of just sheer physical size, and in part because they're more expensive.
John:
Yeah, the Play 3 looks more like the iPod Hi-Fi, like it's a rectangular thing.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, this is good.
Marco:
I hope, I really hope this works, and I hope that it does smart things integrating with, so like, for instance, I already have other Sonos speakers.
Marco:
I have a few other ones throughout the house.
Marco:
you know am i can i only buy one of these things do i even have to buy any of these things or can i just have the echoes connect to the sonos through the apps i think they can do that actually but i don't know yet so this is i have a lot of research to do and and we have a lot of you know just no one has actually used this device i don't i don't think there's any reviews of it except that there was one on wired that was kind of not that specific um so i don't know we'll see but uh
Marco:
I hope this works as well as their advertising does.
Marco:
Because if it does, this is going to be a total game changer in the Echo market because it will be finally a fusion between the good sounding world of Sonos and the really convenient world of Echo.
Marco:
It's going to be a problem for the HomePod, I think.
Marco:
I mean, the HomePod is already... Given the HomePod's price...
Marco:
And relatively limited apparent capabilities.
Marco:
I think the HomePod is going to have a hard time in the market.
Marco:
Now I think it's going to have an even harder time than before.
Marco:
Because if this works at all, the Sonos 1, the new one with the Echo built in, is going to be a very compelling alternative for a lot of people.
John:
So a lot of people are asking after the story came out, why doesn't Amazon just buy Sonos?
John:
They seem to buy everybody.
John:
Like, this type of integration, this type of partnership is practically unheard of.
John:
Like, it's basically Sonos saying, we're never going to do all this stuff that Amazon does.
John:
And Amazon apparently saying, we don't want to build a really nice speaker.
John:
We'll just, our new version, as you noted, the new good version of the Echo.
John:
didn't really make a lot of progress sound well there's a little dolby like oh we'll make it sound better but they didn't change the hardware in a way that makes it sound like they are serious about audio quality they just tweak the you know but like so they say okay well sonos you do the sound part and we will do the software part
John:
I'm not entirely sure what's in it for Amazon to continue that relationship.
John:
Why not take those nice profits that Sonos is making by selling expensive speakers?
John:
Why doesn't Amazon want those too?
John:
Arguably, Amazon is providing the majority of the value in this arrangement.
John:
because i think it is easier to make a nice speaker than it is to make a thing that understands words that you say and does intelligent things like they've got all the back end that is finding that music for you and you know playing it back and the music subscription service and all sorts of other things making a speaker compared to that is relatively easy and i suppose sonos is you know secret sauce is the multi-room stuff but anyway there seems to be a natural synergy between these companies and given the fact that amazon bought things like imdb and other companies that like
John:
seem like it should be, or Whole Foods, right?
John:
I mean, just buy Sonos.
John:
What are you even waiting for?
John:
It makes me uncomfortable as a consumer if I was into these type of products to know that I'm buying a thing between two companies that are
John:
you know, that are, uh, that are frenemies, right?
John:
They're, they're competitors, but they're also in this mutually beneficial arrangement.
John:
And I just, it just seems like there's a tension there and I'm not sure how that, that is sustainable.
John:
So I'm, you know, not that I'm for, you know, big companies buying up all the small companies, but someone has kind of had its chance to figure out the, uh, you know, make something that you can talk to and they've essentially outsourced it to Amazon.
John:
So I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm with you too.
Marco:
I don't see why Amazon gets enough out of this deal to make it worth it.
Marco:
Even the integration, it's such that also... When I went to go pre-order the Sonos 1 today, you can't buy it on Amazon.
Marco:
You can buy every other Sonos on Amazon, but this one you can pre-order only on Sonos' website right now.
Marco:
They couldn't even coordinate that?
Marco:
Can you order toilet paper from the Sonos one?
Marco:
The way it's advertised and the way the product page positions it, it looks like it has full Echo integration, or a full Echo built into it, basically.
Marco:
So I think you should be able to do everything the Echo can do.
Marco:
A lot of this will depend on when we actually get these things.
Marco:
Does it actually do those things?
Marco:
Is it actually as good?
Marco:
What if there's other problems?
Marco:
What if the microphones aren't as good as on a real Echo?
Marco:
There's going to be issues like that.
Marco:
But the good thing is, though, if this integration works the way it appears to on all their advertisements and in the apps and everything...
Marco:
you might not even need to buy the Sonos one.
Marco:
Like from what everyone's saying, you can just connect your Sonos account in the M or in the Alexa app and just start sending commands to it.
Marco:
And you can just start controlling them.
Marco:
Like that's, that's kind of incredible if that's true.
Marco:
And so like, again, like I don't, this will all depend on how well this stuff is implemented, but yeah, basically ask again in a couple of weeks, but I'm really happy about this.
Um,
Marco:
As recently as two months ago, I was saying that I would be surprised if Sonos was still in business in a year, because it seemed like things weren't going well for them.
Marco:
But this could really turn things around for them, if this makes a lot of people buy more Sonos stuff.
Marco:
And also, one area that...
Marco:
maybe maybe that we're not seeing by looking at just the speaker like the little portable speaker side of this thing one area in which maybe amazon wanted to get in that they couldn't easily do themselves is home theater sonos in recent years has dramatically gotten into the home theater business with their soundbar products and then later on like the the subwoofer the play
Marco:
I think it's the Playbase of the subwoofer.
Marco:
Their names are a little confusing, so I forget which is which.
Marco:
But they launched their first soundbar a couple years back, and I think they have a second one.
Marco:
I don't even know anymore.
Marco:
But I think those actually sell really well.
Marco:
And Sonos, I think, does pretty well in the soundbar business now.
Marco:
So if Amazon wanted to get more echo music playback into home theater systems...
Marco:
Maybe this is what they get out of this deal.
Marco:
Maybe they get access to this market of high-end home theater stuff that the Echo hardware being this kind of like inexpensive kind of crappy audio products, we're probably never going to get into that business.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And if you use code ATP, you can get $50 towards any mattress purchase.
Marco:
Terms and conditions do apply.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Casper for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Hi, I'm back.
John:
Ready to talk about alarm clocks, Casey?
Casey:
I am so excited to talk about alarm clocks.
Casey:
Tell me more.
John:
This is just a coincidence.
John:
I did not have any inside information about Amazon's product announcements, but a show or two ago, I mentioned offhand how I was looking for something to replace my clock radio from the 80s that would just perform one function that wouldn't
John:
be you know i wasn't going to use my ios devices which potentially travel around the house and i have to remember to put my bedside and plug in just wanted something that was always on my bedside that that i could look at and always showed me the time and then had an alarm on it and that's about it um and what amazon came out with
John:
is this little ball thing it's like the amazon echo show and that it's like a screen and it shows you the weather and tells you what time it is and i guess shows you news stories that you don't want to see and annoys you with all other stuff like that but anyway it's got a circular screen on it and it's 130 bucks uh and it's basically a smart dedicated
John:
Looks like an alarm clock thing.
John:
And a lot of people are saying, hey, is what you're asking for?
John:
Someone, probably not Apple, to make some kind of dedicated alarm clock electronic component thing.
John:
And guess what?
John:
Amazon did it because, as Jason Snell, I think it's Jason Snell said in his article about it, God bless Amazon with throwing out every single form factor and seeing what people might buy.
John:
that's the thing that amazon does they they just make a bunch of crap and you know maybe people like this maybe they won't we'll just keep trying um it's cute i'll give it that but and you know 130 is kind of ridiculous um but the thing that makes it uh makes me pretty sure i'm never gonna buy this is that it has a camera on it and i'm not one of those people who's paranoid about cameras but of all the places i'm not gonna stick a camera of dubious security it's next to my bed so
John:
Sorry, Amazon.
John:
If this thing didn't have a camera, then I would probably still not buy it because my next fallback position would be Marco hated the screen and it was really annoying and this has the same screen.
John:
So unless someone told me, though, the screen, they solved that problem.
John:
You can make it to the screen.
John:
It's not annoying or not too bright or whatever.
John:
I probably still wouldn't get it.
John:
But the camera.
John:
no deal for me um and that's despite the fact that when we talked about the amazon look the thing that takes pictures of your outfits and stuff that i totally endorse the idea of having more cameras in the house for functions like that but for me personally my bedside table is a no-go that's just my position if you don't mind it and if you're not concerned about security or whatever then by all means go for it and tell me how annoying it is but i'm not getting this thing that's a different lifestyle
Marco:
No, I mean, I think there's a theme of my opinions of Amazon products, basically.
Marco:
And that is that when Amazon does things that are related to sheer functionality or voice response and voice interfaces, I really like the way they do things most of the time.
Marco:
When it comes to UI...
Marco:
I really don't like almost any visual interface that Amazon makes.
Marco:
The Echo Show, I really did not like.
Marco:
This thing, I think, would have the exact same problem, as you mentioned, with just like... It takes a certain degree of standards and taste and good decision-making to do a user interface like this well.
Marco:
And I don't think Amazon has that talent right now, or at least they don't let it shine.
Marco:
They just...
Marco:
they have not shown that they can make a good interface.
Marco:
The Kindles have always been interface disasters.
Marco:
The only reason anybody enjoyed using Kindles is because for most of the, you know, heyday of the black and white e-ink models, there just wasn't much of an interface there.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
Amazon's mediocrity at interface design was less of a problem with this primitive thing that just couldn't do that much.
Marco:
But they have gotten progressively more and more annoying as the technology has gotten better.
Marco:
And now that they have these full color screens, the interface design is about as good as it is on their tablets and their TV boxes, which is not that good.
Marco:
So this is the kind of product that if Apple made something like this,
Marco:
It might be really good, although you could argue they do.
Marco:
It's an Apple Watch in nightstand mode.
Marco:
But, you know, or an iPhone and a dock.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, this is the kind of thing that I don't think Amazon should make with their current talent.
Marco:
And also, you know, the camera, I think, is going to be one of the most turnoffish factors of it.
Marco:
Why does this need a camera?
Marco:
And the only reason I can think of is they really want to push their video calling thing.
Marco:
They're trying, obviously, very hard to make that a thing, even though I don't think anybody actually wants it.
Marco:
But if this didn't have the camera, not only could it maybe be five bucks cheaper...
Marco:
But I think more people would buy it lacking a camera than anybody who's going to buy it with a camera.
Marco:
This seems like one of those corporate strategy tax things where they're obviously trying so hard to push calling people on the Echoes that they're putting the cameras in all these different models that really probably shouldn't have them.
Marco:
And I think this would be a much better product without it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I don't see this being a good thing with the combination of the camera and Amazon's terrible UI taste.
Marco:
But the concept is a good concept.
Marco:
And I hope someone, Amazon or not, does it right.
Marco:
Because I think that would be a really nice market.
John:
Maybe if you put it in a kitchen, it wouldn't be as bad.
John:
There's nothing that says this is supposed to be on your bedside table.
John:
That's just where I was interested in putting it.
John:
But if you put it in your kitchen, it is less ugly and gigantic.
John:
Or I don't know how gigantic it is because I don't have one.
John:
But the other one certainly looks big.
John:
I know it's not actually that big when you get it in person.
John:
But it's like a rectangular monolith.
John:
And this is a cute little ball.
John:
And so maybe it would fit in more places in people's lives.
John:
And the camera...
John:
because it's so cheap it just feels like a hedge like maybe we'll think of something cool to do with this or maybe you can hold things up to it and we'll find them on amazon and buy them for you you know and that is the video conferencing angle too but the camera just gives you a lot of possibilities so i understand why it's there it's just that for me it makes it a not a choice for the bedroom but for something in the kitchen or whatever that's where i wouldn't mind it i already have a camera in my kitchen to watch my dog so i'm obviously that's not a problem for me
Marco:
So here's... I just noticed in the specs of this little ball thing, it has a line out for sound.
Marco:
That's interesting.
Marco:
So that basically makes it a fancy, expensive Echo Dot.
Marco:
So you could use this to add a small screen to a smart speaker somewhere in your house.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
if you take it out of the bedroom that i think makes it a more interesting proposition anyway so i wish them luck with these things and we'll see i mean probably next year between me between me and john casey i know you're not going to buy any of these things but between between me and john we're probably going to own one of each of these things that means you're going to buy every single one of them because i don't think i'm buying any of these yeah just wait
John:
I mean, I thought about having another having an echo and the Google Home and the house at the same time.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I think I'm what I'm more likely to do at this point is buy more cameras for my house, more dedicated cameras, because now that I have one to watch the dog, I'm like, I can get a better angle on the dog when she's in a different room, like maybe a second camera.
John:
uh or something like that or maybe i'll finally get into like the the light bulbs and stuff and then i'll get an echo in some other room to do uh light control but but we'll see none of these are making me want to run out and buy any of them i'll let you buy all of them and tell me what they're like okay thanks
John:
I'm back again.
Marco:
What did I miss?
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Hello, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
What do we got for the after show?
John:
Fancy chairs.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
This time it was John that spent an exorbitant amount of money.
John:
Yeah, I got a lot of chair issues in my little computer room that also has my PS4 in it.
John:
I've got a chair in front of my wife's computer, which is a 5K iMac.
John:
I've got a chair in front of my old Mac Pro, and I've got a third chair in front of my PS4, where I play Destiny.
John:
and all these chairs are bad chairs well two of them two of them are bad chairs one of them is just really old um so my wife's chair is some crappy like office max staples whatever cheap chair that is actually not even good for the amount that we paid for it like it's like well it was a cheap but it's okay it's it wobbles it was never very comfortable it's ugly it's just not a good chair
John:
the ps4 chair is like not actually a chair that's supposed to be in front of a desk it's like sort of a casual i don't know what it is like it's not like a folding chair where you take out when company comes over but it's like one step removed from that it's not a folding chair but it is like it's not a computer chair at all and i don't like it because it puts weird marks on the carpet
John:
And we have like a pillow on top of it to make it marginally comfortable and like it's kind of falling apart.
John:
So that's not great.
John:
And then finally, my computer chair, which is the one I'm excluding from calling a bad chair.
John:
It's just it's seen better days.
John:
I bought this chair for $250, which seemed like a huge amount of money when I lived in Georgia, which was at least 20 years ago.
John:
And, you know, I was just out of school, just married, living in our first apartment, you know, away from home.
John:
We were buying furniture for our stuff.
John:
I bought myself a desk, which I'm not using anymore.
John:
Actually, my wife's using it.
John:
Well, the desk that my wife is using, so that thing survived.
John:
And I needed to get a chair for it, and I spent what I thought was a lot of money, $250 for a chair in like 1997, 98.
John:
Boy, that's a lot of money.
John:
In the grand scheme of things, it's not that expensive.
John:
But anyway, that $250 chair has lasted me...
John:
You know, 20 years.
John:
And it still works okay.
John:
The cushion is absolutely shot.
John:
It is shredded.
John:
And it also, any foam that might have been in there is compressed, you know, beyond belief from 20 years of me sitting on it.
John:
But nothing on it is broken.
John:
doesn't really rattle the pneumatic up and down thingy has a little bit of spring in it when it shouldn't like it sort of goes down compresses when you sit on it no matter what but it's pretty heroic like kind of like my mac pro you know it's it's past this time but it is pretty but anyway it has never been a particularly comfortable or good chair and i just feel like i needed a better one
John:
And I've been putting this off for years.
John:
It's not like I'm buying new fancy chairs on a whim.
John:
For years and years, I've been like, we need new chairs.
John:
All our chairs are crap.
John:
And I'm sitting on a 15-year-old chair.
John:
Now I'm sitting on an 18-year-old chair.
John:
Now I'm sitting on a 20-year-old chair.
John:
And for whatever reason, finally...
John:
got the wherewithal to say, we just need to get new chairs.
John:
And I've been resisting mostly because fancy chairs cost huge amounts of money.
John:
If you've never looked at fancy chairs and you think the $250 one was too much money, don't look.
John:
It's terrifying.
John:
They cost too much money.
John:
And I would be like...
John:
I don't like my chair, but do I not like it that much?
John:
The answer is usually no.
John:
I was working during the dot-com boom, right?
John:
And that means I had occasion to encounter Aeron chairs, which was one of the first fancy chairs.
John:
And I sat on them, and they're interesting, but they never seemed like they could justify the price.
John:
So I always had an excuse in my head of like, yeah, okay, fancy chairs may be nice, but they're not that nice.
John:
And I had some foundation in it, having to actually sit on some kinds of fancy chairs for an extended period of time.
John:
But obviously I changed my mind on that, and I'm sure Marco, as always, has a compelling case for why people should spend money.
John:
So I'll allow him to provide that now before I explain why I did it.
Marco:
Well, okay, so chairs are one of the many categories of products in modern life where the middle class is gone.
Marco:
There is no more middle class.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
it's one of those products where you can go to a store and you can buy one for, you know, a hundred bucks or 150 bucks.
Marco:
Like that's, that's like the, like the, the typical, like, you know, Staples or Office Max, like base model of decent products.
Marco:
desk chair with arms on it it's gonna be about 150 bucks you know something like that um you could also get the one for 250 but these days maybe when you bought yours things were different john probably not but maybe um but these days like
Marco:
The $250 one, you're not really getting higher quality than the cheaper one.
Marco:
You're just getting a higher price with some features thrown on to make you pay that higher price, but it's not really a higher quality.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing where there's basically one quality level that they just assign multiple price points to for marketing and profit, basically.
Marco:
But you're getting...
Marco:
The same crap quality, just with a nicer finish on the arms or something like that, like minor cosmetic differences.
Marco:
This is true of so many things.
Marco:
This is true of appliances, so many things, where everything's basically cheap crap.
Marco:
And to get the next level of quality up, you have to go from $150 to $1,000.
Marco:
Everything in between, you're being ripped off, basically.
Marco:
The $400 one is going to be the same as the $100 one.
Marco:
The $600 one is probably going to be similar quality.
Marco:
You have to make a big jump to go much higher end to get a noticeable increase in quality if you want that.
Marco:
Because the middle class has just kind of been hollowed out by cheapness and decontenting and outsourcing and just crap over time that now...
Marco:
All the low-end stuff is all made the same way, and only the high-end stuff can afford to have any quality left in it.
John:
And, of course, the high-end stuff, as with all high-end stuff, has tremendous margins.
John:
So, you know, I don't know if you consider it being getting ripped off, but you, like, because the middle is gone, your choice is narrow margins on crap or huge margins on expensive stuff.
John:
Expensive stuff always has huge margins.
John:
So I feel like the high-end stuff not only is expensive, you feel like you're getting ripped off because you're like, okay, this is better.
John:
and maybe i'll say it's two times better but it's not four times better and it's four times the price and that's that's just the price that's the price you pay on the high end for anything it is never proportional like you know your mercedes s-class is three times as good as a honda accord but it costs way more than three times the price and that's just just the way of the world in the high end it is it's tough to stomach and it's the reason i've been sitting on the same chair for 20 years is because i'm
John:
I'm just like, I can't do it.
Marco:
And by the way, the $100 chair at Staples, there's a pretty good margin on that, too.
Marco:
That chair is made out of sawdust and thin plastic.
John:
Percentage-wise, maybe, but in absolute dollars, it's $20 you're making off that chair.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, I did those cheap chairs for years.
Marco:
The reason why I finally upgraded... So, I finally upgraded to a good chair when I started working from home full-time.
Marco:
Because I decided, you know, if I'm going to be here all the time, I need something actually good.
Marco:
Because, you know, at work, I would sit in decent office chairs.
Marco:
Like, I think at Tumblr the whole time, I think I had an Aeron.
Marco:
The job before that, I had like, you know, not like the super fancy chair, but like a mid-range, you know, office company chair.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
When you're sitting in something for one hour a day at home when you come home from work, that has very different needs than when you're sitting in it all day every day.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why offices tend to have pretty nice chairs.
Marco:
Anyway, so I decided a chair lasts a pretty long time.
Marco:
If you spent...
Marco:
$100 on that chair, or if you spend $1,000 on that chair, over the course of 20 years, you're not really going to notice that much.
Marco:
Over the time span in which you're using it, that actually is not that ridiculous.
Marco:
So anyway, I decided to get nice chairs when I started the home office.
Marco:
I have one.
Marco:
Tiff has one.
Marco:
And they are wonderful.
Marco:
I will tell you what they are after you tell me what you bought.
Marco:
But I think you already know.
Marco:
And yeah, it's wonderful.
Marco:
So what did you decide to do?
John:
Well, so I did what everybody does these days, and I went to the Wirecutter, also known as Wirecutter.
John:
No need for the the.
John:
And I looked at their chair reviews, and the thing is, because I've been looking at this for years, I have some experience with what's out there in the high-end chair market.
John:
And also, by the way, probably even more experience with the crap chairs.
John:
Because every few years, I'll go into an office store and sit on every single one of the chairs.
John:
And just...
John:
see if there's any that I can tolerate or that make me want to pay the $150 or whatever.
John:
Um, and in my travels around the working world and friends' houses who have expensive chairs, I've sat in, uh, not a lot of the expensive chairs, but, but a couple of them.
John:
Um, and, and, you know, at work and at jobs, like some people have fancy chairs at work and there's always ubiquitous leftover air-ons from the dot-com boom.
John:
And so I'm familiar with a lot of these chairs.
Um,
John:
And part of the reason why I bought a new one is just my old chairs are just getting older and creakier.
John:
And really, I really just wanted to buy my wife a new chair because hers is the worst.
John:
And I always felt like we could, once I'm getting her one, I'm like, well, then we should just get us both one.
John:
And then I can rotate my old chair to the PlayStation and get rid of that other chair.
John:
And just, you know, I don't know.
John:
It just seemed like the time to do it.
John:
The Wirecutter recommendation is this thing called the Steelcase Gesture.
John:
I was looking at that, and I figured, and the other alternative is the chair that Marco has, and the chair that I think Underscore also has.
John:
Don't you both have the same chair?
John:
I forget, probably.
John:
Pretty sure you do, because I think I've sat in both your chairs.
John:
When I visited both your houses, I made it a point to sit in your expensive chairs to see what they're like.
John:
And the gesture is cheaper, and it was the number one pick.
John:
And part of the reasoning of the number one pick is like the Marco's chair, which is the Herman Miller in body, is $300 more expensive.
John:
uh, but doesn't seem $300 better.
John:
Like the gesture was, it was, it was a better deal.
John:
Um,
John:
And one of the factors in buying my chair, the chairs I'm getting is that I tend not to like armrests at all.
John:
I don't want them on my chairs at all.
John:
All the chairs I've ever had, I either remove the arms from them at work and at home or I buy chairs without armrests.
John:
I just finally get in the way of my, I've got long arms and I finally get in the way of my arms and my elbows.
John:
And when I rotate my chair, the arms hit my keyboard tray because I use a keyboard tray everywhere that's down low.
John:
And I just don't like the arms.
John:
And
John:
both the gesture and the embody look like they have the possibility that if you remove the arms there would be no stubby things poking you like the the gesture arms are way back like by the sides of the seat back and the embody arms are way down below and back uh by the side so i'm like oh those are both good when it came time for me to start ordering my plan was by one embody and one gesture and my wife and i would try both of them and then we would decide
John:
If we, you know, if we each like one of each, then we would just use the chairs.
John:
And if we both like one, didn't like the other, we would return one and get another one.
John:
So then it came down to the company's return policies.
John:
And Steelcase's return policy was crap.
John:
They had a 20% restocking fee and like, no thanks.
John:
You can buy them through Amazon.
John:
And as far as I could tell, you'd be subject to Amazon's return policy, which is like 30 days return, blah, blah, blah, in reasonable new condition.
John:
But I wasn't so sure about that.
John:
And then the final alternative is to find a local store.
John:
and you know go there and see what their return policy is but it's just you know about yeah you're busy you're working and i'm like oh if i have to find a store to do it maybe it's a long drive and i'll never end up doing it and the places that are close to me didn't carry the gesture they just carried other steel case chairs and just i didn't i didn't want to go through it so anyway we're trying to experiment and i decided i'm going to buy uh the herman miller one by the way has a 30-day return policy buying direct from herman miller
John:
with no restocking fee and it has a 12 year warranty on the chairs for whatever that's worth in case like it gets damaged or whatever um so i figured i'll try the herman miller body mostly because i found youtube videos of removing the arms and it looked very straightforward like it's not some complicated thing
John:
because I have sat in it at Marco's house and Dunderscore's house.
John:
And because the wire cutter basically said it's, you know, we pick gesture as our number one, but that has a lot to do with price.
John:
The embodies a good chair too.
John:
Um, this is all, despite the fact that I think all Herman Miller chairs, including the air on the body are ridiculously over-engineered and have things on them that do not make them better chairs.
John:
Um,
John:
There's a lot of that sort of high end has to be fancy and weird to make you feel like you're justified spending this money that I really think does not actually make it a better chair.
John:
But despite all that stuff, it is also seems like a sturdy chair and sitting on it feels solid.
John:
It feels more solid than any of the chairs in my house, and I'm just hoping it would be comfortable.
John:
So I'm sitting on it now.
John:
I just got it today.
John:
I've been sitting on it during this whole podcast.
John:
And it takes some getting used to.
John:
Maybe I don't have it quite adjusted the way I want yet.
John:
The arms, I'm trying to experiment with the arms on.
John:
These arms are coming off because I cannot stand the arms.
John:
They have to come off.
John:
Luckily, they're easy to come off.
John:
And then I'll have my wife try it for a little while as well.
John:
And after 30 days, we'll decide, are we keeping this or are we buying a second one or are we going to try something else?
John:
So this is an experiment.
John:
And in case you're wondering how much this chair costs, you can go to HermanMiller.com and find out.
John:
And you can customize this kind of like a Porsche.
John:
where you can get a different fabric on it for an additional $150.
John:
Those are the kind of options they have for you.
John:
Or an additional $90 to get a different finish on the bottom of the chair.
John:
This gives you an idea of what it's like.
John:
But the cheapest you can come out with one of these things is about $1,300 for a chair, which sounds...
John:
very very ridiculous and honestly it is ridiculous but if you have recently shopped for say a non-casper mattress or a nice couch not from ikea furniture is really expensive or a dining room table not even like a high-end dining room table but just like a middle of the road dining room table with six chairs and a leaf furniture is expensive so anyway good furniture is expensive
John:
but it's not good like we have an expensive dining room table but it's not good it's just it's from jordan's furniture jordan's furniture is not a high-end furniture store it's a local chain you probably don't know about if you don't live in massachusetts but it's not ikea it's not cheap furniture but it's not fancy expensive furniture it is solidly middle of the road mainstream furniture and same thing with mattresses like again not casper mattresses seem like they're expensive go real mattress shopping one day and find out how much like a real queen size mattress costs that's not the cheapest one in the entire store
John:
They're ridiculously expensive, right?
John:
So, anyway, I'm not going to pretend this is not an expensive chair.
John:
It is a ridiculously expensive chair.
John:
The margins on it are big.
John:
And like I said, a lot of the design elements, I feel, are there.
John:
Kind of like that, uh... What's the Apple dude with the, uh...
John:
uh the the expensive uh hourglass and crap like that mark newson yeah like a lot there's a lot of mark newson style flourishes on herman miller chairs and and the steel case ones as well that i just feel like don't add that much so anyway my initial impressions of this chair having just sat on it for a couple hours of podcasting
John:
um and again i'm familiar with the chairs i've sat on other people's it feels like the other people's do the base feels very solid and very wide the chair itself is way heavier than my old chair that manifests in me not being able to roll it on carpet as easily it's got i've got the carpet casters on it so in theory they they're the right i've got the right feet on it so it doesn't you know sink in or whatever
John:
but uh it's just so much heavier it's like twice as heavy as my other chair so rolling it is harder to do um this chair despite the fact that it's all fancy is not believe it or not as adjustable as my other chair because the backrest can't go up and down like vertically like towards the ceiling and towards the floor because it's sort of one continuous piece and i'm a tall person with a long torso so i'm not entirely sure that i'm getting the support i need from the back of it but you know i'm willing to wait and see
John:
uh using it for a while how i feel sitting in the chair long term um bottom part of it feels okay so far arms are definitely going to come off um anyway it's an experiment uh and even if i don't love it uh you know i'll see if my wife likes it and if neither one of us do we will try to return it somehow
John:
i'm trying to save the box and packing materials but it's a that's a lot of stuff um and even if we do like it maybe we'll try another one of these for my wife and or me or maybe i'll try a gesture if i can find a way to buy without returning it and if you're thinking of using a chair like this the best way to do it is to find a local store that you can sit in with and then when you can talk to somebody about like what if i don't like it can i return it i just didn't have the time to do that and i just i felt like if i tried to
John:
if I tried to pursue that as I have in the past, what would actually happen is I would never find time to go to the store or I would go to a store and they would have one or two chairs and I would try them and not know.
John:
And then I just wouldn't do anything.
John:
And I just needed to jump in the pool.
John:
Uh, Oh, and you do get to pick all the different colors and finishes, which is just stress inducing.
John:
This is by the way, is why I always like, uh,
John:
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I ever had to order like a Ferrari or a Bentley because you get to pick like everything about the inside of them.
John:
What color leather do you want?
John:
What color carpet do you want?
John:
What materials do you want here?
John:
Like they will do anything for you, especially like, you know, Bentley and Rolls because they're basically building their car just for you.
John:
um and i would be paralyzed about like i don't know i don't want to like spend 400 grand on a car and end up with this monstrosity because i have bad taste like they should really limit it to and i know they do have some presets like just pick these presets but it's a lot of pressure being able to customize all that stuff this is why rich people have other people pick them out for them or whatever but uh anyway i picked the options on this chair mostly to keep it inexpensive uh so mine is all black it's just black black black black black with the cheap fabric
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So whatever it's worth, you know, so we have two of these in our office, one for me, one for Tiff.
Marco:
I bought them both in 2010.
Marco:
So they're like seven and a half years old now.
Marco:
We have sat in them.
Marco:
You know, I'm here.
Marco:
I'm sitting here more than Tiff is.
Marco:
So, you know, mine is a little more worn than hers.
Marco:
And ours are both like the typical black and black, whatever the fabric is that used to be the only fabric.
Marco:
Because when I bought these, there were very few options because the Embody in 2010 was still fairly new.
Marco:
So there weren't that many options.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
It has held up so remarkably well.
Marco:
Not only is the support and everything still wonderful, as far as I can tell, flawless, but even the fabric covering.
Marco:
You expect a chair that is totally covered in fabric.
Marco:
The Aeron, the more famous one from the dot-com era, the Aeron has a whole lot of plastic framing around it.
Marco:
So a lot of the pressure or the friction of you moving around and sitting on the chair is on some of those plastic pieces.
Marco:
I think one of the biggest sources of wear on a chair is probably the front rim of it.
Marco:
And on the Aeron, that's all plastic, what goes under your knees, basically.
Marco:
With the Embody, everything is wrapped in fabric, basically.
Marco:
Every edge that you touch is fabric covered, including that front lip.
Marco:
So you would expect these chairs after seven years of having my rear end on it constantly.
Marco:
I don't use this chair a little bit.
Marco:
I'm really good at sitting in my office.
Marco:
So you would think after all that time, there would be a lot of wear and tear on this chair.
Marco:
And I have...
Marco:
two tiny little spots on the fabric on that front lip where like the edge there's like an edge support that kind of comes in from the sides and there's these two little worn away dots in the fabric and that's the only visible wear on the entire chair tiff uses hers a little bit less than me hers is still perfect hers doesn't have those dots and it's so it's just like nowhere and this is after seven and a half years of fairly heavy use
John:
You should get that repaired under warranty because you're still under warranty.
John:
You say, hey, fabric wore through.
John:
Give me a new fabric.
John:
Yeah, actually, I probably will.
John:
You didn't do it for your iMac.
John:
I forgot to remind you about that last show.
John:
I remember it again, re-listening to the show.
John:
This is the part where I meant to tell Marco that he needs to bring his iMac in before the warranty expires.
Marco:
You know what it is?
Marco:
I'd have to use my laptop without a monitor or I'd have to go to the beach, get the LG monitor that I hate and bring it here.
John:
Just do it.
John:
The warranty is expiring.
John:
It's worth just trying.
John:
I know.
Marco:
It's expiring in a few weeks, but I really don't want to go without having a nice computer right now.
Marco:
With all the lead-up to the iPhone X development, this is a very bad time for me to be without a fast computer with a giant screen.
John:
You just waited too long.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, speaking of chairs and lips, the Aeron, as most people know who have any experience with them, the Aeron has mesh seats, which is good if you get hot in the seat because it lets the air flow up through it.
John:
But it is basically mesh stretched over a plastic frame.
John:
And especially the front lip with the front plastic rim that is holding the mesh in.
John:
Think of it like a tennis racket, that rim.
John:
If you don't sit in it just the right way so that your butt is sitting on the mesh...
John:
uh that rim digs into the bottom of like your your thighs behind your knees and is very uncomfortable and can cut off circulation if you're sitting out the right way it's not a problem but people sit in all sorts of different ways like slouching and sliding to the side especially if you're in the chair a long time even though you're not supposed to or whatever
John:
So that's the main complaint about that.
John:
And, you know, Aeron's, you know, if you don't like the mesh, you're not going to like it.
John:
But anyway, I sat on enough Aeron's to know that I don't like that, that I sit in weird positions that digs in.
John:
So the Embaii doesn't have that problem.
John:
But that's one of the big things that the various reviews I've read, including the wire cutter said about the gesture is that it's even better in that the entire bottom cushion.
John:
is very large and all the edges are not just fabric covered but also kind of squishy so you can sit in all sorts of weird positions with your limbs draped off at all different angles and no at no place will you have your circulation cut off so i am still interested to try a gesture i just need to find somewhere where i can try one so that i can return it if i want to because gesture is a thousand dollar chair instead of a thirteen hundred dollar one but still pretty expensive
Marco:
Also, if anybody's looking to get these things for less money, for a better deal, there's a couple things you should know.
Marco:
First of all, I heard, I should probably verify this, but I haven't verified this, but I heard when I was shopping for mine that if you don't buy new from an authorized reseller, Herman Miller's warranty does not apply to you.
Marco:
So if you're buying from a used sale or a discount site, be careful with that.
Marco:
I would say do some research to figure out if that's true or not.
Marco:
Secondly, if you're buying an Aeron used or anywhere for that matter,
Marco:
What John just described about the front lip digging into your knees, if you don't sit on it just right, is exacerbated by the fact that it comes in three different sizes.
Marco:
So make sure if you're buying an Aeron, look up what the sizes are and make sure you're buying the right size for you.
Marco:
If you buy one that is too large, that will dig into your knees way more than it should.
Marco:
Most people who find the Aeron uncomfortable...
Marco:
were sitting in one that was the wrong size for them.
Marco:
Fortunately, if you go for the Embody, which I think you should, there's a reason why it was the kind of sequel to the Aeron.
Marco:
It's better.
Marco:
But if you go with the Embody, you don't have that problem.
Marco:
That's why the Embody only comes in one size.
Marco:
Because it's just a better design.
Marco:
The Aeron takes a lot of adjustment to be good and to fit you well.
Marco:
The Embody doesn't really have much of anything that can be adjusted and comes in exactly one size.
Marco:
And it's great and it fits almost everybody really well.
John:
And that size is fat ass, basically like this seat.
John:
If you want your butt to feel small, sit in the body because the bottom of the seat is just it's just tremendous.
John:
Like you need I do not have bottom to fill this seat.
John:
I feel inadequate to the task of filling the seat with my butt because it is wide.
John:
I have like six inches on either side of me here.
John:
It's a it's a it's a big seat.
Marco:
You got some work to do, John.
John:
Yeah, I'm working on it.
John:
I almost ate an entire pint of Haagen-Dazs last night, so I'm working on it.
John:
You're on your way.
Marco:
Man, the Aaron chair looks pretty dated to me now.
Marco:
It was so iconic for the time that now it looks like 2004.
John:
yeah i mean and again like the aaron had some innovations i feel like that the mesh is an innovation uh because of the breathability and stuff but some aspects of it are just not like the lumbar support that's not great like that little oh well you get this thing for more money that shoves a plastic lump in your back like that's not well considered i that thing never or like and like a lot of people will put these weird headrests on them too yeah you
John:
You can get headrests for the embodied, too.
John:
You can get headrests for everything.
John:
I'm like, no.
John:
Then you're in a dentist's chair.
John:
That feels weird to me.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
That never worked out for me.
Marco:
Especially in the Tumblr office, there were always a million different eras around of different eras and sizes that were bought.
Marco:
Because it was a shared office for all the time I was there.
Marco:
So there were like...
Marco:
25 different erons in the office that were all bought at different times and so they were in various stages of like adjustment from previous people who had worked there and everything else and so it was always like as this bizarre combination of weird jairs and yeah none of them it i can like i i finally found like the one that fit me right in the office and like it was like a red staples situation like
John:
occasionally like when somebody would be in the office and would like take my chair to some other desk and would like put some other chair back at my desk when they were done i would notice immediately like where's my chair like this is a problem when i was when i was out for work during the summer like we moved all everyone in the whole building did another you know we move all the time at work but anyway we did some kind of shuffle and i i as i always do put labels on my chair so like this is my chair or whatever i
John:
And I came back to, like, set up my new stuff at my new desk and to put on my new keyboard tray, like, two days into my, you know, long break.
John:
My chair was there.
John:
And then I came back at the end of the summer to come back for good.
John:
Chair was gone.
John:
I'm like, what the...
John:
I don't know my coworkers.
John:
I said, like I said to them and they like watch my chair and like, ha ha.
John:
Yeah.
John:
John and his chair.
John:
Like, no, seriously, you should have watched my chair.
John:
I had to search the entire floor and to go into every conference room.
John:
And eventually I found it.
John:
It was like, it was totally like missed.
John:
You guys both played missed.
John:
I played it for like 10 minutes, so I didn't actually beat it or anything.
John:
Everyone in the chat room who hasn't played Myst, close your ears.
John:
This is a Myst spoiler.
John:
It was just like Myst in that I thought I had checked every single conference room for my chair.
John:
And it's easy to recognize.
John:
Guess what?
John:
It's the one with no arms on it.
John:
Right.
John:
It's a particular variety of chair.
John:
It's an older variety of chair because I've been at the company for a long time.
John:
But it's the only one in the office with no arms on it.
John:
So it should be easy to find.
John:
And I checked everywhere and I was like asking people around, have you seen my chair?
John:
Like, where could it have gone?
John:
It was you had to go into one of the more obscure conference rooms and then turn around and look at the door you came through and against the wall next to the door hidden behind a thing.
John:
Right.
John:
Because you just go into a room and you don't think to turn around and look at the doorway you just came through.
John:
That's where it was.
John:
It was like behind the open door to the conference room.
John:
You come in, you open the door and the door blocks your view of the chair.
John:
And I found it.
John:
And this is after I feel bad.
John:
This is after I took one of the chairs of a similar model and remove the arms because I'm going to, I'm going to make a new facsimile of my old chair, but it wasn't the same.
John:
Like it was, it was a similar model, but not exactly the same model.
John:
And I couldn't remember, like my butt's been in that chair at work for eight years.
John:
I've got eight years of butt time in that chair eight hours a day.
John:
So, uh, thank God I found it.
John:
And, uh,
John:
And I remember when I found it that I had put like puffy stickers of animals on it to even further reinforce that it's mine, like on the back of it.
John:
So it is totally my red stapler at work.
John:
If I could chain it to my desk, I would.