A Clear Path to Okayness
Casey:
john how are you let's lighten the mood how's things going with you john i'm tired i'm exhausted you guys are making me more exhausted i i seem to have become the authority on not seeing easy solutions to my problems
Marco:
Is somebody going to tell you about rsync now?
Casey:
I have heard about rsync, and I actually have used it for years, literally years, but that's not the issue.
Casey:
I've been working on an app that I don't particularly want to talk about the specifics on the show, but suffice to say it relates to HealthKit, which already means I'm kind of treading on underscores waters, actually, but whatever.
Casey:
So I asked him, you know, hey, is there any way to export HealthKit data
Casey:
And bring it into the simulator because I prefer to do most of my development against simulator because it's quicker and easier.
Casey:
So I need a whole bunch of health kit data on the simulator.
Casey:
And I was like, man, is there any way to export it?
Casey:
Then like import it?
Casey:
Is there somewhere on the file system or something like that that I can do this?
Casey:
And in the most polite way, which is underscores, you know, MO, in the most polite way, he said to me, these are my words, mind you, you frigging idiot.
Casey:
You can get on iCloud on the simulator.
Casey:
Just join your account on iCloud.
Marco:
I didn't know you could do that, actually.
Casey:
Well, I'll see.
Casey:
I did know that you could do that, but I didn't put two and two together.
Casey:
But this is where it gets really bad, and I shouldn't share this publicly, but here I am.
Casey:
I said to him, but underscore, here's the thing.
Casey:
I want to be able to save things to HealthKit, but I don't want them to actually save to the canonical...
Casey:
instance of health kit so in other words if i save i don't know like an like a workout which is not actually what this app does but for the sake of conversation i save a workout i don't want it to go to like my actual canonical health kit uh i don't know identity for lack of a better word repository i want that to kind of just live alone on the simulator so without batting an eye underscore says so sign out of icloud
Casey:
so annoyed right now you're like two weeks away from having an arm full of apple watches like underscore does you know i know right but it's like this this is such an easy solution why do i not see these things i maybe i'm just a really crummy developer and i don't realize it but oh golly like i don't think i'm an exceptionally great developer but i didn't think i was that bad of a developer why don't why don't i see these things why can't i why can't i recognize this
Marco:
So everyone, hire Casey for your development needs.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Yeah, that's the trick.
Casey:
That's the ticket right there.
Casey:
You really do a good job at selling yourself.
Casey:
This is why I don't want to be an independent consultant.
Marco:
I love that you keep... I heard your episode of Analog.
Marco:
It was very good.
Marco:
Last episode of Analog, where Mike talked you through a lot of this stuff, which I highly suggest everybody listen to, just because it's a good show to begin with, but also if you're interested in our...
Marco:
arc of trying to convince Casey to, you know, go out on his own somehow.
Marco:
It was a very good episode.
Marco:
And, and, and I think, and we even got, we got this like 2000 word email that it does seem like your heart is not really in consulting.
Marco:
Like it does seem like you don't really care to do it.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
And that's the thing.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Marco:
then you know fine i'm not gonna i'm not gonna push that anymore because to do anything like that you have to you have to be a little more into it than than what you are so that's probably not gonna happen so okay i'll stop pushing that button i do however think it's hilarious that you keep trying to trade in these like these ways that you can immediately get a lot of money for things that take like years to build up to a livable wage like i think i'm gonna start a youtube app and making small indie apps
Marco:
Or YouTube channel, rather, excuse me.
Casey:
Yeah, that's indie success right there.
Casey:
Guaranteed.
Casey:
Everyone is making money hand over fist in the app store and on YouTube.
Casey:
There's no way for this to be a disaster.
Marco:
All right, here's what you do.
Marco:
You get five envelopes.
Marco:
In each one, you put $5.
Marco:
You mail the top two to these people.
Marco:
Then you mail out a whole bunch of letters to the other.
Marco:
It's like, this is never going to happen.
Marco:
It's like, if you started doing these things 10 years ago, you might now have enough to live on.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
These are slow buildings, slow...
Marco:
It takes a while.
Marco:
It's so true.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've been waffling about this.
Casey:
Aaron and I have been talking a lot about this.
Casey:
And not in an angry way.
Casey:
Like, I'm not upset about it at all.
Casey:
But I don't want to talk about it anymore at this particular moment because I feel like all I've been doing is stressing about it for the last month and a half.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I have such conflicted and mixed thoughts that I don't know what to do.
Casey:
And it's like, you know, I think your assessment is accurate that the idea of just 1099ing my way through life, that is to say being an independent consultant, like –
Casey:
There are ways in which I think that would be fun.
Casey:
Like, let's say for the sake of discussion, I can wave my magic wand and I can have you give me, I don't know, between five and 10 hours of work a week.
Casey:
I can have underscore give me five to 10 hours of work a week.
Casey:
I can have some of my other independent app developers.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, Jelly, who works on gift wrapped, which if you believe in animated gifts at all, you should have.
Casey:
Or, you know, Curtis, who works on slopes, as another example, which if you believe in skiing or snowboarding, you should have that app.
Casey:
You know, if any of these people, if all of you guys and underscore, of course, you know, if you guys could each, you know, shave off five to 10 hours each.
Casey:
Then then I could probably make a living.
Casey:
But the idea of just like going out and chasing random people for work and random businesses for work is just just the thought of it is is extremely tiring.
Casey:
And that's not to say that that's bad or wrong or anything else.
Casey:
It's just I don't to your point, Marco, I don't think my heart is in chasing, chasing work from random people.
Casey:
And I mean, not in a nasty way, just in an observational way.
Marco:
So, well, I do wonder, though, I think that the part of that of the 2000 word email that we got that was mostly a little bit off putting.
Marco:
But the part of it that I thought was was interesting and potentially a good path to consider is the part where the author says that, you know, clearly your heart's not in consulting, which I think was true.
Marco:
But that maybe you should consider being like the Swift person, like the person who has a lot of instructional Swift content.
Marco:
Granted, that's a very crowded market.
Marco:
There's a lot of people who have been doing a lot of instructional Swift content for a long time.
Marco:
But you also already have an existing audience of developers, which is pretty good.
Marco:
That's a pretty good advantage to start with.
Marco:
And so you do have a bit of an unfair advantage there, which you can use to your advantage.
Marco:
The other thing I would say is when talking about who you can get consulting work from,
Marco:
Don't do me and underscore and Curtis.
Marco:
We're all indie developers working on indie budgets.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
We're the worst people to have trying to get consulting work for because we can barely afford employees.
Marco:
I think Marco just pre-fired you.
Marco:
No, I told him I'd give him some hours if he did this, but I'm in a position that most Indies are not.
Marco:
And even I, I couldn't afford you full time.
Casey:
Although, can I just say publicly that it may be worth, maybe not the money, but worth the experience for both of us to watch me have to slum it in Objective-C land and watch you have to slum it and deal with an employee.
Casey:
That would be hilarious on many different levels.
Marco:
The world's least interesting reality.
Casey:
reality show well it would be it would be the least interesting but perhaps most funny cards against humanity to sponsor yeah yeah right oh god can you but seriously like you don't let me speak for you but i have the feeling like even with me and i like to think i get a little bit of special privilege here you have no interest in having anyone as like an employee in any capacity and although i don't have any real angst against objective c i have
Casey:
let's say i feel like it's a little bit old and a little bit tired i mean that could be said for all of us right well that that's fair uh i just think it would be some days more than others can you imagine like you you send me off to work on some bug fix and i like rewrite an entire class in swift and try to pass that but i wouldn't do that for several different reasons but just for the sake of discussion like i write this entire class i rewrite an entire class in swift i'm like here you go here you go marco this is good right you just look at this and i'm like what did you do
Marco:
I could just set all this money on fire by making you write unit tests.
Casey:
Well, I don't know if it'd be setting it on fire.
Casey:
I almost walked into that, you bastard.
Casey:
You're more right than you are wrong, you big jerk.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
We should get started or slash continue with talking about how Siri is all up in front of the show, Daniel Jalkit's business.
Casey:
So who added this to the show notes?
Casey:
Can tell me what's going on.
John:
I edited this.
John:
Here's the first account I read of, I think, a story that I've heard from a lot of people now as it relates to HomePod.
John:
It's that you've got this thing in your house.
John:
And unfortunately, it has the same trigger phrase as a bunch of other things that you might also have in your house.
John:
So once you get past the, you know, being amazed that it can hear you over loud music or whatever, and you just happen to be in your house and you talk to some device that may or may not be your HomePod and your HomePod decides, oh, I can totally hear you and I'm going to take this for you.
John:
Hang on.
John:
I got it.
John:
And Apple has this thing where if multiple devices are around and you say the trigger word, they negotiate amongst each other to figure out who's going to answer.
John:
but home pod will grab a request that it can't handle just to tell you that it can't do that right so that it would have worked if it was on your phone but home pods grabs it maybe because it has better microphones or because it like it takes priority or whatever and then it grabs it and says oh yeah no i totally can't do that sorry about that um
John:
So that's not that's not nice behavior.
John:
And a lot of people have complained about that.
John:
And it's kind of another situation where Apple's had a few of these where like their best customers are more likely to run into these complex problems.
John:
Right.
John:
Apple wants you to have a household of Apple devices.
John:
You got Macs and iPads and phones and everybody should have one and they should be all over the place.
John:
And yet, if you do that, you run into all the situations in which Apple doesn't handle a house full of devices.
John:
We've talked before about the, you know, families sharing, you know, iCloud and Photos accounts, you know, before the family plans for iCloud storage existed.
John:
It was a while before Siri could understand different people and you had to do the training and everything.
John:
So now it can distinguish voices.
John:
Well, here's another growing pain of the multi-Apple device lifestyle.
John:
If you've got multiple things in your house listening for the same trigger phrase, it's great that they negotiate with each other.
John:
It's not so great that the negotiation results in the worst possible device answering your question.
Marco:
I mean, the funny thing is, like, in many ways, this actually rewards you if you're a person who has not gotten into the Hey Siri ecosystem.
Marco:
Like, if you, like me, like, I don't leave it on on my phones.
Marco:
I try it on my, because I have, like, my iPad that just sits in the kitchen all day for the most part.
Marco:
And I figured, like, maybe I could use that the way I use the Amazon Echo.
Marco:
Like, maybe I could set timers and stuff using Hey Siri on the iPad.
Marco:
And I've tried that, and it's terrible, so I'd never do it.
Marco:
But it, oh, crap.
Marco:
My development phone just went off.
Ha ha ha.
Casey:
Well done.
John:
I was like, why are you saying it?
John:
See how nicely I said trigger phrase like nine times?
John:
So you're just rattling them off and now you're being punished.
Marco:
No, the rule is if Phil Schiller can go on the talk show and say, hey, Siri, in front of everybody and have nothing go off, then I can do it on a podcast.
John:
But he's got a computerized chip in his throat that masks it so the devices won't pick it up.
John:
Like the Amazon Echo ads in the Super Bowl.
John:
by the way that's that amazon echo method where you cut out the three kilohertz thing i'd play with that i could not reproduce that i could not get that to actually work and that post was like a year old so i'm guessing it's it's not well did you see that i tweeted something there's some paper about how you can make basically any spoken phrase be interpreted by speech recognition engine uh as any other phrase that you want you have to know the details of the recognition engine but of course amazon does know the details it's pretty neat it does you can notice that it's been modified like there's noise added but it's
Marco:
fascinating and terrifying that you can have the audio say anything you want and have the transcription say an entirely different phrase yeah yeah anyway so the point is like if you are a home pod person you actually have a pretty good reason right now to disable the hey dingus feature on as many devices you can get away with it
Marco:
Because if you don't end up using that much, if you're willing to just hit the button on things, you're way better off having that off on lots of devices because that way you won't have this problem where the HomePod grabs it when it's actually not the device that either you want or that even can handle the request you're giving it.
John:
jalkin had a good story to it he was using he uses timers for like a midday meditation and the home pod grabbed the you know please set a timer for whatever which is fine you know whatever and you can set a timer for me uh but unlike the device that he normally that he was trying to talk to was his watch that like taps you when like your time is up then the home pod would speak out loud uh about setting the timer and about when the time went off it really kind of harshes your mellow when you're trying to uh meditate so
John:
Yeah, that's the intentionality of what you want.
John:
Like if you talk to your wrist, despite the fact that the HomePod can hear you just fine and like quote unquote wins the contest and it can support timers.
John:
It doesn't understand that you were talking to your wrist.
John:
Anyone looking at you would know you were talking to your wrist because they'd see you doing that.
John:
But the HomePod can't see you.
John:
Maybe it just needs cameras.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
But on a happier note, tell us about the Sonos and wood furniture.
John:
That's not happy, it's sad.
John:
Why is this happy?
John:
But yeah, Sonos and I'm sure lots of other audio and non-audio products that have the same feet made of the same or similar material that soaks up the oil from the wood and everything.
John:
can also leave marks uh and i think that's terrible i think that you know again i said on the last show i understand that it's important to have something vibration absorbing down there for audio performance but i have to believe there is some substance on the planet that is both squishy and does not absorb oil from wood furniture leaving rings or marks of any kind so shame on sonos shame on apple uh and i believe we have the technology to solve this
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Oh.
Marco:
uh who has a home pod because i know i don't and that's in no small part because i friggin hate siri marco i do not although that's in partially small part because i've been traveling so i wasn't actually anywhere where i could buy one i have still thought about maybe putting it on the counter one thing i want to know actually i was thinking like is i know like some of our friends like merlin are very uh positive about the uh echo is it the spot the little circular one i think that's right yeah
Marco:
I was wondering maybe I could try one of those because the one reason I got the Echo show for a day and then returned it promptly was that I really would like to see the progress of the timers counting down while cooking.
Marco:
Right now, I just ask the Echo, hey, timer status.
Marco:
But ideally, I could watch them or see them without having to...
Marco:
ask something have it hear it over the fan and on the stove and then you know so anyway um so i was thinking maybe i could get an echo spot put it on the little counter right next to uh where we cook and then have the home pod on like the kind of like transitional counter to the big great room and dining room area where that's where the music should come from so i thought about that but i don't know i still i still think i want to wait it just seems like there's so many like 1.0
Marco:
limitations and little annoyances here and there um that people are having and also i again i'm not that hot on siri so i think i'm gonna wait a little bit or until i have a really good reason for overcast development oh we can hope we can hope how about you john
John:
i actually got something before marco mark it on your calendar what you got the home i got a home pod yeah just one just one uh which actually more than one would have been cool but anyway i did i i knew i had a place for it because i don't i put in the same room that i have my google home mini uh which i got for free as part of some other purchase and of course you'd never want to play audio on all right so
John:
There's competition for it in terms of answering questions.
John:
And in general, I think I'll probably still ask questions to the Google Home Mini, mostly about who stars in movies that I'm watching on television while I'm watching them.
John:
And yes, I know that lots of applications...
John:
uh on apple tv can do that for you uh some of them like i think the amazon one even if you just pause it will show you like who's on screen right now so be aware of that but uh but anyway uh i i find myself asking questions of the google home mostly because uh force of habit uh but i don't really have anything in that room that
John:
that can play good audio that is always on.
John:
I do have okay speakers attached to my TV, but usually that whole receiver and everything is off when someone's not watching TV.
John:
So it's nice to have something in there that...
John:
You know, it sounds OK and that I can both speak to to make it play something and in a pinch airplay to.
John:
So I subscribe to Apple Music.
John:
I tried to do like some family trial thing or whatever.
John:
I still assume I will unsubscribe eventually, but I wanted to give it a fair shot to say I want to be able to just speak to the air and have it play music.
John:
uh and it sounds pretty good uh no i didn't put it on the coaster it is sitting on top of my furniture but i don't have any nice furniture in my life period so i don't have to worry about it uh do i have any let me see like my dining room table is okay but anyway i don't have a nice furniture for the most part so i don't have to worry about it leaving rings it's sitting on top of what i assume is a computer printed photograph of wood
John:
uh you know transferred onto some kind of aluminum powder covered with uh plastic dust uh crappy uh piece of furniture that i have um i tried it in a bunch of different positions to see how it would adjust its sound couldn't tell much of a difference you know i i couldn't tell whether it was adjusting its sound or whether it just sound different because it was in a different place i do have it kind of near a corner which i think is not great for boomy bass but i really it's really the best place i have uh for the thing i got white
John:
mostly because i couldn't decide and so i asked my son and he picked white which i think is a reasonable choice because all the other things are white as well um in terms of filling the room with sound tell that it's a point source like that's why i mentioned like if i get two of them might be better uh even if it wasn't just stereo like i can tell the sound is coming from that part of the room which of course you expect to be able to tell that like it's not it's not magic but
John:
it is let's put it this way it is less enveloping than the 5.1 system that i have on my tv and i probably sounds better than the 5.1 system but the 5.1 system surrounds the room so when i play you know we'll find that next year but most times i play music like during christmas you play christmas music when you're like decorating the tree or on christmas day or whatever uh it's nice to have it come from all around and maybe i'll still do that but
John:
It's in the room.
John:
I talked to it.
John:
My out-of-box experience was not the greatest because you go and you set up the thing and it shows a little picture of the HomePod.
John:
You're like, yes, set up.
John:
And you go through the whole thing.
John:
Everything seems fine.
John:
And then you can go to the Home app to control the device or to do something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I never even launched the Home app.
John:
So I launched the Home app and there's my HomePod that I just set up.
John:
And it just got a big red message on it that says, like, not responding.
John:
And it was like that for, like, 10 minutes.
John:
Like, what do you mean not responding?
John:
The thing is right there.
John:
I'm talking to it.
John:
It's working fine.
John:
How can you tell me it's not responding?
John:
Eventually, it started responding.
John:
And I saw you can tap on it to, like, pause the music and tap again to unpause.
John:
Right?
John:
Whatever.
John:
And then, like, 15 minutes later, I launched the home application again to try to pause it from a different room.
John:
And there was a little spinner on it, like the little dotted spinner.
John:
And the spinner just spun there.
John:
And it just spun for, like, five minutes until I closed the home app.
John:
not you know what i don't know what the deal with that is i don't know what its problem was seems to work now not not a great experience just one of those kind of like oh sometimes apple stuff doesn't work you just have to wait so it's kind of kind of depressing um i did all the experiments everyone else did turn the volume real loud talk to it it's impressive how well i can hear you i was not impressed with how quickly it executed my commands
John:
It shows the most when you're telling it to stop playing a song because I do that all the time with the Google Homes I have because my kids make them play things and I want them to stop immediately, right?
John:
So this is probably my most common interaction with any of these devices to tell it to stop playing whatever audio it's currently playing.
John:
And the HomePod will do it.
John:
But it's a little bit more lag than there is when I'm telling any of the Google devices.
John:
The Google devices, like, as soon as I get the word out of my mouth, it's like, boom, the audio cuts off.
John:
The HomePod seems like I have to think about it for half a second or so, and I find that a little bit annoying considering it's much more expensive than the other ones.
John:
so yeah not no real surprises um the only thing that i didn't anticipate is how angry my children would get when they try to talk to it using the google's uh trigger phrase right so they're constantly saying you know okay google or whatever to try to make it do things especially again if it's in the middle of something and one kid wants to stop it playing audio play a different one they're yelling at it to be and so the other so the google thing is answering them at the you know trying to play music at the same time
John:
It's like you have to talk to it, but it's like they don't understand why you would have to use a different phrase.
John:
I mean, I guess you can explain like it's not a Google thing or whatever, but that's stupid.
John:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So I have such mixed feelings about this.
Casey:
So we got a letter from Tim Wouders, and Tim said, I see some funny parallels between Apple product launches, even with you guys, with respect to HomePod in your latest episodes.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
and tim enumerates a bunch of things and and i'll try to summarize his summary so in when the ipod was released in 2001 you know it enters an existing market of mp3 players oh there's no wireless there's less space in a nomad lame the iphone oh it's ridiculously expensive it doesn't have a physical keyboard no copy copy paste no 3g etc etc home pod well it's ridiculously expensive it doesn't do multi-room audio it doesn't do stereo doesn't do multi-user series it's severely limited etc and
Casey:
So Tim's point is he continues, I'm assuming he continues, every time Apple obliterates critics with its relentless focus on continuous improvement.
Casey:
So in so many words, why isn't HomePod the same thing all over again?
Marco:
Well, I mean, I don't think it's fair to assume that every Apple product that is kind of weird or iffy or delayed or incomplete 1.0 will grow up to be an awesome 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0.
Marco:
The initial iPod was really expensive, and it was pretty limited, especially because it was Mac only at the time.
Marco:
There were reasons to be skeptical of the initial iPod, and that market wasn't really proven yet.
Marco:
whereas over time, they did make it great, and it was very successful.
Marco:
The original iPhone was too expensive for a lot of people.
Marco:
That original one did not sell nearly as many as the follow-up models.
Marco:
But over time, they made the iPhone ridiculously great.
Marco:
I mean, in my opinion, it was pretty great from day one, but they made it more successful and more mass market as time went on.
Marco:
But look at the Apple Watch.
Marco:
The first version of the Apple Watch was barely usable.
Marco:
It was really a pretty mediocre product.
Marco:
It had lots of problems, lots of limitations, lots of weird and bad design choices.
Marco:
They did iterate that over time, but most of that iteration happened with the help of additional hardware generations and a couple of years of software generations.
Marco:
That doesn't mean that we were wrong to criticize the Apple Watch 1.0.
Marco:
The Apple Watch 1.0 needed a lot of criticism.
Marco:
The HomePod, I think, is going to be more like that, although I think it's probably starting from a better place.
Marco:
The HomePod is clearly a one-pointer.
Marco:
There's lots of missing features.
Marco:
There's lots of things that are a little bit wonky or don't quite work the way people want them to.
Marco:
But I do expect over time for the HomePod to get significantly better.
Marco:
That doesn't mean that this HomePod will necessarily get better.
Marco:
That might require new hardware.
Marco:
So I think it is fair to criticize this one.
Marco:
And the other side of this is that...
Marco:
A lot of the criticism about the HomePod today is about Siri and the limitations of Siri and inferior performance in some areas of Siri.
Marco:
I don't think we can reasonably assume that that's going to get better at the same kind of pace that we're used to seeing Apple products get better with.
Marco:
When you're mainly waiting on hardware advances, like, we need the CPU in this thing to get faster—
Marco:
That's going to happen.
Marco:
That's kind of a sure thing to happen one to two years after the launch of version one of pretty much anything that Apple makes.
Marco:
When you're worried about the local device software getting better.
Marco:
Apple's pretty good at local device software.
Marco:
There's some flaws here and there, but they're pretty good at it.
Marco:
But Siri is not new and has gotten better at a glacial pace and in many ways has the same problems today as it did when it launched like seven years ago.
Marco:
I don't necessarily think it's a reasonable assumption that the HomePod's flaws that are Siri-related are about to get better or are going to get better in two years.
Marco:
I actually don't think that's a safe assumption.
Marco:
I would love for that to be the case, but the track record of Siri so far is pretty slow progress and certain types of things that basically are always problems.
Marco:
I don't see that changing quickly, at least not as a sure thing.
Marco:
So I think it is reasonable to criticize HomePod 1.0 for no one to be making fun of us for criticizing the things that are actually wrong with it today.
Marco:
And also to be a little skeptical of Siri improvements being meaningful that are coming anytime soon.
Casey:
The funny thing about this is that Siri, or at least my understanding of the implementation of Siri, is one of the few things that Apple could actually tweak on their end without a software update, right?
Casey:
Like, they can make tweaks to Siri server-side, and they can do that at any time.
Casey:
And obviously, that's not a universal thing, but generally speaking, they can make Siri a lot better without having to do any sort of software update locally.
Casey:
And so here's the one place where Apple is most well-equipped to make changes in
Casey:
And yet I completely agree with you, Marco, that Siri has gotten potentially even worse than when it was new.
Marco:
No, it's not worse than... It definitely... I mean, it started out pretty bad.
Marco:
It definitely is better, and it is getting better, but it's getting better at a very slow pace, and it's still...
Marco:
It gains new abilities about once a year, which is not frequent enough.
Marco:
It gains new abilities about once a year, but it seems like it hit a plateau of reliability roughly in year two or three and hasn't really gotten more reliable since then.
Casey:
The point I'm driving at, though, is that it's weird to me that this is the one place where Apple could really, you know, ship fast, ship off, and they don't.
Casey:
And it really bumps me out.
Casey:
And, oh, man, I have so many angry thoughts about Siri that we'll probably get to next that I'm just going to leave for now.
Casey:
But I agree with pretty much everything you just said.
Casey:
John.
John:
so when you read this i think we got all of it from the email um and so i think this uh like we didn't leave out any examples and basically the only two examples are ipod and iphone and the gist of the email is uh you know why do you doubt apple like haven't they proven the doubters wrong right doesn't you know the last line history proves you wrong doesn't it right well
John:
i think to start we have to say whatever whatever uh logical fallacy or statistical bias that is you know you cherry picked like it's uh ipod and iphone are the two examples yes uh yes there's the you know the famous uh was it rob malda of slash dot anyone remember slash dot yeah the ipod was no wireless less space than a nomad lane that's what that quote is and that people lots of people doubted the iphone right
John:
uh those are like the apple's two biggest products after the mac so yeah you can pick them and say there were doubters uh there were doubters for ping too uh that didn't go anywhere there were doubters for the ipod hi5 that didn't go anywhere there were doubters for the g4 cube that like you know if you just pick the ones that end up being smash successes it can look like hey history proves you wrong but setting that aside like so whatever you know so you can't use these as examples to anything but what's different about the home pod
John:
What makes it more likely to be more like whatever sort of not so great success than it is to be like the iPod and the iPhone?
John:
Not to say that this means HomePod is not going to be a success, but I think it probably means that HomePod won't be as huge a success as the iPod and the iPhone.
John:
Both of those things came into the market and they were substantially different than the existing players.
John:
Obviously, the iPhone was different.
John:
A lot of the criticism was about how it was different.
John:
There's no physical keyboard.
John:
No one does phones like that.
John:
You can't make a phone like this.
John:
It doesn't even have 3G.
John:
All the phones out there have 3G and, you know, expensive.
John:
But like the iPhone was not just like a Nokia candy bar phone, but with an Apple logo on it.
John:
Right.
John:
It was very, very different.
John:
It had things that no other phone in the market had.
John:
That's, you know, the software, obviously no other phone in the market behaved like that.
John:
People didn't even think it could possibly be real.
John:
Right.
John:
The iPod was more conventional, but still it was smaller and more well integrated than the other devices that you could buy that hold lots of songs in them.
John:
And the key part about the iPod was that normal people could be successful at the task of taking your music collection and putting it on this device and listening to it.
John:
I owned a bunch of pre-iPod solid state music players.
John:
And if you remember, they also had pre-iPod hard drive based ones that were the size of a truck, right?
John:
Normal people would, if they bought those things at all, which they probably wouldn't, tended to be less successful.
John:
I know my wife was not successful at getting the audio onto her tiny little flagship.
John:
whatever a samsung or or maybe it was panasonic i don't even remember like there were or maybe yamaha that
John:
ipod was different than the others in that it was better in all ways uh in terms of like size and number of songs that it held and it was better in all ways related to user interface and so even though it was very limited and it was mac only it was expensive and it had no wireless and had less space than a nomad which i think was the one of the hard drive uh based players in the market yep uh it had significant advantages homepod enters a market
John:
already populated by devices that already do more than the HomePod does in exactly the same way that the HomePod intends to do it.
John:
There are cylindrically shaped speakers that play audio that you can talk to, right?
John:
There is no differentiator for the HomePod except perhaps audio quality, and it's not like there's no competition for audio quality.
John:
Sonos has good audio quality, and depending on whose test you look at, even the Google Max thing seems to be so-so, right?
John:
So, HomePod comes in with no real differentiator.
John:
Like, there's nothing that it does that is different.
John:
It's not like everything else has a physical keyboard and it doesn't.
John:
All the other ones require you to touch them and HomePod lets you talk to it.
John:
No.
John:
It's exactly the same feature set.
John:
And that's why the HomePod's getting slammed.
John:
Because...
John:
it comes into a crowded market doing nothing different or better than the competition and not doing many things that the competition does and like i said the only thing you could say home pod has going for it is audio quality but even audio quality per price you can get two sonos ones versus the home pod and two sonos ones sound just about as good as the home pod with the possible exception of bass most people say um so that thin edge of like okay well it's the best sounding cylinder that you can talk that you can get but on the other side of that coin
John:
you can't talk to it in as many ways as you can talk to these seven other products, means that it's getting slammed for, I think, legitimate reasons.
John:
And it also means that unless something very important changes, it doesn't have the potential to be a breakout hit in the same way the iPhone and the iPod do because it isn't differentiated enough.
John:
Even if it gets better at everything and it is as good as the Google Home devices at answering your things and as good as Sonos in audio quality or whatever...
John:
you just caught up then right whereas the iphone was either going to live or die based on the idea that you can have a phone that's all screen and guess what it lived right and same thing with the ipod is the ease of putting music on this thing enough to make up for the high price well you know that turns out that it was especially once it came to windows uh the iteration is definitely a thing uh but even iteration can't save you uh entirely or can't not not save you can't make you a wildly successful apple tv is a great example uh
John:
Apple TV came out a long time ago, back when it was called ITV, before Apple learned they couldn't use that name.
John:
The original Apple TV was not popular and did not succeed.
John:
Other devices came on market and did better than the original Apple TV.
John:
Eventually, Apple caught up and said, we're going to make a little puck-shaped thing, and we're going to do what everyone else is doing.
John:
But right now, Apple TV is...
John:
you know it can it's main advantage is that you can play your drm locked apple content but other than that it has no great differentiator for other you know besides media locking from all the other you know television connected devices and even some smart tvs can like play netflix just as well as the apple tv so
John:
They iterated an Apple TV for a long time, and it actually took them essentially two tries to even figure out what the correct features and price are for that type of device.
John:
So I think it's not like we're doubting that the HomePod will...
John:
you know be a successful product but i think it is entirely reasonable to give it all the criticism that i think that it's getting and i think it's entirely reasonable not to expect it to be a breakout success like the ipod and the iphone at least at least unless or until it comes out with some differentiator in fact if it was it would have you know they always say this like if people aren't uh making fun of you you're
John:
it if it was more differentiated and did something radically different that would give it probably more potential because like maybe it does maybe that weird thing that it's doing that nobody else is doing is going to be the thing that makes it a great success right but now you look at it it's like it's not doing anything differently than anyone else it's doing exactly the same stuff only some of it not as good and that doesn't spell uh you know massive success it spells okay success
John:
Even the watch, I would say, is much more differentiated.
John:
And even the watch has taken a while to get going.
John:
But there was really no other smartwatch that had basically the power and the fashion sense that the Apple Watch did on its introduction.
John:
So even that had more potential upside than the HomePod.
John:
So I think everyone is lukewarm on the HomePod for valid reasons.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I mean, it's just it's a fair point.
Casey:
Like, I understand why the email was written.
Casey:
I just I don't currently see it as the same.
Casey:
And even if HomePad version seven is the best speaker that has ever been made, I don't think that negates any of the criticisms we have now.
John:
and i'm trying to think of like what would be a breakout feature like you know it's a feature that doesn't already exist in a google or amazon or sonos product that the home pod could have uh and you know just because i can't think of one doesn't mean there isn't one there could be one uh but nothing apple has announced i think fits that category maybe well i don't know maybe like if the home kit stuff ever takes off apple could do a better job of integrating all of our
John:
light switches and doorbells and whatever than amazon currently does but i don't know um and in the meantime we're all just hoping that homepod catches up that its voice stuff is ends up being as good as google and amazon uh and that it gets all the capabilities that apple originally advertised for it in terms of having multiple ones and multi-room audio and all the other things that some of its competitors already have
Casey:
I want one, but I know I'm going to be disappointed by it.
Casey:
And so that's why I haven't bought one.
Casey:
And plus it's, what is it?
Casey:
$350, $400?
Casey:
Like that's, it's enough money.
Casey:
That's, that's not an impulse buy to me.
Casey:
And not to say that it is to you two either, just for me anyway, it's not an impulse buy.
Casey:
And, and so I, I just, I, it's new and shiny and Apple made it.
Casey:
So that means I should, I should have one.
Casey:
That's, that's the rule.
Casey:
That's what they tell me to do.
Casey:
That's what uncle Tim tells me to do.
Casey:
And I don't know, I'll probably get one eventually, but sitting here now, I just, I know it's going to disappoint me.
Marco:
Yeah, I really want to want the HomePod more.
Marco:
I feel like I'm on Apple's team for pretty much everything else, as much as some people think I'm not.
Marco:
I really am on Apple's team for the most part.
Marco:
And the reason why I sometimes criticize them is because I like them so much and because I think they're better than everyone else in the industry at a lot of stuff.
Marco:
But I really want so badly to love and then buy everything that they make.
Marco:
The HomePod is about 70% of the way they are for me.
Marco:
I need something else.
Marco:
I need...
Marco:
really good AirPlay 2 or I need a reason for Overcast to be developing on it, which might be AirPlay 2 whenever that ships.
Marco:
Or I need a SiriKit API.
Marco:
Give me something else.
Marco:
Close one of these open checkboxes here that are making it not quite enough for me.
Marco:
Ultimately, the thing that could really make it awesome for me is if Siri gets a lot better.
Marco:
I think we might be waiting a long time for that.
John:
On the audio front, the audio quality, or even just the device quality and the integration with the Apple ecosystem, HomePod has the very easy potential to be the audio equivalent of Apple TV.
John:
There are lots of Apple TV-like devices that you can connect to your television that can play like YouTube and Netflix and Hulu and all that stuff.
John:
Apple TV is not the only competitor in that market, but
John:
A lot of people I know who are in the Apple ecosystem and like fancy Apple stuff, instead of having a Roku or a Fire TV, they have Apple TVs.
John:
And why do they have them?
John:
Is it because Apple TV is fantastically better than Fire TV and Roku?
John:
Yes.
John:
It's better in ways that Apple nerds care about.
Marco:
No, trust me.
Marco:
It's better.
Marco:
I mean, I tried like maybe what was it two years ago when I tried like the all I tried to Roku and a Fire TV because I was frustrated with the Apple TV.
Marco:
And I'll tell you what, the Apple TV drives me crazy.
Marco:
but it's still better than those.
John:
I've used a bunch of them, and I think the difference is not that big.
John:
I feel like it's mostly aesthetic.
John:
I like some of the other remotes better than the Apple TV remote.
John:
Well, yeah, that isn't hard.
John:
But anyway, an Apple TV is more expensive, but people buy it because it's the Apple-iest one.
John:
So HomePod easily could get the market for people who want...
John:
a cylinder they can talk to that plays audio nicely, and there are people who are in the Apple ecosystem and are willing to pay a little bit more for a nice-looking device that sounds really good.
John:
Like, that's the easy market, right?
John:
Even if it doesn't do everything that Google Home and Echo do, and, you know, setting aside Sonos for now.
John:
So HomePod for sure should get that entire market, which is not a small market.
John:
If it can suddenly be as successful as the Apple TV 4K, I think Apple would be okay for that for a 1.0 product, right?
John:
And then they can go from there.
John:
So I think there is a clear path to okayness for the HomePod, even without improving anything about it, simply because it is nice looking and it sounds good and it's integrated with the Apple ecosystem.
John:
And Apple people, like you both just said, like to buy Apple stuff.
John:
So I think that's a gimme.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's talk about Siri.
Casey:
I have thoughts.
Casey:
So this started a couple of weeks ago.
Casey:
I was having a conversation with my friend, Jamie Pinkham, and we were talking with a mutual friend of ours, and Jamie had said, you know, Siri is terrible, but I applaud Apple for sticking to their guns in regard to privacy.
Casey:
We all know if they gathered more info on us, it would be better.
And
Casey:
And I thought, you know what, he's absolutely right.
Casey:
And maybe the reason I'm so grumpy about Siri is because Apple isn't just, you know, forgoing and eschewing.
Casey:
I think that's how you pronounce the word, eschewing, you know, privacy.
Casey:
They're doing what I would want them to do, which is to do the right thing and keep, you know, user privacy at the forefront.
Casey:
And, you know, if their product is a little crummy or because of it, then so be it.
Casey:
But then I got thinking about it a little bit more.
Casey:
And it occurred to me, but Siri still sucks for a lot of things that have nothing to do with my data.
Casey:
Like, did I tell the story on the show?
Casey:
I think I did about asking when the the UVA Tech game basketball game was.
Casey:
And I'd asked for like, you know, when is the Cavaliers game on?
Casey:
And it wanted to show me the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Casey:
OK, fine.
Casey:
And then I asked, like, when is the Hokie game on?
Casey:
And they was like, I don't know.
Casey:
Okay, when are the Hokies and Cavaliers playing each other?
Casey:
They played each other six months ago.
Casey:
Here's the score.
Casey:
Okay, what time is the Hokie basketball game?
Casey:
Oh, it's totally tonight at six o'clock.
Casey:
Why do you ask?
Casey:
Like, it's just, and that's the thing that's so frustrating.
Casey:
Well, one of the things that's so frustrating to me is that, yeah, I think Jamie was right that in and of itself, things could be a lot better or, you know, Siri would be more knowledgeable.
Casey:
If privacy wasn't as big a deal, you know, if so much more of this stuff could be crunched server side, like if my entire calendar was server side, if all of my email was server side.
Casey:
And by that, I mean, Apple could read all of it.
Casey:
In so many ways, I feel like Siri could be so much better.
Casey:
And I respect Apple.
Casey:
I truly and honestly respect Apple for making their product by most arguments worse by not cutting that corner, because I think that that's better for me, even though the product on the whole is worse.
Casey:
But can you get like an actor's name right?
Casey:
I was in even just basic dictation.
Casey:
So I went for a run yesterday.
Casey:
And it's one point in the run.
Casey:
I have my iPods in.
Casey:
I'm on my Apple Watch, my Apple Watch with the LTE connection, which I don't know if you've ever heard.
Casey:
I'm a little grumpy about.
Casey:
But here, be that as it may.
Casey:
Uh, I'm on my AirPods, Apple watch.
Casey:
I am panting to be fair, but I have, I had held down the crown on the Apple watch.
Casey:
So it would listen to me because I have, Hey Siri, or actually, Hey Siri doesn't work with the AirPods, but, um, I don't have the, the double tap to kick on Siri because I prefer to do it differently.
Casey:
I prefer for the double tap to do different things.
Casey:
So I hold down the crown on the watch.
Casey:
I hear the beep beep.
Casey:
And I said something to the effect of like, remind me to open a five 29 savings account for Michaela.
Casey:
and holy God, I wish I had recorded what it had come up with.
Casey:
In the defense of Siri, I was panting.
Casey:
This was like two-thirds of the way through my run, but it came up with something that was barely intelligible.
Casey:
I was able to piece it together after the fact, but it was hilarious how bad the transcription was, and all it was was a reminder.
Casey:
This shouldn't, in theory, have been that complex.
Casey:
Then I get home,
Casey:
And I decided I wanted to listen to some probably god-awful music.
Casey:
I don't even remember what it was.
Casey:
And so I'm in front of my garage.
Casey:
I'm on my driveway.
Casey:
My phone was sitting in my kitchen.
Casey:
Now, Marco, you've seen the house.
Casey:
And we are talking 20 feet maybe from basically the garage door to the kitchen.
Casey:
And to be fair, there's a couple of walls, including an exterior wall between me and my phone.
Marco:
And probably a lot of Tito's and Velveeta shells and cheese.
Casey:
Naturally.
Casey:
And so I said, hey, can you play me the latest album by MuteMath or something like that?
Casey:
I don't remember exactly what it was.
Casey:
And then I see, hold on.
Casey:
Again, this is on my watch.
Casey:
Now, I have plenty of Wi-Fi coverage at this point, but it appears that's not good enough.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I'll tap you when I'm ready.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Nope, Siri's not available.
Casey:
Sorry about that.
Casey:
And it's like, come on.
Casey:
Now, maybe that isn't, I guess, strictly speaking, that's not Siri.
Casey:
Like, that's just a general connectivity issue.
Marco:
Well, I mean, is it?
Marco:
Or is it, like, is it a local failure or a server failure?
Marco:
Either way, it's kind of a serious problem.
Marco:
Like, if your watch should be connected, you know, like, if it's in an area where it has good coverage, it should be connected.
Casey:
I mean, I have plenty of LTE, although I did look, and it was not on LTE at the time.
Casey:
I have plenty of LTE, though.
Casey:
So hypothetically, it could, should have fell back to LTE.
Casey:
I certainly was well within my Wi-Fi coverage.
Casey:
Without question, I was within Wi-Fi coverage.
Casey:
And yet it insists on going, I think, to the phone, because when I did the swipe up to get the little control center thing, I saw a phone icon in the upper left.
Casey:
And it was insistent on going to the phone, which in of itself is a first stop.
Casey:
OK, fine.
Casey:
I'm OK with that.
Casey:
But can you not fall back onto something else?
Casey:
And whatever I was trying to play was something that I had in iTunes match.
Casey:
So this should have like the way I expected it to work is that maybe it would have tried the phone and then given up when it wasn't a strong enough connection or whatever.
Casey:
And then just gone via either Wi-Fi or LTE and asked, you know, Apple, hey, what did Casey just say?
Casey:
Oh, he wants to listen to the latest album by Mute Math.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
So does he have anything by Mute Math and iTunes?
Casey:
Oh, indeed he does.
Casey:
Here's what you should play.
Casey:
And it should work.
Casey:
And it's just these little failures are happening all the frigging time.
Casey:
And it's to the point that I feel like
Casey:
I cannot communicate with my phone verbally.
Casey:
I cannot communicate with my phone by typing on my phone because that's become a disaster.
Casey:
So I just, I feel like the only device that I have that I can input any text into with any efficacy is my Mac.
Marco:
And it's driving me insane.
Marco:
But better hope it's not the MacBook keyboard.
Casey:
Actually, my C key was a little bit crunchy today.
Casey:
I was not too happy about that.
Casey:
I was able to mash on it and get whatever microscopic speck of dust was in there out of the way.
Casey:
I did not need to worry about grabbing the can of compressed air.
Casey:
That, I kid you not, I bought specifically for my MacBook.
Casey:
I hadn't had a can of compressed air in the house in like 10 years.
Casey:
But I needed one for the MacBook.
Marco:
No, I mean like I think a lot of the frustration here is like – I mentioned I think last show or maybe it was on my 17-hour talk show last week or whatever it was.
Marco:
I mentioned that I – that like when I first got the Amazon Echo, it was – after years of like kind of passively trying to use Siri and have it fail a lot of the time and just kind of be frustrated about it, it was striking to me.
Marco:
how reliable the Amazon Echo was and how quickly it would answer me.
Marco:
And in part, this is kind of not a straight comparison because the Amazon Echo is stationary, plugged in all the time, listening all the time, for the wake word at least,
Marco:
and is in a controlled environment it's always in the same spot and there are like you know acoustic things that can happen like for instance i mentioned earlier like when when my range hood fan is on on the stove it creates like you know a good deal of fairly broadband white noise and the echo just can't hear anything anymore like even if it's even if humans can hear over it just fine like certain types of noise that are in the room the echo just seems to really hear very badly if those
Marco:
But otherwise, the Echo is pretty reliable.
Marco:
But again, that's because it's in one place, plugged in all the time, listening for the wake word all the time, and has a stable connection.
Marco:
It can remain connected to the network.
Marco:
It doesn't have to power save and drop itself off the Wi-Fi when it's not necessary.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
So this is not a straight comparison here to your watch situation, which was very possibly affected by connectivity and power saving stuff.
Marco:
But that being said, like...
Marco:
The way the error rates of these things work, suppose the Echo hears me 95% of the time and Siri hears me 90% of the time.
Marco:
That still means Siri fails twice as often.
Marco:
And so as you get closer to these higher numbers... Same math when you talk about cache hit rates.
Marco:
You have the same problem.
Marco:
It seems like when one of my cache servers is down, then about 8% of hits will miss.
Marco:
But that also means that my databases are then serving like...
Marco:
five times as many hits because the hit rate is usually so high.
Marco:
So, like, you know, you'll see a huge spike in load on the databases for what seems like a small difference in the cache hit rate.
Marco:
So, you know, it's a similar problem here with, like, you know, for Siri to get, like, competitive and better in this way, it needs to get...
Marco:
It needs to dramatically reduce its error rate and its failure rate.
Marco:
And Apple might think it's really good.
Marco:
If Apple has data on this, which I'm sure they do, they might see it as somewhere being in the 80s or 90s and think that's great.
Marco:
But the competition is even better than that.
Marco:
And the difference can still be seen and felt pretty regularly.
Marco:
I would love so much for Siri to improve at the same rate as Apple's hardware and software usually improves.
Marco:
But it's been here a while, and we haven't seen that.
Marco:
So I don't think anybody should reasonably anticipate that that's going to happen now.
Marco:
All of a sudden, is Siri going to start getting better at a rapid pace?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
They have the HomePod, which depends very heavily on Siri, so you might think that's great motivation.
Marco:
But I think the iPhone, for the last seven years, is also pretty good motivation, and they haven't done that.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like it's really...
Marco:
a core competency of Apple to make really good AI based big data services like this.
Marco:
And, and, you know, a lot of people lean on the privacy thing and, and Apple to some reason or to some degree also kind of leans on the privacy angle almost as an excuse of, of why it has to be this way.
Marco:
And I think that's not a valid argument.
Marco:
I think the privacy aspect of the way Apple does things is nice.
Marco:
And there's merit to that.
Marco:
There's value to that.
Marco:
I'm glad they do that.
Marco:
But that does not preclude them from making really good services in this area.
Marco:
It just doesn't.
Marco:
It's two separate things.
Marco:
Yes, if they had more data, if they were more creepy with collecting stuff, certain types of certain services could get better.
Marco:
But Apple makes a lot of services that could get better with what they already have.
Marco:
And they don't.
Marco:
Or they don't get better enough.
Marco:
So I don't think that Apple has to give up privacy to make great services.
Marco:
Conversely, I don't think the privacy is the reason their services in some of these areas are not great.
Marco:
I think that's a convenient excuse for people who don't really understand how to make these services very well.
Marco:
But otherwise, that's not the reality.
Marco:
The reality is...
Marco:
These services can get way better with the amount of information that they already do or don't collect.
Marco:
I don't think Apple is culturally and structurally set up to make really great services of this type.
Marco:
I think they have proven that.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's exactly my point when I was bringing up what Jamie had said, is that there's so much that has nothing to do with privacy.
Casey:
Like, okay, fine.
Casey:
Maybe if Siri saw that I was sitting in Virginia when I was asking about two Virginia colleges playing each other, maybe it could have narrowed down a little bit more.
Casey:
but either way, I don't think that would have made a tremendous difference.
Casey:
And okay, even if that would have made a difference, then what happens when I'm using Siri as like a front end IMDb?
Casey:
Like I think it was John had mentioned earlier, you know, I want to know about who's acting in the movie I'm watching or the TV show I'm watching.
Casey:
Like Siri falls all over its face on that half the time.
Casey:
And that has nothing to do with anything, except I guess if it was listening to what I was watching, which is even creepy enough that I don't think Google does that sort of thing.
Casey:
So yeah,
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like there's so much that that has nothing to do with privacy.
Casey:
And this is what I was saying originally, what Marco was saying now just a moment ago.
Casey:
There's so much that is beyond this.
Casey:
And I just it's frustrating.
Casey:
And I want to see it get better.
Casey:
And I'm frustrated that it's not getting better, especially since unlike, you know, the annual release cycles for macOS and iOS, which we hopefully talk about this episode.
Casey:
I don't understand why this isn't getting better faster, except perhaps just in Marco, you said this a moment ago, you know, a corporate culture that isn't conducive to it.
John:
I think to generalize this from Siri specifically to these voice systems in general, this is just to reiterate what Marco just said and what he said on this topic many times, and I think what we've all talked about in the past.
John:
I think it's actually analogous to the iPhone, which I'm thinking about because we had that earlier feedback about it.
John:
that it's uh marco talked about the the percentage differences in the gaps and like so you know uh if the competing products are this good and series that good even if series improving there's still a gap between it but i think the important part of those hypothetical numbers is that like the original iphone
John:
There is a threshold.
John:
On one side, the same interface is not acceptable.
John:
On the other side of that threshold, you pass into the realm of acceptability.
John:
The iPhone was one of the first mass-market devices to cross that threshold for touch input on a screen.
John:
Touchscreens, which existed forever and people generally hated, suddenly got responsive enough to...
John:
that it you know it wasn't just like oh this is like one percent better it crossed over a line right and suddenly it was good enough and they've gotten way better since then right but it was so clear that this is the first device that that uh is good enough that regular people will use the touch screen and not just fine you know they'll like they won't hate it it'll it'll feel good it'll feel right it'll feel like they're directly manipulating the things on the screen right for the cylinders that you talk to
John:
the essential that there there is the same line and amazon crossed it a long time ago uh and it's there's a couple of aspects one is it's got to hear you right uh two is it has to know what the hell you're asking me about and three is it has to do it fast
John:
right and the combination of those three things produces a feedback cycle for people who use the echo that builds confidence the first time you use it you're impressed that even understood what you mumbled then you're impressed that it did like it could do the thing that you asked for and then i think with the echo you're impressed that it did it so quickly like you feel like you barely had the words out of your mouth and it's setting your timer or doing whatever or telling you what time it is or telling you the weather it just seems so fast and when that happens
John:
the threshold that it crosses like the utility threshold of like this is an appliance and it's no longer a computer thing where i just you know cross my fingers and hope that something cool and computer reworks just becomes part of your day right even if it has limitations like oh i just know it can't hear me with the range hood on right there there's parameters to it you know if you know that's the case that's bad and amazon should improve that uh but
John:
It's not like on some days when it's raining, you can't hear me.
John:
And then on Thursdays, sometimes doesn't hear me like you cross that threshold where it becomes reliable.
John:
And there are so many things that we can talk to, including Siri and lots of other things that have some kind of voice interface that do not cross that threshold.
John:
And so you you give up on them.
John:
You don't use them or use them for an extremely narrow set of things in particular circumstances.
John:
Now, I think the HomePod has actually crossed some of those thresholds for Apple.
John:
I think the HomePod can hear me really, really well.
John:
It may be able to hear me better than any other device on the market.
John:
Not better enough, perhaps, to make a difference, because in general, I'm still amazed at how well the Google Home could hear me.
John:
And I've seen other people talk to their Echoes from far distances, and it seems to work pretty well.
John:
But the HomePod, I think, crosses the threshold for can it hear me.
John:
it does not cross the threshold for does it understand what i'm asking for because still many times it will either not do what i think it should do or the same command will get different results uh and it also i think doesn't cross the threshold as i mentioned before for responding quickly enough when i tell it to stop playing music i know it hears me i know it understands what i want to do and it does it but it does it a little bit more slowly than i would like
John:
slowly enough that it makes me it gives me that millisecond of doubt whether it's doing it it doesn't create that that feedback cycle where i'm like oh now i feel like i have a voice connection to an off switch right in the same way that whenever marco says like turn everything off and is downstairs that it turns everything off and you get used to it doing that right then you don't get you don't expect it to have like a little spinner light going spin spin spin spin okay i'll turn off your lights that's too long that doesn't create the feedback cycle so
John:
And I'm not sure exactly what values those lines are at, but I can tell that certain devices are over and certain devices are not.
John:
And I think HomePod, with the advancement of its audio output and input, has crossed over a bunch of those lines, but it's still a couple things lag behind.
John:
And you really got to get everything over the line, kind of like the original iPhone did.
John:
to sort of enter the game, to enter the realm of devices that regular people will use routinely day after day and stop thinking about as a tech gadget and start thinking about as an appliance that you just expect to work all the time.
Casey:
Yeah, we're a long way from there, unfortunately.
John:
But not for the other cylinders, Casey.
John:
You should get a Google Home or an Amazon Echo.
Casey:
I actually have an Amazon Echo on its way to me right now.
John:
Really?
John:
Wait, what?
Marco:
Sorry about Barry the Lead.
Casey:
Actually, yes.
Casey:
So a friend of mine, Justin Williams, you might know from Glassboard, among other things, he was getting rid of his Echo and said to me,
Casey:
You know, rather than trying to figure out, you know, who to sell it to, you know, if I covered postage, he would send it my way.
Casey:
And so I Apple Pay cashed him the cost to send it from him to me and it'll be here sometime next week, probably after we record, actually.
Casey:
So you're not going to hear any more about this for a couple of weeks at least.
Casey:
I still don't have any particular interest in having an Echo in my house, but since almost everyone I know has one and almost everyone I know loves them, I'm curious to see what will happen with it.
John:
Put it in your kitchen and start asking it kitchen questions or put it in your TV room and start asking it TV questions.
John:
By the way, I did test the HomePod on TV questions.
John:
I asked it who is the star of a movie that's out now, and I asked it when a movie was released, and I did both of them in just the first way that occurred to me.
John:
uh the this is you know questions that i have a good comparison to because i ask my google things all the time for the who stars in the movie it it more or less got it it basically read me a web page but it read me the relevant portion of the web page and it read me like seven of the people that are in the movie and then asked me if i want to read the next two as well so it didn't get like who the star was i think there's an obvious answer like one person but it
John:
It read the cast.
John:
It didn't read me the title and the rating, so I'd give it that one, but it definitely sounded like, I found this on the web about blah, blah, blah, which is not as direct as when I ask the question of Google and just tells me straight up.
John:
I asked it the release date, and it was verbose about it.
John:
It said the movie XYZ was released on January 12th, blah, blah, blah, but it got the right answer.
John:
I don't know if HomePod has gotten better about that than Siri.
John:
Mostly, I'm just enjoying the fact that I find it so much more reliably able to hear me.
John:
I hate using Siri.
John:
I don't even have my watch.
John:
I don't wear my watch most of the time.
John:
But I hate using Siri on my phone because I activate it, and I never know when it's safe for me to start talking.
John:
And almost all the time, I hold down the Home button, and the little Siri thing appears on the screen, and I say whatever I want to say.
John:
Right.
John:
And I see the little waveform move.
John:
And while I'm talking, it goes.
Casey:
That is exactly.
John:
And then I'm like, well, maybe it maybe it heard me anyway.
John:
So I finished what I'm saying and it just stares at me and it says, how can I help you?
John:
you you moved your waveform in response to my speaking it's clear that the audio was entering into the system and you know jiggling but and so i always have to end up saying everything twice and i hate that it makes me feel dumb and it's not a good interaction if i wait for the bloop i feel like i'm waiting there forever now now is it okay for me to talk it's the worst talking to a cylinder is so much better i don't care if it's ready for me i just start talking and uh hey and the home pod definitely passes that test you know
John:
Not once did it not hear me.
John:
Not once did it, you know, bloop at me or do anything or interrupt me in any way.
John:
I was able to say what I wanted to say and it was able to do what I wanted it to do.
John:
So, you know, like I said, I think HomePod definitely crosses some thresholds that previously hadn't been crossed by any Apple product.
Marco:
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Casey:
We got word, not us three specifically, just in general, there was word spread a couple of weeks ago, I think, that Apple is going to pull a snow leopard, but for real this time.
Casey:
Like, we really mean it this time.
Casey:
For realsies.
Casey:
Pinky swear.
Casey:
Um, there's an article in Bloomberg that said Apple is going to kind of pump the brakes and it's going to, well, the, the, the headline is how Apple plans to root out bugs and revamp iPhone software.
Casey:
So, uh, there's a quote that one of you pulled for my convenience.
Casey:
So thank you quote, instead of keeping engineers on a relentless annual schedule and cramming features into a single update, Apple will start focusing on the next two years of updates for its iPhone and iPad operating system.
Casey:
According to people familiar with the change, the company will continue to update its software annually, but internally engineers will have more discretion to push back features that aren't as polished to the following year.
Casey:
I don't know where to start with this other than to say that if this really is true, sitting here now anyway, this sounds magical.
Casey:
This sounds like the glass of ice water in hell.
Casey:
Not to say that things are that bad by any stretch, but what I mean is I really think that Apple could stand to kind of pump the brakes on new features and just work on hardening things.
Casey:
And I think that
Casey:
the three of us are amongst many voices that have been saying the same.
Casey:
And when we were doing Jason Snell's end of year recap in, in survey or whatever he called it, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
One of the things that struck me as I was reflecting on some of the things he'd asked about, like software quality is that over the past year.
Casey:
So during 2017, I had had a lot of my like family members and, you know, so most of my friends are kind of pretty big nerds, but,
Casey:
Most of my family members are not.
Casey:
And I had had some family members say to me in so many words, holy crap, this Apple stuff never works anymore.
Casey:
What happened to it just working?
Casey:
And that really struck me.
Casey:
And I mentioned that to Jason.
Casey:
I think he actually used that in the report card.
Casey:
And it seems like it's time that the perception anyway, whether or not it's reality, the perception is, and I'm very much in this camp, that software quality is really kind of taking a turn for the worse.
Casey:
So it's, it's easy to blame the relentless speed of new features for, for maybe that being the problem.
Casey:
Maybe, maybe it's just that they need to not be, not have a litany of new features to release every WWDC and
Casey:
So perhaps slowing down on new and shiny will give everyone time to improve the old and well busted.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's hard because I've worked in big software companies, but not quite this big.
Casey:
John, you can be the adult in the room as you always are.
Casey:
So I'll come to you after I ask Marco.
Casey:
Marco, how do you feel about this?
Marco:
First, let's have the children discuss it.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
You and me are at the kiddie table at Thanksgiving.
Casey:
So let's talk amongst ourselves.
John:
Mark already talked about this for an hour on another podcast.
Casey:
I haven't had the time to listen to that.
John:
No one has the time to listen to that.
Casey:
Well, I was trying to figure out a way to make that joke, so thank you.
Casey:
All right, so anyway, so can you give us the chief summarizer-in-chief version, then, of that argument?
Marco:
Yeah, basically, this is great to hear.
Marco:
I'm happy that this, you know, and, you know, this seems like it has multiple sources and everything.
Marco:
It probably happened, this meeting or this change, but
Marco:
I don't think it really means much of anything yet.
Marco:
It's very much a like, okay, that sounds promising.
Marco:
Let's see what happens.
Marco:
Let's wait and see what the actual results of this are.
Marco:
I do think that the annual schedule of heavy feature-filled releases on almost all their platforms has been a significant contributor to the recent quality issues.
Marco:
I think from the little bit we've heard here and there,
Marco:
It really does seem like they don't devote enough time to bug fixing and refinement before the engineers on most of these projects have to go to the next thing, have to build the next marketing features, build the next headlining features, or get to the next major version.
Marco:
There's not a lot of time in an annual cycle for refinement and bug fixes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
if indeed they're moving to a two-year cycle for major efforts, and this isn't saying that they're going to only release iOS every two years or whatever.
Marco:
It's just like major features will now be allowed to take two years.
Marco:
That sounds good.
Marco:
I don't know how different that is from how it has been, though.
Marco:
I mean, we know certain things like APFS, that didn't take one year.
Marco:
Major features have always been allowed to take more than a year.
Marco:
So it's...
Marco:
I don't know what exactly this is allegedly changing, and I think we're not really going to know whether it's working or whether it's having a real effect for probably a couple of years.
Marco:
We're going to have to just see how the software evolved over the next couple of years and kind of see, does it seem better now or not?
John:
I've been in a lot of big software companies, and over the years I've seen... I can't speak to what it's like inside Apple, but I have to think that it's not so incredibly different from other large companies, especially these days.
John:
And the thing that happens in companies that do stuff with software or technology in general, and probably in any company, is that...
John:
The higher you go up the management chain, the more the incentives are structured for those people to make it seem like things are going well and to themselves believe that things are going well.
John:
But eventually, something will happen that ripples all the way up the entire org chart.
John:
Me, from down at the bottom of the org chart, I always saw those unfortunate things that happened as opportunities that must be seized upon by those in the lower ranks.
John:
Because that's your chance to say, you people higher up have thought everything's been great, but we've been down here telling you that...
John:
X is really a problem.
John:
And now those chickens are who come home to roost.
John:
So let's how, uh, you know, come together and have a discussion about how we're going to change things.
John:
Right.
John:
And this cycle just repeats itself.
John:
Like it never, it never actually like fixes all your problems, but basically, you know, you,
John:
You gather together, you say, we're going to change how we do things in a way that will prevent things like this from happening.
John:
And you do it.
John:
You make the actual change.
John:
You change procedures.
John:
You reorganize people.
John:
You change priorities.
John:
You do almost exactly the same things you talk about here.
John:
Lengthen schedules, give people who are closer to the actual work more authority to push back on deadlines.
John:
You stop setting unrealistic internal deadlines just so some middle manager can get a bonus this year.
John:
You do all that stuff, right?
John:
and it works like it's not like it doesn't work it works like you make things better uh there are the countervailing forces of things slowing down and everything also happen but then it just builds back up again you get into a happy place again and then you know again the same incentive structures cause people to press hard and set aggressive internal deadlines and fear of competition makes you add lots of features and so on and so forth and you get it and then another crisis happens and people seize on it and i feel like this is just a cycle of
John:
any large group of people doing things um and that's not say i'm not trying to be like cynical about it i agree with marco and almost everyone else has looked at this is like yes this is exactly what we want apple to do and i really believe that a they're really going to do it and b that it will really help right uh
John:
I think this same cycle has happened inside Apple many times in the past and it will happen many times in the future.
John:
And I just think we're kind of in, you know, in like a downswing that hopefully is about to take a turn into an upswing.
John:
So I see it as positive.
John:
And like, there's an entire industry around like how to not go through this, you know, rollercoaster cycle and how to, you know, get sustainable growth and just do great things forever and ever.
John:
And it's just a constant struggle to get any larger group of people to do that.
John:
um maybe apple that's another topic we won't get to today but like you know people have rose-colored glasses about the whatever they think the heyday of apple was and how well it was able to execute during those times and i think we will talk about that on a future show but in general this this quality focus thing i think is positive real and we'll have real results uh but we'll find ourselves back here in about 10 years at minimum or at maximum rather and that's just the nature of the beast and we just need to
Marco:
learn to learn to ride it out so i'm i'm optimistic i you know what i keep saying i'm optimistic until i see what they do with the mac pro because if they disappoint me now they're already crushed me but i think i may be unique in that regard well but and the mac pro is is actually a really good um you know thing to mention here it's like they told us directly like officially on the record that they're working on a great new mac pro that this you know that our mac pro problem will be solved the
Marco:
And honestly, half of us, I think our Mac Pro problem was solved by the iMac Pro.
Marco:
It's pretty great.
Marco:
But for the modular upgradable tower or modular upgradable Mac Pro, I don't know if it's going to be a tower, that's still a giant unknown.
Marco:
They said, they promised it will be better.
Marco:
But until it actually comes out, we don't know that it will be better.
Marco:
And so it's like, great.
Marco:
That was great talk to get, but we haven't seen the actions yet.
Marco:
So we can't really say whether that's an actual positive thing or not.
John:
And one more minor point on this, and we've talked about this in the past as well, particularly for the Mac, where the phone, obviously, they're still doing great in the phone, and they have fierce competition in the phone, right?
John:
So I bet they're going to still be running pretty hard on the phone front.
John:
And so far, they have been running hard.
John:
They've been shipping good phones, so good on them, right?
John:
It's obviously the highest priority.
John:
They do a good job on it.
John:
um you know i don't expect that to change that much the os that runs in the phone uh you know they push features out here and there i think they've they don't feel as much pressure from the competition as they did back when they had really you know back when android was just so far ahead of them in terms of notifications and stuff and multitasking and stuff like that i think that you know it's it's a closer race now but the mac
John:
the fantasy opportunity that the low level engineers would love to seize upon us.
John:
Like, boy, imagine if we could have, you know, sets of people permanently responsible for every important part of the system.
John:
And those people just sat there and drained their bug cues and like improve performance and test coverage and drain their bug cues for like three years to make.
John:
And why would you do that?
John:
How can you afford to do that?
John:
Because the max competition is not moving as fast.
John:
as uh the the phones and the tablets competition right not as much action is happening uh down there and if you're trying to try to find a role for the mac and the company it could one possibility as we discussed and shows in the past is it to make it be super reliable bulletproof industrial grade uh you know never crashes never does the wrong thing just does what it's supposed to do uh reliably uh
John:
Make that the reputation of the Mac.
John:
Make it seem, you know, you're in exchange for boringness and for a slightly slower or perhaps, you know, much slower rate of change, you get massive reliability.
John:
So staff up the Mac teams, drain those bug queues, improve your test coverage, improve performance and memory usage and all those type of things.
John:
You know, this is assuming there's no major components that still need to be rewritten because there may still be things lurking in there.
John:
And then do that for a couple of years to restore the Mac's reputation and to, uh, make it more attractive to the people who are most likely to use the Mac before you go on to the next cycle, whatever that is in the marzipan thing.
John:
And now, now it's time for the Mac takes next evolution time to get radical again.
John:
I don't think that will happen, but that is one way that, you know, we're the, we're the people who, who seized on this opportunity able to really seize on it.
John:
Uh,
John:
I'm sure that's the dream of lots of low-level people who work on the Mac and who are sick of ignoring your bugs just as you are sick of them ignoring them.
Casey:
I mean, this is definitely a good thing.
Casey:
I don't see any way we can spin it as a bad thing.
Casey:
But fast forward to what episode are we on?
Casey:
Like 265.
Casey:
Fast forward to episode, I don't know, 310, and we'll see what we think.
Casey:
But no, I'm excited about this.
Casey:
As much as I'm joking around, I'm really excited about this.
Casey:
I think this is a good sign that Apple is seeing what we're seeing.
Casey:
And it's also tough, too, because...
Casey:
We don't get to see all the, I don't know if analytics is the right word for it, but the analytics data that Apple sees.
Casey:
And they may see that hard crashes in software are trending down over the years.
Casey:
And I think that that very well could be true.
Casey:
But it seems to me that it's the kind of wiggly stuff that's really been letting us down lately.
Casey:
like siri just not working when you want it to for example let alone just you know answering the question incorrectly i don't know it's tough and it's it's i i don't know what to make of it but uh steven sanofsky is that how you pronounce it i think something like that wrote a tweet storm about this and we'll put a link to either the tweet storm or he eventually wrote a blog post about we'll put some sort of link in the show in the show notes but
Casey:
I wanted to call out a few tweets of his.
Casey:
He was a Microsoft engineer and headed up a lot of their bigger software products, if not most of software.
Casey:
I don't know exactly where he was when he left Microsoft.
Casey:
Supposed to say the guy knows what he's talking about, and he knows what he's talking about when it comes to delivering software to lots and lots and lots of people.
Casey:
And so in some of the tweets he wrote, and this is tweet number 28 of his tweet storm, no one ever anywhere has delivered a general purpose piece of software and hardware at scale to a billion people delivering such a broad, robust, consistent experience.
Casey:
We don't have a measure for what it means to be, quote, high quality, quote.
Casey:
I can say that in any absolute sense, Apple has exceeded everyone else.
Casey:
And that's kind of what I'm talking about, right?
Casey:
Like, you know, it may be that really software quality is good.
Casey:
It's getting better.
Casey:
But it's in terms of crashes, perhaps.
Casey:
And we've talked about this more than once on the show.
Casey:
But maybe it's getting worse in some of the kind of gray area that's harder to track.
Casey:
Stephen continues in tweet 31.
Casey:
But what happens to a team as complexity evolves is simply the challenge of coordination and, more importantly, consistency or leveling of decisions across a complex system.
Casey:
This is particularly acute if the bulk of the team is only known the previous years of success.
Casey:
He continues in 32.
Casey:
So Apple will just renew the engineering process.
Casey:
It means thinking about how risk is analyzed, how schedules are constructed, how priorities are set.
Casey:
This is literally what it means to run a project and what we are all paying them to do.
Casey:
So in conclusion, so to me on Apple, this is Stephen, to me on Apple, even as an outsider, I feel confident saying that this isn't reactionary or a crisis or a response to externalities.
Casey:
Importantly, it isn't a massive pivot or a student body left.
Casey:
It's a methodical and predictable evolution of an extremely robust and proven system.
Casey:
So the short, short version is, hey,
Casey:
When you have a lot of people writing a lot of code for a lot of different systems, every once in a while, just like John said, you're going to have to sit back and take stock and say, we got to tweak a few things.
Casey:
And that's what they're doing.
John:
I think what Sanofsky missed is the cyclic nature of this.
John:
Like, yes, this is a totally routine thing that happens and that it happens repeatedly.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
I get that.
John:
That forms a kind of a roller coaster that people don't like.
John:
They'd rather see just like a gentle slope from, you know, with constant improvement.
John:
uh i've never seen that happen in the real world uh but the cyclic nature of it can make you can make you jaded if you are a long-time employee or a long-time engineer and be like yeah this always happens or whatever but that you know the problems just come back uh i think that's true but that's but
John:
it's better if you don't do the up and down roller coaster just becomes a down roller coaster that just goes down forever and you never do make that adjustment so i you know i fully believe that these type of adjustments have gone on at apple for the entire life of the company and will continue to go on and you just you know you just have to roll with it but i'm ready i'm ready for an upswing i think everyone is
Casey:
yep big time barton meeks writes in do you think the modular mac pro will provide a solution to a mac mini update at a reasonable price nope nope alistair campbell writes in you've alluded to a negative effect of running movies at the wrong frame rate but i must have missed the original explanation i'm wondering if it is better to handbrake blu-rays at 24 or 30 frames per second what's the good digital backup for you and john you seem to be the most opinionated about this so do you want to take this one
John:
So the negative effect of running things at the wrong frame rate is that they're not nice multiples of each other.
John:
It has to show frames for different amounts of time.
John:
The video content we have expects you to show every frame for an equal amount of time, whether it's 1 30th of a second or 1 24th of a second or whatever.
John:
If you show some frames longer than you show other frames, it can make motion look stuttery because it's like long, long, short, short, short, long, whatever.
John:
It doesn't, you might not notice in lots of still images and maybe you don't notice that much in motion, but it doesn't quite look right.
John:
So that is the negative effect.
John:
You don't want that.
John:
asking whether it's better to handbrake to uh to encode blu-rays at 24 or 30 you should encode them at whatever the frame rate of the original source material is so if it's a tv show and it's a 29.97 whatever encoded at that frame rate if it's a movie and it's a 24 encoded at that frame rate don't do any kind of conversion whatever the source frame rate is keep that uh and what's a good digital backup uh
John:
I'm assuming you mean like take it off of your plastic disks and put it somewhere.
John:
You have to just rip the data exactly as is.
John:
No transcoding, no anything.
John:
If you really want to have a digital backup, use something like MakeMKB or whatever to just pull the bits off the disk exactly as is with no conversion of format whatsoever.
John:
And that is the only digital backup that you can have of stuff like this.
John:
The best digital backup is perhaps to buy all these things in the cloud and then you don't have to worry about storing them, but then you have to worry about the company going out of business and you having no way to watch that stuff anymore, which leads us into our next question.
Casey:
The next question is from Benjamin Esham.
Casey:
John, you've mentioned that you prefer e-books to paper books.
Casey:
How do you deal with DRM slowly making your e-books inaccessible over time?
Casey:
Benjamin continues, I quote-unquote own a couple of Palm Digital Media books that I'll never be able to read again.
John:
So this is tricky.
John:
There was a lot of churn in the e-book business early on.
John:
Some people who made and sold e-books no longer do so.
John:
I worked for Palm Digital Media back when we had the largest e-book store in the world.
John:
If you can believe it, this is before Amazon entered the game.
John:
And many, many things went wrong there.
John:
But anyway, they were DRM encumbered.
John:
And if you purchased them from the store, you could read them in an application that was ported to all sorts of different platforms.
John:
So it eventually, Palm...
John:
went down the drain and the business of selling ebooks went down the drain with it more or less and eventually you get to the point where the you know the ios reader application which existed for many years like doesn't even launch anymore i think it's probably because it's 32 bit these days so you've got these uh drm encumbered ebooks that you quote unquote own that you can no longer read or that you can only read on like a really old mac that can still run the old reader software or whatever um
John:
Uh, so what to do, how do you deal with that?
John:
Um, I do still prefer eBooks, uh, just for the convenience or whatever.
John:
I understand the limitations they provide, but I think the convenience is worth it for me.
John:
Uh, in general, these days you're buying eBooks from one of the modern vendors.
John:
uh most of them uh there's some uh shady way for you to crack their drm and to make them unencumbered so you're still stuck with the format like you can convert them to e-pub or whatever but 50 years from now you want to read your e-pubs and like we have nothing that can read e-bub e-pubs you know html died in the uh you know the fire of the nuclear armageddon whatever you know who knows who knows you don't be able to read your e-pubs but the point is it's not drm encumbered at least you're only limited by the
John:
I don't know if there's a way to crack them.
John:
You can try the application Caliber, which I think is used to crack a whole bunch of the Amazon stuff with certain plugins or whatever.
John:
But Palm Digital Media eBooks were originally encrypted with your credit card number that you used to buy them.
John:
And if you don't know the credit card number,
John:
With modern computing hardware, I can tell you that it should be feasible to brute force crack them.
John:
But I don't know because this was a long time ago.
John:
I don't know of any actual application that understands enough about the DRM to actually brute force it.
John:
But I believe that you could in a reasonable amount of time literally brute force crack it.
John:
It's much easier if you just know your credit card number.
John:
the palm ebook format was actually very simple so if you can get the data out you can easily convert it to epub or some other more modern format i know it doesn't help too much uh i'm sure i myself have some purchased palm digital media ebooks and peanut press ebooks that i can no longer read but in most cases i also have those books in epub from a different source and also in paper sitting to the right of me right here so
John:
If you're really worried about it, buy the paper copy and don't keep them in a basement that'll flood because you'll lose your paper books that way.
Casey:
Not that you'd know.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Squarespace, and Simple Contacts.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't.
Casey:
I don't know what made me think of this, to be honest, but obviously I've been going back and forth about, you know, if I'm going to buy a car, which I'm not convinced I am actually, what should I buy?
Casey:
Should I get a Jeep Wrangler?
Casey:
Should I get a Golf R?
Casey:
Should I get something else entirely, a new BMW, etc.?
Casey:
And
Casey:
it occurred to me that I think to, to me, or to some degree I am as well, but particularly you two have, have self pigeonholed, have pigeonholed yourselves into specific kinds of cars.
Casey:
Marco, you've basically said that until something dramatic changes, you're going to be a Tesla owner until the end of time, John, you know, unless something dramatic changes like, you know, money raining from the skies right over your house, you know, you're seem to be an accord guy for at least the foreseeable future.
Casey:
So,
Casey:
I have for each of you a question, and I'll start with Marco.
Casey:
If you couldn't buy a Tesla, and I'll even broaden it to if you couldn't buy an electric car, and you've made it very plain that that's what you prefer, but if you couldn't buy an electric car, just out of curiosity, what would you buy?
Marco:
So I saw this in the notes earlier.
Marco:
I've been thinking about it this evening.
Marco:
And unfortunately, I don't really know enough about what cars are available these days to have a great answer here.
Marco:
What has happened to you?
Marco:
But I'll tell you, very high on the list would be the new M5.
Marco:
Because even though it doesn't have a transmission I would like, I really enjoy having a fast, large sedan.
Yeah.
Marco:
Now, there's lots of options within that, you know.
Marco:
Obviously, you know, and I should probably list in this list something from like Mercedes or Porsche or something, but I just don't know their lineups at all.
Marco:
Audi might be somewhere on the list because honestly, one thing I really enjoy about the Tesla that I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I do is having the nice big hatchback trunk.
Marco:
And so I know like the Audi A7 is kind of similar in like size and trunk nature.
Marco:
And also hideous.
Marco:
yes it's pretty bad looking so yeah like i don't know but i like it i think the a7 looks great oh you're so i would probably i would probably at least give that like a look just to see if i could tolerate it because i do i do like having a large fast sedan that is also a hatchback um without being a wagon or an suv or a crossover so so that's great um
Marco:
So yeah, probably on the list would be maybe look at the A7, maybe look at the new M5.
Marco:
I would probably look at whatever Mercedes offered in the same thing.
Marco:
I also might just consider a regular 5 Series, like a 550 or even whatever the 540 is these days.
Marco:
I might look at those because the M5 was a fun time in my life, but I have now grown to appreciate the value of a quiet car.
Marco:
I like having a quiet car that is also fast.
Marco:
I feel like I don't need to shout to the world how fast my car is with noise.
Marco:
But ultimately, when I drive other cars now – so I went on a trip, which is why we're a couple days late.
Marco:
And on the trip, I rented a Nissan Maxima, and it was a perfectly nice car.
Marco:
It had lots of great features, lots of nice little luxuries inside.
Marco:
I'm very happy I rented it because we were somewhere very cold, and it was nice having the heated seats.
Marco:
Uh, but like, it just feels like going so far backwards to both have a gas car and to have some like little entertainment system on like a six inch screen with like, you know, running basically DOS.
Marco:
Like that's, that's how these systems all feel to me.
Marco:
And when I occasionally have to drive TIFF's car, which is a modern BMW three series, uh,
Marco:
it doesn't feel modern to me anymore like it feels old like using iDrive you know everything about a gas car with like you know starting it up putting it in gear and having to remember like actually like turn it off and lock it like an animal yeah like it's it it doesn't it just doesn't feel great to me so i think if i had to get a gas car again
Marco:
i might actually go lower end than like an m5 or something because i don't get the enjoyment out of that anymore that i used to like it's almost it's it's like well this is i was gonna say it's like you know getting back with your high school girlfriend but i don't really have any basis on which to say that because i never really had girlfriends in high school because i was just terrible at everything um so but like
Marco:
It's like I've moved past that in my life now.
Marco:
Like I had a great time with loud, fast cars, but now I'm perfectly happy with quiet, boring, more comfortable cars that also happen to be fast.
Marco:
So I would probably just get something fast, but not too ridiculous.
Marco:
That's why I'm thinking maybe like a 550 or something like that.
Casey:
fair enough i uh i want to hate the new m5 because it does use the zf8 speed if i'm not mistaken which is very good but i i i can't believe the m5 can't be had with a stick anymore but oh my word all the initial reviews of the new m5 oh zero to 60 in like between 2.8 and 3.2 seconds depending on who you ask like
Casey:
It's a 90 million pounds full-size sedan going to 60 in three seconds.
Casey:
Like I probably have mentioned this on the show 44 times, but when I was a kid and really getting into cars, I remember that like having a zero to 60 time in the four second range was like Lamborghini and Ferrari territory.
Casey:
Like nobody could get to 60 in four seconds.
Casey:
And here it is, this M5 will do it in maybe two worst case low threes.
Casey:
Like, yeah, God, it's just bananas.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'll tell you what, maybe one other direction that I might want to go is if I can't get my nice big comfort boat from space, maybe if Tiff's car could become the family car that could hold a lot and be big, then maybe I would do something that electric currently is not very good at.
Marco:
I'd get something small and light and fast and fun.
Marco:
So maybe something like an M2 or a Cayman or something like that, something that electric cars really can't be very well yet.
Casey:
That's interesting.
Casey:
Do you miss the 1 Series M ever?
Marco:
Occasionally, but not significantly.
Marco:
I would love to, at some point, drive the new M2 or even the 235, the M235.
Marco:
I would love to drive either of those just because they do...
Marco:
By all reviews and accounts, they do sound like they're pretty fun little cars.
Marco:
I think that would be fun to drive those and to consider those if I couldn't have my big comfort boat.
Marco:
But ultimately, I've gotten slightly older and a lot more boring.
Marco:
And I kind of just like my fast comfort boat now.
Marco:
So it's hard for me to really give this question an honest answer or honest consideration because my head's not in that space anymore.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
I drove an M235i, which is now an M240i, and it was really great.
Casey:
I wouldn't say that there was anything tremendously remarkable about it.
Casey:
It was just a fun, small, nimble car, which there's something to be said for that, right?
Casey:
It was really nice in that regard, and I had a lot of fun with it.
Casey:
John, do you have any comments on Marco's choices?
Casey:
Not to say that this was really designed to create an argument, but far be it for me to not give you a chance to respond.
Casey:
Any thoughts?
John:
I was going to start by telling Marco what he should have bought anyway in my answer.
John:
So the best direct replacement, best non-electric direct replacement for his Tesla is the Panamera.
John:
It has a hatchback.
John:
The new version is not as ugly as the old one.
John:
It's really fast and fun to drive.
John:
It seats four, which should be adequate for his needs.
John:
And, yeah, I think he would end up there because I think it is more exciting than the 5 Series.
John:
And shape-wise, it practically looks like a Model S at this point.
John:
So I think it would have a lot of fun with it.
Casey:
They're still not good-looking.
John:
You've got to see it in person.
John:
I think they actually are pretty good-looking.
John:
The old one obviously had the weird hunchback that wasn't nice.
John:
This is much more nicely proportioned.
John:
And when you see it in person, like the Model S, which I think looks kind of dowdy in pictures, when you see it in person, you realize it is lower and wider than you thought, and it has a nice presence in person.
John:
I know because I see them all over where I live.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, looking at these on their website and everything, you know, because I really have enjoyed a hatchback, I would give this a look.
Marco:
But I wouldn't feel good about it.
John:
And everyone said, like, this behaves... This is the least sedan-like of all of the big sedans.
John:
Like, everyone says... But I like sedans.
John:
But I mean, like, in terms of not feeling heavy and like a boat, right?
John:
That it feels nimble and, you know, it feels like...
John:
a slightly bigger caiman it doesn't feel like a souped up you know cadillac or whatever yeah fair they're making it electric too by the way so marco actually might be in the market eventually when when their lectures come out because they will actually have a direct electric competitor to tesla and uh that's another reason marco will be in the porsche dealership
Marco:
Their concept, the Mission E, that did look really cool, but it's just a concept and who knows what will actually ship.
Marco:
When it does ship, there's the big question of charging stations.
Marco:
Tesla has a lot of superchargers and they keep adding more at a pretty remarkable rate.
Marco:
I know there's the standard-based networks that are also out there, but Tesla has a pretty big head start, and they're in a lot of places.
Marco:
And they're in a lot of places that I go.
Marco:
They now cover upstate pretty well.
Marco:
They used to have very little coverage.
Marco:
Now they have great coverage.
Marco:
They're getting all over the place.
Marco:
And so anybody who comes in with a major...
John:
long distance electric car competitor is going to have a pretty serious fight ahead of them to get past the supercharger network what you should be worried about though is when the hell are they going to replace the model s because this is always happening i am worried about that so it comes out in comparison tests where like one model that has won the comparison test for the five years running is at the end of its its generation's lifetime and it's about to be redesigned and it comes up against the newly redesigned competitor and then loses for the first time and so yeah the model s is great
John:
But you can't just keep the same car with minor interior and exterior tweaks for 15 years.
John:
You have to come up with the next version, and the next version has to be better.
John:
So presumably, everybody who's targeting Tesla, they've got the Model S in their sights.
John:
They know what their benchmark they have to beat, and they're going to end up beating it, setting aside the charger network things.
John:
Tesla, but you would fully expect, okay, well, Tesla's going to beat it too for the next Model S and we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
I am very, very curious to see what the heck the next Model S is because they've done a lot of things with the Model 3 that sound really good to me and a few things that sound really bad to me.
Marco:
So I wonder, like, what are they going to carry over?
Marco:
Like the single screen thing?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Not for me.
Marco:
That does not sound good.
Marco:
The elimination of the auto steer cruise control stock?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Don't like that.
Marco:
But things like, you know, having the one giant vent across the top and having the way faster, more responsive touchscreen?
Marco:
That sounds great.
Marco:
So, you know, there's things I like from the Model 3.
Marco:
We'll see what they actually bring over, right?
Marco:
I really hope they don't ruin it.
Marco:
It seems like every...
Marco:
Tesla model they do like almost everything right and one thing that's just like a dumb risk they took that didn't pay off that you know ends up being annoying or failure prone so like with the Model S it was the stupid pop-out door handles that fail constantly
Marco:
With the X, it was the weird gullwing doors that, you know, caused them to have lots of delays and issues.
Marco:
Falcon wings, please.
Marco:
Whatever, yeah.
Marco:
And then with the Model 3, I think their weird risk they took was having just that one screen and having way too many functions rely on that one screen and, like, you know, some menu there.
Marco:
So, you know, who knows what they're going to ruin with the next Model S. I just hope it's something I can tolerate.
Casey:
So John's challenge, similar.
Casey:
If you had to buy something that wasn't in a cord, what would you buy?
John:
A Mazda 6 because it is about the same size.
John:
It gets good reviews, comes with a stick shift.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And I didn't know specifically what you were going to say, but I had a feeling it would be something along those lines.
Casey:
So now let's assume for the sake of conversation that a two-pedal car is okay.
Casey:
Just for the sake of conversation, I'm not saying this is what you think.
Casey:
Would that change your tune?
Casey:
Would you choose something different?
John:
no i've if it's okay no i would never pick it okay poor choice i'm not allowed i'm not allowed to have a stick shift let's let's go with that let's say you're not allowed to have a stick shift i think i would i think i might find myself in the one accord that i recently learned comes with an automatic they not the cbt ones but the one with the automatic interesting okay wait is he allowed to pick an accord
John:
uh let's say no actually i didn't specify i didn't specify but yeah good point let's go with no because let's make this more interesting it gets you out of your comfort zone i don't know because like now we start getting into uh spending more money than i want to spend on a car well that's the next question we're not there yet i know but like but i'm trying to think of what's the cheapest non-disgusting automatic transmission car that it can fit my family that i would buy
John:
I don't know.
John:
Does the Mazda 6 come with an auto?
John:
Maybe I'll get that.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, that's what Erin had.
Casey:
She had a 2007.
John:
Yeah, I'm not with the current model, though.
Casey:
No, no, I know.
Casey:
I'm just saying, like, she had a 2007 Mazda 6 Grand Touring.
Casey:
It had darn near every option on it.
Casey:
It was an automatic, and it was a phenomenal car.
Casey:
It was a really, really, really great car.
John:
Yeah, I think I would get the Mazda 6 with an automatic.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So now some, you know, African prince has died and bequeathed you all of his money, but it's actually legit this time.
Casey:
You have, you know, $10 million with which you can spend on this car.
Casey:
What would you buy?
John:
Ten million dollars.
Casey:
Well, I mean, you don't have to use all ten.
John:
Can I spend part of that on the house to house the car?
John:
Sure.
Casey:
Don't worry about your acorns.
John:
I'm worried about it.
John:
I'm not going to buy a nice car and get ruined by my kids scraping their bicycle handles across it as I shove it into my little garage.
Casey:
Don't worry about the acorns.
Casey:
Just worry about the car.
Casey:
Let's just presume that everything else is taken care of.
John:
And you said I can't, no Ferraris?
Casey:
No, no, I didn't say that yet.
Casey:
You're cheating.
Casey:
You're looking at the show notes.
Casey:
So in the show notes, it reads as follows.
Casey:
John has to buy one non-accord.
Casey:
What would he buy?
Casey:
Next bullet.
Casey:
What if two pedals were okay?
Casey:
Next bullet.
Casey:
Okay, this is in the show notes.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
Now money is no object and it has to be two pedals, no Ferraris.
Casey:
But let's start with the Ferraris.
Casey:
But even though we all know your answer, it's whatever the V12 is.
John:
you know i was looking at you know i was looking at the 488 again i don't know the 48 just hasn't grown on me as much as i thought it would so i'm wondering if i would actually get a 458 or even a 430 uh because i do like both of those cars better but then i look at the interiors they're all kind of weird so i don't know uh but like practically speaking like i wouldn't if you only let me have one car i wouldn't get any of those because i can't i can't like you can't drive that to work every day and carry your kids kids around in it and go on vacations stuff it's just not practical it has to be like your second or third or fourth car right
John:
uh so i'm i'm back into four-door sedans then um i think if i'm not especially if i'm not allowed to get a new house uh no just don't again don't worry about the house the the acorns have gone away your kids will not touch the car but all right so it was only one car
John:
i think i would end up with like an amg e series a mercedes because the s-class as much as i love it i think it's just i think it's just too big to be i think i would like the ease better because these aren't that small these days i feel like they're more or less a cord size they're really fast but also are comfortable and have lots of tech gadgets i'm not even sure if i would get the amg model frankly i might actually end up
John:
with the non-AMG model if I felt like that was fast enough or the AMG one was squishy but I really like the E's and I feel like they are more they're more to my taste I think than than probably the M5 that said I haven't really seen details about the new M5 so maybe they've adjusted a little bit and I did like Marco's M5 but I just feel like all the all the the bad vibes that you both give me about BMWs and repair wheels and everything would go to the uh the devil I don't know in Mercedes I suppose
Casey:
But you would not get a wagon?
Casey:
You would get a sedan?
John:
Yeah, I'd get a sedan.
Casey:
Do you like wagons in principle?
John:
I do.
John:
I just don't think I need one.
John:
We just have the two kids and it's not like we're going camping.
John:
I do like wagons.
John:
I would get a wagon over a minivan any day, but I just don't feel like I need that extra space.
John:
Why would I get a wagon when I could just get a sedan?
Casey:
Since I'm now a car journalist, I've been considering wagons more and more with each passing day.
Casey:
And even though as an American, I'm supposed to hate wagons, there's something to be said for a fast wagon that has no business being as fast as it is.
Marco:
So I'm configuring my Porsche Panamera.
Casey:
Excuse me.
Casey:
Excuse me.
Casey:
It's Porsche, sir.
John:
Don't pick the $20,000 option that gives you like a colored key fob.
Marco:
The options that they give you are like, there's like, first of all, there's like 90 different options.
Marco:
That's not an exaggeration.
Marco:
Of course there is.
Marco:
And it is ludicrous.
Marco:
I thought BMW was crazy with all the little nickel and diamonds.
Marco:
Porsche is the king of options.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
So among other things, I have the option to add a six-disc DVD changer for $560.
Marco:
Wow, that's cheap.
Marco:
I can add a USB port in the rear for $420.
Marco:
That's just the port.
Marco:
I can add a fire extinguisher, I don't know where or how, for $180.
Marco:
Like, I've never seen this many options.
Marco:
It's ridiculous.
Oh.
John:
I was watching a Demura video recently.
John:
I think it was talking about the 918 or something, but I think, was it a paint color option that was $65,000?
John:
There was some option that was like a cosmetic option that cost more than most cars.
Marco:
So I can get the air vent slats painted for $2,330.
Casey:
Oh, I do not like the look of this interior at all.
John:
i bet the interior is very very highly configurable so it is very highly configurable as long as you're willing to spend two thousand dollars to paint your air slats yeah no porsche it seems it seems like that that if you want anything that's not stock it costs a huge such a huge amount of money that you're like do they just buy the stock car and then take out the parts and burn them and then put in new parts like why does it cost so much money
Casey:
God, there's so many options.
Casey:
See?
Marco:
Like, it's... Holy smokes.
Marco:
Like, and, I mean, yeah, the good thing is, like, if, yeah, I think John's right, like, you know, if you want to customize, I mean, they have, they have, like, 15 different wheels you can pick.
Marco:
Like, there's so many options to this.
Marco:
And half of them, I don't even understand what they would do or why I would want them.
Marco:
Seatbelts in chalk, $660.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Decorative valve stems.
Casey:
Decorative valve stems in black with colored Porsche crest.
Casey:
$70.
Marco:
That might be the cheapest thing on this entire list.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Casey:
And this is starting at $150,000 for the Porsche Panamera Turbo Executive.
Oh.
Marco:
Oh, I didn't go to the executive.
Marco:
I stopped at the 4S, which my configuration is $124,000.
Marco:
Good grief.
Marco:
And I haven't even gotten good seats and everything.
John:
I think there's a game with the Porsche opposite.
John:
You want to get the one with the good engine.
Marco:
right and then after that you want to pick like two things that are important to you and everything else just except stock i think the real answer here is you want to buy these used because like you know used cars you tend to you tend to get a lot of the options basically for free because like you know because like you don't you know if you spec up a car like the used pricing is based on not all the options based on like the engine trim level year and mileage like that's a that's about it
Marco:
So like the way to get any of these cars, if you want a lot of options, is to just wait for a used one to come up that has a lot of options that someone else took a bath on.
Marco:
And you get those pretty nicely.
John:
I think I mentioned this about like Rolls Royce and Mercedes last time we talked about it.
John:
But I'm just so surprised that these companies stick to this.
John:
I mean, I suppose there is some attraction to the high end clientele of being able to customize everything, especially like on Bentley and Rolls and stuff.
John:
But as Marco has noted in his salad power user, you know, diatribe, it's the paralysis of choice.
John:
I would be terrified that I would be accidentally configuring the world's ugliest Rolls Royce.
John:
Right.
John:
Because you have you can choose everything, every kind of every material, every surface, every color, everything.
John:
It's like, don't.
John:
Don't trust me to design it, especially if they have not so great visualization.
John:
It's like I paid 350 grand for this Bentley and it looks like a clown car because I didn't think about how this color leather would look with this color stitching would look with this material because I'm not a car interior designer.
John:
Just give me some presets like Marco wants for his salads.
John:
And then maybe I'll say, give me that preset and then they'll tweak one thing or something.
John:
Because think of how scary, I mean, I think mostly in terms of how scary it would be to buy a car sight unseen.
John:
Like you've never seen a car with this materials.
John:
You've never sat in it.
John:
You don't know what it's going to look like.
John:
You don't know how it's going to feel.
John:
And just picking from a menu.
John:
terrifying so i wonder if rich people have like other people configure their cars for them right or they just say oh i don't know you just make just make it nice for me or like they hire car interior designers just like you design you know hire them for your house like poor people you know just go to the home center and they pick out materials for their floor and their countertops and whatever and they cross their fingers and hope it looks okay the rich people hire interior designer and you know also cross their fingers i suppose but pay gobs and gobs of money for them to come up with
Marco:
materials and everything look good together so i wonder if they do that for cars too because it's it's a huge expense and there's just too many choices yeah i'm looking now like i would rather have just a regular five series i think than the panamera like you get so much more for the money and it's a way nice looking car even though it does have a little bit of the skin flap issue of modern ones um but yeah that's i think i'd rather have that
John:
I found a job for Casey.
John:
Casey, do you have any interest in being a car option configurator to rich people?
Casey:
I would love to.
Casey:
Are you kidding?
Casey:
I would love to.
John:
Wouldn't you feel the pressure, though, of not accidentally making an ugly car for them?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I really wouldn't.
Casey:
Because, I mean, they're rich.
Casey:
Who cares?
Casey:
They're just looking for someone to blame.
John:
I mean, yeah.
John:
Well, you have to charge your fee.
John:
It's like interior designers.
John:
You have to charge your fee, which should be like at least one third of the price of actually doing the job.
John:
Purely for like, you know, what service do you provide?
John:
You tell them what options to pick.
Casey:
I have long thought about how fun it would be to be like a car headhunter, if you will.
Casey:
So, you know, take me, for example, when I was buying my 3 Series, you know, I wanted a 335.
Casey:
It had to have a stick.
Casey:
It had to have the M Sport package.
Casey:
You know, and I think there were one or two other options I insisted upon.
Casey:
Not white before either of you jerks pipe in.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, you know, I would love to be a car headhunter.
Casey:
I would love to be a car headhunter that's, you know, that my job is just like scour auto trader to try to find that like perfect unicorn for somebody.
Casey:
I think that would be super fun.
Casey:
But anyone who would have the money for that would be buying new anyway, so they would just order one.
John:
I was going to say, you just hang out.
John:
I wonder if you work at the dealer and say, we have this person here.
John:
Their services are provided at a very small fee of $50,000, and they will help you select the options for your $250,000 car.
Casey:
I'm in.
Casey:
If you're looking to hire me, you can find my contact information at Casey list.com.
John:
Yeah.
John:
50 grand per car.
John:
Like you, you know, you can make some, some good money doing that.
Casey:
Uh, if only.
John:
And honestly, if I had the money to buy a Bentley, I would gladly pay 50 grand to someone who would prevent me from, from misconfiguring my car and getting an ugly $350,000 Bentley.
John:
Instead, I'd have a good looking $400,000 Bentley.