Text Adventure Mode
Marco:
It's going to be long, you know, long drive.
John:
But I bought walkie talkies so that we could be like Top Gear stuff.
John:
Of course you did.
John:
You're going to find out how crappy walkie talkies are compared to a modern digital cell network.
John:
Yep.
John:
Just start calling each other.
Marco:
Yeah, but they're really fast.
Marco:
Like that's the thing.
Marco:
Like you just push a button and talk.
John:
And you're static.
John:
Type, type, type, you know.
Marco:
I got decent ones.
John:
When I said the modern digital cell network, I meant the voice.
John:
Like do you know you can talk into your phone?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
What?
John:
No one does that.
John:
I'm just saying that you can call people on it.
John:
Try it.
Casey:
No, what are you?
Casey:
Oh, how we miss the days of the Nextel push to talk.
John:
Yeah, no, it's not.
John:
It's not push to talk.
John:
If you just leave the call connected all the time, you don't even have to push.
John:
You just set up a WebEx in each car.
Casey:
Oh, Jesus.
Casey:
Now I'm definitely going to bed.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Damien Shaw writes, Google Home allows for both compound commands and context-sensitive commands.
Casey:
I do this all the time.
Casey:
Quote, play something and set volume to five.
Casey:
It gets it every time.
Casey:
And, quote, Google, what's the weather in San Diego?
Casey:
I just said it.
Casey:
Oh, well, sorry, people.
Casey:
Hey, Cylinder, what's the weather in San Diego today?
Casey:
A few seconds later, hey, Cylinder, what about tomorrow?
Casey:
And that also always works for Damien Shaw.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is this is my bad because I said last episode that none of the cylinder supported multiple commands in one sentence.
Marco:
I'm not talking about follow up like afterwards.
Marco:
I'm talking about like play Weezer and the volume to five or, you know, make a pasta timer five minutes and a sauce timer for 20 minutes, like stuff like that.
Marco:
Like that's having all that be in one command.
Marco:
and i don't even know did anybody say if it can do multiple name timers i don't even know anyway it doesn't matter apparently google home can do it uh with certain commands so oh well i made a mistake um i i wish siri and the amazon uh service would add this that's and this was in the context of amazon adding their their like follow-up listening feature to the echo of like it'll it'll listen for a few seconds after you
Marco:
after it does a command to see if you have anything more to say.
Marco:
That's a BS non-feature, but multiple command support in one sentence is a great feature and something that we desperately need.
Marco:
I thought nobody had it.
Marco:
Turns out Google has it.
Marco:
Done.
John:
So the thing about these cylinders is...
John:
Like they don't really have a particularly discoverable interface.
John:
That's one of the reasons that Amazon emails you all the time to tell you all the new things that you can do with your cylinder, because otherwise, how would you know?
John:
Like it just sits there.
John:
You know, it doesn't it has no apparent way to communicate to you that it is now has now has a new capability on this topic.
John:
Are you sure, Marco, that your Amazon cylinder can't do compound commands?
John:
Like, when's the last time you tried?
John:
That's a reasonable question.
Marco:
I don't... I guess I'm not sure.
Marco:
The last time I tried was probably months ago, and they could have added it last week.
Marco:
I don't actually read those emails.
John:
I think I might have done multiple timers in one sentence, but I don't know.
John:
Like, I treat my Google cylinders...
John:
Like every time I talk to them, I'm daring them not to understand me.
John:
I say things in an informal way, in a more complicated way, not in a more complicated way, but that I don't simplify them.
John:
I don't dumb it down to say...
John:
okay cylinder i know you won't understand me so let me explain to you very clearly and slowly what i want i just say it and which is daring it to like go ahead screw up don't and most of the time it succeeds and that's that little weird game that i play with it it's part of my satisfaction with the product part of the satisfaction is the challenge and seeing the challenge be met by this little thing in my house right um
John:
But on the discoverability front, I think actually one of the pieces of feedback that we got that may not have made it into notes is that what the heck is it called?
John:
HomePod also can do compound things or at least play music or other audio and issue a volume level at the same time.
John:
And that goes back to what I was saying.
John:
It's not always clear what these cylinders can do for us.
John:
And the only way to really find out is to try.
John:
And the problem with trying is if it falls on its face, you're like, oh, my stupid cylinder can't do that thing.
John:
Two months later, maybe it can do that thing and you have no idea.
John:
So...
John:
I guess the moral is... I mean, I don't know what the solution is here because Amazon's email is one approach.
John:
Just keep spamming people so they realize you can ask it facts about dogs, right?
John:
But I don't think that's a great solution either.
John:
You certainly don't want these cylinders like when you wake up and tell them to turn on the lights to throw in a sentence or two about these new capabilities.
John:
Although, I can imagine like in sci-fi movies and in bad infomercials made by people who don't know how actual people act...
John:
cylinders would always be telling you about the stuff they can do and you'd be delighted like you know the sci-fi actor wakes up uh and you know his his futuristic apartment and all his devices tell him i just wanted you know the last night i had new capabilities and blah blah blah and he's like oh thank thank you cylinder blah blah but in real life you'd smash the thing with a hamburger so i was talking to you in the morning like that so um and in advertisements people are so happy to hear the new capabilities that the refrigerator has no they're not happy they don't want to know so
John:
i don't know what the solution is certainly when you wake up like your five-year-old doesn't say father i can now understand compound commands like they just grow and get better and we expect them to you know to grow and get better but appliances especially appliances that we don't see doing software update or appliances that get enhanced by changes on the server that really are invisible to us like it doesn't affect our you know it's
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's tricky.
John:
Maybe they should have little tiny brain icons that grow as they get smarter.
John:
And if you wake up this morning and say, oh, Cylinder, I see your brain is a little bit bigger.
John:
That's great.
John:
Not an actual solution.
John:
Just kidding.
Marco:
Also, I feel like supporting compound commands is not a binary, like, yes, it does now.
Marco:
No, it doesn't thing.
Marco:
People said the HomePod can do a playlist at music level, but can it do...
Marco:
Set a timer for 10 minutes and turn on the office lights.
Marco:
And can Google Home do that?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Like one of the biggest use cases, I think, for multiple commands would be turning on or off multiple smart home things at once that don't already have a preexisting group.
Marco:
So you could say like, you know, hey, cylinder, turn on lights in office, bedroom and kitchen.
Marco:
That might be three commands by, you know, normally three separate commands.
Marco:
That's pretty tedious.
Marco:
Or you can say, like, hey, cylinder, turn off outside lights and lamps in the living room.
Marco:
Like, you know, can you do that?
Marco:
Can you say, turn on kitchen lights and start a pasta timer for five minutes?
Marco:
Like, can you combine domains in one sentence?
Marco:
Like, it's one of those things, like, again, like, this is the kind of thing humans expect to work at some point.
Marco:
And I wish the cylinders were smarter.
Marco:
But the good thing is that these assistants are getting smarter.
Marco:
at some of them faster paces than others.
Marco:
Let's be honest here.
Marco:
Apple has lagging behind here pretty badly in rate of improvement.
Marco:
But the Amazon and Google services are doing great.
Marco:
They're really improving very quickly.
Marco:
And so that's promising.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if they get there fairly soon.
Marco:
One other little nitpick while we're on the cylinder thing, and this is something that bothers me,
Marco:
about siri that the amazon service will interpret things you say literally if you if you give like an unusual phrasing so for instance if i say if i want a timer for like if i'm starting this happening the night i was starting some something in you know some rice or pasta or something in a pot and i also had some i was going to put some french fries in the oven so i asked the amazon cylinder
Marco:
Start a timer for rice for 25 minutes.
Marco:
And I said, start a French fries timer for 10 minutes.
Marco:
And so what I wanted was in 10 minutes for it to say, start the French fries.
Marco:
So it's weird.
Marco:
You have to say, start a start French fries timer.
Marco:
The Amazon service gets that right every single time.
Marco:
It always knows what I mean by that.
Marco:
It's like treating it as a string literal.
Marco:
It's like, this is the name of the timer you are creating here.
Marco:
And it gets it right every time.
Marco:
It's one of those things, like John said, where you're almost trying to trip it up by trying this kind of thing.
John:
that's the opposite of what i said because you're playing it like a text adventure you're doing the altavista thing of like you want a thing that works like a programmer and you're a programmer and you're like you see the the placeholders in your head and you're filling them in because you know how it'll be interpreted but i would argue that no human speaks to another intelligent thing like that you're playing the game that is your cylinder which is fine i think it's a useful feature for people who want to play that game but it would be better like
John:
if you if you were talking to another human you probably would have said uh don't let me forget to start the french fries in 10 minutes or like something like that or remind me in 10 minutes to start the french fries but i was avoiding remind me because that sounds more like the that's create a reminder right like you're oh reminders and timers or whatever you just wanted to know what you mean or tell me in 10 minutes you know like whatever it is like
Marco:
But that's what timers are.
Marco:
Named timers are basically telling you this thing in this time.
Marco:
And it's great.
Marco:
It's a very, very useful function.
Marco:
And it's awesome to hear the beep go off and say, your start french fries timer is done.
Marco:
It's great because it reminds you what to do and staggering things out.
John:
That's awkward too when it says your start french fries timer.
John:
I want it to say it's time to start the french fries, but it doesn't understand the name of the timer.
John:
So I think the problem is in these sort of
John:
This weird area where you can say it in a vague way, but it doesn't understand what you meant, and it tries to be smart.
John:
Lots of people were complaining about Siri trying to get it to play, or HomePod, trying to get it to play songs that have weird titles that themselves might be interpretable as commands, and they just literally can't get it to play those songs or those albums because there's no way, to your point, to get it to understand...
John:
that it's a string literal that it's a placeholder you know to get it to parse as initiation command placeholder for thing for song name and then verb right and it just it stubbornly refuses to do it and it's trying to be flexible so it can like interpret meaning or whatever but if there's any ambiguity it falls over whereas the alexa one is very cut and dried and there are certain forms that you can put it in certain places where it expects the placeholders and if you play that text adventure game with your cylinder
John:
it has predictable functionality like it doesn't vary like with the songs with homepod some songs you can say it a million different ways because there's no way that song title is potentially misinterpreted but other songs it screws up whereas with the placeholder format anything you put in there
John:
I bet you would get your cylinder to say, start a timer for 10 minutes for 10 minutes.
John:
I bet you could nest it and it would still figure it out because it's probably just doing a very naive text-to-speech and then parsing that.
John:
And speaking of naive text-to-speech, on the thing you were getting at before about doing compound things...
John:
Even Google is not above punting on this.
John:
Like they have a feature of the HomePod where you essentially set up macros.
John:
You're like, look, if there's a series of commands that you could issue, but you don't want to say all those words because it's weird and awkward, just tell us what you're going to say.
John:
And when you say that, we will do all these other things.
John:
That's really cool.
John:
I mean, it's not.
John:
It's like the most brain-dead thing ever.
John:
No, but it's useful.
John:
They had just put ATP so they can say, hey, cylinder, ATP, and it says, play the latest episode of Accidental Tech Podcast.
John:
It's just a shorter way to say that, but literally any list of commands you can do.
John:
It's just macro expansion, very simple macro expansion.
John:
If it was truly intelligent, you wouldn't have to do that.
John:
You would...
John:
be able to converse with it and shorten what you say.
John:
And based on how often you ask for a thing that's similar to this, blah, blah, blah, we're not there yet.
John:
Right.
John:
But I'm just showing that Google eventually says the utility of letting programming people essentially make macros of their own design.
John:
And then we'll just dumbly use, uh, dumbly.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, speech to text and then map it onto one of these macros.
John:
And if it matches one of them, we'll do that thing.
John:
Uh,
John:
It provides utility while they work on providing the actual intelligence at some point in the future.
Marco:
No, I mean, and that's useful.
Marco:
And I would also posit that I bet Google Home customers are more programmers than...
Marco:
than average uh but but also like you know so going back to my to my you know start a start french fries timer like that's that sounds you know contrived in an edge case uh but what i really get tripped up by places where siri does because siri seems to make no effort to to understand that kind of syntax but that can also trip up legitimate you know quote legitimate use cases so for instance the other day i said
Marco:
I asked Siri to remind me in things to add the 12 volt battery to my Tesla repair.
Marco:
Now it's the, the word add Siri interprets that as to add to the to do list.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So even though I said, remind me to add this, blah, blah, blah, it ignored the fact that there was already another word in the sentence that said, remind me to remind me, basically.
Marco:
It didn't figure that out.
Marco:
So when I said, remind me to add 12-volt battery to my Tesla repair, I got some task and things that said something along the lines of 12-volt battery to my test pair.
Marco:
So it didn't parse the sentence correctly at all.
Marco:
And I also have...
Marco:
So inconsistencies there where when you're asking, you know, to remind you about something, you will usually put some kind of word between remind me like to.
Marco:
So remind me to take the trash out.
Marco:
most of the time Siri parses that as add a reminder with the text, take the trash out.
Marco:
Sometimes it parses it as add a reminder with the text to take the trash out.
Marco:
So we'll have a reminder that says to take the trash out.
Marco:
And it's like literally the same thing.
Marco:
Sometimes we'll do that.
Marco:
Sometimes won't.
Marco:
It's just like, this is one of those things like whatever, whatever algorithms and machine learning Siri is doing to parse sentence structure is,
Marco:
seems like it's significantly behind the others and also inconsistent like so much of Siri and it's just kind of I don't know it's frustrating like that because that that seems this seems like easy stuff like basics of adding reminders and setting timers and stuff like that like
Marco:
this is what Siri was demoed with in 2011.
Marco:
Like this, this should be easier and better by now.
Marco:
And we know from the other assistants that it can be better because theirs are better.
Marco:
And so this is like, it's just yet one more thing that just like, it's a little like paper cut every time I use Siri that like one of these dumb things happens and the other ones it doesn't.
John:
I think that was that reminders thing of where it thinks you're trying to add something to a list was like one of my original Siri complaints, maybe on this program, maybe on an earlier podcast.
John:
I had the exact same problem.
John:
I, the thing I wanted to remind me about it stubbornly insisted on interpreting as an attempt to either create or add to some unknown list that I did didn't exist because I was trying to maintain the list and remind myself to put things on the list.
John:
I was kind of like you were doing and it just could not handle it.
John:
And even today when I do reminders,
John:
Sometimes I'll do multiple tries and I'll have to go into text adventure mode where I'm just like, look, I'm going to give a name of this reminder.
John:
I'm not going to have like normal syntax.
John:
I'm going to be like, remind me.
John:
And then a phrase that is unambiguously interpreted as text that has to appear there, but it's not the way I would want to phrase it.
John:
Like just enough so that I will beat the text adventure, but also not so much that when I go look at the reminder, I won't understand what I was doing.
John:
Um, and, and this is like, here's another speaking of inconsistency.
John:
I've always loved the feature of Siri.
John:
I'm assuming it's a feature of Siri where, um,
John:
I would say I would create a reminder or something involving one of a family member's name.
John:
And I assume it would look in contacts for the spelling, right?
John:
Like my daughter is Kate, but she spells it with a C and it would transcribe it as like a K, but then it would like do some processing and change it to a C because it, I'm assuming knows that I have that listed as a nickname for my daughter and my contacts.
And,
John:
And I appreciated that feature.
John:
It's like I'm constantly talking about this Kate person.
John:
It's never with a K. And I'll correct it if it transcribes it with a K. And I like the fact that it seemed like it had figured out, oh, at some point along the line, it's like, all right, there's no Kate with a K in your contacts, which would be bad if there was.
John:
I think it should figure it out anyway.
John:
But there's no Kate with a K. I'll change it to a C. And every time I saw that little Kate changed to a C, I'm like, oh, that's nice.
John:
That's Siri being smart.
John:
Again, kind of like the Google thing where you get like a good feeling from using a product that you gave it something challenging and it used its smarts.
John:
But lately, it's decided to go back to K. And I'm kind of annoyed at it.
John:
I'm like, come on, change to a C. And it just never does.
John:
So I go and edit it and I change it to a C myself.
John:
And why?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know, man.
John:
Just stop working.
Marco:
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Casey:
moving on to uh annoyances and language but written language scott little writes i'm almost sure that the you shut down dialogue as in you shut down your computer uh only happens after the user is force powered off the machine for example when the whole system hangs not after a kernel panic so in reality the text is accurate i could have sworn i tried to make this point on the show and either i didn't or maybe maybe it hit the editing room floor one way or the other but
Casey:
That's what I thought, too.
Casey:
And I thought we concluded I was crazy.
Marco:
You are crazy, but maybe not for this reason.
Marco:
So I was talking about how this dialogue of you shut down your computer because of a problem infuriated me because that often happens when I don't feel that I'm at fault for the problem.
Marco:
So I think this is correct, that it does only come up with an improper shutdown, maybe not a kernel panic.
Marco:
The problem is like there are certain situations where you have to for shut down the computer because of like a bug in Mac OS, you know, like it won't wake from sleep or something like that.
Marco:
Like this happens all the time, you know, well, not all the time.
Marco:
This happens to every Mac person at some point, especially if you're a laptop person.
Marco:
This happens a lot, especially regarding waking from sleep.
Marco:
But,
Marco:
There are some times where you have to hold down the power button for five seconds to get the computer to turn off or to turn on.
Marco:
And then it says, you shut down your computer because of a problem.
Marco:
So it's kind of like...
Marco:
It's kind of like slapping you in the face.
Marco:
It's like, well, it was your problem.
Marco:
You're throwing this back on me.
Marco:
But I didn't write the bug that caused my computers to need to be power cycled.
Marco:
So I think this is correct.
Marco:
I think it does only come up when it's been improperly shut down.
Marco:
But I still think that it's bad language design to...
Marco:
throw the action on the user to say you shut down the computer like you can just say the computer was shut down improperly or the computer didn't shut down correctly or something like you can say you can reword that in so many ways that that don't like ascribe the the purpose of this to the user because like
Marco:
The user at that point is probably not very happy with the computer because the computer just did something wrong.
Marco:
Like the computer just like malfunctioned.
Marco:
And then the computer says, you didn't do this right.
Marco:
So it's not a good time to do that.
John:
So I think the wording actually is reasonably fair for the thing where it was user initiated.
John:
And we got a lot of feedback from people saying that's when they see this dialogue.
John:
But we also got feedback from people saying,
John:
I did not turn this thing off.
John:
I didn't unplug it.
John:
I didn't hold down the power key.
John:
And yet I saw this dialogue.
John:
And like I said, it can't know whether you are the one that caused whatever cleanup things not to have been cleaned up so that on boot up it finds this uncleaned up file, whatever flag thing, whatever heuristic it uses to determine that it didn't get to shut down properly last time.
John:
There are a number of things that can cause that to happen, only a couple of which are the human doing something, and it has no idea what you did.
John:
So I think this dialogue still does show up in cases where there actually was no user action.
John:
Even if you had some kind of catastrophic crash that throws you back to login window, it might not have the time to clean up the things or the processes that died.
John:
Or crash couldn't have cleaned up the little thing so that when you log back in, it throws this dollar because, again, this is asking you, do you want to open the applications that are open when you shut down?
John:
Right.
John:
Like telling you if you want to resource state just in case one of those applications is one of the things that caused the crash or something.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's a good dialogue box.
John:
I think this should be there.
John:
But I don't think it can know that you shut down your computer.
John:
I think it does guess right a lot of the time.
John:
And I think it's not actually telling you that the problem was yours or that you shouldn't have shut down the computer.
John:
But it is a little bit more accusatory than it probably should be because it just can't be sure that you shut down your computer.
John:
Somebody did.
John:
Might have been you.
John:
What if a different person turned on the computer and the person who actually shut it down left?
John:
Now you're being yelled at for shutting down the computer, but you didn't shut down the guy who was here two seconds ago did.
John:
so probably not the best wording but it is at least a little bit potentially more accurate than we thought it was yeah what if you have like the world's worst office mates or roommates they come to come by and hold down power for five seconds your computer sometimes well i remember holding down power doesn't reboot holding down power just turns the thing off so you could you could someone someone could uh someone in your family let's say
John:
Yeah.
John:
and hopefully they find the power switch which used to be on the keyboard which was super convenient and the thing starts up and it says you shut down the computer probably like what do you mean i just woke up i didn't shut down the computer because of a problem so again the dialogue box can't know so it could probably probably should err on the side of being uh on assuming your innocence
Marco:
I love how much time we've given this dialogue box because it drives me nuts every time.
Marco:
At least it doesn't have a typo like disk utility.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Maybe in peak Sierra or whatever the hell comes next.
Marco:
I don't know anything about California.
Marco:
Maybe somebody will reword this dialogue in the English localization to not do this stupid blame thing.
Casey:
Okay, we need to move on.
Casey:
So let's talk about GDPR, which I already forgot the acronym, but it's basically the you are in control of your data law that we discussed last week.
Casey:
Aaron Power writes in, with regard to the cookie law in GDPR, I think that the problem is that companies, especially American companies, don't understand what the law covers and put warnings when there's no need or don't put warnings in when they're required.
Casey:
So to talk about the cookie law, then that doesn't apply only to cookies, according to Aaron.
Casey:
It applies to any form of persistent storage, like local storage.
Casey:
It also doesn't apply to first party cookies.
Casey:
So like a cookie to keep you logged in.
Casey:
It only applies when there are cookies from a third party, like Google Analytics.
Casey:
Now, according to Aaron, the cookie law was weak.
Casey:
However, GDPR is a much stricter, more consequential law, and there's bigger penalties if you don't follow it.
Casey:
So there's a lot of bullets here.
Casey:
I'm assuming because one of you put this in the show notes, I am supposed to be reading them, so I will do so.
John:
You're supposed to learn how to summarize them.
John:
The challenge is – you are the chief.
John:
You're not just a summarizer, Casey.
John:
You're the chief summarizer in chief.
Casey:
I'm pulling at my tie.
Casey:
I'm pulling at my tie right now.
Casey:
I'm adjusting my neck and whatnot.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So basically any of the personal information that you give to a company, it is qualified under GDPR.
Casey:
The company can't hold on to it unless there's a reasonable reason to do so.
Casey:
They need to absolutely get your consent to hold on to it.
Casey:
And with kids, it requires their parents' permission, which apparently must be verifiable.
Casey:
Then once you say, no, I don't want you to have my data anymore, then the data must be at least slightly anonymized.
Casey:
such that a single piece of data isn't enough to identify you.
Casey:
And then you can also ask at any time for what personal data the company has for you.
Casey:
And also, you can get them to erase your data and inform third parties that they need to erase their data.
Casey:
Now, the real kicker, though, is that if they don't do this, the fines can be up to 20 million euros.
Casey:
Or 4% of the company's worldwide turnover, whatever that means.
Casey:
But I'm assuming that's a lot.
Casey:
And it's not whichever is lower.
Casey:
It's whichever is higher.
John:
Turnover is one of those.
John:
I'm assuming it's a Britishism, but they just mean revenue.
John:
4% of the company's revenue in Americanese.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
So basically, this could amount to a whole crowd.
Casey:
crap load of money and that's why everyone especially in europe who's actually paying attention to this uh is freaking out and not to say that americans shouldn't be freaking out because we will be held to this as well but it seems that the europeans are way ahead of this and i believe this comes online that's a poor choice of words but i believe this becomes law and and it can be enforced sometime in the next few months if i'm not mistaken
Marco:
this is like you know last episode like i had read some about it i was a little familiar with it um i should have been a lot more familiar with it this is like the kind of thing like i don't know why i'm only hearing about this like a month or two before it goes live but i'm glad i heard about it at least a month or two before it goes live because you can make your onboarding screen right
Marco:
Well, I have a login screen already.
Marco:
Overcast has already complied with a lot of this already, just by having fairly reasonable practices, not collecting that much data in the first place, having reasonable security practices, and having a very clear privacy policy.
Marco:
I was kind of already inadvertently implementing about two-thirds of the stuff I needed to do.
Marco:
So it's not a huge deal for me.
Marco:
But this is a huge deal for pretty much anybody who runs any kind of web service or app that collects data.
Marco:
And it's not – because it isn't just – Casey, you said data that people enter.
Marco:
That's not necessarily the limit.
Marco:
It's just data that you collect and store about people or analyze about people.
Marco:
Even if you don't store, I think if you analyze it.
Marco:
Anyway, it's complicated.
Marco:
I suggest anybody who runs a web service or an app that is responsible for it
Marco:
I strongly suggest you look into GDPR now, like very, very, very quickly, because there are a lot of ramifications.
Marco:
It's pretty cool.
Marco:
It's pretty big.
Marco:
It does not just apply to European companies because it applies to any company worldwide that stores data about European users or European citizens.
Marco:
which is pretty much every web service unless you block Europe for some dumb reason.
Marco:
But it's going to apply to pretty much everybody.
Marco:
And so this is like – it's way more – it's way stronger than that cookie law because the cookie law I think only basically applied or at least was ever enforced for European countries –
Marco:
if it was enforced anywhere ever but but it would you know only european websites would display those cookie warnings but this is way bigger than that uh and and this this will affect tech stuff worldwide and you know in in the context of a lot of the stuff going on recently with with tech stuff especially like this horrible facebook cambridge analytics you know horrible scandal bs that i mean look facebook's a horrible company i i don't know who knew
Marco:
yeah it's like not a lot of this is new or shocking to me it's just really horrible and sad and just disgusting um but anyway this this law will have a pretty big impact on a lot of the worst stuff about the web and it's probably going to be a pretty good positive impact it's probably well not good for them uh but but screw them um
Marco:
It's probably going to have a really good impact for people who respect their users and those users who want to be respected.
Marco:
So it's going to be a good thing.
Marco:
I wish there were more resources online so far about how to comply.
Marco:
without having to hire a GDPR compliance specialist for a lot of money that you probably can't get in late April to help you out.
Marco:
But it's going to change a lot of things if it's enforced.
Marco:
And the EU is usually pretty good.
Marco:
When they pass consumer protection regulations, they tend to enforce them.
Marco:
So this should be interesting.
Marco:
It's probably going to be a really big deal
Marco:
And it's going to be a slight pain in the butt to just get some of the boilerplate stuff.
Marco:
But from what I've seen so far, most of it's pretty common sense stuff.
Marco:
It's going to be a pain for bigger companies, I think.
Marco:
But for small companies, it seems like it's actually not that big of a deal.
Casey:
cool i mean it's intense but it's for the best nick tempelis writes in to give you an example of the teeth of this law this is still um the gdpr for the cambridge analytica breach facebook would be fined up to 813 million dollars just for not notifying its users so like we were saying
Casey:
oh boy, this is the real deal.
Marco:
Yeah, because there's also provisions about, you know, what, like, first of all, security measures that you, you know, security level, you know, responsibility that you have to maintain to protect the user data.
Marco:
You have to, like, keep logs of who accesses the user data in your company.
Marco:
So, like, you know, you can't say, like, oh, we didn't know, you know, some intern was copying all the files.
Marco:
Like, you know, you have to keep logs and keep audits.
Marco:
There's stuff about that.
Marco:
There's stuff about, you know, if you have a data breach, how you have to notify people, you know, stuff like that, what you have to do.
Marco:
So it's very wide-reaching.
Marco:
It's a very, very big policy change that is seemingly mostly or entirely pretty good common sense stuff.
Marco:
If you think, how should things be with regard to safekeeping and collecting personal data?
Marco:
Most of it's pretty common sense stuff.
Marco:
So again, I think this is going to be potentially a very big thing.
Casey:
Yeah, agreed.
Casey:
Continuing on, AWACS writes, a key part of GDPR is that the company collecting the personal data is directly responsible for any leak or misuse.
Casey:
It can't shift the blame to a contractor, partner or third party.
Casey:
And we see that a lot in the US where, oh, there was this big leak.
Casey:
Actually, Apple just recently, it was a month or two ago, had...
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
It was like the bootloader for an old version of iOS or something like that.
Casey:
I'm sure I have the details slightly wrong.
Marco:
Yeah, it was the source code to, yeah, the source code to like iBoot, whatever that, I guess it's the bootloader.
Marco:
I don't actually know that much about iOS internals.
Marco:
But yeah, the source code to iBoot, like an old version of it from a few years back leaked.
Marco:
And they said that it was apparently like an intern had copied the entire source tree and taken it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So AWACS's point here is that you can't just pass the buck and be like, oh, Joe Schmo's consulting firm is the reason that this all leaked.
Casey:
Go talk to them.
Casey:
It's still your problem.
John:
Well, that's an interesting theory.
John:
I'm not sure how well that law works in the American legal system, though, because you know that any company the size of Apple, if they contract any other company, they basically says, oh, and by the way, if the work you do for us causes us to get sued, you agree to pay all damages.
John:
Now, you can't get blood from a stone.
John:
But at the very least, you know, Apple can't shift the blame to the third party, but it can shift all of the penalties to the third party until the third party disappears and basically until they get run out of money, which may happen pretty quickly.
John:
But that's generally how big companies protect themselves is that if there's some law that makes Apple liable, they shift as much of that liability as possible to the small contractor company, and then they just get whatever's left over on top of them.
Casey:
Finally, Michael Sagi writes, GDPR is also incredibly technology agnostic in that it applies to everything everywhere and is conceived of as a regulation that nobody will ever be able to comply with.
Casey:
I can't state whether or not that's true or false, but that was their particular opinion.
John:
So that's another view of like a sort of wide-reaching regulation that it starts to seem like, well, this is so big.
John:
How could you ever comply with it?
John:
Because it's so vague and so far-reaching that like...
John:
A motivated enforcer could find literally any company not in compliance of some portion of it.
John:
Right.
John:
Because it tries to be so it tries to not fall into the trap of the cookie law or fall into the trap of the interpretation of the cookie law anyway.
John:
where it seems narrowly defined and you get all the negatives, the annoyance, and you don't actually get any of the benefits because everything else you can skirt around as technology evolves.
John:
And this tries to be so broad and so far-reaching and apply to everything you say and do, and it's so hard to comply with.
John:
It's just like, how can I ever comply with this?
John:
There's just too many regulations.
John:
But there are industries...
John:
that are like that already that even in the U S that we, you know, we managed to survive.
John:
So healthcare is one where there's a bunch of laws related to healthcare and protection of information, you know, like, uh, or even, you know, finance, you got PCI for, for finance for basic, you know, credit card processing stuff.
John:
You've got HIPAA for, uh, health information and other, uh, personally identifiable information and stuff like that.
John:
And those are similarly, uh,
John:
weirdly acronymed, fairly wide-reaching regulations that I think you could find any company out of compliance with.
John:
HIPAA is very, very broad.
John:
And even a very diligent company trying to follow all the rules, inevitably there's some place where there's some kind of a breach.
John:
The purpose of these laws is not to say...
John:
everyone is going to be a hundred percent in compliance.
John:
Otherwise the law is useless.
John:
If people are even 50% in compliance, it's so much better than the status quo.
John:
Uh, and that the law has to be sort of enforced responsibly where, I mean, it's kind of like, I think this is a terrible analogy for lots of reasons, but it's something that people will be familiar with speed limits on American roads.
John:
Anyway, everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time, but through selective enforcement, uh,
John:
uh the speed limit allows the police to pull over someone who is really driving dangerously at a very high speed that's you know not safe for conditions while letting all the people who are five miles an hour over the limit on the highway sail by in some ways that is like giving too much power to the enforcers that basically everyone is not in compliance all the time so you can arrest anybody um
John:
But the reason it's a bad analogy is because I think we would agree that some data protection is good.
John:
We want our data to be protected in some way.
John:
We don't want companies to be able to do whatever they want with it.
John:
So we will take any amount of improvement over the status quo, even if it means that...
John:
A ill motivated enforcer of this law could punitively enforce pretty much any enforce these guidelines on any company and say, oh, you're you've missed compliance in this one little corner or whatever.
John:
So I don't think it's ideal.
John:
But I think, you know, again, with HIPAA.
John:
healthcare companies are not going out of business because there's zealous HIPAA enforcement by a giant fleet of, you know, government officers wandering over all the businesses in the world.
John:
That's just not how it works.
John:
They're outnumbered, for one thing.
John:
Like, there's more companies than there are people going around to check for HIPAA compliance, right?
John:
It's more like when your company is already doing enough terrible things to get the attention of law enforcement and
John:
That's when this stuff comes back to bite you, and I'm not going to say that's a good thing because, again, I think it's open for abuse, but it's better than the status quo where you can do whatever you want and keep it secret and nothing ever happens to you.
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Casey:
All right, so we have good news for Marco.
Casey:
We have a solution for your keyboard woes.
Casey:
You can quit whining and complaining, Marco, because Apple has patented a screen-based...
Marco:
macbook keyboard that will feel like it's real check that out how excited are you my friend try to contain your excitement and keep it professional if you please this is this is my excitement you know you know what apple also thinks they've released is a keyboard that works and is good they see they think that they think this will feel real they just like they think the macbook pro from 2016 is awesome
John:
Well, I mean, like this, this is definitely reads to me as one of those patents.
John:
We're talking before you patent every idea you have, whether you whether you've gotten it to work or not, because our patent system is dumb.
John:
And this is what you're forced to do with our dumb patent system.
John:
and so when i look at patents i'm putting them into the bins of that's a thing that could conceivably ship because i think they could have actually figured out a way to make that and the other bin is that's an idea that someone someone had some time uh that they probably never got to work but that they patent it anyway because you have to patent everything because patents are dumb and this definitely falls into the second bin where i you know as we've discussed before
John:
uh apple has on-screen keyboards uh and considering future on-screen keyboards is an obvious thing to do right especially for devices like ipads where you want the keyboard to be small and imagine if when you're not using a keyboard you'd repurpose that as a second screen it's an obvious thing that they should be investigating and of course there's downsides to on-screen keyboards so you think they would investigate how can we make on-screen keyboards less crappy
John:
And here's a patent describing a couple of ways.
John:
And I was amazed.
John:
Since you don't actually have to have a working version of anything or understand how you're going to manufacture this, it's mostly just an idea, which is why patents are dumb.
John:
I was surprised by how...
John:
unappealing i found the ideas in this patent because normally you make the ideas like imagine if there was a keyboard that did this and that and the other thing you're like wow that would be cool too bad we have no idea how to do that huh anyway um all the ideas in this one sounded awful to me like even if you could execute all of them so the idea is it's a picture of a keyboard but we all know typing on a picture of a keyboard isn't great because you can't feel the keys and you can't rest your fingers on the keys like you can on a keyboard like we all know what the disadvantage we all have on-screen keyboards especially on ipads there disadvantages them so how do we overcome those disadvantages and
John:
And this patent has a couple of ways.
John:
One way is that the screen would actually smush in when you press it to let you know when you've hit something and it would give you feedback.
John:
That feels like a button, doesn't it?
John:
I cannot imagine a screen that I can smush in with my finger and it pushes back on me a little bit feeling like a button.
John:
It would feel like a screen that smushes in a little bit.
John:
Well, to be fair, I mean, that's what the trackpad buttons do.
John:
But it doesn't deform underneath your fingertip.
John:
It deforms across the entire axis.
John:
Like if you look at the pictures, this is the idea of like you are pressing.
John:
You don't have to imagine how this would be because just think back to your palm devices that you all had because they're all old like me.
John:
They did not have capacitive touchscreens.
John:
They had pressure sensitive touch screens, which meant that you would have to squish the screen in with your finger or your fingernail or a stylus to cause it to register any kind of input.
John:
So the screen would smush in just at the point of contact.
John:
So if you press with a plastic stylus, it would make a little dimple there.
John:
If you press with your finger, it would make a little, you know, it felt nothing like a button.
John:
It didn't squish in very much.
John:
This seems like an exaggerated version of that.
John:
And this all in theory, this would also solve the problem of, oh, I can't rest my fingers on the home keys.
John:
because if you rest your fingers all of a sudden you're typing it's like well now you're not typing on this keyboard you're only typing when you smush which talk about an unsatisfying like if you don't like the the low travel like buttons on the the current uh apple laptop keyboards imagining having some kind of squishy membrane that you dig your little grubby fingertips into
John:
um and i don't know how that would really hold up and the second one is you can't feel the edges of the keys when everything's flat um one way to get around that is to have the screen bulge out around the keycap so it's like this lumpy island of mentos or something like where you just have these lumpy little squishy uh i was gonna say pustules but i don't do we don't want to go that far let's just say stress bumps let's go with that if we're gonna go with the uh
John:
is that uh i don't even know doesn't matter is that move on uh back to work probably anyway um one of the merlin man shows that wouldn't feel too good either another strategy they have is use i think they say electrostatic or something use use some kind of electrostatic charge to make it
John:
to make you be able to feel the edges because there's a different sensation in your fingers as you glide across the keys and that i i don't want any kind of tingly electrostatic anything telling me where the edges of anything are on a screen
John:
So I think this is a patent full of bad ideas that I hope they never make.
John:
And honestly, if you gave me ILM and a movie and said make any kind of futuristic clicking keyboard input that you want for a movie thing...
John:
like the only thing that occurs to me that would be acceptable would be that the screen is made up of like little nanomachines that rearrange themselves to become essentially a mechanical keyboard when you want to use a mechanical keyboard and then when you don't want to use it the little nanomachines rearrange themselves to become a screen because if you're going to stupidly confine yourself to keyboard input as as your futuristic way of getting text into a computer
John:
pressing a button with your fingers is a really good solution and so i would have to have the screen change into an actual button like a thing that moves up and down and has edges and then have it change back into a screen that's it like i don't have any better ideas on unlimited technology um obviously the better idea is not to type right not to do anything like that cracks me up about uh an anime series that neither one of you has heard of but that i enjoy um
John:
Ghost in the Shell was a movie and there's a television series and other spinoffs from it.
John:
And one of the signature visual flares is they have these, you know, sort of cyborg people or robot people sitting in front of computer terminals.
John:
And because they're not regular people.
John:
like you know their hands are all robotic hands it looks like normal hands but then they put their hands over the keyboard but now since they're robots their hands kind of like open up and fold out and explode and these huge tentacles come out of them where their fingers were and those tentacles fly over the key surfaces typing faster than any human can type across this giant keypad right
John:
like that's their you know superpower it's like a human can only type this fast with their little meat fingers but look at the these ghost in the shell cyborg machines they can type much faster because they have all these metal tendrils that go out all over the keyboard it's like if you're a cyborg just plug into the rs232 port for crying out loud it's gonna be faster than it's gonna be faster than typing keys on the keyboard like this this is a control room designed for these robot cyborg thingies
John:
they can just connect with a serial cable they don't need to press buttons anyway i'm i'm digressing um but yeah so this patent does not describe a product i would like to use and it does not describe a product i think anyone would like to use but it does show that apple continues to investigate ways to make uh to be able to have screen when you want a screen and keyboard when you want a keyboard
John:
There is one good idea in this patent.
Marco:
They fixed the arrow keys.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
They have the correct arrow key layout in the patent illustration.
John:
Yeah, but to get that layout, you have to stand up out of your seat and say, McDonald's.
John:
So it sucks.
John:
I get the reference.
Marco:
No, I mean, this is like... This is potentially cool down the road, but I think a concern that I have here... Again, this is not going to be a half-hour rant.
Marco:
A concern I have here is like...
Marco:
What if Apple looks at the current problems of the keyboards and the laptops and instead of saying, wow, we need to make more reliable key switches, what if they're like, you know, there's a problem.
Marco:
Laptop keyboards are unreliable.
Marco:
How do we get rid of the laptop keyboards?
Marco:
Because this is a really, really complicated solution to a problem that doesn't need to exist.
Marco:
And we already have way simpler, cheaper, more robust solutions already existing in the world for quite some time.
Marco:
They're called buttons.
Marco:
And they're fine.
Marco:
Like a keyboard with key switches has existed for quite some time.
Marco:
And they're wonderful.
Marco:
They're proven.
Marco:
They're durable.
Marco:
They're affordable.
Marco:
They're repairable.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
It's cool that somebody is filing patents and doing research in these crazy directions.
Marco:
I just really hope that that's just for file as many patents as possible purposes, not actual future product directions.
Marco:
Because the problem they're solving is entirely self-created and optional.
John:
it's not cool that they're following patents patents suck but uh we just saw a patent for for key switches last show right so they are investigating that but i think i think it actually is important to investigate ways to make on-screen keyboards better because like uh yes it's bad if they think this is a replacement for keyboards but we already have on-screen keyboards i would like those on-screen keyboards to be better and i also think
John:
Replacing those flat, smart keyboard things on iPads with thinner, lighter things that can double a second screen when they're not a keyboard would give everybody the multi-pad lifestyle.
John:
All right.
John:
And, you know, I think that's worth pursuing.
John:
If you can figure out a way to make a combo keyboard screen that is an okay screen and a passable keyboard, that's worth investigating.
John:
Not as a replacement for your laptops, unless it is really fantastic, but just as a potential accessory.
John:
Now, that said...
John:
this particular patent doesn't contain anything that i find uh compelling like that even if they could build everything that's exactly the way they said i don't think it would be a satisfying keyboard in fact i think it might even be less satisfying than just a picture of a keyboard on a screen that we have now but i do think apple should be investigating this because they do have a lot of devices with screens they already have on-screen keyboards so yes of course they should be investigating ways to make them better and every way they investigate whether it turns out to be a turkey or not they're going to patent it
John:
By the way, let's appreciate all the ways that patent diagrams are ridiculous.
John:
There's, of course, the classic patent hands where anytime you see a hand in a patent, it looks inhuman and weird.
John:
They did pretty good.
John:
These fingers look kind of like fingers, so I'm proud of them there.
John:
But then the keyboard?
John:
Control isn't next to the spacebar.
John:
What the hell?
John:
Like, you have a keyboard right in front of you probably when you're making this diagram.
John:
Like, just look down.
John:
Control isn't next to the keyboard.
John:
And they didn't label all the modifiers anyway.
John:
They just labeled some of them.
John:
I'm going to label control.
John:
And you know what?
John:
Control's next to the spacebar, right, on a Mac?
John:
Okay, let's do that.
John:
Nope.
Casey:
oh john oh my word uh speaking of apple making things apparently they're making their own displays so we got word uh over the last few days that apple is trying to do micro led which is i guess a also organic but different than oled uh display technology and apparently somewhere in california and in in uh cahoots with somewhere in
Casey:
They are trying to in-house develop a brand new display technology, and the theory goes that they will figure out how to create it, figure out how to manufacture it, and then throw it over the wall to some other company like Samsung or perhaps Foxconn to actually build these in volumes.
Casey:
So they're not getting into the manufacturing business, but they are getting deeper into the creation of hardware-specifically displays business in a move that surprises pretty much nobody.
Casey:
I think this is a good idea.
Casey:
I like the sound of this.
Casey:
I don't personally have too much more to say about it, but I'm assuming one of you do.
Casey:
So, Marco, thoughts?
Marco:
I think it's a good idea for them to be looking into this.
Marco:
The screen is such a critical part of all of their products, really, I guess except the HomePod and the iPod Shuffle.
Marco:
They don't make those anymore.
Marco:
The screen is so important.
Marco:
And especially with modern high-end OLED screens, that's every Apple Watch and the iPhone X and every touch bar and presumably more products as time goes on because OLED is pretty awesome.
Marco:
The problem is that there aren't that many OLED manufacturers.
Marco:
It's pretty much like Samsung and LG, and LG seems to do really well in TV OLEDs, but seems to do pretty poorly in computer and phone displays.
Marco:
Now, Apple has been tied to basically LG and Samsung for LCD displays for years.
Marco:
Like I remember like like my my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, like when I when I made when I had my image retention issue and I made that that like waffle page.
Marco:
I had the LG panel, and the LG panel was the one that had all the image retention, and this Samsung panel didn't.
Marco:
It was that kind of thing.
Marco:
So they've had this kind of two-supplier thing for a while.
Marco:
With OLED for the phone, it's an incredibly important component.
Marco:
That OLED panel is the iPhone X. It's such an important component.
Marco:
It probably is a pretty large price component compared to the other components in it.
Marco:
It might be the most expensive part of the whole phone.
Marco:
So I can't imagine Apple is that happy to rely on just one company.
Marco:
Like those are only made by Samsung.
Marco:
They can currently only be made by Samsung.
Marco:
That probably doesn't make Apple feel good from like a just reliance perspective.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that that company is Samsung, which I'm sure they don't love.
Marco:
And yet they buy like a lot of flash from Samsung and stuff.
Marco:
But you can also get flash from other people if you need to.
Marco:
No one else can make that OLED screen that's in the iPhone X, in addition to the fact that they're giving tons of money to Samsung.
Marco:
So it does seem like an obvious thing for Apple to try to take display technology in-house the same way they've taken other critical parts like the A-series system on a chip and stuff like that.
Marco:
That does make total sense.
Marco:
Whether they can do it or not, I have no idea.
Marco:
I don't know anything about this business.
Marco:
It seems really ambitious.
Marco:
There's probably a really good reason so far why only Samsung can make these good enough OLED screens.
Marco:
So Apple going into micro OLED, which I've never even heard of until this rumor came.
Marco:
I didn't even know what was next.
Marco:
Maybe that's easier.
Marco:
Maybe that's a thing they can do.
Marco:
Maybe they've made some acquisitions towards that.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
But
Marco:
It's a totally defensible and sensible thing for them to be doing.
Marco:
Whether it ever amounts to anything, who knows?
Marco:
But it would be kind of cool if it did, because I can't imagine that they love, depending on Samsung, especially just Samsung, instead of having a balance.
Marco:
And also, other things they have taken in-house...
Marco:
tend to be pretty awesome.
Marco:
The Apple version of it that comes out later tends to be better than the off-the-shelf stuff at the time.
Marco:
Look at what they've done with the A-series CPUs, what they're doing with the GPUs now, what they're doing with the SSD controller in the Mac Pro, like the T thing, the wireless Bluetooth W chips.
Marco:
There's so many different things now that they're doing in-house that used to be third-party manufacturer components.
Marco:
And the Apple versions, because of the integration and the tie-ins and the optimizations they can do, are just better.
Marco:
So if they can do that same thing to displays, cool.
John:
So this strategy, I don't know if vertically integrated is the right word because I've never went to business school, but this strategy of aggressively in the whatever Tim Cook quote is, owning and controlling the major technologies that make up their products is actually...
John:
more more ambitious and more uh more more aggressive than the apple of old even the apple of apple's heyday which is a topic we will continue not to get to in this program um because it used to be that and maybe not just apple but across the entire industry um for computer makers there were people who made computers and
John:
And there were people who made parts that go into computers.
John:
And there were a lot of parts suppliers for almost every component.
John:
Every once in a while, there would be a part supplier that has something novel.
John:
So Sony with 3.5-inch floppy disk.
John:
uh was a change from the other floppy disks a very very sony a very sony type change like we're going to improve on this thing we have a new idea of how floppy disks could work check this out i'm not sure if sony was the maker of that thing but they but the sony 3.5 inch floppy drive just to give an example and
John:
sony apple would either know that they made it or sony would pitch them on making i think there's a good story about uh the macintosh engineers hiding a sony engineer in a closet uh not to let some higher up know that they were looking into getting a 3.5 inch floppy drive because they were still insisting that it had to use a five and a quarter which would have been so gross good job closet hiding people um we'll put a
John:
And the synergy between, hey, I'm a part supplier and we have this cool idea for the thing.
John:
And, hey, I'm a person who uses parts to make products.
John:
Maybe we can make a novel or interesting product or line of products out of this.
John:
And it's a good deal for you because you get to make a cool product.
John:
And it's a good deal for us because we came up with this novel product.
John:
And eventually, everyone can make 3.5-inch floppies because they somehow skirted these super stupid worlds of patents enough to be able to...
John:
have the part manufactured across the industry the ipod is another example whatever that hard drive maker was was it hitachi or whoever came up with those really teeny tiny hard drives the light bulb goes off like what could we do with a little hard drive like that's really cool and you get something like the ipod right
John:
but eventually all sorts of little hard drives are available or flash replaces the hard drives or like there's no sort of monopoly on one kind of thing and so apple in the days when that was the way the industry worked was more or less content to say we're going to source our parts from the best parts available who has the best screens who has the best ram or the you know the best combination of you can manufacture a lot of them it has a good price they have good performance they have good quality control they would shop around from the part suppliers and
John:
from product to product and year to year they'd pick different screens or different ram or different hard drives or different video cards back when they weren't really super mad at nvidia you know like and and that's how they built their computers there's a bunch of companies making parts and we will pick among them and maybe we'll try to influence their roadmaps and maybe once in a while someone has a great thing we will assemble them into a product
John:
The more aggressive strategy is to say, I see the world of parts manufacturers out there and they make all sorts of interesting things.
John:
And sometimes every once in a while, someone has a really cool one that sparks their interest and we can make a cool product out of.
John:
But that's not good enough.
John:
We know exactly what we want.
John:
We want to push the envelope in a specific direction.
John:
We have an idea of how this could be done better in service of a kind of product or even a specific product that we have in mind.
John:
And we're not going to try to coerce or cajole some other parts maker into making it.
John:
And we're not going to wait around for someone else to make it.
John:
And we're not going to buy anyone else's off-the-shelf parts and try to cobble together stuff off the shelf.
John:
We're going to design our own CPUs for our phones with our own GPUs and our own weird, you know, step counting, neural network fingerprint sensing, secure englave, whatever.
John:
Like, if the first version has to be assembled partially out of parts that come to the industry, that's fine.
John:
But eventually, we like to bring that in-house because we feel like we can do it better.
John:
We know exactly what we want for the watch.
John:
We know exactly what we want for our phones.
John:
I don't want to have to convince some other company to make this product for me.
John:
And in fact, we have some better ideas about how it might be done because we hide all the best people in this industry because we have too much money, right?
John:
And that is way more aggressive than just shopping among like, oh, we're going to use a Sony panel on this display or we're going to use Trinitrons because they're the best CRTs.
John:
It's way more aggressive to say, we're going to do it ourselves because...
John:
It's a competitive advantage not to have to wait for the rest of the industry to do anything.
John:
And in the case of these screens, even if you're in a situation where one company makes the best screens and Apple wants the best screens and they feel bad getting one supplier, I think Apple's view on it, aside from that we just don't like giving money to Samsung as a single supplier, is to say...
John:
We think we can do that better because we know exactly what we want.
John:
And it's a pain to have to tell Samsung exactly what we want and get them to build the thing that we want and go through all that thing.
John:
We know what we want.
John:
Why don't we just do it ourselves?
John:
And that's what they've been doing with lots of components.
John:
If they have any problems with any kind of supplier, like Qualcomm being annoying about charging them lots of money or...
John:
them not having lots of alternatives and trying to get intel to build radio chips and stuff and eventually say you know what i'm tired of this we have good engineers we know how to build things why don't we build the radio chips and not build so much as design and have manufactured for us the last bastion of that is manufacturing where thus far apple has been happy to say
John:
manufacturers compete amongst yourselves and we will give you cpu fab our design that you will fab for us and we will give you manufacturing thing our case design that you will machine out of aluminum for us and we will help you buy the machines for it and we'll help you work on the techniques to use those machines and we'll do all this stuff but in the end
John:
So Apple doesn't own the factories.
John:
Apple does not own a silicon CPU fab.
John:
It still allows other companies to do that for it.
John:
So it hasn't gotten to the point where we say, you know what, I'm tired of waiting for, you know, Taiwan semiconductor to come up with a new fab.
John:
Let's make our own fab because that starts to get, you know, a couple billion here, a couple billion there.
John:
So you're talking real money.
John:
So so far, they've been avoiding that.
John:
But.
John:
the modern apple i think is more aggressive than any other apple has been in their drive to get a real competitive edge in the market by saying we'll do it ourselves and having the confidence that they'll be able to be able to do it better than anyone else which is exciting from a technology perspective to see
John:
That's what we always want Apple to do.
John:
Although it may seem exciting when Apple is able to synthesize from the parts that are available to almost anybody or most people, plus or minus one or two parts, to make a great product out of it.
John:
It's even more exciting, I guess in the iPhone age, to see them make phones that are just leaps and bounds better in certain areas than other phones.
John:
for reasons that are directly traceable to Apple strategy to say, bring the system on a chips in house.
John:
That's why their system on a chips are so much better than everybody else's.
John:
If they were still sitting around and they were using the same chips as Android phones,
John:
though the i think the phone landscape would look very different apple wouldn't be able to do half the things that it does because it would be working with cpus that are not not going to say that are worse or slower which in many cases they are but that simply are not tailored to the set of features that apple wants it picks the exact number of cores the exact number of amount of
John:
cache right the the you know the exact layout so they can put all their different you know they know exactly what they want for like the iphone 10 to do face id and if they had to adapt some weird you know snapdragon processor that has way more cores than they want but not enough of something else that they want uh we'd still be waiting for for face id so
John:
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that I think that this aspect of Apple, the technological aggression, is actually, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of the company today and probably underappreciated by anybody who doesn't follow Apple really closely and doesn't really care what's in their products.
John:
But I find it exciting.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's move on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
Simon Edging says, hey, what's the deal with the bits that were once used as an important spec for gaming consoles?
Casey:
How many bits does a modern console have?
Casey:
And why is it no longer used in marketing?
Casey:
And so as soon as I read this, I thought back to the days of the Nintendo 64, which everyone knew was 64-bit because it was right there in the name.
Casey:
And oh, man, was that thing way cooler than any other modern console or so I thought when I was 10 or whatever.
Casey:
So, John, as the chief gamer of the three of us, can you explain to me what's the deal with these bits?
John:
And why are they no longer used in marketing?
John:
Well, marketing has moved entirely on to blast processing as a differentiating factor.
John:
All right.
John:
So the bits thing, like, first I read this question, and I'm like...
John:
Is that a thing that people really wonder about?
John:
Are consoles still marketed with bits?
John:
And I think the person who's asking this must have lived through the era when that was true.
John:
These days, I haven't seen the PS3 or PS4, or even the PS2 for that matter, marketing with bits.
John:
It's a thing that has passed us by for good reasons.
John:
But back when it was used as a marketing turn...
John:
um ascribing a number of bits to a cpu like oh this is a 16-bit cpu this is a 32-bit cpu this is a 64-bit cpu there's no hard and fast rules as with most things in marketing when you can say something like that but in general the number of bits tended to be applicable because certain things have the same number of bits so
John:
The, you know, the integer registers, the place where you store a number would have 16 bits and the address bus would be 16 bits wide, which controlled how much RAM you could address.
John:
And you'd call that processor a 16 bit processor.
John:
didn't have to be the case for example there are many quote-unquote 32-bit processors that shipped with hardware-wise physically speaking a 24-bit memory bus i'm thinking of the original macintosh and many after that you'd still call it a 32-bit processor though because the integer registers were 32 bits wide and even on a quote-unquote 32-bit processor the floating point registers might have been 64 bits wide why is that not a 64-bit processor
John:
and what if the memory bus is wider than the integers and what if the integer is wider than the memory bus and like so there is no hard and fast rule but in general because usually either the memory bus or the integer register with or both were on this number and because there was a progression because it's more expensive especially in the early days to make wider buses to make larger registers right uh
John:
that each leap, like now we can make the registers 32 bits.
John:
Each leap was met with a marketing push to say, you know, the 386 is a 32-bit processor.
John:
And importantly, in terms of representable numbers for integers, 64-bit integers end way before you want them to, like 65,535, right?
John:
32-bit integers end at a pretty high number that you feel like, I can do a lot more with 4 billion.
John:
There's a lot more things I can count with precision from, you know, with the 4 billion items that I can count on.
John:
Whereas 65,000, I can think of lots of scenarios where I might need, and I'm very good at that.
John:
So once we cross 32 bits where, and same thing for memory addressing, although in the beginning there was no computer, no personal computer could fill up all the 32 bits of that memory bus.
John:
So eventually we got there.
Yeah.
John:
once you cross 32 you have a lot more headroom so 8-bit and 16-bit it's like lots of problems where this is annoying uh and floating point doesn't help you entirely because of precision and all that stuff 32-bits you're like i can run this for a while and we did we ran on quote-unquote 32-bit processors for a long time
John:
Until we eventually got to the point where you could fill a PC with more RAM than could be addressed with 32 bits, and then we needed to go to 64.
John:
But that took a really long time.
John:
Now our phones are freaking 64-bit, which is amazing if you live through the era where you had to progress through 16 and 32 and so on and so forth.
John:
Game consoles, same deal.
John:
They're computers.
John:
They have memory buses.
John:
Usually they use cheaper stuff because they cost less money than a PC.
John:
So when PCs were using 32-bit processors, game consoles maybe had 8 or 16-bit processors just because they had to cost so much less money, and it cost less money to make...
John:
you know smaller chips in surface area and the more lanes you have for your address buses everywhere and the wider your interest registers and all that other stuff the bigger they are um so once consoles like so 16-bit was uh turbo graphics 16 uh snes genesis uh second master system was 8-bit right yes anyway you can look on wikipedia what the bits were but so there was uh there was 8-bit gaming consoles 16-bit once we got to 32 uh
John:
Around the era, surprisingly, of the Nintendo 64, we got to 32.
John:
PlayStation was 32.
John:
Nintendo 64 was arguably not as 64-y as they made it out to be.
Casey:
Okay, why do you say that?
John:
I don't think every... I have to look it up in Wikipedia, but I don't think the memory bus on the Nintendo 64, for example, were 64-bits wide.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're right.
John:
There were parts of it that were 64-bit, but it was arguable.
John:
Because why would you make the memory bus 64-bits wide?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
I'm just pulling this off the top of my head, but seriously, there's no way in hell, physically speaking, they have a 64-bit memory bus on something that had like 2 megabytes of RAM.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
Yeah, because you need 4 gigs to exceed the addressability of 32-bits.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And if they did, it must have only been because they were reusing an existing part.
John:
But it just doesn't seem like they would do.
John:
It's the same reason they had 24-bit memory bus on the Macintosh.
John:
Because, first of all, you're never going to address, like, 4 gigabytes of RAM?
John:
Gigabytes?
John:
You can't have 4 gigabytes.
John:
You know, the Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
So even a 24-bit memory bus was over.
John:
So you save money because you have less...
John:
Yeah, less room on the chip, less traces on your board, blah, blah, blah.
John:
So I'm assuming that it wasn't.
John:
But if any part of it is 64-bit, you can call it 64-bit.
Casey:
Okay, so a little bit of digging as you were talking.
Casey:
The R4200 has a 32-entry translation local side buffer, yada, yada, yada, blah.
Casey:
The system bus is 64 bits wide and operates at half the internal clock frequency.
Casey:
However, the R4300i, which is what I believe was in the N64, is a derivative of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and a cut-down 32-bit system bus for reduced cost.
John:
yeah um but in marketing for mark needs and by the way like i said lots of times in 32-bit processors the uh like i've you know with x86 and x86 have an 80 80 bit wide floating point registers or something like that i don't remember something i just had to learn how to decode that format
John:
Yeah.
John:
But no one ever said it's an 80-bit processor.
John:
Just because of convention, they just kind of say, oh, the memory buzz and the engine registers, that's kind of what we call the processor, right?
John:
That's why they're marketing terms.
John:
Because 16-bit and 32-bit...
John:
it might you might think it means something but unless you know exactly what it means it doesn't you know never mind that like the width of the memory bus and the size of integer registers really says nothing about how fast the thing processes stuff like and you know anyway gauging speed is hard but there was a clear progression with number of bits up to about the 32 bit point where we hung out for a long time and now that we've gone to 64 bit it's
Marco:
uh where we really are 64 bits you know even 64 memory bus i don't think we're at full 64 what is what does like the zeons have they probably have like 48 bit yeah because there was that there was that pae thing for a while where like to address more than i think 16 gigs there was something like that where like even even the intel even when intel went 64 bit you couldn't address 64 bits worth of memory without certain tricks here and there and i i think that has since been lifted to a pretty high level but
John:
but but probably not a full 64 like i i i know that you can buy servers with like 256 gigs of ram in them right but you can't buy servers with however much ram fits in 64 bits which is some astronomical amount right yeah zeta bytes or whatever the hell it is um
John:
So we're still saving money in that regard.
John:
But 64-bit integer registers are going to run us a good long while.
John:
And I don't really see anything going to... First of all, there's no need for a 128-bit memory bus because we can't even physically put 64 bits of memory to fill that whole address space.
John:
And 128-bit integers aren't really getting you that much more...
John:
uh of uh of problems that you can deal with in 64-bit registers floating point registers are even wider than they've ever been now too and on gpus and in sort of the uh you know media streaming simd instruction sets those could actually stand to go a little bit wider just to be able to process more values at once because a lot of times they're using like
John:
what they call half precision values for games and stuff where you don't need so they'll use they'll still use 16 bit stuff just to pack more in to process more at once so there's probably headroom for those to all crank up to 32 and 64 bit to you know or to use floating point everywhere for everything so there's some headroom there but no one brags about gpus in terms of number of bits either because it doesn't make any sense and that's just not how they're marketed um
John:
So this is a very long-winded explanation that gets into more technical detail than you probably cared about.
John:
But I think that's part of the thing, that this was entirely a marketing thing that latched onto a real thing that happened in the progression of the width of certain aspects of CPU design in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that has leveled off because there's no longer any obvious benefit to widening these things at an accelerated rate.
Marco:
uh again setting aside gpus which there is some benefit to continuing to widen stuff there and they will continue to be one but gpus aren't marketed in that way so marketing's weird i would also say like you know they like back in you know like we grew up in the well casey and i grew up in these days john was already 50 but uh but you know we grew up in the time where like you know like like we we both really saw like the the 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit generations
Marco:
and you know 8-bit systems like they didn't market themselves as 8-bit it was the you know the nes versus the sega master system you know vast majority dominated by the nes and then the sega genesis mass you know was very heavily marketed when it came out as 16-bit because it was like this is twice as good like that was really like when the marketing i think was a piece like oh my god this is 16-bit and then the super nintendo came out and that was you know well marketed to be 16-bit as well not as heavily as the genesis though um
Marco:
And then, you know, we went 32-bit with the PlayStation 1, the Sega Saturn, and then the generations kind of started being staggered.
Marco:
Like, the N64 came out, there was a gap between the 32-bit generation and the N64.
Marco:
So it started becoming like, oh, look, since there's a gap, and the N64 was in many ways significantly better than the Saturn and PlayStation 1, then it was like, this is...
Marco:
They were kind of trying to say this is the next generation, even though it was kind of like a half generational step.
Marco:
Like the generations were no longer in sync.
Marco:
And then that continued in the future generations.
Marco:
Like Sega went kind of, you know, middle of generation with the Dreamcast.
Marco:
Then the PS2 came out really early.
Marco:
And then the Xbox happened like a little bit later.
Marco:
So like the generation started to become more staggered.
Marco:
And it wasn't all like, okay, these are the two systems for this one.
Marco:
Then these are the two systems for this one.
Marco:
And then, of course, this corresponded with, as what John was saying, how the bits kind of stopped growing and stopped mattering.
Marco:
The number of bits has so little bearing on modern performance.
Marco:
Computers back then, especially the kind of computers that were in game consoles, were really simple.
Marco:
i think once we got to the era of having many different processors being involved and having them all be pretty complex and then having things like vector instructions which you know take the stream like you know you mentioned simd and then you have gpus coming and you have the gpu revolution that's happened like over the last you know you know decade or so where like gpus have gotten so incredible and so much of computing is moving to the gpu and
Marco:
And that's where so much of the action is happening.
Marco:
And there, the bits are completely different than the CPU bits.
Marco:
A lot of things don't work the same way or don't matter the same ways.
Marco:
So I think most of the reason we've moved past the bits thing is that...
Marco:
you like like you know like Simon asked like how many bits does a modern console have you kind of can't say because like well how many how many bits in what part do the integer registers of the CPU or the address bus even matter to modern performance or is it like for a game console you're probably looking more more at the GPU than anything else how many bits wide is the GPU you know in various like buses and things like that like
Marco:
That might matter, but even that's hard to compare between different architectures and different generations and everything else.
Marco:
Everything is so much more advanced now that it's way more complicated.
Marco:
There really is no single number you can say, all right, this is a 128-bit system.
Marco:
You really can't say that anymore, and it's not really a relevant question to even ask.
John:
They do have the numbers that they say, though.
John:
To that end, manufacturers do throw numbers at you, but the numbers are no longer about width.
John:
in the most case although like i said i think they probably will go back to width once they start once the gpu uh precision starts going up and that starts mattering more in games but for now they don't say that but what they do tell you is uh
John:
They tell you flops, floating point operations per second of the GPU, because that's kind of how they just do the sort of, you know, my GPU is bigger than your GPU.
John:
Like, the architecture is so complicated that no one can comprehend it.
John:
Right?
John:
No regular people can comprehend it.
John:
And it's very regular and repeated.
John:
And maybe they'll tell you the number of execution units or something, a number of engines or a number of building blocks.
John:
But really what you want to know is floating point operations per second.
John:
That's just some big aggregate number that...
John:
doesn't really have any bearing because you're never actually maxing it out well maybe if you're a really good game developer you might be maxing out for some period of time they'll tell you memory bandwidth which is important for how you can shuffle information to and from your big pool of ram and to and from the the cpu and the gpu and those numbers i think have way more bearing on performance than any kind of width because at least they tell you like i can process this many things in this amount of times that i can ship this many things from a to b
John:
and these days that's what people are measuring consoles are and then maybe clock speeds they'll throw in there but really it's not that much they don't do even do that much cpu measuring there's lots of ways you could measure cpu but they don't even really compare those because they know that for the most part especially as we've gone to hd and now 4k the gpu is very often a limiting factor so they throw they throw that stuff around um
John:
So there's always some number that'll come up with a marketing team to let people measure their consoles against other people's consoles.
John:
But it hasn't been bits for a while.
John:
And speaking on the bits thing, I don't know if this was clear, but the reason it mattered so much back when we were going to 8 to 16 and 1632 is not just the accountability of things of saying, oh, 65K is not quite enough.
John:
I think the...
John:
The thing that brings it home is a link that I couldn't find.
John:
I just tried to Google for it.
John:
Maybe he'll be more successful.
John:
It's to think about what it would be like to build a game on a device that had 8-bit integer registers and no floating point.
John:
So you get 0 to 255 and you have to make a game.
John:
Like that's all you have.
John:
You can add, subtract, divide.
John:
You can do whatever you want with those numbers.
John:
Right.
John:
But there's no floating point and you can never have a number bigger than 255 and you can have a number smaller than zero.
John:
And if you want to do negatives, you can, you know, reserve a bit for sign and have your range.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's if my memory serves me correctly, that is not just a hypothetical exercise.
John:
That's the original Game Boy.
John:
And if you think of the sum of the games that are arranged in the middle of Game Boy, like say you're making a side scroller.
John:
How do you keep track of where they are on the thing?
John:
Or say you're doing a top view Legend of Zelda.
John:
Where are they on the map?
John:
How many inventory items do they have?
John:
Like try making a game where you can only count from zero to 255.
John:
It's really hard.
John:
You have to be very clever.
John:
And never mind that.
John:
Oh, by the way, that's also the thing that's figuring out how to draw the screen and what palettes to go from and how to define sprites and do stuff like that.
John:
That's why the bits mattered so much, because when you went from 8-bit to 16-bit, suddenly you had enough numbers for counting that you could define bigger color lookup tables and you could make bigger sprites and ship them around and count to higher numbers to make bigger maps.
John:
And yes, of course, audio processing is, you know, higher bit rate for audio and stuff like that.
John:
You would see the result of those bits on the screen.
John:
The clock speed, you don't even care what that was.
John:
You're just like, now I can count to higher numbers.
John:
Now I can keep track of more colors and more things on the screen because I have, you know, there's literally you can count to higher numbers.
John:
It makes a big difference, especially when you don't have floating point to approximate those things.
John:
And so the leap from 8, 16 to 32 were huge.
John:
partially because of the business just because you were so starved you were so starved for the ability to just count and do basic math and keep track of things in the limited architecture but once you can count to four billion you're probably okay with the counting thing you're probably okay with a number of colors you got all that stuff covered and by the way you have floating point some of the point along the line floating point comes in so if you really need to do something you can do floating point um
John:
And so that's why you don't have bits anymore.
John:
But I think bits were actually super important.
John:
Like Marco said, 16-bit was a change you could see.
John:
So much more than you could see the difference between PS3 and PS4.
John:
8-bit, 16-bit was just like... It was bigger than Retina.
John:
No one is confused about it.
John:
Is this an NES game or an SNES game?
John:
Nobody is confused.
John:
It was such a big difference.
John:
Kids these days... The closest thing they have is appreciating how much faster new iPhones are than previous ones because they're still getting faster pretty fast.
John:
but there is no technological equivalent to 8, 16, 32 bit console progression for people growing up today.
John:
So far, maybe when they get into like holographic things or biological modification, we'll have even bigger changes.
John:
But for now, you just have to listen to stories from old people.
Marco:
What I would say, too, like I think one of the biggest reasons why we stopped talking about bits is that even the whole concept of having these like console measuring contests just like fell out of relevance because consoles are all so powerful now.
Marco:
I don't know anybody who, I mean, maybe except John, who would make a console buying decision based on hardware specs.
Marco:
Oh, you're just not in the right forums.
Marco:
Console wars still exist.
Marco:
Oh, and I'm sure those people will always talk about it.
Marco:
But, like, I think it's definitely not in the mass market, if it ever was even.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
You don't buy a new console today because of how many mega flops or teraflops or whatever the unit is today.
Marco:
You don't buy a console today based on that.
Marco:
If you're deciding between the Xbox of the day and the PlayStation of the day and the Switch of the day, that decision is going to be made based on things like games, like titles that are available for the systems.
Marco:
It's going to be based on things like
Marco:
media features, output features, like does it support 4K or not, VR potential, add-on potential.
Marco:
That's going to be the kind of thing that most people buy their consoles based on these days.
Marco:
The hardware is so good now.
Marco:
The gains that are occurring in the hardware are oftentimes not very relevant in numeric terms compared to other attributes of the system that aren't necessarily its raw performance.
Casey:
So my dad, as I've mentioned in the past on this show, worked for IBM for almost my entire life.
Casey:
And I remember that he was so excited about the cell processor in the PlayStation 3 and was talking to me constantly about it.
Casey:
I don't know how much of that was just because he was an IBMer and it was an IBM processor, or at least in part anyway.
Casey:
I don't know how much of that was like regular people marketing or how much of that was just IBM patting themselves on the back.
Casey:
But
Casey:
And John, I'm kind of looking at you to clarify, but I heard about this cell processor constantly about, oh, Casey, did you hear what they're doing with the cell now?
Casey:
Oh, and they're doing this for, you know, scientific computing.
Casey:
Oh, they're doing this for some other thing.
Casey:
You know, it's not just about the PlayStation.
Casey:
It's going to revolutionize the way computers are built, which sort of kind of was, sort of kind of wasn't.
Casey:
But anyway, did that marketing ever really happen or was that just being the child of an IBMer?
Yeah.
John:
It did.
John:
And like I said, part of the reason you don't see as much of that these days is just because the consoles became so similar because the ability to create the stuff that goes into consoles started to go so far outside the realm of console developers ability.
John:
They couldn't even like outsource it and say, we want you to build you a CPU like this just because it costs so much money.
John:
And so they started to have to pool their resources, and it would be like NVIDIA says, well, we've got a lot of GPUs, and we can customize one of our GPUs for your thing, but we're not going to build you a fresh GPU from scratch just for your thing.
John:
We can cobble together something out of leftover bits of the last generation of our desktop parts.
John:
And there's no way you, Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony, are going to design your own CPU from scratch.
John:
Like, forget it.
John:
So...
John:
how about everybody just uses power pc cpus of a couple of different variants and amd ati gpus and so we had a whole generation of consoles with power pc gp cpus cobbled together from cores that were used in like mac slightly modified uh and uh ati at that time uh gpus and in this generation you've got x86 cpus from amd they're in the playstation and the xbox they use that and gpus from uh amd also um
John:
very similar very off-the-shelf parts so what are you going to brag about right and so the cell was different the cell was probably the last the last gasp of we want a radically different thing that is not just a bunch of power pc or x86 cpu cores thrown although there were power pc cores in there because you can't do everything from scratch um
John:
but it's going to be really weird and really different and really exotic and have lots of interesting ideas in it.
John:
Um, and to, to make that happen, they had to convince IBM or IBM had to convince itself that like your dad said, it's not just about the PlayStation.
John:
There's going to be lots of applications for the cell and we can use it for this and we can use it for that to justify the massive investment they put in partnership with all these other people to make this thing.
John:
And they did reuse power PC cores for certain, uh, for the, for like the, I forget what they call it.
John:
The, uh,
John:
ppes right but for the spus they made these other little cores and they made this ring bus and everything and it was a really cool really interesting cpu architecture like go read the articles about the cell it is it is novel and interesting and has lots of ideas from like supercomputing and other things in a small package totally a technological feat so your dad was right to be excited about it but uh to marco's point
John:
you know people don't care about that they just care about the games and to your point casey sony did market the exoticness of the cell as much as they could they were all about the cell is different than other people's things and it was different sony's pitch was it's different in a way that will make you have amazing things in reality it was different in a way that will make it very difficult to write dev tools that work to it because it doesn't work like any other game console and it was very difficult to
John:
write a program that efficiently used all those resources because it was honestly not quite a good balance in resources you really had to figure out how to orchestrate them just so you were using them all to their maximum extent and not leaving any idle and it was just it took years and years for the best developers game developers in the world to figure out how to wring all the performance out of the cell by the time the last of us came out it's like wow
John:
ps3 is pretty powerful gonna do some pretty amazing stuff but it's still kind of unbalanced and the whole system is kind of ram starved and i wish it had more of this and a little bit of that and it's the you know this is the casey must love this because the current generation of consoles and you know for a while now
John:
It's been the American approach of there's no substitute for cubic inches.
John:
You know how you can solve this problem?
John:
Give it a ton of RAM.
John:
Give it a big, powerful x86 CPU and a cut-down desktop GPU.
John:
Done and done.
John:
No exotic architecture needed.
John:
Solve the problem by throwing displacement.
John:
That's what they're throwing at it, right?
John:
And it's easy to develop for it because it's kind of the same, you know, PC, game console, whatever.
John:
Again, x86 CPU, GPU that you're familiar with, 3D APIs that you're familiar with, a mature tool chain and everything.
John:
That's what people want, and that's what they have.
John:
So the cell approach was technologically really cool and interesting, and they did market the really cool and interesting part of it, but it ended up making a console that didn't produce...
John:
the results in terms of cool fun novel games that sony wanted it to and so everybody learned the lesson of that including sony and the ps4 was like a giant apology about the ps3 the ps4 fixed everything that was wrong with the ps3 it was so conventional so straightforward had so much freaking ram was so simple to develop for and that's why the ps3 uh did so much better than the ps4 did so much better than the ps3
Casey:
That went on longer than I expected, but that was awesome.
Casey:
So thank you, John, for telling us.
John:
Everybody loves game consoles.
John:
They're great.
Casey:
I won't argue with you, but I've been really liking my Switch lately as I keep bringing up over and over again.
John:
That uses an off-the-shelf NVIDIA Tegra X1 because Nintendo can't even afford to have people make mildly custom things for them anymore.
Marco:
I love the Switch.
Marco:
It is the system that I've been happiest with basically since my Genesis.
Marco:
I have not had a game system since my Genesis that I was this happy with.
Marco:
And it has almost nothing to do with...
Marco:
the processor or the gpu i have no idea what it has in it i i didn't look at that when getting it i haven't thought to look at that since i have no idea how it compares to the xbox 17 or whatever the hell xbox is the current xbox way less powerful that's how it compares yeah probably but it doesn't matter at all
John:
like it just doesn't because what matters is the games and the games are awesome like that's that that to me is so much more important than any of the specs and like i'm just i'm incredibly happy with my game console and i have no idea what's in it so it it does matter um in that if it was really difficult to develop for the switch it would take longer to make games that are up to the standards that you're currently playing them right and uh there would be fewer games because not as many developers would be able to
John:
to you know so like there is there are aspects of technology that impact like how do we end up with good games you need to have a minimum baseline of like oh i can develop games for this and it's not too weird uh and i can develop them efficiently with skills i already have without encountering too many bugs without having to learn an entirely new custom dev environment and uh 3d api and tool chain and everything like that's a part of the technology selection that does impact the part that you care about
John:
I would also argue that the power of the system also influences what you care about, but it's clear that the Switch is a compromise between a plugged-into-the-wall TV-connected console and a portable one, so they have to make compromises in power, and it is less powerful.
John:
And I think that decrease in power gives you the huge benefits of portability, which according to Nintendo's surveys that they're running, tons of people use this in portable mode, so they made the right choice there.
John:
But the downside is that
John:
games that are possible on the ps4 and xbox one x uh and especially the xbox one x and but also the xbox one may not be possible on the switch and so they won't even get ports or if they do get ports they'll be cut down ports which means that most people want to play them on other consoles right so
John:
Power is still a thing that Apple needs, Apple, Nintendo needs to keep up with.
John:
There are rumors that Nintendo actually is going to come out with a sort of a Switch Pro with a more powerful, probably Nvidia Tegra X2 maybe chip inside it.
John:
Again, probably off the shelf.
John:
uh because that's the thing they're doing these days is making spec bumped versions of existing consoles that nevertheless play all the old games sort of like a generation and a half type thing and the reason they do that is like nintendo also knows if we make this more powerful we it expands the realm of the kind of games we can make the breath of the wild follow-up if there ever is one for the switch but whatever platform it's on
John:
we'll be able to have a more detailed, more expansive world than this one is.
John:
In the same way that you could never do Breath of the Wild on a Wii U or a Wii, like that better game that we all love and just care about the games, you can't do that game on less powerful consoles because the world is too big, the draw distances are too large, doesn't have the, you know...
John:
The hardware software to set for all the level of detail stuff doesn't have the RAM, so on and so forth.
John:
So technology does enable good games and has to be pursued.
John:
But absolute spec numbers are not the end all be all.
John:
Because if you add up all the theoretical floating point operations that the cell could do, it looks like it's this amazing monster CPU.
John:
And in the end.
John:
people couldn't even figure out how to use half of it and half the launch games were leaving leaving huge swaths of the surface area the silicon surface area of the chip idle because they just couldn't figure out how to even use all those cores and their engine only knew how to use like one or two so they would use one or two and leave half the hardware idle like the launch games that's not a good situation
Casey:
And just to put a period on this four-hour ask ATP, I really love having the ability to pop the Switch out of the dock and just walk around with it.
Casey:
And I might be the only one.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, what you said, John, is that it sounds like Nintendo is seeing a lot of that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They released some numbers, like we surveyed our users, like something that Apple never does and say, how often do you use your Switch docked, portable and both?
John:
And like the number of people who are like me and Marco who only use it docked was very small.
John:
It was like 20% or something and 80% of people are using it portable at least some of the time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I use it probably half and half, to be honest, which I know is probably barbaric to you.
Casey:
But, you know, it is what it is.
Casey:
So we'll try to do an abridged couple of ask ATPs to round this out.
Casey:
Johnny O would like to know, hey, what's the deal with sports?
Casey:
He writes, please explain to the nerd crowd the concept of being a sports team fan.
Casey:
I don't understand why people refer to my team, et cetera, unless they've actually played for that team.
Marco:
Well, you've written into the right podcast, Johnny.
Marco:
We are sports experts here.
Casey:
No, we can cover this quickly.
Casey:
So sports is about more than just as with anything in life is about more than just looking at the quote unquote ones and zeros of it and looking kind of a little bit deeper.
Casey:
And so.
Casey:
let's talk about my team so i went to school at virginia tech uh in blacksburg virginia and virginia tech had at the time this was in the very early 2000s had a exceptionally great football team uh that was quarterbacked by michael vick who ended up being a not so exceptionally great human being wait is this the the dookies home pods what are they whatever they are
Casey:
Hokies.
Marco:
There we go.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So the reason one would be enthusiastic about that is because in the case of college sports, that's your peers.
Casey:
They were also students of the same university that are playing in this national arena.
Casey:
And so why is it my team?
Casey:
Because I was also a student at Virginia Tech.
John:
Because you went to school in the same school that they did.
John:
Right.
John:
So you were there, and they were there.
John:
Right.
John:
So doesn't it make it our time, Casey?
John:
You don't get that reference.
John:
Stop laughing, Margot.
Marco:
No, I'm laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation.
Marco:
You're right, I don't get the reference.
Marco:
But when I was in high school, I was in the marching band for the football team, right?
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
I was literally at every football game, sitting 30 feet from the football players, watching the whole game, participating in this weird way of playing music to encourage them and celebrate victories in the game.
Marco:
And I still wouldn't say we won.
Marco:
I would never call my team, our team.
Marco:
It was literally I was right there.
Marco:
I was somewhat involved.
Marco:
I never thought that way.
Marco:
This is my team.
Marco:
I couldn't give less of a crap how they did.
John:
But anyway, I think Casey is an accurate explanation of why people feel it's their team.
John:
My comment was being snarky and I'm silly, but I think people who go to the school do feel it's their team because they go to the same school, despite the fact that I feel like most...
John:
college athletes especially at the highest level are really going to a different school than you are oh the experience of school is so different than your experience of school absolutely but it is still your school and you are going to it and so are they
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And this is also applicable for professional sports, except it's a much more nebulous association.
John:
Except the school is your state and or region.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
And or country for the Toronto Bulls.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So if you look at a professional sports team, it's often that it's the team that either your family has been rooting for.
Casey:
So as an example, I'm a fan of the New York Giants.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My grandfather, my mother's father, has been a Giants fan pretty much since the franchise started.
Casey:
And so I just grew up watching the Giants.
Casey:
That's just what we did.
Casey:
And at the time, we lived in the New York area.
Casey:
And so it made sense for that to be our team because of geographic proximity.
Casey:
Where this really falls apart is all the people who are woefully uninformed and think that the Dallas Cowboys or the Pittsburgh Steelers are good football teams, with the notable exception of the 10 fans from each team that actually live in Dallas or Pittsburgh.
Casey:
Because if you ever notice an NFL fan, generally speaking, they either like the Cowboys or the Steelers.
Casey:
And generally speaking, they have no association with either Pittsburgh or Dallas.
Casey:
Not that I'm bitter about this.
John:
That's old football fans who remember when the Cowboys and the Steelers would win Super Bowls, right?
John:
Not young football fans.
John:
Steelers?
John:
They win Super Bowls?
John:
Yeah, isn't it now about, like, Cowboys versus the Cheaters?
Casey:
Yeah, it's really Cowboys versus anybody.
Casey:
Yeah, the Cheaters are John's team, actually.
John:
I don't have a team.
Casey:
Well, because your team is Cheaters.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
I wouldn't want to claim them either.
John:
I wasn't rooting for the Patriots in the Super Bowl.
John:
I'm just going to say that.
Casey:
So anyway, so the idea is that take something that you either participated in as a kid.
Casey:
So as an example, I played a little bit of basketball as a kid.
Casey:
And imagine watching something that you can do all right, but watching somebody who is a professional at that thing.
Casey:
And it's almost poetic watching how good they are at that particular skill and that particular sport.
Casey:
That's what's that's what's fun about it.
Casey:
And then when you add in that kind of ownership, either by way of a school affiliation or geographic affiliation, it just becomes fun.
Casey:
And, you know, why would you watch somebody play a video game?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It's the same thing.
Casey:
Now, maybe you wouldn't claim that that's your team within the video game.
John:
But video games have teams now, too, though.
John:
They do the same sports thing.
John:
Esports actually do have teams and the teams are regional.
John:
And they're so they're trying to adopt that model.
Casey:
Yeah, but you get the idea is that imagine something that you do, but it's some other people that do it a hell of a lot better than you will ever do it.
Casey:
And it's just cool to watch.
Casey:
And plus, you know, games are fun.
Casey:
Games are fun to watch.
Casey:
Games are fun to play.
Casey:
And so it's just a confluence of all of that.
Casey:
And I have a feeling that Johnny O, you're going to listen to this and be like, yeah, that didn't convince me at all.
Casey:
And that's OK.
Casey:
Sports aren't for everyone.
Casey:
And I'm not a crazy sports person that watches ESPN all day, every day and lives for SportsCenter or anything like that.
Casey:
I just enjoy football and occasionally a couple other sports, too.
John:
But the question wasn't about why do I enjoy sports?
John:
It was about why being a sports team fan of having my team.
John:
I think you did address that.
John:
But like it doesn't I don't think the question was like, why are sports enjoyable, period?
John:
Like just see achievement, human achievement or whatever.
John:
It's about the fandom and my team type of thing.
John:
And to that end, if I was to give.
John:
My short version of the answer to this would be that sports are a socially acceptable outlet for xenophobia.
Casey:
Well, that too.
Casey:
That too.
Casey:
Not that I was making fun of Pittsburgh Steelers or Dallas Cowboys fans at all just moments ago.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
TT on air writes, hey, I know you're not a big fan of Facebook and what they do with their data.
Casey:
how do you guys feel about this whole Instagram thing since Instagram is owned by Facebook?
Casey:
And I don't have a good answer for this.
Casey:
I'll be the first to tell you, I do not have a good answer for this.
Casey:
And my answer is, I freaking love Instagram.
Casey:
And I'm going to steal Marco's thunder and steal Marco's line and say, it's my happy place.
Casey:
And because it's my happy place, despite the fact that they're insistent on trying to ruin it,
Casey:
I'm going to keep using it until I have an even more compelling reason not to use it.
Casey:
I do have a Facebook account.
Casey:
I occasionally look at it.
Casey:
I would happily get rid of my Facebook account long before I would get rid of my Instagram account.
Casey:
And that's just a choice I'm making.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's a good choice.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's reasonable.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's not hypocritical or backwards or whatever, but it's just my choice.
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
I was talking a little bit on Twitter about this earlier.
Marco:
It's hard because the tech giants are so big.
Marco:
Facebook owns so much stuff.
Marco:
If you're trying to, for instance, get off all Facebook services, what if you're in one of the many parts of the world where WhatsApp is the default messaging platform?
Marco:
That applies to a lot of places, to a lot of people.
Marco:
There's a reason why Facebook bought it for $19 billion or something like that.
Marco:
it's everywhere in certain places like it i know it's kind of an oxymoron but like it's like because whatsapp is not very big in the u.s so like u.s residents might not realize how big of a deal it is but everywhere else in the world whatsapp is huge and really is like it you know it's bigger than sms it's bigger than messaging it's bigger than i message like it's bigger than everything in certain parts of the world but
Marco:
To tell somebody, oh, well, Facebook happens to own that and Facebook is a terrible company and so you should quit everything of theirs, including WhatsApp, that could really have a pretty significant negative impact on someone's life if they're in an area where WhatsApp is big for them.
Marco:
And it's hard.
Marco:
I love the idea of dropping a tech giant that is being horrible to people or to its company or to data or whatever else.
Marco:
In some cases...
Marco:
it's easier than others.
Marco:
Like when Uber is being terrible, which happens all the time, like, you know, a lot of us moved to Lyft like I did.
Marco:
I haven't used Uber since all that crap, you know, whatever it was like a year ago.
Marco:
Same.
Marco:
I've been using Lyft.
Marco:
And it's, you know what, it's totally fine because everywhere I've been, like, I don't use ride sharing that often.
Marco:
Usually it's only like when I'm traveling somewhere.
Marco:
But, you know, every time...
Marco:
i've used i've i've like hired a lift it's been totally fine but there are certain regions where like lift just doesn't really serve or doesn't serve anywhere near well enough to be useful and so people there have to use you know suck it up and use uber and i'm not going to tell them like don't use any of these services like if sometimes that's your best option sometimes that's your only option so it's and so with facebook like they own so much they
Marco:
And a lot of what they own, you know, both things like WhatsApp and Instagram.
Marco:
Instagram is a bit of a special case, which gets to in a second.
Marco:
But like, you know, stuff they own like WhatsApp and the core Facebook service itself.
Marco:
For a lot of people, they can just drop this stuff and it's no big deal.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
I encourage you to.
Marco:
But for a lot of people, if they aren't on Facebook, they can no longer see the pictures of their grandchildren.
Marco:
Because that's the only place where people post them.
Marco:
I have never been a really active Facebook user.
Marco:
I've never posted stuff to Facebook or anything else.
Marco:
But I do regularly check...
Marco:
two communities on facebook because that's the only place that these communities exist one of them is for our summer place and one of them is for the local school like there's like a group of like parents for the local school on facebook and a lot of times that is the the first the best or sometimes the only place that certain very relevant news or info is posted and
Marco:
And this applies – like lots of people, they're kind of stuck using Facebook for this reason because there's some kind of community or something that only posts incredibly important to them information on Facebook.
Marco:
So it's really hard to tell people like that you should stop using Facebook because the impact of them not using Facebook, like the cost to Facebook of one less account –
Marco:
is probably virtually nothing compared to the cost in that person's life of not having access to these communities or this information that is posted there.
Marco:
So it's hard to make that argument that people who were in a situation like that should do it.
Marco:
And I made the analogy earlier on Twitter.
Marco:
It's kind of like when people get mad because they have a bad experience with a flight and they try to swear off an airline forever.
Marco:
And there's like five airlines and like they don't they don't all go to all the same places.
Marco:
So like like, you know, if you live in, say, like a hub for United and United and you have a bad experience on United, which is common because it's terrible.
Marco:
Like, what are you going to do?
Marco:
Swerve United was like if you live somewhere that's one of their hubs and all the flights going in and out are United, you're going to have a really hard time flying anywhere after that.
Marco:
And there's not that many airlines.
Marco:
So if you swear one off when you have a bad experience and you say you're never going to fly with them again, that starts to impact your life pretty significantly without too much time.
Marco:
And so I feel like the tech giants are in a similar situation where they own so much technology.
Marco:
So many of these big tech services are so critical to people's lives, and many of them don't have direct alternatives or they have such lock-in to certain communities that it's kind of unrealistic to expect people to move en masse.
Marco:
that it's really hard to just tell people like you shouldn't use everything Instagram is a bit of a special case because to a lot of people Instagram is not critical you know it's not like it isn't often like part of your job or anything but like like for me if I quit Instagram I
Marco:
I would lose access to a lot of, like, my friends' and my family's photos because that's where they all post them, you know?
Marco:
And, like, they don't have blogs.
Marco:
They don't have websites.
Marco:
We don't have photo shares elsewhere.
Marco:
And maybe we could try to set some up, but, like, that becomes a much harder problem for, like, for me to be taking a political stance to say I don't want to use Facebook stuff anymore...
Marco:
to then try to convince all my friends and family and people I don't know very well who I just enjoy their photos, like, hey, can you instead start posting these over here?
Marco:
Or in addition, start posting these over here?
Marco:
It becomes a much harder proposition.
Marco:
And I would be fine without Facebook.
Marco:
I would just lose access to these communities that...
Marco:
are are occasionally useful to me and i'd be fine without instagram i would be less happy um there are certain like just you know inertia that in that like i've been on instagram since i think 2010 my entire you know like the entire life i have here in the suburbs that includes the house my dog the entire life of my son
Marco:
has all been cataloged routinely on Instagram.
Marco:
Every year, Tiff makes a photo book of Instagram photos for our family.
Marco:
That's kind of like our family photo albums are like these Instagram books.
Marco:
It would disrupt a lot of that stuff.
Marco:
And so it's hard for me to overstate how much I dislike and disrespect Facebook, the people who run Facebook, the idea of Facebook, and just the horrible, amoral, morally bankrupt people there, right at the top, right up to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, right at the top.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
They are morally bankrupt, horrible people doing horrible things.
Marco:
And that's also not very new.
Marco:
It's not like this just started happening in the 2016 election.
Marco:
This is not new at all.
Marco:
They always have been horrible people doing horrible things.
Marco:
They're spineless turds and cowards.
Marco:
I really, really do not like them.
Marco:
But I also can't totally avoid their services and retain access to certain information that I need and want.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
you know, the, the, the joy and family and friends connections I get through Instagram.
Marco:
So it's, it's hard to avoid.
Marco:
It's, it's not a simple thing.
Marco:
It isn't, it isn't so simple to say like, you know, you know, are you being hypocritical by still using it or why haven't you quit yet?
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
to a lot of people it's more complicated than that and it's it isn't it's a bigger calculus than just like do you like these people or not because i hate those people but i still you know i i've decided that the that like the statement i would make by leaving is too small to for the the cost it would be to me in my life you call those services too big to bail i guess
John:
Wow.
Casey:
I see what you did there.
John:
That's where you put the cricket sound effect in there.
John:
I think that was quality.
John:
That's basically what you're saying.
John:
You would like to get out of them, but they're just too big because you can't convince everybody.
John:
So two things.
John:
One, I'm going to remind the world and the recording that I'm speaking into to take credit for the airline analogy that you just made because I'm pretty sure I made that exact same one a couple of years ago, although you probably don't remember it.
John:
Also, I'm pretty sure John Roderick made it before you.
John:
Yeah, no, it's Turtles all the way down.
I think I might have made it before John Roderick, but it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Go and check the tapes.
John:
No, I mean like in real life, not on a podcast.
John:
Sometimes I say things that aren't recorded on a podcast.
Casey:
Did you really say them then?
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
Who's to say?
John:
Who's to say?
John:
If this is not recording, who can tell?
John:
And two, I'm going to predict that three weeks from now or so...
John:
There will be a podcast featuring me where I talk about this very same issue at length, and so I'm not going to talk about it at length here.
John:
So if you're interested in hearing that discussion that will probably happen sometime in the next three weeks, you can check out Reconcilable Differences on Relay.fm.
John:
I look forward to hearing that in six to eight weeks.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Rectiffs is, by the way, one of my favorite podcasts in the entire world.
Casey:
I love that show so much.
Casey:
Yeah, it's quite good.
Casey:
You really should be.
Casey:
You, the listeners, should really be listening to that if you're not already.
Casey:
And not unlike this show, the shows do tend to run a little long, but they are worth every damn minute.
Casey:
So you should be checking that out.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Squarespace, and Instabug.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
A lot of people have been reaching out and saying, hey, Casey, have you thought about the Kia Stinger GT?
Casey:
Think about it.
Casey:
It's a nice car.
Casey:
it's not that nice a it's not that nice b i've sat in it c i didn't like the interior in d two pedals but otherwise if you you know other than that mrs lincoln how did you enjoy the play uh otherwise it sounds nice it did tie the bmw 340i in a comparison test which shows just how far bmw has fallen i think i mentioned that in a past show bmws
Casey:
It actually occurred to me just the other day, I was saying this to somebody, shoot, I don't remember who it was, but it wasn't on a podcast, so I guess I never said it.
Casey:
I was walking back up the driveway from getting the mail, and I looked at the garage, and I looked at Aaron's car, and I looked at my car.
Casey:
I looked at my car for a while, and it occurred to me just a few years ago, especially in 2013, for example, when Marco and me and underscore went to the driving school.
Casey:
Just a few years ago, I would have said I was pretty much equally into Apple and BMW.
Casey:
Like that was during the heyday of my BMW love, speaking of heydays.
Casey:
And I loved both of those brands more than almost anything.
Casey:
And I don't really give a crap about BMW anymore.
Casey:
I feel like I've been so let down by this one, this one experience.
Casey:
And I know I shouldn't judge all BMWs forevermore based on one somewhat crummy, almost lemon, but I just, I can't find myself, I can't find myself getting excited by BMW anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm also... I think I'm in a very similar boat, but maybe even more extreme.
Marco:
BMW just isn't relevant to me anymore.
Marco:
When I moved to Tesla, I didn't realize quite how different it would be and quite how much it would make all other cars...
Marco:
It just seemed like the past by comparison in multiple ways, not just the drivetrain, but the big touchscreen, having some of the more smart, useful little features, the app features, some of the practicalities of just the giant hatchback and how much cargo space there is in it.
Marco:
um it's super nice like yesterday i i brought i i i had a um a flat tire on my bike i had to get a new inner tube and i don't know how to do that so i brought my bike to the store in town to have them do it and i fit this giant you know 27.5 plus semi-fat bike in the back of my car and as i was i i opened the open the trunk and it doesn't fit with a lot of leeway but it does fit
Marco:
And, like, I opened the trunk when I got there, like, parked in the street, and I pulled this giant bike out.
Marco:
There was this person on the sidewalk that, like, wow, you just pulled that out of that car?
Marco:
They couldn't believe that it fit.
Marco:
Like, it's so nice.
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, like, I kind of have a similar feeling of, like,
Marco:
I have no interest in going to test drive the new M5 or anything like that.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons why it was so hard for me to answer that question a few weeks ago of what car would you have if you couldn't have the Tesla?
Marco:
I really have no idea.
Marco:
I'm not interested in any other cars at all.
Marco:
Again, maybe that will change in the future when there's more electric options for everybody.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't...
Marco:
Anticipate that changing in the near future.
Marco:
I think it's probably going to be a far future thing.
Marco:
But anyway, I'm totally with you.
Marco:
The direction they've gone in has seemingly been significantly more mass luxury market, like obviously going after a lot of what were probably formerly Lexus customers.
Marco:
And a lot of that came at the cost of the enthusiasts.
Yeah.
John:
BMW's not going to get any Lexus customers.
John:
Lexus customers need reliability.
John:
They're going after Mercedes customers.
John:
We're accustomed to a little bit of unreliability but want a softer car.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
It is kind of funny that the decline of BMW's appeal to us
Marco:
has corresponded somewhat to the decline of Apple's appeal to us.
Marco:
It's kind of sad, really.
Casey:
You took my moment because I was about to say the same thing.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
That was obvious.
Marco:
You can't blame me for that.
Casey:
Oh, but still.
Casey:
All right, you can have it.
Casey:
But I mean, I shouldn't have cut you off, but here I am.
Casey:
So since I have, I feel very similarly, but way, way, way less so about Apple.
Casey:
That there are things that are annoying me about Apple that never used to annoy me.
Casey:
you know, and we'll, and I'll beat up on Siri just briefly because that's the most obvious example.
Casey:
Like, you know, anytime I go to use Siri, I'm, I'm just, I just die a little inside.
Casey:
Not literally, of course, that's a bit, um, what, what's the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
Hyperbolic?
Casey:
I don't know, whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, it's a bit extreme, but, um, but nevertheless, it's like, it annoys me every time in a way that Apple stuff used to delight me every time consistently that I touched it.
Casey:
And, um,
Casey:
And I feel, you know, I feel like it's this vector is the same direction, but a far smaller magnitude that I'm getting.
Casey:
I'm finding myself not as emotionally like excited by Apple stuff as I was in the past.
Casey:
Now, there are exceptions like just the other day.
Casey:
I looked down at my iPhone 10 and I was like, you know what?
Casey:
This is a really awesome phone.
Casey:
And having that swipe gesture has made everything better.
Casey:
And in the lack of a home button, like Face ID still does drive me nuts in a few ways, but by and large, it's so cool.
Casey:
And so I'm not trying to say that I've like lost hope in Apple by any means, but, and certainly the alternatives as we've gone around and around and about numerous times on the show, the alternatives are not really alternatives.
Casey:
But but nevertheless, I find myself getting similarly disappointed.
Casey:
I'm not mad.
Casey:
I'm disappointed in you, Apple.
Casey:
And and that's that's a bummer because it's I mean, it's just a company, right?
Casey:
Like here again, like to come back to the Ask ATP about sports like.
Casey:
Apple is kind of my team.
Casey:
And Marco, I'm definitely taking a page out of your playbook on that one because you've made this point for years that Apple was kind of your team.
Casey:
And I feel like my team is not a slump.
Casey:
That's dramatic.
Casey:
But my team is not winning championships left and right like they used to be.
Casey:
And that's...
Casey:
That's a little bit of a bummer.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think it's especially... It's a little depressing when you don't have something else to replace that source of excitement for you.
Marco:
When I kind of fell out of love with BMW, that was easy for me because now I'm a big fan of Tesla.
Marco:
And so it just kind of got replaced.
Marco:
The reason the Apple stuff bugs me so much is that I haven't replaced that yet in my life.
Marco:
And I don't really know what will replace it.
John:
replaced it with video games yeah you love video games now more than you have in a long time that's replacing your apple love i mean i love yeah i love a few video games but it's i would hardly call it like a category you just said that the switch is like the best gaming thing you've had since like your childhood yes you know uh sega so i think that's that's pretty high praise in the grand scheme of things that you have loved in your life and video games may fade if the next nintendo thing is like that doesn't appeal to you or it doesn't have good games and then
John:
And you'll be all excited about your new Jaguar I-Pace.
Marco:
I would probably, like, no matter how good or appealing it was, I don't think I would ever actually buy a car from that brand because I just never want to have to say it to people.
Marco:
You don't have to say Jaguar.
Marco:
You can just say Jaguar.
Marco:
You can say Jaguar like Steve Jobs.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
No, I mean, but the problem is, like, no matter... First of all, it's kind of like a d*** brand, right?
Marco:
And second of all... You're thinking of BMW.
John:
Yeah.
John:
No, it's way worse.
Marco:
I mean, they both are to some degree.
John:
I don't think it is.
John:
It is snootier sounding, but I think if you had to picture the kind of person who drives a Jaguar and the kind of person who drives a BMW and you're going to put a dick label underneath one of them, it's definitely going underneath the BMW person.
Marco:
Either brand, if somebody asks you out loud in a room full of other people who are being kind of quiet, hey, what brand is your car?
Marco:
If you have a BMW, you want to say that a little bit quietly.
Marco:
If I had a Jag, I would just be like, I don't have a car.
Marco:
I would just not want to say.
John:
I think that the Jaguar product managers, you know, marketing manager would love to hear you say that because that's the image they want.
John:
They want it to be like snooty and highfalutin.
John:
But realistically speaking, these days, I don't think it is.
John:
I think Jag would just love to be included in the same buying decision as Lexus, let alone BMW and Mercedes.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, they're totally irrelevant.
Marco:
But the other factor is like, I just don't want to hear everyone tell me how to pronounce it.
Marco:
Well, then never get a Porsche either.
Casey:
I was about to say the same thing.
Marco:
Honestly, I was thinking the same thing as I said.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, yeah, that would also apply to that brand, which I'm also not going to try to say here because I'm not going to say it right now.
Marco:
I don't care.
Casey:
So anyway, I don't want a stinger.
Casey:
But yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, Marco, about part of the reason why I'm bummed about BMW not really revving my engine anymore is that I haven't figured out what's replacing it.
Casey:
Like,
Casey:
There's a part of me that's enthusiastic about getting a Wrangler, and I'm not trying to open that can of worms, but I don't know that that's really going to replace that love.
Casey:
Because there was a stretch of time that every time I got in my car, I was just thrilled and excited to be sitting in that chair.
Casey:
And now it's not an appliance, but it's closer to an appliance than something that gives me pleasure.
Casey:
And that's really unfortunate.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
and i don't think i don't think i would view a jeep in quite the same way as i did the bmw circa 2013 and it just bums me out like i wish i had something to replace that that kind of joy in my life and and you know maybe i will but not to maybe it'll be your family nah no come on don't be ridiculous what can replace this joy says the person who just had a new child
Casey:
You know what I mean, damn it.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Why you got to make me sound like such a jerk?
Marco:
Speaking of which, back in Build and Analyze, I forget when in the series it was, but sometime during Build and Analyze, I was talking back then about possibly...
Marco:
that was when I was waffling over what car to get after the first BMW and I was thinking about something fast.
Marco:
And Dan was talking about how he used to care about fast cars and now he just got minivans and he was totally fine and he just kind of stopped caring about driving fast.
Marco:
That's a lie because he eventually got an Audi.
Marco:
Yeah, his next car was an Audi.
Marco:
But that sounded to me like that would never happen to me.
Marco:
I could not fathom
Marco:
that, that ever happened to me.
Marco:
I would always care, you know, as, as much as I did then.
Marco:
And, and I did care for a while.
Marco:
Like I went through some nice fast cars and my current car is fast.
Marco:
Um, but I, I really do feel myself caring a lot less over time.
Marco:
Like, and like, I'm not really like, you know,
Marco:
taking the little turn that's down at the bottom of my street where I can kick it out a little bit when there's leaves down.
Marco:
I don't do that anymore.
Marco:
There's certain highway ramps that I could go super fast before and I just kind of don't do that anymore either.
Marco:
Even just over the last year, I've felt myself really chilling out a lot in that way where...
Marco:
And even the other day, I was thinking, like, maybe on the next one, I won't mind so much that I'm now forced to get the smart air suspension, which softens the ride.
Marco:
That sounds kind of nice.
Marco:
And I realized after I was thinking that, I'm like, oh, my God, who am I?
Marco:
Mercedes, here we come.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, but I started realizing my priorities have changed too.
Marco:
If I was buying a new car today, I would still get a Tesla and I would still get a fast model, but it's because I would want the biggest range, which is not the fastest model.
Marco:
which is the decision I made with this one, and I would make the exact same decision again.
Marco:
The speed of it is way less important to me than the range of it.
Marco:
I like that it's fast.
Marco:
I have fun with the speed sometimes, but it's way less often that that's relevant to me than it used to be.
Marco:
And, you know, for you, Casey, like, you know, as we mentioned in the past, like, you know, being a car enthusiast is so much a part of your identity that, you know, and it need not be, you know, that's that's an option that you have.
Marco:
But but, you know, you you still you have a lot of that love and you and some degree you probably always will.
Marco:
But it's OK if if it comes to this, if you realize this, you know, in introspection.
Marco:
it's okay for your priorities to change or for like the, the, the significance that you apply to certain factors to be rearranged or to shift around.
Marco:
And so like, it's like, you know, you said like, you know, used to be, you know, used to be really like, you know,
Marco:
thrilled getting in your car and now it's more of a function and part of that is because you're you know you've had this car for a while so it's no longer as novel part of that is because you kind of hate this car because of how much it costs you um but you know part of that's also like you are growing up you know you you're you're what six seven years older now than than when you got growing up he's in his mid-30s he's getting old you stop growing up we're always growing up you know well you start getting old at a certain point i think you
Marco:
We are continuing to get old.
Marco:
Some of us older than others.
Marco:
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Marco:
Finally, something you'll both get.
Marco:
Reference acknowledged.
Marco:
Whatever it is, it's okay to change over time and to recognize that that's what's happening.
Casey:
And I agree with you.
Casey:
The thing is, I don't feel like I'm that different.
Casey:
I agree that I am slightly different.
Casey:
And the joy I get from Aaron's car is...
Casey:
is indication to me that i am feeling differently because aaron's car feels to me anyway very cushy it has a lot of those techno bits that like your car has not exactly the same but like you know there's an app where i can start it remotely and i know you're like aha what's an engine but you get what i'm driving at um and and i get a lot of pleasure from aaron's car despite the fact that it's big it's slow it according to john tips over if you steer more than you know five degrees laterally
Casey:
But in every way, it's wrong from the list of things that Casey enjoys.
Casey:
But I do like it.
Casey:
And I think the thing that the crisis I'm having is that I don't feel like I'm that different.
Casey:
Like, well, all I really want in the world...
Casey:
Is somebody that is not BMW to make me either a 340 sedan or an M3?
Casey:
And I don't think that really exists.
Casey:
And there was a report.
Casey:
I'm not going to be able to find the link.
Casey:
But a friend of mine, Brad, sent me a report, some rumors that the 3 Series is going to lose the stick in the next generation, which...
Casey:
isn't particularly surprising, but it's kind of devastating.
Casey:
And I know I need to just wake up and smell reality that the three pedal cars are not long for this world.
Casey:
But I feel like I'm being, this is a lot of words to say, I feel like I'm being abandoned.
Casey:
And BMW was supposed to help me.
Casey:
And it sounds like they're abandoning me.
Casey:
And either way, I'm grumpy about the fact that this car has cost me a bazillion dollars.
Casey:
So I just, I feel like I'm a Ronin, right?
Casey:
Like I'm a man without a master now.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And that bums me out because I want to be able to to find a car that gives me that joy again.
Casey:
And, you know, the Julia did give me a lot of that joy.
Casey:
And maybe I would feel slightly differently about it if there was literally no other options, like if there were no three pedal cars.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, I feel like I've been I've been left wanting in that that kind of bums me out because I feel like I'm the same as I've always been.
Casey:
older and maybe wiser and certainly slower but it's at least older at least older but but you know what i mean like i just i feel like nothing is filling that void even though i'm ready for something to fill that void