Overflow Gallery In The Bathroom
You're doing, like, inline and online.
You know the one that I mean that's lately that I keep seeing online, meaning on the internet, is grown people, I guess, also intelligent people, saying on accident.
Oh, God, that's the worst.
Rather than by accident?
Yeah.
Not, like, ironically, not isolated cases, but just it's rampant.
I think there's whole sections of the adult population that think that's a perfectly acceptable way to talk, and
I don't think anything of it.
Most of them go there because the weather is nice.
That's why they go to Florida.
But the weather in Florida is terrible.
They don't go in the winter.
They don't go in the summer.
Right.
That's the whole snowbird phenomenon.
They go down in the winter to Florida and then come back to New York in the summer.
That's what my grandparents do.
my jewish grandparents that live in boca raton like every other set of jewish grandparents i think i'm outnumbered on the show on the pronunciation of that state too so i'll just let that one slide sorry florida yeah keep practicing you're supposed to be a new yorker now you're doing a piss poor job i'm from ohio give me i know i know oh tiff's supposed to whip you into shape
I don't even speak well for an Ohioan if it makes you feel any better.
No, no.
You're a mongrel without a home.
I was supposed to say – I think being from Ohio, I'm supposed to say things like Warsh and the shopping cart is a buggy.
No, but you do say the word – Get my groceries and some sacks.
You say the word Q-U-E-R-Y like either an Ohioan or a Pennsylvania.
Or a crazy person.
Or a crazy person.
It's not query.
It's query.
It's what?
We're not going to do word pronunciation.
We have follow-up to get to here.
Let's do some follow-up.
The very first item is an ancient follow-up that we never managed to mention.
I think in one past show I was saying how I couldn't figure out what version of Bugshot I was running and couldn't think of a way to look up the version in the app.
And many people wrote and tell us if you go to settings, general usage, and select the app that you can see the version number.
And I could swear I did that, but apparently I didn't.
So there you go.
The iSCSI one I think we did address, so you could actually delete that one.
The fact that even if you use iSCSI, you can't just take the drive out and put it in your Mac.
It depends on the implementation of the enclosure, whether it has raw disk access or whether it uses some other intermediary layer.
And a NAS probably doesn't, but maybe just some box with a disk in it might.
But anyway.
That being said, I still haven't tried iSCSI with my NAS yet, so I still can't actually tell you whether Synology does or not.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to talk about that today, eventually, someday.
We have tons of topics, I know.
Yeah.
Yeah, we do need to talk about that.
Did you open your present yet or not?
I did.
I could not resist.
Oh, man, it's so good.
But let's keep with follow-up.
All right.
And so the real follow-up here is from people talking to me about backups because we talked about on the Three Phones A Go show about the problem of preserving your photos on your phone or otherwise.
Yeah.
The first one is from Ben Griffel, and he says, one thing came to mind, what if backing up photos simply isn't as important to the current or younger generation of people?
When you have 1,000 photos on your phone, how important is any one photo?
I thought I mentioned that on the show.
Maybe Apple's idea is don't worry about it.
Don't be such a pack rat.
Take your pictures, enjoy them, look at them, and 10 years from now, yeah, you won't have these photos, but so what?
I don't think that's the case.
I think it's really just that trying to deal with all of everybody's photos is just such a large-scale problem and has so many other problems that we discussed with things like upload bandwidth and storage, things like that.
Videos are a whole other problem where these devices can capture new data so quickly.
Like, if you...
open up your iPhone and record a 30-second video, that's a few hundred megs, right?
Something like that.
It's something like that.
You know, it's these devices, and the photos aren't that much better.
You know, if you snap a bunch of photos in the night, that could be 50 megs.
Photos are way better.
I mean, like I said in the show, I think photos are in the realm, possibly video, forget it.
Like, there's no...
There's no chance of that.
I mean, storage capacity alone.
You can't even store it on... For photos, it's within the realm of reason.
But it's like a dirty problem to Apple.
Apple, they know that they can't do online backup of all your photos and all your videos, even though these devices try to make those two things very easy to capture and encourage you to capture them, and they put them all together in one big bin on the device.
That's why I think...
since they can't really do it well and they probably won't be able to do it well for the foreseeable future of backing up all of your all of your photos forever and all your videos forever i think they just kind of say you know what that you're on your own for that even though whatever we think about that solution i think that's the clear message from them which is like i think i think they would be liked they would like to do it they're just doing a bad job of it uh and actually if we well i want to get to this follow-up and we can talk more about some other things that have come up related to
this but yeah but ben's point is that maybe it's not important to the consumers to the current or younger generation like we're talking about it but we're old or whatever but like maybe younger people don't care i suppose that's possible but i have a hard time believing that there's such a generation gap uh you know value change in values in terms of uh memories uh
It's true that the younger generations are producing much more of it, so maybe that makes each individual photo worth a lot less.
But I think the idea that you'll want to see pictures from your honeymoon or your wedding or from when your baby was born or from when you graduated college or when you were in high school, the desire to see those and to preserve those in some form somewhere is not a generational thing.
People will want to do that.
And that's the killer.
That's the...
It's not so much like, oh, I don't care about the photo I took last year.
It's 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, you almost certainly will want to see something.
Maybe not every single picture, but you want to see something.
Maybe that would actually be a viable strategy of just thinning out your pictures as you go through the past, but I don't think that's reasonable because I think...
storage capacities will increase so much that that won't be necessary.
But anyway, that was one interesting point.
And another one, these are both from Twitter.
No, one was email, and this one's Twitter.
Jared Tate said it should not be anyone else's responsibility but the end user for backups, he means.
And he says, obviously, it's too complex an issue to discuss via tweet.
I agree with that.
But ignorance is not a good enough reason to force autonomous backups.
So this person's position seems to be that...
I was asking for Apple to take care of this and said it's not Apple's problem.
It's not Apple's responsibility.
It's the only person whose responsibility is the end user's responsibility.
And ignorance, as in you don't know enough to know how to do your backups, is not a good enough reason to force autonomous backups, as in it's like the state or the Apple or whatever, forcing you or putting upon you this automated backup system.
And there's no justification for that.
I guess this person doesn't want Apple getting in their business or pulling their photos down.
or, you know, whatever.
So there's a little bit of tinfoil hat-ery in here, but again, Twitter is kind of short to understand this.
But the whole idea that it's not anyone's responsibility, but the end user, like that's, there's a time for those type of feelings, but the time passes, right?
So it's like,
You know, it shouldn't be anyone else's responsibilities but the drivers to, you know, to figure out what the correct fuel-air mixture is at a given, you know, temperature and barometric pressure and RPM and throttle position.
Really, I mean, it's not really the responsibility.
Really, you know, seriously, drivers have to take some responsibility for themselves.
And, you know, what was it?
They have like a choke mechanism.
knob or something they used to have in the cars right yeah boats have those right or they used to at least yeah and it's like you know that's that's your responsibility as a driver you should not be pushing that off onto the car manufacturers but now that sounds crazy right you know so it the bar shifts like things that used to be the responsibility of the operator and people get self-righteous about like you know we were just talking about shifting and everything well that should be the responsibility of the driver and it's fun to do and it makes you a real driver and so on and so forth but none of us would be like i really i really need to control the uh the fuel injectors and
Because that, you know, otherwise I don't feel like I'm really driving.
I'm surprised this guy even heard our show.
Because I'm guessing, I mean, what do you think the chances are that he's a desktop Linux user?
I don't know.
You can't tell from two tweets.
It's very difficult to catch voice.
If he's a desktop Linux user, and we only encode this show as an MP3.
We don't do Og Vorbis.
And so I'm actually kind of surprised he has heard the show at all.
Please email Marco.
I mean, like...
The idea – it's easy to make fun of that, of people saying, you know, you should take responsibility.
Because we've all had that feeling, especially when we're younger, at certain points of like that these skills that you have that you're proud of that other people don't have, they don't deserve the benefits that come with that skill.
So if you can't figure out how to do your own backups, fine.
It's not Apple's problem to solve your problem.
It's kind of a nanny state kind of, oh, they're going to come and solve all your stuff.
That's not their problem.
That's your problem.
But like it's –
It's ridiculous.
What do you think you're paying Apple for?
They're giving you a device that does things, and every year it does more and better things.
Previously, it didn't do these things.
You want them to solve your problems for you.
If one of your problems is, I'm worried that 30 years from now, I won't have any pictures of my children...
Yes, of course.
Is it Apple responsibility?
No, they're not held at gunpoint having to do this, but they want to make a product that people want to buy.
So you got to give features that people want.
So if this person doesn't want those features and is happy taking responsibility for his own backups, that's perfectly fine.
But that's not how Apple stays in business and makes products that people want to buy.
And I think he has a minority opinion.
You figure there's also probably some – and I'm sure this is a relatively small effect.
But there would be some effect where if somebody had some kind of horrible disaster, which really isn't that uncommon these days.
Let's say a phone goes down the toilet while lightning strikes their house and people break in and steal their disconnected drives.
So all their stuff is gone.
They get some new stuff from their insurance companies to check.
They go to the Apple store, get a new MacBook.
They log into their stuff, and all their stuff is back.
All their photos are back.
All their kids' memories are all back.
That could make them incredibly loyal customers for life.
In the same way that – bring another car analogy –
A lot of times people who have been in a serious car accident in which their car has performed extremely well in safety and really protected them, a lot of times then after that, they only will ever buy that kind of car because it treated them so well.
Which doesn't make that much sense.
And neither does the Apple thing.
Really what you want to happen is for it to go past.
That's the honeymoon period transition.
You want it to go to the point where...
No one is overjoyed that their pictures are preserved when their house burns down, but they're furious if every single picture is not preserved.
Like that's the next phase where you're like, everyone takes it for granted.
And there's only a downside, like as a vendor, you know, we're not even close to that.
So you're right.
There would definitely be a period, like I was saying last show, if you were the company to do this first, everyone else would be like, oh, I lost these pictures and blah, blah.
And you'd be like, well, I don't have to worry about that because insert name of company or product or service.
That has proven itself again and again to keep your crap.
Lots of people are emailing me and Twittering me and stuff and saying, like, why is an iCloud backup enough?
Isn't that sufficient?
Except for the fact that you have to pay, which I think I complained about on Hypercritically once, like making money, making it be like a small amount and then saying, oh, you got to pay to actually back up everything that's on your phone.
I think it's cruel and stupid, but, you know, the money is what it is.
And last year I said, fine, you can charge for it or whatever.
But they're saying, well, all right, so if you charge money and you pay for iCloud backup to your phone, isn't that a perfect solution?
And I was amazed at the number of people who came up with that.
And I was like, you know,
Children were born before 2007.
Just screw them, I guess.
I mean, like, their pictures aren't on the phone.
You didn't take them on the phone because you didn't have an iPhone.
And people have these things called cameras, and I know they're so rare and stuff like that.
Some people were saying most people just take all their pictures on their phone.
Like, I know phones are popular, but I think people still have cameras.
Like, I think that is a big enough thing that you can't ignore it.
So people have cameras and people have children born before in 2007 or before they got an iPhone.
There exists pictures that are not on their phone.
And it's just not a tenable solution.
Like, storage of phones is not increasing rapidly enough, especially if people are going to take any video at all, for you to be able to have your whole library on your phone.
So even if your entire phone is completely backed up.
with iCloud and all that good stuff because you pay for it, that does not solve your photo problem for your family or even for your individual life unless you have no cameras and no memories that you care about before you got your first iPhone that you've been slapping your pictures from one phone to the other with.
I think that is currently not a tenable solution.
Maybe in the future, no one will have cameras.
And all the babies born before 2007, no one cares about them anymore.
And they'll just be like, well, you know, I came of age in the age of the iPhone.
All my pictures have always been on my phone.
Every year, I transfer every single one of my pictures to my new phone.
They're all backed up in iCloud, and I pay for it every year.
And therefore, I never have to worry about my photos.
But I think that is incredibly rare, and we're not there yet.
So let me ask stupid question of the night.
Why doesn't Apple with their eight gazillion dollars in the bank just buy CrashPlan or EverPix?
I just signed up for EverPix after the last show.
I'd known about it for a while.
And I'm like, you know what?
After that last show, why don't I just try out this EverPix thing?
Is it good?
I don't know if I'm going to keep using it.
It's like $50 for a year.
I just paid for the whole year.
I just wanted to see how they did.
How long will it take them to get all my photos?
How good will they be about pulling my photos?
Everpix is a service, by the way, that takes all your photos, and like the name says, they keep them forever.
Full resolution, they organize them for you, and they will suck them from any one of your devices.
By the way, many people wrote in and told me that Google Plus promises to do something similar if you take it on your Android for it, and they get pulled into Google Plus.
That'll be around forever.
That's the thing I thought about with people saying...
you know that all google plus will do that for you like are you kidding like they have not they have a long way to go before i'm going to trust them to take care of all my pictures forever like i don't even trust them to keep track of my email forever like every piece of email that's in gmail i have on my own computer that's backed up you know what i mean like they have not earned that whereas everpix at least you said look that's their whole business it's in their freaking name like maybe they're going to go out of business maybe their startup maybe apple's going to buy them and shut them down but clearly for as long as they're in business they are totally serious about keeping your pictures um
And so I signed up for it.
It pulled in all my pictures.
First, I just let it go on my little library, and I saw that it was working, and then I said, all right, that was like the free trial.
And then I signed up for my account for my wife because she's got the family iPhoto library on her computer.
It pulled them all in.
I mean, granted, I have a big upload connection, but it was pretty seamless.
It worked.
Their web interface is...
Probably not how I'd want to manage my pictures, but it's interesting that if someone says, oh, where is that picture of whatever?
Now, no matter where I am in the world, I can just go to everpix.com and find the picture that they're asking about and give them the full result.
I did it already after I came back from my vacation.
My mom asked, where is that picture of us with the grandkids?
Because I hadn't copied onto their SD card because we took it on the last day we were there right before we left, right?
Yeah.
And she sent me that email when I was at work.
I just pulled up the website, pulled out the high-rise pictures, emailed them to her.
So I give the service a thumbs up.
I still think Apple should buy them.
Because, again, they seem to have worked out most of these things here.
Why doesn't Apple do that?
Charge a similar amount of money, maybe less, build it into every iPhone?
I know they're kind of trying to do the same thing with PhotoStream, but nobody I know, even the super geeks,
knows all the rules about how PhotoStream works.
And we shouldn't have to think.
It should just be like EverPix.
What are the rules of EverPix?
We grab all your photos as soon as we can and keep them forever.
That's easy to remember.
That being said, though, it's great.
I haven't actually used it yet, although I've heard great things.
They even sponsored the talk show like a year ago or something, and I heard that then.
Daring Fireball.
They didn't sponsor the talk show.
They sponsored Daring Fireball.
I thought the same thing.
I thought...
I don't know.
Anyway.
That's what Lex told me, but we'll see now.
I think maybe it's much of both.
Anyway, I think it's a great service for the role you just described of having instant access to everything from anywhere.
That's fantastic.
That being said, though, I still don't think it's wise to trust any web service for the primary storage and backup of your photos.
Oh, no.
I wouldn't.
what comes after tertiary whatever comes after tertiary backup yeah I mean that's what it is because I've got like you know backups and local backups and have crash plan and this is one more because I'm is it cheaper I guess it is cheaper $50 for the year or something it seemed cheap to me at the time that's about what backblaze costs
Yeah, but it was, like, unlimited.
It was so focused on photos.
I like the idea that this would be an extra backup because, like, I'm willing to spend the extra money not to back up all of my crap to yet another service, but just, like, now we're getting down to brass tacks.
Like, what do you really care about, right?
Photos, and I don't think it does any video, but, like, I'll pay extra to have that.
So, like I said, when the year is up, I'll think about whether I want to do it again, whether it's earned its value, but I would definitely say, like, oh, now that I've done this, I don't need to back up my iPhoto library.
No, no, definitely not.
It's just, you know, it's another backstop against disaster.
But I think a lot of people wouldn't use it like that.
Like, a lot of people use these things as primary storage.
It would be better than nothing, though.
Wouldn't you be glad?
Like, if someone who wasn't doing any backups before, and there's no way you're going to be able to convince them to even use Time Machine because it's too complicated for whatever.
You're like, look, sign up for the service.
At least then you feel like, all right, at least you have some backstop.
Like, that's your version of CrashPlan for them, you know?
Yeah, but the problem with photos, as you said, you care less about a photo you took one year ago and more about a photo you might have taken 10 years ago.
I got my first digital camera 13 years ago.
And so that's when... I have pictures... I have a good number of regularly taken pictures, not like two or three a year, like in the film days.
But I have a good number of pictures being taken from the year 2000 forward.
And...
Back then, I mean, first of all, they look like crap because even though it was a really nice camera, it was low resolution by today's standards.
I believe it was like 1.3 megapixels or something.
No, it was 2.0.
It was very high end, 2.0.
But isn't that the awful paradox that these ones that you care about from 10 years ago that – Oh, they look terrible.
And you care about them so deeply.
Oh, crap.
Cry me a river.
Mine were taken with disc cameras.
Remember disc cameras?
Yeah, the floppy disc.
Those were not... I think each negative was the size of my pinky fingernail.
Yeah, those are rough.
But I still have these in Lightroom.
Although at some point along the way, I lost full resolution versions of many of them.
And so I only have thumbnails, I believe, from Aperture six years ago or something like that.
But anyway...
There's a whole lot of these that I really care a lot about and I would love to keep.
And certainly the older I get, the more I will want to keep them because they'll be further away, more distant memories.
But any kind of web service will never satisfy that kind of timescale.
The web just doesn't work that way.
I mean, it's hard enough to keep moving between computers.
I don't know if that's true, though.
Are you saying that no web service will be around that long?
I'm saying it's very unlikely that a photo storage and backup service or feature of a bigger service will generally be around for greater than 10-year timescales.
But they don't have to be.
They absolutely don't have to be.
All they have to do is...
Have duplicate copies of everything that you have somewhere else.
And when they go out of business, it's on you to find an alternate service to take to be your backstop.
And by then maybe some other backup service will come.
So you're not expecting a single thing.
It's kind of like your data.
Your data isn't expected to live on whatever hardware was created on.
You carry it along with you.
And as storage increases, you just keep bringing it, copying it from thing to thing.
So I envision this having various backup services and they're either going to go out of business or I'll prefer one to the other or whatever.
I will stop using that one or they will disappear.
And I will take because that's my backup.
I will take that data, which I already have a copy of.
That's just one of the many backups and put it onto another service and let it go out of another service.
Like I think that's a reasonable way.
The only way really to bring your data along with you through your life is to constantly move it from service to service, hardware to hardware.
So I don't think you have to worry about the longevity of the companies except within like you want to go for a company that's going to go out of business next week because then it was kind of a waste of your time.
But other than that, I think I'm comfortable with that.
Oh, yeah, but we're nerds.
We're okay doing that kind of management and redundancy and everything.
For web services, you don't think regular people could do that?
like because they just sign up and then well the problem is if you're relying only on a web service like you know let's say all your photos are backed up to apple's magical thing uh that that doesn't exist let's say it starts existing and all your photos are backed up to iCloud let's say in four years apple stuff starts to really suck and you want to switch to android or whatever is existing in four years uh how do you do that
Yeah, well, you stop using Apple services, but you should still have all of your photos because they were just the backup.
That wasn't the only copy of them that you had.
I mean, that's another place where Google actually excels is they're very good about letting you get your crap out, right?
And again, granted, it's a little bit techie, but at least you can get it.
But with the online services, you just discontinue use of those services, discontinue use of those products.
And when you set up your new thing, you copy all your old crap onto your new thing.
And if the new thing really is better and is smart, they'll probably have some kind of migration assistance.
I think Apple even has a Windows migration assistance to
grab your crap off windows and put it on your mac so you don't lose like your excel file that you keep your taxes in or whatever uh that's i think it's just part of the process and online services i think are the easiest to switch up because it's usually just a matter of stop using a website stop paying the bill cancel hopefully through their website and sign up for another one in a web form that's easier i think than transferring your data with a migration assistant when you upgrade from one computer to another
I mean, it's not as easy as it could be, but I think we're within the realm of possibility.
And I would be happy if everyone in my family just used Everpix or something similar, because even though I know that's inadequate, I've tried to get them all to use Time Machine, and mounting and unmounting volumes is beyond the realm of normal computers, apparently.
Well, but that's why you get a time capsule and it all happens magically through the air, very slowly but magically.
I can't imagine time capsules sell that well because think about the sales proposition there.
Already airport extremes are way more expensive than most wireless routers.
And most people now have internet service.
If they have broadband at home in the U.S.
at least, usually your internet service comes with a wireless router or they talk you into leasing theirs every month because they tell you that you need it.
uh and so the market for wireless routers is already pretty cheap and commodity uh oriented but then apple comes out with a 200 router which of course we have but nobody else does because everyone else is sane uh and if you want you can spend like 400 to get this one with this giant disc inside of it i mean it's a it's a refrigerant toaster because like what you're
You're combining what with what?
Like, I want a router, and I want, like, something like a network-attached storage backup thing.
Those both sound like good things, but why would I combine them?
Because then you're tying, like, what if you want more storage, but your router is still fine?
Or what if you want a new router, but your storage is fine?
Like, you're combining two things that don't need to be combined and tying them.
Yeah, and plus, they had a terrible reputation for reliability, and I still think time machine over the network is not great.
But I don't know.
I mean, like, conceptually, it sounds good, but...
they're you know realistically speaking the product wasn't great and i don't yeah i think you're right i think it's not that popular because that's a tough sell i guess it's probably for like rich people who come into the apple store and they're like oh well you know if you want the really good one this will do your backups automatically like that sounds good to people in the store like oh i don't want to have to worry about backups i'll do this and most normal people would be like yeah but 400 bucks but you got a lot of money you're like all right and then you will regret it later
Yeah.
And you need an external drive to do it on.
And you're not a fiddly kind of person, so you don't want to go to Amazon and get an enclosure or even get an enclosure with a drive in it.
You just want one box that will solve all of these problems.
And whether or not it actually solves these problems, I think to Joe Consumer, that's maybe just slightly more...
not intelligent, but has the wherewithal to think about backing things up, I think a time capsule is a really good solution for that person.
Now, granted, technically, it may not be the best.
It's very slow.
Backing up over the network is kind of crummy.
But if you just want the problem to go away, you just want to throw a little bit of money at the problem and make it go away, I think it's a pretty reasonable answer.
But if Time Machine actually did that, maybe you'd have a point, but I still think the price would be a big barrier there.
I think at this point it's easier to sell people on spending a little bit extra for the iCloud backup than it would be for them to play out ahead of time, even though the iCloud backup could end up costing them more for the long haul or whatever.
That's not how...
people think, but the product just doesn't do what they say it's going to do.
It does not solve your problems.
It lets you experience the joy of hearing questions of, that thing on my menu bar is always spinning.
Is there a reason for that?
When does it say your last backup was?
Oh, like six months ago?
You're like, oh, time capsule, yay.
It's not...
If it had actually pulled it off, if it worked reliably, eventually we'll talk about NAS stuff.
The transporter, which I have now and I've been using, that works the way you expect it to work.
It works as advertised.
Whereas the time capsule, the whole thing is, I'm going to do time machine backups to it.
It's not really the time capsule hardware's fault, probably, but many things conspire to make network time machine backups and time machine in general less efficient and good
and potentially have the potential to get wedged.
My new thing is that now Time Machine deals so poorly with when the disk fills up, it's such a bad judge of how much room it's going to need.
Now I'm just sitting there with TMUtil manually deleting old backups because it can't figure out.
It takes days to figure out, look, just delete half the backups.
You're not going to make it.
It tries again and again, and it goes all the way through, hits the limit, fills the disk, starts over again.
It goes all the way through, hits the limit.
It just takes hours and hours for it to figure out that, oh, I didn't make enough free space.
I know you didn't, so there I am, tmutil deleting all day long, so I can finally get enough free space to make a complete back.
That is absolutely painful.
You're absolutely right.
I haven't actually had my Synology setup.
I haven't had it fill up yet because it's a giant disk in there.
But when that does fill up, historically, what I've done whenever my time machine fills up is I just format the partition.
Wipe and start over.
I do.
I just delete the partition because it's way faster than deleting all the files.
Just repartition the disk and start over.
And if I lose data during that time, I have backblaze.
Yeah.
Time Machine does do okay with small incremental backups, but if you use VMware at all, which this happens at work all the time, any modification to a couple of my big VMs, and it's like, oh, I got another three gigabytes to back up because you just touch lots of pages on these little two gigabyte Stripe files that VMware writes out, and you just see Time Machine going, and you're like, you are not going to make enough free space for that.
I don't know why you're not going to.
But you are not going to.
And so sure enough, it says, oh, backup failed.
Then I manually delete.
But small backups like 50 megs, 100 megs, it can make it through.
It's the big ones where it loses track of stuff.
But yeah, there's lots of technical reasons.
So I file time machine.
The way it does everything is inefficient and crappy.
Like when it first came out, they're like, oh, give them a chance.
They're doing it whole files at a time and really inefficient and the crazy hard length there.
But I'm sure they'll enhance it over the years.
Nope, not really.
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You know, you are the king of not trusting any of your stuff to anyone else.
And the fact that you and we have trusted both of our podcast websites to Squarespace should be enough.
Like, you shouldn't need any other ad read than that.
That's all you need to know.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you should host every website that you will ever make in your life on Squarespace.
It's all about priorities and needs and values.
And the fact is...
I would not have any provider of any blog platform be the only place where all the photos of my kid live.
That's just not what these things are supposed to do.
However, when I'm launching something and I don't have time...
to make a whole new site, code a whole CMS, or install somebody else's and keep it updated and all that stuff.
Or it's not part of the value add.
Exactly.
And for most people, for most sites that exist, they don't need to be on anything custom.
They don't need to be coded from scratch.
They don't need to be having their own installation of WordPress that somebody has to maintain.
There's so many site types out there.
I wish every restaurant that I ever searched for would just have their site on Squarespace.
Because they all have these crappy custom-built flash sites from 10 years ago that don't work on any mobile devices these days, and you're out somewhere, you went in front of a restaurant, and yeah, it's a disaster.
There's so many categories like that.
My wife is trying out Squarespace for her photography site.
There's all sorts of categories where it just does not make sense, even if you could make it yourself.
It doesn't make sense to hand-code every single thing from scratch.
Because no one's going to say, well, I was going to listen to that podcast, but this podcast does their website by hand.
You can't even tell.
The odds that you're, especially for most people, the odds that you're going to hand-roll a website that looks and works better than the Squarespace one are slim.
And also, have you seen other podcast websites?
They're usually pretty bad.
I mean, Dan built something good at 5x5, but a lot of the other podcast sites out there are terrible.
terrible it's not it's not a core part of the podcast experience people just like they arrive on their phone or whatever like that's how it works and we have to have a website and it has to be there and that's what the rss gets you know like there's there's reasons for it but it's not it's like is that where you want to spend your time the answer is you know i'd rather i'd rather delegate that exactly
All right.
Anyway, what's next on our topic list?
Because I have a few things I could bring up, but we have such a long list.
Why don't you look at the file like the rest of us?
Why do you shun the file?
I was busy reading our Squarespace ad tab.
Yeah.
Anyway, what do we have listed?
Children, children.
I think the first item we should probably save for last.
That makes sense.
Oh, that's going to be good.
Yeah, that is going to be good.
All right, so what else do you guys want to talk about?
I don't know.
Do you want to talk about If This Then That and Twitter?
I read that article, and the only thing I could come up with was to tease Panzer about something he wrote.
Oh, please do.
Friend of the show, Matthew Panzerino.
Yeah, writing for TechCrunch now.
Yeah.
Did he leave the Next Web, or is he writing for both?
Yeah, he left the Next Web and got quite a promotion at TechCrunch, actually.
All right.
Well, anyway, he did write that they didn't jive J-I-V-E with the new tweet display rules.
And so I want to shame him for that publicly.
It's a jive, right?
Yeah.
I just stay away from those words because I'm like, it's like whom, you know?
And yes, we know.
Oh, my goodness.
Don't even get me started on that.
Everyone send Casey the Oatmeal comic.
Oh, God.
Everyone.
person on all of the internet has sent me that link and i appreciate every one of you for sending me casey this is part of being you know you know f-list famous or whatever we want to say we are it's like like it's you have to that angry feeling you're getting like you have to use the rational part of your reign to wrangle that because each person who's sending it to you doesn't know about all the other people sent it to you and
And it's not reasonable to ask them, please, before you send me anything, check my at replies to make sure 800 people also haven't sent.
People are still sending me that pop art, culture, whatever poster you can buy of all the video game controllers.
I still get that every week, right?
Your inclination as a, you know, as a lizard brain, you know, hairless ape is to be like, stop sending me these things I know.
Don't you know I know?
But, like, the human part of your brain should be, no, they don't know you know, nor should they have to know you know.
They're just trying to do something nice for you, so don't get frustrated.
When you can actually not be frustrated, like, phase one is, like, being frustrated.
Phase two is realizing you shouldn't be frustrating and tamping it down, and phase three is actually not getting frustrated.
So I'm rooting for you to break through, Casey.
LAUGHTER
This is like training wheels for you.
It is nice because it is nice to know that people think of me and that it amazes me that anyone thinks that I exist outside of the hour or two that they listen to this podcast.
But that being said, I got a million copies of it and I was like, my goodness, this is a lot.
one thing you can do though because you do know that we're getting it is not ccs on them in your replies to those people like when you reply to them to say something you don't you don't have to include me to marco because you actually do usually don't we're sometimes i do but usually i don't i used to do it a lot when we this is terrible we should talk about something else but uh all right
Well, before we leave, the other thing about this is the first person who sends it to you actually is providing a service because before the first person sent it to you, you hadn't seen it.
And then you had.
And every other person is doing exactly the same thing as that first person did.
So the gratitude that you feel for that first person should extend to all those people because any one of them could have been the first person.
And if no one sent it to you, you would be living a life not having seen that oatmeal comic unless you read them every day, which I assume you don't.
Actually, I do follow the oatmeal on Twitter, which was the worst part of all is that I see this link fly by and I'm like, oh, crap.
I know what's – boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And I'm getting like at replies from the entire internet.
I do appreciate it.
It was funny.
Did it help you learn or no?
You know, the funny thing is somebody had said to me a while ago, here's what you do – and this was via Twitter and I apologize to –
Whomever you are?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I apologize to whomever that is, but they said, you know, just substitute either he or him and figure it out.
And if it's he, it's who.
And if it's him, it's whom.
This is not a new thing.
Like they've been teaching that in, you know, elementary school since, you know, for a hundred years.
right exactly um so i don't remember remember what you were asking i was saying did it actually help you or was it just i didn't like many oatmeal things it's kind of a humorous rehash of things that people have seen before but it's all it's all about the presentation and delivery and people look crap on the oatmeal for that because like oh all you're doing is you know gathering humorous things from the internet and packaging up in an attractive form in a single place yeah that's that's called you know that's that's that's called entertainment i don't get all the oatmeal hate that he gets so much crap and he seems like he's a
really nice guy like that's totally what it is because he like he his mistake was being honest about like look i find things that are funny on the internet and you know synthesize a single funny thing out of them that hopefully is greater than the sum of its part and people say i've seen that before or that's derivative which is ridiculous because that's what all art is he was just he was just more honest about it and that freaks people out so well and also he is really funny like i love his stuff i i have oh me too
His poster about dogs, I have it on my bathroom wall.
I love his art.
I love his style.
I love his humor.
I think he's really funny, and he gets an amazing amount of crap from people.
I really don't get it.
Humor is subjective.
You're someone...
was it something in the chat room saying the funniest thing about the oatmeal is that it exists but it's not funny well if you don't find it funny you don't find funny like humor is subjective i think the the guy can be obnoxious and if obnoxious humor is annoying and if you don't find it funny if you don't find the art style funny like you know you don't have to like it i'm just you know but you're right he gets he gets a lot of crap and he gets i think he gets a lot of crap because he's honest about how he makes things and it seems like low class and he seems fine with it but people like no you're
I want you to do things, be inspired and completely original and not derivative in any way and not tell me the crass commercialism that enters into your calculus.
That's how he makes his living.
That's part of being good at what he does, and he's good at it.
So like it or don't.
So there's two funny things that come out of what you guys just said.
Firstly, with regard to the oatmeal,
I am the king of sending the there versus there comic to people because that drives me nuts when people confuse T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E with T-H-E-I-R and T-H-E-R-E, and that drives me insane.
And so I've been sending these links to people forever, and so really I deserve every one of these links and all the links that will come after I've made that statement.
Do you converse with elementary school children a lot?
Who's messing up there, there, and there?
Oh, you have no idea.
I don't want to know.
Don't tell me.
Have you ever read an email from anybody?
Yeah, exactly.
I only converse with people who have impeccable grammar, apparently.
What about the itzes?
The itzes I don't blame people for anymore in the age of autocorrect, because the friggin' autocorrect will always pick the wrong one, and you won't notice.
It's a great excuse.
I noticed.
Even my fingers.
My fingers type the wrong ones all the time, right?
And I totally know the difference.
No, it happens.
The controller's broken.
That's why I died.
No, no, no.
My fingers type the wrong one.
And I totally know the right one.
I never had any confusion about it's and it's.
I don't know why I never had any confusion.
I probably learned the rule when I was in third grade and just never forgot it.
Never any confusion.
And yet, they come out of your fingers like that.
But they're there and they're like, those are spelled entirely different.
It's not like one key's difference.
Oh, it's the worst.
And you're and you're.
But anyway, the other thing I wanted to say is with regard to Marco having the poster, pro tip, if you ever happen to be in the Armand household, go to the bathrooms because that's where the best art is.
Well, yeah, because Tiff won't let me keep a lot of the best art in general purpose rooms so I can hide in the bathrooms.
So you get the bathroom.
Yeah.
That sounds like a raw deal.
Oh, goodness.
You should get the computer room.
Why isn't that the place you can put up here?
Unfortunately, I've filled up the walls in the computer room, and so I have to expand.
That's your overflow gallery.
Yeah, pretty much.
I have to expand into the bathroom.
So to speak.
Overflow gallery.
Oh, you don't want to call it overflow gallery in the bathroom.
Oh, my God.
Goodness.
All right.
So do we have anything to say about If This and That and Twitter?
I guess not.
I totally missed that story.
I read the article.
I didn't think there was anything there.
You tell me.
I just thought it was interesting that they're, as I phrased it in the show notes, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, just in that Twitter's allowing, or worked with If This and That, even more than just allowing it, they worked together in order to get that integration back.
And I thought that was kind of cool and a positive step.
It's only a story if you think this is part of a turnaround at Twitter, and I do not.
No, that's very fair.
I would also say not.
I mean, if this than that, they have funding and everything, right?
And they have a staff, right?
Isn't that?
I think so.
So the fact is Twitter will give API access to partners.
And so if you're willing to devote enough time and money into courting them with salespeople and relations and everything else, you can become a partner.
And so it's not that surprising that a company with funding and a staff was able to convince Twitter to give them API access.
And especially since they're really not in any way competitive with Twitter, and they don't look like they ever will be competitive with Twitter.
Facebook being cut off from their products interacting with Twitter and vice versa, that's because Twitter is afraid of the competition.
And of boosting some of the social network or some of the social network coming in and stealing all the following relationships away from Twitter and all the traffic and everything.
If this and that is not really a threat at all.
They're big enough that Twitter can make a deal with them, but they're small enough and narrow enough in scope of what they do that they're really never going to be a threat.
It's very, very clear.
They're not looking to take over and replace Twitter.
So it doesn't surprise me that they were able to make a deal.
Yeah.
All right, do we want to talk about the gold iPhone that's not gold?
Champagne.
Is there anything to say about that?
Why is it not gold?
It's champagne.
Because it's champagne.
I'm keeping up on the rumors.
Did someone rumor that that is what they're going to call the color, or are people just saying that as a backlash against the really, really gold-looking?
They're saying it as a description of what the color is.
Is there any doubt that Apple would call it gold instead of champagne?
If they make a phone that's a goldish color, they're going to call it gold.
They don't do the thing of calling it Midnight Mist.
Really?
Because one of my pockets called Slate or something, right?
Yeah, but that's reasonable.
But if it's gold, it's going to be gold.
I mean, the iPod Mini was gold.
They called it gold.
That's what I was going to ask.
I feel like if it's gold, they'll call it gold.
The other thing that I was expecting is...
What was the... You guys won't know this, but the PowerBook G3 with the bronze keyboard.
Or was it a G3?
Anyway, it was a PowerBook with a bronze keyboard.
And bronze perfectly fits with the description of that color, too.
So maybe they could call it bronze.
But gold, bronze, yellowish, whatever...
They've made uglier devices before.
iPods came in lime green and pink and this terrible teal and pastels.
Gold is not outside the realm of something that Apple would make.
If they make it, good for them.
Even the iPod Touch has come in pretty terrible colors.
I would say the current yellowish green, whatever that yellow-green cute color is for the iPod Touch, that's a terrible color.
It's hideous, but they make it and they sell it.
Yeah, exactly.
People like it.
Obviously, all the rumors are pointing pretty solidly to this iPhone 5C having this plastic back and being cheap and coming in all these iOS 7 palette colors, or at least three or four of them.
And that looks pretty likely, and that makes a lot of sense.
They just need to name it after a hipster beer, and it will sell like hotcakes.
Right.
It was like, find some beer that's the same shade.
I don't know enough about beers.
Maybe Marco could say, find some beer that is the same color as this phone is, and there you go.
Call it that.
The funny thing is, they get so much crap.
Every phone that's come out pretty much since the iPhone 4, they've gotten so much crap for it not being different enough, not being new enough, not being innovative, all that crap, mostly for superficial reasons, mostly because they didn't change the case.
Or even when the iPhone 5 came out, which was a massive change, people say, well, it looks kind of similar.
It's a rectangle with a screen on it.
They get so much crap for that.
I think now that they're going to have what appears to be two different models, with one model being totally new exterior-wise, and the other model being the same, quote, as the iPhone 5, but having new guts, new camera probably, a new faster CPU probably, and having this extra color that's radically different looking from the other two –
I think people will be very happy with this release.
I think they'll actually say, wow, finally we got new stuff.
And then iOS 7 also looks very new in the software.
I think this is an overall massive reactionary storm that's going to all hit at once in response to the last three or four years of everyone saying Apple wasn't innovating at all.
Well, we talked to several shows back about if they could have an iPhone 6 with a new form factor, boy, that would really just bring it home.
But, you know...
They probably wouldn't because they're probably going to do a 5S, and that seems like it.
I mean, they've got to do what they've got to do.
You can't just magically say, oh, you know what would also be great if we had a brand new iPhone 6?
Well, it seems like they're not going to unless they really, really surprise us.
But what they have rumored, if all those rumor things are true, that is totally adequate.
More than adequate.
My statement on Twitter a couple of days back was that it looks – because right now, iPhones we can predict pretty well in advance these days because the supply chain to make enough iPhones to satisfy the demand for them is so huge and gears up so far ahead of time.
It's almost inevitable that the supply chain will leak in the month leading up to an iPhone.
So that's why we've seen pretty much the entire iPhone 5C already.
We've seen the back shell for the iPhone 5S, and who knows?
We probably wouldn't even recognize any difference with the front.
So it's pretty obvious now what we're getting and what we're not getting.
And so it is pretty obvious that there's probably not going to be a quote iPhone 6 or anything beyond what we see as the 5C and what we see as the 5S online.
And so I tweeted a few days ago that it appears pretty clear now that we're not going to get a larger screened iPhone this year.
And I think that's a mistake.
What do you guys think about that?
I think if they could have made a bigger phone this year, they would have, but they can't.
I mean, when we talked about their bigger phone, we're like, they've got to do it.
It's going to happen.
But we were like, oh, but can they pull it off this year?
And that's when we started talking about the iPhone 6 and different form factors.
But, like, they...
like they're not they can't do it like the the 5c rumor thing is their new form factor this year it's probably been planning a long time doesn't seem like they had a larger phone in the pipeline for now but i i'm not as down on them as it being a mistake as you are because i think i think they can last one more holiday season but just barely like it would be better if it was out now i think they'll survive as it is uh
I bet they wish they could have it out sooner, too.
I know some people are giving you crap on Twitter like, oh, Mark, are you talking about – I mean, the people who don't listen to our podcast because they think you're saying they're going to have one of those ridiculous, you know, gigantic holding up a lunch tray to your head things.
Like, we're talking about a slightly larger iPhone.
Not even – you need the context.
Maybe four and a half inches, right?
Or maybe not even that big.
That's a lot.
You need the context of all those shows that we talked about this to understand that we're not saying that Apple's going to make a giant phone.
Without that context, your tweet might seem silly.
But, like, we're talking about the Apple needs to make a bigger one.
It's not going to be massively bigger.
They need it sooner rather than later.
I think they'll survive without it.
But I bet they're disappointed, too.
I bet they're disappointed that they can't have a larger one.
Because the fact is they are definitely losing sales to people who buy Android phones primarily, not necessarily only, but primarily because of the bigger screens.
Yep.
I don't know.
Half of me says you're right, half of me says you guys are wrong.
Firstly, as someone who has a 4S, I would kill to have the 5 form factor any day now because I'm too cheap to get a new phone every year.
You don't have to kill someone for it.
It's a lot cheaper than that.
Fair enough.
All right.
So I guess I'll just have to save my pennies.
But no, you know what I mean?
And I'm really excited to have, even if it looks exactly like what you have, Marco, and it's just a little bit quicker, I'm very, very, very excited for that.
Now, to be fair, there's no chance I'm going to buy an Android phone this year.
I also think that you're right that a lot of people do buy Android phones, and I have heard some people with iPhones say,
on various degrees of the nerd scale say, I might not go iPhone this year because I really want something with a bigger screen.
And so I think you're right about that.
But I also think that a lot of the reason people buy Android phones is because oftentimes they're cheaper, especially upfront, you know, instead of paying 100, 200, $300 or whatever it is these days for a brand new iPhone.
And granted, this is where the 5C comes in and so on and so forth in theory.
But a lot of people today will buy Android phones because simply because they're cheaper.
But we talked about that just several shows back as well.
Like, what if the cheaper iPhone is also the bigger one?
That seems like that's not going to be the case.
And if that was the case, that would be awkward because it's like, well, if you want the bigger phone, you got to get the slower one.
And it turns out that's not going to be an issue.
And, you know.
the bigger the slightly ever so slightly like it's like not much bigger because like the iphone 5 is kind of awkwardly dimensioned because they basically just made it taller which is a really weird way if you think about it to ever expand like can you think of any other device with a screen where the screen expanded in only one dimension in a significant amount uh it's really weird so like it's it's very tall and very skinny and it's just like
Could you just make that a little bit wider maybe?
Or just maybe a little bit bigger?
And again, not going to be the only phone they offer.
People who want smaller ones will have smaller ones, I think.
But slightly bigger would really help.
I agree.
And a couple things we're not considering, both with the gold iPhone and the size.
is that we're taking an extremely American-centric, myopic view of the world.
I've heard a lot of reports that the gold or champagne color is very popular in China.
I have no earthly idea if that's true or not.
Please email anyone but me.
But I've heard a lot of that.
Someone in the chat room said a second ago that a lot of people in Asia will buy specifically around screen size.
I don't know if that's factual or not.
You can just look at Samsung's sales numbers.
They sell a lot of phones with really big screens, and people are not grudgingly taking the big screens.
They like them.
They want them.
And you can complain whether they should like them or not or whether it's too big and phones shouldn't be that big and Apple should take some sort of principle stand.
People want it.
Like I said, Apple, I don't think, is going to make something comically large.
They're just going to go a little bit bigger because people want a little bit bigger.
I'd buy it.
Yeah, especially, you know, you figure if they made a little bit bigger, they would have room for a lot more battery volume.
And sure, the screen would take up more power because it would be a larger area.
However, I bet it would not take up.
I bet it wouldn't totally cancel out the battery increase.
So I bet if they made a larger phone, it would have overall better battery life than the current five size models.
Did you see that one guy who was tweeting about the internal changes to the iPhone, changes to the bus and stuff like that?
Yeah, saying apparently the PCI Express bus might come next year to it, which would be awesome.
Yeah, and what I've said to the thing was that self-refresh is coming, which is like a feature, not that they're going to be Intel-based, but like the Haswell...
chipsets basically so that the the video hardware doesn't constantly have to tell the screen keep displaying that no keep displaying that yep same thing keep displaying that instead the screen can sit there and not keep getting signals from the graphics hardware if unless the picture is changing which is a big power saving thing so if that's come i don't even know if it's in the new macbook airs but it's part of intel's push with their haswell chipsets
for pc hardware and it makes perfect sense to do in a phone uh you know anywhere you can get power saving so maybe that's part of that but yeah the changing of all the internal buses i think this is probably where the lightning connectors design will pay off because i'm assuming apple built it so that when they do change all the internal buses they won't have to have a new connector a new like you know like it's it's disengaged and isolated from the internals to enough of a degree uh that they should be okay with lightning connector i'm hoping that that was their plan all along and now we're seeing their plan come together
Yeah, because the lightning connector, it has enough pins that if you fudge the spec a little bit on grounding, I believe you can have a full USB 3.0 speed out of it at least.
I believe you can just make a USB 3.0 lightning cable and it pretty much could work.
Yeah.
And so obviously they made this thing.
They didn't just make this thing to last two years.
Obviously they made it to last a while.
That's why the little adapter has that crazy chip in it that's running the little tiny embedded OS.
The reason they did that is because the old way was we just hooked up the connector directly to some hardware that outputted the video signal.
But that ties us to, oh, we have to continue to output that.
We really need to just totally...
isolate you know this bus from the rest of the thing and yeah maybe that'll make it so our adapters have to be weird and stuff but now we're not tied to the internal implementation so that's the price they're paying and this is supposedly going to be the payoff of like we don't have to change the connector we don't have to bend over backwards to keep adding things to be sending out signals on all those pins uh because that's what the old one did you know we've we've pushed that responsibility upwards into the phone and the software and downwards into the adapter and then this can just be a nice connector to send the signals through
Speaking of sending things out of your phone and into it, our second sponsor – I've got to figure something out.
Look at you segueing today.
You're very good.
Maybe.
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So you play them anywhere.
It's great.
audible's offering atp listeners a free audiobook along with a 30-day trial go to www.audiblepodcast.com slash atp to take advantage of this special offer now guys audible as you know uh prefers if if the host can come up with a uh a pick a recommendation of maybe a a good book or audiobook that you've read slash listened to recently do you guys have any picks for that
I do, but John, would you like to go?
I have a pick as well.
Do you want to save my pick for the next time, or do you want to do both of them?
Ooh, that's tough.
All right, Casey, go ahead.
We'll save John's.
All right.
So a couple weeks ago when we were in the midst of our crazy recording schedule, I went to the beach for a few days, and I read the book Ready Player One on Faith and Jason's recommendation from a while back now.
And I checked and not only does Audible have the audiobook version of Ready Player One, which, by the way, is an excellent, very quick read, but they have the one done by Will Wheaton, which I have not heard, but I have heard through the grapevine is absolutely incredible.
And so I definitely recommend that.
Great.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot once again to Audible.
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial.
Thanks a lot to Audible.
All right.
So I want to talk about this whole fingerprint scanner home button thing.
no no i think it's time for john to get angry that's a good idea that's way more interesting am i gonna get angry about your recommendation of writer player one i just pasted into the chat room our incomparable episode about it we did not like it as much as you did really oh i loved it fine i'll have to listen uh we can argue about we can argue about that another time but uh speaking of you being angry about things how do you like the new tivo
Yeah, I actually had an opportunity to review the Nutivo.
I could have had it in my sweaty little pause and played with it, but I don't have time to do that for obvious reasons.
So I have not even seen this thing in person, used it, done anything with it at all, because I don't have time for it.
But...
i in the messaging for it i was glad to see that one of the items one of like the three items they were marketing was that it's faster which is like it whether or not it's really faster and at this point i have a hard time actually believing that it's actually going to be faster in the ways that i want it to be or if it is faster it'll be like slightly less embarrassingly slow uh
At least they have figured out that this is a problem that we have to address and that we can't just not say anything about it.
We're going to say, here's the new TiVo.
It's got X, it's got Y, and the interface is faster.
So I applaud them for that.
They have this thing.
They do surveys of their customers.
I forget what they call it.
They have some name for it or whatever.
customer, server, server.
Anyway, they ask you questions and you, and you answer like demographic stuff that they sell to advertisers and stuff.
But also you get a chance to say like, what features would you like to see in the next Tivo?
And do you have any general comments?
And I actually answer these surveys every month, like, you know, a dutiful little customer.
filling out the little boxes for all the movies I'm not going to see in theaters because I have kids.
And when I get to the end part, I always say, please make your user interface faster.
Please.
I should just save it as a text expander snippet or something.
I'm like, please, for the love of God, make your user interface faster.
And so whether or not they have done it, they have acknowledged that this is a problem and released this thing here.
I was saying to Lexi the other day that he should get TiVo to sponsor the show.
And I think a lot of people think that I hate TiVo because I have all these rants about it on old episodes of Hypercritical and everything.
But I feel like someone who's a real Hypercritical fan and who actually listened to that episode knows that it's certainly not the case.
Because despite all my yelling and screaming about TiVo, what I always say again and again, and I'll say it here again on this show, is it is the best DVR you can buy.
I have them all over my house.
I could not live without them.
If someone took away my TiVo, I would be very upset.
Is it as good as it could be?
No, and that's why I yell and scream about it.
But it's kind of like Apple.
It's the first DVR worth criticizing.
I've been a TiVo user for ages.
And so I think them sponsoring the show would not be crazy.
And this new TiVo looks to be the best TiVo they've made in a long time.
Is it as responsive as a TiVo Series 2?
I don't know.
I haven't tried it.
I can't say one way or the other.
But at the very least, they understand, hey, the responsiveness of our UI is an issue.
We should address that.
I'm disheartened to see all the other features that they're advertising because, you know, like, oh, now you can stream to iOS and it's got this thing built in.
It's got six tuners instead of four on the high-end model.
It's like, no, no, no, guys.
Don't worry about that stuff.
Just constantly, like, regroup.
You need to have, like, a Snow Leopard release.
Just internals only.
Get rid of the standard definition menus everywhere.
Make the thing blazing fast.
And then the next release, Ed, like, oh, we have new features.
Because, like, all those little, you know, we can do Amazon.
We can do Netflix.
We can do Hulu.
We can do this.
We can do searching across all, like...
I know those are not going to be as good as I would want them to be.
And like, at this point I like ignore the Netflix feature on my TiVo because in the competition among all the boxes connected to my TV, they can do Netflix.
TiVo is like in last place.
Maybe, maybe it's ahead of the Blu-ray player.
You know,
Apple TV is my number one.
Silent, no fan, responsive interface actually works with Netflix.
So I understand that TiVo has to advertise all those fancy features, but that's not what I want out of TiVo.
And if I was telling someone why they should buy TiVo, I would say to record programs and watch them later.
And it does that amazingly well, and it's reliable, and it doesn't crash.
Yeah.
You just wanted to record the programs and have you watch them later.
And in that job, that indispensable job that my household could not function without, TiVo does it.
And everything else about it, I'm not as interested in as those key features.
So I look forward to trying this out.
I did think about maybe I'll get rid of my existing TiVo as kind of like a gift to myself this Christmas or something.
It would not be economically wise because I just bought this TiVo two years ago.
It's not even a warranty yet because I bought the extended three-year warranty.
I bought lifetime service for it.
Wait, people buy that?
Yeah.
All the past TiVos I've had, lifetime service has been a good deal.
I've had them and used them far past the point where lifetime service... I would have been paying way more if I had paid monthly or yearly than the lifetime service.
But if I was to get rid of my current TiVo now, which was the previous top end TiVo...
It would not be economically wise to have paid for lifetime service two years ago and then ditch it.
And you can't transfer the lifetime service to the other thing.
And Tiwo's expensive.
There's no two ways about it.
And I don't complain too much about the expense, because I've always said, make a $1,500 box.
Just make it fast.
I'll buy it.
And this is like $600 plus...
four hundred dollars for the lifetime service like it's expensive i don't know how much it probably would come out to be under a thousand but i'd be willing to pay a huge amount of money for this because it's that important to like you know like my life and the functioning of my house but i can't really it's like you just bought a tivo and i'd rather i think i'd rather spend that money on a playstation 4 so that's probably how that's gonna go
I'm very disappointed that you're not absolutely infuriated that some of the screens, the user interface screens are apparently still standard def.
Well, you know how long I've been living with that insanity?
What I've heard from various people is that the actual application that's running TiVo that records all the shows and everything...
is standard def.
And all the high definition menus are just like one of those extra applications that you launch from the real application that's running TiVo.
So the high definition menus are, you know, that's one more layer up, right?
So as soon as you exit out of the high definition menus, then you see the real interface underneath it.
And if it were you to exit out of that, then you just, you know, the thing wouldn't be recording stuff anymore.
I don't know how accurate that is in terms of their stack, but like, that's why the high def, you know, the standard def menus there, because that's the actual underlying machine.
And I can kind of understand...
you know, why that didn't go away immediately because you don't want to screw with the reliability.
But now it's been like, how many years have television has been high def?
It's just embarrassing.
Like maybe they don't, maybe there's some deep technical reason why they can't get rid of it or whatever.
Like if I had to choose a crashy and screws up my recordings, but it has all high def menus versus the current situation, I would choose the current one.
I just think it's embarrassing for them technically that they haven't been able to get rid of these, but it's,
If forced to choose, I would say, look, if you feel like you don't have the technical chops to ditch the underlying thing that's recording all this stuff and has the standard def menus because you're afraid of instability, I'm willing to believe that your assessment of your competency is accurate.
And I prefer to have, like, because my TiVo, you know, there was times where they'd been a little bit crashy, and, like, you know, many years ago.
This thing has not spontaneously rebooted, has not crashed, has been, like, a champ against, you know, MPEG artifacts and stuff and the things I record.
It records four shows all the time.
It's really quiet.
It just works and does what it's supposed to do.
And even though I, you know, I grit my teeth and think how insane it is that I can't scroll through the menus, and then it's like...
down wait for reaction wait for reaction oh it moved down wait for you know it's like that infuriates me but in sort of like you know maslow's hierarchy of needs like are the shows recorded yes can i watch them yes yeah can i navigate them too quickly no but you know i've got like food shelter safety that's about the level we're at so
If anyone wants a DVR, again, I haven't read reviews of this yet, except for the Verge preview thing.
People are just getting them now.
I would say wait for the reviews, and if they say it's a good deal, you should get one.
I'm very happy with the TiVos I have, and like I said, if you took them away from me, I would be pissed, because what's my alternative?
A cable company DVR?
No, thank you.
I've used many of those over relatives' houses, and they are so much worse.
All right.
So with that in mind, I am genuinely not trolling you.
The only DVR I've ever had is the Verizon Fios DVR that we got months ago.
We didn't have a DVR until like six months ago because I was too cheap to pay the monthly fee.
What makes a TiVo, again, I'm really honestly asking, what makes a TiVo so much better than that?
Well, so the first thing is capacity.
Cable company DVRs can hold like nothing, even if you get the fanciest, schmanciest one.
The current top-of-the-line TiVo holds like 10 times as much.
What is it, like 450 hours of HD?
Do you know how many hours of HD yours holds?
I want to say it's measured in tens.
Probably not even hundreds.
It's not even close.
And that might sound crazy.
Oh, I'm not going to record that much.
But once you have a bunch of kids and a bunch of season passes and I have queued up a maximum of five episodes of 17 different shows for all the different kids and all our own things and whole series that I let queue up, that's...
That's what I'm paying all this money for this box to do.
Under the dome, I watched the first couple of episodes, and now I'm just like, man, I'll save that for later.
I'm letting the whole series queue up.
I'll get to it later.
You can't do that unless you have a three-terabyte drive in there, or if you have U-verse, and they do it all server-side.
But even then, the capacity is not that great.
So that's the biggest thing.
Again, our household would not function.
My wife has no idea.
I always get the one that holds the most that you can possibly hold, and she's still like, oh, it's 80% full.
I've got to delete stuff.
She has that paranoia about...
know the thing filling up or whatever i'm like don't worry it'll it'll delete off the ones that were not marked to save it'll be fine but like capacity so that's number one uh number two most you know the dvrs that you get from the the cable companies can't record four shows at once or now six shows at once and you say i'll never need to record six shows at once i didn't think i ever need to record four shows at once but you look at the thing and very frequently all four lights lit up and those are not all suggestions like it would also record shows that it thinks you want i don't really use that feature but anyway
I'll see what it's recording.
I'm like, you know what?
Those are four legitimate shows that are going on at the same time.
Now, granted, maybe the two that are recording for the kids we could defer until later for a repeat.
But I like being able to record all those things at once.
Now, to quickly interrupt, that actually does make sense because there has only been once or twice.
There were a couple times where we were recording two different shows and then I wanted to watch live TV for whatever reason and not watch those shows at the moment.
And our DVR was like, uh-uh, I've got two tuners.
You've got to pick either one of those two shows or leave me alone.
So that actually does make sense.
And the final thing I would say is 30-second skip, which is like every time I use someone else's DVR or U-verse thing or whatever and commercials come on and I have to fast-forward through them,
It's just terrible.
No, the Verizon one does, I don't know how many seconds it is, but it does a bulk skip.
Some of them have some kind of skipping feature, but most of them have like the fast forward scan feature.
And then like they have varying amounts of overrun where you'll wait till you'll see the first scene of the show and then you'll tell it to stop.
It'll actually put you like 10 seconds back into the commercial because it makes you're old and have bad reflexes.
And TiVo does that.
TiVo does exactly the same thing.
But TiVo, I think, is tuned for people with better reflexes.
But 30 seconds skip and 30 seconds forward, eight seconds back.
Having that be single button presses, that's one of the things that pissed me off about the fancy TiVo I have now is the 30-second skip got slower.
If you press the 30-second skip button really fast, it will stop showing you a different frame of video, and then you'll have no idea how far you've gone, and you'll have to pause.
That's a performance issue, right?
But even with the performance issue, even with me manually throttling myself, I would much rather 34 or 8 back or 7 back or whatever it is than do fast-forward scan and any other DVR.
So I would say those are the cornerstones of why TiVo is essential to my life and why other DVRs infuriate me.
And there's many, many other features that you could be interested in transferring things.
This amazes me.
They have a nice iOS app.
The iOS interface on the iPad or even on the iPhone is faster, more responsive, everything.
It's like...
How did you make a nice iOS app?
I mean, granted, the iOS app was crashy early on.
But when you're using it to move stuff, you're like, oh, if only the TV interface was like this.
It looks just like the TV interface.
Why can't you do this over there?
This iPod Touch costs $200.
Your box costs $600.
Just put the iPod Touch inside the box.
I don't understand what's going on over there with the hardware.
Maybe this one will be faster.
But anyway, there are all sorts of other features that other people might be interested in.
But for me, those are the big ones.
It's the Mac Pro of DVRs, basically.
Why do you need a Mac Pro?
Why can't you just get an iMac or an iBook?
You could, but I want the Mac Pro, and so I have the Mac Pro of DVRs.
No, that's fair.
But you sound reasonably optimistic about this.
It's uglier than mine.
That's another reason it's keeping me from playing.
Are there more fans?
No, the fan is pretty darn good and pretty darn quiet.
But the front of it, all they did was change the front panel.
It's just a metal box to the front panel.
And the new front panel is uglier than the old one, in my opinion.
But oh well.
All right.
Well, fair enough.
Anything else we want to talk about or do we want to just end slightly early-ish?
Well, I discovered that we will hit the 50 meg limit with our audio settings roughly at like an hour 40.
I think an hour 43 is the exact limit of how long we can go.
Even if you go mono, you hit that thing where you found out you were doing stereo before, right?
Oh, yeah, I've been doing mono now for weeks.
All right.
Yeah, so as long as you want to keep 64K mono, we've got to keep it below an hour of 43.
Oh, it's up to you guys.
Let's wrap it up.
We have so much to talk about.
We can save it for next episode.
Yeah, why aren't we trying to keep these shows around an hour?
I kind of like that.
And then we started going long again.
All right.
Well, it's like we're on that hypercritical show or something.
Yeah, it happens.
Like, let's say how long we were in follow-up today.
You'll slide right back into that.
It'll be a disaster.
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Squarespace and Audible.
And we will see you next week.
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.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They did it.
You can hear the opening chord of the song, can't you?
uh all right so yeah that's that's the thing that people don't know is like they talk about the song being catchy it's catchy for us too like i find myself thinking about like why are you thinking about the songs to your own damn podcast but it happens oh yeah that the whole reason we picked that song was because we couldn't get get it out of our own heads and because you don't have the good taste to appreciate bleeps and boops oh god listen to this guy
Anything else going on?
No, I mean, well, there's a whole lot going on, but I guess, John, how's the review going?
Yeah, it's going all right.
I mean, like I said, at this point, I have another section that I need to write, but then after that, I'm waiting on Apple.
I'm waiting for another build, waiting to see what new things work, what screenshots get changed.
I'm doing e-book production, working on all that crap.
Try to get into the iBook store this year.
We'll see how that goes.
Oh, interesting.
Actually, I'm curious.
Has your eBook workflow changed since last year?
Because you mentioned you described it in a pretty good chunk of hypercritical back for the last review.
And I know obviously the whole world of eBook tools is awful.
So I'm wondering if anything is different this year.
I had the programmer's pile of crap, because I just did a bunch of terrible scripts, and all I did was copy those bunch of terrible scripts and modify the terribleness inside them.
At a certain point, maybe I'll feel like, you know what, I should...
make these not crappy but it's just i'm just too efficient at modifying the crappy scripts to work with the new thing and the thing is like and i'm like leaving old stuff in there i'm just like either commenting it out or like maybe i'll need that later like so then they're accumulating residue the scripts are terrible but yeah these are all just hand assembled it's just me bb edit and pearl uh and that's all you need to basically make an ebook
And the thing is, I fought it all last year to make these scripts.
And now I know, don't bother looking at the tools.
It's just a bunch of files in a container, in a format.
It's all text.
You zip it up.
You feed it through some executables.
Whatever.
And what it comes down to in all these things is it's like Android.
It's like fragmentation.
The process is build the book, load it on this device, see what's crappy.
Build it, load it.
It's like Jenga.
You push something, all right, now it looks good on the Kindle Touch.
All right, let's look at an iBook.
So now it looks bad there.
The worst one is Kindle because Kindle packs two formats into a single file, the Mobi format and the KF8 format.
KF8 is reasonably full-featured, and Mobi is a pile of crap.
But you can't give different, you know, different content to the two formats.
You have to find some crappy way with CSS to, you know, like do these terrible hacks of like, okay, well, apply this style sheet.
You can apply style sheets on each device.
You can say this style sheet applies to KF8 and this style sheet applies to Mobi.
and that is sufficient to do anything you want because you're like fine display none on kf8 and then you know you just you can just hide things but like come on guys like i'm generating these files i could generate two totally different files this one would be optimized for mobi this won't be optimized for kf8 but instead i gotta make one set of markup and do stupid ass css hacks
to make it look good in both of them and then by the way make sure it looks good on you know on the iphone screen on the big iphone on the small iphone and now i got to check in on ibooks on the mac as well and on all the different kindles and on the e8 kindles and on the kindle fire and use the kindle preview to show us other things but the kindle preview crashes when you use this particular device so you have to use the real device and how do you get the same book onto all your seven devices and then see where it looks right so that's that process sucks and continues to suck
So, Marco, did you ship all of your old devices up to the Boston area in order for John to test?
I've got plenty.
I don't have Marco's collection of Kindles, but I've got sufficient Kindles.
Last year, I did have to ask Scott McNulty from The Incomparable, who also has every Kindle on demand, to test something because I didn't have a Kindle Touch and the simulator was lying to me.
That's the other thing.
Like the previewer they give you to say, here, try it on that device.
Oh, that's a piece of garbage.
Yeah, it's a terrible application, and it lies, apparently.
Because, like, I previewed it on the Kindle Touch, and it looked fine, and then someone sent me a picture of his Kindle Touch after it had already been uploaded to the Amazon Star, and he bought it and got it, and it was, like, unreadable.
And it's like, well, that's not what the previewer showed.
No, generally speaking, the Kindle previewer does not tell you anything.
Honestly, you should not even be using it.
It is that bad.
I think it's better than nothing.
It's not, because it'll tell you that something looks a certain way, and the actual device is nothing like that.
There's that big of differences.
It is completely useless because it gives you a false sense of security.
It does give me feature support, though.
The iOS version of the Kindle Reader, by the way, is terrible.
It doesn't support...
I don't even know if it doesn't support KFA.
Maybe it doesn't support KFA.
Maybe only the Kindle Fire supports KFA, but I'm amazed that this... KFA's two years old, a year old, and the iOS reader still acts like an e-ink Kindle with fancy graphics.
It can't do floated images to the side.
It's like, oh, can't handle that.
So that kind of thing of like, is this feature supported in iOS?
The previewer can usually show it because if you try to float something, it will not float in the previewer and it will not float in the iOS app.
So...
I don't trust it entirely because I have the devices here, but when I'm making change after change after change, sometimes I just want to go to the previewer and click three times and get it to reload the book.
That's the great thing about the Kindle for Mac, which, by the way, I also have to test in, which does display KFA, is you have to right-click the book, delete the book, go to the finder, find the book, drag it onto the Kindle thing because you can't do open from within the app.
And then because it copies it into like the Kindle library repeatedly doing that task, I should make an Apple script for it because it's like so annoying.
You can't just like, you know, you want to say, okay, the file has changed, reloaded.
It's like, what do you mean reloaded?
It hasn't changed.
I have my own copy in my library and that one hasn't changed.
That sounds awful.
So that I went through that process, which in the beginning, that process is a nice break from writing, but eventually you're like, you know what?
This sucks.
I'm feeling all, oh my God, this is like, I bet you don't bad flashbacks.
But you're feeling relatively confident about it, the review?
I'm all right.
I mean, I thought it would kind of be a similar length to the Mountain Lion one.
And I think after I finish the Slack session, it will be maybe a little bit shorter.
But it feels longer to me because I don't know why it feels longer.
Maybe it feels longer because all the screenshots are retina.
Like, I don't think there's more screenshots than there were before.
Maybe they're even less.
But all of them are twice as big.
So, like, the production workflow, those big images.
And that's the other thing with Kindle.
They charge you for the download.
They charge you per megabyte.
And so now I've just doubled the size of my book and it's like, it's a $4 book and I'm already, you know, Amazon's already get, you know, it's $5 book.
Amazon's already getting like four bucks out of that five, you know, like I'm going to double the size of it and they're going to take even more.
I don't want to raise the price of the book.
So I've had to crush down the images with even bigger compression.
in the kindle one that's that's the advantage of the ibooks version i'm going to ship full res pings on there because apple as far as i know does not charge anything for download so i'm like here you go 35 megabook enjoy yeah apple i mean like that's why uh what was david spark's book was it paperless the one that he did yeah it was huge gig right yeah and it was fun like apple doesn't charge anything different for that that would that would cost you like 150 in download fees from oh yeah inside
Amazon has two deals.
You can do 70% royalty, which is pretty good.
So you get 70% of the purchase price of the book.
Of course, you don't get to pick the purchase price because they can change it for price matching.
But anyway, 70%, but there's that per megabyte fee, or you can get 30% and no per megabyte fee.
They know what they're doing over there.
But I'll be much happier to get the 70% and also no download fee at iBooks if I can get through the process of submitting a book to iBooks and getting it published and approved, which is much harder than Kindle, because Amazon's like, sure, upload it, click a button, and eventually we'll put it up for sale, but then we'll refuse to load it onto an iPad for no reason.
Yeah, that was last year's drama.
This year, I don't know what's going to go wrong.
Who knows?
But you're just totally powerless.
You can't get in touch with a human.
And days are passing and people are like, how could you sell this book?
You can't even load it on an iPad.
And you totally can.
But their website says you can't.
And their website refuses to send it to an iPad.
Like, you know, send to my Kindle.
It won't even list your iPads.
Like, sorry, this book can't be sent to an iPad.
Yes, it can.
It totally can.
I'm looking at it right now.
And then they fix it, and then we uploaded a new version of the book with typos fixed, and then it couldn't be loaded on the iPad again.
Yeah, that's the whole episode of Hypercritical about that.
Now, I'm curious.
Because of the audience – obviously, this is not a good solution for most books.
But because of the audience of an in-depth, tens of thousands of words, Mac OS X point-release version review –
Obviously, this is a somewhat technical audience.
Could you do the thing that I believe O'Reilly does or one of the big publishers does, probably all of them do it, where you sell the book on your own site or on ours' site, whoever's doing it, and then you can just download a Mobi version if you want to put it on a Kindle?
Well, ours does that.
If you sign up for a month of ours premiere, which is like $5, the same price as buying a book on all the stores, you get the Kindle.
I don't know if they put the Kindle version.
But anyway, you get an iBooks-compatible EPUB, no DRM.
You get a PDF version.
And I believe they also put the Kindle version up, but I forget.
You get the movie in KFA.
paid a version like so like that is that is the best deal if you want to do that but then people are wary like oh I don't want to subscribe to something then I have to remember to cancel and all this other stuff and it's like well for five bucks you can get every single one of these books in every format but if you'd rather buy people just feel comfortable buying from Amazon so that's why I put it up on Amazon a lot of people ask about iBooks
If I can get my book up there, I'm going to do that as well.
I think everyone should read it on the web for free.
I think that is by far the best version of this book to read.
But sometimes people just want to give me money.
Sometimes people just really want to read it on their Kindle.
If you're going to read this review on an e-ink Kindle with the images all on grayscale, some people want to do that.
And who am I to say that they can't give me money?
That's why I figure how much of your time and trouble is it really worth to give an amazing experience to these devices where it's already doomed to be a pretty crappy experience in general.
It's not amazing.
I'm just trying to be acceptable.
Well, but it's pretty much doomed.
It's not going to be good.
And why not – and especially dealing with the weird megabyte limitations and Amazon's stupid tools.
I mean every tool Amazon makes for publishers is ridiculously horrible.
And so just dealing with all that stuff is... Well, you can sign up for KDP Select, and then you get no per megabyte download and all this other great stuff.
But your book must be for sale exclusively on Amazon.
Oh, yeah, and that's, of course, correct.
So if that...
I mean, seriously, the concerns about not wanting to sign up for a subscription and having to remember to cancel it, those are very valid.
Why not just, you know, because obviously I'm sure there are people at ours and they're Cundinast, right?
I'm sure they want people to subscribe and that's part of the reason of having it on their site.
But certainly they can also realize the value of
Just make a dedicated page for just this book, put a Stripe form up there, and just have some way to pay $5 and get the files for download right there without having to sign up.
You would make so much more, and they would make so much more from that.
It's not that much money in the grand scheme.
It's not that many people buy the book, so we don't want to get it too overblown.
And they do sell more books than just mine.
I think you're right.
At this point, maybe there's like four e-books a year that they sell.
They get significant sales.
it's maybe probably worth it for them to do what you said, put up a page, have Stripe do it or whatever.
But like, I don't think that's how, like, that's something that ours would have to make on its own.
Condé Nast has no sort of infrastructure for like, Hey, we're going to sell stuff over the way.
How do they sell the other eBooks that they make?
You can say they make four a year.
Yeah, they do put them on Amazon.
Like, that's... Most people just put them up on Amazon.
I think I'm... They may have done some on iBooks.
I don't remember.
Or I may be the first iBooks one.
I don't know.
But, like, they're... If they did it themselves, but, like, if you think about the development cost of how many developers and how much time it would take to do that, they would eat up the first and second year sales.
Like, we sell some eBooks, but, like, they're $5 eBooks.
And, like...
tons of people read them on the web and slice off many, many zeros to see how many people who actually buy them.
It's not that much money.
So I kind of understand it's kind of on the balancing point of like, well, we could have our developers add features to the website or whatever, or we could have them put up a Stripe page.
And at this point, I think sending them to Amazon or iBooks and sort of delegating that and outsourcing it, I think it's still reasonable.
Like if they were selling...
You know, if every single article is available in ebook form or like some percentage of them, but it's really just like four or five high profile articles a year.
And, you know, who knows?
It could happen, like, because they do have good development.
They wrote their own live, you know.
what do you call it event?
Like, uh, what was it?
Cover it live, those type of things.
Yeah.
Like when you're, when you're covering it.
Yeah.
Because they kept using third party vendors and they kept crapping out.
So they wrote their own, but that's like more of a core competency of the site.
Like you go to ours for the live blog.
Cause there's like, you know, 20 of those a year and that's big traffic time.
So they wrote their own one of those and, you know, had their developers do it.
And it's awesome.
Uh, I don't think they're at that point now for book sales.
Anyway, uh, can we talk about the M4?
Speaking of gold.
Yes, seriously.
What is that color?
Every time I see that, I'm like, that's got to be Photoshopped.
No real object is that color.
Remember when the Dodge Neon first came out in, like, 98?
Yes, yes.
And it had, like, a mustard yellow color.
It just looked like terrible.
I don't know why people do that.
i don't know why people do that like bmw has has some a bad color gene they have that yes well all of their cars have to be available in like two or three great colors three or four forgettable colors and like two completely awful i can't believe that's even available colors
I don't know if that's a cultural thing.
In Germany, those colors are popular.
Do you remember the taxis?
The Munich taxis.
How did you describe it, Marco?
It's the color of aged plastic.
It's this very, very light beige.
It's plastic from the late 80s that, when it was new, was white.
It's sun scorched.
It's like when you leave old Apple hardware, like old Macs, out in the sun, the orange deepens.
Exactly.
Yeah, same thing.
The white MacBook had that problem originally.
I had one of those that had that problem, where the entire, what they call the top case, which is the whole service that the keyboard is part of, that whole panel would discolor into this gross, orangey-looking thing because of heat.
And people thought it was because of dirty hands, because it would be a lot of times in the hand resting area.
But even if you'd put like films on top of it, which I did immediately when it was brand new, you would still get that discoloration underneath the film.
And it turned out they had this problem that it was just like the plastic was aging poorly with all the heat that it had to deal with being a laptop.
And they eventually replaced them all.
So they probably dealt with that same issue among many others with the white iPhone that they had so much trouble with.
Oh, I'm sure that was part of it.
so yeah so the m4 was announced it's this hideous gold and when we say gold we don't mean fun looking champagne if you even consider that no it's like mustard vomit hideous yeah it's like it's like if you miss mustard and mercury yes yes and it's awful it the i think it's a decent looking car under the paint maybe it's so hard to see because i'm too busy cleaning up my own vomit but uh but they're saying it's a twin turbo version of my motor the m55 which is about the same power output as the uh
v8 e90 wait they gave they gave engine details a little bit or maybe it was i i was in that autoblog post it was expected to be a triple turbo uh v6 30 um with roughly 400 horsepower
Can you put a link in the chat room to that one Hades picture?
I'm trying.
I'm trying to multitask.
It's not working.
And so the other interesting thing that they announced today, and I'm putting the link in now, is that it's losing the manual transmission, which makes me... Well, but hold on.
That was a rumor.
that autoblog reported that they said their source said but like but then like beamer post uh chimed in and said we've actually heard the opposite and here's a photo of a prototype on on you know that was spotted somewhere that had a stick and there's like all the and like here's like the vin database that this one says it has a dct and this one doesn't say that so it probably has a stick like there's there's all sorts of uh of pretty good reasons to the contrary
See, this color, oh my god, this color looks like it's Photoshopped.
You know what it looks like?
Marco will know what color that looks like.
Actually, I've dealt with... You're probably talking about infant poop or something.
I am talking about infant poop.
After you feed them the peas, that's infant poop color.
Totally.
They're not onto solid foods.
It's mostly milk because their milk poop is kind of yellowish, but if you started feeding them the split pea, that is in a diaper right there.
Yeah, definitely.
I've actually spent all day dealing with a sick dog, and I've seen some of those colors today, actually.
Yeah, it's also dog vomit color because dog vomit is usually yellowish.
Yeah.
No, I've also seen – and I think I sent this only to Marco.
I don't remember if I sent this to you, John.
But somebody found or put together sales numbers or what do they call them?
Take rates for – Yeah, you sent it to us of how many people are buying the manuals.
Right, the E90M3 and how when they started offering the DCT –
you saw the take rate of manual transmissions just plummet everywhere except the US, which seems totally backwards to me because nobody in America drives a stick and everyone drives stupid automatics.
Whereas in Europe, in my experience, everyone drives a stick and nobody drives automatics.
But apparently in the M3, it was reversed.
And so one of the arguments they've had, Marco and I were talking about this earlier, and I am, is, well, maybe the U.S.
will get the stick and nobody else will.
But then it could be like the M5 where, like, yeah, the U.S.
gets the stick, but it sucks and no one wants it.
Well, yeah, and, you know, if you look at those take rates, it does look like, though, that, you know, the M5, the take rate for the stick was getting pretty bad, but the M3 take rate for the stick in the U.S.
was, I think, like, 50% still.
Right, but the M3 stick was good, and the M5 stick, every review I've read of it is, like, mushy and not satisfying to use.
Like, you gotta make a good stick.
You can't be like, oh, fine, here you go, here's a stick.
No, no, it wasn't that it was a bad stick.
It was that, like, the rest of the car designed around the stick just so, it was so much better with the DCT.
Well, hold on, hold on.
Every review I
read of it said it's a bad stick which which m5 are we talking about mine marco's m5 okay because the e60 which was the v10 m5 universally everything i've ever heard you're absolutely right total piece of crap where the f10 m5 which is marco's i read one article and it was only one
And to be fair, I think it might have been in the BMW owner's club, whatever it is, magazine.
But they said, oh, my God, the six-speed F10 M5 is amazing.
And they were extremely effusive about it.
Go read the –
groupings of magazines from my youth which i keep reading like an old no no i agree car and driver road and track automobile motor trend motor trends kind of raggy none of them like the stick oh i completely agree this was the only one i saw the dct version was the one to get and that like even though even like car and driver who's like they got the whole save the manuals campaign they're like we can't recommend that you get that anyone get this manual uh it's not a good manual you should you know get an m3 if you want a manual
Well, and maybe not anymore.
I bet it still has to stick.
Yeah, it seems like – I think it would have to.
I totally believe that person who said that the U.S.
is going to get it.
I do worry, though, that it will be like the M5.
Like Marco said, not well matched to the car, but also like the M5, not a satisfying manual by all the reports that I read.
of it which is a shame because like it's not it's not a check mark so you don't be like oh it's got a manual check the box therefore i feel good you want to get the enjoyment of the manual and bmw manuals are really nice i've driven my father's and i've driven his audi and you know many only different manuals my whole life and the bmw manual he's got in his car is the nicest feeling one that i've ever driven and they have something there uh if they're going to preserve it for the u.s as a kind of a throwback and these people want it at least give the good one
I mean, whatever it's worth also.
Like when I had the 1M, that was an amazing stick.
That was a fantastic stick car, fantastic stick experience, everything.
Now they're replacing that effectively with the new M235i model that is coming to the U.S.
And that, for all intents and purposes, looks like the sequel to the 1M.
That's the kind of thing, I bet that's going to be probably the last car in the lineup available with a stick.
Yeah, that's possible.
Because they always said the 1M was as close as you could get to, what, the E30 M3?
You know, the original lightweight, relatively high power, but extremely lightweight, high-revving M3.
And everything I read about the 1M was it was very similar to that.
But not as attractive.
No, but, like, you know, it's... I think...
With a car, and this is going to sound crazy, but with a car the size of the 3 Series and, of course, being based on it, then the M3.
Now, with the new M3 and M4, they have focused a lot on weight savings.
That's one of the reasons they went from the V8 to the V6, and they're doing more carbon fiber, more aluminum.
They're saying one of the main goals with the M3 and the M4 was to be lighter weight than their regular non-M3 Series counterparts.
So maybe this won't hold true quite yet.
But I think enthusiasts who like the feel of driving a lot and who want that kind of direct connection between your body and the road that you can feel so well with a stick and that level of control, I think they're going to be pushed to smaller and smaller cars.
And...
I don't think it would be that bad if the M235i comes out and ends up being awesome, and maybe five years from now, that's the only BMW available with a stick.
I don't think that would be that bad, because the enthusiasts who like having a stick, who like the advantages that it gives you, tend to also like smaller and lighter cars.
Yeah, they'll eventually go too.
A generation of kids will grow up not ever using a stick, not ever desiring a stick, and they will appreciate all the good things about an automated manual, and there are many, and then that'll be that.
So eventually we'll all die.
But yeah, we worry about adjusting the fuel mixture with the rods sticking out of the dashboard.
We don't care about that.
People used to.
They all died.