Playing You Like a Video Game
John:
Skype doesn't ring anymore on my computer.
Casey:
Maybe you should get a new computer.
Marco:
Yeah, your Mac Pro is probably broken.
John:
I'm going to blame Skype.
Casey:
I think it's Mac Pro.
Casey:
We should do some quick follow-up with regard to what's the official name for it?
Casey:
Voice memos or voice messages, whatever it is that Marco and I were running into.
Casey:
Raise to listen.
Casey:
Yeah, well, the thing that we solved by raise to listen, maybe.
Casey:
I will answer that I have not seen one of those misfires with the, you know, speak a text message to somebody.
Casey:
I've not seen one of those since you and I had the simultaneous epiphany and invention of turning off raise to listen, raise to wake, whatever it is.
Casey:
How's that been for you?
Marco:
Yeah, same thing.
Marco:
Raise to wake, I still use.
Marco:
Raise to listen is what we turned off in the messages preferences.
Marco:
And yeah, I too have had no accidental do-doot as I'm putting my phone in my pocket and then I end up sending or half sending or trying to send a very long audio message of my pocket, basically.
Marco:
So yeah, I've been very happy with that so far.
John:
I wonder if they picked the wrong defaults on this one then, because I understand the feature.
John:
I think I even remember it being demoed and I understand the utility of it, especially if you frequently need to like fire off a text message, but you don't have time to type it.
John:
So you just want to like bring it to your face, talk and put it down.
John:
Right.
John:
But like the unexpected consequences of enabling that feature.
John:
that were obscure enough that took you guys a while to figure it out and like it's it makes the phone seem like it's broken you want to bring daisy in she seems to have an opinion yes seriously she's got opinion about people walking past our house what's going on with her i haven't heard an update on rectifs in a while uh i mean it's springtime so the windows are open on the house and uh there's more people walking by on the sidewalk all the time and there's more interesting smells out there and there are birds and squirrels and so she's going a little crazy
Casey:
And we wanted to point out that the tickets for Layers are available.
Casey:
This is a three-day conference that's during WWDC.
Casey:
A lot of people seem to have come to the opinion that Layers is strictly a designer conference.
Casey:
And although design is a heavy part of Layers, it is not at all a designer-only conference.
Casey:
I went...
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
2016, I believe.
Casey:
And the only reason I'm not going this year is because it's more appropriate for work anyway if I go to WWDC.
Casey:
But Layers is phenomenal.
Casey:
The speakers are always great and diverse.
Casey:
The talks are always phenomenal.
Casey:
They're oftentimes about stuff that I would never think I would find interesting and then I'm absolutely fascinated and riveted by them.
Casey:
And so you should definitely, if you're going to be in the area of San Jose, if you like delicious snacks and or if you like both in the food sense or in the brain sense, if you want a snack for your brain, go to Layers.
Casey:
It's good stuff.
Casey:
Because, Marco, you've been to at least one in the past, right?
Casey:
Yeah, I've been to two, actually.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
The one you went to was the one I didn't go to.
Yeah.
Marco:
But I went to the one, I think, one year before that and the year after that.
Marco:
And they were great.
Marco:
It's run by our friend Jesse Char, who does lots of wonderful things, and Elaine Pau.
Marco:
They're the partnership.
Marco:
They put on this great conference every year.
Marco:
And it's great, not only if you're a designer, but if you are a single person, product person, or you need to concern yourself with such things, or if you just like cool stuff.
Marco:
And
Marco:
So not only do they have great talks, they really are great on the diversity front, both of people and of ideas, which is really nice.
Marco:
And usually they get really, really talented speakers as well.
Marco:
And also, it is just such an incredibly fun conference because Jesse and Elaine, the organizers, are so...
Marco:
Not only are they very fun people themselves, but they know what's fun.
Marco:
And they know what people who go to conferences need and what you don't even realize you need, but you really do need.
Marco:
And so you go there and the snacks are amazing.
Marco:
The coffee is amazing.
Marco:
They throw the best parties and this wonderful after party.
Marco:
It's so much fun.
Marco:
And they build in fun and socializing into the schedule as well, so you're not just sitting in a chair all day.
Marco:
It's just a great conference.
Marco:
It's really fun.
Marco:
And if you're going to be in San Jose, I highly suggest you check out Layers.
Casey:
Yeah, it's really, really good.
Casey:
And if Marco says the coffee is amazing, you know that it's going to blow your freaking mind.
Marco:
It actually is amazing coffee.
Marco:
You know I wouldn't say that lightly, but it actually is amazing coffee.
Yeah.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And, you know, the way that I knew that they really were not f***ing around was that the first or the only time I went, I should say, is that they had like a, I don't want to call it a snack table because it wasn't for snacks at the time.
Casey:
It was like almost like a refreshments table, but they had like mints and mints.
Casey:
for those of us who stayed out too late drinking.
Marco:
They had like Tylenol for hangovers.
Casey:
It was great.
Casey:
And they also had like these little, I don't know how to describe them, but like one-time use, no water required toothbrushes in case you needed to freshen up a little bit.
Casey:
Maybe you just rolled in from the bar directly to layers.
Casey:
So Layers is a truly great conference.
Casey:
And I don't recall how much tickets are off the top of my head, but I remember it being very, very, very affordable, especially compared to WWDC.
Casey:
So if you are at all interested and you will be in San Jose or could be in San Jose, I think it's the first.
Casey:
first three days yeah i believe it's monday tuesday wednesday usually and yeah it's great and yeah the tickets are it's like between an ipad mini and an ipad pro somewhere in that range so anyway the the url is layers.is and again i cannot recommend it enough don't let don't let anyone scare you i mean i could see how at a glance you could look at their website and say oh this is for designers but
Casey:
But that's not at all what this website is trying to say.
Casey:
And I think that the initial – maybe it was the first year it was very design heavy.
Casey:
But even if it's about design, in my experience, it's about the sort of design that everyone cares about.
Casey:
It's not about specifically UI design for a specific mobile app or anything like that, or usually anyway.
Casey:
It's just about all sorts of interesting and cool stuff.
Casey:
And it seems like not unlike Singleton from years past –
Marco:
it the the the the marching orders for speakers are basically hey talk about something cool that's about it it's also i'm cool i have to point out too like if you happen to be at wbc in san jose last year if you happen to notice as you're walking out of the convention center that next door was this outdoor patio full of people who look like they were having a lot more fun than you that was layers and
Marco:
like and that happened like that was like they would have like these amazing snacks brought in and everyone's hanging out outside and having fun and like and then you know the developers like stocking out with their box lunches like that's like it was the like the more fun looking party next door
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
I swear on everything I consider holy, I swear that one time I was walking to the conference and I passed this outdoor area, just like you described, and I'm like, wow, people are having a lot of fun out there, just like you described.
Casey:
What the hell is going on?
Casey:
Oh, it's Layers.
Casey:
Okay, that makes sense.
Marco:
Yeah, like everybody who walked past that kind of wished they were there instead.
Marco:
So you can be there by going to Layers.
Casey:
Yeah, indeed.
Casey:
Anyway, so we'll let this go.
Casey:
But layers.is, Jesse and Elaine are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people, and they find wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people to speak at their conference.
Casey:
So it's really, really great.
Casey:
So today, there was a very interesting piece in, I believe it's pronounced Hodinkee, or is it Hodinkee?
Casey:
Hodinkee.
Casey:
I'm genuinely asking.
Casey:
Hodinkee?
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
I can't believe this is like my worlds are colliding.
Casey:
Yeah, indeed.
Casey:
So Hodinkee is, and jump in when you're ready, Marco, is a kind of online periodical website that's about watches.
Casey:
I presume mostly high-end watches, or is that unfair?
Marco:
Pretty much exclusively high-end watches.
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Marco:
Yeah, so Hodinkee is like the daring fireball or tech crunch of the watch world.
Marco:
And the person who wrote this, Ben Clymer, is either the founder or the head person now.
Casey:
So anyway, so there was an article.
Casey:
I guess they do like a literal magazine, which is in print?
Casey:
Is that true?
Marco:
This is volume two.
Marco:
They literally just started doing this.
Marco:
But I guess this is also on the web.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't get the print magazine.
Marco:
I just read their site in a feed reader.
Casey:
Suffice to say, they ended up doing an interview with Johnny Ive, which is obviously relevant to all three of us, even if the rest of the website is not.
Casey:
And so there was an interview with Johnny Ive, mostly, of course, about wristwatches and kind of how did the Apple Watch come to be?
Casey:
What does Johnny consider important?
Casey:
And I have...
Casey:
several poll quotes that that i'm happy to go through uh in a minute but perhaps you know we should give some overall impressions of the article i didn't think it was particularly well written but it did not strike me as egregiously poorly written i think i'm the only one that feels that way because several people have spoken to not just you guys said it was very poorly written uh i thought it was fine
Casey:
I do feel like this is a world I'm not used to because, and I didn't call out examples of this, but there were very clear descriptions about very many expensive, tangible things that were not limited to wristwatches.
Casey:
And I can't think of a specific example, but like clothes were described with excruciating detail.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
It's like Sound and Vision magazine, where the magazine is funded by mentioning the latest movie on DVD or whatever, right?
John:
So when they're reviewing a DVD player, they have to say, I was watching Captain America, and I could say the blue of Captain's shield and blah, blah, blah.
John:
It's a product placement, essentially, and that's how they pay for this stuff.
John:
Only I think that's not what this was.
John:
It's just that this person couldn't help but saying...
John:
And the people came in, and they were dressed in this, and they were wearing these expensive boots by these brands.
John:
And you could tell they weren't just regular PR people.
John:
They were Apple PR people.
John:
It's like, oh, someone kill me.
Casey:
Here you go.
Casey:
I was greeted by a team unlike any other in Silicon Valley.
Casey:
They're veterans of places like GQ and Harper's Bazaar, and they've studied at the Sarban and served in the White House.
Casey:
They're not dressed ostentatiously, but you know those understated boots must be St.
Casey:
Laurent, or however you pronounce it, or maybe Bottega Veneta.
Casey:
I'm sure I pronounced that wrong, too.
Casey:
It's a subtle reminder that Apple isn't just a tech company.
Casey:
It's potentially the greatest luxury brand in the world.
Casey:
That just seems so...
Marco:
gross to me i'm not used to it maybe it's a casey problem but it just made me feel gross no you know what it's not a casey problem like i read this site i like watches i like apple i found this article insufferable like it was just totally insufferable and again i read their site all the time
Marco:
But this was way... I mean, in every possible horrible sense of the word, it was just like masturbatory.
Marco:
It was just like... It was like a high school English student finally discovered the thesaurus feature.
Marco:
And it's... Oh, God, it was so bad.
John:
See, it wasn't the mechanics of the writing.
John:
It was the choice.
John:
It was the choice to say, what I'm going to write here is I'm going to write like several hundred words...
John:
about every aspect of my personal it's sort of like gonzo journalism but with less gonzo like every aspect of leading up to uh this interview with my thoughts and feelings about how it was going and what i think about everything that i see and it's just like look people you have an interview with johnny hive all people want to see
John:
is the interview with johnny ive the 600 words of your personal experience leading up to that and all your opinions about everyone you see and all the things they own and all that what how you feel about things you own and how you feel about things you might have owned and how it's just like oh my god no one is reading for that and like and that's a choice and you know i don't think like it wasn't badly written at the micro level the choice to do to take you know this very high profile interview
John:
with the person who doesn't give a i don't know how high profile they are compared to like their watch people interview but johnny i've doesn't give a lot of interviews period right he's not all over the news all the time he doesn't talk much in public get to the interview so i totally disagree with that choice and then when you get to the interview the the little italic sort of thoughts put in between the the questions and the answers oh that's
Marco:
painful it was just killing me killing me oh god yeah it was this whole thing it's i think this this makes nobody look good i mean you know i think a lot of it was padded and fluffed up because this is a you know a luxury site that is trying to expand into this long form magazine format um and so obviously it was puffed up for that i think also it was it was fairly clear that
John:
he didn't have a lot of time with johnny it seemed like i'm guessing based on the the amount of questions and answers actually in this versus the amount of fluff in this i'm guessing he had like 10 minutes with him it seemed like it was a really you know short interview i mean it could have been it could have been 30 minutes like i you know johnny gives good substantive answers in his way to questions that could have been answered in an even more short manner so i bet it was at least a half an hour interview plus a half an hour photo shoot afterwards like
Marco:
you know i this this is surprising surprising amount of interaction for a watch site i would you know i wouldn't have guessed unless johnny hive is a fan of the site and like marco reads it as well or something yeah i don't i just i think the whole thing like no one looks good from this i don't know who they're trying to relate to half people at least who read this are going to be people who have never heard of hodinke who are reading the apple news right like
Marco:
So to be bragging about how you really wish the Apple Watch was available in solid platinum with a solid platinum bracelet, which, by the way, that would probably cost like $75,000.
Marco:
Or it's a shame that you missed out on your bid for Steve Jobs' old Seiko watch that he wore once in a photo shoot, and the winning bidder was $42,000.
Marco:
You were the second place bidder.
Marco:
That is just so incredibly alienating, and it doesn't make anybody look good.
Marco:
It's just throwing out money numbers.
Marco:
I feel like in the luxury world, a lot of luxury products like fancy cars, fancy jewelry, a lot of these things are very expensive.
Marco:
It's just incredibly tasteless to just be talking about numbers out there like that, to just kind of be bragging about how much you spent on things or how much you can or want to spend on such things.
Marco:
That's just...
Marco:
It's not a good look.
Marco:
And even for a watch site that is read by people... The watches they cover on the site in the news probably have an average price of about $10,000.
Marco:
So they don't cover cheap things.
Marco:
But even for their audience...
Marco:
Not to mention the audience that this piece was likely to receive because it's about a high-profile Apple person.
Marco:
It's just incredibly off-putting and alienating to be bragging so much about incredibly needlessly expensive purchases or wishes.
Marco:
And that didn't add anything to the article at all.
Marco:
And I think Johnny Ive didn't come out looking that great on this either.
Marco:
I don't think he gained anything from this.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
you know he had his typical kind of like you know johnny in space kind of philosophy statements where it sounds kind of interesting until he tried to parse what he said and really he didn't say much of anything and then i thought the way he referred to and talked about other watch brands was really condescending and and like it was a little subtle but if you look at the way he worded things
Marco:
It was incredibly condescending and arrogant.
Marco:
And I don't think that came off as a good look either.
Casey:
I didn't personally get that impression about what Johnny said, but the rest of what you said I agree with.
Casey:
This almost feels like, and I don't know anything about Benjamin Clymer, but this feels like...
Casey:
One of the rich kids of Instagram grew up and actually sort of made a living for himself.
Casey:
But you can't change the fact that he's one of those rich assholes from Instagram.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's just... I don't know.
Casey:
It just feels gross.
Casey:
Now, that being said, and even though I completely agree with what you were saying about how tacky it is to talk about, oh, well, I lost that bid and it was won for $42,000, thus implying he was willing to spend $30,000 plus on a watch...
Casey:
Do you feel like that's maybe just the Americans in us?
Casey:
You know how it's very taboo in America to talk about how much you make, where I've heard in other countries that's far less the case?
Casey:
Do you think that's what this is, or do you think it's just freaking gross, or both?
Marco:
I mean, there's probably a little bit of that in it, but I don't think that's all this is.
Marco:
I mean, I think this was just really overindulgent, alienating writing.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think it was the money.
John:
I think it was the format, the choice to... If someone who's reading this article is not interested in...
John:
what the person who's writing the article the every detail of their lead up to the interview they just want to get to the interview and speaking of the interview i don't i is the person i came in with i've i've read probably every interview johnny i've read the recent johnny i've book by leander caney i think which i thought was a pretty good book about johnny and gives lots of lots of insight into his character that it didn't have before um
John:
And my impression of him in this interview was he was his normal, thoughtful, you know, slightly Johnny Ivan space kind of person that we always expect him to be.
John:
And that he actually really admires and is into non-Apple Watches.
John:
But that he also really likes the Apple Watch surprise.
John:
I didn't get anything that was making me think that he was...
John:
looking down on other watches if anything i he he revealed himself to be a bit of a you know watch fanboy regular watch fanboy and i thought i thought he kind of that was the impression i'm getting of him because i didn't know how how into watches is johnny hath and in this interview i'm like oh he's actually more into watches than i would have thought he was um and i didn't think he was crapping on other watches or he's he's not
John:
He's certainly not a braggart, and I don't think he's particularly aggressively arrogant.
John:
So Casey pulled out a bunch of pull quotes here, and I can see how you might read one of these uncharitably and come away with the impression that...
John:
he's crapping on other watches but this this is on the uh apple watch versus mechanical watches he said sometimes you'll wear an apple watch for outright utility and other times you'll wear something else for nostalgia and affection it's like oh so so if you want utility you have to wear an apple watch but the only reason you'd wear some other watches nostalgia and affection that's i i don't read it that way i read it as he really likes mechanical watches and it's nostalgia for him because now he wears the apple watch all the time because
John:
utility wise it does a ton more stuff even if you could make the argument that telling time wise it has less utility than mechanical watch um but affection that that he really does have an affection for mechanical watches and that he understood what he was competing against because he himself is one of those rich people who buys really expensive watches and cares about them uh and his friends all design them and he's super into them or whatever i think that he was describing uh
John:
a reasonable you know way to deal with the dichotomy between your computer watch and your non-computer watch so i don't know i didn't i didn't like i said when we talked about this earlier in slack i came away from this article really disliking the the writer of the article and the choices he made and basically having the same opinion johnny as i've always had i didn't i don't think he came off badly in this article at all
Marco:
I think my main point about the condescension of him towards the other watch brands.
Marco:
So that quote you said, maybe you'd wear another watch for nostalgia or affection.
Marco:
That's a big thing, right?
Marco:
And you covered that.
Marco:
Also, there was one where he says...
Marco:
I have so much respect for many of the other brands, Dash, Rolex, Omega, because there is remarkable longevity combined with such an obvious and clear understanding of their own unique identity.
Marco:
It's rare but inspiring when you see the humble self-assurance of a company that ignores short-term market pressures to pursue their own path.
Marco:
that to me kind of okay so the combination of that along with the like maybe a mechanical for nostalgia or affection the combination of those things to me says look at these quaint little companies making these quaint little watches they're not doing the correct thing we're doing the correct thing that the market is saying they want they're they're humble and they're they're pushing their own path because it's kind of based on based on an assumption that to not have the apple watch
Marco:
is inherently worse and that the reasons that you would either choose to not wear one or that you as a watchmaker would choose not to make a smartwatch are not out of merit they're not out of like like what whatever you are making as as a non-smart watch or wearing as a non-smart watch is just worse and you're just doing it for irrational reasons like like tradition or nostalgia or affection and
John:
totally ignoring the possibility that maybe just maybe there are ways in which other watches are better than the apple watch so i think you've got a chip on your watch shoulder i think i was absolutely the wrong read on that here's a chip on my wrist john get it right come on watch shoulder here's what i think the rare read on that is he he is making a favorable comparison a backhanded favorable comparison
John:
between apple and those watchmakers that he admires what he's basically saying is by the way he has the most boring taste in the world like apple nudge nudge wink wink these other companies have a clear sense of identity and and think long term and don't worry about they they do the right thing and they have an identity and they're all about longevity and the long term and not about what i need to do next quarter and not about chasing fads and
John:
And he didn't mention Apple, but I think that 100% was saying, these companies I admire because these companies, like us, have this philosophy to be sort of long-term, secure in their own identities, humble.
John:
He's always saying his design group is humble and they came up there with the product humble.
John:
Basically, everything he says, nice things he says about these things, he's also saying about Apple.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think he really does admire those companies for exactly the reasons he says, because that's the reason he admires his company, because he thinks he's doing all those same things.
Marco:
Well, I guess you and I interpreted this article differently.
Marco:
I see what you're saying.
Marco:
We can ask him.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, that's likely.
John:
He went on this watch blog.
John:
Come on, we can get him.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
You get on that.
John:
I'll grab him in the hallway at WWDC.
John:
He hangs out at those sessions, I think.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, totally.
Casey:
These are just some quotes I thought that were interesting.
Casey:
With regard to the Apple Watch, Johnny said, I don't think there was a problem specifically.
Casey:
It was more of a matter of optimization of opportunity.
Casey:
And that seems to implicitly confirm what we all kind of suspected, that Apple said, hey, we could put something on the wrist.
Casey:
That'd be neat.
Casey:
Well, what would you use it for?
Casey:
I don't know, but it'd be cool, right?
Casey:
And so it seems like Apple Watch was one of the less opinionated products that Apple's come out with in recent years.
Casey:
And so far as they didn't really know what it was for.
Casey:
And if you, you know, obviously look back to the release and the announcement, it's pretty clear.
Casey:
But and we've talked about that, the three of us and many others as well.
Casey:
But I feel the way I read that anyway, was kind of a tacit confirmation that that is exactly what happened.
John:
I think to give more context to this, I think the question was like, what problem is the Apple Watch solving?
John:
Which is a good question, an expected question to come from like a traditional watch site, right?
John:
Because they're like, look, what's wrong with watches?
John:
Why did you have to come here and make a different watch?
John:
What's wrong with watches how they've always been made?
John:
Like, what's wrong with all the things that we love?
John:
and johnny again being a fan of those type of watches is not going to say well here's what's wrong with the mechanical watches they can't do this they can't do that blah blah here's the here's the problem they were solving you have a problem with your mechanical watch and we're here to solve it and he says no that wasn't it at all it was you know in his typical obtuse way a matter of optimization of opportunity which is like
John:
we've learned at apple that and i think he did this analogy some player somewhere else in the article that taking computers from being you know he made the comparison with clocks which i thought was very clever like clocks used to be one big clock tower in the middle of the the square of the town right a giant thing that you know no one person owned but it was like hey everyone can look up in the town square and see what time it is and then eventually you get clocks in your house but they're expensive and maybe only have one clock for your entire house then eventually you got clocks in multiple rooms that eventually the clock is small enough that it's on your wrist and at each stage of downsizing
John:
new opportunities like it's an optimization of taking the clock tower and putting it all around your wrist it's enabled by technology and there's opportunities like what what does that enable you know how does it change your life how does it change society right and similarly with computers going from mainframes to personal computers to phones down to all around your wrist and
John:
uh that i thought was a good analogy and it made sense and it it it tracked with me of like what he was trying to say about you know we weren't trying to solve some sort of problem that we had like oh how can i live my life when i only have one clock in my house i'll never know what time it is why do i need a clock on my wrist it's so stupid but it's an opportunity it's a technological opportunity and i don't think
John:
They needed to say, well, what problem are you solving in my daily life by putting this clock on my wrist or this clock in my pocket to go pocket watches or whatever?
John:
It's like, well, you don't quite realize until you have that thing how it might change your life.
John:
And similarly for the Apple Watch, how might it change your life to have...
John:
a little computer on your wrist i already have a little computer in my pocket what why do i need my wrist what can it do differently and there are opportunities um and as casey stated maybe they thought that the world of opportunities was slightly bigger than it actually turned out to be at least with current technology but there were definitely opportunities and people do like their apple watches and it turns out you know fitness and notifications ended up being the two big opportunities that are sticky but i think that was a fairly good answer to a fairly good question despite the terrible lead-up to this interview
Casey:
Not that we're bitter.
Casey:
With regard to just designing new ideas, Johnny said, things are exceptionally fragile as an idea, entirely abstract.
Casey:
But once there's an object between us, it's galvanizing.
Casey:
And to put a little more context in this, he was saying, you know, once they build a prototype, and not necessarily like a functional prototype, just like an object, like think about when you're designing a car and doing the like clay model or whatever it is.
Casey:
He was saying that, you know, you can just kind of talk around and around about things
Casey:
prior to that model being in your hands.
Casey:
But the moment you see it and touch it, that's when the conversation really starts.
Casey:
And that's not surprising, but I just thought it was interesting.
Casey:
With regard to material science, and the context here was talking about how there was the gold Apple Watch, now there's the ceramic Apple Watch, et cetera.
Casey:
Johnny said, we have now worked with ceramic and with gold, and our material sciences team now understands these fundamental attributes and properties in a way they didn't before.
Casey:
This will help shape future products and our understanding of what forms make sense.
Casey:
I don't think that this is any particularly strong clue for any particular future product, but I just thought it was interesting.
Casey:
And again, it's obvious, isn't it, that, oh, now they know how to work with gold, and maybe they'll do that again in the future.
Casey:
Oh, now they know how to work with ceramic, and maybe they'll do that in the future.
Casey:
And certainly in the lead up to, I think it was the iPhone X that we were...
Casey:
going on and on about whether or not there would be ceramic or some people were going on and on about whether or not it would be ceramic at least in part and so i just thought it was interesting you know him directly addressing the fact that that this could be in our future somewhere you never know gold mac pro confirmed yeah you heard it here first this this i thought was the perhaps the biggest stretch of any answer that he gave because i understand i understand what he was saying that you know it's good for a design group to learn about new materials
John:
but the utility of learning how to work with gold is very limited like it's great so you know how to make solid gold watches tell me how in any way that's going to apply to any other product in your lineup i mean maybe it'll apply to gold glasses frames in 2050 i don't know but it's just it's not particularly ceramic maybe has more applicability i did also like the bit that he threw in which i think was you know
John:
a brief glimpse into into the uh the difficulty of being johnny i've that it was fun to do a product that you didn't have to make in large quantities talking about the addition like this is like everything we make we have to make like 10 million of them it's nice to be able to make this gold thing that we have to make like 20 of them because nobody buys them right obviously he wouldn't give sales numbers but that was that was a nice uh glimpse into like it's so much less stressful like i don't everything i do i don't have to think
John:
You know, will this take an extra half a second during manufacturing, which multiplied out by the number we're going to make is an extra six months in the schedule or something?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
I noticed that as well.
Casey:
And then my final poll quote, which I think might have been my favorite.
Casey:
I will call this Johnny discovers the Internet.
Casey:
And he was saying to the writer, he was saying to the Hodinkee writer whose name I've already forgotten, Benjamin Clymer, he said, with regard to Ben's review of one of the prior Apple watches, this is now Johnny talking, that was the other thing that struck me about the feedback to your review, the vitriol from some of the commenters.
Casey:
It's not surprising, but it is unnecessary.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
that's unnecessary unnecessary thanks dad it's unnecessary to criticize apple it's unnecessary to be a jerk about it i mean but here's the thing i was most surprised about is that he a read the review and b read the comments all right fine you read the review maybe you read because again maybe he reads this website because it's apparently the website that people like expensive watches read right
John:
um but then you read the comments like don't read the comments johnny everyone knows that apparently not him i mean he's just like yeah yeah and the thing is it's not surprising so it's not like he's shocked that people are mean on the internet but his advice it's unnecessary oh thanks now now that they know it's unnecessary i'm sure they'll stop
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Mack Weldon.
Marco:
For 20% off your first order, visit MackWeldon.com and enter code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
I can tell you a little secret.
Marco:
I've been wearing Mack Weldon underwear for every single show that we've recorded in the last year.
Marco:
Because I bought my first set of Mack Weldon stuff last year, about last April.
Marco:
And it is so good.
Marco:
I've just kept buying more.
Marco:
And this is the first time they're sponsoring.
Marco:
I did that on my own volition, totally unbiased.
Marco:
It just is that good.
Marco:
I'm currently wearing their socks.
Marco:
their t-shirt and the underwear.
Marco:
And next to me is their hoodie and their waffle warm knit shirt over there in the coat closet is more of this stuff.
Marco:
My drawer upstairs has, I think, probably about 10 of their t-shirts and a few of their long sleeve shirts, also known as the Merlin shirts.
Marco:
They are just great quality clothing.
Marco:
These are mostly focused on men's essentials.
Marco:
So underwear, socks, t-shirts, they have sweatpants and workout gear now too.
Marco:
When I work out,
Marco:
Everything I wear except for my shoes is made by Mack Weldon.
Marco:
I have the shorts, everything.
Marco:
And it's just all so good.
Marco:
And they know it's good.
Marco:
They're so confident that it's good.
Marco:
Order your first pair of underwear.
Marco:
If you don't like it, you can keep it.
Marco:
They don't want it back.
Marco:
they'll give you a full refund.
Marco:
You can still keep it.
Marco:
That's how confident they are that you're going to like it.
Marco:
So they have this wonderful line of silver thread things that are naturally antimicrobial.
Marco:
This includes at least shirts, socks, and underwear.
Marco:
I wear these in the summertime.
Marco:
And honestly, you don't stink when you wear them.
Marco:
It's shocking.
Marco:
This is what converted me, is how good they are in hot weather.
Marco:
And in the summertime, I'm telling you, you have to get their underwear and their shirts.
Marco:
And of course, if you don't need the silver or you don't want to wear...
Marco:
awesome fabric for some reason they have lots of other fabrics as well and they're all really nice their long sleeve stuff their short sleeve stuff their underwear their socks i highly suggest you try mac weldon i would not tell you they can't pay me to say that they can pay me to read their script they cannot pay me to tell you that i'm wearing their stuff right now that i love it that i've been wearing it for the last year i beg them to become a sponsor just so i could tell you how good this is
Marco:
So see for yourself at MackWeldon.com and you can get 20% off your first order by using code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
That is MackWeldon.com with code ATP for 20% off your first order.
Marco:
Trust me on this.
Marco:
You got to give this a try.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for sponsoring our show and for keeping me comfortable and not stinking all summer.
Casey:
Google I.O.
Casey:
is happening, or at least it's happening as we record this.
Casey:
I watched bits and pieces of the general keynote, and I only saw a tiny bit of what I would call the State of the Union, which I forget exactly what they called it, but it's basically the nerd keynote that follows the general purpose keynote.
Casey:
I don't know how you guys want to handle this.
Casey:
I guess I'll just go in the order of whatever I guess was John put together in the show notes.
John:
No, don't.
John:
You should have read ahead.
John:
So did any of us watch the whole thing?
Marco:
I watched the 14-minute Verge recut of it, which I consider fair.
Marco:
Casey, did you watch it?
Casey:
I watched most of the general public keynote, but not all of it, and almost none of the other keynote.
Marco:
so i watched as much of it as i could which was maybe a quarter of it but you laughed at me watching the 14 minute cut and you couldn't even watch the whole thing no for time constraints not like i was bailing out for time constraints like yeah i also had time constraints i had a lot of napping to do today it was more important than that oh my god right
John:
Anyway, yeah, because I had a podcast last night, so I couldn't watch last night and tonight I did as much as I could in between making dinner and coming here anyway.
John:
So I and I put a bunch of comments in here from from tweets and stuff when it was going on.
John:
But I think clearly as far as everything that I've seen and maybe Marco with the 14 minute super cut can tell me if I'm missing something.
John:
There is one aspect of this keynote that I think is worth discussing in isolation.
John:
And if we have more next week after all of us have either seen more of Google I.O.
John:
or decided that there was nothing else interesting, we can talk about it then.
John:
But I think we should concentrate this discussion.
John:
On one particular demo, and we all know the demo we're talking about because I think it is the most interesting and it is emblematic of Google itself and the whole rest of the thing and the other things that they announced similarly tie into it.
John:
And I guess I'll let our chief summarizer in chief describe that demo since I'm sure he's seen it.
Casey:
That is one of the things I saw.
Casey:
And my initial reaction, and I will explain what it is momentarily, my initial reaction was my chin hitting the floor and just like in Looney Tunes, my tongue like rolling out like a red carpet across the room.
Casey:
It's a gross carpet.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
I have since had some different thoughts about it, but my initial reaction was, oh my God, I just witnessed the future and it happened today.
Casey:
So what am I talking about?
Casey:
I forget exactly how they set up the context, but what they were trying to say was, hey, what if you really wanted to make a dinner reservation?
Yeah.
Casey:
You really wanted to make it for four people at a particular restaurant, and you knew you wanted it to be perhaps on a certain day, or you just knew that it needed to fit in your schedule, in your calendar.
Casey:
What if you didn't actually want to call that restaurant, though?
Casey:
Maybe they're very difficult to get a hold of.
Casey:
Maybe you just can't be bothered, whatever.
Casey:
So Google, I guess it's the Google Assistant, which is their kind of Siri, if you will, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
It will actually, or it is capable of placing a telephone call to that restaurant on your behalf, which in and of itself, okay, fine.
Casey:
You know, that's not entirely surprising.
Casey:
I can just imagine, you know, hello, ritzy restaurant in New York City.
Casey:
Hello, this is Google, you know, or something like that.
Casey:
But they played a recording of this conversation, and it could not have been further from what I expected.
Casey:
It sounded unnervingly like a human.
Casey:
And I'm not talking about Uncanny Valley unnervingly.
Casey:
I'm saying we started in, you know, hello.
Casey:
Hello, fellow children.
Casey:
We started there, walked right through the Uncanny Valley, and went into, holy crap, that's real.
Casey:
That almost sounds like a recording of a human being.
Casey:
And the most fascinating thing about it was, aside from the fact that it was conversational, the most fascinating thing about it was it actually said, like, um, hmm.
Casey:
So the maitre d' or whomever on the other end of the line says, oh, we don't have any availability on the 9th.
Casey:
Would the 10th work?
Casey:
And then Google said, hmm, yeah, that should be fine.
Casey:
It inserted these synthetic...
Casey:
pauses and stumbles and ums and hmms in a way that was mind-blowing i could not believe what i was watching and there are implications many implications of this but if we could just for a moment focus on what we saw and not really unpack the meaning of it is that a fair characterization like marco what did you think when you saw the 14 minute demo or the recap
Marco:
I too am very impressed with the technology behind this.
Marco:
But I think this is such a typical Silicon Valley and in particular Google thing to do where you have amazing technical smarts and you're applying them in a way that...
Marco:
probably has some unintended consequences, or at least you don't care about the consequences, whether you intend them or not, and is also kind of creepy and a little unsettling.
Marco:
You know, it's so stereotypically Google.
Marco:
Great AI, great big data service, kind of creepy, and not really getting the human problems here.
Marco:
You know, there's lots of weirdness about this.
Marco:
So one big thing is like, you know, some people have pointed out like...
Marco:
what they're basically doing is turning the workers at restaurants and stuff into unpaid API endpoints.
Marco:
You know, so that's, that's a little bit, that's a little bit weird.
Marco:
And, and, that's amazing.
Marco:
And the other thing is like, you know, like, you know, I, like when I get pizza, my pizza guy,
Marco:
He has two iPads at the register that are both running different apps for all these different menu ordering services and pickup services and everything.
Marco:
He has to run his side of it.
Marco:
And you look in any restaurant these days, they're busy.
Marco:
They have to be dealing with all these online ordering systems, all these apps and everything, in addition to people actually calling them on the phone and people coming into the place.
Marco:
The last thing they need is for...
Marco:
robocalls that pretend not to be robocalls which is a big problem to be calling them and making these like kind of human-like but a little bit off requests uh via voice and kind of taking up their time on the phone like it's just it's kind of weird on a number of levels it does seem like google is taking advantage of the people on the other end
Marco:
And these are people who don't have time to deal with BS from Google.
Marco:
Like, you as the user of this couldn't be bothered to not pick up the phone, because you're probably already holding the phone, but to tap a different spot on the phone to make the phone call to actually just be a human for two seconds and talk to them.
Marco:
Now I get, we don't like making phone calls.
Marco:
I get that.
Marco:
I don't like making phone calls either.
Marco:
But I would feel way worse about initiating one of these on the back end on my behalf than I would about actually placing that phone call.
Marco:
It's dehumanizing to the people on the other end.
Marco:
It's wasteful of their time.
Marco:
And I think it's a little bit insulting to try to hide the fact that you are a bot calling them.
Marco:
I think that what they should do, if they're going to do this at all, and I'm not sure they should, but if they're going to do this at all,
Marco:
They should begin the call with a quick way of basically saying what's going on.
Marco:
Basically saying, hi, this is the Google Assistant calling on behalf of John Syracuse.
Marco:
Do you have a reservation for this day?
Marco:
Make it very clear.
Marco:
And stop with the fake ums and mms.
Marco:
All that is doing is trying to trick people.
Marco:
And that is not in good faith.
Marco:
That is trying to take advantage of people and try to trick them into...
Marco:
playing into your API without being willing participants of that.
Marco:
And that's just kind of sleazy.
Marco:
I don't like that.
Marco:
And if they did it the robotic way, or they actually just say what it is, and they're up front about it...
Marco:
that at least is you know it's not trying to trick anybody it is still wasteful of people's time and i still would feel bad about initiating that call but i at least wouldn't feel like i was like i don't know just like yeah deceiving people it's just it's just a weird thing um and you know there's there's other feature that i think one of you wants to bring up about um calling about holiday hours where
Marco:
Apparently, like on holidays, where hours might be different, they will call the place like once in the morning to see what the hours are, and then they'll just cache those results so that allegedly it saves them from all these phone calls all day.
Marco:
What if they miss that call?
Marco:
What if they misinterpret the results from that call?
Marco:
When you think about the ramifications of before, if the person on the other end of the phone...
Marco:
said the wrong thing once in the morning to one person, it affected one potential customer.
Marco:
Now, if you slip up and say the wrong thing once in the morning, it could affect all your customers that day who would have come there from search.
Marco:
There are ramifications to these kinds of things that really just seem...
Marco:
not really that good for the local businesses that are on the other side of this and it's all all of this is to create minor conveniences for lazy tech dudes who can't not just pick up the phone because the phone's already in their hand but can't literally push one button on the phone to tap that phone number and call them instead and i think that i think this is a step too far especially when it involves deception of the person on the other end and potentially wasting their time
John:
So I want to talk about the technology behind this because I think that's, you know, Casey's first impression was based on the dazzling tech.
John:
And that's how I like to think about these things and think about how they could find themselves in a position where they're using this technology in this particular way.
John:
But first you have to talk about the tech.
John:
And the tech they're showing is...
John:
It's obviously, you know, speech to text because the person on the other end of the phone call says things and Google Assistant has to figure out what it is they're saying.
John:
So it's going to convert their speech into text.
John:
Then it has to have some understanding of what it is that they said.
John:
And then it also has to have some understanding of what its mission is.
John:
I'm going to try to get a reservation for this time for this many people, right?
John:
And the parameters of that mission, you know,
John:
all the different things like what if nothing's available what if they don't have they have a particular call where they couldn't reserve a table for that many people like you know so it has to have that mission and has to understand what the person says and then it has to be able to engage in a conversation a back and forth of saying you said this now I say this and keeping the state of it all in its mind you know sort of semantic analysis of when you say that when you make that sound thing on the other end of the phone it means these words and these words mean this
John:
actual you know message or meaning and that applies to what we've said in the past in this way that's the that's the tech that they're trying to show there um and researching and developing that tech i think is really important a really important area of research uh because if you can do that better than we currently can by some appreciable degree
John:
Many interesting opportunities come up.
John:
Like if I told you that even if it's for a very narrow domain, like making an appointment or something like that, whatever, you know, pick it, pick the narrow domain of your choosing.
John:
If I told you I could get a computer to understand meaning behind things that you say and to engage you in a conversation to to accomplish a goal.
John:
If you've been listening to me talk about cylinders in the show for a long time, it's been my push on the past several months worth of shows when we were talking about HomePod and everything that I want to engage my cylinder in a conversation and work towards a goal, right?
John:
It's the same exact tech, only the difference here is I'm initiating the conversation.
John:
I know I'm talking to a cylinder because it's in my own house and it's sitting right there.
John:
There's no deception involved.
John:
And I would find that interaction...
John:
better than having to initiate a series of commands or make a macro for myself or no particular syntax or whatever and even just within the realm of the things that cylinders are supposed to already do to to be able to have the extra smarts on display here to understand nuances of speech and to to understand like the overall mission of what i'm trying to accomplish and to help me refine it and narrow it and to be helpful and
John:
that technology is incredibly important and should be developed and so i applaud google for doing that this of all the places where this technology could be applied i would not have even predicted that this would be where they because they they have a thing called google assistant that is just like this they're still under my house with google assistant on it they have phones like isn't that the first most obvious application of that anyway but setting that aside second aspect related to the application that they
John:
that they are showing here which is all we're going to make a phone call for you for you behind the scenes which by the way you don't get to hear this phone call you just talk to the assistant and it says okay i'll make that reservation for you and then you just wait and wait and wait and in the background it's having a phone call that you don't get to hear and don't participate in any way right and then it comes back to you and says yeah i totally made that reservation for you um in that particular application of this technology the pitch is that
John:
you know, you don't have to be involved with this.
John:
Don't worry about the details, but Google assistant will handle it.
John:
And all of the, the things that Marco was talking about, uh, you know, how, uh, how deceptive it is and how disrespectful it is to the person that they rent and how it like, how it isn't that hard to think of a much more respectful way to do this, like by pre-announcing yourself and so on and so forth, but that that's not what they chose to do, that they're really leaning on the fact that they can, you know, fake you out by pretending to be human, which by the way, I think, I think there still are in the uncanny value.
John:
Uh, you can, uh,
John:
You can tell these things are not quite human.
John:
They're still in the uncanny valley.
John:
It's not totally human.
John:
It's way better than it was before.
Marco:
Even in the canned demo they did, the way when it asked for noon and it said, you know, we don't have anything, and the way that the assistant re-asked,
Marco:
Do you have anything between 10 a.m.
Marco:
and 12 p.m.?
Marco:
No one talks like that.
Marco:
This is your demo.
Marco:
This is your canned demo.
Marco:
It's obviously like almost any response you get from a human being has a pretty high chance of being some kind of slightly exceptional condition or things that require more explanation that the Google Assistant will respond in some way that makes it clear either this is a really weird person or this is not a person.
John:
Yeah, it seems very unlike a person.
John:
That leads me to my next point about this tech.
John:
It's the same point I made about self-driving cars in the past.
John:
And it also, you know, is related to the deception angle here.
John:
This thing, no matter how good it is, no matter how long it's in beta, it's going to fall over a lot.
John:
And when it does, because it's a really hard problem, like it's you you can you will be trivially easy to be able to to stump this thing and to have it start saying nonsensical, computery things that are not related to what you say that to the point where the person would hang up on it.
John:
Right.
John:
Because everyone sees this demo and it's like, it's how 9,000 were there.
John:
It's like, you are not there.
John:
Like that last 10%, just like self-driving cars, the level five automation, right?
John:
That last little bit is, that's a mountain that's way bigger than you think it is.
John:
Right.
John:
And so even though it seems like we're right around the corner and it's like, Oh, more is love.
John:
We'll be there in two seconds.
John:
It's way harder than you think.
John:
And so if you start off this conversation with the deception, like if that's your goal, it will be a hundred times worse when the thing falls on its face and it will fall on its face a lot.
John:
Uh,
John:
And from the business's perspective, obviously, ideally, they would all have actual APIs and not humans.
John:
But if they don't want to do that, from the business's perspective, they want your business.
John:
They want this reservation.
John:
If you pre-announced and said, this is the Google Assistant, I'm a computer acting on behalf of a person, blah, blah, blah.
John:
After the first four or five calls of that type, the person on the other end would know how to most efficiently deal with this stupid computer thing to get the reservation because they want the reservation.
John:
They want the money.
John:
It's the whole reason people set up with all these apps and everything.
John:
And maybe it will motivate them to get on one of these apps to not have to deal with these stupid computer phone calls.
John:
But it's better than not getting a reservation at all.
John:
Right?
John:
But if the thing's going to fall over, like, like, like phone trees, like when we, you know, when you call the support thing, we all know their phone trees and we all know their, their various failure modes by this point.
John:
And we know how to navigate them efficiently.
John:
I would much rather have that than something that tries to fool me into thinking it's human, but then like goes berserk.
John:
And now I have to go, Oh, I waste all this time talking to you like a human when I should have just been playing you like a video game to get to the point where we, we, we make the reservation.
John:
Like, let's just let me, you know, a text adventure all over again.
John:
Uh, so, um,
John:
you know i don't even if people see this and they think this is a great feature and it has an important applicability in my life because that's another point on this that some of the comments i pulled out here like there are places where this exact feature is actually really important for people who literally can't make that reservation themselves and do want to appear as human as possible right there's an accessibility angle to this um but even in those situations even in the
John:
my advice to anyone watching this is do not expect this to work even as well as it did in that demos all the time because it won't like it will it will work and you know it doesn't always work with humans sometimes it's difficult for a human to make a reservation sometimes you can't hear anything in the restaurant sometimes people are ornery sometimes they hang up on you sometimes you lose your cell signal right but the success rate of this thing is going to be way lower than people think it does it we are a long way off from me even with limited limited domain we are a
John:
from basically from passing the turing test now it doesn't mean your reservation is not going to be a success because once the other person on the other end figures out that it's a computer they'll play the little game and they'll get the reservation because they want the sale right but don't get starry-eyed about how you know amazing i mean it it is an amazing leap from anything that we may have seen before but it is still so far from the whatever the equivalent of level level five self-driving automation is for having a conversation with a human and
John:
Even within a limited domain begins humans are inscrutable and is really difficult to, you just can't account for everything that they're going to say and do.
John:
You can't account for all the nuances.
John:
You just, it's like the reason they work at all is because when the computer acts like a, like a pig headed computer, the person eventually best case reverts to thinking this is just a pig headed person who's not listening to what I say.
John:
And like, they're just, they just have a one track mind and they just want to make this reservation.
John:
And they, they didn't understand what I said back to them.
John:
because they're just they're not paying attention or maybe they're driving or something and then you just roll their eyes like that's the best case scenario um but yeah if and when they actually launch this i can't wait to see all of the uh the conversations that the people manage to get this thing into where it just goes completely off the rails because it's a hard problem and that's why we're also impressed by it it's such a hard problem it's like i didn't even know we were this far along we're surely we're within striking distance and i think that we are not within striking distance
Marco:
And you can even just picture, like, you know, what if the person on the other end has follow-up questions?
Marco:
Okay, you want a reservation?
Marco:
Where?
Marco:
What part of the restaurant?
Marco:
It's simply like that.
Marco:
Or like, oh, do you want a table outside or inside?
Marco:
Or like, you're ordering a pizza.
Marco:
Oh, do you want a medium or a large?
John:
The most misguided one was when he's, you know, obviously it's forward-looking.
John:
Sundar Pichai was the person doing the thing, I think.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, the presenter said, you know, we don't have a lot of time, so maybe, like, your kid is sick.
John:
And you need to make a doctor's appointment for them.
John:
Like, have you ever made a doctor's appointment for a sick kid?
John:
That conversation involves a lot of questions about what's wrong with your kid and did you take their temperature and how are they feeling and when's the last time they threw up and, you know, but like...
John:
no computer is hell i get on that call and i feel like i have to have like information ready like to be like when's the last time they came in when's this but you know like there is no way i would let a computer make that call i barely think i myself am competent to make that call right maybe i would let them make the call to the school to tell them that they're not going to be in that day but really the schools just have a website where you can click something because that's stupid but uh but like
John:
Yeah, that was the wrong example.
John:
Ordering food, making a reservation, something with a business transaction where the person on the other end is motivated to deal with my crap, computerized crap or otherwise, because I'm sure those people deal with people crap all the time too.
John:
People being rude when they make reservations are just generally being inscrutable, right?
John:
they're motivated at least to do that but like my doctor is not motivated to listen to my computer my doctor like the whoever answers the the desk has a ton of questions about my kid very specific questions determine whether you should even come in oh we don't take pink eye in the office you should do this and that and what do you want to do and what pharmacy is near like no way a computer can handle that um so i think they're they're uh
John:
I hesitate to say the heart is in the right place.
John:
I actually think it is.
John:
I think the heart is in the right place in terms of doing this research and having the overall goal of trying to help people.
John:
But the way they're going about it baffles me.
John:
Because like I said, they have a cylinder that they sell you that I would love to talk to in this way.
John:
They would not involve deception at all.
John:
And if my cylinder could talk to me like this within the limited domain of music or appointments or whatever, it would be an amazing advance over how I talked to my cylinder today.
John:
But they didn't demo that.
John:
They demoed it making phone calls for you, which just boggles my mind.
Casey:
I think this is, to my eyes, a very good example of just because we can doesn't mean we should, which is basically the summary of all of Silicon Valley, in my personal opinion.
Casey:
It's so obvious.
Casey:
After I saw the technology, which, again, I cannot stress enough.
Casey:
I think the technology is amazing.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And like you said, which is what I was going to bring up, you know, there is an accessibility angle wherein I think this is more reasonable.
Casey:
Like if I am mute, if I literally cannot talk on the phone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or if you have a speech impediment or if you have, say, like maybe you have to call a place where you don't speak their language very well or you have a thick accent that's sometimes misunderstood a lot.
Marco:
Like there's lots of accessibility reasons for this kind of technology.
Casey:
But sheer laziness is not it.
John:
But the application would be different there.
John:
You'd be speaking through it.
John:
You would want to be in on the conversation.
John:
In other words, you wouldn't want it to go off and do it completely on its own.
John:
In most situations where someone has a synthetic voice speaking for them, they don't want to leave the room when it's happening.
John:
If they can be there and see your face or hear you or hear the other end of the conversation or monitor it or otherwise nudge it in the right direction, they want to be some kind of participant and not just like...
John:
set it sail and just let the computer do what it's going to do like and getting to cases like just because you can doesn't mean you should like it's it's more subtle than that because they can and should develop this technology but it's exactly it's exactly how you choose to apply it and the subtle difference between what they demoed and talking to your cylinder which seemed like it is not the same thing it's a human talking to a computer having this conversation but the difference like the difference is subtle and it's
John:
telling that this is how they chose to show this off maybe because it's seemingly the most impressive but it is the the most ill-conceived um and like and and i don't even think like i say it's ill-conceived just because of the world we live in now it could be as many have pointed out that like
John:
you know once this genie's out of the bottle we will deal with it the same way we deal with those stupid phone trees which we could have had the same exact conversation about because they have a lot of the same problems it's disrespectful to the caller sometimes you get tricked into thinking it's human but eventually we just all get used to it we get used to the disrespect we all learn to very quickly pick up on the cues of whether this is a pre-recorded human's voice or not right despite how they try to fool us and they do try to fool you on those stupid phone trees sometimes
John:
We just all get used to it and we accept it.
John:
And I fully expect that this turns out to be popular.
John:
This could totally happen with that technology as well.
John:
But I still maintain that if you have this technology and are advancing it, this is not the most bang for your buck.
John:
There are better ways to apply this technology that will be more useful and more helpful to more people than this specific detailed implementation, even for the accessibility angle.
John:
most people would want to probably identify themselves as I'm speaking through this thing, right?
John:
Maybe they wouldn't.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But it seems like that when things fall apart, you'd want there to be some kind of explanation.
John:
Like if you see someone in person and they're using an assistive device to talk to, you understand what the deal is and you can accommodate that, right?
John:
But if you think you're just talking to a regular person and don't realize it's someone who has to use this to communicate with you, have some sort of allowance that I think that would help as well.
John:
So, you know, I don't...
John:
I'm not even going to go so far as to say that this is a way this technology should never be used.
John:
I'm willing to believe that this is a way this technology will be used, that when we're all 80, it will be so boring that no one will be able to talk about it anymore.
John:
But right here and now, I'm going to say there are richer veins to be mined than this.
Marco:
Can you imagine if it was Siri making these calls?
Marco:
It'd be like, hi, can I have an appointment between 10 and noon?
Marco:
And the other person's like, sure, I have one at 10.
Marco:
And Siri would be like, what do you want to convert 10 to?
Marco:
Right, thinking.
John:
Ask again later.
Casey:
I found this on the internet for you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just... It's so tough because I can't stress enough.
Casey:
My initial reaction was so overwhelmingly positive.
Casey:
But then the moment I really started thinking about this, I was like...
Casey:
Oh, this is kind of creepy.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like this is just Silicon Valley in a nutshell.
Casey:
It's a bunch of people, probably dudes, probably entitled dudes, just thinking, you know what?
Casey:
I really just don't want to be bothered making a reservation.
Casey:
I'm too good for that.
Casey:
My time is too valuable.
Casey:
So what can I do?
Casey:
I can use the whole of human technology to fake...
John:
something that sounds like a human to make that reservation for me it's just so i guess i could see where you'd come away with that on this but i i really think that there is actually a little kernel of the 70s era silicon valley idealism in this as well perhaps a naive idealism which is also part of it but and you know like it was phrased as saving you time and you can say okay it's got to save you time because you're so important your time is so valuable because you're you know a rich tech nerd but first of all this technology is not exclusively available to rich people
John:
Sure, fair point.
John:
Android is very democratizing technology.
John:
It's available on cheapo phones everywhere.
John:
A lot of it happens on the servers.
John:
You don't need to have an expensive device.
John:
And the way it was trained for the most part was we're trying to help people with their lives.
John:
People have challenges in their lives.
John:
Everybody does, and we want to help them solve the problems they have in their life.
John:
Whether this is, you know, the biggest problem or the way people would want it to be solved, that was the stage of motivation.
John:
Andy Anaco had a very optimistic take on us when he was tweeting it in real time, and he kept coming back to the message that Google was sending
John:
sending out throughout the presentation as uh not directly most of the time but more or less indirectly contrasting themselves with facebook basically this is andy uh interpreting what they're saying it's like they mean google are trying to say facebook uses its power to abuse your privacy and exploit you and undermine institutions we use our power we mean google to help you and improve your life
John:
And that was the message.
John:
Use Google products because you have challenges in your lives and Google products will help you overcome them.
John:
And again, I see the elite angle on there, but I think the populist sort of techno optimism of we take amazing technology, make it available to everybody for free or cheap, and it helps them with their lives effectively.
John:
is a very sort of 70s silicon valley bicycle for the mind personal computer on every desk utopian philosophy again perhaps naive but i think like i said the heart is in the right place for this type of thing um you know there are other aspects of the presentation i'll probably talk about next week like the digital well-being stuff um what was the other thing like the well the developing on chromebooks the whole chromebook angle too why they even do that they have these cheapo computers like this i'm
John:
i mostly give google the benefit of the doubt on this front especially because uh well i was gonna say especially because it's it's it is less clearly tied to advertising it's still tied to commerce right but it's less clearly tied to this is a way for us to show you more ads right i mean it's a way to gather more information about you so they can show you more ads but anyway i really believe that people working on this project think that the technology they're developing the ability of a computer to understand and negate in a conversation in a little limited problem domain
John:
can help humanity i believe it can help humanity just i'm not sure they've figured out quite how yet
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Eero.
Marco:
Finally, Wi-Fi that works.
Marco:
We all know that one Wi-Fi router does not cover most places very well because there's things like walls that no matter how many antennas you put on your router, there's going to be like small dead zones or rooms where it doesn't reach or the very edge of your yard where you have a smart bulb that you really want it to reach but it just doesn't.
Marco:
What you need is a distributed system that broadcasts Wi-Fi from multiple physical points in a big mesh.
Marco:
Now, this is what schools and businesses and things have used for years, but they have to use expensive and hard-to-administer enterprise stuff.
Marco:
Eero brings enterprise-grade hardware and features to consumers in an incredibly easy-to-use package.
Marco:
It's the easiest setup I've ever seen of any router, let alone a mesh system.
Marco:
It's incredibly easy.
Marco:
You launch the Eero app.
Marco:
It sets you through the whole thing.
Marco:
You start out with the Eero base station.
Marco:
You connect that the same way you connect to any other router.
Marco:
You connect it to your internet connection.
Marco:
Then you plug in the Aero beacons that you have, the additional Aero beacons, and these are going to communicate with that base station and broadcast a nice mesh of Wi-Fi all around your house.
Marco:
The app will help you place the beacons in effective locations.
Marco:
You can measure their speed to make sure you're putting them places where they're actually going to work and not like stepping on each other's toes or anything.
Marco:
And your experience is seamless.
Marco:
You walk around your house, you only see one network, and it just covers everything.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
And again, I can't stress how easy it is to use.
Marco:
If you need any help, they do have great support as well, but I have a feeling you won't need it.
Marco:
So see for yourself how easy Eero is.
Marco:
I've never seen an easier system to set up for Wi-Fi, and it works really well.
Marco:
For free overnight shipping to the U.S.
Marco:
and Canada, visit Eero.com, select overnight shipping, and then enter promo code ATP to make that shipping free.
Marco:
Once again, visit Eero.com.
Marco:
That's E-E-R-O.com.
Marco:
And at checkout, select overnight shipping, then enter promo code ATP to make it free to the U.S.
Marco:
or Canada.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Eero for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
So this past week was the 20th anniversary of the original iMac.
Marco:
And lots of our friends in the Apple and writing world have given wonderful retrospectives and lots of our podcasting friends have had lots of great talks about it.
Marco:
When the iMac came out in 1998, I was still a PC person.
Marco:
I mostly ignored it.
Marco:
Like I ignored almost everything Apple did back then because I was a PC person.
Marco:
But I do want to talk about one part of the iMac that did have a lot to do with the PC world because we shared it with them.
Marco:
I want to have a retrospective.
Marco:
Instead of the iMac, my retrospective is about USB and quite how much USB changed the world.
Marco:
Back then, like, it was just, it was like this new port and it was hyped and it was, you know, everything that any new technology product got back then, you know, standard level of hype.
Marco:
But I didn't fully realize, like, until a few years in quite how much USB changed things.
Marco:
For one, it was a very inexpensive standard on all sides.
Marco:
It was inexpensive to host on the computer side.
Marco:
It was inexpensive to make USB devices.
Marco:
The logic on devices was very simplistic.
Marco:
It was just very cheap and simple to implement.
Marco:
This is why it beat Firewire at pretty much everything.
Marco:
This is why it beat Thunderbolt at pretty much everything and still does.
Marco:
USB is really cheap to implement.
Marco:
It also uses really cheap, simple cables and connectors.
Marco:
USB cables were standardized a long time ago.
Marco:
And so even as the user, when you're buying USB stuff, it's generally not only does it cost less to buy up front, but also like you probably already have a cable for it.
Marco:
So for things that don't come with cables, you don't usually have to buy one.
Marco:
You usually have them and you can keep USB cables around and use them with lots of different devices over time.
Marco:
So it was just very inexpensive on all sides and that benefits pretty much everybody.
Marco:
Also, compared to other things at the time, when USB was introduced in the late 90s, the competitors on the PC side were basically serial ports, parallel ports, and SCSI.
Marco:
And SCSI was very rare on PCs.
Marco:
You'd see it on high-end workstations and servers.
Marco:
I know Macs used it a little bit more.
Marco:
But on PC, almost no PC sold to consumers had SCSI cards.
Marco:
You could buy one, but they were expensive.
Marco:
and scuzzy was you know it was like a big ribbon cable interface it was just a big parallel thing it was a big pain in the butt you had to have like scuzzy terminators on the end of the scuzzy chain it was just a big pain usb came and replaced all of that on the pc side with these small connectors with small thin cables the cables could be way longer they could be up to 15 feet long they were widely available pretty much everywhere you can get them in lots of different lengths different colors if you wanted you
Marco:
USB also introduced, I think for the first time in the PC side, bus powered devices.
Marco:
Keyboards might have their own power through the PS2 port, but like other low powered devices could get their power from the port.
Marco:
So they wouldn't need their own power supplies.
Marco:
This is, again, another massive innovation in USB.
Marco:
And the number of innovations in USB.
Marco:
This is why I was thinking about this on my dog walk yesterday.
Marco:
I was just enumerating in my head all the things that USB changed for the first time.
Marco:
It's a huge list.
Marco:
So another big thing.
Marco:
Just the sheer number of ports you could have on a computer.
Marco:
Until recently, USB ports were quite plentiful.
Marco:
Couldn't help it, could you?
Marco:
No, of course not.
Marco:
Most PCs sold back then had two serial ports and one parallel port, and two PS2 ports.
Marco:
Those were keyboard and mouse.
Marco:
But then almost all your peripherals had to be a serial port, which you only had two of, or the parallel port, which was usually your printer.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
If you wanted to add more than that, you usually had to buy an expansion card and stick it to one of your card slots.
Marco:
With USB, you could have more ports.
Marco:
And usually, you know, the very first USB controllers came with two ports.
Marco:
And fairly soon in PC history, four became standard.
Marco:
And now there's even way more than that.
Marco:
And then also, huge game changer, hubs to add more ports.
Marco:
This was not possible with serial ports or parallel ports.
Marco:
And SCSI could do like a chain up to a certain amount, but it was a pain.
Marco:
Anyway, again, that was pretty much unheard of in consumer PCs.
Marco:
There was no such thing as a serial port hub or a parallel port hub that could multiply your parallel port into more parallel ports.
Marco:
Again, adding more ports meant adding expansion cards or just not having more ports.
Marco:
So that was another massive change.
Marco:
Then, on top of that, was the whole family of things that went into what was called at the time, breathlessly, plug and play.
Marco:
And we made fun of Microsoft relentlessly for how bad plug and play was in Windows 95 and everything.
Marco:
But the fact is...
Marco:
There's a number of things about USB that changed everything about peripherals.
Marco:
Number one, you could connect and disconnect things without turning off the computer or having to reboot to get them to start working.
Marco:
This was huge.
Marco:
If you wanted to install a new device on one of your other ports, a lot of times you'd have to reboot or turn the computer physically off to do it either safely or in a way that worked.
Marco:
And obviously, also, if you're putting in cards, then you have to turn the computer all the way off, but leave it plugged in so it's grounded.
Marco:
Nobody ever did that.
Marco:
But anyway, that was a huge, huge pain right there, solved by actually hot plugging and unplugging things.
Marco:
Then, the way devices would communicate to the computer...
Marco:
Before USB, there really wasn't a way for devices to self-identify with a computer.
Marco:
The way the architecture worked would be like you'd install a sound card, and the sound card would have jumpers or dip switches on it that would pre-configure it, like it would hard configure it to be addressable by a certain I.O.
Marco:
address and certain interrupts, certain IRQs and DMAs.
Marco:
Remember all this?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
When you would set up your sound card in your game that you were playing or whatever...
Marco:
You would have to tell the game, okay, I have a Sound Blaster 16.
Marco:
It's at IO address 220, IRQ5, DMA1.
Marco:
And you had to make sure that was right, according to the jumpers on the card, because if it wasn't, it just wouldn't work, right?
Marco:
There was no way for your card to tell the computer, I'm a Sound Blaster 16.
Marco:
I'm an audio device.
Marco:
Here's how you talk to me.
Marco:
Here's where I am.
Marco:
usb brought all of that in one standard in addition to you know the nice cables and ports and hubs and everything it brought device self-identification and auto configuring of things like how to address it that changed so many things it made so many things better and then combined with that the other massive change with usb
Marco:
is that it introduced something called standard class-compliant profiles.
Marco:
So this includes, we still hear these terms sometimes today, HID, USB audio, and USB mass storage profiles.
Marco:
So what this means is that you could, for the first time, I think...
Marco:
You could make like a standard USB sound card and you could plug it into a computer.
Marco:
The computer would see it because of plug and play.
Marco:
It would know how to address it.
Marco:
And you could make it so that it required no drivers at all because it would just conform to the USB audio class compliance standard.
Marco:
You could do the same thing with keyboards, mice, game pads, joysticks, and then eventually mass storage, hard drives, SD cards, stuff like that.
Marco:
There was this whole class, network cards, video capture devices.
Marco:
All of these things could be driverless that people could sell.
Marco:
a device or whatever that you didn't have to install their terrible driver on.
Marco:
I can't tell you how much hardware that I had to either give up using or that never worked right at all because of random problems with their drivers in the PC world.
Marco:
Or they wouldn't update their driver for Windows 98 or whatever.
Marco:
It was always a pain.
Marco:
And so the more you could do without drivers, the better.
Marco:
USB brought that world.
Marco:
Before USB, you had to do pretty much everything with custom drivers.
Marco:
With USB...
Marco:
you had standard class-compliant profiles.
Marco:
That also meant that Macs and Linux PCs were usually able to use them too.
Marco:
And we still see those advantages today because when you have USB standard class-compliant things, they also, for instance, work on iOS devices through the camera connection kit with no configuration, no drivers, nothing like that.
Marco:
All of this was back like in 1998.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And a lot of what made the iMac possible and what made it great and what made it work was really USB.
Marco:
And we complain a lot about the current standards and everything, but USB still has all these things.
Marco:
And all of that started back then.
Marco:
So all of our friends are talking about how the iMac changed everything for Apple.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
I think they're right, but I wasn't there for that part.
Marco:
I was in the PC world.
Marco:
And what we saw was that USB changed everything for us.
John:
Well, I have a couple of minor corrections for Marco in the PC world based on old Mac stuff.
John:
For the most part, I agree with what you said.
John:
But SCSI on the Mac, SCSI was everywhere in the early days of the Mac.
John:
It wasn't just like a niche feature that was on just the high-end Macs.
John:
It was everywhere.
John:
Yeah, because Macs were expensive, lol.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
USB was part of a transition that started slightly before USB when the the IO chips and basically the price of compute and went down to the point where.
John:
there was a realization that you could get a less expensive and faster IO by having, by doing a very fast serial interface than a parallel one.
John:
Like SCSI was kind of the culmination of like, look, we need lots of data and we need it to go fast.
John:
So let's send it all at once in parallel down these gigantic cables and be really careful with that electrical interference induced terminators and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Right.
John:
Because that was the way,
John:
You know, it's kind of like, you know, we need we need more traffic on this road.
John:
Let's add more lanes.
John:
Right.
John:
And then the analogy falls down here with the cars thing.
John:
But like imagine you say, no, instead of having a bunch of lanes with lots of cars in them, let's just have one lane and send the cars at the speed of light.
John:
And have something that can somehow deal with shoving the cars quickly into this little tiny string straw.
John:
So the price of compute went to the point where they realized serial interfaces were the future, not parallel interfaces.
John:
We'd basically taken parallel interfaces as far as they could go.
John:
We realized how problematic they were.
John:
They're just finicky and big.
John:
I mean, I had SCSI cables that were like the thickness of a hot dog.
John:
Huge, huge non-bending cables.
John:
Just very, very delicate, very finicky.
John:
very capable and you could daisy chain them which was interesting but but serial interfaces were the future and on that front what apple had for a long time before usb came along which had a lot of the benefits that you cited was apple desktop bus adb was used to connect essentially the keyboard and mouse and they had serial ports that had a similar looking connector for printers and stuff that work more like you would expect a pc serial port to do but
John:
keyboard and mice uh i don't think there were any ever any adb hubs of i suppose there could have been but the keyboard had an adb port on one side that you would connect to the computer and you could connect your mouse to a port on the other side of the keyboard which should look familiar to anybody who has a usb keyboard with two uh usb ports on it where you connect your your wired mouse to the keyboard if you still have a wired mouse back in the day right
John:
you could plug and unplug adb peripherals while the computer was on and sparks did not fly and the computer understood what you were doing and whatever you plugged in your computer would find it and configure it obviously it's apple desktop bus it's proprietary it's not an industry standard so of course apple could do this because they understood where all the peripherals came from and they had their own standards for how they identified themselves um
John:
and adb was a serial bus mostly because you know it was for low bandwidth things and they didn't have to make it parallel right uh but those benefits a lot of the benefits of this sort of the usability of usb and the convenience of it apple had been enjoying since the mac se and the mac 2 or whenever adb was introduced that's i think that's when they they both came out
John:
When USB came along, it seemed like the next logical step, because it's a serial interface, because we can make serial interfaces fast and cheap.
John:
The cables are thin and not giant, thick, disgusting, scuzzy things.
John:
The connectors were...
John:
Despite all our complaints about, you know, the externally symmetrical and internally asymmetrical, incredibly infuriating USB-A connectors, they definitely looked more modern than ADB because ADB had like actual little pins inside it.
John:
It was like it was from the old era of like, you know, pins going into little holes in the back of your thing with like a metal sheath around it.
John:
and apple did a pretty good job trying to make it so you understood the orientation because the connector itself was round but it only went in one way you had to line the pins up so they made the actual casing of them flat on one side so you always knew like the flat side went up right and that's how you could figure out how to plug them but it was a little bit fidgety but anyway usb was an upgrade in that regard and and uh you mentioned firewire before and how you know usb was more popular than firewire firewire was another one of those uh you know
John:
interfaces that came out of the idea that we can make really fast serial interfaces and give up on parallel but it was the high-end one it was like how do we replace the highest of the high bandwidth stuff to replace scuzzy with something that has way more bandwidth than usb and that has guarantees about timing and that can be
John:
chained together without and that you can have high bandwidth without involving the then anemic cpu on the computer which is how usb saved a lot of money by having the computer cpu do a lot of the work and not having to put that put those smarts in the interface chips which made the interface chips cheaper on both the host device and the actual peripheral right and
John:
So it's not as if FireWire, quote unquote, lost the USB.
John:
It was clearly aimed at a different segment, the less populous segment, the high-end segment.
John:
It ended up being used for digital video on camcorders and stuff like that.
John:
And it lasted a pretty long time, all things considered, because it was very expensive.
John:
But there was never going to be a FireWire mouse.
John:
Let's put it that way.
John:
It's nonsensical.
John:
right um but but it's part of the same family of serial over parallel um and so and finally on the iMac front yeah like as you know the iMac the most important thing about the iMac was not the fact that it uh you know that it came with USB let's say like but lots of other podcasts have talked about the more important aspects of it that's what I thought we were going to talk about here but now we're out of time so I'm not going to dwell on it any longer uh but uh the fact that uh
John:
it you know not that it had usb but as as jason snell pointed out his macro chrome that it dropped all the other ports that are on macs that was the in terms of ports the the most shocking factor about it for an apple user because we had peripherals we had adb peripherals and the benefits of usb over adb especially like when usb is first coming on the scene is
John:
It's like, what does this do that my ADB stuff doesn't do?
John:
I've already got an ADB trackpad, an ADB extended keyboard, an ADB mouse.
John:
Like, why do I need this new interface that I can't use any peripherals?
John:
What the hell happened to my SCSI port?
John:
I have stacks and stacks of SCSI hard drives here.
John:
I have a SCSI RAID.
John:
How do I connect these to my iMac?
John:
This thing is useless, right?
John:
And then I can't connect my printer to it.
John:
My printer's not USB.
John:
Whoever heard of a USB printer?
John:
I have a serial printer and it can plug into the serial port.
John:
The same serial port that's been on my Mac since, you know, 1986, right?
John:
I can't plug this in anywhere.
John:
How the hell do I print?
John:
and then of course the no floppy drive thing or whatever um so as a mac user as jason pointed out the imac was met with some hostility by people who had a bunch of peripherals that they can't plug in and unlike our current usb-c situation there was not any real hope of dongles there was adb usb dongles which i think ruber is still using to use his uh his uh apple extended to keyboard right but
John:
But in general, it's not as if you bought a dongle for your style writer and just used it for years and years after that.
John:
It's like, no, everyone got USB printers.
John:
Like, what happened is USB slipped through the whole industry for the reasons Marco stated.
John:
And we just all got new stuff.
John:
And we said, oh, yeah, this is better.
John:
Because instead of having a SCSI port and two serial ports and ADV ports, now I just have USB.
John:
And then FireWire for the expensive high bandwidth stuff.
John:
And that was better.
John:
And that was the future.
John:
And, like, I think this is like a...
John:
positive version of this of what this of the usbc story where there's a lot of parallels and they seem very similar but it's sure taking a lot longer than it did with usb for the usbc revolution to uh to come along and sweep us all away and we're still kind of grumbling about dongles and kind of wishing we had some of our other ports back
Marco:
It also just, it says quite a lot about just how groundbreaking and forward-looking USB was, that now, 20 years later, you can take a USB device that was released 20 years ago for USB 1.1 and plug it in to an iMac Pro without a dongle.
Marco:
And if it still works at all, it will work on that computer.
Marco:
that's that's my like nothing else in computing has lasted as long as usb has it's incredible oh vga yeah well yeah that's not really used anymore oh you wish you wish it wasn't used well yeah i know projectors and stuff but yeah like most like most people in their house are not using vga for anything that's it's all hdmi and dvi and stuff
John:
even dvi is gone i'm amazed at the number of people take like their you know their retina max and plug them into a series of dongles that culminate in a vga port so they can project it happens all the time at work and i'm just like just that is not the you are not getting the maximum value for your money out of that computer
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Casper and the new Wave mattress.
Marco:
For $100 off your Wave purchase, visit casper.com slash ATP100 and use promo code ATP100.
Marco:
Terms and conditions apply.
Marco:
The Wave is the most innovative mattress from the sleep experts at Casper.
Marco:
It is the first mattress of its kind to relieve pressure at 36 different points so you can feel relaxed in ways you never thought possible.
Marco:
The Wave has advanced temperature railing technology to help you sleep cool and comfortable without overheating.
Marco:
And only the Wave has five layers of superior foam, including a cushioning top layer for maximum comfort.
Marco:
The Wave is Casper's biggest breakthrough in sleep technology for exceptional comfort and deep restorative sleep.
Marco:
And it supports you in all the right places, whether you're a back, stomach, or side sleeper.
Marco:
The Casper Wave gives you the support and relief you need for a good night's sleep.
Marco:
Thanks to its patent-pending contouring system, it adjusts to your body and its natural curves.
Marco:
And it's designed to stay sturdy and keep its original form for years to come, no matter how much time you spend on it.
Marco:
All of this...
Marco:
is an incredible value compared to similar high-end mattresses on the market experience casper's most innovative mattress yourself and this is the one i sleep on i sleep on the casper wave and man is it good i i can't even tell you how good it is it's i i stopped caring about mattresses once i got this one because it's like all right i'm done this is great i don't i never need to look again
Marco:
So you too can see this for yourself.
Marco:
Experience it in your own home for 100 nights risk-free.
Marco:
And it gets delivered right to your home in a small box.
Marco:
And all Wave purchases come with in-home white glove delivery and setup for free.
Marco:
So see for yourself with that 100-night home trial.
Marco:
You can't go wrong.
Marco:
For $100 off your Wave purchase, visit casper.com slash ATP100 and use promo code ATP100.
Marco:
That's casper.com slash ATP100, promo code ATP100.
Marco:
Terms and conditions apply.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Casper and the wonderful new Wave for sponsoring our show and supporting me while I sleep.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And let's begin with Keimer, who asks, how do you have Finder configured?
Casey:
Do you view as icons or lists or columns?
Casey:
Do you show tab path status bars, range by name, date, none, icons in the toolbar, tags, etc.
Casey:
?
Casey:
Does it differ per folder, one config system-wide, or do you adjust it as you go?
Casey:
I adjust as I go.
Casey:
I also don't find this question terribly interesting, but I try to keep the path bar, whatever it's called, at the bottom on, the status bar at the bottom bottom on, and other than that, everything gets adjusted periodically.
Marco:
I have just learned what the path bar is, as you said that.
Marco:
Wow, that could be useful.
Marco:
It's like you don't even read my reviews.
Marco:
I use list view, status bar on, so I can see disk space.
Marco:
And I don't know.
Marco:
List view, that's about it.
Marco:
Normally, I'm sorting by name, but in open save dialogues, when I'm viewing either the desktop or the downloads folder, I will sort those by date descending, so that the new stuff always shows up on top, because usually what I'm dealing with is the newest stuff.
Casey:
All right, John, you only have, let's cap you at 35 minutes if you don't mind.
John:
I can't go into all the details of this, but how I use the Finder, I continue to try to use the Finder like I used to use the Finder my first 16 years of Mac use.
John:
Of course.
John:
The current Mac Finder does not want to be used that way, and it fights me every step of the way.
John:
But I continue to wage that battle, mostly because I'm willing to forgive its forgetfulness and just repeat actions over and over again just to get the experience I want.
John:
So the experience I'm looking for, for people who know how the Finder used to work, is...
John:
The two main views I use are icon view and list view.
John:
Icon view a couple of windows.
John:
I try to keep the icons arranged and the window size the way I want them, like the applications window and stuff like that sort of.
John:
Windows without a lot of stuff in them.
John:
List view for almost everything else, for anything that has lots of stuff in it.
John:
And I'm very into the little disclosure triangles of disclosing different hierarchies and changing the stored order and stuff like that.
John:
I never have the sidebar visible, so I don't have the path bar or anything like that.
John:
I always have the status bar visible because I always want to see the available disk space.
John:
So if you were to look at my Finder desktop, chances are good that you would probably...
John:
see one icon view window if any and just a bunch of list view windows with various parts disclosed all with the little status bar visible on the top
Casey:
I'm surprised you closed the sidebar.
Casey:
I actually like the sidebar.
John:
No, I don't use it.
John:
I don't use the finder as a browser is what I'm getting at.
John:
I do not use it as a browser.
John:
I try to use it as the old finder, which is very difficult because it, you know, every once in a while to give you an example, the applications window, which occasionally I find myself in, you know, messing with applications or dragging something over disk image or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
Every once in a while, the application window, which I have sized and arranged in a particular way, decides, nope, I'm going to be in a different size in a different position and I'm going to have the sidebar now.
John:
Why does it decide that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It just does.
John:
And then I turn off the sidebar on it and I put it back where I thought it was supposed to be and I readjust the view settings for it and then I close it and hope it remembers again next time.
John:
But, you know, at least like once a month or something, some window that I had previously positioned and configured in a particular way will decide now it wants to be this weird,
Casey:
you know metal browser thing it's not metal anymore i know but no i don't i don't want to use it as a browser andreas echegren writes what are your thoughts on volvo using android and google maps and google assistant for their census system in the future i think it's a first for car manufacturers so as chief summarizer in chief uh what this is referring to is volvo in the last few days has announced that for their quote-unquote i drive if you will
Casey:
They're going to be working with Google, Tombed, the voice-controlled Google Assistant, Google Play Store, Google Maps, and other Google services into its next-generation census infotainment system, which will be based on Android.
Casey:
As an owner of an almost brand-new Volvo, I find this very interesting.
Casey:
So I am tentatively optimistic about this.
Casey:
I would be very perturbed if this meant, as I presume it might, that I couldn't use CarPlay anymore.
Casey:
Obviously, this is for the next generation, so it's not going to affect Aaron's car.
Casey:
But in the future, if it ends up that you can only use Android Auto and not CarPlay, that would really annoy me.
Casey:
But that being said, it would be pretty sweet to have Google Maps as the actual onboard, like first party, so to speak, mapping application, which I think would be super cool.
Casey:
So like, Marco, obviously, this isn't relevant to you because you don't own a Volvo.
Casey:
But like, how would you feel about hypothetically Tesla saying, hey, we're going to use Google Maps from now on?
Casey:
Or do they already?
Casey:
And I don't realize it.
Marco:
They do use Google Maps for the map tiles and the map view.
Marco:
They don't use it for navigation.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So do you think this would do anything for you then?
Casey:
I guess it's sort of already there for you, huh?
Marco:
Well, it's not using Android and Google Assistant and everything else.
Marco:
So this would be a step forward or a step significantly in that direction from where Tesla is now.
Marco:
Ultimately, I buy a car for its other factors and I just deal with whatever entertainment system it has.
Marco:
So I would just deal with whatever they did.
John:
I would like Google Assistant in my car because I think it does a really good job of figuring out what the heck I want and doing it.
John:
And my hilarious infotainment system on my Accord, it lets you do voice calling, which occasionally I use.
John:
I know, why don't I just do...
John:
talk to my phone i don't because i don't have hey dingus enabled and anyway it's a whole bunch of reasons why i don't use the phone thing but my car itself has a way to do voice calls and it is terrible it is it's a real it's like a difficult text adventure like it's really hard i know exactly what to do and i still fail like 25 of the time but i use it because my hands can be on the wheel
John:
uh and then i don't know anyway so i would love for my car or any future car to have a google assistant and and google maps and google navigation because i think all those things are really good and surely better than what any car manufacturer would come up on their own and also better than what car manufacturers would you know buy from some third party like tom tom or whatever whoever is selling infotainment systems now so i applaud volvo for making a deal with the best in class assistant and maps for their car and i wish more people would do it
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Hudson Hayward asks, do you buy, it was asked as PlayStation 4, but I'm going to expand it.
Casey:
Do you buy video games, console video games on disk slash cartridge or is digital downloads?
Casey:
I generally like having physical cartridges or disks, but find the noise of the spinning disk to be excessive sometimes.
Casey:
Um, I generally speaking prefer cartridges for the switch because I can hand them to somebody else so they can play it for a minute.
Casey:
Um, so I don't have to worry about like installing an SD card or anything in the switch, which is not difficult for the record.
Casey:
I just don't, you know, I don't have an extra micro SD, whatever it is lying around.
Casey:
However, I will say that I deeply, deeply regret not downloading Mario Kart because a game like Mario Kart is it's one of the only games I'm ever going to play with friends on the Switch.
Casey:
And it would be super convenient if I could have, say, the Zelda cartridge in the Switch, but then just pop over and play Mario Kart for a minute with my friends and then go back to Zelda when I'm by myself.
Casey:
It's not a big enough deal that I would buy Mario Kart again in order to do it, but I do wish I had, for games like that where I know I'm going to be playing with friends kind of at a moment's notice, I would recommend downloading.
Casey:
Otherwise, I personally like the cartridges, but teach their own.
Casey:
John, how do you feel about this?
John:
i searched to see if we had been asked this question before because it sounds familiar but i couldn't find it but anyway um we are only one or two console generations away from these things not having a physical media port on them i have never had a plastic disc inside my ps4 at all i download all my games if i can possibly do it the only card i have for my switch is zelda because i bought the special fancy edition and you had to get a card with that like they didn't have a digital one because it came with this big box with a bunch of
John:
accessories and do hickeys and stuff like that uh digital downloads they are the way to go i recommend it for everybody do not buy physical media if you can at all help it it does mean that you might have to expand the storage on your system it does mean you have to understand how this affects your ability to transfer games and have save state and what happens when you run a roof and so on and so forth but we are in we are in transition period and i feel like we're at the tail end of the transition period digital only is the future
Marco:
Yep, I'm with you.
Marco:
The very first thing I did when I got the Switch was buy a 200GB microSD card.
Marco:
Once I knew I could do that, I bought zero cartridges.
Marco:
I have one game for Switch on a cartridge, and it's the Mario Rabbids game that I bought on Black Friday because it was on sale.
Marco:
I have yet to play it, but the cartridge has been in my Switch since Black Friday because all of our games are downloaded.
Marco:
So what's great is it kind of avoids Casey's Mario Kart problem.
Marco:
All of your games are always accessible to you.
Marco:
You can just always play whatever you want.
Marco:
You don't have to worry, oh, I left that one at home or I don't have that one with me right now.
Marco:
There is a real downside, as Casey said, that you can't just hand your copy of the game to someone else to play.
Marco:
Or if you want to have multiple Switches in your family, you can't easily just transfer the games between them.
Marco:
So that's kind of annoying in certain cases.
Marco:
You also can't resell downloads back to GameStop or whatever for $0.
Marco:
They can resell it for way more than that.
Marco:
um you know you can't trade with friends like there are definite downsides to the way downloads are usually implemented but as somebody who doesn't usually do all those things and who is instead very lazy i love the fact that i can just pick up the switch or turn on the tv with the switch and all the games that we have are just in a menu and you can just pick whatever you want to play and it just starts
John:
And a lot of those limitations you mentioned are actually just policy ones.
John:
And Nintendo historically has not been the best on the policy.
John:
But for example, on PlayStation 4, there's many games that I bought one copy of that I can play on both of my PS4s in the house.
John:
My son can play on his account on his PS4 because it's like a sub account of mine or whatever.
John:
Like they have a way.
John:
for a lot of games not all but a lot of games for you to buy one copy of it and have two people playing it on different playstations on different accounts which is a much better policy than the nintendo policy right so it really is up to and they could even do reselling and stuff like that if they want so it really is up to the individual company that's why i say
John:
become familiar with what the those the policies related to digital downloads on your console and figure out if they're you know if they're an issue if you never resell them you probably don't care about that but if you do want to buy one copy of a game and have multiple people in the house playing it find out if that's possible and you might be pleasantly surprised and by the way i know i said it myself earlier but like
John:
You know, I don't buy games on plastic discs.
John:
I prefer digital.
John:
Obviously, the digital on the plastic disc, too.
John:
This is just like mechanical keyboards, another one of those nonsensical things.
John:
It's like, oh, so you like digital games.
John:
Yeah, I get my games on vinyl.
John:
They're all analogs.
Casey:
The graphics are way better that way.
Casey:
Much warmer.
Marco:
It's more about the ritual.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Eero, and Casper.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So Long
John:
We just got another Switch card in the house, and I realized that I had had the Zelda Switch card in my card slot so long that I forgot where the card slot was on my Switch.
John:
Nice.
John:
We got some dancing game for my daughter.
John:
She's going to use it at her birthday party.
John:
I'm trying to think, how do we end up getting this and not downloading it?
John:
But anyway, we have a second physical card in the house now, which I'm already regretting because then I have to take out my tiny little Zelda thing and put it somewhere where I don't lose it.
John:
I can't wait for them to do the... I don't know if you've been keeping up with this, but the...
John:
the nintendo online service that we're all currently enjoying a free trial of or whatever is going to become commercial and as part of that there's going to be cloud saves thank god so finally my all my zelda progress will be somewhat safer than it is now i just i fear like that the kids are going to spill a drink on my switch and i'm going to lose like 150 hours of zelda
John:
yeah i'm worried about that for all of our saves too yeah when is that launching it's not not soon right uh forget uh september maybe i don't know google for nintendo switch online you'll see i wasn't paying too much attention i just saw the feature set but it's it's before the end of the year and i think maybe the fall
John:
and apparently we're going to be able to play mario 3 multiplayer over the internet i was just more nes games by the way you'll be able to play more nes games surprise yeah we all kind of saw that coming out i think they're giving you a bunch of good ones are free i think they're giving you like mario mario 3 i figure what they were anyway just go over the story to see details but anyway it's cheap it's like 35 for a seven person family per year uh and cloud saves that's all i need to hear i would you know have no idea how much i would play for cloud saves i'm so paranoid about this switch