Left-Handed Streaming Service
Casey:
I was thinking about that the other day, about our differing definitions of jam band and how wrong your definition is.
Casey:
That's all right.
Marco:
You mean mine is good?
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
They are very different.
Casey:
No, because I feel like a jam band, by definition, is about improvisation.
Casey:
It is not about what instrument is emphasized or what the particular flair of music is.
Marco:
Totally disagree.
Marco:
Jamming is about improvisation.
Marco:
But a jam band is a specific musical genre.
Casey:
I don't know how to properly adjudicate this disagreement other than to say I feel as strongly as you the other direction that it is.
Casey:
It is little to nothing to do with the particular flavor of the music, but more about the style.
Casey:
Style is a wrong word there.
Casey:
It's about the fact that they improvise.
Casey:
So as an example, I think it would be terrible, but there is no reason in my world that you couldn't have a death metal jam band.
Casey:
If they're all about improvisation and if every show sounds very different, sure, they're a jam band.
Casey:
It's not my kind of jam band, but it's a jam band.
Marco:
But I mean, that's like saying like anybody who raps is making rap.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
That's not necessarily.
Marco:
No, like like rap.
Marco:
Rapping is a verb.
Marco:
Making rap may be the widest thing you've ever said.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Maybe this is a bad example.
Marco:
I don't know anything about this, but like like anybody can rap as part of some other genre of music.
Marco:
But then there's also a genre named rap that includes rapping, but is also a genre.
Marco:
Jam band is a genre of music that refers to a specific style of music that includes jamming.
Marco:
Other bands who are not jam bands and are not playing jam band music can jam, but it's not necessarily, that doesn't make them a jam band.
Marco:
And the category, the musical genre jam bands does not include all songs from all bands that include jams.
John:
I don't think I ever heard the term jam band until I heard you, Marco, discussing it in this context.
John:
And I just like to continue to think that it's a band that's really into like fruit preserves, like that kind of band.
John:
Because that sounds much more appealing than either of your definitions.
Casey:
They jammed our radar, John.
Casey:
That's a reference, by the way.
John:
Marco hasn't seen it.
Casey:
No, I bet he's seen Spaceballs.
Casey:
Come on.
Marco:
he hasn't a long time ago like like i think like in high school or college and i i found it incredibly unfunny in part good movie but yeah in part because it isn't very good and in part because i had one of the situations where like my friends had quoted it to me too much beforehand and so i was like it's similar see also monty python i didn't think that was funny either for the same reason like my friends had been quoting it to me badly for years before i ever saw it so by the time i did see it it sounded like my annoying friends not the movie you know well
John:
Unlike Spaceballs, Monty Python is not one thing.
John:
So they probably quoted things that you are now sick of, but there's so much Monty Python that they weren't quoting that you couldn't theory watch, whereas Spaceballs is just the one movie.
Marco:
See, the problem is, though, I got quoted Monty Python so much by other people in high school that the entire style of Monty Python humor sounds like my annoying friends.
John:
Well, funny part, that isn't really a style of humor.
John:
It's a genre.
John:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
John:
Here we are all over again.
John:
It all comes back around.
John:
They're more jam comedians, I don't know.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I mean, in the defense of Mark—see, this is why I am not a good debater or arguer, because in the defense of Marko—
Casey:
I think the canonical example jam band is someone like a Phish or a Grateful Dead.
Casey:
And I think Phish and Grateful Dead, to my ears, have very, very similar sounds.
Casey:
And I apologize if that's like blasphemous.
Casey:
I genuinely don't mean it to be.
Casey:
But to my ears, they're very, very similar.
Casey:
Very guitar heavy, very happy-go-lucky.
Casey:
Very, very similar sound.
Casey:
But I would contest and posit that...
Casey:
it is not compulsory to have a guitar-heavy, happy-go-lucky, you probably are high as shit on weed when you listen to it sound, which, by the way, is also applicable to Dave Matthews.
Casey:
But you don't have to be high in order to enjoy it.
Casey:
I think that, to me, a jam band is all about improvisation.
Casey:
Somebody said in the chat, you know, does that make all of jazz or every jazz group a jam band?
Casey:
I mean, yeah, if you want to use a... I suppose.
Casey:
I don't see why not, because jazz is all about improvisation.
John:
Oh, Casey.
John:
I wanted to remain neutral in this argument, but the more you talk, the more I start to agree with Marco.
John:
Okay, tell me why.
John:
Because you're going into robot or not territory.
John:
That's why you're drawing.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm waiting for you to jump in on this.
John:
Because you're saying, well, if you think about it, your definition is so broad, it starts to include things that are ridiculous, like jazz.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
Grateful Dead was a good example.
Marco:
I wouldn't say there's as much overlap between them as fish as you think, but that's only because you don't know them very well.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
They do share a genre.
Marco:
Grateful Dead, I think, was the first jam band in the category, and they largely defined the category, and their fandom largely defined the category.
Marco:
It's more about the style of music than about the...
Marco:
actions in the music or the components is it does that make sense like like jamming is an action or like a component like it's not a musical style or genre because you know jazz is a great like jazz sounds nothing like fish or grateful dead or dave matthews or anything like that like it sounds nothing like any of these bands but it is the action of jamming it includes that right jam bands include that too but jam bands are a genre of music that does not include jazz
Casey:
I think it's jazz.
Casey:
Many of today's jam bands have brought widely varied genres into the scene.
Casey:
A jam band festival may include bands with electronic folk rock, blues rock, jazz fusion, psychedelic rock, southern rock, progressive rock, acid jazz, hip-hop, hard rock, and bluegrass sounds.
John:
To be clear, when I was saying I agree with Marco, it was about whether the definition is as broad.
John:
It was about the definition.
John:
I didn't know nothing about Dave Matthews, so I can't say what definition they fit in.
John:
I was just saying...
John:
Trying to define it as just any kind of music with improvisation or that being the essential part of it just seems wrong to me because that includes too much stuff.
John:
And all these bands they named, I recognize like two of the names that can name like one or two songs.
John:
So I have no idea if any of these bands fit into the definition.
John:
But I think the definition is a lot narrower than just music that includes improvisation.
Casey:
It's a tough call.
John:
Anyway, everyone check out churches.
John:
They're really good.
John:
Wait, like the buildings?
John:
It's spelled with a V, Marco.
John:
It's very complicated.
Casey:
There's apparently a software-based fix to your MacBook Air, John, and this is Unshaky by Underscore Sam.
John:
I kind of missed out on a cool name for this.
John:
Well, I'll describe what it is, and then we can suggest some cooler names.
John:
So sometimes on newer MacBook Pro keyboards, when you hit a key, you might get two or zero of the key that you pressed, even though you think you did what is a normal key press.
John:
How can we fix that, aside from Apple making a better keyboard?
John:
Well, industrious people like this person whose name, as far as I could determine, is underscore Sam, not to be confused with underscore David Smith, made this thing that you can install on your computer.
John:
And it will try to intercept all the keystrokes or the key input as you type on your computer and sort of mega-de-bounce your keys.
John:
So we discussed debouncing before where the firmware or software that is involved in your keyboard waits for the key to settle before determining whether it's a key press or not because it bounces microscopically when it hits, right?
John:
So this is like, all right, I'm going to wait for it to stop bouncing, and then I'm going to wait a little bit more.
John:
And if there's two letters that are the same right after each other really, really quickly, like so quick that maybe it might not even be humanly possible to hit them that quick unless you were really trying, like, you know, trying to play summer games or something on your computer, I'm just going to count that as one.
John:
So that's what Unshaky does.
John:
I think Omega D Bouncer would have been a cooler name.
John:
I think it's sad that this has to exist.
John:
I think it's cool that underscore Sam made it exist, and I might actually try installing it.
Casey:
Horace Dudu has pointed out some interesting facts and figures with regard to iPhone quarterly revenue growth or not over the last eight quarters.
Casey:
And I'm assuming it was John that came up with this, but I'm going to steal your thunder and read them out.
Casey:
So for the last eight quarters, from oldest to newest, 1% growth, 3% growth, 2% growth, 13, 14, 20, 29, negative 15 for last quarter.
Casey:
Whoops.
John:
Yeah, the numbers don't really tell much, which is why I made this little tiny sparkline graph that you probably can't see and we probably won't even bother putting the notes.
John:
But the tale that the numbers tell is not only was iPhone revenue, like it was like iPhone sales have flattened out, but they've been increasing the prices.
John:
So the revenue may still go up.
John:
Not only was the revenue going up, this is not like how much money they made this graph.
John:
This is the growth, right?
John:
So this is the rate of change.
John:
The rate of change was increasing.
John:
So it was like 1% growth, 3%, you know,
John:
It was going up, up, up, and right at the peak, it takes a huge nosedive.
John:
So it's not like this was a gradual thing where sales, where iPhone revenue was, you know, on the way down and then just dip below some threshold.
John:
It went from going up pretty quickly to rock bottom.
John:
So that's part of why the story has a lot of drama behind it.
John:
it is uh it's pretty intense that graph i will try to remember to put in the show notes but you can envision that it is pretty ugly it's not a good graph because it doesn't label this again this is this is revenue growth i'm assuming it's year over year uh or maybe it's quarter to quarter i don't know uh horace let's know what horace's podcast to find out for sure but but bottom line is it's not just numbers it's not just like i sold five widgets and 10 widgets and 11 widgets this is rate of change um and the next next follow-up item relates to this
Casey:
And that would be that Samsung and LG have released their financial results, and it's a pretty bad dumpster fire for everyone involved, it seems.
John:
Yeah, and guess what's bad?
John:
China.
John:
Who knew?
John:
They all... Anyone who has anything to do with the smartphone industry and has ever... There's other companies included in these stories, too, that I took out, because there's a bunch of companies that have, like...
John:
This company has not made money selling smartphones since 2014, so we don't include them because they've never been making money or whatever.
John:
But the other big players in the smartphone market also all had a bad year in China and are having bad results.
John:
I don't know if it was smart for Apple to be the first one to say, hey, guess what?
John:
Our results are going to be worse than we thought and we're doing really bad in China.
John:
But everyone else is saying the same thing.
John:
uh and so it seems like the china story is definitely the real deal uh as who pointed this out oh ben thompson pointed this out to me as we'll find out at earnings even though i talked about uh in the last show like that's what apple says but they just gave us overall numbers when they announce earnings they do still break that stuff down by region they don't give you unit sales but they do break down all of their other numbers by region so we'll be able to validate uh apple's uh report that uh
John:
this is all a China issue.
John:
And then we can see like, Oh, China was in the crapper, but in the United States, the growth continues or, you know, things were flat or whatever.
John:
So we'll find that out when they do actual earnings.
Marco:
One thing I want to add to this, there was a great discussion on upgrade this past week on this whole mess and, and other related topics.
Marco:
But yes, Apple said like, you know, this is due to losses and, you know, basically contractions of the market in China or lower demand in China.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And you can look at this and you can say, well, you know, apparently a lot of things are taking a hit in China, not just the iPhone specifically.
Marco:
So it isn't necessarily Apple's fault that the iPhone isn't selling as well because of factors X, Y and Z that are like macroeconomic factors in China, specific macroeconomic factors and so on.
Marco:
isn't it people at apple's job to try to forecast this stuff yeah but like you know you can't tell the future well you can't tell the future very far in advance but like they when did they issue this guidance like october one quarter ago like that's the whole thing it's not like october november right like it wasn't that so like even then and by the way the issue guidance that is a range of what they think might happen
Marco:
And there was a great article also by Ben Thompson on Stratechery about this, I think two days ago now, looking at the timeline of when Apple had to make these predictions on their earnings versus it was only a couple days into sales of the iPhone XR or something like that.
Marco:
So they had to basically guess how many XRs they would sell, and they had maybe one month of data on the S line.
Marco:
So it seems like they probably predicted way too high on the XR.
Marco:
And that was causing basically this problem.
Marco:
But isn't it their job to look at the economic climate all over the world and to base predictions on that?
Marco:
Like for them to have made such a significant miss in a relatively short-term prediction –
Marco:
It requires a lot of optimism and factors that turn out not to be true.
Marco:
And I'm not saying this is a reason for anybody to be fired, but I save those accusations for when it matters more.
Marco:
But I think you look at this and it's not – Apple's framing it in the letter.
Marco:
It's like this is something that happened to us basically, but it's their job to –
Marco:
forecast things like this they have they should have the best resources in the world at trying to look at world markets and what's happening there have been signs for a while now that the world economy is on shaky ground and after a period of things being kind of good it's cooling down like that's been that's
Marco:
I don't follow China stuff at all because I don't know anything about it.
Marco:
But people who do, when they heard Apple's report, they're like, yeah, of course, that makes sense because China is contracting or whatever.
Marco:
It's been a hard time in China recently.
Marco:
So it's like, when they're making their predictions and they're issuing their guidance, and they didn't just miss their guidance by amount X, they fell below the bottom of the range of guidance by that much.
Marco:
With such a short time horizon, I have to imagine, like...
Marco:
This wasn't just something that happened to them.
Marco:
Oops.
Marco:
You know, it's like it was actually like a significant misprediction and misunderstanding of the market that they should have had a better understanding of.
John:
It's like saying it's a basketball team's job to score more points than the other team.
John:
It's their job to score more points than the other team.
John:
Why didn't they do it?
John:
They should have known what the other team was going to do.
John:
They have all the tape of the other team playing.
John:
Why didn't they just score more points than that?
John:
I would be more on your side if they were the only one who missed.
John:
But seeing the results from everybody else saying, yeah, we had it worse, is because China took a nosedive steeper than people predicted.
John:
The people who are saying, yeah, it makes sense, are saying it from now, when we see the nosedive that China has taken.
John:
Last quarter or October or whenever, when they were making these predictions, those same people, if asked to make predictions for Apple...
John:
There would have been some range.
John:
Some would say that Apple's predictions are high.
John:
Some would say they're low or whatever.
John:
I don't think Apple is unique in this position.
John:
And sometimes things are on a trajectory.
John:
And Apple does predict these trajectories, which is why sometimes its earnings that they predict are lower than Wall Street expects when they say, here's our guidance.
John:
And Wall Street's like, oh, we don't like that guidance.
John:
But it turns out to be right on.
John:
They have a pretty good record of getting their guidance.
John:
This is a...
John:
More dramatic downturn than companies expected in every company that's in the same business as them is saying, yep, it's more dramatic than we expected to.
John:
Are they all incompetent?
John:
Is all of their jobs to predict?
John:
Sometimes things just go down faster than you think they're going to.
John:
That's I mean, again, I'm not deep into this world, but seeing from a high level of using all
John:
a bunch of very similar competitors having the same story about how things are happening it makes sense to me you know sometimes things go down faster than you think they're going to if if there are people who could track the market within this narrow percentage window uh as well as that they would just not make devices and they would just play the stock market or you know do like uh commodities trading and not bother actually having to try to do the hard work of making something instead just make money off of their amazing knowledge of how exactly the world's going to go
John:
I mean, to be fair, there are a lot of people who do that.
John:
They try.
John:
But I'm saying like if they had like if you could if you could predict the movement of the markets to a to a degree where you wouldn't make a miss like this in this situation, you know, three months ahead of time, that's that's a pretty amazing ability to predict.
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Casey:
It seems that any time we scoff at Chrome because it's really bad, somebody wants to come out of the woodwork to remind us that Firefox is not dead and is in fact still a thing.
Casey:
And in this case, it was Christopher Tipper who wanted to write us or did write us and say, hey, I'm curious how there's a whole conversation about Edge without any mention of the other viable browser, Firefox.
Casey:
I'm not about to advocate for it, though I've relied on it for a long time, and it's not the browser you were using five years ago anymore.
Casey:
But how sensible is it to complain about a lack of diversity when people are too lazy to switch?
Casey:
And that actually is a pretty decent question.
Casey:
No, it is not a decent question.
John:
First of all, we did mention Firefox, albeit in passing, but we did mention it.
John:
Maybe we got it out of the episode, but it was definitely mentioned.
John:
And second, what good is it to complain about a lack of diversity when people are too lazy to switch?
John:
Well, first of all, it's like...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
the most power behind it to get people to use it because it comes bundled with Windows and historically has been a very popular browser, whereas Firefox is a third-party download and much more difficult to get people to switch to.
John:
This is a browser that people would end up using mindlessly because you have to know to install Chrome or know to install Firefox.
John:
And if you don't do that and you have Windows, this is the one you would have been using.
John:
So I think this is not a particularly good point.
Marco:
Well, also, we aren't all in the world using Firefox or not using it because we're lazy.
Marco:
We're not using it because it hasn't been very good for a very long time.
Marco:
And if it's good now, cool.
Marco:
Good luck to them.
Marco:
Maybe I'll check it out.
Marco:
But it was not very good for a very long time.
Marco:
And that's a very good reason for a lot of us not to have used it.
John:
Yeah, it is better now, but it's got such a hurdle.
John:
If Firefox went away, we'd also be sad because we'd be like, it's decreasing the browser diversity.
John:
It's one of those big ones up there.
John:
There's not that many, as we talked about, making a modern web browser engine is incredibly difficult and resource intensive.
John:
That's why there aren't a million of them.
John:
So losing any one of them is bad.
John:
But losing Firefox would probably be less impactful than losing Internet Explorer or Edge or whatever, simply because Firefox is a third-party browser that has to convince people on its merits to use it, whereas the one that comes bundled with Windows has an immediate advantage, just like the one that comes bundled with iOS has an immediate advantage.
John:
and to a lesser degree the one that comes bundled with the Mac.
John:
So it would have been bad for any of these players to disappear.
John:
Any of them disappearing is a decrease in diversity, and it's particularly bad for one of the sort of most powerful, most important ones to disappear.
Marco:
So the version of Firefox that I've been judging it on apparently was not the current version and had no auto-updating to the current version.
John:
Yeah, the auto-updaters in Firefox at various times in the semi-recent history, meaning the last five years, have stopped working and refused to auto-update to the next major version.
John:
They've just prompted you, go download the new version, which I've done.
John:
And so you will eventually get to the newer version.
John:
But it's weird that they don't chain their... At certain points, they stop chaining their auto-updaters.
John:
They're like, we give up.
John:
Just go and down.
John:
They send you.
John:
They say, go to this place and download it.
John:
But it's kind of weird.
Marco:
i keep firefox as my third browser basically i have safari primary i have chrome as my secondary and kind of like google and facebook if i have to kind of thing and you know and then uh firefox is kind of my third one like if i need another login account for like say if i'm testing overcast i need like a third browser that has a different account logged in for one of the tests i'm doing or something like that it's curious we have this whole conversation about browsers and no one's mentioned opera yet
Marco:
Well, because the opera user is not part of this podcast.
Marco:
But anyway, so I decided, okay, let me give it a fair shot.
Marco:
Granted, in the two minutes before we talked about it.
Marco:
So I went to the Firefox site.
Marco:
I downloaded the newest version of Firefox, installed it, and opened it up and browsed to a few sites and poked around a little bit.
Marco:
And first thing I did was resize the window because it was the wrong size.
Marco:
And the resize animation is wrong.
Marco:
It was all jaggy.
Marco:
It had black clipping artifacts as you'd resize it.
Marco:
It's not a smooth resize.
Marco:
I noticed when scrolling, it does not bounce on top and bottom the way both Chrome and Safari and every other scroll view on Mac and iOS do.
Marco:
And finally, when I went to my own website, overcast.fm, the logo, the orange on Overcast site is wrong because I have a P3 display and they're rendering the regular, you know, whatever the regular RGB display
Casey:
I know what you're thinking of.
Casey:
I can never keep it straight.
Casey:
I thought it was SRGB.
Marco:
Yeah, so my SVG and my website specify regular color, not wide color.
Marco:
And it seems to be mapping that incorrectly onto the wide color display.
Marco:
So the colors are way too bright in the oranges and overcast.
Marco:
So my initial impression is not very positive that all these basics are still really crappy.
Marco:
So I'm kind of thinking this is going to remain my third browser.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They let it slide, but this one doesn't.
John:
But it doesn't matter who's correct when it looks good in the browsers that have the massive, the most market share, right?
John:
Your other browser, Firefox, is the weird one.
John:
Chrome had the same problem when it was introduced.
John:
Chrome was the weird one.
John:
It's like, oh, this site works in IE, but it doesn't work in Chrome, right?
John:
That's the hill you have to climb.
John:
If you're a third-party browser and you want to get traction and you don't have a platform to be your tractor, you have to deal with stuff like this.
John:
You have to say, okay, well, even though we're technically right, and again, I don't know if this is a case where they're right or not, but there are cases like that.
John:
Even though we're technically right,
John:
Let's do the thing that the other browsers do so that sites work.
John:
Like that was the hill Safari had to climb too, even though it had the support of the entire platform.
John:
It still had to climb the hill because when it came out, I believe IE was still on the Mac and so was Firefox.
John:
Firefox was bigger than it at that point and it had to render sites as well as IE or Firefox or whatever.
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And this is awesome because this means while you're waiting at the gate or while you're in the car on the way to or from the airport, you can plug your phone into your suitcase and charge it up.
Marco:
So you're never like entering a flight with an empty battery or a half full battery or whatever.
Marco:
It's always useful to get more charge while you're waiting around while traveling.
Marco:
And if you get gate checked or whatever and you have to take the battery out for TSA reasons, no problem.
Marco:
You pop it out with one click, it's out and you can bring it on the plane with you.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
These two cases are made from lightweight, durable polycarbonate from Germany or aluminum alloy recently, a new addition there.
Marco:
And both of those materials are guaranteed for life.
Marco:
Their suitcases also have a TSA approved combination lock for spinner wheels that spin all 360 degrees around for easy maneuverability and a removable washable laundry bag, which is really nice when you're traveling.
Marco:
Like it's always nice to keep your dirty clothes separate while you're, while you're going through your trip.
Marco:
It just, you know, it feels better.
Marco:
It's more organized and everything.
Marco:
And you get home, you can pop it out and wash it.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
See for yourself at awaytravel.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP during checkout and you can get $20 off a suitcase.
Marco:
Once again, that's awaytravel.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Code ATP for $20 off a suitcase.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Away for sponsoring our show because this season, everyone wants to get away.
Casey:
This week is CES week, which I have never really found that terribly interesting, and it's even less so now, but that's okay.
Marco:
But Casey, how are we going to ever get so excited about all the different TV technologies and other technologies that always debut at CES and then always come out into shipping products later and are definitely as good as they're promised and come out anytime soon?
John:
that's not fair that's that's not fair at all because yeah if you're bored by tv technology then fine but they showed it at the show and for the most part the things they show at the show become products that ship in the year of the show that they showed it or it's some you know or they say this is not for this year whatever it's not different than any other sort of tech show or apple presentation specifically on tvs other tech who knows like they show the machine that folds your own laundry that's probably never going to exist or whatever but or only you know
John:
it'll be ridiculously expensive and not work that well but the tv stuff it's pretty much like this is this year's crop of tvs and we're going to release them sometimes it's later in the year than you want it to be but we're going to release them this year and this is what they're like and then also here's a bunch of wacky tv tech and i do have a topic after the one that we're actually going to talk about we probably won't even get to the show about specifically tv technology which i find exciting um all the rest of ces i can take or leave
Casey:
At any case, it came out, I don't know, it was a couple of days ago, it doesn't really matter when, but it came out in fits and spurts that Apple has apparently partnered with a lot of major TV manufacturers in order to include iTunes and or AirPlay 2 and or HomeKit in several major manufacturers' TVs.
Casey:
So the first shoe to drop, I believe, was Samsung.
Casey:
And they have said that Samsung's 2018 and 2019 range of TVs will be able to access and play your iTunes movie and TV show library.
Casey:
And you'll also be able to buy and rent content from iTunes directly from the TV.
Casey:
And, of course, it will support AirPlay 2.
Casey:
Then later on, Vizio and LG said, yeah, we're going to get the AirPlay 2 thing.
Casey:
We'll get HomeKit support.
Casey:
Maybe, maybe not on the iTunes thing.
Casey:
uh sony i believe said the same i don't have the information in front of me that's okay though and then apple has actually updated their airplay page to say hey a bunch of this stuff is happening um this is interesting to me and i think exciting i actually find it very hard to get excited about anything tv related our tv in the house as i've said before is ancient it's 40 inches i have no intention of upgrading it anytime soon i just don't
Casey:
I don't get revved up about TV stuff like you, John, and Marco do.
Marco:
You should look at this different, Casey.
Marco:
Your TV is so old, and it's only 40 inches.
Marco:
You are in the market.
Marco:
So this should be very exciting to you.
Casey:
Except I don't think I want to spend the money on this stuff.
John:
But I'm with you in principle.
John:
You are in the market, though, because every year they come out with new fancy TVs, the less fancy ones get cheaper.
John:
They're pretty cheap now.
John:
They're getting down into Casey territory, getting down into I don't care about TV territory.
Yeah.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
In any case, I do think this is interesting because this is not the sort of move that Apple of the past often made.
Casey:
I mean, they did from time to time, but this is not the sort of thing that you saw that often in the past.
Casey:
And as paired with, what is it, Apple Music going to Amazon's Echo line of products, Apple is really, really, really starting to walk the services walk, which...
Casey:
I don't know if that's good or bad.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm excited or sad, but one way or another, it's different and interesting.
Casey:
And actually, speaking of upgrade, a friend of the show, Mike Hurley, had some very interesting tweets about this.
Casey:
I think it was right when this information first dropped.
Casey:
And I'm going to butcher what Mike said, and I'll try to find the link for the show notes.
Casey:
But basically, he said, hey, look, Apple is not really the same company it was even just a couple years ago, much less 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
You as an Apple fan are going to decide if you want to be on board with this or not.
Casey:
And either decision is fine, but they're different now.
Casey:
And this is a very exciting and interesting time to be watching and interested in Apple.
Casey:
And I think that that was very astute of Mike.
Casey:
And I think that this broadening of their willingness to put their content on other people's devices is a perfect example of that, which is what Mike was saying.
John:
I'm glad I got to get on to Upgrade before Mike and make that same point.
John:
What was he?
John:
He was on vacation or something?
John:
I forget.
Casey:
I forget, yeah.
John:
Yeah, this is episode 222.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes where I talked about this very issue, not in the context of TVs because, of course, none of these announcements had been made, but we were talking about it in the context of music.
John:
It was just me and Jason.
John:
To get back to the TV stuff for a second, all those TV announcements that you listed, that's basically all the important TV players.
John:
I think TCL wasn't listed, right?
John:
But I'm not sure what their deal is.
John:
Maybe they've since made an announcement.
John:
the little snippet on the AirPlay page, Apple's AirPlay page, which probably used to say something like, AirPlay is a great way for you to wirelessly send your video to your Apple devices and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
John:
Now it says, to your Apple TV, favorite speakers, and soon, popular smart TVs.
John:
And so it's clear that Apple is...
John:
not just like making one deal with one thing like they are reframing their technologies not as a way you know an example in case of airplane not as a way for you to send your video wirelessly among your apple things but as a way for you to send your video wirelessly to your tv and apple doesn't even make a tv so it's got to be you know third-party tvs and they didn't just do a deal with one they did a deal with as many as they could it seems like so they had
John:
And even though the announcements trickled out, it's clear that this has been sort of a full court press.
John:
And, you know, it's easier to just listen to me rant about this on Upgrade if you want to hear a longer version.
John:
But the short version is in the context of the discussion I was having with Jason.
John:
If you have any kind of service where someone's going to pay you and then you get to like watch TV shows or listen to music or something like that.
John:
It's very difficult to be in the market at all if for people to use your service, they have to do some specific thing.
John:
Like you want the largest addressable market as possible.
John:
You don't want to say we will sell our music service online.
John:
Only to people with blue eyes.
John:
Like, only to people who own BMWs.
John:
Like, why would you limit your audience that way?
John:
If you have a music streaming service, sell it to anyone who will give you $10 a month.
John:
Like, sell it to everybody.
John:
Like, I'm sorry, you can't use our music streaming service.
John:
Only left-handed people can.
John:
That's a bad music streaming service.
John:
And how are you going to make the economics worth if you only sell to left-handed people?
John:
There's just not enough of them, right?
John:
So the technology version of being left-handed is we will only sell you iTunes content if you own an Apple device.
John:
Apple does not have massive overwhelming market share in any of the markets where it sells devices.
John:
It doesn't have overwhelming market share in phones.
John:
It doesn't have it in computers.
John:
It doesn't even sell TVs.
John:
It doesn't have it in TV puck devices.
John:
It's not a good idea to have a service of any kind, music or television or movies or whatever, and only be able to sell it to people who buy your hardware.
John:
And the whole thing, I think what Mike was getting at is the whole notion like, well, Apple does all this stuff, but it's just a way to sell you high margin hardware.
John:
Even though Apple's hardware margins are still very healthy, in the end, unless Apple says something radically different...
John:
it would be a herculean effort to say the iphone is going to go from 20 worldwide market share to 90 the apple tv is going to go from maybe apple tv actually does have these in market share but it's going to go from wherever it has to having 90 market share and even 90 is not as good as 100 and so i talked about an upgrade is let's look at the people who have been successful in services netflix being the prime example like the defining characteristic of netflix is you can't buy anything on the planet that has electronics in it that doesn't play netflix
John:
If you buy a television that plays Netflix, there's Netflix buttons on the remote control that say Netflix.
John:
It's like Marco's dream of having of having a button that changes.
John:
There's literally a button that has the Netflix logo on your remote.
John:
Like you don't have to forget about having to buy a box like it's in all your TVs.
John:
All your computers can play it.
John:
You can play it on your phone.
John:
You can play it on your tablet.
John:
You can play on your fire.
John:
Like it's it's everywhere.
John:
Because Netflix is in the business of saying, we don't want there to be any barriers to you signing up for our service.
John:
If you exist and have a way to watch movies at all, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to sign up for Netflix.
John:
And that is really the only way to have any success in any kind of service thing.
John:
uh and i think on upgrade i also talked about when has apple done this in this past when has apple actually done a thing where they say we don't just want to sell this to people who have apple hardware or left-handed people where we want to sell it to everybody and the ipod is the only real recent example in most people's minds because once they made the ipod for windows it's like look everybody can buy an ipod we don't care if you have a mac we don't care you know just we'll sell ipods to everybody and
John:
And everybody was simpler then because it was basically like if you have a Mac or a PC.
John:
And that was all that mattered back then.
John:
But they sold them to everybody.
John:
And they sold really cheap ones and really small ones and really big ones and expensive ones.
John:
And they just sold it to whoever would take it in the head.
John:
They actually had fairly dominant market share in the digital music player market.
John:
Like they were the biggest game in town.
John:
Netflix has even better penetration.
John:
Netflix basically has 100% penetration.
John:
Like if you can't watch Netflix, you are trying really hard or you're Casey and never replace anything.
John:
Although Casey can watch Netflix, so he can't escape it.
Casey:
Actually, even my ancient TV might have a Netflix.
Casey:
Your Apple TV you can play.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I'm thinking, though, even my ancient TV that I don't even remember how old it is, but it was exciting that it was 1080 because that was up for grabs whether or not it would have been.
Casey:
And I think it has a native Netflix app, which is exactly what you're talking about, John.
Casey:
Netflix is frigging everywhere, and it was frigging everywhere years ago.
John:
yeah and the apps weren't great but the whole point was not oh it's a beautiful app that reflects the brand of netflix and is elegant and lovely and high performance like it will eventually play video like that's all i care about can you play can you play the video um and yeah so apple music on on uh the amazon's uh echo devices is one thing but like the video thing which we had in the notes for a long time we never really talked about we talked about like a year ago when we were talking about the same topic that has been coming up for maybe multiple years now of like
John:
How can Apple produce video content and then apply its Apple brand to say, well, we don't want people to be cursing and we don't want there to be violence?
John:
Can you compete with HBO and Netflix if you do that?
John:
Blah, blah, blah.
John:
That story came around for its yearly run maybe three or four months ago.
John:
But the larger story, as information has been trickling out of the typically silent Apple, is that Apple is going to introduce a video service.
John:
And they're spending about a billion dollars for original content.
John:
They're not just like we're going to dip our toes in.
John:
They want to be in the same game as Amazon and Hulu and Starz and, of course, Netflix.
John:
And what you have to do to be in that market now is you have to pay for and produce original content, which costs tons of money.
John:
And it's make or break.
John:
Netflix would not be Netflix without like, you know, House of Cards or Orange is the New Black, right?
John:
HBO would not be HBO without its shows, although it didn't start as a streaming service, obviously.
John:
And, you know, everything has to have some original content.
John:
Otherwise, why would I subscribe to your service, right?
John:
It's not like it's a way for you to watch content that other people make because increasingly the content is made by the streaming services.
John:
So Apple is spending a billion dollars.
John:
You don't spend a billion dollars on content and say, and this billion dollars is just to make shows for people who listen to ATP.
John:
you're not going to spend a billion dollars and say yeah you have to buy you have to buy the world's most expensive puck device and attach it to your tv otherwise you can't watch this content you would never narrow your audience like that so this is all absolute no-brainer stuff that's going on and still by the way does not guarantee apple's going to be successful because unfortunately in this market your shows have to be good which is a whole other issue but we don't know what the show's going to be like all we know is apple's going to have a video streaming service and
John:
and apple being in every tv in 2018 and 2019 or in 2019 and on they have to do that it's not shocking it's not surprising they absolutely have to do it and they have to do it as fast as they possibly can because anything that makes it harder to sign up for and watch whatever the content is is death even before we get to the point of are the shows actually good
Casey:
You know, just to make it absolutely clear, if Apple would like to give the three of us a billion dollars to make some TV content just for our listeners, I am willing to orchestrate that for you, Apple.
Casey:
So just have your people call my people.
Marco:
Yeah, you know, I have really been dying to make that Cooking with John show.
Marco:
I think a billion dollars would do it.
John:
That would be amazing.
John:
I think I might have too much sex and violence for Apple's service.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Wow.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
Now I really want Cooking with John.
John:
It's a dark, gritty reimagining of Cooking with John.
Casey:
Imagine the epic road trips we could do because even John would probably quit his job for one third of a billion dollars.
Casey:
So imagine the Top Gear style road trips we could do.
Marco:
You want to bet he still wouldn't?
Casey:
I think you might be right.
Marco:
How much do you want to bet if John made $333 million, he still wouldn't buy a Ferrari and still wouldn't quit his job?
Marco:
No, that's over my threshold.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think we do that as a rectif topic, exactly how much money you need to do certain things.
John:
I have numbers.
Marco:
All right, so for you to quit your job and buy a Ferrari, what's your number?
John:
I would...
John:
I think $100 million is the threshold of Ferrari territory because I feel like $100 million, I could adjust my life enough to support a Ferrari in the way that it needs to be supported.
John:
All right.
John:
And is that pre or post-tax?
John:
It's pre-tax.
John:
Cash or all assets?
John:
Cash.
John:
Pre-tax and cash.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Let's see.
John:
So anyway, let's make that happen.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right, Apple.
Marco:
Here's our price.
Marco:
If you want Cooking with John, the hottest new show of this coming fall, that's our price.
John:
Well, see, the thing is, like, this is relevant to what I was going to say before, like, they have already spent a bunch of money on content that as far as I can tell is not going to see the light of day.
John:
Like they made this whole like the story of Dr. Dre or something series.
John:
I don't know the details of this, but they spent a lot of money to make a show.
John:
But then they decided that it wasn't like suitable for, you know, that it had too much violence and cursing and drug use and whatever.
John:
And so they just basically spiked it or canned it or whatever the the whatever the term is when it comes to television shows.
John:
but they already paid to have it made.
John:
So if they had taken that money that they paid to have it made and just given it to me, I can have my Ferrari now, and they would have the same number of shows.
John:
So now we're offering to help them not make shows for a lot of money.
John:
Yeah, they can just give it to me.
John:
I'll tell them I'm making a documentary of Dr. Dre, and then I'll say, actually, it's got a lot of drugs in it.
John:
You probably don't want it.
John:
Apple, this is a win-win.
Casey:
It's a win for everyone involved.
Marco:
This could be like the one thing I have seen.
Marco:
This could be like a producer's strategy of like you take their money and you try to make the absolute most offensive thing you possibly can so that they spike it and you get to keep all the money.
John:
Yeah, that's another possible strategy.
John:
strategy yeah i mean that and that's that's sort of i mean they do that in in movies all the time although usually they end up releasing this a lot of movies that were on the shelf but usually they put them out whether it's straight to video or they just you know get them out somehow there are a few that i think have never been released i think there was that jerry lewis uh uh clown concentration camp movie uh there was the the corman uh captain america i forget if that was released
John:
anyway that's totally fits with the apple ethos of like we try all sorts of things and if they're not good enough we don't release them uh we just tend not to hear about the technology products that happens with but we did hear about this tv show shelved it there you go that's that's the term we should be using it's funny to me that that marco who didn't care for space balls actually neither of you really cared for space balls here we are talking about the producers by mel brooks it's all coming full circle now
John:
Does he know the producers of my networks?
John:
I don't know.
John:
No.
John:
There are connections, but he's not aware of them.
John:
Neil Patel had some points about this.
John:
I've already forgotten.
John:
Some points about this particular thing as well.
John:
So he talked to Apple, and he said, Apple tells me no smart TV content tracking is allowed on AirPlay 2 streams on Vizio and LG TVs, in addition to preventing Samsung from tracking the iTunes app.
John:
So this is Apple saying, like, they're dictating some amount of terms to their television partners that integrate their technologies.
John:
And if you read this and aren't keeping up with what television, the television world is like, you're like, what do they mean?
John:
No smart TV content tracking?
John:
Like...
John:
Are they tracking what I watch?
John:
The answer is yes.
John:
That's what smart TVs do.
John:
That is a very, very important business model.
John:
There was a big article on The Verge about this for years and years.
John:
There was a bunch of stories about Vizio having privacy violations and all sorts of other things where even if you opted out, it still recorded stuff and recording things on cameras and microphones.
John:
But forgetting all that, just the basics of these televisions,
John:
know what they're displaying on the screen because they are the television right and they do content identification in that and they track that information and they report it because it's valuable information to know what people are watching on television and these people make television sell that information so apple apparently said you are not allowed to do content tracking for things that are streamed over airplay um or things that are you know into in the itunes app basically just trying to fence it off and saying look like
John:
You can't do this.
John:
I know you have the technology to do it.
John:
I know you can tell what's being displayed in your stream, but no go.
John:
I don't know how Apple is verifying that, but presumably it's in their contract with all sorts of penalties if they mess up.
John:
But as Neely points out in his next tweet, the wacky part is that Apple can prevent TV makers from tracking content over HDMI inputs, so a smart TV can track what you watch on your Apple TV.
John:
So if you buy an Apple TV, they can totally track what you're doing because it just connects over HDMI, and there's no sort of relationship or contract between...
John:
Apple and the television, because when you buy an Apple TV, they have no idea what TV you're going to hook it up to or whatever.
John:
So the world of television is...
Marco:
scary and filled with ads and and tracking um what else is new but it's good that apple is trying to do what it can to not let televisions track you quite as much no i think you know the question what else is new like no this actually is fairly new like the the concept in fact you know going back to neil patel's um stuff put out recently he there was some article or podcast i forget where but somewhere he had an interview with a tv exec uh who i think anonymously told him like
Marco:
that post-sale monetization is a really big deal in TVs now because they're selling them basically at cost because it's such a cutthroat commodity business that there's very little profit margin in the actual TVs anymore.
Marco:
And so they're selling them basically as close to cost as they possibly can and then making it up by making money from you after the sale.
Marco:
Now, of course, you ask, how do they make money from you after the sale if you have no... I bought an LG TV last year.
Marco:
I have no way to give LG more money for the TV or do I?
Marco:
Turns out it's like that.
Marco:
Yeah, you can monetize it through analytics and selling data and ads and everything.
Marco:
So this is yet more reasons why like I don't trust any of these TV makers to be ethical or technically competent at all.
Marco:
So like when I got and I got a, you know, a well-rated LG, you know, the C7, whatever TV.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I love the TV.
Marco:
It has no way to connect to the internet because when I set it up, I plugged in an ethernet cable.
Marco:
I did not give it my Wi-Fi info.
Marco:
And I said, all right, here, download whatever you need to download.
Marco:
And then I unplugged the ethernet cable and I never used any of its smart apps again.
Marco:
And I feel totally confident that my TV is not doing anything creepy because it can't.
Marco:
That is the only sane way, I think, to use a smart TV now if you care about your privacy.
Marco:
If you don't care, that's a different question.
Marco:
If you don't care, fine.
Marco:
That's up to you.
Marco:
But if you do care, I would not trust any of these manufacturers to actually respect decency or laws or to not do anything that you opt out of.
Marco:
I won't trust them for a second.
John:
next year's tvs will connect to the cell network and if you're yeah so that was the article i was referring to and no it wasn't anonymous wait will they i'm guessing i'm just who knows but it honestly wouldn't surprise me if that's their business model it's well worth their the money to for them to do that i don't think they need to though because i think people are not as paranoid as you and they'll just use people's wi-fi which they will connect it to
John:
But yeah, that was a Vizio executive, not an anonymous person, not a secret tip.
John:
It was like a Vizio executive making a public statement.
John:
I mean, everybody in the industry knows this, and I think consumers basically don't care about it.
Marco:
No, I really don't think consumers know.
Marco:
How would anybody know that?
Marco:
I don't think consumers would ever expect that.
John:
Well, they make you agree to terms and people just click past them.
John:
Oh, nobody reads that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
But I think consumers don't care.
John:
I think you're also right that they don't know.
John:
But if you told them, they'd be like, oh, well, if it makes my TV cheaper, I'm fine with it.
John:
And it is newish as in the last five years, but it's not new as in this year.
John:
It's just people are talking about it more now.
John:
And the margins on TVs have always been terrible.
John:
It's like it's always been cut through.
John:
I think TV executives are super excited now that unlike the decades and decades where the business was cutthroats and the margins were razor thin.
John:
now they have a way to make money after the sale like that like they didn't have that before it was like we had to just compete and they would like kill each other for like their three percent margins and the one who has three percent margins beats the one who has 2.9 percent margins and then the other one dies then you buy their factory like that used to be the tv business now it's like
John:
we don't have to worry about that we can make and i like it because it means we can make the best tv we can make and we'll make it all up by selling your data and then for people who care like barco they you know you they can't get your data because you'll just air gap your tv but nobody does that like very very few people do that and again it's nice that it's an option worst case if they put a sim card in there you can wrap some tinfoil around the right part of your tv or something and keep it from connecting um but honestly i think that's a trade even if you explained it
John:
for the most part people would be willing to make uh we will anonymously track everything you watch and report it back and in exchange your televisions will be cheaper they'll be like all right fine they just feel like they're a nielsen family or something um but yeah and if apple has a unique selling proposition it's that they won't do that but again apple doesn't make a tv much to gene munster's dismay they decided not to as one of the many products they decided not to ship although uh you know maybe it helped us get the home pod but who knows
Marco:
One of the aspects of this story that I thought was really interesting is just like, you know, and this is also discussed on Upgrade, so please listen to Upgrade.
Marco:
But like the whole idea of like, would you have imagined telling us not even like, you know, you often say like, you know, oh, can you imagine telling us from five years ago this thing would have happened?
Marco:
Can you imagine telling us five months ago that Apple would in, you know, in only a few short months be
Marco:
be running the iTunes video content on an app on someone else's hardware, let alone hardware by Samsung.
Marco:
But even setting aside that law of Samsung, nothing that is not an Apple device or iTunes has ever been able to play iTunes DRM video content.
Marco:
And the fact that this is now going to be a thing on at least Samsung, and if not more providers for that part of it in the future, that is a radical departure of strategy.
Marco:
And see also having Apple Music on the Amazon Echo and on Sonos.
Marco:
I think this is really a turning point.
Marco:
And all the reasons you said earlier, John, make sense, and that's great, and it's probably why they're doing it.
Marco:
But it's still one of those things that I never thought we'd see out of Apple.
John:
If you asked me five months ago, yes, I would have totally, I would have predicted it and put tons of money on it.
John:
Again, because they've been spending, if you've been keeping up with the, you know, how much money is Apple spending to produce original video content?
John:
Because it takes a long time.
John:
They have to, you know, hire talent, who hires talent, who makes the show.
John:
And then like, yes, yes, up to a year or two years ago, as soon as we started laying out real money and hiring real TV executives...
John:
It's just the dominoes fall.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's not it's it's very rare and it is a big change, but it's not unprecedented.
John:
They've done it before in the past when they've had a business where they've been they've been convinced either by internal or external forces that the way to succeed in this business is you have to go wide.
John:
And it took convincing for the iPod, you know, iPod and Windows like Steve Jobs famously did not want it and had to be berated into doing it.
John:
and you know it spelled the success and so the the question for music service video service is always are you going to do this apple are you not in the beginning you can start off just selling to mac customers and see what the deal is so and so but eventually you have to decide look are we in are we out and you can tell they're in when they said okay we're going to start hiring people we're going to start getting talent we're going to start making tv shows um
John:
And yeah, after that comes, it's like, well, you got to be in every TV.
John:
You got to let your music service be in every platform.
John:
It could have been they could have said, well, music, we're going to get out, but video, we're going to go in or vice versa.
John:
So it wasn't a given until they started laying out the books, laying out the books that they were going to do anything, in particular, the music service.
John:
At any point, they could have said.
John:
yeah we're not really into this music thing anymore and we'll just like seed the market to Spotify or whatever but they didn't so they stuck with that and so now they have to go wide on that as well and the video thing they tried to do the skinny bundle thing back in the days when cable was much more important than it is now and couldn't get that deal done or didn't find anything satisfactory so we're quiet for a while but a few years ago they said okay we're going to do
John:
we're gonna do this other thing we're gonna we're gonna look at the model of netflix we're gonna make some original shows and we're gonna sell somebody a video streaming source and we're talking about this like it's a done deal because a billion dollars has been laid out and money has changed hands and shows are being made and have been made but there's no apple video streaming service you subscribe to right now we're just talking about it as a done deal because it's like if they laid out all this money and they never introduce an apple video service that's going to be a big red mark on their balance sheet in some quarter somewhere so
John:
We all very strongly assume that it's coming.
John:
And for people who aren't Apple followers and don't follow the trades in the world of movies and TV or whatever, this will come as a surprise and a shock.
John:
Imagine getting a TV and saying that it has Apple stuff.
John:
Those people, especially if you're not an Apple fan, might not have even known that Apple... Does Apple sell movies or TVs?
John:
Can you rent movies from Apple?
John:
That's weird, right?
John:
And I don't think they're going to be inclined to use anything that Apple offers.
John:
because they'll be like oh well i just watch netflix like there's no there's no reason for them to try the apple stuff if they're not apple customers so that's why apple spending a billion dollars to have some show that they hope their friends are going to tell them you got to check out the new show whatever and then it was like oh that does sound cool where can i watch that
John:
only on insert name of apple streaming service and that's that is the feedback loop they're looking for for people who don't even know that apple sells you know television shows or movies and don't care that it sells television movies because they already have cable or hulu or netflix or whatever much more popular like apple is late to this game and they are not the big name
John:
They have cachet with, again, ATP listeners and other Apple enthusiasts, but they do not have cachet with the massive people out there who are watching Netflix or whatever other much more established streaming service.
Marco:
All right, and the second question, and I promise I'll leave this topic alone after this.
Marco:
I've been thinking, I haven't heard anybody really talk about this.
Marco:
I've been thinking, like, might we be heading into a massive oversupply of not just TV subscription services, but TV content?
Marco:
Like, it already...
Marco:
I mean, I don't watch a ton of TV, I guess, but already there is tons of stuff that I am interested in.
Marco:
Even like series that have new seasons that I've watched the previous seasons for, or new series that I keep getting recommended by friends and that I want to check out.
Marco:
And there just is not enough time to watch all this TV for me.
Marco:
There's way more...
Marco:
good tv content being produced now then i think a lot of people have time to watch even setting aside the definitely significant issue that you are having to pay for more and more streaming services in order to get all the things people are recommending is is this maybe a bad time to try to get into the same market because like honestly i think there's going to be a crash like i i don't think that i don't think the market can bear
Marco:
This much, this level of like good TV production, good video series production, I don't think people have enough time for it all.
Marco:
And I don't think that market really knows what that's like because it has never really been possible before to oversaturate it.
Marco:
In the olden days, you had broadcast limitations, a number of broadcast channels.
Marco:
Then you had cable, but you still had cable channel limitations and relatively wide targeting still necessary and everything.
Marco:
But now, with all these services, you have infinite real estate.
Marco:
You have infinite channels.
Marco:
And because this seems like a hot market, everybody's trying to get subscription services going.
Marco:
It's a huge, great seller's market for – if you're a TV producer, you can pitch your show to so many different places now that if there's anything good about it at all, you can probably get it made.
Marco:
And people have a certain fixed amount of time in the day they can spend watching TV content.
Marco:
I think we're way oversaturated in this market.
Marco:
By the time Apple releases their service, it might be a really bad time because it might be as everybody's realizing, oh crap, I'm subscribed to four different services and I only really ever have time to watch one of them.
Casey:
I think you make a fair point, but when was the last time you subscribed to a new podcast?
Marco:
I think today.
Casey:
And don't you already feel like you're fairly overexposed on your podcast queue?
Casey:
Because I know I do.
Marco:
Well, but you know, one comes in, one goes out.
John:
who cares yeah so the the oversupply of television shows is a multi-year-old meme but it is a real thing for sure it is so well established that there are seemingly too many television shows uh that there was a recent simpsons skit about it simpsons is still in the air oh i'm still making jokes right so it got to the point where it was a simpsons skit here we go todd found me the link thankfully
Marco:
And maybe we could make room by stopping The Simpsons, finally.
Marco:
Please.
Marco:
Put it out of its misery.
John:
It was actually on Fresh Air had the clip, so it's nice.
John:
We have an audio clip of a television show courtesy of NPR.
John:
So I will put the link in the chat room and in the show notes.
John:
This clip, while funny, although longer than it should be for a traditional Simpsons gag,
John:
That's more like an SNL skit that goes too long.
John:
Actually does explain the situation fairly well while trying to be funny.
John:
Which is, yeah, there are a huge number of scripted television shows available.
John:
Just astronomical.
John:
Way more than there has ever been.
John:
And also, there's therefore a larger number of good ones and it feels like there's too much for you to watch.
John:
But...
John:
The point made in this thing as a joke, but is real, is that the companies paying for this content to be created don't care if you have time to watch it.
John:
All they care is that you care about one show enough to sign up for their service.
John:
it's recurring they just want that if you sign up for their service and never watch anything you are their best customer sign up for monthly recurring billing and you know and and there are so many services and we talked about before we've talked about in this show how many services i pay for like i just subscribe to these things sometimes i cancel them on the shows i'm not interested anymore aren't there sometimes i don't right does it add up to be more than my cable bill of course i also still pay for cable right but
John:
They just want to get you on a recurring payment.
John:
And the way they get you is to make as much content as they possibly can that's compelling to the widest range of people.
John:
They can't just make one good show and just say, well, we'll get all the people like that one good show.
John:
They want to make as many good shows as they can.
John:
They need – because it's like it's a creative endeavor.
John:
You don't know what's going to be a hit or whatever.
John:
You have to make a lot of stuff and some of them will be hits and some of them aren't.
John:
And the thing is, as someone who describes to a million of these services, I am –
John:
forever just it's kind of like apple music for me i am forever discovering shows that were made three four five years ago right that i find interesting and want to watch like you get to the deep catalog type thing it's kind of it's like music because i don't follow music and i go to apple music and it's like what has been released in the last three decades that i might be interested in right you can do that with television shows because they have a back catalog it's not like broadcast tv there's a huge oversupply
John:
But it's actually kind of great because if you're interested like in mid-budget sci-fi time travel shows, you have like 15 choices, whereas before you would have zero ever, right?
John:
And sometimes you find an amazing gem and you're like, you know, we all in our little circle of friends here found Patriot, which is a show that was made in 2015.
John:
And we found it like in 2017, late 2017, right?
John:
And enough people found that they made a season two of it.
John:
So some people say it's the golden age of television, but you are 100% right, Marco, that there is too much television for any human to watch.
John:
It is a huge oversupply, but I don't think it's actually, and I think there actually is, you know, there's going to be a limit, and you're right, there's probably going to be Reckoning.
John:
It's a bad time for Apple to enter, though, not because of oversupply, but because they're late, because everyone else is already there and they have to come from behind.
John:
That's why it's bad for Apple.
John:
It's not like Apple is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
John:
Right.
John:
The camel's back is long since broken.
John:
Like there are just way too many, way too many shows and way too many things like and you have to, you know, regular people who aren't.
John:
dumb like me and are willing to pay like 15 a month literally six times over to subscribe to every service under the sun you have to pick and choose you have to say do i care enough about star trek discovery to pay for cbs all access because it's the only show i care about on the whole service i don't watch any other shows on cbs do i care enough about that especially since sometimes in the past shows that you care about that used to be exclusive end up appearing on some other thing like on netflix you can get a bunch of
John:
shows that weren't netflix originals but end up on netflix anyway but like delayed by a year and a half which may not be a big deal for you if you don't watch your shows that quickly so i think it's bad because apple's late but i i don't think the oversupply is going to be what hurts apple what's going to hurt apple is if they don't make good shows that people want to watch it is very it's it's more much more like pixar to name another steve jobs affiliated company it's much more like pixar where it's like you got to make good movies we don't care
John:
how good your tech is or how elegant, you know, your artwork is.
John:
You got to tell a good story.
John:
You got to make a thing that people want to watch.
Marco:
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John:
You know, we've been talking about TVs for a while and I'm similarly cautious about buying new TVs even though I'm super into them.
John:
I'm still using my plasma.
John:
And I mentioned that I'm probably going to be in the market for a new TV maybe this year or next or something.
John:
And CES is where the new TVs are announced, so I'm watching those announcements with interest.
John:
And it occurred to me that the time I'm usually ready to buy a TV is like...
John:
When whatever the best TV making technology is like mature and established, right?
John:
So I bought my plasma.
John:
I bought multiple plasmas.
John:
But I bought my first plasma when plasmas were like clearly the king of the hill.
John:
They were mature.
John:
They had addressed their growing pain issues.
John:
They weren't super expensive anymore.
John:
They had the best picture quality.
John:
There was large selection.
John:
And then I bought another plasma at the very tail end, like the very last plasma you could buy before Panasonic stopped making them.
John:
The best one they ever made, you know, I got, right?
John:
So at that time, whether you're in like the middle of the curve, like this is the heyday of this technology or especially the tail end, it usually means that there's another technology coming out, like whatever the new technology is.
John:
Like I'm basically – what I'm getting to is I'm going to buy an OLED TV.
John:
Just at the point when we all know what will eventually be better than OLED.
John:
And last year and this year, at CES, they've had technologies that are fairly clearly, depending on when they ship, the better successor to OLED.
John:
So while I'm excited to get a new OLED TV this year or next year, at CES, I was also excited to see what is my next next TV going to be like.
John:
And it looks like it's probably going to be micro LED, which I think is very interesting because television technology...
John:
I think I talked about this hypercritical, like what the contenders were and what the roadmap was like.
John:
Someday we may have televisions like X, Y, and Z. For a long time, OLED was like, someday we may have these televisions made with OLEDs and they could be super thin and they'd be amazing and have these properties.
John:
And look, here they are.
John:
They took a long, long time.
John:
It took decades of us hearing about OLED before you could even buy one, and then you could buy some tiny one, and it cost $15,000, and eventually they come in TVs.
John:
One of the other technologies that was discussed way back when we went from the CRT to the flat tube era is like, well, you've got LCDs, and you've got plasma, and you've got potentially OLED, and you also have potentially LED TVs.
John:
And everyone thinks they have an LED TV because that's how they advertise them in the store.
John:
I have an LED TV.
John:
I bought it at Best Buy.
John:
No, you don't actually have an LED TV.
John:
What you have is an LCD television where the backlight is made of LEDs, which is great and all, but it's not an actual LED TV.
John:
An LED, I don't know if you've seen these, if you've used a breadboard kit or whatever.
John:
It's a light-emitting diode.
John:
It's a little tiny thing that lights up.
John:
And you can make colored ones, and you can make white ones, and...
John:
Like when they have the backlight where it's like an LED backlight LCD, it's usually like white or blue backlights.
John:
Just a bunch of LEDs they make.
John:
And you make light bulbs that are LED.
John:
It's very small, relatively energy efficient compared to incandescent bulbs.
John:
Source of very bright light.
John:
An LED television would be a television where the red, green, and blue subpixels are each tiny LEDs.
John:
Little red LED, little blue LED, little green LED.
John:
A television like that would be like the best of all possible worlds that we have available to us now.
John:
Like an OLED, it can have perfect blacks, meaning if the screen is black, you just turn off all the LEDs and you could be in a dark room and all the LEDs are off and it's fine.
John:
Can't have that an LCD because the way LCDs work is they shine a bunch of light.
John:
through a liquid crystal layer and then through some colored filters and when you don't want the light to come through you tell the liquid crystals to stop the light from passing but they can't stop all the light so light leaks out so if you sit in front of a lcd television in a black room and make the television black it's not black it will light up your room because the liquid crystal can't stop that backlight from spraying light out that's why they have backlights that can turn off but they can only turn off for regions yada yada yada
John:
Micro LED, just like OLED, can turn off-off so it can have perfect blacks.
John:
It can also be super-duper bright because the things that make the light are the actual sub-pixels.
John:
It's not like it's shining some light through a bunch of filters, through liquid crystal, through anything like that where you're losing light content.
John:
the little tiny sub pixels actually produce the light so they can be very bright and they're also very close to the screen and they shoot light in all directions so you have amazing perfect viewing angles from everywhere and they can also be very saturated and rich and have really great colors you don't have this you know strange color ships and everything it is
John:
A couple of articles will put links in the show notes if you want to read about all this, but there's much more detail than that in terms of how current televisions work and how potential future ones can work, but I'm just giving you the broad strokes here.
John:
And then also they can be very thin, and they can be energy efficient, and you can make them to any size and shape you want because once you're stamping out these tiny little LEDs, you just keep making more and more of them in little panels that you can just snap together and just keep making larger and larger sets.
John:
any resolution you want uh the reason it's called micro led is because it's easy to make a television out of leds like if you go to a football stadium and you see those huge screens they're usually made out of leds but the leds are you know the size of tennis balls like they're huge right at ces last year they had huge led displays like look it fills the whole wall isn't it amazing
John:
You may think it's amazing, but what's more amazing is a smaller one because you can make big ones because you can just make a bunch of LEDs for every single pixel.
John:
But if your LEDs are, you know, the size of a thumbtack and you make a 4K display, then it's being the size of a wall.
John:
Most people don't have room in their house for a 50 foot display.
John:
If you want something that's 55 inches, the LEDs have to be really, really, really small.
John:
And it is really hard to make tiny, tiny little LEDs and put enough of them as tightly packed as you can to make a 4K display.
John:
I think I have numbers in the article.
John:
It's basically 25 million LEDs in precise arrangements of RGB.
John:
There's some complication with that in terms of quantum dots to change the colors and actually making all the LEDs the same color for cost reasons, yada, yada.
John:
The bottom line is this year's CES, they had demos of like television size micro LED displays, and they are amazing.
John:
They have all the things I said, perfect blacks, you know, infinite viewing angles, amazing color reproduction, energy efficient, thin, good response time.
John:
And by the way, no burn in.
John:
It would be the first television technology in several decades that I may end up buying that doesn't have any burning issues.
John:
So now, obviously, I want a micro-LED display.
John:
But they don't exist yet except as tech demos.
John:
So come back to ATP in, let's say, eight years, and I should be buying my first micro LED display.
John:
But I am super excited about it because both this and a quantum dot emissive technology both have the promise of getting me where I want, which is all the best attributes of every current television technology with none of the bad ones.
John:
and that's what i want and so i'm super excited about micro led and if you recall apple to get bring back to apple briefly had invested in some micro led company and they were looking into it for their displays and stuff i i think they bailed on those efforts because it turns out to be way harder than you think it's going to be like it's there there are lots of issues with micro leds and the other one with the quantum dot stuff was actually really fascinating you should read one of the articles that i put in the show notes about how uh
John:
you can emit light of one wavelength and these little quantum dot things can absorb it and emit it a different wavelength that's how you can have like an entire blue a blue backlight like an entirely blue black light and make your red and green pixels out of by taking the blue into a quantum dot and changing it into the red and green so you don't lose any light like it's not like going through a filter because when you send light through a filter you lose a lot of the light right you can't get peak brightness or anything like that so
John:
uh yeah there's there's that is another promising technology but micro led was actually on display at ces so it makes me believe that this is you know it was a tech demo last year the size of a wall now it's a tech demo the size of a tv it makes me think eight years they're going to have television sets to work like this because it's kind of following the same path like it's not just an idea we have we can actually build them and show them to you and they do indeed look amazing so i'm excited about that
John:
how long do you think it'll be before we can actually buy these well sorry let me correct that before they're good and we can buy them yeah i think i think probably like seven seven or eight years probably that long similar yeah because like remember they had oleds at ces for years like they and oleds were the opposite they had small ones first because it was just hard for them to make them at all like they have like a 14 inch oled
John:
like you know seven or eight years ago and then by the time you bought one they'd come they'd gone more or less mainstream they were still expensive but you could buy them and you can make tvs out of them right that's usually the path it takes like there are a bunch of manufacturing users they have to deal with they're very expensive to make they have to like the strategy they're probably going to go with is the quantum dot thing where it's easier to make 25 million tightly packed blue
John:
like they're all the same instead of having to do red green blue red green blue red green blue because it's actually difficult to do them and the the power efficiency of red and green and blue leds are like they're more expensive and they have different characteristics so it's easier to make them all the same color and use quantum dots to change the color um
John:
And the emissive ones have a potential advantage in that you can kind of sort of print them because it's more like laying down silicon stuff.
John:
So if the emissive dot comes out, I'm giving it the wrong name, but there's a technology that uses quantum dots and just uses them to emit light of different colors.
John:
If that gets done before micro LED, it outruns it.
John:
Micro LED may never end up existing because it has much of the same characteristics.
John:
But one of the two of them, I think in about eight years, you're going to be able to buy an expensive fancy person's TV with one of these two technologies.
Casey:
Yay.
John:
And someone asked in the chat room what QLED is.
John:
Right now you can buy televisions that advertise quantum dot.
John:
They are LCD televisions that try to... They use quantum dots to, again, change the color of the light coming out in a way that absorbs less light than filters.
John:
Like a filter is just like... You put like a green or a blue or a red filter like you would put on sunglasses or whatever.
John:
And it blocks a bunch of light.
John:
And so they do a bunch of tricks to...
John:
make the backlight emit light with big peaks in the wavelengths of exactly red green and blue and then or they or they try to make it emit light that has those components and then they use the quantum dots to you know change the the wavelength to the the one they want anyway there's a bunch of articles in the show notes you see it's actually very complicated but the cue led ones you see are lcd televisions that are using quantum dots to help
John:
increase their brightness and color saturation but they're still in the end lcd televisions and so they cannot have perfect blacks which is a bummer
Casey:
All right, friend of the show and previously mentioned, Todd Vaziri writes, hey, what Siri shortcuts do you all use and have created?
Casey:
I'm still fairly intimidated by the shortcuts workflow and haven't yet made any significant tools and need a push to get going.
Casey:
So let me get my terminology straight.
Casey:
So by Siri shortcuts, I'm assuming Todd is talking about a workflow style shortcut that is kicked off specifically with our voices.
Casey:
Is that what we're taking this to mean?
Marco:
That's how I interpreted the question.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the only one that I can think of that I really use a lot is I kind of improved upon the, hey, I'm on my way home shortcut that I'd written about on my blog forever ago, which is basically take wherever I am and figure out how long it will take me to drive home and send a text to Aaron saying, hey, I'll be home in five minutes, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Well, I've since improved that, and it says, hey, I'll be home in five minutes.
Casey:
That's 5.05 p.m.
Casey:
And what's nice about shortcuts being a first-party app is that you can actually have it send a text message in the background, whereas previously when it was workflow, you had to interact with your phone and actually hit the send button, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Well, now...
Casey:
and where this is all coming around to what Todd is asking, I can say to my phone, hey, Dingus, I'm on my way home.
Casey:
And it will automatically figure out how long it will take to get home and tell Aaron, you know, in the background that I'll be home in five minutes.
Casey:
That'll be 5.05 p.m.
Casey:
And that is the only shortcut I can think of that I use regularly that I kick off by Siri.
Casey:
I'm trying to think if there's any others.
Casey:
There's plenty of shortcuts I use in general, but not through Siri.
Casey:
Marco, what about you?
Casey:
None.
Marco:
Oh, I don't, you know, I'm not proud of this.
Marco:
I'm not saying I always want to use no Siri shortcuts, but right now I use no Siri shortcuts.
John:
John.
John:
So when I saw this question, I was thinking, well, I'm going to be like Marco and say none because I don't really use Siri shortcuts.
John:
And that's true.
John:
I don't use them or invoke them through Siri or otherwise.
John:
But the actual number of shortcuts I have in the shortcuts app is actually pretty large because every time I see an interesting shortcut, usually posted by Vitici, but not always, I download it and I check it out and I usually run it once or twice manually.
John:
Remember when we were dealing with the, like, maybe your contacts aren't syncing it because the contact photos are too big and a bunch of people made cool shortcuts that would, like, find your big contact photos and
John:
Eventually, we got to the point where one of them would like scan your contacts, find all the all the contacts that have photos that are too big, scale them and save the scaled versions to a folder in your iCloud drive like cool stuff.
John:
Like so I have I have run many shortcuts and I have I think I have multiple scrollable screens full of shortcuts, many of which are very complicated.
John:
none of which i wrote i think i tried to write it wasn't a shortcut it was back when it was workflows i tried to write a workflow to mail myself a tweet and mail myself links from tweets and i failed pretty miserably because i don't know what i'm doing and i really hate as we discussed in a past episode i really hate
John:
like essentially programming through that kind of interface it's like you know programming with other mitts on it makes i don't like it um so i i never ended up making anything like i i made one that worked kind of but didn't work as well as using the mail share action and it didn't work as well as the sadly defunct app which is called like mail me or mail myself something or i forget what the hell what the hell is that app called
John:
There's an app whose sole job was to vend a share extension that would email something to yourself.
John:
And the app stopped working, I think, because GPDR or whatever stuff, which was sad.
John:
So now I'm back to doing share, selecting mail, tapping in the first few letters on my email address, tapping the autocomplete and hitting send, which is not ideal.
John:
But when it did that, it got more of the tweets content than I could figure out how to extract with workflows.
John:
So no, I haven't written any and I never activate any through Siri.
John:
And the only time I ever run them is after I download them and when I'm playing with them.
John:
And like Marco, I don't think this is ideal.
John:
And I think I should find a place for them in my iOS life because I think they will make my life easier and better.
John:
That's why I keep downloading them and checking them out.
John:
I just haven't crossed that hurdle yet.
Casey:
Moving on, Fred McCann writes,
Casey:
Do you envision that ATP, hypercritical, et cetera, ought to be archived long after the show ends?
Casey:
Or are they products that are relevant and exist only at some point in time?
Casey:
So kind of in summary, where do podcasts go when they die?
Casey:
And, you know, I just wanted to call out Geek Friday and IRL Talk.
Casey:
That was one of my favorite podcasts.
Casey:
And I was really saddened.
Casey:
It was a year ago, I believe.
Casey:
That the co-host of those shows, Jason Seifer, Passed Away Suddenly, which we talked about on April 1st, which is very fitting given Jason's personality.
Casey:
But anyway, I just wanted to call out that I do still miss Jason and I wish he were still around.
Casey:
But to directly answer the question, I archive any podcast that I appear on and I put it on my Synology so that one day if I want to go back and listen for some crazy reason or if, you know, Declan or Michaela would like to go back and listen –
Casey:
They are all available.
Casey:
Do I think all shows should be archived?
Casey:
I mean, I think that's kind of the choice of the creator or creators, right?
Casey:
But I mean, I don't have any problem with ATP being, you know, archived forevermore.
Casey:
I'm proud of the work that the three of us have done, and I'd like to think it holds up.
Casey:
So I think it's a case-by-case basis, but in the case of ATP and analog, I'd be perfectly happy for it to be recorded forevermore.
Casey:
What about you, Marco?
Marco?
Marco:
I do think that inherently almost everything we put on the internet is ephemeral to some degree, or temporary at least.
Marco:
I mean, one could argue that everything in life is temporary, but everything we've ever made or will build or ever will make is temporary on an infinite timescale.
Marco:
But it's just like anything else you put on the internet.
Marco:
it's subject to removal down the road.
Marco:
And there's lots of good projects like archive.org that try to actually archive stuff and make things searchable after they're removed.
Marco:
The fact is, anything on the internet with a URL that points to it, somebody can remove that down the road.
Marco:
So everything we do here is temporary.
Marco:
Even if you stay out of the whole larger life questions that make you question everything that you will ever do and legacy and so on, just at a technical level,
Marco:
It just files on a server and whoever runs that server can at some point decide to remove those files or the person can die and stop paying for it and then the hosting company will reclaim it or whoever.
Marco:
There's always something that can happen to them.
Marco:
Podcasts are just more files on the internet that can disappear at any moment.
John:
I think there is definitely value in preserving stuff like this.
John:
Obviously, the people who make it have that choice.
John:
They can throw it away.
John:
It's their stuff, right?
John:
But as I think I talked about in Hypercritical Way Way Back When, at a certain point, especially for media entertainment, when it reaches a certain level of popularity, I feel like it stops and a certain amount of time passes.
John:
It stops being owned exclusively by the creator and starts being owned collectively as part of the culture.
John:
Like the example I gave was Star Wars, which is a cultural phenomenon that has long surpassed its small number of creators and now belongs to us all as a cultural artifact.
John:
And at a certain point, it should not be possible for the creator to say, you know, 50 years later, I've decided that I want all copies of Star Wars to be deleted.
John:
It doesn't just belong to you anymore.
John:
Legally, it may or whatever, but...
John:
philosophically it's part of the culture obviously podcasts podcasts do not raise the level of star wars most don't anyway maybe some do like maybe cereal is gonna end up being like that or whatever like whatever the star wars of podcast is but in general i think there is value in preserving all kinds of media like this so i would encourage anyone who does make a podcast to preserve it the same way you know like old movies are preserved they don't have to be classics they don't have to be good but like
John:
Bad old silent movies should be preserved because they are of significance.
John:
They were a thing that was created.
John:
They are part of the culture.
John:
At the very least, they're of academic significance in the future and far future.
John:
So obviously we're fighting against entropy and we're fighting against the fact that we're all going to die and our hosting company is going to delete our files or whatever.
John:
But ideally, I think this stuff should be preserved and I think there is definitely value in it.
John:
As for things that just happened like a few years ago where no one has yet – well, I was going to say no one has died, but now I'm sad again thinking about Jason.
John:
I think if you are somebody who creates something that you think has some value and you intend to preserve it, like you should make some effort to do so.
John:
I'll link to the –
John:
classic W3C article that has a boring URL that just talks about URIs but the thing everyone remembers about this is the big H1 tag at the top that says cool URIs don't change which means that once you put something up on the internet that you've created
John:
If at all possible, leave it where it is.
John:
So people's links to it don't break.
John:
Don't constantly redesign your site and move it around.
John:
Don't put it on a different site and say, I don't want that site anymore.
John:
I started a new site.
John:
Let it continue to work.
John:
And this applies to audio files or web pages or anything like that.
John:
Because if you're intending to...
John:
If you think it should still be there and it just falls off because of some redesign or whatever, that's not great.
John:
So I think everyone should keep their stuff up at the URLs they're at.
John:
We will make an effort to do that with ATP.
John:
I, like Casey, also make local copies of everything.
John:
But as a creator, I do feel some responsibility to keep the things that I make that I have control over in some fashion on the Internet at their original URLs so that people can find them in the future.
John:
Obviously, when I'm dead, who knows what the hell is going to happen?
John:
But I hope someone preserves this stuff.
Casey:
And finally, I have a new mortal enemy and thy name is Graham Wetzler who writes about destiny stuff.
Casey:
So I'm going to go pass out now.
John:
This is a weird esoteric question, but I figured we could do it as a quick.
John:
I put it at the end.
John:
I always put these at the end for you, Casey, because I know.
John:
Thanks, honey.
John:
Beginning, you won't be able to handle it.
John:
You're not even going to read the question for me?
Casey:
For John, as a developer, what are your thoughts on the way that Destiny 2 mechanics are tied to visual frame rate?
Casey:
For example, 1K voice is doing more damage on PC or the fact that you can only Titan skate on a PC with high frame rate.
Casey:
Okay, so all kidding aside, this actually did pique my interest, but I don't understand but every fourth word in this question.
Casey:
So can you translate into dumb-dumb for me?
John:
So this is interesting because I don't understand all the technical details of this, but I think we all remember, well...
John:
People who are old enough, and I think that includes both of you, remember games that were written for personal computers where the author of the game designed around the computer they had available to them and so made a game system available.
John:
that basically did everything as fast as it could and used the computer clock as the thing that controlled when things happened uh one of the examples i can think of is the game red baron on pc where you play red baron and it would be fine but if you press the turbo button on your pc xt or at which one had the turbo button maybe both
John:
uh and it increased the clock rate of your cpu the game would go twice as fast because you've doubled the clock rate or whatever it was like because the game was literally like tied to the clock rate of the cpu which is fine on game consoles that whose clock rate is never going to change but pc games it's not the right approach uh and in general modern game design meaning like after the 80s
John:
especially on PCs but even I imagine on consoles at this point makes games so that they have some sort of internal clock of like you know our physics engine makes new calculations 30 times a second and we render to the screen 60 times a second if we can and if we can't you know like the player AI changes you know five times a second or whatever like
John:
that it's based on wall clock time not oh if you get a faster cpu all of a sudden like the enemies in the game will walk much faster like if you run around in doom for example you run at the same speed in doom whether you have a fancy computer or a slow one if you have a fancy computer you get more frames per second but you don't travel across the room faster until it takes you one second to cross the room you just may get more in between frames during that room crossing um
John:
um so what this question is asking about is in destiny 2 there are certain destiny 2 is available on consoles and on the pc and on the pc it can get much higher frame rates because pcs are more powerful than consoles and there are certain mechanics in the game that behave differently because there are so many more frames you don't run faster well just titan skating aside you don't you don't the game doesn't you know things in the game don't move faster
John:
but because there are so many more frames and apparently so many more calculation points some things behave differently so some weapons that do like damage apparently actually do damage that is in some way tied to the number of frames of animation and if you're running it like 120 frames per second it does more damage and titan skating i think mostly has to do with macros but this this is the way that you can move in the game by hitting a series of commands in just the right sequence
John:
to like initiate a jump and then a move forward you know it lets you basically travel faster by doing this strange maneuver that's harder or impossible to do on console um anyway i don't understand exactly why that's happening but it seems clear that despite modern game design there are still certain things that are tied to frame rate especially perhaps in a game that you know destiny 2 is on pc but destiny 1 was not destiny 1 lived entirely on console and so maybe the entire game engine didn't ever expect to be running at 120 frames per second
John:
um either way uh these things are i i consider them bugs i feel like with the exception of things that affect gameplay in reasonable ways like recoil and stuff with the with a mouse cursor you shouldn't get these kind of glitches on pc that don't have like doing extra damage that should that's a bug that should be fixed titan skating they need to decide whether that's a thing they want to allow or not and they should allow it in both places um
John:
or neither place or whatever i don't care because i'm not titan because titans are big luck heads um but yeah fix the ones that uh that are clearly bugs and the behavioral ones make a decision the current situation is not great and i think they need to do something rest assured that all made sense to a very very small subset of listeners
John:
Well, I, for one, agree.
Casey:
Yeah, what those guys said.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Casey would be a Titan.
Casey:
Marco?
Casey:
I feel like I should be insulted, or I feel like I should feel insulted right now.
Marco:
Did he just call you a glughead indirectly there?
Marco:
A lughead, yeah.
Marco:
A lughead.
John:
No, Casey would be a Titan because they're the biggest and strongest, and Casey wants to be big and strong.
John:
Doesn't everybody?
John:
I feel like Marco would be a hunter because they're short, and he'd identify with that.
John:
But they're also sneaky, and I don't know if Marco is sneaky.
John:
Not really.
John:
I'm obviously clearly a warlock.
John:
That's what I am, and it fits.
John:
They're the nerds.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Away, and Audible.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was 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.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
Off air, which Marco will edit out, Casey was complaining about the Mac Pro game, which reminded me that we are into...
John:
a very special time a time once again are we though yes a time once again when any day could be mac pro day that's right any day the day you're listening to this could be mac pro day because the mac pro as we know is a 2019 product and we are all in 2019 so any day could be mac pro day uh i am ever on the lookout even though i know for a near certainty that it's going to be announced wwc but you never know you never know what's going to happen i'm sure you're excited by this casey i'm so excited you guys
Casey:
Yay.
John:
I think someone has IstodayMacProDay.com.
John:
The answer is nope, that today is not Mac Pro Day.
John:
But the site is still up.
John:
Istodaymacproday.com.
John:
Check it every day.
Marco:
When do you think it'll actually be?
Marco:
I should probably look at the Xeon.
Marco:
Assuming it's going to be an Intel-based Mac, which is not given.
Marco:
I think it's the most likely outcome, but I wouldn't say it's a sure thing.
Marco:
Is it time yet for the next Xeon to be the one after the iMac Pro generation?
Yeah.
Marco:
Honestly, at this point, I don't care.
John:
Put the existing Xeon in.
Marco:
If it's the same as the one that's in the iMac Pro, releasing it in summer 2019, it's already like a year and a half old at that point.
John:
Yeah, that's pretty much par for the course with Mac Pro hardware at this point.
John:
I forget.
John:
I looked it up.
John:
I remember looking it up, and I think there is actually a new Xeon coming that's
John:
not conceivably within the timeline that apple could release it in 2019 and have that chip in it but knowing intel and delays i would be like apple yeah if it looks like it's borderline just put the old chip in it it's it's fine it'll be fine no you know i don't think people are going to end up buying a mac pro for like single threaded performance because it's not like this thing is supposed to be big and multi-threaded and have lots of storage and big gpus like that's the role and be modular that's the role it fills
John:
so i'm not i'm not i won't be too put out if it doesn't have a chip that is like you know i don't put it this way do not delay it to 2020 to get the newest chip in it please 2019 product you said it was 2019 you can delay it's fine just take all the time you need it's totally fine you don't want to delay it casey it's just a prolonging your pain it's probably all of our pain no i haven't been in pain i haven't been in pain for a long time i'm doing great
Marco:
so okay so right now at the beginning of the year you know we have no information we have no information we didn't have in 2018 there is no no one has any idea when this thing is going to come out or if this thing's going to come out so right now with that being said what month do you think it will be in 2019 and i include the possible choice of month 13 is out of bounds which means it was not released in 2019 after all
John:
That joke is not going to age well.
John:
No.
John:
Do you mean when it ships to customers, when you can order it, or when it's announced?
John:
When the first ones get delivered to customers.
Marco:
Oh, that's a hard question.
Marco:
For the 2013 Mac Pro...
Marco:
A few trickled out in December of 2013, but it was basically January or February before a lot of people could really have them.
Marco:
It could be a couple-month range here.
Marco:
It's going to be near the edge of a month, but it could be the same thing where the 2019 Mac Pro might be actually shipping to people in mid-December of 2019.
John:
all right so my i have two guesses my optimistic guess is september early september september 9th september 15th right in in customers hands and my pessimistic guess is like december 30th
John:
because i believe it can be in somebody's hands but like the optimistic scenario is they gave themselves enough time they're going to announce it at wwc and it'll ship in they'll say fall and around september it'll come out because actually they were they're on top of it and they had it ready if they don't have it ready and they're scrambling it'll be like those computers they just try to get out before the end of the year just to save face and just a few trickle out in late december so those are my two guesses
John:
Casey?
Casey:
My optimistic guess is that it gets shelved.
Casey:
That's not really true.
Casey:
I joke, and now it's become kind of a character or a shtick.
John:
But you want one to do your video editing now.
Casey:
Slightly, but I'm never going to pay for it.
Casey:
There's not a chance in hell I would pay for it because it's going to be unaffordable.
Casey:
I think my realistic expectation is very late in the year.
Casey:
I think in the September to December time frame.
Casey:
I'm not even terribly convinced it would be announced at WWDC.
Casey:
I do think that makes the most sense.
Casey:
I completely agree that it makes the most sense.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I really think this is going to be another just under the wire kind of product.
Casey:
And I would like to hear Marco's thoughts on when it would be released.
Casey:
But a kind of a tangential question, will the Mac Pro or AirPower ship first?
Yeah.
Marco:
that's a really good question i think because both are kind of like maybe they'll never ship you know yeah the back pro is not maybe you'll never ship how can you say that because it isn't out promised us it's coming i have never heard john more stressed in my entire life
John:
It's not an... AirPower, who the hell knows?
John:
Because it's way overdue and they haven't said anything about it.
John:
But the Mac Pro, they've been... They're both products Apple has announced.
John:
But the Mac Pro, they've been so straightforward.
John:
They said, we're going to make one.
John:
We're telling you way in advance.
John:
And it's a 2019 product.
John:
Like, they've been...
John:
They have not missed any of their, they've said, like, this is what it's, every time they've said something, they haven't been proven to be liars yet.
John:
And AirPower, they've long since been proven that what they said, they couldn't pull off.
John:
So I feel like AirPower is a big question mark, and the Mac Pro is a near certainty, right?
John:
Near certainty.
John:
Say it with me, everybody.
John:
no i but did they ever actually say 2019 they definitely said not 2018 2019 now you're not keeping up with the mac pro news there's not much of it but yeah they have officially said it will be 2019 they said it is a 2019 product they did not say it would ship in 2019 or it would be announced but i don't know how you can be a 2019 product without at least being announced in 2019
Marco:
yeah i i do think that the you know it is what they said means they intended for it to ship in 2019 but uh but yeah so as for whether mac pro or air power will ship first i'm guessing mac pro simply because while while both of them are uncertain like until it's out we can't say they will definitely release the mac pro even though they said they would the
Marco:
They also said they release AirPower.
Marco:
So things happen, things change, plans change.
Marco:
So until it's out, we can't say for sure it will ever be out.
Marco:
But I do think that the Mac Pro has a much higher chance of coming out than AirPower.
Marco:
So I'm going to vote for that question.
Marco:
And then as for the month, when I think the Mac Pro will actually ship to customers, I'm guessing...
John:
my optimistic guess would be july uh but my realistic guess is probably november or december july i can't even bring myself to believe that announcement at wwc like i can't imagine it being available in the summer i can't i can't be that optimistic so that's why they fall because it just feels like one of those things they'd be like they'd announce it and it'd be really cool and it would be like coming this fall and i would be happy with that like fall is fine
John:
and as for when it'll be announced wwc or earlier or earlier not announced at wwc if it's not announced at wwc i'm like i don't know what i'm gonna do yeah if like if we haven't heard anything like if they haven't given any statements or any quotes or anything by by after wc like yeah that's that's not a good look you're gonna have to have a team of people to take care of me after the wc keynote if there's not a mac pro announced i don't know if i can handle this
Marco:
follow-up question do you think that the uh pro display a will indeed ship and b will it ship before simultaneously with or after the mac pro i think it will ship and i think it'll be simultaneous
John:
That's the way it should be.
John:
I think it'll be after, though.
John:
How can they sell them with no display?
John:
They're going to make you use the LG thing with it?
John:
It's gross.
John:
Hell yeah.
Marco:
That's what they've been making us do.
John:
The Mac Mini, the MacBook Pro.
John:
I don't think I will order it if I can't order it with an Apple display.
John:
Oh, really?
John:
Challenge accepted.
John:
I was promised an Apple display.
Marco:
Casey, are you honestly doubting John's ability to not buy a Mac Pro?
Marco:
Because he's been not buying Mac Pros for like 10 years.
John:
As I sit here in front of a tweester,
Marco:
23 inch apple cinema display not even a 24 inch the backlight on this is not even an led yeah casey let me remind you that john's current computer i think off the top of my head i think is older than all of our children combined yep oh my word you make a good point so yeah you know it's so i had this fantasy of course you know because like whenever whenever we as apple fans want something to happen
Marco:
We always fantasize about this big release, this big product release that includes everything we want.
Marco:
Because occasionally that kind of happens.
Marco:
But it's pretty rare.
Marco:
Usually you get one thing you wanted and everything else is kind of partly what I wanted or I didn't hear at all about these three things I thought I would hear about this event or whatever.
Marco:
But
Marco:
We've been told the Mac Pro is 2019, and we know it's probably not super soon in 2019.
Marco:
We also know there's a Pro display that they announced would be coming at some unspecified point in the future, but the implication was with the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And we've heard rumblings that there is going to be a significant MacBook Pro update this year.
Marco:
What if this is all one event?
Marco:
And what if it's WBDC, which would make the most sense for it?
John:
These are not three separate products.
John:
It's a Mac Pro, it's a monitor, and it's a laptop.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
it's the apple switch uh wait yeah but like you know what yeah it's called the mx uh no like what what if this wbdc ends up being like super awesome and it includes like a macbook pro that actually like you know incorporates feedback and is a redesign of some sort uh and is you know awesome in some way a pro display to go along with that macbook pro and hey by the way here's the mac pro we promised you and it's amazing and here's you know and that can also go with this display
Marco:
I don't know I think I think that like the timing is like all of these things are lining up to to all be released sometime this year probably and because that they're all pro focused it would make sense to have this attempt to be a combined big pro event.
John:
I think the laptop people should get in line because the Mac Pro people have been waiting longer.
John:
Yes, your laptops got bad in 2015, right?
John:
But the Mac Pro, we've been waiting since 2013, was the last time anything new was released, and that was kind of weird then anyway.
John:
Those things that we're talking about are... Honestly, those aren't even the headline things that would be announced.
John:
If they were all announced, they're all ancillary because laptops are actually kind of big.
John:
No one cares about the Mac Pro but us.
John:
But the real announcements would be whatever the hell they're doing with Marzipan and whatever the iOS and phone announcements are.
John:
Those are the headliners and we're just arguing for the second tier and nth tier.
John:
Laptops are second tier and then the Mac Pro is like...
John:
you know it'll only be mentioned because it's cool and we'll have a cool video but it must be mentioned oh man i i'm so torn because i want john to be happy but oh his his utter disappointment would be so delicious you're gonna have to carry me out of the theater if this thing is not announced assuming we even get tickets i don't know if i can handle it if that doesn't i if they don't announce anything
John:
I will probably wait until the end of the year, and if there's still nothing announced in 2019, I'm just going to get an iMac Pro, assuming they still make those.
John:
I'll tell you what, the iMac Pro is really good.
John:
I know.
John:
It's good.
Casey:
So why don't you buy one right now?
John:
Because Apple said that they're going to make a computer that might be what I want.
Casey:
You really think that they're going to make something that you can replace video cards and replace hard drives and stuff?
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
even remember what they promised anymore it was so damn long ago i don't know what that means no one knows what it means we don't yeah all they said was modular they they gave very little information we don't know i mean they could make end up making something that i don't want like the with the cylinder in which case again i'll buy a mac pro but but if they make something i don't want i'll be like fine they made a mac pro it's not exactly what i want but they did what they said i will be fine with that i won't be like oh sad but if they don't if they don't announce anything it'll be like
John:
i just feel like they're leading me on like you have to do something right if it's not what i want hopefully it's what somebody wants and i will still applaud them for making it you said you were going to make a mac pro you said it was coming 2019 you did and you know for whatever reason like maybe it's fifteen thousand dollars or maybe it like doesn't have the features that i want or has it misbalanced like the main reason with the uh
John:
The trash can is like, I don't, the dual GPUs for like 3D, you know, pro stuff is not, that's not what I want.
John:
I would rather have to have one gaming card.
John:
It's not the computer they made, even though, you know, I thought it was a really cool computer.
John:
It just wasn't what I wanted.
John:
Right.
John:
And I was just going to wait for the next one.
John:
But yeah, if they make a Mac Pro and it's not what I want, fine.
John:
At least they made something.
John:
But if they don't say anything, I don't, I won't be able to handle it.
John:
then again you know what i i like i think about all the the uh the product announcement disappointments and disappointments in my life and the mac pro is the biggest technological one or close to it anyway i mean maybe waiting for tv technology which we'll get into our next topic uh
John:
It's similar.
John:
But the other thing to compare it to is waiting after Return of the Jedi for another Star Wars movie and then having them be the prequels and then waiting after the prequels, like saying goodbye to Star Wars and then waiting for another Star Wars movie to be made and having it be The Force Awakens.
John:
So I've been on this roller coaster a few times before.
John:
and sometimes the wait isn't even longer and sometimes it turns out badly like the prequels sometimes it turns out pretty well like the force awakens so here's hoping this is the force awakens of mac pros