We Should Probably Get to the Apple Event
Marco:
So it's a little early to really give much information on this front, but basically I'm in kind of a bad mood because I've been doing a low-carb diet for about almost a year now.
Marco:
Yeah, I was going to say, this is nothing new.
Marco:
So we had our annual physical for the first time now, and it turns out that this diet has made me eat way too much meat and cheese, and my cholesterol is crazy high.
Casey:
Oh, define crazy high.
Casey:
I have a story about this as well.
Casey:
Define crazy high.
Marco:
It's like 40% higher on both numbers than what it should be.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Because I went to my doctor for the first time in five years, and I had, I think my regular, like my overall cholesterol, I don't really understand this quite obviously, but my overall cholesterol was like a few points higher than 200, which I guess is the threshold between good and bad.
Casey:
But my bad cholesterols were definitely...
Casey:
considerably higher than they should have been.
Casey:
I don't know if it was to the tune of 40%, but it was a lot.
Casey:
And so I have been avoiding red meat like the plague.
Casey:
And I know that there's cholesterol and plenty of other things, don't get me wrong, but I've been avoiding red meat like the plague, eating considerably more salads than I usually do because I have to get my blood drawn in a few weeks, which was basically a month after I went.
Casey:
So you and I are high cholesterol buddies.
Casey:
Hooray!
John:
You got to get in on some of this purebred Mediterranean genetics, guys, because I eat terribly.
John:
My cholesterol is lower than both of you.
John:
I'm half Mediterranean genetics, and that doesn't seem to help at all.
John:
Not enough.
Casey:
Yeah, I think I'm a quarter or something like that, but clearly that ain't enough either.
John:
100%.
John:
It's what you need.
Casey:
So what action are you taking in order to rectify this then?
Marco:
Well, he recommends something that I think is a marvelous rebranding.
Marco:
He recommends something called a 100% plant-based diet.
Marco:
And he said this a few times and about halfway through, he had a lot to say about it.
Marco:
And about halfway through, I'm like, so just to clarify, basically you mean vegan, right?
Marco:
And he's like, yeah, basically vegan.
Marco:
It's 100% plant-based diet.
Marco:
And then he never said the word vegan again.
Marco:
just all avocados all the time yeah which is great because i'm allergic to them i think this is the fattiest fruit you can find i haven't been able to eat avocados for about 10 years without getting massive stomach aches so we'll see that sucks because both of those i i personally think that both of those are quite tasty fruits i genuinely feel bad yeah those are both quite filling vegan foods uh sorry 100 plant-based foods um and so i shouldn't laugh because i feel for you
Marco:
I love he didn't want to say that because no one who's not a vegan thinks that's a good word.
Marco:
It's considered an unfun, horrible thing by people who don't practice it usually.
Marco:
But I love the rebranding of this as 100% plant-based.
Marco:
So anyway, we're going to try that.
Marco:
And so I had to like...
Marco:
About two hours ago, I was out shopping for all new groceries and everything.
Marco:
Because I've been the keto chef of the family.
Marco:
I've been in charge of all shopping and all cooking for the whole diet, and it's gone fine.
Marco:
And I was just getting pretty good at that.
Marco:
And I am just totally lost with this.
Marco:
And so I...
Marco:
I don't even... Like, I have to, like, relearn how to shop and what to shop for and what goes into a meal.
Marco:
And now I have to... And, like, you know, we were eating lots of vegetables before, but I wasn't relying on them to be, like, the main core.
Marco:
So, like, the primary part of the fillingness of the meal.
Marco:
So, like, I just have so much more to learn.
Marco:
And I have to now, like...
Marco:
totally cook a whole new cuisine that i've never cooked before that i've barely even eaten before um and i like it all like i like all of the the foods that go into it like i don't i don't mind all the various like meat substitute things i like pretty much all vegetables and pretty much all like you know grains and everything nuts legumes i like them all like i i don't think i'm gonna have a problem finding things i like uh my main concerns are like
Marco:
How the heck do I shop for this?
Marco:
How the heck do I cook for this?
Marco:
And how do I make things that are filling without going so carb heavy that I gain all the weight back?
Marco:
But, you know, the good thing is like a I've learned through the low carb diet.
Marco:
I've learned to become I've become more comfortable like at a restaurant just asking for exceptions to things.
Marco:
to be like oh i'll have the burger but without the button like so like i used to just never feel comfortable asking for things like that yeah i've had to develop that to do this diet all this time so like now i can say like yeah i'll have this out just don't have the cheese please like that's fine you know like i was always so terrified to even ask and it turns out every single restaurant here's so many exceptions every day that not a single person ever bat an eye they were just like all right you're making you're making me sad making me sad thinking about this marco can i pitch you on my diet plan oh god yeah
Marco:
Sure, Dr. Syracuse.
Marco:
Let's go.
Marco:
What do you got?
John:
My super secret diet plan is you basically eat whatever you want, but less of it than you normally would.
John:
And that's how you lose weight.
Marco:
Well, at this point, I've lost most of the weight I want to lose.
Marco:
At this point, I just want to maintain.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So just have a healthy diet that has a reasonable balance of stuff in it because you went to one extent.
John:
Right.
John:
But also not have a heart attack.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You went to one extreme where it was like get out all the carbs and you replace it with like proteins and fatty things and that wasn't bad.
John:
And like now you're going to go to another extreme.
John:
Just how about just like a basic regular balanced diet with a reasonable balance of all the different kinds of food just slightly less enough that you maintain whatever weight it is you want to maintain.
John:
That's it.
John:
That's my plan.
Casey:
But you look good.
Casey:
You got that going for you.
Casey:
Your outsides look good even if your insides look like garbage.
John:
No one can see your arteries.
Yeah.
Casey:
ATP will be recording a live episode at WWDC.
Casey:
The tickets will go on sale this coming Friday, the 29th, at either noon ATP time or 3 ATP time.
Casey:
We're not entirely sure yet.
Casey:
There's been a little bit of confusion.
Marco:
Most likely noon Eastern, but it might end up being noon Pacific, depending on what the logistics are getting inside of.
John:
There's a countdown on the page, so you just go to the page, you'll see a countdown timer.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So if you go to atp.fm slash WWDC, you will see all of the information there.
Casey:
Again, tickets on sale this coming Friday, somewhere between noon and 3 p.m.
Casey:
ATP time, which is American Eastern time.
Casey:
Tickets will be $29 a piece.
Casey:
It will be at the Hammer Theater, which you may know from last year's relay show.
Casey:
It's a very, very lovely venue.
Casey:
I'm really enthusiastic and excited to be there.
Casey:
No WWDC ticket is required for entry.
Casey:
This is coincident, coincident, at the same time as the WWDC festivities, but it is not an officially sanctioned event.
Casey:
Doors will open at 5 on Monday, June 3rd.
Casey:
The show will be at 6, again, that first Monday of WWDC in San Jose.
Casey:
If you're there, if you're nearby, we'd love to see you, and we appreciate it if you even consider that.
John:
throwing a few bucks our way to come see the three of us do our thing all right tell me about the pro mini somebody who put this in the show what is that that was me i just put in one of those little notes to remind myself of one of the things we forgot to talk about last week where all the new ipads uh came out um and we talked about the new ipad mini
John:
and how the line is separated into like the pro ones with the flat sides and the new pencils and face ID and the non-pro ones that have their own weird names and how the lines made sense based on the ages of those technologies.
John:
But there's one, and setting aside the super cheap iPad, which we didn't really talk much about, but continues to exist at 329 or whatever it is.
John:
But there's one thing that still doesn't quite make sense, the nice uniform line that it could be.
John:
And that is the fact that the mini...
John:
only comes in one style.
John:
There is no Pro Mini.
John:
There is no iPad Pro style Mini.
John:
Now, maybe there's no market for that and it makes sense, but it is a non-uniformity.
John:
And so I'm sure fans of the Mini are just overjoyed to have a new modern Mini at all.
John:
but if they want to have if someone wants to spend an obscene amount of money on a very powerful usbc sporting face id apple pencil 2 powered uh ipad mini that doesn't exist and i'm wondering i mean right now probably no one cares but if apple wants to keep this up and actually is going to update the mini i think there might be a market for a pro mini i don't know maybe i'm wrong but i don't know we didn't mention that last week i thought it was worth noting
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Julian Heatherbell writes,
Casey:
Yet it's slower than NVIDIA's card at the same price point, which is the RTX 2080, apparently.
Casey:
It's also louder, hotter, less efficient, and less forward-looking.
Casey:
For example, no ray-tracing support.
John:
Yeah, that's what we were getting at before.
John:
Radeon was, you know, AMD, they got to 7 nanometers first, and the card they put out just barely matched some of the existing NVIDIA cards on larger processes.
John:
So not only are they the slowest, but they're also less power-efficient.
John:
So it's not...
John:
Not a good look.
John:
Apple's basically making do with second best GPUs on the top end of its desktop offerings.
John:
As we said in past shows, they could solve this in theory by making their own amazing GPUs like they do for their iPads and phones, sort of.
John:
But I haven't even heard any rumors about that, so I assume it's not anywhere in our near future.
Casey:
Anthony Rossbach writes, with regard to iMacs with spinning disks, some interesting stuff about how schools work with this.
Casey:
I don't really understand some of the things that are being said.
Casey:
Can you decode this for me, John?
Yeah.
John:
Why do iMac exist with spinning disk?
John:
Who would want such a thing?
John:
It's such a terrible experience, yada, yada, yada.
John:
And what Anthony was bringing up is the idea that SSDs wear out after a certain number of writes.
John:
You're like, oh, sure, fine.
John:
They wear it after a certain number of writes, but what kind of application is going to put that kind of write volume on an SSD?
John:
It shouldn't be a concern.
John:
And the context where you might get a huge amount of writes is...
John:
Having Macs in a situation where the user's profiles are on a server somewhere and every time someone logs in, it brings apparently multiple gigabytes of data down to the local machine.
John:
So it's like you log in and it, you know, the example he gives is like if the SSD wear rating is 50% fail rate at five gigabytes of writes per day for five years.
John:
If you have a shared system with network users over Apple server that writes 20 gigabytes per day of user data, you can burn through all that in a year.
John:
So you can buy this SSD system and just put it in a school and have people using it for a year and get to a 50% fail rate because you've just done 20 gigabytes of writes per day, which is an incredible amount of writes, an unexpected amount of writes for a system, you know, even a system in constant use because normal people that doesn't, you don't just generate that much data.
John:
Or if you do, you're putting in an external disk or something like that.
John:
Um,
John:
So I can understand why.
John:
And by the way, Fusion Drives won't really help here because you'll just wear through the SSD part of the Fusion Drive with all the writes.
John:
I think the solution here, though, is not spinning disks.
John:
The solution here is a system that doesn't require multiple gigabytes to be written to disk every time a user logs in.
John:
I mean, that kind of goes without saying, but...
John:
there aren't many alternatives and apple is slow to evolve this aspect of their system like they haven't there are many possible technical solutions that can exist and have existed on other systems and on new systems in the past but the brute force technique of just taking all the user's data and pulling it down over the network and writing it to the local disk temporarily can work because of fast you know fast ssds and fast networks but it seems like a terrible system i mean the other obvious solution is
John:
SSDs that are more highly over-provisioned so that they can support more writes before wearing through, like they have more spare storage or whatever.
John:
So I still think that iMac with just a plain spinning hard drive is pretty terrible because who cares if it can support the writes if the act of using that iMac day after day is miserable for all the students.
John:
But...
John:
Something's got to give here.
John:
It just seems like there's no good solution given the current mixes of technology, and I think the thing that should change is the system for dealing with multiple uses on a Mac, not the storage mechanism.
Marco:
And I have some follow-up about my HDMI CEC problem from last week's After Show.
Casey:
Ah, tell me more.
Marco:
Twitter users Joe Chrysler and Scott Shukart both recommended that I turn off a feature called Quick Start Plus.
Marco:
I did, and the problem is mostly solved.
Marco:
There was one case where I got into a loop where the Apple TV and Nintendo Switch kept stealing the input back and forth every two seconds between themselves.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know how or why that happened, but I somehow got it to stop, and it hasn't happened since, and otherwise it's been solid.
Marco:
Also, Ivan Sakulik recommended a factory reinstall of the TV, basically the TV version of format and reinstall.
Marco:
Oh, here we go.
Marco:
Haven't tried that yet, but if I continue to have problems with Quick Start Plus disabled, I will try that next.
Marco:
But reinstalling your TV is unpleasant, and I have to redo all my settings.
Marco:
I don't want to do that.
Casey:
Do you remember when the TV was just a TV man?
Casey:
Like, forgive me for sounding so old, but oh, man, it's it's wild to me how complex everything has become these days.
Casey:
And I mean, in some ways, it's great.
Casey:
In some ways, it's not.
John:
Speaking of resetting stuff, I was having some problems with my HomePod the other day where every time I would ask it to do something, it would do whatever I asked it to do.
John:
But then it would it would recite a message about something has gone wrong.
John:
Sorry, please try again later.
John:
Like it had some canned message that would read every time, despite the fact that it would do what I asked.
John:
I mean, to be fairness, something was going wrong.
John:
I suppose.
John:
I suppose that's right.
John:
It's kind of a circular logic there.
John:
Anyway, I said to it, hey, Dingus, reboot yourself.
John:
And the voice helpfully said, sorry, I can't restart your HomePod.
John:
It's like, well, you know what I want.
John:
And someone wrote a message to tell me that it can't do it.
John:
Just do it.
John:
And so I went over and I was like, how do you restart your HomePod?
John:
Like, I just wanted to reboot it because I'm like, well, something's messed up.
John:
So let me just reboot it.
John:
Do either one of you know how to reboot your HomePod?
Marco:
I just unplug it and plug it back in.
John:
That's the answer, which is a little bit terrifying because, you know, we're trained, like, don't do that to computers.
John:
It's bad.
John:
And we all know what's inside the HomePod.
John:
It's not some magic pixie dust.
John:
This is a little iOS computer in there, right?
John:
Or whatever it is, audio OS.
John:
uh but yeah there's even from like the home thing doesn't have a way to reset it there's no way to reset it from your phone or anything like that and i googled and it came up with an apple page that i mean it was talking about uh you know how to do like a fairly large reset but yeah like if you want to reboot it it recommends you pull the plug and plug it back in which is bar back which is what i did and now the thing is quiet again but i didn't like that i mean
John:
voice control should reboot the thing i can even reboot the apple tv apple tv has a way to reboot without unplugging it so should the home pod no empathy for the for the machine am i right john i have too much empathy i don't want to yank the cord out i who knows what it's in the middle of doing does it even i guess it has apfs now what if it's in the middle of some hfs plus thing and i corrupt my disc oh my word
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, I wanted to call attention to, I'm sure most people have seen this, but Joanna Stern wrote a absolutely tremendous essay, I guess you could call it, or a post about the butterfly keyboard.
Casey:
And the way this was done, this is in the Wall Street Journal.
Marco:
It's so good.
Casey:
The way this was done was that by default,
Casey:
the article does not include any of any instances of the letter e because apparently her e key on her keyboard has broken or any instances of the letter r now you can toggle them on to make it readable but by default you will look at this article the way it would come off of her broken ass keyboard and so it is absolutely worth looking at and there the video is like five minutes or less and it's also very good um
Casey:
I loved this, and I thought it was extremely well done.
Casey:
Wait, there's something wrong with Apple's keyboards?
Casey:
Oh, no, nothing, nothing.
Casey:
Everything's fine.
Marco:
And to be clear, this is about the brand-new 2018 MacBook Air keyboard.
Casey:
Yes, thank you.
Marco:
With the dust membrane and all.
Marco:
Basically, yeah.
Marco:
listeners of our show are you know this is not news to you but the good thing is that a this is news to a lot of people so this is good to get it out there for a major publication and b an apple spokesperson actually gave a comment on this that included the words we're sorry yeah but but they say that they say they're they'll give that statement about anything think of the most obscure hardware problem you could possibly have like oh there's a dead pixel on my iphone screen
John:
You can get a statement from Apple that says if anyone is having trouble with their iPhone screen with dead pixels, we're sorry.
John:
Bring it to Apple and we'll repair it under warranty or whatever, which is exactly what they said about the keyboard.
John:
It's like, OK, anyone you can get that answer from anyone about any problem.
John:
It doesn't really address the systemic issue.
John:
But I feel like the reason we're mentioning this at all is obviously not to inform ATP listeners that there's a problem with the keyboard, which ATP listeners well know.
John:
Um, it's because like, like Marco said, uh, this is in the wall street journal.
John:
Like this issue has crept up from people like us complaining about it on obscure tech podcasts for years and years to people complaining about it on websites that are not strictly related to tech, but tangentially related to tech to major newspapers that don't really have anything to do with tech.
John:
Like it's, it's gone all the way up to the highest level of the non tech, uh, sphere to the point where it does get a canned response from Apple PR and, uh,
John:
People are talking about it, and I bet many more people will know about it.
John:
And the 2018 keyboards, again, if you're listening to tech podcasts like us, you know the 2018s didn't solve the problem.
John:
But perhaps the last time the story bubbled up, the world was convinced the 2018s fixed the issue.
John:
And speaking of that, finally, and we mentioned this back when the keyboard repair extension program came out.
John:
The repair extension program, whatever the hell it was called, does not include the 2018 keyboards.
John:
At the time they came out with that, we're like, well, maybe the 2018 fixed a problem, so they don't need to include them to this repair program, but...
John:
Now, we well know, as we've discussed on past episodes, that the 2018 keyboards do not definitively solve this problem and yet still are not covered under the extension program.
John:
But in theory, they're still all under their first year warranty because, you know, it was still 2018.
John:
Well, here we are in 2019, and I forget what month those July keyboards came out in.
John:
So I guess we're still within the first year.
John:
So there's something to watch for.
John:
By the end of this year...
John:
i would hope that the 2018 keyboards are included in this fairly expansive repair extension program once they all start falling out of warranty because if they don't it actually makes them the worst keyboards to get worse than the 2016s or 2015 macbook or 2017s because at least there's an extension repair extension program for those but the 2018s it's like uh you're on your own with your regular warranty so
John:
We'll revisit that story, I suppose, in late summer to see if Apple actually has expanded the umbrella of repair extension and annoyance to encompass the 2018 keyboards.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $5 a month.
Marco:
And this is really, truly unlimited.
Marco:
$5 a month per computer, and they will back up all of the space in that computer.
Marco:
The entire hard drive, no matter how big it is, any external hard drives that you have connected to it, they will also back those up.
Marco:
All your data is backed up to Backblaze.
Marco:
It's no gimmicks, no additional charges.
Marco:
$5 a month per computer.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
restoring is super easy to you can of course restore from their website you can download a giant zip file or if you have to do like a really big restore and it's more efficient to just have a hard drive they will send you a hard drive in the mail overnighted via FedEx and if you return it you get a refund on the price of the hard drive
Marco:
People trust Backblaze because it's a really good service.
Marco:
They have over 500 petabytes of data under their management.
Marco:
They've restored over 28 billion files because it's just a really great service.
Marco:
It's easy to use, unlimited, unthrottled, and you really need cloud backup because, you know, and look, I've tried them all and Backblaze is by far my favorite.
Marco:
I've been a Backblaze user since long before they were a sponsor because it's just the best for me.
Marco:
And I suggest you give it a shot today because there's lots of risks that can happen if you just have your files
Marco:
on various hard drives that are connected to one computer or in one room or in one building.
Marco:
You could have problems like fires or floods or theft or power surges that could knock out your whole office, every computer, every hard drive connected to it.
Marco:
So you need something off-site.
Marco:
Backblaze is constantly backing up to the cloud and you have it, you know it's there, it's reliable, and it's in someone else's data center so you don't have to worry about it.
Marco:
Once again, backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You can get a 15-day free trial.
Marco:
See for yourself how great it is.
Marco:
And don't forget about business backup.
Marco:
Tell your sysadmin at work to go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Hit the business backup link at the top of the page.
Marco:
It's the same awesome service with more admin tools using Backblaze groups.
Marco:
So once again, backblaze.com slash ATP for a 15-day free trial.
Marco:
I love this service, and I bet you will too.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Marco:
I suppose we have some topics tonight.
Casey:
Yeah, we do have a couple things to talk about.
Casey:
I would like to talk about something that's gone wrong for me.
Casey:
I upgraded to 10.14.4 on my Mac and on my laptop because I was having an issue with a Swift CLI app and I didn't realize...
Marco:
the reason why and so i thought oh i'll just upgrade and that'll fix it and it did and i can explain what happened if anyone cares but nobody does however i love i love like all the people who are listening to this episode who just can't wait for us to get to the event and they're and we're making them sit through like all this other stuff first sorry guys this is how we roll i mean they shouldn't be too surprised this is kind of how we roll
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So 10.14.4, I upgraded.
Casey:
Everything was going well.
Casey:
And then Mail said, we need you to log into Gmail again because I use Google Apps for my domain from forever ago as my email service of choice.
Casey:
And so it said, you need to open Safari or basically the Mail app will open Safari and you need to log in again.
Casey:
So I did that.
Casey:
And then I went back to Mail and Mail said, yes, thank you.
Casey:
Can you please open Safari and log in again?
Casey:
So I did that, and then the same dance happened again, and I realized, uh-oh, something's broken.
Casey:
I tried this.
Casey:
I think it happened first on my laptop because it was what I happened to be using at the time.
Casey:
Then it happened again on my iMac.
Casey:
And now neither of my desktop computers can actually use the Mail app with my email, with my particular email server, which is just a little annoying.
Casey:
Apparently, this is a known thing.
Casey:
There's a MacRumors thread we'll put in the show notes about it.
Casey:
I am so annoyed by this.
Casey:
And I know people that work in Apple QA and they take their jobs very seriously.
Casey:
But guys, what are you doing?
Casey:
Does nobody think about these sorts of things ever?
Casey:
How does this happen?
Casey:
Now, maybe it's something on the Google side.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But I can tell you that this whole login flow looks different in 1014.4 than it did in 1014.3 or whatever came before.
Yeah.
Casey:
i'm gonna guess it's apple apple's problem uh what's going on guys how do you let this out functional high ground ring a bell oh sorry too soon anyway how do you let this out what's going on here john have you well you use the web interface like an animal so that you're sitting pretty i'm trying to figure out your whole description of g suite do you use something different than what i use do you have like google for your domain or whatever yeah
Casey:
Yeah, so it's an old term for it.
Casey:
I think it is just G Suite.
Casey:
But way back when, way, way, way back when, probably 10 plus years ago, when Gmail's whole infrastructure was extended such that you can use Gmail on a different domain.
Casey:
So instead of at gmail.com, it could be, say, I don't know, at kclist.com.
Casey:
At the time, it was called Google Apps for Your Domain.
Casey:
And at the time, if you were not a business, you could get it for free.
Casey:
I don't think it's called Google Apps for Your Domain anymore.
Casey:
I think it's called G Suite, to your point.
Casey:
And I don't think it's free anymore.
Casey:
I'm not sure about that, though.
Casey:
But anyways, but yeah, basically, I'm using the whole Google Cloud offering on CaseyList.com.
Casey:
And so my email is Gmail, but it's not Gmail.com.
Casey:
It's CaseyList.com.
Casey:
And I was using it with Mail App.
Casey:
A lot of people say that that's ridiculous.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
It's what I like.
Casey:
I think Mail App is fine on both iOS and the Mac.
Casey:
It works for me.
Casey:
If it doesn't work for you, that's fine.
Casey:
But you're not me.
Casey:
And right now, it doesn't work for me.
Casey:
So the joke's on me.
John:
Yeah, is this bug limited to people who do what you do?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think maybe, but I'm not sure.
John:
Because if it is, that would explain why it would pass QA, because they surely QA it with Gmail.
John:
But they'd be like, well, who pays for that weird thing where you get to have your own domain with Google services?
John:
You find a tiny, tiny fraction of people, and they probably didn't even test this at all.
John:
And we're just as surprised as you are, and they'll fix it in another point update.
John:
That's what you get for using obscure stuff.
John:
Just be glad it's not so obscure that they are going to fix it.
John:
Let's say you use like Fastmail or something and it didn't work.
John:
They would never fix that.
John:
Fastmail would have to fix it.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
But, I mean, consider that the same mechanism that I used to use at work, which was all G Suite, is the same mechanism I used for my personal email.
Casey:
And I thought your company was on G Suite, at least up until recently.
John:
No, it was all Microsoft for emails.
John:
It's all Outlook and Exchange and all the other crap.
Casey:
So yeah, I would assume that a lot of people that have G Suite at work, which is, from what I gather, a lot of people, I would think that this would apply to them as well.
Casey:
Or maybe I just got unlucky twice.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
But IT departments won't allow the update to happen if they know there's incompatibilities.
Casey:
That is true.
John:
That is true.
John:
We had a thing at work with the upgrade to whatever.
John:
I think it was the upgrade to...
John:
mojave or maybe some point release of mojave that they released after doing all this testing it's like okay go forth and update and then people updated and they started having problems and they pulled the release and the way they pulled it is if you launch the uh the updater or the installer they would kill minus nine the process like not not even a nice kill people were saying this isn't a console log it says this thing was killed signal nine what's going on here it's like yeah that's us we're stopping you from upgrading but i thought you said we can't upgrade yeah we did say that but we changed our mind
Casey:
Aye, aye, aye.
Casey:
All right, so if you happen to work at Apple or know somebody that does, that may be able to fix this, I'd appreciate it.
Casey:
Tell them Casey sent you.
Casey:
Then I'd like to turn this frown upside down and do a quick Cheapods review because my new AirPods came in earlier today.
Casey:
I've only been able to use them very, very briefly, but...
Casey:
I love them.
Casey:
They are tremendous.
Casey:
I love that I can just use the Qi charger for them.
Casey:
I can't say that I really had a problem with plugging in the lightning cord, but as with all things, I am of the opinion that fewer wires is better.
Casey:
Now, one thing I wanted to specifically call out
Casey:
is that I've been trying to get into this whole HomeKit thing, which is both bliss and a total dumpster fire, depending on which particular part of HomeKit you're working with.
Casey:
I don't really want to get into a HomeKit rant right now.
Casey:
Maybe I'll do that another day.
Casey:
But as part of the bedtime process for Michaela, I need to tell...
Casey:
her lamp in her room to turn off.
Casey:
And previously, if I was listening to a podcast as I was just like rocking her to sleep or something like that, what I found myself doing was using Hey Dingus with my watch.
Casey:
Because if I tried to do it with my phone,
Casey:
After a while, it just refused to listen to me when my AirPods were connected.
Casey:
It may be a hardware issue with my particular AirPods.
Casey:
I'm not sure what was going on.
Casey:
But there was a problem where it just wouldn't hear me on my phone.
Casey:
So I would use Hey Dingus on my watch, and it would work, although it would take a little while.
Casey:
Today, as I was putting her to sleep, I thought, oh, these new AirPods are supposed to use Hey Dingus as well.
Casey:
So I said, hey, Dingus, turn off Michaela's lamp.
Casey:
And sure enough, it worked no problem.
Casey:
I waited a few seconds, and Overcast came back on, as you would expect.
Casey:
I didn't have any of that awful thing where it falls from... I think we were talking about this last episode.
Casey:
Where it falls from the high-quality audio back to headset audio, and then forgets to go back to high-quality audio.
Casey:
You know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
Didn't have any problem with that.
Casey:
So that alone...
Casey:
I am really genuinely excited about having Hey Dingus on my AirPods just for that one moment each day.
Casey:
I don't think I'll use it that often other than that, but just that one moment, I'm really excited.
Casey:
And again, the Qi charging, I'm also really stoked about.
Casey:
Now, did either of you guys, I don't recall, did either of you guys order AirPods?
Casey:
John, you did, right?
John:
Yeah, I was supposed to get them delivered today, but I forgot that you have to sign for everything that comes from Apple.
John:
So they bounced off my house.
John:
But I'll get them as soon as I can be here to sign for them.
John:
I will get them.
Casey:
And Marco, did you bother?
Marco:
I didn't.
Marco:
But are we glossing over?
Marco:
Do you listen to podcasts while you're putting your daughter to bed?
Casey:
Well, this is the like whatever.
Casey:
She's just going to sleep phase of it.
Casey:
i i need to use what i i need i need what she hey let's just leave that alone for now all right i don't feel like getting into it but suffice to say she doesn't know what's going on it's okay there will come a time that she's going to know what's going on and that's not going to work anymore she knows very smart oh my god yeah anyway and i i also have quite a lot of uh of home smart home ramblings but i'm going to save those for another day because we should probably get to the apple event
John:
One quick more thing about the AirPods.
John:
Do they have a different hinge on the case?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
It looks the same.
John:
Feels the same.
John:
Someone mentioned it.
John:
I just want someone to confirm.
John:
Feels the same?
John:
All right.
John:
Just wondering.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Hullo Buckwheat Pillows.
Marco:
Have you ever tried a buckwheat pillow?
Marco:
It is totally different than the kind of fluffy soft pillows that most of us are used to.
Marco:
It's kind of similar to a bean bag.
Marco:
So you can position it however you want, and then it stays there.
Marco:
So however you want to set it up to support your head and neck, it will support it like that as long as you want it to.
Marco:
It doesn't just slowly sink and squish like normal pillows do.
Marco:
And what's inside of it is natural buckwheat.
Marco:
It's really a more natural way to sleep.
Marco:
You know, whatever you're laying your head on at night, maybe it's like, you know, a bag of bird feathers or some kind of petroleum-based foam.
Marco:
Buckwheat is a much more natural option.
Marco:
It's made in the USA with quality construction and materials.
Marco:
The case is made of certified organic cotton and it's sewn for durability.
Marco:
The buckwheat is grown and milled right here in the US and it's very customizable to what you want.
Marco:
You can add or remove how much fill is in it because there's just a zipper on the side and you can open it up, you can empty it out, you can add more, you can replace it over time.
Marco:
They sell you refill buckwheat if you want that.
Marco:
If you want it fluffier, you can add more.
Marco:
If you want it less fluffy, you can take some out.
Marco:
You can take it all out if you want to totally wash the inside case.
Marco:
people love this thing you can see for yourself on their site and it's been extensively used in japan for a long time so it doesn't it's not like just new to podcast to sleep on buckwheat pillows this has actually been a thing for a while and they actually they sent me one and i used it for a while and i loved it i don't use it anymore because now it is next to me at night it was stolen from me it's so good it was stolen uh so
Marco:
i have to get another one uh but check it out today you can sleep on it for 60 nights to try it out if you don't like it after that time just send it back they will give you a full refund so go to hello pillow.com it's h-u-l-l-o pillow.com kind of like hello but made of buckwheat holes you know
Marco:
So hullopillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you try more than one, you can get a discount of up to $20 per pillow as well, depending on the size.
Marco:
Every order comes with fast, free shipping, and 1% of all profits are donated to the Nature Conservancy.
Marco:
So once again, hullopillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hullo for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think we might be done procrastinating now.
Casey:
I think we should probably talk about this March 25th event.
Casey:
So I feel like I would like to summarize my thoughts on this by kind of sort of quoting two different people.
Casey:
First of all, something that friend of the show Mike Hurley has been saying a lot lately, or at least I'm pretty sure it's been Mike, and he's not the only one, of course, but especially Mike, is in so many words, this ain't your daddy's apple anymore.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think something that's been interesting for me to come to a little bit of terms with, and I got to imagine it's really weird for John to come to terms with because Marco and I came to Apple at about the same time, is that the Apple that I, if you'll permit me, grew up on, which isn't actually true, but you get the idea.
Casey:
The Apple that I grew up on is a very...
Casey:
Very different Apple than we're seeing today.
Casey:
And that isn't necessarily bad, but it's different, and it's something we have to get used to.
Casey:
And so Mike has been saying for a long time, this ain't the same Apple anymore, and basically get on board.
Casey:
And I think there's a lot of truth to that, and we'll talk a lot more about that in a minute.
Casey:
And the other thing I wanted to bring up is a friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry, who
Casey:
who, by the way, has a Patreon that we'll link to in the show notes for his company.
Casey:
But anyways, he said, and this is a direct quote, Apple at its best is a company that announces something that you want right now and can get in a short time.
Casey:
That was not today, or really the 25th, but he wrote it on the 25th.
Casey:
And I think that that was really, really astute because anything that they've announced that I've been really, really amped about, AirPods being a great example,
Casey:
They were announced, well, the new ones anyway, were announced as available now.
Casey:
Well, that is to say available for order now, and you'll get them in a week.
Casey:
And phones typically work that way, with the, of course, exception of the original iPhone.
Casey:
And iPads were like that.
Casey:
I think it was like a week or two lead time.
Casey:
New Macs and MacBooks, with the exception of the MacBook Pro, or excuse me, the Mac Pro,
Casey:
generally speaking are not announced until they're basically ready and i do think that craig is right that that that's when apple is at their best and that was not what we saw on monday so that's kind of my opening statement any other openings thoughts or do we just want to kind of crawl through this this whole thing
John:
We'll crawl through it, but let me comment on what you said, your ageist comments about how it's going to be the most upsetting for me for Apple to have changed.
John:
You got that exactly backwards.
John:
Anyone who has been following the company for as long as I have is so used to Apple transforming and reinventing itself like Madonna that there is no change that we find particularly jarring.
John:
You have no idea how different the older Apples were from the Apple today.
John:
uh short time apple fans have their definitive apple that they think whether it's the ipod era or like the the imac era or the iphone era and then they have like you know a short time with that that's cemented in their minds the one and only apple then this is weird time where it's different and then there's the current apple that is different still and like why can't it just be that one apple but the longer you spent with the company you realize more you realize there is never one apple it's just a series of them so
John:
I don't find this change jarring at all.
John:
That said, you can debate the merits of the change because there's such a thing as good change and bad change.
John:
And we'll talk about each of those in each of the services we do in turn.
John:
But people shouldn't fear change.
John:
People should expect it.
John:
And I think the older you are when it comes to Apple fandom, the more accustomed you are to this kind of dramatic change.
Casey:
That's an interesting point.
Casey:
I definitely did not think of it that way, but I totally get what you're saying.
Casey:
And I'm proud of you, John.
Casey:
That's a good way of looking at it.
John:
I think when Mike calls it out, like all the younger people call it out, it's because they feel it a little bit themselves but realize that it's an instinct they have to fight against.
John:
Like, oh, it's not just always going to be the Apple of the iPhone or the Apple of the iMac or whatever.
John:
It's going to change.
John:
And they get called out on it by like they see people who are yelling about how Apple is changing in a bad way.
John:
And they're like, no, I have that feeling briefly, too, but I thought better of it.
John:
And you should be, you know, so I feel like it's more of a conversation among younger people than than the old timers who are grizzled veterans of the transforming Apple.
John:
Anyway, that's it.
John:
That's my comment on your opening statement.
Casey:
Marco, anything from you or shall I just carry on through the event?
Marco:
I think my summary of this event is we're bringing together artists and storytellers to tell stories about artists bringing us together with storytelling.
John:
Is storytelling important, Marco?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
They could not have been more heavy handed with all that language.
Marco:
But the technology industry is very big.
Marco:
It's very, very.
Marco:
And it's always growing even bigger.
Marco:
And there's a whole bunch of stuff.
Marco:
that we just don't cover because it's either out of our expertise or we don't care that much about it or we just don't have time to cover it with three opinionated people talking for two hours every week.
Marco:
You can't cover everything that way.
Marco:
So there's things like we hardly cover Android at all.
Marco:
There's important issues going on in tech that we often just don't have time to cover or haven't covered yet.
Marco:
Things like the new EU copyright directive, we haven't covered that at all.
Marco:
We haven't talked about Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up all the tech companies at all.
Marco:
We don't have time to cover everything.
Marco:
It's a huge industry.
Marco:
But until fairly recently, I think we did have time to cover everything Apple did.
Marco:
And we were interested in covering everything Apple was doing.
Marco:
And I think part of the discomfort here, for me at least, and I think for a lot of people like us, is that Apple's starting to do a lot more stuff that we just don't care about or that we don't know anything about.
Marco:
You know, Apple's a big company searching for all sorts of new ways to make billions of dollars that they haven't made before with their existing billions of dollars.
Marco:
And so they're going to do a lot of boring big company stuff.
Marco:
And part of the, I think, discomfort that I have with it is like Apple's doing a bunch of stuff now that I either,
Marco:
don't care at all about and or that I think is actually really kind of un-Apple like in my own definition of what that means but you know that's what is Apple like evolves over time and
Marco:
the reality is that my version of it, it's kind of like when people complain about every generation of BMWs that came after the one they bought first.
Marco:
It's like, oh, after that, they ruined it, but that was the best one.
Marco:
It's like, whenever you came to Apple, that's what you view as, that's what's Apple like.
Marco:
And everything that comes after that, that the company does afterwards, like, oh, it's not the same anymore.
Marco:
And so I think we're feeling a lot of that as they do a lot of things here.
Marco:
And they tell a lot of stories with artists and storytelling and stories that just are not at all things we care about.
Casey:
all right so let's go through this um i will try to hurry us along as quickly as possible but we're so good at that yeah we're real good at that but we start with apple news plus uh plus is a theme throughout this this event which at first i was kind of like really but i actually think it's okay it saves them from the naming problem because we were like oh what are they going to call this stuff like and by the way no bundle spoilers
John:
But you'd be like, what are they going to call these things?
John:
What are they going to call their video service?
John:
They're going to call Apple Video.
John:
And they came up with a novel solution similar to the eye in front of all their old products, which is we'll just put a plus on the end.
John:
And that solves the problem of coming with new product names because you just take an existing product name and you add a plus to it and it's a whole new product name.
John:
And they can add additional pluses.
John:
Unlike Swift, they're brave enough to do that.
John:
Courage.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
They didn't announce a bundle today, but I think that's partly because the stuff is super early, partly because most of these things aren't even available for purchase for the next six months and didn't even announce pricing for a lot of them.
Marco:
I think a bundle can still come, and I think when and if the bundle does come, and I still think it really should.
Marco:
The obvious name for it is Apple+.
John:
i still don't think they're going to do that i think i think they'll if they put a plus on it i'll have to here's the thing about the plus if you have an existing product name you have to add the plus to differentiate the plus version from the non-plus version but if you don't have an existing product name you don't need to add the plus i made a joke during the stream that i'm going to wait for apple card plus because apple card who the hell wants the apple card doesn't have a plus after it what the hell is that
John:
It's a little bit confusing.
John:
Anyway, let's get to the products.
John:
Apple News is the one thing that is available now.
John:
We all have it on our phones and Macs if we updated, foolishly by Casey, breaking our email.
John:
The fact that we have it on our computing device doesn't mean that it works.
John:
I have the new Apple News app on my Mac at work, which is updated to the latest version of macOS, and it crashes on launch every single time for the past two days.
John:
Oh, neat.
John:
I've never successfully launched it.
Marco:
Yeah, if you look, Steve Trout and Smith's been doing a lot of sleuthing on Apple News and discovering a lot of problems with the way it's implemented, including that apparently there's some bad data being fed from the servers that's causing some index out of bounds exception or something like that.
John:
Yep, that's basically what it is if you look at the crash log.
John:
And it's like, that's not great.
John:
A, it's not great that you've got poison data in your CDNs and you should find a way to fix that.
John:
But B, it's not great that your app crashes when that happens either.
John:
yeah well i mean it happens to the best of us but yeah i i think i mean so out of curiosity like have have either of you subscribed to news plus because i have and i have some thoughts i haven't yep i subscribe because it's got a one month free trial so just put a reminder in your calendar to cancel uh because you can't cancel so you subscribe because the cancellation happens immediately uh and there's a month to try it out and i totally tried it out despite the fact that i really despise apple news i'm like i'll try a free trial
Casey:
I didn't try the Apple News Plus yet, but I will say, and this is only tangentially related, that I have found myself in the evenings, like as I'm getting ready to go to sleep, popping open Apple News, particularly on my iPad, and just checking out like what's being talked about, which I really like as a kind of brief way to see what the rest of the world seems to think is important.
Casey:
And so I probably will at some point try Apple News Plus, but I haven't had the chance to yet.
Casey:
But Marco, you said you also have?
Marco:
Yeah, I've tried it.
Marco:
And I actually – so I was – I had to renew my driver's license this week.
Marco:
And so right before I went to the DMV, which I knew would be a long, boring wait in a building with very poor cell reception, I downloaded a bunch of magazines to read in Apple News+.
Marco:
So the way that this was implemented –
Marco:
i i think it's smart you know a lot of people are saying like isn't this just the new newsstand like what apple previously launched as newsstand and i believe ios 5 um and it kind of flopped and didn't really go anywhere newsstand was challenging i know this as somebody who published a magazine briefly in newsstand um it was the epitome of the idea of apple's old idea of like just let people build apps and let every company who wants to be in this new store build their own app
Marco:
And you can see a lot of parallels to the way they did TV later.
Marco:
And the result was similar with Newsstand.
Marco:
The result was some companies made good apps, but most companies didn't.
Marco:
And so you had really like, you know, must-read, important, big-name content mostly being served in a...
Marco:
really terrible collection of apps.
Marco:
They were inconsistent.
Marco:
Every app worked differently.
Marco:
They were almost all bad.
Marco:
They all had their own separate subscriptions that you had to do and everything.
Marco:
And even though the App Store made it somewhat easy to manage subscriptions, it was still nowhere near as nice as having a built-in business model of people just pay once and get everything.
Marco:
So the new way of doing this is...
Marco:
Apple writes the app.
Marco:
The publishers simply provide the content feed, whatever that is, whether it's the Apple News format or the weirdo PDF ones, whatever it is, that's fine because that's all publishers know how to do.
Marco:
Publishers can't and shouldn't write their own apps
Marco:
you know every time so having one app that you can see all the content in apple can make that one app really good in a few ways they haven't but they can make that app really good and it can be you know consistently formatted consistently navigated and to have the built-in business model of you just pay once and apple splits it up among the publishers however they do it while taking a giant cut that solves a lot of problems that newsstand had
Marco:
And so I think this is way better for publishers in general.
Marco:
Maybe not for certain ones, but in general, way better for publishers and way better for users than what Newsstand was.
Marco:
Because it makes everything consistent and easier, and it lets publishers specialize in what they should be specializing in, which is the content, and not trying to build a good app every single time.
Marco:
So from that point of view, I like the way they're doing News+.
Marco:
I think it's good.
Marco:
I think $10 a month is a great price for what you're getting here.
Marco:
um and that's why i signed up so i was gonna go you know i was gonna go sit for a while somewhere offline so i thought all right let me let me download some magazines it's not i'm not an apple news expert i i haven't usually used apple news so most of the ui was new to me that you can you can browse magazines literally just alphabetically like a through n or a through m and n through z is the two sections and
Marco:
So you go through, and you've got to find the ones you want, and you can hit the little cloud download icon on the ones that you want to download.
Marco:
So I went through, I downloaded six or seven magazines, figuring I'll check these all out and see how they are and everything.
Marco:
I'll find something to read.
Marco:
And I also wanted... I also want...
Marco:
to download the newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times.
Marco:
Those are big newspapers.
Marco:
I want to see how those are.
Marco:
I want to download those.
Marco:
Could not figure out how to do that.
Marco:
And maybe I just missed it, but it was not obvious, not an obvious place.
Marco:
Anyway, so I get to the DMV, and I sit there for about an hour, as I expected, and I go back to news, and I could not for the life of me find a list of the ones I had downloaded.
Marco:
The only way I could navigate these was to go back into those giant A-M, N-Z sections and just scroll, scroll, scroll and find them just by looking at which ones were downloaded by their cloud icon.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, there is no apparent way, at least no way I could find...
Marco:
to like to say like these are my magazines like i want to i want to subscribe quote to these six magazines and always be notified when they have new issues and have them always be downloaded like they i couldn't find that functionality anywhere yeah there's a favorites feature it's very hard to find but there is a favorites feature i spent a while trying to find it because i did see the heart at one point i'm like oh that's your favorite things great it was for magazines not for newspapers but uh
John:
But then I'm like, okay, so I can favorite things.
John:
And at some point I lost that screen.
John:
I'm like, how do you favorite things again?
John:
So I did that iOS thing that we all do.
John:
It's basically like the equivalent of right-clicking or searching through the menus on a Mac.
John:
It's like I'm presented with an interface.
John:
I'm pretty sure the functionality is there.
John:
I don't know where it is.
John:
Let me just hold my finger down on this thing for a really long time.
John:
or maybe try force pressing believe it or not what what it popped up was one of those i don't know what this is called marco you would know the you know the thing that pops up that has like uh cut and copy on it and like look up or define like that black black pop-up segmented control i think it's just called ui menu controller yeah great name for it anyway that thing popped up and one of the little black bar segments was favorite i'm like are you kidding me what the hell is this but yeah there is a way to favorite it's just not particularly obvious
Marco:
all right yeah so i i didn't find it so thank you i'll try that but so anyway so you know so it was fine so i i eventually scrolled through the giant lists and found the magazines i had downloaded and you know read some articles and it was indeed a really good experience reading the articles it was i think all the ones i read were apple news format because they were all perfectly formatted for my phone uh instead of being the pdf type so i read like you know some things in the atlantic and the new yorker and stuff like that and
Marco:
And it was fine.
Marco:
They were mostly fine.
Marco:
I love there's no ads.
Marco:
I had no issues with, you know, any formatting or content or anything like that.
Marco:
So I realized, like, I just hate magazines.
Marco:
It turns out I don't like reading the news because...
Marco:
Most of what I was able to find was like, turns out kind of interesting stuff, or it was like modern political stuff, which I don't, I just don't want to read all that.
Marco:
And so it was all stuff that's either going to like make me sad or angry or like not very deep articles and things I actually cared about.
Marco:
So it turns out I just don't like the news.
Marco:
And then I...
Marco:
earlier today when the aforementioned uh joanna stern article on the wall street journal about the keyboard was released um i i first hit the link and hit the wall street journal paywall somewhere like in some little web browser window so i thought okay let me go to apple news and search for this title which i did yesterday to read a wall street journal article and it worked fine um let me go to the i mean and granted keep in mind like we have universal links
Marco:
I don't know why I can't just say like open in news from a web page and have it open in my paid for news subscription in the news app.
Marco:
But okay, we'll set that aside for now.
Marco:
The complete lack of the news app interacting with the web and URLs.
Marco:
Set that aside for the moment.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And so anyway, so I decided to look for the Joanna Stern thing so I could read it, and it was not there.
Marco:
And I think I saw her tell somebody on Twitter earlier today, like, yeah, it isn't there because it's part of some dynamic thing, and it's some section of the Wall Street Journal that isn't being made available.
Marco:
So it's just like, I don't...
Marco:
I'm trying so hard to like News Plus, but I think it's just not for me.
Marco:
I think it's giving me access to a bunch of content I don't want, it turns out, and the news and stuff that I actually do want is really hard to navigate.
Marco:
and there were actually a lot of publications that I wanted to be in it that weren't like the first thing I looked for that wasn't there was The Economist Harper's isn't there New York Times isn't there these are pretty big names that and yes they all have their own subscription things but like
Marco:
I would have liked if those were there and they're not.
Marco:
And the interface for browsing the actual newspapers is seemingly non-existent and barely there.
Marco:
So yeah, I think it's a really nice looking implementation of something that I don't actually want and has some functional problems.
Yeah.
John:
I think that Joanna Stern's article brings up a good point.
John:
I'm not sure what reason she gave for it not being there.
John:
And there was some debate about what parts of the Wall Street Journal are visible in Apple News Plus versus the ones that are only available through search in Apple News Plus or whatever.
John:
But practically speaking, if you've seen that Wall Street Journal article, which, by the way, it's behind a paywall.
John:
But if you search for the headline in Google, like a Google search result, it'll let you see the whole thing.
John:
As Casey described, it has these little iOS style toggle switches on the page that lets you turn on and off the letter E's and the letter R's and stuff.
John:
It's part of the gag, right?
John:
That's a web page.
John:
And it's got a bunch of these custom, you know, little widgets powered by JavaScript in the article because it's kind of like a one-off fun, interesting thing to do in an article.
John:
on the web that's something you can do you can have a cms and have a system for publishing articles but you can have the one-off and like oh we're going to put these cool little controls in here and write some javascript and have some people do that right in anything like apple news or magazines where there's like whatever the anf apple news format whatever thing and then you can also publish magazines in pdf which is kind of gross but a lot of people do it because it's easy because they already have to make something like that for their print editions and
John:
it's not the web uh you touched on it with the the the linking structure the fact that you can't send these things to instapaper limited control over font sizes and other things that you would have in web browsers apple news is not the web much of that content is on the web there is a washington post website there is a new york times website
John:
And you can look at them in web browsers on your phone and have a separate subscription.
John:
Being not the web, as far as I'm concerned, is a big downside to this service.
John:
Now, is it a downside to the success of this service?
John:
Like maybe it'll be super successful because it's not the web, right?
John:
I don't know.
John:
All I know is that I don't like the fact that it's not the web because the web has an entire ecosystem of tools and, you know, software surrounding it that lets people navigate and read the web.
John:
Same kind of thing with like RSS readers where...
John:
RSS, I feel like, is part of the web.
John:
It doesn't dictate how you read the content.
John:
In fact, it usually sends you to a web browser or uses a web view, but you have the option to do either.
John:
And either way, they're all URLs, right?
John:
I like the idea of content being on the web.
John:
Call me crazy.
John:
Newspaper, magazines, all these things exist on the web.
John:
Lots of magazines that I read in Paper Edition have websites, and so do newspapers.
John:
And some of those websites and newspapers have paywalls and ways to pay for them and so on and so forth.
John:
So very often I look at Apple News and I'm like...
John:
Is this solving a problem for me?
John:
I mean, $10 a month for tons of content?
John:
Yeah, that's solving a problem.
John:
It's letting me get more content for less money.
John:
Okay, good.
John:
But it introduces its own set of problems.
John:
You get less content for more money.
John:
Reverse of that.
John:
Swatch that.
John:
You get more content for less money.
John:
but on the downside it's no longer on the web really and all the things that you might want to do with content on the web or the ways you want to read it or experience it or save it or whatever most that's not going to be available for you're even just sharing it with other people and being able to give people links like for years now when i've seen an apple news link in someone's tweet i have frowned i i don't click it if i you know if i can possibly avoid it i don't click it if i hit one accidentally because it was
John:
gone through some other link shortener or something i didn't notice it was an apple news url i get pissed off when it launches apple news like if you link me something link it on the web so as far as i'm concerned the only function of apple news that is a net win for me is the ability to read lots of magazines for a lower price um and by the way marco car and driver is in there which i know you don't subscribe to but i think it's a really good magazine
John:
despite some of the strange political pains you will find in there, you should check it out because it's part of your subscription.
John:
And so is Wired, which I stopped subscribing to years ago, and it was very difficult to make that happen.
John:
But now it's back on my phone.
Marco:
Oh, I actually did download Wired, but I had to scroll down to W, and so I forgot to do it when I was trying to actually read.
John:
yeah oh by the way the phone and i was just looking at the favoriting thing the phone interface seems like subtly different than the ipad one the ipad one has the sidebar or whatever anyway if you want to favorite something on either one of them you have to make sure the title of the publication is visible in like a little banner at the top right so if you scroll it goes away but if you go up to the top there's a title tap on the title which will bring you to the page of the publication itself not just the issue and then there'll be hearts it's not a great interface anyway i'm not a fan of apple news because it's not part of the web
John:
But if you want to get some magazines for cheap on your phone or iPad, it's not terrible.
Casey:
And apparently they really are taking a 50% cut, which seems insane to me.
John:
You can't tell they're taking a 50% cut because this is the hilarious part.
John:
I think of the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal both had stories about the cut that Apple's taking.
John:
Both of them know the cut that Apple's taking, but the wall between editorial and business is such that the articles have to be written from the perspective of sources familiar with the matter, like
John:
reporters in the paper where the executives of the paper know what the deal is, but maybe the reporters don't, like, leak to their very... It's a silly game, but yeah.
John:
In terms of the economics of how this is helping or hurting journalism, it seems like a thing that many publications...
John:
may find themselves having to do because it is in the end advantageous to them money-wise just because there are so many people but it's it doesn't seem like that's not the way they would really want it to happen um as i don't think that's the way any of us really want it to happen but i mean it's like they bragged about on stage did you know that apple news is the most used news application on the iphone did you guys know that yeah
John:
you don't say it's installed by default people like it doesn't mean it's the best news application it doesn't mean it's the most satisfying it doesn't mean it's the most conducive to the to the future health of the news industry in this country all it means is that it's installed by default and i feel like bragging about it on a slide it's just rubbing salt in people's wounds because anyway i'm gonna get some magazines for cheap go for it apple news plus
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode.
Marco:
Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud.
Marco:
You can get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.
Marco:
You can get a $20 credit at linode.com slash ATP using promo code ATP2019.
Marco:
So Linode is by far my favorite web host I have used.
Marco:
I have all of my servers there for all my different web applications I host, from little ones like what I host my blog on to a really big setup, which is what I host Overcast to hold backend on.
Marco:
You can do all this with Linode.
Marco:
They have servers to suit all sorts of needs from a basic one gigabyte of RAM plan.
Marco:
That's just $5 a month.
Marco:
all the way scaling up from there to whatever your needs may be, including specialized plans like high memory plans and new dedicated CPU plans, among many other choices.
Marco:
They also have wonderful add-on services, including managed backups, load balancers called Node Balancers, Longview, which is a wonderful stats package.
Marco:
All of this is backed by 24-7 friendly support if you ever need it.
Marco:
Now, hosting things there for so long, I've had the opportunity to use their support here and there, and every time it's been wonderful.
Marco:
I'm just very, very happy at Linode.
Marco:
That's why I keep all my stuff there since long before they were a sponsor.
Marco:
I've been a customer there for, I think, about eight years now.
Marco:
And it's just wonderful.
Marco:
I'm there for a reason.
Marco:
It's a consistently great value.
Marco:
Their servers are really high-end hardware.
Marco:
They perform really well.
Marco:
The network is solid.
Marco:
It's a 40-gigament network behind it all.
Marco:
These servers are running Intel Xeon E5 processors.
Marco:
They're running enterprise-grade SSDs.
Marco:
So this is really high-end hardware at a really good price, backed up by great support.
Marco:
You can see for yourself at linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And if you use promo code ATP2019, you can get a $20 credit.
Marco:
And with a seven-day money-back guarantee, there is nothing to lose.
Marco:
If you are looking for a job and the kind of jobs they might offer, they're also hiring at linode.com slash careers.
Marco:
Otherwise, linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP2019 for a $20 credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for keeping all my servers running and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Then we go to Apple Card, which will be available this summer in America.
Casey:
And Apple Card, I kid you not, is a Apple-branded MasterCard that is backed by Goldman Sachs.
Casey:
I guess the sell of it is that it's designed by Apple, both a physical card that's made of titanium that is designed by Apple, and the entire experience is designed by Apple.
Casey:
So it's integrated with Apple Wallet, of course.
Casey:
It's supposed to be a much better experience for you to manage.
Casey:
It's supposed to surface where you're spending your money and how you're spending your money in slightly clever and interesting ways.
Casey:
It's supposed to help you with your financial health in the sense that it is very clear about if you only pay the minimum payment, this is how long it will take you to pay off the credit card.
Casey:
And we really recommend you pay more.
Casey:
And, you know, there's like a little circular wheel where you can kind of fine tune how much you want to pay, etc., etc.
Casey:
And then the arguably most interesting piece of it is that there's a cashback structure.
Casey:
So if you buy something at Apple, including, it seems, things in the App Store, you get 3% back.
Casey:
For everything else in the world, you get 2% back, and then you only get 1% if you use that Fancy Pants physical titanium card that they will eventually send you.
Casey:
Now, they pitched the card and said there's no fees, and the interest rate is really, really good, and that seems to maybe be some really good marketing spin there.
Casey:
because the apr the the interest rate seems to be about the same as any other credit card which is not good and i've heard very conflicting reports as to whether or not there will be say like foreign transaction fees and stuff like that in fact somebody pointed out i don't have the tweet handy but somebody pointed out that in their own slide they one of their own slides they made mention of a foreign transaction fee but that that may have been taken out of context or wrong or something i'm not sure but
Casey:
I'm not sure what to think of this.
Casey:
I don't think I have a problem with it.
Casey:
I think it's weird for Apple to be a bank, but I mean, they're already kind of halfway there as it is.
Casey:
I should mention that the cashback stuff rides via Apple Pay Cash, which is to say their kind of debit card within Apple Pay that you can use for person-to-person transfers.
Casey:
So this cashback
Casey:
It comes every single day, rather than like once every quarter or something like that.
Casey:
So every evening or morning or what have you, you'll get your 3%, 2%, or 1% put back.
Casey:
But instead of being put back onto the card, it's put back into your Apple Pay Cash virtual debit card.
Casey:
So I think the idea is that you're just kind of sucked, or your money anyway, is kind of sucked within Apple's ecosystem forevermore.
Casey:
I think that's kind of my executive summary.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think about this?
Marco:
Well, just for a quick clarification, you can get Apple Cash out of that into your bank just by linking a debit card or anything.
Marco:
So it isn't trapped in there forever.
Marco:
But clearly Apple wants you to... This is one of those things where, again, Apple's doing some boring big company thing.
Marco:
They're trying to make this...
Marco:
Sound like they're doing you a favor by keeping your data private and everything else.
Marco:
But look, this is Apple trying to get more of your money in a pretty bland and kind of shameless way.
Marco:
This is still a credit card and Apple pays a certain percent of their transaction volume to credit card processors that aren't them.
Marco:
And they want to capture that so that they can keep it instead of the other credit card processors.
Marco:
It's as simple as that.
Marco:
This is a way for them to get more money in this kind of boring, big company way.
Marco:
They are not the first unrelated to credit cards company to launch a credit card.
Marco:
Almost every major retailer has one.
Marco:
Amazon has one, another big tech company, and it actually has better rewards if you buy a lot of stuff on Amazon.
Marco:
So this is not like totally uncharted waters here.
Marco:
This is like a big company doing boring big company thing.
Marco:
And it does look really nice.
Marco:
I don't know if I have much of a use for it.
Marco:
I have enough credit cards, and that is two.
Marco:
I consider that enough.
Marco:
As a quick summary of my strategy, as a result of a vacation a couple years ago where both my one credit card and my debit card to my bank were
Marco:
were locked and compromised within the time I was on the trip such that I had no more credit cards or way to get cashed while on vacation.
Marco:
To alleviate that, I now have a separate policy where my debit card
Marco:
only ever goes into an ATM by my bank.
Marco:
It never goes into anything else but that.
Marco:
It is never used online for any purchases ever.
Marco:
And my credit card, I basically had to get a second credit card because my first credit card was in American Express.
Marco:
And not everyone takes American Express.
Marco:
So I wanted something else to cover the gap where it would be accepted everywhere.
Marco:
And so I got a second credit card that was a Visa.
Marco:
And so now everything gets charged to one of those two things, and my debit card is used for nothing except ATMs of my bank.
Marco:
And so for Apple's card to be another credit card doesn't really solve any problems I personally have.
Marco:
And it's a MasterCard.
Marco:
And while I can't think of any time that I saw something that accepted Visa but not MasterCard,
Marco:
I know that Visa is the most widely accepted one of all these things.
Marco:
So if I was going to just have one or have one be like my maybe not accepted everywhere card, I would want it to be a Visa, not a MasterCard.
Marco:
Anyway, all that is to say, this looks fine for you.
Marco:
It looks like it's more for a world in which Apple Pay is everywhere.
Marco:
But in my world, that's not the case.
Marco:
And maybe that's true for more people.
Marco:
In my world,
Marco:
Apple pay is not everywhere.
Marco:
It's actually still a fairly like novel thing that, Oh, you take Apple pay.
Marco:
How nice.
Marco:
Um, and so the benefits of this card when you're not using Apple pay are significantly reduced and less competitive compared to other cards.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And so I just don't think that this is going to be that compelling of an option for me and for a lot of people.
Marco:
But it's really nice.
Marco:
And if you don't object to having more credit cards than you might need, it might be a nice option to get those rewards on Apple purchases.
Marco:
And I might eventually get it just for that 3% pack on Apple purchases.
Casey:
Yeah, I feel the same way.
Marco:
yeah but ultimately like you know the interest rates are just like everyone else's interest rates there's still the ability to get into financial trouble with it they're making certain things nicer and that's great I'm proud of them but it's still at the end of the day a credit card and my concern with it
Marco:
is that apple now has a strong financial incentive to make using other credit cards worse on their platforms to push this credit card heavily and and to to provide it abilities that other credit cards don't get or to add speed bumps to the use of other credit cards to push more people into theirs and you
Marco:
Apple already plays fast and loose with the rule against promoting stuff via push notifications, things like that, with their own apps.
Marco:
I just see a future in which Apple keeps building more and more incentives for them to be a little bit crappy to us, to make themselves more money.
Marco:
The company already can't prevent Apple Music from spamming people with notifications to extend their free trial or whatever.
Marco:
They already can't keep that under control.
Marco:
this is going to be worse.
Marco:
They're going to be sending us push notifications for marketing their stupid credit card.
Marco:
I don't love that at all.
Marco:
I think we're heading into a period of this kind of shameless corporate mediocrity here that's going to annoy us with spam, ultimately.
Marco:
I don't like seeing Apple build systems that will incentivize this, but that's what they're doing.
John:
I think a credit card is an interesting, vaguely Apple-like area to get into.
John:
Because if you think about a couple of their recent big product introductions, and obviously their biggest, most recent one, the background behind it is basically like...
John:
there's a thing vaguely related to the skill set of apple that most people don't like uh and a while back that was smartphones yeah there are phones out there but most people don't really like their cell phones like ask around the room a bunch of apple executives who really loves their phone we were like i love a blackberry it's awesome like yeah but is it really great or do you just love what it does for you and then other people like i don't really like my phone at all because i'm not into blackberries and it's just an annoying like
John:
Find an area, find a product area where everybody has one and some of them are okay, but for the most part, people don't love them.
John:
And can we go there?
John:
Can we make a big difference there?
John:
Can we make a phone that people will absolutely be head over heels for?
John:
And that was the iPhone, right?
John:
Credit cards are very similar.
John:
A lot of people have them, almost everybody in the U.S.
John:
probably.
John:
Who really loves their credit card?
John:
Like, maybe you have one that you like more than the other, or maybe you enjoy whatever cashback or airline miles that you get, but there's always annoying stuff with cards.
John:
So it's like an opportunity for Apple to enter a very crowded field where there's 100% market saturation...
John:
like cell phones or you know personal computers for that matter um depending on what area you decide to put that uh starting poll in and make it better in all the apple ways now apple's not the first company to do this lots of other companies i think simple as one or there's a couple other companies with similar names that i can't remember they tried to say banking is annoying here is a less annoying bank
John:
But it's difficult to do because there are, you know, large companies and large barriers to entry.
John:
And you can't like even the cell phone thing Apple thought about but couldn't become its own cell carrier.
John:
Right.
John:
So it had to partner with Singular and AT&T.
John:
And like it's just it's always a little bit harder than you think, even if you have something as amazing as the iPhone.
John:
So here comes Apple credit card trying to make a credit card that is
John:
slightly less annoying than existing credit cards.
John:
It may be a credit card that people will love.
John:
And it has some innovation, like the innovation, they have all these slides with the check marks that they tattered all the things they're going to do for it.
John:
And a bunch of them were focused on privacy and security and sort of modernization and convenience.
John:
So you didn't really lean on this too heavily, but the big selling point of this card is it's essentially a virtual card.
John:
I know we said there's a physical card, but they didn't even get to the physical card until later in the presentation.
John:
It's like...
John:
How do I get this card through your iPhone?
John:
You can ask for this card and we can give it to you if we decide to on your iPhone.
John:
And again, by that point in the presentation, they hadn't even mentioned a physical card.
John:
It's like you use it with Apple Pay and it's magic and it integrates with Apple Wallet.
John:
So here we have a platform advantage, an easy use advantage, a bundling advantage like Apple News.
John:
It'll come on your iPhone like no other credit card lets you sign up for it from the home screen of your iPhone that comes straight out of the box.
John:
Uh, and it's got the security of Apple pay and we have this cool application to let you know how you're spending your money.
John:
And unlike those other credit cards that are annoying and have obscure bills with hard to read transactions on them, we're going to do that thing where we figure out what the actual store is and put a nice little icon and show you what your budget is.
John:
And like, uh,
John:
a nicer credit card and even the physical card doesn't have a card number on it uh which seems inconvenient if you have to enter a card number somewhere but of course apple wants all the websites to use apple pay and realistically speaking when websites do use apple pay i think apple fans like it because it's easier than having to enter all your info but anyway it's more secure because it'll have one time use card numbers and do all this other stuff like it is trying to be a better credit card through the power of technology and apple's platforms
John:
But like kind of like a cell phone is probably even worse.
John:
At the end of the day, it's a MasterCard.
John:
It's not like Apple is, you know, having its own payment network.
John:
They're partnering with Goldman Sachs, which is not a fuzzy teddy bear of a company that we all love.
John:
The cashback deals are not as good as the cashback deals for other particular vendors.
John:
Amazon gives 5% back on its card when you buy from Amazon.
John:
Other companies give even more valuable things back if you do some specific thing, whether it's
John:
going on a certain airline or buying from a certain store like if you're a super duper bargain hunter this is not the the greatest card for you it punishes you for using the physical card which will probably be annoying because there is no actual uh you know number on it and no no cvv code on the back like it's it's a little bit weird to use so you probably need a regular credit card the interest rates maybe go down a little bit lower than other people but otherwise are about the same um
John:
and so i feel like it's this kind of it makes sense that apple's doing this and i think there is room for them to innovate and they are innovating and i like the idea of them pushing the industry forward to the idea of mostly virtual credit cards without fixed numbers on them because that's all kind of archaic right but there's only so much it can push because you know just as it was not a cell phone carrier it's not it's not a bank and apple is not a you know a payment network and
John:
It has to partner.
John:
And why is it MasterCard and not Visa despite the fact that Visa is bigger?
John:
Presumably because MasterCard gave them a better deal.
John:
It's, you know, it's probably actually surprisingly one of the announcements that I'm the most excited about just because I like the idea of getting 3% back on my Mac Pro.
John:
Which, by the way, it's not tremendously higher than you get back.
John:
Like if I...
John:
if i you know pay on any other credit card you'll probably get like two percent back um and you can also compound this i assume with like the whatever the business discount you get from apple business reps plus the three percent for the direct purchase with this card right so this is a question a lot of people had i think i'm gonna get this card i think marco will get this card i think case will probably get this card just because it'll be so easy to do from our stupid phones and we'll use it for apple purchases to get three percent back but
John:
I don't know how much it's going to change our lives because if you can't use it everywhere and the world hasn't converted to Apple pay, it just becomes another, you know, another tool in your tool belt and your financial tool belt.
John:
And I have way more credit cards than Marco does.
John:
And I feel like at each opportunity, part of the knowing how to navigate the world financially is knowing which card is the best to use in which context to give you the most benefits or protection or cash back or whatever.
John:
Uh, and this just adds one more item to the list, but yeah,
John:
I think it's a welcome item.
John:
I'm happy to have a cool-looking card.
John:
I'm happy to have a little titanium thing.
John:
I'm happy to have a virtual card with better security things.
John:
I don't care about their literal financial planning thing, but it's an area for them to innovate.
John:
And I'm ready to get 3% back on my Mac Pro.
John:
If it ever ships.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The other thing I was a little disappointed by was there was no discussion.
Casey:
I didn't really expect there to be.
Casey:
But even after the event, I haven't heard any mention of any idea of a joint account or having another user that has permission to use the account.
Casey:
So what I mean by that is Aaron and I share one discussion.
Casey:
credit card, it's issued in both our names, and 80 to 90, maybe even damn near 100% of the purchases we make outside of bills, we do against this one credit card.
Casey:
It's nice having the family's purchases roll up into one place.
Casey:
And so if, let's say, I wanted to ditch that credit card and switch to Apple Card,
Casey:
that wouldn't be the case anymore.
Casey:
It would now be that Erin has her card and I have my card, which, is that a big deal?
Casey:
No, but it's a big enough deal to me that I don't think I would ever be able to go all in on this until there was some mechanism for having a family account, which is funny because so much of this entire presentation was about how families can share all of these things, and in this case, that's not true.
Casey:
Now, maybe it will be in the future, or maybe we just haven't heard about it,
John:
Yeah, they didn't say one way or the other.
John:
And I would imagine because it's not Apple, I mean, Apple's doing part of this, but in the end it's MasterCard and you can't have a joint MasterCard, I believe.
John:
I'm not ruling it out.
John:
But on the other hand, look how long it took for them to add family support to literally any of their other products.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
Also, we should note that there was a really good Twitter thread by a gentleman by the name of Peter Berg, who kind of went through a lot of the motivations from this that he expected from Apple's side.
Casey:
And it's worth reading that.
Casey:
It kind of went around our circle a few days ago.
Casey:
But if you haven't seen it, it's worth reading.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Apple Arcade.
Casey:
This was something that I really didn't expect to be that impressed by and ended up really impressed by.
Casey:
So this is coming in the fall.
Casey:
Price was not even alluded to.
Casey:
And the idea here is that Apple is becoming, I guess, kind of a publisher.
Casey:
I'm not big enough into arcade or really any games to be able to
Casey:
know where the lines are but basically apple seems to be kind of sort of bankrolling the creation of some of these somewhat more indie titles by a bunch of developers that seem to really know what they're doing i thought this portion of the entire um keynote went the best i don't recall the the presenter's name and i apologize but she did a great job i thought that it was really tight and
Casey:
I thought they showed more than told, which is a problem that they ran into later in the event.
Casey:
I'm actually kind of excited for this.
Casey:
Even though I almost never play games, really anywhere, but particularly on my iOS devices, I think this looks real good.
Casey:
And I think it's interesting that you should be able to use these same games on your Apple TV and even, God forbid, your Mac.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, Marco, you are maybe a little bit more into games than me, maybe, but I think we probably are close.
Casey:
What did you think about Apple Arcade?
Marco:
I'm actually really excited about it.
Marco:
I look forward to paying $10 a month for games that I tell myself I will play and then never will.
Marco:
But it looks really nice because Apple has some challenges here in the game market because they want to make good stuff.
Marco:
They want good stuff to be on their platforms.
Marco:
And of course, they want more service revenue, but set that aside.
Marco:
They want good stuff to be on their platforms.
Marco:
But the economics of the App Store,
Marco:
really favor free-to-play games that have like you know these weird like psychological tricks and gambling mechanics to basically pump money out of people in kind of not that comfortable kind of sleazy ways then there's all these like wonderful indie games that don't do that that actually just try to compete on quality but the market for those is really hard
Marco:
Some people make it, and they do okay, but most people who try to just make a high-quality game never get found, never get seen.
Marco:
Or if they do get found, they get ripped off immediately by a bunch of clones, and they undercut them on price and everything.
Marco:
So it's a hard market.
Marco:
It's a very risky market, and it's a market that doesn't easily reward investing in quality.
Marco:
And so what Apple is doing here I think is very smart on a number of fronts.
Marco:
So number one, this is a service that they can include in a bundle that will make them money.
Marco:
Number two, by taking an actual publisher relationship, they are fronting money to the game studio or to the game makers and picking the games that they want to do this for and supporting them both with money and then with visibility down the road, presumably as part of the service.
Marco:
So Apple is helping them succeed.
Marco:
They're also enforcing standards.
Marco:
So anything involved in Apple Arcade, they said, as you mentioned, it's going to run on all their platforms, which is awesome.
Marco:
Like all the games that are part of this to have running on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV all be what sounded like a requirement.
Marco:
with seamless iCloud switching between them so you can like progress through the game and pick up where you left off on a different device that sounded like it was also kind of requirement they were enforcing no in-app purchases you get everything up front no ads no data collection without consent so it sounds like no data collection without using apple's built-in system uh so that's great like and family sharing included which was kind of a theme of all these services which is also great like
Marco:
This sounds really awesome.
Marco:
This is a great way to fix the problem of the iOS game market kind of just being crappy in kind of uncomfortable ways.
Marco:
And you just get really great games made that I'm very excited about in addition to boosting Apple's platforms, especially boosting the Apple TV and the Mac, which you only need it.
Marco:
I mean, heck, even the iPad.
Marco:
A lot of great games never really make good iPad versions.
Marco:
So this is going to help all these platforms.
Marco:
And I think this makes it clearer than ever.
Marco:
When you look at both Apple News+, the new TV app which we'll get to, and especially looking at Apple Arcade and this cross-platform stuff, I think we're seeing why Marzipan is made.
Marco:
Marzipan was not made to make it easier for me to make overcast for the Mac.
Marco:
Marzipan, I think, was made because it's going to make it easier for Apple to do all their stuff.
Marco:
And for things like games to be more easily ported and things like that.
Marco:
And for them to be able to write one TV app and have it run everywhere.
Marco:
Whatever the reason...
Marco:
The result of this is that they appear to be treating the Mac like a first-class citizen for the first time in a long time.
John:
What?
John:
I wouldn't go that far.
John:
Still a second-class citizen, but it's no longer a ninth-class citizen.
John:
Like, that's why... Yeah, okay.
John:
All these things that are launching in the fall, it's because they need new OSs, and the new OSs are going to be announced at WWC, and they're going to ship in the fall.
John:
So...
John:
It needs the thing that lets iOS games be easily ported to the Mac, which isn't going to be released until the new OS, which hasn't been announced.
John:
So all the fall ones, when you see fall, just think Marzipan, right?
John:
And it's not the Marzipan that we know today in Mojave.
John:
It's the new improved Marzipan that they'll announce at WWDC and give an official name to and tell developers to write for and everything like that.
John:
So, yeah, it's great to see the thing being required on all platforms.
John:
um but that's kind of the whole the whole mars band strategy is i mean you said it's not for overcast to be on the mac but it is it's for everything that is on ios to be more easily ported to the app and of mac and their other races and of course that includes apple's own applications and their services that rely on it but they could have just said it works on all of the platforms we care about but not the mac
John:
Like they could have done that, but they didn't because they've got this thing that lets them not do that anymore basically by letting iOS stuff run on the Mac.
John:
And by the way, everything you just described, like, you know, I agree that this Apple Arcade is actually a good thing.
John:
But what you just described is like sort of the budding springtime sprout of what console makers have been doing forever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
having a curated collection of games partially funded uh where there are standards where you have to conform to you have to use cloud syncing you have to be available on this you have to do that like this the rules for what you have to do for console games it varies from console to console and from year to year depending on what the manufacturer does but that's that's the point of console games that you know you have to support cloud sync you have to support a downloadable thing you have to support these resolutions you have to have this minimum frame rate you have to have this minimum quality and
John:
Right.
John:
And that's why when Apple would get into games and thinking like we're the biggest game maker or whatever, like the two the two slams are always Apple's not that into games and Apple doesn't really get games.
John:
I think those two slams still apply, but less because they're learning.
John:
They're saying, what works to make high quality games?
John:
It's not like it's a mystery.
John:
Apple's out here like we sell more games than anything, but people don't like our games because they're like little mini casinos for kids.
John:
What games do people like?
John:
It's not a mystery.
John:
Like consoles have existed forever and people love them.
John:
Like why do people love Nintendo?
John:
You know, when is Apple going to buy Nintendo?
John:
We were saying, you know, saying for years, like Nintendo was the most Apple-like of console.
John:
What's the difference between Nintendo and the iOS App Store?
John:
And it doesn't take a genius to look at it.
John:
Like, how are they different?
John:
Oh, well, it's not anybody can make a game for insert your favorite console here.
John:
And their games are really high quality.
John:
And that's how they get to charge 60 bucks for them.
John:
And people are happy to pay it because the games are amazing.
John:
How is that not the same as Angry Birds?
John:
What's the difference between Angry Birds and Zelda?
John:
Like, study it for a couple of years and say, you know what?
John:
We could pay for people to make games.
John:
And we could forbid them from doing casino-like things.
John:
And we can forbid in-app purchases entirely and just say, like, you buy the game and you get the game.
John:
And we can do it as a subscription service and they get on the service revenue and blah, blah, blah.
John:
So they go off in their own direction, but they've learned a little bit.
John:
They've learned a little bit from the whole rest of the gaming industry and are trying to take some of those lessons and incorporate it into their plan.
John:
Now, all that said, there's a lot of questions about whether this is going to work because they're not eliminating the Kitty Casino, right?
John:
That's still going to be there.
John:
they are paying for a bunch of content to be made.
John:
But as we're going to, we'll talk about if we ever have time in the show a little bit later game.
John:
And as console makers know, paying for games to be made is not a thing where money just buys you success because it's creative process and you can throw money at the wrong people or the wrong ideas or the development process and go wrong.
And,
John:
It is a creative endeavor, like making movies or music or whatever.
John:
There is an aspect of it, sort of talent cultivation, knowing a good game when you see it.
John:
I am entirely not convinced that the people controlling the money for funding games at Apple...
John:
are as good at picking good games as people with more experience in this area, like the console makers.
John:
Everyone has hits and misses, and you're lucky when you get some amazing game that just turns out way better than you thought it would, but there's a certain amount of both judgment and...
John:
and patience that goes into this like a good example is like one of my favorite games i talk about all the time journey which uh sony funded it's a small group of people sony funds lots of people all the time you never know which games are going to be good which games can be crap which games are you going to ship journey took way longer than than sony wanted was way over budget and
John:
And I think if Apple was funding it, would they have had the wherewithal to say, okay, you can have an extra six months.
John:
Okay, we'll put more money in.
John:
Because by all aspects, until the game ships, it looks like an abject failure.
John:
They said they were going to bring us game.
John:
It's crap.
John:
They don't have a game finish.
John:
You're already over your budget.
John:
The time is up.
John:
How much more time do you need?
John:
We've given you three extensions already.
John:
It takes someone with the experience of a Sony to say, this is how this business works sometimes.
John:
Sometimes the production of the movie is disaster and all our stars are drowning and there are injuries on set and it goes way over budget and it takes way too long.
John:
But sometimes at the end you get Titanic.
John:
It takes experience to know is this going to be Titanic or is this going to be Waterworld?
John:
And I don't think Apple, that was about the trouble with the production of Titanic.
John:
I switched from Journey.
John:
But the same thing with Journey.
John:
Like,
John:
It's hard to tell when you're in the midst of it whether you are throwing money down a pit because sometimes you are.
John:
Sometimes you're throwing money down a pit and you don't find out until the game ships and everyone hates it and it costs you tons of money.
John:
All I'm saying is that this is a difficult skill that Apple has thus far not had experience in doing in the games industry.
John:
So they're just spreading the money around.
John:
And to be fair, all the games I saw on their page, they look amazing, right?
John:
Lots of games look amazing in the trailers.
John:
It's difficult to tell which is going to be a great game, which will resonate with people, right?
John:
Especially with these types of games, the idea is not to be super addictive like Candy Crush.
John:
The idea is to be entertaining and enjoyable in the way that
John:
you know, Nintendo games are, right?
John:
Where they don't rely on energy mechanics or time limiting or, you know, manipulative things.
John:
They rely on the fact that they're fun and they're manipulative in a different way, but hopefully in a nicer way, right?
John:
And so I hope Apple is successful with this endeavor, successful enough that the money they put in to make these games, they make back in subscriptions, successful enough that the studios that made the games, their cut of that subscription revenue is enough to fund their next game, right?
Yeah.
John:
and the game industry as a whole it's very difficult very often a studio like that makes an amazing game like journey that's critically acclaimed will still end up going practically bankrupt because they did go over budget and people did work for free for a certain period of time and they don't have a next game and it's exclusive to sony for a certain number of years and they have to regroup like it's a difficult business
John:
But Apple is finally doing some things that that look from the outside more like what everybody else is doing.
John:
And if they do them reasonably well and or they are very patient and willing to throw lots of money at it and try and try again, they could hopefully build a tiny corner of the app store for games in which the games that they ship.
John:
are viewed positively by all involved uh the developers the users apple everybody i wish them the best of luck because i want this to succeed but i recognize that it is not a thing that apple has done before and no amount of money can pay for you to get good at it i just hope they either have already hired the right people or do hire the right people who know how this stuff works to give them the best chance of success
Casey:
I just wanted to quickly reiterate what Marco said, which is that I found this really, really exciting as someone who really doesn't find games that exciting.
Casey:
So I'm very curious how much it would cost.
Casey:
I said to Marco on Twitter yesterday, the day before, that I can't imagine it being less than $20.
Casey:
And between Marco and some others telling me about other services that I was not previously aware of, all costing $10, I think, Marco, you're probably
Casey:
probably right that $10, maybe $15 will be the answer.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
It seems like if they knew, they should have just told us.
Casey:
But one way or another, this is more exciting than I expected, and I'm really interested to see what games come from Apple Arcade.
Casey:
Apple TV.
Casey:
There are four different things now that are Apple TV.
Casey:
There's an app.
Casey:
There's Apple TV Plus, which is some content that's made by Apple, which we'll talk about in a minute.
Casey:
There's Apple TV 4K, which is a box, and Apple TV HD, which is the box that preceded the Apple TV 4K.
Casey:
But
Casey:
For now, we need to talk about the Apple TV app, which apparently is coming in May, and it is going to be revamped in ways that I honestly couldn't notice.
Casey:
So, it's better now?
Casey:
What's going on here?
John:
The best part of that demo, they had someone up on stage demoing the new Apple TV app before they revealed all of the other stuff that we're going to talk about, their original content and their channels and blah, blah, blah.
John:
They're just demoing, here's the new Apple TV app, and here's the ways that it's better.
John:
And this poor person has the Apple TV remote that we all know and hate, connected by a wire to avoid any weird, presumably, Bluetooth stuff.
John:
When you're demoing, you don't want any weird signal stuff with a room full of people with computers.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's connected by a wire.
John:
She's holding the thing in the traditional Apple TV remote way, gingerly with her thumb hovering over it, because if you touch any part of it with your thumb, something will happen.
John:
She's going through her scripted demo, which is, I might like show X, and show X is highlighted as the upper left show.
John:
Or I might like to see what the next episode of show Y is.
John:
I don't remember what the shows were.
John:
What she's supposed to do is move the selection from the upper left to the right one space to highlight the next show.
John:
Because that's part of her canned demo.
John:
But she doesn't pull it off.
John:
You know why?
John:
It's really hard to use that goddamn swipe pad.
John:
She tries to swipe to the right.
John:
but ends up swiping down, which causes the entire gigantic beautiful screen behind her to scroll the image of the tvOS UI up, and then she has to scroll it back down and then make a second attempt at the swipe.
John:
And if we need any more proof that that remote is terrible, that even an incredibly rehearsed, carefully constructed Apple demo cannot successfully demonstrate basic use of the remote to do a simple function, like move one item to the right in a UI.
John:
God, I hate that remote.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Now, hold on.
Casey:
I have many times defended this remote.
Casey:
And so now it's my time to tell you that this thing is a piece of shit and I'm totally on your side.
Casey:
It has taken me this long to finally come around to this point of view.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I think I said it on the last episode, maybe it was on Analog, somewhere I told the story of Erin almost throwing the thing across the room, which is very uncharacteristic of her, because she couldn't get the darn thing to work.
Casey:
And I found that, I don't know if it's, I'm becoming, maybe I'm getting older and I'm shaky, I don't know.
Casey:
But something is happening where I am...
Casey:
becoming more inept at operating a remote that i've had for like two years now or something like that and it is getting to the point that even i a previous defender of this remote have decided i've had enough and i am on your side you guys and i think this thing has got to go
John:
It's like the opposite of OXO Good Grips, like a tool designed for people with limited mobility.
John:
It's like, this is designed, it's like experts only.
John:
Make it the most difficult to use remote you can.
John:
And if you have amazing dexterity and never lose things and never inappropriately touch anything you want and can move your hands in precise angles and don't need to see things with your eyeballs and can carefully feel for the ring so you know which direction it's in, but don't reach too high because you'll touch the touchpad.
John:
If you can do all of that, you will be successful.
John:
oh it's it's i know when it shouldn't be talking about the remote this is about the app anyway the app has minor improvements that don't seem to dramatically change things that we don't care about and we have lots of stuff to talk about so i think we should move on suffice to say there's a new version of the tv app it will be coming to all your platforms by the way mark german pointed out that in this the the seeds for the ios 12.3 beta and tv os 12.3 beta there's also an update for the old non tv os apple tv
John:
Like the one that doesn't run tvOS, the one that was before that.
John:
And that could mean that the new TV app and the TV Plus stuff might even be coming to that old Apple TV box, which I think is interesting and plausible because, as we'll get to in a second, and as we talked about in many past shows, once Apple is paying billions of dollars to make original content...
John:
Anything that stands in the way of people being able to watch and therefore pay for that content is bad.
John:
And one thing that might stand in the way is I've got an Apple TV, meaning the stupid box, but it's an old one.
John:
And so I can't watch or pay for Apple's new programs.
John:
And Apple might say, no, we are going to launch a updated version of the TV app for the old Apple TV because we don't want you.
John:
to not be able to watch any of our shows because we want your money to watch them because we've had a lot of money to make them.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right, so next in the trifecta of Apple TV things is the Apple TV Channels package, which is also coming in May.
Casey:
And that allows you to subscribe to channels, and all of these channels can have their stuff consumed in the aforementioned app.
Casey:
So I...
Casey:
Do I care?
Casey:
Why do I care about this?
John:
Well, if you've tried to use the TV app in tvOS before, or any OS, you know the TV app?
John:
It's got an icon that says TV on it, right?
Casey:
It's the thing I use so I don't have to use the Amazon Prime Video app.
John:
Right.
John:
Although you are, I believe, in effect, using it because it's just a central interface.
John:
But once you start playing things, it chucks you out to the app that plays the content.
John:
It's always been kind of weird.
John:
It's like this clearinghouse of stuff, but it's not really centralized because some things, namely Netflix, are not there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
um and chucking you out to another application was weird right so the new one is it's the same model essentially where there's a tv app where you supposedly see all your stuff accumulated there and it tries to tries to do a good job of saying we think you were just watching this so you might want to continue watching that and whatever like it tries to do that type of stuff the new one will play all your stuff in the app
John:
so apple controls the player hopefully they make a good player with basic functionality in it that allows you to pause and skip forward and back by fixed amounts and god i i don't want to go off on too much of a tangent here but like players for video
John:
i there is a minimum set of functionality i think it should be required and honestly that minimum is is too low maybe i'm the only person who finds themselves in the situation but very often you'll be watching a television program and some you know some will pass a note to somebody or there'll be some text on the screen or something and i'll want to be able to read it like i want to be able to pause it so i can read uh you know the text right even if it's just like an easter egg and you weren't even supposed to read it but sometimes even you were supposed to read i want to be able to read it at my leisure and think about how it affects the plot or whatever
John:
Getting the thing paused on the frame that contains a non-motion blurred version of that text is incredibly difficult because so many players have controls that disappear.
John:
If you hit the pause button and it's paused, then you hit play.
John:
The controls that let you pause disappear after a moment, and then you want to pause.
John:
What?
John:
No, I want to pause there.
John:
Oh, but the controls are gone.
John:
So my first tap actually just brings the controls back, and now it's too far.
John:
And then you need a fixed amount skip forwarder back.
John:
If you don't have a fixed amount... By the way, see also the touch bar.
John:
If you don't have a fixed amount skip forwarder back, then you're forced to scrub.
John:
Good luck scrubbing back 30 seconds in a two-hour...
John:
progress bar forget about that so now you're no but so let's say you have a scrub forwarder back if it's 30 seconds now you've got to wait 30 29 20 something seconds to get back to where you were and then you have to pre-stage the pause button tap to make the controls visible oh they disappeared tap to you have to like pre-stage it and then when you get close you have to do play pause play pause play pause play pause just to creep it's like for god's sake people this is so easy on the quick time player seven which will soon be gone where you can just pause at any point use the arrow keys to go forward and backward a frame at a time
John:
Maybe these are expert controls.
John:
Maybe I'm asking for too much.
John:
But all I'm saying is when Apple has centralized the player into one place, that's the opportunity to have a way, even if it's just for experts, to do everything I'm just describing.
John:
Forward and back by frame amounts.
John:
play pause skip forward and back by perhaps even configurable amounts that are non-uniform i mean even even overcast the application that doesn't want to add weird features lets you just specify how much you want to skip forward or back and it's anyway sorry for that tangent but i have i have hopes for the apple player that apple's because apple's players usually are pretty good in terms of scrubbing and features and skipping and stuff like that oh and by the way have a way to turn on subtitles without going through seven submenus plex
John:
anyway that's that's the uh that's the the television thing and the channels packages within television you can subscribe to channels like showtime and hbo and all that other stuff and it's like you can do that from within the channel and then when you play them you don't go to the hbo application you don't go to the showtime app you don't have to remember what the hell's the name of the showtime app is it hbo now or hbo go like
John:
it's all in one place so anyway that's uh apple's tv channels thing i think it is is an improvement a clear improvement over the over the current system where they try to do this but not particularly well it still has the same uh lack of netflix which makes sense because netflix is massively the market leader and why would netflix subsume itself to this apple interface like it doesn't make any sense uh also by the way
John:
I mean, it's hard to tell because we haven't used this, but based on the demos, I would say that the Netflix interface to letting you continue what you were watching before and to presenting you with stuff you might want to watch is still probably better than Apple's because Netflix is pretty good at that.
John:
Not perfect, and it could be better because Netflix...
John:
really really wants you to like kind of like youtube really wants you to ride the algorithmic wave right they don't want you to build your list of things you want to watch they just want to like we know what you want to watch because it's either what you're watching before or what our system thinks you want to watch but you also have the ability to add things to quote unquote my list but getting to my list in the ui is sometimes tricky because they don't want to they don't want you to use it like a a cue right and so it's there's a little but anyway netflix is good at figuring out what you might want to watch and it is good about letting you resume where you picked up
John:
Unlike, I don't want to go another stupid rant on this.
John:
Unlike, by the way, so many other video apps where, like, I forget which one this is because I subscribe to so many freaking things.
John:
I think it might be Hulu or maybe it's a CBS app.
John:
Some show that I watched season one of and I started watching season two of somehow because of its bad ability to sync playback position between different devices.
John:
Like I'd watch it on my TV, on my iPad, so on and so forth.
John:
thinks that i was partially through an episode in season one or maybe i even went back to it to review something like it thinks my play position is like season one episode seven like two percent through
John:
but I'm actually watching like season two, episode five.
John:
But every time I launched the app, it's like, do you want to continue watching season one, episode seven?
John:
It's like, no, I don't.
John:
I watched that whole season and there's no way in the application to tell it.
John:
I've watched the show.
John:
I even tried going to the episode, bringing the scrubber to the end and letting it naturally play off the end to let it think I played that episode.
John:
And I couldn't get through it.
John:
It's thick skull that when, when, you know, so the whole continue watching feature, they throw in your face, you launch the app and it's like, do you want to continue watching season one, episode seven?
John:
Like I do not.
John:
it's not where i am in the series you stupid application again basics that netflix mostly gets right and hopefully hopefully apple will get right like you wouldn't think there's that many features to showing video but and there's only like like a page of them but if you don't have them all or you have a bug related to them it is maddening so i have some hope that apple will do well here but i'm kind of glad that the netflix app is still separate because i think despite my frustrations with their application they're probably one of the best and i think that actually their closed caption thing is only two taps away
John:
One tap away would be ideal, people.
John:
Closed caption on or off.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Oh, and on, yeah, I guess on the same thing that we were touching on before, Apple wants you to be able to watch your stuff everywhere.
John:
This new Apple TV app will be on smart TVs, Samsung TVs in the spring, and on all the other TV manufacturers later, which means you don't need an Apple TV box to use this TV application.
John:
Previously, the only way you could get this application with this UI, this wonderful UI that we just talked about,
John:
would be on a little black Apple TV box.
John:
You'll be able to get it on your smart TV.
John:
You'll also be able to get it on Roku and Fire TV.
John:
The other little black box is not made by Apple, which is kind of amazing because it means Apple is essentially developing applications for Roku and Fire TV.
John:
Like,
John:
you know those the sdks for those systems are not the same as ios and i don't think apple is has made like a miniature ios emulator kind of like it when it was like quick time for windows they made like a miniature version of like the mac toolbox calls they needed to run quick time on windows so they're they're making considerable effort to make sure if you want to watch and at this point by the way in the presentation they hadn't yet announced all the original apple shows so it was kind of mysterious but we all know the next item will be all the original apple shows if you want to pay apple to watch those shows
John:
Watch it on your Samsung TV.
John:
Watch it on your Fire TV.
John:
Watch it on your Roku.
John:
Watch it on your LG TV.
John:
Watch it on your Sony television.
John:
It's like, we don't care.
John:
Just watch it.
John:
Just pay us and watch it.
John:
So I'm glad they're pursuing this strategy.
John:
As far as I can tell, there's still no way to watch it on the web because Apple's like, web, what's that?
John:
Or on Android, which is weird because Apple Music is on Android.
John:
But anyway, it seems the strategy is pretty clearly Apple TV and this Apple TV application, which Apple seems proud of, but which I think is just kind of middle of the road.
John:
they want that to be available everywhere, not just on their little black puck boxes, not just on their iPads.
John:
Hell, there's going to be a Mac version of it, for crying out loud.
John:
A Mac version of the TV app.
John:
How are they going to do that?
John:
I would imagine some marzipan magic.
John:
Although it says this stuff is coming in May, so I'm not entirely sure how they're going to do that.
John:
I mean, obviously, we're all running marzipan apps right now, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that Apple can ship an Apple TV app that is, in fact, marzipan, but...
John:
We'll see.
John:
Oh, and by the way, it's in 100, more than 100 countries, which every time we talk about any kind of service that we're interested in, lots of people come and tell us, well, that's great, but that service is only available in the US and Canada and some of Europe, but not where I live or whatever.
John:
So they're going to try to go global with this.
John:
So I think overall, this announcement, the Apple TV channels package and stuff, it's all improvements.
John:
It's available more places.
John:
It is a better application than it was before, even if it's still not best in class.
John:
So I'm looking forward to it.
Casey:
Apple TV Plus.
Casey:
We finally have a name.
Casey:
We have timing.
Casey:
We have no idea the price.
Casey:
It's coming in fall 2019.
Casey:
And this is the original TV and movie content that we've been hearing deals about, you know, hearing about the deals for months and months and months, if not a couple of years now.
Casey:
I really disliked this part of the presentation.
Casey:
I thought it was really hard to watch.
Casey:
What ended up happening was they brought all of these content creators on stage one by one to tell us about the things that they're making and why they made them.
Casey:
I did think the way that they just kind of had people appear on stage from, you know, a black, dark stage.
Casey:
And all of a sudden, oh, there's Steven Spielberg.
Casey:
And all of a sudden, oh, there's Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
Casey:
I thought that was well done.
Casey:
But outside of who is the guy who's a stand-up comedian?
Casey:
I always forget the guy's name.
John:
Kumail Nanjiani.
Casey:
Thank you.
John:
He was the best.
John:
Yeah, definitely.
Casey:
Far and away the best.
Casey:
Clearly was comfortable being the only guy on stage kind of riffing.
John:
He's a stand-up comedian, I think, right?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly, which is why I think he was the best.
Casey:
But most of this I found exceedingly boring and exceedingly uninteresting.
Casey:
And I kind of get why it was done.
Casey:
But I feel like it could have been a tenth as long and potentially even just done with like a little trailer movie or something like a Johnny Ives style, you know, in the white room or in this case, black room sort of thing.
Casey:
Maybe a white room with black curtains.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Anyways, the point is, I just felt like it dragged on forever and I really disliked it.
Casey:
But what did you guys think?
Casey:
Like, John, were you also bored to tears or were you really riveted by this?
John:
So they have a bunch of stuff that they paid for.
John:
Some of it is presumably done or mostly done, but a lot of it isn't done or mostly done.
John:
And ideally, if you have a bunch of video content that you've made, the way you pitch it,
John:
is to show people trailers for it.
John:
Like, show me video about the video that you made.
John:
That's why movie trailers are not a person who comes up in front of the movie theater and describes the movie.
John:
All right, so it's like the other Avengers, but there's even more characters.
John:
It has a different title, and people fight each other in it, and it's probably going to be pretty good.
John:
Now, they show a trailer, right?
John:
You want to show video.
John:
And I think the problem was that they just didn't have enough video ready to do trailers for everything.
John:
They had like their sizzle reel thing where they show select scenes from a few shows, like all combined and kind of like a medley.
John:
But I just honestly, I don't think they had enough to show you a trailer for all of the shows.
John:
And I think it would be weird and or, you know, kind of unfair or probably not great marketing to just show the one or two that happened to be farthest long in production that they have a trailer for.
John:
And you do want to have the celebrities there.
John:
Like if they had all the trailers, they would probably still want the star power.
John:
But it wouldn't then be up to the celebrities to explain to you in words.
John:
the video project that they were working on, you know, like that.
John:
And that's, that's the job they had in front of them.
John:
And some, you know, some celebrities did it better than other.
John:
Like, you know, I think, I think Kumail was, was the best one because he's a standup comedian.
John:
He got to be entertaining.
John:
Um, and it's interesting to hear people pitch their shows, um,
John:
you know to describe them right but in the end we want to see the shows and failing that we want to see trailers for them so i don't i kind of understand apple's position like i don't think they should have waited like oh they shouldn't have shown this until they had trailers for them no it's they should announce it now because i think now is a reasonable time to announce it they didn't announce a price it's only coming in the fall but they did tell us here are the people who are making the shows
John:
And here's roughly what those shows are going to be, which is better than nothing.
John:
And honestly, no one cares about or will remember how boring the presentation of people talking about their shows were.
John:
All we care about, as we've said a million times, is are the shows good?
John:
And kind of like the discussion about games, just because you have lots of money doesn't mean you know how to convert that money into good television shows.
John:
Unlike the game area, Apple hired a bunch of people that have lots of experience in this area and have a track record of knowing how to pick, pay for and cause to be produced high quality content.
John:
And that those people in turn picked other people and give the money and it rolls down.
John:
And so, like, I feel like they have a reasonable shot of producing one or two good things.
John:
but it's not easy um it's hard to like i mean netflix did it pretty amazingly well like putting all their money behind a couple of big name shows all which turned out to be pretty good for them and then they were able to diversify apple is behind everyone else in this area and they're spending a lot of money but not netflix style money quite yet which i think is smart because you don't want to pay 10 billion dollars your first year if you have no idea what you're doing um but
John:
I am looking forward to this video service.
John:
I'm going to pay for this video service.
John:
There is at least one or two shows on this video service that after hearing them described, I would be interested in watching and I think have a chance of being good and being interested to me.
John:
I think it will probably cost...
John:
around about the same as all the other video services i've subscribed to costs uh but that's fine with me uh and you know i think i'm glad apple has finally picked the name for this service and announced that it is real and we all have a date and a concrete thing to look forward to and i'm mostly going to give a pass to the weird presentations where the celebrities talk for a little bit too long
Marco:
it was it was basically the tv show version of the endless parade of game demos that we often see like at wbdc but the game demos show the actual games imagine if the game demos was just the developer talking about their game but they didn't show anything on the screen we're we're gonna have a game later this fall that's gonna really help you explore people's storytelling and their artists and their stories let's
John:
It's a great racing game.
John:
The cars go really fast, and the roads have a lot of turns, and there are items that you can shoot.
John:
We're really going to change the world.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the Oprah intro, my favorite tweet was Mr. Rebo on Twitter.
Marco:
Christ himself would be embarrassed by that.
John:
Yeah, that was very overblown.
John:
And Oprah was basically the one more thing.
John:
And the intro they had was like their little – they had to have a video.
John:
It was like their little words and dots about the voice that we need to hear and that has been gone for too long.
John:
And I was like, what?
John:
Is it Louis C.K.?
John:
I mean –
John:
I thought it was going to be Obama at first.
John:
Some of it would have lined up with that, but no, it's just like... It was just too overblown.
John:
I think as we were discussing in Slack, it's an interesting line to walk because creative things can often get away with that, like the big emotional appeal, because they're kind of right that the whole storytelling thing does connect with people emotionally and you can...
John:
You can get dramatic lead-ups like that that resonate with people because it is a, you know, a valued property or a story or there's an audience connection or whatever.
John:
And even in the technology world, like we were talking about the incredibly over-the-top intro to the iPhone.
John:
Like there's been, you know, whatever it was...
John:
three amazing revolutionary things in the history of apple and it's like so incredibly overblown and yet in hindsight probably undersold the iphone which is amazing because like they didn't know i mean they thought they had an amazing thing and they did but like you could go back in time with hindsight and said actually we can crank up the hyperbole here because you don't realize this but the iphone is going to be way bigger than you think it is
John:
right so you never know like i give i give apple mostly a pass because i feel like their heart's in the right place they wanted it to be a thing that that connected with audiences and so they went for it and if it fell on its face a little bit that's a great example of the the uh the experience of uh making making and funding creative content you have to go into it with your full heart and sometimes you go splat on your face and you got to get back up and try again
Marco:
i have a very hard time getting too excited about this because you know the iphone was the iphone this is like 10 tv shows it's fine like one of them might be good though that's probably about the ratio to expect that's realistic but like even if one is really good and even if even if heck let's say they do really well and they've done a really good job with these let's say five of them are really good we're adding to the world five tv shows
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
We have a lot of really good TV shows already.
Marco:
And don't forget another recurring subscription to pay for those TV shows.
Marco:
Don't forget that part.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
This is going to be one of those areas like Android phones where I'm just not in this world at all.
Marco:
I'm going to have a very hard time ever covering this area of news or topics.
Marco:
Honestly, if you want this kind of stuff, listen to Upgrade.
Marco:
Upgrade does a way better job of covering the TV and entertainment side of this than we ever can.
Marco:
So yeah, just listen to Upgrade for this because
Marco:
Apple is super excited about their new TV series.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
Apple knows more about them than they showed.
Marco:
What we saw was not very exciting.
Marco:
Maybe it'll be exciting.
Marco:
Maybe these will be good.
Marco:
But none of that was shown to us.
Marco:
What was shown to us was a parade of celebrities that really was very long and drawn out.
Marco:
And that Apple was hyping way more than what was warranted for the amount they were actually ready to reveal.
John:
I think, though, looking back up the stack at all the Apple TV things, combined, it does make a fairly compelling...
John:
apple related television story right despite the fact that obviously they didn't announce any new hardware or anything in that remote it still sucks what they've done with the their improved app things their channel deal uh you know all the economics of apple finding new ways to get cuts of people's subscription for their services while improving their user experience like it adds up to a story that certainly makes sense to apple from a financial perspective because you know recurring revenue and cuts of other people's subscriptions
John:
makes sense to the user as a general improvement to the experience of using the Apple TV applications.
John:
Despite the fact that it's surely not the center of many people's lives, it is a part of a lot of people's lives, and making that part better is good.
John:
Expanding it to be available to way more people, like you don't have to have one of those black pucks anymore, right?
John:
And funding original content, which as we know is table stakes for getting in on the business and being able to get your own recurring revenue of original content.
John:
It adds up to a fairly comprehensive, fairly good Apple-style...
John:
baseline level table stakes apple entering the streaming video original content market which is basically what we expected so i mean i don't think i'm not sure what people other than having a better presentation or having like shows that everyone agrees are going to be amazing even before they see them
John:
There's not much more or better they could have done.
John:
There's not some aspect of this where we're going to say, oh, they really messed up there, or they really didn't announce this thing.
John:
They've got all the pieces here, and they all begin with Apple TV, right?
John:
There is a consistent brand for them.
John:
i i think it's a good start uh for for their endeavors as long as they kind of like the games thing as long as they stick to it and like when maybe all their original first shows flop or whatever you just got to keep trying just to be a player it's not they're going to come to dominate it's not they're going to you know buy netflix which they maybe should have done a long time ago but too late for that now
John:
It's not that they're going to become the center for all our entertainment because inevitably there's lots of competition.
John:
They just want to be a player.
John:
I think it's important for them to be a player.
John:
I think it's good for them to be a player.
John:
And I think being a player in this market forces them to do things they otherwise wouldn't like expand, expand their software experience out to other platforms and make sure that, you know, the Mac can do this stuff as well.
John:
And, you know, like I,
John:
I don't want to be negative about this section because I think every single one of our announcements was good.
John:
There are just still question marks.
John:
And because it's kind of all out in our future, there's the little kind of like hurry up and wait thing of like, well, you told us about some stuff.
John:
The presentation was awkward.
John:
What do I do about it now?
John:
Maybe I'm not that into it.
John:
Wake me up when it's something compelling.
John:
And I see that perspective, but as somebody who subscribes to every video service under the sun and will watch a whole bunch of these shows, I'm actually kind of excited for it.
Marco:
Yeah, and I actually am excited to see some of these shows too, but it's like, great, my interest is slightly peaked after a very long presentation, and I have to wait six months before any of that can be resolved.
Marco:
It just seemed like...
Marco:
this was more of a presentation for Apple's own sake than for ours.
Marco:
And I'm sure they have their reasons.
John:
And honestly, they had to announce something.
John:
Like, we know they're making shows.
John:
I didn't want them to wait six months to announce this service.
John:
I don't want them to wait until all the shows are available streaming today.
John:
I think right now was a perfectly good time to announce it.
Marco:
I guess, but I don't know.
John:
Because the more time they wait, the more there are going to be details of the shows revealed, the more we're going to be like, who's making all these shows for what Apple service?
John:
Announce the service.
John:
It's fine.
John:
I think it's perfectly good.
John:
If anything, I'm a little bit anxious to get the Apple TV app update because if you use that app at all, any significant improvement to it is welcome.
John:
So bring it on.
John:
And that's coming in May, so that's not that long.
John:
Too far in the future.
John:
So...
John:
i mean i can see the perspective you know from the presentation but like again that this presentation will fade in our memories very quickly most people don't even know this presentation took place the way they'll learn about it is there'll be an ios update that will or an app store update that will update their apple tv app and they'll have a better app like oh they made an improvement the app it's better now and then sometime in the more distant future
John:
They'll buy a new TV or something and see the fact that they have an Apple TV app and they'll see original shows in it and maybe hear about one from a friend who says, oh, you got to check out that C show where everybody's blind.
John:
And they'll be like, how do you do that?
John:
Oh, it's on Apple TV, something or other.
John:
And they'll figure out how to watch it on their TV and they'll watch a TV show.
John:
And boom, Apple is now a player in a market where once they weren't.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, HelloPillow, Backblaze, and Linode.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
Marco:
People keep asking us about, quote, bread slicing a bagel, which seems to be just like basically slicing it up into discs instead of like big circles.
Marco:
Like you slice it a whole bunch of ways as if you're putting it through a bread slicer so that it slices it as a bunch of thin discs.
Marco:
What is this for besides making bad bagel chips?
John:
I think it's for, I mean, I feel like it's a basic acknowledgement that when people get, these are from Panera, when people get quote unquote bagels from Panera, they're not really bagels and people don't want to eat them like bagels.
John:
It's just round bread with a hole in the middle.
John:
It isn't that bad.
John:
Round bread can be good, but like when you have that.
Marco:
Panera's bagels are not that bad.
Marco:
They are very bad.
Marco:
They are on the level of Brugger's bagels, which is pretty good.
John:
No, they are so much worse than Brugger's.
John:
So much worse.
John:
I would not eat a Panera bagel.
Marco:
They're not quite as good as Brugger's, but I don't think there's a very big gap between them.
John:
I think there's a big gap.
John:
Anyway, when you buy bagels like that for a group, because no one is like, oh, awesome bagels.
John:
I love bagels.
John:
And it's going to take one and cut it in half like a bagel and eat it like a bagel.
John:
Like no one wants it that much.
John:
If you bread slice it, what it turns into is a bunch of little pieces of bread that people are like, I don't really want a bagel, but I'll take one of these little pieces of bread and maybe smear some cream cheese on it.
John:
So they're kind of acknowledging that these are not bagel enough for people to treat and eat them and get excited about them like bagels.
John:
But sometimes people might want a slice of bread.
John:
So let's go with that.
Marco:
I actually like seeing the, the bread sliced bagel.
Marco:
I actually do kind of respect this as a choice because you're right.
Marco:
Like basically if you just slice them regularly or if you don't slice them at all in a communal setting like this, you're forced to take a lot more bagel.
Marco:
Like you're forced to take at least half a bagel.
Marco:
Um, and inevitably people like start cutting them themselves anyway and like they'll like cut it in half and leave the other half for somebody else.
Marco:
And then you go like a bunch of like bagel butts.
John:
Nobody wants or just start tearing pieces off like animals.
Um,
Marco:
Yeah, and so the bread slice thing makes sense if what you want to do is have a small amount of bagel, and this also dramatically increases the surface area ratio of cream-cheesable surface area to amount of bagel you're eating.
Marco:
So if you want to optimize for cream-cheesable surface area, this is the way to do it.
Casey:
I guess in a work environment, maybe this would make sense.
Casey:
But my word, in any normal scenario, this is just blasphemy.
John:
And it just – It's an acknowledgment that you don't have bagels because if you took real bagels and did that to it, like you should be set on fire.
John:
Like it's there.
John:
Right?
John:
But for these Panera things, it's like, whatever, you know, whatever it takes to get people to actually consume and in some way receive some enjoyment from this food item, then go for it.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I would have expected this of Montreal, but it seems so very weird to come from St.
Casey:
Louis.
Casey:
It's going to shove that in there, don't you?
Casey:
Can't help myself.
Casey:
Can't help myself.
Marco:
The funny thing is, Montreal bagels are actually too thin.
Marco:
This actually wouldn't work very well.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
And they are tasty.
Casey:
They're just not the canonical bagel, if you ask me.
John:
Why do you do it to yourself, Casey?
John:
Why do you have to antagonize the Canadians?
John:
They just want to be polite and sorry.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
At least they don't incorporate.
Casey:
I can't even do it right.
Casey:
I've said this to you before.
Casey:
What are you trying to say?
Casey:
Your incorporate is not correct.
Marco:
He's trying to say you're not Boston accent that you insist you don't have.
Marco:
With my accent?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Whatever you say, it's like Marco's query.
Casey:
It's called the Long Island accent.
John:
Marco, you married someone with it.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
You have a Boston accent.
Marco:
You don't even realize it.
John:
Believe me, I do not.
John:
Incorporate.
Casey:
I don't even know what you're trying to say.
Casey:
It was not perfect, but it was much closer than mine.
Casey:
Much, much closer than mine.
John:
If I park the car in Harvard Yard, then you'll let me know, but I don't.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
No, not that, but the other Boston accent, the one that sounds like a Long Island.
Marco:
No, it really doesn't.
Marco:
Believe me.
Casey:
i i'm not weighing in on whether you are or do or do not have a long island or long island accent but uh i will say that your incorporate sounds wrong to my incorporate i don't think i say it weird at all incorporate no you said it normally there but when you say well i'll try to say it abnormally how do i supposed to say abnormally incorporate are you with me on this marco
Marco:
Yeah, when John says certain, like, you know, vowel next to R sounds, they will often come out in a slightly Boston-ish way.
Marco:
And he insists he does not have this kind of accent.
John:
I don't think, A, I don't think you know what slightly Boston-ish means, and B, I disagree that they come out in any weird way.
John:
I do say coffee instead of coffee or whatever the hell normal people say.
Marco:
But that's a New York accent.
Marco:
It's not Boston.
Marco:
You can't possibly live somewhere for as long as you've lived there.
John:
I certainly...
John:
I don't interact with people with a Boston accent.
John:
I go to work with a bunch of programmers who are also not from Massachusetts.
Marco:
How long have you lived there?
Marco:
Like a decade or more?
Marco:
At least 15, 20 years, right?
John:
When do I encounter people?
John:
The most I encounter people with Boston accents is in movies.
Marco:
same as you well if you watched movies like i don't i don't know i'm not i'm not talking about like the like the ben affleck or tom hanks like terrible boston accent the tom hanks please where did tom hanks come from no like they both have done bad boston accents and movie roles before but like it and they're not good at it um i'm not talking about that kind of like exaggerated like boston like that kind of thing
Marco:
The way you form certain vowel sounds, you have influence from Boston.
John:
Well, you still haven't given me an example of it yet.
Casey:
Listen back to this episode, John, and when you say incorporate way like an hour ago, you probably won't hear it, but you should hear it.
John:
The thing is, here's the other thing.
John:
Because it's late at night and I'm tired and I mumble, I often say words in totally weird ways, some of which I can imagine coincidentally landing on a recognizable accent.
John:
But most of the time, it's just random ass slurring of words.
Casey:
Incorporate is every time.
John:
I just said it 20 times for you.
John:
Incorporate, incorporate, incorporate.
John:
That's how I said it.
Casey:
No, because now you're thinking about it.
Casey:
It's not.
John:
Incorporate.
Casey:
Here's the thing, though, Marco.
Casey:
If John said, I need to go pack the car down by Harvard Yard or whatever the hell it is.
Casey:
You can't even do that one.
Casey:
I know, I can't because it's so wrong.
Casey:
He would still say that that is just the particular street he grew up on in Long Island.
Casey:
And that's where the accent comes from.
John:
I know what a Long Island accent is, and I know what a Boston accent is, and apparently you know about neither.
John:
You can keep thinking you don't have an accent.
John:
Next, we're going to tell me Casey has a Southern accent because he lives in the South.
John:
No, he doesn't.
John:
And he probably doesn't interact with people with Southern accents frequently.
Marco:
John is the only person on Earth who has not been influenced at all by the place he's lived for over a decade.
John:
No, some people are susceptible to it, and some people aren't.
John:
And I am not susceptible.
John:
I maintain that.
John:
My own original accent.
John:
Oh, I see how it is.
John:
Some people are susceptible.
John:
Like my mother, when she goes down south and talks to her sister who lives in the south, immediately picks up a southern accent.
John:
Or people, when they visit England, suddenly have English accents, right?
John:
Everyone knows people like that, where they're there for three days and all of a sudden they've got the accent.
Casey:
No, but here's the thing.
Casey:
I have resisted some Virginia-isms pretty badly.
Casey:
And Richmond's a melting pot where you do definitely hear a Southern accent.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say you don't.
Casey:
But there's plenty of transplants from all over the place.
Casey:
But I have noticed, having been in Virginia since 2000, that I'm starting to elongate.
Casey:
I think I've made this speech on either this show or Analog recently.
Casey:
I've elongated some words.
Casey:
So I've noticed that mile is creeping ever closer to mile.
Casey:
which is a very Virginia thing, and I keep trying to correct it, but it just happens.
John:
I haven't heard you say that.
Marco:
And you're surrounded... Exactly.
Marco:
Even if the people around you don't have thick accents, you still are in a region where you're surrounded by something... You can't possibly not be affected.
Marco:
I have...
Marco:
I have a slight change in the way I talk now compared to when I lived in Ohio or Pittsburgh because I'm around a bunch of New Yorkers now.
Marco:
And I've lived here for 10 years or more than that, actually 12 years now.
Marco:
And so I know that there are certain words that I say a little bit differently, certain vowel sounds that are slightly different.
Marco:
It isn't a huge influence.
Marco:
I wouldn't describe myself as having a New York accent, but the New York accent has affected the way I talk, and there is some influence there.
Marco:
Right.
John:
The main effect that living in Massachusetts had on me is less into my New York accent, making me more neutral because I can't say coffee here as much as I used to because everyone else isn't saying coffee.
John:
So I end up saying coffee, which is a slight softening, but it is not a Bostonification.
John:
It is merely a more neutralization of it.
John:
My New York accent gets thicker.
John:
If I go to Long Island and start talking with people at a deli, suddenly it gets thicker because I'm back home and it's like you're talking in the same wavelength.
John:
Here it becomes more neutral and kind of just like the awes go down.
John:
Right.
John:
But the idea that it's a Boston accent is mostly people who don't know what a Boston accent is hearing a accent and thinking it must be Boston.
Casey:
I'm on team Marco on this one.
John:
And citing the incorporate thing.
John:
Now I remember that.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
That was it.
John:
Citing the incorporate thing.
John:
That's a New York accent.
John:
Corporate.
John:
C-A-W.
John:
Incorporate.
Casey:
Citing that.
John:
The one time I said it, it was one of those weird tongue twister mangle things like when I mangled the word developers in the Schiller interview.
John:
It's not like that's an accent.
John:
It's just a mistake of speech.
Casey:
You do it every time except when we brought it to your attention.
Casey:
And for the record, I am not necessarily claiming.
John:
Incorporate.
John:
I could say it a hundred times to you.
Casey:
I can't mimic it.
Casey:
But for the record, I am not the one that's blaming this on Boston, although I do agree with Marco that there is a natural, be it a softening or an adoption.
John:
And like I said, I think the natural thing is for me to soften my New York accent to not be as extreme and say coffee talk.
John:
But I still say dog and dog, log and log, all that business.
John:
None of that is how you actually say any of those words.
John:
The way I say it, the thing I was getting at is elsewhere in the country, the word L-O-G and the word D-O-G rhyme.
John:
But where I'm from, they do not.
John:
And they still don't because I still say dog and log.
John:
And they're pronounced, they don't rhyme with each other, dog and log.
John:
I don't say dog and log because I was a long analyst, I would say it, but I say dog and log.
John:
The softening of that from dog to dog is what happens from living in Massachusetts.
John:
But it doesn't make me say them rhyming anymore.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Do they rhyme when you say them?
John:
Dog and log?
John:
No, I feel like dog and log.
Casey:
Does that rhyme?
Casey:
I don't feel like it does.
Marco:
I don't think they rhyme the way other people say it, John.
Marco:
I think maybe you have Boston hearing now.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
No, dog and log.
John:
If you say dog and dog, say it like with a Long Island accent, dog and log.
Marco:
No, I hear it.
Marco:
My assertion is that they're always a little bit different.
Marco:
Even like in the Midwest, they're a little bit different sounding.
Marco:
No, they're not.
Marco:
Some people say them exactly the same and they're monsters, but it's true.