Auto-Update My Parents
Casey:
You know, if only you had a picture management solution.
John:
Yeah, that would be nice.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be awesome?
Casey:
We should talk about that for another hour.
Casey:
Let's do that.
John:
Last week, we talked about the problem of disabling, turning on the reduced motion thing.
John:
And if you turn it off, then you get the parallax effect and it zooms in your background image and it was cutting off my background image that I wanted to use with my dog.
John:
And so I was talking about
John:
If I could extend the background of the image of my dog to make the image bigger so it kind of looked like I could get the same crop as I had with reduced motion on and off by using two different pictures.
John:
And I mentioned using Content-Aware Fill to try it in Photoshop, and I did that.
John:
Content-Aware Fill is not magic.
John:
It worked okay.
John:
I tried touching it up, and I made a version that was extended a little bit, but it wasn't great.
John:
And then a lot of people recommended to me an iOS app called Anticrop,
John:
And I'm like, well, that's probably going to work about the same as content-aware fill.
John:
But that was not the case.
John:
It worked way better than content-aware fill.
John:
Obviously, Photoshop in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing might be better than Anticrop.
John:
But for me, who just wanted to spend two minutes in Anticrop, I just pressed the button and extended it.
John:
I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what I did in Photoshop over the last five minutes.
John:
Only this is a better job.
John:
So I was impressed by that.
John:
But of course, Anticrop has the same limitations as content-aware film Photoshop, and then it has no idea what a dog looks like.
John:
And my dog is going off the top and right edges of the screen.
John:
So neither one of these programs is going to draw the rest of the dog.
John:
It'll draw the rest of the deck, which is pretty regular straight lines and, you know, a single color and stuff like that, but it cannot draw the rest of the dog.
John:
Until maybe Photoshop CS10.
John:
I'm not holding my breath.
John:
So someone named Jim Pierce on Twitter said, hey, I'm a visual effects artist.
John:
Do you want me to extend the picture of your dog?
John:
He said, have at it.
John:
So I sent him the picture.
John:
He sent it back to me and he did an amazing job.
John:
He extended not only the deck edges, but also the dog because he knows what a dog looks like.
John:
So once again, humans triumph over computers.
John:
His website, I believe, is hatandsuitcase.com, and you can look at his portfolio and everything up there.
John:
But I'm not sure if I'll use the picture because I just couldn't stand the parallax stuff.
John:
Like, even with the picture crop looking right, the dialog boxes still move, and the icons on the home screen still move.
John:
Like, my background is black, but the icons still move on the black background, and I can see it, and it drives me nuts.
John:
So I'm still in reduced motion land, despite the fact that I don't like the crossfades.
Casey:
Yeah, it's funny you say that.
Casey:
So my friend Chris Harris, who I believe both of you guys have met, he works for the other media and has been making a few waves lately for being the head of the company or product called Glide, which Dalrymple is using for his rebooted Loop magazine.
Casey:
He saw me or heard me complaining about the same issue and did some sort of Photoshop magic on my picture of Aaron that I took in 2008 and extended.
Casey:
It was taken in our kitchen, so he extended all the bits that are easy to extend.
Casey:
And that was the first time I'd seen an instance of Content-Aware fill in my world.
Casey:
I'd seen the original video from whenever, a few years ago, when this concept was kind of invented and
Casey:
And my goodness, it worked flawlessly and looks really good.
Casey:
It's kind of creepy how good it can just invent something out of nothing.
Casey:
So I was very impressed.
Casey:
So thanks, Chris, for that.
Casey:
And then I guess something happened with Lynx and Mavericks.
Casey:
Is this you, John, that added this?
John:
Yeah, I think we talked about a couple of shows maybe way back at the beginning.
John:
I don't remember even which podcast it was on.
John:
I mentioned that I have a little folder or a little tag set in Yojimbo where I keep the starting point of my notes for each new version of OS X, and I have to make those notes before I know what the name of the OS would be, and I always guess and put the name down there.
John:
And then for 10.9, I made a links folder, L-Y-N-X.
John:
Uh, and not necessarily because I thought that would be the name of the next big cat thing, because I've always thought like, where can you go from a lion and, you know, mountain lions seem kind of lame, but it's like, all right, well, they're done.
John:
You know, it can't possibly be a cat, but if it was a cat, it should be links.
John:
And so I wrote links and then, you know, of course it's called Maverick has nothing to do with big cats.
John:
But, uh, this past week I did get a tip that, uh,
John:
But Apple was at the very least investigating the word Lynx if they were to go with cat names, which, of course, they didn't in the end.
John:
So I feel slightly vindicated in my instincts for Lynx because I got Mountain Lion.
John:
I, you know, if you had forced me to guess, I would have said, well, it's got to be some sort of thing, a mountain lion or something like that, you know.
John:
I feel like I have a good sense of what the cats could be.
John:
I think we talked about this on the recent episode of Talk Show, more about the cat stuff.
John:
But anyway, I feel good knowing that Lynx was in play and that it could have been a 10.9 name, and I would have been perfectly happy with it.
John:
But we're on to the places in California, so that's fine.
Casey:
Well, it's funny because looking in the show notes, the only entry is OS X 10.9 LYNX.
Casey:
And I assumed this was going to be you lamenting the lack of the web browser or something changing about the web browser in Mavericks.
John:
That would be lowercase links, right?
John:
Because the executable is lowercase.
John:
And I always install it, install links on OS X.
Marco:
Do you test your websites in it?
John:
No.
Marco:
With JavaScript off?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I occasionally find myself firing it up, even if it's just to run links dash dash dump or something.
John:
I use it.
John:
Fun.
John:
You would.
Casey:
You would.
Casey:
I haven't used it in forever.
Casey:
Okay, so the other big news that just happened this week, and then I think we have a tremendous amount of Mavericks review-related follow-up, is EverPix Folded.
Casey:
which I'm really, really, really disappointed by.
Casey:
After listening to, I don't recall what episode it was of the prompt, and I don't think Hackett is in the chat to correct me, Bradley Chambers came on the prompt to talk about photo management, which is something I've classically been very bad at, and said, oh, you should really try Everpix.
Casey:
It's really good, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And so I tried it and decided it is really good and actually paid for your subscription and
Casey:
And it turns out that they have just decided to close their business.
Casey:
And I'm very sad about that.
Casey:
And I don't know what you guys have to add.
Casey:
Certainly, there's some things we can talk about here in the show notes.
Casey:
But John, it seems like you've taken a keen interest in this.
John:
Yeah, I signed up for Everpix just because I'm like a lot of people looking for some way to deal with all my pictures to give me a little bit more security.
John:
And I'm all paranoid and have all these multiple bags of my pictures.
John:
But the thing about Everpix was like, we'll store all your pictures for you.
John:
We'll suck them out from all the places where they are.
John:
So it didn't want to like own the pictures.
John:
It was like, we'll pull them out of iPhone.
John:
We'll pull them off your phone.
John:
We'll pull them from wherever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh, and we'll store them forever.
John:
And there's no limit.
John:
And the price was like 50 bucks a year or something.
John:
So I was like, all right, I'll pay $50 for one year, uh, just to try this thing out to see if it'll give me like, you know, a fourth or a fifth backup of my stuff.
John:
Uh, and the fringe benefits of it were that I had access to all of my pictures, uh,
John:
from any device that could run a web browser.
John:
And they had a nice iOS app as well.
John:
So if there's some picture I wanted to see from, like, seven years ago or something, I'm not going to have it on my phone because I can't have all my photos on my phone.
John:
And, you know, if I didn't pick that one, it's not going to be there.
John:
And I can wait until I get home and go through my iPhoto library or something.
John:
But EverPix gave me access from anywhere to all of my pictures.
John:
And you could easily, like, give full-resolution download links to relatives if they wanted.
John:
Oh, I want to do new prints for my wall of this picture of whatever –
John:
It was just convenient.
John:
It's the way, you know, what everyone's saying about Everpix now that they're gone is like, this is the way insert companies should do photo management, whether it's Google or Microsoft or Apple or anybody.
John:
And actually Google sort of comes close to this with their photo stuff, but they don't have as many hooks into Apple's applications and stuff.
John:
But anyway, you don't have to worry about your photos.
John:
They're all in the cloud.
John:
We'll save them all for you forever.
John:
Storage is unlimited.
John:
The pricing is reasonable.
John:
You have access to them anywhere.
John:
Uh, so it was great.
John:
And mostly I didn't think about too much about it because I'm like, okay, I'm going to try this for a year.
John:
And if it seems like it works out, I'll sign up for another year.
John:
So I didn't just sign up for a month.
John:
It was like, well, 50 bucks, I'll try the whole year.
John:
And had it gone through the whole year, I probably would have signed up for it again.
John:
If only for just like, I would pay $50.
John:
It's like, even if they didn't store them, but somehow gave me magical access to them from everywhere.
John:
But like, you know, tunneling through to my home computer or something.
John:
It was just great to have access to them.
John:
And there was a feature that Lex talks about a lot, Lex Friedman, of the Unprofessional Podcast and other things, that he liked the flashback emails that it would send you.
John:
It would send you an email like, this is what happened a year ago today, two years ago today, three years ago today.
John:
And if you don't have kids, you may think, well, nothing happened three years ago today.
John:
But when you have kids, you take pictures, especially when they're young, you take pictures like every single day.
John:
And so it's kind of nice to see on this day in history, when your kids were three years younger, these were the pictures you took.
John:
And I thought that was a little bit silly, and I didn't sign up for the emails because I don't need to get any more emails.
John:
But occasionally when I'm flipping around on my phone, I would go to the EverPix app and look at the flashback, and it was cute and enjoyable.
John:
But alas, the company is gone, and they're supposedly refunding the prorated amounts for the people who subscribed and their subscriptions weren't up yet.
John:
And I think it's sad for everyone involved because I think when we first talked about Everpix, we said, you know, Apple should buy this company.
John:
It's filled with a bunch of ex-Apple people.
John:
They're doing things better than Apple does.
John:
I don't understand why Apple can't do what they're doing or couldn't do what they're doing, but they're not.
John:
So why don't you just buy this company and do it?
John:
And that didn't work out.
John:
Nobody wanted to buy them.
John:
They could.
John:
They tried to sell themselves.
John:
They had, you know, a couple of close calls, but no takers, and they just ran out of money.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, and it's funny that you mentioned the daily flashback email because when I started the trial with EverPix, which would give you, I think, a year of photos, and then you can pull a Mike Hurley and, you know, sell your soul in order to get more free – more time –
Casey:
for free.
Casey:
Well, even the one year of flashbacks, even for a person who doesn't have children, I thought was really cool.
Casey:
And man, as soon as I signed up for the full year like you did and started getting the flashback emails from as much as like 10 or 12 or whatever years ago, it was the neatest thing to be able to see.
Casey:
And I found myself, I realized that I was sending pictures to like Aaron and my friends of
Casey:
Oh, look what we were doing six years ago.
Casey:
And I was probably getting to the point that I was becoming a spam bot.
Casey:
And it's probably for the best in my personal relationships that EverPix is going away.
Casey:
But the point I'm driving at is that the flashback emails were incredible, even as someone who doesn't have kids.
Casey:
And you had mentioned being able to...
Casey:
get to your pictures from basically anywhere.
Casey:
And not unlike Mike, I was one of those people who had a camera roll of three gazillion pictures.
Casey:
And the reason I did that, even though I had gotten them off my phone and onto my computer, I always wanted to be able to show a friend or someone I just met or a
Casey:
A picture if I felt the need.
Casey:
So, for example, if I'm talking about when Marco and Tiff and Aaron and I went to Germany, I want to be able to have those pictures always or my or the top gear parties that we throw or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
I want to be able to show someone those pictures.
Casey:
And with Everpix, I could do that.
Casey:
And I didn't have to have a camera roll that was 3,000 pictures, which is literally what I had.
Casey:
And now I don't really have a solution for that at the moment.
Casey:
And perhaps in a minute, we'll talk about some of the alternatives.
Casey:
But it seems like from what I've gathered, there's no clear winner.
Casey:
And the other thing that I thought was interesting about this, I don't think it would have worked because it's too fiddly.
Casey:
But I was surmising on Twitter earlier, what would have happened if...
Casey:
You could provide your own storage, but EverPix provided the software.
Casey:
So I'm thinking kind of along the line, kind of a cross maybe between FileTransporter, a past sponsor of the show, and the Fever RSS reader, where you need a web server that you install their software on.
Casey:
Or at least that's the way it was originally.
Casey:
It may not be anymore.
Marco:
Or even like Arc, the backup app for Mac, which uses S3 as a storage engine, but you provide your own S3 credentials.
Marco:
So you're paying for all the costs, and they just sell you the app.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so I was thinking, I wonder if S3 bills weren't an issue for EverPix, could they have survived?
Casey:
And both Bradley and Stephen Hackett, who I was exchanging tweets with, of course called me out, and rightfully so, saying, well, then nobody would have bought it because it's way too fiddly.
Casey:
And that's true.
Casey:
But on the other side of the coin, I can't help but wonder what could have been.
Casey:
And it's very easy to be an armchair quarterback in this capacity.
Casey:
But I'm really, really bummed about what's happened with Everpix.
Casey:
And I wish that Apple had bought them up.
Casey:
Although, John, you had exchanged a few tweets with, I guess, one of the employees, one of the founders.
Casey:
I don't know if you want to talk about that at all.
John:
Yeah, so a couple of people were responding to, you know, the news and responding to my retweet of whoever, whatever announcement it was.
John:
And one of the people, Rory on Twitter, said the classy thing to do for these failed companies is to...
John:
Open source their technology, you know, so the stuff that they wrote doesn't just go away like, OK, well, the company failed.
John:
Why not make all your code open source?
John:
And one of the engineers of the company said, we wish we could have, but we had to sell the technology to pay for an orderly wind down and refund.
John:
So they already sold like the underlying technology, I guess.
John:
And they did that so they would have enough money to keep the lights on long enough to wind down the service and to give everyone back their refunds.
John:
You know, I have to pay their bills and, you know, all the outstanding stuff.
John:
So they're trying to shut the company down in a good way, like giving you a refund for the time that you paid for that you don't get because the service is going away and doing all that stuff.
John:
And to do that, apparently they had to sell the tech.
John:
And so, of course, I asked who bought it.
John:
And he said, that's currently private.
John:
So we don't know who bought it.
John:
So for all we know, Apple bought the tech.
John:
Yahoo bought the tech.
John:
Microsoft, Google, who knows who bought it?
John:
So that was interesting.
John:
So they couldn't sell the company, but apparently they could sell the tech or whatever at fire sale prices.
John:
And then some other back and forth about, you know, well, why didn't the company make it?
John:
There's like, you know, big long blog posts about it and speculation, but this is from the guy at the company.
John:
He said a variable costs were covered by customer income.
John:
So they had enough subscribers to cover their variable costs, but they hadn't yet reached the economy scale to cover their fixed costs.
John:
Like basically they didn't have enough customers to make the fixed costs of like running the service infrastructure and everything to cover it.
John:
to cover all that stuff and that was really the problem they needed to scale up to get bigger and bigger if the uh i think this is one another one of the guys the company said uh if they had three times their current subscriber base they would have been profitable so they just needed more people and so that's another thing to put another nail in the coffin of casey's idea to have like your own server and your own storage like they had to make it more accessible they needed to market it to more people and there's been a lot of articles written about how
John:
Having an awesome product is not enough in the startup world because everyone who used Everpix loved it, and their conversion rate from free to paid was excellent.
John:
It's just that they didn't get enough customers fast enough, and they couldn't get more funding with the tiny subscriber base they had, which was measured in the thousands, and their growth curve of how many new subscribers they were getting was just too small.
John:
So they were so close, like, oh, if we only had three times more customers.
John:
Well, that's not that big of a deal when you've got a couple thousand customers or whatever it was.
John:
I forget what it was like fifty five thousand free customers and like six or seven thousand paid.
John:
They just needed to grow a little bit faster.
John:
They just ran out of money too fast, despite the fact that the product was great.
John:
So that's kind of a shame.
John:
But like when I look at companies like this, I think.
John:
And everyone thinks it.
John:
Why is this company, with this great product that everybody loved, with this team of, like, six people, able to do something with this giant company that has billions and billions of profit, like, burning a hole in its pocket?
John:
It's got so much cash, it's trying to give it back to the shareholders to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
John:
And it still can't get rid of the cash fast enough.
John:
This cash pile is still growing.
John:
I'm talking about Apple here, of course.
John:
How come their thing...
John:
people don't like and is confusing and is crappy and costs, you know, doesn't cost more money than ever picks, but it's like Apple has huge profitable businesses that could easily subsidize the costs of, of an ever picks like service.
John:
Uh, and that, you know, it's just an opportunity for these big companies to see, to learn from the small companies as, as everyone says, whoever uses ever picks, uh, why, you know, the big thing is why doesn't, uh, photo stream, which Apple seems to now be rebranding as just iCloud, uh,
John:
you know, it's application.
John:
Why doesn't it work in reverse?
John:
Why is it your device has the last thousand photos?
John:
And then the stuff, why, why isn't it reversed?
John:
Like where the photo stream keeps all your photos and only the most recent thousand are on your device instead of being, Oh, well, you know, your pictures, once you hit a thousand photos and photo stream,
John:
the pictures don't, you know, aren't in the cloud anymore.
John:
Only the most recent 1000 are in the cloud.
John:
And of course the rest of them will be an iPhoto or on your phone or whatever.
John:
Like people, the whole point of any kind of cloud type service for pictures and photos, the whole point is you don't want people to worry.
John:
It has to be, you don't have,
John:
You don't want to have to do math in your head of like, well, where are the photos?
John:
Have I synced this recently?
John:
And if I run out of room on my phone, that's fine until I hit the 1,000-picture limit, and then they start going off the end, and I've got to make sure I sync the iPhoto on my computer, but then I've got to back up my computer.
John:
It's like people shouldn't have to worry about it.
John:
And if you have to charge money to cover the cost, fine.
John:
Charge money to cover the cost.
John:
Can you work it into the margins of your other products?
John:
I feel like a company like Apple could.
John:
The big win only happens when someone says, oh, you should get an Apple whatever phone, iPad, computer,
John:
because then you won't have to worry about if your photos are safe.
John:
Nobody ever says that now.
John:
And EverPix, you could have, when the company was still around, say, get EverPix, then you won't have to worry about if your photos are safe.
John:
And speaking of that, the second issue that a lot of people are responding about is like, oh, you know, we heard you talk about EverPix.
John:
Now look what happened.
John:
Now we learned our lesson.
John:
Never trust anybody.
John:
uh i think we emphasized this in the past show about backups the whole point is you never put all your eggs in any one basket so if a company like everpix goes down you shouldn't lose your photos because that should not have been the only copy of your photos right you should have your photos in multiple places and
John:
and if all those places can be like fire and forget all my photos are saved forever like you have them all on your computer and your computer is backed up with like you know crash banner black blaze or something like that or it's backed up to a transporter in your house and that transporter syncs with a transporter your office like many many layers of backup and all those you want to be as brain dead simple don't have to think about it everything gets backed up automatically
John:
as you want and if any one of them goes down if your hard drive dies and your mac dies you should be able to get your stuff back from like your time machine backup if your house burns down you should be able to get your stuff back from your cloud backup if your house burns down and your hard drive dies you should be able to at least get your family photos back from everpix or whatever other online service you're using to just store your photos you need to have multiple layers and if any one of those layers goes out of business burns down breaks you replace it
John:
replace ever picks with another service does the same thing replace your online backup with another backup thing replace your house with a new house replace your mac with a new mac that works replace your broken hard drive that's the whole point of backups it's not that all these things are going to be around forever it's acknowledging that every one of these things that you're backing up for will eventually not be around either the company will go out of business or the hardware will die and you should be able to replace it because that shouldn't be the only place you have your stuff
Marco:
I think you guys are being a little bit easy on EverPix.
Marco:
I think everything you said about backup is correct.
Marco:
I agree with everything you just said.
Marco:
I have nothing to add to that.
Marco:
So I'm going back a step instead.
Marco:
You look at where they say their variable costs are already covered by customer income.
Marco:
Well, is S3 a variable cost?
John:
I don't even know if they were using S3.
Marco:
They were.
Marco:
And so there's this article on the Vergs that we'll link to that is kind of like a first-person account.
Marco:
Anyway, we'll link to it.
Marco:
And they mentioned they had a $35,000 S3 bill that was about to come in that was going to be a problem.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So anyway, I think it's obvious that they were not about to be profitable because if they were about to be profitable, then it wouldn't be an issue to refund everyone's annual pre-purchases because their annual pre-purchases wouldn't all be spent already.
John:
No, they needed three times the current subscriber base to be profitable.
John:
But like I said, three times $6,000 is not insurmountable with another funding round.
John:
I feel like they could have got to three times.
John:
Their biggest cost was personnel.
John:
They spent the vast majority of the money invested on people.
John:
So yeah, that's their fixed cost.
John:
We have six people.
John:
We pay them salaries.
John:
And that's where all their money went.
John:
And so if you can get three times the subscriber base, you don't need three times the number of employees.
John:
And, you know, they would have been in the black.
John:
I'm not saying they were, like, just this close.
John:
They weren't.
John:
That's why they're gone.
John:
They didn't make it.
John:
And they didn't make it probably because they spent too much time trying to make their product better and not enough time trying to get more customers.
John:
But, you know, lesson learned.
Marco:
I mean, I think...
Marco:
They committed a massive strategic error in their product creation and in their business plan, which is, generally speaking, when you're making a new service like this or a new product like this, you've got to choose one extreme or the other.
Marco:
As we learned when Underscore David Smith and I taught Casey how to play Puerto Rico a few weeks ago –
Marco:
In the game of Puerto Rico, generally speaking, you have to pick one extreme strategy and stick with it.
Marco:
If you try to do a middle strategy that combines elements of like, oh, I'm going to ship a whole lot of goods, but also I'm going to build a bunch of buildings, you're not going to do either of them well enough to win.
Marco:
VC-funded companies, or I mean, web services and new services like this are kind of similar in the growth factor versus financing and versus paying your own bills, which is...
Marco:
You have to either go for something that is very cheap to scale, but will attract tons of users very quickly, in which case you can pay for it by lots of VC money coming in because you have tons of growth.
Marco:
Or pick something that's hard and expensive to do, like hosting a ton of photos on S3, but
Marco:
Don't go into that with a free growth-based model up front.
Marco:
Go into that with a more bootstrapping, more self-finance model, which is you shouldn't be losing money on every new customer.
Marco:
And you should also enter that kind of market with very low expenses to begin with.
Marco:
Not a big staff, not an office.
Marco:
Enter that market with low expectations of profit for a while and adjust your cost accordingly.
Marco:
And instead, Everpix kind of tried to ride the middle.
Marco:
They chose to do something that's very expensive to scale.
Marco:
They chose something that it was not likely, and maybe this was there, I don't think it was ever likely to have booming explosive growth.
Marco:
Because the market for it is not...
Marco:
Everyone who ever takes pictures needs this and is driven to do this.
Marco:
It's really only people who care about their photo storage and who know enough about photo storage to know why they would need something like this.
Marco:
That is not a big market relative to something like Instagram.
Marco:
To give you some idea, Tumblr, three or four years into it, had something like 20 terabytes of photos.
Marco:
By my math, Everpix had 400 terabytes or so, if their S3 bill was correct.
Marco:
And so, obviously, they were scaling at a storage level that's insane.
Marco:
This was one of my main things, and John, to go back a sec, what you were saying about how we all wish PhotoStream kind of worked this way, and it doesn't.
Marco:
It's because people's photos can vary so much in size.
Marco:
The idea of EverPix, of upload all your photos to us and we'll store all of them forever, you're talking potentially hundreds of gigs for people or even terabytes for people, and that's not that uncommon of a case.
John:
But Apple could absorb that easily.
John:
If this company would be profitable with their income stream with three times the number of subscribers, and remember, they're doing freemium.
John:
If they take the freemium out of the equation, it's even more close to being profitable.
John:
$50 a year.
John:
Apple just adds $50 a year spread across all its profitable product lines.
John:
You wouldn't even notice that.
John:
And who knows how much money they're already spending to do photo stream.
John:
I feel like a company like Apple, with their margins and their profit and what they're already doing,
John:
could easily absorb this business a six-person startup with a freemium model where they have 55 000 customers but only you know 7 000 are paying can't absorb it but then they and they came close if they got one more funding round which they might have gotten if they might have gotten another funding round if they had started this company 10 years ago earlier it's just harder to get funding now because people want to see you know instagram or something and if they don't they're like meh don't bother funding them
Marco:
No, I mean, the problem is that they were never going to have the rate of growth needed to get tons of VC money to pay these ridiculous costs.
Marco:
They are paying tons and tons and tons of money as people upload massive photo collections.
Marco:
And that's another thing, too.
Marco:
If the whole point of your service is upload everything you've ever shot...
Marco:
like when you first start using it, then your storage needs don't grow slowly over time as people accumulate new photos.
Marco:
Your storage needs spike up at the beginning.
Marco:
I mean, the whole thing was a very, very expensive business to run, not even considering the staff, which staffing is insane.
Marco:
I mean, like the staff costs or something like this, because what do they have, like five or six people, something like that?
John:
If you took away 90% of their storage costs, they would be fine.
John:
It's the freemium guys that killed them because they said, hey, sign up for free, upload a year of photos.
John:
And, you know, 40 or 50,000 people did that.
John:
The people who were paying, that was a sustainable business.
John:
If it was pay $50, we'll store all your photos because...
John:
People have variable size of photos, but apparently they had figured out a model where they could store all your photos and be profitable as a six-person company with 7,000 subscribers.
Marco:
Here's the other problem.
Marco:
$50 for a year of Amazon storage buys you about 20 gigs.
Marco:
By the time they're getting into their bulk pricing, maybe you're talking 25 or 30 gigs.
Marco:
Maybe that's the average.
Marco:
That sounds a little low to me, though.
Marco:
For anybody who would use a service like this, that sounds low.
Marco:
I shoot 20 gigs in a year.
John:
They were doing... I'm pretty sure they were doing lossy compression, though.
John:
So I think they were saying they get 5X compression.
John:
Did they support RAWs?
John:
Because that matters a lot.
John:
That makes it like five times bigger.
John:
No, it was not.
John:
That was the other thing.
John:
Talk about going in the middle road.
John:
They had a thing where they thought this could be for everybody, but they weren't storing RAWs, and they were doing 5X lossy compression.
John:
All things the professional photographers would never accept.
John:
And the pricing, I think, was priced like that.
John:
It's like, well, it's $50 a year.
John:
This is not a thing for professional photographers.
John:
It's a thing for...
John:
Everybody who just wants access to all their pictures from everywhere and wants to know they're safe.
John:
And if you're the type of person that says, well, you're not saving my raw, so my pictures aren't really safe.
John:
This is not the service for you, right?
John:
So they were – they had a misbalance of –
John:
their business model and their funding, and they made mistakes, but it's not entirely crazy because I think this same company, like I said, this same company had gone 10 years ago in that VC environment, or I don't know if 10 years ago was in the middle of a bubble crash, but at this point, I think it's getting harder to find...
John:
vc funding for a company in the state that this thing was whereas when you're in the midst of a run-up or a bubble people like oh my god you have actual paying customers and you you know you have a product that people like here take our money but now they're like no you have actual paying customers that means you're never going to grow that fast and yeah people like your product but who cares no thanks we'll pass like it's the curse of it's you know the curse of a business model if you didn't take money from anybody then you would you'd be on you know the the instagram that thing is
John:
We have no revenue.
John:
We don't take money from anybody.
John:
Well, not the Instagram.
Marco:
But if that was the case, then their user number would be impressive.
Marco:
And it wasn't.
John:
I know.
John:
Then you have the potential for explosive growth.
John:
So they were in this.
John:
It's an unfortunate situation.
John:
And the thing about it is I get the feeling that the vultures surrounding them, both the VCs and the other companies were like, why would we ever buy your company?
John:
Why don't we just wait for you to run out of money and then screw up the technology?
John:
Which seems to have been what happened because it's like you don't need the company and you don't need to invest in the company if you don't think it's going to be the next Instagram.
John:
If you think the technology is interesting, just wait, sit back and wait.
John:
And then after it all goes down, I bet you can get the technology involved really cheaply.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Well, firstly, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Someone in the chat, who I've already lost your name, it was Savvy, posted a tweet from one of the gentlemen that worked at Everpix saying, we use perceptually lossless 5x compression.
Casey:
So you were right about that, John.
John:
So JPEG.
John:
Perceptually lossless means lossy.
John:
It's like virtually spotless.
John:
But anyway.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
But the thing that I really take issue with is something that Marco said a few minutes ago, which is
Casey:
you know, this isn't for everyone.
Casey:
And I actually strongly disagree.
Casey:
I think EverPix in principle was maybe not literally for everyone, but was for any normal human being that shoots pictures with any device that they don't want to lose, which is to say almost everyone.
Casey:
I mean, we don't have kids, but if we were to lose some of the pictures we've taken of vacations, of family gatherings, of
Casey:
of us goofing off at BMW in South Carolina.
Casey:
If we lost those pictures, I'd be devastated.
Casey:
And EverPix was such an easy and reasonably cheap way of getting yourself a backup.
Casey:
And John, I completely agree with what you said a while back, that this is just one leg in a chair that holds up all of your pictures and makes sure they're safe.
Casey:
But
Casey:
It's a very easy way to do that.
Casey:
And if you think about it, I don't think most people that I know use a crash plan or a backblaze or anything like that.
Casey:
And so getting all of your pictures into the cloud is such an improvement over having no backup or just having time machine, which, by the way, most people I know don't use either.
Casey:
And so I agree with you guys that this probably was doomed.
Casey:
And Marco, your Puerto Rico analogy, while ridiculous, is actually fairly accurate.
Casey:
But on the other side of the coin, I strongly disagree that this wasn't for everyone.
Casey:
It may not have appealed to everyone, but I think it should have.
John:
Well, it's not for everyone in the sense that Marco meant it.
John:
It's not that everyone can't benefit from this because they can.
John:
It's that it's not of interest to everyone, which I think is totally true.
John:
They're not going to rush to it.
John:
Right.
John:
For everyone doesn't mean like if everyone's to have this, they would get benefit from it because everyone would get benefit from this.
John:
The question is, is this the type of product that if you describe to anyone, they immediately says, oh, yeah, I totally would like that.
John:
And yeah, here's $50.
John:
And the answer to that was definitely no, because it's the type of thing that people don't really know that they need.
John:
And it's also the type of thing that we've been conditioned by sort of modern computing platforms to assume is a platform level concern.
John:
Like, oh, doesn't Apple take care of that for me?
John:
Or doesn't Google take care of that for me?
John:
And it really properly should be a platform level concern, which is why everyone kept saying someone should buy EverPix, because it's like, you know, it's the type of third party thing where you're like, whoever my platform vendor is should be providing some way for me to do this, whether it's paying for iCloud storage or, you know, as part of my really expensive phone or as part of my Google account.
John:
So they get all my personal information or whatever, like it should be a platform level concern.
John:
and so people aren't going to say i'll pay an extra 50 bucks to this other company to do this thing that yeah i may get value of it but it's not something that's eating it's only people who are really bothered by it are crazy people like us who think about backups and stuff and that's that's the terrible thing about everpix is most people don't think they need this at all even though they do and if you gave it to them for free they would probably enjoy it but they're not going to go out and buy it and if you have something people aren't going to go out and buy you basically have a business that's quote unquote not for everyone because everyone does not come to you to buy it and
John:
It's a subtle distinction, but it's an important one when you're sitting there waiting for the customers to arrive.
Marco:
Also, I want to address two quick follow-ups here.
Marco:
One, the idea that Apple should just do this for everyone, to put it bluntly, it is not that easy because Apple is so big and the number of iOS devices being used and having Photoshop onto them is so large that S3 isn't big enough for that.
Marco:
That's the kind of scale that we're talking about.
Marco:
They're too big for S3.
Marco:
And doing something like this on Apple scale is such a completely different ballgame than doing it on the scale of a new web service with 10,000, 50,000, whatever users.
Marco:
It's not even close to the same game.
Marco:
Number two, the idea that a startup is worth a lot less once they've made any money at all is mostly not true in practice.
Marco:
In practice, growth matters above everything.
Marco:
Even if you aren't making a whole lot of money right now, if you are getting user growth, traffic growth, attention growth, but especially user growth, that papers over everything.
Marco:
That's what the entire VC world is based on is just like the stock market is the potential for future money.
Marco:
And if you've made some money now, but it's been disappointing, but your user growth is totally through the roof, that doesn't mean you're worthless.
Marco:
It means you didn't try the right business plan yet or the right revenue plan yet, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
Marco:
If you have user growth, VCs will give you money, period.
John:
Yeah, but the easiest way to get that explosive growth and to make people believe that there's going to be explosive growth is to not charge anybody money for anything.
John:
Because then people will truly believe, oh, this can scale to all the people who have computers.
John:
As soon as you charge any money for anybody for anything, they're like, well, that automatically puts a cap on your potential growth rate because you're asking for money, period.
Marco:
Totally agree.
Marco:
But I'm saying if your actual growth rate is really good, regardless of whether you're charging for anything, if your actual growth rate is consistently good, you'll keep getting VC money.
Marco:
And that's why VC-funded companies always give everything away for free, because you're correct that since the whole game is based on growth for as long as possible, the last thing you want to do is inhibit growth by charging money for any part of the product.
John:
And their growth rate was not great, and they kept touting their conversion rate, which was very good, but your conversion rate doesn't matter if you're converting on peanuts worth of people who are not growing fast enough.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
No, you call this 866 number toll-free.com.
Marco:
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Marco:
It's really quite incredible if you've ever called customer service for anything ever in your life to call this number and have something to ask them about and have a person pick up immediately.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So do we want to – oh, I should note actually before we move into the review follow-up that a lot of people have been wondering what are the alternatives to ever picks.
Casey:
I can only speak for myself.
Casey:
I don't know about you guys, but I haven't looked into any yet.
Casey:
I haven't had the chance.
Casey:
But the three that we are aware of are Loom, Picture Life, and Adobe – is it Revel?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah, Revel.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And those are the three that we're aware of.
Casey:
I don't know, John or Marco, if you have anything to add about those three, but –
Casey:
Those are the ones that are the obvious ones.
Marco:
Revel is interesting.
Marco:
I have a brief conflict of interest in that they sponsored my site when they launched Revel for something like eight weeks in a row.
Marco:
But it's an interesting product, I think.
Marco:
It seems as though Adobe is not paying a lot of attention to it recently, and maybe...
Marco:
i don't know adobe it seems like the lightroom team is rocking it with with the success of lightroom and i wish these things were just part of lightroom and it seems like there's no good reason or rather i'm sure there's a good reason but i wish revel was just like a lightroom cloud and it's not it's a separate thing and lightroom can publish to it but it doesn't it doesn't store raws and stuff like that and
Marco:
And it kind of tries to bridge the gap between consumer and pro and doesn't really satisfy either of them amazingly.
Marco:
And so it's kind of an odd product, and it seems like it's kind of getting lost in Adobe's complexity.
Marco:
But what I would love, really, is Lightroom Cloud.
Marco:
I would pay a good price for that to basically have the Revel ability to store everything online and just have thumbnails and stuff on iOS devices and be able to download anything by tapping it.
Marco:
To have that, but integrated fully with Lightroom and supporting RAW, that would be amazing.
Marco:
But it doesn't exist.
John:
I haven't tried any of these services yet either, although I did look at all of their pages, and the one thing they all have in common is much higher prices than Everpix.
John:
So take that for whatever you will.
John:
Are there chances of surviving better than Everpix?
John:
Are they worse?
John:
I mean, I don't know if any of them even have a freemium model.
John:
I think they all just charge up front.
John:
Is that the case?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I haven't investigated.
John:
But anyway, maybe I'll look into them all and try it.
John:
But one of the things that I found attractive about Everpix was that it was so inexpensive.
John:
It's kind of like Backblaze.
John:
When they first came out many, many years ago, they're like, oh, well, this company will be out of business because they're charging like $5 a month for unlimited backup.
John:
How can that be sustainable?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And here we are many, many years later, and they're still around, and they have competitors, and apparently they've been able to make that work.
John:
And actually, I want to get back to what Marco was saying before about how Apple scale will be much larger.
John:
I think that's true, but Everpix said they would be profitable 3x their subscriber rate.
John:
That's $50 a year per person, right?
John:
So Apple will have 300,000 times their subscriber rate.
John:
So presumably, if it's profitable three times EverPix's subscriber rate, it would be profitable 300,000.
John:
And I think Apple is especially positioned to be even more cost-effective for this thing because EverPix had to pay S3, which means Amazon gets to skim some profit off the top because they're reselling the storage service.
John:
Apple presumably would implement its own storage solution or have its own already something, something, its own storage stuff that it doesn't have to give Amazon or some other company a piece of its profit.
John:
And that's it before you get into, you know, what I was talking about, like, okay, we'll take some of your massive profit from your,
John:
other product lines and plow it into that, which presumably is what they're doing with the iCloud storage, which must be subsidized by their other products and stuff.
John:
Uh, and iCloud storage, I don't know if how it compares to $50 a year.
John:
It's obviously not $50 a year for unlimited, but again, I feel like if ever picks with their technology that they were using was able to be profitable at $50 a year, if Apple charged $50 a year and they would stall store all your photos in iCloud for you, and then just put the most recent thousand on your phone or something, uh,
John:
they would have, I think, a service that at the very least breaks even, if not makes profit on its own.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the issue I don't think would be profitability.
Marco:
It would just be dealing with that scale.
Marco:
It would be a ton of engineering time and resources just to deal with the scale, not necessarily the raw costs of, okay, we're paying for this many servers and this much of bandwidth.
Marco:
It's not that.
Marco:
It's the massive engineering effort required to operate something at that scale where
Marco:
Something like S3 is really not suitable.
Marco:
And by the way, an S3 is not cheap.
Marco:
I mean, none of Amazon's web services are cheap.
Marco:
And there's this culture in tech startups these days that the default of you're starting anything, the default answer is let's host it all on Amazon Web Services.
Marco:
And that is not...
Marco:
cost-effective at all for almost anything.
Marco:
You do it on Amazon Web Services because the scaling is effectively free up to a limit that's so high that even Tumblr probably hasn't reached it yet.
Marco:
Although Apple, I think, would with that data set.
Marco:
But you're talking...
Marco:
Amazon scales very, very easily with some of their services.
Marco:
EC2, maybe.
Marco:
S3, definitely.
Marco:
And you pay a big premium for that.
Marco:
If your entire business, like Backblaze, if Backblaze was based on S3, they would not be able to offer that kind of pricing.
Marco:
Backblaze very famously made their own storage servers.
Marco:
They designed their own storage servers with massive numbers of hard drives crammed into this case.
Marco:
They even open-sourced the design and something like that.
Marco:
They actually designed custom hardware to get tons of storage as cheaply as possible.
Marco:
That's why they can offer that.
Marco:
If your entire business is...
Marco:
storing a very large amount of data for as little money as possible, S3 is not actually a good fit for you.
Marco:
That's not going to scale very well.
Marco:
But it's the easy quick fix up front at least while you figure out whether your business has legs.
Marco:
And that's the problem is that EverPix didn't.
John:
Yeah, it lets you get in without putting a bunch of money down.
John:
Because in S3, it's like, hey, $0, and you put your first byte of storage in, and you pay for that first byte of storage, and you keep going.
John:
And eventually, it becomes ridiculous and unsustainable, because now you're giving all your slim profit margins to Amazon.
John:
But it lets you get off the ground.
John:
And for companies like Apple, though, at a certain point,
John:
This is going to become the price of entry if you are a platform vendor.
John:
Like Google's already there where they're like, you know, certain things people just start to expect.
John:
Like a long time ago, Apple didn't give you an email address.
John:
And nowadays, if you are the platform vendor, even if a lot of people don't use it, and even if your thing doesn't become the most popular email thing, Apple has to offer people a way to have like a Mac.com or an iCloud.com email address.
John:
Is it a core part of the business?
John:
No.
John:
Are they ever going to threaten Gmail or Hotmail?
John:
No.
John:
But it's the price of entry.
John:
You just have to do that because you're going to have an email application.
John:
And so at a certain point, I hope eventually a price of entry will be, of course, whoever my platform vendor is will store all my pictures for me in the cloud.
John:
As for some yearly fee, part of my cell phone plan, some way to get enough money to cover the cost for that, it'll become the price of entry because Google is almost already doing it.
John:
And if people get used to that, it is terrible for Apple to be like, well, let me show you this diagram showing you where your pictures are and how much money you have to pay and which device burns down, which photos you'll lose at what time.
John:
You just want to not have to think about it.
John:
And so it's difficult to do, and they can't do it through Amazon because why would you give Amazon all that money?
John:
Apple's supposed to do it themselves.
John:
Apple has to figure out a way to do it.
John:
The time is coming where they're just going to have to face that music and just do it.
Marco:
Although, again, I'll make the same argument I made last time we talked about that, which is that the reality is that people's photos and God especially videos are so large file size-wise that you're into pretty severe upstream bandwidth problems and data cap problems if you try to do a lot of this.
Marco:
That's another one of the problems that EverPix had is that
Marco:
For EverPix to be useful to you, you had to upload a lot of photos to it.
Marco:
And a lot of people just don't have a fast enough connection to do that in a reasonable amount of time.
Marco:
Online backup has a similar problem for a lot of people.
Marco:
And I think that limitation of just bandwidth not catching up very quickly, and when it does catch up, you start getting data caps and stuff like that.
Marco:
That's...
Marco:
That's always going to be a problem, and as bandwidth increases, so will photo size, and so will the amount of videos people take.
John:
Bandwidth is already outrunning photo sizing.
John:
Video, that's still true, because video, it's a big problem.
John:
It's going to take a long time for bandwidth to catch up to video, and I don't think 4K video is around the corner, but 1080p video is already way too big for anyone to do.
John:
But I think photos, I think we're already there for photos.
John:
I think anybody with a photo collection and any what you would call broadband thing, it's going to take a while, but all your photos will eventually go up, which is not true of video.
John:
So I think it's kind of like when we passed the point where you could download music on Napster, but you couldn't download feature-length movies.
John:
We're at that point.
John:
You can do photos, all right?
John:
Because remember, most people don't have RAWs, and they just have cruddy JPEGs.
John:
And yes, the pictures are getting bigger, but I think bandwidth is getting bigger faster.
John:
I mean, just look at Casey with his LTE Nirvana, where he's amazed at the speed he gets on his...
John:
The speed that he gets on his phone is sufficient for any photo collection of anybody who's been alive less than 100 years and takes a dozen pictures a day.
John:
I think we've passed the photo realm.
John:
The fact that videos are mixed in is a problem, but I would say for Apple, they can just say, oh, we don't back up your videos, because what can they do with videos?
John:
This 1080p is just too much data.
John:
Maybe when they do H.265, whatever the next standard is, I think I got the number right, that's supposed to give you another 2X or 3X compression thing with no loss.
John:
Maybe we start and then LTE becomes common and people's broadband has to at least match LTE.
John:
Then maybe we start to enter the realm of video.
John:
But like I said, if we ever go to 4K, it just starts that all over again.
John:
But pictures, I think, are going to probably top out at 30, 40, or 50 megapixels.
John:
Regular people are never going to want more pixels than that.
John:
In their images, because what are you going to do, put it on the side of a building like it's big enough to get a 24 by 24 inch print and you're fine.
John:
Right.
John:
And so I think that will top out.
John:
And I think we've passed that.
John:
So but, you know, if if Apple doesn't start trying to do it now, it's not like they're going to wait until bandwidth can carry it.
John:
And.
John:
And say, okay, now that we feel like we can so comfortably do it and everyone can upload their total photo collection in an hour, now let's do it.
John:
They've got to start now.
John:
I mean, arguably they have started somewhere with PhotoStream.
John:
It's just that it's kind of a shame to do a half solution.
John:
They should just try to do the whole thing and, you know, bite the bullet now.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We've spent quite a bit of time talking about EverPix, and I think that's because I know I speak for myself and probably both of you that I'm really bummed that it left.
Casey:
Any other thoughts, though, real quick before we move along?
John:
Rob Mathers in the chat room thinks that upload bandwidth is still a problem.
John:
I point to Casey's phone.
John:
You had good upload speeds, too, right?
John:
It wasn't just download that you were impressed with.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
What was your upload speed on that LTE?
Yeah.
Casey:
I forget off the top of my head.
Casey:
I'm trying to look.
Casey:
But it was something to the order of 1515.
Casey:
15 megabits up.
John:
That's plenty.
John:
And that's on a phone.
John:
Everyone will have a phone.
Marco:
Wireless upload speeds are fine.
Marco:
Home broadband upload speeds are terrible.
John:
I know, but if that happens, home broadband will be eclipsed by the people who are selling LTE.
John:
everyone already knows they need a cell phone and everyone is eventually going to have an LTE cell phone.
John:
And that's a bad for cable companies.
John:
If they can't get their acts together to get their upload bandwidth better and people realize they have faster upload bandwidth from their iPad or their iPhone, you know, and that's not even a problem from Apple's perspective since if everyone's taking their pictures with their iPhone and it's already on LTE, you know, there you go.
John:
There's your upload bandwidth.
Marco:
Right, but then you have data cap limits.
Marco:
There's no clear path for this immediately.
Marco:
Maybe in five years, typical carrier data caps will be two or three times as high.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe they won't.
Marco:
Maybe they'll be exactly the same as they are today or lower.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
Well, data caps are artificial, though.
John:
That is the type of thing that can change without people running new copper or putting up new cell towers or doing the infrastructure thing.
John:
Someone just changes a number in a spreadsheet and all of a sudden you're allowed to upload.
John:
I feel like that's the type of thing that will solve.
John:
Sometimes
Marco:
Well, there's also issues with radio spectrum space and crowding of the towers, though.
Marco:
None of this scales particularly gracefully, and all of it's controlled by companies that historically have not shown much of a willingness to lower prices over time or to give you more over time.
John:
You never know what's going to lead, though, because sometimes it's competition amongst the people providing the service where they compete with each other.
John:
Oh, Fios is coming.
John:
Now we need to, you know, as soon as Fios enters town, you see all the cable people crank up their bandwidth and everything, you know, because that's one level competition.
John:
level competition is if there's something on the net that draws customers customers will you know will be will be drawn to it like say oh i've got to have netflix and netflix doesn't work on time warner cable just to pick something out of a hat because i don't have enough bandwidth and it's terrible i'm going to find a new isp assuming there's any competition at all which is another big problem but
John:
I'm going to find another ISP, even if it's wireless or WiMAX or whatever the hell it's going to be, because I need to watch Netflix.
John:
And then in that case, Netflix is the draw.
John:
So you have forces on both sides.
John:
And I think the forces on the side of competition among server survivors is so terrible that we should be relying on the force of make this thing on the net that people want and who will get pissy if they can't get it.
John:
And
John:
If part of the thing is, oh, all my photos are backed up and safe because I have a decent ISP or my caps are higher or whatever and yours isn't, you should switch to T-Mobile, Sprint or whoever the hungry competitor is who gives you some insane no limit, you know, T-Mobile doing like the 200 megabytes free bandwidth or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Despite the incredible dysfunction in our thing, I think if you make a product or service out there that everybody wants, they will be pissed if they can't get it and they will be pissed at their carrier and they will look for any alternative.
John:
That's a market opportunity for the people who are currently losing in the market to do something.
Casey:
So real-time follow-up from myself, I just ran a speed test on my phone on LTE, and I got 25 megabits down and 15 up.
Casey:
And I know I've told this story at least once or twice before, but I'll tell it again.
Casey:
When Aaron and I bought our house in 2008, I was arguably more excited about getting Fios than I was about owning our first home.
Casey:
And at that point in time,
Casey:
the reasonable Mac Daddy service was 1515.
Casey:
And that was just 2008, which is just five years ago.
Casey:
And on my cellular telephone, I just got 2515.
Casey:
At this point, we're past the point in which photo uploads are doable over even LTE with the exception of the data caps like we talked about.
John:
And you should say, how much of your data do you use per month?
John:
Like not counting, you know, you're not uploading photos, but just like regular phone use.
Casey:
I'd say between one and two gigs in a general month.
Casey:
And I don't even know how to be honest with you because I'm on Wi-Fi always, but somehow or another I find a way.
Marco:
If you're running the overcast beta, it doesn't do cell filtering yet for the downloads.
Casey:
I'm not.
Casey:
Wait, there isn't.
Casey:
Is there a beta?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
I was going to say.
Marco:
I just saw my usage today.
Marco:
It was like 400 megs for the month so far.
Marco:
I'm like, oops.
Marco:
Our second sponsor this week is FSIM Space Shuttle.
Marco:
This is interesting.
Marco:
This is a new kind of sponsor for us.
Marco:
FSIM.com.
Marco:
as in flight simulator, FSIM Space Shuttle is an iOS and Android flight simulator that is highly realistic, and it's designed to simulate specifically the landing of the U.S.
Marco:
Space Shuttle in its final descent into Kennedy or Edwards Air Force Base.
Marco:
When I first saw this, I was like, they have a whole app for that?
Marco:
And then I tried the app.
Marco:
It's incredibly detailed.
Marco:
You've got to read the reviews.
Marco:
The reviews back this up.
Marco:
It's not just them paying us to say this.
Marco:
There's this great review on the Mac Observer.
Marco:
I'm not really a flight sim person in general, but you can look at people who are flight sim people and you can see what they say about this.
Marco:
And
Marco:
they just love this thing it simulates very realistically these space shuttle landings and you can configure everything you can challenge yourself you can be like all right well let me let me turn on you know a major major turbulence and i'll do it at night with really cloudy visibility and i'll simulate the failure of one of these instruments or you know the my flaps won't work or something like that and i'll have to i'll have to still try to land it well uh
Marco:
under these challenging conditions.
Marco:
Or you can just do it straight and do it under perfectly clear conditions and just try to get it exactly right without slamming down too hard and putting too much force on the landing gear or being unsafe or missing the glide path, things like that.
Marco:
It's really interesting.
Marco:
I didn't realize there was this whole world around this stuff until we were sent this app for review for this spot.
Marco:
I have to admit, I'm terrible at it.
Marco:
I've tried a bunch of landings myself, and the best I can get is what they call a crash landing.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Which is like you don't crash, but you've landed hard enough or wrong enough that you've put too much force on certain parts and it's not proper and it could be unsafe.
Marco:
So there's the crash, which I haven't gotten.
Marco:
There's the proper landing, which I haven't gotten.
Marco:
And then in the middle, there's the crash landing, which is what I keep getting.
Marco:
But it's an exercise in precision.
Marco:
And just like, you know, practice and self-control.
Marco:
It's really cool.
Marco:
The graphics are amazing, by the way.
Marco:
Like this is, you know, flight sims are always, and again, I don't know that much about flight sims, but I've always noticed that they've always been amazing with the visuals, with the graphics and everything.
Marco:
And this is no exception.
Marco:
Like you play this on a Retina iPad.
Marco:
It works on iPhone too, and I did it on both.
Marco:
But man, it looks fantastic, especially on the Retina iPad.
Marco:
So check out FSIM Space Shuttle.
Marco:
It's F-SIM.
Marco:
You can search that in the App Store, or you can go to FSIM, with or without the dash, doesn't matter, FSIM.com.
Marco:
It's only $4 US, and probably some similar amount elsewhere, available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android.
Marco:
Check out the screenshots.
Marco:
They have videos.
Marco:
It's not like an arcade game or anything, but if you like flight sims, you will like this.
John:
I think the amazing thing they did about it is that when you think about flight sims like that, you're like, oh, this is going to be too technical for me.
John:
I'm not going to be able to do it.
John:
There's going to be too many buttons.
John:
It's going to be too fidgety.
John:
The amazing thing about this game is that you can start it and just start playing.
John:
Don't read a single thing.
John:
Don't read the help.
John:
Don't look at the controls.
John:
Don't do anything.
John:
Just start the game.
John:
And play it.
John:
And you can successfully do what you think is a landing until it tells you that it does technically as a crash landing because you just jam the space shuttle into the ground way too fast.
John:
And you'll get a low score and you'll feel bad.
John:
But the point is, you don't have no idea what to do.
John:
You can immediately pick it up and use it.
John:
And the one thing I really liked about this game is that I hate games with tilt controls.
John:
But this game, when you do the tilt controls, and I haven't seen any other games do this, but I think they all should now that I've seen it.
John:
When you tilt the iPad, the picture stays level.
John:
So like the horizon stays level with your eyes, even as you tilt the iPad.
John:
And tilting the iPad is how you control, you know, like rolling the thing from left to right.
John:
But this image on the screen doesn't tilt.
John:
There's nothing worse than playing like a game like those driving games where you try to turn to steer the wheel.
John:
And the whole world tilts when you tilt the screen.
John:
I hate all those games.
John:
This works in that mode if there's an option to turn on that mode, if that's what you prefer.
John:
But I vastly prefer the mode where as I turn the iPad, the horizon does not tilt with me until the thing is rolling.
John:
So that made it immediately accessible.
John:
I played just long enough to beat all you guys' scores because you guys are terrible.
John:
LAUGHTER
John:
My best is like 7,000, which is terrible.
John:
My best is like 40,000, but all my scores for the 40,000 still were crash landings.
John:
It is really, really hard, and I'm playing like with, you know, I'm not turning on the inclement weather, or I did random a few times or whatever.
John:
This is a game that if you're into it, you can pick it up immediately and do it, and then...
John:
If you are obsessive or into flight sims, I don't know how long it would take you to do this perfectly.
John:
Forget about failures.
John:
Forget about this thing doesn't work and the wind picks up.
John:
Can you actually do a perfect landing in perfect weather, perfect visibility, and no things?
John:
I think that would take you a long time.
John:
So this is an extremely deep game that nevertheless you can pick up and just immediately...
John:
play and do something with and it's short like if you do a final approach it's it's like you know two minutes worth of gameplay it's not something you're going to be there for seven hours flying across the country and microsoft flight simulator you know right that's what i was going to say to really quickly kind of wrap up the spot that
Casey:
It's a really good inline game or online, depending on who you ask, in that it's only a couple minutes long.
Casey:
And so unlike, say, Flight Control, which is a very good game but could last forever if you do well, no matter what, you're going to land that shuttle.
Casey:
So it's a matter of just a couple of minutes.
Casey:
It really works well when you just have a couple minutes to kill, which is when I typically play these kinds of short games.
John:
That's the brutal thing about the shuttle.
John:
No engines.
John:
You're going to land the shuttle because gravity is like, okay, I'm going to come in for another approach.
John:
Let me just hit the engines and circle back.
John:
Nope.
John:
It's going down like a rock if you don't do it right.
John:
It's definitely an extra twist on flight simulator landing because I'm accustomed to, okay, I'm coming a little low.
John:
Let me just boost my engines a little bit here.
John:
Nope.
John:
None of that.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
going down yep it's a glider yeah anyway so thanks a lot to f sim space shuttle you can find it on ios or android app stores fsim.com so john when you install mavericks do you do a fresh install or do you update and i should say that this is from listener mike there's going to be a series of questions which i will uh attribute to him so do you do a fresh install
John:
I've answered this before.
John:
I always do an update install on OS X. I did manually integrate.
John:
In the classic days, I would do a fresh install, and then I would manually bring over all the little files that were part of the system folder because I like to manually merge it together.
John:
But when an OS X came, I realized, A, there are way too many files for me to do that manually anymore, and I didn't know them like the back of my hand, like I knew the classic ones.
John:
And B...
John:
Once I started doing the update installs and saw that it didn't lose my settings, because that was the old slam against classic macOS was if you tried to do an update install, you could lose some of your settings or overwrite your preferences with new ones and it wasn't that friendly.
John:
But OS X has always been pretty good about that.
John:
So I always do an update install, so much so that I probably have plist files from companies that have long since gone out of business just lurking inside my library folder.
John:
And it's fine.
John:
Works fine year after year.
John:
Always do an update install.
Casey:
Do you have auto app updates on or off?
John:
I'm assuming they're asking on the Mac.
John:
On the Mac, no, I don't.
John:
I haven't really decided what I'm going to do on the Mac.
John:
I think probably I won't just because I don't want to be bothered...
John:
by the like oh the little dialogue that says oh we have an update ready like all you need to do is restart you know and then it will start your install i would rather be bothered by a little badge on the app store or something like that than be bothered by the oh we've already like i know it's the same amount of bother it's just the files on your disk or it's not it's the same kind of nagging but it makes me feel worse when it says we've already downloaded it in fact all you need to do is restart and we'll start the installer uh somehow that still bothers me so i still have it set to manual
Casey:
Now, for family members' computers, will you have them on auto?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think I would put a family member that I wasn't going to be.
John:
If I go visit my parents in Colorado, I think I would put them on auto-update after update them because I'm not going to be there to, every once in a while, run updates for them.
John:
But for a computer in my house, I won't set my wife's computer to auto-update.
John:
If I'm not going to be there, I'd rather set an auto-update to at least have some confidence that updates are being applied in some fashion at some point.
John:
But if I have access to the machine in any way,
John:
I'd rather handle that myself just so I can, you know, like I wouldn't put my wife on an auto update because what if some update ran and she didn't like it?
John:
Like I want to, I want to be able to clear this with her.
John:
Whereas it's just when, when I'm far away, I'd rather just have the updates run.
John:
So I guess it's a distance thing.
Casey:
And then what are your thoughts on the yearly release cycle?
Casey:
From your view, I got the impression that you have some concerns that large, important features will have a hard time fitting in.
John:
It was mostly, I talked about in the review and it's mostly about the idea that,
John:
Apple shouldn't feel like it has to do yearly updates just because iOS does yearly updates.
John:
Just as if we didn't have yearly updates, people would say, oh, they're ignoring the Mac.
John:
And the reason I worry about it is because if you're always in that yearly update cycle, it's more difficult, not impossible, but more difficult to do features that can't be done in a year.
John:
Because then you've got to sort of like half do them.
John:
all the while you're tracking the two versions of OS X that slide by underneath you and see which one you can land in.
John:
And that is a little bit more uncomfortable.
John:
It's like, well, if we had 18 months or even two years, we could do a really impressive update.
John:
And in the middle of that 18-month or two-year cycle, we don't really have anything releasable that's worthwhile.
John:
So why bother going through... There's overhead for each release.
John:
There's overhead for the QA process and putting out the marketing message and figuring out what it is you're going to highlight.
John:
And like...
John:
Especially now that the thing is free, it's not like you're foregoing any income that you could have gotten in there.
John:
So I'd be perfectly fine with them sort of slackening off a little bit.
John:
But I think Apple thinks that they need to do every year you get a new iOS and every year you get a new Mac OS and they're both free.
John:
And I understand why they're doing it.
John:
I just think it's actually going to delay some interesting new features more so than they would be if the OS X releases were allowed to come out sort of as they naturally wanted to.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
Now, can you estimate how much time you took on your review?
John:
Well, you guys know, and listeners of the podcast know, because you can just track based on when the whining began about working on it.
John:
Like, last year, for Mountain Lion, I had a huge amount written before I ever went to WWDC.
John:
This year, didn't have anything written before I went to WWDC.
John:
I had lots of notes and stuff, you know, things to look into.
John:
But, like, did we know anything before WWDC?
John:
I don't think we knew anything of substance.
John:
Nope.
John:
I don't think so.
John:
We didn't have builds.
John:
We didn't have a name.
John:
We didn't have, like, oh, here's what's going to be in the OS, you know, and, like, insider hints were thin on the ground.
John:
It's not like – there wasn't – in all the stories about here's what might be in 10.9, there wasn't even, like, the whole, you know, 10.9 is going to be about energy saving.
John:
Even that vague rumor was not in the air before WWDC, so –
John:
Uh, I didn't have much, but so I guess you could probably track it from, you know, as soon as the old release is done, I, or not as soon as the old release is done.
John:
I haven't created my new document for 10, 10 yet, but I guess when I do, I'll mention it on the air.
John:
Uh, once I have anything to put in a document, I'll make it and I'll start adding stuff to it.
John:
But I didn't do any, started doing real work until WWDC.
John:
And then it just works on it basically straight through from what, WWDC, June, July.
John:
I forgot this year, early June.
John:
Yeah, until October.
John:
So when did I work on it?
John:
After the kids were in bed.
John:
And towards the run-up to the end, I stole a couple of weekend days when my wife would take the kids out somewhere during the day, and I'd get some work done during the day as well.
John:
So I don't know how you'd add up the hours.
John:
It's not as long as it seems, because again, this is not my full-time job, as many people don't know.
John:
It's what I do on nights and weekends.
Marco:
And then you just hibernate for the entire rest of the year.
Yeah.
John:
Well, you know, maybe I'll actually post something to my blog again.
John:
It could happen.
John:
Weird.
John:
If my life is wake up, get the kids out of the house, feed the breakfast, you know, get them off to school, go to work, pick the kids up, make them dinner.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, get them to bed.
John:
go to work on a review, go to sleep.
John:
Like that's, I can't sustain that for that's, that's too, there's an, I need downtime.
John:
I desperately need some kind of downtime where I just sit like a vegetable and don't do something with my brain.
John:
And sometimes at the end of a long day of work, I don't want to use my brain anymore.
John:
Like it's not at work.
John:
I'm not just like twiddling my thumbs.
John:
I'm using my brain.
John:
I'm programming like that can, that can burn you out.
John:
And plus, and sometimes like you want to have that downtime and I'm sure, you know, Marco and Casey both do this, like where you,
John:
You spend the day programming, right?
John:
And you come home and that break where you're not doing anything, where you're just making dinner and you're just, you know, watching some dumb TV show or whatever, that's when your brain is working on the programming problems that you encounter that day.
John:
So when you come in the next morning, now you have a much better approach to that problem.
John:
And it may be occurred to you during dinner or in the shower in the morning or whatever.
John:
And if you didn't have that downtime,
John:
If you had just sat there plugging away at the problem, you never would have come up with that.
John:
It's almost like sometimes I think, you know what, I should have stopped working sooner.
John:
Because as soon as I stopped working and just let my brain chew on that, it became obvious to me, oh, what are you doing?
John:
That's stupid.
John:
Do it this way.
John:
And then you go in the next morning all ready for that stuff to just dump out of your fingers.
John:
And you're like, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
John:
Dun, dun, dun.
John:
I worked on this for three hours before I went home yesterday and got nowhere.
John:
And all I needed to do was stop working, let my brain stew for a couple hours, go to sleep, wake up, and, you know,
John:
15 minutes of work and it's like yep that's what i should have done last night so that's the way i feel and if i if i try to take that time when my brain be working on work programming problems and say okay nope switch gears now you got to work on this whole other thing work work work like you burn out so
John:
i really try to save the crunch time for just like a couple of weeks or maybe a month of crunch time where it's like no every waking moment i have to do and even then i try to give myself down time even if i'm sacrificing sleep like okay i gotta stop writing for the night it's 11 o'clock let me watch an hour and a half of tv and then go to bed because i need that hour and a half to like decompress right um there's also a little bit of feedback from michael james boyle i guess this is about the ebook is that right
John:
Yeah, we're asking about how the e-book stores handle updates and how Amazon is very bad at it.
John:
And the question really is, if you do stuff to your e-book and you make notes and you make highlights and you do stuff like that, and then you update the e-book, how well does each e-book store handle that updating process?
John:
Do you lose all your notes, all your bookmarks, and all your highlights and everything?
John:
Or does it try to incorporate them?
John:
And so he gave the answer for that.
John:
how iBooks works and he said it does not lose everything you have it tries its best to preserve it and doesn't do a very good job but it's better than deleting everything so even highlights of passages of text that have not changed the highlights will be off because they'll be shifted by other texts or other things but the highlights will be there and the notes will be there and so you could like in theory if the book hasn't changed that much manually fix them which is vastly preferable to wiping out everything but it's not as great as like
John:
Oh, we figured out they added a paragraph here, so I'm just going to shift all my other highlights down because I can find where they begin and end before.
Marco:
It's not like running diff intelligently and trying to figure out, oh, this was inserted here and then shift everything over.
Marco:
Yeah, it sounds like it's literally just like storing a text offset and length for each highlight.
John:
Yeah, and which is better than nothing.
John:
I mean, like, for example, one of the updates that my iBooks thing I did was I changed all the, you know, the primes and double primes into curly quotes and, you know, smart apostrophes and everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that will totally, if it was trying to say to track the text, if the text has any sort of contraction in it or a quotation mark, the text is different.
John:
You know, like that would totally throw off any kind of, oh, I'll fake diff algorithm, unless the diff algorithm was also smart enough to know, oh, this character is more or less equivalent to that one.
John:
You know, so it's very difficult to do this correctly.
John:
But I think Apple's solution of doing it badly, but attempting it is way better than what used to be the Kindle solution.
John:
I'm not sure if it still is of like, you lose everything.
John:
No, no trace.
John:
Tough luck.
Marco:
Anyway, all right.
Marco:
Let's wrap it up for the week.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Hover and FSIM Space Shuttle.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
Before the show started, Erin was in the office with me, and so I played the live feed just to hear what awful drivel you were putting all of our beloved listeners through.
Casey:
And she said to me something to the effect of, how come you never get to pick the music?
Marco:
Because your music's terrible.
Marco:
Speaking of your terrible music, there's somebody in the chat room named Pills who is asking what my opinion of Dave Matthews' band is.
Marco:
And I think I've talked about it before, and I'm going to cut this out of the actual show, but my opinion of Dave Matthews' band is that they are not a jam band.
Marco:
And I know that is a contentious position to take among DMP fans, but I...
Marco:
A jam band – like people don't really know – people who are not really fans of jam bands rarely have a good idea of what they are.
Casey:
Are you really going hipster on us?
Casey:
Are you really going hipster on us right now?
Marco:
Most people who are big jam band fans – or most people who are not jam band fans think that what makes a jam band a jam band is that they play really long songs.
Marco:
And that's not really it.
Marco:
That happens to be a side effect.
Marco:
They usually do play long songs, although we're not talking like half-hour songs usually.
Marco:
That might happen like once every three years that a band might play a 35-minute song.
Marco:
Most Phish songs are like eight minutes long.
Marco:
So by pop standards, yeah, that's long, but we're not talking like half-hour every night.
Marco:
But a jam band is really a lot more about improvisation and style.
Marco:
It really is a genre, not necessarily a type, if that makes sense.
Marco:
And there aren't that many of them that anyone's ever heard of.
Marco:
There's a very, very small number.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think Dave Matthews Band is really a rock slash, not really pop, they're a rock band that happens to play their songs a little bit longer live sometimes.
Marco:
But for the most part, you're still hearing like, for the most part, you're hearing the album version of the song every time.
Marco:
It doesn't vary as much as a real jam band.
Casey:
Oh, I'm so angry right now.
Casey:
Oh, we got to change the subject.
Casey:
I'm so f***ing angry.
Casey:
I'm about to get in my car and drive up and beat you.
John:
By Marco's definition, I think Paul and Storm are a jam band, but neither one of you know who Paul and Storm are.
Casey:
I've heard of them.
John:
People in the audience right now.
John:
30-minute songs, improvisation, changes every night.
John:
Paul and Storm.
Casey:
Oh, I'm so angry right now.
Casey:
All right, now that I'm all punchy.
Casey:
Let's start the show.
Casey:
So angry.
Casey:
You're so wrong.
Casey:
Oh, you're so wrong.
Casey:
Anyway, okay.
Casey:
So we have a lot of follow-up this show.
Marco:
Also, Dave Matthews is always just kind of like asleep.
Marco:
I don't know if he's drunk, like the Eddie Vedder style of singing or what.
Marco:
I hate you so much.
Casey:
I'm trying so hard to be the better man, and I'm about to lose my self-control.
Marco:
That is Eddie Vedder.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Jam bands are... A lot of it is from Phish, of course.
Marco:
But overall, the jam band culture is very happy, upbeat most of the time.
Marco:
Whereas Dave Matthews' band is like... Hey, Virginia.
Marco:
He's so just down and drunk.
Marco:
He never seems like he's having any fun.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I am so angry right now.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm not engaging in with you anymore.
Casey:
I'm so fired up.
Marco:
Also, that voice.
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Casey:
That I will give you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So.