The Compliance Shark
But where's my data?
But I had a backup.
I used Time Machine.
All right.
Is this a show?
I guess.
I don't even know.
All right.
John, you have some FU, don't you?
Yeah, sure do.
Last week, we talked about Cisco VPN, enterprise software, and all that stuff.
And I was telling a story from my life with a broader point about enterprise software.
But the specifics of it...
were what mostly got responses to one of the big responses was, hey, do you need that new version of the Cisco VPN software?
Because even though you couldn't get it, because you don't have a service contract or whatever, here are various places where you can get it, or do you want me to email it to you?
If you do Google search for this, you'll find it or someone so far.
So a lot of people
were nice and offering me this piece of software which i don't know if it's likely is that illegal software copying is that a probably piece of software probably but anyway uh thank everyone for their offers i did not take anyone anyone up on their offer because i as i think i said at the end of the little segment last week the the final result of that was that it was partly my fault for not reading the message and that even if i could get the software it didn't matter because i was had to wait for my it department to approve it for use
Like it has to be, this new version has to be approved for use with all the other stuff they do.
And then when it's approved for use, they will put it up on their download thing that you got to go through the Java app for whatever.
So anyway, even if I can get this software, which I totally could, if I wanted to Google for the things that people tell me to Google for or whatever, wouldn't do me any good because it's against our IT department's policy to install it.
So I'm just now patiently waiting.
So thanks for all the help, but I don't need it right now.
And the second bit is from the, there's an AnyConnect Twitter account.
Of course there is.
I don't know why I didn't think this VPN software, this specific VPN software product wouldn't have a Twitter account, but it does.
And the AnyConnect Twitter account responded a few times to me.
And one of the things they said was that, about Cisco being clueless about 10.9, they said that Cisco had announced this issue publicly and reported it to Apple prior to the release.
And a couple of other people said that,
there was some networking related change really late in the, in the beta period, like maybe right before GM that caught a lot of people off guard.
So apparently if you were following the right places that I wasn't following, you would have known that they were going to be incompatible with 10 nine and that they weren't ready in time of the GM.
So,
Apologies to Cisco for saying that they did not know the 10.9 was coming.
Obviously, they did.
They had an issue.
They filed with Apple.
They just didn't get their stuff working in time for the 10.9 release.
They did get it working a couple weeks afterwards.
And now I'm just waiting on my IT department, however long that will take.
Sounds fun.
That's always, that's always fun.
Yeah.
And I did.
The other thing I found out is a lot of people were recommending third party Cisco VPN compatible clients.
One thing I think some people are confused about is that the built-in OS 10 VPN works with some Cisco VPNs.
And we used to have a Cisco VPN that the built-in one work with.
And that was great.
It was like no software to install.
Your OS works with it out of the box.
It worked in 10.8.
I think it worked in 10.7.
Uh,
But this new Cisco product they bought doesn't work with the built-in VPN.
So a lot of people are saying, oh, here's how you can decrypt this file and get the right things to enter into the OS VPN preferences.
I had already done that.
I already had figured out all that stuff and it was working, but they upgraded, side graded, whatever, changed to AnyConnect, which doesn't work with the built-in VPN.
But there are third-party products that you can buy, not from Cisco, that will apparently work with Cisco AnyConnect.
One of them was called OpenConnect.
It's like an open source project or whatever that looked like a little bit too much work for me to try to install.
Another one is called Shimo, which I checked out.
I could not get it to work, and I didn't want to fight with it because if I fail to get it to work three times in a row, I get locked out, which I did.
I didn't have to call someone on the phone.
I asked them to unlock my thing for me.
So I'm just going to stick with the Cisco IndyConnect VPN, wait for my work to approve it for use, and then upgrade everything and continue my life.
All right.
We also had a great bit of follow-up from a guy named Jared, who asks, I'm wondering what you might perceive as a market for better enterprise software.
I know that's a big question, but is there a place for a smaller company whose focus is enterprise software to come in and disrupt one of the big guys with something vastly better without the name recognition?
I've been fighting with enterprise accounting software and seriously considering writing my own to try and combat the insanity that is most accounting software.
But I'd be fighting an uphill battle.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
So I picked this as something I wanted to talk about because my first job out of college was actually at a small enterprise software company trying to disrupt a bigger enterprise software market.
I learned a lot there.
Most of what I learned was just because I was a smart-ass college kid just out of school and thinking I knew everything entering the workforce.
I was working with a bunch of way smarter people than me who were way better programmers and had much more wisdom accumulated among them.
I got my butt kicked pretty severely in the best possible way during that first year or two.
Just like learning how to be a real professional software developer instead of just some college kid who knows that program.
Part of that...
growing up process is that i think every programmer when they leave college is very likely to be the kind of person and i certainly was who looks at anything else and says oh well that's stupid why why do they do it that way why don't they just do xyz like you think everything's a simple problem you think everyone else is an idiot and obviously the reason why this sucks is because they're all stupid and i know better and i can walk in there and and take over you know or or i would do it better and so
I had a look at this market from that point of view.
I'm not saying that's Jared's point of view.
It probably isn't.
He's probably more experienced than that.
But that was certainly my point of view.
And I learned kind of the hard way why enterprise software is so hard.
And it really is.
It's not as simple as, oh, well, crappy programmers read it because they didn't want to work on consumer stuff.
It's not that at all.
It's also not that the developers of enterprise software are just...
they don't care about interface or they don't care about quality.
It isn't that at all.
It's that the enterprise market is really, really complicated, and it's not nearly as easy as the consumer market to enter.
So one of the biggest reasons is just the buyers.
When you think about the culture of a company, and Casey, you mentioned this a little bit last episode with meetings and people wanting to be heard and wanting to not get fired and be relevant –
One of the biggest problems is that, you know, you've heard the phrase, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
And if you think about, like, if you're a big business buying a big enterprise software product and you're the IT manager or you're the CIO, whatever they do, you know, something like that.
I don't know enough about these terms to know who makes these decisions usually, but let's call it the IT manager.
Yeah.
If you install some crazy email system from a startup, and the guy before you was running Lotus Notes, which is horrible for the users.
It's horrendous for the users.
But it's like, you know, quote, enterprise, and it's well known.
You know, nobody ever got fired for installing Lotus Notes.
Although they probably should.
Which, by the way, Lotus is owned by IBM.
Yeah, I know, which makes that extra funny.
Although I don't think that it was always that way.
But anyway, it doesn't matter.
If you devote your whole company's budget for Category X and all this effort to install it and everything, and it turns out to kind of suck for you...
If that's a really well-known thing like Microsoft Office or the Exchange server, no one's going to fire you for that because that was a reasonable decision to make.
If you go buy some kind of crazy startup thing and that doesn't work very well or people just don't like it, that's on you.
And so there's a lot of pressure just from the situation you're in there.
There's a lot of pressure to go with the big established things.
Yeah.
It's also a very human-intensive sales process.
There was an article forever ago that I'll have to link to on Joel on software about software pricing, which I've probably linked to 10 times over the last five years for various things.
One of the things he mentions is that there's really not a lot of software between $1,000 and $50,000.
because once you get above a certain price threshold, you have to start flying a sales force out to meet with potential customers and play golf with them and schmooze with them and go out there to support everything.
And so it becomes a much more expensive proposition for you, the software vendor, to even sell software to big enterprises.
So you have to charge a massive amount.
That same process, that big sales process, makes it so that...
you basically have to have a very large sales force and a dedicated sales force to fly out and meet with people all the time if you want to sell enterprise software in any meaningful volume.
For the most part, you can't just have a website and a download button and that's it.
Much of the software, you've got to fly people out, schmooze with them, meet with them for months, etc.
And then once you get the software built, let's say you actually sell it to them.
Or you come close.
Then you have to deal with their requirements.
And this is one of the reasons why enterprise software is so expensive and why there's not a whole lot of choices for a lot of the stuff there.
Enterprise stuff has to work at much larger scales and much higher reliability than a lot of consumer software.
You know, you might design your app thinking that, oh, this, you know...
what's the maximum number of database records that I'm going to have to handle on this app?
You know, what is it?
Maybe a million.
And then you find out that, you know, your customer has to import 15 million records a year from the last 30 years from their ancient system that was running on a mainframe that, you know, some contractors built in the eighties, you know, like it was, it's that, it's that kind of, of scale that you're operating at with so many companies.
Um,
You also have all these needs like what John was saying last week.
You have security needs.
You have regulatory needs.
You have logging and auditing and fine-grained access control and groups and permissions and all these things that are so often required by enterprise customers that –
that's you know consumer stuff doesn't need most of that stuff or can get away with a smaller scale version of that or a less a less official version of things like that there's also um you know you might have requirements in certain industries about like they might want to know how you run your company they might they might want to have security audits of your company quality audits of things you know like things like six sigma quality certifications stuff like that i don't know enough about it to say more of them but
Stuff like that.
They might put the burden on you to say, well, for us to buy your software, we have to have these organizations or regulatory bodies verify that your company is legit and secure.
A lot like PCI compliance in the payment industry, that kind of thing.
Can I interject real quick?
Yeah.
As somebody who has either worked for big enterprises as a consultant, or I also spent some time at a huge company.
It wasn't a software company, but it was a huge company nevertheless.
This is absolutely true.
And a lot of times you'll have really progressive and really smart developers putting in, I touched on this last episode, putting a situation where
Because of all the requirements put on them about code reviews and about even the version control you use.
Like in a past job, I had to use the rational suite where I couldn't check in code unless I associated it with a task in the bug slash work tracking part of that same tool.
So I couldn't make a change to the code unless I was tagging it and associating it with something that somebody else more important than me told me to do.
And that's extremely, extremely frustrating.
And the other thing is with big companies, they've typically been around long enough that they have screwed up in every possible way.
And the answer to screwing up when you're in a big company is to make a procedure so you don't do that exact thing again.
And so now you have a million and five procedures.
And Marco, you were touching on this with Six Sigma and blah, blah, blah.
You have a million and five procedures in place to avoid you pretty much getting work done with any sort of urgency or speed.
And it's very, very difficult and very frustrating.
You're absolutely right.
And the sales process is also weird because, first of all, there's analyst reports.
These things are so big and there's so much money at stake.
One of the things analysts are paid to do is tell companies what kind of enterprise software they should be buying.
And the analyst game at that scale is kind of a scam.
You as a software vendor basically have to...
pay massive sums of money to become members or clients of the analyst firms and then they'll start recommending you and it's not it's not ever actually said that way but that's kind of how it works in practice and so there's a lot of companies that you know they'll only buy what some analyst tells them to buy and so you have to kind of get in that game that's a very expensive game to get into and and then even when you get in it's like well they might not recommend you or they might not put you in the right boxes or something
compliance is like that too a lot of i've been through a lot of compliance things and those are basically like extortion scams because it's that you the company will come you'll pay a company to come to tell you whether you are compliant with something whether it be pci or a million other acronym standards that you have to comply with and they'll tell you which things you are non-compliant about and then they will sell you consulting services to make you compliant and after you pay it
After you pay this very same company the money to help remediate your failures to comply, then they will give you your certification.
And everybody – like once you get that critical mass of like, oh, everybody in the X industry needs to have Y certification compliance just to be a player because –
People start putting it on each other's requirements.
Marco talked about the requirements.
Once everyone starts putting it on their requirements and everyone decides they have to be on it, the culture of companies that build up around allowing companies to get that compliance as a sort of little cabal, it's like...
It's kind of like I was saying before with the startups all passing money back and forth to each other until the venture capital money ran out.
This is for actual profitable companies, and they're passing money back and forth to these middlemen who give them the compliance so that they can continue to sell to people and the little people who can't afford to play that compliance game.
A lot of these compliance things start with the right intentions, especially government compliance.
In general, have some good intentions to begin with, and then they're just sort of...
people finding little nooks and crannies of profit where they can like sort of live as the big suckerfish on the, on the government shark or on the compliance shark and say, we have found a little area where we can be profitable by helping other companies comply with these stupid things.
It's not, it's not a pleasant place to be this, this whole enterprise environment.
And I've talked about it on past shows where I think this, this whole environment that we just described to all these different things about that are weird and terrible and that people have to do.
it eventually produces companies that are not able to compete.
Like in the short term and medium term, it produces companies that can crush other companies.
But in the long term, it resigns you to death.
Because once you're completely ossified with procedures and compliance and all that other stuff,
And you were the king of your mountain of these other big companies that are all playing the same game and you've defeated them all.
And there's like two or three of you left and you think you're the winner.
Some other little furry mammal comes up and the comet comes and you die and the furry mammal grows up to be the next dinosaur.
Like that's the that's the evolutionary process.
And getting back to this question from Jared about like, what do we think about some small company disrupting stuff like that?
This is happening all the time, this constant turnover of the little company comes, then they become the big company, then they become a giant behemoth that can't do anything, and then they die, and the next one comes.
That's always taking place.
In the enterprise market, a lot of places that are small, like I'm thinking of Igloo, one of our past sponsors with the whole internet software.
It's so easy to make a product that end users want to use more than the things that they're forced to use.
The trick is for those companies is either be so incredibly desirable that the important people want it, and that's like the iPhone approach, where it doesn't matter.
The CEO has an iPhone.
The CTO has an iPhone.
All the C-level executives have iPhones.
IT department, you're going to make iPhones work with our network.
I don't care.
I don't want to hear about BlackBerry.
Just make it work.
Like that's one way to go in there.
And that's sort of like a, you know, from the top down type of approach.
And the other one is the bottom up approach where in our company, at least like we have SharePoint, which Casey can tell us all about how wonderful that is.
And we all hate it and it's terrible.
And
People just, you know, individual people, not developers, but just like regular everybody, anybody in the company, salespeople, managers, everybody just started using their own Dropbox accounts or making shared Dropbox accounts with like, you know, just random names and then sharing them amongst all the people because it was easier to share files with Dropbox.
But that's not compliant with all our compliance stuff.
So it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't be using Dropbox.
We have all these requirements.
Data has to be in-house, has to be encrypted, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And what we're switching to now is Box.net, which is like a secure Dropbox type of thing that lets you self-host and stuff like that.
That's kind of like the Igloo approach, where you take a product that end users really like, but they may not have enough of the requirements to get into an enterprise.
And you go from the consumer side and you say, what if we just add just enough features and compliance to get us into not all enterprises, not even the biggest enterprises, but now we're a player in the small to medium business type of enterprise.
where, well, take a product that everybody loves.
Apple did it itself with the iPhone.
Take the iPhone that everybody loves and don't make it into a BlackBerry, but give it enough enterprise features, the remote wipe, the little bit of a management service or whatever.
So you don't bend over backwards and pervert your product to make it into true enterprise software.
You merely take a really desirable product that consumers love and you do what it takes to get in the door.
And that's a bottom-up type approach.
And there's a new Dropbox for business announcement as well.
So now everyone's kind of doing that, where you can get into the enterprise without...
fleet of salespeople and without being like, we'll do anything for you in the big support contracts and stuff like that, by just taking a successful consumer product that you know people are using anyway, sort of on the sly or illegally, quote unquote, and just do what it takes to get in the door of a couple of businesses.
I think that is a viable strategy for disruption.
We'll see, you know, 30 years from now, what the state of file sharing within large enterprises looks like.
I was talking at work with somebody today, just today actually, and he was saying that he was talking to big banks at some conference a while ago.
That must have been fun.
Well, you would think not, but actually I guess it was very interesting.
And my coworker was saying he was talking to I guess like a director of innovation or something like that at a big bank.
And this particular gentleman said, you know, I don't fear the other big banks, and I genuinely don't know which bank it was.
But for the sake of conversation, let's say it was Bank of America.
And the guy from Bank of America said, I don't fear Capital One, and I don't fear Wells Fargo.
You know who I fear?
The little startups, because they can move so much faster than we can.
And there's nothing I can do about that.
And that makes me think of, say, Square.
And Square is never going to replace a Bank of America, but Square is my go-to mechanism for giving money to friends in sums more than like $10 or whatever I would have in my wallet.
And if I have to pay a friend that I don't see on a regular basis because he did me a favor or I bought something from them secondhand or whatever the case may be, you know what I do?
I use Square Cash.
And it's that sort of disruption, I hate to use that word, I'm probably misusing it, but that sort of air quote disruption that I think is scary.
And I think Jared's spot on in saying, you know, maybe that's possible.
And if you make a great product, it could happen.
This week's first sponsor is a repeat sponsor, I think.
But anyway, we've had other things from them before.
This week, it is Ting.
Ting is from the people at Two Cows.
They are the same company, the parent company of Hover, and so many good things.
Ting is mobile that makes sense.
They're a no BS, simple-to-use mobile service provider.
They're a reseller on the – they're an MVNO, if anybody remembers that acronym.
They're an MVNO reseller of the U.S.
Nationwide Sprint Network.
If you go to our special URL, atp.ting.com, to get $25 off a new device or a $25 service credit if you bring your own.
So Ting has great rates, and there's no contracts or early termination fees.
You buy and own your device outright from the start.
So they don't need you to have a contract or come back or pay these big ETFs.
And what's most interesting about them, I think, is that they have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.
You pay a base price of $6 per month per device, and then above that, you're just automatically billed for the actual amount of minutes or messages or megabytes that you actually use each month.
So for instance...
If you never use voice or messages, you don't pay for them.
Let's say you use 100 megs of data this month.
That's a total of just $9, including that $6 per device base cost.
$9.
And then next month, let's say you're traveling and you use a gig.
Then you'll pay $30.
You don't need to guess what you're going to need in advance or remember to change it next month.
If you boost up your data this month because you're going to be traveling and then next month you've got to bring it back down, no, you don't have to do that.
You just pay for what you use.
They charge you properly in these little buckets and you can go on their site and see.
It's really great.
On top of that, there's a few small regulatory surcharges each month but only what they're legally required to collect.
They don't charge any mysterious or misleading recovery fees that you see on most other wireless bills.
You see all these random fees, and you're like, oh, I wonder what those are.
Some of them are legally required.
Some of them aren't, and it's kind of shady.
Well, Ting only charges you the minimum that they need to charge you for those.
And you can add as many devices to your account as you'd like.
You can use their awesome web interface to manage a big fleet of devices.
If you have a big pool of devices you want to manage, you can do that.
And it's really great.
So one idea I had for how to use Ting
is it'd be great for developers like me.
If you want to have an Android test phone, let's say you're an iOS developer and you're making an Android version of your app or you need to test out your website on an Android phone or something like that.
Tablets are fairly easy to get these days, but data plans really aren't and phones really aren't still.
With Ting, you can get your own Android phone.
You can buy a used one or you can get it new from them.
You can get your own Android phone and just have this barely minimal data plan.
You can pay $6 a month most months when it's sitting in the drawer.
And then you can take it out and you can say, oh, I'm going to take this around and test something out in the world with real service on my phone.
And you'll end up paying like $3 or $4 that month.
It's great.
So I think that's a really great use case for Ting.
You're a developer.
You want a test device.
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In fact, they even have this cool new thing.
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If you have Verizon, they will even, if you want, they will take your credentials to log into Verizon, and they'll scrape all your info out of Verizon for you to do it all automatically.
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Remember, there's no contracts and no early termination fees, so these are devices you just buy them, you own them outright, and you pay for whatever you use.
Check out Ting at atp.ting.com, and thank you very much to Ting for sponsoring the show.
I have one quick bit of follow-up to end the follow-up train, and it vaguely relates to EverPix, which is going to really make everyone excited.
The two Windows Phone users came out of the woodwork over the last week to complain about the fact that I called it Windows Phone Series 7 Mobile Series Metro, not Metro, phone.
I think that's fair.
Well, to be honest, I mean, I think they're right.
And I got some tweets from Arby saying,
And an email from Chris M where they took issue with what I was saying.
And to some degree, I think they were right.
And so let me read a quote from this email, which I never actually got blessing to read from, but whatever.
They were talking about, among other things, and we saw this from other people as well, that SkyDrive apparently is kind of EverPix for Windows Phone devices.
And so this is Chris who emailed me.
When I jumped from iOS to Windows Phone because it was just too gaudy in 2010, I got something very, very nice, indefinite photo backups.
I just looked at my SkyDrive and saw that I've got 8,581 photos backed up.
That's many photos I've taken for just over three years on my phone.
That whole EverPix debacle, that whole does or doesn't iCloud backup more than 1,000 photos, we don't have that problem, all 4% of us.
And so it is worth noting that this is a really cool thing.
And I didn't look into it any more than these emails and tweets that we got.
But that's what I wanted from Apple.
And it seems that Microsoft can do it.
And perhaps they can do it because they have 4% of the users, like Chris said.
But it is very compelling.
And it is very interesting.
And I should give Microsoft some credit for that.
So my apologies to the Windows Phone users of the world.
And I appreciate you guys pointing that out.
The thing about all these though is that even though it seems like they're being magnanimous and doing this out of the goodness of their heart to help you keep your photos safe and maybe make you more satisfied with your Windows phone or your Google phone or whatever –
It is also a form of platform lock-in because say every one of these, say Microsoft, Google, and Apple all protect all your photos forever.
Which one of those companies, if any, gives you a way to switch platforms?
Say, oh, I've decided I don't like Windows Phone anymore.
Now I'm going to try an Android phone.
I'm going to try Google, Nexus, whatever number they're up to.
And then you think, oh, hey, wait a second.
All my pictures are on Microsoft SkyDrive.
When I buy my new Google phone and set it up, where are all my pictures going to be?
How am I going to see them?
Is Microsoft going to bend over backwards to say, oh, it's easy.
You can just export all your photos here and put them in there.
Do you assume that all the photos in your SkyDrive also exist on your local disk because they're mirror Dropbox style?
Or do you have backups of them?
Like this siloing effect, I mean, it's good for all the individual companies.
And I would think out of all the companies, Google is the most likely to give you a way to get your data out because they're pretty good thus far about giving you some sort of gigantic give me my data out in a non-proprietary format.
But certainly Apple is not good about that.
And I imagine Microsoft would not be either.
So that's something we didn't even talk about last time.
Like assume we snap our fingers and everybody provides a way to protect all our data, including our photos forever up in the cloud and blah, blah, blah.
Now we're all locked in even further to the platforms that we're using probably.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I think it's wise when you're looking at how you're going to do something like this.
It's wise to break that hard link with one of these major platform vendors who's going to have all these different strategy barriers they're going to probably erect.
And I think it's better to go with something either self-managed where it's on all your stuff, like a hard drive and transporter and Dropbox, stuff like that, or go with something like EverPix, which is a service that is kind of neutral and unlikely to be bought.
Actually, I guess...
Sorry, I can't really say that.
If Everest picks it, stayed in business, fine.
But then once they get acquired, kind of like how Facebook's always snapping.
Facebook bought Instagram and everything.
You thought you were using this independent service, and now it's part of the Facebook empire.
That's just something you have to watch for.
Like we said in the last thing, none of these things are going to be your solution forever.
It's your responsibility to have all these different things, and then one of them goes away, gets acquired, starts behaving in a way you don't like or whatever.
Then you swap it out for what you are.
You just...
You're never going to be all set forever.
You're always going to have to keep an eye on these things and decide when some service or vendor is now across the line into something you don't like, and then you've got to switch.
Exactly.
So totally changing topics.
John, I assume you have been following the reviews of the PS4 and Xbone.
I haven't even actually read any of the reviews, but I've read so much about both of them beforehand.
It's almost like now that people actually have them, what are they going to say that I didn't already know about it?
But the one thing that we all didn't know about any of these things is how many people are going to buy them.
And now for the PS4, at the very least, we do have sales numbers proudly announced by Sony itself.
They said that they sold a million of these in the first 24 hours in North America alone.
And that doesn't sound like a lot compared to how many iPhones sell on the first day.
It was like 9 million that first weekend or something for the 5S.
But in the world of game consoles, I put a link into this Economist story, which I think had some nice graphs about it, or some interesting graphs anyway.
But in the world of game consoles, those numbers are actually pretty good.
The PlayStation 4 sold more consoles in its first 24 hours than any other previous console sold in, I think, its first week or maybe its first month.
It's really big opening day numbers.
And the reason I bring this up is because we had a conversation about Nintendo, I don't know, a couple months ago when everyone was talking about Nintendo.
I did this post on Hypercritical Nintendo in Crisis.
We should put that in the show notes.
And one of the things I said in it was that if the market for dedicated gaming hardware goes away, then Nintendo is probably in big trouble because I don't think Nintendo has the ability to...
put out a full-fledged platform like for applications and everything in the style of iOS or Android.
It just doesn't seem like that's in the, you know, it's just something the company is not able to do.
And to be fair, very few companies are able to do that.
Who is able to produce a platform for mobile desktop or anything?
Many companies have tried and most of them have failed.
And we've got Windows Phone, barely, Android, and we've got iOS.
And on the desktop, we've got Windows, the Mac, and, you know, maybe Linux if you want to throw that in there.
And dead bodies of all the past companies that have tried from, you know, Palm OS to Amiga to OS2 and all, you know, BOS, all these things, the companies that couldn't do it.
So I don't think Nintendo is a platform company.
And I think their survival depends on there being a market for dedicated gaming hardware.
Now, out of the next generation consoles, the PlayStation 4 is the most dedicated gaming hardware.
The Xbox One tries to be like...
We do television stuff, and you can do Skype with your friends, and you can overlay a web browser on top of your game.
It has HDMI input, for crying out loud.
It is trying to be a television experience with the Kinect built in and all that stuff.
The Wii U, I don't know quite what that is.
I guess you would call it a dedicated gaming console as well, but it's actually very strange with the handheld tablet thing and everything like that.
The PlayStation 4 is straight up the middle.
It's a box.
It has controllers.
It plugs into your TV.
You put a game disc in it.
You play the game with the controller on the TV.
Very straightforward.
and so what does the very big opening day sales of the playstation 4 say about the viability of dedicated gaming hardware uh i think do you guys have the economist thing open with those charts i don't but i can i don't do my homework click it in the link it's in the show notes all right i got it yeah i i think these charts are interesting for a couple of reasons uh
This shows the generations of game consoles.
I don't know how they come up with these numbers.
They're probably from the Wikipedia pages.
But the sixth generation is listed as the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox.
Seventh is the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360.
And the eighth is PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U. You guys all have the charts up now?
Yeah.
You can look at the sixth generation and you can see how massively the PS2 dominated.
Like if you're not into games or don't follow the industry, you might think, oh, that was the time when these three consoles existed.
And if your friend's house who you always went over, if they had an Xbox, the original Xbox,
you would have thought, yeah, that generation was pretty much evenly split between Xbox and PS2, and I don't know anybody with the GameCube.
Or you might say, oh, I had a GameCube, and it sold about as many as the PS2 and Xbox, right?
No, you look at these graphs, and it's very clear.
That was the PS2 generation.
Xbox and GameCube also existed as products.
more or less it's not you know it was a blowout and then you look at the seventh generation with the wii ps3 and xbox 360 and you can see the wii just shooting up like a rocket ship and then coming down like a rocket ship you know uh but still massively dominating that generation because the the ps3 and the 360 are just these little lumps underneath and even though they had a more longevity than the wii they could not come back from that just man i mean look at the slope of that thing it's just unbelievable
It's the model rocket trajectory.
Yeah.
But clearly the Wii dominated that generation.
It may have had a big fall, but it went up twice as high.
Actually, I think I pulled numbers from Wikipedia for that to see what the heck was it.
Wii was $100 million.
PS3 ended up being around $80 million.
Xbox 360 ended up being $76 million.
And most of that is because the Wii sales just dropped off and the PS3 and Xbox kept chipping away.
The longer that generation went on, the more the PS3 and 360 would start to catch up.
But it was a blowout in the beginning and middle.
And then the hilarious eighth generation chart they have here.
You notice that gray area that says FCAST, which I guess is the hip way to say forecast.
They're trying to forecast into the future.
Each one of these charts has an area where they're forecasting into the future.
But the eighth generation chart is all in the FCAST zone.
It's all forecast.
There's one data point that's not in the forecast.
Right.
Well, the Wii U has been out for a little while, and the PS4 has been out for a day.
And the Xbox One is not out yet.
So they said, let's just make stuff up.
Here's what we think the future of this thing will be.
And they draw a bunch of lines, and they show the Wii U being small.
That's probably a safe bet.
And then they show the Xbox One and PS4 or the PS4 being higher.
But none of those lines come close to reaching the peaks of the Wii U or the PS2.
They're having the PS4 top out.
around like 15 million, you know, I guess a year or two from now.
I don't know where they come up with these numbers.
Well, if you look at the previous generation, it looks like they're basically assuming that the PS4 is going to sell about as well as the PS3.
Yeah, and that the Xbox One will be worse than the 360.
Yeah.
Right.
But see, I think I would disagree with that because I think if you look at this generation, it's very clear, as you said, that Sony is really targeting gamers.
This is a gaming machine.
We're not going to try to do a whole lot of other multimedia things.
We're not going to try to be a TV pass-through with all this other stuff that the X-Bone is doing.
They're really just trying to be a really good gaming machine.
And...
So I think they're probably going to do a lot better this time than Microsoft will.
And I think they're probably going to sell a lot more units than what's in this FCAST zone in this graph.
Yeah.
And I said on a past podcast that I think I was on a talk show talking about this with Gruber.
that you know that that that my premise like nintendo better hope that there's a market for dedicated gaming harbor because they can't they're they're doomed if there's not because they can't do anything but dedicated gaming hardware and uh i think i said i think there is at least one more generation of dedicated gaming harbor that it will be viable for one more generation because at that time none of these things were out yet except for the wii u and even though it wasn't doing that well i said i think maybe dedicated gaming hard does go away and we all play this on our phones
wirelessly to our TVs or a little Apple TV style puck or whatever, but not this generation.
We are at least one more generation of what we know as actual game consoles, whether they have fancy other functionality as well.
And the reason I think that is because the last console generation was like seven to eight years long, which is pretty long for a console generation, especially at the, at the pace things, uh,
you know, develop in the electronics industry these days.
Yeah.
And so there's a whole generation of kids who grew up with these consoles who have never seen a new console launch.
Like, they started playing when they were 7, 8, or 9 years old, and now they're like a teenager entering college, or maybe they're in their early to mid-20s or something.
They've...
grown up their entire life with just one game console or like one one generation of game consoles they're at that age where they have a job they don't have anything else to spend on except for like you know entertainment going to the movies buying video games and buying game consoles going out like they don't have a mortgage or family or whatever these people are absolutely positively ready to experience the thrill and excitement that people my age have experienced many times over of a new game console generation and maybe they heard from the old fogies like us
like oh when the nintendo 64 came out and mario 64 blew our mind and oh the snea so it was so amazing i got to play jrpgs and like you know they didn't they've never had that their whole life has just been this imagine if your whole life like the computer that you you played with when you were eight you were still playing with that same computer when you were 16 that feels like just way longer from the ages of eight to 16 than you know the same eight years for an adult
they are ready to buy and it did not surprise me that a million of them went out and bought the PS4 on day one because these people have played with the PS3 and maybe their older brother's PS2 and maybe they even went back to the PS1 but they have never been through a console launch so boom a million out the door and I think the Xbox One launch will also go pretty well
So far, so good for the idea of there being a viable mark for dedicated gaming hardware.
But I'm not sure that these 1 million buyers who bought on day one represent anything more than the most enthusiastic gamers.
I'm not sure that they, like if you look at these graphs, is it going to be something more like the Wii graph where it goes up really steeply and then it takes a turn?
I don't know if this kind of sales pace can be sustained.
I think the PS4 is a great product, and I think that at the very least, everybody who bought a 360 or a PS3 would be perfectly satisfied with a PS4 or Xbox One.
I'm just not sure how many of them think that this is something that they need to go out and buy.
uh so i'm i'm keeping my eye on this to see not just like oh great opening day sales like if it was a negative result like if no one went out and bought it on day one that would be a terrible terrible sign but having it be such a an overwhelmingly positive result like wow biggest first day sales of a new console ever in the history of anything that is merely neutral i think it doesn't preclude the the idea that these sales will taper off and never get up to the levels of the ps2 or the wii uh in the past generations
Yeah, I think there was a really good quote that I wanted to relay from the Inantech review today that basically he has his hands on an X-Bone and a PS4, and so he compares them and stuff.
And first of all, I think it's really interesting to see the... He took side-by-side videos and screenshots, so you can see the differences in the same game ported to both systems and the graphical difference between the two.
And man, to my eye, the PS4 version looks way better.
But on the very last page, she says, Being an early adopter of an X-Gen console is rarely a fun thing.
Literally all of my friends are on Xbox 360s or PS3s, meaning online multiplayer with people I know is pretty much out of the question for at least a year or so.
And this is the part that I thought was most interesting.
The launch lineup for both platforms is reasonable but could be a lot better.
Having just played Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us, I'm going to need more than COD or NBA 2K14 to really draw me into the Xbox One or PS4.
This is how the story goes with any new console launch.
And I think that's...
You know, I haven't heard of any must have games for all three of these consoles.
I mean, John, how's the Wii U doing on that front?
Like Nintendo actually is usually does pretty good about system selling games.
They've really dropped the ball in the Wii U. But even they had more games out of the game.
Like there's the reason one of the reasons I don't have a PS4 yet is because there were no launch titles that I said I need to have that title.
which is very often the case.
And Anand's right about this.
He's old enough to have lived through many console launches.
And it's gotten worse now that the console makers are on the hook to not necessarily produce a platform like iOS or Android, but they're on the hook to provide network services, social networking, digital downloads, fancy features,
All these consoles are launching without the full complement of features that were promised in all the previous keynote speeches, the PS4 in particular.
And all of them, even if they did launch with all the features, they won't work for months or years.
Like, this is the long game.
It's not like an iPad where Apple releases a new iPad and it better be damn good because next year another one's coming out.
There's not going to be another console for like six, seven, eight years, maybe longer.
This is a long game for these guys.
And out of the gate, their software platforms suck.
They don't have the features that they want.
They don't have, they don't work right.
The ones that are there, like all these things that the hardware is capable of, you know, it just like the PS4 doesn't even have a standby mode, like where you don't have to turn the thing entirely off.
You got to turn totally off and then it's got to boot totally up, which is like,
It's like, didn't you have all these presentations saying, oh, the PS4 is going to have an auxiliary chip to keep it on, do all this stuff?
Nope, doesn't do any of that stuff out of the gate.
So anybody who's buying this console stuff, especially if you were an early adopter of the PS3 or the 360, is used to this now.
Because when the PS3 launched, the software was horrendous.
Like, you couldn't even download games in the background.
And the 360 has gone through many major revisions.
So all the people buying this, I think, especially on day one, they realize I'm getting a day one console.
It's going to be a piece of crap.
It's not going to work right.
But this exact same hardware three, four years from now, boy, it'll really be singing.
They won't have to do any upgrades.
They won't have to buy a new video card.
They won't have to do anything except for apply software updates, which presumably will come down faster.
And people using the PS4 have said...
Thank God it downloads software updates much better than it used to.
All that being said, like you were getting at before, the main thing about this is, okay, fine.
It's going to be buggy.
It's going to have missing features that I was promised.
I'm assuming they'll come later.
But as long as it has game X that I really want to play in amazing next generation graphics with next generation features in the new controller or whatever, I'll buy it.
And I don't think the PlayStation 4 has any of those games at this point.
And that's not a very strong launch.
And they sold a million systems in 24 hours without any system selling games.
There is no Mario 64 for the PS4.
It didn't even launch with Last Guardian for the crazy people like me.
There's no launch title out there that people say, I wasn't going to get a PS4, but once I saw it had Game X, I had to get it.
And that's, I guess, also still a positive sign.
It's a negative sign for the PS4's game library.
But I think with these sales numbers and the pipeline of games, we don't have to worry about there not being a lot of games for the PS4.
But it was not a Nintendo-style launch where the only reason people buy the system is because there's one game on it that you absolutely have to play.
So, you know, I think everyone involved in this process understands that
This is not a sprint, it's a marathon, and I don't even know if the Wii U will be finishing that marathon at this rate.
Yeah, I'm really not positive on my outlook of the Wii U's future.
I really do think that this is going to be a PS4-dominated generation, and the X-Bone is going to be second place, probably half the volume of the PS4 over time, and I don't think the Wii U is going to show up much on the chart.
I give the Xbox more.
I don't think that the PS4 is going to be double it.
But ask me again after the Xbox One launch.
We'll talk about it again in a year.
Yeah, because they do.
The thing about the Xbox One is it's a good game machine and also X, Y, and Z. And Microsoft does online and its software stack so much better than Sony.
And that is increasingly important.
It's tough to handicap this because they are very complementary.
There's not a lot of overlap in their strengths.
Microsoft is so strong in the areas that Sony is so weak and vice versa.
So we'll have to wait and see.
And these days, system-selling games are hard to come by.
With Xbox, Halo is the reason Xbox exists at all.
If the Halo franchise did not exist, I don't think Microsoft would have been willing to put that much money into the console itself.
And Sony had lots of system selling, you know, Final Fantasy seven and all that stuff that made Sony Sony.
But nowadays, like these launch titles, you know, that you see, like, I guess, you know, Killzone is everyone's got their their one exclusive first person shooter.
But is that even the most popular first person shooter without Call of Duty and all the other, you know, things that are multi platform?
Right, and all the big sports franchises are all multi-platform.
Grand Theft Auto.
So many things are multi-platform.
And even when you can get an exclusive, all that means is it'll be on your platform in a year or six months or whatever.
That's what exclusive means these days.
So the only things that are exclusive-exclusive are first-party games, which I don't think even Halo is at this point.
Oh, no.
Yeah, it's Halo.
Yeah, Microsoft still owns Halo, and they're having 343 Studios or whatever do it.
And Bungie is off doing Destiny, which is multi-platform, by the way.
Sony has its own little arty in-house things and, you know, stuff like Gran Turismo and stuff like that.
And Nintendo, of course, their entire business is built on first party.
Those are never available anywhere.
And that's like the only reason anyone buys Nintendo hardware anymore is because the hardware software synergy and you can't get that software anywhere else.
So that continues to be Nintendo's hope for success.
Yeah.
I think we should do one more sponsor, and then I have a little bit more about Nintendo afterwards to wrap up this segment.
I'm actually really upset that Sony killed the Wipeout Studio, so there's not going to be a Wipeout for PS4.
They sold more games that would have survived.
I probably would have bought a PS4 to play the next Wipeout.
That's how much I love Wipeout.
It is the only game I own for my PS3.
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No.
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Rose gold?
Is that like the new color of the next iPhone?
No, it's actually – it's like a darker – it's interesting.
It's a different shade of gold.
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You know, like with these sponsors like Gembar and Warby Parker, where it's a web version to buy something that previously you'd always like, oh, I always have to buy those in person because of reasons X, Y, Z. I'm like fast forwarding 50 years in the future.
And instead of just having a website where you can build your own custom ring out of like pick this, pick the gem, pick the accent thing, pick the metal color, pick the design and like sort of building your own thing.
I guess this gets in sci-fi territory where it's like, why can't I just 3D print anything that I want?
And I'll just go to a website and the replicator machine will make me tea or gray hot or whatever it is that I ask for.
And we're creeping up on that.
And I think that that sales process of sitting in front of your computer and clicking a bunch of buttons and seeing some nicely rendered graphics update with the thing it is that you are potentially manufacturing or having manufactured on your behalf –
is so much nicer than driving to a store and talking to salespeople and going from store to store and sitting in traffic.
Just sitting at a website and clicking buttons until you get what you want is much nicer.
And so we're creeping up on the replicator machines a little bit.
There may be a web interface instead of a voice interface in a box in the wall.
Awesome.
All right, John, you said you had some more stuff about video games.
Yeah, one final bit on Nintendo and their prospects.
There were some rumors.
There's always rumors about Nintendo, and I don't know how fond of these are, but it just made me think of this.
The rumors were like, oh, Nintendo making an Android tablet or whatever.
I think these have been going around for months and months.
They're resurfacing.
Yeah.
That's ridiculous.
And everyone always wants to hear, you know, Nintendo's making apps for iOS.
Nintendo's going to do this for Android.
Like, all these things that they think, oh, Nintendo's problem is that they're not a real platform.
And they don't have one and they can't make one.
Therefore, they have to, like, join one, you know, instead of doing their own thing.
Uh, and the reason I bring this up is, is because there is an aspect of it that can make the people who wrote those stories claim victory later.
Like it's not as crazy as it sounds because Nintendo devices do need some kind of operating system, you know, these days, because they don't just, it's not just you stick a cartridge in like a Nintendo and it just like plays the cartridge.
They do other things.
There is sort of like an OS type layer.
And if Nintendo decides that it's easier or better to use Android as its OS, instead of whatever the heck they're using now is their sort of embedded OS.
and they're sick of maintaining it and developing it, and they just want to base it on Android, that's fine.
But that is an entirely separate question from whether or not their devices will suddenly become, quote-unquote, Android devices, whether you'll be able to run Android apps, they'll be part of the Android ecosystem, even to the degree that the Kindles are.
Like, the Kindles, like, oh, are Android a name only, barely, but they can run applications that are built for Android or close to it, right?
They're not entirely walled off.
and my take on this is for all we know for all the average person knows i know better most gamers do as well but for all the average person knows the wii u and the 3ds could be running android right now it like it would make no difference to them because what os it runs under the covers has no bearing on what it feels like to use the device you know what i mean and actually when i was trying to look it up like what os do those things run i was reminded that the wii not the wii u but the wii runs something called ios with a capital i in front of the os and i think it
predate the iphone maybe it doesn't is it a cisco router yeah that's the other ios right now it's the same type of thing it's like it's their firmware it's not the os os but it's like the firmware that controls io and stuff like that i just thought that was funny but anyway the rumors of uh nintendo android stuff keep that in mind because if someday down the road someone says oh my god confirmed uh nintendo is going to android
I don't think it's outside the round possibility for them to use Android as part of building their products.
But I don't think they would ever say the word Android.
And I don't think you would ever know they were using Android under the covers.
It would have nothing to do with their actual business strategy.
And it had everything to do with just internal implementation details of their software stack.
And they probably wouldn't be selling their games on the Android marketplace.
No, no.
That's a whole different thing, and that's something else that people want.
Don't get too tied up into what people are using under the cover.
It's like, oh, my God, Google is moving to Linux.
I hear Android is based on Linux.
Don't tell anybody.
Or they're going to use Java, but they call it Dalvik.
These are all implementation details that have little to do with their business strategies.
So I got a Retina iPad Mini, and I'm very excited about it.
It has terrible burn-in or image retention or whatever you call it, image retention.
And I'm choosing not to care because I'm not Marco.
Wait, hold on.
To be fair, I have also chosen not to care because I went to the mall and waited in the Apple store for 40 minutes for them to get to me.
even though it was 10 in the morning i even took a picture to show how how empty the store was like there was there was very few people there um but i waited for 40 minutes plus the trip to the mall you know overall i spent an hour and a half of my life trading in my old ipad for trading in the one i just bought with this image retention problem for another one that also has an image retention problem and it was the only one they had in stock i'm like you know what i you know i'll just take this i'm gonna choose not to not care anymore
Have you found a way to get the screen manufacturer out of the firmware with some crazy thing yet or no?
No, I wasn't able to.
I mean, nobody told me anything and I didn't really poke around.
I've chosen to not care because in day-to-day use, you don't really notice it.
Image retention in general on LCDs, it can be very noticeable when it gets really bad.
It can be like you'll still see the Safari address bar when you move away from Safari.
That's like an element that's always there.
Yeah.
In reality, on the minis, I don't think it's bad enough to cause that for most people.
Certainly, if you're in one app that has this interface element on it for 5-10 minutes, and then you switch to an all-white screen, you'd probably see that.
But in reality, that doesn't come up very often for me, and I think for most people.
I saw it all the time on some of the first-gen 15-inch Redna MacBook Pros, the ones with the bad screens.
And I don't know if there's something about the Mac, like having a windowed environment where certain elements like the dock or the menu bar or a text window that's in the background...
And then you switch to another app that has a bunch of empty documents and you see the text from the previous text window.
I would not be able to have stood that.
I'm assuming, like, you tested the ones in the Apple Store, right?
You were taking pictures like, look at these demo units.
They totally don't have any image retention whatsoever.
I ended up testing all four that they had on the iPad table.
All four of them passed the test.
None of them had any retention at all.
However, they were also all for Wi-Fi models.
I'm hearing mostly from people who are saying that their LTE ones have the problem.
and so it really does seem like the LTE ones were made in smaller quantities.
Maybe they had to get a lot of them out in time, and maybe either there's a bad batch of screens in the first big chunk of the LTE ones they manufactured, or they just have to get so many of them out on time that they lowered their standards for the LTE ones.
Either way, it kind of sucks, but it's also not that unusual.
People are saying, I've had tons of people run the test on the first-gen iPad mini,
And it's way worse.
And it's like more around the edges, but it has way worse retention.
The iPad 2 had way worse retention.
So this actually is not like a totally unique thing to just the new Mini.
It's actually common in a lot of products that we've never noticed before.
So it's not that big of a deal.
I think other people have made a much bigger deal out of it than I would and wanted to.
On the Reddit MacBook Pros, though, wasn't it like they had screens, so the chat room will tell me if I'm getting wrong, but it was from LG and Samsung, and the LG ones had it much worse than the Samsung screens?
Yeah, and I actually have one of the bad ones, which is why I made that test a year ago in the first place.
That's the whole reason I made that test, was because I read about that on a forum, and I'm like, oh, I wonder how mine is.
And I made that little test to test it, and mine failed.
But what you're describing with being able to see it in regular use, I've never...
had that problem with this so maybe mine is not as bad as uh as the worst but whatever brand it was that was the bad screen i do have that brand of screen in the macbook pro as you can tell in software um so i do have that screen but it's not it isn't that bad yeah and that's what it bothers me a little bit is that like for on the first retina macbook pros like okay fine it's your first retina device like there's going to be growing pains or whatever you'll sort it out and presumably they did but like at this point now they should know okay look
It seems like, let's do image retention testing as part of our qualifications of vendors for screens.
Like, maybe I would have to think the only reason they would do this is either because they don't take the issue seriously enough yet, which I think they should, or because what choice do they have?
Like, there's one vendor that passes all their tests with flying colors, whoever that happens to be, but one vendor cannot provide them the capacity they need to meet the holiday season.
So they're forced to go with the second-best vendor, which has...
worst image retention problems simply because no one else can provide them the number of screens that they need and that strikes me as plausible but either way it's disappointing to me that image retention was an issue continues to be an issue and frequently we're in the situation where one manufacturer gets the quote-unquote good screen the other one you know it gets the bad screen and it
Consumers have no way to tell.
And obviously, it is possible to make it without retention, but not everyone gets it.
And that's kind of like the bad old days of dead pixels, where I was terrified to buy my 22-inch Apple Cinema display because of the dead pixels.
And sure enough, I had like three dead pixels, which was not within the replacement threshold.
And I just had to spend three years consciously not looking at the one pixel that was stuck on white and the one pixel that was stuck on red.
And I knew exactly where they are.
And I could picture them in my mind right now and point you to them exactly where they are on the screen.
like that that bothers me obviously it bothers me way more than it bothers normal people i understand that but uh apple needs to get on the ball with that because i forgive them their first generation product maybe their second generation but at this point they need to make it like you know they need to just say look this is our these are same way they do with color gamut and like viewing angles and stuff they just have to draw a hard line if they possibly can and say uh this image retention stuff has to stop
I'm sure it's very similar to the dead pixel thing where it's not that they will tolerate no image retention.
It's that they have some kind of threshold.
These days, dead pixels, I don't think I've ever seen a dead pixel on an Apple device.
Yeah, no, we've come out of the dead pixel.
Like, at this point, I think if you had even a single one, you could probably get a replacement.
But there were years where they had, you know, if it's three, then three inches of each other or whatever.
But the thing about the image retention is there's, like, the good manufacturer and the bad one.
It's like, no, why can't they all be the good one?
I will accept that, like, this is the best we can do.
But obviously, one vendor can do way better than the other one, and I have to think it's just because that one vendor can't make enough screens.
But I wish that one vendor would buy the other one.
they all could be the good one in a year.
For us to get the Retina Mini this year, we had to accept crap like this, I think.
But see, the thing is, that's one of the first Retina MacBook Pros.
I'm like, okay, they haven't had it sorted out, but surely a year from now, everyone will get on the same page.
But no, we just keep going through this again and again with each thing.
And is the Retina MacBook Pro screen?
Well, I guess they are, because the new IGZO thing, IGZO, I forget what it stands for, indium, gallium, zinc, oxide, whatever the hell.
The new low-power...
retina screens is what lets you have these retina devices because you could not have them with the old retina screens because they just took too much power for the backlights right so i i guess i'll go back on what i said maybe i'll give them a pass on this because i forgot they just changed screen technology and maybe maybe this is the sorting out year or the sorting out generation or two for this new uh lcd screen technology but i really the moral of the story is i really really hate image retention okay
There was also, because I know we're going to get emailed about this, there was a test that was widely linked a couple of days ago from, I believe, DisplayMate.
They're a company that measures and benchmarks display quality, and they ran their tests on all the modern tiny Retina tablets that they had.
The iPad Mini Retina, the Google Nexus, was it the Nexus 7, I think, the new Nexus 7?
um i don't know the line well i want to say the the kindle hdx and um and i think that was it and and they came away saying that the ipad airs oh and the ipad air right and and basically the um kindle kindle was the best screen yeah i meant to bring this up last week yes and it uses a whole different thing it uses like low temperature poly something lt
Yeah, and that's not an option for Apple because they sell too many units.
Right, and that's the problem.
You can make a tablet with a better display, but you probably can't make it at Apple's volume.
And that's the problem they face with a lot of these component decisions.
They never used OLED, and there's things that they can't really use because of yield issues that they just have to make so many of these things.
That being said, though,
I am a little disappointed.
Seeing that test result, seeing the color gamut kind of sucks on the Mini 2.
The iPad Air display has a much better color gamut.
The Mini has, especially in the red, it's a little bit muted and a little bit inaccurate.
And that, I think, was disappointing to see.
That being said, again, in regular usage, I haven't noticed it at all, and I probably never will.
Yeah, Apple has to be on the cutting edge, but they can't be on the cutting cutting edge.
When your volumes are low, like Amazon, or lower anyway, you can afford to be on that super... Like, Apple could have gone... IGZO displays, I don't even know if that's how people pronounce it.
I don't feel like saying the letters every time, but anyway...
Those were out like a year ago.
It's not like they didn't exist.
It's just that, oh, well, they're too new.
No one can make them in big enough volume.
So Apple can't ever be on the cutting, cutting edge.
They have to wait until... And I think they're barely making it into, like, can we have enough of these...
exo screens to go to do support our holiday product line this year i think they barely scrapped by with that so the low temperature polysilicon stuff was just like you know maybe next year right and then same you know oled has existed forever but there's been no oleds that have satisfied all of apple's requirements uh you know for power viewing angle color gamut longevity you know all that stuff i mean it's the same reason they had seven inch tablets
there were retina years ago from companies other than apple it's like why can't apple be retina uh because you know they couldn't they can't go until that's the price of being as big as apple is they can press push the cutting edge and they can be like the first one to have really high volume is this great technology but they can't be the very very first anymore unless they do something like they seem to be doing with that big quartz factory in arizona or whatever where nobody has the capacity to make you know quartz coated glass screens or whatever or
We're going to be the only company in the world that has that capacity.
We're going to pay half a billion dollars to make our own factory that we don't own, but we paid for most of it.
And they will exclusively build stuff for us.
And that's how we will be.
That's how we will get the advanced new technology and get in the volumes we need before anyone else.
But that's pretty much their only road to being on the very, very cutting edge as compared to companies that sell in lower volumes.
Someone says I mean sapphire instead of quartz.
Maybe I do mean sapphire instead of quartz.
I don't know.
It's a thing in Arizona.
I don't remember.
Yeah, it's sapphire.
So anyway, so Casey, what do you think about the Mini?
I'm sorry.
Are we still here?
Is this the show?
So yeah, so the Mini, I like it quite a bit.
So I'm coming from – I still have my iPhone 5S.
I had an iPad third gen, so the first of the Retina iPads.
Um, uh, my iPhone is AT&T.
I am still on the unlimited plan.
Thus I cannot tether because AT&T is a bunch of jerks.
I bought a Verizon iPad mini, which is the first time I've gotten an LTE iPad.
And coincidentally, uh, day before yesterday, uh, Verizon, my Verizon Fios for the first time in five years, uh, conked out and it was a very excellent time to have an LTE iPad.
So I could get online and,
even despite not having an internet connection at home.
I should also note that additionally, I went to the T-Mobile store today, and for $10.50 because of sales tax, I picked up a T-Mobile SIM and plugged that into my iPad Mini and was able to get cellular data for free, well, if you accept the $10 for the SIM.
And so that T-Mobile thing that people keep talking about, it was easy peasy.
It took a little while at the store, but I don't know if that was a...
a sales representative thing, or if it's just that it takes a little while to get the stuff squared away.
But now I have a T-Mobile SIM that'll get me 200 megs a month for free.
I have a Verizon SIM that came with it that I can pay for for data.
And what was really cool was I'd use the Verizon SIM for a bit and put something like 80 megs on the
I don't know, it's a poor way of phrasing it, but I'd used about 80 megs of data on my Verizon SIM.
I popped that out, plugged in the T-Mobile SIM, used like two or three megs just to prove to myself that it worked, popped the Verizon SIM back in, and my cellular usage went back to 80 megs.
So I was very pleased to see that the iPad was smart enough to keep the two separate and continue to track the two of them.
So if you happen to have an iPad, an LTE iPad that is unlocked, then you can spend your $10 and get your...
T-Mobile SIM if you live in the United States and get some free data, which is pretty awesome.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
Do you know, does anybody know, does it work on old iPads too?
I mean, probably, maybe you need an LTE once, maybe it's like iPad 3, Mini, and Air, and 4.
But that would be a great thing to do if you have, if you just replaced an iPad and you're going to give it to
your mom or something like that.
That'd be a great thing to just get one of these T-Mobile things, put it in, if it's not going to use a lot of data, but you at least have then the option to have this thing be connected somewhere if you need it or if you're giving it to somebody who's going to use it pretty lightly.
Yeah, Nick Finn in the chat says it worked with an iPad 3, with a Verizon iPad 3.
That's great.
Which I agree.
It is a very cool idea.
And it worked really well.
200 megs obviously isn't a lot of data, but it's enough to get you by in a pinch, which is really fantastic.
So I'm pretty pleased with that.
Now the only problem is I have two nano SIMs and I have no idea what to do with the other one.
In the sense that it's so tiny, I'm inevitably going to lose it.
But that's okay.
One thing I was surprised by, when I moved my Verizon service from my first gen iPad mini to my new iPad mini, it actually said on the first gen, when I deactivated it, it basically said that it was bricking that SIM.
That I can't even reactivate with that same SIM.
And if I ever want to reactivate it, I have to go to a Verizon store and buy a new SIM.
And I don't know if that's true.
I didn't try reactivating it, but that's kind of crappy.
Did the magic smoke escape?
I didn't see one, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.
It's like the Mission Impossible thing.
Oh, and by the way, we're nuking your simps.
Smoke comes outside.
And I've been asked – I was asked on Twitter earlier today, what happens when you run out of your 200 megs?
I don't know to be honest.
I would assume that they just stop giving you data.
I did pay for my $10 SIM with a credit card just because it was easier.
But the gentleman that had rung me up had said, are you paying with cash or credit or debit or whatever?
So I bring that up because it seemed to me like during the activation process, he never took a credit card for sure.
And I don't think that me having paid for the $10 sale with a credit card is indicative of the fact that they have my credit card information for anything other than that one sale.
Well, it probably works just like other iPad data plans always have, which is there is no automatic pushing you up into a new plan, which is awesome.
And however Apple negotiated that, it was genius.
Probably Steve Jobs was probably involved, but –
What they do is, let's say you buy a one gig plan from Verizon or something.
Once you use that one gig, it'll start warning you when you get close.
And then it just cuts off the data when you hit that limit.
And it says, go to settings if you want to buy more.
Or you'll get more on this date, which is the one month anniversary next month.
So that's probably how this is going to work too, which is you can just use it and there's no auto billing.
You can just use it until you hit 200 megs and then it'll just yell at you and stop.
And you can go buy more if you want, or you can just wait.
That's how I bet it's going to work, but I don't know that for sure.
That's exactly what I expected as well, but I haven't run into that yet, so I can't say that with any sort of authority.
Sam the Geek in the chat says as far as he understands, they throttle to dial up is what he said.
He wasn't absolutely positive that that was the case, but in other words, they give you just unbelievably crummy throughput or like Marco said, and that's what I would expect.
They just cut you off entirely.
But in terms of the screen, retention issues aside, it's a beautiful screen.
The iPad is very, very nice.
And it is a little bit heavier.
I can definitely tell that it's a little bit heavier than the iPad Mini I had previously, which was not LTE.
And I should also note that a friend at work got an iPad Air, which was not LTE.
And I held my LTE iPad Mini and his Air that was not LTE, one in each hand.
And I could tell you, I couldn't tell the difference.
And I looked at Apple's website and the iPad Mini with LTE, the Retina iPad Mini with LTE is 341 grams.
The iPad Air without LTE is 469 grams, which is what, 120 grams-ish?
uh but in my hand my hand was not sensitive enough to tell the difference they felt like they were the same darn weight and that was a really great testament to how thin and light the ipad air is because i swear to you it to me anyway it felt the same as the ipad mini in my hand i know marco you tiff has an ipad air doesn't she
Yeah, yeah.
It's actually her first new iPad.
She kept using my hand-me-downs.
This is her first new one.
She moved from an iPad 2 to this.
It was a pretty big jump.
But yeah, and looking at these two devices, again, I think I like what everyone else has said, like all the reviewers have said.
You really can't go wrong with either of them, and you're basically just buying for screen size.
There is that very minor performance difference.
I don't think anybody would really notice it in practice, to be honest.
you know you're really just buying you know what screen size do you like better and and you can one way you can you can make an easy decision and just buy whatever screen size you were using before so if you if you were using a first gen mini and you really got used to that size and you really uh you know you really want you know you love that portability and everything the air is probably going to feel too big for you and so you should just get another mini if you're going to if you're going to upgrade um you know get the retina one but
If you're coming from a full-size iPad and you don't necessarily need it to get smaller and you do things that benefit from a bigger screen, like watching video or drawing or sketching apps or certain games, things like that, that will benefit from a bigger screen, then by all means, get the Air because it's a substantial improvement from the 3 and 4 and there's pretty much no downside except that it's a little bit bigger physically in size.
There is a weight difference, but...
In practice, the bigger difference is that this is a much larger rectangle.
When you hold it, it's going to have different forces as you hold it.
If you're holding it up in bed, the mini will be easier to hold for long periods.
The reality is, whichever one you've been using before, I would say use that one.
Whatever size class you were in before, you can probably stay in your size class and be perfectly happy.
And, you know, obviously the best thing to do is go to a store and try them both and see how you feel.
But if I had to make an assumption to recommend without you trying anything, I would just say stick within the size class that you already liked.
Speaking of that performance deficit between the Air and the Mini that you mentioned that you probably can't tell, what is it, like 7% or something like that, just the clock speed?
It's 1.3 versus 1.4 gigahertz, but there's also the thermal issues that, again, Nantech did an awesome graph of this where the CPUs in all the A7s, so the iPhone 5S, the Retina Mini, and the iPad Air,
all have this thermal throttling behavior where they can work at really awesome speed for like a minute or two at max load, and they start throttling down for heat reasons.
And so the iPad Air has the highest ceiling for that.
So the iPad Air can work at full speed for the longest, and then when it does throttle, it doesn't throttle down as far as the Retina Mini and the iPhone 5S.
even though they all have roughly the same cpu just the air has like you know a more thermal mass to cool and everything so i was going to recommend that article we should put in the show notes not only because of the the actual ipad air testing but he snuck in there and in the mini review too i think but he snuck in the air one a lot more information about the a7 cpu and i was excited to see that like
There's some advantage to actually knowing less about this stuff on a concrete level, because obviously those guys who work at Tech know so much more about the individual part numbers and the supply chains and what the other vendors are doing and stuff like that.
I remember reading one of his, I think it was the 5S review when he was talking about the A7 and saying how he was speculating because he didn't know at that point, like Apple didn't release any information.
They didn't have any specs and no one had cut the top off the chip yet.
So he had to kind of guess of like what, you know, Apple claims 2X speed.
Let's do some benchmarks.
And sure enough, it is like 2X speed and what's making that happen or whatever.
And
We had a show, we talked about it as well.
And I don't know all the details of all these chips or whatever.
But I'm like, well, if they have 2x speed, you're not going to get that.
We talked about obviously not going to get 64 bit, which may make you go slower, all the things being equal.
And then the other thing was like, oh, so how are they getting 2x speed?
It's not going to be 2x class speed or whatever.
And
me knowing nothing about the details of this said well it has to be just there has to be more execution units i mean you have to you know it has to be you can't just be the same chip running faster or some small tweaks you need actual more hardware to do stuff um and and on a hit site knowing more about the details so like well it's not going to be like
You know, it's not going to be double the width or triple the width in terms of execution units as the A6, because that's crazy.
I mean, even the A15 doesn't have that kind of size, so it must be something else or whatever.
And he was cursed with the knowledge of the individual details of how many execution units each one of these things have, which I didn't know off the top of my head.
But it caused him to make the wrong call because, sure enough, when they cut the top off of this thing, it's like a six-wide machine with, like, you know, you can do simultaneously four integer, two floating point, whereas the other machine was, like, three wide, but you can only do, like, one and a half because there was dependencies on integer and floating point.
And, like, the A7 really is, you know, in Apple's marketing speak, a desktop-class machine.
In terms of the width and the number of executed units of the machine, you know, out of order, being out of order like, you know, a desktop machine is in A7.
It really is such a huge leap over the A6 that no one expected.
And it's like, how could you get that machine into a laptop or into a phone, for crying out loud?
And, you know, this iPad Air article and other things explain how they did it.
Like, they cut the...
memory bus width in half.
They do all these.
They have four megabytes of on-die SRAM serving as sort of an L3.
Because they had to say, look, we're going to cut the memory bandwidth in half, but we still need to run an iPad retina screen.
How are we going to do that?
Well, we'll put this huge SRAM thing here.
And they said that for power savings, instead of doing simultaneously fetching from DRAM and from the L3, they check L3 first.
And if it's not there, then they do a second request.
for the thing in DRAM.
And if you're making a desktop CPU, you would never do that, but you have to make compromises for power.
So they basically found a way to wedge a twice as wide machine into the same thing by making it worse than the A6 in many different measures, but overall being twice as fast.
And it's an amazing balancing act when you look at what they did with this thing,
They did a seemingly impossible thing.
When you learn a detail, it's like, oh, it wasn't impossible.
It was just really, really wise tradeoffs to give them, from the outside, what looks like an impossibility, a machine that's twice as fast at a similar clock speed in the same power envelope.
It seems like it shouldn't be possible, but it's like, oh, I see where they compromised.
And if I know how to tickle it just right, I can show you a benchmark where the A6 crushes the A7, but no real application is ever going to do that.
So thumbs up for Apple and on TechSite and scientific progress in general.
Yay.
It's pretty amazing when you look at the lineup.
Now that we've had the whole fall lineup revealed for us, it's pretty amazing that the A7 is in all three of these products.
And it's basically the same... It's almost the same performance in all three.
And when you look at now...
When the iPhone 5S came out, we were all like, whoa, that was a bigger jump than we expected.
Because now, looking at it, you would expect that to be only in the iPad Air.
And then the iPad Mini should have had a dice-shrunk A6, and then the iPhone should have had an A7 that was much lower-clocked than the iPad.
That's how you would have expected this to go.
And in reality, you have...
basically the high-end ipad chip in all three devices uh with with very minor differences and that's really impressive it was just just the difference in thermal thermal throttling and minor clock speed deficits and and that's it exactly and it's like and it's the same with memory bus the same s ram the same like what it comes down to is that the iphone 5s that cpu has the ability to drive a retina ipad screen which is unbelievable
Exactly.
I mean, it's really, really good.
And this, you know, now we're starting to see every year since the A4 when, you know, like shortly before that they had acquired PA Semi and they were talking about, you know, doing their own silicon or the rumors were at least.
Every year so far, we're seeing quite how much that's paying off as they get more and more advanced into the kind of divergence they can achieve from everyone else's ARM chips.
When you start seeing all the custom stuff they're doing, last year with the A6, you got to see their awesome new core design, and now you're seeing these other trade-offs like the SRAM and stuff like that.
It's really impressive what they're doing, and what's really interesting is why...
why isn't samsung doing something like this you know why why aren't the other manufacturers able to match this as as closely it could be that apple's just a little bit ahead like you know i i would assume that the next generation of armed parts from other people are going to have similar apple's just there first like sometimes apple gets there there first by two months by six months by eight months by an entire year we'll see but i i would assume everyone's just there first that's the depressing thing about this from from my perspective
is that all these things we're seeing, going from an in-order machine to going out of order, making the machine wider, putting on-die RAM, like every single one of the – it's just a replay of the history of the desktop CPUs.
Because if you go back, back, back in time, like back to, you know, the 386, 486, and Pentium and like –
We're seeing in mobile the exact same evolution we saw there, only in a crazily constrained power envelope.
So all the tricks you're seeing here, like, it used to be back in Ars Technica when John Stokes was doing all his articles about PowerPC versus Intel, like, and, you know, Itanium came out with, you know, Intel's new instruction set, and they were doing, like, predication where they would...
execute two instruction streams at the same time then discard the results of one basically like that all these interesting ideas some of them didn't pan out some of them did uh and we went through this whole evolution to see how much you know how much instruction level parallelism can you extract from regular programs that are compiled by people how wide can you make machine before the point of diminishing returns and then the multi-core and then cache coherency and multi-level like we did it all already and then we had to reset the clock to go okay here's a risk machine it's in order it sucks uh but it fits in a phone
And then we have to go back through the exact same evolutionary cycle.
Hopefully, you know, with the knowledge of hindsight of like, oh, we know exactly how to make this faster.
Because jumping right to the A7, that takes into account like, oh, you know, those designers are the people who know what we did on the desktop.
But there are still so many obvious things that, you know, if you just look at, hell, look at the, you know, the current generation Xeon.
That has stuff inside that we just can't fit into a phone power arm.
But it's just waiting there.
Like, we know how to do it.
Like...
it will make your software faster.
We can clock it higher.
It will be, it's branch prediction will be better.
You'll have a higher cash hit rate.
We have all these awesome things.
You just can't fit them in a phone yet.
And so we're just waiting patiently, right?
And hopefully we will get back up to the point, you know, like it seems like desktop CPUs, like that's not where the money is anymore and people aren't interested in advancing them.
So we have to wait for the mobile CPUs and the process that makes them to catch us up to sort of where we are on the state of their own desktop.
And then we can finally start making sort of
forward progress in the absolute realm sort of like whatever ibm is doing with the power eight or whatever the help power number they're up to where they're always just like give an unlimited money and power budget how fast can we make a cpu for crazy supercomputing stuff assuming anyone besides the government and the nsa are available to buy it from us uh
It's kind of disappointing to me to see a replay of that in the mobile space.
It's kind of exciting to have it in the palm of your hand, but on the other hand, I'm always interested, as with my love of the Mac Pro and everything, I'm always interested with the let's see how fast we can really go type of advancement, not merely let's see how small we can really go with stuff that we already did on the desktop five, ten years ago.
So on a final note, John, I hear that you're having some disk woes.
Care to share?
I had them.
This was like a couple of weeks ago.
I just forgot to talk about it.
It kept being at the bottom of my notes.
This is a boring story.
It's not that long, but again, I think there's a nice moral at the end.
So I was running disk first aid on my wife's boot drive on her MacBook Air, which is an SSD, and
and why was i doing that because that's one of the things that i do i run i run i write it's not called disk first aid anymore right you run disk utility and go to the first aid tab whatever but you know it's like fsck whatever you want to call it check your file system metadata structures to make sure they know where everything is on disk they keep track of you know which bits are allocated to which files which bits aren't allocated how many of these free blocks are available here this that they keep track of all that information and that information gets out of sync because hrs plus sucks
So I run this periodically.
You know, I didn't know you thought that.
Yeah.
And I don't know how many people do this.
Do either one of you run disk first aid on your disk, disk utility on your disk with any regularity ever, just for no reason?
No.
No.
You should.
You totally should.
And that's the thing.
Like when I brought this up on one of my first shows about file systems, I said, just try this.
People are like, HFS Plus is fine.
There are any problems.
I'm like, okay.
Well, if you think that, go and look at one of your disks and run Disk First Aid on it and see if it finds any errors.
If it finds any errors, that means something screwed up in the past.
And eventually, if those errors accumulate, you will be sad because whole directories will go away and bad things will happen.
Maybe it will never happen to you.
Maybe you'll buy a new computer before that happens.
You could be fine.
But things are going wrong on your disk and you may not know about it.
It's the worst kind of failure.
Anyway.
I run it periodically.
I think everybody should too.
And I ran it and it found errors.
All right.
And very often it does find errors.
And there's a repair button.
You can repair it.
But when it's your boot drive, you can't repair your boot drive.
You can only verify it.
You have to reboot from another drive.
So great.
Use, you know, hold down command R, reboot into recovery mode or whatever it is.
And then you can run repair on your boot volume, even though you're still booting from the same disk as the recovery partition.
But anyway, I hit repair and repair fails.
And when that happens, like when you try to use Disk Utility, it says, well, there were problems with Disk and I couldn't repair them.
Your choices are limited at that point.
You can buy a third-party product that can repair it like Disk Warrior or something.
Many third-party products can repair things Disk Utility can't repair.
So if you already have one of those or if you desperately want to repair it, I would recommend that.
I had an old version of Disk Warrior, but I don't have an update one.
I didn't want to pay for it again.
And I said, well, fine.
So Disk Utility can't repair it.
No big deal.
I'll restore from Time Machine, right?
so before i restore from time machine this is another thing i think not enough people do and i don't even know if the genius part people do it run a disk utility first aid check on your time machine volume before you restore from it because if you don't do that you could be restoring some crazy garbage onto your boot drive from your time machine volume so i ran the you know first aid on my time machine volume
And it found errors.
I said, okay, I will repair the time machine volume, which I can do without rebooting.
I tell it to repair.
It says, sorry, can't repair.
So now I have two disks.
The disk utility says there are errors on, and it can't repair.
And not only that, now the time machine volume won't mount anymore, and it's grayed out in disk utility.
And when I try to repair again, it hangs in disk utility and eventually says after many minutes, couldn't unmount volume, which makes no sense to me because it's not mounted as far as I can tell.
And it's grayed out in disk utility.
And I said, all right, well, fine, let me erase this time machine disk.
I'll get to why I can do that in a second.
It wouldn't even let me erase it.
So I'm like, all right, screw it.
Unplug that drive from the computer, put it away.
At this point, most people would be screwed because most people don't have a backup in the first place.
They're like, well, there's errors, but the disk is still working.
The time machine volume I hosed by trying to repair with Apple's own disk utility tool.
So that must have been really far gone.
right but me being the paranoid maniac that i am i still have my second time machine volume on my synology my super duper clone and a crash plan backup so i still have three viable backups hopefully viable backups even though i've not really lost my boot drive but it has errors and my time machine volume is totally hosed because it couldn't even be repaired so what i decided to do i have lots of options at this point lots of options that most people don't have what i decided to do at this point was
go with the super duper uh clone and my super duper clone hadn't been made that recently so i manually copied the few files that i know have been modified since my super duper clone was made
Onto a spare partition on another disk.
Then I erased my boot disk and I restored from the SuperDuper clone.
And by the way, I ran disk first aid on the SuperDuper clone before I did the restore and it checked out.
Always run disk first aid on your things before you do anything with them, especially in a backup scenario, because the worst thing you want to do is to just start spreading corruption all around and think you've recovered and you haven't.
And then after I had restored, the very next thing I did was ran disk first aid on every single thing.
I ran on all the volumes that were connected, and I did fresh backups on all destinations except for the super-duper backup and the second time machine volume.
So I did a new time machine backup to my local disk, which I finally did get erased through many reboots on another machine.
and did full backups and everything else, ran this first day on them.
So now I'm back into a stable state where I have multiple backups.
They're all checkout.
They're all in sync with each other, but I saved two to be the old thing, just in case there was something going wrong.
And I waited a few days after I had done this recovery process to see, now is it safe for me to finally toss my one good one that I think is good that I restored from one other super one other backup of time machine volume saying like, this is, this hasn't been touched ever.
it's perfectly fine in worst case i can fall back on that everything was fine and eventually i just allowed those to sync up too so i guess lessons you get out of this is one backup is very often not enough because say i just had that time machine volume i mean i didn't really lose the boot disk it just had errors on it but they were unrepairable errors so what was i supposed to do in that case just leave them there forever and cross my fingers and hope new ones didn't accumulate or whatever error was it wasn't important you know
Yeah, that's nuts.
I mean, for me, I treat any disk error as fatal.
I mean, well, I guess HFS, but any kind of hardware error, to me, that disk is dead to me.
That's it.
It's gone.
But it's not a hardware.
This is a software.
It's like a wrong number of hard link counts.
I don't know the exact details.
So it's like HFS plus metadata structure.
It's not a hardware problem.
That's an important distinction that people don't make because they think, you know, my hard drive is dying.
If you have a hardware problem, usually you know it because it manifests in ways that are not...
visible and disk utility in any meaningful way like i i you know things freeze up on your computer and nothing happens terrible noises come from your hard drive it's mechanical you can detect those this is just merely software corruptions the disks are fine right uh second lesson is that more backups give you more options not just like oh and now i'm safe it's that you have options right and and the third lesson is that disk clones and time machine stuff like that
have different pros and cons so that when you have more options if you have i have a time machine one i have a super duper one i have an online backup like disc clones i really like really like super duper because it's simpler and less can go wrong
And it's often faster to recover from because it's just a plain old copy.
In fact, you can boot from that clone if you need to.
You can be a backup in a second if you just boot from that clone.
It's a bootable clone.
On the other hand, Time Machine gives you multiple backups.
So if your super duper clone was made after something terrible happened, it's no good to you because you really want like three weeks ago or whatever.
So I highly recommend having more than one backup, more than one type of backup.
And I also recommend running disk first aid, not every day, not every week, but just once in a while just to see what's going on there.
So this whole story started with you electing to run disk utility?
Yeah, I do it all the time.
I do it, you know, whenever I feel paranoid.
So hourly?
It's not all the time, but like – and the thing is I don't – I suspect –
I suspect computers with externally attached drives more than internally attached ones, so I run it more often on my wife's computer than mine.
Hers is also more likely to bump out the cable, or she unplugs her laptop from the Thunderbolt cable without unmounting the drives that are attached through the firewire thing connected to the back of her Thunderbolt display.
All the things that can go wrong with her system that are less likely to go wrong with my internal SATA drives.
But yeah, I do it at work too.
Make sure my backups are fresh.
Make sure they're still working.
Make sure, I mean, disk first data is the most minimal check.
It's not checking whether your data could be totally hosed.
All it's checking is, hey, I'm a file system and I know where all the blocks on the disk are.
I know which ones are allocated.
I know which files they belong to.
I know how many of them there are.
That's all we're asking at the file system.
Just keep track of that stuff.
And when it loses track, sometimes it's not a big deal.
Oh, it thought there were only, you know, 15 free blocks here, but there's actually 17.
So what?
Like, it's not causing your data to be gone.
But the accumulation of those little errors is eventually what causes software-based, like, quote-unquote, disk failures.
Disk hardware is fine, but your data is hosed in some way that you might need something like Disk Warrior or whatever is going to brute force...
reconstruct the appropriate metadata for your disk and then write a new directory structure back out.
I just wish I didn't have to do any of this, but I do.
So I do.
You know, John, I have a pro tip for you.
Ignorance is bliss.
No, no, it's not.
Bliss right up to the point where the crying starts.
Yeah, exactly.
Where's my data?
But I had a backup.
I used time machine.
Wow.
I think we just found the beginning of the show.
We have.
And let's find the end of the show now.
So thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Gemvara and Ting.
And we will see you next week.
Cause it was accidental.
Accidental.
It was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Accidental.
It was accidental.
Accidental.
You can find the show notes.
And you can get her into Twitter.
Go with them on Twitter.
C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, that's Casey Lynn.
A-R-C-O-A-R-L-E-N-G, Marco Arment.
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Late in and
You too should both just immediately run Disk Utility, all your disks.
See the horrors that await you.
now i'm curious well the thing is the worst thing is that like if you have i like four literally four million files on like my average disc like my average you know boot volume or whatever it takes to takes forever man are you talking about verified disc permissions or verify disc not permissions i should have said that in the show please no please don't verify permissions i mean that does almost nothing it does something it doesn't have anything useful you go to the first aid
My computer might be slow or unresponsive.
Should I?
Don't run.
No, no, no.
Don't run on your boot disk now.
Yes, well, running it on your boot disk while you're booted into that disk will just, like, walk away.
Like, it's not, you know.
You can run verify, and it will tell you if there's errors, but I always just run repair on it.
Because if there are any errors, my next thing I'm going to run is repair, and it takes so long anyway.
So just pick an external drive.
And by the way, when you select it in the sidebar, it shows, like, the disk, and then indented underneath it is, like, the volumes that are on that disk.
Running it on the top disk just checks the partition map, sort of.
You have to select the volume below to actually check the structures on that volume.
So usually checking the partition map is really fast, and it'll almost always check out.
And if it doesn't, you've got big problems.
If it doesn't know where the volumes are.
But then running on the individual disks is a thing that takes forever.
And it'll find something small, like, oh, incorrect number of... I don't even know what these messages are, but they're just... My impression is that HFS Plus keeps a lot of
uh sort of denormalized counts of other structures so it'll have like a bunch of structures and then it'll have a number that indicates how many are available and how many are there and it can reconstruct that count by walking the tree and finding out how many and writing the number there and that number gets out of sync somehow and it's usually not a big deal that's like the easiest type of errors to fix but there are more serious ones getting all the way down to
Could not repair your disk, and by the way, it will never mount again.
Say goodbye to it, and you can't even erase it.
That one really frustrated me because I was like, what?
I can't even erase the disk?
I don't know.
I took the disk off.
I put it on a whole different computer.
I rebooted that computer a few times.
I eventually got it to erase that disk.
I have no idea what the hell its problem was, but that disk is out of rotation now.
So that one has done enough wonky stuff to me that I'm like, all right, you're having a timeout.
I used it to test the next build of 1010 or something.
That one's becoming a magnet donor?
Yeah.
I swapped in one of my vast collection of caviar blacks in another enclosure.
So while we're on the topic of hard drives, I can't imagine this coming up quite like this again.
I recently decided to make a change in my hard drive buying policy.
My policy used to be that I would look at the current best bang for the buck capacity and buy one or two of those for either storage or maybe buy two of them to put them in RAID or something like that.
And usually that was – like today, that's probably three terabyte.
In the past, it's usually like one or two levels down from the biggest drive that exists on the market that day.
Yeah.
I never like buying the biggest.
That makes me nervous.
Well, so –
I think I'm deciding to change that policy and now just buy the biggest.
Because what happens is now I have this drawer full of one terabyte hard drives.
And a bunch of them went into the Synology, but I don't even have room for all of the hard drives I have in the Synology.
Because now the problem is that when you buy anything but the biggest, its useful lifespan can be much shorter.
I think that's an asset because then it keeps, it keeps you from using a disc.
Did you, what was that thing that had the, uh, I tweeted it.
Someone, it was a backblaze was showing the hardest lifetime graph.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
Did you see what, did you see what happened at three years?
The knee of the graph goes, and now you're screwed.
So like, I don't want to, I don't want to have a disc.
Wow.
It's at such a capacity.
I could use it for four years.
No, don't do that.
Like I would rather have it age out because it's too small.
That's, that's, that's a positive force in the ecosystem of, uh,
of my spinning storage i feel like that's a fair counterpoint i can totally see that i guess so yeah it depends on how how long you want to use it but i mean like i was having some problems where like you know i would buy like two one terabyte discs to make a really fast rate array and then like 18 months later i outgrow that space and need more and like that that sucks
Yeah, well, I mean, the size is now, I think it's making it harder for you to outgrow it now because like three terabyte is now kind of the not biggest size you can get.
And it will take you longer to fill that.
Like your data needs have not tripled since one terabyte drives were the sweet spot, right?
So now three terabyte drives are the sweet spot, but you can get away with it for longer.
But in scenarios where you're putting them into a box where it's going to be some sort of raid setup and redundancy, then, yeah, I think it's better.
to go with the biggest possible capacity because like you, you have built in hardware redundancy.
You're, you're putting these in there.
You're putting them in there to die.
Like I need, I need the space.
That's true.
And because you have to over provision so much for these raid schemes or the drobo type schemes or anything else like that.
Like you have to just over provision the space so much.
and the only advantage you're getting is like it's okay one of you can die even two of you can die since i'm so massively over provision and then yeah just go up to the max but i'm what i'm mostly talking about is like individual drives that i use just as plain old drives you know internal like in fact sometimes i do multiple volumes on them i'm the opposite of raid i tend to do multiple volumes per disc instead of multiple discs per volume but uh yeah i'm i'm new to the box that holds a bunch of discs phenomenon
You want to do titles?
Let's do titles.
The compliance shark?
Who said that one?
You did.
No, I didn't.
Yes, you did.
Maybe I mumbled something that sounded like the compliance shark.
You totally said it.
I'm going to cut it in.
You'll see.
Can anyone remember the context?
It was early on.
We were talking about enterprise software.
Oh, it was like a sucker fish on the shark?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I might have said it.
You did say it.
I say a lot of things.
nooks and crannies of profit where they can like sort of live as the big sucker fish on the on the government shark or on the compliant shark and say compliant shark compliant shark one of my favorites was accidental f-cast let's make up some numbers here and like it's so precise like it's not even like you know vague like no we know exactly it's these exact little kinks in the lines
One rant I wanted to make in the show, but we didn't have time for.
Maybe I'll do it next week.
Or maybe it should be a blog post.
I don't know.
I look at people who are trying to get away with just using an iPad.
There was a great post that Fraser Spears mentioned how he records his podcast on just an iPad.
Dan Benjamin was talking to Merlin on this week's Back to Work about possibly going iPad only for himself when he travels.
And
People will jump through the most ridiculous set of hoops to try to cram their life into going iPad only when it really doesn't serve their needs particularly well.
It's like you can do that, but maybe you shouldn't.
Like SimCity 2000 on the Super Nintendo.
Yes, you can do that, but it's not ideal.
You probably shouldn't.
You should probably just use a computer for that.
Right.
I was going to say, when people see me using my iPad with the keyboard attachment and little wing stand thing at WWDC, I would love to have a MacBook Air.
I'm not doing that.
Look at me.
I'm living off my iPad.
It's because I don't have an Air, and they cost a lot of money, and I already have an iPad.
I'm doing it for cost reasons only, and every time I'm there, every year, I'm like, next year, I need to just...
Can I rent a MacBook Air?
Like, it would be so much better for me.
Like, I do not want to have these two things.
Like, it's like the Microsoft Surface.
Like, the keyboard is not attached to the thing.
As much as I love my iPad, that environment is made for the MacBook Air.
And my wife, well, let me take hers.
And I don't have an 11-inch, so I get by with it.
But yeah, when I see people doing it as a virtue, it's like...
The Airs are pretty light now, you know, and they like it was it was I guess maybe when it was 10 hours battery life versus three or four, then you could be like, OK, actually, the iPad is better for your use.
But now maybe not the 11 inch, but the 13 inch versus the iPad Air, the battery lives are similar.
And the iPad Air is so much better for for, you know, text entry.
And you can get a used Air even or buy one from the refurb store.
Get the crappiest 11-inch Air model anytime that the 11-inch Air has existed from 2010 until now.
And for a lot of purposes, if you're not going to use it particularly heavily, if you just need something like...
you know to to ssh to a bunch of servers with when you're away or to you know run a couple of minor things like we're multitasking or a keyboard or a file system that you can actually access like where that helps like i was reading like like the post from from freezer about how he does his podcast i was reading like how he moves the files around between different apps on the ipad and it just sounded like such an incredible chore
It's like the towers of NLA.
Well, first you have to put the file up.
You pull it into that app, but you can't put the – it's like the big disk can't go on the small one.
Yeah, and there is certainly a price argument, but I think for people who are that price sensitive, they probably are not going to have an iPad at all.
Well, it's time versus cost.
I go to WWDC once a year, if that.
But if I was traveling all the time trying to type on my iPad, I would have long since bought.
I'm not buying it because I'm cheap, but also because I don't do that.
That thing that I do at WWDC, that's the only time I ever do it.
Right.
I should point out also another thing I wanted to include but didn't really get to is I got my Logitech keyboard cover for the iPad mini today.
I had the Ultra Slim for the full-sized iPad.
When I got the iPad 3, I got that.
And the full-sized Logitech keyboard for iPad is very good.
And I use it a lot on planes.
It's awesome on planes.
Because normally I bring my giant 15-inch laptop.
And sometimes when you're on a plane, if the person in front of you is an asshole and reclines their seat, then you really have a hard time using a 15-inch laptop.
And so sometimes my only option is smaller things like iPads.
And I found if I'm just...
wanting to dick around on Twitter and RSS and stuff, putting the iPad in the keyboard tray on the tray table is really, really nice on a plane.
And it, of course, lasts forever and everything else.
So I got the mini one.
I even read the Lex Friedman review where he says they're all terrible.
But I tried it in the Apple Store, and I got it anyway, and boy, it is small.
It's pretty uncomfortable.
I can't imagine using it for heavy typing, but I got it for the same reason where most of the time I use it, it's going to be used as a stand more than a keyboard.
And I'll probably type 10 or 15 emails on it over the next year.
It's not going to be like a ton of typing.
But it is in many ways very similar to the full-size iPad 1.
It's very obvious to the same device family.
Things are similarly proportioned, just a smaller size.
So it's interesting.
I think, though, if you're the kind of person who uses the keyboard cover a lot and you want to type on the iPad a lot, I think that's a pretty good reason to go with the iPad Air over the iPad Mini.
Is the Mini cover the same size as the Mini?
Yeah.
Is that even possible?
Yeah, it is possible.
How can you type on that?
You can use one finger in each hand.
Peck, peck, peck.
maybe like the first two or three fingers like it's it's you can do it it's not great to make you make you start wanting to pick up the keyboard and use your thumbs having read lex's review i'll have to dig up these links having read lex's review i thought it was going to be worse and i and i tried one in the apple store they had one out and uh it was it was better than i expected having read that review so i could i couldn't even tolerate the one that was the width of the big eye because like i said my wife has the the logitech
thing for the big uh for you know ipad 2 and i and that's why i went with the wing stand thing because i wanted a full-size keyboard so i got the bluetooth i couldn't even stand one it has to be full size like not that i'm the best typist in fact i'm a terrible typist maybe that's why i need the i i have no i have no fallback technique i just my fingers know where the keys are on a full-size keyboard and i use all the wrong fingers to hit all the wrong keys and if anything is thrown off a little bit um that's it doesn't work
So for reference, I was just looking up, you can get a refurb 11-inch MacBook Air that is the current generation, 4 gigs of RAM, 128 gig SSD, 850.
I would get an LTE iPad Air for that price, though.
Like, not for that use, but, like, yeah, I would like to have that.
Because I remember I have an iPad 3, and I still haven't seen an Air in person.
Well, but again, it's, what are you doing with it?
Like, for my needs when I'm traveling, like, yeah, I have the iPad or the iPhone even for casual stuff like that, but I couldn't carry just that, like...
I would rather have this because then, at least with this, like, yeah, I couldn't watch 10 hours of video with this in all likelihood.
But I could, you know, log into a server.
I could run Xcode if I needed to, even though you don't have a whole lot of screen space.
But you can do it.
You know, you can run like a full-size text editor.
You can run TextMate.
You know, you can multitask and easily you can have all these different apps open that you use for different things.
Whereas...
If you try to cram that kind of workflow into an iPad, you have to jump through so many hoops with so many of these things that you have to do.
Yeah, some people can do the kind of work they need to do on an iPad just fine.
But it kind of annoys me when I see people trying to cram in so much additional stuff and just jumping through ridiculous hoops that really it would be so much easier to just do this on a computer.
It's like using the wrong tool for the job.
I'm looking at the picture that someone posted in the chat of the mini thing with the iPad mini keyboard.
Pictures on the website make it look like one of those Casio personal organizers from the 80s.
The little, you know, the wide keyboard that is way too small for people to use.
I guess the gigantic 2,500 pixel wide screen on top of it is not like the 80s, but you know.
Minor difference.
Instead, it would be like a four-line, non-backlit passive matrix LCD.
Exactly.
Green background with black.