Marco Bought Four
Casey:
We have some follow-up?
Casey:
Okay, guess not.
Casey:
I'm waiting for John to jump in there.
Casey:
I guess we're done.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
John:
Is it okay for me to take a drink of water before the show starts?
John:
I thought I had time.
John:
You just jump right in.
Casey:
No, I'm a professional, John.
Casey:
I'm Johnny on the spot.
John:
We got an email from someone who works at an Apple store who prefers to remain anonymous, as those people tend to do, on the subject of...
John:
Apple's messages program and the iMessage service.
John:
And I will quote this little part from the email.
John:
People who stopped by the Apple Store with problems are obviously not representative of iPhone users in general, but iMessage is probably the top problem among the folks who do stop by.
John:
Problems with iMessage are probably the top frustration with Apple's products and services among the specialists in our store.
Marco:
We got a number of people writing in saying it's always been fine for me, but I think there's been enough reports of it being not fine for many people and something like that.
Marco:
That's a really good data point.
John:
Obviously, they only see the people with problems, but they see everybody's problems.
John:
They are in the best position to decide what is the most common problem amongst all users of Apple products, period.
John:
He's not just iPhone users or whatever, just across all of Apple's products and services.
John:
He also says, in contrast to the common podcast, blog, fodder, other iCloud problems, other than those stemming from obvious gross user error, are relatively rare.
John:
Yeah.
John:
He's saying that problems that are directly attributable to iCloud are not as big a deal as they're made out, but iMessage is the number one frustration from people who come in to see them.
Marco:
I mean, just as a user of iCloud, I use it kind of gently.
Marco:
I use basically Calendar and Contact Sync and not a lot of other features that it offers.
Marco:
The documents in the cloud I don't really use.
Marco:
and stuff like that.
Marco:
And by using it lightly like that, I rarely see any problems.
Marco:
And I think that's probably how most people use it.
Marco:
Where you mostly hear complaints about iCloud being weird and buggy and potentially awful is from developers who are trying to develop against the sync APIs, which, as we discussed before, have a lot of issues and possibly some pretty fatal designs.
Marco:
So the developer point of view of iCloud is very different from what the public are seeing.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I wonder, like, for people who do, who are not fiddling around with stuff, if they have undemanding use, and they have, like, maybe three contacts, and they don't modify them that much, then maybe they don't notice a big deal.
John:
But, like, if you have tons of stuff, and want it to work just so, and want to play with all those little iCloud syncing switches and everything, and then something doesn't work, and it gets hosed and goes off into the weeds, I don't know if those people ever bother going to an Apple store.
John:
Because those are the type of people who are going to try to figure it out themselves.
John:
And I think in a lot of cases, when Icon doesn't work, people just don't notice.
John:
Or, like you said, they blame the application, and they don't blame the phone or whatever.
John:
But the number of people who go into the Apple Store with software problems, that, I guess, is a different class of people.
John:
Because I would never...
John:
go into the apple store with a software problem i think as long as i can actually determine it was a software problem because what are they going to do for me they're just going to poke the same buttons that i can poke it's people who don't know how to fix this stuff you know or if you want to say maybe it is a hardware problem they'll take into the back room and hook it up to whatever machine they have that'll run some diagnostic but
Marco:
yeah that was an interesting data point something else also how many what percentage of iphone users do you think don't have any other apple products and therefore don't really see like the syncing issues necessarily yeah that could be the case too although i would i think only apple knows those numbers like how many iphone users also have a mac but i would love to know those
Casey:
Yeah, I would assume it's getting smaller and smaller as PCs are doing less and less well in the marketplace and Macs are doing better and better.
Casey:
I'm sure that that's getting to be small and smaller.
Casey:
But to use an anecdotal piece of evidence, the first Apple device that I believe my dad got was either an iPad or an iPhone.
Casey:
I want to say it was an iPhone.
Casey:
And now, fast forward two or three years later, and pretty much my entire immediate family, as in Aaron and I, as well as immediate family, as in my parents and brothers, they're almost exclusively Mac now.
John:
You've just got to look at the sales numbers, though.
John:
How many iPhones has Apple sold in the past three years versus how many Macs have they sold?
John:
And I know sales are not the same as installed base, but the number of iPhones just massively dwarfs the number of Macs in existence by this point.
John:
I'm thinking of all the old Macs that are sitting around.
John:
How long do you keep counting?
John:
Some ancient Mac with a power PC and it is still hanging around or whatever.
John:
But there's just so many more iPhones and iOS devices than Macs that you have to say most people who have iOS devices do not have Macs.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I would say if I had to take a guess at what percentage of iPhone owners that was their only Apple device, I would say it's probably like 50% or maybe even more.
John:
I think it's like, if you want to know the percentage, if you look at all people who buy iPhones and say, what percentage of those have a Mac, I bet it's very similar to the percentage of the general population that has a Mac at this point.
John:
Because the iPhone is a mass market general purpose product.
John:
I don't think people see any real connection to the Mac, but they just like,
John:
it would never occur to them that if you got an iphone that there was any connection to the mac that you had to have a mac that you should have a mac anything and honestly it's true there's nothing there's nothing you're going to get out of having a mac really i guess maybe a desktop version of the notes application so why don't you build a gaming pc yeah all right that'll make that'll make my freaking ipod shuffle sync better i hate that thing so much
Marco:
Most people don't even sync their phones to their computers, which is why Apple had to push for so long to get all this stuff over iCloud and backups and sync and wireless and iTunes match and all that other stuff.
Marco:
Keep in mind, it wasn't that long ago.
Marco:
It's easy to forget, but it was only iOS 5 that brought most of that stuff that made you stop having to sync with iTunes to get a lot of these features.
Marco:
That was not that long ago.
Casey:
Do you remember the jailbreak app that would allow you to do Wi-Fi?
Casey:
And it was like such a big deal.
Casey:
This was roundabouts of iOS four or five.
Casey:
And it was such a big deal because you could sync over wifi and people like, Oh my God, Apple, you have to do this immediately.
Casey:
They were like expecting a point release of iTunes the next day to, to, to enable wifi sync.
Casey:
And I don't recall exactly when it actually showed up in iOS, but,
Casey:
But I remember that being such a big deal.
Casey:
And that was the brief window of time.
Casey:
It was around the brief window of time when I had actually had a jailbroken iPhone.
Casey:
And so I had thought about, I think at this point, re-jailbreaking just for that.
Casey:
And it was so silly.
Casey:
But yeah, it really wasn't that long ago.
Casey:
You're exactly right.
John:
And then they implemented a Wi-Fi sync and nobody uses it.
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, I'm curious.
Marco:
What do you guys do for sync and backup?
Marco:
I always connect with a cable.
Casey:
Yeah, typically I do as well.
Casey:
I think I have Wi-Fi sync enabled, but I believe I'm backing up my iPhone to my computer and my iPad to iCloud.
Casey:
But I actually have a gripe about this, which is branching away from follow-up.
Casey:
But since I'm talking, I'm just going to continue.
Casey:
I think that because of SMS logs, which I'm a pack rat and I don't delete...
Casey:
I think it's because I have four years of SMS logs or something like that.
Casey:
My iCloud account, which I just have the free one, which is, I believe, five gigs.
Casey:
It is full the moment I start backing my iPhone up to it.
Casey:
And I've looked at the usage and settings.
Casey:
And I haven't looked in a while, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details.
Casey:
But there was nothing that jumped out and said, oh, there's no app or anything that said, oh, I'm using 34 gigs or anything like that.
Casey:
And the only thing I can guess, because I believe I turned off the app
Casey:
backups to iCloud for just about everything.
Casey:
And it still was whining about not having enough space.
Casey:
And the only thing I can think of is I've got a gazillion SMSs and perhaps more importantly, MMSs that have been around since 2008 when I got my 3GS that I think are trying to go to iCloud and failing miserably.
Casey:
And that's kind of a bummer.
Casey:
And as everyone in the chat is saying, yes, I am the king of sending animated GIFs to people, which is certainly not helping.
Casey:
So that's probably a self-created issue.
Marco:
When you first started saying it was SMS, I was thinking, yeah, that's like filling up a terabyte with Word documents.
Marco:
But now that you say, you know, yeah, that you get a lot of MMS and do a lot of image sending and receiving, that actually makes a lot of sense because where is that stored?
Marco:
What is that categorized as?
Marco:
And yeah, that really could be the problem.
Marco:
Plus your billions of emoji.
Marco:
Imagine if Apple stores your emoji as images.
Casey:
Oh, you'd be screwed.
Casey:
I'd be so doomed.
John:
It actually stores high DPI images of the text bubbles.
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But you know what I'm saying?
Casey:
And it's frustrating.
Casey:
So maybe I'm abnormal in that I don't go through and call text messages.
Casey:
And maybe most people are paranoid or whatever.
Casey:
But for me, by me not taking action, in other words, by me not going through and deleting old text messages and picture messages, I have put myself in a position where iCloud backup effectively doesn't work for me unless I pay for it.
Casey:
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Casey:
And it pretty much is my fault.
Casey:
But it's interesting to me that when I do something that you would assume an average user would do, which is just let SMSs and MMSs fly by and just let them go into the ether.
Casey:
By doing that, I've set myself up in a position where I can't use iCloud or not effectively anyway.
Marco:
Does anybody pay for extra storage on iCloud?
John:
I would if I wanted to use it.
John:
Like, if it was better than local backup in more ways, like if it was as fast, if it kept all my passwords and encrypted, like, you know, there's still things that iCloud backup does slightly differently.
John:
I've thought about paying for it many times and just go, well, yeah.
John:
And the reason I always use a cable to do my backups is not because I'm against Wi-Fi syncing or anything.
John:
It's just because my battery almost always needs to be charged by the time I end up back at the computer.
John:
I'm plugging it in anyway to charge it.
John:
Why not also do the backup then, right?
John:
And, you know, it's just...
John:
I don't particularly like it.
John:
Maybe I'll go wireless eventually, but for now, I'll keep doing it the old-fashioned way.
Casey:
And I believe iMike pays for iCloud backup, and I think he is the only person on the planet.
Marco:
Yeah, and his setup, according to his statements on the prompt, sounds pretty weird in general.
Marco:
It's either very uncommon or every other non-geek in the world is just like him and we just don't see it.
John:
I think what happens is people get the free iCloud and then they run out of space on it because it's not hard to blow through that space.
John:
And then they go to the Apple store because they can't figure out why their phone isn't working and it's giving them some message about being out of space.
John:
room or something or keeps asking them like they don't understand what it's saying to them and eventually someone explains to them it's telling you that if you want to keep using your phone like you've been using it you have to pay some amount of money and they hate that and they complain about it but it's better than learning a new way to do things so i wonder if a lot of people just end up yep you know not disliking apple and having a bad feeling about apple and that happens which is why i said so many times that they need to like
John:
figure that out like giving people that little taste just it's just setting them up for bad feelings later but for most people it's easier than changing the way they do things it's like well i just want to keep doing whatever it is i was doing make this go away you know or maybe they could just like or i guess the other alternative is they could just turn off iCloud backup and i'm not sure how many people take that alternative i don't need backups nothing will ever happen to my phone oh goodness all right so talk to me about a squished mac mini
John:
This is from Zed Mata on Twitter, and he offers a theory about why the Mac Mini got squished.
John:
I said in the last show that I didn't like that it got squished.
John:
I liked it better when it was taller and skinnier.
John:
And his theory is, or her theory, is that it's because now if it's in a one-year rack.
John:
Which I kind of buy.
John:
Before, they used to rack them vertically when they were fatter.
John:
The Fat Mini, they just turned them on their sides, and I guess they would take up 2U at that point.
John:
Oh, more than that.
John:
I think 4 or 5, probably.
John:
I don't remember what it was like.
John:
But anyway, the Mini...
John:
The Mini is not really a rack-mountable machine.
John:
People have rack-mounted it because it's small and it will fit, and squishing it down to one U maybe was a nod to the people racking them.
John:
But if you're going to make something good for racking, you wouldn't make something like the Mini.
John:
It would be made differently.
John:
Put it that way.
John:
At the very least, it would have little flanges or something, so you could actually put in a mounting thing.
John:
The Mini still looks to me like something that's meant to be on a desk somewhere.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree.
Casey:
And, you know, if they wanted to rack mount a Mac, don't you think they would have like some serve or server and it would run OS 10, but you would maybe abbreviate it as like X or something?
John:
Yeah.
John:
One more piece of follow up.
John:
This is from an anonymous industry source.
John:
That's how close I'm going to get to identifying this person.
John:
And he's talking about the Dolby CES demo, which I found out at the end of the show that neither one of you knew what the hell I was talking about last week.
John:
At CES, Dolby showed this experimental, like, this is not a product, but let's just show you what this would look like, this experimental crazy television setup thing.
John:
It was demonstrating what I was talking about, you know, in terms of better pixels, a much larger range between the darkest and the brightest spot on a television.
John:
If you think about when you go outside in the real world, what is the difference in brightness between a place that's under direct sunlight at noon and a place that's shaded under an umbrella?
John:
Or if you're looking up at the sky and the sun is in the corner of your eye, what is the difference in brightness between that and the dark thing in the corner?
John:
It's huge, gigantic dynamic range.
John:
I don't know what it is numbers-wise, but it's way more than it is on a TV.
John:
A TV has bright areas and dark areas, but they are much closer together.
John:
And some of that is, practically speaking, you're going to have to limit.
John:
If your television had the same dynamic range as real life and a show panned the camera up to a sunny sky and you stared at the TV, you would go blind.
John:
So that's bad.
John:
If you had televisions emitting the full electromagnetic spectrum of the sun at the same brightness, A, that would take a lot of power.
John:
and b it would not be good for your vision but that's not what we're talking about we're saying there's a happy medium between the current incredibly small dynamic range of televisions today and uh the outdoors and so this demo was like here here's what we can do with current technology if we just you know make this crazy experimental set and it looks strikingly different than a regular television regular television starts to look like a completely low contrast pool of mud compared to this uh greater dynamic range
John:
And so this industry that they're in is the video entertainment industry.
John:
And the source says, high dynamic range has two big wins.
John:
It looks stunning and is, in my opinion, the most interesting feature added to cinema recently.
John:
It adds more to the experience than stereo 3D, high frame rate, or 4K.
John:
Also, since most studio and other content creators are already producing 16-bit per channel images with overrange values, it's almost free.
John:
There's some stuff that has to be done in post and color grading, but there's no re-rendering as there is with 3D and 4K.
John:
uh, I've seen the Dolby tech and it's great for the home, but I'm not sure how they're going to get us, get this into theaters, which is where the money is for the studios.
John:
So the thing about the source is a good point because saying that, that most of the content is already created with color values that are outside the range that can be displayed by any current output device.
John:
So all of their content is shot with 16 bits of value.
John:
Uh,
John:
per component and scaled down to eight bits or less or whatever the current output devices that we have in our home so they don't have to reshoot the footage they don't have to re-render to do anything like that they just they already have source material that is outside the range that can be displayed so if someone could make a commercial set that could display a larger dynamic range a lot of the content that we already know of that's been created in the past few years already has the source material is already sufficient to show that extra dynamic range uh but again dolby was not demonstrating a product that you could buy it was just kind of a
John:
you know, wouldn't it be cool if kind of tech demo.
John:
So I really hope that that's where people concentrate, especially after 4k comes and goes and, you know, does its thing.
John:
The next thing they should be looking at is, I mean, they should be looking at it now, but it seems like 4k is what they're going to do because it's easier, but higher dynamic range, I'm much more excited about.
John:
So I'll watch for that in 10 years.
Casey:
Sounds good.
Casey:
Hey, Marco, you want to talk about a friend of ours?
Marco:
I would love to.
Marco:
It is possibly our best friend.
Marco:
It is Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code Marco.
Marco:
Squarespace is constantly improving their platform.
Marco:
They have new features, new designs, and even better support all the time.
Marco:
Their designs are beautiful, they're responsive for mobile, and you can customize them in any way you want to.
Marco:
You can customize the CSS, you can inject JavaScript, or you can use their awesome GUI tools and just edit it without touching any code.
Marco:
It's all up to you.
Marco:
They have over 20 highly customizable templates to choose from, and these templates have won awards, and then design awards, and then they also have incredible customer support.
Marco:
Their customer support team works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they have also won their own awards.
Marco:
There's just awards all over Squarespace.
Marco:
They have over 70 employees devoted to support right here in New York City.
Marco:
So Squarespace starts at just $8 a month, and that includes a free domain if you sign up for a year.
Marco:
And you can start a free trial today, or any day really, but do it today.
Marco:
You're remembering now.
Marco:
Don't put it off.
Marco:
Just do it today.
Marco:
Start a free trial today with no credit card required.
Marco:
A real, genuine free trial.
Marco:
No weird strings attached.
Marco:
No credit card required.
Marco:
And start building your website.
Marco:
See if you like it.
Marco:
When you do decide to sign up, please use our offer code, Marco, to get 10% off and to show your support for this show.
Marco:
Interestingly enough, this week, my wife decided to move her photography site over to Squarespace.
Marco:
You can check her out.
Marco:
It's TiffanyArment.com.
Marco:
And she moved it over.
Marco:
She is so happy at how easy it was to use.
Marco:
Before, she was kind of wedging it into Tumblr, and Tumblr really is not made to do what she wanted to do exactly.
Marco:
And it was using the wrong tool for the job.
Marco:
Squarespace, turns out, is the right tool for the job in this case.
Marco:
And it...
Marco:
Oh, man, it was so much easier for her to do the photos she wanted, embed them the way she wanted, and do the layouts.
Marco:
And she was happy.
Marco:
Every day, she was happy to be working on it and thrilled and so motivated.
Marco:
She put up a bunch of new posts.
Marco:
Huge difference in productivity and customizability for what she actually wanted to do with it.
Marco:
So she's very happy with Squarespace.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring.
Marco:
Once again, go to squarespace.com.
Marco:
Use offer code MARCO for 10% off.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
Some pretty big stuff has happened over the last couple of days.
Casey:
We're recording on Wednesday the 15th.
Casey:
And on the one hand, I don't know if there's really that much more to say about it.
Casey:
But on the other hand, I know the three of us well enough to know there's probably some stuff to say.
Casey:
So are you tearing the thermostats off your wall, Marco?
Marco:
Everyone keeps asking me this.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So the story, in case you've been living under a rock and somehow listened to podcasts, are that Google has bought Nest or is about to buy Nest pending regulatory approval, I believe.
Marco:
But Google is probably going to buy Nest for three point something billion dollars, three point two, whatever it was, a little over three billion dollars.
Marco:
And so I have Nest thermosets in my house.
Marco:
They're okay.
Marco:
My favorite feature of them is the remote control iPhone app.
Marco:
I turned off all the learning stuff because it kind of just fought with me all the time.
Marco:
But imagine that.
Marco:
Something that wanted to control didn't get along with me because I wanted control.
Marco:
So big surprise.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So, no, I'm not ripping them off the wall yet because, first of all, one of the reasons I got them is because nothing else really does the remote control aspect while also looking reasonably nice in the rooms.
Marco:
So that's one problem.
Marco:
One of the problems, though, is that this is still a very new thing.
Marco:
So I'm not going to, like, rip the thermostats out of the wall out of some...
Marco:
spite or speculation of what Google slash Nest might do in the future.
Marco:
That being said, I wrote a post about it, so I'm not going to go too far into it, but I don't think it's wise for anybody to assume that these things are going to magically remain completely separate.
Marco:
Obviously, if they're going to remain completely separate, why would Google spend a lot of money on it?
Marco:
That's probably not what happened.
Marco:
I think you can look at how Google does acquisitions on this scale.
Marco:
When Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion forever ago, back when... I mean, at the time... Nowadays, acquisitions for a billion dollars are almost commonplace, but back then they weren't, at least in the tech business.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
When they bought YouTube, it was very clear video is a big thing on the internet.
Marco:
I think history has supported that since then.
Marco:
That was a very wise decision.
Marco:
If they didn't buy it, Yahoo or Microsoft were probably going to buy it.
Marco:
It's a very good thing Google got it for them because video is very, very important and represents tons of traffic and activity on the internet.
Marco:
They kind of had to do that.
Marco:
When Facebook bought Instagram, that was also over a billion, wasn't it?
Marco:
Or was it exactly – it was exactly one billion, right?
Marco:
Something like that.
Casey:
I believe it was around a billion, yeah.
Marco:
So Facebook bought Instagram because they were threatened and freaked out because Facebook's primary – like most used application is photo sharing.
Marco:
And there was this huge world of photo sharing happening on this social network that was dominating mobile.
Marco:
So it was competing with the thing Facebook uses the most on mobile, where Facebook was still pretty weak and did not have a strong foothold.
Marco:
So this was a major threat to Facebook.
Marco:
That's why Zuck rushed the deal through, and regardless of it being right before their IPO and possibly having problems with that, he pushed it through because he's a smart guy.
Marco:
He knew this was a threat, right?
Marco:
So going back to Google, they recently, more recently than YouTube at least, they bought Motorola Mobility for, was it $12 billion?
Marco:
I don't even remember.
Marco:
I think Google wishes it didn't remember too.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Marco:
So Google buys motor mobility for something like $12 billion.
Marco:
And it seemed like the reason they bought it was because they were threatened and freaked out.
Marco:
Again, just like buying YouTube, they were threatened and freaked out.
Marco:
Facebook buying Instagram, they were threatened and freaked out, right?
Marco:
So Google buying Motorola, they were threatened and freaked out because all this patent stuff was going on around Android, and Android's very important to them, and the Android market was kind of becoming the Samsung market, and it was kind of nice to prop somebody else up a little bit just for diversity's sake and competition.
Marco:
But it was mostly about patents, I think.
Marco:
I think the industry bears that out so far.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Looking at that, it didn't turn out so well.
Marco:
It seems like it was a sloppy move.
Marco:
It seems like it was maybe not thought through, maybe not enough diligence done on what the value of these patents actually might be.
Marco:
Whatever the reason, it seemed like it was kind of a rash decision at the time that caught a lot of people by surprise and so far has proven not to have really been worth it.
Marco:
So this brings us to Nest.
Marco:
What the heck do they want with Nest?
Marco:
There is a good post on our friend Ben Thompson's site, Stratechery.
Marco:
Am I saying that right finally?
Marco:
I think it's Stratechery.
John:
It's a long E. It's got the little thing on the E. Every time.
Casey:
I pronounce it in my head, Stratechery, but I believe it's Stratechery.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Marco:
So anyway, so Ben Thompson at Strategory wrote this nice piece, I think we yesterday, we'll link to it in the show notes, about this might be Google's new business model they're getting into, that all of their previous business models have been focused on
Marco:
advertising and the number of people using the internet continuing to grow tremendously, but that apparently we're starting to reach limits of the world population and economic realities such that the number of people using the internet, the growth peak of that is going to end in a couple of years.
Marco:
That growth is going to start slowing down significantly.
Marco:
So
Marco:
If Google's relying on more and more people just using the internet and looking at their ads every day for all their future business, it's almost saturated.
Marco:
It's not going to start shrinking.
Marco:
It's not going to stop all growth, but the growth is going to slow down a lot.
Marco:
So his theory is that getting into devices, getting into hardware, might be their next new business model arm because advertising might be saturated for them or close to it.
Marco:
I don't know, because... So, let's look at what they bought here.
Marco:
They bought a company that is not very old, sells products to a good volume, but we're not talking like an Apple or Samsung kind of volume of products that they're shipping here or manufacturing.
Marco:
So they're not buying a huge supply chain.
Marco:
They're buying some good retail connections, certainly, but not the kind of retail connections that a phone or computer OEM would have, for instance.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think one of the biggest things is that they're buying what appears to be a pretty good staff.
Marco:
Having Tony Fidel on the team is probably going to be a pretty big win.
Marco:
But they're saying they're keeping Nest separate, and he's going to keep running the Nest part of it.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
It kind of feels like that's a lot of money to have spent on a company that I'm not entirely sure how Google is really going to get that amount of value out of this company.
Marco:
What do you think?
Marco:
So could it be an acquihire?
Marco:
It's way too expensive for that.
John:
For $3 billion?
John:
How many employees do you think Nest has?
Marco:
I mean, probably a couple hundred.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm just guessing.
John:
A couple hundred?
Casey:
That seems way high.
Casey:
Yeah, I would say it's between 50 and 100 would be my guess based on no facts.
Marco:
You're thinking like programmers.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Companies have way more staff than programmers tend to estimate, myself included, because once you leave the engineering department and you get into retail sales, support, manufacturing, all that stuff, it's massively people intensive.
Marco:
They probably have a couple hundred, I'm guessing.
John:
I thought you had to order Nest online.
John:
Are they in retail stores?
Marco:
Yeah, they're in Best Buy.
Marco:
They had a big launch deal with Best Buy.
Casey:
And they're in the Apple store, aren't they?
John:
Yep.
John:
Like, whatever it is, $3.2 billion is a lot of money for a product that is a luxury product that I don't think sells in...
John:
any kind of both of their products are luxury products because if you if you just want a smoke detector a thermostat you can get them way cheaper right and your house already has a thermostat only you know people with expendable income or tech nerds want to replace something and you want to get a smoke detector people are just going to go to walmart get the cheapest smoke detector they can to be up to code or they'll just let to take the battery out and never put it back in like these are these are luxury items they have to be low volume there's not a lot of employees there's not a lot of intellectual property there i would imagine you you
John:
You're getting a superstar, Tony Fidel, Mr. iPod, but that's one person.
John:
You're not paying $3.2 billion for him.
John:
I think the penetration of Internet, the growth peak thing is a real thing, but I'm not sure that's particularly related to the Nest acquisition.
John:
I think the easiest explanation for the Nest acquisition is the obvious one, which is
John:
Uh, Google, Google loves information.
John:
They love, you know, that's, that's what, it's not so much like they love advertising or that they love information.
John:
And, uh, some people think it's because they're evil and they want to spy on everything.
John:
But like, I see it a lot from their perspective as a sort of nerd perspective is like,
John:
Think of the cool things you could do if we had more information.
John:
What if we had pictures of every street in the United States?
John:
What if we did the inside of buildings like that?
John:
You could go right from the street into the inside of buildings and walk around.
John:
You know, if they could have live cameras on every street in the United States, they would do that instead of having old pictures, you know, satellite footage and stuff like that.
John:
What if we could tell where location?
John:
GPS and phones is a great tool.
John:
We can tell you're on your way home from work and what your traffic is like and when you're going to be there and all that other stuff that you can do.
John:
What if we had sensors in your home that could tell what temperature it is, whether your home or not, the temperature outside?
John:
You can do cool things with information.
John:
What they have is basically a massively distributed computing infrastructure for information.
John:
What is their motto?
John:
To organize the world's information?
John:
The temperature of your house is part of that world's information.
John:
which is, of course, what freaks people out about it.
John:
But think of what Nest does.
John:
Nest makes things that gather information from inside people's homes.
Marco:
I agree with everything you just said, that they can derive value out of that, out of the data, the connections, the installed base of being in people's houses.
Marco:
But I can't see them getting $3 billion worth of value out of that from this company.
John:
well this company figured out a way to sell people sensors that go in their homes that are connected to the network and thus far google has been bad at that i'm sure google would love to have more sensors in people's homes that are connected to the network and well nest is like well we we don't sell a lot of them and we just sell it to early adopters for now but we found a way to sell it they have enough style and cachet to be interesting to nerdy people marco bought one
John:
Right.
John:
That's what that was right in their meeting.
John:
They said, hey, Marco bought one.
John:
I bought four.
John:
There you go.
John:
That's what they should write in their slide.
John:
And they're, you know, Google, you should acquire us.
John:
Next slide.
John:
Marco bought four.
John:
That's it.
John:
Three point two billion.
John:
Like, you know, baby steps.
John:
Right.
John:
I don't if this is part of a big initiative, I don't think it's because Google wants to start selling, you know, iPods or, you know, consumer hardware.
John:
They want to sell things that feed information back into this giant thing that is Google.
Casey:
Yes, and I think you're right.
Casey:
But we're also not considering that it's more than just Tony Fidel.
Casey:
It's also, as per some people who probably don't know, like the chat, and I'm not talking about them, but the chat has been quoting, oh, 100 or 100 plus ex-Apple employees.
Casey:
And do you think that 3 billion or that 100 Apple employees that are presumably very good –
Casey:
Plus, Tony Fidel is worth $3 billion.
Casey:
I don't think so, but maybe there's more talent there than we realize.
John:
You have to retain that talent.
John:
Depending on who gets what stock options and what your golden handcuffs are and how long you have to stay at the company to get your whatever you're going to get.
John:
It is a good way to get good employees, but the best employees are always restless.
John:
They get the startup.
John:
They make the cool thing.
John:
They get acquired by the big company.
John:
They stay at the big company for two years, and they repeat that process because they just want to move on to new things and don't want to be a cog in the big machine.
John:
But, I mean, I don't know.
John:
Of all the companies they could have acquired...
John:
nest is not so outlandish the price seems outlandish to me even with the supposedly 200 to 500 employees it still still seems like a heck of a lot of money but uh you know they're they're buying based on what they think the future value to google is that's the way the sales work it's not how much nest is work worth it's how much nest is worth to google and i think nest for example how much would nest be worth to apple is it worth 3.2 billion to get those 100 employees back
John:
hmm maybe maybe not our nest products work that much i think that apple would turn its nose up the product and say if we wanted to design a thermostat we could have done just as good a job if not better and same thing for the smoke detector but google cannot say that google would say if we'd tried to design a thermostat it would be shaped like a sphere and no one would buy it and would never ship
Marco:
no i mean i i think i think i think it was ben thompson who said this in one of his articles or correct me if i'm wrong um that you know like tim cook always says keep the company simple you know we we do a few things well apple would never buy it because they like apple doesn't buy companies that have existing products in the marketplace that they have to keep supporting like they don't they don't do that that's not their style well they do they buy logic and then stop making it for anything except for the mac right yeah
John:
I always want them to buy Intel and say, and we're not selling chips to anyone else anymore.
John:
Sorry, guys.
John:
That would be amazing.
John:
It would have been amazing like four years ago.
John:
AMD would just take all that business, I guess.
John:
But that would make everyone hate Apple.
John:
If Apple really cared about personal computer market share, it would buy Intel and stop selling their chips to anyone else.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I have to imagine, too, the Department of Justice would possibly have a problem with that move.
John:
I don't know if they would, because, like, Intel is the big dog in the chip space, but there's a bunch of people who fab arm chips, and there's AMD sitting over there going, hey, we sell chips that go on servers, too.
John:
That nobody wants.
John:
Yeah, well, because Intel ones are always slightly better.
John:
Oh, it's more than slightly.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
Well, it's not night and day.
John:
Like, they're in the fight.
John:
I mean, hey, what are all the game consoles?
John:
AMD got that contract.
Marco:
Yeah, because that was about price.
Marco:
In servers, it's about performance per watt.
John:
I know.
John:
I always wonder why Intel didn't compete harder for the game, because surely Intel could have gotten the game console thing if it wanted it, but it was like, we don't want that, but let AMD have it.
Marco:
Well, it's probably because, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't all of these game console CPUs not x86?
John:
No, they're x86.
John:
It's AMD, x86 chips.
John:
AMD has particular assets that make it good because it has the... I forget what their interconnect bus is.
John:
It used to be hyper transport, whatever it is.
John:
AMD is good at making integrated single chip solutions, which is what the game consoles needed.
John:
I think they were better tailored to that.
John:
And the margins have to be way, way low on the game consoles.
John:
So why would Intel bend over backward to make its...
John:
custom tailored single chip solution for game consoles and their reward is super low margins i mean just compared to the margins they're getting on the cpus that they're selling less and less of but they sell into the server space those margins are much nicer so i don't know intel intel has a problem in terms of what their future business is going to be like but uh they they didn't go for the game consoles maybe it would have been good for them to give them an outing but anyway that was reacting to something in the chat room that was saying what what would be the equivalent purchase for apple you know google buys nest what does apple buy
Marco:
That beats me.
Marco:
I wished a few years ago they would have bought Twitter because I think that would have given them not only a massive foothold in a very important area called social networks that you might have heard something about in the last few years, but it also would have given them a massive staff that knows how to run major web services.
Marco:
I think they tried, right?
Marco:
Well, I mean, they might have tried years ago, but it's just it's not their style to buy large established companies that are not directly related to what they're doing.
Marco:
You know, I wouldn't see them really doing something like this.
Marco:
That's the problem is like there is no Apple equivalent to this because they wouldn't they wouldn't do something like this in all likelihood.
John:
But Apple likes to have their cake and eat it, too.
John:
They want other companies.
John:
They need other companies help, but they want the other companies to assume all the risk.
John:
And they want a bunch of other companies to compete for the honor of assuming all of their risk for them.
John:
So they will pay billions of dollars for some company to buy equipment to build their stuff.
John:
But it's like, you know, after you finish making all those widgets for us, the next widget might go to a different factory and we say goodbye to you.
John:
You're not our problem anymore.
John:
We don't have to worry about your employees.
John:
We don't have to worry about how you're going to make money in the future.
John:
It's like totally, you know, they're in a power position.
John:
They say, we have lucrative contracts to build things.
John:
Everybody wants our contracts.
John:
Why would we ever buy a chip manufacturer with a fab or whatever?
John:
Like, I mean, the fab is the one thing that's different than the other stuff because there are only a few fabs in the world.
John:
Fabs are so insanely expensive and Intel has the best one.
John:
and apple seems to be saying we can make our own chips we give them little names with a's and letters just like audi and they're cool and you know like and we design them and we pay someone else to fathom but whatever uh but they they fancy themselves like we control our own destiny because we have an arm license and we tell we pay someone to fathom and now we don't have we're not beholden to intel for our chips which is true you know you don't have to worry about paying intel for these big margins but
John:
You're now at the mercy of three possible fabs, one of which is Intel, and ARM, which I assume will continue licensing its things far and wide.
John:
Or we don't need ARM, we'll just make our own architecture, we'll be fine.
John:
But those fabs, I guess it would be collusion if they all got together and said, we're going to crank up the prices for Apple.
John:
But they're not really in control of their own destiny.
John:
I mean, for crying out loud, Samsung is fabbing so much of their stuff still.
John:
That should tell them something.
John:
So I would actually encourage Apple to consider buying Intel sometime in the future when they're weaker and smaller.
John:
Intel, that is.
Casey:
And you don't think they would want Dropbox.
Casey:
I don't think they would.
Casey:
But I'm thinking, what are Apple's big weaknesses at the moment?
Casey:
And I think relying on other fabs is a great example.
Casey:
And as we've whined about ad nauseum on this show and just about every other podcast that covers Apple, cloud services are an issue.
Casey:
And who is really, really good at cloud services?
Casey:
Twitter has gotten there.
Casey:
Instagram is, but too late.
Casey:
Tumblr is, but too late.
Casey:
So what's left?
Casey:
And since Steve flirted with the idea of Dropbox, if memory serves.
John:
No, they wanted to buy Dropbox, totally.
John:
But if any of those stories are to be believed in, I didn't see Apple people categorically denying them or anything like that.
John:
They wanted to buy Dropbox.
John:
I mean, the same thing with the Twitter thing.
John:
I don't think we have any concrete evidence that they wanted to buy Twitter, but it's assumed that.
John:
I didn't read the Twitter book, so maybe that's in there.
John:
And Dropbox, as soon as Steve Jobs visits your company and tells you your product is crap, that means Apple wants to buy you.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Well, and people always talk about that incident with Dropbox.
Marco:
I know Apple should have bought them, and I wish Apple bought Dropbox.
Marco:
Trust me, you don't wish for that if you like Dropbox at all.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because if Apple bought Dropbox, it probably would have been for the talent.
Marco:
And maybe some of the algorithms or sync techniques, maybe, but mostly for the talent.
Marco:
And they probably would have shut down the product or ruined it.
John:
Oh, agreed.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And not having a fab is not a weakness of Apple.
John:
Again, I think Apple's in a strength position.
John:
We don't need to assume all this risk of having these big, expensive things.
John:
Other people will assume all the risk and will get all the benefit as long as we manage these relationships.
John:
But...
John:
It's a minor difficulty of the uncomfortable situation of relying so heavily on one of your biggest competitors.
John:
It's like, well, that just kind of happened.
John:
But by the same token, that's billions of dollars changing hands, and it's kind of weird that you're paying Samsung.
John:
But on the other hand, Samsung is not going to say, we refuse your billions of dollars.
John:
No, they're going to keep taking your billion dollars as long as you can.
John:
So Apple is trying to transition away, but it's not like...
John:
oh no, we're in a weak position because at any moment Samsung can refuse our billions of dollars to fab our chips.
John:
Samsung's going to keep taking that money as long as you keep offering it.
John:
It's just that I keep looking at Intel because that is a strategic event.
John:
Intel is sitting there off to the side with an architecture that nobody wants for mobile, but the best fabs in the world.
John:
And I'm not sure what their plan is, but if I was at any of these companies, Samsung, Google, Apple, it'd be like, you know, we could have an easy 10, 15, perhaps larger percent advantage over all of our competitors,
John:
uh if we could just fab at a smaller process size than they could sooner than they could uh and that would and it's not something they can you know if you if you get intel's fabs what is your what is your competitor's recourse they can't like catch up to you they can't like whip tsmc harder say work harder they're at 14 nanometers come on you guys gotta do better i think that's what uh taiwan semiconductor has been doing for its entire life is trying to get better and they are getting better but
John:
For now, Intel has the lead.
John:
So I keep looking at them.
Marco:
Well, and a few people pointed out when we last brought this up and when a bunch of people, including our friend Ben Thompson, were talking about this.
Marco:
One of the problems is that supposedly people who are smarter than me at this stuff figured out that Intel actually doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to fab things for Apple.
Marco:
To fab things for iOS, rather, you know, specifically.
John:
Well, that's a soft lie.
John:
Did you just see that story that Intel closed a brand new fab in Arizona before even opening it, before even starting to fab chips on it?
Marco:
I missed that one.
John:
There's a multi-billion dollar fab.
John:
They built the building and everything.
John:
They just didn't buy the fab, you know, the super expensive fab equipment.
John:
It's like two-thirds of the cost of the entire center.
John:
But instead of buying that equipment and installing it, they're just like saying, just leave that aside for now because they were going to fab their 14 nanometer stuff there.
John:
Instead, they said they're going to fab their 14 nanometer stuff and their existing fabs.
John:
And the reason it's speculated they're doing that is because they don't have enough customers to warrant opening an entire new fab.
John:
So it's like, if you buy it, they will build.
John:
I don't know how I'm mangling that thing.
John:
But basically, if Apple suddenly said, hey, Intel, we want you to fab all of our stuff.
John:
suddenly they would say, great, well, we have all this excess capacity that we're currently not using.
John:
We'll buy that fabbing equipment.
John:
We'll install it in that building.
John:
We'll start building more.
John:
That's a problem Intel is happy to have.
John:
But right now it looks like they have the opposite problem, that they were building with the expectation that their growth would continue on the current trend, but the dip in the PC market and the prominence of mobile is making it so well.
John:
Many, many years ago, we set out to build this giant fab in Arizona, and it looks like we're not even going to need it, so just...
John:
Keep it on pause there.
John:
Maybe we'll need it later.
John:
I think Intel would love to fulfill Apple's needs by greatly increasing its capacity.
Casey:
Do you think Intel will eat crow anytime soon?
Casey:
Do you think it will stop being so proud and allow themselves to have Apple bully them into a deal?
Casey:
Because, you know, Apple, to your point earlier, won't go into a deal unless it's extremely lucrative for Apple as well, or perhaps maybe if it totally screws Samsung.
Casey:
So do you think that Apple would get, I don't know if desperate is the right word, but punchy enough to give Samsung the middle finger and simultaneously Intel will get desperate enough to take on Apple?
John:
I think that's... The only thing you could scare Apple with would be like, well, Apple, I know we've been going back and forth and we keep saying you've got to take x86 and you keep saying just fab our A8 chip as is on ARM and we can never come to agreement.
John:
But, you know, Samsung is over here and they're talking to us and they want us to get... Like, the only way you could try to make them jealous is like, look, if you don't do it, Samsung is going to.
John:
And you know Samsung is stupid and makes dumb deals and they'll get, you know, they'll get our fabs and you won't.
John:
Oh, they're not stupid.
John:
They're shameless.
John:
There's a big difference.
Marco:
They are quite smart.
Marco:
It's true.
John:
I don't see that.
John:
I think we're at an impasse until someone's power position changes drastically, until Intel gets way weaker, until Apple gets way stronger, until Samsung gets way stronger.
John:
In the current scenario, I think in any negotiation between these three companies, between any pairs of these three companies,
John:
we're kind of at the status quo that there's no reason that intel should bend over backwards and save apple's deals now and there's no reason that apple should bend over backwards and say oh until we need you so badly because they don't like nobody needs anybody that badly to make a dumb deal at this point so nothing happens right but just look how how long it took to get intel into
John:
max and for a long time the writing was on the wall that apple was in the weak position apple desperately needed a cpu solution intel was willing to offer it and even that took forever to come to pass so i think we're far from that kind of power imbalance here that's fair all right anything else about uh nest stuff
John:
What do you guys think about the privacy paranoia stuff?
Marco:
Well, before we get to that, let's do the second thing we like this week.
Marco:
It is our friends at Transporter.
Marco:
So Transporter, we've talked about Transporter a lot before to review, and then I have some new stuff.
Marco:
But to review, Transporter is this cool product, which it's basically... It works in software like Dropbox, but it's a hardware external drive enclosure that you own and control.
Marco:
So you...
Marco:
You buy this enclosure or their new product called Transporter Sync, which just has a USB port and you plug in any external hard drive that you already have.
Marco:
So you buy this enclosure or this adapter for your existing enclosure and your hard drive becomes a cloud storage drive.
Marco:
And it's private and it's secure.
Marco:
Everything's encrypted back and forth over the internet.
Marco:
So you can have this thing in your house and you can have another one in somebody else's house or your office and you can have certain folders or the whole thing sync to each other.
Marco:
You can install software on your computer or any of your computers or even on your iPhone or Android devices and iOS and Android devices, excuse me.
Marco:
And you can access everything over the internet from that hard drive that's sitting in your house.
Marco:
And
Marco:
All these folders, all these files are not stored on the cloud.
Marco:
They are stored only on that drive or whatever computers are syncing to it.
Marco:
So everything is private.
Marco:
It's secure.
Marco:
It's easier for certain regulatory compliance.
Marco:
It's easier for personal privacy and for if your principles or standards are such that you don't want to store your stuff on cloud drives.
Marco:
If you're worried about security or the NSA, it's really this...
Marco:
Very nice product for this kind of hard to explain thing, but trust me, it's awesome.
Marco:
Just think of it like Dropbox where you own the hard drive that everything's stored on.
Marco:
And they have this awesome software.
Marco:
You install it.
Marco:
It's called Connected Desktop.
Marco:
They have a new feature in version 2.4.
Marco:
Now you can select to automatically sync your special user folders on Mac OS X. You can say sync the desktop, documents, downloads, movies, pictures, music, all these special media or destination folders.
Marco:
You can have those sync with folders on your transporter automatically and sync between any computers you have connected to the transporter.
Marco:
So think about the possible uses of that.
Marco:
I mean, that's incredible.
Marco:
You can have all your photos synced
Marco:
from your photos directory, no special directories, not in this Dropbox folder or anything, not on a network share.
Marco:
You can have everything synced locally.
Marco:
That's really powerful.
Marco:
You can also upload photos directly from your iOS device to your transporter with their iPhone and iPad apps.
Marco:
Really great stuff going on.
Marco:
They're doing a lot of improvements to the software.
Marco:
They're adding new capabilities all the time to these things.
Marco:
And best of all,
Marco:
their prices were already pretty good, and now they've cut their prices for the transporters that have hard drives in them by $50.
Marco:
So now the 2TB transporter model is just $349.
Marco:
A 1TB transporter is just $249.
Marco:
500 gigs, just $199.
Marco:
And you can get the Transporter sync.
Marco:
It's like a little disc almost.
Marco:
And that's the one you just plug in your own hard drive.
Marco:
And that's just $99.
Marco:
So it's a really, really good deal here.
Marco:
And there's no monthly fees.
Marco:
Any kind of cloud service, you're going to pay monthly fees.
Marco:
With Transporter...
Marco:
You own the drive.
Marco:
You just buy it up front, and then that's it.
Marco:
There is no monthly fee to access things.
Marco:
Even the syncing procedure that happens over the internet, there's no fee for that.
Marco:
It's just yours.
Marco:
You just own it.
Marco:
So really great.
Marco:
Go to filetransporter.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You can watch.
Marco:
They have a sandwich video, which we love.
Marco:
We love our friend Adam's sandwich, so you can go watch the sandwich video at filetransporter.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And besides those already low prices that I just told you about, you can save another 10% off by buying transporters at the company store.
Marco:
Go to filetransporterstore.com.
Marco:
Use discount code ATP, and you can save another 10%.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to File Transporter for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So John, you had just asked about privacy.
Casey:
Do you care to restate the question, sir?
John:
Yeah, well, mostly to Marco because he's the most anti-Google amongst us.
John:
A lot of people are freaking out over the privacy concerns that not only are their Nest devices going to start spying on them, but now Nest, previously the company that they loved and trusted, is going to start making new products that come pre-installed with Google's evil.
John:
And they'll spy on you and steal your skull and do whatever they do.
John:
And so you said you're not going to get rid of your nest things.
John:
But how do you feel about the like previously, if we asked you, how do you feel about the company nest?
John:
You'd be like, yeah, they're right, whatever.
John:
And now it's like, oh, no, Google has them there.
John:
Now they're evil.
Marco:
I would certainly hesitate before ever buying another one.
Marco:
That's for sure.
Marco:
But I think I'm not going to rip the current ones off the wall.
Marco:
I don't hate Google.
Marco:
I'm kind of just maybe a skeptic or maybe a cynic, but certainly a skeptic.
Marco:
And by that, I don't mean that I look at everything and try to find the worst possible interpretation.
Marco:
I look at things and I try to cut through the corporate speak and the, you know, hey, we're all friends here kind of patronization.
Marco:
Patronization?
Marco:
Patronization?
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Either way.
Marco:
Try to cut through all that.
Marco:
Because corporate communication is just infected with bloat and euphemism and just diversions.
Marco:
All this crap to candy coat...
Marco:
bad news or to hide things that they don't really want you to think about or that are inconvenient for you to think about.
Marco:
We used to think that the tech industry was different and real, and now the tech industry is big enough that that's not the case.
Marco:
The tech industry has just as much corporate crap in all of its communication as everybody else does.
Marco:
So I try to cut through all that and look at things realistically because history has proven that all of these nice candy-coated statements from the big tech companies,
Marco:
There's usually a real truth there that's less pretty if you think about it.
Marco:
And again, history has proven that that is usually the case.
Marco:
Once you see what companies say versus what happens and what happens next and what happens two years later…
Marco:
I think I'm not being unreasonable with a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
I'm not saying I'm always right that everyone turns evil or anything, but I think history has shown that there's good reason to be skeptical of what companies tell you, and there's good reason to try to cut through some of this crap that tries to candy coat and spin things.
Marco:
I look at what they're doing here, and I say, well...
Marco:
obviously they say now that you don't have to worry.
Marco:
We're keeping these companies as separate units and Nest data will only be used for improved Nest products and services.
Marco:
But obviously that doesn't really mean anything because they can always change that because privacy policies can always be changed.
Marco:
So they can always change that.
Marco:
And the definition of what exactly a Nest product and service is can be so broad once they're owned by Google then it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
So
Marco:
If you're concerned about Nest data being used by Google, then that's a valid concern.
Marco:
And I don't think you can trust anything that they say to the contrary, that you shouldn't be concerned about that.
Marco:
I think if you don't want Google knowing stuff that your Nest can find out or can infer...
Marco:
then that's a valid concern.
Marco:
And their statements have not done anything to really alleviate that to any critical eye.
Marco:
That being said, me personally, I don't care that strongly about it.
Marco:
If I cared so strongly, I would block Google in my hosts file and just not ever use any of their services and block all of their embeds everywhere and just be fine with that.
Marco:
I don't care that strongly about it.
Marco:
You know, I...
Marco:
I try to keep a somewhat healthy distance from Google, but I still use their stuff when it's the best tool for the job for what I'm doing.
Marco:
And so I still use search, I still use maps, and probably some other stuff I'm not even aware of.
Marco:
I still use analytics on my site, even though I hate it.
Marco:
I still use it.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So I don't care that strongly about it, and I think caring so strongly to try to avoid one company – like bending over backwards to avoid one company is usually just hurting yourself.
Marco:
And it's like when people have a bad experience flying somewhere, and then they're like, oh, I'm never going to fly Delta or whatever again.
Marco:
They're out of airlines in five years.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
They all suck.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Spoiler alert.
Marco:
That's what this stuff is.
Marco:
Every tech giant, Apple included, does stuff that I don't like and that offends me.
Marco:
And so you just kind of have to look at pragmatism and say, well, okay, I could go full Stallman or I could be useful.
Marco:
Ha!
Marco:
And I choose to have things be a little bit easier.
Marco:
And everybody makes the same tradeoff.
Marco:
That's why all these ad-supported, creepy services are able to exist and thrive so well, because everybody's making that same tradeoff.
Marco:
People say, I don't want to pay for email hosting.
Marco:
Fine, I'll go to Gmail.
Marco:
It's good enough, or it's the best, in their opinion.
Marco:
And that's fine with them.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Everyone has a line where they draw to say, well, I will tolerate X amount of ad slash creepiness slash cost to me.
Marco:
I will tolerate that in exchange for the service or product that I want to use.
Marco:
I'm not saying that you should necessarily move that line and where you draw it.
Marco:
I just think it's worth knowing what you're getting into and looking at things critically.
John:
I think I'm probably the biggest Google fan amongst us, or at least I use more of their products.
John:
I use Gmail as my mail.
John:
I use their calendar.
John:
I use analytics, use their search, how I even use Google Plus sometimes.
John:
And, of course, YouTube and everything.
John:
And I think where a lot of the commentary on Google Nest and Google privacy concerns...
John:
from you, Marco, but also from other people, goes wrong, is not so much in what's going to happen, but why.
John:
So the thing about... So obviously, Nest and Google stuff is going to be integrated, and they're going to share data, and anything Nest does...
John:
by definition is to improve Nest products.
John:
So that's a meaningless statement and blah, blah, blah.
John:
So, you know, Google Nest are going to be connected.
John:
Google's going to connect up all that information to all the way through all of its other products because that's what Google does.
John:
And I think a lot of those things could be cool, could enhance Google's products, could enhance Nest.
John:
It will make Nest better.
John:
It will make your Android phone better.
John:
It will make Google search better.
John:
It will make maps better.
John:
It will make driving directions better.
John:
It will make everything.
John:
There's a lot of synergy, as they say, in the business.
John:
between this because you know, hey, sensors, set more sensors and more data makes more intelligent decisions.
John:
And that's all good.
John:
And so I and I think that's mostly how Google sees it, because the people who work there are like, thinking, you know, sci fi, like, what can we do if we had all this information?
John:
People always wanted sensors and stuff in the home and you know, things smart, smart homes and all this other crap.
John:
And, you know, Google sees a way to make that happen.
John:
So that's, we know that's going to happen, right?
John:
Uh, and the next thing is like, okay, well, once that happens, this is all happening kind of within one company, you know, Google, even though it's Google nest or whatever.
John:
This is all happening.
John:
Like there's some centralization of power.
John:
Google was already so powerful because it had search and everything.
John:
And now just more and more information is accumulating into Google, which is why people get pissed off at Google plus integrating with YouTube comments and everything.
John:
It's like they want to think of it as silos, even though it's totally not behind the scenes.
John:
And once it becomes clear to them, this is all going to one place.
John:
They think, oh my God, this one company knows so much about me.
John:
If I think, what does Google know about me?
John:
They know everything about, you know, you're worried about like the NSA, having metadata on your phone calls and everything.
John:
If you use all Google services, they have way more information than the NSA.
John:
And obviously, it's different because the NSA is taking it unwillingly, and that the government and I'm not saying this is your equivalent, but I'm just saying, there's a lot of information about you in Google.
John:
And here's where I think it goes wrong.
John:
The danger of Google having all this information is not that Google is going to do terrible things with it.
John:
The danger of Google having all this information is that Google will do something stupid or people will hack them.
John:
I mean, just look at the target thing of getting all this credit card information on a target or whatever.
John:
Any giant pool of information about people is a target.
John:
And the more centralized that pool is and the more valuable the information is and the more of it there is, the more it's a target.
John:
And I don't think Google is going to get all this information and be evil with it.
John:
Although, depending on your definition of evil, that may have already happened.
John:
I think what the danger is, all this information is gathering into this big funnel into Google.
John:
And Google will allow that information to leak out into the world accidentally.
John:
People will get it from them.
John:
It will leak out unintentionally.
John:
Because that's the nature of the thing.
John:
We've been putting credit cards into these giant databases for years and we just kept doing that and kept doing that until finally there's a little chink in the dam and some credit cards get stolen or whatever.
John:
Eventually it's going to be, look, every credit card ever issued has now been stolen.
John:
That's going to happen eventually because this information is in too many places.
John:
It's all over the place.
John:
And I think where people go wrong with their criticism, they're like,
John:
Google is mean and evil, and they're doing this because they're evil.
John:
No, it's incompetence that's going to happen.
John:
What's going to happen is they're doing it because they are well-intentioned and they want to make cool products, and then that information will get out because it's impossible for it not to get out, and then we're all screwed.
Casey:
Yeah, I think the thing that people find alarming is that Google is getting demonstrably better over time at figuring you out and getting a more complete picture of who you are and what you do.
Casey:
For example, at work, I was sitting there, this was two or three months ago, and somebody started kind of spazzing out at their computer, and they were kind of muttering to themselves, whoa, whoa, what?
Casey:
Huh?
Casey:
And then the same, almost exact same thing happened just a week or two ago.
Casey:
And what was going on was when that person, one of my coworkers went to Google.com, it had like, I didn't see it myself, but it had like confetti or something.
Casey:
And it said, happy birthday, you know, John Smith, because it knew that that day was that person's birthday because they were signed into Gmail or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And so on the Google homepage, it said, Hey, happy birthday, John.
Casey:
And
Casey:
That they found to be very creepy, not necessarily because wishing you a happy birthday is bad, but it was taking information that, yes, they willingly provided to Google, but to maybe Gmail, for example, and using it on Google.com.
Casey:
And just like you said, John, you know, it's not really siloed, but...
Casey:
it sort of feels siloed to a normal person and to myself included.
Casey:
And I use Gmail and I use Google Calendar.
Casey:
And I don't know if I go so far as to say I use these services begrudgingly, but I'm getting more – I'm giving it harder and harder side-eye with each passing year.
Casey:
And I think that, again, the real problem is that Google is getting a more complete picture of who we are.
Casey:
And to think that we're – that they're getting a more complete picture of who we are even at home when we are our most unreserved –
Casey:
is creepy.
Casey:
Now, to argue with myself for a moment, a friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, had a couple of really good tweets earlier today that I'm going to read real quick.
Casey:
He said, maybe we should keep our pants on.
Casey:
I don't particularly care for Google's policies, but fearing your thermostat spying on you is nuts.
Casey:
Then he went on to say, I'm more upset about what seemed to be a cool, innovative company leaving the market, and I left Gmail months ago.
Casey:
And I think that that was a nice way of saying we all need to relax, and this may not be so bad.
Casey:
And I think that's both right and wrong.
Casey:
I don't think it's going to be bad soon.
Casey:
It may not be bad at all.
Casey:
But the thing that creeps me out is –
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so I wanted one so, so badly.
Casey:
And, uh, and so I eventually had a friend at school that, that got one and he gave me an invite and, oh my God, I was so excited because Google doesn't do evil.
Casey:
It says it in their frigging motto.
Casey:
They don't do evil.
Casey:
And I was so excited to have a Gmail invite.
Casey:
I could get away.
Casey:
Well, I knew I was going to have to leave my, my Virginia tech email address and, and I didn't want to have to go back to like Hotmail from when I was 10.
Casey:
And so, oh man,
Casey:
I was so excited to be on Gmail.
Casey:
Fast forward from 2004 to 2014, a decade later, and every time Google does something, I end up giving it harder and harder side-eye.
Casey:
And I look at it again and be like, hmm, that... I think you're doing the same thing, though.
John:
Your friend who was freaked out about the birthday thing, and you are both misattributing your discomfort to Google.
John:
Google does not...
John:
have your, your personal information does not have any value to Google in the way that you mean.
John:
Like now they know that you're cheating on your wife and they have this information and they're going to black you with it.
John:
That information is useless to Google unless they can sell you like, you know, uh,
John:
what is that ashleymadison.com or whatever that website is that you you know like it's they there is no there is no person there salaciously trolling through the details of information but the discomfort you feel is founded and it's founded in not that google is going to do evil things with your thing is that once google has that information everybody else who would want that information knows exactly where to get it they go to google if you
John:
If you want to find out what's going on in someone's life, well, guess what?
John:
I know where there's enough information.
John:
Think of a politician who uses Google services.
John:
I bet their competitor in a close race would love to get every bit of information Google has about them.
John:
Google's not going to use that information.
John:
It is not in Google's best interest, probably, to sway the...
John:
the the outcome of political races or maybe politics is a bad choice because it actually probably would be in google's interest but i'm thinking of just like more mundane things of like i know you know uh that you you didn't go to school today because i tracked where your gps was on your android phone because your check-ins and i'm going to tell your parents that you didn't go to school google is not going to do that
John:
It is really dumb to do evil things with that information.
John:
But once Google has that information, once that information is in one place, everybody else who wants to do bad things to you, the mundane, you know, your random jerky guy down the block or a bunch of hackers who want to get it and sell it to people who want to use it or whatever, that's the problem.
John:
And so when people, when you're giving Google your hard side eye, it's not that you shouldn't be afraid that Google is going to do evil stuff because that would be incredibly stupid for Google to do evil stuff to you.
John:
that would not be in their interest.
John:
But you do know that they have this information, and you do know that there's someone out there who could want it, and now they know where to get it.
Casey:
Yeah, and I think you're right, but it's not necessarily about Google doing evil.
Casey:
It's about mundane things that you think should fly under everyone's radar don't anymore.
Casey:
And let me give you a concrete example.
Casey:
A friend of mine at work, my buddy George, he said to me, oh, you know, I was looking up how much it would be to pay off the rest of the loan on my car.
Casey:
And he said, I did this on Saturday or something like that.
Casey:
Well, get this, Casey.
Casey:
He says, come Monday, I got a call from my dealer that I bought the car from saying, hey, man, you know, do you ever think about coming in and upgrading your car?
Casey:
And there was something else he had said to me, and I don't recall what it was, but it was a couple, like maybe he got an email from someone, someone else that wanted to like get him into a new BMW.
Casey:
He has a BMW now.
Casey:
And so it was very creepy that him doing nothing but looking at how much it would cost to finish his loan, presumably – I mean, we don't know this for sure – but presumably led to some dealer calling him and saying, hey –
Casey:
do you want to get into a new BMW?
Casey:
I bet we can make that happen.
Casey:
And so the point I'm driving at is this was a very mundane thing that he didn't think would make any difference.
Casey:
And suddenly he's now getting heckled from a dealer because of it.
Casey:
And I think Google having a more complete picture of who each one of us is could lead to things like that.
Casey:
And another example is Ty Ty in the chat earlier said, and I read the same article, but I forget the details, that Target had
Casey:
started emailing some young lady's dad, because they shared a credit card or something like that, like, hey, we think you might like the following things.
Casey:
And the things were all things for new moms.
Casey:
So Target had deduced, based on the purchases that the young woman made, that she was probably pregnant and would probably need the following things.
Casey:
And so Target
Casey:
Her dad found out that his daughter was – that the daughter was pregnant by way of Target saying, hey, we think you might want the following.
Casey:
And that's just weird.
John:
But that's like – that was old world tech.
John:
We've been tracking our purchases on credit cards for decades and that you don't need too much information to do that.
John:
But what I'm thinking about is where – how do you make this system work?
John:
Because in some respect, it's inevitable that there's going to be more information about all of us out there and it's going to be more interconnected.
John:
And that's just the bottom line.
John:
Like there's no turning back on that because the usefulness of it is too great.
John:
It outweighs the same thing with credit cards.
John:
When you pay for everything with cash, nobody knew what you bought.
John:
But credit cards are way too convenient.
John:
We were willing to live with the fact that the credit card company knows everything we buy.
John:
We made that decision decades ago.
John:
Everyone's okay with it.
John:
The fallout of it is sometimes Target sends you money.
John:
A thing for baby toys and your dad finds out you're pregnant.
John:
Well, I think that's the tradeoff we've made.
John:
Right.
John:
But as the volume of information goes up, I think our laws need to keep up with it.
John:
And I think that what we're missing here in these laws and again, setting aside the NSA for now, because that's that's extra legal.
John:
They are the law, like Judge Dredd.
John:
What we're missing here is, like, I think there's no turning back the tide.
John:
There's no going full installment and saying you can't collect this information or whatever or trying to do some sort of, like, informational antitrust, like, monopoly thing.
John:
Like, oh, no, one company can have X amount of information about you.
John:
I don't even think that's going to work.
John:
What you have to do is say, look, we know you're going to collect all the information, but it's illegal to do X, Y, and Z with that information.
John:
How about, you know, it's illegal to look at that information.
John:
You know, it would have to be like privately encrypted.
John:
It's illegal for you to sell that information.
John:
But like right now, once Google has that information of yours, there are very few limits on what they can do with it, right?
John:
And what should it should be like, you know, you can collect all this information, but understand that you're collecting it for my benefit.
John:
So I can know how long my commute is going to take.
John:
So my phone can tell me that my wife is running late and just went to the store.
John:
But if that you can't certainly you can't give that information to anyone else.
John:
And if it you know, if we find out someone in your company is looking at that information, it's a felony and they go to jail like there is a gap in the law, which because the laws don't expect any one company to know that much about one person.
John:
And right now, the law is like, hey, you totally clicked agree.
John:
You totally signed up.
John:
You gave them that information.
John:
Google owns that information.
John:
You don't own that information.
John:
That's not part of your life.
John:
And that's the gap that we have that needs to be addressed.
John:
because there's no way you're going to stop them from collecting it.
John:
I think we all want them to collect it.
John:
We just want to know that that information is being collected on our behalf, and there are strict limits on what they can do with that information.
John:
And if you violate those limits, bad thing happens to individuals, to companies.
John:
I don't know what chances that we'll ever get laws like that, but I think that's what needs to happen, because the other things are just not going to happen.
John:
We're not going to stop them from collecting it.
Casey:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Marco:
All right, we have one more sponsor this week.
Marco:
It is our friends at Ting.
Marco:
Ting is mobile that makes sense.
Marco:
They're a no BS, simple-to-use mobile service provider from the people at Two Cows, the company behind Hover.
Marco:
Ting is a reseller of the Sprint Network in the U.S.
Marco:
For more information, go to their special URL, atp.ting.com.
Marco:
Ting has great rates.
Marco:
There's no contracts, no early termination fees.
Marco:
You buy your device up front, and you own it outright from the start.
Marco:
They have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.
Marco:
There's a base price of $6 per month per device, and then above that, you just pay for whatever amount of minutes or data or messages that you actually use, whether that's zero, in which case you pay nothing, or whether it's bucketed by different amounts.
Marco:
If you have different usage this month than last month, no problem.
Marco:
They'll automatically bill you for whatever you used, whatever bin you fit into, whatever the cheapest bin is that you fit into.
Marco:
They'll bill you for that.
Marco:
Very smart.
Marco:
No BS.
Marco:
Very simple.
Marco:
It's a great deal.
Marco:
You can even see how much you're going to save with Ting by going to atp.ting.com and checking out their savings calculator.
Marco:
You can enter in your last few bills from your carrier.
Marco:
You can even have them scrape your Verizon account if you want to give them your Verizon credentials.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
Let's say you have an early termination fee.
Marco:
So you're like, well, I don't want to break my contract.
Marco:
I'll have to pay this fee.
Marco:
Well, to help make that easier for you, Ting will even give you 25% of it up to $75 in Ting credit if you have to pay a fee like that.
Marco:
And like Hover, Ting also has fantastic customer support with a no-hold, no-wait phone number.
Marco:
You just call this number, and a human being picks up the phone.
Marco:
You're not put on hold.
Marco:
You don't have to wait in some long queue.
Marco:
You call a number.
Marco:
A human being picks up a phone who is ready and able to help you.
Marco:
There's no transfers, different departments, having to tell people the same thing 10 different times, nothing like that.
Marco:
It's fantastic telephone support.
Marco:
Plus, of course, all the online support options you can wish for in case you don't like calling people in this ad about calling people.
Marco:
So you can add as many devices to your, to your account as you'd like.
Marco:
You can get pooled billing pool usage between them.
Marco:
It's actually really nice if you have to manage a fleet of devices, uh, for instance.
Marco:
So really great service here.
Marco:
Um, I, I've said in the past, you can use this for, let's say you're a developer, you want an Android test phone.
Marco:
This is fantastic.
Marco:
Um, let's say you wanted to just lower your monthly bill and you, you know, you, you use enough data or minutes in such a way that you're kind of getting ripped off by anybody else's plans, which is pretty likely.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Great for all that.
Marco:
They also include tethering, no additional charge.
Marco:
You just use the megabytes that you're buying, no additional charge.
Marco:
So you can use it as a tethering device.
Marco:
Really fantastic.
Marco:
So you can buy a newer used device from Ting.
Marco:
You can bring your own compatible Sprint device if you'd like to.
Marco:
You can even bring a Sprint iPhone 4 or 4S if you'd like.
Marco:
So go check it out.
Marco:
Tons of options.
Marco:
Great provider here.
Marco:
Go to atp.ting.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Ting for sponsoring the show.
John:
Yeah.
John:
there was the political capital to make laws to address this because like okay well your doctors have this information about your health and most people feel that that's so sensitive that like okay i'm giving you this information about my health but you just can't give it to anyone you want you don't own the information about about my health you can't tell my boss that i have some incurable disease or you know or even even my wife for that matter like this that information is private and so there are laws saying what what
John:
what people who deal with health information can and can't do with it.
John:
Now, those laws, I think, are still too lax.
John:
I say this working for a health care company in terms of like what the punishments are, because if if you first of all, people, people who sort of work with health care information, if they have a business related reason to see it, it's okay for them to see it, you know, as part of their work, you know, working on information systems deal with I mean, how otherwise how could they deal with it, right?
John:
but if you see information that you're not supposed to or there technically isn't a work-related reason the penalties to the company and the individual are probably not as severe as they should be especially at the company level like where they do fines and the fine values were set sometime when the law was made and it's like that's like you know seven hours of revenue for our company who cares it's not a big deal like you don't want it to be like the cost of doing business so any kind of law that's protecting information like this does google have a health care information or
John:
Well, I think they probably had some health care initiative like every other company has at some point.
John:
But for the most part, no, they don't have.
Marco:
Wasn't that part of the island plan that all your health information would be open source or something?
John:
Yeah, every company has done that.
Marco:
It was some kind of weird thing.
John:
Every company has done something involving health care, fictional and real.
John:
But if you look at a certain point, I think the accumulation of information that Google has about you will be more of a privacy concern than information protected by HIPAA.
John:
especially for like, you know, for, for most people who you don't have, you know, maybe you don't have that much health, but like Google would know where you are every second of the day, what you're doing, what your comings and goings are, what your, what your searches are, what every email to and from you said, what your text messages said, if you know, or I am like, they will know it for this way.
John:
If getting back to the evil political opponent, if you were given two choices, you can have complete access to your political opponents, healthcare records, or you can have complete access to their entire, everything Google knows about them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you were a betting man, you'd say, I'll take the Google information, please.
John:
Because unless there's some health information, like he has a terminal disease or something, that's your only real chance.
John:
Like, don't elect him.
John:
He's going to die soon.
John:
But the Google information, boy, especially if it's ongoing, give me the Google information feed on my opponent.
John:
That's super valuable.
John:
So the laws the government or Google can do for the information we give them should already be stronger than HIPAA.
John:
And HIPAA, I think, could be stronger still.
John:
Okay.
John:
We're far from that, but what else is new?
John:
Welcome to America.
Marco:
One thing that gives me hope is... Here, I'm going to put this link in the notes.
Marco:
It's an article on The Verge by Nilay Patel, who hates me, but I like him.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It's about, he posted a couple of yesterday about, you know, called why is everyone disappointed by Google buying Nest?
Marco:
And at the end, he says Google, like people are becoming skeptical of Google's motives and becoming a little afraid of here, afraid of an unchecked Google.
John:
What's the date on this lake?
John:
Because I'm pretty sure we all had this conversation like three years ago about, hey, people are becoming... I swear on an actual podcast, maybe exactly three years ago, I remember being on a podcast where we're talking about this, like the tide had turned because maybe it was like...
John:
google think of buying twitter or something and that that was that was the talking about it's like hey remember when we used to be excited when google would buy somebody and nowadays are excited when our favorite startup got bought and nowadays uh when google buys somebody we're like oh well that's the end of that and now they're gonna be evil like this this i think you could you could keep rerunning this story every year every time they buy something
Marco:
Well, I think I've felt a shift in this myself, just anecdotally, because I've been skeptical of Google and expressing fear of an unchecked Google, I think a few years longer than most people have in the tech writing world.
Marco:
And I kind of felt like I was being my own crazy paranoid self out in the middle of the woods.
Marco:
You are.
Marco:
I am, that's true.
Marco:
But it felt like I was the only one
John:
who felt this way who who wasn't that excited whenever google would roll out some new feature that would crush a whole industry you know and and who would you know like i was never i was never like all in on google oh here's maybe it was the dejan news i think i think maybe that was the thing i'm thinking remember when they bought dejan news no you remember what dejan news was nope no that's what i'm saying it's way back in time so dejan news was the thing that had all the usenet posts
Marco:
Oh, and that's how they got it all?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
And that became Google Groups.
John:
And Deja News was like, oh, Deja News is great.
John:
You can find stuff in you because Usenet was terrible to use like the native way.
John:
And so you would use Deja News and then Google bought them.
John:
Everyone's like, oh, that's too bad.
John:
And that like, I don't know what date that is.
John:
I'm in the chat room to look it up.
John:
But that was a long time ago.
John:
And that was, I think, the first time that conversation came up of like, we all love Google.
John:
We all love Deja News.
John:
Why aren't we happy when Google buys Deja News?
John:
Well, Google Groups is why I guess.
Yeah.
Marco:
What gives me hope is that this is no longer an isolated opinion.
Marco:
This is no longer a minority opinion.
Marco:
And it was.
Marco:
Even back then, it was.
Marco:
Even a year ago, it was.
Marco:
Now, though, people are starting to get a little bit creeped out by Google, and I think that's the best for everybody, including Google, that people are finally getting a little bit skeptical, a little bit like, you know, maybe we should put a little more...
Marco:
critical thought into this before we go celebrate and throw all of our data in here.
Marco:
And that's very good.
John:
Well, it's spreading wider, right?
John:
The nerds have always been concerned.
John:
And by the way, the chat room says it was 2001 when Google bought data news.
John:
But now it's spreading wider.
John:
And I guess The Verge is still a tech nerd site.
John:
But I guess I don't read enough of the New York Times and stuff to know, is it coming up at that point?
John:
But I think now if you asked the average person, how do you feel about Google acquiring a company, they're going to say, I don't know what Nest is.
John:
Explain it to me.
John:
If they think about it for a little while, it'll probably occur to them, you know, Google's getting a lot of information about us.
John:
And I think, like, you know, it's just been slowly ramping up.
John:
Maybe once we get that mainstream kind of acceptance where you can take a microphone to anyone on the street and say, hey, Google is thinking of buying X. What do you think about that?
John:
And they groan, then that's it.
John:
It's, you know, they will have made complete penetration.
John:
So I think it's escalating.
John:
And I guess you measure it in our nerds.
John:
nerdosphere by the number and uh volume of uh in terms of loudness of posts whenever google buys somebody uh and so maybe like this time there's even more articles and they're even more strident and angry about it
John:
But I'm not quite sure it's crossed over to USA Today yet.
John:
Maybe USA Today will run a story about this, but will the tone of the USA Today story be, look at all this extra information Google is getting about you, and is it unsafe that one company has all this information?
John:
And again, I cringe every time it's like, because Google is going to do evil things with it.
John:
Google is going to do stuff that makes them money with it.
John:
And maybe that's selling it to advertisers and stuff like that, and maybe you consider that evil.
John:
But Google is not going to tell your wife that you're cheating on her.
John:
It's not in Google's interest to do that.
John:
Not on purpose anyway.
John:
They'll do it accidentally, but not on purpose.
John:
But once Google has that information, it is extremely dangerous that anybody has that information, especially a company like Google that doesn't care anything about you or your life.
John:
They're just like, well, we'll protect it as best we can.
John:
But if you're stupid and someone gets it through your error or we're stupid and someone gets it through our error or we're really smart and someone just breaks in or we have a bad employee or, you know, whatever else happens.
John:
It's dangerous, and hey, there's no real punishment for us other than you stopping using our services, but what are you going to do?
John:
Use Bing?
John:
Use Hotmail?
Casey:
Does that mean we're done?
Marco:
I think so.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Ting, and Transporter, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Marco:
So long.
John:
What are you going to do?
John:
It's a two-party system.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
Throw your vote away.
Marco:
What the hell is that?
Marco:
I actually know this one for the first time ever.
Marco:
Hey, Marco watches TV.
John:
Marco watches it.
Marco:
Well, I watched TV 12 years ago when that episode of the Simpsons Halloween special aired.
John:
There you go.
John:
Look at that.
John:
He knows exactly what it is.
Casey:
Wow.
John:
Look at you.
John:
Casey wasn't born yet, but that's okay.
John:
Yeah, that's all right.
John:
I'm older than Marco, for Christ's sake.
John:
I know, but it was convenient for...
John:
You're not mentally and psychologically older.
John:
Marco is aged.
John:
He's aged by... He got too close to the ring for too long.
John:
He's spending all the time in the room with David Karp.
Marco:
No, that should be reverse aging, because David's like six years older than me.
John:
How do you think?
John:
It's like Dorian Gray.
John:
He just sucks the life right out of you.
John:
No, actually, it's having a kid that does it to you.
Marco:
Yeah, that's more likely.
Marco:
I mean, geez, David is like a ball of constant energy and enthusiasm.
John:
Where did all that energy came from?
Marco:
You have to brush it all off to prevent it from seeping into you too much.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
Oh, man, that's funny.
Casey:
We didn't get to talk about net neutrality.
John:
We didn't even get to the iPad Pro.
John:
It's been in there forever.
John:
We'll get to it next year.
Marco:
And someday we will get to software methodologies.
John:
Oh, I didn't get the AV receiver stuff.
John:
That would have been good if I had prepared for it at all, which I didn't.
Marco:
We keep getting questions on Twitter from people saying, hey, when was the Methodologies episode?
Marco:
I think I missed it.
John:
Yep.
John:
I got another one for you.
John:
When are we going to get to the fireworks factory?
John:
The what?
John:
No, Marco doesn't get that one.
John:
All right.
John:
Listeners will get it.
John:
Somebody will get it.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Do you want to do titles?
John:
I haven't seen anything better than Marco bought four.
John:
I think that's my top choice.
Casey:
I can come around to that.
John:
Speaking of Marco buying four, did you see the flat LED light bulbs?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, the Philips ones?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, as soon as I can buy one, I'll order one just to try it out.
Marco:
But it's getting to the point now where there's tons of pretty decent LED bulbs that are roughly 60 watts equivalent in brightness for roughly $12.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Why do they keep doing only 60s?
John:
I would start buying them maybe if they did hundreds equivalent.
Marco:
Well, I did find a good hundred equivalent, but it's still like $55.
Marco:
So I bought one of them, and it's awesome.
Marco:
I put it in the one pole lamp next to my desk that I was keeping a CFL in all these years.
John:
I think I know why they're all... Well, there's probably some technical reason for the low wattage, but in terms of...
John:
marketing and selling them i think they'll watch because people who have enough money to buy led light bulbs also have houses with many fixtures and and a lot of a lot of fixtures will use like like one to three 60 watt bulbs well but i'm saying like if you have a lot of fixtures you don't put 100 watt equivalent bulb in in 17 fixtures right whereas my house which is ancient and decrepit has very few fixtures so i need those fixtures to be super duper bright so i will be willing to buy the you know the highest output bulb you can put in there and it's and i would love it if that
Marco:
didn't actually consume 100 plus watts of electricity producing you know and you know transferring most of it to heat and putting out a little bit of light too well also i i think one of the one of the reasons i mean first of all i think the technical reason for it is is substantial and that is i believe mostly heat related um because yes leds produce way less heat than incandescents but uh they're also a lot less tolerant of heat themselves it's it's it's that heat is concentrated in a smaller area
John:
you know i've heard that said i don't think that's the problem i think the problem is just that like leds themselves are not uh are not that tolerant of operating in extremely high temperatures for a very long time that's probably true too because they'll melt or whatever but like the the phillips bulb that i was talking about the flat one the innovation on it is they spread the things out so it dissipates heat better it's the same amount of
John:
heat output but it's spread out it's like instead and they don't have to put a big giant metal heat sink on it like they found it's kind of like the the air cooled equivalent they spread everything out in a big fan shape on this flat plane apparently that helps cooling and it's way cheaper to do that than it is to put a big expensive metal heat sink on the thing
Marco:
As of January 2014, I'm pretty sure it's now illegal to sell or manufacture 100-watt bulbs in the U.S., which is why there's all of a sudden a few more 100-watt equivalent LEDs on the market.
John:
Yeah, there's plenty of 100-watt equivalent CFLs.
Marco:
Yeah, but CFLs are so awful.
John:
Yeah, my house is filled with them.
John:
And they're awful, right?
John:
I'm not as sensitive to light color as you are, apparently, because they don't bother me nearly as much as they seem to bother you.
John:
And the flickering or whatever that seems to bother people doesn't, either I don't see it or it doesn't bother me.
John:
And they take less energy than incandescent.
John:
So I replaced all of my, because they're so cheap, like the CFLs are so cheap compared to LEDs.
John:
So I don't think we have any incandescents left in the house.
John:
It's all CFL.
Casey:
A part of me wishes that I had more nice things.
Casey:
Like there's a slim part of me that wants like a big fancy TV like John has or has fancy light bulbs in the house.
Casey:
But about 99% of me is so freaking happy that I don't care.
Casey:
I'm so glad I don't care.
Casey:
Because you know what I do when I need a light bulb?
Casey:
I go to Home Depot or Lowe's and I buy whatever the first light bulb I find that fits is.
Casey:
It's so nice.
Casey:
I don't have to worry about anything.
Casey:
It's great.
You should try it.
Marco:
I think with this audience of me and John, there's no chance of me and John caring less about things.
John:
I know.
John:
I don't notice the light quality difference as much, but the stupid, whatever it is, the ballast or whatever, the thing that drives the CFLs, some of them buzz, and that I cannot stand.
John:
And it's not like they buzz like every one of these models buzz.
John:
You just get unlucky.
John:
You get a buzzing one, and then you just got to either return it or get a different one.
Marco:
My problem with CFLs was always that it was a lot like desktop Linux and Android, where everyone always says, oh, now they're good.
Marco:
All those problems you've had before with CFLs, now we've fixed them.
Marco:
And then I go buy new ones, and they're bad still.
Marco:
And you never know what you're buying, whether the ones you're buying are actually good or not.
Marco:
And it's...
Marco:
oh cfls i've i have spent so much money on so many cfls in so many different apartments and houses over the last five years or ten years and almost all of it i regret how is that how is that unlike leds because you keep doing the same thing with those you keep buying them and saying they're crappy except for like the one that you like but then the next round comes and all the new ones are better than the one that you liked
Marco:
Most of the ones that I've bought are still in full-time use in my house because most of the ones I bought have actually been really good.
Marco:
Trust me, there's a huge difference in satisfaction between CFLs and LEDs.
Marco:
CFLs...
Marco:
CFLs were mediocre when they were new, and then as they aged, their colors would shift and get even worse and take longer to warm up to full brightness, and it was just a disaster.
Marco:
And every time somebody would say, oh, this CFL is good, so I'd go try that one, and it wouldn't be.
Marco:
And, ugh, disaster.
Marco:
Plus all the mercury and the complexity.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not a good scene.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
This is exciting.
Marco:
This is what people tune in for.
Marco:
It's not the car talk.
Marco:
It's this.
John:
You're the one who does the light bulb posts on your blog.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
This is what you live for.
Marco:
No, it's exciting to me.
Marco:
People love those posts.
Marco:
I get so much feedback on those posts, way more than I expect.
John:
I'd rather have you buy them and find out which ones are good than me buy them and find out which ones are good.
John:
When the day comes that I actually – you'll tell me when they get down to the price where it makes sense for me to buy them, and then I'll look at your posts and buy whichever one you say is good.
John:
If they have more than 60 watt equivalent.
Marco:
Yeah, I would say for all the things in your house that use 40 or 60 watts, you can do that now.
Marco:
Yeah, well, how much are they, though?
John:
They're like $10 to $15 each.
John:
I guess maybe the next time the kitchen ones go.
John:
That's the problem with these CFLs.
John:
They last forever.
John:
They're all these CFLs and stuff.
John:
When the ones in the kitchen go bad, I got new ones.
John:
Well, that'll be five years from now.
Marco:
The problem is CFLs, like I said earlier, they age poorly.
Marco:
Almost always the colors will shift or the ballots will start bugging out.
Marco:
That's another problem I have with them.
Marco:
You buy them thinking, oh, they're going to last for 5-10 years like they're claiming.
Marco:
They might work for that long, but you might not want them in that long.
John:
The only one that I have to die frequently is the one in the room that I'm in now, which I think lasts a year and a half on average.
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, I would like to say that I also enjoy reading the LED posts on your site, so this way I know what light bulb I'm never going to bother buying.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
It's good to know.
Marco:
Valuable information.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Anything else going on?
Marco:
I think that's it.
Marco:
Do you have anything else besides software methodologies?
Casey:
Yeah, but nobody wants to hear about that, apparently.
Casey:
Ahem, Marco.
Casey:
It's not my fault that news keeps happening.
Casey:
We'll get there.
Marco:
Well, I guess we're out of time.