Roamio and Siracusiet
John:
Well, they introduced the iMac.
John:
It was on a pedestal.
John:
The G4 Cube came up from the floor.
John:
Phil Scheller had to jump onto an airbag.
John:
That's real power.
Casey:
So, uh, we got some email from an Apple store genius.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Last week we were talking about iCloud and who buys more storage for iCloud.
John:
And I think I said that, uh, I imagined that people would go in not knowing what this error message on their phone means saying it says something and about iCloud, blah, blah, blah, fix it, Mr. Genius person at the bar.
John:
And what they would, I assume they would do is say, uh,
John:
And the genius would tell them, oh, it's iCloud.
John:
We only give you a certain amount of storage for free.
John:
You've run out of that.
John:
If you want more, you have to pay, blah, blah.
John:
And the customer would be pissed.
John:
And they would say, I don't want to pay more money for this stupid thing or whatever.
John:
But I figured they would eventually just pay because they just want to keep using their phone the way they used to use it.
John:
And then at the end of that, I joked that it said, oh, I guess they could just turn back off stuff entirely if they think nothing will ever happen to their phone.
John:
Well, according to this Apple Store genius who's been there for two years, people do come in with the message that they don't understand what it means.
John:
It says, not enough storage.
John:
And he says, the customer's first reaction is not to pay for something they don't understand.
John:
They just turn iCloud backup off and never think about it again.
John:
So there you go.
John:
Oh, God, that's so painful.
Marco:
But that's extremely believable.
John:
The other thing is, or they don't understand how to turn the prompt off and will just hit OK every morning when an iCloud backup was attempted.
John:
So that's their new way they use the phone.
John:
It's like every morning there's this dialog box and I hit OK and it goes away.
John:
It doesn't bother me until the next few days.
John:
And he says, there are very few people who have actually paid for iCloud storage.
John:
In recent memory, the only people I can think of that bought it are people that assume iCloud storage will increase with the size of the phone's storage capacity.
John:
And we talked about that before, like how ideally, you know, whatever they're going to do with iCloud storage, it would match the size of the total sum size of the devices you have.
John:
So whether that's free or whether it's a fee or whatever, it seems like
John:
As you buy more devices, your storage should expand.
John:
Apple should somehow build that into the price of the devices or build that into the price of iCloud, but they don't.
John:
It's freemium.
John:
They learned it from the App Store.
John:
They give you a little bit for free, and then you inevitably reach the limit, and you get it.
John:
So I'm sad thinking of people going, oh, I know how to fix this.
John:
I'll just turn iCloud backups off.
John:
Done and done.
Marco:
If the problem is I get this box every morning that's annoying, it does fix the problem, in quotes.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think the more we hear about these stories of how regular people hit these walls on their iOS devices of this photo storage wall and what to do once you've hit that wall...
Marco:
It's just so sad.
Marco:
Really, it's tragic how many people lose their photos that they've taken.
Marco:
Keep in mind, a lot of people, their phone is their primary or only camera.
Marco:
They could be taking the only pictures they have of their kid.
Marco:
Actually, I know somebody who this happened to.
Marco:
So these problems really are affecting a lot of people in very big ways.
Marco:
And I have to imagine what we have now with iCloud photo backup, this can't be it.
Marco:
This can't be the solution to this problem, period.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think there's such a huge gap between the ideal of backing up everything and where we are now of backing up kind of partially some things.
Marco:
It's very confusing.
Marco:
I think there's a lot of middle ground between those two that we can still achieve today, that Apple could still achieve today if they wanted to.
Marco:
And it just seems like either they can't get their act together on that yet or it's not a priority enough.
Casey:
Yeah, and I actually have some sort of related follow-up.
Casey:
So last episode, I lamented the fact that I had what I thought was multiple gigabytes of messages data on my iPhone, and it was so much that it was preventing iCloud from backing up my iPhone because I was running out of space and I hadn't paid for any extra, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So I don't remember if I had hard facts at the time we recorded, but I can tell you I'm looking at my iPhone right now and I have three and a half gigabytes of messages data as per the settings.
Casey:
Then I believe it's general than usage.
Casey:
Yeah, general than usage.
Casey:
And so I was I concluded that I really need to get this off of my phone.
Casey:
And as much as I love my animated GIFs, I can find them elsewhere.
Casey:
And so tonight I paid $35 for iExplorer, which used to be known as iPhone Explorer.
Casey:
And I'm sure someone will write and tell me, no, you idiot, you should have done it this way.
Casey:
And here's the secret hack to get to these things.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I paid for this app and it will let me extract...
Casey:
SMSs from an unencrypted iTunes backup.
Casey:
So I had to do an unencrypted iTunes backup.
Casey:
Well, anyways, it will do many things.
Casey:
It will save PDFs of your messages.
Casey:
It'll save CSVs and it'll also save text files.
Casey:
And I exported just my conversations with Aaron, my wife, and as a PDF, which does like the little chat bubbles and everything, it was 217 megs.
Casey:
As a CSV file, where it's nothing but text, it was still two megs of messages.
Casey:
And that's because I haven't deleted any, to my recollection, since I got my 3GS in, what, either 2008 or 2010.
Casey:
I always get that wrong.
Casey:
So anyway, so the point is, I had a lot of messages on my phone, and I don't view this as something abnormal.
Casey:
And this is something that I feel like a lot of regular people do.
Casey:
And I'm really...
Casey:
I'm surprised that Apple hasn't found a better way to handle this.
Casey:
And it makes sense because in Apple's perspective, it stands to reason they wouldn't have to handle this because maybe normal people do delete their messages.
Casey:
But I would assume that not all normal people do.
Casey:
And certainly I think of myself as slightly normal and I didn't.
Casey:
So this is kind of a bummer.
Casey:
And hopefully after the show, I'll be able to go through and delete all of these text messages and
Casey:
And all of the animated GIFs and emojis that are associated with them and hopefully reclaim all that three and a half gigs and then be able to use iCloud for backups again.
John:
So I guess you don't need this new Romantimatic application.
John:
Do you know about this?
Casey:
No.
John:
Someone made an application.
John:
I think it was Greg Noss or somebody I know from The Incomparable.
Casey:
Oh, is this the thing that like pings you?
John:
Reminds you to send nice text messages to your significant other.
John:
It seems like you're all set in that regard.
John:
Oh, that could have been a fast text feature.
Casey:
It could have been.
John:
He doesn't need it, obviously.
Casey:
Clearly not.
Casey:
Which, by the way, I have a new icon for Fast Text.
Casey:
My internet friend, Jacob Swidek, has been working with me, that poor guy.
Casey:
And I have a new icon.
Casey:
I haven't quite finished the update to Fast Text, but I don't need to hear any more complaining from John and Marco about the icon soon.
John:
I'm going to complain if the new one doesn't have feet.
John:
Doesn't have feet.
John:
No.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
But the icon is so much better.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
It's so much better.
John:
No feet, no sail.
Marco:
Going back inside to the photo thing.
Marco:
And the messages thing, too.
Marco:
It's one of those problems where iOS has this kind of idealized picture of conditions of usage.
Marco:
And this has been a problem with a lot of Apple software.
Marco:
The iPhoto storage and organization methods, iTunes, etc.
Marco:
There's these idealized...
Marco:
situations that I guess the designers at Apple figure this is how people use this thing.
Marco:
And they try to hide the complexity of dealing with computers and the reality of computers.
Marco:
And when you get to something like the photo storage and backup issues on iOS, and even things like messages taking up a ton of space...
Marco:
I think the big problem is that you're hitting these places where it's, to use a Joel on software term, it's a leaky abstraction.
Marco:
You can't hide the realities of computing devices have limited storage space.
Marco:
And photos and videos shot by good cameras are huge.
Marco:
And upstream bandwidth in most places is not great.
Marco:
And oftentimes not free for very long.
Marco:
And there's all these kind of inconvenient truths in the
Marco:
in the reality of using these computing systems that iOS either ignores or buries so deeply that people do have to deal with the problem of storage space.
Marco:
That's a reasonable thing to expect somebody using a computing device to do is like, well, you have this much space.
Marco:
and you're trying to store more stuff than it holds, so you've got to make some decisions here.
Marco:
And iOS really makes that hard.
Marco:
Merlin talked about this a lot, too.
Marco:
It makes it very hard to know where the storage is being used.
Marco:
It's very hard to control that, to delete things intelligently, to make space intelligently, to know what's being backed up somewhere and what isn't.
Marco:
A lot of the blame for this lays on the design of iOS for...
Marco:
For trying to pretend like these realities don't exist when, in fact, they're extremely common.
John:
iOS loves to do the thing where, like, the usage screen where I spend a lot of my time because I always buy 32 gig iOS devices and I can barely fit my stuff on them.
John:
So I'm always right up against the storage limit because of, like, movies for the kids and other random things that I put on there.
John:
Video always pushes me over the edge.
John:
So I spend a lot of time on the usage screen looking at that stupid scrolling list and expanding it and seeing it.
John:
And the solution to you're out of room is look at that big list, find the application that's big that you don't think that you need or whatever, and delete the entire application.
John:
Because you're like, okay.
John:
can I just delete a couple of the things in that application?
John:
In some cases, you can't like video, you can delete individual videos from the video application.
John:
But in other cases, applications are not designed to say, Hey, I'm application food.
John:
And here's all the list of the data that I'm storing.
John:
And you want I can purge my caches, I can delete these old things that you haven't seen in a while.
John:
I can you know, just some way to manage the data in the application.
John:
The only solution is, you know, hold down, go into wiggle mode, hit the little x, nuke the whole application.
John:
I mean, I recently had to do that with Instapaper because I was up to like 1.2 gigs.
John:
Instapaper was 1.2 gigs.
John:
And Instapaper doesn't have any way like within it to like trim its data or whatever.
John:
I could have gone through the individual things and deleted them off or whatever.
John:
The easiest thing for me to do, because luckily Instapaper has a server side component, was to delete the whole app and then reinstall it.
John:
And there was basically no loss in functionality.
John:
But whatever the hell Instapaper was keeping around was gone.
John:
And then Instapaper shrunk back down to its normal size.
John:
And I'm sure it's slowly growing back up as I go.
John:
I mean, that's an extreme case or whatever.
John:
But, you know, same thing with the SMS things.
John:
You could have gone through the SMS app and deleted individual messages if you wanted.
John:
But nobody, after a certain, once you hit that limit with SMS, I know so many people have hit this limit in iOS, no one's going to go back and delete individual messages.
John:
And there's nothing in the messages application that says delete messages older than X, delete messages from, you know, do something complicated.
John:
Do like a search query, find all those delete.
John:
Like, there's not a lot of good solutions and you can't delete the messages application as far as I know.
John:
So,
John:
iOS tries to simplify things, but then it ends up chunking it into these big immutable blobs of data, and people are forced to make choices like, should I delete this entire application?
John:
I guess it's my only choice.
John:
I mean, and some people, maybe they don't even know that you can go into the video and delete individual videos, but...
John:
Yeah, it's a difficult situation.
John:
It will kind of be better if when Apple does a storage shift, because I think most people can get away with like a 64 gig device and be pretty sloppy.
John:
But lots of people are buying 16s and that's just not enough for anybody to use for more than like a year and not run out of room.
Casey:
Well, in either way, if you have the 16 gig device, and if you have 16 gigs of legitimate data on it, that's not going to get backed up to iCloud unless you pony up some money.
Casey:
And this is where, like you guys had mentioned earlier, and Bradley Chambers, I think was the first place I've seen this, said, well, the amount of iCloud backup you have should be the cumulative size of all of your devices associated with that account.
Casey:
So if you have a 32 gig phone and a 32 gig iPad, then...
Casey:
As far as we're concerned, the size of your iCloud allotment should be 64 gigs, which is a lot more than 5, obviously.
Marco:
Even then, though, obviously we're not talking about desktop size, backup sets, but even that might hit problems with upstream limits.
Casey:
Yeah, very much so.
Casey:
But, I mean, at least it's a step.
Casey:
It's an improvement.
Casey:
True.
Marco:
Yeah, definitely.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So, I mean, John, I imagine you want to force your coworkers to take this, right?
John:
It's an optimistic view of what will help them.
Marco:
Well, it's beginner to advanced, so maybe.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So we talked a lot about Google last episode and buying Nest and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And we've had at least a couple of people write in and actually have some really interesting feedback about that.
Casey:
But John, I believe it was you that added something in particular?
John:
Yeah, I just wanted to note this one thing, not to go into too much depth.
John:
We were talking about why they buy Nest.
John:
Is it because they want to get into consumer products, because they want more information, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And Troy Diamond wrote in to mention one specific product that is actually directly connected to what Nest does, which doesn't necessarily mean that it has anything to do with why they bought Nest, but it's an interesting coincidence.
John:
There's this genie project that they were doing.
John:
It's about...
John:
creating like a smart building for you know sustainable construction and environmentally friendly friendly buildings and stuff like that uh and this was part another one of their pie in the sky things that google does like self-driving cars or whatever uh and apparently they spun it off into another company so i don't know how much bearing this has a nest but
John:
It just goes to show that the type of things that Nest is doing, albeit on a very small scale, using technology to make things that we all have that we've, you know, we don't question, like our thermostats or our smoke detectors or whatever, more intelligent to try to make for more efficient building.
John:
Google's already gone down that road partially with this project.
John:
I should put this link in the show notes if people want to know more.
John:
Again, I don't think this has much to do with Nest at all, but it just goes to show the similarity of thinking.
John:
Nest is not too far from something that Google might have done, although the way Google does it is to do some crazy far-reaching sci-fi thing and then just lose interest and spin it off.
John:
But Nest actually focuses on one small area and ships a product that people might want to buy.
Casey:
So I think this might turn into the John Syracuse show, which will probably make a lot of people, including me, very happy.
Casey:
I hear that there's some things going on with TiVo that happened right before we recorded, and we're recording on Wednesday night.
John:
Yes, this is late-breaking, so there's not much info right before I was going in to set up my computer to record.
John:
Someone tweeted some link to a Wired story that TiVo had laid off...
John:
Most of it's hardware design teams, supposedly, and that they're getting out of the hardware business, which really annoys me mostly because I don't want to buy the new Tivo that came out.
John:
Like when it came out, people are, oh, aren't you going to get this new Tivo?
John:
It's supposedly faster, so on and so forth.
John:
And I read all the reviews and I said, no, I'll just wait for the next one, right?
John:
Well, maybe there won't be a next one.
John:
It's a confusing article where it says they laid off five people and that was most of their hardware design team.
John:
I mean, I guess I would explain some things, but I don't know.
John:
It's still too early to know if this is like a rumor gone bad and they just did some sort of reshuffling or whatever.
John:
But it seems like TiVo wants to get into the business of supplying software to other people who make set-top boxes and doing server-side DVRs like the AT&T U-verse thing.
John:
Rather than selling you a box with a hard drive and a CPU that you put in your home.
John:
And I kind of like the box with the hard drive and a CPU that you put in your home.
John:
So as I tweeted, does this mean now I have to get one of these TiVos?
John:
Because like my television, it's like, well, it's the last one they're making.
John:
And when it goes away, who knows what you'll be able to buy?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I just priced one out, and even with a discount code that you get for filling out their stupid monthly survey things, it's still like $900-something for me to get the big Hong and TiVo that I want with lifetime service.
John:
Wait, what?
John:
Are you serious?
John:
Half of that is the service cost.
John:
So the box itself is $500 or less for the big one that holds like 450 hours of HD content with six tuners.
John:
right that's what we're talking about here this is the big the big guns i don't shop down as low into the range and then double double that price for the service contract and the service contract is like basically paying for them to send you program information for the life of the device you could pay like 12 a month if you want to do it month by month or you can pay some big amount of money and get lifetime and i usually get lifetime because i keep my t-book boxes for years like
John:
I, you know, I slowly rotate them and retire the map.
John:
Most of the time, the lifetime thing more than pays for itself because I retired the TiVo after three, four or five years.
John:
And it's, you know, at $12 a month, doesn't take too many years to equal like a hundred, $200 or whatever it used to be for lifetime.
John:
But they keep bringing the prices up and I don't want to pay months to months.
John:
So I always look at the lifetime thing, but my current lifetime on my TiVo premiere,
John:
It's not close to being paid for.
John:
I forget what I paid for that lifetime thing, but that's another reason I didn't buy the new Romeo DVR when it came out, even though it does look like it's faster and nicer than mine.
John:
Some of the menus still weren't HD, and I said, oh, I'll just wait for the next one.
John:
I'm still in the middle of my lifetime in this one.
John:
I don't need a new TiVo.
John:
My current TiVo is fine, such as it is.
John:
But now, if they're getting out of this business, now I have to play that stupid game where I wait and see if I can get one of these when they become cheap, or maybe they'll never become cheap and let it just disappear.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm kind of sad about it though.
Casey:
So everything you like is disappearing from under you.
Casey:
I'm surprised there's a new Mac Pro.
John:
Well, sort of.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not that like the TV thing is just like a fluke kind of where because there will be better TVs eventually, like OLEDs will eventually become cheaper and they'll be way better than what I have now.
John:
But it's just, you know, we're in a lull period where the thing that I want is going away and something better will come and replace it.
John:
But I don't know when that will be.
John:
But the television, it was a clear choice because my old TV, like you could buy almost any modern TV and it would be better than my old one just because technology moved on in four years for plasmas.
John:
But for TiVo, my current one is still pretty darn good.
John:
It's very reliable.
John:
Four tuners, I don't need six tuners.
John:
Four tuners is enough.
John:
The only reason I would get the new one is because the UI is faster, and that's the thing that drives me crazy about my current one, that and the stupid ads.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I haven't decided what I'm going to do, but I'm sad that they're apparently getting out of the heart.
John:
I still think there's a market for this product.
John:
What it does is amazing.
John:
People who I know who have never had TiVo and they happened to buy one, like Scott McNulty from The Incomparable had never had a TiVo, I think, and he bought one recently.
John:
He's just amazed by it.
John:
He's like, wow, this is great.
John:
I'm like, yes, I could not –
John:
i i could not watch television without tiva i wouldn't i would never want to use a cable company's dvr i would never want to not have a dvr this is how i want to do it it's just that this hardware could be so much better it just needs a little bit a little bit of finesse and know-how applied to it make the cpus faster make everything about it better uh improve the software like it's so close and it's so much better than everything else but to see them sort of
John:
Bail on the business and just decide they're going to get in bed with the cable companies and just supply software.
John:
I don't know where their expertise lies.
John:
Are they great at making hardware?
John:
No, not really.
John:
Are they great at making software?
John:
No, not really.
John:
The combination was something that didn't exist before.
John:
The box that you could have in your house is kind of like Transporter.
John:
A box in your house with the hard drive with stuff on it, no cloud stuff needed.
John:
just program information that you can come down and it's got a lot of features now like the ios apps aren't that bad you can control your tiwo from the other side of the country with your with your phone or your ipad you could stream to your ipad from your house and what there's all sorts of things you can do with the hardware that they have they finally started to kind of get some useful features under them it's just that the hardware was not great and their their software was a little bit creaky uh i don't know i'm sad
Marco:
Well, if that makes you sad, what do you think of the Nintendo stuff?
John:
Oh, you're evil.
John:
That actually makes me less sad, yes.
John:
That's the next thing to think about.
John:
Before we leave this topic, I want to ask you guys, do either one of you guys have a TiVo?
Casey:
No, I have Verizon's DVR that – well, I shouldn't say comes with your cable service.
Casey:
But we – just a year ago, Aaron and I finally decided that I think $10 or $15 a month was worth it for DVR.
Casey:
So everyone else on the planet had had a DVR for –
Casey:
easily five years.
Casey:
And we just got one, like I said, around a year ago.
Casey:
And I really like it, but I feel like I could live without it.
Casey:
And I don't find it to be, I find it to be sufficient because I've never really used a TiVo.
Casey:
All I needed to do is record the shows I want and play the show I want when I ask it to play it.
Casey:
I guess maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't see why you need anything more than that.
Casey:
And my menus, if memory serves, are in HD.
John:
How much programming can you fit on your... Oh, I don't have the faintest idea.
Casey:
We don't watch enough TV to ever get that close.
Marco:
To me, I always avoided this stuff.
Marco:
I had a DVR box from the cable company for a few years, and then I was one of those people who cut cable.
Marco:
And that was a while ago.
Marco:
I mean, that was in 2007, 2008, maybe?
Marco:
So it was a while ago.
Marco:
And to me, one of the reasons I did that is because
Marco:
As a nerd, looking at DVRs, it's just such a terrible hack.
Marco:
And it's hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks.
Marco:
Mixing in TiVo is even more hacky because then you have to deal with your cable company's crap.
Marco:
It's layers upon layers of fragile, hacky things that can and often do fail or break.
Marco:
And I would rather just...
Marco:
put the same amount of money really or less what ends up being less most of the time into Netflix and iTunes purchases and you know it works for us because the shows we watch are available that way and the money works out where like you know we don't watch so many shows where that would be prohibitively expensive you know it doesn't work for everybody of course you know like if you like live sports and stuff like that it's not going to work but
Marco:
For us, it works very well.
Marco:
And so to me, that's a much more elegant solution if you can fit within it.
Marco:
Because then you don't have to fast forward through commercials.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about what if the thing missed the start time by five minutes because something changed at the last second.
Marco:
All that crazy stuff you have to deal with with DVR.
Marco:
Storage space.
Marco:
I mean, all that crazy stuff.
Marco:
I prefer to just do the 80% solution of I can get...
Marco:
80% of what we want in this far better way that's usually cheaper and has all these other advantages.
Marco:
Like, for example, no commercials ever.
Marco:
All these other advantages.
Marco:
It's just, to me, that's a much more elegant future.
Marco:
And so the idea of buying a really decked out DVR, for me, seems like investing in the wrong future.
Marco:
But again, that's only because my consumption habits fit within the way I've chosen to do things.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
there are some advantages, even if you're not a heavy TV watcher.
John:
Well, if you're a heavy TV watcher, like I am and my whole family is, then you can't use a cable company to provide DVR because they don't have enough storage space.
John:
Like we, we, my thing has, I think it has like a three terabyte drive in there and we, we fill it constantly.
John:
We're deleting stuff to make, make room for things.
John:
So we fill the thing up because it's just four people's worth of programming in there.
John:
And actually we have another two terabytes upstairs and we, you know, use the superset of that storage.
John:
Uh,
John:
So, you know, and if you're a heavy TV viewer, that's what you, you know, it's obvious that you can't get by with any other solution.
John:
And if you're a heavy TV viewer, that also means you're not content to wait until they show up on iTunes.
John:
It's not even the money thing.
John:
It's just like, can I watch it right now?
John:
It's on right now.
John:
Why can't I watch it right now?
John:
Or why don't you just torrent it?
John:
Is it available?
John:
Although I had to deal with torrenting and stuff like that.
John:
It's like this is the solution that gets you the programming you want to.
John:
when you want it, more or less.
John:
And if you don't care about that, then yeah, the solution is better.
John:
But I would say even if you're not a heavy TV watcher and even if you don't care about a little bit of delay, the main feature that I think of all these DVRs in the age of cable card is they make it so you don't have to have a cable box.
John:
If you think you want to have cable for whatever reason, I can't imagine having a cable box.
John:
I've never had a cable box.
John:
I've never had a cable box in any house that I, let me see, maybe in the apartment.
John:
I don't think in any house that I've owned I've had a cable box at all.
John:
When before, maybe before, around the time my first child was born, we said, okay, we're not going to have time to watch our TV shows the way we normally have because once you have a kid, you can't be like, oh, it's 8 o'clock.
John:
Let's go sit down and watch the TV because that doesn't work anymore.
John:
And that's when I sort of said my goodbyes to live TV.
John:
It's like saying your goodbyes to the light when you become a vampire.
John:
When I got my first TiVo like nine, ten years ago, that was it.
John:
I said goodbye to live television.
John:
I will never watch live television again.
John:
I will never see a commercial again that I don't skip through with a 30-second skip button.
John:
Live television is dead to me.
John:
Flipping through channels is dead to me.
John:
All of that, totally gone.
John:
From that point on, for the past decade of my life, television is I go in front of my television, turn it on, go to some box that's connected to it and select what I want to watch from it.
John:
And it just so happens that TiVo is filled with all the programming that I want to record in sort of real time.
John:
And even when we watch quote-unquote live television, we always wait for the commercials to queue up.
John:
We don't start watching our 8 o'clock programs until 8.30 because we know we'll never have to see a commercial that way.
John:
You don't have to do HBO shows.
John:
We can watch them in real time because they have no commercials.
John:
So I just think it's a more civilized way to watch television because cable boxes, DVRs or no, cable boxes are disgusting.
John:
Just terrible black boxes with those big red LEDs on them and the horrible remotes they give you.
John:
I never want one of those things in my house at all.
John:
And this is like you can buy your own box, get this little cable car, put it in there, you know, get Fios or something in the basement, run the coax up there.
John:
It's the same reason I don't use the cable company's router.
John:
I don't want their box.
John:
I don't want their router.
John:
I don't want anything in the house.
John:
So for that reason alone, I think if you subscribe to cable, it is better to have one of the smaller TiVo DVRs than to take their cable box.
John:
But if you don't want cable, then yeah, the TiVo is not doing anything for you.
John:
And if you can get by with the, I think even Casey, depending on how much you use your Verizon DVR thing, you would probably like a TiVo better, but probably not to be worth the amount of money that it costs.
John:
Although how much do you pay per month for that DVR thing?
Casey:
I think it's about $15.
Casey:
And I don't debate that a TiVo is surely better in every measurable way, and probably a bunch of immeasurable ones as well.
Casey:
But to me, having never had a DVR before, I'm just excited that I have a thing, a machine, if you will, that will record the television shows that we do watch without me having to intervene.
Casey:
And to your point a moment ago, I used the Verizon piece of crap action tech router that I was given when we moved into the house in 2008.
Casey:
And I have it.
John:
It may need some kind of intervention.
Casey:
Probably.
Casey:
But –
Casey:
But it hasn't caused me any issues.
Casey:
Now, for Wi-Fi, I use a slightly old Airport Extreme.
Casey:
So really, the only thing that this router is doing is getting internet to my set-top boxes and getting internet to my Airport Extreme.
Casey:
And for that...
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
And again, I completely understand and agree that not having to use the Verizon router would probably be better.
Casey:
And not having to use the Verizon DVR would probably be better.
Casey:
But it serves my needs just fine.
Casey:
And so I don't have any compelling reason to upgrade that I'm aware of.
John:
$15 a month, though.
John:
That adds up.
John:
You should wait until they have a fire sale on the last TiVo Romeos and get one of the small ones and just try it.
John:
I think cost-wise it may end up being cheaper and it will be a nicer experience.
Casey:
Probably.
Casey:
And the chat room is saying, oh, well, you're renting that equipment.
Casey:
I'm absolutely renting the DVR.
Casey:
I don't recall if I'm renting the router.
Casey:
It stands to reason I am.
Casey:
But again, for me, it's sufficient.
Casey:
And I mean, our Verizon bill is somewhere around $150, $160 for the
Casey:
for the baller but not obscene internet so not quite marco level but really good internet and reasonable cable we have hd service of course but we don't get any like cinemax or hbo or anything like that and we even have a home telephone for a reason i haven't quite figured out yet
Casey:
And for that, it's about $150.
Casey:
And I actually, I love my Fios.
Casey:
I would be devastated if we ever moved to a place that didn't have Verizon Fios.
Casey:
So, I mean, I don't think that that's a terrible deal, but I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I'm missing out.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, and in fact, when I was a C++ developer many years ago, I taught myself C Sharp by writing my own time tracking tool, which was indeed terrible.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Well, Harvest fixes all that.
Marco:
Harvest is this great, beautifully crafted tool.
Marco:
You can work from anywhere.
Marco:
You can start a time tracker via your web browser.
Marco:
You can also start on your...
Marco:
iPhone or Android device.
Marco:
You won't have to go searching for your timer app.
Marco:
You just go to Harvest from any device.
Marco:
You can start a timer.
Marco:
You won't have to play the memory game later with your timesheet.
Marco:
You can stay focused on the task at hand.
Marco:
Just start the timer anywhere and get to work.
Marco:
All your tracked hours appear in visual time reports designed to help finish projects on time and within budget.
Marco:
They're big on this whole on time and within budget thing.
Marco:
They really try to get your focus on that to just keep you on track.
Marco:
And their awesome tools will actually really be able to show you which clients and projects are making you money and which ones are costing you.
Marco:
If you're getting paid less than what you're actually spending to work on it, you're losing money on that, and their tools will help you find that.
Marco:
So other people agree, creative businesses around the world will track millions of hours in Harvest this year.
Marco:
So you should join them before 2014 slips away to another poorly tracked year of work.
Marco:
Check out Harvest at GetHarvest.com, and you can try it free for 30 days.
Marco:
After the trial period, use promo code ATP anytime before March 1st, and you'll receive 50% off your first month.
Marco:
So again, GetHarvest.com, try it free for 30 days, and use code ATP after purchase before March 1st to get 50% off your first month.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Harvest for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, so we never actually got to Nintendo, right?
Casey:
Or am I crazy?
John:
No, we didn't.
John:
I deleted it.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
Okay.
John:
Are they dead yet?
John:
It's going to be a while.
John:
Yeah, so they announced their financials, or their expected financials of projections, and they are forecasting a $240 million annual loss because the Wii U is not selling...
John:
And they're cutting their forecast on how many Wii U's they think they're going to sell.
John:
They previously had saying they were going to sell 9 million, and now they're saying they're going to sell 2.8 million.
John:
And even Wii U games, they cut that from saying they were going to sell 38 million Wii U games to saying they were going to sell 19 million.
John:
So, you know, everyone knows that Wii U is not selling.
John:
Nintendo has not done anything to make it sell any better.
John:
3DS is doing okay, not great, not terrible.
John:
It was actually the best selling console for all of 2013, which is not that impressive because
John:
what did it compete with in 2013 a bunch of old consoles that were on the way out the door but it was also the best-selling console in december which is kind of impressive because in december the new consoles were just coming out and you think you know they sold like a million dollars and a million units in the first day or whatever so i mean compared to the ds numbers 3ds isn't big but compared to how dedicated gaming devices are selling now 3ds is doing pretty well for itself uh
John:
Wow, real-time follow-up in the chat room.
John:
TiVo refutes the rumors and says hardware is a core component of its business.
John:
Okay, well, I'll read that link later to see.
Marco:
You know, I read that when somebody posted it earlier, and the actual response from the TiVo person, it kind of... Double speak?
Marco:
It basically sounds like they're trying not to scare people away from buying the Romeos.
Marco:
So it's basically saying, like, we're going to keep supporting the Romeo.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
but it's a lot of doublespeak that basically sounds like, we're going to keep supporting that, but don't expect much else because we're focusing on cloud.
John:
Yeah, it's kind of like when Panasonic was getting out of the Plasma business for like a year leading up to that, there would be a story saying, oh, Plasma.
John:
Panasonic's getting out of plasma business.
John:
Panasonic would issue some statement that neither confirms nor denies, but kind of tries to tell you, no, it's okay, you should buy our existing TVs because we have inventory to clear, but never officially saying we're getting out of the business until, like, the whole year is up and then Panasonic then finally officially says, yes, it's true, we're getting out of, you know, so where there's smoke, there's fire, but we'll continue with that.
John:
I'll look at that story after the show.
John:
That's why I prefaced it with saying I just saw this link just before we came in.
John:
Who knows how accurate it is?
John:
It's kind of fuzzy information, but the signs don't look good.
John:
But anyway, Nintendo, I don't think there's any news here.
John:
Like, we all knew that the Wii U wasn't selling that well.
John:
I guess they could have sold Gangbusters in December, but even if it did... I mean, the PS4 and Xbox One sold pretty well in December.
John:
Like, they're coming out of the gate strong.
John:
And they got outsold by the 3DS.
John:
And what I've always said about Nintendo, and this is the time of year when people are going to keep posting more stories about what Nintendo should or shouldn't do or whatever...
John:
is that as long as there's a market for dedicated gaming devices, Nintendo has a way to thrive and to be successful and to be the Nintendo we want it to be.
John:
Just because there is a way for them to do that doesn't mean they will do it.
John:
That's the distinction that subtleties that most people will probably forget about.
John:
There is a way for Nintendo to win as long as people are willing to buy hardware that mostly just plays games.
John:
If people stop being willing to buy hardware to just play games, Nintendo can't play anymore because Nintendo can't make a general purpose OS, I don't think.
John:
They don't have the expertise.
John:
They can barely make a dedicated gaming console software stack.
John:
They can't make something based on Android.
John:
They can't make their own iOS.
John:
They can't be a platform.
John:
They just can't do that.
John:
They don't have the people do that.
John:
It's very difficult to do.
John:
So as long as people keep buying dedicated gaming devices, all Nintendo needs to do is make really good dedicated gaming devices with really good games that people want to buy.
John:
That's it.
John:
It sounds easy, doesn't it?
John:
Well, if they don't make game hardware that people want to buy and games that people want to buy, they can still fail under that scenario, but at least it won't be like, well, it's out of the question.
John:
I think there's nothing they can do to say, we're going to make our own operating system.
John:
and our own app store, and our own general purpose platform that does more than games.
John:
That's just out of the question for them.
John:
The only thing they can do, and the only thing I think they should do, is try to make game devices that people really want to buy with great games that people want to buy on them.
John:
And that's it.
John:
uh and they're not doing that now they made the wii u no one seems to want it for i think what should be fairly obvious reasons at this point it's it's weak it has bad third-party game support because it's weak it's like a it's like a previous gen console that no one is really interested in and that the novelty this time of the second screen is not catching on with people and nintendo hasn't demonstrated why it should catch on and it's just a bad situation but they do have 14 billion dollars in the bank
John:
as i said i think a couple months ago when this came up in the first round of nintendo woe it's like they just need to like reset and think about what they're going to do for their next thing i don't know they don't need to give up on the wii u they still they still need to put out whatever games they have planned for the wii u even if it doesn't sell a lot of units and third-party support is just disappearing for the wii u because who the hell is going to make a game for a crappy console that can't run modern games and has very few uh you know and is not selling a lot of units no one's going to sign up to make games for that it's just
John:
grim but nintendo will make games for it because nintendo will make money off its games for it and you know what choice do they have so i think that will just make games for the wii u put them out the thing will sort of fade away and nintendo just thinks needs to think about what it's going to do next spend that part of that 14 billion dollars wisely and come out with a good idea with a good platform
John:
And hope that by the time they do that, that the market for dedicated gaming hardware has not disappeared.
John:
As I've said many times, I think there is room for one more generation of dedicated gaming hardware.
John:
And this is it.
John:
PS4 and Xbox One.
John:
After the PS4 and Xbox One, seven, eight years from now, I'll have to revisit that question and say, is there still a market for dedicated gaming hardware?
John:
Maybe then the answer will be no.
John:
And then Nintendo is screwed.
John:
But for now, Nintendo just did a big swing and a miss this generation with their consoles and maybe got like a foul tip with their handhelds.
Marco:
Do you think, are they in worse shape now as they were when they launched the GameCube?
Marco:
I know the GameCube was not a huge success, was it?
John:
They're worse off now in terms of sales, but I'm assuming they have much more money in the bank now than they did back then.
John:
Because the GameCube, if you look at the charts, the GameCube sold easily more than the Wii U. For all the problems that the GameCube had, Nintendo would kill to get GameCube-like numbers on the Wii U. They do not have that now.
John:
and the ds sold way better than the 3ds but a lot of that is kind of like look at the downward trend of dedicated gaming devices like overall the market is slowly declining and so everything's like relative it's like well the 3ds is doing well now but nothing compared to the ds and the gamecube was seen as a failure because it was a third place console then but uh boy what nintendo would give to sell gamecube like numbers of wii u at this point
Casey:
So if you take off your Nintendo fanboy, and I mean that in a good way, hat, you're the only one of us that has a Wii U. And when we visited, I played it for five minutes and it seemed nice, but whatever.
Casey:
Taking off the hat, the fanboy hat, is it a good system?
Casey:
I know what you just said about it being not very powerful, but just in general, is it good?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The games that Nintendo will make for the Wii U, and that they already have made, demonstrate it as a platform that you can have fun games on.
John:
And as I said before, you can have kinds of fun and kinds of games on the Wii U that you can't have on any other console because of that weird second screen thing.
John:
it doesn't mean that they're the most amazing games in the world but there's experiences you can't have other places uh and like nintendo land the thing that demonstrates like here's umpteen different ways you can use our combination of hardware some of them are fun some of them aren't but out of that big you know collection of mini games there's three or four in there that are really interesting and novel that can't be matched anywhere else and so if you're in if you're into games and you want to say show me a new way to be entertained instead of just another first person shooter
John:
Nintendo is showing you that kind of like on the Xbox one and the Xbox 360 with the Kinect.
John:
Uh, Microsoft said you can stand up in front of the TV and wave your arms and legs around.
John:
That's a new way to play games.
John:
Try that.
John:
Do you like it?
John:
Is it fun?
John:
Whether you like it or not, that's something you can't experience on the other consoles because they don't have the Kinect.
John:
You know, they may have the eye toy and the other things that the cameras or whatever, but there are Nintendo does have something novel with the Wii U. Uh, and yeah,
John:
So that's one aspect.
John:
And the second aspect is Nintendo makes great games and their games are going to be on the Wii U. Their games are not going to be on any of the other consoles.
John:
So if you're interested in playing the next Zelda game, there's only one place to do that.
John:
And maybe the next Zelda game won't take advantage of any of the Wii U features, unique features at all, but it'll still be a great game.
John:
And it's kind of the same reason I got a PlayStation 3 to play the Last Guardian, which has still not been released.
John:
But, you know, Journey is an example.
John:
Journey is not available on any other platform.
John:
I would buy a PS3 just to play Journey.
John:
Journey could be on any platform.
John:
It doesn't use any unique features.
John:
It's like analog stick and buttons.
John:
It's not like you need the Kinect board.
John:
It's not like you need a second screen.
John:
It's a very straightforward game.
John:
It could be a PC game.
John:
Hell, it could probably even exist on iOS, God forbid.
John:
But it was only on...
John:
the ps3 so that's why i bought a ps3 um and i continue to think that you know that's the way forward for nintendo is make awesome hardware that people want that third parties are willing to support that sells in big numbers and also make your very best games and put them only on your hardware that's it just simple as that nintendo i don't know see what the problem is you just got to make awesome games and hardware that people love
Marco:
In order to win, you have to do well.
Marco:
Geez.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
Well, I mean, like, because people keep talking about structural things, like, oh, they need a different strategy.
John:
Even Nintendo itself saying, you know, we'll have to look at smartphones and do this and do that.
John:
It's like, I don't think that's a winning strategy for Nintendo because I don't think Nintendo can...
John:
can do what it does.
John:
People keep making this analogy and saying why it's not apt or whatever, but there's enough aspects of it that I think are apt that it's worth revisiting and thinking about.
John:
Again, it's kind of like when Apple was in trouble and they were totally in trouble, like in the 90s, and people were saying Apple needs to get out of the hardware business and just put macOS on Windows PCs.
John:
because what they're doing now is not working.
John:
They're not making hardware that people want to buy.
John:
People kind of like their software.
John:
Why not just put that software on other people's hardware?
John:
And you could argue that had Steve Jobs not returned, Apple would have gone down the tubes and gone bankrupt, and people would have said, see, you should have just put Mac OS on PC hardware.
John:
Your stupid thing of selling it.
John:
Why did you keep doing that?
John:
Why did you keep keeping your software just to your hardware that nobody wanted?
John:
Why didn't you just put it on generic x86 hardware?
John:
And now you're out of business.
John:
You should have listened to me.
John:
But instead, Steve Jobs came back and did like the thing that I'm teasingly saying is so easy.
John:
How about you just make computers that people actually want to buy?
John:
And then they'll, you know, you put your good software on, you make that even better, too.
John:
And then when you have hardware and software that people want to buy, you can become successful.
John:
That's not as simple as that because, you know, Apple did other things as well.
John:
But there is a definite analogy in that what Nintendo makes is a combination of hardware and software that gives a unique experience that is potentially better than all of its competitors.
John:
And that's why people buy it.
John:
People bought the Wii because it was crazy, waggly remote mixed with some software that made that crazy, waggly remote fun.
John:
That's it.
John:
All you got to do is make something that people want to buy.
John:
And if you said, okay, well, why don't you just make software?
John:
All you got to do is make software that people want to buy.
John:
How many copies of software does Nintendo need to sell for iOS to make the kind of money they make even off of their crappy failing Wii U and their so-so 3DS?
John:
You know, 3DS games are like $30 a pop.
John:
Wii U games are like $60 a pop.
John:
And, you know, they got to be making money in the Wii U consoles itself.
John:
Nintendo can't come into iOS, put out $60 games and expect like, I mean, you just do the revenue graphs.
John:
I'm like, well, if I sell at $1, how many do I have to sell?
John:
If I sell at $60, we know how much I'll sell compared to if I sell at $1.
John:
Does Nintendo have to start making freemium games?
John:
Like it's, it's a whole different market, you know, never, nevermind what kind of games could you make on iOS.
John:
And now you're dependent on a different hardware vendor and you can't innovate gameplay because you're, you're at the mercy of what kind of hardware Apple wants to put out and how well they're going to support your games.
John:
And whole category games can't even exist without the physical controllers.
John:
Oh, you just sell to people with physical controllers and Nintendo can make a physical controller.
John:
Now you're selling to a fraction of a fraction of a market.
John:
Anybody willing to buy a physical controller to play Nintendo games on their iOS device would also be willing to buy a 3DS.
John:
And, you know, television game consoles with a controller there, they could just buy a Bluetooth controller and AirPlay their iOS device and you worry about the lag.
John:
Like, there is no good way out for Nintendo in those areas.
John:
I think Nintendo should pay no attention to the smartphone space because they can't be a player there.
John:
They're never going to have their own platform.
John:
They're never going to have their own OS.
John:
If that becomes the price of doing business, they're doomed.
John:
For now, it looks like there's still a market for dedicated game consoles.
John:
They should just make one that people want to buy.
John:
sounds easy yeah i don't know why they didn't consult me before they made the wii u wow i would have told them like there's a couple of articles like you know the hindsight is 2020 articles kind of like i was at a game developer and they showed us the wii u and i totally knew that they shouldn't be making this because it was the hardware was too weak uh you know it's easy to say that in retrospect but i mean they probably would have said the same thing about the wii standard definition of game console everyone else going hd you're doomed well they weren't so doomed there uh but yeah i don't think they could pull that off a second time and they didn't
Marco:
Yeah, I think part of the problem with that is that the Wii was really successful because of this fad that it introduced.
John:
No, it is totally not a fad.
John:
A fad is something that comes and goes quickly and has no lasting value.
John:
Motion control... I would say that is what you said.
Marco:
Come and goes quickly and has no lasting value.
Marco:
I bet that is the pattern for the majority of Wii owners of how they use their Wii.
John:
It lasted an entire generation.
John:
We dominated the entire generation.
John:
And motion control is not going away.
John:
Every single modern console has motion control coming out the butt.
John:
It's like saying, well, the Macintosh, because the Macintosh lost it.
Casey:
That sounds uncomfortable.
John:
The Macintosh lost to Windows because that GUI thing was just a fad.
John:
And yeah, now every modern computer has a GUI, but they're not a Macintosh, so I guess that whole GUI thing was a fad.
John:
Motion control was not a fad.
Marco:
Well, that's not a fair assessment.
Marco:
I think... Because, you know, stuff like a GUI is... You use it, and then you keep using it, and it keeps being awesome.
Marco:
Whereas the Wii...
Marco:
Almost everyone I've ever heard from who has a Wii has said that they had the same problem where they got it, they played it, they played the crap out of it for a couple of weeks or months, and then they never turn it on again.
Marco:
And then it eventually goes in the closet, and then it eventually goes away.
John:
Like a computer, it needs software.
John:
So if you got a Macintosh, and then people just stopped making applications for it, and Doom wasn't out for the Mac, and all these other programs you wanted to play weren't out for the Mac, you're just like, well, I had a Mac, and I used it a lot, but then...
John:
Like I'd played the few games that I had and I'd used the software I had, but all the new applications were coming out for Windows.
John:
So I put the Mac in the closet and I got a Windows machine and I used their GUI apps.
John:
Like it's a platform.
John:
You do need software to be released for it.
John:
And making it standard definition didn't help.
John:
And Nintendo's relationship with third parties didn't help.
John:
And eventually the only thing available on the Wii were terrible, crappy shovelware ports of like ancient PC games or last gen console games.
John:
And all the new titles that people wanted to play weren't available for the Wii at all.
John:
So what are you going to do?
John:
Keep playing Wii Sports for eight years?
John:
Of course you're not going to.
John:
Of course it's going to go into the closet.
John:
It's a platform, right?
John:
But you can't say that the motion control was a fad and it went away.
John:
And that's why it's because no one made new games for it.
John:
No one made new, exciting, popular games for it.
John:
Everyone else wanted to play Mass Effect and the new Halo games.
John:
Even with an exclusive shot.
John:
Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare.
John:
All these games came out.
John:
They're available for PC, 360, and PS3.
John:
PC, 360, or PS3.
John:
Never the Wii because the Wii can't play because it was too weak.
John:
It just aged out.
John:
No one made new software for it.
John:
So what you're saying is I was right.
John:
No, it's not that the motion control was a fad.
Marco:
I didn't say the motion control was a fad.
Marco:
I said the Wii was a fad.
John:
The Wii is not a fad.
John:
The Wii was just a console that didn't have good third-party support.
John:
The GameCube was similar.
John:
As the GameCube got older, third-party games came out for the other platforms and not for the GameCube.
John:
Nintendo was really bad about third-party support because...
John:
It's caught between, well, we can support our own platform with our first-party games and, well, we kind of want third-party games to round out the platform, but we don't really care if those guys make any money.
John:
And then people are like, well, screw you.
John:
We're not going to make games for your platform anymore unless you sell in huge numbers.
John:
And even when they sold in huge numbers, all they did was attract the vultures to say, well, I'll make a stupid tying game for my movie.
John:
and sell a Wii version just to get some free cash because there's so many Wiis out there in the world.
John:
And then people would buy the crappy movie tie-in game for the Wii, and the kids would play it and say, this sucks.
John:
And it was like the 2600, the Atari, where eventually everybody was making 2600 games, and it just devalued the entire concept.
John:
So...
John:
We, as a product, was a good idea and a good product.
John:
The relationship with third parties was terrible, and they didn't support it, and it just fizzled out.
John:
I mean, any console can do that.
John:
If any of the other console makers had the same problem, if they put out hardware that was too weak to play modern games and didn't have a good relationship with third parties, they would fizzle out and die, too.
John:
If Nintendo had simply made a PlayStation 4 with a second screen on it and had...
John:
sony or microsoft level of intelligence about third-party support the wii would be selling like hotcakes because who wouldn't want a ps4 that can play the next mario and zelda game everybody would like you have your cake and eat it too so there's no reason you have to choose between those two things uh except for price but nintendo has always you know said well we want to keep it as cheap as possible and we think that'll work great and it did with the wii kind of but even that ran into their stupidity about third-party relationships
Marco:
Well, the reason I brought up this thing inside of this big fire is because it's always a flaw, a strategic flaw in business if you don't really recognize why you have been successful in the past or the present.
Marco:
Because if you attribute present or past success to the wrong factors, then you'll probably do the wrong things on your next project in your upcoming direction.
Marco:
And so I think...
Marco:
For Nintendo to say, you know, oh, well, the Wii sold really, really well, and therefore we have to keep doing gimmicks like this.
Marco:
It's not a gimmick.
Marco:
Well, hold on.
Marco:
So this has kind of been Nintendo's M.O.
Marco:
in the last few generations of consoles, where, you know, it used to be in the olden days of like 8 and 16-bit, even the N64, Nintendo was basically doing the same kinds of things as everyone else.
Marco:
And in some ways, they would do things better.
Marco:
And then they had these awesome games to carry them and to really be the foundation of their business.
Marco:
The Wii was this new hardware gimmick that... Excuse me.
Marco:
This new hardware method that...
Marco:
that was very successful in the market, briefly, at least in that one generation.
John:
For eight years, yeah, briefly for eight years.
Marco:
Well, okay, regardless, it was very successful, and it had this new hardware thing, this new kind of thing.
Marco:
The DS had these two screens.
Marco:
That was very successful, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But is the reason it was very successful because it had two screens?
Marco:
Or because Nintendo made really good games and they happened to make the best portable game system and it happened to have two screens?
John:
You're right that they're misattributing things, but it's not that misattribution.
John:
Because the Wii sold and the Amazing Numbers did because it had a novel input method, right?
John:
Here's Nintendo's problem.
John:
They competed with Sony and the original PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64.
John:
That was kind of where the turning point was for them.
John:
And a little bit of the SNES as well.
John:
And they didn't do as well as they thought they should.
John:
They said, we have a great product.
John:
We have great games.
John:
Why are we losing to Sony, this newcomer into the market?
John:
Why are we having trouble with Sega and their Genesis and stuff like that?
John:
We should be crushing them.
John:
We're Nintendo.
John:
We should do great.
John:
And the GameCube really brought that do ahead because the GameCube was just an amazing piece of hardware.
John:
It was the best console of that generation hardware-wise.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They're like, we should really be killing these guys.
John:
We made this thing and we came in last place.
John:
Why?
John:
Why don't people want to buy our stuff?
John:
Aren't our games good?
John:
And so when the Wii came around, they're like, we keep failing.
John:
We need to do something different.
John:
And they look back at why they had failed and they said, I think we failed because we're not giving people something different.
John:
We're just trying to make the same thing as everyone else.
John:
And they said, here's what we can do, but we'll make something different.
John:
How about we use motion control?
John:
And they were actually thinking about motion control for the GameCube as well.
John:
We'll do motion control.
John:
And they couldn't figure out why they kept losing.
John:
And they're losing because they were just obstinate about third-party relationships with other developers.
John:
Like, Sony won because it was nice to third parties, and Nintendo always wanted to screw them.
John:
Because Nintendo said, we sell our first-party games, and you pay us through the nose for the privilege of being on our platform.
John:
And another company came in there and said, we won't be such bastards to third parties.
John:
And Nintendo continues to refuse to believe that that's why everyone is crushing you.
John:
It's not because they make better hardware.
John:
It's sure as hell not because they make better first-party games.
John:
It's because they're not jerks to the third parties.
John:
And Nintendo doesn't want to hear that.
John:
And unfortunately, the idea that... Here's what the problem was.
John:
The problem was we didn't make something that was interesting enough.
John:
We're just doing the same thing as everyone else.
John:
Let's do something interesting.
John:
That worked for them.
John:
They said, aha, see, that was it.
John:
It wasn't that all that stuff people were saying about us not having good relationships with third parties.
John:
It was just because we want to give people something new.
John:
So when it came time to make the Wii U, they said, we can do that thing again where we make something new.
John:
And so they made something new, and it is new, and it is interesting.
John:
It's just not as interesting as motion control was coming from a previous world without motion control.
John:
And they kept having the weak hardware, and it fell on its face because...
John:
They continue not to realize that the reason they keep failing is because they don't have good third-party resources.
John:
Again, if you could buy a Nintendo console and it had all the modern games on it, it had Grand Theft Auto, it had Call of Duty, it had everything.
John:
It looked great.
John:
It was competitive with everybody else.
John:
Any third-party game came out for the next eight years, you should be sure it will be on the new Nintendo console.
John:
It was just like the 360 or the PS3.
John:
Sometimes it's on the 360, sometimes it's on the PS3.
John:
It's probably on the PC.
John:
Nintendo is not even in that conversation for multiple generations now.
John:
And if they can't be in that conversation, the only people who are going to buy a Nintendo console are people who just want it for the first-party games.
John:
And they're stupidly limiting themselves.
Casey:
I almost wonder if there's a parallel to Apple here in that Apple is getting more and more anger directed at them by third-party developers.
Casey:
We've gone through the ratings kerfuffle a thousand times and the
Casey:
review kerfuffle a thousand times.
Casey:
And I was fiddling with certificates and provisioning profiles last night for Fast Taxed, and I wanted to throw myself off the roof of my house.
Casey:
And I'm definitely reaching here, but
Casey:
I can't help but wonder if Nintendo and Apple both were or are in a position where they had the ability to be smug and to act like the king of the world.
Casey:
And eventually what we've seen with Nintendo is that didn't last.
Casey:
And the more friendly to third-party developers upstarts came around and ate their lunch.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I'm being overdramatic, but I can't help but wonder if that's the future for Apple if they don't start improving things like iTunes Connect, improving things like developer relations.
Casey:
And they certainly have gotten a heck of a lot better.
Casey:
And Marco, you would know better than any of us how much better it's gotten.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It strikes me as a vaguely parallel path.
John:
Yeah, the difference with Nintendo is that their heyday when they really were the king was back with the NES.
John:
That was so long ago and maybe the SNES.
John:
And it's just like it's that carryover.
John:
It's kind of more like Microsoft where they weren't as dominant as long as Microsoft was, but they were as dominant as Microsoft for a brief moment in time.
John:
and that's their image of themselves and even a change of ceos like the change of ceos the old guy yamauchi got pulled back and like finally now we'll get someone who realizes they're not the king of the world anymore and the new guy did the wii which looks like hey new guy comes in it's kind of like the return receive job new guy comes in and suddenly nintendo is back on top of the console heat but again they were on top
John:
Like, they didn't recognize their previous problems.
John:
They just happened to find something else that would give them a turbo boost above everyone else.
John:
But they kept all the same old attitudes.
John:
Like, the expectation that you can make a new console and do it just like the Wii again and think that everything will work out fine because you'll just be that much more amazing than everyone else.
John:
Like...
John:
It's like Microsoft thinking that for so long, well, we're Microsoft.
John:
When we make a tablet, people will buy it.
John:
And when we make a phone OS, people will buy it.
John:
And Windows Phone will soon be the dominant phone platform or we'll be in strong second place or whatever.
John:
You just get that image in your head of we're Microsoft.
John:
We're the king of everything.
John:
Obviously, anything we do is going to be successful.
John:
And it takes repeated failures to get through your corporate head that actually, no, that's not, you're not going to automatically win.
John:
You can't, you can't do that.
John:
You have to, you know, developer tools, you know, like it is kind of like a, it's more like Apple did it to, to the other developers with phone.
John:
It's like, if you look at Apple's developer tools for writing apps for iOS, yeah, we may complain about them and everything, but compare it to phone development before the iPhone, right?
John:
Like, you know, using Xcode to write applications for iOS is so far beyond using whatever SDK to write Nokia apps or whatever.
John:
It's like night and day.
John:
And so no wonder suddenly Apple has tons of third party support for applications and every other phone platform just goes away.
John:
At this point, Nintendo's not that bad compared to their competitors, but Nintendo's strength is not making developer tools or middleware or other things.
John:
Not that it's really Sony's or Microsoft's strength either, but Sony and Microsoft have gotten better at it faster than Nintendo.
John:
Same thing with online, Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.
John:
Again, they're not great at it, but Nintendo is terrible.
John:
And so it's kind of like Nintendo was the king a long time ago, and it does everything worse than all of its competitors now except make fun games.
John:
And that stuff is coming home to roost.
Marco:
Do you think some part of it also is, you know, back in the 8 and 16-bit era, I mean, actually even the 32 slash 64 era, the first one, that...
Marco:
Back then, the best games for a platform, both the best critically acclaimed ones and the ones that would sell the most, were usually first-party games by the platform vendor.
Marco:
And that is no longer the case these days, as far as I know.
Marco:
It seems like these days, the big blockbuster games are made by third parties who...
Marco:
have really no reason, unless they have some kind of big pricey business deal, they really have no reason to limit themselves to just one of the consoles.
Marco:
And so it becomes, you know, like if you want to play the latest Call of Duty or the latest Madden Football, you can do it on anything.
Marco:
And it's in their best interest to put out the games for all the consoles.
Marco:
And so it's a lot less of an advantage to have the strong first-party library as it used to be because most of the games people are buying and getting excited about are available on all the platforms.
John:
It's so expensive now to make a AAA title that people can't afford to have exclusives.
John:
If you're going to be EA or something, and you're going to make Madden, and someone wants you to make an exclusive to their platform, EA is going to be like, do you realize how much money you'd have to pay us to do that?
John:
Because in a sort of even horse race between two or three competitors, it's like, are you going to pay for all the copies that we could have sold on the Xbox?
John:
If Sony wants it to be exclusive, pick any game like that.
John:
You can't afford to pay them.
John:
That's why these people buy studios.
John:
Microsoft buys Bungie.
John:
Well, now we don't have to pay you to make Halo exclusive to the Xbox.
John:
We bought your whole company.
John:
Make it for the Xbox only, right?
John:
And even that Bungie found a way to reel its way out so its next game could be multi-platform.
John:
It's just so expensive.
John:
The only people who can afford to make a game exclusive to a platform are like...
John:
gaming studios that are going down the tubes and need tons of money and they'll take whatever cash payout they can to go exclusive or you know first parties um i don't know if there was ever a heyday where the first party games are always the best i guess maybe in the nes days i mean nintendo's always its first party games have always been you know among the best on on any platform anywhere so that's easy one sega i guess they had sonic in the genesis days but was that really the best games nintendo's the only one who's been so dumb
Marco:
Sega had a lot of... I was a Sega guy back then.
Marco:
They had a lot of really good games in the 8 and 16-bit era.
Marco:
I would even say for the Saturn, which didn't sell well.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
They were the only games for the Saturn.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
Even for that generation, I think Sega had the best Saturn games.
Marco:
I think Nintendo had by far the best N64 games.
John:
PlayStation changed that, though.
John:
That was their deal.
John:
Think of the first-party PlayStation games like Crash Bandicoot.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, the PS1 games really were not that great.
Marco:
The PS1 mainly succeeded because the Saturn was a bomb.
Marco:
I mean, the Saturn kind of made space for it, and the N64 wasn't out yet.
Marco:
And it used cartridges when it came out.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Although, I will stand by that being a good decision, actually.
Marco:
Looking back at the load times and everything... Well, it was a really bad decision for Nintendo.
John:
It had advantages, but the reason Nintendo did it was because A, they're stubborn, and B, people would pay Nintendo to make their cartridges.
John:
If you wanted to make a game for N64, like the other stuff, you'd have to pay Nintendo to make your cartridges for you.
John:
And Nintendo charged profit on that.
John:
It was like free money.
John:
Why would we let you make a $0.10 CD when we can charge you for these cartridges?
Yeah.
Marco:
But my point is, in this new era of most of the big popular games are multi-platform, Nintendo will always lose that battle because they're not in the cutting-edge hardware and ecosystem game.
Marco:
They're not in that game at all, and so they're going to keep losing.
John:
But they could be, though.
John:
The GameCube proves that they could be because the GameCube, hardware-wise, was...
John:
more than a match for its competitors like there's no reason that they can't be because they don't make you know they pay ati and ibm or whoever makes you know they like look at the ps4 or the xbox one is it am they both have amd cpus with you know like they could nintendo can go to the same vendors just like they did with the gamecube isn't you know the gamecube is even more extreme because ibm and ati were also in the xbox 360 so it was like
John:
It was right there.
John:
We're all using the same vendors.
John:
You don't have to make this stuff yourself.
John:
They just chose not to compete in that.
John:
There's not something structural about Nintendo that prevents them from making a console that can host all the modern games.
John:
It's a business choice.
Marco:
Well, I don't know.
Marco:
It's because it isn't just about the hardware anymore.
Marco:
Now it's about these online services, integration with cable boxes and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's all these things that Nintendo really has never shown any interest in doing.
John:
Sony is terrible at that, too.
John:
Microsoft is the only company that knew anything about online because they're a PC company.
John:
They know about platforms.
John:
They know about networking, stuff like that.
John:
Sony didn't know anything about that.
John:
Sony stuff sucked, and they slowly learned, and Nintendo stuff...
John:
has always sucked continues to suck it sucks slightly more than sony but like it's it's a it's not outside i think this is something that nintendo can do nintendo can make online games they have nintendo can make like social media lobby type things they have done that they just do it badly
John:
Sony also does it badly.
John:
Microsoft does it less badly, but there's nobody who's like, I guess maybe Microsoft is out ahead of both of the other ones, but Sony's pretty crappy at that too.
John:
So like the bar is low.
John:
I feel like they could, they could cross that hurdle.
John:
And again, you have like, now it may be a little bit too late, but that's so many years, like Xbox live came out so many years ago.
John:
nintendo if they got their head out of their butt would have said all right we suck at this now let's get good at it slowly over many years it's just what sony did and sony is still terrible at it and they you know they lost all those passwords and their service is not as good as xbox live and when the ps4 came out you know it has integration with streaming and the headset support and stuff like that i think they learned it's possible and nintendo is just much slower learner and or too stubborn or whatever but i don't think it's outside the realm of possibility
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I got all my big apps that I've worked on.
Marco:
I got those printed out and stuck them on my wall of my office.
Marco:
And it's like a nice little row of kind of like these trophies of apps I've worked on.
Marco:
And I even just got a new one that arrived a few days ago.
Marco:
The original Tonks art that had the little walking AeroPress Chemex and French Press.
Marco:
I went to them and got the original source of that and printed my own little copy.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's like 12 by 17 or something like that.
Marco:
What's great about these things is that they're very lightweight.
Marco:
The front is this nice glass surface, but then the glass layer is thin enough that it's pretty light, and then the back is this nice, I don't know, eighth inch of foam board or something like that.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, what else do we want to talk about?
Casey:
Should we breach the net neutrality topic?
Casey:
Because this could go for hours.
Casey:
Even I have a lot to say about this.
Marco:
There's a lot there.
Marco:
I think any loss of net neutrality is really bad and really, frankly, a likely disaster for our industry and many others.
Marco:
But legally, I don't know enough about what just happened.
Marco:
I don't have a good legal understanding of it, and I haven't done all the reading on it.
Marco:
I still have to read Neil Patel's article on it.
Marco:
So I don't really have a lot to say on that right now.
Casey:
Well, I just wanted to briefly add, and then John, I'll ask for your two cents.
Casey:
Somebody tweeted, and I'll put a link in the show notes and in the chat, and this may not be the original instance of it, but somebody tweeted a really interesting graphic that basically said...
Casey:
Hey, if you want really fast Netflix, that's an additional $10 a month.
Casey:
And if you want really fast blah, blah, blah, that's an additional $15 a month.
Casey:
And it was extremely interesting and a really ominous sign of what net neutrality could mean or the loss of net neutrality could mean for the future.
Casey:
And it was a really clever way to hammer it home that if not all traffic is created equal, that could lead to some very bad things.
Casey:
And it's very frightening.
Casey:
And just like you said, Marco, it's very, very potentially dangerous for the industry.
Marco:
Also, I thought the Fred Wilson post was really good too.
Marco:
Fred Wilson is – in case you don't know him, he's a big investor.
Marco:
I actually know him.
Marco:
He's a really nice guy.
Marco:
And his blog is avc.com because he is a VC.
Marco:
Anyway, he had this great post on it basically just like –
Marco:
these scenarios of these theoretical future investor meetings where he's meeting some young startup founder who wants to get some funding.
Marco:
And they're describing like, oh, well, I had this great idea for this new music startup where this is like a new streaming service.
Marco:
It's going to have these differences from other streaming services.
Marco:
And he's like, sorry, we can't take that because Apple and RDO and Spotify and Beats have all paid all the telcos to get their...
Marco:
transfer to not count towards your data allotment, and you won't have that power or money, so no one's going to buy your service because it's going to count against their data, so we're not going to fund you.
Marco:
And that's going to happen.
Marco:
That kind of thing where it's not going to affect everything.
Marco:
If you're running text and transmitting text all around, it's probably not going to be big enough to matter or get throttled like that.
Marco:
But you don't know.
Marco:
And there's...
Marco:
There's all these other... It dramatically affects any kind of large transfers.
Marco:
Definitely would affect podcasts.
Marco:
No question about it.
Marco:
And so that hits home for me, certainly.
Marco:
And it showed it for you if you're listening.
Marco:
And so there's that aspect.
Marco:
There's also...
Marco:
One thing I liked a lot was Matt Drance's piece on Apple Outsider where he also – not only does he link to all these other good ones, but he also says there's also a problem of privacy where now – yeah, right now your ISP can look at everything passing through and where it's going, but there's not really much of a reason for them to.
Marco:
There's no business case for it, so they probably aren't in generally –
Marco:
They don't really have motivation to do that, but with this, they would have to look at everything you're doing, and they would have business reasons to do it, and so there's massive privacy implications for it as well.
Marco:
There's all these problems with what a lack of net neutrality will cause, and
Marco:
And the arguments about free markets and everything else and deregulations, benefits in some cases, don't really apply because there's not a lot of competition in most broadband markets.
Marco:
And mobile, the rules are different.
Marco:
And again, I don't know if I'm about this to really talk at length, but the rules are different for mobile networks.
Marco:
And you could look at that and say, well, mobile is competition for the broadband, which it is.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
As long as mobile data caps can be burned up with watching Netflix for an hour, I don't think we're in the same league here.
Marco:
Home broadband still has a big role for a lot of people.
Marco:
As the cable companies and phone companies and these home broadband companies, as they add things like phone service to them and their own on-demand video, and as people start cutting cable service to say, oh, well...
Marco:
I don't need to pay for your TV service because I just buy everything online.
Marco:
Those ISPs are going to have more and more really big business reasons to do evil crap like this, to do things like throttle Netflix, throttle Skype.
Marco:
Look at what happened with Vonage forever ago.
Marco:
That was one of these first cases.
Marco:
They're going to have reasons to do all this stuff, big business reasons, and so you know they're going to do it.
Marco:
It's not like they have morals and are sitting around saying, oh, yeah, we're Verizon, we're Comcast, we're just going to be nice to our customers.
Marco:
No, they're going to screw you at every chance you possibly get.
Marco:
come on these companies they they have it in their dna to be complete to everybody that's every company that that's how companies work that's you know that's if there's a business case to do some big thing they're going to do it and so it would be foolish to think that if these companies were permitted to do stuff like this that they wouldn't do it of course they're going to do it and where are you going to turn there's nowhere to go there's chances are you know most people have
Marco:
at most, two options for their broadband at home.
Marco:
Usually you can choose between one cable company and one diesel company in the US.
Marco:
And I think in the rest of the world, some places are better, some places are worse.
Marco:
I think overall it's not that much better on average.
Marco:
It might even be worse.
Marco:
Generally speaking, you have between one and two broadband companies to choose from in the U.S.
Marco:
In most places, those one or two are the same one or two.
Marco:
There's not that many ISPs.
Marco:
There's five or six big ones in the whole country, maybe.
Marco:
It doesn't take much.
Marco:
If Comcast or Verizon say, okay, we're not doing this thing, that's going to affect a quarter of the country or something.
Marco:
It's a big number.
Marco:
And so this is a big deal, and we need regulation.
Marco:
The role of government regulation is where the market can't do the right thing for whatever reason, where it's dysfunctional or impossible or completely impractical for the market to do the things that are best for the people, best for the overall industry.
Marco:
That's when government regulation is most needed.
Marco:
And that's definitely the case with broadband.
Marco:
Broadband, there is no competition, and we need the government regulation, and it's not happening, and that's really scary.
John:
The problem with net neutrality, and I've experienced this problem myself with trying to explain it to my mother, and for all the people who are going to complain that I always use my mother as an example, and that's insulting because who's to say that mothers don't know stuff about technology?
John:
I'm using my mother as an example in this case and in many other cases because she's the one of my parents who is most interested in and knowledgeable about technology.
John:
So she's the one who's actually willing to entertain the discussion with me about net neutrality, not because she's less competent.
John:
So let's get the mother as a –
John:
It's not a hypothetical.
John:
This is my actual mother, and I actually explain it to her, and that's the reason I explain it to her and not my father, because my father doesn't care, doesn't know about it, doesn't give a crap about this.
John:
Anyway, I try to explain that neutrality to her, and it's difficult.
John:
And that image that Casey was talking about showed the big price sheet of, like,
John:
uh so you want internet access well for an extra five bucks you get netflix search ten bucks and my impression was not that you get faster netflix it's like oh so you want netflix with your internet that'll be five extra dollars oh so you want to have you know hbo go with it that'll be ten extra dollars oh you want to go on facebook that'll be 12 extra dollars uh and it's made to look just like it does when you buy cable now you want cable tv okay well here's the base price if you want espn it'll be this price and if you want hbo it's part of our premium package that's 12 it's like buying a bmw you know you gotta get the whole other package you know
John:
The problem with that image, as terrifying as it is to nerds, is that to a regular person, you're like, oh, that's already how I buy TV.
John:
And that's not that bad.
John:
We're like, no, it's terrible when you buy TV.
John:
Don't you understand?
John:
And with the television, it's terrible in some ways.
John:
But on the other hand, it also subsidizes a lot of channels.
John:
So there are good things about bundling and bad things.
John:
But in general, if you go from a situation like it's different because those are services that are being bundled together in a package of things that you have to pay for and all those things you have to pay for, this is...
John:
Basically taking a wire and saying we're only going to let certain... It's a negative instead of a positive.
John:
We're only going to let certain things through on it.
John:
Oh, so you want us to let Netflix traffic in?
John:
Pay us this amount of money, and now we'll let Netflix traffic go through your house.
John:
That's not an internet service provider anymore.
John:
I don't know what that is, but that's not...
John:
That's not someone providing you access to the Internet.
John:
That's someone preventing you from having access to the Internet to varying degrees based on how much you're going to pay them or how much they're going to pay the companies or whatever.
John:
And the problem with that image, I think, is it looks too familiar to people and it won't be terrifying to people because they won't realize the implications.
John:
And this is the difficulty I have trying to explain net neutrality to my mother or to anyone else, is that it's very difficult to...
John:
in part on them like the thing that we all know in our gut that like this is the end of the internet as we know it if you don't have an internet interconnected network of computers that can all talk to each other but instead have an interconnected series of toll booths that you have to pay money for for information to get one person the other that defeats the entire purpose of the internet and you know isps don't want to be dumb pipes and we all want them to be dumb pipes and that's the constant tension that's there between
John:
us and them and the role of government regulation like in any free market type system uh it's not like when companies can't do the right thing it's the incentives are aligned for companies to make to maximize their profits and if those are the only incentives in the system
John:
then, yeah, the companies will go off and do those things that will cause incredible damage in the long run because that will make them the most profits.
John:
They'll become a monopoly so we have anti-monopoly laws.
John:
If they will end net neutrality because it will make them more money, we need a counterbalance to that.
John:
And the counterbalance can't be other private market companies.
John:
That's something someone said to me on Twitter.
John:
Well, if ISPs do this, won't other net neutral ISPs crop up to compete with them?
John:
Uh, that's, that's an interesting fantasy scenario, but unfortunately with the exception of wireless, all of the wires and fiber optic cables going to people's houses is the barrier to entry to saying, okay, well, Comcast is terrible and Verizon is terrible and they're all net neutral anymore.
John:
I'm going to start my own ISP.
John:
Great.
John:
Well, let me know when you run wires to everybody's house in the United States.
John:
That's a significant barrier to entry.
John:
Or even for wireless, let me know when you paid for all the spectrum you plan to use.
John:
And again, the regulations are different about divvying up spectrum between people and common carrier stuff.
John:
And the same thing with the wires.
John:
There's some regulations in this area already.
John:
But you can't rely on the private market not to, you know...
John:
totally get away totally remove net neutrality because it will make them more money and if there are companies they're trying to make more money they're not trying to be magnanimous or advanced civilization they're trying to make more private so there needs to be a counterbalance to that and that's why all the nerds are hoping the government will fulfill its role as being a counterbalance to private industry to prevent private industry from doing what it does like those machines are aligned in a certain way to make money and we should let them run off and do that right up to the point where they start causing damage and there needs to be a counterbalance
John:
And it's just it's too esoteric and weird and nerdy.
John:
And even even if it slowly happens, like it's it would just happen in pieces one at a time.
John:
And everyone who was happening to would just simply accept it as the way things are until two generations from now.
John:
The Internet could be dead as we know it, and no one would care, and no one would ever have put up a fuss.
John:
It's one of those type of things, like a slow-moving type of disaster where you have to kind of be a little bit chicken little and say the sky is falling to get people's attention.
John:
Otherwise, this terrible thing will slowly happen to them, and they'll accept it.
John:
They won't even wake up one day and be in a dystopia.
John:
They'll just be like, well, it's just the way things are.
John:
It's just the way things have always been.
John:
Oh, well.
Casey:
You know, I'm glad we don't have much to say about this.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll have to talk about it some other time.
John:
Well, we weren't talking about the events.
John:
We were just talking about net neutrality in general as a concept.
John:
And that, I think, is enough.
John:
Instead of talking about what happened in this court case or how is the battle going for net neutrality, just the concept of net neutrality, the concept that one computer could talk to another computer and send data through it and they all pay for internet access to get access to the internet and it's undifferentiated and the ones and zeros flow through the tubes like...
John:
That doesn't sound like much, but if you take that away and turn it into some crazy tollbooth thing, it just destroys the whole endeavor.
John:
It destroys every part of it.
Casey:
And even as someone who doesn't directly make my living on the internet in the same way that, say, Marco does...
Casey:
Obviously, I still indirectly make my living on the internet because the consulting that I do in my day job is all web-based.
Casey:
And even despite being slightly removed from all this, it absolutely scares me.
Casey:
It petrifies me, the thought of losing net neutrality.
Casey:
And net neutrality was the great equalizer that there's no reason that –
Casey:
Marco couldn't make a read later service or that Marco and David couldn't make a new blogging engine because they had the same right to the same pipes as everyone else did.
Casey:
And to take that away, that's scary.
Casey:
We're in such a wonderful time right now.
Casey:
Well, I guess you could argue anyone in a garage could always do something incredible, but it's so much easier now.
Casey:
I mean, hey, look at the three of us, three people in three converted bedrooms and three houses across the eastern United States are able to reach tens of thousands of people on a weekly basis.
Casey:
And that's really powerful and really incredible, and we're very lucky for that, the three of us most especially, but I like to thank all of our listeners as well.
Casey:
And just like Marco alluded to earlier, imagine if we had to subsidize, the three of us had to subsidize getting our podcast to our listeners.
Casey:
You think ads are bad now.
Casey:
My goodness, the show would be 80% ads if that were the case.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
We already pay for that.
Marco:
The cable companies and stuff wanting payments from Google and Apple and Netflix, stuff like that.
Marco:
Google and Apple and Netflix are already paying to upload that data.
Marco:
They're already paying for their data centers to have connectivity to all the big backbones.
Marco:
And we already pay for the bandwidth for this show.
Marco:
And thank God Libsyn is unlimited because if Libsyn wasn't unlimited, this show would cost like $1,000 a month in bandwidth alone.
Marco:
And we already pay for that.
Marco:
Everyone already pays for their upstream bandwidth, and the cable companies don't get that money directly.
Marco:
They are offering access to these big backbones, and I don't unfortunately know the details of how all of that works and the way peer agreements work and who pays who and all the cases and everything, but they didn't build that infrastructure.
Marco:
They have parts of it.
Marco:
They have their own infrastructure to the home, but like –
Marco:
they are offering you this product that's out there that everyone else is already paying to be into, and they want money too.
Marco:
They want a cut too, even though no one's ever had to pay for that before to get to that last mile.
John:
The thing is, data is not water.
John:
There's not a volume of water going through pipes like
John:
well, a certain volume of water goes through our pipes, and they wear down our pipes, and we have maintenance for our valves in the pipes.
John:
And there is telecom equipment that you have to have.
John:
But, like, at a certain point, like, once you have the equipment set up, the amount of data going through it, if it's anything less than 100% or, you know, 90% of the capacity, where if you're using 1% of the capacity of the hardware, that's just wasted.
John:
Like, it's not as if, well, there'll be less wear and tear on our routers now that there's less traffic on them.
John:
I mean, I guess someone's going to write in and say, well, the heat generated by a fully stressed router, you.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
But it's not the same as paying for cars going over roads.
John:
Cars destroy roads as they go over them, right?
John:
And it's not water through a pipe.
John:
At a certain point, the marginal cost of putting extra data, which is why they have these peering agreements, it's like, well...
John:
Otherwise, this bandwidth would just be idle.
John:
So I'll pay you and you'll pay me and it'll all work out.
John:
And there's all this strange kind of make believe money changing hands or peering group is just to make the entire internet work because the data has to change hands and has to go from place the other and everyone is always jockeying for position of who can make a little bit more money off of this.
John:
But in the end, what we just want it to be is the internet, this conceptual thing, kind of like iCloud, that is just giant umbrella term for this huge networks of computers and hardware and wires and software that is run by a giant conglomeration of people all trying to make this one big sort of emergent living entity called the internet work, where any computer can talk to any other computer if it has its IP address.
John:
IPv6 will be a topic for another show.
John:
And that's the system we're trying to preserve here.
John:
And
John:
At every turn, companies are trying to say, yeah, but we can make more money if X, Y, and Z, and it's terrible.
John:
The worst argument I hear about this is the free market thing.
John:
Government regulation is bad.
John:
You're stifling competition and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Marco talked about it before.
John:
The net neutral internet has been the largest driver of free market capitalism and economic growth that the world has ever seen.
John:
Two guys start Tumblr and it makes how many billion dollars did Yahoo pay for it or whatever?
John:
If you don't have a net neutral internet and can't let two guys...
John:
If you take that away and say, well, now only the big guys can, you have destroyed so much more of the economy.
John:
Yes, you made the ISPs get richer.
John:
The price has been a huge amount of innovation and market value that you've totally destroyed by not making it easy to enter this market.
John:
It's so incredibly short-sighted for people to say government regulation is always bad, free market is better, because the internet is the free market.
John:
It is the thing that has enabled more businesses to
John:
spring into existence to add value to the economy to employ people than any other invention in the entire world.
John:
And to destroy that just so ISPs can make more money, it's so insane.
John:
And again, this entire concept and all this is so hard to explain to people who don't know or care about it, which is why I fear every day that we will never have sane laws in this area because no one understands the issues involved.
John:
No lawmakers do.
Marco:
If you look at the history of actions taken by the FCC in the last 15-20 years, there's not a lot of things in there that give you a lot of confidence that they're going to do the right thing here.
John:
No, like it's, it's, it's terrible.
John:
It's, it's too, it's too nuanced and esoteric and like, and even when I say like Lawrence Lessig up there and other people who are trying to explain it, like they do such a good job at explaining.
John:
I'm like, surely now you must understand it.
John:
He did such a good job of explaining that.
John:
And like, nope, still don't get it.
John:
I need a campaign donations from Comcast.
John:
I'm screwing everybody.
Casey:
It's miserable.
Marco:
Well, with that, let's wrap it up for the week.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors, lynda.com, Harvest, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, 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 So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-
Casey:
Yeah, so I ended us on a sour note.
John:
Sorry about that.
John:
Any discussion of technology and politics is going to be sad.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
Oh, it's so painful.
Marco:
You want to talk about the iPad Pro at all?
Marco:
It's the after show.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
Save that for another show because I think it's worth being an actual topic.
Marco:
Well, unfortunately, the prompt kind of beat us to it, and they did a better job of it.
Marco:
Did you hear Federico Vertici's discussion about this?
Marco:
I think it was just Mike that week on the prompt, I think last week or two weeks ago.
Casey:
I think it was last week.
John:
I'm still in the middle of the giant iPhone keynote episode.
John:
That's good.
John:
I'm kind of mad that we didn't think of doing that.
Casey:
Oh, I know.
Casey:
Me too.
Casey:
It's so good.
John:
I don't think I'd want to record that episode, but I'll listen to it.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Well, that's one of those things.
Marco:
When they put that out there, I saw that in my list, and I was skeptical.
Marco:
I was like, man, I've got to listen to a two-hour-plus podcast.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
I heard the iPhone keynote.
Marco:
I watched it.
Marco:
I don't need to watch this or listen to this.
Marco:
And I listened to it, and it was so good.
Marco:
And when it ended, I was like, oh, that's it?
Marco:
Like, that's when you know that you don't need to worry about cutting your show any shorter.
Marco:
Like, if people are going to listen to it and say, wow, that's, like, I'm kind of upset there's not more of that, even after, you know, two hours and ten minutes or whatever it was, that's really good.
Marco:
And they hit it out of the park with that.
Marco:
That was so good.
Casey:
Yeah, the show was really good in general, but God, that episode was so annoyingly good and I'm really jealous and I'm bitter it wasn't us.
Marco:
Well, because what was good about it was that they didn't just go through the Apple keynote and say, oh, here's what happened, then this happened.
Marco:
They gave really good context of what the situation was at that time and right before that time and why some of these things were so groundbreaking.
Marco:
And a lot of that stuff I had forgotten about.
Marco:
You know, like, why some of that stuff was so impressive.
Marco:
How, you know, how the room reacted to seeing, like, scrolling a table view for the first time by touch.
Marco:
Like, that was a big reaction.
Marco:
And, like, you think about it, why that was a big reaction because of what we had before the iPhone.
Marco:
And it was really good.
Marco:
It was...
Marco:
The context they provided was very, very good and made it extremely listenable and very interesting and very upsetting when it ended.
Marco:
Even if you've heard the iPhone keynote a million times before, it's still worth it.
John:
They need more old people on the show, though, because their history, a lot of them, their history of watching Apple had started around the time of the iPhone.
John:
That wasn't Apple's first keynote.
John:
They'd kind of been doing this whole keynote thing for a while since then.
John:
As always, I wanted an old person like me on the show to say, well, you know...
John:
Well, they introduced the iMac.
John:
It was on a pedestal.
John:
G4 Cube came up from the floor.
John:
Phil Scheller had to jump onto an airbag.
John:
That's real power.
John:
What other reference that none of you will get?
John:
All right, that's fine.
John:
I just started listening to Marco, an unprofessional, and realizing the depths of his pop culture lack of knowledge.
John:
Sorry.
John:
It's all right.
John:
I don't know what Casey's excuse is.
Casey:
Well, why does Marco have an excuse?
John:
You know, he's unique.
John:
Maybe you have proximity to Marco has prevented you from engaging in the culture of producing entertainment.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I just, I don't, I feel like I watch a crudload of TV, and apparently I don't watch any, or I just watch the wrong TV.
John:
Are you watching NCIS with the Senior Citizens?
Casey:
No, but I did watch CSI for a long time.
John:
Oh, well, you're getting close.
John:
I was close.
Casey:
Enhance.
Marco:
I'm zooming out.
Marco:
Rotate it around.
Marco:
Enhance again.
Marco:
Look, a license plate.
John:
If Casey was born 20 years early, he'd be watching Matlock.
Casey:
You're such a jerk, but you're probably right.
Marco:
Going back a sec, so the reason I brought up the prompt on the iPad Pro, they had a good discussion last week where Federico Vitici brought up the really good point because he's like the iPad Pro.
Marco:
He is the iPad Pro user.
Marco:
He might be the only one.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe him and Dr. Drang.
Marco:
No, I don't think he even used the one.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
The rumors are that Apple is going to make a larger iPad, maybe 12.9 inches-ish, and that this will be a, quote, iPad Pro of some sort.
Marco:
And the rumors are all really confused and inconsistent as to whether this is going to...
Marco:
also be a convertible MacBook Air with a keyboard, an optional keyboard, one that would fold back like a convertible tablet, or whether it would even run OS X or iOS, whether it will have an Intel or an ARM processor, whether it has an ARM processor that runs OS X, who knows.
Marco:
And so the problem with all these rumors is that, and maybe the OS thing is more interesting, but the problem is that the size of the iPad,
Marco:
is not really what what's holding it back for most types of quote pro uses whatever that means with that's a whole discussion of what that even might mean the size is not holding it back there are uses of the ipad where people want a bigger size like i had asked on twitter a couple of weeks ago when this rumor first came out like you know what what would a bigger ipad even solve
Marco:
Who is really asking for that?
Marco:
And the most common responses were either, nobody, I like my mini.
Marco:
Or it was, of course, a bunch of geeks follow me.
Marco:
So it was that mostly.
Marco:
But it was also a lot of people who do music production in particular said they would love a lot more screen space.
Marco:
And there's a few other verticals like this where more screen space would be nice.
Marco:
on the iPad and would be worth the extra size.
Marco:
But for the most part, I certainly don't think it's mass market.
Marco:
And the problem is that the size of the screen is not holding back pro usage.
Marco:
What's holding back pro usage, and this is what they were talking about on the prompt, is iOS.
Marco:
And the structure and the restrictions of iOS.
Marco:
And this is not an easy problem to solve.
Marco:
The multitasking system is really extremely rudimentary in iOS and very limited.
Marco:
Document models and file storage and sharing data between applications, all of that stuff is extremely primitive on iOS and it's just so limited.
Marco:
That's really most of the problem.
Marco:
And if you're going to make a, quote, pro iOS device, iOS itself needs major changes, and that's not going to happen quickly or easily.
Marco:
And many of those changes would actually make iOS worse at its core functions.
Marco:
And so they probably aren't, like, I'm guessing that this kind of pro iOS is probably not really happening.
Marco:
And I think the iPad Pro, the pro super compact Mac, is the MacBook Air.
Marco:
or a super compact apple device i think it's the macbook air i think and we ranted about this before which i got some flack for but but actually in the prompt it's funny on the prompt federico was arguing with with a point that i didn't make and he he clarified that at the very beginning but most listeners i think missed that and so they were telling me oh he was he was ripping you apart of the problem he actually wasn't we actually agree with most of what i said i think but uh anyway
Marco:
If you're hitting these massive barriers with the iPad and having to jump through all these different hoops of bouncing between 10 different apps and these weird URL schemes that are kind of hacked together and trying to share data and weird methods because you can't share it directly, if you're jumping through all these hoops and doing all these weird hacks –
Marco:
Maybe a Mac is really the better solution for you.
Marco:
And for pro work, if what you want to do does not fit comfortably in an iPad, an 11-inch MacBook Air is really not that much bigger.
Marco:
And it's not that much more money than a reasonably well-equipped iPad.
Marco:
And it will last longer, probably.
Marco:
It's just...
Marco:
I think the border is if you are needing to use a keyboard on the iPad frequently, if you're buying a hardware keyboard and using it frequently, you're probably going to be better served by a Mac.
John:
See, I wanted to save this for a regular show, but no.
Marco:
Our topic list is so long.
Marco:
I knew this would be quick.
Marco:
I figured I'd burn it.
John:
I mean, I actually have a quick thing to say about it, because I think I'll Simpsons did it again and say that I'm pretty sure I'm the first person who I recall.
John:
Like, I didn't hear anyone else say iPad Pro when I talked about it on a hypercritical episode years ago.
John:
I don't remember how it came up, but I mentioned that I'm very interested in a larger, more powerful iPad.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know i don't remember if i said ipad pro i probably did because that's the obvious name for it years and years ago you know basically as soon as the first ipad came out it way well before there was a mini i wanted a bigger more powerful ipad you know an ipad pro and i said that's not going to happen anytime soon but you know and marco's question on twitter reminded me of this because he was like who the hell's asking for a bigger ipad because marco's old now and he'd forgotten or not listened to that episode of hypercritical where i'd ask for it i'm asking for a bigger ipad pro
John:
And the reason I'm at, and I'm also not a mini user, but anyway, the reason I keep thinking about an iPad pro and the reason I was thinking of an iPad pro all those years ago and continue to, it's very simple.
John:
And it has nothing to do with these rumors, which as many people point out, could just be, you know, the new 12 inch MacBook air form factor or whatever.
John:
You can't, I love screen size rumors.
John:
Like,
John:
So Apple is ordering screens of X size, therefore, and then every product they could possibly fit that screen in it.
John:
It's the new Retina Mac Pro.
John:
They're going to put seven of those screens together.
John:
Anyway, ignoring that, why do we care about an iPad Pro?
John:
Why do I think this iPad Pro is a thing?
John:
And it's very, very simple.
John:
ios is a better user experience than the mac for most people i think everyone would agree on that which probably means that ios or something like ios is the future of computing and if ios is the future of computing or something like it that means that anything we can do on our mac today we'll want to do on something that's more like ios in the future and that will mean that ios devices need to get bigger and more powerful yes the hardware yes also the software it's just simple logical progression
John:
You're going to want to do more stuff with iOS devices because iOS is the future.
John:
iOS devices are going to have to get both bigger and smaller, probably not much smaller than they are now.
John:
They're going to have to get bigger and more powerful someday.
John:
It's not all probably, but some of the things we do on our Mac that we can't do on iPads today, we will have to be able to do on iPads because they're the future.
John:
So they're going to have to get bigger.
John:
They're going to have to get more powerful.
John:
And yes, they're going to have to get more capable.
John:
And that's it.
John:
That's the calculus.
John:
You don't have to say they're going to come out now or this year or next year.
John:
They can't come out until software changes.
John:
Of course, all that is true.
John:
But all the things that iOS gets rid of that we don't like anymore, they're not coming back.
John:
There's not going to be a new device that comes out that's more complicated than the Mac.
John:
Like, it's going... It's the other direction, right?
John:
Now, the iOS is going to have to get more capable and hopefully not get as complicated as the Mac.
John:
Like, it's the whole continuum of iOS and Mac on the other.
John:
Where do they meet in the middle?
John:
What happens?
John:
But that form factor, a tablet form factor, is going to become more capable.
John:
You're going to be able to do more stuff with it.
John:
So they have to have a bigger, more powerful one someday.
John:
I don't know when that day is, but I continue to wait for it.
John:
Because as soon as you see iOS, as soon as you see a tablet OS, you're like, well, I can barely do anything on this thing now.
John:
But...
John:
i can imagine a future where i can do way more with this thing and that way more is going to require a bigger screen and more power and so that's that's that's my simple explanation for the ipad pro because it has to it has to assume some of the mantle of the mac eventually it will assume some of the mantle of the mac eventually or it will just go away and be replaced by something different but it has to uh you know tablet form factor has to do that and so it's going to get bigger
Casey:
Yeah, but that doesn't – nothing you just said implies a difference.
Casey:
So when I hear iPad Pro, what that indicates to me is that there's going to be a clear delineation between iPad regular and iPad Pro, be that much larger screen size, which to me is a weak line, a dashed line, if you will, or a much better processor, much more RAM, or a much bigger – It's got to have a bigger screen size though.
Casey:
But, see, I don't see why.
John:
Because one of the things that a Mac can do that iOS devices can't do is a bunch of stuff at once.
John:
And a bunch of stuff at once means the thing you're doing probably can't take up the entire screen.
John:
And if you're going to divide the screen up in any possible way, you need more screen.
John:
That's it.
Casey:
But some of the beauty of iOS is not being able to do more than one thing at once.
John:
True.
John:
All true.
John:
I'm not saying that's going to go away.
John:
I'm saying, well, you wouldn't want to divvy up.
John:
Imagine divvying up an iPhone screen.
John:
Now you can have two iPhone apps side by side.
John:
No, it's too small, right?
John:
And even a full-size current iPad screen, I don't think you want to divvy that up.
John:
But if you're going to be using a tablet device to do development, like the new version of Xcode in 2027 only runs on iOS, right?
John:
You're going to want to see more than one thing at once.
John:
And you need more screen space to do that.
John:
It's the same reason we all have multiple windows on our Macs.
John:
Now, it's not going to be a multi-window interface.
John:
Like, that's too complicated, right?
John:
But it's a continuum.
John:
And if you want to do more stuff with iOS, you need to see more things at once.
John:
And it's not a smart idea to take existing screen sizes and chop them up.
John:
So I think it's inevitable that at a certain point you need more screen space to do.
John:
Otherwise, it was saying Mac's going to be around forever.
John:
And there's nothing you can do on a Mac today that you can't do on iOS that's ever going to jump ship to like, well, previously you couldn't do that on iOS, but now you can.
John:
And previously you needed a Mac to do that, but now you can actually get away with it on iOS.
John:
We've already seen that happen in small degrees.
John:
Eventually, we're going to reach a point where you say, well, the only way we could ever do that on iOS is we need to be able to see more than one thing at once.
John:
And we can't do that on existing screen sizes, so we need a bigger screen.
John:
And a new OS and a new paradigm for how we're doing that, whether it's the Windows 8 way with Divi in half.
John:
They've got to come up with some of that because the need to do more than one thing at once and see more than one thing at once is not going away.
Marco:
Well, but we've had, throughout computing history, we've always had specialty devices that could do less that still had a place in the market, but they never took over.
Marco:
So things like game consoles are probably the best example of this, where no one was ever saying, eventually game consoles are going to be so good, they're going to replace computers.
John:
No, no, no, you're forgetting the GUI again.
John:
It could do less than the command line, but it took over.
Marco:
The problem I see with trying to make tablets replace computers, the biggest problem by far, is the same thing I was saying on my blog, which was horrible in 2009.
Marco:
There were all these rumors that Apple was going to make a tablet, and I wrote a few articles that were... The gist of it was...
Marco:
Apple's going to have to solve the input problem because the biggest problem with tablets and the reason they've never taken off before is because of input.
Marco:
And because, you know, you have this weird thing where like, you know, it's trying to do computer tasks, but...
Marco:
keyboards for tablets have always sucked, unless they've been full-on laptops that do the convertible thing, in which case they're big and kind of crappy tablets.
Marco:
And so, what are they going to do to solve this?
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
In fact, they didn't solve it.
Marco:
They just punted.
Marco:
They basically said, you know what?
Marco:
We're just going to keep the on-screen keyboard that we had on the iPhone, and it's going to work okay.
Marco:
And they did, and it does.
Marco:
It works okay.
Marco:
It doesn't work amazingly.
Marco:
It's very limited.
Marco:
And there's a lot of things that people are demanding real keyboards for for very good reason, because real keyboards work way better.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
They didn't solve that problem with the iPad.
Marco:
That doesn't mean they ever will.
Marco:
It doesn't mean that... I think multitasking on a full computer kind of requires good, advanced, fast input.
Marco:
And so you not only have to solve the keyboard problem of... Who's to say an iPad Pro wouldn't have a keyboard?
Marco:
Okay, so maybe it will.
Marco:
The bigger problem is...
Marco:
What do you do with the mouse?
Marco:
Because iOS doesn't... And there was a good discussion on the talk show this week about this, too.
Marco:
iOS is not built for a mouse cursor.
Marco:
A mouse cursor doesn't really... I mean, you can do it in the simulator, but it kind of sucks, and it's very clearly not made for that.
Marco:
The experience of using a hardware keyboard with an iPad and having to keep reaching up to the screen with your finger to touch things is really terrible.
John:
and so like there's there's these major major problems with ios that they would have to solve that well i mean it's a problem only in the sense of trying to make it replace computers well they're not trying to replace computers they're just trying to take take some of the functionality that currently requires computer and allow it to be done on the ipad that's like that's the history of ios and the ipad things that previously required a computer are now feasible on ios devices
Marco:
Well, yeah, but that's always been the case with iOS.
Marco:
It's always been expanding its reach a little bit, but there are these major barriers that it doesn't really easily cross because of things like input and multitasking.
John:
It's going to be difficult, yeah.
John:
I mean, the multitasking problem is not technically difficult, but UI-wise.
John:
But I think it has to happen because the alternative is relegating the human race to have to use...
John:
windowed personal computers of the type that we know now forever and they're just too complicated for regular people to use like they're just that the windowed interface with file system access and folders and like we all love it we all think it's great it will always exist for expert users but humanity has voted and they want things that they can touch that are not as complicated
John:
And so we are tasked with, you know, we have to find a way to make more things possible with these things that people actually want to use that are harder to screw up.
John:
Like that's just progress.
John:
I can make it so it's not so complicated.
John:
So there's not so much to know.
John:
So it's harder to break.
John:
So it's more reliable.
John:
Like we've done that with iOS.
John:
We've done it by shedding almost everything that's.
John:
you know that you can do with the personal computer but we'll say how much of that can we get back without compromising the complexity and if we screw it up and bring too much of the computer stuff over to ios then maybe we'll need another reboot and let's try this again and start over with a different paradigm sometime in the future but i think this is this is what's going to happen is this is our opportunity is to take
John:
to make ios more capable does it include putting a keyboard on it maybe it does maybe it doesn't maybe you know what can you do without a keyboard or do we need a mouse or do we not need a mouse we don't like to reach up for the thing like do we want to have it on our lap do you want to have a better virtual keyboard like i don't know what the solutions are to these things but like baby baby steps would just be you know windows 8 is already doing it with like if you've got a big enough screen
John:
Sometimes you want to see a Twitter app on the side while you're working in another app.
John:
Or sometimes you want to copy and paste from one app to the other without doing a switch type thing.
John:
Like the larger screen being able to see more than thing at once is a small step in that direction.
John:
And if done well, can open up lots of functionality that I haven't listened to this episode of the podcast you're talking about.
John:
But it can open up a lot of functionality.
John:
I assume they're complaining about it.
John:
It's like, look, I just want to do a simple workflow where I've got like a graphic editor and some links in a web page and I'm writing text like, you know, just blogging.
John:
How much easier it is blogging on a Mac because you have all those things kind of in play at once versus trying to do an iOS and you feel like you're constantly switching stuff.
John:
That is a surmountable barrier with some clever software and a larger screen.
John:
Ignoring the keyboard input and just keeping with our fingers, just being able to do a simple blog post synthesizing from some graphics and text and links and stuff.
John:
I think that's our next step.
Casey:
See, I don't think that's the next step.
Casey:
I feel like the next step is – and I know everyone's been beating this to death – but just better inter-app communication.
Casey:
Because if you look at what Vatici is doing with xCallbackURL and URL schemes and chaining just ridiculous things together –
Casey:
I feel like if that was less user hostile, and it will probably always be a power user sort of thing to do, but just a less user hostile way of doing things.
Casey:
Like whatever Android does or like Windows phones, contracts, whatever they're called.
Casey:
That's not the right word for it.
Casey:
I forget what it is now.
Marco:
It's intense on Android, I think, and contracts on Windows 8, right?
Casey:
Oh, it is it?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I think you're right now that you say that.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Marco:
I would love that on iOS.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
And it would be so much nicer.
Casey:
But it would enable us to do a lot of things.
Casey:
Like if you're doing a blog post, yes, it would be in a perfect world nice to look at something that you're commenting or writing a post about on the left-hand side of a landscape screen and your editor window on the right.
Casey:
But to be honest, using your four fingers on an iPad to shimmy back and forth between apps and do the fast app switching, that's
Casey:
And I'd almost rather have the hurdle of swapping between apps to see something that I'm commenting on and then comment on it.
Casey:
I'd rather do that than have some crazy scheme of having, I don't know, two iPhone apps side by side or something where the screen is split in half.
Casey:
It seems to me like that would be not fun.
John:
Well, we're talking
John:
Think of it this way.
John:
Remember people who first got like 24-inch monitors or 21-inch monitors?
John:
The monitors, they were way bigger than they previously had.
John:
It was like, you know, you'd have a 14-inch and all of a sudden you got a 21-inch.
John:
And you'd see the Windows users with their new 21-inch monitor and be like, this is awesome.
John:
I have a gigantic monitor.
John:
And then they would take their notepad window and zoom it to full screen.
John:
and it would fill their entire screen it would be like their text would be in a little column on the upper left and the whole best of it would be an expansive white and it's like i think you're missing the advantage of having a larger monitor it's not so you can take all your existing windows and make them huge because i mean people would eventually learn if it was wrapping wasn't on that trying to read a line of text that's two feet wide is not comfortable like there's a comfortable width for a column of text so you can your eyes you know and then once you've made it narrow what are you going to do with oh you can put something else in that space like
John:
And that's why I'm getting back to iPad Pro.
John:
Not that it's what everyone's going to use instead of a PC or not that everyone who has an iPad is going to get one.
John:
Just that there will exist this... It's kind of like the Mac Pro of the iPad line.
John:
There will exist a tablet-type device for artists, for graphic designers, maybe even for coders.
John:
If, like, you put a keyboard in front of it and Xcode, like, instead... Imagine an architect's drafting table with a keyboard in front of it where it's all flat and you're not reaching up at a screen or whatever.
John:
Like, there are...
John:
endeavors that you might be able to do where you're like this is less complicated than a mac and i can get all the same things done and once you get a larger screen like that you're gonna be like well you know all the plumbing's there i could do this with the four finger swipe or whatever but i've got this gigantic screen that's like 19 20 inches uh and it's a beautiful touch screen i can do these amazing things with it and everything but sometimes i just want to see more than one thing on it so they have to come up with some solution to that and the solution can't be a bunch of windows because that sucks and we're just making the same stuff come back that we had before so i don't know what the solution is but
John:
I think that's inevitable if we ever want to leave behind the crappy things that computers make us endure now, but still get some of those advantages in some realms.
John:
And we'll still be all the single-screen phones, and we'll still be the regular-sized iPads that normal people use.
John:
I'm just thinking of... This is the reason the Pro is in the name.
John:
The iPad Pro used by...
John:
3d you know modelers graphic designers people doing page layout if pages still exist anywhere maybe people people doing web development maybe even people working in xcode doing ios devices hell maybe you could have one of the other windows could be your simulator while you do real-time uh updates in xcode and it can recompile your stuff in real time and you watch the the changes take effect in real time on the other thing it's like you had a dynamic programming language but not really
Casey:
And that would be very cool.
Casey:
But doesn't the move for OS X to be more iOS-like, most specifically around full-screen Windows, and how that support has gotten a lot better in Mavericks, and it's actually kind of usable now, that makes me feel like...
Casey:
Some sort of windowing system isn't the right answer.
Casey:
And I know I'm harping on something that I really shouldn't harp on, but I just don't see how any sort of windowing is really the right answer.
Casey:
I think it's something else.
John:
It can't be that kind of window system.
John:
And with OS X, again, OS X is trying to become more iOS-like and iOS is trying to do more things that –
John:
previously only OS 10 could do.
John:
And I don't know who will lurch more in which direction and how and how that will go will one like get I think my impression is that it's harder to make Mac OS 10 simpler or OS 10 simpler than it is to make iOS more capable.
John:
So I would imagine that's why I think the future is making iOS more capable and not
John:
We can simplify OS 10 until it's just as simple as iOS.
John:
You'll never do it, nor should you ever.
John:
It would just be a disaster.
John:
Better to start with what you... They were so smart to start really simple on iOS and just don't screw it up.
John:
And it's probably not going to be Windows.
John:
Like, full-screen mode on OS 10 is a great example because, like, now we've made it simpler.
John:
No, you've actually just made it more complicated because you left all the existing ones because you can't get rid of the existing windowing system, nor should you.
John:
But now you have another mode to go into.
John:
And on iOS, they have the opportunity...
John:
to do something better.
John:
And I'm not sure what it is or how it'll work, but it can't be like OS X Windows.
Marco:
So it seems like the kind of jobs forestall dynasty was pushing for this, for the Mac to become more iOS-like, for iOS to get better.
Marco:
But for the most part...
Marco:
that era of Apple was pulling the Mac towards iOS.
Marco:
And it seems like now in the Tim Cook era and the restructuring of the divisions, it seems like Apple has become more confident in keeping the Mac the Mac and not trying to make the Mac iOS.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And John, you've kind of been on this too.
Marco:
All of this talk about these two merging eventually has this built-in assumption that that would be a good idea and that that's inevitable.
Marco:
And I would question both of those things.
Marco:
I would say that...
Marco:
We saw what happened when Apple tried to make the Mac more iOS-like.
Marco:
It kind of sucked.
Marco:
And everything you're talking about, about what iOS would need to become more pro, in a lot of ways that would make iOS worse.
John:
Well, I mean, it's like I said in the Mavericks review, it's picking the right things.
John:
What the forestall jobs thing was like, they were picking the wrong things to make the Mac iOS.
John:
They picked some of the right things, but the right things they did pick, we like.
John:
For example, the App Store is a better way to deal with ignoring the policy stuff, just in terms of the mechanics of installing applications.
John:
It's better the App Store way than it used to be, where you go to a web page, download a DMG, mount, blah, blah, blah.
John:
That's a simplification that came from iOS.
John:
It doesn't necessarily have to look like iOS or work the same way.
John:
The finder doesn't need to be replaced with, you know, launchpad with little shaky icons, and XSL did that too.
John:
But the key feature is...
John:
Dealing with installing applications is a pain in the butt.
John:
It's not a pain in the butt on iOS.
John:
Can we bring that simplicity to the Mac?
John:
And they did, and they brought a bunch of other crappy baggage with it.
John:
It's just about picking the right thing.
John:
So if you're going to do it the other direction and say, we want to make iOS more capable, don't pick the crappy things that just make it as complicated and evil as the Mac.
John:
You've got to find the right things.
John:
It's not like you're bringing a feature over.
John:
You're bringing a capability.
John:
Can I instruct someone over the phone on how to purchase and install an application on a Mac?
John:
Previously, you couldn't.
John:
Now you can.
John:
right good job uninstall not great right you know but like it's just a tiny little bit like it's why i keep talking about filing off the rush rough edges of os 10 all the parts of it that are like complicated in ways that normal people shouldn't have to care about need to go away and you got to just do that part and not try to be like and we need to make this application look like an address book because it looks like that in ios and it's like no that's not that's not the important part
John:
of you know the important part is like seamless data sinking through the cloud and blah blah blah and they kind of screw that up right but it's it's difficult it's not saying it's an easy job but that's what they have to do pick the right things the right capabilities to bring over some of them can't be carried over some of them shouldn't be carried over and some of them have to be done in a different way on the target platform
Marco:
See, I would disagree that it's even possible to make a good combination.
Marco:
The problems that these two very different platforms solve, I think there's insurmountable differences in attempting to merge them.
Marco:
I mean, look at Windows 8.
John:
You're not going to get one.
John:
I don't think anyone's arguing that both of these will go away and they'll be replaced by one thing.
John:
That's not going to happen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you did replace it by one thing, it would have to be one thing that has so many different modes that it access to different things.
John:
Like what's the point of you having it?
John:
You'd have Windows 8.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
You could just right now make up a new brand name and apply it to both OS X and iOS and say, hey, we're unified.
John:
It's one operating system.
John:
Just the way you install it on your Mac, it looks different and behaves totally different.
John:
You're right.
John:
It's exactly like Windows 8 where there's the desktop version and then this Metro thing over here.
John:
And that's not useful to anybody.
Marco:
I think if both platforms maintain their confidence and they're both okay being themselves, I think everyone's better off.
Marco:
The platforms, Apple, the customers, regular people, nerds, power users, I think everyone's better off because I don't think trying to merge these two platforms together is possible to do well.
John:
Yeah, but I think it's the thing that they're doing now of making the Mac simpler and making iOS more capable is the right thing to do carefully, cautiously, in the right ways.
John:
They've already had false starts.
John:
Sometimes they tried to make the Mac simpler in ways that were not appropriate.
John:
I mean, and the jury's still out on a lot of them, like autosave and stuff.
John:
kind of the right idea kind of not the best implementation but like in general i i agree with their that motivation and with ios adding multitasking like thumbs up right the multitasking switcher was not great it's a little bit better in ios 7 right like they're doing it in little bits and with and with some dead ends and and you know like copy and paste was a good addition right let's make ios more capable kind of you know you did that right but that was something you needed like baby steps
John:
sometimes dead ends retreat, figure out what you did wrong, try again.
John:
And you know, the big reset with iOS seven is another opportunity.
John:
And I fully expect if, and when they come out with something like an iPad pro and try to enhance iOS to make it a worthwhile product, they'll screw up something about it.
John:
They'll make it more complicated than it should be.
John:
They'll have to, you know, I mean like the multitasking switcher, it's like, that wasn't a great multitasking switcher.
John:
And it's gone now.
John:
And I don't think many people miss it.
John:
But the idea that you would want to switch applications and that some of them could be running like or background apps like that concept was good.
John:
They just had to figure out the right time to do it, the best way to do it.
John:
Maybe the current implementation is not great, but like they're going in the right direction in small pieces.
John:
And that's I look I look down the line at that.
John:
And you're right.
John:
I never see one OS going on everything because it doesn't make any sense.
John:
It would have to be such an incredibly capable OS to scale from a phone up to a PC.
John:
It doesn't make any sense probably in our lifetime.
John:
But these two products should evolve to adopt each other's benefits to the degree that it's possible and appropriate.
Casey:
Are we actually done now?
John:
Marco wanted to put this topic in this show.
Casey:
It's all Marco's fault.
Casey:
God, he's so mean to us.
John:
You just wait until I talk about AV receivers.
John:
How about soccer methodologies?
John:
When are we doing that?
Casey:
Let's start now.
John:
Why not?
John:
Did you guys Google the fireworks factory?
John:
No, you probably didn't.
Casey:
What the hell are you talking about?
Casey:
Oh, never mind.
Casey:
Are you making another Simpsons reference?
John:
Yes.
John:
Not all my pop culture references are from the Simpsons.
Casey:
But 90% of them are.
Casey:
All right, can we do titles?
Casey:
I'm half tempted to start software methodologies, kind of to troll myself into staying up late.
Marco:
I do really like Romeo and Syracuse yet.
Casey:
What the hell was that?
Casey:
Where was I when that happened?
John:
No one said that.
John:
That's just someone making up a title.
Casey:
That's a hell of a compliment, the Accidental Hypercritical Podcast.
Casey:
It's a terrible title, but a great compliment.
John:
This was not an Accidental Hypercritical Podcast.
John:
It was no accident.
John:
This was no boating accident.
John:
Did you get that one?
John:
Nope.
Jesus.
John:
Chat room, do you see what I'm dealing with here?
John:
I need something to commiserate.
Casey:
How many times have you said that?
John:
It just boggles my mind.
Marco:
It boggles my mind.
Marco:
This should totally be part of their drinking game.
Marco:
This should be on everyone's bingo boards.
John:
Do you see what I'm dealing with?
John:
When I get mad and become crazy because you guys don't know the most... I'm not that much older than you, but you have no excuse.
John:
There's no excuse!
John:
oh john trolling you might be my favorite thing in the world i mean i love you if you start trolling me it would work because like your your actual your actual lack of knowledge about pop culture it's it's like impossible to parody that time that time i had actually seen that movie but i lied just to annoy you it's like well it's no worse than the ones you haven't legitimately seen so it's not even it's not even effective trolling
John:
oh god it's so true it's like is there a movie you can pretend to not have seen that is more that that is more implausible than the movies you've actually not seen forrest gump no that's not that impressive no one likes forrest gump yeah speaking of the professionals listening to marco he was saying that he had seen the star wars he was like marco has seen star wars i was so proud of you uh yeah of course although i have not seen any harry potters any lord of the rings um
Casey:
You're not missing anything on Lord of the Rings.
Casey:
I'll tell you that right now.
Marco:
No Star Treks.
Marco:
I was never a Star Trek guy.
Casey:
Zero Star Treks?
Marco:
Ever?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I've seen bits and pieces of the TV show here and there, but never sat down and really watched it.
Casey:
See, I was a religious Next Generation fan.
Casey:
Next Generation, excuse me.
Casey:
I'm already making myself sound terrible.
Casey:
You're already trolling?
Casey:
I'm trolling myself.
Casey:
And Jon.
Casey:
And then I watched all of the movies up through like the second or third Next Generation one.
Casey:
I forget which one it was.
Casey:
That was the last one.
Casey:
But I know enough to know that the evens are the goods and the odds are no good.
John:
Debatable.
John:
You should watch the J.J.
John:
Abrams Star Trek movies.
John:
They're fun.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I have seen the new ones.
Casey:
Those are very good.
Casey:
I was talking about like the writer.
Casey:
It was star Trek generations.
Casey:
I think it was the last one I saw.
Casey:
And then there were like four that were the next generation cast staff, whatever you want to call them.
Casey:
And I missed those last four or whatever it was.
John:
You're not missing too much.
Casey:
No, I didn't think so.
John:
You watch the TV series next gen.
John:
So you can imagine that crew is not really cut out for action movies.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I mean, I love the show, don't get me wrong, but you're right.
Casey:
They're not cut out for action movies.
John:
We need some titles here.
John:
Sorry, yes.
Marco:
So I'm going through the podcast by Lex and Dan Morin called Not Playing, where they go through movies that everyone has seen that Lex and Dan Morin have not seen, and they watch them for the first time and record a commentary track.
John:
Well, they did Mannequin.
John:
I don't think that's a movie everyone has seen.
Marco:
Yeah, I haven't seen... Okay, I'm looking through here...
Marco:
All right, so Beverly Hills Cop, I've never seen that.
John:
Oh, so good.
Marco:
Die Hard 1, I don't think I've seen that either.
John:
So good.
Marco:
I've seen some of the recent ones.
Marco:
UHF, I did see UHF once.
Marco:
Hey, you're going to drink from the fire hose.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I hated it, but I did see it.
Marco:
Field of Dreams, I'm pretty sure I have not seen.
Marco:
I might have seen bits and pieces on TV here and there, but I haven't seen the whole thing, I don't think.
Marco:
I've never seen it.
Marco:
Mannequin, definitely not.
Casey:
I think I saw that when I was a kid and had inappropriate feelings about it, if memory serves.
Marco:
So did Lex.
Marco:
And Lethal Weapon, definitely not.
Casey:
Lethal Weapon, I've seen.
Casey:
I've seen all the Lethal Weapons, all the Beverly Hills Cops.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
Field of Dreams, never seen.
Casey:
UHF, I don't think I've ever seen.
Casey:
Of course, I've seen Die Hard.
Casey:
I mean, come on.
Casey:
I'm not an animal.
Casey:
And that's it, I guess.
John:
titles people god titles this is how this is how john's trolling you constantly taking us off the titles track i didn't think you're the one looking through not playing i haven't listened to that though i only listen to the capsule ones i don't do the commentary ones uh i don't see any amazing titles so whatever
John:
i i'm a big fan of romeo in syracuse yet although i have to spell romeo correctly which that's not the way the tivo's people spelled it yeah i had to look it up when i tweeted about it because i had made a guess and i was wrong it's a stupid name that's not a word and it's nothing to do with roaming it sits onto your tv you're roaming you can roam all over your house on the internet like yeah stupid
Casey:
All right, can we go off air for just a minute before I pass out?
Marco:
Yeah, we'll keep not picking titles.
Marco:
All right, thanks.
Marco:
Thanks, live listeners.
Casey:
Bye, everybody.
Casey:
We're so good at this.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We're professionals.
Marco:
Good grief.