The Little Puck That Could
Marco:
I saw the Ashton Kutcher Jobs movie finally because it was free on Netflix.
Casey:
Ah, I did as well.
Casey:
And it was – actually, I – well, you go ahead.
Casey:
You go ahead.
Marco:
It sounded like you're about to give it a semi-decent review.
Marco:
I think –
Marco:
One of the most frustrating things about it is that even if you ignore some of the little inaccuracies in it, and it seemed overall to get the big stuff right, even if you ignore all that, it's not even a good movie because it takes like two hours to...
Marco:
And right towards the end in like the last like 15 minutes, they have this eight second montage that covers the entire time span from when he was fired from Apple to when Apple bought next.
Marco:
And so not only does this gloss over a pretty significant part of Steve Jobs' life and career, but it was also like, here's the big gloom and doom.
Marco:
Apple is failing.
Marco:
It shoved all of that into eight seconds, into a montage.
Marco:
So it appears chronologically, as you're watching the movie, it's like, here's Apple.
Marco:
Here's the big villain, Apple, firing Steve Jobs because they think they know better.
Marco:
And then eight seconds later, Apple's, you know, on the floor dying and they need him and they beg him to come back somehow and he somehow saves them.
Marco:
You know, like they, it's not even good storytelling because they just kind of like, oh, snap their fingers and oh, all of a sudden everything's fine again.
Casey:
It clearly was dumbed down, which is as you would expect.
Casey:
But given that everyone panned it and said it was like the worst thing committed to film ever, I didn't think it was nearly that bad.
Casey:
As someone who has a reasonable amount of Apple history in my head, I thought it was mildly enjoyable.
Casey:
And the one thing I will say that was extremely positive was I feel like Ashton Kutcher just nailed Jobs' walk.
Casey:
And I didn't even know that Jobs had a unique walk until I'm watching Ashton Kutcher play
Casey:
you know pace around the stage and whatnot and i don't know why but it just really reminded me of the one wwdc i saw where where jobs was there and he just has this weird like gate to him that i'd never noticed before yeah i mean i i give them credit i agree that the movie was not as bad as as as i thought it would be based on what people were saying about it but back when it came out but to be clear it was not good but it was not terrible
Marco:
It seemed like they worked so hard to get overall details right and then just blew some of the really easy ones that they could have gotten right with no additional cost or anything.
Marco:
They could have gotten these things right and they just didn't.
Marco:
Moreover, I was just kind of annoyed that it was...
Marco:
just weird, so weirdly paced.
Marco:
And that, you know, they, if they wanted to tell the story in detail, they could have, you know, glossed over certain parts a little bit faster or, you know, added 10 minutes to the movie to, you know, to get it, to get a little more detail into the story as to how these things happened.
Marco:
You know, that whole middle era, you know, maybe do a 45 second montage instead of an eight second montage.
Marco:
Like, it's just something like...
Marco:
It just seemed like there was a lot of low-hanging fruit that they could have grabbed to make it a better movie, and for whatever reason, they didn't.
Casey:
Now, John, did you see this movie yet?
John:
No, nor do I plan to.
John:
We've just got the Sorkin one left to endure, and then we've got to be clear of this for a little while.
John:
This is true.
John:
And as KG Healy points out, Tom Bombadil isn't even in the Steamjobs movie, which is totally unacceptable.
Marco:
Who is that?
Marco:
I don't even know.
John:
We're just going to keep going.
John:
We've got to have one of those every show, guys.
John:
That may have been the one for this show.
John:
Good job.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So do we want to do any follow up?
Casey:
We do.
Casey:
We always do.
Casey:
We always do.
Casey:
John, would you like to do some follow up?
John:
Sure.
John:
First bit of follow up is from Mike the eye roller from last week's follow up.
John:
He sent an email with some clarification is a bit from the email.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
You mentioned the bar is set too high to know everything about gender issues or anything else you guys talk about that aren't core expertise.
John:
But that's exactly what I was trying to get at in my feedback.
John:
If too high is any sort of knowledge about gender issues beyond what is observable in our lives, then yes, I set the bar too high.
John:
I don't think any of the three of you would accept that in any sort of technical field.
John:
Women in the workplace is probably one of the most studied sociological topics of our generation.
John:
And one can learn about it on Wikipedia, just like they can learn about CPU design.
John:
I think we very much agree on this topic.
John:
I was just trying to point out that this doesn't need to be some sort of nebulous idea that can only be solved by talking through it.
John:
There's data supported answers out there.
John:
Basically, I thought his first email about the eye-rolling when we started to talk about this topic was that he thought we hadn't met whatever bar he was setting.
John:
It's like, oh boy, here these guys go, starting to talk about this thing they don't know anything about.
John:
I'm not going to speak for you two, but I've certainly passed the bar of having any sort of knowledge.
John:
I've read tons about this all over the place.
John:
blogs articles uh flame wars for years and years like i i have i feel like i have read a lot of those but that's all informal it's like you know just on the internet but i've definitely definitely crossed that bar if that's what he's setting it to um and as for like the uh
John:
The whole idea that we don't need to just talk about it as sort of this vague concept, like there's data out there and there's things you can learn and stuff like that.
John:
During the whole conversation of sexism in the past two shows, I've been intentionally avoiding vocabulary that I know that are sort of terms that are common within this topic right now for two reasons.
John:
One, for the people who are familiar with those terms, I didn't want to use them because using them sort of
John:
It slots into people's brains in certain areas.
John:
If I say certain words, they immediately think they know that we're on the same page.
John:
We may be talking about different things.
John:
So by entirely avoiding those words, I was forced to explain myself, you know, in sort of plain language or from first principles without relying on jargon that we may or may not agree on the meaning of.
John:
And two was if I use those words as shorthand jargon, then I'm not communicating with the people who don't know any of those words.
John:
So that was I had to stop myself many times from saying the words that all the people listening to the conversation probably expected to hear.
John:
And maybe some people heard that interpreted as these guys don't know what they're talking about.
John:
They don't even know the vocabulary.
John:
I definitely didn't know the vocabulary, but I was consciously avoiding it.
John:
I don't know if that was a good move or a bad move, but it's what I chose to do.
John:
And I think I think it's for the best because.
John:
In a topic like that, where there's less expectation that our listeners have the same background, like we can use terms about CPUs and Apple jargon and stuff, because presumably people know more about that.
John:
But this topic was far off a field that I wanted to just talk about it using, you know, just regular vocabulary to describe things.
Casey:
To be honest, I'm not even familiar with what vocabulary you were dodging, but I would hazard a guess that it is probably for the best that you did indeed force yourself to explain yourself the entire time.
John:
You do.
John:
You know a lot of people.
John:
I didn't say the word ally.
John:
I didn't use the word privilege.
John:
You know those.
John:
There's plenty of them.
John:
I'm not going to get into all sorts of even fancier terms, but when you say any of those things, people sort of click into whatever little slot they have in their brain for those terms, and then sometimes you can get out of whack, and I think it was better just to explain things.
John:
The second bit of follow-up is that after talking about Oculus and Facebook buyout, Michael Abrash, who we also mentioned on the past show, is now working for Oculus instead of Valve, which is kind of a bummer for Valve because they were working on VR stuff as well.
John:
But hey, what can you do?
John:
So now it's Carmack and Abrash back together again, trying to change the future.
John:
Of course, people get excited about that.
John:
It's like, oh, those guys, they did so much together earlier in their careers.
John:
Now it's like two old men doing it.
John:
And it's kind of like...
John:
Wouldn't you expect to see the next revolution run by two young men?
John:
Not that I'm begrudging the old men as being an old man myself.
John:
Like, you know, hey, we can still do stuff.
John:
We still have stuff in us.
John:
But it's kind of weird that, like, these people who brought us the revolution of 3D, first-person, you know, hardware-accelerated 3D games, are now trying to bring us the next revolution as well, instead of it being the next generation.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So I think it's a testament to these two guys.
John:
And it's a little bit weird.
John:
Like, you usually don't expect that.
John:
the most the the whole thing with like scientists and everything oh you've done all your best work by the time you're 20 or 30 you never have a second big breakthrough whatever the the cliche is i don't know if that's true in technical fields hope not steve jobs certainly had two very big acts in his life one very early and one much later so uh maybe this is the new normal
Marco:
I think it actually could be really nice to have people with a lot of experience and wisdom and who are real experts in their field, which these two guys by all measures are, to be tackling the VR prop because VR has been tried so many times in the past and it has failed so many times in the past.
Marco:
that they were around for all those failures in the 90s and beyond.
Marco:
They saw all of those things.
Marco:
They might have tried some of those things or started developing for some of those things, and they've seen all of these failed attempts.
Marco:
And so having that wisdom in people who are working on the new thing rather than just some 20-year-old who's going to recreate all those same mistakes over and over again like Unix and Lisp, that will benefit the effort, I think, tremendously.
Yeah.
John:
It's kind of like a lot of the guys responsible for C doing Go, like they have the experience.
John:
I think my favorite thing both about Go and about the Oculus stuff is that these guys, Aberration and Carmack, they're not like the CEOs or they're not building a team.
John:
carmack's in there writing code he's like he's doing the same thing i mean obviously on a slightly higher level but more or less doing the same thing he's writing code he hasn't like just traveled up that like now i'm big powerful and i run the company i'm a venture capitalist and i'm a master of the universe he's there at a keyboard typing code right uh and that's refreshing like and mike abrash is going to be doing like they're going to be writing code they're it's so refreshing to see that you don't have to like the only path is like yeah in the beginning you write code but then you move on
John:
And you do, you become like the CEO or the CTO.
John:
I mean, I think their titles probably are something like that, but I guarantee you John Cromack is going to be writing code.
John:
That's why he's a hero to so many programmers that, you know, even now as an old man, he's still getting it done.
Casey:
And then what else about Oculus and Kickstarter?
John:
One more bit of feedback from another person named Michael.
John:
Apparently we only get feedback from people named Mike or Michael now, which is fine, you know, if that's the way it's got to be.
John:
He says, when we were talking about the Oculus and Facebook, and he says, you guys almost exclusively characterized the outcry as being from jilted Kickstarter backers.
John:
Maybe I'm an edge case, but many of my friends who don't share my extreme privacy concerns were also not backers and were nevertheless saddened by the Facebook news as well.
John:
So what he's getting at is he didn't think we talked enough about people who don't care one way or the other by Kickstarter or backers or feeling like they've been betrayed, but just basically people who are creeped out by Facebook and are worried that now...
John:
I don't, I don't know what the, I guess they're worried about like Facebook ads being in their face or I'm not going to buy any product.
John:
That's associated in any way with Facebook was Facebook.
John:
Facebook is not careful with my personal information.
John:
I feel like they're invading my privacy.
John:
I mean, maybe Marco can address this since he's afraid that Google is constantly invading his privacy.
Marco:
Well, I mean, what is there really to address?
Marco:
I mean, Facebook now owns a company that has a lot of potential privacy invading stuff in the future.
Marco:
What else is new?
Marco:
I mean, the fact is, you know, it's going to get increasingly more difficult.
Marco:
It already is very difficult now to try to live a life online and use modern technology without having your stuff be in some giant creepy company's database.
Marco:
Um, that's just the reality of how we live.
Marco:
You know, you can, you can go as I previously referred to as the full Stallman route, which is, you know, increasingly like, Oh, I'm going to go live in the woods and be off the grid.
Marco:
Like there it's, it's becoming increasingly more disconnected from the rest of the world of technology.
Marco:
If you want to go that route.
Marco:
Um, and so, you know, if you want to try to avoid Facebook stuff, Google stuff, Apple stuff, you know, there's Amazon stuff.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
there's only so far you can run, really.
Marco:
My philosophy with these things has always just been, as I said on a previous show, just to keep a healthy distance.
Marco:
Not to be totally off these things, not to be totally invisible, not to try to conceal my identity from these companies, because that's mostly a waste of time.
Marco:
They probably know more than you think.
Marco:
Or they can infer what you don't tell them based on your other behavior.
Marco:
I think it's important for people to be...
Marco:
are healthily skeptical of these companies and critical of these companies and to point out things like hey you know what x or y is going to really give them a lot of information about you or they're going to use the information they have on you to do xyz and those are all kind of weird and creepy and maybe we don't want that that's fine but i think we have to admit and realize that's just the world we live in and that stuff's going to happen and we just have to keep tolerating it and making a stink where we can but it's we're not going to always win
John:
In the case of Oculus, though, it seems weird to me because just because Facebook does its main product that we all know about is not good with privacy and everything, it doesn't mean that that's the only way they know how to do anything.
John:
Any product they get, they're going to immediately suck into the Borg and make it show Facebook ads and play Facebook games and steal your personal information.
John:
And Oculus is so far removed from Facebook, the product, the website that you go to where you see pictures of your friends and stuff,
John:
that there's not even a line you can draw dotted or otherwise it says and therefore facebook wall and vr like they're obviously at least especially in the short term oculus is going to make a thing you put on your face to play first person games and i can't imagine it having any connection for years to anything having to do with getting any personal information
John:
to any degree greater than say what steam does now or anything else like it just it doesn't seem connected and so like to immediately say facebook bought and therefore i'm never gonna have anything to do with oculus that seems way premature to be like sure don't use it if they're doing something you don't like or if they could potentially be doing something you don't like and you're not sure but
John:
It just seems like they're not connected at this point.
John:
Like, I mean, I don't use Facebook.
John:
I'm not I have a Facebook account, but I don't use it for anything.
John:
And I'm just not into it.
John:
But it doesn't mean that I automatically assume that every company Facebook acquires will suddenly be pulled into exactly the same sort of privacy destroying vortex that their main their flagship product is.
Marco:
Got a new sponsor this week.
Marco:
It's called 2 Checkout.
Marco:
Number two and the word checkout with no spaces in the middle and the C is capitalized.
Marco:
I don't know how many of those things are important, but just know it's the number two followed by the word checkout.
Marco:
2 Checkout is one of the largest global brands in online payments.
Marco:
For example, they compete with the likes of PayPal, Braintree, and Stripe.
Marco:
You probably heard of all of them.
Marco:
2Checkout simplifies selling across the globe with a localized checkout experience.
Marco:
They really focus on this worldwide thing, so they adapt to local languages, currencies, and payment methods, specializing in 15 languages and cultures and available in 196 countries.
Marco:
Over 100 of the most relevant shopping carts and many of the largest e-commerce platforms have chosen to integrate with 2Checkout, even some that advertise here.
Marco:
2Checkout has launched a new payment API that allows you to control the checkout experience.
Marco:
You can put your brand all over it if you want to.
Marco:
With one integration, just integrate with 2Checkout, and by doing that, you will get, accepting 26 currencies, you'll get top payment methods, you'll get a state-of-the-art fraud system with over 300 heuristics that they've come up with in the industry, and new ones added frequently.
Marco:
and enhanced recurring billing features.
Marco:
So if you want to have a subscription priced good or service, they have nice recurring billing features.
Marco:
Now, all of this is available through their payment API.
Marco:
API libraries are available in PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Java, Node, and even simple REST requests that you can try out with curl on the command line.
Marco:
visit to checkout.com slash Casey.
Marco:
Now this, you guys, you got to see this page.
Marco:
Seriously.
Casey:
Just don't, don't take it any further.
Casey:
It is an exercise for the listeners.
Casey:
It is hysterical.
Casey:
You should really check it out.
Casey:
It'll be worth your 30 seconds to look at this page and look at the animation.
Marco:
Yeah, so go to to the number two and the word checkout to checkout.com slash Casey to sign up for a free developer sandbox account and see for yourself how great this is.
Marco:
Once again, to checkout.com slash Casey.
Marco:
Thank you very much.
John:
Boy, I wish these services existed when I was running e-commerce sites.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We had modems that would dial the credit card companies over phone lines, and we had to have multiple ones.
John:
If you think wrangling, like you're talking about VPSs and stuff in your blog post, Margo, imagine wrangling analog modems in a rack in a data center.
John:
Not fun.
Marco:
Man, you're old.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, even just a few years ago, like when I built the Instapaper subscription thing, that was probably in, I don't know, 2010, something like that.
Marco:
Even then these things weren't, you couldn't do subscription building like this.
Marco:
So I had to use PayPal, which I hated.
Marco:
It was awful in every possible way.
Marco:
And I would never recommend using PayPal for anything to anybody, especially subscriptions, which it's especially bad at.
Marco:
And that's saying a lot because PayPal is pretty bad at a lot of things, but it's especially bad at subscriptions.
Casey:
All right, so Amazon decided to get into the console-y TV sort of game today, and they released the Amazon Fire TV, which apparently involves neither termination of employment nor flames.
John:
Call these television pucks.
John:
Is that a good name for this category?
Casey:
I don't know if it's ever been used before, but I dig it.
Casey:
So let's go with it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Puck to me seems round.
Marco:
It's like a slice of a cylinder would be a puck.
Marco:
How would you describe this shape?
John:
Well, this is not Puck-like, but the Roku and the Apple TV are, and they kind of define the segment.
John:
So now I think that's why Amazon thing looks like it does.
John:
Well, two reasons.
John:
One, because it's cheaper to build that way, and Amazon loves things to be cheap.
John:
And two, it's visually distinct from the two other big market leaders, Apple TV and Roku.
John:
fair enough it is it is a rectangular solid is it actually is it square i don't know i haven't from the top is it square it looks like it's yeah or either way i think you're right it looks like all the edges are hard angles and yeah it is just a box yeah think of think of an apple tv but not rounded in anything just flat sides six flat sides
Marco:
Not a rounded rack.
Marco:
Although, like the Roku and the Chromecast, because it's remote, does not need line of sight, you don't have to put it anywhere you can see it.
Casey:
Yeah, that is nice.
John:
Yeah, so what are the attributes of this thing?
John:
You already went over them on Twitter, Marco.
John:
How is it distinguished from the Apple TV?
Marco:
Basically, it's not as distinguished as you might think.
Marco:
It has a lot of the same apps, a lot of the same capabilities.
Marco:
It's the same price.
Marco:
It's the same category of device.
Marco:
Many of the same channel kind of things.
Marco:
The biggest difference, they put in beefier hardware into it so it can play games.
Marco:
So that's one thing.
Marco:
So it has more RAM, bigger CPU, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
And it also has this remote that, if it works the way they advertise, could be pretty cool because it is a Bluetooth remote, so it doesn't need line of sight, and it has voice input, and you can apparently search by voice for what you're looking for, which would be really nice.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
All of that, to me... Oh, and they're selling an external game controller for it, which, John, I'm sure you'll have a lot to say about maybe.
Marco:
But to me, the games part of it is probably not that important because I just... I don't know.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
I could be totally wrong with this.
Marco:
I think we'll end up seeing what happens, especially if Apple also makes an upgraded Apple TV that can play games.
Marco:
We'll see how that market pans out of the super cheap game box on TV that happens to be for other purposes.
Marco:
Kind of like the opposite of the Xbox approach, where the Xbox is like...
Marco:
the big beefy gaming machine that happens to have media functionality also that's kind of a side effect of it this is coming from the opposite direction this is like a media box that happens to be able to play some some games on it so we'll see if that takes off assuming that's irrelevant to you or it doesn't take off looking at just the media side of this i think you know you can look at this look at this landscape and none of them offer everything
Casey:
That's so true.
Marco:
If you want to buy anything from iTunes, you can only play it on the Apple TV.
Marco:
If you want to watch things on Amazon streaming video, you can't do that on the Apple TV.
Marco:
And almost everything else can do it, but the Apple TV can't.
Marco:
And so that's the main disconnect.
Marco:
So if you want both Amazon video and iTunes compatibility, you have to buy two devices.
John:
Don't forget HBO Go, which is not on the Amazon thing, as you pointed out on Twitter.
John:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, I don't care because I don't have that, but a lot of people like it.
Marco:
So, yeah, that's in there.
Marco:
So, I think, you know, right now, there is no one device that covers everything.
Casey:
Well, is that true, though?
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
But doesn't, by virtue of the Apple TV being able to receive AirPlay, doesn't that to some degree make it an omnivore?
Casey:
Now, yes, it's no longer a standalone thing.
Casey:
I'm not arguing that at all.
Casey:
But, for example, to me, I oftentimes find a use for AirPlay, and I use it a lot.
Casey:
And so even though there's other boxes that I think I'd like, like the Roku and even this Amazon Firebox,
Casey:
I keep coming back to no matter what, I'm going to want to have an Apple TV connected to my TV so I can do AirPlay either streaming or mirroring.
Casey:
Well, if I've already got this Apple TV connected to my TV, I can play Amazon Instant Video, I'm assuming, through their iPad app or iPhone app.
Casey:
I can use Plex and throw Plex to the Apple TV.
Casey:
And in the grand scheme of things, I would kill to have native Plex devices
Casey:
support within the Apple TV, but I can get pretty close by using my iPad.
Casey:
So it's not standalone, which I wish it was, but it's still sort of an omnivore.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's going to be a popular option, I think.
Marco:
And a lot of people, like our friend Jason Snell in the chat, says that he does Amazon Instant Video using AirPlay to the Apple TV.
Marco:
And he says, quote, it's not ideal, but it works.
Marco:
And I think you're right.
Marco:
That's no question.
Marco:
I think you can do that.
Marco:
You can do AirPlay.
Marco:
I think any robust home TV solution, if you have anything in the Apple ecosystem, you are very well served by having an Apple TV.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
If you want complete coverage, I would say the Apple TV and the Amazon Fire TV are probably going to be... That's going to be the combo that I think is going to... Like, for people who are going to have multiple boxes, I think that's going to be the combo that sets in.
Marco:
Because, see, with Roku, it seems like... I've never used a Roku, so maybe I'm missing the appeal.
Marco:
But it seems like...
Marco:
The Amazon Fire TV pretty much encompasses all the benefits you get from a Roku.
Marco:
And I know that Roku has cheaper models, and Amazon right now is not going cheaper than $100, which is surprising.
Marco:
But that's where they chose to go.
Marco:
So if you ignore the price difference between the cheaper Rokus and this...
Marco:
I would say you cover basically everything with an Apple TV plus the Amazon Fire TV.
Marco:
And so I think that's going to be where people go who want to cover everything with the hardware.
John:
I don't have a Roku either, but everyone I know who has one says that it has tons of content and that they like it better than their Apple TVs in terms of the interface.
Casey:
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Casey:
And the other really neat thing about some, if not all, the modern Rokus is that they have a headphone jack on the remote.
Casey:
And having never used a Roku, but I'm at least familiar enough to know that you can actually sit in bed, for example, maybe your wife or husband or whatever is passed out next to you, but you're still watching TV and keeping it quiet because you've plugged your earbuds or headphones into the remote, which is within a foot of where you're sitting.
Casey:
And that's really cool.
John:
Yeah, I'll give you that.
John:
So in all these things, I think the real barrier, maybe the only barrier that Apple's put up is the whole ecosystem buying thing.
John:
Because in the Amazon videos, what they want to show you is like, and look, you can have a second screen experience with x-ray, which is really cool.
John:
Like their x-ray stuff is actually cool, you know, but your second screen experience, like they show you using your Kindle Fire.
John:
And you could take the video with you and watch it on your Fire and then resume it and watch it on your big TV.
John:
And it's like...
John:
yeah but what if i want to have an ipad and uh i'm assuming amazon will eventually come out with apps for the ipad that do all these things but apple tv's big advantage is hey you buy stuff on the itunes store and you've got it on your ipad and you've got it on your phone and you've got like all apple's cloud stuff saying yeah you can only buy stuff from the itunes store on apple tv but once you buy it there you can use it on all your devices as long as all your devices are apple and
John:
Amazon wants to say the same thing.
John:
Oh, you can buy your stuff and you can use it on all your devices.
John:
They're not going to force you to buy a Kindle Fire.
John:
They're going to try to be everywhere.
John:
But...
John:
maybe you don't want to have a kindle fire like it's like well i'd rather have an ipad and it's kind of like amazon can't amazon doesn't have a top to bottom ecosystem where they've got a phone a tablet a computer and a tv thing they just have a small portion of that they're getting pretty close well they try to be everywhere but it's kind of like it spreads them thinner whereas apple's just like look we're going to make sure it's the best experience on on your apple tv and we're going to make that available on your mac and on your phone and on your tablets and on whatever else we come out with um
John:
And that's tough to compete with that big ecosystem because I still want an iPad instead of a Kindle Fire.
John:
So there's no advantage for me to getting this.
John:
Oh, well, it has integration with Kindle Fire.
John:
Well, I don't care about that.
John:
I don't care that my Apple TV doesn't have Kindle Fire integration.
John:
And it's not going to make me buy this to get... So I feel bad when they try to show that integration because it's not a selling point.
John:
But there's a couple of other differences between this thing and the Apple TV that I think are worth pointing out, both good and bad.
John:
One is that this does have a wall wart, apparently.
John:
The power supply is not internal, so you have to have another one of those big plugs shoving into the big power strip that's behind your entertainment center, which is kind of annoying and kind of a shame since it does look like it's actually a little bigger than Apple TV.
Marco:
Well, knowing Amazon, we're just lucky they even include the AC adapter in the box.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
The RF remote is great, and it's embarrassing that Apple's stupid remote doesn't have that...
John:
You know, I think it has no fan inside it.
John:
Someone's posted a link to an exploded view from the presentation.
John:
It looks like there's no place for a fan in there.
John:
And it makes sense if it's using, like, you know, cell phone caliber parts that it wouldn't need a fan.
John:
The box is plenty big to have, you know, passive cooling for the...
John:
for the insides there but i think the whole reason this box and the roku exist it's apple's fault for not making apple tv better fast enough like the whole thing with apple's like oh they keep you know improving their products incrementally and before you know it they're so far from where they've gone just look at how much more amazing the iphone 5 is than the original iphone sure that's for the products they care about but for these hobby products and stuff apple tv has stagnated like crazy like it's ancient hardware and the software features like
John:
is worse than like ios 1.0 on there oh you got a big grid of icons that you have limited control over and we keep adding new icons to it kind of sort of but like think of how much better it could be we should have search across all services the voice support all these things that we see on apple all of apple's other devices and i'm not asking for a thumbprint center on a remote but
John:
give us something like there's nothing that that amazon or roku has done that apple couldn't have done years ago they just didn't and i don't know they're just not prioritizing it or if they have some other grand plan that has yet to be revealed and it will make sense that they've been you know like they're going for such a huge jump over what's come before it but they have not incrementally made apple to be better at a rate that is i mean they've let competitors catch up to them
John:
and pass them in so many areas for for no good reason other than just not putting the resources towards it no good reason that we know of yet again if they come out with something like and here is our grand plan for tv and it's like leaps and bounds beyond then it's like okay well it took them a while and that's where they were concentrating all their effort but right now it just looks like they're letting people catch up with them and letting people do things that they should have done a long time ago it's you know whether or not i buy one of these devices it's making me less satisfied with my apple tv to know
John:
It's like, come on, Apple, everyone else is doing this.
John:
You've got your stupid, you know, IR remote, no voice command, terrible interface.
John:
And occasionally, as Merlin will point out, occasionally I see the stupid little spinner and it gives me an obscure R message and I have to go unplug my Apple TV and it annoys me and it makes me sad.
Casey:
So you love your Apple TV is what you're saying.
John:
I mean, it's still my favorite Netflix client.
John:
I still go to it for Netflix because it has no fan in it and because it's better than the Netflix client built into my television, which has to be on.
John:
So that's its competition.
John:
The TV's got to be on anyway, so I could use its Netflix client.
John:
And it's second place because it has no fan.
Casey:
So what do you think about this controller?
John:
Oh, the game controller.
John:
I mean, again, you can't tell without holding it, but it does not look good.
John:
And the history of non-gaming companies making game controllers is not good.
John:
So I'm assuming the game controller will not be all that wonderful.
John:
Their gaming ambitions, it kind of reminds me of the Ouya.
John:
Remember that thing, the kickstarted Android-based console?
Casey:
Yeah, I've used one.
John:
That thing also apparently had a terrible controller, but it's tough to break into the game business, especially if you just want to go casual.
John:
Like, oh, and by the way, it plays games.
John:
You'll get like, it's like being a Mac gamer.
John:
You'll get, maybe if you're lucky, you'll get the most popular three games from a couple of years ago on other platforms that all real gamers have already played.
John:
And maybe it'll be okay for your kids to play them.
John:
And I know Amazon hired a bunch of gaming people to write games for their platform or whatever, but...
John:
I think Ouya did something similar, and it's really difficult to get critical mass in gaming.
John:
You really need to be dedicated to it.
John:
If you want to be in AAA, top-of-the-line gaming, if you just want to be into casual games, then you're competing with the iOS ecosystem or cell phone games and stuff.
John:
that's difficult to do too and the controllers are 40 bucks each so if you buy two controllers you're almost doubling the cost of the entire thing and they're not they'd appear not to be very good controllers from looking at how they're shaped uh and i can't imagine shape aside that amazon's first controller is up to the standards of a good controller from microsoft sony or nintendo but
John:
We'll see.
John:
I mean, it's the type of thing where it's like, if they didn't do it, it's just like Apple.
John:
I mean, the Amazon way is like, look, we've got the hardware there.
John:
It can play games.
John:
We can still sell it for 99 bucks.
John:
Why not?
John:
I think it's a good move to add it.
John:
I think it's smart.
John:
And if it takes off, fine.
John:
If it doesn't, then it's just another little thing that your TV can do.
John:
Like there's so many things that are...
John:
devices hooked up to our TV can do.
John:
My TV can do the TV, not anything else, but just the television itself can do Amazon, Netflix.
John:
I can stream from my Synology.
John:
I can pull things from my Mac.
John:
Just the television does that.
John:
Everything has Netflix built in soon.
John:
Everything's going to have Amazon Video built in.
John:
Everything has support for DLNA servers.
John:
It's just...
John:
It's just a question of which box do you want to use, and it's just, you know, who has the exclusives?
John:
Well, iTunes stuff is only from Apple, and Amazon seems to be pretty promiscuous, but some things like HBO Go are only on certain platforms, and it's just like, it's enough already.
John:
I'm glad there's a little bit of competition here to try to keep Apple honest and try to make their puck better, because it really needs to be improved sometime soon, but...
John:
Having more little pucks to connect to my TV is not really solving my problem.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's the frustrating part.
Marco:
Honestly, this is a lot like cable TV.
Marco:
It's a lot like the entire TV business always has been and still is.
Marco:
We ask these tech companies, oh, please come in and save us from bad TV companies.
Marco:
But they're just doing the exact same thing, which is company A has exclusive content, X. Company B has exclusive platform, Y. And all these things make it so that there is no one good solution for everything.
Marco:
It's just...
Marco:
And it's annoying because these problems are pretty much doomed to happen because of these business models, because of just what happens with publishing content, owning content, making ecosystems, owning ecosystems.
Marco:
It will never be in any of these companies' best interests to make something that is actually good for us because somebody will have less control or make less money as a result of that.
John:
Well, at least cable companies, no matter who you got your cable from, first of all, you had a few choices, but everybody offered you HBO.
John:
Maybe the prices vary slightly, but you can get HBO everywhere.
John:
You get ESPN everywhere.
John:
There's no place you lived where if you could get cable TV, you couldn't get HBO, Showtime, ESPN, MTV.
John:
You could always get those things.
John:
The exclusives remind me more of the game console space where if you want Halo, you get a Microsoft console.
John:
It's never going to be anywhere else.
John:
Microsoft owns them, right?
John:
Or pick whatever for your Mario and Nintendo and
John:
Sony games.
John:
It's there was, you know, exclusives to try to bring into that platform and it would annoy like real hardcore gamers would have to buy multiple consoles just for the three or four games that were exclusives because they were good.
John:
But there's the constant battle to see how many big players in the game console space can be sustained.
John:
You can't have 50 of them.
John:
There's just not enough.
John:
Like people aren't going to buy 50 consoles.
John:
So the number seems to be around two or three.
John:
And in the TV connected puck market, we've had Apple and Roku basically
John:
And a couple other people coming here and there.
John:
So maybe it's going to be Amazon, Apple, and Roku.
John:
I think you could probably sustain them with them jockeying for exclusive content.
John:
But then you've got companies like Netflix that want to be everywhere that also are trying to get exclusive content.
John:
But then they're selling House of Cards to Comcast for on-demand.
John:
And it's a weird...
John:
a weird situation that is hopefully going to resolve itself sometime in the next decade or two.
John:
But right now, just everyone is jockeying position.
John:
I think people better jockey for position as hard as they can, because if you don't and you're slow, like Google, if Google doesn't have a puck, they've got Chromecast and they've got their fiber TV thing, but they don't seem to be in the puck market at all.
John:
And it could be that by the time the dust settles, they're just fenced out by whoever the two or three big people who won that race are.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I don't see Google being present in this race at all because it's always been like, well, not always.
Marco:
Obviously, everything in tech is pretty young.
Marco:
But it's been pretty obvious for a while that the online media market of video content mainly is really a two-horse race.
Marco:
It's Apple versus Amazon.
Marco:
Microsoft has their own deals with Xbox Live they used to have.
Marco:
I don't know if they still do.
Marco:
They probably do.
Marco:
And Google has a couple of things in the Play Store and stuff before.
John:
Well, Google's got YouTube, though.
John:
And you would think, like, oh, YouTube's not the same thing.
John:
YouTube is just a bunch of videos.
John:
It's not TV shows.
John:
But the amount of, like, video that my daughter now watches that's YouTube, I think it's long since it eclipsed television.
John:
She watches YouTube instead of watching television.
John:
I don't know if that's a transient thing and it will go away, but...
John:
YouTube can't be discounted.
John:
And I mean, Amazon basically, I mean, Amazon, not Amazon, Google was trying to do Google video.
John:
Remember that before they bought YouTube?
John:
Well, they made the right move.
John:
They said, yeah, nevermind.
John:
We're going to, we're going to buy YouTube.
John:
But I mean, and YouTube is everywhere.
John:
YouTube is available on my TV.
John:
It's available on my Apple TV.
John:
I'm assuming it's available on Amazon's thing.
John:
So Google kind of has a horse in this race, but not a hardware thing.
John:
They don't have a puck.
John:
well and it's probably not in google's best interest to ever withhold youtube from a platform yeah and i mean they had google tv like they did make it they were the only people to actually try to do my omnivorous box thing and they did a bad job of it and nobody liked it and it was never going to work because everybody in the entire industry hates the idea of such a thing even if it worked well which it didn't so that kind of went away i don't know if they'll make another run at it but uh
John:
They were early and they were early with like a big giant platypus awkward thing and it didn't work out for them.
John:
So maybe they're gun shy now.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like all of this is really about licensing.
Casey:
And I say that because the Amazon Fire TV isn't available outside the U.S., right?
Marco:
I don't know, but Amazon is historically very bad at non-US media availability.
Casey:
Precisely.
Casey:
And so if this isn't available anywhere else, and additionally, I think you're right, John, in saying that we're just kind of running in circles around just getting streaming things to our TV in different ways.
Casey:
But the only way I think there's going to be a monumental shift in how TV works is if licensing deals change.
Casey:
So for
Casey:
For example, I can go online and order a season pass for getting the New York Giants on my Apple TV, and maybe I'll have to pay for that, and that's fine, but I don't need to worry about whether or not they're playing the Redskins or what blackout situation there is.
Casey:
It's just, I get to see the Giants always.
Casey:
Or perhaps you could buy a season pass for How I Met Your Mother, which obviously just ended, but just for the
Casey:
for the sake of discussion you know how i met your mother and you can get those episodes either as they are live or moments after and i think without probably sports and if not sports more widespread streamable traditional tv or look at game of thrones is another great example i've not seen it but i understand it's wildly popular and you can't get it anywhere but uh the u.s so without fixing that
Casey:
I don't really feel like any of these pucks are really going to make a tremendous difference in our worlds.
Casey:
But fixing that, as you said, John, is just a total bag of hurt.
John:
Well, the pucks are important because the pucks give you something that can get better at a faster rate than your television.
John:
And that is extremely important.
John:
That's why what I'm dinging Apple for is like they have that advantage and they're not taking advantage of.
John:
They have three generations of the puck, maybe only two generations of the little black puck before they went from the big giant crazy thing like of iOS based Apple TVs.
John:
and they haven't made it better at the same rate as it's like the slowest movie like ipod touch i complain about because it's been like 500 days since an update but like apple tv they the 1080p update wasn't that long ago but it was like a nothing update and they keep you at any channels but like how far is ios itself or the iphone come in that same distance there's obvious features that their competitors are getting i mean an arc remote voice search a nicer ui game support anything like
John:
All these things were there for the take, and they're not taking it.
John:
And so I'm glad to see the pucks out there trying, like Roku has improved its hardware and software by leaps and bounds over the same period that Apple has not.
John:
And this is Amazon's first go.
John:
But these little pucks give the market an opportunity to churn.
John:
You know, it's cheap.
John:
They're $99 each.
John:
You can buy a new one of these every two years and not feel bad about it.
John:
And you're not going to buy a new TV every two years unless, say, apparently you're me.
LAUGHTER
John:
it lets them chase each other make the tech better make it faster maybe these morph into game consoles maybe they don't like maybe these things get embedded in the TV when they reach a certain point but like getting embedded into a television is like the worst thing that could happen at this point because you want these guys to compete and iterate and iterate to get through this awkward beginning period just to kind of settle down into like the feature set
John:
uh you know if they end up being gaming devices they can never settle down because games you will we always need more power for like you'll never say well this game console is good enough i'll use this in the next 20 years you will not it will not be good enough for 20 years like you'll you'll want the newest thing eventually so i'm glad these pucks exist as an external thing but like
John:
There's going to be some consolidation coming, and I think it's going to be a long way off.
John:
You mentioned sports with the local blackout.
John:
That's probably not going to go away in our lifetime just because of the huge amount of money in local television.
John:
That's going to take forever to get rid of.
John:
And so there's so many barriers to actually, you know, if you could just wipe the slate clean and say, we have the Internet.
John:
Pretend there is no pre-existing video.
John:
Let's make a system built on it.
John:
You could build something that's nice and even and gives consumers choice and has competition and everyone can get every content they want for a reasonable price.
John:
But we don't live in that world.
John:
We've got to transition from what we have now, and that's going to take a long time.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
But is there someone, is there a sport that's like T-Mobile where they're just seriously desperate to get viewers?
Casey:
And I think the MLB has done this and also NHL to some degree.
Casey:
I guess from what I'm told, I'm not a baseball nor hockey fan, but from what I gather, their streaming apps and plans and so on and so forth
Casey:
are actually fairly good.
Casey:
And I think there's still blackouts for sure, but they're relatively future-looking.
Casey:
And I'm wondering, obviously, the NFL will never get to this point.
Casey:
But, well, unless all this stuff about concussions, actually, people pay attention to it.
Casey:
But anyway, maybe the MLB, for the sake of conversation, gets so desperate that they're like, you know what?
Casey:
Screw the local channels.
Casey:
Let's just do this right.
John:
I think MLB is going to be the last one to do this probably.
Casey:
Okay, maybe that was a poor choice.
Casey:
But you know what I'm driving at, right?
Casey:
Is there any sport like that?
John:
Yeah, there's WWE, which I read an article about recently.
Casey:
Ah, good point.
John:
That's a sport-ish.
John:
Well, you know, it's entertainment anyway.
John:
And they've embraced the internet as a way to get their content to their viewers because they couldn't get a channel.
John:
They kept trying to get a WWE channel or wrestling channel on cable, and they kept getting a rebuff, so they've gone to the internet.
John:
There's also eSports, which is watching people play video games for people who don't.
John:
I know the terminology, at least I think I'm getting it right.
John:
That's what they call it nowadays, esports.
John:
Anyway, it's wildly popular in other countries.
John:
It's somewhat popular here.
John:
That's a natural medium for the internet, Twitch TV and all that stuff.
John:
Incredibly popular among a certain set of people.
John:
Yeah, there's an opportunity for for sports markets that aren't or any way to send video to people that don't have a precedent in regular television and aren't entangled in these crazy relationships for things like baseball and football and, you know, in the rest of the world.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The rest of the world is like for soccer and everything, but I suppose if you wait for the current generation of people to all die, maybe two generations for people to die, then people won't care about watching things on local television anymore, and they'll just be so incensed that they can't watch their local team on their iPad that it will just have to change, but...
John:
Certainly for the people who are alive today, you've got to wait for pretty much everyone who was an adult when the internet came into being to die before we can get local television out from the local television markets for things like baseball.
John:
Because how much money the Yankees make from selling exclusive rights to local television broadcasts to their games is just enormous.
Casey:
Yeah, I know you're right.
Casey:
I kind of hope for some sport that's the sporting equivalent of T-Mobile to be so desperate to just shake things up, to just say, you know what, screw TV.
Casey:
And I think WWE was actually a very good example.
Casey:
You just say, screw TV, let's do it our way and see what happens.
Casey:
And I don't think there's going to be anyone...
Casey:
that people care enough about, kind of like T-Mobile, to really get a groundswell to push the NFL or MLB or whatever into being more progressive.
John:
Let's wait and see what happens with T-Mobile first before we decide that strategy needs to be employed elsewhere.
Casey:
Fair point, fair point.
Marco:
I guess T-Mobile keeps doing things that at launch sound like, oh my god, this is really going to be a big deal.
Marco:
And then it ends up just not really being a big deal.
John:
Because their barrier is infrastructure.
John:
They would never do that if they had the cell towers that Verizon has.
John:
But if they had the cell towers that Verizon has, they wouldn't need to do that.
John:
It's a chicken-egg thing.
John:
I think it's good that you have competitors who need to do more radical things, but it doesn't solve their structural weakness.
John:
Suddenly...
John:
your signal doesn't get better, uh, depending on where you live.
John:
You know, you just, there's no getting around physical infrastructure, the wires to people's houses or cell towers.
John:
And speaking of cell towers, I put peace cell somewhere way down in our topics.
John:
If we happen to get to it.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week also, once again, by our friends at Pixelmator, also known as Pixelmator, a full-featured image editing app for the Mac.
Marco:
Now, yes, I know Photoshop exists.
Marco:
Most people don't need Photoshop, and Pixelmator does a lot of things, not only the same, but actually better, and it costs a lot less, and it does a lot of cool stuff, and it's really very Mac-like.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
They just made a brand new 3.0 FX update.
Marco:
It's a major upgrade featuring new powerful tools to play with.
Marco:
They have non-destructive layer styles, which is a really big deal for anybody doing this stuff.
Marco:
They have liquefy tools.
Marco:
You can liquefy the image and play with it and warp it and everything.
Marco:
Really powerful stuff here.
Marco:
Their new image editing engine almost doubles their performance.
Marco:
And this is, you know, one of the criticisms of other major apps in the field.
Marco:
Um...
Marco:
is that they're not very Mac-like, or they don't really integrate fully with the OS, or they don't play nice when Apple releases new APIs, or they don't optimize.
Marco:
Pixelmator is basically the opposite.
Marco:
Pixelmator is... It has full Maverick support.
Marco:
And it had full Maverick support, as far as I remember, from day one of Mavericks being out.
Marco:
It supports file tags.
Marco:
It supports multiple displays.
Marco:
It's very...
Marco:
It's very optimized for app nap and the power management stuff in Maverick.
Marco:
So if you're running this on a laptop, which most people will be, it's very, very power efficient.
Marco:
You can always see.
Marco:
You can go to the battery shame meter, as John says, and you can see what programs are being shamed into using too much or because they're using too much power.
Marco:
You can compare competing products to Pixelmator, and you can see Pixelmator really is...
Marco:
Very heavily optimized for power saving and for all the new stuff.
Marco:
They also optimized it very heavily for the new Mac Pro.
Marco:
So if you have a new Mac Pro, new Pixelmator 3.0 FX has dual GPU support with OpenCL.
Marco:
It supports 16-bit images.
Marco:
It has special Xeon E5 optimizations.
Marco:
It'll have special optimizations for the PCI Express SSD and for all the ridiculous memory bandwidth we get on the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Really great system here.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Pixelmator 3.0 FX was a free upgrade to all existing Pixelmator customers.
Marco:
If you are not yet a Pixelmator customer, go check it out.
Marco:
It is full-featured image editing app for the Mac.
Marco:
Go to Pixelmator.com, P-I-X-E-L-M-A-T-O-R, Pixelmator.com to learn more.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Pixelmator for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So the USB consortium people have decided they too would like a lightning connector.
Marco:
Yeah, and we actually talked about this back before they had any idea what it would look like.
Marco:
Back when they announced, the USB-IF announced that they would be looking into this and creating a new kind of connector that would be small, reversible, and non-sucky, because everyone agreed that the USB 3.0 plugs suck, especially the mini ones, which are ridiculous.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
They went off and they said, alright, we're going to design one of these.
Marco:
It's going to come out soon.
Marco:
So this, what's new now, is that we now have a rendering of what it might look like from the USB-F.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I'm not sure if this is actually news or not.
John:
I think it's news if it's accurate.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like if the rendering is not just fantasy, but just like this is what we plan to build and we haven't built it yet, but it's going to look like this when we build it.
John:
That's my impression of what this rendering is.
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
And, you know, the rendering basically looks like the halfway point between lightning and mini USB or micro USB 2.
John:
Well, when we first talked about it, I think I said that, like, it has to look like the lightning connector because what else can you do in anything that small?
John:
It has to be like the lightning connector because it's so darn small.
John:
Certainly, you can't make it like...
John:
A shrunken version of the regular USB connector won't work at those sizes, which is why lightning looks like it does.
John:
But then other people said, I think you guys as well, that like, well, lightning is expensive to make and it can't be as precious and beautiful as lightning connector because it has to be cheap for everybody to make.
John:
I just didn't think they could come up with a connector that was that small and also not pretty much exactly like the lightning connector, like a solid piece of metal with contacts on the other side.
John:
And it looks like from these drawings that they've somehow decided that
John:
that they're going to make it the size and shape of lightning connector, but still have it be hollow, so that in the connector slot is a little, must be a microscopic, extremely thin little thing with contacts on it that goes into the hole in the connector.
John:
Now, granted, it fits both ways, and it should be pretty easy to line that up, but boy, I'm worried about that in terms of durability.
John:
Like, once you get down to that size, the lightning connector makes so much sense, it's like, it's going to be so small.
John:
Anyway, you better make it solid and put the contacts on the outside.
John:
I can't, like,
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, we'll have to see the real.
John:
I guess it's conceivable that it could be done, but I'm super worried about having to shove a little tiny thing inside a little tiny microscopic hole, even if it fits both ways.
Marco:
Yeah, and think about, too, that the jack side of it is going to be on phones, which means it's going to be in people's pockets and get filled up with lint.
Marco:
And to have the tolerances be so small.
Marco:
We saw some of this with the old 30-pin dot connector, which had a similar kind of design, but it was larger, of course.
John:
Oh, it's way bigger, way bigger than this looks like.
Marco:
Yeah, but, you know, you could see, like, okay, if you have a really, really thin, you know, flat card-type, you know, connector on one side and then, like, you know, a jack on the other side, like, you know, okay, well, dust is going to get in there.
Marco:
It's going to have weird contact.
Marco:
It's going to have weird, you know, pressure issues.
Marco:
It might snap it or bend it or whatever, like, and that was at that thickness for the docked connector that that actually happened.
Marco:
It didn't happen a lot, but it did occasionally happen.
Marco:
At this, this is an even smaller connector by a lot.
Marco:
It's narrower, so there's less area to bend.
Marco:
So it just seems that looks like if they can pull this off, it's going to be great.
Marco:
It's going to be not as nice as Lightning because of that more complicated physical design inside the connector.
Marco:
But if they actually pull this off, great, good for them.
Marco:
I just have doubts that they will be able to, or that if they do, I have doubts that it will be very durable.
Marco:
That's the big thing.
John:
I feel like he'd go around to everyone's laptop or smartphone with one of these connectors on it, stick my fingernail in there and go, snap.
John:
Oh, now your connector's broken.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, you could just reach in there with your fingernail and snap every one of those.
John:
Because once that little printed circuit board snaps down, like, it's such a small opening.
John:
And like I said, with dust and everything...
John:
This opening is small enough anyway that I think this might even be a problem for people who keep their iPhones in their pocket now.
John:
I don't know what gets shoved into the lightning connector, but at least you've got the full width and height of that connector.
John:
This, you're less than halving it.
John:
Something less than half the width of that connector can get jammed in there because it's jammed between the internal tongue and the top or bottom.
John:
That's a small margin there.
John:
And what could that tongue be made out of such that it's stiff enough to go into the little hole and line up correctly, but not so stiff that I could break it off with my finger now?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And USB also, as we discussed previously, one of the reasons why the USB connectors were always so plain and bland and crappy is because...
Marco:
one of their design goals has always been to be very, very cheap.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why USB has become universal, why it lived to its name, because it was really cheap to implement, and the hardware was all really cheap, and the connectors were all really cheap.
Marco:
And the tolerances were pretty big in some of these things.
Marco:
You could make a pretty whacked-out connector or cable, and it would still work.
Marco:
And obviously, as things get better, faster, more advanced, the tolerances are going to have to shrink and get tighter.
Marco:
But this...
Marco:
I'm afraid to see how this will be implemented badly because it will be.
Marco:
Every USB standard becomes implemented badly among a lot of the devices that are out there.
Marco:
You're going to buy a $10 card reader or a $15 external drive enclosure or something.
Marco:
Those are going to have not the best quality connectors on them.
Marco:
If this becomes the new standard, which if it doesn't, it's kind of pointless.
Marco:
You kind of want it to become the new standard.
Marco:
All those super cheap USB devices out there that are part of what makes USB so great, those are going to have some really dodgy connectors, I think.
John:
I think about this.
John:
I think about it.
John:
This depresses me.
John:
Apple's devices, which I think we would all agree have extremely precise cutouts for the connectors on them, like the laser cut things.
John:
They usually line up pretty darn well.
John:
But Apple also has a tendency to design its things without regard to connectors.
John:
So, for example, on the back of a 27-inch Thunderbolt display or any of those curved displays, they have USB ports on the back.
John:
But the back is curved, but the ports obviously have to be – you have to plug the plugs in perpendicular to the connector.
John:
And these are, like, big, chunky, full-size USB, you know, the A-type connector, like, you know, regular USB connectors.
John:
very often i find it difficult to plug in the connectors because you're not sure what angle it's supposed to go at and i've seen apple displays where people have done that struggle like trying to get the thing plugged in enough that they've subtly bent the little plastic thingy that's inside usb connectors to make that makes it even more difficult to plug it in because now it's kind of like bent in the wrong direction you have to kind of get past that little threshold to go in and
John:
And these are the big, humongous, chunky USB connectors that they haven't broken, but they're annoying to plug in because you have to line something up.
John:
And by people struggling with it, they've made it worse by bending something in the wrong direction.
John:
This is going to be that same problem on Apple's devices anyway, multiplied many times over.
Marco:
By the way, I know this is a ridiculous thing to complain about, but try having a cylindrical computer.
Marco:
It's actually substantially worse.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, because you have to guess what angle they have to go in.
Casey:
You deserve it.
John:
I do.
John:
You're right.
John:
If you're having trouble with that cylindrical computer, you can send it my way, by the way.
John:
Take it off your hands.
John:
The beauty of the lightning connector is that if you can find the hole, just start shoving and it will align itself.
John:
There's nothing you have to line up within the hole.
John:
You just have to get the metal thing into the slot and just press and it will line itself up, which is not true of USB or FireWare 800 is even worse.
John:
FireWare 800 connector needs to be burned with fire, I guess.
It's...
John:
It's so hard to plug those things in because they have so many little details that have to be lined up.
John:
Try plugging one of those in the back of an Apple Thunderbolt display.
John:
Most of that is Apple's fault, but I'm just saying a connector that can tolerate that type of environment is best, and I'm not sure about this one.
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week once again by our friends at Warby Parker.
Marco:
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Marco:
They should even be affordable enough for people to accessorize and have multiple pairs if they want to.
Marco:
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Marco:
They sell higher quality, better looking prescription eyewear online at a fraction of the price, starting at just $95.
Marco:
Go to warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You know, I actually...
Marco:
when we did the sponsor last week, some people in the chat were pointing out that I didn't realize this, like almost every eyeglass store and almost every eyeglass company is owned by like one big company, uh, like Luxottica.
Marco:
I think it's anyway.
Marco:
Um, it's like, I didn't realize it quite how much consolidation there is in this business, but where we Parker is independent and this is why they're able to bypass this tremendous distribution system by this conglomerate.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
They didn't tell me to say that.
Marco:
In fact, I hope I don't get in trouble for saying that, but that's why they're able to do this because there's this huge monopoly power there and they're just bypassing it completely and passing the savings along to you.
Marco:
So they have these great vintage inspired designs with a contemporary twist.
Marco:
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Marco:
And every pair comes with a hard case and a cleaning cloth.
Marco:
There's no weird add-ons.
Marco:
They don't start jacking up the price if you start adding up the things you actually need.
Marco:
There's no, like, well, you can get this base price model, which sucks, or you can get the one that you actually want that won't fall apart in two days for $600.
Marco:
Nothing like that.
Marco:
Buying glasses online sounds like it would be risky.
Marco:
So how would you know whether they'll fit or how they'll look on you?
Marco:
Well, they have you covered with these two pretty impressive things.
Marco:
So number one, they have these tools on their site where you can use your webcam.
Marco:
You can take a picture of yourself.
Marco:
It can overlay and it can show you exactly how the glasses will look on you right from the webcam.
Marco:
And then they have this even better thing, which is the home try-on program.
Marco:
So here's how this works.
Marco:
You go to their site.
Marco:
You pick out up to five pairs.
Marco:
If you don't pick out all five, they'll send you five anyway.
Marco:
They'll pick stuff for you.
Marco:
You pick out five pairs and they will send you the frames you can try on for free right in your home.
Marco:
Keep them for a couple of days, whatever you need.
Marco:
Decide at home.
Marco:
Ask your significant other.
Marco:
Walk around.
Marco:
Ask your people at work.
Marco:
Whatever you want to do.
Marco:
Decide on whatever of these frames you want.
Marco:
And if you don't like any of them, that's a valid decision too.
Marco:
But I bet you'll like one of them at least.
Marco:
So
Marco:
Pick out the one you want, send back the box, and then you can place an order to have that with your prescription in it.
Marco:
All of that is free.
Marco:
There is no charge for the home trying program.
Marco:
They pay to ship it to you.
Marco:
They pay to ship it back.
Marco:
All that very, very simple, very good.
Marco:
And you can do a couple of these if you want to.
Marco:
If you don't find what you want the first time, get another batch.
Marco:
But I bet you're going to find what you want.
Marco:
They have a great selection.
Marco:
They also have prescription and non-prescription polarized sunglasses, which I love personally.
Marco:
If you only ever had non-polarized sunglasses, trust me, you don't know what you're missing.
Marco:
So go to WarbyParker.com, W-A-R-B-Y-P-A-R-K-E-R.com slash ATP.
Marco:
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Marco:
And get your home try-on kit risk-free.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So we should probably at some point talk about this employee poaching thing that seems to have started in the Valley but spread quite a long ways away from there.
Casey:
So what this is about is Apple and Google especially seem to be pointed at the most, but many companies – I think the number was like 20 or 30 companies, something like that – were accused of and from all accounts seem to have –
Casey:
uh tried to avoid hiring from each other and made agreements that they would try to keep wages the same not hire from each other it really is extremely crummy and so this is all it it's in trial now is that correct do either of you guys happen to know
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know enough about this.
Marco:
Do we know for sure?
Marco:
The articles I've read, which admittedly have not been enough, I keep seeing it being referred to as a wage-fixing cartel, but I haven't actually seen anything about wage-fixing.
Marco:
I've seen anti-poaching agreements, which might have the effect of keeping wages down, but is there actual...
Marco:
Were they actually agreeing to keep salary levels at a certain range?
John:
It's the same thing.
John:
They're just labeling it with a secondary effect, but it's all the same thing.
John:
You can't agree with a bunch of companies all can't agree with each other.
John:
I won't hire from you, and you won't hire from me, and that way we won't have to pay our people more.
John:
That's the implied secondary effect.
John:
It's actually even worse than that if you saw some of the emails.
John:
I think it's got to be in trial now because I don't know why I'd be seeing these emails.
John:
But one situation that was detailed in these, it was either in a deposition or email or both, was like a bunch of people left Apple and went to work for Google.
John:
So Google didn't poach them.
John:
They left Apple of their own accord and went to work for Google.
John:
Google wanted to set them up doing something in an office somewhere.
John:
And before they did that, they were in touch with Steve Jobs and say, hey, we've got some people here and they used to work for you and we want to set them up in an office here.
John:
Is that okay with you, Steve?
John:
I know you were close with these people or whatever, just wanted to make sure.
John:
And they're like, well, you know, they were talking amongst themselves, like, as long as they're not working on any like phone stuff or whatever, I bet it will be okay with Steve.
John:
Like, so first of all, the whole premise that you would have to call the CEO of your competitor to make sure that you are allowed to hire
John:
his employees who left their own accord, which is crazy.
John:
And then saying, well, we can, we can hire them and make sure they're not working on anything that would make Steve angry.
John:
So we can't have them work on a mobile phone or anything like that.
John:
But surely if we agree, they're not going to be working on mobile phone stuff.
John:
Steve will be okay with it or whatever.
John:
And in the end, Steve jobs essentially said, I'd prefer you don't hire these people.
John:
And so they didn't.
John:
They didn't put them to work in that office they were going to set up for them.
John:
That's crazy.
John:
That is super illegal and terrible and anti-competitive.
John:
And just like, what's going through these people's heads at these companies that think this is the way things should be done?
John:
That you would get the okay to...
John:
So what your employees are going to do or whether you're going to hire people from your fiercest competitor, obviously this was maybe before Google and Apple were at each other's throat, but it just makes you sick to your stomach to think about that these people's lives and careers are altered by the whim of a person who runs the company that they don't work for anymore.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And the other thing I saw was that apparently Facebook basically said, screw that, tough noogies.
Casey:
And because of that, apparently Google decided, oh, well, a lot of our people are going to Facebook.
Casey:
And since we can't get Facebook to agree not to poach our people…
Casey:
Hmm, what can we do?
Casey:
We should probably try to convince our people to stay.
Casey:
Oh, we could pay them more.
Casey:
That's what we could do.
Casey:
And so they gave everyone, I think in the entire company, a $1,000 spot bonus and raised salaries 10%.
Casey:
I'm almost sure that's right.
Casey:
It was in one of the links we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
But yeah, because...
Casey:
They weren't poaching.
Casey:
Well, I'm sorry, because they were poaching.
Casey:
Facebook was poaching Google people.
Casey:
Google suddenly realized, well, we should probably pay our people more.
Casey:
So, Marco, to your point earlier, you know, even though it it may not and John was saying this, even though it may not on the surface sound like wage fixing, the net effect was wage fixing.
John:
And this is totally like, I mean, this is not just an Apple problem as many companies involve Google and many others like Apple and Google get it because they're the most famous and they're in the headlines.
John:
Right.
John:
But like, regardless of all the other companies involved, this is 100% a Steve Jobs thing to do because in his mind, like he's like, look, I'm trying to do great things here and I need great people to do great things.
John:
And you stealing my people pisses me off and it makes it harder for me to do great things.
John:
So why don't we all captains of industry get together and just agree not to steal each other's people because it'll make everybody's life easier and we all hate it.
John:
And now finally we can get back to work.
John:
Which is basically putting Steve Jobs desires and his desire to change the world with Apple above the lives of all the employees of all these companies like we don't care if you can get make more money or you can move to a different city and get and get an equal, you know, tech job like or a different country or whatever.
John:
because i don't care about your mobility in your life i just care about doing great things and so my demands as ceo are trump all these employees and this is the way it should be and like someone in the chat room asked why on earth would google ask apple if it was okay if they're legally in the clear why don't they just hire the person like that's the whole point google didn't want apple stealing its people apple didn't want google stealing its people because like that churn and turnover it was a problem for both companies it raises they would have to raise all all their payrolls to keep the people that they wanted
John:
And they're just like, look, it's easier for both of us if we just agree, let's not steal each other's people.
John:
And Facebook didn't agree to that, mostly people think, because most people wanted to go to work for Facebook, because I guess maybe at that point they had like pre-IPO shares or there was more upside to Facebook.
John:
Like Facebook was stealing people because they were offering more stuff, and Facebook's like,
John:
We're not going to agree to this because we're stealing all of your people.
John:
You're not stealing our people.
John:
And the reason I think Facebook was stealing all their people is because they offered them more.
John:
You have potential to be richer if you come to work for Facebook.
John:
Like, we're a younger company.
John:
Maybe you'll get some pre-IPO shares.
John:
Maybe you'll get some shares with a much bigger upside than these more mature companies.
John:
We'll pay you more.
John:
It's more exciting.
John:
Maybe you're bored at Apple or Google or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
Facebook was hiring people the old-fashioned way and stealing people from everybody.
John:
And of course, Facebook's not going to agree because their whole strategy is we're going to steal all your employees by offering them better stuff, which, like Casey pointed out, made Google say, well, I guess the only tool we have for retention against Facebook is to pay our employees more.
John:
And in a competitive market where people with these skills are in high demand, they're supposed to get paid more.
John:
The companies aren't supposed to collude to make sure that these people can't be mobile in their careers.
John:
This whole story is infuriating as...
John:
and i totally see it as like the the worst it's kind of like that good side of steve jobs where he just wants to get the job done but the worst side of steve jobs is he doesn't care you know what kind of damage he leaves in his wake to to get what he wants and neither do any of these other companies as well it's not just steve jobs but all the other people who agreed to this it's it's a terrible attitude it just it makes me sick reading this whole story
Marco:
John Gruber has been doing some great commentary on this because it really does show this is the kind of thing that... Apple is not worse off in every way with Tim Cook.
Marco:
There's a few ways that they're better off with Tim Cook, and I think this is one of them where...
Marco:
A lot of people are saying this.
Marco:
I really don't think this would have happened with Tim Cook at the helm because it's not really his style.
Marco:
He's very careful.
Marco:
He's very pragmatic.
Marco:
He's very kind of unemotional about these things, he seems.
John:
He's also very cutthroat, so I'm not sure about this because he is very demanding and cutthroat.
John:
Thus far, it's a good bet.
John:
From the outside, the image that Tim Cook portrays, we all have trouble seeing him doing stuff like this where we don't have trouble seeing Chief Jobs do it, but I think the jury's still out.
Marco:
It's not quite accurate to make this all about money and wages, at least for all the companies involved.
Marco:
I don't think Steve Jobs gave a crap about what he was paying his engineers and whether this would keep their wages down.
Marco:
I don't think that has anything to do with his end of it at all.
Marco:
I think his end of it was all about vengeance and control and loyalty.
Marco:
He didn't want to lose his people to this evil company, Google, that was stealing his products from him.
Marco:
It was...
John:
probably it was almost certainly like this emotional and controlling thing from steve jobs not at all about salaries and salaries were simply a side effect of it that he probably didn't even think or care about well but that's the thing he thinks you should stay there because you want to like he's like i shouldn't have to pay you more you should stay here because working for apple is you you get to work for the best company in the world and it's insulting to me that you expect me to pay you more money to stay here but at the same time he also didn't want to lose those people so he's like well
John:
It's like he's of two minds.
John:
He thinks, like, you should be staying here because you love it so much, but I'm going to make sure that even if you wanted to leave, you couldn't because you wouldn't get anything better anyplace else.
John:
You might as well just stay so we can crap on you.
John:
Like, if you really wanted people to stay, you could just pay them more money.
Marco:
Well, see, no, that's the problem.
Marco:
That's the other flaw in this argument, is that engineers, especially people who are out on the West Coast, who can choose between many very well-known tech companies to work for without really uprooting their life too much...
Marco:
It's like these companies get employees, they get talent because of what they're doing and what's interesting about them.
Marco:
Engineers are famously not as motivated by money as you would think.
Marco:
And generally speaking, if somebody's thinking about leaving Apple for Google, say, giving them $10,000 more at Apple is not going to really change that decision for that long or at all.
Marco:
It's not a very effective way to keep people.
Marco:
If you have people looking around because they're bored or unhappy at their job,
Marco:
Money is a terrible way to fix that because it just doesn't work that well.
John:
And the individual level, maybe not, but on the grand scheme of things, it does.
John:
That's why Facebook was able to grab these people.
John:
Apple is a more exciting place to work than Facebook.
John:
You're going to be working on more interesting things that are more appealing to the average engineer than you would at Facebook.
Marco:
That depends on what kind of engineer you are and what team you're assigned to.
John:
i mean i think like even even if you get to be on like the glory team where you get to like make the new cool paper app and everything like that there's equal glory positions at apple and probably if you really care about your thing being used in the long term by a lot of people you have to put your money on apple like you've designed the next version of ios it's probably going to have more longevity and impact than designing even the very tippy top flagship cool new ui thing like paper or the facebook phone or whatever thing like you
John:
You know, Apple has the Apple has the projects to offer people.
John:
Facebook should never be able to steal people from Apple, except on the server side, which obviously that's a whole different story.
John:
And again, retention there is probably not just money below.
John:
I've heard I know so little about what goes on in Apple, but.
John:
Everyone I know who has worked there, we see people come and go.
John:
And they go not because they don't like Apple anymore, but just because you burn out on it.
John:
It's tough to work within Apple.
John:
It's a hard job.
John:
It's hard work.
John:
There are crunch times.
John:
Kind of almost like a game developer.
John:
There's...
John:
this sort of crunch times that everyone accepts are going to exist and you just do what you have to do and that can really burn you out after a while and sometimes you just want to relax and also you want to just do your own thing and within google i think there used to be more latitude to do your own thing and less of a crunch time there's a lot of factors that contribute towards you know deciding whether you want to stay or you know leave and come back but
John:
This type of agreement that doesn't allow you the mobility shuts out all of those, because if they all agree not to hire anyone else, like then you don't have to worry about making your employees happier in any way, whether giving them more money or giving them more flexibility to do interesting projects on their own or not not subjecting everyone to these massive crunch times.
John:
All those tools like it's like, oh, we don't have to worry about that anymore because where the heck are they going to go?
John:
We have this agreement with all the companies in the area.
Casey:
Yeah, and to go back a step, this was all happening in 2008, all these emails that are coming out, and the Facebook IPO was in 2012.
Casey:
So it actually – Facebook being able to poach all these people may have been financially related.
Casey:
And additionally, from the Pando Daily article that we'll put in the show notes –
Casey:
The combined workforce of just these 11 companies, and I'll read them real quick in a second, totaled over 775,000 people in 2008.
Casey:
Those companies are Apple, Comcast, DoubleClick, Genentech, IBM, Illumina, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Oglevy, WPP, and Google.
Casey:
So that was nearly a million people in 2008 that were all at least in some capacity
Casey:
being shrouded beneath this do not poach agreement thing.
Casey:
That's a lot of people.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing about this that's good or encouraging about these companies at all.
Marco:
It's, you know, like John said, it's just kind of a gross story.
Marco:
It's just kind of sad, and it shows a lot of arrogance on all sides that, like, this is, I mean, obviously this is illegal.
Marco:
Like, all this collusion is obviously a problem, and I'm...
Marco:
I'm very surprised that any of these companies were stupid enough to do it, especially by email, for God's sake.
Casey:
Yeah, to that end, I was just going to read this.
Casey:
So this is a quote from an email from Eric Schmidt, who is CEO of Google.
Casey:
Quote, I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later, question mark.
Casey:
Not sure about this.
Casey:
Two periods.
Casey:
Thanks, Eric.
John:
Of course he's a two-period guy.
John:
He means a literal paper trail.
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
But I mean, do you not realize as the CEO of Google?
John:
Yes, it is delicious.
John:
It's delicious irony that this the person who doesn't care about anyone else is like, I don't know.
Casey:
This is the same guy who was like, oh, privacy doesn't really matter.
Casey:
It's not a thing.
Casey:
Nobody will really have privacy anymore.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
It's so ridiculously arrogant.
John:
Yeah, and the whole fact that the thing I was talking about where they're trying to talk about, did Steve give the okay?
John:
Can we hire these people?
John:
And it looked like it was going to be okay, but then Steve Jobs sends back one of his terse emails and says, I prefer you don't hire these people.
John:
And they all scramble and say, oh, we can't.
John:
We can't do it then.
John:
That's all happening over email, too.
John:
It's almost as if, not the ignorance of the law as a defense, but it's like, you read this, and you're like, do you guys not know that what you're doing is...
John:
both illegal and immoral like wouldn't you be embarrassed like if you're gonna rob a bank don't email your fellow bank robbers back and forth about it for the months leading up to it like that doesn't seem like a good idea but like so we're gonna rob the bank right okay i'll send you an email or i'll send you a text right like you know like seriously like it's just they they're so casual about it and they like they communicate to each other email so casually about this like it's almost as if looking from the outside you're like they must not know it's illegal because if you did no
John:
No idiot would email.
John:
It's just so incredibly incriminating.
John:
It's not like they were secretly taped or anything.
John:
They're emailing each other about it.
John:
And they didn't delete the emails.
John:
It's just mind-boggling.
Casey:
Yeah, it really is ridiculous.
John:
The moral of the story is don't work for any of these dicks.
John:
As you pointed out, this was in 2008, and I imagine that even this collusion was in effect once the big falling out between Apple and Google, like, you know, post iPhone, like those agreements were off.
John:
Like once Steve Jobs is saying to everybody, you know, we're going to bury Google and they betrayed us and they backstabbed us or whatever.
John:
I imagine he also said, and forget it, we're poaching all their people.
John:
It's too late.
John:
You already broke the law.
John:
And if there's a paper trail in electronic form, you're going to get screwed for it anyway.
John:
It's kind of a shame that Tim Cook is left holding the bag in this type of deal.
John:
If he knew about it and it was part of it, then maybe it's fitting.
John:
But if he didn't know about it or wasn't a part of it or disapproved of it, now he's the guy holding the bag on this.
John:
And so whatever.
John:
I mean, I'm assuming there'll be a wrist slap because it's always a wrist slap with these big, rich companies.
John:
It's a shame.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I'm guessing... It says... I think I've read somewhere that apparently a lot of the companies involved have already settled.
Marco:
I'm really surprised that Apple didn't.
Marco:
It seems like that would be the pragmatic approach here.
Marco:
Just settle this.
Marco:
Just take whatever it costs.
Marco:
Settle it quickly and quietly.
Marco:
As quietly as you can, at least.
Marco:
And just get it past you.
Marco:
Because, yeah, this is obviously a thing of the past for most of these companies because of their relationships that have changed.
Marco:
And especially, as I said, I really can't see Tim Cook wanting to be a part of this because he's too smart for that, I think.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
The whole thing is just gross.
John:
The revenue Apple generated while we were discussing this would be enough to pay for the settlement.
John:
So they're all set.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else?
Casey:
Are we good?
Casey:
Want to have a short one this week?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Well, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
To check out Pixelmator and Warby Parker.
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.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't.
Marco:
Actually, what we should talk about is WWDC theories, because that should be pretty quick for now.
Casey:
Okay, so I have an insane theory.
Casey:
So if you go to the Moscone schedule, let me find a link and stall for a moment while I'm doing that.
Casey:
There's a meeting in June.
Casey:
That's the American Diabetes Association, I believe.
Casey:
That goes on from the Friday that everyone expects.
Marco:
Are you talking 7th through 10th or 14th through?
Marco:
13th through 17th.
Marco:
I've heard it's the previous week, June 2nd through 6th.
Casey:
Okay, that corroborates my theory.
Marco:
Is your thing that has the Friday included, does that involve Moscone West?
Marco:
Because there's three Moscone.
Casey:
Now that's the thing.
Casey:
So you've hit the nail on the head.
Casey:
So I see that – actually, I saw a few weeks ago that the American Diabetes – or I'm sorry, the American Diabetes Association 74th Scientific Sessions, that is in Moscone North, South, and West from the 13th of June, which is that Friday, through the 17th, which is the following Tuesday.
Marco:
So there you go.
Marco:
It's the previous week.
Casey:
So, well, but no, it's not quite so simple because what I know the WWDC ends on Fridays and it ends around midday.
Casey:
And so let's assume for the sake of conversation for just a moment that maybe they could flip it or perhaps maybe the rest of the time the ADA needs West, but they made some agreement with Moscone where they don't need it Friday.
Casey:
So I go digging around to look at what is the American Diabetes Association 74th Scientific Sessions.
Casey:
And I'm trying to figure out, okay, is there or is there not anything going on in Moscone West?
Casey:
And I'm looking at...
Casey:
I'm looking at all sorts of things.
Casey:
I'm looking at vendor maps, and I don't think that was West.
Casey:
I'm looking at schedules, and they say, well, on Saturday, there's absolutely something in Moscone West, but there's no real talk about Friday in Moscone West until I find what I just put in the chat.
Casey:
Special opportunities.
Casey:
World Cup viewing room.
Casey:
Since scientific sessions will once again fall over FIFA World Cup matches, we'll set aside a viewing area in Moscone West so that attendees can catch up on the latest action without leaving the convention center.
Casey:
So with that in mind, when does the World Cup start?
Casey:
And I didn't verify this myself, but I was talking with Underscore earlier today, and he said it starts on like the 12th or something like that, or the 11th.
Casey:
I forget exactly what day.
Casey:
doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
But the point is, it starts before the 13th.
Casey:
So if you put all of this together, that says to me that Moscone West is going to be clogged up on Friday the 13th of June.
Casey:
So that eliminates the week of 9 through 13.
Casey:
The following week,
Casey:
It is still covered by the same ADA meeting.
Casey:
So we've got nine through 20 all booked up, which leaves 23 through 27, which has already been booked for Google I.O., which means by process of elimination, it's the second through the sixth.
Marco:
Yeah, or it's in August.
Casey:
If it's in June and if it's still at Moscone.
Marco:
And I think being at Moscone is a pretty safe bet just because where else are they going to do it?
Marco:
We've talked about this before.
Marco:
It's almost certainly still at Moscone.
Marco:
It doesn't necessarily have to be in June.
Marco:
It's just very likely it will be because that's how they've done it and it works out in a number of ways.
Marco:
I suspect it'll just be that first week, June 2nd through 6th.
John:
But it doesn't really matter where the dates are, because don't we all assume they're going to pre-announce the dates and the ticket sale and everything?
John:
It's not going to be a surprise anymore.
John:
The only question now is, is it going to be like last year, or is there going to be a lottery or whatever?
John:
But I really doubt they would ever go back to the thing where it's like, oh, here it is, and go buy it.
John:
It's always going to be pre-announced.
John:
So we just sit around and wait for them to pre-announce, and they'll say tickets will be on sale at X date, and here's the system we're going to use, and then we just all deal with it.
Casey:
Yeah, but it's nice to try to figure out what the schedule is.
Casey:
For example, I was thinking of flying Aaron out to meet me late in the week, and then we would spend some of the following week out there together.
John:
Yeah, I looked at plane tickets and hotel fare a little while ago, and the prices looked crazy and bad, so...
Casey:
Well, the prices are terrible in the 9th through the 13th.
Casey:
They're almost livable the 2nd through the 6th, as per underscore earlier today.
Marco:
Yeah, I saw the Park 55 hotel is almost exactly the same price now as it was last year.
John:
Well, that's gone down since I looked at last, because last I was looking, it was like $100 more per night.
Marco:
uh it it was like it was like in the high hundreds like 190 200 ish like in that oh that's really good no that's yeah yeah i mean we'll see yeah for the second to six it was substantially yeah i was talking underscore earlier too and he and he suggested too like you know maybe they'll do a lottery this year and i think honestly you know the more i think about it the more i think that's really the only good option at this point like anything that involves just everyone rushing at this particular time uh that's gonna always be problematic um
Marco:
It'd be one thing if it was like, all right, we're going to open it this time, first come, first serve, go.
Marco:
And it sells out in 10 minutes.
Marco:
So everyone has 10 minutes.
Marco:
A lot of people can get in in 10 minutes.
Marco:
But if it sells out in like 45 seconds again, like it did last year before everything started breaking and failing, that's tough.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What you want is for all the people who really, really want to get in to be able to get tickets.
Marco:
But there's not enough tickets for that anymore.
Marco:
There's too many people who qualify for that, people who really want to go.
Marco:
There's just too many of those.
Marco:
And any system you make is only going to have a random subset of them effectively.
Marco:
So you might as well do it in a way that feels fair and make it a lottery.
John:
It's not truly random anyway.
John:
I like the idea of people being rewarded for their enthusiasm for buying tickets.
John:
If Apple could just make a web application that doesn't die, then you could, in theory, give people tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.
John:
And then the people who are sitting there hovering over the button as the seconds tick down on their synchronized clock...
John:
They would be rewarded for their crazy enthusiasm for getting tickets, and they would be more likely to get tickets than the people who stroll in 30 seconds later.
John:
I know it's a small window and it's crazy, but if you could eliminate the error, a lottery is truly random.
John:
The people who are just like, meh.
John:
I guess I'll put my hat in the ring for WWC tickets.
John:
And they do that like three days after they were announced.
John:
They have an equal chance with you who is like there, you know, the second.
John:
And I don't think I like seeing some weight given to people who are more enthusiastic about going.
John:
And there's no way to express that enthusiasm.
John:
If there's a four day window for you to put your hat in the ring for a lottery for a ticket.
Casey:
I completely agree.
John:
So I would prefer it if they could just merely make a web application that work correctly and have it sell out in 10 seconds is fine with me.
John:
10 seconds is more than enough for everyone to sit there.
John:
Click, click, click, click, click.
John:
All the people who are there, you know, trying to get it in that 10 second window.
John:
Maybe it sells out in five seconds, in three seconds.
John:
Like...
John:
if they can just get an application that wouldn't break you could get you could reserve people spots in that amount of time and say your spot is reserved you have five minutes to check out and then the application won't fail and you've got you know like there we have somebody has a technology perhaps not apple but yeah that's the problem you're you're asking apple for like a really complicated web app that's going to be super reliable and fair right yeah right i mean come on
John:
Write the whole thing and like, it doesn't seem like, how many people could there possibly be?
John:
So let's say there's a million people who want to go to WDC.
John:
I think that's way too big.
John:
I feel like with Apple's budget, it is possible to set up a bunch of servers that serve like text only, no images, just like a button and like, click this button to reserve your ticket when it's like...
John:
I feel like I could write this thing for a million people.
John:
It would be ugly, but it would work.
John:
Give me Apple's budget and a couple months to do this, and I can make a fair system for reserving your spot for WWDC that gives you a token, and it sends you off to the real checkout process during which we check in.
John:
It's not rocket science.
John:
It doesn't have to be a big fancy store checkout process or whatever that's not used to this kind of onslaught, but...
Marco:
Well, I think the reason why it broke so badly last year is that Apple really didn't seem to do a lot of custom work for it.
Marco:
They basically just tried to wedge it into their regular checkout process, and it just was not designed.
Marco:
Whatever system, whatever backend stuff was involved with those tickets in particular, they didn't put enough effort into it.
Marco:
In short, they half-assed it, right?
Marco:
And
Marco:
Apple half-assing a web service, especially one meant for developers, is nothing new at all.
Marco:
And there's no signs ever from Apple, there's no signs that their priorities have changed in such a way that making a really amazing web service for developers is suddenly a really important thing.
Marco:
So I don't see that happening at all.
Marco:
And that's why I think if you assume that it's going to be no better than last year, if there's a big rush point, like if they say, all right, show up at this time, first come, first serve, just like last year.
Marco:
I don't have any reason to believe that reasonably speaking, it'll be any better than last year.
Marco:
And last year was pretty bad.
Casey:
Oh, last year was terrible.
Casey:
And I say that because I'm still grumbly about the fact that I had major ticket acquisition issues, but it was really rough.
Casey:
But that being said, how come we don't have the same problems with the last one or two iPhone and iPad pre-orders?
Casey:
If I recall correctly, the 5S did not have an online pre-order.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Well, there's way more capacity, though.
John:
Right.
John:
I don't think you have the emphasized rush because people know that there's not 5,000 iPads available.
John:
If there was 5,000 iPads available and people knew there were 5,000 iPads available, it would be the same disaster.
John:
But there's, you know, there's millions of iPads available.
John:
Sure.
John:
And it's spread out over, you know, like even the people who are like waiting up until 3 a.m.
John:
or whatever, everyone's getting through.
John:
And maybe your shipment date moves out if you're in the first five minutes or two.
John:
But it's not like this is so much more capacity.
John:
There's such a limited number of tickets for this.
Casey:
Right, but what I'm saying is, let's say there's 50,000 people that really want to go, and obviously I made that up out of thin air.
Casey:
Don't you think there'd be a lot more than 50,000 people trying to pre-order a new iPhone or iPad on the moment at 3 a.m.
Casey:
that it's available?
Marco:
Well, but they have to make that work really well.
Marco:
I mean, John, I think you're right that, yes, the demand probably is a little more spread out in that it isn't as urgent that everyone who wants one get there at second zero.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I also think that Apple puts a lot more resources into that and into testing and deploying that because it's way more important to them.
Marco:
Think about how much of their revenue is directly from that process on those couple of days or even that night.
Marco:
That's a lot of money.
Marco:
That's a huge, very important thing.
Marco:
If it fails, also it's a major PR blunder that they will be raked over the coals for and all the tech sites and everything saying how they're doomed because they can't keep a store up for their most important product.
Marco:
Meanwhile,
Marco:
If developers get a couple of error pages and everyone's carts time out and there's all these errors buying tickets to their developer conference, the Wall Street Journal doesn't give a crap about that.
Casey:
No, but I guess what I'm saying is if they clearly have conquered this for iDevices, couldn't you use some of the same either servers or tech or something for WWDC?
Casey:
And also consider that from everything we can tell from the outside...
Casey:
It seems like it was a pretty labor intensive aftermath last year when everyone got half cooked on their orders.
Casey:
And then people from Apple had to either email or call everyone.
Casey:
In fact, I thought they called a lot of people saying, hey, we see you got halfway through this order.
Casey:
Do you want to finish it?
Casey:
And that is not something I would assume they expected to need to do.
Casey:
And if that's a ton of people, even if it's a few thousand, I mean, a few thousand, if it's only two interns doing all the calls for the sake of conversation, that takes some time.
Casey:
And I remember hearing about these calls happening, I would say at least a couple of weeks, if not a month after the tickets went on sale.
John:
Well, all of this argues in favor of Apple doing the lottery, because if you think about it from Apple's perspective, a lottery is the best for them.
John:
It makes them not be embarrassed about having a crappy thing that falls down.
John:
It avoids all this work that you just described, Casey.
John:
And the third advantage that it gives to Apple is that it lets them cherry pick.
John:
Like they can, you know, oh, yeah, it's random, quote unquote.
John:
But behind the scenes, Apple has the ability to go that one, that one and that one and that one.
John:
OK, and then you do the rest of them random.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, and they do that anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
They were doing that with the people who had problems and whatever.
John:
But like a lottery is by far the best from Apple's perspective because it solves all of Apple's problems.
John:
It does not solve all of the customers problems.
John:
And I don't think it's more fair than the system I described.
John:
But if you just go by like what's best for Apple.
John:
a lottery is it so if you if you want to take the easy bet it's like will apple do the thing that's best for apple or will they care about how developers feel i don't know it's you know we'll see well with the added with the added caveat that the thing that's best for apple requires them to do a little bit more work on the service side
Marco:
Which makes it a lot less likely.
John:
Well, the thing that's best for Apple doesn't require them to do any more serverware.
John:
It's really easy to get a little sign-up form and just collect the names and then send out the emails and say, oh, congratulations, you've been selected, and check out at your leisure with the special token code.
John:
It's so much easier for them.
Casey:
Well, but didn't they do that?
Casey:
The last iPhone pre-order I did, which I did the 5S in line, but I believe for the 4S or maybe it was the, it doesn't matter, for something, I got a kind of sort of token.
Casey:
It basically said, okay, we see that you want an iPhone and we know that we can't handle it right now, but we have reserved one for you.
Casey:
We will email you a link and let you finish the process later when we think we're good and ready.
Casey:
Do you remember that, Marco?
Marco:
I don't, although Underscore said earlier that he thinks that's how tech talks were done, that tech talks were done by a lottery where you just like you enter your email and then it says, all right, we'll let you know if you can come.
John:
Yeah, they have to have a system for this.
John:
I mean, even if the system is simply will take provisional orders.
John:
And we'll just cancel the ones that we don't pick.
John:
There's so many ways within the bounds of... Because there's no time.
John:
It's like, sure, everyone get your tickets in over the course of the next week.
John:
No rush, because it doesn't matter when you do it.
John:
They have no problem supporting this using whatever system they decide to use.
John:
And it definitely makes their lives easier.
John:
And I think the extra control of them being able to cherry pick the people who they want and who they don't want there...
John:
just like they must be like, yeah, that's great.
John:
Why don't we just do that?
John:
And so I fear that's what will happen this year.
John:
But I mean, like Marco said, the realistic alternative is a repeat of last year because none of us believe that they can make a server or they would have the guts to make like a simple text only, no JavaScript, really tiny one button, click this thing to reserve your ticket kind of, you know, like they would never do that because it wouldn't be the Apple way and it wouldn't look all pretty and like,
John:
have shiny buttons.
Marco:
Well, that isn't even the problem.
Marco:
I mean, the layout you can solve with CDNs.
Marco:
I mean, that's not their problem.
Marco:
Can you?
John:
Apparently Apple can't because the CSS wouldn't load and half the pages during my checkout last year had no CSS in them.
John:
I just blindly plowed on.
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Marco:
As a developer of systems that handled these kinds of traffic in the past, I can't imagine the kind of weird, ancient, limited infrastructure they must have put on this task last year that caused this problem, unless there were millions of people hitting it at once.
Marco:
But there weren't.
Marco:
The total domain has to be under a million.
Marco:
It has to be.
Marco:
Yeah, total demand.
Marco:
They have 5,000 tickets.
Marco:
They sell it very quickly.
Marco:
How many people do you think are actually trying to get those tickets?
Marco:
10,000?
Marco:
20,000?
Marco:
50,000 maybe at most?
Marco:
How many could there really be?
Casey:
How long ago was the first sellout?
Casey:
Wasn't that like 2010, 2011, something like that?
Marco:
I think it was earlier.
Marco:
I think it was like 2009, but it was like a month and a half after the tickets went on sale.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So you look at, you know, I think it was 2012 was the first one that happened really fast, and that was like 10 minutes, something like that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I can't imagine we went from 2009, let's call it, where it took a month to sell out to 2010, where it was quick.
Marco:
Can I refuse to call it 2009?
Casey:
Yeah, well, this is accidental.
Casey:
You know, that's the way it is.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, in 2009, you know, it took a month to sell out.
Casey:
And then in 2012, it was really uncomfortably quick.
Casey:
And then 2013, it was just unbearably quick.
Casey:
I can't imagine that means there's more than 50,000 people, and even that I feel like is pretty aggressive, that are looking for tickets.
Marco:
What do you think this year, knowing what happened last year, knowing what people did last year, will you be going if you don't get a ticket?
John:
I probably won't because the videos are so much... The real-time videos that we didn't know were coming last year that Apple surprised us with, assuming they're going to do them again, that's probably enough for me.
John:
I'm not sure if I need to be there for... I mean, I guess it depends on what gets announced and if there are things that I would want to talk to people behind the scenes about or in person or whatever the...
John:
That experience I can't get with the videos, but depending on what's announced that experience may be less important.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's not always about the sessions, though.
Marco:
If I don't get a ticket, I think what I'll be most disappointed about missing, whether I'm there or not, is the socialization that happens in the common areas in Moscone during the day between the sessions.
Marco:
I see so many people there.
Marco:
I talk to so many people.
Marco:
I've made deals there.
Marco:
That's a very important thing to me, is that community...
Marco:
engagement like being around people of you know of our industry and meeting new people like being in the building to be there for all this if you just go and go for like the social elements and you know drinking at the bars with your friends afterwards and stuff you get some of that but it's not nearly as much
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's the thing is that I feel like I'd want to go for at least maybe two-thirds of the week, even if I didn't have a ticket.
Casey:
But, oh my goodness, selling work.
Casey:
Even if I told work, hey, I'll fund it from a financial perspective, but can I kind of not work for a week and not have to take vacation?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
that's going to be a tough sell i don't know if i yeah i mean i mean for me like i'm trying to just i'm justifying the large expense of the trip and everything is part of work on you know os 10 review so that's like it's it's like a business trip i have to take off from work from my real job that just it's you know it's vacation from that but it's like am i going to spend a week of vacation and also spend all this money to do this thing it has to be in service of something so i need to like it can't just be like oh i just want to hang out with my friends like if
John:
Yeah, if money was no object and I didn't have any other responsibilities, you'd just go there to have a fun week, right?
John:
But even if I didn't have a ticket, which some people did last year, but I don't think I have that luxury.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm 50-50.
Casey:
Knowing me, I'll cave and go.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
That's a tough sell.
Casey:
But it sounds like, Marco, you'd almost certainly do it.
Marco:
I would definitely go, but I would probably end up being really bored during most of the days.
Marco:
Because last year they released the videos, what was it, like the evening or the next morning there were the videos from the previous day?
Marco:
It wasn't real time, was it?
Marco:
But it was pretty soon afterwards.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
I think it was within 12 hours.
Marco:
Yeah, something like that.
Marco:
So on any given day, you could watch the previous day's videos.
Marco:
So yeah, maybe I could do that.
Marco:
But where am I going to do that?
Marco:
In what context?
Marco:
Am I going to sit around in a hotel room alone watching videos all day?
Marco:
That's going to suck.
Casey:
On crummy Wi-Fi?
John:
Right.
John:
Well, you'd go meet people for lunch and meet people for dinner.
John:
But yeah, the rest of the time you'd be sitting in a hotel room or in some coffee shop or something trying to stream videos.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that sounds like a pretty miserable week, honestly.
Marco:
So if that's the alternative, that's pretty bad.
Marco:
If there's a lot of people who are in this situation who all end up going, then maybe you could try to organize something a little more reasonable than that for the daytimes.
Marco:
And for the night, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
No one's in Moscone after 4 p.m.
Marco:
anyway.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
what do you do from 9 a.m.
Marco:
to 4 p.m.?
Marco:
That's the big question.
Marco:
And if you don't watch the videos, when do you watch the videos?
Marco:
One of the great things about being there is that your job during that week is to go to the sessions.
Marco:
So you will go to the sessions.
Marco:
Maybe not all of them, maybe not every slot, but you will go to the sessions.
Marco:
You have nothing else to do that week but do that.
Marco:
Whereas...
Marco:
If you wait until after that week, if you're like, oh, well, I'll watch the sessions when I get home.
Marco:
You know, I'll watch sessions later in the year.
Marco:
You'll just probably never do it because there's never a time where it's your job to watch that session.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And there was alt WWDC last year, which from everything I've heard was actually very, very good.
Casey:
So you could presumably go to that and spend your time there during the day.
Casey:
But I agree.
Casey:
And the other thing to consider is that despite San Francisco being this hotbed of internet everything, the hotel Wi-Fi in any hotel I've ever stayed in is just as crummy as every other hotel anywhere in the country.
Marco:
Oh, it's miserable.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So what do you do to get the videos, even if you could get them?
Casey:
I mean, you have to have to go to – Marco, would you go to Starbucks to get the videos?
Marco:
Honestly, I would probably just ask like Macworld or an office that's nearby that we're friends with.
Marco:
I would just ask them if I could go to their office and use their internet connection to download all these things.
Marco:
And that might be the answer, right?
Marco:
The answer might be small groups of people who know someone in San Francisco get together at various people's offices or apartments and have little parties or gatherings or Wi-Fi download sessions there.
Marco:
But the problem is that's not really...
Marco:
That's not really like a big community event.
Marco:
It breaks up into smaller communities, and it also makes it much harder for people who don't know anyone yet, who are new to the community, who don't know anyone in San Francisco, or don't know anyone in these big companies.
Marco:
It makes it much harder of a sell for them to be any part of this, really.
Marco:
And that's a shame.
Marco:
And so, you know, it's, you know, it's one thing like, you know, we can go out there and yeah, Jason Snell already said we could use their office.
Marco:
So we know we, we know if we went out there, we'd have somewhere to go.
Marco:
Um, but that's not going to apply to everyone.
Marco:
And that's right.
Marco:
It's just, it's just kind of, it's just an, it's an unfortunate situation that it has to be limited like this, but you know, unfortunately it does.
Marco:
Like there, there are no bigger venues.
Marco:
There aren't no, uh,
Marco:
Even if they could find a bigger venue, do you really want a conference with 20,000 people?
Marco:
We've been to those.
Marco:
South by Southwest is giant, and it's terrible.
Casey:
Doesn't it spread out over all of Austin?
Casey:
I've never been, but my understanding was it's like a gazillion different locations all around Austin.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Yeah, it pretty much started spreading out to like, now you have to take buses across the river to go to some weird hotel for session one.
Marco:
It's so weird.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
It's like forums.
Marco:
Discussion forums have certain sizes above which they just do not scale very well.
Marco:
And once the community gets beyond that size, there's kind of no turning back.
Marco:
There's no rescuing it.
Marco:
It just gets out of control.
Marco:
And, you know, conferences are a similar thing.
Marco:
There's certain natural sizes after which it's just really, really hard to make it good and to make it work.
Marco:
And I think they definitely...
Marco:
have reached that point with WWDC.
Marco:
We see how it's very hard to get into a lot of the sessions because there's lines out the door.
Marco:
You can't even get into so many of them.
Marco:
It's already bursting at the seams.
Marco:
They can't really make it bigger and have it be the same kind of thing.
Marco:
And there's lots of, you know, they could try to split it up in various ways, but then that kind of ruins other aspects of it as well, including some of that community aspect.
Marco:
So it's one of those things that there's just no good option here.
Marco:
We just have to pick between bad options.
Marco:
And on that bombshell... Speaking of picking between bad options, what about those M3 colors?
Casey:
Oh, God, they're so bad.
Casey:
They're so bad.