Boiling A Pretty Big Lake
Marco:
Remember when Twitter was good?
Casey:
Well, Twitter itself, the service is still mostly okay.
Casey:
But God, the decisions that make a terrible... You know what I've noticed lately, by the way?
Casey:
Maybe I'm just waking up to five years ago, but I've done a couple of searches recently for hotels, like for WWDC and things like that.
Casey:
And I was looking at Facebook recently, and they were putting in ads for...
Casey:
for the destinations I was searching for when I was not even anywhere near Facebook at the time, which is extremely creepy.
Marco:
Oh, that's the new internet.
Marco:
That's the modern privacy economy.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
So now I'm extreme.
Casey:
So the net effect from that is that if I do look at Facebook, I look at it, and then I log the hell out because I feel like that makes a difference, even though it probably doesn't.
Marco:
It doesn't.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, this is just like the boil the frog analogy.
Marco:
It's like, you know, at some point we all say, oh, we can't do this.
Marco:
This is too creepy.
Marco:
And then, you know, six months later, that's fine.
Marco:
And then move on to the next creepy thing.
Marco:
And Facebook and Google and all these companies that make money based on how creepy they're willing to be.
Marco:
will always get more and more creepy over time because that's how they will keep making money and keep staying ahead of each other in the competition and keep their numbers growing every quarter.
Marco:
It's a whole business built on how creepy are you willing to be.
Marco:
And if you take small enough steps, it's pretty easy to justify pretty much anything.
Casey:
Anyway, you want to do some follow up?
Casey:
Actually, let me since I've brought it up, let me interrupt you by saying we should we have recorded this on Monday, the 19th of May.
Casey:
And we did that because our schedules over the next couple of weeks are a little wild.
Casey:
But regardless of when we release this, if anything, wacky wild, something like that.
Casey:
Regardless of when we release this, if something we say sounds really, really stupid because of some news that has just recently come out, it's because we recorded this on Monday rather than our normal day.
Casey:
And clearly that's why we sounded stupid.
Casey:
And it couldn't possibly be because we actually said something stupid.
Marco:
Right, and that would be the only reason why we would ever say anything stupid.
Marco:
It's only because we record the show a couple days before we post it, usually.
Marco:
That's the only reason we ever get anything wrong.
Casey:
I'm not going to bring up finals.
Casey:
So, tell me about Beats headphones.
Marco:
So, last week, I kind of defended Apple's supposed acquisition of Beats, which we still don't know anything about, and we still have no confirmation about, but...
Marco:
I defended it basically saying that Beats is actually a really strong headphone brand and that their headphones, while they are not what audiophiles want in a headphone, they are very appealing to a lot of people.
Marco:
And well, anyway, so today I actually spent the most time that I've ever spent with Beats headphones because I had to go back to the Apple store.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
What's going on?
Casey:
Is it anything worth sharing?
Marco:
No, the iPhone 5 sleep-wake replacement program.
Marco:
I wanted to get mine replaced because I wanted to have a very long life for development testing.
Marco:
So anyway, so I went to go pick it up today.
Marco:
And, you know, like everything you do at an Apple store these days, this is probably its own topic, but everything you do at an Apple store these days takes like 45 minutes.
Marco:
Because there are certain things that you can't really make appointments for, like picking up your phone from repair.
Marco:
There are other things that you can make appointments for if you're willing to make an appointment 17 days ahead of time.
Marco:
And then you get there and it doesn't really matter that you made the appointment because they are already backed up and it still takes 40 minutes before anybody will see you.
Casey:
Like a doctor.
Marco:
Yeah, and they do this weird thing where you go to the person... Well, first you go to the person at the front door who seems to be doing nothing.
Marco:
And they tell you to go back to Ivan in the back or whatever and go register with Ivan back there with the line of people.
Marco:
So you go in the store and you think you're getting somewhere.
Marco:
And then there's this big line of people behind some guy with an iPad.
Marco:
And eventually you get to him and you tell him what you need.
Marco:
And he's like, all right, here, stand here at this table and wait.
Marco:
And we'll have, you know...
Marco:
jerry come out and talk to you and so then then you stand and then you're like all right well you know five ten minutes in like okay can i move from this table like what what will happen if i go look at the laptops over at that other table or go start playing with the headphones at the table over there um and you just kind of have to sit there standing around like
Marco:
waiting and playing this game, like, oh, maybe I'll just go over there and listen for my name and look for someone walking over there.
Marco:
It's a really weird experience.
Marco:
I definitely get the feeling that Apple retail stores are not only having trouble keeping up with the customer volume that they get, but...
Marco:
Not doing a very good job with the solutions they've come up with so far with creating good experiences with people.
Marco:
I no longer enjoy going to the Apple Store.
Marco:
It's getting closer and closer to going to the DMV in experience, quality, and things I would try to avoid.
Casey:
But it's really because you're an East Coaster and we're too, I don't know, organized.
Casey:
And we like order too much.
John:
Lines.
John:
We like lines.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Apple stores are, to me, like the epitome of California.
Casey:
Hey, man, it's cool.
Casey:
Just wait here for a while.
Casey:
It'll be awesome.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I've never enjoyed going to Apple stores.
John:
I want to get in.
John:
I want to get out.
John:
And they make it impossible.
John:
It's like a game.
John:
You just have to try to get served.
John:
Good luck.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I will say that the...
Casey:
Apple Store app that lets you buy things.
Casey:
That is really nice.
Casey:
But everything else about the experience is pretty crummy these days.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so I had some time for my pickup that's supposed to only take five minutes.
Marco:
I had probably a good 20 minutes in there.
Marco:
And I went back to the headphone tables I mentioned last week.
Marco:
I figured, well, you know, it was only two tables away from my designated spot where I was supposed to stand, but there was nothing.
Marco:
So I figured, you know, oh, well, I'll see what goes on.
Marco:
And it turns out they did find me.
Marco:
It wasn't a big deal.
Marco:
So nice top tip for all you life hacks out there.
Marco:
So I got a chance to try all of the headphones they had.
Marco:
I made it a point to try every single one.
Marco:
And so it was probably a total of, I don't know, maybe 20 sets, something like that.
Marco:
And the good thing is this time there was a song on most of the iPods.
Casey:
There was the Foo Fighters' Walk.
Casey:
Learning to walk again
Marco:
Which is a great song from a great album from a great band.
Marco:
And the good thing about this song is that I actually knew it.
Marco:
Normally I go to the iPods in these stores and I don't know any of the songs on them.
Marco:
And they're all crappy modern pop songs, which makes it very hard for me to judge sound quality.
Marco:
And I'm always afraid to plug my own iPhone in because it looks like the headphone cable had some kind of security attachment on it as well.
Marco:
So I'm never willing to plug my own phone in to use my own music.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
So I was able to compare this song that I know very well.
Marco:
I know how it's supposed to sound on good headphones.
Marco:
And it's a pretty rocking song.
Marco:
It has a lot of bass, a lot of everything, really.
Marco:
It's a very, you know, all over the spectrum kind of song.
Marco:
So it should give me a pretty good idea of how things sound.
Marco:
And I tried every headphone they had that worked, which is another problem.
Marco:
About a quarter of them just didn't work.
Marco:
A lot of them, like, they weren't plugged in, maybe, or they had noise canceling and the batteries were dead, or whatever the case, doesn't matter.
Marco:
Most of them I was able to try.
Marco:
And the beats had such an incredibly distinct sound.
Marco:
And by that I mean it was all bass.
Marco:
Like, all, all bass.
Marco:
It was shocking.
Marco:
Like, you know, in this Foo Fighters song...
Marco:
I had to turn it down far enough that it wasn't blowing up my ears with bass, but at the highest bass volume I could tolerate for a sustained period, you could barely hear the words that were being said.
Marco:
The bass was so strong and the mid-range was tucked down under everything, you could barely hear it.
Marco:
And it was really strange.
Marco:
And so I looked at a few other, you know, I tried a few other sets and verified that, you know, they didn't just have a crappy version of the song.
Marco:
It wasn't some weird EQ setting in the iPod settings area or whatever.
Marco:
It was just that the Beats headphones really sounded bizarre.
Marco:
And I don't know why anybody would want that.
Marco:
I said last week that people do like it, and that's true.
Marco:
I mean, I guess this is a lot of the same opinion I have when I drink Starbucks coffee, but man, it was rough.
Marco:
It was really rough.
Marco:
And I tried every other set they had, too, and most of them... I tried all the Bose ones.
Marco:
Bose has this new line called Accurate Sound or something, which is comical because it doesn't sound accurate at all.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of...
Marco:
all sorts of other luxury brands.
Marco:
There's Bang & Olufsen, there's B&W, and not BMW, B&W, and all these other things.
Marco:
And, oh, please, BMW, never make headphones, because they would probably be terrible, and that would cause a conflict in my mind.
Marco:
So, generally, I got the opinion, if you ever go into a Bang & Olufsen mall store,
Marco:
uh they will it's you get the feeling it's it's like a bose store times 10 where like they have all these things around that like you know they'll have like this crazy expensive speaker dock crazy expensive headphones crazy expensive speaker tower fan thing and all these like weird bizarre boutique electronics that are ridiculously expensive and you know kind of cool and gimmicky maybe but probably not worth those prices um
Marco:
that's how the Apple Store is getting with all of its audio stuff.
Marco:
And to some extent, it's always been this way.
Marco:
The Apple Store has never been a place where you could go buy audiophile-grade headphones or anything.
Marco:
But that is... That's how their entire headphone department is.
Marco:
It's these, like...
Marco:
$200 to $400 boutique, fancy, fashion-y, marketing-heavy brands that are not very good by most measures, but just cost a lot of money and are fancy.
Marco:
And I wonder... I hope...
Marco:
I hope this is wrong, but I'm a little scared this might be a future direction that Apple takes or makes a bigger push into with their retail efforts.
Marco:
Becoming this fancy upscale boutique thing and other things.
Marco:
We...
Marco:
Apple has always had the reputation for being expensive and overpriced compared to other computers.
Marco:
And we all know because, you know, we're not, we all know because we're informed on these matters that Apple computers really aren't that much more expensive than comparably priced other computers.
Marco:
Apple just doesn't really have the kind of low end that everyone else will market.
Marco:
You know, Apple just pretty much has the mid-range and high end of computers.
Marco:
In fact, really just the high end these days.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so Apple computers are not overpriced.
Marco:
They are expensive, but it's a good value.
Marco:
You get your money's worth for them.
Marco:
All the headphones they have in their store are not that way.
Marco:
They don't have that same like, okay, well, they're pricey, but it's worth it.
Marco:
They're pricey and it's not worth it.
Marco:
And it is just overpriced, you know, kind of almost sham marketing sheep kind of stuff.
Marco:
Like all the stuff that other fans accuse us of for being like, you know, Apple sheep or fanboys or whatever.
Marco:
That's all like people who like the kind of headphone brands that Apple sells.
Marco:
Those accusations are a lot more accurate for that and for the headphone business that Apple is doing now.
Marco:
And so I hope that Apple is not going to go further in that direction because it scares me because I think that would actually damage their overall brand because people would start associating Apple with even more so with like overpriced stuff that's not actually worth its price.
Marco:
And for the rest of their products, that's not the case.
John:
But people like those headphones, though.
John:
People see the value in Beats headphones because they're cool, right?
John:
Whereas when you show them your Mac, you're like, well, I like it because of such and such operating system and build quality and whatever.
John:
And they're like...
John:
Meh.
John:
But you show them the Beats headphones and they don't care about the sound quality.
John:
They like them because they're cool.
John:
It's like those $100 pair of jeans.
John:
The stores that sell $100 jeans.
John:
Try to convince someone who bought a $100 pair of jeans that your $25 pair of Levi's is just as good.
John:
You won't.
John:
It's a different type of mindset of the experience.
John:
I think the advantage that Beats has is that you don't have to convince a regular person that the Beats headphones are worth that.
John:
You do have to try to convince...
John:
the regular person that your Mac is worth more than a $300 Dell laptop because they don't see that.
John:
I mean, we see the differences, but they don't.
Casey:
I don't know if that's necessarily true, though.
Casey:
I think that most people that don't have Macs would probably buy one and spend the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that they think extra.
Casey:
If a comparable PC is $500, the equivalent Mac in their minds is $1,000.
Casey:
I think a lot of people would spend that extra $500, so to speak,
Casey:
But the thing is, it's $1,000 they're spending to get this Mac, unlike spending just a couple hundred dollars on a pair of headphones.
Casey:
Like a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money, don't get me wrong.
Casey:
But it's a much more approachable luxury price point.
Casey:
In the same way that there are probably many people that would, if they could, buy either a German luxury car or perhaps an Italian sports car.
Casey:
But as you keep going up this ladder, the jump from agreeable to really nice is tremendous and less and less and less affordable.
John:
Think about Air Jordans when we were kids in the 80s and 90s.
John:
They were $100 in the 80s.
John:
That's easily the amount of Beats headphones that were Air Jordans better than a basketball shoe that costs half as much.
John:
Probably not.
John:
What about the Reebok pump?
Casey:
Oh, I wanted some of those so bad.
John:
Yeah, you wanted them because they're cool.
John:
They got to charge a ridiculous premium for them, and they were similarly priced to Beats headphones today, adjusting for inflation, depending on what particular model you were getting.
Marco:
i have incredibly sad real-time follow-up this is the saddest thing i've ever seen oh the beats bmw headphones yeah yeah there actually is a pair of beats bmw headphones officially made by beats licensed by bmw wow i can't even imagine the level of douchetude required to wear those in public wow
John:
wow but it's just it's just the bmw logo that adds that though beats by themselves are just beats once you add the bmw logo to it's like that's too much yeah that's that's rough that wow well they have those didn't porsche porsche design did like a hard drive enclosure for lacy at some point oh please porsche and ferrari are the worst when it comes to licensing their their logo for use on everything under the sun
John:
But it wasn't a logo.
John:
It was like they designed.
John:
I didn't even think it had the Porsche logo on it.
John:
It wasn't like a car type thing.
John:
The Porsche has a design studio.
John:
They did a laptop like that, too.
John:
It didn't look bad.
John:
Anyway, those Beats headphones is just logo branding.
John:
All they did was stamp a BMW thing on there.
Casey:
And probably triple the price.
Marco:
Well, it's on sale right now for only $150.
Marco:
You couldn't pay me to wear those.
Marco:
Before I get miserable as well, anything else on Beats?
Marco:
No, I think that's it.
Marco:
Just that the Apple Store is a terrible place to buy headphones.
Marco:
I will say, by far, the most comfortable pair of headphones there, it was night and day difference.
Marco:
Most comfortable pair of headphones by far was the B&O H6.
Marco:
Those like tan ones with like the white cups and the tan leather ear cups.
Marco:
extremely lightweight very very comfortable they they were in a class of their own for comfort unfortunately they're like three or four hundred dollars and they didn't sound that good um but they those were great and all the other ones like people kept asking oh did you try like you know the the bmw p5 and p7 yes i did um all the new bows the quiet comfort 15 the new you know accurate whatever which is a hilarious name all those things everything i tried sounded weird and disappointing to me in some way or another
Marco:
A lot of people have asked me what they should buy instead of these things.
Marco:
I don't have one solid answer for that because it depends on what you're doing.
Marco:
I guess I'll write it up on my site sometime.
Marco:
The challenge is that a lot of times these luxury overpriced marketing brands...
Marco:
will be better than the better sounding ones in some of those factors like comfort or convenience, noise isolation, or the clicker.
Marco:
They'll have the iPhone clicker where some of the big ones won't.
Marco:
So it's tough.
Marco:
I can't just give one solid recommendation.
Marco:
I would say, in general, there's, like, five or six solid models.
Marco:
I disagree with the Wirecutter on a number of them, but for the most part, there's, like, five or six good solid models.
Marco:
Like, you know, the AKG makes a bunch of good ones.
Marco:
Sony makes some good ones.
Marco:
Bayer Dynamic, or Bayer Dynamic, however you say it.
Marco:
I love their stuff.
Marco:
The DT770s would be a really good pick, I think, which Casey's wearing right now.
Marco:
There's a number of really good ones that are not that expensive and are very good.
Marco:
But, you know, it depends on, you know, do you need them to be portable?
Marco:
Like, for portable...
Marco:
If you're going to be walking around and you want them to be folded up and pocketable, I haven't found anything better than the Sennheiser PX200 2i, which is unfortunate because it's mediocre in all other regards except portability, but it destroys everything else in portability.
Marco:
Everything that's not an earbud, it's way better.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
if you can wear in-ear monitors or earbuds without a lot of discomfort like what i have by all means do that because they're way more practical you can fold them up and put them in your pocket and everything i just can't wear those so you know i'm stuck with full-size headphones but oh well anyway before we move on to anything else we should talk about our first sponsor it's a new sponsor this week it's called dash it's the dash.com slash atp that's the dash.com slash atp
Marco:
Dash is run by a really nice guy who I met last year, and I can't tell you why, but he did a really nice thing for me.
Marco:
Anyway, so this is thedash.com.
Marco:
Now he's a paying sponsor, and his site is even better now than it was last year, and it's really great.
Marco:
They've done a lot of good work here.
Marco:
So Dash is real-time dashboard for your website, your business, your life.
Marco:
It's an online dashboard and it has all these little widgets.
Marco:
It's almost like a more deluxe, more robust hosted version of Panic's status board.
Marco:
as like a web app and so it's really it's really quite good so go to the dash.com slash atp to see what i mean they have a bunch of different widgets pre-built for you you can build your own widgets they have they integrate with lots of third-party services you can do things like you know watch your server statuses or watch the weather watch the news analytics kind of things for your services or for your products whatever you can get
Marco:
You can also set up variations of your name to get vanity searches, your product name, your company name.
Marco:
You can search Twitter, Google News, all sorts of great stuff.
Marco:
They also have... You can customize all these widgets.
Marco:
They support Apple TV.
Marco:
It'll look good there.
Marco:
It'll look good on a Chromecast if you Airplay it or send it to Chromecast.
Marco:
And all this stuff is really...
Marco:
you got to just log in and try it out and the good thing is you can log in for free you can sign up with just an email free accounts you can get one private dashboard and uh you can also create public dashboards it's kind of like github where like the public model is free and then if you want private ones like for your internal company use that you want to keep private you get one for free and uh if you have a if you have a pro account for just 10 bucks a month you can have unlimited private ones if you want
Marco:
but everybody gets unlimited public dashboards so check it out go to thedash.com slash ATP really great thing here and check it out great guy behind it and I've tried it it's pretty fun to play around with and you can make some pretty cool dashboards thanks a lot to dash at thedash.com slash ATP for sponsoring our show he made dashboards on that page he's got one for each one of us this looks really nice
Marco:
Yeah, this does look awesome.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, he's a fan.
Marco:
He actually bought a few sponsorships.
Marco:
I think we have him for like the next three weeks.
Marco:
So yeah, he's a fan of the show.
Marco:
He's been following us for a long time.
Marco:
And so we thank him very much.
Marco:
This is really cool stuff.
Casey:
You know, I love that for each of these dashboards, there's an image.
Casey:
And for John, it's, I believe, the correct toaster.
Casey:
That is the correct one.
Casey:
I was going to say, from my eyes, it looks right.
Casey:
See, attention to detail.
Casey:
For mine, it's a white BMW.
Casey:
Well, that could be silver, but it looks white to me, BMW.
Casey:
For yours, it's a picture of yourself, which I just think is a hysterical commentary on what the three of us think is important.
Marco:
Yep, this guy's such a fan.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
He needs to add hypercritical.co to my server status widget.
John:
This looks really nice.
Marco:
Well, you can try it for free if you want everything to be public.
John:
Yeah, we should move our download stats to this.
Casey:
Anyway, all right, so we have a little bit more follow-up about net neutrality.
John:
Yeah, this was just an article today that reminded me of our past discussions of net neutrality.
John:
It's by, these guys confuse all the time, so I wrote his name.
John:
Ben Thompson is a stratechery guy, or stratechery if he's given up on stratechery, but I still like stratechery.
John:
It's about net neutrality and touches on some of the things that we mentioned on the last show.
John:
about how there are tech companies that are lobbying Washington for their interests in the net neutrality debate.
John:
And then there are the ISPs and all the other companies lobbying on the other side of this, and they're spending way more money than the tech companies.
John:
And this article basically says that we shouldn't all be as cynical as we are about
John:
uh making changes don't just assume oh we're never going to win or whatever because if we do that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and i don't want to ruin the little arc of this article it's kind of short but you should you should read it he describes some of his personal experiences and he said how he says despite his personal experiences it's important for all of us in the tech community not to give up on this and not to be like well you know nothing's ever going to change so why bother
John:
uh and and particularly highlights the phenomenon of us doing that well nothing's going to change why bother and then waiting for some terrible bill to come up or for some terrible thing to be proposed and then everyone gets angry all of a sudden on the internet and like fills out these little petition forms and i do this as well like you know just tries to rally people on twitter and use hashtags and do whatever you can and write your congressperson and call them to try to stop whatever is like at the last minute right and
John:
His comparison is like, that's what we're doing.
John:
And the other people have been lobbying Washington steadily for 10 years.
John:
And so our strategy of waiting to the last minute and get all angry, it becomes less and less effective as everyone gets bored of our anger, you know.
John:
So I mean, I'm actually even a little bit more cynical.
John:
Then this article in that I think that even if we all have the right attitude, the bottom line is if we don't have the same number of zeros before the decimal point and the amount of money that we're throwing into Washington, it doesn't really matter.
John:
So maybe that's the next level of cynicism that he has to shake me out of.
John:
But I thought it was a good article.
John:
I think everyone should read it.
John:
We'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So something we didn't get a chance to talk about last week and perhaps even a week or two before that is that Nintendo is not having a good time.
John:
Yeah, this keeps floating around the notes.
John:
I don't know if there's that much to add.
John:
I mean, I think the reason it went in there is because they announced some financial results, which were bad.
John:
And they made some projections about how many Wii U consoles they think they're going to sell this year.
John:
And it's not a lot.
John:
And it's causing everyone to think about Nintendo again.
John:
And I don't think anything has changed other than...
John:
And us knowing now that the things that Nintendo has tried to do and seems to be trying to do aren't working, or at least they aren't working yet.
John:
I wrote something about this on Hypercritical a while back about Nintendo in Crisis.
John:
I went back and reread that, and I think it basically, that's still my opinion.
John:
It doesn't, nothing has changed.
John:
That Nintendo has the ability to get themselves out of the funk that they're in, because the whole thing was based on a premise that
John:
If if there's no longer a market for devices that mostly play games, Nintendo is screwed.
John:
But if there is a market for devices that mostly play games, then they have a chance.
John:
And so there definitely is a market for things that just play games because the PlayStation 4 is selling like crazy and Xbox One is selling pretty well as well.
John:
They're kind of changing their strategy to try to keep up with the PlayStation 4.
John:
And even the 3DS isn't doing that terribly, but the Wii U is doing terribly.
John:
But anyway, the point is that it's not as if no one is buying things that mostly play games.
John:
People are still buying them.
John:
It's still a big market.
John:
Nintendo has the ability to get themselves out of their current crisis.
John:
They're just not doing it.
John:
So that was just a, you know, I don't want to go necessary but not sufficient again, but it's a precondition for them getting out.
John:
And so the question is, what do they do at this point?
John:
Do they just keep trying to release games for the Wii U and hope that some game catches on and people buy them?
John:
Like the Wii U is kind of in the classic death spiral where they don't sell a lot of consoles, which means the third party developers aren't going to bother making games for it because even if you sold to 100% of Wii U owners, which you're never going to do, there would still be a small number.
John:
And because there's no third party games, people have less and less reason to buy a Wii U and it just goes down, down, down.
John:
So...
John:
I don't know what they can or should do.
John:
Mario Kart 8's coming out soon.
John:
Mario Kart 8's getting great reviews.
John:
Everyone says it's a great game.
John:
Is that going to sell more Wii U consoles?
John:
Probably not.
John:
I mean, it's the same choice they had before.
John:
Either make games that make people buy Wii U consoles, and if third parties won't do it, you've got to do it yourself, or figure out what your next thing is.
John:
I think Nintendo has enough money and stamina and corporate will
John:
to weather the storm of the terrible Wii U sales and figure out what they're going to do next.
John:
And hopefully, hopefully by the time they make their next move with either the next console or revision of the Wii U or whatever, we haven't passed through the period of time during which game mostly or game only hardware is something that people want to buy.
John:
So.
Marco:
If you were Nintendo, what would you do?
Marco:
Can I go back in time?
Marco:
Do I have a time machine or not?
Marco:
If you took over today and you had enough political power to push through any change or initiative you wanted to, what would you do?
John:
I would start working on my next console, which will be comparable in power to the competitive consoles.
John:
And I would do basically what Sony did this generation, which is look at what you did in the past generation and what everyone hated you for, what developers are pissed off at you about, what third parties are pissed off with you about.
John:
Get all those people in the room, have them all tell you what you did wrong and how your actions have hurt them.
John:
And then sort of like an intervention and then take that information and fix all those mistakes.
John:
Sony did an amazing job with the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 3 had all sorts of problems.
John:
It was late.
John:
It was expensive.
John:
It was a weird architecture.
John:
Third parties didn't like it.
John:
And so for the PlayStation 4, they brought all those people together to just tell us what you think we should do.
John:
And they listened to them.
John:
They actually listened instead of being like, oh, we know what the best thing is.
John:
And that's one of the reasons the PlayStation 4 is doing so much better.
John:
It was relatively inexpensive.
John:
They didn't commit lots of money to a motion control accessory of dubious value like Microsoft did.
John:
They made the architecture much nicer for developers.
John:
They worked on their dev tools.
John:
They were nicer to third parties.
John:
And their reward is they're the clear leader in this generation of consoles.
John:
So Nintendo needs a console that is on the same hardware level as whatever its competitors are going to be.
John:
That's the price of entry where you can say, OK, then at the very least, we can convince EA to give us the next iterations of all its games.
John:
Make it a no-brainer for people to port to.
John:
Like, well, we're making a cross-platform game.
John:
It's easy enough to port it to.
John:
Whatever the new Xbox is, whatever the new PlayStation is, and whatever Nintendo's console is.
John:
And for two generations now, they've been out of that conversation.
John:
And they're getting farther and farther out of that conversation.
John:
Whenever you're going to make a new game, you're going to be like, well, we're going to make it for Microsoft console, Sony console.
John:
And then maybe like a year later, we'll think about making some terrible cut down port to go on Nintendo's console.
John:
Last generation, they didn't need the third party support because of the magic of the Wiimote and waggling your wrists and Wii Sports and all that good stuff.
John:
This generation, they didn't pull it off.
John:
Their novelty with the gamepad was not enough to get people on board, and they're in sort of a death spiral.
John:
So the next generation, they got to make competitive hardware.
John:
And if they can't make competitive hardware, this is an option for them.
John:
They say, oh, they should get out of the hardware business.
John:
If they can't make competitive hardware and decide they're not going to be in the hardware business,
John:
I guess they should partner with somebody like this is not my first choice, but I think about this a lot.
John:
It's like if this is not in Nintendo's wheelhouse to ever do hardware anymore, you know, go over to Sony and say, we really like what you've done with your hardware.
John:
How would you like it if we teamed up on the next console and made sort of a joint Sony Nintendo console where Nintendo had some influence on the hardware and it was, you know, amazing, great hardware that had lots of power, was inexpensive and innovative and maybe had a VR headset or whatever.
John:
And then all the Nintendo franchises will be exclusively on that console.
John:
Again, I don't put that as my first choice, but I spend a lot of time thinking about it because I look at the PlayStation 4 and I say, how great would it be if I knew that Nintendo was right now working on a Zelda game for that console?
John:
And they're not.
John:
They're working on it for the Wii U, which is going to be, I'll enjoy it as well and it'll be interesting, but it's kind of a shame that they're going to be that constrained when the contemporary consoles have so much more power.
John:
So that's what I'd do.
John:
I would get working on the next console and make it competitive.
Casey:
so if nintendo gets in a really bad place they continue marching down the hardware path and that continues to go poorly and now they're legitimately starting to to you know circle the drain does apple buy them no i hope that would be like terrible i i would not want apple to buy them because apple doesn't apple's not into games but what if they want to be
John:
I don't know if you can, you know, it's, it's part, it's either part of your culture or it's not, I'm not going to say that Apple doesn't get games, but you know, it's, it's like the, what do you call it?
John:
The terrible book from the nineties.
John:
He's just not that into you.
John:
Apple.
John:
That's one of the notes.
John:
And when I notes up Apple and games, he's just not that into you.
John:
Like they're doing Apple's just not that into games.
John:
Like they liked them on their platform and the fun and everything, but all the other gaming companies, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple,
John:
have people in positions of power who are really into games who love games who live and breathe games like that is the same thing with any movie studio yeah there's going to be a bunch of bureaucrats and suits at movie studios but there's also going to be people who love movies and movie studios you need to have that not everybody there's going to be some stuffed shirts in there and everything but you need to have people same thing with car companies the car guys who just love cars you absolutely need to have them and thus far i'm not convinced there is anyone high up in any position of power that that has that passion for games at apple
John:
Which is fine.
John:
Apple doesn't have to be a game company, but I would not want them to buy Nintendo.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that not only is Apple not caring about games, I don't think they respect games.
Marco:
I said this before a long time ago, so I'll just go over the quick version, but basically...
Marco:
If you look at Apple's history of how they treat games on their platforms, both on the Mac and on iOS, on the Mac, they basically said, we're never going to do anything to really make games easier or possible to bring this platform in a competitive way.
Marco:
On iOS, games came there anyway for other reasons, and Apple found themselves in the position of all of a sudden being in a really pretty powerful and pretty important position in the gaming world almost accidentally.
Marco:
and the way they've treated it since then has really just been kind of patronizing like game center is is one of the best examples of this and just like the the the mediocrity that game center is uh together with the design that it had uh at first does it still look like that in seven or did they
John:
it's in seven.
John:
It's got these bubbles and stuff.
John:
Like every game that I have in a game center integration, I, it makes it worse.
John:
Like when I play letterpress, like I'll get, I'll get a notification and letterpress that someone's moved.
John:
And then I will, you know, swipe and letterpress will be the front most app.
John:
Like I'm not swiping on the notification.
John:
I'm just swiping to reveal letterpress as the front most app.
John:
And I can sit there and stare at it and like, oh, well, it said there was a move, but I don't see it yet.
John:
And my solution is always go, you know, hit the home button, then go back into letterpress.
John:
Then maybe it will load the move like stuff like that.
John:
It's like no progress indication, long waiting times.
John:
A notification comes through, but the game doesn't know about it yet.
John:
Like what?
John:
I mean, it's great that Loren didn't have to write all this code himself and it probably really helped him get out a game that was popular and so it's good for developers.
John:
But as a player, I hate it when the little Game Center banner comes down and causes a hitch in frame rate.
John:
I hate it when Game Center tells me there's a move, but I launched a game and it doesn't show the move immediately and I have no progress indication.
John:
And there's so many games with integration like this that I can't say, well, it's just because that developer didn't integrate with Game Center properly.
John:
It just, it makes games worse.
Marco:
Yeah, it's always been, it's been like this,
Marco:
I got the feeling that Steve Jobs might have been a Steve thing where they would use cheesiness and kitsch to patronize and pay lip service to things they didn't really care about.
Marco:
that they were being forced to address in some way, you know, or, you know, for some reason, like, they would try to appropriate, you know, the success of gaming to do their, oh, let's, this fun little game center, you know, like, like, you can kind of tell, like, not only was their heart not in, but they don't really like it, and, and it just, it, it,
Marco:
It resulted in this attitude that was very clearly like, obviously Steve doesn't give a crap about games, and that shows in the product.
Marco:
And it seems in all the changes in Apple in the last few years, I haven't seen anything regarding games change for the better.
John:
I think they're trying.
John:
It's just that they don't know the right things to do.
John:
It would be as if the music application or whatever, the thing that you play music on your iOS device, as if it had a theme like a music room.
John:
And there was little batons for conducting.
John:
And there was little musical staffs and a little guy with a tuxedo as the conductor.
John:
And then like...
John:
And they understand it's so much more serious.
John:
Like, it's not just the theme.
John:
It's the idea that there needs to be this kind of window dressing.
John:
Like, that games are a diversion.
John:
And, like, almost every app is more serious.
John:
The photo app is more serious.
John:
Like, they understand, like, photos are an important thing.
John:
And we're not going to sort of put, like, a weird photo theme on there.
John:
I mean, iOS 7 has helped with that a lot.
John:
Like, the old ones were a little bit more skeuomorphic and everything.
John:
But it's just the whole idea that gaming as a realm needs to have some different treatment.
John:
Uh, because games are this other thing and no one is really seriously into it.
John:
Whereas music is like, Oh, you're really into music.
John:
And we would never want to script.
John:
We want to show the album art big.
John:
We want to have a nice, efficient application because music is important and you want it to be powerful and have, you know, increase the capabilities for you to get your music anywhere, enjoy it and show people enjoying it.
John:
And games it's like, uh,
John:
i mean they're they're a casual gaming type of company so when they show people playing games they're like you know shaking their ipod touch around and some kid is playing some little game wow look at that car vroom vroom but game center itself doesn't doesn't acknowledge how serious and what an important part of people's lives and for that matter i think ibooks kind of doesn't acknowledge how important books are in people's lives because they're kind of like a little bit of the old version of ibooks anyway a little bit of the uh you have to feel like you're in an old musty library otherwise books don't count yeah
Marco:
And with GameCenter, it's very much about compartmentalization.
Marco:
It's like, let's take this world of games that's happening all around us accidentally, and we're going to clean all this mess up and just kind of shove it in this drawer over here.
Marco:
All you game things, you can stay in here.
Marco:
We don't really want you to seep out.
Marco:
Same thing with Newsstand.
Marco:
Newsstand is exactly in the same position, if not even worse, because Apple's like, okay, well, we have this...
Marco:
You know, we will benefit if magazine and newspaper people make their apps here instead of making websites.
Marco:
And, you know, we'll benefit from that.
Marco:
And, you know, we want it to, like, you know, look good for our platform.
Marco:
So we're going to make this little newsstand area.
Marco:
It's exactly the same thing.
Marco:
Like this, like...
Marco:
this like cheesy, kitschy, like condescending skeuomorphism that started out, you know, in previous versions.
Marco:
And then in seven, it really didn't get a lot better.
Marco:
It just actually, in many ways, a newsstand is significantly worse than iOS 7.
Marco:
And just, you know, there's no more wooden shelves, but it's now it's like even more invisible.
Marco:
And, you know, there's all sorts of other problems with it.
Marco:
And it's like Apple just takes the things that they don't want to really see, that they don't want to be prominent, and creates areas for them to be segregated and tucked away and hidden.
Marco:
Because to them, this is this sloppy, dirty, juvenile or evil world of games or magazines, respectively.
John:
Yeah, and iOS is a platform for certain kinds of games, but it's not for the kinds of games that Nintendo does well.
John:
And those are the type of games I like to play, like console games, handheld games, games that are really deep, really rich, that have physical controls.
John:
And VR games may be a separate thing entirely, because the industry is experimenting with VR now, and Sony's got their own headset coming out.
John:
Nintendo could possibly do something interesting in that direction.
John:
We don't know how well that's going to work out.
John:
is Apple going to have headset support for its iOS devices?
John:
Maybe they will.
John:
Maybe that'll be the way games get into that.
John:
But for now, all iOS games are things where you tilt your device or you touch your screen.
John:
And that is a fairly narrow range of things.
John:
And the games that...
John:
I've traditionally been on Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft platforms are still really popular.
John:
Just look at the sales numbers for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
John:
People still want to play them and you can't play them on iOS devices.
John:
So it's like, why should Apple be interested in getting that serious about games when it doesn't have a hardware platform you can play them on?
John:
I mean, someday if they wake up and decide to turn Apple TV into a game console, maybe then we'll have something going on there.
John:
But that hasn't happened so far.
Marco:
Well, even like last year, they added the game controller framework to iOS 7, which lets other – it's like they could have just like gone the extra step, made their own official controller attachment for their iPhones and iPod Touches.
Marco:
Like why didn't they do that?
Marco:
And the answer, I think, is because they just don't care that much or they weren't that confident in the idea or, you know, whatever the case may be, they didn't want to bother with that.
Marco:
They didn't want to, like, tarnish their product line with this cheesy little game controller attachment.
Marco:
They want, okay, we will make an API...
Marco:
That will, of course, you know, if you want to make your own, you can.
Marco:
And of course, you'll have to pay us to make your own.
Marco:
But that's another thing entirely.
Marco:
And of course, the reality which anybody could have told them, anybody who has ever played video games ever in their life could have told them.
Marco:
If the first-party vendor doesn't have an official hardware add-on, nobody will buy it.
Marco:
Even official hardware add-ons like the Kinect, usually those fail.
Marco:
Like we talked about a few episodes ago, the 32X, the Sega CD, the Jaguar CD attachment, the TurboGrafx CD attachment, all these hardware add-on things in the old console world that almost all failed.
Casey:
Well, not all of them.
Casey:
I said almost.
Casey:
What was the memory pack for the Nintendo 64?
Casey:
I forget what that was.
John:
Well, that's because it came with Perfect Dark.
John:
Yeah, because they bundled it with a game.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the same thing with the Rumble pack.
John:
They bundled it with Star Fox.
John:
But like, I mean, even the Kinect, the Kinect, you know, the original Kinect, that had a pretty good sell through for a peripheral.
John:
Like people made games that supported the Kinect, which is fairly unprecedented.
John:
Like, you know.
Marco:
Yeah, that was remarkable and very unusual.
John:
But it was, you know, certain like dance games and stuff that you couldn't do without the Kinect.
John:
They weren't bundled with the Kinect.
John:
You'd have to buy the Kinect and buy that.
John:
And a lot of people, but like, I think Apple would be overjoyed if, well, I don't know if they would be overjoyed.
John:
But anyway, it would be, have you ever seen anyone using one of those controllers attached to an iOS device?
John:
I've still never seen one in the wild.
John:
And so that makes me think that they're not selling a lot of those devices and let alone games that like require them or take advantage of them.
John:
Like none of those are really like, I don't even know if it's financially feasible to make a high quality game and say, oh, by the way, to play this game, you need to have a controller accessory.
Marco:
And then the other problem is the economics of the App Store are such that, I mean, there's lots of, that could be a whole show of discussing the problems of economics in the App Store for developers.
Marco:
But in this particular area, one of the problems is if you make a game that requires a gamepad,
Marco:
You've cut down your market size so substantially that, you know, suppose 1% of iPhones sold in the past year, you know, 1% of those also bought game pads.
Marco:
That's probably extremely optimistic.
Marco:
I bet the number is nowhere near that.
Marco:
But let's say it was 1%.
Marco:
Well, that means you're also cutting your audience down, you know, by 99% by making a game that requires it in a market where the only way to make any money at all is through massive volume.
Marco:
That's a terrible, it's just a terrible situation.
Marco:
It's never going to catch on.
John:
That reminds me of the other story that I alluded to earlier.
John:
I don't know if you guys heard about that.
John:
Microsoft is unbundling, making a version of the Xbox One that you can buy without the Kinect 2.
John:
Yeah, I'd heard that.
John:
Yeah, and that's kind of a shame, but it's kind of, I mean, in the face of Sony's sales, I guess they felt like they had to do something.
John:
I believe they're still keeping the SKUs that have it bundled, but they want to make a cheaper one without it.
John:
Bottom line is, not a lot of games are coming out that...
John:
require the Kinect that are compelling enough for someone to want to pay an extra $100 for the consoles.
John:
They're like, all right, well, here's a version.
John:
We'll shave some money off the price.
John:
You don't have to buy the Kinect with it.
John:
And it's kind of a shame because I think the Kinect was an interesting idea.
John:
I think the second version of it is way better than the first.
John:
And...
John:
you could do interesting things with it it's just that it because they're selling so much fewer uh consoles than uh sony is they feel like they have to make this move and it's really like i don't i don't know how i feel about it because in many respects like if they had just launched in every country instead of launching in like sony's in way more countries than there i think i think the microsoft's in like 13 and something like 50 or something like that
John:
If their rollouts had been equal geographically, maybe the race would have been closer in terms of sales numbers and they could have stayed the course.
John:
But instead, because they're behind, they want to have a way to catch up.
John:
But once you open that door, once you say that it's possible that there's any Xbox One out there without the Kinect,
John:
forget about in this generation having some game that someone's going to put tons and tons of money behind that's going to be like a tractor that pulls you know that shows everyone how amazing the connect is because like marco said now all of a sudden you have to look at the ratios it used to be i could sell into 100 of the xbox one market if i made a connect game and now it's like oh it's 99 98 97 like depending on how that skew sells without the connect the number is probably just going to go down and down and so
Marco:
And also in the console world, it's very important, as you said earlier, to be cross-platform.
Marco:
With these games having such massive budgets to be competitive, if you can't be on PlayStation and Xbox, it's going to hurt pretty big time.
Marco:
That's going to hurt a lot.
John:
Well, the Kinect games are always trying to be the exclusives.
John:
Like, yeah, of course you can't port the same because no one else has the amazing Kinect.
John:
And same thing with Sony with VR.
John:
If Microsoft doesn't have a VR headset and Sony does...
John:
Sony's got to get people to make VR games or ports, VR ports of games.
John:
And those are not going to be able to be on the Microsoft console.
John:
And Sony, if you sell again, if you sell the most hardware, you're in the power position.
John:
It's like, who cares if you can put your game on Microsoft or Nintendo's consoles?
John:
We have sold X number of million consoles.
John:
You're doing fine.
John:
And Nintendo can't even get those people to answer their calls.
John:
And Microsoft, it tries to make that same argument for the Kinect.
John:
People go like, we've looked at how well Kinect games sell in the previous generation and the current one.
John:
And it's not just about addressable market.
John:
It's about the fact that no one has found a way to make a game.
John:
that will sell millions of copies for you know the connect like i hope microsoft keeps trying i hope what they've done can combine with vr stuff can combine with the gamepad stuff that nintendo's done like there is the making some some great next generation gaming experiences uh down the line with all the technology that everyone has experimented with in the past two generations
Casey:
So, Marco, what else is pretty neat these days?
Marco:
What's also amazing these days is an old sponsor that's back.
Marco:
It's our friends at Hover.
Marco:
Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names.
Marco:
Now, Hover's a domain registrar.
Marco:
They're owned by the people at Two Cows, which have been around forever.
Marco:
And, you know, they... Look, let's be realistic here.
Marco:
Not every domain name registrar is a pleasant experience to use and be a customer of.
Marco:
Hover is just great.
Marco:
I use it for a lot of my stuff.
Marco:
I use it for about half of my domains, some of the emails I use, all this stuff.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
Hover gives you easy to use, powerful tools to manage your domain so that anybody can do it.
Marco:
It's nerd friendly.
Marco:
It's also regular people friendly.
Marco:
They also have amazing customer support.
Marco:
You can call them on the phone.
Marco:
You can do it online too.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
They have online support like everybody, but you can call them on the phone.
Marco:
And if you call during business hours, which are pretty generous, a real human being will pick up the phone and they will be able to help you.
Marco:
They have a no hold, no wait, no transfer phone policy.
Marco:
So it's pretty amazing.
Marco:
Literally, you call them up, and somebody picks up the phone, and they can actually help you.
Marco:
I wish all companies, not just regular stores, I wish all companies had this.
Marco:
And the only other one that I know of is Ting, and that's only because it's the same people running it.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
um so hover they take all the hassle and friction out of registering a domain and then owning it we know we all know we've all had those tech support calls from people who are who are less into web geeky stuff like us who like somehow they got themselves stuck trying to figure out dns and we have to like we have to try to help them out send these people to hover trust me it you will you will not regret it so
Marco:
They also have fantastic email hosting in addition to domain registration.
Marco:
These days, it makes sense to get your own unique email address.
Marco:
It is personal, professional, and cooler than your Hotmail or AOL address.
Marco:
Am I supposed to pronounce AOL as like AOL because of the new capitalization?
Marco:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Marco:
All right, well, it's cooler than your Hotmail or OWL address for your business, blog, portfolio, resume, or whatever you use your email address for.
Marco:
You can get your own domain name, have your email be something at that domain, and all that can be taken care of at Hover.
Marco:
Really fantastic.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There's so much more I can say about Hover, and I will tell you on the next few weeks of ads, because I don't have time today, but it's a great domain name registrar.
Marco:
Check them out.
Marco:
I use them.
Marco:
A lot of people use them.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
So check out Hover.
Marco:
Our code this week is scrummerfall.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
So if you use coupon code SCRUMMERFALL, do I have to spell that?
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
Do people know what that means?
Marco:
It's S-C-R-U-M-M-E-R-F-A-L-L.
Marco:
SCRUMMERFALL.
Marco:
Use coupon code SCRUMMERFALL to get 10% off your purchase at Hover.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So we should probably talk about things that are probably going to happen during WWDC.
Casey:
Think there's going to be a keynote?
Casey:
There's going to be a keynote.
Casey:
There's going to be Odwalla.
Casey:
Marco's going to complain about the fact that Odwalla has bananas in almost all of them.
Casey:
Now, do you think they're going to bring back my flavor?
Casey:
All I care about is that there's Mango Tango.
Casey:
If there's Mango Tango, I'm happy.
Casey:
That's all I care about.
Casey:
We had a very interesting email a little over 10 days ago, and it was an anonymous email that went via the feedback form.
Casey:
And the message is iOS 8 wishlist.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And then there's a series of items, maybe, and a series of items.
Casey:
This person did not specify who they are, didn't specify if they're knowledgeable about anything, didn't specify really anything at all other than to say that they need to be anonymous.
Marco:
For now.
Marco:
It said anon for now.
Marco:
So it basically has no credibility.
Marco:
However, I think it's an interesting list.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
And so what I thought I'd do is kind of start calling out the items on this list.
Casey:
And we'll talk about the ones that we think are worth talking about.
Casey:
And then we'll just blow by the ones that we don't think are very interesting.
Casey:
So with that in mind, in the yes column...
Casey:
Health book, monitor heart rate, VO2 level.
Casey:
I'm not sure why it's VO2.
Casey:
I'm assuming that's oxygen level.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Is that like a virtual?
Casey:
Unless it was a fat fingered CO2 level.
Casey:
Anyway, hydration level, sleep and steps.
Casey:
What do we think?
Marco:
I mean, I think there's been enough smoke around the health book thing that it's probably correct.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
You know, the details of which things are included.
Marco:
I mean, steps and sleep can both be tracked by motion.
Marco:
That's easy.
Marco:
You know, hydration, O2 and heart rate, that would require some kind of extra sensor that we don't know about yet.
Marco:
So that's probably a question marker, maybe.
Casey:
No, we know about it.
Casey:
It's going to be the earbuds.
Yeah.
John:
No, that was fake.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know.
John:
I'm kidding.
John:
As opposed to this email, which is impeccably sourced as a random person who typed things into a feedback form.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
For the record, I was kidding.
Casey:
I knew that was fake.
Marco:
But yes, I would say the health book thing is plausible.
Marco:
The details of it, we don't really know for sure, but it's certainly plausible.
John:
We didn't even talk about that in the Nintendo thing, how one of their strategies to get them out of their funk was going to be health-related apps, which seems to be – everyone seems to be doing this these days.
John:
The fact that we have the technology, the networking, and the last piece we need is the sensors, and Fitbit has been sort of the spearhead into this and to –
John:
health monitoring for individuals.
John:
It seems to be reasonably popular and have positive results for people.
John:
So Apple getting into it doesn't surprise me.
John:
And of course, we've all seen all the screenshots of the health book looking app and stuff.
Uh,
John:
This is just an iOS 8 wish list, so we can't talk about whether Apple's going to have any devices like this, whether they're going to launch this kind of like the M7 without any accompanying hardware.
John:
It's like, oh, well, our phone has this, these new APIs, and so on and so forth, and then third parties will make sensors for it, or is it going to integrate with the iWatch later?
John:
But I think it's a pretty sure bet that some health monitoring stuff is going to be in iOS 8 software-wise.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
And I'm very curious to see what sensors, if any, will be provided for this.
Casey:
And by the way, real-time follow-up, VO2 is apparently aerobic capacity.
Casey:
Thank you, KJ Healy, friend of the show.
Casey:
It's for volume, right?
Casey:
So thanks for that, KJ Healy.
Casey:
Next, transit in the Maps app, in the Apple Maps app.
Casey:
I would suspect this would be something they would do because they got dinged on it or they continually get dinged on it.
Casey:
But I think we talked about, maybe it wasn't us, but somebody talked about on one of the podcasts I listened to about how hard that is because to normalize all this disparate data across gazillion cities across the planet is not an easy task.
Casey:
And given that Apple does so well with normalizing all the data on their map themselves, I
Casey:
I'm not really too confident they're going to get this right, but it seems plausible.
John:
I think that's something that they want to do, whether they're ready in time.
John:
Like, I think they're more cautious about rolling out something half-baked at this point.
John:
Especially in maps.
John:
Yeah, on the maps effort...
John:
Apple seems committed and they did not have a good initial showing.
John:
And hopefully they're learning that the only way to do this is to do what Google does is you're not boiling the ocean, but you're boiling a pretty darn big lake.
John:
And that's what they have to end up doing.
John:
You got to put bodies in the ground.
John:
You got to, you know,
John:
Put resources towards this.
John:
It's a super big pain.
John:
You can't half-ass it.
John:
There's no shortcut.
John:
And the transit, like, oh, the shortcut will be that we'll just have third parties do it.
John:
It's a third-party opportunity.
John:
And people are like, no, we don't like that shortcut.
John:
Google has transit.
John:
You don't.
John:
You suck.
John:
So I really hope that this is true, that they're working on transit.
John:
As for whether it's ready in time for a WODC announcement, I'm not sure.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
On-device Siri.
Marco:
See, I would love to see that.
Marco:
So I assume what this means is that the dictation would take place on the device, which Android and Windows Phone already do, and so do Macs, actually, and just not iOS devices yet, right?
Marco:
There's still no way to do it on iOS?
Casey:
That's right as far as I know.
Casey:
However, isn't the download on OS X something like a little shy of a gig?
Marco:
Yeah, it's like 800 megs, something like that.
Casey:
So given that Apple is ridiculously obsessed with continuing to offer 8 and 16 gig devices, really?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, it seems like that'd be a lot of space to take up on some devices that really don't have enough space.
Marco:
Well, it would probably just be an optional download then, just like it is on Mac.
Marco:
Because how many people actually would care enough to use that?
Marco:
Probably a minority, but for those people, it would be really nice to have.
John:
I think they need to concentrate on getting their server-side implementation up to snuff before worrying about adding another implementation to the mix.
John:
Because the...
John:
The problem with Siri is not that, oh, it does everything over the network, because for phone people, like the size of data that it's transferring is not that big.
John:
It's just the server's got to be responsive.
John:
They have to be available.
John:
They have to respond quickly.
John:
You can't, you know, talk, record something, send it to the server, wait and get a response to say, oh, yeah, forget it.
John:
We couldn't talk to the server.
John:
Sorry about that.
John:
Try again later.
John:
Like that is unacceptable.
John:
And so.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anytime that happens, it's bogus, and I'm not ready for them to say, well, actually, we have a second implementation that's all on-device, and you don't have to worry about the network.
John:
You just have to worry about memory usage and storage area and whether this on-device thing works.
John:
And again, it's another area where Google has on-device stuff working, and their servers respond faster.
John:
So...
John:
this list reads more like a list of areas where apple needs to improve i guess it's a wish list like every area where they need to improve they should improve in all those areas but uh i i don't see them going for on device siri uh with i i would rather see them address the server side stuff uh because i don't think it's that crazy for phones anyway to just say yes it's all service i don't worry about it it's you know we'll we'll get the data through it's not a lot of data we'll just make sure our servers are all available and fast
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, certainly that would be nice.
Marco:
I mean, I would prefer they give us both, really.
Marco:
Having on-device dictation, like, you know, have the servers still do the smarts of like, okay, we know what you said, but then what do you mean by that?
Marco:
Like, that's obviously an area where the server-side infrastructure could benefit a lot from continuing to be server-side with both...
Marco:
resources and with you know just updating the information that it has and and learning and stuff like that and that's that's very much like a big data problem they need big data to do it the actual dictation though while dictation does benefit from the big data approach you can also do a pretty good job just having something local as you know by using using all the dragon stuff
John:
Yeah, you need more RAM for that, as I think Casey pointed out.
John:
Like, that's hardware-wise.
John:
I mean, the excuse has always been, well, more RAM requires more power, and it's a battery thing, and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But, jeez, I mean, forget about the storage, which we've already complained about, the 163264 Eternal Trinity.
John:
You got to get more RAM.
John:
You got to get more RAM on these devices.
John:
You got like people.
John:
It's just unacceptable.
John:
One gigabyte is not enough.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so like having more RAM and if they can deal with the battery stuff, I think that would open the door for on device where you're talking about on device.
John:
Like I'll just figure out the text version of what you said and send the text up to a server, which is even lower bandwidth.
John:
And it can do the smart stuff of figuring out what you mean by those words.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Next, Notification Center revamp.
Casey:
More Siri like Google Now and less a list of notifications.
John:
Boy, I would hate this.
John:
So where does the list of notifications go?
Marco:
Yeah, I agreed.
Marco:
The last thing Notification Center needs is for Apple to be more clever about it.
Marco:
They need to become less clever about it.
Marco:
Simplify it.
Marco:
Just give me a straight list of notifications would be better than what it is now.
Marco:
With the confusing all versus missed and then some things just disappear forever.
John:
How many times does a notification appear on your device and you do whatever the wrong thing is and you say...
John:
What did that notification say again?
John:
It's like, oh, sorry, sucker.
John:
You're never going to see that again.
John:
Try to find it.
John:
Is it a notification said or no?
John:
Is it a missed?
John:
No, because you didn't miss it.
John:
You saw it and then it went away.
John:
You know, it's not.
John:
They could be clever, but it tried explaining to somebody like I saw a word appear on my screen, but now it's gone.
John:
Where is it?
John:
And it's a hard problem.
Marco:
Trying to be smart about it, I just think it kind of can't be done well.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing that it sounds cool on paper, it'll make for an interesting keynote, as you see with things like Google Now and with Cortana.
Marco:
You see the other platforms doing this.
Marco:
In practice, it's really hard to make that right all the time.
Marco:
It's a classic AI problem of like...
John:
it tries to be smart but a lot of times that's not really what you wanted and it's very frustrating and it's trying it's battling against notification overload because if you did just do the dumb linear list like very quickly that list would be crazy and people would just start ignoring it like they're trying to strike a balance between just show you what's important get rid of it when you've already seen it and don't ever present like this humongous list that you have to scroll through to look because sometimes people get a lot of notifications right like that
Marco:
That's how I would do it, actually.
Marco:
If you look on the Mac, on Mac Notification Center, it groups it by application, similar to iOS, but they kind of just stick around forever until you clear them.
Marco:
It's very annoying, actually.
Marco:
And you can kind of see, like, okay, well, that's one approach.
Marco:
That's kind of weird.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
What would actually be best is for Notification Center to just be one combined timeline of notifications so that whatever order you receive them, whatever order you saw them in on the lock screen, whatever order they came in, there's a list that shows those same ones in that same order and maybe has a blue dot next to the unread ones.
Marco:
But they're still there.
Marco:
Even after they're red, they're still in the list.
Marco:
I can't come up with any better alternative that's better all around.
Marco:
Because every other one you come up with, it's like, well, it's good for this use case, but it's bad for these three use cases.
Marco:
If you just give it one big list, I think that's probably the least crappy option.
John:
I think they need to have that thing you're describing accessible somehow.
John:
I'm not sure it needs to be the thing in people's faces.
John:
You need lifestreams.
John:
Remember lifestreams?
John:
That was a big trend back in the whatever, 90s maybe.
Yeah.
John:
To conceptualize... I once met a vlogger.
John:
To conceptualize your use of a computer... It was weird.
John:
...by time rather than by file name or application or project or anything like that.
John:
So that anything you've seen or done in your computer, you just scroll back through time-wise.
John:
Kind of like the time machine UI, but, you know, just...
John:
cross-cutting across everything like web pages you've seen email that you've read things that messages that you've sent then you could just go scroll back through time and see things in that way and what you're talking about is a sort of live stream view of your interaction with notifications uh and i think that should be accessible because if you can't find something i'll just go back to your whatever they'd come up with some buzzword for hell they could call it live stream if they wanted and here's everything and just go back through it and you will see the events of the day as they unfolded this is when the message came in and then you read it and then you know
John:
you replied and you did this and you did that like but i don't know if that needs to be the thing in the person's face because what they're trying to do is make it so you don't feel overwhelmed by notifications by making them go away that's why they have the missed thing and the all thing and i think that does make for a better experience until like you're like oh what did that thing say let me just go to the live stream and look at it i hadn't i shouldn't say live stream because it's a terrible name but
Marco:
i don't know what else to call it but that's what that's how people use text messages though all the time and it's fine like text messages are one giant chronological list totally unsorted just you know just by time no but it's by person it's by person though isn't it oh yeah okay that's fair but still like i know so many people who like they they need to get a piece of information out of their text messages like if that's the only place it lives and they just they can just scroll up and just keep going they know roughly where it is and then they eventually find it and that's it like but then they end up with three gigabytes of messages and
John:
Well, yeah, but... The other category on their device starts growing and growing.
John:
How helpful.
John:
If only Apple could store those things in the cloud, and when you scrolled, it would just pull those messages down, and yeah, no, dare to dream, right?
John:
We'll get there.
Casey:
All right, so Notification Center and iCloud, clearing notifications across Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Casey:
I will say that for iMessages...
Casey:
I think it's a little too quick to fall back to my other devices.
Casey:
But in the last couple of months, maybe even more than that, if I'm in the midst of a conversation on one of my devices, the other devices oftentimes will receive a new text message.
Casey:
But generally speaking, nothing does any beeping or bonging or vibrating or anything like that unless – let's assume I'm on my Mac – unless I haven't –
Casey:
acknowledged that new text message on my Mac for like 10 or 15 seconds.
Casey:
Now, I think there should be a slightly longer grace period than that, because sometimes I'm, especially on my Mac anyway, I'm looking at another window or whatever the case may be, and I haven't clicked back to the messages window.
Casey:
But messages has actually been working pretty well for me in this sense.
Casey:
But I agree that in every other capacity, it would be kind of neat to have one unified, unified timeline, actually.
Marco:
Man, your grace period is way more forgiving than mine.
Marco:
With mine, if I'm talking to you over iMessage, and if the message's window is not my frontmost window, at the moment that comes in, it vibrates on all my devices.
Marco:
I get zero grace period.
John:
This thing reads even more like a wishlist item of like, here's a problem I encounter using Apple's cloud services on multiple devices, and I want Apple to fix it, but I don't have anything to say other than it should do what I mean all the time.
John:
And conceptually, we talked about this when messages first came out and iMessages first came out.
John:
Conceptually, the thing that Apple is missing is presence awareness, like figuring out where you are and what you're doing.
John:
Because if they can have the concepts of presence awareness,
John:
defined API wise so that so that each individual app isn't like doing its own crazy heuristics like there was a framework for presence and an awareness of where you are and what device you're near and what you're using or whatever then they could just make improve that framework over time and applications that use that framework would do the right thing including initially Apple's own like it would be a private framework probably for a couple of releases and who knows maybe they have a framework that's supposed to do that but it seems crappy like we're all talking about situations where yeah
John:
because your messages window was hidden or because it was in the front, but you were looking at a different window, it didn't go off on your iOS device.
John:
I have better luck getting messages in the web interface to Gmail, you know, the little chat messages that come up.
John:
I have missed fewer of those than I have missed iMessages from my wife.
John:
Like she'll send them from her phone and I'll get the first one notification sender and I'll click on it and it'll launch messages and I'll converse with her and then I'll go do something else and another one will come in messages and I won't notice.
John:
And she was like, why didn't you respond to that one?
John:
I didn't see it on my iOS device because it wasn't there because messages open and it wanted me to say it was there, but it didn't even like, or maybe bounce the icon once or something like it's not, they haven't, they don't have it yet.
John:
So I think they have a long way to go there.
John:
And I think this item for iOS 8, iOS 8 will fix this.
John:
Well, not in, not, it won't unless it has a cooperation with the new version of OS X and all sorts of other things.
John:
And this is just,
John:
Yes, I would like this too.
John:
Make it so, but it's a benefit more than an implementation.
Marco:
Our final sponsor this week is once again our friends at NatureBox.
Marco:
NatureBox delivers delicious and nutritious snacks to your door every month.
Marco:
Go to naturebox.com slash ATP to get 50% off your first box.
Marco:
These are smarter snacks you can feel good about with no high fructose corn syrup, no partially hydrogenated oils, no trans fats, no artificial sweeteners, no nascual, and no artificial flavors or colors.
Marco:
They're better for you, and they're nutritionist approved.
Marco:
When you sign up, you get a discovery box filled with surprise snacks.
Marco:
Then you have the option to pick your own every month, or you can have NatureBox surprise you with new ones.
Marco:
You can browse their site, naturebox.com slash ATP, to check out their full lineup along with all previous NatureBox deliveries with full nutrition labels and ingredient lists for everything.
Marco:
Each bag includes three to five servings of its snack, unless you put it next to your computer all day, and then it might become less than that, but...
Marco:
because they're really good.
Marco:
Each bag includes three to five servings of its snack, and you can choose from three quantities every month.
Marco:
You can get five bags for just $19.95, 10 bags for just $29.95, or 20 bags for $49.95.
Marco:
All of those come with free shipping to the continental United States, and it'll even ship to Alaska or Hawaii for just $2 more.
Marco:
NatureBox is great for the home, office, or on the go.
Marco:
Go to naturebox.com slash ATP to get 50% off your first box.
Marco:
Thanks a lot once again to NatureBox for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
The sample they sent me is completely gone because it was good.
Casey:
I've been very, very good about milking mine, so to speak, but it is very good.
Casey:
And very off the wall, which is kind of refreshing.
Marco:
Yeah, they have some cool combinations.
Marco:
Actually, I should be honest, my sample was actually gone before we even recorded last week's show.
Marco:
But yeah, it's really good stuff.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So continuing this list that at this point absolutely confirms that it's a wish list and not a birdie telling us something they know.
Casey:
Unlimited photo stream.
John:
Unlimited, just like unlimited bandwidth from AT&T.
John:
everything in tech you know that's that claims to be unlimited that's always true right totally well i mean sometimes like think about it uh backblaze for instance yeah that's they actually managed to do it they say it's unlimited maybe it's not maybe if i had like 300 terabytes that someone would come to my house and talk to me like
John:
In person.
John:
But so far, like I have multiple I have multiple terabytes there.
John:
I mean, maybe they're relying on the fact that you can't upload like the ISPs.
John:
You know, how long would it take you to upload like a petabyte of data?
John:
It's like, you know, it would take a long time.
John:
But so far, I haven't hit it backwards.
Marco:
It's probably also the law of averages.
Marco:
My mom's computer, I back up everything I possibly can back up from that.
Marco:
It's 37 gigs.
Marco:
I'm paying the same for 37 gigs there as I'm paying for 1.5 terabytes on my desktop.
John:
Yeah, PhotoStream, they don't have that same advantage, though, because I think people just keep taking photos their whole life.
John:
And, you know, it's not like with data, there's some turnover.
John:
Like, you know, you're going to – I don't know what the turnover is in data.
John:
I think maybe people delete their email after time.
John:
It just doesn't seem like it grows linearly.
John:
Like maybe people aren't putting their photos into –
John:
photoshop or whatever anyway unlimited or not yes we all want photo stream to be better we've had many past shows about describing how frustrating it is that uh with the ever picks gone and everything that apple isn't picking up the baton and saying don't worry no matter how many pictures you take we'll take care of keeping them safe for a fee for not a fee like at least give us that option at this point your options are not great and no one company is ready to to take care of your photos forever or even try to make that promise
Marco:
I really think this is the kind of thing – and we've talked at length about this.
Marco:
The Prompt has talked at length about this even more so than us, I think, which is saying a lot.
Marco:
I think this is one of those things like Apple has to be the one to offer the photo solution finally.
Marco:
And it doesn't mean they will.
Marco:
I actually am not that confident that they will.
Marco:
But I think that's what needs to happen long-term.
Marco:
I really do.
Marco:
And there are so many question marks about how they would do that and if they would do that and how they could pay for that.
Marco:
To me, I think the biggest question mark is still video.
Marco:
What do you do with video?
Marco:
And the answer is probably you just omit it from PhotoStream or severely downsample it so it fits within the one-minute sending limit, stuff like that.
Marco:
But overall, I just think...
Marco:
If you look at how people actually use these devices and what people's expectations of their data and its safety actually are, I don't see any other solution that would actually be good long term.
Marco:
Apple just has to do it and they have to find a way to do it and pay for it.
Marco:
And, you know, there are some shortcuts they can take that could substantially cut down on the cost and data volume.
Marco:
Like, for instance, just don't store, you know, obviously don't support RAWs and stuff from desktops.
Marco:
Just don't store the full JPEG quality.
Marco:
Like, if they store every picture at quality 40...
Marco:
Almost nobody will ever be able to tell.
John:
No, I don't like that.
John:
They need to store the full quality one.
John:
Otherwise, they're not really solving the problem.
John:
I don't want crappy quality versions of the pictures of my kids saved.
John:
Oh, don't worry.
John:
All your devices went up in smoke when your house burned down.
John:
But we've got really crappy quality graphics.
John:
No, I want the originals.
Marco:
No, but there's a lot of headroom in the JPEG format.
Marco:
For good JPEG encoders, there is a ton of headroom.
Marco:
You can get the quality down really small.
Marco:
You're not going to bring a full camera size picture down to 60 kilobytes or anything, but you can bring it down from... What's a JPEG off an iPhone worth these days?
Marco:
Like three and a half, four or five megs, something like that?
Casey:
Somewhere around there.
Marco:
you could easily bring it down to one meg or less and be very, uh, and, and be transparent to almost anybody.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Just like you can on a CD.
Casey:
Yeah, you can.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't, I don't like that.
John:
I don't like that solution.
John:
I think, I think they should take raws.
John:
They just got to figure out the economics.
John:
Like, um, this is something that I think people would be willing to pay for as long as it's reasonable.
John:
And I think with $5 unlimited backup, uh,
John:
It shows that it's going to get more and more reasonable over time because photos are not getting bigger at the same rate that storage is getting cheaper at this point, I think.
John:
So hopefully this will solve itself eventually.
John:
A more realistic wishlist item for this would be what we've also talked about is for iCloud backups, at least allow it to match the size of the device for a reasonable price.
John:
Instead of being, oh, you get a little bit free and then we nickel and dime you.
John:
And if you buy another device, oh, you don't get any additional storage and you just keep paying more.
John:
It would be nicer if they sort of rewarded their good customers who buy the biggest devices, who buy lots of devices by making each additional purchase help you towards iCloud backup for them.
Casey:
You know what would be really neat is if Apple, and I don't think they'd ever do it, but did a unified backup solution.
Casey:
So you've got backups of your iDevices as big as they are, as much as you want.
Casey:
You know, Time Machine now can refer to either a local drive and or the Apple platform.
Casey:
you know, MobileMe Cloud or something like that.
Casey:
PhotoStream goes on either forever more or considerably longer than it does right now.
Casey:
I could just see how that would be so awesome.
Casey:
And I would pay so much money to just be able to in one place or pay one entity to make all of these backup problems go away.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Next on the wishlist is auto-downloading and updating iOS.
Casey:
I don't see how that would really be feasible without... Doesn't it already auto-download it?
Marco:
Yeah, but this is, like, auto-updating.
Marco:
Well, here's one problem.
Marco:
I mean, like, my mom can't upgrade to iOS 7 yet because she doesn't have free space.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it needs, like, you know, 800 megs or something, and she doesn't have that.
Marco:
And what I have to tell her to get that is, well, if you want to do that, you have to, like, delete all your photos, basically, because she has, like, an 8-gig iPhone 4.
Marco:
There's, like, no space on there.
Casey:
Isn't this the one that you told her expressly not to buy?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes, it is.
Casey:
Have you reminded her of that fact?
Marco:
Every time I see her.
Marco:
And how does that go over for you?
Marco:
It's starting to not go over that well anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, it's an 8-gig iPhone 4, so it's really the best of everything.
Marco:
Anyway, so I think that's implausible.
Marco:
It would anger so many people to have their phones automatically update to a major OS release.
Marco:
Imagine if iOS 7 was an automatic update, not just automatically downloaded, but if it just automatically installed while your phone was charging one night.
John:
I think that's coming, just not in iOS 8.
John:
Distant future.
John:
The infinite version.
John:
The Jeff Atwood blog post.
John:
Chrome is already auto-updating.
John:
You have no choice.
John:
No, the Jeff Atwood thing is it's going to be written in JavaScript.
John:
No, not that.
John:
He wrote a blog post called The Infinite Version about the trend of software that wants to update itself and you just accept it because that's just the way it works.
John:
That's a totally an Apple move.
John:
When that day comes, it will just happen and you'll just deal with it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what happens with web apps, but people get pretty angry at that too.
Marco:
Just like anytime Facebook ever changes anything, you see like half the world explode.
John:
I think they could make that the default and people would just accept it.
John:
Like, you know, maybe they're not ready for it in iOS 8.
John:
I don't think this is going to happen in iOS 8, but in iOS 15, I would bet on it.
Casey:
Alright.
Casey:
Separate game store from app store.
Marco:
I would love that.
Casey:
I think it would be nice.
Casey:
I don't think it'll happen.
Marco:
Like, because if you look at the app store now, and yeah, I agree.
Marco:
I don't think there's a chance of it happening.
Marco:
I just wish it would happen.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
Generally speaking, I think if you're browsing the App Store, you probably have one of those things in mind.
Marco:
Are you looking for a game right now, or are you looking for something else, something non-game?
Marco:
What that would do to App Store browsing would be pretty substantial.
Marco:
It wouldn't all be good, but I think it would be a net win.
Marco:
If you think about...
Marco:
If games had their own top charts, assuming Apple's going to keep the top chart, which I still think they shouldn't.
Marco:
I think the top apps ranking lists are very destructive to quality of software and economics and so many things.
Marco:
I think they're very, very bad for a lot.
Marco:
but apple seems seems to be pretty committed to keeping them uh at least by their inaction so assuming they're going to keep the the top lists in the app store um having games have their own complete top list like not just this one category with the little subcategories in the in the real app store
Marco:
If you give it its own entire store, and then it has a completely different standard for editorial, what's new and noteworthy, the top list, all that stuff, it would allow them to have more granular categories.
Marco:
Not that they would, but it would be nice if they would.
Marco:
Stuff like that, that would be great.
Marco:
And then in the newly separated app store with no games in it,
Marco:
um it would be a lot easier to find apps because you wouldn't have all the charts and lists and features be cluttered up with games um the problem i think is that first of all very few people you know relatively speaking most people would just visit the game store and the app store would be uh pretty pretty abandoned by by most customers i think for casual browsing and
Marco:
And that might not be a bad thing anyway, because like, you know, how many of them were actually going to the app store looking for a new game to play and they ended up buying like your PDF app?
Marco:
Like, really?
Marco:
Like, does that really happen a lot?
Marco:
I mean, it might.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I would guess not.
Marco:
And then the other problem would be, you know, how do you like how do you enforce the difference?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If you're an app that has a game-type element, but you're a very useful productivity app also, would you put yourself in the game store to get more visibility?
Marco:
Would Apple disallow that?
Marco:
How would they judge certain apps that are kind of on the borderline between, like, is this an app or is this a game?
Marco:
So I think overall...
Marco:
It would have a few problems.
Marco:
Apple could overcome this if they wanted to, but I just think the chances of them doing this are so low because it would be a massive change to the App Store.
Marco:
And if it's one thing Apple has shown us over the last six, seven years, however long it's been...
Marco:
it's that they don't really care to make massive changes to the App Store.
Marco:
Whether they can't or whether they choose not to, I don't know.
Marco:
But one of those things, either they can't or they choose not to.
Marco:
And that's very, very clear.
Marco:
And I'm expecting no substantial changes to the App Store.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like at some point they're going to have to piss or get off the pot when it comes to... That is not the metaphor, but go ahead.
Casey:
Well, I'm trying to be polite-ish.
Casey:
That was the polite version?
Casey:
Yeah, ish.
Casey:
So they're going to have... They're trying to play flight controller, get off the pot.
Yeah.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
They're going to have to do something.
Casey:
And I concur that I don't think that this is going to be the time for them to do it.
Casey:
But I just – I don't know.
Casey:
I don't understand why the outward – all outward indication is Apple just does not give a crap that all of their best third-party developers really are getting –
Casey:
i don't know if disenfranchised is the right word but getting grumbly about about the ecosystem and um friend of the show underscore david smith had a really really good episode of developing perspective um that if we remember we'll put in the show notes that wherein he talks about kind of what how the the prevailing feeling in the community is very pessimistic and
Casey:
way more pessimistic than it's been in a long time.
Casey:
And I agree with him completely that there's a lot of grumbling going on, a lot more than usual.
Casey:
And I don't know, not that it all comes down to the store, but you put a little money in everyone's pockets and typically everything looks a little bit better as a result.
Casey:
So we'll see.
Casey:
I don't know how much separating the game store from the app store is really going to help.
Casey:
I know it'll help
Marco:
make anything other than a game stand out a little bit more but i think we've got much bigger much more fundamental problems than that i mean here's here's the problem the way i see it um that if you look at the people who are actually complaining it's the small potatoes for the most part it's people like us it's you know it's people like underscore and
Marco:
It's people who are in the Apple geek blogger community.
Marco:
It's people who read Daring Fireball, basically.
Marco:
Those people are complaining.
Marco:
But if you look at what's actually in the App Store, all those people who are on those top lists, they're probably like, well, look, we're fine.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
Our...
Marco:
has always complained about the App Store from day one.
Marco:
We were complaining about some different things back then, but it was mostly the same stuff, mostly the same people.
Marco:
We've always been complaining about this.
Marco:
And if they fix some of the issues we have, we will complain about different ones.
Marco:
uh so i i don't actually think it's that different now um now there's just you know some of the some of the directions that the app store was taking at the beginning like the like the race to the bottom and pricing like some of those have just played out further uh than than they were at the beginning but i think for the most part it's the same it's the same group complaining but the same complaints and
Marco:
And I don't know how much Apple cares about that because, you know, what I was saying earlier about how they kind of, you know, put Game Center stuff and newsstand stuff, like they put these things like in a drawer and just kind of forget about it.
Marco:
I think that's how they see apps.
Marco:
I think that's how they see the entire third-party development community.
Marco:
Not quite as severely, but...
Marco:
the same kind of feeling where it's like, we're going to have this, this major community here that we kind of just, we, we have to deal with them because of market forces.
Marco:
Like we, we have to interact with them, but we're going to try to compartmentalize it as much as possible and kind of patronize it to the degree we have to.
Marco:
And just kind of, you know,
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Just kind of, like, shove all these people together in this way that will make them shut up and get them out of our face so we can keep doing our pristine stuff over on this side of the fence.
Marco:
Like, that's... And...
Marco:
I know this doesn't represent everybody who works at Apple.
Marco:
There's a lot of great people there who try to make developers' lives better.
Marco:
But the actions of the company as a whole indicate that that's what they think of us.
Marco:
And that has been the case for the entire history of the App Store.
Marco:
And I don't see that changing.
Marco:
And I don't really see a pressing need for it to change.
Marco:
Because if you look at it from the super hype executive's point of view, you look at it from Tim Cook or from Phil Schiller, who I think...
Marco:
The app store is actually under Shiller's reign, I think, but I'm not entirely sure.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Whoever's reign it's under.
Marco:
If you look at it from their point of view, every quarter they can point to some number like, look, here's how much we've paid to developers overall.
Marco:
We're doing great.
Marco:
We have all these apps in our store.
Marco:
People keep buying them or people keep putting coins into candy, whatever.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
There's no problems.
John:
Yeah, that metric-based approach, though, is what annoys me the most because they get up there and this is what they say.
John:
They have these numbers to say.
John:
Here's how many bajillions of dollars we gave to developers.
John:
Here's how many apps we have in the store.
John:
And let me show you this awesome app that is great.
John:
And...
John:
If they lay them all out like that, you're like, wow, the app store is great.
John:
But what they don't realize is the awesome app that's great sells nothing.
John:
All that money is from bilking a bunch of whales out of money for in-app purchases for crappy games.
John:
And the number of apps in the store is high because there's millions of keyword spam, clone piece of crap things.
John:
And like those three numbers are big on their own.
John:
But like together, they don't make an app store filled with awesome games and developers making a lot of money.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And I don't know if they know that or if they think if they just look at their metric and say, that metric is good.
John:
That metric is good.
John:
That metric is good.
John:
Therefore, the app store is good.
John:
Because I think when they see these games, like, look at this app.
John:
Isn't this beautiful app used for medical imaging?
John:
That sells like 10 copies.
John:
No one buys that.
John:
Everyone is buying Candy Crush and getting their money sucked out of their pockets.
John:
And there's so many apps.
John:
Look how many billions of apps we have.
John:
We have more apps.
John:
Yeah, they're all crap.
John:
Like, we just...
John:
What we're all complaining about is because we realize that those things are so different, and we want there to be a store with lots of good, high-quality apps made by developers who get a fair price for them and customers who are satisfied with them.
John:
And that's not the app store that exists, but the individual metrics, the numbers look good, right?
John:
And I really wonder whether they are fooled by those numbers or whether they just bring those numbers out and say, well, this makes good for good PR, but we know internally there's a bunch of problems.
John:
That's a good question.
Casey:
But if they know internally there's a bunch of problems, we've had a lot of time for those problems to get fixed.
Casey:
And Marco's right.
Casey:
There's been a decided lack of action.
Casey:
So at what point do we just throw our hands in the air and say, you know what, this is obviously the way it is and we're just going to have to live with it?
Marco:
I mean, a lot of it, like if you look at the App Store, it's obviously built on the same infrastructure as the iTunes Store.
Marco:
And the iTunes Store has the exact same issues where it doesn't really change very often.
Marco:
If you look at the iTunes Store today versus the iTunes Store in 2008 when the App Store was launched, it has not changed much.
John:
Yeah, but any joker with $99 can't put a song up there that uses the same title as a Beyonce song and trying to make money by people accidentally buying it.
John:
Right, that's true.
Marco:
Well, it probably isn't that different, actually.
Marco:
But anyway, it seems like anything that involves the iTunes store infrastructure, for whatever reason, whether it's technical, political, whatever the reason is, it's like it's frozen in time, and Apple can never meaningfully improve it, or they just choose not to.
Marco:
And I don't know what that... Forever ago, Casey, our friend... I probably shouldn't name him, but forever ago, our friend told us a number of times that the iTunes store is not run by Apple.
Marco:
It's run by some contractor in Virginia, something like that.
Marco:
And I don't know if that's true or not, but...
Marco:
If that is true, it would explain a lot.
Marco:
But either way, it just seems like Apple doesn't care that much about the iTunes store or they are paralyzed by some kind of technical debt that they haven't repaid or choose not to repay and just can't change anything about it.
Marco:
Or whatever reason they don't change anything about it.
John:
They're paralyzed by the success in terms of like the volume.
John:
Like some of those numbers they tried out.
John:
How many apps are there?
John:
How many things are downloaded?
John:
How many bytes?
John:
How many songs?
John:
And those numbers are so big.
John:
And any interruption in that is so, you know, like, you know, this should be something that the company can handle doing.
John:
But I think that as the biggest thing they have, the biggest online thing that money comes in and data goes out is basically the App Store and iTunes Store combined, right?
John:
That's their biggest thing.
John:
If your plan is we're going to totally change that thing and you're an organization that feels nervous about your not so confident about your ability to deploy sort of web scale, Google scale services, you're going to be like, yeah, my bonus depends on not being down on Christmas morning and letting people set up their new devices and be able to buy apps and iTunes things.
John:
And this works for that.
John:
And people have complaints, but like it's pretty easy to convince yourself that the safe move is to just stick with the infrastructure you have and just keep improving it by bits and pieces.
Marco:
How long can Apple keep going with their web services feeling like they're running on DOS and everyone else is in this century?
John:
Yeah, well, the longer they go, the bigger it gets.
John:
Like if they had these same feelings back when the Apple store didn't exist and the iTunes store was half the size, and now just the problem keeps getting bigger and bigger over time.
John:
And so the longer they wait, the harder it is to replace it with something better that also happens to work at that scale.
John:
It's just by Google.
Casey:
Well, you know, I think we're all losing sight of the fact that it's only a matter of time before WebObjects has a resurgence, because clearly that's what's going to happen.
Marco:
And I don't even know if they're still using WebObjects.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
They are.
John:
They are, really?
Casey:
They are.
John:
Oh, boy.
John:
On the back end, like, we can see the WOA URLs and the web page, but...
Marco:
That could have been legacy URLs.
Marco:
No, probably not.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
My extremely limited understanding, influenced in part by friends of birdies and birdies occasionally, it is all mostly web objects as far as I know, if not all web objects in the back end.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, that probably, the language might not be the problem.
Marco:
I think it's pretty clear the problem is just cultural within Apple.
Marco:
It's like they, for whatever reason, they just do not consider it a priority to modernize these systems in a significant major way.
Marco:
or to make significant changes to the stores themselves or the way they work to benefit users and developers in a substantial way.
Marco:
They just don't care.
Marco:
That's the reality of it.
Marco:
They just don't care.
Casey:
Well, and I wonder if part of the reason they don't care is because from my understanding of the Google Play Store, that is so full of, I don't know if I should call it spam, but full of things that probably don't belong.
Casey:
And you can define that however you'd like.
Casey:
It's an even worse Wild West out there.
Casey:
And so since nobody's showing them up and making them look
Casey:
bad and additionally since so many really hot apps are still on ios first you know like instagram is a great example which is quite old now but you know take instagram um what's compelling apple to make it better a bunch of whiny nerds talking on a podcast that maybe none of them listen to anyway you know i just i i don't i don't see what the impetus is to really make it better from their point of view
John:
yeah that's a good point i think we would all agree that they still have the best store as crappy as it may be because the problem the problems are worse elsewhere and so like apple apple responds to competitive pressure android getting better you know if you look at the past i past major ios versions and look at the features they've added a lot of them have been in ios first and that competitive pressure really had you know when apple's deciding what's going to go in ios 5 what's going to go in ios 6
John:
you know strategic and competitive things like strategic is like oh we got to do maps on our own because we hate google now and you know notifications uh why do they get those well android had them for a while and people wanted them so they had to do something like you know they apple can add lots of different features to their os they very often choose to add ones that competitors had before them because competitive pressure and so who is making the better curated more pleasant less spam filled app store nobody i guess
Casey:
Well, there's, what is it?
Casey:
Findio, FND.io.
Casey:
Isn't that MuteWinner that did that?
John:
No, I'm saying, like, which other platform?
John:
Like, I mean, maybe Windows Phone, because it doesn't have a lot of apps, so all of them in there are, like, I don't know.
John:
I don't want to make fun of Windows Phone, but.
I don't know.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So back to this list, which the longer we spend going through it, the more I think it's not actually somebody with knowledge.
Casey:
But anyway.
John:
Yeah, I think at this point it's pretty clear.
John:
Instead of going to the next item, is there anything in the remainder of the list that we think is interesting enough to talk about?
Marco:
I think the one month auto delete messages thing could be interesting because we've talked before, as has the prompt.
Marco:
We've talked before about the issue of people's text messages getting so big because what ends up happening is if somebody messages you a photo,
Marco:
That photo sticks around and your message is forever until you delete that entire conversation.
Marco:
Or I think you can delete individual items, but nobody ever does.
Marco:
So that photo sticks around forever and just takes up space on your device.
Marco:
And so having some kind of auto-delete, I think, is...
Marco:
A solution.
Marco:
I don't think it's the solution.
Marco:
I think the solution, like John, you mentioned earlier, is to store those things in iCloud and just have some kind of retention where maybe you don't delete photos after a month.
Marco:
Maybe you keep somebody's photos for the last year.
John:
Just keep everything.
John:
People aren't going to use, it's not like people are going to use Gmail as a file backup because I'm going to email myself things.
John:
I don't think anyone's going to exploit it by saying, just send me through iMessage all the photos because Apple will start them forever.
John:
It's just text mostly.
John:
Yes, there's pictures in there, but just keep them.
Casey:
John, John, John.
John:
Just bite the bullet.
John:
Look, the battery in these iOS devices is going to run out in like three years.
John:
This thing's going to be dead.
John:
They're going to buy a new one because technology is advancing.
John:
They're going to give you more money.
John:
Just store all our messages forever.
John:
Their text and plus a little bit of images.
Casey:
John, you clearly never exchange text messages with me because they are way heavy on the images and way light on the text.
John:
But it's total.
John:
How many years since 2007, you have like three gigs or something?
Casey:
I forget what it was because I've since deleted most of them.
John:
I know, but you had like three, it's not that much.
John:
Like if it really needs, it really needs to be, I think people would be willing to pay some sort of thing of like Apple keep all my stuff forever.
John:
And the default could be deleted after a year or two years or something reasonable like that.
John:
But yeah, like Marco said, deleting off the device is so primitive.
John:
Like there, if only there was some other place we could put text.
John:
Yeah, it's like this server, just stick it up there.
John:
And when I get to the end of the scroll thing, pull them down.
John:
I just like basic, basic cloud stuff that we all take for granted is like, well, of course, Apple can't do that.
John:
They'll just have to delete them off the device when they get too old.
John:
That's the sad part.
John:
They can't.
Marco:
They have shown us so many times, they actually can't.
Marco:
It's embarrassing.
Marco:
They're certainly probably the most influential tech company in the world.
Marco:
They are one of the biggest, one of the most successful.
Marco:
They are on top of their game in so many ways, and yet once it comes to touching something on a server somewhere...
Marco:
Again, it's like they're living in the DOS days.
Marco:
And certain parts of their infrastructure are great.
Marco:
Like the push notification system is really good.
Marco:
It's rock solid most of the... I mean, maybe in its first few months it might have had some problems, but it's been rock solid for me the entire time.
Marco:
They have these couple of things that are amazing, and then everything else is just like...
Marco:
half-assed, crappy, unreliable, or relevant to this part of the discussion, just extremely limited in ways that would seem archaic and too limited on the internet 10 years ago.
John:
Or built on a framework that doesn't acknowledge the existence of servers.
John:
It's built on a framework that's entirely a client-side framework, and then there's some kind of shim or adapter to get it.
John:
It's not web-native.
John:
Even as native as you think of...
John:
a stupid infinite scroll web page that when you get to the end, it makes an Ajax request and pulls down some more data and sticks it in.
John:
They're like, no, no, that's too primitive.
John:
We have a framework that deals with us.
John:
Of course, it works only client-side, and if you wanted to pull it down server-side, there's not even any good hooks for that.
John:
And then when they try to take something like that, like, oh, we'll make core data, but we'll also make it work over iCloud, that didn't work out all that great so far either.
John:
So...
John:
I'm not saying they have to be web first and do all their UIs and HTML and JavaScript, but every API they make, every framework they make for dealing with data at this point should have some acknowledgement that it may be useful for some or all this data not to be local and build that into how the framework works.
Casey:
You know what I just thought of is I've met a handful of Apple engineers, I don't know, maybe between five and 15.
Casey:
And every single one of these people, and firstly, they're all software engineers, and they're not hardware engineers, but every single one of these people...
Casey:
I can't think of any that have been anywhere near servers.
Casey:
And it's extremely anecdotal and not really representative of anything real.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Do you guys know anyone that works at Apple on the server side?
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Are there that many of them?
John:
I've talked to some people who have done work on the backend for iCloud.Mac type stuff back in those days.
John:
Those people are there, but we've talked about the same problem so many times.
John:
It's just...
John:
If you're going to do this type of thing, just look at the client side.
John:
Apple does the client side so well.
John:
Look at the things they do there and how they do them.
John:
Look at how they make new frameworks for solving problems and extend those frameworks and support them and fix bugs in them and replace old ones with new ones.
John:
And they build an infrastructure from the compiler all the way up for doing client side stuff very well.
John:
And they just, you know, it's just constant improvement, improving the language, improving the IDE, improving the compiler, making new frameworks, just on and on and on.
John:
There's no equivalent to that on the server side, or if there is, we don't see it at all versus Google, which does exactly that equivalent on the server side.
John:
They have tools for storing data, for synchronizing data, tools for managing their data center on the hardware side.
John:
There's just constant revision, constant improvement to every piece of the infrastructure from the bottom up.
John:
That's all they do all day long, all year.
John:
Like the whole company is built around that.
John:
And Apple does that on the client side.
John:
It's just that.
John:
that apple doesn't invest in infrastructure on the server side in a way that is visible to us on the outside it could be that they do all exactly the same things that google does internally and we just don't see it because why would anyone outside need to see these things but i think that's part of the culture why do we know about spanner and big table and map reduce because google told us about them and shared their knowledge and expertise and open sources stuff and protocol buffers and like all these you know even facebook with all its different projects and hhvm and
Marco:
scribe and all this other stuff like that culture doesn't exist at apple and i don't see how they're ever going to be competitive with those companies unless they get some of that religion i think it's like what i well i think to summarize what i see from the outside it's that apple completely lacks hustle in the entire category of web services like
Marco:
you see like Apple is like pulling the industry forward when it comes to hardware design forever.
Marco:
Um, and, and a lot of the software design as well.
Marco:
Like they're, they're like dragging the industry forward.
Marco:
Like, look at how awesome we are.
Marco:
We're going to force you all to keep up with us in hardware and software design.
Marco:
Um, and then it comes to things like web services and the rest of the industry is doing that to Apple and
Marco:
And Apple is just, like, being dragged along, kicking and screaming, like, fine, I guess I'll do the bare minimum that might solve your problem on a web service.
Marco:
And it's, like, they are only doing what's required, often not even that.
Marco:
And just putting no – seemingly to the front, putting no heart into it, no substantial effort that's, like, above and beyond –
Marco:
They're just like, to them, it's just a checkbox.
Marco:
Like, fine, I guess we have to do something with the web service.
Marco:
Eventually, here you go.
Marco:
There's no hustle there.
Marco:
We don't see, like, there's never anything where they launch it and then all of a sudden everyone else has to scramble to keep up.
Marco:
you know siri might have been one of those things but even then they got they got you know lapped pretty quickly after they launched it like they they just completely lack that hustle on the services end whereas they they have it in other areas of their business but you just don't see that at all for services whereas then google and facebook and amazon but especially google they're i think they're the best at this by far um
Marco:
Google just nails that.
Marco:
Google will destroy anybody with sheer server-side hustle.
Marco:
They're so good at it.
Marco:
They just have infinite server-side engineering resources to just beat everyone up with web service capabilities and advancements and new expectations set by customers because of how awesome their web services are.
John:
and you know so google does with web services what apple does with hardware design um and apple just seems to not want to close that gap at all someone on twitter asked why we don't use a shared pages document for a show notes and instead we use uh the google thing and it's because i don't like the pages thing like i i looked at it again just to make sure that i still didn't like it when he did that tweet
John:
And I went to iCloud, I went to Pages, created a new document, it opened a new window, it resized it, and it looked like a big, you know, word processing window from 1997.
John:
And I said, nope, close that up.
John:
Like, it's not what I want.
John:
And I don't even know, does it even support all the, like, you know, sub-Ether edit, kind of multiple people editing in the document at the same time with different colored cursors that we take for granted in Google Docs, which is, like, how old now?
John:
I think it's supposed to, but I don't know that it does...
John:
Like that's that's an example of like those apps may be great, but, you know, mind share wise, I'm not even going to consider them because I assume they're not great and I assume they're not reliable.
John:
And interface wise, they're trying to imitate a desktop application.
John:
And then that's not what I want out of a web application.
John:
I want something I can open in a tab that we can all type in at the same time.
John:
And Google provides it and it will be up and fast and reliable and won't do weird things.
John:
And it'll work in whatever browser I try to use it in.
John:
It'll just be a little bit creepy.
John:
I mean, whatever.
John:
The reason we're not using Pages, I think, Casey suggested it and you said you wanted to do it.
John:
I said, no.
John:
It's not because I hate Apple.
John:
It's because I know Google Docs works and it's reliable and it's very difficult to gain that trust back even if you match it.
John:
Even if you're better, it's hard to gain that trust back.
John:
It's like, why does everyone use Google Hangouts?
John:
Because they work.
John:
Because it's a way that people can communicate with each other and Google introduced this thing and they've steadily improved it and people have learned...
John:
That's the thing that works.
John:
Everyone gets a web browser.
John:
If you can't forget what a web browser works, just get Chrome.
John:
We know that'll work.
John:
Not too hard to set up.
John:
And they get the job done.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
At some point, Apple's got to take this seriously.
Casey:
And maybe they're taking it seriously already, but they've got to show someone outside of Cupertino that progress is being made.
Casey:
And it's not...
Casey:
It's not an Apple's MO to be self-deprecating or really admit things are wrong unless they're pretty sure it's already fixed.
Casey:
But man, some sort of, not even State of the Union, but some sort of nod that says, hey guys, this is pretty crummy, but here's what we're doing and here's what's coming.
Casey:
Which is exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see at WWDC if that's a card up their sleeve.
Casey:
But yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We're running out of time on that, and we're actually kind of running out of time on the show.
Casey:
So let me scoot forward.
Casey:
Cellular fallback was in the maybe category on this wish list.
Casey:
That has appeared on and off in betas of various versions of iOS, and I have always loved it because – and cue the –
Casey:
the first world problem violin music.
Casey:
When I walk out of the office, if I'm fiddling with my phone after our office is on the third floor of the building, as I walk down the stairs and eventually out of the building, a lot of times my iPhone will try to cling to the office Wi-Fi and I'll be trying to peruse Twitter or something like that.
Casey:
And I can't get anything.
Casey:
I don't get any response back because my phone is being too persistent clinging to Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And there was a brief window of time, like I said, when on a beta you could tell it, you know, just go ahead and fall back to cellular if you're not really getting an answer quick enough.
Marco:
Isn't that what multipath TCP is for?
Casey:
I believe so, but now you're outside my wheelhouse.
Casey:
I've heard of it, but I'm not really sure about it.
Casey:
And man, I would love for that to come back and be a thing.
Marco:
I think it's supposed to be in 7.
Marco:
Maybe it doesn't work as well as we want.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
Well, and I think that, I don't know, I'm waiting for John to correct me, but I think Multipath TCP is supposed to help with, or isn't that supposed to be like two different, you could use cellular and Wi-Fi simultaneously for speed boost?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I should look this up.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Dash, Hover, and NatureBox.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
I actually wrote down a couple things, but I have to look back and see if any of these are worthwhile.
Casey:
Oh, what are they going to do about Interapp Communication?
John:
I wasn't even on this person's wish list.
John:
He doesn't care about it.
Marco:
Do you want to talk about that weird iOS 8 side-by-side on iPad thing that came up last week?
Marco:
Yeah, I don't buy it.
John:
Well, shouldn't we talk about it?
John:
Next week's show, we'll do like real predictions and talk about the whole keynote.
John:
This was a good overview of iOS 8, but we need to like, you know, say hardware announcements, what software announcements, you know, just the whole nine yards.
John:
New Mac Pros.
John:
And that'll be our last chance before WWC for next week.
John:
So I think we should save iOS side-by-side because I think it'll come up there.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
I mean, cause that's something that's, you know, well, I don't know if it has any more credence than an anonymous email, but I, it was on, it didn't, didn't, uh, what's his name have it on nine to five Mac?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's like, that's, that's, I think the only reason anyone's even talking about it is because Mark Gurman had on nine to five and he has a really good history.
Marco:
Like he, he is, he is a pretty reliable, uh, leaker of rumors.
John:
Um,
John:
That's exactly how he likes to be known.
John:
Yeah, sorry.
John:
Reliable leaker.
Marco:
Pretty reliable leaker of rumors.
Marco:
Yeah, he has pretty reliable sources and he chooses, like the things he chooses to report, his record is pretty good.
Marco:
So what I'm saying is he's good at his job.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
For him to report this as what seems like a pretty sure thing, there's certainly some weight to that.
Marco:
Whether it will actually ship is another story, but it would not surprise me if the side-by-side thing has at least been tested for iOS 8 and is being considered for inclusion in iOS 8.
Marco:
Although I would imagine by now, like a week and a half from the keynote, they've probably already decided whether it's going to be there or not and whether it's going to be mentioned or not.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, yeah, you have to think that something that big, if it appears in the keynote, people are going to expect it to ship.
John:
But in the past, things have appeared in keynotes and then just not shipped in the version of the OS.
John:
But they've been more minor features, something this big.
John:
I feel like they'd have to commit to.
Marco:
since we're talking about it anyway, uh, I couldn't possibly care less about this feature.
Marco:
I think it's not, maybe, maybe there's, maybe they've thought of something that I haven't and it's going to be amazing.
Marco:
But I think the biggest problem with iOS multitasking is not side by side apps.
Marco:
It's, it's the, it's the file system problem.
Marco:
It's, it's sharing the data.
Marco:
It's you have like, where do you keep the documents?
Marco:
Where do you keep files?
Marco:
Do you keep files?
John:
Well, you would assume something would be part of this, though.
John:
I don't have a place to put a thing so that this app can write it and this other app can read it, right?
John:
But if you have them side-by-side and they made something like, oh, well, if you drag it from one thing to the other, then we will make some temporary location, put the thing in it, like some plumbing to make that happen.
John:
I don't know if that will be part of side-by-side apps, but when I see side-by-side apps, I immediately think...
John:
I would like to be able to drag things between them.
John:
And if that's not part of it in version one, I would hope that if they keep going down that road, they'll work on that.
John:
And yes, that means that like the side-by-side part is not what's making that work.
John:
It's whatever the underlying system is they have for having these solid applications shared data between each other.
John:
But even a really stupid one that's basically like copy and paste with file, temporary file backing, even that could go a long way because that solves the problem of like,
John:
Where do I put this so that when I leave this app and go into this other app, it can see it?
John:
And there's no putting.
John:
If you drag it between there, then it's just like, oh, well, this is a single action and we have a framework that handles a single action and it will do whatever it needs to do to deal with the sandboxing stuff to make that happen.
John:
Yeah, that would definitely help a lot.
Casey:
I feel like there's some sort of inter-app communication fix that none of us can conceive.
Casey:
And as per usual, as soon as Apple shows us, we're going to say, oh, of course that's the way it works.
Casey:
But I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
If there isn't any sort of inter-app communication improvement, well, first of all, Federico is probably going to just quit the internet.
Casey:
But secondly...
Casey:
It's just, I don't know.
Casey:
What else is really, really egregiously broken about iOS other than bugs?
John:
And HFS+.
John:
I'd trade interactive communication for a new file system any day.
Casey:
For everyone other than John Syracuse.
John:
Oh, you'd like it too.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Marco:
There's not really a lot going on, right?
Marco:
I mean, this is the problem with trying to record our crazy schedule of working around our travel needs and everything and recording basically three episodes in about eight days.
Marco:
There hasn't been a lot happening during these eight days.
John:
Yeah, we're going to miss the week before WWDC when all the good leaks come out.
John:
But anyway, we'll have to... What, is the next recording of Thursday?
John:
Yes.
John:
We'll just have to make sure that we go through all the things.
John:
Hardware announcements, software announcements, and not get too bogged down in any one thing like the split-screen iOS app.
Casey:
Have you guys met yourselves?
John:
For our homework, we should all have lists of things that we think are going to be announced.
John:
And we should just go through our list, and then we can go back and talk about the individual things.
Marco:
Okay, I'm sure that will work perfectly.
Marco:
Totally.
Marco:
We will definitely do our homework.
John:
And Marco will play Monument Valley and everything will be fine.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, yeah, because everything that prevented me from playing it the last couple of weeks, that's all gone now, so now I'll be able to play it.
John:
yeah i'm saving all of my my overcast complaints for a future show because i i look at the activity on the beta and most people are hitting on most of the things that uh but i am trying to use it speaking of a complaint this is not your fault but i'm thrilled that you're trying to use it that that alone is a compliment yeah i'm i'm trying to use it i used it in my commute to work today and i this weekend i'm like let me just set it up with my car with bluetooth because if i'm going to be using this ipod touch as my podcast thing your pod catcher
John:
yeah whatever and my car has bluetooth support but and my ipod touch has bluetooth but they don't talk to each other at all when i turned on the bluetooth pairing thing on my car it said do you want to connect to and it said my wife's iphone 5s which apparently has been in the car before and the car is detected and is all ready to pair with it well does it does the car support music streaming like as i think it's well it used to be called a2dp i don't know if it still is but does it support music streaming or just voice
Marco:
Because some cars, like I rented a Maxima when I was in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, and it had Bluetooth, but only for phone calls, which actually led me to think about it would be a really cool feature if I could simulate a phone call over Bluetooth, but just play the podcast through it from my app so that you could play it in cars that didn't have that feature enabled.
Marco:
But I don't know if that's possible with iOS.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
It supports music streaming and handset pairing for voice, everything, but only with iPhones.
John:
It doesn't even see my iPod Touch.
John:
Bluetooth is on, discoverable, everything, no devices detected.
John:
So that was disappointing.
John:
So I'm using the USB adapter for it, which is kind of crappy.
John:
i'm still going anyway i have tons of complaints i'll tell you all and you know next time we see each other i'm honored thank you but like but really the beta people are really getting a lot of them like you're getting a lot of good feedback from the beta and anytime i have any complaint i just go look through the beta feedback i'm like yep that person said that i agree with that i like i mean i can i can meet to them if you want me to vote but mostly they're getting yeah actually that would help yeah voting helps just file a bug and i'll mark it as a duplicate
John:
I should put favorites, but we're doing it on glass boards.
John:
I'll put little faves next to the ones that are like, can't tell what the hell's downloading, don't want it to play when I tap on the thing because I just want to see the description, all that.
Casey:
Oh, thank you.
Casey:
I'm glad you agree with me on that.
John:
Everyone agrees.
Marco:
No, it's definitely going to play, but I'll give you an info, a detailed disclosure button.
John:
And you and your stupid toolbar icons, you're still holding the line on that.
John:
Yeah, well.
John:
I don't want to ruin what it is, so just I'll complain about it after you release the thing.
John:
If you don't end up falling back to the icon that you know you should use but refuse to.
John:
No, I'm not going to do it.
John:
But you should because it would work and everyone knows what it means.
John:
You're right, but I don't want to use that icon.
John:
I want to see.
John:
It's an experiment.
John:
I want to see if I can get along without using it.
John:
I know, but why?
John:
It's like you're no settings in the magazine.
John:
There's always one thing that you do.
John:
Like, damn it, I'm going to hold the line on this.
Marco:
Well, yeah, I always put like some kind of like I always try experiments in my apps and sometimes they bomb out and don't work.
Marco:
Most of the time they bomb out and don't work.
Marco:
But occasionally they work really well.
Marco:
And and and that's like and people end up loving my apps for those occasional times where those things work.
Marco:
Like so many of the little features that people loved about Instapaper were those kind of experiments.
John:
I'll just wait for the support email influx of people who can't figure out where the hell the thing that's behind that button is.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll see.
John:
But anyway, I don't want to disclose anything about the app, so we'll talk more about it probably long after WWDC when you start getting to the point where you either want to release it or talk about it more publicly.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know when the hell I'm going to release it.
Marco:
I'm thinking maybe... I'm not even going to give a date.
Marco:
If I had to give a date... I was just waiting.
Marco:
Yeah, if I had to give a date today, seeing what I have to do in the next few weeks, just life, going to this conference and family stuff and travel stuff... And iOS 8.
Marco:
I mean, forget it.
Marco:
Yeah, iOS 8.
Marco:
I'm thinking I'll be lucky to get it out in July, maybe.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Plus, you've got plenty of plain old bugs in there.
John:
This is what happens when it goes from a one-user app to a 30-user app.
John:
They find all the bugs.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's why.
Marco:
It's amazing how many bugs have been found.
Marco:
It's really quite shocking.
Marco:
Like, am I...
Marco:
Typical me naivety.
Marco:
In my initial email to the testers, I wrote something on the lines of, I'm pretty sure this is pretty close to 1.0.
Marco:
I'm mainly looking for bug fixes.
Marco:
But feature-wise and design-wise, I'm pretty sure this is pretty close to 1.0.
John:
And yeah, it's nowhere close.
John:
You're just too close to it because you understand the app entirely and then you throw this thing in front of people who haven't been looking at it for months and it's like...
John:
you know i don't understand how even even to this day there's still features i don't want you to explain them to me like but that i don't entirely understand i'm able to get the app to do what i want which is interesting but the conceptually there are things in there that i don't understand at all and it's like i could just ask marco and he would explain it to me but other people aren't going to be able to ask you that you know what i mean so i'm trying to like see if as the betas progress it starts to reveal itself to me but
John:
Already, I like it better than any other iOS podcast app, you know, with the UI that I've used because I can configure it to let me manage my podcast the way I've been manually doing it terribly painfully manually on my iPod shuffle.
John:
So thumbs up for the utility department there.
John:
But I may go back to my shuffle after I if I get sick of like plugging the stupid USB thing into my car.
Marco:
And the problem is that there's nothing I can do really reliably to sync with desktop iTunes.
Marco:
That's like a wall that podcast clients can attempt to... If you have a Mac client, you can try to read the iTunes library.
Marco:
It kind of works.
Marco:
It kind of doesn't.
Marco:
On the iPhone, you can...
Marco:
I haven't enabled this feature in the betas yet, but one of the things I wanted to do was have an import from Apple Podcasts option.
Marco:
And the problem is you can read the library through public APIs, but only actual downloaded episodes.
Marco:
So if you have a podcast that you've listened to everything and deleted it all, that won't show up to me at all.
Marco:
I have no way to tell that you're subscribed to a podcast that currently has no episodes downloaded on your device.
Marco:
So there's these limitations that it's just going to make it really, really hard to ever support iTunes importing to a degree that people would expect it to work very well.
John:
Yeah, I wish I could just configure playlists in Overcast and then they would magically appear on my iPod Shuffle.
Casey:
Your obsession with your iPod Shuffle is kind of comical.
John:
Because it's so easy.
John:
I can clip it onto my clothes.
John:
It's a wearable.
John:
Plug them right into my car.
John:
The parts that are painful about it are trying to get songs on it ever, which is just super painful.
John:
It's like torture.
John:
And accidentally hitting buttons on that stupid...
John:
They put the play pause button in the middle of a circle trying to figure out which button you're hitting, not accidentally hit forward or back.
John:
The physical UI is crappy as well.
John:
It's much easier than having to deal with it.
John:
You know what I really need to get?
John:
I really need to just get a clicker headphone.
John:
I keep saying that.
John:
I've been saying it for years.
John:
One of Apple's headphones puts a little clicker thingy on it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the problem.
Marco:
And that's actually one of my big problems with the headphone market is for portable headphones.
Marco:
All the headphones that sound really good are all the full-size ones that you use at your desk, and they have these big, long cables.
Marco:
Oftentimes, the cables are coiled, or they might have the giant quarter-inch plug on the end instead of the nice little eighth-inch plug.
Marco:
Almost none of the headphones that sound great have the iPhone clicker.
Marco:
And so the iPhone clicker, but the iPhone clicker is really, really useful if it's not like you at your desk at your computer.
Marco:
If you're out walking, if you're on a plane, you can keep the iPod or whatever in your pocket and just have the clicker there to do all your control.
Marco:
And there are just very few headphones that are both good...
Marco:
and have the clicker and have a good clicker like because there are different clickers like sennheiser makes a really good one akg makes the worst one i've ever used in my life um some of the like fashion brands some of them have good ones like the ones i tried in the apple store like some of them were good some of them were awful it's and and uh and as dashi points out many headphones have detachable cords you can like kind of swap one in but most headphones don't have detachable cords and
Marco:
So you're kind of like stuck either doing like a really tiny sensitive soldering job to kind of hack your own cable on there, which is a terrible idea, or just use the cable that comes with it, which will eventually fray somewhere internally and die.
John:
Well, maybe my iWatch will solve this problem for me.
John:
But basically the problem is if you listen to a podcast while you do dishes, which is a reasonable thing to do, and your spouse comes into the room and wants to talk to you, you get to fish this thing out of your pocket, hit the button, swipe to unsleep the device, find the pause button, and pause.
John:
So compare compared to just click on a clicker or just tap a little button on things that can become reflexes because they're physical devices.
John:
There's no way in hell I want to fish an iPhone or an iPod touch out of my pocket and interact with the UI deposit.
John:
And by the time I do that, my wife is already rolling her eyes and saying, why are you always listening to podcasts?
Casey:
You know what you could do is you could just get an iPhone that comes with the headphones with the clicker.
Casey:
Does it come with it?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
Yeah, they do.
Casey:
It does.
Casey:
And then when you go into your car, by the magic of Bluetooth, you don't have to plug anything in.
John:
My wife has an iPhone 5S, and I'm pretty sure there are no clicker headphones in this house.
Casey:
There is not a debate in my mind.
Marco:
they're under it in the box you ever lift up the little white thing i should go maybe i left them in the box that's the case i gotta go fish those things out yeah every iphone has come with the has come with earbuds the first one even came with a dock but yeah that was short-lived well of course they come with earbuds but with the clicker on them yeah with the clicker i'm gonna go i'm gonna go find that right after the show because i have not seen that yeah every every earbud set that has ever come with iphones and every iphone has come with earbuds uh they've all had clickers there have been a couple of generations of them but but they've all had them
Casey:
I can't believe you don't know that, John.
John:
There's one iPhone in this house, or one iPhone 5S in this house, and I was pretty sure it didn't come.
Casey:
Well, Tina's had an iPhone for a while, I thought.
John:
She had a 4S and a 5S, and neither one of them.
John:
You're wrong.
John:
Maybe she never used the headphone.
John:
I mean, it's conceivable they're still sitting in the package coiled up.
John:
I'm just saying I've never seen them in the house.
John:
Or maybe she's got them and hides them from me.