The Endgame Is Omnipotence
Casey:
Alright, so the showbot is up again so far.
Casey:
We'll see how long that lasts.
John:
Are you still centering the titles?
John:
Come on, Casey.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
What's wrong with that?
John:
What's wrong with that?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Besides that it's like daggers in your eyes, it's impossible to read.
John:
Besides that.
Casey:
Oh, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
John:
It forms crazy shapes that mean nothing.
John:
It turns the entire thing into a giant Rorschach test.
John:
That's a man with a hat looking at me.
John:
Is this person's name actually Jason Discount?
John:
Not only is this person's name Jason Discount, but I knew this person when I was a kid.
John:
So you know this is actually his real name?
John:
Yes, it is his real name.
John:
I think he lives in Australia now, but he used to live like, you know, the town over from me.
Marco:
So his name is Jason Discount, and he's emailing us about upgrade pricing discounts.
John:
Yeah, it's finally a legitimate reason for him to have that name.
Marco:
He's been waiting his whole life for this moment when a podcast had something wrong about discount pricing.
John:
It's not wrong.
John:
It's just that I don't think any of us brought up this specific scenario when complaining about the confusing bundle pricing as a way to do upgrades.
John:
And he gives the example of, let's say you release an application at $6 and then you work on your second version of the application and you want to sell that for $6 too, but you only want people to be able to upgrade from version one for $2.
John:
So his strategy for this is if you reduce the first version to $4 and make the bundle price with both of them together, $6,
John:
If someone accidentally buys the old app, it still only costs them a total of $6 to buy the new app.
John:
And of course, anybody who already has the new app can buy the bundle and complete this bundle to get it for $2.
John:
I don't think this entirely solves it because what if somebody has the old app and accidentally buys the new app for $6?
John:
Then they're out $4.
John:
But...
Marco:
oh that's a whole other angle you're right yeah because there's nothing like you can't like they there's nothing stopping them from individually buying the apps at full price in theory right unless the store would like detect that they bought one and only offer them to complete their bundle right but this this uh idea of lowering the price of the old one that you have to keep on the store uh so that if anyone accidentally buys it uh they're you know it
John:
they they're not they pay the same price anyway if they accidentally buy it like oh just buy the bundle then you can get the new one for the same price you would have paid for it if you bought it individually but there's still the full price new one out there lurking is a problem anyway this whole thing is roundabout and trying to explain it is confusing and that's why it's a bad idea but uh i i still think people are going to try it we'll see i i still maintain that it's a terrible idea and that nobody should do it because
Marco:
At best, it's fairly confusing for your customers.
Marco:
At worst, if you do things wrong, it could cost them extra money that you can't easily refund them and that they will be angry about and leave you one-star reviews about.
Marco:
The thing with the one-star reviews is it only takes something angering a very small percentage of your user base in order for them to suddenly become the dominant voice in your reviews, because very few people review things, even if you show them one of those annoying pop-ups.
Marco:
There's still a very small percentage of people who actually review your apps.
Marco:
And so it doesn't take much.
Marco:
If you cause an issue that really, really angers a tiny little fraction of your user base, that will become disproportionately influential in your ratings and your reviews and all the discussion about your app online.
Marco:
And that's really not good.
John:
People are much more motivated to actually sit down and figure out how you go about leaving a review when they're mad about something.
John:
Whereas if they love your app, they may briefly think, you know, the person who made this app is nice and I wonder if I could do something to help them or I'd help it.
John:
But like that thought goes away quickly and they go back to their life.
Casey:
so quick side note one of my favorite things to do which i admittedly don't do very often is if i for some reason have to call like say verizon or something because there's an issue which almost never happens or if i have really a really really great server at a restaurant occasionally i like to ask for their manager just to say something really nice because i feel like it puts some good karma in the world and maybe that karma will come back one day so you ask to talk to their manager don't they feel like oh what did i do yeah that
Casey:
the best part is to kind of that's not the best part you're just torturing torturing these people no but then but then usually but then i'm extremely effusive about how wonderful they are now that's that's like calling a kid down to the principal's office randomly and you know freaking him out and just saying just wanted to say hi to you how's your day going well sometimes oftentimes i'll say you know i'd let you know that this was really awesome can i tell a manager but sometimes i don't sometimes i like to mess mess around and yes you're mad with power casey
John:
Casey, we need to talk.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
You know, I'm just going to be quiet from now on.
John:
You trying to say something nice about if you had a good service, that's a good, you know, your motivation is good.
John:
The thing you're trying to do is good.
John:
The way you're doing it is not great.
Casey:
Which sounds a lot like the show bot, actually.
John:
Well, you'll get that.
John:
Practice makes perfect.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Are games, movies?
Casey:
Are there going to be spoilers?
Casey:
Do I need to go away again?
Casey:
Because I genuinely, honestly, did not listen to that part of the show.
John:
It's not going to be spoilers.
John:
It's not about journey.
John:
It's, it's about the whole, uh, is Apple set to disrupt Microsoft and Sony and that whole conversation we had.
John:
And lots of people tweeted about that.
John:
I know there was a whole podcast about it that is in my queue, but that I haven't yet listened to that features, uh, Ben Thompson who wrote that article, uh, and a bunch of other people, uh,
John:
I haven't listened to that yet, but the thought that occurred to me after we finished the show, because, of course, I wanted to talk even more about the topic that we talked about forever anyway, because I like talking about games, was are video games more like apps or more like movies?
John:
And I mean this in one specific respect that I don't think we touched on.
John:
Although we didn't bring this up in the show specifically, the whole personal computers are like trucks metaphor that has been discussed that I think Steve Jobs brought up many years ago.
John:
And that people don't need a Mac Pro to post to Facebook and read websites and check their email and stuff.
John:
Despite the fact that the Mac Pro does all these amazing things, they're probably not going to use them.
John:
The amount of technology we have and the features available far exceed what any person is ever going to want to do with it.
John:
And that's why I say, is it like apps?
John:
I guess I should have said it more.
John:
Is it like a computer where we know personal computer technology is available now that is far beyond the needs of what regular people want to do with computers?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I'm comparing that to movies where movies, the technology available to make movies just has gotten better by leaps and bounds.
John:
If you compare like a blockbuster movie, if you could take like even the crappiest blockbuster movie like Transformers or some crap like that.
John:
back in time back in time 50 years and show it to somebody they would not have on first viewing they would not have been able to compute how terrible the movie was because they would just be amazed at the visuals because they would be like this is magic i don't understand where this came from this must be like an alien artifact because they wouldn't understand how we how we put all those visuals on the screen
John:
And I think, in movies anyway, the mass market appetite for increasingly amazing things is not satisfied.
John:
It's not like, well, you know, once we can do reasonable practical effects like, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark, that's all we'll ever need.
John:
There's no upside to making it better.
John:
People don't need the Mac Pro of movies.
John:
They get by perfectly fine with the iMac, so we'll just be...
John:
Stick with the feature set that's available on Raiders of the Lost Ark.
John:
No need for Jurassic Park.
John:
No need for the advances in CGI we have today.
John:
No need for all the CGI that's used in television shows to do backdrops and stuff.
John:
Sets are fine.
John:
We've pretty much got this set.
John:
I don't think that's the case.
John:
And it's not like the only people who care about...
John:
Just more features, more technology, more amazing stuff are the people who are super into movies and the casual moviegoers are like, I don't need CGI.
John:
Practical effects are fine with me.
John:
I think the appetite is essentially unlimited for amazing visuals and movies.
John:
you know, again, setting aside the stupidity of scripts and all the other stuff that have always been the same, it's not as if movies got good enough and people are like, no, you don't need to improve them anymore.
John:
And they keep trying to improve them.
John:
It doesn't mean everything they do to improve them is better.
John:
3D is an attempt to improve it and may or may not be better.
John:
Maybe people don't like that.
John:
Higher frame rate, same deal.
John:
High definition television, I think that's an improvement that people do say, yes, we like that better.
John:
I say, yeah, standard def's good enough.
John:
I'm not a power user of television.
John:
I don't need high definition television.
John:
Standard definition, no.
John:
As soon as you see high definition, you're like, well, screw that old thing.
John:
We want the new thing.
John:
And the question about video games is what are they more like?
John:
Are they more like the PC where increasing power is like, no, I don't really need that.
John:
Or is it more like movies where there is a seemingly infinite appetite of the mass market for making them better in ways that involve technology and money?
John:
And I think for video games so far, I don't know if this will always be true, but for video games so far, they seem a lot more like movies to me.
John:
And that anytime, like people saying, what about when a $99 puck gets as powerful as the PlayStation 4?
John:
Then we're all set, right?
John:
No, because people will still want the power that the PlayStation 5 or 6 offers.
John:
Like, why will they want that?
John:
Well, because they always want that.
John:
Because their appetite for better games and better graphics and things that, you know...
John:
more power can do is unlimited and it's not like a computer where it's like you don't need all that technology and that mac pro you just want to check your email games are different if you could have a vast fully realized realistic looking city with amazing draw distances and amazing physics and everything people want that they don't know or care how it works they're playing the game it's much different than using the the computer to do something uh so that is a factor that i didn't articulate in the last time we discussed this that i think is definitely uh in play here with games and that
John:
I don't know if the appetite is inexhaustible, but I know we haven't exhausted it yet.
John:
And that's why I think a lot of people who are saying, oh, you think that now, but what about when the $99 puck is as powerful as a PlayStation 4?
John:
Then there'll be no more market for a $400 gaming device.
John:
I think the reason people keep buying $400 gaming things is because their appetite for better visuals and better gameplay and better physics and just better games, period,
John:
is insatiable it is not satisfied we never get to the point where games are good enough and then it just stops and stays that way there's always something more you can do even just for stupid 2d genres and stuff like that you can always do something more with more technology with more memory with more sensors with more you know who knows what uh so that more than anything i think is going to keep the 400 boxes alive for much longer than i think people think
Casey:
i see i'm not so sure like as an example so we have a 40 inch tv at home and we it does support 1080 but the difference to me between 720 and 1080 is i can't tell i can tell the difference between 480 whatever standard def is and 720 or 480 and 1080 but i can't tell the difference between 720 and 1080 and i know with games it's a bit different because it's not a film it's
Casey:
It's something that's been created.
Casey:
And so I do think you're right that we will always seek for more clarity, better, better, better, more polygons, etc.
Casey:
But I don't know of anyone that buys games that needs the latest and greatest systems specifically for the best graphics, except people who generally self-describe as gamers.
Casey:
So for me, I don't really care about games very much.
Casey:
And if a new system comes out, better graphics, cool.
Yeah.
John:
But it's not just better graphics.
John:
That's the whole problem.
John:
First of all, I would say that, yeah, maybe only the self-described gamers care about this and purchase on it, but there's enough of them to sustain the market, right?
John:
We already established, like, this generation, previous generation.
John:
There's enough of them to sustain the market, right?
John:
But for everything else...
John:
As the technology increases, new types of games become possible.
John:
It's kind of like you couldn't do live action Lord of the Rings without computer effects.
John:
You just couldn't film that like you could do with with puppets, maybe or people in costumes, but it would just not have the kind of appeal.
John:
And you don't need to know or care anything about the technology involved in making that to appreciate Lord of the Rings.
John:
And so it's not to get hung up on the high def versus standard def, but it's what's on the screen.
John:
You can do different kinds of things.
John:
If you were to take any current game developer and say, what if I gave you 100,000 times the memory, the bandwidth, the whatever,
John:
What could you do?
John:
They wouldn't just make their existing games with more polygons and higher-res textures.
John:
They'd be like, oh, well, with that, I can make a different kind of game.
John:
Like, you know, I can make a hiking simulator that people will love.
John:
Like, I mean, at a certain point, you get to the holodeck, right?
John:
There's different categories of games, especially with physics and materials, because a lot of things you do in games, it's like everything feels like a set where it's just sort of a rigid polygon or with some sort of predefined destructive things.
John:
Once technology gets to the point where you can do, like, real arbitrary destructibility,
John:
whole new people who aren't so interested in games before will suddenly be interested if they can realistically take a baseball bat through like a showroom of supercars and it doesn't just feel like you're triggering a bunch of destruction animations i'll have to rethink cities no like it just there's different categories of games you can have i mean i mean the hiking simulator thing is a joke i had from when i was a kid but i bet there probably is a hiking simulator now like we've gotten to the point where
John:
where the visuals in games are enough that people who are only interested in visuals would never have been interested in 16-bit games, in NES games, in Pong, or anything like that.
John:
But suddenly, when games start to look, start to pass some threshold of realism, whole new categories of people become interested.
John:
Even if it's only like the deer hunter simulator type things.
John:
Those people were not interested in playing Super Mario Bros.
John:
But once you can simulate deer hunting in a way that they find appealing, suddenly you open up
John:
an entire new market so i think the the insatiable appetite for better technology for games isn't because people know or care or understand the technology it's the same as the insatiable appetite for increasingly ridiculous visuals just again transformers despite the fact that the rest of the movie is terrible
John:
People go see these movies because the visuals are amazing.
John:
And you'd say, oh, well, they're amazing now, but they can't get any more amazing.
John:
Surely 10 years from now, the visuals will be exactly the same and no person will ever go into a movie and be wowed.
John:
I don't think that's the case.
John:
I think people will always want to see something amazing out of people.
John:
I think people always want to play something amazing.
John:
And I think increases in technology will only open the market because you'll be able to do different things, not just the same things we're doing now, but fancier.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the big risk, though, is, you know, typical disruption where the big risk is not that people will stop caring about things being more and more advanced as we get new technological capabilities.
Marco:
The big risk is that other factors come into play that, you know, the kind of thing where somebody gets to think like, okay, well, I could buy this new game system for $400.
Marco:
But instead, I can have this other thing where, you know, maybe it's an iPhone, maybe it's an iPad, maybe it's a Nintendo DS7, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
You have these other devices that come in where somebody can say, I don't care about the graphics because X. Or I don't care about the technological inferiority because X. Where X can be some kind of really compelling reason, whether it's an extremely different price point.
Marco:
you know a completely different portability class or you know it's always with you or it's built into something else and you already have it so it's kind of free things like that that's what causes the big problems and so it's not that the market for super powerful game boxes is going to disappear but i certainly think there's a lot to to suggest it's going to be marginalized and continue to be marginalized over time and you know you can look at movies are actually a pretty good example of this where
Marco:
Box office sales are actually kind of crappy relative to what people expected for this time period because there's a lot more to do besides go see a movie these days.
Marco:
And so it's not that people stopped caring about movies getting better and better.
Marco:
It's that now they have a lot of other stuff they can do.
Marco:
During times which, you know, in the 90s, they might have gone to see a movie.
Marco:
And so I think that's the big risk here is kind of a splitting of attention and an increase in disruptive factors that are different from the things these boxes do best.
Marco:
Not that people will stop caring about what they do best.
John:
Well, you just put placeholders in for the things that's going to cause it, but I don't think you can name it because all the things you named already exist and still haven't killed off the market.
John:
I mean, spreading attention is one thing.
John:
Like, no one can help that.
John:
If suddenly just there's too many other things going on and, you know...
John:
if people just get spread too thin, that could happen, right?
John:
That could happen to anything.
John:
It could happen to TV, movies, anything like that.
John:
But the one thing video games has going for it is, as a concept, conceptually, if not in the specifics of a box that you buy that you connect to your TV, but conceptually...
John:
Games are camped out in the end zone waiting.
John:
Like, I don't know if this is the wrong analogy.
John:
It's not a sport, not a good sports analogy, but games are basically at the end of the line, tapping the front and patiently saying, you guys can do all whatever you want, TV, movies, live theater, music, all that other stuff.
John:
But we'll be here in the end when you're all gone because our logical conclusion is the holodeck, which will sort of end humanity because once you can realistically simulate anything and have you not distinguish it from real life, we'll all just be dead in our little virtual reality sensor tubes within 10 years, right?
John:
That's the end game.
John:
The end game is...
John:
you know omnipotence the the illusion of omnipotence know everything do everything indistinguishable from reality that's going to come out of gaming it's not going to come out of television it's not going to come out of live theater it's not going to come out of music gaming is trying to get there uh and so it's not going to get there in our lifetime obviously but
John:
Way out thousands of years in the future, games are the only form of anything and eventually destroy the entire human race.
John:
So I don't think gaming has that one good thing going for it in that it's not going to go away.
John:
And if we do get spread too thin because of other factors, it'll come back because it's...
Marco:
it's uh the end zone is the wrong thing it's it's at the end of the line waiting for all of us wow our first sponsor this week i don't even know how to follow that our first sponsor this week is a new sponsor and a close friend of the show uh if you ever listen to bionic you know the other half of it uh the fake british guy who used to be british but now is american
Marco:
Matthew, Percival, Edwardius, Alexander.
Marco:
He started a company and that company is called Need.
Marco:
And it's at Need with an N, not the K version of it.
Marco:
It's needlifestyle.com.
Marco:
So go to needlifestyle.com, check this out.
Marco:
So Need is a refined retailer and lifestyle magazine for men.
Marco:
So each month, they get this nice curated collection of something like, you know, nine, ten items.
Marco:
And it's all from the world's top men's brands.
Marco:
And they offer it to you at a special price in a special collection.
Marco:
And they're presented in the form of this monthly editorial that's built around a theme.
Marco:
And they always, you know, they support local photographers and have, you know, local photographers photograph all these things, local models.
Marco:
Beyond clothing, they also have coffee, literature, furniture.
Marco:
It's like a men's kind of, you know, cool fashion magazine.
Marco:
It's for people who are not, you know, it's for people like me, basically.
Marco:
People who are not that good at making these decisions on our own.
Marco:
You can go to need and you can see what is cool because I certainly can't tell you.
Marco:
But this stuff is pretty cool.
Marco:
I've gotten some of this stuff and it's really, really good stuff.
Marco:
You know, Matt has a really good eye for this.
Marco:
Tearaway trousers.
Marco:
They also plan to localize to different cities around the world.
Marco:
The first of which will be London, of course, because he's almost British.
Marco:
And so take a look, go to needlifestyle.com.
Marco:
They just released volume seven today, which is built around the theme this month is summertime commutes, events and weekends with friends.
Marco:
So they're going to do a special deal for our listeners because Matt likes us and he's a cool guy, even though he's half British.
Marco:
Anyone who places an order with need and was sent from us,
Marco:
send them an email at hello at needlifestyle.com with the subject line world's greatest podcast.
Marco:
If you do this, if you email hello at needlifestyle with the subject line world's greatest podcast after you've placed an order with them, they will throw in a bunch of free extras with those orders.
Marco:
Things like, you know, magazines, field notes, notebooks, socks, scarves, you know, the kind of extras that a cool hit men's magazine has lying around.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
They will also, if you do this, you will also then get 25% off your next order.
Marco:
This is pretty cool.
Marco:
I know this is kind of like, you know, haphazard last minute because neither of us knew how to write an ad for this and it was very, it was kind of a last minute booking that kind of saved our butts here.
Marco:
So, Need is great.
Marco:
Matt is great.
Marco:
It's really a fantastic company run by fantastic people.
Marco:
That's all I can really say.
Marco:
Take a look.
Marco:
Needlifestyle.com for all of your cool stuff needs.
Marco:
Needlifestyle.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Need once again.
Marco:
Why did I say once again?
Marco:
This is the first time they're sponsoring.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Need for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I just love that they're having us now be associated with the world's greatest podcast.
Marco:
In my defense, Matt wrote that line.
Marco:
I didn't.
Marco:
We would have.
Marco:
but we didn't yes uh so it is matt to blame if you do not think that we are the world's greatest podcast either way you should order from his company just so you can then email him get this cool discount get the free socks and scarves and stuff and then tell him why we're not the world's greatest podcast do you want to talk about a few more things on the wwdc hit list or do you want to jump straight to the fire phone the fire phone happened today so that's this is the best thing we do is when it when an event happens the day we record and we know nothing about it hey let's talk about it
Marco:
Why not?
Marco:
Yeah, before anyone has reviews or even has this thing in their hands.
John:
I read Twitter when the press conference was going on.
Marco:
Does that count?
Marco:
That's about all I did.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
And I reacted to things I wrote on Twitter.
Marco:
That's about it.
Marco:
All right, so what this thing is...
Marco:
It's basically what you'd expect from Amazon making a phone based on what they've done with the Kindle Fire tablet line.
Marco:
It's a phone that runs Android.
Marco:
It has pretty decent specs, 2 gigs of RAM, some kind of CPU I'm not familiar with.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm sure Android people know it.
Marco:
Most of the innovation in it comes from software tweaks, I think.
Marco:
But I think what's most interesting, if you would have asked people, including us, a few months ago, like, hey, Amazon's going to make a phone, what do you think they're going to do?
Marco:
I think almost all of us would have guessed that they were going to do something disruptive or creative or different around pricing.
Marco:
Because everyone was thinking, oh, Amazon's all into getting things really cheap, and maybe they could revolutionize the phone business by giving you a phone for free, or for free supported by ads, or included with Amazon Prime, or something like that.
Marco:
Somehow subsidize the phone to make it very, very cheap or free.
Marco:
and what they what they gave us instead was a phone that's priced almost exactly like the iphone and other smart uh other high-end smartphones which is interesting so you know it's 200 bucks on contract 650 without um there's a few things that make it a little better value there's like the the 32 gigs of storage is the base storage instead of 16 you get a year of amazon prime if you buy the phone um and if you already have it you get your membership extended for a year for free
Marco:
So, there's a couple of things that add value there, but for the most part, it's still a $600 unsubsidized phone or a $200 on a two-year contract phone.
Marco:
It runs only on AT&T so far, only in the U.S.
Marco:
So, honestly, it's kind of boring.
Marco:
I mean, there's a couple of things we'll talk about with what they've done with some of the software and hardware, but I don't think we're even going to be talking about this in like two weeks.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, probably not.
Casey:
Some of the things that were very interesting, the most interesting thing to me, which has gotten less interesting as more information came out, was one of the slides they showed during their keynote or announcement or whatever you call it, was unlimited photo uploads to Amazon Cloud Drive.
Casey:
There wasn't a lot of information that I could glean on it, but John Gruber has said that there's only unlimited photo storage for photos taken with the phone itself.
Casey:
Notably, that completely eliminates videos, which are the things that take up the most space.
Casey:
And additionally, anything else is apparently subject to a 5 gig cap.
Casey:
And I'm not sure the mechanism by which they're determining this.
Casey:
I don't know if they're just reaching into EXIF data or what have you.
Casey:
But yeah, that's a somewhat noteworthy difference.
Casey:
Although, to be fair...
Casey:
The two cameras that we have in the house are two iPhone 5Ss.
Casey:
So in a parallel universe where Aaron and I both have Amazon, what are we calling this?
Casey:
A Fire Phone.
Casey:
When we both have Fire Phones, that could be fine for us because that is all our photos because that's the only cameras we use.
Casey:
But I know amongst this crowd, we're probably quite the anomaly.
Marco:
Well, you know, so if you look at when Amazon originally launched the Kindle Fire, their first Android tablet, one of its biggest selling points by far was it was really cheap compared to other Android tablets.
Marco:
And it was like the best $200 Android tablet you could get for a little while, which is pretty terrible because it was pretty bad.
Marco:
And the newer Fires, from what I hear, are better.
Marco:
I haven't actually used them, but the newer ones are supposedly better.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
anyway the big reason people bought it was because it was so damn cheap and the fire phone doesn't have that so my question is what are the major things this offers above and beyond something like a high-end samsung or htc phone like if you're obviously it's the same price and everything as an iphone like you know you get a little bit less with the iphone for the same price but
Marco:
Most people are not going to care.
Marco:
It's close enough.
Marco:
So you're looking at $200 either way.
Marco:
$200 on contract for this phone.
Marco:
So it's not cheaper than an iPhone.
Marco:
It's probably not going to have much, if any, presence in phone retail stores, which is going to really hurt its sales.
Marco:
And, you know, why...
Marco:
It's going to be limited in certain ways.
Marco:
All the Google services, it doesn't get.
Marco:
It is not, as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, anybody, but all of Amazon's Android stuff so far, it doesn't get the Google seal of approval.
Marco:
It doesn't have the Google Play Store, as far as I know.
Marco:
It doesn't have Google Maps, Google Now, all that cool integration you get on officially blessed Android phones.
Marco:
So there's a lot of downsides to this.
Marco:
The upsides are, you know, it has some Amazon integration with some of their stuff.
Marco:
It has some store integration where you can like point it at some things and scan stuff.
Marco:
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Marco:
But I'm kind of wondering why people are really going to buy this in any significant numbers.
Marco:
Because I don't see the appeal.
Marco:
If it was really cheap, maybe.
Marco:
If it had the full Android experience plus Amazon stuff, maybe.
Marco:
But I see Android people wanting to get an officially licensed Google-blessed phone, and I see iPhone owners sticking with their iPhones.
Marco:
So I'm kind of missing the point of this.
John:
amazon's kind of like the new microsoft but only with hardware uh you just have to assume now whenever amazon enters a market with a hardware product just wait until their third try right i mean you mentioned with the uh the kindle fire tablets or whatever just forget about the first one second one you know like it's going to take them a while to get it right so there's there's a learning curve there and i just had a thought while you were describing uh the phone and
John:
is that phones are kind of like PCs now, used to be, and that it's no longer a novelty that any company with reasonable pockets can make one.
John:
Like back in the day, if you were a technology company and you had a lot of money, you could make a PC.
John:
Like you buy the CPUs from Intel, you buy a motherboard, a chipset possibly from Intel, possibly from someone else.
John:
You buy a hard drive from someone, you make a plastic case, you put a power supply in it, you put a screen on it.
John:
You know, you make a PC.
John:
Lots of people did it.
John:
There was tons of PC companies back before, you know, consolidation and all fell apart.
John:
These days, it doesn't seem like a big deal for anybody to basically, you know, build your own iPhone-like smartphone.
John:
Amazon went to all the vendors.
John:
These people are making all these parts, and the phone they made looks...
John:
I mean, if this phone had come out before the iPhone, we'd be falling all over ourselves to say how amazing it is.
John:
But now it's, you know, many seven years later, it's not so amazing.
John:
Now it is just a fairly straightforward thing to say, yeah, we can make a phone that looks like a smartphone, that has a good CPU, that has memory, that has, I assume it has a reasonable battery life, that has a couple other little features.
John:
That's no longer a big deal.
John:
And obviously it's not quite as easy to make something as good as the iPhone on your first try.
John:
So we're going to give Amazon...
John:
three tries to do this or whatever.
John:
But I guess it's just, it's interesting that phones used to be this amazing thing and only amazing Apple could make a smartphone like this.
John:
And now they're basically like PCs.
John:
If you want to make one, you can make one.
John:
And so Amazon is making one.
John:
I don't know if this is a good move or not, but Marco also mentioned disruption at the beginning.
John:
Like, Oh, I hope they would do something with pricing to try to disrupt the phone market.
Yeah.
John:
I think Amazon, uh, it's a problem with the word disruption.
John:
Like when they did that with the, uh, the tablets, they sold them those sort of at cost or possibly at a loss, certainly not making big profits, uh, and undercut everybody.
John:
Like Amazon would give you a nicer screen and more storage for less money than Apple would.
John:
Uh, but I don't think you can, it's kind of weird to call something disruption, uh,
John:
Before it has disrupted anything, you could say an attempted disruption, but everyone just says, oh, Amazon disrupts the tablet space by selling their product at or below cost.
John:
As far as we all know, because Amazon doesn't sell you sales figures, but as far as we all know from sort of just like walking around and how much Amazon is touting these things, they haven't disrupted the tablet space.
John:
That much, right?
John:
didn't work i guess they could have gone more and say the real problem is we didn't we weren't radical enough with the pricing we'll pay you to take it to one of these phones right uh but instead they went the other direction and said all right obviously that strategy did not buy our way into the tablet space let's try the more conventional strategy of making money uh by selling things at a profit with subsidies uh and so that's what it seems like they're doing with the phone
John:
I don't think there's any particular reason to favor this phone over the best Android phone you can find or an iPhone.
John:
And there's many reasons not to.
John:
But to Amazon's credit, they did at least try to differentiate.
John:
I mean, again, it was a version one product.
John:
I assume this is going to be a stinker, just like the version one Kindle Fire was.
John:
But it has interesting things in it.
John:
You know, the multi-camera thing and that silly depth perception and the parallax and the, you know, the thing for scanning things to buy them on Amazon and the Amazon.
John:
I mean, Marco listed all the stuff.
John:
That's way more differentiation than the average crappy Samsung phone has.
John:
And Samsung sells like crazy.
John:
So it could be, again, like the PC space.
John:
that all you really need is to pass some minimum threshold of like, yep, we got a CPU, we got a hard drive, we got memory, we got a case that looks kind of nice, and we have a couple of differentiators or a reputation or a connection with a brand that you like or a franchise that you like or whatever, and again, in movie parlance, and that's enough to become a player in the space.
John:
uh i think that's sort of what amazon's game plan is not to rock the market but just to try to be part of the conversation the same way all those pc makers were like hey we're a part of the pc market we we're we're sell pcs we'll put cow stripes on them we'll call ourselves gateway put 2000 in the in our name because we'll never actually reach that year right guys that was my first computer and it came in the cab box and it was awesome
John:
Maybe someday we'll have retail stores.
John:
Anyway, that's how I see Amazon's entry here.
John:
And so I'm not for it or against it.
John:
I like more competition in the phone market.
John:
I don't know what their long-term odds are, but wake me up when they're on their third phone.
Marco:
I'm guessing a big part of it might be, as weird as this sounds, they probably didn't spend much money on this.
Marco:
I'm sure they contracted out the even hardware design to somebody else.
Marco:
They definitely contracted out the manufacturing.
John:
I think HTC made it for them, right?
Marco:
Yeah, so I bet they didn't invest very heavily in it.
Marco:
I'm guessing the main purpose of this is, just like all the other hardware, it's just to juice Amazon sales.
Marco:
And one of the things this will do, if they can get a big enough presence in the phone and tablet market, they're already probably there with tablets, maybe, but if they can get enough of a market presence,
Marco:
everybody who develops an android app will be forced to put their app in amazon's android app store and uh because this this as far as i know this only works with the app store unless you go you know download apks and enable that crazy setting but i think for the most part you have to have things in the amazon app store because there's there's no google play store on this please correct me from wrong chat but uh so you know if they get if they get even you know 10 of the market
Marco:
then it would be pretty unwise for Android developers to not develop, to not put their stuff in the Amazon app store.
Marco:
And then Amazon gets to take a nice cut of any kind of money flowing through Android apps.
Marco:
Not that there's historically been a whole lot, but with enough people, that adds up.
Marco:
And there's also the other factors.
Marco:
For all of the reasons that Google wanted to make Android and kind of had to make Android, the main reasons why were that Google was threatened by...
Marco:
by the possibility of somebody like Apple or Microsoft dominating the phone space in a way that then they could lock out Google's services from working on their phones.
Marco:
So Google kind of defensively had to make Android to give themselves a place for their services to live and thrive so they couldn't ever be locked out of a dominant phone platform.
John:
Or so they tell themselves anyway.
Marco:
Yeah, it's true.
Marco:
Good point.
Marco:
And I think Amazon has a similar goal here in that Amazon wants to make sure that none of their digital services get locked out.
Marco:
Their physical services are probably fine.
Marco:
Everyone's going to keep buying their shampoo from Amazon.
Marco:
It's no big deal.
Marco:
I don't think Apple cares to interfere with that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It certainly is a risk that maybe Amazon's bookstore or video store or music store or those kind of services could easily get locked out of future iOS and Google-blessed Android.
Marco:
And so I think...
Marco:
They kind of strategically thought this was a good idea, and I'm sure they'll make enough on it to justify the probably minimal investment they put into it, maybe.
Marco:
But it doesn't need to set the road on fire to succeed in their goal.
Marco:
Oh, sorry.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It doesn't need to sell extremely well.
Marco:
It would be nice if it did.
Marco:
I'm sure they would appreciate having the extra margin to play with because they don't have a lot of margin on most of their other stuff.
Marco:
But the reality is I don't think this really is that important for this to sell well, and I don't think it will sell well.
Marco:
I mentioned it in passing earlier, but it's definitely worth reiterating this is also U.S.
Marco:
only, mostly because most of Amazon's services are still U.S.
Marco:
only, or at least very limited outside of the U.S.,
Marco:
And so as long as this is US only, that's going to extremely limit its market share, especially since it is the exact same price in the US as a lot of much better phones.
John:
I think it is a good idea.
John:
I mean, don't you?
John:
You said, you know, whether this is good.
John:
I think it is a good idea.
John:
It is a good idea for it was a good idea for Amazon to make tablets.
John:
It's a good idea for them to make a phone.
John:
I mean, despite the fact that, like I said, I don't think the tablets are really tearing up the charts.
John:
Again, we don't know for sure because Amazon doesn't like to release numbers.
John:
but i think it's a good idea for them to make a phone because because it is like pc is it now like why why shouldn't they have a phone why shouldn't they have a tablet why shouldn't it's part of their ecosystem they sell they sell you things you can consume on that tablet so it's good to have a tablet they also sell you things that you can consume on the phone and you can use both of those devices to buy things from their physical store they they have a cohesive story around these things and i think it was a good idea for them to develop it because and i think this was more or less the right time where they can just you know
John:
put it together out of off-the-shelf parts, add some innovation.
John:
I think they probably did invest in it because I think they, you know, it makes sense for them to have these pieces of the package and to not rely on other people for these because it makes sense for their business.
John:
It's not totally out there like they've decided to make, you know, self-driving cars or something.
Marco:
Yeah, but I still think it was a good idea for them to make this, no question.
Marco:
And since they were already making tablets and already maintaining this OS, I'm sure there's a lot of shared development resources there anyway.
Marco:
I'm sure they almost definitely spent way more on software development than on hardware development, and they can probably...
Marco:
use most of that in their tablet effort.
Marco:
The difference here is, you know, phones and tablets are very different markets as a lot of people have found it over the last few years, especially most of the early attempts at Android tablets found this out.
Marco:
It's a very, very different, these two are very different markets and what works in phones doesn't necessarily work in tablets and vice versa.
Marco:
Amazon was able to break into the tablet market by being extremely aggressive on price.
Marco:
Nobody was buying the Kindle Fires, and still today, nobody's buying the Kindle Fires because they're the best tablets.
Marco:
Because they're not.
Marco:
They're certainly better than they used to be, but they're still not the best tablets.
Marco:
People buy them because they're cheap, and they see them promoted like crazy on Amazon.
Marco:
This phone is going to be promoted like crazy on Amazon, fine, but...
Marco:
It's not cheap.
John:
It's cheaper, though.
John:
I mean, especially for like it's not going to pull people away from the iPhone.
John:
Right.
John:
But when people are shopping for Android phones and anyone who's willing to pay $200 for the phone for a phone shops, this $200 phone against any competitive $200 phone, assume they're not going to buy an iPhone because they're not in that market at all.
John:
So spec wise and feature wise, this compares favorably with any with the other with another $200 Android phone.
John:
And so I think that's the conversation they're trying to win.
John:
They're like, we're not going to compete with people who are shopping for an iPhone because this ecosystem, the cache, the apps like we're not there.
John:
Forget it.
John:
Right.
John:
But there's tons of crappy Android phones.
John:
I mean, you look around.
John:
Mostly what I see is people with iPhones or people with a huge menagerie of crazy looking Android phones.
John:
that's that's the jungle where this phone is is stalking and it's got a nice screen it's got a lot of ram it's got a fast cpu it's got crazy ass cameras that are going to impress people in a demo somewhere once they see someone who has one the camera is pretty good right like it's got all sorts of stuff and the crazy things like the tilt scrolling and the parallax that reminds you of the stupid crazy features like in the galaxy s5 that no one's ever going to use to track your eyes and when you close your eyes the video stops and you don't have to touch the screen and like
John:
people go for that crap and so this is in that crap show and even though it's not super cheap it i think it compares like it compares favor to the iphone let's put it that way in terms of pricing and specs uh and i think they're going after the people who care about g-wiz features and also the people who care about stupid number specs uh not against the iphone where no one cares about the specs when they buy an iphone they're buying an iphone to have an iphone and to buy into that whole system
Casey:
You know, what if you are living not near family members and you really want a smartphone and your family members that live nearby that are really good with computers – I'm sorry, your family members that are really good with computers don't live nearby and you feel kind of all in your own little island and you want something that you know you can get help with it.
Casey:
And maybe you don't live near an Apple store.
Casey:
This Mayday thing, I'm –
Casey:
fairly surprised that the Mayday and the tablets hasn't made more waves.
Casey:
And I could very much see, like, say, my grandmother, for example, who is fairly computer savvy, especially for a woman that is not terribly young, but she lives near no one in terms of her family members that are good with computers.
Casey:
And so I could absolutely see her wanting this, if nothing else, for the Mayday feature.
Casey:
So she knows within 15 seconds she can have help.
Casey:
And I can see that as being very powerful.
John:
That's a clever use of Amazon's strengths because their strength is like physical logistics.
John:
Having a human being on the other end of a phone is a physical matter.
John:
It's not a matter of software or servers or whatever.
John:
And Amazon does that all the time.
John:
They're all about people and physical things and managing things at ridiculous scales.
John:
So they were wise to bring to bear the skills they have from their retail business on the phone in the same way that Google is wise to bring to bear all of its great assets.
John:
Like, you know, it's, it's really, you know, good maps and, and driving directions and their server capacity and all their web apps.
John:
Like everyone is bringing their best stuff to the table.
John:
So that's that, you know, I think this does make sense.
John:
And I don't think this will necessarily, like if your grandma was to buy this phone, uh, I mean, maybe she has nothing to compare it to.
John:
It wouldn't matter, but I don't think the experience would be that great because this is version one.
John:
And, uh,
John:
Amazon, in my mind, I tried to tweet this, but I couldn't figure out how to tweet it in a way that would express myself.
John:
So I'll try just by rambling here.
John:
Unfortunately, my perception of Amazon now, whenever I think of them and I think of Jeff Bezos or Bezos, like Glenn, you got to tell me how to pronounce that name.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Up on the stage is...
John:
Amazon has really good demos and everything they show is much crappier in real life.
John:
Like, I don't know if that's just me getting that impression, but like after several of these demos, because like, and sometimes they're okay in real life.
John:
Like, you know, the Kindle Paperwhite really was more or less like what they showed, but like all of their Fire tablets and now the phone and a lot of the Kindles they've demoed, they do really good keynotes.
John:
And you look at them, you're like, wow, I can't even believe Amazon pulled this off.
John:
They've got the features, they've got the specs, they've got the design, everything is amazing.
John:
Then you see the actual product and it's like,
John:
Oh, you know, if you like you feel like they pulled the wool over your eyes and that's the reputation they're getting in my mind so much so that I'm kind of tuning out the what are very good presentations and fairly polished and like, you know, not going to say in the Steve Jobs style, but obviously, you know, in the post Steve Jobs presentation world, adding their own twist.
John:
But now I'm just kind of starting to write that.
John:
That's that's a tech person type thing.
John:
But anyway, you know, grandma doesn't know what their presentations are like, but I feel like real people, once they get them, will be like,
John:
The same way when they get the Galaxy S5.
John:
Like, you play with the little whizzy features that you're never going to use again, and in the end, you have kind of a crappy, ugly phone that you get rid of after two years.
Casey:
See, but what makes you think that anyone would find it to be crappy and ugly?
Casey:
Because on the surface, especially if you don't have something as well-designed as perhaps modern Android or certainly an iPhone, like you said, if you don't have anything to compare to, then how would you conclude that it's that crappy?
Yeah.
John:
Oh, the Samsung I was saying is crappy and ugly.
John:
I think the Amazon's industrial design is better.
John:
Like as ridiculous as the original Kindle Fire was in terms of size and weight and everything, the industrial design is not bad.
John:
Like it was, you know, pleasingly shaped.
John:
I mean, all right, so the power buttons are in the wrong place.
John:
We all know that.
John:
But like they have rubber grippy parts in the right spot.
John:
Amazon has had really great screens.
John:
Their problems, of course, are in software and ecosystem and kind of using the device is not...
John:
as wonderful and magical as you would expect it to do they they miss on a lot of the details it's like well you can have an amazing screen and a quad core gpu and twice the ram of any ios apple device please apple fix this please uh but it doesn't matter if when you flick the scroll it's jumpy
John:
like how can it be jumpy we got twice as many cores we got twice as much ram it's like it takes a lot of effort and coordination between hardware and software to make all that come together you know how can apple get away with having half as many cores as the top end android phones and yet it still feels faster and does things quicker uh that's where those guys can't compete and that's what i mean by like again if they don't have anything to compare it to fine but
John:
What if they go into an Apple Store and start flicking around on an iPad or an iPhone?
John:
I think even a normal person could be like, oh, my thing doesn't feel like this.
Marco:
Well, and going back a sec to Mayday, I do think that that's probably Amazon's best feature.
Marco:
If it even works half as well as it demos, that's an amazing feature.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
That will win over a lot of people, especially people like us who are possibly in the position of buying a phone for someone else that we don't want to have to tech support.
Marco:
That I can see the benefit of.
Marco:
But there's also the other side of that, which is Mayday can only help you with problems that involve the phone being able to boot and show the screen contents.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I was going to say like the comparison is I like to tell people to get Apple stuff because then if they have any problems, I say just go to the Apple store.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And that's the thing like, you know, like Mayday.
Marco:
Well, Mayday is great as long as the phone can boot the screen works and it can connect to a data network or Wi-Fi.
Marco:
All of those things have to feature and that will solve a lot of problems, no question.
Marco:
But there's also a whole class of other problems that people routinely hit with their phones.
Marco:
that Mayday won't be able to solve or they won't be able to access it.
Marco:
And there is immense value in Apple having this giant network of retail stores and in being able to walk into an AT&T store with your Samsung phone that you bought there and get some help there.
Marco:
There's massive, massive value in being able to go to a physical place and get service.
Marco:
And in the case of Apple, the phone network stores aren't that great about this, but in the case of an Apple store,
Marco:
you could walk out of there with a replacement.
Marco:
Like, your phone could break in the morning, you could go to the Apple store at lunch, and if there's not too big of a line, you can walk out of there with a replacement in a half hour.
Marco:
And that's something that Amazon can approach that.
Marco:
They can have you be able to call them up, and then they can overnight you a new phone, maybe.
Marco:
Maybe, we'll see about that.
Marco:
But that's still a very different degree.
Marco:
It's a very different kind of experience.
Marco:
You have to talk on the phone to somebody, talk them through...
Marco:
The problem and then Amazon has to decide whether to send you a phone and send you a phone and then it arrives the next day or by drone later that day.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But it's still it's a different it's a different problem.
Marco:
And there's just such immense value in having those retail stores there.
Marco:
Now, granted, there's also a whole class of problems where like.
Marco:
You might just live with it.
Marco:
Like if you're somebody who doesn't know the technology very well and you're like, oh, well, for whatever reason, you know, my mail is all blue and I don't know why, but it's not really worth going all the way to the Apple store for that.
Marco:
Well, maybe, you know, on a Kindle thing, maybe you would, you know, hit the Mayday button and say, hey, why is this all blue?
Marco:
Can you help me change this back?
Marco:
You know, so there's you would be able to get better help with a lot of small problems like that.
Marco:
using Mayday, but, you know, phones and phones are even more so than tablets.
Marco:
Phones get carried around with people.
Marco:
So phones have a lot of hazards happen to them and a lot of things that are weird that break.
Marco:
And so I see that being a problem for Amazon.
Casey:
See, but what you're not considering is that both of you are taking a completely myopic northeastern view of the world because the nearest Apple store to like half of Virginia is either in another state or easily two hours away.
Casey:
I mean, I'm lucky in that there happens to be an Apple store in Richmond, but outside of Richmond, like let's take Charlottesville, for example, which is an hour west of where I am.
Casey:
You can either come here to Richmond or go two hours north to D.C.
Casey:
And Charlottesville is a not small city.
Casey:
I mean, Virginia classifies it as a city.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
Okay, you can be all smug and mightier than me because you live in the Northeast.
John:
I'm just saying they could just look up the population of Charlottesville and see if it's larger than the population of where I went to high school.
Casey:
And perhaps it's not.
Casey:
But I think you're way, way overselling the utility of Apple stores.
Casey:
Because if you're lucky enough to live near one, yes, you're absolutely right.
Casey:
But most of the country doesn't.
Casey:
And beyond that, most of the world doesn't.
Casey:
So that's wonderful that you guys have 44 Apple stores within a 10-minute drive, but I've got only one option, and if I lived an hour away, it would be an hour drive to get to the nearest Apple store.
Casey:
An hour drive, maybe in my busted-ass car, that can barely get up the highway.
Casey:
I mean, I'm being a little dramatic, but my point is that Apple's retail footprint is really inconsequential.
Casey:
Now, this is where you would say, well, there's AT&T's footprint, and yes, you're right about that.
Casey:
AT&T has a lot more stores, but you're not going to get the same level of service
Casey:
and repair at an AT&T store that you would at an Apple store.
Casey:
So I think you're grossly overselling.
John:
I like yourself rebutting there because that's exactly what I was going to say.
John:
Apple store is the best case scenario, but leave Apple store aside.
John:
Normal people get their phones at the quote unquote phone stores and they're everywhere in every strip mall, probably even in Charlottesville.
John:
Uh,
John:
And those are not a great place to bring your phone back to.
John:
But it's still a place to bring your phone back to.
John:
Because once grandma gets that phone from Amazon, she doesn't know where to take that when it doesn't work.
John:
And then it involves essentially tech support, calling someone on the phone and trying.
John:
I mean, Amazon is generally good at that.
John:
Maybe that's also playing to Amazon's strengths.
John:
But Amazon, for all their physical logistics...
John:
is not in the retail if the physical brick and mortar retail store business for what i think are obvious reasons that's sort of the opposite of what amazon is so if they're going to sell you physical products it's all about them trying to make the experience really good of like i can i can do text chat i can do email or i can call someone on a phone uh to arrange for me to return this thing to them in a package either i ship it myself or they send me a box and i ship it back and all that other stuff um
John:
And that has to compete with going to the phone store at the strip mall that's five minutes away, going to the Apple store that's nearby me if I live near a big city.
John:
If you don't live near anything, then maybe Amazon is the way to go.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
It's...
John:
The Mayday feature, I think, is a good selling point, and Amazon was smart to put it in there, but it's competing against those other possibilities for getting help.
John:
And as someone said in the chat room, my mom can get tech support in 15 seconds, too, but it's a FaceTime call to me.
John:
Or calling you on the phone.
John:
And that's what we're weighing as the technically savvy people with relatives.
John:
We're weighing, like, what do I tell...
John:
my relative or my non-tech savvy friend to get so that they don't call me in the middle of the night because they're having a problem or when they do call me i don't have to debug it i can tell them just take your phone back to the store just go to the apple store uh or just go to this webpage on amazon and decide whether you want to call them email them or text chat them
John:
and they'll arrange for you to return the thing because that's really what we want is to not be bothered with those people we want we want them to get a solution and we're not going to try to debug it remotely maybe we can go over their house and try to figure it out or whatever but once that's happened it's all downhill so i i think mayday in the cases where everything is working it's great just to have another human there to talk to who's who's getting paid to help you with your thing and that will help you not uh send a facetime request uh to your child
Marco:
It's also very smart of Amazon to do this because it's the kind of thing that their competitors really can't.
Marco:
Microsoft probably could, but Apple really can't because it would just be way too big of an operation because way too many people have iPhones.
Marco:
It would be a nightmare to support and scale that at the iPhone sales volume.
Marco:
And Google kind of can't because, well, first of all, they hate people and don't understand them.
Marco:
And second of all, like...
Marco:
How would Google even pay for that?
Marco:
The way Android's whole model is set up, they'd have a hard time supporting that, really.
Marco:
And even if they were in the business of applying lots of human power to things, which they're definitely not.
Marco:
Microsoft could maybe do it for the same reason Amazon can do it, which is...
Marco:
They don't sell that many phones.
Marco:
Amazon's actually lucky in a lot of these things that, for example, one of the reasons why they were able to use certain screens and some of the Kindle Fire HDXs and stuff like that is because they're at small scale.
Marco:
They can use components that don't have very good yields, that aren't being produced in very high volume because they can't be yet.
Marco:
Things that, for Apple to put something in an iPhone, they're going to need 100 million of them in a month.
Marco:
They can't do that.
Marco:
And so this is a very smart move from Amazon of doing something that they can do and that kind of only they can do.
Marco:
So anyway, let's move on to our second sponsor before we forget because it's been almost an hour.
Marco:
Our second sponsor is a return sponsor.
Marco:
It's our friends at Hover.
Marco:
Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names.
Marco:
Put simply, I'm going to ignore their three-page script because it's three pages and I'm not very good with paper.
Casey:
Thanks, Marlon.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, Hover is a domain registrar that doesn't suck, basically.
Marco:
They have all sorts of features, all sorts of plans, all sorts of products.
Marco:
You can buy hosting, you can buy email, you can buy domain names.
Marco:
And I can't speak to most of the stuff.
Marco:
I do use their email service.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It works for some of my domains.
Marco:
And mostly, I use them as a domain registrar.
Marco:
And that's, I think, their main business.
Marco:
And you go there, they have...
Marco:
tons of TLDs, very, very, very complete inventory of TLDs that they support.
Marco:
You can get .pretty much anything, even the stupid new ones.
Marco:
They support all those that are out so far.
Marco:
They support all those.
Marco:
So it's a great domain market store.
Marco:
And they don't try to screw you.
Marco:
They don't have all these big add-ons and gimmicks and boxes that say, uncheck this to not opt out of not being billed for the privacy blocking protection service.
Marco:
And you're like, what?
Marco:
What is...
Marco:
What is that?
Marco:
Do I have to check this?
Marco:
Am I going to get charged for this?
Marco:
They basically have same defaults.
Marco:
It's well designed.
Marco:
They also have amazing support.
Marco:
They have a no hold, no wait, no transfer phone support policy.
Marco:
So yeah, you can email them if you want.
Marco:
You can fill out support tickets.
Marco:
They have knowledge bases online if you want.
Marco:
But you can also just call them.
Marco:
And if you call during business hours, a person just picks up the phone and talks to you and they can help you.
Marco:
You don't have to wait and hold.
Marco:
You don't have to do one of those annoying push-button menus or even the more annoying talking menus.
Marco:
Boy, do I hate those.
Marco:
You just call them and a human being picks up and talks to you.
Marco:
Hover is fantastic.
Marco:
I've used them myself.
Marco:
Lots of people use them.
Marco:
There's a reason why they sponsor tons of podcasts because they're cool, first of all, and also because they know that you guys value this stuff.
Marco:
The audience values...
Marco:
services and products that aren't trying to rip them off and that are actually providing good service, good quality.
Marco:
So go to hover.com and you can get 10% off your first order by using the new coupon code this month.
Marco:
Let me get that for you.
Marco:
what i knew you wouldn't get it i got nothing you'll get it later anyway go to hover and use coupon code let me get that for you for 10 off and uh we'll see if anybody ever gets that this week please email casey if you do
Casey:
No, don't email me.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Let me get that for you.
Marco:
All one word, all lowercase.
Marco:
No spaces, no punctuation.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So I'm looking at the... I'm still a little frustrated with you two.
Casey:
I'm looking at the Boston metro area, and there are, by my count, one, two, three, four, five, six, maybe seven Apple stores within...
Marco:
Well, one thing I'd like to know based on your rage here.
Marco:
So, yes, by geographic area, Apple stores don't serve a lot of people.
Marco:
But what percentage of the U.S.
Marco:
population is within driving distance of an Apple store?
Marco:
And then also, what percentage of the population most likely to buy an iPhone is within driving distance of an Apple store?
Casey:
Well, the first one I'll give you.
Casey:
The second one I won't.
Casey:
And let me finish my thought real quick, which is to say that the Boston metro area has six Apple stores.
Casey:
The entire state of Ohio.
Casey:
has six apple stores it also has less people than the boston metro area probably it probably does but if you don't live on i-71 is this that runs from southwest ohio to northeast ohio then kindly piss off because there is no apple store near you so anyway so the point is um there's a lot of there's a lot of america like the entire um what is this nebraska south dakota north dakota montana wyoming like none of them have an apple store if they do i missed it
Marco:
Yeah, but those are all green states.
Casey:
In any case, and your point about population density is fair, but I also wonder, like, what if an Apple store popped up in a larger city in Wyoming, assuming such a thing exists, which I'm sure it does, but I can't think of any.
Casey:
But anyway.
John:
Let me cap off the geography thing that I just bothered to look up while you guys were discussing where stores are in the United States.
John:
The population of Charlottesville is apparently about 44,000 people.
Casey:
Is that really it?
John:
The population of Smithtown, New York, where I went to high school, is 117,000 people.
John:
So...
John:
Just saying.
Casey:
God, I'm surprised.
Casey:
I mean, hey, it's a fair point.
Casey:
I'm surprised Charlottesville is that small.
Casey:
Funny how that is.
Casey:
Well, I mean, look at Richmond, the Richmond metro area.
Casey:
Not Richmond itself, but the Richmond metro area.
Casey:
I think it's a couple million, and we have an Apple store.
John:
I think you have an Apple store.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
Yes.
John:
Yes.
John:
Yeah, getting back to something Marco said a while back about taking advantage of the fact that they're not going to sell a lot of them.
John:
Like, they can afford to have the fancy screens because their volumes are low, and they can afford to do Mayday, presumably because they're not going to sell a lot of these.
John:
Or at the very least, they're starting from zero, so there'll be a growth curve.
John:
It's not like Apple, where on day one, you're going to sell 10 million of these things wherever they sell, and then you've got a big problem with Mayday, right?
John:
Because you just can't handle that capacity without working up to it.
John:
And this gets me into the...
John:
the problems with the concept of unlimited that a lot of people were tweeting about when they were tweeting about the unlimited photo storage and uh casey already noted what uh gruber had tweeted about it not really being unlimited it's like oh well it's only unlimited if you take them on the on the phone and if you have any existing library pictures then you know you have it's subject to a five gigabyte cap maybe they'll charge you above that and it gets us back in the same discussion we always have where it's like i just want someone to take care of my crap and uh
John:
And then you hear about it.
John:
You're like, well, that will take care of my crap.
John:
And then you learn the details.
John:
And there's always weird rules.
John:
And you got to remember this.
John:
And you got to remember that.
John:
And this is free.
John:
And this is for pay.
John:
And this is for that and the other thing.
John:
And a lot of people on Twitter were saying, this is the problem with unlimited.
John:
It's like, it's pointless.
John:
It's never really going to be unlimited.
John:
If you ever see the word unlimited, run the other direction.
John:
It's it's just for people who who use too many resources and it's not like the way anything should be.
John:
And I think that's too extreme of a reaction because I think the thing that we all want someone to take care of our pictures for us can be done and will be done eventually.
John:
it's not the unlimited part that's bad it's the complexities of like someone who wants to put unlimited on a slide but doesn't want to commit to that right and it's not like oh you're going to get something from nothing and a great example is our frequent sponsor backblaze where it's unlimited but they charge you there's a monthly it's a low monthly fee and they figured out how to presumably they figured out how to run a business where we charge people a low monthly fee we give them unlimited it really is unlimited and the way it works out is that most people don't have a lot of data and the average works out so that we're able to make money
John:
We are also sponsored this week by Backblaze.
Marco:
Wow, serendipitous.
Marco:
Really, actually.
Marco:
Might as well do this now.
Marco:
Backblaze is $5 a month, unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated online backup.
Marco:
You can try it for free with no credit card required.
Marco:
Literally, it's $5 a month, unlimited online backup.
Marco:
It's very, very simple.
Marco:
They have a Mac native client.
Marco:
This is actually founded by ex-Apple engineers, so they know the Mac sensibilities.
Marco:
Their software is really nice.
Marco:
And you can actually access your files from anywhere.
Marco:
They have this cool iOS app where you can access any files backed up on Backblaze from anywhere you are.
Marco:
So if you're on vacation somewhere and you want to access a file that's on your home computer, as long as you're back up to Backblaze, that file's there and you can get to it right there.
Marco:
You can also get email alert notifications for peace of mind to know that you're being backed up and to know if for example if something's not being backed up for a certain amount of time they can email you and tell you that which is very nice to know.
Marco:
Backblaze is by far the simplest online backup to use.
Marco:
You just install it and it does the rest.
Marco:
And really, I have a lot of data in Backblaze, and I've had trouble with other services not accepting it fast enough, because I have a pretty nice upstream here with finally getting Fios.
Marco:
I waited my whole life to live somewhere that has Fios, and I finally do, and it's glorious.
Marco:
I found with other services, they wouldn't accept the uploads quickly enough.
Marco:
With Backblaze, I don't have that problem.
Marco:
Backblaze accepts the uploads as quickly as I set it to.
Marco:
And you can set it to, you know, be kind to your connection.
Marco:
Or you can set it to just decide for itself how much it should use.
Marco:
And I've never had a problem.
Marco:
I've left it at that.
Marco:
I've never had a problem.
Marco:
It uploads quickly, and I have, between me and my wife and my mom, we probably have a total of about four and a half terabytes worth of stuff there, and it's fantastic.
Marco:
Five bucks a month per computer, unlimited space.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And you can get a free trial, no credit card required.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Backblaze.
Marco:
You really need online backup.
Marco:
If you are not backing up online and you have the upstream capacity and the bandwidth to do it, you really, really, really need to do it.
Marco:
I know some places you don't have good upstream or you have low bandwidth caps.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
You are kindly excused.
Marco:
Um, but everybody else, you should really be doing this.
Marco:
It's, there's so many backup problems that this can be a nice safety net for things, you know, things that are going to happen to your house.
Marco:
Uh, if you have, you know, just your computer and a time machine drive put into it, then like electrical problems, fires, floods, theft, all sorts of crazy stuff, water flooding from the apartment above you, like all sorts of crazy stuff can happen that can take out all of your copies of your data if it's only in your house.
Marco:
Uh, so really you want an offsite backup and Backblaze, in my opinion, is the best one.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you very much.
John:
and the thing the backblaze has going for it is they they get to use the word unlimited which takes away the stress from from anybody really but from certainly from high capacity like high demand users you don't want to know is there a limit am i going to hit the limit
John:
Do I have to worry about the limit?
John:
And even casual users who, if there is a limit, they may not have any sort of conception of how much data they have.
John:
Like, so like, do I have that much data?
John:
How much is a gigabyte?
John:
Will I have that much data in five years?
John:
Like, it doesn't matter if they're totally never going to reach the cap.
John:
If they don't understand that, it could cause them hesitance.
John:
So unlimited gets rid of that anxiety of like, I don't have to worry about how much stuff I have.
John:
And then the only job you have to do after that is make the financial arrangement both attractive and easy to understand.
John:
And this Amazon arrangement is not easy to understand.
John:
I would never have guessed that only the photos I take on my phone count towards that unlimited, but it's a five gigabyte cap.
John:
But maybe I can buy stuff other than that.
John:
And can I import my existing photo collection and blah, blah.
John:
It's already too complicated.
John:
You know, Backblaze is we charge a fee per month.
John:
It is a small fee.
John:
People are willing to pay it.
John:
The average data stored by our customers is enough that we make money at that price.
John:
It's easy to understand.
John:
$5 a month unlimited.
John:
Something like that for photos.
John:
It doesn't have to be we'll store all your photos for free.
John:
Unlimited doesn't mean free and unlimited.
John:
It just means...
John:
No more anxiety about, but what about these photos?
John:
But what about those photos?
John:
What about photos I take here?
John:
But what about my existing stuff?
John:
But will you keep the RAWs at full resolution?
John:
Will you downsample them?
John:
Is there a 30-day window?
John:
All that crap and anxiety needs to go away, and then the company just needs to find some way to pay for that, whether by charging a reasonable monthly fee or incorporating it into some other service or subsidized or whatever.
John:
And so...
John:
We were all briefly excited about this Amazon thing.
John:
Now we're all unexcited about it.
John:
It's just another solution that is too complicated and too weird and is going to leave people in situations where they're not sure their stuff is safe and where in reality probably won't be safe.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I actually, if we have the time, if you guys will permit me, I would actually like to talk now about continuity.
Marco:
I think it plays into some of the stuff we were just talking about.
Marco:
So Continuity is a feature during the keynote that they demoed where between Yosemite and iOS 8 and now apparently possibly even the Apple TV, they have features where you can, for example, start doing something in an app on one of these devices and then go to another one of your devices and pick up where you left off or do crazy things like take a phone call on your Mac and stuff like that.
Marco:
or transfer an email as you're writing it between your phone and your computer.
Marco:
All these different things that involve basically passing off tasks from one computer or device to another one seamlessly.
Marco:
And one of the reasons I think this is smart, one of the themes...
Marco:
Where Apple tends to not do so well, and this doesn't actually apply just to Apple, but where Apple tends to not do so well is trying to go past what they're good at, trying to do a really big new project in an area that they are really, really not good at.
Marco:
And so one of the best examples of this, obviously, is Maps.
Marco:
where Maps is the kind of area where Google is really good at the kind of big data integration, massive scale data collection, and resolving conflicts between different sources of data, and ranking things, and finding relevance.
Marco:
Google is really, really good at that kind of problem.
Marco:
And so when Google tackles that kind of problem, they can generally do it very well, and very few others can.
Marco:
Apple tried to tackle that problem with Maps and iOS 6?
Marco:
5?
Marco:
6?
Marco:
I think it was six.
Marco:
And famously did not do very well at it.
Marco:
And it's certainly better than it was, but it's still not to Google level of quality, and honestly probably never will be.
Marco:
And so you can look at things like that, and you can see, all right, these are kind of areas where Apple's weak.
Marco:
And I mentioned right before the break or right before this last topic how I thought it was very good of Amazon to recognize one of their strengths and do something in Mayday, do something that the other people kind of can't do in the business, can't or won't do.
Marco:
And so what Apple has done with continuity, I think, is the same kind of strategic thing where continuity is the kind of thing that Apple actually can do very well.
Marco:
Yes, it uses iCloud, but I think it mostly actually uses local networking.
Marco:
I think it uses Bluetooth LE to do some of the initial handshaking and probably doesn't go over the network or over the WAN unless it has to.
Casey:
So I think to jump in, my recollection of the video I watched was it negotiates over Bluetooth LE and then the amount of data you can send back and forth is like the state of the world is almost none.
Casey:
So it establishes proximity using Bluetooth LE, and then you have to use some other mechanism of your choice, including a stream that I believe they can open between devices.
Casey:
Actually, that might be over Bluetooth as well.
Casey:
But anyways, by some other mechanism, you have to establish like what the crap it is you're working on and what you're doing.
Casey:
But the proximity awareness bit is Bluetooth LE, and this is freaking terrible for me because both of my Macs are late 2011 Macs, and they don't have Bluetooth low energy, and I'm very sad.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
They'll eventually be replaced, and you'll be able to use all this cool stuff.
Casey:
But I'm sad now.
Marco:
Just talk to any Mac Pro owners in the last few years who ever had to use AirDrop and realize they can't do it because the Mac Pro is so old.
Marco:
Anyway, so this is the kind of thing.
Marco:
This involves local networking with high-end, brand-new, controlled hardware.
Marco:
And passing around the internet very small bits of information in very large volume.
Marco:
That's what push notifications are.
Marco:
That's what iMessage is.
Marco:
That's the kind of stuff Apple is already doing this stuff at scale and doing it very well most of the time.
Marco:
And it requires...
Marco:
very deep you know top to bottom integration of the hardware and the software and the services it requires people who buy multiple devices from the same manufacturer and who actually keep them somewhat up to date casey and i'm just giving you a hard time eventually you'll have it it'll be cool and so this is the kind of thing where not only is apple really good at this sort of thing
Marco:
But only Apple can really do that.
Marco:
If you look at Google, and Gruber wrote a big thing about only Apple.
Marco:
It's really good.
Marco:
And I was kind of hoping it'd be more about this when I saw the title.
Marco:
He touches on this, but I'd like to go a little more into it.
Marco:
Microsoft can't do this because they don't sell any phones, really.
Marco:
And even their computer sales are not doing that great.
Marco:
And they have this massive bevy of hardware to contend with.
Marco:
And what percentage of Windows computers have Bluetooth low energy?
Marco:
And what version?
Marco:
And all this crazy stuff that they would have to contend with that Apple doesn't.
Marco:
Google can't do this because nobody's buying Google computers.
Marco:
And even their tablets are pretty weak.
Marco:
And there's also, again, similar issues with hardware diversity.
John:
Well, Microsoft and Google can't do it now.
John:
They'll be able to do it eventually.
John:
Apple can do it first.
John:
So it's the only Apple can do this now.
John:
It's an important qualifier because eventually everyone will be able to do this and they will.
Marco:
Well, the directions that these various companies, markets and products and strengths are going, I don't see a future where anybody else can do this, really.
John:
Well, I mean, if it's a useful thing to do that catches on, all the other players will develop some kind of open standard for doing it, and eventually all their hardware will catch up in many years.
John:
It's the same thing with everything else.
John:
Only Apple could make the iPhone 1, but today Amazon can slap together a phone that essentially looks and behaves to a regular person's perspective like the iPhone 1.
John:
Hopefully maybe a little bit better performing, but maybe not.
John:
We'll see.
John:
But you know what I mean?
John:
There's a big lead time.
John:
Apple has an advantage, but it's mostly a temporal advantage, not a...
John:
qualitative advantage.
John:
Everyone will eventually be able to do this.
John:
So yes, this is exactly what Apple should be doing.
John:
Doing the things that they can do before anyone else can do them because they have more control than everyone else.
John:
And even Apple is kind of in the uncomfortable situation of it's like, poor Casey, you know, you got to have a new-ish Mac because the chipset needs to be whatever and you got to have a device with lightning connector.
John:
Sorry, iPad 3 users like me and, you know, all this.
John:
There are other
John:
uh they're even even with apple's world and how fast they get everyone upgraded and everything there is a slight constraint so apple is doing it essentially as soon as they possibly can and we'll see if this feature is like a killer like that's what you need is if this is a feature that people really want then everyone else will eventually copy if it turns out to be something that's kind of okay but maybe not important enough for the other guys to go through the effort to copy then oh well but apple has will have the advantage of the first mover advantage that they like to have
Marco:
Yeah, but I think really, ultimately, this is the kind of thing that Apple is going to be the only game in town that really does it in any effective widespread way for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
I really don't see that changing anyway.
John:
Well, I also worried a little bit like when networking is thrown into the mix, because I agree with like devices and hardware and software just on those devices.
John:
Yeah.
John:
apple that's at apple's wheelhouse but once you get anything involving the network i just i have bad flashbacks i mean and like messages which i've been using much more lately because sort of wwdc everyone was using messages and i was you know i guess last year i was doing it too maybe but this year i use messages way more and i kind of i'm still using it i've been using it more since basically since my wife got uh maybe the iphone 5s she had the 4s but anyway i find myself using messages on the mac i find myself using it on my
John:
iPod my kids have iMessage accounts so I use them to talk to them on their various iPods and I find the program maddening like it doesn't fulfill the basic function of providing a text box that I can type into and hit send and having a message show up somewhere else some absurd percentage of the time it says not delivered and the only thing I get to do is tap the exclamation point and say try again and then it says not delivered why is it not delivered
John:
Will it ever work?
John:
Sometimes I just have to delete that message and send the same message again and then that will work.
John:
I have no idea, but it's failing on a basic level.
John:
So I really hope continuity doesn't actually involve the Internet or any of Apple servers.
John:
I hope it does ad hoc Wi-Fi like AirDrop and I don't have to involve any Internet stuff because every time Apple does Internet stuff, it screws up.
John:
I mean, just today I saw a tweet in my timeline and someone said on one device I added a phone number.
John:
On another device I deleted a phone number.
John:
Now neither device has either phone number.
John:
Thanks, iCloud.
John:
That was like stuff like that.
John:
I know sync is hard or whatever.
John:
I'm just saying like that is outside Apple still is outside Apple's wheelhouse.
John:
So I really hope continuity only involves like the airspace and hardware and software that's within my arm's reach and does not involve any servers anymore.
John:
I know push notifications is better, but...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I haven't tried it yet, so we're all just hoping it will be good.
John:
There is a potential, you're right, that potentially this is something that is right in Apple's wheelhouse.
John:
If it's outside, it's not very far outside.
John:
It's just, you know, I get nervous.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly fair.
Marco:
But I really think that people give them a hard time with stuff like iMessage weirdness.
Marco:
But if you look at things like iCloud Key Value Store, push notifications, and really most use of iMessages, iMessage?
Marco:
Most use of iMessage, I think everything works great.
Marco:
And there are the fringes where things fall apart, but...
John:
See, I think the bar is low on iMessage, though.
John:
It's just text.
John:
I'm not asking for the world.
John:
I'm not sending GIFs like Casey.
John:
It's just text.
John:
And here's my fallback.
John:
In these times when I'm frustrated and I can't send a message and it's frustrating, I launch the Gmail app and I send that message as an email.
John:
And you know what?
John:
That sends every freaking time.
John:
Every freaking time I send the email in Gmail, if I have an Internet connection, it sends the email every single time.
John:
It has never said it could not send.
John:
It has never failed if I have a network connection.
John:
And that it's tough to compete with that.
John:
Like when I find myself going to the Gmail app or maybe even Apple's own mail app, like I could have if I use Apple's mail app, I would have gone to that.
John:
I message still angers me greatly.
Casey:
See, it's funny because I actually don't have any normal issues with iMessage.
Casey:
I occasionally get like a message failed to send.
Casey:
I occasionally get like either a time shifted message or something like that.
Casey:
But 99% of the time, I have no issues with iMessage.
Casey:
And so it's so weird to me to hear that you have a ton of problems and you're not the only one.
John:
But you've had the failed to send.
John:
What does that mean?
John:
What does it mean failed to send?
John:
I don't understand what it's like.
John:
I would like an error message.
Casey:
I'm thinking it means that the thing that it tried to send didn't send.
John:
I don't know what that means.
John:
Like, why?
John:
Did the server not respond?
John:
Not that I'm saying I need the details, but intellectual curiosity.
John:
I wonder what it is that is not connecting.
John:
Here's what I would want out of the thing.
John:
Okay, so you can't connect the dots for whatever reason.
John:
Or maybe that's a legitimate reason.
John:
Sometimes I think...
John:
maybe the phone like if their phone is rebooting can i not send this message like there's some is there some sort of like they want to show me the delivered message and if say there the phone was in the middle of rebooting it can't possibly be delivered because you know there's nothing to receive it like maybe that's what it is but even if that's the case which i think is ridiculous by the way it should never be the case it should be storing forward like most other im systems are like a google talk or whatever even if that was the case it should be the job of the software to just say
John:
I'll just keep trying.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
I won't say it was delivered.
John:
I'm not going to lie to you, but you don't have to keep hitting the exclamation point and try again.
John:
I'll eventually get it sent.
John:
And what it should really be is storing forward like email or like apparently every other I am message, like when on aim or Google talk or whatever, if someone is not online, if all their computers are turned off, I can still send them a message.
John:
And the next time they sign on to the service or turn on one of their devices, they'll see my message.
John:
Right?
John:
Like that's all I'm asking for.
John:
It's not, it's just text, man.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Need at needlifestyle.com, Hover, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
John:
Want to do titles?
John:
Did your bot survive?
John:
I saw you yelling at the people in the chat room.
John:
Nope.
Casey:
Bot's dead.
Casey:
Right now, I want to be bitter and angry and say I'm just not bringing it back.
Casey:
But that's immature.
Casey:
What was the problem this time?
Casey:
So the problem this time was somebody decided to... So I guess WebSockets may have been a poor choice.
Casey:
It's actually a technically sound choice.
Casey:
But the problem is it's not very obfuscated.
Casey:
And because... Well, I guess I could like, you know...
Casey:
Base64 and code everything.
John:
Don't worry about obfuscation.
John:
What was the problem?
Casey:
So the problem was that somebody decided to run a loop of voting for every possible ID, and IDs are integers, because why wouldn't they be?
Casey:
Because why do you need a GUID or something super complex for an ID?
John:
No, you need throttling.
Marco:
it's a defense against denial of service yeah you don't have any like there's no i guess the problem is because you don't have state to be a counter for well no you can you can keep it in memory i mean like like whenever whenever i've done a rate limiter in in the application layer i always do memcache because it's just it's quick it's easy it's lightweight i know it's fast and and if you if the if you hit the application consists only of launching your you know getting your stack up to the controller level and you firing off a memcache read or a memcache increment rather
John:
He doesn't need MMCache.
John:
He's single process, though.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
He could just keep it in an array.
Casey:
That's the thing, though, is that, well, there's two problems.
Casey:
One, I mean, I'd have to do this all by hand because this is a raw socket to the server by definition.
Casey:
That's what a web socket is.
Casey:
And shoot, what was he?
Casey:
Oh, the other one was I realized that double vote prevention was totally borked.
Casey:
And it took me a few minutes to realize that all of the vote submissions were coming from 10.x addresses.
Casey:
which can't be.
John:
Because you didn't get the X forwarded for, Heather?
Casey:
You're just trusting the... Exactly.
John:
This is like a mini web boot camp for you.
John:
It's like a microcosm of how to make a web app.
Casey:
It's funny because I've been so far abstracted from all of these things that you guys, I guess, have somehow or another had to worry about.
John:
Somehow or another by writing web apps, yes.
John:
No, stop.
John:
It's just experience.
John:
It's just the same way you learned all the stuff you learned writing fast text that you didn't know before about how to write an iOS app.
John:
Well, there's a different set of things you need to know for web apps.
John:
They're just more fun when you're doing them publicly and there's antagonists in the chat room.
Marco:
This can be a whole series, a graduate school for KCA in web apps.
Marco:
Just every week, you'll try to put it up.
Marco:
And every week, the chat room will educate you on something that you didn't account for or didn't do correctly.
Marco:
And then the next week, you can fix that and you can get a new problem.
Casey:
Well, the thing is, I write web apps for a living, which at this point probably sounds like I make a terrible living.
Casey:
But the thing is, so much of it is abstracted so far away from me that I never have to worry about it.
John:
And it's also for intranets, right?
Casey:
Not exclusively, but generally, yes.
Casey:
I've done some public-facing stuff.
John:
But things that aren't a target.
John:
Basically, you survive because there's not people.
John:
Now we have a podcast, and it's a fun little game to target your thing.
Casey:
It's fun for them.
John:
Just think of how just think of how incredible your thing will be when forged in the crucible of people in the chat room.
John:
Like by the end of it, it will just be completely hardened shell.
John:
Unlike so many other crappy things where someone writes a little web app and puts it up on GitHub and says, here you go.
John:
And then some poor sucker runs that and uses it for something really popular.
John:
And then it falls under the load.
John:
Yours will be battle tested, I guess, or dead.
John:
One of the other two battle tested or dead.
Casey:
Well, we're standing here now, actually.
Casey:
I feel like just murdering it forevermore, but that's very immature of me.
Casey:
So I will lick my wounds.
Casey:
I will put bandages on them, and I will take another stab sometime, maybe next week.
Casey:
I had to eliminate myself from the chat room for like half an hour, though, because not only was it distracting, but I wanted to murder all of them.
John:
You just need to, like for all these things, write like failing test cases for all of them.
John:
Write a little test for denial of service to test your throttling.
John:
Write a little test for duplicate voting to handle, you know, like do everything that is done to you turn into a test case.
John:
And so that you'll know that your future changes don't regress and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
But the thing that's frustrating about it is this is a bot to record votes for the chat room, suggestions and votes for the chat room to suggest titles.
Casey:
Why am I having to go through all this?
Casey:
Why can't we all just act like adults and behave?
Casey:
But oh no, not this crowd.
Casey:
I'm wondering...
Marco:
What the heck could 20 people in a chat room do to bring down Node.js?
Marco:
I've seen the code.
John:
It's not that complicated.
John:
They're not bringing it down.
John:
They're just writing an infinite loop, and he's got no throttling, and it's denial of service, right?
Casey:
Well, I think what happens is at some point, actually it might be when ints wrap around like Brent was talking about way back when, but anyway.
Marco:
There is no way they're making enough requests to make a 53-bit integer wrap around in 20 minutes.
Casey:
Well, today the issue was they were just incrementing the ID and trying to place a vote for every successive ID number.
Casey:
And eventually that did piss it off and make it fall down.
John:
Do you know the – oh, what the hell is the acronym?
John:
Do you know this acronym?
John:
Is it OWASP?
John:
Yes, they do open web application security project.
John:
Oh, OWASP has like a list of, you know, common vulnerabilities and web apps and they update the list every year.
John:
And you have hit several of them already.
John:
One of them is exposing your internal IDs to the outside world.
John:
I forget what it's called, but there's some snappy name for it.
John:
And that's the one where those people increment a number to try to guess your IDs.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
But I mean, here again, like I conceptually know that many of these things could and probably would be problems, but I was perhaps obtuse or maybe just stubborn, but I didn't think that I would need to write like 10,000 lines of node to prevent the chat room from being a bunch of people's.
Casey:
And as it turns out, I'm going to need to do that or just give up on it and we'll rely on Brad Choate's, well, the gray winter slash Brad Choate set up.
Marco:
There isn't a package in Node that's like a simple rate limiter and stuff like that?
Casey:
Well, there is.
Casey:
But again, because I'm using WebSockets, it's not so simple.
John:
Well, it's probably like a WebSockets wrapper library that has a rate limiting parameter that you can, you know, when you set up the receiving end of your socket.
John:
You're not going to do it on the sending end.
John:
It's all going to be in the receiving end.
Casey:
And that's the thing is I'm going to have to write my own rate limiting.
Casey:
I did a quick cursory search to see if there was anything.
Casey:
And I didn't see anything, but I did, you know what?
Casey:
30-second search.
Casey:
So tomorrow or at some point when I'm less bitter about it all, then I'll have a proper think on it.
John:
Not that it matters for showbots or whatever, but realistically speaking, like for the people who are actually web developers and are listening to this, this type of thing where a bunch of people are just intentionally attacking this app, you're like, oh, well, I'm glad the app that I'm doing doesn't have that problem.
John:
That's...
John:
I mean, you may luck out there, but really what you're saying is my app is going to develop and add features and become important and essential to the people who are using it.
John:
And then some person is going to stumble across it and break it.
John:
Because it doesn't mean your application is not vulnerable to these or will never experience these.
John:
It just means that if...
John:
If it's not going to happen now, it's going to happen later, and later it's going to be worse.
John:
Because if this stuff is ever going to happen in the lifetime of the app, you want it to happen early.
John:
Because if not, it happens when the app has been deployed for six months and the entire business relies on it, and then some piece of malware or bot or whatever stumbles across your thing and wipes it off the face of the earth.
John:
And that's a much bigger problem when your whole company now relies on this app or you have millions of customers or whatever you have than it would have been if during the early development of this app,
John:
it had a bunch of jerks attacking it and and made you harden it again not really relevant to a show bot but i'm like it is relevant to people building a real app it's like don't stick your head in the sand because everybody gets hit by one of these eventually and if you don't then you just you're either lucky or you never got popular enough to be noticed but even if you're not popular just this malware that scans and just you know fuzzes its way into everything and so eventually every web app will be a victim
Casey:
Yeah, and that's the thing is that I had thought, since this is a controlled audience, which I had assumed were all well-behaved, I didn't think I needed to do a lot of the things that I would have otherwise done in my real world, in my job world.
Casey:
And I just took a lot of shortcuts because I thought, eh, well, we're all friends here.
Casey:
It'll be okay.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Apparently not.
Casey:
And by the way, I owe an apology to, I think it's Adam Kearney, who has already actually quite a while ago, put up a poll request on GitHub because Accidental Bot is on there, put up a poll request to fix an unrelated small issue that we discovered during the show about not refusing titles that are too long.
Casey:
And that is the appropriate way to behave.
Casey:
If you're going to break it, that's fine.
Casey:
But throw me a poll request, man.
Marco:
Did he submit the source code change as a very long title?
Marco:
No, but that would be funny.
Marco:
That would be the best way to do it.
Marco:
But there's no persistence, so you would never see it.
Casey:
And that's on the list is I'll probably have to set up, like, some NoSQL database or something just to stuff this in there.
Marco:
It's pronounced nascual, Casey.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Just because... Well, actually, in a perfect world, I would never need it because the darn thing will never crash.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Oh, well.
Casey:
That's great.
Marco:
I'm still... How did this take down a Node instance?
Marco:
This is either the worst ad in the world for Heroku's small instances or the worst ad in the world for Node.
Casey:
Or my code.
Casey:
But to be honest, like you said, this code is pretty straightforward.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
Because I've survived a couple of links from your site, which through...
Casey:
as far as i could tell some pretty serious traffic we talked about that in the past and and heroku like i said in the past reached out to me and said oh yeah that was nothing like you your your dyno was good to go cruising at like i think what they said it was like under a third cpu usage bandwidth usage you know or throughput etc so i i don't know if it's my code if it's the fact that it's web sockets something is weird is it maybe is there like a connection limit on the web sockets layer somewhere
Casey:
I mean, it could be.
Casey:
I'm not aware of one, but it certainly could be.
Casey:
I mean, there's only so many port numbers, but I can't imagine that's the issue.
Marco:
Well, it could be.
Marco:
You should guard against that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Whatever.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Let's look at titles in the show bot that works.
John:
Man, you guys have been mean today.