Notifications Duck
John:
Which one did you listen to?
John:
The stupid one with Mike Daisy from way back when?
Casey:
No, the one with the Long Island Jeep dealer or whatever it was.
John:
Yeah, that was a pretty good episode.
John:
You still do your fake, like, this is how we think people on Long Island sound after hearing people on Long Island talk for an entire show?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And you're still going to do that?
John:
It didn't take.
John:
Hearing all the actual people from Long Island talk, you're just going to go back to that because you think that is somehow representative of something.
Casey:
No, I think it makes you mad, and I think that's funny.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
So Richmond's in the south, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Once upon a time, it was the capital of the Confederacy.
Marco:
Too bad it's so small, it doesn't even have an Apple store.
Casey:
No, Richmond does.
Casey:
You're thinking of Charlottesville, which is an hour west.
Casey:
You're just trying to get me angry so you can go to bed.
Marco:
I really want to go to bed.
Marco:
My throat's all dry.
Marco:
I just took my last sip of water.
Marco:
I'm so tired.
John:
Just think of the editing job you have ahead.
John:
You're going to have to listen back to all this crap again to try to extract some value from it.
John:
So you have double punishment.
Casey:
Right, so we have some follow-up.
Marco:
All right, take that out of the parking lot.
Casey:
All right, so the first follow-up is from me, and it's from A.L.
Casey:
I don't know if that's Al or A.L.
Casey:
or what.
Marco:
I'm going to say Alabama.
Casey:
You know, I think that's right.
Casey:
I think this person's name is Alabama.
Casey:
So anyway, he or she...
Casey:
made a point with regard to people switching from Android to iOS, which you had said kind of off the cuff an episode or two ago.
Casey:
And so reading from his or her feedback, in my immediate circle of friends and colleagues, 15 people have switched from iOS to Android.
Casey:
None have switched from Android to iOS.
Casey:
The main reason, and this is what I thought was interesting, the main reason, after an iOS update, their one-plus-year-old iPhone, officially supported by Apple, slowed down and made them mad.
Casey:
Now on Android, 95% of them don't get updates, but everything keeps working as, scare quotes, fast, scare quote, as it did when they got the phone.
Casey:
And I thought that was very interesting, because I've not heard this personally, but I could see...
Casey:
That being, I don't know if I should use the word legitimate, but perhaps justifiable reason for not upgrading your iPhone or alternatively going to Android.
Casey:
And I was just curious if you two had any thoughts on that.
Marco:
I mean, it's kind of a weak argument.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, it's totally anecdotal.
Marco:
Now, my statement was...
Marco:
I've heard, you know, my statement, I forget exactly my words, but it was it was saying that not a lot of people ever move from iOS to Android, but people do move from Android to iOS.
Marco:
And I didn't back it up with anything.
Marco:
And I don't really have a lot of strong support for that, except that just, you know, from what I've seen online, I've seen occasional studies and surveys and, you know, reports here and there that some Android people move to iOS after having an Android phone.
Marco:
And I've never seen a report that says otherwise.
Marco:
I mean, it says the opposite, that some people move to, you know, some statistically significant number of people move from iOS to Android after having an iPhone.
Marco:
Those numbers might be out there, but I've only ever seen the former and I've never seen the latter being reported in an actual study or report of real numbers with real people.
Marco:
So, you know, anybody can have anecdotes saying, oh, well, I switched or my friends all switched in the other direction, but...
Marco:
I would love to know if anybody has actual numbers backing that up in either direction or both directions or in either direction.
Marco:
I would love to see actual numbers for that because neither of us really do, uh, really have anything to support this me or ow.
John:
I like this anecdote though, uh, because it highlights a phenomenon, uh, uh, that I I've seen a lot in that, you know, when we, when you have a study of a large group of people, you want to see, you know, larger trends or whatever, but, uh,
John:
Those big numbers are good for seeing where the industry or the population is going, but in any small pocket of people, this phenomenon that this person is describing is something that I've seen a lot of.
John:
How do people...
John:
decide to you know change platforms switch from a mac to a pc like do whatever sort of technology uh purchasing decision and platform believing is how do they change do they change on an individual basis most of the time what i see is what this person described is that social groups move kind of as a herd in that it will become socially accepted within some small small or large group of people whether it's just five friends or an entire family or entire community
Casey:
Or a framily.
Casey:
What?
John:
Yeah, and it will become, like, common wisdom.
John:
Everybody knows that X is true of Y. And it starts becoming socially unacceptable to still be using X when everybody knows X has this problem Y and you should all change to Z. Whatever it may be, whether it's about cars, dishwashers, car seats...
John:
daycares i'm thinking of parenting things but like you know uh and also with phones and i've seen this as well in small groups of people everyone just knows like oh uh you know like the the original was like with the iphone oh your phone is crappy you should get an iphone because it's better at the web or whatever and then everyone or it's the cool thing or they have apps and apps are cool and on the other side uh you know in this group like oh i you
John:
you should get off Apple phones because Apple doesn't support their old products and they, they intentionally slow things down.
John:
Everybody knows that you should try Android or whatever.
John:
It doesn't really matter whether the thing they're talking about is true or not, or whether it's true for a brief period of time or was true in the past is no longer true or was never true.
John:
It doesn't really matter.
John:
All it matters is that like the social proof of, uh, of a group of friends or family or whatever can move these little pockets of people, uh,
John:
And, you know, the pocket phenomena has almost nothing to do with the larger trend, because there could be pockets going in, especially if they're basing their movement on things that aren't true anyway.
John:
These pockets could be just brownie in motion, just like random movement of these little pockets.
John:
But I think it's interesting that...
John:
it's not it's not a uniform motion and the decisions aren't made an individual basis it's sort of social proof and hearsay and half truths and stuff like that that cause these little pockets to move one direction to the other and that i think is fascinating no matter which direction they're moving it fascinating a little bit depressing but uh i've long since learned that it's no there's no use trying to dissuade people of whatever notion that they've they've uh decided about whatever it is they're talking about whether it's
John:
vacuum cleaners or cars, or certainly parenting, and also things like phones.
John:
And they tend to go in cycles.
John:
So whenever I hear someone say something like, I'm always going to get Android phones because iOS phones don't have flash and I need flash.
John:
It's difficult to discuss that topic in a constructive way with them about the utility of flash on the web and how many Android phones have flash or how useful it is in the mobile web or whatever.
John:
Once they've decided that, they're not going to change their mind until the new thing is, you know, Android phones are unreliable.
John:
I'm going to get Apple because my last two Android phones broke or something equally unfounded or random or whatever.
Marco:
I think Al's specific instance here, he's saying that his friends and he all switched because they were mad because their one-year-old iPhone got a software update from Apple that made it slower.
Marco:
And this is actually an interesting conundrum.
Marco:
What should Apple do here?
Marco:
Now, I've never heard anybody say that about an Android phone, that it got a software update...
Marco:
Period.
Marco:
But also that a software update slowed it down.
Marco:
And maybe that's because they so rarely get updates.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But whatever the reason, I've never heard people say that.
Marco:
I think a lot of this has to do with this cultural narrative that people, especially Apple skeptics and anti-Apple people, have had about Apple for a while, which is their products are overpriced.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
You know, never mind that that, you know, the iPhone is often sold at retail at the same price as as similar Android phones, whatever.
Marco:
And, you know, you can make those arguments all day about, oh, we'll configure a PC with similar hardware as a MacBook Pro and it's a similar price.
Marco:
You know, you can you can make those arguments all day.
Marco:
It doesn't matter, as John, you just said, you know, it's hard to ever convince these people otherwise once they have these these like long running beliefs.
Marco:
But.
Marco:
The commonly held... And I've heard people say this all the time.
Marco:
The commonly held thing here is, Apple's update made my old phone slower to force me to buy a new one because they want more money.
Marco:
Now, again, I've never heard anybody say, Samsung updated my phone to make me buy a new one and intentionally made it slower so I'd buy a new Samsung phone.
Marco:
I've never heard a single person say that.
Marco:
Again, this is anecdotal.
Marco:
Who knows if people do?
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That, you know, the motive is ascribed to Apple that if a new version of the software is slower or if I just perceive it to be slower, even if it's not or if it is slower, but for a reason that's not the fault of the operating system, maybe I'm like running more apps and stuff and some app is slowing stuff down or killing the battery, you know, whatever the reason they ascribe the blame to, oh, Apple is greedy because their products are expensive and they want more of my money.
Marco:
However, what would happen if Apple did not give software updates to one-year-old phones?
Marco:
Then you'd have these exact same people making the exact same complaint.
Marco:
Apple is so greedy, they won't let me have the new software.
Marco:
They made my phone obsolete.
Marco:
They will use the word obsolete, even though it does not mean what they think it means, but they will use the word anyway.
Marco:
Apple made my phone obsolete to force me to buy a new one because they want more money and they're so greedy.
Marco:
It would be the exact same argument if they did it the other direction.
Marco:
And so this is one of those things.
Marco:
I think it's a cultural rumor or meme or just norm that...
Marco:
this certain pretty sizable group of people just thinks this about Apple and will always describe that motive of their stuff is expensive.
Marco:
Therefore, anything they do is to make me go spend more money on their stuff.
Marco:
And occasionally that might be the reason they do something, but I think it's pretty occasional.
Marco:
I think that's more like a happy side effect of moving things forward and making new stuff every year and moving the requirements for it every year.
Marco:
But
Marco:
What do you expect them to do with your 18-month-old iPhone 4?
Marco:
Do you expect them to... Either way, if they support this old hardware forever, it will get slower over time as the OS gets more complicated and more advanced.
Marco:
If they don't support it forever, you'll scream that they stopped supporting it.
John:
Well, it's the social aspect of it that's important because I think what happens in these little pockets that move around is that one or two people with stature in the social group will get unreasonably angry about something.
John:
And then the other people will feel that they will be looked upon as foolish if they continue to have dealings with the company that's been denounced by the person with a higher social standing.
John:
and they'd be chided about it and said like oh you're still doing that apple stuff like it becomes socially unacceptable even if that individual if left to their own devices doesn't have a problem their device didn't get slower or they upgraded and didn't notice any problems or whatever it becomes a problem socially speaking because of the one or two people are angry and you see this in the opposite thing too marco recently you put posted a link on on your website
John:
about the guy's experience at Google I.O.
John:
versus WWDC.
John:
In our social circle, or at least in some social circles, there is a stigma about Android phones, about how they're crappy and there's nothing good on them.
John:
And if you were seen with an Android phone, whether you like the Android phone or not, if you're in a social group where that is looked down upon, you will get crap about having an Android phone.
John:
Now, I've never experienced that with the groups that I've traveled in.
John:
People care that much, but I know it is definitely a thing because I've seen this opposite thing as well.
John:
And it has, if you're in that social group, it doesn't matter if you are perfectly happy with your Android phone.
John:
At a certain point,
John:
You begin to think you begin to feel foolish for having an Android phone because all these other people that you respect say that you shouldn't have one and they're crappy or you get teased about it or whatever.
John:
And so groups will move, you know, groups of teenagers, families, groups of coworkers.
John:
And again, these individual bubbles mean nothing about the larger trend.
John:
They are just, you know, lumps in the real world data.
John:
But I think it's fascinating how these little groups are moving.
John:
Sometimes I think the groups can spread quite widely.
John:
Obviously, the macro phenomenon is if something...
John:
if something happens to some kind of news story that lets you learn that like company X is evil because they sell children into slavery or whatever, that bubble will just grow and cover everybody.
John:
And we'll be like, well, I'm not going to, you know, forget it.
John:
We're not buying anything from them anymore.
John:
The company goes out of business.
John:
Like the bubbles can end up growing and connect with each other and just cover the entire map.
John:
But these type of bubbles, I, in my experience tend to be focused on one or two people with high social standing who have a bad experience with whatever.
John:
And, uh,
John:
That spreads to like one or two degrees of connections from the person.
John:
The only exception is cases, and this one always cracks me up, where there are no good alternatives.
John:
Whenever someone with high social standing has a bad experience with an airline and they say they will never fly that airline again, it's like, well, five down, you know.
John:
six more to go and you will be out of airlines because they're all terrible it's like i'm never dealing with comcast again it's okay well so you have probably one two possibly zero other cable companies or you know eventually you will hate them all and then what will you do then you'll have to pick the least bad one which is what we're all doing anyway so that one i think people have learned to ignore because it used to be like oh well i'll never fly delta our family doesn't fly delta
John:
delta is terrible sorry delta i'm just picking your name out of the hat is delta still in business yes and they are terrible but it doesn't really matter because they're all terrible right and you know but at this point everyone sort of knows look they're all terrible if someone in your family or work group or whatever is super mad at some airline it is not a reason for you to not fly that airline if anyone gives you crap about flying an airline because they'll tell you about the horrible experience they have you said look
John:
every airline has those stories they're all terrible right but with the phone things i mean i still think this is going in cycles and with apple stuff as well like i have relatives who were on macs for years and then a bubble forms about like my mac broke and i didn't feel like i was getting the support i need or i felt like it was obsolete before it was supposed to be or it is unreliable or i no longer understand it so they switched to pc or my you know and
John:
i don't like apple and i've switched from mac to pc so now i'm going to get an android phone on general principles because i'm mad at apple about the whatever thing like that that can happen anywhere but like wait 10 years and it could be back around the other side again i'm never getting the android phone again these things are terrible i don't like them for whatever reason they decide i'm only getting you know microsoft phones or windows phones or whatever and
John:
Very few of these decisions have anything to do with logic, and they just end up being noise.
John:
But this is the source of anecdotes.
John:
So anytime you hear an anecdote, just think of one of these bubbles and think of what is making this bubble move from one camp to the other for any reason.
Casey:
So you're saying that you never got made fun of for your flip phone, say, in the lobby of the Park 55 at WWDC?
Casey:
That doesn't run Android.
Yeah.
John:
that's a whole other category of thing and that's like gentle teasing i didn't feel like i'm excluded from the group because i have one it's like i can't hang out with you guys i don't have an iphone like no one really cares what i don't think we made fun of you i just took a picture and posted on instagram and got 400 people to make fun of you
John:
That's a whole other category of things like you're not even participating.
John:
You don't even have a smartphone.
John:
You still have a dumb phone.
John:
It's like I would if I showed up running a penny farthing bicycle or something, it's like whatever.
Marco:
But, you know, it's funny because it's not, you know, I'm not going to laugh at anyone using a flip phone.
Marco:
I will laugh at you using a flip phone because it's funny that you of all people don't have a smartphone.
Marco:
It's actually not funny.
John:
It's been explained many, many times.
John:
But anyway, people who are excited about it can be excited.
John:
But the point is, it's not like I felt as if I wasn't welcome in the group.
John:
Whereas that was the angle with the Google I.O.
John:
thing where you're hanging out at WWDC and you pull out an Android phone and you somehow feel like you can't participate in the group anymore.
John:
You are not allowed in.
John:
You're not with the cool kids or whatever.
John:
I mean, I've never personally experienced that phenomenon.
John:
Maybe I don't care enough about what phone I have.
John:
Maybe other people don't care enough about what other phone I have.
John:
But I imagine it's entirely real, depending on who you're hanging out with.
Marco:
Yeah, I've also never seen that.
Marco:
But I've also very rarely ever seen somebody take out an Android phone, period, at WWDC.
John:
And I think in the groups that we hang out in, if we were hanging out and someone brought an Android phone, I think our reaction would be curiosity.
John:
We would all want to know, show me something cool in that phone.
John:
Why are you using that phone?
John:
Not as a challenge, but show me the thing that that phone can do that the iPhone can't do.
John:
Again, not as a challenge, but because we're interested in...
John:
A, most of us don't know a lot about Android, and B, in the circles we travel in, if anyone we know pulls out something, we assume because they're someone we respect and are friends with or whatever and knows tech stuff, that there must be a reason they're using it, and we would want to know that reason.
John:
I feel like curiosity would be the reaction.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like if somebody, you know, showed up to a party on an elephant.
Marco:
Like, okay, well, we all drove here.
Marco:
You took the elephant.
Marco:
I haven't seen an elephant being ridden in a while, especially to parties like this.
Marco:
Please tell me why you were the elephant here and can you show me, you know, can I have a ride maybe?
Marco:
Like, what's going on?
Marco:
Can I see the trunk?
Casey:
Sorry, that joke was too bad to pass up.
Casey:
A tangible example of this is I went to dinner with Justin Williams and a couple other people when I was at WWDC and he's rocking or he was at the time rocking a 5C, which that's exactly what happened.
Casey:
It led to a very brief discussion of a 5C.
Casey:
Why not a 5S?
Casey:
What the hell is wrong with you?
Casey:
Why aren't you rocking a 5S?
Casey:
What makes a 5C so much better?
Casey:
And it was more about, you know, it was playful ribbing, but more about
Casey:
geez, tell me why you prefer this, because you're someone whose opinion I trust and I respect, and you've taken what could be called a contrarian opinion or a contrarian position.
Casey:
Tell me why.
Marco:
Or even, it doesn't even need to have to be contrarian.
Marco:
It's just unusual.
Marco:
Like, you're the only person that I've seen in this entire conference so far have a 5C.
Marco:
You know, out of curiosity, why?
John:
And the answer is because it's super comfortable and smooth on the back and everything.
John:
It's just a better form factor than the...
Casey:
Actually, I think that was pretty much his answer.
John:
And it comes in colors.
Casey:
That too.
Casey:
You want to tell us about something awesome and then we'll continue with follow-up?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
We don't have to argue whether it's pronounced like Gillette or Gillette, right?
Marco:
Like GIF and JIF.
Casey:
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Marco:
It's Gillette.
Marco:
That's what I thought.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I've actually been a secret shaving nerd for a long time.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I think there's some kind of metal in the middle somewhere.
Marco:
It's a nice weighty handle and certainly looks a lot nicer, feels a lot nicer in the hand and is more substantial than the Gillette one.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So we have some follow-up about the biomedical stuff, and then we also have some follow-up about iPhoto.
Casey:
Do you want to cover that real quick, actually?
Marco:
So I said last week that the way iPhoto did raw editing back in the day was that you'd have the first edit of a raw photo would be kind of losslessly operating on the raw, and then it would bake that into the JPEG, and then future edits would lose a little raw badge in the corner, and you would be working on the JPEG only, and if you wanted to
Marco:
go back and do like a real adjustment to the raw you'd have to reprocess it and reset everything apparently in newer versions of iPhoto that is no longer the case which is awesome so now in new versions I've had multiple people tell me that uh I haven't actually tested it yet but I've had multiple people tell me that in current versions of iPhoto uh you always get the raw editing if you're working on a raw file it doesn't do the thing where it bakes the edits in after the first one and then you're working on a JPEG so good on that I got that wrong and that's it
John:
Got another quick one here about the alarms going off in hospitals and how things are always beeping because the devices don't know enough to know whether something is normal or abnormal, there's some malfunctions and stuff like that.
John:
And Adam Gaines wrote in to tell us that the proper name for this is alarm fatigue.
John:
And we'll put a link in the show notes talking about, it's an NPR story talking about alarm fatigue.
John:
But it makes sense this is already a term for this because it's definitely a thing.
Marco:
That's a nice term too.
Marco:
I like that.
John:
We get notification fatigue on mobile devices, I guess, or on those watches that are always buzzing on your wrists every time you get a notification.
John:
Although I don't know how people deal with it with their phones.
John:
Sometimes I briefly use someone else's phone and the thing is always beeping and buzzing and things are going off.
John:
I disable every notification.
John:
Almost everything is disabled.
Marco:
Yeah, I talked about this before, but I keep them so low that I can sleep with my phone on next to my bed with the volume on every night, and I expect to hear nothing all night unless something is really important and happening.
Marco:
And I've done that for years, and it's been fine.
Marco:
I think people are criticizing these Android Wear watches for buzzing constantly and showing them all these notifications constantly, but that's not really the watch's problem.
Marco:
That's your problem as the user for having all the notifications configured.
Marco:
And maybe you could say that the platform should add some kind of granularity, setting priorities for notifications.
Marco:
I don't know if they do or not.
Marco:
I'm assuming they don't, or at least the watches don't integrate with anything like that yet.
Marco:
But that's not a great solution.
Marco:
That's like a programmer hack solution.
Marco:
That's not really a good solution.
Marco:
The good solution is to...
Marco:
exercise a little bit more self-control over the notifications that you choose to receive and if you don't want to have your wrist buzzing all the time maybe it isn't important enough to have a notification for it uh so that's like i don't that's another thing like people are arguing or they're they're criticizing these watches for that it's like that's not really like that's your fault not the watch's fault
John:
thing that really blows me away for like ios users are most people don't read twitter the way i do and that they don't read every single tweet in the feed right which is fine that's a different way to use twitter but then those same people who don't read their entire feed have like notifications turned on for their ad mentions and that combination just doesn't make any sense to me you're not interested enough that you're going to read every single tweet of all the people you follow but you are interested enough when any random person
John:
At mentions you that your phone is going to buzz and vibrate and bleep.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
I have no notifications for Twitter.
John:
I have no notifications for email.
John:
The only thing that could make my iPod make any kind of noise, I think, is iMessage.
John:
And I almost never use that unless I'm like at WWDC.
Casey:
How does that not make sense?
Casey:
Because I don't necessarily care about the crap that that everyone else is shouting into the world.
Casey:
But hey, if you're talking to me, I want to know.
John:
So you don't care.
John:
The list of people you decide to follow, you don't care enough to read everything they say.
John:
But anybody in the entire world that mentions you and you need to know about it right now.
John:
Any jerk from anywhere has more control over your attention than the people you have chosen to follow.
Casey:
I mean, to be to be clear, I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Casey:
But yes, I mean, I don't think that's a that's a surprising conclusion for any normal human to reach.
Casey:
Humans are selfish bastards.
Casey:
And that's that's what we're programmed to be.
Casey:
So it's all about us.
Casey:
It's all about me, me, me.
Casey:
And it's not surprising to me that people would skip what everyone else is saying unless it pertains to me.
John:
Maybe if people get very, very few at mentions, it's not a problem.
John:
But most of the people that I know do get a lot of at mentions, and I bet at least half of them are bad.
John:
So it's like you're running that Facebook experiment on yourself where you're making yourself feel bad by making your phone ring with a 50% chance that it's going to be someone saying something that's going to make you feel bad.
John:
But you need to, oh, now it's time for my phone to vibrate.
John:
I got to pull that out.
John:
Let me see what random jerk 123 had to say about me.
John:
50-50 shot.
John:
It's going to make me feel bad.
Casey:
which is exactly right which is exactly why i recently came to the conclusion that having notifications for all that mentions is insane and i am a completionist like you for the record but anyway i um instead have notifications only for people that mention me that i also follow so the so the assumption here is that if somebody that i follow is mentioning me the signal to noise ratio is quite a bit higher
John:
i still think it's not a reason to be notified right now about it you can have a separate view of your twitter feed that shows you at mentions by people you follow like i can understand viewing your feed filtering your feed that way to show you stuff but it's not a reason to like i don't need to know right now that someone had mentioned me on twitter right if i was if i'm in the middle of reading twitter then fine but like just i again i have a low tolerance for anything making my phone vibrate unless it's like
John:
a family member, member giving me information I need to have right now.
John:
And this is basically the equivalent of a phone call, the modern day equivalent of a phone call where it's like real, real time information that I need to know now.
John:
Whereas even if it's someone I follow and they had mentioned me, I don't need to know that now.
Casey:
Well, you have much more self-control than I do.
Casey:
And I need to be more like you.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that to patronize you.
Casey:
I feel like I want to know if somebody's talking to me because I feel like Twitter is just a half step less important than a text message, which goes back to my appearance on IRL Talk.
Casey:
But I should turn off all at-mentioned notifications.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I want to know.
Casey:
I want to know if somebody's talking about me.
John:
You'll find out when you have a chance to look at Twitter.
John:
Then you will see what they had to say about you.
John:
But you need to know this second.
John:
Again, it gets back to just I have so few notifications turned on at all, period.
John:
There is very little that happens on my phone that I think...
John:
requires me to service it immediately.
John:
It's servicing an interrupt, not that kind of service.
John:
Interrupt service routine.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
To be clear, I don't have sounds on.
Casey:
So it shows up on my home screen, but I don't have any sort of buzzing or anything like that.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm actually... So Overcast has push notifications for the episodes.
Marco:
And the way it works is I send a content available push, which is silent, which doesn't alert the user.
Marco:
The app wakes up, downloads new stuff, and if there's something new that the user should be notified about, it shows a local notification.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I actually intentionally set no sound for it.
Marco:
And so far in the beta, no one has said anything about that.
John:
And I'm wondering, like... I was going to mention that to you, but I didn't want to report bugs in the podcast.
John:
This may be a separate thing.
John:
I'll be listening to a podcast, right?
John:
And then the sound will duck.
John:
as in you know go lower volume yeah briefly and that is my cue to know that some notification has happened on my system but i don't know what notification it was because no banner goes down because i have no notifications or not but i know that something has happened and so frequently i will pause the audio go back and see that that was a message or something and is that because my settings are screwed up that it didn't make any noise the audio duck so clearly overcast knew that something was happening but no other noise came through my headphones
John:
well that one's not thank god that's not my bug in fact not only is that not my bug but applications don't even get a notification when they're being ducked like i can't really do anything in response to that so am i supposed to be here like in theory am i supposed to be hearing something probably but fortunately that's not my bug all right well anyway the ducking audio at first i thought there was like a podcast production problem like boy you know in our podcast or someone else is like oh why the audio but now i learned something else going on my phone anyway notifications suck
Casey:
Tell me how you really feel.
Casey:
Don't hold back.
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Casey:
Do we want to do this biomedical stuff and follow up?
John:
I'll just read it.
John:
It's brief.
John:
This is Ben Griffel who wrote in before and he's correcting himself.
John:
So I think that in that spirit, he should have a podcast.
Marco:
Yeah, he could do follow up.
John:
I'm just going to read it because it's fairly concise.
John:
So there are a few watches out there that can determine your heart rate optically using infrared light shine through your skin.
John:
And by the way, I've seen a lot of people tweet at me about various wristwatches and things that use something similar to this.
John:
Some reviews suggest this method works fairly well.
John:
This changes the equation about what you can and can't do with the watches.
John:
Long-term continuous heart rate monitoring becomes feasible, which can give you all kinds of health information, including heart rate variability.
John:
It also makes the process of getting continuous heart rate during exercise much more convenient.
John:
However, a lot of my other points still stand.
John:
the bigger is what can you do this information and will people really care you can't use this information to diagnose or treat any conditions with f with fda approval and studies still show that for most people this kind of data just becomes boring noise it might motivate some people to exercise in the short run but long term it just doesn't happen this was a big point of his previous feedback that i didn't mention like the idea that fitbit and those other kind of tracker things it's kind of like a short-term boost but then people get bored of them and go back to their old habits
John:
Which I don't think that's a slam on Fitbit.
John:
That's true of all diet and exercise regimes.
John:
Everyone eventually backslides because that's the way people are.
John:
So he says, I just don't see this as a big field.
John:
Easy to use home blood pressure monitors have been around for ages and they're not exactly flying off the shelves.
John:
The only thing I'll add to this, other than allowing him to do his self follow up to say that he was wrong about not having a way to measure heart rate, is that
John:
Well, actually, let me read the second bit of follow up, which is from a different person, is also fairly short before I go for another tangent.
John:
This is from Josh Brock.
John:
He says, the doctor, this would be the other person who gave feedback was a doctor, not a biomedical engineer and a doctor.
John:
So this is Josh Brock addressing the doctor's points.
John:
The doctor was so pessimistic about the potential medical use of health book style devices wasn't wrong, but he was thinking too narrowly.
John:
While one day's worth of data probably isn't useful or interesting, having a year's worth of prior data could be very useful.
John:
Physicians frequently know very little about an individual's healthy vital signs or long-term health.
John:
Most healthy people only have their heart data monitored a few times a year at most.
John:
Even people with serious health problems are typically only seen by a physician intermittently and only fully monitored while actually in the hospital.
John:
So being able to see a long history of data with long-term trends could open up new opportunities for diagnosis and treatment.
John:
So this is what we talked about a little bit in the last thing, that
John:
While the information may not be particularly interesting to you or useful to you and may not vary that much, if you have long-term information and your doctor can see that, whether they're monitoring it in real time or whether you just get dumped on them off of your phone or wrist thing, whatever, it's kind of a better equivalent of the logbooks that doctors have people keep if they have chronic health conditions, keeping a log of how they felt, what they did in response to it, what medications they took.
John:
The doctors will look at that because they just get to see you for a brief period of time.
John:
And what they want to know is essentially your history.
John:
And you just verbally telling them what happened is probably not that reliable.
John:
You keeping a logbook probably more reliable.
John:
But having a device monitor things for you is probably, I mean, aside from bad reading and stuff like that, the device's memory is going to be better than yours.
John:
And if it's something that you wear all the time, I'm sure a doctor would love that in addition to hearing what you have to say about how you felt and what you did.
John:
And the point I wanted to get to about these things not flying off the shelves is that we keep talking about Apple and wearables in terms of all the sensors they're going to have and whether it's going to have a screen or not or whether the screen is going to be a touchscreen or not or, you know, what kind of integration with the phone.
John:
But one aspect of the wearables that we talked about way back when that we haven't talked about much recently is things you can use it for besides sensing your health and integrating with your phone.
John:
And one of the ones that I think should come back around if it hasn't already in the rumor mill is using it as a form of identity.
John:
Didn't we talk about that like months and months and months ago?
Casey:
Oh, I don't remember.
Casey:
Probably.
John:
Having this thing on you as a way of identifying yourself, sort of like the location-based unlocking thing that the Apple patent was going around the news this week.
John:
Basically, if you pick up your phone, you don't have to use Touch ID to unlock it.
John:
You don't have to enter a code because you're wearing your wrist thing and that identifies you as you.
John:
And you walk up to your Mac, it unlocks the screen because you're wearing the wrist thing and that identifies you as you.
John:
Sort of a Touch ID without touching type of identity thing.
John:
uh because i think not that i think this is you know a slam dunk that this is what apple's going to do with their wearable stuff but so much of the wearable stuff has been focused on uh ironically not on timekeeping not on not being able to tell what time it is but on saying there's something called a watch and what it's going to do is measure your vitals and record them uh
John:
And that just seems weird to me that there's such an incredible health focus.
John:
I mean, maybe not that weird because Apple does have the health kit thing, but they also have HomeKit.
John:
And no one is talking about using your wrist thing as a way to turn on lights as you wander through your house or open your garage door as you drive up or whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Just throwing that out there so we can get in every possibility before Apple releases something that's wearable.
John:
And then we can say, see, we talked about that on some show in the past.
Marco:
To me, this is like yet another thing that is not a very compelling justification for these devices to exist.
Marco:
It's like yet another thing where, okay, well, first of all, there are some security issues with that.
Marco:
There's also some creepiness issues if this becomes your identity.
Marco:
And I don't know, it solves problems that most people I don't think really have in ways that are substantial enough where the gains would be big enough that it would be worth having another thing to maintain, buy, and charge.
John:
Well, I mean, you assume it would be some combination.
John:
But what did you think about that patent, though, for the location-based thing?
John:
Basically, not having to enter your unlock code or use Touch ID when you're in your house with your phone or something like that.
John:
Is that something you think is worthwhile?
Casey:
Oh, hell yeah.
Casey:
I'm already using that with my Mac with Control Plane, Control P-L-A-N-E.
Casey:
If I remember, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But I think the slogan they use is context-aware computing, which I may have talked about in the past on the show, but suffice it to say, based on the network address I have, based on what external monitor I'm connected to, based on what Bluetooth devices are nearby –
Casey:
this thing will basically perform a series of macros to turn on or off my screensaver password or to set a default printer or things like that.
Casey:
And it's wonderful.
Casey:
And I love it because when I come home after work, it will automatically figure out, oh, he's at home now.
Casey:
Well, let me turn off VMware Fusion.
Casey:
Let me turn off Outlook.
Casey:
Let me turn off Link, which has probably crashed anyway, and so on.
Casey:
And it's wonderful.
Casey:
And I really love it.
Casey:
And I'd love to have that for my phone.
John:
And Mark, are you talking about that not being a particularly compelling benefit in and of itself?
John:
Perhaps not.
John:
But just think of how life changing it was when you all got proximity keys for your fancy German cars.
John:
Right.
John:
And how you don't want to go back to having to fish out a key and stick it, you know, like.
John:
It's not that big a deal, but it's a big enough deal that you have trouble going back to that type of thing.
John:
It's kind of like Touch ID.
John:
I'm a pretty big Touch ID convert, despite the fact that I don't have a Touch ID device.
John:
Every time I pick up my wife's phone, I don't even know her security code thing.
John:
I just have my one thumb encoded on the thing, and I have a very high success rate with Touch ID.
John:
And it's much better than me having to ask her what her code is and then never remembering it the next time or have her unlock the thing or whatever.
John:
I just pick it up and use the touch thing.
John:
And if I'm not going to say this is a reason I'm going to wear a thing around my wrist, but presumably there's other reasons that you're going to wear whatever this wearable thing is.
John:
If this is there on top of everything else, like I would definitely use it.
John:
I'm sick of typing in my password to unlock my screen at work.
John:
I just think it's ridiculous.
John:
I mean, you have to have a screen lock because, you know, corporate policies or whatever.
John:
every time i get up i i lock the screen dutifully and then i have to unlock it when i come back no matter how long i'm gone uh i would love to have a thing on my wrist i would wear it at work just for this one feature you know uh but i don't think i would buy it just for this one feature so anyway we apple has to come up with a reason for us to all buy this thing and keep it charged and all that good stuff this is just another possible thing because i definitely wouldn't buy it track my vitals so that is also not compelling to me uh it's
Marco:
i don't know it's got to do something uh or it could just be another thing that apple introduces that i don't buy so add it to the list yeah our final sponsor this week is backblaze once again backblaze unlimited unthrottled uncomplicated online backup that's available anywhere you can try it for free with no credit card required
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Thanks a lot to Backblaze for sponsoring once again.
Casey:
Have we ever gone through all three sponsors during follow-up?
Casey:
Because we still have a little bit more.
Casey:
I feel like we're in hypercritical right now.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, Tiff and I went back and listened to the hypercritical on the first episode on game controllers.
Marco:
I believe there were two and a half, but we went back and listened to that on the way up to my mom's house yesterday.
Marco:
And when we pulled into her driveway, we were just finishing follow-up.
Yeah.
Marco:
It was like 70 minutes in.
Casey:
That's magnificent.
Casey:
So we have one last piece of follow-up, which is about the death of plasma.
Casey:
And I actually might have some thoughts on this, but John, go ahead.
John:
It's not really the death of plasma because I think LG is still making plasmas, unless I'm mistaken.
John:
But anyway, the story that was going around this past week was that Samsung is stopping production of its plasma TVs.
John:
Panasonic already stopped production of their plasma TVs.
John:
And after Panasonic stopped, it's like, well, they were the best ones, but you can still buy Samsung.
John:
So those were the second best buy that instead.
John:
I think the Wirecutter updated their TV review things.
John:
They had previously recommended Panasonic plasmas and eventually had to say, well, you can't get those anymore.
John:
Uh, so, uh, our next choice is the, is the, uh, Samsung plasmas.
John:
Now they're going to update it again because now Samsung is not making them anymore.
John:
Like I said, I think maybe LG is, uh, but yeah, the days of plasma are going, there's a bunch of stories going around the web about, uh, mourning the end of plasma.
John:
A lot of them were retreads of, uh, Panasonic when Panasonic stopped, uh,
John:
For all the people who care about picture quality, saying basically these TVs that are discontinuing have better picture quality than any TVs that have been introduced after them or that you can buy for any price anywhere, which is a shame.
John:
And again, plasmas do have their downsides.
John:
We talked about them on past shows.
John:
They're not perfect.
John:
But if you care about picture quality, many people are willing to put up with their downsides in exchange for having a better picture.
John:
It doesn't surprise me for the reasons I think we talked about in past shows.
John:
Nobody was putting in the money to try to make a 4K plasma, and 4K is clearly the future as far as television manufacturers are concerned anyway.
John:
It may not even be technically possible to make...
John:
a reasonable plasma at 4k because the size of the little whatever you call it the little pits or thingies that make the picture images are so tiny at 4k that we don't really have manufacturing processes i mean they could develop it uh but we already have 4k in uh lcds and even oled which was supposed to save us from the scourge of lcd that's kind of been backburnered as well so it seems like we're just going to be
John:
LCD with LED backlights, standard high-definition, and 4K for the foreseeable future, which is kind of a shame, but I'm glad I brought my Panasonic when I did, and I just hope it lasts a long time.
Casey:
Did you ever even think about a 4K TV?
John:
No.
John:
I mean, there's no content available for it that I care about, and really, like, there is something to be said about screen size and viewing distance, and like...
John:
720, 1080, I can kind of tell the difference between my seating distance.
John:
4K, I don't know.
John:
I mean, if the content was good enough, maybe I could tell the difference, but nothing I care about is in 4K.
John:
Everything I care about is in HD, and I figure by the time things that I care about are in 4K, it will be time for me to get a new TV in several years, but I don't know how long that's going to take.
John:
I mean, 4K is a tougher sell than the HD, standard FHD HD,
John:
is a more compelling consumer case than HD to 4K.
John:
So it's up to content creators and television manufacturers to convince us that we need to go from 1080p to 4K.
John:
Look how difficult it was to convince us to go from standard def.
John:
As soon as someone sees a high-definition television, if they have good vision or if they're into sports or something else where you care about small details, that's a pretty easy sell.
John:
But 4K...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, I guess maybe I haven't been to CES and seen the fanciest new 4K TVs.
John:
I haven't seen an OLED 4K TV if those things exist.
John:
So maybe they're more convincing.
John:
But I figure I have many years of service left in this plasma.
Casey:
Well, I tend to agree.
Casey:
And the reason I ask is my parents have just recently moved down to pretty close to where Aaron and I are.
Casey:
And so a couple weeks ago, my dad and I went to a Crutchfield store, which those of you who were into car audio in the 90s probably know what Crutchfield is.
Casey:
And their home office is in Charlottesville, which I bring up, brought up periodically on the show.
Casey:
Well, anyway, we went to the store and looked at a few 4K TVs.
Casey:
And we were looking for mom and dad's house, which the viewing distance or the seating distance, what have you, is like 15 feet or something like that for where this is going to be.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I looked at these 4K displays, a lot of which were curved, by the way, which I don't really understand the whole curved TV thing.
Casey:
Maybe there's a point, but I don't get it.
Casey:
But anyways, the 4K displays, I mean, they looked beautiful when you were a foot or two away, but I completely agree at 5, 10, certainly 10, and definitely 15 feet.
Casey:
I, I don't get it.
Casey:
And I, maybe in five or 10 years when content is available, I will get it.
Casey:
But today I agree with you.
Casey:
I don't understand.
John:
Well, if you can make the screen, the size of your wall or something like that, because we have some, if we had some technology that could, you know, or, or projectors or whatever, like 4k has a place because eventually the screen becomes way, way bigger.
John:
But for television set size screens where it's like a thing that's sitting on a, you know, some kind of pedestal or something, uh,
John:
uh i don't know 4k like i think a lot of it has to do with the content what kind of things are you trying to show but at a certain point it's like when people get old their vision gets bad you can't make out that kind of detail on a screen that's only like you know 50 60 70 inches and that's that's a pretty big modern tv but in the movie theater when the screen is gigantic then yeah that resolution you know can be useful
Casey:
Well, that's the thing is we're looking at these like 70, 75 inch TVs.
Casey:
And yeah, I mean, you can maybe make out a difference.
Casey:
And to be fair, my eyes are not the best.
Casey:
But certainly at the 10 or 15 feet that mom and dad's house is viewing distances at, I do not see the need, even in like a 75 inch TV, I don't see the need for 4K.
Casey:
And the other thing is, and you just mentioned this, you know, we talked to the salespeople both at Crutchfield and at Best Buy.
Casey:
And we were like, so what content is 4K these days?
Casey:
Because this is not, this is well out of my wheelhouse and I don't keep up with this stuff.
Casey:
And, and so they're like, well, some stuff on Netflix.
Casey:
And that's about it.
Casey:
And that's about all you get.
Marco:
And even like what device can output 4K?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I mean, well, I guess the TV could have it built in.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like my, for example, my audio video receiver has 4K pass through.
John:
Like a lot of devices are 4K capable at this point.
John:
So in theory, if I was getting Netflix at 4K,
John:
on a device that can output 4K.
John:
The pieces are there that it's possible to view it.
John:
That's why Netflix is running these kind of experiments.
John:
The topically named pan and scan in the chat room has a point where 4K isn't just about resolution, but also, we talked about this before, color depth and refresh rates and other parts of the 4K standard that are a step up from HD.
John:
I mean, I think they're even less compelling to consumers, but as a image quality nerd,
John:
I would probably maybe that's what I would notice more.
John:
Yeah.
John:
On my, you know, smallish, you know, by by projector standards, 55 inch TV, the resolution difference wouldn't be that big, but the color gamut difference could be significant.
John:
Assuming we get some kind of television technology that has reasonable black levels.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Anyway, I don't think it's in the imminent future, which is why I felt entirely safe buying a plain old normal high definition television last year or whenever I bought this thing.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we have any topics today?
Casey:
Any other follow up?
Casey:
Is this it?
Casey:
Are we done?
Casey:
Is this the show?
Casey:
Is this what people tune in for?
Casey:
So we saw a YouTube video from somebody who I am not familiar with, who seems to have an iPhone 6 sapphire display.
Casey:
What do we think about this?
Marco:
I mean, it's very impressive.
Marco:
Like, you know, regardless of whether, you know, there's a bunch of things we don't know.
Marco:
The big two are we don't know if this is actually an iPhone part or a part for something else or a fake or something else.
Marco:
And we also don't know whether it's actually Sapphire.
John:
Yeah, that was going to be my big point.
John:
Those are the two big ones that we don't know.
John:
My big point, that's why I put Sapphire in quotes, because...
John:
i have no idea if that sapphire or not maybe a gorilla glass of that exact same thickness behaves in the exact same way i don't know i've never taken a piece of gorilla glass and tried to bend it or stab it with a knife so i have no idea if this is impressive at all or if that's exactly what all existing phones are like now or you know and i don't know how they would tell like i don't blame the person for not doing due diligence or whatever it's like i don't know how you would tell it was sapphire like a spectrometer or something
Marco:
Whatever is being shown in the video, whether or not it's a real iPhone part and whether or not it's actually Sapphire does seem to have impressive physical characteristics and does seem to have very good resistance to both scratching and bending.
Marco:
I don't know enough about either of these things to say whether that's likely to be a fancy Gorilla Glass product or Sapphire.
Marco:
I have no idea.
John:
Well, whatever it is, it's a laminate, obviously.
John:
I mean, like, even if it was sapphire, what they mean is that sapphire laminated against something else that's flexible laminate.
John:
Like, it's obviously some kind of laminate because you can't... I don't know if the glass ones are... Maybe the grill glass is not a laminate, but anything with sapphire, I think, would have to be some kind of laminate if they're using for the screen.
John:
But I think the most interesting thing about this, even if you assume this is entirely fake...
John:
is that it shows, I mean, they didn't measure it.
John:
I wish they had measured it, but it shows a 4.7 inch thing, presumably, next to a regular iPhone to give you kind of a size comparison of like, well, it's bigger.
John:
It's not gigantic, but it does seem, it's definitely noticeably bigger.
John:
And I think I tried to show like a fake image on what the screen would look like.
John:
But they use the same number of icons as if the res was just scaled up.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
So I'm not sure.
John:
But I put this in a category on the topics of iPhone 6 parts leaks.
John:
I haven't been pursuing parts leaks, but there's tons of them all.
John:
This is just the one I happen to see because it bubbled up in my feed.
Marco:
And to be fair, about half of them are this part.
John:
Yeah, and all sorts of leaks, and this guy also had a mock-up of what he thought the back could look like based on all the leaked specs and leaked drawings.
John:
As is the case with most of the past iPhones, all these leaks, I mean, as the parts start to come out, I would think the idea that it's going to be kind of rounded on the back, kind of like the iPad mini is, and they're going to be bigger, and 4.7 keeps coming up, and this thing, if it's 4.7 inches, is...
John:
You know, reasonable odds that it could be a part of some kind.
John:
We're starting to get close to the season where we start to see things that are real.
John:
So I don't entirely discount this either.
John:
I just thought it was interesting that it's not just here's a picture of the part.
John:
Take a look at it like the torture test type phenomenon.
John:
I would like to see someone do that as soon as the iPhone 6 comes out, take apart an actual iPhone 6 and do the same experiments, do the same experiments with the 5S or whatever.
John:
I guess this starts getting expensive, but maybe the iFixit people could tackle it because I really don't know the properties of the existing parts for iPhones.
Marco:
I think it's very likely this probably is a real iPhone part.
Marco:
The timing is right.
Marco:
It matches all the things we've heard from general rumor voting.
Marco:
It's matching all the stuff.
Marco:
It is very likely to be a real iPhone part.
Marco:
The big question mark is whether it's actually Sapphire.
Marco:
And you're right, whether if you took the same part or the closest similar part, the cover glass of an iPhone 5S and did the same things, how would it react?
Marco:
What would it withstand?
Marco:
Would it be similar or not?
Marco:
The scratch resistance is one thing, but I think...
Marco:
The real the real problem that needs to be solved in iPhone cover glass, if it's possible to easily solve it, is not bending.
Marco:
It's shatter resistance.
Marco:
Like what happens if you drop it on a corner?
Marco:
You know, like does the phone does the glass shatter as easily or does it shatter less often?
Marco:
You know, that's that's the problem people usually have.
Marco:
If they can if they can improve that, that's big news.
Marco:
One thing to consider, and I don't know if this... I don't know what I'm talking about with manufacturing stuff, so who knows.
Marco:
But if they're going to use Sapphire for the screen glass of all the new iPhones, the two new sizes...
Marco:
And backing up a second, there was on the talk show a couple of weeks ago, Gruber had Paul Kafasis on and they were talking and they were both kind of agreeing that they didn't actually want a 4.7 inch phone to be the new smallest size, that they both are perfectly fine with the current five size and don't want to get any bigger.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And so the question, if you believe that line of thinking is, okay, well, is there a new 4-inch phone and a new 4.7-inch and a new 5.5-inch?
Marco:
The question is, is there a new 4-inch phone or not?
Marco:
And I think the answer is very simple for anyone still doubting this.
Marco:
I think the answer is 4.7 will be the new small size, period.
Marco:
And maybe there might be like a 6S or a 6C that still uses the 4-inch size, but that's going to be phased out in the next new model lines as the big size goes down in the line.
Marco:
I think 4.7 is the new size, and we're going to have a handful of people saying, no, I want my phone to stay small.
Marco:
And it's going to be the exact same thing that happened when they went from 3.5-inch to 4-inch with the 5.
Marco:
they're gonna there's gonna be those handful of people to say no i don't want the phone to be any bigger than this and the new one will come out it won't be that much bigger and it won't be a big deal and it'll probably even be thinner and lighter and so everyone will just deal with it and everyone will forget about their complaints within six months and that'll just be the new size anyway going back to the beginning of this massive paragraph um if they're going to use sapphire for the screens of these new phones and
Marco:
That's a lot of Sapphire.
Marco:
It's really hard to properly communicate how much they have to make of this stuff.
Marco:
Just materials, supply-wise, like manufacturing.
Marco:
They make so many iPhones.
Marco:
Anything that goes into the iPhone has to be available in quantity.
Marco:
It has to have very high manufacturing yields, very high consistency, easily sourced.
Marco:
I know they have that big Sapphire thing in Arizona or wherever, but
John:
it would surprise me if they could make enough sapphire all of a sudden to be able to be the glass on every iphone well like i said i think it's a laminate and it could be some deposition process again i don't know anything about the manufacturing but like it's i think it's within the realm of a reason that they could that because you're only putting the sapphire there for scratch resistance sapphire is not giving you anything in terms of bend or shatter resistance i would imagine uh
John:
But anyway, I don't think you have to make the whole thing out of it.
John:
I think it just needs to be the surface coating.
John:
Like, it's hardness is its thing, and then you back it by other materials, whether they be, you know, Gorilla Glass or some thin piece of plastic or something like that.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
If they keep saying it's Sapphire, if everybody's saying it's Sapphire, I don't know how they can tell.
John:
I don't think anyone is measuring it.
John:
I'm sure we'll know as soon as Apple introduces it, because if it's Sapphire, I'm sure they'll emphasize that.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Casey:
I was stunned by the bend resistance.
Casey:
I don't know if that's the right word I'm looking for, but the way in which this handled bending, which may or may not have anything to do with sapphire.
Casey:
But my goodness, this thing was bent a lot and didn't crack.
Casey:
And certainly the scratch resistance was incredible.
Casey:
But the dude in the video noted that he didn't really have an appropriate way to test the
Casey:
dropping it on a corner, which is what you guys brought up a minute ago, because he didn't have the rest of an iPhone to mount this thing against.
Casey:
But I agree that that's the real test, because pretty much anyone I know with an issue with their iPhone display or Android display, for that matter, is because they've dropped it in some way and it shattered.
John:
Yeah, I've seen scratches on screens too, like little nicks or whatever.
John:
But I've seen – like it's hard to notice them because they're small.
John:
What you notice is the person using a phone with an actual crack in it.
John:
And no one is ever going to bend their screen like that because if you bend it that much, the rest of the phone is broken now.
John:
It doesn't matter if the screen can bend that much.
John:
The printed circuit board can't bend that much.
John:
And so if you ever bend your phone that much, it's dead.
John:
But if you drop your phone into concrete and it lands on a corner or smacks face down –
John:
and it shatters, then you have the choice of, you know, getting the screen replaced or just sitting there, as I see so many people doing, and swiping their thumbs across fractured pieces of glass just makes you think they're going to cut themselves.
Marco:
Or, you know, you just spend 15 bucks at the Apple store and get one of those horrible stick-on screen protectors and just hope that covers it up enough.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Might even hold it together a little bit.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on the iPhone 6?
Casey:
Oh, I should note – I'll answer my own question.
Casey:
I agree with both Gruber and Kafasis in that I don't want a bigger iPhone, but I think you're right, Marco, that the 4.7 or whatever, the smaller of the new ones I think will be the smallest –
Casey:
high-end iPhone.
Casey:
And I think I can get behind a 4.7, but goodness, this 5 or 5.5 or whatever it was, I do not want that in my life.
Casey:
That just seems like a darn tablet.
Marco:
I'm going to have a very hard time choosing between the two if the screen size is the only substantial difference.
Marco:
If there's something else, if there's rumors that the camera might be different, if the camera is substantially better on one or the other, I will almost certainly get the one with a better camera.
Marco:
I can't imagine, you know, just marketing wise, it would be very strange if the biggest one wasn't the best one.
Marco:
And so chances are the biggest iPhone, whether it will be, you know, whether it's called the iPhone Air, the iPhone 6 Plus, whatever, the five and a half inch iPhone, if it's real, it's very likely to have the best of everything that Apple has to offer.
Marco:
And so it's very likely that some of us are going to convince ourselves to buy it.
Marco:
If the best one is the huge one, then I'll probably try it and I'll take the bullet for all of us.
Marco:
And I know, John, you're not going to buy anything.
Marco:
And Casey, you're going to stick with the small one or you're going to wait two years and I can make fun of you.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I'm in and off here this year, so I've got another year to wait.
John:
Do we have parts leaks for the 5.5, rumored 5.5 inch?
Marco:
You know, that's a good question.
John:
And still I see some parts leaks for that.
John:
I continue to think that, as like Casey said, diversification, fine, but a new 4.7 size while keeping around the old 5S in a different case or even in the same case, that's reasonable diversification.
John:
I'm not sure they need a 5.5.
John:
Maybe they're going to have one?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I would like to see parts leaks for that because more or less I want to see what it looks like proportion-wise and line up all three of them and show them next to a hand and see what that would be like.
Casey:
I just – I don't feel like I have – and I think I've said this before.
Casey:
I don't feel like I have that much –
Casey:
excess pocket space in order to stuff a five and a half inch phone and for those of us who leave the house ahem everyone but marco uh that's kind of an issue and i don't i don't have a purse i don't have a man purse and so my phone lives in my pocket and i don't think i want a five and a half inch phone in my pocket i just don't
Casey:
But whatever.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Remind me of this when I buy one in a year and a half or whatever.
Casey:
But sitting here today, I don't think I want that in my life.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Harry's, Lynda.com, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
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.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it in
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast.
Casey:
because john insists on using stupid google docs for our show notes i keep the show bot open in chrome because google chrome is my google what did you call quarantine hell whatever you called it marco yeah well anyways so uh about an hour ago uh somebody hunter h suggested question mark in a box in a question mark in a box which is because stupid chrome still doesn't support emoji it's ridiculous that is so evil of google
John:
It is.
John:
It's the real reason you don't use Chrome.
Marco:
Open always wins.
Marco:
So I've been working on a very basic web interface for Overcast.
Casey:
And why have you been doing that, Marco?
Casey:
Because it had to be done?
Casey:
No, it's because I whined you about the fact that there wasn't a web player.
Marco:
That too.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So anyway, some people whine to me about it.
Marco:
So I made a very basic web player and I turned on content security policy in very strict mode so that it disables any of the things that begin with unsafe.
Marco:
The hardest thing about that is that
Marco:
you can't use inline style or script tags.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Script tags were easy to pull out.
Marco:
Inline style tags are not that easy to pull out if you've already written a whole bunch of code.
Marco:
The advantage of content security policy is that... So, for those of you who don't know, it's still pretty rarely used, I think, because it's pretty new and pretty hard to use.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
There's a couple of headers you set as a web programmer.
Marco:
You set a couple of headers, or one header, but three times to all the stupid vendor prefixes, because web programming is awesome.
Marco:
And the header basically says, only permit JavaScript from these sources, only permit CSS styles from these sources, only permit images from these sources, and so on.
Marco:
And the spec even kind of inherently yells at you.
Marco:
If you enable content security policy at all, if you want these things, like by default, it, I believe, won't allow anything.
Marco:
And if you want the ability to use like an inline style attribute on something or an inline script...
Marco:
You have to say allow unsafe dash inline or unsafe eval because eval is also unsafe.
Marco:
And it's a pretty well-designed standard, I think, because it's designed to inherently yell at you if you set things unsafely.
Marco:
So anyway, so I've now made my entire interface with it.
Marco:
It's a very small interface.
Marco:
It's a very small app so far.
Marco:
But I now have my thing where it only allows things from its own host and the host of the CDN.
Marco:
That's serving some of the static pages.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And it's great.
Marco:
And I'm wondering, Casey, why don't you play with this also?
Marco:
Why don't you use this on Showbot?
Marco:
Because it would help dramatically reduce the number of people who would ever be exposed to XSS on your site if you were to miss a vulnerability.
Casey:
I probably should, but I don't need to because the Showbot's still up.
Casey:
What now?
Casey:
Well, yeah, but... I'm kidding.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
Casey:
I understand your point.
Casey:
I probably should.
Casey:
To be honest, this was not something I was familiar with, so I'll have to look into it.
John:
Do sort by votes first, please.
Casey:
Yeah, actually, that's... Yeah, please do that first.
Casey:
That's a fair request.
Casey:
Sort by votes first.
Marco:
It's a cool standard.
Marco:
I learned about it roughly a year ago, I think, when GitHub enabled it.
Marco:
And the way I learned about it is that at first, like when it was very first implemented by browsers...
Marco:
Most of them would also block bookmarklet execution because that was a script that didn't come from blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
And the standard specifically says bookmarklets should not be interfered with.
Marco:
But the browsers all missed that the first time.
Marco:
And so it broke bookmarklets for a little while.
Marco:
But now, certainly Chrome and Safari have fixed that.
Marco:
Firefox was the last one to fix it.
Marco:
I don't know if they have yet, but who cares?
Marco:
It's Firefox.
Yeah.
Casey:
Do you remember back in the day when that was lean and mean?
Casey:
I know we've been over this at some point, but yeah, my name's on the poster.
Marco:
When they launched, I donated like 50 bucks and got my name like in the, in the big ad, the big full page ad they were running in like the, some, maybe it was New York times.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I was like a backer of Firefox, and I wrote Firefox extensions at my first job in 2004, which was a terrible time to write Firefox extensions.
Marco:
I believe when I started, it was still called Phoenix, whatever .7 was.
Marco:
Yeah, Firefox was awesome back in the day.
Marco:
The problem is the world moved on and Firefox really didn't.
Casey:
Well, it became what it was trying to solve.
Casey:
Because remember, Netscape was just this bloated, disgusting mess.
Casey:
And so Firefox was all lean and mean and it was a small download and it was fast as hell.
Casey:
And then next thing you know, fast forward like four years and it's the disgusting, bloated mess that Netscape once was.
John:
Well, it was standards compliant.
John:
In addition to being lean and mean, it was like, we're going to write standards.
John:
And they did do that because all the browsers that supplanted it, you know, conformed to standards with the exception of IE until very recently and even then still annoyingly.
John:
But it succeeded in that mission.
John:
It's just that other people picked up the mantle and moved on because, you know, it's got the...
John:
Firefox has the oldest code base.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Is KHDML's oldest Mozilla?
John:
Anyway, it's certainly got the creakiest code base.
John:
The other ones have had much more recent attention to get them cleaned up.
John:
I mean, aren't the Mozilla guys trying to write a new rendering engine in Rust?
John:
That's why they're doing the whole Rust thing.
John:
So maybe they will rise again.
John:
But they were the flagship for standards.
John:
And now we have standards everywhere and standards are what we want and IE-isms are mostly dead with the exception of the ones that are still supported by the versions of IE that we still have to deal with.
John:
So it kind of succeeded in its mission.
John:
So I don't think it's like it died by getting fat and ugly and it failed its mission.
John:
It succeeded, it's just that
John:
Now it's a little long in the tooth.
John:
I mean, I remember I used to use Firefox because Firebug was the best and only reasonable way to debug stuff on the web.
John:
And it just gradually shifted off onto, for a while I was using Safari's DevTools when the WebKit ones were really good.
John:
Now I use Chrome's DevTools, which I think Safari covers all the same bases, but I've just kind of gotten to use Chrome's DevTools interface, kind of like where things are until they change it, I guess.
John:
But no, I haven't launched Firefox in forever.
Casey:
Yeah, I cannot remember the last time we've launched Firefox.
Marco:
I use it to post to Twitter when we make a new episode of the show because I leave Firefox signed in to that account on Twitter, and that's it.
Casey:
You have a quarantine for everything.
Casey:
How many browsers do you have?
Marco:
Well, Chrome, I used Chrome for some other Twitter login.
Marco:
I forget which one, so I wanted to keep them separate.
Marco:
I really should just install the Twitter app again on my desktop is what I'm saying, but...
Casey:
You don't have like TweetBot on your desktop or anything?
Marco:
No, I deleted it in a fit of productivity boosting because I use this app called RescueTime that tracks how long you spend doing things and sends you a report every week saying like, you spent 16 hours in Xcode, four hours in Logic, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
And it kept telling me every week that I was apparently spending roughly four hours a week using Twitter.
Marco:
And that wasn't just one week.
Marco:
That was consistent.
Marco:
And so I realized, you know what?
Marco:
I should really not be spending that much time with it.
Marco:
And so to force myself not to spend much time with it, I deleted the complete app.
Marco:
Because it's one thing... You can just redownload an app.
Marco:
But with a Twitter app, you have to log into each of the accounts separately.
Marco:
And that's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
So I knew that...
Marco:
I knew that it would be a significant barrier to put it back.
Marco:
I was actually just thinking about putting it back earlier today because in my effort not to have it on my desktop, what I haven't said... So right now, I have my laptop, which I still have it installed.
Marco:
During our show, I keep TweetBot open so I can see replies coming in from people, similar to how I have the chat window open.
Marco:
So during our show, I have to have my laptop next to me over here as the second screen just showing Twitter.
Marco:
During the day, if I post a tweet, I still can post tweets from Notification Center, but I can't read the responses I get.
Marco:
But many times, I have to have a conversation with somebody over Twitter DMs.
Marco:
And sometimes it's personal, sometimes it's business.
Marco:
Either way, it's a way that a lot of people communicate.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
And so I frequently have to have the Twitter website open in a tab so I can use the DM thing there so I can type quickly instead of using my phone.
Marco:
Or I'll have the laptop on this side, which is annoying, and then it's open anyway, and then it's just a different computer, and then I have to copy links back and forth between the two, and it's annoying.
Marco:
And so I have to... Or I'll ask a question on Twitter, and then I'll be reading the responses on my phone, on my desk, bent over, and it's just like...
Marco:
I'm jumping through a lot of hoops to still use Twitter anyway.
Marco:
And so my rationale is like, I should probably add it back because I'm using it anyway, just in ways that rescue time doesn't really track as easily, but I'm using it anyway.
Marco:
And it would actually be faster if I had the real app on my desktop again, because all these things, I wouldn't have to jump through as many hoops.
Marco:
They wouldn't be transferring things back and forth between devices.
Marco:
I'd be able to do things with keyboard shortcuts and type faster.
Marco:
So it's,
Marco:
I think I should just put it back, but I don't know.
Marco:
Isn't that really exciting?
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
Lots of discussion about workflows.
John:
Someone put in the chat room a link to the Wikipedia article showing the web rendering engine timelines among Gecko, KHDML, and WebKit.
John:
Gecko is slightly older than KHDML and also older than Trident, which I think is what IE uses now.
Marco:
The reason why I think most people abandoned Firefox over the last few years didn't have a lot to do with Gecko.
Marco:
It had more to do with the Firefox interface, being based on Zool and having a whole bunch of crap being able to be thrown in and having extensions.
Marco:
Extensions kind of made and broke Firefox.
Marco:
They made it in that a lot of people...
Marco:
used it for a while.
Marco:
A lot of people still use it because certain extensions are only there or even only possible there.
Marco:
But what made those extensions possible was that the whole Firefox interface is built on... I assume it's still... Please tell me if this is out-of-date information...
Marco:
But it was built on this big XML specification where the whole browser was specified in XML and had all these complexities.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why it never really looks quite native and never looks quite right on the platform and why it's very slow.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
It's basically a web page.
Marco:
And it's more complicated than that, but that's kind of the gist of it.
Marco:
It's specified in this very heavy, customizable language so that it can be so flexible.
Marco:
So extensions can do anything.
Marco:
Extensions are written in the same language.
Marco:
Extensions can control everything, do everything.
Marco:
The browser...
Marco:
was like this giant, slow interpreter to run all this crap, including its own interface.
Marco:
And that, I think, made Firefox feel much heavier and slower and more bloated.
Marco:
It certainly made it look pretty bad.
Marco:
They didn't have very good design either.
Marco:
So it felt big and slow, it was big and slow, and it looked big and slow.
Marco:
And in the era where now everything needs to be efficient and fast and getting better and JavaScript's getting better and everything's getting better and faster, and Firefox is this big, bloated, slow thing on the corner.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Hasn't been good in a while as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Hey, can we talk about something important?
Marco:
Like your show bot, my Twitter productivity, or Firefox, the most current topic in the world.
Marco:
What's more important than these things?
Casey:
So what's more important than these things is what I just put in the chat room, which is somebody dynoed a new M3.
Marco:
Can you translate to English for those of us who are not experts in this field?
Marco:
Does this refer to a dinosaur in any way?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
So somebody put a new M3 on a dynamometer, which measures how much power the car produces.
Casey:
And they compared it to the prior generation M3, which is from my generation.
Casey:
And my goodness, you should see the torque curve on this thing.
Casey:
It goes from no torques to use a top gearism to darn near all of its torques in a thousand RPM.
Casey:
It's ridiculous.
Casey:
You're the worst.
Casey:
John, do you at least slightly appreciate this?
Casey:
Somebody help me out here.
Marco:
The magic of turbos.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
So it is the magic of turbos.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
My car actually doesn't have a curve that different from this, and I can tell you it's mostly useless because if you actually give it full power at low revs, you just lose grip and the tires spin.
Marco:
Like, you can't actually use all of your torque off the line, which is where I think it matters most.
Marco:
You can't use it all because it's too much power for two wheels to put down.
Casey:
If only you had a four-wheel drive M car.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Well, there is one, but it's terrible.
Marco:
I wish they would make some better ones.
John:
Don't you have launch control on that thing?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
How many times have you tried it?
Marco:
Zero.
Marco:
Isn't the point of launch control to spin the wheels even more?
John:
No.
John:
The computer controls making sure that you get the car moving as fast as possible.
John:
So it's going to modulate the throttle.
John:
Does it modulate the brakes as well?
John:
Anyway, it wants to maintain friction right on the ragged edge of you losing traction but not going over it.
John:
in a way that you could, kind of like Andy Lock brakes, in a way that you couldn't do yourself if you were modulating it.
John:
That's why, what was it, the most recent car and driver, they have the Porsche 918 going to 60 in 2.2 seconds.
John:
That's launch control.
Casey:
God, that's insane.
Marco:
To me, like, this is exciting.
Marco:
It's exciting in that the M cars keep getting much better, and they're able to get this much power out of a six-cylinder again.
Marco:
So the cars are getting smaller, lighter, or at least, you know, maintaining the same weight and getting more powerful close enough.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
They don't need more power.
Marco:
Power is not the challenge right now.
Marco:
They need lower weight and they need better traction.
Marco:
And I think they're pretty much at the limits.
Marco:
On the BMW side, I think they're pretty much at the limits of how much torque you can apply to two wheels and have it be reasonably useful.
Marco:
I think they need to move to an all-wheel drive system in the M cars.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
There's too much power there.
Marco:
And this is with the current generation.
Marco:
What are they going to do with the next generation of these things?
Marco:
where presumably the powers are going to go even further up and the weight's going to go down, how are you going to apply those power to the road?
Casey:
Yeah, I'm not so sure you're right, but we'll argue about this forevermore.
Casey:
But to come back to what John was saying, so I'm attempting and failing.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
to put a link in the chat room of me this past, I think it was this past winter, in my car doing a four-wheel burnout in snow.
Casey:
And I took the video, or actually Aaron took the video using one of our iPhones in high frame rate mode.
Casey:
And if you look at the front tire, you can see it slowing down, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, because the traction control is trying to keep me moving forward.
Casey:
And so it's a very fascinating video seeing it in slow-mo because I can assure you that when you see this at full speed, it did not look like that was happening at all.
Casey:
And as a quick aside, a friend of mine who has a chipped rear drive 335 said to me that he went through rear brakes extremely quickly because the traction control was just melting all the rear brakes trying to keep him moving forward.
Casey:
And I just thought that was hysterical.
John:
I don't think launch control does the same things as traction control, though.
John:
I think the idea of launch control is there.
John:
I mean, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not using the brakes as much as traction control on a slippery surface is.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
I think it's more about clutch application and how many revs you have when you pretty much dump the clutch.
Casey:
But I think at least in part, it uses brakes in order to get...
Casey:
get everything moving forward.
Casey:
Although on an M card actually has a limited slip, which I guess helps.
Marco:
See, now I don't feel bad at all about talking for like two minutes about my Twitter productivity challenges because now you've spent time on this.
John:
I was going to cut all this out.
Marco:
No, I want everyone to know how boring we are.