The World’s Greatest Conference Call
Marco:
why don't i save pants for next next show because i have i have i need to spend a little bit more time with my um with my pants too okay oh man all the good stuff is in the we're not even in the bootleg all the good stuff is happening before the bootleg for god's sakes
Marco:
Does anybody in your life, like have you ever heard other people in your life who seem to know how to watch Apple TV Plus shows?
Casey:
I don't know how to watch Apple TV Plus shows.
Casey:
So if there is anyone in my life that does know, I would like to know the secret, please.
Marco:
Even celebrities who are on some of the shows, like cast members who are out promoting them and stuff like that.
Marco:
First of all, no one calls it Apple TV Plus.
Marco:
So people who are even in the shows will say like, oh, it's a new show on Apple.
Casey:
That's what they say.
Marco:
It's on Apple.
Marco:
Occasionally, I've heard someone else around me and I'll be like, oh yeah, this new show, it's on Apple.
Marco:
I guess we're stuck with that phrasing for the rest of this product's lifetime now.
Marco:
Also, no one knows how to watch it.
Marco:
If I have to explain to someone, or it's even worse when I overhear other people trying to explain to each other how to watch an Apple TV Plus show,
Marco:
No one knows.
Marco:
No one even knows not only where to watch it, but no one even knows if they have that service or not.
Marco:
And I overheard one conversation about a month ago where the guy who was trying to ask how to watch the show to his friend, he thought that the only way to watch Apple TV Plus was to buy a new iPhone.
Marco:
And he's like, I'm not really ready for an upgrade yet, so I don't have that.
Yeah.
Marco:
oh my goodness like they've they've done such a poor job of naming it marketing it messaging it like it's so bad no one knows where to watch this how to get the service why to get the service like it's it's so hard like i you know as we nerds try to like recommend to oh hey you should go watch ted lasso or whatever it's so hard because no one knows oh yeah it's on apple
Casey:
And admittedly, I've been programmed by Plex.
Casey:
And I know that there are people in this world who think that Plex is a UX nightmare.
Casey:
And maybe you're right.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
But for me, Plex makes sense.
Casey:
Because what do I want to watch?
Casey:
Do I want to watch a movie or a television show?
Casey:
If I want to watch a movie, I go to the movie section.
Casey:
If I want to watch a television show, I go to the television section.
Casey:
And then everything's sorted by title, like adults would want.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Whereas Netflix and Apple TV Plus are actively competing to see which one is more hostile and infuriating to just find the thing you were just watching before.
Casey:
I feel like the only way I've ever successfully watched Ted Lasso on Apple TV Plus is by doing a, I can't say the word, a heydingus search for Ted Lasso.
Casey:
And maybe I'm an idiot, and that very well could be, but I feel like there is no rhyme or reason to the UX to the Apple TV app on the Apple TV device.
Casey:
Hell, the fact that I have to specify the Apple TV app on the Apple TV device is a UX nightmare to begin with.
Casey:
It's just so bad.
Marco:
No wonder everyone's confused.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
Even nerds have a hard time keeping this stuff straight.
Marco:
What chance do regular people have?
John:
I thought that's what you were going to say is exactly what Casey said.
John:
It was like, assuming you know everything about the service...
John:
And you subscribe to it and you've done all the things that I thought the problem was, how do I watch a show given that I know all that stuff?
John:
Because I know all that stuff.
John:
And like the way you would have to do it, say I'm watching on my iPad.
John:
Well, there's like a black icon that's like the little black Apple TV icon, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I can get that far.
John:
I can say, okay, that's probably the thing I have to tap to watch shows on Apple TV Plus, the service, right?
John:
But the problem is that app is not like the Netflix app.
John:
When you launch the Netflix app, it shows you shows that are on Netflix.
John:
When you tap that icon, which as far as I'm aware is the only way to watch Apple TV Plus shows, am I correct in that?
John:
I think so.
Casey:
Well, on Apple platforms, that is.
Casey:
Yeah, on an iPad.
Casey:
I'm watching on my iPad.
John:
That's the only way to do it.
John:
But when you launch that, it's not like Netflix.
John:
You don't just see the 17 shows that are on Apple TV+.
John:
You see tons of crap.
John:
Because originally, that app was like, oh, we're going to show you stuff from Hulu.
John:
It's trying to be the one place you go for all your television, except for Netflix, which is a pretty big except.
John:
Or Plex.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Well, that's a much smaller except let's be honest.
John:
It is, but it means something to me, darn it.
John:
But if I just want to go there because that's the place where I go to watch Ted Lasso, if Ted Lasso is not the banner at the top of the page.
Casey:
Yeah, there's no way to find it.
Casey:
There's no way to find it.
John:
Well, so they added a nav item called Apple TV Plus Originals or something.
John:
They added that nav item later in the life of the app to say, okay, if you do want to narrow the field down to just the shows that Apple puts out, you can tap this thing.
John:
But, of course, that just narrows it down to a subset of, you know, like, here's the Apple TV Plus shows.
John:
But there's a lot of those shows.
John:
What about the one that I was just watching?
John:
I talked about this in Rectiffs.
John:
Like, they don't have an equivalent of Netflix's My List.
John:
They have a thing called Up Next, which tries to be similar but isn't really similar in lots of bad ways.
John:
But that, I think, is the final hurdle.
John:
It's like, say you know everything about it, you've successfully subscribed to it, there is no icon you can press that just shows you the Apple TV Plus shows, which I think...
John:
Hurts the service like they have to.
John:
I mean, I don't know if they have to decide whether they want to be the one app where you go for everything with these exceptions or if they want to be, you know, maybe they should have like a standalone app.
John:
This is called the Apple TV Plus app that only shows those shows and leave the quote unquote TV app.
John:
to be there if people want, because honestly, I never, I never go to the TV app to watch a Hulu show, right?
John:
I go to the Hulu app and Netflix, I have to go to the Netflix app and Plex, I have to go to the Plex app.
John:
So I feel like they have lost that war to try to make like one, you know, one starting point for all your TV, especially on devices like iPads and iPhones.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And I think perhaps like the charitable read on this is that the Apple TV app is designed for people who are kind of omnivorous and just want something to watch and they don't really give a crap what because I feel like it would probably do pretty well in that scenario because it's very pretty and it highlights various sundry things that you can watch.
Casey:
But for me, I'm only opening that app if I specifically want to watch like Ted Lasso or For All Mankind or Morning Show or what have you.
Casey:
And for that experience, it's just completely inscrutable in the same way that Netflix seems to go back and forth between I haven't used the Netflix app in a little while now, but it seems to go back and forth between we will show you exactly what you want as though we're reading your mind, which is amazing.
Casey:
Or more often than not.
Casey:
Here's a bunch of random crap, and it's anyone's guess if I need to swipe up or down to get to the thing I was just watching an hour ago.
Casey:
Like, it's so frustrating.
Casey:
I don't feel like this is a hard problem to solve, and yet here we are.
Casey:
We should probably move on.
Casey:
We should talk about things that are happy.
Casey:
And you know what's happy?
Casey:
What's happy is that we are introducing yet another tier of ATP membership.
Casey:
We're doing the pre-bootleg bootleg now.
Casey:
And that's because we were just talking before the show.
Casey:
And there was a bunch of funny stuff that we didn't even get in the bootleg.
Casey:
And I'm sorry about that.
Casey:
So we're not actually introducing the pre-bootleg bootleg.
Casey:
But that was my crummy segue to say that, hey, you know, if you are an ATP member, perhaps because you just bought a shirt or something like that, which, by the way, thank you very much, everyone.
Casey:
That was very kind of you.
Casey:
you should be aware that not only do you get a bootleg, which is of not the best audio quality, but you also get an ad-free feed if you so desire.
Casey:
And it seems like a lot of people weren't aware of that.
Casey:
So if you become an ATP member at atp.fm slash join, I am kidding, of course, about the pre-bootleg bootleg, but I am serious that there is a bootleg that is...
Casey:
put up, usually before we're even off the call, like we'll sign off for the live people.
Casey:
The three of us will chit chat for five or 10 minutes.
Casey:
And usually by the time that call is done, the bootleg is already up.
Casey:
And if that's not your speed, because audio quality isn't the best and, you know, we meander a lot and we, you know, Marco is a good editor for a reason because he cuts out the garbage.
Casey:
And so there's a lot of garbage in the bootleg.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, also, like, the bootleg doesn't have usually full show notes yet.
Marco:
It definitely doesn't have chapters or anything like that.
Marco:
So, like, there are, you know, there's a lot of, like, production niceties that go into the final version that are not in the bootleg just because they take time to do.
Casey:
So not only do you optionally get to, you know, listen to the bootleg if you so desire, and you can do that somewhere between 12 and 24 hours before the show is released, but at the same time the show is released, you can also listen to an ad-free feed of the show if you so desire.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Now, we like our sponsors.
Casey:
We like them quite a lot.
Casey:
I don't know how to say this without sounding like a turd, but here we are.
Casey:
We allow them to sponsor us because we like them.
Casey:
I apologize for how obnoxious that sounds, but here I am.
Casey:
But if you don't want to listen to that, you can get the ad-free feed, which is all of the same stuff that the regular show gets.
Casey:
All the great edits, all the chapters, all the show notes, and everything else.
Casey:
It's just less ads, as in none.
Casey:
And you can check that out as well if you're interested in that.
Casey:
So, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
So I will do a small bit of promotion here for the ad-free feed.
Marco:
When we launched membership, if you look around the podcast landscape, many people might have noticed lots of podcasts were launching paid membership programs around the same time.
Marco:
And the reason why we launched it, if you recall...
Marco:
Right kind of like at the beginning of COVID.
Marco:
It was like, what is it, June of COVID start?
Marco:
So like a few months into the COVID shutdowns.
Marco:
And what happened is when COVID started really hitting, there was a lot of economic strife and downturns and stuff.
Marco:
And one of the things that happened was that a lot of advertisers decided to pause all their campaigns because they didn't know what was going on.
Marco:
Podcast ads in that period took a huge hit.
Marco:
It was very hard to sell ads.
Marco:
Many people who had booked ads wanted to cancel them across the whole industry.
Marco:
It was a really tough problem, and that's why you saw all these podcasters like us and like many of our friends and podcasters, big and small, launching membership programs because it just became much harder to sell ads in that time, and we wanted kind of a backup plan and an alternative.
Marco:
Well, I took this opportunity.
Marco:
For any podcast that I actually listen to that has an ad-free feed, I subscribed to get it.
Marco:
And let me tell you, it's glorious.
Marco:
Now, it's not a required thing.
Marco:
If you add up all the podcasts that you might listen to and all their, you know...
Marco:
four to ten dollar a month you know membership programs obviously that's going to be a decent amount of money to a lot of people and so this is not a required thing but it is a really nice luxury if you can swing the money i highly suggest buying the ad free feeds to any podcast that you regularly listen to because it's so nice because you know we all know
Marco:
that most of you listen to most of the ads most of the time.
Marco:
We also know that many of you, myself included, might skip an ad if you've already heard it before, or if you just don't feel like hearing an ad.
Marco:
We know that.
Marco:
We're human.
Marco:
It's okay.
Marco:
Because it works, because most people listen to it most of the time.
Marco:
We all know also it is kind of nice.
Marco:
It's a nice luxury not to have to listen to an ad if you don't need to.
Marco:
And so I strongly suggest if you can swing this luxury, do it.
Marco:
It's so nice to hear all your favorite shows, or at least most of them.
Marco:
Not all of them even have this option.
Marco:
Merlin, I'm looking at you for Roderick on the line.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But most of your favorite shows offer this option now probably.
Marco:
It's such a nice luxury to have your favorite shows and not have to skip an ad if you feel like it every 20 minutes or something.
Marco:
It's a really nice thing.
Marco:
So while we love our sponsors and we're very thankful to them for providing what is honestly the bulk of our income here, it is also really nice if you want a luxury product to take the ad-free version.
Marco:
Even if you don't want to do it for us or if you're already doing it for us, I strongly suggest do it for your other podcasts that you love, that you listen to all the time.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
John:
I always get annoyed at iOS apps when I see, like, regular people using iOS apps.
John:
Obviously, most iOS apps you see people running are free because most apps are free.
John:
But, you know, they're playing like a Scrabble game or a Solitaire game or just some, you know, generic game.
John:
Checkers, Othello, whatever.
John:
And there are ads all over the place.
John:
And you see, you know, as I say, you see some relative playing this game over the course of weeks and you're like...
John:
Why don't you just pay the $1.99 to get rid of those ads?
John:
Because they're obnoxious, they're blinking in your face, they take up room on the screen.
John:
If it's an app that you play every single day, just pay to get rid of the ads.
John:
And then you find out you can't pay to get rid of the ads.
John:
There is no option to pay to get rid of the ads.
John:
I'm like, seriously, you won't take my money?
John:
That annoys me because it's the same type of situation.
John:
If you download a checkers app once and play it a few times, you don't want to pay for that.
John:
So it's just a free app.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But if you pay it every single day for years, you will gladly pay $5, even $10 just to never look at an ad.
John:
So I feel like the same thing with ATP.
John:
if you know you know whatever it's a free show you listen to it whatever the ads are fine you're getting you're getting it for free it's good uh but if you listen to it all the time and have listened for years and don't want to hear ads there is an option for you to pay a small amount of money to not hear ads and that option i'm very glad it exists for our show obviously any option like this takes effort to create and you know it's not straightforward you have to have a
John:
I kind of wish every free thing on iOS in particular had the option to get rid of ads for the people who want it.
John:
Because the only other alternative you have is just live with the ads forever or try to find some other app.
John:
And that's never fun.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So sorry for a little bit of housekeeping, but it was brought to our attention that a lot of people didn't know that was a thing.
Casey:
And so since we certainly have a handful of new members, which we deeply, deeply appreciate, and despite what John says, you can remain a member as long as you want.
Casey:
You do not have to cancel immediately.
Casey:
Then please feel free to check out any of these other feeds, but also check out our sponsors because they're genuinely also great.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
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:
Again, there's no coding required anywhere here.
Marco:
There's all intuitive and easy to use tools to make them.
Marco:
And I actually have extra experience more recently because in my household, we've made another Squarespace site.
Marco:
My wife recently set up a storefront.
Marco:
So I had never used the storefront functionality before.
Marco:
Normally, hosting a storefront on your own is really hard, and making it on Squarespace was really easy.
Marco:
She did the whole thing.
Marco:
I didn't have to intervene at all as the nerd in the family.
Marco:
She did the entire thing, and it's now a working storefront for shipping physical goods around.
Marco:
You can also have storefronts for digital goods, or you can make websites on Squarespace for other types of sites, obviously.
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:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
We were talking... I think it was Marco was talking about comparing Xcode build times using a stopwatch last week.
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
I should read my own show notes.
Casey:
It says as follows.
Casey:
This is from Abel DeMose.
Casey:
Marco, you do not need a stopwatch to time Xcode builds.
Casey:
Apple provides a command that you can run in the terminal, which shows the build time in the Xcode app.
Casey:
After a build, the duration is shown in the activity viewer alongside the succeeded message.
Casey:
And we'll put this in the show notes, but it's defaults, right?
Casey:
Com.apple.dt.xcode.
Casey:
Show build operation duration.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And I tried this, and sure enough, it shows up exactly where you'd expect, and it's pretty nice.
Casey:
And my builds of my new thing, which is officially in test flight right now, I'm making progress.
Casey:
I need an icon, but nevertheless, we're making progress.
Casey:
The builds are like one to three seconds oftentimes because it's a new app, and it's really small, and that's pretty awesome.
Casey:
So yeah, I don't know, Marco, have you played with this at all, or did you see this in the show notes before four seconds ago?
Marco:
i did see it i actually i i never knew this was there because normally when i'm normally testing xcode build times usually i will use from the terminal the xcode build command yes um and and i would just use the time command so i'll say time space xcode build and then you know my giant project path and everything else um so that's usually how i time it which is obviously way more precise than using my iphone stopwatch it's
Marco:
time things uh visually you know that's but um the reason i didn't do it for these tests with the new macbook pros is that i had there was some kind of weird code signing thing that i couldn't get to work in xcode build so i ended up timing simulator builds from xcode so knowing about this actually would have helped that so thank you for writing this in and i will do this next time
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So we had news over the last few days as we record that there was some sort of weird memory leak happening in Monterey.
Casey:
And I only heard bits and little bits and pieces about this over the last few days.
Casey:
And then there was a blog post about this at Eclectic Light that talks about this.
Casey:
John, do you want to walk us through this?
John:
Yeah, there may be more than one memory leak bug, but there was enough people posting screenshots of their activity monitor showing some part of the operating system or some app using tens of gigabytes of RAM and getting that dialogue that the OS throws up in your face and says, your system is pretty much out of memory.
John:
You should probably kill one of these apps.
John:
Um, so, uh, somebody, the developers of Firefox did find a bug in Apple's framework that is a memory leak.
John:
And it apparently has to do with setting the cursor specifically.
John:
I think if you use the accessibility features to change your cursor to something nonstandard, like a little bit bigger version of it or whatever, um,
John:
And you wouldn't think this would cause too much of a memory leak because cursors are small.
John:
And so what?
John:
Maybe you're leaking a cursor image here and there.
John:
But they're tiny little images.
John:
How are you going to use gigabytes of that?
John:
Two things.
John:
One, when you're using a web browser, you probably don't notice this that much.
John:
But the cursor changes a lot.
John:
Like when you go over a link, you get the little, you know, Mickey Mouse finger.
John:
uh icon and then then you have the arrow the rest of the time but then if you go over a text area you have the ibeam cursor um or if you go over some random text you get the ibeam cursor so the cursor does actually change a lot when you're just browsing the web you're not doing anything you're just moving the mouse but the cursor is changing right and the second thing is applications and anyone who any anyone who's developed agree application probably knows
John:
Applications very often do operations that are not visible.
John:
So it could be that the Firefox application is calling the API to set the cursor to something when it already is that cursor, because most, you know, it's usually not a good practice to do lots of bookkeeping to say, no, I only want to set the cursor to the arrow cursor if it's not already the arrow cursor.
John:
You don't want to put that conditional in there and you don't want to do the bookkeeping to try to keep track of whether it's the arrow cursor or not.
John:
It's much easier to just say when the mouse enters this region, set the cursor to the arrow cursor, even if it was already the arrow cursor, even if it's about to enter another region where you're also going to send it to the arrow cursor.
John:
So it could be that the app is calling set cursor many, many, many more times than you notice.
John:
It's just that most of the time it's setting the cursor to the image that it already is.
John:
So if this API is leaking, which it appears that it is, it could be leaking lots and lots and lots of cursor images to the tune of multiple megabytes of RAM over the course of a day of using.
John:
So this bug has been found.
John:
It's been registered with Apple.
John:
Apparently it's reproducible.
John:
So that means it will probably be fixed shortly.
John:
If there are any other memory leaks, hopefully we'll find those as well.
John:
But I was excited to see this because it's great when a bug is actually found and reproduced because that means it can be fixed.
Casey:
Amen to that.
Casey:
All right, Marco, continuing our multi-week journey of your grab bag of mini topics, what do you have for us this week?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So first, I have a bad news and a good news thing.
Casey:
Oh, more sandwiches.
Casey:
Excellent.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So the bad news thing, I kind of breezed by this, and I've been doing a little bit of research and hearing a few other stories recently.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
My original full-sized HomePods are not working very well anymore.
Marco:
And this is not a recent thing.
Marco:
It seems to have been like a slow descent into not working very well.
Marco:
But we are an entirely HomePod family now.
Marco:
We don't have any more Amazon devices that are in active use or even plugged in most of the time.
Marco:
And I love being a HomePod family on lots of different levels for lots of different reasons.
Marco:
And number one for me, obviously, is the other systems just seem like it's cheap garbage products run by oftentimes cheap garbage companies and with questionable privacy and law enforcement cooperation kind of stuff.
Marco:
So I'm happy being in the home
Marco:
homepod ecosystem and in the home kit ecosystem and you get all these wonderful integrations there and i especially love airplay too and and the the process of living with airplay as your multi-speaker uh slash you know casting kind of ecosystem it's fantastic and this is why i like the homepod and the sound quality that you get
Marco:
out of the HomePod products is way better than what you get from other products at comparable sizes.
Marco:
I should clarify, for purposes of music playback, I strongly suggest a stereo pair, whether you're using the big ones or the small ones.
Marco:
But a stereo pair of the big HomePods, while it cost an arm and a leg back when they were new...
Marco:
That's a really great sounding system for a very reasonably small size and a reasonably small visual footprint in the room.
Marco:
So one area that we use HomePods the most is on the kitchen counter.
Marco:
Our kitchen is a pretty large room, and two full-size HomePods on the counter is a nice match for it, size and sound-wise.
Marco:
Two HomePod minis in this context would not be very good.
Marco:
So anyway, AirPlay 2 is how we do multi-room audio in our house.
Marco:
It's also how we do things like, hey, I want to play a podcast from my phone onto something loud while I'm in the shower so I can hear it or whatever.
Marco:
This is a very important thing to us.
Marco:
Now, the original full-sized HomePods, these were never fast products.
Marco:
But they have gotten significantly slower, I think.
Marco:
Certain commands that you tell them, again, they've never been fast.
Marco:
The HomePod Mini is, again, not a fast product, but substantially, noticeably faster than the full-size HomePod.
Marco:
And the full-size one, I think, has just gotten slower to respawn with Siri and has gotten less reliable, especially.
Marco:
It'll have issues like, you know, obviously, you say, hey, dingus, stop, or hey, dingus, play, or, you know, you give a volume command, and it'll wait, and then it'll duck the music down, and then it'll think about it, and then it'll say, okay, you know, whatever.
Marco:
And then it'll duck the music back up after a while.
Marco:
It's a slow process.
Marco:
If you ask it to play something, it'll say, okay, playing, you know, whatever.
Marco:
and you don't have like eight seconds of silence before the whatever track starts.
Marco:
There's a lot of slowness to the full-size HomePods, some of which was always there, some of which has, I think, recently gotten worse.
Marco:
The bigger problem is that the iOS 15 series, I think,
Marco:
and whatever corresponding versions of HomePod OS or Audio OS, whatever it's called, came out with it, seems to have made AirPlay support way worse on the full-size HomePod than it ever has been.
Marco:
It almost doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
And this is very disruptive.
Marco:
It used to be that I could...
Marco:
easily airplay like from my ipad or iphone to the home pod and it would be fine i could retain control the whole time it would be great because i could do things like as i'm like working on the counter if i have like my ipad there i could just like hit the volume down button to change the home pod volume and not have to like
Marco:
go over and tap the HomePod or use a voice command that would be slow and take forever.
Marco:
So that kind of thing was great, and that's all done through AirPlay.
Marco:
Also, if you want to know what song is playing, you could just check Control Center or open the music app, and you would see what song is playing on your device.
Marco:
So you wouldn't have to ask again for a voice command or anything like that.
Marco:
That's also good if you want to do things like, say, add that song to a playlist.
Marco:
Very, very useful integration.
Marco:
This is, again, a huge part of the value of using HomePods.
Marco:
a lot of those things have gotten buggier in the last few months to the point where they barely work at all anymore.
Marco:
I also have a very hard time including the old HomePods in any AirPlay groupings with any other speakers.
Marco:
The Sonos amp that's on the other side of the floor or HomePod minis, like whatever it is, they don't play well with others anymore with AirPlay.
Marco:
It's gotten very frustrating.
Marco:
And finally, this is the more concerning part,
Marco:
This main pair of HomePods that we use most of the time in the kitchen, one of them will occasionally just drop out.
Marco:
It'll just stop playing audio for, I don't know, 45 seconds maybe, and then it might rejoin the group.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
I assume it's rebooting itself maybe.
Marco:
Occasionally, when it drops out, that is met with a loud popping sound as if the woofer maybe gets a bad signal, like a big loud bass pop.
Marco:
So that's a lot of fun.
Marco:
I've heard a lot of reports recently of HomePods dying, like the full-size ones.
Marco:
Another thing I've heard, I haven't verified this myself yet, I've also heard that Apple cannot replace them under warranty anymore.
Marco:
Because they've been discontinued for long enough that they literally don't have any to replace them with, or at least they're not replacing them.
Marco:
I haven't verified that, but...
Marco:
It sure seems like this product has been discontinued for some time now.
Marco:
All of them are probably out of warranty now, or at least most of them are.
Marco:
But I really like the way they sound.
Marco:
They are really, really good for what they are.
Marco:
For a voice-controlled, all-in-one kind of speaker that can also work in a stereo pair and looks nice enough in the kitchen and doesn't have a big box...
Marco:
And it is driving me nuts that A, that I think mine might be dying.
Marco:
B, even if they're not actually physically dying, they're not working as well as they were before due to what seems like software issues.
Marco:
And C, if they do die, I can't replace them with anything comparable because nothing comparable exists on the market today.
Marco:
They're both making them worse through neglect and there's no replacement.
Marco:
It kind of sucks that this product that was not inexpensive and is only maybe three years old, the ones I have, maybe something like that, maybe four at the most, I would expect a longer lifespan out of something like this.
Marco:
It doesn't have a lot of computing needs.
Marco:
It doesn't have a lot of...
Marco:
moving software needs there's no reason oh it doesn't even have a battery so there's no reason for this product to degrade over only a handful of years to a point where it breaks or is not very good at its primary functions that's it needs a longer lifespan than that
Marco:
And number two, if Apple's going to keep having this product line exist, we'll keep up with it.
Marco:
The HomePod mini is a great product for small spaces.
Marco:
It is not a great product for medium and large spaces.
Marco:
It just is too small to have good sound for larger spaces.
Marco:
It just can't do it.
Marco:
And it's also, you know, it's a simplified cut-down version in the way its speakers are designed, like how it doesn't even have dedicated woofer and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's weird compromises to it that make sense as part of a product line.
Marco:
but are not sufficient for it to be the entire product line.
Marco:
So fix the software on the original HomePod for God's sakes.
Marco:
I know there aren't many of them out there, but they're really good for those of us who have them, okay?
Marco:
So please fix the software so they can be at least as good as they were when we bought them.
Marco:
So that's number one.
Marco:
Number two, please, for the love of God, continue the HomePod line and expand it.
Marco:
Give us a replacement for this product.
Marco:
If it's not going to work very well, or if the software that you want to make is too slow to run, and I think it has a little A8 processor in there,
Marco:
Okay, you know, it's X years old, fine, you know, it will eventually need to be upgraded, give us an upgrade.
Marco:
Because I want this product line to continue.
Marco:
It is, for my purposes, which I know is not everyone's, but for my purposes, it is the best product line out there for this.
Marco:
but the old ones don't work anymore and part of that seems to be software on them a bigger part of that seems to be ios and it's handling of airplay whatever it is please make them work and please let this product line continue because when my home pods die i bet the new ones won't be available yet if they're if like if they're planning on having some kind of new big size home pod doesn't seem like it's anytime soon that's going to come out but
Marco:
And I bet at least one of mine dies within maybe six months.
Marco:
And I'm going to be very sad when that happens because there literally is nothing else in the market to replace them.
Casey:
may I tag on a very small airplay related complaint slash question?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Um, so we, you know, put a screened in porch in the back of the house, uh, a few months ago now, and I got a, um, Oh shoot.
Casey:
It's a Belkin sound force, sound source.
Casey:
I'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
Basically it's a hundred dollar box.
Casey:
That's kind of what the airport express used to be.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Where it's an airplay receiver and almost nothing else.
Casey:
And, um,
Casey:
Um, and, and it works really well for the most part.
Casey:
Uh, it's not perfect of course, but it works pretty well for the most part.
Casey:
But the problem that I'm having is it is not infrequent that I will put like a concert on typically on Plex, but I'll put some video on the Apple TV, which is on the other side of the screen and porch, you know, it's right inside the house from screen and porch.
Casey:
And, um,
Casey:
I put a video on the Apple TV, but I want it to be broadcast not only in the living room, but also in the screened-in porch via this Belkin sound, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
And I haven't done enough testing to see if this is a Plex problem or a tvOS problem.
Casey:
Although it strikes me as though it would be a tvOS problem.
Casey:
But if I'm doing something with video and I try to broadcast to both the speakers that the Apple TV typically plays through and an AirPlay receiver, it doesn't work for squat.
Casey:
It will only play outside and it will not play inside.
Casey:
Maybe this is user error, but I don't feel like this is a complex operation to accomplish.
Casey:
For me, I mean.
Casey:
And it never seems to work.
Casey:
Now, if I do it with audio, like if I'm using the SiriusXM app on the Apple TV or if I'm playing Apple Music or whatever, it works great.
Casey:
No problem.
Casey:
Every time it works great.
Casey:
And I can adjust volumes independently and everything works as it's supposed to.
Casey:
But when the source is video rather than audio...
Casey:
It never works.
Casey:
And I actually have been meaning to ask a friend of the show, Ryan Jones, about this because he was the one who pushed me to do this sort of setup.
Casey:
And I think he was mostly right.
Casey:
But for the life of me, I cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong here.
Casey:
So if you have a secret, people, please reach out and let me know because I'd love to know.
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:
That's how I know I wear them every day because I wear underwear every day.
Marco:
Pretty easy logic there.
Marco:
I also very frequently, including right now, wear their t-shirts.
Marco:
I love their t-shirts, especially the silver line.
Marco:
These are my base layer or my only layer on top for the warmer months.
Marco:
I love them because they use actual silver fibers in the fabric blend.
Marco:
And they're naturally antimicrobial.
Marco:
And what this means is you basically can't stink while wearing them.
Marco:
So it's pretty great.
Marco:
Now, as the weather's getting colder, I also am wearing their wonderful warm knit line.
Marco:
I love the warm.
Marco:
It's like a waffle knit shirt.
Marco:
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Marco:
It's just a fantastic line of products, and they are made to incredibly high quality standards.
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:
Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Mack Weldon, radically efficient wardrobing.
Casey:
We have some other Ryan Jones-related follow-up, though, don't we?
Marco:
Yes, actually.
Marco:
Good segue.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
The positive side, well, I mean, it's not so positive for Ryan Jones, that I finally replaced Weatherline.
Casey:
Well, it's good because it got sunset in a happy way, didn't it?
Marco:
Yes, exactly.
Marco:
So Weatherline has been the iOS weather app that I choose to use for years now.
Marco:
I forget how many years, but it's been a long time because I just loved that presentation, like the line of the hourly forecast throughout the day.
Marco:
I love that so much.
Marco:
Even at times where the app was not...
Marco:
as competitive with other apps in terms of certain features, whatever, I always stuck with it because I just loved its design, and it really clicked with my brain the way I wanted to see weather data.
Marco:
About maybe six months ago, something like that, Ryan Jones, the main maker of Weatherline, announced that it had been acquired and that they were shutting it down because the company that acquired it, it wasn't the kind of thing where they were just going to keep it running.
Marco:
They bought it for other reasons, so it was going to be shut down, and we had to...
Marco:
find new apps soon.
Marco:
And Weatherline, I think it's going to run for a while longer.
Marco:
I think maybe six months to a year longer.
Marco:
But because I knew that there was an end date that was not too far off, I decided I should probably start planning for this and
Marco:
I probably shouldn't write my own because, A, no, I don't need the headache.
Marco:
I have enough to do.
Marco:
And B, I would probably just make a clone of Weatherline, and that's not a great way to spend my time either.
Marco:
So I figured that's not a good idea.
Marco:
and i decided you know i've always heard that carrot weather was the best weather app in the universe and i've i always wanted to like carrot weather but it was never my primary app like i i had it installed for a while and i i even paid the premium stuff so i could use certain features because i i was playing with it like as as a watch complication and and stuff like that and
Marco:
But I never used the full app very much because I would open it up, look around, and be like, eh, this design doesn't fit me as well as Weatherline's design, and I would close it, and that would be it.
Marco:
Now that Weatherline has a definite end, and I'm kind of forced to go elsewhere, I figure, you know what?
Marco:
Let me give Carrot a real try.
Marco:
Let me try fully switching over to it.
Marco:
Move Weatherline off my front screen, take off its widget, get...
Marco:
totally move it away and bring in carrot and, and try using only carrot.
Marco:
And I,
Marco:
What I didn't realize in the previous times I had tried Carrot Weather is that not only is it highly customizable in terms of the attitude it gives you, which I always knew that was an option, like you can have it be really snarky with the text and everything, or you can turn that down and have it just be neutral and tell you the data.
Marco:
It's also, though, this was news to me, also the UI is highly customizable.
Casey:
That's new-ish.
Casey:
That was just in the last three to six months, I'd say, that the UI became crazy customizable.
Casey:
It used to be, I think, a little bit, but now it's like a calculator construction kit sort of thing.
Casey:
It's bananas how much you can do with it.
Marco:
It really is extremely customizable.
Marco:
And I was able to customize not only certain views that are kind of weatherline-like.
Marco:
It doesn't have an exact match, probably for many reasons.
Marco:
That would probably be in poor taste for a competitor to clone your UI completely.
Marco:
So I understand why there's not an exact weatherline view.
Marco:
But you can kind of get close if that's what you're looking for, which for me it is.
Marco:
That's how I want to see my hourly graph.
Marco:
So I kind of got close to weatherline.
Marco:
Plus, it has just the most features in the universe.
Marco:
There's so many features.
Marco:
And Carrot Weather is also made by one person.
Marco:
It's an incredibly good app.
Marco:
It's exactly what you want out of an indie app.
Marco:
It has good business morals behind it, great development, great design.
Marco:
I think he won an ADA last year.
Marco:
It's just a very well-done app.
Marco:
And my God, the features.
Marco:
There is so much there.
Marco:
So now that I've been able to customize the design into something that I like, I'm getting to enjoy the utility of all these features.
Marco:
And it is so good.
Marco:
For instance, one of the things, forever, I had this concept idea of an app I could make someday that I wanted to make.
Marco:
A smart watch complication slash iOS widget, whatever.
Marco:
This was before it just existed, but I was kind of picturing an app that would just show a card or something like that.
Marco:
But mainly for the watch.
Marco:
And the idea was I wanted to be able to set priorities between different conditions that might occur and have it only display one of these things.
Marco:
So for instance, if I have a timer running, I always want to see the timer.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
If I don't have a time I'm running, I don't want an icon that says set.
Marco:
Like I just want something else, like either nothing or give me some other data that might be useful.
Marco:
I care a lot about what time sunset is for about an hour before sunset and not at any other time of the day.
Marco:
I don't care when sunset is at 11 in the morning, right?
Marco:
I care a lot if it's raining, but only when it's raining.
Marco:
If the chance of precipitation is zero, I don't care about it.
Marco:
i care a lot if the uv index is above like five but i don't care all winter when it's zero to one so there's there's all sorts of conditions like this in weather so here at the beach wind is a very big issue like wind is something that in like in my regular previous suburban life i never cared about wind it was never a big deal
Marco:
Here, I care a lot if it's going to be windy tonight because that means I might have to move stuff inside or take other preparations because windy here does not mean windy in the suburbs.
Marco:
Windy here is a whole new thing.
Marco:
So Carrot Weather allows you in a few places in the app, including recently in a watch complication, to set certain thresholds in a prioritized list to say, okay, tell me and put this card up here or display this in the complication and
Marco:
If this value is going to be above this range or if this is going to happen in the next 12 hours or whatever, it's so nice.
Marco:
You can also have that notify you and you can tell it when to tell you what range to look at.
Marco:
It's so ridiculously customizable.
Marco:
So for instance, now I have one that every evening it will tell me if the wind is going to be above a certain speed overnight.
Marco:
That way I know, oh, maybe I should bring the trash cans in so they don't blow it on the street or something like that, you know?
Marco:
That kind of thing.
Marco:
You can customize so much about this.
Marco:
So I am just so happy with this app.
Marco:
I wish I had tried it earlier in some ways.
Marco:
So I'm kind of burying Weatherline with this massive party for Carrot Weather, but...
Marco:
But I think also, as Casey, as you just said, a lot of these features are pretty new to the app.
Marco:
So I think maybe I came at exactly the right time for me.
Casey:
I think so, yeah.
Marco:
But it is just so, so good.
Marco:
This is not a sponsorship.
Marco:
I strongly recommend that you get Carrot Weather and you pay for the annual whatever cost to get all the cool features because it's so, so good.
Marco:
Highly recommend it.
Casey:
Strong agree on everything you just said.
Casey:
Carrot Weather, it's one of a very small subset of apps that I have been using literally every day since like five plus years ago, because Carrot Weather's been out a fair bit of time at this point.
Casey:
And I feel like, you know, it's Carrot Weather, it's Overcast, it's TweetBot, GIF-wrapped.
Casey:
Like, off the top of my head, amongst indie apps, you know, not like the Instagrams of the world or whatever, but amongst indie apps, it's probably those and only a couple of others that I've used every single day for forever and change.
Casey:
And so, yeah, Carrot Weather, I cannot recommend enough.
Casey:
It is a phenomenally powerful app.
Casey:
It's one of those situations where it's an app that also makes me incredibly angry because it's Brian Mueller, right, that wrote it?
Casey:
Do I have that right?
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, his education is nowhere near computer science or anything like it, and he is so much better at his job than I am in mine.
Casey:
It's so annoying because he is incredibly talented at not only the code but also the design, and especially now that I'm really getting close to shipping something.
Casey:
It's infuriating in the best possible way to see how good one individual can be at doing everything, like server-side stuff, on-device stuff.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
It's so well done.
Casey:
I cannot recommend it enough.
Casey:
It's a great app.
John:
two other weather app recommendations i also used weatherline for a long time and i was looking for replacements uh one of the ones i came upon is called weatherstrip it's very similar to weatherline it's more complicated there are more lines instead of just the one line uh but it's nice it's got a different aesthetic i enjoy it as a good line replacement for weatherline uh and then finally the the official apple weather app got a lot better on ios 15. i think it's kind of my default weather app now
John:
Um, it doesn't have all the details of the, you know, the fancier weather apps.
John:
It doesn't have lines like a weather strip does.
John:
It is not as customizable as car weather, obviously.
John:
Uh, but check those both out.
John:
If you're looking for a weather app or if you've given up on the Apple and you thought it was too simple, the new version is pretty nice.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then we should also talk about one other quick follow-up piece.
Casey:
We've gotten feedback.
Casey:
This was with regard to selling my computers and my MacBook Pro, my 2020 MacBook Pro is gone.
Casey:
It is at its new home.
Casey:
And as far as I know, everything's going well.
Casey:
I was saying before the show that the iMac Pro has been unplugged for a few days now, and I'm genuinely sad about it because, I mean, obviously I would say this because I'm trying to sell it, but
Casey:
nevertheless like hand to god i love that iMac pro so much i really really do it's such an incredibly nice computer i love it so much and i already kind of miss it um and i'm sad that that it's not on my desk anymore but i will be unloading that very soon so if you're interested please reach out but
Casey:
people have talked to us about, hey, we brought up eBay.
Casey:
I think Marco in particular brought up eBay a little while ago saying, oh, it works pretty well for Marco.
Casey:
And people have written in, I can't speak for whether or not this is true, but a lot of people have said, hey, eBay is good as long as you get a good buyer.
Casey:
But
Casey:
You can very easily get a buyer that's a con artist, and the buyer will claim that the device doesn't work or tries to return it, but will just accidentally take the RAM out or the SSD out or something like that.
Casey:
And apparently eBay is expensive.
Casey:
extremely buyer-friendly.
Casey:
So if you're the seller, you're kind of up a creek.
Casey:
And again, I have no personal experience with this one way or the other, but it is something to consider.
Casey:
And we've heard several recommendations for Swappa, which might be an American thing, SWAPPA.
Casey:
If I can't sell my iMac Pro, which I haven't formally priced yet, but I'll probably put it on Twitter like I did the MacBook Pro and see if anyone bites.
Casey:
And if not, I think I'll probably go to Swappa if nobody grabs it beforehand.
Casey:
But
Casey:
And I've heard many, many people say that the fees on Swappa are great and the people are typically great and it's usually a much better option than eBay.
Casey:
Again, I have no personal experience either way.
Casey:
I'm just telling you what we're being told.
Marco:
Typically with almost any kind of online sale and definitely with anything based on credit cards –
Marco:
the buyer has way more power than the seller because of how credit cards handle disputes.
Marco:
If the buyer says, you know, hey, I paid for this thing with my credit card and it came broken and the seller wouldn't take it back or it didn't come at all, you know, the seller's a scammer.
Marco:
In almost every case, the credit card company will side with the buyer and will issue a charge back to the vendor or seller.
Marco:
And that's why places like eBay or PayPal, like if there's a dispute,
Marco:
the buyer will win the dispute if they make a big enough stink.
Marco:
Typically, your risk is greater as a seller than as a buyer.
Marco:
Now, there are a few exceptions.
Marco:
There are certain ways that you can accept payment where...
Marco:
the buyer is basically handing you cash in the digital form.
Marco:
So obviously, yes, crypto, blah, blah, I don't care.
Marco:
Also, there's the PayPal goods and services method of sending.
Marco:
Venmo has a way to send where it's kind of like cash.
Marco:
There's Apple Pay cash.
Marco:
You can pay for things where the buyer has no recourse whatsoever if the transaction doesn't go very well.
Marco:
Obviously, most buyers don't want to do that, especially if they don't know you.
Marco:
So this is one area where we mentioned before about how selling on Twitter, if you can get somebody to do the goods and services method on PayPal or one of these cash-based methods, that's better for you in terms that you don't pay the fees, but it's also better for you in that they can't scam you out of the item in some way.
Marco:
The downside is that they have to trust you to do that, and that's not going to be possible for a lot of transactions.
Marco:
Again, this is one of those things where if you want to be guaranteed not to get scammed, trade it into Apple.
Marco:
Because, actually, even then, sometimes even then, they will receive your item and they'll say, hey, actually, the screen has a chip in it.
Marco:
So this is worth zero.
Marco:
You want us to recycle it or send it back?
Marco:
And by the way, when they say that, send it back.
Marco:
Don't take their thing.
Marco:
If you know it wasn't chipped, get it back and try some other option or give it away or something.
Marco:
But anyway, if you want to minimize the risks of humans trying to scam you intentionally, then go with one of the easier options where you're not going to get the best rate.
Marco:
If you want to get the best rates, it is going to be on some level a bit of a gamble.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons you get higher rates.
Marco:
And sometimes you might get screwed, but most of the time it will work.
Marco:
So that's, you know, in my experience, I haven't run into any scam buyers.
Marco:
I haven't sold a ton of things on eBay, but I have sold, you know, maybe 20 or 30 items over the years.
Marco:
And I never had a problem at that scale.
Marco:
But, you know, it's a gamble.
Casey:
And John, your attic is just about to crumble from the weight of all of your old computers, so this is not something you have any opinions on, I assume, right?
John:
By the time I'm ready to get rid of any of them, they're going to be worth nothing, so I'll have to pay someone to take them away.
John:
It'll be a reverse sale.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This is what used to be called a VPS host or, you know, a compute host or whatever.
Marco:
This is what, you know, modern servers are.
Marco:
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Marco:
This is where I host all the servers that I run for my app backends or for any kind of custom CMS or any kind of custom in the cloud service that I want to run.
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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Casey:
We have been intending to talk about Facebook and meta for a long time and the time has come.
Casey:
So, uh, when are we moving the podcast to the metaverse guys?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I actually really don't have that much to say about this.
Casey:
I don't feel like I'm clairvoyant enough.
Casey:
I don't have enough Nostradamus in me to be able to have any clear thoughts on this.
Casey:
The one thing I will say is that it's been interesting reading Ben Thompson's coverage, and we'll link to the interview that he had with Mark Zuckerberg recently.
Casey:
One thing that has been fascinating to watch, speaking of subscription things that are absolutely worth the money, Ben's coverage on Stratechery has been interesting where he went from, in my opinion, kind of poo-pooing VR to, well, actually, this has a place.
Casey:
And I think it was largely because of...
Casey:
him conducting meetings in VR, like business meetings.
Casey:
And he said that the perception of presence is so strong, even though it's all virtual.
Casey:
And especially in these unprecedented times, there's something to be said for that.
Casey:
And I don't have any interest in putting together
Casey:
either a vr rig or whatever the one is where it's all standalone but it's like 600 bucks or something like that like i don't have the desire to spend 600 bucks i don't have the desire to spend 300 bucks but is it only three that's actually not as bad yeah the quest you're talking about the quest 2 rather yeah that's the one we have it's all standalone wireless yeah it's great
Casey:
That's not as bad as I thought.
Casey:
I take it slightly back then.
Casey:
But let me remind you that my iMac Pro is on sale soon.
Casey:
But anyways, I would like to try that sort of thing, even though I don't have much of an occasion to meet with people anymore.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I get real big, you know, Ready Player One vibes from this and that's not necessarily bad, but I don't know.
Casey:
I just I don't know what to make of it one way or the other.
Casey:
I don't know which one of you was a John that put this in here.
Casey:
So presumably, John, you have some thoughts about it.
John:
Yeah, the combination of this and Facebook is interesting to me.
John:
So first, for people who don't know what we're talking about, the whole metaverse thing, it's basically, as Casey was alluding to, it's tied to VR, VRAR, where...
John:
A lot of things that we could do now, you can go to a Slack room or a Discord and chat with other people and have different channels.
John:
And you can play an online game where a bunch of people are in an instance together wandering around.
John:
And, you know, they have avatars with equipment and stuff.
John:
And like, but why is that not the metaverse?
John:
All these things that we have in the world of computing, what's the difference between that and the metaverse?
John:
The main difference is the metaverse is focused on it.
John:
AR VR type stuff where you put a thing over your face.
John:
So the screens are right in front of your eyeballs.
John:
And when you turn your head, you look around.
John:
And that combined with one of those things I just described equals the metaverse.
John:
You know, all the things that you can do online, you can shop, you can talk to people, you can play a game, you can be pretend you're in a different place than you're in, you know, all the things that you can do and all the different work and play things.
John:
But with this new additional
John:
input-output experience, which is the screens on your face and the idea of presence, where it feels like you're there.
John:
Because when you're in an actual place, you can look left, look right.
John:
And when someone talks at you, the sound comes from where they are and it hits your ears.
John:
And if you're far away from people, they're quiet.
John:
And if you're close, they're louder.
John:
And you can go places and do things.
John:
And anyway.
John:
That's the basic concept of the metaverse.
John:
You've probably heard or seen it before in the past in science fiction.
John:
And, of course, if you've been keeping up with VR, AR at all, you know this technology is out there.
John:
And the metaverse is just someone saying, this is what we want.
John:
We want to do all these things in this place.
John:
So why is it interesting that Facebook has renamed their parent whatever, kind of like Google did with Alphabet, they want to call their company Meta or whatever.
John:
There is a whole business sideshow of that that I don't want to get particularly into, but I think it's enough to say that Facebook, being the fairly savvy company that it is,
John:
is trying to make sure, trying to ensure its long-term success.
John:
Facebook is, was a website, and then it was an app, but it's basically, we know what Facebook is.
John:
They call it the blue app in their internal parlance, apparently.
John:
Facebook is Facebook.
John:
And, you know, there was a time before Facebook, there were other things that were similar, like MySpace, but Facebook kind of wiped them out.
John:
uh the folks who run facebook are smart enough to know that facebook isn't necessarily forever um it may be skewing older people who just decide one day that facebook is done and there is something that is similar that's a better replacement and facebook is trying to say well if someone's going to replace the blue app with something else it should be us and we think this whole metaverse idea
John:
might be it.
John:
So let's rename the parent company Meta and let's start working on this.
John:
We still love Facebook.
John:
We still love, you know, selling access to you to advertisers.
John:
That's how we make all our money.
John:
Facebook still has hojillions of users.
John:
I shouldn't say hojillions.
John:
I should just say billions.
John:
Like it actually has billions of users.
John:
That's not a fanciful exaggeration.
John:
And that's a powerful thing.
John:
But in the meantime, if there's going to be something that replaces Facebook, Facebook should start working on it and
John:
Mark Zuckerberg apparently is totally into the whole idea of the metaverse because maybe he's read too many science fiction novels.
John:
So that's that.
John:
That's like, why is Facebook?
John:
Why is Facebook doing this now?
John:
Why are you know, why do they feel like they have to do this?
John:
I think in general, it's having a hedge is smart.
John:
Because it would be wrong for Facebook to think that the blue app is forever.
John:
And because they have billions of users, they will always have billions of users and there's no way to unseat them.
John:
It's hard to unseat them.
John:
It's a hell of a moat, as they say in the business.
John:
You can do a lot with billions of users that people can't compete with.
John:
But I do look at, you know, what young people are doing, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or whatever, you know, or even not really Twitter, because that's all for old people these days.
John:
It is possible for a new thing to come out and grab the hearts and minds of the younger people.
John:
And that's bad for Facebook because old people eventually die.
John:
So I think it is wise for them to be hedging.
John:
But all that said, Facebook and the Vetiverse thing, you know, this is not a new idea.
John:
And when I look at all of the press that Facebook is getting with Meta, it, you know, again, I understand why Facebook's doing it.
John:
I don't quite understand why so many of the stories about it don't sort of say, don't talk about the elephant in the room, which is,
John:
that if there was going to be one company or any company, pick a company you think is going to have a good chance at bringing the metaverse into existence, I would never pick the company that just has never been good at making consumer hardware software products.
John:
Facebook has tried to make a lot of stuff in its time, and they bought Oculus, which is good they didn't try to make that themselves, right?
John:
But this is not their strength.
John:
to you know to realize the metaverse there is a very important hardware component in fact some would argue it's the most important component because it's the one we haven't figured out how to do yet yeah the quest is great and cheap and small or whatever but the idea that billions of people are going to wear something like that all day long it would have happened already if we were at the point where the hardware wasn't the issue
John:
Right.
John:
Once we got, you know, forget about smartphones.
John:
Once we got cell phones to the point where the hardware is good enough for regular people, boom, seemingly overnight, the whole world had cell phones.
John:
And then, of course, smartphones and everything.
John:
I'm just talking about like plain old dumb, you know, feature phones, right?
John:
When they were huge and expensive and the size of bricks or only worked in your car, billions of people didn't have them.
John:
Eventually, they hit the, we got the right hardware threshold and, you know, whatever, Nokia was the big company back then.
John:
And then it's like, oh, now everyone has a cell phone.
John:
because we crossed that barrier.
John:
We're not there with VR.
John:
What VR does now, even the expensive, cool ones, like the highest end stuff, is not compelling enough for the world to buy it, either because it's too big and uncomfortable or because it's too expensive or it's too constraining or all those things combined.
John:
It's just not there yet.
John:
So to get to the metaverse, you need to overcome that hurdle of we need to figure out how to get pixels into your eyeballs and sensors all around you so we can tell where you're looking in a reasonable way with good resolution and good latency with a reasonable price.
John:
Like, oh, you have to cross all those thresholds.
John:
And I would never pick Facebook as my horse to bet on that's going to crack this problem because they're so bad at this.
John:
They have never made a really great hardware product.
John:
They bought Oculus, which was smart because they were the leader in the space at the time.
John:
But Oculus hasn't crossed that threshold either.
John:
They were mostly catering to high-end gamers and now, you know, these more low-end things.
John:
But that's not something...
John:
I don't even think it's something that people want to wear while they sit at their desk eight hours a day, let alone something as transformative as a smartphone that people carry with them all the time everywhere, wherever they go.
John:
And to truly realize the magic of the metaverse, it has to at least be as sort of
John:
comfortable and normal to use as sitting in front of a laptop and i would say if you want it should probably be as comfortable and personal as a smartphone and that people are okay using it whenever or wherever uh and it feels like you know an extension of themselves and you know the most personal device you own which is what apple said about the apple watch or whatever
John:
But nobody's really venturing out into the real world with a VR headset on their face because the hardware is not there and the battery life isn't there and the network connection isn't there.
John:
There's so many things that are missing.
John:
And although Ben Thompson may enjoy, you know,
John:
sharing a spreadsheet and sitting down at a virtual table with a bunch of cartoon avatars because it's a cool, fun experience.
John:
That is not the type of thing that is yet compelling enough that there's going to be billions of people wanting to do that.
John:
Because if there was, they'd be doing it right now.
John:
So there's a long way to go.
John:
The hardware, the software, the services, we have not...
John:
crossed the barrier into mass market yet.
John:
And I don't, and I read article after article about Facebook.
John:
Facebook wants to do meta.
John:
Facebook wants to make the metaverse.
John:
It's like,
John:
Why are we even – it's like if Apple said they wanted to do an amazing social network.
John:
Like we would laugh at them.
John:
Everyone would bring up Ping.
John:
We would say, Apple, you're not good at this.
John:
You've tried it.
John:
You're very bad at it.
John:
You continue to be very bad at it.
John:
If you said you're going to be the next great social network that's going to surpass all the existing ones, we wouldn't have story after story with stars in their eyes saying, Apple, soon to usher in a new era of social networking.
John:
No, they're not because Apple's terrible at this.
John:
We would not take them seriously.
John:
And I don't understand why people are taking Facebook seriously.
John:
Facebook can want this all they want, but they just don't have the skillset.
John:
They need to buy more companies or get better at this stuff real fast.
John:
Now, it could be argued.
John:
It doesn't matter they don't have the skillset.
John:
The real thing they have is the billions and billions of people.
John:
And that's harder to get, arguably, than figuring out how to make good hardware software products.
John:
Like maybe eventually the technology gets good enough that even if Facebook is crappy at making hardware and software,
John:
It's easy enough for them to slap something together.
John:
The real barrier is the billions of users, because that's just harder to get and takes longer and is more of a barrier than, you know, any particular hardware skill.
John:
Right.
John:
That's possible, maybe.
John:
But at the very least, I feel like almost any story about Facebook in the metaverse should at least touch on the idea that historically Facebook has been terrible about everything you need to do for the metaverse.
John:
I think they're terrible at all the software parts of it, too, because there's nothing about Facebook, the application, that makes me think it will translate well to a persistent online 3D world that they lovingly curate and care for so that it's a place people want to spend time.
John:
People barely want to spend time on a series of web pages shown through a little iOS app because it's just a cesspool of angry walls of text from, you know, your weird uncle, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's what Facebook is.
John:
And the 3D translation of that and think about how many times Facebook has changed and totally altered the way their product works and it worked and, you know, switched around all their technologies like that does not lend itself to fostering a long term metaversy type thing.
John:
And on the flip side of that, who has been good about doing any kind of metaverse type stuff?
John:
on the software side you have the people who have been doing it best are essentially people who run online gaming services world of warcraft even things like second life any kind of game where there's a social space even in very narrowly defined things arguably even something like destiny where it's incredibly narrowly defined there's very little you can do you can only do destiny things it's certainly not you know a whole world it's just a very narrowly defined slice of the world even that like
John:
To have a company that understands how to get a bunch of customers, and in many cases these are paying customers, which Facebook can't do because they have billions of people and billions of people aren't going to pay you $60 a year or $5 a month or whatever, to build a space, a 3D space with presence or whatever, and to nurture that over the years.
John:
finding places where it's being exploited or crumbling or falling down, preserving people's investment in that 3D space, making it feel like a place where people want to be and want to invest their time.
John:
That's what online games do.
John:
And it's really, really hard.
John:
And one of the main activities of that successful kind of software incarnation of the metaverse is...
John:
You know, reacting strongly to cases where people do bad things, bad actors, people griefing in games, people hacking in games, you know, making the game worse for other people.
John:
Does this start to sound familiar?
John:
Facebook does not stop this in Facebook.
John:
Facebook lets all the worst behavior happen because it means more engagement, because it means more time online, because it means they can sell your information to advertisers and that's how they make their money, right?
John:
That is all the opposite of the things that are required to make any kind of sort of metaverse-y type place with presence.
John:
Setting aside the VR, just saying 3D persistent world where people go and spend hours and want to spend time there.
John:
If you look at all those things, it's mostly gaming companies and they act very differently than Facebook.
John:
And then on the hardware side,
John:
Again, Facebook is not known for its hardware innovation, whether it's very fast, low-power CPUs, great APIs for 3D and native apps.
John:
They bought Oculus.
John:
I feel like they've—not that they've ruined Oculus, but they've—
John:
They mishandled Oculus, let's say, in that they didn't stick with catering to the hardcore gamers.
John:
They wanted to go sort of broader than that.
John:
But then they made people sign in with their Facebook account, and that was a mistake.
John:
And it's just kind of like made people who were previously big Oculus fans less so while not replacing them with people who are equally enthusiastic from...
John:
uh the you know the broader market they did a little bit of that like there there is has some been some give and take there but i think they've kind of seeded the high-end space to like the what the valve index or whatever that thing is called um and had you know haven't created an equivalently large enthusiastic group of people who spend eight hours a day with their quest on their face taking meetings or whatever
John:
And, you know, again, setting aside the idea that meetings are the ultimate incarnation of this and, you know, looking at the evidence of where do people, where historically, where have people chosen to spend lots of their time online?
John:
In IRC channels, in MUDS and MUSHs, and, you know, in Second Life, in World of Warcraft, those things all have, like, nothing in common with Facebook and they also have nothing in common with a virtual, like, meeting room where someone can show a spreadsheet on the wall.
John:
So...
John:
uh i guess what is the i'm i am bearish on facebook and the metaverse i can never get it right i always get it the bull is one the one where you're enthusiastic about it the bear is where you think yeah like i don't have any confidence in facebook's ability to realize this vision which is good because i hate facebook and don't want them to realize this vision and really want someone else to figure out how to do this before they do because facebook is terrible at maintaining spaces where people want to be um
John:
I also think the technology to get this over the hump is a lot farther off than people think it is.
John:
But in the meantime, if you want to have any of the experiences that are promised for the metaverse, you can get all of it except for, for the most part, the 3D VR presence thing.
John:
uh in other places uh and it's great uh you need arguably a discord or a slack are can be versions of the metaverse any kind of online community a web bolton board i feel like i've been on web bolton boards that have more of a sense of community and quote-unquote presence without any a vr without any even graphics even just like usenet groups that have had more quote-unquote presence and community than the metaverse so i feel to some degree i feel like it's like uh
John:
chasing something that already exists because now there's a way to sort of make it strategically important and fancy and invoke all of these science fiction tropes when in reality making online communities has always been a valuable thing to do will continue to be a valuable thing to do is very difficult to do and requires making essentially the opposite decision that facebook has ever made anytime they've been faced with any kind of decision wow
Marco:
I didn't even think about that when I was thinking about the possibility of this actually coming to fruition the way they envision it.
Marco:
Let's take this bits at a time.
Marco:
Do you think that the name change to Meta... Obviously, there's lots of potential reasons why Facebook might have wanted to...
Marco:
make some kind of bigger overarching brand for their properties that was different than the name Facebook.
Marco:
Obviously, there's lots of cynical reasons.
Marco:
Facebook has not a great reputation among lots of people.
Marco:
It is very popular, but it is very controversially popular and unevenly popular, I would say, and definitely seems to be very uncool among young people and more left-leaning people.
Marco:
And that's, you know, when your audience is mostly older, that's not great for your future prospects of brand equity.
Marco:
So that's obviously one big problem they have.
Marco:
They have more recent problems of various scandals flaring up here and there.
Marco:
But that's honestly, I think those pale in comparison to the fact that young people think they're not cool.
Marco:
But do you think overall, like, you know, when Google created this alphabet umbrella,
Marco:
That lasted in the press for maybe a day, and then we all just forgot about it.
Marco:
We're like, I would just call them Google.
Marco:
Alphabet doesn't own YouTube.
Marco:
Google owns YouTube or whatever.
Marco:
Maybe Bloomberg might have to say Alphabet Inc., parenthesis Google, but no one ever talks about them that way.
Marco:
No one talks about Google being an Alphabet product.
Marco:
Everyone just says Google.
Marco:
I think the way Facebook has branded Meta
Marco:
suggests that they want it to actually be a consumer-facing brand name, whereas Google seems to have created Alphabet mostly for accounting reasons or stock market reasons.
Marco:
But Meta seems like Facebook actually wants that name to be its own thing and to be known.
Marco:
And part of it, again, cynical reasons.
Marco:
When Facebook had that giant outage a few weeks back, I think that's when a lot of people learned that Facebook owns WhatsApp.
Marco:
I think a lot of people who use WhatsApp every single day did not know that Facebook owned it until that day.
Marco:
I think that was a wake-up call.
Marco:
Facebook has, as John mentioned, they very aggressively have tried to push the Facebook brand name into other successful properties they own.
Marco:
They first started doing it with Instagram, and then they started doing it with Oculus, where Instagram used to be called Instagram.
Marco:
For years after Facebook owned it, it was still called Instagram, and you could use it for years and never actually know that Facebook really owned it.
Marco:
And then a couple of years ago, they started rebranding Facebook into Instagram to promote Facebook, the quote, blue app, the Facebook app, because it was losing ground among young people.
Marco:
So they renamed Instagram to Instagram by Facebook and added that to the launch screen and added that all over the app and started integrating Facebook into Instagram much more, having cross-chat, having account integration.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons why they did that.
Marco:
I think almost all of them are cynical.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because I should clarify, I have no respect for this company or its morals.
Marco:
It's a horrible company run by horrible people.
Marco:
Among all of the big tech companies that you can think of and name, I think the people running Facebook might be the worst people in terms of moral standards and ethics.
Marco:
They might be the worst, and that's really saying something.
Marco:
But anyway, so...
Marco:
There were lots of reasons to do that, but I think it kind of backfired in the sense that their goal of trying to make Instagram make young people like Facebook more didn't seem to have happened.
Marco:
And certainly trying to use Oculus to promote Facebook really didn't happen.
Marco:
That backfired tremendously and made everyone hate Oculus and made them lose a whole bunch of gamers and gamer cred.
Marco:
And that's not great for anybody involved.
Marco:
So I think meta, though, might have been in response to how badly those things went.
Marco:
Now, what if in six months or a year, you don't have to log into your Oculus Quest with your Facebook account.
Marco:
You log in with your meta account.
Marco:
We like to think that people will see right through that and that such a ploy wouldn't work.
Marco:
But in practice, such ploys tend to work.
Marco:
They totally work.
Marco:
We hate it.
Marco:
We're like, how can you... What do you mean?
Marco:
It's just Facebook.
Marco:
And that kind of thing totally works.
Marco:
People will be fooled, slashed, buy into it.
Marco:
The question is, I think, not whether this distraction-based naming will work, but...
Marco:
what will the actual prospects be like afterwards?
Marco:
And this is where, you know, like what John was saying a minute ago, I have been rambling for a while, probably much longer than a minute ago, what John was saying many minutes ago, last time I let anybody else talk, was, you know, that Facebook is not great at creating this kind of thing.
Marco:
And that's pretty true.
Marco:
You know,
Marco:
The idea of creating a social network for broadcast purposes, where Instagram is kind of broadcast.
Marco:
You are putting stuff out there for everyone to see and hope that everyone sees you and gives you lots of likes.
Marco:
That's a different thing than...
Marco:
A, creating social private rooms, which is kind of what the metaverse, I think, is probably more likely to become if it becomes a thing.
Marco:
And B, workplace uses, which are totally different.
Marco:
In the workplace, Facebook is likely to get stomped all over by Microsoft.
Marco:
We've seen time and time again what happens to useful workplace tools.
Marco:
Microsoft makes their version, and it usually wins because it's built into everything else, and they have all these integrations, and they have great distribution and sales channels.
John:
It's because the companies are already paying Microsoft.
John:
That's why they win.
John:
Microsoft gets companies into deals where they pay whatever it is, whatever the tractor is for the day.
John:
Probably it's still Exchange, but it could be Word and Excel and Office.
John:
The number of big companies that aren't already paying some package deal to Microsoft is probably small.
John:
And once you're paying some kind of package deal to Microsoft, the way Microsoft wins is they just say, oh, our competitor to X is now part of that thing you're already paying for.
John:
And then so someone sees that and they say, oh, well, why would we ever pay Slack X number of million dollars a year when for zero additional dollars a year we can get Teams?
John:
And all their employees say, well, it's because Teams is terrible and Slack is better.
John:
And then they say, yeah, but zero dollars.
John:
And you can guess how that argument goes.
Casey:
So very quickly, I'm in a Slack with a bunch of people that I used to work with a couple of jobs ago, like a free Slack.
Casey:
And I am watching this unfold from the sidelines as we speak because all the employees really like Slack.
Casey:
The company's been on Slack.
Casey:
This was after I left.
Casey:
But, you know, they went to Slack after I left.
Casey:
And all the employees, all the rank and file love it.
Casey:
But the bean counters are looking at teams and saying, well, we get teams for free.
Casey:
So guess what they're doing?
Casey:
They're switching to teams.
Casey:
It's exactly what you just said, John.
Casey:
And it's just hilarious because I'm on the sidelines with my bucket of popcorn watching this all go down.
Casey:
And it's literally word for word exactly what you said.
John:
It's not like Microsoft doesn't have anything in VR.
John:
They got HoloLens, the AR stuff.
John:
Microsoft is better.
John:
The things you brought up is like consumer enterprise.
John:
Facebook is not good in the enterprise.
John:
That's arguably one of the reasons why they need the name changes because you try to bring Facebook into an enterprise.
John:
Facebook is what your employer wants to make sure you're not doing at work because Facebook equals goofing off.
John:
Facebook does not equal working.
John:
So there's...
John:
If a Facebook enterprise sales team lands at your company, they're like, we don't want our employees having anything to do with Facebook.
John:
And they said, no, no, no, it's for work.
John:
It's like Facebook.
John:
It's like we don't want Facebook for work.
John:
No, it's like you're in a meeting room.
John:
They have to come under a different name.
John:
Meta could be that name, but the whole idea of the rebranding, you have to have something behind that brand.
John:
I don't think you can just rename the Facebook account to the Meta account.
John:
It won't do anything.
John:
You need to have a product that people want, or at least your version of a product that people want.
John:
Teams is a version of Slack, right?
John:
People already wanted Slack.
John:
Oh my God, my voice is dying.
Casey:
I was going to say, holy smokes, my dude.
Casey:
Are you sick or are you just gravelly today?
Marco:
You got to invest in a humidifier up there.
Marco:
It's getting cold.
John:
I'm extremely gravelly tonight.
John:
I apologize for being gravelly.
John:
Marco will have a filter that will fix this.
Marco:
You know, that's optimistic.
John:
People already wanted Slack, but...
John:
Teams, you can just say, we're like that thing you already want, but it's our version of it, right?
John:
With the metaverse, someone has to make a version of the metaverse that people want.
John:
Then you can compete and say, oh, here's our version of the metaverse.
John:
And then Facebook is not on great footing either, because they could say,
John:
Well, there's multiple versions of the metaverse that people want.
John:
Why would I buy the one from Facebook, a company with no track record of serving the enterprise?
John:
Right.
John:
And consumers would say, why would I want the version of the metaverse that's from that privacy invading company with all these congressional hearings?
Marco:
And also, even the concept of one metaverse for everyone to use between work and play and everything, I think that's never going to happen.
Marco:
We already see what happens with technology and the enterprise.
Marco:
Your business gives you their email address with your name prefixed on it.
Marco:
You have their chat app.
Marco:
You have their collaboration app.
Marco:
You have their tools.
Marco:
You get issued one of their computers and one of their phones locked down to their policies.
Marco:
They don't want you to...
Marco:
to have your Facebook or meta personality thing in a metaverse to come in to be your business metaverse icon, whatever these things are called.
Marco:
They don't want that, even if something like this gets off the ground, and that's a big if, but even if something like this gets off the ground in the consumer or social spaces,
Marco:
You're not going to get to use that at work.
Marco:
You're going to have to use the crappy Microsoft version at work.
Marco:
It's never going to be one giant metaverse where everyone's getting along and all these systems somehow interoperate, which that's a whole other thing.
Marco:
Getting to that for a moment, if we can.
Marco:
Did you watch the Facebook content video about this?
Casey:
I did not.
Marco:
I got through about five minutes of it before I bailed out.
Casey:
See, and that's why I didn't.
Casey:
It's because I had a strong assumption that I wouldn't make it long.
Marco:
But it was, if you remember back to the 90s, and do you remember seeing all these concept animation, 3D animation videos about the information superhighway and how amazing the internet would be?
Marco:
Oh, sure.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's all this like utopia vision of what we'll be able to do with technology.
Marco:
Isn't this amazing?
Marco:
Look at how great this is.
Marco:
And this will all work fantastically somehow.
Marco:
And it will all be funded somehow.
Marco:
And what you actually see in technology is we do have some standards that interoperate.
Marco:
We have some decentralization that happens and that we've built into the system.
Marco:
But that's not the common case.
Marco:
The much more common case in technology is not stuff like the web or email.
Marco:
Open distributed standard protocols are far from the common case.
Marco:
The much more common case is companies make their own walled gardens.
Marco:
They centralize power to themselves, and then they control power, distribution, publishing, as much as possible themselves to make themselves the most money and lock in the most power for themselves.
Marco:
I don't see how we're possibly going to enter a world now, especially now that we have a very mature technology industry and world here.
Marco:
No one is going to launch a brand new open protocol and let everyone else interact with it.
Marco:
It's going to be one company.
Marco:
So let's get Facebook's thing where they're, oh, this is going to – it can't just be – there's going to be protocols.
Marco:
bs facebook is going to do their own thing that works with their own stuff and just like what everyone else does if they have an api of any sort it will only be accessing things that aren't their core lock-in
Marco:
They're not going to give you access to the core stuff that really matters so that you could actually build what you want and have actual interoperability that matters.
Marco:
They're going to let you add value to their platform but not take any back out because that's what every big tech company does with anything new they launch these days.
Marco:
So let's get right out of the way.
Marco:
There is no chance.
Marco:
of some kind of awesome cooperative standard forming where different companies, metaverses will all get to form together and you'll have portability of it.
Marco:
No, that's right out the window.
Marco:
That's like what happens when human selfishness and greed come into the picture, right?
Marco:
Secondly, Facebook's glorious concept video, which frankly I found insufferable, but I'm like, I hate all these people, but...
Marco:
Maybe that's just me being an East Coaster here.
Marco:
But it was all idealized content as well.
Marco:
It's like when you watch one of Apple's group FaceTime demos.
Marco:
Hey, Joe, you want to get lunch?
Marco:
Oh, sure, Lisa.
Marco:
It's so saccharine, just canned.
John:
Everyone's a model in perfect lighting, living in their fabulous house in a scenic place, you know.
Marco:
yeah but you know what you would actually have in one of these metaverse conversations chat roulette yeah first well yeah yeah first of all there's you know genitals flying everywhere right okay that's problem number one see also second life yes right you also have things like technical problems there's marcia she oh she's flickering out again because her internet connection sucks you're muted you're muted no one can hear you you're muted
Marco:
Yeah, it's like the world's largest Zoom call.
Marco:
You're going to have technical issues, people having problems operating the equipment and interfaces that they are given, differences in people's internet connections, differences in how good their equipment is.
Marco:
And so therefore, some people are going to be smoother moving than others.
Marco:
You'll be able to hear them better.
Marco:
I mean, look, look at all the technology we have today.
Marco:
We still can't make a conference call that works.
Yeah.
Marco:
We have infinite technology in the form of things that can make conference calls good and we still can't even do that because of mostly human nature problems or just technical realities of networks and equipment and physics and stuff like that.
Marco:
So we have all sorts of technical problems.
John:
This is a good example though because things like what we call Zoom calls.
John:
Zoom really just sort of fell butt backwards into –
John:
into us being the proprietary eponym for conference calls.
John:
But over the course of the past decade or so, the idea of doing a real-time audio multi-person chat where you're presenting a document has gotten way, way better.
John:
Still crappy, which is your point, but it's gotten way better.
John:
And I think that gives you an example of the kind of timeline we should expect starting from zero right now, more or less, with metaverse type stuff.
John:
And if we're still not done making boring audio only, maybe with some video share a document work stuff work well, we're really far away from 3D persistent world presence stuff.
John:
Really far.
John:
Yeah, I know we have technology to do now.
John:
You can do a cool tech demo or whatever.
John:
But we're like where audio conferencing was a decade ago.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then finally, we get to the content problem.
Marco:
Even if we accept the fact that not everybody's going to be a model in perfect lighting, and even if we accept the fact that everyone's going to have good equipment that's working correctly, that they're operating correctly on a good internet connection, which, again, none of those are actually realistic expectations, but setting all that aside...
Marco:
The big problem with all these concept videos and these lofty ideas is that they don't have any ads and everyone is speaking nicely to everyone else about trivial things that don't matter.
Marco:
And that does not happen in real life.
Marco:
What's going to happen if somebody develops such a thing in any kind of public way outside of corporate environments, if there is some kind of public social metaverse,
Marco:
What's actually going to be there is a whole bunch of people yelling at each other.
Marco:
There's going to be the racists, the haters, all the political arguments, religious arguments, name-calling, swearing, harassment, all the sexual problems.
Marco:
And it's all going to be surrounded by ads constantly being injected everywhere in really weird, creepy places.
Marco:
And not just good ads, but really terrible ads.
Marco:
It's not going to be like, oh, look, what a wonderful Nissan you just virtually drove up in.
Marco:
No, it's going to be, you know, Viagra boner pills and all sorts of other crap that it's going to be, you know, political ads.
Marco:
It's all the garbage that you actually get in online ads all over Facebook.
Marco:
You see that.
Marco:
Just take what Facebook is when you visit Facebook.
Marco:
Take all of those problems and all of that mediocrity and the moral bankrupt people who run it and put all that in 3D.
Marco:
That's what we would actually have.
Marco:
It wouldn't be one of these magical concept videos where all these attractive people are talking about getting lunch.
Marco:
I guess they can't even really do that.
Marco:
But anyway, it wouldn't even be like that.
Marco:
It would be like...
Marco:
Your crappy relatives on Facebook now in 3D, surrounded by 3D dick ads.
Marco:
Like, that's what you'd actually get.
Marco:
These concept videos never consider real-world content, real-world problems, real-world people and their technical problems and their arguments and their greed.
Marco:
that's what we're actually going to have to deal with and those problems are way harder than how to make your avatar have a new suit or whatever or dress up like a bear if you want to that's the easy part the hard part is dealing with people and their crappy technology and their crappy morals and all the ads are going to be funding it all and i don't see how we get
Marco:
From here to that wonderful paradise without first having to figure out how the heck to deal with all that crap in the middle that's mostly unsolvable.
John:
I mean, it's not unsolvable, but that's why I brought up games before.
John:
Lots of online games have the same problem.
John:
They want to make a place where people want to be.
John:
So World of Warcraft, there's not a bunch of ads all over the place.
John:
If they put tons of aggro ads into World of Warcraft, their customer base would revolt.
John:
That's not where they want to be.
John:
They want it to be like World of Warcraft.
John:
They want it to be nice.
John:
There are features that you add or don't add.
John:
Can players push other players off a bridge?
John:
Can players destroy geometry or wreck someone else's castle?
John:
Can they steal items from other people?
John:
games do this all the time because you want to make a place where people feel safe and can build communities and hang out with their friends while not being bothered by their enemies and strangers and like you know but from from something like world of our craft which is you know very close to a metaverse type thing just without the vr all the way down to a web bolton board you know about like uh you know knitting where it has a good set of moderators and a good policy and who can get into it or not and it's essentially a well-maintained community right so
John:
Facebook has some version of that in its groups and Reddit and its subreddits and stuff like that.
John:
But that is the actual work of creating online community.
John:
And technology doesn't change that work.
John:
And what you're getting at is Facebook doesn't do any of that work for the most part.
John:
It's just a free-for-all and it's terrible and there's ads everywhere because that's how they make their money.
John:
The idea of a Facebook that wouldn't put ads in your face because Facebook users would revolt if they saw ads, that's not the culture that Facebook has built.
John:
And arguably, Facebook has billions of users and World of Warcraft has mere probably single digit millions or whatever.
John:
So maybe Facebook has the right approach.
John:
But the problem is with the whole VR presence thing right now, that's a hurdle to get people over.
John:
They don't want to strap something to their face.
John:
It seems weird.
John:
The more immersive it is, the less attractive it is because if you're immersed in a place that is unpleasant, it's worse than scrolling some text that's unpleasant maybe to try to get to a baby picture or something.
John:
If you have to walk through, like literally walk through the muck to try to get to the cute pictures of some baby, that's worse.
John:
It feels worse than scrolling past or clicking on a link or whatever.
John:
The more immersive something gets,
John:
Like, you know, World of Warcraft or Minecraft or, you know, anything like that.
John:
The more it feels like you're really there, the more it has to be pleasant.
John:
Otherwise, you will not want to be there.
Marco:
Well, also, like, yeah, I think that's a good thread to pull on.
Marco:
Like, we don't necessarily want to be more immersed in our work meetings.
Marco:
I know a lot of people who their jobs are basically being in meetings all day, or at least that's a big part of the job.
Marco:
I don't know any of those people, first of all.
Marco:
Setting aside the ergonomics issue, which I'll get to in a second, I don't know a lot of those people who want...
Marco:
those meetings to see more of them and who want to be more engaged in those meetings let's be honest how many people out there have paid 100 attention to the meetings that you're in ever everyone is always looking at their phones or checking their email or they have a background window open or something like you're always multitasking with you know different apps at the same time
Marco:
if you are in a fully immersive VR environment, that's going to get impossible to difficult.
Marco:
It's certainly going to be different.
Marco:
And that's going to be just less pleasant.
Marco:
Again, it's one of these areas where the idealized version of being in a meeting is very different from the actual experience of being in a meeting.
Marco:
And so the issues with that of like, do I really want to be more fully immersed in my company's ideal version of whatever meetings actually, what they think meetings are,
Marco:
but then there's the issue separately from all that suppose this does take off think of the massive number of problems that we have on the physical and ergonomic side right now if you put on an oculus quest so first of all
Marco:
you're going to have problems with battery life.
Marco:
And that's going to be solvable over time with technology.
Marco:
We'll get all sorts of claims of all-day battery life.
Marco:
We'll have another wave of that until we actually get it, if we ever do.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
It's just the technical side of you need the gear that you are using for these very important roles in this theoretical world that this thing exists.
Marco:
That gear then has to last much longer than it does today.
Marco:
Because many people whose jobs involve meetings, they're meetings for many hours a day.
Marco:
And also then if you use this exact same equipment or similar equipment for social things after you're home from work or on the weekends or something, again, we're talking about multi-hour use time here.
Marco:
So the technology first has to get to a point where it even will run for multiple hours without being like tethered to a wall or something like that.
Marco:
And that's its own significant problem.
Marco:
Then you have to worry about things like comfort.
Marco:
Are you actually going to want to wear an Oculus Quest or something like it as it gets smaller over time, hopefully?
Marco:
Are you actually going to want something like that on your face for six hours in a day?
Marco:
I mean, maybe the most hardcore gamers might be okay with that, but most people won't be.
Marco:
That's a pretty big physical ask for people.
Marco:
Even gamers wouldn't do that.
John:
And that's why I was bringing up the things that Facebook is bad at.
John:
And I don't want to bring up Apple specifically, but like...
John:
If you're going to improve the technology that does this, you have to overcome these hurdles.
John:
You'd have to make something that is comfortable to wear all day, that have to be much smaller and much lighter and much more comfortable.
John:
And why would you look to Facebook to do that?
John:
Facebook has never made an amazing consumer hardware product that surpasses others in these type of areas of being like smaller, lighter, better, more attractive, more fun to use.
John:
Facebook has never, ever, ever done that.
John:
Never.
John:
Like, so why would you think they're going to solve like the hardest problem currently facing technology, which is like, how do I, you know, how do I make an ARV or headset that doesn't become a sweaty, uncomfortable ergonomic nightmare?
John:
No one's figured it out yet.
John:
No one has released one.
John:
Like you're saying the best ones out there are good for short periods, but none of them are sort of all day comfortable.
John:
People can and do use desktop computers all day.
John:
People can and do use laptops, iPads, iPhones all day long.
John:
And they have ergonomic problems, too.
John:
It's not like they're, you know, it's a solved problem.
John:
People have ergonomic problems with RSI from typing, from using the mouse, from probably using their phones.
John:
I don't know the ergonomic problems of iPad-only people.
John:
But there are problems with established devices.
John:
But VRAR, there's lots of really difficult problems to solve.
John:
And they are solvable.
John:
And they're solvable with technological improvements.
John:
But I would never look to Facebook to be the company to solve them.
John:
Never, ever, ever.
John:
I would name, like, five other companies that are more likely to figure this out before Facebook does.
Marco:
yeah and and i think those those technical hurdles are are not to be minimized this isn't going to be the kind of thing where everything's going to be really awesome in five years i think we're looking at a much longer time scale than that for things to be really great in this area because we're just so far from it in so many ways the the vr space will likely get there before the ar space will simply because of so many challenges with ar in terms of
Marco:
of like projecting bright enough amounts of light to overcome things like sunlight you know that's that's a hard thing to do whereas if you're if you have a totally enclosed space like in a vr helmet not only can the thing itself be much much bigger than glasses but also you don't have to deal with the external world's interference with your images so the vr i think i think is way closer than ar and will be for some time probably but even even in the vr space you have so many challenges like this
Marco:
Not to mention, long-term ergonomics problems.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
There could be serious concerns with things like your eyes and how they focus.
Marco:
If you're in a VR helmet for many hours a day and you're physically not focusing to a great distance, I mean, I don't know how that works with how your eyes reflect.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm sure it's not as bad as I think it would be, but...
Marco:
There's probably some issues there.
Marco:
Also, VR equipment is kind of specialized, and there's many people to whom it is basically inaccessible for various reasons.
Marco:
Now, this is true of any kind of technology.
Marco:
There are some people who can't afford any of these things we're talking about, so there's a huge money barrier.
Marco:
Even among those who could theoretically afford such things, there are barriers in the physical world.
Marco:
So there are people who can't physically operate laptops or phones or things like that.
Marco:
There are also many people who cannot physically operate VR helmets for various reasons.
Marco:
Lots of, I mean, first of all, if you have any kind of head or neck problem, that's going to be, that's going to probably be an issue for you with just like the, the weight of this thing sitting on you, you know, all day.
Marco:
And, you know, it's going to cause probably some neck strain, at least if not other problems.
Marco:
Also things like skin reactivity, because the skin on people's faces is often very sensitive.
Marco:
So you have to deal with that.
Marco:
You have to deal with motion sickness, which is a massive problem.
Marco:
John probably couldn't use one of these things for a very long time.
Marco:
I can't even use the Quest.
Marco:
I don't usually have motion sickness, but the Quest is not great for me in that way.
Marco:
I have to stop using it after a pretty short time.
Marco:
We are so far from these kind of things even being universally applicable or universally usable for what they are.
Marco:
let alone considering what about the whole new classes of people and conditions that make these things hard or impossible to use at all?
Marco:
And how do we include those people in this brand new big world if this is going to be really important to the way business and socializing are done?
Marco:
So there are so many massive hurdles to overcome here, some of which I think will be overcome in time, but many of them probably won't be.
Marco:
And so I just – I don't see how the real world with actually the people that we have, the people that we're stuck with, I don't know how we get to anything like what Facebook has proposed here with this metaverse concept.
Marco:
Now, we might get to other things, but I think it's going to be –
Marco:
Kind of similar to what we have now, as we were saying earlier.
Marco:
I think it's going to be fragmented.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of private entities that try to make their own little metaverses, I guess.
Marco:
Is that even a thing?
Marco:
Is that an oxymoron?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's going to be way less cool, less fun, and much more of a grind than we think it is.
Marco:
Because what we're actually doing is making the world's greatest conference call.
Marco:
And I don't know a lot of people who really are dying to get there.
John:
I'm pretty confident that all the technical barriers can be overcome with time.
John:
A long time, but I feel like they're all tractable.
John:
But I don't have faith that Facebook's going to be the one to do it.
John:
And all the things you brought up about how far we are from it brings up the – I don't know if this is a –
John:
thing that I made up or it's just a phrase that I remember the cynics dilemma of like when someone like Facebook gives a presentation like the metaverse thing the cynics dilemma is and it comes up with politics a lot too is does the person saying this really believe what they're saying or
John:
Or do they, like everyone else who's listening, understand how big, how much BS it is and they're saying it for strategic reasons, right?
John:
And the reason it's the cynic dilemma is neither one of those answers is comforting because if they really believe it, it's scary because they're like clueless or like, you know, you know,
John:
high on their own supply and believing their own BS.
John:
But if they don't believe it and are just saying it cynically to get the end effect they want, they're just villains, right?
John:
So everything we've just said about all the difficulties of VR and how Facebook has not historically...
John:
been the type of company to tackle these problems and defeat them and it's not particularly well positioned to succeed in any of the areas that it talks about like we can all see that and if they're you know setting aside what I said before by Facebook being smart enough to realize that Facebook is not forever and they should start working on the next thing I really hope that they don't believe that
John:
And, you know, in any kind of reasonable timeline, all that crap they put in that video is going to both come to fruition and also be as successful as they dream it is.
John:
Because they could next year have all the stuff that is in that video, but no one will use it.
John:
Like, it's not going to attract users because it's not attractive yet.
John:
The hardware is bad.
John:
The software is bad.
John:
People don't want to do all the things we just said, right?
John:
Surely they know that.
John:
Like, they're not like, oh, the stars in their eyes.
John:
And I think, I really hope, like...
John:
If I had to put money, I would say they understand how much, you know, how far they are from that reality.
John:
But they're saying this now because they want to start down the long path of a sort of like a long term rebranding and escaping from the toxic Facebook brand.
John:
you know letting the old people be you know i don't i don't honestly i don't understand what the strategy is but it's like this is step one of eight billion and mark zuckerberg will only be there to see it if he like finds some life extension thing to let him live to be 500 years old or whatever but they're starting down that path right
John:
But I can't I can't I don't believe that anyone in the company really thinks that in five years we'll have, you know, multiple billions of users in the metaverse.
John:
Right.
John:
And because it just it's just not realistic.
John:
Like we're so far from that.
John:
There are so many problems to be solved.
John:
Facebook has not solved them.
John:
Even when Apple had basically solved the problems of like, how do we get a smartphone, a touchscreen smartphone into the hands of everyone in the world?
John:
Technically speaking, they'd cracked that with the introduction of the iPhone.
John:
It wasn't just a concept video.
John:
They had the product.
John:
And even then, if you would ask them, how confident are you
John:
that in five years, that this will be a world-changing phenomenon.
John:
They'd be like, well, we think it might be, but they're not entirely sure.
John:
And they had the product.
John:
They literally had it.
John:
It wasn't like they had an idea for a product or a concept.
John:
They'd figured it out.
John:
The whole phone is a screen.
John:
You move stuff around with your fingers.
John:
That was it.
John:
Right.
John:
And even then, I think it would be hard to find someone who is confident that Facebook has nothing except for like a gaming VR headset and a cheaper version of it that nobody wants to be in for eight hours a day in meetings.
John:
And they're like, here's this vision of the future.
John:
It's like just I have to believe that they don't actually think that that's a thing.
John:
And so this entire dog and pony show is insane.
John:
hey look over here like we wouldn't it be cool if this was the future i mean yeah i guess and we're gonna do it uh-huh all right yeah okay sure like it's just it just seems like a it just seems like a distraction like the worst kind of distraction i keep bouncing back and forth but like okay so it's a distraction in their villains but maybe they really believe it and they're dumb but no it's a distraction in their villains but they really believe it they're delusional and you know neither choice is good um
John:
And, you know, you get Apple over here who's saying nothing, but internally working on all these same technologies, which we've mentioned several times.
John:
It's a smart thing for companies like Apple to be doing, because if you get this right, it could be transformative.
John:
But kind of like Apple's car stuff, apparently they haven't gotten it right yet.
John:
Because, you know, all we have all we have in the outside world from Apple is, you know, AR kit and the VR stuff, which they're slowly working on and they build into our iPads and phones.
John:
And it's cool for placing furniture in your room and, you know, all that stuff like they're making headway.
John:
But Apple is not putting out concept videos about their amazing, you know, AR VR headset.
John:
It's just all internal.
John:
And if they ever think it's ready to be a product, they'll release it.
John:
And so far it hasn't been.
John:
And so just this Facebook thing, it's like, it doesn't make me feel good on many, many different levels.
John:
The only thing that makes me feel good about it is my fairly high confidence that Facebook is not going to be the company to pull this off.
John:
But as I said before, if any other company pulls it off, Facebook is well positioned to say, okay, let's do that and leverage our billions of users into the dominant metaverse.
John:
Like, like Margaret was saying, like, yeah,
John:
They'll all want to have their own.
John:
And we just have to hope that it doesn't turn out like YouTube, where there's one dominant company that controls the entire thing.
John:
Or Facebook, one dominant company that controls all social networking or whatever.
John:
We complain about the app stores, but at least we have Android and Apple.
John:
We have two.
John:
That's so much better than the YouTube scenario or the Facebook scenario.
John:
And the only things that we have in this world that are good are things that...
John:
Like the web, the platform that nobody owns, right?
John:
Email, the web, all the things that were created before the big tech companies came along, continue to exist and continue to weave everything together.
John:
But we've been through this enough times now that we know all the bad ways this can turn out.
John:
And it remains to be seen if we can ever have another good thing.
John:
by itself like dark but you know like easy twitter's doing like the twitter blue thing or not the twitter blue thing was it the blue sky thing what is it called where they're like want to make open open protocols for something like twitter and like i don't understand what their end game there is but like occasionally there are high-minded ideas of like well you know imagine if youtube said well you did here at youtube we control online video
John:
But we envision a world where one company doesn't control online video and we want to sort of make an open network of, you know, video sharing and like, no, you would never do that.
John:
Why would why would they do that?
John:
And Twitter Twitter's effort for what is it called?
John:
Project Blue Sky or something.
John:
Seems like they're saying we want to make kind of like an open interoperable protocol for doing stuff like Twitter does.
John:
So that, you know, if someday Twitter dies as a company or gets acquired or crumbles or who knows what happens to it, still somewhere out there in the universe will be a bunch of interconnected things that work kind of like Twitter that's not owned and controlled by one company.
John:
But just great.
John:
But I, you know, that hasn't actually happened.
John:
And who knows if it ever will.
John:
And I don't know how cynical that that effort is.
John:
But the metaverse stuff, you know, talking about how it's going to be interoperable protocols and everything.
John:
what's going to make that happen the only thing that ever makes stuff like that happen are is like individuals uh with i don't know what does the individuals have i'm not gonna say integrity uh high-minded ideals uh individuals with both control and high-minded ideals who are able to make it happen just because they think it's the right thing to do
John:
arguably that's the worst that's the worst thing about facebook arguably facebook is one of the few companies where that could actually happen because there is literally one person who if he had high-minded ideals could bring them to fruition unfortunately that person is mark zuckerberg and he does not have any high-minded ideals so what he is making happen is not any of those things now he talks about it in the metaverse like oh maybe that's what i want or whatever but his actions say no that's not
John:
what's going to happen, right?
John:
Most of the other companies have boards of directors and other people who, you know, who don't have dominant, uh, unwavering control.
John:
Facebook does, which I think is the source of most of the sort of harm in the world from Facebook comes from the fact that it is controlled by a single person and no single person should have that much power for, you know, for that long over that many people.
John:
Like even if Mark Zuckerberg was a saint and he's not,
John:
You would never want a single person to have that much power.
John:
The reason kings are bad, right?
John:
Imagine a king who is the king of a kingdom with multiple billions of people.
John:
It's not good.
John:
So I really don't know if we're, I don't want to get it for whatever good things again.
John:
I really don't know how in the current climate we produce a good on the same level as
John:
Email, the web, Unix, most of which happened either because of high-minded deals or by accidents of history or both.
John:
Because everything that's sort of been deliberately done since then has benefited individual companies or sometimes individual people to the detriment of most others.
Casey:
You know, I don't disagree with mostly anything that you guys just said, but I don't know.
Casey:
I'm stupefied that I'm the first person to make this reference of the three of us.
Casey:
But I keep coming back to the Knowledge Navigator, which, in retrospect, is preposterous in almost every way.
Casey:
but i don't begrudge apple and if you're not familiar it's this like super campy video from like 87 or thereabouts um where apple was pitching what depending on how critically you view this could have been an ipad or could have been something that was nothing like the ipad except kind of like the ipad um but anyways it was a preposterous thing for apple to release it was it was a moonshot of a moonshot of a moonshot in in
Casey:
Like I said, if you think critically about it, not a lot of it came true.
Casey:
But I do think there's something to be said for sticking your flag in the ground and saying, this is where we're aiming.
Casey:
And again, I don't really love the idea of Facebook being in control of my life in that way, any more than one could argue it already is.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't necessarily begrudge them for planting the flag and saying, this is what we think the future looks like, and this is where we're headed, and this is what we want to do.
Casey:
And especially in the last 18 months, where I can only speak for myself, but Declan did get his first shot this past Friday, and I'm super excited about that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
um the pandemic is far from over for the list family uh you know michaela is not vaccinated and we're still not out in the world like many many many other people are so for this last year and a half it would have been pretty cool to have some sort of vr presence and experience uh in to to offset particularly in 2020 you know before i got my vaccination to offset the
Casey:
not being able to see anyone.
Casey:
And, you know, back before we understood that, well, as long as you're not a complete buffoon, you know, as long as you're outside, it's mostly safe, generally speaking.
Casey:
So, you know, for most of 2020, we didn't see anyone.
Casey:
And that was kind of our own choice.
Casey:
But, you know, it would have been nice to have something like this situation
Casey:
this phantom metaverse to be able to interact with and yeah we did some zoom calls with people and facetime calls with people but it's not the same and i haven't experienced vr in any reasonable capacity i haven't experienced it since i was like 10 and you had to stand on this like platform that had like a ring around it and put on a headset that was almost so heavy i couldn't lift my head up um and it was so you know it wasn't even pixelated it was just you know wireframes if i remember right it was terrible but amazing at the same time
Casey:
i don't begrudge meta facebook whatever the moon shot and i think in the same way that i look fondly on the knowledge navigator all while also saying it was stupid and campy i wouldn't be surprised having not even seen this video if we look fondly at oh look how adorable we were look what we thought where we thought we were going and yeah we ended up taking two right turns three left turns and turning around three times but
Casey:
You can see how that path started way back in 2021 with that ridiculously campy video.
Casey:
And I don't think that's so terrible.
John:
I don't think it started there.
John:
I hope no one credits the Facebook metaverse with starting any of this stuff.
John:
But no, I think the big difference in the knowledge in I would get a video is for all its silliness,
John:
the Knowledge Navigator video was made by a company that you could say, yeah, if I could like magically fast forward Apple, this company, 50 years, 100 years, I could see them making a product like this because this looks like the kind of product that we know Apple makes.
John:
Apple makes these amazing products that are like the Knowledge Navigator, but with like older tech, right?
John:
That's exactly what Apple makes.
John:
Hardware, software products that wow us.
John:
And so when they make a video, even if it's something like Knowledge Navigator that has no bearing on any active product efforts whatsoever, it's worse than Metaverse.
John:
Because Metaverse, like Facebook is working on stuff related to this.
John:
It's not that far away.
John:
It is technically plausible.
John:
Knowledge Navigator was not technically plausible by any stretch of the imagination.
John:
There was no product inside Apple that looked anything like that.
John:
Even the Newton did not spring from Knowledge Navigator, right?
John:
It was just pure fantasy.
John:
But when you looked at it, you would say...
John:
Yeah, like if this was a sci-fi novel and it was the far future and Apple still existed, this is what Apple would be making.
John:
If we look at Facebook today and we said, okay, if I could fast forward Facebook 100 years, 200 years, what kind of thing would Facebook be making?
John:
We would envision something like from, what do you call it?
John:
uh the mike judge movie idiocracy oh yeah ow my balls with all the ads all around the thing that's what we would envision facebook making in 100 years we would never envision them making the metaverse because that's not the type of thing that facebook makes we think about facebook we think about the blue app and we say okay what does the blue app look like in 100 years in 50 years or whatever and nobody says oh it looks like the metaverse and that's what facebook is trying to do trying to say
John:
stop extrapolating from where everything you know of Facebook and saying what that would be like.
John:
We're going to change.
John:
We're going to be a different company.
John:
We're going to make this other thing.
John:
And I look and I say, no, you're not.
John:
Maybe someone else will, or maybe you'll copy them when they do, or maybe you'll buy them when they do.
John:
But I look at that and I don't see how you get from where you are to that.
John:
Whereas with knowledge navigator, I say, yeah, I remember watching that and saying that totally looks like some cool product.
John:
Apple would have in the future.
John:
It's kind of hilarious to look at though, because if you think of the things that did and didn't come to fruition, like the,
John:
the massive size of the camera parts.
John:
Like if they had made the Knowledge Navigator video where the cameras were invisible pinholes, we'd be like, that's so stupid, they didn't even try, like that's impossible, right?
John:
Look, here we are today with these tiny little devices with amazing screens with better resolutions and smaller borders than that stupid Knowledge Navigator, including like flexible bendable things without a crease where the hinge is and everything.
John:
that stuff we've got all that already i don't know how long ago knowledge navigator was because i can't do decade math because i always end up dropping a decade or two but like the the gigantic camera and microphone setup and the pinstripes and all this other stuff our actual technology is so much better than they envisioned right on the other hand the the one part is like oh an intelligent photorealistic assistant that works well we can't do that worth a damn marco can't even get his cylinders to play music so you know it's just
John:
The typical sort of future thing where like in some ways people can't, they can't allow for the things that are really going to progress.
John:
Like the idea that cameras and microphones would get so much smaller and so much higher quality to basically disappear.
John:
If you tried to do that in sci-fi, you know, 50 years ago, people would reject it and say, well, that's impossible.
John:
You're just making up fantasy, right?
John:
Whereas if you take something and just make it incrementally better, like, oh, a personal assistant that can do what you ask.
John:
Like, well, today we have computers that we can talk to and they can understand our speech.
John:
And so probably in 20 years, they'll be able to be like little people.
John:
It's like self-driving cars all over again.
John:
Yeah.
John:
people are notoriously bad like picking the things that will advance rapidly and the things that won't because they don't understand how hard the how relatively hard the problems are they can't look at like what do sensors and camera technologies and integrated circuits look like and if we extrapolate those technologies in a boring linear way over time will we get tiny cameras that are so small that you can't even see them
John:
versus if we extrapolate how well this little remote control car can make it through a maze in a lab to a real full-size car on our current roads there is no straight line path between those two things and so if you look at the knowledge navigator think about the parts of it that they got hilariously wrong like that this is an amazing future technology with some stuff in it that
John:
like honestly it was only like one or two years uh worse than what they had then and in particular screens cameras microphones batteries and the size of the devices all of that they got hilariously wrong because the ipad stomps all over the knowledge navigator in every way except there's no little guy with the bow dialer stuff for you
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Mack Weldon, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join and preserve podcasting, which is one of these awesome things that we still have at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
May I tell you a quick story about how I'm an idiot?
Marco:
I would love to hear this.
Casey:
It's my favorite kind of story.
Casey:
The other day, Erin was out with Declan at an outdoor birthday party, and she was returning home, and she got home and said to me, oh, you know, my key wouldn't unlock my car.
Casey:
And she has a Volvo XC90.
Casey:
It's a few years old now, and it's a proximity key where you just have to walk up to it, grab the door handle, and then it should open right up.
Casey:
So the first challenge for her, and I didn't know any of this until she got home.
Casey:
So she obviously made it home successfully without my intervention.
Casey:
But she said, well, I had to figure out how to get my car.
Casey:
Now, most cars, and the Volvo is one of them, there is some sort of physical key like you would have had 10 years ago or given –
John:
uh john's choice of cars john probably still has one um but it was a physical key that you could put in some sort of keyhole to actually unlock the automobile you know my you know the valet key doesn't do that i was trying to give the valet key to like the dealership but i realized i can't lock my car then because the valet key will not unlock the car from the outside i guess that's kind of the point but i thought it would just not open the trunk but it won't even open the car doors that seems backwards to me
Marco:
So if the valet accidentally locks your car, they can't get back in?
John:
Right.
John:
But you can't lock the car with... The valet key doesn't have... There's no remote on it, so you can't lock the car with it.
Marco:
You can't, like, lock it and then close the door?
John:
No, it's not, like, the safety thing that keeps you from locking things out.
John:
Like, you can't... If you physically try to do that and you close the door, like, it's got weird locks.
John:
It won't let you...
John:
I guess, could you lock the key?
John:
I don't think you could even lock the valet key in the car.
John:
I don't think it's possible for you to do because I think if you get out of the car and try to like lock the door handle thingy, it's weird.
John:
But anyway, if you're outside the car with the valet key, there's nothing you can do to make the doors on the car lock.
Casey:
So all kidding aside, as much as I'm snarking on you, is it a proximity key or is it a traditional key pop?
John:
No, it's a piece of metal.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
But is there not a keyhole you could stick the valet key into?
John:
Yeah, you can.
John:
You can turn and it does not lock the car.
Casey:
Huh.
John:
That's weird.
John:
It is weird.
John:
But what I'm saying is like having what you're describing, having a physical keyhole that you can put a key into and turn and make things lock.
John:
Like in older, in modern cars, there is an electronic component to that because you got the thing where if you lock the driver's door, all the doors lock.
John:
That's electronics making that happen.
John:
But in older cars without those electronics, what you would have to do is manually lock all the other three doors or whatever doors and then manually lock the driver's door.
John:
You could do that with a dead battery and it would still work.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
And so Erin had to figure out how to get into her own car.
Casey:
And the Volvo has a app that's very well designed, although a little quirky to use.
Casey:
I think it's called like Volvo On Call or something like that, where she could unlock the car remotely.
Casey:
And that's what she did.
Casey:
And I guess, which seems odd to me, but I guess once she got in the car, there was enough juice to transmit to get the proximity ignition portion to work so she could start the car and drive home.
Casey:
But curiously, there wasn't enough to get her car to unlock itself.
Casey:
So as I told her when she got home, well, of the three cup holders in the center of the car, because hashtag America, even though it's a somewhat sweet or somewhat Chinese car, if you put the key in the middle cup holder, even if the battery is just dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, then it will still, using like NFC or something, will be able to turn the car on.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
She gets home and she explains to me, oh, it's not working.
Casey:
I said, okay, it's probably about time we change the battery.
Casey:
And it's one of those typical coin cell, little pancake-y batteries.
Casey:
And I open up her key fob and I pull out the battery in her key fob and I replace it with one that's brand new.
Casey:
And I did this in the kitchen.
Casey:
The garage is right off the kitchen.
Casey:
I left the people door to the garage open and
Casey:
And, you know, I tried to boop-boop on the key fob, you know, just the traditional boop-boop function to unlock or lock the car or whatever, you know, not the proximity portion of it, just a traditional RF, you know, lock or unlock.
Casey:
And it doesn't work.
Marco:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So I think, I forget exactly the order of operations here, but I might have tried a second battery, if I'm not mistaken, second brand new battery, and that didn't work.
Casey:
Huh.
Casey:
So I go and get my key fob, and I verify that it is still working.
Casey:
So it doesn't seem to be the car, we don't think.
Casey:
It's something power or key fob related.
Casey:
And I think, OK, well, this battery definitely works.
Casey:
I'm going to take this battery, and I'm going to put it in Aaron's key.
Casey:
And I do that.
Casey:
And I, at some point I, I saw a piece of plastic kind of appear out of nowhere, which I didn't expect, but we're going to put that aside for a second.
Casey:
And one way or another, I put my battery, I put my battery.
Casey:
That's what we in the business call foreshadowing kids.
Casey:
I put, I put my battery into her key fob and I try to boop, boop, and it doesn't work.
Casey:
So then I put the battery back in my key fob, the one that was working three minutes ago.
Casey:
And that doesn't work.
Yeah.
Casey:
So I have now murdered two key fobs in the span of about five minutes.
Casey:
Neither of them work.
Casey:
I have verified that there's no plastic on the batteries.
Casey:
The batteries are dated for like 2027 or something like that.
Casey:
I have murdered both of her keys in the span of five minutes.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
We conclude this was not this past Sunday night, but Sunday prior.
Casey:
So we conclude, all right, what we're going to do is we're still transporting Declan to school because we're not really comfortable with him being on the bus.
Casey:
So I'm going to take Declan to school in the morning and I'm going to drive to Volvo with my tail between my legs and explain what happened.
Casey:
So that's what I did.
Casey:
I went to Volvo.
Casey:
I didn't lock her car because I didn't want to have to unlock it using the app or anything.
Casey:
I just parked it right in front of the service bay and said, hey, I went to change these batteries and I done messed up.
Casey:
So would either of you guys like to make a guess or would you rather me just continue and just tell the rest of the story?
Casey:
But what do you think happened?
John:
Confusing positive and negative on the batteries.
Yeah.
Casey:
Fair question, but no, I was not.
Marco:
The fact that a bit of plastic broke off, is it the wrong kind of battery?
Marco:
Is it too big?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I like to think I'm smarter than that, but I'm probably not, and so it's a fair question.
Marco:
Well, because of all those, like the CR2032s and all, there's a whole bunch of very similar-looking batteries that are different physical sizes.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
No, that was not it.
Casey:
So I tell my tale of woe to the very, very kind person of Volvo of Richmond, and he says, ah, yes, this has happened before.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
I said, well, okay, before you do anything, how much are...
Casey:
Two new keys.
Casey:
He said about $400 each.
Casey:
Stupendous, okay.
Casey:
Each?
Casey:
Each.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
And I said to Aaron the night before, I said, we're probably in for $1,000.
Casey:
I don't know what I did, but I bet we're in for $1,000.
Casey:
And so it would have been somewhere between $500 and $1,000, closer to $1,000 than not.
Casey:
But he says, don't worry.
Casey:
This has happened before.
Casey:
In fact, it is not unusual for somebody from Batteries Plus or one of those battery-only retail stores to come in here and say, I need a new key because I've broken my customer's key.
Casey:
And so then Battery Plus has to pay $400 for a new key.
Casey:
So what had happened was when I was ejecting the coin cell battery.
Casey:
Now, mind you, I have changed the battery in both of these key fobs before.
Casey:
I'm almost sure of it because we got the car in mid 2017 and it's now four years later.
Casey:
God, is it really four years old?
Casey:
Wow, it is.
Casey:
So I've changed these batteries at least once each.
Casey:
But as it turns out,
Casey:
Even though, in my personal opinion, the Volvo XC90 is a very well-designed car, and I really, really love it.
Casey:
I really recommend it if you're interested in one.
Casey:
But nevertheless, the clips that hold the coin cell battery in and onto the contacts within the key...
Casey:
are literally one to two millimeters wide.
Casey:
Like I cannot, I cannot, I guess, understate how small they are.
Casey:
I mean, I can't overstate how small they are.
Casey:
And apparently in the process of changing the battery, I broke both of the clips.
Casey:
I broke clips on both of the keys, I should say.
John:
Were you in a hurry?
John:
What are you just wrenching these batteries out of there?
Casey:
No, I didn't.
Casey:
They wouldn't come out, so I levered them out.
John:
So you just used some more force.
Casey:
Yep, and then he called me Clarkson.
Casey:
So he says, we used to fold up pieces of paper to do this, but then Joe over there came up with a better solution.
Casey:
So he walks a few faces down the big long desk, goes in a drawer, comes back with those little circle stickers you would use to put a price at a tag sale, you know what I'm thinking of?
Casey:
And he takes three or four of them,
Casey:
puts them on the underside of the battery door, and then sticks the door back on the key, works no problem.
Casey:
Does the same thing to the other one.
Casey:
I was out the door in maybe 5, 10 minutes and spent $0, and I am forever indebted to the service department at Volvo of Richmond.
Casey:
So five-star service.
Casey:
I very much appreciated them.
Casey:
But for the span of about, I don't know, 12 hours, I really thought I was out $1,000 because I apparently am too strong for my own good and manhandled those batteries a little too effectively.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Not instill confidence in the design of the rest of this car that the inside of the key thing is designed to be so incredibly breakable.
John:
Agreed.
John:
I also don't know.
John:
I would love to see what this thing looks like because I can't decide whether it's made like delicate glass on the inside or you're just a brute who just goes in there like a bull in a china shop and just rips out the battery.
Casey:
I think it's a little of column A, a little of column B. I haven't verified this video, but I'll put a YouTube video of changing it
Casey:
uh into the show notes and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be able to find a time stamp right now to show you the clips i'm talking about but i think it is both the clips truly are extremely extremely small like hilariously small but i also think on top of that i manhandled them and and ended up snapping them
Casey:
Uh, so it, it looks like it's somewhere in the range of two minutes, 30 seconds or thereabouts that, um, that these clips are making appearance in the YouTube video I put in the show notes and in the chat room.
Casey:
But yeah, for, for a fleeting moment, I thought it was an idiot.
Casey:
And the funny thing is I agree with you that this seems like a really crummy design.
Casey:
I think it is a crummy design.
Casey:
However,
Casey:
On my Golf R, if I were to need to, quote unquote, break into it because, you know, the battery is dead on my key fob, I need to actually like physically remove a portion of the trim on the door handle in order to expose the keyhole that I would need to use.
Casey:
Whereas on Aaron's car, when you pull... It's one of those grabby door handles, you know what I mean?
Casey:
So when you pull the door handle out, the keyhole is right there in the space that's been exposed by pulling the door handle out.
Casey:
It's very hard to verbally explain.
Casey:
But my point is, you don't have to remove part of the frigging car in order to get to the keyhole.
Casey:
You do have to disassemble the entire key to get the key out, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
So yeah, the car's design...
Casey:
Very, very good.
Casey:
The key fob design, terrible.
Casey:
Absolutely terrible.
Casey:
But I thought you two would enjoy this tale of woe.
John:
Yeah, I just looked at it.
John:
The thing that's bad about design isn't the fact that the little grabby things are delicate.
John:
It's the fact that the grabby things are necessary.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Because, like, the lid, you know, the lid that goes on it, why, you know, why do you... That should be sufficient to keep the battery in place.
John:
Yeah, I agree.
John:
Like, most of the things that take a battery, you put the battery in, you put the little...
John:
yeah it's it's very silly but anyway the person in this video did not take it out particularly carefully and also did it without breaking it so i don't know quite what you were doing yeah i don't know apparently i was not being patient is what i was doing but uh you know did you use any tools to take the battery out or just your fingernails yeah i took the i took the like screwdriver i had my hand to to open up the battery door and knocked it right out so there that that's yeah the power of the lever