Computers Can Do Things
Casey:
All right, we should move on before I get cranky again.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Have another donut.
Casey:
Move right along.
Casey:
I'll have another donut.
Casey:
If you don't understand that, atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
Moving right along, we had talked last episode.
Casey:
I think the context was you jump-starting the FJ via the Model S, and we were curious if that was possible.
Casey:
What would the mechanism for that be?
Casey:
And Jesper Welts wrote in.
John:
I don't even know where the battery is.
John:
That's why YouTube exists.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So Jesper Welts wrote in and pointed us to a video wherein you have to dismantle half the Tesla in order to get to the battery terminals, but it is possible.
Casey:
Big Tesla energy there.
Casey:
And then somebody else whose name I don't have in front of me, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Jameson sent us a second video.
Casey:
Each of these videos is like two and a half minutes, so they're quick to watch.
Casey:
And this reminded me of like a year ago, James May of Top Gear and the Grand Tour.
Casey:
He has a Model S among his many other cars.
Casey:
And and he apparently at the beginning of lockdown basically stopped driving it as basically all of us did.
Casey:
We just stopped driving.
Casey:
And especially in the UK where they really took lockdown seriously, where they actually
Casey:
They had actual lockdown, not what Americans think of as lockdown.
Casey:
Anyways, so the Model S sat for a long time, Marco, and it was not on any sort of charger of any kind.
Casey:
And if I recall correctly, I watched this video like a week ago.
Casey:
He went to get in the car, but because the door knobs, the door handles are inside the car until you walk up to it, he couldn't get in the car because the door handle knobby things wouldn't pop out.
Casey:
So then he assumed that the key fob battery was broken or dead or flat in Britishisms.
Casey:
And it was not.
Casey:
So, you know, he put in a different battery and that didn't do it.
Casey:
Come to find out that, you know, there's two different battery systems in a Tesla, or at least in the Model S. There's the 12-volt battery and then the big, big battery.
Casey:
And it would appear, if I understand things right, and now I'm going to get everyone writing me.
Casey:
Trust me, I really don't care, everyone.
Casey:
But anyways, one way or another, the big battery doesn't exactly always totally charge the little battery.
Casey:
And so what he had to do in order to get into his car was he needed to pop the frunk.
Casey:
And in order to do that, you needed to crack open the wheel well trim in the front of the car on each side and squeeze your hand in there and pull a cable on each side.
Casey:
That would let you get the frunk open.
Casey:
Once you get the frunk open, you have to remove four different panels and
Casey:
A smattering of ducting.
Casey:
And then eventually at that point, you can actually get to the terminals.
Casey:
So you can put a charger, like a trickle charger, which we talked about last week, like a trickle charger onto the battery to get enough juice so that you can actually open the driver's side door.
Casey:
Excellent work.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
Excellent job, Tesla.
Casey:
Just great work there.
Marco:
Yeah, I have heard from a number of Tesla owners problems with the 12-volt battery.
Marco:
Over time, they have seemingly improved this with software updates and things like that.
Casey:
That's also big Tesla energy.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But yeah, definitely...
Marco:
So the problem is, like, you know, the way electric cars use or don't use 12-volt batteries is totally different from the way gas cars use them.
Marco:
The batteries aren't necessarily designed for the kind of use electric cars are using them for.
Marco:
Because this, again, this is not the battery that they're using to power the wheels.
Marco:
This is just the battery they use to, like, do all the accessory stuff in the car.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Many people have like the 12-volt battery just totally die within a few months of buying a brand new electric car because it's just – it's not – it's failing because the usage pattern is totally wrong for it or whatever.
Marco:
And this is actually a problem that other electric car manufacturers have, and this is like – this is something that Tesla has finally –
Marco:
pretty much solved i think um but then you start seeing problems problem reports of this from other car manufacturers who have launched more recent electric car models like that they're all going through this stupid learning curve of learning like wait a minute these batteries are totally wrong for this purpose um and and we don't really have a good solution for that except that i think tesla now does a little bit smarter management of its charge level in software
John:
Yeah, these videos show, you know, jump-starting a gasoline-powered car from your Tesla.
John:
It's not so bad to get to the battery in some of the cases.
John:
I think one of them shows a Model 3 where it's really just pop off a panel and there are the terminals.
John:
And I like the idea of the person getting into the Tesla and revving the engine, you know, just to make sure there's enough juice.
Casey:
Indeed.
Marco:
Oh, I saw, what's the big Porsche thing that you guys were trying to get me to buy?
Casey:
The Taycan?
Casey:
I always pronounce it wrong.
Casey:
I think that might be wrong as well.
Casey:
Taycan?
John:
I finally saw one in real life.
John:
Really?
John:
I'm surprised it's taking that long.
John:
They're all over the place around here.
Marco:
So first of all, it was basically on the ground.
Marco:
It's a very low car.
Marco:
Way lower than mine appears to be.
Marco:
And second of all, it looked certainly very large.
Marco:
Now, this wasn't right next to my car.
Marco:
This was like I was walking towards the ferry and I saw one coming into the parking lot.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It looked like a I don't know how the dimensions compare, but it looked bigger than my car and it looked very low.
Marco:
So, again, I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe this is just like my perspective at the time, but it looked like something that was probably not going to be a good thing for any of my near future needs.
John:
Your car is two inches longer and it is identical in the other dimensions.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Then this is totally wrong.
Casey:
So money, leaving the money aside.
Casey:
Which is substantial.
Casey:
Which is substantial.
Casey:
Is this even a possibility to you or not even close?
Marco:
I don't even know what my needs are going to be right now with like, you know, beach vehicles and stuff like that.
Marco:
So right now I am not looking to buy any new electric vehicles unless they happen to be like trucks or SUVs at this point.
Marco:
But hopefully in a few years when I no longer am here full time, that will hopefully change things.
John:
I mean, I'm trusting the Google results on this, by the way.
John:
It's eerie how close they are, because this is in inches.
John:
They're literally down to the inch the same, except for the Model S is two inches longer and one inch wider, depending on which trim level you got on the Porsche, I think.
John:
But it's like that's that you can tell when one car is targeting another car when they're like down to the inch, basically the same size.
John:
I wonder if the EQS is similar.
John:
The EQS is much more like the Model S and it's got the lift back as well.
John:
So it was like it's just basically a Mercedes Model S. Is there a substantial difference in ground clearance?
Bye.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I agree with you.
John:
They definitely look lower.
John:
And, of course, the Porsche, because it's a Porsche, you can get with 8,000 different options.
John:
So I'm sure there's one of them that actually is lower.
John:
But maybe the Plaid is lower, too.
John:
It goes into cheetah stance, right?
John:
Doesn't it lower with the air suspension on the Model S when you go into the super fast mode?
Marco:
I think when you're going above 70 miles an hour, it has an option to go extra low.
Marco:
I believe you can set the speed threshold when that happens.
Marco:
But it only goes down like a half inch.
Marco:
It's not a big difference.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
We talked about AirTags in the past and how they can be used for nefarious purposes.
Casey:
And Apple has posted an update on AirTag and unwanted tracking.
Casey:
And Apple has detailed some steps they're going to take in the future in order to make this better.
Casey:
New privacy warnings during AirTag setup that basically says, hey, among other things, it's probably illegal for you to stalk somebody with this.
Casey:
Addressing alert issues for AirPods.
Casey:
So I haven't personally seen this, but apparently it's very common for you to get an alert for an AirPod that's on the Find My network.
Casey:
Or if you're near an AirPod that's on the Find My network that doesn't belong to you, you'll get an alert on your phone.
Casey:
Unknown accessory detected, which is not particularly helpful in the vein of most Apple Airs.
Casey:
And so they're going to fix that and say, hey, there's an AirPods Pro near you or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
There's going to be better support documentation.
Casey:
I'll believe that when I see it.
Casey:
And then additionally, later on this year, they will allow precision finding, even if it's not your AirTag.
Casey:
So this is the thing where you wave your phone around and it'll point an arrow in the direction that the AirTag is.
Casey:
It will display alert with sound.
Casey:
And so I'm going to read a little bit from their post.
Casey:
When AirTag automatically emits a sound to alert anyone nearby of its presence and is detected moving with your phone, iPad, or iPod Touch, we will also display an alert on your device that you can then take action on, like playing a sound or using precision finding if available.
Casey:
This will help in cases where the AirTag may be in a location where it is hard to hear or if the AirTag speaker has been tampered with.
Casey:
Additionally, refining unwanted tracking alert logic.
Casey:
So they're going to, you know, futz around with logic there if they think that you're being tracked.
Casey:
And then finally, tuning the AirTag sound.
Casey:
Currently, iOS users receiving an unwanted tracking alert can play sound to help them find their unknown AirTag.
Casey:
We will be adjusting this tone sequence to use more of the loudest tones and to make an unknown AirTag more easily findable.
Casey:
it's a tough it's a tough thing right because air tags i only have one of them so far and they are super cool and when used as intended it works really well and it's really well done but the problem is people are terrible and people are using them not as intended and they're ruining it for everyone yeah it's like the the better they make it for the people who are using it as intended the the worse it gets for the bad people and vice versa right so as they're trying to make it sort of
John:
Safer, it is getting worse for you, the normal user, right?
John:
It's complete.
John:
It's like security, like security and convenience, right?
John:
The more secure you make it, the less inconvenient it is.
John:
It's difficult.
John:
Like the line I'm trying to walk here in particular with most of these changes is air tags are increasingly not for helping you when your stuff gets stolen.
John:
Because all the stuff that we just described is going to alert the thief that there is an air tag, you know, traveling with them, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's about you losing things, which if someone didn't take them, you just lost them and misplaced them, right?
John:
So it's even further narrowing the use case of like, oh, I'll put this AirTag on, so if someone steals my thing, I'll find it.
John:
No, if they actually steal it, now it's going to be more aggressive about alerting the thief on the thief's iPhone to say, hey, you might not know this, but you're now traveling with somebody else's AirTag.
John:
And they'll be, oh, thank you, phone, and they'll take it off and then have your thing, right?
John:
That's not the use case Apple.
John:
Apple just has to basically say,
John:
If you're looking for something to help you find stolen stuff, this ain't it, right?
John:
Because of the safety concerns, because of it being used for stalking or whatever.
John:
So the use case gets narrower.
John:
It becomes a little bit less convenient, but it also becomes that much slightly more safe.
John:
Yeah, and it is, I think when we talked about this the first time, I give Apple a lot of credit for trying very hard to think of and account for the bad scenarios with this product.
John:
Uh, but it's difficult to think of all the bad scenarios and to know exactly how to tune all these parameters that Casey just read, like how aggressive should it be about this?
John:
What should this sound be?
John:
When should it do this?
John:
Like, and it takes some experience in the real world to figure out the right balance of those things.
John:
So still think it's a definitely a valid product to have, but it's good for people to understand what it can do well and what it can't do.
John:
And I think Apple is moving the right direction by saying even if it makes this less useful for certain cases like stolen items, it's better for it to be safer for more people.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I can see both sides of it.
Marco:
Like, I'm glad they're making this a little bit safer for people.
Marco:
I don't know if it's possible for them to ever make it safe enough that it can't be used in a widespread way for bad people doing bad things.
Marco:
I still question whether it was worth them making this product at all because of that risk and because it really does seem like that's going to have a really hard time being possible.
Marco:
That being said, as a customer of AirTags, for things that I was hoping would get tracked during casual theft, this update is going to make it significantly worse at that.
Marco:
And I'm kind of annoyed about that.
Marco:
I see why they're doing it.
Marco:
And it's probably for the best for the abuse reduction.
Marco:
But as a customer of these things, they're actually making this product worse for me now to the point where it's going to only barely serve the purpose I wanted it to serve.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Having that happen after purchase is kind of crappy as well.
Marco:
So I don't see a great way out of the situation for them.
Marco:
It seems to me that the AirTags are a tough product to not cause problems.
Marco:
And maybe they shouldn't have been released at all.
Marco:
do you think the drunk people will notice when they're stealing your bike that their phone is going off they'll probably just keep going i don't i don't think they're gonna scour your bike for the air tag if they even notice the notification i think it still works for your use case yeah well i've heard the notifications like the audible ones like like the air because the air tag makes a little chiming sound when you when you move it away from its phone for a while because i have one on my wagon that i i pulled a town to get packages and
Marco:
The wagon lives on my deck next to my house.
Marco:
So it is always maybe 20 or 30 feet away from my phone when we're just sitting in the house.
Marco:
That's apparently far enough that it doesn't think the phone is connected to it.
Marco:
So almost every time I go grab the wagon to walk to town, I hear... A little sound coming from the speaker.
Marco:
And even though I am...
Marco:
there with my phone in my pocket like i approached the wagon with my phone in my pocket i grabbed the wagon and i start moving it with the phone in my pocket the phone is often even on with its bluetooth active playing a podcast into my headphones and i'm still hearing because it takes so long to recognize that oh oh the phone is here oh never mind we're okay like so these okay these are already products that like
Marco:
just barely work and so i i i'm a little bit disappointed that they're going to be made worse for my purpose but i think john you are right that considering this is mostly for my use is mostly to solve casual drunk theft um it will still probably work okay enough for that but it is kind of annoying again it's just it's annoying that kind of like tesla they're making my product worse after purchase
John:
Real-time follow-up according to the random results that Google chucks up when you try to do a search and you're too lazy to follow a link.
John:
Model S ground clearance, 4.6 inches.
John:
Porsche Taycan ground clearance, 5 inches.
John:
Again, with the caveats that both of these cars, I think, can change their ride height.
Marco:
Yes, and the Model S, I think, can go up to like 6 point something on the max height.
Marco:
Don't take either one on the beach.
Marco:
No, but I do.
Marco:
I leave.
Marco:
So one thing about Long Island is that it's pretty low across the whole thing, or at least most of it.
Marco:
And so Long Island, like the regular parts of the island where regular suburbs are floods all the time.
John:
Well, if you're near the water, like at no place that I ever lived growing up on Long Island flooded because I was in the middle of the island.
Marco:
Well, that's fair.
Marco:
But yeah, so all these places on the South Shore.
Marco:
So one thing I have to be concerned about is during the biggest flood seasons, which is usually the fall, you have to be careful that if you leave your car parked at the ferry terminal, it might get flooded out.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
so i learned i you know through habit i learned like all right i like the the parking lot is very slightly sloped and so i know like where the tallest part is yeah so i park on the high ground and i raise the air suspension all the way up when i leave the car it's little tippy toes it looks ridiculous like it does not look like like an attractive vehicle in this stance however that extra you know inch might be enough to save my car from being flooded sometimes you gotta get the functional high ground
John:
Oh, God.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
That's a deep cut.
Casey:
I genuinely hope that there is a time that I can come visit y'all on Fire Island because the way you describe it, it seems like everything about this is made to be inconvenient and basically intolerable.
Casey:
And I bet that if I were there, I would say, oh, no, no, no, I totally get it now.
Casey:
But from afar, everything about this sounds terrible.
Casey:
You can't get mail or shipments in a quick way.
Casey:
It's certainly not exactly cheap.
Casey:
You can't drive anywhere, which in some cases is a benefit, not a downside.
Casey:
It randomly floods random hurricanes.
Casey:
But no, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, the play is great.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So actually, it's about to get worse.
Casey:
Oh, and the sound or whatever freezes over, and then you can't get off the island.
Casey:
It's not the sound.
Casey:
Whatever it is.
Casey:
Whatever it is.
Marco:
Okay, so two things.
Marco:
Number one, it's about to get worse in one way, but I'm about to tell you why it's great.
Marco:
But the way it's about to get worse, the very company told us a couple days ago that they're going to cut off all servers to us starting March 1st indefinitely because they can't reach an agreement for a contract with the village.
John:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
So that's fun.
John:
Talk to your village people over your PA system and say, hey, get a deal because we're stranded here without our SAN license.
Marco:
It's like when a cable or satellite provider drops a channel or threatens to drop a channel.
Marco:
So they drop it for a few weeks.
Marco:
Everybody complains and eventually they work it out.
Marco:
It's going to be like that.
John:
You realize this is just like incrementing the doomsday clock on Marco getting a boat.
John:
Like five more minutes, right?
Marco:
You know, there aren't a lot of people who have boats on the Long Island in the Great South Bay in March.
Marco:
That's not...
John:
I know.
John:
Well, you have to put them somewhere for the winter, but then they go back in the water.
John:
Don't they like marshmallow wrap them for the winter and put them on land somewhere?
John:
Getting a boat is the inevitable conclusion of your complete transformation into Long Island, man.
Casey:
I was just listening to Downeaster Alexa earlier today.
Casey:
And before you tell me the good part, I want you to be clear.
Casey:
Hand to God, I really do believe it is an amazing, wonderful place.
Casey:
I'm not trying to actually yuck your yum.
Casey:
It's just so funny to me the way you describe it is that it sounds terrible, but
Marco:
from a distance and i i don't doubt that when you're there all of that goes away the ferry parking lot is not the cool place to be clear right it's also true parking lot for a ferry it's not yeah yeah yeah a ferry that isn't going to run much longer yeah right yeah but anyway uh but you know like what so i noticed um i went last week on uh on thursday the reason why the show came out a
Marco:
is because I had to schedule all these errands on Thursday, where in one day, I went off the island, drove all the way back to Westchester, brought hops in for service, then drove all the way back.
Marco:
And I was editing the show on the ferry on the way there, sitting at a supercharger, sitting in my passenger seat...
Marco:
in front of a whole foods and then back on the ferry back that's how i edited last week's show so if anything it sounded like if there was like some like slight transition between words that were edited that i couldn't quite hear like somebody's wrong breath on it's because i was editing it on a very loud boat like while wearing airpods pro which while they have great noise isolation uh or noise cancellation features uh are not as good as sitting in my quiet office doing it that way anyway um but you know so during this day where i was you know going back and
Marco:
Back to my old neighborhood and getting things done and then coming back.
Marco:
Every time I spend time off the island, I realize that the entire rest of the world that most people live in is designed for cars first and people second.
Casey:
Yeah, which is not a good thing for the record.
Marco:
And I agree with you.
Marco:
And in many ways, like there's so many things wrong with this.
Marco:
But that's like the place I live, like to be clear, maybe I'll put a picture in the art.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But to be clear, like we have there's a bunch of houses packed together here.
Marco:
You know, most of the most of the house lots here are like four.
Marco:
30 to 50 feet wide by about 50 to 80 feet deep and so these are not large house plots the houses are all close together it's very dense and instead of having streets we basically have wide sidewalks that are i don't know exactly how wide they are maybe eight or ten feet wide it's wide enough that like a regular like u.s pickup truck can
Marco:
can fit as a road but just barely and like the like the side view mirrors on the truck will brush against everyone's hedges like as they go by like that's how tight it is and so you so here i'm in a place that is designed for people first and
Marco:
And will just barely accommodate cars when necessary.
Marco:
The rest of the world is designed to accommodate cars as easily and great as possible and just barely accommodates people when necessary.
Marco:
That's the difference.
Marco:
And it is so different.
Marco:
Even just walking my dog in the regular suburbs on regular land.
Marco:
I'm constantly having to look around for cars and, oh, stop here at this intersection, wait for the cars to go by, cross the street, look for the car.
Marco:
I'm screeching onto this little tiny sidewalk and the cars have all this nice space.
Marco:
And here, I have the space because I'm the person.
Marco:
And my dog and I can walk down this super wide sidewalk and have room.
Marco:
I can bike easily without having to worry that I'm going to get hit by a car on my bike and die.
Marco:
Like, it's really, it's so crazy.
Marco:
And the sad part is that there aren't more places like this.
Casey:
But before we get the entire rest of the planet riding us, there's not more places like that in America.
Casey:
And surely there are other countries that are similar to the way we are.
Casey:
But there are many, many, many places on the planet that are people first and are not car first like so much of America is.
Marco:
That's fair, but honestly, there's not a lot of those places.
Marco:
You know, most places are car first.
Marco:
And usually, to have anything that is not car first, you have to be somewhere that is so old that it was all laid out and built before cars.
Marco:
And there aren't that many of those places.
John:
Well, I mean, you just need people who are willing to make that change.
John:
I mean, there's the big meme of what country is it they were showing?
John:
Like, is it Amsterdam or something?
John:
And they're like, you know...
John:
it's a constant meme of uh people saying well you know in america we we can't all be like amsterdam or i'm sorry if it's not amsterdam who knows whatever it is but but then the follow-up is well here's what amsterdam looked like in 1975 and it looked just like america it was filled with cars filled with street uh you know cars parked along the line along every single street in all direction cars cars cars cars and they changed it right you can make you can change the way your city works by changing the laws and
John:
doing construction um and as a lot of the uh the covid stuff uh you know came down a lot of places and cities were closed to cars or had much less traffic and it was an opportunity to change the way things were and a lot of the cities decided to keep it that way i think paris actually is now you know they shut down a whole bunch of roads and made them all no cars allowed anymore on these streets and then people filled the streets and
John:
And instead of just going back to normal, they're trying to make that permanent and say, actually, those roads are shut down permanently.
John:
And now they're going to be for people and sidewalks or whatever.
John:
It is possible to do that in countries with mildly functioning governments and citizenry, not 100 percent brainwashed by fascists.
John:
But that's not where we live.
John:
So we, you know, we take what we can get.
John:
But anyway, like change is possible.
John:
uh but it's yeah the cars and it's for mostly for a good reason that cars you know we built everything around cars because they're it's they're super convenient and they make a lot of new things possible but we obviously went way too far in that direction in this country and we need to reel it back in and probably are going to have a difficult time doing that
Marco:
Yeah, it's a shame.
Marco:
When all you've ever known is car-focused design, which is all I ever knew before this, you don't realize quite what you're missing.
Marco:
And once you have a taste of people-first design, effectively...
Marco:
It kind of ruins you, kind of like the XDR.
Marco:
It kind of ruins you.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Marco:
And now I just, maybe I'll become an activist to try to get that done in more places in the U.S.
Marco:
because it really is a breath of fresh air on many levels, including literally because you have fewer cars polluting the air that you're breathing.
Marco:
But it's really, it's so nice.
Marco:
And I wish everyone in America could experience this kind of life so that you could know
Casey:
a what you're missing and be what we can what we can maybe aspire to part of the reason that i like visiting cape charles so much is because although it is not car free the downtown or the historic district is like i think it's a square mile or something like that and there are roads all over the place but there are fewer cars than almost anywhere else that i go on a regular basis and so it is
Casey:
It is kind of de facto people first.
Casey:
It's not the same as Fire Island.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say it's one to one, but it's spiritually similar, I think.
Casey:
And oftentimes when we go for a week, we will park Aaron's car on whatever day we arrive.
Casey:
And the next time we climb in is when we get to go home, you know, and we'll walk the rest of the time.
Casey:
Or perhaps, you know, if we were feeling lazy, we could, although we haven't done it yet, we could rent like a golf cart for the week.
Casey:
Uh, and, and people will do that.
Casey:
And, and I do agree with you that it is quite lovely to walk to dinner instead of driving to dinner, you know, and stuff like that.
Casey:
So I, I hear you.
Casey:
It's just, it's, it's so funny to me hearing all the woes and issues that you have, particularly in the wintertime, which is certainly not when Fire Island's putting its best foot forward.
Casey:
Again, I don't mean that to be a turd.
Casey:
I'm just saying it's, it's, it's clearly not designed by your own admission for many year round residents.
Casey:
And so, um, so yeah, so it's just, it's just funny to hear.
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Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
You know, what was great to hear though, or read actually was a blog post by our very own John Syracuse.
Casey:
Imagine that it's, it's that time of year.
Casey:
And I mean that in every sense of the phrase, it is that time of year.
Casey:
Cause we usually only get one a year.
Casey:
Uh, and we got a blog post from John and you know what, uh,
Casey:
There are times on the show that I'm a host and there are times that I am simply just listening.
Casey:
And as far as I'm concerned, John, if you want, if you don't want to just talk the rest of the episode, I am happy to hear it.
Casey:
I loved this blog post.
Casey:
And this is the one that you've been threatening to write for a couple of years now about how to make a decent streaming app.
Casey:
So as deep or as wide or both as you'd like to go, tell me, John, about your unsolicited streaming app specification.
John:
to be clear it's not one blog post a year it's an average of one a year and those are two different statements one a year means that in every calendar year there should be one post an average of one a year means that over the course of 10 years there should be 10 posts right it's around an average one a year i think i'm over 1.0 um anyway uh yeah i missed 20 i didn't do anything in 2021 sorry everyone so maybe i'll do a second one to follow up on this eventually in 2022
John:
So what I wrote about was I was trying to have an outlet for my frustration with streaming video apps, like on any platform, on your phone, on iPad, on Apple TV, on your television, things you use to watch Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, HBO, like whatever.
John:
I think we know what streaming video apps are.
John:
Um, I subscribe to a whole bunch of those services.
John:
I subscribe to them all the time.
John:
I can't even keep track of how many I subscribe to.
John:
I'm getting better about unsubscribing when I'm done watching shows on them, but sometimes they just have enough good content that I just keep my subscription going.
John:
Anyway, and that means I get to use a lot of these different apps and it boggles my mind how annoying they are.
John:
in basic ways like obviously everyone's going to have their own peeves about some you know feature that one has and another one doesn't have and i wish it did this cool thing or whatever but i'm just talking about like the super duper basics what i originally planned for this post probably last year or the year before that was just the playback screen like this the screen where you've got a play button right and you're watching the thing and you can press it and you can pause and then you can press it and you play that like the playback screen
John:
That screen alone, it amazes me how many apps get that just entirely wrong by omitting some major feature.
John:
Most of them, you know, I haven't found one that omitted play and pause.
John:
So good, thumbs up.
John:
You got the play and pause thing.
John:
But pretty much any other feature you can think of, there's some streaming video app that doesn't implement it.
John:
And I find that, you know, so it's like, I was going to say here, just...
John:
Here's a list of things you have to have in your sort of now playing video player or whatever screen.
John:
And then you could go through all the streaming video apps and see that none of them fulfill that.
John:
Right.
John:
That eventually expanded into what happened was I was going to write that and someone else wrote it.
John:
Someone else wrote like it was like a year or two ago.
John:
Someone else wrote essentially that exact article.
John:
I'm like, ah, someone else already did it.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Even though what they wrote was not exactly the same.
John:
It was the same idea.
John:
Like here's the controls that should be in every streaming video app or something like that.
John:
But time has passed and people forgot about that article.
John:
And I said, you know, I should write about this too, but I shouldn't just limit it to the now playing screen.
John:
I should talk about the entire app experience.
John:
But how am I going to do that?
John:
Am I just going to go like, here are, you know, things that annoy me about the apps that I use, or here's some stuff people could do to make their apps better.
John:
And I was still sort of concentrating on
John:
how frustrated I am that these things can't get the basics right.
John:
So instead of what I decided to do was write a sort of informal specification that you could hand off to a development team at a company that has a streaming app and say, here, we're a streaming service.
John:
Please make an app that people can use to use our service.
John:
Here are the requirements.
John:
Here's a specification of just the basics.
John:
It's not a complete spec.
John:
It's not like if you make this, you make an awesome app.
John:
It's like you have to do these things.
John:
After that, you can do all sorts of awesome stuff on top of it.
John:
Fun things, things that are branded, things that differentiate the app, things that make, you know, as Apple would say, your app surprise and delight the user.
John:
That's not what I'm talking about.
John:
I'm saying before you even get into all the cool stuff, make sure at the very least your streaming video app does these things.
John:
And it's such a boring list.
John:
Like it is just, you read it, you're like,
John:
Great, so people should be able to find video and play it.
John:
Okay, thanks.
John:
Why did you even need to write this?
John:
But then you look at any real app, pick whatever your favorite app is, and you realize how many of these things it doesn't have.
John:
And it's not like this is a list of optional stuff.
John:
I feel like every single thing on this list should be mandatory because it's so simple.
John:
And if you don't have it, if you don't have even just one of these things, using it is frustrating because...
John:
Like the things that we're using to watch streaming video apps, they're computers.
John:
Like even the TV, like Apple TV is a computer, right?
John:
Your phone, your app, those are computers.
John:
And we all know computers can do things with digital video.
John:
Like, for example, computers can skip forward and backwards by, you know, some number of seconds.
John:
Like you don't have to hold down the fast forward and rewind button like you're on a VHS player, right?
John:
You can skip.
John:
any number of seconds backwards and forwards.
John:
If you're using a streaming video app that does not have that feature, you get angry because you're like, you're a computer.
John:
I know you can do this.
John:
Why does this feature not exist?
John:
Right.
John:
And like other things, I didn't really delve too much into this, but like, because I tried to, I tried to put these features in, in a way that doesn't dictate their implementation.
John:
It's just like, look, the app needs to let the user be able to do these things.
John:
How you let them do it is kind of up to you.
John:
Some of these can be implemented in different ways.
John:
Right.
John:
So I didn't want to be too prescriptive.
John:
But one example of that is a lot of the features can be satisfied by using the timeline thing.
John:
Like most video players have like a timeline that goes along the bottom.
John:
There's a little scrubber, like the little playhead that you can grab and move around, you know, to move among the video.
John:
A lot of these features, if you implement a timeline, a video timeline with a little scrubber,
John:
It satisfies a lot of these.
John:
So that's one way to do it.
John:
I didn't want to say you have to have a timeline, you have to have a scrubber or whatever.
John:
But in practice, that's what a lot of, that satisfies a lot of these things.
John:
But a lot of video apps put that timeline with a scrubber in it and they're like, well, we're done.
John:
This solves all of our problems.
John:
Skip forward and back is a good example.
John:
We don't need a skip forward and back button because we've got the little timeline.
John:
If you want to go back 30 seconds, just grab the little scrubber thingy and move it backwards 30 seconds.
John:
No problem.
John:
And to that I say, if I'm watching a two-hour movie, do you know what kind of magical dexterity you would need to move the playhead backwards 10, 5, 10, 20, 30 seconds precisely?
John:
Speaking of this, I'm getting off streaming apps for a second.
John:
I was taking photos of a...
John:
was like a document that i wanted to have a picture of or whatever i do that frequently just have you know put it in my phone especially now with text recognition and ios which is neat um and i you know i didn't get my camera lined up exactly yes i know you can do the document scanning thing and notes but i was just using the phone app right and so i went into edit and i'm going to straighten i'm going to straighten the picture because it's not it wasn't exactly at 90 degrees like the corners was a little bit twisted
John:
But the control to straighten things on my fancy amazing computer phone thing is that like the little bar in the photos app with the little notches on it.
John:
It's like it's like a sliding bar that you slide left and right and it rotates the photo.
John:
And that bar has a kind of snap to center field.
John:
You know what I'm talking about?
John:
Like, you know, the default, like the way you took the picture, it snaps into that.
John:
Right.
Right.
John:
And so if you take that little thing, if your thing is only off by a very tiny amount, you grab that little line and you move it and all of a sudden your picture starts rotating.
John:
You're like, whoa, that's way too much.
John:
So you start moving it back towards the middle because it's like, it's just a little bit off.
John:
I just need it to be rotated a little bit.
John:
And as you get closer and closer to the middle, all of a sudden it snaps back to the middle again.
John:
So you yank it out again and it
John:
Oh, yanks.
John:
Okay, now it's twisted too much.
John:
Let me put it back towards the middle almost straight.
John:
Oh, it snapped back to the middle again.
John:
It is literally impossible, as far as I can tell, even if you had a robot with a tiny little fleshy thing the minimum size needed to activate the capacitive touchscreen, it's literally impossible to rotate an image less than the minimum degree they decide is reasonable because then it snaps back to the center.
John:
That's why a scrubber thumb timeline thing, especially with touch controls, is not a replacement for a skip forward and back
John:
x number of seconds button and that's why it listed as a separate thing and that's why i say these are minimum requirements because these are things that people frequently need to do want to do and expect to be able to do because they're using a computer so if you decide no one will ever want to skip forward or backward by some fixed number of seconds in in your tv thing because they can always just swipe on a touch pad or grab the scrubber tongue scrubber tongue you're wrong and you're making a mistake and your app is bad okay
John:
that's why I listed all these things I'll just read off a few of them just so you can see what the features are like for the video players what I talked about earlier a play and pause button skip forward and backwards I didn't say button play and pause skip forward and back some small number of seconds
John:
uh skip to the beginning or end of video again why you say why do you need these buttons why can't you just grab the little scrubby thing and go all the way to the left or all the way to the right you don't need buttons to skip to the end of the beginning well two things one grabbing the little thing dragging it can sometimes be annoying and fidgety and two if the thing you're using is like a remote even if it has a swipey pad that's it requires some dexterity and finesse that a lot of people either don't have or don't want to deal with when if you could just have a button that says skip all the way to the beginning and all the way to the end that's way easier than
John:
activate putting pause swiping on the touchpad especially if like again if you're watching a two or three hour movie and if the acceleration on your touchpad isn't right you're going swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe especially if while you're swiping it is scrubbing through the movie then maybe you're spoiling yourself if you hadn't seen it and your spouse had left it in the middle but you want to go back to the beginning skip to beginning event why because it's a thing computers can do
John:
Select the audio track, select the subtitle back, subtitle track.
John:
Things like answering the question, what am I watching?
John:
I can't even keep track of which app this is, but it frustrates me every time.
John:
Like, we'll start watching it for a variety of terrible reasons not listed in this spec.
John:
We won't know whether the thing is showing us the next episode in the series we've been watching every single night for the past month, right?
John:
Is this the next episode or is this showing us the one we already saw last night?
John:
I don't know.
John:
What episode are we looking at?
John:
And then you're just like, you pause it and it pauses and it shows the little timeline on the bottom with a little thumbnail of where you're paused and no other text is on the screen.
John:
So you swipe and you press and you're just like, what am I watching?
John:
Put text on the screen that tells me what am I watching?
John:
And not just what I'm watching,
John:
What is the TV show?
John:
What season number is it?
John:
What episode number is it?
John:
Why are you hiding this information?
John:
You know this information is there.
John:
It's a question people might want to know.
John:
You must show this on the screen.
John:
It must be possible to tell what am I watching without leaving the thing.
John:
And then leaving a thing is a whole other problem because how do you leave the thing that you're watching and where do you go when you leave it?
John:
Anyway, it's all in the post.
John:
It's very boring and dry of like, these are the minimum things that you should do.
John:
And then at the very end, I look at...
John:
three representative apps, one on iOS, one on iPadOS, and one on Apple TV.
John:
And I see how they measure up.
John:
And you can see how even these extremely famous, extremely well-funded apps fail in a few ways to meet even this most basic spec.
John:
Beyond the basic spec, there's tons of awesome things that you can do.
John:
And a lot of the feedback I got from people is, oh, I think you should have put more things on even your basic spec because I think this feature is essential and you didn't list it or whatever.
John:
But I was really trying to limit it to the basics.
John:
The closest I got is...
John:
saying that one of the basics should be a button to enable and disable subtitles that essentially nobody does but it annoys me so much that nobody does it that i put it on my basic list it's my list i'm allowed to have one gimme for me because if you if you have occasion to enable subtitles briefly which i personally have occasion to do and i am also frequently asked to do by other people to figure out what somebody said or how something is spelled or what the
John:
you don't want subtitles on the whole time say say you don't want some people do want them on the whole time fine but for people who don't want them on the whole time you want to be able to turn them on use that 30 second skip back feature turn subtitles on watch that line that you didn't understand and then turn them back off again but if every time you need to turn them on or turn them off you need to do tap swipe swipe tap swipe scroll scroll scroll english tap swipe tap
John:
OK, play and then go through that whole thing again to turn them off.
John:
That's bad.
John:
There's so much room on the screen.
John:
Put a single button that enables and disable subtitles and then a separate thing to pick which subtitle track you want.
John:
Anyway, that was my only sort of minor pet peeve that I put in there.
John:
But instead of people complaining about the subtitle peeve that I had, they had their own stuff that they demanded be in the basics.
John:
So I think the overall theme and probably what I will write about if I do a follow up on this is
John:
How do people feel?
John:
How do people who use streaming video apps feel about the apps?
John:
Do they love the apps?
John:
Do they have an affectionate feeling towards them?
John:
Or do they hate them with a fiery passion?
John:
Now, obviously, when you write a post like this, you're going to hear mostly from the people who hate them.
John:
But usually when you write a post like this, you're also going to hear from at least a few people who say, I know you were complaining about streaming apps, but I actually really, really like streaming app X.
John:
nobody has sent me that i've got zero feedback from anybody telling me uh yeah these most streaming apps are bad but i really love this one nobody loves them and i i touched on this towards the end i maybe should have emphasized it more because you know people don't get through a long post or whatever but like some of the reason these apps are annoying are misaligned incentives right in particular the thing i emphasized very early on is
John:
When you launch a streaming video app, the most important thing that it should do is quickly allow you to continue watching whatever you were watching before.
John:
Because that's the sort of job to be done.
John:
Every night we're going to sit down and we're going to watch an episode of my favorite show, right?
John:
They drop the whole season and we'll just watch an episode per night, right?
John:
For the past five days, all I've done is at night, I sit down, turn on the thing, I watch the next episode.
John:
And then you sit down the next night, you turn on the thing, you launch the app, and it's like, what do you want to do?
John:
You're like, what do you think I want to do, App?
John:
I want to watch the next episode of the show that I've been watching every single night for a week.
John:
And it's like, I don't know what you're talking about.
John:
What do you want to do?
John:
People want to find the thing that they were previously watching and continue watching it.
John:
And the apps make that more difficult because the incentives of the company that makes the streaming apps are not the same as the incentives of the people who are using it.
John:
And I think I phrased it in a very sort of...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So just to confirm what should be obvious to everyone, which is why I didn't delve too much into it, I had some anonymous feedback.
John:
This person said there was an experiment at Hulu last year to move the continue watching section below the fold down two rows from where it was below the fold, meaning like it's it's off the screen.
John:
You launch the app and you can't even see the continue watching section.
John:
You have to scroll down to find it.
John:
This was done with a very small group of users.
John:
It was so successful that the increased engagement was projected to generate more than $20 million a year.
John:
The experiment was immediately ended and the new position was deployed to all users.
John:
While I understand and largely agree with your frustration that your in-progress isn't the top feature, you could argue this even provides more value to the user as they discover content they wouldn't have otherwise.
John:
Hence the increased engagement, right?
John:
So this last bit about, well, isn't it great that you learn about new stuff?
John:
Isn't that better than you just finding the show that you wanted to watch and watching it and then getting done?
John:
This will let you see stuff that you never would have discovered because we're constantly throwing it in your face.
John:
That's not what I hear from people who are sending feedback.
John:
And also what they're doing in testing here and saying, hey, we move, continue watching down.
John:
So it's below the fold.
John:
And we got more, quote unquote, engagement.
John:
Well, some percentage of that engagement is people flailing wildly trying to find the thing that they were previously watching.
John:
Some percentage of that engagement is people giving up finding it.
John:
Some percentage of it is just, well, I can't see the thing that I want.
John:
So I'll try this other thing.
John:
What is not measured by this thing, if you're just measuring engagement, what is not measured is the frustration being induced in people that have to hunt for the thing they were previously watching.
John:
There is no sort of measure of that frustration, really, except maybe abandonment before watching or whatever.
John:
But maybe even that would show increased engagement, because if you just go launch the app and click the show you're watching, that's a limited amount of quote unquote engagement versus hunting for it.
John:
If you hunt for it briefly and bail on the app,
John:
That may count as more engagement in your measurement than finding it successfully and watching it.
John:
So as with any with metrics, be careful what you measure, because if you're measuring the wrong thing or you're ignoring something that you should be measuring, you're going to end up with an app that frustrates users that nobody loves.
John:
All right.
John:
So, again, while I understand there is lots of motivation to show you the new show they paid $100 million for at the top of the screen, filling the entire screen, rather than showing you the next episode of the show you're watching,
John:
It's a bad choice long term.
John:
People will have affection for an interface that lets them do the thing they want to do.
John:
The example that I didn't dive too much into because it's like old man news or whatever is the TiVo interface.
John:
Tons of people use TiVo and loved it.
John:
And if you ask them, they loved the interface.
John:
They let them do what they wanted to do.
John:
They didn't feel lost.
John:
It was responsive.
John:
The playback experience was good.
John:
It had all the controls they wanted on it.
John:
And it made a user base that was so loyal that essentially kept the company alive way longer than it should have been.
John:
It's still alive technically now, but it's a bit of a corpse.
John:
So it is possible and also valuable and important to have users who love your interface.
John:
And I think no streaming service has that today.
John:
So I really hope...
John:
Somebody somewhere reads this, realizes that their app doesn't measure up to even the basics.
John:
And then I hope they go beyond these basics and do all the things that, you know, a good video player should do.
John:
I said good to great, like maybe a great video player should do.
John:
So to give an example, I talk all about like, oh, when an episode is over.
John:
You know, when you finish watching an episode, the next thing it should offer you to do is to watch the episode that is next in the series.
John:
Right.
John:
But I didn't say, how do you tell when an episode is over?
John:
I think we all know and understand that a really good app will have good heuristics for determining whether you've completed an episode because most people don't sit through all the credits.
John:
Right.
John:
You get to a certain point and you're like, well, we're done with the episode.
John:
But if you looked at the progress bar, you're not really done because there's 17 minutes of international credits on this Marvel show.
John:
Right.
John:
and so then if you launch the app the next day and it says do you want to continue watching you say yes and it just keeps showing you the credits like no no i finished that episode show me the next one we expect an app to go above and beyond the basic spec of when the episode is over show the next one we expect it to know and by over i mean what a person would think of as over
John:
Like this is what boggles my mind.
John:
Like we talk about on the show when we talk about, you know, app development or what Mark was doing with Overcast or whatever.
John:
Any decent software developer, this is all they spend their time thinking about.
John:
These details.
John:
How do I tell when the show is over?
John:
How do I, what is the right balance of how far into the credits did they get?
John:
Does it look like it's over?
John:
Is there a post-credit sequence?
John:
And if I send them to the next episode, are they going to miss the post-credit sequence?
John:
Oh, now it seems like I need to have metadata to understand on a per episode basis.
John:
If there's a post-credit sequence,
John:
This is the thought that goes into making an application.
John:
This is not the basics.
John:
I don't mention this anywhere in this article.
John:
I'm just saying like basics, let people launch the app, find the thing they want to watch, watch it, right?
John:
But to actually make a really great app, you have to go beyond the basics.
John:
And these apps don't even get the basics right.
John:
So that's why I tried to limit myself to the basics to say, look, you're not even on, you're not even in the ballpark yet.
John:
Make sure your app has the basic functionality.
John:
And then please, please,
John:
spend a lot of time on every single one of these individual things, finding out how you can do a better job of that.
John:
Most actual apps are a mix.
John:
Like some apps do a really good job of one thing.
John:
Like the Amazon Prime app has that x-ray thing where at any time you're watching something on the Amazon Prime video player and someone says, what is that person from?
John:
You just hit pause.
John:
It shows the faces and names of all the actors who are in the current scene you're watching and you can drill down into them and see the other stuff that they were in.
John:
why has nobody copied that i mean the snarky answer is because amazon owns imdb and because potentially there's patents about it but i'm just saying like that's an example of surprise and delight that is way above and beyond the basics amazon's been doing it for years and years no one else seems to care even though you know everyone's sitting on their captures watching a show and saying what is that person from and then we take out our phones and we have to look it up in the stupid imdb app that's terrible or we have to google it or whatever it's like
John:
Anyway, there's a lot of room for improvement here.
John:
My angle is just try to go to the basics, and I really hope these things get better over time.
John:
I'm a little bit pessimistic because of the misaligned incentives, but I feel like there's so many of these apps, at least one of them needs to be in there and say...
John:
Rather than chasing what we think of as engagement at all costs, maybe we should try to make an app that people actually like using.
John:
Or maybe we should just start measuring user sentiment.
John:
Do you love our app or do you hate it?
John:
No, not one star through five star, but like some kind of user sentiment analysis, some kind of net promoter score, some kind of business jargon mumbo jumbo that says, do people like using our thing?
John:
Because the answer right now is mostly no.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
One-time sponsor, Channels, they did a victory lap saying that they think they fit your criteria pretty well.
Casey:
I use Channels regularly, and to the best of my recollection, I think that's mostly true, if not accurate.
Casey:
I had a couple people write in and say that Plex does most, if not all, of this.
Casey:
You use Plex enough that you would know.
Casey:
I didn't have the chance to go through and verify myself, but I think a lot of it they do, right?
Casey:
Certainly not all of it, but a lot of it.
Casey:
So there's hope to be had.
Casey:
But I think that that is the problem.
Casey:
And you've nailed it, is that the misaligned incentives for anything like a Netflix causes them to make decisions that are contrary to what I want as a just regular schmo that wants to watch some TV.
John:
That's one of the things about the things you mentioned, channels, Plex.
John:
Very often you hear people deriding sort of developer interfaces, right?
John:
Like, oh, it looks like a developer made this UI.
John:
You know, because it's very kind of,
John:
by the numbers, you know, boring, straightforward, no frills, no real creativity, right?
John:
Especially like perhaps, you know, navigationally, if you think of like old iOS apps of like a master detail view or a simple straightforward hierarchy with the expected number of steps between A and B, and it's like, okay, fine, but that's very sort of computer-y and developer-y.
John:
And things like Plex or XBMC before it, or what was that other one, especially the K, like these sort of
John:
mostly nerd-derived media player thingies, which did not start life as streaming videos.
John:
I know Plex has some streaming thing or whatever.
John:
Plex does not start its life as a streaming video service.
John:
I think it started before that thing even existed.
John:
Or even channels, which is kind of a nerdy thing for setting up to you or whatever.
John:
They tend to have interfaces that...
John:
have a lot of features so then they they tend up also having the basics because you know if you're if they're made by tech nerdy people like well of course it's a computer we'll put in all the features the computer could do why would we not have skip to beginning and skip forward back you know in fact we're computer users we're not afraid of having a setting screen maybe we'll have a setting screen let's choose how many seconds backwards and forwards you can skip and nobody in the room says whoa whoa whoa we can't have settings that's madness users will not be able to figure this out
John:
Whereas they put that one little feature in there and then anyone who uses them is like, oh, thank God, I can pick the number of seconds forward and backwards.
John:
In fact, maybe I'll only go backwards, you know, seven seconds and forward 30 seconds.
John:
I can pick different amounts.
John:
It's amazing.
John:
And that makes them happier.
John:
Anyway, the reason those apps tend to do better is because they have those sort of straightforward interfaces.
John:
No one in those meetings is saying we should have an algorithmic timeline that makes that figures out what we think they want to watch and shows them that.
John:
And it's like, no, let's just make a hierarchy.
John:
You have TVs and movies, TV shows are broken down into seasons and there are specials that are out of the seasons and they're ordered sets.
John:
Movies can be in series and we can have trilogies and, you know, like it's just this.
John:
They just do the straightforward hierarchy and the navigation is like down, down, down, up, up, up.
John:
And it's not, you know, the smoothest thing in the world, but it's the obvious way that this could work.
John:
And that's one of the things I say is here.
John:
You have to support the obvious intrinsic hierarchy of the material, right?
John:
above and beyond that if you want to do this cool like here's what we recommend for you or based on what your friends are watching or we built in a social network yeah sure by all means do that but you also have to support the idea that there are tv shows that have seasons and seasons have episodes and episodes are made by people and have titles and have durations like it there is an intrinsic hierarchy to this stuff um and you can spend hours and hours making it better saying okay but what about series that you
John:
you know, have special episodes inserted.
John:
What about the Doctor Who Christmas special?
John:
Where does that fit in?
John:
And how do we, you know, yes, you can go like we talked about with music.
John:
You can spend a lot of time making the data model just perfect.
John:
But let's just start with the basics.
John:
And I think the smaller the app and the more it predates streaming video services, the more likely it is to pass this basics test because no one was there to tell them that it's wrong to make a simple usable app with a few settings.
John:
Whereas the streaming video apps all look like they were made with like, we have a blank canvas and we've never heard of hierarchy.
John:
Throw a bunch of squares on it.
John:
Good, we're done.
John:
Is that it for that topic?
John:
Unless San Marco's going to announce the streaming video app.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
The problem is that...
Marco:
There is no way, you know, right now we have this wonderful situation in the podcast app market where anybody can make a podcast app.
Marco:
And the world of podcast content that's out there, with a growing number of exceptions, unfortunately, but the world of podcast content is mostly available to anybody who wants to make an app.
Marco:
So we aren't stuck with only a small number of big companies as the content owners being the ones who can make the apps that play that content.
Marco:
That is the case where we're stuck in that kind of situation for most other forms of media today.
Marco:
Most of the forms of media, especially video, like...
Marco:
The reality is that Apple tried with the Apple TV to have standardized players and everything like that.
Marco:
Actually, the old Apple TVs before tvOS actually achieved this in a much better way, in part because it was simpler and capable of less, and also in part because I believe Apple was actually writing all that software themselves and just kind of making deals with content providers to access some of their stuff on the back end or whatever.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Now we're in this world where only the programmers at Netflix are going to be able to make the apps that can play the Netflix content.
Marco:
Only the programmers at Disney are going to make the Disney Plus content playable and so on.
Marco:
And so we have this unfortunate situation where...
Marco:
first of all, we have a million different apps to play this now, which we're like, and not in a good way.
Marco:
Like what I mean by that is like, if you as a consumer want to watch six different TV shows, you probably have to use four different apps to watch them.
Marco:
And the, and all those apps are going to behave differently and they're all going to be written by different people with different priorities and different skill levels.
Marco:
And so they're going to have all these different experiences.
Marco:
They're going to drive John nuts, uh, in part because they're bad and also in part just because they're different from each other.
Marco:
Um, but yeah,
Marco:
You also have this problem of now that things are so siloed and locked down by these giant corporations that don't want to work together with anybody else, no one else can make another app to play it.
Marco:
I can't make a streaming video app if I wanted to because it wouldn't be able to play any video.
Marco:
Music is almost that bad.
Marco:
Like back when we all were playing MP3s that we pirated off of Napster and stuff.
Marco:
Oh, excuse me, that we ripped legally from our own CD collections.
Marco:
You could have other MP3 players.
Marco:
Anybody could make a music player and have a chance of it getting traction.
Marco:
Yes, I know when iTunes came out, it kind of crushed the market.
Marco:
But for the most part, there was a time span there with music where anybody could make a music app.
Marco:
And as somebody who uses the music app on my devices every day, I would love to make a new music app.
Marco:
How do I put this gently?
Marco:
I would love to make a music app where it appears that the person who makes the app uses the app.
John:
ever well done well done because oh my gosh in my continued attempt to force myself to like apple music oh the music app the music app is so bad and it's so bad everywhere it's not like there are third-party music apps though i mean like marco said the existence of apple's app kind of makes that a market tough and so there's not a lot of uh entrance but to apple's credit it is possible to make a third-party music app for ios and the mac and they do exist
Marco:
Well, yes, and it is possible.
Marco:
However, the market for them is very small because in a large part, because what customers are accessing in their music apps is so frequently now a streaming service and not their own collection.
Marco:
Now, there are some exceptions to this, like you can make an app for iOS and Mac that accesses Apple Music.
Marco:
There are some limitations on what that app can do then for various DRM reasons and everything like that.
Marco:
But you could make an app, a third-party app, for Apple Music Playback.
Marco:
And if I were to ever make my own music app, this is not an announcement.
Marco:
I haven't written a single line of code or even decided to do this ever, let alone anytime soon.
Marco:
But if I were to make a music app,
Marco:
that is probably what i would make i would probably make something that could either integrate with the api to play apple music for that demand or i would say f it i'm not going to integrate with any streaming service if you can somehow find a folder of mp3s that you either brought from the 90s with you until now or somehow i don't even know if people like do people even pirate music anymore like there's no point
Marco:
But anyway, like that's that's how I've always thought about it in my head.
Marco:
Like if I were to make a music app, it would either be using the music API and being very limited and tied to this thing that I'm sure is a buggy mess.
Marco:
Because think about like an API that's a based on an Apple web service and be almost certainly not at all the same API that Apple's own apps use.
Marco:
So the chances of that being good and long term stable are very low.
John:
It probably is the same one that Apple's apps use because the Apple's apps are also laggy and weird.
John:
And so it's probably dog food.
John:
That doesn't probably limit the quality of your third party app is that in the end, you have to make a bunch of HTTP calls to get the music that you have to play.
John:
And if those stall out and are slow, then your app suddenly is slow when you hit the play button.
Marco:
That's fair.
Marco:
But anyway, so yeah, so my plan would either be that or again, like just just plays files like maybe maybe it will sync to an S3 bucket so you can have them on multiple devices.
Marco:
But like literally just plays DRM free files that you happen to have.
Marco:
How you get those, that's up to you, because honestly, that's what I use most of the time.
Marco:
Most of the time I am playing my Phish concerts that I download legally from them and.
Marco:
And those are all just DRM-free MP3 files.
Marco:
And the vast majority of my collection is not stuff I've added from Apple Music.
Marco:
It's mostly stuff I either bought legally or ripped legally that I had before streaming services became a thing.
Marco:
Or it's Phish concerts that are legal and totally outside of that system.
Marco:
But the problem is, getting back to the point, the problem is...
Marco:
The reason I'm probably never going to make this app is because there is basically nobody else who would want to use it.
Marco:
I know all dozens of you are saying, oh, I would, I would.
Marco:
But the problem is, this is an app for almost nobody.
Marco:
Relatively speaking, percentage-wise, of today's music listening population.
Marco:
Almost everyone now, first of all, listens to music I don't even understand anymore.
Marco:
So why should I even make this app?
Marco:
This is not obviously my expertise area.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
most people are listening on a streaming service and so to to launch a music app today when you don't own a major streaming service is market suicide probably well that's the problem you have with video there is a market for that though like the the the companies that two of the companies we listed so plex obviously i mean i think they have their own streaming thing or whatever but the plex's deal is
John:
If you can somehow get the video to me, Plex, I will organize it for you and let you play it and let you, you know, mark it up and get the artwork and do all the things right.
John:
And then channels, which former sponsor, my understanding of the way their things work is they will also say, look, you know, if you if you pay for cable,
John:
uh sign in with your credentials because a lot of the cable providers have a way that they show video on the web and we will extract that and then and so it's like you get everywhere you get to use our player the channel's player even though they don't own the streaming service they don't own you know xfinity or fios or you know over the air antenna or like the hd home run things like it is
John:
plausible and possible and these companies do it to say i'm going to try to make a player interface to this video that like marco said is locked up in these third-party services but man do they not make it easy like the companies that actually own the video do not want those other companies putting their player or system on top of them plex is like okay well
John:
You know, we have other ways to get that video.
John:
So screw you streaming service.
John:
Right.
John:
But things like channels are trying to play along as best they can with things like cable cards and over the air video and your cable subscription and the web interface.
John:
But the companies that own that stuff don't want that to happen and will stop it any way they legally can.
John:
So it is an extremely tough market.
Marco:
And this is why it's really hard to have usability or experience innovation in an area where you are beholden to content provided by a small number of large companies.
Marco:
Because the reality is that it's very difficult or impossible to build
Marco:
build an app as somebody who is not one of these big companies to access other people's content today unless that content is an existing already wide open medium and the number of those is dramatically shrinking and isn't large to begin with.
John:
I have to say I'm kind of heartened to see that
John:
There was so much feedback from people having dissatisfaction with the sort of the first launch experience because I had feared when I was writing this that that an entire generation of people had been conditioned to the idea that when you launch a streaming service app, of course, it's not going to give you an obvious way to continue watching the show you're watching.
John:
Like that you will always be presented with essentially a splash screen promoting a bunch of things that it thinks you might like and that you will always have to dig or scroll or search or do a voice command or whatever to find the show that you've been watching.
John:
Right.
John:
But no, even though essentially every big streaming service does that, again, for user engagement reasons, because, you know, it's important for them to.
John:
You know, if you're one of these companies, what's more important that they that the user finish watching the TV series that they really wanted to watch when they signed up, or that they start watching a new thing.
John:
If they finish watching the series, maybe they say, Oh, that's done.
John:
Now I can unsubscribe from Paramount Plus, I finished the Star Trek, right?
John:
They don't want that.
John:
They want you to start a new thing.
John:
So
John:
It is so in their interest to hide that.
John:
Right.
John:
But, you know, despite the fact that every single streaming service makes it degrees of difficult for you to continue watching what you're watching, that is still what everybody wants to do.
John:
And that is absolutely the number one complaint I heard echoed is like nobody can find where was the thing I was just watching.
John:
nobody can find it even though like the answer is often it's right there or it's down two rows or you don't see it it's over like something some hide it really well some hide it just a little bit but the bottom line is people go in there trying to accomplish a task which is let me watch the next episode of ted lasso and the apps fight them the apps fight them they launch the app and it's like i don't know what you're talking about with the ted lasso but what about the show
John:
Or it shows the big banner for Ted Lasso, and you click it, and it starts playing episode one of Ted Lasso.
John:
And it's like, God, you have one job.
John:
But I guess that counts as engagement.
John:
Anyway, so I'm glad that people have not been conditioned to accept that this is how it has to be.
John:
With streaming music, I think people have, unfortunately, been conditioned to accept it.
John:
Because honestly, I think streaming music apps are better in the grand scheme of things.
John:
than streaming video apps.
John:
But streaming video, despite... Are they?
John:
Despite, apparently, all going to the same conference where they all agree to suck in exactly the same ways, users still don't like it.
John:
They just want to watch their show.
Marco:
Well, and the problem, too, as you talked about earlier, is that when it's only big companies making these apps or even able to make these apps, it's so much easier for them to justify the decisions they make based on, quote, data.
Marco:
And, and I, and it's not that they're not being evil or stupid or anything.
Marco:
That's just how large companies work.
John:
They're being a little bit stupid though, because like I said, data, like it depends on what you decide to measure.
John:
You have to be careful with what you're measuring.
Marco:
That's fair.
Marco:
But for the most part, like if, if they have some data that shows like, Hey, this, this, you know, kind of less user friendly or less graceful design actually resulted in higher performance on whatever metrics we're tracking.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
It's really hard if you're in a company to argue, hey, but why don't we do the nicer thing instead?
Marco:
When you're in a company, that kind of logic does not get rewarded and does not succeed because everyone's like, well, I make more money this way.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
And when you're an individual or a small group that is less focused on extracting every penny of profit and more driven by like, hey, let's make the best thing we can make.
Marco:
You make different decisions.
Marco:
You think differently.
Marco:
You have different priorities.
Marco:
And you can because you're smaller.
Marco:
But it's very different when you are like a very small cog in a very big machine where you are rewarded only for like making money and that's it.
John:
I think it's a little bit subtler than that.
John:
A lot of the cases where when you're small, you think the way to make money is to make an app that people like using.
John:
Like that's the connection that you make naively make, you know, like, okay, well, if I'm going to make a word processor and I want my word processor to be really great, I want people to love my word processor.
John:
I want to make the best word processor I can make because if I make the best word processor I can make, I'll make money, right?
John:
When you're big, that connection, quality of product equals making money.
John:
That's not how you make money in the big leagues, right?
John:
It's different than that.
John:
It's like, okay, but how do we actually make money?
John:
Show me the path from make a really good streaming interface to making money.
John:
And they'll say, well, actually, the streaming app is not that big a deal.
John:
We just need a giant play button, right?
John:
What we really need is content.
John:
And how do you get content?
John:
And we really need this distribution.
John:
How do we get it installed on everybody's TVs?
John:
And there's so much more to making money.
John:
The connection between making money means doing these things gets farther and farther from the simple thing of if I just make a really good...
John:
app or piece of software that's especially for things like streaming services honestly we're complaining about these you know these interfaces or whatever the bottom line is if there's not good tv shows on it or not good movies you're not going to watch it no matter how good the app is right so the the most important thing is content and that's a whole other ball of wax right but i don't think even the app itself is like second or third or fourth or if it is the purpose the app is serving is not
John:
let the user accomplish their intended task with the least amount of frustration that's not the thing that is going to make the money because they say okay say our app is 10 times better than the next person's they're still going to do better because they're making that extra 20 million dollars from extra engagement by putting up the big promo for their new show and we need to do that right and so it's
John:
I think everyone in it wants to succeed or make money or whatever you want to say, but it's the way, it's the sophistication of the connection between what I do and how that translates into money.
John:
And, you know, this small developer...
John:
it can usually hold on to the, right or wrong, can hold on to the connection between the quality of their app and how much money they make much longer than a large corporation can.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think it was that Dilbert strip where there was like some character having an existential crisis and saying, oh no, I just lost the connection between my performance and how much I'm paid.
John:
Like having like a thought in your head is like, if you lose that, if you just like...
John:
I know I've lost it.
John:
I can't, I can't see it anymore.
John:
Like, cause when you're, especially when you're first starting at a job, you think if I do well in my job, I will succeed.
John:
And there are various times in one's long career where you will lose that connection and say, how well I do my job seems to have no connection.
John:
to how much i'm paid or how i'm promoted right and you just lose it you're like what what even is anything i don't know and then maybe you get it back anyway um that's it definitely seems like the connection between the quality of the streaming app and how streaming companies make money essentially doesn't exist
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Casey:
All right, so there was some slightly breaking news that happened, I believe, this morning as we record.
Casey:
Akamai, which is a, if not the CDN, Content Delivery Network, has announced that they are going to acquire a very frequent former and probably future sponsor Linode.
Marco:
They are literally sponsoring this episode.
Casey:
I was going to say, I was about to look, are they sponsoring tonight?
Casey:
So we are obviously all big fans of Linode here.
Casey:
And we certainly have a financial interest in what happens with Linode in the sense that they sponsor us.
Casey:
But that being said, I think, and I would hope that you all know us well enough to know that we'll call it like we see it.
Casey:
And so Akamai has announced that they're going to acquire Linode.
Casey:
Reading from their announcement, just a couple of quick things.
Casey:
It says, together with Linode, Akamai will become the world's most distributed compute platform from cloud to edge.
Casey:
And then the Akamai CEO, Tom Layton, said, we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run, and secure applications from the cloud to the edge.
Casey:
This is a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale reach, performance, reliability, and security.
Marco:
I hope nothing happens.
Marco:
so here's the thing so my concern here is less you know selfishly it's it's less about them sponsoring our show in the future and more because you know i think we perform pretty well for them and i think if they continue doing sponsorships at all i think they'll probably stick with us um but i think my concern for them is is more as a customer that i have everything hosted there and i have been through web host acquisitions as a
Marco:
I've also been through Linode's own migrations before, where maybe they're trying to retire some old hardware and move everybody onto newer hardware.
Marco:
I've been through those before.
Marco:
Linode has always handled those very well.
Marco:
I'm not concerned that Linode will, as they're almost certainly going to start moving stuff into Akamai's infrastructure on some level, I'm not worried they're going to do a bad job of that.
Marco:
They've done a great job of that in the past, and so that's been fine.
Marco:
I'm also, again, having been with other hosts when they've gotten acquired, normally what happens is for a while everything is the same, and then eventually the new owner of it makes everybody move over to their plans, whatever their infrastructure is, their plans, and they shut down all the old stuff eventually.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So that might happen here.
Marco:
But in this case, Linode was not acquired by another web hosting company.
Marco:
They were acquired by a large CDN that has other solutions, but they don't really like Akamai does not sell what Linode is.
Marco:
And if you look at the statements from the Akamai people and everything, it seems like their main interest in Linode is to have a server platform and server solutions that they can sell their other customers through their massive sales channel.
Marco:
This was covered very well in the Stratechery article for subscribers this week or today about this.
Marco:
I strongly recommend anybody out there, check it out.
Marco:
Sign up if you want.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It's a great thing.
Marco:
It's worth it.
Marco:
Anyway, so we'll link to it in the show notes.
Marco:
But the Akamai position on this publicly seems to be like they want a server platform or solution that they can sell to their other customers through their big sales channel.
Marco:
Now, what this means to existing Linode customers is that it sounds like we are not super important to Akamai.
Marco:
Now, that can be good and bad.
Marco:
In one way, it can be good in the sense that we probably don't matter enough for them to mess with us.
Marco:
It can be bad in the sense that as they choose what directions to go in the future, they might not consider our needs or they might not prioritize us over their other larger goals.
Marco:
But I imagine they paid Linode a decent amount of money to buy this decently sized company for a reason.
Marco:
It wasn't just to sell stuff and get a commission or whatever.
Marco:
They could have done that through some kind of affiliate marketing deal.
Marco:
They didn't have to buy the company to do that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
i think this will probably be okay for a while if it ends up that what i use and need about linode is somehow ruined or no longer available then i'll be really sad and i'll be forced to move and that'll suck because when you look around like i i looked around today to see like well what what does the
Marco:
there's not that many companies like this left.
Marco:
You know, it's basically like DigitalOcean and then this one that Ben Thompson linked to with the V. I hadn't even heard of them before.
Marco:
Apparently, they're huge.
Marco:
I'd never heard of them.
Marco:
But I looked at their offerings and everything, and I would have some stumbling blocks moving to either of these companies because...
Marco:
as i mentioned in every single ad linode's really good and they solve my needs really well and i currently i i spend something like five thousand dollars a month on overcast servers there oh god that makes my heart hurt yeah and if you look at you know linode's linode's prices are like you know 20 bucks a month 40 bucks a month you know look at the plans and
Marco:
It's a lot of servers to reach those numbers.
Marco:
It's a good number of servers.
Marco:
And so to move to another host would not only be a very large technical ordeal that just... Again, I've done this before.
Marco:
I could do it.
Marco:
It's a pain in the butt to move hosts.
Marco:
But I could do it.
Marco:
But it's a big pain for something that I really don't want to do.
Marco:
And also, I don't have a track record with somebody else established now.
Marco:
I know...
Marco:
I know that with Linode, I don't really have to think about my stuff most of the time.
Marco:
As somebody who runs this by myself, I am my own server admin.
Marco:
I am the one who's always on call if anything breaks.
Marco:
And I know that I can do things like go to sleep at night.
Marco:
And not have to worry that I'm going to be woken up at 2am or worse, not woken up at 2am when a database breaks and my entire site's down.
Marco:
I know that I don't have to worry about that most of the time because I know Linode is reliable and I know I have a long history with them now.
Marco:
And I know what I can count on.
Marco:
If I'm going to be forced to move anywhere else, like if my Linode solutions go away or get ruined, I would have to relearn all of that and take risks at a new host.
Marco:
And frankly, what I would be very tempted to do, or at least to try, is to just move to AWS at that point.
Marco:
But moving to AWS would probably, again, I said $5,000 a month for what I have at Linode.
Marco:
If I move to AWS, that would probably multiply by at least three or four.
John:
You are correct.
Marco:
And that's why I'm not there now.
Marco:
Because AWS is a great deal if your usage fits certain profiles and mine doesn't.
John:
Here's the thing about AWS.
John:
AWS is a role-playing game.
Casey:
If you...
John:
If you go into it's like progress quest kind of like one of those things if you go into AWS and naively re implemented your Linode stuff there, you would pay so much money.
John:
Yes, but it's a game.
John:
And it's a game that can be played in the game is essentially how do I get this functionality while spending the least amount of money and it's a hard game.
John:
The only good thing about this game is that essentially everybody who works for AWS, in my experience, wants to help you win the game, which is weird.
John:
Like, they're telling you, like, here's how you can get that functionality by paying less money to us.
John:
But I swear that's what they do.
John:
But it's a hard game.
John:
You need their help.
John:
And so, yeah, if you went in there and you're like, how is this possible?
John:
Why does this cost so much money?
John:
And it's like, you don't know the secret ways of you use this service with that and do this and get these discounts and this thing and that.
John:
And it's like,
Marco:
when you when you win the game when you solve it you're like wow i'm paying one eighth what i was and i get better performance and it's more reliable but it took me a year to figure out how to win this game um so anyway get ready for that if you ever decide to go over there but and i hope i don't because like the reason the reason i haven't gone to aws yet yeah i mean to be fair i use s3 um but i i don't i don't i've never used ec2 or you know their their various compute uh services i've only ever used s3 as from their services
John:
There's so much beyond EC2 you don't even know.
Marco:
I know, I know.
John:
One of the secrets to winning the game is don't use EC2.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But, so, one of the reasons I haven't gone over there yet is that, or, you know, ever, really, is that I know that cost would be a big difference.
Marco:
But another one is that
Marco:
I always loved the idea with being with somebody like Linode.
Marco:
And by the way, the chat says that the one I was thinking of earlier and couldn't remember the name is Vulture or Vultr.
Marco:
It's V-U-L-T-R dot com.
Marco:
And yeah, apparently they're huge and I've never heard of them.
Marco:
But yeah, as far as I can tell, the big names in this space are Linode, Vulture, and DigitalOcean.
Marco:
And I don't know of any others that are substantial and are good deals.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
The reason I ever went to AWS with my server needs is that I never liked the idea, besides the price issues, which are substantial, I never liked the idea of moving my stack to something that is pretty proprietary, that if the host ever went bad, like if AWS ever went bad in some way, it would be hard to move something off of AWS.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
It's all this kind of custom tooling, custom stuff.
Marco:
It isn't just a bunch of EPSs if you're not just using dumb EC2 stuff.
Marco:
You're using some of their more high-level or managed services in some way, and so it's harder to move away from it.
Marco:
And that reduces my portability, and that locks me in, and that could screw me later if pricing or quality goes south in some way.
Marco:
Well, by staying on something like Linode...
Marco:
That was based on the assumption that Linux VPSs would be always available from a diverse set of hosts that would all be competing well and would be pretty good indefinitely into the future.
Marco:
And I'm having some doubts on the viability of that assumption.
Marco:
It seems like maybe the number of server hosts out there that just will give you commodity, unmanaged Linux VPSs
Marco:
seems like it's shrinking when linode which is you know either the biggest or second biggest player in this field if they are taken out of the market that makes me feel very nervous for this market in general so that's so again i hope what i what i hope happens here is largely nothing for me because if akamai just wants to sell linode services to their things they
Marco:
That doesn't have to impact the way that Linode's customers are using Linode.
Marco:
But the reality of acquisitions is that it usually does.
Marco:
And it might take a while, and it might not be so bad.
Marco:
The last time I was through a host acquisition was back when I was a Tumblr, and we were with a host that was called The Planet, and they were eventually bought by SoftLayer.
Marco:
And actually, that was eventually bought by IBM.
Marco:
But going through those two acquisitions,
Marco:
It was largely fine for a long time, like going from the planet to soft layer.
Marco:
That was just a bigger host buying a smaller host.
Marco:
And so they continue to offer web hosting like it was it was just the regular service.
Marco:
But then when IBM bought it, I haven't kept up with it since shortly after that.
Marco:
But when IBM bought it, the direction they wanted to go was very different.
Marco:
And my needs as a smaller user of it that wanted unmanaged services, which, you know, read low profit for them services and
Marco:
my needs were very unimportant from that point forward.
Marco:
And the products I was using were very unimportant and they probably don't exist anymore.
Marco:
So if Linode goes this direction, then there's a high chance that my needs would no longer be important to them anymore.
Marco:
I hope that doesn't happen.
Marco:
And there is probably a reason why Akamai paid so much money for them that hopefully is not wanting to get rid of what they are.
Marco:
But this is a lot of hope.
Marco:
And everyone involved could have the best of intentions right now.
Marco:
Both parties, Akamai and Linode, right now might think, we intend fully to have Linode customers be well handled into the future forever and to have this continue operating as an independent business or whatever else.
Marco:
They might think that today.
Marco:
But it's different when you get acquired.
Marco:
Things change.
Marco:
People bought it for reasons.
Marco:
They want to get certain values out of it.
Marco:
And then once they have it, maybe the leaders of the companies who are there now...
Marco:
in five or ten years if they aren't there anymore new leaders come in with different priorities this stuff changes over time you know no matter what anyone's intentions are up front so i hope and i think there's a decent chance of this i hope that linode continues to be what it is today so that customers like me who are very happy there and don't want to move anywhere else can continue having the types of products that we use today be available forever and
Marco:
And if they're not, I guess I'll check out DigitalOcean or Vulture, but I won't like that.
Marco:
And then if there's a big market for this kind of acquisition, what's stopping them from being acquired by other CDNs?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
When things get consolidated...
Marco:
or when there's a lot of money in a part of a market that you're not in uh as the customer of these things sometimes your life with no options and that's that's the part i want to avoid but as long as linode continues to be what they've been for me for the last whatever it's been 10 years or whatever i have no intention of leaving it and i hope they continue to because i really don't want to go anywhere else and i think anywhere else i would go would be worse
Marco:
that's that's i think my ultimate uh concern long term is like if linode goes south i don't think anyone else is going to step up and be the new linode i think this category of things will just have fewer options and be worse and that's not good for anybody so i hope that doesn't happen so
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
And there's a number of great benefits to have smart lighting.
Marco:
You can do things like automate.
Marco:
You can have triggers from actions and things like that.
Marco:
It plays very nicely with HomeKit and you can possibly save money.
Marco:
And what's great about these is that they are always smart.
Marco:
So you don't have to worry like if somebody accidentally flips off the wrong switch and turns off your smart bulb.
Marco:
Nope, that's not a problem here.
Marco:
This is just the switch in the wall being smart.
Marco:
That also means there's no learning curve to other people learning how to use the lights in your house because there's still switches on the wall.
Marco:
So anybody who doesn't want to use an app or voice control or automation can just walk up to the switch on the wall and hit it like they would normally in Lightworks.
Marco:
So that's fantastic.
Marco:
And I got to say, I've used so many smart lighting products and smart outlets and things like that.
Marco:
The Lutron Caseta stuff is by far my favorite.
Marco:
It is the only system.
Marco:
And I've tried many popular systems.
Marco:
It is the only smart home system that I have found that works every single time.
Marco:
Not 90% of the time, not 98% of the time.
Marco:
It works every time.
Marco:
And it makes smart stuff as reliable as regular mechanical switches.
Marco:
And I just love that.
Marco:
It's so much better than everything else I've tried.
Marco:
So see for yourself, get smart lighting the smart way with Caseta by Lutron smart switches.
Marco:
Learn more about Caseta at Lutron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's Lutron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Lutron for really making my house smart and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Chris Gleim writes, this winter, I've had to scrape ice off my car's windshield quite a few times, and I usually do this while wearing AirPods, listening to podcasts.
Casey:
I turn on the car so it can defrost while I'm scraping, and I have an early 2010s Honda CR-V with no CarPlay and use a Bluetooth audio while I'm driving.
Casey:
The problem is my car's Bluetooth is greedy, and it takes over my Bluetooth no matter what I do.
Casey:
Even if I go into the Bluetooth settings and select my AirPods again, after about 30 seconds, the car steals the Bluetooth connection again.
Casey:
Eventually I get fed up and forget the device so I can use my AirPods and then I'm stuck later connecting to my car Bluetooth with an obnoxiously loud walkthrough where I type in 0000 to connect again.
Casey:
Is there some sort of Bluetooth priority that devices have which allows my car to steal the Bluetooth connection?
Casey:
Have you ever run into this?
Casey:
And if so, how do you deal with it?
Casey:
I definitely see this from if I ever touch my car doors while I've got AirPods in, because what ends up happening is the little dongle I have that gives me wireless CarPlay.
Casey:
It does the same sort of thing and tries to take over the connection and play to the radio that isn't even on because it doesn't know that it's not really on right then.
Casey:
And what I can do is I can go into Control Center and just say, go back to my AirPods.
Casey:
However, I get this little skip every three or four seconds, and it's incredibly frustrating.
Casey:
So I don't know if there's a good answer to this.
Casey:
And I would suspect that the thing that's happening is that iOS is just trying to figure out what it suspects to be the highest priority.
Casey:
But I don't necessarily agree with the choices that it makes, that the car is definitely more important than AirPods.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Do you guys have more actionable advice here?
John:
So I have a 2014 Honda that I scraped the ice off with my AirPods in listening to podcasts with the car turned on.
John:
And it also it also steals the audio from me, but mostly only if I forget to do this thing.
John:
Right.
John:
So my car also doesn't have CarPlay.
John:
It's just Bluetooth or whatever.
John:
Again, it's four years later than this one, but it's a possibility.
John:
If you press the little volume knobby thing, it shows on the screen audio off.
John:
like that's basically saying regardless of what it happens to be paired with i won't play audio out of the speakers from your bluetooth device if it's an audio off if i remember when i start the car engine to just whack the little thing so it says audio off it will still steal like you know it'll stop playing in my airpods when it steals the audio but then all i have to do to fix it is tap or squeeze the little airpod stem and then it starts playing in my airpods again
John:
try that if you haven't tried it try that that actually works reliably for me so you just you let it steal it and i think the reason it's stealing is because it's the newest thing like here i am and you told me to pair with your thing which is normally what you want to do when you get in the car so i'm going to do that right now here i go i'm pairing because if it didn't do that think about it if you got in your car and drove away it would never stop you know sending through your phone speaker or whatever you want it to do that
John:
It's just that you have to immediately sort of correct it.
John:
So if you do audio off, the reason the audio off is important is because I think it steals it, but then doesn't play it.
John:
So you don't miss any seconds of audio.
John:
And then if you just squeeze or tap the AirPods, it might start playing again.
John:
So that's my suggestion.
John:
If that doesn't work, then yeah, essentially you are at the mercy of the stupid Bluetooth audio implementation of your car thing, which you have limited control over.
John:
I don't think there's anything in particular that iOS can do.
John:
that would be useful to stop that from happening because in the end you do want your car to be able to without any interaction from you realize that your phone is in the car and it's the last device it paired with and therefore it should pair right so i mean i think maybe the best the uh the phone could do is maybe use gps to realize the car is not moving it can't even use the motion sensor because you're busy scraping the ice you are actually moving it but like if it uses the gps to realize you haven't left your driveway
John:
then maybe it could fend off the pairing thing, but even that wouldn't work because maybe you're outdoors with a Bluetooth speaker.
John:
It's like a limitation of the Bluetooth protocol.
John:
It doesn't have enough smarts to understand the various scenarios, so it does what we think is the right thing to do, which is just pair
John:
with the thing that I'm used to pairing with.
John:
If you're lucky, you can correct it after it has made the wrong choice, which is not as good as it making the right choice, but it's definitely better than taking out your phone, swiping your control center, pressing the little icon, doing all that stuff.
Casey:
And then as we discussed earlier, Marco hates cars.
Casey:
So moving right along.
Marco:
Actually, there is one like really annoying Bluetooth quirk in the FJ.
Marco:
So first of all, pairing my phone to this radio was amazing.
Marco:
So this it has it has like, you know, an old style LCD screen.
Marco:
So not like a bitmap display, but, you know, one of those like, you know, multi segment things where, you know, it makes a small number of letters with, you know, like two lines of segments or whatever.
Marco:
But, you know, mostly a text based interface.
Marco:
And but it does have Bluetooth support on the stock radio.
Marco:
And it has the way you have to pair this.
Marco:
I remember like I was sitting in front of the baseball field like the day after I bought it.
Marco:
trying to pair my phone to it in the cold with my gloves on and going through this process so you have to i hope anyone i hope people out there with photos or who have done this are hearing this uh and being like oh yeah that crazy thing you have to you know flip it over like the accessory bluetooth mode and then using like you know the up and down and enter keys you know some very rudimentary interface pair a bluetooth device but do it by voice
Marco:
The actual interface to pair a phone, delete a paired phone, or even list the paired phones does not show up on the text of the radio very easily, and in some cases at all.
Marco:
The way you're supposed to do it is by voice.
Marco:
And so you have to go through this weird voice menu where you hit...
Marco:
you know you hit whatever button it is and it's like you know list list phones you know or list of devices new device and then you go to list devices you gotta wait till it reads all of them and like you could tell this car had occasionally been borrowed by people and the owner was was not super technical and so and i don't i don't think the owner ever paired her own phone to it um and so i had to go through and it's like joe's iphone delete you know repair
Marco:
frankie's iphone and it's like because what you have to do eventually is when you pair your phone it records you saying it in your voice for some reason and then plays that back it it is it is the most amazing system is that because the display is inadequate to communicate that information you said you have two lines of text that's plenty to say marco's iphone
Marco:
But there's no way to enter text.
Marco:
I think that's the thing.
Marco:
And so when it's asking you to specify things by voice, I think it's doing like a voice similarity match.
John:
And it doesn't extract it from the device?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Because I don't think it ever displays the text on the screen.
Marco:
At least I couldn't figure out how to make it do that.
Marco:
It was amazing.
Marco:
But anyway, so besides that amazingness, one quirk of this, and this is part of the problem, like what you're describing, you don't realize...
Marco:
Bluetooth behavior is so dependent on little tiny details of how these things are handled in the devices and in the software.
Marco:
And a lot of this stuff, there is no clear standard or at least people don't follow it.
Marco:
And so you're kind of at the mercy of whatever you happen to do.
Marco:
This is why like...
Marco:
I'm actually fairly happy with Tesla in this department that Tesla's handling of Bluetooth, while it is often buggy and while it is sometimes hilariously limited, they have good behavior in ways that you expect.
Marco:
So for instance, this situation wouldn't happen to me because if you get out of the car and close the door, the radio inside turns off and does not take the focus from Bluetooth.
Marco:
Oh, and if you open just the back door but the front door's not open, it doesn't take it.
Marco:
If you open just the trunk, it doesn't take it.
Marco:
It only takes the Bluetooth if you open, I think, one of the two front doors and then sit down and push the brake to turn the car on.
Marco:
If you are out of the car, it does not take Bluetooth.
Marco:
Even if the car's heat is running to defrost the car, if you're out of the car, the heat can still run, but your Bluetooth is not being taken by the car at that point, which is very, very nice.
Marco:
Overall, I've been very happy with that, and their behavior among a lot of this stuff is great.
Marco:
One little quirk of the FJ is, as far as I can tell with the built-in radio, I can't get driving directions to announce themselves over Bluetooth unless I am playing music or a podcast.
Marco:
like because the radio tries to be smart and read the play pause status of the phone over bluetooth and reflect that in the radio okay great however the play pause status does not necessarily reflect the odd the audio channel of the device so if the device is paused in the media logic sense like if you if you have paused your music or podcast
Marco:
your map app can still be announcing a direction over that audio channel.
Marco:
Well, in the FJ's Bluetooth thing, if the music or podcast is paused, you don't get the voice prompts from your map app.
Marco:
So I have to constantly be playing something.
Marco:
Time to get that two-hour silent track.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
A very good song.
Marco:
Was that what it was called?
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
Anyway, sorry, go on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I think that's all we have for that.
Casey:
So moving on, Christopher Ward writes, I have a small community on Discord and like to screen share for my M1 Mac.
Casey:
I have a workaround for desktop audio capture, but it's a pain.
Casey:
There's native support for audio capture, but it requires, quote, reducing security, quote, in recovery mode.
Casey:
Is that as scary as it sounds?
Casey:
This really ticked me off when I got my M1 MacBook Pro, because in order to record our show, two-thirds, if not three-thirds of us use Audio Hijack.
Casey:
And Audio Hijack is an app by our friends at Rogue Amoeba, which is just incredibly good at capturing audio.
Casey:
In order to get that to work on an Apple Silicon computer, you need to do the following.
Casey:
launch audio hijack enter your administrator password acknowledge the system extension blocked alert open system preferences security and privacy click the enable system extension button shut down your mac press and hold the power button boot into recovery environment select administrators enter the administrator password open startup security utility switch to reduce security approve the change by entering your password again restart your mac acknowledge system extension blocked alert open system preferences security and privacy unlock click allow restart again
Casey:
That entire thing took me seriously 20 or 30 minutes when I was actually doing it.
Marco:
It's three reboots, right?
Marco:
If you do everything right, it's three reboots.
Marco:
And I think I had to enter my password like six times.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
It's some ridiculous... And this is not... To be clear...
Marco:
this is not Rogamiba doing a bad job of their installation.
Marco:
This is what Apple makes everybody do to achieve this function.
Marco:
And, oh, man.
Marco:
And the good thing is, so the way Rogamiba is implemented there is, I don't know what Discord does, but the way Rogamiba does it for Audio Hijack, which, again, to echo Casey's statements, I absolutely recommend.
Marco:
If you have any needs that Audio Hijack solves...
Marco:
And it's because it isn't just hijacking audio.
Marco:
It's also like recording, processing, broadcasting.
Marco:
There's so much stuff.
Marco:
We're using it now to broadcast the live stream, plus record stuff, plus adjust the audio so that we're all the same volume level.
Marco:
It does a lot.
Marco:
It's a fantastic app that I very strongly recommend.
Marco:
And yeah.
Marco:
And if Audio Hijack ever stopped working on Mac OS...
Marco:
I might stop working on Mac OS.
Marco:
That's how big of a deal that is to my work.
Marco:
But anyway, it does sound scary with Audio Hijack that you have to set it to reduce security.
Marco:
Now, to be clear, this is not disabling system integrity protection.
Marco:
there's multiple different security options that you have to set in the boot environment with modern mac os on m1 max in particular and you don't have to disable system integrity protection entirely you just have to allow it to run signed extensions and then you have to you know enable this whole thing and go through all that but
Marco:
with audio hijack at least with current version mac os after you've enabled it once and gotten it working you can then go back into into the secure boot environment and re-secure it back down to the default level once it's been approved once it will continue to work so you even after you like re-lock it down
Marco:
So if you're uncomfortable with running things in the reduced security mode, which frankly I am, like, so all you have to do is set it this way once, approve it, get it going, and then you can go back to your secure mode.
Marco:
And then this will be the only thing approved to run that way.
John:
Mentioning system integrity protection makes me wonder what what additional things that does these days, because the original purpose of it was what it said.
John:
It protected the integrity of the system, meaning the operating system.
John:
It would prevent you from modifying files that come as part of macOS.
John:
Right.
John:
Because, you know, by accident or on purpose, you know, it would even if you were root.
John:
You would try to like, you know, mod of a hex edit, the kernel, you know, and it would say, no, you can't add that file.
John:
Like, what do you mean?
John:
I'm rude.
John:
I can't edit.
John:
Aha, system integrity protection.
John:
Right.
John:
But nowadays on modern Mac OS, you boot from a read only snapshot of a cryptographically signed system image.
John:
so the whole first of all it's not even a disk it's a snapshot and second it's the whole thing is read only like there is no writing to it by anything ever so i mean i guess that qualifies system but if you turn off system integrity protection you still can't modify the os because it's a mounted read-only snapshot so system integrity protection probably does things above and beyond that but um it i feel like in some ways it's been surpassed by a structural change to the way mac os works in particular uh
John:
regarding protecting the operating system but yeah all the other features of like am i allowed to run any kernel extensions is this mac allowed to boot from an external disk which i had adventures with way back when i was trying to get my thing to boot from windows there are lots of security settings um and your comfort with them really depends on like as long as you know what the setting does and don't forget that you turned it off so that you can turn it back on later um
John:
Yeah, part of it comes down to do you trust the developer, but part of it also comes down to do I remember what state I left my Mac in?
John:
Because if your Mac is in some weird state that you put it in to do something with some piece of software, but you forgot to set it back to full security that you could be vulnerable for a long period of time.
John:
The other good thing you have going for you is most people don't mess with these defaults.
John:
This process that Casey read out, not only is it complicated and long, but it brings you to parts of your operating system that you've probably never seen before.
John:
If you've never done this type of thing, like booting into recovery and using these startup security utility, like nobody sees that during the normal course of using a Mac.
John:
It's there, but no one usually has to see it.
John:
So if you make any of these changes, you are one of a very, very tiny minority of people.
John:
And most sort of malware that's going to be out there or viruses are not going to target the 0.001% of Mac users that have ever screwed with the system security utility or startup security utility.
John:
They're going to target the mass market of Mac users.
John:
And the mass market of Mac users is generally much better protected than that.
John:
So...
John:
I wouldn't worry about it too much if it's a reputable software developer that has been around for a while that you trust.
John:
And especially if, like Marco said, if you can switch it back after the installation process has been done.
John:
That said, I don't know too much about Discord.
John:
I don't know if they're not that they're going to be malicious, but like.
John:
How reliable is our software?
John:
Is it likely to introduce some kind of bug that causes system instability?
John:
I can't judge that one way or the other, but you'll find out by trying it.
John:
Worst case, you can do what Mark used to do and have one computer where you install the scary software, but you use your Mac mini for that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, so try it on a Mac that you don't care that much about, and if it seems like it's stable, you know, or ask around, like, you could even ask Discord, it's a big company, right, and say, hey, can I set all the settings back to the non-scary mode after I'm done, or will it break your thing, and like, they'll walk you through what your options are, but...
John:
Yeah, Rogue Amoeba is an incredibly Byzantine process.
John:
That's what Apple requires you to do, to do things the quote unquote right way.
John:
And it is very user hostile, but in theory provides a more secure system for all of us.
Casey:
Finally, Ava writes, what's the best dumb TV on the market now?
Casey:
And are they any good at all?
Casey:
Am I better off just getting a monitor instead?
Casey:
I don't have a well-researched answer for this, but I will tell you that right around, I think it was Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we replaced the TV in our bedroom, which we use exceedingly rarely.
Casey:
And when we do, it's typically because we're both working out but doing different workout videos at the same time.
Casey:
But that being said, there was an incredible deal.
Casey:
This might be a Walmart exclusive.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But there was a really good deal on a 4K, which I actually was planning on getting a 1080 TV.
Casey:
That's how much we don't care about that TV.
Casey:
But anyway, there was a 4K 43-inch TV by Scepter.
Casey:
and this is a dumb TV.
Casey:
The James Bond villains?
Casey:
It's perfectly sufficient.
John:
The classic Mac game, you mean?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This TV is sufficient, except the one thing that I haven't cracked, and because I've used it so rarely, I don't really care that much, is that it does not seem to remember, and this actually is kind of table stakes, to be honest with you, but it doesn't seem to remember to do native resolution for the Apple TV, you know what I mean?
Casey:
Where it has like the whole frame is like kind of sucked in a little bit.
John:
Overscan is always on?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, or something like that, which is infuriating.
Casey:
And maybe there's a setting somewhere that I missed to do it.
Casey:
But it is a dumb TV.
Casey:
It doesn't have like Netflix or anything like that.
Casey:
It never asked me to get on the Wi-Fi or anything like that.
Casey:
I don't remember if it even has an Ethernet port in the back of it or not.
Casey:
So this is sufficient.
Casey:
And I landed on this in part because when we tailgate in the before times, when we tailgate at University of Virginia football games, we'll bring a television because, you know, one of our tailgate people has a generator.
Casey:
And so we'll bring a television and we have this like ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient 720 scepter TV that has been that has traveled to
Casey:
And from Charlottesville, from Richmond, it's about an hour-ish drive, has done that for years and years and years, and it still hasn't broken yet.
Casey:
And so I considered that a good omen that maybe one that's just stuck on the wall and never moves may not be so terrible.
Casey:
So that is an example.
Casey:
I would give it a tepid endorsement.
Casey:
But I don't know if either of you guys, particularly John, perhaps, since I know you live and breathe TVs that you'll never buy, perhaps have a better solution here.
John:
There's not enough information about the intended use of this thing to know much more.
John:
But for the reading the letter of the statement, you know, for dumb TVs, you know, what are the best dumb TVs?
John:
And are they any good at all?
John:
The answer is no, they're not good at all.
John:
I mean, if you don't care and you just need I just need a TV, then, yeah, you can get the you know, this thing that Casey got.
John:
Right.
John:
But like in terms of how good a TV is, like how good is the picture?
John:
No, like none.
John:
None of the ones that don't have smarts in them.
John:
care at all about the picture so it's just going to be an lcd panel it's like you get what you get like the black levels are terrible the color reproduction is bad but hey if you just need a tv to show pictures it'll do that job um but that said if you buy like a real tv and they all have smart stuff in them you can starve it right most i'm pretty sure that there's only a few really scary companies that ship with like
John:
free cell phone access that they connect to the cell network that you don't have to pay for, right?
John:
Just so they can suck your private information and report on what you're watching, right?
John:
Wait, that happens?
John:
I think it was at least one or two electronics companies.
John:
I don't forget if they were smart TVs.
John:
They would essentially do the Kindle thing where it would connect to the cell network at their own cost to exfiltrate your info, right?
John:
But for the most part, they need to either be plugged into ethernet or they need to get on your wifi.
John:
Hopefully your wifi has a password
John:
Never give it to your TV.
John:
Don't plug it into Ethernet.
John:
That will starve your quote-unquote smart TV.
John:
And most of them will still function as a television.
John:
You won't be able to use any of the apps or any of the other stuff, but you don't care.
John:
You just want the dumb stuff.
John:
But the sad fact is that television is now...
John:
Like plain old televisions have to come with software, right?
John:
It's expected in the product.
John:
So all of the even remotely good ones in terms of picture quality, they're all quote unquote smart TVs.
John:
It'll be like, you know, kids, young kids today don't consider this a smartphone because what the hell is a smart?
John:
It's just a phone, right?
John:
A phone that doesn't do all the things that our phones do is not a phone.
John:
That's what TVs are like now.
John:
A television that doesn't have apps on it and connect to the network is a broken television, right?
John:
So you have to buy a smart one if you care at all about picture quality.
John:
But you can currently, this may not be true forever, but currently you can buy a quote unquote smart TV and just starve it.
Casey:
Another thing that's worth looking into, and I don't know if this is really doing me any good or not, but if you're a piehole user like I am, and if you're not, just don't even bother.
Casey:
But there are ad lists that are specifically for smart TV stuff.
Casey:
So one of the ad lists I use is smart TV block list for piehole.
Casey:
And somebody put this together, and it's apparently a bunch of domains that these TVs will try to use to call home and phone home.
Casey:
And, you know, when you have this DNS server that you're running in your network, it will just deny those requests.
Casey:
You know, it will give them a bogus IP in return, so those requests won't work.
Casey:
And that is kind of an okay halfway.
Casey:
John's approach is unquestionably better.
Casey:
But if you wanted to, I don't know, for example, hook up your TV to your Wi-Fi or Ethernet such that it can be an AirPlay receiver, you're going to need internet or, you know, at least network access for that, but you may not want to give it carte blanche to everything else.
Casey:
And this is a sort of kind of halfway.
Yeah.
John:
People in the chat room pointed out that televisions will find your neighbor's unprotected Wi-Fi network.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
If you have a neighbor who doesn't have a password and you don't let it get to anything, it will find that one very often and connect to it.
John:
So starving it may involve tinfoil at a certain point.
John:
Not on your head, but...
John:
yeah like it can be done but that's just this is a sad fact like no one no one who cares about picture quality would ever make a television doesn't have any smarts unless they were doing something like oh for commercial purposes for your restaurant here's this essentially monitor but those are going to cost you like 10 grand or something because anything for commercial purposes is always ridiculous money
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Lutron Caseta.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
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:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
John:
Speaking of playing games like AWS, the game that we played this episode was, if you, during the course of listening to this episode, sent me an email to tell me that I can hold down the microphone button on the Apple TV remote and say, what did he say?
John:
And it will rewind, turn on captions and play forward.
John:
You lost the game because that means you didn't read my article, which mentioned that very future towards the end of it.
So...
John:
Thanks for everyone for playing.
John:
I hope you did well.
John:
Wow.
John:
Sorry, John.
Casey:
So one of you put this in show notes.
Casey:
I probably should have done this, to be honest with you.
Casey:
This made the rounds a couple of days back.
Casey:
Toyota apparently has a patent for a quote-unquote manual transmission for electric cars, including something that vaguely resembles a clutch.
Casey:
I actually completely...
John:
forgot to look into this before the show so i apologize for that can one of you do the uh job of chief summarizer in chief for me yeah i read this article a few days ago so i've already blocked most of it out of my mind but it's exactly what you think it's a stick a stick shift lever with an h pattern right and a clutch pedal and they all work the way that you would expect them to but imagine that the clutch pedal is not connected to a clutch and the stick shift is not connected to a gearbox right
John:
It's kind of like if you're in a really cool simulator.
John:
It doesn't go anywhere.
John:
There's no wheels.
John:
There's no engine.
John:
But it's a simulator.
John:
It's trying to teach you how to drive a stick shift.
John:
So it works kind of like a flight simulator.
John:
The flight controls aren't connected to control surfaces on wings, but it has to feel like a real plane.
John:
So, you know, if there's...
John:
You know, when you're diving or something or if there's like tension on the stick, you have to feel that and the pedals have you have to feel.
John:
That's what it seems like this is like.
John:
And, you know, hey, like most cars are brake by wire and, you know, throttle by wire these days, meaning that rather than the gas pedal being connected to a series of cables or whatever that cause a throttle to open.
John:
Right.
John:
Instead, they're just connected to an electronic switch that can tell you have pressed the gas pedal 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%.
John:
And that measurement of that electronic thing sends a signal through wires to something that eventually opens and closes throttles on the engine.
John:
Same thing with the brakes.
John:
A lot of modern cars are brake-by-wire.
John:
Rather than the brake pressing on a thing that causes hydraulic fluid to press the little calipers to squeeze the brake pads, that brake is connected to nothing except for an electronic sensor that tells how hard you're pressing on the brake.
John:
And that electronic sensor then does the rest of the stuff in the car.
John:
Well, this thing is like, imagine if the clutch was not connected to anything except for a little electronic sensor.
John:
And imagine if the stick shift was also not connected to anything except for an electronic sensor.
John:
It's exactly the same.
John:
it makes much less sense than brake by wire and throttle by wire because the whole point of the stick shift and the clutch is to be mechanically connected to the things that they do because you're changing mechanically changing gear ratios and you're mechanically engaging and disengaging clutches right so it strikes me as
John:
the coolest technology ever for playing like Gran Turismo, like, or, you know, some other like iRacing or whatever, like video game racing, because to make this work, they have to take a car that probably has one fixed gear ratio, maybe two, right?
John:
But that you have no control over, right?
John:
And simulate a clutch and a gearbox so that you can play a fun game while you drive.
John:
And that means that like your engagement of the clutch and the slipping of it and the gear ratios is used to essentially, I guess, calculate how much torque the electric motor should put out, right?
John:
So I think you could actually do this in a really convincing way because you have really good precise control, especially if there's a fixed ratio.
John:
Like you have really precise control over it.
John:
And because you get like 100% of the torque from zero RPM on an electric motor, you can simulate, I'm assuming...
John:
less than 100 of the torque by just controlling how much power you send to the electric motor and i imagine it could feel almost like you're like slipping a clutch they even put installing so that if you don't give it enough yes oh my god they simulate that as well like what are you stalling like there's nothing to stall but they simulate that as well it is essentially a video game um so i think it's really clever and they should totally sell this technology to those people who make those cool like racing rigs that people play video games with
John:
but i can't imagine like wanting this on an electric car because i mean well maybe like on one mind one one side i think like well what if you want to play this video game when you're really driving i mean you could right but i don't i don't think i want to play this game and it's not because it's not real i feel like it's like once i go to an electric car like the game is there from as far as i'm concerned your mileage may vary in case you can chime in in a second to hear how he thinks about this but
John:
The reason I enjoy that game of driving is because it makes the car perform better than it would if it didn't have a stick shift.
John:
So if I took the stick shift out of my cord and put literally any other transmission in there, except for probably even the world's best current automated manuals and automatics, it would be worse because it has so little power.
John:
There's not a lot of horsepower, right?
John:
I need the stick shift to have complete control over what gear I'm in and how much of it I'm putting down to the tires to make the car perform better and be more fun.
John:
And not annoy me like, oh, you picked the wrong gear, stupid transmission or whatever.
John:
But you don't need to do that to make an electric car perform well.
John:
It just just let it do what it naturally does.
John:
And it's great.
John:
So I don't think I would choose to play this game.
John:
But Casey, would you choose to play this video game in your car?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like the whole point of learning to drive a stick and the reason I enjoy it so much is because it is a skill that my impression is it's not unlike golf.
Casey:
I wrote one or two posts about this years and years and years ago that I'm too lazy to dig up.
Casey:
But the idea is, you know, every time you take off from a stop or every time you switch gears, that is another chance to have something that's smooth and efficient.
Casey:
And sometimes I do a good job of that and sometimes I don't.
Casey:
And part of the reason I like a stick shift so much is because it is, as you were saying, such a direct connection to the mechanics of the car.
Casey:
And I think simulating that while novel would probably be silly.
Casey:
And honestly, one of the things that I love about electric cars is that there is instant torque always.
Casey:
And
Casey:
you can mash down on the loud pedal.
Casey:
Well, except it isn't loud, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
You can mash down on the accelerator.
John:
You can mash down on the whining pedal.
John:
It's still loud.
John:
It makes a noise.
John:
It's just different.
Casey:
You can mash down on the whiny pedal and you are launched forward.
Casey:
And that's what makes electric cars so fun.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Again, I think this is novel.
Casey:
I would certainly love to try a car that did this, but I don't suspect that this would be something that I would particularly enjoy.
Casey:
And I feel like it's simulating...
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's simulating the bad parts of driving a stick, but it's simulating the, like, not that terribly fun parts.
Casey:
Like, stalling is not fun.
Casey:
And yes, I guess that's an increased realism.
John:
That's the failure condition of the game, right?
Casey:
Well, yeah, I guess.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just... I enjoy driving a stick because it gives me increased control, and it prevents me from just...
Casey:
being a passenger while i'm driving if that makes sense like the idea of full full self-driving like leaving aside the safety aspects and all that like the idea of full self-driving yeah i guess that's kind of cool and it would be neat to go on a highway and just turn you know tune my brain out and be able to like scroll twitter i guess or whatever but but the reason i don't drive an automatic today is that i no matter what automatic i've ever driven it always feels
Casey:
Or I should say any torque converted automatic.
Casey:
So like a dual clutch that does not fall under this.
Casey:
But any automatic with a torque converter, they call it a slush box for a reason.
Casey:
It feels disconnected.
Casey:
And yes, I'm aware of like locking torque converters and so on.
Casey:
But like, it still feels disconnected to me.
Casey:
Or that there's like this...
Casey:
Or this, I don't know how to say it other than disconnection.
Casey:
There's this goo between me and the car.
Casey:
And I love driving a stick because I have a direct visceral connection to the car.
Casey:
And I don't feel like this would give that back.
Casey:
It would just remind me that what I'm doing is a crummy facsimile of the real thing.
John:
The other thing I think of that might be a use case for this, that it would provide some benefit on an electric car, is that controlling how power goes down to the ground, right, sometimes can be done in a more sophisticated way than simply a dial that goes from zero to 100, right, like the gas pedal, right?
John:
So on an electric car, say you're stationary, and let's say you're in a snowy, slippery, icy condition, and you want to get the car going, and you don't want to have wheels spin.
John:
just controlling how far you press the gas pedal is only a one-dimensional way of controlling this like you can only sort of like you know you can move it's like a dial and you can move it and you know try to get the car going give it enough so that it starts moving but not so much that it slips but sometimes you need a little bit of slip setting aside traction control whatever pretend you could turn off all the traction control stuff which most of the time you can't but pretend you could
John:
Just having the gas pedal alone in an electric car may not give you as much control as having a fake gas and a fake clutch and a shifter.
John:
Because very often what you might want to do if you're a super-duper expert, which I am not, but if you're a super-duper expert in getting the car going in questionable traction conditions, is you might want to sort of rev up the engine, right?
John:
But with the clutch disengaged or slipping, and then quickly engage the clutch to essentially...
John:
give a burst of power at you know like at the current quote-unquote rpm if you know what i'm saying right to immediately put that power down and then take it away it's almost as if you would put the gas pedal to a certain position and then decide at this position of the of the gas pedal i don't know why i keep going with the gas pedal at this position of the accelerator engage and disengage the clutch it gives you a second dimension with which to control the power that's being put down this may just be something that's in my head and physically speaking there's no difference between the one-dimensional pedal and the two-dimensional thing of like
John:
throttle position and clutch engagement?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
What you're saying is correct.
Casey:
And it's bananas to me that you are a resident of a winter hellscape and don't ever have to do this.
John:
I do have to do it.
John:
I'm just not very good at it.
John:
But I'm saying like in an electric car, would that kind of control mechanism, as opposed to just the gas pedal, give you a better ability to control the car in slippery conditions?
John:
Maybe, maybe not.
Casey:
Oh, hell yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, because here's the thing.
Casey:
Why do you start in second gear in the snow?
John:
Well, you have such faith in the horsepower in my car.
John:
I can start in second gear, but you have to do it so carefully because I have less than 200 horsepower.
Casey:
Well, then the reason you do that is because you want less torque to the wheels, because if you just start it in first, it might be too much torque.
Casey:
You'll start slipping.
Casey:
So if you apply less torque, fewer, whatever, less torque to the wheels, then you will potentially get going without slipping.
Casey:
And when you have...
John:
I'm also applying a lot more gas because I don't want to stall.
John:
And so I mean, obviously, doing it a gas engine is very different than doing it electric.
John:
But like those two dimensions of control do allow me to do things like, hey, you're giving it a huge amount of gas.
John:
The engine is going at really high RPM.
John:
But because you're in second gear and you're slipping the clutch a little.
John:
The actual amount of torque that goes.
John:
And it's also like how bursty it is.
John:
Does the torque go down all at once or does it gradually go?
John:
And you can modulate those two different things.
John:
How engaged is the clutch and how far down is the gas pedal to get a result that I think would be more difficult to do with just an accelerator pedal on an electric car.
Casey:
Right, and so that's why in this faux stick shift, I could see if you were to start in second gear, second quote-unquote gear, and slip the quote-unquote clutch, perhaps instead of giving you 100% of the torque immediately, maybe it only gives you 50% or something like that.
John:
But how does it do that?
John:
Does it just provide less power to the electric motor?
John:
It's all a question of how good this simulation is.
John:
Because under the covers, it's a bunch of wires going to an electric motor with electricity flowing through them, and I'm not sure...
John:
if you know if it collapses down to that one dimension you know i don't know enough about the electricity but i would certainly want to try this because if only kind of like portrait mode on the camera so you could see like is it able to do a decent job or is it just awful right because this is not an easy game to get right because a real clutch and a real shifter don't have to cheat it's a physical thing right and it's simulating that with something where there's no gearbox and no clutch that's going to be hard
Casey:
It's an awful idea, though, and I approve them chasing down this rabbit hole.
Casey:
I just don't expect that I would be impressed by it.
John:
What was the other one that I think they were going to do?
John:
Was it the Mach-E?
John:
There was some other sort of stick shift in an electric car, but I think it didn't have a clutch.
John:
It had a shifter, but only two pedals, which was also like, why even bother with that?
John:
Why not just put a fidget toy in the middle of the dashboard?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You're not wrong.
John:
It's the ballpoint pens.
John:
You can click the thing.
John:
Click, click, click, click.
Casey:
Ford has a new manual transmission patent that doesn't need a clutch pedal.
Casey:
It still has a clutch, but it could operate it automatically.
Casey:
Didn't, shoot, there was, I thought Saab's did this like forever and a day ago.
Casey:
It was like a traditional H pattern, but there was only two pedals or something like that.
Casey:
I probably have that wrong.
Casey:
It was like Saab or Volkswagen or something, I thought.
Casey:
But I don't know, whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, it's novel and interesting.
Casey:
And I'd certainly, like you said, I'd certainly like to try it, but I'd be very surprised if it impressed me.
Marco:
I, you know, I understand what, where you guys are coming from as, as the more, more car nerdy people on the show compared to me.
Marco:
Uh, but I, as much as I love driving stick, when I drove gas cars, the reason I love driving stick was because, you know, Casey, you were talking earlier about like, you know, the kind of the pile of hacks that it is to drive an automatic and how it doesn't really feel good.
Marco:
And it kind of, kind of disconnect from the car.
Marco:
And, you know, the,
Marco:
The reality is the gas engines have this narrow band of RPMs where they can be most powerful and everything else around that band kind of sucks.
Marco:
And so they have these complicated systems of gearing and clutching to try to control the car better and to optimize it better for performance and various needs and everything like that.
Marco:
Well...
Marco:
an electric car typically only has one gear.
Marco:
And, you know, I know there's a few exceptions, but most of them it's, you know, fixed gear and you have all the torque you need from the beginning.
Marco:
And so you don't need to have all these different levels of control to finally customize what it's doing.
Marco:
You just let the pedal do what you tell it to do and it does it immediately and directly and very gracefully.
Marco:
And so to me...
Marco:
The stick was not something that was itself something that I took joy in operating.
Marco:
It was more that it let me have greater control over what was a very complicated process that my car was trying to do.
Marco:
Because my car, trying to guess with an automatic what I wanted at any given moment would often guess wrong.
Marco:
Because, of course, it's not magic.
Marco:
And sometimes things that try to be smart about a complex process, see also Bluetooth, will guess wrong.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so in those cases, sometimes it's better to just turn off automatic pairing and just manually shift your AirPods to all the different devices that you have them paired to.
Marco:
Well, once you have something like once all that complexity goes away, you know, I like I don't need to feel the feeling of manual shifting.
Marco:
on an electric car because the electric car doesn't have that giant pile of hacks.
Marco:
It's a much simpler and more direct drive that you're operating to begin with.
Marco:
And so I don't need to feel the feeling of operating a clutch and shifting gears and everything to be simulated for me on a car that doesn't need any of that.
Marco:
I would rather just drive the car directly with my foot on the single pedal that you actually need to drive the car directly.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The feeling I get of the control over my car, it doing exactly what I want it to be doing, those feelings I would get by operating a stick on a gas car, I get those already with electric because that's just how electric works.
Marco:
And so I don't need something like this to simulate this old thing for me in the same way that I don't need my electric car to play engine noises over the speakers.
John:
A lot of them do.
John:
But to be clear, electric motors do have power bands.
John:
It's just that, like I said, they're shifted down so that all the torque starts at zero RPM, which is not how gas engines work.
John:
But they do have power bands.
John:
And the complaint about, you know, they're good, they're wide, and they shifted way down low, which makes them ideal for almost all use cases.
John:
But in the case of like very sporty cars,
John:
The electric motors tend to tail off when you get to really high RPMs, which is why, you know, the Porsche Taycan has two gears in it, because when that power tails off, it upshifts.
John:
Right.
John:
And now you're, you know, it's if you drew like the power and torque curves for the various engines, you'd see the electric ones are way better suited to the case of driving around in a car.
John:
But it's not like a flat plateau forever.
John:
It does tail off.
John:
So that's why gear ratios exist.
John:
And the other thing about driving with the electric car is because this power band exists and mentioning like thing choosing for you versus you doing it yourself.
John:
The equivalent to that, I think, in electric cars is the setting that most of them have for how much regenerative braking you want and the idea of one pedal driving.
John:
The manual transmission way to drive an electric car is not to do one pedal driving because you don't want...
John:
one pedal to dictate both how much energy is going to the motor and also how much regenerative braking is being applied because those are two separate things the manual way to do it is to say okay you know both pedals are totally disconnected it's all electronic obviously electric car right gas pedal just controls power to the motor and brake pedal controls braking and most of the brake pedal may be regenerative braking before it hits the friction brakes but the point is
John:
So you decide how and when to apply any braking at all and how much braking should be applied versus just having the gas pedal and saying, OK, when I lift up on the gas pedal, apply regenerative braking.
John:
Because the thing about one pedal driving is you can't do an emergency stop with one pedal driving, right?
John:
the regenerative braking is never going to be such that when you lift your foot off the gas, it slams on the brake maximum.
John:
Like you'd injure people, right?
John:
So you do have to use the friction brakes or the brake pedal itself sometimes, but sometimes you don't.
John:
And so that sort of automatic mode of like, we'll mostly choose what you think is the right thing.
John:
But of course, if a kid runs out in front of your car,
John:
take your foot off the accelerator and jam on the brake as hard as you possibly can.
John:
We still expect you to do that.
John:
But in the easier cases, the regenerative braking, which we will dial in based on your setting in a preference screen somewhere, will give you that as you lift up on the gas pedal so you can do one pedal driving around town like you're in a golf cart, right?
John:
So I think...
John:
that when i think about my electric car future when i think of like what it would be like to have a manual transmission what i mostly think about is please no one pedal driving i don't want any braking of any kind to be applied unless i touch the brake pedal because i'm an old fogey and that's what i want and that but that i feel like would give me the most control over an electric car because i find one pedal driving disconcerting because i'm not used to it but also philosophically in the same way i don't like automatic transitions i would like to control when braking is applied
Casey:
Maybe that's the answer is we repurpose the third and leftmost pedal as a analog application of how much regenerative braking you want.
Casey:
I don't want that.
Casey:
So if you want to just slow down a teeny bit, you put your left leg just a
Casey:
teeny bit down on what was formerly known as the clutch, now is the regenerative braking pedal.
Casey:
And then when you want to get a lot of regenerative braking, like you want to slow down on a very steep hill, downward hill, then you just mash down on the thing that was formerly called a clutch and you get a whole bunch of regenerative braking.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's that's the one of the measures of really good electric cars is how well they blend the regenerative braking and the friction brakes right because you know you don't want to feel when they're switching from one to the other and that's actually tricky to do um but i think with the exception of doing what is it called wheel stands or whatever with the exception of the thing where you where you're taking a gas car and you stand on the brake and the gas at the same time to build up torque for a big launch or whatever you generally don't want to give anyone the opportunity to apply both the quote-unquote gas and brakes at the same time
John:
which is why when you learn how to drive, even though there are two pedals in an automatic car and you have two feet, the way you drive it is not left foot on the brake, right foot on the gas, because that's bad.