29: Computerized Garden Gnome
06 Sep 2013iPhone event predictions, fingerprint security, new product categories, using our Synology NASes, and what Nokia does for Microsoft.
Episode Description:
- John's Mavericks review progress.
- iPhone event predictions.
- Design and security tradeoffs of a theoretical iPhone fingerprint lock.
- iPhone 5S colors.
- Will the 5C be the mainstream, best-selling model?
- Cell towers near rich people.
- The Apple TV shipment rumor.
- Tim Cook's "new product categories" statement earlier this year: What might that be that could plausibly come this fall "and into 2014"?
- Our Synology experiences and disk-layout strategies so far.
- The OmniKeyMaster Mac App Store saga.
- Microsoft and Nokia: Stratechery 1, Stratechery 2, Asymco: Who's buying whom?
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use coupon code ATP9 for 20% off in September!
- Hover: High-quality, no-hassle domain registration. Use promo code ATP for 10% off.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s a nice guy. Like just he has like a voice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s how we and you sound to other people, Marco. This gives you a glimpse of what it must like for the people,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for the people who hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. I was thinking it, but I didn’t say it.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the people who hate us, this is exactly how we sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Hold on, hold on. Nobody hates you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is so not true. Like, look at my email there. Believe me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay. There’s a difference between hates you and corrects you. You do realize that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BEEP So how’s the review going, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John well with the the uncertainty about the release date and You know like it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be Any day now or whatever? I thought it was a well. I brought up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John ours guys, and they agreed that we should just start Editing and copy editing this even though it’s not done done
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re still doing battery tests and getting results and still waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for dictation to work and Stuff like and still waiting for pricing information, but like what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there like we better start going through it now, so it’s It’s uploaded and it’s in the process of being
⏹️ ▶️ John edited and copyedited, what there is of it, and we just got to wait. You
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they’re going to give you a nice long notice about when it’s going to be released, but they could just
⏹️ ▶️ John say, and here it is, and it’s shipping now, or God knows what they’ll do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, their plans don’t factor in the quality of life of people writing
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews, because that’s really low on their list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can’t make a call to one of your birdies or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Figure this out.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many birdies? I don’t know how many birdies. And besides, nobody knows this anyway. This is the type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that the price and ship date are the type of things that you can change right up to the last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need a big advance notice for any of these things. They can hold it. They can keep it. You know what I mean? It’s not all those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of those things are known to such a small group of people. It’s not like even the name of the product,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has to be in marketing materials and everything like that. Pricing is in marketing materials a little bit, but there hardly
⏹️ ▶️ John are any marketing materials. It’s gonna be on you know the App Store, so Just waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fun you don’t you sound beaten, but or not beaten. I should say you sound battered,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not it’s not this is a not a fun part like you know rerunning tests going
⏹️ ▶️ John through screenshots to make sure things haven’t changed Retesting things it’s just it’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You sound like a man who’s on the edge of stopping, but I feel like every year you get to this point, and then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ships, and then you’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, every year has something that’s annoying about it. And this year, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John not knowing the ship date or the price and stuff like that, I don’t have such terrible memory of
⏹️ ▶️ John these things, so I can’t tell you, but it seems like in every other year previously, we knew the ship date
⏹️ ▶️ John or the price well in advance of it happening. Who knows maybe we will this year as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the fact that we don’t by now is Annoying me uncertainty is bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough we have a lot to get through Anything else on the review?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is gonna be a tough show I think because next week we’re doing the show right after the iPhone of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early today after the iPhone event and So I would imagine that next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. We’re gonna have a pretty packed show full of iPhone stuff although I don’t know does it look that interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think based on what we’ve seen so far, if it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone and not also iPad slash Apple TV slash anything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s just the iPhone, which I would probably say there’s a 50-50 chance of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I actually don’t know if there’s going to be any surprises. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the leaks have covered so much. We’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John the fingerprint scanner for half the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, let’s not talk about the fingerprint scanner for half the show, only because we don’t have the time for it. think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your point that if there’s anything interesting I suspect that it will be something like the fingerprint scanner. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like there’s a lot of smoke about the iPhone 5 color as I’m calling it, the iPhone 5 champagne,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think that those seem to be pretty much a lock. I had thought earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter whether the champagne iPhone would be just a China thing or an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Asia thing I should say or if it would go everywhere. At the time I thought it be just them. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m thinking it would probably be everywhere, but that all seems to be pretty much a lock as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the only big surprise in my mind would be, well maybe not surprise, but slightly surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing would be a fingerprint scanner. And there’s some amount of smoke there, but not a lot. I don’t know, what do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I don’t know, I’m thinking we’re probably, I mean the fingerprint scanner, there was something in the in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software I believe that that tipped that off. There was some kind of reference to it in the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff somewhere, in like in iOS 7 beta something I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen that before haven’t we? I can’t cite an example but I could swear that we’ve seen stuff like that before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it kind of makes sense as like something more interesting than a passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock and and faster you know it’s whether it’s more secure depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a lot of things and is highly arguable but it’s at least more convenient like I don’t I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a passcode lock on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No I only do if I’m traveling and I feel susceptible to my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being lost. Like at WWDC I typically do, not because I don’t trust fellow conference goers, but because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gazillion iPhones in a square mile and it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody accidentally grabbed the wrong one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But generally speaking, I do not have a lock on mine either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I figure like for security though, you know, this is always the argument with security.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you’re just going to like put your password on a post-it note and stick it to your monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you’re better off having lower password requirements and just being able to remember it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the kind of thing like, I don’t use a passcode lock because it would slow me down too much when I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock the phone. If they do something with a fingerprint scanner where it’s really fast to unlock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the fingerprint on the home button, I might do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they could go one or two ways on the fingerprint scanner. could do the, you guys don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember this, but the Mac OS 9 had a voice password thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for its fake user accounts where you would say something and then instead of typing your password
⏹️ ▶️ John you would say the same thing and it would let you in. And that one’s, the policy of that system,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was so impressive when you first used it, you realize that it errs on the side of letting you in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if anyone says anything remotely similar to what you said in a similar voice, they get let in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s very comfortable and easy for you to use, but the security is perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better than nothing, but not much, right? And the other way to go with it is
⏹️ ▶️ John to err on the side of not letting people in. So the fingerprint
⏹️ ▶️ John scanner works like 50% or 40% of the time, but it never lets someone else in except for your finger.
⏹️ ▶️ John And based on the the fingerprint technology thing, I don’t think it can be all that
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable. So they have to make one of those choices like it’s not going to work. I don’t think even 90% of the time so they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to decide, are we just going to say okay, well, 90% of the time that gets you without entering your
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode but 10% of the time you get to enter your passcode anyway, and there’s a little frustration factor. They’re like, why did I bother
⏹️ ▶️ John putting my finger on there? Because this time it didn’t work, let me just enter the passcode and then maybe people, you know, it doesn’t take much for people to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it doesn’t work almost 100% of the time, I’m just going to enter my passcode every single time and not bother with a fingerprint thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other way to do it is to be for people like Marco, who don’t use a passcode, and just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if your finger’s close and it looks kind of close, it’ll let you in. Maybe it will let someone else in sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s better than nothing. So that’s what I’m going to watch for if this thing has a fingerprint scanner, is
⏹️ ▶️ John which one of those two policies do they come in. I guess the third possibility is that it’s magic and it works 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time, and Apple doesn’t have to make that choice, or close to 100% of the time. But for some reason, I find that unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, on top of that, if you think about it, my thumb, I have an average sized hand, and my thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is considerably bigger than the home button. So what happens if I use like the tip of my thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one moment to unlock the phone, but then I use kind of the heel of my thumb the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time? Is there some sort of scanner that I have to, like some training process I have to go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to scan my entire thumbprint? That just seems so not Apple-like at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s my thought process on the fingerprint scanner. Apple has yet to produce an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS device with a Home button where the Home button doesn’t fail some percentage of the time that’s large
⏹️ ▶️ John enough for us to all have heard of or experienced a failed Home button. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s true. Have you never heard of or experienced a failed Home button?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I have on previous models. But I think the 4 was really bad for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the 4S might have improved it. Certainly the 5, I believe the 5 made it metal-backed. They keep making it better.
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But I have heard of people with fives with failed Home buttons. And
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I’m saying it’s their fault and it’s shoddy workmanship. It’s just that it’s a button that you press all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s good. I don’t know what the percentage is. Maybe 99.5% of the Home buttons are fine after the first year
⏹️ ▶️ John and 0.5% fail. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a button that does nothing except be a button. So to expect an equal or higher percentage out
⏹️ ▶️ John of a button that is a button and, by the way, also some kind of fingerprint scanner.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I’m explaining why I’m ruling out the idea that it will work reliably enough that Apple won’t have to make those
⏹️ ▶️ John choices of which way to go with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tend to agree. I mean, I think it’s an interesting premise, but like you, I’m very dubious as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to how they can execute well on it. But just like Marco was saying earlier, you know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a passcode lock on my phone. I find it to be annoying when I do use it at conferences or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the case may be. And the thought of a perfect thumbprint scanner really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does sound excellent to me. But it also has some other weird annoyances that come with it. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if Erin’s phone is in the kitchen, all the iPads and whatnot are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upstairs, we’re sitting on the couch, and she wants to look up something real quick. If I hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her my phone, what does she do? I mean, logically, I would assume she would have to enter my passcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which of course I would have already shared with her. But how does that work? and that gets to be a little dicey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what is the fallback, like you were saying earlier, if my thumb doesn’t unlock it? Is it the passcode? I know, it just seems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the passcode will always work. Passcode will always, I’m assuming, will always be an option and will always work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right, I’m saying, would that be your fallback if you can’t scan your thumb? And it stands to reason it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, but I don’t know. It just seems, like you were saying before, it just seems like it would be annoying if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work darn near all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if, John, you’re exactly right that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would just be like a quick shortcut to get out of the passcode entry screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like a quick alternative to entering the passcode, but it would still – it might even still show the passcode
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it has another important effect similar to Siri in that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a gee whiz kind of feature. So even if you only – even if someone bought an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 4S or whatever when Siri came out and only used Siri for like the first two or three days to show people
⏹️ ▶️ John and play with. A lot of those people I think got their value out of Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they got a cool new phone you could talk to and they played with it and were entertained by it and eventually became
⏹️ ▶️ John bored of it because it doesn’t work reliably enough and they don’t doesn’t fit into their workflow. But I think a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are not bitter about that. Like they still were left with a really nice phone and they got that extra bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of enjoyment out of it and it was exciting and interesting and new and the fingerprint scanner could
⏹️ ▶️ John fill that role for the iPhone 5s or whatever they end up calling it you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Man Siri’s a mess. Every time… seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been out now for what two full years? It’s just a beta
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is it still? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know I can’t keep track.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time I try to use Siri, which isn’t that often, like I used to use it a lot but it just kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failing so often back when it first came out that and you know not even just doing the wrong thing but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failing to be recognized and timing out and having server issues. It was failing so often that I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, slowly slowed down my use of it and then eventually stopped for a while. And I’ve been trying it over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of months, like just maybe like once a week I’ll try something. And it fails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about half the time. And so I’m just like, it’s so discouraging. Like I can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after all this time it still has this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean I use it sporadically. I think I would lump myself in that category of, ooh, this is shiny and fancy when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I first got my 4S. And I used it more, but not a lot. Now I find myself only using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri to set timers, so for like cooking or something like that. Or if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to send a text message while driving, I’ll dictate it to Siri and hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that what I send, Aaron or whomever, is remotely similar to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the words that came out of my mouth. And I would agree that Siri, not only is it bad, but I would say it’s gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse lately. because I actually had pretty good luck with Siri up until the last month or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I feel like it’s a total crapshoot now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right, so what else will be new? So are we saying yes to Champagne iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I mean, I think, and by the way, not only Champagne, there’s also that new kind of lighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray color with the black glass. You saw, you see that also?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s four proposed colors, and somebody had a video of all four of them lined up, like all four of the shells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lined up. So it’s the dark black and the white and silver that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have now. And then there is the champagne one, which I’m sure everyone’s probably seen on rumor sites by now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then there’s also like a lighter, like a light black, if that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s closer to raw aluminum color, but it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the black accents, which could be nice, because honestly, the black one, I even said this last year when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five was new, the black I think is too dark. you don’t really get a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice metal quality from it, because it just looks like just one big black slab. It doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, the difference between the black glass and the metal backing is not a big enough color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. There’s like no contrast there. So I don’t actually think the black looks that good. It also does not age well, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially along the chamfered edges, the black anodized coating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flakes off on those corners and on those edges, and so you see a lot of the underlying metal. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think for the next one, I was even thinking about getting white although my wife has has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prohibited that in advance, but she’s right Well, she wants it and she doesn’t want us to both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the same But I’m thinking about that medium gray color is looking pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good Honestly, because I think it’ll age better and I think I think it’ll just look cooler. Like I think the black just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The detail the black just gets lost because it’s it’s too dark.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if people are going to have iPhone 5c envy Not just
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the colors, but maybe maybe I’m the only one like this But you’ve seen you’ve all seen my iPod touch, and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got that uh What is it called kind of plastic tPA is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John TPU TPU I think it’s a kind of plastic That’s like not squishy like rubber,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also not hard like regular plastic It’s a little bit grippy, and that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John like on my cases I want it to be like curved and comfortable But a little bit grippy and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell what the back of the 5c is made out of like some kind of plastic But if it’s made of TPU
⏹️ ▶️ John or something similar, I mean, I’m guessing it’s not, but like it looks more comfortable in my hand that I’m wondering if,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, I got the much faster, fancier, more expensive looking 5S or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But holding a 5C is more comfortable. It feels more secure in my hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t have sharp edges. It’s more durable and resilient to nicks and scratches and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. But of course to be slower and have you know, it’d be not as good a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wonder about that. I wonder if like Anybody out there will come home with
⏹️ ▶️ John their 5s and feel a little twinge of like Disappointment that they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get to bring home the green curved comfortable one that they liked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the people in the know are all pretty much saying for certain that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5c is literally just an iPhone 5s internals probably even the same camera if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to guess. That’s kind of their style when they’re going to do something like this. So it’s basically an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 5. But rather than just pushing the iPhone 5 down, they’re supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting rid of it and replacing the quote old model this year with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new edition of the old internals with this new casing around it. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the case, it’s going to be a pretty good phone. The iPhone 5 is still really good, even with iOS 7 stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still a very, very good phone. And when you think about what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually selling, they don’t, as far as I know, nobody’s been able to break it down. Maybe Horace Didu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found a way to figure out with margins and stuff, but what the breakdown is between the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone models that are sold at a time, like how many sell relative to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from just looking at the public and what people buy, just anecdotally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always seemed like the cheaper, like last year’s or two years ago models of iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have sold extremely well. So what if the iPhone 5C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the iPhone 5 is still so good by most standards of phones today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if the 5C kind of makes it official that the lower-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model slash last year’s model is like the default model?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Similar to what the iPad Mini did to the iPad, What the iPod mini and iPod Nano
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did to the iPod, you have the high-end super premium model. That’s going to be the 5S this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. And then you have the one that most people buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And previously, that was last year’s model. This time, maybe that’s going to be the 5C.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that would be a change in iPhone buying, because up until this point, what Apple has told us is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the most popular model is always whatever the fanciest one is. They won’t give you breakdowns, but
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the time, And they will confirm that most people are buying iPhone 5s, or something to that effect,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s the best. And they’re still selling a high-end thing. And I would not be surprised at all if, come
⏹️ ▶️ John some earnings call, when someone tries to get this information out of them, they say that most people are buying
⏹️ ▶️ John 5Cs, or they sold more 5Cs than 5Ss. But I think the 5C might be a better
⏹️ ▶️ John conceived physical product, because they’ve gone through all these iterations of
⏹️ ▶️ John the glass back and the external antenna, and the 3G with the big bubble plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John back, and the original one with the plastic bottom. They’ve gone around and around trying to find something that’s a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John balance, something that’s a beautiful object. And I think the 4 4S form factor
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most attractive as a piece of sculpture. And also one that’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ John utilitarian, fun, and comfortable to use to recognize that most of the time you’re holding this thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John your hands and chucking it into your purse or your pocket or whatever. Which one strikes the right balance? And maybe that’s going to end
⏹️ ▶️ John up being the 5C. I think it depends heavily on what kind of plastic that is and stuff. But I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5 has nailed the sweet spot yet either. So maybe you’re right. Maybe the 5 becomes the iPad 4 of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John line. And this thing becomes the mini. And then it
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes the biggest selling. And I’m sure Apple would be perfectly happy with that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as they’re concerned, they’re selling you a cheaper version of last year’s phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Oh, yeah. And I agree with you, by the way. I think that the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling iPhone in my hand was the 3G slash 3GS, because it had that nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curve and it was plastic, so it felt very secure in the hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That was too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. Well, you’re an iPod Touch person. Every iPhone is too big for
⏹️ ▶️ John you. I’m just saying, you’re trying to look for what is the sweet spot between making something too thin
⏹️ ▶️ John and too, and the 3G was very large and maybe a little bit overly large. And yeah, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ John comfortable, but it didn’t feel comfortable in the other aspects Like when you shove it into your pocket, now it’s like, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe thinner would be better, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So really quickly, just to put the rumor mill to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bed, if there is a 5C, and let’s say that it’s very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap on contract, John Syracuse, will you finally get an iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because it won’t be very cheap on contract. Apple is not adding. Apple is not responsible for the
⏹️ ▶️ John price of an iPhone. The carriers are. The price of the phone is so small compared to the cost of
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for a Verizon calling and data plan for two years of life, the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone price. Like, Apple has so little control over whether I buy an iPhone. It’s all up to the carriers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because you’re the only person in the world who buys a phone in a subsidized environment and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually does that computation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think some people
⏹️ ▶️ John do it, too. Maybe they just do it for their kids, because their kids, like some teenager who wants an iPhone, they’re like, do you know
⏹️ ▶️ John how much that cost? Like, go get a job delivering pizzas, and then you can pay for the data
⏹️ ▶️ John plan. You can play, you know. So we’ll see. I will eventually reach that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m waiting them out. They’re lowering their prices. And my wife’s got one, so I get like the family plan
⏹️ ▶️ John price now. So if they suddenly lower the family plan price, I just re-upped my re-upped whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing campaign made that term come into existence. I don’t know. But apparently, it has penetrated my consciousness. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just paid again for my stupid phone plan. And I bought two years
⏹️ ▶️ John worth because it was $150 for two years worth of service for this phone. So think
⏹️ ▶️ John about that the next time you get your $70 Verizon bill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what if you could find a decent prepay data plan that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supports the iPhone? And to be honest, that may exist already, and I have no idea. But would you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco do a prepay? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it does in the US. Although, our previous sponsor, Ting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem to imply on there, or maybe even state directly on their website, that they expect to get the iPhone pretty soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, people think I’m cheapskate and don’t care about nice things by not having an iPhone. But the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John is that I am a prima donna and demand the very best things. And if I can’t have them, I just forego it entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want an iPhone unless I can get it on Verizon, partially because I live kind of in a cell phone dead area.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Verizon has the best coverage around where I am. And it also has the best coverage
⏹️ ▶️ John at my house and also at my work. So I’m not going until I can get
⏹️ ▶️ John the Verizon network. That’s the reason they get to charge so much money, because they know, look, we have cell towers all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t. So I’m basically a slave to Verizon because of the physical realities
⏹️ ▶️ John of where the cell towers are where I live.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that really still true?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m the opposite with AT&T. That AT&T covers everywhere fairly mediocre-ly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s a word. But Verizon covers everywhere OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except my house, where there’s no coverage. So I still can’t use Verizon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really haven’t had bad experience with AT&T in the last year or two. When I got the 3GS, which I got when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand new, that was pretty ugly. As soon as you got off the beaten path,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were screwed. And I got that on AT&T. And by the time I got the 4S,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things were pretty good for the most part. Now it’s very rare that I have a situation that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have pretty good, if not excellent, coverage. Now to be fair, I’m not often off what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would call the beaten path, but I mean I’ve traveled quite a bit over the last couple of years and I’ve never been in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can recall that somebody was standing near me with a Verizon phone without an issue and I had my AT&T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone and it was a piece of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Marco has the same problem that I do. You live too close to rich people. In Marco’s case, very close.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem near me is that Chestnut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hill- Excuse me, I passed an M5 like a block from your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I live too near rich people. Chestnut Hill is the problem. There’s an area near us called Chestnut Hill that
⏹️ ▶️ John so local tales go has a lower density of cell towers than elsewhere because
⏹️ ▶️ John no one wants a cell tower in their backyard and they’re all rich people. And what it produces is like you can see it when you go on the beeline
⏹️ ▶️ John on the T. You go past Chestnut Hill and there is no signal. Like for a brief period,
⏹️ ▶️ John but zero signal. And so that’s bad. And I’m assuming you have the same problem as what you get up
⏹️ ▶️ John into Batman, Bruce Wayne Manor territory.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Suddenly no one wants a
⏹️ ▶️ John cell tower near their house and so the service gets spotty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t have that problem. And in fact, our town hall has cell towers right on it. We can almost see it directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from our house. I just don’t think there’s a Verizon tower there. But the problem we have is that the area around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is very hilly. And as anybody who lives near hills or mountains can tell you, they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much radio waves’ worst enemies. So it’s just very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spotty coverage up here for most radio things. AT&T happens to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it well, possibly because there’s an antenna on top of our town hall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, plus the, I can’t think of the word I’m looking for, But the the way in which GSM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and CDMA signals work is a little isn’t it a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little better for landscapes on GSM but a little crummier for buildings or something like that? I’m reaching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things I’ve forgotten years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obsolete. Well with LTE that doesn’t matter as much does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it matters mostly the frequencies I believe. Anyway we really shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey talking about it. Yeah seriously. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna get so much email because we don’t know what we’re talking about. Nope. Unless John, unless you do because you would actually not talk unless you knew.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why I’m not talking. All right let’s wrap up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone topics because we’re gonna be talking about this all next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Is there anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else? I mean I don’t have anything else I just want to make sure you and John both had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco chance before we talk about something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. Unless you actually think there’s gonna be something non iPhone released.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well here I’ll throw this out there I this is like fourth hand from some random person
⏹️ ▶️ John that has no providence anywhere but someone mentioned today and I just remembered it is so out of the blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Applications for Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I saw there was somebody mentioned, I don’t know whether it was like one of our blogger people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’re friends with or Mac rumors or something. Somebody mentioned that like the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SDK was apparently like almost done for WBC that they heard. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just got pushed or canceled or whatever. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John My thoughts on that was like, you know in the recent months, there have been a whole bunch of new icons that have appeared
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Apple TV. Right. Yeah, all the different channel partners. Right. And so when I look at those, I’m like, OK, well, is Apple writing
⏹️ ▶️ John all those apps? Or is there some sort of proto-SDK that Apple is shipping off to its various partners,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Disney and ESPN and stuff, and they’re writing those apps? And then maybe it’s not too much of a stretch to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, look, instead of all these icons just appearing on your Apple TV every time you do a software update,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about we make some kind of crappy sort of Apple TV store where you can choose which icons you
⏹️ ▶️ John want. And then maybe we’ll hook them up to some kind of payment subscription thing and let people subscribe to Netflix through
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV and subscribe to Hulu and that type of thing, where it’s not quite the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all thinking of. Like, oh, now there’s going to be Angry Birds and stuff, because what are you going to do? Control it with a little five-way
⏹️ ▶️ John controller and that stupid remote? And it’s not the new amazing Apple TV that we’re all thinking of. It’s just kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John regularizing the current ongoing system of adding icons to our home screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and making us turn them off parental controls, because we can’t control them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a couple of thoughts there. Firstly, earlier today, and I don’t where I saw it, there was a report that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody had snooped like delivery information or something. I forget where exactly I saw this nor what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically it said, but they said something along the lines of Apple’s been receiving shipments that were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labeled for the purposes of customs set top boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I saw that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so they were starting, they were trying to extrapolate that, oh, maybe these were like demo units or first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run units from China where they’re being built. The other thing I should point out is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding of Apple TV apps as they are today is that They’re all quasi-web-based.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for example, the Plex app, which masqueraded as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the trailers app, it was like this weird hack where you set your computer to be a proxy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then when you go into the trailers app on the Apple TV, it would intercept that. And it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show you information from Plex, which is a media manager. It’s a fork of XBMC. Well, anyways, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was all XML and HTML and CSS and so on and so forth, from what I’m told. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that even if there is an SDK, I think it’s more a la the initial iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was not native. It was just make a web app and be thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re letting you do that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t honestly see this happening yet. I don’t know. I mean, Tim Cook hinted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early this year, I think it was maybe at the All Things D conference or on various earnings calls or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else. Tim Cook hinted on a number of occasions, pretty strong hints, that we would see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s basically a new category of thing from Apple this fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Is that not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the 5C matters that much. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, for the iPhone, yeah, the 5C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be profitable for Apple, but they’re going to make a killing on it because the iPhone is their most popular product and they’re going to sell a buttload of 5Cs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the implication that he gave in these statements was, oh, here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sam the Geek in the chat room and says it was a direct quote new product categories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I don’t you know that to me you know the implication there is we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the kind of thing like you know like the watch or the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or we’ll one of these one of these new things people are talking about that that was the implication now it’s you know maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he had a loose definition of that maybe the Mac Pro that they announced in June after he said this maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro is is considered a new product category because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s a new type of desktop. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t consider it one, but maybe he does. You know, it could have been just that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m betting not. I’m betting there’s something else. No, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the watch thing. Like, you know, we’re talking about one event in September 10th. There’s still time
⏹️ ▶️ John for an October event for them to announce. How about the Mac Pro, which we know they’re going to, you know, they said they’re gonna announce.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s time to produce an iWatch thing. Like, there are possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. It’s just that, like, we’re questioning, okay, well, what’s going to be on September 10? And that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it’s just going to be a phone event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like this suggestion from jerk in the chat room that the new category is a new double A battery charger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I, I don’t know what they’re gonna do with events this fall. I mean, obviously, they’re not going to cram everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into September 10 event that’s that’s very likely to just be iPhones. And it’s very unlikely to contain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else at all. It’s going to be iPhone, probably iOS 7, the official
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announcement here, it’s done and it comes out in today slash a week, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case may be. And they’re not going to have events for every release.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the new MacBook Pros come out and they happen to just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Haswell update, maybe Thunderbolt 2, if it’s just that and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also like Retina Display desktops with the Mac Pro all together in one big event,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wouldn’t do an event for just like a CPU update to a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they still have iPads, they still have the Mac Pro, they still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have potentially a new category, whatever that means. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. I think we’re in for more than we expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was just thinking that, and I was thinking, you know, a lot of the chatter before WWDC was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how quiet Apple had been. And if you think about it, there hasn’t really been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. Now yes, iOS 7 was a radical visual departure from what we’ve seen in the past, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and large there were some very cool new APIs, but nothing earth shattering. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, say, Siri API, for example. So there’s still not been a lot of activity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a year. I mean, on the one hand, you could say there’s been a lot, but to me there’s not been a lot. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if they’re just going to cram everything into fall, like everything is coming, maybe a watch, maybe a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Apple TV, maybe something else we’re not even dreaming of. What if they’re so smug and just sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so quietly on their laurels waiting for the next three months or so in the beginning of 2014 to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just knock all of our socks off because that strikes me as an Apple thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s – the two things we’re talking about for new categories are television thing and thing you wear
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t imagine both of those things being ready for the holiday season. Even one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John being ready for the holiday season is still questionable, but it seems like not an Apple thing to do, just to
⏹️ ▶️ John do both amazing new television product and amazing new thing that you wear probably on your wrist
⏹️ ▶️ John before the holidays. Not just because they might not both be ready, but it would distract
⏹️ ▶️ John from one of them. Like you’d want one of them to be the big push. You wouldn’t want to dilute the message of either
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those things, assuming they’re both as impressive as we all imagine by having them out at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one thing that also tipped me off that the timing of this is a little weird is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chris Parker’s departure from UIKit. So, you know, I’m sure you saw that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chris Parker is this really nice guy who works at Apple. If you’ve ever gone to WWDC, you’ve almost definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen him give the What’s New in UIKit talk. He’s a guy with long, straight, blonde hair, and he’s very energetic and gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome talks. So I follow him on Twitter, nicest guy in the world, and And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his dog is adorable. And he and his dog are adorable together. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was, you know, something important, I don’t really know exactly what, on the UI Kit team for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four or five years. Some very long time, pretty much since UI Kit has been a public thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he announced about a month ago or a few weeks ago, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announced that he was leaving the UI Kit team to go work on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else within Apple that he couldn’t talk about that was that the implication was that it was new and exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So given his experience on the UI kit team, I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this means like going to work on something else that’s maybe in the same vein
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the same kind of thing like a UI level framework slash API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash developer tool and so that would correspond pretty nicely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there is a watch or a TV SDK then that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be you know that would make sense however not if they’re releasing it this fall that would be way too soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So 2014 and I think was Art Jonesy in the chat said earlier that Tim Cook had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there would be new stuff in the fall and in 2014 so everything you’re saying corroborates or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That makes sense. The question is what’s what’s in the fall that that would be considered possibly a new category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like maybe the first generation of the quote watch is basically an iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nano that can show notifications from your phone on it
⏹️ ▶️ John or lose the sight of what’s important here guys Maverick ship date it’s concentrated
⏹️ ▶️ John except you you can throw me a bone you know we have all event today
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be all about phones and the 5s and the 5c and colors and then let the And just go on, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mavericks is going to ship on such and such a date. Thank you. Good night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Welcome, John. Sir. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release it one day. They’re not even going to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John know that’s my fear that you’re just going to wake up one morning and it will be on the app store. It’ll be a Friday night.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And it’ll be on the app store immediately available for sale for a price. Developers will never have received
⏹️ ▶️ John a GM, you know, or like the same thing. Developers get a GM, but still no
⏹️ ▶️ John date and price. And then it just, you know, we have the GM for three weeks and then it arrives in the store one morning
⏹️ ▶️ John with a price. You know, how can I get a book into the,
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the e-book stores if I don’t know the price until it arrives? How, Apple, I ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? Well, I mean, you could argue, do you really need to know the price for the content of your review?
⏹️ ▶️ John I already wrote about it with my best guess in the price. I could delete that whole section.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you put in like a variable that you can assign later? Yeah, right, I’ll have it be
⏹️ ▶️ John a web service call.
⏹️ ▶️ John pull different paragraphs of text. If it’s free, pull this paragraph. If it costs $0.99, pull this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll be an app purchase. There you go. Marco, it reminds me we should take a note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you and I discuss the Syracuse rescue plan if this happens, and how I’m getting to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’re getting to him in time to stop him from doing something stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I can get us to him quickly, at least. And with butt massaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And with butt massaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should talk about something awesome. Speaking of which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our first sponsor this week is a repeat sponsor. In fact, both of our sponsors this week are repeat sponsors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I will save the surprise until later of the second one. Our first one, it’s going to be a huge surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our first one is Hover. Hover is high quality, no hassle domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco registration. We have a promo code as usual. You can use promo code ATP for 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off any registration or add on you buy at Hover. It’s pretty great. Hover offers.net,.co,.com,.tv,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of country code TLDs and they’ve been adding a bunch of new TLDs recently. They just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got.io pretty recently and they’re constantly adding more. You can get.com,.net,.io,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just about.anything else. They actually said.anything else. That’s pretty cool. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover takes all the hassle and friction out of owning and managing domain names. Now everyone here, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to this show especially because you’re all nerds like us, or geeks, whatever the term is, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John. Domain registration is usually a pretty terrible experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually the way it works with other registrars is you go through their terrible shopping cart after you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search for names in their terrible search interface, and they try to upsell you like crazy on every stupid little service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s always confusing check boxes, like don’t not prevent the newsletter from getting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what? And then there’s like, okay, So do you want to pay an extra $10 a month for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not sell your information to spammers? And they go, well, wait a minute. So there’s all this crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that other registrars do that just makes it pretty unpleasant. Then once you finally get their name registered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their interfaces for managing them are terrible. And a lot of times you’ve got to pay extra for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very basic things like DNS that a lot of registrars offer for free. Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just good. And I say this as a Hover customer. I was a customer before they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a sponsor of the show. I’m happy that they are sponsoring the show because I can actually honestly tell you Hover is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t believe in heavy-handed upselling or aggressive cross-selling. They don’t hide functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really should be there. They have email services and they even have Google Apps for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your domain, all sorts of cool stuff. And one of the best things about Hover, well, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two, my two favorite features about Hover are one, they have this awesome Valley Transfer Service or Transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Valley, I forget what they call it exactly, because it isn’t in my script here. But if you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re moving to Hover, you can just give them the login for your existing registrar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They will log in and move everything over to Hover for you. You don’t even have to mess with it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, if you don’t want to give them the credentials, you can still do it yourself. It’s very, very easy. I moved a few myself, and it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. My second favorite feature of Hover is their phone support. So they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a no hold, no wait, and no transfer phone policy. You call this number, the toll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free number that’s on their site, Monday through Friday, 8am to 8pm and Eastern, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will speak to a live person. They will pick up the phone, a live person will pick up the phone and say, Hi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is Hover, how can I help you? And they will actually be able to help you. I’ve used it a couple times, it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does work. It’s really great. Go to hover.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use promo code ATP for 10% off any domain you register there or anything else. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great service. Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize there was no transfer as well. That’s pretty cool. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ve only called like twice, but both times, the person who picked up the phone immediately upon ringing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they helped me through the whole thing. I didn’t have to get bounced to different departments or anything. I don’t think it’s that big of a company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re talking a handful of people who all know their stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the power to do things for you. They don’t have to like bounce you to 17 different departments.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mad Fientist That is really awesome. As I’ve said in the past, but I’ll repeat because I haven’t said it in a while, my father was registering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a domain. My dad is savvy but not a geek in the traditional sense. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told him just go to Hover and just figure it out. Sure enough, he went to Hover.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He figured it out and it worked out great. So truly, whether you’re a geek or not, it’s a great option. definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend them. Anyway, what else we want to talk about? We have a laundry list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. Do we want to talk about confections? Do we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to talk about how the App Store sucks? Or do we want to talk about Nokia?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I feel like a lot of these topics are gonna be pretty boring. I mean the KitKat thing, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, who cares? Like who cares like which mountain or ski lodge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel users for the next chip code name like it doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what portion of California Apple is using for their next not C line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right yeah exactly I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey what yeah what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other portion of California that has an awkward pluralization in the name that nobody who’s not in California has ever heard of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what could possibly go wrong sorry Californians
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right so enough of that do you want to audible to something totally different a little told me we maybe should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about synologies or synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Is that how it’s yeah it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pronounced like synergy but with ology at the end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Synergyology. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to talk about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can if you want I mean I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can totally audible away from the thing that probably things that everyone else wants to talk about and talk about what we want to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that a football term?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio or an audiobooks related.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s a football term.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I forgot my audience my apologies. Anyway, so we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should back up and explain what we’re talking about. So a while ago, Marco, and you can feel free to interrupt me when you’re ready,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco had tweeted about, hey, I want to get a new network attached storage, what should I get? Should I get a Drobo? Should I get this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Should I get that? Blah, blah, blah. And I remember this was going on right around WWDC, because I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about it in line with you for one of the presentations in Presidio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so come to find out that somebody from Synology caught wind of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and offered to send Marco a Synology network attached storage box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was extremely kind of them and then decided, you know what, we don’t want to just be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome. Let’s be even more awesomer. Yes, that’s a word. And let’s send a box to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John and Casey as well. And so all three of us have all gotten the same Synology box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They even doubled down on awesome and filled John’s and mine with hard drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that can be said for you as well, Marco. So they gave us these unbelievably awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not cheap network attached storage boxes, no strings attached whatsoever. And we’re talking about them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we want to, not because they told us we have to. But with that said, they were comped. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco or John, what would you guys like to say about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you’ve already heard me talk a lot about mine back when I got it. So John, why don’t you go ahead?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll preface it by saying that I haven’t had a network attached storage box before except for the transporter which the transporter
⏹️ ▶️ John guys sent us And that we’ve they have sponsored the show and we’ve talked about those before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this Why you should start a podcast everybody if you want you want network attached storage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we can’t really get a whole lot else, but if you want network attached storage, we have tons of that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the transporter is you know, it’s you’ve seen all seen them. They’re very small They’re also much cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John than something like a Synology But that was the first network to that storage thing I had. And I use it like, as I described
⏹️ ▶️ John in a past Transporter Spot, kind of like a little magical thing that just contains my data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve been using the Transporter a lot. I know I was supposed to talk about Synology, but briefly, in the Transporter
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like, now that I know other people, also in the podcasting space, who have Transporters,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I want to send a large file to somebody, and I know they have a Transporter,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s such a relief because I don’t have to do one of those, like, oh, can I to put it in my Dropbox and give them a public URL, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not. Everyone of those files send it services or it’s too big to send over email or I have to host it
⏹️ ▶️ John on a web server and keep my computer running for them. It’s so much easier if I can just jam into the transporter and send them a little
⏹️ ▶️ John share request and then turn all, you know, put my computer to sleep and not think about it. So anyway, that was my first experience
⏹️ ▶️ John with network attached storage. And that’s already changed my life, you know, to a similar degree that like Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John did where now you have this new sort of third place where you can put things and stage
⏹️ ▶️ John things It’s not one of your computers that doesn’t require you to keep your computers on or connected or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John so that was kind of relief, but What I was always looking for in my life for network attached storage is
⏹️ ▶️ John Since it’s the same type of thing like the third place the other place that isn’t on any of my one computers
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is gigantic like that can fit all my crap on it plus all backups like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John It can’t just be one little hard drive or two little hard drives. It has to just be massive And I
⏹️ ▶️ John never could bring myself to buy one of those things because I had no experience in the field and I was afraid I would get
⏹️ ▶️ John like the wrong thing or, you know, I look at all these sort of do-it-yourself projects and, you know, I’m such a big
⏹️ ▶️ John fan of ZFS, so I could try to build one of those with Open Solaris and ZFS or this FreeBSD ZFS boxes or
⏹️ ▶️ John this build-your-own-NAS things or maybe I should just get a little PC and stuff it full of disks and put it in the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never knew what to do, so Synology solved the problem for me by sending me this box. And my expectations
⏹️ ▶️ John were actually pretty low, because like the transporter I expected to work like an appliance because it looks like an appliance. It looks like a little tiny…
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even as big as a potted plant, This cute little vertical thing looks like a little computerized garden gnome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, oh, it’s adorable. It’s great. But it’s one 2.5 inch drive in there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not expecting, again, terabytes of storage. But everything else looks like some big, ugly PC
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I remember when Marco got his, I was asking him, you know, fans, how loud are the fans?
⏹️ ▶️ John How can you have this thing in the same room? You put it in a closet, isn’t it overheating the closet? Like, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have high expectations for this thing. I figured it would be like a big, ugly, noisy PC disks in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I got the box and it’s big and it’s heavy and it
⏹️ ▶️ John feels like it costs as much money as it does because it’s made of metal, it’s very solid, it was stuffed with
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drives. I got like the 8 drive model so it’s stuffed with 8 hard drives. I took
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of the box and like the instructions that come with it are like two sentences long. It’s like plug into
⏹️ ▶️ John power, plug into Ethernet, go to your computer and type find.synology.com
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever into your web browser. Like it was just a host name that you type into your web browser and then that somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John finds your network attached storage, your network, and there it is. And I’m like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it just mounted as like a single volume, a single massive volume, which is like, oh, that’s great and everything, but that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want to do. I’m like, oh, no, what am I going to do with this thing? Like having, you know, 24
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte of storage just sitting there on my desktop with network attached isn’t very useful to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I fired up the software interface of this thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I expected to look like, I don’t know, if you ever had a non-Apple router, and it’s like that web page you go to
⏹️ ▶️ John hosted web server, and it looks like some disgusting thing or whatever. But I didn’t care. I’m like, fine. If it looks gross like that, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I just want to be able to like, at first, I was like, oh my god, maybe I didn’t understand what this thing is. Maybe it just gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you, like, it puts all the disks together in some kind of rate arrangement or something, and you can choose which rate arrangement. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it just shows up as one volume. But I don’t want to use it like that. divvy it up into different pieces and slices
⏹️ ▶️ John and I shouldn’t have worried because the interface they have it’s a web interface but and it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t look like an Apple web interface it looks kind of like a Linux on a desktop kind of interface influenced
⏹️ ▶️ John by the original Apple Aqua stuff but it is perfectly serviceable
⏹️ ▶️ John it works the way you expect even got little windows you can drag around and stuff and you can do anything with
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing like just by clicking around you can divvy this thing up into any possible arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John of every any different RAID strategy, carve up volumes into different pieces, make it appear as different volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John that mount to your computer, apply it, create user accounts, apply quotas, and maybe this is all an old hat for people who know NAS stuffs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was impressed by the flexibility of this thing. And my main problem now is it’s too many possibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how I’m going to divvy this thing because it’s so much space, and I have so many schemes that
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to do to it. So I spent the first week just slicing these disks up into different pieces, and then reformatting
⏹️ ▶️ John them all and slice reslicing them and trying this out and installing applications doing all this stuff. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the whole time, by the way, this thing is in my basement, and it has two gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John fans in the back of it that are amazingly quiet, not quite enough that I would ever want it in the room with me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John still pretty darn amazingly quiet. And in fact, it comes when it comes out of the box, like one of the umpteen settings
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in the web interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought you were gonna find this
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet, I found every option this thing is quiet mode and cool mode, and it comes shipped in quiet mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s It’s like, well, the whole reason I put it in my basement is so I don’t have to deal with that. So I switch it to cool mode. And it is not that
⏹️ ▶️ John much noisier. I can’t even tell the difference. I mean, it’s about the same amount of noise either way. So I have this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John down in the basement, about six feet off the ground on top of something with a Cat6 cable
⏹️ ▶️ John running to the back of it. And I put my transporter down there too. And I put a UPS down there also off the ground.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like basically if my basement floods, the water has to get six feet high before it takes my network attached storage offline. Right, in which
⏹️ ▶️ John case you have lots of other
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and we don’t have flooding here anyway. So this has really changed my life, like that I have this
⏹️ ▶️ John unseen magical storage that’s always on, that I can even make it accessible from the web I’ve wanted, because of course the box
⏹️ ▶️ John has that feature as well. So I am mightily impressed with this, and I would not hesitate to suggest
⏹️ ▶️ John this product for anyone who wants network-attached storage. Because everything that I’ve asked it to do, including
⏹️ ▶️ John network time machine backups from two separate Macs, that’s the great thing about, I forget when they did it, Line or Mountain Line, let you add
⏹️ ▶️ John the second disk to your time machine. I just said, why the hell not? and I added it
⏹️ ▶️ John as the second time machine destination for all the computers in my house. And now they back up to their
⏹️ ▶️ John local time machine disk that they always had, and they also back up to the network one. And that was my first test of it. Can you back up 4
⏹️ ▶️ John million files off my Mac Pro to network time machine? And the answer is yes. Now maybe it will flip
⏹️ ▶️ John out when it runs out of space because it does that when it’s connected to a regular disk, and that’s not really the fault of the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it has done everything I’ve asked it to do, and I’m very impressed by it, and I give it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say also, before I had the Synology last year when I was using a laptop instead of a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-time, I had a Mac Mini running Lion Server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using the network time machine that way, like with a USB disk plugged into the Mac Mini through Apple Server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the network to my laptop. It was incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow. To backup, to look things up, to restore files, it was just ungodly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow. With the Synology, with the Mac Pro, obviously there’s a lot of different factors here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The disks aren’t external to it, although you can plug in USB drives to it, but in this case I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just way faster. I would say Time Machine, both backups and restores and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browses from my Mac Pro to the Synology are just as fast, perceptibly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me at least, just as fast as using a local disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John The time machine itself is still incredibly slow and terrible protocol. Even just
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it to a local disk inside my Mac Pro, it’s slow because it’s just doing all sorts of terrible things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I did do with this is try to see what kind of speeds I was getting from it. And I enabled
⏹️ ▶️ John jumbo frames, which I hadn’t done before because I had never had a reason to. But now all of a sudden, I have a reason to enable jumbo frames. And I was happy
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn that all of my switches in between me and the NAS support jumbo frames. So I turned it all on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was getting over 100 megabytes a second just writing big media
⏹️ ▶️ John files, which is obviously the easiest case to this thing. So I’m completely satisfied with the speed. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, Time Machine is still slow as balls, but it’s obviously not the fault of the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything between. It’s entirely a software thing, which I’m willing to live with. But it’s not so slow that it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like about the same speed as Time Machine to an internal disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See? That’s what I’m saying. It’s about the same. For me, it wasn’t even. I haven’t done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive restore yet, but I’ve pulled a few files off of it here and there. And doing that really just feels the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it always did using an internal 3 and 1 half inch drive in the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one thing that I planned poorly about was when I knew the NAS was coming, I ran another cable
⏹️ ▶️ John from my computer room through these various holes I have, fishing it through with
⏹️ ▶️ John a hanger and everything. I have several cables going through these holes, but every time I do it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John never bother to put a lead in there so I can pull things back and forth. Anyway, I did a new cable and stapled
⏹️ ▶️ John it all up to the rafters and got it all the way into the other corner of the house where the NAS stuff is. And then when the
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS came, I put it down, then I realized this has four LAN ports in the back of it. Yep. I
⏹️ ▶️ John should have run three more wires. It was a big mistake. And now if I run, because I could, in theory, run
⏹️ ▶️ John one cable to my Mac, to the switches to my Mac. I could also run another cable directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to the back of my television if I wanted to stream. Because of course, this thing is a DLNA server, and it does video streaming and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. So it would have a gigabit to and from my Mac, but it would also have a separate gigabit interface to and
⏹️ ▶️ John from my entertainment center if I wanted to stream movies. And those movies wanted to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John at 100 megabytes a second, which is kind of unreasonable. But anyway, and that has four ports in the back. So I kind of regret
⏹️ ▶️ John not running more wire, but that’s not the fault of the NAS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, it supports connection bonding. So if your Switch supports that, you can, I believe, bond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all four of the ports together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve got two ports in the back of my Mac Pro, and the new Mac Pros do as well. if I bonded those interfaces,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you do that in OS X? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco assuming you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. I don’t know. I’ve never tried. I would hope so. I mean, on a Mac Pro, which is the only Mac that has multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet ports, that would make a lot of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. All right, so Casey, what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I, too, had never had network attached storage before the FileTransporter, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearly serves a wildly different purpose than the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And previous to getting the Synology, I had the most ridiculous setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of half USB external enclosures. Well, they were all like USB external enclosures,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one or two were connected to my Airport Extreme,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two were hard-lined into one of my Macs, and so this way my two Macs could back themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up via Time Machine. It was ridiculous. I’m actually fairly embarrassed at how ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. So I get this Synology, and I divvied it up. So the particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones we got were the 1813 pluses, which are kind of the big daddy models, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again, thank you so much Synology for sending them. And so I took the first two physical drives, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly Marco’s recommendation, took the first two drives, made them one single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume, and that would be Time Machine backups for my two Macs and Aaron’s Mac. And then I took the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other six and said, do that Synology hybrid RAID whatever magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to make it one gigantic volume with one redundant drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that becomes expandable. It’s very similar to how Drobos work, where they call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it the SHR for Synology Hybrid RAID. And it’s very similar to Drobos, where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull one drive out and replace it with a bigger one, and then it’ll rebuild the array and expand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although the reason, I should point out now if you don’t mind, Casey, the reason I recommended that you split it up like that is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hybrid RAID volumes are very big and very expandable but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slow. And because when you think about how it works, it’s similar to how RAID 5 works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where every access, every read and write, requires all of the disks in the array to read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and write before it’s done. And so you can imagine, in reality, that’s actually slower than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one disk in that kind of performance, or at least, especially on writes. It’s especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow on writes. And so, you know, the SHR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume for me, Like I was a little nervous to have eight discs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all reading and writing constantly with the exact same things I was nervous for both the speed of that and also the lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those discs being All read and written to like exactly the same amount and and for everything I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was pretty heavy use and I don’t want just to die early and because none of them are like those crazy You know NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editions or great editions of this whatever the stupid things that drive manufacturers do these days you try to get more money out of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but But so that’s why I recommend like Time Machine is a very different access pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than everything else. Time Machine is very frequent. It should be fast. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do two disks in RAID 0, which I know is crazy, but it’s a backup and it’s not even my only backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I figure it’s okay. Two disks in RAID 0 are Time Machine for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why we have to do it that way is because I don’t know whether this is limitation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the Synology management interface or the underlying component they’re using that’s probably a BSD thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that emulates Time Machine, but you can only have one Time Machine share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Synology at once. So if you want multiple computers to back up to one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want multiple computers to back up to the Synology at all, you have to have them all go to the same share and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can manage their space with user quotas. But we will see how well that works in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I did, you know, the two RAID 0s for that, and then I have four disks in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SHR for like my general like big file storage and, you know, media serving and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I have two bays empty for future expansion. So yeah, Casey, sorry, proceed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, not at all. So mine is fully loaded, so I have the two, like you had said, two in RAID 0,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then the other six is one gigantic drive. A few things that, and let me pick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up my little clipboard and take notes on, a few things that I wanted to point out about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology. Firstly, it has actually a suite of iOS apps you can download.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of them is just a general manager. So if you expose it to the internet, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t, which by the way, you can get your own SSL certificate and install it and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, if you expose it via the internet, you can manage it remotely via the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can manage it remotely via this iOS app. Also, the Synology itself has kind of a package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manager. And so you can actually install different packages. And one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packages I installed was a download manager. And so that’ll let me download, if I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to download a torrent, or if I have a newsgroup account and want to download newsgroup things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can, or even just do like a Wget for all intents and purposes, all of that can be done on the Synology, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a separate iOS app for that. It has a Plex app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Synology. So if all of your media is on the Synology, which all of mine is, then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it can expose that via Plex. And I think I mentioned earlier in the show that Plex is a really neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey media manager. Let’s see what else. There are smaller versions of the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like I said, we all were we were lucky enough to get the big daddy ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are smaller ones that have fewer drives. And I believe all of this line of Synologies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also support getting like daughter boxes for lack of a better word. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so you could load a bunch of drives in there in the future if you decide you need to. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way you don’t have to pay the price for this whole big thing up front. And you could get one of the smaller ones and then add on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you really find you need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can also hook up USB disks. They have USB ports in the back. And like, for example, I have a bus-powered 1TB drive
⏹️ ▶️ John that if I wanted I could just go throw that down in the basement and I’ve got an extra one terabyte of portable
⏹️ ▶️ John storage that just attached to the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although you can’t, as far as I can tell, when it mounts to USB drive, you don’t have all the same options. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t make RAID volumes out of them and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like it’s just a basic device. It would
⏹️ ▶️ John just be like a portable appendage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. But yeah, and as far as I know, so we have the DS1813 plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the numbers that end in threes, I think are the most recent revisions right now. So the 1813, there’s also the 1513, same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but instead of eight bays, it has five. But I think otherwise it’s effectively identical and it has all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same capabilities. If you don’t need eight bays, I would say the 1513 Plus is probably the one to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s even two bay models, like down at the low end. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they have like less processing power because they have to be so cheap. So I’m not sure if they would be able to do all these exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same things. But the five bay and eight bay models are
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room was asking whether they thought it was worth it for the price. And obviously it’s worth it for us because we
⏹️ ▶️ John got it for free. But the price is a question, and maybe that was what was keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John me away from buying one. It’s that these things are expensive, and you look at them and you’re like, well, I could just buy a PC for that price.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then the reason I wasn’t buying a PC for that price was, well, you buy a PC, then you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John install an OS, probably install Linux on there, and deal with volume management, and where you’re going to put the drives, and are they going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John all internal, and how easy it is to get them, and maybe you should buy a shuttle PC where you can get them in and out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually you end up sort of cobbling together your own NAS, like with the do-it-yourself NAS kits, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John arrive back at the thing that Synology is providing for you already done. Software, hardware, everything included.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I should have just pulled the trigger on that before, because that to me is worth
⏹️ ▶️ John the price. Now the downside for me as a Unix nerd is that don’t go into this expecting
⏹️ ▶️ John that what you’re going to get is a Linux PC with logical volume management
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. Like you can get a shell, you can SSH into it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know it’s like whatever it’s like an Atom processor or something, but it is not a full-fledged Linux PC that you can just expect
⏹️ ▶️ John to immediately pop right in there. It’s gonna have all your Linux user LAN that you expected and you’re gonna be able to just install
⏹️ ▶️ John your own stuff from RPMs and just treat it like, oh it’s like I have a Linux PC and also
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a NAS. What you have is a NAS and it is totally designed from top to bottom to be network attached storage and not designed
⏹️ ▶️ John from top to bottom for you to just have an interactive user shell and use it as like your little place to the
⏹️ ▶️ John USSH into instead. And you can install SSH, you know, SSH I think comes with it or maybe it’s in the Packager Manager.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can install Perl from their Packager Manager and stuff like you can do all that stuff but it doesn’t come out of the box for
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So if you’re expecting like a Linux home server that you’re going to be using interactively from a shell,
⏹️ ▶️ John well I don’t know how many people wanted that except for me maybe, this is not that This is a NAS and although you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John it act kind of like a Linux machine It’s kind of like swimming against the tide to do that So because like
⏹️ ▶️ John I went in there for example, like I’m gonna set up some cron jobs to do stuff instead of going through the GUI But I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John cron D was on there or maybe was a second It’s very clear once I like the shell they give you isn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John like bash or let alone You know my favorite shell TCSH you can install ZSH
⏹️ ▶️ John you can install bash You can install all these things, but they’re not there to be in with that’s a signal to you to not set up
⏹️ ▶️ John cron jobs but to use it like a NAS because there’s a GUI interface for all this stuff you have some repeated job you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do you know go nuts with it so that’s that’s the only caveat I would give this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is if you want something that’s a network attached storage appliance by this if you want a Linux home server by a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that I mean it’s if you if you’re gonna want to like really hack it and have and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re gonna want to do things that it can’t do officially and there’s a lot There’s a lot that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can do officially. They have like a kind of like an app store type interface, like a package manager interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can install a bunch of stuff from. You can probably browse it on their site somewhere. But I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you can SSH into it. Like I tried installing the crash plan client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly onto it so you can have it back itself up to crash plan. And because my crash plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server here, as we discussed previously, because my crash plan nearest server is terrible, I ended up abandoning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I did get it working. It just was too slow to upload to matter. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you’re going into that area of like installing your own package manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then installing Java and then installing your own stuff, at that point you might want your own PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, a regular Linux PC that happens to have a bunch of drives in it, maybe. But if what you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for is the NAS, then yeah, I agree with John that this is pretty much the way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I had a couple other quick thoughts and one of them actually was about crash plans. So I have two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pros, one of which is works, one of which is mine, and the one that’s mine has crash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan on it. And I told my Mac, I told crash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to look at the Synology and back it up. The big, you know, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, 15 terabyte array or whatever it is. And it took, I don’t know, three or four days or something like that because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have the problems you have with crash plan. And sure enough, all of that is now in CrashPlan. I’m not paying anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extra for it. It’s all just up there waiting for me, which is really great. And the other thing I wanted to point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out was, just like John said, it really changed my world. And I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that because, say for example, I really like Top Gear. It’s my favorite TV show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the British version. And so I have all of these episodes of Top Gear stored on literally 15 or 20 DVDs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as John berated me about early on in ATP’s existence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that really isn’t a very good mechanism for keeping all of these files. Additionally, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had all of our wedding pictures on a couple of DVDs. And yes, I had a couple of backups of those. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these things that were just sitting on DVDs in various binders, or whatever you call them, straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of like 99, they’re now all, they’ve all now been sucked into the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now, in principle, I never have to worry about them again. And that is really awesome. And on top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, if I want to watch some random episode from the fifth season or series of Top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gear, I can do that in no time. Whereas before, I would have to say, oh, God, now I got to go up to the office,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find the binder full of Top Gear DVDs, figure out which one is the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Top Gear episode I want, and it would have taken forever. Now it’s all just right there. So in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summary, it really has been awesome. I’ve always kind of felt like I wanted a network-attached storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I never felt like it was something I needed, and now I’ve been completely changed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I must have this in my life. So I definitely recommend it. Even if you don’t get the model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have, find a different model that fits your needs. But I definitely recommend it. I can’t say thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough for the folks at Synology for sending all of us one. That was extremely kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, really great of them to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m compelled at this point to remind people, because no one has said it yet in this discussion, that RAID is not a backup
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. Yes. Just keep repeating that to yourself as many times as possible. when I was divvying up my
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology, and I still haven’t come up with a final setup that I’m going to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly I was settling on using it as not as just a box of disks
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing, but close to that, where I’m struggling to think of any reason why
⏹️ ▶️ John I would set up any kind of raid situation, because none of the stuff that I’m using,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the reason you want raid is because you don’t want downtime. But I’m not in that type of
⏹️ ▶️ John environment. I can be down for a day or two days, and it’s not a big deal as long as I don’t lose data,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I don’t need to like, oh, I’ve got to put that in at least a RAID 1, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what if one drive fails, right? All these things are, the vast majority of it for me, are backups
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that I already have on probably two other hard drives elsewhere in the house, plus in the cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And for the few things that I have on there that would only be on Synology, like all my media files
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m going to, they’re all on my Mac Pro now, so they really are backups now. when I get my new Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John with its dinky internal storage, a lot of it will only be on the Synology. And when that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, my solution is going to be to set up two volumes on the Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of which has all my media, and one of which has a regularly backed up copy of all of my media. And
⏹️ ▶️ John why wouldn’t I just do a RAID setup? Because if something goes wrong and I accidentally delete everything or it gets corrupted
⏹️ ▶️ John or something bad happens, a backup is something that doesn’t change at the same time you change the primary. So no RAID
⏹️ ▶️ John solution, SHR, Whatever RAID 10 RAID 6 is going to save you if you accidentally delete
⏹️ ▶️ John all your files Because it will delete them across all of your disks And when you say hey, I want those backs it’ll say
⏹️ ▶️ John you should have had a backup So I’m gonna end up divvying this thing up into many different slices Maybe with a few
⏹️ ▶️ John RAID 0 things in there But probably almost no redundancy or data protection all of my data protection
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably going to be By having the Synology backup to itself and of course to online
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other places that I back up So that’s actually kind of a surprise to me too after all the stuff of thinking about different
⏹️ ▶️ John raid schemes and stuff I tried many of them and every time I looked at it, but like This is
⏹️ ▶️ John really what I want and it’s one of the few things that made me finally buy Carbon copy cloner which
⏹️ ▶️ John I hadn’t bought for years because I’d always been using super duper but super duper doesn’t do network disks and carb e copper cloner does so
⏹️ ▶️ John if I want to have Two volumes on the mass I can have a job that
⏹️ ▶️ John on any of my Macs that will smart copy one I’m using super duper terminology intelligently
⏹️ ▶️ John copy one of those volumes onto the other to make a weekly or whatever backup of
⏹️ ▶️ John my media drive instead of you doing a RAID 1 volume or RAID 5 volume for my media
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinking that somehow that’s protecting it because it wouldn’t be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And despite all the times we’ve talked about it none of us have tried iSCSI yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I’m still too afraid of it. I mean I’m assuming it would work fine but I’m like this works so well why would I?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why like what is it that I can’t do with it the way it is that I would want to install kernel extension you know? Backup
⏹️ ▶️ John Back, please that’s a big one. Well. I’m already a crash plan subscriber, right? You know so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll probably just like do like Casey didn’t suck this all into my crash plan thing But may still use back place
⏹️ ▶️ John for my local Mac I don’t know haven’t decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I could see like you know if you if you wanted to use one of the Synology disks as like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photoshop scratch disk or something like that like some Some disk role where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the network protocol overhead might be prohibitively slow for it or weird in other ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you don’t need to share it then that might be that might work, but who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s a latest version of Synology software Has support for SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t have some kind of SSD support like an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco SSD cache drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t listened to it yet Yeah, like the read caching a few other a few other NASA’s do this already also It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not the first one to do this, but yeah It works you know similar to how you’d expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically not quite like fusion drive, but it basically uses an SSD of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever size you know you stick it in there and it can use it as a read cache but I don’t know in detail how that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John works and I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be for people who like have massive aperture libraries or something and they use it with the iSCSI interface
⏹️ ▶️ John right and so then they get a little bit extra performance because they’re really you know thrashing it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever well the difference though is that if it’s it depends on how it’s being used like fusion drive is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not just a cache it’s actually you’re It’s actually moving blocks around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and saying, all right, this block that’s being actively read and written to now lives here on the SSD. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it can not only make reads faster, but it can make writes faster. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like a simple, dumb caching arrangement instead, where the data still lives on the spinning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disks and the SSD is just like a read cache for it, then that’s great for reads, but it doesn’t do any good
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I still wish I could. I’m still trying to angle with this new trash can in Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. if I could somehow get a fusion-based boot drive out of that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Good luck with that. I mean, either that or I want a 1.5 terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I know that’s not going to happen. So I’m thinking of something. So my NAS is not entirely solved
⏹️ ▶️ John in my Mac Pro problem. But that’s Apple’s fault, not Synology’s, because they didn’t put any drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. All right. So really quick question, Marco. And then please tell me about something else that’s awesome. I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked by some friends that actually believe in photography in a way that I don’t. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology works as a like aperture, lightroom, I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the terms, like library or something like that, and I feel like I saw you answer this via Twitter or email or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that, but do you find for you and or Tiff especially, like what is your workflow? Can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use this as your primary working drive or how did you guys divvy that up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We really don’t know. I mean neither of us are qualified to know. Tiff’s photo management is she uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her own file and folder structure and uses Adobe Bridge and Photoshop. Bridge for browsing and light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing and RAW and Photoshop for more detailed editing. So Bridge is basically a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file browser. It doesn’t keep much of its own library around. It doesn’t manage the files for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use Lightroom, which is not actually that different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bridge. Lightroom is basically a nice interface with a few different nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface with a few different, like a few additional library management features on top of Bridge. It has all the same editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls, the same, you know, camera raw stuff that Adobe does. What I like about Lightroom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, little side note, what I like about Lightroom a lot, first of all, compared to Aperture, it’s way faster, way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more frequently updated and way more stable. And the processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff they have is really good. It’s, I would say, far ahead of Aperture at this point, with no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign of Aperture catching up anytime soon. Aperture always has felt like there’s nobody working on it and I think it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been true for a lot of the time it’s been around. But anyway, so the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is though, neither of us can tell you, because you know Tiff doesn’t use things where the library would be like half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and half in her computer. She has some like old archive client work that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the folders are on the NAS now, but she’s not like actively browsing that so you can’t really tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually still keep my entire photo library on my local SSD So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the NAS for me does not take a role in this so I people keep asking me this all the time And I I can’t I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry. I can’t give you the answer Aperture has this weird concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like you can have the masters in one place And then you can have like the working files or previews Locally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something and back when I used aperture I used it for a couple of years And I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons I stopped using it besides all the other problems decided was I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was never quite clear on where the files were and and like where what I’m supposed to be managing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here Like where is this file? Do I actually have a copy of this file? You know, can I delete this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of this? You know Is that going to delete the original like and the whole concept of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like vaults and reference masters and all this crazy stuff Aperture has to manage files and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they’re located, I could just never wrap my head around it. So I never really used much of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with Lightroom, you have a lot more control. I think it’s less… I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t use this stuff that heavily, so with a grain of salt, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lightroom seems to have less automatic management of those files, but it gives you more control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the file structure and where it goes. You know, it doesn’t try to just hide it all in a bundle like Aperture does. It has, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you just tell it what directory to import to and it imports those directories. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like that a lot better. But to answer your original question, I can’t actually tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a photo library on a NAS. I really can’t tell you. That’s one of those examples where maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iSCSI might be worth considering or trying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. How about something awesome?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds fantastic. Our second sponsor of this episode is is another repeat sponsor. It is the repeat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor. It is once again Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a minute, September is here and this is really cool. Every other month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve run Squarespace and that I’ve ever heard Squarespace sponsor any other show, every other month they have a 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off coupon code. This month it’s even better. This month, just for September, use coupon code ATP9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because September is month number nine, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Use coupon code ATP9 for 20% off. That’s a lot. That’s a big, big cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s 20% actually. So, use coupon code ATP9 for 20% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, Squarespace is constantly improving their platform. They have new features, new designs, better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support. And they have over 20 highly customizable templates for you to choose from to start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can customize everything. You can change the markup. You can inject JavaScript. You can do all sorts of cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. I’ve customized the layout for ATP’s site. I’ve used JavaScript hacks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insert download links for the MP3s and stuff like that. They give you all sorts of stuff to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. It’s incredibly easy to use. If you need any help, though, they have an amazing support team.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They work 24-7. And Squarespace starts at just $8 a month, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s before our coupon. Starts at just $8 a month and includes a free domain name if you sign up for a whole year at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we all know that Squarespace is beautiful on the outside. But what’s also amazing is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the code is beautiful too. Take a look at the markups on time. You’ll see there’s a lot you can do there. They take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pride in their backend code. So this ensures easy markup, accessibility,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SEO, all sorts of great benefits. So they take care of the hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you don’t have to. We’ve talked before, and I’ll repeat it a little bit here, that we all know how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make websites. We can make our own We can stick it on a server somewhere, but that’s a pain in the butt. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all know it. We’ve all done it. And there’s a lot of situations for which you do not want to be doing that or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t be doing that. And Squarespace is just fantastic to get something up there quickly and easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, especially in my case, way better than anything I could make myself. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to Squarespace for hosting or for sponsoring this episode of ATP. And really don’t forget, use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coupon code ATP9 for the month of nine for 20% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the month of September. Check it out, use that code, you’ll save a bundle. And thanks a lot to Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, thank you guys. No, and they’ve been really good to us, Squarespace. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s very much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciated. So there’s a couple of things I think we could talk about, but we’re a little short
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on time. So do we have any thoughts on Omni Key Mapper, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was called? Do you know what I’m talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I do. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go ahead, John, because I don’t know much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t have any thoughts except for sadness. Like, I can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this is the continuing tension between Apple’s app store policies and
⏹️ ▶️ John what third party Mac software developers want or need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do to maintain their business. And is a difference of opinion about
⏹️ ▶️ John how the Mac software business should work. And third party developers rely on upgrade revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John and think it’s a reasonable thing to do and Apple doesn’t. And now Apple’s trying to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party developers from allowing Mac App Store customers to upgrade to a non-Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store version. So the scheme that Omni had was like, hey, you bought our app on the Mac App Store. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John the next incremental update, but you don’t want to pay full price. Just use this application
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have. It will figure out that you purchased our previous version of our application from the App Store and
⏹️ ▶️ John will give you upgrade pricing on purchasing the next version not from the App Store. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t even allow that to happen. They said, stop doing that. Lots of people on Twitter were like, is that even
⏹️ ▶️ John legal? Can they stop you from doing that? It’s like proof of purchase. Isn’t there some sort of precedent case
⏹️ ▶️ John in law that you’re allowed to do proof of purchase type discounts from competitors or whatever? Oh, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. There’s no law. Yeah, but the point is, who cares? Unless you have the money to challenge Apple in court,
⏹️ ▶️ John which nobody does, basically, except for maybe Adobe or Microsoft, neither of whom are in the Mac App Store anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a moot point. So basically Apple is, you know, being like they’re being they’re being kind of jerky
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. They’re saying you don’t like our store. Fine, don’t be in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, don’t try to do anything that involves our store like giving your customers a discount. And you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John argument we talked about paid upgrades before, but the argument is like some people asked on Twitter, on Twitter, why should
⏹️ ▶️ John why should an upgrade be any cheaper than the original purchase? And as the Omni guys have explained on their site and in Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, it’s like you get more value from the first purchase of the program. If you don’t have a program
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you do, that’s incredibly valuable. And then when they upgrade the program to a fancy new version,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an incremental amount of value above the current one you have, but it’s presumably not as big a value as
⏹️ ▶️ John going from not having that program to have it. So that’s why upgrade prices should be cheaper than the initial purchase, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the initial purchase has more value to you, and the upgrade has some value to you, but presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John not as much as the entire application to begin with. And Apple disagrees.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they don’t have upgrade pricing in the store, and this will continue to be
⏹️ ▶️ John an annoying battle until this gets sorted out in some way. I mean, one way it can get sorted out is all Mac developers
⏹️ ▶️ John who have any desire to have upgrade pricing leave the Mac App Store. But that’s probably not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I just I feel so bad for the Mac developers that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like they don’t have a lot of leverage unless they in mass leave the App Store, like you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying. So by themselves, they don’t really have any leverage. And so they just have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. And that’s really too bad. And I wish that Apple, maybe they do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care, but they give the outward appearance of not caring about how this works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anyone but themselves. And that’s crummy. And it’s one of the ways that Apple really disappoints
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like we said the past time we discussed this, in theory, they could care about the customers
⏹️ ▶️ John because they think just a low price for everybody better than upgrade pricing because of lock-in and making a more competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John market, and all those things we talked about in the past show. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the much less charitable opinion that many people expressed is, no, in reality,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they want is for software to be free, because they want there to be many attractive reasons to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy their hardware. And so they want software to be entirely commoditized and almost free, and eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ John any company that can’t survive by giving away almost free software. So if you need to charge $50 for the first version
⏹️ ▶️ John $10 upgrade pricing, you will be eliminated by the company that can charge $15 for every single version
⏹️ ▶️ John year after year and somehow stay in business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s sad. It is sad. So any other thoughts on that? And then we have one more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey topic I want to try to squeeze in if we can.
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Buy OmniGraffle. It’s a good program. They are not a sponsor of the show. I just use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they deserve a break. All right. Nokia or Nokia or whatever it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure I’m sure we’re pronouncing it wrong even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey now. Surely we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it’s maybe we’ll hear about it on Stratee-kery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I was really surprised to hear that was the correct pronunciation but this we’re already taking a turn for the boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what do we think about this Nokia thing? I don’t see how this is really helping anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it just smells of desperation to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh it’s helping somebody. I think it’s helping both of them, both companies. It’s helping
⏹️ ▶️ John Nokia because they get to save face kind of because they were going down,
⏹️ ▶️ John down, down, and now it’s like, well, not our problem anymore. You know, uh, Microsoft bought
⏹️ ▶️ John it and then it’s their fault that our phones didn’t sell or whatever. And Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if we get back to discuss, let’s say if they want to be a devices
⏹️ ▶️ John company, according to like the, the Balmer plan before he was booted out. If that’s what they want to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John acquiring a hardware manufacturer is the logical next step, and the obvious one
⏹️ ▶️ John they would acquire is the one they’re already half in bed with, with their, you know, Microsoft guy who went to
⏹️ ▶️ John be their CEO, and this very intimate deal for them to make Windows phones, and
⏹️ ▶️ John widely acknowledged to be making the best Windows phones. So yeah, that’s the one to buy. So now Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John has more hardware muscle to go along with its supposed Is it planned to become kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Apple and Google all wrapped into one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ben Thompson is the author of Statikkur. I think his theory is probably the correct one. Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already had Nokia around their finger for a long time, for the last few years, ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since Elop was installed as CEO.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already had Nokia being their phone maker, they were making, was it exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows Phone smartphones at this point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they were making what most people considered very good hardware for Windows Phone and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Microsoft was already kind of getting the milk for free there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well I don’t know if that’s the same thing though. Well it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be but regardless, Ben Thompson’s theory as to why this was necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you You know, Nokia was, by most people who were smarter than us in this area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by most people’s assessment, Nokia was in severe financial problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were possibly on the verge of going bankrupt. And there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also some rumors that maybe they were considering just making Android phones, you know, just starting to use Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to get more market share and more money coming in. So, if either of those were about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen, if Nokia was about to either go bankrupt or or start becoming an Android manufacturer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would give Microsoft a pretty big reason to help them out and step in there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get some more influence there. Because if Nokia stopped making Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, who the heck would? You know, there’s a handful of other manufacturers that make them and they’re all terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, Nokia makes the only good ones. And Microsoft still, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fighting hard for, well, they’re fighting for Windows phone to still be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and they’re not just gonna give in and start making Office for Android, which has a bunch of Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parallels that we don’t have time to get to today. But they’re not gonna do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they should, they’re probably not going to. So Microsoft kind of had to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretically if this is true, they kind of had to do this. And it might have played a role in why Steve Ballmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been suddenly kicked out, like maybe Nokia would only agree to it if Elot became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next Microsoft CEO, or maybe Ballmer opposed the idea and the board didn’t. There’s all sorts of possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. But I think that, you know, given what we’ve heard about Nokia’s financial situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds like a really plausible explanation for all this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And really, if they want to be a company that makes awesome hardware and software together,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no getting around them making their own hardware. And they’ve got a taste for it with the Surface, and even with the Zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ John and of course with the Xbox. You just can’t, it’s not the same when it’s another company
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. Because that’s the reason that Apple kept making better products than them for
⏹️ ▶️ John all those years, even though they were dominating them in the market, was that it was all in-house in Apple. And Microsoft somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like trying to control a horse by a pair of reins, that were
⏹️ ▶️ John poking something with a stick. They could try to influence the people who made PCs. Please don’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John crapware on, or try to strong arm them by requiring, if you want the Windows logo
⏹️ ▶️ John for Windows XP, you must include X, Y, and Z, or you better put a sound chip on your thing because we’re embarrassed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the PC speaker. They had some influence on all the people, but it’s not the same as when it’s you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they’d see Apple, like, oh, fine, sure, Apple can make awesome hardware, because they can just put whatever the hell they want in there. And sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have all these crazy driver and support problems because they make seven machines, and they know exactly what they need to support.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Microsoft’s sick of that. It’s like fighting with one arm tied behind your back. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they need hardware expertise. And this could have been
⏹️ ▶️ John the perfect storm, or like Margot was saying, that if they didn’t save these people, all those beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John Lumia phones would be gone. And if you’re going to buy someone anyway to help you make phones, why would you not buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the company that’s currently making the best Windows phones? So it makes sense from all those different
⏹️ ▶️ John perspectives. People are down on the deal just because they’re like, is this going to be enough to save you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this really going to make a difference, or is this another one of your stupid deals that
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to make and that doesn’t end up changing Microsoft in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like what is, let’s say in six months from now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything’s all settled and they own this massive division from Nokia that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their phones and they can finally start releasing the next generation of Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lumia phones. They bought the rights to use the trademark Lumia, but not the trademark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nokia because They didn’t actually buy all of Nokia. They only bought their phone hardware division. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose six months from now this is all in place and they release Windows Phone 8.5 or 9.0 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is on the new Microsoft Lumia whatever. What’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then compared to today? Like what does this really change? What does this enable besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a continuation of the status quo which was not working well? What does this enable?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well it enables them to do the things that Apple does. Like say the next version of Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8.7 or I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what the hell the version they’re up to. They want to do something with it. And they say, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, this version of Windows Phone will only run on, because Microsoft’s done this like crazy, will only
⏹️ ▶️ John run on such and such hardware. And they can even say it will only run on this new hardware. And in fact, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to design this new hardware. And we’re going to custom pick the GPU and the system on a chip. And we’ll build
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire thing as a unit, kind of like we’re building an Xbox, with the hardware and software tied together to work in perfect synergy to give
⏹️ ▶️ John us exactly the GPU features we want, exactly the clock speed, memories and bus sizes that we need
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement the software stack that we plan to implement in this OS to make a match set.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of saying, we’re going to make this OS, and this is the driver interface, and we’ll try to support
⏹️ ▶️ John your things. And maybe you should pick like, they can make an integrated package that doesn’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like we make this over here, you make this over there. And then we have meetings to work out our interfaces, because you never end up with an optimal
⏹️ ▶️ John situation like that you want something as low cost as possible that performs as well as possible
⏹️ ▶️ John and the smallest amount of power. And, you know, like, they want them to be a match set
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same way that Apple does with all its phones, like crazy. And like Microsoft does with the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John where they control the entire stack. So that I think is the win that they’re looking for. It doesn’t mean they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the competence to pull it off, but in theory that was not possible before and now it definitely is
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. It’s just up to them to pull it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, sort of. My recollection of the original Windows Phone 7 specs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were that the hardware specifications were pretty specific. To your point, they weren’t as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific as, hey guys next door, can you build exactly this? But they were pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn specific, and there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you couldn’t iterate on it. They produced the spec and said, you guys should build this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then they go off and build the thing. And they do still have leeway to pick their own camera, or pick their battery sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ John or pick the materials, or pick the screen technology, and stuff like that. Like, it’s when Apple designs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like one team goes off and says, here’s iOS 7, and here’s what the specs have to be, and then hands off a piece of paper to the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John guys, and they build the phone. It’s totally together. It’s a process moving in lockstep, iterating over and over
⏹️ ▶️ John again, like revising, revising. Instead of OS manufacturer makes a new OS, provides
⏹️ ▶️ John a spec sheet that says, to run this OS, you need this hardware. Even if the spec sheet they give you has no variability,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the same as it having been designed altogether and going through iterations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we’ll see what happens. I mean, only time will tell. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the good pieces that I read personally were both of Ben Thompson’s. We’ve already talked about one. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another that he himself actually has linked in the chat, which has some talk about the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, value something, value act? Which I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re theorizing has some play in some things going on in the board, behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scenes. Also Horace’s take on it, which had a delightfully Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trolling title, which I got a fine. I think it was like who bought whom, or who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is buying whom. Reading a quick blurb from that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so in a way an acquisition of priorities is almost a reverse acquisition. The acquired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually quote buying quote the acquirer. The acquired company’s priorities enhanced processes and resources,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become the guiding principles in the acquirer. It’s what happened when Apple bought Next, and may have happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when Disney bought Pixar. And whether or not you buy into the theory, I thought it was a really interesting point.
⏹️ ▶️ John We forgot the most important point, of course, which has been made by many other people online. That when you own the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John company, you don’t get a $15 license fee for your OS when they sell the phone. You can get like $300 out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the $3,000 cell phone service contract that you got. So you make a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot more profit when you sell. I mean, that’s the obvious thing that is going unsaid here, but it’s worth mentioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t have even considered this possibility if that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, that doesn’t make much
⏹️ ▶️ John of a difference if no one buys them. So I still think of it from the perspective of, finally, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a fighting chance of doing what Apple does or what Samsung does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because even though it’s like, well, Samsung doesn’t control the OS. It’s like, well, they don’t control it, control it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they kind of, kind of. Like, I always wonder how many people Samsung has working on their Android OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s open source, and they customize their OS to various degrees. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John are more masters of their fate than Nokia was, because I imagine that, oh, I don’t know what the deal is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty incestuous being Microsoft. But I don’t know if Nokia previously had all the source to
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows Phone 7 and 8 and were able to sort of customize it. I mean, I’m pretty sure they weren’t allowed to customize
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because they said, we want you to have the Windows Phone experience Don’t change the UI to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Motorola sense skin or all those things that people do with Android, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so is that it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Guess I I can’t think of anything less interesting to me at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then trying to figure out in any more detail than what we’ve talked about I try to figure out what’s going on with Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s bored like the whole value act thing That sounds really interesting when Ben Thompson writes about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I would hate to be be trying to do more research on it, though. Like, can you imagine having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dig through board stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John That probably is, actually, I think, the board intrigue part and the politics part of it is the most
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting part of this entire deal, but has the least or perhaps the most negative
⏹️ ▶️ John bearing on the success of the future companies. It’s interesting from a political personal, like you wonder what happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John and kind of like Game of Thrones, right? But the more interesting that
⏹️ ▶️ John gets, the board boats ill for the future of these companies because if this deal is really about like who’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John CEO and backstabbing and acquisitions and whose stars rising and falling in the corporate ranks,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is totally taking your eye off the ball and you do not want any kind of drama like that or at the very least you
⏹️ ▶️ John want very intense and very brief drama, leaving you to a new regime that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes along smoothly. But this just looks like a gigantic mess over there in the boardrooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m so glad that we aren’t there sitting through it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do want to end with one quick thing, a tweet from Matthew Panzerino from a few days ago, which I think hits the nail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the head. A reality check though, you and I as consumers can only win if Microsoft and Nokia succeed. Competition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only burns the crucible hotter and purer. And I think that’s dead on. I know we’ve all said that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many times, but if this does work out, it makes Apple work that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much harder and Google work that much harder and Samsung work that much harder. So I do hope it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works out, but it’s going to be interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John If not for the Metro look, who would Apple have used for inspiration for iOS 7?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. That’s such a minefield.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on that bombshell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s wrap it up, because we’re running long here. And we’ve got to get our sleep before next week’s iPhone episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Hover and Squarespace. And we’ll see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech broadcast so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just so excited to be playing with it every day. Every time I see it automatically mount on my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John and slowly and painfully get a time machine and back up and then go away. I think, oh, that’s down there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s down there doing that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s down there doing that stuff. Are we still talking about the Synology?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That whole paragraph is a title.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so close to getting a Mac mini or something to be a Plex thing. It’s connected to my TV. I just I just need a fanless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right do we want to do titles real quick?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I like computerized garden gnome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think it’s like a little garden gnome? It’s like a little statue. I know what you’re saying. It looks like a robot. It’s got a little light around it. It’s cute.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so happy that I just think of them down there. The two of them sitting next to each other in my basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like all on their own little UPS that’s made just for them. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which one’s Bert and which Which one’s Ernie? Goodness.