40: The Compliance Shark

22 Nov 2013

Why enterprise software is hard, game-console sales, Retina iPad Minis, image retention, the A7’s awesomeness, and repairing HFS.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up on Cisco VPNs on Mavericks and [photo backups] to SkyDrive on Windows Mobile Phone Series Metro Not-Metro Phone Windows.
• Why enterprise software is so hard, and the barriers to entry for small companies targeting the enterprise market.
• Game-console sales by generation, Nintendo In Crisis, and AnandTech's Xbox One and PS4 mini-review.
• Casey's new Retina iPad Mini, Marco's accidentally popular image-retention test, DisplayMate quality analysis, free data with a T-Mobile SIM, and choosing between the iPad Air and Retina Mini.
• A7 thermal throttling in iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and Retina iPad Mini, and deeper analysis of the A7.
• John's disk-corruption adventure and why you should "repair" your HFS disks. Take John's disk-repair results survey!
• Ending Theme Song 2.0 by Jonathan Mann. (We still like the old one, so we'll keep it but rotate this in sometimes.)
• After-show: Fraser Speirs producing his podcast on an iPad, Back to Work 146 with Dan possibly going iPad-only, SimCity 2000 on SNES, Lex's Logitech Ultrathin Mini keyboard review, Apple refurb discounts, and the Casio B.O.S.S., which can even exchange data with a PC!

Sponsored by:

• Ting: Mobile that makes sense. No contracts, and pay only for what you use.
• Gemvara: The revolutionary leader of custom-made, fine jewelry shopping online.

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But where’s my data? But I had a backup! I used Time Machine! All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, is this the show? I guess. I don’t even know. All right, John, you have some FU, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, sure do. Last week we talked about Cisco VPN, enterprise software, and all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that stuff, and I was trying to like, I was telling a story from my life with a broader point about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enterprise software, the specifics of it were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what mostly got responses to one of the big responses was, Hey, do you need that new version of the Cisco VPN

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software? Because even though you couldn’t get it, because you don’t have a service contract or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here are various places where you can get it or do you want me to email it to you? If you do Google search for this, you’ll find it or so on and so forth. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of people were nice and offering me this piece of software, which I don’t know if it’s like they is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John illegal software copying? Is that a problem the software probably. But anyway, thank everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for their offers. I did not take anyone up on their offer because I as I think I said at the end of the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John segment last week, the final result of that was that it was partly my fault for not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reading the message and that even if I could get the software, it didn’t matter because I was had to wait for my IT

⏹️ ▶️ ^John department to approve it for use. Like it has to be this new version has to be approved for use with all the other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do. And then when it’s approved for use, they will put it up on their download thing that you got to go through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the job applet for whatever. So anyway, even if I can get the software, which I totally could if I wanted to Google for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things that people tell me to Google for or whatever, it wouldn’t do me any good because it’s against our IT department’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John policy to install it. So I’m just now patiently waiting. So thanks for all the help, but I don’t need it right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the second bit is from the, it is an AnyConnect Twitter account. Of course there is. I don’t know why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t think this VPN software, this specific VPN software product wouldn’t have a Twitter account, but it does. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the AnyConnect Twitter account responded a few times to me. And one of the things they said was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about Cisco being clueless about 10.9, they said that Cisco had announced this issue publicly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and reported it to Apple prior to the release. And a couple of other people said that there was some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John networking related change really late in the beta period, like maybe right before GM that caught a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people off guard. So apparently if you were following the right places that I wasn’t following, you would have known

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they were going to be incompatible with 10.9 and that they weren’t ready in time of the GM. Apologies to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cisco for saying that they did not know that 10.9 was coming. Obviously, they did. They had an issue. They filed it with Apple. They just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t get their stuff working in time for the 10.9 release. They did get it working a couple of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John afterwards. And now I’m just waiting on my IT department, however long that will take.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sounds fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s always fun. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the other thing I found is a lot of people were recommending third party Cisco VPN compatible clients.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One thing I think some people were confused about that the built in OS 10 VPN works with some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cisco VPNs. And we used to have a Cisco VPN that the built in one work with. And that was great. It’s like no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software to install your OS works with it out of the box. I worked in 10 eight. I think I worked in 10 seven.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this new Cisco product that doesn’t work with the built in VPN. So a lot of people think, oh, here’s how you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decrypt this file and get the right things to enter into the OS VPN preference. I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already done that. I already had figured out all that stuff and it was working. but they upgraded, side-graded, whatever, changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to AnyConnect, which doesn’t work with the built-in VPN. But there are third-party products that you can buy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not from Cisco, that will apparently work with Cisco AnyConnect. One of them was called OpenConnect, it’s like an open-source

⏹️ ▶️ ^John project or whatever, that looked like a little bit too much work for me to try to install. Another one is called Shimo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I checked out, I could not get it to work and I didn’t want to fight with it because if I fail to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to work three times in a row I get locked out, which I did, and then I have to call someone on the phone and ask

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done my luck my thing for me so I’m just gonna stick with the Cisco AnyConnect VPN, wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for my work to approve it for use and then upgrade everything and continue my life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right. We also had a great bit of follow-up from a guy named

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Jared who asks, I’m wondering what you might perceive as a market for better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enterprise software? I know that’s a big question but is there a place for a smaller company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whose focus is enterprise software to come in and disrupt one of the big guys with something vastly better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without the name recognition. I have been fighting with enterprise accounting software and seriously considering writing my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own to try to combat the insanity that is most accounting software, but I would be fighting an uphill battle. I would love to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hear your thoughts. So I picked this as something I wanted to talk about because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my first job out of college was actually at a small enterprise software company trying to disrupt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bigger enterprise software market. And so I learned a lot there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And most of what I learned was just because I was a smart-ass college kid, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of school and thinking I knew everything, entering the workforce. And I was working with a bunch of way smarter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people than me, who were way better programmers and had much more wisdom accumulated among them. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I got my butt kicked pretty severely in the best possible way during that first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year or two, just learning how to be a real professional software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developer instead of just some college kid who was on a program. Part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that growing up process is that I think every programmer when they leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco college is very likely to be the kind of person, and I certainly was, who looks at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything else and says, oh, well, that’s stupid. Why do they do it that way? Why don’t they just do X,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Y, Z? Like, you think everything’s a simple problem, you think everyone else is an idiot. And obviously, the reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this sucks is because they’re all stupid and I know better and I can walk in there and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take over or I would do it better. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had a look at this market from that point of view. Not saying that’s Jared’s point of view. It probably isn’t. He’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more experienced than that, but that was certainly my point of view. And I learned kind of the hard way why enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco software is so hard. And it really is. It’s not as simple as,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh, well, crappy programmers write it because they didn’t want to work on consumer stuff. It’s not that at all. It’s also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not that the developers of enterprise software don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about interface or they don’t care about quality. It isn’t that at all. It’s that the enterprise market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is really, really complicated, and it’s not nearly as easy as the consumer market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to enter. One of the biggest reasons is just the buyers. When you think about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco culture of a company—and Casey, you mentioned this a little bit last episode with meetings and people wanting to be heard and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanting to not get fired and be relevant. One of the biggest problems is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, you’ve heard the phrase nobody ever got fired for buying IBM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s if you if you think about like if you’re a big business buying a big enterprise software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products and you’re the you’re the IT manager or you’re the CIO whatever they do you know something like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know enough about these terms to know who makes these decisions usually but let’s let’s call it the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco IT manager. If you install some crazy email system from a startup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the guy before you was running Lotus Notes, which is horrible for the users. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco horrendous for the users. But it’s like, you know, quote, enterprise, and it’s well-known. Nobody ever got fired

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for installing Lotus Notes, although they probably should.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which, by the way, Lotus is owned by IBM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I know. Which makes that extra funny. Although I don’t think that it was always that way. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, it doesn’t matter. If you devote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your whole company’s budget for Category X and all this effort to install it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything and it turns out to kind of suck for you, if that’s a really well-known thing like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Microsoft Office or the Exchange Server, no one’s going to fire you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that because that was a reasonable decision to make. If you go buy some kind of crazy startup thing and that doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very well or people just don’t like it, that’s on you. And so there’s a lot of pressure just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the situation you’re in. There’s a lot of pressure to go with the big established things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s also a very human-intensive sales process.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You hear—there’s an article forever ago that I’ll have to link to on Joel on Software about software pricing, which I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably linked to like ten times over the last five years for various things. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the things he mentions is that there’s really not a lot of software between $1,000 and $50,000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because once you get above a certain price threshold, you have to start flying a sales

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco force out to meet with potential customers and play golf with them and schmooze with them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and go out there to support everything. And so it becomes a much more expensive proposition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for you, the software vendor, to even sell software to big enterprises.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you have to charge a massive amount. That same process, that big sales process,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco makes it so that you basically have to have a very large sales force and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a dedicated sales force to fly out and meet with people all the time if you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to sell enterprise software in any meaningful volume. You can’t, for the most part, you can’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like have a website and a download button and that’s it. Like much of the software you’ve got to fly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people out, schmooze with them, meet with them for months, etc. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once you get the software built, let’s say you actually sell it to them, or you come close,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you have to deal with their requirements. And this is one of the reasons why enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco software is so expensive and why there’s not a whole lot of choices for a lot of the stuff there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Enterprise stuff has to work at much larger scales and much higher reliability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than a lot of consumer software. You might design your app thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what’s the maximum number of database records that I’m going to have to handle in this app? What is it? Maybe a million?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then you find out that your customer has to import 15 million

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco records a year from the last 30 years from their ancient system that was running on a mainframe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that some contractors built in the 80s. It’s that kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of scale that you’re operating at with so many companies. You also have all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs like what Sean was saying last week. You have security needs, you have regulatory needs, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco logging and auditing and fine grain access control and groups and permissions and all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these things that are so often required by enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customers that consumer stuff doesn’t need most of that stuff or can get away with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smaller scale version of that or a less official version of things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You might have requirements in certain industries. They might want to know how you run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your company. They might want to have security audits of your company, quality audits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of things like Six Sigma, quality certification, stuff like that. I don’t know enough about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to say more of them. Stuff like that. They might put the burden on you to say, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for us to buy your software, we have to have these organizations or regulatory bodies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco verify that your company is legit and secure. A lot like PCI compliance in the payment industry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can I interject real quick? Yeah. As somebody who has either worked for big enterprises as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a consultant, or I also spent some time at a huge company, it wasn’t a software company, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was a huge company nevertheless, this is absolutely true. And a lot of times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’ll have really progressive and really smart developers putting in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I touched on this last episode, putting a situation where because of all the requirements put on them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about code reviews and about even the version control you use. Like in a past job

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had to use the rational suite where I couldn’t check in code unless I associated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it with a task in the bug slash work tracking part of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same tool. So I couldn’t make a change to the code unless I was tagging it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and associating it with something that somebody else more important than me told me to do. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey extremely, extremely frustrating. And the other thing is, with big companies, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey typically been around long enough that they have screwed up in every possible way. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the answer to screwing up when you’re in a big company is to make a procedure so you don’t do that exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing again. And so now you have a million and five procedures, and Marco you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were touching on this with Six Sigma and blah blah blah, you have a million and five procedures in place to avoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you pretty much getting work done with any sort of urgency or speed. And it’s very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very difficult and very frustrating. You’re absolutely right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah. And then, and the sales process is also weird because first of all there’s analyst reports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These things are so big and there’s so much money at stake, one of the things analysts are paid to do is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tell companies what kind of enterprise software they should be buying. And the analyst game

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at that scale is kind of a scam. You as a software vendor basically have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to pay massive sums of money to become members or clients

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the analyst firms, and then they’ll start recommending you. And it’s not ever actually said that way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s kind of how it works in practice. And so there’s a lot of companies that they’ll only buy what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some analyst tells them to buy. And so you have to kind of get in that game, and it’s a very expensive game to get into.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then even when you get in, it’s like, well, they might not recommend you, or they might not put you in the right boxes or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Compliance is like that, too. I’ve been through a lot of compliance things, and those are basically like extortion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scams. The company will come, you’ll pay a company to come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to tell you whether you are compliant with something, whether it be PCI or a million other acronym

⏹️ ▶️ ^John standards that you have to comply with, and they’ll tell you which things you are non-compliant about, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then they will sell you consulting services to make you compliant. And after you pay this very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same company the money to help remediate your failures to comply, then they will give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you your certification. And once you get that critical mass of like, everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the x industry needs to have y certification compliance just to be a player. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people start putting it on each other’s requirements. Marco talked about the requirements. Once everyone starts putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it on their requirements and everyone decides they have to be on it, the culture of companies that build up around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowing companies to get that compliance as a sort of little cabal. It’s like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like I was saying before with the startups all passing money back and forth to each other until the venture capital money ran

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out. Only this is for actual profitable companies, and they’re passing money back and forth to these middlemen who give them the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compliance so that they can continue to sell to people and the little people who can’t afford to play that compliance game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, a lot of these compliance things start with with the right intentions, especially government compliance. In general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have some good intentions to begin with. And then there are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people finding little nooks and crannies of profit where they can live

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the big sucker fish on the government shark or on the compliance shark and say, we have found a little area where we can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John profitable by helping other companies comply with these stupid things. It’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pleasant place to be, this whole enterprise environment. I’ve talked about it on past shows,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I think this whole environment that we just described, all these different things about that are weird and terrible and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people have to do, it eventually produces companies that are not able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to compete. Like in the short term, in the medium term, it produces companies that can crush other companies. But in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long term, it resigns you to death. Because once you’re completely ossified with procedures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and compliance and all that other stuff and you are the king of your mountain of these other big companies that are all playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same game and you’ve defeated them all and there’s like two or three of you left and you think you’re the winner, some other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little furry mammal comes up and the comet comes and you die and the furry mammal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grows up to be the next dinosaur. Like that’s the evolutionary process. And getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back to this question from Jared about like, what do we think about some small company disrupting stuff like that? This happens,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is happening all the time. This constant turnover of like the little company comes, then they become the big company, and become

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a giant behemoth that can’t do anything, and then they die, and the next one comes. That’s always taking place.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And in the enterprise market, a lot of companies that are, a lot of places that are small,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I’m thinking of Igloo, one of our past sponsors with the whole big internet software. It’s so easy to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a product that end users want to use more than the things that they’re forced to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The trick is for those companies is either be so incredibly desirable that the important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people want it, and that’s like the iPhone approach, where like, it doesn’t matter that CEO has an iPhone, the CTO has an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone, all the C levels, I could just have iPhones. IT department, you’re going to make iPhones work with our

⏹️ ▶️ ^John network. I don’t care, I don’t want to hear about BlackBerry, just make it work. Like that’s one way to go in there. And that’s sort of like a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, from the top down type of approach. And the other one is the bottom up approach, where in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our company at least, like we have SharePoint, which Casey can tell us all about how wonderful that is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we all hate it, and it’s terrible. And people just the individual people, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers, but just like regular everybody, anybody in the company, salespeople, managers, everybody just just started using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their own Dropbox accounts and are making shared Dropbox accounts with like, you know, just random

⏹️ ▶️ ^John names, then sharing them amongst all the people, because it was easier to share files with Dropbox. But that’s not compliant with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all our compliance stuff. So it’s like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, you can’t be using Dropbox, we have all these requirements, data has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be in house has to be encrypted, but you know, blah, blah, blah. And what we’re switching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to now is a box dot net, which is like a secure drop box type of thing. It lets you self host and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. That’s kind of like the igloo approach where you take a product that any users really like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they may not have like the enough of the requirements to get into an enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you go from the consumer side and you say, what if we just add just enough features and compliance to get us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into not all enterprises, not even the biggest enterprises, but now we’re now we’re a player in like the small to medium

⏹️ ▶️ ^John business type of thing where we’ll take a product that everybody loves. Apple did it itself with the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Take the iPhone that everybody loves and don’t make it into a Blackberry, but give it enough enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features like a remote wipe, a little bit of a management service, or whatever. You don’t bend over backwards and pervert your product to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it into true enterprise software. You merely take a really desirable product that consumers love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you do what it takes to get in the door. That’s a bottom-up type approach. There’s a new Dropbox for business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John announcement as well. Now everyone’s doing that where you can get into the enterprise without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fleet of salespeople and without being like, we’ll do anything for you in the big support contracts and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff like that, by just taking a successful consumer product that you know people are using anyway, sort of on the sly or illegally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote unquote, and just do what it takes to get in the door of a couple of businesses. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that is a viable strategy for disruption. We’ll see, you know, 30 years from now, what the state of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file sharing within large enterprises looks like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Aaron Ross Powell, The Big Bang Theory. I was talking at work with somebody today, just today actually, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he was saying that he was talking to big banks at some conference a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That must have been fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, you would think not, but actually I guess it was very interesting. My coworker was saying he was talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to I guess like a director of innovation or something like that at a big bank, and this particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gentleman said, I don’t fear the other big banks and I genuinely don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which bank it was, but for the sake of conversation, let’s say it was Bank of America. The guy from Bank of America said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t fear Capital One and I don’t fear Wells Fargo. You know who I fear? The little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey startups because they can move so much faster than we can and there’s nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can do about that. That makes me think of say Square. Square is never going to replace a Bank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of America, but Square is my go-to mechanism for giving money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to friends in sums more than like $10 or whatever I would have in my wallet. And if I have to pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a friend that I don’t see on a regular basis because he did me a favor or I bought something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from them secondhand or whatever the case may be, you know what I do? I use square cash. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s that sort of disruption – I hate to use that word. I’m probably misusing it. But that sort of air quote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey disruption that I think is scary. I think Jared’s spot on in saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe that’s possible. And if you make a great product, it could happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This week’s first sponsor is a repeat sponsor, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But anyway, we’ve had other things from them before. This week it is Ting. Ting is from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people at Two Cows. They are the same company, the parent company of Hover and so many good things. Ting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is mobile that makes sense. They’re a no BS, simple to use mobile service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco provider. They’re a reseller on the, they’re an MVNO, if anybody remembers that acronym.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re an MVNO reseller of the US Nationwide Sprint Network.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you go to our special URL, atp.ting.com, to get $25 off a new device or a $25 service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco credit if you bring your own. So Ting has great

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco outright from the start. They don’t need you to have a contract or come back or pay these big ETFs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What’s most interesting about them, I think, is that they have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You pay a base price of $6 per month per device. Then above that, you’re going to automatically bill

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the actual amount of minutes or messages or megabytes that you actually use each month. For

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco instance, if you never use voice or messages, you don’t pay for them. Let’s

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’ll pay $30. You don’t need to guess what you’re going to need in advance or remember to change

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of them are legally required, some of them aren’t, and it’s kind of shady. Well, Ting only charges you the minimum that they

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can use their awesome web interface to manage a big fleet of devices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you have like a big pool of devices you want to manage, you can do that. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really great. So one idea I had for how to use Ting is it’d be great for developers like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. If you want to have like an Android test phone, let’s say you’re an iOS developer and you’re making an Android version

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tablets are fairly easy to get these days, but data plans really aren’t and phones really aren’t still.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six bucks a month most months when it’s sitting in the drawer and then you can take it out and you can say, oh, you know, I’m going to take this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around and test something out in the world with real service on my phone. And you’ll end up paying like three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or four bucks that month. It’s great. So I think that’s a really great use case for TING. You know, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a developer, you want to test device, boom. In fact, they even have this cool new thing you can even buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Nexus 5 from the Google Play Store and then you can bring that to Ting to have a

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s pretty cool. So go to atp.ting.com. You can look, you can see,

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And thank you very much to ting for sponsoring the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have one quick bit of follow up to end the follow up train and it vaguely relates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to ever picks which is going to really make everyone excited. The two Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Phone users came out of the woodwork over the last week to complain about the fact that I called it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Windows Phone Series 7 Mobile Series Phone, Metro not Metro Phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} to be honest,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s well, to be honest, I mean, I think they’re right. And I got some tweets from RB

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and an email from Chris M, where they they took issue with what I was saying, and to some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey degree, I think they were right. And so let me read a quote from this email, which I never actually got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey blessing to read from, but whatever. They were talking about, among other things, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we saw this from other people as well, that SkyDrive apparently is kind of ever picks for Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Phone pictures. And so this is Chris who emailed me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I jumped from iOS to Windows Phone because it was just too gaudy in 2010, I got something very, very nice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey indefinite photo backups. I just looked at my SkyDrive and saw that I’ve got 8,581 photos backed up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s many photos I’ve taken for just over three years on my phone. That whole EverPix debacle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that whole does or doesn’t iCloud backup more than 1,000 photos, we don’t have that problem, all 4% of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us. And so it is worth noting that this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a really cool thing. And I didn’t look into it any more than these emails and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tweets that we got. But that’s what I wanted from Apple. And it seems that Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can do it, and perhaps they can do it because they have 4% of the users, like Chris said. But it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very compelling, and it is very interesting. And I should give Microsoft some credit for that. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my apologies to the Windows Phone users of the world. And I appreciate you guys pointing that out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The thing about all these, though, is that even though it seems like they’re being magnanimous and doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this out of the goodness of their heart to help you keep your photos safe and maybe make you more satisfied with your Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone or your Google phone or whatever. It is also a form of platform lock-in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because say every one of these, you know, say Microsoft, Google and Apple all protect all your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photos forever. Which one of those companies, if any, gives you a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to switch platforms? Say, oh, I’ve decided I don’t like Windows phone anymore. Now I’m going to try an Android phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to try Google Nexus, whatever number they’re up to. And then you think, oh, hey, wait a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my pictures are on Microsoft SkyDrive. When I buy my new Google phone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John set it up, where are all my pictures going to be? How am I going to see them? Is Microsoft going to bend over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backwards to say, oh, it’s easy. You can just export all your photos here and put them in there. Do you assume that all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photos in your SkyDrive also exist on your local disk? Is the mirror Dropbox style? Or do you have backups of them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This siloing effect, I mean, it’s good for all the individual companies. And I would think out of all the companies, Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the most likely to give you a way to get your data out because they’re pretty good thus far about giving you some sort of gigantic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give me my data out in a non-proprietary format but certainly Apple is not good about that and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John imagine Microsoft would not be either so that’s something we didn’t even talk about last time like assume we snap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our fingers and everybody provides a way to protect all our data including our photos forever up in the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and blah blah blah now now we’re all locked in even further to the platforms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they were using probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s wise when When you’re looking at how you’re going to do something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, it’s wise to break that hard link with one of these major platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vendors who’s going to have all these different strategy barriers they’re going to probably erect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s better to go with something either self-managed, where it’s on all your stuff, like a hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and transporter and Dropbox, stuff like that, or go with something like EverPix, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco service that is kind of neutral and unlikely to be bought. Actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorry, I can’t really say that. If EverPix had stayed in business, fine. But then once they get acquired, kind of like how Facebook’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always snapped up. Facebook bought Instagram and everything you thought you were using this independent service and now it’s part of the Facebook empire.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s just something you have to watch for. Like we’ve said in the last thing, none of these things are going to be your solution forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s your responsibility to have all these different things and then one of them goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away, gets acquired, starts behaving in a way you don’t like or whatever, then you swap it out for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you are. Like, you know, you just, you’re never gonna be all set forever. You’re always going to have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keep an eye on these things and decide when some service or vendor is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now across the line to something you don’t like and then you gotta switch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. So totally changing topics. John, I assume you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have been following the reviews of the PS4 and Xbone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I haven’t even actually read any of the reviews but I’ve read so much about both of them beforehand it’s almost like now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people actually have them, what are they going to say that I didn’t already know about it? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the one thing that we all didn’t know about any of these things is how many people are going to buy them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now for the PS4 at the very least we do have sales numbers proudly announced by Sony

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself. They said that they sold a million of these in the first 24 hours in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John North America alone. And that doesn’t sound like a lot compared to how many iPhones sell on the first day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like 9 million that first weekend or something for the 5s but in the world of game consoles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put a link into this economist story which I think had some nice graphs about it or some interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graphs anyway but in the world of game consoles those numbers are actually pretty good the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PlayStation 4 sold more consoles in its first 24 hours than any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other previous console sold and I think its first week or maybe its first month, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really big opening day numbers. And the reason I bring this up is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because we had a conversation about Nintendo, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know, a couple months ago when everyone was talking about Nintendo. I did this post on Hypercritical, Nintendo in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crisis, we should put that in the show notes, and one of the things I said in it was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if the market for dedicated gaming hardware goes away then Nintendo is probably in big trouble because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think Nintendo has the ability to put out a full-fledged platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like for applications and everything in the style of iOS or Android. It just doesn’t seem like that’s in the cut, you know, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something the company is not able to do. And to be fair, very few companies are able to do that. Who is able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to produce a platform for mobile, desktop, or anything? Many companies have tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and most of them have failed. And we’ve got Windows Phone, barely, Android, and we’ve got iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and on the desktop we’ve got Windows, the Mac, and maybe Linux if you want to throw that in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And dead bodies of all the past companies that have tried, from you know, Palm OS to Amiga to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS2 and all, you know, BOS, all these things, the companies that couldn’t do it. So I don’t think Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a platform company. And I think their survival depends on there being a market for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dedicated gaming hardware. Now out of the next generation consoles, the PlayStation 4 is the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dedicated gaming hardware. Xbox One tries to be like, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do television stuff and you can do Skype with your friends and you can overlay a web browser on top of your game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on top of your, you know, it is trying to, it has HDMI input for crying out loud, it is trying to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a television experience with the Kinect built in and all that stuff. The Wii U, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know quite what that is, I guess you would call it a dedicated gaming console as well, but it’s actually very strange with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the handheld tablet thing and everything like that. is straight up the middle. It’s a box. It has controllers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It plugs into your TV. You put a game disc in it. You play the game with the controller on the TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Very straightforward. And so what does the very big opening

⏹️ ▶️ ^John day sales of the PlayStation 4 say about the viability of dedicated gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware? I think, do you guys have the Economist thing open with those charts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t, but I can. I don’t do my homework.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Click it in the link. It’s in the show notes. I got it. Yeah, I think these charts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are interesting for a couple of reasons. This shows the generations of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game consoles. I don’t know how they come up with these numbers. They’re probably from the Wikipedia pages. But the sixth generation is listed as the PS2,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GameCube and Xbox. Seventh is the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360. And the eighth is PS4,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Xbox One and Wii U. You guys all have the charts up now? Yeah. We can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at the sixth generation and you can see how massively the PS2 dominated. Like if you’re not into games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or don’t follow the industry, you might think, oh, that was the time when these three consoles existed. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your friend’s house, who you always went over, if they had an Xbox, the original Xbox, you would have thought, yeah, that generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was pretty much evenly split between like Xbox and PS2. And I don’t know anybody with a GameCube or you might say, oh, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a GameCube and it sold about as many as the PS2 and Xbox, right? Now you look at these graphs and it’s very clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was the PS2 generation. Xbox and GameCube also existed as products, more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or less. It’s not you know, it was a blowout. And then you look at the seventh generation with the Wii, PS3,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Xbox 360, and you can see the Wii just shooting up like a rocket ship and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then coming down like a rocket ship, you know, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still massively dominating that generation because the PS3 and the 360 are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these little lumps underneath. And even though they had more longevity than the Wii, they could not come back from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. I mean, look at the slope of that thing. It’s just unbelievable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s the model rocket trajectory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. But, you know, clearly the Wii dominated that generation. It may have had a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fall, but it went up twice as high. Actually, I think I pulled numbers from Wikipedia for that to see what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heck was in there. Wii was 100 million, PS3 ended up being around 80 million, Xbox 360 ended up being 76 million.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And most of that is because the Wii’s sales just dropped off and the PS3 and Xbox kept chipping away. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the longer that generation went on, the more the PS3 and 360 would start to catch up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the beginning and middle. And then the hilarious eighth generation chart

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have here, you notice that gray area that says FCAST, which I guess is the hip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to say forecast. They’re trying to forecast into the future. Each one of these charts has an area where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re forecasting into the future. But the eighth generation chart is all in the FCAST zone. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forecast. There’s one data point that’s not in the forecast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, well, because the Wii U has been out for a little while, and the PS4 has been out for a day, And the Xbox One

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not out yet. So they said, let’s just make stuff up. Here’s what we think the future of this thing will be. And they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John draw a bunch of lines, and they show the Wii U being small. That’s probably a safe bet. And then they show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Xbox One and PS4, or the PS4 being higher. But none of those lines come close

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to reaching the peaks of the Wii U or the PS2. Like, they’re having the PS4 top out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around like $15 million, I guess, a year or two from now. I don’t know where they come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up with these numbers. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, if you look at the previous generation, it looks like they’re basically assuming that the PS4 is going to sell about as well As the ps3 Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that the Xbox one will be worse than the 360 Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but see I think I would disagree with that because I think if you look at this generation It’s very clear as you said like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that Sony is really targeting like gamers. This is a gaming machine We’re not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to do a whole lot of other multimedia things We’re not gonna try to be a TV pass-through with you know all this other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the Xbone is doing they’re really just trying to be a really good gaming machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and And so I think they’re probably going to do a lot better this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time than Microsoft will. And I think they’re probably going to sell a lot more units than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what’s in this FCAST zone on this graph.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I said on a past podcast that I think it was on a talk show talking about this with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Gruber, that my premise is that Nintendo better hope that there’s a market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for dedicated gaming hardware because they’re doomed if there’s not because they can’t do anything but dedicated gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware. And I said, I think there is at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one more generation of dedicated gaming hardware, that it will be viable for one more generation. Because at that time, none of these things were out yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for the Wii U, and even though it wasn’t doing all that well, I said, I think maybe dedicated gaming hardware does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go away, and we all play this on our phones wirelessly to our TVs or little Apple TV-style puck

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, but not this generation. We got at least one more generation of what we know as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actual game consoles, whether they have fancy other functionality as well. And the reason I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is because the last console generation was like seven to eight years long, which is pretty long for a console generation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially at the pace things develop in the electronics industry these days. And so there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a whole generation of kids who grew up with these consoles who have never seen a new console launch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like they started playing when they were seven, eight, or nine years old. And now they’re like a teenager entering college, or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re in their early to mid 20s or something. They’ve grown up their entire life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with just one game console or like one generation of game consoles. They’re at that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John age where they have a job. They don’t have anything else to spend on except for like, you know, entertainment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to the movies, buying video games, and buying game consoles, going out. Like, they don’t have a mortgage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or family or whatever. These people are absolutely positively ready to experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thrill and excitement that people my age have experienced many times over of a new game console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John generation. And maybe they heard from the old fogies like us, like, oh, when the Nintendo 64 came out and Mario 64

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blew our mind and oh the SNES it was so amazing I got to play JRPGs and like you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they didn’t they’ve never had that their whole life has just been this imagine if your whole life like the computer that you played with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you were eight you were still playing with that same computer when you were 16 that feels like just way longer from the ages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 8 to 16 than you know the same eight years for an adult it this they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ready to buy and it did not surprise me that a million of them went out and bought the PS4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on day one because these people who play with the and maybe their older brothers PS2 and maybe they even went back to the PS1,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they have never been through a console launch. So, boom, a million out the door. And I think the Xbox One launch will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also go pretty well. You know, so, so far so good for the idea of there being a viable market for dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gaming hardware. But, I’m not sure that these one million buyers who bought on day one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John represented anything more than the most enthusiastic gamers. I’m not sure that they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like if you look at these graphs, is it going to be something more like the Wii graph, graph where it goes up really steeply and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it takes a turn. You know, I don’t know if this kind of sales pace can be sustained.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the PS4 is a great product and I think that at the very least everybody who bought a 360 or PS3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would be perfectly satisfied with the PS4 or Xbox One. I’m just not sure how many of them think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this is something that they need to go out and buy. So I’m keeping my eye on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see not just like, oh great opening day sales, like if it was a negative result, like if no one went out and bought it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John day one, that would be a terrible, terrible sign. But having it be such an overwhelmingly positive result,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, wow, biggest first day sales of a new console ever in the history of anything, that is merely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John neutral, I think. It doesn’t preclude the idea that these sales

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will taper off and never get up to the levels of the PS2 or the Wii in the past

⏹️ ▶️ ^John generations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think there was a really good quote that I wanted to relay from the Anandtech review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today that basically he has his hands on an Xbone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a PS4 and so he compares them and stuff. And first of all, I think it’s really interesting to see the… He took

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco side-by-side videos and screenshots so you can see the differences in the same game ported to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both systems and the graphical difference between the two. And man, to my eye, the PS4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version looks way better. But on the very last page he says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being an early adopter of an next-gen console is rarely a fun thing. Literally all of my friends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are on Xbox 360s or PS3s, meaning online multiplayer with people I know is pretty much out of the question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for at least a year or so. And then this is the part that I thought was most interesting. The launch lineup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for both platforms is reasonable but could be a lot better. Having just played Grand Theft Auto V

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and The Last of Us, I’m going to need more than COD or NBA 2K14 to really draw me into the Xbox One or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PS4. This This is how the story goes with any new console launch. And I think that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, I haven’t heard of any must-have games for all three of these consoles. I mean, John, how’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Wii U doing on that front?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nintendo actually is usually just pretty good about system-selling games. They’ve really dropped the ball on the Wii U, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even they had more games out of the gate. Like, one of the reasons I don’t have a PS4 yet is because there were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no launch titles that I said I need to have that title, which is very often the case. And Anon’s right about this. He’s old enough to have lived

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through many console launches. And it’s gotten worse now that the console makers are on the hook to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not necessarily produce a platform like iOS or Android, but they’re on the hook to provide network

⏹️ ▶️ ^John services, social networking, digital downloads, fancy features. All these consoles are launching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without the full complement of features that were promised in all of the previous keynote speeches,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the PS4 in particular. And all of them, even if they did launch with all the features, they won’t work for months or years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, this is the long game. It’s not like an iPad where Apple releases a new iPad and it better be damn good because next year another one’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming out. There’s not going to be another console for like six, seven, eight years, maybe longer. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a long game for these guys. And out of the gate, their software platforms suck. They don’t have the features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they want. They don’t have, they don’t work right. The ones that are there, like all these things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hardware is capable of, you know, it just like the PS4 doesn’t even have a standby mode, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you don’t have to turn the thing entirely off. You got to turn totally off and then it’s got to boot totally up, which is like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, didn’t you have all these presentations saying, oh, the PS4 is going to have an auxiliary chip to keep it on, do all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this stuff? Nope, doesn’t do any of that stuff out of the gate. So anybody who’s buying this console stuff, especially if you were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an early adopter of the PS3 or the 360, is used to this now. Because when the PS3 launched, the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was horrendous. Like you couldn’t even download games in the background. And the 360 has gone through many major revisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So all the people buying this, I think, especially on day one, they realize, I’m getting a day one console. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to be a piece of crap. It’s not going to work right. this exact same hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three, four years from now, boy, it’ll really be singing. They won’t have to do any upgrades. They won’t have to buy a new video card. They won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to do anything except for apply software updates, which presumably will come down faster. And people using the PS4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have said, thank God, it downloads software updates much better than it used to. All that being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, like like you were getting at before, the main the main thing about this is, OK, fine, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s going to be buggy. It’s going to have missing features that I was promised. I’m assuming they’ll come later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But as long as it has GameX that I really want to play, in amazing next generation graphics,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with next generation features in the new controller, whatever, I’ll buy it. And I don’t think the PlayStation 4 has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of those games at this point. And that’s not a very strong launch. And they sold a million systems in 24

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours without any system selling games. There is no Mario 64 for the PS4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It didn’t even launch with Last Guardian for the crazy people like me. Like, there’s no launch title out there that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people say, I wasn’t going to get a PS4, but once I saw I had GameX, I had to get it. And that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess, also still a positive sign. Negative. It’s a negative sign for the PS4’s game library. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think with these sales numbers and the pipeline of games, we don’t have to worry about there not being a lot of games for the PS4. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was not a Nintendo style launch where the only reason people buy the system is because there’s one game on it that you absolutely have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John play. So, you know, I think everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John involved in this process understands that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And I don’t even know if the Wii U will be finishing that marathon at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this rate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m really not positive on my outlook of the Wii U’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco future. I really do think that this is gonna be a PS4-dominated generation, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Xbone is gonna be second place, probably half the volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the PS4 over time, and I don’t think the Wii U is gonna show up much on the chart.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I give the Xbox more, I don’t think that the PS4 is gonna be double it, but ask me again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after the Xbox One launch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’ll talk about it again in a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like, cause they do, the thing about the Xbox One is it’s a good game machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and also X, Y, and Z, and Microsoft does online and its software stack so much better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than Sony and that is increasingly important. It’s I don’t you know it’s tough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff to handicap this because they are They’re very complimentary. There’s not a lot of overlap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in their strengths Microsoft It’s so strong in the areas that Sony is so weak and vice versa So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know what the way and see and these days system selling games are hard to come by like with Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Halo is the reason the Xbox exists at all the halo franchise did not exist I don’t think Microsoft would have been willing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put that much money into the console And Sony had lots of system selling, you know, Final

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Fantasy 7 and all that stuff that made Sony Sony But nowadays like these launch titles, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you see like I guess, you know kill zone is everyone’s got their their one exclusive First-person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shooter, but is that even the most popular first-person shooter? What about Call of Duty and all the other you know things that are multi-platform?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right and all the big sports franchises are all multi-platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Grand Theft Auto like so many things are multi-platform and even when you think get an exclusive All that means is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll be on your platform in a year or six months or whatever like that’s what exclusive means these days So the like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only things that are exclusive exclusive our first party games, you know Which I don’t think even halo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is at this point. Oh, no. Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} halo Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft still owns halo and they’re having three four three studios or whatever do it and bungee is off doing destiny Which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multi-platform by the way Sony has its own little arty in-house things and you know stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Grant reasonable stuff like that and Nintendo, of course their entire business is built on first party Those are never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John available anywhere and that’s like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} only reason anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buys Nintendo hardware anymore is because the hardware software synergy And you can’t get that software anywhere else so that continues

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be Nintendo’s hope for success I Think we should do one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more sponsor, and then I have a little bit more about Nintendo Afterwards to wrap up this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John segment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m actually really upset that Sony killed the wipeout studio So there’s not gonna be a wipeout for ps4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have sold more games that would have survived.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I probably would have bought a PS4

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco play the next Wipeout. That’s how much I love Wipeout. It is the only game I own for my PS3.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show and looked at some of their stuff. They have metals I’ve never even heard of yet. They have all the golds and platinums

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stuff like that. But they even had something called rose gold now. Do you guys even know where this existed? No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sure John, you’re an expert on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Rose gold? Is that like the new color of the next iPhone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s actually like a darker shade. It’s interesting. It’s a different shade of gold.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not white gold. They have white, yellow, and then there’s rose, which is interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I see it on the website. It looks nice. It looks kind of like, uh, copper-ish.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like, you know, like a little bit of like a pinkish, reddish, orange. It’s hard to describe. You just go look at it.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, like with these sponsors like Gemvara and Warby Parker, where it’s a web version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy something that previously you’d always like, Oh, I always have to buy those in person because of reasons. XYZ.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like fast forwarding 50 years in the future. And instead of just having a website where you can build your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own custom ring out of like, pick this, pick the gem, pick the accent thing, pick the metal color, pick the design and like sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of building your own thing. Like, I guess it’s gets in sci fi territory where it’s like, why can’t I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 3d print anything that I want? And I’ll just go to a website and the replicator machine will make me, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, tea or Earl Grey hot or whatever it is that I ask for. We’re creeping up on that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that that sales process of sitting in front of your computer and clicking a bunch of buttons and seeing some nicely rendered graphics

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update with the thing it is that you are potentially manufacturing or having manufactured on your behalf

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is so much nicer than driving to a store and, you know, talking to salespeople and going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from store to store and sitting in traffic, just sitting at a website and clicking buttons until you get what you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is much nicer. So we’re creeping up on the replicator machines a little. There may be a web interface instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a voice interface and a box in the wall. Awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, John, you said you had some more stuff about video games?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, one final bit on Nintendo and their prospects. There was some rumors. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always rumors about Nintendo. And I don’t know how founded these are, but it just made me think of this. The rumors were like, oh, Nintendo making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Android tablet or whatever. I think these have been going around for months and months. What? They’re resurfacing. Yeah, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ridiculous. And everyone always wants to hear, you know, Nintendo’s making apps for iOS. Nintendo’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do this for Android. Like, all these things that they think, oh, Nintendo’s problem is that they’re not a real platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they don’t have one, and they can’t make one. Therefore, they have to, like, join one, you know, instead of doing their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. And the reason I bring this up is because there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an aspect of it that can make the people who wrote those stories claim victory later. Like, it’s not as crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as it sounds. Because Nintendo devices do need some kind of operating system, you know, these days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they don’t just, it’s not just you stick a cartridge in like a Nintendo and it just like plays the cartridge. They do other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, there is sort of like an OS type layer, and if Nintendo decides that it’s easier or better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use Android as its OS instead of whatever the heck they’re using now as their sort of embedded OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re sick of maintaining it and developing it and they just want to base it on Android, that’s fine. But that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an entirely separate question from whether or not their devices will suddenly become quote-unquote Android

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices where you’ll be able to run Android apps They’ll be part of the Android ecosystem Even to the degree that the Kindles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are like the Kindles like our Android and name only barely But they can run applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are built for Android or close to it, right? They’re not entirely walled off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And my take on this is for all we know for all the average person knows I know better and most Gamers do as well But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for all the average person knows the Wii U and the 3ds could be running Android right now It like it would make no difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than them because what OS it runs under the covers has no bearing on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What it feels like to use the device, you know I mean and actually when I was trying to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at something like what OS do those things run? I was reminded that the we not that we you but the we run something called

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS With a capital I in front of the OS. I think it pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Predate the iPhone. Maybe it does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it a Cisco router?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s the other iOS right? It’s the same type of thing. It’s like it’s their firmware It’s not the OS OS, but it’s like the firmware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that controls IO and stuff like that. I just thought that was funny. But anyway, the rumors of Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Android stuff, keep that in mind, because if someday down the road someone says, oh, my God, confirmed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nintendo is going to Android. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility for them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use Android as part of building their products, but I don’t think they would ever say the word Android, and I don’t think you would ever know they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used using Android under the covers. It would have nothing to do with their actual business strategy and had everything to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with just internal implementation details of their software stack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they probably wouldn’t be selling their games on the Android marketplace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no. That’s a whole different thing. And that’s something else that people want. But I would say, don’t get too tied

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up into what people are using under the covers. Like, oh my god, Google is moving to Linux.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hear Android is based on Linux. Don’t tell anybody. Or they’re going to use Java, but they call it Dalvik.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John These are all implementation details that have little to do with their business strategies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I got a Retina iPad Mini, and I’m very excited about it. It has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey terrible burn-in, or image retention, or whatever you call it, image retention. And I’m choosing not to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey care because I’m not Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait, hold on, to be fair, I have also chosen not to care because I went to the mall and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco waited in the Apple Store for 40 minutes for them to get to me, even though it was 10 in the morning. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even took a picture to show how empty the store was. Like, there was very few people there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I waited for 40 minutes, plus the trip to the mall. Overall, I spent an hour and a half of my life

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trading in my old iPad for, or trading in the one I just bought with this image retention problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for another one that also has an image retention problem. And it was the only one they had in stock. And I’m like, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what, I’ll just take this. I’m gonna choose to not care anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Have you found a way to get the screen manufacturer out of the firmware with some crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing yet, or no?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I wasn’t able to. I mean, nobody told me anything I didn’t really poke around. I’ve chosen to not care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because in day-to-day use you don’t really notice it. The image retention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in general on LCDs, it can be very noticeable when it gets really bad. It can be like, you know, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still see like the Safari address bar when you move away from Safari. That’s like an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco element that’s always there, you know. In reality on the minis, I don’t think it’s bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough to cause that for most people. Certainly, you know, if you do exactly the right, like if you’re in one app that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has this interface element on it for, you know, five, 10 minutes, and then you switch to an all white screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you’d probably see that. But in reality, that doesn’t come up very often for me. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think for most people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I saw it all the time on the some of the first gen 15 inch, red and a MacBook pros,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ones with the bad screens. And I don’t know if there’s something about the Mac, like having a windowed environment where certain elements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the dock or the you know, the menu bar or a text window, it’s in the background.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then you switch to another app that has a bunch of empty documents, and you see the text from the previous text window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would not be able to stood that I’m assuming like you you tested the ones in the Apple store right you’re taking pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like look at these demo units they totally don’t have any image retention whatsoever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I tested I ended up testing all four that they had on on the iPad table

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all four of them passed the test none of them had any retention at all however they were also all for Wi-Fi models

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m hearing mostly from people who were saying that their LTE ones have the problem and so it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really does seem like the LTE ones were made in smaller quantities, maybe they had to get a lot of them out in time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they, maybe they, either there’s a bad batch of screens in the first big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chunk of the LTE ones they manufactured or they just have to get so many of them out in time that they lowered their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco standards for the LTE ones. Either way, it kind of sucks, but it’s also not that unusual.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People are saying, I’ve had tons of people run the test on the first gen iPad mini,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and It’s way worse and it’s like more around the edges, but it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way worse retention. The iPad 2 had way worse retention. So this actually is not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a totally unique thing to just the new mini. It’s actually common in a lot of products that we’ve never noticed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before. So it’s not that big of a deal. I think other people have made a much bigger deal out of it than I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would and wanted to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, on the red and MacBook Pros though, wasn’t it like they had like screens, chat room will tell me if I’m getting wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it was like from LG and Samsung and the LG ones had it much worse than the Samsung screens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I actually have one of the bad ones, which is why I made that test a year ago in the first place. That’s the whole reason I made that test,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was because I’ve read about that on a forum, and I went, oh, I wonder how mine is, and I made a little test to test

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, and mine failed. But what you’re describing with being able to see it in regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use, I’ve never had that problem with this. So maybe mine is not as bad as the worst.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But whatever brand it was that was the bad screen, I do have that brand of screen in the MacBook Pro, as you can tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in software. So I do have that screen, but it’s not it isn’t that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and that’s what it bothers me a little bit is that like for on the first retina MacBook Pros like you’re okay fine. It’s your first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John retina device like there’s going to be growing pains or whatever you’ll sort it out and presumably they did but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at this point now, they should know. Okay. Look, it seems like let’s do image retention testing as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of our qualifications of vendors for screens. Like maybe maybe I would have to think the only reason they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would do this either because they don’t take the issue seriously enough yet, which I think they should, or because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what choice do they have? Like there’s one vendor that passes all their tests with flying colors, whoever that happens to be, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one vendor cannot provide them the capacity they need to meet the holiday season. So they’re forced to go with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the second best vendor, which has worse image retention problems, simply because no one else can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John provide them the number of screens that they need. And that strikes me as plausible. But either way, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disappointing to me that image retention was an issue, continues to be an issue, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frequently we’re in the situation where one manufacturer gets the quote unquote good screen, the other one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets the bad screen. And consumers have no way to tell. And obviously, it is possible to make it without retention,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but not everyone gets it. And that’s kind of like the bad old days of dead pixels, where I was terrified

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy my 22-inch Apple Cinema display because of the dead pixels. And sure enough, I had like three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dead pixels, which was not within the replacement threshold. And I just had to spend three years consciously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not looking at the one pixel that was stuck on white in the one pixel that was stuck on red. And I knew exactly where they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I could picture them on mine right now and point you to them exactly where they are on the screen. Like, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bothers me. Obviously, it bothers me way more than it bothers normal people. I understand that. But Apple needs to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the ball with that. Because I forgive them, their first generation product, maybe their second generation. But at this point, they need to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it like, you know, they need to just say, look, this is our, this is our same way they do with color

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gamut and like viewing angles and stuff. They just have to draw a hard line if they possibly can and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this image retention stuff has to stop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sure it’s very similar to the dead pixel thing, where it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they will tolerate no image retention. It’s that they have some kind of threshold.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I mean, these days, dead pixels, I think they don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead pixel on an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple device.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, no, we’ve come out of the dead pixel. Like at this point, I think if you had even a single one, you could probably get a replacement. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there were years where they had, if it’s three within three inches of each other or whatever. But the thing about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John image retention is there’s like the good manufacturer and the bad one It’s like no, why can’t they all be the good one? I will accept

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it like this is the best we can do But obviously these one one vendor can do way better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the other one I have to think it’s just because that one vendor can’t make enough screens But I wish that one vendor would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy the other one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They all could be the good one in a year Like if we if for us to get the retina mini this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year, we had to accept crap like this I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but see the thing is like that’s when the first retina Mac were pros like okay They haven’t had sorted out but surely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a year from now everyone will get on the same page But no, we just keep going through this again and again with each thing and is the retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Pro screen Well, I guess they are because the new IGZO thing IGZO. I figure what it stands are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John indium gallium zinc oxide Whatever the hell that the new low-power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Retina screens is what lets you have these retina devices because you could not have them with the old retina screens Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they just took too much power for the backlights, right? So I guess I’ll go back on what I said Maybe I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give them a pass on this because I forgot they just changed screen technology And maybe maybe this is the sorting out year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or the sorting out generation or two for this new LCD screen technology, but I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the moral of the story is I really really hate image retention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay, there was also because I know we’re gonna get emailed about this there was There was a test that was widely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco linked a couple of days ago from I believe display mate there they a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company that measures and benchmarks display quality. And they ran their tests

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on all the modern tiny Retina tablets that they had. The iPad mini Retina,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Google Nexus, was it the Nexus 7, I think, the new Nexus 7? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know the line, what I want to say. The Kindle HDX, and I think that was it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they came away saying that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} The iPad Air still.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, and the iPad Air, right. And basically the.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Kindle was the best screen, yeah. I meant to bring this up last week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes. And it uses a whole different thing. It uses low temperature, poly something, LT.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and Apple couldn’t. That’s not an option for Apple because they sell too many units.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and that’s the problem. You can make a tablet with a better display, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you probably can’t make it at Apple’s volume. And that’s the problem they face with a lot of these component decisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They never use OLED. And there’s things that they can’t really use because of yield issues, that they just have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make so many of these things. That being said though, I am a little disappointed. Like seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that test result, seeing like the color gamut kind of sucks on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mini 2. Like it’s, the iPad Air display has a much better color gamut. The Mini has,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially like in the red, it’s like a little bit muted and a little bit inaccurate. And that I think was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disappointing to see. That being said, again, I’m a regular user, I haven’t noticed it at all and I probably never will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Apple has to be on the cutting edge, but they can’t be on the cutting, cutting edge. and your volumes are low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Amazon or lower anyway, you can afford to be on that super, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple could have gone, Ixo displays, I don’t know if you know if that’s how people are announced, I don’t feel like saying the letters every time, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those were out like a year ago, like it’s not like they didn’t exist, it’s just that, oh, well, they’re too new, no one can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make them in big enough volume. So Apple can’t ever be on the cutting, cutting edge, they have to wait until, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they’re barely making it into like, can we have enough of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ixo screens to go to do support our holiday product line this year. I think they barely scraped by with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. So the low temperature polysilicon stuff was just like, maybe next year, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then same, OLED, it’s existed forever, but there’s been no OLEDs that have satisfied all of Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John requirements for power, viewing angle, color gamut. Longevity. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that stuff. I mean, it’s the same reason they had seven inch tablets. They were retina years ago from companies other than Apple. It’s like, why can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple be retina? Because they couldn’t, they can’t go until, That’s the price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of being as big as Apple is. They can push the cutting edge, and they can be the first one to have really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John high volumes of this great technology. But they can’t be the very, very first anymore unless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do something like they seem to be doing with that big quartz factory in Arizona or whatever, where nobody has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the capacity to make quartz-coated glass screens or whatever. We’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be the only company in the world that has that capacity. We’re going to pay half a billion dollars to make our own factory that we don’t own,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we paid for most of it. And they will exclusively build stuff for us. And that’s how we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will get the advanced new technology and get it in the volumes we need before anyone else. But that’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much their only road to being on the very, very cutting edge as compared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to companies that sell in lower volumes. Someone says I mean Sapphire instead of quartz. Maybe I do mean Sapphire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead of quartz. I don’t know. It’s that thing in Arizona. I don’t remember what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was. Yeah, it’s Sapphire. So anyway, so Casey, what do you think about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mini? I’m sorry, are we still here? Is this the show? So yeah, so the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mini, I like it quite a bit. So I’m coming from, I still have my iPhone 5S.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had an iPad 3rd Gen, so the first of the retina iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My iPhone is AT&T. I am still on the unlimited plan, thus I cannot tether because AT&T

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a bunch of jerks. I bought a Verizon iPad mini, which is the first time I’ve gotten an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey LTE iPad, and coincidentally, day before yesterday, Verizon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my Verizon FiOS for the first time in five years conked out and it was a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excellent time to have an LTE iPad so I could get online even despite not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey having an internet connection at home. I should also note that additionally I went to the T-Mobile store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey today and for $10.50 some cents because of sales tax, I picked up a T-Mobile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey SIM and plugged that into my iPhone mini or excuse me iPad mini and was able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get cellular data for free because well if you accept the $10 for the sim

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so that T-Mobile thing that people keep talking about it was easy-peasy it took a little while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the store but I don’t know if that was a sales representative thing or if it’s just that it takes a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey little while to get the stuff squared away but now I have a T-Mobile sim that’ll get me 200

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey megs a month for free I have a Verizon sim that came with it that I can pay for for data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And what was really cool was I’d used the Verizon SIM for a bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and put something like 80 megs on the SIM. Or I don’t know, it’s a poor way of phrasing it. But I’d used about 80

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey megs of data on my Verizon SIM. I popped that out, plugged in the T-Mobile SIM, used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like two or three megs just to prove to myself that it worked, popped the Verizon SIM back in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and my cellular usage went back to 80 megs. So I was very pleased to see that the iPad was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey smart enough to keep the two separate and continue to track the two of them. If you happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have an LTE iPad that is unlocked, then you can spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your $10 and get your T-Mobile SIM if you live in the United States and get some free data, which is pretty awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s fantastic. Does anybody know, does it work on old iPads too? Probably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe you need an LTE one, so maybe it’s like iPad 3, Mini, and Air, and 4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that would be a great thing to do if you just replaced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an iPad and you’re going to give it to your mom or something like that. That would be a great thing to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get one of these T-Mobile things, put it in, if it’s not going to use a lot of data, but you at least have then the option

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have this thing be connected somewhere if you need it or if you’re giving it to somebody who’s going to use it pretty lightly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, Nick Finn in the chat says it worked with an iPad 3, with the Verizon iPad 3. That’s great. Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I agree. It is a very cool idea. And it worked really well. 200 megs obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t a lot of data, but it’s enough to get you behind a pinch, which is really fantastic. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m pretty pleased with that. Now the only problem is I have two nano-SIMs and I have no idea what to do with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other one in the sense that it’s so tiny I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey inevitably going to lose it, but that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One thing I was surprised by, when I moved my Verizon service from my first-gen iPad mini to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my new iPad mini it actually said on the first time when I when I deactivated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it it basically said said that it was bricking that sim like that I can’t even reactivate with that same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sim and if I ever want to reactivate I have to go to Verizon store and buy a new sim and I don’t know if that’s true I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try reactivating it but that’s kind of crappy did the magic smoke escape I don’t think I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see one but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like a mission impossible thing oh and by the way we’re nuking your sim, psst, smoke

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes out the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey side. I’ve been asked, I was asked on Twitter earlier today, what happens when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey run out of your 200 megs? I don’t know to be honest. I would assume that they just stop giving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you data. I did pay for my $10 sim with a credit card just because it was easier,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but the gentleman that had rung me up had said, are you paying with cash or credit or debit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or whatever? I bring that up because it seemed to me like during the activation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey process, he never took a credit card for sure, and I don’t think that me having paid for the $10 sim with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a credit card is indicative of the fact that they have my credit card information for anything other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than that one sale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it probably works just like other iPad data plans always have, which is there is no automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pushing you up into a new plan, which is awesome, and however Apple negotiated that, it was genius.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Probably Steve Jobs was probably involved, but what they do is, let’s say you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a one-gig plan from Verizon or something, once you use that one gig, it’ll start warning you when you get close, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just cuts off the data when you hit that limit, and it says, you know, go to settings if you want to buy more. Or you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get more like, you know, on this date, which is like, you know, the one month anniversary next month. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably how this is going to work too, which is you can just use it and there’s no auto billing, you can just use it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until you hit 200 megs, and then it’ll just yell at you and stop. And you can go buy more if you want,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you can just wait. That’s how I bet it’s going to work, but I don’t know that for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s exactly what I expected as well, but I haven’t run into that yet, so I can’t say that with any sort of authority.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sam the Geek in the chat says, as far as he understands, they throttle to dial up, is what he said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey He wasn’t absolutely positive that that was the case, but in other words, they give you just unbelievably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crummy throughput, or like Marco said, and that’s what I would expect, they just cut you off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey entirely. But in terms of the screen, you’ll burn it, or I keep calling it burn in. Retention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey issues aside, it’s a beautiful screen. The iPad is very, very nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it is a little bit heavier. I can definitely tell that it’s a little bit heavier than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad Mini I had previously which was not LTE. I should also note that a friend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at work got an iPad Air which was not LTE and I held

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my LTE iPad Mini and his Air that was not LTE,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one in each hand and I could tell you, I couldn’t tell the difference. And I looked at Apple’s website

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the iPad mini with LTE, the Retina iPad mini with LTE is 341 grams. The iPad Air without LTE

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is 469 grams, which is what,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 120 grams-ish. But in my hand, my hand was not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sensitive enough to tell the difference. They felt like they were the same darn weight. And that was a really great testament

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to how thin and light the iPad Air is because I swear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to you, to me anyway, it felt the same as the iPad Mini in my hand. I know, Marco, Tiff has an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Air, doesn’t she?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, yeah. It’s actually her first new iPad. She kept using my hand-me-downs. This is her first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new one. She moved from an iPad 2 to this, so it was a pretty big jump. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, and looking at these two devices, again, I think I’ll echo what everyone else has said, like all the reviewers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have said. You really can’t go wrong with either of them and you’re basically just buying for screen size.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, there is that very minor performance difference. I don’t think anybody would really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notice it in practice to be honest. You know, you’re really just buying, you know, what screen size do you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better. And you can, one way you can make an easy decision is just buy whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen size you were using before. So if you were using a first gen mini and you really got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used to that size and you really you really want, you love that portability and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Air is probably going to feel too big for you. And so you should just get another Mini if you’re going to upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Get the Retina one. But if you’re coming from a full-size iPad and you don’t necessarily need it to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smaller and you do things that benefit from a bigger screen like watching video or drawing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or sketching apps or certain games, things like that, that will benefit from a bigger screen, then by By all means,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get the Air because it’s a substantial improvement from the 3 and 4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s pretty much no downside except that it’s a little bit bigger physically in size. There is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a weight difference but in practice, the bigger difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that this is a much larger rectangle. When you hold it, it’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have different forces as you hold it. If you’re holding it up in bed, the mini will be easier to hold for long periods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The reality is whichever one you’ve been using before, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would say use that one. Whatever size class you were in before, you can probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stay in your size class and be perfectly happy. Obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the best thing to do is go to a store and try them both and see how you feel. If I had to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an assumption to recommend without you trying anything, I would just say stick within the size class that you already liked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know speaking of that performance Deficit between the air and the mini that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mentioned that you probably can’t tell what is it like 7% or something like that They just the clock speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s 1.3 versus 1.4 gigahertz But there’s also the the thermal issues that again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an an tech did an awesome graph of this where? The CPUs in all the a7

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so the the iPhone 5s the retina mini and the iPad air all have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thermal throttling behavior where they can work at really awesome speed for like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minute or two at max load and they start throttling down for heat reasons and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad Air has the highest ceiling for that so the iPad Air can can work at full speed for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco longest and then when it does throttle it doesn’t throttle down as far as the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Retina Mini and the iPhone 5s even though they all have roughly the same CPU just the air has like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know more thermal mass to cool and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was going to recommend that article. We should put it in the show notes, not only because of the actual iPad air testing, but he snuck in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there and in the mini review, too, I think. But he snuck in the air one lot more information about the A7 CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I was excited to see that, like. There’s some there’s some advantage to actually knowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less about this stuff on a concrete level, because obviously those guys who work at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know so much more about the individual part numbers and the, you know, the supply chains and what the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vendors are doing and stuff like that. And I remember reading one of it. I think it was the five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S review when he was talking about the seven and saying how he was speculating because he didn’t know at that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point, like Apple didn’t release any information. They didn’t have any specs and no one had cut the top off the chip yet. So he had to kind of guess of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what, you know, Apple claims to XP. They want to do some benchmarks. And sure enough, it is like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John XP. And what’s making that happen or whatever? And we had a show where we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talked about it as well. And I don’t know all the details of all these chips or whatever. I’m like, well, if they have 2x speed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re not going to get that. We talked about obviously not going to get 64 bit, which may make you go slower. All the things being equal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then the other thing was like, oh, so how are they getting 2x speed? It’s not going to be 2x classified

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. And me knowing nothing about the details of this said, well, it has to be just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there has to be more execution units. I mean, you have to, you know, it has to be, it can’t just be the same chip running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster or some small tweaks. You need actual more hardware to do stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a hit site, knowing more about the details, they’re like, well, it’s not going to be like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not going to be double the width or triple the width in terms of execution units as the A6, because that’s crazy. I mean, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the A15 doesn’t have that kind of size, so it must be something else or whatever. And he was cursed with the knowledge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the individual details of how many execution units each one of these things have, which I didn’t know off the top of my head.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John top of my head. But it caused him to make the wrong call, because sure enough, when they cut the top off of this thing, it’s like a six wide machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with like, you know, you can do simultaneously four integer, two floating point, whereas the other machine was like three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wide, but you can only do like one and a half because there was dependencies on integer and floating point. And like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A7 really is, you know, in Apple’s marketing, it’s a desktop class machine. In terms of the width and the number of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John executed units of the machine, you know, out of order, being out of order, like, you know, a desktop machine is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it really is such a huge leap over the A6 that no one expected. And it’s like, how could you get that machine into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a laptop or into a phone, for crying out loud? And this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Air article and other things explain how they did it. They cut the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John memory bus width in half. They do all these. They have four megabytes of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on-die SRAM serving as sort of an L3. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they had to say, look, we’re going to cut the memory bandwidth in half, but we still need to run an iPad retina screen. How are we going to do that? well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll put this huge SRAM thing here. And they said that for power savings, instead of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing simultaneously fetching from DRAM and from the L3, they check L3 first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if it’s not there, then they do a second request for the thing in DRAM. And if you’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a desktop CPU, you would never do that. But you have to make compromises for power. So they basically found a way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wedge a twice as wide machine into the same thing by making it worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the A6 in many different measures, but overall being twice as fast. It’s an amazing balancing act

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you look at what they did with this thing because it they did the seemingly impossible thing when You learn it either. I was like oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it wasn’t impossible It was just really really wise trade-offs to give them from the outside What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks like an impossibility a machine that’s twice as fast at a similar clock speed in the same power envelope It seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it shouldn’t be possible But it’s like oh I see where they compromise and if I know how to tickle it just right I can show you a benchmark

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Where the a6 crushes the a7 but no real application is ever gonna do that so thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up for Apple and and on tech site and and scientific progress in general. Yay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s pretty amazing when you look at the lineup. Now that we’ve had the whole fall lineup revealed for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us, it’s pretty amazing that the A7 is in all three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these products. And it’s basically the same, like it’s almost the same performance in all three.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And when you look at now, when the iPhone 5S came out, we were all like, whoa,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That was like a bigger jump than we expected. Because now looking at it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you would expect that to be only in the iPad Air. And then the iPad Mini should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have had a die-shrunk A6, and then the iPhone should have had an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A7 that was much lower clocked than the iPad. That’s how you would have expected this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to go. And in reality, you have basically the high-end iPad chip in all three devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with very minor differences. And that’s really impressive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was just the difference in thermal throttling and minor clock speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deficits, and that’s it. Exactly. And it’s the same with memory bus, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same SRAM, the same like, what it comes down to is that the iPhone 5S, that CPU has the ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to drive a retina iPad screen, which is unbelievable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. I mean, it’s really, really good. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now we’re starting to see, every year since the A4, when shortly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before that they had acquired PASMI they were talking about doing their own silicon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the rumors were at least. Every year so far, we’re seeing quite how much that’s paying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off as they get more and more advanced into the kind of divergence they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can achieve from everyone else’s ARM chips. When you start seeing all the custom stuff they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing, last year with the A6, you got to see their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco awesome new core design, and now you’re seeing these other tradeoffs like the SRAM, stuff like that. It’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco impressive what they’re doing. And what’s really interesting is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why isn’t Samsung doing something like this? You know, why aren’t the other manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to match this as closely?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It could be that Apple’s just a little bit ahead. Like, you know, I would assume that the next generation of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arm parts from other people are going to have similar… Apple’s just there first. Like sometimes Apple gets there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first by two months, by six months, by eight months, by an entire year, we’ll see. But I would assume everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just there first. the depressing thing about this from from my perspective, is that all these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re seeing going from an in order machine to go out of order, making the machine wider, putting on dire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ram, like every single one of the it’s just a replay of the history of the desktop CPUs. Because if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you go back back back in time, like back to you know, the 386 486 and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pentium and like, we’re seeing in mobile the exact same evolution we saw there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only in a crazily constrained power envelope. So all the tricks you’re seeing here, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it used to be back in Ars Technica when John Stokes was doing all his articles about PowerPC versus Intel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, and, you know, Itanium came out with the, you know, Intel’s new instruction set. And they were doing like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John predication where they would execute two instruction streams at the same time, then discard the results of one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically like that all these interesting ideas, some of them didn’t pan out, some of them did. And we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John went through this whole evolution to see how much, you know, how much instruction level parallelism can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you extract from regular programs that are compiled by people. How wide can you make machines who are at the point of diminishing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John returns? And then the multi-core and then cache coherency and multi-level, like we did it all already. And then we had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reset the clock to go, okay, here’s a risk machine. It’s in order. It sucks. Uh, but it fits in a phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then we have to go back through the exact same evolutionary cycle. Hopefully, you know, with the knowledge of hindsight of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, we know exactly how to make this faster because jumping right to the A7 that takes into account, like, oh, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, those designers are the people who know how, what we did on the desktop. But there are still so many obvious things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, you know, if you just look at how look at the, you know, the current generation Xeon that has stuff inside that we just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t fit into a phone power on foot, but it’s just waiting there. Like we know how to do it. Like. It will make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your software faster. We can clock it higher. It will be it’s branch prediction will be better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’ll have a higher cash hit rate. We have all these awesome things. You just can’t fit them in a phone yet. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re just waiting patiently. Right. And hopefully we will get back up to the point, you know, like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like desktop CPUs, like that’s not where the money is anymore and people aren’t interested in advancing them, so we have to wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the mobile CPUs and the process that makes them to catch us up to sort of where we are on the state of there on desktop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then we can finally start making sort of forward progress in the absolute realm, sort of like whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IBM’s doing with the Power 8 or whatever the hell power number they’re up to, where they’re always just like, give an unlimited money and power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John budget, how fast can we make a CPU for crazy supercomputing stuff, assuming anyone besides the government

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the NSA are are available to buy it from us. It’s kind of disappointing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me to see a replay of that in the mobile space.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of exciting to have it in the palm of your hand. But on the other hand, I’m always interested, as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with my love of the Mac Pro and everything, I’m always interested with the let’s see how fast we can really go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of advancement, not merely let’s see how small we can really go with stuff that we already did on the desktop 5,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 10 years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So on a final note, John, I hear that you’re having some disk woes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Care to share?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had them. This was like a couple of weeks ago. I just forgot to talk about it. It kept being at the bottom of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes. This is a boring story. It’s not that long. But again, I think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a nice moral at the end. So I was running disk first aid on my wife’s boot drive on her MacBook Air, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an SSD. And why was I doing that? Because that’s one of the things that I do. I run.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not called disk first aid anymore, right? You run disk utility and go to the first aid tab, whatever. But it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John FSCK. whatever you want to call it, check your file system metadata structures to make sure they know where everything is on disk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They keep track of which bits are allocated to which files, which bits aren’t allocated, how many of these free blocks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are available here, this, that. They keep track of all that information. And that information gets out of sync because HLS plus sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I run this periodically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, I didn’t know you thought that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And I don’t know how many people do this. Do either one of you run disk first aid on your disks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or disk utility on your disk with any regularity ever, just for no reason?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No. No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should. You totally should. And that’s the thing, like when I brought this up on one of my first shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about file systems, I said, just try this. Go up to your people like HFS++ find errors, any problems. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, well, if you think that, go and look at one of your disks or run disk first aid on it and see if it finds any errors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If it finds any errors, that means something screwed up in the past. And eventually if those errors accumulate, you will be sad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because whole directories or it will go away and bad things will happen. Maybe it’ll never happen to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you. Maybe you’ll buy a new computer before that happens. You could be fine. things are going wrong on your disk and you may not know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it. It’s the worst kind of failure. Anyway, I run it periodically. I think everybody should too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I ran it and it found errors. All right, and very often it does find errors. And there’s a repair button you can repair,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but when it’s your boot drive, you can’t repair your boot drive. You can only verify it. You have to reboot from another drive. So great, use, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hold down Command-R, reboot into recovery mode or whatever it is, and then you can run repair

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your boot volume, even though you’re still booting from the same disk as the recovery partition. Anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hit repair and repair fails. And when that happens, like, and you try to use disk utility, it says, well, there were problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with disk and I couldn’t repair them. Your choices are limited at that point. You can buy a third

⏹️ ▶️ ^John party product that can repair it, like disk warrior or something. Many third party products can repair things disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John utility can’t repair. So if that, if you already have one of those, or if you’re desperately want to repair it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would recommend that. I had an old version of disk warrior, but I don’t have an update one. I didn’t want to pay for it again. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said, well, fine. So disk utility can’t repair it. No big deal. from Time Machine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So before I restore from Time Machine, this is another thing I think not enough people do, and I don’t even know if the Genius Spark

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people do it, run a disk utility first aid check on your Time Machine volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before you restore from it. Because if you don’t do that, you could be restoring some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crazy garbage onto your boot drive from your Time Machine volume. So I ran

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first aid on my Time Machine volume, and it found errors. I said, okay, I will repair the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Time Machine volume, which I can do without rebooting. I tell it to repair, it says, sorry, can’t repair. So now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have two disks. The disk utility says that there are errors on and it can’t repair. And not only that, now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the time machine volume won’t mount anymore and it’s grayed out in disk utility. And when I try to repair again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it hangs in disk utility and eventually says after many minutes, couldn’t unmount volume, which makes no sense to me because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not mounted as far as I can tell and it’s grayed out in disk utility. And I said, all right, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine, let me erase this time machine disk. I’ll get to why I can do that in a second. It wouldn’t even let me erase it. So I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all right, screw it. Unplug that drive from the computer, put it away. At this point, most people would be screwed because most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people don’t have a backup in the first place. They’re like, well, there’s errors, but the disk is still working. The time machine volume I hosed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by trying to repair with Apple’s own disk utility tool. So that must’ve been really far gone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But me being the paranoid maniac that I am, I still have my second time machine volume on my Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my SuperDuper clone, and a crash plan backup. So I still have three viable backups,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hopefully viable backups, even though I’ve not really lost my boot drive, but it has errors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And my time machine volume is totally hosed because it couldn’t even be repaired. So what I decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do, I have lots of options at this point, lots of options that most people don’t have. What I decided to do at this point was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go with the super duper, uh, clone and my super duper clone hadn’t been made that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recently. So I manually copied the few files that I know had been modified since my super duper clone was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made onto an, like a spare partition on another disc. Then I erased my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boot disk and I restored from the SuperDuper clone. Oh, and by the way, I ran disk first aid on the SuperDuper clone before I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the restore and it checked out. Always run disk first aid on your things before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do anything with them, especially in a backup scenario, because the worst thing you want to do is to just start spreading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corruption all around and think you’ve recovered and you haven’t. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then after I had restored, the very next thing I did was ran disk first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aid on every single thing. I ran it, I ran it on all the volumes that were connected, and I did fresh backups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on all destinations, except for the super duper backup and the second time machine volume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I did a new time machine backup to my local disk, which I finally did get erased through many reboots on another machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And did full backups and everything else, ran this first eight of them, so now I’m back into a stable state where I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiple backups, they’re all checked out, they’re all in sync with each other, but I saved two to be the old thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just in case there was something going wrong, and I waited a few days after I had done this recovery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process to see, now is it safe for me to finally toss my one good one that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is good that I restored from, one other backup of time machine volume, saying like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hasn’t been touched ever, it’s perfectly fine, in worst case, I can fall back on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everything was fine, and eventually I just allowed those to sync up too. So I guess lessons you get out of this is, one backup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is very often not enough, because say I just had that time machine volume. I mean, I didn’t really lose the boot disk, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just had errors on it, but they were unreparable errors. So what was I supposed to do in that case? Just leave them there forever and cross my fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and hope new ones didn’t accumulate or whatever error was that wasn’t important, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s nuts. I mean, for me, like I treat any disk error as fatal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, well, I guess HFS, but anything, any kind of like hardware error to me, that disk is dead to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s it, it’s gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s not a hardware error. This is a software. It’s like a wrong number of hard link counts, or, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know the exact details. So it’s like HFS plus metadata structures, not a hardware problem. That’s an important distinction that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t make they think, you know, my hard drive is dying is if you have a hardware problem, usually, you know, it because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manifests in ways that are not visible and disc utility in any meaningful way. Like I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, things freeze up on your computer and nothing happens. Terrible noises come from your hard drive. It’s mechanical. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John detect those. This is just merely software corruptions. The discs are fine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Second lesson is that more backups give you more options, not just like, oh, and now I’m safe is that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have options, right? And the third lesson is that disk clones and time machine, stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that have different pros and cons. So that when you have more options, if you have, I have a time machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, I have a super duper one, I have an online backup, like disk clones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really like, really like super duper because it’s simpler and less can go wrong. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s often faster to recover from because it’s just a plain old copy. In fact, you can boot from that clone if you need to. You can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a backup in a second if you just boot from that clone, it’s a bootable clone. On the other hand, time machine gives you multiple backups. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if your super duper clone was made after something terrible happened, it’s no good to you because you really want like three weeks ago or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I highly recommend having more than one backup, more than one type of backup. And I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recommend running disk first aid, not every day, not every week, but just once in a while, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see what’s going on there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So this whole story started with you electing to run disk utility.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I, yeah, I do it all the time. I do it, you know, whenever I feel paranoid. So hourly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not all the time, but like, and the thing is, I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I suspect computers with externally attached drives more than internally attached ones. So I run it more often on my wife’s computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than mine. Hers is also more likely to someone like bump out the cable or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she unplugs her laptop from the Thunderbolt cable without unmounting the drives that are attached

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through the firewire thing connected to the back of her Thunderbolt display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All the things that can go wrong with her system that are less likely to go wrong with my internal SATA drives. But yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it at work too. Make sure my backups are fresh, make sure they’re still working, make sure… I mean, disk first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aid is the most minimal check. It’s not checking whether your data could be totally hosed. All it’s checking is, hey, I’m a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file system and I know where all the blocks on the disk are. I know which ones are allocated, I know which files they belong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, I know how many of them there are. That’s all we’re asking of the file system. Just keep track of that stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it loses track, sometimes it’s not a big deal. It thought there were only, you know, 15 free blocks here, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s actually 17. So what? Like, it’s not causing your data to be gone, but the accumulation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those little errors is eventually what causes software-based, like, quote-unquote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disk failures. The disk hardware is fine, but your data is hosed in some way that you might need something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like DiskWarrior or whatever that’s going to brute force reconstruct the appropriate metadata for your disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then write a new directory structure back out. I just wish I didn’t have to do any of this, but I do, so I do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, John, I have a pro tip for you. Ignorance is bliss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no, it’s not. It’s bliss right up to the point where the crying starts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, exactly. Where’s my data? But I had a backup. I used Time Machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think we just found the beginning of the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We have. And let’s find the end of the show now. So thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Gemvara and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ting. And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show is over, they didn’t mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental, it was accidental, accidental. John didn’t do any research,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, accidental. You can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now at incidental.fm, And you hear it in the Twitter, we should all let

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it turn C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, that’s KC Lipp A-R-C-O-A-R-L-E-N-T,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cause it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was accidental, accidental They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t mean to, accidental, accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You two should both just immediately run Disk Utility on all your disks. See the horrors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that await you. Well, now I’m curious. The thing is, the worst thing is that like if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have, I have like four, literally four million files on like my average disk, like my average, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boot volume or whatever. It takes forever. Man, are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you talking about verified disk permissions or verified disk?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not permissions. I’ve said that on the show. Please don’t verify permissions. I mean, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does almost nothing. It does something. Doesn’t do anything useful. You go to the first aid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My computer might be slow or unresponsive. Should I?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t run. No, no, no, no. Don’t run it on your boot disk now. Yes, it will. Running it on your boot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disk while you’re booted into that disk will just walk away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can run verify, and it will tell you if there’s errors. But I always just run repair on it. Because if there are any errors, my next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing I’m going to run is repair. take so long anyway. So just pick an external drive. And by the way, when you select it in the sidebar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it shows the disk and then indented underneath it is the volumes that are on that disk. Running it on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John top disk just checks the partition map, sort of. You have to select the volume below

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to actually check the structures on that volume. OK. So usually checking that partition map is really fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’ll almost always check out. And if it doesn’t, you’ve got big problems. If it doesn’t know where the volumes are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then running on the individual disk is a thing that takes forever. And the thing that will find something small, like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John incorrect number of, I don’t even know what these messages are, but like, they’re just, uh, I, my impression is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the HFS plus keeps a lot of, uh, sort of, uh, denormalized counts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other structures. So it’ll, it’ll have like a bunch of structures and then it’ll have a number that indicates how many are available and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many are there, and it can reconstruct that count by walking the tree and finding out how many and writing the number there and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that number gets out of sync somehow. And it’s usually not a big deal. That’s like the easiest type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of errors to fix, but there are more serious ones getting all the way down to. Could not repair your disk and by the way it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will never mount again say goodbye to it and you can’t even erase it that One really frustrated me. I was like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t even erase the disk I know I took I took the disk off. I put it on a whole different computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I Rebooted that computer a few times. I eventually got it to erase that disk I don’t know idea what the hell’s problem was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that disk is out of rotation now So that one that one has done enough wonky stuff to me that I’m like, all right, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re having a timeout I used to test the next bill of 1010 or something, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco becoming a magnet donor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I swapped in a what what am I a vast collection of caviar blacks and another enclosure?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So while we’re on the topic of hard drives, I can’t imagine this coming up quite like this again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I recently decided to make a change in my hard drive buying policy My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco policy used to be that I would I would look at the current you know, best bang for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the buck capacity and buy like one or two of those, you know, for either storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or maybe buy two of them to put them in a raid or something like that. And usually that was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, like today that’s probably three terabyte. You know, in the past it’s usually like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one or two levels down from the biggest drive that exists on the market that day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I never like buying the biggest. That makes me nervous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, so I think I’m deciding to change that policy and now just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy the biggest because what happens is now I have this drawer full of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one terabyte hard drives and a bunch of them went into the Synology but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t even have room for all of the hard drives I have in the Synology because like now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the problem is that when you buy anything but the biggest, its useful lifespan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can be much shorter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that’s an asset. Because then it keeps you from using a disk. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that thing that had the, I tweeted it, someone, it was Backblaze was showing the hard disk lifetime graph,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did you see that? Yeah. Did you see what happened at three years? The knee of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graph goes, and now you’re screwed. So like, I don’t want to have a disk. Wow, it’s at such a capacity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I could use it for four years. No, don’t do that. Like, I would rather have it age out because it’s too small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a positive force in the ecosystem of my spinning storage, I feel like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s a fair counterpoint. I can totally see that. I guess so, yeah, it depends on how long you want to use it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I was having some problems where I would buy like two one terabyte disks to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make a really fast rate array. And then like 18 months later, I outgrow that space

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and need more and that sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, I mean, the size is now, I think it’s making it harder for you to outgrow it now because like three terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is now kind of the not biggest size you can get, and it will take you longer to fill that. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your data needs have not tripled since one terabyte drives were the sweet spot, right? So now three terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drives are the sweet spot, but you can get away with it for longer. But in scenarios where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re putting them into a box where it’s going to be some sort of RAID setup and redundancy, then yeah, I think it’s better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go with the biggest possible capacity because like you have built in hardware redundancy. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John putting these in there, you’re putting them in there to die. Like I need the space. That’s true. Because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to over-provision so much for these raid schemes, or the Drobo type schemes, or anything else like that. You have to just over-provision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the space so much. And the only advantage you’re getting is, it’s OK. One

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of you can die. Even two of you can die, since I’m so massively over-provisioned. And then, yeah, just go up to the max.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what I’m mostly talking about is individual drives that I use just as plain old drives. Internal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, in fact, sometimes I do multiple volumes on them. I’m the opposite of raid. I tend to do multiple volumes per

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disk instead of multiple disks per volume. But yeah, I’m new to the box that holds a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John discs phenomenon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You want to do titles? Let’s do titles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the compliance shark who said that one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I didn’t yes you did Maybe I mumbled something that sounded like a compliance shark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did I you totally said it? I’m gonna cut it in you’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I What can anyone remember the context

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was it was early on we were talking about like enterprise software

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Oh, I was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sucker fish on the shark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I might have said it I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You did say it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I say a lot of things. Nooks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and crannies of profit where they can like sort of live as the big suckerfish on the government shark or on the compliance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shark and say, compliance shark, compliance shark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of my favorites was accidental F cast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Let’s make up some numbers here. And like it’s so precise, like it’s not even like, you know, vague.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, no, we know exactly. It’s these exact little kinks in the lines.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One rant I wanted to make in the show, but we didn’t have time for it. Maybe I’ll do it next week. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe it should be a blog post. I don’t know. I look at people who are trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get away with just using an iPad. There was a great post that Fraser Spears

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mentioned how he records his podcast on just an iPad. Dan Benjamin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was talking to Merlin on this week’s Back to Work about possibly going iPad only for himself when he travels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just like people will jump through the most ridiculous set of hoops to try to cram

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their life into going iPad only when it really doesn’t serve their needs particularly well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it’s like you can do that but maybe you shouldn’t like SimCity 2000 on the Super Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you can yes you can do that but you it’s not ideal you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably shouldn’t you should probably just use a computer for that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was gonna say like that’s what people when people see me using my iPad with the keyboard attachment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and little wing stand thing at WWDC. Like I’ve I would love to have a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air. I’m not doing that. But like, look at me, I’m living off my iPad. It’s because I don’t have an air and they cost a lot of money. And I already have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iPad. Like I’m doing it for cost reasons only. And every time I’m there every year, I’m like, next year, I need to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of rent a MacBook Air like it would be so much better for me. Like I do not want to have these two things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s like the Microsoft Surface like the keyboard is not attached to the thing. As much as I love my iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that environment is made for the MacBook Air and my wife. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take hers and I don’t have an 11 inch so I get by with it. But yeah, when I see people doing it as a virtue, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Airs are pretty light now, you know, and they like it was it was I guess maybe when it was 10 hours

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery life versus three or four, then you could be like, OK, actually, the iPad is better for your use. But now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe not the 11 inch, but the 13 inch versus the iPad Air. The battery lives are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John similar and the iPad Air is so much better for text entry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can get a used Air or buy one from the refurb store. Get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the crappiest 11-inch Air model, any time that the 11-inch Air has existed from 2010 until now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco For a lot of purposes, if you’re not going to use it particularly heavily, if you just need something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to SSH to a bunch of servers with when you’re away or to run a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minor things like multitasking or a keyboard or a file system that you can actually access.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Where that helps. I was reading the post from Fraser about how he does his podcast. I was reading how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he moves the files around between different apps on the iPad and it just sounded like such an incredible chore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like the Towers of Hanoi. First you have to put the file up here and then you pull it into that app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like the big disk can’t go on the small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. There is certainly a price argument, but I think for people who are that price

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sensitive, they probably are not going to have an iPad at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, like, well, it’s time versus cost. Like, if I go to WWDC once a year, if that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if I was traveling all the time trying to type on my iPad, I would have long since bought. Like, you have to just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not buying it because I’m cheap, but also because, like, I don’t do that. That thing that I do at WWDC, that’s the only time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I ever do it. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I should point out also, another thing I wanted to include, but didn’t really get to is, I got my Logitech

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keyboard cover for the iPad mini today. I had the Ultra Slim for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the full-sized iPad. When I got the iPad 3, I got that. And the full-sized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Logitech keyboard for iPad is very good. And I use it a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on planes. It’s awesome on planes. Because normally I bring my giant 15-inch laptop, and sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re on a plane, if the person in front of you isn’t at the table and reclines their seat, then you really have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard time using a 15-inch laptop. And so sometimes my only option is smaller things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like iPads. And I found like if I’m just wanting to like dick around on Twitter and RSS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stuff, putting the iPad in the keyboard tray on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the tray table is really, really nice on a plane. And of course, it lasts forever and everything else. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got the mini one. I even read the Lex Friedman review where he says they’re all terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I tried it in the Apple store and I got it anyway. And boy, it is small. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty uncomfortable. I can’t imagine using it for heavy typing, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got it for the same reason where most of the time I use it, it’s going to be used as a stand more than a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keyboard. I’ll probably type 10 or 15 emails on it over the next year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not going to be a ton of typing. It is, in many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways, very similar to the full-size iPad. It’s very obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s the same device family. are similarly proportioned, just a smaller size. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s interesting. I think though, if you’re the kind of person who uses the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cover a lot, and you want to type on the iPad a lot, I think that’s a pretty good reason to go with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad Air over the iPad Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is the Mini cover the same size as the Mini? Yeah. Is that even possible?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it is possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How can you type on that? You use one finger on each hand? Peck,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe like the first two or three fingers. You can do it. It’s not great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Does it make you start wanting to pick up the keyboard and use your thumbs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Having read Lex’s review, I’ll have to dig up these links. Having read Lex’s review, I thought it was going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be worse and I tried one in the Apple store. They had one out and it was better than I expected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having read that review.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I couldn’t even tolerate the one that was the width of the big iPad because like I said, My wife has the Logitech thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the big, for iPad 2. And that’s why I went with the wing stand thing, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wanted a full-size keyboard. So I got the Bluetooth. I couldn’t even stand one. It has to be full-size. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’m the best typist. In fact, I’m a terrible typist. Maybe that’s why I need the… I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have no fallback technique. My fingers know where the keys are on a full-size keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I use all the wrong fingers to hit all the wrong keys. And if anything is thrown off a little bit, that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So for reference, I was just looking up, you can get a refurb 11-inch MacBook Air that is the current generation, 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gigs of RAM, 128 gig SSD, $850. I would get an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LTE iPad Air for that price though. Like not for that use, but like yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would like to have that because I remember I have an iPad 3 and I still haven’t seen an Air in person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well but again, it’s what are you doing with it? Like, for my needs when I’m traveling, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, I have the iPad or the iPhone even for casual stuff like that, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco couldn’t carry just that. Like, I would rather have this, because then at least with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, like, yeah, I couldn’t watch 10 hours of video with this in all likelihood, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I could, you know, log into a server. I could run Xcode if I needed to, even though you don’t have a whole lot of screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco space, but you can do it. You know, you can run like a full-size text editor. You can run TextMate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can multitask and easily have all these different apps open that you use for different things. Whereas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you try to cram that kind of workflow into an iPad, you have to jump through so many hoops with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many of these things that you have to do. Some people can do the kind of work they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to do on an iPad just fine, but it kind of annoys me when I see people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to cram in so much additional stuff and just jumping through ridiculous hoops that like really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would be so much easier to just do this on a computer. It’s like using the wrong tool for the job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m looking at the picture that someone posted in the chat of the mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing with the you know the iPad mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} keyboard you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about. The pictures on the website make it look like one of those Casio personal organizers from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 80s. The little you know the wide keyboard that is way too small for people to use. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess the gigantic 2500 pixel wide screen on top of it is not like the 80s, but you know. Minor difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Instead, it would be like a four line, non-backlit, passive matrix LCD.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Exactly. green background with black.