59: The Little Puck That Could
04 Apr 2014Amazon Fire TV and the rest of the puck landscape, tech giants’ anti-poaching agreements, and WWDC ticketing (sort of).
Episode Description:
- Follow-up on vocabulary and Michael Abrash joining Oculus.
- Amazon Fire TV — no fan!
- USB-IF's renderings of their proposed new connector
- The giant anti-poaching collusion between Google, Apple, and dozens of other companies (Facebook apparently refused)
- Google checking with Steve Jobs first before making a hiring decision
- After-show: We tried to predict WWDC dates, not knowing that Apple would announce them 12 hours later, then discussed ticket lotteries and how Apple probably wouldn't build one. (Yeah.)
Sponsored by:
- Warby Parker: Boutique-quality, vintage-inspired eyewear at a revolutionary price.
- Pixelmator: Full-featured image editing app for the Mac.
- 2Checkout: Control your checkout experience from pixel to payout with our Payment API. Visit for your free sandbox account.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw the Ashton Kutcher Jobs movie finally because it was free on Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, I did as well and it was actually I well you go ahead you go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounded like you’re about to give it a semi-decent review. I think one of the most frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about it is that even if you ignore some of the some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the little inaccuracies and it seemed overall to get the big stuff right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ignore all that, it’s not even a good movie because it takes like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours and right towards the end in like the last like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes they have this eight second montage that covers the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time span from when he was fired from Apple to when Apple bought Next.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so not only does this gloss over a pretty significant part of Steve Jobs’s life and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career, but it was also like here’s the big gloom and doom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is failing. It shoved all of that into eight seconds into a montage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like it appears chronologically, like as you’re watching the movie, it’s like here’s Apple, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big villain Apple firing Steve Jobs because they they know better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then eight seconds later, Apple’s, you know, on the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dying and they need him and they beg him to come back somehow and he somehow saves them. You know, like they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not even good storytelling because they just kind of like, oh, snap their fingers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, all of a sudden everything’s fine again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It clearly was dumbed down, which is as you would would expect, but given that everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Panned it and said it was like the worst thing committed to film ever. I didn’t think it was nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that bad. I, as someone who has a reasonable amount of Apple history in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head, I thought it was mildly enjoyable. And the one thing I will say that was extremely positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was I feel like Ashton Kutcher just nailed jobs as walk. And I didn’t even know that jobs had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a unique walk until I’m watching Ashton Kutcher, you know, pace around the stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. And I don’t know why but it just really reminded me of the one WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw where job where jobs was there and he just has this weird Like gate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to him that I’d never noticed before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean I give them credit I agree that the movie was not as bad as as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it would be based on what people were saying about it, but back when it came out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to be clear it was not good, but it was not terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seemed like they worked so hard to get overall details right and then just blew some of the really easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones that they could have gotten right you know with no additional cost or anything like they could have gotten these things right and they just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know more moreover I was just kind of annoyed that it was just weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so weirdly paced and that you know they if they wanted to tell the story in detail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could have you know glossed over certain parts a little bit faster or you know added 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes to the movie to you know to get it to get a little more detail into the story as to how these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened, you know, that whole middle era, you know, maybe do a 45 second montage instead of an 8 second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco montage, like, it’s just something, like, it just seemed like there was a lot of low-hanging fruit that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could have grabbed to make it a better movie and they, and for whatever reason, they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, did you see this movie yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, nor do I plan to. We’ve just got the Sorkin one left to endure and then we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John probably get the clear of this for a little while. This is true. And as KJ Healy points out, Tom Bombadil
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t even in the Steve Jobs movie, which is totally unacceptable.
⏹️ ▶️ John that? I don’t even know. Who? Yeah. We’re just going to keep going. We’ve got to have one of those every show, guys. That may have been the one for this show. Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So do we want to do any follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. We always do. We always do. John, would you like to do some follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. First bit of follow-up is from Mike the Eye Roller from last week’s follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John He sent an email with some clarification. Here’s a bit from the email. Here’s the thing, you
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned the bar is set too high to know everything about gender issues or anything else you guys talk about that aren’t core expertise,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s exactly what I was trying to get out of my feedback. If too high is any sort of knowledge about gender issues beyond what
⏹️ ▶️ John is observable in our lives, then yes, I set the bar too high. I don’t think any of the three of you would accept that
⏹️ ▶️ John in any sort of technical field. Women in the workplace is probably one of the most studied sociological topics of
⏹️ ▶️ John our generation, and one can learn about it on Wikipedia just like they can learn about CPU design.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we very much agree on this topic. I was just trying to point out that this doesn’t need to be some sort of nebulous idea that can only be solved
⏹️ ▶️ John by talking through it. There’s data supported answers out there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John basically, I thought his first email about the eye rolling, we started to talk about this topic was that
⏹️ ▶️ John he thought we we hadn’t met whatever bar he was setting. It’s like, Oh boy, here we go. These guys go starting to talk about this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. They don’t know anything about I’m not gonna speak for YouTube, but I’ve certainly passed the past the bar
⏹️ ▶️ John of having any sort of knowledge. Like I’ve read tons about this all over the place, like just blogs,
⏹️ ▶️ John articles, flame wars for years and years. Like I have, I feel like I have read a lot of those, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all informal. It’s like, you know, just on the internet, but I’ve definitely, definitely crossed that bar if that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s setting it to. And as for like the, uh, the whole idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, we don’t need to just talk about it as sort of this vague concept, like there’s data out there and there’s things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John learn and stuff like that. During the whole conversation of sexism in the past two shows, I’ve been intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John avoiding vocabulary that I know is sort of that are sort of, you know, terms that are common within this this
⏹️ ▶️ John topic right now for two reasons. One for the people who are familiar with those terms, I didn’t want to use
⏹️ ▶️ John them because using them sort of slots into people’s brains in certain areas.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I say certain words, they immediately think they know that we’re on the same page, we may be talking about different things. So by entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John avoiding those words, I was forced to explain myself, you know, in sort of plain language or from first principles
⏹️ ▶️ John without relying on jargon that we may or may not agree on the meaning of and two was if
⏹️ ▶️ John I use those words as shorthand jargon then I’m not communicating to the people who don’t know any of those words.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was, I had to stop myself many times from saying the words that all the people listening to the conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John probably expected to hear and maybe some people heard that and interpreted it as these guys don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re talking about, they don’t even know the vocabulary. I definitely did know the vocabulary but I was consciously avoiding it. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if that was a good move or a bad move but it’s what I chose to do. I think it’s for the best, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in a topic like that where there’s less expectation that our listeners have the same background, we can use
⏹️ ▶️ John terms about CPUs and Apple jargon and stuff, because presumably people know more about that. But this topic
⏹️ ▶️ John was far enough afield that I wanted to just talk about it using just regular vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ John to describe things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be honest, I’m not even familiar with what vocabulary you were dodging. But I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hazard a guess that it is probably for the best that you did indeed force yourself to explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yourself the entire time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do. You know a lot of this, OK? I didn’t say the word ally. I didn’t use the word privilege. Like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco those. Like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty of them. I’m not going to get into all sorts of even fancier terms. But like, when you say any of those things,
⏹️ ▶️ John people sort of click into whatever little slot they have in their brain for those terms.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then sometimes you can get out of whack. And I think it was better just to explain things. The second bit of follow
⏹️ ▶️ John up is that after talking about Oculus and Facebook buyout. Michael Abrash,
⏹️ ▶️ John who we also mentioned on the past show, is now working for Oculus instead of Valve, which is kind of a bummer for Valve because
⏹️ ▶️ John they were working on VR stuff as well. But hey, what can you do? So now it’s Carmack and Abrash back together
⏹️ ▶️ John again, trying to change the future. Of course, people get excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, those guys, they did so much together earlier in their careers. Now it’s like two old men doing it. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, wouldn’t you expect to see the next revolution run by two young men? And not
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m begrudging the old man as being an old man myself, like, you know, hey, we can still do stuff. We still have stuff in us. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of weird that, like, these people who brought us the revolution of 3D first
⏹️ ▶️ John person, you know, hardware accelerated 3D games are now trying to bring us the next resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, instead of it being the next generation. You know what I mean? So that’s, I think, is a testament to these two guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a little bit weird. Like you usually don’t expect that. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing with like scientists and everything. You’ve done all your best work by the time you’re 20 or 30 you never have a second big breakthrough
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever the the cliche is I don’t know if that’s true in technical fields Hope not Steve Jobs certainly had
⏹️ ▶️ John two very big acts in his life one very early and one much later So maybe this is the new normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Think it actually could be really nice to have people with a lot of experience and wisdom and who are real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experts in their field Which these two guys by all measures are to be tackling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the VR prop because VR has been tried so many times in the past and it has failed so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times in the past that like they like they were around for all those failures in the 90s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and beyond like they were they saw all of those things they might have tried some of those things or started developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some of those things and they’ve seen all of these failed attempts and so having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wisdom in people who are working on the new thing rather than just some 20 year old who’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recreate all those same mistakes over and over again like Unix and Lisp that’s it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will benefit the effort I think tremendously.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like the guys, a lot of the guys responsible for C doing Go like they have the experience. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John my favorite thing both about Go and about like the Oculus stuff is that these guys,
⏹️ ▶️ John Abrash and Carmack, they’re not like the CEOs or like they’re not building like a team or like
⏹️ ▶️ John Carmack’s in there writing code. He’s like he’s doing the same thing. I mean, obviously, on a slightly higher level, but more or less doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing. He’s writing code. He hasn’t just traveled up, like now I’m big, powerful, and I run the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a venture capitalist, and I’m a master of the universe. He’s there at a keyboard typing code, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s refreshing. And Mike Abrams is going to be doing it. They’re going to be writing code. It’s so refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that you don’t have to. The only path is, yeah, in the beginning you write code, but then you move on, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you become the CEO or the CTO. I think their titles probably are something like that. But I guarantee you,
⏹️ ▶️ John John Carmack is going to be writing code. That’s why he’s a hero to so many programmers, that even now, as an
⏹️ ▶️ John old man, he’s still getting it done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS And then what else about Oculus and Kickstarter?
⏹️ ▶️ John JB One more bit of feedback from another person named Michael. Apparently, we only get feedback from people named Mike or
⏹️ ▶️ John Michael now, which is fine, you know, if that’s the way it’s got to be. He
⏹️ ▶️ John says, when we were talking about the Oculus and Facebook, and he says, you guys almost
⏹️ ▶️ John exclusively characterized the outcry as being from jilted Kickstarter backers Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m an educate edge case But many of my friends who don’t share my extreme privacy concerns were also not backers
⏹️ ▶️ John and were nevertheless said and by the faith Facebook news as well So what he’s getting at is he didn’t think we talked enough about
⏹️ ▶️ John People who don’t care one way the other by Kickstarter or backers or you know feeling like they’ve been betrayed but just
⏹️ ▶️ John basically people who are creeped out by Facebook and are worried that now I
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t I don’t know though. I guess they’re worried about like Facebook ads being in their face, and I’m not gonna buy any product
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s associated in any way with Facebook was Facebook Facebook. It’s not careful with my personal information I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re invading my privacy I mean maybe Marco can address this since he’s afraid that Google is constantly invading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean what what is there really to address? I mean Facebook now owns a company that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot of potential privacy invading stuff in the future. What else is new? I mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact is Because it’s going to get increasingly more difficult, it already is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult now to try to live life online and use modern technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having your stuff be in some giant creepy company’s database.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just the reality of how we live. You can go, as I previously referred to, as the full Stallman route,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is increasingly like, oh, I’m going to go live in the woods and be off the grid. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becoming increasingly more disconnected from the rest of the world of technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to go that route. And so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to try to avoid Facebook stuff, Google stuff, Apple stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s Amazon stuff. There’s only so far you can run really. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, my philosophy with these things has always just been, as I said on a previous show, just to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a healthy distance. not to be totally off these things, not to be totally invisible, not to try to conceal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my identity from these companies, because that’s mostly a waste of time. They probably know more than you think. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can infer what you don’t tell them based on your other behavior. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s important for people to be healthily skeptical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these companies and critical of these companies and to point out things like, hey, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X or Y is going going to really give them a lot of information about you, or they’re going to use the information they have on you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do x, y, z. And those are all kind of weird and creepy. And maybe we don’t want that. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think we have to admit and realize that that’s just the world we live in. And that stuff’s going to happen. And we just have to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tolerating it and making a stink where we can, but it’s we’re not going to always win.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the case of Oculus, though, it seems weird to me because, like, just because Facebook Facebook does have its
⏹️ ▶️ John main product that we all know about is, you know, not good with privacy and everything. It doesn’t mean that that’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only way they know how to do anything like any product they get, they’re going to immediately suck into the Borg and make
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, show Facebook ads and play Facebook games and steal your private personal information. And Oculus
⏹️ ▶️ John is so far removed from Facebook, the product, the website that you go to where you see pictures of your friends and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s not even a line you can draw or otherwise it says, and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook wall and VR, like they’re obviously, at least, especially in the short term, Oculus is going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing you put on your face to play first person games. And I can’t imagine it having any connection
⏹️ ▶️ John for years to anything having to do with getting any personal information to any degree greater than
⏹️ ▶️ John say, what Steam does now or anything else. Like it just, it doesn’t seem connected. And so like to
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately say Facebook wall, and therefore I’m never going to have anything to do Oculus that seems way premature
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like sure don’t use it if they’re doing something you don’t like or if they
⏹️ ▶️ John could potentially be doing something you don’t like and you’re not sure but it just seems like they’re not connected
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point like I mean I don’t use Facebook I’m not I have a Facebook account but I don’t use it for anything
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m just not into it but it doesn’t mean that I automatically assume that every company Facebook acquires will
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly be pulled into exactly the same sort of privacy destroying
⏹️ ▶️ John vortex that their flagship product is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve got a new sponsor this week. It’s called 2Checkout, the number 2 and the word checkout,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no spaces in the middle and the C is capitalized. I don’t know how many of those things are important, but just know it’s the number 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco followed by the word checkout. 2Checkout is one of the largest global brands in online payments.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For example, they compete with the likes of PayPal, Braintree, and Stripe. You’ve probably heard of all of them. To check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out simplifies selling across the globe with a localized checkout experience. They really focus on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worldwide thing. So they adapt to local languages, currencies and payment methods, specializing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 15 languages and cultures and available in 196 countries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Over 100 of the most relevant shopping carts and many of the largest e commerce platforms have chosen to integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with to checkout, even some that advertise here. To checkout has launched a new payment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API that allows you to control the checkout experience. You can put your brand all over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it if you want to. With one integration, just integrate with 2Checkout and by doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will get, accepting 26 currencies, you get top payment methods, you get a state of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art fraud system with over 300 heuristics that they’ve come up with in the industry and new ones added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently, and enhanced recurring billing features. So if you want to have a subscription priced good or service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have nice recurring billing features. Now all of this is available through their payment API. API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco libraries are available in PHP, Python, Ruby,.NET, Java, Node,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even simple REST requests that you can try out with curl on the command line. Visit 2checkout.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash Casey. Now this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got to see this page. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just don’t don’t take it any further. It is an exercise for the listeners. It is hysterical. You should really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check it out. It’ll be worth your 30 seconds to look at this page and look at the animation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so go to 2, the number 2, and the word checkout, 2checkout.com slash Casey to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for a free developer sandbox account and see for yourself how great this is. Once again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2checkout.com slash Casey, thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, I wish these services existed when I was running e-commerce sites.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had modems that would dial the credit card companies over phone lines and we had to have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. If you think wrangling, like you’re talking about VPSs and stuff in your blog post, Marco, wrangling
⏹️ ▶️ John analog modems in a rack in a data center. Not fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, even just a few years ago, like when I built the Instapaper subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, that was probably in, I don’t know, 2010, something like that. Even then, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things weren’t, you couldn’t do subscription building like this, so I had to use PayPal, which I hated. It was awful in every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible way. And I would never recommend using PayPal for anything to anybody, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriptions, which it’s especially bad at. And that’s saying a lot because PayPal is pretty bad at a lot of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s especially bad at subscriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Amazon decided to get into the console-y
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV sort of game today, and they released the Amazon Fire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, which apparently involves neither
⏹️ ▶️ Casey termination of employment nor flames.
⏹️ ▶️ John these television pucks. Is that a good name for this category?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s ever been used before, but I dig it. So let’s go with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Puck to me seems round. It’s like a slice of a cylinder would be a puck. How would you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco describe the shape?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is not puck like, but the Roku and the Apple TV are and they kind of define the segment.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now that’s what I think. That’s why Amazon thing looks like it does. Well, two reasons. One, because it’s cheaper to build
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. And Amazon loves things to be cheap and two it’s visually distinct from the two other big
⏹️ ▶️ John market leaders Apple TV and Roku.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. It is a rectangular solid. Yes. You know, is it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is a square? I don’t know. From the top is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco square? It looks like it’s yeah or either way. I think you’re right. It looks like all the edges are hard
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it is just a box. Yeah, think of think of an Apple TV, but not rounded in anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just flat side six flat sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not around a direct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, like the Roku and the Chromecast, because its remote does not need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line of sight, you don’t have to put it anywhere you can see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So what are the attributes of this thing? You already went over them on Twitter, Marco. How is it
⏹️ ▶️ John distinguished from the Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, it’s not as distinguished as you might think. It has a lot of the same apps, a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same capabilities. It’s the same price. It’s the same category of device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same channel kind of things. The biggest difference, they put in beefier hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it so it can play games. So that’s one thing. So it has more RAM, bigger CPU, blah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah blah. And it also has this remote that, if it works the way they advertise, could be pretty cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is a Bluetooth remote, so it doesn’t need line of sight, and it has voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input and you can apparently search by voice for what you’re looking for, which would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. So all that to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh and they’re selling an external game controller for it, which John, I’m sure you’ll have a lot to say about maybe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me the games part of it is probably not that important because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I don’t know, I think, I could be totally wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this, I think we’ll end up seeing what happens, especially if Apple also makes an upgraded Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can play games. We’ll see like how that market pans out of like the super cheap game box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on TV that happens to be for other purposes, kind of like the opposite of the Xbox approach where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Xbox is like the big beefy gaming machine that happens to have media functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, that’s kind of a side effect of it. This is coming from the opposite direction. This is like a media box that happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to play some some games on it. So we’ll see if that takes off. Assuming that’s irrelevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you, it doesn’t take off. Looking at just the media side of this, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know you can look at this look at this landscape and none of them offer everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want to buy anything from iTunes, you can only play it on the Apple TV. If you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch things on Amazon streaming video, you can’t do that on the Apple TV. And almost everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do it, but that but the Apple TV can’t. And so that that’s the main disconnect. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want both Amazon video and iTunes compatibility you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to buy two devices
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget HBO go which is not on the Amazon thing as you pointed out on the on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I mean, I don’t care cuz I don’t I don’t have that but a lot of people like it. So yeah, that’s that’s in there So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you know right now There is no one device that covers everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, is that true though? I I agree with you, but doesn’t by virtue of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV being able to receive AirPlay, doesn’t that to some degree make it an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey omnivore? Now, yes, it’s no longer a standalone thing. I’m not arguing that at all. But, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, to me, I oftentimes find a use for AirPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I use it a lot. And so even though there’s other boxes that I think I’d like, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Roku and even this Amazon Firebox, I keep coming back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to no matter what, I’m going to want to have an Apple TV connected to my TV so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can do AirPlay either streaming or mirroring. Well, if I’ve already got this Apple TV connected to my TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can play Amazon Instant Video, I’m assuming, through their iPad app or iPhone app. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Plex and throw Plex to the Apple TV. In the grand scheme of things, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kill to have native Plex support within the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, but I can get pretty close by using my iPad. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not standalone, which I wish it was, but it’s still sort of an omnivore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s going to be a popular option, I think. And a lot of people, like our friend Jason Snell in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says that he does Amazon Instant Video using AirPlay to the Apple TV, and he says, quote, it’s not ideal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it works. And I think you’re right. That’s no question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you can do that. You can do AirPlay. I think any robust home TV solution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have anything in the Apple ecosystem, you are very well served by having an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV. I think if you want complete coverage, I would say the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Amazon Fire TV are probably going to be the combo that I think is going to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who are going to have multiple boxes, I think that’s going to be the combo that sets in. With
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Roku, it seems like… I’ve never used a Roku, so maybe I’m missing the appeal, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Amazon Fire TV pretty much encompasses all the benefits you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get from a Roku. I know that Roku has cheaper models, and Amazon right now is not going cheaper than $100,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is surprising, but that’s where they chose to go. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignore the price difference between the cheaper Rokus and this, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say you cover basically everything with an Apple TV plus the Amazon Fire TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I think that’s gonna be where people go who want to cover everything with the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a Roku either but everyone I know who has one says that it that it has tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John content and that they like it better than their Apple TVs in terms of the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly what I was going to say and the other really neat thing about some if not all the modern Roku’s is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have a headphone jack on the remote and having never used a Roku but I’m at least familiar enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know that you can actually sit in bed for example, maybe your wife or husband or whatever is passed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out next to you, but you’re still watching TV and keeping it quiet because you’ve plugged your earbuds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or headphones into the remote which is within a foot of where you’re sitting. And that’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll give you that. So in all these things, I think the real barrier, maybe the only barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s put up is the whole ecosystem buy-in thing because in the Amazon videos, what they want to show you is like
⏹️ ▶️ John and look you can have a second screen experience with x-ray which is really cool like their x-ray stuff is actually cool you
⏹️ ▶️ John know but your second screen experience like they show you using your kindle fire and you could take the video with
⏹️ ▶️ John you and watch it on your fire and then resume it and watch it on your big TV and it’s like yeah but what if
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to have an iPad and I’m assuming Amazon will eventually come out with apps for the iPad that do
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things but Apple TV’s big advantage is hey you buy stuff on the iTunes store and you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got it on your iPad and you’ve got it on your phone And you’ve got like all Apple’s cloud stuff saying, yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can only buy stuff from the iTunes store on Apple TV. But once you buy it there, you can use it on all your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as all your devices are Apple. And Amazon wants to say the same thing. Oh, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John buy your stuff and you can use it on all your devices. They’re not going to force you to buy a Kindle fire. They’re going to try to be everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe you don’t want to have a Kindle fire. Like, it’s like, well, I’d rather have an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of like Amazon can’t, Amazon doesn’t have the top to bottom ecosystem where they’ve got a phone, a tablet,
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer, and a TV thing. They just have a small portion of that. They’re getting pretty close.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they try to be everywhere, but it’s kind of like it spreads them thinner. Whereas Apple’s just like, look, we’re going to make sure it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John best experience on your Apple TV, and we’re going to make that available on your Mac, and on your phone, and on your tablets,
⏹️ ▶️ John and on whatever else we come out with. And that’s tough to compete with that big ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I still want an iPad instead of a Kindle Fire. So there’s no advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to getting this. oh, well, it has integration with Kindle Fire. Well, I don’t care about that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care that my Apple TV doesn’t have Kindle Fire integration. And it’s not going to make me buy this to get, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel bad when they try to show that integration, because it’s not a selling point. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of other differences between this thing and the Apple TV that I think are worth pointing out, both good and bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is that this does have a wall wart, apparently. The power supply is not internal, so you have to have another
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those big plugs shoving into the big power strip that’s behind your entertainment Which is kind of annoying and
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a shame since it does look like it’s actually a little bigger than Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well knowing Amazon. We’re just lucky to even include the AC adapter in the box
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the RF remote is great and embarrassing that Apple stupid remote doesn’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John You know I think it has no fan inside it someone’s posted a link to an exploded view
⏹️ ▶️ John from the presentation It looks like there’s no place for a fan in there And it makes sense if it’s using like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John cell phone caliber parts that it wouldn’t need a fan the box is plenty big to have, you know, passive cooling for the
⏹️ ▶️ John for the insides there. But I think the whole reason this box and the Roku exist, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s fault for not making Apple TV better fast enough. Like the whole thing with Apple’s like, oh, they keep, you know, improving
⏹️ ▶️ John their products incrementally. And before you know it, they’re so far from where they’ve gone. Just look at how much more amazing the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John five is than the original iPhone. Sure, that’s for the products they care about. But for these hobby products and stuff, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV has stagnated like crazy, like it’s ancient hardware and the software features like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is worse than like iOS 1.0 on there. Oh, you got a big grid of icons that you have limited control over and
⏹️ ▶️ John we keep adding new icons to it, kind of sort of. But like, think of how much better it could be. We should have search
⏹️ ▶️ John across all services, the voice support, all these things that we see on all Apple’s other devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not asking for a thumbprint sensor on a remote, but give us something. Like there’s nothing that Amazon or Roku has
⏹️ ▶️ John done that Apple couldn’t have done years ago. They just didn’t. And I don’t know if they’re just not prioritizing it or if they have some
⏹️ ▶️ John other grand plan that has yet to be revealed and it will make sense that they’ve been, you know, like they’re going for such a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge jump over what’s come before it. But they have not incrementally made Apple TV better at a rate that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’ve let competitors catch up to them and pass them in so many areas for for no good reason
⏹️ ▶️ John other than just not putting the resources towards it. No good reason that we know of yet again, if they come out with something
⏹️ ▶️ John like and here is our grand plan for TV and it’s like leaps and bounds beyond. And it’s like, OK, well, it took them a while. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where they were concentrating all their effort. But right now, it just looks like they’re letting people catch up with them and letting people do things
⏹️ ▶️ John that they should have done a long time ago. It’s you know whether or not I buy one of these devices It’s making me less satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ John with by Apple TV to know it’s like come on Apple everyone else is doing this You’ve got your stupid. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John IR remote no voice command tell a terrible interface and occasionally as Merlin will point out occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the stupid little spinner And it gives me an obscure air message and I have to go and plug my Apple TV and it annoys me
⏹️ ▶️ John and it makes me sad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you love your Apple TV is what you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s still my favorite Netflix client I still go do it for Netflix because it has no fan in it, and because it’s better than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix client built into my television, which has to be on. So that’s its competition. It’s the TV’s got to be on anyway, so I could
⏹️ ▶️ John use its Netflix client. And it’s second place because it has no fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what do you think about this controller?
⏹️ ▶️ John The game controller, I mean, again, you can’t tell without holding it, but it does not look good. And the history of non-gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John companies making game controllers is not good. So I’m assuming the game controller will not be
⏹️ ▶️ John all that wonderful. Their gaming ambitions, it kind of reminds me of the Ouya. Remember that thing, the kickstarted
⏹️ ▶️ John Android? Yep. Base console.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve used one.
⏹️ ▶️ John That thing also apparently had a terrible controller. But it’s tough to break into the game business, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just want to go casual. Like, oh, and by the way, it plays games. You’ll get like, it’s like being a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John gamer. You’ll get, maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get the most popular three games from a couple of years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John on other platforms that all real gamers have already played. And maybe it’ll be OK for your kids to play them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Amazon hired a bunch of gaming people to write games for their platform or whatever. I think Ouya
⏹️ ▶️ John did something similar and it’s like it’s really difficult to To get critical mass in gaming you really need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated to it If you want to be like in like, you know Triple-a top-of-the-line game if you just want to be into kind of casual
⏹️ ▶️ John games Then you’re competing with the iOS ecosystem or you know, like cell phone games and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s difficult to do too and the controllers are 40 bucks each So if you buy two controllers You’re almost doubling
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost of the entire thing and they’re not they’d appear not to be very good controllers from looking at how they’re shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can’t imagine, shape aside, that Amazon’s first controller is up to the standards
⏹️ ▶️ John of a good controller from Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s the type of thing where it’s like, if they didn’t do it, it’s just like Apple. I mean, the Amazon way is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, we’ve got the hardware there. It can play games. We can still sell it for $99. Why not? I think it’s a good move to
⏹️ ▶️ John add it. I think it’s smart. And if it takes off, fine. If it doesn’t, then it’s just another little thing that your TV can do. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so many things that our devices hooked up to our TV can do. Like my TV can do the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John not anything else, but just the television itself can do. Like Amazon, Netflix, I can stream from my
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology. I can pull things from my Mac. Like it’s just, just the television does that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, everything has Netflix built in. Soon everything’s going to have Amazon video built in. Everything has support for DLNA
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. It’s just, it’s just a question of which box do you want to use? And it’s all, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, who, who has the, the exclusives? Well, iTunes stuff is only from Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon seems to be pretty promiscuous, but some things like HBO, some things like HBO go are only on
⏹️ ▶️ John certain platforms. And it’s just like, it’s enough already. Like they’re not, I’m glad there’s a little bit of competition
⏹️ ▶️ John here to try to keep Apple honest and try to make their puck better. Cause it really needs to be improved
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime soon. But having more little pucks to connect to my TV is not really solving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And that’s the frustrating part is, you know, because it, honestly, this is a lot like cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV. It’s a lot like the entire TV business always has been and still is. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we ask these tech companies, oh, please come in and save us from bad TV companies, but they’re just doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exact same thing, which is company A has exclusive content X, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company B has exclusive platform Y and all these things make it so that there is no like one good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution for everything. It’s just annoying because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these problems are pretty much doomed to happen. Because of these business models, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just what happens with publishing content, owning content, making ecosystems, owning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystems, it will never be in any of these companies’ best interest to make something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is actually good for us because somebody will have less control or make less money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, these cable companies, no matter who you got First of all, you had a few choices, but everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John offered you HBO. Maybe the prices vary slightly, but you can get HBO everywhere. You get ESPN everywhere. There’s no place you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John lived where if you could get cable TV, you couldn’t get HBO Showtime, ESPN, MTV.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could always get those things. The exclusives remind me more of the game console space, where if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John Halo, you get a Microsoft console. It’s never going to be anyplace else. Microsoft owns them,
⏹️ ▶️ John or pick whatever for your Mario and Nintendo and Sony games.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was exclusives to try to bring to that platform. And it would annoy, like real hardcore
⏹️ ▶️ John gamers would have to buy multiple consoles just for the three or four games that were exclusives because they were good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s the constant battle to see how many big players in the game console space can be sustained.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t have 50 of them. That’s just not enough. People aren’t going to buy 50 consoles. So the number seems to be around two or
⏹️ ▶️ John three. And in the TV connected puck market, we’ve had Apple and Roku basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a couple of other people coming here and there. Maybe it’s going to be Amazon, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Roku. I think you could probably sustain them with them jockeying for exclusive content. But then you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John companies like Netflix that want to be everywhere that also are trying to get exclusive content, but then they’re selling House of Cards
⏹️ ▶️ John to Comcast for on demand. And it’s a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John situation that is hopefully going to resolve itself sometime in the next decade or two.
⏹️ ▶️ John But right now, just everyone is jockeying for position. I think people better jockey for position as hard as they can, because if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re slow like Google, if Google doesn’t have a puck, they’ve got Chromecast and they’ve got their fiber TV
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but they don’t seem to be in the puck market at all. And it could be that by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John the dust settles, they’re just fenced out by whoever the two or three big people who won that race
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I don’t see Google being present in this race at all, because it’s always been, like, well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not always, obviously this is, everything in tech is pretty young, but it’s been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obvious for a while that the online media market of video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content mainly is really a two-horse race. It’s Apple versus Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft has their own deals with Xbox Live they used to have. I don’t know if they still do. They probably do. And Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a couple of things in the Play Store and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Google’s got YouTube though. And you would think, oh, YouTube’s not the same thing. YouTube is just a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John videos. It’s not TV shows. But the amount of video that
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter now watches that’s YouTube, I think it’s It’s long since Eclipse television. She watches YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of watching television. I don’t know if that’s a transient thing and it will go away, but YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be discounted. And I mean, Amazon basically, I mean, Amazon, not Amazon, Google was trying to do Google video.
⏹️ ▶️ John You remember that? Before they bought YouTube? Well, they made their move. They said, yeah, nevermind. We’re going to, we’re going to buy YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, and YouTube is everywhere. YouTube is available on my TV. It’s available on my Apple TV. I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s available on Amazon’s thing. So Google kind of has a horse in this race, but not a hardware thing. don’t have a puck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and it’s probably not in Google’s best interest to ever withhold YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah and I mean they had Google TV like they did make it they were the only people to actually try to do my omnivorous
⏹️ ▶️ John box thing and they did a bad job of it and nobody liked it and it was never gonna work because everybody in the entire industry hates
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of such a thing even if it worked well which it didn’t so that kind of went away. I don’t know if they’ll make
⏹️ ▶️ John another run at it but they were early and they were early with like a big giant platypus
⏹️ ▶️ John awkward thing and it didn’t work out for them. So maybe they’re gun shy now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I feel like all of this is really about licensing. And I say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the Amazon fire TV isn’t available outside the U S right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but Amazon is historically very bad at non U S media availability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Precisely. And so if this isn’t available anywhere else, and additionally, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right, John, and saying that we’re just kind of running in circles around just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming things to our TV in different ways. But the only way I think there’s going to be a monumental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shift in how TV works is if license licensing deals change. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, I can go online and order a league or a season pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for getting the New York giants on my Apple TV, and maybe I’ll have to pay for that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s fine. But I don’t need to worry about whether or not they’re playing the redskins or what blackout situation there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just I get to see the giants always or perhaps, you know, you could buy a season pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For how I met your mother which obviously just ended but just for for the sake of discussion You know how I met your mother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can get those episodes either as they are live or moments after And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without probably sports and if not sports more widespread spread, streamable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional TV, or look at Game of Thrones is another great example. I’ve not seen it, but I understand it’s wildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey popular and you can’t get it anywhere but the US. So without fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, I don’t really feel like any of these pucks are really going to make a tremendous difference in our worlds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But fixing that, as you said, John, is just a total bag of hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well the pucks are important because the pucks give you something that can get better at
⏹️ ▶️ John a faster rate than your television. And that is extremely important. That’s why I’m digging Apple for is like
⏹️ ▶️ John they have that advantage and they’re not taking advantage of they have three generations of the puck, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John only two generations of the little black puck before they went from the big giant crazy thing like of iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John based Apple TVs and they haven’t made it better at the same rate as it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the slowest movie like iPod touch. I complain about because it’s been like 500 days since an update but like Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 1080p update wasn’t that long ago, but it was like a nothing update and they keep you at any channels, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like how far is iOS itself or the iPhone coming that same distance? This obvious features that their competitors
⏹️ ▶️ John are getting. I mean, an arc remote voice search, a nice UI game support, anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things were there for the taking. They’re not taking it like and so I’m glad to see the pucks out there
⏹️ ▶️ John trying like a Roku has improved its hardware and software by leaps and bounds over the same period that Apple has not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is Amazon’s first go but these little pucks give the market an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to churn at it, you know, it’s cheap. They’re 99 bucks each. You can buy a new one of these every two years and not feel bad about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re not going to buy a new TV every two years unless apparently you’re me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It lets it lets them chase each other, make the tech better, make it faster. Maybe these maybe these morph into game consoles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they don’t like maybe these things get embedded in the TV when they reach a certain point. But like getting embedded into television,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the worst thing that could happen at this point, because you want these guys to compete and iterate and iterate to get through this awkward
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning period just to kind of settle down into like the feature set. And you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they end up being gaming devices, they can never settle down because games you will we always need more power for like, you’ll never say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this game console is good enough. I’ll use this for the next 20 years, you will not it will not be good enough for 20 years, like you’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll want the newest thing eventually. So I’m glad these pucks exist as an external thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, it’s, there’s gonna be some consolidation
⏹️ ▶️ John coming and I think it’s gonna be a long way off. Like you mentioned sports, with the local blackout, that’s probably not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John go away in our lifetime just because of the huge amount of money in local television. That’s gonna take forever to get rid of.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, there’s so many barriers to actually, you know, if you could just wipe the slate clean and say, we have the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretend there is no pre-existing video, let’s make a system built on it. You could build something that’s nice and even
⏹️ ▶️ John and gives consumers choice and has competition and everyone can get every content they want for a reasonable price.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we don’t live in that world. We got to transition from what we have now, and that’s going to take a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree. But is there someone, is there a sport that’s like T-Mobile,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they’re just seriously desperate to get viewers? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MLB has done this, and also NHL to some degree. I guess from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m told, I’m not a baseball nor hockey fan. But from what I gather, their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming apps and plans and so on and so forth are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly good. And I think there’s still blackouts for sure, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively future looking. And I’m wondering, obviously the NFL never get to this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but well, unless all this stuff about concussions, actually people pay attention to it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the MLB for the sake of conversation gets so desperate that they’re like, you know what? Screw the local channels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s just do this right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think MLB is going to be the last one to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably. Okay, maybe that was a poor choice, but you know what I’m driving at, right? Is there any sport like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, there’s WWE, which I read an article about recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Ah, good point. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Ish. Well, you know, like it’s… it’s… it’s… it’s entertainment anyway, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they… they’ve embraced the internet as a way to get their content to their viewers, uh, because they couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get a channel. They kept trying to get, like, a WWE channel or wrestling channel on cable, and they kept getting rebuffed, so
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve gone to the internet. There’s also eSports, which is watching people play video games for people who don’t…
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the terminology, at least I think I’m getting it right. That’s what they call it nowadays. Esports anyway, it’s wildly
⏹️ ▶️ John popular in other countries. It’s somewhat popular here. That’s a natural medium for the Internet, Twitch
⏹️ ▶️ John TV and all that stuff. Incredibly popular among a certain set of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s an opportunity for for sports markets that aren’t or any
⏹️ ▶️ John any way to send video to people that don’t have a precedent in regular television and aren’t entangled in these crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John relationships For things like baseball and football and
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the world, I don’t know, the rest of the world is like for soccer and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose if you wait for the current generation of people to all die, maybe two generations
⏹️ ▶️ John for people to die, then people won’t care about watching things on local
⏹️ ▶️ John television anymore and they’ll just be so incensed that they can’t watch their local team on their iPad that it will just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to change. But certainly for the people who are alive today, you’ve got to wait for pretty much all,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone who was an adult when the internet came into being to die before we can get like local television out from
⏹️ ▶️ John the local television markets for things like baseball. Cause it’s like how much money the Yankees make from
⏹️ ▶️ John selling exclusive rights to local television, broadcast their games, it’s just enormous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know you’re right. I’m just, I kind of hope for some sport that’s the sporting equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of T-Mobile to be so desperate to just shake things up, to just say, you know what, screw TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s just, and I think WWE was actually a very good example where you just say, screw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, let’s do it our way and see what happens. And I don’t think there’s going to be anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that people care enough about, kind of like T-Mobile, to really get a groundswell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to push the NFL or MLB or whatever into being more progressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let’s wait and see what happens with T-Mobile first before we decide that strategy seems to be employed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey elsewhere. Oh, fair point, fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because T-Mobile keeps doing things that at launch sound like, oh my god, this is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be a big deal. And then it ends up just not really being a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s because their barrier is infrastructure. It’s like, they would never do that if they
⏹️ ▶️ John had the cell towers that Verizon has. But if they had the cell towers that Verizon has, they wouldn’t need to do that. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a chicken egg thing. So I think it’s good that you have competitors who need to do more radical
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But it doesn’t solve their structural weakness. suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John your signal doesn’t get better depending on where you live you know you just there’s no getting around physical infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John the wires to people’s houses or cell towers and speaking of cell towers I put p-cell somewhere way down in our topics
⏹️ ▶️ John if we happen to get to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are sponsored this week also once again by our friends at pixel mater also known
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as pixel mature a full-featured image editing app for the Mac now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes I know Photoshop exists. Most people don’t need Photoshop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pixelmator does a lot of things not only the same but actually better and it costs a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less and it does a lot of cool stuff and it’s really very Mac like. So they just made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a brand new 3.0 FX update. It’s a major upgrade featuring new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful tools to play with. They have non-destructive layer styles which is a really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal for anybody doing this stuff. They have liquify tools, you can liquify the image and play with it and warp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and everything. Really powerful stuff here. Their new image editing engine almost doubles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their performance. And this is, you know, one of the criticisms of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major apps in the field, is that they’re not very Mac-like, or they don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrate fully with the OS, or they don’t play nice when Apple releases new APIs, or they don’t optimize.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pixelmator is basically the opposite. Pixelmator is, it has full Maverick support. It had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full Mavericks support as far as I remember from day one of Mavericks being out. It supports file tags, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supports multiple displays, it’s very optimized for app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nap and the power management stuff in Mavericks. So if you’re running this on a laptop, which most people will be, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very power efficient. You can always see, you can go to the battery shame meter as John says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see what programs are being shamed into using too much, or because they’re using too much power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can compare competing products to Pixelmator and you can see Pixelmator really is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very heavily optimized for power saving and for all the new stuff. They also optimized it very heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the new Mac Pro. So if you have a new Mac Pro, new Pixelmator 3.0 FX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has dual GPU support with OpenCL. It supports 16-bit images.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has special Xeon E5 optimizations. It has special optimizations for the PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express SSD and for all the ridiculous memory bandwidth we get on the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really great system here. So Pixelmator 3.0 FX was a free upgrade to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all existing Pixelmator customers. If you are not yet a Pixelmator customer, go check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is full featured image editing app for the Mac. Go to pixelmator.com, P-I-X-E-L-M-A-T-O-R,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixelmator.com to learn more. Thanks a lot to Pixelmator for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, the USB consortium people have decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they too would like a lightning connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and we actually talked about this back before they had any idea what it would look like. Back when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announced, the USB-IF announced that they would be looking into this and creating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new kind of connector that would be small, reversible, and non-sucky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everyone agreed that the USB 3 plugs suck especially the mini ones which are ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they went off and they’re all right we’re gonna design one of these it’s gonna come out soon so this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s new now is that we now have a rendering of what it might look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the USB if so I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is actually news or not I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John news if it’s accurate Yeah. Like if the rendering is not just fantasy, but just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what we plan to build, and we haven’t built it yet, but it’s going to look like this when we build it. That’s my impression
⏹️ ▶️ John of what this rendering is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much. And, you know, the rendering basically looks like the halfway point between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning and mini USB or micro USB 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when we first talked about it, I think I said that, like, it has to look like the lightning connector, because what else can you do
⏹️ ▶️ John in anything that small? It has to be like the lightning connector, because it’s so darn small. Certainly you can’t make it like
⏹️ ▶️ John a shrunken version of the regular USB connector, won’t work at those sizes, which is why lightning looks like it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then other people said, I think you guys as well, that like, well, lightning is expensive to
⏹️ ▶️ John make and it can’t be as precious and beautiful as lightning connector because it has to be cheap for everybody to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just didn’t think they could come up with a connector that was that small and also not pretty much exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ John the lightning connector, like a solid piece of metal with contacts on either side and it looks like from these drawings that they’ve somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John decided that they’re going to make it the size and shape of lightning connector but
⏹️ ▶️ John still have it be hollow so that the in the connector slot is a little must be a microscopic
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely thin little thing with contacts on it that goes into the hole in the connector now granted it
⏹️ ▶️ John fits both ways and it should be pretty easy to line that up but boy I’m worried about that in terms of durability like
⏹️ ▶️ John but once you get down to that size the lightning to make so much sense. It’s like, it’s going to be so small. Anyway, you
⏹️ ▶️ John better make it solid and put the contacts on the outside. I can’t, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, we’ll have to see the real, I guess it’s conceivable that it could be done, but I’m super worried about having
⏹️ ▶️ John to shove a little tiny thing inside a little tiny microscopic hole, even if it fits both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and think about too that the jack side of it is going to be on phones, which means it’s going to be in people’s pockets and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filled up with lint. And to have like to have the tolerances be so small like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know we saw some of this with the old 30 pin dot connector which had a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of design but it was larger of course
⏹️ ▶️ John it was way bigger way bigger than this looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but but you know you could see like okay if you have a really really thin you know you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know flat card type you know connector on one side and then like a you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a jack on on the other side like you you know okay well dust is gonna get in there it’s gonna have weird contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have weird you know pressure issues it might snap it or bend it or whatever like and that was at that thickness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the docked connector that that actually happened didn’t happen a lot but it did occasionally happen at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an even smaller connector by a lot it’s it is narrower so there’s less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area to bend so it just seems that looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they can pull this off it’s gonna be great it’s gonna be a night it’s not it not as nice as lightning because of that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that you know more complicated physical design inside the connector. But if they actually pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this off, great. Good for them. I just have doubts that they will be able to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that if they do, I have doubts it’ll be very durable. That’s the big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I could go around to everyone’s laptop or smartphone with one of these connectors on it, stick my fingernail in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and go, snap. Oh, now your connector’s broken. You know what I mean? You could just
⏹️ ▶️ John reach in there with your fingernail and snap every one of those. Because once that little printed circuit board snaps down,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s such a small opening. And like you said, with dust and everything, This opening’s small enough anyway that I think dust
⏹️ ▶️ John might even be a problem for people who keep their iPhones in their pocket now. I don’t know what gets shoved into the lightning connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at least you’ve got the full width and height of that connector. This, you’re less than halving it. Something
⏹️ ▶️ John less than half the width of that connector can get jammed in there because it’s jammed between the internal tongue
⏹️ ▶️ John and the top or bottom. That’s a small margin there. What could that tongue be made
⏹️ ▶️ John out of such that it’s stiff enough to go into the little hole and line up correctly, but not so
⏹️ ▶️ John stiff that I can break it off with my finger now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And USB also, as we discussed previously, one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USB connectors were always so plain and bland and crappy is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of their design goals has always been to be very, very cheap. And that’s one of the reasons why USB has become universal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it lived to its name, because it was really cheap to implement and the hardware was all really cheap and the and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the connectors were all really cheap. And the tolerances were pretty big in some of these things. Like you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a pretty whacked out connector or cable and it would still work. And obviously as things get better, faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more advanced, that the tolerances are gonna have to shrink and get tighter but this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m afraid to see how this will be implemented badly because it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. Everything USB standard, every USB standard becomes implemented badly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco among a lot of the devices that are out there. by like a $10 card reader or a $15 external drive enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, like those are gonna have not the best quality connectors on them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this becomes the new standard, which if it doesn’t, it’s kind of pointless, you kind of want it to become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new standard, all those super cheap USB devices out there that are part of what makes USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so great, those are gonna have some really dodgy connectors, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about this, I think about, this is depressing me. Apple’s devices, which I think we
⏹️ ▶️ John would all agree have extremely precise cutouts for the connectors on them, like the laser
⏹️ ▶️ John cut things, they usually line up pretty darn well. But Apple also has a tendency to
⏹️ ▶️ John design its things without regard to connectors. So for example, on the back of a 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt display or any of those curved displays, they have USB ports on the back. But the back is curved,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the ports obviously have to be, you have to plug the plugs in perpendicular to the connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these are like big, chunky, full-size USB, you know, the A-type connector,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, regular USB connectors. Very often I find it difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in the connectors because you’re not sure what angle it’s supposed to go at. And I’ve seen Apple displays
⏹️ ▶️ John where people have done that struggle, like trying to get the thing plugged in, enough that they’ve subtly bent the little
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic thingy that’s inside the USB connectors that makes it even more difficult to plug it in because
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s kind of like bent in the wrong direction you have to kind of get past that little threshold to go in. And these
⏹️ ▶️ John are the big, humongous, chunky USB connectors that they haven’t broken, but they’re annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John to plug in because you have to line something up. And by people struggling with it, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John made it worse by bending something in the wrong direction. This is going to be that same problem
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple’s devices anyway, multiplied many times over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I know this is a ridiculous thing to complain about, but try having a cylindrical computer. It’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John substantially worse. Oh yeah, because you have to guess what angle they have to go in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do, you’re right. If you’re having trouble with that cylindrical computer, you can send it my way, by the way. Take it
⏹️ ▶️ John off your hands. The beauty of the lightning connector is that if you can find the hole,
⏹️ ▶️ John just start shoving and it will align itself. There’s nothing you have to line up within the hole. You just have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the metal thing into the slot and just press and it will line itself up. Which is not true of USB
⏹️ ▶️ John or FireWire 800 is even worse. 800 connector needs to be burned with with fire I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John so hard to plug those things in because they have so many little details that have to be lined up. Try plugging one of those in the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of an Apple Thunderbolt display. Most of that is Apple’s fault, but I’m just saying like a connector
⏹️ ▶️ John that can tolerate that type of environment is is best and I’m not sure about this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week once again by our friends at Warby Parker. Warby Parker believes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that prescription eyeglasses simply should not costs $300 or more. They should even be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affordable enough for people to accessorize and have multiple pairs if they want to. Warby Parker bypasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the traditional channels. They sell higher quality, better looking prescription eyewear online at a fraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the price, starting at just $95. Go to warbyparker.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP. You know, I actually, when we did the sponsor last week, some people in the chat were pointing out that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t realize this, like, almost every eyeglass store and almost every eyeglass company is owned by like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big company like Luxottica I think it’s anyway it’s like I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it quite how much consolidation there is in this business but worry Parker is independent and this is why they’re able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bypass this tremendous distribution system by this conglomerate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t tell me to say that in fact I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying that but that’s why they’re able to do this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this huge monopoly power there and they’re just bypassing it completely and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passing the savings along to you so they They have these great vintage inspired designs with a contemporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twist. Every pair is custom fit and it comes with anti-reflective, anti-glare, polycarbonate prescription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lenses. And every pair comes with a hard case and a cleaning cloth. There’s no weird add-on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t start jacking up the price if you start adding up the things you actually need. There’s no like, well you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get this base price model which sucks or you can get the one that you actually want that won’t fall apart in two days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $600. Nothing like that. Buying glasses online sounds like it would be risky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how would you know whether they’ll fit or how they’ll look on you? Well they have you covered with these two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty impressive things. So number one, they have these tools on their site where you can use your webcam, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can take a picture of yourself, it can overlay and it can show you exactly how the glasses will look on you right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the webcam. And then they have this even better thing which is the Home Try-On Program.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s how this works. You go to their site, you pick out up to five pairs. If you don’t pick out all five, they’ll send you five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. They’ll pick stuff for you. pick out five pairs and they will send you the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames you can try on for free right in your home keep them for a couple of days whatever you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide decide at home ask your significant other walk around ask your people at work whatever you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide on whatever of these of these frames you want and if you don’t like any of them that’s a valid decision too but I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like one of them at least so pick out the one you want send it send back the box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you can place an order to have that with your prescription in it all of that is free there is no charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the home trying program they They pay to ship it to you, they pay to ship it back. All that very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very simple, very good. And you can do a couple of these if you want to. If you don’t find what you want the first time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get another batch. But I bet you’re going to find what you want. They have a great selection. They also have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prescription and non-prescription polarized sunglasses, which I love personally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you only ever had non-polarized sunglasses, trust me, you don’t know what you’re missing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to warbyparker.com, W-A-R-B-Y-P-A-R-K-E-R dot com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A-T-P. Check out their great selection of premium quality affordable eyewear and get your home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try on kit risk free. Thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should probably at some point talk about this employee poaching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that seems to to have started in the valley but spread quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a long ways away from there. So what this is about is Apple and Google especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to be pointed at the most, but many companies, I think the number was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 20 or 30 companies, something like that, were accused of and from all accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to have tried to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hiring from each other and made agreements that they would try to keep wages the same, not hire from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each other. It really is extremely crummy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this is all – it’s in trial now, is that correct? Do either of you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I don’t know enough about this. Do we know for sure – the articles I’ve read,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which admittedly have not been enough, I keep seeing it being referred to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a wage-fixing cartel, but I haven’t actually seen anything about wage-fixing. I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-poaching agreements, which might have the effect of keeping wages down, Is there actual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were they actually agreeing to keep salary levels at a certain range?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same thing. They’re just labeling it with a secondary effect, but it’s all the same thing. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with a bunch of companies all can’t agree with each other. I won’t hire from you and you won’t hire from me and that way we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay our people more. Like that’s the implied secondary effect. It’s actually even worse than that if you saw some of the emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s gotta be in trial now because I don’t know why I’d be seeing these emails. But one situation that was detailed in these,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was either in a deposition or email or both, was like a bunch of people left Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and went to work for Google. So Google didn’t poach them. They left Apple of their own accord and went
⏹️ ▶️ John to work for Google. And Google wanted to set them up. I forget these people. It was a group of people. Google wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John set them up doing something in an office somewhere. And before they did that, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John in touch with Steve Jobs and say, hey, we’ve got some people here. And they used to work for you. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to set them up in an office here. Is that OK with you, Steve? I know you were close with these people or whatever. Just wanted to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. And they’re like, well, they were talking amongst themselves, like, as long as they’re not working in any
⏹️ ▶️ John phone stuff or whatever, I bet it will be OK with Steve. So first of all, the whole premise that you would have to call the
⏹️ ▶️ John CEO of your competitor to make sure that you are allowed to hire his employees who left of their own accord
⏹️ ▶️ John is crazy. And then saying, well, we can hire them. Make sure they’re not working on anything that would make Steve angry. So we can’t have them
⏹️ ▶️ John work on a mobile phone or anything like that. But surely, if we agree they’re not going to be working on mobile phone stuff, Steve will be OK
⏹️ ▶️ John with it or whatever. And in the end, Steve Jobs essentially said, I’d prefer you don’t hire these people. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t. Like, they didn’t put them to work in that office they were going to set up for them. Like, that is crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is super illegal and terrible and anti-competitive. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, what’s going through these people’s heads at these companies that think this is the way things should be done?
⏹️ ▶️ John That you would like get the OK to
⏹️ ▶️ John what your employees are going to do or whether you’re going to hire people from your fiercest competitor? Obviously, this
⏹️ ▶️ John was maybe before Google and Apple right each other’s throat, but it just makes you sick to your stomach
⏹️ ▶️ John to think about that, like, like, these people’s lives and careers are altered by the whim
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, a person who runs the company that they don’t work for anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And the other thing I saw was that apparently Facebook basically said, screw that tough noogies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because of that, apparently Google decided, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, a lot of our people are going to Facebook. And since we can’t get Facebook to agree not to poach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our people, what can we do? We should probably try to convince our people to stay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, we could pay them more. That’s what we could do. And so they just, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gave everyone, I think in the entire company, a thousand dollars spot bonus and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey raise salaries, 10%. I I’m almost sure that’s right. It was in one of the links we’ll put in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, because they weren’t poaching, well, I’m sorry, because they were poaching,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Facebook was poaching Google people. Google suddenly realized, well, we should probably pay our people more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, to your point earlier, even though it may not, and John was saying this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though it may not on the surface sound like wage fixing, the net effect was wage fixing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is totally like, I mean, this is not just an Apple problem. As many companies involved, Google and many others,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple and Google get it because they’re the most famous and they’re in the headlines, right? But regardless of all the other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John involved, this is 100% a Steve Jobs thing to do. Because in his mind, he’s like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to do great things here, and I need great people to do great things. And you stealing my people pisses me off, and it makes it harder for
⏹️ ▶️ John me to do great things. So why don’t we all, captains of industry, get together and just agree not to steal each other’s people? Because it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John make everybody’s life easier, and we all hate it, and now finally we can get back to work. Which is basically putting Steve Jobs’
⏹️ ▶️ John desires, and his desire to change the world with Apple, above the lives of all of the employees of all these companies. Like, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care if you can make more money, or you can move to a different city and get an equal tech job,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, or a different country or whatever. Because I don’t care about your mobility in your life. I just care about doing great
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And so my demands as CEO are trump all these employees.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the way it should be. And someone in the chat room asked, why on earth would Google ask Apple if it was OK?
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re legally in the clear, why don’t they just hire the person? Like, that’s the whole point. Google didn’t want Apple stealing its people. Apple didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John Google stealing its people. Because that churn and turnover was a problem for both companies. They would have to raise
⏹️ ▶️ John all their payrolls to keep the people that they wanted. And they’re just like, look, it’s easier for both of us if we just agree. Let’s not steal each
⏹️ ▶️ John other’s people. Facebook didn’t agree to that, mostly people think, because most people wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John go to work for Facebook, because I guess maybe at that point they had pre-IPO shares, or there was more upside to Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook was stealing people because they were offering more stuff. And Facebook’s like, we’re not going to agree to this, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re stealing all of your people. You’re not stealing our people. And the reason I think Facebook was stealing all their people is because they offered
⏹️ ▶️ John them more. You have a potential to be richer if you come to work for Facebook. We’re a younger company. Maybe you’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John some pre-IPO shares. Maybe you’ll get some shares with a much bigger upside in these more mature companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll pay you more. It’s more exciting. Maybe you’re bored at Apple or Google or whatever. Facebook was
⏹️ ▶️ John hiring people the old-fashioned way and stealing people from everybody. And of course, Facebook’s not going to agree because their whole strategy is we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to steal all your employees by offering them better stuff, which, like Casey pointed out, made Google say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the only tool we have for retention against Facebook is to pay our employees more. And in a competitive market
⏹️ ▶️ John where people with these skills are in high demand, they’re supposed to get paid more. The companies aren’t supposed to collude to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that these people can’t be mobile in their careers. It’s this whole whole story is infuriating as
⏹️ ▶️ John and I totally see it as like the worst It’s kind of like that good side of Steve Jobs, or he just wants to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the job done But the worst side of Steve Jobs is he doesn’t care You know what kind of damage he leaves in
⏹️ ▶️ John his wake to to get what he wants and neither do any of these other companies As well, it’s not just Steve Jobs that all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other people who agreed to this. It’s It’s a terrible attitude. It just it makes me sick reading this whole story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Gruber has been doing some great commentary on this because it really does show like this is the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know Apple is not worse off in every way with Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook. There’s a few ways that they’re better off with Tim Cook and I think this is one of them where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t a lot of people are saying this I really don’t think this would have happened with Tim Cook at the helm because he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not really his style he’s very careful he’s like he’s very pragmatic. He’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of unemotional about these things, he seems.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s also very cutthroat. So I’m not sure about this, because he
⏹️ ▶️ John is very demanding and cutthroat. Thus far, it’s a good bet. Like, from the outside, the image that
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook portrays, we all have trouble seeing him doing stuff like this, where we don’t have trouble seeing Chief Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. But I think the jury’s still out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not quite accurate to make this all about money and wages, because, at least for all the companies involved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t think Steve Jobs gave a crap about what he was paying his engineers and whether this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would keep their wages down. I don’t think that has anything to do with his end of it at all. I think his end of it was all about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, vengeance and control and he didn’t want to… and loyalty, right? Like, he didn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose his people to, like, to this evil company Google that was stealing his products from him. Like, that’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was probably… it was almost certainly, like, this emotional and controlling thing from Steve Jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not at all about salaries, and salaries were simply a side effect of it that he probably didn’t even think or care
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but that’s the thing. He thinks you should stay there because you want to. Like, he’s like, I shouldn’t have to pay you more.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should stay here because working for Apple is, you get to work for the best company in the world and it’s insulting to me
⏹️ ▶️ John that you expect me to pay you more money to stay here. But at the same time, he also didn’t want to lose those people. So he’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it’s like he’s of two minds. He thinks like, you should be staying here because you love it so much, but I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure that even if you wanted to leave, you couldn’t because you wouldn’t get anything better any place LC might as well just stay
⏹️ ▶️ John so we can crap on you. Like if you really wanted people to stay you just pay them more money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, see, no, that’s the problem. That’s the other flaw in this argument is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineers, especially people who are out on the West Coast, who can choose between many very well-known tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work for without really uprooting their life too much, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like these companies get employees, they get talent because of what they’re doing and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re, you know, what’s interesting about them. Engineers are famously not as motivated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by money as you would think. And generally speaking, if somebody’s thinking about leaving Apple for Google, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving them $10,000 more at Apple is not going to really change that decision for that long or at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not a very effective way to keep people. If you have people looking around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re bored or unhappy at their job, money is a terrible way to fix that because it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John And the individual level, maybe not, but on the grand scheme of things, it does. That’s why Facebook was able to grant these people.
⏹️ ▶️ John is a more exciting place to work than Facebook. You’re going to be working on more interesting things that are more appealing to the
⏹️ ▶️ John average engineer than you would at Facebook. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That depends on what kind of engineer you are and what team you’re assigned to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you get to be on the glory team where you get to make the new cool paper app and everything like that, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John equal glory positions at Apple. And probably, if you really care about your thing being used in the long term
⏹️ ▶️ John by a lot of people, you have to put your money on Apple. You’ve designed the next version of iOS. It’s probably going to have more longevity
⏹️ ▶️ John any impact in designing even the very tippy top flagship cool new UI thing like paper
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Facebook phone or whatever thing. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John the projects to offer people. Facebook should never be able to steal people from Apple, except on the server
⏹️ ▶️ John side, which obviously, that’s a whole different story.
⏹️ ▶️ John again, retention there is probably not just money. But I’ve heard,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know so little about what goes on in Apple. But everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John I know who has worked there, like we see people come and go and like they go, not because they don’t like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore, but just like, cause you burn out on it. Like it’s tough to work within Apple. It’s a hard job.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard work. There are crunch times, kind of almost like a game developer, you know, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John this sort of crunch times that everyone accepts are going to exist and you just do what you have to do. And that can really
⏹️ ▶️ John burn you out after a while. And sometimes you just want to relax. And also you want to just do your own thing. And within Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there used to be more latitude to do your own thing and less of a crunch time.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of factors that contribute towards deciding whether you want to stay or
⏹️ ▶️ John leave and come back, but this type of agreement that doesn’t allow you the mobility
⏹️ ▶️ John shuts out all of those. Because if they all agree not to hire anyone else, then you don’t have to worry about making your
⏹️ ▶️ John employees happier in any way, whether giving them more money or giving them more flexibility to do
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting projects their own or not not subjecting everyone to these massive crunch times.
⏹️ ▶️ John All those tools like it’s like, oh, we don’t have to worry about that anymore, because where the heck are they going to go? We have this agreement with all the companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and to go back a step, this was all happening in 2008. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these emails that have that are coming out, and the Facebook IPO was in 2012. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actually Facebook being able to poach all these people may have been financially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related. And additionally, from the Pando Daily article that we’ll put in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the combined workforce of just these 11 companies, I’ll read them real quick in a second, totaled over 775,000 people in 2008. Those companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are Apple, Comcast, DoubleClick, Genentech,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IBM, Illuminata, Intel, Intuit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft, Oglevy, WPP, and Google. So that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly a million people in 2008 that were all at least in some capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being shrouded beneath this do not poach agreement thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean there’s nothing about this that’s good or encouraging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about these companies at all. It’s, you know, like John said, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just it’s just kind of a gross story. It’s just it’s not, it’s just it’s just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sad and it shows a lot of arrogance on all sides that like this is I mean obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is illegal like all this collusion like is is obviously a problem and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very surprised that any of these companies were stupid enough to do it especially by email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah to that end I was just gonna read this so this is a quote from an email from Eric Schmidt who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is CEO of Google quote I would prefer that omid do it verbally since I don’t want to create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Two periods. Thanks, Eric.”
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course he’s a two period guy. He means a literal paper trail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, but do you not realize as the CEO of Google…
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, it is delicious irony that this, uh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John person who doesn’t care about anyone else is like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same guy who was like, oh, privacy doesn’t really matter. It’s not a thing. Nobody you’ll really have privacy anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, it’s so ridiculously arrogant.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And like the whole fact that like in the thing I was talking about where they’re trying to talk about it’s did Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John give the OK? Can we hire these people? And it looked like it was going to be OK. But then Steve Jobs sends it back. One of his terse emails is
⏹️ ▶️ John I prefer you don’t hire these people. And they all scramble and say, oh, we can’t we can’t do it then. Like that’s all happening over email,
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Like it’s almost as if not the ignorance of the law is a defense. But it’s like you read this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like, do you guys not know that what you’re doing is both illegal and immoral. Like, wouldn’t you be
⏹️ ▶️ John embarrassed? Like, if you’re gonna rob a bank, don’t email your fellow bank robbers back and forth about it for the months leading up
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. Like, that doesn’t seem like a good idea. But like, so we’re gonna rob a bank, right? Okay, I’ll send you an email, right? I’ll send you a text, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, seriously, it’s just, they’re so casual about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they, like, they communicate to each other via email so casually about this. Like, it’s almost as if looking from the outside, you’re like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John must not know it’s illegal. Because if you did, no idiot would email. It’s just so incredibly incriminating.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like they were secretly taped or anything. They’re emailing each other about it. And they didn’t delete the
⏹️ ▶️ John emails. Like, it’s just mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The moral of the story is don’t work for any of these.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you won’t have this wasn’t 2008. And I imagine that even this collusion was in effect. Once the
⏹️ ▶️ John big falling out between Apple and Google, like, you know, post iPhone, like those agreements were off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like once Steve Jobs is saying to everybody, you know, we’re gonna bury Google and they betrayed us
⏹️ ▶️ John backstabbed us or whatever, I imagine he also said, and forget it, we’re poaching all their people, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too late, you already broke the law, and if there’s a paper trail in electronic form you’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John screwed for it anyway. It’s kind of a shame that Tim Cook is left holding the bag in this type of deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether he knew, if he knew about it and was part of it, then maybe it’s fitting, but if he didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know about it or wasn’t a part of it or disapproved of it, now he’s the guy holding the bag on this. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, I mean, I’m assuming there’ll be a wrist slap because it’s always a wrist slap with these big, rich companies, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a shame. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m guessing it says, I think I’ve read somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that apparently a lot of the companies involved have already settled. I’m really surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple didn’t. Like it seems like that would be the pragmatic approach here. Just settle this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just take whatever it costs, settle it quickly and quietly as well as you can at least. And just get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, get it past you. Because yeah, this is obviously a thing of the past for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these companies because of their relationships that have changed. And especially, as I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really can’t see Tim Cook wanting to be a part of this because he’s too smart for that, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know. The whole thing is just gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John The revenue Apple generated while we were discussing this would be enough to pay for the settlement. So they’re all set.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Anything else? Are we good? Want to have a short one this week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Well, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. To check out, Pixelmator and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Warby Parker. And we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over. They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. Accidental. John didn’t do any research. Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey wouldn’t let him. Cause it was accidental. Accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Harmon,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental. They didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tech podcasts, it’s so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, what we should talk about is WBDC theories. That should be pretty quick for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so I have an insane theory. So if you go to the Moscone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey schedule, let me find a link and stall for a moment while I’m doing that. There’s a meeting in June,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the American Diabetes Association, I believe. That goes on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Friday that everyone expects—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re talking 7th through 10th or 14th through— 13th through 17th. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard it’s the previous week, June 2nd through 6th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, that corroborates my theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is your thing that has the Friday included, does that involve Moscone West? Because there’s three Moscone—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that’s the thing. So here, you’ve hit the nail on the head. So I see that, actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw a few weeks ago, that the American Diabetes Association’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 74th Scientific Sessions, that is in Moscone, north, south, and west, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 13th of June, which is that Friday, through the 17th, which is the following Tuesday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there you go, it’s the previous week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So well, but no, it’s not quite so simple, because what it, I know that WWDC ends on Fridays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it ends around midday. And so let’s assume for the sake of conversation, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a moment, that maybe they could flip it or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the rest of the time the ADA needs West but they made some agreement with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moscone where they don’t need it Friday. So I go digging around to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at what is the American Diabetes Association 74th Scientific Sessions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m trying to figure out, okay, is there or is there not anything going on in Moscone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey West? And I’m looking at I’m looking at all sorts of things. I’m looking at vendor maps, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that was West I’m looking at schedules and they say well on Saturday. There’s absolutely something in Moscone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey West, but there’s no real Talk about Friday in Moscone West until I find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I just put in the chat Special opportunities World Cup viewing room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since scientific sessions will once again fall over FIFA World Cup matches will set aside a viewing area in Moscone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey West so that attendees can catch up on the latest action without leaving the conference center – excuse me, the convention center.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that in mind, when does the World Cup start? And I didn’t verify this myself, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was talking with Underscore earlier today and he said it starts on like the 12th or something like that or the 11th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget exactly what day. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. But the point is it starts before the 13th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you put all of this together, that says to me that Moscone West is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be clogged up on Friday the 13th of June.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that eliminates the week of 9 through 13. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey following week is still covered by the same ADA meeting, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve got 9 through 20 booked up, which leaves 23 through 27,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which has already been booked for Google I O, which means by process of elimination, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the second through the six.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or it’s an August
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s in June, and if it’s still at Moscone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s I mean, that’s probably I think being at Moscone is a pretty safe bet. Just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of there’s, you know, where else they’re going to do it. There’s we’ve talked about this before. So that it’s it’s almost certainly still at Moscone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t necessarily have to be in June. It’s just very likely it will be because that’s how they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it and it works out in a number of ways. I suspect it’ll just be that first week, June 2nd through
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t really matter what the dates are because don’t we all assume they’re going to pre-announce the dates and the ticket sale and everything?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to be a surprise anymore. It’s like, it’s just the only question now is like, is it going to be like last year? Is there going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a lottery or whatever? But I really doubt they would ever go back to the thing where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here it is and go buy it. Like it’s always going to be pre-announced. So we just sit around and wait for them to pre-announce, and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say, tickets will be on sale at X date, and here’s the system we’re going to use. And then we just all deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but it’s nice to try to figure out what the schedule is. For example, I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of flying Aaron out to meet me late in the week, and then we would spend some of the following week out there together.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I looked at plane tickets and hotel fare a little while ago, and the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John look crazy and bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the prices are terrible the 9th through the 13th. they’re almost livable the second through the sixth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per underscore earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I saw the Park 55 hotel is almost exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price now as it was last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s gone down since I looked at last, but last I was looking, it was like 100 bucks more per night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like in the high hundreds, like 190, 200-ish, like in that. Oh, that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. No, that’s, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we’ll see. Yeah, for the second to sixth, it was substantially. Yeah, I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underscore earlier too. And he suggested too, like, you know, maybe they’ll do a lottery this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think honestly, you know, the more I think about it, the more I think that’s really the only good option at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. Like, anything that involves just everyone rushing at this particular time, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to always be problematic. It’d be one thing if it was like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to open at this time, first come first serve, go, and it sells out in 10 minutes. So everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has 10 minutes, like you can you can a lot of people can get in 10 minutes. But if it sells out in like 45
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds again, like it did last year, before everything started breaking and failing, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tough. What you want is for all the people who really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really want to get in to be able to get tickets. But there’s not enough tickets for that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s too many people who qualify for that, people who really want to go. There’s There’s just too many of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And any system you make is only going to have a random subset of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively. So you might as well do it in a way that feels fair and make it a lottery.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not truly random, anyway. I like the idea of people being rewarded for their enthusiasm
⏹️ ▶️ John for buying tickets. If Apple could just make a web application that doesn’t die, then you could, in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John give people tickets on a first-come, first-served basis. And then the people who are sitting there hovering over
⏹️ ▶️ John the button as the seconds tick down on their, you know, synchronized clock, they would be rewarded
⏹️ ▶️ John for their crazy enthusiasm for getting tickets. And they would be more likely to get tickets than the people who stroll
⏹️ ▶️ John in 30 seconds later. Like, I know it’s a small window, and it’s crazy. But if you could eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ John the error, a lottery is truly random. Like, the people who just like, meh, I guess I’ll put my hat in the ring for WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John tickets. And they do that like three days after they were announced. They have an equal chance with you, who is like there, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the second. And I like seeing some weight given to people who are more
⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiastic about going. And there’s no way to express that enthusiasm if there’s a four-day window for you to put your
⏹️ ▶️ John hat in the ring for a lottery for a ticket.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would prefer it if they could just merely make a web application that worked correctly and have it sell out in 10 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John is fine with me. 10 seconds is more than enough for everyone to sit there, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. All the people who are there
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get it in that 10-second window, maybe it sells out in five seconds, in three seconds. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they can just get an application that wouldn’t break, you could reserve people’s spots in that amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, your spot is reserved. You have five minutes to check out, and then the application won’t fail. And you’ve got, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have, somebody has this technology, perhaps not Apple. But I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the problem. You’re asking Apple for like a really complicated web app that’s going to be super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable and fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John come on. Right, the whole thing. And like, it doesn’t seem like, how many people could there possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John be? Let’s say there’s a million people who want to go to WDC. I think that’s way too big. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple’s budget, it is possible to set up a bunch of servers that serve text only, no images,
⏹️ ▶️ John just a button and click this button to reserve your ticket. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I could write this thing for a million people. It would be ugly, but it would work. Give me Apple’s budget
⏹️ ▶️ John and a couple of months to do this, and I can make a fair
⏹️ ▶️ John system for reserving your spot for WWDC that merely gives you a token and it sends you off to the
⏹️ ▶️ John real checkout process during which we check in. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a big fancy store checkout process or whatever that’s not used to this kind of onslaught.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason why it broke so badly last year is that Apple really didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to do a lot of custom work for it. They basically just tried to wedge it into their regular checkout process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just was not designed. back end stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was involved with those tickets in particular, just it they didn’t put enough effort into it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they in short, they half-assed it, right? And Apple half-assing a web service, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one meant for developers, is nothing new at all. And there’s no signs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever from Apple, there’s no signs that their priorities have changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in such a way that making a really amazing web service for developers is suddenly a really important thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t see that happening at all. And that’s why I think think if you assume that it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no better than last year, if there’s a big rush point, like if they say, all right, show up at this time, first come first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve, just like last year. I don’t have any reason to believe that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably speaking it’ll be any better than last year. And last year was pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, last year was terrible. And well, and I say that because I’m still grumbly about the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had major ticket acquisition issues, but it was really But that being said, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come we don’t have the same problems with the last one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two iPhone and iPad pre-orders? If I recall correctly, the 5S did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have an online pre-order. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it does weigh more capacity, though. I don’t think you have the emphasized
⏹️ ▶️ John rush because people know that there’s not 5,000 iPads available. If there was 5,000 iPads available
⏹️ ▶️ John and people knew there were 5,000 iPads available, it would be the same disaster. But there’s, you know, there’s millions of iPads available.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. And it’s spread out over, you know, like, even the people who are like waiting up till 3am or whatever, everyone’s getting
⏹️ ▶️ John through and maybe your shipment date moves out if you’re in the first five minutes or two, but it’s not like this is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more capacity. There’s such a limited number of tickets for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But what I’m saying is, let’s say there’s 50,000 people that really want to go. And obviously, I made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that up out of thin air. Don’t you think there’d be a lot more than 50,000 people trying to preorder a new iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or iPad on the moment at 3am that it’s available?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but they have to make that work really well. They absolutely… I mean, John, I think you’re right that yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the demand probably is a little more spread out in that it isn’t as urgent that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wants one get there at second zero. But I also think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple puts a lot more resources into that and into testing and deploying that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s way more important to them. Think about how much of their revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is directly from that process on those couple of days or even that night. That’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money. That’s a huge, very important thing. If it fails, also it’s a major PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blunder that they will be raped over the coals for and all the tech sites and everything saying how they’re doomed because they can’t keep a store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for their most important product. Meanwhile, if developers get a couple of error
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pages and everyone’s carts time out and there’s all these errors buying tickets to the developer conference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Wall Street Journal doesn’t give a crap about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but I guess what I’m saying is if they clearly have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conquered this for iDevices, couldn’t you use some of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either servers or tech or something for WWDC? And also consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that from everything we can tell from the outside, it seems like it was a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labor-intensive aftermath last year when everyone got half-cooked on their orders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then people from Apple had to either email or call everyone. In fact, I thought they called a lot of people saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we see you got halfway through this order. Do you want to finish it? And that is not something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume they expected to need to do. And if that’s a ton of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s a few thousand, I mean, a few thousand, if it’s only two interns doing all the calls for the sake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of conversation, that takes some time. And I remember hearing about these calls happening, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least a couple of weeks, if not a month after the tickets went on sale.
⏹️ ▶️ John All of this argues in favor of Apple doing the lottery, because if you think about it from Apple’s perspective, a lottery
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best for them. It makes them not be embarrassed about having a crappy thing that falls down.
⏹️ ▶️ John It avoids all this work that you just described, Casey. And the third advantage that it gives to Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John that it lets them cherry pick. Like, they can, you know, oh yeah, it’s random,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, but behind the scenes, Apple has the ability to go, that one, that
⏹️ ▶️ John one, and that one, and that one. Okay, and then you can do the rest of them random. And they do that anyway. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they were doing that with the people who had problems and whatever. But a lottery is by far the best from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s perspective, because it solves all of Apple’s problems. It does not solve all of the customer’s problems. And I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more fair than the system I described. But if you just go by what’s best for Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lottery is it. So if you want to take the easy bet, it’s like, hmm, will Apple do the thing that’s best for Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John or will they care about how developers feel? Hmm, I don’t know. It’s, you know, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, with the added copy, the thing the best for Apple requires them to do a little bit more work on the service side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which makes it a lot less likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing is that the best for Apple doesn’t require them to do any more server work. It’s really easy to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John little sign up form and just collect the names and then send out the emails and say, oh, congratulations, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been selected and check out at your leisure with the special token code. It’s so much easier for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but didn’t they do that? The last iPhone pre-order I did, which I did the 5S in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line, But I believe for the 4S, or maybe it was the iPhone, it doesn’t matter, for something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got a kind of sort of token. It basically said, okay, we see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you want an iPhone, and we know that we can’t handle it right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we have reserved one for you. We will email you a link and let you finish the process later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we think we’re good and ready. Do you remember that, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, although Underscore said earlier that he thinks that’s how tech talks were done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech talks were done by a lottery where you just like you enter your email and then it says all right we’ll let you know if if you can come
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah they have to have a system for us I mean even if the system was simply we’ll take provisional orders
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll just like cancel the ones that we don’t pick like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ John within the bounds of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no time you know it’s like sure everyone get your tickets in over the course of the next week no rush because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter when you do it like they have no problem supporting this using whatever system they decide to use
⏹️ ▶️ John and it definitely makes their lives easier. And I think the extra control of them being able to cherry
⏹️ ▶️ John pick the people who they want and who they don’t want there, just like they must be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s great. Why don’t we just do that? And so I fear that’s what will happen this year. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, like Marco said, the realistic alternative is the repeat of last year, because none of us believe that they can
⏹️ ▶️ John make a server. Or they would have the guts to make a simple text only, no
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript, really tiny one button, click this thing to reserve your ticket kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they would never do that, because it wouldn’t be the Apple way. It wouldn’t look all pretty and have shiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons. Well, that isn’t even the problem. I mean, the layout you can solve with CDNs. I mean, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their problem. Can you? Apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t, because the CSS wouldn’t load. And half the pages during my checkout last year had no CSS
⏹️ ▶️ John in them. I just blindly plowed on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I can’t, you know, as a developer of systems that handle these kind of traffic in the past, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine like the kind of like weird, ancient,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited infrastructure they must have put on this task last year that caused this problem unless there were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millions of people hitting it at once. But there weren’t because
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean… Yeah, the total demand has to be under a million. It has to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, total demand, you know, they have 5,000 tickets. They sell it very quickly. How many people do you think are actually trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get those tickets? 10,000? 20,000? 50,000 maybe at most? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many could there really be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, how long ago was the the the first sellout wasn’t that like 2010 2011 something like that? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was earlier I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh nine But it was it was like a month and a half after the tickets went on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sale, right? So you look at you know The first I think it was 2012 was the first one that happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really fast and that was like 10 minutes something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can’t imagine we went from 2009 let’s call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it took a month to sell out to 2010 where it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick Can I refuse to call it 2009? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, this is accidental. You know, that’s the way it is. Anyway, the point is, in 2009, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took a month to sell out. And then in 2012, it was really uncomfortably quick. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then 2013, it was just unbearably quick. I can’t imagine that means there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than 50,000 people, and even that I feel like is pretty aggressive, that are looking for tickets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think this year, knowing what happened last year, knowing what people did last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will you be going if you don’t get a ticket?
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably won’t because the videos are so much…
⏹️ ▶️ John The real-time videos that we didn’t know were coming last year that Apple surprised us with, assuming they’re going to do them again,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably enough for me. I’m not sure if I need to be there. I mean, I guess it depends on what
⏹️ ▶️ John gets announced and if there are things that I would want to talk to people, you know, sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes about or in person or whatever that that that experience I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get with the videos, but depending on what’s announced that experience may be less important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean it’s it’s not always about the sessions though. Like, like if I don’t get a ticket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what I’ll be most disappointed about missing, whether I’m there or not, is the socialization that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens like in the common areas in Moscone during the day between the sessions. I see so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people there. I talk to so many people. I’ve made deals there. Like, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very important thing to me is like that community engagement, like being around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people of, you know, of our industry and meeting new people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like being in the building to be there for all this. If you just go and go for like the social elements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, drinking at the bar with your friends afterwards and stuff, you get some of that, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And that’s the thing is that I feel like I’d want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for at least maybe two thirds of the week, even if I didn’t have a ticket, but oh my goodness, selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work, I like, even if I told work, Hey, I’ll, I’ll fund it from a financial perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but can I, I’m kind of a not work for a week and not have to take vacation. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be a tough sell. I don’t know if I,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I mean, I mean, for me, like I’m trying to just justify the large expense of the trip and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of work on, you know, OS 10 review. So that’s like, it’s, it’s like a business trip. I have to take off from work
⏹️ ▶️ John from my real job. That just, you know, it’s vacation from that, but it’s like, am I going to
⏹️ ▶️ John spend a week of vacation and also spend all this money to do this thing? It has to be in service of something. So I need
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, it can’t just be like, oh, I just want to hang out with my friends. Like if, yeah, if I was, if, if, if money
⏹️ ▶️ John was no object and I didn’t have any other responsibilities, you’d just go there to have a fun week. Right. But even if,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if I didn’t have a ticket, which some people did last year, but I don’t I don’t think I have that luxury
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah I don’t know I’m 50-50 knowing me I’ll cave but and go but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that’s a tough sell but it sounds like Marco you’d almost certainly do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would definitely go but I I would really I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would probably end up being really bored during most of the days so suppose they because last year they released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the videos what was it like like the evening or like the next morning there were the videos from the previous day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it was like it wasn’t real time was it was pretty soon afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right I think it was within 12 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah something like that so you could like you know you could on any given day you could watch like the previous day’s videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah maybe I could do that but where am I gonna do that in what context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like am I gonna sit around him in a hotel room alone watching videos all day like that’s gonna suck
⏹️ ▶️ John right that well you’d go meet people for lunch and meet people for dinner but you know but yeah the rest of time you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in a hotel room or in some coffee shop or something trying to stream videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right then that sounds that sounds like a pretty miserable week honestly so you know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alternative that’s pretty bad if people if there’s a lot of people who are in this situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who were all who all end up going and you know then maybe you could try to organize something a little more reasonable than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the day times and you know for the night doesn’t matter but no one’s in Moscone after after 4 p.m. anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what do you do from 9 a.m. to 4pm. That’s the big question. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t watch the videos, when do you watch the videos?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the great things about being there is that your job during that week is to go to the sessions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you will go to the sessions. Maybe not all of them, maybe not every slot, but you will go to the sessions. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing else to do that week but do that. Whereas if you wait until after that week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re like, oh, well, I’ll watch the sessions when I get home. I’ll watch sessions later in the year, you’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably never do it because there’s never a time where it’s your job to watch that session.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And there was all WWDC last year, which from everything I’ve heard was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very good. So you could presumably go to that and spend your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time there during the day. But I agree. And the other thing to consider is that despite San Francisco being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this hotbed of internet everything, the hotel Wi-Fi in any hotel I’ve ever stayed in is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy as every other hotel anywhere in the country.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s miserable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So what do you do to get the videos, even if you could get them? I mean, you’d have to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to… Marco, would you go to Starbucks to get the videos?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I would probably just ask like Macworld or an office that’s nearby that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends with. I would just ask them if I could go to their office and use their internet connection to download all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, that might be the answer, right? The answer might be small groups of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who know someone in San Francisco get together at various people’s offices or apartments and have little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parties or gatherings or Wi-Fi download sessions there. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that’s not really like a big community event. It breaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up into smaller communities and it also makes it much harder for people who don’t know anyone yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are new to the community, who don’t know anyone in San Francisco don’t know any one of these big companies, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it much harder of a sell for them to do it to be any part of this, really. And that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shame. And so, it’s one thing, like, we can go out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yeah, Jason Snell already said we could use their office. So, we know if we went out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, we’d have somewhere to go. But that’s not going to apply to everyone. And that’s… Right. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an unfortunate situation that it has to be limited like this. But, But, you know, unfortunately it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are no bigger venues. There are no, you know, there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they could find a bigger venue, like do you really want a conference with 20,000 people? Like, you know, we’ve been to those. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Southwest is giant and it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, isn’t it spread out over all of Austin? I’ve never been, but my understanding was it’s like a gazillion different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locations all around Austin. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they pretty much started spreading out to like, you know, now you have to like take buses across the river
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go to some weird hotel for session one and it’s like, it’s so, it’s so weird. I mean like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the problem is that this, this does, it’s like forums, like discussion forums have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain sizes above which they just do not scale very well. And once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the community gets beyond that size, there’s kind of no turning back, there’s no rescuing it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just gets out of control. And you know, conferences are a similar thing. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain natural sizes after which it’s just really, really hard to make it good and to make it work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they definitely have reached that point with WDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We see how it’s very hard to get into a lot of the sessions, because there’s lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the door. You can’t even get into so many of them. It’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bursting at the seams. can’t really make it bigger and have it be the same kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s lots of you know they could try to split it up into various ways but then that kind of ruins other aspects of it as well including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that some of the community aspects so it’s just there’s it’s one of those things that there’s just no good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option here we just have to pick between bad options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and on that bombshell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking of picking between bad options what about those m3 colors