66: Boiling A Pretty Big Lake
22 May 2014Beats and headphone alternatives, Nintendo’s situation, iOS 8 predictions, and the state of the iTunes Store infrastructure.
Episode Description:
- The modern Apple-store experience
- Follow-up:
- Marco reneges on his recent praise of Beats headphones, then receives the saddest real-time follow-up ever
- Headphones mentioned:
- B&O BeoPlay H6: Great comfort, but not sound.
- Beyerdynamic DT-770 Pro (32-ohm version; Casey's headphones) for very good sound at a great value (when the price drops to $175).
- Sennheiser PX 200-II i: Marco's favorite portable set. Great portability, clicker, and value, but poor sound and durability.
- More picks from Marco
- Ultimate Ears TripleFi 10 (Casey's earphones)
- Net Neutrality
- Nintendo's sad trombone
- Nintendo in Crisis
- PS4 outperforms Xbone
- Game Controller Programming Guide
- Nintendo 64 Accessories
- Kinect-free Xbone
- Beginnings of WWDC predictions
- Odwalla
- Healthbook
- The Prompt on Carousel, one of their many photo-management-related episodes
- The Infinite Version
- Casey and Marco explore mixed metaphors... politely. Ish.
- _ on the state of the Apple community
- WebObjects
- Fnd.io
- Multipath TCP
- After-show:
- iOS 8 split-screen multitasking
- John obliquely discusses some Overcast complaints.
- Wearables. Sorta.
- More on headphones.
- John was wrong about something.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember when Twitter was good?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, Twitter itself, the service is still mostly okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But God, the decisions they make are terrible. You know what I’ve noticed lately, by the way? Maybe I’m just waking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to five years ago, but I’ve done a couple of searches recently for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotels, like for WWDC and things like that. And I was looking at Facebook recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they were putting in ads for the destinations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was searching for when I was not even anywhere near Facebook at the time, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s the new Internet. That’s the modern privacy economy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now I’m extremely, so the net effect from that is that if I do look at Facebook,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I look at it and then I log the hell out because I feel like that makes a difference, even even though it probably doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t, yeah. I mean, this is just like the boil the frog analogy. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point we all say, oh, we can’t do this, this is too creepy. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months later, that’s fine. And then move on to the next creepy thing. And Facebook and Google and all these companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make money based on how creepy they’re willing to be will always get more and more creepy over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s how they will keep making money and keep staying ahead of each other in the competition and keep their numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growing every quarter. It’s a whole business built on how creepy are you willing to be? And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take small enough steps, it’s pretty easy to justify pretty much anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, anyone do some follow-up? Actually, let me, since I’ve brought it up, let me interrupt you by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have recorded this on Monday, the 19th of May. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we did that because our schedules over the next couple of weeks are a little wild, but regardless of when we release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, if anything- wacky wild case. Something like that. Regardless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we release this, if something we say sounds really really stupid because of some news that has just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently come out, it’s because we recorded this on Monday rather than our normal day. And clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why we sounded stupid and it couldn’t possibly be because we actually said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and that would be the only reason why we ever say anything stupid. It’s only because we record the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple days before we post it usually. That’s that’s the only reason we ever get anything wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not gonna bring up finals. So tell me about Beats headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So last week I kind of defended Apple’s supposed acquisition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Beats, which we still don’t know anything about and we still have no confirmation about. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defended it basically saying that Beats is actually a really strong headphone brand and that their headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they are not what audiophiles want in a headphone. They are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appealing to a lot of people. And well anyway, so today I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spent the most time that I’ve ever spent with Beats headphones because I had to go back to the Apple Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, what’s going on? Is it anything worth sharing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the the iPhone 5 sleep-wake replacement program. I wanted to get mine replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I wanted to have a very long life for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing. Okay. So anyway, so I went to go pick it up today and you know like everything you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it at Apple Store these days this is probably hits on topic but everything you do it on Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days takes like 45 minutes because there are certain things that you can’t really make appointments for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like picking up your phone from repair there are other things that you can make appointments for if you’re willing to make an appointment 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days ahead of time and then you get there and it doesn’t really matter that you made the appointment because they are already backed up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it still takes 40 minutes before anybody will see you like a doctor yeah and they do this weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you go to the person, well first you go to the person at the front door who seems to be doing nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they tell you to go back to the to you know Ivan in the back or whatever and go register with Ivan back there with the line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people. So you go in the store and you think you’re getting somewhere then there’s this big line of people behind some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guy with an iPad and eventually you get to him and you tell him what you need and he’s like alright here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand here at this table and wait and we’ll have you know Jerry come out and talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you. And so then you stand and then you’re like, all right, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, five, 10 minutes in, like, can I move from this table? Like, what will happen if I go look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptops over at that other table, or go start playing with the headphones at the table over there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you just kind of have to sit there standing around, like, waiting and playing this game, like, oh, maybe I’ll just go over there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen for my name and look for someone walking over there. It’s a really weird experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely get the the feeling that Apple retail stores are not only having trouble keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with the customer volume that they get, but not doing a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good job with the solutions they’ve come up with so far with creating good experiences for people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I no longer enjoy going to the Apple store. It’s getting closer and closer to going to the DMV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in experience, quality, and things I would try to avoid. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really because you’re an East Coaster and we’re too, I don’t know, organized.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we like order too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like lines. Exactly. I don’t know. Apple stores are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, like the epitome of California. Hey, man, it’s cool. Just wait here for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while. It’ll be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’ve never enjoyed going to Apple stores. I want to get in. I want to get
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And it’s just, they make it impossible. It’s like a game. You just have to try to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seriously. I will say that the Apple Store app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lets you buy things, that is really nice, but everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else about the experience is pretty crummy these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, so I had some time for my pickup that’s supposed to only take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five minutes. I had probably a good 20 minutes in there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went back to the headphone tables I mentioned last week. Figured, well, you know, it was only two tables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from my designated spot where I was supposed to stand, but there was nothing. So I figured, you know, oh well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll see what goes on. And it turns out they did find me, it wasn’t a big deal. So, nice top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tip for all you life hacks out there. So I got a chance to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the headphones they had. I made it a point to try every single one. So it was probably a total of, I don’t know, maybe 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sets. Something like that. And the good thing is this time there was a song on most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPods. There was the Foo Fighters’ Walk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is a great song from a great album from a great band. And the good thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this song is that I actually knew it. Normally I go to the iPods in these stores and I don’t know any of the songs on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And they’re all crappy modern pop songs, which makes it very hard for me to judge sound quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m always afraid to plug my own iPhone in because it looks like the headphone cable has some kind of security attachment on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as well. So I’m never willing to plug my own phone in to use my own music. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was able to compare this song that I know very well. I know how it’s supposed to sound on good headphones. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a pretty rockin’ song. It has a lot of bass, a lot of everything really. It’s a very all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the spectrum kind of song. So it should give me a pretty good idea of how things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound. And I tried every headphone they had that worked, which is another problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco About a quarter of them just didn’t work. A lot of them, like, they weren’t plugged in maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they had noise cancelling and the batteries were dead, or whatever the case, doesn’t matter. Most of them I was able to try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the beats had such an incredibly distinct sound. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by that I mean it was all bass. Like all, all bass. It was shocking, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this Foo Fighters song, in order to turn… I had to turn it down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far enough that it wasn’t blowing out my ears with bass, but at the volume… at like the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bass volume I could tolerate for a sustained period, you could barely hear the words that were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said. Like the bass was so strong and the mid-range was like tucked down under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, you could barely hear it. And it was really strange, and so I looked at a few other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I tried a few other sets and verified that they didn’t just have a crappy version of the song, it wasn’t some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird EQ setting in the iPod settings area or whatever. It was just that the Beats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones really sounded bizarre and I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody would want that. I said last week that people do like it and that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess this is a lot of the same opinion I have when I drink Starbucks coffee, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, it was rough. It was really rough. I tried every other set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had too, and most of them, you know, like I tried all the Bose ones, Bose has this new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line called like, Accurate Sound or something, which is comical, because it doesn’t sound accurate at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s all sorts of, all sorts of like other luxury brands. There’s Bang &
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Olufsen, there’s B&W, not BMW, BNW, and all these other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, oh please, BMW, never make headphones, because they would probably be terrible, and that would cause a conflict in my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, generally, I got the opinion, you know, if you ever go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a Bang & Olufsen mall store, they will,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, you get the feeling it’s like a Bose store times ten, where like they have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things around that, like, you know, they’ll have like this crazy expensive speaker dock, crazy expensive headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy expensive speaker tower fan thing, and all these weird, bizarre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boutique electronics that are ridiculously expensive and kind of cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gimmicky maybe, but probably not worth those prices. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Store is getting with all of its audio stuff. And to some extent it’s always been this way. The Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store has never been a place where you could go buy audiophile-grade headphones or anything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is… That’s how their entire headphone department is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s these like $200-$400 boutique, fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fashion-y, marketing-heavy brands that are not very good by most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measures, but just cost a lot of money and are fancy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wonder, I hope this is wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m a little scared this might be a future direction that Apple takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or makes a bigger push into with their retail efforts, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becoming this like fancy upscale boutique thing and other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has always had the reputation for being expensive and overpriced compared to other computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we all know because we’re informed on these matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple computers really aren’t that much more expensive than comparably priced other computers. Apple just doesn’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of low end that everyone else will market. You know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pretty much has the mid-range and high end of computers. In fact, really just the high end these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so Apple computers are not overpriced. They are expensive, but it’s a good value.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get your money’s worth for them. All the headphones they have in their store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not that way. They don’t have that same like, okay, well, they’re pricey, but it’s worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re pricey and it’s not worth it. And it is just overpriced, you know, kind of almost sham
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing sheep kind of stuff. Like all the stuff that other fans accuse us of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for being like, you know, Apple sheep or fanboys or whatever. That’s all like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who like the kind of headphone brands that Apple sells. Those accusations are a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurate for that and for the headphone business that Apple is doing now. And so I hope that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not going to go further in that direction because it scares me because I think that would actually damage their overall brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because people would start associating Apple with even more so with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overpriced stuff that’s not actually worth its price. And for the rest of their products, that’s not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people like those headphones, though. Like people see the value in Beats headphones because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John cool, right? Whereas when you show them your Mac, you’re like, well, I like it because of
⏹️ ▶️ John such and such operating system and build quality and whatever. And they’re like, meh.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you show them the Beats headphones, they don’t care about the sound quality. They like them because they’re cool. It’s like those hundred dollar pair
⏹️ ▶️ John of jeans. The stores that sell a hundred dollar jeans. Try to convince someone who bought a hundred dollar pair of jeans that your $25 pair of Levi’s
⏹️ ▶️ John is just as good. Like you won’t. It’s a different type of mindset
⏹️ ▶️ John of the experience. So I think the advantage that Beats has is that you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John convince a regular person that the Beats headphones are worth that. You do have to try to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular person that your Mac is worth more than a $300 Dell laptop, because they don’t see that. I mean, we
⏹️ ▶️ John see the differences, but they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, though. I think that most people that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have Macs would probably buy one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and spend the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that they think extra. If a comparable PC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is $500, the equivalent Mac in their minds is $1,000. I think a lot of people would spend that extra $500, so to speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. But the thing is, it’s $1,000 they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending to get this Mac, unlike spending just a couple hundred dollars on a pair of headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a much more approachable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey luxury price point in the same way that there are probably many people that would, if they could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy either a German luxury car or perhaps an Italian sports car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But as you keep going up this up this ladder, the jump from agreeable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to really nice is tremendous and more and less and less and less affordable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Think about Air Jordans when we were kids in the 80s and 90s, they were 100 bucks in the 80s. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John easily the amount of Beats headphones that were Air Jordans better than a half a
⏹️ ▶️ John basketball shoe that costs half as much. Probably not without the Reebok pump like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I wanted some of those so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, you know, you want them because they’re cool. They got the charge a ridiculous premium form and they were
⏹️ ▶️ John similarly priced to Beats headphones today adjusting for inflation depending on what
⏹️ ▶️ John particular model you were getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have incredibly sad real-time follow-up. This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Beats BMW headphones? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. There actually is a pair of Beats BMW headphones officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made by Beats licensed by BMW. Wow. I can’t even imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the level of douchetude required to wear those in public. Wow. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s just the BMW logo that adds that though. Beats by themselves are just beats. Once you add the BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John logo to it, it’s like, that’s too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s rough. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they have those, didn’t Porsche Design did like a hard drive enclosure for Lacey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, please, Porsche and Ferrari are the worst when it comes to licensing their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo for use on everything under the sun.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it wasn’t a logo. It was like they designed. I didn’t even think it had the Porsche logo on it. It wasn’t like a car type thing. Porsche has a design
⏹️ ▶️ John studio. They did a laptop like that, too. They didn’t look bad. Anyway, those Beats headphones is
⏹️ ▶️ John just logo branding. All they did was stamp a BMW thing on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And probably triple the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s on sale right now for only $150. Woo. you couldn’t pay me to wear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before I get miserable as well, anything else on beats?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think that’s it, just that the Apple store is a terrible place to buy headphones. I will say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far, the most comfortable pair of headphones there, it was night and day difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most comfortable pair of headphones by far was the B&O H6.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those like tan ones, with like the white cups and the tan leather ear cups. Extremely lightweight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very comfortable. They were in a class of their own for comfort. Unfortunately, they’re like three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or $400 and they didn’t sound that good. But those were great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the other ones, like people kept asking, oh, did you try like the BMW P5 and P7? Yes, I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the new Bose, the QuietComfort 15, the new Accurate whatever, which is a hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name, all those things, everything I tried sounded weird and disappointing to me in some way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or another. A lot of people have asked me what they should buy instead of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. I don’t have one solid answer for that because it depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what you’re doing. I guess I’ll write it up on my site sometime. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge is that a lot of times these luxury overpriced marketing brands will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than the better sounding ones in some of those factors like comfort or convenience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise isolation or like the clicker on, they’ll have like the iPhone clicker where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the big ones won’t. So it’s tough, like I can’t just give like one solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommendation. I would say in general there’s like five or six solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models. I disagree with the wire cutter on a number of them, but for the most part, it’s like five or six good solid models,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know, the AKG makes a bunch of good ones, Sony makes some good ones, Bayer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dynamic or Bayer Dynamic, however you say it. I love their stuff, the DT 770s would be a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick, I think, which Casey’s wearing right now. There’s a number of really good ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not that expensive and are very good, but it depends on, do you need them to be portable? Like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portable, if you’re gonna be walking around and you want them to be folded up and pocketable, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found anything better than the Sennheiser PX200 IIi, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunate because it’s mediocre in all other regards except portability, but it destroys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else in portability. Like everything that’s not an earbud, it’s way better. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can wear in-ear monitors or earbuds without a lot of discomfort like what I have, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all means do that because they’re way more practical. You can fold them up and put them in your pocket and everything. I just can’t wear those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m stuck with full-size headphones, but oh well. Anyway, before we move on to anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, we should talk about our first sponsor. It’s a new sponsor this week. It’s called Dash. It’s thedash.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. That’s thedash.com slash ATP. Dash is run by a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice guy who I met last year, and I can’t tell you why, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he did a really nice thing for me. Anyway, so this is thedash.com. Now he’s a paying sponsor, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his site is even better now than it was last year, and it’s really great. They’ve done a lot of good work here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dash is real-time dashboard for your website, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business, your life. It’s an online dashboard and it has all these little widgets. It’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a more deluxe, more robust hosted version of Panic’s status board
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like a web app. And so it’s really quite good. So go to the-.com.atp to see what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a bunch of different widgets pre-built for you. You can build your own widgets. They integrate with lots of third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. You can do things like watch your server statuses or watch the weather, watch the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news, analytics kind of things for your services for your products, whatever you can get. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also set up variations of your name to get vanity searches, your product name, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company name, you can search Twitter, Google News, all sorts of great stuff. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customize all these widgets. They support Apple TV, it’ll look good there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll look good on a Chromecast if you AirPlay it or send it to Chromecast. And all this stuff is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta just log in and try it out. And the good thing is you can log in for free. You can sign up with just an email,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free accounts, you can get one private dashboard, and you can also create public dashboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of like GitHub, where the public model is free, and then if you want private ones for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internal company use that you want to keep private, you get one for free, and if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pro account for just $10 a month, you can have unlimited private ones if you want. But everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets unlimited public dashboards. So check it out. to the dash dot com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Really great thing here and check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great guy behind it and I’ve tried it. It’s pretty fun to play around with and you can make some pretty cool dashboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to dash at the dash dot com slash ATP for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John He made dashboards on that page. I take a look at he’s got one for each one of us. This looks really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look awesome. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he’s a fan. He’s he actually bought a few sponsorships. I think we have him for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next three weeks. So yeah, he’s a fan of the show, he’s been following us for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so we thank him very much. This is really cool stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I love that for each of these dashboards there’s an image, and for John it’s, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the correct toaster. That is the correct one. I was gonna say, from my eyes it looks right. See, attention to detail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For mine, it’s a white BMW, as sort of, well, that could be silver, but it looks white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, DMW, for yours, it’s a picture of yourself, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a hysterical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commentary on what the three of us think is important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, this guy’s such a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you. He needs to add hypercritical.co to my server status widget. This
⏹️ ▶️ John looks really nice. Well, you can try it for free
⏹️ ▶️ John be public. Yeah, we should move our download stats to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right. So we have a little bit more follow up about net neutrality.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was just an article today that reminded me of our past discussions of net neutrality. It’s by,
⏹️ ▶️ John these guys confuse all the time, so I wrote his name, Ben Thompson. He’s a strategery guy, or a stratechery
⏹️ ▶️ John if he’s given up on strategery, but I still like stratechery. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John about net neutrality and it touches on some of the things that we
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned on the last show about how there are tech companies that are lobbying
⏹️ ▶️ John Washington for their interests in the net neutrality debate. And then there are the ISPs and all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other companies lobbying on the other side of this. And they’re spending way more money than the tech companies. And this article basically
⏹️ ▶️ John says that we shouldn’t all be as cynical as we are about
⏹️ ▶️ John making changes. Don’t just assume, oh, we’re never going to win or whatever. Because if we do that, it’s a self-fulfilling
⏹️ ▶️ John prophecy. And I don’t want to ruin the little arc of this article. It’s kind of short, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you should read it. He describes some of his personal experiences He said how he says, despite his personal
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, this is important for all of us in the tech community not to give up on this and not to be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing’s ever going to change, so why bother? And particularly how it’s the phenomenon
⏹️ ▶️ John of us doing that. Well, nothing’s going to change. Why bother? And then waiting for some terrible bill
⏹️ ▶️ John to come up or for some terrible thing to be proposed. And then everyone gets angry all of a sudden on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John and fills out these little petition forms. And I do this as well. Like, just tries
⏹️ ▶️ John to rally people on Twitter. and use hashtags and do whatever you can and write your congressperson
⏹️ ▶️ John and call them to try to stop whatever is like at the last minute, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John his comparison is like, that’s what we’re doing. And the other people have been lobbying Washington steadily for 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so our strategy of wait until the last minute and get all angry, it becomes less
⏹️ ▶️ John and less effective as everyone gets bored of our anger, you know? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m actually even a little bit more cynical than in this article in that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that even if we all have the right attitude, the bottom line is if we don’t have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John number of zeros before the decimal point and the amount of money that we’re throwing into Washington, it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t really matter. So maybe that’s the next level of cynicism that he has to shake me out
⏹️ ▶️ John of, but I thought it was a good article and I think everyone should read it. We’ll put it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so something we didn’t get a chance to talk about last week and perhaps even a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or two for that is that Nintendo is not having a good time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this keeps floating around the notes. I don’t know if there’s that much to add. I mean, I think the reason it went in there
⏹️ ▶️ John is because they announced some financial results which were bad and they made some projections about how many Wii U consoles
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re going to sell this year. And it’s not a lot. And it’s causing everyone to
⏹️ ▶️ John think about Nintendo again. And I don’t think anything has changed other than.
⏹️ ▶️ John us knowing now that the things that Nintendo has tried to do and
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be trying to do aren’t working, or at least they aren’t working yet. I wrote something
⏹️ ▶️ John about this on Hypercritical a while back about Nintendo in crisis. I went back and reread that
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it basically, that’s still my opinion. It doesn’t, nothing has changed. That Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John has the ability to get themselves out of the funk that they’re in because the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John was based on a premise that if there’s no longer a market for devices that mostly play
⏹️ ▶️ John games, Nintendo is screwed, but if there is a market for devices that mostly play games, then they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a chance. And so there definitely is a market for things that just play games, because the PlayStation 4 is selling like
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy, and Xbox One is selling pretty well as well, although they’re kind of changing their strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to keep up with the PlayStation 4. And even the 3DS isn’t doing that terribly, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wii U is doing terribly. But anyway, the point is that it’s not as if no one is buying things that mostly play games.
⏹️ ▶️ John People are still buying them. It’s still a big market. Nintendo has the ability to get themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John out of their current crisis. They’re just not doing it. So that was just a, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to go necessary but not sufficient again, but it’s a precondition for them getting out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the question is, what do they do at this point? Do they just keep trying to release games for the Wii U and hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that some game catches on and people buy them? The Wii U is kind of in the classic death spiral where
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t sell a lot of consoles Which means the third-party developers aren’t gonna bother making a game
⏹️ ▶️ John Games for it because the even if you sold to a hundred percent of Wii U owners Which you’re never gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John there would still be a small number and because there’s no third-party games People have less and less reason to buy a Wii
⏹️ ▶️ John U and just goes down down down So I don’t know what they can or should do. Mario Kart 8 is coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out soon. Mario Kart 8 is getting great reviews Everyone says it’s a great game. Is that gonna sell more
⏹️ ▶️ John Wii U consoles? Probably not. I mean, it’s the same choice as they had before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either make games that make people buy Wii U consoles, and if you, if third parties won’t do it, you got to do it yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John or figure out what your next thing is. I think Nintendo has enough money and stamina and corporate will
⏹️ ▶️ John to weather the storm of the terrible Wii U sales and figure out what they’re gonna do next. And hopefully, hopefully by the time they
⏹️ ▶️ John make their next move with either the next console or a revision of the Wii U or whatever, However, we haven’t passed through
⏹️ ▶️ John the period of time during which game mostly or game only hardware is something that people want to buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you were Nintendo, what
⏹️ ▶️ John would you do? Can I go back in time? Do I have a time machine or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you took over today and you had enough political power to push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through any change or initiative you wanted to, what would you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would start working on my next console, which will be comparable in power to the competitive consoles.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would do basically what Sony did this generation, which is look at what you did in the past generation and what everyone hated you for,
⏹️ ▶️ John what developers are pissed off at you about, what third parties are pissed off with you about, get all those people in the room, have them all tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you what you did wrong and how your actions have hurt them. And then sort of like an intervention
⏹️ ▶️ John and then take that information and fix all those mistakes. Sony did an amazing job
⏹️ ▶️ John with the PlayStation 4. And the PlayStation 3 had all sorts of problems. It was late, it was expensive, it was a weird architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Third parties didn’t like it. And so for the PlayStation 4, they brought all those people
⏹️ ▶️ John together and said, just tell us what do you think we should do? And they listened to them. They actually listened. Instead of being like, oh, we know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the best thing is. And that’s one of the reasons the PlayStation 4 is doing so much better. It was relatively inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t commit lots of money to a motion control accessory of dubious value like Microsoft did.
⏹️ ▶️ John They made the architecture much nicer for developers. They worked
⏹️ ▶️ John on their dev tools. They were nicer to third parties. and their reward is they’re the clear leader in
⏹️ ▶️ John this generation of consoles. So Nintendo needs a console that is
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same hardware level as whatever its competitors are going to be. That’s the price of entry
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can say, OK, then at the very least, we can convince EA to give us the next iterations
⏹️ ▶️ John of all its games. Like, make it a no-brainer for people to port to you. Like, well, we’re making a cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John game. It’s easy enough to port it to whatever the new Xbox is, whatever the new PlayStation is,
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever Nintendo’s console is. And for two generations now, they’ve been out of that conversation. And they’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John farther and farther out of that conversation. Whenever you’re gonna make a new game, you’re gonna be like, well, we’re gonna make it for Microsoft console, Sony console.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then maybe like a year later, we’ll think about making some terrible cut down port to go on Nintendo’s console. Last
⏹️ ▶️ John generation, they didn’t need the third party support because of the magic of the Wiimote and waggling your wrists and
⏹️ ▶️ John Wii Sports and all that good stuff. This generation, they didn’t pull it off. Their novelty with the game pad
⏹️ ▶️ John was not enough to get people on board and they’re in sort of a death spiral. So the next generation, they got to make
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive hardware. And if they can’t make competitive hardware, this is an option for them. They said, oh, they should get out of the hardware business. If they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make competitive hardware and decide they’re not going to be in the hardware business, I guess they should partner with somebody. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not my first choice, but I think about this a lot. It’s like, if this is not in Nintendo’s wheelhouse to
⏹️ ▶️ John ever do hardware anymore, go over to Sony and say, we really like
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ve done with your hardware. How would you like it if we teamed up on the next console and made sort of a joint Sony and Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John console Nintendo had some influence on the hardware and it was, you know, amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John great hardware that had lots of power, was inexpensive and innovative, and maybe had a VR headset or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then all the Nintendo franchises will be exclusively on that console. Again, I don’t put that as my
⏹️ ▶️ John first choice, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it because I look at the PlayStation 4 and I say, how great would
⏹️ ▶️ John it be if I knew that Nintendo was right now working on a Zelda game for that console? And they’re not. They’re working on it for the
⏹️ ▶️ John Wii U, which is is going to be, I’ll enjoy it as well and it’ll be interesting, but it’s kind of a shame that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to be that constrained when the contemporary consoles have so much more power.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s what I’d do. I would get working on the next console and make it competitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if Nintendo gets in a really bad place, they continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marching down the hardware path and that continues to go poorly and now they’re legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to, you know, circle the drain, mean, does Apple buy them?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I hope that that would be like terrible. I would not want Apple to buy them because Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not into games.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what if they want to be?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you can, you know, it’s it’s part it’s either part of your culture or it’s not. I’m not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that Apple doesn’t get games, but you know, it’s it’s like the what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John call it? That terrible book from the 90s is just not that into you. Apple that’s one of the notes and when
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s Apple and games, he’s just not that into Like, they’re just… Apple’s just not that into games. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they like them on their platform, they’re fun and everything, but all the other gaming companies, Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony, Nintendo, have people in positions of power who are really
⏹️ ▶️ John into games, who love games, who live and breathe games. Like, that is it. The same thing with any movie studio. Yeah, there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be a bunch of bureaucrats and suits at movie studios, but there’s also gonna be people who love movies at movie studios.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to have that. Not everybody. There’s gonna be some stuffed shirts in there and everything. You need to have people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with car companies, the car guys who just love cars. You absolutely need to have them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John thus far, I’m not convinced there is anyone high up in any position of power that has that passion
⏹️ ▶️ John for games at Apple, which is fine. Like Apple doesn’t have to be a game company, but it’s not, but I would not want them to buy Nintendo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that not only does Apple, not only is Apple like not caring about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games, I don’t think they respect games. And like, like I said this before, a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, but so I’ll just go over the quick version but basically like if you look at Apple’s history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how they treat games on their platforms both both on the Mac and on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know on the Mac they basically said we’re never gonna do anything to really make games easier or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible to bring this platform in a competitive way on iOS games came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there anyway for other reasons and Apple found themselves in the position of all of a sudden being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really pretty powerful and pretty important position in the in the gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world almost accidentally and the way they’ve treated it since then has really just been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of patronizing. Like Game Center is one of the best examples of this and just like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mediocrity that Game Center is together with the design that it had at first. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still look like that in 7 or did they?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in 7 it’s got these bubbles and stuff like every game that I have in a Game Center integration
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it worse. Like when I play
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Letterpress like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get I’ll get a notification in Letterpress that someone’s moved, and then I will swipe,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Letterpress will be the frontmost app. I’m not swiping on the notification. I’m just swiping to reveal Letterpress as the frontmost app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can sit there and stare at it, and like, oh, well, it said there was a move, but I don’t see it yet. And my solution is always
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the Home button, then go back into Letterpress. Then maybe it will load the move. Stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like no progress indication, long waiting times. A notification comes through, but the game doesn’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John it yet. Like, what? I mean, it’s great that Lauren didn’t have to write all this code
⏹️ ▶️ John himself, and it probably really helped him get out a game that was popular. And so it’s good for developers. But as a player,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate it when the little game center banner comes down and causes a hitch and frame rate. I hate it when Game Center tells
⏹️ ▶️ John me there’s a move, but I launched a game and it doesn’t show the movie immediately and I have no progress indication. And there’s so many games
⏹️ ▶️ John with integration like this that I can’t say, well, it’s just because that developer didn’t integrate with Game Center properly. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes games worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s always been like this. I got the feeling that Steve Jobs might have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might have been like a Steve thing where they would use like cheesiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kitsch to kind of patronize and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just pay lip service to things they didn’t really care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were being forced to address in some way or you know for some reason like they would try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appropriate you know the success of gaming to do their oh let’s this fun little game center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like every you can kind of tell like not only was their heart not in but they don’t really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and and it just it I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it resulted in this attitude that that was very clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like obviously Steve doesn’t give a crap about games and that shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the product, right? And it seems in all the changes in Apple, you know, in the last few years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I haven’t seen anything regarding games change for the better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re trying. It’s just that like, they don’t know the right things to do. It would be as if I, the
⏹️ ▶️ John music application or whatever, the thing that you play music on your, on your iOS device, as if
⏹️ ▶️ John it had a theme, like a music room and there was like little batons for conducting. and
⏹️ ▶️ John there was, you know, there was little musical staffs and a little guy with
⏹️ ▶️ John a tuxedo as the conductor. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and they understand, they understand it so much more serious. Like it’s not just the
⏹️ ▶️ John theme. It’s the idea that there needs to be this kind of window dressing. Like the games are
⏹️ ▶️ John a diversion and like almost every app is more serious. The photo app is more serious. They’re like, they understand
⏹️ ▶️ John like photos are an important thing. And we weren’t, we’re not gonna sort of put like a weird photo theme
⏹️ ▶️ John on there. I mean, iOS 7 has helped with that a lot. Like the old ones were a little bit more skeuomorphic and everything, but it’s just the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that gaming as a realm needs to have some different treatment because
⏹️ ▶️ John games are this other thing and no one is really seriously into it. Whereas music is like, oh, you’re really into
⏹️ ▶️ John music. We would never want to screw up. We want to show the album art big. We want to have a nice, efficient application
⏹️ ▶️ John because music is important and you want it to be powerful and have, you know, increase the capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to get your music anywhere, enjoy it, and show people enjoying it. And games, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re casual gaming type of company. So when they show people playing games, they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John shaking their iPod touch around, and some kid is playing some little game. Wow, look at that car, vroom, vroom. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Game Center itself doesn’t acknowledge how serious and what an important part of people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lives. And for that matter, I think iBooks kind of doesn’t acknowledge how important books are in people’s lives, because they’re kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of the old version of iBooks, anyway, a little bit of the, you have to feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in an old musty library otherwise books don’t count.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know with Game Center it’s very much about compartmentalization. It’s like let’s take this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of games that’s happening all around us accidentally and we’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean all this mess up and just kind of shove it in this drawer over here. That all you game things you can stay in here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t really want you to you know seep out. Same thing with Newsstand. Newsstand is exactly in the same position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not even worse because you know it’s just the you know Apple’s like okay well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we we have this you know we will benefit if magazine and newspaper people put make their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps here instead of making websites and you know we’ll benefit from that and and you know we want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want it to like you know look good for our platform so we’re gonna make this little newsstand area it’s exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing like this like this like cheesy kitschy like condescending skeuomorphism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that started out you know in previous versions and then in seven it really didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot better. It just, actually in many ways, Newsstand is significantly worse than iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just, you know, there’s no more wooden shelves. But it’s, now it’s like even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more invisible. And you know, there’s all sorts of other problems with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like Apple just like takes the things that they don’t want to really see, that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to to be prominent, and creates areas for them to be segregated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tucked away and hidden. Because they don’t, you know, to them it’s like this is this like sloppy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dirty juvenile or you know evil world of games or magazines
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah and like iOS is not, it’s a platform for certain kinds of games but it’s not for the kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of games that Nintendo does well and those are the type of games I like to play. Like you know console games,
⏹️ ▶️ John handheld games, games that are really deep, really rich, that have physical controls that you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and VR games may maybe a separate thing entirely because that’s the industry is experimenting with VR now
⏹️ ▶️ John and Sony’s got their own headset coming out. Nintendo could possibly do something interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John in that direction. We don’t know how well that’s going to work out. Is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have headset support for its iOS devices? Maybe they will. Maybe that’ll be the way you know games
⏹️ ▶️ John get into that. But for now all iOS games are things where you tilt your device or you touch your screen
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a fairly narrow range of things. And the games that I’ve traditionally
⏹️ ▶️ John been Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft platforms are still really popular. Just look at the sales numbers for the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 4 and Xbox one. People still want to play them and you can’t play them on iOS devices. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why should Apple be interested in getting that serious about games
⏹️ ▶️ John when it doesn’t have a hardware platform you can play them on? I mean, someday if they wake up and decide to turn Apple TV into a game
⏹️ ▶️ John console, maybe then we’ll have something going on there. But that hasn’t happened so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, even like last year, they added the game controller framework to iOS 7, which lets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other… It’s like they could have just gone the extra step,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made their own official controller attachment for their iPhones and iPod Touches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why didn’t they do that? And the answer, I think, is because they just don’t care that much, or they weren’t that confident in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, or whatever the case may be, they didn’t want to bother with that. They didn’t want to tarnish their product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line with this cheesy little game controller attachment. They’re like, okay, we will make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an API that will, of course, you know, if you want to make your own, you can. And of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course you’ll have to pay us to make your own. Uh, but that’s another other thing entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and of course the reality, which anybody could have told them, anybody who has ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco played video games ever in their life could have told them if the first party vendor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have like an official hardware add on, Nobody will buy it. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco official hardware add-ons like the Kinect, like usually those fail. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was, like we talked about a few episodes ago, the 32X, the Sega CD, the Jaguar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CD attachment, the TurboGrafx CD attachment, all these hardware add-on things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the old console world that almost all failed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, not all of them. I said almost. What was the memory pack for the Nintendo 64? I forget what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was. Well, that’s because it came with Perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John Dark. Yeah, they bundled it with a game. Yeah. And the same thing with the Rumble Pak, they
⏹️ ▶️ John bundled with Star Fox. But like, I mean, even the Kinect, the Kinect, you know, the original
⏹️ ▶️ John Kinect that had a pretty, pretty good sell through for a peripheral. Like people made games that
⏹️ ▶️ John supported the Kinect, which is fairly unprecedented. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remarkable and very unusual.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was, you know, certain like dance games and stuff that you couldn’t do without the Kinect. They weren’t bundled with the Kinect.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d have to buy the Kinect and buy that. And a lot of people, like, I think Apple would be overjoyed if, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they would be overjoyed, but anyway, it would be, have you ever seen anyone using one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John controllers attached to an iOS device? I’ve still never seen one in the wild. And so that makes me think that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not selling a lot of those devices and let alone games that like require them or take advantage of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like none of those are really like, I don’t even know if it’s financially feasible to make a high quality game
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, oh, by the way, to play this game, you need to have a controller accessory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the other problem is the economics of the App Store are such that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, there’s lots of, that could be a whole show of discussing the problems of economics in the App Store for developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in this particular area, one of the problems is if you make a game that requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gamepad, you’ve cut down your market size so substantially that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose 1% of iPhones sold in the past year, you know, 1%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those also bought gamepads. That’s probably extremely optimistic. I bet the numbers nowhere near that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but let’s say it was 1% Well, that means you’re also cutting your audience down, you know by 99%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by making any requires it in a market Where the only way to make any money at all is through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive volume That’s that’s a terrible. It’s just a terrible situation. It’s never
⏹️ ▶️ John It reminds me of the other story that I alluded to earlier I don’t know if you guys heard about that Microsoft is unbundling making
⏹️ ▶️ John a version of the Xbox one that you can buy without the connect to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I’d heard that
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah, and that’s that’s kind of a shame, but it’s kind of I mean, in the face of
⏹️ ▶️ John of Sony’s sales, I guess they felt like they had to do something. I believe they’re still keeping the SKUs
⏹️ ▶️ John that have it bundled, but they want to make a cheaper one without it. Bottom line is not a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John games are coming out that require the Kinect that are compelling
⏹️ ▶️ John enough for someone to want to pay an extra hundred dollars for the consoles. They’re like, all right, well, here’s version will
⏹️ ▶️ John shave some money off the price you don’t have to buy the Kinect with it and it’s kind of a shame because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Kinect was an interesting idea I think the second version of it is way better than the first
⏹️ ▶️ John and you could do interesting things with it it’s just that because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John selling so much fewer consoles than Sony is
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like they have to make this move and it’s really like I don’t know how I feel about it because
⏹️ ▶️ John in many respects like if they had just launched in every country instead of launching in
⏹️ ▶️ John like Sony’s and way more countries in there, I think I think Microsoft’s like 13 and something like 50 or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If their rollouts have been equal geographically, maybe the race would have been closer in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of sales numbers and they could have stayed the course. But instead, because they’re behind, they want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to catch up. But once you open that door, once you say that it’s possible that is any Xbox one out there without the connect,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about in this this generation having some game that someone’s going to put tons and tons of money behind
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be like a tractor that pulls, you know, that shows everyone how amazing the Kinect is. Because like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, now all of a sudden, you have to look at the ratios. It used to be I could sell them to 100% of the Xbox One market
⏹️ ▶️ John if I made a Kinect game. And now it’s like, oh, it’s 99%, 98%, 97%. Like, depending on how that SKU sells
⏹️ ▶️ John without the Kinect, the number is probably just going to go down and down. And so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And also, in the console world, it’s very important, as you said earlier, to be cross-platform. These games having such massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco budgets to be competitive. If you can’t be on PlayStation and Xbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna hurt pretty big time. That’s gonna hurt a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the Kinect games are always trying to be the exclusives. Like, yeah, of course you can’t port the same because no one else
⏹️ ▶️ John has the amazing Kinect. And same thing with Sony with VR. If Microsoft doesn’t have a VR headset and Sony does,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony’s gotta get people to make VR games or VR ports of games, and
⏹️ ▶️ John those are not gonna be able to be on the Microsoft console. And Sony, again, if you sell the most hardware, you’re in the power position.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, who cares if you can put your game on Microsoft or Nintendo’s consoles? We
⏹️ ▶️ John have sold x number of million consoles. You’re doing fine. Nintendo can’t even get those
⏹️ ▶️ John people to answer their calls. And Microsoft, it tries to make that same argument for the Kinect.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve looked at how well Kinect games sell in the previous generation and the current one. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just about addressable market. It’s about the fact that no one has found a way to make a game that will sell millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of copies for the Kinect. I hope Microsoft keeps trying. I hope what they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done can combine with VR stuff, can combine with the game pad stuff that Nintendo’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is the making some great next generation gaming experiences down the line with
⏹️ ▶️ John all the technology that everyone has experimented with in the past two generations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, what else is pretty neat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days? What’s also amazing these days is an old sponsor that’s back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s our friends at Hover. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names. Now, Hover’s a domain registrar, they’re owned by the people at Two Cows, which has been around forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, they, look, let’s be realistic here. Not every domain name registrar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pleasant experience to use and be a customer of. Hover is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just great. I use it for a lot of my stuff, like I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for about half my domains, some of the emails I use, all this stuff, it’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, it gives you easy to use, powerful tools to manage your domain so that anybody can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nerd friendly, it’s also regular people friendly. They also have amazing customer support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can call them on the phone. You know, you can do it online too, that’s fine. They have online support like everybody, but you can call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them on the phone. And if you call during business hours, which are pretty generous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real human being will pick up the phone and they will be able to help you. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a no hold, no wait, no transfer phone policy. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty amazing. Literally, you call them up and somebody picks up the phone and they can actually help you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish all companies, not just registrars, I wish all companies had this. And the only other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that I know of is Ting, and that’s only because it’s the same people running it. But anyway. So Hover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they take all the hassle and friction out of registering a domain and then owning it. we all know we’ve all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had those tech support calls from people who are less into web geeky stuff like us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who somehow they got themselves stuck trying to figure out DNS, and we have to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help them out. Send these people to Hover, trust me, you will not regret it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they also have fantastic email hosting in addition to domain registration. These days it makes sense to get your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unique email address. It is personal, professional, and cooler than your Hotmail or AOL address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Am I supposed to pronounce AOL as like AOL because of the new capitalization?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness! I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Well, it’s cooler than your Hotmail or OWL address for your business, blog, portfolio, resume,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever you use your email address for. You can get your own domain name, have your email be something at that domain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that can be taken care of at Hover. Really fantastic. So there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more I can say about Hover, and I will tell you in the next few weeks of ads because I don’t have time today, but it’s a great domain name
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you use coupon code Scrummerfall, do I have to spell that? I don’t even know,
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should probably talk about things that are probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen during WWDC. Think there’s gonna be a keynote? There’s gonna be a keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s gonna be Odwalla. Marco’s gonna complain about the fact that Odwalla has bananas in almost all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now do you think they’re gonna bring back my flavor?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I care about is that there’s mango tango. If there’s mango tango, I’m happy. That’s all I care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a very interesting email a little over 10 days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was an anonymous email that went via the feedback form.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the message is iOS 8 wishlist. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then there’s a series of items. Maybe, and a series of items. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person did not specify who they are, didn’t specify if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowledgeable about anything, didn’t specify really anything at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all other than to say that they need to be anonymous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For now. It said a non for now. So it basically has no credibility. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s an interesting list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. And so what I thought I’d do is kind of start calling out the items
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this list and we’ll talk about the ones that we think are worth talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we’ll just blow by the ones that we don’t think are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very interesting. So with that in mind, in the yes column, health book, monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heart rate, VO2 level. I’m not sure why it’s VO2. I’m assuming that’s oxygen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, is that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unless it was a fat-fingered CO2 level. Anyway, hydration level, sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and steps. What do we think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean I think there’s been enough smoke around the health book thing that it’s probably correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. You know, the details of which things are included. I mean, steps and sleep can both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be tracked by motion. That’s easy. You know, hydration, O2 and heart rate, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would require some kind of extra sensor that we don’t know about yet. So that’s probably a question marker, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, we know about it. It’s gonna be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earbuds. No, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John As opposed to this email, which is impeccably sourced as a random person who typed things into a feedback form.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. For the record, I was kidding. I knew that was fake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yes, I would say the health book thing is plausible. The details of it, we don’t really know for sure, but it’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we didn’t even talk about that in the Nintendo thing, how one of their strategies to get them out of their funk was gonna be health-related
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, which seems to be, everyone seems to be doing this these days. The fact that we have
⏹️ ▶️ John the technology, the networking, and the last piece we need is the sensors, and Fitbit has been sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John the spearhead into this, into health monitoring for individuals. It seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonably popular and have positive results for people, So Apple getting into it doesn’t surprise me. And of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, we’ve all seen all the screenshots of the health book looking app and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just an iOS 8 wish list, so we can’t talk about whether Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to have any devices like this, whether they’re going to launch this kind of like the M7 without any
⏹️ ▶️ John accompanying hardware. It’s like, oh, well, our phone has this, then these new APIs, and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then third parties will make sensors for it, or is it going to integrate with the iWatch later?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it’s a pretty sure bet that some health monitoring stuff is going to be in iOS 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. And I’m very curious to see what sensors, if any, will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provided for this. And by the way, real-time follow-up, VO2 is apparently aerobic capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you, KJ Healy, friend of the show. It’s for volume, right? So thanks for that, KJ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Healy. Next, transit in the Maps app, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Maps app. I would suspect this would be something they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do because they got dinged on it or they continually get dinged on it. But I think we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, maybe it wasn’t us, but somebody talked about it on one of the podcasts I listened to, about how hard that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Because to normalize all this disparate data across gazillion cities across the planet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not an easy task. And given that Apple does so well with normalizing all the data on their map themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not really too confident they’re going to get this right. But it seems plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s something that they want to do, whether they’re ready in time. Like I think they’re more cautious about rolling out something half-baked
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point. But especially in maps. Yeah. On the maps effort, Apple seems committed
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did not have a good initial showing. And hopefully they’re learning that the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way to do this is to do what Google does. You’re not boiling the ocean, but you’re boiling a pretty darn big lake.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what they have to end up doing. You got to put bodies in the ground. You gotta put resources
⏹️ ▶️ John towards this. It’s a super big pain. You can’t half-ass it. You gotta… There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no shortcut. And the transit is like, oh, the shortcut will be that we’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John have third parties do it. It’s a third-party opportunity. And people are like, no, we don’t like that shortcut. Google has transit.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t. You suck. So I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is true, that they’re working on transit. As for whether it’s ready in time for a WODC
⏹️ ▶️ John announcement, I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On-device Siri. See that? I would love to see that. So I assume what this means is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictation would take place on the device, which Android and Windows Phone already do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so do Macs, actually. And just not iOS devices yet, right? There’s still no way to do it on iOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right as far as I know. However, isn’t the download on OS X something like a little shy of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gig? Yeah, it’s like 800 megs, something like that. So given that Apple is ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obsessed with continuing to offer 8 and 16 gig devices, really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it seems like that’d be a lot of space to take up on some devices that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t have enough space. Well, I mean, it would probably just be an optional download then, just like it is on Mac. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people actually would care enough to use that? Probably a minority,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for those people, it would be really nice to
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to concentrate on getting their server side implementation up to snuff before worrying
⏹️ ▶️ John about adding another implementation to the mix. Because the problem with Siri is not that, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does everything over the network. Because for phone people, the size of data that it’s transferring is not that
⏹️ ▶️ John big. It’s just the server’s got to be responsive. They have to be available. They have to respond quickly. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John talk, record something, send it to the server, wait, and get a response to say, oh, yeah, forget it. We couldn’t talk to the
⏹️ ▶️ John server. Sorry about that. Try again later. That is unacceptable. And so I don’t think that experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of going to a server, it would be all that terrible if it just worked reliably and quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so hopefully that’s where they’re concentrating their effort. I don’t use Siri enough to know whether it’s getting worse or better or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But any time that fails for one of those, yeah, you said a bunch of stuff, and we recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but we couldn’t connect the dots. Yeah, I know you have a net connection. It just didn’t work out. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Any time that happens, it’s bogus. And I’m not ready for them to say, well, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John we a second implementation that’s all on device and you don’t have to worry about the network, you just have to worry about memory
⏹️ ▶️ John usage and storage area and whether this on device thing works. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s another area where Google has on device stuff working and their servers respond faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this list reads more like a list of areas where Apple needs to improve.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s a wish list, like every area where they need to improve, they should improve in all all those areas but
⏹️ ▶️ John I I don’t see them going for on-device Siri with
⏹️ ▶️ John I would rather see them address the server-side stuff because I don’t think it’s that crazy for phones anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John to just say yes it’s all service I don’t worry about it it’s you know we’ll get the data through it’s not a lot of data we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just make sure our servers are all available and fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean it’s certainly that would be nice I mean I would prefer they give us both really having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having on device dictation, like, you know, have the servers still do the smarts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, okay, we know what you said, but then what do you mean by that? Like that’s, that’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an area where the server side infrastructure could benefit a lot from from continuing to be server side with both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources and with, you know, just updating the information that it has and, and learning and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. And that’s, that’s very much like a big data problem. They need big data to do it. actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictation though, while dictation does benefit from the big data approach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can also do a pretty good job just having something local, as you know, by using all the Dragon
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you need more RAM for that, as I think Casey pointed out. Like, that’s hardware-wise, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the excuse has always been, well, more RAM requires more power, and it’s a battery thing, and blah blah blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but jeez, like, I mean, forget about the storage, which we’ve already complained about the 1632 64
⏹️ ▶️ John eternal trinity you gotta get
⏹️ ▶️ John ram you gotta get more ram on these devices you got like people how it’s just it’s unacceptable one gigabyte is not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough yeah and so like having more ram and if they can deal with the battery stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John i think that would open the door for on device what you’re talking about on device like i’ll just figure out the the text
⏹️ ▶️ John version of what you said and send the text up to a server which is even lower bandwidth and it can do the smart stuff of figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out what you mean by those words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right next Notification Center revamp more Siri like Google now and less a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list of notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boy, I would hate this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So where does the list notifications go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agreed The last thing notification center needs is for Apple to be more clever about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They need to become less clever about it simplify it Just give me a just straight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list of notifications would be better than what it is Now with like the confusing like all versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed and then some things just kind of disappear forever
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, no, how many times does a notification appear on your device and you do
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever the wrong thing is and you say what did that notification say again? It’s like oh, sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John sucker You’re never gonna see that again. Try to find it. Is it a notification center? No, is it a missed? No, cuz you didn’t miss
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You saw it and then it went away You know, it’s not They could be
⏹️ ▶️ John clever, but it Tried explaining to somebody like I saw a word appear on my screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s gone where is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? And it’s a hard problem. Like, you know, it’s trying to be smart about it. Like, I just think it kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t be done well. It’s the kind of thing that it sounds cool on paper, it’ll make for an interesting keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you know, as you see with things like Google Now and with Cortana. Like, you see the other platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this. In practice, it’s really hard to make that right all the time. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classic AI problem of like, it tries to be smart, but a lot of times that’s not really what you wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s battling against notification overload, because if you did just do the dumb linear list, like very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John that list would be crazy and people would just start ignoring it. Like they’re trying to strike a balance between just show you what’s important,
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of it when you’ve already seen it, and don’t ever present like this humongous list that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to scroll through to look, because sometimes people get a lot of notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how I would do it actually. Like if you look on the Mac, on Mac Notification Center, it groups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it by application, similar to iOS, but like they kind of just stick around forever until you clear them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very annoying actually. And you can kind of see like, okay, well that’s one approach, that’s kind of weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what would actually be best is for Notification Center to just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one combined timeline of notifications. So that whatever order you receive them, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order you saw them in on the lock screen, whatever order they came in, there’s a list that shows those same ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that same order. And maybe has a blue dot next to the unread ones. But they’re still there. even after they’re read,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re still in the list. I don’t see I don’t I can’t come up with any better alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s better all around because every every other one you come up with it’s like well it’s good for this use case but it’s bad for these three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use cases and like it’s if you just give it one big list I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the least crappy option.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they need to have that thing you’re describing accessible somehow I’m not sure it needs to be the thing in people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John faces but what you like you need life streams Remember live streams? That was a big trend back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, 90s maybe. To
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conceptualize… I once met a vlogger.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco To conceptualize
⏹️ ▶️ John your use of a computer… It was weird. By time rather than by
⏹️ ▶️ John file name or application or project or anything like that. So that anything you’ve seen or done on your computer, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could just scroll back through time-wise, kind of like the time machine UI, but you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ John cross-cutting across everything. like web pages you’ve seen, email that you’ve read, things that messages that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John sent, then you could just go scroll back through time and see things in that way. And what you’re talking about is a sort of live stream
⏹️ ▶️ John view of your interaction with notifications. And I think that should be accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you can’t find something, it’s I’ll just go back to your whatever, they’d come up with some buzzword for how they could call
⏹️ ▶️ John it live stream if they wanted. And here’s everything and just go back through it and you will see the events of the day as they
⏹️ ▶️ John unfolded. This is when the message came in and then you read it and then you know you replied
⏹️ ▶️ John and you did this and you know that like but I don’t know if that needs to be the thing in the person’s face because
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re they’re trying to do is make it so you don’t feel overwhelmed by notifications by making them go away that’s why they have the miss
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and the all thing and I think that does make for a better
⏹️ ▶️ John experience until like you’re like oh what did that thing say let me just go to the live stream and look at it I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I shouldn’t say live stream because it’s a terrible name but I don’t know what else to call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but that’s That’s what that’s how people use text messages though all the time and it’s fine like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Text messages are one giant chronological list totally unsorted. Just you know just by time no, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s by person It’s by person though isn’t it well yeah, okay? That’s fair but still like I know so many people who like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They they need to get a piece of information out of their text messages like if that’s the only place it lives And they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can just scroll up and just keep going they know roughly where it is And then they eventually find it, and that’s it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the man then about three
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabytes of messages Well, yeah, but the other category on their right I starts growing
⏹️ ▶️ John If only Apple could store those things in the cloud and when you scrolled it would just pull those messages down and yeah No,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a dream right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll get there All right. So notification center and iCloud clearing notifications across Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone and iPad I will say that for I messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Think it’s a little too quick to to fall back to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other devices, but in the last couple of months, maybe even more than that, if I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the midst of a conversation on one of my devices, the other devices oftentimes will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receive that same, a new text message, but generally speaking, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does any beeping or bonging or vibrating or anything like that, unless the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s assume I’m on my Mac, unless I haven’t acknowledged that new text message my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like 10 or 15 seconds. Now I think there should be a slightly longer grace period than that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because sometimes I’m especially on my Mac anyway, I’m looking at another window or whatever the case may be and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t clicked back to the messages window. But messages has actually been working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty well for me in this sense. But I agree that in every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other capacity, it would be kind of neat to have one unified unified timeline actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, your grace period is way more forgiving than mine. With mine, like if I’m talking to you via over iMessage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if the messages window is not my front most window,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the moment that comes in, it vibrates on all my devices. I get zero grace period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this thing reads even more like a wishlist item of like, here’s a problem I encounter using
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s cloud services on multiple devices, and I want Apple to fix it, but I don’t have anything to say other
⏹️ ▶️ John than it should do what I mean all the time. And conceptually, we talked about this when
⏹️ ▶️ John Messages first came out and iMessages first came out. Conceptually, the thing that Apple is missing is presence
⏹️ ▶️ John awareness, like figuring out where you are and what you’re doing. Because if they
⏹️ ▶️ John can have the concepts of presence defined API-wise
⏹️ ▶️ John so that each individual app isn’t doing its own crazy heuristics, like there was a framework for presence and
⏹️ ▶️ John an awareness of where you are and what device you’re near and what you’re using or whatever, then
⏹️ ▶️ John they could just improve that framework over time. And applications that use that framework would do the right thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John including initially Apple’s own. It would be a private framework, probably for a couple of releases. And who knows? Maybe they have a framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s supposed to do that, but it seems crappy. Like we were all talking about situations where
⏹️ ▶️ John because your messages window was hidden or because it was in the front, but you were looking at a different window,
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t go off on your iOS device, then you might have better luck getting messages in the
⏹️ ▶️ John web interface to Gmail, the little chat messages that come up. I have missed fewer of those than
⏹️ ▶️ John I have missed iMessages from my wife. Like she’ll send them from her phone and I’ll get the first one
⏹️ ▶️ John notification center and I’ll click on it and it’ll launch messages and I’ll converse with her and then I’ll go do something else and another
⏹️ ▶️ John one will come in messages and I won’t notice and she’ll be like why didn’t you respond to that one. I didn’t see it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS device because it wasn’t there because messages was open and it wanted me to say it was there but it didn’t even like or maybe bounce the icon
⏹️ ▶️ John once or something like it’s not they haven’t they don’t have it yet so I think they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a long way to to go there and I think this item for iOS 8, iOS 8 will fix this. Well not
⏹️ ▶️ John in co-op, not a, it won’t unless it has a cooperation with the new version of OS X and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of other things and this is just, you know. Yes, I would like this too, make it so, but it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a benefit more than a implementation.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been very good about milking mine, so to speak, but it is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And very off the wall, which is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refreshing. Yeah, they have some cool combinations. Actually, I should be honest, my sample was actually gone before
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so continuing this list that at this point absolutely confirms that it’s a a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wishlist and not a birdie telling us something they know. Unlimited photo stream.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, unlimited, just like unlimited bandwidth from AT&T.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything in tech, you know, that claims to be unlimited. That’s always true, right? Totally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, sometimes, like, think about it. Backblaze, for instance. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they actually managed to do it. They say it’s unlimited. Maybe it’s not. Maybe if I had like 300 terabytes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that someone would come to my house and talk to me. In person? So far, I have multiple terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I mean, maybe they’re relying on the fact that you can’t upload the ISPs.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long would it take you to upload a petabyte of data? It’s like, it would take a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so far, I haven’t hit a backplace limit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably also just the law of averages. My mom’s computer, I back up everything I possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can back up from that. It’s 37 gigs. I’m paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same for 37 gigs there as I’m paying for one and a half terabytes on my desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, PhotoStream, they don’t have that same advantage, though, because I think people just keep taking photos their whole life. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like with data, there’s some turnover. Like, you know, you’re going to, I don’t know what the turnover is
⏹️ ▶️ John in data. Maybe people delete their email after time. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John just doesn’t seem like it grows linearly. Like, maybe people aren’t putting their photos into
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop or whatever. Anyway, unlimited or not, yes, we all want PhotoStream to be better. we’ve had many
⏹️ ▶️ John past shows about describing how frustrating it is that with
⏹️ ▶️ John the ever pics gone and everything that Apple isn’t picking up the baton and saying, Don’t worry, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how many pictures you take, we’ll take care of keeping them safe for a fee for not a fee like at least
⏹️ ▶️ John give us an option at this point. Your options are not great and no one company
⏹️ ▶️ John is ready to take care of your photos forever or even try to make that promise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really think this is the kind of thing I mean, and you know, we’ve talked at length about this. The Prompt has talked at length about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more so than us, I think. Which is saying a lot. I think this is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those things like, Apple has to be the one to offer the photo solution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally. And it doesn’t mean they will. I actually am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that confident that they will. But I think that’s what needs to happen long term. I really do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many question marks about how they would do that, and if they would do that, and how they could pay for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, I think the biggest question mark is still video. What do you do with video? And the answer is probably you just omit it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PhotoStream or severely downsample it so it fits within the one minute sending limit, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. But overall, I just think if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at how people actually use these devices and what people’s expectations of their data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and its safety actually are, I don’t see any other solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would actually be good long term. just has to do it and they have to find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it and pay for it. And there are some shortcuts they can take that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially cut down on the cost and data volume. Like for instance, just don’t store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously don’t support RAWs and stuff from desktops, just don’t store the full JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality. If they store every picture at quality 40,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost nobody will ever be able to tell. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like that. They need to store the full quality one, otherwise they’re not really solving the problem. I don’t want crappy quality versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of the pictures of my kids saved. Oh, don’t worry, all your devices went up in smoke when your house burned down, but we’ve got really
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy quality JPEGs. No, I want the originals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but there’s a lot of headroom in the JPEG format. Like, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encoders, there is a ton of headroom. You can get the quality down really small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, you’re not gonna bring a full camera size picture down to 60 kilobytes or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can bring it down from, you know, What’s a JPEG off an iPhone worth these days?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like three and a half, four or five megs, something like that? Somewhere around there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could easily bring it down to one meg or less and be very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be transparent to almost anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, just like you can on a CD.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t like that solution. I think they should take RAWs. They just gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out the economics. Like, this is something that I think people would be willing to pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as it’s reasonable. And I think with $5 unlimited backup, it shows that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to get more and more reasonable over time, because photos are not getting bigger at the same rate that storage is getting cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, I think. So hopefully this will solve itself eventually. A more realistic wishlist item for
⏹️ ▶️ John this would be what we also talked about is for iCloud backups, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John allow it to match the size of the device for a reasonable price. Instead of being, oh, you get a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit free, And then we nickel and dime you if you buy another device, so you don’t get any additional storage and you just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep paying more. It would be nicer if they sort of rewarded their good customers who buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest devices, who buy lots of devices, by making each additional purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John help you towards iCloud backup for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what would be really neat is if Apple, and I don’t think they’d ever do it, but did a unified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup solution. So you’ve got backups of your iDevices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as big as they are, as much as you want. Time Machine now can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refer to either a local drive and or the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MobileMe Cloud or something like that. PhotoStream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes on either forever more or considerably longer than it does right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could just see how that would be so awesome. And I would pay so much money to just be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one place or pay one entity to make all of these backup problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go away. All right. Next on the wish list is auto downloading and updating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS. I don’t see how that would really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be feasible without.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t it already auto download it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is like auto updating. Well, here’s here’s one problem. I mean, like my mom can’t upgrade to iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet because she doesn’t have free space. And it needs like, you know, 800 megs or something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she doesn’t have that. And what I have to tell her to get that as well, if you want to do that, you have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete all your photos basically. Because she has an 8 gig iPhone 4. There’s like no space on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t this the one that you told her expressly not to buy? Yes, yes it is. Have you reminded her of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time I see her. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey how does that go over for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting to not go over that well anymore yeah yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an 8 gig iPhone 4 so it’s yeah they’re really the best of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway so I don’t see I think that’s implausible it would it would anger so many people to have their phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically update to like a major OS release like everything imagine if iOS 7 was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an automatic update like not just I’m gonna download it if it just automatically installed while your phone was charging one
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s coming, just not in iOS 8. Distant future, the infinite
⏹️ ▶️ John version, the Jeff Atwood blog post. Chrome is already auto updating, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the Jeff Atwood thing is it’s gonna be written in JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, not that. The other, he wrote a blog post called the infinite version about
⏹️ ▶️ John the trend of software that wants to update itself and you just accept it because that’s just the way it works. That’s the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s totally an Apple move. When that day comes, it will just happen and you’ll just deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s what happens with web apps, but people get pretty angry at that too. Just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime Facebook ever changes anything, you see like half the world explode.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they could make that the default and people would just accept it. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’re not ready for it in iOS 8. I don’t think this is gonna happen in iOS 8, but in iOS 15, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Separate game store from app store. I would love that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it would be nice. I don’t think it’ll happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, because if you look at the App Store now, and yeah, I agree. I don’t think there’s a chance of it happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just wish it would happen because generally speaking, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think if you’re browsing the App Store, you probably have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things in mind. Like, are you looking for a game right now or are you looking for something else? Something non-game?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What that would do to app store browsing would be pretty substantial. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t all be good, but I think it would be a net win. You know, if you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if games had their own top charts, assuming Apple’s going to keep the top chart, which I still think they shouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the top apps ranking lists are very destructive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to quality of software and economics and so many things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re very, very bad for a lot. But Apple seems to be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco committed to keeping them, at least by their inaction. So assuming they’re going to keep the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top lists in the App Store, having games have their own complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top list, like not just this one category with the little subcategories in the real App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you give it like its own entire store, and then it has a completely different standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like editorial, you know, what’s new and noteworthy, the top list, all that stuff, It would allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to have more granular categories, not that they would, but it would be nice if they would. Stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, that would be great. And then in the newly separated App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no games in it, it would be a lot easier to find apps, because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have all the charts and lists and features be cluttered up with games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem, I think, is that, first of all, very few people, relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking, most people would just visit the game store and the app store would be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty abandoned by by most customers I think for casual browsing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might not be a bad thing anyway cuz like you know how many of them were actually going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the app store looking for a new game to play and ended up buying like your PDF app like really like does that really happen a lot I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean it might but I don’t know I would guess not and then the other problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be you know how How do you enforce the difference?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re an app that has a game-type element, but you’re a very useful productivity app also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you put yourself in the game store to get more visibility? Would Apple disallow that? How would they judge certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are kind of on the borderline between, like, is this an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or is this a game? So I think overall, it would have a few problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple could overcome those if they wanted to, but I just think the chance of them doing this are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so low because it would be a massive change to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store. And if there’s one thing Apple has shown us over the last, you know, six, seven years, however long it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, it’s that they don’t really care to make massive changes to the App Store. Whether they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether they choose not to, I don’t know. But one of those things, either they can’t or they choose not to. And that’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clear. And I’m expecting no substantial changes to the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like at some point they’re going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piss or get off the pot when it comes to… That is not the metaphor, but go ahead. Well, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to be polite-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That was the polite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version? Yeah, ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, they’re going to have to… They’re trying to play flight control or get off the pot. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re going to have to do something, and I concur that I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is going to be the time for them to do it. But I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t understand why the outward, all outward indication
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Apple just does not give a crap that all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of their best third-party developers really are getting, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if disenfranchised is the right word, but getting grumbly about the ecosystem. And a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of the show, underscore David Smith, had a really, really good episode of developing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perspective that if we remember, we’ll put in the show notes that it wherein he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talks about kind of how the prevailing feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the community is very pessimistic and way more pessimistic than it’s been in a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. And I agree with him completely that there’s a lot of grumbling going on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more than usual. And I don’t know, not that it all comes down to the store, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you put a little money in everyone’s pockets and typically everything looks a little bit better as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a result. So we’ll see. I don’t know how much separating the game store from the app store is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to help. I know it’ll help make anything other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a game stand out a little bit more, but I think we’ve got much bigger, much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more fundamental problems than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean here’s the problem the way I see it. That if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are actually complaining, it’s the small potatoes for the most part. It’s people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like us. It’s people like underscore. It’s people who are in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple geek blogger community. It’s people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who read Daring Fireball basically. Those people are complaining. But if you look at what’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the App Store, all those people who are on those top lists they’re probably well look we’re fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is great like it our community has always complained about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store from day one they were we know we were complaining about some different things back then but it was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same stuff mostly the same people there’s always been we’ve always been complaining about this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if they fix some of the issues we have we will complain about different ones so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually think it’s that different now. Now there’s just you know some of the some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the directions that the app store was taking at the beginning like the like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco race to the bottom in pricing like some of those have just played out further than than they were at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think for the most part it’s the same it’s the same group complaining but the same complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know how much Apple cares about that because you know what I was saying earlier about how how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kind of you know put game center stuff and newsstand stuff like they put these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like in a drawer and just kind of forget about it. I think that’s how they see apps. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s how they see the entire third party development community. Not quite as severely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the same kind of feeling where it’s like we’re gonna have this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major community here that we kind of just we have to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them because of market forces. Like we have to interact with them, but we’re gonna try to compartmentalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as much as possible and kind of patronize it to the degree we have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just kind of, you know, I don’t know, just kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shove all these people together in this way that will make them shut up and get them out of our face so we can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing our pristine stuff over on this side of the fence. Like that’s… and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know this doesn’t represent everybody who works at Apple. There’s a lot of great people there who try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make developers lives better, but the actions of the company as a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indicate that that’s what they think of us. And that has been the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the entire history of the App Store. And I don’t see that changing. And I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a pressing need for it to change. Because if you look at it from the super hype executive’s point of view,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at it like from Tim Cook or from Phil Schiller, who I think the App Store is actually under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Schiller’s reign, I think. But I’m not entirely sure. It doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under. If you look at it from their point of view, they can every, you know, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quarter they can point to some number like, look, here’s how much we paid the developers overall. We’re doing great. We have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these apps in our store. People keep buying them or people keep, you know, putting coins into candy, whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fine. There’s no problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that metric based approach, though, is what annoys me the most because they get up there and this is what they say.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have these numbers to say. Here’s how many bajillions of dollars we gave to developers. Here’s how many apps we
⏹️ ▶️ John have in the store. And let me show you this awesome app that is great. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if they lay them all out like that, you’re like, wow, the app store is great. But what they don’t realize is the awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s great sells nothing. All that money is from bilking a bunch of whales out of
⏹️ ▶️ John money for in-app purchases for crappy games. And the number of apps in the store is high because there’s millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of keywords, spam, clone, piece of crap things. And like those three numbers are
⏹️ ▶️ John big on their own, but like together they don’t make an app store filled with awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John games and developers making a lot of money. You know what I mean? And I don’t know if they know that or if they think
⏹️ ▶️ John if they just look at their metric and say, that metric is good, that metric is good, that metric is good, therefore the app store is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think when they see these games like, look at this app, isn’t this beautiful app used for medical imaging? That sells like 10 copies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone is buying Candy Crush and getting their money sucked out of their pockets. And there’s so many apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look how many billions of apps we have. We have more apps. all crap. What
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all complaining about is because we realize that those things are so different. We want there to be a store
⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of good, high-quality apps made by developers who get a fair price for them and customers who are
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfied by them. That’s not the app store that exists, but the individual metrics,
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers look good. I really wonder whether they are fooled
⏹️ ▶️ John by those numbers or whether they just bring those numbers out say, well, this makes good for good PR, but we know internally, there’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. But if they know internally, there’s a bunch of problems, we’ve had a lot of time for those problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get fixed. And Marco’s right, there’s been a decided lack of action.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So at what point do we just throw our hands in the air and say, you know what, this is obviously the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, and we’re just have to live with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, some a lot of it, like if you look at the App Store, it’s obviously built on the same infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the iTunes store. And the iTunes store has the exact same issues where it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really change very often. It doesn’t, you know, it’s, it’s, if you look at the iTunes store today versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iTunes store in 2008 when the App Store was launched, it’s, it has not changed
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but, but any joker worth $99 can’t put a song up there that uses the same title as a Beyonce
⏹️ ▶️ John song and trying to make money by people accidentally buying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, that’s true, but, well, it probably isn’t that different actually. But anyway, you You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like anything that involves the iTunes Store infrastructure, for whatever reason, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s technical, political, whatever the reason is, it’s like it’s frozen in time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple can never meaningfully improve it, or they just choose not to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what that like, you know, forever ago Casey, our friend, I probably shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name him, but forever ago our friend told us a number of times that like iTunes store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not run by Apple, it’s run by some contractor in Virginia, something like that. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if that’s true or not. But, you know, if that is true, it would explain a lot. But either way, it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple doesn’t care that much about the iTunes store, or they are paralyzed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by some kind of technical debt that they haven’t repaid or choose not to repay, and just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change anything about it. Or whatever, whatever reason they don’t change anything about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re paralyzed by the success in terms of like the volume, Like those were some of those numbers they tried out. How many apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are there? How many things are downloaded? How many bytes? How many songs? And those numbers are so big and any
⏹️ ▶️ John interruption in that is so, you know, like, you know, this this should be something that
⏹️ ▶️ John the company can handle doing. But I think that as the biggest thing they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest online thing that money comes in and data goes out is basically the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store and iTunes Store combined, right? That’s their biggest thing. If your plan is
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to totally change that thing, and you’re an organization that feels nervous about
⏹️ ▶️ John your, you know, not so confident about your ability to deploy sort of web scale, Google scale
⏹️ ▶️ John services, you’re going to be like, my bonus depends on not being down on Christmas morning
⏹️ ▶️ John and letting people set up their new devices and be able to buy apps and iTunes things, and this works for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people have complaints, but like, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that the safe move is to just stick with the infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John you have and just keep improving it by bits and pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How long can Apple keep going with their web services feeling like they’re running on DOS and everyone else’s in this
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, the longer they go, the bigger it gets. Like if they had, they have these same feelings back when the iTunes, when the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store didn’t exist and the iTunes store was half the size and now just the problem keeps getting bigger and bigger over time. And so the longer
⏹️ ▶️ John they wait, the harder it is to replace it with something better that also happens to work at that scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just by Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, and I think we’re all losing sight of the fact that it’s only a matter time before web objects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a resurgence because clearly that’s what’s going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t even know if they’re still using web objects. Who knows? It doesn’t. They
⏹️ ▶️ John On the back end, like we can see the the URLs and the web page, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could have been legacy URLs. No, probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. As my extremely limited understanding, influenced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in part by friends of Bertie’s and things in birdies occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is all mostly web objects as far as I know, if not all web objects in the back end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, that probably, the language might not be the problem. I think it’s pretty clear the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just cultural within Apple. It’s like they, for whatever reason, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just do not consider it a priority to modernize these systems in a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major way or to make significant changes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stores themselves or the way they work to benefit users and developers in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a substantial way. They just don’t care. That’s the reality of it. They just don’t care. Jay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Haynes Well, and I wonder if part of the reason they don’t care is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my understanding of the Google Play Store, that is so full of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I should call it spam, but full of things that probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t belong. And you can define that however you’d like. It’s an even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse Wild West out there. And so, since nobody’s showing them up and making them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look bad, and additionally, since so many really hot apps are still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iOS first, like Instagram is a great example, which is quite old now, but take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instagram. What’s compelling Apple to make it better? A bunch of whiny nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking on a podcast that maybe none of them listen to anyway? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t see what the impetus is to really make it better from their point of view.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a good point. I think we would all agree that they still have the best store, as crappy as it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be, because the problems are worse elsewhere. And so Apple responds
⏹️ ▶️ John to the competitive pressure Android getting better? You know, if you look at the past, I past major
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS versions and look at the features they’ve added, a lot of them have been an iOS first
⏹️ ▶️ John and that competitive pressure really had, you know, when Apple’s deciding what’s going to go on iOS five, what’s going to go
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS six, you know, strategic and competitive things like strategic is like, Oh, we got to do maps on our own because we
⏹️ ▶️ John hate Google now and you know, notifications. Uh, why did they get those? Why Android hadn’t for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while and people wanted them. So they had to do something like, you know, they, Apple can can add lots of different features to their OS. They
⏹️ ▶️ John very often choose to add ones that competitors had before them because of competitive pressure. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so who is making the better curated, more pleasant, less spam-filled
⏹️ ▶️ John app store? Nobody, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there’s, what is it, Findio, FND.io. Isn’t that MuteWinner that did that?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m saying like, which other platform? Like, I mean, maybe Windows Phone because it doesn’t have a lot of apps, so
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them in there. Like, I don’t know. I don’t want to make fun of Windows Phone, but. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. Right, so back to this list, which the longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we spend going through it, the more I think it’s not actually somebody with knowledge. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think at this point it’s pretty clear. Instead of going to the next item, is there anything in the remainder of the list that we
⏹️ ▶️ John think is interesting enough to talk about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the one month auto-delete messages thing could be interesting, because we’ve talked before, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the prompt, we’ve talked before about the issue of people’s text messages getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big, because what ends up happening is somebody messages you a photo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that photo sticks around in your messages forever until you delete that entire conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I think you can delete individual items but nobody ever does. So that photo sticks around forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just takes up space on your device. And so having some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of auto-delete I think is a solution. I don’t think it’s the solution. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution, like John you mentioned earlier, is to store those things in iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just you know Have some kind of retention where you know, maybe you don’t delete,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe you don’t delete photos after a month Maybe you keep somebody’s photos for the last year
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just keep everything how big like people aren’t gonna use It’s not like you know people saying all gonna use gmail as
⏹️ ▶️ John a file backup is gonna email myself things like I don’t think anyone’s Gonna exploit it by saying just just send
⏹️ ▶️ John me through I message all the photos cuz Apple will start them forever It’s just text mostly. Yes, this picture is in there, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John just bite the bullet. Look, the battery in these iOS devices is going to run out in like three years.
⏹️ ▶️ John This thing’s going to be dead. They’re going to buy a new one because technology is advancing. They’re going to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you more money to store all our messages forever. Their text and plus a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you clearly never exchange text messages with me because they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way heavy on the images and way light on the text.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but even total, how many years, since 2007, you have like three gigs or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what it was, because I have since deleted most of
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but you had like three gigs. It’s not that much. If it really needs to be, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John people would be willing to pay some sort of thing of like, Apple keep all my stuff forever, and the default could be delete after a year or
⏹️ ▶️ John two years or something reasonable like that. But yeah, like Marco said, deleting off the device is so primitive.
⏹️ ▶️ John If only there was some other place we could put text. It’s like the server, just stick
⏹️ ▶️ John it up there. when I get to the end of the scroll thing, pull them down from… I just… like…
⏹️ ▶️ John basic cloud stuff that we all take for granted is like, well, of course Apple can’t do that. They’ll just have to delete them off the device
⏹️ ▶️ John when they get too old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the sad part. They can’t! Like, they have shown us so many times they actually can’t!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s embarrassing. It’s like, what… like, they’re one of the most… they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly probably the most influential tech company in the world. They are one of the biggest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the most successful. I mean, they are on top of their game in so many ways, and yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it comes to touching something on a server somewhere, they just… Again, it’s like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco living in the DOS days. And certain parts of their infrastructure are great. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the push notification system is really good. It’s rock solid. Most of the… I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, maybe in its first few months, it might have had some problems, but it’s been rock solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me the entire time, like most of they have like these couple of things that are amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then everything else is just like, you know, half assed, crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreliable, or in or, you know, relevant to this part of the discussion, just extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited in ways that would seem that would seem like archaic and too limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the internet 10 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John or built on a framework that like doesn’t acknowledge the existence of servers Like it’s built on a framework that’s entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John a client-side framework, and then there’s some kind of like shim or adapter to get it. Like it’s not sort of like web-native.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Right. Even as native as you think of like a stupid infinite scroll web
⏹️ ▶️ John page that when you get to the end, it makes an AJAX request and pulls down some more data and sticks it in.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, no, no. That’s too primitive. We have a framework that deals with this. Of course, it works only client-side. And if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull it down server-side, there’s not even any good hooks for that. But you know, and then when they try to take something like that, like, oh, we’ll make core data,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll also make it work over iCloud. It didn’t work out all that great so far either. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying they have to be web first and do all their UIs in HTML and JavaScript, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every API they make, every framework they make for dealing with data at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John should have some acknowledgment that it may be useful for some or all this data not to be local
⏹️ ▶️ John and build that into how the framework works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know what I just thought of is I’ve met a handful of Apple engineers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, maybe between five and 15. And every single one of these people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and firstly, they’re all software engineers, and they’re not they’re not hardware engineers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but every single one of these people, I can’t think of any that have been anywhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers. And it’s extremely anecdotal and not really representative of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real. But I don’t know, do you guys know anyone that works at Apple on the server side?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. Are there that many of
⏹️ ▶️ John them? I’ve talked to some people who have done work on the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John back end for iCloud dot Mac type stuff back in those days.
⏹️ ▶️ John So those people are there. But I mean, we’ve talked about the same problem so many times, like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going to do this type of thing, just look at the client side. Apple does the client side so well. Look at the things they do there
⏹️ ▶️ John and how they do them. Look at how they make new frameworks for solving problems and extend those frameworks and support
⏹️ ▶️ John them and fix bugs in them and replace old ones with new ones and they build an infrastructure from the compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way up for doing client-side stuff very well and they just you know it’s just constant improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John improving the language improving the IDE proving the compiler making new frameworks just on and on and
⏹️ ▶️ John on there’s no equivalent to that on the server side or if there is we don’t see it at all versus
⏹️ ▶️ John Google which does exactly that equivalent on the server side they have tools for storing data, for synchronizing
⏹️ ▶️ John data tools, for managing their data center on the hardware side. There’s just constant revision, constant improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John to every piece of the infrastructure from the bottom up. That’s all they do all day long, all year. Like, the whole company is built
⏹️ ▶️ John around that. And Apple does that on the client side. It’s just that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t invest in infrastructure on the server side in a way that is visible to us on the outside. It could be
⏹️ ▶️ John that they do all exactly the same things that Google does internally, and we just don’t see it, because why would anyone outside
⏹️ ▶️ John need to see these things? But I think that’s part of the culture. Why do we know about Spanner and Bigtable
⏹️ ▶️ John and MapReduce? Because Google told us about them and shared their knowledge and expertise and open sources
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and protocol buffers and like all these, you know, even Facebook with all its different projects
⏹️ ▶️ John and HHVM and Scribe and all this other stuff. Like that culture doesn’t exist at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t see how they’re ever going to be competitive with those companies unless they get some of that religion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s like what I, I think to summarize what I see from the outside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that Apple completely lacks hustle in the entire category of web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. Like you see like Apple is like pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the industry forward when it comes to hardware design forever and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of the software design as well. Like they’re they’re like dragging the industry forward like look at how awesome we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna force you all to keep up with us in hardware and software design. And then it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to things like web services and the rest of the industry is doing that to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple is just like being dragged along kicking and screaming like fine I guess I’ll do the bare minimum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might solve your problem on a web service and it’s like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they are only doing what’s required not often not even that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just putting no seemingly to the front putting no heart into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it no substantial effort that’s like you know above and beyond they’re just like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them it’s just a checkbox like fine I guess we have to do something with the web service eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here you go there’s no hustle there we don’t see like there’s never anything where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they launch it and then all of a sudden everyone else has to scramble to keep up you know Siri might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been one of those things but even then they got they got you know lapped pretty quickly after They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched it, like they just completely lack that hustle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the services end. Whereas they have it in other areas of their business, but you just don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that at all for services. Whereas then Google and Facebook and Amazon, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially Google, I think they’re the best at this by far. Google just nails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Google will destroy anybody with sheer server-side hustle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re so good at it. They just have like infinite server-side engineering resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just beat everyone up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web service capabilities and advancements and new expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set by other people, by customers because of how awesome their web services are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Google does with web services what Apple does with hardware design. And Apple just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not want to close that gap at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter asked why we don’t use a shared pages document for a show notes, and instead we use
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google thing. And it’s because I don’t like the pages thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked at it again just to make sure that I still didn’t like it when he did that tweet. And
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud, I went to Pages, created a new document, it opened a new window, it resized it, and it looked like a big
⏹️ ▶️ John word processing window from 1997. And I said, nope, close that
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Like, it’s not what I want. And I don’t even know, does it even support all the sub-eth
⏹️ ▶️ John edit, kind of multiple people editing in the document at the same time with different colored cursors that we take
⏹️ ▶️ John for granted in Google Docs, which is like how old now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s supposed to, but I don’t know that it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s an example of like, those apps may be great, but mind share wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even going to consider them because I assume they’re not great, and I assume they’re not reliable. And interface wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re trying to imitate a desktop application, and that’s not what I want out of a web application. I want something that I can open
⏹️ ▶️ John in a tab that we can all type in at the same time and Google provides it and it’ll be up and fast and reliable and won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do weird things and it’ll work in whatever browser I try to use it in. Right, it’ll just be a little bit creepy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, whatever. Like the reason we’re not using Pages, I think, Casey suggested it and you said you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to do it, I said, no, it’s not because I hate Apple. It’s because I know Google Docs
⏹️ ▶️ John works and it’s reliable and like, you know, it’s very difficult to gain that trust back even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you match it. And even if you’re better, it’s hard to gain that trust back. It’s like, why does everyone use Google Hangouts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they work. Because it’s a way that people can communicate with each other. And Google introduced this thing, and they’ve steadily
⏹️ ▶️ John improved it. And people have learned that’s the thing that works. Everyone gets a web
⏹️ ▶️ John browser. If you can’t figure out what a web browser works, just get Chrome. We know that’ll work. Not too hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to set up. And they get the job done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see. At some point, at some point, Apple’s got to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this seriously. And maybe they’re taking it seriously already, but they got to show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone outside of Cupertino that progress is being made. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple’s MO to be self-deprecating or really admit things are wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless they’re pretty sure it’s already fixed. man, some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even state of the union, but some sort of nod that says, Hey, guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is pretty crummy, but here’s what we’re doing. And here’s what’s coming, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see WWDC if that’s if that’s a card up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their sleeve. But I don’t know, running out of time on on that. And we’re actually kind of running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on out of time on the show. So let me scoot forward. Cellular fallback was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe category on this wish list. That has appeared on and off in betas of various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of iOS and I have always loved it because and cue the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First World Problem violin music, when I walk out of the office, if I’m fiddling with my phone after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our office is on the third floor of the building, as I walk down the stairs and eventually out of the building,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of times my iPhone will try to cling to the office Wi-Fi and I’ll be trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to peruse Twitter or something like that and I can’t get anything. I don’t get any response
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back because my phone is being too persistent clinging to Wi-Fi. And there was a brief window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time, like I said, when on a beta you could tell it, you know, just go ahead and fall back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cellular if you’re not really getting an answer quick enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t that what multipath TCP is for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe so, but now you’re outside my wheelhouse. I’ve heard of it, but I’m not really sure about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And man, I would love for that to come back and be a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s supposed to be in 7. Maybe it just doesn’t work as well as we want? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and I think that I don’t know, I’m waiting for John to correct me, but I think multipath TCP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is supposed to help with there. Isn’t that supposed to be like two different you could use cellular and Wi-Fi simultaneously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for speed boost? I don’t know. I should look this up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Dash, Hover, and NatureBox. And we will see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to accidentally take my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually wrote down a couple things. I have to look back and see if any of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are worthwhile. Oh, what are we going to do about interapp communication?
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t even on this person’s wish list. He doesn’t care about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want to talk about that weird iOS 8 side-by-side on iPad thing that came up last week? Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, shouldn’t we talk about it next week show? We’ll do like real predictions to talk about the whole keynote. This was a good overview
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS 8, but we need to like say hardware announcements, what software
⏹️ ▶️ John announcements, just the whole nine yards. New Mac Pros. And that’ll be our last chance before WWEC
⏹️ ▶️ John for next week. So I think we should save iOS side by side, because I think it’ll come up there. Yeah, maybe. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s something that’s, well, I don’t know if it has any more credence than an anonymous email,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t know. What’s his name have it on 9 to 5 Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s I think the only reason anyone’s even talking about it is because Mark Gurman had it on 9 to 5 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has a really good history. Like he is a pretty reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly how he likes to be known.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, sorry. Reliable leaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable leaker of rumors. Yeah, he has pretty reliable sources and he chooses, like the things he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chooses to report, his record is pretty good. So what I’m saying is he’s good at his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job. So for him to report this as what seemed like a pretty sure thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certainly some weight to that. Whether it will actually ship is another story,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it would not surprise me if the side-by-side thing has at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been tested for iOS 8 and is being considered for inclusion in iOS 8.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I would imagine by now, like a week and a half from the keynote, they’ve probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already decided whether it’s going to be there or not and whether it’s going to be mentioned or not. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, yeah, you have to think that something that big, if it appears in the keynote, people are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to expect it to ship. But in the past, things have appeared in keynotes and then just not shipped in the version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the OS. But they’ve been more minor features, something this big, I feel like they’d have to commit to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Since we’re talking about it anyway, I couldn’t possibly care less about this feature. I think it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe there’s, maybe they’ve thought of something that I haven’t, and it’s going to be amazing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the biggest problem with iOS multitasking is not side-by-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. It’s the file system problem. It’s sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data. It’s like, where do you keep the documents? Where do you keep files? Do you keep files?
⏹️ ▶️ John You would assume something would be part of this, though. I don’t have a place to put a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John so that this app can write it and this other app can read it, right? But if have them side by side
⏹️ ▶️ John and they made something like, Oh, well, if you drag it from one thing to the other, then we will make some temporary
⏹️ ▶️ John location, put the thing in it, like, like some plumbing to make that happen. I don’t know if that will be part of side by side apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when I see side by side apps, I immediately think I would like to be able to drag things between them. And if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not part of it in version one, I would hope that if they keep going down that road, they’ll work on that. And yes, that
⏹️ ▶️ John means that like the side by side part is not worth making that work. It’s whatever the underlying system is they have for
⏹️ ▶️ John having these solid application to share data between each other, but even a really stupid one that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like copy and paste with file, temporary file backing, even that could
⏹️ ▶️ John go a long way because that solves the problem of like, where do I put this so that when I leave this
⏹️ ▶️ John app and go into this other app, it can see it. And there’s no putting if you drag
⏹️ ▶️ John it between there, then it’s just like, oh, well, this is a single action. And we have a framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that handles a single action and it will do whatever it needs to do to deal with this sandboxing stuff to make that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that that would definitely help a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like there’s some sort of interapp communication fix that none of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can conceive. And as per usual, as soon as Apple shows us, we’re going to say, Oh, of course, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it works. But I mean, I don’t know if there isn’t any sort of interapp communication improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, first of all, Federico is probably going to just quit the internet. But secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just I don’t know what else what else is really really egregiously broken about iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and HFS plus I’d trade it to rapid communication for a new hospital system any day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone other than John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what else going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not really a lot going on right I mean this is the problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with trying to record you know our crazy schedule of working around our you know travel needs and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and recording basically three episodes in about eight days. There hasn’t been a lot happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during these eight days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re gonna miss the week before WNBC when all the good leaks come out. But anyway, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have to, on, what is the next recording, Thursday?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll just have to, we have to make sure that we go through all the things, hardware announcements, software announcements, and not get too bogged down in any one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like, you know, the split-screen iOS app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you guys met yourselves?
⏹️ ▶️ John For our homework, we should all have, we should all have lists of things that we think are going to be announced. And we should just go
⏹️ ▶️ John through our list and then we can go back and talk about the individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. OK, I’m sure that will work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly. Totally. We will definitely do our homework
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco will play Monument Valley and everything will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, everything that prevented me from playing it the last couple of weeks, that’s all gone now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now I’ll be able to play it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m saving all of my my overcast complaints for a future show because I look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the activity on the beta and most people are hitting on most of the things that but I am trying to use it. Speaking of a
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint, this is not your fault, But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thrilled that you’re trying to use it. That that alone is a compliment. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I’m trying to use it. I used it in my commute to work today and this weekend. I’m like, let me just set it
⏹️ ▶️ John up with my car with Bluetooth, because if I’m going to be using this iPod touch as my podcast thing, your
⏹️ ▶️ John pod catcher. Yeah, whatever. And my car has Bluetooth support,
⏹️ ▶️ John but and my iPod touch is Bluetooth. But they don’t talk to each other at all. When
⏹️ ▶️ John I turned on the Bluetooth pairing thing in my car, it said, do you want to connect to? And it said my wife’s iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 5s which apparently has been in the car before and the car is detected and is all ready to Pair with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, does it does the car support? Music-streaming like as I think it’s well used to be called a 2d piano if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still is but does it support music streaming or? just voice because some cars like like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I rented a maxima when I was in Phoenix a couple weeks ago and It had Bluetooth but only for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like phone calls Which actually led me to think about it would be a really cool feature if I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simulate a phone call over Bluetooth but just play the podcast through it with from my app so that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could play it in cars that didn’t have that feature enabled but I don’t know if that’s possible with
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. It supports music streaming and handset pairing for voice everything
⏹️ ▶️ John but only with iPhones it doesn’t even see my iPod touch. Bluetooth is on, discoverable, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John no devices detected so that was disappointing so I’m using the USB adapter for it which is kind of crappy but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still going. Anyway I have tons of complaints. I’ll tell you all and you know, next time we see each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m honored. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ John you. But really, the beta people are really getting a lot of them. Like you’re getting a lot of good feedback from the beta.
⏹️ ▶️ John And anytime I have any complaint, I just go look through the beta feedback. I’m like, Yep, that person said that I agree with that. I like I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can I can meet to them if you want me to vote, but mostly they’re getting Yeah, actually, that would help.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, voting helps. Just file a bug and I’ll mark it as a duplicate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should put I should put favorites, but we’re doing it on glass boards. I’ll put little faves next to the ones that are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell what the hell’s downloading. Don’t want it to play when I tap on the thing because I just want to see the description and all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh thank you I’m glad you agree with me on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No it’s definitely gonna play but I’ll give I’ll give you an info detail disclosure button.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you and your stupid menu toolbar icons. You’re still holding the line
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to ruin what it is. I’ll complain about it after you release the thing. If you don’t end up falling back to the icon that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know you should use but refuse to. No
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. But you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work and everyone knows what it means. You’re right, but I don’t want to use that icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it’s an experiment. I want to see if I can get along without using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but why? It’s like you’re no settings in the magazine. There’s always one thing that you do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, damn it, I’m going to hold the line on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Well, yeah, I always put like some kind of like I always try experiments in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and sometimes they bomb out and don’t work. Most of the time they bomb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and don’t work but occasionally they work really well and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s like and people end up loving my apps for those occasional times where those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work like so many of the little features that people loved about instapaper were those kind of experiments
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just wait for your the support email influx of people can’t figure out where the hell the thing that’s behind
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I don’t want to disclose anything about the app, so we’ll talk more about it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John long after WWDC when you start getting to the point where you either want to release it or talk about it more publicly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know when the hell I’m going to release it. I’m thinking maybe…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not even going to give a date. If I had to give a date… I was just waiting. Yeah, if I had to give a date today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing what I have to do in the next few weeks, just like life like going to this conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and family stuff and travel stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it. I mean, forget it. Just yeah, I always say it like I’m thinking like I’ll probably I’ll be lucky to get it out in July.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus, you got you plus you got plenty of plain old bugs in there. Like this is what happens when it goes from a one user app
⏹️ ▶️ John to like a 30 user app. They find all the bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s why it’s it’s amazing. Like how how many bugs have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found? It’s it’s really quite shocking. Like like in my typical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typical me naivety. I in my initial email to the testers, I wrote something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the lines of like, I’m pretty sure this is pretty close to 1.0. I’m mainly looking for like, you know, bug fixes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And but like feature wise, and like design wise, I’m pretty sure this is this is pretty close to 1.0. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nowhere close.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, you’re just you’re just too close to it, because you understand the app entirely. And then you throw this thing in front of people who haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been looking at it for months. And it’s like, you know, I don’t understand how even
⏹️ ▶️ John even to this day, there’s still future. I don’t want didn’t explain them to me, like, but that I don’t entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John understand. I’m able to get the app to do what I want, which is interesting, but conceptually there are things in there that I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. And it’s like, I could just ask Marco and he would explain it to me, but other people aren’t going to be able to ask you that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? So I’m trying to like, see if as the beta progresses, it starts to reveal itself to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But already I like it better than any other iOS podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you know, with the UI that I’ve used because I can configure it to let me manage
⏹️ ▶️ John my my podcast the way I’ve been manually doing it terribly painfully manually on my iPod shuffle
⏹️ ▶️ John so thumbs up for the utility department there but I may go back to my shuffle after I
⏹️ ▶️ John if I get sick of like plugging the stupid USB thing into my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and the problem is that like there’s nothing I can do really reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sync with like desktop iTunes like that’s something like that’s like a wall that like podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clients can attempt to like if you have a Mac client you can try to read the iTunes library it kind of works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of doesn’t on on the iPhone you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m able to I haven’t enabled this feature in the beta’s yet but like one of the things I wanted to do was like you know have an import from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco import from Apple podcasts option and the problem is you can read the library through public APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but only actual downloaded episodes so like if you have a podcast that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’ve listened to everything and deleted it all that won’t show up to me I have no way to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re subscribed to a podcast that currently has no episodes downloaded on your device So it’s like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like these limitations that It’s just gonna make it really really hard to ever support like iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco importing That’s you know to a degree that people would expect it to work very well
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wish I could just configure playlists and overcast and then they would magically appear on my iPod shuffle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your obsession with your iPod shuffles kind of comical
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s so it’s so easy. I can clip it onto my clothes it’s a wearable. Plug it
⏹️ ▶️ John right into my car. The parts that are painful about it are
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get songs on it ever, which is just super painful. It’s like torture. And accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John hitting buttons on that stupid… They put the play, pause button in the middle of a circle trying to figure out which button
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re hitting, not accidentally hit forward or back. The physical UI is crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. But it’s much easier than having to deal with it. You know what I really I really need
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a clicker headphone. I keep saying that, I’ve been saying it for years. You know, one of Apple’s headphones with the little
⏹️ ▶️ John clicker thingy on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the problem. And that’s actually, that’s one of my big problems with the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market is for portable headphones. Like, all the headphones that sound really good are all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the full-size ones that you use at your desk, and they have like these big long cables. Oftentimes the cables are coiled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they might have like the giant quarter-inch plug on the end instead of a nice little eighth-inch plug. almost none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the headphones that sound great have the iPhone clicker. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the iPhone clicker, but the iPhone clicker’s really, really useful if it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you at your desk at your computer. If you’re out walking, if you’re on a plane, you can keep the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPod or whatever in your pocket and just have the clicker there to do all your control. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are just very few headphones that are both good and have the clicker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have a good clicker. Like, because there are different clickers. Like Sennheiser makes a really good one, AKG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes the worst one I’ve ever used in my life. Some of the like fashion brands, some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have good ones, like the ones I tried in the Apple store, like some of them were good, some of them were awful. It’s, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Dashihi points out, many headphones have detachable cords, you can like kind of swap one in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most headphones don’t have detachable cords. So you’re kind of like stuck either doing like a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny sensitive soldering job to kind of hack your own cable on there, is a terrible idea, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just use the cable that comes with it, which will eventually fray somewhere internally and die.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe my iWatch will solve this problem for me. But basically, the problem is if you’re doing, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to a podcast while you do dishes, which is a reasonable thing to do, and your spouse comes into the room and wants to talk to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get to fish this thing out of your pocket, hit the button, swipe to unsleep the device,
⏹️ ▶️ John find the pause button, and pause. Compare it to just click on a clicker or just tap
⏹️ ▶️ John a little button on things that can become reflexes because they’re physical devices. There’s no way in
⏹️ ▶️ John hell I want to fish an iPhone or an iPod touch out of my pocket and interact with the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John to pause it. And by the time I do that, my wife is already rolling her eyes and saying, why are you always listening to podcasts?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you could do is you could just get an iPhone that comes with the headphones, with the clicker.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it come with it? Yes. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so. Yeah, they do. It does. And then when you go into your car by the magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Bluetooth, You don’t have to plug anything in.
⏹️ ▶️ John My wife has an iPhone 5S, and I’m pretty sure there are no clicker headphones in this house. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying there is there is not a debate in my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re under it in the box. You ever lift up the little white thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I should. Maybe I left them in the box. That’s the case. I got to go fish those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Every iPhone has come with the has come with earbuds. The first one even came with a dock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, that was short lived.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, of course they come with earbuds, but with the clicker on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. With the clicker.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to go. I’m going to go find that right after the show because I have not seen that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, every every earbud set that has ever come with iPhones and every iPhone has come with earbuds They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all had clickers. There have been a couple of generations of them, but but they’ve all had them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t believe you don’t know that John
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s one iPhone in this house or one iPhone 5s in this house, and I was pretty sure didn’t come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, she had a jeans had an iPhone for a while. I
⏹️ ▶️ John she had a 4s and a 5s and neither one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe she never used the headphone. I mean, it’s conceivable. They’re still sitting in the package coiled up I’m just saying I’ve never seen them in the
⏹️ ▶️ John house. Or maybe she’s got them and hides them from me.