70: The Endgame Is Omnipotence
20 Jun 2014Are games more like apps or movies? Amazon Fire Phone, Mayday vs. Apple stores, Continuity, and playing to your strengths.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up on app bundles as upgrade pricing.
- Whether games are more like apps or movies.
- Amazon's Fire Phone
- Who's it for?
- Mayday tech-support feature vs. Apple's retail stores
- Amazon and Apple doing what they're respectively, exclusively good at.
- Continuity and Handoff in Yosemite and iOS 8
- Only Apple (John Gruber)
- John's opinion of iMessage.
- Casey's further adventures developing a small web app in a hostile environment.
- OWASP top 10 web vulnerabilities
Sponsored by:
- Need: A refined retailer and lifestyle magazine for men. Email here after ordering to get some bonuses and 25% off your next order.
- Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
- Hover: High-quality, no-hassle domain registration. Use coupon code LETMEGETTHATFORYOU for 10% off.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the show bot is up again so far. We’ll see how long that lasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you still centering the titles? Come on, Casey. Come on. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with that? Yeah. Besides that it’s like daggers in your eyes, it’s impossible to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
⏹️ ▶️ John It forms crazy shapes that mean nothing. It’s like it turns the entire thing into a giant Rorschach test.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a man with a hat looking at me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this person’s name actually Jason Discount?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not only is this person’s name Jason Discount, but I knew this person when I was a kid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know this is actually his real name?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, it is his real name. I think he lives in Australia now, but he used to live, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So his name is Jason Discount and he’s emailing us about upgrade pricing discounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s finally a legitimate reason for him to have that name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been waiting his whole life for this moment when a podcast had something wrong about discount pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not wrong. It’s just that I don’t think any of us brought up this specific scenario when complaining about the confusing bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing as a way to do upgrades. And he gives the example of
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say you release an application at $6 and then you work on your second version of the application.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you want to sell that for $6 too. But you only want people to be able to upgrade from version one
⏹️ ▶️ John for $2. So his strategy for this is if you reduce the first version to to $4 and make the bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John price with both of them together $6. If someone accidentally buys the old app, it still
⏹️ ▶️ John only costs them a total of $6 to buy the new app. And of course, anybody who already has the new app
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy the bundle and complete this bundle to get it for $2. I don’t think this entirely solves it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John what if somebody has the old app and accidentally buys the new app for $6, then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, that’s a whole other angle. You’re right. Yeah. Because there’s nothing like you can’t like they there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopping them from individually buying the apps at full price in theory, right? Unless the store would like detect that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they bought one and only offer them to complete their bundle. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this idea of lowering the price of the old one that you have to keep on the store
⏹️ ▶️ John so that if anyone accidentally buys it, they’re, you know, they’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John they pay the same price anyway. If they accidentally buy it, be like, oh just buy the bundle, then you can get the new one for the same price you
⏹️ ▶️ John would have paid for it if you bought it individually. But there’s still the full price new one out there lurking as a problem. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this This whole thing is roundabout and trying to explain it is confusing and that’s why it’s a bad idea. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think people are going to try it. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still maintain that it’s a terrible idea and that nobody should do it because at best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fairly confusing for your customers. At worst, if you do things wrong, it could cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them extra money and then you extra money that you can’t easily refund them and that they will be angry about and leave you one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco star reviews about. Like, the thing with the one-star reviews is like, it only takes something angering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small percentage of your user base in order for them to suddenly become the dominant voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your reviews. Because very few people review things, even if you show them one of those annoying pop-ups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s still a very small percentage of people who actually review your apps. And so it doesn’t take much. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you cause an issue that really, really angers a tiny little fraction of your user base,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will become disproportionately influential in your ratings and your reviews and all the discussion about your app online, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, people are much more motivated to actually sit down and figure out how you go about leaving
⏹️ ▶️ John a review when they’re mad about something. Whereas if they love your app, they may briefly think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the person who made this app is nice, and I wonder if I could do something to help them, or I could help you, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that thought goes away quickly, and they go back to their life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, quick side note, one of my favorite things to do, which I admittedly don’t do very often, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I, for some reason, have to call like say Verizon or something because there’s an issue which almost never happens or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I have really a really really great server at a restaurant occasionally I like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask for their manager just to say something really nice because I feel like it puts some good karma in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe that karma will come back one day.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you ask to talk to their manager don’t they feel like oh what did I do? Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the best part is to
⏹️ ▶️ John of. No that’s not the best part you’re just torturing torturing these people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No but then but then usually but then I’m extremely effusive about how wonderful they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like calling a kid down to the principal’s office randomly and, you know, freaking him out and just saying, just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to say hi to you. How’s your day going?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, sometimes, oftentimes I’ll say, you know, I’d let you know that this was really awesome. Can I tell a manager? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I like to mess, mess around. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, you’re mad with power, Casey. Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need to talk. Fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’m just going to be quiet for now on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You trying to say something nice about if you had a, you know, a good service. a good, you know, your motivation is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing you’re trying to do is good. The way you’re doing it is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which sounds a lot like the show, but actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you, you’ll get that, you know, that practice makes perfect. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are games, movies? All right. Is there, are there going to be spoilers? Do I need to go away again? Because I genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly did not listen to that part of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to be spoilers. It’s not about journey. It’s, it’s about the whole, uh, is Apple set to disrupt
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and Sony and that whole conversation we had and lots of people tweeted about that. I know there was a whole podcast about
⏹️ ▶️ John it that is in my queue, but that I haven’t yet listened to that features Ben Thompson, who wrote that article,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of other people. I haven’t listened to that yet. But the thought that occurred to me after we finished the show, because
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, I wanted to talk even more about the topic that we talked about forever anyway, because I like talking about games
⏹️ ▶️ John was our our video games more like apps are more like movies. And I mean this in one
⏹️ ▶️ John specific respect that I don’t think we touched on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although we didn’t bring this up in the show specifically, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John personal computers are like trucks metaphor that has been discussed that I think Steve Jobs brought up many years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that people don’t need a Mac Pro to post to Facebook and read websites
⏹️ ▶️ John and check their email and stuff, despite the fact that the Mac Pro does all these amazing things,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re probably not going to use them. the amount of technology we have and the features available
⏹️ ▶️ John far exceed what any person is ever going to want to do with it. And that’s why I say, is it like apps? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John where, I guess I should have said it more, is it like a computer where we know personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computer technology is available now that is far beyond the needs of what regular people
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do with computers? And I’m comparing that to movies where
⏹️ ▶️ John movies, the technology available to make movies has better by leaps and bounds
⏹️ ▶️ John if you compare like a blockbuster movie if you look it could take like even the crappiest blockbuster movie like transformers
⏹️ ▶️ John or some crap like that back in time back in time 50 years and show it to somebody they would
⏹️ ▶️ John not have on first viewing they would not have been able to compute how terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John the movie was because they would just be amazed at the visuals because they would be like this is magic i don’t understand where this came from
⏹️ ▶️ John this must be like an alien artifact because they wouldn’t understand how we how we we put all those visuals on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think in movies anyway, the mass market appetite for increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing things is not satisfied. It’s not like, well, you know, once we can do reasonable practical effects, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark, that’s all we’ll ever need. There’s no upside to making it better. People don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro of movies, they get by perfectly fine with the iMac. So we just be, you know, stick with the feature set that’s available on Raiders
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Lost Ark. No need for Jurassic Park. No need for, you know, the advances in CGI
⏹️ ▶️ John we have today. No need for like all the CGI that’s used in television shows to do backdrops and stuff. Sets are
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. We’ve pretty much got this set. I don’t think that’s the case. And it’s not like the only people who
⏹️ ▶️ John care about just more features, more technology, more amazing stuff are
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are super into movies and the casual moviegoers are like, I don’t need CGI. Practical
⏹️ ▶️ John effects are fine with me. I think the appetite is essentially unlimited for amazing visuals in movies.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, again, setting aside the stupidity of scripts and all the other stuff that have always been the same, it’s not as if movies
⏹️ ▶️ John got good enough and people are like, no, you don’t need to improve them anymore. And they keep trying to improve them. It doesn’t mean everything they do to improve them is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D is an attempt to improve it and may or may not be better. Maybe people don’t like that. Higher frame rate, same deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John High definition television, I think that’s an improvement that people do say, yes, we like that better. I say, eh, standard def’s good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a power user of television. I don’t need high definition television. definition? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey As soon as you see a
⏹️ ▶️ John higher definition, you’re like, well, screw that old thing. We want the new thing. And the question about video games is, what are they more
⏹️ ▶️ John like? Are they more like the PC, where increasing power is like, no, I don’t really need that? Or is
⏹️ ▶️ John it more like movies, where there is a seemingly infinite appetite of the mass market for making
⏹️ ▶️ John them better in ways that involve technology and money? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John for video games so far, I don’t know if this will always be true, but for video games so far, they seem a lot more like movies
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, in that anytime, like people are saying, What about when a $99 puck gets as powerful as
⏹️ ▶️ John a PlayStation 4? Then we’re all set, right? No, because people will still want the power that the PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John or 6 offers. Like, why will they want that? Well, because they always want that. Because their appetite for better games
⏹️ ▶️ John and better graphics and things that more power can do is unlimited. And it’s not like a computer where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, you don’t need all that technology and that Mac Pro. You just want to check your email. Games are different.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can have a vast, fully realized, realistic-looking city with amazing draw distances and amazing physics
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, people want that. They don’t know or care how it works. They’re playing the game. It’s much different than using
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer to do something. So that is a factor that I didn’t articulate the last time we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John this that I think is definitely in play here with games. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the appetite is inexhaustible, but I know we haven’t exhausted it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I think a lot of people who are saying, oh, you think that now, but what about when the $99 Puck is as powerful as a
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 4? Then there will be no more market for a $400 gaming device. I think the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John people keep buying $400 gaming things is because their appetite for better
⏹️ ▶️ John visuals, and better gameplay, and better physics, and just better games, period,
⏹️ ▶️ John is insatiable. It is not satisfied. We never get to the point where games are good enough, and then it just stops
⏹️ ▶️ John and stays that way. There’s always something more you can do. Even just for stupid 2D genres
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, you can always do something more with more technology, with more memory, with more sensors, with more who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what. So that more than anything, I think, is going to keep the $400 boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John alive for much longer than I think people think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see. I’m not so sure. As an example, so we have a 40-inch TV at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it does support 1080. But the difference to me between 720 and 1080
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I can’t tell. I can tell the difference between 480,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever standard def is, and 720, or 480 and 1080. But I can’t tell the difference between 720
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 1080. I know with games it’s a bit different because it’s not a film. It’s something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been created. I do think you’re right that we always seek for more clarity, better, better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, more polygons, etc. But I don’t know of anyone that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buys games that need the latest and greatest systems specifically for the best graphics,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except people who generally self-describe as gamers. So for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really care about games very much. If a new system comes out with better graphics. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not just about graphics. That’s the whole problem. First of all, I would say that, yeah, maybe only the self-described gamers
⏹️ ▶️ John care about this and purchase on it, but there’s enough of them to sustain the market. Right. We already established like this generation,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s enough of them to sustain the market. Right. But for everything else,
⏹️ ▶️ John as the technology increases, new types of games become possible. It’s kind of like you couldn’t do live action
⏹️ ▶️ John Lord of the Rings without computer effects. You just couldn’t film that like you you could do with puppets maybe or people
⏹️ ▶️ John in costumes, but it would just not have the kind of appeal. And you don’t need to know or care anything about the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John involved in making that to appreciate Lord of the Rings, right? And so it’s not to get hung up on like the high
⏹️ ▶️ John def versus standard def, but it’s like, it’s what’s on the screen. You can do different kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of things. If you were to take any current game developer and say, what if I gave you 100,000 times
⏹️ ▶️ John the memory, the bandwidth or whatever, what could you do? They wouldn’t just make their existing
⏹️ ▶️ John games with more polygons and higher res textures. They’d be like, oh, well with that, I can make a different kind of game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, I can make a hiking simulator that people will love. Like, I mean, at a certain point, you get to the holodeck,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There’s different categories of games, especially with physics and materials, because a lot of the things you do in games, it’s like everything feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John a set, where it’s just a sort of a rigid polygon or with some sort of predefined destructive things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once technology gets to the point where you can do like real arbitrary destructibility, whole new,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who aren’t so interested in games before will suddenly be interested if they can realistically take a baseball bat through like
⏹️ ▶️ John a showroom of supercars and it doesn’t just feel like you’re triggering a bunch of destruction animations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll have to rethink cities.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like, there’s different categories of games you can have. I mean, I admit the hiking simulator thing is a joke I had from when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was a kid, but I bet there probably is a hiking simulator now. Like, we’ve gotten to the point where the
⏹️ ▶️ John visuals in games are enough that people who are only interested in visuals would never have been interested in 16-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John games, in NES and Pong or anything like that, but suddenly when games start to look, start to pass some threshold
⏹️ ▶️ John of realism, whole new categories of people become interested. Even if it’s only like the, you know, the deer hunter simulator type things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those people were not interested in playing Super Mario Brothers, but once you can simulate deer hunting in a way that they
⏹️ ▶️ John find appealing, suddenly you open up an entire new market. So I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John insatiable appetite for better technology for games isn’t because people know or care or understand the technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same as the insatiable appetite for increasingly ridiculous visuals. just again transform it despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the rest of the movie is terrible People go see these movies because the visuals are amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d say oh, well, they’re amazing now But they can’t get any more amazing surely ten years from now The visuals will be
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same and no person will ever go into a movie and be wowed I don’t think that’s the case
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people will always want to see something amazing out of people I think people always want to play something amazing and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Increases in technology will only open the market because you’ll be able to do different things not just the
⏹️ ▶️ John same things we’re doing now, but fancier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the big risk, though, is, you know, typical disruption where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big risk is not that people will stop caring about things being more and more advanced as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get new technological capabilities. The big risk is that other factors come into play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, the kind of thing where somebody is where somebody gets to think like, Okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could buy this new game system for $400. But instead, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this other thing where, you know, maybe it’s an iPhone, maybe it’s an iPad, maybe it’s a Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DS7, whatever the case may be, you have these other devices that come in where somebody can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care about the graphics because X, or I don’t care about the technological inferiority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because X, where X can be some kind of really compelling reason, whether it’s an extremely different price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, you know, a completely different portability class, or you know, it’s always with you, or it’s built into something else, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already have it so it’s kind of free, things like that. That’s what causes the big problems. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that the market for super powerful game boxes is going to disappear, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I certainly think there’s a lot to suggest it’s going to be marginalized and continue to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marginalized over time. And you know, you can look at movies are actually a pretty good example of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where box office sales are actually kind of crappy relative to what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expected for this time period because there’s a lot more to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides go see a movie these days. And so like it’s not that people stopped caring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about movies getting better and better, it’s that now they have a lot of other stuff they can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during times which, you know, in the 90s they might have gone to see a movie. And so I think that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big risk here is kind of a splitting of attention and an increase in disruptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factors that are different from the things these boxes do best. that people will stop caring about what they do
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you just put placeholders in for the things that’s going to cause it. But I don’t think you can
⏹️ ▶️ John name it because all the things you named already exist and still haven’t killed off the market. I mean, spreading attention is one thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one can help that. Suddenly, just there’s too many other things going on. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if people just get spread too thin, like that could happen, right? That could happen to anything. Happen to TV, movies,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything like that. But the one thing video games has going for it is, as a concept, conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not in the specifics of like a box that you buy that connect to your TV, but conceptually
⏹️ ▶️ John games are camped out in the end zone, uh, waiting like, I don’t know if this is the wrong analogy. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a sport, not a good sports analogy, but games are basically at the end of the line, tapping the front and patiently saying
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys can do all whatever you want. TV movies, live theater, music, all that other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll be here in the end when you’re all gone, because our logical conclusion is the hollow deck, which will sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of end humanity because once you can realistically simulate anything and have you not distinguish it from real life,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll all just be dead in our little virtual reality sensor tubes within 10 years, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the end game. The end game is omnipotence,
⏹️ ▶️ John the illusion of omnipotence, know everything, do everything, indistinguishable from reality. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to come out of gaming. It’s not going to come out of television. It’s not going to come out of live theater. It’s not going to come out of music. Gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to get there. And so it’s not going to get there in our lifetime, obviously, but way out thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of years in the future, games are the only form of anything and eventually destroy the entire human race. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the game gaming has that one good thing going for it in that it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to go away. And if we do get spread too thin because of other factors, it’ll come back because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the end zone is the wrong thing. It’s at the end of the line waiting for all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, our first sponsor this week, I don’t even know how to follow that. So I’m just gonna go Gordon’s list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is a new sponsor and a close friend of the show. If you ever listened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Bionic, you know the other half of it, the fake British guy who used to be British but now is American.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthew Percival Edwardius Alexander He started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a company and that company is called Need. It’s at Need with an N,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the K version of it. It’s needlifestyle.com. So, go to needlifestyle.com and check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this out. So, Need is a refined retailer and lifestyle magazine for men.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, each month they get this nice curated collection of something like, you know, nine, ten items
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s all from the world’s top men’s brands and they offer it to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a special price in a special collection and they’re presented in the form of this monthly editorial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s built around a theme and they always you know they support local photographers and have you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know local photographers photograph all these things local models beyond clothing they also have coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literature furniture it’s it’s it’s like a men’s kind of you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool fashion magazine it’s it’s for people who are not you know it’s for people like me basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are not that good at making these decisions on our own you can go to need and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see what is cool because I certainly can’t tell you. But this stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty cool. I’ve gotten some of this stuff and it’s really, really good stuff. You know, Matt has a really good eye for this. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tear away trousers. They also plan to localize to different cities around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world. The first of which will be London, of course, because he’s almost British. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a look. Go to NeedLifestyle.com. They just released volume seven today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is built around the theme this month is summertime commutes events and weekends with friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they’re gonna do a special deal for our listeners because Matt likes us and he’s a cool guy even though he’s half British.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyone who places an order with need and was sent from us send them an email at hello
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at need lifestyle comm with the subject line world’s greatest podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you do this if you email hello at need lifestyle with the subject line world’s greatest podcast after you’ve placed an order with them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will throw in a bunch of free extras with those orders things like magazines, field-nose notebooks, socks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scarves, the kind of extras that a cool hit men’s magazine has lying around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you do this, you will also then get 25% off your next order. This is pretty cool. I know this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like haphazard last minute because neither of us knew how to write an ad for this and it was kind of a last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute booking that kind of saved our butts here. So Needlifestyle is great. Matt is great. It’s really a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic company run by fantastic people. That’s all I can really say. a look needlifestyle.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of your cool stuff needs. Needlifestyle.com. Thanks a lot to Need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once again. Why did I say once again? This is the first time you’re sponsoring. Thanks a lot to Need for sponsoring our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just love that they’re having us now be associated with the world’s greatest podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In my defense, Matt wrote that line. I didn’t. We would have, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we didn’t. So it is Matt who to blame if you do not think that we are the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco greatest podcast either way You should order from his company just so you can then email him get this cool discount get the free socks and scarves and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff And then tell him why we’re not the world’s greatest podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I talk about a few more things on the WWDC hit list or do you want to jump straight to the fire
⏹️ ▶️ John The fire phone happened today. So that’s this is the best thing We do is when it when an event happens the day we
⏹️ ▶️ John record and we know nothing about a day. Let’s talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why not? Yeah, before anyone has reviews or even has this thing in their hands.
⏹️ ▶️ John I read Twitter when the press conference was going on Does that count?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about all I did. That’s me too. And I reacted to things I wrote on Twitter. That’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it So, alright, so what this thing is It’s basically what you’d expect from Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a phone based on what they’ve done with the Kindle Fire tablet line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a phone that runs Android It has you know, pretty decent specs 2 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of CPU. I’m not familiar with I don’t know I’m sure Android people know it. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the innovation in it comes from software tweaks, I think. But I think what’s most interesting, if you would have asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, including us, a few months ago, like, hey, Amazon’s going to make a phone, what do you think they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do? I think almost all of us would have guessed that they were going to do something disruptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or creative or different around pricing. Because everyone was thinking, oh, Amazon’s all into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting things really cheap, and maybe they could revolutionize the phone business by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving you a phone for free, or for free supported by ads, or included with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Prime, or something like that. Somehow subsidize the phone to make it very, very cheap or free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they gave us instead was a phone that’s priced almost exactly like the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other high-end smartphones. Which is interesting. So it’s 200 bucks on contract, 650 without. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few things that make it a little better value. There’s like the 32 gigs of storage as the base storage instead of 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get a year of Amazon Prime if you buy the phone. And if you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it, you get your membership extended for a year for free. So there’s a couple of things that add value there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, it’s still a $600 unsubsidized phone or $200 on a two-year contract phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It runs only on AT&T so far, only in the US. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, it’s kind of boring. I mean, there’s a couple of things we’ll talk about with what they’ve done with some of software and hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think we’re even going to be talking about this in like two weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, probably not. Some of the things that were very interesting, the most interesting thing to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which has gotten less interesting as more information came out, was one of the slides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they showed during their keynote or announcement or whatever you call it, was unlimited photo uploads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Amazon Cloud Drive. And so there wasn’t a lot of information that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could glean on it, but John Gruber has said that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s only unlimited photo storage for photos taken with the phone itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So notably that completely eliminates videos, which are the things that take up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most space. And additionally, anything else is apparently subject to a five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig cap. And I’m not sure the mechanism by which they’re determining this. I don’t know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just reaching into EXIF data or what have you, but yeah, that’s a somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noteworthy difference. Although to be fair, the two cameras that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have in the house are two iPhone 5Ss. So in a parallel universe where Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I both have Amazon, what are we calling this, a Fire? Fire phone. When we both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have Fire phones, that could be fine for us because that is all our photos because that’s the only cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we use. But I know amongst this crowd, were probably quite the anomaly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, so if you look at, look at when Amazon originally launched the Kindle Fire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first, their first Android tablet, one of its biggest selling points by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it was really cheap compared to other Android tablets. And it was like the best $200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android tablet you could get for a little while. And, which is pretty terrible, because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pretty bad. And the newer Fires, from what I hear, are better. I haven’t actually used them, but the newer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones are supposedly better. But anyway, the big reason people bought it was because it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damn cheap. And the Fire phone doesn’t have that. So my question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, what are the major things this offers above and beyond something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a high-end Samsung or HTC phone? Like, obviously, it’s the same price and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything as an iPhone. Like, you know, you get a little bit less with the iPhone for the same price, but most people are not gonna care. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close enough. So you’re looking at 200 bucks either way, 200 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on contract for this phone. So it’s not cheaper than an iPhone. It’s probably not gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, if any, presence in phone retail stores, which is going to really hurt its sales. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, why? It’s gonna be limited in certain ways. Like, all the Google services, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get. It is not, as far as I know, correct me if I’m wrong, anybody, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of Amazon’s Android stuff so far, like, it doesn’t get the Google seal of approval, it doesn’t have the Google Play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store, as far as I know, It doesn’t have Google Maps, Google Now, all that cool integration you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on officially blessed Android phones. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of downsides to this. The upsides are it has some Amazon integration with some other stuff. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some store integration where you can point it at some things and scan stuff. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of wondering why people are really going to buy this in any significant numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I don’t see the appeal. If it was really cheap, maybe. If it had the full Android experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus Amazon stuff, maybe. But I see Android people wanting to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an officially licensed Google-blessed phone, and I see iPhone owners sticking with their iPhones. So I’m kind of missing the
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon’s kind of like the new Microsoft, but only with hardware. You just have to assume
⏹️ ▶️ John now whenever Amazon enters a market with a hardware product, just wait until their third try,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, as you
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned with the Kindle Fire tablets or whatever, just forget about the first one,
⏹️ ▶️ John second one, you know, like it’s going to take them a while to get it right. So there’s a learning curve there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I just had a thought while you were describing the phone is that phones are kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs now, used to be, and that it’s no longer a novelty
⏹️ ▶️ John that any company with reasonable pockets can make one. Like back in the day, if you, you know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John were a technology company, you had a lot of money. You could make a PC, like you buy the CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John from Intel, you buy a motherboard and a chipset possibly from Intel, possibly from someone else, you buy a hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ John from someone, you make a plastic case, you put a power supply in it, you put a screen on it, you know, you make a PC. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of people did it. There was tons of PC companies back before, you know, consolidation and it all fell apart. These days,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t seem like a big deal for anybody to basically, you know, build your own iPhone-like smartphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon went to all the vendors, these people are making all these parts, and the phone they made looks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if this had phone phone had come out before the iPhone, we’d be falling all over ourselves to say how amazing it is. But now it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John many seven years later, it’s not so amazing. Now it is just a
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly straightforward thing to say, yeah, we can make a phone that looks like a smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ John that has a good CPU that has memory that has a life soon and has a reasonable battery life that has a couple other little features.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s no longer a big deal. And obviously, it’s not quite as easy to make something as good
⏹️ ▶️ John is the iPhone on your first try. So we’re going to give Amazon three tries to do this or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I guess it’s just it’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John that phones used to be this amazing thing and only amazing Apple can make a smartphone like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now they’re basically like PCs. If you want to make one, you can make one. And so Amazon is making one. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is a good move or not. But Marco also mentioned disruption at the beginning, I hope they would do something with pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to disrupt the phone market. I think Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the problem with the word disruption, like when they did that with the tablets, they sold them at cost or possibly at a
⏹️ ▶️ John loss, certainly not making big profits, and undercut everybody. Like, Amazon would give you a
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer screen and more storage for less money than Apple would. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you can, it’s kind of weird to call something disruption before it
⏹️ ▶️ John has disrupted anything. You could say an attempted disruption, but everyone just says, Oh, Amazon disrupts the tablet space
⏹️ ▶️ John by selling their product at or below cost. As far as we all know, because Amazon doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell you sales figures, but as far as we all know, from sort of just like walking around and
⏹️ ▶️ John how much Amazon is touting these things, they haven’t disrupted the tablet space that much, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there, it’s not like because they priced them so low, all the incumbents who make a
⏹️ ▶️ John profit on their tablets were put on their heels and said, I said, whoa, we can’t handle this. Soon
⏹️ ▶️ John our market share is shrinking. Amazon is stealing all our customers. My impression is that that has not happened. So their
⏹️ ▶️ John attempt at disruption with that pricing strategy with tablets didn’t work. I guess they could have
⏹️ ▶️ John gone more and say, the real problem is we didn’t. We weren’t radical enough with the pricing. We’ll pay you to take
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these phones, right? But instead, they went the other direction and said, all right, obviously that strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John did not buy our way into the tablet space. Let’s try the more conventional strategy of making money
⏹️ ▶️ John by selling things at a profit with subsidies. And so that’s what it seems like they’re doing with the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s any particular reason to favor this phone over the best
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phone you can find or an iPhone. And there’s many reasons not to. But to Amazon’s credit,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did at least try to differentiate. I mean, again, if it was a version 1 product, I assume this is going to be a stinker, just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John version 1 Kindle Fire was. But it has interesting things in it. The multi-camera
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and that silly depth perception, and the parallax and the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for scanning things to buy them on Amazon and the Amazon Prime. Marco listed all the stuff. That’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John more differentiation than the average crappy Samsung phone has, and Samsung sells
⏹️ ▶️ John like crazy. So it could be, again, like the PC space, that all you really need is
⏹️ ▶️ John to pass a minimum threshold of like, yep, we got a CPU, we got a hard drive, we got memory, we got a case that looks kind of nice,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we have a couple of differentiators or reputation or a connection with a brand that you like or a franchise that you
⏹️ ▶️ John like or whatever. again in movie parlance and that’s enough to become a player in the space.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s sort of what Amazon’s game plan is not to rock the market but just to
⏹️ ▶️ John try to be part of the conversation the same way all those pc makers were like hey
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re part of the pc market we we’re we’re sell pcs we’ll put cow stripes on them we’ll call ourselves gateway put 2000
⏹️ ▶️ John in the in our name this will never actually reach that year right guys that was my first computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it came in the cow box and it was awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe maybe someday we’ll have retail stores anyway that’s how i see amazon’s entry here
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and so i’m i’m not for it or against it uh i like more competition in the phone market
⏹️ ▶️ John uh i don’t know what their long-term odds are but it wake me up when they’re on their third phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i’m guessing a big part of it might be i mean as as weird as this sounds i mean they probably didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend much money on this like they i’m sure they contra they contracted out the the uh the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even hardware design to somebody else they definitely contracted out the manufacturing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think HTC made it for them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so you know, they didn’t invest very heavily in it. I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main purpose of this is just like all the other hardware, it’s just to juice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon sales. And one of the things this will do, if they can get a big enough presence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the phone and tablet market, you know, they’re already probably there with tablets, maybe. But if they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get enough of a market presence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everybody who develops an Android app will be forced to put their app in Amazon’s Android App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because this, as far as I know, this only works with the App Store, unless you go, you know, download APKs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enable that crazy setting. But I think for the most part, you have to have things in the Amazon App Store, because there’s no Google Play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store on this. Please correct me if I’m wrong, chat. But so, you know, if they get even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 10% of the market, then it would be pretty unwise for Android developers to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put their stuff in the Amazon App Store. And then Amazon gets to take a nice cut of any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money flowing through Android apps. Not that there’s historically been a whole lot, but there’s been enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people that adds up. And there’s also the other factors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For all of the reasons that Google wanted to make Android and kind of had to make Android,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main reasons why were that Google was threatened by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the possibility of somebody like Apple or Microsoft dominating the phone space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that then they could like lock out Google services from working on their phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Google kind of defensively had to make Android to give themselves a place for their services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to live and thrive so they couldn’t ever be locked out of a dominant phone platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves anyway. Yeah, it’s true. Good point. And I think Amazon has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar goal here in that Amazon wants to make sure that none of their digital services get locked out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their physical services are probably fine. Everyone’s going to keep buying their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shampoo from Amazon. It’s no big deal. I don’t think Apple cares to interfere with that. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly is a risk that maybe Amazon’s bookstore or video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store or music store or you know, those kind of services could easily get locked out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of future iOS and Google blessed Android. And so I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they kind of strategically thought this was a good idea and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure they’ll make enough on it to justify the probably minimal investment they put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it, maybe, but it doesn’t need to set the world on fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to succeed in the goal. You know, oh, sorry. Yeah. It doesn’t need to sell extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. It would be nice if it did. I’m sure they would appreciate having the extra margin to play with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they don’t have a lot of margin on most of their other stuff. But the reality is, I don’t think this really is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important for this to sell well, and I don’t think it will sell well. I mentioned it in passing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, but it’s definitely worth reiterating. This is also US-only, mostly because most of Amazon’s services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still US-only, or at least very limited outside of the US. And So as long as this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is US only, that’s going to extremely limit its market share, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is the exact same price in the US as a lot of much better phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is a good idea. I mean, don’t you? You said, you know, whether this is a good idea. I think it is a good idea. It is a good idea for,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a good idea for Amazon to make tablets. It’s a good idea for them to make a phone. I mean, despite the fact that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, I don’t think the tablets are really tearing up the charts. Again, we don’t know for sure because Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like to release numbers, but I think a good idea for them to make a phone because it is like PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Why shouldn’t they have a phone? Why shouldn’t they have a tablet? It’s part of their ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ John They sell you things you can consume on that tablet, so it’s good to have a tablet. They also sell you things that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can consume on the phone, and you can use both of those devices to buy things from their physical store. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have a cohesive story around these things, and I think it was a good idea for them to develop it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this was more or less the right time where they can just put it together out of off-the-shelf parts,
⏹️ ▶️ John add some innovation. I think they probably did invest in it because I think they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes sense for them to have these pieces of the package and to not rely on other people for these because it makes sense for their business. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John totally out there like they’ve decided to make, you know, self-driving cars or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I still think, like, it was a good idea for them to make this, no question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and since they were already making tablets and already maintaining this OS, I’m sure there’s a lot of shared development resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there anyway. I’m sure they almost definitely spent way more on software development than on hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development, and they can probably use most of that in their tablet effort. The difference here is phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tablets are very different markets, as a lot of people have found out over the last few years, especially most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the early attempted Android tablets found this out. These two are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very different markets, and what works in phones doesn’t necessarily work in tablets and vice versa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon was able to break into the tablet market by being extremely aggressive on price. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was buying the Kindle Fires and still today, nobody’s buying the Kindle Fires because they’re the best tablets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re not. They’re certainly better than they used to be, but they’re still not the best tablets. People buy them because they’re cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they see them promoted like crazy on Amazon. This phone is going to be promoted like crazy on Amazon fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s cheaper though. I mean, especially for like, it’s not going to pull people away from the iPhone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But when people are shopping for Android phones, and anyone who’s willing to pay $200 for a phone shops this $200 phone against any competitive $200
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, assume they’re not going to buy an iPhone because they’re not in that market at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Spec-wise and feature-wise, this compares favorably with another $200 Android phone. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the conversation they’re trying to win. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not going to compete with people who are shopping for an iPhone because this ecosystem, the cache, the apps
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re not there, forget it, right? But there’s tons of crappy Android phones. I mean, you look around, mostly what
⏹️ ▶️ John I see is people with iPhones or people with a huge menagerie of crazy looking Android phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the jungle where this phone is stalking. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a nice screen. It’s got a lot of RAM. It’s got a fast CPU. It’s got crazy ass cameras that are going to impress people
⏹️ ▶️ John in a demo somewhere once they see someone who has one. The camera is pretty good, right? Like, it’s got all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff. And the crazy things are the tilt scrolling and the parallax that reminds you of the stupid, crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John features like in the Galaxy S5 that no one’s ever gonna use to track your eyes. And when you close your eyes, the video stops
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have to touch the screen. And like that people go for that crap. And so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is in that crap show. And even though it’s not super cheap, it, I think it compares
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it compares favorably to the iPhone. Let’s put it that way in terms of pricing and specs. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going after the people who care about G-Wiz features and also the people who care about stupid number specs,
⏹️ ▶️ John not against the iPhone where no one cares about the specs when they buy an iPhone. They’re buying an iPhone to have an iPhone and to buy into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, what if you are living not near family members,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you really want a smartphone, and your family members that live nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are really good with computers, or I’m sorry, your family members that are really good with computers don’t live nearby, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel kind of all in your own little island. And you want something that you know you can get help with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. and maybe you don’t live near an Apple store. This Mayday thing, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly surprised that the Mayday and the tablets hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made more waves. And I could very much see, like say my grandmother, for example, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is fairly computer savvy, especially for a woman that is not terribly young, but she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lives near no one in terms of her family members that are good with computers. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could absolutely see her wanting this, if nothing else, for the Mayday feature. So she knows within 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds, she can have help. And I can see that as being very powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a clever use of Amazon’s strengths because their strength is like physical logistics. Having
⏹️ ▶️ John a human being on the other end of a phone is a physical matter. It’s not a matter of software or servers
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And Amazon does that all the time. They’re all about people and physical things and
⏹️ ▶️ John managing things at ridiculous scales. So they were wise to bring to bear the skills they have
⏹️ ▶️ John from their retail business on the phone. And the same way that Google is wise to bring to bear all of its great
⏹️ ▶️ John assets, like, you know, it’s really, you know, good maps and and driving directions and their server capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John and all their web apps, like everyone is bringing their best stuff to the table. So that’s that, you know, I think this does make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. And I don’t think this will necessarily like if you were to buy this phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe she has nothing to compare it to. It wouldn’t matter. But I don’t think the experience would be that great because this is version one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon, in my mind, I tried to tweet this, but I couldn’t figure out how to way to tweet it, how to tweet it in a way that would express myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try just by rambling here. Unfortunately, my perception
⏹️ ▶️ John of Amazon now whenever I think of them and I think of Jeff Bezos or Bezos like Glenn, you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me how to pronounce that name. I don’t know. Up on the stage is Amazon has really
⏹️ ▶️ John good demos and everything they show is much crappier in real life. Like I don’t know if that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John getting that impression but like after several of these demos because like and sometimes they’re okay in real life
⏹️ ▶️ John like you know the Kindle paperwhite really was more or less like what they showed But like all of their fire tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John and now the phone and a lot of the Kindles they’ve demoed They do really good keynotes and you look at them. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wow, I can’t even believe Amazon pull this off They’ve got the features. They’ve got the specs. They’ve got the design. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is amazing then you see the actual product and it’s like oh You know, they feel like you feel like they pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John the wool over your eyes and that’s the reputation They’re getting in my mind so much so that I’m kind of tuning out
⏹️ ▶️ John the what are very good Presentations and fairly polished and like, you know, not gonna say in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Steve Jobs style But obviously, you know, in the post Steve Jobs presentation world, adding their own twist.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now I’m just kind of starting to write that. That’s that’s a tech person type thing. But anyway, my what you know, grandma
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t know what their presentations are like. But I feel like real people once they get them will be like, the same way they
⏹️ ▶️ John when they get the galaxy s five, like you play with the little whizzy features that you’re never going to use again. And in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have kind of a crappy, ugly phone that you get rid of after two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, but what makes you think that anyone would find it to be crappy and ugly?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because on the surface, especially if you don’t have something as well designed as perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern Android or certainly an iPhone, if you like you said, if you don’t have anything to compare to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then how would you conclude that it’s that crappy?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the Samsung I was saying is crappy and ugly. I think I think the Amazon’s industrial design
⏹️ ▶️ John is better, like as ridiculous as the original Kindle Fire was in terms of size and weight and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John The industrial design is not bad. Like it was, you know, pleasingly shaped. I mean, all right, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the power buttons are in the wrong place. We all know that, but like they have rubber grippy parts in the right spot. Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John has been had really great screens. Their problems, of course, are in software and ecosystem and kind of using the device
⏹️ ▶️ John is not as wonderful and magical as you would expect it to do. They miss on a lot of the details. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, you can have an amazing screen and a quad core GPU and twice the RAM of any iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple device. Please, Apple, fix this, please. But it doesn’t matter if when you flick
⏹️ ▶️ John the scroll, it’s jumpy. Like, how can it be jumpy? We got twice as many cores. We got twice as much RAM. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes a lot of effort and coordination between hardware and software to make all that come together. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John how can Apple get away with having half as many cores as the top-end Android phones, and yet it still feels
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and does things quicker? That’s where those guys can’t compete. And that’s what I mean by, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if they don’t have anything to compare it to, fine. But what if they go into an Apple Store and start flicking around on an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad or an iPhone. I think even a normal person could be like, oh, my thing
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t feel like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and going back a sec to Mayday, I do think that that’s probably Amazon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best feature. If it even works half as well as it demos, that’s an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature. And that will win over a lot of people, especially people like us who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly in the position of buying a phone for someone else that we don’t wanna have to tech support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that I can see the benefit of. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also the other side of that, which is Mayday can only help you with problems that involve the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone being able to boot and show the screen contents.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was gonna say, like, the comparison is I like to tell people to get Apple stuff because then if they have
⏹️ ▶️ John any problems, I say just go to the Apple store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, and that’s the thing. Well, Mayday is great as long as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone can boot, The screen works and it can connect to a data network or Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of those things have to be true and that will solve a lot of problems, no question. But there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole class of other problems that people routinely hit with their phones that Mayday won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to solve or they won’t be able to access it. And there is immense value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple having this giant network of retail stores and in being able to walk into like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AT&T store with your Samsung phone that you bought there and you know get some help there. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive, massive value in being able to go to a physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place and get service. And you know, in the case of Apple, you know, the phone network stores aren’t that great about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in the case of an Apple Store, you could walk out of there with a replacement. Like you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go, your phone could break in the morning, you could go to the Apple Store at lunch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if there’s not too big of a line, you can walk out of there with a replacement in a half hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s something that Amazon can approach that. They can have you be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call them up and then they can overnight you a new phone maybe. Maybe. We’ll see about that. But that’s still a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very different degree. It’s a very different kind of experience. You have to talk on the phone to somebody who talked them through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem and then Amazon has to decide whether to send you a phone, then send you a phone, then it arrives the next day or by drone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later that day. Who knows? But it’s still a different problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just such immense value in having those retail stores there. Granted, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also a whole class of problems where you might just live with it. If you’re somebody who doesn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the technology very well and you’re like, oh, well, for whatever reason my mail is all blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know why, but it’s not really worth going all the way to the Apple store for that. Well, maybe on a Kindle thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you would hit the Mayday button and say, hey, why is this all blue? Can you help me change this back?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would be able to get better help with a lot of small problems like that using Mayday, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, and phones are even more so than tablets, phones get carried around with people. So phones have a lot of hazards happen to them and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of things that are weird that break. And so I see that being a problem for Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, but what you’re not considering is that both of you are taking a completely myopic northeastern view
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the world. Because the nearest Apple store to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half of Virginia is either in another state or easily two hours away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m lucky in that there happens to be an Apple store in Richmond, but outside of Richmond,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like let’s take Charlottesville, for example, which is an hour west of where I am, you can either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come here to Richmond or go two hours north to DC. And Charlottesville is a not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small city. I mean, it’s, Virginia classifies it as a city. Well… Okay, you can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all smug and mightier than me because you live in the Northeast.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just saying, you can just look up the population of Charlottesville and see if it’s It’s larger than the population
⏹️ ▶️ John of where I went to high school.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perhaps it’s not, but I think you’re way, way overselling the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey utility of Apple stores. Because if you’re lucky enough to live near one, yes, you’re absolutely right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But most of the country doesn’t. And beyond that, most of the world doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s wonderful that you guys have 44 Apple stores within a 10-minute drive. But I’ve got only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one option. And if I lived an hour away, it would be an hour drive to get to the nearest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple store. An hour drive, maybe in my busted ass car that can barely get up the highway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m being a little dramatic, but my point is that Apple’s retail footprint is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inconsequential. Now, this is where you would say, well, there’s AT&T’s footprint. And yes, you’re right about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AT&T has a lot more stores, but you’re not going to get the same level of service and repair at an AT&T store that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would at an Apple store. So I think you’re grossly overselling.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like you self-rebutting there because that’s exactly what I was gonna say. Apple Store is the best case scenario, but leave Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ John aside Normal people get their phones at the quote-unquote phone stores and they’re everywhere and every strip
⏹️ ▶️ John mall probably even in Charlottesville And those are not a great place to bring your phone back to but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still a place To bring your phone back to because once grandma gets that phone from Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John She doesn’t know where to take that when it doesn’t work and then it involves Essentially tech support calling someone on the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and trying I mean Amazon is generally good at that and maybe that’s also playing to Amazon’s strengths. But Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ John for all their physical logistics, is not in the physical brick and mortar retail
⏹️ ▶️ John store business for what I think are obvious reasons. That’s sort of the opposite of what Amazon is. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re gonna sell you physical products, it’s all about them trying to make the experience really good of like, I can do text
⏹️ ▶️ John chat, I can do email, or I can call someone on a phone to arrange for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John return this thing to them in a package. Either I ship it myself, or they send me a box and I ship it back
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff. And that has to compete with going to the phone store at the strip
⏹️ ▶️ John mall that’s five minutes away, going to the Apple store that’s nearby me if I live near a big city.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t live near anything, then maybe Amazon is the way to go. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. The Mayday feature I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John a good selling point and Amazon was smart to put it in there, but it’s competing against
⏹️ ▶️ John those other possibilities for getting help. And as someone said in the chat room, my mom can get tech support
⏹️ ▶️ John in 15 seconds too, but it’s a FaceTime call to me. That is, or calling you on the phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what we’re weighing as the technically savvy people with relatives. We’re weighing like, what do I tell my
⏹️ ▶️ John relative or my non-tech savvy friend to get so that they don’t call me in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the night because they’re having a problem? Or if when they do call me, I don’t have to debug it. I can tell them, just take your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the store. Just go to the Apple Store. or just go to this web page
⏹️ ▶️ John on Amazon and decide whether you want to call them, email them or text chat them and they’ll arrange for you to return
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing because that’s really what we want is to not be bothered with other people’s we want we want them to get a solution and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to try to debug it remotely maybe we can go over their house and try to figure it out or whatever but once that’s happened
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all that I know so I think mayday in the cases where everything is working it’s great just
⏹️ ▶️ John to have another human there to talk to who’s who’s getting paid to help you with your thing and that
⏹️ ▶️ John will help you not send a FaceTime request to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco child. It’s also very smart of Amazon to do this because the kind of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their competitors really can’t, Microsoft probably could, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really can’t because it would just be way too big of an operation because there way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too many people have iPhones. It would be a nightmare to support and scale that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the iPhone sales volume and Google kind of can’t because well first of all they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate people and don’t understand them and second of all like how would Google like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would Google even pay for that like the way Android’s whole model is set up like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’d have a hard time supporting that really and you know even if they were in the business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of applying lots of human power to things which they’re definitely not Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could maybe do it for the same reason Amazon can do it which is they don’t sell that many phones like Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually lucky in a lot of these things that like for example one of the reasons why they were able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use like certain screens and some of the Kindle fire HDX and stuff like that is because they’re at small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale they can use components that don’t have very good yields that aren’t being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco produced in very high volume because they can’t be yet things that like for Apple to put something in an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna need a hundred million of them in a month like they can’t you know they can’t do that and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is a very smart move from Amazon of doing doing something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can do and that and that kind of only they can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway let’s move on to our second sponsor before we forget because it’s been almost an hour our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second sponsor is a return sponsor it’s our friends at hover hover is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best way to buy and manage domain names you know they’re put simply I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignore their three-page script because it’s three pages and you know I’m not very good with paper but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so hover is a domain registrar that doesn’t suck basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have all sorts of features all sorts of plans all sorts of products you can buy hosting you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy email you can buy domain names and I I can’t speak to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the to the most of the stuff I do use their email service it’s great it works for some of domains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mostly I use them as a domain registrar and that’s I think their main business and you go there they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of TLDs very very very complete inventory of TLDs that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support you can get dot pretty much anything even the stupid new ones they support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although all those that are out so far they support all those so it’s a great domain where you start and they don’t try to screw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you they don’t have all these like big add-ons and gimmicks and like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boxes that say like you know uncheck this to not opt out of of not being billed for the privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocking protection service. And you’re like, what? What is what is that? Do I have to check this? Am I going to get charged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this? They basically have sane defaults. It’s well designed. They also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have amazing support. They have a no hold, no wait, no transfer phone, phone support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco policy. So yeah, you can email them if you want. You can fill out support tickets. They have knowledge bases online if you want, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can also just call them. And if you call during business hours, a person just picks up the phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talks to you and they can help you. You don’t have to wait and hold. You don’t have to do one of those annoying push button menus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even the more annoying talking menus. Boy, do I hate those. You can you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just call them and a human being picks up and talks to you. Hover is fantastic. I’ve used them myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lots of people use them. There’s a reason why they sponsor tons of podcasts because they’re cool, first of all, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also because they know that you guys value this stuff. You know, the audience values services and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products that aren’t trying to rip them off and they’re actually providing good service, good quality. So go to hover.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can get 10% off your first order by using the new coupon code this month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me get that for you. What? I knew you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it. I got nothing. Ah, you’ll get it later. Anyway, go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover and use coupon code, let me get that for you for 10% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see if anybody ever gets that this week. Please email Casey if you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, don’t email me. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me get that for you, all one word, all lowercase, no spaces, no punctuation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m looking at the, I’m still a little frustrated with you two, I’m looking at the Boston metro area
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there are by my count, one, two, three, four, five, six, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven Apple stores within, what is this, 128 that runs around Boston?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, one thing I’d like to know based on your range here, so yes, by geographic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area, stores don’t serve a lot of people, but what percentage of the U.S. population
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is within driving distance of an Apple store? And then also, what percentage of the population most likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy an iPhone is within driving distance of an Apple store?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the second—the first one I’ll give you, the second one I won’t. And let me finish my thought real quick, which is to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Boston metro area has six Apple stores. The entire state of Ohio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has six Apple stores.
⏹️ ▶️ John It also has less people than the Boston metro area, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably does. But if you don’t live on I-71, is this, that runs from southwest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ohio to northeast Ohio, then kindly piss off because there is no Apple store near you. So anyway, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point is, there’s a lot of them. Like the entire, what is this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like none of them have an Apple store. If they do, I missed it. Yeah, but those are all green states. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any case, and your point about population density is fair, but I also wonder, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if an Apple store popped up in a larger city in Wyoming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming such a thing exists, which I’m sure it does, but I can’t think of any. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me cap off the geography thing, but I just bothered to look up while you guys were discussing where stores are in
⏹️ ▶️ John the United States. The population of Charlottesville is apparently about 44,000 people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that really it? The population of Smithtown, New York,
⏹️ ▶️ John where I went to high school is 117,000 people. So just saying. God, I’m surprised. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, it’s fair point. I’m surprised Charlottesville is that small. Funny how that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, look at Richmond, the Richmond metro area, not Richmond itself, but the Richmond metro area, I think is a couple million and we have a
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you have an Apple store. Anyway, getting back to
⏹️ ▶️ John something Marco said a while back about taking advantage of the The fact that they’re not going to sell a lot of them, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they can afford to have the fancy screens because their volumes are low and they can afford to do Mayday presumably because they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell a lot of these. Or at the very least, they’re starting from zero, so there’ll be a growth curve. It’s not like Apple where on day one you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John sell 10 million of these things wherever they sell and then you’ve got a big problem with Mayday, right? Because you just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John handle that capacity without working up to it. And this gets me into the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John with the concept of unlimited that a lot of people were tweeting about when they were tweeting about the unlimited photo storage. Casey already
⏹️ ▶️ John noted what Gruber had tweeted about it not really being unlimited It’s like oh, what’s only unlimited if you take them on the
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone? And if you have any existing library of pictures, then you know you have it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John subject to a five gigabyte cap Maybe they’ll charge you above that and it gets us back in the same discussion we always have where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want someone to take care of my crap and And then you hear about it. You’re like, well that will take
⏹️ ▶️ John care of my crap But then you learn the details and there’s always weird rules and you got to remember this and you got to remember that and this Is
⏹️ ▶️ John free and this is for pay and this is for that and the other thing and a lot of people on Twitter we’re saying this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with unlimited it’s like it’s pointless it’s never really gonna be unlimited if you ever see the word unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ John run the other direction it’s it’s just for people who who use too many resources
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not like the way anything should be and I think that’s too extreme of a reaction because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that we all want someone to take care of our pictures for us can be done and will be done
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually it’s not the unlimited part that’s bad it’s the complexities of like someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who wants to put unlimited on a slide but doesn’t want to commit to that, right? And it’s not like, oh, you’re gonna get something from nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a great example is our frequent sponsor Backblaze, where it’s unlimited but they
⏹️ ▶️ John charge you. There’s a monthly, it’s a low monthly fee and they figured out how to, presumably, they figured out how to run a business
⏹️ ▶️ John where we charge people a low monthly fee, we give them unlimited, it really is unlimited, and the way it works
⏹️ ▶️ John out is that most people don’t have a lot of data and the average works out so that we’re able to make money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week by Backblaze. Wow, Oh serendipitous. Really, actually. Might as well do this now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze is five dollars a month, unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup. You can try it for free with no credit card required. Literally it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five bucks a month, unlimited online backup. It’s very, very simple. They have a Mac native client.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is actually founded by ex-Apple engineers, so they know the Mac sensibilities. Their software is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. it. You can actually access your files from anywhere. They have this cool iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app where you can access any files backed up on Backblaze from anywhere you are. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on vacation somewhere and you want to access a file that’s on your home computer, as long as you’re back on to Backblaze, that file’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and you can get to it right there. You can also get email alert notifications for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peace of mind to know that you’re being backed up and to know if, for example, if something’s not being backed up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain amount of time, they can email you and tell you that which is very nice to know. Backblaze is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far the simplest online backup to use. You just install it and it does the rest. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, I have a lot of data in Backblaze and I’ve had trouble with other services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not accepting it fast enough because I have a pretty nice upstream here with finally getting Fios. I waited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my whole life to live somewhere that has Fios and I finally do and it’s glorious. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found with other services, they wouldn’t accept the uploads quickly enough. With Backblaze I don’t have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze accepts the uploads as quickly as I set it to. And you can set it to, you know, be kind to your connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can set it to just decide for itself how much it should use. And I’ve never had a problem. I’ve left it at that. I’ve never had a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it uploads quickly. And I have, between me, my wife, and my mom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we probably have a total of about four and a half terabytes worth of stuff there. And it’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five bucks a month per computer. Unlimited space. Simple as that. Go to backblaze.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP and you can get a free trial, no credit card required.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Backblaze. You really need online backup. If you are not backing up online and you have the upstream capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the bandwidth to do it, you really, really, really need to do it. I know some places you don’t have good upstream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you have low bandwidth caps, that’s fine. You are kindly excused. But everybody else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should really be doing this. There’s so many backup problems that this can be a nice safety net for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are going to happen to your house. If you have just your computer and a time machine drive put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it, then electrical problems, fires, floods, theft, all sorts of crazy stuff, water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flooding from the apartment above you, all sorts of crazy stuff can happen that can take out all of your copies of your data if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only in your house. So really, you want an offsite backup, and Backblaze, in my opinion, is the best one. Go to backblaze.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that Backblaze has going for it is they get to use the word unlimited,
⏹️ ▶️ John which takes away the stress from anybody really, but certainly from high
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity, like high demand users. You don’t want to know, is there a limit? Am I going to hit the limit?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I have to worry about the limit? And even casual users who, if there is a limit, they may not have any sort of conception of how much
⏹️ ▶️ John data they have. Like, so do I have that much data? How much is a gigabyte? Will I have that much data
⏹️ ▶️ John in five years? It doesn’t matter if they’re totally never going to reach the cap. If they don’t understand that, it could cause them hesitance.
⏹️ ▶️ John So unlimited gets rid of that anxiety of, like, I don’t have to worry about how much stuff I have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the only job you have to do after that is make the financial arrangement, both attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John and easy to understand. And this Amazon arrangement is not easy to understand, I would never have guessed that only
⏹️ ▶️ John the photos I take on my phone count towards unlimited, but it’s a five gigabyte cap, but maybe I can buy stuff other than that. And can I
⏹️ ▶️ John import my existing photo collection and blah, blah, it’s already too complicated. You know, backblaze is we charge
⏹️ ▶️ John a fee per month, it is a small fee, people are willing to pay it, we the
⏹️ ▶️ John average data stored by our customers is enough that we make money at that price. It’s easy to understand. Five dollars a month unlimited.
⏹️ ▶️ John Something like that for photos. It doesn’t have to be. We’ll start all your photos for free. Unlimited doesn’t mean free
⏹️ ▶️ John and unlimited. It just means no more anxiety about. But what about these photos? But what about those photos?
⏹️ ▶️ John What photos I take here? But what about my existing stuff? But will you keep the raws at full resolution? Will you downsample
⏹️ ▶️ John them? This that is there a 30 day window? Is there like all that crap and anxiety needs to go away? And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the company just needs to find some way to pay for that, whether by charging a reasonable monthly fee
⏹️ ▶️ John or incorporating it into some other service or subsidized or whatever. And so we were all briefly excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about this Amazon thing. Now we’re all unexcited about it. It’s just another solution that is too complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and too weird and is going to leave people in situations where they’re not sure their stuff is safe and where in reality probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So I actually if we if we have the time if you guys will permit me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would actually like to talk now about continuity. I think it plays into some of the stuff we were just talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So continuity is a feature during the keynote that they demoed where between Yosemite and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 9 and or 8 yeah iOS 8 and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently possibly even the Apple TV they have features where you can for example start doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something in an app on one of these devices and then go to another one of your devices and pick up where you left off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or do crazy things like take a phone call on your Mac and stuff like that, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfer an email as you’re writing it between your phone and your computer. All these different things that involve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically passing off tasks from one computer or device to another one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seamlessly. And one of the reasons I think this is smart, one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the themes where Apple tends to not do so well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this doesn’t actually apply just to Apple, but where Apple tends to not do so well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is trying to go past what they’re good at. Trying to do a really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new project in an area that they are really really not good at. And so one of the best examples of this obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Maps. Where you know Maps is the kind of area where Google’s really good at that at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the kind of like big data integration, massive scale data collection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and resolving conflicts between different sources of data, and ranking things, and and finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevance and and Google is really really good at that kind of problem and so when Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tackles that kind of problem they can generally do it very well and very few others can. Apple tried to tackle that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with Maps and iOS 6? 5? 6? I think it was 6 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and famously did not do very well at it and and it’s it’s certainly better than it was but it’s still not to Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of quality and honestly probably never will be and so you know you can look at things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that you can see all right these are kind of areas where where Apple’s week. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned right before the break or right before this last topic how I thought it was very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Amazon to recognize one of their strengths and do something in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Mayday, do something that the other people kind of can’t do in the business, can’t or won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And so what Apple has done with continuity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is the same kind of strategic thing where continuity is the kind of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple actually can do very well. Yes, it uses iCloud, but I think it mostly actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses local networking. I think it uses Bluetooth LE to do some of the initial handshaking and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably doesn’t go over the network or over the LAN unless it has to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think to jump in, my recollection of the video I watched was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it negotiates over Bluetooth LE and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the amount of data you can send back and forth is like the state of the world is almost none.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it establishes proximity using Bluetooth LE and then you have to use some other mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your choice, including a stream that I believe they can open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between devices. Actually that might be over Bluetooth as well. But anyways, by some other mechanism you have to establish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like what the crap it is you’re working on and what you’re doing. But the proximity awareness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit is Bluetooth LE and this is freaking terrible for me because both of my Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are late 2011 Macs and they don’t have Bluetooth low energy and I’m very sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t worry they’ll eventually be replaced and you’ll be able to use all this cool stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just talk to any Mac Pro owners in the last few years who ever had to use AirDrop and realize they can’t do it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro was so old. Anyway, so this is the kind of thing, this involves you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local networking with high-end brand new controlled hardware and passing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the internet very small bits of information in very large volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what push notifications are that’s what iMessage is that’s the kind of stuff Apple is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this stuff at scale and doing it very well most of the time and so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the and it requires very deep you know top-to-bottom integration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the hardware and the software and the services. It requires people who buy multiple devices from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same manufacturer and who actually keep them somewhat up-to-date. Casey, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a hard time. Eventually you’ll have it. It’ll be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is the kind of thing where not only is Apple really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at this sort of thing, but only Apple can really do that. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at, you know, Google, you know, and Gruber wrote a big thing about only Apple is really good and it I I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of hoping it’d be more about this when I saw the title. He touches on this, but I’d like to go a little more into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft can’t do this because they don’t sell any phones, really. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even their computer sales are not doing that great. And they have this massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bevy of hardware to contend with, and what percentage of Windows computers have Bluetooth low energy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what version, and all this crazy stuff that they would have to contend with that Apple doesn’t. Google can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this because nobody’s buying Google computers and even their tablets are pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weak and there’s also again similar issues with hardware diversity. Well
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and Google can’t do it now, they’ll be able to do it eventually. Apple can do it first. So it’s the only Apple can do this
⏹️ ▶️ John now. It’s important to Qualifier because eventually everyone will be able to do this and they will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well the directions that that these various companies, markets, and products and and strengths
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going, I don’t see a future where anybody else can do this really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like, if it’s if it’s a useful thing to do, that catches on all the other players will
⏹️ ▶️ John develop some kind of open standard for doing it. And eventually all their hardware will catch up in many years. And like, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing with everything else. Only Apple can make the iPhone one. But today, Amazon can slap together a phone that essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John looks and behaves to a regular person’s perspective, like the iPhone one, hopefully maybe a little bit better performing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe not, we’ll see. But you know what I mean? Like, there’s a big lead time, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John an advantage, but it’s mostly a temporal advantage, not a qualitative advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone will eventually be able to do it. So yes, this is exactly what Apple should be doing, doing the things that they can do before anyone else can do
⏹️ ▶️ John them because they have more control than everyone else. And even Apple is kind of in the uncomfortable situation of it’s like, poor Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you’ve got to have a new-ish Mac because the chipset needs to be whatever, and you’ve got to have a device with lightning connector,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, iPad 3 users like me, and all this. There are other, even with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s world and how fast they get everyone upgraded and everything, there is a slight constraint. So Apple is doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially as soon as they possibly can. And we’ll see if this feature is like a killer feature. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you need is if this is a feature that people really want, then everyone else will eventually copy it. If it turns out to be something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of okay, but maybe not important enough for the other guys to go through the effort to copy, then it will. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will have the advantage of the first mover advantages that they like to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think really ultimately, this is the kind of thing that Apple is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the only game in town that really does it in any effective, widespread way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the foreseeable future. I really don’t see that changing anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I also worry a little bit when networking is thrown into the mix. Because I agree with like devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and hardware and software just on those devices. That’s an Apple’s wheelhouse. But once you get
⏹️ ▶️ John anything involving the network, I have bad flashbacks. I mean, like messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’ve been using much more lately because sort of WWDC, everyone was using messages. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess last year I was doing it too, maybe, but this year I use Messages way more, and I kind of, I’m still using
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I’ve been using it more since, basically since my wife got, maybe the iPhone 5S, she had the
⏹️ ▶️ John 4S, but anyway, I find myself using Messages on the Mac, I find myself using it on my iPod, my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John have iMessage accounts, so I use them to talk to them on their various iPods, and I find
⏹️ ▶️ John the program maddening, like it doesn’t fulfill the basic function of providing a text box that I can type into and hit send,
⏹️ ▶️ John and having a message show up somewhere else. absurd percentage of the time it says not delivered
⏹️ ▶️ John and the only thing I get to do is tap the exclamation point and say try again and then it says not delivered. Why is it not delivered?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will it ever work? Sometimes I just have to delete that message and send the same message again and then that one will work. I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea but it’s failing on a basic level so I really hope continuity doesn’t actually involve the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John or any of Apple servers. I hope it does ad-hoc Wi-Fi like airdrop and I don’t have to involve any internet stuff because every time
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does internet stuff it screws up. I mean just today I I saw a tweet in my timeline. Someone said, on one device,
⏹️ ▶️ John I added a phone number. On another device, I deleted a phone number. Now, neither device has either phone number.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thanks, iCloud. Like, stuff like that, I know sync is hard or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying, like, that is outside Apple’s, still, is outside Apple’s wheelhouse. So I really hope continuity
⏹️ ▶️ John only involves, like, the airspace and hardware and software that’s within
⏹️ ▶️ John my arm’s reach and does not involve any servers anywhere. And I know push notifications is better, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet, so we’re all just hoping it will be good. There is a potential, you’re right, that potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John this is something that is right in Apple’s wheelhouse. If it’s outside, it’s not very far outside. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, I get nervous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly fair, but I really think that people give them a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time with stuff like iMessage weirdness, but if you look at things like iCloud Key Value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store push notifications and really most use of iMessage. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great and there are these there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like you know the fringes where things fall apart but.
⏹️ ▶️ John See I think the bar is low on iMessage though like it’s just text like I’m not asking for the world
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sending gifts like Casey is like I’m just it’s just text and
⏹️ ▶️ John like here’s my fallback like in these times when I’m frustrated I can’t send a message and it’s frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John I launched the Gmail app and I send that message as an email. And you know what? That sends every freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Every freaking time I send the email in Gmail, if I have an internet connection, it sends the email. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John single time. It has never said, could not send. It has never failed if I have a network
⏹️ ▶️ John connection. And it’s tough to compete with that. Like, when I find myself going to the Gmail app,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe even Apple’s own mail app, like if I used Apple’s mail app, I would have gone to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage still angers me greatly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s funny because I actually don’t have any normal issues with iMessage. I occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get like a message failed to send. I occasionally get like either a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time shifted message or something like that. But 99% of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no issues with iMessage. And so it’s so weird to me to hear that you have a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems and you’re not the only
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’ve had, you’ve had the failed to send. What does that mean? What does it mean? Failed to send? I don’t understand what it’s pro- like
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like an error message.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m thinking it means that the thing that it tried to send didn’t send.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what that means. Like, why? You have an end point to the server and not respond? Like, I’m not that I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John I need the details, but like intellectual curiosity. I wonder what it is that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John connecting. Like, here’s what I would want out of the thing. Like, okay, so you can’t connect the dots for whatever reason. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a legitimate reason. Like, sometimes I think maybe the phone, like if their phone is rebooting, can I not send
⏹️ ▶️ John this message? Like, there’s some, is there some sort of like, they want to show me the delivered message and it say there the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John was in the middle of rebooting, it can’t possibly be delivered because, you know, there’s nothing to receive it, like maybe that’s what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, but even if that’s the case, which I think is ridiculous by the way, it should never be the case, it should be store and forward, like
⏹️ ▶️ John most other IM systems are, like a Google Talk or whatever, even if that was the case, it
⏹️ ▶️ John should be the job of the software to just say, I’ll just keep trying, don’t worry, don’t worry about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t say it was delivered, I’m not going to lie to you, but you don’t have to keep hitting the exclamation point and hit try again, I’ll eventually get
⏹️ ▶️ John it sent, and what it should should really be is storing forward like email or like apparently every other I am message like when
⏹️ ▶️ John on aim or Google talk or whatever if someone is not online if all their computers are turned off I can still send them a message and the next time
⏹️ ▶️ John they sign on to the service or turn on one of their devices they’ll see my message right like that’s all I’m asking for it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s just text man
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week need and need lifestyle.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hover and backblaze and we will see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to Want to do titles?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did your bot survive? I saw you yelling at the people in the chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bot’s dead. Right now I want to be bitter and angry and say I’m just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bringing it back, but that’s immature. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem this time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the problem this time was somebody decided to, so I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WebSockets may have been a poor choice. actually a technically sound choice. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, it’s not very obfuscated. And because well, I guess I could like, you know, be 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and code everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t don’t worry about obfuscation. What was the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the problem was that somebody decided to run a loop of voting for every possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID and IDs or integers because wouldn’t they be? Because why do you need a grid or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something super complex for an ID?
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you need you need throttling. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defense against denial of service. You don’t have any like there’s no I guess the problem is cuz you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have state to be a counter for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no you can you can keep it a memory I mean like like whenever whenever I’ve done a rate limiter in in the application layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always do memcache cuz it’s just it’s quick. It’s easy. It’s lightweight I know it’s fast and and if you if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if he hit to the application consists only of Launching your you know getting your stack up to the controller level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you firing off a memcache read or a man catch increment Rather
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t need a memcache. He’s single process though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, yeah, that’s yeah He could just keep it in an array.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing though is that, well, there’s two problems. One, I mean, I’d have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this all by hand because this is a raw socket to the server by definition. That’s what a web socket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. And shoot, what was the other one was I realized that vote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey double vote prevention was totally borked and I, and it took me a few minutes to realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all of the vote submissions were coming from 10 dot X addresses,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get the X forwarded for Heather.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re just trusting the- Nope, nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. This is like a mini web bootcamp for you. It’s like a little microcosm of how to make a web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s funny because I’ve been so far abstracted from all of these things that you guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, have somehow or another had to worry about, but-
⏹️ ▶️ John Somehow or another by writing web apps, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No. It’s just experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just the same way you learned all this stuff you learned writing fast text that you didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John before about how to write an iOS app. well, there’s a different thing, a set of things you need to know for web apps. They’re just more fun when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing them publicly and there’s antagonists in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, see, this can be a whole series, a graduate school for Casey and web apps. Just every week you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try, you’ll try to put it up and every week the chat room will educate you on something that you didn’t account for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or didn’t do correctly. And then the next week you can fix that and you can get a new problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well the thing is, like, I write web apps for a living, which at this point probably sounds like I make a terrible living, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing is, it’s so much of it is abstracted so far away from me that I never have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s also for intranets, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not exclusively, but generally, yes. I’ve done some public-facing stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, things that aren’t a target. Like basically, you survive because there’s not people. Now we have a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a fun little game to target your thing. It’s fun for them. Just think of how
⏹️ ▶️ John incredible your thing will be when forged in the crucible of people in the chatroom. Like by
⏹️ ▶️ John the end of it, it will just be completely hardened shell. Unlike so many other crappy things where someone writes a little web app
⏹️ ▶️ John and puts it up on GitHub and says, here you go. And then some poor sucker runs that and uses it for something really
⏹️ ▶️ John popular and then it falls under the load. Yours will be battle tested, I guess, or
⏹️ ▶️ John dead. One of the two battle tested or dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re sitting standing here now, actually, I feel like just murdering it forevermore. But that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immature of me. So I will lick my wounds, I will I will put bandages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on them and I will take another stab sometime maybe next week. I had to eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself from the chat room for like half an hour, though, because not only was it distracting, but I wanted to murder
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need to like for all these things, do right, like failing test cases for all them, right, a little test for
⏹️ ▶️ John denial of service to test your throttling, right, a little test for duplicate voting to handle, you know, like do everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John is done to you turn into a test case. And so that you’ll know that your future changes don’t regress and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re right. that that frust that’s frustrating about it is this is a bot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to record votes for the chat room there’s suggestions and votes for the chat room to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggest titles like why am I having to go through all this like why can’t we all be why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t we all just act like an adult or act like adults and behave but oh no not this crowd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m wondering what the heck could like you know 20 people in a chat room do to bring down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco node.js how like I’ve seen the code it’s not that complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t bring it down, they’re just writing an infinite loop and he’s got no throttling and it’s denial of service, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think what happens is at some point, actually it might be when ints wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around like Brent was talking about way back when, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no way they’re making enough requests to make a 53-bit integer wrap around in 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, today the issue was they were just incrementing the ID and in trying to place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a vote for every successive ID number. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that did piss it off and make it fall down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know the what the hell is acronym? Oh, you know, this acronym is a wasp. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do open web application security project. Oh, oh, WASP has like a list of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, common vulnerabilities and web apps and they update the list every year and you you have hit several of them already.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them is exposing your internal IDs to the outside world. I forget what it’s called, but there’s some snappy name for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the one where they’ll let people increment a number to try to guess your IDs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing. But here again, I conceptually know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of these things could and probably would be problems. But I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps obtuse or maybe just stubborn. But I didn’t think that I would need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to write like 10,000 lines of node to prevent the chatroom from being a bunch of bulls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as it turns out, I’m going to need to do that, or just give up on it and will rely on Brad Schoat’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, the gray winter slash Brad Schoat setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There isn’t a package in Node that’s like a simple rate limiter and stuff like that? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean. Well, there is. But again, because I’m using WebSockets, it’s not so simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s probably like a WebSockets wrapper library that has a rate limiting parameter that you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you set up the receiving end of your socket. You’re not going to do it on the sending end. It’s all going to be in the receiving end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the thing, is I’m going to have to write my own rate limiting. I did a quick cursory search to see if there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, and I didn’t see anything. But I did a 30-second search. So tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at some point when I’m less bitter about it all, then I’ll have a proper think on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that it matters for showbots or whatever, but realistically speaking, for the people who are actually web developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and are listening to this, this type of thing where a bunch of people are just intentionally attacking
⏹️ ▶️ John this app, you’re like, oh, well, I’m glad the app that I’m doing doesn’t have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you may luck out there, but really what you’re saying is my app is going to develop and add features
⏹️ ▶️ John and become important and essential to the people who are using it. And then some
⏹️ ▶️ John person is going to stumble across it and break it. Because it doesn’t mean your application is not vulnerable to these or will never
⏹️ ▶️ John experience these. It just means that if it’s not going to happen now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to happen later. And later, it’s going to be worse. Because you want this stuff. If this stuff is ever
⏹️ ▶️ John going to happen in the lifetime of the app, you want it to happen early. If not, it happens when the app has been deployed for six months
⏹️ ▶️ John and the entire business relies on it and then some piece of malware or bought or whatever stumbles across your thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John wipes off the face of the earth. And that’s much bigger problem when your whole company now relies on this app or you have
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of customers or whatever you have, then it would have been if during the early development of
⏹️ ▶️ John this app, it had a bunch of jerks attacking it and made you harden it again, not really relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ John a show bot, but I’m like, it is relevant to people building a real app. don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stick your head in the sand because everybody gets hit by one of these eventually. If you don’t, then you’re either lucky
⏹️ ▶️ John or you never got popular enough to be noticed. But even if you’re not popular, just this malware that scans and
⏹️ ▶️ John just fuzzes its way into everything. So eventually, every web app will be a victim.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s the thing is that I had thought since this is a controlled audience, which I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assumed were all well-behaved, I didn’t think I needed to do a lot of the things that I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise done in my real world, in my job world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just took a lot of shortcuts because I thought, well, we’re all friends here. It’ll be okay. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. And by the way, I owe an apology to, I think it’s Adam Kearney, who has already actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a while ago, put up a pull request on GitHub because Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bot is on there, put up a pull request to fix an unrelated small issue that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we discovered during the show about not refusing titles that are too long. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the appropriate way to behave. If you’re going to break it, that’s fine, but throw me a pull request,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did he submit the source code change as a very long title? No, but that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny. That would be the best way to do it. But there’s no persistence, so you would never see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And that’s on the list, is I’ll probably have to set up like some,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like NoSQL database or something just to stuff this in there. It’s pronounced Nos-Q-ul, Casey. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just because well, it’s actually in a perfect world. I would never need it because the darn thing will never crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still how how did this take down? No a node instance I this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is either the worst ad in the world for Heroku small instances or the worst ad in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey node or my code But to be honest, like like you said this code is pretty straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know I really don’t because I’ve survived a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of links from your site, which through as far as I could tell some pretty serious traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talked about that in the past. And Heroku, like I said in the past, reached out to me and said, oh, yeah, that was nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like your dyno was good to go cruising at like, I think they said it was like under a third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU usage, bandwidth usage, or throughput, etc. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if it’s my code, if it’s the fact that it’s WebSockets, something is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it maybe there is there like a connection limit on the websockets layer somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean it could be I’m not aware of one but it certainly could be I mean there’s so many only so but so many port numbers but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine that’s the issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it could be you should guard against that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever so So yeah, so, um. Let’s look at titles in the show bot that works.