78: Fleece the Whales
15 Aug 2014We’ve finally done it: an entire show of follow-up. Sort of.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show:
- Follow-Up:
- USB Type-C connector finalized
- ARM Macs
- More on Jared Sinclair and the App Store economy
- TiVo Premiere UI update
- TiVo ditches Flash
- Haxe (həvər)
- Account-free Overcast
- Post-show:
Sponsored by:
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do we always have this much to talk about even when we have nothing to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John Blabbermouths, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why you should get more out of your system on your new podcast Then you won’t have as much to say here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh because I’m definitely the one who bogarting the mic of the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John any follow-up Why is follow-up always
⏹️ ▶️ John you invented follow-up? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John a surprise? I mean, I put all this all up you guys can put follow-up in to you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we don’t believe in following up on things because we’re just always right
⏹️ ▶️ John Doing being right that’s adding additional information People ask on that like on the earning
⏹️ ▶️ John calls. Can I get some more color on that? We provide more color All right. First item
⏹️ ▶️ John is that that new reversible USB connector that we talked about many many
⏹️ ▶️ John many shows ago they have Reportedly finalized the spec and released a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of images of what the connector is supposed to look like if you look in the show Notes, you can see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have like mock-ups before we already knew That it wasn’t going to be like lightning It wasn’t going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a solid metal thing with contacts on the top and bottom But rather was going to be more like an existing
⏹️ ▶️ John USB connectors where it’s it some kind of shape metal shell and then inside the little
⏹️ ▶️ John metal shell is is… what’s inside there? There’s a better picture of the inner… it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little hole and then in the thing you plug it into there’s a little board with
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts on top and bottom and anyway it’s difficult to explain we’ll put pictures in the show notes you can see what it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not very exciting to look at I guess I mean it’s got it’s basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John a rectangle with round end caps on the right and left side
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess there’s not much more to say about it, except there’s one comment on the Ars Technica story,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ll link, from Peter Bright, who is known for being wrong about everything all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. Yeah, that’s kind of his reputation. Way to put it gently. Yeah, how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really feel? But in a pleasant way.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s well informed that he knows lots of things, but whenever there’s a choice to make
⏹️ ▶️ John one decision or another based on subjective criteria, he chooses wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this like the John Syracuse equivalent of bless his heart?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, he wrote in the comments, the big question is where are the sprung parts?
⏹️ ▶️ John USB traditionally did this right, putting them in the cable, which is cheap and easy to replace. Apple did it wrong, putting them in the port,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is expensive and difficult to replace. And what he’s talking about is when you have a connector where two contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John press up against each other, one or both of them have to have some give to them. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were both completely rigid, you’d have to have it perfectly aligned and You have to have these little, you know, metal things touching each other
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. One of them you want to be kind of like a spring. So if there’s a little bit of wiggling,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, then they move back and forth. The spring will account for that motion by staying in contact with the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And traditionally there’s like one rigid part and one springy part of it. I suppose you could do two springy parts, it would work the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John In Lightning Connector, the little thing that you plug in is stiff. You can look at it, it’s a little metal, solid metal
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with contacts on top and bottom. But inside the connector are these little kind of springy
⏹️ ▶️ John finger things that are, when no connector is in it, they are closer
⏹️ ▶️ John together than the connector, than the width of the connector. When you shove the connector in, it presses those springy things apart,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that when it’s inserted in there, the connectors are pressing against the contact area.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if the lightning connector wiggles a little bit, the things stay in contact with each other. and
⏹️ ▶️ John Peter is saying that in USB the little springy things are inside the connectors So
⏹️ ▶️ John if they get unspringy or they start to get looser, whatever fine You throw it out the cable you get a new one and in lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John the little springy things are inside the connector itself So the cable doesn’t matter if those little springy
⏹️ ▶️ John things get loose you need to replace the thing that the cable connects into Which makes some sense
⏹️ ▶️ John But the question always is what is the expected lifetime of the little springy things?
⏹️ ▶️ John If the expected lifetime of the little springy things exceeds the expected lifetime of the device then you’re fine
⏹️ ▶️ John If it doesn’t then you have problems presumably Apple took this into account I like the idea as I talked about on the past shows that
⏹️ ▶️ John the lightning connector is you know It’s very physically robust. It is a solid little
⏹️ ▶️ John ingot of metal It does have very fine connect contacts on it Which I guess is just the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of being small and having you know you need like what is it? You need at least four connectors there. I forget how many
⏹️ ▶️ John are on lightning I guess I can stare at this thing and look, what is it, eight? I think it’s eight on each side, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, that’s a lot of connectors in a small place, but the connector itself, it’s like there’s nothing to snag on
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. You can bang it around and it will probably be OK. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John more robust to me than a similarly sized connector. The USB three USB type C connector
⏹️ ▶️ John is bigger than lightning, but not that much. I think we went over the exact size in millimeters on the previous episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s hollow. So it’s got this really skinny shell and inside that little shell is a little gap where this thing plugs into
⏹️ ▶️ John it And i’m not sure how durable that will be compared to this now He’s right that it’s like well if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to replace something wouldn’t you rather replace the cheap cable? than replace the other thing so if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had something fragile into your cable, like if your connectors were fragile and you accidentally, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Stepped on them or they got dropped and bent or whatever. Well, so what you buy a new cable?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, it’s not so bad for the connectors to be fragile, but the springy parts is a good point that I’m not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John sure how that’s going to work out in practice. I don’t think Lightning has been in the market long enough for anyone to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John Lightning connector device where the little springy things become unspringy or get permanently
⏹️ ▶️ John bent up or lose their spring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what’s interesting is that this actually might be a good design on Apple’s part because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It certainly seems from the sound of people complaining when lightning came out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cables might outlast people’s use of the devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they still have the little, you know, the little strain relief sleeves on the edge. Sure, yeah. Like, so those things, those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wear out. But I’m saying, like, I bet, I bet, I bet the average person who has more than one iPhone in their life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably keep cables around. Because I mean, like, I know I do. Like, it was really annoying to me when I, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought lightning cables when, when the iPhone 5 came out because I had accumulated so many dot cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years that I wanted to like, you know, at least partially match my collection so I could have all the convenience of having these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere. I bet that had to have crossed somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind at some point at Apple when designing this connector that actually, you know, most people replace their iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every one to two years, whereas these cables might hang around for five years or more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing about the cables, I do also have a lot of old cables hanging around.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I would imagine the part that fails in the cables, like I said, is not the connector part of the on lightning or even on the dock connector,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is this crazy wide thing with very weird, you know, tiny contacts in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazed the dock connector ever worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yes, it’s I know still using it. My iPad still uses but but instead, it’s the it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the the wire itself, especially the stream release parts for people who are not delicate with their devices and just
⏹️ ▶️ John yank it out. Eventually, the part where the wire goes into the connector starts to fray. And once that goes, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter that your connector is still fine, the whole wire is dead. You could be right, though, especially for phones on
⏹️ ▶️ John a two-year replacement cycle with contracts in the US, that the cable might outlive the thing. The
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about, I mean, like I said, lightning hasn’t been around for a while, for long enough for us to know if the little springy things
⏹️ ▶️ John are a problem. We do know that in all connectors, dock, port, lightning, anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John with any portable device that you carry around in pockets and stuff, lint is an issue. Like, if there’s a hole in a device
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re carrying it around in your pocket or in your purse, lint will get in there. And I’ve known many people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John had to, either had to go to the Apple store or sort of done surgery on their own with like, I don’t know, toothpicks and dental tools
⏹️ ▶️ John or something to remove big wads of lint from, because like if you eventually, if you pack in enough
⏹️ ▶️ John lint in your thing and you try to put the lightning connector in, it won’t go all the way in. It’ll basically be prevented from
⏹️ ▶️ John seeding. And you know, there’s two little dents on the side of the lightning connector that these other two little
⏹️ ▶️ John springy things grab onto. And then you know it’s properly seeded. That’s why you get that little click. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you get enough crap inside there, you can’t even get it seeded. I mean, that’s, there’s not much I think the connector can
⏹️ ▶️ John do about that, except maybe not having it open at all and being more like MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that has its own set of problems. But anyway, I’m glad USB is getting reversible. I think the connector
⏹️ ▶️ John looks okay. I would have preferred if it looked and worked like lightning, but there is an open question about durability
⏹️ ▶️ John for both of them because neither one has existed long enough for us to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just proud of them for finally making, possibly, maybe, just maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a micro USB connector that isn’t totally infuriating to insert and remove.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s not go too far. It’s still early.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will join the eight bazillion other kinds of USB connectors that are out there. In this thread
⏹️ ▶️ John on Ars Technica, in the comment thread about this connector, about a million people posted the XKCD
⏹️ ▶️ John comic about, you know, competing standards and how there’s, you know, too many standards. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll make one standard that everyone can use and now you’ve just created one more standard. That’s the history of USB. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just kept creating connector after connector. There are so many of them in so many different shapes and sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus the weird proprietary ones that occasionally people would come out with that only appear on one or two devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully this new reversible one will sweep away all the old ones. At the very
⏹️ ▶️ John least, I hope it replaces everything on PC, laptops, and desktops. I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John care so much about cameras and stuff like that because I think they’re always just going to do their own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I welcome my new USB connector overlords.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the Simpsons, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It is good job All right
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, hey, that’s pretty cool. I appreciate that. But 20% that’s some serious stuff. What else is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in follow up, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh, man. You want to do this next one? I just pasted it in there, but I didn’t have no particular
⏹️ ▶️ John tie to it more than anyone else does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t know which parts in particular you wanted to talk about, but this is from Gavin regarding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM Max. And again, there’s like 300 words here. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which particular words you felt were important.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re failing as a summary service. You know the thing, is it still
⏹️ ▶️ John on OS X where you can to select a bunch of text and ask it to summarize it for you. Back
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in the day, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service. Isn’t that what that kid had created that did the news
⏹️ ▶️ John article? Somely. Yeah. All right. Anyway, this is from Gavin. And he asked a question about ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. His idea is, what about, instead of an ARM Mac, what about
⏹️ ▶️ John a traditional Mac form factor device, but with an ARM CPU running
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and not OS X? I think that’s essentially what he’s asking about here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What would that accomplish that like one of those silly Logitech keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey covers doesn’t other than the fact that it would be less silly?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think the idea is that like iOS is the newer OS. iOS has less annoying stuff in it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John easier for people to use. Why should laptops be stuck with
⏹️ ▶️ John the more complicated OS? Why can’t we make a laptop form factor but have it run iOS? And I I think the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to that is that, you know, what do you do? Do you touch the screen or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s the question. First question you have to ask. All right. So it’s running iOS. I always doesn’t work with a mouse pointer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a touching thing. So am I going to be touching the screen of my laptop?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’ll use the same mouse and keyboard combinations that the iOS simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses because those are super fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s still no shortcut to adjust dynamic text size. It drives me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, like the exact text is, what about a laptop WIMP version of iOS? So he’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to have Windows. What is WIMP? Windows something. Intel. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. MySQL PHP? Yeah. Mouse pointer, whatever. I think he’s saying it’s going to have a,
⏹️ ▶️ John he compared it to a Chromebook, basically. So the idea is instead of having iOS go down market, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other part of his email was, what if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John something that was like an Intel computer in the house, which he calls the truck, but each
⏹️ ▶️ John individual person has their own iOS device that either docks with or connects with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you only replace the big Intel computer every few years, but you replace the iOS things more
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently. And when I read this part, I thought, it seems like, well, I don’t know what the replacement cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John is, but it seems like the replacement cycle for iPads in particular is not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John frequent. They are hanging around way longer. I don’t know if they’re hanging around longer than Macs are, but they’re certainly hanging
⏹️ ▶️ John around for a long time because they’re not tied to a contract. There’s nothing artificial making you upgrade it. So I know so,
⏹️ ▶️ John so many people who still have iPad ones being used in the house. Granted, usually by kids, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John you cannot kill these things. Like if you don’t physically break it and it still runs the same five apps than it was running
⏹️ ▶️ John before, I guess at a certain point, maybe like if you can’t view YouTube on it anymore, or if the browser
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes so old that you can’t use most websites, that will kill it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we have an answer to this question, kind of. A friend of the show, underscore David Smith,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just updated his version stats page to include the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey average device age, which for an iPad, is 883 days. And by comparison, an iPhone is 804 days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a difference of, what is that, 80 days? Something like 30? Yeah, about 80 days. Yeah, I saw those stats, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were so similar. Because you would think the upgrade cycle on phones would make them last longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I mean, the thing, the problem with underscore, all of underscore stats is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if he has a broad enough crutch section of the user base. I think a lot of the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John use his apps or know about them might be in the nerd circle and then that could be skewing things a bit, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this is all from audio books alone, I thought, which is a little bit more mainstream.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I suppose. And, you know, now that I think about it, like in the same way that iPads get
⏹️ ▶️ John handed down, I do know a lot of cousins, for example, who have old versions of their parents’
⏹️ ▶️ John phones. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also, not everyone is on a two-year cycle. You know, that, from what I gather, is maybe not a uniquely American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, but a particularly American thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I’m not sure about Gavin’s theory here. I think we’d have to work out a lot of issues in terms of the input
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iOS-powered Chromebook-type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea of trying to get rid of the legacy concerns of the back. But we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have, we’re not anywhere close to having a replacement for all the functionality that a Mac provides. And I don’t think you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John make everyone go iOS and solve all these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think any sort of doc-like thing would make much sense. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what he’s driving at with a Chromebook. And I don’t know, the Chromebook, to me on paper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why it’s appealing. But I know Ben Thompson of Stratechery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it used to be Stratechery, now it’s Stratechery. I know he swears by his and I’ve heard from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey others, so I can’t remember who that they love theirs, but having never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used one, I don’t get it. But then again, I said the same thing about an iPad and I love my iPad. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John You said on paper, you don’t get it on paper is exactly where I get it. Like conceptually, conceptually. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, all the things that they’re doing, I think are great. It’s just in practice the actual devices
⏹️ ▶️ John I have not found appealing. Although maybe I just need to use them. The whole idea is like, throw it in
⏹️ ▶️ John a river, who cares? All your stuff is somewhere else. You just sign in, everything syncs, nothing is local.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything local is just a cache. Everything’s in the cloud. All your applications are web applications or similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that concept, don’t worry about backups. Don’t worry about local device
⏹️ ▶️ John management. Don’t worry about anything. It’s just like, it’s not a dumb terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a smart terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ John have local disk, local cache, memory, GPU, all that good stuff that you want. What you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have is local state. What you’ve eliminated are all the stupid concerns that make us have difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John tech support calls with relatives about how to deal with computing. And it’ll be just, you know, take away all those concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in practice, what are the applications? How do you use it? How is the experience? How is the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware? What is the pricing and performance like? And those things aren’t quite yet worked out. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, sure. It’ll all be iCloud. It’ll be perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Google does a better job than Apple with iCloud. But yeah, we’re not there yet. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone’s going to get there first, to be Google, so I keep my eye on the Chromebook
⏹️ ▶️ John space to see how it’s going. But so far, it’s not has not impressed me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right, so we also have some follow up. This was sent specifically to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? From Jared Sinclair?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just wanted to make sure. That makes one of us. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he says in an email to the three of us, in my post I was very careful not to assign blame to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone else for UnRED’s failure, not even to Apple. The main purpose of my article was not to assign blame, but simply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make my failure a matter of public record. Here’s why. In response to Brent Simmons’ recent post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about who are the indie iOS developers, numerous people on Twitter responded mentioning my name. With the high profile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviews of UnRED and several app store features, I could see why an outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey observer might assume that UnRED was earning me a sustainable living. I don’t want someone to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my silence as a tacit approval of that notion. And more importantly, I don’t want someone to consider, scare quotes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going indie, to make that career change without hearing about how easy it is to fail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the app store. The scale of the app store with over 100 million credit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cards can make it seem like any given niche is big enough for a solo developer to earn a small but sustainable living.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The idea out there is that great design and great reviews will be enough to carry you. Reality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often contradicts that wishful thinking, as I learn the hard way. Maybe someone out there can learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my mistakes and not repeat them.” So I thought that was pretty interesting and well phrased.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And similar and kind of relatedly, sometime in the last week or so, Jared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually took a full-time position with someone, I say as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stall, but it doesn’t really matter, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He talked about it actually on, there’s a good podcast called Release Notes that you should all listen to if you’re a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially if you listen to this show, that will be relevant to you. It’s a very good show and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had him on last week and then this week they talked more about it. And yeah, it’s good. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, hell, we could talk about this for episodes and episodes. We probably shouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We probably will. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really quickly, a real-time follow-up, it’s Bloglovin that he is joining. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I mean, I don’t know. There’s so many angles to this whole thing. First of all, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth anybody trying to figure out what indie should mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The definition of the word indie doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this argument. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s really a discussion that needs to happen. I don’t think we need to care about how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are there making their living solely on this. And, you know, again, like, you know, what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think you can just look around to see, you know, this, that it’s hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of people out there doing iOS app development with the hopes of making money from it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very few of them make a meaningful amount of money from it. That to some degree has always been the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. Like our friend underscore David Smith did an episode of Developing Perspective, which you should also be listening to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco During the very first week, this was being discussed a few weeks back, and where he basically said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always been hard. And he’s right. I mean, I’ve been in the App Store since day one, and I was lucky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Instapaper on well, It was actually like day two or three, technically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there was a huge backlog of submissions. And even though I submitted by the deadline that where they said you’d be there on day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I wasn’t. No, I’m not. I’m not bitter about that. I’ve been there since roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day two or three. And yeah, the fact is, it’s always been hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was lucky that my app was very popular from the start, relatively speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even that was not that easy to sustain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve had other efforts since then that were not that successful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I saw the other side of it, too. At some point I want to do a big blog post about app marketing and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually means, which is funny coming from me, and it would probably include me talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about brands because it’s actually relevant. You have to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about marketing from the start. Like when I made Overcast, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided to start making it, the very first thing I did after deciding, okay, I’m going to take this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little prototype audio engine I have and make it into an actual app, the very first thing I did was download all the other podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that I could find and make a folder on my phone so I could keep tabs on them and see what they added and see what they did and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what they were good at and see what they weren’t good at. And I took screenshots of all of them. I did like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little tour of each app and took a screenshot to say, you know, here’s how this app looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I made folders saying, you know, this is downcast, this is instacast, this is pocketcast, like all the all the apps. Here’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they look. Here’s their setting screen. Here’s their playback screen. Here’s their list screen. Here’s the options, you know, that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever. I did all this so that I could have like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portfolio of info. And then I made a list saying, here’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan to do with my app. How will it be better than or worse than these apps? And what you know, in what regards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will I be better than this? And then, well, you know, and for each app, I had an entry in a big text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file saying, here’s the pros of Overcast versus this app, and here’s the cons of Overcast versus this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And I did all this, not because I’m good at doing research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or homework, because that’s not even close to being true. I did all this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to make sure that I had a chance and not a chance of being, you know, being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a minor success for a week or two. I wanted this app to be to be successful enough that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could develop it for years, because that’s what I want to do. I want to keep working on this. I don’t like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s out. I’ve actually I there was an update which I’ll get to I guess later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already fixed many of the known bugs. If I if I wanted to just abandon this app and move on, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably abandon it in about another two months, but I don’t want to do that. I want to keep working on it. So far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will be able to you know it’s selling well enough that so far I can do that, but I did all this research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front and all this planning to really know like what am I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really going to be adding to this market? And you know Jared points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there’s this idea that you know he says there’s the idea that great design and great reviews will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to carry you and that’s not and he points out rightly that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wishful thinking that’s you know that doesn’t fit reality because the fact is you can have the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch in the world and be all over daring fireball and MacStories and iMore and all the great sites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that review this stuff. But what you have to look at is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an App Store buyer who is just browsing the App Store, who has searched for the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of app that you have. They typed in podcast into the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They get a list of the podcast apps and they’re going to look at the first few and make a decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to ask yourself before you even start any work at all, you have to ask yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will people meaningfully in meaningful numbers, will people buy my app in that situation?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not going to go to Mac Stories. They’re not going to go to Darren Fireball. They’re going to go to the App Store and look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the list and they’re going to make a few comparisons. Probably first, they’re going to look at price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re going to look at the front. They probably first look to see if there’s a free one that fits their needs and if there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great, they’re going to stop there and that’s it. And then they judge it based on the icon, the title,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screenshots. you’re lucky and no one ever ever ever reads the description text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of it. You’re the only person who reads it. Yeah, I read it too, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also read emails, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s like three words visible in the description text
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey most of the time. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John two or three words a period, a new line, new line, one word, new line, dot dot dot, tap for more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And no one ever, and Apple, Apple there is designing for what people actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Like it used to be more text visible and over time they’ve shrunk because presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because nobody reads it and they can use that space for other things. So you know people have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to plan from the start. This is this is marketing. This is part of marketing is figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out where you fit in the market and making sure you’re gonna fit somewhere that there actually is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a market for. It’s marketing from the very beginning. It’s thinking about the stuff from the very beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to be able to think you know you have to be able to make a good case for your app based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no reviews having been read, no research having been done, usually not even people trying trials
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different apps, they’re usually going to stick with whatever they use first. So in that list when they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app store search, they’re browsing a list, is your app going to be compelling enough?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the fact is because there’s so many apps in the store, it’s hard to be compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And especially the model of paid upfront. The reason it’s so hard is because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how people browse. The reason the race to the bottom happened is because of that. That’s It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people are buying apps, not from their desktop, reading reviews and clicking the link to go to iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have the app sync over. Most people are buying apps right from the phone in the App Store app, period. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing that probably after doing a search. We don’t know for sure yet. But I bet I bet once we have better analytics, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find that out pretty quickly. That’s probably through through browsing top lists first, and searching for terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distant second. And you know, most people aren’t going to be on the top list. So you know, your your hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is searching for terms. When they browse the list and they see that one of the apps is free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that like three or four of them are free and there’s your app sitting there at four bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t stand a chance. You just don’t. If people hear about your app in some other way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if a friend tells them that they read a review and your app is four bucks, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have a decent chance there. But the average person browsing, and I know there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are specialty app types for which this is not true. fine but for general audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps general purpose apps that are not being used in some kind of specialty business role or anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general audience apps this is how people browse they look for what they want they find one hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s free they download it and they stop looking that’s it and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid up front apps just as they don’t really stand a chance in this model this is why overcast has not paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front in paper was paid up front the whole time I saw the challenges it worked for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it stopped working very well And it’s hard for developers to accept this because paid up front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is easy. It’s really easy to just make an app where everything’s always enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t have to worry about trying to manage purchases or anything like that. You just make a great app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you put a price tag on it and you’re done. And you don’t have to deal with refunds or anything like that because Apple deals with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for you. And you don’t have to deal with limiting things and trials and demos and working within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s limitations and rules for that and all that stuff. You just put it up there and you’re done. It’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story. It worked for a long time. It stopped working. It doesn’t work now. Now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to put a little more work into it. You know, now you have to actually figure out, well, what can I how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I wedge a free trial type thing into the system? What can I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid for in this app, if anything? And then you have to implement that you have to say, All right, well, you have to like, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it overcast. I made these like little demo modes where you can demo the effects for five minutes and you know, before you buy them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all additional work. I had to have an interface for buying things. I had to have a screen explaining that what you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you buy things. You have to have all these different states that exist in the app. You have to, with iOS 8, you have to deal with delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchases, all this stuff. This is just the reality of the market now. You have to think this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to do more work. You probably, if you want a general audience app, you probably have to do free with an app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make any money, and that’s just the reality of it. You know, what Jared was doing with Unread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was appealing to us, appealing to people like you and me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not the market. That’s a very small part of the market. And he got that part of the market, but it just wasn’t enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think you would have had, maybe the bravery is the best way to phrase it, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release Overcast had you not already proven your success in the app store with Instapaper?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying like to other people, do you think internally you would have had the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bravery, again, for lack of a better word, to jump into the App Store in today’s App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had you not already lived through 2008’s App Store? Matt Stauffer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably would have been stupid enough to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t want to discourage people from doing it. Just have reasonable expectations. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is, in 2008, you could put anything up there. I mean, God forbid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually see screenshots of InstaPaper 1.0, it’s a disaster. And I actually didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have I didn’t have a paid app on day one. My first app was free and then I made Instapaper Pro about two months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. That was the paid app. So about two months in, I started getting paid revenue and even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that version, I mean, look at the screenshots. It’s just a disaster. It’s awful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking. And I charged $10 for it and it sold well. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy. And the fact is, standards were just much lower back then. There was a lot less in the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These days, every category already has 10 apps in it at least. Especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, God, some categories have thousands. You’re competing against a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive, massive market now. It’s not the same game anymore. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to adapt to the new reality of it. And you can’t really depend, you know, and Jared’s right, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really ascribe blame to Apple in this. Because, you know, I wrote this post a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks ago called Apparat. This post was a failure of mine as a writer. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had about three different ideas I wanted to express. They should have been three different posts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was lazy one night and made it one post. I’ve been sitting on these ideas for months and I just couldn’t get them out. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the motivation. People misinterpreted it to mean a lot of different things because I tried to conflate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different things that should have been different posts into one post. Apple is not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at fault at all here for this part of the market failure. They have other things they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do to make the market better, but this is not Apple’s fault. This is not because we don’t have trials or anything like that. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, or paid upgrades, you know, this is simply the result of the market having a ton of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. A ton of developers do this, as we talked about last week. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s, there’s not much Apple can do to fix this problem. There’s some things they can do to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other problems. Like, like I mentioned, getting rid of the top lists, won’t fix this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will fix other problems or reduce them. But this problem is here to stay because the market is just
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of the same way it was with like the, with just companies in general with the dot com thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Where, you know, it started out if you were an internet company and you had a website, you had
⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable shot, but then all the websites got better and very quickly what evolved was the business model where
⏹️ ▶️ John you get as much venture capital as you can. You try to get as many users as you can by giving away everything you
⏹️ ▶️ John can for free and then figure out how to monetize it later. In the App Store, we’re not really in the figure out how to monetize
⏹️ ▶️ John it later. But we are in the part where like the goal is get every single human being with an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John device to download this application and have within this application a way to get money from it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John there like you know, people don’t have to use it whether it’s like buying magic coins or paying for energy to
⏹️ ▶️ John play your game or whatever the hell it is like the monetization thing is already in there. So in that respect, it’s better than the.com
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re just like, ah, we’ll figure it out later. We just want to get as many people. But that strategy evolved
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly of like growth over everything. Get as many users as possible. That is the number one goal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care how many people I don’t care if our conversion rate is point oh one percent if we get just
⏹️ ▶️ John millions and millions and millions of users that still serious money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when that happened in the dot com world and continues to happen, you know, arguably with like what
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell was that? 19 billion dollar acquisition was it WhatsApp or whatever? Oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the messaging app yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. There’s still a viable strategy like no one is buying WhatsApp if they what WhatsApp pursued the strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John of just just you know get as many users as possible become super valuable Instagram for that matter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco too Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be fair it’s a really really good business model to freak out Facebook. Well that is the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible business model in this entire industry in the entire tech industry just freak out Facebook and you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see, the old strategy before there were big companies like Facebook to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John you for too much money, I mean, there were always companies to buy you for too much money, but not like it is today where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a few vacuuming everything. But the old one was, we’ll just get a bazillion users, our growth curve will look like a hockey
⏹️ ▶️ John stick, and we’ll IPO, and everyone who has a stake in the company will get rich off the IPO, and then the company will go
⏹️ ▶️ John down the tubes. In other words, no one would buy us. We never will figure out how to make money. But everyone who invests
⏹️ ▶️ John in the company made out like a bandit on the IPO, so who the hell cares? and it eventually goes down and somebody buys the scraps or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the new strategy is get as many users as possible. Yeah, except freak out Facebook or becomes so
⏹️ ▶️ John big. Like this is the next big thing. Get someone to buy you. And that’s how you get your big payday, not from the IPO, but from a big
⏹️ ▶️ John acquisition. And then, you know, whatever. After that, nobody cares. Right? Also in the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store, same strategy. Get it get big really, really fast. But just like
⏹️ ▶️ John in business today, even though that is still a viable strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John and it happens a lot, the other strategies evolve along with it. Not every company that
⏹️ ▶️ John has, not every sort of online focused company decides that its strategy is going to be get as many
⏹️ ▶️ John people as possible as fast as possible. I’m not sure what the breakdown is. Are there more
⏹️ ▶️ John technology-based startups trying to get as many users as possible as fast as possible than there are
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to sell a product? I mean, obviously, when you get into physical goods, it gets different.
⏹️ ▶️ John The strategy of the Nest company was not to get as many users as possible as fast as possible. I don’t know how many
⏹️ ▶️ John thermostats and smoke detectors they sold, but it was not like WhatsApp type numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they made a quality product. They charged people for it. And it was enough to get them acquired by somebody who wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John the talents they had. And that worked out for them. But they didn’t pursue that strategy. And it was still successful. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned before applications where, oh, it’s a specialty app or it doesn’t apply to you. But if you want to go to the mass
⏹️ ▶️ John market, I think there is a spectrum where I think of an application like Capo where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like a super specialty app, like something for someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in a very specific field to use. There’s tons of musicians. Musicians is a big market, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not mass market. Not everyone is a musician. Certainly not everyone is looking for an application to help them with
⏹️ ▶️ John their music creation process. But it’s much broader than
⏹️ ▶️ John last week’s dental office software. But musicians are willing to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for things that help them make music better, especially if your application, in these types
⏹️ ▶️ John of cases, replaces lots of other much more expensive equipment. Suddenly, your $10 app seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bargain compared to the $200 worth of equipment it’s replacing. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very viable thing to do. Or even a drawing application. Not everyone needs an application like Acorn
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, right? But the people who do are actually willing to pay money for it. And is that mass market? Well, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as mass market as an instant messaging app or even a podcast app, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s much more mass market than some very narrowly defined app that could maybe command $100 or whatever. So what
⏹️ ▶️ John we really want to see is the breakdown. How many are doing that crazy, get as many people as possible, and then fleece
⏹️ ▶️ John the whales for some percentage or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John us, it seems like that’s big. It seems like, oh, that’s the entire store. Because that’s all we see. They downed the topless.
⏹️ ▶️ John It pisses us off because we think It’s not like a constructive and honorable way to make money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so to us, it seems like that’s bigger than it is. But I wonder how it compares
⏹️ ▶️ John to that middle ground of people selling applications that
⏹️ ▶️ John charge money up front to not the mass market, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John not to just a couple hundred people, and that it works out for them. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I think our impression of the market is correct, that it’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John those people doing tons of stuff, because the numbers don’t lie. They do dominate
⏹️ ▶️ John the top lists with their stupid free applications with in-app purchases and everything. But I hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John over time, just like in the dot com things, I hope over time that that crazy frenzy getting
⏹️ ▶️ John many people a possible thing will sort of not run its course, but simmer down
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit. And we will get a healthier middle part of the market from people
⏹️ ▶️ John making applications and selling them to people who actually want to pay money for software. Because in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a business of people paying money for software. And we all continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that that is a thing that people are going to do because software provides value. Speak
⏹️ ▶️ John No, even the free applications. People are paying for software. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for virtual currency within software. paying they’re not getting anything for like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting any physical goods they’re putting money in what they’re getting out is an experience so it’s like buying a ticket to a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John buying a level for a game or paying money to be able to tap the screen sooner than you
⏹️ ▶️ John could previously tap the screen like they’re paying money for essentially nothing and
⏹️ ▶️ John even the big scary gross top end of the market shows that people are willing to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be not outside the realm of possibility to get people to pay money
⏹️ ▶️ John for things that give them value in in ways other than entertainment, it’s just going to be a smaller market. So I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John equilibrium is. But I think we’re not what I’m saying is, I think we’re not there yet. I think we are now tilted
⏹️ ▶️ John still way over into the candy crushes of the world. And there still needs to be a little bit more rocking
⏹️ ▶️ John back towards the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week by our friends at hover. Hover is the best way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy and manage domain names. You know, I had a few people on Twitter bothering me about in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few weeks about how I pronounce hover. How are we supposed to pronounce it?
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it right I don’t know what they said you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pronounce like I
⏹️ ▶️ John was supposed to say hover no you’re not it’s hover I maybe it’s because you emphasize the the
⏹️ ▶️ John you sound I don’t over just keep just keep saying hover it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah you pronounce some things weird like query instead of query but hover you get right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I don’t I’m wondering what please listeners who criticize my pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hover please record an audio file of yourself saying it properly and send it to me because I honestly don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I’m supposed to be saying it differently than this. Hover is a domain registrar that’s awesome basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don’t need to explain to you guys what domain names are, I can just tell you what Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really good at. So first of all, their interface is awesome. It’s nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s clean, it’s quick to do things. I’ve used many other registrars control panels before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Hover’s is, yeah I can safely say it’s the best one I’ve used. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve used it a lot and they’re almost always universally awful. hovers is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. That’s I mean, that’s that alone is a reason you should you should go with them. But there’s more reasons to so first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have amazing customer support, you can call them on the phone if you want to, and a human being picks up the phone and can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help you. There’s no hold no wait, no transfer phone support. You can also of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email and you know, do online stuff if you want to, but that option is always there for you can just call them. They also have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great prices. In fact, so there’s all these new domain names like all these crazy new things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like dot plumbing and all this crazy stuff. Most of these new domain names are on sale. Big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales in the month of August. So if you listen to this in time, you should be able to catch this sale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want any of these new domains, check out Hover. They’re on sale for often up to 50% off. They’re deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discounted, maybe even more than that on some of them. Check it out. If you want, you can get.ninja,.guru.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of horrible ones and a few good ones that you can get. So check that out too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover includes things for free that other people make you pay for. For example, you get Whois
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy on every domain for free. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do with Hover.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have email hosting, they have Google apps for your domain hosting. They also have this really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service, which I talked a little bit about last time, called Valet Transfers, where if you want to transfer a domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name into Hover from another registrar, you can do it the normal way if you want to, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very good chance when you transfer domain names that you’re going to mess something up. Usually it’s DNS settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. If you want to, optionally, Hover will, at no additional charge, log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into your old registrar, you just give them your credentials, they will log into your old registrar and do the transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. And you can often do this with a very large number of domain names, like don’t think you’ll have too many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’ll still do it. It’s pretty impressive. So that’s it. And I don’t know of any other registrar that has that service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So give Hover a try. We have a new coupon code this week. The coupon code this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week is VinylSoundsBetter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you go to hover.com and use coupon code VinylSoundsBetter, all one word,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume you can spell, VinylSoundsBetter, you will get 10% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your first purchase at Hover. And really, again, I can’t recommend them enough. They’re a domain registrar that’s awesome, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all I need to tell you guys. You guys are geeks. You know what this is about. You can get so many domains these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. You can get them for humor, you can get them for business, you can get them for your own personal site or email address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If your blog is like something.wordpress.com, that doesn’t look very good. Just get your own domain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manage it, manage your identity. There’s tons of reasons to buy domain names these days. If you’re drunk and have a funny idea for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a domain name or an app, just buy the name. Great, go to Hover. Tons of reasons to buy domain names, and if you’re going to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ever, you should buy it at Hover. So thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show. Once again, don’t forget to use coupon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code VINYLSOUNDSBETTER for 10% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that they basically forced you to admit that vinyl does indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound better. Also I’d like to add before anyone jumps on me that earlier today I noticed that.bmw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a top level domain now. And I did not at mention or anything hover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that tweet. And they replied to my tweet with the following.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It says, at KCList,.bmw is being operated as a closed TLD, so not available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the public. white dot BMW for you. And then they had a link to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual registrar page, which I thought was hysterical. So even when they’re kind of sort of trolling, they’re super nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and they’re fans of ours, too. So you know, they’re they’re good people. How bad could they be if they like this show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s move on to Tevo. Apparently, there’s been an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re still in business. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been waiting for this update for a while since I read about it, but they do like sort of a staged rollout.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I don’t know how they determine the stages. But anyway, I finally got it on my TiVo. So the thing with TiVo,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been complaining for many years that the user interface is not as responsive as it should be, especially after
⏹️ ▶️ John they went to high definition. At first, their menuing interface
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t high definition, even though the video was. Then they added a high definition menuing interface
⏹️ ▶️ John written in Flash. And it was super duper slow and terrible. And it just made me sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was the case until my current TiVo, which is the TiVo Romeo,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has a much more responsive user interface, much more responsive than the previous ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s still some standard def menus in there, which is shameful in this late stage. But anyway, at least they made the
⏹️ ▶️ John main interface that you use faster. Well, so this update supposedly was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the older TiVos have the same interface as the most recent
⏹️ ▶️ John models. It would look the same, and it was supposedly much, much faster. And I wish I could find
⏹️ ▶️ John this for the show notes. I actually spent a while looking for it a couple days ago. Maybe someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room will know. They stopped using Flash for their interface, so good on
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Whether that was why it was slower, just a side effect or something else, bottom line is the Flash
⏹️ ▶️ John interface on the old Devo is terribly slow. This new interface uses something to replace Flash, and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John for the life of me remember what the hell the name of the technology is. It’s not something you’ve heard of. It’s like a weird name.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not Swift. Obviously, that’s popping into my head because of the language things. Maybe it started with an S or something. If anyone in the
⏹️ ▶️ John chat room knows what they’re using instead of Flash, because there was this big presentation from the TiVo people that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John here is how we evaluated this new technology. And here’s how we sort of ported our existing infrastructure over to
⏹️ ▶️ John it and figured out what the issues were in terms of CPU performance and memory usage and all this other stuff. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting presentation that I, of course, read and just completely lost track of. And it’s nowhere in any of my
⏹️ ▶️ John browser histories that I wouldn’t know what to search for anyway. Anyway, bottom line, this update came. I got it
⏹️ ▶️ John on my TiVo Premier that I moved upstairs when I got the new TiVo Romeo downstairs. It does
⏹️ ▶️ John look like the new interface and it is way, way faster. It is not as fast as it is on the Romeos, I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is much faster. So if you have an old TiVo Premier, it is no longer embarrassingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John disgustingly slow if you have the latest version of the software, which is a free update to everybody. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of good news. Like if you happened to buy one and didn’t know how slow it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you were holding off buying a used one because they’re all slow and gross, they’ve actually made their hardware faster
⏹️ ▶️ John with software and I give them a big thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. Really quickly before we move on to topics, because we haven’t gone on long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough with follow up. Is this still follow up? Yeah, sort of. How is the review, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can ask me this every week. It’s like torture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is me encouraging you to accomplish the review as quickly as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this weekend, my wife was nice enough to take the kids out to do various activities, and I got a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of stuff done, which only serves to remind me how much more I have to do with him. Like I feel all accomplished and I
⏹️ ▶️ John like wrote an entire section and a half. I’m like, oh, great. Only like nine more to go. Just do that
⏹️ ▶️ John nine more times. And then you look at the calendar and you think about the possibility of that. And yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, on that happy note, Marco, do you want to quickly talk about the overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update that is pending? Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first, let me tell you about our last sponsor because we’re running long here. Our last sponsor is Linda dot com l
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry, but if you still use LinkedIn, they have little certificates that somehow
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you’re in a kind of environment where people look at LinkedIn, they probably care about stuff like what you
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of value out of that. They gave me a trial of it and I kept going with it. It’s fantastic.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that a thing yet, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s sort of a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s one of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a – does not have a short answer. So alright. So yeah. all sorts of great things from technical
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have, they even have a course here that’s called Microsoft Intelligence Business Stack Fundamentals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing somebody out there knows what that means, but it’s definitely not me, but they have it. And so I could watch that and I
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we know, is not a simple topic. They have videos to help you out with that. So go to lynda.com
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell us about this overcast update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been preparing the the the 102 update for a few weeks now. It’s been a little while. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly bug fixes and minor improvements. And then a few days ago, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a notice in the App Store Rejection Center. What is it called? The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Resolution Center, yes, where they post rejection messages now. So I got a notice in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rejection Center saying, upon reevaluation, I hadn’t even submitted an update at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just out of the blue said, upon revaluation, we’ve decided that you’re in violation of this rule 17.2, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean which is the rule that basically says you can’t require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account based logins with personal information for things that basically shouldn’t require a login.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I responded, first of all saying, Well, there really aren’t any features in my app that don’t need the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, the entire app is account based. And oh, and they said, you need to submit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bill that fixes this within two weeks or we’ll pull you out the store basically. They said it nicer but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gist of it. I first responded with my thing saying well basically trying to explain my way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of it. The reason why I didn’t explain all this, the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have an account free option at the beginning and I explained this a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit before I think but the main reason why is that you think of the situation where suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody has an anonymous sync account which is kind of what I call them in the back end. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these anonymous sync accounts, then they at some point, they launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their iPad or whatever, they launch a device, they launch the app on a different device. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a login screen, and they they assume mistakenly that they’ve created an account. So they type in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco username and password. They ignore the text in the box that says, this account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t exist, do you want to create it? And they just click Yes, because that’s what most people do. Then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco presented with this newly created account that is blank and then they email me saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t believe you deleted all my stuff it’s all gone oh my god you suck one star refund
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything’s horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you’ve ruined my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life I saw this happen so many times with instapaper this is how people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually behave trust me it’s like this will happen and because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people you know people don’t read text on screens and they don’t remember understandably because there’s so many things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there they don’t remember what they’ve made accounts for what they haven’t they It often will do it with two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email addresses, but not much I can do about that. So I wanted to avoid this support issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what do you do with this kind of situation? It’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If those people write in, I can explain to them, oh, well, you know, you have this other account here. If I can find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, if I can figure out who it is, which I probably can’t with anonymous stuff, but anyway, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could try with support. The problem is most of the time, those people won’t even email in support. They’ll just assume that I’m a terrible person and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an incompetent programmer. I lost everything of theirs and they will just be angry and never buy my stuff again. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell their friends how much it sucks or they’ll post a review or they’ll get a refund from Apple. All of which suck for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I really did not want to go down that route. So that’s why I said let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just require it at the beginning. It’ll just be email account, no usernames.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even answered that part in the fact because I’m like no usernames necessary for this because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had it with Instapaper first where it was at first you could enter anything for your email or not, just any string of characters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would work. And I had the problem again if people would log into a new device, type in an email address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they had used username before or vice versa, and create a new account by mistake and think everything was gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all that stuff sucks. I wanted to avoid it. So that’s why I did it the way I did at Launch here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mentioned earlier, you know, when I launched, I believe on the launch show here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we were talking about this, I believe I said, you know, something like half of all people who downloaded it were actually creating accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I ever wanted to raise that rate, I would have to add an option like this. I was considering it, but I wanted to avoid the support issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, back to modern day, Apple tells me a few days ago, you have to do this within two weeks. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I explained my way out of it. Maybe. But Apple doesn’t respond quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to those things I offered in the thing I said, you know what, if you want, you can call me and we can talk about it on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like two, two days later, and two or three days later they tell me we will schedule a call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within three days. Now I have a two week deadline and I’m sitting on this bug fix update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I really need to get out there because there’s one or two fix some pretty important bugs and I’m thinking you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is too long. I can fight this now. I might not win. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t win I’ll be down a whole week at least probably longer so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to really rush out a fix. Furthermore if I do win this argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s you know if I’m living on the edge of a rule I tell people this all the time don’t rely on living on the edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a rule in the app store guidelines if I lose this are if I win this argument now and convince
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them it’s okay for me to not to require accounts now there is nothing guaranteeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them from from oh there’s nothing guarantee guaranteeing that I will always be exempt from this rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I could at some point in the future submit a really important update to fix some really important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug and have it be held up in review because they’re going to get they’re going to get me in this rule again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a terrible situation to try to always assume I’ll be able to get around this rule. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided even before I heard back from them and I still haven’t heard back from them I decided you know what let me just I’ll just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You know I was I was on the fence about doing this at all to begin with you know it wasn’t like I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always totally against doing so I just wanted to minimize those issues but I’m like you know let me just do this I’ll probably get more users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll be alright fine. So I did it and I submitted I did I tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for a few I did the whole thing over about four days implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to submission I submitted it today at noon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was approved today at 8 p.m. Wow this is remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume that if you have one of these open issues on your on your app which you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marked and iTunes connected everything I assume that any update you submit gets bumped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the front of the queue because it’s to fix that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you say that because a friend of the show, Daniel Jaukat, was saying that earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to somebody on Twitter. I think it might have been Brianna Wu from Giant Space Cat. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that corroborates his theory as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the funny thing was, I was very upset when I first got this because I was literally about to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco submit 102 then. And I was like a day away from submitting it. I was just in final beta testing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was so mad. I’m gonna be delayed I’m gonna all these bug fakers are gonna be delayed you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know because I have to now do this and test this and everything turns out that was about a week ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and review times recently have been about a week so I think it was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a blessing in disguise that you know I had to do this yes and that it’s a better product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it for the most part if there are gonna be support issues I’m I’m gonna be annoyed to deal with them people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be upset, but it is overall, I think, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gain. We’ll see. And it is nice that, you know, because of that jump in the queue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, this was released today, which was probably going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be roughly when 102 would have been released if I submitted it at the normal time anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been a busy week. It’s been a little bit of a stressful evening because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have enough time to test this compared to what I usually do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume that I’d be able to test it during the app review process a little bit more. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can only reject the binary if it’s broken. And you shouldn’t make a habit of doing that all the time. But it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have like that extra week of testing just in case. I had eight hours of extra testing this time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see. But yeah, that’s what’s going on. Anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John else is new? Someone in the chat room did find what technology Tivo is using instead of Flash.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is called H-A-X-E, which I’m going to say is either hacks or hakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pronounced hover.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but it’s like a cross platform toolkit slash
⏹️ ▶️ John cross compiler. I think you can write code in their language, their high level language and generate code for
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of other platforms. It’s an open source thing. Anyway, bottom The bottom line is it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than Flash, way faster than TiVo’s Flash implementation. And there’s an article also put
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes from Slashgear talking about how ditching Flash could mean that you
⏹️ ▶️ John could put the TiVo interface on other devices like Xbox and Fire TV. And I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John how that wouldn’t have been possible also with their gross Flash interface. I would also say, by the way, that
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo’s interface, they would probably kill to have UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ John dropped upon them and say, here,
⏹️ ▶️ John just make your user interface in this, like a sort of mature IDE, well-established
⏹️ ▶️ John API that when done correctly makes extremely performant. Because what is TiVo? It’s a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John text lists. The video part is the video part. But when you’re going through menus, it’s just big, long
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling lists of text with various options that you can do to each selected item in menus.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not rocket science. And they would probably need a more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU to run UIKit in there. But anyway, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Hakes or Hacks is the be all end all of interface things. I just am glad that my TiVo got faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. This has been remarkably positive from you on TiVo tonight, John. This is, are you okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always want, I want them. I think they should sponsor the show. I don’t understand why that, I mean, I know I complain about them all the time, but I continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy them and when I buy them, I buy whatever the most expensive one is that they sell and I keep doing that year after
⏹️ ▶️ John year because I still think it’s the best and so if that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what it is. Yeah, I have complaints, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints about everything. They should sponsor the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The strong Syracuse endorsement. I buy this even though I hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Automatic, Lynda.com, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover. And we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Harmon, S-I-R, A-C, USA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s accidental. It’s accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t mean to. Accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental. Tech podcasts, so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t overthink the hover thing. Well, I actually looked it up in the dictionary just to make sure we’re not all crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re not. It’s the same little upside down E as the beginning of the word other. Hover other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, honestly, I want people to record an audio file and send it to me of how they think I should be saying it.
⏹️ ▶️ John By people, you mean like the three people who are crazy about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it all like Australians or something? Because they have a tendency to pronounce things just completely wrong, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cache instead of cash, for example. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but we’re just confining ourselves to American English. and then we’re gonna go to like
⏹️ ▶️ John the debate of what is unaccented American English. Is there such a thing or is there not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good question. Well, there’s like there’s like the newscaster accent, right? It’s it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of kind of Midwestern kind of averaged. It’s you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s just defined by the newscasters who were famous in those roles for a long time. Like so Dan
⏹️ ▶️ John Rather has an accent because he was famous for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John We say, oh, that’s the news cat or Walter Cronkite or whoever, like a few individual people from actual
⏹️ ▶️ John places in the country with actual accents hiding under their newscasteriness. I don’t know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. What else is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t. Yeah. Somebody in the chat just pointed out, was this all follow up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, it was. But like, I mean, it’s fine to have that because like talking about overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always, Is it always going to be follow up? Because we’ve talked about Overcast before. Therefore, every time you talk about Overcast again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is follow up. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to follow up on last week’s Apple news with this week’s Apple news.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Jared Sinclair thing, you didn’t emphasize that. I think this was sent because
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of people. So like one or two emails or tweets that thought we were trying to say that Jared’s post was blaming Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I listened back to the show. We didn’t actually say that. But the word Jared
⏹️ ▶️ John and the phrase someone to blame were in close enough proximity to each other people could have made that
⏹️ ▶️ John mistaken assumption. But it was, and plus we all ramble and don’t talk in complete sentences, or maybe it’s just me. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of posts about this whole App Store stuff. And a lot of them are looking for someone or something
⏹️ ▶️ John to blame. And then there was Jared’s post. We’re not necessarily saying that Jared was trying to add something. So that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John he wrote in to clarify. And I’m glad he did, because this explanation, and this is the magic writing technique
⏹️ ▶️ John that I try to use on myself and my children.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You write on your children?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I try to use this trick on my children. So you write something, and you think you’ve said what you want to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then people who read it misinterpret it or whatever. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the next task is explain to someone who is misunderstanding what you wrote, explain what you
⏹️ ▶️ John actually meant. And when you do that, then you say, why don’t you just write that in the first place?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously, that’s a little glib, but this little introductory thing of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s why I wrote this. Brent said this, a lot of people looked at me and I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John people to know, actually, I’m not a good example of that because here’s why. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in the post. It’s in there. But when you find yourself having to explain to somebody who read what you wrote and still didn’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you have to explain it again more clearly, emphasizing
⏹️ ▶️ John the parts that they’re getting wrong. That makes for stronger writing. So in the same way as having to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John something to somebody makes you understand it better, doing this exercise doing it all before you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John publish anything is useful. Like when someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John having trouble writing something, whether it’s my children or someone else, you just say, well, don’t write anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just explain to me what you want to say. And a lot of people can do that. They’re like, well, what I want to say is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. And if you just write down everything they say during that part and put in front of them, you say, here, type this. You just write it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s funny. So on a random note, tell me that I shouldn’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my privacy slash soul to get symmetric file service.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what are they asking you to do exactly? I’m not clear what you have to give up.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they know you have a child on the way. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s probably true. I’ve been spending so much damn time on babies rs.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, they know you have a child in the way. So that’s what they want. You’re first born.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s all. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no, I was looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John actually from? You talk about Australia, you know, not, you never saw that movie. I don’t, I can’t get the title off the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John my head. Chat room helped me with the title of that movie. See how fast you can get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. While they’re doing that, um, I saw, um, I think it was Zach Burr talking about this earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I forget who it was, but I’m looking at, so there’s a link that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put in the chat that’s a public link where it doesn’t really say anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting increased speeds but behind my private
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page, you know, like my account information, MyRewardsPlus, sharing online just got faster. Great news,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re eligible for an upload speed to equal your current download speed at no additional cost to you. Simply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey click here and enroll in our MyRewardsPlus program. It’s easy and free. Just our way of thanking you for being a loyal Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customer. Faster upload speeds means better sharing experiences. powerful and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess they like snoop your stuff and you get 75 I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 75 75 instead of 75 35 yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to figure out what exactly this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that’s the thing is it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuz they can already snoop your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but is this just is this just like they’re gonna start sending you like gift card crap promos and stuff like that I mean I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think. Because I mean I already get spam from Verizon in the mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every day trying to upgrade me to a higher plan that includes like TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff because I just had the internet and phone. And I called them like there’s no way to opt out of this. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way to get them to stop bugging me. I would imagine they’re probably already doing creepy things like selling my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information to Starbucks and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s actually exactly what they’re doing because it’s talking about all these particular vendors like Target
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Exxon Mobil and Amazon and Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks and Panera Bread and Visa prepaid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card and blah blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but see so they’re saying apparently this is a system where you gather points to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way you can gather points is To like them on Facebook to go to their website to refer a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend celebrate your birthday Well, I celebrate my birthday every year. Am I are they tracking that somehow?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Rent or buy on demand movie. I mean, so what,
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you can usually, I don’t know the specifics of this deal, but you can usually
⏹️ ▶️ John take whatever service they want and then use it in such a way that you don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John interaction with them. I’m really close to not having any interaction with Verizon at all because I don’t have any of their boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use their router. I don’t have a video on demand, like all these services that they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to sell me and everything, I don’t see. The only one they’ve still got me on is their stupid DNS. Because if you use Google DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, you don’t get good geo IP routing. Even though Google says you’re supposed to, and practice has shown me
⏹️ ▶️ John that if I use Google’s IP or Open DNS or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get worse speeds from downloading Apple software, where I should be pulling it from Akamai across the river,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not because it thinks I’m someplace else. So I can’t entirely, and what does
⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon do with DNS? Give them an inch. You type in the wrong URL, and you get some big, stupid advertising parked page.
⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon DNS is super slow and crappy. I don’t like it. So, but I’m really close to getting rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So it seems like if you opted into this thing and you did a similar scenario where you got rid of everything, didn’t have any boxes,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t use their router, didn’t use their DNS, didn’t use anything like that, didn’t have video on demand, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess like what’s left? Like Marco said, they’re already, believe me, they’re already selling every ounce of your information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re a horrible company. Like everything about Verizon as a company is just horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but everybody sells all your information. Like any information you give them, Of course they’re selling it to everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no more giving away of your information that they could be doing. They’re already doing it as hard as they can. So
⏹️ ▶️ John unless they can make you interact, like, oh, here, take the survey to tell me what you thought of these detergent brands. Unless
⏹️ ▶️ John they have some way to get you, like you’ll be using your computer and all of a sudden you go to a site, instead of going to the
⏹️ ▶️ John site, you see this stupid survey that comes up that wants you to rank the movies you’ve seen recently or some crazy thing like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems like the only way they can get you, but I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t want to be the one to experiment with this and find it out because
⏹️ ▶️ John downgrading from it or getting rid of it is probably a super pain too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My rewards plus points are easy to get. The only hard part will be deciding which rewards you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This includes options such as use the my Fios registered trademark app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect to us through Facebook, like us on Facebook, order new equipment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try Verizon’s in-home agent, rent or buy a Fios trademark on demand movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, these are so I cannot decide which of these things to start with. all sounds so appealing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so you don’t have to you don’t have to do any of those. Like that’s kind of like the free like free antivirus
⏹️ ▶️ John software I get as part of my thing, a free online backup. Like I just never do
⏹️ ▶️ John those. Never look at it. So if you never do any of those things, you never like them on Facebook. You never download their app. You never download
⏹️ ▶️ John their free antivirus software. Like they will email me and say, hey, I’ve noticed you’ve had this service for seven years that have
⏹️ ▶️ John never downloaded our free online backup software. It’s like it’s good that you noticed that it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Like they’re always going to spam you. They’re always going to send you stupid cards in the mail that you put right into the recycle
⏹️ ▶️ John bin. But I don’t think they can make you do anything unless they start getting intrusive. Like the DNS thing is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John intrusive. Like you mistype URL and you’re looking at a bunch of Verizon crap. That is intrusive, which is why I wish I could get rid of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else you can just simply not use, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it seems to me like they’re already snooping everything anyway. I’m already getting spammed anyway. Why not just get 75 75?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I need you guys are supposed to convince me not to do this. You’re not supposed to convince me. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they announced these plans a few weeks ago, they said they would be rolled out automatically for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not true now. See, if they’re actually requiring this, then that was BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it wouldn’t surprise me if that was BS, because they’re a giant ISP and they’re a horrible company, like all giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ISPs. So that wouldn’t surprise me. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is indeed what’s required to get this, that is complete BS.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, the movie was A Cry in the Dark, 1988, starring Meryl Streep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And isn’t it originally like a Dingo ate my baby or something
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Yes. People know it from Seinfeld, but yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I’m hearing is I should be the guinea pig and do this? Nah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always move. Yes, because that’s totally an easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution to this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the post office sells your information to everyone else when you move. So then everyone tracks you anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever hey what else going on one do titles the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sprung parts is pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what the show is about
⏹️ ▶️ John whales least the whales was more of what the show was about then The spring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m biased, but I did like fleece the whales that is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve said that many times before though. It’s just like it’s like something we’re making up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to get it’s a funny concept to somehow Combine whales and fleece
⏹️ ▶️ John I never liked the term whales anyway, but it’s I don’t know where I got it started I first heard it didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly Casinos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I think I first heard in boiler room It’s it’s definitely like, you know, it got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it started in businesses that don’t respect people For sure. It’s speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Russia. It’s yeah It’s it’s definitely not a respectful term Which is why Zynga uses it and all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid free-to-play games that try to abuse people’s psychology to pay them more money money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not. It’s not a great term. It’s like eyeballs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not that it’s disrespectful. If anything, it’s disrespectful for the people who aren’t whales because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John none of our customers matter except for these five people. And so I mean, because for casinos, these five high rollers
⏹️ ▶️ John get everything right and everyone else you don’t matter because the bottom line is we make most
⏹️ ▶️ John of our money from these high rollers, not five people, but whatever it is like such a small and everyone else is
⏹️ ▶️ John just there kind of like to fill seats, Right? It’s all about the whales.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That also kind of insults whales.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, they are treated well. They are considered important. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you wouldn’t talk to them and tell them that they are whales, because then they would be like, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John What this means is that my money is leaving my pocket and going into your pocket. But I mean, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with gambling, it’s like maybe that’s like they understand that. Like, they know when they go to Las Vegas
⏹️ ▶️ John with $2 million and come back with $0. they had a good time that’s worth two million dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John to them whatever I don’t understand what they’re thinking but anyway the Zynga whale’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably worse because it’s like I feel like playing these games or buying in-app purchases
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no opportunity to win like even in a casino the house is going to win almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John but at least there’s some slim possibility that you could get lucky once it like it’s you’re never gonna become a millionaire playing candy
⏹️ ▶️ John crush. So it’s like a 0% versus.001% the.001
⏹️ ▶️ John feels better. You get some excitement. Even if you don’t win, you feel like during
⏹️ ▶️ John that period of time when I lost, there was a chance I could have won and that was exciting and I paid for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t, I don’t gamble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really? I never would have guessed. I am so surprised by that statement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Although if I did gamble, I would do with, uh, you guys don’t aren’t watching the leftovers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do that. That style of give us there was a silly gambling sequence where someone
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to a roulette wheel and bets on red three times in a row. Those type of odds I can figure out with like
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil and paper and fractions. I could say all right, well I can calculate these odds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, wait a minute. Wait, hold on. Did he say it will land on red three times in a row?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I understand. Make that the bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, No, it was there were pigeons involved and premonitions. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a television show, not a real one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the whole point is like, you know, so he doubles his money. And you know, the next time it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John around, if you put all your money back on for another 50 50 shot, you know, and just do
⏹️ ▶️ John that several times, you can, you know, through the magic of doubling if you keep winning. But then the odds of it being
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, whatever. That’s what I would do. So it means I would immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John lose most of the time or immediately win. And then you don’t have to sit there
⏹️ ▶️ John and do anything that’s skill based or complicated or takes a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So your goal with this activity that most people do for entertainment value would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to get it over with as quickly as possible and just leave.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the whole thing is like people go to Vegas and like I’m going to Vegas with like $500 and like, I don’t care if I come home with zero $500 of
⏹️ ▶️ John my entertainment budget, which is the way, the way you should do it. If you’re not addicted to gambling, right? You just go there, you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a money I’m going to spend. And I fully recognize that I can come
⏹️ ▶️ John home with zero of it, but that’s fine. I’m willing to pay $500 for a fun weekend with excitement and the possibility of winning
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But if you don’t like actually playing the games, if you don’t like blackjack or poker, poker or any of these
⏹️ ▶️ John games, like you don’t enjoy the actual playing of the game, you just get that part over really fast. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John put $500 on black spin and then you win or you’re lost. If you won, you leave. If you lost, you didn’t. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John done in like five minutes. then you can just, I don’t know, get on a plane and leave again. Can you tell I’ve never been to Vegas?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just I love that you’re optimizing for it. Let’s end the fun as quickly as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John possible. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not fun. Like I was like, there’s no fun to be had. If you don’t like playing blackjack, you don’t like sitting at a bar. If you don’t like playing
⏹️ ▶️ John poker, if you don’t like any of those things, that’s not the fun part. The only fun part is that brief moment when you might win or
⏹️ ▶️ John when you might gain money or lose money. You can get that over with really quickly. Like, well, I won. Yeah, I’m happy. Well, I lost. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t. And you did have that brief moment of excitement. And that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why not just do it online and save yourself the flight?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. Although online gambling is illegal in the US, so you’d have to do one of those offshore things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s really pain to get money in and out of those things. So how do you know? I was
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, not that you would know. I work for an online gaming company many years ago. We
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t take US play because it’s illegal. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wonder why we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, I mean, the the actual servers were an Indian reservation in Canada, as they have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t in Sealand.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, no, we were crushed by competitors who took US play because they were based in the Bahamas
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t have any US resident employees. Because people in the United States, surprise, want to gamble online.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t take their business, someone else will, and that someone else will get much bigger, faster than you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. So I didn’t realize you worked in the gaming market as well, because my first job out of college was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indian casinos in Oklahoma, or Native American casinos, whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John correct term is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mm-hmm well it was bingo but we had reels on the machine so you thought you were playing a slot machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but really you were playing bingo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah right you explained on pragmatic right about how like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was either that or debug one or the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah yeah but like the yeah I think it was debug you’re right yeah like some technicality of like this type of gaming was allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this type of gaming wasn’t allowed so you did something that was technically allowed even though it looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a slot machine right correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep it wasn’t skill game. And so poker, blackjack, etc. were considered skill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games. I don’t know why a straight up slot machine wasn’t allowed. I think because it had to be multiplayer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the bingo was strictly speaking multiplayer. So all these, all these DOS machines had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like some sort of TCP networking that we’re going to, I think a Windows server that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue the bingo cards and pull the same numbers for everyone on the floor. It was weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever. So we going with Fleece Wales? Yeah we have to. It’s too good.
⏹️ ▶️ John What else going on? Anything? You want to try to squeeze in this Wii U thing in 30 seconds?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not really. Sure. Damn
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Why don’t you read the, describe the tweet sequence Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright so Patrick Thornton, PW Thornton on Twitter said also you guys need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about how the Wii U quietly became the next-gen system with by far the best games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I replied saying could be a good topic the Wii U is the only next-generation system I’ve been tempted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try because of its games and that’s true basically you know I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly with everyone raving about how good Mario Kart is the Wii U is the only next-gen system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I that I’m tempted to try however I still haven’t bought one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep reminding myself that I will probably never actually play it in practice because I’m not a
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Patrick’s tweet is just an accurate description of the current situation and not
⏹️ ▶️ John a revelation about a reality that people don’t realize. Yes, the Wii U does have some games that
⏹️ ▶️ John are reviewed well that people like, but doesn’t change how many Wii U’s are in the market, does
⏹️ ▶️ John not change the size of the Wii U game catalog, does not change the pipeline of upcoming
⏹️ ▶️ John Wii U games, does not change the fact that pretty much every
⏹️ ▶️ John anticipated or currently popular AAA title is available for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4,
⏹️ ▶️ John and not the Wii U because it can’t run them and it has a small installed base. Like all these things, they all
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to be true. Nintendo’s got its work cut out for it. So that’s why I thought this
⏹️ ▶️ John was a tweet, like that the people are surprised to learn that the third place game
⏹️ ▶️ John console that nobody wants has some good games. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course it does. people think people don’t buy the Wii U because it stinks. No, it’s like when the new Zelda
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out for the Wii U, I fully expect that it will be highly satisfying to rabid Zelda fans
⏹️ ▶️ John like myself. That doesn’t make the system more successful. That doesn’t make it like, oh, you should totally buy a Wii U now
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got these three good, really awesome games. And people point out, look, there’s nothing I really want to play on the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 4. I don’t have a PlayStation 4 yet either because there’s nothing I really want to play on it. But I know that
⏹️ ▶️ John the games pipeline, the upcoming games pipeline for the PlayStation 4 is crazily big and good and has
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting things things in it, including a game that I’ve been waiting for for seven years, which may never be released.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Wii U game pipeline looks like a desert and it’s sad and it makes me sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I do have a Wii U. I don’t have a PlayStation 4, but over the long haul in this generation, unless it’s intended
⏹️ ▶️ John as something drastic to turn it around, they’re going to continue to not get the popular AAA games.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every year or two, they’re going to come out with one or two gems because they’re really good at making games, but that’s not going to be enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a difference. It doesn’t seem like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean I kind of felt like like the reason why the Wii U
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Seemed interesting to me is Not because it’s a great game system it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kept hearing about these good games for it and You know if I wanted to academically buy the best game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. I’d probably buy the ps4 I don’t think it would be much of a decision, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Don’t care much about games and and so all the games that are not that are coming out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are big blockbusters that are not going to be available on the Wii U are very likely to be games I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play anyway and not care about anyway. The problem is because I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nonchalant and not involved with gaming I’m probably not even involved enough to own a Wii U. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably play Mario Kart for a few days and play Mario Super 3D World whatever for another few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then never look at them again. So that’s why I’m not going to get it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t hear anybody talking about the great games on the PS4 or the Xbox One.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you do if you read gaming sites, because I mean, everyone’s talking about Destiny and there that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a cross-platform game everywhere except for the Wii U, of course. But that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a really highly anticipated, sure to be almost certainly going to be popular game.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t read about people being excited about that, or it’s because you’re not reading gaming sites because you’re not a console
⏹️ ▶️ John gamer. But early in any console’s life, the launch games are usually crap. And then it
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a while for things to get up to speed. And then one or two gems come in. This has actually been nicest generation in that the indie
⏹️ ▶️ John games very quickly, like you got indie ports of games that you already knew were good that are now available
⏹️ ▶️ John on the consoles because they all have online stores. And a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of the post-launch games haven’t been that bad. But a console generation,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re it for the long haul and the catalog and the upcoming game releases all
⏹️ ▶️ John look good. All highly anticipated by people who like PlayStation 4. Sony just announced
⏹️ ▶️ John their sales numbers at some gaming… what the hell is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Press conference at some gaming convention in Europe. They said their install base is 10 million now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is pretty good. That
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seems pretty good,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s been out for nine months, 10 million, roughly a million a month. It’s growing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s selling faster than the PS3 did, which is not that much of a feat because the PS3 was like 600 bucks and had a slow
⏹️ ▶️ John start. But you know, they’re doing well. Nintendo is not selling
⏹️ ▶️ John a million Wii U’s a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I want to try Mario Kart, Wii U, whatever it’s called, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just Mario Kart. Double Dash is still better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never even played that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve never played Double Dash and I’ve never seen a Wii U in the wild outside of like a Target
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store in your house. Yeah, me too.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is interesting technically. I think if both of you got Nintendo land and played through all the things you
⏹️ ▶️ John would have gaming experiences that you had never had before. But they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the thing that like has a bunch of mini games that show different mechanics with the controllers. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good demo of like, here’s all the things you can do with this crazy, stupid tablet game pad thing
⏹️ ▶️ John do lots of interesting things, things that you have not done in iOS or on a Mac or like they are
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. And some of them have do have sustainable value. Like I said, my my son’s friends come over.
⏹️ ▶️ John they still play the Metroid Blast minigame, which I think does not have that much depth in it. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John love it. They love the, you know, the asymmetrical play where one person gets to be the ship and the other people
⏹️ ▶️ John are get to be the people and they can, you know, the ship sees a different perspective and they’re all on
⏹️ ▶️ John us. You know, it’s it’s not these are all slight games. You know, there are many games, but it’s a good demonstration
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the different things you can do with it. But if you’re not interested in an academic sense of like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a new gaming experiences, like, you know, kind of like a VR helmet. Like, wouldn’t you want to try that? Wouldn’t you want to try the Oculus Rift just
⏹️ ▶️ John just to see what it’s like? Yeah, you’d get that out of the way you do. But that’s not something like, OK, well, now that I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s possible, do I want to keep and you guys just aren’t gamers. I just have to once TIFF
⏹️ ▶️ John goes through my sort of back catalog of must play games that she can already play, maybe I’ll recommend a Wii U game
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll have to buy one because you’ll need to play something on it. But right now, I mean, Mario Kart looks
⏹️ ▶️ John great. It’s extremely well done game. I have some complaints about it. I think they were driving
⏹️ ▶️ John in double dash was still better but You know if
⏹️ ▶️ John you play Mario Kart you play Mario Kart. It’s Mario Kart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last one I played was 64 is it has it gotten much different since then or is it basically the same game? Wii was
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the same though the driving has gotten feels very different than it in the n64
⏹️ ▶️ John Version and the graphics are just like obviously phenomenally better because that was a million years ago go.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you saw it, you’d be impressed. But in the end, you’re driving around on carts, getting little presents, shooting shells
⏹️ ▶️ John at people and doing all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So yeah, basically the same game. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it’s a racing game. What at the bottom? That’s how how much can it possibly change? You go around courses
⏹️ ▶️ John and the person who gets there first wins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How much could Zelda possibly change?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m messing with you, but still, I mean, it’s a pretty similar concept every time,
⏹️ ▶️ John So Zelda is a is a more broad concept because like it’s racing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, you know, you go around a circuit and the person gets their first wins. And Zelda, you’re playing through
⏹️ ▶️ John a narrative, more or less. And the narratives like they all have a similar structure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, you know, a bad guy, a good guy battle against evil. But there’s different characters involved,
⏹️ ▶️ John different events take place. And in each Zelda, they try to come up with some new gameplay mechanic that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, uses the controller, whether it’s swinging the little Wiimote around to use your sword, or
⏹️ ▶️ John riding on a horse, or traveling by boat, or, you know, different combat
⏹️ ▶️ John systems. And so in the overall, yeah, you’re playing through some story, there’s some fight against evil,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the end you win. But in that range, there’s much more that you can do. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes sense. Playing Wind Waker compared to playing Twilight Princess, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though you could graph them all out and so they all have the same thing. They all have dungeons. You get a weapon, use the weapon to
⏹️ ▶️ John defeat the boss at the end of the dungeon. You get more power. Like they all do exactly the same things. But the experience of playing those two games
⏹️ ▶️ John feels very different. They look entirely different. They feel different. Whereas Mario Kart, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like in every game you go around, of course, Mario is more or less looks the same. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John in one, you know, they can add motorcycles and other type of things, but it’s like wheeled vehicles. You know, they can make it look like a wipe
⏹️ ▶️ John out. It would still be Mario Kart. Like you’re still it’s still a racing game. So there’s much more freedom. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John this upcoming Zelda game supposedly is going to finally throw away a lot of the conventions that they’ve been leaning on since Ocarina
⏹️ ▶️ John of Time to actually change the gameplay so that if you did graph it out on a whiteboard it would look different
⏹️ ▶️ John like that It’s not a linear progression of dungeons and it’s not a dungeon weapon you can go to anything anytime you want, which is more like
⏹️ ▶️ John the old version of uh, Zelda where you can uh, If you discover it, you can go do it Even if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not ready for it, then you just get killed Anyway, we’re not not entirely sure uh, but they what the new Zelda is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be like But they have said they’re going to break some conventions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roughly, when is that out?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know like 2015 2016 something like that They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just make it require like a $60 add-on controller to help their financial problems a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, let’s talk about you know, what if you just sell to a small number of people who are willing to play money?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder about like how much money you could intend to make if they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just oh, yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just sell the new Zelda game for $300. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean I would buy it it. So that’s one sale, right? There are a lot of rabid
⏹️ ▶️ John Zelda fans, but I think that the whatever the economic term is for the
⏹️ ▶️ John market for Zelda games, it’s not, it’s either not that elastic or not that inelastic, but I never
⏹️ ▶️ John took any economics course, so I don’t know which one of those things is the correct term.