catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

124: The Tyranny of Radio

Apple Music, Beats 1, and why you may not want to force TRIM on your SSD.

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

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I guess do you want to get started on the actual show? We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a show, you know. Oh, we do? This is a song about Alice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got an idea. Oh, is that Alice’s Restaurant? Wow. Were you seriously quoting, what is it, Guthrie? Harlow Guthrie?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? We all did music podcasts in like the last week, didn’t we?

⏹️ ▶️ John A week or two. You did one too, John? Yeah, no, everyone’s doing it. So, all right, let’s do some follow-up. John, why don’t you tell us about LLVMIR?

⏹️ ▶️ John Last time I heard it was a year ago. Last time I heard it was a year

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. I’m not sure if it’s a year ago or not. I’m not sure. So, all right, let’s do some follow-up. John, why don’t you tell us about LLVM

⏹️ ▶️ Casey IR?

⏹️ ▶️ John Last week, it got so long ago, whenever it was, we talked about LLVM IR, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is also known as bitcode and its sort of binary representation, and whether or not that helps

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to be able to move any of their platforms to different CPU architectures in the

⏹️ ▶️ John future. We basically decided that it doesn’t help or hurt that it is

⏹️ ▶️ John an orthogonal concern mostly having to do with taking advantage of new instructions

⏹️ ▶️ John and new processors being able to remove instructions from processors when they’re no longer needed all without

⏹️ ▶️ John asking developers to re upload new binary versions of their applications and recompile them for

⏹️ ▶️ John new architectures and stuff. So a bunch of people sent me good links someone sent me I forgot who this was unfortunately

⏹️ ▶️ John a 2011 I think it’s use that post or no a a mailing

⏹️ ▶️ John list post from Dan Goeman at Apple. Presumably he works on the

⏹️ ▶️ John LVM team or did at least in 2011. I’ll put the link in the show notes. People can read it. He

⏹️ ▶️ John outlines the reasons why he thinks LVM IR is a poor system for building a platform, by which

⏹️ ▶️ John he means any system where LVM IR would be a format in which programs are stored or transmitted for

⏹️ ▶️ John subsequent use on multiple underlying architectures, which is exactly the question we were asking before.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this is 2011. Things may have changed, but in general, he says like if you’re going to make some kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of a multi CPU architecture intermediary form LLVM IR would not be it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And he lists the reasons. Someone named Jacob

⏹️ ▶️ John Stoklin Olson hope I got that right sent us an email with some

⏹️ ▶️ John more good information about what is platform specific about bitcode. What is it that makes bitcode

⏹️ ▶️ John not portable. Says one of the biggest sources of bitcode differences is the target ABI, meaning application

⏹️ ▶️ John binary interface. Clang generates functions that are able to call C functions compiled

⏹️ ▶️ John by other compilers by following the ABI for that platform. That’s basically what an ABI is, so that everything doesn’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ John be compiled by the same compiler. You compile with one compiler or have a compiled library or whatever. I can call you, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can call back into me. We all know how we’re gonna call each other’s functions. It’s the ABI defines how function arguments

⏹️ ▶️ John and return values are laid out in memory or registers. You put your address here and the return value is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be in this register. that’s the ABI. Everyone has to agree on that or you can’t call into other code. And one of the requirements

⏹️ ▶️ John for a bit code and for any of Apple’s compiler stuff is that you have to be able to compile code and has to be able to call functions

⏹️ ▶️ John that were compiled with another compiler, even if it’s just an earlier version of the same compiler. Otherwise every time

⏹️ ▶️ John a new OS came out that was compiled with a new compiler, everyone would have to recompile their apps at the ABI changed. It doesn’t. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a sort of hard and fast requirement of what Apple does with its compilers. Jacob

⏹️ ▶️ John goes on. In general, the client front end is using a combination of LVM types and argument flags to get the code

⏹️ ▶️ John generator to generate the correct function calling sequence. It knows how the code generator for selected target architecture

⏹️ ▶️ John behaves. He says you can even get different bitcode when using different ABI is on the same instruction

⏹️ ▶️ John set architecture. So even on a single chip, you can have multiple ABI is defined and you get different bitcode if you target

⏹️ ▶️ John different ABI is a NCR was saying it would be possible to create LVM IR that can

⏹️ ▶️ John be compiled on multiple CB architectures only by giving up on the ability to call native functions compiled with other compilers.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could define a virtual ABI that specifies the layouts, the struct layouts, and how C function calls are mapped to LLVM

⏹️ ▶️ John IR. This is essentially what Google’s PNACL, the Portable Native Client Project, does.

⏹️ ▶️ John It works since the code only has to run inside Chrome sandbox and calling functions provided by Chrome. So

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of theoretical possibilities, but in the practical real world of what Apple uses as compilers for Bitcode

⏹️ ▶️ John and LLVM IR are not the answer to portability across platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, then. And why don’t you tell us about what Chris Latner has been saying lately?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is some info from Kaishin says Chris Latner was asked a question. These are all paraphrases was asked

⏹️ ▶️ John a question. I’m assuming this is a WC didn’t say any plans to write Swift and Swift. We talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John self hosting last week self hosting turns out to be the right definition. I just failed to read the Wikipedia page correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. And what he said was what Chris Latner said was his goal is to make the best language

⏹️ ▶️ John for writing consumer facing software, not compilers. And he mentioned that if you started writing a compiler in Swift, it’d have to be great,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would end up being a great language for writing low level code, but inadequate for writing iOS and Mac apps, which is like kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John the politically correct answer. I, you know, for self hosting, I thought I thought it’d be

⏹️ ▶️ John neat. It’s kind of a shame that the people who are actually writing Swift are spending their whole day writing c++.

⏹️ ▶️ John Wouldn’t they love to use this new language they’ve invented to do their work as well. And I got a lot of replies

⏹️ ▶️ John like this. It’s like, No, I asked Chris Latner that and he says, we did that then just, you know, Swift would be a really good language

⏹️ ▶️ John for writing compilers. And that’s not what they’re making. They’re making trying to make a really good language for writing iOS and Mac apps, which technically,

⏹️ ▶️ John according to a submission statement in the Apple book published on the topic, they’re trying to make a language that spans

⏹️ ▶️ John the range. compilers would be in that range, I think would prove the language would can

⏹️ ▶️ John do that type of task. But anyway, luckily, we live in the age of Twitter and the new age of the

⏹️ ▶️ John open Apple, not the one from the Apple to keyboard. Nice. Yeah, Chris Latner replied

⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter to a thread involving us. And he said, we’ll put links to his tweets. Many of us would love to rewrite

⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift compiler at Swift. It would crash a lot less and be a lot more joyful for us. That said, we have a ton

⏹️ ▶️ John of higher priority, higher priorities that affect users of Swift. Poor compiler hackers would just have to

⏹️ ▶️ John suffer for now. So the cobbler’s children have no shoes or whatever that expression is. So

⏹️ ▶️ John contrary to the many tales of Chris Latner saying, I’m sure he did say this, that you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ John we if we wrote our compiler in Swift, if that’s what we’re using

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of to dog food our language, we would end up making a language is really good writing compilers, which is true if they

⏹️ ▶️ John did it to exclusion or everything else. But in the grand scheme of things, Chris laterally says that many of us would love

⏹️ ▶️ John to write the compiler in Swift, like, of course, they would like they’re making this new language. Of course, they like the language, of course, they like to use it

⏹️ ▶️ John in their work, but it’s not really a high priority. Their main priority, of course, is making it a great language for right, iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac apps because that’s the most important part of Swift. So there you have it. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a great example of like direct accurate quotes from people can be misleading

⏹️ ▶️ John if the only thing you ever hear is that and which is why I think Chris felt the need to say even though I said that and it’s true that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not the entire story like there are many dimensions to all these decisions. It’s not like oh Chris Latner hates Swift

⏹️ ▶️ John and would never want to write his compiler in it or the reverse Chris Latner would love to write in Swift but mean old Apple won’t let him like

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone is always looking for the sensational headline type story, especially if something gets repeated around and around.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if everyone in Apple, like if the people who the source of information were silent, any one of these

⏹️ ▶️ John things could have like spiraled into like three years from now, it becomes accepted wisdom that Chris Leder never

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to write the compiler in Swift, which is just BS. And I just love the fact in the age of Twitter, he

⏹️ ▶️ John can say, you know what, tweet, tweet done. I have now sort of like adjusted

⏹️ ▶️ John the record to more accurately represent the complex nuanced position that I have and you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John that in two tweets right combined with all the things he apparently said to people wvc

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is yet another example of a whole new apple pr world which is exciting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey final bit of follow-up let why don’t you tell us about trim support

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was also last episode we talked about trim force the the little command that will let you enable

⏹️ ▶️ John trim on your ssds even though apple doesn’t want to and has that big scary warning that says that you can enable it but

⏹️ ▶️ John if you lose data don’t blame us so 10 10 4 is out now It has this thing in

⏹️ ▶️ John it, I believe. I upgraded it at work, I didn’t upgrade it at home yet. I didn’t look for the command, but I’m assuming it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the last show I said, you know, like, I’m not going to use it until I have problems. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I said something like, I know probably people have the same SSD as me and they have trim enabled and everything is fine, but I don’t want to be the guinea

⏹️ ▶️ John pig and I’m not going to take the risk until I have problems. And a bunch of people sent me links to a couple

⏹️ ▶️ John of stories that describe some of the hard drives, whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell you call them, some of the solid state drives that do have problems with the trim command that you enable trim on them, they accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ John erased the wrong blocks of data and just destroy your data for you. And on that list

⏹️ ▶️ John of drives that may or may not have this problem, according to various people’s stories is my drive. Oh, lovely.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, and so I’m very glad that I didn’t enable trim. And now I’m probably not going to enable trim.

⏹️ ▶️ John I you know, I don’t know the technical details of the thing like mate, does it depend on firmware version? Is it just for queued

⏹️ ▶️ John trim requests or for all of them? Or some people think it doesn’t matter that drive reports that are

⏹️ ▶️ John that supports queued trim commands but it really doesn’t so the thing you know and most of the stories involve Linux not

⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 so I don’t know what to think but safe bet don’t mess with trim force unless you’re feeling

⏹️ ▶️ John adventurous and don’t mind losing any data or unless you have some amount of information that you’re sure

⏹️ ▶️ John that like other people are doing this it’s safe it’s been torture tested uh so yeah I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of leaving my drive the way it is for now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for the record don’t you have a very popular and well-regarded Samsung SSD

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John super expensive. It’s a terabyte. It’s their it’s their latest greatest best model and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it works 850 Pro Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 850 Pro. That’s a yeah, that’s a very common popular well-regarded SSD. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little scary. That’s on that list

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean like it’s it’s scary but like the OS is are doing the right thing like it’s blacklisted in Linux

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming Windows does the right thing OS 10 does the right thing with it the right thing in this case turns out to be like Apple didn’t test

⏹️ ▶️ John it and verify That it behaves correctly. So no trim for you, right and And it’s bad because

⏹️ ▶️ John we know that eventually the thing’s gonna fill up and slow down and everything, but it’s better than losing data. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like this is thread that you can follow. I put a link to a comment thread in

⏹️ ▶️ John Ars Technica that has links that you can chase down to like, you know, Samsung bug reporting website

⏹️ ▶️ John where Linux users are complaining about it. And Samsung’s like, this isn’t our problem. Linux is open source, fix it yourself or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s, that’s not what they say,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they basically end up saying like, it’s not a supported platform is what they end up saying. and they mentioned open source in that

⏹️ ▶️ John and people are like, what are you saying? Because it’s open source, we have to fix it ourself. What it comes down to is Samsung doesn’t care that it doesn’t work on Linux. But OS

⏹️ ▶️ John X, like that’s an Apple’s court. Apple can validate this or not, and Apple can

⏹️ ▶️ John file bugs or, I guess anyone can file bugs against it. Like they can enable it on OS X and get a reproduction of a problem and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John hey, your drive with this firmware does this thing wrong. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m happy with my SSD. It’s still really fast. It’s still nice and quiet. It’s still got a terabyte of storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John As far as I’m aware, it has not corrupted my data yet. So, so far so good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please correct me if I’m wrong on this. Wasn’t the whole point of the more advanced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD controller starting with the SandForce thing forever ago, wasn’t the whole point of that to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like use different tricks, like different leveling techniques and everything to keep drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance pretty good even without trim support?

⏹️ ▶️ John All those things are true, that they’re trying to make performance better doing tricks, but you need to have trim because

⏹️ ▶️ John when you that episode we talked about trim when the when the operating system deletes a file, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John go and overwrite every block with zeros or doesn’t tell the SSD that

⏹️ ▶️ John all those blocks are gone, it just updates like a single, a single little piece of information and its file

⏹️ ▶️ John system metadata structures says you know what this area that was previously taken is now free. So it updates a bitmap

⏹️ ▶️ John thing and HFS plus or some other metadata and so on. And the only thing that gets written to the disk as far as the disk

⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism is concerned, it sees right to this area of the disk, and that area, this is the metadata

⏹️ ▶️ John area, it’s not actually touching the data of the file, it just says, Oh, I received a right to this metadata area, the disk

⏹️ ▶️ John has no idea what that right is, it just says that’s right to address 123, it has no idea what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an address 123 has no idea that address 123 is the thing that tells you that these blocks are

⏹️ ▶️ John allocated, it doesn’t know where those blocks are doesn’t understand the file system, it’s just a big, you know, block addressable

⏹️ ▶️ John storage device, the SSD mechanism has no way to know,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, by the file system writing that piece of information, what that means is all these blocks

⏹️ ▶️ John of belonging to this one gig file are now technically free. And I should feel free to reuse them for any other rights

⏹️ ▶️ John that get sent to me. It doesn’t know that it’s just like it’s if it sees a right come in, it says, Where can I put this data? Where can I put this data?

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t think it can put it where that one gig file was, because the only right that got sent was the

⏹️ ▶️ John hey, to address 1, 2, 3 with these numbers. It doesn’t know those numbers mean that 1

⏹️ ▶️ John gig of space has now been freed up. That’s what the trim command is for, to send it to say, by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ John the file system, the operating system would say, write to this area of the disk to note that this file is gone now, and

⏹️ ▶️ John also send the disk controller a command to free up, to mark all of these blocks of data

⏹️ ▶️ John as you can use those again, and if a subsequent write comes in. So there is no, there’s literally no way

⏹️ ▶️ John that the drive can know, it’s a different layer of the storage hard, the drive can know that. So inevitably, without

⏹️ ▶️ John trim, no matter what tricks you do, everything will fill up, which will mean every single right also involves clearing out some

⏹️ ▶️ John area first.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is cards against humanity. And they asked us not to read a sponsor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco read and instead sent john another toaster to review.

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse talking about toasters more exciting than a roller coaster.

⏹️ ▶️ John Will it fit on his countertop? I hope the reviews never stop.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, what

⏹️ ▶️ John is the toaster this week? This week’s toaster is another Another one from Black & Decker, model T01322SBD.

⏹️ ▶️ John This thing is a two knob, fairly small toaster. I remember we had the three knob Black & Decker

⏹️ ▶️ John early on and it was kind of like middle of the road. This two knob thing does most

⏹️ ▶️ John of the bad things that have been discussed previously on all other toasters, right? It’s a nice tour of

⏹️ ▶️ John things that are wrong with toaster ovens. So you like it. Yeah, so it’s got two knobs, one

⏹️ ▶️ John of which is a timer knob that you have to repeatedly turn to a precise angle for consistent toasting. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a common flaw. The other knob also has to be in the right mode. So if you’re if you have still have

⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure two knobs are adjusted to the right thing to make it toast anything, you got to make sure the top one’s in toast because if you just turn the bottom one,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I forgot to turn the top when it was on bacon, I’m slowly making my bread warm instead of toasting it. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John a single heating element on the top and the bottom right in the middle. They are shielded at least so that’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the single heating home on top and bottom are just not adequate for a toaster of this size, leading to a ridiculous five

⏹️ ▶️ John minute plus toast time. I thought it was broken. I tried it multiple times. Maybe the bread was

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit cold. Maybe it was thicker, like crazy long toast times. It’s just got one helmet on top, one element on the bottom. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not enough for a toaster of the size. It’s not a big toaster, but whatever it is, it’s not getting the job done. Really,

⏹️ ▶️ John really thin wire rack. Like, like, I feel like I could crumple it up in my hand. That kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing, you know, not that it matters. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like the bread is going to fall through the rack, but sort of like the I was going to say intangibles.

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not it’s the opposite it’s tangible like the things that signal quality and durability that really thin rack

⏹️ ▶️ John is not it. The door doesn’t really open all the way to 90 degrees

⏹️ ▶️ John like it opens almost to 90 degrees and at the limit of its travel it’s like springy and

⏹️ ▶️ John bendy it felt like it was gonna break off it’s just not a nice feeling door. The crumb tray

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s underneath like a little metal crumb tray you have to tilt the crumb tray to get it out another flaw that we’ve seen in other toasters

⏹️ ▶️ John which is terrible because if you’re not careful, you’ll tilt it and just spill the crumbs on the crumb tray back into the toaster. And now how do you get

⏹️ ▶️ John them out? The whole point of the crumb tray is supposed to take the crumb tray out with the crumbs on it and dump them so you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to take your whole toaster over the garbage or sink or shake it to get the crumbs out. I mean, it’s not as bad as that hybrid toaster,

⏹️ ▶️ John which was just terrible. Like you bought this. It’s amazing. It would be OK. It would get the job done. The three

⏹️ ▶️ John knob black conductor is way better. I didn’t look at the price of this one. What is the price of 38 bucks on Amazon right now?

⏹️ ▶️ John It seems I don’t know what the three knob one was a three. No one was better than this one in all possible ways. This is not

⏹️ ▶️ John a great toaster. It’s like, and I was in a department store recently looking at like the toaster oven

⏹️ ▶️ John section.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the ones that were in there. I had actually reviewed. So that was interesting. But I was just looking at them again to say like to survey

⏹️ ▶️ John the field of all these things we’re seeing, like, are we am I just getting crappy toasters? Because still, none of them have been as good as my

⏹️ ▶️ John super expensive toaster. And even my super expensive toaster have complaints about. So I saw the fancier version of

⏹️ ▶️ John my super expensive toaster in the store. It has crappy knobs too. They’re better than my knobs a little bit, but still

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty crappy. Lots of just terrible knobs and very expensive toasters. It’s not hard, people. Remember,

⏹️ ▶️ John what was that one we had, the Hamilton Beach one, that actually had good knobs, even though they didn’t have… They felt good to turn,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though you couldn’t tell where the heck they were pointing. They always blow it. Yeah, there was no indicator. There was, but it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ John hard to see. They always blow it in some way. And lots of bad doors.

⏹️ ▶️ John If I could talk to the people who are designing toasters, I understand you have to make it cheaply, You have

⏹️ ▶️ John to have your margins. I’m not saying every toaster has to be $200, right? I think you can make a decent 40

⏹️ ▶️ John or 50 dollar toaster if you just concentrate on the right things. Make the controls reasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t cost any more money to have a good control. You don’t have to put a fancy LCD screen or whatever. If you’re just gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of knobs, just don’t make the mistakes of like having to turn a little ticking thing to the right angle every time. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, this toaster also ticks. It’s a quieter tick, but it does tick. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John having buttons, like, I feel like you can do a reasonable set of controls that combines the best of knobs

⏹️ ▶️ John and buttons. Have a door that feels good to open and close, have a wire rack that feels like it’s sturdy. Does that

⏹️ ▶️ John really cost that much more? It’s like, it’s a box with a door and some knobs and a tray. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just concentrate

⏹️ ▶️ John on those things. Make a nice door, make some nice knobs, make a nice tray.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s asking for everything. And I feel like it’s almost like they should

⏹️ ▶️ John take some lessons from kids toys, which also have to be cheap, but they also have to be durable. Like the toys on like

⏹️ ▶️ John the doors and stuff on like the little Fisher price toys and everything feel so much better than all these toasters. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to be disappointed with the state of toaster ovens. This one is not as bad as the hybrid toaster, which is the new low bar,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I do not recommend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, I mean, it seems like like there’s only basically two prices the toaster ovens are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there either $40 or $200. it seems like among the $40 ones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’ve reviewed that they almost all like you can get good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco elements in all of them like you can if you take the best parts of each one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put them all together you could make a good toaster so it

⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like it is or an okay toaster like we’re not asking for it’s not amazing but it’s there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing in it’s embarrassing it doesn’t feel like it’s gonna fall apart it you know it does the job

⏹️ ▶️ John consistently and in a reasonable manner.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now this toaster I see on the front here it’s advertising that it has even toast technology.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Were you able to test the even toast technology and does it stand up to that claim?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It was

⏹️ ▶️ John reasonably even

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ John for five minutes like it’s you know it’s probably pretty easy to do even toasting if you do it super slow. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John when you have a really hot element that’s when you get hot spots. If you take five minutes sure yeah it’s nice and even across the

⏹️ ▶️ John bread and you know being right in the middle of each thing probably helps because you have four

⏹️ ▶️ John elements if you have two on bottom and two on top and you just have the two pieces of toast like if you don’t sort of Center

⏹️ ▶️ John them over the elements right but this toaster is small enough and there’s only one element and it’s in the middle that if you just stick toast in there

⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t think about you’re probably gonna stick it somewhere around the middle back to front wise and it will come out even so it was fine

⏹️ ▶️ John like you know if you want to wait five minutes for your toast it will get the job done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and finally did the staff at the store recognize you

⏹️ ▶️ John no this was just a Coles

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I mean how many professional toaster oven reviewers are there in the world?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Maybe like three? Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. No one came to help me at all which is what Coles is like. Which I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John need any help which is fine. Yeah no you mentioned you mentioned the two price ranges like $40

⏹️ ▶️ John and $200. The other thing that kills me is the $200 ones don’t feel like $200 appliances.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again if you had to make a metal box with a door and knobs and you gave me $200 to do it I would make damn sure that those

⏹️ ▶️ John doors the doors are better. Like the doors have little rubber stops them they open and close in a reasonable way except

⏹️ ▶️ John for the door on my actual toaster which still springs closed and tries to burn you but like i said i think that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John just my particular model my particular unit and not all this model because everyone else i

⏹️ ▶️ John ask who has this toaster they say no my door stays open fine but anyway the doors are better but the knobs they’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe it’s just the the Breville ones how can you make such a terrible knob it feels like a uh a snapped together plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John model from the 80s that the knobs are just barely hanging on there they feel terrible to turn, they’re wobbly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like on the fancy one, they made them like fake chrome, like shiny, you know, again, like a snap-together

⏹️ ▶️ John model, like when you have the, you know, chrome-finished wheels on your snap-together model car.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re shiny plastic for $250. I’m not saying you have to give me a metal

⏹️ ▶️ John knob, but give me a knob that at least feels good to turn and doesn’t wobble in my hand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this is, I mean, this is like, like what you’ve identified here is like, this applies to so many different categories

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things, where like, you know, well, thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show once again. So what,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this applies. Way to get out of the ad. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, well, cause I’m gonna run over the time that I allot for the ads now, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪ Syracuse and Tolstoy ♪ ♪ Reviews all day, every single day ♪

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪ Hear him talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tolstoy ♪ ♪ And I’m whisked away, talkin’ about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tester ♪ But like, this applies to so many things. Like, you know, you have, you have like, used to have like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap, good, and then commercial slash pro in so many things, electronics,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, appliances, stuff like that. And now you still have cheap, good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and commercial slash pro price points on things. But it seems like the middle tier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, like the prosumer kind of level, that in so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many things is now just like the same cheap garbage that the cheap one is made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of, doesn’t last any longer, isn’t of much higher quality, just has like more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bells and whistles on it. But it’s still a cheap quality thing that you’re just paying $200 for. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think toaster ovens in particular, like the original Hypercritical episode about this was titled Worse and More Diverse

⏹️ ▶️ John because like there are so many more toasters in all different shapes and sizes, but all of them are crappier. And I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s true across the board. The great example is like, you know, any Japanese car, Honda, Toyota

⏹️ ▶️ John cars, the knobs and stuff in those feel great compared to toaster knobs. Like, they’re not as nice as obviously BMW

⏹️ ▶️ John or Lexus or Mercedes controls, but they are really, really good. They put every toaster to shame. And you can get that

⏹️ ▶️ John in a Honda Fit for like $15,000, like the cheapest car you can get. Like, they still have

⏹️ ▶️ John nice turnstocks, nice, like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, nothing like just this pieces of crap

⏹️ ▶️ John that are on a $200 toaster. So I feel like it is possible, at the price points they want to hit,

⏹️ ▶️ John if they cared about it, because you don’t have to do all the bells and whistles, and you don’t have to do the the actual expensive things of having more

⏹️ ▶️ John healing eating elements of having a little computer and having an LCD screen and crap like that like we understand you have to hit

⏹️ ▶️ John a price point pair it down to just heating elements simple you

⏹️ ▶️ John know mechanical analog controls for them a box in a door and just concentrate on the few elements that

⏹️ ▶️ John you touch and make them nice and that’s what the cheap car companies do these cars don’t have fancy features a Honda fit does not have

⏹️ ▶️ John a camera that shows you all around your car of a composited out of a bunch of cameras at the corners of your car so you can park

⏹️ ▶️ John without scraping your Such a great feature your wheels and I know it is it’s great, but like They

⏹️ ▶️ John have the money for a bunch of plastic on a dashboard a plastic wheel and and they

⏹️ ▶️ John they find a way to make parts That are cheap that are simple to assemble

⏹️ ▶️ John and that feel not like pieces of crap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so what’s our first topic this week?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we have we have follow-up from the chat room Do you wanna I miss this one, but I’m assuming Casey put this in there

⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea what you’re talking about the SSD thing yeah, if they say in the chat room We says real-time follow-up from our

⏹️ ▶️ John Secret anonymous tipster who foolishly hangs on the chat room every week or as far as we’re able to tell same

⏹️ ▶️ John guy says Apple Samsung 800 8xxx meaning the 800 840 850 whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John series firmware is not the same as retail drives We fixed the bugs. I don’t know what that means because

⏹️ ▶️ John I bought mine You know from Amazon or whatever it’s not Apple’s thing does Apple ship devices with

⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung 800 series SSDs in them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they have they have like Samsung manufactured sticks in their various like like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro. I think that’s I think that’s a Samsung SSD stick and stuff like that, but it’s not it’s not like package

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a 2.5 inch drive enclosure with us with the serial ATA port in the back like it’s it’s just like it’s in those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little sticks they put in all their

⏹️ ▶️ John computers. So that counts as like the 800 series even though obviously looks nothing like the things you buy from retail.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like the tips are saying now like those are just variants of normal Samsung SSDs so yeah I’m sure like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the Samsung giant serial number you know msata stick thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is say a rebranded 840 pro or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah well

⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t help me or it doesn’t help anyone else who bought a you know commercial third party buy

⏹️ ▶️ John it directly from you know Samsung branded thing that looks like a you know little two

⏹️ ▶️ John and a half inch drive but actually has a bunch of chips inside it but anyway yeah Apple tends to do that’s that’s what it means you know

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple qualifies their drives to work with trim or not. And, you know, they

⏹️ ▶️ John test them and they make sure they work. And so if you’re buying third party stuff, Apple’s default is

⏹️ ▶️ John no, we won’t enable trim for you because we haven’t tested your thing and be careful if you haven’t tested

⏹️ ▶️ John it either. And I don’t know if you I don’t know if people have the option of trying to fix the firmware in their

⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung 850 retail drives. I would not recommend that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the tipster is saying that yes, the Apple drives are just variants of normal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung SSDs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you guys ever run a firmware update on a disk of any sort?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think I have in the past. It used to have to like boot into DOS to do it. Like give you like a floppy

⏹️ ▶️ John drive to remember that. And so I would use like I use like virtual PC. This is back in the day, you know, before x86

⏹️ ▶️ John Max use virtual PC to be able to use the virtual floppy

⏹️ ▶️ John drive thing to get it to see my I was just convoluted terrifying thing. But you know, at that point, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the drive is empty, like I would make sure like, before I attempt this, get all the data off the drive. So then,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, worst case scenario, I break it and have to send it back and they send me a new one, but I have done it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I did it like once. And it was one of those it was like, it was embarrassingly late

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in technology that it was requiring me to use a DOS floppy. It was like to the point where like, I had to like figure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out how to boot a DOS floppy image, because the computer I had of course didn’t have it was like 2007 or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like something some very late time it’s like wow we stopped using floppies like 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years beforehand. You had to edit your

⏹️ ▶️ John config.sys right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I actually never was brave enough to do that even when I was a PC guy.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the line was in an Apple ad back when they were trying to make fun of DOS which was you know the appropriate thing

⏹️ ▶️ John to do because it was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ridiculous at the

⏹️ ▶️ John time but they had some kid in the ad say you need to edit your config.sys.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice. So, Apple Music.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you guys listened to Taylor Swift

⏹️ ▶️ John yet? Nope. What do you mean yet? Most of us have heard Taylor Swift already, but I like the fact that it took

⏹️ ▶️ John a large new product initiative from Apple to get you to listen to the songs that everyone has been listening

⏹️ ▶️ John to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To get me to listen to like the number one selling album of like the last two years or whatever. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Yeah. So it seems like a pretty good service. I mean, did you guys have you guys

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used streaming services before?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm hmm. Yeah, I’m a Spotify user and a fairly devout one. Devout enough that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve I’m happy enough with it that I’ve never tried beats. I’ve never tried RDO.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t mean they’re not better. It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like them more. It’s just I’ve been happy with Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I haven’t had any compelling reason to mess with my setup. And, and so So I’ve been fiddling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple Music over the last 24 hours as we record this. We’re recording it on Wednesday night and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music launched roughly midday yesterday. And I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey play much with the streaming portion of it until today. I was mostly just listening to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beats 1 because I was really curious to hear how it was. I like Beats 1.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was entertaining. I thought the music selections were good and varied. Pretty early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, they played a non-English song,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which took me aback. And then I thought, you know what? That’s pretty cool, actually. If this really is worldwide—I forget the slogan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they use over and over and over again. But—

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Apparently not enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, apparently that’s right, because it would have been burned in by now. But anyways, since

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a worldwide radio station, or so they say, the fact that they were playing non-English songs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought was kind of cool. I don’t know Zane Lowe or any of the other DJs from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, but they all seem pretty entertaining. Today, however, I started

⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing with what I would call the Spotify-like features of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music. So that is to say, I want to play such and such album by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such and such artist right now. And it worked just fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I’ve been fiddling with it around lunchtime

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, and I haven’t come up with a good way to describe it, but I don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel the best way I can describe it, and I can’t decide if this was the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion I had before I even tried it, and so now I’m just fitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my experience to my previously held opinion, but it felt like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of stuff just stapled onto the side of iTunes, which is already relatively confusing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me to begin with because I don’t use iTunes very often. And it just felt weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas Spotify, it has many of its own UI issues. It has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many problems and many, many poor choices, but by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and large, it does not take me long to figure out how to go to a particular album or to a particular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey artist or to perform a particular operation. Whereas, as an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, I wanted to listen to, or I wanted to see the activity-based playlists

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they had set up. A friend of the show, Underscore, had snarkily pointed out that they have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Getting It On playlist, I believe it’s called. And so I was going to look and see what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these playlists were and what options they were, and it took me literally five minutes to find it, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it would be in either the playlist section, but no, that was my playlist in iTunes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional iTunes. I thought it would be in the For You section, but no, they weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And so I went looking in every section except the section that it was in, which was I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, because clearly all these playlists should be in the new section. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not saying I don’t like it. I’m not saying I’m not going to switch to it. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very well may switch to it, but my initial impression is Beats 1, thumbs up. Apple Music

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a streaming on-demand service, thumb to the side. I haven’t really decided

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, when Apple did photos recently, I felt like they kind of wiped the slate

⏹️ ▶️ John clean of all of their past efforts. Like, they had accumulated a lot of history with Aperture

⏹️ ▶️ John and iPhoto. And clearly, they were like, all right, do over. Start over from scratch. Let’s bring only what we need with

⏹️ ▶️ John us and give it sort of a migration path. And the same thing with the photo streams.

⏹️ ▶️ John They kind of kept those on. But they get reconceptualized a little bit in the new service with

⏹️ ▶️ John a, and the iCod photo library, like it was their chance to put a big reset button,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And Apple Music, product naming wise, looks like, oh, you know, all that crap we were doing

⏹️ ▶️ John with iTunes and iTunes Match and this, that, and the other thing, this is, you know, Apple Music, let’s reset, new name,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just gonna start over. But as Casey just pointed out, they didn’t. What they did was took the existing mess,

⏹️ ▶️ John which involves iTunes and a bunch of other crap, and added more stuff to it. Like even iTunes Match is still around

⏹️ ▶️ John and is confusingly different. We should put this link in the show notes. Serenity had a good article today explaining, do

⏹️ ▶️ John I need iTunes match if I have Apple music? Do I just want one or the other? Are there differences? What are those

⏹️ ▶️ John differences? It’s super confusing. That’s before you even get into, so the little icon on my iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John has changed and now I can’t find anything anymore. And by the way, iTunes 12 too continues, doesn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John have Apple music in it, but continues to have more different changes. It doesn’t have music, right? Like it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have the streaming stuff in it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes now, iTunes on the desktop, the new version that came out like a few hours after Beats launched,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, Apple Music launched. That has everything

⏹️ ▶️ John as

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco far as

⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Oh, all right, so it must have been before it had been updated because the one came out for iOS first. Yeah, yeah. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John these are features on top of all the existing other features. Some features are superseded and replaced by new

⏹️ ▶️ John ones, some are not, and some things have different names and they’re in different places, so it’s not the sort of clean

⏹️ ▶️ John sheet reset, which makes some sense because it is an additive thing. It’s like, well, we already had the thing where you could download

⏹️ ▶️ John and buy music, and we already had the thing where you could rip your CDs and organize music, and we already had these other things and podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ John and syncing your iOS devices and all the other crap you can do in iTunes but we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have a streaming service now we have a streaming service and we also have this radio station and we also have you know like

⏹️ ▶️ John boy there’s a lot of crap in there and for someone like me who doesn’t like I have Spotify installed and I’ve used it a few times but for

⏹️ ▶️ John someone like me who’s not like I tend to just want to listen to my music all this other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John is I look at all the other stuff and think in what way

⏹️ ▶️ John does this either help or hurt my ability to listen to music the way I normally listen to it? Is it going to, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ John scramble all my album and artist metadata as some people are reporting the new version of iTunes has done to them if they had previously

⏹️ ▶️ John used iTunes Match? Will it let me, say, get higher bitrate DRM conversions of songs that I

⏹️ ▶️ John ripped from CD many years ago? Like iTunes Match did that. That was a good feature. It was a plus. Will it let

⏹️ ▶️ John me not have access to all of my music on my iPhone but not have to have all my music on my iPhone? Again, iTunes Match

⏹️ ▶️ John did that. That was a plus. Apple Music stuff I feel like is neutral or a minus because it makes it harder for me to

⏹️ ▶️ John find things that I want to find and the sort of teething you know bugs.0

⏹️ ▶️ John release or whatever even though this is kind of like Beats Music 2 whatever their their service was called before

⏹️ ▶️ John make me worry about it so I did sign up for the trial but I’m a little bit afraid of

⏹️ ▶️ John the new version of iTunes on my Mac and I guess maybe I’ll look into the streaming

⏹️ ▶️ John things and try it but like it’s not a slam on their service. I can’t really judge it because I’m not a streaming music kind of person.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I was never into any of the other ones I installed either. I’m mostly looking at it as a potential

⏹️ ▶️ John harm to my existing music listening habits, which, you know, to Apple’s credit, they’re still trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John support that. Like you can still listen to music that way if you want to. And maybe you

⏹️ ▶️ John might still want to subscribe to Apple Music for the iCloud syncing features, but maybe not

⏹️ ▶️ John if you already subscribed to iTunes Match, which is way cheaper. So anyway, I feel like this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a very confusing situation for me and I’m not sure what to make of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like, you know, I totally agree with you on, you know, the problem of bolting all this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto their existing very complicated iTunes slash music setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, they have so much legacy there. And you know, you’re comparing it with Photos was apt, you know, but,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, with Photos, they did a clean start and that was a massive engineering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort, it seems. I mean, it seemed like it, first of all, I think it was late,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was also, you know, just, it was a massive effort, I would imagine, to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, to basically, you know, try to replace iPhoto and Aperture with this new thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do a pretty decent job at a 1.0, plus this massive cloud backend stuff, and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having iOS match up the whole time with the desktop. Like, that’s just a massive effort that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to go into photos to make that happen. I would love if they did the same thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iTunes and you know deprecate iTunes and have a new app just called music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even on Mac and have a new you know music that app that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only does music and even you know leave like videos and stuff make a separate videos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app you know just like you know they split off iBooks and that was fine they even now kicked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio books out of the music on iOS and left that in the iBooks app now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can do the same thing on Mac. Basically, slowly divest iTunes of the things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does that aren’t music.

⏹️ ▶️ John And fold iTunes Match into it. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the fact

⏹️ ▶️ John that iTunes Match still exists, there should be one new thing that encompasses, functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John is fine, but there should be one new thing with various different price points and features, like it should

⏹️ ▶️ John supersede iTunes Match, in the same way that photo streams still exist the new photos things, but they’re reconceptualized

⏹️ ▶️ John as a share section of iPhoto. Like, so if you had existing ones that are there and you can make new ones, but it’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s under a new umbrella, a new name, a new pricing structure. There’s just one thing you have to know about,

⏹️ ▶️ John not seven layers of legacy things that you have to know about and understand how they interact, right? That’s how it should be presented

⏹️ ▶️ John and conceptualized. And like you said, the implementation wise, if you’re going to try to conceptualize it is that you also have

⏹️ ▶️ John to get it out of the app that you use to sync your iPod shuffle or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And I think I think that’s the main problem is like they have all this massive legacy stuff that iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has to do like there’s still nothing else that can do a lot of these roles and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know yes you have iOS devices that can set themselves up now without a computer and never be synced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to iTunes at all but there’s still a there’s still a lot of people who do sync it to iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or who do use iTunes to manage their iOS devices and be there’s all those devices they keep selling called

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPods that that still need iTunes so it’s like they’re still you know and granted not selling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of iPods but they are still selling them and they might be in new colors in a couple of weeks or whatever like it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the the massive amount of engineering effort that was required to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dump iPhoto and Aperture and make this new photos thing with this new iCloud photos library

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the corresponding scale of the job to do that for iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and music was probably just too big to do in a reasonable amount of time and it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not time for that yet. And I don’t know if it ever will be, but it’s I think it’s clear that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple believed it was not time for that yet, and that they probably had to move faster to get,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they were clearly like, like the relevance of of the iTunes music store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to buy music outright, I think was declining faster than they probably expected.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they had plenty of time to react like that. That’s something needs to be said for the context here. This is a me

⏹️ ▶️ John to move Apple should have had a streaming service long ago. They spent a long time getting one. They

⏹️ ▶️ John ended up having to acquire a company to accelerate their ability to have one. But if you would ask, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the rise of all the streaming services, it’s not like this happened overnight. And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to have caught Apple flat footed, but it shouldn’t have because there was plenty of time for them to realize this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing they should have. And it seems like they just couldn’t get it together and ended up having to have make an acquisition

⏹️ ▶️ John to bring that to bear. And my favorite hobby hoist hobby horse with the whole server side stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and which Apple’s credit, they’re actually making some motions on is like, Oh, we did that thing with photos was a big

⏹️ ▶️ John effort. We had to do that for music too. We don’t have time. Like it’s too much effort. If you

⏹️ ▶️ John concentrate on producing infrastructure for network services, instead of concentrating

⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, we got to redo photos. If you make infrastructure, like say cloud kit, that is an example of infrastructure

⏹️ ▶️ John that if you do a good job with your general purpose infrastructure, lots of sort of online powered applications have

⏹️ ▶️ John similar needs and hammered on this again and that’s like all Google does, it seems like is make incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ John powerful infrastructure upon which they can build all sorts of applications. Each one of

⏹️ ▶️ John those applications doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel and find a new way to store its data and stuff. So I would hope that some

⏹️ ▶️ John of the effort they put into the back end for photos would give them a leg up on potentially

⏹️ ▶️ John in the future. Rejiggering I mean, it’s tough as they have they bought it. It’s not something they did in house beats is what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t like rewrite all the beats code and you know, overnight or whatever. But like, I’m hoping some of that infrastructure

⏹️ ▶️ John work that they’re finally doing will pay dividends in like now it shouldn’t be such a Herculean effort

⏹️ ▶️ John to do the same thing you did for photos for iTunes because a you’ve done it once before and be you should

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to reuse a lot of that work a lot of the expertise a lot of the experience a lot of the code a lot of the server side stuff a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John the frameworks you know that should help you accelerate the you know

⏹️ ▶️ John when they have to do the music app that is like oh it’s a total rewrite or whatever all

⏹️ ▶️ John the things they did for the photos app I mean that’s like framework stuff they seem to understand of like, oh, collection view, that would be useful everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John We should make that and have it everywhere. Core animation, that’s client-side infrastructure. We’ve talked about this before. Server-side

⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure, how do you store a bunch of data? How do you get it on demand in a reliable way?

⏹️ ▶️ John And like, how would database to store all the metadata? And how do we make all your stuff be in the cloud and only parts

⏹️ ▶️ John of it on your devices? And that’s what they’re trying to do with photos. And music is actually data volume-wise

⏹️ ▶️ John an easier problem, because photos are bigger than music, so for the most part.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think really the The challenges we see here are purely that, you know, it’s the same thing like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time iTunes gets a redesign, like the desktop, every time there’s a new design for iTunes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really just makes the app harder and more confusing to use because they can’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove features from it for various reasons. So instead, they just like hide things in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different like modes and drawers and stuff. And it’s just like, it’s weird, like you just get this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco impossible to use application that is extremely complicated, but it’s trying to look

⏹️ ▶️ John simple. and they move things around a lot and that upsets people who are like, I knew where that was before

⏹️ ▶️ John and now I don’t. And it’s like, I bet if you asked them, they’d say, okay, if you knew where it was before,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird that we moved it. But if you’ve never used it before, the new location is better for reasons X, Y, and Z. And maybe they’re right,

⏹️ ▶️ John but for, and maybe they’re even right that like, there are more new users than there

⏹️ ▶️ John are existing ones. But just constantly reshuffling the deck chairs, especially kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John when they, you know, when they changed the whole iTunes DJ functionality and replace it with Up Next. Not only

⏹️ ▶️ John do people know how the iTunes DJ functionality works, but it was around long enough that people were like, kind of get into

⏹️ ▶️ John a groove with it. They have kind of like a workflow of how they play music at parties or whatever involving iTunes DJ or whatever that

⏹️ ▶️ John feature was called. And then it was replaced with Upnext. They can say, Oh, Upnext is better for reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John X, Y, and Z. It’s like, but I can’t reproduce my workflow. It’s it’s, you know, not that iTunes is, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a desktop publishing application or Photoshop or whatever, but you’re just constantly

⏹️ ▶️ John moving things around to try to find maybe this arrangement would be more pleasing. But like you said, Marco, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John only if you keep the same set of things, and you don’t want to give up anything,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you probably don’t, because it’s not like there’s lots of unessential functionality. It’s just like the functionality of seven apps in

⏹️ ▶️ John one. It’s moving it around, just pisses people off who you’re, you’re like experienced,

⏹️ ▶️ John loyal users. And it doesn’t actually, you can’t actually make it that much simpler, because all the crap is still there somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. And there’s, and there’s, by the way, there’s the big windows question of how do you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable these things for people on Windows, so they need a bunch of crap for that. There’s obviously tons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of technical debt here for things like I still have to quit my music player

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I upgrade my developer compiler tools because they’re related. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s so many weird little tie-ins to iTunes that have been accumulating over the years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think any kind of meaningful change to it is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlikely to happen just because it just, it seems like it’s never going to be worth the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably surprisingly large engineering effort to substantially improve it and break things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and, you know, start clean.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you said never and we know about that, but anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I live for the timescale.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thus far, yeah, that’s come up recently. I’m trying to figure out if I ever actually said that or if you guys

⏹️ ▶️ John said it as an attempt to characterize and mock my line of reasoning. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John far, no one has found, they found me saying it in reply to Casey saying it back to me but I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if I ever said that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but anyway

⏹️ ▶️ Marco underscore will find it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah fine

⏹️ ▶️ John someone tried and I thought they’d found it but really they just found Casey saying it like snidely so it’s obvious that at

⏹️ ▶️ John some point previously that like it had come up before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I remember correctly I think it was when I was saying Apple didn’t really need to replace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco objective C and you were saying on an infinite timescale yeah the argument you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John getting at I did make but I’m saying like those exact words okay you know because it keeps being called like my infinite

⏹️ ▶️ John time scale argument and like I guess like it’s more like that’s that’s Marco’s name

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s snide characterization of my much more

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco subtle and nuanced

⏹️ ▶️ John argument right yeah derpy smudgly

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or maybe I actually said that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to believe that I actually said it too I just don’t remember it because so long ago

⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway yeah iTunes something’s gonna have to be done eventually for now

⏹️ ▶️ John they just are content to keep changing the icon and moving crap around in the UI. But you know, iOS got I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how new the iOS app is like it’s new ish. Certainly there’s less technical debt

⏹️ ▶️ John in the iOS one and they didn’t move crap around a lot. And if you that’s the thing like if you

⏹️ ▶️ John even if you don’t sign up for Apple Music, a lot of the options it seems like are moved around or hidden or not

⏹️ ▶️ John there and you actually have to go into the settings app and say Apple Music off and then it looks more like the old

⏹️ ▶️ John music player app. I did sign up for the trial and by the way if you sign up for the

⏹️ ▶️ John free trial it’s like a three month free trial which is pretty generous as far as free trials go.

⏹️ ▶️ John It will auto renew for whatever price you sign up for but you can turn off the auto renewal somebody tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ John instructions for doing that I followed their instructions and it wasn’t that bad it was like go to your Apple ID go to manage and

⏹️ ▶️ John then go turn off auto renew. So it’s kind of slimy that they turn auto renew on by default

⏹️ ▶️ John I’d rather have it say you know like a Squarespace real free trial like it’s a free trial and at the

⏹️ ▶️ John end of that then we’ll do this. Hey, you’ve been using this for three months. If you like it, pay money rather than just saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we’re just going to sign you up for auto renew. I suppose it would pop up, send the email or whatever, like all the subscriptions

⏹️ ▶️ John do and say, by the way, your, you know, I cloud storage is about to renew in six days, like to give you a

⏹️ ▶️ John chance to cancel or whatever, but it would be nicer if they didn’t have the auto renew. But apparently apple is not

⏹️ ▶️ John that far in the light side of the forest that they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you can turn it off. But anyway, I have signed up to do that. I can still find my music I

⏹️ ▶️ John am now slightly fearful from reading the horror stories of what it might do to my metadata and stuff for all my

⏹️ ▶️ John songs so I’m kind of warily watching it and being careful with how I play back

⏹️ ▶️ John my music.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to turn off this auto renew if you are in Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Music in just about any tab it looks like you hit the little avatar you know profile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person in the upper left and then there’s a button for a row

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for view Apple ID and then in there there’s a subscription section there’s a manage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey button and then in there you can say it says your membership

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music membership and you can turn it off in there so just FYI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it seems like it’s very very similar to the auto renewing subscriptions that they have an iOS for things like newsstand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco publications by the way newsstand is dead yay and other things any kind of auto renewing thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you bring that up because as I went through the stance to confirm I knew how to do it, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticed that I had one other thing in subscriptions. Would you like to guess what it is? The magazine?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s correct. Nice. Although it shouldn’t be billing anymore. I think it’s… No, no, no. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey expired. Yeah. But either way, I thought that was kind of funny. So, why don’t you tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us about something else that’s cool?

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so anything else about Apple music?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I thought the the sort of first run experience where it shows you like the artist bubbles,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can tap them multiple times to make them bigger. And it shows the picture of the artist on them. They

⏹️ ▶️ John demo that in the keynote when they were introducing it, and I went through it. And I was disappointed for

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple reasons. One, the little bubbles it gave me, I was looking for my favorite bands, and they were

⏹️ ▶️ John not there. So I’m not sure how it was coming up with the button, you do like more artists, like I kept hitting more artists hoping

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually would rotate in some of my favorite bands because I think that you know if it’s trying to get an idea of what kind of music I like

⏹️ ▶️ John you know I’d like to tap the bubbles for you to REM Bruce Springsteen Radiohead like that’s a good start right there

⏹️ ▶️ John right you know we can branch out and keep going right and those just weren’t there but two

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you should have had to ask me at all because I’ve been an iTunes match subscriber for a long time it’s got all my plate

⏹️ ▶️ John play counts for like for years worth of play cumulative play counts across all devices

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got that in in the cloud somewhere, right? Why does have to ask me who my favorite artists

⏹️ ▶️ John are? Don’t ask me, you’ve got the actual data, no matter what I say, like, I mean, you can have both. I tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ John this, I thought it was ridiculous. They didn’t use this information. There’s a couple of angles. One, the angle is you don’t have to do that bubble thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t do it, maybe they do use your thing in the cloud. If that’s the case, then they’re the sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of onboarding process did not make that clear to me that if I just skip the bubbles entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t deal with it, it will just use the information has about my listening habits. I didn’t. That was

⏹️ ▶️ John not made clear to me during the thing, if it’s even true. And the second thing is like having both

⏹️ ▶️ John of those options. Maybe I don’t want you to use my usage data. Maybe I think my taste of change recently. Maybe I want to give a time window

⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s lots of I just felt like there’s lots of things they could have and should have done. And if they are doing

⏹️ ▶️ John them, they could have communicated it better. It wasn’t a for a nice first run experience. And a lot of people said like, well, that’s a Google

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of thing to do, like where they where they make it clear that they know you’re listening experiently. We

⏹️ ▶️ John know they know. How do you think your play count when you play something on your phone that you look at the play count in iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ John because you have iTunes match it increments over there. Like we know they know this information. We have,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how iTunes match works, right? And even if it wasn’t in the cloud, even if it was just on your device, even on a given

⏹️ ▶️ John device, you have at least like a couple of weeks or months of years of play count data depending on how long

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve had the device. So even if you stayed on device, you could still look up that information. And I would have liked the onboarding

⏹️ ▶️ John process to say, we do or do not know something about your habits either because you just got this phone, you never

⏹️ ▶️ John subscribed to iTunes match, you don’t listen to iTunes, you listen to Spotify, like, let it let it tell the person

⏹️ ▶️ John how much it thinks it knows about your habits and say, would you like us to use what we know of your habits

⏹️ ▶️ John over the X number of months or the X number of you know, some way of presenting to them to say this is how much we know about you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want us to use that information to do your recommendations? Do you or do you want to pick new things and then go through the

⏹️ ▶️ John bubbles process and then have the bubbles process be a a little bit nicer about, you know, guessing which

⏹️ ▶️ John artist it wants to put in the mix. Like maybe it’s because maybe just go by your age like that would be I don’t know what kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John algorithms they use, but age would probably give them a good start, right? You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they don’t have that demographic information either. But again, I don’t know how it’s coming up with the bubbles, but whatever algorithm

⏹️ ▶️ John it was using, the bubbles were not matching up with me like it was. It was bands that I had not heard of that were probably

⏹️ ▶️ John bands that the youngsters like, and it just would not bring up a bubble for any of my like

⏹️ ▶️ John top five or top seven favorite bands no matter how many times I had more

⏹️ ▶️ John artists. Yeah so that was disappointing. Other people were saying that the recommendation

⏹️ ▶️ John bubbles led them to a bunch of playlists that really nailed their taste and even after I went through the bubbles and

⏹️ ▶️ John picked the best ones that I could when I saw like the sort of page for you or recommendations for you they

⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t terrible so that makes me think it really is using the iTunes match information behind the scenes which

⏹️ ▶️ John again makes me question why the bubbles were there. But anyway, the bubbles are a neat UI,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the onboarding experience for Apple Music for me was not good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So real-time follow-up, sort of, kind of. I was fiddling with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Music on my phone while I was listening to you guys talk, and I went to the Connect tab

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what was there. And I’ll start by saying that I got subscribed to a bunch of artists

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not possibly care less about when I first got on boarded with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole Connect thing. That said, I went through and unselected most of them, kept the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones I liked, and then selected a couple others that I really enjoy. And so if I were to pick

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite band right now, and this has been the case for a few years, and I’ve mentioned it I think before, that’s this band

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Mute Math. And so I was scrolling through Connect, and the second

⏹️ ▶️ Casey item after a Dave Matthews entry is an entry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from MuteMath where apparently a local magazine from here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Richmond sat down with them either before or after the concert that Aaron and I went to that was a couple hours

⏹️ ▶️ Casey away from here. I think it was last month. And I had no idea this existed. I follow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire band on Twitter. I follow the band’s account on Twitter. I had no idea that this was a thing. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the show’s over tomorrow or something, I’m going to go ahead and read this interview with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much my favorite band from a local magazine. I had no earthly idea. So that’s a pretty cool thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far. And the Connect thing seems like it’s being populated by a handful of people. Somehow Tim

⏹️ ▶️ Casey McGraw’s in here, I’m not really sure why. But no, I’m impressed that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve already discovered something I would not have known about otherwise.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it just makes you follow everybody and every artist in your collection like that. Its initial follow list is everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John who you have music from.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which I think that’s great. I mean, for years I’ve had this problem where I will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have five albums from a band and they’ll come out with a new album that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I won’t know about because I don’t follow the news that well. And I’ll discover it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco months or years later, like, oh my God, I would have bought this years ago. Why didn’t I know about this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco album? And they’ve had for a long time some kind of artist alert system where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could say, alert me whenever this artist has a new release or something, but you had to manually enable that for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything and it just seemed like the obvious choice would be like just look at any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music I have any artist in my collection especially any artist for which I own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco full albums just notify me whenever just like you know have some newsfeed area or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some notifications somewhere email me you email me for all sorts of other garbage email me first like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the whenever any artist who I’ve bought music from in the past releases a new album

⏹️ ▶️ John do you think that’s the right default any artists because I have tons of things that like I have two tracks by this

⏹️ ▶️ John artist one track by this artist like I think it’s okay to have that option because manually following all

⏹️ ▶️ John the artists and your thing would be tedious but I’m not entirely sure that should be the default like I feel like most

⏹️ ▶️ John people have a handful of artists that they’re really interested in new releases from

⏹️ ▶️ John and a long tail of artists that they have one or two tracks from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep I agree

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really I don’t know maybe it maybe I’m weird cuz I’m a full album Kind of person, but I don’t know it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know who some

⏹️ ▶️ John of these artists are I’m going through it now Maybe this is some tracks from my my kids or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like the secret sisters. I don’t even know who that is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, there definitely were entries that I did not know the artist or Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a single track from them from like back when I was in college or something like that

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I’m not gonna you know, I know who Toto is but I’m not gonna follow them I’m not waiting

⏹️ ▶️ John the new total album. That’s gonna be you know what I mean unfollow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know it’s I Didn’t like the onboarding experience

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which should sound familiar But by and large I didn’t think it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s bad so far. So we’ll see I Don’t know. All right anything else about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I I’ve only listened to it for you know, what a day right now now, so it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but I like it a lot so far. I’ve already listened to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few albums that I wouldn’t have jumped to buy, but because I can listen to them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now for free slash no additional cost, I will gladly listen to the album

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and on for a couple of them, I thought, you know, I might want to buy this for a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I thought, you know, I’m really glad I didn’t buy this, but that was that was interesting, you know, like that or you know, I enjoyed it for those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five minutes or for 40 minutes but I don’t want to hear it again and you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I mean this is obviously you know this is like me discovering what everybody else in the world discovered years ago

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when streaming services started to become a thing but this is kind of nice like I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like this and I can see why it changes the way people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy and pay for music so much because it is very compelling and This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this if everything they said pans out, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if what they are attempting to do ends up being what they’re actually doing in in the way that like they have the heat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the human curation aspect and the playlist and everything if that ends up being good and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco staying good, this is going to be great for me because I I’ve tried other services

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past. I first had a long time ago. I tried Pandora. I tried Spotify. I briefly tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RDO and then for like a day. I tried beats before I realized they didn’t even have a real Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. My problem is that I don’t find new music on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own very well. And the systems they’ve had in the iTunes store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to date, where they basically just have like, you know, people who bought this also bought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this list of crap at the bottom. That has been terrible for me. I’ve spent so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time exploring those, previewing those albums, and trying to see like, okay, I’ll to a band I love and I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see you know the people who bought also bought section at the bottom and it’s just a bunch of garbage like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine why people buy those two things together. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the human curation aspect so far in the in the handful of playlists that I’ve listened to that have been like the featured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlist kind of things where it looks like some person was involved I’ve liked it it has given me new music it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has it has introduced me to new stuff in a way that all of the algorithmic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in the previous services I’ve tried plus the iTunes recommendations under their their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchased albums, those have never gotten there for me. They’ve never they’ve never been good enough to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick with me. So far this looks promising so I’m looking forward to this and and that is that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what everyone always was saying about beats about beats music when it was called that that they were very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at that and the only reason I didn’t give that a chance again was because they didn’t really have a Mac app. Now this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems like this could really be something for people like me who who are you know too old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find good music on their own.

⏹️ ▶️ John How do you find the recommendations of like services that are say better than Apple at doing this type of thing like maybe Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ John or Netflix? Netflix I guess is the best example like people who like this movie you also like this movie do you find that

⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix are you just like sort of don’t find the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who like also like conceptually is a good thing or is it just that Apple’s implementation is crappy and it just says people like this

⏹️ ▶️ John also bought Taylor Swift’s 1989 because everybody bought it and their algorithm is stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve generally found those those recommendation type things to be better than my opinion of apples.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell us about one more thing that’s awesome and then I think I have a couple more thoughts about this and John might as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people don’t like about memory foam. It really is the best of both worlds from people who have tried it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you guys have tried it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, absolutely. Yeah, my parents were just visiting and one of them slept on the

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco to box it up. you know, they will help you arrange for that if you want to send it back, but chances

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wanted to quickly build on what you were saying, Marco, about streaming services.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not surprised that neither of you necessarily said that streaming services had worked that well for you in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey past. I used to be a music listener like I think you guys are,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is you have a batch of music that you tend to listen to, you have your library, and you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stray here and there, but generally speaking, you’re pretty darn content with what you got. I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch flipped in my mind, but over time I got more and more into hearing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more and more eclectic things and, and, and satisfying very random cravings at very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey random times. And what I love about being a Spotify user, and this should be applicable to Apple music as well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I can listen to damn near anything I want anytime I want immediately. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s, what’s so appealing to me about streaming services. I never even got that into Spotify in terms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, um, in terms of like their radio stations, in terms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of whatever curation they may have. And I agree that I’ve heard constantly about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how great the curation is on Beats Music. Um, and so I just loved being able

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to listen to anything, anytime. And Spotify also has some really great, um, community

⏹️ ▶️ Casey features, particularly around playlists. So for example, Aaron and myself have football season tickets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the University of Virginia and We have a shared playlist with the guy that we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go with That we will any any one of the three of us can just add songs that playlist

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Spotify which works out really well I have no earthly idea if that’s possible on Apple music. I doubt it, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t tried and So in a lot of ways Spotify has worked really well for me and I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enjoy it and I enjoyed enough that I I think it took me a day or two to sign up for the $10 a month

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fee for Spotify that I’ve been paying for like two or three years now. Um, so I would encourage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to do exactly what you did, Marco, and give it a shot and just kind of try poking around and seeing what you can find.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause I think you might be surprised at, at how much interesting and good music you can find, even if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that ends up happening is you quit, you common, or you very often fall back to the things you already know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and love. Um, and the other thing I wanted to ask both of you guys is, did you have a chance to listen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Beats 1 at all and I’ll start with you, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can probably predict

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my answer. You either didn’t or you heard it for 10 seconds and decided you hated it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The latter pretty much. I listened, you know, everyone’s saying it’s very good. So I listened

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, I don’t know, five or six songs. Didn’t hear a single thing that I liked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Each song I wanted to turn it off during, but I figured,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, let me give it a little bit more time. So it’s fine. I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just not the kind of music I like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now you know how everyone feels when they listen to Phish.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it’ll be interesting to see how this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does because it really is bringing many of the benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of radio stations kind of back or to a different area where they weren’t really before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it also brings most of the drawbacks of radio stations. Everyone’s already very tired of hearing their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco station ID and their overlay, their talkovers and everything. You can’t skip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a song if you don’t like it because it’s live, and you can’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back either. It seems like they have brought most of the annoyances

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and limitations of radio stations with them, and most of that’s out of necessity. If they’re going to do this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kind of have to do it that way for the most part. So it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is bringing into the modern age a format that is it’s almost like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco skewer morphism of radio. It’s like they copied all of the limitations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and annoyances, along with the you know the the core of it meant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of which is you know kind of inseparable. So you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. I’m sure people will like it. Maybe if I was having a party, I might put that on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something where I just wanted to put on something that would make me sound cool, if that’s even possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably isn’t. But I don’t see myself listening to it, really.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, have you listened to it at all?

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t bother listening to it. And my additional point on Apple Music is basically just made

⏹️ ▶️ John by Marco that, first of all, actually getting back to Casey’s characterization of the I have my

⏹️ ▶️ John collection of music and that’s that, I would adjust that slightly to say the way The way I listen to music

⏹️ ▶️ John is I have my collection of music and I’m always on the lookout for additions but the key is I’m looking for

⏹️ ▶️ John additions to my collection of music. So if I was ever sort of you know one way

⏹️ ▶️ John you can do it is you can graze like just listen to a bunch of music, travel around links or whatever. You can also do it the

⏹️ ▶️ John same way I find a lot of things now which is recommendations from people who I know who have similar tastes to me and things

⏹️ ▶️ John you see on social media and sort of the overwhelming recommendation of a bunch of people.

⏹️ ▶️ John saying you got to go see Fury Road. Maybe it’s something to that if everybody, if a whole bunch of people in your circle tell

⏹️ ▶️ John you Lady Gaga is not just another, you know, manufactured pop star, even though that’s what you think about them for

⏹️ ▶️ John the first six months they’re out, maybe you should look at, you know, but the whole activity is

⏹️ ▶️ John do a bunch of crap and add to my collection of music. So it’s not a static collection. It does grow and it grows slowly,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I add not just new songs, but entire new artists and new bands

⏹️ ▶️ John get added to the collection. So it is a dynamic growing thing. But the The essential question is when it comes time to listen to music,

⏹️ ▶️ John do you want to listen to a bunch of music picked by somebody else or listen to quote unquote your music?

⏹️ ▶️ John And listening to your music doesn’t mean that you don’t ever want to change your music. You do. You want your,

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to discover like Margo, you want to discover new music that you will like. It’s just a difference in when

⏹️ ▶️ John it comes time to do the listening part, not the discovery part. What do you want to do? And I just want to listen to my music,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s why I didn’t even bother listening to Beats 1, which I think is probably fine, but it’s just not how I listen to music.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the other angle on Apple Music that Marco was getting at was, and I’ve seen a lot of other people talking about this,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is, you know, this, not that, you know, people talk about as if Apple’s the first one to do it, but this Spotify, audio,

⏹️ ▶️ John all of these things are interesting in that they are bringing radio

⏹️ ▶️ John to a generation of people who are much younger than us, obviously, who didn’t grow up with

⏹️ ▶️ John radio as, as big a dominant force in their life as it was in our lives, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John not that they didn’t know what radio was and didn’t listen to it or whatever, but like the kids of the iPod generation,

⏹️ ▶️ John when it was technically feasible for you to have a huge collection of music with you at all times,

⏹️ ▶️ John that enabled a lot more people to do what I do, which is to have a massive collection of your music and listen to

⏹️ ▶️ John that instead of just saying I’m gonna listen to these things coming over the airwaves, you know, on your little transistor

⏹️ ▶️ John radio. You couldn’t have your whole record collection with you. It was gigantic, like you need a record player, it needs to be not bouncing around,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even the CD players with skip protection, like you can have one or two CDs, right? The people who grew

⏹️ ▶️ John up in the iPod era, this whole concept of someone else is going to pick a bunch of songs

⏹️ ▶️ John and play them to me live is something that they’re familiar with tangentially,

⏹️ ▶️ John but wasn’t their primary interface to music. So there’s some novelty to it, like the sort of the radio

⏹️ ▶️ John skeuomorphism. That’s it’s, it’s kind of retro. And there’s also it’s also a novel and

⏹️ ▶️ John some people like that type of thing. Like if your tastes aligns well with the taste of the person who is programming that radio

⏹️ ▶️ John station, that can be good for you. And also I’m hoping that these internet

⏹️ ▶️ John reincarnations of radio stations get rid of a lot of the crap that defined old radio

⏹️ ▶️ John stations in terms of the things that you were played had little to do with the taste of any individual person, whether that taste is

⏹️ ▶️ John good or bad, and much more to do with what record companies were pushing or possibly paying to be played.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m hoping it does away with that as well. But like Marco said, like the iPod era

⏹️ ▶️ John for people who grew up with radio freed us from the tyranny of radio stations, because it usually may be only four or five radio

⏹️ ▶️ John stations that came in good at your house. And there’s the classic rock station, the oldie station, the alternative

⏹️ ▶️ John station, the heavy metal station, and like NPR and a few like, your

⏹️ ▶️ John options were so limited. And it’s like, I don’t want to listen to what other people want to play for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know the music that I like, I can bring my like, the beauty of the iPod was that it freed us from all of that. And

⏹️ ▶️ John bringing it back is not tempting me to go back to that old world, but for the people who never experienced that world

⏹️ ▶️ John or never fled it to go to the iPod, the same people who are asking for an FM tuner to be added

⏹️ ▶️ John for their iPods for years and years, Beats 1 and that sort of internet radio station intentionally

⏹️ ▶️ John removing the ability to, you know, skip tracks or even pause or rewind or anything

⏹️ ▶️ John like that could be an interesting novelty. And if that if that format is actually a thing and not

⏹️ ▶️ John just an accident of history, not just like, well, in the back of the old days we had to do radio this way because of these technical limitations

⏹️ ▶️ John but once we didn’t we never did that again like if it turns out that it actually is a way people

⏹️ ▶️ John want to listen to music and not just a technical limitation it’s good that all these streaming services are also

⏹️ ▶️ John saying by the way not everything about radio is stupid there may

⏹️ ▶️ John still be a mass appeal to a DJ to programmed

⏹️ ▶️ John you know quote-unquote radio station on the internet so even though I I still think it’s not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is definitely worthwhile for everyone to figure out whether that whether that’s still a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I would say in many ways, it is similar to the problem that newspapers and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco magazines face, especially magazines, where and I know having having tried to run one and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having succeeded, really, you know, one of the problems is like when you have something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a magazine or radio station, you are you’re like prescribing to people, here’s what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to see. Here’s the package of things. You’re going to see this, then this, then this. And you’re going to hear this, then this, then this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have moved on from that technologically. People are accustomed to more freedom. People are accustomed to being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to pick and choose and seek around and do whatever they want. And if you say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of a magazine, I’m going to charge you X every month, and I’m going to give you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these 10 articles, and they’re going to be on a variety of topics, you might care about one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. That worked for a long time when there were really no good alternatives, but now people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just find the few good things they like online from all sorts of different sources, not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even just you, and they like that better, and it’s kind of better for everybody that way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except for maybe the publishers, but you know it’s better for the readers, for the consumers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And radio I think has a similar problem of like, you already have this world where everybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have their own program station, tailor it exactly to their likes. If they don’t like a song, they can skip it. If they want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play it again, they can just play it again. If they want to buy it, you know, it’s all integrated and everything. Like, the world we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that isn’t radio stations is really nice and really advanced, and we are all accustomed to that now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, to try to go back to the way radio was, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using it in the past tense because, let’s face it, radio has been dead for a long time. To go back to the way radio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, now, once we’ve all moved on with how we think music should work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how music does work everywhere else, I think it’s really a problem. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re all listening right now because we want to try it out because it’s cool and new. I’m really curious to see if this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually is something that has any influence whatsoever. Does it have any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cultural presence? Are a lot of people listening to it in six months? A

⏹️ ▶️ John resident secret-betraying Apple employee wants to emphasize that Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ John does not have a DJ. They just have a what he calls a Pandora clone.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Um, so

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure. I’m my familiarity with streaming services is small, but like maybe Apple is the first one to try to get,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, actual human DJs to pick things out as opposed to algorithms and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, all

⏹️ ▶️ John like technologically speaking, if this turns out to be a thing, it’s very presumably very easy for all the other

⏹️ ▶️ John streaming companies to hire their own people to be DJ like radio DJs. I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re out there looking for work, like if, especially especially if you can pay them Apple sized salaries or even Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ John or Pandora sized salaries. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I, I, because I don’t listen to music that way, it’s hard for me to handicap the

⏹️ ▶️ John odds that the DJs turn out to be a thing. Some other person in the chat room also said that a lot of this

⏹️ ▶️ John is again, as usual, from an American perspective, because American radio stations are crappy,

⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe they’re not so bad in the rest of the world. And the idea of, I think, you know, a person gaining

⏹️ ▶️ John fame by having good taste and choosing music that other people hear and you sort of trusting them

⏹️ ▶️ John to pick good music for you and coming to have sort of a relationship with them as a DJ

⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t happened for as much in the US because of all the radio corruption and top

⏹️ ▶️ John 40 BS and all the other recent things get played on the radio. But maybe it does happen in the rest of the world. So maybe they already know the answer that

⏹️ ▶️ John to the question I’m asking, which is, Is it actually valuable for a human to program music for lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ John to listen to, even though technology makes it possible to not have to ever do that again?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. But one thing I was wondering from earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I don’t see, I think part of the reason why I love Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much is that even in the times when I want to listen to something that I own, that I have in my iTunes library,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll just go to Spotify because it’s what I’m used to, and it’s the first place I think of and I’ll look up that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey album and I’ll just play it. And so yes, like the old curmudgeon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in me feels like I’m just renting access to, to all of my music, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. But nonetheless, I can listen to anything I want within reason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime I want to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, any anything I want. You’ve said that a few times, that brings up another topic that has come up for both

⏹️ ▶️ John me and a few other people I’ve seen. I mean, obviously no streaming service has like all the

⏹️ ▶️ John music, right? You know, the Apple music doesn’t have Beatles. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John Spotify didn’t have Taylor Swift because of her streaming decision for

⏹️ ▶️ John that sort, you know, you don’t have everything, everything, but they have most things right. But for people

⏹️ ▶️ John with weird tastes, like if you’re like Dan Morin and really like soundtracks, or if you’re like me and you

⏹️ ▶️ John like basically illegal mashups or video game soundtracks, Nobody here has weird taste

⏹️ ▶️ John in music. Right, well, I mean, Fish You Think is weird, but Fish is going to be on the iTunes store.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not the ones I listen to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, probably not the live ones, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, like there’s kind of a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But yeah, like those things, the things I’m talking about, sometimes they’re real albums. Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re imports from Japan. But a lot of these things I have on CD. They’re not pirated anything. This is the official

⏹️ ▶️ John soundtrack for this game put out by the publisher of the game. And it’s not going to be anywhere on their list of things.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I have, maybe I wouldn’t want, you know, someone to DJ video game music for

⏹️ ▶️ John me, just like only the best orchestral arrangements of Zelda songs. Like, I don’t know, maybe that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John enough, not enough for someone to DJ a channel up or whatever, but these things aren’t even for sale on the plain old 99

⏹️ ▶️ John cents per track iTunes store, let alone available on Apple Music. So being able to have access to sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of the world’s music, the only place that’s still true is if you Google for something with, you know, in URL colon

⏹️ ▶️ John MP3, and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then you can

⏹️ ▶️ John basically, Basically you can find every video game soundtrack you want. But on Apple Music,

⏹️ ▶️ John the percentage of my music that is available for streaming on Apple Music, ignoring obviously iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ John Match and the fact that Apple Music will upload my music, all these things, it’s not like I can’t listen to my music. I have it, it will let

⏹️ ▶️ John me stream it. I can already do that with iTunes Match for 25,000 songs a month or whatever the limit is or a year or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the catalog of music really relies on you having

⏹️ ▶️ John musical tastes that are at least vaguely mainstream. As you start to wander

⏹️ ▶️ John into other realms, I can imagine, I don’t know anything about this, but like classical music or opera, I don’t know what their

⏹️ ▶️ John selection is like in that. Like as you just start to wander away from

⏹️ ▶️ John popular music, for lack of a better term, it could be that Apple Music’s overlap with your

⏹️ ▶️ John library is small enough that when you go, oh, I really want to hear the blah, blah, blah from blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. And if the blahs are a movie or a video game, Apple Music’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about, dude. And if you didn’t previously upload that through iTunes match and stream it back down or part of the my music

⏹️ ▶️ John collection. No, you can’t like say don’t have something in my collection like, you know what, I have

⏹️ ▶️ John no music from Street Fighter in my collection. But right now I would like to hear like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the most popular or famous Street Fighter themes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Street Fighter had music.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s if it’s not there, like then The one thing that I would think out music is for like Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ John saying like sometimes you just want to say There a song exists. I know the title. I know the artist type type

⏹️ ▶️ John type two seconds later. I’m listening to it That’s amazing how it works When it doesn’t it shakes my faith and

⏹️ ▶️ John in the utility of this service for me in any way because I don’t want to listen To things that are DJ. I don’t want to listen to random

⏹️ ▶️ John streaming things I basically just want to listen to my music the one utility you could have is If

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just some song I think of that I haven’t heard in years that I want to hear right now now, just type it in and it’s there. And if that works

⏹️ ▶️ John for me, even only 80% of the time, that makes me think, you know, definitely not $7

⏹️ ▶️ John a month or whatever they’re charging.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In general, you know, you’re right. It’s worth pointing out that like, you know, if you have non mainstream tastes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, that these services are probably not going to help you discover a lot of new music in that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those areas. And that’s worth considering. But for other roles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the music that it does have. The fact that Apple’s service is integrated with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this uploads feature that they have, whether it’s iTunes match or whatever they’re calling the new thing that’s in music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically does the same thing. The fact that this is all integrated,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think gives them a huge leg up on the other services. For me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was always useless for me to try the other services because I would want to listen to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco normal people music sometimes times and my crazy fish live shows at other times and i have to keep bouncing between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two different apps and i then you know i’m a picky jerk and that would drive me crazy whereas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apple stuff they basically built a streaming service into the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app i was already stubbornly using for all my music listening so that i that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me and and because it integrates all of my stuff with their stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is compelling and I think again it’s not this is not going to be a mainstream

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need I bet the majority of users of Apple Music are never going to use these upload features

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the people who will use them this sets Apple Music apart from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other service.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess what I’m getting at with the catalog selection is that one of the advantages one of the supposed and real I

⏹️ ▶️ John think advantages of you know so the internet age is not only can we make like

⏹️ ▶️ John the world’s music available to you at your fingertips but yeah we can add the video game crap we can add

⏹️ ▶️ John like I mean rights issues aside but like again the video games the easiest because these are actual real press CDs

⏹️ ▶️ John officially from the companies that make the games this is not illegal stuff or live recordings or anything of

⏹️ ▶️ John you know dubious origin you don’t have room for that in the

⏹️ ▶️ John record store there’s no shelf space blah blah blah but there is no shelf space on the internet there’s no shelf space in Apple Store in the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever like you know chase down that long tail put all that crap crap in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, why not? Like, like, that should be one of the advantages of this type of services that

⏹️ ▶️ John you can have a longer, not an infinite tail, but a longer tail than you could have when you had to put things

⏹️ ▶️ John when you had to, you know, put things on shelves and stores because then you really had to make some hard choices.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have more runway that should be it. Like I said, it certainly is the dream of just googling. You could find any music anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John These streaming services, one of the advantages they should have among there many is now finally

⏹️ ▶️ John the tail can be longer. And I think it is. I think that obviously the iTunes music store has more music in it than

⏹️ ▶️ John any record physical record store that probably ever existed. But I’m saying, you know, keep chasing that down. Don’t be content with

⏹️ ▶️ John what you have. Go full fledged on, you know, just start with like categories, movie soundtracks,

⏹️ ▶️ John video game soundtracks like that’s all official music that you can probably get from somebody.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if something’s not there because only five people are interested in it just you know

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is an advantage that they should leverage that the size of their catalog should be a bragging

⏹️ ▶️ John right and not just you know 800 versions of the most popular top 10 songs from every

⏹️ ▶️ John year but chase down the long tail a little bit more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well again I think that’s also an area where Apple has an advantage that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though they have not done so well in streaming in the last few years and they’ve fallen behind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their relevance in music in the last few years as a result. Despite that, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are not only do they have the right legacy, the right resources, and the right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connections, but also now they have what appears to be what’s probably going to be a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular and successful music service for streaming now. I think Apple has the best chances

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of any of the players in this game of getting really good deals. If the Beatles were ever going to be streamed anywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably going to be Apple Music. Stuff like that. Apple is really good at getting deals, generally speaking for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of stuff and they are gonna you know they’re gonna really like sit on everybody who they can’t get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until they can get them and maybe that extends also to the long tail I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think if anybody has a chance is Apple and if you are a long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tail rights holder for something and you are trying to see like where which of these services

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you want to submit your stuff to or get your stuff on again I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s gonna have a pretty strong presence there. I mean they aren’t the biggest streaming service right now, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a few years they might be and they’re certainly always going to be a sizable one that people will think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about when they’re sitting when they’re trying to figure out as publishers or as Indies where do I put my stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again I’m pretty optimistic about Apple Music. I think if anything and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen only great things about it so far on Twitter and stuff. If anything this all just highlights

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how clunky the presentation was because it seems like it looks like it’s a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good service and people really like it and it has a lot of things that other services don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a shame that none of that came through really in the presentation but it doesn’t really matter now

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t think I think the presentation and the actual like we talked about with the iTunes app and the music

⏹️ ▶️ John app I think there is a there are similar levels of confusion about them because

⏹️ ▶️ John it is a very complicated thing that’s difficult explain that there shouldn’t be this many like, FAQ articles

⏹️ ▶️ John and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, explainers about like, what is Apple Music? And what does it really give you? And what do you get? And what do you

⏹️ ▶️ John get when you pay for it? And how does interact with iTunes match? And what does it do with your files like the confusion of like, well, when if you just

⏹️ ▶️ John have Apple Music, and it matches your track, it downloads the DRM version, but if your iTunes match downloads a non DRM version that

⏹️ ▶️ John but then if you enable iTunes match, while you still have Apple Music enabled, you can match against the things and get the non DRM one and then not

⏹️ ▶️ John subscribe from like, it is actually pretty darn complicated. Like, I think what you’re saying is the benefits

⏹️ ▶️ John are there like they didn’t do a good job of explaining what the benefits are but I think the product

⏹️ ▶️ John offering and the touch points of like how do I use Apple Music? How do I use it on

⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac? How do I use it on my iOS device? What do I get when I pay my money? How can I access the things that I

⏹️ ▶️ John got? That is just as muddled as the presentation. Underneath it

⏹️ ▶️ John all, once you start figuring out where everything is, the actual benefits of oh now I can listen to music that

⏹️ ▶️ John I like or discover new music that seems to be good. But I think the like I said, with you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is not the clean sheet approach that that photos took conceptually or software wise.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that I think is actually a reflection of their poorly explained at that

⏹️ ▶️ John at that time, not finalized deal for all their music with all their products. So I think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s work to do there. And that may, I think it will slow adoption doesn’t doom Apple Music to a ping like

⏹️ ▶️ John death. Uh, basically you could say pretty much anything that apple does with music

⏹️ ▶️ John just because it’s apple doing it has a very high chance of succeeding. Ping is the counter

⏹️ ▶️ John example because that wasn’t really about music, but like a music streaming service is a thing. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is not the inventor of that thing. They are late to the game because it is a thing. Any streaming service

⏹️ ▶️ John that apple does, they had to try pretty hard not to end up being a major player a couple of years down the road.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the complexity of this product offering and the weirdness of presentation and the difficulty

⏹️ ▶️ John of really understanding what you’re getting, I think will only potentially slow adoption.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in the end, streaming services of the thing that people want,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple has one. And if you actually find your way to start using it, it seems like people think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretty cool. So I would project reasonable success for this thing over the next

⏹️ ▶️ John few years, unless Apple really drops the ball somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Cards Against Humanity, Harry’s, and Casper,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, And it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M A-N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey S-I-R-A-C me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use my talk with this holds Safari considered harmful thing

⏹️ ▶️ John on poor Casey so second wants to go to bed I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know and we gotta talk about Safari I mean we we don’t we can save for next week but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we should save I think we should save for next week because I have a lot of things to say about it I don’t want to talk to poor Casey about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh No, I thought it was gonna be quick and I was more than happy to entertain it if it was gonna be quick

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t think it’s gonna I don’t think it’s gonna be quick because I have a lot of things to say about it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too Man, standards people are the

⏹️ ▶️ John worst Non-standard people is what I want

⏹️ ▶️ John Wow left-handed people that means I guess right I don’t know lefty slam

⏹️ ▶️ John The one marginalized group you’re still allowed to slam in America.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so I was in Florida last week and holy crap is it hot there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you went to Florida in July.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In June, in late, late, late June.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did possess you to go to Florida in late June?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna be going in the summer too. It’s gonna be just as bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so a good friend of mine was getting married and so we decided to go down

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the week prior, Well, like the beginning of the week that he got married and we went visited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family and then spent two days in Disney World with Declan Which was less of a disaster than I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be And then did the wedding thing, but holy hell, you know on paper

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was approximately the same temperature. Although the humidity in Florida is about 11

⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion percent And I don’t know if it’s just a mental thing because it’s not my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weather and so I am less tolerant of it But one way or another, God was it hot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be outside for literally 45 seconds and I’d start to sweat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, is it possible, I don’t know scientifically, but is it possible to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a super saturation of humidity where you can actually exceed 100% in Florida?

⏹️ ▶️ John You would just, when dust goes into the air, you get like a nucleation site and just water drops out of the air onto the ground?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s called rain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are literally in a cloud.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I guess that’s fog.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess these all have things already, but… Let’s learn about the dew point, kids. Yeah. So how was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveling with Declan?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was fine. The plane was fine. Traveling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an infant requires you to travel with a bunch of crap. We counted, I believe it was nine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different items we were lugging through the airport. There was the stroller,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car seat, the breast pump, the diaper bag,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s backpack, my travel bag, two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey suitcases, crap there’s one other thing, oh a portable pack-and-play.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. Yeah. That’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a large set of objects. So how many things did you actually carry onto the plane with you because you checked the bags

⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff so you’re bringing onto the plane.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No I checked one bag. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re bringing onto the plane the car seat, the baby, the stroller, the pack and play, gate check the

⏹️ ▶️ John stroller?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. We gate checked the stroller and the car seat. He was-

⏹️ ▶️ John And the car seat! Oh, so you didn’t get the lovely experience of having to install car seats while everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John else in the plane stares at the back of your head with daggers. Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so, what is the deal? Is it required?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not if he’s under two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Only if you love your children.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Aww, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John cold. That’s cold. No, they say for like for babies of a certain size that I think they have them

⏹️ ▶️ John on your lap.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Under two, I believe it is. Maybe that’s wrong, but he was considered a lap infant.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He still had a boarding pass, which isn’t entirely surprising, but I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit surprised by, but the boarding pass had no seat on it. It just said like inf or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was he allowed to keep it in his pocket when he went through the scanner?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we actually, this was my first time using PreCheck, and PreCheck was pretty cool. Does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he have PreCheck? Yes, because he rides on our PreCheck. He does not, however,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have his own global entry, so we need to file for that shortly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when he’s too old to be a lap infant in like two years or a year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, can you and Aaron go through PreCheck or like? Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he gets it until he’s like 18, I think, or something like that, or quite a bit older than he is right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, that’s good, all right. So, man, the car seats, we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not flown with Adam yet, and one of the reasons why is that I heard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on various, I believe it was Your Daily Lexus forever ago, Lexus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accounts of traveling with kids in car seats on planes, and it just sounds awful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of fun. I think at one point we did two, two kids, two car seats. Maybe we never did two.

⏹️ ▶️ John My wife will probably correct me, but anyway, the struggle of.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like car seat is big, it’s heavy, whatever. Like the real problem is getting it installed

⏹️ ▶️ John in the seat with the airplane bugles and then getting it out again. I can tip I’ll give you. I haven’t listened to the episodes

⏹️ ▶️ John of turning this car around or that you’re referencing. I’m assuming for likes, but you know, when they showed

⏹️ ▶️ John a little demo of like lift the flap and the little thing goes into, you know, the car, you know, how, how, how seat

⏹️ ▶️ John belts work on planes, right? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ John right. You don’t really pay much attention to that because they’re like, whatever, I’m going to put it on my lap. I’m going to click

⏹️ ▶️ John it in when I want to get out. I’m going to lift the buckle when you’re bringing the car seat on the plane. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess some people probably don’t even buckle it in at all. They just put it on the seat, put the baby in it, and that’s done, which doesn’t make much

⏹️ ▶️ John sense to me because then it’s just your entire baby and the car seat hurtling up to the ceiling and turbulence and smashing it. Right. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you really should be buckling the car seat in. And you want to do this quickly because everyone is behind you, you know, wanting

⏹️ ▶️ John to get through and you’ve got your whole family block in the aisle and all the crap everywhere, especially if you have two seats and the

⏹️ ▶️ John kids are screaming and everything. So you try to buckle the seat

⏹️ ▶️ John in by taking the seat, fishing it through whatever stupid thing you’re fishing it through, you know, behind and underneath

⏹️ ▶️ John the seat, clicking it in, yanking the thing to tighten it, good, put the baby in, you’re done. You think, like, wow, we

⏹️ ▶️ John did it, right? When it comes time to unbuckle that, especially if you’re a crazy

⏹️ ▶️ John parent who pulls it really tight because you want to get the seat really tight because you’ve been trained by the people at the fire department who

⏹️ ▶️ John told you how to put your car seat into your car, you pull it really tight. When it’s time to get off the plane and

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re patiently waiting and everything and you’re like, well, I don’t want to disconnect this seat until we’re ready to go, but someone’s got to pick

⏹️ ▶️ John up the infant and then I got to take out the seat and whatever. You go there and you realize, I can’t lift

⏹️ ▶️ John the flap because the flap is hard against the back of the plastic seat that I just

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tightened down as tight as I possibly could.

⏹️ ▶️ John How do I get this thing unbuckled? And now you’re like trapped, again, the kids are screaming, everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ John upset, you just want to get off this plane and you can’t lift the flap because it’s facing, So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John going to tell you, face the flap away from the seat when you tighten it. It’s not probably the

⏹️ ▶️ John natural way you’re going to do it, because if you think of how it is over your lap, the flap is face it would be facing the back of the seat.

⏹️ ▶️ John Face the flap the other way. Otherwise, you will be super sad. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco god. So out of curiosity, how was

⏹️ ▶️ John that resolved? That was resolved with anger and muscles. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can imagine,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you can

⏹️ ▶️ John pull the belt away from the seat, and then pull it away as hard as you can to try to make a

⏹️ ▶️ John gap, and then shove your hand in there to push, but you got to lift the flap up. It’s not coming off unless that flap goes up. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you basically have to as hard as you tightened it. I hope you didn’t tighten it as hard as you could because you have to have a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ John leverage to like pull the strap away from the back of the seat and push that little lever up just enough that

⏹️ ▶️ John thing releases and you know, it goes shooting out the side of the seat probably puts a hole in the side of the plane as it springs

⏹️ ▶️ John out and then you release the seat and in my case put it into a giant bag that goes on your back

⏹️ ▶️ John like like the old woman from Labyrinth the movie that neither one of you has seen probably. Wait, with David

⏹️ ▶️ John Bowie, that one? Yeah, remember the junk lady? She’s got a million things on her back. She starts putting on Jennifer

⏹️ ▶️ John Connelly’s back too, so she’ll become one of those hunched ladies. Well, anyway, when you have a car seat on your back, and a rolling thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John and a kid, and all the other crap, you feel like that lady. But yeah, we did eventually get the seat off the plane,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve done several airplane flights with car seats, and at no point was it easy,

⏹️ ▶️ John but a few tips and a little bit of experience can make it easier. Also, don’t bring the baby because they scream

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time.