130: Technical Countermeasures

14 Aug 2015

Notebook Xeons, ad blockers, and various letters of the Alphabet.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • IBM's TrackPoint study
  • More on [self-proclaimed] Tap-to-Click Wizards
  • Apple SIM
    • Apple's documentation
    • Lady Whimsy's summary 1 2 3 4
  • Carrier Performance
    • Feedback from Chris 1 2
  • Carrier plans
    • Derek's theory
    • Ben's theory
    • Jeffrey's theory
    • Links from Aaron E
      • FCC on early termination fees
      • Mobile carriers stand by cancellation fees
      • More on the FCC
• Notebook Xeons
• G is for Google
• Ad-Blocking Ethics
  
  • Safari is the new IE
  • Gruber on iMore
  • Rene Ritchie on content blockers
  • Ghostery
  • Disconnect
  • Ad Block Plus
  • Lynx
• John's preemptive follow-up on his Star Wars reference.
• Post-show:
  • How's not-reviewing going for John this summer?
  • Marco's new Sony A7R II
    • Phase-detect autofocus
    • Contrast-detect autofocus
    • Focus Pixels
    • The key factors to a high keeper rate:
      • Phase-detect autofocus with continuous subject tracking
      • In-body image stabilization
      • Programmable auto-ISO with high shutter speeds
      • A sensor with low noise at very high ISOs

Sponsored by:

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

Chapters

1. Pre-show
2. React!
3. Follow-up: TrackPoint
4. Follow-up: Tap-to-Click Wizards
5. Follow-up: Apple SIM locking
6. Follow-up: Carrier upgrade plans
7. Sponsor: Fracture
8. Notebook Xeons
9. Sponsor: Backblaze
10. Alphabet
11. Sponsor: Casper
12. Web ad-blocking
13. Post-show: Not reviewing
14. Post-show: New camera

Pre-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was working on something right before the show started and I paused for the show and now I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in that annoying mode where I’m thinking about that thing. I was working on and not thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about what I should be thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now when you say pause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now Jason Seifer everyone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I feel like we should all like kiss our fingers and point up to the sky now or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is this a reference I’m not getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me and Casey the reference getters right Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yep, totally Uh, that’s among other things, you could call that a sports ball reference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I couldn’t even tell you which sport you’re talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, it’s every sport, Marco. Every single sport. And the Grammys and the Oscars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Everything. It’s a reference to everything. It’s a reference to life. Yeah. I’ll

React!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey while back, this was easily two or three months ago, I was fiddling around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and tried to teach myself React, not React Native, just straight up React,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and wrote a showbot in React. It is that showbot-R

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the web, if you’d like to see it. It could probably die in a terrible, awful fire, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is presently working, which is exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, John, I assume you’re gonna have an opinion on the different placement and coloring of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the upvote arrows on the showbot are compared to the regular showbot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything was not uh correctly aligned like along the center line of the page so i had to close the window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jesus christ also you know if any uh web application framework should have an exclamation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point at the end of its name in the grand tradition of yahoo it’s react should be react

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so uh it’s 165 lines that’s including white you know blank spaces comments etc

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the React version, it is 180 on the straight jQuery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version. So I’ve saved 15 lines. Woot woot. Geoff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s worth rewriting the entire thing. Jim Yeah, totally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I did teach myself React. And the funny thing is, I’m looking at this code, I’m like, what the f*** is this stuff doing? I have no idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what’s happening anymore, because it was like two months ago, and I’ve not touched it since. Geoff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, one of us has to play with new things on a regular basis. Jim That’s certainly not gonna be you two old farts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. John has a chance maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do it any chance I get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco New versions of Perl.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, woo! All sorts of new things. Exciting new versions of jQuery that leave IE8

⏹️ ▶️ ^John behind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I didn’t realize that was a thing now. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. The best is like, you know, so it supports IE9 and above, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even in IE9 you have to convince IE to pretend that it’s a good browser

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by like forcing the, you know, like a meta tag for like edge, make sure edge mode is enabled because like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first time I loaded up like what I thought this thing works in IE 9 what is it complaining about oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have to tell IE don’t be stupid edge mode please

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then okay yeah now all of a sudden stupid anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web fun do I have to be testing in edge is that is it different enough that I need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to care or not no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like it’s like edge mode and IE 9 I’m not talking about the actual like browser but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s IE 9 there’s IE 10 I I think there’s even IE 11 and then there’s that, whatever the hell that other thing is. I just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really, yeah, I have the, I fought a long time and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if I fought, but anyway, the path of my career has been, I used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be a thorn in our side, but you just have to deal with it because everybody had it. And eventually we came to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this place where we can develop, do our web application development for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a set of modern browsers. And then only at the very, very end, to see now what kind of disaster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this in the various versions of IE that we support. And then sort of like spackle over them and try to make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better with those. It used to be the reverse. You had to make it work in IE and everything. And then you could see if there were some nice things you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do in the modern browsers. Now, develop everything against Chrome, Firefox, or Safari,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or I suppose even Opera. And then at the very end, when you’re done and you’re happy with it, it’s like, all right, now let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John load it in IE. And you just grit your teeth and you’re just like, oh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is Opera still, did they switch to WebKit? Did I still mention I remember or is it all WebKit now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t remember. I remember, that sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I have never had a job where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco support Opera, ever. Oh, nobody ever has.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe someone who, people who work for the Opera, you know, the company that makes the Opera website, maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do you think even they use Opera? Yeah, someone’s got it. Oh, we’re gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so little email. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But all three devout users that also happen to listen to this show are gonna be very upset.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Extremely. Good thing about that feedback. Anyway, thanks for watching.

Follow-up: TrackPoint

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, we should probably do some follow-up. And we have some follow-up. And I would blame

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this on John, but this is not John’s fault. I have actually added a bit of follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I’d like to start with a bit. At two, Casey. I know, I know. I’m sorry, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey By the way, that’s a reference to Shakespeare, I believe, Julius Caesar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think it’s just Shakespeare. I think it’s Julius Caesar, like, period. I think that’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a thing that was most likely true, that he most likely said something to to that effect possibly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fine, fine. Everyone’s a critic, right? So David S. wrote in and he wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tell us that the TrackPoint mouse, which we discussed a lot last episode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has been scientifically proven, well, by IBM, to be more accurate than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a trackpad. So David S. writes, In the late 90s, I worked at IBM’s User Systems Ergonomics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Research Group for a short time. The group did all sorts of user interface research, including designing and testing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new types of keyboards and pointing devices, but they’re also known for having invented the TrackPoint. So of course, as part of that development,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they did lots of tests on the ergonomics of the TrackPoint. The results were very interesting. As I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recall, people were both faster and more accurate when using a TrackPoint compared with a trackpad. I believe the difference was small for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people who were novices on both devices, but they also found that people got much better with some experience on the TrackPoint, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that a week of experience made a big difference. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because the accuracy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey differences were small for novices, and because the TrackPoint interface was a little easier to figure out. Initially, people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually tended to like the trackpads more at first, or for example, when using a computer in the store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then he has provided a link to Microsoft, of all places, that has what appears to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a scan of this research paper. So apparently it has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey scientifically proven that trackpoints are better if you believe IBM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, also, like, IBM, the maker of trackpoints, did one study that proved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that trackpoints were slightly better than the trackpads of 1990s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s like, trackpads when they first came out really were terrible, and they really did get a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better in the early 2000s and throughout the 2000 to 2010 interval like as mostly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let’s be honest, as Apple made them better because the PC industry’s trackpads still usually, as we said last time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really suck compared to anything good and usable. Modern trackpads

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are, with the exception of the Force Touch, way way way better than what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they were probably testing against. Whereas track points probably have not really changed since then because there just isn’t that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much to change about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. If they tested like a series of tests where you have to involve typing and mouse cursor that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the track point really shine because that’s its big advantage especially for people who are good typists or touch typists

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so you don’t have to relocate you can sort of keep your hands in the same position and have ready access to cursor movement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and clicking buttons and typing all at the same time so you I assume that they would do well there But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the trackpads of the 1990s were just these little tiny things that like it was barely enough room to move your fingers It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an inch and a half by an inch and a half like very small So you’re trying to navigate a screen the screens weren’t that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much smaller the screens were still like 15 inch laptops existed Trying to move a cursor around a 15 inch screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by swiping your finger on a little plastically plasticky 2x2 square

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not very fun, but I would imagine that the trackpads would do it Anyway, everyone should use mice the end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so you two beat the piss out of me because you say that it’s scientifically proven The vinyls better

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} here it is. I give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Scientific scientific study that track points are better and oh, no, it’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean this one study It’s done by the company that invented the track point So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perhaps a little bit bias and unlike vinyl and CDs track pads have changed since the 1990s vinyl not changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in sign Only to perhaps get worse and the knowledge of how to correctly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John master them gone away So let’s see how I think this happened to vinyl CDs The format is exactly the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the specs are exactly the same. Nothing has changed related to CDs since the 1990s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screw you guys I’m going home. That’s a reference, by the way.

Follow-up: Tap-to-Click Wizards

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, in other news, speaking of, uh, inferior pointing devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there are so many tap to click wizards in our audience. Who knew?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So many self-proclaimed tap to click.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here we go. Everything has a caveat,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Well, no, I’m saying like they, I, I believe that they, they believe they are self-taught

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to click wizards. Like the, basically that they don’t, they don’t perceive any impairment to using tap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to click. That is the way they prefer to do it. They are never frustrated by it. It is not a compromise that they’re dealing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with. they don’t accidentally make any clicks. It’s just you know, they’re,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they are tap to click wizards. According to my definition of like, you know, we’re saying I was saying that I’m not one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because whenever I turn on tap to click, I find myself inadvertently doing things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t intend to do. And that pisses me off. And it makes me turn that mode off, right? But these people tap to click wizards,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no problem with it whatsoever. Does it mean they never make any kind of errors? Or do they make the errors? It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bother them. Either way, they’re basically tap to click wizards because it’s the way they prefer to work it. None

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of them expressed any sort of caveats about like, well, I use it all the time and it only annoys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me a little bit. They were like, nope, I’m a wizard. So I guess those guys can start a club.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, goodness, I demand to see proof and a scientific study.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no, they are they they are tactical quiz. I just didn’t think there were that many people who basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t have any like there’s no downsides for them for using that to click and it’s probably people who like learned on it you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know who never who just like once they found out that was a mode and like the first you know day that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got their laptop turned it on and like that’s how they use their laptop and that’s how they’ve trained themselves to uh to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they don’t have any other habits that they’re breaking right they’re just this is the this is the way they’ve built their habits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maybe maybe they actually just accept that a certain degree of unreliability is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of using a trackpad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i’m willing to to believe that a large part of them actually don’t have accidental tap to clicks because that gets to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the next feedback from ML whose name consists of two capital letters separated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by a space. I don’t understand how you would accidentally click with tap to click. If you put a finger down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and leave it then it’s not a click if you put a finger down and lift it back up then it is a click. On the last show we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used the wrong terminology in terms of like how much force you apply but that’s basically you know there’s no force sensor it’s basically oh there wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back in the day it’s timing based and the reason I personally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidentally do clicks is all my habits around trackpad use involve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t involve making sure that I don’t accidentally touch the surface like briefly or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brush against it with some other finger or whatever that leads to the other trackpad setting that we didn’t talk about last time which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the hell is that the phrasing of it like ignore unintentional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s been phrase differently. Ignore unintentional taps. That one is infuriating because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the trackpad is trying to figure out what’s an accident and what’s not and it will go into this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mode where it’s like, oh I’m gonna ignore that because it looks like an accident. Then you try to do something legitimate and it ignores you and you become

⏹️ ▶️ ^John furious. You’re like, no except my command my finger is moving. But anyway all my habits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were not designed around the idea that I have to be cognizant of how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long my finger is in contact with the trackpad because if it is in contact with the trackpad too briefly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that counts as a click and so that’s just not how my hands work and I have years of using trackpads

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without tap to click before I you know before tap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to click became even a thing probably was certainly before I ever tried to turn it on so I’m accidentally hitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the trackpad because during the course of using a trackpad my fingers briefly come in contact with the trackpad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in ways that register as clicks but I’m not intending to click at all doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens enough that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find it infuriating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, because it’s like, if you need to do a very, very small, fast cursor movement,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like if you need to move the mouse over like one or two pixels on screen, it is very easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that to be misinterpreted, because the way it differentiates is not just how quick the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tap is, but how much it has moved during the touchdown time span.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because obviously, if you mean to tap, to click, then it’s going to be effectively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unmoving, but of course there’s gonna be a very small amount of movement a lot of time just because of imprecisions and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way people work. So it has to determine in software the difference between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an intentional small quick movement of the cursor and a tap to click.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that is not a perfect science, and it never will be. There’s always gonna be some little flex margin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of error there where it’s gonna get wrong sometimes. And so if you’re doing certain things that require

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco small, fast cursor movements, you will probably hit this problem more often than if you’re not doing that kind of movement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they have no choice but to put that in. They can’t make you like, they can’t demand that you precisely put your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finger down and precisely lift it up without moving it because that would mean it would become very difficult. They just have to build

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in that margin to make it comfortable for people to actually use tap to click. But that same margin is what makes you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidentally activated and I think the reason, you know, control freaks like me are so against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tap to click because A, we have this error rate and B, the error rate is potentially very, Like we have dialogue buttons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with dialogue boxes with buttons in them. The buttons are close to each other. If you were to move the cursor over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from one button to the other, it’s not very far. And if it actually registers a click that did cancel or OK, when you want to do the opposite,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that could be a data destructive operation. Like there’s not that you’d be hitting dialogue buttons with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mouse cursor anyway, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bad click in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if it’s just accidentally having a bad click that you didn’t realize,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put the input focus into a window, uh, into the window that you didn’t think you were typing in and get one of those wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John window situations. Like data loss, wrong window stuff. I just, yeah, I don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then that’s the final verdict. I don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So what is the rich at the pond have to say? He was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John giving a defensive track balls. Uh, and the idea behind this is if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do to old age, or if you have any other sort of motor problems, sometimes it’s difficult to, I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people over this problem in real life, to position the cursor over something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and click without moving the cursor again. And when the button and the thing that moves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are separate, like they are in a trackball, you move the ball, you’re moving the cursor, you take your hands totally off the ball, then you can press the button at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your leisure. Usually the buttons are very large, and they are separate from the ball, and you can be sure that where you’re clicking is where the cursor is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s better for people with motor impairments. Trackpad is similar when they have the button on it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you know the physical button that’s gone now and now like you know you move the cursor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the trackpad to get where you want then you kind of take your hand off and just go vertically down and click and be sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know but anyway a trackball with a separate button in a separate ball does have that advantage.

Follow-up: Apple SIM locking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s see. Oh, next. Right. So I’d asked at the end of the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey episode, or toward the end of the last episode, Hey, what’s the deal with Apple SIM? And I had asked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of without having done any research on it. Lady Whimsy, who is a retail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey employee weighed in on this and also provided the official link, which we’ll put in the show notes. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a retail employee. AT&T is the only carrier that locks the SIM. Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey opted out of Apple SIM in its entirety. and you can swap SIMs. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you’re going to get Verizon service, you have a completely segregated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Verizon SIM. And then if you want to use the Apple SIM, you can use T-Mobile and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I believe Sprint and AT&T, but the moment you engage AT&T, that SIM gets locked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So she continues, when AT&T is selected as the carrier, a pop-up warns you, but you can always purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an additional Apple SIM for $5, which I didn’t know, and that’s really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And additionally, a Verizon SIM is free at her store anyway, you just have to ask for it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All of that was extremely useful information. I was very glad that Lady Wimsy reported in. And like we said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’ll put a link to the official documentation in the show notes about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Does this set a new record for the cheapest thing you can buy in an Apple store? That might be. I was going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say, it’s cheaper than iPod socks. And the $10 MagSafe adapter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just bought another one of those, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Although if we’re going to go by volume or weight, it may still be more expensive than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} MagSafe adapter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s true. These things are, well, they’re not heavy by any means, but they’re a heck of a lot heavier than micro, nano, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey SIMs. I always get them backwards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Can you fold a $5 bill to be smaller than a SIM? I don’t think you can. I don’t think so. Not these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey SIMs, at least. But anyway, that was extremely useful feedback. And there were some other people that wrote in as well. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thank you to everyone who provided some of that information. But it sounds like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey obviously, the easiest answer, which I don’t know why I didn’t even think of this. And Nathan A reminded me in the chat room, just use the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same darn Sims. Like, why not just do that? I, it just completely escaped me. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey um, but if I weren’t to use my existing Sims, I can use, I can, I can potentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get two Apple Sims, one for AT&T, one for T-Mobile and then a Verizon Sim

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as well for, it looks like maybe five extra dollars, which is a So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty slick setup.

Follow-up: Carrier upgrade plans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, we got some feedback about domestic carriers, one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by Chris Niles. He said, as a genius, the number of iPhone users I see for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cellular issues are mostly Sprint, then T-Mobile, and Verizon, and last,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey AT&T, meaning that AT&T was the best of all. This is from three different markets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he said, the Bay Area, Seattle, and Denver. And then we got some really long feedback from someone who I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wanted to remain anonymous. Which one the signal signal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John strength one and the yeah, yeah Yeah, one of the points that a lot of people brought up We were asking you how you get such good signal inside Moscone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever as they have indoor antennas that are just for the people inside the building and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re competing with only the people inside the building instead of everybody out in San Francisco and the antenna is really close to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the person who sent us the email about spectrum and stuff had some tips for like switching to 3g when everyone else is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on 4g because sometimes you just can’t get the attention, like you can receive the signal plenty strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in like a stadium or something, but your send signal is bombarded by, is interfering with everyone else’s send signal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you switch to 3G, you might actually have a better experience. That was a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John letter, but it was also very long and probably doesn’t really fit into follow up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And the next section of the follow up here is all people telling us about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why carriers might have changed the way you buy phones, uh, as opposed to, uh, you know, the subsidized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone model where you pay a certain amount for a phone, the carrier pays Apple, the rest of the price of the phone, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you pay a monthly fee to pay back the subsidy. And then some going with the model where there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no subsidy and you basically, you, the price of the phone is spread out over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the course of your bills. And so Benjamin Glickman got the first theory here. Well, does he have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first one? I think someone else, maybe Maybe someone moved it. The first theory. Oh, here it is. Uh, Derek.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Derek Beachy. Yeah. Derek from Veris tab.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Liam, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. This is the big thing that we’re missing is that the upfront costs for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big, fancy expensive phone is $0 that it’s not like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, I used to be able to get the top of the line iPhone for $200 and then a monthly fee. And now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to realize the full giant cost of the iPhone is actually like 700 or $800. now that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the cost of the phone is zero dollars because they just take whatever the cost of the phone is divided by 12 or 24 and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John add that to your bill. And so it seems like from the customer’s perspective it has the advantage of being like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh you know every phone is a free phone now even though you’re paying the exact same money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or possibly more it’s just spread out into your various bills. There are a lot of theories that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this will increase upgrade frequency because you get the same monthly payment and I mean this goes kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John goes against what Marco was saying was like these these thing where you spread out the cost of the phone over multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John months will end and when it ends you don’t have to pay for the phone anymore and so one side of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this coin is oh well then people will just keep upgrading their phone as soon as the payment ends and the other side of the coin is what Marco was saying people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be like oh my bill decreased and my phone is still good so why would I get a new phone so I don’t know which one of those behaviors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is gonna win out when people start signing up for these things presumably the entire rest of the world knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because as stated on the past show this is how a lot of the rest of the world pace of the phones already,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there are two sides to that coin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see whether more people now will choose the bigger storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tiers based on this new pricing. And if anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this gives Apple even less of a reason to drop the 16GB, because now it’s even easier for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people to spend more money on the higher models. That’s roughly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my opinion of that as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Jeffrey says the new plans cost significantly more for less, as in the carriers are going to charge you more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the similar size plan and you will either won’t notice or won’t care because it’ll be adding the phone price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into it and it’ll just be all confusing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are the rates actually going down without the subsidy? If I buy my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco outright, just get it unlocked or whatever, and then own it outright, am I actually going to be paying a lower bill after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco moving to this system? I tried to find this out on AT&T’s site and it’s very confusing and I couldn’t figure it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out. As far as I can tell, I’m actually not going to be paying any less money on the bill.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have to have a big spreadsheet and keep it up to date because they change the numbers all the time. You can get special deals

⏹️ ▶️ ^John depending on where you’re coming from. You just have to keep redoing the math. Has it ever been cheaper to buy a Mac phone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then pay a monthly fee? Is it cheaper? Which is cheaper? If they’d still done the subsidy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or if they just take the price of the phone and divide it by 12 or 24 and add it to your bill, what bill are they adding it to? Is the bill they’re adding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to bigger than it was before so the total comes out? You just got to do the math yourself. bottom line with all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff in the US anyway, what are you going to do about it? You got like two, three choices if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lucky. One of those choices is probably super crappy, so really you’ve narrowed it down to two. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the amount of sort of unspoken collusion in these industries and the huge barriers to entry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean that there’s very little connection between the value of the service you’re getting and how much money you pay and so we’re just we’re all screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So like worrying about this is it’s almost academic. Aaron

⏹️ ▶️ ^John E has another theory about this thing it was a he says it’s primarily motivated by the FCC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was pressuring cell phone companies to get rid of their early termination fees because they had really high fees for like if you bail on your contract

⏹️ ▶️ ^John early and so the cell phone this this theory is the cell phone companies way around this is all right we won’t have early

⏹️ ▶️ ^John termination fees anymore what we’ll do is we’ll give you a phone for zero dollars and we’re essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loaning you the rest of the money for the phone that you will slowly pay back over the course of your plan but if you bail early

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course you have to give us back the money we loaned you to buy your 800 dollar phone so instead of an early

⏹️ ▶️ ^John termination fee it’s like oh and by the way you got to pay us well it’s like a loan and then you sort of exit the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John contract and it’s like well you got to pay back the loan because you’ve been using the phone you’ve got the phone so that’s their way of getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around the early termination fee while still making sure that if you leave the plant early you got to pay a whole bunch of money to them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which motivates you to stay and we have a bunch of links to various FCC complaints

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and things related to this for the show notes.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m glad I kept forgetting to make the fracture or I want to do I decided I’m going to since I don’t have app icons to the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the wall like Marco, I figure I can put up the logos of all the podcasts that I’ve been on or associated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with in some substantial way. And to make fractures of all those in line up, but I kept forgetting to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do the other so now I’ll use our code. Well, I haven’t decided what size I’m going to get. What size are your icons?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you have the little one that we made of us in the macro studio? Yep. That’s five by five.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, no, it looks kind of small my wallet. I don’t know if I well, it depends on how many icons there are. I gathered up all the high res

⏹️ ▶️ ^John artwork from all the people who are associated with the shows who would have access to that. So I think I have I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go a little bit bigger, but I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it depends on like your viewing distance to you know where you’re putting them in everything. Yeah, it’s great.

Notebook Xeons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Alright, moving on. What’s next?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, it’s, uh, notebook Xeons. Which is something I could not possibly care less about, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} two-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, no, that’s not true! You should care. Everyone should care about this. Alright,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me why. Tell me why. Well, so the announcement is, uh, another one of these Intel half-announcements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they’re like, uh, they announce that they’re gonna make Xeons, uh, uh, with power specs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so they can go in notebooks, but they don’t have all the details on them quite yet. on them quite yet. Kind of like how they announced all the Skylake stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we have to wait for IDF for all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco details. Anyway. Intel is so good at half-assed announcements.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t know why they do that. But anyway, we’ll find out when we find out. But we know enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think we know enough to be kind of excited. It’s kind of exciting in a dumb way, because we talked about in the past, what is the difference between a Xeon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the rest of the Intel chips? And there’s things to be said about, well, like they’re more conservative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re lagging behind the other things, and maybe they give you the the ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that have fewer manufacturing defects or something, like you can do this hand wave, you can come like, these are the fancy expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones. But the things that count are, they spec them out with way more PCI Express lanes, which is why they can go in the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Perhaps not for the Xeons and the notebooks, but that remains to be seen. And the second big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing is that they have ECC RAM and can usually support more RAM. And those two things I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think are super important. In Apple’s quote unquote pro laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can get a pretty large amount of RAM. Is it still just 16 or can you get 32 in the big one? I forget. I believe it’s still 16,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I will double check. That’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Either way, but by the standards of just a handful of years ago, a 16 gigabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notebook is huge. We keep putting more and more RAM in these things and the error rates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surrounding RAM, maybe they’re getting better, but probably not as fast as RAM capacity is increasing. It’s kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data integrity on the file system where we keep getting bigger and bigger disks, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the error rate for the things we’re storing them on aren’t getting that much better or not getting it better faster. In some cases,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it might even be getting worse. And so if we have all these bits and the error rate is one in a million bits or one in a billion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bits, and we have like millions and millions and billions of billions of bits, that means you got errors there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so ECC RAM is RAM that checks for hardware faults

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that cause a bit to flip here and there, and it can fix some kinds of errors at least report

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other kind. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pros because they all come with ECC RAM, which is more expensive. But I mean, again, maybe it’s voodoo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think people have done some studies in this on the ECC RAM actually is a benefit. But it just seems like the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cost of ECC RAM is not the big of a deal. But Intel has always segmented its product line by saying, oh, only our fancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pro chips get ECC. And so if Intel is going to be stubborn, and they’re not going to bring ECC RAM down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to their consumer chips, the next best thing is to say fine we’ll make notebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chips with the Xeon feature set. So again we don’t know if they have more PCI Express lanes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t know if they’re like the higher quality processors or the ones with the you know a more conservative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manufacturing process or whatever. We do know they’re gonna have ECC RAM and they can support up to 64 gigs of RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And who wouldn’t want a 15-inch Mac Pro with 64 gigs of ECC RAM? That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds like an awesome machine to me. Finally, that sounds like, I mean, you know, going back to the old 17-inch days, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds like a truly pro MacBook Pro, as opposed to just like, well, it’s a MacBook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s a little bit bigger and fancier, especially now that they’re all aluminum and everything. So I have no idea if Apple will even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use these things. Oh, and the other thing they advertise is that it’s coming with Thunderbolt 3, but so do the desktop ones. It’s just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John question of whether they have Thunderbolt 3 integrated into the controller for it, or is it just like you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy the controller chip if you get the Xeons and their chipset? But anyway, I don’t know if Apple will use these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if they’re worth using, this first generation of things, but I like the idea of ECC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RAM and more RAM capacity come to Apple’s Pro Notebook line. So fingers crossed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I mean, what they announced, I believe it’s only gonna be the Xeon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco E3 line, and the E3s are even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco closer than usual Xeons. They’re even closer to the consumer line. They don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco extra PCI Express lanes. They do support ECC, as you said. They do support the higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RAM counts on certain chipsets. Our tipster in the chat room is basically on fire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right now because he’s saying that you can get ECC on the consumer chips as well. I don’t know about that. We’ll find out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the Xeon name on the E3 line doesn’t mean much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s all marketing. It’s all marketing segmentation anyway. But like, fine, if you want to do this marketing segmentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t care what it’s called. All I want is a laptop with ECC RAM because it’s crazy to have 16 gigs of non-ECC RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a supposedly pro thing. And I think that the laptop should go up higher RAM. I’m not saying Apple’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell one with 64 gigs, but maybe they could sell one with 32 with the super expensive top of the line. Like I think people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would buy that because it’s especially now that the laptop CPUs are practically as fast and sometimes faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and single threaded than some of the, you know, supposed pro CPUs from years past.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That if you have a top of the line 15 inch laptop and you can just put more RAM in it, you could probably do some pretty amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things with that on the road. So whether it’s just a silly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John marketing thing and whether the E3s are not all their crackups, I mean, you don’t get any extra PCI Express lanes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Thunderbolt 3 is available everywhere anyway, and you can just buy a different controller chip set to get ECC RAM on the desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The bottom line is Apple hasn’t done that. They continue to sell their laptops, even their super top of the line ones without ECC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RAM, and maybe this will change that because maybe they’ll have a nice canned solution from Intel that won’t require

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them to get some different extra chip to make their RAM ECC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On the other end, the Xeon line is always really holding back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what the Mac Pro can do with things like ports and chipsets and everything else because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pro uses the higher class of Xeons, the E5 series, and with the extra PCI lanes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a couple other things, and those tend to lag behind in chipsets. I don’t know, do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco E3s use more consumery chipsets sets because like it always holds back the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pro with things like how like how soon it can support Thunderbolt or USB 3 or like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know the new whatever new port specs come around the Mac Pro is always like the last thing to get that support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because Intel’s Xeon chipsets that support the Xeon CPUs at that level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are so they just lag so far behind the consumer stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they don’t need to because they’re gonna go in servers and no one needs Thunderbolt 3 ports on like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a rack server somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know. Exactly and so why would Apple want to tie another one of their product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lines to the the delayed chipset and platform support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the Intel Z online

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well you know I if it’s same our PCI Express lines doesn’t make a difference there but I think these you see Ram

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the thing that a TV tipster says that you could get easy see on the desktop things but not on mobile so this is a first for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel or a a first in recent history that you can get laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chip from Intel with the CC ramp support I just think it’s like data integrity. It’s like it should be everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It should be all RAM should be easy see RAM if it was spread across the entire industry the small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John additional cost of Making the actual RAM chip support easy and all the controllers and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me and I think it’s like it’s literally the least we can do as we add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a ridiculous number of bits to all of our machines and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the RAM Category that we’re just not we’re just like well. I’m sure it’ll be fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure every single one of the bazillion bits that we send through this thing will always come back exactly as we did it in A couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} small one-bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John errors here and there you can get kernel panics You can get corrupted data. You can get everything like you can’t trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your RAM. What can you trust? Not your file system. Yeah forget that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is this really gonna trickle down to To anything that I’m gonna buy anytime soon. No you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got a new laptop What no work got a new laptop? I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have I would say what do you think the actual odds of Apple using? Any of these chips at all ever in any of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its products like I think even that is maybe 50 50 I think low I’m gonna give it 50 50

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I hold out Hope that someone is like, you know what? We could sell a laptop for way more money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than we do now We just position one is like the suit but that’s what they used to do with the 17-inch. It was like it’s like well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is barely a laptop, but certain people need it So we’re gonna charge them an arm and a leg and here you go This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should be one of those shouldn’t there just like the Mac Pro. Yeah 4k screen sure why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not 21-inch laptop go So, PowerBook G5, we are ready, finally. Liquid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cooling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Bye.

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Alphabet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I have an announcement to make. ATP is now numbers. We’ve now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bought all numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Apple would sue us for that name. You got to think of a… I know you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have difficulty with the names. I’m not surprised you came up with numbers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but… Integers. We are buying all the integers. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my goodness. Yeah, we couldn’t get integer.com or the integer Twitter handle. So, we’re just going to go with the integer with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lowercase l instead of the i.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Where we’re going in the clouds, it doesn’t matter whether we can’t get the Twitter handle. We’ll just buy Twitter and we’ll make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco integer number 45. This is getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad quickly. So to summarize this news, I don’t know if it’s even possible, it’s because it sounds so stupid when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you say it out loud, Google decided to rename itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Alphabet and then make and then divide up its businesses, divide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up all the things that Google did before. Some of the things that Google did before are going to be under

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new subsidiary of Alphabet called Google and that’s going to be like Search and Android

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and web ads and I don’t know what the heck goes under that And then a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the other stuff that Google does is going to go under someplace else. Is it just directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John under Alphabet? I forget. But anyway, it’s not under Google anymore. It will be all that stuff they do with self-driving cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and giant balloons with Wi-Fi access points on them and biomedical stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and contact lenses that check your glucose level. And Google does a lot of weird stuff, like a lot of sort of R&D

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type stuff. And so this is a reorganization under a new name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Alphabet that is just that it’s saying like within Alphabet which is still the company the same company the Google was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re dividing up their businesses in different bins the super confusing part is that their stock symbol will still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be GOOG on whatever that is NASDAQ or whatever like their stock symbols will still look like Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever but the name of the company will be Alphabet and Google will just be a subsidiary a wholly owned subsidiary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Alphabet Larry and Sergei Sergei I don’t know how to pronounce his name are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John staying in charge of everything but now they’re in charge of Alphabet and they appointed a new CEO of the Google part of Alphabet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not the same guy who did Google Plus, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s Sundar Pichai. I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. And the guy who did Google Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco left, right? Wasn’t that… Yeah, I can’t keep track of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the drama involved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this. Anyway, he left. And so Sundar, from what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco understand, everyone likes Sundar a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s good. I think I’ve seen him in presentations. He’s always seems like to he seems like he’s he’s a good presenter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway I have no no nothing no nothing about him except seeing him on stage at IO. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think yeah So I don’t know I mean to me you look at this move and first of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s it’s odd And it’s kind of like head in the clouds kind of you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spacey new age Larry Sergei type stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it spacey the name is the name spacey because I think the actual move despite being super confusing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is is less head in the cloudsy because it’s finally recognizing that there, that this company called Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does two kinds of things. Crazy things like self-driving cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and hot air balloons and all that stuff. Like just maybe they’re good ideas, maybe there’ll be dead ends. Like kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, freewheeling research, kind of you never know what’s gonna hit or whatever. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very solid, predictable, same business that Google’s been doing forever with the web ads and the search and all that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. and having them both under the umbrella of the same company, that I think is more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of hippy-dippy, head in the clouds, like, we’re just like a company, we’re just like, we have a campus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you play volleyball and we give you free food, and some people try to figure out how to monetize web ads,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and other people are trying to figure out how to save the world, one whatever at a time, and we’re all in the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John family. And it’s like, how would you feel if your job was doing analytics on like, keyword

⏹️ ▶️ ^John search return on investment, and someone else’s job was like, you know, self driving cars or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that really the same company you’re recruiting for that company just the same way across the board? So I think it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is a little bit more concrete and a little bit more down to earth to say we really need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John divvy this stuff up. So it’s clear who’s working for what and what the goals are. And then Google can be Google.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then everything else can be its own thing. And we don’t have to like mix them together. I don’t know the financial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John implications like does it help them with reporting? Does it help them with with hiding profits and losses and making themselves look better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not having the crazy, you know, it’s like Alphabet or whatever they, I wish I knew.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I read all these press releases and I’ve already forgotten because it was too long ago. You know, it was only a couple days, but. Is all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new research and stuff under just plain old Alphabet or do they make another subcompany? I think it’s just under Alphabet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and there’s X, there’s like the X Labs, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but those things are basically cost centers and those don’t look good on Google’s balance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sheet, right? So if you could get them off into another subsidiary, then you can kind of do more hand-wavy stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, yeah, because like what’s interesting is like they didn’t spin out things like YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Android out of the new division called Google.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That fits with Google, don’t you think? Like YouTube is a fairly concrete established thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is not like glucose sensing contact lenses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But so is Nest, and Nest is spun out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but Nest is still kind of like, can you make money selling nerds a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive smoke alarm that goes off at the wrong time?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, to me, whenever you see a company like Google, which has…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have a spotty record of BS in their statements, let’s say that. I mean, they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally awful, but they’re not perfect either. And Apple does a lot of their own BS too. I’m not trying to be all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weird about it here, but this is the kind of thing that it’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sniffing around to see, is there a cynical take on this that is plausible for why else they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might have done it? Because, you know, there’s so much like floaty language here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the cynical take is, you know, what you said is like, it sure looks like they’re moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of cost centers out of Google and leaving Google,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the thing that is named Google, now as a more focused and most likely more profitable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of entity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But that’s not cynical. That’s just, isn’t that just good business? Isn’t that kind of like not letting the two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things like, they’re just, it just seemed very different culturally and what their goals are and what their priorities should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and combining them into one thing just like confuses like they’re they’re separable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough because it’s not like oh we should spin off uh mac painted mac right into claris sorry to use old references

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the young people listening like because that was like that was a core competency of apple those didn’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be spun out but like hot air balloons man like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that that’s not the same company right so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i think i think it’s that’s one of the things that I’ve always admired about Google is that they’re willing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these things. Like people ding them for it. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you doing out there trying to make these self-driving cars? Like, if not them, then who? Right? You have a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of smart people that have a lot of money. I’m glad they’re trying to do these things. And I think those projects

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be given kind of more air to breathe and be under less pressure in a separate company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And and yes, the flip side of that is the other part of the company will probably look more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John focused. It’s not like it looks more more focused to investors, you’re still buying the stock and the big overall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company. I just think it’s just better organizationally. So I’m not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think there’s any real actual cynical interpretation of this, except for the one that I heard, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds like total BS to me is like the Sundar was going to leave and they were like, oh, we better make them CEOs. It just totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not pass the smell test for me at all. But it’ll be like the stupidest reason ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to reorganize this big giant company. But everything else about it seems straightforward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a reasonable thing to do. I just really don’t like the name. But I don’t know. Marco, what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I’m with you for the most part. Believe me, if there was an obvious cynical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take on this, I would be the one to make it. And I don’t think there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a clear one. I mean, there is possibly the looking better on the investment type of divisional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff that we don’t know enough about to really talk about. There is possible issues with taxation that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of people have pointed out that this might be like a tax dodge. I think these are all those are definitely gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be benefits of it. They probably were not the cause of it and they were probably not you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not the driving thing that you know that drove this decision with them. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this actually is mostly about what they say it is. I think this is actually something that they’re saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco honestly that you know because you’re right it does make sense organizationally to separate out these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really, really disparate things into their own divisions. Things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have nothing to do with what else the company is doing or have very little to do with what else the company is doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It does make sense to separate those out. That being said, this is all still Google.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Putting a new name on it will have some PR distancing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefits to it, kind of like the joke that is intellectual ventures doing things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through Lodsis. You know, this is a thing that is created

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to imply that there is artificial distance or disconnection that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t really there. So this is really still the same people running it. It’s still the same company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s all, right now it’s even installed in the same buildings and everything that are all labeled Google. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff is all still Google stuff. So like Nest was spun off from Google. If you weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comfortable with Google owning Nest and having the data from your house about your Nest thermostats,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you weren’t comfortable with that before, you shouldn’t be comfortable about it now either because it’s the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing. It’s all the same people. So it’s important to keep the perspective

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this that it’s not like how AT&T was forced to split up and they had to make actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco separate companies. This is like, no, this is still all the same people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who all are working together really. You know, they just, different divisions, but like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is all still what we know as Google.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe that’s the one cynical take I heard. I think it was from Horace Didu, or someone related to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his conversation, maybe a commenter, was basically like, Google makes the money and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sends it over to Alphabet, and Alphabet takes the data, takes the money from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Google part, and feeds it back into Google data that it collects from whatever crazy things it’s doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like scanning the entire Earth, or every book in existence or whatever. So it’s an exchange

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of money and data. So it’s like, yeah, it’s all entirely, all in the family. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no wall being built between these two things. It is just like, now we can be free to have different reporting chains,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different cultures, different priorities. In our meetings, I imagine they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can concentrate on what they’re doing and not worry so much about what the Google side of things are doing. It becomes more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, they can pretend within this little universe, little Google-verse. they can pretend they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two separate companies that communicate with each other like two separate companies would, even though they really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the same company and they both have the same boss who can just tell them what to do if they really want to. But at this point in Google’s history,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the two founders still are exerting kind of like personalized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idiosyncratic control over the company that they founded. They don’t need any money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They care about money only insofar as as far as I can tell, only insofar as it it helps them achieve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever goals they’re trying to achieve. So I am even more inclined not to believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it’s like some kind of like clever financial maneuvering. Cause really they just want like, why aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we making better progress on our research projects? Uh, you know, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and why are, is Google, the Google proper distracted by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these research type of things? We should really reorganize to, so both groups can better achieve their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John goals because that’s what they want to do as the founders of the company. I really don’t think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motivated, but we could become even more rich. They’re not Larry Ellison, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. It’s funny. I was sitting here thinking to myself, what are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the different stops on the journey from a dictatorial CEO

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that kind of does whatever and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, perhaps maybe like Jeff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bezos, whatever, and somebody who just tows the company line like, you know, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every Hewlett Packard CEO that’s ever been. And I feel like Larry and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sergey are no Jeff Bezos, but certainly closer to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey side of the spectrum than someone who just, you know, tries to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shareholders as much money as they possibly can. And this seems to me like you guys were just saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, let’s try to reorganize the company in a way that makes a little bit of sense, and let’s try to remove

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any shackles perceived or real that prevent us from doing this change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the world kind of stuff that we really wanna be doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I think the line is like, if you feel ownership of the company, if you are one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the founders of the company, or at least were there super early, you feel like you have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right to just do whatever you want with the company. And, you know, investors be damned, Wall Street be damned, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously, to some degree or another, a lot of times founders don’t have full control over the company, they lose control. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so someone else, you know, but like if you’re one of the early people, you’re like, this is my company, I do what they want with it. But if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and you are like the 17th CEO, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John harder to feel like you have the, that you should just be like, you know what, what do I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want Google to be? I’m the CEO because the CEO and most companies have been around that long as beholden

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to a board of directors and they don’t have the control and they didn’t put everybody on the board. So they really aren’t in charge or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But as founders and founders who are wise and very carefully managed to retain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John majority control over the company they founded, they feel like this is my toy. This is my play thing. I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do what I want with it. And I think that’s a great way to run a company. I hate the other way where they run a company where you’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the CEO is like a steward for two or three years and whatever happens, the company doesn’t matter as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long as they get their golden parachute and their bonus and they they go out and someone else comes in and it’s like completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rudderless, no actual leadership, short term thinking, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies that are huge and have huge revenues and huge impact on all the people around them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the people who buy their stuff and that’s the worst. So I fully endorse this modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^John style of ambitious, very strange, unconstrained

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by conventional thinking leadership of companies, even if in the end it ends up doing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some or all these companies in the long term. Apple so far I think is the only one that’s in the second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phase because its founder, leader is gone now and its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leadership has been passed over. Does Tim Cook feel the same kind of ownership over Apple as Steve Jobs did? Maybe not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I think he’s still doing the same kind of things. What is Tim Cook like? The environment, human

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rights, diversity, Yeah, all those things that Steve Jobs was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not Steve Jobs was not steering Apple in that direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John At least not to the degree that Tim Cook is and so it’s Tim Cook has put his stamp on Apple I feel like he

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he is not Embarrassed to do that or doesn’t feel like it’s not his right Maybe it’s because he was there with Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole time. Anyway, well, I’ll be dead by the time Apple finally is on the 17th CEO

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that will probably be just a big mess but for now Apple is still doing well in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John area and I think this move by Google aside from the name and Marco that’s what I was asking before aside from this name which I think is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really terrible this move makes sense to me it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a exceptionally bad name the alphabet right Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wow yeah that that wouldn’t have helped either

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like who will ever say the word alphabet because like I said even the stock symbol is goo we’re just gonna like I think we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should all agree on the show not that we’re like trying to be contrary or being stubborn or whatever but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m just gonna keep saying Google and I think most people are gonna keep even when we’re talking about the self-driving cars it can be like Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John self-driving cars so people are gonna say alphabet self-driving cars I don’t I don’t know if Google is really committed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to or if it could even do the kind of rebranding necessary to turn god

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know this chain but it was like AT&T Atlantic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bell like that you know you ever see the diagram of like chain of names after AT&T was broken up that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually you know, we have all these different other names and they recombine into the monster that is Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the new AT&T and yeah, anyway, that kind of rebranding usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only happens when the previous name is so incredibly hated that the value of it is zero or negative.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you make up a new word. And people like, well, I hated Bell Atlantic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this Verizon company, I’ve never heard of this. Maybe they’re better. It’s like, singular is terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but AT&T is pretty good. Yeah. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you know, I’ve heard some wonderful things about Xfinity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s where people see the chain, I guess people see the chain entirely But anyway, Google is a name that people like that has positive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John value That is a very strong brand and I don’t see alphabet ever eclipsing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so I hope people just won’t actually use that name except in like official documentation and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like actual press releases and people who have to be journalists, but casually speaking. I’m I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until until it seems incorrect based on common usage. I’m just gonna keep saying Google for the whole thing

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Web ad-blocking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So, Marco, you wrote a perhaps contentious,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but probably not really contentious post about ad blocking. Would you like to tell us why you’re such a jerk and why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you hate anyone who writes for the web?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So this is interesting. I wrote a post basically defending modern day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco JavaScript blocking, which will of course rule out many ads and many, many trackers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was actually really afraid to publish it because I have so often published something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and had it blow up in a way I didn’t really expect or want and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really regretted it afterwards. And this, in which I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a fairly prominent voice in some circles, am advocating basically for many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco modern ad and tracking blockers, I thought knowing as many people as I do in publishing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this could be a problem. And And so I showed it to a bunch of friends ahead of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was like five hours ahead of time. By the time I saw your link to like, hey take a look at this, it was already posted for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real. So I’d say more lead time next time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Fair enough, I actually got direct feedback from a few friends who read it faster than you did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t see the link until much later. Well and whose fault is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am a slack completionist in most

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} of my channels. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did read it, but I should look at what this timestamps are. Anyway, it wasn’t that long. But yes, you did solicit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not a web publisher, so I can’t give you the feedback you’re looking for anyway. I’ll just tell you to pick different words.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. So, yeah, anyway. So I actually really did like kind of sanity check it with some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco friends ahead of time because I was afraid to say this. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the gist of my article here, it’s called The Ethics of Modern Web Ad Blocking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is a lot of stuff that we actually talked about on the show here in the past. We have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be very careful with the web because if you just follow a link, then your browser

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will just load that page and everything on it without giving you a chance to kind of say, oh, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know what, no thanks. I don’t agree with everything this page is trying to do. You know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you follow a link that somebody sends you or that you, or if you find in a search or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you load all the trackers, all the ads, all the code that page wants you to execute, you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco load it and run it in your browser. Like, that’s just how modern browsers work. all the collection of your data they’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you find something on the page offensive, or if it’s tracking you between multiple sites through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cross-site trackers like Ad Networks and Google Analytics and stuff like that, you’re giving all that data up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without really being asked first. They take the data and then you can maybe go and try to disable it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco later. And that whole model has been so abused

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by web publishers and advertisers and scammy and legitimate companies alike, it has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so abused that now everything you do on the web is watched like a hawk, tracked,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have massive privacy violations happening constantly. And this came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a head a few weeks ago. There was not only the Safari’s UIE thing, but then there was people calling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out the Verge for their… And the Verge calling out mobile web for sucking and everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, well, look at your page. It’s full of 15,000 trackers and 8 megs of JavaScript and all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. And Gruber called out iMore for… Because they have great writers, but they have this site

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s full of these really crappy ads a lot of the time. And then Rene Ritchie from iMore wrote this post explaining about how…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Basically how bad ad networks are and how they don’t have much control over the matter. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there was all this discussion around this. But really, what it comes down to is, I think now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the same way that pop-up ads got so crazy in the early 2000s, that pop-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blockers became basically required usage and then became integrated into the browsers themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and turned on by default. My argument is that now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco JavaScript tracking and and and you know cross-site tracking and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of the ads but it’s it’s honestly more problematic with the tracking have gotten so bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so abused that it is now time to take technical countermeasures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to reduce or eliminate that tracking if you don’t want it. The same way that we took technical countermeasures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to block pop-up ads 15 years ago. And I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thought this was going to be, as I said, I thought this was going to be very controversial. I thought a lot of people who were in publishing, which includes a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of my friends, would really be offended that I’m suggesting ad blocking, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it wasn’t. The guys from The All were really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upset with me, but I I don’t really know them and I don’t really care. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nobody else was. I thought there would be a huge divide.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s why I said I was a little afraid to publish it. Instead, I’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hundreds and hundreds of responses and links and just hundreds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people telling me, yes, finally, yes, I agree. That’s exactly right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Including many of my friends who publishers, including many publishers I am not friends with, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am now, we’ll see. I was shocked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at how positive and supportive and how much in agreement their reaction to this was. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can go on my blog and I can post, My name is Marco Arment, and I will get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more disagreement on that than I will from this article. Like, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco crazy how much people will argue with me over anything else I ever And this that I thought was going to be incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco controversial, it turns out a lot of people think this and even publishers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know. Because like you know, and I said it’s not like publishers are like evil, you know, devil corporations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like publishing is hard. It’s as I learned when I tried to do the magazine and as I’ve seen like with my other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco efforts with you know ad supported media and trying to do stuff online that makes money, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard. And especially if you have to have a staff and your costs are way higher than individuals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like me or or John Gruber are publishing on our own sites. Like, having a staff is incredibly expensive, and so it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is very, very hard for publishers to make enough money to stay afloat. And we see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many publishers shutting down or downsizing, it is incredibly difficult to make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work. And so they have been, you know, kind of forced—some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them have been forced by financial situations, some of them have just been greed, but they’ve been—whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cause, publishers, many of whom are well-meaning have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quote forced to adopt really terrible ads and integrate really terrible tracking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s of course this whole obsession between lots of people about metrics and tracking everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody ever does on a web page or on media or in an app. And apps are a whole separate discussion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’ll get to that, I’m sure, in the future. But there’s all this tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going on and all this abuse from ads. publishers often just say…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And like Renee said, often they’ll get a report of some ad being bad or inappropriate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or over the line in some way. And they have to go like, you know, well, they have to go to the ad network that’s server to them and try to report

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. And that’s often very hard. And you’re just inserting code on your page that will call to an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ad network and just have them run arbitrary code that some advertiser entered in some system somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on all your viewers’ computers. And so you, as the publisher, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t have a lot of control over that. The ad network barely has control over that, and they have even less incentive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to care. And so you have this terrible situation where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s really nobody policing the store in a way that will be effective.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so you have to do it as the user yourself. You have to adopt technical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco countermeasures. You know, my term, it’s like, you have to start considering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco installing ad blockers or tracking blockers. Like I mentioned, I use Ghostory. I know there are others.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Please stop telling me about the others. I’m happy with Ghostory. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think now is the time to do that. And what’s extra frustrating is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of the problems with this, a A lot of the problems that have led to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are things that are inherent to the way web browsers work, like how they request things, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cross-domain requests work, how cross-domain cookies work, how JavaScript includes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work and what they have access to. And over the last 20 years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that this kind of stuff has been possible and has developed, web browser manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and standards committees have added all these capabilities to the web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that add new things web pages can do and and new new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways now. Now the new thing is to make web pages to give them more of the abilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that were previously exclusive only to apps and to sort of make web pages more app like. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco meanwhile, the core problems that that enable all this terrible tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and privacy invasion and horribly slow JavaScript and everything, those have not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been addressed very well by the web development and and standards communities. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so like, you know, like, why, why have they not addressed that? Why have they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, the recent years, like you’re right up until maybe like a year or two years or three years ago when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John browser vendors, especially the, you know, Chrome and sort of the leading edge, uh, modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^John browsers really started turning the screws on things that are, they’re mostly security

⏹️ ▶️ ^John focused, but they end up affecting advertising. Uh, like anything related to cross-site scripting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the doors have been slamming down on things related to accessing DOM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John elements and other frames or accessing anything happening in JavaScript that was served from a different domain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s kind of a pain in the butt if you’re doing web development, especially if you own sort of a fleet of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your own domains, they’re all like something.foo.com and you want them to all cooperate. That used to be easy because that just worked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John normally. But then they started pulling things down. It’s like, oh, I got add cross origin request headers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to everything and and like the wild carding is crappy you can’t do star.foo.com you got to either do star

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or the exact domain names and if the domain names don’t match up you maybe something will work but you can’t get your JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stack traces and it’s like that is like I said it’s mostly security related like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not related to advertising advertisers can still do what they want because they make you serve it through your own proxy or do something else that gets around all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this stuff but it does end up limiting the privacy invading things you can do in the bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old days once Once JavaScript got on your page, you could read all your cookies, you could read things in other frames, even in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an embedded iframe, and now the restrictions are much greater than they were before. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that is, you talk about technical countermeasures, the most important countermeasure is what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you mentioned before, like the platforms and the browser vendors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They have much more power than individual nerdy users, because we are few and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the grand scheme of things, not that important. But as soon as you know pop ups, everyone hated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pop ups and pop unders and all that stuff. Browser vendors correctly realized that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is almost no downside to and a big upside to putting pop up blockers in your browser.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s practically overnight. They just slam the door shut on that entire thing. Like that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they were an epidemic. Popups were everywhere. And it was like everyone just said nope, that’s not happening.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Was there any sort of lengthy negotiation and hemming and hawing about putting the websites we love out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of business doesn’t matter. It was in browsers, it was on by default. That’s the end of that, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There was a little bit of arms race fighting like CEO we can like if you when you click on this link, I’ll count that as your intentional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John click to pop up a pop thing. But for the most part, putting that feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the browser made pop ups way less prevalent they worry for like I still see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them they still they can still trick you into clicking and doing something like that. That is a super important technical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John countermeasure. thing with Apple allowing you to do is what do they call them content filters or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in in iOS you couldn’t do that before Apple has opened that door

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I think they made the same calculation they’re like we know if we do this the first thing out the gate is gonna be a million ad blockers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna make it super efficient we’re gonna make it faster because they want people to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know how download of those ad blockers and use them to make their experience browsing the web on their iPhone better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that’s that’s like the I almost feel like we are not as involved

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the struggle as as We like to think that we are that is really it’s a negotiation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between the platforms the software and the websites Only as nerds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who know about what a chrome extension is and are shopping around for these You know ghostery and disconnect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these other And you know the good old ad blog and all that stuff most people don’t run those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or don’t know how to install them or someone installs them for them but then they break some websites or whatever. Like navigating that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly a nerd concern. But since those are the circles we travel in, I understand your concern about like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I post this and I endorse this, I know everyone who’s reading it knows how to install these things probably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so now by my endorsing it, am I encouraging other people to install it? And then, you know, am I reducing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the revenue to sites that people I know work for or whatever? And when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think about that, like just sort of our own little microcosm, not in the sort of grand scheme of things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the wider web. When I think of that, I think, well, it’s, you know, it’s the same negotiation we’ve always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had between sites. Like, it’s not so much. You have to just, you have to decide,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to like sort of do the calculation. Do you like reading this website? Yeah, I like the website, but I don’t like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other part of it. All right, well, you can decide I’m going to continue to read the website, but I’m going to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something that will make it a better experience to me. Are you going to block all ads? Most people know that, yeah, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John block all ads, probably you are making less money for the site, but just one person and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you think, well, even if me and everyone I know blocks ads and even if all the nerds block ads, it’s only X percentage, so I still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel okay with that. So maybe you’re fine with it. You just have to decide. Like there are consequences to everyone’s action. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should I block pop ups? Oh, what if I’m stopping the revenue that these guys were getting from these obnoxious pop up ads?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If I want the site still to exist, I better enable pop ups. Well, some sites did go under because they couldn’t be supported

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without pop ups, but other sites didn’t go under they found another way to make money. If everybody’s blocking pop-ups,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John advertisers just find another way to advertise. So I’m sort of, on this battle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between users and websites and browser vendors and whatever, I try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, in my actions with the own stuff that I install, try to make them reflect,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the sites that I care about, like a white list, the sites that I care about that have just become too obnoxious, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I have to send them a signal, like, I like your site, I like reading these things, but autoplay video is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not happening, so I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} to install

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna install things, they’re gonna stop that. And that is my signal to you, the site, that if the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way you can exist is with auto-playing video, then I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to exist. And I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, speaking of ethics and morals and stuff, I think that that is not, like there’s no obligation on either side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They put something listening on a port at an IP address, and I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they welcome the entire world to make a request for it and receive that information, and we can do whatever the hell we want with that information. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can redirect it to a file, I can run it through links, or I can show it in a web browser, but just not request any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the flash and not request any of the JavaScript trackers like that’s that’s the negotiation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there’s nothing there’s nothing ethical about it’s purely practical. It’s like you if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you understand the consequences of what you’re doing on your end, and how it might affect revenue and how it might affect the existence of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing on that end. Also, how it might motivate them to change their website. If everybody blocks pop ups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like then, then the sites go, well, we’ll have to come up with a different strategy. And maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that strategy involves a million JavaScript trackers that are not as invisible as pop-ups, but they can end up paying more when we track your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John habits. And if everyone installs something to block that, you know, they’ll have to find another way. This,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m pretty comfortable with this negotiation, I don’t lose any sleep over,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over the give and take. I think that’s just the natural way things work out. The thing I’m mostly frustrated with is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the longest time, it seemed like the browser vendors were kind of afraid to take that extra step.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, you know, browsers could come with built-in ad blockers, for example, or built-in JavaScript. Like, they don’t. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just kind of, like, well, we have an extension framework and people can write whatever they want and the nerds can install it and whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Browsers do come with a built-in pop-up blocker. It seems like we’re ready for the next round

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of kind of platform owners and browser vendors to take the next step.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I think leaving it entirely to third parties, even how iOS is doing, is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John create a little bit of confusion. There’s a potential for the ad blockers and the anti-tracker things to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John themselves be scammy. I think someone pointed out the ghostery is produced by an ad company. The good old ad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John block extension is also lets people pay it to whitelist their ads. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scamminess finds a way. It’s like a life in Jurassic Park. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we still have to be vigilant, but I think I’m ready for the next round of like you said, technical countermeasures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from all parties involved to renegotiate the contract because there’s nothing that says like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only way sites can make money is to have increasingly scammy ads. If nobody can have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much trackers and that much stupid JavaScript, if it ends up being wildly blocked, they’ll have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find a different way, hopefully a more tasteful way to advertise. This is the negotiation. They put out content, but if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we find it annoying, they have to provide something that we like and not annoy us too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much. And if they’re annoying us too much, we’ll do something back. And they have to figure out a way to make something that people enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that also pays money. And that’s why I think the whole thing of like, if you block ads, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a criminal, you’re you’re taking foods from people’s mouths. You’re trying to put sites out of business. Like, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obligation on either side of this. We all have to come to a mutual agreement and we feel like you have a beneficial relationship. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enjoy the things that you’re writing and you enjoy me coming there to see it and, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, seeing your ads or whatever. Like, that’s that’s the negotiation we’re all in here. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not as if one party is just obligated to just choke down whatever the other party does, nor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like on the other side of the coin sites that say you can’t come read our site if you run an ad blocker. And like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our technique has various times done various detection to see Hey, are you blocking ads? Nope, sorry, not to read our site.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They can do that too. Like that’s the negotiation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah. Because because our technique is historically, I would imagine I don’t remember the exact numbers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a higher expense percentage than normal bad blockers because it’s read by a by a bunch of nerds, right? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, well, you can’t have 50% of the people running ad blockers. It’s just not viable for our business. You are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reading our site, you obviously enjoy the content. We’ll try to keep it tasteful. We don’t have autoplay ads, we don’t have video ads. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t have a lot of ads on the page. If you block ads, you can’t read the site. So that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing we’re going through here. And I’m ready for the next round of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh God, I almost quoted Phantom Menace, I won’t do it. Everyone knows what I was gonna say. I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t. Me neither. I know the rest of the audience does it’s fine. Now I’m depressed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} don’t like that popping into

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} my head.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Damn you George Lucas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How many times have you seen The Phantom Menace? I’ve only seen it like twice. Too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many. I did a podcast about it. I don’t even wanna talk about it. It’s a dark

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. That was from one of the good movies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh wow, all right so we should potentially be done here but so John can get himself a tissue and cry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wow, well thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Fracture, Backblaze, and Casper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M A-N-T Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse, ah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s accidental They didn’t mean to accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tech Podcasts, so long

Post-show: Not reviewing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, let me make you happy. How is not doing a review this summer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s pretty good. Pretty, pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey See, just like that, you’re back in it. Let’s do another hour and a half. Another reference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You want to watch Star Wars with all your new time? How about, let’s start at episode one. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that again?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s a couple of weird things about not doing the review. Like obviously, yeah, free time, less pressure, it’s more relaxing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah. But the other thing is that, you know, of course I have El Capitan installed. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that’s annoying me about it it is it seems like like first I have it installed but I don’t use it a lot because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m my main computer I don’t want to reboot and I don’t have a reason to go into it and then every time I reboot into this like two new updates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but rather than just installing like the latest version on top of it I have to go through the update like two times like I’m a Windows user it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like upgrade to beta 5 upgrade to beta 6 upgrade to beta 7 with a reboot in between each it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just just bring me right to beta 7 guys I don’t anyway um I don’t know much about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using the operating system because I’m finding myself not using it so The other thing exciting thing is gonna happen here is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s gonna come out and I’m gonna have to read reviews to find Out what the hell I mean, I think I know most of this stuff But all the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intricate details and the deep dives and stuff. I’m not doing that myself So I basically don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what I don’t know What it’s like to use that as my main operating system for any substantial period of time because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just haven’t been it’s like I’ve only booted into it if you’d every time I boot into this two more updates and then I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the updates and I wander around And I enjoy the fact that I don’t have to take any screenshots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then I fiddle around with it and play with the various options and look at things and then I reboot it into my regular OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’ll be interesting to see like you know as when when it comes out and as you have to then turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to other people for their reviews You’re probably gonna have some very conflicting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feelings of probably immense relief that you didn’t have to do it But also immense dissatisfaction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the job everyone else did in your absence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m fine with it. It’ll be fine Mm hmm. I’m excited. I’m excited to use the new OS because like I see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know It’s hard to tell because you reboot into a clean OS you’re like wow This is so much faster It says nothing installed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on and it’s like even a different Apple ID and it’s all you know It seems smoother and cleaner and nicer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’ve done minor refinements to the look that I like I think all the changes they’ve made to look I endorse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even on my crappy non-retinous green here it looks a little bit crisper and cleaner and tighter less kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of low contrast faded and and edgeless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and yeah I like I like everything about it so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I like the suggestion from Chloe digs pipe work in the chat room who says we should pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our money to get John out to California so he can review the actual El Capitan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know how I would review the mountain. I don’t like being on top of the, what is it, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John caldera or whatever that’s going to explode and destroy the entire west coast sometime in the next 50,000 years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guaranteed, or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow. Oh my goodness. So is there any one particular review that you’re looking forward to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or, you know, do you know who’s doing it for ours? Is ours doing it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, ours is doing it. I will read theirs. If Vitecci does one, I’ll read it. I’more,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure I’ll read.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Jason will probably do one for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macworld at this rate. I’ll read that one. Like, oh, you know, I read them all anyway, but like now I’ll reading them and I’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like learning things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And what I will, I’m with Marco that I can’t wait until all this comes out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then you quietly tell somebody, one of us, hopefully, Oh my God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I cannot believe the job that these people have done, like they did a great job, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did I ever say that before? I know it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like it’s fine. They got most of the way, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unless there’s like some obvious pop culture reference that nobody managed to make now feel like I will miss you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I really needed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That annoyed me about the Google alphabet thing, but they made like the period

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a link to the Hooli thing Did you see that yeah? And it was like oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John god. It’s the best Easter egg ever like seriously a period link amateur hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it wasn’t even underlined like it like this They styled it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} such a way that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text decoration none. Whoa advanced technology. Yeah. All right. Anyway, my my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my pointless HTML Easter egg genius will go and recognized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my lifetime clearly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sorry John who’s gonna make all the Simpsons links references

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the worst thing about Easter eggs in HTML is you just use sourcing you can see them All right, like I’m not I was never clever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was never like doing the job, you know in this age of Right-click inspect you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even hide stuff in the Dom anymore. Maybe I did it with shadow Dom But anyway, I didn’t even try to hide it was just out there in the open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it seems like all the Easter eggs all my reference should have been found by now But most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people just don’t even care. So they just go right by it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I didn’t click I would at least hover on all of your links But I didn’t click on a lot of them because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey knew if I’m honest I wouldn’t I wouldn’t understand the damn reference in the first place.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes I give you the hover sometimes I don’t depends on the reference depends on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing but period links

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s just say that I did not read your review on Expert. I read it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Amateur Hour.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I wouldn’t even follow most things because I was reading on iPads usually because that’s how I would prefer to read, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to sit down, concentrate, not sitting in front of my computer, but like sit down and actually read, you know, reading mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And to me, for me, that’s an iPad or an iPhone. So I would always read it on an iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I could have done some cool, like, gesture recognition Easter eggs but never got around to it. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, goodness. So what do you do in the summer other than traveling a bit? Like do you feel like you have time to fill?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I assume the answer is no, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s more relaxing. I mean, I’m podcasting more this summer than I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was because I’ve got the two regular podcasts now, even though one of them is every other week. And so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually does make a big difference. So it’s basically, and plus between all the vacations, it’s like at least two podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every week. It’s taking up more time and then yeah, being on vacation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not stressing about things and just the nights when I’m not podcasting, I can actually just relax

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and watch an episode of Orange is the New Black and not worry about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have and haven’t written and not worry about retaking screenshots or pouring over details of the OS or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to get in touch with Apple PR in the three days before I have to publish my thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Relaxing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am glad. I really am. whether things are going well and that you are relaxed. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are you relaxed enough to do it for whatever ridiculous name they come up with next year?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, no. I’m out. I’m out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you’re not Michael Jordan. This is your one and only retirement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I’m going to go play baseball. Come on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You never know. Just asking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m already reviewing toasters, kind of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s true. And bless you for doing it. Oh, goodness. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have a door yet? No. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ha ha ha. See, home contracting work is never done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like the goal was to have this done this summer. I think we’ll probably still make that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, could be into September, whatever. Yeah.

Post-show: New camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, how’s your new child that arrived about a week ago?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, the camera. Good? It’s really good. Yeah, I mean, I’ve only had it a week so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far. I knew going into it that I would not be happy with the battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco life, that the battery life on all the Sony mirrorless cameras, at least the full-frame

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones, is awful. And they have continued that tradition. The battery life is indeed terrible. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have partially fixed that problem by just shipping it with two batteries. Seriously? Yes, they ship

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. This is the first thing I’ve ever bought that comes with two of its own batteries.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, and they give you an external charger also, and it can charge via USB when you plug it in, so it’s hilarious.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So yeah, so we have multiple batteries and it’s fine. And the picture quality is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stunning. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. What I especially like about it, so this is, I’m talking about the A7R II.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know if I actually said that earlier. I think I forgot to. What I especially like about it is that my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hit rate or my keeper rate, like the percentage of pictures I shoot that end up being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good and good enough to keep and not just delete because something was out of focus or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my hit rate is extremely high, way higher than it’s ever been with any other camera I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever used, including an iPhone. And I think there’s a number of possible reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for this. Number one, I think is just that it has a really, really good autofocus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system. Most mirrorless cameras don’t have phase detect autofocus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And phase detect is, that’s what Apple called focus pixels in the iPhone 6. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way that SLRs have always focused. The alternative is contrast detect, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you just read the image off the sensor and you move the focus motor forward and back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until you see, you notice, like there are more high contrast edges at this focal length

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than this focal length. That’s most likely in focus. And that’s why you see cameras kind of going in and out of focus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as they try to find that point. That’s called hunting, and it’s more prevalent in contrast systems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so for a while, mirrorless cameras only had those, and many of them still only have that, but a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few of them have phase-detect autofocus, and this is one of them. And the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sonys, with the exception of the a7 II, the previous, like the a7 I line, didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phase. So what this, this results in way faster and more accurate autofocus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than, you know it’s almost SLR speed. It’s not quite there, but it’s almost SLR speed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s the closest I’ve ever seen in a camera that wasn’t an SLR. Or for my usage, I think it’s close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough. It’s a little early to say that definitively, but I think it is close enough to be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, very similar to a good SLR. Like I used the system in the Nikon D750

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I rented was well regarded. It’s another very, very well-liked, very advanced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco autofocus system for SLRs. I I don’t think it’s the best in the world, but I think it’s certainly up there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say this is actually very close to that. It’s very, very close focus speed-wise. Anyway, contributing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to my percentage of pictures that are good being high is that really good focus system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The percentage of pictures that I’m shooting that the focus is correct is very, very high because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s just fast and accurate. The other thing that I like is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s this… sensor like you can crank the ISO sensitivity on the sensor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up like crazy because it’s just really really good like like most modern Sony sensors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which includes the ones in Nikon cameras most modern Sony developed full-frame sensors are just stunningly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good with with keeping low noise at high ISO sensitivities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so what’s good about this camera is that not only does it have that but it has a feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is only in a ridiculously small number of cameras I don’t know why this is such a rare feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and such a relatively new feature where you can custom you can set it on auto ISO and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you can customize what your minimum shutter speed is so you can you can have you can run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the camera in aperture priority mode and you can set the aperture whatever you want and then you can say auto ISO

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but keep the shutter speed above say 1 to 50th of a second because 1

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to 50th you know you can you can you can freeze most motion with most lens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lengths around that you know so that that’s a good minimum so if you’re shooting inside at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco f 5.6 and trying to keep 1 to 50th of a second the ISO has to crank really high

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up to like you know the 10 to 25,000 range really high ISOs and this camera it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just looks good like it still looks good at those crazy ISOs and again you can get this in modern icons as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well so I you know not say this is exclusive to Sony but to have this in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in such a small camera with so many advanced features. So the combination of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the focus system being so good, the auto ISO with the minimum shutter speed, making it so that you can basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shoot anything in any light and have it be sharp as long as you’re willing to tolerate some noise at the extreme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high ISOs, and also it has a stabilized image sensor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, you know, just similar to the iPhone 6 Plus, this has sensor shift technology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it can shift the sensor around to do image stabilization no matter what lens you put on it. So even when you’re using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a really short lens, like a 35 millimeter, which it’s very hard to find short

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco image stabilized primes generally, though not a lot of manufacturers ever make those because there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less demand for image stabilization in short lenses like that than there is like for telephotos and zooms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you can have like very, very short distance, image stabilization,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shooting really fast, high ISO. So the combination of those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just incredibly improves the hit rate of what you’re taking. So rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than shooting like 200 photos in an afternoon of doing something and then trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to pick out like the 20 good ones, I’m shooting like 40 photos and picking out the 20 good ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s incredible, like the difference, you know, the time it saves. And even like, I’m even considering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turning off RAW because the JPEGs that come out of this camera are so good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and do such a good job with dynamic range capture, and there’s a bunch of options I still can play with that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it’s just incredible. Even RAW is becoming a lot less necessary.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m using the Photos app and Lightroom in parallel right now because the Apple camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RAW system doesn’t support the RAW files for this yet. I’m only dealing with the JPEGs in the Photos app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and only seeing the RAWs in Lightroom, And I like the JPEGs better than the color I can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at a Lightroom. And they don’t look worse for the most part.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll go to the RAW if I have to pull up shadow detail really high or something, but that’s rare.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So yeah, overall, it’s great. It’s a really great camera. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m extremely happy with it. I have three lenses, and I don’t expect to get any more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the near future. I have the 35mm f2.8, little 35mm. I have the 55 1.8, which is possibly the best lens I’ve ever seen. And I have the 90 macro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is really ridiculously sharp. And it’s awfully close and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco massive and heavy. But for like product shots for my blog and stuff like that, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco greatly enjoying that. So yeah, overall, three thumbs up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nice. Every time I think of buying one of these super expensive cameras, I remember A, that I’d rather spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that money on a Mac, and B, that where I take most of my pictures during each year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is standing waist deep in ocean waves. And I really wouldn’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be holding a two or three thousand dollar camera in my hand while doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So far I haven’t dropped one, and I don’t know how many years we’ve been going on vacation to the beach and me taking pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of kids in the waves, but like at least, you know, six, seven, eight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years, haven’t dropped a camera yet. It’s gonna happen eventually and when it does I want it to be like a $600 mistake I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really don’t want it to be a two or three thousand dollar mistake Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did fall this year with it, but only on the sand and camera was held safely in the air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I Wish I’d seen that I can only imagine the acrobatics you went through to save the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah but I was what I was actually saving was my sneakers because we were just like it was after a run and like I didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, you know, I had actual sneakers on with socks and it was just yeah I wasn’t gonna go in the water, but like the waves, you know come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and like one wave sort of come out and it was caught me by surprise and I’ve started to run backwards up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hill in the sand to keep my sneakers out of the water and lost my footing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Went onto my butt but camera stayed in the air and no water on the shoes either

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sand on the butt, but otherwise Nothing, that’s by the way. This is this is my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know for for people who do not have super expensive cameras let me give you the most important photography tip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Take your crappy camera and take pictures in ridiculously bright sunlight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They look really good, because everything is lit up and your crappy camera that does not very light

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sensitive with a tiny little sensor, it’s fine. You can capture any kind of motion in the bright light of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sunny summer’s day in mid afternoon, they look really good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, just put your iPhone in a plastic bag, done. Oh, I won’t go that far. Bright sun is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, pretty much any camera. Like that’s why the the iPhone like whenever there’s a new iPhone and they’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about how great the camera is and they show like this is a real picture shot on an iPhone. It’s always like this bright, sunny,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco beautiful scene in California. It’s like no, that’s that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like a close up of a flower in the midday sun. Yep, that will always look good. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my camera. So the cameras I buy, I don’t even bother taking pictures indoors at this point. Like there’s no point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just they’re always going to be terrible. just it has to be outdoors and it has to be sunny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which is fine with me. There’s plenty of times when those conditions are met and I can get lots of pictures of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John family and things. We still get professional photos taken. Now I think we’re down to once a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just to have someone else take them so we can all be in the picture and have family photos. And the professional photographer uses a fancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera so they look better than ours but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we are adequately documenting our lives at this point. As long as it’s all backed up, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be fine.