137: Feature Photos
01 Oct 2015Ad-blocking estimates, Apple Music three months in, iPhone 6S first impressions, and John doesn’t review El Capitan.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Endowment effect
- VFX and Wacom tablets
- Ad-blocker penetration
- Ruggedized phones
- Apple Music trial ends for day-one adopters
- Who renewed?
- What's to like?
- What's not to like?
- Getting rid of "loves"
- iPhone 6s
- 3D Touch
- Web 3D Touch support (via @bzamayo)
- Taptic Engine
- Live Photos
- Siri and the M9
- Inventory
- 3D Touch
- El Capitan
- Post-show
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Casey touched it
- Follow-up: Loss aversion
- Follow-up: iPad Pro at Pixar
- Only nerds use ad-blockers?
- Ruggedized phones
- Sponsor: Cards Against Humanity
- Apple Music, 3 months in
- Sponsor: Harry’s
- Loves
- iPhone 6S impressions
- Live Photos
- Touch ID
- Inventory and purchasing
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- John doesn’t review El Capitan
- Post-show: TiVo Bolt
Pre-show: Casey touched it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so a lot of OS updates these days. Yeah, like all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like everything. I definitely sat down at 715
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to upgrade my work Mac, which is the one I’m recording on, to El Capitan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco hate that name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You upgraded to a.0 release on your podcasting machine a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours before you had to podcast from it? Less than three.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew not to say anything to you guys, nor the internet, until I had at least gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the call and that much had worked. We’ll see if I have actually recorded anything by the time this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, but yes, in theory everything’s going well. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically the rule of audio setups, and this applies to a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, but especially in audio setups, the rule is once you have something that works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t touch anything ever. leave it there. Don’t touch it. And of course, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice this is harder to do, you know, if you had to like, you know, oh one time had you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something different, then you got to, you know, change the snob, change the setting, you know, maybe change the wiring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around for something, then you got to change it back and it’s a pain. And then, of course, in the age
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of computers and software, it’s even worse. And it’s like, well, you know, some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to like try to keep around an old machine, running an old version of the OS, because the software doesn’t work on anything newer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they just don’t want to risk it breaking. So there’s a balance to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco struck here because obviously it’s very hard to hold on to old versions of OS and old versions of software forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as time goes on I think it’s getting harder to hold on to old versions of things but at the same time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked and you touched it. So I think there’s I think there’s a balance to be struck here and you did not strike it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably is okay for me to upgrade as long as I don’t have any drinks near the machine. I think that’s a fair compromise.
Follow-up: Loss aversion
⏹️ ▶️ John right, you want to some follow-up talk about why? People are upset
⏹️ ▶️ John about Marco pulling peace and one of the things that I think Marco brought up and we were trying to Google For the name of it was
⏹️ ▶️ John loss aversion Joshua Pollock points out that another term that might fit is endowment
⏹️ ▶️ John effect The hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them
⏹️ ▶️ John So once you’ve got peace, it’s super important that you have peace before you had peace It wasn’t super important
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get it. So once they’ve got the $3 application and then you pull it It’s much worse than
⏹️ ▶️ John him never having launched it, even though the effect is the same. Anyway, people are weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thanks, Joshua, for the follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In summary, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, good times. And we can summarize much of our follow-up that way.
Follow-up: iPad Pro at Pixar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. What else do we have here? Daniel Melitz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a short anecdote about visual effects Which which I think has been in the follow-up for about 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years now, but would you like to tell us about that John?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually related to the iPad Pro and pen stuff He says he works in VFX
⏹️ ▶️ John which is visual effects and he says by my rough estimate Somewhere around 50%
⏹️ ▶️ John of compositors use a Wacom or Wacom tablet instead of a mouse for RSI
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons. And I see that a lot too, people using a tablet not just to do drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but to do everything in the computer. Like they’re using their tablet basically as a
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse to select menus, to select tools from palettes, to move icons around on their desktop in the Finder,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is they’re doing. And that’s relevant to the iPad Pro because recently
⏹️ ▶️ John Michael Johnson, Dr. Wave on Twitter, I think it was him, tweeted a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of people at Pixar trying out the iPad Pro apparently Apple visited Pixar and
⏹️ ▶️ John Deposited some iPad Pro hardware in front of the Pixar artists and they got all got
⏹️ ▶️ John a chance to try it out And the reviews were pretty good. I mean, it’s just tweets. So it’s not like some
⏹️ ▶️ John big article that you can read about the Trial run of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things But the one thing I remember is they said that the palm rejection was really good Which means like when you rest your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John on? the surface of the tablet and then try to draw with the pen because you want to sort of steady the pen it doesn’t think that your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John is a touch and suddenly draw things underneath where your hand is or move stuff around or whatever it just knows
⏹️ ▶️ John to take a look at the pen so anyway I am still looking forward to trying out this pen even though I don’t really do
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of illustration just because it looks neat and
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows maybe I’ll get one someday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right Thank you.
Only nerds use ad-blockers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see. So Monty, Mont, Monty Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also wrote in. He said, conventional wisdom seems to be that only, that the only people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently using ad blockers are nerds, which is to say a subset of Internet users. So I’m not understanding why the doomsayers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that an upcoming tweak to iOS, which is now here, is going to cause legions of people to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do something that they are already not doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is something I wanted to talk about, but then Margo had to go and cause all the drums as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ John had to have a whole show about that. But yeah, more broadly on the topic of ad blocking, I put this in here
⏹️ ▶️ John way before I was not even came out, just because like all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion about ad blocking and the ethics of ad blocking and the possible effects in the publishing industry
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, I hadn’t seen anyone really nailed down what they expected to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen in terms of the number of people who run ad blockers. Obviously introducing this feature to
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS is really important because iOS is a big platform. A lot of people use iOS, especially a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who buy things use iOS, and adding the ability to have blockers where once
⏹️ ▶️ John there was no ability to have them, at least with the built-in browser, is significant, but you’re still left with the question,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people do we think are going to install an ad blocker? It’s way easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to install one now. You can install it by tapping a couple buttons on your iPhone, but iPhone users
⏹️ ▶️ John are only what 20% of the smartphone market or 30% less than
⏹️ ▶️ John that of the overall phone market and so you say a hundred percent of iOS users are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to install an ad blocker the day iOS 9 comes out which is totally not true I’m gonna say it’s under 100% but even if 100% did does that destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John publishing a hundred percent of desktop users can install an ad blocker right now what percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of desktop web browsing people actually do install an an ad blocker. I don’t have much
⏹️ ▶️ John experience with this except for reading things on the web and even I think like the nerdiest sites are only
⏹️ ▶️ John around like they’re still under 50% ad blockers for like the very nerdiest most paranoid
⏹️ ▶️ John most privacy concerned readers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even those sites seem to only get around you know 50% or less of people installing ad blockers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say for the general web on the desktop it’s well under 20% of people
⏹️ ▶️ John install ad blockers but I don’t I’m just pulling numbers out of my butt. Anyway, in the spirit of pulling numbers out of our butt,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do we think is going to happen with iOS? What percentage of iOS users
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to install some kind of ad blocker?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess 10 to 20% closer to 10. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds I mean, that sounds high. Like, if you say what percentage of iOS users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will install anything, like it’s such a broad base of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I would say 10% would be a pretty good conservative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a pretty good optimistic high estimate. I mean think about like the most popular app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone is probably the Facebook app, the most popular third-party app. Most likely Facebook right? If not YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but probably Facebook. Then like you know how how many people have that installed on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS? What percentage of iOS users have that installed? Maybe half? I don’t know maybe more? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. I I have no idea what to expect there, but that’s a massive app right there. Like to reach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half of iOS people, that’s huge. So yeah, I would guess on the order of 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is reasonable to be an optimistic goal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll be a little bit higher than that eventually, mostly because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John one app like Facebook or YouTube. It’s basically a category. Do you have any kind of blocker installed?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think word will spread among the people who care about this stuff at all
⏹️ ▶️ John that like get a blocker, whatever, like, you know, pick a brand name, or whatever brand
⏹️ ▶️ John name is traveling around in people’s social circles, is gonna be like, you need to install X because
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes stuff faster on your phone. I bet people are gonna be saying, you need to install X because it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook faster, like the Facebook app, which is probably not true. I don’t think Facebook actually uses any
⏹️ ▶️ John web views that would honor the content blocker, but either way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, that’s a big problem, though. That’s a big problem in regular people’s expectations what this will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do and won’t do. So keep in mind content blockers can’t block anything that is not displayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a Safari view controller, which people like Twitter and Facebook and everything are unlikely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use at least anytime soon if ever, especially as Facebook is pushing more towards their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news format that shows in a custom way in their own app that isn’t even a web browser. So that’s that’s problem number one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Problem number two is you sell somebody an app that says this will block ads on your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t block in-app ads like ads that are not in a web view in an app. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only blocks ads in Safari and Safari View Controller. And as more and more browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is happening in apps that aren’t Safari, and in some of these apps that have their own custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that aren’t just launching Safari View Controller, the percentage of ads that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on mobile see that can be blocked by this is probably going down over time, not
⏹️ ▶️ John Well sure they’re gonna work around it, but I don’t think it matters whether it actually blocks it. It only matters that this
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of it’s kind of like quitting all your apps. This sort of information slash misinformation
⏹️ ▶️ John starts traveling. Think of the force quitting all your apps, which we’ve talked about many times before. That
⏹️ ▶️ John travel has traveled pretty well. Doesn’t matter what effect it does or doesn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John All that matters is that people think it does something. So I’m going to guess that the idea that you should
⏹️ ▶️ John install a whatever on your iPhone because it will make whatever better, that
⏹️ ▶️ John idea has legs and that idea will get around I think people will install a blocker
⏹️ ▶️ John and won’t be able to tell whether it does anything and won’t ever bother to uninstall it. So I’m going to say that the percentage might
⏹️ ▶️ John be as high as like 20%. Like I’m willing to go up around that range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep in mind also, before I move on from this point, though, keep in mind also the process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of enabling a content blocker after you’ve installed it is so buried and complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a lot of those people you you just mentioned, install it and never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually turn it on. That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d forgotten about that part of the process. All right, so I guess we have to modify it to and not how many people will install them, but how many
⏹️ ▶️ John people install it and also turn it on. All right, now I dropped my estimate down again.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think 10% is optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, anyway, but all all of our numbers that we’re throwing out there are well below 50%. And this is what I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at. And all the discussion and hemming and hawing about content blockers and all the New York Times articles or whatever, no one seemed to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and by the way, all this thing that were kicking up a fuss about, 90% of the people aren’t going to install one anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that I think is the one of the most important underlying
⏹️ ▶️ John premises of any argument about what ad blockers are or aren’t going to do to the economics of the web or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And I understand sites like don’t want to have 10 or 20% of their people not seeing their ads and that this is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but it’s not the sort of Armageddon doom saying about ad blocking. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit overblown unless the same people who are speaking doom and gloom
⏹️ ▶️ John are also going to boldly assert that doom and gloom is coming because
⏹️ ▶️ John X percentage of people are going to install it and because that percentage is, you know, equals doom and gloom,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And no one seems to ever want to nail it down. No one’s going to say all these bad things are going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I think all these things are bad are going to happen because 5% of people are going to still add blockers. And guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? 5% is enough to wipe out all publishing life on earth. Uh, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like no one thinks it’s going to be 100% but no and I think it’s going to be a pretty low and I think this is an
⏹️ ▶️ John important move and I think it will have effects I’m not saying it’s not going to do anything but every time I think about this issue
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just we’re just guessing this one we’re trying to figure out how many people are going to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m thinking meme wise best case scenario it spreads as far and wide
⏹️ ▶️ John as the force quitting your apps think spreads which is surprisingly far but even that one I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John is less than 50% I bet if you just, you know, pick 50% random iPhone users
⏹️ ▶️ John from the world, put them in a room and say, do you even know, like, show them force quitting apps, you can’t say words,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they won’t know what force quit or whatever, you know, it’s Mac lingo, show them the thing and say, Do you know what this is? Have
⏹️ ▶️ John you ever done this? And I bet more than half will be like, I don’t even know what you just did. I don’t know what that
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I don’t know why I would ever do that. The other half would say, Yeah, you do that because it saves battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I see a lot. I’m not saying you’re wrong about any stretch, but I see it a lot. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just the other day when we were at a football game, the person in the row in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me would open an app, do his, his thing, then go to the task switcher and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey force quit the app every single time. And it was maddening because I want to just be like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop. Yeah. Apple needs to like, I don’t know what Apple can do about that. It kind of got it away from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You like, what can they do to stop people from doing that? I think a fun thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John would to make make the app switcher. I don’t know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it make the the application disappear when you switch away from I can’t figure it out. Like once people know that it’s there
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just like doing it, it’s just it’s kind of like the same as the people who don’t put their iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John to sleep, but shut them down every time they’re done using them. And then like five minutes later, they booted up again, then they shut
⏹️ ▶️ John them down. There are people like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then they boot them up and they shut them down. And they’re they’re annoyed by how long it takes. I gotta see the Apple logo takes so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you do to stop that? Like you can show them the other way or you can try to convince them and they’ll just like they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just say, I like doing it this way. I like to be off. I could think we can pull it off. I don’t like the idea of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s on. Anyway, yeah, so this this I
⏹️ ▶️ John have more to say and I blockers but I think we’ve talked about them enough on past shows. We will circle back
⏹️ ▶️ John it later on when we get to I mean, because I think we’re gonna eventually start getting numbers like the second round of
⏹️ ▶️ John stories about this are going to be like, so iOS 9 has been out for six months, and here’s a bunch of popular websites.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s what they say about iOS users using iOS 9 or percentage, you know, like we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get numbers on it. And so we’ll, we’ll circle back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, speaking of, uh, our friend Ben Thompson is in the chat and has said that over 50% of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stratechery, he did embrace stratechery, right? It’s no longer stratechery. Anyway, uh, 50%,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over 50% of stratechery users have ad blockers. Now, to his own point, it’s a very geeky audience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but he got these numbers apparently by comparing Google Analytics numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versus server logs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… Well, I wouldn’t say that’s a great comparison because of various JavaScript things and bots and everything else, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s maybe a ballpark. But I think also, you know, what we’re going to see is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to see a really big spike in those percentages if people have been tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them temporarily. Because for the last few years, mobile traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been dominating so much that it’s pretty common for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typical sites to have over 50% of their traffic being mobile. And for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these years so far, there really haven’t been mobile ad blockers in any meaningful numbers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden, like 50% of your traffic is now able to get ad blockers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it couldn’t before.
⏹️ ▶️ John 50% if it was 50% mobile then that was like half Android and half iOS Depending on what
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of website you run and the Android people I’m assuming have always been able to get ad blockers Is that not the case?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I don’t think I should the research takes from what I’ve heard. I don’t think there’s like a standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reasonable system way to do it besides like some kind of like rooted Thing that like interferes with DNS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the system level or something like that But I don’t I don’t think there’s like a common way that people do it
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there probably will be if there isn’t already.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know I mean, I don’t think Google will necessarily be leaving those hooks all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but anyone can ship anything on Android, right? I don’t know We should ask the people on an Android podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John to find out but anyway I Whatever talking about is iOS and again in the circles we travel in and the friends
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a lot of them run sites where the vast vast vast majority people who are coming on mobile are coming in iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know the vast majority people who are coming on desktop or coming on Macs and And it’s a strange
⏹️ ▶️ John little world. When I was talking about sites that I thought like barely started to push over to the super site, I’m talking about as mass market as
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get. Like I’m gonna say Slashdot and feel old or whatever, but you know, Ars Technica,
⏹️ ▶️ John Slashdot, you know. Slashdot was never mainstream. But yeah, back in the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was all we had. Sites that are bigger than like an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John person’s blog, like even just like Daring Fireball would be considered in the small camp. Because yeah, it’s big for a one person
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but it’s not like, you know, an institution with lots of writers
⏹️ ▶️ John and 15 articles a day and you know, so on and so forth.
Ruggedized phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, one last quick piece of follow-up, and then let’s talk about all the new things that happened today. Ruggedized
⏹️ ▶️ John was in response to a couple of shows ago. I was trying to articulate for the millionth time this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I should have written down in a blog 17 years ago. The idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John product manufacturers can gain fanatical loyalty by making their products excel
⏹️ ▶️ John in a few ways and really sticking to that over the years. one of those ways is
⏹️ ▶️ John rugged design, durability, it doesn’t have to be look fancy, doesn’t have to be the best,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have to be the cheapest, but if you have something that is reliably rugged, whether it’s Fisher-Price toys
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a reputation for like you buy this toy and the kid won’t be able to break it, or I use Craftsman, although
⏹️ ▶️ John people say Craftsman has gone downhill or whatever, over the years if you really stick to that core value
⏹️ ▶️ John you can you will get very loyal followers. And I said it’s a shame that was no
⏹️ ▶️ John one’s doing that for phones because all the phones are pretty delicate and elegant and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going for something different like stylishness and chicness and plus they got to make millions of these things so they’re not going to you know
⏹️ ▶️ John so where is the the narrow focus manufacturer that’s really concentrating on ruggedized
⏹️ ▶️ John phones it’s certainly not Apple well so here’s one example that someone sent in sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John I lost the name since this was a feedback from a while ago this is Sonim or Sonim
⏹️ ▶️ John and the example products is a Sonim XP7 which is a phone it It looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John a rugged phone, it’s just an Android phone with like tons of crap all over it, but it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John things they claim about it. Long battery life, usable with gloves on, drop and impact resistance, oil and
⏹️ ▶️ John chemical resistant, temperature resistant, extreme pressure resistant, protection from microparticles
⏹️ ▶️ John with powerful audio, waterproof, and puncture resistant. So here is a, you know, if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the woods and you want to have a smartphone with you and you don’t want to try to get an iPhone with like a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John protector in in a case someone is actually making ruggedized phones. This is a little bit more extreme.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a little bit like those Toughbook things or those laptops that people would make for the military and stuff like that. I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John more along the lines of like L.L. Bean or whatever, where it’s regular person clothes, but they have a reputation for,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not durability, then at least standing behind their stuff and with like a zipper rips on your L.L. Bean jacket, you can get it replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John because they basically think that should never happen and if it does, come to us and show us and we’ll give you a new jacket
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Now we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna hear from those people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The LL Bean people? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m glad that, I mean, this is another advantage of Android. iOS is like whatever Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John decides to make, and if Apple decides that they don’t wanna make a smallish phone that’s a little bit thicker that has longer
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life, tough luck. You can’t get one with iOS like that. But Android has room for people to
⏹️ ▶️ John make different kinds of products, and so here, someone decided there’s a market for ruggedized phones, and they’re using Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most people just use cases to achieve these kind of goals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, look at the goals. You can’t achieve these kind of goals with just cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get pretty close. Cases can be surprisingly good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I guess you just encase the phone in a lucite brick or something, like, then you’re good to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is trying to be integrated, where it doesn’t just look like a phone with a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how good these phones are. I’ve never tried them or whatever, but I’m glad it’s out there. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good to see the market trying to find some way to fill the needs that a
⏹️ ▶️ John small group of people have. But I still think it would behoove all, like, the major manufacturers, whether it’s Google or Apple or
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung or whatever. Samsung is actually doing pretty good too. They were one of the first ones, the big vendors, to
⏹️ ▶️ John tout the fact that they make waterproof phones. But they didn’t look waterproof, they were. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John people are taking iPhone 6S’s and dunking them in water and saying, it’s kinda waterproof-ish. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put your phone in water. Don’t put your iPhone in water, if you can help it.
Sponsor: Cards Against Humanity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity. And as usual, Cards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Against Humanity, rather than doing an ad read, has asked us to have John review a toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Syracuse are talking about toasters ♪ ♪ More exciting than a roller coaster ♪
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Will it fit on his countertop? ♪ ♪ I hope the reviews never stop. ♪
⏹️ ▶️ John Around about this time, I think I should have Jason Sneller or somebody sing Toaster or Not because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey arrived at my
⏹️ ▶️ John house. and it was a very large box. And on the outside of the box, it said,
⏹️ ▶️ John microwave and convenience oven. Toaster or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta say, this box was not any bigger than the biggest toaster boxes I’ve gotten. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like comparably sized to the large toasters. And the picture on the outside of it looked like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what that is. Maybe it’s like a toaster microwave combination. I’ve already had a toaster oven slot
⏹️ ▶️ John toaster combination. Maybe this is one of those things. This is, how do I get the model number here?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the LG LCSP1110ST.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, the LCSP11110ST. It’s the best. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll put the link in the show notes. You can take a look at it. Oh my God, it’s huge. It’s really big.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I gave the inch measurements, but it is really big. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like a microwave with like a cash register, cash drawer below it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, so it’s a microwave on top, you know, the microwave door and a bunch of number pads and all that other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then underneath the thing is a silver sort of pull-out handle tray
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And what, you know, before I unpacked this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had one idea about what it might be. And then as I unpacked it, I realized what it actually was. It’s literally just a plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old microwave with like a little rotating dish and all the other stuff and some really bad UI and
⏹️ ▶️ John the controls. And then underneath it is a very, very flat sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John miniature oven that you couldn’t put anything in that’s any higher, like the whole thing at Tater Bowsy, you can put pizza
⏹️ ▶️ John in there or chicken nuggets, but that’s about it. Like you pull out the drawer and there’s maybe an inch or two
⏹️ ▶️ John of clearance in there. Put something in there and it’s got like a little pan that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John use. I guess you could put something else that’s not on the pan in there. But anyway, you can’t see anything when it’s inside there. You
⏹️ ▶️ John just slide it in. That little slot thing gets really hot really fast because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John small area, but this is not a toaster. you can’t really make toast
⏹️ ▶️ John in this. It doesn’t claim to be a toaster, it’s a convenience oven. Although this convenience oven is the least convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John oven ever because the only thing you can really cook in it is things that are very flat or frozen pizzas.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the controls are like, the controls are inscrutable. I don’t wanna dwell too much in the controls because I have one other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I really wanna yell about about this thing that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey related to the
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality. But the controls are like, press this one button repeatedly and
⏹️ ▶️ John each one of these buttons corresponds to some kind of weird preset. So like, press it once and it’ll be this temperature.
⏹️ ▶️ John Press it, you know, if you press bake once, it’s 425. You press bake twice, it’s 400. You press
⏹️ ▶️ John bake three times, it’s 375. You press bake four times, it’s 350. Like, A, you
⏹️ ▶️ John never guess that. And B, I mean, it has a display and it shows you. But B, you’ve got a number pad for crying
⏹️ ▶️ John out loud. Why are you making me hit like, it’s got like auto bake, auto defrost, press the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pizza. Yeah, it has an auto pizza button.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you press that multiple times for different kinds of pizzas. like seriously just it’s all just voodoo
⏹️ ▶️ John like you really just want at least a microwave works normally the microwave you punch a bunch of numbers and it started and the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John are like you know fill the thing with minutes and seconds and that works a straightforward way so anyway the microwave
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it is really small it’s only about a one cubic foot inside the microwave part
⏹️ ▶️ John but the overall device is very large I removed my other microwave to make room for this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it barely fits it’s much taller than my other microwave and about as wide and as deep but the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John is smaller so it’s a very space inefficient you really have to be getting a lot of use out of that
⏹️ ▶️ John slide-out drawer miniature pizza oven thing to make this worth
⏹️ ▶️ John I you know I I can’t think of anything that I’d ever want to use it for and the microwave
⏹️ ▶️ John is only what is it 1,100 watts which is pretty wimpy for a microwave the oven part is 1,400
⏹️ ▶️ John watts I just I should have done this I didn’t try running them both at once I probably would have blown the circuit breaker
⏹️ ▶️ John now maybe not I don’t know anyway so I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John declare this not a toaster it is not a toaster oven is not a slot toaster and I’m not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John sure who this is for and holy cow three hundred two hundred and something dollars two hundred eighty nine dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John that is I mean it’s not a bad microwave we can use it to warm up dinner tonight it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s small but it’s the microwave part of it is fine. Like I said the UI is not
⏹️ ▶️ John too messed up. But the oven thing? Why is that even there? Maybe if you have frozen pizza a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John it will heat up faster than your big oven but you better hope your frozen pizza is small enough to fit in that drawer. If it’s a family-sized
⏹️ ▶️ John frozen pizza it is not going to fit. I just think this is a bad… It’s not a refrigerator
⏹️ ▶️ John toaster and it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey probably slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more practical than the the hybrid slot toaster toaster oven but this is not a toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John oven. It doesn’t really make toast so I give this a thumbs down. But all that aside, there’s one other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I think is the strangest, worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life
⏹️ ▶️ John for people like me and perhaps for people like you. I took this thing out of the box,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And on the front, if you’re looking at the picture of it, on the front of it there’s like a stain, a brushed stainless
⏹️ ▶️ John steel part and it had that like static cling plastic on it. You know, they put over stuff so it doesn’t get scratched
⏹️ ▶️ John up in shipping. And I’m peeling up the static cling plastic and it’s a little bit difficult to peel off. And I’m like, oh maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got stuck in the drawer. So I pulled out the drawer and turns out the static clink plastic had sort of like been tucked under the
⏹️ ▶️ John lip so you had to kind of pull the drawer out and pull the static clink plastic off of the the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John of the lip of the of the drawer and stuff and that was a little bit annoying and then I looked at the top of it and there was a big
⏹️ ▶️ John sticker on top and I am I’m gonna say I’m a person who always wants to remove stickers
⏹️ ▶️ John from everything but I’m gonna go so far as to say everybody should remove stickers from everything if you buy something
⏹️ ▶️ John from the store like a dustpan or a broom or a vacuum cleaner or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John a garbage can, and it has a sticker on it, take the sticker off. It’s not there, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be there for the next 30 years as this garbage can says in your house. The sticker is just like to advertise at you in the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not part of the product, please peel it off. And manufacturers, please make that easy to do. Anyway, there’s a sticker on top,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I start peeling it off, and it’s difficult to peel, and I read the sticker, and it’s in like three different languages, it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John this product is coated with a clear vinyl for protection during shipping. You
⏹️ ▶️ John must remove this vinyl before using the product otherwise moisture will build up inside and
⏹️ ▶️ John bad things will happen and blah blah blah. Now I’m looking around at the thing and I’m like well I just peeled off all the static thing stuff from the front and
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a little annoying. Is that what they were talking about? But then it says no start peeling on back right edge. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked on the side and there’s vents on the side of the thing and the vents like I put stick my fingers in them. There’s no plastic blocking
⏹️ ▶️ John the vents so it’s not as if the entire vents were blocked up but I was concerned because the bottom pizza part gets hot like when you
⏹️ ▶️ John use it it heats up considerably. So I didn’t want to like have some plastic slowly melting
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing and that would be gross. So I go to the back right bottom edge and I find
⏹️ ▶️ John the little edge of it I’m like oh this entire like top you know it’s all silver all around the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The entire top and sides is coated with this peel-off clear plastic that’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to peel and I start sort of getting the edge and starting to peel the thing off I’m thinking it’s gonna be like one of those big things
⏹️ ▶️ John like a cable sassers what is call it competitive peeling where he likes to peel off the big protective films in one big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I’m peeling the thing off and then I realize what’s happening here. The
⏹️ ▶️ John top part of this oven thing, I don’t know if you can see it in the pictures, this entire sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of silver top back case had this clear vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff stuck to it before assembly, like on all edges.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no! Then they assemble the thing and now they want you to peel it off.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as you peel It’s impossible to get off cleanly because it’s tucked
⏹️ ▶️ John in like as the pieces meet together the vinyl was tucked inside it So if you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey peel this thing off
⏹️ ▶️ John There is literally no and if you are sort of an anal retentive or obsessive compulsive person or like a neat
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m used those words Those are not the technical correct terms if you are the type of person who likes things to be neat and tidy
⏹️ ▶️ John You are either doomed to have a thing in your house that annoys you forever or to spend 17 hours with
⏹️ ▶️ John tweezers trying to pull this plastic crap out of the seams. Please, appliance manufacturers, never
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. It’s cruel. It is cruel and unusual.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either people aren’t gonna pull the vinyl off, they’re gonna ignore that sticker and it’s gonna be there forever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s probably fine because like I said there are holes put in the vents. I don’t see how it could have been a big deal. Or once you start peeling it
⏹️ ▶️ John and you realize what you’re in for, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s all I can do every time I go over there is to stop trying to pick one of those little things that pick. And of course, as you pick it out and it stretches
⏹️ ▶️ John and it rips, all it does is make the thing so small that you can’t grab it anymore. Like the little tufts and oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst. I think I believe this is the worst thing. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me for from an appliance
⏹️ ▶️ John unpacking experience. I if I had bought this, I would have returned it immediately. Not that I
⏹️ ▶️ John ever would have bought this anyway. LG, I don’t know what you are thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ John I just. And never mind the fact that if there’s any part of this that gets hot, like the parts that are down near the bottom, it’s going to slowly melt
⏹️ ▶️ John that plastic that’s caught between the seams. Holy cow. I should take if I had better like macro photography
⏹️ ▶️ John skills, I would take a picture of this thing. It’s just it is the worst. So anyway, not a toaster. Terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John vinyl wrapped around the whole thing. Giant thumbs down. Is it a robot? Not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Toaster! Or not. Thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show once again!
Apple Music, 3 months in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so today was it, I believe? It was today, within the last day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two as we record this. The Apple Music Free Trial ended for those of us who are day one adopters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you guys renew, yes or no? I did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. I’m still on the fence, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still use it occasionally. I probably don’t use it $10 or $15 a month worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do use it occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, what about you, John? Did you even do the trial?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. I did the trial and for the most part I was enjoying it. I’ve never used a streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John service before. Casey, you were in the same boat, right? No, no. You used Spotify, right? That’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I used Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’d never used a streaming service before and so just the novelty of like, oh, I can go
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to any song I want whenever I want was interesting. And that part mostly worked and I did look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the recommendations and the little for you section and tried to do some discovery stuff there. I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of enjoyed wandering through their playlists and laughing at their playlists. I did discover Lana Del Rey,
⏹️ ▶️ John who I had never heard of before, through these lists. What I did when I discovered an artist that I like
⏹️ ▶️ John is I just bought songs because I didn’t want to just say, oh, add these to my collection and then have
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out later if I didn’t renew. So anyway, I just found the songs and I bought them the old-fashioned way, like
⏹️ ▶️ John for $1.29 each. And so now when I didn’t renew Apple Music, all those
⏹️ ▶️ John songs were still there. And I didn’t renew, not because I didn’t like it, it’s just because I didn’t like it, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, like $15 a month worth. Like it was not working out economically speaking for me because
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like a way to discover music, but realistically speaking, you can discover
⏹️ ▶️ John music, you can search for it anywhere, you can use some other streaming service, you can just ask
⏹️ ▶️ John friends and then go illegally download a song and then buy it when you find the artist that you like. Like there are
⏹️ ▶️ John other ways to do music discovery Apple Music. And Apple Music wasn’t great,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wasn’t bad either. I don’t know. I kind of like the idea that I could play whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John I want whenever I wanted. It’s just a little bit too expensive for me. The
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs that everyone complained about, I didn’t get hit by any of those, but I was wary of them always. Mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my music collection doesn’t suffer from the things like, poor Jim Dower Rampo has got like 50 versions of the
⏹️ ▶️ John same song from different albums, and Apple Music gets all confused. I generally don’t have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I do have lots of copies of the same song, they’re like from CD rips and I named them differently and iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John is not confused by them because it can’t make heads or tails of them. So just going by my metadata, which is all distinct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and Apple music really just maybe it’s because helping is like I said, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John early on when we were talking about the service just doesn’t have enough of the obscure stuff that I like. Like it’s it’s selection of
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s selection of mashups for example is not great because most of those are illegal and
⏹️ ▶️ John its selection of video game music is not really that great or movie soundtracks it’s a little bit better with but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I would like to continue to do it but I’ve just I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John justify the cost I almost did it I almost said you know what I’m you know I like it I do like it
⏹️ ▶️ John but just I just look at the price and I say I do not like it $15 a month worth I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I like iTunes match $25 a year worth easily so I’ll just keep renewing that until they cancel the program and that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be sad. But no, I didn’t renew it but through no real fault of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music. I tried Spotify back in the day. I’m just not… the way I listen to
⏹️ ▶️ John music just doesn’t lend itself to getting a lot of value out of streaming services because I’m very particular and I want to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John pick the songs that I like and occasionally I want to go out into the wider world, find new songs or new artists I like and I just
⏹️ ▶️ John bring them back to my collection and I listen to them there. So, sorry Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music, but, you know, and it was a little bit annoying when it was expiring, because it kind of let me still use the UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it kept bringing up this dialogue that says, Apple Music is expired. I’m like, well, fine, hide it from the UI for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why do I have to go on iOS and say, show Apple Music, yes, no. Once it’s expired, stop showing it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Anyway, they’re just trying to get me to resubscribe, but I’m glad I had successfully done,
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out how to stop the auto-renew, because a few times I was paranoid about that. Does auto-renew really off? Is this going to
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-renew? You know, it didn’t auto-renew. Everything was fine. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that incredibly easy or clear, but I don’t know. I think Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the whole is, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this bad, but it’s kind of like Apple’s Surface, where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really tried to have this no compromises, everything all in one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iTunes and your local music and iTunes Match and Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and throw in the Kinect thing, I don’t know if anybody’s using that, like all the social stuff. So they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw all this stuff into one product and the usability, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suffered tremendously, first of all. Even if everything worked properly all the time, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t, but even if it did work properly all the time, it is a design disaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really, really hard to use, to figure out, to know what mode you’re in and where your music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is and whether you have your music or not. It is really tough. of that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s just that it’s a really big problem to be solved and no one could have designed it well but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they also didn’t design it that well like it I think I think it could have been designed better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even in the best of limitation it wouldn’t have been great just because the problem is too weird and complex to cram into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good design but it is very confusing it does have a lot of functionality but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard to find it and it’s very unreliable in my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing playing songs off of it like I’ll play through a whole album and every third or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fourth track will either be skipped or it will stop in the middle and then it’ll advance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next one. Like it’s very unreliable for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular? No, that’s on my desktop at home.
⏹️ ▶️ John See I didn’t have that problem. Like I tried it over cellular a few times and I’m always in these
⏹️ ▶️ John zones where I get like one dot on my stupid cell signal so I blamed it on that but desktop it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less worked for me. I haven’t had any big delays, the songs start playing immediately, never skipped, never Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just lucky. I’m obviously not a heavy user, and I have heard people reporting what you said. But that’s the thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are largely, or in this case, primarily a server-side
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenon. Depending on what the weather is like in iCloud, if it’s bad weather
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re trying to do it, it’s a piece of crap and nothing works. And if it’s good, again, it goes back to the bits on your disk
⏹️ ▶️ John are the same as the bits on my disk. But depending on what the weather is like in Apple Server Farm that day, it could just totally
⏹️ ▶️ John not work and be a piece of crap. And then when I do it, everything could be fine because it’s a different time. And you know, the servers
⏹️ ▶️ John are responding now. They’re actually, you know, or maybe I’m getting different ones because it’s like, you know, you IP
⏹️ ▶️ John routing for a different CDN or whatever the hell it is. It’s that’s that’s the frustrating and inscrutable
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about cloud services. It’s like it’s not just one thing that you can get your hands on. It’s it really is more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it’s and unfortunately, like this is exactly the kind of problem where Apple historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has done very badly. They really aren’t as good as the other tech giants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at making sure that things that are dependent on internet infrastructure and CDNs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything being different in different places, making sure that works well for the most number of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple traditionally is not very good at that. Netflix does it way better. Amazon and Google do it way better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook, I think, is their own universe over there. They do it fine. I mean, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just seems like this is the kind of thing that Apple does not do very well, and they haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an insidious problem because you can imagine complaining to like an Apple executive like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to use your thing and it didn’t work or whatever. And they could
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, I’m totally going to fix that for you. That’s unacceptable. I’ve got to have that work. And so maybe they’ll try it themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will probably work. And they’ll go back to the team and they’ll be like, this person said this thing happened and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. And they’ll be like, well, you know, what are you talking about? Everything’s fine. Like, it’s always fine
⏹️ ▶️ John when you look like after the fact. And if it was just bad weather that day, they’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re not, if you’re not really obsessive about metrics and
⏹️ ▶️ John measuring the actual experience of all of your users, it’s very easy to convince yourself and others inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the company that everything’s fine because look at our uptime. It’s like this number of nines and we are
⏹️ ▶️ John always up and we’re always responding and our response times are good and so on and so forth. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the end user experience? Maybe your servers are up, but maybe your network routing is messed up, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John for some point there was some corrupted CDN that was giving bad data that was causing the thing to repeatedly retry
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. If that stuff isn’t visible to you, you can think everything is great. You can think
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that you’re measuring are great, every time an executive gets angry and checks for
⏹️ ▶️ John him or herself, everything is fine. But then when you go to the engineering team, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you try to tell them what the problem is, like, well, show me, show me what’s wrong. and every time an Actable executive does
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it works great, right? Or maybe it doesn’t work for a second, but they try it again and it works. And like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess everything’s fine. It’s so easy to convince yourself that there’s nothing that needs to be done because
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have the same experience that someone else had, or you have it for a second and then it gets better. And it’s like, well, I guess this
⏹️ ▶️ John is fixed forever. I never need to look at this again. It’s server-side stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to have a different philosophy than you do with making products. Because making products, you look at them, how they come off the line, and they measure
⏹️ ▶️ John return rates and stuff, I think they have a handle on how to figure out whether they’re making quality products in that way But
⏹️ ▶️ John for service I stuff I think they just don’t have I feel like if they had the metrics
⏹️ ▶️ John They would be improving more rapidly. Whatever metrics they have are Convincing them that things
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t as bad as they are and maybe the only one they care about is like in the end I don’t care about this crap I like how about
⏹️ ▶️ John is customer sat right customer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey satisfaction if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the high 90s and everything’s fine And then I just get back to success hides problems because there are lots of things that are awesome about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and iOS devices and we all love them. But that can hide the fact that as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, and I think as we all kind of feel, they’re a little bit behind everyone else in the cloud stuff in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of reliability, not a lot. It’s not a piece of crap. It does. It works, you know, most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. In fact, the vast, vast, vast majority of the time it’s like, but when it doesn’t work, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John just so infuriating. And you can only do that a certain number of times before
⏹️ ▶️ John people are like, you know what, I’m just going to use Dropbox because Dropbox failed me once in the three
⏹️ ▶️ John years I’ve used it and this has failed me once in the one year I’ve used it Therefore you are bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you mean once in the year? We have five nines. We’re blah blah blah it’s like yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox seems more reliable and I Don’t know. That’s that’s the world of server-side. It’s tough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s to come back to why why not renew Apple Music for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my case anyway I loved the Siri integration. Being able to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Siri, play such-and-such album or play songs by such-and-such artist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was awesome. Really, really liked it. I also kind of liked being able to say, you know, I really like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey album, just treat it as though I own it. And I know that’s a very polarizing approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some people love that. Some people hated it. I liked it. But what I kept coming back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to was I just didn’t care for the way in which you find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music within iTunes. And I know it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious to complain and moan about iTunes, and so I’m not going to go on about it, but suffice to say, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really didn’t care for the interface in iTunes. And I really like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify’s UI. I mean, it has its own problems for sure. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I wanna find and play a piece of music in Spotify, it’s very quick and very easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I found an Apple Music on both the Mac and on iOS. Maybe it’s just, I think differently. Maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is another example of Twitterific versus Tweetbot. You know, in that sense, I come down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, in the Tweetbot camp, Twitterific is somewhat inscrutable to me. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in this case, I come down in the Spotify camp. It doesn’t mean that Spotify is by necessity better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, it works better for my brain. And so that’s why I’m not renewing. Um, plus I’m kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DJ for the house. So I didn’t need to worry about family things. Aaron very rarely listens to music that isn’t on the radio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, and, and beats one was not her thing. So that’s why I did it, but there’s certainly a lot to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like with Apple music for sure, and I don’t want to lose sight of that because there’s, it is pretty damn magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say play songs by you know Bill Withers or something and next thing you know you’re listening to some pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty good music so there’s stuff like just wasn’t for me
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the aesthetics of Apple music better than Spotify that the one time I tried Spotify maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John six months ago for an extended period I don’t know if it was their their weird icon
⏹️ ▶️ John or the color or the way the UI looks it just looked like it was like a weird non-native web so I I guess all
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff in iTunes is webby stuff anyway. It just, taste-wise, it seemed,
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t match my taste as well as the Apple Music stuff does. Functionality-wise, it was fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it seemed a lot like I was using, like, I don’t know, like a weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like a GUI made with Linux or something. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it didn’t look right, it didn’t fit, and
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it was not pleasant to look at. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was always stuff is always pleasant to look at, but a lot of it I would struggle to find the UI or I’d say like all
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got is a big giant play button on this recommended playlist for me. It would be nice to have more functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John here until I click into it or whatever. But I thought whoever did like the sort of it’s basically web design. Whoever did the web design for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Music did a pretty good job. They have a lot of nice artwork and most of the things they
⏹️ ▶️ John present you have. I’m always surprised the amount of sort of custom artwork they have available for artists and playlists
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. They did a lot of work to basically add graphics for
⏹️ ▶️ John even the most obscure artists, not just album art, but also background images,
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of the artists and stuff like that. And color themes and all the other stuff they do. It’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John something inside iTunes that I think looks nice, which is a nice change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Any other thoughts, Marco, or are you good?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m good. I mean, I’m going to keep using it because I do like when I want to go explore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and find new artists I do like being able to go and play their entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album straight through or at least most of the songs or something you know the first half of most of the songs before they die
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cut out that part is very frustrating but but I do like the idea of being able to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through an entire album before I buy it that being said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just so half-assed like the whole all of Apple music is so half-assed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I should probably try something else instead. And ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, Apple Music has really destroyed the iOS music app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It hasn’t done as much damage to desktop iTunes. Desktop iTunes I can still use my way and it mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t get in the way. If canceling my membership to Apple Music would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restore the iOS music app to the way it was before, I would do it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heartbeat. know it seems like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music is here to stay and it’s going to keep taking prominence in Apple’s stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because it is an important business interest they have. So the business needs of Apple Music are going to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco influencing the direction of music and music integration on all of their platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve shown repeatedly that they’re very very happy to destroy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes and iOS music app usability in the name of promoting the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing they’re doing in music and right now it’s Apple music and that’s that’s probably gonna be the thing for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I wish things were better there I I wish either that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t destroy it in the name of Apple music or that just Apple music was was better than it is and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe over time it will get better I hope it does
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re still right for as we talked about when Apple music was announced we’re still right for a photos like
⏹️ ▶️ John simplification unification of music they’re close to it now right there they’re they’re lurching towards with
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes match and Apple Music and this whole, you know, they’ve done a reasonable integration of like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you sign up for Apple Music, you have the access to all this music. And you can say whether you like it or not. And like Casey said, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can add it to your collection. Now it’s like your music and you can actually also still buy it so that if you like I did, so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you unsubscribe, Mountain music, these songs don’t go away because you actually bought them, but you discover them through Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re close. It just doesn’t need to be 17 different plans all integrated with each other just needs to be one unified interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John where every single song in the in the world is either part of your music, part of your
⏹️ ▶️ John music that you own, or go like, I mean, it’s basically conceptually the same as what it is now. Like, I’m just describing
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what the situation is now, but it’s complicated now because it is, there’s iTunes with nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s iTunes Match, which you pay for separately, and there’s Apple Music, which you pay for separately. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John are separate tabs that you go to that are specific to Apple Music, then there are ones that are just your music, then there’s a hybrid. Like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not subscribed to Apple Music anymore, but I still have the hearts next to my things, and I can click on them, and it encourages me. It says,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, click on more hearts because that will tell us what kind of songs you like. I’m like, you’re not gonna recommend anything to me anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m unsubscribed from Apple Music. And there’s still iTunes, oh, I forgot about iTunes Genius. There’s still iTunes Genius, so maybe is the genius
⏹️ ▶️ John using the hearts? That’s still there? There’s a lot, I don’t know. There’s a lot of crap in there. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got all the functionality. It just needs to be like, you know, history eraser button, clean
⏹️ ▶️ John slate, and say, okay, we’re finally admitting that music collections live in the cloud like photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John We keep the canonical copies. You can tell your Mac to download all of them. Like basically what they did with photos only was much, much better
⏹️ ▶️ John performance, please. And fewer bugs. But like, they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John conceptually, they have everything that they need. They finally agreed that the files on your disk aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the canonical copy that they can kind of do, you know, iTunes match, iTunes in the cloud, matching things, and they just need to
⏹️ ▶️ John get better about like the sort of keeping track of everything they did. Hey, we found this
⏹️ ▶️ John file on your computer on this date, and this was the file, and we’re never gonna get rid of it, and we’re gonna preserve it forever. But by the way, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John would like to replace it with this DRM free 256 kilobit blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah song you can but if we did the wrong matching for us tell us and you can get your old one back like I feel like anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s used any of these features can spec out everything that they want and it’s a massive simplification if you just say
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not seven programs and 15 features this is one thing they should have just called it Apple music just like it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John photos or whatever it’s one thing and there are different things that you can pay for for different services
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is completely unified and it’s just like a cloud based music library
⏹️ ▶️ John with streaming features and all those stuff. So I don’t know if that also has to come with an iTunes rewrite. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if that has to come with a back end rewrite as they slowly unify, you know, iTunes genius, iTunes match and all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff. But I think we are going in the right direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John We are in a transitional phase now.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been a huge shaving nerd before. I’ve used double-edged safety blades from Feather and all
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Loves
⏹️ ▶️ John real-time follow-up you can get rid of what Apple calls loves
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not likes because like is not passionate enough for a company like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple loves music
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Facebook has
⏹️ ▶️ John a trademark on likes or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway I think any cute loves music
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah so in iTunes preferences under the general tab and preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a pop-up menu for ratings you can pick stars loves or stars and loves so I guess I can go to it and change it back to
⏹️ ▶️ John stars and not see the loves anymore but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait what’s the difference oh the Stars are the one through five, I see. Yes, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the loves are the hearts. And the hearts are relevant to Apple Music. I was doing that when I was
⏹️ ▶️ John going through their playlist and saying, well, I like this, I like that. And so it can recommend songs for you. And it encourages you, says,
⏹️ ▶️ John good, keep clicking those hearts, because that lets us know what you like, and we can make better playlists for you. But now that I’m not subscribed
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple Music, it’s not going to be making any more playlists for me, unless iTunes Genius is still in there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it probably isn’t. I always disabled iTunes Genius, because it always made iTunes either crash or gobble up memory
⏹️ ▶️ John until memory was exhausted on my machine, which was always fun. And it would just, I’d watch it in the process thing, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would grow by like a gigabyte a minute, right? And that has bad effects after not
⏹️ ▶️ John too many minutes. And the only way to get it to stop back in the day was for me to just
⏹️ ▶️ John deactivate Genius. So I’ve had it off everywhere. Like every time I launched iTunes, it’d be like, trying to send Genius data. I’m like, no, stop,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do that. Whatever it is you’re doing, you’re not going to do it well, stop. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes is confusing.
iPhone 6S impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway moving on so I received an iPhone success
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Aaron received a iPhone success Marco I presume you and Tiff both received
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone successes. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. That makes everybody in the world except John. That is correct
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna have one in the house. Eventually. My wife’s gonna get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just think of all the things you could be forced pushing in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I Get to try one at work. I was excited by it. This is this is the big story
⏹️ ▶️ John I think every now that everyone has their successes you guys have it and you know everyone else in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John who ordered On day one has their thing The word on the street is
⏹️ ▶️ John that 3d touch. Please don’t call it force touch anymore is the bees knees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Would agree with that With an asterisk. I think it’s very cool. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be even cooler The problems I have with 3d touch the biggest one is I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget that that’s a thing and so I don’t think to try it it. And the other problem is a lot of third party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps just haven’t embraced it yet, which I mean, it’s not third party developers faults. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely had any time with it so far. But like, when I discovered it in Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just thought it was the most amazing thing ever. And I’ve been 3D touching all the things, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of funny because most of the touch targets in Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that do have a 3D touch affordance are fairly small because they’re text.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like the 3D Touch. I think it’s very, very cool. I’m very anxious and excited to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what third-party devs do with it in the future. And what was very interesting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me was somebody retweeted, somebody else that I retweeted, we’ll put the link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently it’s available via JavaScript as well. So you can do this on the web as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s going to be useful or not, but I just think that’s kind of cool that it’s exposed, whether or not anyone ever does anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I keep, I have a similar problem as you where I keep forgetting that it’s a thing I can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m sure over time that we’ll all get used to it and consider it a really cool shortcut. There is a significant discoverability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue with it, where there’s really no way to tell that something can be forced touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without just pushing all over the place and just seeing what happens. And I kind of worry that it’s going to be a little bit like the early days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Siri, where like we’re going to try it on a bunch of stuff, most of it’s not going to work, and then we’re just going to forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try it again for a while. You know, like that happened a lot with Siri at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it would fail a couple times and you’d be like, well, I guess I’m not gonna try that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even Siri, like I think 3D Touch has the same effect as Siri in that people are like, well, Siri’s
⏹️ ▶️ John messed up and doesn’t do what I want, but I still use it to set timers, but I still use it to set reminders. Like everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John found the one really easy thing they could have Siri do, so maybe people are gonna like 3D Touch everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John not find any new places to use it, but the two places where they do use it, they’re gonna use it there all the time. Siri still can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John start the stopwatch. I know, I know. I also can’t set reminders for, what is it, 10 minutes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever its frequency is, it drives me nuts. Sorry, I can’t set something that frequent. Why, why can’t you do it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, what do you have to be reminded of every 10 minutes? Stir the sauce, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course. Remind me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to stir the sauce every 10
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes. And Siri’s like, sorry, I can’t do that. Like, you don’t care about my sauce, Siri? You
⏹️ ▶️ John just want it to stick? You just want it to burn on the bottom? I’m so glad I asked. So, seriously, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is my use case for it. And so then what I have to do is, in 10
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes, remind me to stir the sauce in 10 minutes. And then it does, and then I gotta set another reminder for the next 10 minutes. And I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John say, I don’t understand how this is better than setting it every 10 minutes. Speaking of iOS things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are, but I guess maybe they’re, the only thing I can think of is like, then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going off all the time and people don’t know how to stop it or whatever. That’s the only logic I can think of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe they’re afraid it’s gonna hurt battery life. I have no idea. Anyway, I had someone today who had a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with their iPhone and wanted to come over and have me look at it and see if I could fix their iPhone. I’m like, oh, what is this
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be? Maybe they got their thing wedged or they’re gonna need their whole machine re-imaged or they’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do an iTunes backup locally and then restore from the backup or force an application to download
⏹️ ▶️ John or do something like that. No, what actually happened is they had triple tapped the home button and
⏹️ ▶️ John enabled voiceover. And they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John All it does is say everything that’s on the screen. It was iOS 6. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I turned that off for them. But yeah, I guess that’s the thinking behind the,
⏹️ ▶️ John not every 10 minutes, but anyway, we’ll circle all you back to 3D Touch. Yeah, I think that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in past shows, the lack of discoverability is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a detriment, especially in the beginning when apps haven’t implemented it so you have to experiment,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, boy, I wonder, you know, the first update comes and they say they have 3D Touch support. I wonder what the hell they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or does this app have 3D Touch support? I’ll just start shoving things. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the benefit is that if you’re not into 3D Touch, my brief experience with the 6Ss
⏹️ ▶️ John of friends that I’ve tried and from talking to people is that if you don’t know 3D Touch exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t bother you. Like it doesn’t get in your way. It is not an essential feature that you have. Like the lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of discoverability is a feature and a detriment. It’s a detriment to people like us who really wanna be like power users and make sure we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using things in the most efficient way. And so we’re going to be shoving our fingers into the screen to find out where
⏹️ ▶️ John we can use it. But for everybody else, if they don’t know 3D Touch exists, it does not bother them at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it is completely invisible. It’s a feature that is a benefit if they know it’s there, and it is not a detriment
⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t know it’s there. Which is the best kind of thing, because I can imagine someone will have a success for like a year, and then someone will
⏹️ ▶️ John show them 3D Touch on the camera, or they’ll do it accidentally once, and be like, wow, that’s great. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the default settings, I was surprised at how hard I had to press. I don’t know if anyone would do it accidentally. The first time
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to 3D touch something, I long pressed it and all the icons started wiggling because I wasn’t pressing hard enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the defaults. I knew it was there. So what is that, three settings? Like soft, medium, hard, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also in the 6S, the Taptic Engine, really like it. Can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really tell you why, I just like it. I feel like it’s a much crisper vibration. I found, I caught myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constantly mashing on like the tweetbot icon on my home screen just to get that do-do-do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I find it so entertaining. I don’t know why it’s the silliest thing in the world, but But I really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Taptic Engine. I think it’s well done It’s worth a little bit of extra weight because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what everyone’s been saying right that that that in the 3d touch Sensors is the added weight over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the six. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some or maybe it could also just be the shell like the shell got thicker and a little bit heavier and stuff So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s not it’s only a handful of grams anyway So I think it’s probably everything but I would imagine the screen is the
⏹️ ▶️ John majority of it because the the Taptic Engine is mostly Air and it’s probably less dense than the battery that it replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s probably true. I did when I first got the phone. I did immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice that it was I It felt substantially heavier. I think that’s unfair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was just heavier enough that I noticed it versus the six Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I haven’t held my six in several days. I I don’t feel like it’s any different at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put the 6S in the Apple leather case that the 6 was in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that seemed to be just fine. It seems a little tighter, but nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey egregious. So thumbs up for 3D Touch, thumbs up for the Taptic Engine.
Live Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live photos, two thumbs as high as I can possibly reach. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s extremely cool. And the thing about live photos that I think is going to be really cool is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at a live photo in a year, or in two years, or in three years. Because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very loyal user of PictureLife, and as with many of these sorts of services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including the Photos app on iOS, if you 3D touch that on the home screen, you can look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the pictures you’ve taken a year ago, or two years ago or six years ago or 10 years ago, if your library goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back that far. And I always love seeing those pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I wake up in the morning, that’s one of the first things I do is go to the Picture Life app and look at those pictures because I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get great memories from them. But there are definitely times that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will look at these pictures and have no frigging idea why I took that picture or what it was of. And granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live photos doesn’t guarantee that that problem will be fixed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it certainly helps. And seeing a picture of Declan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just kind of sitting there looking adorable, but then giving it a little push
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and seeing the context of that picture, it’s just genuinely magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I, and I love it. And the problem I have with live photos is that I love it so damn much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it almost makes me give pause to picking up my beloved Olympus, a micro four thirds camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don’t want to give up on that context on these pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aren’t you annoyed by the low frame rate and low resolution? Not really. You will be in a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, absolutely. I will. But today, no. And I think it’s because I understand that we just, well, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say that we just don’t have the grunt to be able to do all that at once, but, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, in a decade I will be annoyed by it, but I would probably still just appreciate having that context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over having no context at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I think it’s maybe the grunt, but probably even more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a factor is the size. If they had, you know, if they cranked up the size, cranked up the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate, assuming this was technically possible, um, cranked up the quality of the compression or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you know, people take a lot of pictures. If you turn all those pictures into three second videos, that really adds up, especially on 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabyte phones. Um, yeah, I think that has to be a factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just thinking of like when my kids were born and babies and stuff, I was recording them
⏹️ ▶️ John on mini DV tapes on my camcorder camcorders in standard death
⏹️ ▶️ John and they look awful. I mean like that’s just, you know, my childhood pictures are like
⏹️ ▶️ John in 16 millimeter or whatever, eight millimeter or whatever, whatever size film as in, you know, video
⏹️ ▶️ John film type stuff was. So yeah, you can’t help that that’s gonna be, you know, his ways. But the thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John live pictures is it’s going to be a gorgeous 12 megapixel photo surrounded
⏹️ ▶️ John by really low resolution sub 30 frame rate
⏹️ ▶️ John video. So, yep, better than nothing and kind of neat. But actually, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m wondering how you decide, is it just a toggle on off, like do live pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, or is it on a per shot basis? How do you decide what to make live pictures, or do you even have that choice?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in settings, I think there’s a general Is it even available setting if memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s just like HDR, where it’s a thing you push on during the capture screen. And you can turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on, you can leave it on, or you can turn it on and off shot by shot. But it works just like HDR does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s what I was driving at is that there’s a little kind of like button on the heads up display in the photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that will let you toggle it on and off. But I could have sworn I had seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there was a live photos. I guess I’m crazy. I’m looking now and I don’t see it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that I’d seen just a general, can you do a live photo, yes or no, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings app. I think I’m wrong. And what I was gonna say is what Marco just said, that as you’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a photo, as you’re in the camera, at the very top, there’s what looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost like a target. I’m not really sure why this is the live photos icon, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the top dead center and that turns live photos on and off.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what do you do? Do you have it on all the time or do you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, no, it’s on all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think also, by the way, I think I saw this on the web, I haven’t tried it myself, that even if you take everything in live photo
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, you can selectively, is this right, decide that after you’ve taken the live photo,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just want it to display as a regular photo in your collection?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like it’d be a simple thing to do, it’d basically just saying, just show the picture, ignore the live photo-y part of it, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John it was recorded. I don’t think it deletes the live photo-y part of it, I think it just toggles it off. Either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like auto HDR and other settings that are up there in the weird swipey
⏹️ ▶️ John interface in the Apple camera. I imagine people are probably gonna either have live pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John on all the time or turn it off, especially in the beginning. If they turn it on all the time and they fill their stupid 16 gigabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John phones with hundreds of tiny videos, then maybe in their consultation
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Apple genius and their frustration, it’ll come up and say, well, one way you can save space is to
⏹️ ▶️ John not do all these live pictures every time. Or maybe people will find it annoying. Because here’s the other aspect of live pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m speculating about because I’m not using a phone that has them. If you have it on all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is the high potential for situations when taking photos of adults where the before
⏹️ ▶️ John and after three seconds of video is not flattering. And not that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it, but I mean, some people are weird about having the picture taken at all. You wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John capture the instant when they’re smiling, the instant before and after when they’re making a weird face. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not like kids where they’re cute all the time. Like maybe they’re not happy that you have those one and a half
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds bracketing the reasonable picture, right? So I wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s also gonna be like a social issue. If you have live photos on all the time, are people gonna be wary
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re taking pictures of them that they don’t just have to be pleasant and smiling for an instant, they have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure that they’re not making a weird face three seconds on either side. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, yeah, you make a fair point, but I think in the end of the day, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be awesome to be able to, as I keep coming back to, have that context around the photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even if it’s somebody giggling beforehand or making a funny face, in some ways that almost makes the picture better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you have the still life posed picture, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the goofy face that led up to it or what have you. I don’t know, Marco, you haven’t said much about it. What do you think about all this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, Tiff sent me my first received live photos today. She and Adam, she went to pick him up from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school and they were out playing in a muddy baseball field near our house and she sent me a live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo of Adam stomping on a giant mud puddle. And it was pretty cool to watch. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinda got it then. I was like, oh, this is kinda nice. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t a video. I mean, it was a very, very short video clip with a photo that previewed it, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So an actual video would have done a way better job of showing the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that if it was intended to be in motion you know but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot like the like the debate between like you know you were saying between using the iPhone camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus using your fancy mirrorless and you know when when you have when you have your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone camera versus some other type of camera one thing that is relevant that is important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like you know what are you gonna actually use people say like you know the camera that you have with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you is the most important camera like what are you actually use like if you’re actually going to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a picture and think about it and get out your mirrorless camera great it’ll be way higher quality than what you can get with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone but if you you know the fact is you’re not gonna have all the time and so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better off not missing a moment and just capturing it with something rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than waiting until you have the better camera out to capture it and so with live photos I think it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a similar kind of thing where it’s like yes you are better off switching over to video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode and capturing a 4k video if what you want is to capture this moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in time in a moving format like video an actual intentionally shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video is going to be better at that for them for most cases but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with live photos on you can kind of you can get like half of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the benefit of a video with every picture without really having to think about it without having to choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mode so that I think you’re gonna get a lot more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many moments where you want to take a picture and then like you know afterwards like oh I wish that was it I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a video of that also like that happens a lot and so this does solve that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t I don’t think it’s the best implementation there’s a number of implementation details that I that I would nitpick about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The quality is a big one. The fact is it’s good enough when you’re looking at it on a phone and that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how most people are looking at most pictures these days which is unfortunate because as technology gets better, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones get bigger, as screens get better, these might not age very well as compared to what they could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they were higher resolution or and especially higher frame rate would be nice. But you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I assume we will solve that over time. I really hope that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low resolution and low frame rate were decided for technical reasons of like this is what the sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do rather than we don’t want to take up more space on our 16 gig phones that we keep selling. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that was the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel as bothered by the low frame rate nor the low resolution. I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with both of you. In a perfect world it would probably be better to have both but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just really doesn’t bother me. In fact I would almost goes so far as to say that part of the charm of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s really a picture that has a little motion around it. And I think you hit the nail on the head,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, that if you’re trying to catch motion, a live photo is not the right way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A live photo, like I was saying before, is to capture a single photograph that gives you a little bit of context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around it. And if you really want to capture video, again, I couldn’t agree more that the right way to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to capture video. But I think the low frame rate, and even to a lesser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree the low resolution is kind of I don’t know adorable in its own way because it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of It’s kind of janky and in a kind of fun way. I don’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably sounds really contradictory But I kind of like it
⏹️ ▶️ John like Instagram and the filters you want to look like old 70s type photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, except that you don’t have the high-res original saved to your camera roll. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John And also it’s it’s not it’s not harkening back to any real past that actually existed unless you’re considering
⏹️ ▶️ John like remember what video looks like in 1990 digital video is low frame rate and crappy race
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost vine like like when you watch it it’s almost like a vine I mean it’s it’s a lot shorter and that’s noticeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the benefit of it you can kind of loop it a couple times like it is kind of viney and I kind of I like
⏹️ ▶️ John did you know this is an OS feature I was messing with my thing the other day I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John was in Twitter if it maybe and I was swiping my finger on the screen when an animated gif was playing and you can scrub
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth from the GIF. Is that an OS double feature for displaying GIFs in Safari or is that
⏹️ ▶️ John a an app feature? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t think so. You can go you can it isn’t just pausing it you can actually go back and
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah no I move my thumb back and forth and we go forward back forward but you know it was a neat way to do it anyway yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John that is another that kind of that’s not really an aesthetic that’s an accidental aesthetic.
⏹️ ▶️ John GIF animations that someone should do a PhD thesis if they haven’t already about GIF animations
⏹️ ▶️ John how how we got to this point because like the history of GIF, the dawning of GIF
⏹️ ▶️ John resolutions, the dormant phase and then having it come roaring back because every single freaking browser could play it. It’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? I’m done with dealing with embedded video or flash. I’m just going to do everything as GIF. But it’s 256
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. Doesn’t matter. I’ll use a different 256 every frame of animation. But they’re huge. Doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter. They play everywhere and that’s all that matters is it plays everywhere and it’s just this incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John backward, stupid, archaic format that nevertheless swept across the internet like a fire
⏹️ ▶️ John in the plains filled with dry grass and now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we’re kind of stuck with it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John just think, in an alternate universe where Apple was more a jokey company, there would be animated
⏹️ ▶️ John GIFs surrounding your 12 megapixel photo. So thank goodness for small favors, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John At least it’s only a low frame rate H.264 video instead. So anyway, the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important question that you guys might not know the answer to is, What’s the default? You get an iPhone 6S out of the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is live photos on by default or off by default? I believe off. That’s kind of a bummer because I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, this is a, I mean I guess it’s easy to turn on, but I don’t know how many people know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the, I think it’s not particularly intuitive the whole weird swipey interface to, to you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John going from videos to photos and turning auto HDR on and off. I’ve seen a lot of people be confused
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. I know how it works. I’ve accidentally switched modes a few times and had to, you know, take that extra second to
⏹️ ▶️ John switch back and I find it frustrating. I don’t really like that UI. But it’s kind of a shame Live Photos isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John on by default. Right, neither is 4K video by the way. That’s good, that shouldn’t be on by default. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well if you really want it, you have it. But this is like a, they’re gonna have TV ads for this that I’m never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Maybe they already do have TV ads for this. Showing hey, Live Photos, this is cool. Like people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people with babies and teenagers will love this. Adults who don’t want their pictures taken
⏹️ ▶️ John might not love it so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re gonna sit there with your dead photos and not enjoy all the fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. You’re dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that would have been the political way to do it. We’re not going to call ours
⏹️ ▶️ John live photos. Everything else is a dead photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We’ll call them feature photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Feature photos. Good grief. Real time follow up, the GIF thing you were talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Jelly has said in the chat, and as I confirmed by using his wonderful app, GIFwrapped,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is not a system thing. That must have been a Twitterific thing. Thanks for watching.
Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Touch ID, super fast in the new phones. I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go so far as to say instant. I feel like most people that I’ve heard talk about it have said it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so fast, it’s instant. And I wouldn’t say that. I mean, it is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really freaking fast, noticeably faster and so fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I am extremely pleased by it every time I use it. But I wouldn’t say instant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One thing I did wanna say though, very quickly about that is I found an odd behavior and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be curious if those who are listening have heard this as well. Feel free to tweet at me. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry about John and Marco. I had my iPhone plugged in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my new success, plugged into the wall via, I believe it was an iPad charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and extension and then both Apple and not Apple USB to lightning cords.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for whatever reason, I couldn’t get my touch ID to work. I couldn’t get it to work, couldn’t get it to work. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried relearning several different fingers, couldn’t get it to work, couldn’t get it to work. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, it wouldn’t even relearn the damn fingers. And I was starting to get really bummed out because I thought, man, I’ve got a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lemon. And then for whatever reason, I unplugged my phone. I don’t know what possessed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to do this. And everything started working instantly. I didn’t think much of it because that was the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I’d had it happen. And then earlier tonight, Erin had the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem on her phone, which is also a success. And I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s this particular charger, I don’t know if it’s gross power coming into our house, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so, but who knows. But one way or another, this is two times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that we’ve had this issue where Touch ID just would not recognize our fingers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until we unplug the phone. So I don’t know what that could be, but if you did have that experience, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to hear about it, so tweet me at Casey Liss. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s new cord protection plan, subtly discouraging you animals using
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your phones while they’re plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John this is why your cords get destroyed. Mm-hmm. At least that’s one possible theory
⏹️ ▶️ John as I continue my streak of never having broken a 30-pin or
⏹️ ▶️ John a lightning cable in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve broken some 30-pins. I don’t know that I’ve broken a lightning though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting worried about our couch charging cable. It’s the end is starting to like bunch up like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it meets the stress boot is starting to like wrinkle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a lot of pictures of that
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you use it ever use it plugged in when you’re there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually don’t but Tiff and more importantly Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Kids destroy everything. My son has bent the like he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got an iPad 2 that he uses and picture this way put the headphone into
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPhone 2 put an Apple earbud headphone to an iPhone 2 and then slam it on the ground headphone and
⏹️ ▶️ John down. So the headphone is bent now like it still works but if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the headphone and it is bent just at the part where it goes into the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does not a good look. This is the kind of stress. And the smart cover is slowly delaminating too. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, kids destroy everything. That’s no good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything else on Touch ID? Mark, you were pretty effusive about it. And I mean, not that I’m not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but would you say I am being ridiculous? Or would you say that it’s damn near instant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not quite instant?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree with you. I wouldn’t say instant. It also depends a lot on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how precisely it recognized it. It seems like if it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really solid match, I think it can recognize it faster than if it kind of has to think about it for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the claim that Apple makes, which is that it’s about twice as fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d say that’s accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree with that. Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m poo-pooing it. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely way, way, way faster. I had read or heard some of the early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rumblings about it as being like instant and it is instant, it is not, but gosh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is close. And I love it, I really do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Related to that is this, these are the links I put in here, the Daniel Jokic thing about how Siri is always listening.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was, we knew this from the keynote and I think people were looking at Apple tech stocks or whatever, anyway. The
⏹️ ▶️ John M9 chip is related to Siri and people were asking, why, how does that M9 chip that tracks
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re stepping or whatever, how is that related to Siri? All this gets down to
⏹️ ▶️ John having features on your phone constantly doing something, constantly sensing
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside world, whether it’s sensing whether you’re shaking the phone up and down or sensing whether you’re saying, hey Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, without killing your battery. So that means you can’t have the main CPU and the big
⏹️ ▶️ John beefy CPU, GPU, RAM, everything big combination running all the time or waking up every
⏹️ ▶️ John two seconds to say, did the user say, hey Siri? Did the user say, hey Siri? That kills your battery. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kill us for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe I’ll have to bleep it. Seriously, people just turn this feature off on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or give you can you give your phone a different name yet? There’s not a thing you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t well the success actually does like a voice training thing where it went during the intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up after it’s when it has to enable Siri. It forces you to actually train
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it kind of teaches you to say hey Siri in your own voice and it like forces you through this process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now it it seems to be matched to your voice. In practice, I don’t know how tightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is matched to your voice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it would be nice if you could rename it. But anyway, that that problem of having a
⏹️ ▶️ John battery powered device always sort of listening, always sensing, but not killing your CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is why the little M9 and the little step counter thing is there. The thing that Apple does is they make dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware with its own little dedicated local buffer. I mean, I don’t know how it looks, it works inside. But I’m imagining
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a super low power chip that It has this one job that just spools crap up and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if it senses something that it thinks is significant, it will then wake up the big CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, hey, by the way, the thing just said, hey, Siri. And by the way, here’s the audio I recorded starting when they said, hey, Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John you take it from here. Like, I’m just entirely speculating about how this actually works. But the bottom line is,
⏹️ ▶️ John custom hardware that it takes way less power than the actual CPU to be sort of the guard,
⏹️ ▶️ John the guard post, like listening, listening for anyone to say, hey, You know counting the steps is even easier
⏹️ ▶️ John because they can just sit there and and tick up a counter and then when the actual CPU Wakes up is like by the way while you were just
⏹️ ▶️ John sleeping over there this many more steps took place or here’s the step data or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John so that is That’s that’s smart use of hardware features like that are coming all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time touch ID is kind of like that I don’t know to what extent it’s already completely independent where the
⏹️ ▶️ John touch ID sensor and it’s a little secure enclave and everything can work entirely Independently of the CPU and then
⏹️ ▶️ John just pass on the information that must be true to some degree just for the security implications But the
⏹️ ▶️ John way you get these things to be more responsive is not like oh, then we need the a10 CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s with you know custom hardware to say the main part of the system is not involved in this process at
⏹️ ▶️ John all This is like a sense organ That you know relays and buffers this information
⏹️ ▶️ John and the faster you can make those little sense organs while keeping them low power the better this is gonna get. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Marcos Peg and get it about twice the speed just like Apple said. If they can do that twice the speed for another
⏹️ ▶️ John two or three years it really will be instant pretty quickly because I don’t think there’s any particular
⏹️ ▶️ John limit on like the sensing. Like once you’re touching it you’re touching it. It’s not as if you need to like it needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to like do this incredibly big computation. You could just dump the raw sensor data out
⏹️ ▶️ John once you’re touching it and then it’s like the processing and the matching or whatever. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they can double it in one year, I’m optimistic that this will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John actually be instant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Anything else on the hardware? I have one other quick thought about the 6S, but anything else on hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How’s the battery been for you? For me, it’s been, I’d say it’s about the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d say it’s about the same, maybe marginally worse, but I also wonder if it’s all in my head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’ve been looking out for exactly that. Right, exactly. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to know. Well, if it’s about the same, that means it’s worse because this is a fresh battery versus
⏹️ ▶️ John your one year old six. Right. So it it should be better than a one year old six. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I mean, it is not dramatically different, but but I wouldn’t I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely not say it’s better. And I’m skeptical that when I say it’s worse, it really honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. It may just be me thinking it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re also playing with your phones more, maybe like you just got the success. you’re forced touching things, the live photos and all that other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. So it’ll probably settle down. But anyway, it being a wash seems reasonable.
Inventory and purchasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My final thought about the success, and I tweeted about this a few days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was interesting to me that anecdotally, based on zero facts whatsoever, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw a lot less kvetching about, oh, my phone wasn’t available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, my phone wasn’t available. I really wanted this in such and such color and such and such capacity and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t available. I did see some of that for the rose gold pretty quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, my recollection anyway, was that by 3.15 in the morning in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the One True Time Zone, which is Eastern Time, a lot of people were already starting to say, oh my God, my thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold out. Oh my gosh. And I didn’t see much of that this year. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in fact, somebody, I can’t remember who it was, said to me, they pre-ordered like two or three days before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first, the launch day, and they were still able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reserve one for launch day. And I just found that surprising. And so I was theorizing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was right before the numbers came out there. Well, maybe they didn’t sell as many, or, you know, maybe it’s just that it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because a lot of these components are similar. And then I got to thinking, well, not all that many of these, of these components are that similar. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, the numbers were through the roof. And I didn’t realize at the time I had to talked about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but apparently the S years are always better. So I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just that Tim Cook’s ops are really getting that much better or, or just, you know, getting more mature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, if you will, but I was impressed by how few inventory problems we heard about with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exception perhaps of the rose gold.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one aspect of that that we have here in the show notes is that the A9 is being made by two different
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturers. I’m not sure if that was the case with the A8, but…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John first time they’ve ever done that. Yeah, so it’s a Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung are both
⏹️ ▶️ John making the A9. And the most interesting thing I think is that they’re both making slightly different A9s. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess they just have different transistor layouts. Maybe they’re actually different sizes, different feature sizes on them
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway we’ll put a link to the chipwork story that they actually opened these things up and sliced open the chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and took a look at the actual little chip that’s inside the package and lo and behold two different things so that
⏹️ ▶️ John helps with inventory you know we talked about like what what is the thing that is most supply constrained on these phones it’s usually the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s hardest to make and that’s usually either something having to do with the camera sensors or something having to do with the cpu
⏹️ ▶️ John gpu system on a chip thing uh and this year looks like they were able to make a lot of them although i
⏹️ ▶️ John i told my wife this hey people aren’t getting getting sold out and you could have just didn’t have to wake up at three a.m. and you could have just walk up in the
⏹️ ▶️ John morning or whatever and she’s like great I’ll be able to get my thing right away and then I went to the Apple website or whatever and it’s like three
⏹️ ▶️ John to five weeks for the model she wanted so maybe that was just a fluke and by the time he does
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it there’ll be plenty of inventory but it’s not it seems like it’s not a bottomless
⏹️ ▶️ John pit it seems like they did demand did actually exhaust supply eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t looked in recent days I’m hoping by the time her contract is up and she goes for her other phone, we can just
⏹️ ▶️ John walk into an Apple store and there won’t be a line of people there and we can just get the phone that she wants.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a 10 terabyte rate array to your computer, it will back up ten terabytes like
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the for my giant nas we We have these three computers, we pay $15 a month, and we have something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven or eight terabytes backed up. It’s a lot between the three computers. She’s a photographer, I’m a geek,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the NAS has all sorts of stuff on it. So it is so good. Their client is good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s native. Here’s the thing, El Capitan came out today. Backblaze works on day one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked through the entire beta. Like it is just there. It works. They’re responsible. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native client. They’re very Mac friendly, very Apple friendly. You can also look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Backblaze files on iPhones and Android phones. You can restore. Let’s say you’re on a trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something or you’re out and you want to get one file off of your computer at home. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do that through Backblaze either through their iPhone or Android apps or through their website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can log into the website and you can just pull one file off. This is so convenient that actually 25%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their restores are just one file like this. It’s really great if you left a file at home and you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to it on a trip or something. If you need everything back, if you have a complete failure, you can order a USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drive with everything on it, or you can download it all from the website. This is a really great online backup.
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John doesn’t review El Capitan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so you mentioned just a moment ago El Capitan, God, I still hate the name, El Capitan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out today. We were discussing before the show that I installed it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the machine that I’m presently recording on, starting at about 7.15 this evening. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started recording at 9 this evening because basically I’m an idiot, but it worked out okay, so I’m a genius.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, initial impressions, already really like the split view,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever they’re calling it for having two apps side by side and full screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I like San Francisco. I feel like every platform I see San Francisco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, my first reaction is, eh. And then over time, I end up really liking it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My site does indeed support pin tabs, which I’m really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about because I had no idea if that was working or not. I didn’t run any of the betas. This is all brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, but so far, so good. I really like it and I did not lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mouse yet but Renz in the chat asked and the mouse jiggle is very creepy and kind of delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all at once. So that’s my initial impressions. Any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey initial impressions from you guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well should we do, is there going to be an official John Syracuse review of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco El Cap on our show or will you kill me for even saying that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t even installed the GM yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, look at you! You really kicked back! I know you’ve graduated and suddenly it’s like whatever man.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s like being spoiler. It’s like my new change in philosophy of trying to be relatively spoiler
⏹️ ▶️ John free for the new Star Wars movies. Whereas with Episode One, I wanted to know almost everything about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I’m trying an opposite approach. So for OS 10, it’s like, you know, I installed the betas,
⏹️ ▶️ John I filled around with it. But I was like, you know what, I’m just gonna do this like a regular person. I see the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ John I installed the betas, I played around with it. But I don’t know everything about the OS. I haven’t been obsessively using it and
⏹️ ▶️ John searching around for it and trying all sorts of things. So I’m going to read people’s reviews. I haven’t even gotten around to reading their reviews yet, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them saved away. I’m going to read reviews and I’m going to learn stuff. And that’s a novel, exciting experience
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to, you know, to find out new things about the US. Um, so I’m looking forward
⏹️ ▶️ John to installing it cause I have used the betas and you know, a lot of my betas are on a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive and a fresh install or on a computer that I don’t use. So it always feels faster because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John with nothing installed everything is faster and snappier but I’m looking forward to performance improvements and
⏹️ ▶️ John the new feature and you know the new fonts and all the other stuff I’m somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John dreading dealing with the system integrity protection stuff but I’m hoping most people have got that stuff worked out
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike Casey I did not rush to install it I did start the downloading today I got
⏹️ ▶️ John about half downloaded I have it paused but I haven’t even updated Skype Skype’s been wanting me to update
⏹️ ▶️ John for months and as Marco talked about with not changing stuff in an audio setup. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why am I updating Skype again? Is there something wrong with Skype now? Is it not working now that I need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Well, there’s kind of always something wrong with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. I know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything is working fine. So I have been saying no, no, no, but I’m going to say yes now,
⏹️ ▶️ John because why would I might update? Because I would imagine that if there’s gonna be any LCAP compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ John differences, like I need to install the latest Skype before I upgrade the OS. I have to go through the whole ritual of making
⏹️ ▶️ John umpteen backups, and then making sure every single one of my apps is up to date for the version
⏹️ ▶️ John that is compatible, and then doing the OS update. It’s not that I dread it. I’m gonna upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, by this weekend, I’ll have all the computers in the house upgraded probably. I’m usually pretty good about these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did the same thing for Mavericks. Everything was fine. And Yosemite,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything was fine. Your mileage may vary. But yeah, I don’t have anything
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly deep and insightful to say about it because I just haven’t used it enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John know those things. But as they come up, I’m sure I will mention them on the show, but don’t be expecting there’s gonna be one episode where I
⏹️ ▶️ John just recite 30,000 words with a review. That’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you miss writing it at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t miss writing it. I missed a little bit having written it. I tweeted, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of weird going to Ars Technica and seeing an OS X review and seeing that it wasn’t mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, it happened, I didn’t need to do anything. And this review appeared in Ars Technica. That’s great,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like magic. You know, it’s like you just go to sleep, you wake up and there’s a review in Ars Technica. How did that get there?
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, people wrote it and that’s how it got there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it kind of like if you go back and visit an old job and you see that there’s just somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing your job and everything just went on without you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s fine. Again, I haven’t read it yet. I looked at it, I saw there’s some good techie parts. One person
⏹️ ▶️ John who tweeted about this that I retweeted said that they’re really enjoying the Ars Technica review including the traditional middle
⏹️ ▶️ John part they only vaguely understand. So I’m looking forward to that. Those are the parts that I enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t enjoy the fact that the terminal examples where they showed terminal text had light text on a dark background.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what happens when you go, when you stop doing it, someone else gets to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John and they get to make the choices and that’s just the price I have to pay, that someone else is making choices about.
⏹️ ▶️ John The aesthetic tiny details of the review, they probably didn’t even put in any references
⏹️ ▶️ John to all my traditional sources, but that’s what happens when someone else writes it. So anyway, I’m looking forward to reading it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking forward to learning things. I’m looking forward to reading all the reviews that I have in there. And I’m looking forward to installing
⏹️ ▶️ John it and trying it out myself. And I’m sure I will have things to say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope so, I really do. Because it is, you know, other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write these reviews now. And other people will always step in. And I’m sure they are good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their ways. But I do miss having it come from you. I do miss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your review. Because what we got was a review, but we didn’t get your review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I read maybe two thirds of the R’s review so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is very good without question. And I think it is, it is definitely done in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spirit of a Syracuser review, but the tone is just different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s to be expected, of course, but the tone is just different and it doesn’t feel the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it used to, just like you were saying, Marco. And I, and I miss that. It’s not a that’s not an attack on the on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who wrote it by any means They did a fine job and god knows I would never have wanted to be the person to follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Syracuse uh, but I Miss that Syracuse atone and that just that kind of flair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that you would put in that I didn’t see in this one
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s like any kind of review type thing I think the thing people may are most familiar with like movie reviews where
⏹️ ▶️ John over time if you you know Read a particular movie reviewer for like years and years and decades
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you agree with the reviewer or not, you start to get a feel for the reviewer as a person. So then you can say, what I
⏹️ ▶️ John know of Roger Ebert, combined with what he said about this movie, lets me know if I’ll like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so having sort of insight into the person
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes like a comfort level, whereas if a new person writes it, you’re like, okay, well I have the review, but I don’t know that much
⏹️ ▶️ John about the person, so how do I how do I figure out what I’ll think of it? I know what this person thinks of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know enough about this person to know if what they think of it is how what they think it relates to what I think of it so
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s you know I understand that of like just you just don’t have the same comfort level
⏹️ ▶️ John with the reviewer because you don’t know you don’t have a model of the inside of their brain yet
⏹️ ▶️ John because you haven’t been reading them for years or decades or whatever but that’ll change
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s plenty of people who have never read anything by me anyway and so I was just another random person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Try trying to do all the little jokes and references and trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep it entertaining. It’s challenging when you’re writing about an operating system. I can tell you like it’s not doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lend itself well to anything except for really bad puns which I tried to avoid mightily like
⏹️ ▶️ John we all know the puns I’m talking about like people like to make I’m not gonna name any particular publications because I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly fine you want to do it you can do it it is an epidemic in the tech industry very sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of simple obvious puns the people just absolutely cannot resist.
⏹️ ▶️ John I resisted them as much as I could. I still did them especially early on I was doing them all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John but as time wore on I’m trying to we used to be trying to keep it light-hearted and keep people engaged
⏹️ ▶️ John in what is usually a pretty dry topic and eventually not even all that exciting when people were much more
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about iOS than OS X. So it’s a it’s a you know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an easy task but you know someone else’s got to do it and someone else is doing it and
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said from skimming through it it looked like it looked like something that I would want to read because it looked like it covered
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the features and it looked like it did get down and dirty into a few specific areas. That’s what I always
⏹️ ▶️ John did. I didn’t cover everything in super depth. It’s just like oh this one feature is actually an interesting feature and let me dive really deep on
⏹️ ▶️ John this one thing. And I was like why you dive why you dive deep on that one thing? You didn’t even talk about this other feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be a complaint I always got. I totally understand that and that’s what the R’s review looks like So I’m looking forward to reading it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s pretty good so far, like I said. So you said that you had run the betas, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you did not run them full time. You ran them on a second partition or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about you, Marco? Did you run the betas?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been running it on my laptop for a few weeks, and I really like it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. Nice. It’s, you know, I don’t use my laptop full time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for me to really say, oh, it’s amazing or oh, it’s terrible in these ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has been perfectly fine for me on my laptop. I’ve run into no issues with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can remember. You know, certainly none that felt like it was because it was a beta before. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been fine. I like San Francisco a lot. I’ve been using iOS 9 all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer, so I was more used to it. But as a font, I like it a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s good. It’s fine. Yeah, I have no complaints so far. But we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I install it on my desktop. I’m a little worried that I know during the beta there were some issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with audio, especially USB audio. And earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was asking the tipster in the chat if that’s been fixed and he said basically no. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little worried about messing with my audio setup. That works by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installing L-Cap on my computer. But I’ve got to install it pretty soon just to keep up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dev tools and everything. I’m going to want to install it fairly soon. So I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just going to install it maybe at point one or maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sooner than that. I don’t know yet. But it seems like, from what I’ve been hearing from people and reading today, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem like there are any massive problems with it. Does that match with what you guys are seeing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen it. Well, that’s not true. Merlin said that 1Password was having issues on his box, but it seems to be working on mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I said in the talking about the reviews in the past and I there was like a couple threads online talking about this like oh
⏹️ ▶️ John OS reviews you know why bother reading them they didn’t tell us about all the problems that are in Yosemite
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that like day one reviews are never going to tell you that they’re just never going to you find them
⏹️ ▶️ John out when millions of people start using it no matter how many like first of all no reviewer that I’m aware
⏹️ ▶️ John of has like a giant lab with every model of Mac and every combination of software and hardware so they can’t do comprehensive
⏹️ ▶️ John testing even Apple probably just can’t test every combination right
⏹️ ▶️ John and so there’s no way a day one review is going to tell you that if you’re reading a day one review to find out what is
⏹️ ▶️ John the long-term compatibility and stability of this going to be like over the next year you there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way to know that it’s not even a way to know whether the GM will work and everyone set up the only way you find that out I mean the public beta is supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be helping with that the only way you find that out is mass massive number of people using it and so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just a job that a a review that comes out on the same day as the US cannot do period.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I long ago gave up basically doing that. If there’s something egregious or if
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if I said this, you know, like leopard, I remember being really flaky, like was
⏹️ ▶️ John always flaky. And even the GM is flaky, and it’s clearly flaky. Like if you get a negative
⏹️ ▶️ John result of I don’t know, I’m using negative, positive, or if you get a result that says there are problems, you can communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John that and like, I’ve never gotten this to work successfully, even in the GM on any of the computers I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably a problem but if everything works fine for you that doesn’t mean everything’s gonna work fine for everybody else all it means is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the problems haven’t yet been discovered so if you’re wary about LCAP
⏹️ ▶️ John wait so the advice I always gave was like wait for the point one if you’re nervous but if you wait for the
⏹️ ▶️ John point one in Yosemite that wouldn’t have solved the discovery D issue either took a long time for them to fix that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d never know what’s gonna happen so if you are nervous at all wait six months read the web you’ll find out if there
⏹️ ▶️ John problems if you don’t wait six months then upgrade with the rest of us and just cross your fingers right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ok thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week cards against humanity Harry’s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back plays 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 It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm. And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin, S-I-R, A-C, USA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental. Accidental. They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcasts,
Post-show: TiVo Bolt
⏹️ ▶️ John We need to talk about the TiVo Bolt. What is that thing? We need to talk about this because-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I know nothing about this because I’ve never owned a TiVo and don’t give two craps about one. So where is there a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent, like, two-second overview?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just go to the link in the show notes. Does it not sit flat? Yes, that is the first thing you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John know about the TiVo. The second thing. The first thing you need to know about the TiVo Bolt is it’s a new box from TiVo. TiVo makes DVRs,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I like them and I’ve owned tons of them and I’m somewhat obsessed with them. Anyway, the TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John Bolt, the second thing you need to know about it is that rather than being a sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of rectangular solid with rounded corners… What is this? It is bent. It looks like a bent
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. Ever so slightly bent so that it does not lay flat and so
⏹️ ▶️ John that the top of it is not flat. It’s, like, it’s bent upwards and so there’s a little space underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s not even symmetrically bent. It’s not bent in the middle. It’s bent, like, two-thirds of the way down. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a stylistic choice. like an interesting type of sculpture or whatever it is a terrible decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not bend things that are gonna go in someone’s AV stack under their TV the only place
⏹️ ▶️ John that can possibly go is on top but realistically speaking you know people are
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna stack stuff on this and it’s gonna look awful people are going to stack it you can’t stop them they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do it and they’re gonna wedge stuff underneath it and they’re gonna put pencils and books or they’re just gonna have everything be tilted and slowly slide off their
⏹️ ▶️ John entertainment centers this is a terrible choice and by the way it’s white a second terrible I know you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John stand out and everything black is better for things to go underneath your TV and your cabinet black is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Standard if you’re gonna have a white one like a console give a choice for black
⏹️ ▶️ John Bent like that is it just I just would love to have been in those meetings when someone’s like but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you understand? It’s distinctive and people were remembered or whatever No, just no just make it flat.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to be able to stack It’s like the ps3 to the same thing like making the George Foreman grill thing
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it I’ve given game consoles a little bit more leeway because like look something’s got to be on the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John your AV stack and If it’s gonna be a game console Maybe has a top loading CD drive
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the old days or whatever you had to do it that way I don’t really give Sony a pass either
⏹️ ▶️ John but only one thing can be on top the ps4 they learned it’s flat You get stackable. This is the first
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the worst box that Tevo has ever made Possibly that
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone has ever made because I’m not aware of anyone who’s ever so egregiously thumbed their nose at the idea of of stackable
⏹️ ▶️ John AVO components. Because it’s not like this is just like a little bit off or whatever. They’re intentionally going, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we screwed you. You can’t, it’s. Got it, anyway, it’s white, the
⏹️ ▶️ John remote is white, it’s ugly. All right, that’s enough complaining about the box. There are other things to talk about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some interesting things related to the Bolt. The features that they’re touting. The first one that I want to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John is SmartSpeed. But they’re not calling it SmartSpeed because Marco would sue them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s not, it isn’t SmartSpeed because they’re, it’s just a speed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they can’t do real smart speed because there’s video and they can’t just skip silence.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right. Because you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch the video part when there’s silence too. But it’s the thing, it just speeds up the video
⏹️ ▶️ John without pitch shifting so people don’t sound like chipmunks. It’s a way to watch things in less time. They say 30% faster. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback mode. So it’s, you know, that’s interesting, that’s useful, not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco novel, maybe in the set-top box space, but like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, it’s the type of thing where you think, why didn’t they have this years ago? Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. Right. sure the ps3 can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously computer play like you know quick time can do it. I’m sure VLC probably has an option somewhere to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in the set top box industry I think that’s pretty pretty unusual so that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I just mentioned it because smart speed like it’s smart sees for your TV so save time watch your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in less time if that’s what you like I would never do that anyway it’s there. is a commercial skipping. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John always had 30 seconds skip and fast forward scan and stuff like that. And now they’re gonna have a button that will let you skip
⏹️ ▶️ John commercials. How does it do that? How does it know where the commercials begin and end? Have they done some amazing machine learning? No, they have a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of humans taking the most popular shows and marking where the commercials are. So you can’t do the skipping
⏹️ ▶️ John feature until the show has aired and TiVo’s legion of actual humans has
⏹️ ▶️ John put in the metadata for commercial start here, stop there, start here, start there. And of course it will only work on the
⏹️ ▶️ John shows they do that for and they’re going to do it for the most popular shows. And I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John the relevant, the stakeholders, as they say in the business world, of advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John and television may be a little bit miffed by this, so this could lead to legal battles and grumbling and who knows what else. But in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy this, and in theory, if you don’t watch the show live, and if you allow,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you watch it the next day or maybe an hour later, I don’t know what the lag is gonna be, you will be able to skip commercials with one
⏹️ ▶️ John button press. At that point, why even make them press the button?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, why not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, I mean, yeah, why? I mean, I think the reality here is that so few people are buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tivos anymore that no one’s gonna even care.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, yeah, it’s possible they won’t care, but you’d be surprised what they care about. But anyway, I buy Tivos, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I care. So I would like to try that feature, even though I’m a 30-second skip wizard by
⏹️ ▶️ John this point. I’m really good at it. That’s why I hate when they’re not responsive, because it throws off my game.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s got that feature. Those are the big things that are, oh yeah, in 4K video, which is mostly irrelevant because
⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing that’s really brought, like, you know, their Netflix client will get 4K from Netflix and you’re recording in 4K and it’s good,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re cranking it up. They’re gonna have to go 4K eventually, so it’s good that they get some practice. Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John how long do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is before their UI is 4K?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, supposedly, almost all, not all, because that would be impossible, almost
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the UI is now in HD. TiVo, for people to know, historically, had a standard
⏹️ ▶️ John definition set of menus and everything, and even long after the TiVo device started recording
⏹️ ▶️ John HD video, the menus were still standard def, and slowly, slowly, more and more, the menus
⏹️ ▶️ John became high def. This year, has high definition come entirely to TiVo? Almost, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re asymptotically approaching an HD user interface, so now only a few screens are standard def, and most
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are high def, which is kind of embarrassing and stupid, but that’s life. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 4K support, where the 4K support matters is that it means that they’re putting in beefier hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John And supposedly this one has more memory, faster CPU, faster video decoding, it can handle 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, these are all good things. I want this to happen. Thumbs up, please, TiVo. If you made a $1,500 box,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would buy it. Like I’m afraid to give you money. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I love TiVo and I just wish it was way faster. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? I don’t understand. I don’t watch maybe as much TV as you do. Aaron and I have maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five or six shows that we watch religiously. But to me, our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really shitty Verizon DVR box is plenty fine. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be the first to tell you, but we are using it to navigate between shows for maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15 seconds any given day. I don’t need the most robust whiz-bang awesome experience. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the way, our menus are entirely and exclusively in HD. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying you’re wrong, but gosh, I don’t understand what could make a DVR so magical that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that it warrants all this money, including a service charge, right, like a monthly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service fee or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, yeah, I buy them out, right? There’s you can you can pay a whole bunch up front and there’s no monthly fee.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I do that because I keep them forever. So there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John monthly fee like I’m, I already pay a lot for these things. And I’d be willing to what I’m saying is to be willing to pay even more
⏹️ ▶️ John that what I’m paying for is the responsiveness to features, you know, like my team
⏹️ ▶️ John has applications like Netflix and Hulu and stuff like that. The The Netflix app, how long does the Netflix quote unquote app take
⏹️ ▶️ John to launch? How responsive is the Netflix? Like when I’m waiting for the Netflix thing on TiVo to launch, which I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John doing by the way, because my Apple TV’s been flaking out to now actually using the Netflix thing on my TiVo. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like waiting for things to launch. Like the iOS app launches faster. Why is it slow on the TiVo? Because the TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John is recording six shows at once and doing a bunch of other things and doesn’t have enough memory and the CPU can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the problem is, I don’t want to wait. I want everything to be instant. I demand it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m willing to pay for it. And so maybe I’m not Tivo’s big customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when we’re navigating to figure out what show we want to watch, that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn instant when it starts playing back. It’s pretty damn instant. How
⏹️ ▶️ John long does the Tivo client take to launch? Or not that the Netflix client take to launch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I don’t have Netflix on my DVR. That’s why I have a Fire TV stick or my Apple TV. How long does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it take to launch on those? I actually haven’t watched Netflix since House of Cards went away. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been a while. I would. for the thing to come up and like to navigate to the thing that you want. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John never usually good about picking up like, oh, play the next House of Cards episode, but I don’t like waiting. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John used to when I was a kid, television was instant because it was all analog and that’s what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, your point is fair and I’m confident that whatever waiting you do is less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the waiting I do, but I just I guess our priorities are just so different and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I mean, that’s what makes the world go round, but I never in my life have I looked at my very crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable issue a Verizon Fios issue DVR and said, you know what, my life would be better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this thing was replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here’s the thing. It’s like one of those things where like, yeah, it’s fine. But if we if I gave you a high end Tivo,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t be able to go back to the other thing because you just get, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey probably right,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if I gave it to you for free, and there was no monetary thing. It’s just much more pleasant. Like, and it’s type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John before you have it. It’s not a big deal. You’re fine. And after you get it, like, it’s not that big of a deal. But would you like to go back to the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one? No, not really. is better. There are plenty of things to annoy about
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo as well. But anyway, the other thing I’m paying for with my big fancy TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that TiVo Bolt doesn’t provide. The TiVo Bolt only comes, as far as I’m aware according
⏹️ ▶️ John to TiVo’s site right now, maybe they’ll expand it out, in a sort of a wimpier
⏹️ ▶️ John model. It’s not their high-end model. So the TiVo Bolt can come with a 500 gig
⏹️ ▶️ John or a terabyte hard drive and four tuners the high-end tivo
⏹️ ▶️ John romeo which is their you know the previous high-end product and still a prime product comes with a three terabyte hard drive and six tuners
⏹️ ▶️ John and mine is like 70 full so i could go you know they make six terabyte drives now the
⏹️ ▶️ John bolt uses a 2.5 inch drive i think which is why they’ve scaled things down but again what would you pay the extra money
⏹️ ▶️ John for i would pay for a six terabyte drive i would pay for two three Terabyte drives sure
⏹️ ▶️ John throw them in there like the hard drives are fairly quiet You know I would pay for an SSD to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it smaller and help you know This is the type of thing I’m willing to pay for do you need six tuners
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes? I use all in is four enough Yeah, probably, but I’d rather have six so the bolt is not
⏹️ ▶️ John their high-end product But right now the bolt has a bunch of features the other things don’t have the skipping
⏹️ ▶️ John the the fast playing mode And you’re skipping they could bring to any of them so the software update could bring that to my
⏹️ ▶️ John model If it doesn’t, I’ll be kind of disappointed because that’s entirely like a metadata service thing and has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the hardware. Maybe my model doesn’t have the hardware support
⏹️ ▶️ John or fast enough innards to do the fast playback thing but I don’t care because I would never use that feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John My Netflix app takes a while to launch and there’s little spinners and I got to wait. Is that ever going to be faster on mine?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably not because the CPU is so wimpy and the RAM is not getting any bigger or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this TiVo Bolt thing is not a replacement for my, like it’s not like I’m, I would never replace it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Storage capacity alone means I would never replace it with this, but I’m assuming the TiVo Bolt inherits the faster CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, video decoder, 4K support, all that stuff. I’m assuming eventually there
⏹️ ▶️ John will be a high-end model of that, and I just hope that it is not bent like this thing, and I also hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not white. Even the remote is white, for crying out loud. I know people like white, I kinda like the white PS4, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have kids, like you should see the crap goes on please just don’t make don’t make the remote white don’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John the box white it would be the only white box besides my Wii and my entertainment center I need everything to be black and I need it
⏹️ ▶️ John not to be bent Teebo
⏹️ ▶️ John excited by the the interesting new features and the increased performance in the increased CPU grunt,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else about it is super annoying to me.