141: Chain-Link-Fenced Garden
29 Oct 2015NAS vs. externals, Google cares about podcasts now, and John teaches Marco what a “sound bar” is.
Episode Description:
- Apple TV and home theater
- Apple's guide to choosing a capacity
- Optical splitter from HDMI
- Marco doesn't know what a "sound bar" is
- Follow-up:
- 5400 RPM benchmarks, charts
- Mac GPUs, heat, and noise
- Dynamic range compression in the new AppleTV?
- Monitor height and VESA-mounting
- Facebook statement on app battery usage
- John's Star Wars tickets
- Apple's earnings call
- Large-storage needs at home: NAS, Drobo, or external hard drives?
- Google Play Music adds podcasts
- Post-show: Apple TV reviews
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Chapters
- Home theater extravaganza
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Follow-up: 5400 RPM disks
- Follow-up: iMac thermals
- DRC in the new Apple TV
- Follow-up: iMac height, stands
- Follow-up: Facebook battery usage
- Follow-up: 3D Star Wars
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- Exciting enterprise solutions
- NAS vs. Drobo vs. external disks
- Sponsor: Fracture
- Google Play adds podcasts
- Post-show: CEC
Home theater extravaganza
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Happy birthday Brady Bala. First things first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did anyone here buy an Apple TV? Now Marco, you got a developer unit, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s correct. And I also bought four more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you being serious? No. Oh, I was like, who are you buying them for? I thought maybe you were like already doing Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are great stocking stuffers, yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit right in there. I actually might end up buying roughly that quantity, depending on, you know, how gifting goes this holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season, but I wanted to at least try it myself first. Once the general release comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and the store opens it up for those apps and I can actually download the apps to it and spend meaningful time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, then I will judge it as a product. But right now, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the developer one. For the people who are curious in the chat, the developer one, I believe, is the 32 gig one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if I were buying a bunch, even if I were buying one today for myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still might not get the 64 because I, you know, just like everyone else has said, I don’t think Apple has really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown us if and why and when we would need the 64 over the 32.
⏹️ ▶️ John think that because you’re not looking at the notes, that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Also, I think, I really am not crazy about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investing more money than necessary further in a 1080p setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I know in the next few years, I will most likely want a 4K setup. So I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna be buying another one of these Apple TVs in a year or two that will support 4K. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t want to dump a whole bunch of money into version one before I even know if I’m gonna use these features. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t see myself installing a bunch of games or anything, so I don’t know. I’m guessing anything more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than 32 would be wasted on me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what’s in this follow-up document, John, that you wanted to talk about with regard to capacities?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, actually, before we get that, I ordered my Apple TV and I ordered the big one. Oh. And Casey, did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, and I’d like to talk about why, but let’s get through this capacity discussion first.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is from Brian Powell, the first one to point to us, to Apple’s website, where they did actually offer a
⏹️ ▶️ John rationale for like, why would you bother buying the 64 or 32? We talked about this on past shows, we
⏹️ ▶️ John had theories, Apple’s explanation matches what was our best guess, which is everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John best guess, which is, if you plan to use your Apple TV, this is right from Apple’s website, primarily to stream movies, TV
⏹️ ▶️ John shows, and music, or a few apps and games, you’ll probably be fine with 32 gigs of storage. If you plan to download
⏹️ ▶️ John and use lots of apps and games, choose 64. So they mention apps and games,
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioning games and, you know, is maybe hinting in the direction that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the kind of applications that are most likely to have large content, but that’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not much of an explanation, but at least it’s something. We talked about how this
⏹️ ▶️ John seemingly makes less sense when the applications themselves the initial download from the store is so limited i think it was 200
⏹️ ▶️ John megs or something but the applications can download whatever the hell they want after that up to a very
⏹️ ▶️ John large limit so you could fill a 32 with a bunch of big games why did i buy the 64 i
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know it’s pretty cheap uh i just want to get the big one who knows if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John if i’ll ever use that space or it’ll just sit there going unused who knows if the software update in the in the future will
⏹️ ▶️ John bump up the minimum size. Even if it just uses that space to buffer video
⏹️ ▶️ John so that when my kids wanna watch a movie that they watched three months ago that it’s still on the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ve watched like 17 movies and television shows since then, that’s worth it for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, if they give me a device with lots of storage and it’s a reasonable price, I’ll buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as usual, you have rushed to order the most expensive item on day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John one. It was like 200 bucks, like come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s only a little bit more than a magic track pad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I guess the price difference is so small. I guess I would probably recommend ordering the big one if you don’t really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you can spare, what is it, 50 bucks? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t recommend it necessarily. In fact, this is one of the cases where I would feel good about recommending just get the cheapest one,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s probably fine. You know what I mean? But for me, and since I’m so obsessed with TV stuff, I just wanna give
⏹️ ▶️ John myself the best chance of having the best experience. And it’s, you know, I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John care about it. So I’m excited to try it. I’m also excited to move my old Apple TV up to a different TV in the
⏹️ ▶️ John house because it’s always kind of been annoying when you get kids fighting over what they want to watch on TV
⏹️ ▶️ John or someone wants to watch this so you can only watch that downstairs because it’s on Apple TV and we have no way to watch anything off
⏹️ ▶️ John of an iTunes DRM encoded thing on the upstairs TV. This will even out our viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John choices once again so that both TVs are uniform in terms of media access and that will bring slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John increased peace to the household.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I did not buy one, and that’s partially because I’m cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and partially because I get to be that guy now. And I’m defining that guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as that guy who whines about the one thing that’s gone away that nobody else cares
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, and that’s optical output for audio. So the way we have our home theater set up, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, but I don’t care, it’s the way it is today, we have, of course, HDMI coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of our Apple TV. I think it’s the third gen, whatever the latest one was before this. Um, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI coming out and that goes into our television. And then there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an optical out from the TV back to the receiver. But especially when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little person in the house who loves looking at, um, screens that are lit up, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s nice to have the Apple TV on and playing without the TV on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we also have optical out going from the Apple TV directly into the receivers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I can grab the remote, mash on a button a couple of times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to wake the thing up because it never seems to wake up unless I do that. And then airplay something to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and leave the TV totally off and everybody’s happy. Declan isn’t looking at the TV, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me happy and Aaron happy. And we’re all listening to music, which makes all of us happy. And it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this new one does not have optical audio out. And that makes me super sad. Now I guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I will cave and eventually buy one, but for now, it’s not really filling any need that I currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have. Um, so I’m just going to wait and see how it goes. I am extremely interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see how the Plex app that supposedly is coming out day one, um, how that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if that gets really good reviews, that is probably going to be enough to get me to cave.
⏹️ ▶️ John So does your receiver not have HDMI? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does not. It’s that old.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, yeah. Well, there’s your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, that’s a fair point that I could just upgrade the receiver, but I I mean, it’s working in every other capacity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it seems a little silly to replace it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might as well, like Marco’s doing, you might as well just wait for 4K to upgrade your receiver at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t tell if you’re being snarky or not, but I’m thinking you’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m being truthful, although I think it’s gonna be later than next year. Like next year, I think still will be early
⏹️ ▶️ John adopter time for 4K, and you, like Marco, are probably better off waiting until 4K is old hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, you know, I don’t know, it really depends on how much you use that Apple TV as an audio device interface. You can get a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John decent, cheap receiver that will do everything that your current receiver does just as well for not too
⏹️ ▶️ John many hundred dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you’re probably right, but I don’t know. It’s one of those things where because I don’t feel like it’s necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and because I don’t really… and that doesn’t really rev my engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I’m not looking for an excuse to spend that money. And because of that, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of meh about the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what are you going to do when you get a new one? You’re going to lose this music ability, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean well there’s probably some kind of like $30 mono price thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John own thing There
⏹️ ▶️ John is nothing for $30 that you connect an HDMI cable to that is reliable I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sure in the entire universe
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember when I was looking where when I didn’t want to buy a receiver I was just looking for an HDMI switcher to make it for the fact that televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John now come with a incredibly small number of HDMI inputs on them and My extensive
⏹️ ▶️ John research led me to conclude that there is no such device in fact the the
⏹️ ▶️ John the best, you know, in terms of functionality, the functionality to cost ratio for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI inputs, an entire giant receiver is the best ratio, which is sad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but true. So, right seconds after I said that, the ATP tipster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chat linked to a $28 little thing on Amazon that does exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it does sometimes. I’m sure it does that sometimes. You can also find similar
⏹️ ▶️ John switch boxes for similar prices with similar strange names and plastic cases, and they all claim to do what
⏹️ ▶️ John they do. And now let us all scroll down to the reviews and read the comments
⏹️ ▶️ John and see what people have to say about this thing. I don’t know, it’s four stars. Splits audio but really lags bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pass-through didn’t work, one star. Verified purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Quality felt a bit shabby. Optical out didn’t work. Runs rather hot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s concerning. Oh, this is magnificent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I mean, there is, yeah. Anyway, some people have good luck with them. I have to say, with the switching thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I gather lots of experiences people have and they’re like, I bought this $15 piece of junk
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s been sitting connected to my TV for eight years and it works flawlessly. Right, but you never know like how many,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you’ll get lucky or maybe you’ll have to buy seven $15 pieces of junk for it. So I wanted a known
⏹️ ▶️ John quantity. And like there was no, as we’ve talked about with USB hubs, you could get one
⏹️ ▶️ John and it could be a champ for years and it’s great, right? And you spent like two bucks for it, right? Or you can
⏹️ ▶️ John keep buying $10 ones and they keep breaking and frying and flaking and driving you crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John and causing bugs that you don’t realize are due to your hub until you’ve tried to debug it for six months, thinking it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John software problem, right? Stuff like that. And you’re like, where is the apple of hubs? Where is the company that makes the expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John solid, well built, reliable hubs? And it doesn’t really exist. I have some
⏹️ ▶️ John good ones. I have one of the ones that was recommended to me sitting right now. I have USB three hubs sitting on my desk that is connected to USB
⏹️ ▶️ John two because that’s all I have. But it seems to be solidly built. I’m also just use it as a charging
⏹️ ▶️ John station now because that’s one of the other benefits is that it’s good for charging stuff. So I think there are good USB
⏹️ ▶️ John hubs out there or better ones anyway, but I never found anything like that for HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, which you got to tell me this USB hub first of all, and then I have a question.
⏹️ ▶️ John to hang out. Let me just go lean over my desk and see what the brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. The Amazon seems to recommend the who to and what’s the battery company?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I got nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anchor. Yeah, it’s way in the back. It is mine. It minus who to it’s black and it’s got like a rubberized outside
⏹️ ▶️ John on and it’s plastic. It’s got a whole bunch of USB three ports on it and has been. Pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John solid, I mean, to be fair, the really super crappy, I think it was literally like seven dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic USB to nice powered hub that I have here that I bought when I first got my 2008 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also still very reliable, but I’ve had a series of hubs before these two hubs that have not been
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable and that have caused my computer to wake up and caused me to try to debug sleep, wake things for a long time and
⏹️ ▶️ John cause all sorts of wonkiness with input and mouse cursors to stop functioning and yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the more I experience various hubs and things, the more I just want to buy future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in Thunderbolt versions, even though it’s probably a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John And expensive Yeah, I don’t know how great that is, although I have to admit that I haven’t had any problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with any Firewire peripheral I’ve ever bought Yeah You’re just, you’re hoping that it’s like the companies making these are,
⏹️ ▶️ John have such, have high enough profit margins they can actually use reliable hardware, but then again, I’ve also never bought a firewire hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t think it could exist anyway firewire switch
⏹️ ▶️ John a place where you plug in multiple firewire cables because it’s not a hub based network but such
⏹️ ▶️ John things like that do exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so before we leave the the home theater topic I have a quick question can one of you explain to me what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I can this thing exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years ago what what is this category is it just a line of speakers like what it What makes it different
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually considered getting one of these. It’s, here’s what it’s for. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to have a home theater thing, but you are essentially space or infrastructure constrained. So you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5.1 or 7.1 where you have a center channel left and right and two back and maybe side channels.
⏹️ ▶️ John And however many channels you have, you just have no way to either, no way to place those speakers, no way to run the cables
⏹️ ▶️ John for them, or your room is just not the right shape or whatever. But you don’t wanna use the crappy built-in speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John your TV and you also don’t want plain old stereo with a bass. You don’t want 2.1. You want something sort of like surround.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a soundbar is a big long strip of speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ John it fixes the space problem by essentially being a similar, you know, going underneath your TV
⏹️ ▶️ John either directly like where the stand is so it’s low enough profile that doesn’t block any of the screen, or like in an entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John center. It’s not maybe not as wide as the whole screen, but very long, very, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John wide and low to the, you know, not very high. And behind the little shield in front of the
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker are a bunch of speakers of various sizes pointed in different directions. And some of them also have some processing
⏹️ ▶️ John and some of them also act as their own little mini receivers so you can plug things right into them. And they will
⏹️ ▶️ John do sound processing to try to bounce the sound around the room, either do no
⏹️ ▶️ John processing and just shoot the sound out of their speakers or do a little bit of processing and mess with like delays and stuff to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to simulate a 5.1 ish sound field by using speakers that are all
⏹️ ▶️ John right in front of you on the TV. So that’s what a sound bar is for. It’s a it’s a compromise thing for people don’t have a lot of space but
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have better sound than they would if they just use stereo better in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of getting closer to a real 5.1 surround where things sound like they’re behind you like in the movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And does that actually work better than just like having stereo speakers would? It
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds different than stereo speakers does like it doesn’t obviously it’s never gonna actually sound like the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John are behind you because they’re not behind you they’re in front of you but some of them depending on the room shape and depending on the environment
⏹️ ▶️ John can do a surprisingly good job of providing a
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to say more convincing sound field but coming closer to making the sound sound like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John all coming straight from the TV now is that accurate is it what the filmmaker is intended
⏹️ ▶️ John is it even pleasing to you that all depends on what you think you You know, you listen to them in the store and they definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John sound different than stereo. Whether they sound better or not is kind of up to you. In the end, I decided not to get one
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because a lot of them either expect you not to have a receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John or kind of they’re competing with the receiver in terms of functionality of how they work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also eventually found a way to get the speakers around my room. My speakers are all in the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John places, but I just did the best I could. I figured I you know if I’m gonna get a receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John with Multi-channel sound support I’m going to try to get the actual sound field
⏹️ ▶️ John experience and so that’s why I went but you know Sound and also trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to place the sound bar and my setup was a little weird too because I’m not quite Sure, we’ll go with the television. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided against it I don’t think they’re entirely crazy if you have a small apartment and are into movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and want a little bit of movie theater sound and You don’t mind whatever the hell the soundbar
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing to try to make it sound like that It’s it’s reasonable, you know Even if only just for the center channel
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can crank the center channel up so you can hear the dialogue better That kind of balance you don’t get in a stereo setup if you just have
⏹️ ▶️ John right and left and a subwoofer It’s hard just to turn up the dialogue But in a movie with a 5.1 mix the center
⏹️ ▶️ John channel has a dialogue and you can crank that higher than the rest of them to help you know you or other people with
⏹️ ▶️ John Low hearing who are always saying what did that person say and you don’t want to turn the subtitles because they ruin the picture and make you read the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John time it’s a reasonable choice for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No I’ve been looking for a while and I have not been able to find what I’m looking for what I basically want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a dynamics compressor in a in a small enough package that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can fit behind my TV or in my very very very narrow TV stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I would love to have just you know I don’t I don’t care about your movies where everyone’s talking really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quietly for dramatic effect and no I can’t hear what you’re saying and if I turn it up then it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blast and it’ll wake everybody up in the house when somebody like you know when a car drives by or something blows up so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would love just dynamic range compression without having to buy an entire receiver because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my my TV stand only has something like three inches of height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this where for something I’d be allowed to place there and there are literally
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed by the historical Commission that runs the the television stand in your house I’m aware of this Commission
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yes and and there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is literally no I’ve looked all for every receiver even they I have, there’s one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s Marantz, has like a really slimline one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a half inch too tall. It’s a bit, like, oh, it’s terrible. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have now is just like, you know, stereo speakers, because I decided long ago that I think of surround
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound the way most people now, including you, John, think of 3D movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is, I just am not, like I had it for a while. I had a 5.1 system for a while. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’d move between different apartments, I would like set up less and less. Like first I dropped the rear speakers and I just had the 3.1 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then eventually I stopped connecting the center speaker and just had the left and the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and realized I liked that a lot better because it was just simpler and you know I didn’t care about the surround. So eventually I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve now switched. But I would still like a receiver and right now it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being driven by this little tiny NuForce amp that has no controls. But I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if anybody knows of like just a basic home theater range compressor,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much every every receiver even the super cheap ones
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know As it
⏹️ ▶️ John has a name brand like they go on a bunch of under a bunch of name brands some of them might be like Dolby where they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John either patent encumbered or proprietary or whatever But they all have a way to do exactly what you’re saying Like I don’t think you
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy one without this feature anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Wanted to echo your sentiment about the surround sound system. My parents had gotten me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago now so it’s probably ancient by today’s standards a a receiver 5.1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surround combination box from like Costco or something like that. It might’ve even come with a TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and DVD player, but anyway, that’s a receiver we’re still using from probably mid to late 2000s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as we moved from apartment to apartment and eventually to the house, we also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did the same thing and dropped the rear speakers after like one of those moves. And so now I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still key, I’ve still kept the center channel and I still have the subwoofer connected, But I haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rear channel in easily six or seven years now or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. You shouldn’t do that. You should either do stereo, which is fine, or stereo with the subwoofer, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is fine. But don’t do 5.1 and then disconnect some of the channels because you’re literally missing some of the sound. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in some movies, they could be mixed such that a line of dialogue only comes from the back speakers, and you literally won’t hear that
⏹️ ▶️ John line of dialogue. So please, just use all the speakers of whatever sound is coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out of your system. If you’re going to put out sound for two speakers, two speakers. If you’re going to put out sound for five
⏹️ ▶️ John plus a subwoofer, use five plus a subwoofer.
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Follow-up: 5400 RPM disks
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a handful of various links and things to talk about. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begins with Tom Bell who wrote in to tell us that smaller iMacs came with a 3.5-inch 7200 RPM drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until 2012 when the tapered edge began. Then they changed to a 2.5-inch 5400 RPM drive with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Fusion Opsel. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently that’s the history of that. Moving on Chloe de Guzman. I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butchered that I’m so sorry Chloe shares from Tom’s hardware data On
⏹️ ▶️ Casey average in two and a half inch drives 5400 rpm drives perform just as well as the 7200 rpm drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Increasing the spindle speed just increases power consumption and heat with little to no gain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5400 wins overall which includes power so we will put a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey links in the show notes about about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The caveat I put in there, which includes power, is in this test in Tom’s Hardware, it wins overall, but only, it’s kind of like in
⏹️ ▶️ John Car and Driver when some car wins overall because of like, they factor in price. You know, every other stat
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not the best car, but because price was a factor and one car is like 30 grand more than the other, it wins, and then people send
⏹️ ▶️ John angry letters. So the 5400 wins overall because they include power consumption. Obviously the 5400 is going to, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna boost the scores of the 5400. So you can take a look at these benchmarks. The Tom’s Hardware does break down the benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John into the individual benchmarks. You can say what if I care about this? What if I care about that? But the bottom line is that modern 5400
⏹️ ▶️ John rpm drives with the you know, the perpendicular magnetic field Whatever things in the higher density are much better than they used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be All this is kind of in the weeds and the details, but it’s worth pointing out Because our main objection
⏹️ ▶️ John is the idea that this thing has no SSD and any spinning drives just astronomically slower in random
⏹️ ▶️ John access especially than any SSD because it’s got a spin a little disk and wait for the point to
⏹️ ▶️ John come under the heads and move the little heads and all that takes a huge amount of time compared to putting signals on different
⏹️ ▶️ John addressing lines and a bunch of flash chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah this this to me like I don’t think anybody needs to waste any breath trying to defend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the benefits or drawbacks of particular rpm hard drives in 2015 it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s just completely irrelevant it’s if you need a bunch of cheap space you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drives and if you if you don’t need a bunch of cheap space you get an SSD period
Follow-up: iMac thermals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, why don’t you tell us john about mac gpus and noise
⏹️ ▶️ John this info i’ve been waiting for on the new 5k I maximized know what the gpus were like. Is it worth it for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the fast one? What is the heat like is the previous one had some problems with the gpu getting really hot and sometimes throttling
⏹️ ▶️ John down same with The cpu and the fan noise so barefeets, uh, which is not spelled like you think it
⏹️ ▶️ John does check the show notes for the link Uh did one of their typical tests and their conclusion was that the new gp
⏹️ ▶️ John the new top-end gpu It’s only a little bit faster than the old one and it gets just about as hot. They said
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know The old and the new both got to 100 degrees Celsius and
⏹️ ▶️ John the fan was running really fast in both of them and the noise meter Look like about the same
⏹️ ▶️ John in both cases. So no, you know, it’s like it’s not worse, but it’s not better
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was kind of depressing I mean it’s not bad news, but it’s not really good news either But then a couple people
⏹️ ▶️ John playing me to this YouTube video by Max Uriev and he does a whole bunch of tests
⏹️ ▶️ John and has a bunch of stats. I’ve never watched any of this guy’s videos and this one had a small number of views but I think everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John can just go look at this video because I think it’s very well done and he talks like at a nice pace very clearly.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s clearly prepared. Everything’s gonna do. He’s got infographics and everything. I thought it was really good. I was impressed by his YouTube video. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t watch enough YouTube videos. And if he’s super famous, I don’t know that. Sorry, but this video only had a few thousand views
⏹️ ▶️ John so I figured this is not MKBHD. This is some less known guy. But anyway, his conclusions
⏹️ ▶️ John were different. He had more detailed things. He said in the, uh, well, the overall conclusion was that in the new
⏹️ ▶️ John model, the fans ramp up earlier than the old model just to try to keep the temperatures down. In other words, rather than waiting for things
⏹️ ▶️ John to get really out of hand temperature wise and then turning on the fans, it turns on the fans faster, sooner, which
⏹️ ▶️ John noise wise isn’t great, but temperature wise is good. In the GPU tests, it seems like the new
⏹️ ▶️ John one can keep the GPU within whatever Apple sets as the tolerance, like they want to keep it
⏹️ ▶️ John under 100 degrees Celsius or whatever, whatever they set as the limit, the new 5k macro according
⏹️ ▶️ John to Max’s tests can keep the GPU within that limit with the fan going slower. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in these in these GPU tests it’s like well they’re both the GPUs are similar temperature but the
⏹️ ▶️ John RPM on the new model is way lower. So I like that especially you know for gaining thumbs up. And in the CPU tests
⏹️ ▶️ John the new 5k Mac didn’t do any CPU throttling that I could see. Like the old one would throttle the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John down when it got too hot, the new one didn’t. It kept the CPU at lower temperatures sometimes had slightly higher fan speeds mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John because the new model has a higher max speed for the fan and some stats I threw in here after 15
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes of their CPU testing the old iMac had throttled down to 3.3 gigahertz and it was a hundred degrees Celsius
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fan was going 2,700 rpm and the new iMac was not throttled it was at full 4 gigahertz
⏹️ ▶️ John it was 10 degrees cooler at 89 degrees Celsius and the fan was going about the same speed 2650
⏹️ ▶️ John rpm so Max’s video made me excited about the new iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John because it seems to basically it seems to keep the innards cooler and also you did a manual override on the fans
⏹️ ▶️ John and said if you do crank the fans up the new iMac can keep both the CPU and the GPU ridiculously cool so
⏹️ ▶️ John really it’s just a question of how much noise you’re willing to tolerate how much temperature you’re going to tolerate so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m feeling better about the iMac than the old one as many people pointed out we’re not going to get any real substantive
⏹️ ▶️ John improvements in GPU in particular until they change the process size I think one of this one is also 28 nanometers just like
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s model. But bottom line, I’m probably gonna get one of these iMacs and I’m probably going to get it with the best GPU.
DRC in the new Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, some real-time follow-up from Kim Alberg in the chat. It appears as though the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV might have built-in dynamic range compression.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you were going to say it might have a built-in fan. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they did. Remember the famous iFixit teardown that got them kicked out of the App Store? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So we know there’s no fan, but it appears that it might have dynamic range compression built in. So I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John it on by default and you can’t turn it off? Because that’ll annoy me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshot posted here, which it looks like it’s from one of the videos, or no, it’s from somebody’s dev kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s an option in the audio menu, like within a movie, like where there’s info, subtitles, and then there’s audio and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says full dynamic range or reduce loud sounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a nice way of putting it. I like that rather than branding it as one of these weird words that every company
⏹️ ▶️ John uses for their dynamic range compression. The first option is not great. But the second option people
⏹️ ▶️ John what people will do is I’m hoping that it’s fault full dynamic range and they’ll watch a movie and they won’t be able to hear what anyone’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll crank the volume that’s something that will explode and they’ll be pissed then they’ll go to the subtitle manual and they say yes reduce
⏹️ ▶️ John loud sounds is exactly what I want and they’ll pick it so that’s that’s some good uh copywriting they could have called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boost because I have a trademark. Oh yeah.
Follow-up: iMac height, stands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t you tell us about the adjustable iMac and monitor stands? I’m assuming this is John
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah a lot of people wrote in to tell us that they thought we didn’t need to Put our monitors on top of anything because we
⏹️ ▶️ John were confused about the correct height of monitors. I’m not confused I know the top of the monitor according
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the ergonomics experts is supposed to be roughly aligned with your Eyeline and everything like that that it you shouldn’t be looking up and
⏹️ ▶️ John all these other things I know that remember I have a 23 inch monitor So it has to be on a stand to be up like that
⏹️ ▶️ John that high and also if you’re if you don’t have a keyboard tray getting your keyboard at the right height
⏹️ ▶️ John means your desk has got to be much lower than you think or your chair has to be higher than you think but anyway we are aware of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomic at least I am anyway I’m assuming Marco is the correct height of all the things it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John to have options and if it means stacking a bunch of books or a piece of loose side or whatever to make your monitor the right height
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you should do but a lot of people also pointed out that the real solution to all of these my monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John is not quite at the right height thing is to either get your Mac monitor or your third-party party monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John or your iMac itself with a VESA mount. Then you can put it on an arm or any other kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of adjustable thing that accepts VESA mounts. And I believe this is the case and has been the
⏹️ ▶️ John case for a while now. If you want that you can’t just buy an iMac and say, great well I’m gonna take off this little L shape
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and put on a VESA mount. You have to order it that way from Apple and they will give you the iMac that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John mount with a VESA mount. I don’t know if that’s true of the Thunderbolt displays but no one should buy them anywhere Anyway.
Follow-up: Facebook battery usage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we have some supposed answers with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Facebook app usage battery gate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so pretty shortly after we published our episode last week where I basically said, this is no bug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is deliberate, they are, you know, jerks about this. Right afterwards, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half a day afterwards, they posted a thing on Facebook, Facebook. Somebody’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think one of the lead engineers or something, they posted a thing saying, this was indeed a bug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the bug. And it was, it seemed like it was a couple of bugs. So they are claiming it was a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly haven’t looked into it. John, do you know, have you looked into this at all? All
⏹️ ▶️ John I did was read the press release, but last week when you were like, they’re doing this on purpose because they’re terrible people
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth, I didn’t really push back that much on it. But I find it entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible this could have been a bug and the corroborating evidence that I use other than my general
⏹️ ▶️ John attempt to have faith in humanity and belief that engineers wouldn’t do something like this unless
⏹️ ▶️ John someone made them is that some people have said now that they mention
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve seen that like where if I have watched a video on Facebook then it sucks my battery
⏹️ ▶️ John but if I’ve used Facebook but not watched a video it doesn’t suck my battery so there’s some vague anecdotal evidence
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes me think that their explanation sounds plausible but like I said said, realistically speaking, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I was struggling last week was like, why would they even do this? What is the advantage to Facebook? It just seemed like a bug to me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I am willing to believe that this was a bug. I do not think that Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John is actively evil unless there’s some really good reason for them to be actively evil. And I can’t really think of a super good reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John make their app suck everyone’s battery down. I came up with a few. I’m also willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that it still could have been intentional, but I was never as, you know, sure about it as you were. And given
⏹️ ▶️ John this explanation, I’m willing to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt and say that they just had a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I see this both ways because I do think they’re fairly evil. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, who was it? Was it you that said, you know, never attribute—what is the line? Never attribute to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey malice what could easily be explained by stupidity or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. John invented that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I invented it, I would have quoted it correctly. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you were the person that reminded me of it. Thank you.
Follow-up: 3D Star Wars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of John we have Important John related news the long national
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nightmare is over John. Can you update us on your Star Wars tickets?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah shortly after the show last week when I was in the midst of Struggling to get Star Wars tickets
⏹️ ▶️ John and being sad about the fact that my wife had accidentally purchased 3d tickets. No fear
⏹️ ▶️ John This is all cured. Now. I have gotten rid of my 3d tickets. All of my Star Wars
⏹️ ▶️ John tickets are now 2d I Believe all of them are also reserved seating,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe one set of them is it and you say how many Star Wars tickets Do you have yes? I’m going to see it multiple times those
⏹️ ▶️ John tickets are already bought for the multiple times I’m going to see it with various groups of people so fear not
⏹️ ▶️ John I will not be watching it in 3d I may actually watch it in 3d after I’ve seen it a few times in 2d
⏹️ ▶️ John Assuming I like it and I want to see it like a fourth or a fifth or a sixth time Maybe I will try it at IMAX. Why the hell not?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Apple had their quarterly earnings and this was the fourth quarter, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, whatever. It was a quarter and they had their quarterly earnings and I think most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it was as expected. iPads are down fairly significantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, Federico. Macs are up, which was slightly surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there are a few things that somebody who did their homework, whose name is not Casey, put in the show notes. I’m assuming it was John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who shouldn’t be doing homework. Um, somebody has to, right? China, iPhone sales
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are up 120%. Um, I don’t find that terribly surprising, but that’s a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And keep in mind, I think this is because they didn’t launch the six in the same quarter in China last year. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John year they did launch a success in China to be counted in this quarter or something like that. So this isn’t all just like, Hey, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s doing better in China. It’s also that they’re, they’re getting better with simultaneous launches and that shows up in the thing. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John China, as everyone says, is super important to Apple, becoming increasingly important
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re growing fast there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then there’s a lot of enterprise-related things that I thought we could spend at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour talking about, John. I’m sure Marco won’t mind. Not at all. How about those new Mac Pros?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, you’re evil. Well played, sir. There are 30,000 Macs inside of IBM, adding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost 2,000 a week, and IBM is claiming that it saves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them $270 per machine versus a Windows computer due to lower support costs and better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey residual values. That’s pretty cool stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the residual value as a factor, which I wouldn’t have thought of because I’m not thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ John a corporate bean counter, but as most of Mac owners know, Macs do hold their value better than
⏹️ ▶️ John old crappy PCs for whatever reason. I mean, just try to buy used Mac Mini, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a factor in how businesses account for them. And so So the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John three years after you buy it, it hasn’t lost as much of its value as a Dell is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John These support things like, boy, I should send these back in time to the 13-year-old version
⏹️ ▶️ John of me and say, someday IBM will publish something saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco having Macs in
⏹️ ▶️ John the corporation is better because they require less support. It just boggles my
⏹️ ▶️ John mind that that is actually still true. Who knows? They’re our partner with Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, they’re going to say that. like IBM saying the track point is awesome right you have to take all this with a grain of salt but
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the old story which was like oh the old Mac versus PC days it’s like yeah but Macs be more
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe more expensive but if you buy a Mac your support costs will be lower because they’re not as crappy as Windows PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like oh you’d like to think that but a computer is a computer and then they’d have all these stories from the Pro Mac people saying oh we
⏹️ ▶️ John bought Macs and our support costs have gone down you know this is still a story this story
⏹️ ▶️ John is evergreen like at this point I bet people everyone’s like Well, everyone agrees that Windows is exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as OS 10 and like modern computers don’t have all those weird things used to have like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John IRQ conflicts and DLL hell and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all that’s gone now. Everything’s all plug
⏹️ ▶️ John and play and they should be about the same and Max have problems too. It’s like it’s all washed now and who cares
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway because we’re all looking at mobile. Who cares what the hell’s going on in Windows and OS 10. And then here is IBM
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, I believe they actually are saving money, not maybe Maybe because Macs are easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to manage or because that the Mac users need less
⏹️ ▶️ John help, but it’s like self selecting anyone who maybe who’s interested enough to to demand a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Mac nerd who already knows how to use it needs less support. That’s got to be a factor in there somewhere. But I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to believe as I always have been willing to believe because I you know, I think it’s the truth that
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s a less variety of Mac hardware and software, that your support costs can be lower.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s just there’s fewer variables like people want to think about it used to be, you know, ease of use like Mac versus
⏹️ ▶️ John DOS or whatever. But the bottom line today I think is there aren’t that many Macs in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are tons of different weird PCs and Windows has to account for all of them and Apple only has to account
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Max that it itself has made. So good job IBM
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a crazy world where IBM is buying 2009 Max 2000 Max per week and has 30,000 already. That’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, as I think I’ve mentioned several times in the past, I am the child of a almost lifelong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IBMer. I mean, I was never that big into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IBM versus Mac debate. I mean, I was to some extent back in the day, and I clearly was on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the side of IBM. But man, this is weird. It’s super weird. Like my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey childhood was defined by ThinkPads, and to see them basically abandoning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own product, which yes, I know is Lenovo and has been for a few years, but, you know, abandoning that thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they came up with to go towards Macs, that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, that’s weird. And to quickly address Gareth in the chat room, I was not forced to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use OS2, I chose to use OS2 Warp. It was magical. Sure. It was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was unbelievably good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. And the Hanson CD was a gift. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that was totally me. So anyway, so speaking of IBM and the enterprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple says that they have earned $25 billion in annual revenue in the last 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months from the enterprise, which is apparently a little over 10% of the total revenue for Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is up 40% year over year. My goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, for a company that isn’t interested in the enterprise that IBM partnership has seems to be working as
⏹️ ▶️ John intended, which is like Apple doesn’t really want to deal with this crap, but they’ll gladly partner with somebody who will do really grunt work and
⏹️ ▶️ John just make them the money. And you know, 10% of your business shows that Apple still is not an
⏹️ ▶️ John enterprise company to the degree that like Oracle or SAP or something is or even Microsoft for that matter. But 40%
⏹️ ▶️ John year over year is big growth. So apparently they’re they’re enterprise. It’s like think about
⏹️ ▶️ John what has Apple done related to the enterprise other than the IBM deals. Not like Apple has suddenly rededicated
⏹️ ▶️ John its entire product efforts on the enterprise. They’re still doing what they’ve always done to support the enterprise. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John IBM partnership is helping. Hell, just just sales of Max to IBM itself alone. Forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about IBM helping other people to buy Macs and recommending them and supporting them
⏹️ ▶️ John with all their neat iPad apps and stuff like that. So thumbs up on this partnership. It seemed
⏹️ ▶️ John like a good idea at the time and still seems like a good idea because I still do not see any area where like unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and IBM’s partnership where IBM is cleverly maneuvering
⏹️ ▶️ John to stab Apple in the back. It just seems like win-win so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I agree. And finally, let’s make Federico sad, the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a really womp womp? Like, I like the, I mean, we all knew the iPad was, you know, if you look at like the graphs, I forget, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it was in Jason Snell’s Six Colors thing, we should add that to the show notes, but he had graphs of like the sales of the different products,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are different lines. There’s the lines for the phone, which is in one section of the graph and has its own slope
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually kicks up in recent years. And then there’s the sections for the Mac and the iPad and the Mac and the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad curves look like they are siblings like yeah, they’re way down here. The volumes are lower. The kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John sad little droopy, you know, they’re they’re going up. They’re not really going down that much. Maybe the iPad dips a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re they’re reasonable. But the iPhone is in a different category. So if you take the iPhone out of the equation
⏹️ ▶️ John and look like the bank, Bennett Devins tweeted this thing earlier and look just the curve of
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop laptops and tablets. If you visualize it in a particular way, as he has done
⏹️ ▶️ John here, what it basically looks like is that laptops are being replaced by tablets. So the laptop sales
⏹️ ▶️ John are dipping a little bit and the tablets are continuing the curve. You guys looking at that tweet photo
⏹️ ▶️ John that I find pretty convincing and it may be that like it doesn’t change the reality that the iPad is not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the next iPhone. We all know that it could just be, you know, in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple wants to introduce products that cannibalize its own products that the iPad and especially the
⏹️ ▶️ John larger iPads are the future cannibalizers of desktop and laptop computers and
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to cannibalize the phone at all because it’s untouchable. Yeah, it seems reasonable. That’s all how you
⏹️ ▶️ John view the thing. Like this graph is could be misleading, but it really you look at this graph and like, oh, totally. I see exactly how that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going, but you could visualize the same data in a different way. But I like I gotta get the Jason Snow on there because I like the one graph
⏹️ ▶️ John that showed how the lines are separate universes from each other and the other graph that shows, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not big growth like the Max and everything like the growth of that sector of the market is small and
⏹️ ▶️ John then Apple is growing slightly and most other companies selling desktop laptops are contracting slightly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s all just off as a kind of like, I wouldn’t call it a hobby yet. But it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a lot of money because everything that Apple does is a lot of money. But the iPhone is just so ridiculous now that you almost have
⏹️ ▶️ John to like have two separate earning calls. Let’s talk about the iPhone. Let’s talk about everything else in the universe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so in summary, Apple has more money than your deity of choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s all stored away in various bank accounts and things are going well.
NAS vs. Drobo vs. external disks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’d like to change change tune quite a bit and talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do we call this follow out is that right? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m all confused now. Yeah, which is different than follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you know? We’re already worried into topics How can you follow out is at the end? I don’t these variations of follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ John are not officially sanctioned not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know Like what is it like made
⏹️ ▶️ John for iPhone MFI? This I need to make an official stamp of approval program for variations
⏹️ ▶️ John on follow-up and these are not these are all bootlegs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh Oh my goodness, that’s fantastic. So this unofficially sanctioned or unofficially and unsanctioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow out is with regard to the podcast upgrade with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our friends Mike Hurley and Jason Snell. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike and Jason were talking about on this week’s episode what to do with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to large long-term on-premise storage. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike had said, you know, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about whether or not having a NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is worthwhile. And then if you do get a NAS, he’s heard, you know, half of his friends say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you should absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, get a Drobo. And then he’s heard the other half of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his friends say, you should absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, get a Synology. And he wasn’t sure what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. He wasn’t really keen on the idea of network-attached storage to begin with. So then the question is, well, do you not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it network-attached? you do something more physically attached? Oh my God, what do I do? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says Mike. And I know we’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but it’s been a long time since we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Um, Marco has been almost burned by some iSCSI software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least 34 times in the last year. So I thought we’d at least briefly revisit this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and kind of talk about what we recommend and what our thoughts are. Um, Marco, do you want to kind of kick this off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. So I mean so we all Synology was graceful enough to to give us all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Synology units back I don’t know what about two years ago. It was a while ago now year and a half something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we all have this I think the same one right the 1813 plus So so we all have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same giant 8 bay Synology And this is like this it’s not it’s no longer their current model But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time they gave it to us. It was a very high-end model And as far as I know we’ve all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had great stories with them. You know we’ve all had great success with them. They’ve proven to be very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem with NASA’s though for me is complexity and backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are what always get me. NASA’s offer a whole bunch of features because they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like little computers really running specialized usually Linux’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a lot they can do. You can have them like you know serve Plex sometimes maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on your transcoding needs like Casey will probably talk about you can have them like download bit torrent stuff for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you can have them host cloud files for you when you’re out there’s all sorts of stuff you can do with it ass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do none of it like I just do not use those features at all all I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it for is archival storage just long-term bulk file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage things I don’t usually need to access even that is all I use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so all those features are wasted on me I think and I think that’s honestly that’s probably what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people really need. I don’t think most people really need to be managing this whole other mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specialized server in their house. I think what they really just want is more space for their computers. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I think that’s the main goal here. And it’s great because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re gonna move to something like a NAS or even a Drobo, which I’ll get to in a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gain the ability to use 3.5 inch hard drives where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can basically spend nothing and get many terabytes of space. It is crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how cheap storage is. And compared to our world of modern, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the decent computers that have SSD storage, we’re fretting over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether to go with the 512 or the terabyte or whatever. Meanwhile, you can get a 4 terabyte desktop drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what? What, like $200, $150 now? I mean, the desktop drives are so cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And they aren’t that fast compared to SSDs, but it doesn’t really matter when you’re doing archival storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So a NAS is a great way to get a whole bunch of archival storage somewhere in your house and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want, like me, if you want to avoid noise at your computer, external drives don’t really help there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can put a NAS anywhere in your house where you can run a wire. So, you know, that gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a lot of options there for, you know, noise and location and everything like that. So there are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of benefits to NASes, but the complexity of basically managing this like little server in your house has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always bothered me a little bit. And also the question of backups. My preferred cloud backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Backblaze and I should disclose they sponsored this show many times. Although I was using them before they sponsored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I like Backblaze a lot. I have tried CrashPlan before and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had nothing but terrible luck with it. I tried it. I tried running CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a Mac trying to back up the Synology. I’ve tried running the actual client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can run directly on the Synology. I’ve tried running that. I have tried CrashPlan, I think at least three times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few years, and every time it fails, it just slows down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a crawl and eventually fails. And people point to various Java heap limits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that, and I’ve tried so many different things that people have said, oh, just change this configuration setting in this file or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried so many different things, and it just fails every time. It seems like it just cannot keep up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a many terabyte backup with tons of files in it. So I have had terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luck with CrashPlan, but CrashPlan is the only one that will backup a network drive or will run directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Synology. Whereas Backblaze will only backup locally attached things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your Mac or PC. So what I do now, my Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the closet, two of the disks it uses for Time Machine, and it uses those normally as its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native file system. All the other ones, It’s serving a giant iSCSI volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is then mounted on my Mac Mini server using a terrible iSCSI initiator,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there isn’t one built into Mac OS X. I use the Atto one, but the GlobalSAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one was worse for me and was less reliable. So they’re both terrible, and those are like $200, right? So there’s more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the drain there. And so I use giant iSCSI volume on the Synology with its crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID setup, mounted with iSCSI onto the Mac Mini as a local disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fools Backblaze into thinking it’s local because it’s iSCSI. And so then Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backs it up and it’s formatted with HFS plus because it kind of has to be for that to work very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a big complex setup when really I think I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly fine these days. I don’t need 10 terabytes of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would be fine these days, honestly, just getting rid of it at some point and just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few either two terabyte laptop drives in little USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosures, little fanless enclosures, and just tolerating the little amount of noise they make, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just getting one terabyte SSDs and putting them in little USB enclosures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because a one terabyte SSD is now $300, and that’s only going down over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I wouldn’t need that many of them. You know, I don’t know. It drives me nuts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how complex my current setup is, and I’m only not changing it right now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is currently working. But as soon as I need to change anything about this setup, I think I’m gonna dump it entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the entire value of a NAS is lost on me, and I don’t need this giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box making all this noise in my closet all the time. I don’t know, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you guys seem like you’re better at it than I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me just, before I talk about myself, if you were to do it all over again, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think you would do? You would do something physically connected, or you would just, how would you handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem of long-term storage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, a good NAS is often near $1,000, sometimes more if you need the 8-bay version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the same price or less, I think I would probably just do what I said, just get three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four one-terabyte SSDs, try to find an enclosure that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run fanless and can hold all of them. It probably doesn’t exist. I haven’t. Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has on her computer, she has a similar kind of setup like this with the OWC Thunder Bay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini 4 or something like that. It’s the one that takes 2.5 inch drives. And that one does not run fanless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned in a previous show, I replaced the fan in it for a quieter one, but it still has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable fan noise. And the reason why is not because the disks run hot, but because it has this Thunderbolt chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, like this controller chip that runs incredibly hot to the touch if you don’t fan it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s no heatsink, It’s just a bare chip and it just runs insanely hot. I have no idea why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like even when the drives are idle It’s just crazy anyway so what I would do now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Probably buy external drives and even even if I spent the money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make them all little SSDs So they would be totally silent That would probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper than a NAS and it wouldn’t be nearly as much space but I would argue I probably don’t need that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space because my NAS has literally had 10 terabytes free for the for the for the last few months?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel—I totally sympathize with what you’re saying, but I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same complaints that you do, as you expected. I have, of course, the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DS1813Plus that you do. From what I can tell with Synology model names, the 8 in 1813 means it’s 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bay, and 13 means it’s the 2013 model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the modern version of what we have is the DS1815+. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they skipped the 14. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize that was a thing until somebody pointed that out on Twitter. I wish I remember who it was and I was like, whoa, mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blown, had no idea. So anyway, so the DS1815 plus is the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version, but I freaking love Mycenology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As Marco said, it was comped. It was comped not only the box, but all the drives in it. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight, three gig, three terabyte, excuse me, hard drives in these. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love this thing. It has its own, I’m gonna call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating system, although that’s a misnomer. It has its own web interface. Let’s use that. It has its own web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface, as many NASA’s do. And it lets you do all sorts of things on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use mine as a VPN server all the time, particularly lately, since I’ve been working out of a client’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey office. And for my Mac, I like to be on a VPN and I might as well be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my own. It has a BitTorrent client, if that’s your thing. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a News Group client, if that’s your thing. It has really great file sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you have a stupidly large file that you wanna send to somebody and maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t wanna use, what’s the Apple thing that just came out in the last year? The Apple Watch. Funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I meant the thing where that lets you send huge files. iCloud sharing or something. No, no, no, that’s not right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, does that actually work? I’ve never actually seen it. I’ve never tried it. Mailbagging. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve used it. That wasn’t this year. That was the year my last review had that. So that must have been in
⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite. But yeah, I’ve used it. It’s a nice way to not, if you use the Apple Mail app, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I think the web interface, you can send an attachment without regard
⏹️ ▶️ John to how big the attachment is because it automatically uploads it to a cloud server. It basically does the same thing as like Cloud App or one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things does, but automatically with no ads and for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free. It’s something drop as per the chat room, perhaps mail drop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so if you don’t want to mail drop, you can use your Synology to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey None of these things are unique to the Synology. Oh, it’ll also be a Plex server, although my model,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 1813 plus, did not have a strong enough CPU for doing live transcoding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ve talked about this in the past, I’m not going to go on about it, but suffice to say it didn’t work well for me. me. But what does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work well for me is having my personal Mac, which is effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a desktop server, even though it’s actually a 15-inch high-res anti-glare. That’s the Plex server,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I just have it look at the Synology to get all its media. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s wonderful having a server in the house if you’re at all geeky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A network-attached storage does not need to be that server. You would probably perhaps be better off with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac mini if you can afford or have such a thing, or if you have, say, a 5K Retina iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you just want to leave it on constantly, that would also probably work just as well if not better. But for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just really like having some sort of box that’s kind of a server that I can offload those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird tasks, like if I do want to download a torrent of some legal software or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some open free movie or what have you, I can offload that onto the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I want to share files with friends or family, it makes it very easy. And the other thing that I love more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else is that because I have six of the eight drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Synology Hybrid RAID, which is one drive redundancy, so one of these drives can explode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is insanely slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it’s like any of those like RAID 5-y kind of things. I mean, true RAID 5 is also very slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I believe it has to write every block to every disk. So yeah, very slow on writes and okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on reads. Nobody uses RAID 5 for performance. And then, so there’s, Synology Hybrid RAID is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar to what people know Drobos to do, and we’ll talk about those, I guess. So, you know, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically you have like a kind of software managed volume where it kind of manages the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file system for you because it kind of has to resize itself. So that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use an array of disks of different sizes, and then you can actually expand the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by replacing disks one at a time. So it’s a cool setup if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expanding needs over time, but you do pay a penalty in performance for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with some of them, like Drobo, there’s a question of reliability. Drobo in particular has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a pretty spotty reliability history, which is why I’ve never ventured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that area myself. Because if you ask Drobo owners, many of the ones you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to have been fine. They’ve had no problems whatsoever. It’s been rock solid for them. However, you will hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people telling you all their horror stories from Drobos. And so it just never…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reviews kind of back this up. If you look on like Amazon or whatever, or you read tech sites, like it really does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they have a spotty history of liability. And that’s why I would not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, want to try one. But I don’t know. You know, you never say never in this business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So anyway, so yeah, to wrap it up, I love having some sort of server-like thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the network in the house. And I really love my Synology. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I got this for free. If I were to have paid for it, it would have been over $1,000 with all the drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it, which is absurdly expensive. But they have other versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they have a 1515 year, which would be a five bay version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s two bay versions. So whatever you think is right for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get that if you can, be it Drobo or Synology. But just having effectively infinite storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a life changer because I used to have to worry about, oh, like as an example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all these episodes of, let’s call it Highest Gear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these episodes of that show, you know, do I burn them to DVDs so I can get them off my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can have all that space back? Oh, I don’t ever want to download the 1080 versions because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to take up that much space now. Don’t care whatever it is. I’ll take it. I got plenty of room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is magical. So I’ve gone on Marco’s gone on John. What’s your take
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, getting back to the what kick us off with Mike and his questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point, despite what all of us have said, or what you two have said, or what I’m going to say and have said in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past about our particular setups, what this comes down to is one of those conversations that used to be more
⏹️ ▶️ John common surrounding things like computers or even smartphones a little bit, but mostly computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John where if you’re known as like the computer guy or gal in your family
⏹️ ▶️ John or in your town or in your group of friends or whatever, you get questions from people who say, or just like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the, if someone know stuff about cars, what car should I buy? What computer should I get? How should I configure the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get computer questions like this? And I’m sure each of us has been the resident
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerd many times to many people. And in most cases, you have to turn it into like,
⏹️ ▶️ John an interview, we had to say, Alright, well, what do you actually want to do? What is your budget? What are your needs? What’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John to you? And then you can recommend something, you can tell them what the trade offs are, which may make them change their minds
⏹️ ▶️ John about, oh, I didn’t realize that. And now I’m going to prioritize this or that I didn’t realize how much that
⏹️ ▶️ John costs or how cheaply I can do this or whatever. But in the bottom, it’s like a back and forth. We’re like, okay, well, if you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t want to use any sort of like, you don’t need a home server, you don’t want to manage another thing, you just want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a dumb box disk, but you do need to backup. But do you subscribe to a cloud backup service that you’re not want to subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to one what kind of backup things you know, it turns into this big, long, complicated interview where I think all of us, if anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John asked, could lead them to the optimal solution for them. There is no optimal solution for everybody. It
⏹️ ▶️ John just really depends on what you want. Uh, and thinking about that and Mike and his questions
⏹️ ▶️ John like I think we could all do that for him and kind of have a little bit in the slack where we all hang out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but the fact that you have to have that conversation and the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John you need all his expertise and experience to guide in the right direction shows that this is sort of an unsolved
⏹️ ▶️ John problem, that it’s annoying that you have to and this also came up in the slack that it’s annoying that you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John all this have these expertise and sort of cobbled together these systems like that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John something you have to think about it. It’s much better than it used to be. I mean, and again, I believe I said in one of my old OS 10 reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John that time machine was the best feature Apple ever added to an operating system because prior to time machine
⏹️ ▶️ John getting anyone to do backups ever was just not happening. And time machine didn’t make it so easy
⏹️ ▶️ John that everybody does it. But boy, did it lower the barrier to entry massively lowered it and And still there is a
⏹️ ▶️ John massive barrier yet to go because it’s like, okay, they made it so much easier. Great. That was great from 10.5. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then you got to buy an external hard drive. And how do I attach it? Is it USB or is it a firewire? Do I back up to a NAS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you do time machine over the network? Are the time capsules flaky? Can I do time machine to a third party thing
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Synology? Like it is still the backups in general are still way, way
⏹️ ▶️ John too hard. And lots of people think like this is this will be solved
⏹️ ▶️ John when everything is network backup. So in this country anyway, if we are all waiting around for
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone to get network connections fast enough to back up the amount of data that they produce and
⏹️ ▶️ John store on their computers, we’re all going to be dead by then. Other countries may have
⏹️ ▶️ John better network infrastructure outlooks for the next 50 to 100 years. The
⏹️ ▶️ John United States does not have very good outlooks. So I think it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a shame that this is still not a solved problem. But Apple, for the most part, has punted
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. They did a time capsule, which I wish worked better than it did because it seemed like the ideal solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe when they get time capsule, when they rededicate themselves to time capsule with their new OS that’s coming out any
⏹️ ▶️ John day now, I’m sure not new OS, new file system, new file system with data integrity protection,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can efficiently send diffs and I don’t know, you can imagine a scenario where time capsule starts
⏹️ ▶️ John to become a much better solution than it is. we’re all talking about buying enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ John and sticking bare drives in it and Marco’s like, well, I’m going to buy some SSDs and find a thing, but like, nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do that. It’s just too darn hard. So I think the take home from this is there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a solution. If you’re listening to this, there is probably a solution that fits your needs to back up what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know what it is because we don’t know what your needs are. And in general, this is way too hard. Like this, this should
⏹️ ▶️ John not, this is one of the last remaining bastions of computers are annoying and difficult to manage
⏹️ ▶️ John and problematic and there’s no easy good choice that I can recommend to everybody. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it’s really unfortunate because you’re right, this is way too complicated for people. This is one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have often no backups, because, you know, like, like, so many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure we’ve all seen people like this, where like they, they will, they will have an external drive enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their desk that that they call their backup drive, but it actually isn’t a backup. It is just more space.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the time machine to it. But like you ever see the message that says time machine is not backed up in 10 days, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, time machine does at least tell you that because I think a lot of people think they’re running time machine, but they’re not because it’s so unobtrusive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they get that message, I can imagine them dismissing it and going, I’m sure that’ll fix itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is why I want to one of my very early like when I started my what was then called the fat bits blog at our technical,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the very first articles I I wrote I think it was called the case for raid or something like that where I was just desperately looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for some way To actually to keep climbing up that stupid back uphill like time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine great thumbs up or whatever I don’t even know if time machine was out by then But it’s like it’s too hard for people
⏹️ ▶️ John to back up like even even with time machine I have to My own battles to convince my relatives
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy an external hard drive try convincing someone they have to spend any amount of money To get a box with wires that
⏹️ ▶️ John connects to the big expensive computer. They just bought they’re like why what why do I need this? What it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone gets a TV and say well you got the cable box I guess so that’s not a good example But anyway, the people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to do it They don’t want to buy an extra thing and then they have to you know The power supply and it dies or there it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John noise. They don’t need to be turned on and off They don’t understand disc mounting and unmounting because it’s complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John What I was looking for a raffle which is you know The old Apple is like can you just build in twice the storage in every single computer
⏹️ ▶️ John like cell computers that say they have X Amount of storage but really have them always have 2x and have them essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John do you know? I think again, I think it was pre time machine having them essentially do incremental backups from
⏹️ ▶️ John one drive to the other, right? I mean they kind of do this recovery partition saving the OS but doesn’t save your
⏹️ ▶️ John data at all and it’s all in the same mechanism I what I basically wanted was I mean again phrasing it as a raid. It’s not really raid
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, although raid one would still be better than nothing even though it’s not a backup but like the the only The premise
⏹️ ▶️ John was the only way you’re ever gonna get people to back up is to just lie to them and just over provision and give them
⏹️ ▶️ John twice the storage they have and pretend they have half that storage and just do incremental backups for them no choice
⏹️ ▶️ John of every single piece. That’s what people want. They just want a computer. You plunk it down like a phone. They want a phone. You want to plunk
⏹️ ▶️ John it down. Phones so far have been able to get by on the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John the data does not accumulate on phones fast enough to make it impossible to do a cloud backup. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John with the cloud backup again, setting aside the pricing stuff, I think phone backups are in a better state than computer
⏹️ ▶️ John backup. Not the best because we, you know, all hear stories about people go into an Apple store with a bum phone and that have never
⏹️ ▶️ John backed it up anywhere, whether on the cloud or an iTunes and then they’re sad because they lose all their photos in their entire
⏹️ ▶️ John family so still ways to go there but that that kind of you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that that blog post throwing out you know raid or just like just the idea of like Apple your computers
⏹️ ▶️ John are so expensive anyway just put twice the storage and all of them because literally is really just a
⏹️ ▶️ John cry for help like we’re never gonna solve this with current technology there’s no way to solve this without
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially making it not an option and we’re still not there and the
⏹️ ▶️ John the new the new slightly more price conscious Apple that is putting spinning hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheapest 4k iMac is definitely not putting twice the storage and everything so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re still waiting bottom line and then one more thing on this we talked about our market about crash plan
⏹️ ▶️ John backing up network drives and back plays not backing them up a lot of requests into back plays with that and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well, we’re thinking about it. We’ve heard that request so on and so forth. I don’t know anything about why back blades
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t back up network drives, but based on what I know about how
⏹️ ▶️ John on what I know about the most efficient way to know what needs to be backed up on a West 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most efficient way you can do that is to use the various APIs in OS 10 that let you know, Hey, since the last
⏹️ ▶️ John time you asked me, I can tell you that things have changed in this directory, that directory that directory. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John even like, here’s what the changes are, right? That’s what you need to be able to do. Otherwise, if you’re trying to back up literally 4
⏹️ ▶️ John million files, which is not an unreasonable number of files for someone with a lot of data. Every time
⏹️ ▶️ John you run the backup, the first job it has to do is say since the last time I backup, which of these 4
⏹️ ▶️ John million files have either been added, deleted or changed since the last time I did a backup. And
⏹️ ▶️ John without a more efficient method, you have to basically scan the entire drive and ask
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone in the files, how you doing? How you doing? Are you still there? Are you a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco file? Have you been
⏹️ ▶️ John updated? What it can compare its date to the last time you backed it up or whatever. That is massively inefficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you want to do a more efficient mechanism and always 10 offer several more efficient mechanisms. But most
⏹️ ▶️ John of them require pretty much all of them, I think, require the efficient mechanisms require the I
⏹️ ▶️ John o to that drive to go through the kernel of the operating system. So if you have local storage, like if it’s mounted like a local
⏹️ ▶️ John disk, whether you’re lying and it’s not really local like ice, cozy or literally is a local disc connected through a firewire or
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt or USB or SATA or whatever. If the I O to that
⏹️ ▶️ John disk, meaning you wrote the file by sending the I O through the kernel running on this Mac and same for all the other operations,
⏹️ ▶️ John then the OS 10 will have a log of all those events in this little FS events log and it has APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to ask it what happened since the last time I asked and it can give you the answer really quickly and efficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John without scanning the entire drive. you can’t do that for a network drive because a network drive people could be doing io2
⏹️ ▶️ John on other macs going through their kernels and their io system and your kernel and your os has no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that that’s happening so there’s no way to say hey what happened to this network drive since last time i asked because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know you just don’t know um so if faculties did do network drive support they would have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John what crash plan does which is every time you do that i got to rescan the whole freaking network drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and find out what has changed since the last time because there’s no more efficient way to ask about it because other people could be updating the drive
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. It’s not locally attached storage. So you know, price wise, or not wanting to do network
⏹️ ▶️ John drives because they’re potentially large or whatever. There are technical reasons why even if backblaze added
⏹️ ▶️ John support for network drives, it would be crappier than backblaze support for local storage. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John for for crash plan. I don’t know if it does the good API’s for local storage even because I
⏹️ ▶️ John see it grinding my disk a lot. And the other thing on crash plan news is recently they announced that there’s a new version of crash
⏹️ ▶️ John plan coming out that does not use Java on OS 10. And that’s another thorn in our side about CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it is a Java application. You have to install the JVM for it, and it doesn’t feel native. And it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to, again, Backblaze, which is a native application, all that stuff. So a native version of CrashPlan is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out. Maybe that will improve what matters, but it certainly won’t improve the fact that it just can’t know what changed on a network
⏹️ ▶️ John drive without scanning all the stuff, all the stuff on the drive. I get around that in my personal setup,
⏹️ ▶️ John touching on that by mostly storing on my network attached storage
⏹️ ▶️ John either large files like the sparse disk images I think those are broken up into like two gig
⏹️ ▶️ John strips or whatever but basically large ish files or things like video files that are also
⏹️ ▶️ John very large so it is a small number of relatively large files and that’s it’s faster to scan that scanning takes
⏹️ ▶️ John is scales with the number of files that you have to scan so I have not so many files not so many directories but those
⏹️ ▶️ John files are very often hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes or larger. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why that’s how I back up my Synology. I have crash plan backing out my Synology and even though it does the incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John inefficient scan the entire disk because it has no choice because it’s network attached storage, it works in a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the things you mentioned about about network drives having all these you know all these limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the fact that they could be accessed through in shared means by somebody else, I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsing network drives. Like I don’t, first of all, Spotlight does not index them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have files on a network drive, Spotlight just can’t find them, as far as I can tell. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one thing is I hate having to connect, you know, hit connect on the side. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if things can auto-connect reliably these days, what year is this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like that can’t happen, right? So I have to go to the server, hit connect, go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the drive, watch the spinner while it loads the list of files, open the directory I want, watch the spinner again as it loads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the list of those files. It’s so stupid. And I mean that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sense that it is not smart. It is just really simple in a primitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. And it is just terrible. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to want all my stuff to be available quickly. Really even though it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco results in a desk covered in enclosures and wires and possibly noise issues if you don’t go all SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really do think that just a couple of external drives is by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best choice most of the time, as long as it can fit what you need to fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s probably the right answer for Mike because I don’t think he wants any sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of management thing. Like all the stuff that I really get jazzed about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my Synology, being able to offload file downloads or file uploads, being able to have a VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey endpoint, I don’t think Mike wants any of that. And so I think you’re right, Marco, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just having one or more enclosures physically hanging off his computer is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what we can tell the better answer for him.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the other angle on that. We mentioned that we got our Synologies for free, and it’s kind of like for
⏹️ ▶️ John me it was the ultimate like gift. You always want to buy people gifts that they wouldn’t buy themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially people who like seem to just buy themselves whatever they want, whose names might be Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s very difficult to know what
⏹️ ▶️ John to get them because it’s like, well, if they wanted something would have already bought it for themselves, but it’s usually something that somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t buy for themselves because they think it’s a frill or they don’t think they need it or whatever but if they got
⏹️ ▶️ John it would actually enjoy it and really good gift guy buyers and I am NOT one of them can figure out what those things
⏹️ ▶️ John are anyway Synology’s PR department actually turned out to be a really good gift buyer for me because I’ve been thinking about NASA’s
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time but I’m like oh they’re expensive and they don’t have data integrity and I don’t want to manage another server
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other things but because I got one for free it’s like whatever I’ll throw it down there and see what it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have to tell you now if this thing broke I would buy another NAS whether I buy in the solidly on I don’t know it’s analogies
⏹️ ▶️ John literally the only in NASA I’ve ever owned so I have no way to compare it to other NASAs other than stories I’ve heard from people but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would buy another one because now that I have it I do what Casey does I love having another I love
⏹️ ▶️ John having a huge amount of storage that is in a different room I love
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all the little server management
⏹️ ▶️ John things like it would you know it’s been totally reliable to me I let I let everything auto update I let the apps I don’t even let the
⏹️ ▶️ John apps auto update on my phone I let them auto update on the Synology I let everything auto update on
⏹️ ▶️ John it Everything’s always been fine. It’s always up. It sends me email if it goes onto UPS
⏹️ ▶️ John power so I can tell when someone is overloading a circuit breaker in the house and I can tell when the power goes back on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I download torrents from it so I don’t have to leave any of my computers running to just download torrents and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It hosts all the video that my kids watch, integrates with my TV. My TV can read,
⏹️ ▶️ John can play video right off the scenology with nothing, just the TV. And of course, every other device that I have can also play video off of
⏹️ ▶️ John my PlayStation and the Apple TV in theory if I got the, what do you call it, the Plex
⏹️ ▶️ John app and stuff like that. All this stuff that I thought would be a frill and that the UI is kind of gross and Linux-y,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is, I use it all the time and I love it. And so had I not been gifted this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would still be saying, nah, NAS, I don’t need something like that. But now that I have it, I would totally get another one. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not an 8-Bay one, because like Marco, I have a lot of free space on the thing at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I like it. So I wouldn’t be so quick to tell somebody, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who has never owned a NAS, that you totally don’t need a NAS, because you may end up like Marco and say, you know what, what I really want
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a bunch of really silent SSD storage right on my desk that’s at native speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you might end up like Casey and I and be excited by the possibilities of your NAS
⏹️ ▶️ John and love it every time you get to copy something to or from it over your local gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ John network and the I was really fast because it’s a bunch of multi gigabyte video files and you don’t have to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John the disks and they’re far away and it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would like to double down on everything you just said, John, particularly about, oh yeah, I don’t think I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a NAS. I’ve been ruined for life because now that I have the Synology, I will never, ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever not have another NAS. And unless something just goes horribly wrong with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology all of a sudden, I will probably always buy Synologies from now on because I freaking love this
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Google Play adds podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so Google has entered the podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem. What is this all about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we don’t know a lot about it yet. So here, they basically made a blog post and they did a couple of interviews that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listened to. And so the short version is that Google Play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music, which is their music streaming service, I guess. I really don’t know anything about it. Google Play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music is adding podcasts to itself. And so what this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will… And it’s going to start out Android only, but for the most part, I believe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it’s going to go everywhere soon at some point. So assume it’s going to be everywhere soonish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is basically Google’s big play in podcasting, as far as we can tell. They used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a really basic Android player, I think, but I think it was discontinued a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time ago. Anyway, what this means for podcasting is still a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big question mark. The idea is they’re going to be blending podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in with music in this one unified Google Play Music service. And then they, I guess, again, I don’t know too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about it, but I guess the whole idea of Google Play Music is to kind of select what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to hear right now based on all the stuff Google knows about you, which is a lot. So it’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going to be at the gym, they’re going to pick gym music for you. you know in the car they’re gonna pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you know that that’s like that’s like the idea is that it kind of it kind of automatically can select and play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that they think is gonna make the most sense for what you’re doing right now based on your your activities and taste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so they’re they’re mixing podcasts into that and so it used to be all music now it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music plus podcast you like or something it’s unclear to me whether it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know whether you subscribe specifically to things or whether it’s just random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s both I don’t know yet and and the implementation details are fairly important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here this is not open of course because Google is not open to despite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they say this is not an open standard this is not this is neither open nor
⏹️ ▶️ John standard well it’s better than it’s better than Facebook instant articles where they make you for or Apple news
⏹️ ▶️ John for that matter where they make you like write some weird format they just read your RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes So but that’s a that’s a one-way transition. So here’s what happens and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is by the way very similar to stitcher and I don’t know if stitcher still works this way I haven’t looked at in a while but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar to how stitcher at least used to work so you can’t subscribe to anything you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcaster has to opt into this because Google is not just reading RSS feeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then going to your server for each person who plays the file like the way overcast does it and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way most podcast players do it is everyone publishes RSS feeds anywhere, who cares? This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open web. You can publish your RSS feed wherever you want. And then the client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, the players like Overcast or Apple’s podcast app, they go download the file directly from the publisher. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way the publisher, first of all, is on the hook for things like bandwidth and everything, but also the publisher then gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stats. The publisher can control that. The publisher hosts the file and can serve exactly the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will be served to people. They can make sure, like, give me this exact encoding with this exact metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is my file. and that they know what they’re serving, they know how many times they’ve served it to how many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they are, roughly with IP geo-location and stuff like that, and they have logs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s something people don’t realize about iTunes, is that when you buy music from iTunes, Apple is giving
⏹️ ▶️ John that to you, they host the files. When you buy applications from the App Store, Apple is giving you those
⏹️ ▶️ John files, they host the applications. But when you do a podcast, which are in the same place and look very similar,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not hosting podcasts. Those are coming from the individual podcaster servers, is why they’re so slow half the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, what Stitcher came out with a few years ago with their service was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was a very similar thing where like you, you as a publisher would have to opt in. Well, at first you didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that was a mistake. And then they changed it. You as a publisher have to opt in because what they were doing was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rehosting your files, first of all, so that not so that they would read your RSS feed. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you they would automatically download all your files and basically be their own cache for them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own CDN and serve their copy of your file to all their listeners. So, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of ate the cost and the bandwidth there, but they also got all the control and all the stats. And they also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would transcode your file down to a lower bitrate to save space and to save bandwidth and to make it stream better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people. And to make it sound worse. Right. And so, and of course, it would make it sound worse. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google Play Music is doing all of those things. It is exactly the same kind of thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you as the publisher, you go and agree to their terms and you submit your fee. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we decide that we don’t want to do this, you just can’t play ATP in Google Play Music. Like no matter how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like the app, you just can’t play it because it isn’t based on the open web at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever show, if a brand new show launches, you want to go check it out, it probably won’t be there. We’ll see what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. But anyway, so you go and subscribe to the show and then you are getting their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copy of the file. your download won’t show up in the publisher’s main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stats system. Now, Google is saying they will offer publisher stats, like if you go into their dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you look at their stats. But most podcasters who care about stats, which is anybody who serves ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they already have their own systems for that. So this won’t integrate with that. This will be a separate thing you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opt into and then go and check and then manually like add into your stats system somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or make some kind of API thing if there even is an API, but they usually isn’t for modern Google services because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re so open. So anyway, they’re going to copy and then transcode your file,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly reduce the quality, and of course, they’re going to reserve the right to play ads, fortunately, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of your show, but between shows. Because I think they can play ads wherever they want, between any song,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think there’s a free tier with ads, something like that. So that part is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odd and uncomfortable for podcasters, but that’s the reality of free streaming services. At least they aren’t cutting into the middle of our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s the deal for podcasters. Basically, they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it the Google way where they know best, they don’t want to deal with you peons, you deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their system, and that’s the way to do it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John other aspect that is very Google-ish but not evil, to use the old Google thing, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that once they have your files and your data, they will
⏹️ ▶️ John almost undoubtedly serve them up faster than in what the random individual podcaster is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. And they will also probably everyone is assuming, and I don’t see why they wouldn’t run them through
⏹️ ▶️ John something that translates the text into speech, provide full text search for them, like trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously underscore David Smith for finding things like maybe that won’t be on day
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Maybe it’ll be on year three or four. But surely, like basically once Google gets data
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re getting data by essentially reading your feed and pulling all those files, they are transcoding them, they are processing
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I’m sure they will, if they have any kind of algorithms that do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything useful related to search, to audio files, and I’m sure they do, they’re gonna do that to podcasts. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, Marco, you’re talking about it from the perspective of a publisher, but from
⏹️ ▶️ John the perspective of a user, if, like they did with Google Photos, if Google can provide
⏹️ ▶️ John something that appears magical, like you can just type the word teacup and see a bunch of pictures of teacups, or you can just type some words and
⏹️ ▶️ John find podcasts those things were spoken using the magic of Google. That is an attractive feature
⏹️ ▶️ John to users because there is nothing equivalent in any of the other podcast systems, including probably Stitcher because I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have all the data analysis tools that Google has at their disposal. So the potential upside
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google’s own little Google reader style,
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to call it a walled garden, it’s called the chain link fenced garden, is that they can provide features to users
⏹️ ▶️ John by sucking in all this data that other people who are either less interested in podcasts because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple seems to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re right there, whatever they’re there, or just don’t have the tech like Stitcher. Those companies
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do that. So there is potential user upside of this service. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John scares me a little bit because I don’t want podcasts to I don’t want Google Play to become
⏹️ ▶️ John the equivalent of iTunes like we said in past shows, the fact that Apple is kind of mildly disinterested in podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. I like that. I like it because it keeps it. It keeps it open. It keeps podcasts is a thing that anyone can
⏹️ ▶️ John have and apples like whatever. As long as it’s not porn doesn’t have, you know, too much objectionable
⏹️ ▶️ John material. We’ll we’ll put it up in our directory and you host the files and go ahead. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I like that. I like that better than a Google reader scenario where eventually the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone ever listens to podcasts is through this Google thing. We are forced to do this Google thing and have ads inserted between
⏹️ ▶️ John our show. We are forced to have our show transcoded and have no control over. We are forced to add up numbers from two different locations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, not long term that’s not good for anybody short term we’re all saying as producers
⏹️ ▶️ John this is doesn’t we don’t like it that much but if everybody starts going through Google Play we’ll be forced to put
⏹️ ▶️ John our stuff up there otherwise we’re gonna cut our audience by 50% 20% 90% like in the end Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Reader was all there was in RSS and then when Google Reader ran away there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a big power vacuum and a few other things like feedbit and stuff that came up but it’s just never been the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so that like that to me like the whole like you know what if this becomes so big that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all have to play ball thing like that is the biggest risk for publishers it does seem on the face of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we we’ve we kind of decided early on that we didn’t want to be on Stitcher and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the reason we didn’t want to be on Stitcher was all of that there was also the way I read the terms there was a promotional requirement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to promote Stitcher on the show that’s one of the reasons why you hear so many people at the end of the podcast saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find us on iTunes and Stitcher because they had to and we did not agree to that so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we didn’t do it. The only reason we could say no to that was because it was so small. By most people’s estimations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stitcher is 5% or less of the listener base so it wasn’t big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to make it worth those downsides but this might become that big and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now podcast listening in general is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very lopsided right now towards iOS. Libsyn occasionally will discuss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stats, and I believe the ratio is something like 8 to 1 in favor of iOS among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all shows Libsyn hosts, which is a pretty wide range of shows. So the total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast listenership is still very iOS heavy. And that might continue to be the case for quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some time, in my opinion, because if you look at what podcasts are popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what kind of people listen to podcasts, I I think there’s a lot of overlap with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of people who traditionally have listened to public radio, and that does tend to skew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upscale, younger, smarter, richer, more liberal. And those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I think, demographics that are more likely to have iPhones and Android devices also.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m not trying to say that to be inflammatory. I think that’s actually true. I think that’s actually borne out by stats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But feel free, if I’m wrong, feel free to tell John. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not matter in the sense that maybe Android people just aren’t that into podcast listening, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to take over the whole market. I’m not going to say there aren’t any, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to be like a massive proportion of the market right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. But who knows what will happen in the future, right? I don’t want podcasting to be like YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like, you know, right now, if you need to make video online, this basically is YouTube. you don’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of other choices that have any reasonable number of viewers. If you want to reach the people who watch videos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you basically have to publish videos on YouTube. I don’t want podcasting to ever become that. I’m a little worried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this from that point of view. The only thing that gives me hope is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t seem like it will be that big. It seems like the kind of thing they’re doing because it isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much work for them to do in the grand scheme of things. They’re trying to boost Google play music, make it appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to more people. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple ended up doing something similar with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blending podcasts into Apple Music in a similar kind of way because these services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are both trying to beat each other over the head and attract people with podcasts. Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t they do the same thing or they talked about doing the same thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought they talked about podcast, yeah, but I don’t, I mean I use Spotify several times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week if not daily and I don’t recall having even stumbled onto a podcast section Spotify now it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean it’s not there I just haven’t noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they’re the way they’re positioning this as like just something that will start playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you want to hear a podcast or something that’s we’ll have to see how this is implemented in practice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that to me sounds like this is a system developed by people who hate podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John or don’t understand them because they don’t understand it’s like a TV show you don’t you know and when we were kids or when I was a kid anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John you could watch any episode of different strokes and it was fine because there was no continuity but podcasts most
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco popular podcasts and
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly something like cereal there’s continuity you got started episode one you got to go through them in order you can’t just be like okay
⏹️ ▶️ John play a podcast you what are you doing interleaving 17 different shows with the random episodes it won’t make any sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even just like interleaving podcast with music makes no sense also like yeah a three minute song and then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two-hour podcast right exactly like it just it doesn’t make sense so I’m hoping they’re gonna be smarter about it than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but upon first glance this looks like like in the same kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that the App Store in many ways you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like by what Steve Jobs thought of third-party software you can kind of tell the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store was designed as a marketplace for software by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a CEO who really didn’t like software. That’s the whole thing with like calling them apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of it’s kind of trivialized it it’s it’s kind of like you know talking down to it in a way.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not my take on apps. You think it’s talking down? I I think it was branding and it was brilliant and it was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to make application software something simple that everybody can use. Where I agree with you is that implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John wise it was so clear that they just repurposed all of the software and services and everything they had related to the
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes store for selling music and just said, doll it up a little bit and voila, it’s a store for selling apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John That part is definitely true but I don’t think the diminutive app or the attitude towards software is recognized. It’s merely
⏹️ ▶️ John recognized that Apple’s not very good at services and the one thing that it had they can sell they can send you
⏹️ ▶️ John bits sell you bits get take money and give you bits and keep track of what you purchased was a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they had built to sell music and they just adapted that to sell apps it looked like that from the outside but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Steve Jobs likes offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I think there’s really a combination there I think it is some of that like kind of condescending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude and and also very similar to the problems Apple has with gaming where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a little bit of the condescension and also just as you said really just not understanding it very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so anyway, I look at what I see from this so far, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard there was a great interview on the actual The Lib Syn podcast, which I’ll link to. I forget the name of it right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but there was an interview of one of the managers or something, some kind of manager title
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this team, talking about it. And if you can get through the corporate speak, which is not easy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the really painfully scripted talking points that the guy just kept hitting in response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to every question. Oh man, is that how people talk in California? Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, it was, that was rough. But if you can get through all that you can kind of get the idea of how they see this. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does kind of seem like this is Google’s version of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and Game Center. Like this is like that for podcasts. You know, it seems like this is designed by people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who, they want to have podcasts in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it just seems like at least at least the way they were talking about it and writing about it so far again this could all be wrong when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it launches we don’t know but it does seem like this is a weird system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed by people who don’t get and maybe don’t respect podcasts but we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I think yeah I think we could be wrong about their understanding I’m just not a podcast because
⏹️ ▶️ John I imagine like many things in Google the only reason this happening at all is because somebody actually is really into podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John and wishes they were part of a thing. The fact that it has to be part of Google Play, that’s a strategy tax. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, you know, percentage wise, many more people listen to music than podcasts. We already
⏹️ ▶️ John have this music thing. Why can’t you integrate that? They’re both audio, yada, yada. So that’s kind of a shame. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is some understanding within Google of how people enjoy podcasts, which is the reason that this
⏹️ ▶️ John project is seeing the light of day at all. And it’s just a matter of how, you know, how,
⏹️ ▶️ John how welcome they integrated, how can they take this thing that’s supposed to be music streaming services and integrate podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that is actually useful for people who really like podcasts. I’m sure they’re going to try to, but the saving grace here may
⏹️ ▶️ John be exactly the same as the saving grace with Apple and that Google is really interested in the play
⏹️ ▶️ John music thing. Podcasts are just a nice to have. They’re never interested enough in it to ever
⏹️ ▶️ John attract a large enough percentage base. I mean, they weren’t interested in RSS either, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Google reader got big kind of like organically on its own and just slowly swallowed up
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and then they but they never really did have interest in it and they’re like you know what forget it and they shut it down and so hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John this will not grow organically like that that it’ll it’ll be there it’s good that it’s there some people will use it people will complain
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re not in it just like some people complain that we’re not in stitch here but hopefully it won’t ever actually be a big deal because Google corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John is never like you know what the next multi-billion dollar thing is podcasts like people are into
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts because it’s the next multi-million dollar industry but But for a single company, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, selling music seems much bigger to them than podcasts do at this point. I think that will probably always be the case. So I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John that podcasts will always be weird enough. Like, you know, like talk radio has always been, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John narrowly focused enough, even though it’s also massively popular. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as massively popular as video games and movies and music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So, yeah, we’ll see what happens. I mean, from a publisher’s point of view, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask, like, you know, What’s the downside of putting yourself in here? I don’t short term immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the downsides are very big. You know, yeah, it kind of sucks that they rehost the files. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to sound worse than your files if you care about quality like I do. Who knows if it’ll do things like strip chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metadata out? Who knows? But for the most part, the downside seems limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, well, we’ll have to go somewhere else for stats and we’ll have these people who hear our show in a less than ideal way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think long term, the downside is that strategy problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, do we really want to be encouraging and supporting a system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is trying to privatize and make proprietary the currently open system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of open web podcasting? And to me, the answer there is pretty clear. I would really rather not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if this becomes so big that you have to do that, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to not be happy about I don’t think it will become that big, but we’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean either. I think that does it for tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, MailRoute, and Fracture, and we will see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, accidental. John didn’t do any research, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John You can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s So that’s Casey Liss M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anti-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental Tech Podcasts So long
Post-show: CEC
⏹️ ▶️ John Got some Apple TV stuff to end the show here, even though we talked about it enough in the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Oh yeah, yeah, it looks like the embargo lifted like right as we started the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, I just saw the one from Mashable, Christina Warren did I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the first one I saw on Twitter, but then I saw someone else sent me the Walt Mossberg one from Recode, specifically this
⏹️ ▶️ John section of the review, where Walt Mossberg and his typical old man not understanding things, sorry Walt.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an unkind characterization, because I’m an old man now too. He says the remote can now control the volume of your TV
⏹️ ▶️ John with no setup in most cases and with an obscure setting on some Newer TVs it can even turn them on and off and change to
⏹️ ▶️ John the right input You know, that’s the HDMI CEC thing that we talked about last time next sentence
⏹️ ▶️ John in parentheses This ladder benefit worked for me for a day or two then stopped working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice well, we have lots of CEC unicorns that he can talk to who wrote into us
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it works perfectly for them, but not for Walt Mossberg But, you know, it almost works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Worked for a day or two, then stopped. And I’m sure Walt is spending a lot of time figuring out why it stopped.
⏹️ ▶️ John The solution, as always, is to disable CEC everywhere.