149: Everyone's on Vacation
24 Dec 2015Phil Schiller would never order a webfont with egg salad.
Episode Description:
- Casey's reconciled differences
- Three truths and a lie
- Marco experiments with his website
- Chrome vs. Safari on the desktop
- Phil Schiller takes over the App Store
- Ben Thompson's take (Stratechery members only)
- Apache Mesos
- Les Moonves
- CBS/60 Minutes feature on Apple
- Upthere
- Post-show:
- Neutral: Marco has ordered a Tesla
- The great bagel dispute
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Chapters
- Intro: Reconciled differences
- Three truths and a lie
- Speeding up a dormant blog
- Chrome vs. Safari
- Sponsor: Linode
- Phil Schiller takes over App Store
- Sponsor: Fracture
- 60 Minutes feature on Apple
- Sponsor: Harry’s
- Upthere
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Tesla order
- Post-show: Egg salad on sesame
Intro: Reconciled differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is your shopping done?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think but I haven’t wrapped everything yet and so that always leaves me wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe I forgot something or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I didn’t get enough for somebody or something so it’s always a baseline level of stress because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always very worried about not having gotten somebody something or enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s why you have a spreadsheet to track these sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. That would be wise if I was thinking that far ahead yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree that That’s the kind of thing I should do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assume John has just a series of Pearl scripts to figure out what to buy people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, I don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking maybe you would have just a large number of windows. I think that would be more you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like maybe like one window that has like 15,000 tabs right in it that was just like one tab for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every person you’ve ever known for each gift that you might someday maybe wanna get them plus the ones you did get them, plus the ones you got them in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for comparison and reference. Actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John that does make a lot of sense. You need a burndown chart for a number of gifts you have to buy other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was about to say there’s no way Marco knows what that is. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. I assume this is another like business thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, it’s a software development thing, but also a business thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happens in a burndown chart? I mean, it sounds really fun. I’m guessing it isn’t. No, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re looking for I think it’s because they look like flames if you have like a layered bar chart, but you’re trying to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John go down to zero. Like you’re trying to make all these different things. It’s like how many of X, how many Y, how many of Z and little bars
⏹️ ▶️ John over time that what you’re trying to do is drop them all to zero. So you’re not buying anybody any gifts. That’s the goal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in the midst of reconciling our visa bill, which is making me mildly upset because it’s the holidays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like during the podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only have a few. If you want, we can discuss watching paint dry. I was about to say, I know this is hugely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entertaining. We can walk through a sort algorithm on the air and just like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco example data set of of how a sort algorithm sorts it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds super fun. Yeah. I use this app called Money Well, which is… What
⏹️ ▶️ John a name. Just chuck your money down a well. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was a well at some point, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right now it’s a bucket full of money. But anyway, so I’m four transactions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away from reconciling my visa bill, and then I get to pay it, which is super delightful because it’s the holidays,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now I’m broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the fact that your holiday purchases are already on a bill you’ve received means that you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more ahead of the game than I am usually at the holidays. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly Well, we should start with, this is a monumental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this is a Christmas miracle. To the best of my knowledge, and I am not presently looking at the notes because I’m finishing reconciling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my visa bill, but to the best of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steven Connelly You’re still, just, how long do you think it’ll take? Should we just sit here and wait?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly No, no, no. Wait, watch this, and, well, you can’t watch because you’re not seeing anything. Boom, reconciled. Done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly How does it feel to be reconciled? Steven Connelly so great except now I got to pay this not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap Visa bill which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is… But you are reconciled that that is so it’s like closure for all of your money you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying goodbye to all of your money you in a fully closed state.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true you could say I have some reconcilable differences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you’ve reconciled them you have reconciled differences. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was waiting for that. I was waiting for you to artfully work it in but I guess you just gave up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You didn’t think that was artful? Thanks a lot jerk. I was pretty proud of that. Anyway, um, what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap were we talking about? I already got a sidetrack. Oh, yeah Do we or do we not have follow-up? I should take a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our show notes where there is the heading follow-up There is a single bullet and there
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, everyone’s on vacation I think we had a couple other shows where there was nothing and then I can made something up on the fly But I don’t even anything to
⏹️ ▶️ John make up because everyone is off Everyone’s watching Star Wars and they’re on vacation and they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John sending us follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. To that end, can we establish that I have not seen Star Wars and I presume Marco has neither and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not wish to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John assume Marco never will. So that’s true.
Three truths and a lie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually I wanted to start this episode with a bit of a game. With a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three truths and a lie.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, Marco knows things from corporate America.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icebreaker they use. So there’s, here’s three truths, three statements of these are true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of them is a lie and you have to figure out which one is the untrue statement. Are
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these things Star Wars spoilers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Okay. Number one, I wrote my first Swift code. Not possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number two, I played Journey. Number three, I went to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Star Wars. And number four, I started using Pinterest.
⏹️ ▶️ John I went to see Star Wars is the lie because Marco doesn’t see things. Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would concur with that, but it’s hard to vote against you actually writing. Like, there’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve written Swift. You’re such an old man that there’s no way. But I would have to agree with John that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that is the lie that you you have you have not seen Star Wars. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have gone with your instinct, Casey. Really? You saw Star Wars and I didn’t? Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I went today to a movie theater to see Star Wars. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John How did that, whose idea was that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m flabbergasted. It was actually my idea, but she was also planning on wanting to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and going anyway, so it was kind of mutual.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you do this just so you could read the internet without worrying about spoilers, or maybe Tiff was worrying about spoilers, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it was because I basically have no podcasts left in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my podcast player that I can play without being about Star Wars. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John everything that I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to this week is about Star Wars and I’ve listened to everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you are actually concerned about hearing Star Wars spoilers that means like otherwise you just like whatever Star Wars spoilers I’m listening I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care I’m never gonna see it. Well so the greatest thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you know all of you Star Wars fans have been trying so hard to avoid spoilers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go into ridiculous lanes. I successfully avoided any spoilers about the movie simply by just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really caring about the movie. I didn’t put any effort into avoiding spoilers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I went into the theater today knowing nothing about it and being pleasantly surprised by everything in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey See, funny how that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, I would say I’ve been avoiding spoilers, but I haven’t been going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular lengths to do so. It’s just if I see like a tweet fly by that looks like it might be spoiler,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there might be a spoiler in it, then I’ll just skip over it and I haven’t been reading reviews or anything like that. I’ve asked friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that have seen it, do you like it? And that’s all have asked and you know I’ve gotten some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hints as to the quality of the movie but I’ve not seen it I’m hoping that Aaron and I will be able to see it maybe even tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually but um but I am still avoiding spoilers and I think my time is running out because I think the internet is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collectively decided from what I can tell that shortly after Christmas all bets are off and and everyone’s gonna talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and that’s that’s part of why I went to see it because I’m fine ignoring major cultural events
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen any of Lord of the Rings never seen Harry Potter, never seen Twilight, anything like that. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the big movie franchises I’ve either never seen or I’ve seen some a long time ago and then never again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly Let me help you. Lord of the Rings, big waste of time. Harry Potter’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Michael Manson Reverse that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Connelly Please email John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Michael Manson Anyway, so, but this one felt very, very important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my circles, more so than those other ones did. And also, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen the other Star Wars movies. I did enjoy them. I am a Star Wars fan. I’m just not a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Star Wars fan but I am a Star Wars fan you know in general so I did want to see it at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was planning on watching it when it came out to video maybe or something or I could get on Netflix but I figured like it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be talked about so much and it’s so important you know in in the in the circles that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I that I live in that I figured I kind of had to go see it in the theater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have gone with my instinct because you know in retrospect the the lengths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would go to to prevent yourself from writing any Swift? That should have been the obvious answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you have gone through some serious mental gymnastics in order to get to the point that you can justify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not writing Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t say I’m never writing Swift. I’m saying I’m not writing Swift yet, but that I do intend to learn it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when 3.0 comes out next year, because they’re doing a bunch of big changes to lead up to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you had just changed your mind about it recently, like in the past show. You’re like, oh, I did that, you know, that podcast, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, oh, I’m not going to do Swift for a while but then the open source thing came out and kind of turned you around so you’re primed to do Swift but
⏹️ ▶️ John the real tell was that the fact that we were talking about Star Wars and that prompted you to do the truths
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lie thing so I mean I already had the list I mean I already I knew you played Journey
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other ones are easy so it was just down to the Swift in the Star Wars it just seemed so
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy of you to actually leave the house and go to a movie theater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pinterest thing didn’t you didn’t have any pause about the Pinterest thing I know
⏹️ ▶️ John it no I know you did Pinterest how’d you know yeah how do you know? Tiff told everybody. You have puppies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s right, she did. Yeah, so I joined a, I started a Pinterest account so I could collect pictures of puppies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches, and things I want to buy for the house, like pipe heating wrap and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the icicle melting zigzag wire that you put on the roof. Exciting stuff. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you find good, good pipe heating wrap, whatever you’re going to call it, tell me, because I have stuff around my, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John like stuff you put around the pipes to keep the, the heat from just leaking out into the, the areas where the pipes go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s to prevent them from freezing if you have a pipe in an uninsulated space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind then. So it’s like we have one in the garage from forever ago. It’s like this ancient two-conductor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable that’s just like a heat wire that wraps in a coil around a pipe that runs through a garage because it’s uninsulated so that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freeze. That has burnt out and no longer heats, so I’m looking at new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solutions to that. And they’re all basically scaring me into either not doing it or having an electrician do it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all basically says that these things are insanely dangerous and you will start fires and they all require insulation around the pipe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and yeah, so I’m probably going to actually outsource this job but we will see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know living in the Northeast is the best because you have to worry about BS like this. Well because we have winter. Well right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well what you have really is is months of depressing evil terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey winter like season whereas I have this brief respite from from wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weather with slightly less wonderful weather and then it’s back to wonderful weather again. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you continue being smug up there in your tundra, and let me know how that works out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was wonderful there when we went there in July. That was really wonderful weather you had there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was warm-ish. That’s not true, it was very hot when you guys were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. Even for us, it was extremely hot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also ordered a Tesla this week, but we’ll save that for the after show, I guess. It was a big week.
Speeding up a dormant blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big week for Marco, and you killed the web font on your website, which by the way I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with. I think that whatever font you have going on now, not making me happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t think I found the right solution to that. I’m experimenting with killing a web font.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might at least do a different web font because the service I was using, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Heffler & Co. font because I like their Ideal Sans font, there have been a few benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done by people that have shown that typically their web font serving is not as fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Typekit or some of the other big web font services and not as fast as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-hosting and stuff. And they don’t allow self-hosting, but they do kind of a weird thing where you have to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through their CDN, but then it redirects to the font files on your server with no cache
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headers so that you’re making the clients make two requests. One of them is going back to your slow server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not to their CDN to actually get the big files, you know, the big like 300 kilobytes worth of font
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files. And the only reason I’m there really is because I really like this one font they have. They have very nice fonts over there at Heffler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m going to look at other options now because it just it was just too slow. Like if you look at the network timeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Web Inspector of like time it’s taking to render this page, it’s just insane. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could argue, I mean I’ve heard many kind of arguments for why I shouldn’t worry about the speed of my web font loading,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of which boil down to either that I should like async load it and then either pop it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or save it for the next load and put it on the next load. Both of those I think suck. Neither
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those I would say are good options just for user experience wise. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would I want to do either of those? The other answer was, why do you care? It’s just a blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t matter how quickly it loads. And that’s BS because not only does it matter quite a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how quickly pages load to whether people complete the loads, but when When you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loading a 300 kilobyte resource that requires two requests to be made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the page can even begin to load, this is like in the head. On mobile and when you have bad connections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, that does matter. That really does add up to a significant delay when loading a page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t like when you embed a big image because that can load after the page loads. When you’re on a mobile connection, that really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out that my traffic, like everyone’s traffic, is mostly mobile these days. You have to think about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re a blog or any kind of content site, especially a tech content site read by tech people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to see a large portion of traffic on mobile. Many of those people will be on cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time they are loading it. Yes, it would be nice if I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly fonts on my site, but it would also be nice if my page loads very quickly. So I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to balance those things. I think maybe doing Typekit might be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better because it’s just a faster web font host. Maybe doing self-hosting would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit faster because then it could optimize the connections a little bit better than going off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a different host. So we’ll see. I’m going to play with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What led you to do all this? Because no disrespect intended, it seemed to me that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of… Not abandoned, but avoided writing posts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while now. I mean, you’ll write your link posts to this show, to Under the Radar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen a whole lot of real writing from you in a while, outside of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you had headphones or podcast mics or what have you. So what inspired you to just start paying attention again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was inspired by being forced by Dropbox. Oh, right, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, I use a Dropbox blogging engine that I wrote that nobody else should use. Please don’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s terrible, but I like it. It’s good for me. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended support for the version that was probably ancient, the Linux client that I was using for Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my ancient server, running its ancient distribution of CentOS, I think 5.5 or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was running an old stack, an old version of their thing. And I couldn’t update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it without upgrading some pretty big things like libc. And everybody was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically saying on the internet, never upgrade libc on a Linux system if you can help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. kind of a problem. So I migrated my whole blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a new server. I also, I love Linux. Every Linux is basically like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, rock solid, runs forever, it’s great, but you want to upgrade it? Forget it. Please don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. You really shouldn’t do this. You should never upgrade a Linux server, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Never upgrade the distribution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They all say that. Don’t do that. The solution to upgrading a Linux server is to abandon it and make a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that is what I did. So I was already in there, mucking around with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guts of it and setting up everything new and clean. So I figured, while I’m here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me also take this opportunity to modernize it. So I switched over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTTPS and everything is now HTTPS. I dropped the www prefix, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fun stuff to modernize the site. And so part of that was… I’ve been thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about dropping the web font for a while, it was actually about to… It bills annually, and it was about to bill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me again $160. So I’m like, you know, maybe this is a good time to reconsider whether I want to keep using this font.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let me try without it. All that being said, you are right. I have barely written anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the site of any consequence in a long time, in months, really. And part of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was because the last time I wrote stuff about app pricing, it went very, very badly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so part of that was just I need to kind of rethink what audience I want to be writing to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who’s reading this? Do they really care? Do I want to be taking the risk of some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things that I would want to say to risk getting all the feedback from it and and being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having my name dragged all over the internet in horrible ways and you know starting a bunch of drama?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most of the time it’s just not worth it to me honestly anymore. It’s just not worth it. I do want to keep writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m kind of going through a process where I want to kind of try to figure figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to keep writing on the site. Because having the kind of potentially controversial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech topic discussions, I think, are better here, where it’s more human and people know me better. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you guys are here to rebut and to provide your own answers to things so that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not going off the deep end, going crazy and getting trash because I said something horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without any kind of rebuttal. And the developer help things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would rather do that on under the radar. The other podcast I do with under David Smith and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything doesn’t fit there. Anything that is kind of helpful to developer economics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m just not going to reveal anymore because it has proven not to be worth it. And then I have there’s lots of other things I could blog about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can blog about headphones and coffee and microphones and stuff like that. Like you know, I can blog about lots of other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without being that controversial or or at least controversial in those ways that I’ve been kind of burned by.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll figure it out over time. I have noticed that not writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything of substance in a while is not making me feel good and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually making me a worse podcaster. Because as you can tell by this long rambling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, not only do I have more to say because it builds up in me all week and then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spew it all out at once in a podcast, and that’s no good. But also my arguments on the podcast are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less coherent and less organized. I think that is because, partially because I’ve been sick for like three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks, and partially because I think not writing is actually making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the arguments in my head more weakly structured and more weakly organized, if that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John Just write it and don’t publish it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one way to do it. Or like, you know, write a private email list or something like that. That might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a good idea I’m not sure if it would be as good you know like if you if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you only surround yourself with people that agree with you or that want to read it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re stranded or if you’re writing for something that is such a small audience possibly of just you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I think you you lose the ability for people to improve you in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in constructive ways and and I think that would be unfortunate and when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would not give the writing as much value to me as it would for, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if it was in public.
Chrome vs. Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to give you a constructive improvement, but I just realized it might just be Chrome. Let me just check.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reload. I didn’t change the name of the CSS. If you reload, I think it’s…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome. Never mind. I was going to complain that the new font you’d chosen apparently didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a good emoji glyph for the cloud icon that you use next to the streaming heading in the Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John 2 post, but it’s just Chrome. It’s a black cloud! It looks like a little turd.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s just Chrome. Never mind. Carry on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand why everyone loves Chrome so damn much.
⏹️ ▶️ John It loads T.co link successfully. So that’s got that going for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, see, I turned off, I think Renee Richie may have found it, somebody had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found a way to do a defaults right for tweet bot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I know is not what you use, john, but to do a defaults right to just direct to the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey URL instead of a T co link or whatever we’re calling them. And, and that that made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything a million percent better and all of the issues that so many people seem to have with Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely like never run into them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You haven’t got the one the new one in El Capitan where the the entirety of the window
⏹️ ▶️ John chrome becomes inert like you can’t put the insertion point in the address bar. You can’t click the window widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t click any of the toolbar buttons. You can’t use the scroll bar. I get that one twice a week now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No but remember that I have a sane amount of tabs open. I don’t have 3000 windows and 4500 tabs. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not why I get up with two browser windows open and then one of them is dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again I’m sure that these people who say that Safari is a piece of crap, I’m sure they’re saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a reason, but darned if I know why because my experience does not match with that. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I don’t think that Chrome is bad outside of the piss poor, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awful emoji support. I don’t think Chrome is bad, but I don’t, I don’t feel like it brings anything to the table
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I care about. And again, I’m sure that there are all sorts of Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diehard Chrome fans that are firing up email clients right now. They’re not. They’re using Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably using Gmail to write me some sort of nasty gram about the things that Chrome does better than Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe that’s true. I’m not saying that they’re wrong. But in my personal experience, I have never thought to myself, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, I really wish I could use Chrome for this because it does whatever better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both. I use Safari as my primary. I used to use Chrome. I used to use one at work, one at home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I would always be up to date on both. And now I’ve just been using Safari now for a while, it’s my primary, and Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my flash isolation area. But anyway, my flash quarantine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Chrome has always been very consistent for me with performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with reliability and everything. Safari is all over the map with every new version. So sometimes Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great for a while, sometimes Safari gets slow or buggy or inconsistent, or crashes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something for a few releases. And in my experience, Chrome is just way more consistent. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Chrome has the better web dev tools most of the time. So we’ll see. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will hear from all the Chrome people and what they think, because Chrome, I believe, has more market share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than Safari in pretty much every, by anyone’s metric, I’m pretty sure. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially ahead of Safari now. So the world has voted, just like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to vote for, Compaq and Dell computers. Those are the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. All right. So not speaking of things that are awesome, why don’t you make us happier after mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Compaq in Dell and tell us about something that is awesome.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s this company out there that I have just talked about for the first part of this podcast quite a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s called Linode. Or Linode? I don’t even know. So it’s Linux, Linus, Linode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. But I say Linode. It’s a web host. It’s been around for a long time now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have been a Linode customer myself for quite a long time. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like 6 or 8 years, at least. I’ve been there a while. I have done a lot of web hosts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my time. I’ve used a lot of them big and small, from stuff as big as hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first four years of Tumblr at a huge host, all the way down to hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little private sites for myself and my friends and everything. Over the years, I’ve liked Linode so much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve gotten so good, that I now host everything at Linode. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one dedicated server left somewhere else for some auxiliary tasks, only because I haven’t gotten around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to moving it to Linode yet. It is such a great host. And I you know, they can’t pay me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say this. I’m saying this honestly as me I was hoping to get them as a sponsor because I’ve used them forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I really do genuinely Like them and recommend them in my opinion. It is the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value in web hosting today They did a major upgrade but I don’t know two years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now or a year ago when they switched everything to SSDs So it’s all fast all SSD modern CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more recently they switched their hypervisor software from Zen to KVM. The latest Unix benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showed that it is 300% performance increase moving to KVM from Zen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve done this with all mine. It’s been fine, rock solid, everything’s great. You want to host things at Linode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe me. Like if you want real web hosting, you want root access to your own server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can configure however you want, and you can install your own software and run your own stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to do that at Linode. It really is an incredible value for what you get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very affordable. The hardware and speed and bandwidth is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid. Check it out. I use it. I recommend it. linode.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP will give you a $10 credit using promo code accidentalpodcast10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So go line of comm slash ATP get a $10 credit by using promo code accidental podcast 10
Phil Schiller takes over App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some news in the Apple executive lineup. John, do you want to kind of give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us a synopsis as to what’s been going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it was so long ago, I can barely remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That was the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco news. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John right after we recorded last week’s podcast. We were like, I wonder what news they’re going to dump at the end of the year. The news
⏹️ ▶️ John was, I think, a fairly tame reorg where Phil Schiller
⏹️ ▶️ John got control of the App Store stuff, the App Store stuff that used to be under IDQ.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he still has like the whole media thing and Apple music and all that stuff, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they named what’s his name? Jeff Williams, CEO, but he was already doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not a lot of exciting things there. But the thing that developers got excited about is the moving of
⏹️ ▶️ John any app store responsibilities from one person to another. And I guess people are getting hopeful just because,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, it’s a change and things are bad now. So change has the potential to be good. But Phil Schiller
⏹️ ▶️ John has been in charge of app review. Marco can correct me if I’m wrong, for a while now, right? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John this, that’s not new. I believe since the start. Yeah, he’s just getting the rest of the App Store. And so app review
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the things that developers complain about a lot. And Phil Schiller has always had that. So he’s not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John your sort of savior of the App Store. If you’re, if you’ve been disgruntled about app review stuff, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil Schiller. And now he’s got the rest of it. The hope is, I guess, that Phil Schiller’s organization,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like, will improve the tech parts of it better. make iTunes connect nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John and let Mac developers use test flight and fix the Mac App Store sandboxing
⏹️ ▶️ John people so people can actually test their apps in the sandbox. I don’t know. Like, that’s the hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that any queue seem to not be able to roll out the the features like the software
⏹️ ▶️ John and server based features for developers as quickly as developers wanted and it’s somehow Phil
⏹️ ▶️ John show would do better. I have no idea if that is the case. But I have to admit,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m also slightly optimistic just because things have been kind of not
⏹️ ▶️ John great limping along for a really long time. And I like to see some kind of shakeup, even if it’s like the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John most minor shakeup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I mean, just to fill out what you said, basically, the the developer ecosystem of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been under these three different divisions in the company. There’s the engineering division
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under Craig Federighi. They make all the API’s and new OS’s and everything. And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Developer Relations Division, which is under Phil Schiller’s division,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under Marketing. And that does WWDC, the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program, and then also app review and the app review policies. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s the Store Division and the editorial part of it. That has been under ADQ in the Services Division.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that decides what apps to be featured, and how the store works, and running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the store back end and everything. I would imagine it also involves the store apps themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that, to have this under three different divisions, you could always tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past where there has been some kind of miscommunication or friction in the past. So for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would have an app that was featured by the App Store editorial team under ADQ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was doing some new cool thing, and then the app review team would call them up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, oh, sorry, we’re not going to allow this. You’ve got to take this app down. it’s being featured by the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco department in the store. And so you have these kind of like weird miscommunications or disagreements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the divisions that have caused some friction or some clumsiness in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The engineering side is still going to be under Federighi. It’s still totally separate. Obviously, that makes sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer relations and the App Store is now together under Phil. And interestingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as our friend Ben Thompson pointed out on Stratechery, and I think this was one of the private members-only things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not, I’m going to link to it. A lot of people aren’t paying a lot of attention to the fact that Phil Schiller has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost a big chunk of his responsibilities in this as well. What corporate people call MarCom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing communications, which I think that’s like advertising and stuff, right? Oh, it beats me. I know nothing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff. Anyway, that used to be under Phil, and now they announced the new hire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whose name I forgot, I’m sorry. The new hire is now taking over marketing communications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Phil and and reporting directly to Tim Cook. So this stuff has been removed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Phil’s plate, it appears. And then Phil has gained the app stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And logically, I don’t know how this works internally. There’s obviously a lot of implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details here that we don’t know. The big one to me is, how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you separate the app stores from the back end that they run on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is all presumably still under ADQ’s division? There’s going to be some weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would imagine. But high level, it certainly appears that Phil has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost his responsibility of running the advertising part of it and gained the responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of running the app stores, whatever that includes. Because he already ran developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relations and app review, that makes some sense. So, John, I’m with you in that I am optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. I don’t think we’re gonna see meaningful change to the app store policies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any kind of rule that you can’t do now. Any kind of controversy over app review, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even expect improvements to app review, at least on iOS. On the Mac App Store, having these occasionally very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long review times, I hope they fix that because that’s just messed up. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s bad. That’s embarrassing. And that’s obviously not the way it’s supposed to work to have your apps in review for a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when it is working, like on iOS, when you typically get a seven or eight day review time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’re going to see any major changes to that system. You know, the system of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review as we know it today. That is here to stay for a long time because the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is at the very top of that organization just took control of the entire app store. Like obviously they’re not looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change that. But the things that I think that I’m optimistic about here are that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I can’t get a great read on Phil, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more that I know of him, or the more that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear him talk, or that I hear stories about him, the more I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like him. I think he has sensibilities that line up with mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more so than most of the other high-up Apple executives, and more so that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the interest of the old Apple. And that comes with some good and some bad. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppReview, I don’t think, is going anywhere, because it’s like the old-school Apple. Overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a good thing, if for nothing else, because as you said, Jon, it is a sign of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big change. And if you look at things that stagnate or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have problems in Apple, many of them, I would say, possibly even most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, fall under that services division. That is clearly a place where they have had a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past, and we keep hearing that they’re getting better. Some of the things they’re doing are better, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Cloud Kit stuff, the new Photosync. of that stuff is really good. And so I think they are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And we’re hearing stories about them like, you know, running Linux servers now and doing this Apache Mezos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and now this is probably where Swift on Linux is going. And, you know, we’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of rumblings that this department is getting better. And some evidence of that is coming out to the consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even if they start doing really well, they also seem dramatically overloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they seem like they have a lot of trouble making progress on especially on multiple fronts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the App Store has basically done nothing. Like the App Store has gone almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nowhere, has improved very little, or has changed very little since its inception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2008. You know if you look at the App Store today versus the App Store in 2008, it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not that different. Yes, some things are better, but not what you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect for what is it seven years? years, seven and a half years. Not what you’d expect for that amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to move a big chunk of this division out of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under new leadership, in a different division of the company, to have that be the App Store, the thing that controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of my living, many people’s living, the modern computing landscape,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of this is dependent on the App Store and the way it’s run and its policies. To move that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to another executive is a big change. I think. It seems like it would be a big change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this is just some paper thing. So I hope that this is a sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are finally going to change the app store. They’re finally going to improve it to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making meaningful changes. And again, I don’t think it’s going to be in regards to app review. I think we’re stuck with that for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it could be in regards to many things that could use improvement. Things like if you want upgrade pricing or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trials, that’s the kind of place, this is the kind of change that would happen. If you want improvements to the Mac App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or better health… I mean, if you look at the health of the App Stores, pretty much all of them except the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one need help. They’re not in great shape. The iPhone one is doing okay simply because of its massive volume,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it could still use some improvement. All of that now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of… We have renewed hope that the App Store might finally get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better because they just did this seemingly substantial sounding move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have high hopes for that. Especially to be under Phil, he cares a lot about the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the product quality and they wouldn’t have moved this for no reason. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing pressuring them to move it. There was no reason they had to do this. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly want to do this and this move has to have been for a good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John there is some kind of pressure because when I it’s hard it’s always hard to tell why things are happening inside Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the press release isn’t going to tell you and all I can do is look at the experiences I’ve had in the companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve worked for when they’ve shuffled people around and the only real underlying cling
⏹️ ▶️ John other than stuff you don’t know about because there’s so much information you don’t have like for all we know like maybe someone you know
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to retire soon or you know maybe someone has expressed an interest in doing something different right
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t know about it stuff it’s not in the press release but usually if some top executive
⏹️ ▶️ John like the CEO or whatever is not getting something they want out of some subdivision
⏹️ ▶️ John of the company they usually let that slide for a while but eventually it’s like I’ve been I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John X for two years now and this person hasn’t delivered it it’s time
⏹️ ▶️ John to give another person a chance sometimes there’s the you know give the really hard job to this one executive who’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John for you know dealing tackling tough problems and that person bounces around like the problem solver
⏹️ ▶️ John or the fixer or the you know like the what do you call it? Silver NSX
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey. Oh, it’s a movie reference. You won’t get it The wolf is definitely a fixer. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be that but like either way It’s like someone is not getting what they want out of Insert thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it could be is someone not getting what they want out of markham And that’s why a new guy has to come in to take
⏹️ ▶️ John it is someone not getting what they want out of the App Store we don’t know because it could be say say the marketing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John seems stagnant, you know, like Apple’s marketing message isn’t evolving. And for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John we wanted to change and Phil doesn’t seem capable to get out of the rut. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna bring in someone new, they’re going to take
⏹️ ▶️ John over the marketing and communication. But since Phil is such an important person, you can’t take away
⏹️ ▶️ John that from him without giving him something else. And Eddie’s got a lot of stuff. So give it over to him. Alright, so that’s one plausible scenario. Another
⏹️ ▶️ John one is the one that we’re all thinking of, which is like, Eddie, for years we wanted X out of this app
⏹️ ▶️ John store stuff. It hasn’t been happening, so we’re going to take that away from you and give it to somebody who is more,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, who we think is going to do a better job. I don’t know if Phil Schiller is the person who’s going to do a better job with
⏹️ ▶️ John that particular thing. Like, there’s just so much we don’t know. But the bottom line is, these things don’t happen without
⏹️ ▶️ John a substantial reason because top executives hate having responsibility taken away from them. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a demotion, but it’s seen as like, you know. So Phil Schiller is not really, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, He got a bunch of responsibilities taken away, but he took the mantle of something else. So I feel like this is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the political org chart of Apple is a little bit of a down arrow on Eddie Q and a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of an up or sideways arrow on Phil. That’s just the way it feels to me from the outside. And what I think about
⏹️ ▶️ John is what, you know, assuming this theory is corrected a little bit, a little bit down arrow on Eddie Q.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it that, uh, that top executives might have wanted that they weren’t getting
⏹️ ▶️ John out of Eddie Q? And that’s makes me think of the success hides problem things where in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John when he had the iTunes store and the app store and everything was going gangbusters, hey, the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John is super popular. Everybody loves apps, they’re installing stuff. And like, every year, every quarter,
⏹️ ▶️ John he, you know, at every meeting, and he could be like, look at these crazy numbers. Look how many apps we have. Look how many
⏹️ ▶️ John people are down on except look how many developers are signed up. Like every metric that he could possibly every
⏹️ ▶️ John chart he could put up every number he could throw in someone’s face was like, I’m in charge of the app store and the app store is
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. But but as you pointed out, Marco, at a certain point, like those numbers, not that they level
⏹️ ▶️ John off, it’s like, yeah, yeah, we heard lots of apps, lots of whatever. But what’s this I’m hearing about, you know, developers
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like this, or it’s hard to search in the store, or this, we bought this company to redo the store, but it kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of looks the same. And people don’t think it’s that much better. And just just from regular, like, you don’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged into this community, just Tim Cook and go to the app store on his own phone to try to find something and
⏹️ ▶️ John notice that there are problems. And bring that up two years ago, they’d be like, Oh, yeah, no, we’ll take care of that. No, we’re working
⏹️ ▶️ John on this working that at a certain point. It’s like, it doesn’t, you know, again, things that things that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who’s not plugged into the developer community, just Tim Cook on his own phone, using the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, doesn’t seem like regardless of whether I think this is good or not, and your
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers are great, and your reliability is great, and you’re making a lot of money or whatever. It just doesn’t seem like it has gotten that
⏹️ ▶️ John much better over the past several years. So maybe it’s time for a change. Now, This could all be delusions
⏹️ ▶️ John based on our perspective as outsiders and people who know a lot of developers. It could be something entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John unrelated. But to me, that’s a plausible scenario that that not that he was coasting,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that like when when you’re on the fun part of the hockey stick, it can hide a lot of stuff. And at a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain point, either the hockey stuff levels off or that stuff becomes old hat and you need like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what have you done for me lately? You know, what have you done to the app store lately? Because the complaints are there
⏹️ ▶️ John and the feedback is there and you know, people leaving the Mac App Store and long review
⏹️ ▶️ John times. I don’t know if that’s even involved in that. And you know, like features and iTunes connect and just it just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, no matter how distantly you’re moved out from the developer community, you can do what Marco just said and say, look at
⏹️ ▶️ John what the app store was like five years ago and look at what it’s like now and think is that five years worth of progress in the app
⏹️ ▶️ John store and you just have to say no. And so that’s why that feels like the strongest
⏹️ ▶️ John reason why there might be a shakeup related the App Store, regardless of what you think of it, it’s just that it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John progressing and advancing the way you would hope it would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, like, you know, I think, as I mentioned last episode, I think you can look at their recent product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launches, the Watch, the Apple TV, and the iPad Pro. In all three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those cases, you can very clearly point to the app ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the app stores themselves as holding these products back significantly. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV app store is frankly embarrassing. There’s so little in it. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hard to use. It is so hard to find anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no like public links for TV apps. You can’t… If you hear about like… Badland 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out this past week or sometime recently. I wanted to get it on my TV or at least find out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was available on the Apple TV. I could not find this information out anywhere except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going over, walking over to the TV and typing poorly Badland 2 into that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible text entry field and finding nothing. And I wasn’t sure, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is search just bad right now or is it really not here? And it turns out I don’t think it’s out for the TV yet. Had it been out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the TV, I would have no way on my computer or my phone or any other device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have clicked buy this app and have it show up on my TV. Like, there are simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like this where the store is really not helping. It’s really hindering things. Not to mention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way bigger challenge of like developer economics and and making it worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing for these platforms, which is a whole separate discussion, but is related to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s in charge of that? Like who like I just to give one example, upgrade pricing, like developers have wanted upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing for a long time. Who is of all the people at the top
⏹️ ▶️ John execs we know at Apple are the people saying no to upgrade pricing and are they still in charge of that decision?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I think it was kind of a combo. I mean, that kind of thing before would have been… If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the app review rules, there are many app review rules related to pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what you’re allowed to do with your pricing and what you’re not. What has to be free? What has to not break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not have limits on it or whatever? So a lot of that is under app review. But then anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco related to things like upgrade pricing would have had to be implemented by EDDQ’s division.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that kind of thing spanned both divisions. And I think that’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why we’ve seen so little change of that type, because it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have involved these two divisions working together, which was probably problematic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least burdensome.
⏹️ ▶️ John They implemented bundles, which seems like so much more complicated than upgrade pricing. I mean, they did in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did bundles, two features that are fairly complicated. So it seems like when whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John is the head of this snake wants to change to the economics, we want to make bundles possible, we
⏹️ ▶️ John want to make in that purchase possible, that’s going to involve your team, Eddie, because you got to handle all the
⏹️ ▶️ John bundle and the pricing or whatever. And in that purchase is going to be like a back end that we’re going to talk to whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seemed to me that those efforts weren’t coming from Eddie accused him. And I’m just wondering, like, who,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I just pulled upgrade pricing out of the hat. But just in terms of the economic issues, somebody is setting
⏹️ ▶️ John the policy, I feel like in an organization like Apple, still, if somebody high enough up said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know we’re going to do upgrade pricing, it would happen, like regardless of who’s in charge of implementing it, maybe it would be cruddy. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like the interface for it, and iTunes connect would be bad. And maybe it’d be buggy to begin with, and maybe difficult for developers
⏹️ ▶️ John to test all those things you can blame on IDQ or whatever. But like, I just I always wonder where the decision
⏹️ ▶️ John is made. Like, do they have a meeting where I say, should we revisit this upgrade pricing? Or just does it never come up? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do they decide once back when Steve Jobs was still alive, that upgrade pricing is good for developers, but bad for users. And let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John never revisit that that decision despite how the iPad Pro may change that equation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to also look at how important is this thing. It’s very important to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. How important is this relative to the division it’s in, then the company it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in? And so relative to all of Apple as a whole, I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important they consider things like the App Store and developer happiness with the App Store and everything else. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they see the tertiary effects. It’s like, why aren’t more people buying iPad Pros? Why Why are people leaving the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store? Why aren’t all these awesome apps that we know it’s possible to build appearing on the on the iPad Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is Adobe not making a full fledged version of Photoshop for the iPad Pro? Like all sorts of questions about why aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John people taking advantage of our platform? And the one is to have is we haven’t sold enough hardware. But it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John a you know, a chicken egg situation. Other answers. What is it about especially specifically with iPad Pro? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it about our platforms that you know, we all know the answers that lends itself to applications that a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of people write and support while they can still make money and then abandon like there is no sort of 10
⏹️ ▶️ John year 20 year application because you can’t get any more revenue from them unless it’s like an in app purchase type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re constantly you know fleecing people for in app currency or whatever you know like other than those
⏹️ ▶️ John models like what why is there no model for sort of professional applications that people buy on a regular basis
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess they could do subscriptions but then you know like we all know what the the the app store policies are there
⏹️ ▶️ John that make it difficult to have a sustainable high-end software package
⏹️ ▶️ John that continually is upgraded on Apple’s iOS platforms. And it’s because all the tools people are used to either
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t exist or have a 30% tax that’s just mostly untenable. Like Adobe loves their subscription revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe would love subscription revenue a lot less if Apple took 30% of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And I mean, there have been so many unimplemented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or lost or canceled ideas and services and products because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that 30%. I mean, that is not a small number. That is a number that makes or breaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s business models in a lot of cases. Going back to Eddie Cue, to his division, if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what else that division had to do while the app store was under them, that’s all of iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all of Siri, that is all of the stores, the other stores, the music stores, that’s Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ John The streaming television plan that still hasn’t happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s all the content deals. It’s negotiating and dealing with all these content companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also. And Apple has not done well in that area recently. And I don’t know if this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just Q doing his job badly. Probably not, it’s probably more complicated than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more like people have Apple’s number now. The first one was easy. And then people learned their lesson from iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was like, no, we’re intentionally giving our business to Amazon to check your power, Apple. So now it’s much harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to go because Apple doesn’t want to come out with a plan. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know, nobody has a plan that is a convincing replacement for quote unquote real
⏹️ ▶️ John television at this point. Apple wants to be the first, so they’re gonna have to be the ones to explain to the big networks
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody, just trust us, this won’t disempower you,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you won’t lose your shirt on this deal, but you have to bring the price down because no one’s gonna buy it if it costs as much as cable but isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as cable, which it won’t be because our stupid Apple TV box isn’t that good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right, and this was like, this was another thing where like, of what I was saying last week about how Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really seem to know how to be in a negotiating position of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just absolute power. I think that, you know, last week I was talking about developers, but this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that applies very equally to the content problems, you know, the content deals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’m willing to say here that in this negotiation between Apple and television networks,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to put money that the television people are being more unreasonable than Apple. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like a safe bet like every time like less moonves makes a public statement I’d be like I don’t envy
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t envy Apple trying to negotiate with these guys because I think That they don’t get it and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is trying to explain it to them. So I really like I It’s hard to fault
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and these things maybe they are being a little bit stubborn But but geez they’re they’re trying to pull an industry’s
⏹️ ▶️ John head out of the sand and it’s it’s slow going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no and that’s fair there, but that industry, I think, is still doing really well without Apple. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the dynamic is different. One of the reasons Apple was able to have so much power in music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get such great deals for music is because the music industry was kind of naive and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty desperate. And today, that’s not the case anymore, especially with TV industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The TV industry is still doing very well and still making tons of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should have been Netflix, but it wasn’t. And Netflix got there first, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John now everyone it’s it’s it’s a bigger mess like you’re right that like music i don’t know if music was more
⏹️ ▶️ John desperate but music was smaller and more tractable and nobody knew what was going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John and apple just steamrolled everybody and then everyone saw what happened that everybody who who basically lost power to apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was like no we’re not doing that again so every other industry from ebooks television
⏹️ ▶️ John to movies to everything was like if apple comes calling look at the music industry as a cautionary
⏹️ ▶️ John tale and negotiate differently and find another way and we’re gonna make our own streaming apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re gonna make deals with Netflix and you know who knows what we’re gonna do but yeah it’s a more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do wonder like I don’t know anything about any cue other than I see the guy on stage and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know he’s not a big fan of buttoning a shirt yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John always wonder what like what his core skill set is like he’s not an engineer right he’s not an ex-programmer or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve always heard that he that he is like the negotiator like that he is really good at these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content deals apparently. I’ve also heard that he has a reputation of being the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixer, getting things done. But I honestly, I don’t see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not on iTunes Connect. No, well, and look, iTunes Connect is the least of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer’s problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John All things associated with test flight integration and the process, your visibility into
⏹️ ▶️ John the app review process and the ability to contact a human about your thing and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, yeah. But like, yeah, I mean, the problems with the App Store go way beyond like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iTunes Connect web interface. Like that goes so far beyond that. I mean, that’s iTunes Connect is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good enough for what it does. You know, it’s not great, but it’s fine. It’s like, it’s like the admin panel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we all make for our websites. Like, no one’s admin panel is nice. iTunes Connect is not nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t need Phil Schiller to fix iTunes Connect. You know, we need Phil Schiller to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot bigger problems than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eddie Q got a bachelor’s in computer science and economics from Duke.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know That’s what I’m saying. Like I don’t know like I can’t get a read it was obviously at this level of the hierarchy No
⏹️ ▶️ John one you’re not doing anything. You’re telling people who are telling people who are telling people to do things which is fine like it’s management
⏹️ ▶️ John it just I’m trying to think like things that either things that
⏹️ ▶️ John were put in there any Q that saw Substantial improvements or they got better or that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know know, like he’s got a lot of sort of stars on his, you know, whatever you call them on his lapel,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like, iTunes and the stores and the app store, especially in the initial part, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of big, important good numbers you can put up there. But he got a lot of big bonuses and a lot of those years and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because everything looked good. But just lately, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t look good anymore. It still looks good. But like I said, it’s like, what have you done for me lately? What what improvements
⏹️ ▶️ John have you made to the system? Yes, as a system, people can upload apps, they can put them on stores, We have multiple stores. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple things, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s progressing. We’ve all been hearing the exact same complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John from the developer side of it for so many years. And so just set that aside because a lot of people listening are like, Who cares
⏹️ ▶️ John about developers? I don’t care about developers. Apple should only care about users. Users should come above developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s right. Users do come above developers and should because there’s many, many more of them. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco related because as a user, you might be like, I don’t care what developers think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing on the App Store. And then at the same time, you might be like, I just got this iPad Pro, why isn’t there more software updated for it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or why is this thing that I downloaded this throwaway app that no one’s ever going to support that doesn’t work right. And but
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, but I’m saying set that aside for a second, just you know, because I’ve totally believe in the importance of that, but just set
⏹️ ▶️ John it aside. I really do feel that from the user’s perspective, the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store as experienced by the user, you just talked about a marker, the App Store as experienced by users of Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, just as a user going to the App Store finding stuff, feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling good and confident about the things that you find there. I think that is has not progressed
⏹️ ▶️ John and the sort of cesspits of it have gotten deeper and more dangerous. The cesspits of free to play,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all those mechanics that are taking money for people and the cesspit of at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of single use unsupported applications that are clogging up your search results
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it much harder to find the one or two good apps among because like they They always brag about
⏹️ ▶️ John how many apps they have. Once that number got to like six or seven digits, it stops being a plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John It starts being a minus. I don’t want 10 million applications. I don’t want 1 million applications, even 200,000
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. Like seriously, can we, you know, those all can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be winners, right? There’s a lot of, right? So not that I’m saying Apple should reject more things
⏹️ ▶️ John from the store or whatever, but like at a certain point, the number of applications you have becomes Apple’s problem
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve, not their thing to brag about. problem to solve is, you know, Amazon has
⏹️ ▶️ John probably millions of products, but I find it easier to find decent things on Amazon, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John their review system is better than Apple’s because they’re people who like this, like that is a little bit better, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the parts that have to do with dealing with lots of products and presenting it to users. That
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the experience of being a user of Apple products has, you know, again, regardless what you think of, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t gotten that much better in years and years and years. And so that that is an area where I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what you think about it, you have to say, we are not progressing fast enough. I don’t know if competitors are nipping
⏹️ ▶️ John at their heels or whatever. But if you can make that experience better, as they showed with the app store to begin with, if you can make that experience
⏹️ ▶️ John better, that can do really big things for your bottom line and for your customer sat and for your developer satisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, letting developers be able to respond to reviews or contact people anonymously or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just those that’s low hanging fruit. It’s not even that big a deal. And it’s like, well, that’s, you know, we can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The app store just came out. It’s been years like one, give me one of those a year for five years
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would make a much bigger difference. I know they did things I just mentioned the bundles and in that purchases
⏹️ ▶️ John arguably are an important thing and subscriptions and opening the stuff that used to be newsstand only up like they have done
⏹️ ▶️ John some things but it just it just feels like stagnation and it you know
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I don’t feel good going into the app store these days unless I know exactly where I’m going and
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can’t get a direct link like on the TV, I don’t know what I would do.
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60 Minutes feature on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So also in the last week, 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose did a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really an interview, but a feature on Apple. And they were afforded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit more access than most TV crews are afforded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you guys seen this? Nope. Of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, but stupid football pushed it off the end of my TiVo, so I had to watch the rest of it on CBS’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever network it is. terrible website that made me watch more ads, but I did eventually watch it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can do that. I can just go to their terrible website.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stupid Football pushes the show out and your TiVo doesn’t correctly adjust because Stupid Football ran long,
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough time for TiVo to get updated guide information, then you can watch as much as you
⏹️ ▶️ John can watch on your TiVo, and then I just always assume I can go to the website of the television show and watch the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of it, and lo and behold, I could as long as I was willing to watch like 17 of the same commercial
⏹️ ▶️ John before I could move the little play head up to the point where I left off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what do you think about football?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not gonna take this bait. I’m not gonna take this bait.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not bait I’m just saying like is there a TV schedule or isn’t there a TV schedule? I feel like if the football runs long it should switch
⏹️ ▶️ John to the football football overflow channel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, I’m still not gonna take this bait. Um, so the feature I it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching although I don’t think any like revelations came from it accepting apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reddit seemed to think that a a MacBook that was shown in the background for four seconds with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Mac, which it wasn’t, which supposedly it wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if it was like this is the best part of that theory. Let’s assume that it was. So what happens now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, let’s just stipulate for the for the purpose of this conversation that there was a there was a different MacBook in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now what happens? Nothing happens. It looked like a laptop like
⏹️ ▶️ John it opens it closes it has a screen and a keyboard. Can you buy one? Do you know what’s in it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus we already know what they’re doing like look Skylake is coming out in the spring slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter slash summer slash God knows when. Skylake is coming out soon. It comes with a huge power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco savings. The Retina MacBook Pro design is gonna be about four years old by the time it comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re gonna take advantage of the power savings and they’re gonna make the stupid thing thinner and it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine. I’m gonna complain about the keyboard and the battery life and the four-stroke trackpad and then I’ll end up buying one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re gonna be the same laptops we have now but thinner and cooler looking and maybe in space gray and gold.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or not. Or they could have amazing features that, but none of them would be visible on the screen. It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco looks like a laptop. It’s a screen and a keyboard and a trackpad. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just like to, you know, just arguing about it. It’s like, I will agree right now that that was
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new unreleased product in the background. And now what happens? Do we just sit here and smile? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even understand. Anyway, go on, Casey. We interrupted you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So there wasn’t that much that I thought was really remarkable about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece, but I But I thought we should at least note that we, well, two-thirds of us have seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The one thing that I thought was really interesting was Dan Riccio saying, and I’m going to butcher the quote because I don’t have it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey front of me, even a tenth of a millimeter of thickness is sacred to us. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was with regard to the MacBook One, but probably pretty telling about Apple’s attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about these sorts of things in general. So that’s a thing. That’s a thing that we’ve been lamenting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while. I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the quote that stuck out to me was when they were talking to Johnny Ive and he was getting into his
⏹️ ▶️ John his Johnny Ive mode where he is very passionate about things. And I think the question was
⏹️ ▶️ John something about like, did you feel like that Apple could become complacent or insular or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And his answer was basically like, I like all the things. And so these are answers
⏹️ ▶️ John that anyone who follows Apple has heard before just repeated in a new context. was
⏹️ ▶️ John the Johnny I have answer from his folio, which I which I believe is the truth. It’s not like B. S. It’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John he has to answer the same questions a million times like every, you know, every famous person has to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And his answer to this one is we’re not really looking at what like we’re not satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ John with what we do like. So we’re not going to be like, Oh, just sort of, you know, lean back and just
⏹️ ▶️ John phone it in or whatever. And we’re not comparing ourselves to what else is out there
⏹️ ▶️ John and other people’s products. What we’re comparing ourselves to is always this ideal, this perfection that we have in our own mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re chasing perfection, our own internal, you know, intrinsic motivation,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ideal that we have in our mind and that’s what we’re chasing. And I believe that because
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows in their products that seem to be chasing some ideal that is
⏹️ ▶️ John inside their minds and don’t involve
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly too many looks at what other people are doing, which is fine, also maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not too many looks at how people use these things in the real world you know
⏹️ ▶️ John like his answer makes sense but it hinges entirely on what is that
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal that you’re chasing and as articulated through many white background movies over many years
⏹️ ▶️ John the the ideal that that johnny ive has always said that he’s chasing has good and bad aspects
⏹️ ▶️ John of it the good one is like it has to look obvious it has to seem like it’s not designed
⏹️ ▶️ John It shouldn’t be designed for design’s sake, but we can see
⏹️ ▶️ John in the products that he makes that he favors simplicity and symmetry and purity
⏹️ ▶️ John and beauty. It can be argued that those things have a psychological effect on the user’s products
⏹️ ▶️ John that it benefits their bottom line, but there are practical considerations as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. the balance between chasing that ideal that
⏹️ ▶️ John again may be beneficial to the company but may not be beneficial to the product and also
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things that you kind of have to do whether it’s more reliable strain relief on cables
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know or more grippy surfaces for things or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John thickness and battery life and all that stuff. I haven’t seen a lot of interviews where
⏹️ ▶️ John that balance has been brought up and really pursued And I’m not expecting like in 60 minutes interview,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, basically it’s going to be people you know if you follow up a lot It’s gonna be people you’ve seen before being asked
⏹️ ▶️ John questions They’ve been asked a thousand times You’ve seen them be asked these questions a thousand times and you know what their answers are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be Because you’ve heard them give the same answer a thousand times and they they dotted each one of them like
⏹️ ▶️ John labor practices parking money overseas popularity of products
⏹️ ▶️ John Secrecy the new Apple campus. I mean, there’s just nothing new there there. But it is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John that they, you know, you get to come in the lab and see the tables draped with stuff and you get to see our milling machine
⏹️ ▶️ John running and whatever. You know, you can peek at it in that way. And it’s interesting to see the people give the same
⏹️ ▶️ John answers and see if they change. But what I always want is, you know, I think what we all want as people who are either
⏹️ ▶️ John on or listening to this program is deeper questions. Like so I think Gruber’s interview with Schiller
⏹️ ▶️ John pursued this a little bit on the whole, like, I forget what he was talking about. Then maybe he was also talking about battery life or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it was developer relations. But anyway, you like to pursue to have follow ups to dig a little bit like
⏹️ ▶️ John to bring up this because I’m sure Donnie, it’s not like this is news to Johnny, if he knows about the the balance between, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, practical features, I’m sure all the engineering people in the manufacturer is telling him practically speaking, you need to do this. And he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, No, can we figure out a way to do this? Like that’s that’s why he was talking about, you know, fractions
⏹️ ▶️ John of millimeters there. There is a tension between what can be done, what is able to be manufactured?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is economical? What is beautiful? What What is ergonomic? Is there something that’s both beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John and ergonomic and obvious and durable, and stays beautiful for a long time like this? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is that’s what design is all about. I would love to hear an in depth discussion with Johnny I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just about those trade offs about how he figures out where that balance is not in vague terms, but getting into specifics because
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think is is the most interesting thing about design. And Johnny I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John talks about it. Maybe he’s never going to because secrecy type thing. doesn’t want to give you a cute, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a window into his mind. But if he retired and I could get him on this podcast, I would spend the entire show just
⏹️ ▶️ John like trying to figure out how they how they did that balance and what factors do we not
⏹️ ▶️ John understand that are involved in this? And are there problems that we see that he doesn’t and other problems
⏹️ ▶️ John that he knows are legitimate issues that we never see and take for granted? And that would be a much more interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John interview than what was on 60 minutes. But then again, it’s 60 minutes so what do you expect?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my expectations for that were even lower than my expectations for Star Wars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why were your expectations low for Star Wars? People had been saying good things about it, the people involved were good,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone likes JJ Abrams, you know George Lucas wasn’t involved, it seemed like your expectations should have been
⏹️ ▶️ John at least middle of the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well let’s just say the last three Star Wars movies I saw were not the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but there’s a whole different set of, maybe you don’t know, but it’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco different set of people here. The old
⏹️ ▶️ John people are out, it’s even bigger than the the Eddie Q Phil Schiller thing all people out new people in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well yeah well I’m like the average consumer I wasn’t really in that world of paying attention all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t expect much from it because the last few Star Wars movies I’ve seen have been terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John they fix that they didn’t they didn’t just shuffle things around a little bit total complete change of hands new people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything on the internet comes back to Star Wars these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what you have to just go see it tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah how is you the one who hasn’t seen this like it’s not somehow Marco has seen it and you I don’t understand what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going on today bizarro world it is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a Christmas miracle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is our Christmas miracle
⏹️ ▶️ John next you gotta tell me that hop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw it I should have brought him he would have enjoyed it oh god no he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no we need we need a babysitter cuz we have like a baby now we’re all like old and boring
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but you got family close by you can make this happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah put your kid in preschool actually the theater I went I went to an Alamo draft house which is like this a kind of like hipster theater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chain but I inadvertently booked a baby showing because they do they do like baby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay showings where like they allow people to bring babies and if they cry oh well. Tiff was really not happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I booked this but it turned out not to matter there was like one baby in the whole theater that cried like once but it didn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that might exist near you if you can find that that is the kind of hipster thing you would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Around me? Yeah. No no there’s no Alamo Draft House anywhere near here I think it’s like at least an hour away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well at any rate look at look at look at local theaters to see if they have any like baby showings of movies because some I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some theaters are to do that now. I went to a nerd show and it was great. What does
⏹️ ▶️ John that mean? What does that include? It was like only nerds allowed, you know, either people who are dressed
⏹️ ▶️ John up or people who think seriously about ever dressing up or people who conceivably be friends with someone who dresses up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very respectful nerds. That’s how I saw it. It’s the only way to do it. Did they market it that way or is it just…
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but it just happens naturally. We congregate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I clearly am not a card carrying nerd because I have no idea when that would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you saw it on the 17th, and especially if you saw it at either the very first
⏹️ ▶️ John showing or like a ridiculously late showing that no insane person would ever go to because you end up getting back to your house at 3
⏹️ ▶️ John a.m. It’s full of nerds. It was the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess we’re done talking about the 60 minutes thing then, huh? To be honest, I have no, I have nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else to add. I mean, it was, it was interesting to watch. It’s probably worth the 20, 30 minutes of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your time. Uh, assuming that you live in the United States. I saw something fly by on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s it’s locked down to the US because reasons But it is worth your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. It don’t expect anything monumental. I also watched their what do they call it 60 minutes overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segments, which were Not that particularly interesting nor worthwhile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The one thing I will say is that I was happy to see Angela Aarons come out from the shadows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They spoke to her a few times and I was very impressed with her I thought she was really really good, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what one would expect given that she was once a CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John They did have one or I say there were there were some tidbits in there Maybe I just don’t know about this But one of the things is they were showing like the model
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store like oh This is where we test out our ideas for Apple stores And there was one wall that had a bunch of foliage on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed that that was very weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m assuming no real Apple store has that But I’m boy love to see that like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, they try out all sorts of ideas there, right? I would love to see that idea make it out of the model and be you know Just go into
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple store and have one wall have a bunch of green vines hanging down And also the ones where like
⏹️ ▶️ John they had cases and you like the case was the pull on the thing lots of wacky ideas there So that was
⏹️ ▶️ John that was interesting to see for two seconds and the other the only reason to watch it This will make you simultaneously
⏹️ ▶️ John angry about 60 minutes But interested in seeing this is you get to see Tim Cook get fired up about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple keeping their money overseas and our stupid tax laws and labor practices and stuff. He gets kind
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds like a fun time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Not angry, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John so they ask him the same questions you always ask him and they don’t like he probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gave like very substantial thorough answers to them. We’ve heard him give those answers before like on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John earnings calls and the things he has for the meetings he has for stockholders and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in 60 Minutes you get three sentences that they cut out of your big long comprehensive answer and they’re the three sentences
⏹️ ▶️ John when Tim Cook is the angriest and they don’t explain anything and then they move on to the next topic. So it was really
⏹️ ▶️ John garbage from a, uh, you know, a perspective of like giving insight to anybody who doesn’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John these issues. All you get the idea is that we say this leading question, Apple angrily denies
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t know what the truth is. Not enough information. Now it’s time to ask about something else. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting to see Tim Cook leaning forward in his chair and getting probably the most sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of worked up I’d ever seen him in a, in a public, uh, scenario like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also would have loved to have heard what Steve Jobs would have said to those same things. I think he would have had his smirk, more of
⏹️ ▶️ John a smirk and less of an earnest sort of anger. Either way, there was no information, like you couldn’t draw any conclusions
⏹️ ▶️ John from that. Like Tim Cook, I’m sure, gave a good answer, but 60 Minutes just
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to air it, which is a real shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to see you interviewed on 60 Minutes, John, and just see like how the heck they would edit
⏹️ ▶️ John that. That’s the word. I like, I feel, I feel for those guys because they’re getting interviewed for like, you know half an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour 20 minutes 45 minutes an hour and they’re gonna take literally five sentences and that’s what they’re gonna air five
⏹️ ▶️ John sentences five of the most dramatic sounding sentences with no surrounding context and there’s nothing you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do about it you can’t explain yourself before you can’t explain you it’s like that they’re just gonna pull them out
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s what people are gonna see and just like why would they even agree to it why would they agree to be it because they have no
⏹️ ▶️ John control over what those sentences are I don’t like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean this is honestly this is why I haven’t rushed to watch it because I figured like you know TV interviews are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so low density you know like I feel like you know like it there’s so little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content in them there’s so much padding and time wasting in them there’s no smart speed and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like it’s just so low density there is a mighty well oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course there is yeah Simpsons did it and opera did it first. Okay.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a long time ago, in a galaxy far, no, a long time ago, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to talk about something that came out of nowhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s a new service, product, company, startup. It’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, and it’s called UpThere, and it has a lot of ex-Apple people in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, I think this was kind of your baby, So what do you want to tell us about up there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah Bertrand sir Lay used to be in charge of Apple software stuff in charge of like OS 10 and everything back
⏹️ ▶️ John before there was iOS and even A little bit after I think and he retired from Apple a
⏹️ ▶️ John while ago, that’s when Craig Federighi took over basically and He disappeared to
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know go on vacation and do whatever you want to do But pretty quickly after he left Apple there were rumblings like oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s Bertrand’s next thing? I guess you don’t ever really leave. I guess you just leave and become like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know a venture capitalist or support other technology things. Anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor was that he was involved in some kind of startup and they were doing something having to do with computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s all anybody knew about it. I didn’t pay too much attention to it. I figured he’ll surface at some point. And he
⏹️ ▶️ John did surface a couple months back with this company called UpThere. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when I went to their website at first, it was like pretty impenetrable because they
⏹️ ▶️ John say if you had a cloud to butt translation your
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a lot of butts going on here it was like they’re doing something in the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are computers and it’s like well how what is different about
⏹️ ▶️ John this company it seemed like they were saying they were gonna store a bunch of your stuff on their servers so you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to store it on yours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah honestly I have looked at this it’s been in the show notes for like two months I’ve looked at this every so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often before the show and and I cannot figure out what it is and why I need to care
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Yeah, and like the quote I pulled from the CEO, who is not Bertrand Sirle, by the way, he’s just one of the founders,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the CEO, Roger Bodamer, says, “‘We’d like the word backup to vanish from the
⏹️ ▶️ John dictionary. “‘We built a consumer cloud from the ground up.’” Oh, here we go. “‘We questioned everything, literally. “‘We
⏹️ ▶️ John experimented a lot, and we want the cloud “‘to be the primary place for your data.’” So this is a fairly succinct summary.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole idea is like, you know, it’s kind of like a Chromebook. You don’t backup a Chromebook because there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John on it that isn’t already on Google servers somewhere, right? And up there, the whole idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is, don’t worry about what’s on your phone or on your Mac or wherever you want it to be. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like a local cache. That’s not where the stuff is. Check your phone into the ocean, who cares? There was nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John on it anyway. You’re fine. All your stuff is up there in the cloud. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the bit from here is like, from the second quote is, we experimented a lot. They’ve been in stealth
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, as they say, for a long time. So who knows what they’ve been doing behind the scenes, but they do have a beta
⏹️ ▶️ John program and I’m on the beta and uh, it’s a public beta program. You just sign
⏹️ ▶️ John up for it. I don’t, you know, um, and they have a couple of applications as a Mac application
⏹️ ▶️ John and as an iOS application, those are the ones I use. Uh, and you launch them and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, there were this cloud thing. Sign up. They already have two factor authentication, which I thought was really nice. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, out of the gate, because if you’re going to be a cloud thing, like you don’t add that like in your fifth year or something it’s important enough to have it now
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it wants you to put stuff into their cloud I’m like alright well they have like an easy button press it’s like hey
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want to put your photos library into the cloud and it’s it’s my photos library not like the family one so my photos library
⏹️ ▶️ John only has like 10,000 photos in it or something like sure here you go take those you know like I mean a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of this is going on just trusting Bertrand Sirle this is not a shady company or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can upload it and you drag files into it or whatever just like whatever fine So I told it to
⏹️ ▶️ John pull up my photos library and just let it do its thing Then it eventually uploaded my photos library
⏹️ ▶️ John and on the iOS application I can go and I can browse through all of my photos in my photos library again only like 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John or so There was some weirdness in that For it to get the phone totally synced
⏹️ ▶️ John like uploaded there for my Mac and then to get the phone totally synced it there was
⏹️ ▶️ John The best way to do it was to have the phone in the application launches like an
⏹️ ▶️ John option that says don’t let don’t let your phone go to sleep when when the application is in the foreground because I guess it uploads better or faster
⏹️ ▶️ John when the application is running and in the foreground I don’t even know that was an option but apparently it is but anyway they got everything
⏹️ ▶️ John uploaded there they have a camera application as well which is kind of getting more into how this
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to work it’s a camera for your phone and you launch this application instead of locking
⏹️ ▶️ John launching Apple’s camera application you take pictures but instead of the pictures going onto your phone the pictures go directly into
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud and the pitch there is you’ll never fill your phone with pictures you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s that’s a real thing that a lot of people who have smartphones do is they take pictures take pictures take pictures and then they fill up their phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS storage management is such that there’s not a real easy way out of that without
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to have an iCloud photo library or do you have that turned on do you have a Mac and like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the up there thing is we’re never gonna fill your phone because we don’t put the pictures in your phone you
⏹️ ▶️ John take the pictures and we immediately upload them now obviously everything about up there is predicated
⏹️ ▶️ John on you having a network connection and that can network connection being somewhat reliable and somewhat you know
⏹️ ▶️ John having a reasonable amount of bandwidth so it’s a forward looking play where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the future is not going to be doing stuff locally and figuring out how to sync it the future is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be pushing everything up and that’s a pretty safe bet what it all comes down to though with this that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why everyone hears about this and reads the website and thinks that it’s like, well, whatever, you’re like uploading stuff to a server
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. Who cares? What it all comes down to is execution. How well does
⏹️ ▶️ John upload stuff to the server? Does it the sink ever get stuck? Does can I actually scroll through all 10,000 of
⏹️ ▶️ John my pictures? How long does it take for the thumbnails to load? And I don’t know what exactly they’re doing tech
⏹️ ▶️ John wise because the website is not illuminating. I would imagine since they’ve been a still thought a really long time, what they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is come up with a better interface than like, the application uses POSIX API
⏹️ ▶️ John to do synchronous IO to your local disk, and then some demon process wanders the file system, and like
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox or whatever and finds things and opens an HTTP connection and shoves the files one at a time
⏹️ ▶️ John to our servers like that’s the old way of doing things. I don’t know if they’re doing exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if they you know, I’m imagining sort of more interesting abstractions where instead of going
⏹️ ▶️ John through a POSIX file IO API, they have their own file I know API that
⏹️ ▶️ John does intelligent things like better support for streaming and batching of multiple things
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, uh, you know, handling failures better and being asynchronous instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of synchronous by default and being multi-threaded and being able to use multiple connections and
⏹️ ▶️ John handling, you know, like that’s what I’m imagining is behind the scenes. But the bottom line is it uploaded all
⏹️ ▶️ John my pictures. And when I scroll through them, I can scroll through all of them and the thumbnails load and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, pretty fast and when you go to the iOS usage
⏹️ ▶️ John screen to see how much disk space the up there applications are taking up it’s like nothing it’s like 90 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think it really is streaming all this stuff in real time from the cloud as they say
⏹️ ▶️ John and like the pitch on their website is storing our entire digital lives photos video
⏹️ ▶️ John music and documents in a single place that it’s always accessible growing evolving and ready to share they’re sharing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is even better than apples already it’s better than apples you can make like something they call loop where you can have multiple people putting
⏹️ ▶️ John their putting their photos into a single bucket right and so like you know you could do that with a family photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library where the whole family could have camera applications and every picture they take could go into one giant shared thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where people can contribute is like it just seems like a forward-looking
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do everything and is the implementation good just because they have five beta testers
⏹️ ▶️ John and all five of us are connected to their super
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fast servers and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be terrible when there’s a million people. Could this scale to be the size of like Apple music or like a
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library? I have no idea. All I know is that whatever the heck they’re doing, it’s working and Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John buy them because it’s better than everything Apple is doing. Even though there aren’t a lot of features yet, I’m just going back. Did it upload
⏹️ ▶️ John my pictures? Yes. Can I see them all? Yes. Can I scroll through them quickly? Yes. Is it storing any files on my, on my phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not as far as I can tell. So it does what it says on the tin and it’s pretty impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been on the beta for like a week or two now. Because I didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a clear read on what the intention is for the app, in fact, you describing it has given me a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better understanding than the very little bit of documentation I read. I didn’t really know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make of it. In like the Mac app, it has some tabs on the left. It has flow, which I guess is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of like a newsfeed sort of thing. It has photos and videos, music and documents. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, I mean, I understand what those words mean. I understand that it’s presumably I’m supposed to just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start chucking things in these buckets, but it wasn’t entirely clear to me what the long-term play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is here. And I understand that a lot better. It seems to work well, like you said. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not, I haven’t really tried much with it, but there’s plenty of stuff there and it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is streaming things from the cloud, like you said, uh, very quickly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey initial impressions by me were confusion, but happy confusion if that, if such a thing exists,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that I’ve heard you talk about it, I’m very interested to play with the iOS app, which I had never bothered to download. Maybe that was half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my problem. I’m very interested to play with that and see how it goes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wouldn’t surprise me if this was in some ways, just an acquisition play to see if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is feeling desperate to get away from web objects and, and, and to hire team that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can solve this problem once and for all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Presumably, like, that it’s a tech play. It’s not just that they’ve done, like I said, they’re doing exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing everyone else is doing, just using HTTP connections with standard
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries and doing local file I.O. and just doing that slightly better than, you know, 1% better
⏹️ ▶️ John than everyone else. It seems like the only reason this could ever be a startup is someone has some good ideas about how to abstract
⏹️ ▶️ John the file system and the network in a way that accounts for the modern world.
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like backward looking like it to some degree, like even Dropbox is that it’s just a bunch of local files on disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is other process that watches them and moves them up and down. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when I think about what like a thumbnails, like surely it is not loading each of those thumbnails one at a time, surely it is either
⏹️ ▶️ John chunking them up or streaming them down or like it’s not making a new connection for everyone. Definitely. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John How is it dealing with like the size of the thumbnails and like, just and how is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John How is it keeping up with my scrolling and knowing which things it wants to load and stuff like that. And I mean, right now, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a beta, whatever, like, I’m not putting anything, nothing is only in up there, because that would be ridiculous. Like my entire,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, photo library, they’re really smart to say there’s a one button press you launch the thing is like, do you want me to upload your photo library? All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you don’t use photos, so you didn’t see that button or wouldn’t be useful to you. But for me, I’m like, fine, go ahead. Because it’s it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John reading from the photos library, and it keeps in sync with it and everything too. And same thing when I when I take photos with the regular Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John camera app, it like a million other apps, like remember, they did Dropbox camera app or whatever, we’ll try to see when you take
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures with your photo app and a level of those what I’m basically using it now is a toy to play with
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while to see what the performance is like and try to figure out what the heck they’re actually doing behind the scenes
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet another free backup for all of my photos you know the small library not the
⏹️ ▶️ John big one I thought about signing up my wife for it and trying to put the big library
⏹️ ▶️ John up to the thing to see if it would choke on that because 10,000 it’s not that big of a challenge what about 60 or 70 $50,000 now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’ll do this as a torture test, but I would never put anything only in up there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Business model, I don’t know. It’s all free and beta, so who knows what they would charge for this stuff. It’s still a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question mark. Pricing is a pretty big question mark, though. That matters a lot to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people will even bother trying to adopt it in the first place. Photo libraries can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be quite big. Once you start talking about storing all of my stuff up there, or all of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documents, or or even many of my documents, plus all my photos, plus other kinds of media, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets very big very quickly, especially if you have any video
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting. But their explanation and the people behind it make you think, obviously they would take that into account, that their
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea is that the old way of doing things, the way that everybody else is doing them, was sort of using 80s
⏹️ ▶️ John and 90s tech to solve a problem that’s really in the future for this future
⏹️ ▶️ John world where everybody has ubiquitous fast connections, we’re just getting closer every day, that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are coming at it from that perspective, they, you know, they must have smart solutions for not just the
⏹️ ▶️ John API and how to write applications into this back end, but how the back end works,
⏹️ ▶️ John how it’s hosted, how it’s scaled, how, you know, what the economics are, how much does it cost for
⏹️ ▶️ John us to host X amount of data? Can we undercut everyone else’s prices by using better technology
⏹️ ▶️ John because we can more efficiently store? Like I have, again, they don’t tell you it’s their secret, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea what they’re doing behind the scenes, but all I can look at is the front end and the front end
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to work more smoothly than every other front end I’ve tried whether it be
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox or the Microsoft’s OneDrive thing or Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John or like we’ve all tried all these different things like what was that one? BitCasa? There’s been so many different
⏹️ ▶️ John services that are like this and you know they’re good ones I use Dropbox all the time like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not they’re not bad but this impressed me with just how sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John no-nonsense and smooth it is and how I don’t even know how they’re doing it. How is it that I’m able to
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll through 10,000 photos and the thumbnails… They’re not there instantly. There’s little white squares initially,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they come in pretty fast. The whole screen is full of thumbnails. I have no idea how it’s doing that, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Assuming that this actually becomes a thing and launches to the public with some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of business model or something, would you… Obviously, they don’t want to be your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud backup service, they want to be your primary storage and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your only storage, therefore. Is there even an easy way to maintain a local copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everything, or do they really not want you to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what I’m getting at. I don’t know. That’s their long-term play, obviously, but right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are perfectly willing to be omnivorous. They will pull in content and say, you don’t have to manually say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I took some new photos with my phone. Every time you launch the app, it will sync up any new
⏹️ ▶️ John photos you’ve taken. I add anything to my phone, I’m just using photos, I’m not using up there at this point. But up there
⏹️ ▶️ John is every time I launch it is pulling all that stuff in. So yeah, it’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of on ramp, like they want to make it easiest for people to launch this app and say, we know you have your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere. And probably you want to keep your stuff elsewhere. And probably you’re only going to deal with elsewhere. But we’re here too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they would have to sort of get you into the flow by saying, we’re cheaper than your other hosting,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re more reliable than photos eventually become trustworthy. I mean, realistically speaking, probably be bought by somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John before any of this happens. But because the tech does look impressive. But, you know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see any reason why they what you’re getting at, I think is like, would you have any, would you ever like put your stuff in there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Like, what would you trust it as primary story? Because they’re trying to get rid of backups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that I could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, I mean, like, it’s aspirational. Like, obviously, you can’t get rid of backups. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if a meteor hits your data center, I need my stuff. Right? So we’re always gonna have always have, you know, my
⏹️ ▶️ John online backups and my time machine and my clone and, and the question of can you have
⏹️ ▶️ John local only copies? Well, yeah, if I just keep using photos, and I have one of the Mac set to always have local
⏹️ ▶️ John copies of the photos, and I have 17 backups of that, including online, like that’s the way I will continue to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I could see, for example, not enabling
⏹️ ▶️ John the the thing that lets you not whatever it is iCloud photo library that lets you see your entire library on your phone because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too onerous, or maybe enabling it but never going to it. Like, for example, someone says,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like I like having access to the whole photo library. Someone asked question like what you know, what one of your kids look
⏹️ ▶️ John like when he was three years old, right? I like being able to launch a thing on a phone and go to the year
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, you know, I have access to every single one of my pictures here. But it’s slower to do that with
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud photo library than it is to do that with up there. Just because it is like I can go to the year
⏹️ ▶️ John and can launch it faster, the thing will load faster. And you know, like, that’s that’s a win for me if
⏹️ ▶️ John that takes over that role where I no longer go to photos to look at my
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, I just go to up there because the same things are in both places and it has nothing to do with backups or whatever. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John long road from there to the aspirational goal of like, hey, we keep all your stuff and that’s where but
⏹️ ▶️ John but I truly believe in that end state, not the end of backups, but maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of backups for regular people, like where you could where they can get it to the point where it’s reliable and redundant
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that you won’t be up because think about now you’re obsessing with people like
⏹️ ▶️ John have you ever backed up your phone have you enabled iCloud photo library if I run over your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with the car or chuck it into the ocean did you just lose the pictures of your infant child who’s now five
⏹️ ▶️ John years old because you’ve never emptied your phone before the whole problem of filling your phone with photos like all those concerns
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to be addressed and go away and I think Android is better at addressing the now and Apple’s catching
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the iCloud photo library and up there is trying to say we’re at we’re way out here at the extreme
⏹️ ▶️ John and where you guys want to be. And I’m just looking at it as a
⏹️ ▶️ John competition between implementations really at this point and their implementation looks pretty good. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to our three sponsors this week, Mynode, Fracture, and Harry’s, and we’ll see you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, accidental They didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to, accidental, accidental Tech Podcasts, it’s
Post-show: Tesla order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do love the cloud to butt plug-in. That is quite good. It’s magical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You spent, well, maybe you didn’t spend any money this week Marco, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey committed yourself to spending some money sometime soon. You want to tell us about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent some, there’s a deposit. Fair enough. Yeah, so I ordered a Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you lost the bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I knew already that I lost the bet, but nobody else did. The bet was, was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the winnings were just bragging rights, the bet was that Marco would absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the performance version of whatever Tesla that he ended up buying. And that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco doesn’t typically know how to do halfway on anything. As it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, I lost the bet and you did not get a P90D or a P90
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no D or whatever it is. I forget the different permutations. What did you end up getting? Why don’t you run it, run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the setup with us?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the 90D. So it is approximately M5 speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maximum range available in a Tesla today. It’s white because it’s the only color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that cars can be in. No, just kidding, it’s red. It’s gonna be my first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-dark colored car ever, really, and my first non-black car in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decade at least. So red Tesla 90D is coming in late March,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of my leases up, but I ordered it now to take advantage of some discounts they were running before the end of the year. MATT
⏹️ ▶️ John TARGETT What wheels did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get? STEVEN SPIELBERG The 19 silver cyclone wheels. I know in the pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so on red you can argue that the dark colored wheels would probably look better, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in pictures they do. First of all, I think up close they look a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat, like they almost look like painted plastic. I know they’re not, but just like the finish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them is kind of like flat and a little bit dull. They also, because it is just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, a thin color coating on top of a regular, I don’t know, what are these made out of? Steel? Aluminum? What are they usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made out of? What metal? Matthew McCullen Uh, depends. Steven Noel Anyway, so whatever metal it is, probably aluminum. The dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colored wheels, any kind of curb rash, anywhere, any scratch whatsoever on them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bright color metal below it just shines right through and you can see it from a mile away. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure enough, like whenever I’d be at a Tesla dealer looking at these things, there would often be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer cars parked in the lot, like, you know, just getting serviced or people visiting to, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at new Teslas or whatever. And every car I saw in person that was a customer-owned car that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark wheels on it had very visible scratches on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those people can’t just drive. I went past a black Model
⏹️ ▶️ John S today with the big dark-colored wheels at the supermarket. They’re red brake calipers
⏹️ ▶️ John too, I think, and there were no scratches on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it has the red calipers, that is a P model. It was tempting to spend 20 grand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra just for red calipers, but I did not. It wasn’t really tempting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you get a lot more than red calipers, but a point noted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but honestly, so you get the red calipers and you get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster rear engine, because you know, the D models have the two engines. The rear engine is faster, but those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually the only two differences. Plus, you get less range, but the suspension is all the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else about the car is the same. I’ve confirmed this with multiple people from Tesla, that they always say the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In my drive, anecdotally, it certainly seems that way. The only thing different is the engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the red calipers, and you get the option for a spoiler on the back that I hate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you got red, you got the 19-inch silver cyclone wheels. What other options? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 90D, black interior, sunroof. I got autopilot, range upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco premium interior, the big next gen seats. I did not get the smart air suspension.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, I, this, I was going to and I did some reading and did some research and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, it sounds like the air suspension really does make the car feel more like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Alexis, like, you know, like a cushy or softer ride. And I did not think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that was even what I wanted, let alone worth $2,500 extra on the purchase price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I’m leasing it. But you know, it’s still, that would be, I would pay probably half of that. Um, So I didn’t get smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air suspension because I want a more firm sporty ride. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not get the ultra high fidelity sound because I did a back to back test of those in the showroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and could tell very little difference in the two sound systems. And neither of them sounded great to me. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both sounded honestly pretty mediocre. So I figured might as well not spend extra money on mediocrity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did get the subzero weather package because I live in a place with real seasons and I did not get the rear facing seats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because for the next three years that this lease will cover. My wife and I decided that we would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be comfortable with our kid in those seats during this age period by enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it worth getting them for an extra $3,000. What
⏹️ ▶️ John did you get as the interior trim accent? You can get a carbon fiber
⏹️ ▶️ John looking or, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was actually a tough call. The carbon fiber looks decent, but kind of hurt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my eyes. And Tiff’s opinion here matters a lot because she, as the passenger usually while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m driving, She sees the trim way more than I do, because there’s this big strip right in front of the passenger side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in the driver’s side, you don’t really see much of it. So she didn’t care for the carbon fiber, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was fine. The two woods, they just have basically a glossy and a matte wood. I didn’t like the look of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matte, so I was basically deciding between the glossy wood and the piano black. The piano black,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my current car has that. I know I like it. It is very nice. That being said, it shows fingerprints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and scratches like crazy. I decided ultimately I would rather have fingerprinted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piano black trim because I just like it better. I would rather have that than perfect glossy wood trim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You stoked? I am, yeah. I’m actually looking forward to something new. I mentioned before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve loved having the M5. It’s been great. I do, however, miss all-wheel drive. Yes, I know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding it to the next model, but it isn’t there now. I also mentioned earlier that I I really want a quieter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. BMW does not currently sell a quieter car that has all-wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive, that has a transmission that I would tolerate. Except maybe the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 335 xDrive still available in stick?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t know, well it’s a 340 now anyway, but I honestly don’t know. I would think not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it might be. That would probably be the only option. The 5 Series is totally out, because the 5 Series you can’t get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t get a stick with all-wheel drive, if at all anymore. and you can’t get a DCT on any of the 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series. And I will not drive the Sport Auto. Yes, I’ve driven it, and no, it is not the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, the Tesla is, in some ways, it’s not as good as the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not expecting it to match it in the luxury feel features. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the BMW interior is more luxurious feeling, no question. I’m very much going to miss the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heads-up display and the top-down parking camera. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is the best. real time follow up you can get a 340 I X drive with a manual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmission okay so that is the only other car BMW makes that would consider getting right now out of the new lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that also I really don’t like the f 33 series honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like it I don’t like the the steering system I don’t really care for the way it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and I think the interior has actually gotten lower quality in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways than the previous three series and and the lack of the all button on the climate control just kills me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why you’re not shopping Mercedes at this point. You never talk, neither one of you ever talk about Mercedes, but like, Marko just bought a
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla. He’s now safely within the Mercedes, you know, market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did, on a recent trip, I actually, I rented a Mercedes, because I was on a trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a year ago and I had to rent a car, and I rented a, is it the E-Class there, version of the 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series, the middle one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I rented an E something something. It was like the V6, roughly 300 horsepower, like basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their version of the 335, or the 535. Well, I wouldn’t say that, but yeah. Anyway, so I rented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and I drove it for a few days, and it was a really nice driving car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but definitely not for me overall. I think, first of all, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care for Mercedes’ designs very much. I think they’re a little bit dated for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. When you say that, you mean exterior design?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, see, I think they’ve gotten pretty lately. Although, that being said, the brand brand brand new ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are very bubbly, and I’m not as into that. But up until about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, the year prior, there was like a five year stretch where they went from really, really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boring to actually very pretty. But for me, it’s a non starter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they don’t believe in three pedals.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like, but he doesn’t have three pedals anymore anyway. And he hasn’t he hasn’t in for two cars. I understand. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like a Mercedes S-Class, when you come back from your electric hangover, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should look at the S-Class. Because by then the S-Class might be electric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might be. I don’t know. But I also, I really don’t care for the Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media system. Those change every year. No, they don’t. Not these. Not Mercedes.
⏹️ ▶️ John five years, whatever. But yeah, no, they’re all terrible. I understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. I mean, I’m not saying I’m going to be Tesla forever. I’m saying I’m going to be Tesla for the next three years. This is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons I lease cars. So I’m looking forward to trying something new, to trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco electric, to it being truly different. And honestly, as I said when I drove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, to it really feeling modern, really feeling like today. And in three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years when I have to choose my next vehicle, whether I get another Tesla or something else, by that time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will probably be more all-electric options or more compelling electric options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the other luxury brands. Right now, there really isn’t much. There will definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John be, yeah. They’ve all got the Tesla fighters in the works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. That Porsche concept looks really nice, honestly. I don’t know if that would pan out into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, and God knows how much it will cost if it does, but it does look really nice on paper, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least. We’ll see what happens with Mercedes and BMW and Audi and even Acura.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else will see what happens in their electric department. Right now, as I have to make a decision right now, Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is by far my favorite option of what’s available right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m excited for you. This should be really awesome. It’s going to be sad to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have you personally in the BMW family anymore, but at least your family will still be a BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t worry. I’m sure at some point we’ll be back, to be honest. There is a lot about the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW does things that I do prefer. You know, I do prefer not having a giant touch screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think. You know, like we’ll see again, we’ll see what happens when I get it, but I do think I’m going to prefer still having hardware knobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to giant touch screens if given the choice. I do certainly like a heads up display and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do like the BMW quality interior and that’s in the 5 Series. So maybe eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will be a an all electric 5 Series that will be really compelling. That will be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me that because that will eliminate the problem I have with the regular 5 series of having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmission I hate. If they can move to not having a transmission, that does solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see what happens. Yes.
Post-show: Egg salad on sesame
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla people if the Model S is designed for short trips? Will
⏹️ ▶️ John this, can this get egg salad? Or will it, is it not designed for that? Chicken salad, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, chicken salad. I’m thinking with my stomach, I prefer egg salad. Why, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. This is worse than the Windows thing. What? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I’m not against chicken salad, I like chicken salad, but my go-to was I would get a cinnamon
⏹️ ▶️ John raisin bagel with egg salad on it, wrapped up in wax paper, and then cut in half through the wax paper. as
⏹️ ▶️ John you know as is proper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay there are so many things wrong with this. Kid Kerr. First of all a cinnamon raisin bagel does not belong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any of the salads. That is an illegal combination. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. You are so wrong about that. You don’t know what you’re missing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John you’re out of your mind. Second of all egg salad only belongs on bread not bagels because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is such a soft filling that you bite into a bagel and it squeezes out. No that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the I understand. I understand the difficulties. The whole the magic is getting that right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like it shouldn’t work. It seems like it should be a disaster that you would bite down and that all it would do is cause the bagel to
⏹️ ▶️ John choose the egg salad shooting out the side and you would be left with an empty bagel. But no, it can be
⏹️ ▶️ John done. We have the technology. Oh my God. The wax paper is key. You know, you know the wax paper. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if your local deli is do that, but you know the wax paper thing. It holds it in during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cutting basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But they wrap it really tightly and hold it in during cutting and you can move
⏹️ ▶️ John the wax back and eat it and it won’t come shooting out the sides. And if the bagel is fresh and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like a stale, big, hard brick type thing, you can actually bite it and not lose all
⏹️ ▶️ John of your egg salad. It’s a delicate balance, I understand. This is a… I haven’t had a good one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, in how many decades. Ever? Because it’s a terrible concept? No. It’s a great concept. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know… here’s a little advanced technique for you if you want to make a bagel sandwich at home. For
⏹️ ▶️ John say you want to have peanut butter and jelly on a toasted bagel, which is fabulous, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way. No! I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John about to say, like, because in high school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worked at a bagel shop and it was always a disaster whenever somebody would order peanut butter and jelly on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bagel because that squeezes out like crazy. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. So let me, I’m going to give you a little, some tips here. Peanut butter and jelly on a toasted bagel at home.
⏹️ ▶️ John How can you possibly make that work? It seems like it shouldn’t work at all, right? You don’t! No, no, you do. We
⏹️ ▶️ John have, we have ways, alright? So you toast the bagel and then one half of it you
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of dig a trench for the jelly to go in. You don’t pull out all the insides leaving
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just the shell. But you dig
⏹️ ▶️ John a trench. Then you put the jelly in the trench. The peanut butter- Is that legal? The peanut butter will
⏹️ ▶️ John stay on its own for the most part. Then you assemble it. You can eat that sandwich. Nothing will squirt out the sides.
⏹️ ▶️ John If assembled correctly, nothing will squirt out the sides and what you have is a toasted peanut butter and jelly bagel sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ John The things I do with bagels, I understand. These are advanced techniques.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco counts, first
⏹️ ▶️ John it counts. It counts. You can do that with tuna as well. When I put tuna on a bagel, it’s key to hollow
⏹️ ▶️ John out some part of it. And you eat the part that you take out. It’s not like you’re just throwing it away. The trick is not take so
⏹️ ▶️ John much out of it that you just basically left with just a crust, right? You have to take out just the right amount. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tuna has enough, you know, tuna is very similar to chicken salad in texture. Like it has enough strength internally
⏹️ ▶️ John usage. But you can get more, you can get more in there. Anyway, you don’t always have to do with tuna. You’re right. It can hold together more like chicken salad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tuna salad and I like bagels and I like bagels with tuna or chicken salad on them at no point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have I ever had a bagel with tuna salad or chicken salad and thought I need to find ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shove more of it in here oh well I thought that because you can fit a lot in the regular
⏹️ ▶️ John way yeah it really depends on how stiff your mixture is you know this is the worst John
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway these are all good things that I’m getting hungry even thinking about them you’re so wrong you’re so what am I
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong about what are you talking about these are all delicious things these are all delicious things that you can make in your own home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you did these are terrible they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible things to know yeah everything you’ve just said has been wrong yeah I concur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John first of all I think any any
⏹️ ▶️ John input about what’s proper way to eat bagels from someone who is Virginia second of all I’m also not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to take that input from somebody who just recently moved to New York Oh which one of us is in New York right now
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh recently moved to New York yeah like eight years ago did not grow up there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now what I know it’s I already got egg salad I’m just I’m so I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John past Are you against egg salad? Is this some anti-egg salad? Egg salad is delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In general, I think I am against it. And I’ve eaten a lot of egg salad in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, now the truth comes out. Against egg salad. Mark Armand, against egg salad,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is why I can’t blog anymore. That’s right. Go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ John You write your blog against egg salad. You’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, see, to me, egg salad is not worth it when you have other options that are similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. If all you have in a store is egg salad, fine, I’ll eat egg salad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if right next to it is tuna salad and chicken salad, those are both way better. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t think of any context in which I would choose egg salad if chicken salad or tuna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco salad or cream cheese or any other sandwich topping were available.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, I mean, I like all of those things. Those are all good. I feel like you just have to mix it up. You don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing every day. Maybe your place makes better chicken salad make egg salad, but good egg salad.
⏹️ ▶️ John You cannot turn your nose up at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never had egg salad that was good enough to overcome decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chicken salad. Yeah. Like I’ve had egg salad where I’ve tasted it and I’m like, oh yeah, this is fine, but that’s like the most I’ve ever thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about egg salad is it’s fine. In other forms, like I love deviled eggs, which are very similar really. You know, deviled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eggs have a lot of similarities in taste and ingredients to egg salad, just in a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shape and preparation. But you know, I love eggs in other forms. just egg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco salad is, it’s just so mediocre compared to the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to. It’s good stuff. If you like eggs, it’s good stuff. It’s egg salad is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sesame bagel of the salad.
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna come out against sesame bagels now? Forget it, forget it. Sesame
⏹️ ▶️ John bagels, what do you have against sesame bagels? They are one of the greatest bagels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I have against them is similar to what I have against egg salad. It’s not worth it when you have better options nearby. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a sesame bagel is fine. I’ve had many sesame bagels in my life. They’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s someone who eats chocolate cake for every meal. Why would you have anything else if you could have chocolate cake for every meal?
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta have the sesame bagel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve been out of New York far too long. You’ve lost touch. It’s so-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I am the only one here who is in touch. We’ve got, you’ve got you who’s in Virginia, and we’ve got him who’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from the world outside of bagels, who has only recently been introduced to them. He’s trying to find his way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which one of us goes to a bagel shop every day in New York? Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right. I’m saying like you’re coming from Ohio or wherever just trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John this crazy new world and making it up as you go along. I’m telling you the way it is. Oh my God, why would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? Yeah, go get a sesame bagel with egg salad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Against sesame bagels and against egg salad. This is not a position you wanna stake out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Compare that to an everything bagel with chicken salad, which is right next to those. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, that’s the whole thing. Like you’re gonna have everything on an, you’re always gonna have it on an, not that everything bagels are great,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? but the whole idea that every single time you have it, you have the most, you know, the best topping,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bagel with the most stuff on it. It’s like sometimes you gotta have, you know, there’s a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John place for the poppy seed bagel, the sesame seed bagel. Sometimes you can have the plain bagel. Why would anyone ever have a plain bagel?
⏹️ ▶️ John People do, it happens. Sometimes that’s the right combination.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my God. You know, I thought you had turned around
⏹️ ▶️ John by not getting the really expensive Tesla, but you’re still getting the everything bagel only with chicken salad because you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself to have anything that you consider lesser but they’re not lesser they’re just different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I mean I have different bagel orders like I love a toasted bagel with butter and if you’re gonna have a toasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bagel with butter everything is a good choice but so is rye or pumpernickel
⏹️ ▶️ John you have rye you could have everything oh my god doesn’t make any sense
⏹️ ▶️ John because those things are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good sesame seed bagels are good like they like I would say a proper a proper toasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rye bagel with butter is just as good as a as a toasted everything bagel with butter. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sesame bagel is like, you have the plain dough, so the dough just tastes like any other plain dough flavored bagel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the topping is included in everything, and itself has almost
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got everything, it’s already there. Wait, well, let’s try to find some common
⏹️ ▶️ John ground here. Caraway seeds in everything bagels, yes or no? No, what? Ew. All right, good. Just making sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that some people want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, everything bagels require five things. Sesame, poppy, garlic, onion, and salt. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s missing any of those things, don’t leave out the salt, Midwestern people. If it’s missing any of those things, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a proper everything bagel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people like the caraway seeds. I gotta say no to that. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people put sunflower seeds on them, which is illegal. No, forget about this. California people, just forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They shove an avocado on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I can’t handle this conversation. John, you’re so out of touch. It defies description. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John out of touch! I’m the only one who’s in touch! I’m the only one with authentic bagel experience! You up there in Connecticut have
⏹️ ▶️ John got nothing, and Marco is a tourist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see, Bagel Eating World, email John this week and tell you which of us is
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no Bagel Eating World. It’s not a democracy, it’s the people who live in the New York metro area and everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else. And everyone else is wrong and we are right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait, you don’t live in the New York metro area. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did, I live there. I’m from there, it will never leave me. You can take the whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John out of New York, you know, complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the saying yourself. Yeah, but you left it and I’m here. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco can’t handle this. I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a Christmas miracle. Oh god. I hate you John so much right now. You’re so wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is terrible. This really is worse than the like 90 windows thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I know. I can’t believe you come out against sesame bagels. Seriously, there’s gonna be protesters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside your house. A sesame bagel with egg salad. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so boring. No, I don’t know. I have sesame. I have… It’s like pairing wine with meals. No, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not. You know, that skill. Oh, yes, it is. Yes, that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t even understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even know this is a skill that you can have, let alone have the skill. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pairing lightly flavored water.
⏹️ ▶️ John with the thing you put on it is a skill. I agree. I just don’t think you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your answer is everything goes on in everything bagel. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey necessarily. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, here. I will fix this. Marco, do you or do you not put lox on a bagel?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t like fish and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t like lox. So you’re already wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I recognize that many people love putting lox on bagels. And were I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to choose a bagel for lox, everything would be pretty high on the list because I know people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of like salty, garlicky onion flavor with the lox. I know it’s a very common combination. John,
⏹️ ▶️ John I also don’t eat fish. You know that. Oh, God. Finally, we agree. You two, so ignorant.
⏹️ ▶️ John not ignorance. We just don’t like fish. That’s what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. I but see but I’ve tried it like I know what I’m missing and I like every time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say I don’t like fish for for years like Tiff would be like you just have to have good fish. Everyone say oh you have to have good fish same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing like I don’t like sushi either. There’s some overlap there and everyone’s like oh you haven’t had good sushi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and eventually somebody brings me to a place where they say okay, this is good next thing I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I try it and I give I give it an honest shot and I hardly ever end up liking it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I can at least say that, okay, I at least know what I’m missing now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have confirmed that I honestly don’t like this. But I’ve had the good thing, maybe I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see why you like it, you know, but I can’t see why anybody would ever order a sesame bagel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anything. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I try Marco’s Coffee when I’m there. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like if you were gonna get a sesame bagel, you might as well just get plain. Or if you want flavor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, you get an everything. can all agree on sesame
⏹️ ▶️ John only you are agreeing on sesame me and the rest of the New York metro area who’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sesame the sesame bagel is it’s like that that’s like that’s like the Dell computer
⏹️ ▶️ John sesame bagel is one of my favorite kind of bagels like I like them all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what do you put on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it if obvious so in your expert bagel pairing experience
⏹️ ▶️ John things that things that pair well with sesame sesame bagel with butter on it toasted
⏹️ ▶️ John is very nice sesame with tuna Very nice. If I had to get
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken salad at your deli, I would probably go with sesame.