181: Eat Your Vegetables
04 Aug 2016Cameras at the beach, QNX, TiVo, and why nobody wants a convertible.
Episode Description:
- John rents a camera for his Long Island vacation
- ATP: The Fully Verified Podcast™
- Temporarily-single dad life
- Casey pretends _'s Tesla is his
- Apple hires Dan Dodge, co-creator of QNX
- Swift 4
- Rovi buys TiVo
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: yet more on TiVo
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Chapters
- Cameras on the beach
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- The fully verified podcast
- Temporarily solo-parenting
- Teslas and convertibles 🖼️
- Sponsor: Warby Parker
- Apple hires QNX co-creator
- Swift defeates Perl, 8–8
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- It’s finally time for TiVo
- Ending theme
- We didn’t get enough TiVo
Cameras on the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. Uh, John, how was your trip to Long Island? Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lovely. Do you like the beach? I hear you’re plugging your phone in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am. I’m really muted when I do that, but you asked me a question, so now you get to hear. Behind the scenes, I plug
⏹️ ▶️ John in my phone so it charges while I record. It’s exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Why not just do that when you go to bed?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do. How long of a time span is it between when the podcast ends and when you go to bed usually? You never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. Vacation was good? Interesting to report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you rented a camera. Would you like to or yeah a whole camera, right? Would you like to talk about that at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah camera and a bunch of lenses This was Marcos recommendation of what camera I should rent And the only reason I was doing it at all is
⏹️ ▶️ John because my wife is going off on a cruise with her mother Which is a thing to do. Maybe we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John later and She decided that our camera is not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John She’s had too much proximity exposure to Marcos fancy cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and other people’s fancy cameras, and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John rubbing off on her. So she’s like, we should get a better camera. And I’m like, I don’t want to get a better,
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s going to go on this vacation, and she wants to have good pictures, and she doesn’t feel like our camera is up to the task. I think our camera is
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty up to the task, but she disagrees. So I don’t want to buy a new camera, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Marco rents cameras, so I asked him about his, the camera rental service that he uses, and he gave me
⏹️ ▶️ John the URL and suggested a camera that we should rent, because we didn’t want something
⏹️ ▶️ John as big as Marco’s. Markers is not big, it’s not as big as like the 5D or like, it’s not like a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but. Yeah, it’s about as big as a mirrorless camera can get and still be a mirrorless camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s still full frame, but it doesn’t have the mirrors in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To add some clarity here, since everybody will be asking, the site that I recommended you rent from is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lensrentals.com. There are a couple other sites, that’s the one I’ve used a lot over like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same here. Oh, geez, I don’t know, maybe over a decade. I’ve used it for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve been great, no complaints. I’ve rented both lenses and entire cameras from them. They’ve been great at lensrentals.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not a sponsorship. The camera I recommended that you rent is the Sony A6300. It is Sony’s new high-end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still crop sensor mirrorless camera. It runs, I think, like 1,200 bucks, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that range. It’s a very, very good camera. It’s about as good as you can get without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a full-frame sensor. The camera that I have is the Sony A7R II, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a full frame sensor, is a lot more money, but is a lot bigger and has a lot higher quality images. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a6300 that I had, John Rent, is incredibly good. And I would say, if you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a mirrorless camera in the like $1,000 range, that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it would be a really, it should be very high on your list. That said, I have not actually used it. This is all based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on review info and experience with other Sony cameras. So John, how is the a6300?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, looking at it compared to your camera, I was surprised to see that there are a couple of specs where the
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, lesser camera is better. For instance, a number of photos it can take per second
⏹️ ▶️ John for burst mode is like double, maybe even triple in the highest setting,
⏹️ ▶️ John what yours does. And I think it had, I don’t know what these specs mean, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of areas of phase detection for auto focus was higher on this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like there’s a couple of attributes that make me think that this camera and this sensor came out after yours. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case? I did, yeah, and also when you have a smaller, and yeah, they came out, I think it was like six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe a year after mine, and well, yeah, between six and nine months, I think, after mine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also when you have a, so a full-frame sensor is a lot larger, it’s, I think it’s 60%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger by area, something
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s double the megapixels, too. Yours is 42, this is 24, so it’s close to double.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right, and so when you have a larger sensor and you have more pixels, it is much harder to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the surrounding electronics able to deal with the sensor dumping like 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos a second off of it. And so usually the smaller sensors will have higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow-mo video frame rates and higher burst per second capacity simply because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot less data to deal with and that has to be pulled off that sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the reason we weren’t looking at Marco’s camera specifically is not particularly because it’s too expensive because the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John idea was we were gonna rent it, but just because it’s big and we’re going from a much smaller-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all relative. well much smaller much lighter camera non interchangeable lens camera you always
⏹️ ▶️ John have super zooms and they’re all made of plastic so they’re very light and they’re they’re small and if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna be walking all over Europe maybe you don’t want to go right from a small light camera to something as big and marketers
⏹️ ▶️ John again is not as big as a as a full-frame SLR but it’s still pretty big and whether
⏹️ ▶️ John a magnesium aluminum body is not as heavy as like a steel body or something but it’s way heavier than a plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John one so this was a kind of a good choice for like it’s gonna take good pictures but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really it’s a very small body like it’s so small that a lot of the lenses look comical and like a lot of the Sony’s have looked like this
⏹️ ▶️ John like they would the NEX series and all that they always looked like the lens was too big for the
⏹️ ▶️ John body because Sony made these very small that’s what you can do with mirrorless cameras and very small looking bodies with
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good sensors in them sometimes to a fault because my brother has one of the earlier Sony’s and it was very often
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to hold them like to find a place where you could grip them and Sony was making them kind of like their PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ John controllers like little pieces of art made of like conical sections and ideal solids and stuff instead of saying
⏹️ ▶️ John no you have to you have to make it grippy so that’s why when I use Marcos camera when I first saw his I was happy to see
⏹️ ▶️ John that Sony has learned hey you should put grippy stuff on the part where you grip it’s got like nice grippy rubber you know like
⏹️ ▶️ John camera grip stuff if you make the whole thing a smooth beautiful rectangle with a little bulge it falls out
⏹️ ▶️ John of your hand and you’re sad so the a6300 is basically like a shrunken version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Marcos is very small it’s still relatively heavy but most of the weight is in the lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use a larger lens. And the lenses I got was the silly little kit lens that it comes with, which is like a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a 15 to 50 or something power zoom, something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, something like that. It’s a very small zoom range, it’s a very compact
⏹️ ▶️ John lens, and it doesn’t seem to be very good. And I got a 50
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter prime, and I got a, what was it? 30 to 40 to 105
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom? All of these were Sony branded lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another possible issue with these things is that supposedly the Sony can take third party lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John and do auto focus on them, but Marcos has the advantage that all of the image stabilization stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the body, not in the lens. Is this correct? I’m not. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s both. I mean, a lot of the lenses have it, but yeah, mine has in-body stabilization.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and this one doesn’t, so it relies somewhat on its ability to work with lenses, but there’s a bunch of adapters for the lenses and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I just got Sony lenses. And I used it on vacation. Normally on my Long Island vacations, I take pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just of the family hanging around at the beach, but I also take a lot of pictures of my family playing in the ocean.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I take those pictures, I’m usually up to my knees or my waist in the ocean, in the ocean waves, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John surf. And that’s not a really good place to be with an expensive camera. I’ve always assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John that one year a wave will get me and I will drop my camera, but I don’t know, we’re going on
⏹️ ▶️ John five years, 10 years. So far, it has not gotten me and the streak continues. But I plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to not even bring the fancy camera to the ocean because I was like well You know I’ll use that one for all the pictures except
⏹️ ▶️ John the ocean pictures and also by the way my super zoom Is a 600 millimeter zoom it’s ridiculous like
⏹️ ▶️ John it helps me get when the surf is like far out I can be up to my knees and they can be way far out and I can still get close-up So I
⏹️ ▶️ John really I really like my camera my super zoom by the way is the Canon fz 200
⏹️ ▶️ John But when it came down to it I’d taken so many pictures with the Sony I didn’t want to leave it at home, so I brought it to the beach with me
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact I brought both cameras to the beach I took a bunch of pictures with my other camera I’m like, you know what I could probably take a few with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Sony may go a little deeper and may go up to my knees go to my you know, I The main thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John was holding me back in the Sony is the zoom was just not you know It was only 105 millimeters. It’s not it wasn’t getting me
⏹️ ▶️ John close enough It was so some of the pictures were kind of far But then he gets 24 megapixels compared to whatever 12
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever My other thing is so I could crop a lot of them to get the same image quality
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it but I kept it out of the ocean. I think I got a couple of drops of water splashed on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John none on the lens. I’m pretty good at staying away from all that and protecting the camera. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John results were really nice. Ann Marie liked it, and she’s definitely gonna bring it on her vacation. The only decision
⏹️ ▶️ John I have now is whether we’re going to rent it again for her vacation or just buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I should point out that Lens Rentals has an incredibly broad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insurance add-on that you can buy. So that would cover, I think it would cover your
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to pay 10% still. I paid for like whatever the most expensive insurance was against damage and theft. But even
⏹️ ▶️ John if the worst happens, you still have to pay 10%. And I had like, what was like a $600 lens, $150 lens, $100 lens, and a
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand dollar body or whatever. So 10% of that is still something I didn’t want to pay.
⏹️ ▶️ John So how many lenses did you say you rented? Just three, just the prime,
⏹️ ▶️ John the zoom, and the little kit lens thing. I didn’t know which one I would end up using more of it as it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John what I ended up using was I almost never used the little kit lensy thing because I had two
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lenses with me
⏹️ ▶️ John and indoors I use the prime because it was the it was a f1.8 it was the the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John took the best low-light pictures and outdoors I use the zoom even though it was relatively
⏹️ ▶️ John huge just because it gave me the most flexibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in all fairness your your battle between like the reach of the Super Zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the quality of the nice camera. In all fairness, I did recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you consider the Sony RX10, which is its Super Zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not, doesn’t have the same reach as this one. I’m like, I’m gonna get a Super Zoom, I’m not gonna get one that stops at 400 or something. The RX10 II maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John does go to 600, but there was some other aspect of it that was worse than my camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the most recent one actually might go out that far. It’s got a pretty big update.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t, it’s not F2.8 through the whole zoom range, like this thing is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s pretty rare. I mean, basically to achieve that, you have to have a very small sensor. I know, well, then
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, not only is there no Sony Super Zoom that I can get at any price that
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like has better feature set, universally better than the one I have, but there’s no Panasonic one. The Panasonic
⏹️ ▶️ John upgraded my camera too and made it worse for my purposes. But anyway, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with the zoom lenses. The problem with all the Sony lenses is that, I don’t know, the lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John get expensive really fast. There’s no sort of, maybe I could talk to you about what lenses I should get if I actually buy this thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no reasonably expensive zoom lens above like 100
⏹️ ▶️ John something millimeter zoom. Like forget about a 600, forget about a 400. I mean I think I can get like
⏹️ ▶️ John a 400 for $12,000. That’s how much I can get. Yeah, well I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know the problem is like what you’re looking at here is you’re looking at a lens system that spans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from prosumer to really like low to kind of mid-range pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sony full-frame sensors, like the A7 series, have become very popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very quickly among high-end users. And we can have lots of debates over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they are considered pro cameras or not, but it’s kind of like asking whether the iPad is a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether or not they are pro cameras, by some people’s definitions, they are still being used by a lot of pros for professional use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it doesn’t really matter whether you think they’re a pro camera or not, because they are just incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good and incredibly compelling for a lot of reasons. Anyway, so the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that when you have these large, very dense, very high quality sensors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need really good lens glass in front of those to be able to resolve enough detail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really take advantage of what those sensors have to offer. And so you can look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at like your little Super Zooms, and Super Zooms, you know, they sacrifice a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of image quality and optical quality to be able to put a large zoom range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a relatively compact and relatively inexpensive body. That’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible to, it’s like something has to give there. If you’re gonna have to serve a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large, nice sensor with lots of megapixels of detail and not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of distortion in the image, I mean, some of that you can correct with software, but still, try to avoid it if you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you have to either shorten the range in order to have less glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that needs to be in place to get that high-quality image to this high-quality sensor without distorting, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to put just a ton of glass in front of that thing. Tons of like highly engineered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, lens elements and these very expensive, very large, very heavy lenses. And so it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this trade-off between all these different factors of like, well, if you want to have something that is small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and light and probably cheap and also has big zoom range, it can’t have good optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality. And if you want something that is small with good optical quality, you should really be probably using a prime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want something large with good optical quality and you have unlimited budget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t mind carrying these giant heavy lenses, the lenses you see in the new high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sony FE lineup, that’s the market they’re targeting. They’re targeting the Canon L
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series lenses and stuff, and whatever the Nikon, I forget what the Nikon Pro ones are called. They’re targeting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that market of pro photographers, the people you see on the sidelines of sports games, the giant white lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re targeting that market now because their cameras are so good, they’re starting to be used in that kind of industry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is pretty impressive for a mirrorless to begin with. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what you’re looking for, you should probably honestly consider the RX10, their super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom, or at least only consider using the Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for occasions in which you don’t really need massive reach of a telephoto zoom. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just like, you’re looking at a market that is designed for very different needs optimizing for very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different factors in that trade-off of lens design, you’re trying to get out of that market like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 600mm lens, try to find a 600mm Canon L lens and you will see quite what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of quality and what this kind of market is like. They get pretty ridiculous pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. I would say this is kind of like your Mac Pro versus gaming PC thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You kind of want the impossible out of this high-end thing, but what you really actually need is a low-end thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s no 2008 Mac Pro equivalent. This 2008 Mac Pro was perfect in 2008. Did everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, like, so what I learned from the vacation is that I’m willing to give up the zoom range for the better quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because first of all, with the Prime, this can take pictures indoors that nothing else I have could take. Those are the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason I never wanted to get high-end camera, because you get used to it and you’re like, well, now I can’t go back. How can you go back
⏹️ ▶️ John from using, you know, a reasonably good camera for indoor photography? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t go back because all the pictures, other pictures are garbage indoors because there’s no light and your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get the light and nothing else can and you know. So, and then at the beach, when
⏹️ ▶️ John I had the choice between both cameras, I had them both right there, I was using both of them. Eventually by the last day
⏹️ ▶️ John we were at the ocean, I just didn’t even take out the Panasonic the whole time, I just used the Sony the whole time. You know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John by that, then I was brave enough to go in the water with it and I didn’t mind the fact that I was a little bit farther
⏹️ ▶️ John away because the, you know, I had more megapixels and I could crop them if I really needed to, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, even if I was a little bit farther away, the increased image quality was worth it
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. I mean, so maybe I like a little bit bigger zoom, and then I can, you know, I’ll shop around, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at Sony’s lenses now, they’re 500 millimeter. You’re right that the signal is, when the lens is white,
⏹️ ▶️ John run away. That’s probably like a rhyme. Yeah. When the lens is white, the price is not right. The 500
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter F4G SSM, whatever those letters stand for, $12,999. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think I’ll be skipping that lens. There’s also the size of a truck. Like, it’s also a bad sign when the lens itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that mounts to the tripod and not the camera, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now the camera’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just hanging off the end of the lens. These are all bad signs for your budget. Ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ John a 300 millimeter one for only 7,500. Anyway, I’ll probably just end up getting
⏹️ ▶️ John this camera with the kit lens and a prime, and then save up for a zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, I mean, I enjoyed it that much. Like, it was heavier, but not that much
⏹️ ▶️ John heavier. and size-wise it was okay. Ergonomically and UI-wise, I
⏹️ ▶️ John still think cameras have a long way to go. I recognize that this is a big improvement over the
⏹️ ▶️ John old Sony, since again, my brother had an older one, like this is better. It doesn’t have a touch screen, which would help, but
⏹️ ▶️ John camera manufacturers need to get over the idea that the best way to arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John all your options is in a big linear list over a series of screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this one has tabs, and then within each tabs, there’s a number line, like search results, that has seven screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and is just a bunch of text things. Like that’s not, it’s organized kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can imagine a much better UI to organize these, because I can never remember where the hell is this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they weren’t organized in any logical way. I’m like, these are the camera settings. These are the ones under gear. These are settings,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not camera related settings. It’s just, it’s a terrible organization. But at least they’ve gotten on the BMW page
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, look, we put a bunch of buttons on this thing. And most cameras do this, but apparently Sony’s been bad about this in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have a bunch of buttons. You can program them all to do anything you want. We printed something next to the buttons that’s have little you know
⏹️ ▶️ John abbreviations to tell you what they do by default But if you don’t like that you can make any button do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part which is another business interface So what do you want this button to do scroll through this list of literally 70 options
⏹️ ▶️ John and find the thing you want It’s it’s really terrible and then everything cameras want to do on camera like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a tab that says apps just no Sony There are no apps that I want to run. I want your camera to
⏹️ ▶️ John take pictures Maybe on camera convert to JPEG, which by the way, this one doesn’t even do it just
⏹️ ▶️ John the raws you have to pull off but everything else wait what it doesn’t convert to you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do like in-camera conversion where you shoot in raw and then fiddle with it and then
⏹️ ▶️ John do a conversion to JPEG before you pull it off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh okay I see you mean
⏹️ ▶️ John you can shoot JPEG plus raw you can shoot raw you can shoot JPEG but a lot of cameras have the thing where you shoot in raw and then on
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera screw with the whatever you’re gonna screw with to get the you know pull out the detail from the shadows and blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah and then just pull off JPEGs that are burned in like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why would you wanna do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Okay, well, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John To save room. Because that’s another thing, and now I understand why my brother has the problem that he can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use iCloud library because he has more than one terabyte of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco photos. And why
⏹️ ▶️ John have more than one terabyte of photos? Because he shoots RAW on his little Sony.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, each of these RAWs is like 25 megs each compared to like three or four megs
⏹️ ▶️ John in JPEG and even smaller. And so I filled a 64 gig card and
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of another card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, in all fairness, buying a larger SD card is probably a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier and they’re pretty cheap now than having to fiddle with like taking up space on the camera. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other thing too is like, a larger SD card is a gettable easily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, pretty easily thing. What is not so easy is to get these cameras batteries to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last very long when the screens are on. And I mean, that’s the one thing like Sony,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love my camera, I love almost everything about it, but the battery life is embarrassing. And I have like all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power saving tips, like it has wifi, but you can put it in airplane mode, turn the wifi up. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did that immediately, as soon as I took this out of the box. Yeah, my camera has always been in airplane mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the battery life is so bad, I need all the
⏹️ ▶️ John help I can get. I had to turn the back screen on sunny day mode. Do you have yours? I’m sure you don’t have yours
⏹️ ▶️ John in sunny day mode, because sunny day means max brightness on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And guess what,
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed that because it was a sunny day at the beach, otherwise I couldn’t see a thing and I couldn’t use the viewfinder the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I usually, when I’m shooting, I will almost always be using the optical viewfinder, just because I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the additional detail that I’m able to see just because it is closer to my eye and there’s no outside light coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and everything else. So anyway, so yeah, I mean, honestly, I recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly giving up on the idea of zooms for the most part, because honestly, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trade-off is so big in terms of, you know, quality or size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and money. Like, like you can get Zooms that are, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is, there’s only very few of them that this is true for, but you can get Zooms that are about as good as, as most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco primes. They do exist, but they’re massive, heavy, and very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there aren’t that many of them. Most Zooms, you’re giving up a lot of quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get that Zoom flexibility. And if you think about, when you shoot with your iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a prime on there, except for the next large iPhone Plus that’s gonna have the optical zoom. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when you shoot with your iPhone, you’re shooting with effectively a 35 millimeter prime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’ve been shooting with that 35 millimeter prime on your iPhone for the last seven years or whatever, however long, well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you haven’t, John. Everyone else has. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while and we’ve gotten used to that and it’s fine and it turns out that when you just have like a decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prime in the wide to normal range, you can get pretty much all of your photography
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done that way, you know, most of the time, and it’s great. And the trade-off is worth it of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, if you have a prime here, then you can make this thing much smaller and cheaper and have higher quality and everything. Same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is true for any size camera. Anybody listening, if you have an SLR, anything with interchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lenses, if you don’t have a prime lens, which means it’s fixed at one focal length, you can’t zoom it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you zoom with your feet. If you don’t have a prime lens, whatever camera system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you own, get the cheap 50 millimeter prime lens for it. Almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera system has something like this, where it is 50 millimeter or whatever the equivalent is for your sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. Usually it’s F1.8, and usually it’s like 100 bucks in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range. It’s fairly inexpensive for a lens. The optical quality you can get out of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it just kicks the butts of zoom lenses. So, and you know, like you were saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, John, that’s the one you were saying you were using indoors, because when you’re indoors or when you’re, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, when it’s not that much light, you can really get a lot of light in there. And even when you have lots of light,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sharpness and the color and just the optical quality that you get out of these lenses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is amazing because they can be so much simpler than a zoom. Like just there’s fewer elements, the elements, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, they can afford to get higher quality optics in there at that price point when you don’t have all those elements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to zoom things or to have a weird perspective or the extreme wide or extreme narrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Primes are just so nice. Like I found that even when I have a big camera, I spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vast majority of my time using primes. And even when I’ve used zooms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly have not liked the pictures that I get from them. The primes are just so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I urge anybody with cameras out there to consider just shooting with primes because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really is incredible. And there are situations where you quote need a zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I bet there’s a lot fewer of those than you expect. And for a lot of camera owners, you basically never have those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of those can be covered by renting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so we are going on a trip soon and I have rented a lens from lensrentals.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did so a few days ago because I also use lens rentals, although probably a lot less frequently. I rented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 35 to 100 millimeter zoom for my Micro Four Thirds camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did that because I want to be able to be a creeper. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to be able to capture, what I mean by that is, with my own family, oh God, taking out of context, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dear God. No, what I mean by that is, so if we’re all at a beach or if we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in a rented house together, so it’s only people I know, I don’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get up in somebody’s face in order to take a really good picture of them. I want to be able to be across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the room where they don’t even know I’m taking a picture, so it’s a lot more natural. But that being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, generally speaking, the only lens that is ever on my camera is a 25 millimeter. I have no idea what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent of that is in a SLR, but it’s a 25 millimeter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is a 50 equivalent. Your pictures look just like 50 pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so it’s a 25 millimeter F1.4 that Sean Blanc had recommended,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is very expensive. It was like $600, but it is a unbelievably, phenomenally good lens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eye, and I don’t know crap about this stuff. And if I ever take a decent picture,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s because I’ve gotten lucky and because of this lens. And I rented this zoom, just like Marco said, because I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have something to take the pictures, you know, maybe in the surf or something like John was describing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or take pictures from across the room. But generally speaking, I never bother with a zoom. And I do have the kit zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this Olympus camera that I have, and it’s fricking terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t give up on the zoom though. Like the one I was using, this is a cheap zoom lens, something like $600, 18 to 105
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter Sony zoom lens. It’s for the APS-C format. It’s not a full frame
⏹️ ▶️ John lens, so maybe that’s why it’s cheaper. And I was really happy with the pictures it took outdoors
⏹️ ▶️ John in the bright sunlight on the beach. And it’s the same reason Casey said. I’m most of the time I like to have candid pictures and
⏹️ ▶️ John either I don’t want to or can’t get close. So like people are all around. I can’t get close to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I do, they start acting weird. So I have to, you know, or they’re far, far out on the water. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they see you
⏹️ ▶️ John coming with the camera and they all turn and smile and ham it up. And I like candid pictures better. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I can capture them like 100 millimeters zoom is enough for like in a outdoor gathering of people
⏹️ ▶️ John to get close enough to get groups of people as if you’re right up next to them without being on next to them. And the surface a little bit, it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John low, but again, I can crop. And I mean, to my eye,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the aperture wasn’t like it was on the Prime. Like, so you couldn’t, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, open it up super wide and get the entire, you know, background nice and blurred and everything sharpened.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe the, I had, you know, I did a little, the F 1.8 50 millimeter prime that Marco was talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap, but good. But I mostly outdoors, I use the big zoom. And I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be bothered by how darn big it is, but it was, I was able to wrangle it fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John easily and I felt like it was worth it. Like that’s, that’s the lens, believe it or not, that I ended up using the most. I thought I would end up
⏹️ ▶️ John using the prime the most, but I ended up using this fairly large zoom the most. So I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just get that same lens. It’s only $600, but in the beginning, I’ll probably just get the prime and the kit lens. or maybe I’ll buy the
⏹️ ▶️ John body without the lens and just get the prime for it just to save some money. I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our days Marco of lording over John and feeling superior to him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sad to say they’re over Because John now has a blue checkmark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was afraid you’re gonna say he finally got a new computer. Oh god. No, come on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s not get ridiculous Yeah, so John congrats on your blue checkmark my friend
⏹️ ▶️ John my computer still better than yours to Casey Is it doesn’t crash
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it That’s why I didn’t say anything because I knew that was coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we go to the check marks What what is the status of your computer has has the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recurred it has not and I haven’t lost power for let’s see Six days 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours and 28 minutes still stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ram in it is your computer plugged into the UPS yet No, it’s not because I didn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reboot it. That’s why because I wanted to I wanted to keep this damn run going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has not lost power does not rebooted. It’s it does still have the OEM RAM in it. So I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still Perhaps perhaps unfairly. I’m still convinced. It’s the Mac sales
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay No, you should get it get on getting that replaced then Did
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know that
⏹️ ▶️ John mem test x64 thing that does like the super duper thorough RAM test? I did not exceed you six.
⏹️ ▶️ John Come on Whatever. That’s what I that’s what I said in my head, but my mouth did something
⏹️ ▶️ John different You’re such not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PC nerd every piece of nerd knows that
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I said in my head, but the words came out differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pronounced 1086 now, but what did I actually say?
⏹️ ▶️ John He said x64. Oh, I was probably thinking you know the modern instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I should rename
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so anyway the point is this is still going strong on the on the OEM RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Whenever this thing decides to reboot itself, or I lose power next or after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like two to four weeks I haven’t decided what I consider to be a long enough run, then at that point I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officially start the RMA process with MaxSales.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Didn’t you have to install the 10 whatever 6 update recently? The really critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security updates with the image parsing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall. I know what you’re talking about. I don’t recall if I did it or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not. You should do that if you haven’t yet. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. All right. Well, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll just not use my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the next week So this way I don’t have to reboot it. I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so to come back on point, John, you are verified. Congratulations, you are a sellout just like me. We are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not good enough like Marco to have had received our checkmarks without solicitation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, I did basically ask for it, just not directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I guess that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you just did the informal version of the same thing that you did. But most importantly now, we are the
⏹️ ▶️ John fully verified podcast, obviously. So is Analog, for that matter. Many fully verified podcasts are happening
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey happening now. Let’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John put that by the way, uh, you know, so I got my check mark for TG, did not get his brown. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did not get hers. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John Renee didn’t get his.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Nope. He just hasn’t heard back yet. No, he got rejected,
⏹️ ▶️ John rejected. I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s still massive injustice in this world. There is for those of us who don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John need it on this podcast. Guess what? We got it. Makes no sense. Oh, and people were asking me if I’m going to change
⏹️ ▶️ John my bio that I complained about mostly on rectifs about having to write this silly bio
⏹️ ▶️ John now I’m afraid to change it because I’m afraid if I change it I’ll lose my check mark so I just I just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to leave this siller silly embarrassing bio there forever or maybe just like give it a year
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it’s safe for me to change it I don’t know so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I have to be influencer forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you can change it I just I’m not sure if you make it go away if they’ll get upset Because part of what you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checkmark is to is to have a bio the funny thing about this whole experience for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I have apparently become I don’t know how to put this maybe I’ve become like the litmus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test for like Oh Casey got verified. Of course insert person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here should totally be verified. So I saw that about Renee I saw that about Federico dude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey got verified. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this person should be verified. So that that’s my new claim to fame I should change my bio. I’m that guy you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe got verified. That’s me
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to find someone who you think is even less deserving of being your RFI to then you just point to them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right But yeah, so I get to see those tweets fly by like every every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few hours Dude, Renee didn’t get his thing. I can’t believe that Casey got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one God my favorite thing is like how when people are just like backhand insulting you like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they feel the need to mention you. To at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Exactly. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. Like, okay, if you want to think that, I mean, knowing me, I’ll probably find it in a vanity search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because hello. But at least have the decency not to mention me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, we are the Fully Verified Podcast and that’s very exciting.
Temporarily solo-parenting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Where is Tiff these days, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how to pronounce the more specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, the general location is France. Fair enough. Yeah. Tiff, my wife, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a vacation for the week, so I am solo parenting this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, it’s only been like three days so far, so for these three days it’s been totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s four more, something like that? Yeah. So, there’s still a while to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m mainly finding it challenging that like last night, so last night was Sunday night,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he’s in like a school day camp, like just like a day camp at his preschool, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summertime. I have to pack his lunch every day, and I realized last night that like a big part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what we pack is fruit of some kind, like raspberries or strawberries or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was just nothing in the fridge, so we had none. And he was already in bed. It was like 10 o’clock at night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, Marco doesn’t know where food comes from. No, food usually comes from me going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shopping for it, but I can’t leave the house with him asleep. You
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta go shopping with the kid, imagine that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what we did today. But yeah, so there’s just little things like that, that I had to realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, when you have two parents in the house, one of them can leave and go run an errand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t go to jail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slight learning experience like that, but otherwise yeah things have been going pretty you know like I’ve had him before alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just I think this is the longest span that we’ve ever had now see the chat room see this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a rookie mistake here so sip in the chat room has suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I go food shopping while he is at camp that is an interesting idea sip I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that however then after school in the six hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before he goes to bed that’s one less thing we could do together we have whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week here. A whole week. So we got any any Aaron that I can run with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him I’m going to run with him.
Teslas and convertibles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know those feels and that actually Segues somewhat nicely into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a brief bit of follow-up. I wanted to discuss which was Friend of the show underscore David Smith
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came down to visit on Friday evening into Saturday morning we watched the hunt for October
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together because it’s one of the best movies in the entire world come at me and Then Saturday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning, which is I think you guys do Sunday Marco, but in the list household we do a Saturday morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into into nap time, daddy time. And Dave joined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me on this, and we took his Tesla to Cars and Coffee. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore and Declan and myself. And we took the Tesla to Cars and Coffee, and it was funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I had promised him that we would try to find the self-organizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey group of Teslas that always shows up. There’s typically three or four of them. I even saw a Model X there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two times ago, which was surprising. But anyway, we showed up in the Tesla and I drove there, which I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slightly perturbed by only because I felt like this was Dave’s big moment. And here it is, he can get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his car and be like, yes, well, this is so not underscore style, but yes, look at me and my Tesla. This is mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I am proud of it. But instead it was me. Instead it was me who got out of the driver’s seat. And of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we stepped out of the driver, I stepped out of the driver’s seat within, I kid you not, 15 seconds, somebody came running over to ask questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I basically threw my hands in the air and, wave them like I just don’t care. No, I threw my hands in the air and said, dude it’s his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car you should ask him about it. But yeah it made quite a splash. People quite liked it. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were backed in as you do because I’m not an animal and I was backed in against a Maserati.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was pretty interesting but it was funny how many people were just completely impressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and and interested in the Tesla. And perhaps even more surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really loved the rear jump seats. They really thought the rear jump seats were interesting to the point that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it a kid, it was like 15, 18 year old, something like that, asked if he could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jump in the jump seats just to see how they felt, which Underscore, because he’s the nicest man alive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, yeah, sure, definitely feel free. But it was funny. And Underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is hysterical watching him do this because he’s like the most easygoing guy. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to hide the fact that my plumage had come out in full force,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, if it were me. But Underscore’s just like, yeah, you know, it’s a thing. He’s just so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s just way cooler than all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, pretty much. What a nice car, though. I kind of am mad at him now, because I’ve forgotten how much I hate my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had forgotten how much I hate my car. And then I drove his Tesla again, and now I hate my car again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have a very nice car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just the Tesla’s better. I have a wonderful car. I truly do. But god, the Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw a white M3 today and thought of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aw, thanks, buddy. A new one or an older one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the last generation, the one that you like. But it was the two-door convertible. I think it was convertible, it was at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two-door. So it was like the weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. Snap question. I know we’re not really in the neutral part of the show, but I have to ask. A friend of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, who will remain nameless, has been debating between M2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Boxster S. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So with the caveat that I’ve driven neither, I would say, I mean, those are very different cars. Like the Boxster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, you know, it’s convertible, I assume, right? Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Cayman’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-convertible one, right? So yeah, so it’s convertible. It’s probably smaller if I had to take a guess. I would guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Boxster’s probably more expensive. It is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you waffling? There’s an obvious answer here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, finish your thought. Then I want to hear the obvious answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So get the M2. That’s not it. That’s not the answer. The correct answer is to get, first of all, don’t get the new
⏹️ ▶️ John generation Boxster, like the one with the turbo engine. Get the previous generation Boxster.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s still on sale, not get a used one. That’s the obvious choice. It’s so much better than the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John in every possible way. The car will make you happier. Because if you’re shopping for M2 or Boxster, you’re already not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for, oh, I some of the groceries to the kids. Get the previous generation non-turbocharged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, having driven none of these two cars and now the third I’m about to mention, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the Boxster when you can get the Cayman? Isn’t the Cayman better in every way and has all the same advantages of the Boxster?
⏹️ ▶️ John person wants a convertible, obviously, if they’re shopping Boxster. I mean, it’s convertible. The top comes. It’s a big difference. If you’re shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John a convertible, you’re not confused about whether you want a convertible. You want a a convertible. Nobody wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like them. No, no. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convertible. It’s one of those decisions that you should sway people away from. Like, no, trust me, you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John No, well, this person wants one and I think it’s fine. And the Boxster is just a more
⏹️ ▶️ John special car. Yes, it is more expensive. The M2 is a good car. If you were shopping, like M2 versus M3, then we could have
⏹️ ▶️ John a real discussion. But if it’s M2 versus Boxster, no contest. Boxster, previous gen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you want to wear socks with sandals, But trust me, you don’t want to wear socks with sandals. You don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John Convertibles are not socks with sandals.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Convertibles
⏹️ ▶️ John are fun experiences. We’re not talking about like Jaguar convertibles from the 80s that are going to leak water
⏹️ ▶️ John all over you and short out. The modern convertibles are fine. No, they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re never fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. A convertible is a fine car in general. I really do like convertibles. But yeah, this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual, let’s just say that they’re always on vacation. So it wouldn’t make sense for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular individual to be shopping a convertible. But anyway, yeah, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just curious. Years ago, in like, I don’t know, 2005, a friend of a friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a Boxster S, and this was when they were still pretty new, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I drove that Boxster S, and I got in that car thinking, oh, this is just an imposter 911. I’m gonna hate this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece of garbage, and oh my God, did I love it. It was phenomenally good. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunned. I could see how the non-S Boxster would be kind of a dog and kind of boring, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, the Boxster S was nice. This was way back in 05. I haven’t driven an M2. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a friend at work that has an M2 35i that I have yet to drive, but he promised me I could at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this obviously is just that, but more. But yeah, the old Boxsters anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were super nice. I’m curious to see how this new one is.
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Apple hires QNX co-creator
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⏹️ ▶️ John Ah. Ah. Ah. Quick follow up on the neutral thing. Apparently the 2016
⏹️ ▶️ John model is the bad Boxster. It’s when they added 718 to the public facing name, the Porsche 718 Boxster. That’s the 2016 model.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get that one. You want the 2015 Boxster, which doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John number in the name. It does have a number. 981 is the number behind the scenes. but it’s just called Boxster. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John confusing, I know, because car model years always are, and they do look very similar, but the 2016 one with the turbo four-cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John engine, thumbs down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we thought the neutral part of the show was over, but turns out it’s not. Apple has hired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody from QNX, which is interesting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey QNX is a company that makes an operating system also called QNX,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that operating system, I understand, to run a bunch of embedded systems, not the least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which is, is it the entertainment system in cars, or is it the actual ECU
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s, well, it might be the ECU, but I think what it’s most known for is, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason people care about QMNX at all is because it’s a real-time operating system. So you would never need a real-time operating system to
⏹️ ▶️ John run your infotainment, because those things are slow as molasses anyway. Oh my God, so slow. Yeah, we’ll put the link in
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes about the Wikipedia entry on real-time operating system, which describes it pretty well. But basically a real-time
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system is the only situation where you can make guarantees
⏹️ ▶️ John about when things will happen. So you can say, we guarantee that
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing will be serviced in a maximum of this amount of time. If it’s hard real time and soft real
⏹️ ▶️ John time, soft real time tries very hard to give
⏹️ ▶️ John computing time to certain things in certain intervals, and hard real time is like, look, this is a part of the system,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are going to be able to service this in a certain interval at minimum. And you use hard real-time systems for things
⏹️ ▶️ John like space probes or flight control systems where you can’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a space probe whizzing around the solar system and have it go to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John that has to be done with millisecond precision and then have a memory allocation happen or an interrupt happen when
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t expect it and not have your routine serviced for an extra couple of milliseconds because there was a little hiccup.
⏹️ ▶️ John On our personal computers, those little hiccups and glitches happen all the time. But in real-time
⏹️ ▶️ John operating systems, especially hard real-time operating systems, the whole design is made so that can’t happen ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason this comes up for automotive things is there are some things in automotive systems that are like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, anti-lock brakes, possibly also engine control, things where you can’t ever have
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of hiccup. You always have to have things done on a certain timeline but within a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John deadline with some fuzz on either side of it, but like there are limits that you need things to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, guaranteed every single time, no possibility that it could happen. So I think we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this when we were talking about what could Apple bring to cars with software, and we talked a lot about, like, like Mark was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, infotainment systems, and the UI, and the things that Tesla does on its big touchscreen, and that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John well and good, and Apple would probably be good at that, and you could basically run iOS on that, and you’ll be fine. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John the other parts of the car, the driving parts, whether they be self-driving or just simply driver aids
⏹️ ▶️ John or smart cruise control or engine control and stuff like that, that stuff has to be real time
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a safety issue. You can’t have any like
⏹️ ▶️ John stutter or whatever that you see in regular operating systems. And operating systems like OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John do have things where they try to give you guaranteed times like audio processing, but anyone who’s ever used audio on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John knows that it’s not a hard real-time operating system. You can get it into situations where you have underflow and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a little stutter and your disk isn’t fast enough or whatever, parts of the whole chain can
⏹️ ▶️ John fall down to give you a failure, whether it be audio or video. But a hard real-time system just simply
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do that. It has to give guaranteed time slices to all the software that’s running
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which means it’s a very different thing for you to create. You wouldn’t create a real-time operating system, even for something
⏹️ ▶️ John like the watch, it would be silly. But it’s very different than anything Apple has ever created, to my knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s why it’s interesting to see this person who, I think there was like the the founder of QNX or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. That’s right some big wig in QNX It’s not like he’s the one writing the real-time operating system, but
⏹️ ▶️ John he was well in the beginning, but you know I mean like now I’m sure Apple’s not hiring him to write their operating system But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna hire someone to be in charge of the real-time operating system effort
⏹️ ▶️ John For your car or whatever the guy who is the founder of QNX is a pretty darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah And real-time follow-up from Wikipedia, where everything is guaranteed to be true. At the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Geneva Motor Show, Apple demonstrated CarPlay, which provides an iOS-like user interface to head units and compatible devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once configured by the manufacturer, QNX can be programmed to hand off its display and certain functionality to an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay device. So it seems, at least for now, that QNX will be used for CarPlay, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like John has described, maybe even more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And BlackBerry bought QNX. Like, it’s not as if QNX is only useful for real-time. like Blackberry brought them is like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can be our phone OS like the Q and X is a flexible operating system you make do whatever you want. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for if Apple’s ever going to do any self driving stuff or even just like the you know, the barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John to entry for just a basic car with simple smart cruise control and lane departure warning and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John or even just anti lock braking systems or whatever, you need a real time operating system to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that type of functionality. And the question was always is Apple going to invent one
⏹️ ▶️ John in house? Does it already have one in-house? Is it going to… I mean obviously it did it just bought this
⏹️ ▶️ John it hired this guy didn’t buy QNX I forget who owns the assets of QNX maybe it’s Blackberry still around I guess they
⏹️ ▶️ John still own it at this point anyway this is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that they need solved if they’re ever going to make a car like an actual complete car instead of just
⏹️ ▶️ John like some component of a car the software system for a car so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the first public signal that They are serious about this aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of the car as opposed to all the rumors like well Of course, it’s gonna be self-driving and of course it’s gonna do that this hire really
⏹️ ▶️ John only makes sense in that in the context of Car software
⏹️ ▶️ John that does the car stuff the safety related car stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and the gentleman’s name is Dan Dodge for the record the unfortunate name for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, he ended up in automotive sort of so I guess that makes sense, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but Dodge is not really the brand that Apple probably wants to evoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, whatever. I’m at least in part a product of a Mopar family, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody’s perfect. But yeah, it’s really interesting. Like you said, John, I think what’s most interesting about this to me is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a public signal that Apple is moving towards automotive. I mean, sure, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interpret this in many other ways. Sure, QNX does seem to underpin BlackBerry 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the newest BlackBerry operating system, I think. The point is, all signs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point to this being an automotive-related hire and a high-profile one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know whether there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s ever-increasing amounts of smoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like Apple is kind of like decreasingly coy about their car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plans. They’re just not even denying them anymore. And they’re just like, yeah, okay, you guys all know we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John And something they could do, which is definitely an Apple move, is for the first car that comes out in 2020 or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if they’re just starting their real time operating system ever now, it’s not going to be ready in time for that, right? So what they can do
⏹️ ▶️ John is release a car that’s not self driving, that merely uses third party
⏹️ ▶️ John components for its engine control and its anti lock brakes and its airbags and it’s smart
⏹️ ▶️ John cruise control. These are all things that you can buy, you know, from various manufacturers off the shelf. Then Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does the car play part of the car, right? And the UI and all the things that are not real time that are just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John UI type things. And that’s still a perfectly good Apple car. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in the meantime, over the next three or four or five years, they work on their self-driving thing with their own real-time
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system. It’s kind of like the iPod approach of where, you know, they have that PIXOS thing or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that they, from a third party, they licensed and use in their iPods. But when it came time to do the iPhone, they didn’t port that over.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although that was one of the competing options internally. They did their own thing. It takes a long time to do your own thing. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure, depending on what stage they’re at now, if that is coming on board to
⏹️ ▶️ John shepherd their multi-year running real-time operating system effort to just make sure like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on track and to you know get it going then maybe they can hit 2020 but if they’re just starting their
⏹️ ▶️ John effort now and staffing up i don’t think they’re going to be ready in time for a car in 2020 and i don’t think they need to be because nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John has produced a completely self-driving car at this point they can drive on any roads and i don’t think apple’s going to in 2020 either
⏹️ ▶️ John so it might be smart to put out a car that is impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John and good in all the ways that apple’s cars can be good, but that Apple outsources all the parts that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not innovating in essentially. Like they don’t have any particular innovation to add to anti-lock braking
⏹️ ▶️ John or adaptive cruise control or engine control and so there’s no reason for them to put their own operating. In fact it’s a huge risk to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. Just they’re third-party vendors who make parts for the rest of the car industry that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy those things from, both software and hardware, and they should just do that and put all their effort into the design
⏹️ ▶️ John of the car and the UI and the parts that that they’re good
Swift defeates Perl, 8–8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess we’re out of the neutral portion of the show, which means I only have one thing left to talk about, and then we might have to go through the stupid TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I offer, I can explain the MP3 file format to you if you want, and why podcasts apparently aren’t and maybe can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, where did that go? That was in the show notes, then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disappeared. John demoted it
⏹️ ▶️ John right before the show. Ah. I almost demoted the Swift thing too, because I don’t think there’s much to say, but you put it there, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John so what do you have to say about the Swift update?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s gonna be quick, to be honest. Mostly I just wanted to hear your reaction to the line about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the goal being to be better at regular, or what was it, regular expressions than Perl?
⏹️ ▶️ John me. You don’t even remember it. I’m on the Swift Evolution mailing list. I read all these things. I am
⏹️ ▶️ John soaking in it. There’s nothing you can tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey about Swift that is gonna be a surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John reference to an ad that was on before you were both born.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Delightful. Anyway, so tell me, John, what you think about this claim that Swift will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be better than string processing than Perl.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a claim, it’s a goal, And a goal is not a promise, if you know, if you read the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did read it. I did read it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just trying to get a rise out of you. Anyway, tell me about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s fine. So like Swift 3, it had a lot of lofty goals. Some of
⏹️ ▶️ John them they missed, particularly ABI stability they didn’t get. Not API, ABI,
⏹️ ▶️ John Application Binary Interface, which basically means can Apple build a library in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John and ship it with their operating system, and then people ship applications that link to that binary?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then can they update that binary in the next version of the operating system and not break people’s applications because
⏹️ ▶️ John the applications are linking into the library and expecting things to be in certain places and find certain symbols. How
⏹️ ▶️ John do you update that? You need ABI stability. If you change the calling convention for your libraries and you release
⏹️ ▶️ John a new version of that library, it will break everybody’s applications because their binaries expect to call
⏹️ ▶️ John into it in a different way. So Swift is still at the point where they haven’t nailed that down. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to do that for Swift 3, but they didn’t make it. A lot of the things they did do in Swift 3 are the reason because they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to nail down generics and some other features that affect, uh, ABI and also this resiliency
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff where it’s like, if we change aspects of the language, uh, again, can, can we make
⏹️ ▶️ John a new version of library and have the old applications still work with it? This is important for, it’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John important for an OS vendor because that’s what Apple does. They ship libraries like UI kit and many other, you know, that’s an umbrella framework, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, huge libraries that applications link against individual application developers for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part, unless they have like a suite of applications And they have their own frameworks that they share between them you can always as an application
⏹️ ▶️ John vendor just statically link your whole thing But you’re gonna dynamic link to the OS libraries But up until
⏹️ ▶️ John this point everyone shipping a swift app was sort of shifting shipping with the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire Swift standard library as Part of their application because it was the only safe way to do that and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of untenable even for applications To be shipped that way so Apple’s gonna fix that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift for that is now their goal for Swift for they still have some issues to work out, leftover stuff from
⏹️ ▶️ John SWF3 to make that possible, and they’re trying to do SWF4 in two phases, one is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the important stuff and then there’s like the frills. Interestingly, in the important stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John section, the stage one of SWF4, was the thing that Casey was talking about, is that they’re going to take another crack at their
⏹️ ▶️ John strings, they’ve changed their strings a couple times already, and they’re going to fiddle with them again, and their goal
⏹️ ▶️ John is to be as good at string handling as Pearl is, which is actually a a fairly lofty goal because
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl for all its historic weirdness is actually really fast at dealing with strings
⏹️ ▶️ John and can do things that most other languages can’t do in terms of Unicode. Um, and all sorts of cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So hold on. I was going to ask you about this. I, now I am not trying to needle you. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly asking what makes Perl so good at string processing? I know that like regular expressions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expressions are, I guess, like a first-class citizen or something, but I’ve written very little Perl in my life. And it was a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time ago. So can you give like an executive summary of what makes Pearl so darn good at this because it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey universally accepted that it is So why
⏹️ ▶️ John well, there’s two aspects one is string representation Which is weird and pearl for
⏹️ ▶️ John historical reasons and is actually very complicated But for example in a language like objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C that doesn’t sort of have native strings like you’ve got you know character
⏹️ ▶️ John pointers which are no good for you because we live in the modern world
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then you’ve got an s-string
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a string is like UTF-16 under the covers and there’s all sorts of methods to get what you want but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a particularly efficient format if you had to pick like you would never pick UTF-16 as an internal representation format because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just not it’s not the way to do things in the modern world it’s bigger than you want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still not fixed size because you have things that take you know it’s not every one of you know you have characters to take
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple uh uh sets of uh bytes and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know it’s not it’s not uniform like an array like it has all the disadvantages none of the advantages Perl’s
⏹️ ▶️ John representation used to just be bag of bytes and they were smart enough to switch to UTF-8 internally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl can do everything every other language can in terms it has libraries that you could encode and decode
⏹️ ▶️ John however you want. The way you want to write things in Perl is when you pull data
⏹️ ▶️ John into Perl from whatever, from the disk, from the network, or whatever, that’s string data, you have to know the encoding
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously because otherwise how do you know how to deal with it? And you want to sort of decode it into Perl’s
⏹️ ▶️ John internal representation, then all through your Perl program you want to deal with,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you want to call them, like Perl strings, where they are just strings
⏹️ ▶️ John that Perl understands that you don’t have to deal with the encoding. And all of Perl’s functions in terms of regular expressions and
⏹️ ▶️ John substring matching and all sorts of other stuff deal with them as logical sets of characters,
⏹️ ▶️ John or I don’t want to call them characters, but anyway, as Unicode code points, right? And when you output them
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it should be a disk file or a terminal or over the network Whatever at that point
⏹️ ▶️ John you decide how you want to encode it for a transmission You turn it back into a byte sequence whether they be
⏹️ ▶️ John utf-8 16 so and so forth and because the modern world basically uses utf-8 everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and Pearl, you know secret secret unbeknownst to you uses utf-8 internally as its internal
⏹️ ▶️ John representation You can go through that whole cycle without ever having to encode and decode which is not the case for
⏹️ ▶️ John NS string Which is an innate a feature of Dek to see and every time you come from utf-8 and tennis string
⏹️ ▶️ John and from any string back To utf-8 it’s an expensive process So that’s just like at the
⏹️ ▶️ John most fundamental level Why is it convenient to deal with stuff in pearl because they picked a good internal representation
⏹️ ▶️ John format because they have a system that says We decode on the way in our entire working
⏹️ ▶️ John with the string in the program You don’t have to worry about the representation But trust us it’ll be efficient and on output you encode
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever you want it to be and that’s a no op if it’s UTF-8 through the whole way. And then after that it’s like okay
⏹️ ▶️ John well then your representation is good, your algorithms are efficient in terms of pre-allocating
⏹️ ▶️ John buffers for strings when you start appending and it realizes you’re gonna keep appending so pre-allocate it and you know like all sorts of smart
⏹️ ▶️ John things like that. Perl’s regular expression engine is you know the gold standard of regular
⏹️ ▶️ John expression engines in terms of the number of years that have been put into both the syntax and the engine itself
⏹️ ▶️ John with all sorts of crazy efficiencies where it can look at your regular expression to figure out you You know what,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see that there’s a faster way to do this than using, you know, just a regular regular expression engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can do something simpler because I can shortcut this by looking at the anchor and optimizing
⏹️ ▶️ John it to an index lookup or use a DFA when it’s faster than an NFA regfs engine because I can look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John regular expression like it’s very clever optimizations to a regular expression engine in addition
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the features. I think what they’re talking about for the Swift stuff is they just want their strings
⏹️ ▶️ John to be as powerful as Perl strings. It’s convenient to deal with, they have all the nice convenient methods for doing things, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you use those methods, things are fast. Because you can get in trouble really fast with strings if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep changing representation internally, or if your internal representation is weird, and any time you have to do any operation
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to like walk the whole string to find boundaries between things or whatever. There’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of chances for inefficiencies. Or even if you have a string and you’re repeatedly appending and making a bigger and bigger string,
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be massively inefficient too if if you’re not careful about how you allocate memory. So Perl,
⏹️ ▶️ John for all of its weirdness, and there is weirdness related to this that I didn’t want to go into,
⏹️ ▶️ John is very fast and has all the features you could possibly imagine, some of which may be obscure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s what Swift is going for. They want to be faster than NSString, which they didn’t list because they’re not going to throw their own stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John under the bus now, but faster and better than NSString, native to the language,
⏹️ ▶️ John and really efficient internally with lots of operations. And then regular expressions were in the phase two, where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a nice to have. We just need to get the string representation and the basic features down. And then we can add regular
⏹️ ▶️ John expressions at any point after that. And that’s a whole other project of like, how do we make a really fast regular expression engine?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s in the phase two box. The phase two is the goodies and the phase one is like, eat
⏹️ ▶️ John your vegetables and get our house in order, get our ABI stability down, figure out what generic is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be. And by the way, async stuff, that’s even farther in the history. It’s not even gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift 4 probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, like I saw Async await and I actually didn’t get to use that too much in my C Sharp days, but I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to know that that’s super awesome. But you know what I did use a lot in my C Sharp days and I’m really excited about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reflection. I’m super stoked about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Matt Stauffer Was that in stage one? I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was reflection in stage one? Jeff Huston Stage two. So reflection is basically, it allows you to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it allows your code to look at itself, hence reflection, and make decisions about things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think I like it so much because it’s my favorite hammer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so everything looks like a nail to me. And there’s certainly appropriate times and ways to use reflection and inappropriate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times and ways to use reflection. But there are some times, and I can’t think of a contrived example right off the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top of my head, but there are some times when reflection is a very powerful way to solve a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think a lot of the kvetching that was going on in the past about how Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not dynamic enough for some of the developers, particularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, the old Objective-C guard, a lot of that would potentially, a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaining would potentially go away with more robust reflection, because there is some support in Swift, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really crappy. Swift today, but it’s really crappy. I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what’s coming. I think everything in this post by Chris Lattner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we’ll link in the show notes, all of it is worth reading. I don’t think there’s any really wasted words, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really curious to see where this goes. It seems like they’re learning from their mistakes. They’re learning from overpromising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and under-delivering. Or maybe it seems from their perspective they didn’t necessarily promise ABI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stability in three, but they didn’t do a good job of stating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what their intention was. Whether or not you agree with that, whatever. But the point is they’re trying to be a lot better about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John stability was a goal, so to speak. As they got into Swift 3, I think they realized
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of things. The appetite for syntax changes in
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift seems to be waning. Like as in people are kind of like, I just learned Swift 2 or
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift 2.1 or 2.0, we’re gonna change it again in Swift 3. And so there was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually a rush to say, look, this is probably our last big chance to change
⏹️ ▶️ John syntax stuff. So everybody, let’s like, if there’s any other syntax crap in the language, are
⏹️ ▶️ John we using equals here or we should use a colons or casing of things is inconsistent between this and that
⏹️ ▶️ John and picking new keywords, like now is the time to do it. So I spent a lot of time in Swift 3 doing
⏹️ ▶️ John syntax breaking changes, non-backward compatible changes to the language itself, to the characters that you type
⏹️ ▶️ John to make your programs. Because they’re trying to really say, we got a little trailing
⏹️ ▶️ John end of syntax changes, and then we’re shutting the door on that, and we’re saying, not that we’re never gonna have them again but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna have to be really, they have to be really justified, there has to be a really strong reason to do them, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John try to maintain source compatibility from here on. So there’s a big rush to get those things in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the second part is, when dealing with the ABI stuff, they still hadn’t sorted out all
⏹️ ▶️ John their generic system and other things that affect the ABI, because they have to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of things are we gonna be calling, in what ways and everything before they can nail down the ABI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they hadn’t sorted out that part of the language, it’s impossible to do the ABI. So it was kind of like, they weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ready to do the ABI yet, because they had other things that they had to do first. Not like they went off into the weeds and
⏹️ ▶️ John were dancing through the daisies and doing other frivolous things, right? They realized that actually we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not at the point yet where we can do ABI stability. We haven’t figured out all these things that are prerequisites for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So they spent all their time trying to sort of get all that painful stuff out of the way
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re still doing that, do all the prerequisites. And then hopefully in the SWF4 stage one timeframe,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will have all that. I’m not sure, you know, again, they were trying to be careful and say this is a goal or whatever, not
⏹️ ▶️ John a promise. It’s still not a promise for this first stage one thing. Who knows how this will turn out? Because you can’t, like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake they can make is to rush the ABI stability and be stuck with a dumb calling convention that
⏹️ ▶️ John prevents them from adding features later. So this is like the most important time to not rush
⏹️ ▶️ John to nail things down and set it in concrete. Because once you do that and Apple starts shipping frameworks that
⏹️ ▶️ John people link their apps against, that’s it, you can’t renege on that. You can’t like, oh, we’re breaking all your apps in this next release,
⏹️ ▶️ John recompile everything, right? They, I mean, they really, really don’t wanna do that. kind of like, you know, for an
⏹️ ▶️ John OS vendor, for a platform vendor, API promises are something you really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to break. Or if you do break them, you want to do a carbon 64 and break it before you actually ship to customers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still pissed off about that because they all developed their applications against it and plan their products and so on and so forth. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John even worse if you ship it to customers and then a year later say, up, you know what, all your apps don’t work anymore when
⏹️ ▶️ John people update their operating system, sorry about that. So this is really a critical
⏹️ ▶️ John time in Swift and it’s much, much better for them to continue to miss dates and to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John they have it solid. Because once you set this in stone and start shipping it in frameworks, that’s it for many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it makes sense. Marco, I know you have a lot to add on this. Uh, what would you like to add about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole Swift thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our final sponsor tonight is Eero.
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco your entire house. You have slow zones, you have dead zones, and you try to solve it with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco routers that have like six antennas on them, they look like these crazy things, and every router claims,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, now we have increased range. And it just doesn’t work very well when you only have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access point. It just doesn’t work. The single router model, in practice, cannot cover your whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house very well for most people. So what you need is a distributed system of multiple Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco routers. And Eero makes this really, really easy with these nice small
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco will need two or three of them. These are like, these are little tiny routers, about the size of an Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you just plug them in. Now, one of them, you plug into your internet connection. The other ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just plug them into any outlet in your house and they communicate with the other ones wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they build this little mesh network so that you don’t have to be running ethernet wires all over your house to have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access points. And the way they do it with this mesh network, it’s actually faster than you’d think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t just like a repeater. They actually do this kind of side network thing that’s way faster than a simple repeater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be. And you guys have Eero’s. This works pretty well for you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, I have a set that they sent me of three and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugged them in thinking, I’ll just try this out so I can talk about it on the sponsor read, then I’ll go back to my actually relatively old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Airport Extreme. And I’m looking at one of my three Eero’s right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s sitting right next to me because I like it enough that I never disconnected it. So the management through the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app is great, it’s simple in a good way and I really like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did the same thing, I hooked them up thinking, I’ll try them out for, you know, if it’s their sponsor, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still hooked up. And I also still have my other router connected. I have them in bridge mode. Like, not that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend doing this, really you should just get these and they will do everything but because I have all these rules in my airport router, you can set
⏹️ ▶️ John it up in bridge mode. So I have my previous wireless router not doing anything wireless anymore and those things
⏹️ ▶️ John do wireless everywhere. And I can’t go back to not having, you know, five little fan shaped thingies
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, Eero, it’s such a better system than just having one router. And all the, you know, the reviews
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It’s finally time for TiVo
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⏹️ ▶️ John It’s time whether you end the show or not, because if you try to end the show now, it’s just gonna be in the after show, but that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. So the thing of it is, I swear to God this is true. I opened an iMessage window and started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing to Marco, you should just end the show after the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John update. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know your plan. Doesn’t matter if you do it. You go ahead, end the show, we’re just gonna do it in the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t send it. I was going to have, I was gonna tell him just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end the show and then we’ll do it in the after show, but it’ll be a funny moment. But then as I was typing that iMessage, I swear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God this is true, as I was typing the iMessage it occurred to me we had one more sponsor to do and then I resigned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself to my fate. John, tell us everything that I’m so excited to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, you don’t want to hear about MP3 file formats?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to but somebody had to move it down.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that doesn’t deserve the place that it got. That’s down by how we handle email now.
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo. TiVo was purchased by Rovi a long, long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John So long, in April, maybe? A
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried so hard, you guys. Let’s go over the list of things that have happened since then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rovi used to be Gemstar, if anyone remembers them. They make
⏹️ ▶️ John on-screen TV guides, like that big grid you pick stuff from channels and macro vision. Do either you two actually remember macro
⏹️ ▶️ John vision like when it was a thing? I do know it was like copy protection for VHS tapes
⏹️ ▶️ John like analog copy protection. So if you bought a VHS that had a movie on it, you tried to make a copy of it and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the right equipment. The copy would have all these little fuzzy things on it. It wouldn’t look good. It was very silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it has this weird like alternating bright and dark line that was in the overscan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range of the TV picture so that it wouldn’t show up on a TV. but the idea was to throw off the automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gain control of the VCR because it would oscillate from bright to dark and show weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this one line so it would be like, alright, well, the maximum brightness of the signal is really high right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so turn the automatic gain control down and then it would go back low and then alright, now turn the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatic gain control up and so if you made a copy of a movie with this with the VCR most VCRs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would try to automatically balance the brightness of the picture the movie would just oscillate every few seconds from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light to dark and light to dark as it was adjusting for this line that was actually off screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, copy protection has always been crappy. But anyway, this is the company that bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of similar to how the MP3 file format works, actually. Yeah, tell me more.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we’re not talking about that now. So the company Rovi is a combination of Gemstar
⏹️ ▶️ John and Macrovision. So this is not a company that really makes products that people
⏹️ ▶️ John love, like who love Macrovision, I guess content owners did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, throw in Rambus and you have like, you know, you know Rambus and Lodsis and then you have really a favorite team here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Rambus made like in theory you know their patents were used in
⏹️ ▶️ John products that people liked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah until they were convicted for fraud because of patent dealings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did anyone like the you know the Gemstar on-screen TV guides like the Gemstar stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is enterprise software was sold to people who make cable boxes and Macrovision was licensed to people who you know you
⏹️ ▶️ John know content owners for making their thing so this is the company that bought Tevo. To just give a very
⏹️ ▶️ John very brief Tevo recap for people who don’t know what Tevo is because it’s an increasingly large number of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tevo was one of the original and probably the best known makers of DVRs, digital
⏹️ ▶️ John video recorders, which is like a VCR but instead of recording television onto a bunch of tapes it records it
⏹️ ▶️ John video onto your hard drive. In the beginning they would take analog video in and record it onto a hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually they worked with cable cards and digital stuff or whatever. And not a lot of people bought
⏹️ ▶️ John Tivos in the grand scheme of things. People who bought them early on, early adopters, it changed their lives.
⏹️ ▶️ John It changed our lives. We got one around the same time we had kids when we couldn’t schedule your
⏹️ ▶️ John lives around like, oh, a television show is going to be on at eight. I better be at the TV at eight. That’s impossible with children.
⏹️ ▶️ John So along with getting a digital camera, getting a Tivo around the same time we had kids was a really smart move because
⏹️ ▶️ John now we no longer had to be on the schedule of televisions. And it really totally changed
⏹️ ▶️ John your life in terms of how you deal with television. Everyone has a TiVo, especially if you bought it early on. Like the fact that you could
⏹️ ▶️ John pause live television, that you could record anything you wanted, that you could choose the shows you wanted to record by picking the
⏹️ ▶️ John shows instead of programming your VCR to say, record channel 4 at 8pm and stop recording at
⏹️ ▶️ John 9pm. You wouldn’t have to do that. It just had a built-in guide that showed up in the shows. You could do a season
⏹️ ▶️ John pass for a show to say, I want to watch the X-Files whenever the X-Files on is recorded, only record
⏹️ ▶️ John the new episodes, don’t record the repeats, all sorts of good stuff like that. It just became the way we
⏹️ ▶️ John watch television. You never actually watch live television anymore. And of course, the most important feature is the skip
⏹️ ▶️ John button where you could skip 30 seconds at a time so you wouldn’t have to see any commercials because your DVR, your
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo would record the commercials, but you would skip over them when you watch because who wants to watch that? The current version of TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John has a series, I’m assuming a series of humans, figuring out where all the commercial break boundaries are in shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now when you’re watching TiVo, when the commercials start, you can hit one button and it just jumps past all the commercials
⏹️ ▶️ John in a single button press. You may ask yourself, hey, why do I have to even push the button? Why doesn’t the TiVo just
⏹️ ▶️ John excise the commercials for me? Well, Replay TV did something like that, a competitor to TiVo, and they got sued
⏹️ ▶️ John out of existence, so TiVo is kind of dancing around that. But anyway, I love TiVos, I keep buying them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I always buy the most expensive, biggest, best TiVo I possibly can, and when a new one comes out, I buy
⏹️ ▶️ John that one and keep replacing them. They’re fairly expensive. There’s either a monthly fee
⏹️ ▶️ John or you pay a huge amount of money for a lifetime service, and I usually just do that because we use the
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVos and they just rotate around the house. I’m a big proponent of TiVo. For
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years I’ve complained that their software and hardware has been terrible. For the amount of money you pay, it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly fast and responsive, and it hasn’t been. They’ve improved that in recent years, but apparently not enough to make people buy their
⏹️ ▶️ John products. So if you listen to, I don’t know, Hypercritical, me complaining about TiVo,
⏹️ ▶️ John or many podcasts I’ve complained about it. Same way we complain about Apple. It’s like, it’s a product,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, for me anyway, it’s a product I love that I think is the best in the industry, but that it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be better in obvious ways. And I’ve always complained that the company seems not to know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John be successful and doesn’t understand what it’s got. Like, many times I was asking them to charge me more money
⏹️ ▶️ John for a higher end product that had higher margins, like I was ready and willing to pay, but apparently they were going down market to try to grow
⏹️ ▶️ John their user base. Anyway, everything they did didn’t work. They were never
⏹️ ▶️ John able to really make any money. Their streaming services came and started to eat their lunch
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was sad about that because I think, you know, until cable companies
⏹️ ▶️ John released their death grip on all the content that we all love, which is happening slowly, like a lot of, increasing number
⏹️ ▶️ John of the shows that I watch are not on quote unquote TV. Like Stranger Things that I just watched is on
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix and not anywhere else. Orange is the New Black, House of Cards. What
⏹️ ▶️ John was that? Man in the High Castle is on Amazon. There is lots of original content coming
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but there’s still a lot of stuff that’s only on television. HBO, now Marco can get the HBO thing that he can never remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John name of, but it’s now the one that doesn’t require you to have the cable subscription, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So things are happening to eventually take us out of the death grip of cable companies, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for many, many years and still today, depending on what shows you’re interested in, the only place
⏹️ ▶️ John to get this content is on television. The only place to get it in real time, in high quality,
⏹️ ▶️ John without having to wait, you know, is on television. And the only civilized way to
⏹️ ▶️ John watch television, in my opinion, is to use a TiVo, not to use the DVR that comes from your cable company,
⏹️ ▶️ John which are universally very bad. But TiVo has been bought by this company, and the question was, well, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is Rovi going to do with them? Rovi mostly licenses intellectual property and does their on-screen guide stuff. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look promising. Rovi has a lot of patents. Tivo has a lot of patents related to DVR stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So everyone’s worried like, oh, either they just bought Tivo for the patents. There were a couple of good signs when they bought them. By the way, they bought them for $1.1
⏹️ ▶️ John billion, which is not, you know, it’s not bad. That’s like an Instagram and a bit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John For a company that everyone was like, Tivo, are they still in business? It’s pretty good because they have a lot of important
⏹️ ▶️ John patents. They’re also taking the name of Tivo, which I thought was a good sign. Like Rovi didn’t buy them
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, the Tivo name is no more. Now it’s just Rovi and we will just stop selling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tivo will stop selling hardware to customers, and we will just stop everything about the company
⏹️ ▶️ John and just license the patents and become a patent troll or whatever. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that they’re taking the name Tivo over the new company, I thought was a good sign, at least in their
⏹️ ▶️ John initial announcement. Then they started saying, well, we don’t really feel like we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make these plastic boxes with hard drives in them and give them to customers, because that seems like a loser business to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re looking into other options, and people are panicking, like, oh no, when my TiVo dies,
⏹️ ▶️ John will I not be able to buy another box that does the same thing? This is my big fear, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re a TiVo household, and we keep buying them. And if I ever catch wind of that happening, kind of like with the plasmas,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I knew Panasonic was stopping making plasmas, I’m gonna buy like three of these things and just hope they continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to work until they’ll break,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Aren’t they dependent on a service run by TiVo?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, kind of. I mean, I feel like that’s a surmountable problem where
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what their commitments are legally to people who bought their products
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep that service up and running for a certain period of time, but even if they stop selling the plastic boxes, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they’ll keep running the service. Because the service, if you don’t pay for lifetime, you’re paying them monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John fee for the service, and it’s gotta be hugely profitable to just run the service, because it’s not, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the fee is, it’s pretty expensive, and it’s not costing them that much per user to keep the service up and running. So I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll keep the service running for a while. That is very optimistic. Well, so here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John The statements, the most recent statement I’ve seen from them is basically the new owners of the
⏹️ ▶️ John company hinting at the idea that they don’t want to make the boxes, but they will
⏹️ ▶️ John gladly let somebody else make a box and TiVo branded, which they’ve done before. They
⏹️ ▶️ John did the DirecTiVo, which was the TiVo branded for DirecTV. If you sign up for DirecTV, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John get essentially a TiVo box integrated with a DirecTV thing in a single unit. so that
⏹️ ▶️ John from your cable company or your television provider, instead of doing the crappy set-top boxes they have now,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would let them use TiVo software and TiVo services to give you a TiVo-powered,
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo-branded box that is not sold to you by TiVo. So they’re kind of like Arm, where they would just license them
⏹️ ▶️ John the intellectual property, the software and the hardware, and maybe they would still run the service or whatever, but that would
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a larger variety of potential TiVo boxes, all tied to the cable companies, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to pick, I’d rather them continue to make their own hardware and just be better at it. Like that’s choice number one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Second choice of having a bunch of cable companies make TiVo branded
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes, that’s not terrible I suppose. The worst is no more TiVo boxes at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. And I have to use the current cable company DVRs. That’s my nightmare scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John So. Keeps you up at night. It does because like this is literally how we watch television
⏹️ ▶️ John in the house. If it’s not on Netflix or Amazon Video, it’s TiVo. That’s how our Apple TV, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV is just our client box or Netflix or whatever. That’s how we watch television in the house. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just waiting my finger on the trigger to spend like one or two grand on a bunch of the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John Antivos before they stop making them. And if I catch wind of that, I’m going to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love like your nightmare scenario. Like it’s like one of the reasons why I criticize Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we had to throw this into the show somewhere. One of the reasons why I criticize Apple is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love using the Mac so much, and I worry if the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever became something that I couldn’t or didn’t want to use anymore for my work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d have to switch back to Windows. And the thought of that, I mean, I don’t say, I might even try Linux instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the thought of going back to Windows is so, like, turns my stomach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how little I want to do that. You seem to be having that kind of reaction with the thought of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going from a TiVo to the cable company’s DVR.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just you can’t go back like just ask anybody who has a tivo like they’ll have complaints about it It’s not the greatest product in the world, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t go back to watching regular like live television It’s barbaric like first of all you
⏹️ ▶️ John see commercials Which is you can’t go back to that if you just use a never ever seen commercials and second of all
⏹️ ▶️ John like just Losing the ability to pause live television or to skip around and let a buffer
⏹️ ▶️ John cue up or like you just can’t there’s no Replacement for that because it was all why don’t you just do screaming?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know what? it’s like when Game of Thrones comes on like there’s no commercials on that to skip but like I can
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it every time whereas when their servers go down because everyone’s trying to watch the episode at the same time I don’t have to deal with that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m above the fray on that like it is the TiVo for all of its faults and all that slow software
⏹️ ▶️ John passes the bar of being like as reliable for the most part as TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to be when we were growing up you turn on the television and there’s a picture there right especially if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had cable unless the cable is out, in which case you see nothing, right? But if the cable is not out,
⏹️ ▶️ John you turn it on and the picture is there and you change the channel and you can see what’s on that channel and it never is
⏹️ ▶️ John buffering and it never can’t find the servers and it never asks for your iCloud password and it never does anything, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just there. Like it is, it passes that level of reliability. It does way, way more and is only
⏹️ ▶️ John ever so slightly less reliable. I can’t remember the last time I had any kind of crash or problem
⏹️ ▶️ John at all with my TiVo. It just sits there like an appliance on all the time, 24 hours a day, never have to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, and it just runs. And it’s an incredibly high bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using them since the Series 2, which is not the original one, but it was still back in the analog days. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every TiVo box I’ve had, I’ve been frustrated that it’s not faster and doesn’t have better hardware in it, and I can’t get it
⏹️ ▶️ John with a faster CPU and more RAM and a bigger hard drive. But other than that, the alternative was just
⏹️ ▶️ John unthinkable to me. So eventually, like, when all the streaming services get better and all the content
⏹️ ▶️ John I I care about is no longer on quote unquote real TV, but it’s all on streaming. Then I’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to leave Tivo behind. But until then I want something like that. And back in the old hypercritical episode
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, I talked about what I really wanted Apple to make. This was back before Apple definitively closed
⏹️ ▶️ John the door on ever doing anything Tivo like when Steve Jobs went to like one of his, uh, it was like D
⏹️ ▶️ John three talks or something like that. And basically explain exactly why they’re never going to do Tivo box. It made me super
⏹️ ▶️ John sad. What I always wanted was a company that’s better at this than TiVo To do
⏹️ ▶️ John what I called an omnivorous box because my idea back then was like look video comes from a million different
⏹️ ▶️ John places even back then there was Netflix and there was cable and there was over-the-air and there was
⏹️ ▶️ John local TV and all sorts of other places where you can get video From and iTunes and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like I don’t want to deal with all those places The video comes from I don’t want to deal with 10 remotes. I don’t want to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with 10 services I don’t want to deal with figuring out where it is and how I get it and what
⏹️ ▶️ John input I have to switch to or anything like that. But on the other hand, I realize that all the different people who
⏹️ ▶️ John own those things are never going to get together and say, we should make this easier for customers because everybody owns their different content and
⏹️ ▶️ John their different ions and has their different licensing deals for the NFL and Major League Baseball and all the HBO shows
⏹️ ▶️ John and network programming and all the different channels and cable bundle. Like, they’re never going to get together. So the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve this technologically is to do what TiVo did, but even bigger. bigger, to make a box that
⏹️ ▶️ John will eat any kind of input, an omnivorous box that says, I will sit in front of your television and you
⏹️ ▶️ John just throw all your video crap at me. And then a bunch of people will figure out how to integrate with all
⏹️ ▶️ John those services and they will make the software for it and figure out how to do all the integration. And your
⏹️ ▶️ John only interface will be with that omnivorous box and it takes in all your input and it can record it locally,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can stream it, it can do everything. And it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from. As far as you’re concerned, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one unified interface. And that’s an incredibly hard thing to do. Google tried to do it. Tivo has been trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it because you can do Netflix from Tivo and Amazon video from Tivo and stuff like that, but they’re not great at it either. No
⏹️ ▶️ John one has ever made that because it’s an incredibly hard problem. Every other one of those companies would be your enemy because they don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing that. They don’t want you being the one and only interface television like the cable companies want to do it with a set top box and Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to do that and to have your client and everything like it’s incredibly hard thing to do. No one has ever even attempted
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it except for maybe Google and they fail pretty much miserably. Tivo has come the closest. Tevo
⏹️ ▶️ John does it for plain old cable television. And they were able to do that because of the cable card thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can totally replace your, I don’t have to have a cable box at all. I haven’t had a cable box in my house ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I had it when I was in Georgia before I had a Tevo. But since I’ve had a Tevo, I have not had a cable box in my house,
⏹️ ▶️ John period. I’ve only had Tevos, which is a thing you can do because of cable card, which is an FCC thing they did, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. And the Tevo, it’s not omnivorous,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it will accept all like quote unquote real TV input. and then slowly but surely they added features
⏹️ ▶️ John for like Netflix clients and Amazon video clients and the ability to play video from one TiVo onto another
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo. And they added an iOS app, which is actually pretty good where I can do everything on my TiVo from my phone or my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, anywhere in the world. I can delete shows, I can set up season passes, I can watch video on it from
⏹️ ▶️ John my TiVo anywhere, kind of like Slingbox style. I can, you know, watch shows on one TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John on the TiVo downstairs, there’s little extender boxes you can do if you don’t need a full-fledged TiVo. They actually have a pretty good system
⏹️ ▶️ John and a pretty good product at this point. It just said that they could never get enough customers to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it work financially. I really hoped that someone would buy them that had a lot of money, that
⏹️ ▶️ John could do a really good job with the product, but Apple sort of put its stake in the ground and said, no, we’re doing the Apple TV puck thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re never gonna record locally. We’re just gonna do streaming, that’s the future. Forget about the TiVo thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Rovi seems like their plan is, we will take a piece of every cable box
⏹️ ▶️ John sold by letting your cable box have TiVo hardware and software in it. And I didn’t even get to talk about the remote, which is another TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John innovation of having an actual good remote with a nice shape and distinct buttons that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use in the dark by feel. Boy, there’s a lot of things I like about TiVo and I will be sad
⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re gone. And right now, with Rovi owning them, it’s kind of like a quiet period
⏹️ ▶️ John where nothing’s happening, but I just really, really hope that I can still, I’m begging this
⏹️ ▶️ John company, let me give you literally thousands of dollars to buy the most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John DVR with TiVo software that I possibly can that works with my cable cards and I will keep doing that for
⏹️ ▶️ John a long, long time. Cool. I don’t understand why either one of you two
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have TiVo boxes. We’ll save that for the next episode and follow up. You two can both explain why you don’t have TiVos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I can tell you right now, the Fios box is just fine. It’s not though. I don’t have cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable. It’s a really quick response. Keisha doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can’t use it, so there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, all kidding aside, That is the executive summary right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s the thing, though, for Casey, if you got one, you would never be able to get rid of one. It’s like the Tesla thing. Like, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go back. No one gets a TiVo, uses it, and then is like, oh, I’ll go back to the old way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently a lot of people did. Otherwise, TiVo wouldn’t be out of business.
⏹️ ▶️ John just not enough people got them to begin with because it was so much more expensive. Like, the cable box is like, oh, it’s part of my cable. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only $10 a month to rent or whatever, and no one does the math to figure out that if you just bought a TiVo, you would have come out of it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end the show. Thanks to our three sponsors this week Casper, Warby Parker and Eero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll We’ll see you next week!
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 it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Accidental, check
We didn’t get enough TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I doubt the the files box is not good as much as I’m trying to get a rise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of you it’s not good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but it’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the basic needs that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I really think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Windows comparison here is apt like the like every DVR that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a TiVo is mediocre at best and that’s really being generous you know the interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things are all awful unlike John I actually have used and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lived with a a cable company DVR before. And yeah, like, you know, they’re, they’re horrible, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, most of the whole reason Tivo doesn’t really have much of a business left anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because as you said, like most people don’t care, they will just be happy to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one their cable company offers them for a few dollars extra a month. And that’s all they know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s probably the only kind of ever seen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not they don’t care. It’s just that they can’t they don’t want to pay more. That’s what it comes down to is Tivo, you’d have to pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the box, which is expensive. And Then you have to pay for a monthly service on top of that that’s not part of your CABA
⏹️ ▶️ John bill, which is the key feature, right? Exactly. And so, yeah, they were just never able to, they were never
⏹️ ▶️ John able to come up with a business model. The customers that they got, for the most part, if you did their customer SAT, they’d be super happy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they could never figure out a way to get people over the barrier. And it was a substantial barrier because the boxes have always been expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lifetime has always been super expensive. And the monthly bills have also, I mean, I think they’ve gone down, but they used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like equal to or more than Netflix. And I was like, what am I getting for this? Like, you know, it was hard to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re even paying for. So it’s mostly just a bunch of, you know, rich people essentially who have these boxes and who enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John them, which is a shame. And the windows comparison, I would do it like this. I think Tivo is the windows where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good enough. It’s like maybe the windows 95 there is no apple that’s actually good in all respects. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no iOS. And then the cable boxes are, I guess like DOS maybe, or like punch cards
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, and some cable boxes are better than that. Like I’ve seen, I’ve seen a lot of these cable boxes and I’ve used them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them have interesting technological solutions. Some of them actually, I think some companies do server
⏹️ ▶️ John side DVRing and then just stream it to you over there, which is an interesting solution to keep hard drives out of people’s houses. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the UIs are all terrible. The capacities are like maybe they’re okay for regular people.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like part of the thing about Teebo is and part of the reason I think that I think most Teebo customers buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the fancy ones is the people who buy it are like enthusiasts. Essentially, they will know what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the biggest hard drive you can get. The biggest hard drive I had in my house was like when they came out with a three terabyte hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the biggest hard drive in my house, was the one in my TiVo. Why did I need all that capacity? Because you realize when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of room, you can do things, you can treat it differently. You can’t have like, oh, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do a season pass and then I’ll watch them. You can record an entire season of a show and just
⏹️ ▶️ John have it sitting there for like the period of time when no new shows are coming out. And then just, you know, and again, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John barbaric for people like, oh, well, you know, Netflix has the whole season of House of Cards and I can watch it whenever I want. Why do I need to have it recorded?
⏹️ ▶️ John But these are for shows that are not available through streaming or are only available through purchase on iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John or are delayed or whatever. Like, you know, again, it’s getting better. Back in the day, this was
⏹️ ▶️ John literally the only place to get a lot of stuff. These days, it’s almost never the only place, but it is still often the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, the reason why Apple never got into this business is very obvious, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DVR as a thing is just an incredible pile of messy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacks. Everything about it is a messy hack. But it’s a beautiful hack though. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to make it good. There is no way to make it reliable and perfect. There’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get what, like what it tries to do is turn broadcast TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whether it’s broadcast over the air or cable, I’m not distinguishing here, effectively into on-demand video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but with a ton of asterisks on that. And where it’s, well, it turns it into on-demand video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sort of, and most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it does a phenomenal job with it. The only place where it falls down is, like I said, and it falls down the
⏹️ ▶️ John omnivorous thing where it only consumes broadcast television. And with broadcast television, it does a really, really good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re really good at that, but it doesn’t take input from any other source and treat it the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like if you wanna watch Netflix, oh, you can load the Netflix client, and the Netflix client on TiVo is not good,
⏹️ ▶️ John and neither is the Amazon. Like, this is not their strength, right? So there is no omnivorous box, but for broadcast TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo got pretty darn good at it, and the number of caveats is really small. And if the alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John is just watch it when it’s on use the cable company DVR, it’s night and day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, it’s a really complex, hacky solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a problem that shouldn’t really exist and the world is moving away from needing to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Investing in TiVo now would be like investing in cassette tapes in 2002. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, there might still be some uses for them, but they’re diminishing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as bad as cassette tapes, but here’s the thing about that. Apple’s decision not to do it, like they did their own
⏹️ ▶️ John TV thing, which is more forward-looking, that makes sense, right? But this was hacking when it was done
⏹️ ▶️ John with analog standard-def video. And if you had said,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, I’m not gonna be interested in that because it’s not the future, that was what? 10 years ago, 15
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago? Like, it’s not as if, like, just around the corner, we won’t have regular television
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. There was a long period of time, and during, like, basically my entire children’s life, at least a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe a decade and a half, that’s 15 years worth of
⏹️ ▶️ John value that they’ve delivered making my television watching better. During that time, you could be saying the whole time,
⏹️ ▶️ John well this isn’t the future, this isn’t the future. It’s like, yeah, but it’s the 15 years from, like I’m not gonna just throw away
⏹️ ▶️ John the 15 years, I’m not talking about geological time scares. I lived through those 15 years, those are 15 important years. During
⏹️ ▶️ John those 15 years, I had a better experience of watching television. So maybe if you’re investing
⏹️ ▶️ John on a 20 year timescale, maybe don’t invest in TiVo, But I’m glad some company decided
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s worth doing this for a 50, I mean, look at how long, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS lasted. It’s like, oh, we shouldn’t have done that because the future is not this, the future is iOS. Well, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna be here until 2007. So why don’t you do something between 1984 and then, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you will get value out of that. Like, because Apple only turned its eye to television really
⏹️ ▶️ John late, it obviously wasn’t the time for them to do that. Although I still think they would have
⏹️ ▶️ John benefited from, for example, buying them up and buying all their patents and assets
⏹️ ▶️ John and having them perhaps design their remote for the Apple TV. Like there’s still value that they could have extracted from the company, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, they wanted to go their own way. But I’m glad TiVo was around for when it was, and I still think now there’s a place
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. It’s fading. There should be shown the door eventually, but for that to happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody else needs to get on the same page. And right now, like I would much rather watch Game of Thrones queued
⏹️ ▶️ John up, you know, 10 or 15 minutes because I couldn’t get into the room in time on my Tivo because I know 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John reliably I’ll be able to watch it and then I can watch the tears of people as they weep on Twitter trying to load
⏹️ ▶️ John their HBO Now app and they can’t get the video to load because lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John are trying to stream it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next week, tune in for the best cordless phone to buy for your home.
⏹️ ▶️ John I already did that. I think I bought the wire cutter pick and I’m not that happy with it, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously, we did. I seriously we did like I love that you bought a new cordless phone like now no new cordless phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that makes it so
⏹️ ▶️ John much We have to have we have to have landlines because our cell signals terrible at our house So we can’t reliably just
⏹️ ▶️ John use our cell phones even though obviously you both have cell phones There are no other solutions to this problem So we have a landline,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we don’t sound like we have like, you know, telephone wire running all over the house. So We didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really need new phones. I think ours were fine One of them just had a dead battery, but she was annoyed and wanted a new one so we got all new
⏹️ ▶️ John ones everywhere. They’re not getting much better. That’s another thing of like, our phone, cordless phone’s getting much
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Not really, they’re not really great, but they’re cheap. And we got like five handsets,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, they’re all over the house, and they work fine. And like, we don’t really talk on the phone that much anyway. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I did the wire cutter pick, and it was all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love, John, that you are, that the same man can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I must have the best possible version of this antiquated technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And- It’s not antiquated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cutting edge. It’s, oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just- Almost all the menus are in HD now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Woo, are you gonna be the one that’s buying the Accord when everyone else on the planet has a Tesla or other
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not buying the Accord if it’s only CVT, I’ll tell you that. Oh God. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John my limits now, it’s, you know, we’ll see. We know when I’ll stop with the Accord,
⏹️ ▶️ John but. Yeah, like I said, I don’t have a choice for it. What am I gonna do? Oh, you shouldn’t buy a cordless phone, You can do everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in your cell phone. Well, if I want to hear people’s voices, I can’t. And I can’t install new cell towers. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s life. You can actually install really little ones in
⏹️ ▶️ John your house. The little repeater? No, there’s no way in hell I’m doing voice. That’s the thing. My demand is that phone be
⏹️ ▶️ John as reliable as phone. And one of those little repeater things that uses the internet connection does not pass that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could also just switch to a carrier that actually works in your house, like AT&T.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, my carrier has the best signal at my house. I’m in a, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a cell phone dead zone nearby me where a certain section of rich people refuse to have cell towers built near
⏹️ ▶️ John their house and their reward is they get no cell signal. I’m not in the actual dead zone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m close enough to it that it’s dead-ish. The great thing about it is on my thing, I can hear
⏹️ ▶️ John them, but they can’t hear a word I say. So they think you’re just a really good listener. Yeah, my wife calls me all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time on my cell phone and I’m at home and I say, hello, hello, and she talks, are you there, are you there? I’m like, I don’t know why I bother
⏹️ ▶️ John talking, you can’t hear a word I’m saying. I can hear everything you’re saying perfectly clearly. It’s great.