199: 10,000 Hours of Coughing
08 Dec 2016John needs tech support, Marco needs tech support, and Casey thinks he doesn’t.
Episode Description:
- Coughing and machining
- Follow-up: The future of the Nintendo 3DS
- John's Keychain woes
- John's headphone woes
- Amazon Go
- Windows on ARM
- Upgrade #118: Missed That by 100% (Relevant section Overcast link)
- Apple's Machine Learning
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Not complaining about the Apple TV
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Investing made better.
- Pingdom: Uptime and performance monitoring made easy. Use code ATP for 20% off.
- Automatic: Your smart driving assistant. Get $20 off with this link.
Chapters
- Coughing and machining
- Follow-up: Nintendo Switch
- Sponsor: Pingdom (code ATP)
- John needs tech support
- Marco needs tech support
- Casey needs tech support
- Sponsor: Automatic (code ATP)
- iOS audio needs tech support
- Grocery stores need tech support
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Intel needs tech support
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Not complaining about Apple TV
Coughing and machining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to go to bed and put my Parmesan cheese back in the fridge. Matthew Feeney Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. Steven Connelly I would recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Steven Connelly How’s things? Matthew Feeney Still coughing, but you know, it’s winter and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kid, so that’s a given,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Steven Connelly Every ounce of my being wants to get smug about how, oh, come on, I never get sick. You can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you must be just weak of immune system, but I know that I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be paying this price in two to three years. Matthew Feeney One year. Try one year. year. Yeah, probably, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my office has opened a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey San Francisco, well, strictly speaking, an Oakland office, which I guess is different enough from San Francisco that people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the area get perturbed if you confuse the two. Those California sensitivities. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they’ve opened a Oakland office, and the other day I was trying to get something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accomplished with one of my coworkers out there, and he had said, oh, I have to go for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a long lunch because all the executives are in town and so, you know, always on vacation in California, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I finally caught up with him after his long lunch. This is already like roughly quitting time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And he says, oh, you know what? I can’t do a Google Hangout with you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work through this issue because we’re all going to the Tesla factory for a tour right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m jealous. And I wish I could have gone. And I’m sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t get free cars, you know, they just, you know, see other cars being made.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved the BMW factory tour so much it was almost if not it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably was one of the highlights of that trip I thought it was Phenomenally cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, did you see that video that uh that I think uh, greg put on twitter of the
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a lathe. Uh, you know metal milling machine lathe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. Oh my god
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah with the coolant coming out the
⏹️ ▶️ John not that one He showed it it was That you know lathe is just thing that spins an item and usually you bring a tool close to
⏹️ ▶️ John it as it spins and you can can shave off parts but this was a thing where the items spun and also
⏹️ ▶️ John the the cutting tool also moved in and out and up and down and it was making basically a crankshaft
⏹️ ▶️ John for an engine which you
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally miss that yeah it was really cool because it’s got it you can imagine what a crankshaft looks like you can’t just leave
⏹️ ▶️ John it out it’s not rotationally symmetrical so it has to cut all that stuff like it’s rotating
⏹️ ▶️ John the piece imagine just trying to cut like part of the part of a crankshaft that connects to the piston right while
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s while the crankshaft is rotating along its normal rotational
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey axis, the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John cuts the piston and has to trace that to make like it was amazing, amazing. I don’t know if that’s how all crankshafts
⏹️ ▶️ John are made. I’m like, geez, if this is what it takes to make one crankshaft, no wonder, no wonder internal combustion engines cost so much money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously, was this Greg Koenig?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am I am thoroughly intrigued by this. And I follow Greg. So I’m surprised that I didn’t notice it when it flew by.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I declared bankruptcy that day or something. Fair enough. How’s everything else? So Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick. John, you alive?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m okay. I’m too busy worrying about my my children’s health. My son has had a cough for
⏹️ ▶️ John a month now. Somewhere in the middle, more than a month, somewhere in the middle of that. After several weeks, we took him to the doctor
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re like, no, he doesn’t have, you know, bronchitis or pneumonia or any other thing that we can do anything about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they just gave him an inhaler and sent him home. And it’s like, you’re still coughing. So now we’re trying like Zyrtec, just
⏹️ ▶️ John like allergy medication, and a theory that like somehow he’s allergic to the change in seasons and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Anyway, I spend most of my time worrying about them, but I’m doing fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fisherman’s Friend. Oh, is that that cough like crazy cough drop thing that you like?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sucking on gross tasting things cures all colds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, okay, basically, yes, they are my crazy gross cough drops. The Fisherman’s Friend original,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, red labeled variety. You can get them on Amazon even, which is nice. they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like the most menthol and the least sugar of most cough drops. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with cough drops is basically that they only really work when they’re in your mouth. Once they’re gone, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop working almost immediately. But they do work while you still have them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you kind of tend to have a lot of them and you’re really coughing a lot and you kind of have to make it all day. You tend to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of cough drops in one day. And if you have the regular like, you know, big square Ricola kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or things like that, They your your mouth just gets so coated in sugar. It’s just disgusting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your teeth get all slime It’s just really gross in your mouth after not that long of a time Whereas fishermen’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend. They’re incredibly strong like very dense menthol flavor and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a lot less sugar in them, and they look gross and they taste gross They also could they but they do they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come in a convenient little like a little ziploc pouch You can just keep that pouch in your pocket So you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like be unwrapping cough drops content And then what do you do with these two wrappers that come around each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one? And you have a whole pocket full of spent cough drop wrappers. It avoids that whole problem, too. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, a friend of ours, a neighbor slash friend, swore by whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, the fisherman’s friend that I guess you had recommended years ago, because he has a seasonal cough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just won’t go away for months. And yeah, he told me that it’s the real deal, that those are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only things that can get him from hacking, to keep him from hacking constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like it’s just menthol cough drops. Like there’s no secret ingredient. It’s menthol cough drops. But menthol
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works and as far as I could tell from the basic research I did like a couple years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there doesn’t seem to be like any kind of horrible side effect to using a bunch of menthol cough drops when you have a cough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it seems like it’s a pretty good bet. It is very effective. When you have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of bronchial irritation, nothing else really works to stop it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treating it with an inhaler and things can solve the long-term problem, but if you are coughing, over-the-counter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like DXM syrup does not really affect this kind of cough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’m an expert in coughing in the last few years. Only in the
⏹️ ▶️ John winter. Matt Stauffer 10,000 hours is all it takes, right? Just 10,000 hours of coughing. Robert Williams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. I’ll get there. Give me a few more years. Matt Stauffer
⏹️ ▶️ John Aye yi yi. All right, so this is the video, John. John Winn Yeah, so if you go to like three quarters of the way done, it’s starting to Take shape
⏹️ ▶️ John is what you really want to see is how does it carve out the little parts that connect to the pistons because those? Aren’t along the
⏹️ ▶️ John rotational axis and then you see the thing rotating in the tool at the same time. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s crazy Oh my I mean you just want to watch the whole video It can be kind of meditative
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch a 15-minute video of machine building another part of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, that’s intense Wow, that is pretty damn cool. I want one of these for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no reason just I want it I think it’s bigger than your house Oh, I’m sure it is. There’s no doubt in my mind that it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of want it. God, think of all the cool things I would never be able to figure out how to build. This is why Greg just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has one of the niftiest jobs in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what, like, when you’re a software developer, anybody who, like, builds physical objects just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s so true. Because, like, we don’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. Like, we just make bits move around. Like, we make nothing. And so, like, the physical world, like, baffles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. It’s this, like, mystic world that we don’t know how these things get here. They just get here, and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John complain about them. include me in this. I know how things get here. I know where food comes from.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Here we go. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why you are royal and I am servile. Food
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes from square packages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we should probably start with some follow-up and try to get this train back on the tracks.
Follow-up: Nintendo Switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Alex Howell wrote in to tell us about the Nintendo 3DS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I believe that’s your job, John, to tell us about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last show when we were talking about Nintendo Switch, I was questioning whether,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we were all questioning, like, what does this mean for the 3DS, for Apple, for Nintendo’s portable line? I did that mistake like
⏹️ ▶️ John three times in the last episode, too, saying Apple instead of Nintendo. Easy to get them confused until they buy each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, and I said, you know, I haven’t been following this, so if someone knows, please send a link. Ox Howell
⏹️ ▶️ John did. It’s an interview with the president of Nintendo who I still realize in my mind,
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep thinking is Iwata, but he died sadly. His untimely death
⏹️ ▶️ John I think last year or maybe it was already this year, I don’t remember. Anyway, there’s this new person whose name
⏹️ ▶️ John is Tatsumi Kimishima if I’m pronouncing it correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kimishima, yeah, I’m close.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an interview, and the question from the interview is in Bloomberg. Question, will you discontinue 3DS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Answer from the president of Nintendo. Thanks to our software, the 3DS hardware is still growing, so that business still has
⏹️ ▶️ John momentum. And certainly, rather than being cannibalized by the Switch, we think 3DS can continue in its own
⏹️ ▶️ John form. Which is a perfectly businesslike answer that completely fits with Marco’s suggestion
⏹️ ▶️ John on the last show, which is that they’re just going to keep it going. If the Switch takes off, they can can it. If the Switch doesn’t take off,
⏹️ ▶️ John then they’ll be glad they kept it going. So that seems like what they’re doing. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that all our follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you guys are slacking off on the follow-up. I mean, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a lot of Switch last show. Yeah, it’s all on us. This is the only, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other follow-up I have item on the Switch, some random thing that I read that I don’t have a link for, was about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Switch. When you, you know, so you pick it up and it’s like a little thing you hold in your hand. It’s got the little controllers that slide on the side. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna sit on your couch and do it, you put the Switch, which looks like a big, you know, 16 by nine-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, you put that in and like a docking station looks kind of like a napkin
⏹️ ▶️ John holder, right? It’s like a little, a little, uh, upright vertical thing that you slide the switch
⏹️ ▶️ John into. And something I read the other day was that when you put the switch in that docking
⏹️ ▶️ John station, one of the advantages to being docked aside from obviously not running down the battery because the dock
⏹️ ▶️ John will be connected to power is that the, the switch itself becomes more powerful because the docking
⏹️ ▶️ John station provides additional cooling, allowing the internals to be at max, you know, to run
⏹️ ▶️ John at full tilt without hitting thermal limits. Huh. Which is really weird if you think about it. So basically means when it’s handheld,
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t be as powerful or as good. So does that mean like this frame rate will suffer or will it crank
⏹️ ▶️ John down the detail? And that’s part of the game maker’s API or whatever. But anyway, all the more reason for you to just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it plugged into your TV and pretend like Nintendo was still making TV connected consoles instead of making
⏹️ ▶️ John really weird, much more powerful portable systems that you can also use on a TV.
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John needs tech support
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey John tell me what’s going on with your keychain sounds like there’s trouble in Syracuse County.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so Sierra situation I’ve graded my wife’s iMac 5k Mac to Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty quickly after release and There I think I mentioned on the show a few weird bumps
⏹️ ▶️ John with keychain stuff I’m like well that happens when you just did the upgrade and apps need to be reauthorized
⏹️ ▶️ John because they think something’s different or the Apple built in apps have You know updated themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you know, whatever like That it’s a common thing that happens after you upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to do some stuff involving keychain But here we are I don’t know how many months after Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John was released and I’m ready to call this a persistent problem that I can’t attribute
⏹️ ▶️ John to data related things because it happens on we all have accounts on our 5k I might happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to my account there and it happens on her account I don’t know if it happens on the kids account but they probably don’t have much stuff in their keychain
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is what happens so we’ll all be using the computer you know people go up to it and switch to their account and do their stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and my son goes and changes his account and plays minecraft and my wife comes and changes to her account and does stuff you know whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John use the computer for while everything is fine at a certain point I think it’s probably multiple days because we never
⏹️ ▶️ John turn this computer off it’s it just goes to sleep but it’s never actually off or restarted. After a couple of days
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a little notification in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Usually again I see it on my account or my wife’s account, but that’s probably because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re the one it’s on most often. And it says you need to create a new iCloud security code
⏹️ ▶️ John and the buttons on the notification dialog are create and later. If you hit later it goes away. If you hit create
⏹️ ▶️ John it opens the iCloud preference pane and then does nothing. Like it doesn’t do anything in the iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John preference pane, it just sits there. Um, I actually have gone through the motion of, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will create a new iCloud security code. Even, you know, I know how to do it. I’ll go into the thing and click
⏹️ ▶️ John on the thing, blah, blah, blah, and enter a new code and blah, blah, blah. That appears to have no effect. You can do it, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter. A couple of days later, you’re going to see that dialogue. And when you see that dialogue, what it’s trying to tell you, like what you will find out later if you just continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to use your computer is that basically nothing involving passwords works. It usually shows up for me that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that like it can’t mount the Synology anymore because the the password for the Synology is in the keychain right and so
⏹️ ▶️ John if we can’t mount the Synology to do time machine backups to it it will stop doing time machines backups to it and
⏹️ ▶️ John complain that it can’t do that or if you try to log into a website or whatever you know like that is not getting
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords out of the keychain if you try to log in somewhere and enter a password and then try to save the password
⏹️ ▶️ John it will say sorry couldn’t say couldn’t find the system keychain or couldn’t find the login keychain or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John to save your password in and if you launch keychain access and look at it you see a bunch of black
⏹️ ▶️ John blank icons in the sidebar and a little text that says read-only mode. Like, it’s like your keychains
⏹️ ▶️ John are all gone. They’re all still there. If you look in your library, you know, keychains thing, they’re all sitting there. The files
⏹️ ▶️ John are there. They’re perfectly fine as far as I can tell, but keychain access won’t even show their icons, let alone any
⏹️ ▶️ John of their contents, and it says everything isn’t in read-only mode. And the only way to fix this is to reboot, and when you reboot everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine again for a couple days. All your passwords are still there, nothing is corrupted. They removed the keychain first aid menu
⏹️ ▶️ John item. I have no idea what the hell it did, but it made me feel good. I would have tried that if that option was still
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but it’s not. But it’s totally explicable to me. I keep looking in activity monitor to see like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is there some sect D, you know, demon that has hung or something and I’ll see it showing up as red because it’s not pulling events
⏹️ ▶️ John off or you know what I don’t like. Is there something I can restart? But I have not figured this out. And because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of those every few days type of problems, sometimes maybe only once a week and the cure
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very fast reboot. Like, my motivation to troubleshoot
⏹️ ▶️ John it has been low, but it’s increasing, but I don’t really know what to do. People are saying to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John disutile reset user permissions on everything, or, you know, the equivalent of
⏹️ ▶️ John repair permissions and stuff like that. Like, the permissions all seem to be fine. And I don’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John know what is going wrong after days of using the computer that suddenly the keychains just go
⏹️ ▶️ John away. Like it’s not corrupt files, it’s not corrupt data, because then just nothing would work ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t even know whether to attribute this to Sierra. I keep hoping there’ll be a point update to Sierra and like well whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John this will be some you know glitch and then it will go away in a point update but the point updates to Sierra don’t seem to be coming out
⏹️ ▶️ John very quickly. I know there’s one in flight right now but I’m not on the beta train maybe I should get on that
⏹️ ▶️ John and see if it changes things. But anyway all this is to say is that it has prevented me, one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the many things that has prevented me from upgrading my technically incompatible Mac Pro to Sierra. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to deal with that. My Mac Pro works the way it’s supposed to and I don’t have any of these problems
⏹️ ▶️ John so why would I want to bring them on? It could be related to my iMac, could be related to the specific data
⏹️ ▶️ John on there, you know, who knows. It could be something corrupt in iCloud. Really, it’s one of those things it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to know what the deal is. But half the reason I’m mentioning it on the show is because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’ve been stewing on it for a long time and it’s, you know worth getting out there in case other people
⏹️ ▶️ John have any problem but really selfishly i’m hoping someone’s gonna tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix it because i just haven’t had time to dive into this and figure out what the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John is and googling for it is not turning up anything maybe i’ll actually you know
⏹️ ▶️ John you know you’re really desperate when i’m thinking of filing a radar like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what can you even say like
⏹️ ▶️ John after some weird amount of time usually a couple days this happens and i’ll just send them like screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ John of keychain access showing everything is blank and reboot and and it fixes it. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sort of tangentially related, I don’t remember when it was, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily a couple of years ago. I used to very frequently get this weird bug with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Magic Mouse, and I don’t remember it happening with the trackpad on my laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe it did. But certainly with Magic Mouse, if I would use the one finger, say, left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to right scroll in order to go back a page in Safari, Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the active page would move right, maybe 50 points, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundred points, and then it would just freeze and Safari would be like freaking useless until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you quit it and restart it. And just in the last day or two, this has started to come back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it happened, I believe on both my work and personal machines, which was super creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really weird. And it’s only happened a couple of times and I haven’t had it happen since,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this was infuriating when it was common a couple of years ago, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have to like quit Safari constantly. And it actually also happened in Chrome once, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was also super weird. And I don’t need to hear anyone emailing me about how I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Chrome and not Safari or about how I should use Safari and not Chrome, my web browser choices or my business, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you very much. But it was certainly very weird and very not reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reproducible. So similarly, I’m not sure what kind of radar I should file other than,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, look the window is frozen with the with me 100 points into a back animation
⏹️ ▶️ John totally sounds like a laptop bug everyone has laptop always has like core graphics bugs related to like their gpu
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers or weird gpu issues especially with the dual gpu switching stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be my favorite thing is that the bug is syncing itself helpfully between your work and home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John computers right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey exactly unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your keyboard shortcuts i was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head i was just about to say my damn keyboard shortcuts are still lost in the ether but hey Hey, this bug is syncing just great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, one more thing about my keychain thing that I remembered. Many times, I don’t know if this is related
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s separate, but many times since upgrading to Sierra, the computer will get into a state where
⏹️ ▶️ John it cannot go to any website using HTTPS. TLS, SSL, all
⏹️ ▶️ John that. If you try to load one of them, it will say, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t make a secure connection, or whatever weird error screened to the browser. Doesn’t matter the browser, Sierra,
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari, Chrome, I think I even tried Firefox once, it just can’t do it. A lot of these symptoms
⏹️ ▶️ John are all explained by like, oh, your time, your clock is off, because many things will get screwed up if your clock
⏹️ ▶️ John is off. A lot of certificates and expiration things, or just agreement between
⏹️ ▶️ John the two ends of a connection about what the hell time and date it is. So almost all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Googling that you do about this is like, oh, you just need to, your computer’s clock is wrong, why you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything involving keychain. Or that’s why you can’t do anything involving secure sites. So I can’t tell you the number of times like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s happened. I immediately look at the clock and say, is that clock right? Is that today’s date? You know, what year is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a time traveler. But and I’ve turned off NTP and turned it back on. And just
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I can tell, every time this has happened, the time and date have been exactly correct. And toggling that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff does not restore anything to a working state. And again, the solution is always to restart and it comes back like
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, and everything is perfectly fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You remember when we used to make fun of the Windows users for restarting their computers constantly? That was awesome.
Marco needs tech support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the thing is, as somebody who was a Windows user a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until 2005 or 2006 or so, I generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only had to restart my Windows computer about as often as I restart my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was partly because I got on the Windows NT kernel early. I started using Windows 2000 since its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta in February 1999, and dropped the 98 kernel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the wayside as quickly as I possibly could. I couldn’t print for like a year, but it was worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, fine. But, so, you know, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you treat your computer as well, if you know what you’re doing, you don’t usually have to restart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows or Macs more frequently than the other. It is, though, a little concerning that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh man, there’s so many bugs in Mac OS now. It’s really kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes me sad. You know, we get feedback telling us to stop complaining about Apple because for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we aren’t allowed to, but it really does make me sad to see my computing platform of choice that I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much. There’s a lot of bugs now. And it’s not like massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showstoppers like John’s Passport thing most of the time. Most of the time it’s more little stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other day, I’ve been using Apple’s new Notes app since it was launched in what, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John 9, whenever that was?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s right. And I’ve been using that for all my little notes. I’m a pretty light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes user in general. I never heavily used the Dropbox editors before that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have something like 50 notes maybe. It’s not like a large number of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not always open. Like I’ll open it, check one thing, and then close it. And it’s worked perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me until last week. Now notes just basically don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync reliably between devices anymore. And I’ve tried logging out of iCloud, log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in, it doesn’t work. Like it’s just, nothing can make my notes sync reliably to certain devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. My laptop logging in and logging out worked. My iPad logging in and logging out didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never had to do this stuff before and it’s just like, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what makes iCloud bugs and iMessage also. People have these problems with iMessage since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beginning. So often the answer that you get if you ask people or even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can get Apple to tell you anything, the answer that you get is usually like, well, just sign out of iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear everything off, sign everything back in. And it’s like, that’s not a solution. Like that should never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the answer. That is never good enough. That’s like telling somebody, restore your phone and don’t restore from backup. Like start cleaning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your phone, erase everything, you just lose everything. But that’s not an answer. That is not a good solution. And there’s just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many bugs now that come up seemingly for no reason in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even edge case usage. Like I feel like now you’re in edge case if you don’t have one of these bugs hitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least one of your various Apple sync services.
Casey needs tech support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually, outside of my damn keyboard shortcuts, which in the grand scheme of things are not that important,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t really have any of these problems. For the longest time when people would complain and moan about iMessage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost everyone had a horror story. I might be an iMessage unicorn because I cannot recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a time that I’ve had more than just a very brief hiccup, not this like continual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-delivered messages or out-of-band messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I’ve split conversations where you’re sending a message to me and then like I reply to you a day later, but it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John up in a separate conversation. So now you have two conversations that are just me and you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but that makes perfect sense. Like I it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John unfortunate. It does not make perfect sense at all. Well, sure it does. No, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the problem, this is particularly bad with group messages, but I believe the problem to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that somebody say, like, let’s say it’s the three of us and I send an iMessage to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s phone number and Marco’s email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John address. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I know. I know the source of the problem, but we’re the same people. this is not, you know, oh, you sent it to my Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and not to my phone number. Like, we’re the same people. It’s the same icon in the application. Combine them. Don’t make them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey separate. No, no, I agree with you. I totally agree with you. But at least that problem kind of sort of makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John And really, and like, there is no solution to that because it’s like, you know, you have to make sure, even if you make sure all your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John are set to, when I send a message, I want to send it from either my phone number or my Apple ID. And if you like, if you make
⏹️ ▶️ John it all consistent on your end, it doesn’t matter because you can’t control how people contact you. And it’s just, it’s chaos. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will never be merged. You can just you just got to hope that people will reply to the same thing that they
⏹️ ▶️ John got it on on a device that is configured like it’s intractable. It’s not it’s not good. They need to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a solution to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See this is why the unified timeline is bad because it gets you spoiled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Spoiled by consistency and series of events
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the other. Incredibly confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Right? I know it’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but all I’m trying to say is that outside of my damn keyboard shortcuts, which drive me absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas. I actually don’t really have any common bugs that I feel like I hit on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basis now that my RAM is actually working. But I do feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the one-off bugs, like for example, I had a kernel panic earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is something I haven’t had happen in a long
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s got to be the RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. No, it was my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John work computer. It was my work computer. Nice try. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John had a kernel panic. I average about one kernel panic per year over all my devices at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, and I go multiple years without any and just like, you know, and then they cluster in a year or, you know, whenever I
⏹️ ▶️ John see when I think something is wrong, hardware wise at this point, talking about how often
⏹️ ▶️ John you reboot, like in the bad old days of the Max in the 90s. You know, you would hear the bongs, the little bongs
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco will insert into the podcast at this point. All over the office all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time from poor developers on classic Mac OS trying to use Adobe products to get their work done,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was just inevitable that you would get a whole system freeze at some point, probably averaging like one point something per day
⏹️ ▶️ John for them if you if you knew what you were doing and had a limited set of non-adobe software essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John like I could go days and days with just my BB edit and you know IE 5 running or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually you know if you were doing anything complicated or stressing it or more weren’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John staying in this little groove you know no no memory protection is like the same reason Marco got off
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 95 and 98 and on to 2000 because you just want to get out of that world So things are still way
⏹️ ▶️ John better than you know in living memory and my very vivid living memory of how bad it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know the kernel panics like in terms of what is the stability of the core system? And this is one of the things I
⏹️ ▶️ John emphasized early on in my OS 10 reviews Then called Mac OS 10. They they did a
⏹️ ▶️ John really good job with the like does the operating system crash?
⏹️ ▶️ John but as a user you don’t care basically if the kernel crashes because
⏹️ ▶️ John if the if the entire UI freezes and the only way to get out of it is like you know kill login window
⏹️ ▶️ John and Send you back to the login screen it might curl might as well have crashed because everything you were doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is hosed It’s like oh the operating system is fine like the kernel is still running It just killed a bunch of processes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it came back So basically like UI freeze versus operating system crash it doesn’t matter from the users
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective But technically speaking I would say that Mac OS 10 specifically and iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John to some degree although I can tell you about some of my iOS weirdness after this but
⏹️ ▶️ John OS is Very solid like to have used Mac OS 10 for how many years
⏹️ ▶️ John you know 10 years 15 years 17, whatever the hell it is Kernel panics are just
⏹️ ▶️ John not a thing in my life and like you said Margo if you see one You immediately think hardware problem. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how reliable the core OS is things above that might start to get flaky and by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John the the suggestion from the chat room which I’m definitely going to try because it smells right to me from ATB tipster
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to solve my problem is turn off iCloud keychain which I have turned on
⏹️ ▶️ John because anything that involves iCloud could you know could be like locking my files in some weird ass way it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John fine I will just turn that feature off and not have the the stuff sync and see if that solves it because
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that we’ve listed so far is like if it involves iCloud that means it involves something other than the bits on your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and is very often buggy But anyway, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the stability and reliability of everything not having to do with cloud services on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John has pretty much gotten better over time. It’s a lumpy path. There are regressions and everything. It’s not a straight
⏹️ ▶️ John up, you know, upward line. It goes up and down, up and down. But in general, the trend is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m thankful for that every day. And it makes me appreciate all the more my beautiful 2008
⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at point, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s running like the very latest version of El Cap. And I mean, it’s just it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly solid. I can’t remember the last time I had any kind of problem with it, which is yet another reason I’m not motivated to upgrade it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I was trying to say earlier is that, you know, outside of these one offs here and there, I do think that things are pretty good. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you were saying, john, that things are so much better than they used to be. And I don’t, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to perpetuate the Oh, all the three of us do is complain idea. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because things are pretty darn great, as long as you’re not trying to keep a sync keyboard text replacement. Other than that, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have literally never used that feature. I have never created or deleted any of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Until earlier last week, when I was, I was setting up my new laptop. And I noticed I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through all the preference windows, it was the first clean install I had done in a long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this in this tech shortcuts was about 16 copies of the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my way entry that’s there. That’s… Delightful. Like, oh, great. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally never touched this feature. And somehow I have 16 copies of this. Obviously, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort being put into this
⏹️ ▶️ John feature. The reason that feature always comes up in our circles is because it is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the easiest toy example of sync. The amount of data is so small, and it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John just text, and it’s a lightly or unused feature. It’s almost as if like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanted to do a demo application of like cloud kit and the syncing services that modern syncing services,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would say, let’s just pretend we’re thinking, you know, keyboard shortcuts, where it’s just, you know, name
⏹️ ▶️ John value pairs, all plain text, like it can’t get any easier than that. And if that doesn’t work 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John rock solid reliability, what hope in the world does anybody have to build a reliable syncing engine for an application
⏹️ ▶️ John with actual complicated data on top of Apple’s cloud services. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why it always comes up like it’s not it’s not just because we’re all obsessed with tech shortcuts. It’s because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a canary. You know, it’s like if they if that doesn’t work, then, you know, as a developer, a don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John bother trying to build like your your sophisticated application on top of the syncing engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, and if that doesn’t work, then as a user, it makes you less confident in any
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s own more complicated syncing things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s why that that’s why notes having a a problem for me this past week is really concerning for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me because this it was reliable for the last year and a half or whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been since they launched it. And then all of a sudden now it’s just not and I’ve tried the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic debugging technique of like, oh, log out, log back in, clear everything. It’s like that doesn’t work. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, now what? You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a debugging technique. That’s just like the only thing you can do. Exactly. But notes is actually notes actually
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly sophisticated. Like it’s not just tech shortcuts like because it does do like try
⏹️ ▶️ John to do like merging of changes and simultaneous accents for shared notes. Do you share notes like do you
⏹️ ▶️ John have like a shared like grocery list with you and Tiff where you both have access to the same note to read write you know Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We I’ve only ever done that with one note and it’s no longer there. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John so I mean we take it for granted like with the fact that we sit here and edit this Google Doc that has our show notes in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Have we ever had data destroying bugs or things that have caused it to be corrupt
⏹️ ▶️ John or Casey write something and I say, Casey, did you write something? I don’t see anything that has literally never happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Docs, whatever, whatever they’re doing, it just always works. This is the greatest app in the world. No, is it possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to get weird things like when I was trying to select some text in case he was writing earlier, my selection move because the text was going under it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you just stop selecting you try again. But like, that’s one of the reasons I have such faith in Google and their and their
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud service stuff, plus or minus privacy stuff, which you know, use your own judgment
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the basics, you know Google Docs can multiple people edit a text document at the same time doesn’t get screwed
⏹️ ▶️ John up proof is in the pudding yes they totally can whereas if we had gone with Margo’s one time
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps sarcastic suggestion to use like a shared pages document I have little faith
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would have been as successful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never said shared pages I would never have suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John someone what do you suggest that we try like I work calm or something I don’t know it could have been a joke yeah we did try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there there was like a there were a couple of other web services that we tried the people who recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of those really worked out for us either. And so we just came back to the Google Docs because it’s Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Docs is basically like the windows of online collaboration. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s too harsh, I think. When it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ John shared text documents reliability, I mean, it’s not a bad application. It’s not great. The UI could be a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit weird, but it works all the time. And it more or less has the features
⏹️ ▶️ John we need. And none of us ever think about it. I don’t think we spend time worrying about
⏹️ ▶️ John how Google Docs is working.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it just, it just, and that’s ideal for a tool you’re going to use for this purpose. Just like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not in the front of any of our minds ever.
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⏹️ ▶️ John I get to my iOS issues. It’s the same as last time. I just want to give it up. This is probably just like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole like bug complaint show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t want it to be. I’m trying to bring it back. But we all have too many new
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bug complaint slash desperately try to crowdsource solutions to your own personal
⏹️ ▶️ John problems We can in theory you could
⏹️ ▶️ John be helping other people too so this should have been a follow-up but too late Uh, I was talking about plugging my light
⏹️ ▶️ John my big fat ugly lightning connected ear pods into my iphone 7 um
⏹️ ▶️ John And how occasionally it doesn’t work and I described some scenarios where it doesn’t work I come up with a new scenario where it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work where I pick up my phone I don’t know what order I do things and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably already unlocked it and overcast is the front most app or whatever. I plug in my headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ John put the ear pods in my ear. I hit the big honking triangle play button overcast and
⏹️ ▶️ John sound starts coming out of the speakers in the phone. Yeah. And there’s a long time between the time when I plugged in the headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and the time and like when that happens, it’s like it’s like getting on an escalator that’s not moving. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wait, wait, what? I
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged in the headphones like seven seconds ago as I’m you know and sometimes you plug in the headphones then
⏹️ ▶️ John you go to springboard or go to go to overcast or like eventually you get there you know go to the podcast you hit the play
⏹️ ▶️ John button the ear pods have been in your ears for what seemed like forever and you hit play and it starts playing audio out of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker and you just like you just shake your head at the phone like what is what are you doing
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is your basics like none of your previous iPhones had this problem I plugged in the damn headphones and hit play
⏹️ ▶️ John on an audio app the sound always came out of the headphones like always did like a hundred percent of the time
⏹️ ▶️ John I have run this experiment many times on every single iPod touch and every single iPhone every single iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John shuffle when I hit play comes out because the headphones are plugged in where else is it gonna come out like this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that that infuriated me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah something’s wrong with that it happens it happens to me in my car also like like when the car Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco captures the the output about once a week It’ll just play through the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker still even the car thinks it’s connected the the phone thinks it’s connected to the car But it still plays out through the phone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internal speaker instead Yeah, but Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John never works like I’m not in a car
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth usually works like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. That’s the yeah I agree My
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Bluetooth does
⏹️ ▶️ John not win my Bluetooth and my Honda is incredibly unreliable and I have all sorts of situations like that But I’m used to dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ John but headphones like the reason it’s so the reason it’s so disturbing to me is like headphones are just
⏹️ ▶️ John you know I’m just in my kitchen right this is this is previously 100% reliable technology
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m really my opinion is going downhill fast well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never the way iOS handles audio routing to different devices has never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been 100% reliable I think in different releases as as they like update and change certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subsystems to enable new things or whatever certain OS’s are better than others and I think iOS 10 is particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad in this area of like selecting the right output device reliably. But this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every iOS version that comes out like almost every you know beta betas one through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five of almost every iOS version every year have some massive problem with audio routing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why like audio writing is just always messed with. I assume all the all the changes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 10 were to accommodate the AirPods and and all the different because that’s like Bluetooth audio got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really messed up for a while in the betas and I’m pretty sure that’s why but like whatever they do it seem like they’re always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to mess with the audio stack in weird ways that leave it very unreliable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the very frequent problems I’ve always had with phones every once in a while you will tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your pocket to play and it’ll think there’s no speakers connected to the phone of any form like it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show like nothing in the in the in the in the source list from the from the airplay icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’ll show like iPhone as as the only entry. Usually you have to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reboot when that like there’s nothing you can do you just reboot at that point but that’s been a long-standing iOS bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again like almost every iOS version has something like that that’s going wrong with it every so
⏹️ ▶️ John But have you ever plugged in plain old headphones into a plain old headphone jack on an iOS device and then
⏹️ ▶️ John played audio and not had to come out the headphones? I’ve literally never had that experience until like this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good point. I know you’re I have not had that happen to me but Now every device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever class of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device that like Bluetooth and car things get like now headphones are like that too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of progress and courage. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John now they got their own little computers in there. Yeah so uh so the the other thing that I saw which is
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure related to this but was really weird because I’ve never seen this one you know iOS occasionally freaks out. iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part is incredibly reliable like I don’t reboot my iOS device they just run and run and run and run
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the way it’s supposed to be. but recently on my iPhone 7, again plugging in the headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ John I plug in the headphones and then I hit the play button. I think it might have been still been on the
⏹️ ▶️ John lock screen because you know the little the media controls are still on the lock screen. I hit the play button to play and it doesn’t play
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Like well fine whatever doesn’t play anything let me just unlock the phone. Well first let me unplug and plug re-plug the
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones which is usually the first thing. Hit the play button nothing happens and like wait is the play button even activating? Let
⏹️ ▶️ John me unlock the phone and actually go to overcast and hit the play button there. And I noticed that I can’t unlock the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, is it the stupid fingerprint? Is that the problem? Oh, forget about the fingerprint. Let me just press the home button so I can do
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, my enter my password so I can unlock my phone, which I never do because I use Trouts. I do all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t get the password screen to come up. And then I hit the home button and nothing’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hit the power button and the phone doesn’t go back to sleep. And so I’m hitting every physical
⏹️ ▶️ John control and semi physical control. I’m pulling out the headphones and putting them back in. I’m hitting the
⏹️ ▶️ John non moving home button. I’m hitting the power button and literally nothing is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John The screen is just sitting there staring at me. It is not turning on, it is not turning off, it is not unlocking, it is not presenting me
⏹️ ▶️ John with an unlock screen. I tried to do what I think, I don’t know if this is the case, but I’m trying to go from memory
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, what’s the new like, you know, hard reboot thing? So I’m doing like volume up
⏹️ ▶️ John and the power button, I think that’s wrong, I didn’t, you know. It’s volume down. Yeah, well anyway, I tried various combinations of buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably all of which were wrong, none of which did anything. I think if I had correctly found the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John kills it, I’m assuming it would have just turned off, like the equivalent of yanking the plug, right? But I didn’t find
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? And I’m doing this for, I don’t know, a minute, two minutes, and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John things start happening and I realize it is catching up with everything that I’ve done over the past several minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It happened to me
⏹️ ▶️ John once too. And all of a sudden I see the volume changing and going up and down and the lock screen coming and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then everything freaks out. The Apple Pay screen pops up because you kept hitting the home button.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, yep, yep, it eventually got out of that all that out of its system. I’m like, okay. Well, it’s back normal And bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is I didn’t reboot the thing but that whole time when it was freaking out Would seem to be
⏹️ ▶️ John kicked off by me plugging in my headphones, but who the heck knows and anyway That was that’s very anti social behavior that also
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me concerned about my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that happened to me if like a few maybe a couple of months ago And I tweeted about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and I got a lot of responses and people saying that happened to them, too And and it so it seems like that’s a that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that uncommon and but
⏹️ ▶️ John Sierra iOS 10 is new so like I just want more point releases
⏹️ ▶️ John well I guess but like Sierra still Sierra has not had a lot of point releases what is it up to is it just the point one still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and 12-1 yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although dot-2 is is I believe in pretty late beta at this point but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I saw all the rumors about the new Polaris GPU drivers with making people think about
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac pros in there but anyway I I’m ready for point releases because every point release I’m like well maybe they fixed this
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying thing so and 10-2 they’re saying they’re on beta 7 of 10-2 I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously they’re more cautious with the iOS releases so it’s taken a while for 10-2 to appear but it was like 10-1 they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do the three digit numbers on iOS versions do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they? Yeah they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do but it’s only able for bug fixes and for the last digit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah anyway hopefully when both of these OS’s both Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS and iOS get their next point releases some or all these things will improve.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. On that happy note…
Grocery stores need tech support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us about Amazon Go. So Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Chief Summaryizer and Chief, Amazon has come up with a, hey, look what we’re building video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is only a couple minutes long, it’s worth watching. And basically it’s taking Apple’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steal to the next level. And the general premise is you scan a, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was like a QR code that’s on your phone as you walk through a turnstile on your way in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you grab whatever it is you want to purchase, And then you walk out. And between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like computer vision and presumably like weight detection or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that. RFID, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine. And RFID, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did they say it wasn’t RFID?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surmising that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. So what are the catchphrases they use? Computer vision, deep learning algorithms, sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fusion are the three things they say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco We just know you bought a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Altoids. You always buy a ton of Altoids. We just assume you’re gonna buy one every time at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John speculatively charge you for things that you’re gonna buy in the future, Minority Report
⏹️ ▶️ John A bunch of bald people in bathtubs know what you’re gonna buy. Which is probably not far from the truth,
⏹️ ▶️ John minus the bathtubs and the people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They know what you’re gonna buy. That’s why Target
⏹️ ▶️ John sends you the thing with the baby supplies before you know you’re pregnant.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They call that big data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that really happened, kids. I’m not gonna put an article in the show notes, because it’ll take me three days to find it, but that really did happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. It’ll take you three seconds to find that one. Maybe. But the point is, you walk in, you scan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a QR code on your phone to identify who you are, you buy some things, then you leave. And there’s no checkout.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You just walk right out. And in principle, this sounds pretty neat to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably, you know, have a moment to mention Humans Need Not Apply,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a great video by a friend of the show, CGP Grey, about how when things like these automations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen, that means that eventually humans will not have jobs, which is a problem. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horrible dystopian future aside, this sounds pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s what I think about how this works based on this video. And the store, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t open yet. There’s going to be one location in Seattle. It’s not open yet. So all you’ve got is a video and a page that has a bunch of information
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. So it shows there’s no turnstile, by the way, that would be barbaric. You walk in
⏹️ ▶️ John through these, you know, these little, you know, they have little dividers that you scan your QR code, but it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going through like a subway, you know, turnstile or an amusement park turnstile. So you just walk through the QR
⏹️ ▶️ John code is scanned. Now the thing knows you’re in the store. And I think one of the key technologies is
⏹️ ▶️ John the video says and then just put your phone away. Like it’s not like you’re scanning things with your phone, like on Apple’s Apple Store app or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you scan your QR code and enter, you still have to have your phone on you. But you can just put it in your pocket. It’s not involved in this. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not you’re not tapping products with your phone. You’re not scanning them with your phone and your phone’s camera
⏹️ ▶️ John is not seeing them like it’s in your pocket, right? But they do have, I think one part of this is
⏹️ ▶️ John proximity, like it knows roughly where you are in the store, probably using those I beacons or similar type of technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John It knows what your phone has to be on. So it knows where it knows that you’re in the store and knows roughly where you
⏹️ ▶️ John are. And the computer vision thing, like if you look at the video, every product that people are getting, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like they’re inside a giant vending machine where things like slide down like the candy bar slides down a little twisty corkscrew
⏹️ ▶️ John right and the next one comes like everything is in a single file lane where you grab the product at
⏹️ ▶️ John the front, which by the way, I would never do because you always you gotta pull from the back or middle, right? But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I assume they have cameras all over, plus like you’re saying, weight sensors and any other things like sensor fusion,
⏹️ ▶️ John of knowing someone has picked a product off of this shelf. You know which product it is because you
⏹️ ▶️ John know which row it came in. It’s not like they’re haphazardly shelved or some employees like shelving them. They’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John precise rows. And when you pull one off, they know you pulled one off and they know it was you based on proximity
⏹️ ▶️ John of where your phone is. Now, what if you are shoulder to shoulder three other people who are also pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John things off. I suppose if you all reach over each other and all three grab things out of the same aisle that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re standing in front of it’s possible to confuse the thing but what I’m getting is I think it’s not RFID. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think there is no there are not RFID tags on every single one of these things. I think there’s plain old containers. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing special about the containers. Everything is about sensing where you are with the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and figuring out when people pull things out of these very specific restricted little columns
⏹️ ▶️ John of food. And the food that you were getting It’s not like your your supermarket where you can go buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know a loaf of bread mayonnaise You know some ground beef like just it is more like
⏹️ ▶️ John prepared foods in little tins like in the prepared food section of Whole Foods or whatever plus maybe a couple of staples like milk
⏹️ ▶️ John and Butter and stuff like that, but it is not a full-fledged grocery store with everything you expect to see there
⏹️ ▶️ John I think partially because it would be hard to get all that into this format into this little slidey
⏹️ ▶️ John down you know whatever like these little rows of food and neat little containers that are
⏹️ ▶️ John all uniformly sized because that’s not how real grocery stores work
⏹️ ▶️ John and then finally the idea is that you you know you grab the food and you just take it with you and you just leave
⏹️ ▶️ John like there is no there’s no scanning of your items as you leave there’s no like you don’t even have to scan
⏹️ ▶️ John your QR code on the way back out you just just walk out of the store it doesn’t care what you put the items in you don’t have to put them into a
⏹️ ▶️ John special bag you don’t have like just you just take the crap and you leave and they say and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know we’ll we’ll charge your account for the amount that you bought you know because it’s amazon they have all your information your
⏹️ ▶️ John credit cards or whatever and you if you’re interested in looking at the receipt you can look at it right in
⏹️ ▶️ John the same app that you scanned on the way and you launch this free app and it’s amazon go app and it says oh
⏹️ ▶️ John you just bought these five things right uh and when i saw that and i had my wife look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this too and i knew what her reaction would be to some degree and when i saw What I thought of was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, no, no checkout lines, no waiting in line. But if everybody who used this
⏹️ ▶️ John was like my wife, which I don’t think everybody in the world is, but there are enough of them, what would happen instead of people waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John in checkout lines is everybody would exit the store with their, with their stuff. And as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ John they got the door, they would be staring at their phone, stopped in place, staring at their phone to make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John the receipt in the app
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly matches everything that’s in their bag
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure they weren’t overcharged for anything. Right. What would actually happen is the entrance to the
⏹️ ▶️ John store would be clogged with a bunch of people who are all frantically checking their receipt to make sure they didn’t get charged for 500
⏹️ ▶️ John cans of Hellman’s mayonnaise when really they just took one or whatever. And then going back into the store and trying to correct
⏹️ ▶️ John them. You have to have, for this to work, it has to be like the people in the video where it’s like I
⏹️ ▶️ John just walk out of the store and I’m fine. I don’t even need to look at this receipt. Maybe later when I’m doing my bills I’ll look at the receipt.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I trust that it’s fine. But people who are, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, very careful about money spending. to know immediately. The same reason you check
⏹️ ▶️ John a paper receipt. Are you guys paper receipt checkers? After you go to the grocery store, do you look down the receipt or do
⏹️ ▶️ John you watch the scanning to make sure that everything is being scanned for the right price and that those are supposed to be two
⏹️ ▶️ John for five dollars? Do you check the receipt to make sure that they didn’t charge you for something you didn’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ John and that you got the right prices? Not usually. Never. Yeah, well, some people
⏹️ ▶️ John are receipt checkers. I’m definitely a scan watcher because what else do you have to do during that time? I
⏹️ ▶️ John watch the items being scanned in case if they like, you know, scan the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John potato, five potatoes I have and it comes up as like some ridiculous price because they thought it was, you know, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, seven pounds of saffron or something, right? Like you can, I, you want to be watching for that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re not one of those people and you can go la de da and just leave. But I think there’s enough receipt checkers
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you’re just to watch people leaving who just least glance over the receipt, you know, make sure the total makes sense. Make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if you saw something that you bought because they were two for $5 and that was a discount that you actually do get them
⏹️ ▶️ John for two for $5. And it’s not like real grocery stores are clogged with people checking their receipts.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that anxiety that like this magical system, like, Can I trust this magical
⏹️ ▶️ John system? Initially, that’s going to be there. Now, if it works really well, eventually, people will just let go and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t need to keep checking that. It’s more reliable than humans. It’s more reliable than you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John then self checkout, it’s more reliable than having real cashier, which I think will be a real challenge because a really good supermarket cashier
⏹️ ▶️ John is way better than that’s why self Checkout sucks when you check yourself out you realize an experienced cashier who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows exactly what code to enter for these particular kinds of green beans just You know like the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that don’t have codes on them a good human cashier is worth way more than we pay them
⏹️ ▶️ John And you don’t realize until you either have to check yourself out, or you get a bad human cashier, but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John If the machines can ever match that will we will be happy and we will stop obsessing with it
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think we have a long way to go we get there and in the meantime time, the possibility of being overcharged
⏹️ ▶️ John is one thing, and the second possibility is that the stupid thing will miss a bunch of stuff and you’ll get a lot of free food. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a possible reason to check out the flagship store, because I would imagine there’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John at least an equal number of situations where it doesn’t keep track of something and you just got some free food. And if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John a receipt checker, you’re not going to know or care, and you’re going to eat the thing, and then later at the end of the month when you reconcile stuff, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, hmm, everything was pretty cheap. Oh, I guess it keeps missing that bunch of bananas that I take from the
⏹️ ▶️ John store every week it hasn’t been charging me for them because there’s no one there watching so i don’t know someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John lives in seattle should try to store out and then uh right into the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many bananas are you buying where you would even notice that whether you got them for free or not because they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i mean it’s one banana michael what could it cost ten dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John no you get a lot of bananas you make a lot of banana bread that’s a it’s a staple around here you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey get a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John if like if they if they you know if they go over they get too brown for people to want to eat banana bread banana muffins
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like you know bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sounds like you’re buying too many bananas on a number of fronts here can never have
⏹️ ▶️ John too much banana bread i don’t think that’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh amen amen couldn’t agree more i don’t know i’m interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this i think it looks pretty neat i suspect that it won’t be commonplace for years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um we discussed this briefly on uh clockwise today which i happen to be a guest host on um we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes and I think this is the indication of the future but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think we’re quite into the future yet so we’ll see but it looks very cool if it works and if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the type of thing I like to see Amazon doing. Amazon does lots of things a lot of which don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to be part of their core competencies or only
⏹️ ▶️ John you know tangentially like it’s arguable whether everything that would eventually become Amazon Web Services
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, S3 and EC2 and all that stuff. Is that part of Amazon’s core competencies? Don’t they sell books on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in the 90s version of them, right? But of course, they have to run their own servers, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t really running their own servers on their web services for a long time. But then eventually they want to be so you
⏹️ ▶️ John can argue that like, it may not seem like this is a core part of a company that sells you things over the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is because this is how they run their business. And then they do stuff like the Fire Phone and the tablets, and you can kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John argue about that. And like, well, it kind of works in with giving you an easier way to buy things and so on and so forth. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John one seems very straightforward to me. Amazon at this point is a place that sells you anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that can be sold to people like physical goods. And people think about Amazon physical stores
⏹️ ▶️ John like how funny that is. Ah, they drove all the booksellers, the brick and mortar booksellers out of business. And now now
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re all dead, they’ll buy up all the retail space that they vacated and start their own stores. Ha ha.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of morbid. But a store where you sell things. things.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an Amazon way to do that. Selling things is Amazon’s core competency, right? If anyone’s going to figure out how to sell things
⏹️ ▶️ John better, it would be Amazon and selling things like without having to pay cashiers
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. Like basically, you know, a store that is just like a big place that you go into and grab
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and Amazon figures how to efficiently extract your money. That’s Amazon’s core competency to
⏹️ ▶️ John the king of the stupid one click patent. Like Amazon wants to make it so you buy things when you sneeze, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you accidentally buy things and it’s so easy to buy things, it is harder not to buy things like you can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John look it’s like don’t look at the Amazon web page you’ll accidentally buy something with your retinal buying thing it sees your gaze
⏹️ ▶️ John lingering on something like that’s you know anyway it and most people
⏹️ ▶️ John like it like the reason we all use Amazon like they despite all the things we
⏹️ ▶️ John may not like about their labor practices and all sorts of stuff like that the draw of their product making
⏹️ ▶️ John it convenient to buy things is a real thing. And so if anyone’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John bring this to us, I give Amazon a fair shot because this is definitely in their wheelhouse. And I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to a store that’s like this. I want them to work on this store over years and years and iterate and iterate and iterate. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want them to give up on it like the Fire Phone or whatever. I want this one to work so that five, 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John from now, there’s one near me that we can just go into and you don’t have to wait on checkout lines anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they don’t put all the other supermarkets out of business and I doubt they will, But I’m really rooting for this,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think this is, and it’s not like implausible future, like, you know, hoverboards or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the fake ones, the real ones. I think that we’re close to this
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of technology, unlike what I’ve said about like true self-driving cars, which I think are farther off than everybody else thinks they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people really just don’t have the same definition as me about self-driving cars. Anyway, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is close enough to work. The first one’s gonna be a disaster, whatever. But like work out the kinks, give it a few years,
⏹️ ▶️ John stick to it and I’m excited for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love it if it would ever come to the suburbs where I live, but I think that’s unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll definitely come to where you live because rich people are the core market for this. They totally want to buy, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John someone is like prepared foods, like can you imagine how much this stuff’s going to cost? You know, go into Whole Foods and try to buy like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a tiny cup of cut up fruit. It’s like each one of them is made out of dollar bills. That’s true. The most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John food items per pound in the universe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Two thoughts here. First of all, I love John making fun of Marco for being where the rich
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people live because John I think you
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in the where the rich people are too
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the stores are gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure your neighborhood is more upscale than mine for the record
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not you live next to Batman I live next to like the people who work on Batman staff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow that was a pissing match I did not expect to be a part of but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway the other thing I will say, which is now not nearly as funny. But one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I was at work like two years ago, and I’d forgotten to bring a lunch, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t bring a lunch because I thought I was going out to eat. And so I was without a lunch, I was lunchless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought to myself, you know what, I’m gonna treat myself, I’m gonna go to Whole Foods, I’m gonna get me, you know, one of those boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I go to the hot bar, and I put a whole bunch of stuff in there. So I went and I got the I think, like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t go for the hard boiled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eggs. They way too much salad bar tricks. It’s funny you say that because I made the critical mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of getting mac and cheese, which is like 18 pounds of mac and cheese for like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one bite. And I went to check out and I put my box of goodies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the scale and it was like literally $18. I was about to guess $80 as a joke price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was gonna guess $27,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have a gauge on exactly how much food you’re piling into there.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing about prepared foods. Like A, they’re really expensive and you can kind of understand how they’re really expensive you start doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the math on they have to pay for the raw ingredients, they have to pay for the people who prepare them and they must have a huge amount of waste
⏹️ ▶️ John because all that stuff doesn’t get sold every day and they got to just dump it or give it away or whatever right? So I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why it’s expensive but B, it doesn’t taste very good. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if I was paying a lot of money, if I was going to a restaurant and paying $18 for lunch, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want something that tastes you know that tastes good enough to be worth $18 but stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in there under like heat lamps or whatever I don’t like it is it is it doesn’t taste good
⏹️ ▶️ John to me so I will never buy that I will I will sooner buy just
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain ingredients to something and make myself a sandwich out of the loaf of bread and the
⏹️ ▶️ John three ingredients that I got then buy one of their prepared things and maybe I’m just allergic to prepared foods and I want
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to either be freshly made or something that doesn’t need to be fresh like you know I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like a thing of yogurt or something where it’s not like they’re making it right there but it’s you know it’s a sealed prepared food
⏹️ ▶️ John versus they made something for you at some point in the hopefully not too distant past
⏹️ ▶️ John and that just sits there waiting for you to buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like they don’t know that salt exists at most of these prepared food bars
⏹️ ▶️ John well you know you should never be going you just be going to a deli you have actual delis oh yeah there and they’ll make you a sandwich
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the ingredient those ingredients like they’re sitting there and the thing like you know my beloved egg salad and your beloved
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken salad it’s the same deal someone has to prepare that and hopefully in the not too distant past and there’s a lot of waste and
⏹️ ▶️ John they get rid of it but it’s a difference between the chicken salad sitting in a tub
⏹️ ▶️ John or even like whatever and chicken salad sandwiches sitting there in a case
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for you to show up when you show up they make you the chicken salad sandwich with the chicken salad sitting the tub but they make
⏹️ ▶️ John it right there and hand it to you and that is so much better than if the sandwich was sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh totally I mean it’s you’re you know you’re talking now you know just like our previous discussion about like Subway and it’s like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the category of like airport triangle box sandwiches. Those are just always soggy
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Yeah, I mean, Whole Foods is hopefully a little bit better than that, but there’s nothing you can do about that. You can’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ John how long has that rotisserie chicken been sitting under the heat lamps? And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty shelf-stable thing where it’s not gonna get too gross, but it’s gross enough not to be worth the $18 that
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s paying for the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say though, so I don’t usually participate in the prepared food bar at grocery stores because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you said, as you pointed out, I typically have, you know, more options around that I can just go to one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I my my crazy indulgence is the pre chopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vegetables that come like in the produce section,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like like if I if I have to if I’ve cook a meal like I don’t buy everything pre chopped,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but things that are really tedious, I will often go that route. Just grab it. Just just fine. This is fine. It’s good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll say ten minutes it’s worth it’s worth the extra
⏹️ ▶️ John you not look at the price so you can sleep at night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them I look and I’m like all right even I can’t do that I cannot justify
⏹️ ▶️ John stomach nine dollars for the chopped walnuts just put them back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well nobody would use one because one of your terrible and they would never cost nine dollars because one of your worthless because they’re terrible I heard about your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the they’re just the worst nuts ever they cost nothing because nobody likes them and yeah anyway they also look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brains but like you know if somebody like pre-chopped, you know, an onion that I’m gonna throw in anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like a whole bunch of peppers like that’s gonna save me time and I also hate chopping onions because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make my eyes crazy so it’s like all right like I’ll pay an extra like $2 premium for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, wait, you get pre-chopped onions? Not every time but like you know if I’m making something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night. I have to draw the line at that
⏹️ ▶️ John because once you break the cell walls and that stuff starts reacting like it changes the nature of the product you have to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John at time of preparation you can’t have those sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is going on a frying pan who cares
⏹️ ▶️ John no but you know how long they’ve been sitting like as soon as you chop an onion the reaction start you’ve got you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that everything mixing with the air producing that sulfuric acid that you know with the water in your eyes that is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna tear up like that reaction starts as soon as you cut that onion so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want that to start three hours before I prepare my meal so I can pick up the things but the
⏹️ ▶️ John limit of our prepared food laziness is and I’ve never done this but it has been done and I
⏹️ ▶️ John have accepted that has been done buying pre-shredded Parmesan cheese. I would rather shred it myself
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s because the pre-shredded adds like five dollars a pound or something obscene to the price of the already
⏹️ ▶️ John very expensive Parmesan cheese. I buy that. You buy the yeah of course you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco buy it. It’s some kind of like fancy like
⏹️ ▶️ John imported aged. No it’s just Parmesan and Reggiano. There’s only one thing it’s it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a specific product. This is what you should buy if you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s different grades though, like there’s different age lengths and there’s like whether you get like D.O.P. official one
⏹️ ▶️ John No, only the official one. Everything else that is not stamped on the outside as the real thing is, I don’t think Helflets
⏹️ ▶️ John even sells it and nobody should sell it and nobody should buy it. Just the question is whether do you bring home a big
⏹️ ▶️ John chunk of this hard cheese and grade it yourself or do you buy it pre-graded? And the pre-graded adds tremendously
⏹️ ▶️ John to the cost and I don’t like how they grade it. They grade it too fine. I like it to be a little bit thicker little
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces than them. That’s as far as I’ll go. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I buy the pre-graded. I think it’s something like 12 bucks a pound. No, it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John more than that. Way more. Ungraded is 15 to 20 a pound. Ungraded. Do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John me to go look? Go ahead, go look. All right, one sec. Is this really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening? What has the show turned into?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the price of many things, but I know the price of Parmesan cheese. It is a staple in our house, the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as milk and butter and eggs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Parmesan was the cheese you had me shred for the pizzas and then you utterly shamed me for my inability
⏹️ ▶️ John You can you not identify cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or no that was mozzarella. That was mozzarella wasn’t it? Yes, my bad
⏹️ ▶️ John What I what I tell the kids is pizza cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was so scarred by the experience of you shaming me for my inability to shred appropriately. All right, I’m back
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna I’m gonna predict $19 a pound. That is exactly right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is the Ambrosie brand Parmigiano-Reggiano D.O.P. Grated, imported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Italy, 19 bucks a pound. Really
⏹️ ▶️ John fine-grated, right? Really fine? Like, they’re tiny little wispy things? That’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John fine for me. I’m sorry. I want it a little bit thicker than that. But yeah, sometimes if you’re in a hurry
⏹️ ▶️ John and you realize you don’t have it and it takes time to do it, someone will come and arrive with a pre-shredded
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And I always keep it separate from my real cheese, which is in the dedicated Tupperware container in the fridge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to mix them together. But sometimes, you know, you got to do what you got to do. But that’s it. Precut vegetables?
⏹️ ▶️ John Precut onions? Definitely no. My wife gets to pre-cut fruit all the time, which I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stand. I just try desperately not to look at the price. I’m just like, I want to peel it off without looking at it. So I just don’t see like $12.99
⏹️ ▶️ John on this like tub of like sad looking watermelon and cantaloupe pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John like $12.99? Really? Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, like certain things that works better I was like, watermelon, I don’t buy pre-cut because it is so expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whole watermelons cost basically nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of shocking how little whole watermelons cost per pound. And he’s like, how do these even get transported here? Yeah, as
⏹️ ▶️ John as you cut it into cubes, it becomes like gold. It’s dipped in printer ink.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, the only substances on
⏹️ ▶️ John earth more expensive than pre-cut fruit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like certain things are actually worth getting pre-cut and certain things work better. So like one of the things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you need shredded Brussels sprouts for like a salad or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sell those in a little box now, and it’s pretty good. And you can’t tell, they taste just as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if you would’ve chopped fresh Brussels sprouts, and it takes way less time. And here you have shredded Brussels sprouts, it isn’t that expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like certain things it’s worth it, but obviously not everything, not watermelon.
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Intel needs tech support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not to ruin the Accidental Food podcast, but late breaking news,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft is bringing Windows desktop apps to mobile ARM processors. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is sort of kind of Windows RT, but not. Windows 10 on ARM, this is from The Verge, is arriving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks to a partnership with Qualcomm. Initially Microsoft will support the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processors and laptops are are expected to be the first devices we’ll see in the market next year. Microsoft is enabling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows 10 to support ARM chips directly by building an emulator into the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Devices will be able to run x86 Win32 applications, but it will
⏹️ ▶️ John This is part of that story we had on a past show. And the rumor was that it was gonna be ARM64
⏹️ ▶️ John would emulate x86-64 stuff. And that was gonna be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John future. I don’t know if this is a separate story where they’re doing 32 now and 64 later, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the power savings that they get from having laptops with ARM processors in them, not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be helped by emulating x86. It’s so true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting though, it’s certainly interesting because I mean, we’ve been talking on and off about the Macs on ARM, and in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should plug, Upgrade had a wonderful episode this week where Jason Snell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made some really fascinating points on ARM Macs and kind of what the position of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. I won’t try to summarize his position, but I really agreed with a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and you should take a listen to that show. Agreed. That was excellent. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this is somewhat interesting news, because Windows RT, from everything I understood, was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of crappy because nothing was cross-compiled for it. So yeah, in and of itself it was fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe the battery life was good, and I think maybe those were the surfaces, SirFi, that didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fans, if memory serves. But anyways, but nobody could run any apps on it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody cross compiled for arm. So this could solve that problem. But I also agree with you, john, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not necessarily going to help things in terms of battery life if you’re emulating
⏹️ ▶️ John think they want people to compile their apps for Windows for arm. Like that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to happen. That’s what I tried to get that move windows RT and it didn’t. And so it’s like, Alright, try number two,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if we have emulation, then more people will buy them because they won’t feel like you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to solve the chicken egg situation. People won’t buy if there’s no apps and people won’t make apps if no one buys them. So like, all right, we’ll put the emulation
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And hopefully that will trick people into buying them. I don’t want to say trick, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that will motivate people to buy it. Oh, yeah, no, you can totally run your existing copy of office. It’ll be fine, really.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then once we get everyone to buy them, then app developers will say your app can run better on their
⏹️ ▶️ John cool arm powered ultra book thing, because yours will be compiled natively for arm and that will
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a selling advantage. I don’t know do people still buy software on Windows other than Adobe software and AutoCAD?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, should make fun of that because they probably have a more robust professional application
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem than Apple does at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, so this is a pretty smart attempt to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John solve this problem. Now, why Microsoft is so seemingly desperate to get Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John off of x86? I don’t know. Maybe this is the slow divorce of of Wintel, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John where Microsoft wants to be everywhere on all platforms and Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs are expensive compared to ARM ones of supposedly equivalent ballpark power.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Microsoft’s not making its own ARM CPUs at this point, but maybe partnering with Qualcomm is
⏹️ ▶️ John a different power balance than partnering with Intel. And I don’t know, but this definitely seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a very slow change happening over in a mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John unwatched corner of the market because you know everyone’s looking at mobile like you know phones and stuff and not
⏹️ ▶️ John many people are looking at laptops and PCs these days except to be depressed about them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish them luck because anything that sort of changes the existing fairly boring status quo is good or even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it just motivates Intel to do a better job that helps everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is worth thinking about. It’s It’s like, we’ve talked forever about, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about ARM Macs? And the idea here is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, Intel is not doing what Apple wants it to do fast enough or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco achieving enough efficiency or whatever, and that maybe ARM chips that Apple could make itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be better and everything. And it’s interesting to see basically now Microsoft seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly making the same hedged bet here of like, you know, Intel’s not really working that well for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us either, which actually just means, you know, Intel’s just not working that well, period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re working,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they charge a lot of money. Like, Intel is still able to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty big margins compared to what the ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John vendors charge for their things. And it’s one of the reasons people always say that the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops cost so much, because if you, people do these silly like bill of material things they’re adding up,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the retail prices, which is not how this stuff works. But anyway, they try it out the price and they realize price wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Intel CPU is a surprisingly large portion or the you know, the the chips from Intel are
⏹️ ▶️ John a surprisingly large portion of the price of a laptop. And that was more it was
⏹️ ▶️ John more pronounced when there was more parts inside a laptop. At this point, there’s not much in there anymore, except for
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel CPUs, some supporting chips, a big battery, a screen and half of a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s all that’s all that’s left
⏹️ ▶️ John in these things. But there used to be all sorts of other stuff in there was, you know, the hard drive and even the SSD thrown into the mix.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it’s still the case that Intel’s margins are would be the envy
⏹️ ▶️ John of any arm vendor and especially in the case of Apple, where Apple is doing the design, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got the arm license, they do the design, they pay someone to fab it for them, that relationship is much more straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s what Apple is used to, like working with a supplier to build a thing, I’ll tell you what to
⏹️ ▶️ John build, you don’t you don’t, you know, you don’t have to design anything you’re going to build this and here it is and give them
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the their chip design and they just fab it for them and i know there’s more to it than that it’s not a matter of just like taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a design and printing it like there is more to it but that is that is a relationship where
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to pay for the margin that intel is charging you for like we designed this whole chip and we designed
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things and we’re not just a dumb fab we’re selling you this value-added chip someone put in the in
⏹️ ▶️ John the chat room that intel has 60 gross margins which are which is pretty darn good for someone who sells physical things instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of selling software so I don’t think Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John is not doing its job and I think they are trying to serve Apple’s needs
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re still charging more and there’s and you know from Apple’s perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John there Apple can’t control their schedules to the degree that they control their own schedules for their a-series chips so that
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s you know there is a definite reason to go in that direction long-term anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah I just I thought that was interesting. We’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s a question. One of the concerns I have with Apple—sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to turn this back into Apple complaints, just for a minute, I promise—one of the concerns I have with Apple is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, I think everybody, even people who think they’re doing fine, can generally agree that they’re also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stretched very thin, and that a lot of their products are having to take a backseat to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, whether it’s the car or the idea that the iPhone is progressing really fast even though it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to be or whatever else it’s like everything seems to be taking the backseat to something so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my question is when the next big shifts happen in important markets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple so things like computers phones tablets when when big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shifts happen like for instance if everyone moves to arm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processors for for their PC computers like you know not just tablets and phones but like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size computers and laptops. In Apple’s current state, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like their immune system is strained, like they’re like they I mean it’s not a great analogy, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can barely hold together what they have now, like keeping things on their current path because they’re doing so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously there’s a lot of resources being devoted to like some other future projects,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like stuff like the Mac and it seemed like it’s just like barely holding on and there the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awfully concerning rumor today that the next iPhone might just add a red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color and still have the exact same general case and design as the 6.
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t they saying that it was also going to be out at the same time as the new all-glass thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or was that trying to say like next year, just a new color, and a year after that, the all-glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one? I believe it was the latter, but anyway, which would be concerning. But anyway, we have one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that, so who knows. But anyway, so given the way it appears as though Apple as having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard time keeping up with other product lines already as it is. When the next big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift happens, do you think they will be able to go with it, to write it, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapt it? Or are they going to fall behind because they won’t be prepared, because they won’t be developing enough resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to these areas? Microsoft right now doesn’t have a successful phone business to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about or to manage or to take forward. Microsoft is pouring everything they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can into what they do have, which is PCs. They do well there, they’re pouring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything they have in it. That’s where we’re getting interesting new developments like the Surface Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows which of these things will take off, if any, but they are there. They are ready to adopt whatever comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out now. But Apple isn’t. Apple is seemingly keeping the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac kind of coasting for the most part, and not doing a whole lot of new stuff with it, and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really keeping it up to date, not really keeping it competitive. Kind of just sitting back and letting off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gas. And this isn’t just the Mac. I would say this definitely applies to the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sort of applies to the iPad, although there’s not a lot of direct competitors anymore, really, unless you count
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops, which I’m not sure I would anymore. And on the iPhone, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might be letting off the gas a little bit, honestly. Obviously, we’ll see what happens next year, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it certainly looks so far that things are progressing more slowly than before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will Apple be ready for the next big shifts, and will they actually do them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or will they lead them anymore, the way they have been for the last decade or so? Or are they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too busy building cars and stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know about any of that. I think basing your thoughts on the premise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of their stepping off of the gas, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you come to that conclusion. I wouldn’t be so fast to come to that conclusion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would, in fact, I would almost go so far as to say that a lot of silence from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple may even be indicating that they’re standing on the gas harder than they ever have before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, truth be told, it’s hard for me to make that argument with a straight face, given what’s been going on with, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Pro, but one, one point does not align make, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously none of us know one way or the other. It very well could be that you’re right, Marco, but if I were to take a read of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tea leaves. I would say that that it is quite possible that big things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are afoot and we’re just not hearing about it because guess what? Apple never tells us about these things until
⏹️ ▶️ John So about the specific shift that you’re talking about, like whatever goes to arm that for that specific change,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple would be fine because if that happened, Apple would see it as an efficiency.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it would it would be the last little bit Apple needs to get to kick it over the line to say, OK, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess we will turn it because we always talk about all the things that are keeping them from transitioning, like is the Mac even worth this big expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John transition and this disruption to users and the dev tools and like, like, is it even worth it to do that for
⏹️ ▶️ John the little old Mac probably like that’s probably one of the biggest things stopping our max this point is that the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John itself is not worth that kind of investment. But if everyone else switches over anyway, suddenly, is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac even worth it? Like, well, everyone else is going that way anyway. And so we might as well just get on that train. And we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John already designing new a series CPUs every year, we’re already really good at it, and we’re gonna make that CPU anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the CPU for the next iPhone is gonna be plenty powerful for all but the most powerful laptops. And if you just add
⏹️ ▶️ John more cores to it, you know, like, it’s an efficiency that they’re ready to grab and a control that they want anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John any little bit that kicks them over into doing that, I think they would see as, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that now that decision has been taken out of our hands, and they would leap at it because they do get efficiencies that are now we don’t have to deal with two
⏹️ ▶️ John things. We just have one architecture, we control our own destinies, all the advantages of the arm stuff come in. So that specific
⏹️ ▶️ John change, I think they would be fine for all the other changes. Uh, you said, you know, they’re stretched thin. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we discussed in the past few shows, they’re stretched less than they used to be. They’re not making wifi routers
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. They’re not making screens anymore. They’re not making the Mac pro and the Mac mini anymore, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, so they are condensing and all these, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all the dark matter, the case he was talking about, like we have no idea what the hell they’re doing except for the self-driving car stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, their augmented reality thing. Is that related to the car thing where they’re displaying stuff on the dashboard or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the way to be ready for an apple, the typical apple way
⏹️ ▶️ John to be ready for these changes to be the one that brings them on. So presumably app has all sorts of experiments going
⏹️ ▶️ John on with AR and VR and machine learning and self driving car stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, like, those all those efforts are exactly what they should be doing to be ready for the next
⏹️ ▶️ John change and to perhaps be the one that initiates the change. But that doesn’t help us out here because we don’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff except except for like, you know, the car project, it’s too big tide at this point. And that is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors about it just being about self driving technology. I think the most concerning about thing about all these projects
⏹️ ▶️ John is that I’ve said this a million times, and I’ll say it again, they increasingly rely
⏹️ ▶️ John on integration with cloud computing, and Apple still scrappy at it. And they’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better really slowly, probably not even keeping pace with everybody else. So there are very few precious
⏹️ ▶️ John few things that you can do that don’t involve some kind of cloud thing. And Apple’s just not shown
⏹️ ▶️ John to be good for that. So the next big thing is cloud machine learning in the cloud. It’s hard to envision
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple even keeping up with the Joneses, let alone being a pioneer in that field. Because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ll again, maybe they’ll surprise us with a brand new version of Siri, that’s way better. But I think they’re mostly getting their butt kicked
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Self driving cars and
⏹️ ▶️ John that type of tech does also does not strike me as something that’s in Apple’s wheelhouse, I don’t really think I would
⏹️ ▶️ John not be comforted by self-driving car software written by Apple being installed into my thing, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John considering, you know, I mean, all they’ve done is CarPlay and it hasn’t, you know, it’s fine, whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the gap between that and also drive the car for me and do a cool AR display
⏹️ ▶️ John on a HUD on my windshield, such a huge gap, but whatever, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the next big thing is Apple should be out there trying to find it and the
⏹️ ▶️ John act of trying to find it appears invisible for a company like Apple we have no idea what it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the stretch thin feeling comes from you know you know do that R&D
⏹️ ▶️ John do that experimental thing investigate things kill a project if it doesn’t like it’s working out do all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John but you also have to have one eye on the rest of your business and we mostly complain about the max we like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac I I think they are definitely not stepping off the gas on the iPhone in all
⏹️ ▶️ John areas except for perhaps industrial design. And that could be just because they keep grabbing for that whatever the next all glass phone is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you look at how the internals of the iPhone have improved, generator after
⏹️ ▶️ John generation, we would kill for that kind of improvement in the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Every a series chip
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much better than the past one. The cameras get better, the battery life gets better. Plus or minus apples
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to thin stuff down like they are, you know, the iPhone is so
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly their main product, and they improve it in ways that we can only dream of in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac world. So I think that’s doing fine. I think a lot of it is superficial, like, oh, you’re gonna make it the same shape again, that’s boring. That’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a marketing problem. That’s a PR problem. That’s a problem for being able to sell these things to people. But if you view it as like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much money did they invest in making the iPhone better, just because they don’t have a new case, because they they
⏹️ ▶️ John keep trying to go for that cool wireless charging all glass, whatever magic phone like I can’t get it year after
⏹️ ▶️ John year. I gave them a pass on that because what’s inside the phones is just getting better so much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster. So, you know, I’m not concerned about the iPhone business, not even concerned
⏹️ ▶️ John about the iPad business, except for the fact that they don’t seem to be willing to feel any competitors to something like the Surface Book, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an iOS device or not. But it just gets back to us whining about our Macs, but we’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true. Now, did you guys I didn’t have a chance to read this, but I saw some headlines and the chat room has brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this up as well. Quartz had a piece entitled, Inside the Secret Meeting, Where Apple Revealed the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey State of its AI Research. And I guess there was a invite-only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lunch at an industry AI conference where Apple showed a bunch of slides, a couple of which, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of which, Quartz got their hands on. And so one of them says, Machine Learning Research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Summary. And there’s several different segments that Apple’s apparently looking at. Health and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vital Signs, Volumetric Detection of LiDAR, which to me means self-driving car, prediction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with structured outputs, and there’s a picture of cars driving, image processing and colorization, intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assistant and language modeling and activity recognition. And then later on, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a chance to read into this much, but there are a couple of graphs where at a glance, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to hint that Apple’s GPUs are being used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for machine learning and are considerably quicker than equivalent Amazon AWS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offerings. Now, again, I’ve only glanced at this. I might be butchering the details, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it certainly seems that at least in an academic sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe Apple’s machine learning chops aren’t so bad after all. Now, to be fair, that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get applied and executed upon. And certainly, you know, here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, are giggling, but also crying about a keyboard, you know, text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey replacement. And so you do need to apply all this machine learning at some juncture. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the academic R&D stuff seems like they might be keeping up, maybe even making
⏹️ ▶️ John The historic complaint about all their this type of academic research and stuff at Apple is that academics
⏹️ ▶️ John want to publish because it’s vital for their continued career as an academic. And Apple doesn’t want you
⏹️ ▶️ John to publish. And so the fact that they’re presenting this is it may be a change in, And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a slight lessening of apples, incredible drive for secrecy that you can’t get the best
⏹️ ▶️ John academics to come work for you if you won’t let them do stuff like this because it’s vital for their career to be able to do this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t just take them and hide them away like they do with the industrial designers who johnny I’ve only lets out once a year
⏹️ ▶️ John and the rest of the time they spend in that room they sleep under black sheets right and then in the morning they just come out anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s difficult to get people to work for you if you do that. Google has a much more open environment. Google is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the leader in this because they have so many freaking PhDs and
⏹️ ▶️ John they put the stuff to use in the magic that is every Google thing that you just type something into and it figures out what
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell you mean. I mean, Google search being the best example, I, I still, it is still not worn off to me
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can type in queries and Google finds results. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I’ve long since gotten past the point where I, where I can even understand how Google figured out what I was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John and gave me the thing I wanted. But it’s like it’s the magic of big data. It’s the magic of you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing it for real. Um, and Apple, all we have from them to demonstrate their chops to Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has its ups and downs, but charitable. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not no one, no one except someone who works for Apple is going to put it
⏹️ ▶️ John as the leader in this. They’re all kind of silly. All those voices are kind of silly, but Siri had such a lead and everyone caught up
⏹️ ▶️ John really quickly and Google just seems to be on top of this stuff. So I hope I hope it’s true that Apple is doing it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is table stakes in the future to have competency in this area. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has to just be doing this just to keep up. I don’t know if this means that there’s something going to be the leader in it or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like they’re learning what it takes to attract those people to come work for Apple and put them on
⏹️ ▶️ John projects. And hopefully, like Casey says, something comes out of it. Like you have to make a product
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually doing this research is important. And if you don’t do research you’ll never be able to make a product
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re in that phase now with machine learning where it’s not commoditized at this point you have to have your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in-house to do it it just I’m not entirely sure that the best
⏹️ ▶️ John application of all this technology is self-driving car tech which seems to be the path they’re going which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a hard problem and someone’s gonna be first and maybe it will be Apple and maybe they’ll be known as the company that puts
⏹️ ▶️ John self-driving software into all of our cars but for now we just have rumors and
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of money spent and, uh, you know, no announced
⏹️ ▶️ John anything from Apple and all this stuff could be canned at any time, uh, or use for
⏹️ ▶️ John something used for an entirely different purpose like, you know, Google goggles or some other weird AR thing. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So from this article, machine learning scientists have long criticized Apple for its reluctance to contribute back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the research community during the presentation, which served to bring a small select group of researchers up to speed with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey efforts. individual Salikha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hindov, I’m sorry, I didn’t practice that before the show because I didn’t know I was going to be talking about this. A prominent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI researcher himself at Carnegie Mellon said that Apple would begin to publish its research and make a greater effort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work with the research community, according to attendees. Just like you said, John. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oliver Cameron, who is self-describing as the lead of the self-driving car team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Udacity had a series of five tweets, which we’ll put in the show notes, which begins with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him saying, hey, this article, this court’s article deserves more attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He says, Apple’s clearly 1000% working on autonomous vehicles powered by machine learning. See
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volumetric detection of LIDAR in that slide. They may be building custom GPUs for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machine learning, perhaps only internally. They also have a custom image data set twice the size of ImageNet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m not entirely clear what that is, but I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John public set of images for training neural networks to recognize things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Thanks. They benchmarked, they benchmarked MXNet, which is Amazon’s framework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of choice on their GPUs and custom image data set and not TensorFlow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So TLDR, this is again, still Oliver TLDR, the new Apple is catching up fast and machine learning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is from someone who theoretically doesn’t have any vested interest in saying such things.
⏹️ ▶️ John this phrase as catching up fast not vaulting to the lead or leaving the competition behind but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is it is the minimum bar that you have to meet because it’s so clear that this type of technology
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming to the point where it can do useful things um and if you don’t have this capability
⏹️ ▶️ John in-house if you just wait around until it becomes like until until amazon is essentially vending
⏹️ ▶️ John the seventh version of this as part of their web services offering or whatever like it until it becomes commoditized
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a big advantage to be able to do it in-house and in some respects like this is part of the thing that made google
⏹️ ▶️ John into google is they they had a good idea for a search algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ John and they eventually were faced with the problem of scale of how to build their data centers and you know how to do all this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and they did a lot of stuff in-house that for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John gave google abilities that other companies didn’t have to scale
⏹️ ▶️ John out to worldwide data centers to give good performance to everybody to do these really complicated things right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had to build a lot of that in house. And I had to figure all this out. And eventually, it started to become commoditized
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where Google itself is vending some of its cloud services. And of course, Amazon has its web services,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so many things are built on that. And so now it is no longer really a competitive advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least not as big as it used to be to be really good at setting up your data centers and having a strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, redundancy and being close to everybody in the world and dealing with large volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John of of data because it’s been figured out enough that if you want to get off the ground, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John bootstrap yourself onto one of these things and not not have to have this in house. But machine learning is still
⏹️ ▶️ John the point where if you want to do this, you want to participate in this at all. You have to do it in house because nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John has got it figured out and commoditized to the point where it’s no longer an advantage. So Apple has to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft has to do is Google has to do it. And Amazon, you know, they all have to do it. Um, and Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John for that matter. Uh, and it’s kind of a, you might think it’s like, oh, isn’t like duplication of effort, but that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John called competition. So they all have to be doing it. And if, if Apple wasn’t doing it, we should
⏹️ ▶️ John be really concerned. So there’s degrees like if they weren’t doing it at all, we should be super concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’re concerned about now is okay, they’re doing it, but are they doing it well enough to keep up with the big boys? And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like probably Yeah, but again, the proof will be in the products,
⏹️ ▶️ John they may be keeping up with the basic race here research. But when does that translate into making
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri better? You know, Or is this all just for self driving car tech? Because that’s that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John big bet. You know, even the bet that Apple will be involved in all of that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like Apple’s not making its own car. And if people who do make cars don’t want Apple’s technology, then
⏹️ ▶️ John all Apple’s work is pointless. Because if the car companies don’t want it, you know, Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want it, Honda doesn’t want it, Ford don’t want it, right? Then who is the customer for this? Apple will have this great self
⏹️ ▶️ John driving car technology, and they can use the power like the shiny white go karts that you use to go around the spaceship campus. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like that’s it. You gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John get this into a car. And if you’re not gonna make a car, you better convince somebody that they should buy your thing instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, because it’s not like the car companies are sitting on their hands waiting for a technology company to offer them
⏹️ ▶️ John self-driving tech. Like they’re not waiting on Apple. They’re all doing their own things. So, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, that concerns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me a little bit. So which Mac do you think the, all this like AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and GPU development, Which Mac are the people using who are developing those? I’m sure they’re doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on PCs. You don’t think they’re doing it on a MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if they are building their own custom GPUs, then it’s like rack-mounted servers. It’s not like they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John XSERVs or whatever. But as they’re sitting in front of their computers, you know, at a certain point when you’re doing research,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you’re using is a fancy terminal window to connect to the bigger computers where all the real action’s happening. True. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine that’s the case. Because you’re not connecting to a computer. It’s like, you know, the giant Mesos
⏹️ ▶️ John clusters or whatever. So it doesn’t really matter. They could be using a MacBook One.
⏹️ ▶️ John The computing power of the thing you’re sitting in front of doesn’t matter as much. Well, they are typing, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they are typing. But I don’t know, maybe they have people to do that. Isn’t that what graduate students are for? The typing? Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Pingdom, Automatic, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment. and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm, And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so
Post-show: Not complaining about Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got nothing for the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I still haven’t watched a new Top Gear episode 2 because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you told me not to
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you totally bummed me out for watching it. Did you watch three?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not yet So are you suggesting that I skip to and watch the rest of the season and then go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and watch you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss out on all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually a little bit of continuity as it turns out but But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re pressed for time and or don’t want to get briefly depressed, skip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode two. And then episode three, actually, I think has been mostly a return to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s right in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the only podcast where I’m not talking about Westworld because I guess neither one of you are watching it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. That’s a show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, hard to believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a game or a movie. Yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should. Don’t you have? Yeah, you have the HBO thing. You should you and Tim might want to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John the season’s over it’s all 10 episodes are sitting there waiting for you to see it there’s not gonna be a new season for like a year so sometime during the
⏹️ ▶️ John winter if you’re bored and want to try a new show I don’t know I go this is not really up your guys alley but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I thought it was science
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fiction I’ll try
⏹️ ▶️ John it it is it’s sci-fi
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well it’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work the main problem is that anything on HBO go right now we basically can’t watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Apple TV app for HBO go has decided to just not work anymore like that’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John so you that’s why you were air playing from your iPad before when you mentioned it right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s why that is because the Apple TV thing doesn’t work. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh man the Apple TV is such a mess. I don’t want to complain anymore about Apple stuff today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m just if you don’t have anything nice to say you don’t say it at all. So I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be talking about the Apple TV in this after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love mine. Mine works great. Now I don’t I don’t do terribly complex things with it but Plex works great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The photos like screensaver works great. The screensaver works great? That’s it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m serious. No I’m serious because it doesn’t on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a nice screensaver. I’ve got that. Hey, we can get that out of the show notes. It’s been in the show notes for what,
⏹️ ▶️ John I deleted it. Did I delete it? Yeah. I had in the top of our document for
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe two years, maybe more, a link to be able to download the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mac OS version
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of the Apple TV screensaver, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is really cool looking. You realize when you see it on a 5K screen all the all the movies and images are
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough resolution. Like they look great on your TV, but they don’t look great on your 5k iMac. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a cool screensaver. And if you want to have that screensaver on your Mac, and why wouldn’t you, it is available someone
⏹️ ▶️ John like ported it, like ripped it out of the Apple TV and ported it to GitHub, because it’s really just a matter of getting the correct URLs
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull the movies down and then having them you know, just, you know, play on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if we can resurrect that link and put in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the habit, I have it. It’s called Arial, I think. Yep. Yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s actually not what I was talking about on the Apple TV. I was talking about the thing where you point it at a photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What am I trying to say the in a shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John album, your photo library from photos, you can see your kids and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And that works great. Now that being said this aerial screensaver, that’s what I use on my work computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Real time follow up the chat room has informed me that I have HBO now not HBO Go.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know, I’ve given up correcting you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just auto corrected in your head at that point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so whichever HBO thing I have doesn’t work anymore on the Apple TV, and so I’m not really sure why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m paying for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Installing and uninstalling and rebooting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I haven’t tried reinstalling yet. Turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow. Oh God. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want things to work. Why is this so much to ask? It’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have all this new stuff, I just wish it worked better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you just used the new single sign-on feature. and it’ll work fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it supports so many providers. Honestly, though, I wish, I keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Apple TV because I have tried the other things before. I’ve tried the Amazon whatever. I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little Roku whatever. I haven’t tried the Google thing yet because I like real remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls and don’t use Android, so it kind of doesn’t offer a whole lot for me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other things are worse, and that’s why I keep using the Apple TV because the Apple TV really is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what’s out there for many things that I want. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just wish it was better than it is. Like, it’s, ugh. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, when I pick up the remote, when we haven’t used it in a few hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why does it not respond immediately? Why does the remote take like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 15 seconds before swiping back and forth on the trackpad actually works?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what, maybe it’s asleep to save power when am I using it? But like, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long does it take to wake up? Why, when it boots up, does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seem like it’s been asleep the entire time and has literally updated nothing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything ever? It’s plugged into the wall. It can update whenever it wants,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t. Why, when it wakes up, does it always tell me there’s no internet connection?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though there always is. It’s hardwired. It always has an internet connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, I just, I don’t understand why this product is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it is. And it’s frustrating, just like many of Apple products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s frustrating that it has these flaws because it is still the best in the market for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still like it better than the alternatives, so I’m going to keep using it. I just wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was better. And it seems like really basic stuff. The design of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote aside, I’ve already worn that to death, But like, why doesn’t it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work better? Why do I occasionally have to reboot it? It makes no sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have these kind of shortcomings in this kind of product in this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember when Marco wasn’t gonna complain about Apple TV. Do you remember
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that, Casey? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do remember that. I do remember that fondly. That was a wonderful moment. Seems so long ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m known for changing my mind. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey man, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I have the same feelings about it. I can say one good thing, and you’re mentioning the Apple TV remote,
⏹️ ▶️ John one good thing about the Apple TV remote, that battery life is amazing. Like, this is not a big
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John The battery can’t be that big in there. I’m trying to think, I think I’ve plugged it in to charge it
⏹️ ▶️ John once, ever, for this Apple TV. Like, one time ever in my entire life.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I have the big Apple TV, like the one that’s too tall. So, whenever that came out, I bought it exactly when it came out,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I plugged it in once. So, that’s good. Everything else you said, you know, is totally true. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ John my apps all work on the Apple TV for the most part. I still have the same problem of like, waking it up,
⏹️ ▶️ John and why does it take so long, and why is it not on all the time, and like, you know, all those things
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, but, and also I’m constantly cleaning the gross stuff from my kids’ fingers off of that
⏹️ ▶️ John track pad, because my kids are gross. But, yeah, when it plays video successfully,
⏹️ ▶️ John I consider it a victory, and I just, you know, walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But do you, is it just me, do you guys have these problems with yours?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mine, like, I have like, you know, sometimes it will get like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t play your iTunes video because of some, like, whatever weird iTunes server error.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I get the sluggishness in that it’s not reacting to my things and stuff like that, but for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John it plays video eventually and plays it through successfully without dying in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want like when it’s being non-responsive or when it’s being seemingly very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily loaded with background tasks, like what is it doing? Because like it doesn’t support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background operation of apps. It has a few things where like you can like refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain feeds for things that appear like in the carousel up top and everything, but it’s really very few of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s fairly decent iOS hardware inside there, running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice stripped-down version of iOS software that doesn’t have a whole lot to do, and it’s plugged into the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has a constant internet connection so it can do things whenever it wants to in the background. I just, I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s doing, why?
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume it’s File.io, because anything I can blame on HFS+, I will, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gotta be File.io, because it doesn’t have fast storage. Like, the storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s flash storage, but it’s not fast flash storage. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and because HMS plus is still single threaded and only one process can be access, you know, writing to the files system at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a potential bottleneck. And if you’ve seen anything having to do with iOS devices, like when, if you hit update all on a bunch of apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you’re still an old person, you manually update your apps like I do, you know, that will cripple
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone. You know, like you can let it update stuff, but as it’s doing anything having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with like pulling down things and messing with your file system, everything is going to be super slow
⏹️ ▶️ John during that time. So that’s my guess for what it’s doing. Like what it’s doing in the background is doing something having to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of file IO and that just bogs everything down. I guess. APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John will fix all this for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just, I just wish it was better. Again, like why, why is this not better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco better. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not working on it, Marco. No, I occasionally have a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of unresponsiveness from the remote when I first grab it, but I’ve taken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, and to me, I don’t find this as unreasonable, but I presume that Marco, you’re gonna find this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely egregious. I just mash down on the, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey track pad or the home button, either one. I tend to click the track pad because it’s a bigger target, but yeah, the home button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the track pad, I’d smash down on that like five or six times. And then as the TV, the Apple TV is starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, and usually as my TV is also starting up, which although I have a fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, like it’s a reasonable TV, but it takes an eternity to turn on. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’m waiting for all these things to turn on, usually the remote is woken up. There’s been a couple of occasions where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it hasn’t, or maybe the remote has gone into sleep mode before the Apple TV has. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mash on a button for a second, it starts working. Like I don’t really have any problems. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps I typically use on my Apple TV are Plex, which is probably 90% of the time. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an AirPlay receiver for Spotify, a not unreasonable amount of time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Netflix. And for those uses, which admittedly, I’m not trying to say these are terribly complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses, But for those uses, works pretty darn reliably for me. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the big one because it was a gift from Erin and she wasn’t sure if I would want the bigger one or the smaller one. I doubt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes a difference, but for what it’s worth, I do have the higher capacity one. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I mean, it definitely has problems from time to time, but generally I found it works great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do the same thing with, when I know I’m gonna be watching on Apple TV, the first thing I do is I hit
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button on the Apple TV, not that it appears I expected to do anything. like the little one that looks like the TV button,
⏹️ ▶️ John but because it will turn the Apple TV on. So I do that first, then I turn my TV on, then every time I receive
⏹️ ▶️ John it on, don’t tell me about you know those remotes, I’m turning into Casey here, I know all about them. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then everything is
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially ready at the same time, but I have developed that habit, because if I do it the other way and get everything all turned
⏹️ ▶️ John on and then switch to the Apple TV input and then grab the Apple TV remote, the Apple TV is asleep. And my
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV is plugged into the wall like everyone else’s, it’s connected to gigabit ethernet, I would love for it to be doing more.
⏹️ ▶️ John My PlayStation 4, both of them, will download entire multi-gigabyte games
⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re quote unquote off, like the fan is not spinning, right? It’s still plugged in, it’s still in its sleep mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John but while it’s in its sleep mode, it will download game updates for me, it will charge my controller. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing so much more work for me than that stupid puck that apparently does nothing until I turn it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should also note that when I grab my Apple TV remote and the TV is off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI CEC, I almost at C and C as in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. The music factory. The point being I mash down on the button and then the TV turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself on. Now I will I will say that the TV does not always switch to the right input, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 99% reliability, the TV does indeed turn itself on when the Apple TV comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a special snowflake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, this is what’s frustrating is like this stuff works like 90% of the time. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s really frustrating that it’s not 100% and I know it’s really hard I know it’s really complicated but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like certain things that don’t work just seem like they really should like the responsiveness of the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the remote like that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John Lot of is the trackpad itself. I always feel like it would be more responsive But part of it is the awkwardness of swiping that little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It just doesn’t feel like That’s why I often use it as a d-pad. I don’t do the swiping
⏹️ ▶️ John I will hit that will click the edges which is in itself is a strange motion but I find it
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it more reliable that I know I’ve done the motion then especially like up and down flicking with
⏹️ ▶️ John like your thumb and it’s it I don’t know I’m I’m not a trackpad person at all and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I feel like a disconnection between them between those motions and the thing even just
⏹️ ▶️ John like whoever came up with the idea that selection state is going to be represented by
⏹️ ▶️ John by making some of the rectangles bigger I don’t think it’s a particularly successful idea because very often
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to double check you know by looking at the screen to make sure the rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is selected selected like a big honking blue outline would certainly be uglier and less elegant but it would let
⏹️ ▶️ John me know better than and you know it’s obvious in a screenshot like you can’t tell what’s selected look at this
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle it’s poking out in front of everything else is overlapping them clearly it’s the one that’s selected but it’s it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious enough I think to you know like the elegance benefit of it and the aesthetic benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John is outweighed by the the usability thing I wish I wish there was more of like a glow
⏹️ ▶️ John or a prominence about it and then when I’m trying to use the swiping to move around to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Netflix app or whatever overshooting and having to go back one is definitely a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s frustrating and I don’t like hitting the d-pad going left left left down down down that’s frustrating too
⏹️ ▶️ John because I see it and I could just I can get it with a mouse instantly and if it was a touchscreen I could touch it immediately having to go
⏹️ ▶️ John left left left down down is a pain but at least I can count the number of less than the number of downs and I know I’ll land on it having
⏹️ ▶️ John to go swipe is the bottom of the barrel where I have to go swipe swipe swipe down down but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how many times I have to swipe because momentum may bring me over and then I have to correct and it’s just not a pleasant experience
⏹️ ▶️ John um and when I talk into the remote like I’ve almost given up on that because Siri really frustrates me and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like when are you ready for me to talk Siri and they keep changing it like oh it’s always listening just start talking
⏹️ ▶️ John but often I start talking then it goes boom in the middle of me talking and I know it’s not it didn’t catch half of what
⏹️ ▶️ John I said and when I tried talking to the remote I hold down the microphone button and oh I never always wonder when it’s safe
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to talk do I have to wait for the little rainbow colored thing to show up can I start talking now and very often it takes two
⏹️ ▶️ John or three tries and it’s often still better than the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco alternative of navigating to
⏹️ ▶️ John an app but yeah I’m ready for the next version that I’ll keep buying these apples
⏹️ ▶️ John use the same reason you do oh the other reason I have that Marco perhaps doesn’t is I’m essentially out of inputs at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So if I want to try something else, I have to evict something. And I’ve locked myself into the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ecosystem with all the iTunes like movies and stuff that I bought. So I have to have an Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m going to keep buying them. And I’m ready to buy a new one anytime Apple wants to make it better