213: Siri in a Can
16 Mar 2017YouTube TV, Ryzen, HomeKit, and the cylinder business.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: A friendly bet for January 1, 2018
- Follow up:
- Windows on iPad (for example, Blackboard)
- Steve Troughton-Smith's Floating Keyboard Playground
- Apple in Education
- Apple's HomeKit Promo Website & Video
- YouTube TV (Verge Writeup)
- Intel goes 14nm again
- AMD Ryzen
- Xeon Gold
- Tim Cook's tease at the shareholders meeting
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Initital thoughts on the Nintendo Switch
Sponsored by:
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi, that works.
- Betterment: Investing made better.
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- Intro: The Bet
- Follow-up: Windowed apps
- Follow-up: Tiny keyboards
- Follow-up: Apple in education
- Sponsor: Eero
- Apple HomeKit promo
- The Old Man Portion
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- YouTube TV
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Intel goes PAOO
- AMD Ryzen
- An Apple rant, sorry 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Switchae
Intro: The Bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re gonna have this exact same conversation about the goddamn Mac Pro whenever that gets refreshed. We’re gonna have much
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation. It’s not gonna be a new Mac Pro, it’s just gonna be a fancier iMac. It’ll be a short conversation. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll buy one anyway and that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I agree with most of what you just said except it’ll be a short conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, thank you, Marco. Completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll last a show or two. I’m just saying. It’s not like we’re gonna be obsessing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. A show or two? It’ll last a month or two.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I guess what we’ll do is we’ll go back to talking about the Mac Pro And they’re like, okay, fine. So they did this
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac thing, but now let’s complain more about why they should actually do a real Mac pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remember when they used to sell a professional computer 15 shows later. So I think we finally
⏹️ ▶️ John But we won’t be talking about the iMac. The iMac pro will be, we’ll take care of in a show or two.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, and then one more show when we all get ours, but then mostly we’ll go back to complaining about it. Seriously, you’re not really
⏹️ ▶️ John making the Mac pro anymore, especially if they don’t say they’re not making it and they keep selling the old one. That’ll be awesome. I come up with the new iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John at WVDC and it’s got a Z on it, but they keep selling the old Mac Pro and be like, what are you doing? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your head? Here’s a question. Do you think on January 1st, 2018, the 2013 Mac Pro will still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be for sale? No, absolutely not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would if I had to pick, I would vote no, but it’s not as big of a it’s not as sure of a thing as
⏹️ ▶️ John I would hope it would be as I think about it. You want to bet five bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not betting you any money. I’m guessing January 1st, 2018, it’s still for sale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll take your $5 bet. Yeah, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a deal. Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s close. That’s why it’s an interesting bet. Because I think they’ll introduce an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and they’ll be like, and this is the replacement for the Mac Pro. That’s how I think it will be positioned. It will finally give them
⏹️ ▶️ John cover to can that stupid machine, to can the can.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So my primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet is that is that it this is still for sale that the 2013 trash can Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still for sale on January 1st. My secondary bet which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess I will probably won’t put money on, but my secondary bet is that during the entire year of 2017 they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t actually address this issue publicly. They won’t even say anything of substance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about any kind of future pro hard pro desktop hardware that basically like this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year will come and go with no changes to the Mac Pro in either the product line or in announcements.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what if they if they make an iMac Pro does that count as them saying something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think only if they discontinue the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what if they say this is our new vision for hardware blah blah blah but then also keep selling it for the same reason they keep selling everything
⏹️ ▶️ John because somebody somewhere wants to buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I’d still win the primary bet in that case. The secondary bet of whether they like have done this I guess would depend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like it’d be a little bit vague it’d be like is Is it just like the same processor lines like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like the Intel like 6700 K whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John it has the word pro in the name like it’s clear what they’re talking about is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know but if it’s still pretty much an iMac like it would need like a zion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s like and not an e3 the e3 does not count as a zion
⏹️ ▶️ John is there an eight core is there an eight core non-zeon intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the in the future I think tips are said a while but like one of the various lakes coffee or whatever one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those they’re supposed to be a six core variant in the series. But if there is like a quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro, but it still has the same consumer processor line, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco count to me. That’s just an iMac. And yet, because the iMac is fine. The iMac is great. I’m using one now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of reasons to have an iMac. But they can tack Pro on the end and sell it in space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray and charge more. But if it doesn’t have a Xeon E5 in there, that’s not a Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will argue about it later, but I’m going to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You MacPro’d him out, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yep, I am tuckered out on the MacPro. It doesn’t take much to be fair. it
Follow-up: Windowed apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as always, we start with follow-up and Lucas Gosen-Gusen. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to look these up before I record. That’s okay though. Lucas G,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he cited an existing app, and we are not going to name that app, that is currently on the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store that actually has overlapping windows. And Colin Allen also wrote in to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when he was working at Blackboard, they shipped a multi-window iPad app with gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, this is a long time ago from what I can tell. So in Alan’s defense, this UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was modern at the time. Looking at it now is mildly alarming. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are things that are multi-window on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that exist either in the past or today. So does that change how you feel about things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any way, shape or form, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because everyone knows there’s always things on the App Store that violate guidelines. Like that’s the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of the App Store guidelines. If you try to say, if you try I did a little kid thing, but why did my sister get to have
⏹️ ▶️ John lollipop? Like, it’s just, yes, there are going to be applications that
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow got by that didn’t get flagged and yours gets flagged. Like your argument is always with, with the rule system and
⏹️ ▶️ John not with like people who happen to have skated by it. I mean, pick a guideline. I guarantee you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple applications in the app star that violate that guideline. That’s just the way it is. But anyway, I like seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John these examples of applications that actually shipped in this way. and the world didn’t come to an end.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, apparently, it was not a UI paradigm. It was copied by lots of other applications. So I’m not quite sure how successful
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, but I like the idea that a few of them snuck through. I like this better than the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of millions of apps that send you spam push notifications Sneaking through, quote
Follow-up: Tiny keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then a friend of the show, Stephen Troughton-Smith, has put together a Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Playground that will let you try the floating keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an iPad. So you would use the Swift Playgrounds app on the iPad and run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the code that he has put on GitHub, I believe. I intended to try this and then completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgot about it. But anyway, you can download this, drop it in Swift Playgrounds, and give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a shot. Have either of you tried this? Nope. See, I really wish I had, but it slipped my
⏹️ ▶️ John John? This is what they get for adding anything resembling a programming environment to iOS because
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s like, you know what you can do with a programming language? You can write programs. And you know what those programs
⏹️ ▶️ John do? They execute on your device without going app review, just as if I had uploaded them from Xcode. But I don’t have to do that because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have Xcode. I just run this Playgrounds file. And so this is all of Apple’s worst fears coming true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, selector swizzling and private APIs. What will happen? Nothing will happen, is the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. the answer. I suppose you could probably you think you could probably you know trigger
⏹️ ▶️ John a bug to you know I guess you could crash the app obviously but uh well
⏹️ ▶️ John crashing playgrounds may not be such an achievement but could you bring that could you bring down the whole os
⏹️ ▶️ John by uh finding some kind of bug or doing something nasty to it anyway uh
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what programming is and this is this is a fun way for people to try it to see if this little keyboard is worth anything
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of weird because you’d want to use it with thumbs like you would on a phone but you can’t reach
⏹️ ▶️ John it with both your thumbs on an iPad like that’s the whole deal that it is a tiny little floating keyboard that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can move where you want it to where you want to put it so it can be out of the way and not take up so much screen space
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t type on it with two thumbs uh there’s no maybe if you put it in the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John i don’t know there’s no way to use it there’s no way to use it like you use it on your phone although i know a lot of people myself included who
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently type with a single thumb on the on their phones you ever do that where where your
⏹️ ▶️ John one hand is occupied and you’re texting something with a single thumb, it’s, I’m okay at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I wish I was. The swipe keyboards, I haven’t used one in a while. In fact, I just took that keyboard off my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I use it so rarely. But the swipe style keyboards, and I think Google’s keyboard, Gboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it’s called supports this. The swipe style keyboards are very good for one-handed use, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find that I don’t use it often enough that I just made it go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I might have the, I have inappropriate thumb friction for a swipe keyboard because every time I try them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t find the right balance of enough pressure to be swiping correctly, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not too much pressure that I’m like scrubbing my thumb against the, like it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to tap. I’m not a swiper. I remember seeing demos of this keyboard, like, wow, this is awesome. Look at that little
⏹️ ▶️ John line darting from key to key. But then when it comes time for my big meaty thumb to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hopeless. So more power to you if it works for you, but I cannot get the swiping to work for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know what to make about this.
Follow-up: Apple in education
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should just move on. John, can you tell us about Apple in education?
⏹️ ▶️ John Got a lot of feedback from people, basically people in education, people who are either teachers or school administrators
⏹️ ▶️ John or people who do IT in education. I tried to pull a few
⏹️ ▶️ John salient points out because a lot of people had very complicated detailed stories about their one situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m trying to generalize here. So one theme I saw in a lot of the email was the recent
⏹️ ▶️ John in recent years push for one device per student, which was not a thing when any of us were in school, like that
⏹️ ▶️ John not just in the super rich schools, but then in all schools, the ideal is when we’re gonna buy any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of computing hardware for students, we wanna have one for every single student, which was just not an option
⏹️ ▶️ John in our days, because you’d have a computer lab and each classroom would have one iMac or two iMacs
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that, one computer for every student, and that wasn’t really feasible when computers came
⏹️ ▶️ John with gigantic CRTs and took up a huge amount of room, but now that they’re all really small and portable
⏹️ ▶️ John and cheaper, you can pull that off. So the one device per student accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John for an increase in overall volume of computing things that schools buy, which is good for
⏹️ ▶️ John good for Google in this case, because they’re, they’re selling most of them. We had one report
⏹️ ▶️ John of technology getting more funding than like, less sexy areas, like music
⏹️ ▶️ John and arts, which are you know, perennially and perennially underfunded, because tech is sexy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think one of you brought this up in the last show, like the idea that there’s money to buy computer-y stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John because everyone agrees that computers are the future and our kids need computers and like, I mean, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re the present now, but when we were kids it was like, oh, everyone’s gonna learn computers because it’s the future and if we get computers
⏹️ ▶️ John in our school everyone feels good about it even though we’re not entirely sure if these computers make education better in any possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way, but hey, at least kids will know computers. There’s still some of that in there and that it’s exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the kids in your school to you know get iPads or get laptops or anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ John and we had a couple of people tell us that although Apple no longer makes education
⏹️ ▶️ John only models like the big ugly tooth and the
⏹️ ▶️ John eMac the eMac and stuff like that they do have special configurations of existing devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that like you can’t buy in the store but only available for education and they also do a thing where they They continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell devices in education even after they’re no longer for sale to consumers. I think the last time I
⏹️ ▶️ John remember them doing that in a big way was the iPad 2. It was like gone for everybody but education could still buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re still trying to do what they can to give education, there’s no real nice way
⏹️ ▶️ John to say this, but like the cheaper, crappier models. Even the
⏹️ ▶️ John education only models, how are they different from the regular ones? They were cheaper, which is important, but they were also crappier
⏹️ ▶️ John because how do you get them cheaper? make them crappier and it always struck me as like a
⏹️ ▶️ John weird bargain because do you want to give a RAM starved
⏹️ ▶️ John computer to a school? Is a school the best equipped to wrangle
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer that is constantly running out of RAM especially in the bad old days without even any virtual memory
⏹️ ▶️ John on Macs or without a good virtual memory system anyway? That’s less of a concern these days but just
⏹️ ▶️ John to down spec so badly and then put those machines into an environment where
⏹️ ▶️ John the people available to like baby them and coax every ounce of performance out of them. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that they don’t have time for that. It’s much better to give them a computer that sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John works without anyone having to mess with it. And if you decontent a computer to
⏹️ ▶️ John use car parlance, that’s a bad situation, but that’s what they want. They want it to be as cheap as possible. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will make them very cheap models. And now Apple will keep selling you devices long after no person should ever
⏹️ ▶️ John be using them but I
⏹️ ▶️ John schools will. I mean again I look at like the laptop cart in my kids elementary school filled
⏹️ ▶️ John with ice books. How old are those? How old is that you know the white plastic iBook? That’s an old machine. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a great machine when it was available and apparently it was good for education because they aren’t all dead
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t know how sturdy I mean I’m assuming they’re all like terribly yellowed and stained and gross from you
⏹️ ▶️ John know kids touching them because it was plastic but um like you know computers last as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as until they break, because why would you get rid of them? And they could just continue to try to find
⏹️ ▶️ John something useful to do with them. And on that front, by the way, in terms of tech funding and everything, I live
⏹️ ▶️ John in a place full of rich people, and we have high taxes and we vote
⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves. We have like the laws in the books to say we can’t raise taxes more than X percent per year. And every
⏹️ ▶️ John year they have a vote to say, if you really want to raise taxes on yourself, vote for this. And every year we vote for it to like
⏹️ ▶️ John to bypass the thing to raise our taxes even more and despite all that our public
⏹️ ▶️ John schools you go into them and and you know from the standards of my own childhood they are woefully
⏹️ ▶️ John underfunded in every single aspect large class sizes facilities all falling apart
⏹️ ▶️ John the vast majority of the computing technology that arrives in the school on a yearly basis is paid for entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the pocket of parents giving money to the school like voluntarily themselves just
⏹️ ▶️ John funding like that so that’s more that says more about the state of public education funding
⏹️ ▶️ John in in our country than it does about uh… things in tech but
⏹️ ▶️ John comparing it to my childhood when there was like a computer lab with a small number of computers and like my my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John uh… experience in school where there are more computers but that all of them had to be bought by the rich parents of the
⏹️ ▶️ John students who go to the school it certainly doesn’t seem like we are in an age
⏹️ ▶️ John where It is accepted that schools will have like one device per student. Everyone will have at least an elementary
⏹️ ▶️ John school will have computers for everyone available. It’s like, oh, you’ll have computers if you live in a place where all the parents have enough disposable income
⏹️ ▶️ John to each give hundreds of dollars to the school each year. It’s the same way we got a new playground, by the way. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John collect money from all the rich parents. And you know, we’re glad to do it because our kids are going there and we have the money and we pay for it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like the wrong way to fund public education. Anyway, that’s I’m really off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny. I probably have told the story once before, but to just reiterate how terrible public education is even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in relatively affluent areas, I grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which at the time, because of other areas of the county, was I believe the most affluent county
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the entire country. I lived in a very unremarkable part of it, so it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite the same for me, but certainly it was a fairly homogeneous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively affluent area. And every year, probably about three quarters of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way through the year, our copier paper, our Xerox paper, was perforated in a very weird way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And curiously, every single page we got said Danbury Hospital Radiology Department
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the bottom of it. And that’s because the only way we could have copier paper, the only way we could afford it is if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the local hospital donated it to us. And it was, I guess, their leftover that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had perforated in a particular way for their particular use. But we just rolled with it because what other choice did we have?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And unlike you guys, who are, I guess, better than we were at the time, we would beg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to raise taxes, just the teeniest, littlest bit, to give the schools a little breathing room. And every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was shot down. And even as a kid, it drove me bananas. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’re only like a year away from dealing with this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, kindergarten starts this fall for our kid. So here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah. Have you, for
⏹️ ▶️ John preschool or for daycare, have you, have they, probably not because that’s like privately funded. But kindergarten,
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if this is like a nationwide thing or just in certain areas, I was surprised when I first could
⏹️ ▶️ John enter kindergarten that one of the things that teachers would ask for is paper towels
⏹️ ▶️ John and tissues and things like that. It seemed like staples of the classroom, like, hey parents,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I was a kid, when the teachers asked the parents for anything, it was, hey parents, have your kids bring in some canned
⏹️ ▶️ John food for a food drive for the needy, right? And my experience with my own
⏹️ ▶️ John children, it’s, hey, parents, please bring in boxes of tissues, because if you don’t, there will be no tissues in the classroom
⏹️ ▶️ John because we have no money for them. Which is like, seriously? Like, I’m these are not frills. That’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, we want to buy a fancy new iMac every year. It’s like, we need literal tissues for kids
⏹️ ▶️ John with boogery noses in kindergarten, and there is no money to pay for them. Like we can we can put a building that
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps the rain out and we can keep the temperature vaguely within human habitable range. But beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you’re on your own, so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s time for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John to pitch in and make sure that we have tissues and paper towels for kids in the class.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, teachers still buy a lot more than most people know or expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Teachers still buy these kind of supplies out of their own pocket. It’s kind of horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Teachers all know this, and families of teachers all know this, but most people don’t. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sad. It’s not like teachers are paid a lot to begin with. So like you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these jobs that are already not paid what they’re worth, and then you have the teachers having to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic supplies for their classroom out of their own pockets. That seems so incredibly wrong to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But for those that don’t know, Erin was a high school teacher in a reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affluent area of Richmond until she had Declan. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected that at all grade levels, every single teacher—and so this is every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high school teacher you have, will send home a list. And there was a term for it, and for the life of me, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember what the name of it was, but they would send home a list of supplies that every student was expected to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So every student was expected to bring Erin like one pack of tissues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and one set of like whiteboard markers because they didn’t have blackboards, they had whiteboards,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like a handful of other things. And this was not unusual. This was expected. And our schools,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as I can tell, are reasonably well-funded. I mean, it’s not the utter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disaster that is happening in many, many, many parts of the country. But even still, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so big a discrepancy between what teachers need and what teachers can provide and what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the schools can provide that they would have the parents bring all this stuff into. It was totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas, but it’s what they had to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero.
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Apple HomeKit promo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check it out today. Eero, E-E-R-O. Thank you very much to Eero for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a video that came out, I don’t know, at this point it was probably almost a month ago, maybe it was a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks ago at the very least. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP, bringing you cutting edge news. As we always do. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is at apple.com slash iOS slash home. There’ll be a link in the show notes. This is the home kit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like demo promo, commercially video thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched it once when it first came out and I haven’t seen it since, but the general gist of it was there’s a young woman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wakes up and, and has her breakfast, which is all automated and leaves the house, which is all automated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then eventually comes home, which is all automated and watches a movie, which is all automated and reads in bed, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess reading in bed. And then turns off her lights, which is automated and it’s all amazing and perfect in every way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as someone who doesn’t really do any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey robots in a cylinder sort of thing, this looked pretty impressive to me. It looked cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t say that I have the faith. I mean, I don’t know where I would even get a HomeKit powered thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As far as I’m concerned, they’re still all but vaporware. But apparently they exist because they’re all in this lady’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house. So I don’t know. There’s been a little bit of chatter about this. Do you want to tell us about it, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a tweet from Scott McNulty on Twitter. I’m not sure if he has all
⏹️ ▶️ John these devices. I know he’s got a million Kindles but I’m not sure if he has all those other stuff. But anyway, his tweet about it
⏹️ ▶️ John about this new website that Apple has to promote HomeKit was, nice website but the film just showcases to me how
⏹️ ▶️ John much easier it is to tell Alexa to do all the same things. Because the video shows for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part the person touching big rounded rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS devices whether they be iPads or phone to do things. There is hey
⏹️ ▶️ John good morning at the very beginning speaking to your phone that’s on your nightstand and having it set your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John up for the morning and also later speaking directly into the tiny horrible
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV remote to say okay it’s movie time to start a movie although I’m not quite sure what it does if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s movie time does it pick a random movie anyway those those are both examples
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew I shouldn’t have activated that thing that I just said, but I did activate it
⏹️ ▶️ John never had a Hawaii telephone enabled until very, very recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn… This is all stayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in, by the way. Oh, absolutely. This is totally
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway… Why do you turn that on?
⏹️ ▶️ John I turned it on to see if… I turned it on to… As an aside, I turned it on like a week or so ago because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, everyone else has this on on their phone and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco had it off for exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason you would think you would have it off because I never wanted it to accidentally activate. But very
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently, well, this gets to the point of this thing. I have a cylinder that listens to me in my home
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And I like the idea that I can just say things into the air and I’m like, you know what, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of relationship with my phone is just there waiting for me and I’ve been too stubborn by keeping this feature off since it
⏹️ ▶️ John was introduced and like literally never turning it and never even trying it because it just sounded awful to me. So I should
⏹️ ▶️ John really give it a chance. And in this week or two that I’ve had it on, I have used
⏹️ ▶️ John it consciously about once, and now I have triggered it accidentally once. That’s the first time I’ve ever accidentally triggered
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because what occasion do I have to say that with my phone nearby? But for this
⏹️ ▶️ John video, showing speaking not to the air,
⏹️ ▶️ John but to a device that you know is nearby, whether it’s a remote in your hand or a phone on your
⏹️ ▶️ John night stand is to me different than just
⏹️ ▶️ John yelling into the air, not yelling, or just speaking into the air the way you do with the cylinders. All the other things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John in this video, like a lot of using the home kit thing on control center,
⏹️ ▶️ John the third screen over or whatever the hell it is, maybe it’s the second, I don’t know, and pressing those rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ John to say I’m here, I’m doing this, I want to do that, change to this mode, which is fine, like it’s good to have
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons for all this stuff, but like Scott McDulty says in his tweet, anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who has cylinders that listen to you when you talk in the air, like that is the killer feature, to be able to just stroll
⏹️ ▶️ John around and just say something and have it do things, whether it’s asking it to set a timer or asking it what
⏹️ ▶️ John the weather’s gonna be tomorrow or telling it to turn lights on or off or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John phrases you enter into the thing, like just getting used to being able to say that. And even for our thing, like the stupid stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John of asking it how to spell things and multiply and divide numbers, like, or define things or
⏹️ ▶️ John say something in a particular language, I don’t have to wonder, is my phone in this room?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will it hear me from that distance? Will I be able to hear it? You know, or if multiple phones
⏹️ ▶️ John in the room and they all have that feature whose name I’m not going to say activated on it, will they all wake up and start trying to answer at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time and everything like that? The cylinders simplify all of this. And so this video, I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of feel the same way. This video basically says, hey, we at Apple have home automation. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John massively less convenient than the cylinders you talk to, but it exists. And if you like tapping buttons boys
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the thing for you and I feel like they’re really they’re really missing the boat on
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of home automation and it makes me think once again that as silly as these
⏹️ ▶️ John little cylinders are everyone who gets one ends up liking it for
⏹️ ▶️ John something like they end up liking it more than they thought they would because it certainly seems pretty dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John and even if they only use one tiny corner of the functionality that tiny corner functionality becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John an important part of their life. And that I think shows a successful product. So I think Apple not
⏹️ ▶️ John having something like this for such a long time, either because they’re coming up with the super duper
⏹️ ▶️ John uber awesome one that’s gonna be way better than everybody else’s and cost twice as much, or because they just think it’s a dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John idea, I think they’re missing the boat. And this website is like a giant advertisement for them missing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because as more people get these devices too, timing to the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of important here. there is a significant first mover advantage because once you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of these cylinders in your house from one of the brands that sells them, if Apple comes out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just a little bit better, no one’s going to buy it. It has to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively better to get people who have already bought into these systems to convert over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, I have the Amazon ecosystem. I have a short cylinder in my office and a tall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cylinder in the kitchen. When the Google Home came out, I heard what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people said about it. I was initially interested, but then once all the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out and basically said, like, yeah, it’s fine, it’s just about as good as the Amazon Echo, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively better or worse, it’s about the same. Better in some ways, worse in others, but about the same overall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I immediately lost any interest in ever trying it, because I thought, well, I already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, it’s all set up, I have all my integration set up. I’m habituated to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying its commands and using it to control stuff in my house and play music and stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why would I switch if the other thing is not massively better? And so if Apple comes out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their version of the Amazon Echo or Google Home or whatever else, and it’s Siri in a can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it has to be way, way better for me to care and for anyone who’s bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these devices to care. And I think the chances of that are just not that great. seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Siri actually is and has been today in the competitive landscape, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing Apple’s recent kind of accessory hardware in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the $200 range, like the Apple TV, or them killing the airport base stations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like seeing their efforts in this kind of area recently, it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill me with confidence that if they do one of these things, that it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively better than what we already have. So it’s probably just going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly the same, if not worse, and as you said, twice as expensive probably. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really see that going anywhere. I think the typical Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the pattern of sitting back and kind of waiting until everyone has like version two and then rolling out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amazing Apple one, that might not work here. I think that might just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be more like what we see with the Apple TV, which is some people buy it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the really devoted Apple fans buy it, but it doesn’t have mass market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco success because it’s just more expensive than everything else, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not better enough, and possibly even not better.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one thing by all accounts that Apple is doing better than its competitors is security. Like, being
⏹️ ▶️ John very careful about who they partner with and having very strict requirements on security and privacy, surely
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re better on privacy than Google and Amazon are. Although, there was that case where,
⏹️ ▶️ John that some some law enforcement agency was trying to subpoena audio recordings from Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John Echo or something and Amazon I think this was Amazon did fight them on it and said no you can’t have our stuff and they’re trying to like get
⏹️ ▶️ John get that audio classified in a way that it makes it not available without a warrant and all these other
⏹️ ▶️ John things right so but there are a lot of security implications to all these devices which at this point you just have to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John that you are compromising security in some way by using any of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple with HomeKit seems to be trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John avoid silly situations where a vendor integrates with you and does something
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely lax when it comes to security and you know has some obvious flaw
⏹️ ▶️ John that either makes devices in your houses into bot nets or into spy devices and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s good like good in general with Apple tends to be good on security and privacy but
⏹️ ▶️ John so far consumers have shown no willingness to value
⏹️ ▶️ John privacy in their purchase decisions. Like, that is not a differentiating, not enough of
⏹️ ▶️ John a differentiating factor, you know, even even in the phone space. Like, Apple is very
⏹️ ▶️ John good on privacy and security with its phones, but I don’t think that’s why people are buying iPhones. Like, they’re buying them because they like iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a nice to have and it’s a perk and or whatever, but like, people are voting with their wallets by
⏹️ ▶️ John buying, you name it, light bulbs, television, cylinders that you talk to with terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John security and privacy that like Literally intentionally spying you record everything you say and do
⏹️ ▶️ John and then sell it to people and everyone’s like, oh, well, whatever TV works Looks nice, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John like so it’s not that that’s how the market is working right now And what can you
⏹️ ▶️ John do if people don’t value it don’t value it? Do we need to change something for people to value it? Do we need a new
⏹️ ▶️ John generation of people in the aftermath of some terrible privacy related thing to deal with this? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John we just happy to leave it to the legal system to say like, well, people get hacked and hacking is illegal and
⏹️ ▶️ John if it happens, you know, someone will stop them, someone, someone, but blah, blah, blah, big sky theory, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one cares about what I’m doing anyway, so I’ll just buy this Vizio TV and get spied on or whatever it is, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s true, it’s true of the Google cylinder that I have, it’s probably true of the Amazon ones, and it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we accept it for the tradeoffs. Even Marco, famous paranoid privacy advocate who won’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John precompiled binaries into his application is willing to trade devices in his house
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly recording him for the convenience of saying something and have his lights go out at night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and to be fair I’m that I’m risking my own personal privacy with that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you know that’s very different from risking the privacy of my entire customer base of my
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re trading you’re trading the thing that you can’t trade but it’s like it seems like a fair trade to you’re like well no one really cares about me
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever and I get this convenience and you weigh them and like well convenience wins in this case
The Old Man Portion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t have any of these devices in the house, like I said earlier, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only interacted with them a couple of times, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I get it. Like, it’s neat, I suppose, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t, this is like the old man portion of the show, and I’m surprised it took us this long to get here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really see how getting up and walking a few paces to turn a light on is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Like, I know that makes me an old man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that makes me backwards and ridiculous. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t write a letter on a piece of paper and walk into the mailbox. Is the mailbox too far away? You
⏹️ ▶️ John got to have those electronic messages?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, no. I completely agree with you. And if the roles were reversed, I would be saying the exact same thing to you. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just this, I know I say this a lot and I’m always wrong. And so I’m sure this is another time, but this fills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a need that I don’t feel like I have. Fast forward to six months from now, I’m going to have probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Amazon cylinder, a Google cylinder, and maybe even an Apple cylinder. I’ll love all of them their own special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. There’ll be my, my, my children at that point, but sitting here now, I just, I, it, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no integration. There’s no thing that I, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can see today that makes me want one of them. And, and I bet you anything, if,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if one showed up at the house, I would end up loving it, but it’s just, it’s even this video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched it and thought, well, yeah, that’s cool, but I don’t. It’s not, it’s solving problems. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like any of those things where you don’t know you have the need until you have it and it’s not going to be like a life-changing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like the iPhone was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know But
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like everyone who has one like we use ours less than I thought I would because basically I was betting on Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Making their product better faster than they actually are So, oh well better me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if only you had friends who told you beforehand to pick the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I would use the other one anymore because I think it’s basically a wash at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco here’s here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you know because it does it is really good at the things that it does do but
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually once you realize these things are there and start to get into the mindset What
⏹️ ▶️ John was it like we’re sitting down ours is it within earshot? when we sit down to dinner and we’re sitting down
⏹️ ▶️ John dinner trying to think of Talking about some songs that someone heard and because I subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google Play Music music. Another reason, by the way, that I wouldn’t want an Apple one is that I would it would
⏹️ ▶️ John make me have to subscribe to Apple music to do what I’m about to describe. We’re having some discussion about a song
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can just say into the air I can just request into the air for that song to be played almost any song
⏹️ ▶️ John to be played. And it just starts playing it. Because we’re having a discussion of what the lyrics were and how it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John and the kids wanted to hear it and you know, one has to get up from the table or pull out their phone and try to search for the song.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just say something into the air before you you can even get your phone out of your pocket and the song is playing. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a weird future world thing that I think is awesome. And is it a big deal? And is it a need?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not. But for the $110 or whatever I pay for the stupid cylinder to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to say words into the air and have the song that I requested play immediately, I think that’s like worth the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of entry. Even if I only do that once every week and a half and the rest of the time my kids are just asking
⏹️ ▶️ John how to say things in foreign languages like this This is all bonus. Now, it’s not, again, not a life-changing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but once you get used to the idea that something is constantly listening in your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and can conceivably do things that you find useful, it’s hard to go back to the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that nothing is listening and you have to actually pick something up and hit it with your fingers, because there is a
⏹️ ▶️ John big difference in how it feels to do something. It’s kind of like the difference between how it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull out your phone and look something up versus how it would feel to get in your car and drive to the library and look something up.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, you know, it’s an exponential type thing where like obviously the library on is way longer
⏹️ ▶️ John than the looking at the phone. But now like how much how much longer is saying something into
⏹️ ▶️ John the air to your phone? It’s probably a couple seconds, a minute, but man, it feels it feels so
⏹️ ▶️ John different. And you just can’t go back to the other way. And if you wanted to go home,
⏹️ ▶️ John full home automation, everything and hook stuff up to it and do all stuff like that, that feel like you’re starting to get into tech
⏹️ ▶️ John gadget land at that point. But that can be awesome too, especially if it’s like a hobby, to have a house where you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John say things and have it do stuff and work with your rhythms. I think these devices
⏹️ ▶️ John can be enjoyed at many levels and as we said last time we discussed this, most importantly, they’re all freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap in the grand scheme of things. Like, they’re not $3, but they’re also not $2,000 like a new
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook, right? You can get one of these, you can buy all of these, you can put them around, what is the dot one? What is
⏹️ ▶️ John the short cylinder, Marco? It’s like 40 bucks. 40 bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really cheap. You can get one of these things, you know, on a whim just to see if you might
⏹️ ▶️ John like it and throw it somewhere. And if you never use it, you’re like, oh well, it’s $40. It’s like a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John meal for one person, like whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, to answer your earlier question, Casey, like, you know, you don’t see what, you know, why it would be a big deal to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have faster light switches or something. The answer is that there’s like one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gets most owners in the door. And for most people I’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to and been around and seen be converted, including myself, that one thing is music. It’s like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John said. It really is awesome to be able to just say, Alexa, play Fish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey work for all of our listeners. You did that on purpose, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible, terrible troll. Not the first time. And you can say, Hey, Cylinder, play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock music from the 90s. It’s just really, really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that. There’s a reason why places like Sonos are having trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Anything that is involved in the high-end audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scene for tech geeks that is not voice controlled is having problems right now. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get into the voice controlled music, it is so awesome. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re having friends over for dinner or something else and you just have it playing and you can just, and anybody can just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, next song or pause or volume up or whatever else, and, or people can call out their own requests. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fun. It becomes a cool, a pretty cool thing. The Echo is not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker. It’s only an okay speaker. Literally, like in my house, it is sitting right next to a Sonos speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is way, way better sounding. And the Sonos speaker almost never gets used anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is just so much more convenient to use the Echo for music purposes. And so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what gets someone in is usually one cool thing that they like see or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear about and they’re like, oh my god, I want it for that, but then once you already have the cylinder in your house and set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and everything, then when you know Black Friday comes around and these switchable outlets go on sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like twenty bucks, you’re like, hey, let me try one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then and you try one you like, oh that’s that ends up like there’s that one lamp it’s the total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other side of the room and I turn it off every night and every night I have to walk over there and turn it off and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if I didn’t have to walk over there I’d save like five seconds a night and that could add up and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next time they’re on sale you get three or four more of them because you realize how useful they are and then all of a sudden you can say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a turn off everything and all of your lights turn off and when you’re going up to bed and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a glass of water in one hand and maybe some laundry or a dog in the other hand and you don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands to go hit all the light switches before you go upstairs you can just say hey turn off everything and five things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn off at once and you just walk upstairs and it becomes pretty cool and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that’s how you get into this it’s it is not that you can’t walk over and hit a light switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but once you have one of these technologies for some other reason like music then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s and you know as all the like you know home automation things just start getting really cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like that you know you can when you can go on going at these switch blots for twenty bucks whatever or or you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other integration through web services through like if to turn the various services like that and you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warm up your car or you can you Casey you have your garage door thing you can like open and close your garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco door by voice like once you are in the system for some other compelling reason like music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will start having these other things trickle in and you’ll be like wait a minute this is kind of awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of it’s necessary like you could operate your house without these things but once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get into that once you have have a taste of this it’s just really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again it’s not it’s not a must have. We can all send letters to the post office if we want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But once you have something nicer, it is pretty great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s funny you bring up, both of you bring up the music thing because when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried Apple Music during the free trial when it first came out, the one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I deeply missed about Apple Music was being able to say to Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, play Mute Math or whatever the case may be and, and just have it happen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was super cool. And it was almost enough to get me to pay for Apple music rather than Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I prefer for reasons that are irrelevant. Um, but all the other things that I preferred about Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were enough to keep me away, away from Apple music. And, and I guess that’s the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is with the garage door opener. As an example, I immediately understood why having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an internet connected garage door opener could immediately improve or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improve, maybe a strong word, but I can’t think of a better one, improve my life. Whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cylinders, I don’t doubt that they would make things better in all the ways you described, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less of a visceral, tangible need that I can see sitting here now. And I’m sure the time will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come that I will get one and I’m sure I’ll be on this show saying, by God, what was I thinking? Of course I wanted this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, ignorance is less.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, it does take it does take some time to actually figure out what you think is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be good for after you just play with it and find the limits of the thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it really it really is situational. Like it’s not it’s not as if you have to like every day I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this thing and I’m going to use this thing to do the thing like getting a new like device into your life and incorporating
⏹️ ▶️ John into some tasks you have to do. Like for me that is not how my experience of having this thing. It’s more like
⏹️ ▶️ John developing an awareness that this thing is there so that when a need comes up that you reflexively
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfy in other ways, eventually you come to remember, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. I can just say this question into the air and get an answer. Even if it’s like dividing two numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John or converting like table teaspoons into cups or whatever, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those things are things I’ve done my whole life and you’re like, Oh, I don’t remember the convergence, let me check or whatever. And you can always
⏹️ ▶️ John like, pick up your phone or ask someone in the house who you think knows the conversion, or you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all these other ways you have to solve this problem. Eventually, what the most important thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to have is, you know, a deep grain instinctive awareness that
⏹️ ▶️ John I can say this thing into the air and get an answer. Right? And that’s the hardest part, because you will find yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling out your phone and typing into Google, you know, how many teaspoons in a cup.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’ll do that and maybe do that without even realizing you could have just asked that question but eventually it sinks in. It sinks
⏹️ ▶️ John in after some incidents of like arguing about the lyrics to the song over dinner and realizing we can settle this in 30
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds. I can just request that song by title, it will immediately start playing and we can all listen to it together, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or not remembering who, you know, what year someone was born or who, what album this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John was on or whatever, like, we can all take out our phones and look it up. We all know how to do that. It’s like, you could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you could just like put a little trigger phrase that I’m not going to say in front of that same question you
⏹️ ▶️ John were just asking each other and instantly get some kind of answer. And it can go
⏹️ ▶️ John too far where you know, we have the recent rash of the Google, what is it the Google answer thing where it tries
⏹️ ▶️ John to answer the question definitively the top of search results and it just
⏹️ ▶️ John out bogus stuff that has no foundation and truth right. And all these devices again, there are security
⏹️ ▶️ John concerns and privacy concerns and everything, But it is a glimpse of the as yet
⏹️ ▶️ John unperfected, unrealized future. And like all gadget tech geeks, we all like to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of see what that future is going to be like and try living it, even if it is pretty rough
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, just because we think there’s value in it. And whatever form it takes in the future, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this type of interface has proved its worth, that it has to be part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the various ways we interact with technology and networks, right? ones that prove their worth and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to go away and be completely replaced with this. But this I feel like has definitively proved its
⏹️ ▶️ John worth. It’s just a question of how it fits in with all the other ways that we, you know, use computing
⏹️ ▶️ John devices and connect networks and stuff.
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YouTube TV
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey coverage of this. It will be missing channels from Viacom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including big names like Comedy Central and MTV. It also won’t have programming from Turner, which means you won’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CNN, TBS, TNT, AMC, Discovery, and A&E. But as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone who is not really looking to cut the cord, this does sound pretty compelling to me. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really have a good feel for what the landscape is for cord cutters because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even really considering it at the moment, But this sounds really good. Marco, I know you’re not really that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into broadcast TV, but I believe you’ve cut the cord. So are you interested in this at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the last time I had cable was about 10 years ago. And I don’t say this to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to super brag in the hipster way possible, just a fact.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve, you know, since then I’ve gotten into the habit of just not having these TV channels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do get and buy TV content in other ways. like through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes and stuff. Although honestly, I cannot leave Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchasing fast enough. As Top Chef wrapped up on one more season,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still can’t believe how bad buying TV series on Apple TV is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then watching them and all the different things that don’t work or that work poorly or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually spoil the show like the auto-generated thumbnails of last chance kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know I’ve kind of gotten into the world now of not having cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so to buy access to all these channels to me it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound that appealing because I kind of don’t need them anymore or I’ve trained myself not to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them anymore. So the idea of buying access to all these things so I can like watch broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV and sports, although with a bunch of asterisks and stuff like that. It is advertising
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a collection of services that I have gone without for 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not something I really am that excited about for myself. I do think it is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good idea for people who have been maintaining a cable subscription all this time for one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things or for multiple of these things. Lots of people have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for example, sports fans, a lot of sports fans, or people who just like to watch live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news or who like to watch some shows that are on one of these networks that just aren’t available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily or affordably elsewhere online, at least legally. So for those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, this is a good idea. It seems like a pretty reasonable price, $35 a month for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff. Now I’m curious, what form does this take? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like just a TV stream and therefore you have to skip commercials and crap? Or is it more like on-demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you just pick what you want to watch and there’s no commercials?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure. The way I read this was it’s that it would basically exist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within YouTube, but I could have that dreadfully wrong. I’m not entirely sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because they make mention of things like a DVR-style recording with unlimited storage space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Google’s cloud and the ability to skip over ads. that kind of sounds like it’s more like watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a broadcast and you just you know it’s kind of like with a broadcast with DVR style controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’d still have to like fast-forward through the ads
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s kind of weird to see YouTube as the company sort of I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re very first out of the gate but one of the first of the big names to do what everyone’s been referring to was
⏹️ ▶️ John a this is the skinny bundle thing where it’s a subset
⏹️ ▶️ John of the stuff that you can buy in cable with the idea that people who pay for cable nobody wants all
⏹️ ▶️ John those channels like everyone just wants a subset of it so if we could sell you a subset of it for a cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John price Then that would be a more desirable product for you And we could get you onto our platform
⏹️ ▶️ John and stop you paying for cable or stop you paying for cable stop you paying for television programming
⏹️ ▶️ John for cable because once again the whole cord cutter thing makes about as much sense as debating which parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of a game engine Are done in software and in hardware doesn’t really mean anything when you look at the phrasing
⏹️ ▶️ John because oh, I’m cutting the cord I’m going to get all my video content over a cable that comes to my house
⏹️ ▶️ John that delivers data but it doesn’t count because it’s internet and not cable television and
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it’s you know totally different thing anyway um Comcast would still sell you your internet access
⏹️ ▶️ John or Verizon or whoever sell your internet access but you just like no thanks I don’t want to pay for your cable television
⏹️ ▶️ John bundle I just want the internet I’ll pay you for that and then over the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John I will get things like YouTube TV but anyway it’s ironic that YouTube is doing it because as far far as my
⏹️ ▶️ John children are concerned, YouTube is television. They barely watch
⏹️ ▶️ John television anymore. They watch YouTube on their iOS devices because that’s what they have.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they didn’t, they would watch on anything else. Television, like, I don’t think they know what
⏹️ ▶️ John ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC are. I don’t think they recognize those sequence of three letters. If we
⏹️ ▶️ John put them in sequence and say, what are these three letters? They would not be able to identify. They have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they watch enough television. They’ve sure seen enough television shows in their life but their entire interface of television
⏹️ ▶️ John A is through my Tivo so there is no you know again trying to trying to explain to them or young children
⏹️ ▶️ John the concept of live television is extremely difficult the task of modern
⏹️ ▶️ John parenting right to explain to your to explain to your toddler what live television is and why you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like fast forward or pause or anything like that like no this is happening now this is live
⏹️ ▶️ John like or we can’t watch this because it hasn’t aired yet like it’s gonna come on at 7 it’s like what are you even
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that I don’t understand like I don’t understand these words Eddie like and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John no dad let me explain it to you you just go like this and you tap over here and but just why isn’t it working I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s broken like no it hasn’t hasn’t aired yet it’s it’s definitely anyway this is a difficult thing to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John right so YouTube it seems has the future locked up and yet they
⏹️ ▶️ John are the ones out of the gate to say we’re gonna try to get the olds by giving them something that makes them feel more comfortable and you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John us $35 a month and we will resell you this content with a nice kind of interface that makes it look like
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a Tivo but you don’t. And you know, some some fashion of on demand
⏹️ ▶️ John type stuff and also with you know, ad skipping and so on and so forth. But like all these deals, like the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it has always been said that Apple hasn’t had this deal as it hasn’t had a deal like this, despite them pursuing it for many
⏹️ ▶️ John years now is they could never, they can never get, you know, presumably according to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfaction, an arrangement of content and price that they, that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple liked, that Apple said, yes, that’s what we want to go to market with. So they’ve come to market with nothing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things, if you look at them, it’s like, oh, well, you got all this stuff, but you don’t have all that stuff. Is that is this the right price and the combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of content? Like, if you got this and you’d be like, I’m going to replace cable. And then you just realize
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m trying to think of a show that’s on AMC, like Mad Men used to be what’s on AMC now. How
⏹️ ▶️ John the Americans is the Americans FX anyway if if you get this and you’re like this will be just like cable
⏹️ ▶️ John we can just pick the channels we want but you realize you can’t get some of these things at any price oh
⏹️ ▶️ John the Walking Dead is an AMC better call Saul you realize you can’t get them at any
⏹️ ▶️ John price that can be a deal-breaker if you know it’s like well I guess we’ll just stick with cable because cable despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that cable is making you pay like you know three dollars a month for ESPN that you never watch or whatever hell the number is these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have access to everything essentially. Cable is a mature industry and everything is resold through cable subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you’re willing to pay enough money you can get everything. To get a skinny bundle, you’re like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I’ll skinny bundle for this and then I will just pay on iTunes for
⏹️ ▶️ John The Walking Dead the day after it comes out or I’ll watch Game of Thrones on HBO Go or now
⏹️ ▶️ John and hope that it doesn’t get overwhelmed by people. That’s the other thing with these skinny bundles. You can be really sad if Game
⏹️ ▶️ John of Thrones premieres and you can’t watch it because of some networking thing whereas if you had cable it would have quote-unquote just worked, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s broadcast versus, you know, database television which has all the problems of any you
⏹️ ▶️ John know database solution. So I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re striking the right balance and honestly I think YouTube shouldn’t care that much if they’re striking the right balance because they
⏹️ ▶️ John sure as heck seem to be the future of television as far as any of my children are concerned and honestly I’m watching more
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube than I used to. Yeah, same here. You know, like, as in subscribing to channels
⏹️ ▶️ John and looking for content to come on them. So they,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a good move for YouTube. It’s like, we are already at the forefront of this new thing, and you know what, we can scrape up some
⏹️ ▶️ John of those old things. And they’re not so picky about, oh, we can’t go to market with this skinny bundle because not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John people will buy it because it doesn’t have CNN and TBS, or A&E and AMC or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just like, whatever, we’ll go for it, we’ll see how it goes. If it doesn’t, whatever, we’re the future. We’ll be fine. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is still waiting for this beautiful, perfect deal that has extremely low prices and
⏹️ ▶️ John the right amount of control for Apple and can provide the right experience. And so they just have nothing. They just have nothing to offer. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have this TV app that, you know, it looks like it’s a ghost town and you can kind of see a glimmer of what it
⏹️ ▶️ John was supposed to be. But what it is now is nothing compared to YouTube, nothing compared to YouTube TV. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not doing well here. And Netflix and Amazon and YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely seem to be the future of video content for For an entire generation of people, whether they be
⏹️ ▶️ John young children or millennials or whatever, who just accept that
⏹️ ▶️ John the content they want probably isn’t on TV, unless it’s live
⏹️ ▶️ John news or sports or something like that. Even that, those will be the last ones to come over. The future looks
⏹️ ▶️ John dim for the old model of television in all aspects, and these skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John bundles entirely seem like a transitional thing to get people over the hump to the new
⏹️ ▶️ John system. And the more of them that are out there, the more people they’ll pull over. And like Marco, eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John like once you do it and realize the world doesn’t come to an end, and you just get used to that kind of lifestyle and accept
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the limitations may be during the transitional period, it’s hard to go back. Like you rarely hear about people
⏹️ ▶️ John who cut the cord, try it for a year, and then immediately go back. I mean, maybe they do if there’s if there’s a disagreement
⏹️ ▶️ John in the house about the how important local live sports are and
⏹️ ▶️ John a misprediction of what a blackout would really mean to your life. But beyond that, I feel like the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John unsubscribe from cable television, especially in tech nerd circles, they find alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John arrangements and are happy with it eventually. Like that it is a successful transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like the people by the cylinders. You’re not quite sure what’s going to work out, but you get it. And in the end, it’s better than you
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing that is somewhat appealing to me about these new digital based services, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there’s no equipment and that you could probably pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily start and stop your service. In the past, if there was a big event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some kind, like watching a presidential election return or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really important news event or a really important TV show that I was super into that I couldn’t get any other way, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be kind of a bummer to not have cable for brief periods in my life. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would occasionally think maybe we should just get it again and just never use it. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of having to like call up a local cable company or whatever and have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schedule an appointment and have them come to the house during this eight hour window that usually becomes more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they come at the very end of it except for that one time where they came early so you can’t really plan for it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they install this giant box that may or may not work. If you want any kind of DVR functionality you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to deal with either another giant box like the Syracuse method or you just deal with their crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant box with their crappy DVR. You learn all the controls all over again. You get another remote hanging around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house, this giant box and all this overhead of starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then later stopping that service. If you want to stop that service, you got to call them on the phone, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will do quite a lot to avoid. Call them on the phone, talk to some customer service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rep, convince this in the case of some of these morally bankrupt companies like Comcast, convince
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to please for the love of God, let you cancel your service, which you may or may not succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that mayor that may or may not take a very long time to convince them then have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whole process in reverse scheduling dealing with the equipment, whether you like I like drop it off somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have them come pick it up and disconnect the wire like it’s a big pain in the butt and then they probably have restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like how often you can sign up or disconnect your service again or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know and then there’s all this basically BS involved in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting and stopping cable TV service. So to have these internet based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones where it’s probably just like you know clicking a few buttons and entering a credit card into the YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and then when you want to stop it you you know go go through some screens and there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an all digital way to do it where you probably don’t have to talk to anybody on the phone, that is actually probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good thing for the cable industry. It’s not good in the sense that it becomes easier to stop your service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think it is good in that for people like me who don’t have it most of the time, but occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some reason why we might want it, I think you’re more likely to win people like us over because the barrier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to entry is now lower than it was before. So that, I think, is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big new good feature of this. However that being said, what John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said about the channel availability is a big deal. It includes the big broadcast numbers, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $35 a month, that’s like a basic cable plan and it does not include Comedy Central, MTV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CNN, TBS, TNT, AMC, A&E, Discovery. It’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge list of channels that come in pretty much every standard cable bundle in the US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like 20 years and they don’t come with this. kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing like in the regular cable market like whether you’re like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choosing between like in one of the various satellite companies like you like direct TV or dish or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have like if you choose between like that or like Comcast or files or whatever your local cable thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes like one of these networks will be missing from one of these services and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’ll be enough to get people to choose the other one So to have this many things missing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s really a pretty big problem, I think. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this specific service at this specific time with this specific set of deals that they made, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such limited channel options, that’s gonna really hurt them, I think. But the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this kind of bundle, I think, is strong if anybody can get all the deals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in place, or even just some of the deals, so just get more than what YouTube got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by BetterBuy.
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Intel goes PAOO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we enter the hardware portion of the program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know which one of you wants to kick this off. But Intel is going 14 nanometers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one more time apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember when they had the Tick Tock strategy and
⏹️ ▶️ John became Tick Tock Thud or whatever. They changed it to this Tick Tock.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I figure what they’re thinking like. It’s not Tick Tock anymore. it’s like, I got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a funny diagram. PAO or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process architecture optimization?
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was because basically like, oh, we used to, you know, we do a process shrink, then we do an architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we do a process shrink, then do an architecture, and it was kind of on a yearly basis, but either way, that was their cadence, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re like, oh, we can’t sustain that anymore, because every time we try to do a new process, it’s taking longer and longer. So to
⏹️ ▶️ John try to get from 14 nanometer to 10 or whatever the next one is, it’s taking longer than we thought. So we’re gonna do a process shrink,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna do architecture, and then we’re gonna optimize that architecture So basically, give us another year to get to the shrink.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new strategy is process, architecture, optimize, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what, let’s optimize again. Because we
⏹️ ▶️ John have the new process size ready to go. And it’s kind of comical to see them change
⏹️ ▶️ John their TikTok strategy to a three-step strategy to a four-step strategy. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little kid stalling on getting their assignment done. It’s like, well, my new strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John is let’s wait another year. And you try to look and see what like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you know, Kaby Lake is not that big of a deal of an enhancement, as we’ve discussed in past
⏹️ ▶️ John things like some video DRM stuff in there and some minor tweaks, but it’s not, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is technically an optimization of a pre existing thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the next one, they will optimize more, but we’re kind of used to even even in
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you know, age of the the dwindling returns on Morris law,
⏹️ ▶️ John used to the idea that we will get a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John jump in CPU capabilities and with with a process shrink. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John that process shrink just never seems to come, it’s like, well, what can we really do? Like we did a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John job as architecture to begin with this process size. The biggest bang for the buck historically has been,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how can we decrease power and get more transistors to do stuff with and you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John make different choices, the shrink gives you that headroom to do it provided you can figure out how to make it work.
⏹️ ▶️ John In lieu of a shrink, you are left with the same power budget and the same number of transistors and just making different
⏹️ ▶️ John trade offs basically, or just being a little bit smarter about a few components. And you can make things better that way. But you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make them better in the after their giant leaps, but you know, to get a double digit
⏹️ ▶️ John percent increase in almost anything is a very big effort within a given process
⏹️ ▶️ John size, especially in an architecture that’s already pretty well optimized, right? So this, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say this is disappointing, but it is further evidence of the slowing
⏹️ ▶️ John rate of advancement at the edges of hardware, on cutting-edge
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. Like, what is the best process size you can get in a processor, in a sophisticated processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John for any amount of money? And for another year in a row, it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean really like these days like an Intel delay is not news like when Intel delays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next big thing for a year that used to be like shake the industry these days it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of more surprising when they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I’m pretty sure they’re still ahead of most other people because other people are like yeah we’re excited we have
⏹️ ▶️ John a 14 nanometer process like this Intel’s gonna be on its third year of 14 nanometer it’s like well welcome to the club
⏹️ ▶️ John right and I guess that lead only counts if they get to the next size before everyone else too
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m I’m guessing they will I’m guessing this is not like Intel incompetence
⏹️ ▶️ John it is merely that it is getting much much harder as the sizes get too much smaller as we discussed on
⏹️ ▶️ John past shows Moore’s Law cannot continue forever as far as our understanding of the physical world
⏹️ ▶️ John is aware because you cannot subdivide matter into ever smaller pieces at a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ John you reach a size where you can’t break it into any smaller sizes without super high energy physics and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So inevitably, eventually, everyone’s favorite infinite timeline argument, Moore’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Law cannot continue. Right? Because if you keep having the size of things, and you’re down to like quarks and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, even getting down just the size of individual atoms, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John functioning of the way we manufacture transistors stops working, and we’re already getting into all sorts of things, problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John the future sizes we’re doing. So it will end, it’s just a question of what does the slope look like as we
⏹️ ▶️ John slide down into the doomsday scenario of CPUs that never get any better
⏹️ ▶️ John and wait for quantum computing to save us all with an entirely new paradigm. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not the type of story that I want to read. I guess another old man story I’ll be able to tell is like when I was a kid,
⏹️ ▶️ John computers would get massively faster every year and it was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember those days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not anymore. Doom on a Pentium. It was like, can any computer be this fast?
⏹️ ▶️ John How is it possible? Last year, this game was barely usable,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it goes faster than my eyeballs. And that would happen every year.
AMD Ryzen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about AMD Ryzen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wish I had more time to read up on this. But we haven’t really talked much about AMD on the show. Occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John we mentioned them, but like we, you know, in the context of Intel alternatives, but we’ve been doing even less
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. And it’s mostly because, despite doing very well in the
⏹️ ▶️ John glory part of PC CPUs back in the day, the Athlon days,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember those when? Oh, yeah. Yeah. When AMD was actually giving Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John a run for their money and was taking a lot of the crowns in those
⏹️ ▶️ John type of sort of speeds and feeds and measurements contests that were so popular back in the 90s.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the best CPU for gaming or for whatever and look
⏹️ ▶️ John at these benchmarks and the highest end and so on and so forth. AMD was doing really well
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were an important player and it was great to see the competition and it forced Intel, I think to
⏹️ ▶️ John get off of the net burst architecture and the Pentium four and come up with the core series, which was awesome. And then it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel took the lead back and am and wiped AMD off the face of the
⏹️ ▶️ John earth. They came out with the bulldozer architecture that was not particularly successful,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was a bad choice. And they’ve always had sort of, you know, financial problems as compared to the behemoth that is
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel. And, you know, have never been, you know, competitive with Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fabbing abilities. And so we haven’t heard anything about them for a long time. And this seems like their comeback,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, hey, we’re AMD, we still know how to make good CPUs. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a lot of CPUs that are competitive, like they’re not, they’re not the
⏹️ ▶️ John best in the world. They’re not like, oh, these are 10 times better than everything Intel has. But it’s a comeback story. And people
⏹️ ▶️ John like a comeback story. This, this company that was not didn’t seem to be even be in
⏹️ ▶️ John the race, like, like people suggesting, Apple’s to just use AMD processors.
⏹️ ▶️ John That suggestion stopped many years ago and started to become Apple should get AMD to make a
⏹️ ▶️ John new processor that’s better than all their crappy ones, right? Right? Or Apple should work
⏹️ ▶️ John with AMD or Apple should make its own x at but all but never like no one’s suggesting like, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac laptops would be better if they took out the Intel CPUs and use AMD ones instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they have these series of CPUs which are significant, mostly because they have to come back in there, they’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive good and be in the vote for the most part they’re cheaper than the Intel alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any that I looked at them briefly to see is there anything that would be great for a Mac Pro no they’re not Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro caliber things but they do have a lot of course for a low price with a reasonable power envelope
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t think this means Apple will look at them any more than they did in the past because of
⏹️ ▶️ John ancillary issues and because who knows what Intel’s roadmap looks like versus AMD’s roadmap
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m excited to see AMD back in the mix because
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that Intel seems to be getting his butt kicked all over the map by arm processors and mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything having to do with that because all of Intel’s mobile efforts have not really
⏹️ ▶️ John gone anywhere and they’re not particularly competitive and they’re just lucky to get like a radio chip that
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple’s iPhones at this point and every day they must forget who did this
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the CEO had already left regret the sale of their arm holdings when they have the X scale processor the arm things
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel got rid of that because they wanted to do everything x86. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like seeing a competitor for Intel on the high end as well, because competition
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. And I hope this spurs Intel to redouble
⏹️ ▶️ John its efforts to stay ahead of the game and to find ways to get more performance
⏹️ ▶️ John and to find ways to get to the next process size and to widen that gap again between them and
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD. Not that I’m saying AMD’s only purpose in life is to make Intel stuff better, but for the foreseeable future I don’t see Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John switching to AMD unless they’re asking them to make their very own custom chips and so
⏹️ ▶️ John for my purposes AMD exists to give PC hobbyists a cool alternative to
⏹️ ▶️ John build PCs with and to make the processors that are gonna be in my Macs hopefully better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool, sounds about right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did it make you want to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to build a PC is Xeons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of people build PCs and a lot of the Hackintosh guides and stuff out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and price comparisons are all about this class of hardware. They’re about iMac-class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPUs. The Intel 4000 series with the K on the end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are really high-powered CPUs for desktops. They’re really nice. But Apple already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes those. They already ship computers with those and keep them reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to date most of the time. They’re called iMacs. And the iMac 5K is a wonderful computer. I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you on it right now. With the exception of my image retention issues on the display, which everyone says are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not solved in the most recent ones. With the exception of that, it’s been a wonderful computer for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I expect it to serve me still for a while until something faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out, which barely really hasn’t happened. The problem is I want something faster. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than four cores. I want higher performance than what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the consumer line can offer me. So I’ve only ever been tempted to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Hackintosh, not to give myself a cheaper iMac, which I understand why people do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That makes sense. But to give me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically a Mac that Apple does not even sell, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a modern Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get an 8-core Ryzen for $329. That
⏹️ ▶️ John way cheaper than the equivalent 8-core Intel chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is true. You know, I don’t know. I guess I’d take a look at it if I was to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build a Hackintosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s purposes, like for an iMac, because again, I don’t think any of these are suitable for as far as I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John aware for laptop chips or whatever. Intel still has that wrapped up. But for kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John what we used to call desktop class CPUs where it’s not the Xeons but it’s not in the power envelope. But like the thing that you could
⏹️ ▶️ John stick in an iMac is it’s big and has lots of fans. And what we currently have in the iMac, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you could get either a better processor in the same envelope or an
⏹️ ▶️ John equally good processor for hundreds less dollars going with AMD. Again, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple will do this because of ancillary reasons and other chipsets and Thunderbolt and just general
⏹️ ▶️ John relationships with them. But it shows me that there’s once again competition in the market. Because before, Gnome was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, you shouldn’t be using that. If we were saying we shouldn’t use this particular Intel CPU and IMAC, we were
⏹️ ▶️ John saying you should use some other Intel CPU instead. We weren’t saying you should use something from AMD or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And now now you can say that there’s products on the market to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, here is an alternative for your IMAX. I know you’re probably not going to do it. But what
⏹️ ▶️ John it does show is that Intel perhaps is not serving your needs as well as they could because clearly it is technically and financially
⏹️ ▶️ John possible to make a chip that would make Marco happier. Why don’t you do that? ‘’ central oil ad
An Apple rant, sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like most of my problems don’t lie with the processor companies. You know like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel’s good enough for me my problem lies in Apple’s inability to ship hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So does that cover our Xeon gold then or now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no the Xeon gold is the chip they’re supposed to use but they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I have not read up on the Xeon gold other than the part that I pasted into the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s sky like EP It’s the Skylake-E PXeons, which is the the line of chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be most appropriate to put in a new Mac Pro But they’re probably not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that so therefore I have Nothing to I haven’t even looked too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far into these because in the past I’ve looked into what Skylake-E Was going to have and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is truly awesome. It’s wonderful But it’s just I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know to me it’s kind of even it’s almost sad or painful to even read about this processor because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that to know this is out there, but that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within it exactly like I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever has been clogging up Apple. I hope it gets out and they start shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware again because something’s wrong like something is deeply wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that company where is the where is all the effort going that’s what I want to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s sure not going into the Mac. It’s sure not going into the Apple TV. It’s not going into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad. Some of it, but not much of it is going to the watch. Like where’s it going?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of it’s gonna be the phone obviously, but is the entire company only capable of keeping the phone up to date at a reasonable pace?
⏹️ ▶️ John a ton of it’s going into the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Sure, huge amount of it’s going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re a big company. Where the hell is everything else? Yeah. That’s what I want to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And until until we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John self-driving car software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that Like that’s easily a separatable thing. Like where is the entire company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going? Something’s wrong. That’s all I can say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something is deeply wrong and needs to change. But that’s… I know that’s not very helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have a year like 2016 in the product line, something’s really, really wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2017 has a lot of checks to cash and we’ll see if they do. I hope they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we haven’t heard a lot of promising info so far to suggest that they will, except Tim Cook’s vague promises.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see that thing I retweeted earlier today of someone was doing Swift compilation
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks like how long does it take to compile
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a bunch of Swift? Yeah, it was LinkedIn. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the two-core Mac mini beat the highest-end trashcan Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. I mean, granted, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems in the Swift compiler, I think. That is not because the Mac mini is faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s what this shows. doesn’t show the quality of the hardware, it shows support for the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, obviously there is something not allowing the compiler to take advantage of this hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that very often there were like weird retina issues with the Mac Pro because it is such a rare
⏹️ ▶️ John machine. And so if we will have them that OS support for it, and like just in
⏹️ ▶️ John general, the software, whether it’s the OS or the applications, have no expectation of ever
⏹️ ▶️ John running out of trash can because there’s so few of them. So it’s not not only is it not optimized for it, but doesn’t even take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the hardware that’s there. It’s the worst case scenario of like, you know, you get weird PC hardware, but Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t support it well, only this is Apple. And this is, you know, they have a limited line of hardware. And like, that’s all I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ John heard from Mac trash can Mac Pro users is that they feel left
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the rest of the Apple ecosystem, because all of the software updates
⏹️ ▶️ John and application updates and OS updates, pretend that they don’t exist. So any weird problems they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t go away, don’t get fixed and new software doesn’t take advantage of all the cores that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. Which is sad because that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. You put out this exotic piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and don’t worry about it because you make the OS too and a bunch of the applications as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make sure that it is leveraged and that you take advantage of it. And when that doesn’t happen, you just have an exotic piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of hardware that gets worse over time. And, you know, eventually you got Mac minis beating you on a compilation
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmark and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why? Again, I really think that’s like Xcode and the compiler having bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings. But your larger point about maintenance and support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does stand. People say, look at Apple, they have all the money in the world, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t they do X? Well it wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft had all the money in the world and they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two decades where they did almost nothing. Microsoft had a very, very long span where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could not produce anything even good, alone great and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s arguable whether they’ve come out yet but but you know they they’re they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey they’re doing a lot better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now they’re doing a lot better than they were like in like the like with like the Windows Vista era like first leading up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Vista and then Vista itself and you know it like Microsoft had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the money in the world but simply could not manage to ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great things because of other problems because of mismanagement because of internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, whatever the case was, Microsoft had just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no ability to apply their money into creating good products reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think we are at that point now with Apple. It is very, very hard to look at the output of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last couple of years and say otherwise. They’re a company that can produce good things sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but increasingly that’s the exception, not the norm. And that’s really, really worrisome
⏹️ ▶️ John Well one of the way that Microsoft got out of it got out of their funk Aside from changing management stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John was they tried a lot of different things most of which failed But they they tried a lot of them
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think you know if I look at like what was what was the success story? that
⏹️ ▶️ John Was able to convince Microsoft itself and the outside world that Microsoft could conceivably do
⏹️ ▶️ John good things again I feel like it was the Xbox because that was a weird mark like why the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft making a game console, right and And it, you know, it struggled
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had to learn this new business in the same way that Apple kind of had to learn the new business of cell phones and they didn’t, it, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s not comparable to the iPhone, obviously in terms of the scope of its success and how important
⏹️ ▶️ John it was to, you know, cause it was just another game console for the most part, although it had its own innovations, but it,
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the things they did, they tried so many things, so many different mobile phone strategies, so many different tablet and pen computing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they were so close to so many innovations, but because they kept trying all these different things. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t even remember how things are that sidekick company that they bought with little turdy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing that they sold.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Xbox of all things, like unquestionably was a
⏹️ ▶️ John success in its market, in a very difficult market that has killed many a company
⏹️ ▶️ John who have tried to enter it and be successful. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple probably needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to continue to do what it seems to have been doing and like be willing to try it. Like the watch is a good example.
⏹️ ▶️ John Try a watch. Maybe it’s going to be awesome, maybe you won’t or whatever, but do it. I don’t think we need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced that Apple can still do great things because the Apple Watch is as accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John as it may or may not be. I think it’s a big step up for the smartwatch
⏹️ ▶️ John market and in many ways has come to not redefine that market
⏹️ ▶️ John but sort of pin down what people expect from smartwatches to the point where smartwatches
⏹️ ▶️ John are very much now aping some of the looks and features of Apple’s things if only to
⏹️ ▶️ John capitalize on their, you know, their marketing cachet. But self driving cars, all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of things that we say, why is Apple even doing that? All you need is one or two of them
⏹️ ▶️ John to hit for it to be worthwhile. Thus far, none of them have been big successes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple was in a Microsoft type situation, and we would all be looking at the watch or the AirPods, they see Apple can make
⏹️ ▶️ John great things. Again, Apple’s not down that low. When we see the AirPods, we’re like, yes, that’s what Apple should be doing. And that’s what we expect
⏹️ ▶️ John of you, right? Versus we’re super surprised that you’ve made a successful good product. We’re not surprised. It’s what we
⏹️ ▶️ John expect. We still expect we still have high expectations of Apple, we still have, we still hold them to high standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s good. But I also like that’s why I don’t want to be too down on all
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird stuff Apple is doing. And I know it’s easy to do the you know, the trade offs like, Oh, you should just be making Max better because that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I like or whatever. But as you pointed out, Marco, for all we know, there’s entirely separate things. And it’s not like they lack the
⏹️ ▶️ John money. So as long as it’s not literally the people who are going to make the Mac Pro who are now making self driving car software,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, go for it, more power to you. Eventually, we
⏹️ ▶️ John may be the point where we’re looking for Apple’s Xbox. And maybe, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s just make a gaming console, but they’re really terrible at gaming, so don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John and the show finally comes to an end, because the apocalypse that will happen if that comes to
⏹️ ▶️ John pass. Yeah, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John as down on Apple as you are, Marco. I continue to believe that they can come out of it. I think Microsoft is a great example that no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how low you go, there’s always something great you can do. And I would hold up Azure as an example of that too, and a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John dev tool stuff that Microsoft has been doing. had a lot of smart people that had a lot of great tech. It was just a matter of finding a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John channel that in a productive way while also continuing to
⏹️ ▶️ John milk the cash cow that is their terrible enterprise software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My main concern here is that 2016 was a really bad year for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the public point of view. And Tim can say stuff like, oh we have stuff coming, don’t worry, just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m working on it, but that doesn’t mean anything. It just seems like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these areas of Apple product development that have stalled or that have taken way too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There seems to be not only no end in sight, but no changes that would suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there would be a change of policy or change of results coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I want is by the end of 2017, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a handful of big hotspot areas that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are still lacking, I want to see somebody get fired. I know it’s not cool to talk about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco executives and SVPs and talk about them personally and say who should get fired, but I think things are bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough now that heads have to roll if certain things don’t get fixed. And I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the list would be Mac desktops, hardware, iPhone design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that new iPhone does not come out this fall and they have another year of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 6 design and general form factor, that’s a problem. If Mac desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not get any kind of meaningful update during this year, that’s a big problem. I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad software, like multitasking on the iPad is one of these areas where that needs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be improved significantly in some way. I would say Siri, the quality of Siri, the reliability,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the intelligence of Siri needs to be improved, and maybe I’d throw in TV content deals, as we talked about earlier, because those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have also been stalled forever and the Apple TV is suffering greatly. So those things, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if all of those don’t have meaningful improvements by the end of 2017, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will be a very long time during which these things have not improved and desperately need to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and somebody high up needs to get fired or resign at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you would like that to happen. But if the rest of the world says,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, record iPhone sales, here’s a 10% bump to your stock price, Apple, Apple is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John great from the perspective of investors and other people who have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the broader world that has expectations what Apple’s supposed to do, which is sell a lot of iPhones for a high price.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re doing that really, really well so far. And everything we’re talking about is tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little slivers of the giant pie wedge that is the revenue of Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, it’s not. Because look, Microsoft did really well under Steve Ballmer financially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time. He had record quarters, record sales, as the product line just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stagnated and crumbled and the quality, the foundation the company was built on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crumbled and the world around it moved on to this massive new world of mobile and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally missed it because they were not being managed properly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that they keep selling record quarters is not good enough for Apple. But what I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John is like executives don’t get fired when your stock price goes up in general. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right. So I’m saying like whether you think it’s the right thing to do or what you would do versus what is actually going
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen. Right. Because the only thing we’ve seen executives get canned for at Apple is not getting along with other executives. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John forestall. Not being like a cultural fit or like flailing and not being a success like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever paper master and those people who were there for a very short time, right? What would it take for a long timer
⏹️ ▶️ John to get fired? I mean, I think we’ve seen with the reshuffling, not firing, but like, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know what’s going on with that reshuffling that they’ve done various times, but surely that reshuffling is
⏹️ ▶️ John elevating some people and, and, and minimizing other people right within the company enough
⏹️ ▶️ John so that they all stay there, but still like, still, still
⏹️ ▶️ John affecting that, right? You’re not going to see, like, a big
⏹️ ▶️ John name executive get fired when every kind of metric you can
⏹️ ▶️ John put on the company is looking good, because that’s just not how big companies work. Now, arguably, like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making a big mistake that sure, you’re figuring out how to make more money by the iPhone, but what about the future of all the blah, but they have
⏹️ ▶️ John answers for all that. Well, future, we have all these super projects that you don’t know about plus the car crap and stuff like that. And maybe they’ll hit and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they won’t like it’s not like they had their heads in the sand, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t what I’m saying is that don’t get your hopes up for that to happen, right? Even if even if none of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John you listed happen, but they still have like, record iPhone sales again, and the ASP
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up again. No, no one’s getting fired. Like, I mean, if whoever was responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for getting a skinny model TV deal hasn’t been fired yet. Another year of not getting
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not going to make a difference to give an example that’s relevant to the things we just talked about. Because obviously, not important
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to the future of the company. And in other areas like the phone, like another phone, the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to tell exactly how the watch is doing because that was being cagey about it. But I feel like the watch is on a slow burn,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It is. It’s not a super duper success like the iPhone was, but even the iPhone wasn’t a super duper success
⏹️ ▶️ John in its first year or two, right? Or the iPod or anything like that. But Apple is standing behind the watch and working on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And things seem like they’re going in the right direction with the watch. It is getting better. People like it more.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is finding a place in the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually would agree with that. The watch, there is a reason why the watch didn’t make my hit list because like it actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not amazing, you know, on all terms. It has lots of asterisks on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall it is healthy and it does seem to be on the right track.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like the Apple that is still willing to nurture a product like that, that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even the iPad, which arguably they’re nurturing and helping along and you know, they’re trying to get it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John come on, come on little product like you can do it. Maybe they’re not quite doing the right things. But like the fact that they’re standing behind those
⏹️ ▶️ John and and all the rumblings we hear about AR and stuff like that. I do see
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of encouraging things of like, how is Apple fostering the you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the development of what could be eventually big important businesses and how patient
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re being with it. Most of our frustration is with pre existing businesses that seem like they
⏹️ ▶️ John are neglected, right? because we like those products. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I don’t know enough about the executives to say someone should be fired. I think if I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John restructure slash restaff a bunch of things, you know what I would my picks is all
⏹️ ▶️ John server side stuff like that’s that part of the company is obviously in the most
⏹️ ▶️ John need. And I don’t know who’s in charge of that. And I don’t know who needs to be in charge of it. But like, Apple should have bought Google long ago and
⏹️ ▶️ John given all the responsibility to all their server side stuff Google because know what the hell they’re doing. Apple does not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re getting better, but not fast enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s getting better faster Apple services or desktop Linux?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple services because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s what it’s going nowhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, but but I can’t I can’t pin that
⏹️ ▶️ John to a particular group or executive and I think there has been restructuring the seeing Apple like presented like mezzo
⏹️ ▶️ John conferences and stuff is showing that that is actually going in the right direction. They’re just so far behind that it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to catch up. But for all the other things, like even the Mac things, I don’t feel like the people who are involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac hardware, like, I don’t know where the blame
⏹️ ▶️ John lies for that. It seems like priorities that would be set above the level of people working on the Mac stuff, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet everyone who’s working on the Mac loves the Mac and wants it to be awesome. And I bet a lot of people who are involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac love the Mac and want it to be awesome. But it’s clear that the
⏹️ ▶️ John pace of product releases and innovation and choices about the particular mixes of the products are not satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain class of Mac users and we find that unsatisfying and even for the people it is satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the releases are slower which you know is not you know it’s not good from anybody’s perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John that like we want to see new better things faster but I wouldn’t fire anyone involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac organization right I feel like that’s a priority set at a higher level and I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fire Tim Cook because of all the good things that we just listed the phone and the watch and trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to make the iPad better. Um, yeah, I’m, I, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to have hopes for this year and I found last year disappointing, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, I think I’m, I think I’m more optimistic than you are that these are all eminently fixable problems. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I am encouraged by, by, uh, efforts like the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And furthermore, I don’t entirely get what firing somebody really accomplishes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than making you feel better that, that somebody’s paying for what you don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it certainly would presumably change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course of Apple, at least slightly if that executive was high enough. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, we, we don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain. We don’t know if they’re playing a long game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that, that will revolutionize the Mac or revolutionize something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, or just create a whole new thing that we can’t even fathom. We don’t know what the long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, what they’re doing behind closed doors. And I just feel like seeing a head roll or demanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a head roll, I don’t know that that’s necessarily going to really change anything. I mean, just because one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even a couple people leave or told to leave, you don’t move a ship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that big without moving the rudder a lot. And one person can only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move the rudder, but so much, unless they’re like Steve Jobs or Tim Cook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason why I want to see something change, if all these things still continue to fail at the end of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year is that if no heads roll, if no one changes jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if nothing really suggests that anything went wrong, then that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple tacitly telling the world and possibly themselves internally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is fine. This is how we wanted things to go. It’s one thing if the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these things are in neglect right now is because lots of things have gone wrong or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody really messed up or somebody made a terrible decision or took a bad risk or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s another thing if these things are all this way in this state of neglect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s considered okay. So if something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s somebody who like whose job changes for instance the role of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store recently got taken out of its previous organization and moved under Phil Schiller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in the like eight years or whatever it was that it was under the previous organization, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. It was just stagnant, had lots of problems, and it’s been under Schiller for about a year now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lots of improvements have happened already, and there’s, you know, they’re at a great pace. So obviously, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was an area where something was really not working right. It was had a lot of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It got moved to different executives. So effectively, the old executive was like, you know, presumably like removed from it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some kind of action, you know, or some kind of decision. And then under the new executive things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change because something wasn’t going right. So that was the recognition internally to the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is not working, this is not good enough, we’re going to change it so it can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good enough. And so if nothing changes in this list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things, you know, Mac desktops, iPhone, if nothing changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we end these things are still being neglected almost a year from now after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being with it for the last few years, then that to me is a sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Tim Cook and everyone beneath him believes that is good enough. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ultimately rests on Tim. Whether the problem is Tim himself or somebody below him,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is on Tim to manage, to supervise, and to fix if there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. You know, when there are problems between Forstall and Ive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever, whatever the drama was there, Tim saw there was a problem here and he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed it. And whether you like his solution or not, he took an action because things were not good enough. He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed it. If nothing changes in these areas and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still being horribly neglected in another year from now, then that is Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook implicitly saying, this is good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s a strategic choice though. If he chooses to de-emphasize the MAC or cancel the Mac entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a strategic choice for the company that will make all of us
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not saying we think this is good enough. It’s saying, yeah, we’re deprioritizing
⏹️ ▶️ John that and shifting our efforts elsewhere because we don’t think that’s important to the future growth of the
⏹️ ▶️ John company, which we hate and we don’t like. But it’s not the same as saying
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re trying to put everything we have behind the Mac. It’s a difference in intention. We are trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac the best it could possibly be, and this is our best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort. I’m not even asking for that. I’m asking for basic maintenance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, again, because if they were trying to say, we are trying to maintain the Mac in the fashion that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has been maintained in the past, and they think this is satisfactory, you’re right, that they’re wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. But if instead they’re saying, this is exactly the amount of support for the Mac that we want, this is exactly how we
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to go, these are exactly the products we want out of them, we’re very happy with the results, this is our strategic direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all sad and mad about it, but from a company, you know, from the perspective of, is Tim Cook making
⏹️ ▶️ John the right decision for the company? It’s arguable that he is, because the Mac is clearly not the future of Apple, right? It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing that we all like and use, right? And if it means that more time and energy and money
⏹️ ▶️ John is available for whatever the actual future of Apple is going to be, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be the watch or AR or self-driving car software or who knows what, that is probably the correct strategic
⏹️ ▶️ John direction for the company, despite how angry it makes us. I think it is entirely a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John what their intent is, because it’s like judging whether it’s a success or a failure,
⏹️ ▶️ John we see what the results are. And if that is the intended results, and they’re getting exactly what they want, and then our quibble is
⏹️ ▶️ John just with the strategic direction. Whereas if the intended result is very different than what we’re actually getting,
⏹️ ▶️ John then that’s the company failing to, you know, execute successfully on its own plan, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And because Apple doesn’t really tell you what its own plans are, in terms of how it emphasizes product lines and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John other than the sort of the PR problem that we get about, you know, we love the Mac, blah, blah, which
⏹️ ▶️ John really says nothing. It’s very difficult to judge whether they are failing or successfully executing
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy we don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I concur that I am disappointed with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way the Mac has been treated. And I would like to see it be different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But just because my engine isn’t revved by a touch bar doesn’t mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch bar is wrong. It doesn’t mean that it was a failure. It doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t innovating. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t mean it’s not or magical, awesome improvement. All it means is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not right for me. And for me to hypothetically say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple’s doing everything wrong or that the head of Mac hardware should be fired strictly because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the touch bar, which is not what you’re saying, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s not at all what I’m saying. Nope. That’s not what I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I know it’s not. I know it’s not. But I think what I’m trying—let me just rephrase and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that I think you’re conflating a disappointment with direction, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what John was just alluding to, a difference in direction or disappointment in direction with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey failure. And that is not necessarily the case, just like John said. I agree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like the way things are going, but I think it’s too strong to say that it’s a failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point. It’s just it seems a little bit aggressive to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t say these things are all failures at this point. I said that these These are like checks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that 2016 wrote for 2017 to cash, and if 2017 goes through and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things are all still a problem, something needs to change big time. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not saying that a company that’s trying to maximize its revenue and make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself a solid growth potential in the future shouldn’t change strategy. What I am saying is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple does not ship shit. Apple’s entire brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the reputation they’ve built up over years and years and years is that they don’t ship sh**.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That Apple products are good. They are great. And for them to keep saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and to have major areas of the product line that are really embarrassing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or really like customer hostile even for years on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. That they keep selling just to scrape a little bit more profit off the pavement before they just totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kill them. That is not what Apple should be doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For Apple. For Corporation X, sure. Let Steve Ballmer run it then. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t Steve Ballmer running it? That’s what they want to do. That’s the goal. Let him do it. He’s great at that. But that’s not Apple. That’s not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough for Apple. It never has been and it shouldn’t be now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, even though I’m actively arguing with you right now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do largely agree with you. I think that you’re right that 2016 wrote a a lot of checks that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet to see 2017 cash. I just, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concerns me is, I wonder if you’re putting Apple on a pedestal and if they don’t release the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect Mac Pro ever that you’re gonna still be fiery about it. If they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version bump the MacBook Adorable, you’re gonna be fiery about it. Truth be told, I will be too, but don’t tell Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The MacBook Adorable is only one year old. That’s fine. By my standards, that’s totally fine. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, also remember we’re only one calendar quarter into the year yet. I mean, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still plenty of time left. Now in your defense, Marco, typically there is a March event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of some sort, and we are already halfway through March and there’s been not even a peep of a confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, which means they’ll surely confirm it tomorrow before we release the episode. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we haven’t heard a March event yet, and that’s slightly alarming, but it’s only March.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t know what’s in store for the rest of the year. And who knows our, our socks could be blown off at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And typically they’re at least, you know, my, my socks are at least blown a little bit forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not entirely off my feet, this analogy to death. And so you never know what will happen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I don’t, I wouldn’t. I think we shouldn’t get too fiery yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If after WWDC and we’ve seen the software updates and we still haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen much in the way of hardware updates, okay, maybe we should start getting fiery. But at this point, I’m not too concerned yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. On the topic of figuring out, like trying to figure out intent, like basically as is it a,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it a, uh, a successful execution of a strategy we disagree with or a failed execution of a strategy that we
⏹️ ▶️ John would support that type of thing. The Mac pro is actually a good example because on the,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the idea of Apple not shipping things that they would be proud of, right. The Mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is the best example of it. It’s not that it was a bad product when it was introduced. It’s actually really cool and interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s that if you keep shipping it for three years, it becomes an embarrassment, right? And it is the
⏹️ ▶️ John type of embarrassment that like look there is no strategy That makes sense with
⏹️ ▶️ John the image that Apple previously had unless the new idea is we don’t want Apple to have that reputation Which doesn’t make any sense because
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else Apple does and everything they say and everything they’ve always done is like yes We want to be the company that has a reputation of shipping good
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. The Mac Pro is It’s you they shouldn’t still
⏹️ ▶️ John be selling it and I understand why they’re why if you were to if you were to get someone up on stage and talk to them in a WDC, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, talk show type interview and say, Why are you still shipping the Mac Pro, I guarantee you what they will set and it’s probably true
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, we didn’t want we we you know, some vague answer about how they had, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t plan for this, like there was a strategy to do to do something better. And it didn’t work out. So I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John they would they would, they would vaguely admit to some kind of failure there. And they would say, Well, then why are you even still selling it, they would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, because we have customers who need a computer like this, and actually believe or
⏹️ ▶️ John not, and Casey could probably believe it, not selling this now piece of crap overpriced computer
⏹️ ▶️ John would actually be worse for those customers than continuing to sell it. And then the only recourse you have that it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, but do you have to sell it for like eight grand? And they’d be like, well, people buy it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, whatever, Apple has never been ashamed of selling people things for way too much money. But that’s the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in. So I feel like the Mac Pro to figure out is this a strategy we don’t agree with, or is this a failure, there has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a failure in there, whether they’re not going to come and tell you exactly what the failures are, you know what I mean? Like, they’re gonna say, Oh, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what went wrong, or whatever. But that seems very clear to me. There is no conscious strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John that apples says, you know, we’re gonna make pro hardware, and then we’re not going to update it for three or four years there. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not believe that was ever Apple strategy. That is evidence of a failure. How big
⏹️ ▶️ John a failure is that in the grand scheme of things? I don’t know, whatever. But that is the only thing that it seems clear from
⏹️ ▶️ John the outset, everything else you can say, is it a failure to like, chip
⏹️ ▶️ John make all your laptops thin and lighter? Is that a strategy? Or is it a failure to have computers that
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t really that much better than the ones they replace but are more expensive? Or is that part of a strategy? Like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John almost everything else I look at and I squint and say that seems a lot like a strategy, maybe a strategy I don’t agree with personally
⏹️ ▶️ John from my taste in products or whatever, but it seems like a strategy. But the Mac Pro does not seem like a strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like a failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Counter argument the Mac Mini. Mac Mini is totally fine. They could update it. It’s really easily updated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses cheap component parts. That’s a strategy. Well, and so their strategy was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s put this thing out there, but because it doesn’t sell in very high volumes, let’s never update it basically. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t that have been the same strategy for the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because the Mac Pro, the whole point of the Mac Pro is the biggest, fastest computer for the most demanding workloads.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the rest of Apple’s product line, like the 5K Mac, has passed it by. Like, its role
⏹️ ▶️ John in the product line is to be the biggest, fastest, is the most expensive. The role of the Mac Mini is to be the cheapest and crappiest
⏹️ ▶️ John success. Like, you know, if you never update it, it exactly feels its role
⏹️ ▶️ John of the cheapest and crappiest and you’re just like, Oh, this is a product Apple doesn’t care about. It doesn’t really care about updating that I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like Mac Mini looks totally like strategy to me. But there is no world in which a strategy of like, we’re going to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest fastest computer and then never make it any faster. And the whole rest of our product line, including eventually our watches
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be faster than this friggin trash can. That’s, that’s not a strategy because of the slot that the product
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in. So it’s got to be a failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we have enough Tim Cook Apple history to know that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s very plausibly I think it was probably a failure of some kind. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s very plausibly also just a strategy of how today’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals with low volume products.
⏹️ ▶️ John We need to like write all these things down so that we can wait like in 20 years for like the tell-all book like we need to track
⏹️ ▶️ John down these long retired millionaire Apple executives like what the hell happened with the Mac Pro like
⏹️ ▶️ John because from the outside we can’t tell what you know was it just like an Intel thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t get or the sales volume or there was something I don’t know what what was the what happened like or did you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John design and they were fatal flaws with this little triangle design and you’re just eating the cost on these GPU replacements and
⏹️ ▶️ John the new one you had planned didn’t work like what what happened whereas the Mac Mini I feel like you interviewed me like again
⏹️ ▶️ John no one cares about that computer it’s the low end it compiles faster than the Mac Pro anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John oh is there any show that we can’t eventually get to the Mac Pro about it Casey loves it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes me so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our three sponsors this week Eero Betterment and Squarespace. we’ll see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, 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, The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anti-Marco Armen, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John to ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ We’ve been back in the podcast for
Post-show: Switchae
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we, can we please talk about something that’ll make us happier? Please like the switch. Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully, possibly. John, how do you like your switch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it’s hard to say how I like my switch because Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey come on, man. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be your happy place.
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no. Cause as far as like, I feel kind of bad because a lot of people who I know who are using
⏹️ ▶️ John the switch are all talking about it and they’re talking about the hardware. And it’s like, this is just a Zelda
⏹️ ▶️ John delivery device for me at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Kind of like it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, my PlayStation 4 became my destiny delivery device and in that
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity I wish as always that the hardware was faster because then
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have slowdowns in forested areas And it’s like I still
⏹️ ▶️ John find myself thinking. Can you imagine how how? You know how even
⏹️ ▶️ John better this game would be on the ps4, but in general I don’t spend much time dwelling on that because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really really loving Zelda I think it’s a great game. I enjoy it. I think about it when I’m not playing it. I can’t wait to
⏹️ ▶️ John play it every time I’m away from the game. And it’s like watching a movie. I really don’t think about the quality
⏹️ ▶️ John of my Blu-ray player when I’m watching a good movie. I think about the movie. So when I’m playing Zelda, I’m thinking about Zelda, and it’s awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s great. And my Switch has literally never been held in my hands
⏹️ ▶️ John to play a game and has not left the dock since I got Zelda. So
⏹️ ▶️ John how I’m using my Switch. It is I’m pretending that Nintendo is still releasing TV
⏹️ ▶️ John connected consoles and not this hybrid portable thing. And I’m perfectly happy with that. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably will take it out and try playing it handheld and see what that’s like. But for now, it is me a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John controller and Zelda and I’m loving it. No spoilers, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny. So I played with two different people’s switches. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sister-in-law got one and she came over the evening of launch day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the following day, I went to my friend, Steve’s house and played with his for a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in, I guess, in a kind of opposite way, in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I really want a canister to speak to because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really see how it will help my life. I want to switch so badly, even though I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll play it for like a week and then never look back, because I just think this thing is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn cool and I’ve been super impressed by it. We actually hooked it up to my TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because my sister-in-law, my sister-in-law’s that is, because she hadn’t hooked it up to hers yet and I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was super awesome. I played a few minutes of Zelda. I thought that was really cool. I didn’t play it enough to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really get into it, but my initial impressions were great. The hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the weirdly named Joy-Cons, like I find that name to be a little bit peculiar, but But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the click that it makes when you slide one of them in and removing it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And the kickstand is a little chintzy or whatever, but it still gets the job done for the most part. Like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this hardware is so cool. And I really want one for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no reason at all, because I’m just not really a video game kind of guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But man, this thing is neat and I’m super impressed by it. And it’s the first time I’ve lusted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after a video game system since the original Wii, which I did play a lot of for about a year. And then I just never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked back. Um, but I’ve been super, super, uh, anxious to get my hands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one, even though, well, I mean, I could get my hands on one, I’m sure, but I know myself enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that I’m just, I’m, I’m in lust. I’m not in love, but we’ll see what happens over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you, you guys are, I guess, really Tiff got one, right? So what have you thought?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we haven’t we haven’t really played it much. I so I just came back from a trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I left that trip shortly after last or left for that trip shortly after last week show the night before the trip I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy and download Zelda and the the credit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card thing on Intentus website just kept failing and timing out and everything like their whole website just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucked that night it just like everything kept failing and so I wasn’t able to buy it in time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the trip and so I didn’t bring it because I’m like you know I have like you know I have Bomberman and that racing game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither which I’ve actually played yet I just because like you know buying and selling this stuff it all takes time and then I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something else and I left for a trip and I’m like well I’m not gonna bring this entire console taking up space in my bag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one more thing to charge and everything else just for these two kind of like you know second to your games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I you know if I could get Zelda before the show sure I’ll bring it but I couldn’t so that’s so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t bring it and now we’re back and I’m dealing with all the work I missed so I still haven’t actually play it yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’d love to play it on my TV but I can’t get a pro controller anywhere so that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of breaks that as well I don’t really want to use the weird
⏹️ ▶️ John you can still play it I was gonna say you can play it on your TV without a pro controller you just got to use the Joy-Con so that a lot of people have asked me
⏹️ ▶️ John if I have like the left Joy-Con disconnecting thing I don’t know I don’t use those things just the pro controller
⏹️ ▶️ John and it works fine right exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so like does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not disconnect yeah so so I need to get myself a pro controller to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really enjoy this thing because what I really want is to just is most of the time to play these games on my TV. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I get that, then let me know. But I’m also, I suspect that these initial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games I got are probably not going to be a lot of my time. I’m not really into Zelda. TIFF would probably play it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably won’t. I’m more into like the racing and stuff games. So when Mario Kart comes out, I’m very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that. But I, that’s not out yet. And like when the new Sonic thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out, I’ll be very much into that probably, but that also isn’t out yet. games when those come out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they also aren’t. Any kind of virtual console stuff to maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play some of the games that I’ve missed since like the Super Nintendo era or the N64 era, like to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the Mario games that have come out in the middle if that becomes available and possible to do, I’d love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that, but I can’t yet because they don’t exist. So eventually I expect to really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing, but right now I’ve barely used it because everything I’ve tried to do either failed or took too long and then I had to go
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like there are like three obvious possibilities with with this Zelda this Zelda in particular One is you’re a super
⏹️ ▶️ John Zelda fan and you played all the 3d Zelda games and you love them You will also love this game. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the easy case. That’s why all the gaming press loves it That’s why I love it. Right two is you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John a Zelda from a hole in the wall and you bought this switch because you saw one thought it was neat
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get Zelda because it’s like the you know, the popular top tier game to get on launch
⏹️ ▶️ John and you start playing it and and you just slowly, gradually
⏹️ ▶️ John get lost in Zelda, playing your version of what you think the Zelda game is supposed to be about,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not even advancing the actual main quest storyline for a very long time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John spend like literally a year and a half consumed by this little
⏹️ ▶️ John toy box world because you have never played a sandbox game before and you’ve never played a Zelda and this is all entirely new
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, right? And the third possibility is you’ve never played a Zelda, get this game, you
⏹️ ▶️ John try it, and you’re like, this seems big and confusing. Not for me. And I think that’s what Marco’s gonna happen. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s neat. I can see how people might like it, but not my type of game. And probably also happened to tip because it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very difficult, I feel like to play this Zelda game in particular in any Zelda game,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a casual way, you’re either going to know what you’re getting into and know you like this
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of game, or not know what you’re getting into and just be completely consumed because you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the antibodies for this this type of thing, but you are the type of person who is entirely who does like this kind of game. And for that
⏹️ ▶️ John type of person, like, I can imagine thinking literally hundreds of hours into this non multiplayer,
⏹️ ▶️ John single player, completely entirely scripted, deterministic game, because you’ll just be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John climbing trees and picking apples and cooking food and, and exploring, and occasionally advancing this
⏹️ ▶️ John big overarching world story thing, which may eventually get too hard for you to do anyway. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, because if you’ve never done that before. This is amazing. I’ve done all this stuff before and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, amazed and excited and just want to go exploring and do things and like, constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John getting distracted from advancing the main quest by all the other things that you can do, whether they be official side quests
⏹️ ▶️ John or entirely different ones. And it’s just it’s for an experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John cell it express it impresses experienced Zelda fans. But I think like the best
⏹️ ▶️ John like the ideal experiences for like for this to be your first Zelda and for you to be the type of person who loves
⏹️ ▶️ John Zelda, but you don’t know it yet because you’ve never played one. This was your first Zelda game like some kid for some kid.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is going to be this kid’s first Zelda game. It’s going to blow their mind. They’re going to talk about this game like we talk about Mario 64
⏹️ ▶️ John of being like, Oh, so that’s what 3D platforming is. Oh, I see. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how 3D works like, like, completely, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John childhood defining game type experience. So I’m, I’m excited by this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have dim hopes that Marco will get anything out of And I’m not sure about Tiff because she’s been hot and cold on
⏹️ ▶️ John the other 3D Zelda games, so we’ll see But yeah I’m as
⏹️ ▶️ John with as with so many other game consoles that I buy if this was the only game I was ever allowed to play
⏹️ ▶️ John on the switch already worth the money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See for me. I expect Mario Kart will probably be that game if not one of the later Mario’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve wondered when the Mario Kart comes out because I haven’t played Mario Kart in a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time And and my understanding is it’s just like a slight refresh or something like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either way What it comes out if I give that a shot? That might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me enough ammunition to buy the switch B And the reason I say that is not because I don’t think I would love just Zelda
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I would but I view that as I would play it once and then be done and I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s worth what $300 for the Switch and like $70 $60 for the Zelda so call it $400 You
⏹️ ▶️ John play it once as in one sitting or you think you would finish the whole game?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no I’m saying over the course of like a month or two, maybe I would finish the whole game, but I don’t know if I want to spend $400 on Zelda because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I would play Zelda, think, wow, that was really great. I’m glad I did that. And then never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at the switch again. But if I see like Mario cart, which I know that I’ve loved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey previous Mario cart games, if I see that and it’s well-reviewed and I get to play it on, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, one of my friends, uh, consoles and I like it, that might change things. Additionally, I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey played Splatoon, but I’ve heard nothing but universal praise for it. So I believe that’s again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a refresher new version is coming for the switch at some point So maybe if I play that I’ll think oh, you know, maybe this is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it but sitting here now I I’m looking for a reason to spend my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money on this thing and I just can’t come up with it yet
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna play that many games though and you’re like Rallying off all those things that you think you might play like honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John We better for you to get a ps4 because there are there are so many Different choices and franchise like that the next
⏹️ ▶️ John game in my queue for example is horizon zero dawn, which has a terrible title which is also
⏹️ ▶️ John an open-worldy type game but looks 100 times better because it’s on PS4 and you know anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s being compared to Zelda a lot but on a PS4 you get
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get the Uncharted series you get all the all the top-tier games on Nintendo’s thing you just get Nintendo’s
⏹️ ▶️ John top tier game so it is slimmer pickings and I feel like you would have a better experience on a
⏹️ ▶️ John on a quote-unquote real TV connected console but for for Nintendo specific
⏹️ ▶️ John franchises Mario Kart 8 I I feel like I know what that’s going to be because I already played it. This is a deluxe version right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And for me, I still miss the driving mechanics of double dash. It’s still my favorite but Mario Kart 8
⏹️ ▶️ John was a really good Mario Kart and just adding more tracks and everything is also going to make it really good. But I find
⏹️ ▶️ John as I get older, my tolerance for rubber banding AI in racing games is decreasing mightily.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, and because I was never particularly good at raising games. Multiplayer is just another
⏹️ ▶️ John another avenue for me to feel frustrated because everyone I play online
⏹️ ▶️ John is 100 times better than I am. So it’s almost almost becomes like a party game where like it’s only good
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re playing with other people. And even then, even within my own family, it’s hard to find people of
⏹️ ▶️ John our skill ranges are too too widely varied, right? That’s the problem. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John we we could play a four player Mario card but two to three people are gonna be really upset
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re never gonna win and and that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah like I’m not entirely sure that you should get a switch Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John I think probably eventually Declan will tell you what you should get and you should just do what he
⏹️ ▶️ John yet but eventually he’ll tell you which console you should get in why and you should just listen to him and do that and then maybe you can
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe he can show the ropes and teach you some things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there’s a couple things you’re not considering though. Like number one, I classically was a Nintendo kind of guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had everything up through and including the 64 and then what was it, GameCube? And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not have, then I had a Wii and I didn’t do anything since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John believe you skipped the GameCube, man. So many good games, such a good controller. To be fair, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skip the GameCube. Also true. It was less about the hardware, more about me just not really being interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in games anymore. And that’s the other thing is that, you know, you’re probably right on paper that a PS4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be a better, like a more worthwhile purchase, but all of these top tier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games that, that any normal human or any normal gamer would, would want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play. I just don’t really have much interest in, like, I know that I, I have played
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least one Zelda game. I played all of Ocarina of Time and a fair bit of what I, whatever was on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wii, if memory serves. Skyward
⏹️ ▶️ John Sword? Where you wave the controller around to wave the sword?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, maybe it wasn’t the Wii then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s what I’m saying, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it was the Wii.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember what it was. Maybe it was one for the GameCube, but I played it on the Wii.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Twilight Princess? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was Twilight Princess, now that you say that. It doesn’t really matter though. The point is that the couple that I’ve played,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve enjoyed. But other than that, what appeals to me about the Switch is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it would be great for for the party games that I remember from when I was a kid from the Nintendo 64,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the equivalents thereof. So like Mario Kart, things like Goldeneye,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I see Splatoon kind of filling that void. You know what I mean? It’s, it’s, I don’t have a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest in going online and playing strangers cause I know I’ll get just completely destroyed by eight year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey olds and that’s okay. Um, but having a bunch of friends or family or both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over and playing sounds really appealing. And I was super impressed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, God knows if this would work at all or if it would work well, but I was super impressed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, by the like trailer promo video or whatever that came out in October
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they had like a portable switch, well, and that’s redundant, but you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch not docked and they had like two people playing each with their own Joy-Con or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there might’ve even been one where they had like four people playing or, or at certainly at another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point they had like a series of switches, switch I, whatever the plural is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in this particular context. Yeah, switch I is correct. Yeah, definitely. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely it. The plural of switch is switch, you guys. But anyway, they had several switches all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like a circle and presumably they were all like networked together. There was another case where there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think a basketball game where they were back to back and there were a bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing simultaneously. I have no interest in a basketball game. I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the group was playing. might’ve been Splatoon, but that sort of a thing is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes the Switch most interested, interesting to me. And that portability, the fact that it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch, ding, between being docked and undocked, uh, that to me is what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find so interesting about it. Maybe that’s silly, maybe that’s stupid, but I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why emotions are not logic and logic is not emotional. Uh, I just, it’s the way I feel. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that that’s, what’s really neat and interesting about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people are enjoying playing portable playing, like within their own house like playing in bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think that would apply to me. Absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve done it, I’ve done it with the Wii U when I was playing Mario Kart 8 for instance and the family wanted to watch the TV, I
⏹️ ▶️ John could continue to play Mario Kart 8 just on the Wii U gamepad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I came to actually like it that way. It’s the same thing that got me into the gaming monitor. Like being closer to the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, being able to see more detail. I haven’t done the math and the angles on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it just, you can get it to to fill more of your field of view even though I have the 55 inch television I do
⏹️ ▶️ John sit kind of far away from it and I even felt like I know this can’t possibly be true
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it is I don’t know I even felt like the input lag was reduced even though the video was being
⏹️ ▶️ John wirelessly sent to this handheld thing like the game was actually playing on the Wii U that’s attached to my TV and it was wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John sending the video like surely that has more lag than playing it on my actual TV but for whatever reason
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is I did better. I did better against the accursed rubberbanding AI in Mario Kart 8
⏹️ ▶️ John and in getting five stars or three stars or whatever it is, max rating and all these things to unlock all this stuff. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did better when I had it in my hand. And I found that fun, being able to be in the same room as other people, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John occupying the giant TV while, you know, they watch some show and I play this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I haven’t done that with the Switch yet. I’ve been doing entirely on TV, mostly because my son and I are playing
⏹️ ▶️ John the New Zelda together and anyone else who happens to come in the room wants to see what we’re up to because we’re up to some
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome stuff. But then it’s easier for us to sit in front of a TV and
⏹️ ▶️ John Zelda is not a Twitch game where you have to have like amazing response times and amazing frame rate
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a good thing because you don’t have that. But it’s more fun for everyone to like look and to
⏹️ ▶️ John be looking at the big screen and admiring the scenery and pointing out the sparkles that I don’t see out of the corner of my
⏹️ ▶️ John eye eye which means that I have to go pick up an arrow that I shot 10 minutes ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sounds like a blast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s awesome. Oh if you ever get bored of yours just send it my way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll play the snot out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I can’t take it out of the dock because I might scratch the screen. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys are you guys aware of this controversy? This
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey internet controversy?
⏹️ ▶️ John So people do you know you know that the switch goes into like the little napkin holder thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s the dock. Yeah, mine’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John there now. Should I be afraid of taking it out? Somehow, somewhere, people are getting scratches
⏹️ ▶️ John on like the sides of the screen. Not the part that lights up, but still kind of like the screen surface, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John black area around it. And all sorts of internet photos and they’re like, scratches
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. And they’re like, is that, is it happening because you’re sliding in and out of the plastic dock? And like, oh, the plastic dock
⏹️ ▶️ John is scratched. People switches, you need to get a screen protector. But then people get screen protectors and the heat from the switch makes the screen protectors
⏹️ ▶️ John peel off off and buckle and they’re saying, oh, you shouldn’t get screen protectors. And then someone puts a video of them taking their Switch
⏹️ ▶️ John and slamming it in and out and in and out and in and out of the dock as hard as they possibly can, like 50 times. And then pulling it out and
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, see, no scratches. So whatever the hell you’re doing to scratch your Switch, it ain’t putting it in the dock. And people are like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know my life. I put my thing in the Switch gently three times
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and it scratched to hell.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, like, unlike the left Joy-Con thing, which is 100% reproducible, as far as I’ve been able to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John in my brief Googling around on the scratching thing is that No one knows what the heck is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and… Chances are good that Nintendo wouldn’t have shipped something that could have scratched it. But the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John as far- I think the screen is not glass. And, uh, so it’s conceivable
⏹️ ▶️ John that the two plastics could combine in a way that could cause scratches on the non-light-up part of the screen, which would
⏹️ ▶️ John be bad. So I have been very, very carefully taking my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Switch in and out of the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John the dock but I was pretty well convinced by that guy going to town on his switch his sacrificial
⏹️ ▶️ John switch in his dock and saying look I’m literally squeezing the napkin holder dock pinch
⏹️ ▶️ John shut as much as I can and jamming this thing out like incredibly rough I’m like if that doesn’t scratch it
⏹️ ▶️ John like well then what is happening like do they they could have a grain of sand inside their dock and that would do it
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know all you need is a grain of sand between two little surfaces and you’ll get scratches out of especially if it’s plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John um but how did sand get in your switch dock so I don’t know it’s I think that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John the least concerning controversy the joycon thing seems like a hardware problem that they’re gonna have problems with it’s just you know
⏹️ ▶️ John people are holding it wrong it’s the same thing all over again you got your your big watery uh meat bags uh
⏹️ ▶️ John blocking the signal and some bad antenna design mixed in you know we’ve all been there and done that but
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t concern me because I’m just gonna use the pro controller or if I didn’t use the pro controller I would
⏹️ ▶️ John use it when they’re docked to the switch in which case signal is not an issue you know what I mean I’ll put the things on the side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only a problem when it’s in the grip? Is that what the thing is?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s only a problem when it’s in your hand. You can use the two Joy-Cons like one in each hand, like just holding
⏹️ ▶️ John them, like you’re on the couch and the switch is across the room, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John using the two Joy-Cons like that. And when you do that, it’s possible to wrap your big meaty adult hand entirely around
⏹️ ▶️ John the left Joy-Con in a way that blocks the antenna and causes like Bluetooth disconnects.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so that’s the issue everyone’s having is only when they’re disconnected. So if you use it like all together
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fine it’s fine yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I think when it’s all together I think it’s literally physically connected or if not you certainly can’t wrap your hand around
⏹️ ▶️ John the side that’s facing the switch because it’s you can’t get your hand there you know it’s connected and that’s right right right I fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it did like a or someone did a tear down to show where the little antenna is and show that like if you attach an extra antenna wire and trace
⏹️ ▶️ John it put it in a different position like you’re able to make it much harder to stop with your hand but you know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s iPhone 4 type situation all over again so I’m I’m I’m not concerned about it. It’s why I didn’t, I was no way
⏹️ ▶️ John I would wait for like, oh, I’ll wait for they make a new hardware revision to fix this problem, which they probably will, but there’s no way in hell I’m waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to play Zelda.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I don’t succeed in getting a pro controller anytime soon, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it an acceptable substitute to use either the little plastic thing that comes with it or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the $30 wall charging grip to just use the Joy-Cons
⏹️ ▶️ John You can try it, see what you like. I mean, the buttons are super tiny on those Joy-Cons
⏹️ ▶️ John is very tiny and it’s all kind of small and tiny and awkward and I wouldn’t choose to do it with my hands
⏹️ ▶️ John but a lot of people are discovering what I discovered
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco long ago. I wouldn’t do it with my hands, I’d do it
⏹️ ▶️ John with your hands. Yeah. Ergonomically speaking having your left and
⏹️ ▶️ John right hand not joined by like not holding on to a rigid thing you know what I mean like to be able to separate them like
⏹️ ▶️ John you do with the nunchuck and the wiimote or whatever is ergonomically great for anyone who has kind of RSI
⏹️ ▶️ John issues because you can put your wrists and hands in more neutral positions you’re not forced to
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, with a keyboard, you know, you’re not forced to align your fingers with the home keys, or a split keyboard lets your wrist be more
⏹️ ▶️ John neutral or whatever. So with the separate controllers, a lot of people are either
⏹️ ▶️ John discovering for the first time or rediscovering how comfortable it can be to have those, have
⏹️ ▶️ John two completely independent, not attached by anything controllers, and you can put your hands however is
⏹️ ▶️ John most comfortable for you, and just use your thumbs and your fingers to manipulate things. I just think they’re too small for my
⏹️ ▶️ John hands, for the size of my hands. But, you know, your mileage may vary, so try it either way. the little the little doggy thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t even tried it and the grip seems fine or whatever it’s like honestly why would I ever why would I ever put
⏹️ ▶️ John those things into the little doggy grip when I have the pro controller I don’t see myself ever doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool I will try to get a pro controller and try to actually download
⏹️ ▶️ John Zelda I might be working out by the way speaking of companies that won’t let you give them their money Sony is the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst at this every time I want to buy something on Sony’s thing like
⏹️ ▶️ John it probably is my fault for triggering this like my the expiration date of my credit card change because I got a new
⏹️ ▶️ John card issued or whatever. And maybe I went through and tried to do the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John before purchase before I had updated the card. It’s like, oh, you know, whatever you’re purchasing go through. It’s like, oh, yeah, I got update the expiration
⏹️ ▶️ John date. So I go update the expiration date and change it to the new one. But it just still won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let me purchase. I delete that credit card enter another one won’t let me purchase and like how many times have I done this every time
⏹️ ▶️ John I go to buy something? It’s like, guess what, Sony will not let you buy anything with any credit card with this credit card with
⏹️ ▶️ John a new credit card I go through like every credit card I own nope nope nope nope nope and it’s because they do this like 24 to 48
⏹️ ▶️ John hour lockout to prevent fraud when they think there’s some sort of problem like and you google for it you see a
⏹️ ▶️ John million people getting payment failures for buying stuff in the PlayStation Store it is so incredibly common
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I think for the past three times I have bought things because I buy all downloadable for a ps4
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t buy plastic discs if I can help it for the past three times here’s how I buy things on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony store. I go to Amazon, I buy a digital download code for $20 for the credit, I get the code,
⏹️ ▶️ John I enter into the thing, like there’s no, I don’t lose any money in the deal except for the money that’s left over. That’s how I
⏹️ ▶️ John buy things on Sony’s stupid store because they won’t take my friggin money. They also Also accept PayPal, but screw PayPal.