221: Personal Body Chemistry
11 May 2017Amazon Echo Show, dropping Dropbox, Mario Kart, and a “brief quiz”.
Episode Description:
- Follow up:
- The politics in the last episode
- Rear Touch ID and prototypes
- Dirty laptop fabric
- Are people being backed into liking touchscreen laptops?
- WikiTribune
- Amazon Echo Show
- Brief Quiz
- Dropping Dropbox
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Marco and Casey can't shut up about the Switch and Mario Kart
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Uncle Casey
- Follow-up: Politics
- Follow-up: Rear Touch ID
- Dirty fabric on laptops
- Bad trackpads and touchscreens
- Follow-up: WikiTribune
- Sponsor: Warby Parker
- Amazon Echo Show
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- Brief Quiz
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Dropping Dropbox
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Mario Kart on Switch
Pre-show: Uncle Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up as of approximately 10 or so minutes ago. I am now an uncle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, congratulations. Hey Do you intend to be a creepy uncle or a fun uncle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or some other kind of uncle?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hadn’t even thought about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to think about these things He’s gonna try to be the cool uncle. We already know that the question is the question is what is he going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true. That is 100% accurate. I wish I could deny it, but that is absolutely
Follow-up: Politics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wanted to spend a moment and talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat political section of our last episode and we got a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of feedback. We got a lot of good feedback. We got a lot of bad feedback. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing that was common that I think was on me that I wanted to apologize to listeners for is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at one point in the heat of getting fired up or in the midst of getting fired up. I’d said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many words, you know, if you disagree with me, you’re a monster. And name calling is not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a constructive way to have a reasoned debate. Not to say that that debate was terribly reasoned anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name calling does not really help the scenario. And, you know, if I’m going to be grumpy about other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people name calling, then I should be grumpy about me doing it. And so no snark intended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do apologize for name calling. I stand by the general premise of what I said, which is to say, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that some of the behaviors of those who who want to take away health care. That is a monstrous behavior,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that does not by necessity make somebody a monster. So, um, I don’t know. You guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can either confirm or deny everything I’ve just said, but for for what it’s worth, I feel bad about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And I wish I had handled that a little bit better, despite by and large sticking by pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything I said. But the name calling doesn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you undercut yourself with the monstrous behaviors thing, because I’m not sure that distinction is particularly important. But that like
⏹️ ▶️ John And we don’t usually talk about politics in the show and I think we kind of accidentally talked about it Which is fitting because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey topic list And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John not slid right into it from wiki Tribune, which was on the topic list
⏹️ ▶️ John And it end up staying in the show unlike many other similar discussions But one of the main problems with any time that
⏹️ ▶️ John we get into politics is that for the most part the three of us? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John coming from the same place like we we agree on the issues and it’s actually surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult difficult to talk about a controversial political issue
⏹️ ▶️ John amongst three people who all agree with each other. And
⏹️ ▶️ John why we get the complaints of like, you know, echo chamber, so on and so forth. The good thing and the bad thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts is even though it’s just the three of us talking about it and we all agree in aggregate,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an echo chamber because believe me, the opposing opinions are presented to us,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So we just don’t get them in real time it is delayed. Um, but that’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re, we’re not doing a political debate show, but, but yeah, so when we’re all talking about it, we all more or less agree. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just like saying things that each one of us agrees about. There’s not even that much nuance to our disagreement
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just kind of spirals off from there. And I don’t, I don’t, it’s difficult to, it’s difficult to clarify
⏹️ ▶️ John our thinking on it when there is essentially no opposition on the podcast itself. So that’s a, that’s a difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John I always feel when, when engaging those and when listening to them, always trying to look for, uh, an angle
⏹️ ▶️ John that is illuminating rather than just the three of us venting, which occasionally happens occasionally we got events
⏹️ ▶️ John and occasionally we’re feeling bad about things. I’m surprised after the presidential election we didn’t have a similar show. Somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John we avoided it, but it came out last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no regrets. I had a feeling, but you know, like in an outland says in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat saying that the people are monsters is counterproductive and makes the argument sound dumb and I would agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I am sorry for that that portion of the discussion. The rest of it. I pretty much stick by.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think one thing that that is really badly missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our culture is the ability to agree on some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause-and-effect norms or being able to talk about cause and effect without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it being politicized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The healthcare debate, when I was saying last week, I want people to actually think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through their arguments of, you know, like, well, how do we think people in society should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be treated and how do we think, you know, the government should take care of people or not take care of people?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish we could talk about that in—we as a society—I wish we could talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without it being so politically charged and people immediately jumping down each other’s throats about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their identities. Because what we need to instead be able to talk about is, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, how do we want to treat people in our society who need some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help? Do we want the standard of that to be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we should just let people fail and die and starve? Or not? And if the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not, then how do we allocate these resources? How do we pay for them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wish we could actually talk about that, but the second you give an opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either way on that, whether you say, I think society should help those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less fortunate. Whether you think, you know, we should provide for people, and we should, like, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let people fail too badly, or starve, or die, or whether you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we should just let people do all those things. That shouldn’t be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco U.S. Republican versus Democrat thing, but it is. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to say, like, oh, we should stay away from political topics or that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view is valid, when some of these views, people on both sides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that it’s not just politics, that it’s like the basics of their identity or of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human standards of decency and obligations to each other. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not just political. It’s not like, I think we should, you know, vote for the person in the red versus the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the blue or whatever else it’s like I want people who aren’t like me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco die or I want to help people and those shouldn’t be political opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those should be like this is the one that we teach ourselves and that we value because we’re good people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is the other one but apparently that’s not what these things are
⏹️ ▶️ John but nobody wants people to die
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s no no no sales a I mean, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the, I don’t want to get into it again because this is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be touching on this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey topic, but that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I can argue the other side pretty decently to, like the old other
⏹️ ▶️ John side, again, I alluded to like the 80s when they used to make arguments to say that actually we all agree on what we want to
⏹️ ▶️ John accomplish. It’s just a difference of opinion on how to best accomplish it. That debate is a lot easier to have
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re getting at is it doesn’t feel like we’re even unified on the goal. But even though the
⏹️ ▶️ John consequences of these decisions may be real, it’s not connected in a straight line in terms of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want people who aren’t like me to die. Like I don’t think you will get anybody to
⏹️ ▶️ John own that opinion anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true, but the problem is that people will very strongly own opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that precede that, but if you actually follow them through to the conclusions, then that is a penalty. suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody has a life-threatening illness that is treatable, but they can’t afford the treatment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What should happen in this case? Should our society find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay for people in these kinds of conditions to get treatment, or should we let them die?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a fundamental argument that we have seemingly about every 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, and if you’re on the side of, we should help people, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’d be a total monster, to use Casey’s word right it seemed to be a total monster to argue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other side of that to say like you know actually no we we should let people die like no good that’s but but
⏹️ ▶️ John want them to die they don’t want them they’re not wishing them ill they wish that if they could snap their fingers and cure
⏹️ ▶️ John them they would say yes you’re cured we should totally do that it’s just an unfortunate situation and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just you know debating the best way to allocate scarce resources and to incentivize the right
⏹️ ▶️ John behaviors and blah blah blah like it we start shift into the more intellectual argument towards it, but when you connect it
⏹️ ▶️ John up to like malice, like to say that people have malice towards that, like it’s not and get
⏹️ ▶️ John ignoring the specifics of this thing. More generally, the other general topic on the political stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John this happens to me, this happens to everybody. When you’re listening to someone talk about something, whether it’s political or technological
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything on a podcast, they will, especially things with two sides, red, blue,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac PC, whatever it may be, you know, uh, the two-sided debate
⏹️ ▶️ John they will address a thing like people who support X are wrong because
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah blah blah blah and if people that support X are on a particular team
⏹️ ▶️ John and you are also on that team but you don’t support X they’ll say people who support
⏹️ ▶️ John X here’s what I don’t like about it and people will get offended to say well I don’t support X but I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ John the same team as the people support X and because you’re yelling at that person I feel you’re set you’re yelling at me and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to hold on to the thread that says, look, if they are
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about something that you don’t believe, they’re not talking to you. You know what I mean? But when there are two
⏹️ ▶️ John teams, it’s like, if they’re saying anything about my team, even though I agree with them on this specific point, it’s like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John attacking my team and I feel attacked. Like, are you trying to say that I believe X? It’s like, well, if you don’t believe X, we’re not talking to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey addressed with you. But when there’s two
⏹️ ▶️ John teams, when there’s two teams and it’s on your team, you can’t help but get pulled into it. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John that happens with everybody, especially with two-sided debates or actual sports teams, as the
⏹️ ▶️ John case may be, where you can’t wrap your mind around a player on your favorite sports team maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John did something bad, but you really do love the sports team and you try to square that circle. So when someone says, hey, that
⏹️ ▶️ John person on that sports team did a bad thing, you say, you be quiet. He didn’t do a bad thing. And really in your heart of hearts,
⏹️ ▶️ John you also agree he did a bad thing, but you love the sports team, right? So anyway, that’s a difficulty.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I’m listening to people talk about, you know, whether it’s to like
⏹️ ▶️ John or dislike a particular movie or a director or a TV show or, you know, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John versus PC things, it’s very easy to think that they’re talking about you or to you, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John ascribing to you beliefs that you don’t have when you have to realize it’s a broadcast medium and no one is saying you
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically there believe these things. And if you don’t, then don’t, uh, don’t take on the burden
⏹️ ▶️ John of thinking that you’re, you’re being reprimanded for something that you don’t believe.
Follow-up: Rear Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, let’s talk about the back of the iPhone. Adam Mork writes in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my take on that rumor image with Touch ID in the back is that it’s a real schematic for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real prototype, but it’s only for testing. There have been more leaked schematics with no Touch ID in the back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m surprised that this has been debated in two episodes as an inevitability. In my opinion, this is Adam,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is zero chance Apple releases a phone with Touch ID in the back. It’s too big of a paradigm shift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in form and function. Apple has done more work for far less in the past. I’d bet a lot of money. It’s under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen at launch. It really feels like a deal-breaking feature they would wait for. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think to be clear, none of us were saying that was an inevitability, merely that this was a supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John leak thing and that we could all conceive of Apple releasing such a thing. Now, obviously, it would not
⏹️ ▶️ John be ideal. And obviously, plan A is the thing under the screen. But we were discussing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It was like, what if they did? What if they couldn’t get it under the screen? Would they put it on the back? Like, obviously, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to. they want to do that thing on the screen. It’s totally cool, right? But I, you know, as I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we first started talking about this, I believe it is a thing that Apple would do. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if the choices between doing that and not having a new phone form factor at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would totally do that. But I also totally buy this, you know, this is not a slam dunk, this is just a random
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing that could be totally fake. And as I said, we’ll find out when the real phone is released. And we look at the millimeter sizing. And if they got
⏹️ ▶️ John it down to three decimal points, chances are that it was at the very least a real leak
⏹️ ▶️ John or something manufactured based on the knowledge of what the phone would be like. But yeah, could be a prototype
⏹️ ▶️ John could be just a testing thing. It’s hard to think of it being a prototype like that, because it would take a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to move around the touch ID to the back, even just for testing, because there’s a bunch of other crap there in the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, for my part, I’m not tied to any one of these particular rumors. And obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John the the the plan a in both terms of rumors and in terms of what what Apple would want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do is the thing in the screen. And so that’s what I’m certainly hoping for, but if it doesn’t arrive and the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is on the back, we won’t all be flipping out because I feel like we will be acclimated to that
⏹️ ▶️ John idea through these leaks.
Dirty fabric on laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s talk about dirty fabric on laptops. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little bit of an odd, well, more than a little bit of an odd thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to set some context, the Surface laptop has Alcantara,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that how you pronounce it?
⏹️ ▶️ John avoid it. Just avoid it. Like we avoid all the words we can’t pronounce. Just avoid it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it has some sort of fabric-y, leather-y something or other on it. And that is, to my understanding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including where your wrists sit. And that seems to me to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really poor choice for any human being of any kind. Because I remember having a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey polybook, hi Stephen Hackett, which is to say a white polycarbonate MacBook, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to take a Mr. Clean magic eraser to that thing like once every couple weeks or deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of my wrist gunk and sweat and whatever and oils turning that thing brown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was gross. And that’s plastic. Imagine fabric. And so there’s a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, what is this, Boy Genius Report or something like that? I don’t remember what BGR stands for. It’s pronounced booger. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair enough. So we have a link to something. And they show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an example of a Surface with, or it appears to be a Surface keyboard with some really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross wrist oils all over it because clearly it’s been used a lot. And that just strikes me as a poor choice. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. What do you guys think? When we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about the fabric on the Surface laptops last show
⏹️ ▶️ John I was concerned about the edges fraying and like the difficulty of sort of mating that material but
⏹️ ▶️ John more broadly as this dirty fabric issue brings up a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John is something that Gets a lot of contact does even though you’re not supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John rest your wrists when you’re typing people do and you know people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hands and wrists are going to be in contact with this thing very very frequently during use
⏹️ ▶️ John and For anything like that. It’s a good idea to make it out of a material that
⏹️ ▶️ John is durable or washable or ideally both because there is gunk on our hands
⏹️ ▶️ John and It is going to come off and I go on to the thing that we’re touching and there needs to be some
⏹️ ▶️ John Plan for that so on the iPhone screens a they’re made of glass which is very you know hard material
⏹️ ▶️ John easy clean and be they have that coating that tries to repel oil so that when you do try to wipe all your gunk off it will come off
⏹️ ▶️ John easily. And that’s a good plan for the front of a cell phone that you’re gonna be touching all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. Similarly for the track pads on Macs, I think we all remember the original track
⏹️ ▶️ John pads before they were glass. They were, you know, various kinds of plastic, and over time the
⏹️ ▶️ John track pads would get kind of shiny and slippery and worn down and discolored on the particular parts that you
⏹️ ▶️ John that you touch them. Moving to the glass track pad really helps solve that problem to keep it sort of uniformly
⏹️ ▶️ John colored and textured, easy to clean, because it is a part that you’re touching all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with keycaps, making them out of hard plastic, figuring out how to make keycaps so that the
⏹️ ▶️ John letters and numbers don’t come off. I’m sure we have all met somebody who is some strain of X person,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means that they secrete oils from their bodies that wear the letters off of the keycaps, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people just have, I don’t know if it’s acidic or otherwise solvent
⏹️ ▶️ John based secretions from the fingertips that will defeat almost any keyboard and leave their keycaps
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly smooth and featureless. But it’s a challenge to wait. People have acid fingers. That’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s actually acid. All I know is that some you know, if you look at some people’s keyboards, they will have the exact same keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John as you and all the letters will be gone from like the home row or like the E key and the return and stuff. And you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Look, I’m using the same keyboard as you for the same period of time. There’s always some difference in our body chemistry that is
⏹️ ▶️ John causing this to happen, which is fine, like whatever, but the job of making a keyboard is to make it easy to clean
⏹️ ▶️ John and make the little, you know, letters resist wearing off. For a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John to cover it in fabric, fabric falls down in almost all these categories. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John not easy to clean because anything that gets in there goes down into the weave or whatever, and to really
⏹️ ▶️ John wash fabric, you put it in the washing machine, and if you’re lucky, that does a good job, but you’re not putting your laptop in the washing machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’ve got a problem already. To
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wash fabric you need moisture. You need like liquid, which unless you’re Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not going anywhere near your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to pass through it like it wasn’t just gonna go on the surface and you want to make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever does get on it comes off easily you know and the surface
⏹️ ▶️ John stays the same if you have it in from year to year and the fabric fabric wears down and frays and can
⏹️ ▶️ John get thin and you know rub through in spots and so on and so forth. So it is not a great solution for anything that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to handle that much. I mean even even clothes wear out because they’re made of cloth we put on our body eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you get holes in the knees and holes in the pockets and you know they just fray and
⏹️ ▶️ John like so it is definitely a material that you can’t treat the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way you would treat even even Casey’s plastic eye book and one of the problems with that with the the plastic eye books
⏹️ ▶️ John was they were white and they had some some discoloration issues that may not have
⏹️ ▶️ John been noticeable if they were like a boring gray or if you know if they could if the
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic could be formulated differently if it was a different color but they were like very white and translucent and that was a problem I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably could be cleaned pretty easily I don’t know if they were porous or what but and even for the
⏹️ ▶️ John very what the black book also had similar problems with the texture the surface texture going eventually Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John settled on materials that are pretty darn resilient the aluminum and the finish they put on the aluminum it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not super glossy You know, it’s like, it’s a finish that will stay looking the same for pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much the life of the thing and combined with the glass trackpad and good keycaps and the glass screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have a Apple laptop that looks more or less the same, plus or minus
⏹️ ▶️ John dents and maybe scratches, but in terms of color, discoloration and finish, many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many years later. One of these fabric covered things, I think no matter how careful you are,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on your personal body chemistry and amount of crap on your hands not
⏹️ ▶️ John literally but maybe literally like it’s gonna be very difficult very
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to keep this thing looking like new with unwashable fabric coating the surface where your
⏹️ ▶️ John hands are going to be so perhaps not a wise choice it is a differentiator
⏹️ ▶️ John is it a style difference as I mentioned last year I think it’s a style difference that doesn’t go far enough because it essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like an Apple laptop that someone put put a bunch of felt on top of, which I think is not a good look and be I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s apes. Apple’s design cues still too strongly, despite the fabric.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, be careful out there with your fabric covered laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I will also point out, I was thinking about this earlier today, and as Casey’s talking about the plastic MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of reminded me of this, that, you know, it wasn’t that long ago that most of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower end or consumer grade products were plastic and you had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay more to get the premium pro ones that were metal. And for all the complaining I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about some of Apple’s product decisions or apathy or various things nearby there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the move to pretty much everything being made out of premium materials is appreciated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is something that not every brand does. In fact, no other brand does it as far as I know in computing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every Mac that Apple sells is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made of metal. Every phone now is made of decent metal and has a decent industrial design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are no more cheap plastic options, unless I’m forgetting something big, but as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell, there aren’t any. Everything now is made of the nice materials that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, age well and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, but you don’t touch that or move it anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice looking plastic and you totally don’t touch it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, same deal with time capsule. Thanks tipster. Yeah, I forgot about the time capsule. Everybody forgot about the time capsule.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple forgot about the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they don’t sell it. They’re out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the router business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they still are for sale. I think they just weren’t going to make more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, so yeah, just nice little note that it’s nice that now everything is made of good materials.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room mentioned the iPhone 5C, which is my immediate thought with plastic. I think the iPhone 5C shows
⏹️ ▶️ John that plastic can look and feel premium because I think the five C was a great
⏹️ ▶️ John design, a great external design for phone. Every time I see them in public, they look like they’re brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new. Like you know, it’s just a very hard, durable, shiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably really easy to clean plastic that doesn’t get dirty. Right? Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be done. Um, and you know, you mentioned the apple TV, it’s a similar type of thing that even if people were handling
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I think it would be very resistant because if you just make it out of like plastic, it’s not just one material it’s a million different formulations
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple sort of learned the hard way which formulations do and don’t work from the soft plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen of the first iPod nano you know to the discoloring
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac books and other materials they tried like the titanium power book that had problems with the
⏹️ ▶️ John paint staying on like they eventually settled on a solution that works well and they’ve spread it throughout their line which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good idea but I’m not gonna count out plastic entirely but I think I’m gonna kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something that you want to put on
⏹️ ▶️ John the quote-unquote wrist rest area of a laptop. Like, no matter how, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the furniture store and they say, we’ve got the magic coating that repels water and you can throw like jello
⏹️ ▶️ John pudding on this couch and nothing will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco happen and that’s true
⏹️ ▶️ John until that coating wears away and then, you know, then, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you’re going to rub something up against, it’s just, it’s not going to last. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose they could work on, what is that, simonizing or
⏹️ ▶️ John All sorts of super duper waterproofing coating for fabrics, but A, that they make the fabric feel
⏹️ ▶️ John more like plastic at that point, and B, even those wear off eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I pay the extra 50 cents at the car wash to get it re-simonized?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what that, I’m just pulling that word out of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know where that came from. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe that’s wax at the car wash, but I’m not positive. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go through drive-thru car washes. You know, don’t at me, bro, or whatever. I can’t believe you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t do that. I’m sure Casey wouldn’t. I decided I decided a few years ago after first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it for cars that I didn’t know better or didn’t care. And then I started getting nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars and people like you guys scared me into not going through automatic car washes and I didn’t want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my clear coat all swirly or whatever. And the result of that was I had really nice cars that were always incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embarrassingly You live in upstate New York, that’s what you’re supposed to have. So instead, I decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting with my current car, I decided I’m not going to care anymore. I’m just going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go through the car wash when I feel like it. And my car has been way cleaner as a result. And I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John just a lease. What do you care all the scratches that are getting from little bits of grit that are on those flabby things scratching
⏹️ ▶️ John your car all over the place? It’s not yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I don’t really notice. Like I know what to look for. It is a little bit different now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my car is red. It’s way more noticeable on black. On the red, it’s a lot less noticeable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s noticeable at fewer angles, I guess. So I don’t care. And most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from almost every angle, my car looks better now that I’m going through car washes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I feel like it, rather than when I would go like five months without getting a car wash, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to wait until I could go to the place that took an hour or when Casey visited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty much. Oh, to be blissfully ignorant again. And you know, it turns out maybe the black cars weren’t such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good idea. Moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on. Oh, man.
Bad trackpads and touchscreens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amartya Banerjee, and I’m sorry if I pronounced that wrong, asks, do you folks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the popularity of touch input on Windows laptops could just be attributed to the terrible trackpads? That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given a good trackpad, having a fridge toaster OS in a laptop form factor is unnecessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, it’s very hard for me to say because I’ve never had a touchscreen laptop and I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever used them a couple times and I found them very frustrating because I wasn’t used to being able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to touch the screen and maybe I grazed it it accidentally and all of a sudden my cursor moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe I was stabbing at it like a monster, who knows. But anyway, because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never really understood the appeal of it, I don’t think that it’s a trackpad problem, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do know that Windows computers have just woefully terrible trackpads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that people just genuinely do like having touchscreen laptops. Like anyone who I’ve ever spoken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to who has a touchscreen Windows laptop, pretty much Every single one of them enjoys it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likes having the option of stabbing at the screen. I don’t get that. It seems kind of kooky to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s pretty universally my anecdotal experience. What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we’ve all been around computers for a long time now. We know that there are screen touchers and non-screen touchers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe the screen touchers finally just won. Yeah. As long as
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t touch my screen. I know, I agree with Casey that, yes, they have travel trackpads, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a separate issue. People like to touch the screen. And I don’t think they do it super duper often. They just like the option of
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to do it because I mean, just think of the generation that’s gonna grow up with the expectation that every screen is touchable. To have
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s not just seems broken. It doesn’t mean that you’re gonna spend the vast majority of your time
⏹️ ▶️ John on your traditionally laptop shaped piece of hardware stabbing at the screen. I mean, you’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John typing on the keyboard, you’re gonna be using the trackpad and every once in a while you’re gonna stab at the screen and it’s just all of a piece.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it mostly comes down to software. Like if the touch targets are frustratingly small,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I think they would be if you just slapped a touchscreen on a Mac. That won’t be a good experience. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re using something like a modern version of Windows, where a lot of the applications and parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of the US make an effort to have touchable targets, whatever, I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think it has to do with the bad trackpads, because honestly, like we, we trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John connoisseurs, Marco in particular, with his hatred of the forest trust trackpad, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John picky about these things. Regular people cannot distinguish between the worst windows
⏹️ ▶️ John trackpad and the best apple one this because I mean I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I think most people have trackpad skills that are more in line with
⏹️ ▶️ John mine I’m not a tactic like wizard I am not particularly graceful with the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m closer to the average and being a closer to the average trackpad person
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how clumsy it feels And that is the overwhelming factor in trackpad use,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the quality of the trackpad, like, or the mouse tracking or the size of the trackpad or how sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John it is or whatever. No matter how good the trackpad is, I feel clumsy. So I think that’s how most people feel. And that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were trying to put the two trackpads, maybe they would notice the Apple one is bigger. But other than that, they’re like, Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. They’re both trackpads. So no, that’s not the reason that like touchscreens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s a little bit aggressive. I think that certainly not everyone notices how far improved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple trackpads are, but I think a lot of quote unquote normal people do notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly they notice the size, just like you said, but I think that it’s noticed more often than most. I’ve heard people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are not like super nerds say to me, oh, you know, I got this Mac and man, that trackpad is much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot to your point, but it does happen for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of one of those things where if they haven’t tried the better one, they’re not sitting there using their Windows laptop and you come up to them, man, how can you use
⏹️ ▶️ John that trackpad? They’re like, well, it’s fine. Now if you were to give them an Apple laptop per week and they had to go back, maybe they could
⏹️ ▶️ John tell the difference, but I don’t hear it as a pain point. I don’t hear it as a reason people don’t like their computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if I go to have to use someone’s Windows computer at work and I say to the person, I don’t know how you work on this trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be like, what? What’s wrong with it? It’s fine. Because they don’t have anything to compare it to and it
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same awkward little thing that they’re just used to using. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they just use
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t forget the culture of being a Windows user, which is like everything kind of doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you just, like, that’s what you expect as normal. Like, you don’t even realize how much better things can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be when things work and are thoughtfully designed, because on Windows, you’re just constantly, like, lying on a bed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nails, and you don’t even notice it after a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I go to use someone’s Windows laptop at work and they have, like, four buttons, like, two above and
⏹️ ▶️ John two below the trackpad, or some other weird arrangement where there’s basically redundant left and right mouse buttons on the
⏹️ ▶️ John surface of the laptop, and I’ll try to do it and, like, nothing will happen. Like, oh yeah, that set of buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work, use these ones. You can continue to tolerate and use this thing. You consider it not broken
⏹️ ▶️ John when some of the buttons and some of the major buttons on the front of it don’t work. You just get around.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You just have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no, no. What probably is happening there is it probably has both an inferior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trackpad pointing device and the unequivocally superior track point style pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device. And the buttons above the trackpad are for the track point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then oftentimes that’ll get turned off because people are wrong and they use the trackpad instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before the entire world, well, actually is me. Remember that I’m basing this opinion on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pre-gesture time. Now the gestures are a thing and trackpads honestly are the better approach. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before gestures were a thing, I tell you, all you people who laugh at that little nubbin mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re wrong. He was way better.
Follow-up: WikiTribune
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, Corey Floyd wrote in to say that they work at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wikimedia and heard our latest show discussing the Wicked Tribune project and they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of, not necessarily correct, but bring up a few things. Wicked Tribune
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t affiliated with Wikipedia or Wikimedia in any way, which has been causing some confusion in the media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is Corey still. I think this mostly came across in your episode, but I also wanted to include a few other interesting specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey below. Tribune is based on WordPress, not MediaWiki like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wikipedia and its sister projects. Additionally, it is not actually developed or otherwise maintained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by existing Wikimedia or Wikipedia community. And finally, Wikimedia also has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an existing, albeit unsuccessful, project called Wikinews, which is in some ways a competitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Wikitribune in the first place. And that’s it. Wikinews.org will put all these links in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve got Jimmy Wales. That is the connecting thread. But don’t be confused about the fact that this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Wikipedia spin-off, because it’s not.
Sponsor: Warby Parker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Warby Parker with prescription eyeglasses starting at just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $95 including prescription lenses. To learn more visit warbyparker.com slash ATP. Warby Parker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes buying glasses online easy and risk-free. Here’s how they do it. They have a home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try-on program and this is totally free. What you do is you pick out up to five pairs of glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They ship them to you. You can try them on and get feedback or look at yourself in the mirror or post selfies or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you want for five days. there’s no obligation to buy because they ship it to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free and then they give you a prepaid return shipping label, so of course also free. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see for yourself, once again warbyparker.com slash ATP. Their glasses start at just $95
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including prescription lenses and it’s with anti-glare and anti-scratch coatings. These are nice glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They come in a wonderful case with a nice cleaning cloth. My wife has a few pairs of these and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really are fantastic. We are big fans of Warby Parker here and they look good too. And also So for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every pair you buy, Warby Parker distributes a pair of glasses to someone in need through various
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco how great Warby Parker’s glasses are. You will be surprised how easy it is. They have various previewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools even online so you can get an idea of what it might look like on you before you even try it on. Their app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also help you out. They have an app in the App Store with a Home Try-On companion feature. You can take pictures
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco prescription lenses. Glasses should not cost as much as an iPhone. They should be affordable. Some might
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Amazon Echo Show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check it out today warby parker comm slash ATP. Thank you very much to warby Parker for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So another Amazon Cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that isn’t a cylinder thing came out and I really don’t care So does somebody who actually gives a crap want to talk about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean this is more of a three-dimensional trapezoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair enough. Yeah, good point
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what Marco said he got it We’ve got a quote from someone named Marco who wrote into the show to say I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade our kitchen echo to this in a heartbeat. He says looking at a then rumored picture of the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John echo show. Yeah. So, Marco, have you upgraded your kitchen echo to this
⏹️ ▶️ John now that your heart has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beaten? No, I haven’t because it isn’t out yet, but I did place a preorder and it will be here on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allegedly June 28th. So we will see when that comes basically the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gist of it is, you know, the the Amazon echo is is quite wonderful to many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself included, and my family has really gotten into it. We use it all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it lives in our kitchen and it is wonderful for playing music around the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for setting timers, especially while cooking. Tiff uses it all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like checking the weather in the morning, when running around getting Adam ready for school. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a number of use cases during the day where it would be nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen. For instance, the timers that I just mentioned, it would be nice to see how much time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is left to see them counting down. If there ever becomes a way to set multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named timers, right now you can set multiple timers but you can’t name them. I’m pretty sure the Google Home you can name them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Echo does not support that at the moment. But again, like when you have multiple timers going, it would be nice to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them visually and maybe to have little touch buttons to pause or cancel them individually because right now it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you kind of can’t do it very well via voice if you have multiple ones going. TIFF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checks the weather in the morning. First of all, these pictures show it kind of always having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this home screen that has the clock and the current weather conditions on the screen all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that would be nice too, to just not even have to ask it certain things. If you’re just walking by, you can glance at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and see the weather. So there’s all sorts of wonderful things like that where many of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses that we currently use the Echo for would be nicer sometimes or all the time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen. Now, there is a fair argument to be made. Why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just put an iPad right there and just use an iPad all the time and enable the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey Dingoes feature on it and just use that. And that is a fair argument. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an iPad that sits right next to it that I take around the first floor and play this podcast while we do things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we really enjoy the Amazon Echo ecosystem. We enjoy the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product works. It works very well for us. to have another Echo come out that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen, I am willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt on this. You know, when the first Echo came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all made fun of it because they released this horrible video and it seemed so weird and creepy. Not that different as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we mentioned last week from the new Echo look, the weird dressing room camera thing. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I will give them the benefit of the doubt because as weird as the first Echo seemed because they were very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad at selling it, or at promoting it and giving us an idea of what it would be like, it turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to be pretty great for a lot of people, myself included and my family included. Also to point out too, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there have been increasing rumors and increasing rumblings that Apple is probably going to release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something similar to this. Rumors are that it might even come as soon as like next month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at WBDC. Keep in mind that if Apple does something like this, which would be like a premium speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some kind of screen and some kind of built-in you know Siri thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much is that gonna cost? Because this Amazon thing is $230 and if you buy two of them you get $100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. That’s what I did. I ordered two. I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll have a use for the second one. Maybe we’ll give it to our parents or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no way that Apple is going to release a standalone speaker with a screen that is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad-like, possibly for $200. That’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This will be interesting to see how Apple plays in this market. And also, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back to previous discussions about it, a lot of what makes the Echo so good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are things that Apple has not historically been so great at. Things like having a really easy-to-use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open ecosystem to integrate really well with it. Things like having a really reliable voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service that is fast, that is very consistent, that works the same way every single time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hears you very, very well every single time. These are things that Apple so far has struggled with, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see how that goes. But I am optimistic about this Amazon thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have this only be like 50 bucks more than the one without the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty impressive. And yeah, so I’m looking forward to when it arrives in June. And look, it might be terrible. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know yet. Nobody has a review of it yet. No one outside of Amazon, as far as I know, has gotten a chance to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one yet. But again, I think Amazon’s track record in this particular area has actually been proven to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be pretty good. We’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you mentioned before you thought it was a fair argument that why don’t you just have an iPad in your kitchen instead of this? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s a particularly good argument because the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John even setting aside software issues in terms of how well Siri understands it can respond
⏹️ ▶️ John to what you can do and how open the ecosystem is for adding, you know, various skills and
⏹️ ▶️ John actions that connect to other devices in your house, even just setting that aside just in terms of the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John An iPad can’t compete with this type of device
⏹️ ▶️ John in two of the three areas that are most important. One,
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers. The new iPads have very good speakers, but this device
⏹️ ▶️ John is dedicating way more room for speakers. So in theory, again, we haven’t seen one of these, in theory you can put way,
⏹️ ▶️ John way, way better speakers in this thing because there’s just so much more room for quote unquote real
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers instead of very clever little cavities in your skinny little thing and playing audio to
⏹️ ▶️ John fill the whole kitchen or whatever is an important function of these types of devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and the second one is microphones the iPad has I think it has multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John likes probably for noise cancellation but I think it has to the strength of the echo
⏹️ ▶️ John is whatever weird five microphone beam forming BS it does to
⏹️ ▶️ John how many eight eight and anyway there’s way more room for more microphones in this type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing and again we don’t know how many microphones this thing has but based on the the the echoes that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have put out this is one of the most important functions this thing is to be able to hear you no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John where you are and the ipad current ipads just don’t dedicate that much hardware for that the third area where i think
⏹️ ▶️ John i feel like it can match it is in the camera because you didn’t mention this but this it doesn’t just have a screen it has a camera and they’re selling
⏹️ ▶️ John the kind of video conferencing thing Who knows how that will go? That’s a whole sort of network effect ecosystem type thing
⏹️ ▶️ John We may just still end up end up facetiming each other on our phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do see why they added this and I think people will use it just not me
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah You can went to grandma who doesn’t who doesn’t have an iPhone doesn’t know how iPhones work and if she can just come in front Of this especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the drop-in feature like where you don’t actually where there’s a certain time where your thing is open to just suddenly seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John Seeing these people on the screen, you know, like if you set this up with with relatives who are not tech
⏹️ ▶️ John savvy to just to be able to do video conferencing where you could never get them to use an iPad, even that was too
⏹️ ▶️ John much for them. If you just plop this down on their counter, like I think that could be effective for that particular purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for regular people, I don’t know. But the camera, again, getting back to the, what do you call it, the look or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hell is it called? The echo scream,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what’s it called? Echo look. Echo show. Echo show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s because everyone thinks it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, the other one, I’m talking about the look, the fashion camera thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are the worst names. Okay, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s called the look. Yeah, so I was saying last week that
⏹️ ▶️ John this device category of computing devices in your home that have cameras that can see you
⏹️ ▶️ John has legs, and here we have, within the next week, another device, granted, from the same company, that puts a camera in your
⏹️ ▶️ John house that can see you and does something with it. Both of them look like they have tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little, you know, tablet-type cameras. So I think that’s a wash in terms of the iPad competing
⏹️ ▶️ John with this. But I would be looking for these type
⏹️ ▶️ John of devices The look and the show and other things like this to get increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John sophisticated cameras They can follow you that made multiple cameras to synthesize
⏹️ ▶️ John an image with you know Depth sensors and stuff like that because that’s where these things are going to have more sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of awareness of what’s going on They can project Sound and video to you and they can be aware of where you
⏹️ ▶️ John they can hear you no matter where you are and they can see you no matter where you are as far as I can tell from this one and only sees you when you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of it and that leads me to that all the things I don’t like about this particular hardware product
⏹️ ▶️ John like if it is a fixed camera camera that’s kind of crappy you’d hope it to be smarter but again
⏹️ ▶️ John cost you know whatever this is the first version will wait this thing is homely it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not an attractive device yeah I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will agree with you on that I mean but to be to be fair like the echo cylinder is also not
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s pretty sleek and I think the cylinder has a thing going for it where it’s be unobtrusive and you could put it off to the side. Although I do,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another reason why I like the, the, uh, the Google home. Now that I think about it, because I was thinking about, you know, if we got
⏹️ ▶️ John an echo, where would I put it? The home is smaller than the echo and it is less obtrusive in the place where I have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but this, you can’t make this unobtrusive because it has to be a place where you can see the screen and it’s, it’s not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive. Um, it black or white. It looks kind of like a sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of retro seventies piece of hardware. It’s very, it’s very strange. It just certainly doesn’t look elegant.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t look like an Apple device anyway, and it doesn’t you know it has kind of sort of it’s kind of like a brutalism Kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a rugged you know 80s Soviet era hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I guess it has has
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain appeal, but and then finally this this thing is I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really tell from the pictures But it’s slanted back in all the pictures. I see it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John backwards like the shape dictates the tilt It doesn’t seem to have an adjustable tilt and for something that you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be looking at that’s gonna be looking back at you that seems just Ergonomically and
⏹️ ▶️ John practically speaking, very limiting. Because the echo you can put literally anywhere that it can hear you, like
⏹️ ▶️ John high, low, left, right, just whatever, it’s fine. This thing, you need sight lines
⏹️ ▶️ John and you need to be able to see it and it needs to be able to see you. And depending on how tall you are
⏹️ ▶️ John or how tall most of the people are, even just being able to see kids and adults, like how would you get that thing in a position where it can both, where
⏹️ ▶️ John grandma can both see your, you know, kids that are half your height and you? And even just if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you know, just living by yourself, But you have to put it on a surface where the camera can
⏹️ ▶️ John see you and you can see the screen, which it just like, it seems like that
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have been better to design this to have a little bit more flexibility about
⏹️ ▶️ John angles. Again, costs, I understand, like you can’t have an adjustable stand or any kind of tilt thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that is any reasonable quality for this price point. So like I’m willing to give a lot of leeway there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this definitely, it kind of reminds me of the first Kindle. Remember what a monster the first Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ John that was something. the weird angular white thing with the weird terrible hardware keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John on and it’s like They took a lot of shots of that until they kind of Settled down onto like the paper
⏹️ ▶️ John white which is kind of the epitome of the old-style Kindle and now they’ve gone with that weird Thing it’s like thick on one edge and thin on the other
⏹️ ▶️ John They need to iterate on this one. I’m sure they will although I say I’m sure they will but what are they done to the Amazon? Echo it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John the same black cylinder. It always was maybe they just nailed that one in the first try But I worry about their software ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ John too Because once I start getting into the realm of like video calling and stuff like that I think it’s gonna be difficult for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to compete with FaceTime. This is basically what they’ve got here they’ve got their own little version of FaceTime and
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTime for all of the wonkiness of like the weird patent thing that cost them to have to restructure
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it’s done and the fact That Steve Jobs impulsively said it was gonna be opened up to the world and it never was
⏹️ ▶️ John and all those other things. I Use it for its intended purpose frequently and it works
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I mean I I can successfully send video and audio to people. The only limiting factor is ever
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy internet connections which is really nothing you can do about right because if you’re trying to communicate with somebody who has a crappy internet
⏹️ ▶️ John connection or you have a crappy internet connection it’s not great but it will gracefully degrade to a black
⏹️ ▶️ John screen with just audio and also other things it basically works and
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon as far as I’m aware this is kind of their first foray into this I think did they do like kind of video
⏹️ ▶️ John support for one of the the color fire tablets maybe so maybe it’s not not their very first thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah they had some kind of thing where it was it was like a screen sharing thing where you could where like their support rep could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like log into your tablet and show you how to do things or do things for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John see them or did they see you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I never I don’t think I’ve heard of anybody actually using this feature but they did have that kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again I think this is one of those things like Amazon you know similar to the to the like the drop-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing was that what they call on this where you can like kind of force call
⏹️ ▶️ John someone? Yeah it’s the same as the Google like knock knock thing that we thought was a dangerous thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for abuse, but this is opt-in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at least the way they’re doing it, yeah, it’s opt-in, it’s whitelist only, and it seems like it’s pretty well controlled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do give Amazon credit. They have, for years, on their tablets and other mainstream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumer products, for years they have been adding features like that, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good parental controls and kid scheduling and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Features that you really would expect a company like Apple to do, because Apple is so considerate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and innovative and cares a lot about the customer experience and everything. Amazon has really made a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these features over the years, and they can kind of get away with it because their scale is so much smaller. Imagine the staffing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required if Apple were to do one of those things where they will log into your computer with you and show you how to do things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would never in a million years be able to handle that on any kind of scale. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon can do it because they’re really at a much smaller scale for most of these products. As far as we’re aware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s true. There’s no labels in the waxes. They make a bunch of weird stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all of it works, but it does seem like, I think they have earned the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit of the doubt in that some of their weird stuff is actually really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also weird that like, I mean, setting aside Apple, which has a strange history with
⏹️ ▶️ John these type of devices and just like being almost like stubbornly unwilling to
⏹️ ▶️ John enter markets even after it’s proven that they’re viable just because it doesn’t seem big enough to Apple or they have different
⏹️ ▶️ John plans or they’re pursuing other strategies and just in the meantime we get nothing and now maybe they’re finally going to come out with one
⏹️ ▶️ John but like an Apple that was doing the opposite of what it’s actually doing. The current Apple is reducing
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of things that it’s making, getting rid of the routers and reducing, trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to simplify its computer and phone lines and you know it’s going the other direction but if it wasn’t going in that direction
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was expanding there’s a lot of categories of devices that you feel like Apple could make a good one of and also Google
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these companies have the have all the pieces to be able to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good Bluetooth speaker a really good thing that listens to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I would I would argue that I don’t think we have seen great hardware from
⏹️ ▶️ John Google I mean Google home is fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen lots of things that come kind of close and they always kind of fall down on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the support or they don’t follow through or the products end up being delayed and not shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they have weird shortcomings or they only get an OS for like six months. Like Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Google has shown that they are really not set up to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company that sells and supports their own hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t follow through, but they have all the pieces to make it. They have the server side component. they can make reasonable hardware, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s just a broken apart Chromecast shoved in a cylinder, which is the Google Home. And the Chromecast for that
⏹️ ▶️ John matter, like that little dongle-y thing, like I agree with you that the follow through isn’t there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they have the pieces to make it happen. Like any company can make a Bluetooth speaker, but once you start connecting it up to services,
⏹️ ▶️ John not everybody has services. Google has tons of services. Apple has enough services that, you know, you get Siri and Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Now. And so like, what’s on the other end of this making it work, right? And so those simple categories of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t we have all, you know, loved If Apple made a good Bluetooth speaker and had been revising it over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years, we would all give them an extra 50 bucks for the Apple one because it would be nice in some way, if it was actually nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the same thing for, you know, essentially a Bluetooth speaker with a screen with Siri that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can ask the weather that, you know, like the cheapest possible iPad shoved into a Bluetooth speaker thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with much better, like Apple could have made this is what I’m saying. Apple could make the exact Echo Show and who knows the WWDC, they may announce
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that they’ve made that is like this but better. And as Marco said, twice as expensive, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but they haven’t been participating in this market at all, leaving other people to try all sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I suppose to gain loyalty and to build their ecosystems and so on and so forth to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Google saw it happening and they’re like, Oh, we should have a cylinder. And so they do. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Google will try to come out with something like this too. And just to see Apple sit on the sidelines, it’s, it’s fine if
⏹️ ▶️ John they are working on the next big thing. But it may turn out that these little things build up the next big
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And if Apple’s going to sit it out for much longer, I think it’s a mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to see what happens. And I’ll use me as an example. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it let’s say at WWDC, they announced the the the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent of this tube thing. I’m stumbling because I don’t want to say any of the like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trigger words and have to have you bleep them later. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called the Apple Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey Siri. Yeah, well, you did this to yourself. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple releases a lady in a canister equivalent, I’m curious to see what my reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be because sitting here now, again, I don’t doubt that the Echo is very nice and that it serves a purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a lot of people. I have no doubt, Marco, that you guys use it constantly and love it. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing wrong with that. Me, I don’t feel like this is solving a problem that I have in my life. I’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that many times before. I’m curious as kind of a litmus test to how susceptible I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to whatever Apple tells me to do, I’m curious to see what happens if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey releases their own lady in a canister and what my reaction is to that. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m like, well, holy crap, I’ve got to have one of these, how could I have lived without it? And it’s really just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Echo but Apple branded, then apparently I really am a lemming and it’s all downhill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In reality, it would most likely be $300 and you would say, oh, I don’t want to buy this one, I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next one maybe. Yeah, and then inevitably I’ll buy it anyway. Yeah, right. Six months later, you’ll have three
⏹️ ▶️ John of a Google Home, a minor Google Home update, they added a thing that lets you distinguish people by voice. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can ask for, you know, tell me what my day is like, and it will tell you your calendar by recognizing who you are.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s basic multi-user functionality. Unfortunately, no one ever asks Google Home
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s on their calendar because it’s just not a thing that we do. And so distinguishing us by voice is not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John useful. I think the only two voices it knows to distinguish is mine and my daughters because we are like the most frequent users. But
⏹️ ▶️ John all that said, I continue to be impressed by I mean, it’s basically just Google search behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes because I’m always impressed by Google search when you do when you type in something in that search box and it somehow figures
⏹️ ▶️ John out what you mean and gives you relevant results. That’s the magic of Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most recent one is we were talking about something of their table. And we’re talking about a
⏹️ ▶️ John movie and and And we’re like, was that released then? Or what year was that released?
⏹️ ▶️ John We could ask the Google Home, what year was the movie Blah, Blah, Blah released?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I didn’t have to think about, how do I have to phrase this in a way that can understand? I don’t even remember
⏹️ ▶️ John how I phrased it. I just asked it the same way I would ask a person with encyclopedic knowledge of movie releases
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s sitting in the corner of the room. And the thing spoke out. The movie Blah, Blah, Blah was
⏹️ ▶️ John released in March. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That, to me, is still magic,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s exactly like Google Search. Like, I probably just turned
⏹️ ▶️ John it into text and typed it into Google Search and then read me the top hit or something like that, but the bottom line
⏹️ ▶️ John is it answered my question. It wasn’t just like a general purpose, like, what’s the weather?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does my day look like? I had a specific question about a movie about the release date, and it just didn’t just tell me the movie and
⏹️ ▶️ John list off, like, all the metadata. Let me tell you everything about this movie. Starring this person, directed by this person, released it, and I had to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the… It just told me the release date of the movie. And that, I love that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s something that I feel like you can’t do if you aren’t backed by Google. Because the hard
⏹️ ▶️ John part is not hearing me and translating that as a text, the hard part is figuring out what did you say and what did you mean and how do I answer
⏹️ ▶️ John you? Now for all I know, that’s a canned thing that they expect people to ask or whatever, but the more of those I have, the less
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m just getting lucky and happening to hit upon something they anticipated and especially coded support for.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just like the magic of Google. So, despite the, I
⏹️ ▶️ John Despite Google Home, I feel like it’s still not being revised
⏹️ ▶️ John as quickly as I would have hoped,
⏹️ ▶️ John and its capabilities are not expanding in the way that I hoped. But just for the basic functionality of answering my
⏹️ ▶️ John questions, we have this dinner table and quickly settling arguments, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John money well spent. Alright, name a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movie. Hunt for Red October. There you go. Alexa, what year was the Hunt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Red October released? movie the hunt for red October was released in 1989 it’s magic there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these queries where I will ask the echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these you know a question like this and the things that I will say will that that I think there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that it’s gonna be able to help me with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well it didn’t because it’s wrong it’s the second of March 1990 really oh
⏹️ ▶️ John minor points according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to IMDB that was the American
⏹️ ▶️ John that International versus US
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey release. OK, well, hold on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. Like, what? I thought to myself, that didn’t sound right to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can ask similar questions about albums and songs and artists or who sings a song,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, and all the lyric search where you can name any lyrics in the song and it will figure it out. I mean, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of overlap between these things. But that, I think, is amazing. And ask the same question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say, what is the release date for? What year was it released? When
⏹️ ▶️ John was it put out? just try different phrasings and see eventually if you can stump it, but it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Well, basically, so my point is, I have asked questions like this a number of times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking that it would get it wrong, thinking that there would be no chance that it’ll get it right. And it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right about maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of the time when I ask a weird question like that, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not only better than I expect, but is probably fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar to most of these things. Probably even fairly similar to how often Google gets it right. In my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the accuracy of search results between different search engines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco — I still use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine instead of Google — it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out this kind of stuff is actually not that rare to be decent at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not just Google that can do these things. It is possible for other companies —
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of DuckDuckGo, way smaller companies to be able to be competent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at search. Just not Apple, most of the time, unfortunately. But it is very possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember when Amazon had its own search? What was that called? A3?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was called Alexa. No, Alexa was the rank, right? A3, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A9 was their search engine. But it was… Anyway, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of them. There’s Bing, there’s DuckDuckGo, there’s Google, there’s A9, which we all know still exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has never dipped its toe into this field. I don’t think there need to be that many people, especially if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, you know… The
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. God, yeah. Apple can’t search a domain way smaller than the web in an efficient manner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, Siri searches things, right? Like, especially like in context like Apple TV or Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But there’s like WolframAlpha. No, but Apple TV, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music, it’s searching libraries of content, you know? And the App Store is really just a really big version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that that should be way better than it is. But it’s not, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what just occurred to me? Doesn’t Amazon own IMDb now? Yeah, they sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do. So how could they have gotten this wrong if IMDb says it’s 1990? You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t find anything on the IMDb website with your own eyes and hands. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever—IMDb is now at work, hard at work, obscuring the information
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to know about movies. Because I go to that website page and I’m like, who played the main character? And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just scanning and seeing if I have to disclose something or click on something. it was just tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John you know sound and fury signifying nothing i missed the old imdb yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i mean chances are like the alexa was trying to find the answer on this page and just got blocked by all the ads
⏹️ ▶️ John oh oh yeah one more one more thing on the echo show um marco is lucky because he has
⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly long kitchen i would have no room for this thing in my kitchen as much as i would like
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a thing like this that is i think another limitation for a device i can’t really tell how big it is from the pictures but
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly it is both wider than the echo and you can’t like put it behind
⏹️ ▶️ John or nestled into a corner or whatever it has to be somewhere where you can see it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well i think it actually might be fairly small because didn’t people say it’s a seven inch screen
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah maybe it’s i mean it’s hard to tell maybe it’s smaller than it looks like um but anyway you can’t you can’t nestle it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a corner or hide it somewhere you do need the space and the line of sight for the thing which makes me think that it could replace like
⏹️ ▶️ John a kitchen tv So if this thing started getting live TV, if Amazon wanted to pull a
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube, what is the YouTube one YouTube TV and Hulu has a live TV or everyone about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has a skinny bundle and a live TV offering. That would be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to incorporate this is people do like little TVs in their kitchen to like watch cooking shows or whatever, with like voice activated
⏹️ ▶️ John DVR functionality. They already showed like cooking cooking up to your like, you know, baby cam to to show your baby
⏹️ ▶️ John in your crib and stuff. The potential for a smart screen with good speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John and a camera that’s internet connected with good software in your kitchen. That feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like a fruitful like it’s a device that has been made a million times over if you’re old and remember all of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John the Audrey or the that three come. Maybe that’s the Audrey that I’m thinking of but that Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John has made with Sony was it the evil I don’t know this There’s been tons of like things like this
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were just that we’re going to say they were ahead of their time. They were ahead of the tech. They weren’t ready. There was no
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem. There wasn’t the smart search behind it. There wasn’t a speech recognition. There wasn’t so often there wasn’t the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John for the really old ones. I feel like the time is now. Uh, and I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope that we see more of these devices from, from the big, the big three or four, however
⏹️ ▶️ John many, however you want to count it. Apple, Amazon, Google, and whoever else. Not fewer.
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Brief Quiz
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so somebody has put something that I find actually somewhat terrifying in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. The show notes reads, brief quiz.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I saw that earlier too and got a little bit scared of what, I knew immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was John. I mean, come on. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was an article going around that hopefully you two were too busy this evening to read and follow the link for
⏹️ ▶️ John that involves a brief quiz that I think we should all take. I have already taken it takes two
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds. And so I will paste the URL into
⏹️ ▶️ John the chat room now. It is a thing that asks you to make a bunch of selections.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just don’t read the whole article, don’t scroll down, just go to the part where you make the selections and make the selections.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not share your comments and then when we have all done it come back and we will discuss our choices. So
⏹️ ▶️ John here you go. It’s in the chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what the hell is alphabet? That’s Google, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Google’s parent company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If an evil monarch forced you to choose in which order would you give up these inescapable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giants of tech? So okay, I’m done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, give me I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think about this for a second. Jeezy peasy people. Yeah, my case has
⏹️ ▶️ John got a mullet over it just a little. You all done?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. All right, so now I’ll explain the premise. They list the big tech companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John alphabet, basically Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon, and it asks you in what order
⏹️ ▶️ John would you be willing to give them up. So if there’s one company that you’re like, I don’t care if that company goes away tomorrow, that’s obviously your number
⏹️ ▶️ John one pick. You’d pick that one, and you keep working your way down. At the end, you’ll be left with the company you would least like to see
⏹️ ▶️ John depart this earth, if they just disappeared or whatever. So who wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John go first? Let’s do a top four style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, the question of how many people do you think arrived at this article and knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Alphabet was? And then every time they mention it, they have to say the parent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company of Google, because nobody knows what that is, because Google is so bad at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything branding-wise, everything human they can’t do I would
⏹️ ▶️ John have just called it Google because it uses the Google brand and I don’t think can you think of something that
⏹️ ▶️ John is in alphabet but not in Google that you care about like a SNES stuff or something anyway let’s let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John now do our number one choice sort of backwards top for the company that we would all be willing to get rid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m willing to bet we all have the same one for this one
⏹️ ▶️ John all All right, what did you pick? Microsoft. Microsoft?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What has Microsoft done for me lately? And by lately, I mean in the last year, no more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they did provide your livelihood for many
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey years. Right, no, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why I said only in the last year. And you’re absolutely right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you have a grudge in the style of my Microsoft grudge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, I will never be a grudge. It will never be a grudge like you. But what has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft done for me lately? Nothing really. I mean, I do love Visual Studio Code. Yes, people are mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visual Studio for the Mac, but that’s just a rebranded Xamarin develop, mono develop, whatever it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that there’s anything that Microsoft has given me in the last 12 to 18 months
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that really affects me day to day, and maybe I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey missing something, but I do get some value out of Facebook, believe it or not, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I actively get any value out of Microsoft today.
⏹️ ▶️ John What value do you get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook? Oh, s***, Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco didn’t even think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that at all. Oh, that might change my tune.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized. But see, I can’t throw Microsoft under the bus either, because I use their keyboard. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they own Skype, which we don’t love, but we use it every week, and there’s nothing good to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco These are all hard choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John I factored this into my choice for Facebook as number one, despite Oculus, which you also forgot about, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram or whatever, that Facebook is the one I get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John and be it is evil monarch it doesn’t necessarily say which one of these affects you that’s that’s the framing device that you’re bringing to it
⏹️ ▶️ John the case he’s decided the way he’s gonna pick this is like which one affects his life but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there are many other factors
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could use in determining which one do you want to depart this earth magically and Facebook I want to depart for so
⏹️ ▶️ John many reasons despite Instagram which I enjoy and despite oculus which may or may not be an interesting thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I use someday. Almost everything else they do I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John and I believe that the need they fill could be filled
⏹️ ▶️ John equally or better by some other company if they were to just poof out of existence. So Facebook is my number one. I don’t like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m going to stick with that too. Eve, as much as I love Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other things on this list are more important to me and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the omission of Facebook from the world, I I think I agree with you. I think would have a better effect on the world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just me than than the removal of any other ones here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Flickr could rise again to fill the Instagram. If Instagram didn’t exist, I feel like something else would have done a similar thing, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what it does is not as revolutionary as the fact that it was able to do it and to gather this network of people
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, honestly, it’s kind of amazing that that Tumblr didn’t do that. You know, I know I’m biased here, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking back on I think that Tumblr had a big opportunity to be what Instagram was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but their timing to mobile was all wrong. Similar cases, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost made Facebook pretty irrelevant in the mobile age, is that when you have a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop browser web service, it’s hard when mobile comes around to realize that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change everything and be mobile first. Facebook realized it almost too late.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tumblr got in on it eventually, too. But by that point, a lot of the ground was already taken, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Instagram. All right, so number two, Facebook. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, Microsoft for me as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like Casey said, they haven’t done a lot for me recently. However, again, these companies are all really big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do own a lot of stuff. None of us had anything nice, except for Casey, had anything nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say about the Facebook product itself, but Instagram is owned by it. So we have to consider that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oculus, things like that. With Microsoft, they own a lot of stuff, too. As I mentioned, they own Skype.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re all using Skype right now, and as much as we hate it, there’s no clear, better thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcasters to use except whatever the Germans are using with that Studio Link thing. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know anything about that. I can’t read German. I can’t understand the page, and it looks like it’s some kind of weird plug-in for another app I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use. Oh, well. I guess I’ll figure out some other time, I hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So far, you can still use Google Translate because you haven’t gotten rid of Google yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did use that to read the page. I opened the page up in Chrome so I could use the built-in translate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but yeah, ultimately Microsoft doesn’t have a large role in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my life So that would be my number two and it’s not I don’t really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really dislike Microsoft I kind of feel bad for them these days because they’re playing catch-up on so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many major important fronts in the industry but they just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide a lot of value for me compared to the other ones above it on this list.
⏹️ ▶️ John I picked Microsoft for a bunch of reasons most of which are not evil grudges there is the
⏹️ ▶️ John evil grudge in the back of my mind but I can think of a lot of reasons why I actually wouldn’t want them to go away
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why they’re not number one. Xbox even though I don’t like it is an important counterbalance to
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation it’s only real competitor in the same sort of level playing field because Nintendo is always off doing its own weird
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So I think it’s good that it exists. The they did buy bungee, which we’ll hate them for
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. But on the other hand, we would not have the bungee that we have today if it was not for
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft, right? So there’s some credit there. The cloud stuff they’re doing, I think is interesting. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a counterbalance to both Amazon and Google. And so I like to see more competition there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t like Word or Excel or Office. I think all those programs, the world will be better if those programs disappeared.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we should come up with modern alternatives. They’re dinosaurs, we can’t get rid of them because they’ve always been here,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John those products that I listed, I either don’t use them or would love to use something else. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t say goodbye to them with a grudge, but out of this group, they are my number two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so number three. Google for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Yep, ditto. Or excuse me, I selected Alphabet, whatever that means, but I’m gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it means Google. And this is, again, tricky, because this includes things like YouTube, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey major. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t consider that. I think I stick by it, but, hmm. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. All of these companies, they have major acquisitions and major properties that you don’t think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily. But yeah, Google owns YouTube, and that’s a major thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s hard to give up in a lot of ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people. but there are other ways to find videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online, just none of them are very big, I guess, but that doesn’t mean somebody else couldn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, it’s a weird calculus, but I don’t use Google’s web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for anything other than the show notes for this show, which we could, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve decided that’s the best for us to just use Google Docs for our shared notes for the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there are other options. We’ve all decided they aren’t as good, but we could go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them. And I don’t use Google Web Search the vast majority of the time. I’m almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using DuckDuckGo. I only occasionally jump into Google when I’m not finding the answer I want. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be fairly easy for me, but for a lot of other people, that would be really hard because they have a lot of tie-ins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to things like Gmail that are really important to them. So it’s kind of an easy one for me to say Google, but I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that would be very common.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not say Google, I said Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting, you know, as we were talking, I started to wonder if me choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google for number three was a poor choice because specifically of YouTube. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contribute to YouTube very often, although I have once, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I am on YouTube almost every day to look at something or look up something or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. My answer was to put Google as number three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I wonder if maybe I should have swapped that with Amazon. How did you land on Amazon as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next one to go, John? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google stuff that Google does is, you know, going back to the Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John framing of like this things that are important to your life to use. I use it for my email. There is no alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John for Gmail that has the same properties like I don’t like using my own server using
⏹️ ▶️ John IMAP is not the same as Gmail. I am a Gmail user at this point, not an email user. I use Google search
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. And the alternatives are
⏹️ ▶️ John differently able to do things, but I’m used to the way Google works and I just use it so extensively
⏹️ ▶️ John that I wouldn’t want to have to try to get used to something else. YouTube was a big factor in my decision as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos and I believe that it’s not a matter
⏹️ ▶️ John of if they went away, someone else can make a video service because even before Google owned YouTube, YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John was very good at what it does in terms of making a video that plays when you
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the play button that the recommendation engine to figure out things you might be interested in and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s all sorts of terrible things about YouTube as well inevitably is the big dominant player in a field but I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John do a good job at what they do and if
⏹️ ▶️ John Google went away tomorrow it would take a long time for those ecosystems to reform around what
⏹️ ▶️ John another set of services so I wouldn’t want to say goodbye to that as well and then all the other stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google does all the wacky things that it does for the most part I like them. The translation
⏹️ ▶️ John engine that was translating that German webpage for you. Google has really good translation and it gets better all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John All their weird projects with hot air balloons and Wi-Fi and self-driving cars and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I love all that stuff about Google and I think the world would be lesser for them not to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why, and Amazon, why did I pick Amazon as my number three? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon is great. I use it like crazy. Like, that’s just what I was thinking about. about. Like, if Amazon went away, where would I order all
⏹️ ▶️ John my stuff? Because I order so much stuff from there, right? But I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ John other places that sell you stuff over the internet, and they’re not that much
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than Amazon. Now, maybe they don’t have as much selection, and maybe they don’t have as cheap shipping and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco forth. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John differ here. I’ve used enough of them to know. I mean, even just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John simple as like when I, you know, camera stuff. I can buy it from Amazon, or I can buy it from B&H Photo. And B&H Photo was not
⏹️ ▶️ John a titan of the internet industry, but it’s fine. Lensrentals.com is not Amazon, but
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was fine. You know, like I’ve, I’ve bought enough stuff online from non Amazon places that I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I could live with that. And often my the defaulting of
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon that we all do like I gotta buy something, let’s go to Amazon, that defaulting runs me into trouble more often
⏹️ ▶️ John these days, because I will accept Amazon selection,
⏹️ ▶️ John as well as Amazon doesn’t have it, it must not exist, which is not true. Or if Amazon has a price, it must be a reasonable price,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not true. Because sometimes something on Amazon is insanely highly priced, and you need to do some comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere for a variety of weird reasons. So I do use it, I do value and rely on the
⏹️ ▶️ John service, but I believe that it is not as impressive. And because I don’t have an echo,
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t do I’m not in that ecosystem either. And also, I believe that other people can do similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was my number three was this was probably my most difficult choice between these two Amazon and an
⏹️ ▶️ John alphabet slash Google, but I came down on Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. All right, so that makes number four next. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is where I, I picked Amazon for my number four. I saved it for this. Same here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, my reasoning for saving it for so long throughout this, this elimination is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically that, you know, there are lots of places like, you know, you mentioned B There are lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other online retailers for that. And by the way, again, Amazon owns a lot of stuff, including,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re a programmer, AWS, which is kind of important for a lot of stacks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not always easy to replace the components you’re using, depending on what you’re using. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for retail alone, whenever I buy anything from other places, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often wish I would have bought it from Amazon for various reasons. There’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of parts of it that other people can do reasonably well sometimes, but it’s rare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you get any other vendor anywhere else online that has the combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everything Amazon offers. And this is not only the kind of fundamentals of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying stuff online, which is, you know, get it for a good price. I mean, now a lot of places offer the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same price on things as Amazon or similar price, close enough pricing, but also be able to ship to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly and for not that much money and be able to accept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco returns really easily if it doesn’t work out for you if it arrives broken be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide you know basic order tracking and things like that many of the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online retail things that are that are good Amazon actually owns them like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like zappos and soap calm which is now merged into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon diapers calm all this stuff like a lot of those things that Amazon actually owns them all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it would rule out a bunch of that stuff. And it’s also just really nice to have somewhere where I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying large quantities of things from Amazon for so many years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, for well over a decade now, that I can go back and search my order history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I need to know what was that thing I bought or when did I buy this thing that might be about to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break and I want to know how long its warranty is. When did I buy this? How much did I pay for it back then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to get another one of these things because the one I have just wore out or broke or ran out or whatever. What exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that so I can just go buy the same thing again? Amazon’s great when you have a big history like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there are other vendors or other retailers that provide some of these parts, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have it all in one place like Amazon is really very, very convenient. There are lots of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Amazon retail that are bad. Things like the conditions in their warehouses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some of the workers. There There have been various reports over time about how those are less than great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not wonderful in all ways. Being a seller on Amazon apparently has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of issues because of things like their incredibly overly generous return policy for the customer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is very problematic for a lot of the sellers. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a user of Amazon, I really, really greatly, greatly enjoy it. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t perfect. For example, I recently got a SanDisk memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card, a fairly fast, decent one that was like $60. Any memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card is kind of a risk to buy from Amazon because they have such a problem with counterfeit products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being in their stock, and memory cards are very commonly counterfeited. Anything like that I’ll buy from B&H
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re much more reliable in that way. Things like Pro Audio gear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll buy from B&H most of the time too. With those few exceptions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything I can buy from Amazon, I usually will buy from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just had Charles remember AWS S3, EC2, and all the other services that Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s powering tons of startups. I know there are equivalent cloud offerings from Microsoft and Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if they were to disappear the next day, it would probably kill like half the internet startups and a bunch of other companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like when S3 goes down, you find out how many companies are relying on it. So it is a tough one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I had a number three instead of number four, you know, and I had Google number four, but I already talked about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So we all chose Apple last.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, surprise. Like obviously, we’re going to do that. But I suppose this is a good litmus test.
⏹️ ▶️ John This quiz doesn’t give you much doesn’t give you much guidance, you could use any
⏹️ ▶️ John criteria you want to remove it. And we’re all talking about the different things we thought about. But I, I would guess that for for
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason we kept to Google or Apple until last is mostly based on the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that we use Max and I was devices. So it’s suddenly a very personal decision that
⏹️ ▶️ John factored in like, Oh, I use Gmail or I order lots of stuff from Amazon or you know, I get some value from
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook and not from Microsoft because I don’t use their stuff. But for Apple, I think it would actually
⏹️ ▶️ John be harder to argue about like if Apple has gone, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one will be able to do X, right? I think at least for me, it more comes down to
⏹️ ▶️ John I use them like the Mac, and there is no alternative that I would want to use. And I use them like iOS devices. And there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John no alternative that I would want to use. And so I don’t want those things to go away. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is less about if Apple is gone, they’ll never be self driving cars, because that’s not true. If
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is gone, no one will ever make VR are not true. Like if Apple is gone, no one will
⏹️ ▶️ John ever make you know, a handheld touch operating system again, actually, we have those now, you know, so It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John based on future stuff. I think in the past, if we were sort of in the beginning phases, like
⏹️ ▶️ John just after the iPod and when Apple was making a series of computers that were really
⏹️ ▶️ John impressive and weird and setting the world on fire, and then the iPod, the surprise success, the surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John overnight five-year success, I think I would have said at that time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saving Apple for last because I want to see what they do next. Because they’re just doing hit after hit after hit, and even
⏹️ ▶️ John the duds like the Cube are still awesome, right? You know, what is that Apple going to do next? These
⏹️ ▶️ John days, I have less of what is an Apple going to do next thing. And it’s more just like, please, Apple, you make many products that I like
⏹️ ▶️ John and enjoy that are an important part of my life. And I wouldn’t like the alternatives, please keep making them and improving
⏹️ ▶️ John them, which is a lesser thing. But I did save it for last. And for me, it’s for very selfish reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I make my living off of Apple, no matter how you slice it, be it this show or my jobby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all because of Apple at this point. So I would be pretty sad and broke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they disappeared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me it’s all about beats. I just don’t want to give up my beats. My beats solo to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Studio X headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple Music Connect, right? Is that really a big part of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your life? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, definitely. I really love connecting with my engaged,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know what it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a big part of finding the setting to remove that from your toolbar in iOS. It’s the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, I mean, you know, so like Casey, I also make my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco living off of Apple stuff, you know, whether it’s through my iOS app, which could not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist anymore if Apple went away, you know, and you know, yes, Overcast does have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a web player, which is used by something like 1% of the user base. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably not much of a business there. Granted, it does suck, but it’s still not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, not much usage there. So my living would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go away, or most of it at least. We could theoretically keep podcasting and we could make money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way, but a large part of what we talk about would go away, especially if we eliminated the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five companies or the other four companies here
⏹️ ▶️ John also. We’d all be using Windows or Linux and Android, so I think we’d have a lot of things to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. So that would be a problem. And also, I will go one step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further, speaking of that, John. You mentioned that without Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you couldn’t really say, like, oh, without Apple, nobody would ever do X or this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing would never exist. I would say that there are many of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things in practice, but the one that I will point out here is, I think, without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, nobody would ever make a great personal computing platform again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s lots of reasons why, and this could be a bigger discussion, I don’t know. But this is part of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so defensive of Apple continuing to make pro hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keeping the Mac healthy. Because without that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many slices of people have to go to Windows or Linux or whatever future options might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come about. And I honestly do not believe that anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, any other company, ever make a good general purpose computer operating system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we know it today, besides Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you put a lot of qualifiers on that because you’re saying as we know it, like, I think that if Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John to go away, and you’re waiting for the next great one of those things, it would be an OS that is not quote unquote, as
⏹️ ▶️ John we know it today, like, to give an example from the past that didn’t quite do it, but I feel like could have web OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I remember web OS was a little bit of a mess had some bad ideas, but it’s not it’s not a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system or general purpose operating system as we know it, right? And even you can even argue Android, like I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like the next, what you’d be waiting for is the next great computing platform after Android, essentially, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve already got Android and iOS, we erase, we’ve already erased Google. So Android is gone. And then we erased Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So Apple is gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re left side of this void, right? And I feel like the next thing to emerge would be more like
⏹️ ▶️ John web OS, iOS and Android, you’re right that there would never be with all your qualifiers, a
⏹️ ▶️ John great personal computing, general purpose personal computing platform as we know it because I feel like that time has passed and
⏹️ ▶️ John so it is true that we’d be losing we’d be losing a category of things right um
⏹️ ▶️ John and that would be sad for us because we’re old but I there would indeed be a new great
⏹️ ▶️ John a new great computing platform it just wouldn’t be recognizable to us as like a general purpose computing
⏹️ ▶️ John platform I mean it’s surely in this day and age you would be entirely like locked down and filled with an app store and all sorts of other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff exactly probably be touch-based or vr-based or whatever and like an ad base, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’ll see. I mean, I thought you were gonna say privacy. That’s what I thought you were gonna say. Because if you look at all these companies, which one
⏹️ ▶️ John of these even makes like most of them don’t even make feints in
⏹️ ▶️ John the direction of privacy, right? I mean, Google, I feel like is kind of good on the security of its own data,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s just so it can data
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mine it for itself. It doesn’t want to let
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the outside world, right? But Apple is the by far the strongest
⏹️ ▶️ John on data privacy for, you know, and even things like, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John energy, sustainability, uh, and stuff like things that Apple Apple’s like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John core values, uh, under Tim Cook or otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John these other companies don’t express in the same strong way. Um, and so data privacy could be without Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long would it take for another company of that size to actually care about the privacy and security of
⏹️ ▶️ John your data to the point where it’s fighting the government to prevent it from turning stuff over. That is not a value
⏹️ ▶️ John that is spread very far and wide in tech, so it would be a shame to lose that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an interesting quiz, for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so now we can scroll down on the thing and see what everyone else picked. So 57% picked Facebook as number one, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is interesting. I mean, who knows? This is a self-selecting thing. Who’s going to click on these things? Probably a bunch of tech nerds, and I know there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John hatred of Facebook among tech nerds, but this is the New York Times, by the way. It’s on its thing. thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the audience is broader than I might imagine. Maybe it’s not entirely tech nerds. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the, what I want to believe is that it shows that Facebook is popular because Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John is popular, but you know, people don’t really have that much love for it, right? They’re like, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on Facebook cause everyone’s on Facebook and everyone’s on Facebook because everyone’s on Facebook, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John universally beloved, uh, for whatever reason, whether it’s the, the software platform itself or the things people
⏹️ ▶️ John associate with it or they resent the fact that they have to be there or whatever. You know, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and second, you know, Microsoft is
⏹️ ▶️ John is not on the way up. It’s on the way down, but it is in transition. So it doesn’t surprise me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Transition down Amazon third. Amazon third kind of surprises me
⏹️ ▶️ John because I thought I would think more people would frame this as here’s a service that I use all the time. And if I couldn’t order from Amazon, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe only tech nerds with with more money than time, order everything on Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Alphabet, assuming people knew what the hell alphabet was. Alphabet is third.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people like Google. I think people like YouTube, especially YouTube. I think people, you know, the general
⏹️ ▶️ John population don’t want to, they just think of Google as the way you search things. They don’t know that DuckDuckGo exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John They maybe heard the word Bing once. Google’s an essential thing. Everything is Googling. And then YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re even aware that YouTube was part of it, they’re gonna be like, pfft, I’m not giving up YouTube. YouTube is basically my
⏹️ ▶️ John TV. And then Apple, most people wanted to drop that last because I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they, Apple, Apple customer sat and brand recognition and good feelings.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, people have a lot of good feelings about this is not a strict ranking. It really just tells you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 32% chose to drop it last and 26% chose to drop alphabet first. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to slice and dice this data, it would be difficult. But anyway, if you look at the little bar graphs at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook drop first is just the runaway winner and then drop last oh actually no Google
⏹️ ▶️ John was that had a higher percentage of drop last so you know 40% for Google and 32% for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John so two companies with a recognizable brand that people really really like and Facebook
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Dropping Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco you want to talk to us about how you don’t believe in Dropbox anymore And that would have been your first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one to go if you had the option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so a few maybe about a month or two ago now. I forget exactly when it was about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month ago Maybe I decided to to try a life without Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have my account, but I uninstalled it from all my computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I stopped using it for anything except I logged onto the website to download the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio files that you guys give me every week for this podcast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were a number of reasons why I wanted to drop Dropbox. Their software on the Mac has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increasingly invasive of the system. It does creepy things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to hack the accessibility database and installing kernel extensions and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all in the name of features that I don’t want. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the accessibility thing I think was about sucking in photos or something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kernel extensions are for things like their project infinite file system thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need or want. And there’s no good options to just say, no, please don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. Just give me the basic thing that uses the supported API in Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this, the stuff that you’re doing for syncing a folder. Like that’s all I really want is a synced folder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all I really want out of this thing. Basically the thing it used to be. And so all these features, I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all this stuff that I don’t want or use that are part of Dropbox now, let’s see what else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get away with. And what I’ve settled on at the moment is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just moved everything to iCloud Drive. I already pay for iCloud storage for all my photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already have all Apple devices that I’m running this on, with one important exception, which is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server that runs my blog engine, which I’ll get to. But for the most part, iCloud Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should work fine for me. So let’s see how this goes. So far, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly fine. But I think I’m gonna go back anyway. In everyday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, everything’s fine with iCloud Drive. I even, to make the transition easier with some of my muscle memory of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running shell scripts in my Dropbox folder. I sim linked home slash Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whatever the crazy path is, like mobile documents, whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco path is to the actual iCloud drive folder on your Mac, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sim linked home slash Dropbox to that. So I at least start, everything is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where I expect it to be if I get into a muscle memory of going to the Dropbox folder or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running a script from there or whatever else. So that was actually a very easy progression. As far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that has not caused anything really weird to happen. Although I do keep running out of file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco descriptors, but it’s probably not that. Mm, LSOF.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so. So for sharing my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own files between my computers, like the basic synced folder, iCloud Drive has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been totally fine for me. I haven’t noticed any kind of weird data loss. Everything is always right there when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want it. One of the interesting things about it is because it kinda has like infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background privileges on iOS, I was out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working today out in the world on my iPad. Not something I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do very often, but I was doing it today for various reasons. Number one, cellular Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t exist. But anyway, I was doing this and I went to the iCloud Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on my iPad for the very first time. I have never launched it before, and all my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was there. And all the files that I wanted to access were already there, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is always working in the background, it is privileged. It has Apple’s blessing to do whatever it wants. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlike Dropbox, which can only work if I had already ever launched it, first of all, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever it gets a background update, but then the system controls that and limits it, and if I never use it, it won’t really get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any. So it has privileges on Apple platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Dropbox can’t have. I mean, on the Mac I guess it can, but on iOS it can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, for the most part, for just that purpose, sharing your own files between your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, iCloud Drive has been totally fine for me. The main areas that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurt are, number one, I built my blog engine on Dropbox. Now, I don’t blog very often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, and that’s a separate discussion, and I want to change that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the main problems with this is that Now I don’t have a way to edit my blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except for SSHing into my server and using Vim in the terminal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John text files. The old ways are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best. Yeah. Stick to that. Which is clumsy, to say the least. I could also just switch to a regular CMS, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I’m not going to do that. It’s great to talk. Yeah, exactly. You know me. I know me. That’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s…yeah. So that has been a pain. And a bigger pain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been our shared folder for this show. The way we do the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that this is a common thing. You guys give me audio files every week from your recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I take them out of the Dropbox folder, I make a project, record it, sync it all up and edit it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else and publish it. We also work together on certain files and folders within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that shared folder. So when we’re doing things like t-shirt designs, we’re working often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with shared files in that folder. And this is an area that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know, iCloud Drive has nothing to offer. There are no, as far as I know, right? There’s no collaborative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud Drive folder syncing options. And maybe at WBC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’ll change that. So maybe I should wait. But for the most part, as far as I know, that doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So collaborating with other people and working with other people in a shared folder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, that seems like it’s, I’m gonna have to either go without without that or do what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do now which is just download stuff off the web interface but that makes it much less convenient to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in the folders with you guys. I guess one thing, if you’re just giving me files and I just have to download them, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine but if we are working together on something where we’re all kind of editing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a folder together, the web interface is going to suck royally for that. I should not be using that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically I’m probably going to go back to Dropbox because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those two big things of shared folders and it isn’t just you guys. I occasionally need it for other things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show is the one that happens most often. But so basically Dropbox shared folders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the blog engine problem. Now I could install another cloud service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do these things. I could, for instance, use something like whatever the new name is for BitTorrent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sync, what is it, it’s Resilio, yeah. I could do that. There’s a bunch of other things that are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Other various services and products that will behave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Dropbox. So maybe I should try some of those first. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna be hard to ever address the shared folder problem with those things because- Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will do it. Well, I’m not on that. What? Google Drive is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I trust Google even less than Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John have a terabyte of Google Drive stuff and I’m like, I’ll stop paying for that one, I don’t need it anymore. But I don’t, it’s nice to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still prefer Dropbox, but Google Drive and OneDrive, which is not as terrible as you think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking as someone who has had it forcibly installed on their Mac at work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. The problem I have is that all the other options sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse to me. The ones that are from big companies like Google Drive or I think even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon has something like this and Box. Box is worse, you’re right about that. So yeah, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing. I think all of these things are worse in some way. And to address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the shared folder problem, I pretty much need to use what everyone else around me is using. And around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our community and around these parts, that’s Dropbox, no question. Like, it’s always Dropbox. So I basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to decide, like, how much am I willing to fight Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to fight not having Dropbox? How much is that worth to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus how annoying is it to just have it and tolerate its crappy Mac client?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m leaning more towards reinstalling it just because not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has been a pain in those two big areas. But we will see. I don’t know, I haven’t made any final decisions yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t you disable the privilege accessibility blah blah blah thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just say no every time it boots up and it says we need your password to work properly. I’m like no you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you’re lying to me Dropbox. So I just say no, I just say cancel every time I reboot. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that pisses me off. Like, why should I have to say that?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably dumb enough that you can let it install and then modify the thing such that
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS will refuse to run them. And so the check to see that it is successfully installed will return true, but then they’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John actually run and you’ll get some errors in your console. Like, you just chmod the files too. Because it’s, especially with the kernel extension,
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS is super picky about the permissions of every single thing having to do with the kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John extension for good reasons. If you just flip on the right bit on like group or
⏹️ ▶️ John other one file the OS will refuse to load it and it’ll just show an error log and I bet you that
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox is dumb enough that when it tries to see whether it needs to prompt you it will just look to see if
⏹️ ▶️ John like a file exists and it’s not getting down to the permission level who knows anyway there are possible ways to hack around
⏹️ ▶️ John that or you can just let it do what it does because I let it do what it does I don’t use the infinite thing I don’t think I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John will um Dropbox Dropbox is occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John gets flipped out because it tries to drink from the fire hose of file system events Yep. Right. And I wish it would
⏹️ ▶️ John drink from a smaller fire hose of just the file system events that happen inside the Dropbox folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John But my impression based on the activity of DBS event D or whatever the hell that thing is called, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s flipping out when stuff is going on on the file system that is not inside the Dropbox folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wish it would just chill out. But other than that, which I can solve by quitting Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John which by the way, is the thing I can’t do as easily with the iCloud drive thing. I prefer it. And I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John terrified of iCloud Drive because of the weird behaviors that I’ve seen with weird
⏹️ ▶️ John locked files that can’t be opened or deleted anywhere and no recourse and no ability to turn it on and
⏹️ ▶️ John off and no way to control the indication of download state or force
⏹️ ▶️ John things to download no way to pin files to my iOS devices. I don’t know if that’s even true, but I’m assuming it is
⏹️ ▶️ John all features that I have with Dropbox. I just find Dropbox so much more tractable because it is a third party thing. I am
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned about the increasing invasiveness, but as long as practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t do anything bad to my computer. And if I need to turn it off, I can. I’m still definitely sticking with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do have Google Drive installed and one note and a bunch of other things. And occasionally I
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Drive, and I think it’s fine. Google Drive is fine. I just prefer Dropbox for now. And and
⏹️ ▶️ John as you said, the network effect is the reason you know, you’re using it because everyone else is using it. It’s just the way people collaborate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s this difficult to overcome. Casey, what should I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you should take off your tinfoil hat. You should reinstall Dropbox. And when we all get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of our data stolen and leaked, then you can blame me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Warby Parker, Squarespace, and Away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental Tech podcasts I’ve been casting
Post-show: Mario Kart on Switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what’s the drama with your switch scenario at home because we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking in the relay chat it seems as though You are in an impossible predicament
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you would like to buy another switch, but there are deep penalties for doing so Yet if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t buy another switch you will never play the switch because tiff basically is taking it over
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you’re gonna talk about him putting the little slidey thing on the joy con the wrong way There’s that too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mario Kart for kids. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John trying to do why you can’t have nice things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, why does it go on the wrong way if it if it locks it there
⏹️ ▶️ John plus goes to plus minus goes to minus match match the shapes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Didn’t notice that at first though in Marcos defense. I did eventually notice that plus and plus minus minus but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t using the wrong one for the controller I was using the correct one but backwards
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but you didn’t match up the symbols they go next to each other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why does it go on backwards? Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I like I like the fact that you had to resort to a YouTube video to get out of it like basically if there was no internet you would be at home staring
⏹️ ▶️ John at this like you’re staring at your broken toy being like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you want to rethink your ordering from earlier now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I really was about to get a screwdriver out and start disassembling it to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this thing off because like I remember I forget which one they were like two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Samsung phones ago where like if you put the stylus in the slot the wrong way it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just it would just get stuck in there forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why like why is the switch designed in such a way that you can so easily easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attach these two very commonly attached parts in the wrong direction. And when you do it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the switch hardware is not Nintendo like in so many ways that it is delicate
⏹️ ▶️ John and fragile and you can easily do the wrong thing and like it is it is weirdly
⏹️ ▶️ John not and it’s not like Nintendo doesn’t have a history of making portable devices. Just look at the huge history of portal
⏹️ ▶️ John devices and almost all of them are rugged to the point of Fisher Priceness
⏹️ ▶️ John and very difficult to do something wrong with like the original Firewire connector is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John was inspired by the Game Boy Connect thing of having you know it was novel at the time a connector
⏹️ ▶️ John that can only go in correctly one way and it can be plugged and unplugged lots of times and still be sturdy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the switch comes along and it’s I mean it kind of started switching to it in the Wii
⏹️ ▶️ John U with making stuff glossy to try to make it look more sort of pro and fancy I’m not gonna say Apple like but like less Fisher
⏹️ ▶️ John Price like let’s say for the for the Wii U and like the Wii U Pro controller
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the glossy black model being the high-end and the switch is just like what is this a
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony device like it looks Sony it looks like you know a
⏹️ ▶️ John right down to the the the delicate little bits that seem like they could break off and the ability to put things on backwards
⏹️ ▶️ John it should never be possible
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to do that it
⏹️ ▶️ John should be super rugged but you know but it is fun to make fun of Margo for doing that but He doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John follow gaming websites, so he doesn’t he didn’t see the 8,000 stories when the switch was launched about putting those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re right exactly So I just did it tonight when I was trying to set up these controllers for two kids to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mario Kart with us And yeah, it was it was tough anyway But besides that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am greatly enjoying the switch because now Mario Kart came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m having so much fun with this such incredibly fun game and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are the kind of video game person who has already played it on the Wii U like John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not much new for you. 60 frames per second. But as somebody who hasn’t played Mario Kart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the Nintendo 64 version Hey buddy. Right it is so much fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I really am quite enjoying this and it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally is fun for the whole family we like now Adam’s playing and and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the auto steer or like the bumper cars version of it that John was complaining about last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week is indeed a problem when adults are playing and you don’t realize the little antennas in the back of their car, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the combination of that and the automatic acceleration is awesome for having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small children play because they can play with the whole family and not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, too far behind, not get themselves stuck and have to try to show them how to reverse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s really nice. And in addition to it just being a really fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Mario Kart racing game for adults when they’re playing it in the normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or hard modes, I’m just having so much fun with this game. The only downside to this game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I’m going to have to buy more pro controllers, probably, so it’s going to cost a lot of money that way. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Switch is still mostly being dominated by Tiff and Adam playing Zelda.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John as it should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also thought, like, you know, what, like, there will be times when I want a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Switch dock. So, for instance, like when we go to a beach house in the summertime, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a second TV in our playroom, and like, so maybe somebody’s using the main TV, but I don’t wanna play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the small screen, maybe I wanna play on it back there. Let me see if I can get a second dock. How much could it cost? 40 bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, 90 bucks. And.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another story that if you had read the gaming press, you would have seen a million on around launch time. Or when the prices were announced,
⏹️ ▶️ John people were shocked. People also are shocked, by the way, with how much the Pro Controller costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, because that’s like 70, right? I have two of them now, and I paid way too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like, so I started doing some research of like, you know, if I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second dock, and it’s $90, and a new Switch is only $250, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes with it? 300. Oh, is it 300? I don’t know, it’s hard to know what the real price is. This is the jump
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco makes very quickly. $90, $300, they’re basically the same. Right? Nears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes no difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s like, well, do I need more Joy-Cons? I thought I was going to need one a few hours ago, because I thought I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broke one of mine. So I started adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. I’m like, actually, this isn’t that ridiculous that maybe we should just get a second Switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That way Tiff can play Zelda on the main TV, and I can go in the back room and play Mario Kart. And then I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take one when I travel to the BBC, Tiff can stay here and play with Adam and everything else. So I started asking around with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends like John of like how does that actually work with like game transfers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I bought these games digitally. I don’t have cartridges for any of them on John’s advice which in most cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good and that was the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, no, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was saying the carts won’t save you. Like even if you had it developed on a cart and you plugged into the other thing, the save date is
⏹️ ▶️ John not on the cart. So it’s not helping you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m basically running into all of the issues of being a Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan that Nintendo fans have been yelling about for like 10 years and I was just never really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a part of it because I was out of the game, so to speak, for all that time. And now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I come back in for Mario Kart and I’m like, man, wouldn’t it be great if I had a second system? Or first let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me just get a second HDMI dock. Wow, that’s expensive. Oh, okay, let me get a couple more controllers. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, those are expensive. Oh, well, I bought my games digitally. Let me see if I can just download it onto a second console.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow, that system kind of sucks and is very limited. Okay, how about our save game? Will that transfer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, that won’t. It’s like, all the things again, like Nintendo fan, this is not news to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s been a Nintendo fan forever. But because I haven’t been, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, I take issue with one thing John just said, though, that the cart wouldn’t help. It would help in getting the software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the two devices. I agree, it will not help in any way, shape, or form Save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it will absolutely help with getting the game in between the devices quickly and easily with any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without any sort of fuss
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you can it can only be activated on one device But I bet if you download it onto both you can just like activate
⏹️ ▶️ John deactivate. I don’t know I’ve never tried it in theory It might be better but I really would not relish the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of taking those tiny little cartridges in and out and walking them back and forth from even just within your house
⏹️ ▶️ John because talk about something that could easily get like vacuumed up or eaten by a dumb dog or all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of other things that can happen to… Dogs aren’t smart.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Especially when it
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to things that should or shouldn’t be eaten let’s say. Having a… My dog particularly loves cat
⏹️ ▶️ John poop so you know the the bad tasting Nintendo cartridge forget it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They also don’t chew and apparently don’t taste things so it’s like one swallow and it’s gone. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t relish doing that and I don’t know what’s worse is
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the having it downloaded on both of them, but I only active on one versus carrying a cart back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are way over blowing the difficulty of the cartridge I have cartridges for both Zelda and Mario Kart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have to swap between them when I want to play different games and you Are way way way over blowing how difficult it is
⏹️ ▶️ John no I’m saying if you’re walking across the house
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like which one is it in
⏹️ ▶️ John From one from one side to the other and just wait until Declan needs one of those cards I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I think you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill.
⏹️ ▶️ John My house isn’t that big? No, the transfer between the two places means you’re not sure which location
⏹️ ▶️ John it is Which means you’re not sure where it is period which means it can get lost. They’re very tiny I mean if it was an n64 cart,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be okay, but these are nothing 64 cards fair enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I will say though that I’ve been deeply enjoying both Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kart and Zelda and much to my own surprise I have I have almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much time in Mario Kart as I do in Zelda and And I think that comes back to what I believe I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying on this show, it might have been analog, that I just find it much easier to just kind of pick up Mario Kart and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play, where to me, yeah we were talking about it on this show, where to me Zelda’s not quite so simple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I am not good at video games and so I need the context.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have what it takes to save Hyrule is what you’re getting at.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The world will just go unsaved. Yeah, that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna say, well it seems like a lot of work to save the world, why don’t I just go around in circles
⏹️ ▶️ John a few times in this kart racing game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah. To me, as somebody who’s only watched Zelda and not actually played it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really am not into that kind of game at all, to me it’s like sitting down for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching an epic film versus like watching a quick YouTube video for fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, this Zelda is the, it’s incredibly easy to pick up and do a small amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of things. I don’t think you’ll actually ever finish the game by sitting down and doing a small amount of things, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John force you to say, I’m gonna do the next dungeon like the old Zelda games. You can do a very small amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John things, pick up at any time, do a little thing and stop. And the way it, this is one thing that Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John has actually finally gotten right, the way you can put the system to sleep and it wakes back up and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like literally back at the exact second you put it to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. Which sounds like something you would take for granted, but it has taken Nintendo this long to successfully do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes it so much easier to pick up, I mean, even just for me, like, I will pick up
⏹️ ▶️ John the Switch, this is the main time I use it in portable mode, Like, and do my amiibo
⏹️ ▶️ John random reward thing. Because it’s just easy to do. Turn it on, I’m exactly where I left off, hit a button,
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the little NFC thing, open up my chest, see what I got, put it back to sleep. There’s no way I would do that
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to boot it up or load a game or wait for a long turning on sequence or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this sounds like stuff you should take for granted, the other modern consoles have done forever. But now Nintendo has finally done
⏹️ ▶️ John that aspect. We’re just still waiting for them to understand how the hell this crazy online thing works, because they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John figured it out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you guys have your switches nearby by chance?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. It’s in the other room. Ah, you suck. What, are you gonna play now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I would never do that. Mm-hmm. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to hone your games, 200 CC comes auto-unlocked in this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, almost everything is unlocked from the start, like all the tracks as far as I know, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey too easy for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m 100% sure. All the characters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only things like some of the tires and stuff you need to unlock.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although that is disappointing. I haven’t spent enough time in it Unlock my favorite the card I usually uses
⏹️ ▶️ John the f0 one. They have like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey f0. I have that one the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blue Falcon I think
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s a lot of ones I like and I think I haven’t unlocked it yet But now in the original America that you had to slowly unlock things
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of the things were DLC like a lot of the additional tracks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But this has all the
⏹️ ▶️ John DLC and everything unlocked except for some of the cart stuff and 200 CC 200 CC
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t even exist in America Right for a long time that was think part of a DLC pack 150 was top so I 3 start
⏹️ ▶️ John all of 150 and 200 CC came out and I was like no I’m not doing that, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John three start a couple of them in 200 CC. I don’t think I’m gonna do all of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love one of my favorite things about Mario Kart as somebody who was out of it for so long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that if you are familiar with the Nintendo 64 version and its mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way the vehicles handle and the controls and how you you know how the weapons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle how you like can hold on to stuff behind you and how you do the jump and skid thing and how you can hold the skin and everything else like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that muscle memory translates perfectly. Like everything still handles pretty much the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exact same way. It still feels like that game. And so you’re able to, at least I was able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, jump in and pretty much know how to play immediately. And actually I can say the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing for Tiff and for some of our friends who have played it. Like everyone I’ve seen pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this game has just immediately gotten it because we all played the N64 version back in the day and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just, it handles the same way. Like it’s new but familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does not handle the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It totally does. By any stretch of the imagination. No, I mean, it is the same conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, I don’t know, you have to be a Mario Kart connoisseur, but Mario Kart’s handling is so unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the N64 one, which is in turn is unlike a Double Dash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the closest you could say is that Mario Kart 8 is a little bit like the Wii version, but I find
⏹️ ▶️ John the handling very, very different, shockingly different between those different versions Mario Kart so
⏹️ ▶️ John much so that it’s almost hard to believe that they’re the same game. You know that they have like the same graphics and everything. You’re right, the concepts are all
⏹️ ▶️ John the same and the things you’re doing are more or less the same, but Mario Kart is a nice compromise between,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I don’t know, Double Dash is my favorite in terms of handling. That’s how I wish all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them handled. The Wii version was a little bit floaty, the N64 version was a little
⏹️ ▶️ John imprecise and you had sprites going on there, so it was a little bit of mess and there was a lot of hopping, so it was very different. There’s no hopping.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you remember in 64 hopping no hopping and
⏹️ ▶️ John right but yeah Mario Kart 8 doesn’t feel as floaty
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Wii version it’s not as snappy and precise as double dash but I it is a nice compromise it is
⏹️ ▶️ John like all round in the middle like nicely I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know nicely rounded handling but it doesn’t it doesn’t feel as precise to me and in terms of the racing as my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might my only complaint about it is that when I first started playing it I was able to immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out how to handle the cars and everything but I had a lot of trouble figuring out like you know what do all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tires do and what are the different air foils do and what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the deal with that because I still haven’t really figured that out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well so and and also I didn’t even realize like what what are the coins for like what do they what are the coins do and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not much help with it with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and so what so I went online and just searched for it because the first thing I wanted to know is like what are the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like weight classes of these characters that I don’t recognize.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, weight classes, that’s not how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and so I went and found like there’s this IGN like wiki kind of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all these numbers. They have iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John apps you can download,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. So now I finally understand. I took like 20 minutes to read all that stuff and I read about the thing how like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you hop off of a jump, you get a little boost. And I figured out what the little anti-grav things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were and how they worked and like all the stuff that like that everyone who’s playing it just kind of knows because this is probably introduced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last 7 years and various iterations of this game, but I’ve, you know, I, the last one I played was the N64 version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that was a long time ago, and that didn’t have things like coins and jump, you know, jump boosts and any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graph wheels and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is the deal with, like, the different wheels and, and sails and whatnot? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how does that empirically affect?
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys both know how to show the stats, which they frustratingly don’t show by default and don’t remember your preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re picking a car, you hit the plus button.
⏹️ ▶️ John what? It’s another thing that annoys you about Mario Kart 8 is they don’t they don’t remember your
⏹️ ▶️ John preference for that. So every time you go to that screen you have to hit it. The other thing I don’t know if this
⏹️ ▶️ John is true of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe but I’m pretty sure it is. They when you hit the plus you
⏹️ ▶️ John will see the stats for the things and you will notice that the wheels change your stats. I don’t know if wings change your stats but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not all some of the wings change your stats but it’s in very minor ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway like really you shouldn’t obsess too much about that because it
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of it comes down to two things. Here’s my advice for picking stats. When you are not good at the courses
⏹️ ▶️ John or not good at the game, pick acceleration over anything else because if you will get are gonna get hit
⏹️ ▶️ John or make a bad turn or whatever, the most important thing is to get up to speed faster. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you also have difficulty and fall off the course ladder, aren’t familiar with whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John prefer handling, right? So the fastest cars are the ones that have bad acceleration, high top
⏹️ ▶️ John speed and handle slowly. And those are the hardest to race and it will make you feel like you’re worse at the game.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never really built up to the point where I liked using those. And seeing speed runners use
⏹️ ▶️ John high acceleration, low top speed things for the handling purposes leads me to believe that those are a sucker’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bet. So a lot of them
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wow, great speed. Look at the top speed. I’ll use this thing like I think the big Mercedes car, like the shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John gold one from one of the earlier Marys huge top speed, cruddy handling. You
⏹️ ▶️ John will never get a good time with that. You’ll never win a race, especially when the million items are flying at you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John those are the stats I would look at handling acceleration and don’t and ignore speed because if you have decent
⏹️ ▶️ John handling acceleration and you use your boosts and that’s the winning formula.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. I’ll have to check that out. I didn’t know you could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, hop on it. You’re off jumps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it seems it seems like the character matters the most and in the car like is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a small multiplier on that and then the tires seem to be a smaller multiplier on that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the wing has like a very slight modifier. And don’t forget about bikes. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why should I use bikes or not use bikes? I haven’t tried one yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have never taken a shine to bikes, but my impression is
⏹️ ▶️ John that bikes have potentially different or better handling characteristics than cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what they give up. I’ve just never, like, whatever is different about bikes in Mario Kart 8,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have not, it has not worked with me. So I just ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, and I just do everything on carts.
⏹️ ▶️ John But your mileage may vary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, usually I go the opposite way. Usually I play as Bowser in some kind of big, heavy thing, because I appreciate the high top speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you were just telling me not to go for. But you’re handling this crap, though. Yeah, well, I run off the track a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John top speed is- And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you take so long to get back up to speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my top speed is ridiculous, and I get to crash into anybody I want, and nothing bad ever happens to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, bad things will happen to you if you get hit with a shell. I mean, it’s not, anyway. Bowser is probably good for like
⏹️ ▶️ John a non, If you’re not racing with computers, it was just a bunch of people, because then you do have a lot of defense about
⏹️ ▶️ John bumping people off the track and stuff like that. But I still, I don’t go in for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you play, Luigi? You seem like a Luigi person.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m a Yoshi man.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Same here. Always been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm, same here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Yoshi was the obvious choice for the N64, because he was clearly the best character.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like now maybe we have not only more balance, but also more options.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, really I’m just picking like a mid range type of thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because of N64 why I’m picking it, honestly. Like, and I’ve carried Yoshi through all the way, whether he’s the best character
⏹️ ▶️ John or not, Yoshi’s my thing. You can get Yoshi in different colors now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how does that work if you pick your own Mii as your player?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t do that, I don’t know. I’ve got outfits for myself, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mii’s actually, it says that apparently the Mii’s figure out their weight class based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mii’s size and weight. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta use like Wii Fit to try to change your weight class. You gotta fatten up so you can be Bowser.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So sitting here now, Marco, what do you think you’re gonna do? You’re gonna get another Switch at some point when you can actually get one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nah, probably not. We’ll probably just stick with what we have and just fight over it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a very Casey answer to the problem and not a very Marco answer to the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally you’d be right, but so. If the game syncs work, he would already have bought one. Well, if I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a hold of one, yeah, probably. But yeah, so that, yeah, if there was a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync solution in place for both purchases and for save game data,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would make that a lot more compelling option, especially considering like how much the accessories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost and how much comes with the Switch when you buy it. So that would be a more compelling option in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. But because that is not an option, or because there’s no good solution there, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then instead I will most likely just stick with what we have and just hope that TIFF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets board of zelda pretty soon but i don’t think that’s on the horizon so we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John as uh… how close to the finishing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i can tell you for sure i believe she has just defeated the last like big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fire monster thing that you have to defeat in return to their saviors or whatever so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears that they’re fairly far in the game
⏹️ ▶️ John well so because it’s open world you don’t have to do anything you could go right to the final boss
⏹️ ▶️ John battle as soon as you get off of the tutorial area essentially you probably die but you could.
⏹️ ▶️ John So she could go and she could have gone before to quote unquote finish the game and she could go now
⏹️ ▶️ John to quote unquote finish the game but merely doing that does not mean you are done with the game by a
⏹️ ▶️ John long shot. I finished the game a long time ago and I’ve put in you know tens of hours since then
⏹️ ▶️ John and I continue to put hours into the game so just because she finishes the game don’t expect that you’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing back. Eventually she probably will get tired of it she’s not gonna find all 900 Korok seeds or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John but I she might spend some more time
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get trying to crank up her number of shrines and if she’s paranoid about
⏹️ ▶️ John going into the final endgame with enough attributes you might send some time you know increasing a number of hearts and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are there any other games coming up that I’m gonna want to play besides Mario Kart like like are there any 2d Mario games on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the horizon or am I just gonna convert to 3d because now I’m apparently in it’s an into Nintendo stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John well there’s the 3d Mario coming I think you will get that and play it and you probably like it. I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s on the schedule I mean a splatoon which you may or may not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’ve actually I’ve never played it I don’t even all I know is that everyone loves it, but I don’t know I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even tell you what kind of game It is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a you run around and shoot paint on People in different areas. It’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a friendly Shooter game instead of shooting bullets you’re shooting paint and painting areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Like and this is like I’m sure like all these characters in Mario Kart that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t recognize They’re probably all from these different franchises that I’ve missed right like some of them appear to be wearing paint smocks So yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John the squid the squid people are from are from Splatoon arms is coming out Which is a new
⏹️ ▶️ John IP which is kind of like a weird? Boxing game with stretchy arms, which I really don’t know how that’s gonna.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s literally arms Figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it was like you know armaments, but no it’s actually arms like it fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. All right, yeah, so I shouldn’t get a second one. I’ll just, I’ll be patient with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are, the patience is not in your vocabulary, sir. No, it’s not. It’s only a matter of time. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably right. It is. I’m telling you, what’s gonna happen is, I’m gonna call you one day from like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Target and say, hey, I’m looking at a Switch. Do you want me to send it to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And you’re gonna say yes. And I’m gonna say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I’m gonna say, well, how fast would you like me to ship it? And you’re gonna say overnight. And I’m gonna say, really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s gonna be like another 50 or $100 and you’re gonna say yeah that’s fine just do it that’s exactly how this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire conversation will go I can guarantee it if you were Amazon I could get it the next day for three bucks I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am NOT Amazon unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like rhyme might be coming out for switch unless I’m misreading this article I just googled just to see the lineup and it’s showing a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of games like yeah yeah fighting game Alex and Alex Marco that other person is not
⏹️ ▶️ John into this rhyme is this coming for
⏹️ ▶️ John a third person little boy running around in a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John mysterious ancient world kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like there’s a lot of indie games coming is what I’m getting at. I think they’re saying it’s coming to Switch. F-Zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey F-Zero’s coming?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Red Out. Don’t mess with my emotions man.
⏹️ ▶️ John Come on. Red Out is F-Zero but not. But Armark already has an F-Zero but not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have the other one. The Fast RMX. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco played it once since getting Mario Kart.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of little indie games that you might look at. Honestly, Marco, I think probably what you’d really
⏹️ ▶️ John be interested in is probably the next year when virtual console stuff ramps up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would like to see that too. It’s funny, seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zelda, which is basically a game that was obviously intended for the Wii U first, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing Mario Kart being released for the Switch that is really just a repackaging and slightly expanded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of a Wii U game. It seems so new to people like me and Casey who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally ignored the Wii U. And I feel like Nintendo is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screaming, like, why didn’t you care about these games before as they rake in all the money?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re happy to say, like, we have a ready game library of basically already completed games that we just have to port
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people haven’t seen. And they’re like, wow, this is great. And so I think it’s a great, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re angry about it. I think they’re happy that they don’t have to develop all these games from scratch. That they’re sort of shovel-ready
⏹️ ▶️ John games to just chuck over there and they’re all new to you and everyone’s happy to have them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it really speaks to like not only how big of a flop the Wii U was but also just like the difference in reception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between these two platforms. Like I think being somebody who has been on the outside of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who’s only casually seen in here and there, the Wii U, I was never tempted to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wii U. The Wii U seemed profoundly uncool and uncompelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways. And some of that might not have been warranted, but that’s how it seemed on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Switch just seemed like the cool new thing that you have to get in on, and it’s so nice and you get it, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun. I know the Wii U was probably that much fun also when it came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for whatever reason, I was never tempted to get a Wii U. And…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it just seemed… It seemed like such a bad idea. For no good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it just seemed… It seemed uncool and uncompelling. And you… You make a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to the hardware, and you release basically the same games, and now it’s the coolest thing
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can find one for cheap, it is worth getting the Wii U just to play Nintendo Land. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a reason to buy the entire console. What’s that? It’s their… It’s their pack-in… I don’t remember if it was a packing
⏹️ ▶️ John game, but it’s their game that basically demonstrates Here’s what you can do with this wacky hardware that no one really picked up
⏹️ ▶️ John on but there are There are games in there That give you that kind of Wii Sports
⏹️ ▶️ John type experience where I have never played a game like this in this way before It is super fun Especially for family
⏹️ ▶️ John games very often with young children for many many years when we had the Wii U Whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John my son would have his friend come over of all the gaming hardware we have in the house They would choose to play one of the mini
⏹️ ▶️ John games in Nintendo land which it was an okay minigame
⏹️ ▶️ John but of all really of all the things that we have this is what you want to play that we played for hours just you know week after week month
⏹️ ▶️ John after month and I don’t even think that’s the best minigame and then when is all mini games essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of them are really fun and really interesting and I will tell you that you have never played a game you know never
⏹️ ▶️ John played because it’s a different hardware arrangement you have multiple screens a TV a handheld thing playing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same environment with these very strange mechanics with motion controls and cameras and so many
⏹️ ▶️ John good ideas in there. None of which obviously is a full-fledged game. They’re all mini games, but totally worth it
⏹️ ▶️ John just to have that experience if you can find one cheap somewhere.