234: Everybody Has Asterisks
11 Aug 2017The #askatp Q&A episode!
Episode Description:
- Toasters
- Cameras
- Ad Blockers
- A/V
- Brace styles
- Dolphin emulator behind the scenes
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Investing made better.
- Warby Parker: Boutique-quality, vintage-inspired glasses at a revolutionary price. Try up to five pairs at home for free.
- Squarespace: Make your next move with a beautiful website. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- Intro: #askatp
- Why no more toaster reviews?
- What cameras do we use?
- Cleaning out /Applications
- Which ad blocker?
- Sponsor: Warby Parker
- Higher-resolution iTunes music?
- Whose setup would we use?
- When to replace an Accord?
- What does John like?*
- Podcast recommendations
- State of Swift
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Women-in-tech progress
- Next iPhone dealbreakers?
- Tabs or spaces?
- Low-level Apple stack wishes?
- Sponsor: Betterment
- How are Overcast ads doing?
- Subscription fatigue
- Noise-canceling AirPods
- Top Swift wishes?
- Arcade-game nostalgia?
- Neutral season 2?
- Would an iOS laptop be viable?
- Podcast payment middlemen?
- What streaming services do we use?
- Mac Plus over Apple IIgs
- How did we meet?
- Do we tape our webcams?
- Happy with Go?
- How did T-shirts go?
- Why does Marco read the ads?
- Explaining John’s bagel love
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Zelda progress?
Intro: #askatp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When we last saw our heroes, they were doing all the things they normally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. But today they do something different. This is the Q&A episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So it is still in ATP time, Friday the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4th of August, but most of you listening are probably listening somewhere on or around the 9th of August.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we did this because as we covered last episode, we didn’t plan our vacations well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case. So yeah, we’re going to do a Q&A episode. So we had solicited had being the keyword
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solicited questions via Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you telling our audience to please stop asking questions now? Is that what that means? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can certainly continue to ask questions, but we are not planning another Q&A episode for at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year. So You can ask but they’re pretty much going into the ether
⏹️ ▶️ John But what about the ask ATP segment that we’re gonna add to the show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I I would I would like to keep the questions Going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh, I mean they don’t have to be as many
⏹️ ▶️ John questions because we’re answer like two of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the hosts have spoken. We have a-
⏹️ ▶️ John just two or three people ask a question every week.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You figure it out amongst yourselves. You coordinate. And then-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fair enough. So we are going to do this in quasi-chronological
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order. We have selected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John questions- That’s a terrible idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because of this, here’s the thing. They were going into the spreadsheet, but I was afraid if I tried to sort them that it would mess with
⏹️ ▶️ John the automated, I don’t know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We’re going to go from
⏹️ ▶️ John top to bottom in this document.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think it’s… You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t save. The document you can’t save.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it turns out that adding every single tweet with this hashtag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a giant spreadsheet and having no way to filter or upvote or sort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at all might not be the best tool for this job, it turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well I am happy for you to coordinate the replacement, my friend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this seems like the lowest impact way to me. I agree with you it is not ideal, but it’s the lowest impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we supposed to be using things like Reddit? Is that a thing? Are we supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be doing that? Oh yeah, that is what the Reddits are for, isn’t it? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not supposed to be doing that. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s question number one answered. All
⏹️ ▶️ John if anyone on this show or off this show wants to make a replacement that’s better than this spreadsheet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be, we probably should have some way to like upvote or downvote, and some way for one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the admins, which would be us, to say, all right, this question, we’re just not gonna answer, so just kill it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but unlike Reddit, I’m not sure this needs to be publicly accessible, but whatever. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so the show notes for this episode may or may not exist. We’ll see what happens. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s basically just a bunch of questions and answers. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just gonna try to emcee this and do the best I can with names, with questions, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re going to dig in.
Why no more toaster reviews?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Gulick, who asks, Hey, why no more toaster reviews, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John The toaster reviews were a sponsorship, believe it or not. I know you don’t remember that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they weren’t just like, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John review a bunch of toasters. It’s actually ads for Cards Against Humanity, but instead of an ad read, they wanted me to do toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews. So they are not advertising, quote unquote, advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show anymore. They don’t have any other campaigns. So that’s why there’s no more toaster reviews. And if they did, they wouldn’t do toasters again. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not gonna get any more toaster reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we have had many people suggest new things that we could have a series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reviews for and honestly none of them sounded as funny as that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was such a great thing it had a wonderful progression it ended I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could have continued indefinitely I think it was pretty much done when it ended and every other suggestion we’ve seen since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then has been less funny so yeah we nobody has tackled anything more than that and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they it probably won’t happen at least in that format
⏹️ ▶️ John and those suggestions weren’t from sponsors right though sponsorship is the key part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t think we would
⏹️ ▶️ John have endured like in the middle of a tech podcast let’s talk about toasters for five minutes unless it was a sponsorship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like and I think one of the one of the funniest things about that was like you know cards against humanity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I and we later came to learn that the person who was organizing all this there was Alex Cox now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Dubai Friday fame so And like, they really…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They weren’t just sending random toasters. There was a clear progression, like getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the normal ones slowly into the really bizarre and crazy and horrible things, like those big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breakfast stations that could make the egg on top and stuff like that. It was clearly in this wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progression that it was just so well done. And you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give Cards Against Humanity credit for that incredible run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, completely agree with you.
What cameras do we use?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kathy Wise writes in, what cameras are you using now? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I will begin, I’m using the same camera that we got shortly before Declan was born. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Olympus OM-D E-M10, which is a truly terrible name. It is a Micro Four Thirds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera. I have a prime lens for it. That is what I use generally speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you remember from the last episode, which in ATP time happened about 15 minutes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also have a zoom lens, which I actually quite like. And I was going to argue with you, Marco, when you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, oh, you can’t get a zoom lens that, you know, covers all three parts of the triangle, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But as you were talking, you had mentioned, well, you know, if you do have a decent zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lens, that means it’s exorbitantly expensive and still probably has some other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concessions. And that is the case for me. The zoom lens I have was like $800 or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And otherwise it’s very nice. It’s F 2.8. I think it’s 100 to 300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey millimeters in regular cameras. I forget what it is in a micro four-thirds. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, I like it a lot, but it was very expensive. Marco, what are you using?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am mostly using my iPhone, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sad, but that is the reality of it. We do have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5D Mark IV now in our family. we had for years, ever since they came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, we had the 5D Mark II, which came out, I think, in 2007 or 2008, something like that. And, oh, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was late 2008. And so, we had that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then, and it was great, but it was getting long in the tooth in a lot of different ways. And so, for a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while, I had a Sony Phase, because the Sony A series of cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first I had the little RX1, then I had the A7R II, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are awesome cameras in a lot of ways. But I found, I’ll make it brief because we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this before, I have found that I generally prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speed and handling and battery life of full-sized SLRs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the little Sony mirrorless cameras. And I think over time that will probably eventually change back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the little Sonys get better. You know, the A9 has now come out and it solves some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems I had. it makes certain things worse. So maybe there will be an A7R
⏹️ ▶️ Marco III at some point, or an A9 Mark II or something like that, that I might go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back for, but for now I’m very happy in the world of big Canon SLRs when I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy photos. But I take fancy photos less and less every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My wife takes them much more often, and she is way, way better of a photographer than I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So most of the good pictures of our family and stuff, taken by her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so that kind of frees me up to do mostly the casual stuff. So that’s I’m shooting mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my iPhone if I shoot anything at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still using my Sony a6300 I thought of trading in for a6500 that was right up until I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw that the battery life was slightly worse and that really much did it for me because the battery life in 6300 is
⏹️ ▶️ John just barely enough like I have two batteries and on vacation I never needed to swap
⏹️ ▶️ John the batteries even on a day at the ocean but I come close and I don’t think I can give up that whatever 10% battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John And the 6500 is more expensive and so I’ve never I’ve never done the swap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still looking at it I’m still you know I would still recommend the 6500 or the 6300 as long as you can
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with the battery life But be sure that you can because that’s that’s a big quality of life issue. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m happy with that The only new lens I got recently was that is that big zoom. I forget which one it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, but it’s one of the Sony ones it’s not it’s not a very good lens like whatever. It’s what is
⏹️ ▶️ John it a uh, 55 to 300. So it’s a pretty big range again,
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusting for what that is on a APC sensor. It’s not, you know, those are the full frame numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still like my 50 millimeter prime the best. I have my own super expensive zoom that does 16
⏹️ ▶️ John to 70 and there’s over $1,000 and that is my sort of general all purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John lens that I keep on the thing. It’s not as good as the 50 prime, uh, and it doesn’t zoom as long as the big zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s kind of a nice all around her and to get a reasonable okay all-arounder, a thousand bucks.
Cleaning out /Applications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, also from Kathy Wise, did the last show, which was actually two shows ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m doing this mental math right, shame you into clearing out your application folders? No, it did not.
⏹️ ▶️ John John, Not only did it not shame me into cleaning out my application folder, but I realized after we finished that show that I was
⏹️ ▶️ John just looking at slash applications. I also have a tilde slash applications with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way more things in
⏹️ ▶️ John it, way more things in it, which is that’s like an old, an old school next early Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X error thing of having an applications folder in your home directory, which you could totally have and the OS knows about
⏹️ ▶️ John it and gives it the little a icon, but only weird people do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on.
Which ad blocker?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oplez asks, which ad blocker did Marco choose?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time… As soon as I killed Peace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within a month or two, I stopped using it too. Just to be fair, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong for me to use it and no one else did. I switched to OneBlocker back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OneBlocker is fine. I don’t have really much bad to say about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or much great to say about it. If you’re going to go with one of those mass market blockers, one blocker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time I looked was the best one. I have noticed that over time more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more sites are broken by it. There was one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS 11 betas where it was not working due to some limits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had changed. So I went looking and I started using Better, which is better.fyi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a paid app, I think it’s like five bucks. They have a Mac version and an iOS version, which is nice, and the Mac version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of keeps itself up to date, which is nice with this little menu bar extra thing. So I’ve been trying Better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. It doesn’t seem to block as much stuff as OneBlocker, but it also doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break as many sites and it seems to block enough that works for me and it seems to get regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates. So right now I’m using Better, but I’ve only been using it for maybe a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks at most, So it’s hard for me to really say you should definitely go buy this. But if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking to buy something right now, that’s the one I would start with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any thoughts? I also use OneBlocker for the record, but John, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m also using OneBlocker, but occasionally, I don’t know if the OS updates it or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it gets turned off and I don’t notice for a while. I don’t have a good blocker situation going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And half the time when things don’t work, I do the little long hold down on the reload to reload without
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to see if that’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think some sites are getting more obnoxious. One, I think the Boston Globe is like, you’re running an
⏹️ ▶️ John ad blocker, I don’t like you, whatever. And it’s like, all right, well, fine. You’re gonna learn not to even tap those links.
⏹️ ▶️ John And some site, I think it was like the Atlantic or something like that is like, sorry, something is wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and we can’t serve you ads. And so I reload without content blockers and it says the same thing. Like, well, what do you want me to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like, you’re running an incognito mode. I was like, I’m not, I’m not an incognito mode. I’m just on my phone and I want to read your website
⏹️ ▶️ John and I turn everything off and you still and the worst thing is it does it with like a sheet that goes down over the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John article and you just want to like right click and inspect and delete
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey node but you can’t because you’re on your phone. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is when Casey occasionally goes off on his little angry rants about how he
⏹️ ▶️ John feels constrained by iOS. I have that in small degrees too and it’s basically whenever I do anything on a
⏹️ ▶️ John web page and I realize I don’t have access to my web developer tools and I feel just just completely crippled.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like it’s just stupid web. It’s just a freaking div. Let me delete it. Like I just saw the articles right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s what I do. This is what I literally do to find out if I want to actually read the article. I do long
⏹️ ▶️ John press to read the slug in the URL, hoping that it’s something sensible. But sometimes it’s not. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John repeatedly revisit the page and try to read the headline before the stupid thing slides down on it. Like I get, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John three words and oh, it slid down. And then I reload three words and just to find out, is this a story that I want to bother going
⏹️ ▶️ John to a quote unquote, real web browser and, you know, looking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, websites are annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You guys try way too hard to read. If a site makes it difficult for me to read an article,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just close it and I move on. Because you know what? No matter how good of a writer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are or no matter how great of journalists you are or whatever else, there’s a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read out there on the web. And if you’re going to make it hard for me to read yours, I’m just not going to read it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that might be like if you have a site with anti-adblocker blocker thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you won’t let me read the site with an ad blocker, that’s fair game. I respect that decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of yours, but that means I’m not going to turn off my ad blocker, I’m just not going to read it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s the option you presented, then fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m saying. I’m willing, like, oh, I’ve detected you have an ad blocker. Fine, I will turn
⏹️ ▶️ John off my ad blocker. I’ll turn it off. I’ll be like, reload without content blockers. Here I am. I’m ready
⏹️ ▶️ John to see your thing. It’s not behind a paywall. It’s not like they want me to sign up, subscribe, or pay money. Like there is no,
⏹️ ▶️ John the site is just broken is what I’m saying. I think it’s a pretty well-known site. Maybe it’s the Atlantic or whatever. It’s like, I’m doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John you want me to do. Turn off all my blockers, turn them off in settings, not be in incognito mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no paywall, you’re not asking me to sign up or subscribe, you just, every time I try to load it, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, I couldn’t figure out something and I’m gonna put a big, I’m gonna slide a big animated sheet down
⏹️ ▶️ John over the article that’s perfectly good, and there’s no reader mode for people asking, there’s no, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John websites, man. Like do you ever test on the iPhone? It’s a popular platform. Get it?”
Sponsor: Warby Parker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Warby Parker, making buying glasses online easy and
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco to order 5 pairs of frames and you get to try them on for 5 days. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no obligation to buy. It ships to you for free and it includes a free prepaid return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco label. And all you gotta do is pick out what you want and they’ll send you this box of home try-ons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can try them, you can show people in your life, you can look in the mirror, you can take pictures, whatever you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to decide what’s right for you. And there’s no obligation. You don’t have to buy any of them. But I bet you will because they’re really high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality glasses. My wife has a bunch of these and they are just wonderful. And they come with great
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your face. You can stitch it into a video, you can share it with friends to help you pick a winner. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even before you get the frames mailed to you in the Home Try-On program, you can preview how they’re going to look on you and then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco educate your guests that way. They make it so easy to buy glasses online and the value
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco such great glasses for starting at just $95. Go to warbyparker.com slash
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Higher-resolution iTunes music?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Jack Johnson, yes, from New York City apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has two questions that are related. Do you think it would be a good move for iTunes to offer a higher resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio file for download or streaming? And then kind of tangentially related, do you think part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the HEVC strategy is to set the groundwork for 4K streaming?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say that I don’t think anyone really cares, except Marco, about higher resolution audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming out of iTunes and… I don’t. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even care about that. I’m surprised. So, as for all my, like, audiophile-ness when it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes to, like, selecting headphones and stuff, I have never been swayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, like, higher-than-CD-quality audio files or lossless compression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schemes. I know a lot of people like these. A lot of people think they can hear a difference. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you can, but I know for sure that I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold on, though. Hold on. How do you download your Phish concerts? MP3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They offer Flack options. I am stunned. That’s what I assumed you were going to say. No, they offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flack for a few more dollars. And there is… So I have bought… So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick background here. Phish sells all their live shows legally through their own site, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few hours after the show’s end. And so you can buy a season pass and you can basically have downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of every show they do for like a whole tour. So I do this. I’ve been doing this since something like 2009 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. And there was one tour early on that I bought in Flack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pre-ordered it and I’m like, gosh, let me get the Flack version. I’ll see if it sounds any different. And it was such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pain because, first of all, iTunes didn’t support Flack at the time. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually is finally adding that in High Sierra, I think, but it didn’t at the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had all these massive files that, first of all, I didn’t want to ever delete them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, well, I paid for these massive files. So they’re taking up tons of space in the hard drive that I still had to transcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to make them actually playable in anything. I did play the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones or there was, let’s see, I think one time I transcoded them to ALAC or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I downloaded, maybe they sold them as ALAC, I forget. But so I did, for a group of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfer them and play them as lossless files as a lack files in iTunes and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just I couldn’t tell any difference at all and there’s there’s lots of again there’s lots of people who claim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to can they can hear a difference there’s a whole lot of tests that have been done that have shown mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise but this is one of those things kind of like my subwoofer thing from last episode of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do things my way and some people consider them insufficient or some people want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better things and I think I’m just I don’t I can’t care anymore like if you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things your own way if you want to get massive files with 2496 or 24182 sample rates and if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have lossless encoding and you want your albums to take up a gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each, fine. It’s hard drive space is cheap. Do whatever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I could not possibly agree with you more, but I was expecting to snicker as you told me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how FLAC is the only answer. So kudos to you, sir. I am stunned.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want audio that’s lower quality and has like hiss and pop in it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No. Here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Something for Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s not the right move for Apple to offer higher resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John audio, but if Apple ever gets to
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they will because again, streaming is what everyone cares about now, as Marco pointed out earlier slash on the
⏹️ ▶️ John last show, but it would be a way to make the Ferrari
⏹️ ▶️ John of purchasable downloadable music. can we charge more money for something that people perceive as better?
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer is yes, you can. You sell lossless or a higher bitrate or some combination
⏹️ ▶️ John thereof, and a very small number of people who think that is worthwhile for them will buy it. It doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John matter if anyone can hear the difference. It only matters whether they’ll give you money in exchange for these goods which are able to be produced.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wouldn’t totally rule it out. I don’t think it’s something Apple needs to do at all. But someday,
⏹️ ▶️ John if buying music at all downloadable continues to be a thing. Some smart person in
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing may say we’re leaving money on the table by not selling high resolution audio.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll just do it and charge more money for it. And a couple people buy it and there’ll be a tiny bump in a graph
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone will get a good performance review.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the thing is, like, there is demand for this. There is absolutely demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for higher than CD quality sample rates and everything and higher bitrate formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more advanced formats or lossless formats, there is definitely demand for that. Most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even know, people who listen to the show probably aren’t aware, quite how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many options there are for what basically amount to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy iPods that sell today for like $400 or more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sony makes a bunch of them. They’re basically little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocketable, portable audio players, the size of a deck of cards, that kind of size class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have a headphone, just like the old iPod Classic, that play these super high bitrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files. They could actually output them and decode them with a fancy DAC and everything else. This market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists. People buy these things for $400, but not a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are streaming services, things like Neil Young’s Pano, things like even Tidal, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a fairly decently sized streaming service now. Like the streaming services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have either been, or even music sales services, I don’t think Pano even was streaming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it only sold stuff if it even still exists. But anyway, there are services that will either sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you high bitrate music legally or that will let you stream them like Tidal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They use the quality as their main selling point, but they don’t really ever become mass market. They don’t really ever get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere off the ground. The only reason Tidal has gotten anywhere is because it has had exclusives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve had exclusive album releases on there. Other than that, when they were really only about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music quality, they got nowhere. The fact is, most people don’t care,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most people don’t need to care, because for most of these gains, there actually is no perceptible difference to most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So while Apple could sell high bitrate songs and stuff, that would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be appealing to a very, very small market in what is already a declining market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the market of music sales.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the second part of this, about HEVC being part of 4K, yep, 100%. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K video is bigger, HEVC is a higher efficiency codec, it supports higher resolutions
⏹️ ▶️ John for video, not just the images with the heath thing. Anyway, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 100% part of that, and that’s why we’re gonna see a 4K Apple TV and ATVC encoded content
Whose setup would we use?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam Sack writes in to say, and this is the first in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a theme that I noticed, which was, try to get the ATP hosts to hate each other. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he writes in, if you had to use the daily tech setup of one of your co-hosts for a week instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your own, whose devices would you choose? And I will start off, and I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose Marco’s because it is in general most similar to my setup. Obviously there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are differences, but most similar to mine. And he has some pretty kick-ass headphones. So win-win.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone would pick Marco’s, including Marco, because he has the best stuff. Who’s not going to pick Marco’s setup? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use Casey’s crappy laptop. Come on. No one wants to use
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my 10-year-old Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Come on, man. So we pick Marco’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would pick Casey’s because non-retina. Sorry, John, you lose.
⏹️ ▶️ John have picked my wife’s. You could have picked the 5K iMac. It’s the one without image retention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s actually better than mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s funny. Yeah, I’m going to pick the Mac.
When to replace an Accord?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ian Murn writes in to say, and I don’t think I selected this as one to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer, but I have a feeling I know who did. I have an 08 Accord. When’s the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to replace it? It’s at about 80,000 miles, no maintenance issues to date. John, did you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps star this as a question to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John answered? I did, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think this is a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the right time, probably the best time to replace this Accord was right
⏹️ ▶️ John now or last year because the the best time to get an accord is at the tail
⏹️ ▶️ John end of a generation when they worked all the kinks out of it and they have we always get like the special
⏹️ ▶️ John edition even if you don’t get the special edition like they know how to build that generation of car it has the most
⏹️ ▶️ John doodads and and you know nice things added to it and they figured out low and the first model to
⏹️ ▶️ John put the usb port in the wrong place or you know fiddle things like That’s the time to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first car of the generation, the new Accord, I think the new Accord is uglier than the old one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does have a better infotainment system. So that’s the other time you can get it. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John excitement of getting in on the first car in a new generation. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John when your Accord starts getting to be around 10 years old, I feel like that’s the time to, if you want to have any chance of having
⏹️ ▶️ John any reasonable trade in on it, or private sale, whatever you want to do with it, to do with it. Don’t wait until the car is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John worthless or it’s worth like a couple hundred bucks. Wait till it’s you know, it’s still a couple thousand dollars worth of value in your
⏹️ ▶️ John car. It’s before crap starts breaking. Like I said, you know, the 8000 miles nothing is nothing is
⏹️ ▶️ John issue with it. It’s an oh wait, right? It’s getting to be around 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, just as a point of comparison, I pretty much agree with you. But when we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought the Volvo, We traded in Aaron’s 2007 Mazda 6, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a little bit shy of 80,000 miles on it, and as I believe I talked about on the show, was pretty much a tank.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That thing almost never had any problems. And we got $3,000 in change for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think CarMax offered us three grand. So it was not worthless by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any means, but I agree with you, John, that this is the kind of edge of the cliff, I think, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go too much further and you’re going to fall right off that cliff. Marco, any thoughts on this?
What does John like?*
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe Sullivan writes in, is there anything that Syracuse is in favor of or likes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without any caveats, reservations, or asterisks? And I have to congratulate Joe Sullivan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there are about a million ways to ask this question like a big fat jerk, and this was not one of them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well done. That’s a great question.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put too many things at the end of this question. Caveats, reservations, or asterisks? Well, caveats,
⏹️ ▶️ John you kind of know what that means. Reservations, it’s still getting a little bit vague. What do asterisks mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John else in addition that you want to say about it like the answer your question there is nothing nothing so perfect come
⏹️ ▶️ John on that’s right there are tons of things that I really like but
⏹️ ▶️ John if pressed to say hey you really like Kiki’s delivery services or anything wrong with that movie
⏹️ ▶️ John well I mean that I think because it’s actually probably closest like I can if pressed
⏹️ ▶️ John I can come up with asterisks for Kiki’s delivery service sure like of course
⏹️ ▶️ John you can right there There is, nothing is going to be absolutely perfect. If you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you literally can’t think of anything wrong with it, then you probably don’t understand the thing. But that doesn’t mean, like, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are my favorite things in the whole world. Like overwhelmingly, everything I feel about these is that they’re great,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I think that qualifies. And that reasonable definition of, is there anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that you are like without any caveats or reservation? Like if someone said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I need a good movie to watch. I say, well, if you’ve never seen The Empire Strikes
⏹️ ▶️ John Back, watch Star Wars and then Empire Strikes Back. I’m not going to add reservations. Oh, but also,
⏹️ ▶️ John here are some reservations about The Empire Strikes Back. I’m going to add no reservations. There is nothing to say
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. So I would say that qualifies. It’s either the only definitions are the pedantic one in which nothing qualifies for anybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the reasonable definition in which there’s tons of things that I really like. If you want to hear me, things I really like, listen to The Incomparable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very, very often on that show, I talk about things I really like. know, for the video game journey to television
⏹️ ▶️ John shows, movies, books. We do. We do talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John asterisks if you want to call it that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t love them. So I think this question is not a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s more than an asterisk, more than a reservation. I think that was a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question because of the answer it got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes, I spent most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about the question. I mean, but that’s true of anybody. Like, is there anything even we ask you the you chose it? Is there anything
⏹️ ▶️ John you two like uncritically without caveats, reservation, or asterisks? I think if you’re honest with yourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to say that’s not true for either of you either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John chat room offered up a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of good options. Your kids, your wife, your dog, Long Island,
⏹️ ▶️ John journey. Well, those are BS questions. You got reservations about your wife and your kids. Don’t say you don’t. Ice cream.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you think your spouse does not have any asterisks, you are either newly married
⏹️ ▶️ John or willfully naive because everybody has asterisks, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like where I am. What can I say? Yeah, but they’re always asked, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey asked is like the tiniest
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing, you know, it’s like, could something be a little bit different? Of course, of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey course, always.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and especially kids like no, my child is perfect. Yes, lots of parents think that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe a little bit less screaming, like not, you know, like, like three seconds less screaming in a lifetime of
⏹️ ▶️ John screaming. Would you accept that? I’m saying yes, I would accept three seconds less.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, that’s an asterisk. There you
⏹️ ▶️ John go. Maybe if that poo hadn’t exploded out the side of the diaper
⏹️ ▶️ John that one time when I had a new car, would you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey always an asterisk? So now you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John love your children because you didn’t want the poo to come out the side of the diaper and go all over your new car seats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s amazing. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move on. Otherwise, we’re never going to get through this. Let’s Let’s see, what was next? I have so many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fricking tabs open. I must be John Syracuse.
Podcast recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edward Lovell writes in, what podcast do you currently listen to and would recommend?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I listen to a ton of podcasts, but there’s a couple that I would recommend. The aforementioned Dubai
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friday is excellent. I will pitch one of my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a couple of my co-hosts shows. I think that Reconcilable Differences is phenomenal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so is Under the Radar, but I will also pitch a couple others very quickly. If you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear a smart person talk about conservative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey politics, which you may or may not want, the Ben Shapiro show is very interesting and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good. I don’t listen to every episode by any means. It’s like 45 minutes and it’s pretty much every weekday. But when I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, usually about once a week, I’ll catch it. And I typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply, deeply disagree with the things he thinks, but nevertheless, it is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will also say that wheel bearings is neutral by people who actually know what they’re talking about. Who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t want to listen to that? Yeah, I know, right? And then 20,000 hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is also very good. Think 99% invisible, but specifically around sound. So those are just some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey selections from my extraordinarily long list of podcasts that I listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, since I’ve been tagging Marco first more often, let’s go to you next.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a strong recommendation for Roderick on the Line, which I love. Flophouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, my probably oldest recommendation. That show is still going.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, Hello Internet and Cortex, the pair of shows
⏹️ ▶️ John both involving CGP Grey. Those are great. What else we got? I’m scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John through Overcast to look at… I have way too many things in Overcast. I’m scrolling through there. Debug,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t know if it’s still ongoing, but the back catalog of Debug is great. It’s a tech
⏹️ ▶️ John where they talk to lots of important people in tech. You should definitely check that out. There’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ John more, but I think that’s a good place to get started.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco? You guys have already mentioned pretty much everything I was going to say. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usuals, Dubai Friday, Hello Internet, Cortex, Roderick on the Line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as in the tech world, again, you’ve covered many good ones. I would also add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Upgrade on RelayFM with Jason Snell and Mike Crowley. That is probably my favorite tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. It’s just really, really great. So, yeah, otherwise, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guys pretty much covered it. Yeah, 99PI, you know, and what I love about, I mean, I could obviously talk about podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever, so I will try not to, but what I love about this is that none of us mentioned shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were like the biggest podcast in the world. 99PI is probably the biggest one we mentioned, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when people think podcasting, they so often will make an assumption like, everybody listens to This American Life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? You know, stuff like that. But the fact is, there isn’t any podcast out there that everybody listens to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of mass market or very, very popular podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still actually fairly diversified. And there’s a lot of people who listen to a lot of podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who don’t listen to any of those big ones. So this is part of what I love about podcasting is like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so incredibly diverse and specialized that like I can look at so many podcasts and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are so many amazing podcasts out there, but I don’t need to spend any time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to things that aren’t like really interesting to me and that aren’t specialized to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interests because there’s so much that is and that’s just part of what I love about podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, my overcast list is huge. I subscribe to tons of things. I was trying to give recommendations that maybe people
⏹️ ▶️ John might not go for like, you know, this one of the reasons I didn’t recommend the talk show because I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that show exists and it’s good and you should totally listen to it. Like I didn’t recommend this American life because assuming you know that show exists
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s good and you should listen to it, right? Trying to find the slightly more obscure corners. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the other thing I like about podcasts. I subscribe to way more podcasts than I than I faithfully listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m not a podcast completionist. I have tons of descriptions, a few shows I keep up with very
⏹️ ▶️ John religiously, but a lot of shows I let age and then go through five episodes at a time. And a lot of shows I just pick and choose from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, that’s the best thing. Not only do you not have to like, Oh, it was only five podcasts that everyone listens
⏹️ ▶️ John to. You should find a podcast that you really like. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you find a podcast and you only have to listen to the episodes that you really like. Like even like the incomparable,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if they do an episode reviewing something that you don’t care about, skip that episode. Like they’re standalone. If they’re, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ John do a thing about a TV show that you didn’t watch and you’re not interested in fine. Like just pick and choose. It’s the beauty of podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just listen to every episode of our show, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, of course. I mean, how could you not?
State of Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Regular Language writes in, what do you think about the current state of Swift? I would like to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what John and Marco have to say about, see, I guess Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rant about Swift opens. Oh, I think there’s new lines missing here. Basically, what do you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think and maybe me talk about Swift open source? So I will, I guess, round this out at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end. So let’s start with Marco and then go to John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t pay that much attention to what’s going on in Swift. I know I’m supposed to, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I should. Overcast contains some Swift code that I added to try to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself the language and stuff, but I’m still writing most code in Objective-C. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really out of a judgment of Swift so much as it’s just a pragmatism that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t see a lot of motivation for me to switch. I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I should, but I, in practice, don’t. John?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is too open-ended of a question. I would have never have picked
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey chugging along.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do keep up with the things that are going on in it. It’s still got challenges, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John making slow, steady progress. So I think Swift is moving in the right direction at varying speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what do we have to say about C?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, that’s not C the language. I think basically the question was, what do you guys have to say about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift, and what do I have to say specifically about Swift open source? All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right, well, go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think your summary of Swift is good and brief, and I stand by it. Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open source is a double-edged sword, I think. I think that the problem that I have with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift open source is that it seems like a lot of the really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really academic, like, I’m trying to think of a way to say this without being pejorative,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but people who are much more interested in the academic side of programming languages seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be the ones that are most vocal and most interested to participate on the mailing lists and things of that nature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where someone like myself, which is not to say I’m at the same caliber as a super academic, but someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like myself, who I like to think of as, I’m a reasonably smart guy, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really have any interest in following the intricacies of what’s going on in the mailing list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really have any interest in arguing about different pitches that have been made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via the mailing list. I just wanna get crap done, man. And to me, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Swift Open Source, It feels like, from an outsider’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point of view, that maybe it could use a little more stern direction from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prevent the kind of meandering and the kind of, I don’t know, language
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features that I find to be really, really silly and not terribly helpful for actually just shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products. And that’s where I kind of get a little frustrated. But it’s easy for me to throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stones from outside the glass house, right? And really, if I wanted to effect change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I should be doing is participating on the darn mailing list that I’m lamenting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure you should be doing that because I’m going to put this out there. Language design is a different skill
⏹️ ▶️ John than being a programmer and using that language. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely appropriate that the list where people are designing the languages looks weird to someone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I just want to write my programs. Like you make the language and give it to me. Like you don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John cross over. I think Switch Evolution, I’ve seen a lot of language design mailing lists and Switch
⏹️ ▶️ John evolution is above average, believe it or not. And maybe if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look in the outside, this is the first time you follow the development of any language, it can look like dominated by academics
⏹️ ▶️ John and weird and chaotic and a lot of bike shedding. But in the grand scheme of things, they’re they are above average.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, just just coming so early to say, Look, we’re gonna have releases, we’re gonna exclude things from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you know, like, there’s gonna be people discussing things in list, even though they say they’re excluded from Swift, serious, but for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in general, I think they’re pretty well behaved and I do want essentially language nerds or people
⏹️ ▶️ John like people with the skill the language design skill and you know RPG poems or whatever to be
⏹️ ▶️ John designing the language rather than having a bunch of people who just want to use the language
⏹️ ▶️ John throwing out the first idea that pops into their head that they think might make their their night like beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John language designers like I’ve been programming for 20 years and I think a language would be cool well how many languages have you designed
⏹️ ▶️ John have you tried doing that what does it actually turn out to be? So I like, I like language
⏹️ ▶️ John design as a separate skill being developed among people who just do that and seeing them do their thing
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely does look weird, but I endorse it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also and part of why I have not adopted Swift more is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of of investing my time into a language that is still very much a beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a huge turnoff for me. Like I do not, I have no interest in participating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the design of this language. I have no interest in beta testing this language for anybody. In the same way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to beta test brakes on my car. I want to get the final brakes, thank you, and I want them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, and I don’t want to ever have to think about them, or I never want them to flake out or fail or cause me undue work.
⏹️ ▶️ John sound like a Tesla owner. You don’t want to beta test the brakes? They just sent us new firmware for your brakes last night while you were sleeping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for me, especially every summer when during beta season when like all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new stuff comes out and I see all the iOS developers I know complaining about something that Swift broke,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am very happy to not be very reliant on it right now. And you know, because the fact is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m an independent developer, I don’t have a lot of time. I like and the time I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend coding, I have to spend it very wisely. And the most frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for me, which is true of many people, is fighting with my tools. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any language or part of my developer toolchain, I’m going to try to minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons that I would have to fight with it, or the amount of work it’s going to require from me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. And Swift, while it does look like a fairly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure it will be good once it’s done, for me, right now, the reality of using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift is still a lot of overhead and a lot of dealing with the changes as they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come, and dealing with weird things breaking sometimes. And I just want to wait until it’s all settled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I invest heavily into it, because I have zero interest in being an early adopter for things like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I want is for it to work so I can spend my time in other ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I will say that there are certainly annoyances, and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimately argue with anything that you’ve said, but it feels like it’s gotten a lot better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last, you know, six to twelve months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh yeah. It has.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the dabbling I’ve done on the Xcode 9 beta, by and large, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a beta, of course, but by and large, it looks really solid. And so I think, and of course, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say this every year, right? Now is the time to dive in, Marco. It’s all better than it ever was. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the year of Linux on the desktop, right? It’ll always be better the next year. But it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly as scary now as it once was. But there’s still dragons back there from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would also love to use Swift on the server. That’s one thing that has me very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interested in learning it, because the idea of learning one language that I can use in both places is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attractive to me. Because that would be a great use of, if I’m going to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more languages and master more frameworks, being able to use the same one in both places basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it twice as valuable to me. So I would love that. But it’s all just so early.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to have basics like concurrency not worked out yet, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I just, I need…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes and no, right? Like it’s just as worked out as it is in Objective-C, because you still have GCD and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just that… Well, when I’m saying server, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean Linux, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, fair. But my point is just that like, concurrency, I agree with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be worked out in a much better way, but it’s not like we’re handcuffed now. It’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the existing GCD API, again, maybe not on the server, but at least on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey client, it’s the existing GCD API. And it actually is a lot nicer in a lot of ways. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there should be something like, you know, everyone is calling for C-sharps async await.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ll see what happens.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to do things like install software updates and worry about your site getting hacked and your
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will ask you to make it for them. And that’s one thing you do not want, you don’t want to be in that business. Because Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so good at it. You can just tell them, here, go to Squarespace. If they won’t do it, set it up for them.
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Women-in-tech progress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, make your next move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Klein writes, about two years ago, you discussed women in tech and podcasting and even exchanged hosts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you feel today regarding women in tech? This is a very good question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which stresses me out because I feel like I’m going to step on some landmine here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, I feel like we have made, We,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the three of us, like we as a community, have made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit of positive strides, but still have an almost equal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of improvement left to make. And I feel like people are paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more attention to the fact that there’s so much sexism in tech and it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a crummy place to be a woman. And I think the easiest example of this is people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like regular people, knowing what Assesspool Uber is slash was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and regular people deciding to use Lyft instead of Uber, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick aside, I used Lyft in Chicago when Aaron and I were on our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10-year wedding anniversary, and it was great. Worked great. No different than Uber,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I highly recommend it. But anyway, so we still have a ton of room. It’s one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we have taken the tiniest, littlest step forward, but there’s still like 85,000 miles in front of us, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s almost imperceptible. Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically agree. I mean, I unfortunately am not an expert in this topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, few men in tech are. You know, that’s not a coincidence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a huge problem, and we still have so, so long to go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we are talking about it now way more than it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked about. So even though I don’t have the knowledge to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s actually making progress really, I have no idea. I would guess it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow progress. But we are talking about it and a lot more people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ourselves included, are much more conscientious of this being an issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than we used to be. And that has to help too. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously a lot more that we can all do and that we need to all do. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that awareness is way better than it was. And that will slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start helping this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s like the first stage of all these things is the very long process of getting people
⏹️ ▶️ John to be aware that this is an issue at all. What’s the issue? What is the problem? Is this a thing that exists?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that takes a really long time. It’s kind of depressing to me because my childhood like I felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whole One of the previous names of a larger version This is the women’s lib
⏹️ ▶️ John movement back in the 60s and 70s and even to the 80s Was also in that stage
⏹️ ▶️ John of like hey raise awareness like women’s liberation. What do women need to be liberated from? What do you mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? I felt like we went through that and And
⏹️ ▶️ John then like that knowledge was lost somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and now we are back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the tech sector which is a microcosm of the larger world, is like, do we have to relearn that sexism
⏹️ ▶️ John exists? Apparently, the answer is yes, and we’re learning it better and more thoroughly. And
⏹️ ▶️ John with, I think, a clearer eyed picture and not accepting as many limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John as the previous, you know, feminist movements and women’s liberation and all that other stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I still very strongly feel that we are in the awareness phase for everybody. I for
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for me as well. I like the and I do see some concrete signs of progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John I find myself seeing I mean from my perspective, a lot of what I see is like who’s speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John at this tech conference. I see and watch and hear about and get forwarded
⏹️ ▶️ John to me more really good talks by women at tech conferences as the circles I travel in
⏹️ ▶️ John and my Twitter or whatever than I did several years ago. And I feel like that is progress,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably just progress in my awareness that that is a thing and also progress in the people
⏹️ ▶️ John I follow forwarding me those things. And you know, like you said, like, the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John there can even be a story that has any real world consequences to a company about, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John this company is run by a bunch of sexist jerks. And that actually, like, is a thing we hear about, and be
⏹️ ▶️ John something, anything, literally anything happens about it, maybe not the right thing, maybe not the best things, but something
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, like, if one extra person deletes their app, like, that is a tiny bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of progress. But yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel how it’s going. And about
⏹️ ▶️ John us specifically on the show, like we’re still, we still talk about it. We still discuss it. We still try
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what we can in the ways that we can. And you know, it’s a continuing struggle.
Next iPhone dealbreakers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Robin Christofferson writes in, which, if any of the many rumored changes to the new iPhone would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make you decide not to upgrade if it comes to pass? I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go on a very small rant about this. I don’t understand people who say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I can’t think of a specific example of, oh, actually the touch bar is a great example. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will never like the touch bar and I will never buy a Mac that has a touch bar. That to me just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sense because it Stands to reason that at least for portable Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the touch bar is going to be the future probably across the line It may not be for five years or something like that But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will probably be the future and even if the touch bar if you think that’s a crummy example It doesn’t matter My point is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like just get on the bus the bus is pulling away Get on the bus and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you may not love it, but get on the bus because what’s the alternative go to Windows? Ha have fun and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so to me there may be something that I don’t like about the new iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for the sake of example, I’m skeptical that I would terribly enjoy the face unlock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I suspect I wouldn’t miss touch ID, but I mean, I will certainly give it a shot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will certainly give it a shot. And if it ends up that I like touch ID better, well then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a stinky part of the new iPhone, but everything else will be amazing. So it’ll all even itself out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t really, I understand the question, But I don’t really understand this question.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think the narrower view they’re asking would make you not want to upgrade. And when I saw this question, I thought about like touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID on the back. If they couldn’t, if they can’t get the touch ID under the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John for this generation, but we know for a fact, because other phones do this, that fingerprint
⏹️ ▶️ John sensing under a screen is a technology that exists that just, you know, wasn’t up to Apple’s caliber yet for
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever reason. I might say if I was, if it was my upgrade year, which it isn’t, by the way, I might say
⏹️ ▶️ John oh I’m not gonna upgrade to to this phone I’ll wait till next year when I and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll have that sorted out or we even wait to the next generation because you know I have no problem waiting it’s not like Casey was saying like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh I’m never gonna buy with a touch bar like obviously eventually you have to get a new phone and eventually I would
⏹️ ▶️ John choose to get an iPhone but specifically like oh if they make a new form factor and it’s the first model year
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had to make weird compromises and touch ID is in the back even if it’s just as simple as like they put touch ID in the back
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’ve never used touch ID in the back I’m not sure I like it I’d rather let a bunch of my friends who I know really well
⏹️ ▶️ John buy this phone and tell me about it so that the next year I’ll know whether I think I’ll like it or like just play with them to start
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever so yes there are lots of weird things involving the phone that would make me decide not to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think there’s many things that would make me decide I’m never going to buy an iPhone again and that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a different question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean I I think pretty similarly I mean look we all know I’m gonna buy it regardless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so why why even bother I mean you know I think the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’m going to do what I always do, which is I’m going to buy the new thing immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I’ll complain about anything that’s worse about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. That’s typically how these things tend to go.
Tabs or spaces?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not want to answer this question because this is another example of where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t care. But somebody, and I think that person’s name might be John Syracusa, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided we should answer this question. So Steven Sandhoff writes, tabs or spaces? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly don’t even have the faintest idea what my editor is set to. It’s whatever the default for Xcode is.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re a monster. You don’t even know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick one. Actually, I can say the same thing. So I know what it is in TextMate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for my iOS code and Xcode, I actually have no idea which one it is. But I will say in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TextMate it’s Spaces. But I tweeted about this a few weeks ago, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because good tools let you switch between one or the other with one command. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really doesn’t matter at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no, no. That’s something a tab user would say. It totally matters. Let me tell you why.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first of all, my answer on tabs versus spaces is spaces. And the reason I say spaces
⏹️ ▶️ John is because spaces are the same size visually everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole point in tabs, I thought, is that I can choose to have my tabs be a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John width. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, yeah. So now tabs, now it’s like, okay, well, tabs are semantic
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in depth here, but
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t tell me how big it has to be. The problem with that is that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John good formatting in most, not maybe, some, let’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John say, in some programming languages, good formatting needs to be done,
⏹️ ▶️ John has instances in which you want to indent by less than one
⏹️ ▶️ John indentation level to align things, right? And if you use
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces everywhere, There is no ambiguity and you can make it look like
⏹️ ▶️ John how you want it to look like. If you use tabs, some joker’s gonna set their tab
⏹️ ▶️ John to two and someone else is gonna have it set to four and someone’s gonna have it set to eight and the part
⏹️ ▶️ John and the line where you use tabs but then use spaces to align a bunch of things is gonna look crazy pants. So spaces is
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct answer but I’m forced to use tabs at work and have for many years and so if you’re a working programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta do what you gotta do with the actual answer is spaces And Chris Lattner agrees with me, so there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s all that really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually drives you to quit your job. Like eventually, one day, you’re going to hit that tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key for the last time, and you’re like, that’s it, I’m done.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, you still hit the tab key even when it does spaces. But work changed both
⏹️ ▶️ John my brace style and the indenting character. But this is what it means to be a working programmer. It’s too far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, what is your preferred brace style?
⏹️ ▶️ John Many years ago, I used BSD style, opening and closing in the same column.
⏹️ ▶️ John For basically my entire career up to maybe 10 years ago. And then I switched to, forcibly
⏹️ ▶️ John switched to K&R. No cuddled else’s, come on people. I’m a K&R person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself. You know, I used to, first of all, I had no idea those were the two, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know the names for those two styles. But I used to be violently, devoutly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in favor of, what did you say, BSD, where all of the opening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Maybe I’m getting it
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. It might be all men. It’s the one where the the opening curly is underneath the eye and if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, right, right. That’s, that’s the way I used to be. Just an I was passionately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it like almost as bad as I am about people who say Jeff like I passionately believed that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have to put it under I and those monsters that say Jeff that also put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the opening brace at the end of the line, just are just without help. And over time, similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story, I think because I started writing a fair bit of JavaScript, I ended up kind of switching to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other style where you have, you know, if something open, open brace
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess an important part in every programmer who doesn’t work for themselves in a single person shop in their in
⏹️ ▶️ John their careers is becoming not just multi language fluent, but becoming able to and you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John worked on open source projects, your forces to becoming able to write code in the style demanded by the thing that you’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s a job or an open source project or whatever you can’t I mean you can be precious about it and have a preferred
⏹️ ▶️ John thing but you have to be able to get the job done in whatever language or formatting
⏹️ ▶️ John that is dictated by the mob because you just have to just practically and you know in the end like I was
⏹️ ▶️ John also pretty strongly about the opening curly under the little eye and I still think it’s the style that makes more sense
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know you get over it a few years of using K&R and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like okay like it’s fine and it’s actually difficult if you get into
⏹️ ▶️ John a groove to switch back and forth like if the mode switch between them you’ll just your fingers will you’ll find them doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that they do and you have to switch back but like that’s life that’s programming for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean actually the reason why I use KNR style is that I used to use the brace under the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye but like in college and like as I was teaching myself how to program and going through college like I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that style and then my first job use strictly KNR style and they just like broke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me of that habit and then that became my style. Oh, we can all agree tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus spaces It doesn’t really matter but the right answer is spaces unless you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use two spaces in which case you’re an animal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I think I could probably get behind that.
Low-level Apple stack wishes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spencer Holbrook writes in, what low-level part of Apple’s stack would you like to see replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next? HFS plus to APFS, Objective-C to Swift, OpenGL to Metal, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m most anxious and most interested in HFS plus to APFS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t think of another example off the top of my head. I’m sure, John, you’ll probably have one. But none
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these really rev my engine that much. Sorry, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Marco, let’s get- I’m asking you
⏹️ ▶️ John what you want to see replaced next. They listed a bunch of ones they’re already doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so following all of that? Yes. Oh. Yeah, wish list. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even know. I’d have to think about that. I’m not sure, to be honest. I’ll pass on this one. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m sure John’s going to have the best answers here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, exactly. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for going to me first. I don’t have to follow him. My boring answers are basically, I have two. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the API framework or if the UI framework is the correct level for this question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to see what surpasses AppKit on the Mac, if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a good one, actually. That’s very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not low level. So if you go a little bit lower level, what I would also like to see is another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing on the Mac, actually. I would like to see Mac sandboxing completely rethought and matured,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a rethinking of the Mac security model with the new… So like basically, bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more iOS-like sandboxing environment to the Mac. So to do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you could knowingly safely install an application and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete that application and know that everything that goes with it gets deleted. Know that it can only write to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and read from certain directories that are easy to manage and isolated from other things and can’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every app that you install as you the user account can’t read your entire user directory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they started down this path of sandboxing whenever that was like eight years ago. And they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most bare-bones basic version and then just stopped. And they never matured it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the version they did and the various shortcomings it had, it basically made it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most apps could not be reasonably sandboxed if they did anything cool at all. And I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a better balance to be struck now in the modern day with what we know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with where the software world is, where the economics and where the ecosystem has gone since then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to see a more modern, more secure version of sandboxing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac that brings it closer to iOS in those security and user assuredness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. But that still has the power of Mac software available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in various new clever ways. I know that’s a very hard thing to solve, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also, A, I think we need to solve it, and B, I think there’s massive gains to be had there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it is solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, John. So there’s probably, there’s a bunch of stuff all the way down to the kernel itself
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can list here. But the reason I put this in was because I don’t have any really good answers for a little stuff that I’m dying
⏹️ ▶️ John for, except for one. It’s actually mentioned in here. They said, you know, uh, HFS, APFS, Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John to Swift, OpenGL to Metal. The OpenGL to Metal one is the one I actually have objections to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like, I understand Metal and it’s a good thing to have and, and Apple is heavily behind
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I think Apple should still have a world-class OpenGL implementation. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John know that’s a tough sell, but it’s like, what do we even need that for? We’re all in on metal, metal is
⏹️ ▶️ John the future, blah, blah, blah. I don’t think you should get rid of metal, but OpenGL
⏹️ ▶️ John or Vulkan or whatever is still a thing and it is still worth
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple not just maintaining, but like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John advance it. Like either don’t have it at all. kind of like flash, like, look, if you think it’s viable to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a web browser without flash, don’t support it at all. Don’t Don’t just say our flash emulation is slow. And so people won’t use it and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John migrate to H just don’t support it at all. Don’t support it at all. And if you think you can’t, you know, oh, we can’t drop open
⏹️ ▶️ John GL, we have to have it our whole OS runs. Well, then make a good version of it. Like I was, this came up recently
⏹️ ▶️ John in the article, I think Casey read, was he retweeted it, but I read earlier about the dolphin
⏹️ ▶️ John And all interesting technical problems. Casey, you can have a show note there. Put that one link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good article. Lots of good articles on that. And it goes through some fun technical details.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then towards the bottom of this really nice article, it says, here’s a section for Mac users. None of this is relevant to you because your OpenGL
⏹️ ▶️ John stack is a piece of crap. And none of the features that we even talked about even exist in your OpenGL implementation,
⏹️ ▶️ John let alone exist in our performance. So screw you guys. And it’s like, look, Apple, it’s embarrassing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I want them. And what do we lose by that? We don’t get to have a cool GameCube
⏹️ ▶️ John emulator unless we boot into Windows or Linux for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I hope that Apple gets their act together with
⏹️ ▶️ John OpenGL. Either don’t support it at all and then figure out what you have to do to make your computer still viable or
⏹️ ▶️ John actually support it and be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was not what I expected, but that was a pretty good answer.
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How are Overcast ads doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey J.C. Calhoun writes, how about an update on how the overcast advertising is working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out? So John, no, I’m just kidding. What do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the short answer is it’s great. I mean, there’s not a whole lot to say on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, so they’re talking about like how I switched a few months ago to selling my own direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads. And now they’re entirely for podcasts. At first it was like for podcasts and or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco websites. The podcasts have been buying them so much that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually recently stopped selling them for anything that’s not a podcast. The capability’s still there if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I choose to use it later, but I don’t think I will need to for a while. I worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out some various pricing and inventory level tweaks over the last few months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just working out how should these things be priced, how many should I have in each category, what should the categories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even be. But I think it’s pretty stable now. And it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good money. It’s making something like 10 times what I was making from Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ad, whatever, their AdMob, that’s what it is, yeah, the mobile app thing. So it’s going great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as this continues to sell at all reasonably, I don’t see myself changing the model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From your analytics or whatever you’ve got running against these ads, does it seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re working? Like obviously they’re working in the sense you keep selling them, but are they working in the sense that it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like they’re pushing subscriptions to shows and all that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I have that info and I share that. The advertisers, when you buy an ad, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see in their little control panel on the website how many impressions, how many tabs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many subscriptions it has gotten. They don’t see anything else, but they see those three numbers. And that’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t collect anything else. That’s all I collect. And that plays into how I price them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try to keep the cost per new subscriber within a certain range. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge in pricing these ads is not trying to get people to buy them, it’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid the temptation to raise prices like crazy because they’re selling out frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s hard for me to know what should a new listener be worth? What range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should I keep this price in? The way I’ve been pricing it, I’ve been keeping it between $1 and $2 for most categories.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certain categories, like I recently separated out business podcasts into their own category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I ran the numbers of what is a listener to over, sorry, what’s a listener to ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth? And if you’ve run the numbers over the course of certain time spans or like a year or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ends up being like five bucks, something like that. And so I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I keep the prices between one and two dollars, that keeps it pretty good, pretty compelling for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certain categories like business, business podcasts are huge, first of all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a huge market for business tips and tricks and writing books and everything. And many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them monetize not just by ads, but by selling you books, e-books,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conferences, seminars, stuff like that. So they might have a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different valuation of what a new subscriber is worth to them. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is true of many of the different categories of podcasts. And some of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people don’t care what a new listener’s worth. They just want to get some listeners and then they have a new show maybe and they wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it basically going from zero. And so they use the ads for that. If you look at it purely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like, how should I price these? In terms of like pure demand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they keep selling out, so I should price them way higher. But if I price them higher, we’re gonna start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting into numbers that if you think about the numbers, If you run the numbers of what is a listener worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it starts not to make sense for a lot of people. So I don’t want to breach that level. So basically the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I even could make more money from it if I tried to, but I would be afraid if I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that I would have a brief period of making more money followed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a crash as a lot of advertisers started seeing, you know, this actually isn’t worth what I’m paying for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these users and starts bailing out. So I want to keep it reasonable so that I have the most advertisers as possible. But besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that minor concern, which I think is largely alleviated now by just time and stability,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going great. It really is going great. And it’s one of the only advertising things I’ve ever seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where basically all the parties win. Because I’m not showing you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads for Viagra mattresses. I’m showing you ads for podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in categories that you subscribe to while you’re using a a podcast app in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco respects your privacy, that isn’t a huge burden, that doesn’t get in your way. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a great setup. And you know, this obviously is not a method that every app can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. So it’s not like, I’m not saying like every app should monetize the way I’ve monetized, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you simply can’t, it doesn’t apply. But for what I am doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s working great. And I have more advertisers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to buy ads then I have inventory to sell them, and that’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s really awesome. John, any additional thoughts on that?
Subscription fatigue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edgar Perez writes in, and this is the first one that I noticed in this context,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve seen this come up a lot, particularly after our 1Password discussion. And he writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, I agree that $3 a month for an app service is reasonable, but what if all the apps I use monthly want $3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month? Can’t let apps kill the Mac. I understand what people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are driving at. And again, Edgar isn’t the first person to say this. Oh, if every app I use is a subscription app, well, suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t be able to afford anything anymore. And I get that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think in my eyes, if everything I used became a subscription,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would either change my usage or I would pay for it all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since we’re now deep into the second episode, I don’t remember if it was this episode or last week, we talked about ad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blockers. I think it was last week, which was really two hours ago. I talked about ad blockers and how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Marco, you were saying, well, if an ad blocker shows up, then I’ll just leave and I just won’t read that content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. Oh, was it this one? Okay, thanks. So I’m getting tired. It’s nearly midnight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so point being, you know, I think it’s a similar thing. So like for me, and this is just for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey, it may not be for others, but for me, I absolutely will pay for 1Password and I will absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay for day one. But maybe you’re, you know, the listener here, maybe you’re a day one user, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t love it. You just kind of like it. And maybe it’s not worth paying for on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basis. So you just stop using day one and use Apple Notes or something like that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. That’s an option like that that will work in life will go on. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. That’s just the way I look at it. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had remembered back to actual last week, I addressed this on the show. The one password
⏹️ ▶️ John episode. I said, look, not every I did it from the perspective of an app developer. Not every app can sustain
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription pricing. Your app has to be valuable enough to enough people to sustain subscription pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think there’s any fear that every single app is gonna be $3 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month, because there are app categories, entire categories, let alone individual apps, that can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sustain that because they don’t deliver that much value to people. So you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to know your application and your market to say, are enough people willing to subscribe to this?
⏹️ ▶️ John People probably aren’t gonna pay $3 a month for a fart app, right? Even if you have new farts released every
⏹️ ▶️ John month, like they’re a whole, you know? You’d have to turn it into like a free to play,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, casino gambling, exploit human nature type service to get that. And then it’s a different kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John app entirely, right? So this is a fear that I don’t think is a real thing. If you’re a customer, this
⏹️ ▶️ John will take care of itself. Don’t like it, the price, don’t buy it, right? And from a developer’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t wanna be on the losing end of that problem, taking care of itself, you should know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if we can’t develop this without subscription pricing, make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John it is valuable enough to enough people to justify subscription pricing. And one password certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John is because a lot of people find it a very valuable thing and they want it to work on an ongoing basis and they
⏹️ ▶️ John understand the ongoing maintenance costs and they’re willing to pay for it. But your fart app might not be. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say don’t worry about this too much. And if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, don’t pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You mean every time subscription pricing comes up, people bring up this issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what’s going to happen when everything’s subscription and everyone gets tired of it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stops paying for it?” Something like that. The idea of subscription fatigue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ve been able to charge subscription prices now for a little while and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just not happening. I have not seen any sign that that’s happening. I think this is one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that the market just sorts out itself. Like John said, most apps aren’t willing to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or sorry, most customers aren’t willing to pay for most of their apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wouldn’t be buying a $36 a year upgrade either instead of paying $3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month. The fact is most apps have a lot of competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and aren’t that necessary for most people. So they’re going to have a hard time no matter how they charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the apps that are really valuable to people, that are difficult for people to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without, or that are required for them to do their work or whatever else, or that appeal to markets that don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about spending three dollars a month, they can do this just fine. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole like slippery slope argument is like, well, once all the apps go this way, no one’s going to want to pay anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t think that’s happening. I think we would have seen that by now. We would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen that at least starting, and it’s just not. Most apps are not even trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to charge subscription rates, and the ones that are mostly do okay.
Noise-canceling AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jude Dunn writes in, is it technically possible for Apple to make second-gen AirPods noise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey canceling or noise isolating? I really, really want that. I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why not. I think the problem with that is it’s even more processing to be done, thus even more battery usage. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, I don’t know that it would be a tremendous difference. And certainly noise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isolating, I mean, they could change the look of these things and change where they sit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within your ear. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. Marco? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you basically got it. The noise cancellation requires a microphone on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then DSP on the inside to basically emit sound waves on the inside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but mixed into your sound, that will cancel out by phase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the wave, that will cancel out the waves of the ones coming in from the outside world. So there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopping them from doing that, as far as I know, in the hardware they have now, or in that style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hardware they have now, rather. But that wouldn’t be very useful without better isolation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And isolation is right now where they really fall down. And that doesn’t require any circuitry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that requires physical barriers, basically, of literally just isolating you from the world around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to do that, right now they are earbuds. And what earbuds are are little drivers that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sit kind of inside your ears, but they’re more like resting in a little curvy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot in your ear, they’re not really blocking your ear canal at all. There are other types,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like canal phones, or in-ear monitors, they’re also called, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually block your whole ear canal with some kind of big rubber cone thing or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they physically block the sound from getting into your ears. Larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over-ear headphones have a similar effect, but they cup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over your ears as if you’re putting your hands over your ears and block the sound that way. Either way, you’re physically blocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sound from getting there. For the AirPods to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, they would have to have a totally different shape that would actually block
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your ear canal and be more like canal phones. Or they would have to have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coating or cover you could put on them, some kind of accessory that you could put on them to do that. Although I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think ideally they would be designed for this from the start. So there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopping Apple from releasing AirPod canal phones. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a different style of product. It’s a whole different shape. It’s a whole different set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of constraints and design goals you’d have to have for it. I don’t expect they would do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably at all. But if they do it, it would probably be a separate product. It probably would not just be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods 2, now they block your whole ear canal. It would probably be like, here’s the new air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco canals, or whatever, they would have a better name than that. But it would probably be a separate product because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very separate physical design of these products.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s just work on Apple being able to ship AirPods in a reasonable time frame before we worry about adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Sick burn. Yeah, and again, I also would not spend too much time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting around for the AirPod 2s, AirPods 2, whatever they’re called. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple was updating the AirPods anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you’re probably right about that.
Top Swift wishes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex S. Glamsas writes in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you could make a single change to Swift, what would it be? I will say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though it’s probably not the biggest thing in the world, what I’d really love to see is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflection. And I’ve talked about this from time to time. Reflection or introspection means at runtime, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at an object in code and say, what are the properties it has? What are the methods it has? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically along with that, you’ll see annotations, which are attributes in C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sharp world, which means you can kind of decorate your code with metadata, which is also super useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could go on and on and on about this, but it’s not terribly interesting. So I’ll just say reflection with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bonus choice of stealing Marco’s thought earlier of a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concurrency model. So since I’ve stolen your obvious answer, Marco, what would you say afterwards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t really have a good answer to this question because I don’t know enough about Swift because of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aforementioned factors. I don’t use it really enough. So I really am not qualified to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if a single change, if concurrency counts as a single change, oh, just solve concurrency.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the solution of your choosing, either a good implementation of async await or something
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely different or whatever, that would be my single thing, but that’s kind of vague. If I have to be narrow, I would say regular
⏹️ ▶️ John expression literals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of those things are coming, by the way. is the question of when.
Arcade-game nostalgia?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brian Middleton asks, what arcade games are each of you nostalgic for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from your childhood? Is there one game you would like to own? I will start as usual. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually have a pinball machine in the house. My dad many years ago had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gone through a phase of restoring, or maybe not restoring, but repairing old pinball machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so he had like six of them at one point, but unloaded all but two of them, one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which went to me and one of which he still has. So I obviously have nostalgia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all those, but in terms of traditional arcade games, NBA Jam,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cruisin’ USA, and Street Fighter II, I didn’t play any of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much, but I enjoyed deeply all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those, both in arcade form and occasionally in console form. So I would say those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I hardly went to arcades in my childhood. We didn’t really live that close to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we didn’t have a lot of money. And so the idea of just going there and blowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tens of dollars maybe, that would not really happen in my family. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I did play a little bit of arcade games as I was a teenager here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one I most liked was Daytona USA. This was during the mid-90s or so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Sega Saturn was coming out and so they had a few cool games like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Virtua Fighter and everything that were coming out alongside of it. And Daytona USA was my favorite one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a racing game and it was just basic kind of like NASCAR style, I think. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey about racing to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But whatever style uses what appear to be stock cars on a round track without a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of turns. So that, and it was a lot of fun, but it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollar per play in most arcades. So I hardly ever played it with the exception there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this like I was in some kind of youth group and there was one time that they had a lock-in at a Magic Mountain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arcade where we just got everything set to free play and we get to play them all night so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I played a lot of Daytona USA for one night and that was awesome but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that it’s I mean this is kind of a sad story like other than that I hardly ever played arcade games so I don’t really know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I played a lot of arcade games I was a lot that I’m very nostalgic for.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to pick one that I would want to own though, because in general arcade games back then, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming still today, were made to take your money. And so I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John getting lots of, you know, tokens or quarters and feeding them into these machines. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think if I owned any of them, they would become shallow very fast, especially the
⏹️ ▶️ John games I’m nostalgic about. Unless you do something like Centipede or like Pac-Man, or you try to make it like the perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John game or whatever but uh in in a couple of summer camps I went to they had arcade
⏹️ ▶️ John games they were either set to free or were only 25 cents
⏹️ ▶️ John when instead of 50 or whatever and then I played a lot and so there are some games I got really
⏹️ ▶️ John good at like one of them it was Tiger Heli which is a not a top-down uh
⏹️ ▶️ John vertically scrolling shooter thing or 1942 similar type of game both
⏹️ ▶️ John of those were at camp I got really good at those games like that That was where you put in one quarter and I’d play for a really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really long time. You know, um, but even then
⏹️ ▶️ John you feel like, oh, well now I’ve seen the whole game. Like this is all there is to this game. And so I really wouldn’t want to own it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think I would want to own any of these machines, but most nostalgic for, um, the star
⏹️ ▶️ John Wars sit down game after burner, which was impressive when it first came out, especially with the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John you move around inside the thing. It was one of the first 50, 50 cent games I can remember. classics
⏹️ ▶️ John centipede Galaga I like time pilot is a weird one called section Z sidearm
⏹️ ▶️ John this was a totally weird one that I still think is awesome I have all I’m probably on MAME now though, so I don’t need to own any of these machines.
Neutral season 2?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nuclear Eclipse asks, this is John Reese, when will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you record Neutral Season 2? My official answer is we’ve been recording it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last like three years in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco aftershows of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this show. My unofficial answer is not soon enough. John, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you answered it. There’s no Neutral Season 2. You’re listening to it. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yep. and done.
Would an iOS laptop be viable?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Krusty the Clown writes, do you think an iOS laptop would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey viable product, i.e. an iBook? I was hoping Apple would announce it at WWDC, but it didn’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t that kind of what an iPad Pro is? Like I understand, or well, I presume that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roger Escobar’s person who wrote in is asking something that has the physical, like connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard and screen that you can never separate the two. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like an iPad Pro is so close to there that it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, is it not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Okay, so I’ve never owned an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, well that’s the thing, I’ve never owned an iPad Pro, so learn me, show me why I’m wrong. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have, I’ve now had the 9.7 Pro and the 10.5, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep it always in the keyboard cover, almost always on the Apple keyboard cover. And there are other keyboard covers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of make it a little bit more laptop-like, but they’re mostly not that great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the way some people use it, and I’m one of these people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would use that. I would buy that product because I always want the keyboard. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard is what made iPads usable for me, as simple as that. I do occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go on the couch and fold the keyboard back behind it and try to use it without it, and I hate it. I always end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folding it back out and trying to use it on my lap, which is awful because it’s all floppy and back-weighted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So I would say this is not a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market probably, but if they did it, I would certainly buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that way because iOS for me, part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it feels so hobbled to me so often is the lack of a keyboard when I’m on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when I’m on an iPad without that. So that’s why for me, the keyboard really has made a huge difference for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me in making iOS on the iPad and making the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth having and worth keeping out in my kitchen all the time. So a clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of that would be welcome. But I honestly, I would be very surprised if they did
⏹️ ▶️ John This is whether it would be a viable product. And I think it totally would. Like as iOS expands its functionality to solve
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the same problems that are currently only or best solved by a Mac today, it inevitably has to come
⏹️ ▶️ John into that area because it’s a proven form factor. People like that
⏹️ ▶️ John form factor. It’s just a question of, oh, can you combine that form factor with a bunch of other things, software
⏹️ ▶️ John and battery life and cost and other trade-offs to make a compelling product? Yes, you totally can. Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do it with iOS today, but certainly as iOS continues to get more sophisticated. So it would be a viable product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether how soon Apple will do it, I don’t know.
Podcast payment middlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chance Rubbage writes in to ask, more and more podcasts are going behind paywalls. Is it a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple to enable a tip jar or in-app purchase for podcasts? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t see how that could really work out, especially since it would presumably be locked to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple Podcasts app. And even if you could just magically snap your fingers and make that work across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any podcast app anywhere, I don’t know, I think it would help the smaller podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for something like us, I don’t know that it would, And not to say we’re like, sorry, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey implies that we’re like a 99% invisible. We’re not that either, but like a mid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level, if you, if we can generously call ourselves that like a mid level show like this one, I don’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would make a big difference. Uh, let’s go to John first.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple implementing it as the problem here, because, uh, having a way for
⏹️ ▶️ John people to do a tip jar in app purchases for podcasts, that would be a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John because the ability to do more business models more easily lets different shows find different
⏹️ ▶️ John ways to fund themselves. Depends on the show and the audience and so on and so forth. But having it be an Apple thing is bad because
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the great benefits of podcasts is they’re not owned and controlled by a single corporation
⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree that a lot of other things are. And so I wouldn’t want Apple to do this because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re wildly successful, it’s a problem. And if they’re not successful, then what the heck was even the point? You don’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ John more business models. I would love for there to be standards that
⏹️ ▶️ John clients would work with across multiple platforms, just like RSS is a standard that clients
⏹️ ▶️ John work with across multiple platforms to distribute podcasts. If there was a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John open cross-platform standard for enabling different kinds of business models, that would be great, but guess who’s motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to make such a thing? Not Apple and not a lot of other companies too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say also, this question starts with the statement, more and more podcasts are going behind paywalls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This sounds like a big trend, but I don’t think it is much of one, really. I think the only podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have actually succeeded in going behind paywalls, for the most part, are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones that monetize their back catalogs, that are fairly timeless, and that you can either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use their own possibly paid app or pay for some membership to download like archived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco older episodes, but then the current ones are still free. That’s a way more common thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even that doesn’t work for every show. Like that only works for shows that are timeless. It doesn’t it wouldn’t work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a show like ours where we talk mostly about news. You know, so it’s like that whole like I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of podcasts overall are going behind paywalls and in the traditional sense of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t listen to this unless you pay us. The fact is, that’s really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really hard to grow an audience if you’re behind a paywall. As I mean, you look around the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of the web, lots of news sites and everything have tried paywalls. Very few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have succeeded because of this problem. And the ones that have, have these kind of porous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paywalls where you can get a bunch for free up front and then you might have to pay us or clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your cookies. Or you have to pay us to read all of our articles unless you come from Google or Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of these holes because paywalls are really hard to make work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcasts have survived and thrived and grown all this time driven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost entirely by advertising the exact same way most websites have always funded themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the same reasons. That it’s really, again, it’s hard to grow an audience if you’re making people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay on the way in. And it’s generally easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sell ads than to do that, and advertisers will typically pay more than your audience will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t really think this is a big problem, either a trend that is happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something that really needs to be explored that much. So that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple were to enable tip jars or in-app purchases for podcasts, I’ve honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have thought about doing this in Overcast before. I’ve talked to podcasters about it. The overall conclusion I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reached is that that would be a very messy business to be in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that for the most part, podcasters now, because there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t a big centralized system run by Apple anywhere else, podcasters now have found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to monetize their podcasts on their own. Ways that they own, ways that they control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People have Patreons, people have memberships, some people just do ads like we do, some people do some combination thereof.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the point is that no one’s involved. There is no middleman. There is no Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skimming 30% off the top and making everything go through them and disallowing everything else like the way there is in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. There is no middleman. When I talked to podcasters when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking about doing something like this in Overcast, the universal response was, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want anyone else handling our money for us. We don’t want anyone else getting between our audience and us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Me or Apple or anybody else. No one wanted that. And I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if I started collecting money and I just distributed it to you, readability style? Would you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that? And the universal response was kind of like, yeah, I guess I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take the money, but I wouldn’t promote it because if I’m going to promote something, I want to promote my own membership thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my own site or my own Patreon or whatever else. Everybody wanted to do their own thing with their own money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t want middle people to come in and collect money on their behalf.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not doing them a favor by doing that. So ultimately, I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why this question is asked, and it’s going to keep being asked like every six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next 10 years, as everyone thinks about these things with podcasts. But I just don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is really a big problem. And I don’t think anybody wants a huge middleman
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come in and get in the way between them and their customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And things like Patreon are a middleman as well, but they’re divorced from podcasting. It’s something about Patreon that is podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John specific. So it’s just a question of, how do you find a way to fund the thing that you’re doing? And you have all these tools. Stripe
⏹️ ▶️ John is a middleman there. Like if they’re taking a percentage of your transactions or anything. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s always going to be people taking a percentage of transactions. But in the world of podcasting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to not have, oh, you have to do it this way because this is how podcasts are sold. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use Stripe, you want to use Patreon, you want to use Kickstarter, you want to solicit donations
⏹️ ▶️ John on your web page and use any one of those services. None of those are tied to podcasting and are interested
⏹️ ▶️ John to the podcast ecosystem or, you know, force you to do something. Unlike for example, the app
⏹️ ▶️ John store where Apple absolutely controls how you can pay for your, you can collect money for your applications.
What streaming services do we use?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Adamson writes, what streaming services other than Netflix do you guys use? Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse have a Crunchyroll subscription? So actually, let’s start with John and then we’ll end with
⏹️ ▶️ John So I saw this question I was trying to think of. I mean, I do subscribe to Hulu. I subscribe to Amazon Prime.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not have a Crunchyroll subscription, but I have had one in the past. Maybe there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. I honestly, I thought about it the other day. I should catalog
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things I’ve subscribed to. So I am aware right around the line of Eel
⏹️ ▶️ John style of not having too many subscriptions, but they’ve been creeping in. Like I mean for
⏹️ ▶️ John things like Hulu it’s like, oh I want to see The Handmaid’s Tale so I’ll subscribe to Hulu, but now I just have a Hulu
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription forever because I find other shows that I want to watch. I already watched The Good Place on there. There’s other
⏹️ ▶️ John things I’m going to watch on Hulu, right? This can’t continue indefinitely because I will be
⏹️ ▶️ John end up, you know, I got to add up all those five, ten, whatever dollars a month and see what they’re at. Oh, it’s HBO?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, but that’s part of my cable. I don’t know. Too many, I guess, is my answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve McLaughlin Fair enough. Marco? Marco Marconi For us, it’s just Netflix and HBO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GO or NOW, whichever one is, you know, the one that doesn’t require a cable. Those two, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Yeah, for us, it’s Netflix. And we are Amazon Prime members by virtue, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Prime Video members by virtue of Amazon Prime. Marco Marconi Oh, yeah, us too. Never use it. Yeah, and that’s the thing like outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Grand Tour we never use it and I probably would have subscribed to Prime Video Specifically for the Grand Tour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then regretted it because Grand Tour was terrible Let’s see.
Mac Plus over Apple IIgs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exelf writes in do I have a real name here? Sorry, a little fancy spreadsheet doesn’t catch real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey names as Alf Rydin writes in I’m standing in the computer store in my local mall before Christmas 1986
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John sell me on a Mac Plus over the Apple 2gs. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John The pixels are the size of boulders on the Apple 2gs The number of amazing games that
⏹️ ▶️ John are you’ll have to play on the Mac Plus will impress any Apple 2gs Yes
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the two GS is color, but a the Mac is future and be the pixels are tiny and
⏹️ ▶️ John See the Mac has incredible amount of charm like it’s it’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John contest if you have the money As they say if you have the means I highly recommend one do not
⏹️ ▶️ John do the Apple to GS. It is a dead end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was Ferris Bueller by the way All right.
How did we meet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Melvin Gundlach writes in how did you initially meet and what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got you started making podcasts together? Bits and pieces of this story have been told many many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many times in the past So I’ll try to give the chief summarizer in chief version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I met when we were little kids Your parents or grandparents it isn’t entirely important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a house that was on a small lake in upstate New York my grandparents had a had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different house on the same small lake in upstate New York and And we would hang out over the summers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because basically we were the only kids that were there. And we kind of fell out of touch, not in an angry way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just in a, you know, we were kids and we grew up kind of way. And I think one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us would email the other from time to time over the years. And then shortly after, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was after we both got married, so not too terribly long after college, one of us reached out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other. If I recall correctly, each of us blames the other for doing this in both the good way and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha-ha way. But anyway, somehow or another we fell back in touch and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we just kind of rekindled our friendship from forever ago. So of the people that I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk to, Marco and our now mutual friend, Brad Lautenbach, who works for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Light, they are my two oldest friends that I’ve known for about the same amount of time and it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like 20 years now. So fast forward to WWDC 2011, 2012, I forget which one it was. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say it was 2011. Marco and I are in line for the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I forget if John Syracuse walked up to us or Marco found John, but one way or another, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found us and we found John, and we hung out for the rest of the day, and then John and I kind of became
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friendly after that. And around the time that Build and Analyze ended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in late 2012, I guess it was, I had started needling Marco about, hey, we should do a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car show. We should do a car show. Even if nobody listens to it, it’ll still be fun. We should do a car show. Spoiler alert,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody listened to it. But anyway, Marco had the presence of mind to say, you know, Hypercritical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just ended. I wonder if John would do it too, because he likes cars. And so that’s how Neutral got started. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we would, as three nerds are off to do, we would start talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerdy stuff after the fact. And Marco, similar story, had the presence of mind to put that on SoundCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the time you listen to this may not even exist anymore. And so he put those episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on SoundCloud. And we realized, well, people actually like when we talk about things we sort of know about. and people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not that interested in us pontificating about cars, of which we know nothing about. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should stop with the car thing and start with the tech thing. And that’s kind of the super abridged version of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how this all came to be. And so ATP really became a thing, I think, in March of 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here we are in the middle of 2017. It’s still a thing. So let’s start with Marco. Any other thoughts to add? And then John after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only that this is now one of the longest jobs I’ve ever held. to paper was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey caught me while I was taking a sip of water. Oh my God. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco almost died just now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey done. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instapaper was about five years. So we’re in year four now for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that mean the clock is ticking or should I get worried?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Once this becomes the longest job I’ve ever held, which I’m pretty sure will happen, then I will celebrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. John, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to protest the characterization of not knowing anything about cars. Speak for yourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know a lot about cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I can’t really argue with that. Alright, let’s see what else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good. And what else is going on?
Do we tape our webcams?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s get here. Do you tape your webcams, gentlemen? John, do you put tape over your webcam?
Happy with Go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, are you still and this is a question from Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Mark to Marco, are you still happy choosing go for the overcast back end?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, not really. But so first of all, only a very small part of the overcast back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end is in go most of it is still PHP. There’s simply a separate go process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the feed crawlers. And they don’t even it doesn’t even do the whole process. It just pulls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of feeds and fetches their contents for changes if they don’t report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on with the cache headers. And then if it detects a changed feed, it then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuffs the contents of that feed into a queue, which is processed by PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumers. And the whole web app is all PHP. So I would not even say I have a Go backend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one Go component in the backend. And Go is an interesting language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure a lot of people like it a lot. I it a lot for certain things, but it’s very cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do complex things. So it’s really great for what I’m using it now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, which is something that is a fairly simple task that you need to be really fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to have a certain concurrency story there, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not want to write, now that I’ve gotten to know the language a bit enough to do this, I would definitely not want to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole web app of complexity using Go just because simple things are cumbersome
How did T-shirts go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we only have time for a few more because I’m about to die. And so let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose a few. Oh god I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to pronounce this but Joshin Marshall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so so sorry How did you or how did this year’s ATP t-shirt campaign work out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you? I’m happy to share my not-so-good experience This is another example of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something nicely that could have taken a terrible turn So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shirts are a tough thing, right Because right now we kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of have two choices. We can use a company that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a printing press, if you will, in Europe, but doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do the best with fulfillment and oftentimes has problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or we can use a company that is only based out of the U S which kind of screws the Europeans,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is way more reliable. And we’ve fluttered back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between these two options. I will only speak for myself and say I will probably petition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the U.S.-only company next year and understand completely if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a $90 t-shirt is just too darn much money to ask for from the Europeans because in some cases, like with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey import tax and VAT or whatever that stuff is called, it got to be unbelievably expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am deeply sorry for that, I really truly am, but I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have everyone have a good experience and just decide whether or not it’s worth the money to them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than having a really crummy experience. So this is your warning, Europeans, right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, that whenever we do T-shirts next, it’s probably going to be expensive and I am sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it was that bad this year. We sold a lot of shirts and there’s some percentage where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be problems. I’m more happy having more,
⏹️ ▶️ John the larger number of people who are happy with the shirts that they got across the whole world, even if it
⏹️ ▶️ John also means a proportionally larger number of people who are unhappy, because I’m presuming the unhappy people can
⏹️ ▶️ John at least at the very least get their money back. But it is a trade off and we’ve tried it both ways
⏹️ ▶️ John and people complain either way and who knows what we’ll do. The problem is, the problem is that this is not, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not our core competency. We are not a t-shirt generating enterprise. We are a podcast generating
⏹️ ▶️ John enterprise that once a year does this silly thing with T-shirts. So the right way to do this is like, oh, you gotta do it all in-house,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re not a corporation here, we’re just three people. So every year, these three people
⏹️ ▶️ John try to figure out how to do T-shirts in
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense for everybody involved, and we have varying degrees of success, and guess what, we’re gonna try again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m with you, Casey, and I would go a little further to say, So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll name names here. Cotton Bureau does great work. They have awesome quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have awesome people who are there who help with the designs or often do the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designs. They designed our ATP Rainbow M logo kind of thing. They designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that themselves without even us telling them. They are great and they do great work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, their international shipping’s really expensive because they print here in the US. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Teespring, which is what we used this year and a couple years ago also, Teespring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has printers in multiple locations around the world. We’ve had lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems though with Teespring. So it is cheaper, and we actually make more money from the Teespring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shirts, usually, I think. But I would go as far as to say right now on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the record, I don’t think I ever want to use Teespring again after this year. Because in the past, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality issue was a single large mistake. It was like when we had that wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco font on the source code on the back of the shirt. That was a single large mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we worked with them, they corrected it, they sent everybody new shirts. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one mistake, one big mistake that was fixable. This year, the problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what has changed at Teespring. I know there was an article about they were having layoffs or something, so I don’t know what’s going on over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. I don’t pay attention. But this year, it was like a large number different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diffuse small problems. Like, even like the shirts I ordered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have bad printing on like two of the four shirts that I ordered. There were things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like missing colors, things like misalignment where like the logo was slightly slanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of being aligned properly, like stuff like that. Just a lot of like small diffuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with Teespring this year that it seems like maybe they have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printers. I don’t know what the deal is, but it was is the kind of problem that you can’t really just go to them and have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix. You can’t go to them and say, hey, like a third of these shirts from random color combinations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and places are weird in different ways and they’re all inconsistent. Like they’re not going to be able to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So I would rather, you know, going back to what Keith said, I would rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have something that I at least know is a good product that is at least coming out right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and coming out, you know, with high quality, even if it costs too much for some people to be able to justify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather sell that than to do what we had this year and see people sending in pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the shirt they were so excited to get and I see like it’s missing a color or it’s slanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s a bad print job, bad ink. That crushes me. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with that again. I would not want to do Teespring anymore and I don’t care what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does. I’d rather not sell t-shirts than sell Teespring t-shirts again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m pretty similar in that feeling.
Why does Marco read the ads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, since you were just talking, let’s have you talk a little more. Why do you do all the ad reads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s by Phil Cohen, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just kind of do. We never really talked about it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just kind of do it. That was exactly my answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It just was the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it started with neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ John The short answer is that I don’t want to do them, and Casey doesn’t want to do them,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco does them. And so neither of us are going to go, hey, Marco, can we do
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing that neither of us want to do? to let Marco do it. So basically, it’s because Marco is nice enough to do them
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey and I are nice enough to let him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I think I started out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to sell them directly myself at the beginning. So it started out that I was selling them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it just made sense for me to also read them because I was talking to the sponsors and learning what they wanted me to say and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. These days, I think anybody could do it. But yeah, I do it and I don’t mind doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it’s part of my workflow and it’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also part of the thing, like this is true in a lot of relationship situations, very often
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s one person that cares more about something than somebody else. And I have a feeling Marco cares more about the ad reads than either
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Certainly more than I do. The way, the way, how much
⏹️ ▶️ John tweaking he does to the ad copy and getting it so that he’s happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is a factor. I think if either one of us did ad reads, we would do it in a way that Marco does not find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Definitely. That is, that is a good point. and I’ll see you next time.
Explaining John’s bagel love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think this is going to be the last question and it should be a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. Hans Schrader writes in, I’m from Europe. Could John explain for a foreigner why he is so touchy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the subject of bagels?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m going to explain to Casey why he should select the question that I highlighted in yellow in the spreadsheet as a final
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only see but so much of the spreadsheet at once. My word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, I’m sorry. Row 100.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I am nowhere near there. That’s why I skipped it. Okay, so the answer to the question is, the answer to the question that John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t answering is there are good bagels and there are things that vaguely resemble bagels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and John and I both have reasons to prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John actually. Do you want me to actually answer this one? Because I can answer it. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John please do. So this is a very simple thing. Everyone has foods that they
⏹️ ▶️ John ate growing up that are like regional or local to their family or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re nostalgic for. Like I want to have the ex that I had when I was a child. That’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And bagels are like that for me, only bagels are pretty widely regional to the New York metro area.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I grew up with the expectation that I can get bagels that taste
⏹️ ▶️ John in a certain way and pizza that tastes a certain way pretty much anywhere. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John a sheltered child who didn’t travel too much, I assumed this was true everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in the United States. But then when I went off to college, I learned this is not true. And even just up
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit farther north and east, everything I got that people called a bagel didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John taste like the things that I ate when I was growing up. And I’d go back to New York and say, no, they’re still there, but nobody else has them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with pizza. So it’s basically, that’s why it’s important that bagels
⏹️ ▶️ John are made a certain way in the region where I grew up. And because that’s sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John their entry point into the US, they have some stake in saying this is the way the bagels are quote unquote supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to taste, right? that I can’t get them where I currently live, so that’s why I’m nostalgic for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. Same thing with pizza. Pizza’s actually probably worse than bagels, but both of them I miss. But when I was on Long Island,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had both. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable for me. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Warby Parker, and Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm,
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, accidental They didn’t mean to,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, accidental Tech podcasts so
Post-show: Zelda progress?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the Zelda question is the one you want John
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the one in yellow I mean, it’s not it’s not enough material for an after-show. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t I have flux on so I can’t tell what the Hell’s yellow right now. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John God, I’m blind. Oh god. I’m the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John say Fluxes, I don’t like those things. We can’t even tell yellow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right, Vincent scovered scurved Vincent scurved I’ll get this one day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So what is your what is the status on your breath of the wild progression? Did you finish every aspect of the game, et cetera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I did with most questions? I’ll start this off. I still very much enjoy the game, but haven’t played
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in probably like a month and a half. I have just been incredibly busy lately and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, haven’t had a chance to sit down with it. And also I think we discussed on the show at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not very good at picking the game up and remembering exactly what I was doing when I put it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ll have like a particular task or mission or thing I want to accomplish, which sometimes is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, one of the official game tasks, but sometimes it’s like, Oh, I want to go and get myself ready for this game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey task by going across the map and doing such and such thing or whatever the case may be. And then I never write it down and completely forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I get frustrated when I pick the game back up because I’m, I have no memory and need to like reestablish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I am and what I’m doing. That’s my two cents. Marco, let’s talk. Are you playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. All right. Moving on to John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Marco can give us a tip update. How is she doing it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know Adam.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They’re they’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sometimes. I can’t tell you how far they I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John Try to participate in your family Marco sit down There watch you play your stupid Sonic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I watch sometimes, but I have I have no idea how to communicate to you how far they are
⏹️ ▶️ John So for me in Breath of the Wild I I don’t usually 100% games. I have 100% did many Zelda’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That series I play a lot. I like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a chance. I would have 100% did breath of the wild if it wasn’t for the Corax seeds
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I’m ever gonna do that. It’s just too many of them, but I have I’m coming close
⏹️ ▶️ John to doing every non seed thing in the non
⏹️ ▶️ John DLC portion of the game to the point where also I’ll be doing things like having every possible armor set
⏹️ ▶️ John also fully upgraded I’m getting close to that it’s like it’s within reach and I might end up doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John for the DLC I did the the was it the trial of the sword
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that so I’m a sort of fully charged up to 260 all the time which is awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John and also lasts a much longer time I did all the side quests in DLC so I’ve done everything of 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the DLC which was tiny or whatever it’s not a big deal and like I said I’m I’m don’t even have all the shrines left
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in the hundreds but I’m within striking distance of 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John representing everything in the main game aside from the Korok seeds.