266: Text Adventure Mode
23 Mar 2018Cylinder syntax, GDPR, simulated keyboards, MicroLED ambitions, game-console “bits”, sports fandom, and why it’s hard to drop Facebook.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Compound commands in cylinders
You shut down your computer because of a problem...- GDPR
- This keyboard feels so real, mannnnnn...
- Apple is developing its own display tech
#askatp- What's the deal with gaming consoles and "bits"? (via Simon Ejsing)
- What's the deal with sports? (via Johnny O)
- What's the deal with Instagram? (via TT On Air)
- Post-show Neutral
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Devices for talking
- Cylinder Corner
- Sponsor: Instabug (code ATP)
- Follow-up: “You shut down” 🖼️
- GDPR
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- More keyboard patents! 🖼️
- Apple making MicroLEDs?
- #askatp: Console “bits” 🖼️
- #askatp: “My” sports team
- #askatp: Dropping Facebook
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Neutral
Pre-show: Devices for talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to be long, you know, long drive, but I bought walkie talkies so that we could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey stuff. Of course you did.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to find out how crappy walkie talkies are compared to the modern digital cell network. Yep. Just start calling each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but they’re really fast. Like that’s the thing, like you just push a button and talk. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. Yeah, no, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re static. Yeah, type, type, type, you know, I got decent ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, when I said the modern digital cell network, I meant the voice. Like, do you know you can
⏹️ ▶️ John talk into your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. What? No one does that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying, you can call people on it. Try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, what are you saying? Oh, how we miss the days of the Nextel push to talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s not push to talk. If you just leave the call connected all the time, you don’t even have to push.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just set up a WebEx in each car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, Jesus, now I’m definitely
Cylinder Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Damien Shaw writes, Google Home allows for both compound commands and context sensitive commands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do this all the time. Quote, play something and set volume to five. It gets it every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And quote, Google, what’s the weather in San Diego? I just said it. Oh, I’m sorry people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, Cylinder, what’s the weather in San Diego today? A few seconds later, hey Cylinder, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about tomorrow? And it all, that also always works for Damien Shaw.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean this is my bad because I said last episode that none of the cylinders supported multiple commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one sentence. I’m not talking about follow up like afterwards. I’m talking about like play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weezer and set the volume to five or you know make a pasta timer five minutes and a sauce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timer for 20 minutes like stuff like that. Like that’s having all that be in one command and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even know did anybody say if it can do multiple name timers? I don’t even know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Apparently Google Home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do it with certain commands. So oh well I made a mistake. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri and the Amazon service would add this.” And this was in the context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Amazon adding their follow-up listening feature to the Echo of like, it’ll listen for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few seconds after it does a command to see if you have anything more to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a BS non-feature, but multiple command support in one sentence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a great feature and something that we desperately need. I thought nobody had it. Turns out Google has it. Done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the thing about these cylinders is, like they don’t really have a particularly discoverable
⏹️ ▶️ John interface. That’s one of the reasons that Amazon emails you all the time to tell you all the new things that you can do with your cylinder,
⏹️ ▶️ John because otherwise how would you know? Like it just sits there, you know? It doesn’t, it has no apparent way to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John to you that it is now has, now has a new capability. On this topic, are you sure Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John that your Amazon cylinder can’t do compound commands? Like when’s the last time you tried? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reasonable question. I don’t, I guess I’m not sure. The last time I tried was probably months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, and they could have added it last week. I don’t actually read those emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I might have done multiple timers in one sentence, but I don’t know. I treat my Google
⏹️ ▶️ John cylinders, like every time I talk to them, I’m daring them not to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John me. I say things in an informal way, in a more
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated way than, not in a more complicated way, but that I don’t simplify it. I don’t dumb it down to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t understand me. So let me explain to you very clearly and slowly what I want. I just say it. And which is daring
⏹️ ▶️ John it to go ahead, screw up, don’t and most of the time it succeeds. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that little weird game that I play with it. It’s part of my satisfaction with the product. Part of the satisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ John is the challenge and seeing the challenge be met by this little thing in my house, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the discoverability front I think actually one of the pieces of feedback that we got that may not have made it
⏹️ ▶️ John into notes is that what the heck is it called HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John also can do compound things or at least play music or other audio
⏹️ ▶️ John and issue a volume level at the same time and they go back to what I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not always clear what these cylinders can do for us and the only way to really find out is to try
⏹️ ▶️ John and the problem with trying is it fail if it falls on its face you’re like oh my stupid cylinder can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Two months later, maybe it can do that thing and you have no idea. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the moral is, I mean, I don’t know what the solution is here because Amazon’s email is one approach, just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John spamming people so they realize you can ask it facts about dogs, right? But I don’t think that’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John solution either. You certainly don’t want these cylinders like when you, you know, wake up and tell
⏹️ ▶️ John the turn on the lights to throw in a sentence or two about these new capabilities. Although if I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John like in sci-fi movies and in bad infomercials made by people who don’t know how actual people act,
⏹️ ▶️ John Cylinders would always be telling you about the stuff they can do and you’d be delighted like you know the sci-fi actor
⏹️ ▶️ John wakes up and you know his futuristic apartment and all his devices tell him
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want you to know last night I had new capabilities and blah blah blah and he’s like oh thank you Cylinder blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah but in real life you’d smash the thing with a hammer so I was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey talking to you in the morning like
⏹️ ▶️ John commands. And in advertisements, people are so happy to hear the new capabilities that
⏹️ ▶️ John the refrigerator has. No, they’re not happy. They don’t want to know. So I don’t know what the solution is. Certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you wake up, like your five-year-old doesn’t say, Father, I can now understand compound
⏹️ ▶️ John commands like they just grow and get better. And we expect them to, you know, to grow and get better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But appliances, especially appliances that we don’t see doing software update or appliances that get enhanced by changes on a server
⏹️ ▶️ John that really are invisible to us, like it doesn’t affect our, you know, it’s, I don’t know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky. Maybe they should have little tiny brain icons that grow as they get smarter, and if you wake up this morning
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, oh, Cylinder, I see your brain is a little bit bigger, that’s great. Not an actual solution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I feel like, you know, supporting compound commands is not a binary,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like yes it does now, no it doesn’t thing, like people said the HomePod can do, like, you know, play a playlist at music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level, but can it do like set a timer for 10 minutes and turn on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the office lights? And can Google Home do that? I don’t know. Like one of the biggest use cases, I think for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commands would be turning on or off multiple smart home things at once that don’t already have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-existing group. So you could say like, you know, hey, Cylinder, turn on lights in office,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bedroom, and kitchen that might be three commands by, you know, normally three separate commands, that’s pretty tedious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if, or you can say like, hey, Cylinder, turn off outside lights and lamps in living room. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you do that? Can you say, turn on kitchen lights and start a pasta timer for five minutes? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you combine domains in one sentence? Like, it’s one of those things, like, again, like this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing humans expect to work at some point, and I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cylinders were smarter, but the good thing is that these assistants are getting smarter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some of them faster paces than others. Let’s be honest here, Apple is, has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lagging behind here pretty badly in rate of improvement, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon and Google services are doing great. They’re really improving very quickly, and so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promising. It wouldn’t surprise me if they get there fairly soon. One other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little nitpick while we’re on the cylinder thing, and this is something that bothers me about Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Amazon service will interpret things you say literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you give an unusual phrasing. So for instance, if I say, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want a timer for, like if I’m starting, this happened the other night, I was starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something in some rice or pasta or something in a pot, and I also had some, I was gonna put some French
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fries in the oven. So I asked the Amazon cylinder, start a timer for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rice for 25 minutes. And I said, start a start French fries timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 10 minutes. And so what I wanted was in 10 minutes for it to say start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the French fries. So it’s weird. You have to say start a start French fries timer. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon service gets that right every single time. It always knows what I mean by that. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treating it as a string literal. It’s like this is the name of the timer you are you are creating here and it gets it right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time. It’s one of those one of those things like John said, you know, like like where like you’re you’re almost trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip it up like by trying this kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the opposite of what I said because you’re playing it like it’s X Adventure.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’re doing the Alta Vista thing of like
⏹️ ▶️ John you want a thing that works like a programmer and you’re a programmer and you’re like you see the placeholders in your head
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re filling them in because you know how it’ll be interpreted but I would argue that no human speaks to another intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like that. You’re playing the game that is your cylinder which is fine I think it’s a useful feature for people who want
⏹️ ▶️ John to play that game but it would be better like if you if you were talking to another human
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably would have said uh don’t let me forget to start the french fries in 10 minutes or like
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that or remind me in 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes to start the French
⏹️ ▶️ John fries. I was avoiding remind me because that sounds more like the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reminder. That’s create a reminder. Right. Like you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, reminders and timers or whatever. You just want it to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you mean. Or tell me in 10 minutes, you know, like whatever it is like, but that’s what that’s what timers are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named timers are basically telling you this thing at this like in this time. And it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very, very useful function. And it’s awesome to like to hear the people go off and say your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start French fries timer is done like that’s it’s great because it reminds you like what to do and staggering things
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s awkward too when it says your start french fries
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to I wanted to say it’s time to start the french fries But it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doesn’t understand the name
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t understand the name of the timer like so I think the problem is in these sort of this weird uh
⏹️ ▶️ John area where You can say it in a vague way, but it doesn’t understand what you meant
⏹️ ▶️ John and it tries to be smart Lots of people are complaining about siri Trying to get it to play
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the home pod trying to get play songs that have weird titles that themselves might be
⏹️ ▶️ John interpretable as commands and they just literally can’t get it to play those songs or those albums because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way to get it to, to your point, to get it to understand that it’s a string
⏹️ ▶️ John literal, that it’s a placeholder, you know, to get it to parse as initiation command, placeholder
⏹️ ▶️ John for thing, for song name, and then verb, right? And it just, it
⏹️ ▶️ John stubbornly refuses to do that. And it’s trying to be flexible so it can like interpret meaning or whatever, But if there’s any
⏹️ ▶️ John ambiguity it falls over whereas the Alexa one is very cut and dried and as there are certain forms
⏹️ ▶️ John that you Can put it in in certain places where expects the placeholders and if you play that text adventure game with your cylinder It has
⏹️ ▶️ John predictable functionality like it doesn’t vary like with the songs that were with home pod
⏹️ ▶️ John Some songs you can say it a million different ways because there’s no way that song title is potentially misinterpreted
⏹️ ▶️ John But other songs that screws up whereas with the placeholder format anything you put in there like I bet you
⏹️ ▶️ John would get your cylinder to say, uh, start
⏹️ ▶️ John a timer for a start a timer for 10 minutes for 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I bet you could, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could nest it and it would still like figure it out because it’s probably just doing a very naive,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, text to speech and then parsing that. And speaking of naive Texas speech, um, on, on the thing that you were getting at before
⏹️ ▶️ John about doing compound things, even Google is not above punting on this. Like they have a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the home pod where you essentially set up macros where you’re Like, look, if there’s a series of commands that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could issue, but you don’t want to say all those words because it’s weird and awkward, just tell us what you’re going to say. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when you say that, we will do all these other things. That’s really cool. And I mean, it’s not. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John most brain dead thing ever. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco someone posted a
⏹️ ▶️ John tweet of ones where they had just put ATP. So they can say, hey, cylinder ATP. And it says, played the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John episode of Accidental Death Podcast. It’s just a shorter way to say that. But literally, any list of commands you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just macro expansion, very simple macro expansion. And if it was truly intelligent, you wouldn’t have to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to converse with it and shorten what you say and based on how often you ask for a thing that’s similar to this blah blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not there yet right but I’m just showing that Google eventually says the utility
⏹️ ▶️ John of letting programming people essentially make macros of their own design and then we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just dumbly use dumbly yeah speech to text
⏹️ ▶️ John and then map it onto one of these macros and if it matches one of them we’ll do that thing it it
⏹️ ▶️ John provides utility while they work on providing the actual intelligence at some point in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, and that’s useful. And I would also posit that, you know, I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google Home customers are more programmers than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco average. But also, like, you know, so going back to my, you know, start a start French fries timer, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds, you know, contrived and an edge case. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really get tripped up by places where Siri does… because Siri seems to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no effort to understand that kind of syntax, but that can also trip up legitimate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote legitimate use cases. So for instance, the other day I said, I asked Siri to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remind me in things to add the 12-volt battery to my Tesla repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now it’s the the word add, Siri interprets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as to add to the to do list. So even though I said, remind me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add this blah blah blah, it ignored the fact that there was already another word in the sentence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that said that remind me to remind me basically like it didn’t it didn’t figure that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when I said remind me to add twelve battery to my Tesla repair, I got some you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some task and things that said something on the lines of like you know twelve battery to my test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like it’s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s so like it didn’t parse a sentence correctly at all. And I also have inconsistencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there where when you’re asking, you know, to remind you about something, you will, you will usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put some kind of word between remind me like to, so remind me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take the trash out. Most of the time Siri parses that as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add a reminder, but the text take the trash out. Sometimes it parses it as add a reminder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the text to take the trash out. So I have a reminder that says to take the trash out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s like literally the same thing Sometimes we’ll do that. Sometimes won’t it just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of those things like whatever whatever algorithms and machine learning Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing to parse sentence structure Seems like it’s significantly behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the others and also inconsistent like so much of Siri and it’s just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of I don’t know it’s frustrating like that because that that this seems like easy stuff, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basics of adding reminders and setting timers and stuff like that. Like this is what Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was demoed with in 2011. Like this should be easier and better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by now. And we know from the other assistants that it can be better, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theirs are better. And so this is like, it’s just yet one more thing that just like, it’s a little like paper cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I use Siri that like one of these dumb things happens and the other ones it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that was that reminders thing of where it thinks you’re trying to add something to a list was like one of my original Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints, maybe on this program, maybe on an earlier podcast I had the exact same problem. I, the thing I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to remind me about, it stubbornly insisted on interpreting as an attempt to either create or add
⏹️ ▶️ John to some unknown list that I did didn’t exist because I was trying to maintain the
⏹️ ▶️ John list and remind myself to put things on the list. It was kind of like you were doing and it just could not handle it.
⏹️ ▶️ John today when I do reminders, sometimes I’ll do multiple tries
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll have to go into text adventure mode where I’m just like, look, I’m going to I’m going to give
⏹️ ▶️ John a name of this reminder. I’m not going to have like normal syntax. I’m going to be like, remind me. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then a phrase that is unambiguously interpreted as text that has to appear there, but it’s not the way I would want
⏹️ ▶️ John to phrase it like just enough so that I will beat the text adventure.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also not so much that when I go look at the reminder, I won’t understand what I was doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is like, here’s another speaking of inconsistency. I’ve always loved the feature of Siri. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming it’s a feature of Siri where I would say I would
⏹️ ▶️ John create a reminder or something involving one of a family member’s name.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I assume it would look in contacts for the spelling, right? Like my daughter is Kate, but she spells
⏹️ ▶️ John with a C and it would transcribe it as like a K but then it would like
⏹️ ▶️ John do some processing and change it to a C because it I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming knows that I have that listed as a nickname for my daughter and my contacts and I appreciated
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature it’s like I’m constantly talking about this Kate person it’s never with a K
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll correct it if it transcribes it with the K and I like the fact that it seemed like it had
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out oh at some point along the line it’s like all right there’s no Kate with a K in your contacts which would be bad if there was
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it should figure it but anyway, but there’s no K with a K, I’ll change it to a C. And every time I saw that little K change to a C, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s nice. That’s Siri being smart. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the Google thing, where you get like a good feeling from using a product that you gave it something challenging and it used it
⏹️ ▶️ John smart. But lately, it’s decided to go back to K. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyed at it. I’m like, come on, change to a C. And it just never does. And it stays, so I go and
⏹️ ▶️ John edit it, and I change it to a C myself. And why? I don’t know. I don’t know, man.
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Follow-up: “You shut down”
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on to Annoyances and language but written language Scott little writes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m almost sure that the you shut down Dialogue as in you shut down your computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Only happens after the users force powered off the machine for example in the whole system hangs not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after a kernel panic So in reality, the text is accurate. I could have sworn I tried to make this point on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, and either I didn’t, or maybe it hit the editing room floor one way or the other. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I thought too, and I thought we concluded I was crazy. Jay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Haynes You are crazy, but maybe not for this reason. So I—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Steven Connelly Story of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my life. Jay Haynes Yeah, so yeah, so I was talking about how like this dialogue of, you shut down your computer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a problem infuriated me me because that often happens when I don’t feel that I’m at fault for the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think this is correct that it does only only come up with like an improper shutdown, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a kernel panic. The problem is like there are certain situations where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to force shut down the computer because of like a bug in Mac OS, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t wake from sleep or something like that. Like this happens all the time, you know, not all the time. This happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every Mac person at some point, especially if you’re a laptop person. This happens a lot, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regarding waking from sleep. But you know, so like there are some times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you have to hold down the power button for five seconds to get the computer to turn off or to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. And then it says you shut down your computer because of a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s kind of like it’s kind of like slapping you in the face. It’s like, well, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was your problem. You’re throwing this back on me. But I didn’t write the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that caused my computers to need to be power cycled. So I think this is correct. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does only come up when it’s been improperly shut down, but I still think that it’s a bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s bad like language design to throw the action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the user to say you shut down the computer like you can just say the computer was shut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down improperly or the computer didn’t shut down correctly. or something like you can say you can reword that in so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ways that that don’t like ascribe the the purpose of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to the user because like the user at that point is probably not very happy with the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the computer just did something wrong like the computer just like malfunctioned and then you then the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says you didn’t do this right so it’s not a good it’s not a good time to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John so i think the wording actually is reasonably fair for the thing where it was user initiated and we got
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of feedback for people saying that’s when they see this dialogue. But we also got feedback from people saying
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not turn this thing off. I didn’t unplug it. I didn’t hold down the power key. And yet I saw this dialogue.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it like I said, it can’t know whether you are the one that caused
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever cleanup things not to have been cleaned up so that on boot up it finds this uncleaned up file, whatever flag
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you whatever, whatever heuristic it uses to determine that it didn’t get to shut down properly last
⏹️ ▶️ John time. There are a number of things that can cause that to happen, only a couple of which are the human
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something and it has no idea what you did. So I think this dialogue still does show up in cases where there
⏹️ ▶️ John actually was no user. Actually, if you have some kind of cash, even if you had some kind of catastrophic crash that throws you back to
⏹️ ▶️ John log in window, it might not have, you know, have the time to clean up the things
⏹️ ▶️ John or the processes that died or crashed, couldn’t have cleaned up the little thing so that when you log back in it
⏹️ ▶️ John throws this dollar because again, this is asking you, do you want to open the applications that are open when you shut down, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like telling you if you want to resource state, just in case one of those applications is one of the things that caused the crash or
⏹️ ▶️ John something, right, so it’s a good dialogue box, something like this should be there, but I don’t think it can know
⏹️ ▶️ John that you shut down your computer. I think it does guess right a lot of the time, and I think it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually telling you that the problem was yours, or that you shouldn’t have shut down the computer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a little bit more accusatory than it probably should be, because it just can’t be sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that you shut down your computer. Somebody did, might have been you. What if a different person turned on the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and the person who actually shut it down left? Now you’re being yelled at for shutting down the computer, but you didn’t shut it down, the guy who was here two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John ago did. So probably not the best wording, but it is at least a little bit potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John more accurate than we thought it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what if you have like the world’s worst office mates or roommates? They just come by and hold down power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for five seconds at your computer sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I remember holding down power doesn’t reboot. Holding down power just turns the thing off. So you could, you could, someone,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone could, uh, someone in your family, let’s say, could be annoyed at the computer or something hung or crashed
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and they hold on the power button for five seconds and the thing turns off. I think that’s what it does, right? It just turns
⏹️ ▶️ John off. Yeah. When you do that, right? Yeah. And then they leave and go to sleep. Next morning, the whole family wakes up, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John else goes to the computer, hits the space bar, it doesn’t wake up and go, huh.
⏹️ ▶️ John And hopefully they find the power switch, which used to be on the keyboard, which was super convenient. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing starts up and it says, you shut down the computer, we have a problem. like what do you mean I just woke up I didn’t shut down the computer because of a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again the dialogue box can’t know so could probably probably should err on the side of being
⏹️ ▶️ John on assuming your innocence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love how much time we’ve given this dialogue box because it drives me nuts every time and maybe Lisa doesn’t have a typo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this utility yeah right like maybe in like you know peak Sierra or whatever the hell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes next. I don’t know anything about California. Maybe somebody will reword this dialogue in the English localization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not do this stupid blame thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, we need to move on.
GDPR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, let’s talk about GDPR, which I already forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the acronym, but it’s basically the You Are in Control of Your Data law that we discussed last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Power writes in, with regard to the cookie law in GDPR, I think that the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that companies, especially American companies, don’t understand what the law covers and put warnings when there’s no need or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t put warnings in when they’re required. So to talk about the cookie law, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t apply only to cookies, according to Aaron. It applies to any form of persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage, like local storage. It also doesn’t apply to first-party cookies, so like a cookie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to keep you logged in. It only applies when there are cookies from a third party, like Google Analytics.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now according to Aaron, the cookie law was weak. However, GDPR is a much stricter, more consequential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey law, and there’s bigger penalties if you don’t follow it. So there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of bullets here. I’m assuming because one of you put this in the show notes, I am supposed to be reading them, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I will do so. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to learn how to summarize them. The challenge is you are the chief. You’re not just a summarizer,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey. You’re the chief summarizer in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chief. I’m pulling at my tie. I’m pulling at my tie right now. I’m adjusting my neck and whatnot. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So basically any of the personal information that you give to a company, it is qualified under GDPR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company can’t hold onto it unless there’s a reasonable reason to do so. They need to absolutely get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your consent to hold onto it. And with kids, it requires their parents’ permission,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which apparently must be verifiable. Then once you say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I don’t want you to have my data anymore, then the data must be at least slightly anonymized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that a single piece of data isn’t enough to identify you. And then you can also ask at any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time for what personal data the company has for you. And also you can get them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to erase your data and inform third parties that they need to erase their data. Now, the real kicker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, is that if they don’t do this, the fines can be up to 20 million euros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 4% of the company’s worldwide turnover, whatever that means, but I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a lot. And it’s not whichever is lower, it’s whichever is higher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turnover is one of those. I’m assuming it’s a British system, but they just mean revenue. 4% of the company’s revenue in
⏹️ ▶️ John Americanese. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So basically this could amount to a whole crap load of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s why everyone, especially in Europe, who’s actually paying attention to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is freaking out. And not to say that Americans shouldn’t be freaking out because we will be held to this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it seems that the Europeans are way ahead of this. And I believe this comes online. That’s a poor choice of words. But I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this becomes law and it can be enforced sometime in the next few months, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like, you know, last episode, like I had read some about it. I was a little familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I should have been a lot more familiar with it. This is like the kind of thing like I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I’m only hearing about this like a month or two before it goes live,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m glad I heard about it at least a month or two before it goes live because… You can make your onboarding screen, right? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not… well, I already… I mean, I have a login screen already and… and I… I’m already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Overcast has already complied with a lot of this already just by having fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable practices, not collecting that much data in the first place, having reasonable security practices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having like a very clear privacy policy. Like I was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of already inadvertently implementing about two thirds of the stuff I needed to do. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge deal for me, but this is a huge deal for lots of, for pretty much anybody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has, who runs any kind of web service or app that collects data. And it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it isn’t just, you know, Casey, you said like data that people enter. That’s not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the limit. It’s just data that you collect and store about people. So it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or analyze about people, like even if you don’t store it, like I think if you analyze it. Anyway, it’s complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suggest anybody who runs a web service or an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is responsible for it, I strongly suggest you look into GDPR. now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like very, very, very quickly because there are a lot of ramifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty big. It’s not it does not just apply to European companies because it applies to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any company worldwide that stores data about European users or European
⏹️ ▶️ Marco citizens, which is pretty much every web service unless you block Europe for some dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, but it’s going to apply to pretty much everybody. And so that’s this is like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more. It’s way stronger than that cookie law, because the cookie law I think only basically applied, or at least was ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enforced, for European countries, if it was enforced anywhere ever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only European websites would display those cookie warnings, but this is way bigger than that, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will affect tech stuff worldwide. In the context of a lot of the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on recently with tech stuff, especially this horrible Facebook, Cambridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Analytics, horrible scandal BS. I mean, look, Facebook’s a horrible company. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a lot of this is new or shocking to me. It’s just really horrible and sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just disgusting. But anyway, this law
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have a pretty big impact on a lot of the worst stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the web. And it’s probably gonna be a pretty good positive impact. It’s probably, well, not good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, but screw them. it’s probably gonna have a really good impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who respect their users and those users who want to be respected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s gonna be a good thing. I wish there were more resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online so far about how to comply without having to hire a GDPR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compliance specialist for a lot of money that you probably can’t get in late April
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to help you out. but it’s going to change a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s enforced. And the EU is usually pretty good at, like when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass consumer protection regulations, like they tend to enforce them. So this should be interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably gonna be a really big deal and it’s gonna be a slight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pain in the butt to just get some of like the boilerplate stuff, but it’s all, like from what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen so far, most of it’s pretty common sense stuff. It’s gonna be a pain for bigger companies, I think, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for small companies, it seems like it’s actually not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. I mean, it’s intense, but it’s for the best. Nick Tumpelis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes in, to give you an example of the teeth of this law, this is still the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GDPR, for the Cambridge Analytica breach, Facebook would be fined up to $813 million
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for not notifying its users. So like we were saying, oh boy, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. Yeah, yeah, because there’s also provisions about, you know, what, like, first of all, security measures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you, you know, security level, you know, responsibility that you have to maintain to protect the user data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to like keep logs of who accesses the user data in your company. So like, you know, you can’t say like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we didn’t know that, you know, some, some intern was copying all the files like, you know, you have to keep logs and keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audits. There’s stuff about that. about if you have a data breach, how you have to notify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, stuff like that, what you have to do. So it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wide-reaching. It’s a very, very big policy change that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is seemingly mostly or entirely pretty good common-sense stuff. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think like, how should things be with regard to safekeeping and collecting personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data? Most of it’s pretty common-sense stuff. So again, I think this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially a very big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, agreed. Continuing on, AWACS writes, a key part of GDPR is that the company collecting the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal data is directly responsible for any leak or misuse. It can’t shift the blame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a contractor, partner, or third party. And we see that a lot in the US where, oh, there was this big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leak. Actually Apple just recently, it was a month or two ago, had, what was it? It was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bootloader for an old version of iOS or something like that. I’m sure I have the details slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was the source code to, yeah, the source code to like iBoot, whatever that, I guess, I guess the bootloader. I don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that much about iOS internals. But yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code to iBoot, like an old version of it from a few years back leaked. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that was apparently like an intern had copied the entire source tree and taken it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So AWACS’s point here is that you can’t just pass the buck and be like, oh, Joe Schmoe’s consulting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey firm is the reason that this all leaked. Go talk to them. It’s still your problem. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting theory I’m not sure how well that law works in in the American
⏹️ ▶️ John legal system though because you know that any company the size of Apple if they contract any other company
⏹️ ▶️ John that basically says oh and by the way if the work you do for us causes us to get sued you agree to pay all damages
⏹️ ▶️ John now you can’t get blood from a stone but at the very least you know Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t shift the blame to the third party but it can shift all of the penalties to the third party until
⏹️ ▶️ John the third party disappears and basically until they get run out of money, which may happen pretty quickly. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s generally how big companies protect themselves is that if there’s some law that makes Apple liable,
⏹️ ▶️ John they shift as much of that liability as possible to the small contractor company, and then they just get whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ John left over on top of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Finally, Michael Sagi writes GDPR is also incredibly technology agnostic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that it applies to everything everywhere and is conceived of as a regulation that nobody will ever be able to comply with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t state whether or not that’s true or false, but that was their particular opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s another view of like a sort of wide reaching regulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it starts to seem like, well, this is so big, how could you ever comply with it? Because it’s so vague
⏹️ ▶️ John and so far reaching that like a motivated enforcer could find literally
⏹️ ▶️ John any company not in compliance of some portion of it, right? Because it tries to be
⏹️ ▶️ John so, it tries to not fall into the trap of the cookie law or if onto the trap
⏹️ ▶️ John of the interpretation of the cookie law anyway, where it seems narrowly defined and it’s just an,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get all the negatives, the annoyance, and you don’t actually get any of the benefits because everything else you can, you know, skirt around
⏹️ ▶️ John it as technology evolves. And this tries to be so broad and so far reaching and apply to everything you say and do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s so hard to comply with. It’s just like, how, how can I ever comply with the break? There’s just too many regulations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but there are industries that are like that already, that
⏹️ ▶️ John even in the US that we, you know, we managed to survive. So healthcare is one where there’s a bunch of laws related to healthcare
⏹️ ▶️ John and protection of information, you know, like, you know, finance, you got PCI for finance
⏹️ ▶️ John for basic, you know, credit card processing stuff. You’ve got HIPAA for health information
⏹️ ▶️ John and other personally identifiable information and stuff like that. And those are similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ John weirdly acronymed, fairly wide reaching regulations that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you could find any company out of compliance with. Like HIPAA is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John broad and even a very, you know, diligent company
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to find to follow all the rules. Inevitably, there’s some place where there’s some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a breach. Uh, the purpose of these laws is not to say
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone is going to be a hundred percent in compliance. Otherwise, the law is useless. If people are
⏹️ ▶️ John even 50% in compliance, it’s so much better than the status quo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that the law has to be sort of enforced responsibly, where I mean, it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think it’s a terrible analogy for lots of reasons. But it’s something that people will be familiar with speed limits on American
⏹️ ▶️ John roads. Anyway, everyone is breaking the speed limit all the time. But through selective enforcement,
⏹️ ▶️ John the speed limit allows the police to pull over someone who is really driving dangerously
⏹️ ▶️ John at a very high speed. That’s not safe for conditions while letting all the people who are five miles
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour over the limit on the highway sail by. In some ways, that is like giving too much power
⏹️ ▶️ John to the enforcers that basically everyone is not in compliance all the time so you can arrest anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the reason it’s a bad analogy is because these I think we would agree that some
⏹️ ▶️ John data protection is good for, uh, you know, we want, we want our data to be protected
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way. We don’t want companies to be able to do whatever they want with it. So we will take
⏹️ ▶️ John any amount of improvement over the status quo, even if it means that a
⏹️ ▶️ John ill motivated enforcer of this law could punitively enforce pretty much any,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, enforce these guidelines on any company and say, oh, you’re, you’ve missed compliance in this one little corner
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I don’t think it’s ideal. But I think, you know, again, with HIPAA,
⏹️ ▶️ John healthcare companies are not going out of business because there’s zealous HIPAA enforcement by a giant fleet of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John government officers wandering over all the businesses in the world. It’s just not how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even you know, they’re outnumbered, for one thing, like there’s more companies than there are people going around to check for HIPAA compliance,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s more like when your company is already doing enough terrible things to get the attention
⏹️ ▶️ John of law enforcement that’s when this stuff comes back to bite
⏹️ ▶️ John you and I’m not going to say that’s a good thing because again
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s open for abuse but it’s better than the status quo where you can do whatever you want and keep it secret and nothing ever happens
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we have good news for Marco. We have a solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your keyboard woes. You can quit whining and complaining, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey patented a screen-based MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard that will feel like it’s real. Check that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. How excited are you, my friend? Try to contain your excitement and keep it professional,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you please. This is my excitement. You know what Apple also thinks they’ve released? Is a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works and is good. See, they think this will feel real. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like they think the MacBook Pro from 2016 is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like this definitely reads to me as one of those patents.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were talking before, you patent every idea you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether you’ve gotten it to work or not, because our patent system is dumb and this is what you’re forced
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with our dumb patent system. And so when I look at patents, I’m putting them
⏹️ ▶️ John into the bins of, that’s a thing that that could conceivably ship because I think they could
⏹️ ▶️ John have actually figured out a way to make that. And the other bin is that’s an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that someone had some time that they probably never got to work, but that they patented
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, because you have to patent everything because patents are dumb. And this definitely falls into the second bin where
⏹️ ▶️ John I you know, as we’ve discussed before, uh, Apple has on screen keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and considering future on screen keyboards is an obvious thing to do, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially for devices like iPads where you want the keyboard to be small and imagine if when you’re not using a keyboard, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John repurpose that as a second screen. It’s an obvious thing that they should be investigating. And
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, there’s downsides to onscreen keyboard. So you think they would investigate how can we make onscreen keyboards less crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s a patent describing a couple of ways and I was amazed like since patents since you don’t actually have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John like a working version of anything or understand how you’re going to manufacture this is mostly just an idea, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John patents are done. I, I was surprised by how
⏹️ ▶️ John unappealing I found the ideas in this patent, because normally you make the ideas like imagine if there was a keyboard that did this
⏹️ ▶️ John and that and the other thing like, wow, that would be cool to bed, we have no idea how to do that. Anyway, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the ideas in this one sounded awful to me, like even if you could execute all of them. So the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s a picture of a keyboard, but we all know the typing on a picture of a keyboard isn’t great because you can’t feel the keys and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John rest your fingers on the keys like you can on a keyboard. Like We all know what the disadvantage we all have on screen keyboards, especially on iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ John their disadvantages them. So how do we overcome those disadvantages? And this
⏹️ ▶️ John patent has a couple of ways. One way is that the screen would actually smoosh in when you press it to let
⏹️ ▶️ John you know when you hit something and they would give you feedback. That feels like a button, doesn’t it? I cannot imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen that I can smoosh in with my finger and that pushes back on me a little bit, feeling like a button.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would feel like a screen that smushes in a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit. Well, to be fair, I mean, that’s what the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons do, but it doesn’t deform underneath your fingertip. It deforms across the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John axis. Like if you look at the pictures, this is the idea of like you are pressing. You don’t have to imagine how
⏹️ ▶️ John this would be, because just think back to your palm devices that you all had because they’re all like me. They did not
⏹️ ▶️ John have capacitive touchscreens. They had pressure sensitive touchscreens, which meant that you would have
⏹️ ▶️ John to squish the screen in with your finger or your fingernail or a stylus to cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it to register any kind of input. So the screen would smoosh in
⏹️ ▶️ John just at the point of contact. So if you press with the plastic silence, it would make a little dimple there. If you press with your finger would
⏹️ ▶️ John make a little, you know, it felt nothing like a button. It didn’t squish in very much. This seems like an exaggerated
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that. And this all in theory, this would also solve the problem of Oh, I can’t rest my fingers on the home
⏹️ ▶️ John keys. Because if you rest your fingers, all of a sudden you’re typing, it’s like, well, now you’re not typing on this keyboard, you’re only typing when you smoosh,
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about an unsatisfying like if you don’t like the the low travel like buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John on the current apple laptop keyboards imagining having some kind of squishy membrane
⏹️ ▶️ John that you should dig your little grubby fingertips into um i don’t know how that would really hold up
⏹️ ▶️ John and the second one is you can’t feel the edges of the keys when everything’s flat um one way to get around that
⏹️ ▶️ John is to have the screen bulge out around the key cap so it’s like this lumpy island of mentos
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like where you just have these
⏹️ ▶️ John lumpy little squishy, I was going to say pustules, but do we not want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to go to the farmhouse? No, we really don’t. Let’s just say stress
⏹️ ▶️ John bumps. Let’s go with that. There we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know. It doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Stress bumps is
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Move on. Back to work probably. Anyway, one of the Merlin Manchos.
⏹️ ▶️ John That wouldn’t feel too good either. Another strategy they have is use, I think they say electrostatic or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of electrostatic charge to make it to make you be able to feel the edges because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a different sensation in your fingers as you glide across the keys and that
⏹️ ▶️ John I I don’t want any kind of tingly electrostatic anything telling me
⏹️ ▶️ John where the edges of anything
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are on a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think this is a patent full of bad ideas that I hope they never make and
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly if you if you if you gave me like you know you know
⏹️ ▶️ John ILM and a movie and said make any kind of futuristic looking keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John input that you want for a movie thing like the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing that occurs to me that would be acceptable would be that the screen is made up of like little nano
⏹️ ▶️ John machines they rearrange themselves to become essentially a mechanical keyboard when you want to use a mechanical keyboard and then when you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to use it the little nano machines rearrange themselves to become a screen because if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to stupidly confine yourself to keyboard input as your futuristic way of getting text into a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John pressing a button with your fingers is a really good solution and so
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have to have the screen change into an actual button like a thing that moves up and down and has edges
⏹️ ▶️ John and then have it change back into a screen. That’s it. Like I don’t have any better ideas on unlimited technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, obviously the better idea is not to type, right? Not to do anything like that. It cracks me up about,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, an anime series that neither one of you has heard of, but that I enjoy, uh, ghost in the shell was a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it’s a television series and other spin offs from it. And one of the signature
⏹️ ▶️ John visual flares is they have these, you know, sort of cyborg, uh, people or robot people sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of computer terminals. And because they’re not regular people like, you know, their hands
⏹️ ▶️ John are all robotic hands. It looks like normal But then they put their hands over the keyboard but now since they’re robots
⏹️ ▶️ John their hands kind of like open up and fold out and explode and these huge tentacles come out of them where their fingers were
⏹️ ▶️ John and Those tentacles fly over the key surfaces Typing faster than any human can type across this giant
⏹️ ▶️ John keypad, right? Like that’s their you know, superpower It’s like a human can only type this fast with their little meat fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John But look at the these ghost-in-the-shell cyborg machines They can type much faster because they have all these metal tendrils that go
⏹️ ▶️ John out all over the keyboard It’s like if you’re a cyborg just plug into the rs-232 port for crying out loud
⏹️ ▶️ John than it’s gonna be faster than typing keys on the keyboard like this This is a control room designed for these
⏹️ ▶️ John robot cyborg thingies. They can just connect with a serial cable They don’t need to press buttons. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m digressing But yeah, so this patent does not describe a product I would like to
⏹️ ▶️ John use and it does not describe a product I think anyone would like to use but it does show that Apple continues to investigate
⏹️ ▶️ John ways to make week to be able to have screen when you want to screen and keyboard when you want a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. There is one good idea in this patent. They fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the arrow keys. Oh God, they have the correct arrow key layout in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco patent illustration.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but to get that layout you have to stand up out of your seat and say McDonald’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get the reference. No, I mean this is like I just, this is potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool down the road, but like, I think a concern that I have here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is not gonna be a half hour rant, a concern I have here is like, what if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks at the current problems of the keyboards and the laptops, and instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of saying, wow, we need to make more reliable key switches, what if they’re like, you know, there’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Laptop keyboards are unreliable. How do we get rid of the laptop keyboards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because like, this is a really, really complicated solution to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem that doesn’t need to exist. And we already have way simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper, more robust solutions already existing in the world for quite some time. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called buttons and they’re fine. Like a keyboard with key switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has existed for quite some time and they’re wonderful. They’re proven, they’re durable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re affordable, they’re repairable, it’s wonderful. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool that somebody is filing patents and doing research in these crazy directions. I just really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that that’s just for like, you know, file as many patents as possible purposes, not actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future product directions. Because the problem they’re solving is entirely self-created
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not cool that they’re filing patents, patents suck. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we just saw a patent
⏹️ ▶️ John for a key switches last show, right, so they are investigating that. But I think it actually is important
⏹️ ▶️ John to investigate ways to make on-screen keyboards better. Because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes it’s bad if they think this is a replacement for keyboards, but we already have on-screen keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like those on-screen keyboards to be better. And I also think
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing those flat, smart keyboard things on iPads with thinner,
⏹️ ▶️ John lighter things that can double as a second screen when they’re not a keyboard, would give everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John the multi-pad lifestyle. All right, and I think that’s worth pursuing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can figure out a way to make a combo keyboard screen that
⏹️ ▶️ John is an okay screen and a passable keyboard, that’s worth investigating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not as a replacement for your laptops, unless it is really fantastic, but just as a potential
⏹️ ▶️ John accessory. Now, that said, this particular patent doesn’t contain anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John I find compelling. like that even if they could build everything that’s exactly where they said
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it would be a satisfying keyboard. In fact, I think it might even be less satisfying than just a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of a keyboard on a screen that we have now. But I do think Apple should be investigating this because
⏹️ ▶️ John they do have a lot of devices with screens that they already have on screen keyboards. So yes, of course, they should be investigating ways to make them better
⏹️ ▶️ John and every way they investigate whether it turns out to be a turkey or not, they’re going to patent it.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, let’s appreciate all the ways that patent diagrams are ridiculous. There’s of course the classic patent
⏹️ ▶️ John hands where anytime you see a hand in a patent it looks inhuman and weird. They did pretty good. These fingers look kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like fingers so I’m proud of them there. But then the keyboard? Control isn’t next to the spacebar what the hell?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you have a keyboard right in front of you probably when you’re making this diagram. Like just look down. Control isn’t next
⏹️ ▶️ John to the keyboard. And they didn’t label all the modifiers anyway. They just labeled some of them. I’m gonna label control. And you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Control’s next to the spacebar right on a Mac? Okay let’s Let’s do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Nope. Oh, John. Oh
Apple making MicroLEDs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. Speaking of Apple making things, apparently they’re making their own displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got word over the last few days that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to do micro LED, which is I guess a also organic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but different than OLED display technology. And apparently somewhere in California
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in cahoots with somewhere in Taiwan, if I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are trying to in-house develop brand new display technology. And the theory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes that they will figure out how to create it, figure out how to manufacture it, and then throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it over the wall to some other company like Samsung or something, or perhaps Foxconn to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey build these in volumes, so they’re not getting into the manufacturing business, but they are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeper into the creation of hardware, specifically displays business and in a move that surprises.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty much nobody. I think this is a good idea. I like the sound of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t personally have too much more to say about it, but I’m assuming one of you do. So Marco, thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a good idea for them to be looking into this. The screen is such a critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of all of their products, really, I guess except the HomePod and the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shuffle. They don’t make those anymore. The screen is so important. And especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with modern high-end OLED screens, that’s every Apple Watch and the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X in every touch bar and presumably more products as time goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, because OLED is pretty awesome. The problem is that there aren’t that many OLED manufacturers, it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much like Samsung and LG, and LG seems to do really well in TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLEDs, but seems to do pretty poorly in computer and phone displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, Apple has been tied to basically LG and Samsung for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LCD displays for years. I remember like my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, like when I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my image retention issue and I made that like waffle page, I had the LG panel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the LG panel was the one that had all the image retention and the Samsung panel didn’t. Like it was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing. So like they’ve had like this like kind of two supplier thing for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With OLED for the phone, it’s an incredibly important component. Like that OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel is the iPhone X. It’s such an important component. It probably is a pretty large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price component like compared to the other components in it, it might be the most expensive part of the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. So I can’t imagine Apple is that happy to rely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on just one company. Like those are only made by Samsung. They can currently only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be made by Samsung. That probably doesn’t make Apple feel good from like a just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliance perspective. Not to mention the fact that that company is Samsung, which I’m sure they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love. And yet they buy like a lot of flash from Samsung and stuff, but you can also get flash from other people if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to. No one else can make that OLED screen that’s in the, that’s in the iPhone 10 in addition to the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re giving tons of money to Samsung. So like it does seem like an obvious thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple to try to take display technology in house the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve taken other critical parts like the, you know, the, the A series system on a chip and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. Like that does make total sense whether they can do it or not. I have no idea. I don’t know anything about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. it seems really ambitious. Like, there’s probably a really good reason so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far why only Samsung can make these good enough OLED screens. So, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going into micro-LED, which I’ve never even heard of until this rumor came, I didn’t even know what was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that’s easier, maybe that’s a thing they can do, maybe they’ve made some acquisitions towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I have no idea. But it’s a totally defensible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sensible thing for them to be doing. Whether it ever amounts to anything, who knows, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be kind of cool if it did because I can’t imagine that they love, depending on Samsung,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially just Samsung, instead of having a balance. And also, other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have taken in-house tend to be pretty awesome. Like the Apple version of it that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out later tends to be better than the off-the-shelf stuff at the time. Look at what they’ve done with the A-series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPUs, what they’re doing with the GPUs now, what they’re doing with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD controller in the Mac Pro, like the T thing, the wireless Bluetooth W chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s so many different things now that they’re doing in-house that used to be third-party manufactured components.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Apple versions, because of the integration and the tie-ins and the optimizations they can do, are just better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they can do that same thing to displays, cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this strategy, I don’t know if vertically integrated is the right word, because I’ve never went to business school, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy aggressively in the whatever Tim Cook quote is owning
⏹️ ▶️ John and controlling the major technologies to make up their products is actually more
⏹️ ▶️ John more ambitious and more more more aggressive than
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple of old even the Apple of Apple’s heyday which is a topic we
⏹️ ▶️ John will continue not to get to in this program because it It used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John that, and maybe not just Apple, but across the entire industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John for computer makers, there were people who made computers and there were
⏹️ ▶️ John people who made parts that go into computers. And there were a lot of parts suppliers
⏹️ ▶️ John for almost every component. Every once in a while, there would be a parts supplier that has
⏹️ ▶️ John something novel, right? know so Sony with 3.5
⏹️ ▶️ John inch floppy disk was a change from the other floppy disk a very Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John a very Sony type change like we’re going to improve on this thing we have a new idea of how floppy disks work check this
⏹️ ▶️ John out I’m not sure if Sony was the maker of that thing but they but the Sony 3.5 inch floppy drive it’s just to give an example
⏹️ ▶️ John and Sony Apple would either know that they made it or Sony would pitch them on making I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good story about the Macintosh engineers hiding a Sony engineer in a closet not to let
⏹️ ▶️ John some higher-up know that they were looking into getting 3.5 inch floppy drive because they were still insisting that it had to use
⏹️ ▶️ John a five and a quarter which would have been so gross. Good job closet hiding people
⏹️ ▶️ John will put a link to that in the show notes. And the synergy between Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a part supplier and we have this cool idea for the thing. And hey, I’m a person who uses parts to make products,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we can make a novel or interesting product or line of products out of this and it’s a good deal for you because you get to make a cool product.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good deal for us because we came up with this novel product and eventually everyone can make 3.5 inch floppies because
⏹️ ▶️ John they somehow skirted the super stupid world of patents enough to be able to have the part
⏹️ ▶️ John manufactured across the industry. The iPod is another example. Whatever that hard drive maker was, was it Hitachi or whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John came up with those really teeny tiny hard drives? The light bulb goes off like, what could we do with a little hard drive like that? It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. And you get something like the iPod, right? But eventually all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of little hard drives are available or flash replaces the hard drives or like there’s no sort of monopoly
⏹️ ▶️ John on one kind of thing. And so Apple in the days when that was the way the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John worked, was more or less content to say, we’re going to source our parts from the best
⏹️ ▶️ John parts available. Who has the best screens? Who has the best RAM or the best combination of you can
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture? A lot of them. It has a good price. They have good performance. They would quality control. They would shop around from the
⏹️ ▶️ John part suppliers and from product to product and year to year, they’d pick different screens or different RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John or different hard drives or different video cards back when they weren’t really super mad at Nvidia.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s how they built their computers. There’s a bunch of companies making parts and we will pick
⏹️ ▶️ John among them and maybe we’ll try to influence their roadmaps and maybe once in a while someone has a great thing and we will assemble them into
⏹️ ▶️ John a product. The more aggressive strategy is to say, I see the world of parts manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John out there and they make all sorts of interesting things and sometimes every once in a while someone has a really cool one that
⏹️ ▶️ John sparks our interest and we can make a cool product out of. But But that’s not good enough. We know exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what we want. We want to push the envelope in a specific direction. We have an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of how this could be done better in service of a kind of product or
⏹️ ▶️ John even a specific product that we have in mind. And we’re not going to try to coerce or
⏹️ ▶️ John cajole some other parts maker into making it and we’re not going to wait around for someone else to make it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re not going to buy anyone else’s off the shelf parts and try to cobble together stuff off the shelf. we’re going to design
⏹️ ▶️ John our own CPUs for our phones, but their own GPUs in them, then our own weird, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John step counting, neural network, fingerprint sensing, secure englave, whatever. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John the first version has to be assembled partially out of parts that come with the industry, that’s fine. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we’d like to bring that in house because we feel like we can do it better. We know exactly what we want for the watch. We know exactly what we want for
⏹️ ▶️ John our phones. I don’t want to have to convince some other company to make this product for me. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have some better ideas about how it might be done because we hide all the best people in this industry we have too much money, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is way more aggressive than just shopping among like, Oh, we’re going to use the Sony panel on this display,
⏹️ ▶️ John or we’re going to use trend trunks, the best CRTs. And you know, like, it’s way more aggressive to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to do it ourselves, because it’s a competitive advantage not
⏹️ ▶️ John to have to wait for the rest of the industry to do anything. And in the case of these screens, even if you’re in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where one company makes the best screens, and Apple wants the best screens, and they feel bad getting a one supplier.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple’s view on it, aside from that we just don’t like giving money to Samsung and it’s a single supplier, is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we think we can do that better because we know exactly what we want and it’s a pain to have to tell Samsung exactly what we want and
⏹️ ▶️ John get them to build the thing that we want and go through all that thing. We know what we want. Why don’t we just do
⏹️ ▶️ John it ourselves? And that’s what they’ve been doing with lots of components. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John have any problems with any kind of supplier, like Qualcomm being annoying about charging them lots of money
⏹️ ▶️ John or them not having lots of alternatives and trying to get Intel to build radio chips and stuff. And eventually they say, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? I’m tired of this. We have good engineers. We know how to build things. Why don’t we build the radio chips? And
⏹️ ▶️ John not build so much as design and have manufactured for us. The last bastion
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is manufacturing where thus far, Apple has been happy to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturers compete amongst yourselves and we will give you CPU fab, our design that you will
⏹️ ▶️ John fab for us. And we will give you manufacturing thing, our case design that you will
⏹️ ▶️ John machine out of aluminum for us and we will help you buy the machines for it and we’ll help you work on the techniques to use those machines and we’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff. But in the end, Apple doesn’t own the factories. Apple does not own
⏹️ ▶️ John a silicon CPU fab. It still allows other companies to do that for it. So it hasn’t gotten to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John we say, you know what, I’m tired of waiting for, you know, Taiwan semiconductor to come up with a new fab. Let’s make
⏹️ ▶️ John our own fab because that starts to get, you know, a couple billion here, a couple billion there. So you’re talking real money. So, so far
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been avoiding that. But the modern Apple, I think, is more aggressive than
⏹️ ▶️ John any other Apple has been in their drive to get a real
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive edge in the market by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll do it ourselves and having the confidence that they’ll be able to be able to do it better than anyone else, which is exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John from a technology perspective to see, you know, that’s what we always want Apple to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, although it may seem exciting when Apple is able to synthesize from the parts that are available to almost anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John or most people, you know, plus or minus one or two parts to make a great product of it, it’s even more exciting,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, in the iPhone age to see them make phones that are just leaps and bounds
⏹️ ▶️ John better in certain areas than other phones for reasons that are directly
⏹️ ▶️ John traceable to Apple strategy to say, bring the system on a chips in house. That’s why their system on chips are
⏹️ ▶️ John so much better than everybody else is if they were still sitting around and they were using the same chips as Android phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Though the I think the phone landscape would look very different. Apple wouldn’t be able to do half the things that it does,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would be working with CPUs that are not not going to say that are worse or slower, which in many cases they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that simply are not tailored to the set of features that Apple wants. It picks the exact number of cores exact
⏹️ ▶️ John number of amount of cash, right, the you know, the exact layout so they can put all
⏹️ ▶️ John their different, you know, they know exactly what they want for like the iPhone tend to do face ID, if had to adapt
⏹️ ▶️ John some weird, you know, Snapdragon processor that has way more cores than they want but not enough of something else that they want,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’d still be waiting for Face ID. So, I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that this aspect of Apple, the technological aggression, is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of the company today and probably underappreciated by,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, by anybody who doesn’t follow Apple really closely and doesn’t really care what’s in their products, but I find it exciting.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s move on to Ask ATP. Simon Edgesing says, hey, what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal with the bits that were once used as an important spec for gaming consoles? How many bits does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a modern console have and why is it no longer used in marketing? And so as soon as I read this, I thought back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the days of the Nintendo 64, which everyone knew was 64-bit because it was right there in the name. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, man, was that thing way cooler than any other modern console or so, I thought when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was 10 or whatever. Uh, so John, as the, uh, chief gamer of the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, can you explain to me what’s the deal with these bits?
⏹️ ▶️ John And why are they no longer used in marketing? Well, marketing has moved entirely onto blast processing as a differentiating
⏹️ ▶️ John factor. All right. So the bits thing, like first I read this
⏹️ ▶️ John question, I’m like, is that a thing that people really wonder about? And like, are our consoles still marketed
⏹️ ▶️ John with bits? And I think the person who’s asking this must have lived through the error when that was true. These days,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen like the, the PS3 or PS4, or even the PS2 for that matter, marketing with bits. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a, it’s a thing that has, that has passed us by, uh, for, for good reasons. But back when
⏹️ ▶️ John it was used as a marketing term, ascribing a number of bits
⏹️ ▶️ John to a CPU, like oh this is a 16-bit CPU, this is a 32-bit CPU, this is a 64-bit CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no hard and fast rules, as with most things in marketing, when you can say something like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, the number of bits tended to be applicable because
⏹️ ▶️ John certain things have the same number of bits. So the, you know, the integer
⏹️ ▶️ John registers, the place where you store a number would have 16 bits and the address, but
⏹️ ▶️ John bus would be 16 bits wide, which controlled how much Ram you could address. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d call that processor a 16 bit processor. Didn’t have to be the case. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are many quote unquote 32 bit processors that shipped
⏹️ ▶️ John with hardware wise physically speaking, a 24 bit memory bus. I’m thinking of the original Macintosh
⏹️ ▶️ John and many after that. You’d still call it a 32-bit processor though because the integer registers were 32-bits
⏹️ ▶️ John wide. And even on a quote-unquote 32-bit processor, the floating point registers might’ve been 64-bits wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is that not a 64-bit processor? And what if the memory bus is wider than the integers? And what if the integers is wider than
⏹️ ▶️ John the memory bus? And like, so there is no hard and fast rule, but in general, because usually either the memory bus
⏹️ ▶️ John or the integer register where they’re both were on this number, and because there was a progression,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more expensive, especially in the early days, to make wider buses to make larger
⏹️ ▶️ John registers, right? That each leap like now we can make the registers 32
⏹️ ▶️ John bits, each leap was met with a marketing push to say, you know, the 386 is 32 bit processor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And importantly, in terms of representable numbers for integers, 64 bit
⏹️ ▶️ John integers and way before you want them to like 65,535, right? 32
⏹️ ▶️ John bit integers ended a pretty high number that you feel like I can do a lot more with 4 billion. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot more things I can count with precision from with from you know, with the
⏹️ ▶️ John 4 billion items that I can count on. Whereas 65,000 I can
⏹️ ▶️ John think of lots of scenarios where I might need a bit of break in that. So once we cross 32 bits
⏹️ ▶️ John where and same thing for memory addressing, although in the beginning, there was no computer, no personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computer could fill up all 32 bits of that memory bus. So eventually we got there. Once you
⏹️ ▶️ John cross 32, you have a lot more headroom. So 8 bit and 16 bit, it’s like, lots of problems where this is annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And floating port doesn’t help you entirely because of precision and all that stuff. 32 bits, like I can run this for a while. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John did we ran on quote unquote, 32 bit processors for a long time. Till we eventually got to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could fill a PC with more RAM that could be addressed with 32 bits. And then we needed to go to 64.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that took a really long time. Now our phones are or freaking 64-bit which is amazing if you live through the era where you had to progress
⏹️ ▶️ John through 16 and 32 and so on and so forth. Game consoles, same deal. They’re computers, they have memory buses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually they use cheaper stuff because they cost less money than a PC. So when PCs were using 32-bit processors,
⏹️ ▶️ John game consoles maybe had 8 or 16-bit processors just because they had to cost so much less money and it cost
⏹️ ▶️ John less money to make smaller chips in surface area and
⏹️ ▶️ John the more lanes you have for your address buses everywhere and the wider your interest registers and all that of stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bigger they are. Um, so once consoles like, so 16 bit
⏹️ ▶️ John was a turbo graphics, Christine, uh, SNES Genesis,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, second mass system was eight bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, you can look on Wikipedia what the bits were, but so there was, uh, there was eight bit gaming consoles, 16
⏹️ ▶️ John bit. Once we got to 32 around the era, surprisingly of the Nintendo 64, We got to 32
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation was 32 Nintendo 64 was arguably not as 64 as they made it out
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. Okay, why do you say that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think every like it didn’t have to look up in Wikipedia, but I don’t I don’t think the the memory bus
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has these for example, or 64 bits wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you’re right. There were like parts of it that were 64 bit but not like it was arguable because
⏹️ ▶️ John like because why would you make the memory bus 64 bits wide? I have no idea. I’m just pulling this off the top of my head,
⏹️ ▶️ John but seriously, there’s no way in hell, physically speaking, they have a 64-bit memory bus on something that had like two
⏹️ ▶️ John megabytes of RAM. Like, it doesn’t make any sense. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because you need four gigs to exceed the addressability of 32 bits.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they did, it must have only been because they were reusing an existing part, but it just doesn’t seem like they would do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same reason they had a 24-bit memory bus on the Macintosh, because first of all, you’re never gonna address
⏹️ ▶️ John like 32, four gigabytes of RAM? Gigabytes? You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have four giga, you know, Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, even a 24 bit memory bus was over. So you save money because you have less. Yeah, let
⏹️ ▶️ John less room on the chip, less traces on your board, blah, blah, blah. So I’m assuming that it wasn’t but if any
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it is 64 bit, you can call it 64 bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so a little bit of digging as you were talking, the R 4200 has a 32 entry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trans translation local side buffer, yada, yada, yada, blah, the system bus is 64 bits wide and operates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at half the internal clock frequency. However, the R4300i, which is what I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in the N64, is a derivative of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and a cut down 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system bus for reduced cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But in marketing, for marketing, and by the way, like I said, lots of times
⏹️ ▶️ John in 32-bit processors, the, like, you know, with x86, didn’t x86 have an 80-bit wide floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point registers or something like that? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. I just had to learn how to decode that format.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but no one ever said it’s an 80-bit processor. Just because of convention,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just kind of say, oh, the memory bus and the integers registers, that’s kind of what we call the processor, right? That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re marketing terms, because 16-bit and 32-bit, you might
⏹️ ▶️ John think it means something, but unless you know exactly what it means, it doesn’t, you know, never mind
⏹️ ▶️ John that like the width of the memory bus and the size of integer registers really says nothing about how fast the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing processes stuff like and you know anyway gauging speed is hard but there was a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John progression with number of bits up to about the 32-bit point where we hung out for a long time and now that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve gone to 64-bit where we really are 64 bits you know even 64
⏹️ ▶️ John memory bus I don’t think we’re at full 64 what is what’s like the Xeons have they probably have like 48-bit yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuz there was that there was that PAE thing for a while where like to address more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think 16 gigs there was something like that were like even even the Intel even when Intel went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 64-bit, you couldn’t address 64-bits worth of memory without certain tricks here and there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that has since been lifted to a pretty high level, but…
⏹️ ▶️ John But probably not a full 64. I know that you can buy servers
⏹️ ▶️ John with 256 gigs of RAM in them, right? But you can’t buy servers with
⏹️ ▶️ John however much RAM fits in 64-bits, which is some astronomical amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Zeta bytes or whatever the hell it is. So we’re still saving money in that regard,
⏹️ ▶️ John but 64-bit integer registers are going to run us a good long while, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really see anything going to… First of all, there’s no need for a 128-bit memory bus, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t even physically put 64 bits of memory to fill that whole address space. And
⏹️ ▶️ John 128-bit integers aren’t really getting you that much more of problems that you can deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with in 64-bit registers. Floating-point registers are even wider than they’ve ever been now, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John on GPUs and in sort of the, you know, media streaming SIMD instruction sets,
⏹️ ▶️ John those could actually stand to go a little bit wider just to be able to process more values at once, because a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using like, what they call half precision values for games and stuff where you don’t need to use they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John still use 16 bit stuff just to pack more into process smart ones. So there’s probably headroom for those to all crank up
⏹️ ▶️ John to 32 and 64 bit to you know, or to use floating point everywhere for everything. So there’s some headroom
⏹️ ▶️ John there. But no one brags about GPUs in terms of number of bits either, because it doesn’t make any sense and that’s just not how they’re marketed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a very long-winded explanation that gets into more technical detail than you
⏹️ ▶️ John probably cared about but I think that’s that’s part of the thing that this was entirely a marketing thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that latched on to a real thing that happened in the progression of certain the width
⏹️ ▶️ John of certain aspects of CPU design in the 70s 80s and 90s that has
⏹️ ▶️ John leveled off because there’s no longer any obvious benefit to widening these things at
⏹️ ▶️ John an accelerated rate. Again, setting aside GPUs, which there is some benefit to continuing to widen stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John there and they will continue to be widened, but GPUs aren’t marketed in that way. So marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is weird. I would also say like, you know, they like back in, you know, like we grew up in the well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey and I grew up in these days. John was already 50. But but you know, we grew up in the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like, you know, like, like we we both really saw like the the eight bit to 16 bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 32 bit generations. And you you know, 8-bit systems, like they didn’t market themselves as 8-bit, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the NES versus the Sega Master System, vast majority dominated by the NES.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the Sega Genesis was very heavily marketed when it came out as 16-bit, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like, this is twice as good. That was really like when the marketing, I think, was appealing, like, oh my God, this is 16-bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the Super Nintendo came out, and that was well-marketed to be 16-bit as well, not as heavily as the Genesis,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though. And then we went 32-bit with the PlayStation 1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sega Saturn and then the generations kind of started being staggered like the N64
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out there was a gap between the 32-bit generation and the N64 so it started becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh look since there’s a gap and the N64 was in many ways significantly better than the Saturn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and PlayStation 1 then it was like this is they were they were kind of trying to say this is the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation even though it was kind of like a half generational step like the generations were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer in sync and then that continued in the future generations like Sega went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, you know, middle of generation with the Dreamcast, then the PS2 came out really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early, and then the Xbox happened like a little bit later, so like the generation started to become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more staggered and it wasn’t all like, okay, these are the two systems for this one, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are the two systems for this one, and then of course this corresponded with, as what John was saying, how like the bits kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stopped growing and stopped mattering. The number of bits has so little bearing on modern performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like computers back then, especially the kind of computers that were in game consoles, were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really simple. I think once we got to the era of having many different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processors being involved and having them all be pretty complex, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having things like vector instructions, which, you know, take the stream, like you mentioned SIMD, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you have GPUs coming, and you have the GPU revolution that’s happened like over the last decade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so, where like GPUs have gotten so incredible and so much of computing is moving to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPU, and that’s where so much of the action is happening. And there, the bits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are completely different than the CPU bits. A lot of things don’t work the same way or don’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same ways. So I think most of the reason we’ve moved past the bits thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that, like Simon asked, how many bits does a modern console
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have? You kinda can’t say, because like, well, how many bits in what part? Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the integer registers of the CPU or the address bus even matter to modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance? Or is it like, for a game console, you’re probably looking more at the GPU than anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many bits wide is the GPU in various buses and things like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That might matter, but even that’s hard to compare between different architectures and different generations and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. It’s just, everything is so much more advanced now that it’s way more complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there really is no single number you can say, all right, this is a, you know, one 28 bit system like you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t say that anymore. And it’s not really a relevant question to even ask.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do have the numbers that they say, though, like to that end, manufacturers do throw
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers at you. But the numbers are no longer about width. In most cases, although like I said, I think they probably
⏹️ ▶️ John will go back to with once they start. Once the GPU precision starts going
⏹️ ▶️ John up, and that starts mattering more in games. So for now, they don’t say that. But what they do tell you is they
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you flops floating point operations per second for the GPU, because that’s kind of how
⏹️ ▶️ John they just do the sort of, you know, my GPU is bigger than your GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like the architecture is so complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John then no one can comprehend it, right? No regular people comprehend it. But and it’s very regular and repeated. And there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ll tell you the number of execution units or something, a number of engines or a number of building blocks, but really want to you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John know is floating point operations per second, that’s just some big aggregate number that doesn’t really have any bearing
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re never actually maxing it out. Well, maybe if you’re really good game developer, you might be maxing out for some period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll tell you memory bandwidth, which is important for how you can shuffle information
⏹️ ▶️ John to and from your big pool of Ram and to and from the CPU and the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those numbers, I think, have way more bearing on performance than any kind of width, because at least they tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John like I can process this many things in this amount of times that I can ship this many things from A to B.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these days, that’s what people are measuring consoles are. And then maybe clock speeds they’ll throw
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. But really, it’s not that much. They don’t do even do that much CPU measuring. There’s lots of ways you could measure CPU, but they don’t even really compare
⏹️ ▶️ John those because they know that for the most part, especially as we’ve gone to HD and now
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, the GPU is very often a limiting factor. So they throw they throw that stuff around.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s always some number that come up with a marketing team to let people
⏹️ ▶️ John measure their consoles against other people’s consoles. But it hasn’t been bits for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking on the bits thing, I don’t know if this was clear, but the reason it mattered
⏹️ ▶️ John so much back when we were going to age 16 and 1632 is not just
⏹️ ▶️ John the accountability of things of saying, oh, 65K is not quite enough. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that brings it home is a link that I couldn’t find. I just tried to Google for it. Maybe you’ll be more
⏹️ ▶️ John successful is to think about what it would be like to build a game
⏹️ ▶️ John on a device that had eight bit integer registers and no floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point. So you get you get zero to 255
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to make a game like that’s all you have. You can add, subtract, divide, you can do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want with those numbers, right? But there’s no floating point and you can never have a number bigger than 255
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can never number smaller than zero and if you want to do negatives you can you know reserve a bit for sign and have your range right
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s if my memory serves me correctly that is not just a hypothetical exercise that’s the original game
⏹️ ▶️ John boy and if you think of the sum of the games that are arranged in the middle of game boy like say you’re making a side scroller
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you keep track of where they are on the thing or say you’re doing a top view legend of zelda where are they on the map how
⏹️ ▶️ John many inventory items do they have like try making a game where you can only count from zero to 255
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really hard you have to be very clever And nevermind that. Oh, by the way, that’s also the thing that’s figuring out how to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen and what palettes to go from and how to define sprites and do stuff like that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why the bits mattered so much. Because when you went from 8 bit to 16 bit, suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John you had enough numbers for counting that you could define bigger color
⏹️ ▶️ John lookup tables and you could make bigger sprites and ship them around and count to higher numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John to make bigger maps. And yes, of course, is audio processing is, you know, higher bit great for audio and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that you would see the result of those bits on the screen the clock
⏹️ ▶️ John speed you don’t even care what that was you’re just like now I can count to higher numbers now I can keep track of more
⏹️ ▶️ John colors and more things on the screen because I have you know there’s literally you can
⏹️ ▶️ John count to higher numbers it makes a big difference especially when you don’t have floating point to approximate those things
⏹️ ▶️ John and so the leap from 8 16 to 32 were huge partially
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the bitness just because you were so starved you were so starved
⏹️ ▶️ John for the ability to just count and do basic math and keep track of things in the
⏹️ ▶️ John limited architecture but once you can count to four billion you’re probably okay with
⏹️ ▶️ John the counting thing you’re probably okay with a number of colors you got all that stuff covered and by the way you have floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point some of the point along the line floating point comes in so if you really need to do something you can do floating point
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that’s why you don’t have bits anymore. But I think bits were actually super important. Like Margo said, 16
⏹️ ▶️ John bit was a change you could see so much more than you could see that, you know, different between PS three
⏹️ ▶️ John and PS four, eight bits, 16 bit was just like, it was bigger than retina.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was no one is confused about is this an NES game or SNES game? Nobody is confused. It was such
⏹️ ▶️ John a big difference. That’s kids these days. The closest thing they have is appreciating
⏹️ ▶️ John how much faster new iPhones are than previous ones, because they’re still getting faster pretty fast, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no technological equivalent to 816 32 bit console
⏹️ ▶️ John progression for people growing up today. So far, maybe we’re gonna get into like holographic things or biological
⏹️ ▶️ John modification will have even bigger changes. But for now, you just have to listen to stories from old people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I would say to like, I think one of the biggest reasons why we stopped talking about bits is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even the whole concept of having these like console measuring contests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like fell out of relevance because consoles are all so powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I don’t know anybody who I mean maybe except John who would make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco console buying decision based on hardware specs. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just not in the right forums. Console wars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still exist. Oh I mean and I’m sure I’m sure those people will always talk about it but like Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s definitely not in the mass market, if it ever was even. Like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a new console today because of how many mega flops or tera flops or whatever the unit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is today. Like you don’t buy a console today based on that. Like you don’t, if you’re deciding between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you know, the Xbox of the, of the day and the PlayStation of the day and the switch of the day, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision is going to be made based on things like games, like, like titles that are available for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems. It’s going to be based on things like media features, output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features, like does it support 4K or not, VR potential, add-on potential.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s going to be the kind of thing that most people buy their consoles based on these days. The hardware is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good now, the gains that are occurring in the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are oftentimes not very relevant in numeric terms compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other attributes of the system that aren’t necessarily its raw performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my dad, as I’ve mentioned in the past on this show, worked for IBM for almost my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life. And I remember that he was so excited about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cell processor in the PlayStation 3 and was talking to me constantly about it. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much of that was just because he was an IBMer and it was an IBM processor, or at least in part anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how much of that was like regular people marketing or how much of that was just IBM patting themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the back. And John, I’m kind of looking to you to clarify, but I’ve heard about this cell processor constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, oh, Casey, did you hear what they’re doing with the cell now? Oh, and they’re doing this for scientific computing. Oh, they’re doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some other thing. It’s not just about the PlayStation. This is going to revolutionize the way computers are built, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of kind of was, sort of kind of wasn’t. But anyway, did that marketing ever really happen, or was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just being the child of an IBMer?
⏹️ ▶️ John It did. And like I said, part of the reason you don’t see as much of that these days is just
⏹️ ▶️ John because the consoles became so similar because the the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to create the stuff that goes into consoles started to go so far outside the realm of console developers
⏹️ ▶️ John ability, they could they couldn’t even like outsource it and say we want you to build you a CPU like this just because it
⏹️ ▶️ John costs so much money. And so they started to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John pull their resources and it would be like Nvidia says, Well, we’ve got a lot of GPUs and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John customize one of our GPUs for your thing, but we’re not going to build you a fresh GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John from scratch just your thing. We can cobble together something out of like leftover bits of the last generation
⏹️ ▶️ John of our desktop parts, right? And there’s no way you Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to design your own CPU from scratch, like forget it. So how about everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John just uses power PC CPUs of a couple of different variants, and AMD ATI GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we had whole generation of consoles with power PC, GP, CPUs cobbled together from cores that were used
⏹️ ▶️ John in like Mac slightly modified, uh, and, uh, uh, ATI at that
⏹️ ▶️ John time, uh, GPUs. And in this generation, you’ve got X 86 CPUs from AMD there in the PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Xbox. They use that and GPUs from, uh, AMD also, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John very similar, very off the shelf parts. So what are you going to brag about? Right? And so the
⏹️ ▶️ John cell was different. The cell was probably the last the last gasp
⏹️ ▶️ John of we want a radically different thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not just a bunch of power PC or x86 CPU cores thrown in although there were power PC cores in there because you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do everything from scratch but it’s gonna be really weird and really different
⏹️ ▶️ John and really exotic and have lots of interesting ideas in it and
⏹️ ▶️ John to make that happen they had to convince IBM or IBM had to convince itself that like your dad
⏹️ ▶️ John said, it’s not just about the PlayStation, there’s going to be lots of applications for the cell and we use it for this and we can use it for
⏹️ ▶️ John that to justify the massive investment they put in partnership with all these other people to make this thing. And they did reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John power PC cores for certain for the for like the I forget what they call the PPS,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, but for the SPUs, they made these other little cores and they made this ring bus and everything. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a really cool, really interesting CPU architecture, like go read the articles about
⏹️ ▶️ John the cell. It is it is novel and interesting and has lots of ideas from like supercomputing
⏹️ ▶️ John and other things in a small package. Totally a technological feat. So your dad was right to be
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about it. But to Marco’s point,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people don’t care about that. They just care about the games. And to your point, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony did market the exoticness of the cell as much as they could. They were all about the cell
⏹️ ▶️ John is different than other people’s things. And it was different. Sony’s pitch was it’s different in a way that will make you
⏹️ ▶️ John have amazing things. In reality, it was different in a way that will make it very difficult to write dev tools that
⏹️ ▶️ John work to it because it doesn’t work like any other game console. And it was very difficult to write
⏹️ ▶️ John a program that efficiently used all those resources because it was honestly not quite a good balance
⏹️ ▶️ John in resources. You really had to figure out how to orchestrate them just so you were using them all to their maximum extent
⏹️ ▶️ John and not leaving any idle. And it was It took years and years for the best developers, game developers in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world to figure out how to wring all the performance out of the cell. By the time The Last of Us came out, it’s like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John PS3 is pretty powerful. It can do some pretty amazing stuff. But it’s still kind of unbalanced, and the whole system is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM starved, and I wish it had more of this and a little bit of that. And it’s the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey must love this, because the current generation of consoles, and you know, for a while now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been the American approach of, there’s no substitute for cubic inches. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can solve this problem? Give it a
⏹️ ▶️ John give it a big, powerful x86 CPU and a cut-down desktop GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John done and done. No exotic architecture needed. Solve the problem by throwing displacement.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they’re throwing at it, right? And it’s easy to develop for because it’s kind of the same
⏹️ ▶️ John PC, game console, whatever. You get x86 CPU, a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re familiar with, 3D APIs that you’re familiar with, a mature tool chain and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John what people want and that’s what they have. So the sell approach was technologically really cool and interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did market the really cool interesting part of it but it ended up making a console
⏹️ ▶️ John that didn’t produce the results in terms of cool fun novel games that Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted it to and so everybody learned the lesson of that including Sony and the PS4 was like a giant apology
⏹️ ▶️ John about the PS3. The PS4 fixed everything that was wrong with the PS3. It was so conventional, So
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward had so much friggin RAM was so simple to develop for that’s why the ps3
⏹️ ▶️ John Did so much better than the ps4 did so much better than the ps3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That went on longer than I expected, but that was that was awesome. So thank you John for telling us everybody loves game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great I won’t argue with you But I’ve been really liking my switch lately as I keep bringing up over and
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses an off-the-shelf Nvidia Tegra x1 because Nintendo can’t even afford to have people
⏹️ ▶️ John make mildly custom things for them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the switch. It is the system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been happiest with basically since my Genesis. I have not had a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system since my Genesis that I was this happy with. And it has almost nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with the processor or the GPU. I have no idea what it has in it. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at that when getting it. I haven’t thought to look at that since. I have no idea how it compares to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Xbox 17 or whatever the hell Xbox is the current Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John way less powerful that’s how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah probably but it doesn’t matter at all like it just doesn’t because what matters is the games and the games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are awesome like that’s that that to me is so much more important than any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs and like I’m just I’m incredibly happy with my game console and I have no idea what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so it does matter in that if it was really difficult to develop for the switch, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John take longer to make games that are up to the standards that you’re currently playing them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if there were fewer games, because not as many developers would be able to, to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so like there is there are aspects of technology that impact like, how do we end up with good games, you need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a minimum baseline of like, oh, I can develop games. So it’s and it’s not too weird. And I can develop
⏹️ ▶️ John them efficiently with skills I already have, without encountering too many bugs without having to
⏹️ ▶️ John learn an entirely new custom dev environment and three D. A. P. I.
⏹️ ▶️ John And tool chain and everything like that’s a part of the technology selection that does impact the part that you care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would also argue that the power of the of the system also influences what you care about. But it’s clear that the switch
⏹️ ▶️ John is a compromise between a plugged into the wall TV connected console and a portable
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So they made they have to make compromises in power and it is less powerful. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that decrease in power gives you the huge benefits of portability, which according to Nintendo’s
⏹️ ▶️ John surveys that they’re running, tons of people use this in portable mode, so they made the right choice there. But the downside
⏹️ ▶️ John is that games that are possible on the PS four and Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John one X, uh, especially the Xbox one X and also the Xbox one may
⏹️ ▶️ John not be possible on the switch. And so they won’t even get ports or if they do get ports, there’ll be cut down ports, means that
⏹️ ▶️ John most people want to play them on other consoles. Right. So power is a still thing. I think that Apple needs Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo needs to give up with their, there are rumors that Nintendo actually is going to come out with a sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of a switch pro with a more powerful, probably Nvidia Tiger X two, maybe chip inside it
⏹️ ▶️ John again, probably off the shelf. Uh, because that’s the thing they’re doing these days is making spec
⏹️ ▶️ John bumped versions of existing consoles that nevertheless play all the old games, sort of like a generation and a half
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing. And the reason they do that is like Nintendo also knows if we make this
⏹️ ▶️ John more powerful, we it expands the realm of the kind of games we can make the breath of the wild
⏹️ ▶️ John follow up if there ever is one for the switch. But whatever platform it’s on, we’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a more detailed, more expensive world than this one is in the same way that you could never do breath of the wild
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Wii U or a Wii. Like that better game that we all love. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the games. You can’t do that game unless powerful consoles because the world is too big. The draw distances
⏹️ ▶️ John are too large. It doesn’t have the, you know, the hardware or software to set for all the level of detail stuff doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the Ram so on and so forth. So technology does enable good games and has to be pursued.
⏹️ ▶️ John But absolute spec numbers are not the end all be all. Because if you add up all the theoretical
⏹️ ▶️ John floating point operations that the cell could do, it looks like it’s this amazing monster CPU. And in the end, people couldn’t even figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to use half of it. And half the launch games were leaving, leaving huge swaths of the surface
⏹️ ▶️ John area, the silicon surface area chip idle because they just couldn’t figure out how to even use all those cores and their engine only
⏹️ ▶️ John knew how to use like one or two. So they would use one or two and leave half the hardware idle like the launch games.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a good situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just put a period on this for our ask ATP. I really love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having the ability to pop the switch out of the dock and just walk around with it. And I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the only one. I mean, obviously, what you said, john, is that it sounds like in Nintendo is seeing a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John But they released the there is some numbers like we surveyed our users like something that Apple never does and say, How
⏹️ ▶️ John often do you use your switch? docked, portable and both and like the number like the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who are like me and Marco, who only use a docked was very small. It was like 20%
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and 80% of people are using a portable at least some of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. And I use it probably half and half, be honest, which I know is probably barbaric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you, but it is what it is.
#askatp: “My” sports team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we’ll try to do an abridged couple of AskATPs to round this out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnny O. would like to know, hey, what’s the deal with sports? He writes, please explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the nerd crowd the concept of being a sports team fan. I don’t understand why people refer to my team, et cetera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless they’ve actually played for that team.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you’ve written into the right podcast, Johnny. We are sports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experts here. No, we can cover this quickly. So sports is about more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than just, as with anything in life, is about more than just looking at the the quote-unquote ones and zeros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it and looking kind of a little bit deeper. And so let’s talk about my team. So I went to school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia and Virginia Tech had at the time, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the very early 2000s, had a exceptionally great football team that was quarterbacked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Michael Vick who ended up being a not so exceptionally great human being.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wait is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the Dukies, Home Pods, whatever they are? Hokies. There we go. Yep. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the reason we would one would be enthusiastic about that is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the case of college sports that’s your peers like they were also students of the same University
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are playing in this you know national arena and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is it my team because I was also a student at Virginia Tech just like
⏹️ ▶️ John because you you went to school in the same and same school that they did
⏹️ ▶️ John right so you were there right and they were there right so doesn’t it make it our
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reference stop blushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Margo no I’m laughing at the ridiculousness of this situation like you’re I don’t reference but like like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like like when I was in high school I was in the marching band for the football team right so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was literally at every football game sitting 30 feet from the football players
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching the whole game, participating in this weird way of like playing music to encourage them and celebrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco victories in the game. And I still wouldn’t say we won. I would never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it my team, our team. It was literally I was right there. I was somewhat involved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never thought that way. This is my team. I couldn’t give less of a crap
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I think Casey is explaining, is an accurate explanation of why people feel it’s their team.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just I was my comment was being snarky and I’m silly. But I think people who go to the school do feel it’s their team because
⏹️ ▶️ John they go to the same school, despite the fact that I feel like most college athletes, especially the highest level, are really going
⏹️ ▶️ John to a different school than you are.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco experience of school is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey absolutely your experience of school. Absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is still your school and you are going to it. And so are they.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And this is also applicable for professional sports, except it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a much more nebulous
⏹️ ▶️ John the school is your state and or region.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly. So country for the Toronto.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So if you look at a professional sports team, it’s often that it’s the team that either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your family has been rooting for. So as an example, I’m a fan of the New York Giants. And my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grandfather, my mother’s father has been a Giants fan pretty much since the franchise started.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I just grew up watching the Giants. That’s just what we did. And at the time, we lived in the New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York area. And so it made sense for that to be our team because of geographic proximity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where this really falls apart is all the people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who are woefully uninformed and think that the Dallas Cowboys or the Pittsburgh Steelers are good football
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teams, with the notable exception of the 10 fans from each team that actually live in Dallas or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pittsburgh. Because if you ever notice an NFL fan, generally speaking, they either like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cowboys or the Steelers, and generally speaking, they have no association with either Pittsburgh or Dallas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not that I’m bitter about
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Matt Stauffer That’s old football fans who remember when the Cowboys and the Steelers would win Super Bowls,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco young football
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They win Super Bowls? Justin Jackson Yeah, isn’t it now about like Cowboys versus the Cheaters?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Cowboys versus anybody. Justin Jackson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, then the Cheaters are John’s team,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John actually, coincidentally. Matt Stauffer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a team. Justin Jackson Well, because your team is Cheaters. Matt Stauffer Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Justin Jackson I wouldn’t want to claim them either. Matt Stauffer I wasn’t rooting for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Super Bowl, I’m just going to say that. So anyway, so the idea is that take something that you either participated in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a kid so as an example, I played a little bit of basketball as a kid and Imagine watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that you can do All right but watching some watching somebody who is a professional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that thing and it’s just It’s it’s almost poetic watching how good they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that particular skill in that particular sport That’s what’s that’s what’s fun about it. And then when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add in that kind of ownership either by way of a school affiliation or geographic affiliation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just becomes fun. And you know, why would you watch somebody play a video game, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the same thing Now, maybe you wouldn’t claim that that’s your team within the video game,
⏹️ ▶️ John but video games have teams now to though
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John sports like you sport eSports actually do have teams and the teams are regional and they’re so they’re trying to adopt that model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but you get the idea is that? Imagine it’s something that you do, but it’s some other people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that do it a hell of a lot better than you will ever do it. And it’s just cool to watch. And plus, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games are fun. Games are fun to watch. Games are fun to play. And so it’s just a confluence of all of that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a feeling that, Jonny-O, you’re going to listen to this and be like, yeah, that didn’t convince me at all. And that’s OK. Not—sports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t for everyone. And I’m not a crazy sports person that watches ESPN all day, every day, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lives for SportsCenter or anything like that. I just enjoy football and occasionally a couple other sports
⏹️ ▶️ John But the question wasn’t about why do I enjoy sports was about why being a sports team fan of having my
⏹️ ▶️ John team. I think you did address that. But like it doesn’t I don’t think the question was like, why are sports enjoyable period like just see
⏹️ ▶️ John achievement, human achievement or whatever. It’s about the fandom and my team type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to that end, if I was to give my short version of the answer, this would be that sports are a socially
⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable outlet for xenophobia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well that’s it. But not that I was making fun of Pittsburgh Steelers or Dallas Cowboys fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all just moments ago.
#askatp: Dropping Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. TT on air writes, Hey, I know you’re not a big fan of Facebook and what they do with their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data. How do you guys feel about this whole Instagram thing? Since Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is owned by Facebook and I don’t have a good answer for this. I’ll be the first to tell you, I do not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good answer for this. And my answer is I freaking love Instagram and I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steal Marcos Thunder and steal Marcos line and say, it’s my happy place. And because it’s my happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place, despite the fact that they’re insistent on trying to ruin I’m going to keep using it until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have an even more compelling reason not to use it I will I do have a Facebook account. I occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at it I would happily get rid of my Facebook account long before I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get rid of my Instagram account And that’s just a choice. I’m making I’m not saying it’s a good choice. I’m not saying it’s reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it’s not hypocritical or backwards or whatever, but it’s just my choice Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean this it’s a really like I was talking a little bit on Twitter about this earlier. Like it’s hard because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the tech giants are so big, Facebook owns so much stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re trying to, for instance, get off all Facebook services, what if you’re in one of the many parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the world where WhatsApp is the default messaging platform?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That applies to a lot of places, to a lot of people. There’s a reason why Facebook bought it for what was it, $19
⏹️ ▶️ Marco billion or something like that? It’s everywhere in certain places. That’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an oxymoron, but like it’s like because whatsapp is not very big in the u.s. So like us residents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not realize how big of a deal it is but everywhere else in the world whatsapp is Huge and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is like it. You know it’s bigger than sms. It’s bigger than messaging It’s bigger than I message like it’s bigger than everything in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of the world To tell somebody like oh well Facebook happens to own that and Facebook is a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company and so you should quit You know everything of theirs including whatsapp that could really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty significant negative impact on someone’s life if they’re in an area where like WhatsApp is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big for them. And it’s hard, like I love the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like dropping a tech giant that is you know being you know horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people or to its company or to data or whatever else. In some cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s easier than others like when Uber is being terrible, which happens all the time, like you know a lot of us moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Lyft like I did. I haven’t used Uber since all that crap, you know, whatever it was like a year ago. I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lyft and it’s, you know what, it’s totally fine because everywhere I’ve been, like I don’t use ride
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing that often, usually it’s only like when I’m traveling somewhere, but you know every time I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used, I’ve like hired a Lyft it’s been totally fine. But there are certain regions where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lyft just doesn’t really serve or doesn’t serve anywhere near well enough to be useful and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people there have to you just suck it up and use Uber. And I’m not gonna tell them, don’t use any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these services. Sometimes that’s your best option. Sometimes that’s your only option. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Facebook, they own so much. And a lot of what they own,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both things like WhatsApp and Instagram. Instagram’s a bit of a special case, which we’ll get to in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But stuff they own, like WhatsApp, and the core Facebook service itself, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, they can just drop this stuff and it’s no big deal. And that’s great, I encourage you to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for a lot of people, if they aren’t on Facebook, they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer see the pictures of their grandchildren, because that’s the only place where people post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Or, I have never been a really active Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user. I’ve never posted stuff to Facebook or anything else. But I do regularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check two communities on Facebook, because that’s the only place that these communities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist. One of them is for our summer place and one of them is for the local school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s like a group of like parents for the local school on Facebook. And a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times that is the first, the best, or sometimes the only place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that certain very relevant news or info is posted. And this applies, like lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people, they’re kind of stuck using Facebook for this reason because there’s some kind of community or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only posts incredibly important to them information on Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s really hard to tell people like that you should stop using Facebook because the impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them not using Facebook, like the cost to Facebook of one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less account is probably virtually nothing compared to the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that person’s life of not having access to these communities or this information that is posted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. So it’s hard to make that argument that people who were in a situation like that should do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I made the the analogy earlier on Twitter, it’s kind of like when people get mad because they have a bad experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a flight and they try to swear off an airline forever. And there’s like five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airlines and they don’t all go to all the same places. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live in, say, a hub for United and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad experience on United, which is common, because United is terrible, like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you gonna do? Swear off United? Well, if you live somewhere that’s one of their hubs and all the flights going in and out are united,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna have a really hard time flying anywhere after that. And there’s not that many airlines. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you swear one off when you have a bad experience and you say you’re never gonna fly with them again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that starts to impact your life pretty significantly without too much time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I feel like the tech giants are in a similar situation. We’re like, they own so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so much of, so many of these big tech services are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critical to people’s lives, and many of them don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direct alternatives, or they have such lock-in to certain communities that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of unrealistic to expect people to move in mass, that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to just tell people, like, you shouldn’t use everything. Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a bit of a special case, because to a lot of people, Instagram is not critical. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like, it isn’t often like part your job or anything but like like for me if I quit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram I would lose access to a lot of like my friends and my family’s photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s where they all post them you know and like they don’t have blogs they don’t have websites we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo shares elsewhere and maybe we could try to set some up but like that that becomes much harder problem for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to be taking a political stance to say I don’t want to use Facebook stuff anymore to then try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to convince all my friends and family and people I don’t know very well who I just enjoy their photos like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you instead start posting these over here or in addition start posting this over here? It becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much harder proposition. And I would be fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without Facebook. I would just lose access to these communities that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally useful to me. And I’d be fine without Instagram. I would be less happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s certain inertia in that. Like I’ve been on Instagram since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think 2010. My entire, you know, like the entire life I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here in the suburbs that includes the house, my dog, the entire life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my son has all been cataloged routinely on Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every year, Tiff makes a photo book of Instagram photos for our family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s kind of like our family, like our family photo albums are like these Instagram books.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it would disrupt a lot of that stuff. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for me to overstate how much I dislike and disrespect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook, the people who run Facebook, the idea of Facebook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just the horrible, amoral, morally bankrupt people there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right at the top, right up to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, right at the top. They are morally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bankrupt, horrible people doing horrible things, and that’s also not very new. That’s not like this just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started happening in the 2016 election, like this is not new at all. They always have been horrible people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing horrible things. They’re spineless turds and cowards. I really, really do not like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also can’t totally avoid their services and retain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to certain information that I need and want, and the joy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and family and friends connections I get through Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s hard to avoid, it’s not a simple thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t so simple to say like, are you being hypocritical by still using it? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why haven’t you quit yet? Like to a lot of people it’s more complicated than that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a bigger calculus than just like, do you like these people or not? Because I hate those people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I still, I’ve decided that the statement I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make by leaving is too small for the cost it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to me in my life. You call those services
⏹️ ▶️ John too big to bail, I guess? Wow. I see
⏹️ ▶️ John did there. That’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you put the cricket.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, definitely. Sound effect in there. I think that was quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s basically what you’re saying. Yeah, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Too big to bail. You would like to get out of them, but they’re just too big because you can’t convince everybody. So two things. one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to remind the world and the recording that I’m speaking into
⏹️ ▶️ John to take credit for the airline analogy that you just make is I’m pretty sure I made that exact same one a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple years ago, although you probably don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember. Also, I’m pretty sure John Roderick made it before you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s it’s turtles all the way down. I think I might have made before John Roderick, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Go check the tapes.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, like in real life, not on a podcast. Sometimes I say things that aren’t recorded on podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you really say them then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. Who’s to say? Who’s to say? If this is not recording, who can tell?
⏹️ ▶️ John And two, I’m going to predict that three weeks from now or so,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be a podcast featuring me where I talk about this very same issue at length. And so I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to talk about it at length here. So if you’re interested in hearing that discussion that will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John happen sometime in the next three weeks, you can check out Reconcilable Differences on relay.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look forward to hearing that in six to eight weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Muckerman Reckdiffs is by the way one of my favorite podcasts in the entire world. I love that show so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John much. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite good. Muckerman You really should be, you the listeners should really be listening to that if you’re not already. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not unlike this show, the shows do tend to run a little long, but they are worth every damn minute. So you should be checking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that out. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Squarespace, and Instabug. And we’ll see
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little even accident
⏹️ ▶️ Casey central the mario p
⏹️ ▶️ John and And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T-Marco Harmon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts so long
Post-show: Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Lot of people have been reaching out and saying hey Casey, have you thought about the Kia stinger GT?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Think about it. It’s a nice car.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not that nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B I’ve sat in it see I didn’t like the interior in D two pedals But otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you you know, other than that mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Otherwise, it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. It did tie BMW 340i and a comparison test which shows just how far
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW is falling. I think I’m not in a past show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMWs I was I’d actually occurred to me just the other day. I was saying this to somebody shoot I don’t remember who it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it wasn’t on a podcast. I guess I never said it I was walking back up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the driveway from getting the mail and I looked at the garage and I looked at Aaron’s car I looked at my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. I looked at my car for a while and It occurred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me just a few years ago ago, like, especially in 2013, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when, when Marco and me and underscore went to the driving school just a few years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have said I was pretty much equally into Apple and BMW. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was during the heyday of my BMW love speaking of heydays. And I loved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of those brands more than almost anything. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really give a crap about BMW anymore. I feel like I’ve been so let down by this one, this one experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know I shouldn’t judge all BMWs forevermore based on one somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy, almost lemon, but I just I can’t find myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t find myself getting excited by BMW anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m also, I mean, I think I’m in a very similar boat, but maybe even more extreme, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW just isn’t relevant to me anymore. Like I, you know, when I moved to Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I didn’t realize quite how different it would be and quite how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would make all other cars just seem like the past by comparison in multiple ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just the drive train, but like, you know, like the, just how, you know, the, the big touch screen, um, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, some of the more like smart, useful little features, uh, the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features, some of the, uh, the, the practicalities of just like the giant hatchback and how much space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much cargo space there is in it. Um, it’s super nice. yesterday I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a flat tire on my bike. I had to get a new inner tube and I don’t know how to do that. So I brought my bike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the store in town to have them do it and I fit this giant 27.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus semi-fat bike in the back of my car. And as I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I opened the trunk and it doesn’t fit with a lot of leeway, but it does fit. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opened the trunk when I got there, parked in the street, and I pulled this giant bike out, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this person inside with it, like, wow, you just pulled that out of that car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t believe that it fit. It’s so nice. Anyway, yeah, I kind of have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar feeling of, I have no interest in going to test drive the new M5 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like that. And it’s one of the reasons why it was so hard for me to answer that question a few weeks ago of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what car would you have if you couldn’t have the Tesla. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have no idea. I’m not interested in any other cars at all. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that will change in the future when there’s more electric options for everybody. But honestly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anticipate that changing in the near future. I think it’s probably gonna be a far future thing. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m totally with you. What BMW, the direction they’ve gone in has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly been significantly more mass luxury market, like obviously going after a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of but were probably formerly Lexus customers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that came at the cost of the enthusiasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW’s not gonna get any Lexus customers. Lexus customers need reliability. They’re going after Mercedes customers. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John accustomed to a little bit of unreliability, but want a softer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah, but it is kind of funny that the decline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of BMW’s appeal to us has corresponded somewhat to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decline of Apple’s appeal to us. It’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sad, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You took my moment, because I was about to say the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco same thing. Oh, come on, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was obvious. You can’t blame me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey for that. Oh, but still. But no, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. But I mean, I shouldn’t cut you off, but here I am. So since I have, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very similarly, but way, way, way less so about Apple. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are things that are annoying me about Apple that never used to annoy me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll beat up on Siri just briefly, because that’s the most obvious example. Like, you know, anytime I go to use Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m, I’m, I just die a little inside. Not literally, of course, that’s a bit, um, what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the word I’m looking for? Hyperbolic. I don’t know. Whatever. Anyway, it’s a bit extreme, but, um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, it’s like it annoys me every time in a way that Apple stuff used to delight me every time consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I touched it. And, and I feel, uh, you know, I feel like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this vector is the same direction, but a far smaller magnitude that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting. I’m finding myself not as emotionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like excited by Apple stuff as I was in the past. Now there are exceptions like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the other day, I looked down at my iPhone 10 and I was like, you know what? This is a really awesome phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And having that swipe gesture has made everything better. And in the lack of a home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button, like face ID still does drive me nuts in a few ways, but by and large, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so cool. And so I’m not trying to say that I’ve like lost hope in Apple by any means but and certainly the alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we’ve gone Around and around about numerous times on the show. The alternatives are not really alternatives,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but But nevertheless, I I find myself getting similarly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Disappoint, you know, I’m not mad. I’m disappointed in you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and that’s that’s a bummer because it’s I mean It’s just a company right like it and here again like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to come back to the ask ATP about sports like Like Apple was kind of my team, and Marco, I’m definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking a page out of your playbook on that one, because you’ve made this point for years, that Apple was kind of your team. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my team is in a—not a slump, that’s dramatic—but my team is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey winning championships left and right like they used to be. And that’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of a bummer. Yeah, and I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little depressing when you don’t have something else to replace that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source of excitement for you. Like when I kind of fell out of love with BMW, that was easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me because now I’m a big fan of Tesla. And so it just kind of got replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason the Apple stuff bugs me so much is that I haven’t replaced that yet in my life and I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what will replace
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Replaced it with video games. You love video games
⏹️ ▶️ John now more than you have in a long time. That’s replacing your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love. I mean, yeah, I love a few video games. I would hardly call it a
⏹️ ▶️ John You just said that the Switch is like the best gaming thing you’ve had since like your childhood. Yes, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Sega so I think that’s that’s pretty high praise in the grand scheme of things that you have loved in your
⏹️ ▶️ John life and Video games may fade if the next Nintendo thing is like that doesn’t appeal to you It doesn’t have good
⏹️ ▶️ John games and then you’ll be all excited about your new Jaguar I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pace I would probably like no matter how good or appealing it was I don’t think I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever actually buy a car from that brand because I just never want to have to say it to people
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to say Jaguar you can just say Jaguar you can say Jaguar like Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jobs oh god no I mean it but the problem is like no matter first of all it’s kind of like a like a
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking you’re thinking of BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no no it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse I mean they both are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it is it is it is snootier sounding but I I think if you had to
⏹️ ▶️ John picture the kind of person who drives a Jaguar and the kind of person who drives a BMW and you’re gonna sign you’re gonna put a dick
⏹️ ▶️ John label underneath one of them it’s definitely going underneath the BMW person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either brand if you if somebody asks you like out like it like out loud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a room full of other people who are being kind of quiet hey what brand is your car like if you have a BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you want to say that a little bit quietly if I had a Jag I’d be I’d like I would just be like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a car like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I would just not want to say I
⏹️ ▶️ John the Jaguar product managers you know marketing manager would love to hear you say that because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the image they want they want it to be like snooty and highfalutin but realistically speaking these days I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is I think Jag would just love to be included in the same buying decision as Lexus let alone BMW and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Mercedes oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re totally irrelevant but the other factor is like I just don’t want to hear everyone tell me how to pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then never get a Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco either. I was about to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I was but I was thinking the same thing as I said, I’m like, you know, yeah, that would also apply to that brand, which I’m also not gonna try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say here because I’m not gonna say it right now. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, I don’t want a I don’t want a stinger. But yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about part of the reason why I’m bummed about BMW not really revving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my engine anymore is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t figured out what’s replaced replacing it like there’s a part of me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s enthusiastic about getting a Wrangler and I’m not trying to open that can of worms but I I don’t know that that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to replace that love because there was a stretch of time that every time I got in my car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just thrilled and excited to be sitting in that chair and now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not an appliance but it’s closer to an appliance than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than something that gives me pleasure and that’s really unfortunate and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would view a Jeep in quite the same way as I did the BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circa 2013 and it just bums me out like I wish I had something to replace that that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of joy in my life and and I and you know maybe I will but
⏹️ ▶️ John not to maybe it’ll be your family
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous what can replace this joy says the person who just had a new child
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come on I gotta make me sound like such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jerk. Speaking of which, back in Build and Analyze, I forget when in the series it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but sometime during Build and Analyze, I was talking back then about possibly…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was when I was waffling over what car to get after the first BMW, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking about something fast. And Dan was talking about how he used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about fast cars, and now he just got got many vans and he was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally fine and he just kind of stopped caring about driving fast. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lie because he eventually got like an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Audi. Yeah, his next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car was an Audi, but but like but that’s like that sounded to me like like that would never happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. Like I could not fathom that that ever happening to me. I would always care, you know, as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I did then and I did care for a while like I went through some nice fast cars and my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current car is fast, but I really do feel myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caring a lot less over time. And I’m not really taking the little turn that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down at the bottom of my street where I can kick it out a little bit when there’s leaves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. I don’t do that anymore. There’s certain highway ramps that I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go super fast before and I just kind of don’t do that anymore either. I have, even just over the last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve felt myself really chilling out a lot in that way. where even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other day I was thinking, maybe on the next one I won’t mind so much that I’m now forced to get the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air suspension, which softens the ride. That sounds kind of nice. And I realized after I was thinking that, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh my god, who am I? Mercedes, here we come. Yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I started realizing, my priorities have changed too. If I was buying a new car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, I would still get a Tesla and I would still get a fast model, but it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would want the biggest range, which is not the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model, which is the decision I made with this one, and I would make the exact same decision again. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed of it is way less important to me than the range of it. I like that it’s fast. I have fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the speed sometimes, but it’s way less often that that’s relevant to me than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for you, Casey, as we’ve mentioned in the past, being a car enthusiast is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a part of your identity, And it need not be, you know, that’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey option that you have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, you still, you have a lot of that love, and to some degree you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably always will. But it’s okay, if it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this, if you realize this in introspection, it’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your priorities to change, or for the significance that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you apply to certain factors to be rearranged or to shift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around. And so, you said you used to be really thrilled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting in your car, and now it’s more of a function. And part of that is because you’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this car for a while so it’s no longer as novel. Part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you kind of hate this car because of how much it costs you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey part of that’s also, you are growing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six, seven years older now than
⏹️ ▶️ John got it? He’s growing up, he’s in his mid-30s, he’s getting old. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stop growing up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re always growing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John up, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John You start getting old at a certain point, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess what, you’re getting old. We are continuing to get old, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John us older than others. Get busy living or get busy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both get. Reference acknowledged. Whatever it is, like, you know, it’s okay to change over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to recognize that that’s what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening. And I agree with you. The thing is, I don’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m that different. I agree that I am slightly different and the joy I get from Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is indication to me that I am feeling differently because Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels to me anyway very cushy. It has a lot of those techno bits that like your car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has, not exactly the same, but like, you know, there’s an app where I can start it remotely and I know you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aha, what’s an engine? But you get what I’m driving at. And I get a lot of pleasure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Aaron’s car despite the fact that it’s big, it’s slow, It, according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to John, tips over if you steer more than five degrees laterally. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in every way it’s wrong from the list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things that Casey enjoys, but I do like it. And I think the thing that the crisis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m having is that I don’t feel like I’m that different. Like, all I really want in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is somebody that is not BMW to make me either a 340 sedan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or an M3. And I don’t think that really exists. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a report, I’m not going to be able to find the link, but a friend of mine, Brad, sent me a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report, some rumors that the 3 Series is going to lose the stick in the next generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which isn’t particularly surprising but is kind of devastating. And I know I need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just wake up and smell reality that the three-pedal cars are not long for this world. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I’m being, this there’s a lot of words to say I feel like I’m being abandoned and BMW was supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to help me and it sounds like they’re abandoning me and either way I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumpy about the fact that this car has cost me a bazillion dollars so I I just I feel like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Ronin right like I’m a man without a master now and that bums me out because I want to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to to find a car that gives me that joy again and you know the the Giulia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did give me a lot of that joy and maybe I I would feel slightly differently about it if there was literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no other options like if there were no three-pedal cars But you know what? I mean? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’ve been I’ve been left Wanting and and that that kind of bums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me out because I feel like I’m the same as I’ve always been older and maybe wiser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and certainly slower, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older at least older but but you know what? I mean? I feel like nothing is filling that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey void, even though I’m ready for something to fill that void.