273: Playing You Like a Video Game
10 May 2018Hello, um, do you have any time to listen to our podcast today between 10am and 12pm, mmm?
Episode Description:
- Follow-up: Disabling "Raise to Listen" on iPhone X
- You should go to Layers
- Jony Ive interviewed by Hodinkee
- Google Duplex
- 20 years of USB
#askatp- How do we have Finder configured? (via Kymer)
- What do we think about Volvo adopting Google products for their infotainment? (via Andreas Ekegren)
- Cartridges/discs or digital downloads for video games? (via Hutson Hayward)
Sponsored by:
- Mack Weldon: Reinventing men’s basics with smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping. Get 20% off your first order with code ATP.
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi, that works. Use code ATP for free overnight shipping to the US and Canada.
- Casper: Get $100 off your Wave purchase with code atp100. Terms and conditions apply.
Chapters
- Follow-up: Raise to Listen 🖼️
- Layers Conference 🖼️
- Jony Ive on Hodinkee 🖼️
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- Google Duplex demo
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- 20 years of USB
- Sponsor: Casper (code atp100)
- #askatp: Finder preferences
- #askatp: Volvo + Google
- #askatp: Downloading games
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Nintendo online
Follow-up: Raise to Listen
⏹️ ▶️ John Skype doesn’t ring anymore on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe you should get a new computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, your Mac Pro is probably broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm-hmm I’m gonna blame Skype.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. I think it’s a Mac Pro We should do some quick follow-up with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what’s the official name for it voice memos or voice messages Whatever it is that Marco and I were running into raised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to listen Yeah, well, that’s the thing that we solved by raised to listen. Maybe I will answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I Have not seen one of those misfires with the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, speak a text message to somebody. I’ve not seen one of those since you and I had the simultaneous epiphany
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and invention of turning off Raise to Listen, Raise to Wake, whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco How’s that been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you? Yeah, same thing. Raise to Wake I still use. Raise to Listen is what we turned off in the messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferences. And yeah, I too have had no accidental, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, as I’m putting my phone in my pocket and then I end up sending or half sending or trying to send a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long audio message of my pocket. Basically, yeah, I’ve been very happy with that so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if they pick the wrong defaults on this one then because I understand the feature. I think I even remember it being demoed
⏹️ ▶️ John and I understand the utility of it, especially if you frequently need to like fire off a text message, but you don’t have time to type it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you just want to like bring it to your face, talk and put it down right. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John the unexpected consequences of enabling that feature that were obscure enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that it took you guys a while to figure it out. And like, it makes the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like it’s broken. You want to bring Daisy in? She seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have an opinion. Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John She’s got an
⏹️ ▶️ John opinion about people walking past our house. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been going on with her? I haven’t heard an update on rec diffs in a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s springtime, so the windows are open on the house, and there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John people walking by on the sidewalk all the time, and there’s more interesting smells out there, and there are birds and
⏹️ ▶️ John squirrels, and so she’s going a little crazy. you
Layers Conference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we wanted to point out that Layers is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tickets for Layers are available. This is a three-day conference that’s during WWDC. A lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to have come to the opinion that Layers is strictly a designer conference. And although design is a heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of Layers, it is not at all a designer-only conference. I went, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it, 2016, I believe. And the only reason I’m not going this year is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s more appropriate for work anyway if I go to WWDC, but Layers is phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, the speakers are always great and diverse. The talks are always phenomenal. They’re oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about stuff that I would never think I would find interesting and then I’m absolutely fascinated and riveted by them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so you should definitely, if you’re going to be in the area of San Jose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you like delicious snacks and, or if you like both in the food, in the food
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense or in the brain sense, if you want a snack for your brain, go to Layers. it’s good stuff. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’ve been to at least one in the past, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been to two, actually. It’s funny, the one you went to was the one I didn’t go to. Fair enough. I went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the one, I think, one year before that and the year after that. And they were great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s run by our friend Jesse Char, who does lots of wonderful things, and Elaine Pow. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the partnership. They put on this great conference every year. And it’s great not only if you’re a designer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you are a single person, product person, where you need to consider yourself such things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you just like cool stuff and so you know not only do they have great talks they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great on the diversity front both of people and of ideas which is really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually they get really really talented speakers as well and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is just such an incredibly fun conference because Jesse and Elaine the organizers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so not only are they very fun people themselves but they know what’s fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they know know how they know what people who go to conferences need and what you don’t even realize you need, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do need and so like you go there and like that you know the snacks are amazing. The coffee is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. They throw the best parties and like this wonderful after party like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so much fun and they you know they build in like fun and socializing into the schedule as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re not just like sitting at you know sitting in a chair all day. It’s just a great conference. It’s really fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re going to be in San Jose, I highly suggest you check out Layers. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really, really good. And if Marco says the coffee is amazing, you know that it’s going to blow your fricking mind. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually is amazing coffee. Like, you know I wouldn’t say that lightly, but it actually is amazing coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And, you know, the way that I knew that they really were not f***ing around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that the first, or the only time I went, I should say, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they had like a, I don’t to call it a snack table because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t for snacks at the time. It was almost like a refreshments table, but they had like mints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and aspirin for those of us who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco stayed out too late. They had like Tylenol for hangovers. It was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they also had like these little, I don’t know how to describe them, but like one-time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use, no water required toothbrushes in case you needed to freshen up a little bit. Maybe you just rolled in from the bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly to Layers. So Layers is a truly great conference. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall how much tickets are off the top of my head, but I remember it being very, very, very affordable, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to WBDC. So if you are at all interested, and you will be in San Jose or could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in San Jose, I think it’s the first three days of WBDC. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I believe it’s Monday, Tuesday,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wednesday, usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s great. And yeah, the tickets are, it’s like between an iPad mini and an iPad Pro, somewhere in that range.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, the URL is layers.is. And again, I cannot recommend it enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t let anyone scare you. I could see how at a glance you could look at their website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, oh, this is for designers, but that’s not at all what this website is trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say. And I think that maybe it was the first year it was very design heavy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s about design, in my experience, it’s about the sort of design that everyone cares about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not about specifically UI design for a specific mobile app or anything like that, or usually anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just about all sorts of interesting and cool stuff. And it seems like, not unlike Singleton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from years past, the marching orders for speakers are basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, talk about something cool. That’s about it. Talk about something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. I have to point out, too, if you happen to be at WBC in San Jose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year, if you happen to notice, as you’re walking out of the convention center, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next door was this outdoor patio full of people who look like they were having a lot more fun than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. That was layers. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would have these amazing snacks brought in and everyone’s hanging out outside and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun and then the developers are slogging out with their box lunches. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more fun looking party next door.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I swear on everything I consider holy, I swear that one time I was walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the conference and I passed this outdoor area, just like you described, and I’m like, wow, people are having a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fun out there, just like you described. What the hell is going on? Oh, it’s Layers. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you, like, everybody who walked past that kind of wished they were there instead. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey be there by going to Layers. You could do it. Yeah, indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so we’ll let this go. But Layers.is, Jesse and Elaine are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, and they find wonderful, wonderful, people to speak at their conference,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it’s really, really great.
Jony Ive on Hodinkee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So today there was a very interesting piece in I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe it’s pronounced Hoden key or is it a Hoding key?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely asking Hoding key. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like my worlds are colliding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, indeed. So Hoden key is in jumping when you’re ready Marco is a kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online Periodical website with root that’s that’s about watches. I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly high-end watches or is that unfair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much exclusively high-end watches?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Okay, there you go. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Hodinkee is like the Daring Fireball or Tech Crunch of the watch world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the person who wrote this, Ben Clymer, is either the founder or the head person now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so there was an article, I guess they do like a literal magazine, which is in print,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question mark? Is that true?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is volume two, like they literally just started doing this. But I guess this is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web. I don’t know. I don’t get the print magazine. I just read their site in a feed reader.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Suffice to say, they ended up doing an interview with Johnny Ive, which is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relevant to all three of us, even if the rest of the website is not. And so there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an interview with Johnny Ive, mostly, of course, about wristwatches and kind of how did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple Watch come to be, what is Johnny consider important. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have several poll quotes that I’m happy to go through in a minute, but perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should give some overall impressions of the article. I didn’t think it was particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well-written, but it did not strike me as egregiously poorly written. I think I’m the only one that feels that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because several people I’ve spoken to, not just you guys, said it was very poorly written. I thought it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do feel like this is a world I’m not used to, because—and I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call out examples of this—but there were very clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey descriptions about very many expensive, tangible things That were not limited to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wristwatches and I can’t think of a specific example, but like clothes were described with excruciating detail
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like it’s like sound and vision magazine where the magazine is funded by Mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know the latest movie on DVD or whatever, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John reviewing a DVD player, they have to say I was watching, you know Captain America and I could say the blue
⏹️ ▶️ John of captains, you know shield and blah blah blah like it’s a paid You know product placement essentially and that’s how they pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for this stuff. Only I think this that’s not what this was It’s just that this person couldn’t help but saying
⏹️ ▶️ John and the people came in and they were dressed in this and they were wearing these Expensive boots by these brand and you could tell they weren’t just regular PR
⏹️ ▶️ John people. They were Apple PR people’s like, ah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey someone kill me Yeah, yep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I was greeted by a team unlike any other in Silicon Valley their veterans of places like GQ and Harper’s Bazaar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’ve studied At the Sarban and served in the White House. They’re not dressed ostentatiously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know those understated boots must be st. Lauren or however you pronounce it or maybe Bottega Veneta. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure I pronounce that wrong, too It’s a subtle reminder that Apple isn’t just a tech company, it’s potentially the greatest luxury brand in the world. Like, that just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to me. Maybe it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not used to it, maybe it’s a Casey problem, but it just made me feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gross. No, you know what? It’s not a Casey problem. Like, I read this site.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like watches. I like Apple. I found this article insufferable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it was just totally insufferable. And again, I read their site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time, but this was way… I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in every possible horrible sense of the word, it was just like masturbatory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just like… It was like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John high school English
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally discovered the thesaurus feature and it’s… Oh God, it was so
⏹️ ▶️ John See, it wasn’t the mechanics of the writing, it was the choice. It was the choice to say, what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna write here is I’m gonna write like several hundred words about every aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of my personal it’s sort of like gonzo journalism but with less gonzo like every
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect of leading up to this interview with my thoughts and feelings
⏹️ ▶️ John about how it was going and what I think about everything that I see and it’s just like look
⏹️ ▶️ John people you have an interview with Johnny Ive all people want to see
⏹️ ▶️ John is the interview with Johnny Ive. The 600 words of your personal experience
⏹️ ▶️ John leading up to that and all your opinions about everyone you see and all the things they own and all the how you feel about things you own and
⏹️ ▶️ John how you feel about things you might have owned and how it’s just like, Oh my God, no one is reading for that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and that’s a choice. And you know, I don’t think like it wasn’t badly written at the micro level,
⏹️ ▶️ John the choice to do to take, you know, this very high profile interview with
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who doesn’t give a I don’t know how high profile they are compared to like they’re watch people interview but johnny i’ve doesn’t give
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of interviews period right he’s not all over the news all the time he doesn’t talk much in public get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the interview so i totally disagree with that choice and then when you get to the interview the little
⏹️ ▶️ John italic sort of thoughts put in between the questions and the answers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco killing me killing me god yeah it was this whole thing it’s i think this this makes nobody look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good i mean you know i I think a lot of it was padded and fluffed up because this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luxury site that is trying to expand into this long-form magazine format,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so obviously it was puffed up for that. I think also it was fairly clear that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he didn’t have a lot of time with Johnny. It seemed like, I’m guessing based on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of questions and answers actually in this versus the amount of fluff in this, I’m guessing he had like 10 minutes with him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a really short
⏹️ ▶️ John It could have been it could have been 30 minutes like I you know Johnny gives good substantive answers in his
⏹️ ▶️ John way To questions that could have been answered in an even more short manner So I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John it was at least a half an hour interview plus a half an hour photo shoot afterwards like you know I
⏹️ ▶️ John this this is surprising surprising amount of interaction for a watch
⏹️ ▶️ John site I would you know I wouldn’t have guessed unless Johnny I was a fan of the site and like Marco reads it as well or Something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I just I think I think the whole thing like no one looks good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this. I don’t know who they’re trying to relate to half people at least who read this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be people who have never heard of her dinky who are reading the Apple news right so to be bragging about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you really wish the Apple watch was available in solid platinum with a solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platinum bracelet and and that you which by the way that would probably cost like seventy five thousand dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to you know it’s a shame that you you missed out on your bid for Steve Jobs’s old Seiko
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch that he wore once in a photo shoot and the winning bidder was $42,000. You were the second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place bidder. That is just so incredibly alienating and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t make anybody look good. It’s just throwing out money numbers that… I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like in the luxury world, a lot of luxury products like fancy cars, fancy jewelry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these things are very expensive. just incredibly tasteless to just be talking about numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out like out there like that to just kind of you be bragging about how much you spent on things or how much you you can or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to spend on such things like that that’s just it’s not a it’s not a good look and even for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watch site that is read by people like most you know the watches they cover on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the site in you know in the news probably have an average price of about ten thousand dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s you know, they don’t cover cheap things, but even for their audience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to mention the audience that this piece was likely to receive because it’s about a high-profile Apple person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just incredibly off-putting and alienating to be bragging so much about incredibly needlessly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive purchases or wishes, and that didn’t add anything to the article at all. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I think Johnny Ive didn’t come out looking that great on this either. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think he gained anything from this. I think, you know, he had his typical kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, Johnny in space kind of philosophy statements, where it sounds kind of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you try to parse what he said and realize he didn’t say much of anything. And then I thought the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he referred to and talked about other watch brands was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco condescending. And like, it was a little subtle, but if you look at the way he worded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, it was incredibly condescending and arrogant. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that came off as a good look either. JS –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t personally get that impression about what Johnny said, but the rest of what you said I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. This almost feels like, and I don’t know anything about Benjamin Clymer, but this feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like one of the rich kids of Instagram grew up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually sort of made a living for himself, but you can’t change the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that he’s one of those rich assholes from Instagram, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, I don’t know, it just feels gross. Now, that being said, and even though I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with what you were saying about how tacky it is to talk about, oh, well, I lost that bid and it was won for $42,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thus implying he was willing to spend $30,000 plus on a watch. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you feel like that’s maybe just the Americans in us? You know how it’s very taboo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in America to talk about how much you make, where I’ve heard in other countries that’s far less the case? Do you think that’s what this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, Or do you think it’s just freaking gross or both?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s probably a little bit of that in it But I don’t think that’s all this is. I mean, I think this was just you know, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overindulgent Alienating writing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think it was the money I think it was the the format that the choice to you know like if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s reading this article is not interested in What the person who’s writing the article that every
⏹️ ▶️ John detail of their lead up to the interview? They just want to get to the interview and speaking of the interview. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like is the person I came here with with. I’ve read probably every interview with Johnny. I’ve read the
⏹️ ▶️ John recent Johnny I’ve book by Leander Caney, I think, which I thought was a pretty good book about Johnny. I even gives
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of lots of insight into his character that I didn’t have before. Um, and my impression
⏹️ ▶️ John of him in this interview was he was his normal, thoughtful, you know, slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ivan space kind of, uh, person that we always expect him to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and that he actually really admires and is into
⏹️ ▶️ John non-apple watches, but that he also really
⏹️ ▶️ John likes the apple watch surprise. I didn’t get anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that was making me think that he was looking down on other watches. If anything, he revealed
⏹️ ▶️ John himself to be a bit of a, you know, watch fanboy, regular watch fanboy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought he kind of, that was the impression I’m getting from him because I didn’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John into watches is Johnny Heif. And in this interview, I’m oh he’s actually more into watches than I would have thought he was.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I didn’t think he was crapping on other watches. He’s not, he’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a, he’s certainly not a braggart and I don’t think he’s particularly aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ John arrogant. He you know, like, so Casey pulled out a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of pull quotes here and I can see how you might read one of these uncharitably and come away with the
⏹️ ▶️ John impression that he’s crapping in other watches, but this is on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple watch versus mechanical watches. He said, sometimes you wear an Apple watch for outright utility and other times you’ll wear something
⏹️ ▶️ John else for nostalgia and affection. And it’s like, oh, so if you want utility, you have to wear an Apple watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the only reason you’d wear some other watches, nostalgia and affection that’s I don’t read it that way. I
⏹️ ▶️ John read it as he really likes mechanical watches and it’s nostalgia for him because now he wears the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple watch all the time because Utility wise it does a ton more stuff even if you could
⏹️ ▶️ John make the argument that telling time wise it has less utility than mechanical watch
⏹️ ▶️ John but affection that he really does have an affection for mechanical watches
⏹️ ▶️ John and that he understood what he was competing against because he himself is one of those rich people who buys really expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John watches and cares about them and His friends all design them and he’s super into them or whatever. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that he was describing a a reasonable, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John way to deal with the dichotomy between your computer watch and your non computer
⏹️ ▶️ John watch. So I don’t know. I didn’t. I didn’t. Like I said, I’m only talking about earlier in slack. I came away
⏹️ ▶️ John from this article really disliking the the writer of the article and the choices he made
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically having the same opinion Johnny as I’ve always had. I didn’t I don’t think he came off badly
⏹️ ▶️ John in this article at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my main point about the condescension of him towards the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other watch brands. So that quote you said, maybe you’d wear another watch for nostalgia or affection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big thing, right? And you covered that. Also, there was one where he says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so much respect for many of the other brands, dash Rolex Omega, because there is remarkable longevity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combined with such an obvious and clear understanding of their own unique identity. It’s rare but inspiring when you see the humble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-assurance of a company that ignores short-term market pressures to pursue their own path
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me kind of okay. So the combination of that along with the like maybe we’re a mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for nostalgia or affection the combination of those things to me says look at these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quaint little companies making these quaint little watches they’re not doing the correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing we’re doing the correct thing that the market is saying they want they’re they’re humble and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John their own because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of based on that based on an assumption that to not have an Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is inherently worse and that the reasons that you would either choose to not wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or that you as a watchmaker would choose not to make a smart watch are not out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of merit they’re not out of like like what whatever you are making as a non smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch or wearing as a non smart watch is just worse and you’re just doing it for irrational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons like like tradition or nostalgia or affection totally ignoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the possibility that maybe just maybe there are ways in which other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches are better than the Apple watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think you’ve got a
⏹️ ▶️ John chip on your watch shoulder.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think that’s absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong read on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chip on my wrist John, get it right, come on. Watch shoulder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what I think the right read on that is. He is making a favorable comparison, a backhanded
⏹️ ▶️ John favorable comparison between Apple and those watchmakers that he admires.
⏹️ ▶️ John What What he’s basically saying is, by the way, he has the most boring taste in the world. Like Apple, nudge, nudge, wink,
⏹️ ▶️ John wink, these other companies have a clear sense of identity and think
⏹️ ▶️ John long term and don’t worry about, they do the right thing and they have an identity and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all about longevity and the long term and not about what I need to do next quarter and not about chasing fads.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he didn’t mention Apple, but I think that 100% was saying, these
⏹️ ▶️ John companies I admire because these companies like us have this philosophy to
⏹️ ▶️ John be sort of long-term secure in their own identities, humble, he’s always saying
⏹️ ▶️ John his design group is humble and they came up there with the product humble, like basically everything he says and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think he says about
⏹️ ▶️ John these things he’s also saying about Apple. So I think he really does admire those companies for exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons he says because that’s the reason he admires his company because he thinks he’s doing all those same things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I guess you and I interpreted this article differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I see what you’re saying. We can ask him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But oh yeah, that would that’s likely. He
⏹️ ▶️ John went on this watch blog. Come on. We can get him. Yeah. All right. You get on that. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John grab him in the hallway. WBC. He hangs out those sessions, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These are just some quotes. I thought they were interesting with regard to the Apple Watch. Johnny said, I don’t think there was a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Specifically, it was more of a matter of optimization of opportunity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that seems to implicitly confirm what we all kind of suspected, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple said, hey, we could put something on the wrist. That’d be neat. Well, what would you use it for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, but it’d be cool, right? And so it seems like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch was one of the less opinionated products that Apple’s come out with in recent years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insofar as they didn’t really know what it was for. And if you, you know, obviously look back to the release and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the announcement, it’s pretty clear. But, and we’ve talked about that, the three of us and many others as well. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel the way I read that anyway, it was kind of a tacit confirmation that that is exactly what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think to give more context to this, I think the question was like, what problem was the Apple watch solving? Which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good question, an expected question to come from like a traditional watch site, right? Because they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, what’s wrong with watches? Why did you have to come here and make a different watch? What’s wrong with watches?
⏹️ ▶️ John How they’ve always been made? what’s wrong with all the things that we love. And Johnny, again, being a
⏹️ ▶️ John fan of those type of watches is not going to say, well, here’s what’s wrong with mechanical watches. They can’t do this. They can’t do that. The blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the here’s the problem they were solving. You have a problem with your mechanical watch, and we’re here to solve it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he says, no, that wasn’t it at all. It was, you know, in his typical obtuse way, a matter of optimisation
⏹️ ▶️ John of opportunity, which is like we’ve learned at Apple that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think he did this analogy, some player somewhere else in in the article, taking computers from being, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John he made the comparison with clocks that I thought was very clever. Like clocks used to be one big clock tower in the middle of the
⏹️ ▶️ John square of the town, right? A giant thing that, you know, no one person known, but it was like, Hey, everyone can look up in the town square
⏹️ ▶️ John and see what time it is. And then eventually you get clocks in your house, but they’re expensive and maybe you only have one clock for
⏹️ ▶️ John your entire house. Then eventually you got clocks in multiple rooms that eventually the clock is small enough that it’s on your wrist. And at
⏹️ ▶️ John each stage of downsizing new opportunities, like it’s an optimization of
⏹️ ▶️ John taking the clock tower and put it all on your wrist. It’s enabled by technology and there’s opportunities like what?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does that enable? You know, how does it change your life? How does it change society? Right. And similarly, with computers going from mainframes
⏹️ ▶️ John to personal computers, the phones down to all on your wrist, that I thought was a good analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John and it made sense. And it it tracked with me of like what he was trying to say about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we weren’t trying to solve some sort of problem that we had, like, oh, how can I live my life
⏹️ ▶️ John when I only have one clock in my house? I’ll never know what time it is. why do I need a clock on my wrist? It’s so stupid, but it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity. It’s a technological opportunity. And I don’t think they needed to say, well, what problem
⏹️ ▶️ John are you solving in my daily life by putting this clock on my wrist or the clock in my pocket to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, pocket watches or whatever. It’s like, well, you don’t quite realize until you have that thing, how it might change your
⏹️ ▶️ John life. And similarly for the Apple watch, how might it change your life to have a little computer on your wrist? I already have
⏹️ ▶️ John a little computer in my pocket. What, why don’t need my wrist? What can it do differently? And There are opportunities,
⏹️ ▶️ John and as Casey stated, maybe they thought that the world of opportunities was slightly bigger than it actually turned
⏹️ ▶️ John out to be, at least with current technology, but there were definitely opportunities and people do like their Apple Watches and it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fitness and notifications ended up being the two big opportunities that are sticky. But I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John was a fairly good answer to a fairly good question, despite the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John lead up to this interview.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not that we’re bitter. With regard to just designing new ideas, Johnny said, things are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceptionally fragile as an idea, entirely abstract. But once there’s an object between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, it’s galvanizing. And to put a little more context in this, he was saying, you know, once they build a prototype—and not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily like a functional prototype, just like an object, like think about when you’re designing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car and doing the like clay model or whatever it is—he was saying that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can just kind of talk around and around about things prior to that model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being in your hands, but the moment you see it and touch it, that’s when the conversation really starts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s not surprising, but I just thought it was interesting. With regard to material science, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the context here was talking about how there was the gold Apple Watch, now there’s the ceramic Apple Watch, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnny said, we have now worked with ceramic and with gold, and our material sciences team now understands these fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attributes and properties in a way they didn’t before. This will help shape future products in our understanding of what forms make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that this is any particularly strong clue for any particular future product, but I just thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was interesting. And again, it’s obvious, isn’t it, that, oh, now they know how to work with gold, and maybe they’ll do that again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future. Oh, now they know how to work with ceramic, and maybe they’ll do that in the future. And certainly in the lead up to, I think, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the iPhone X that we were going on and on about whether or not there would be ceramic, or some people were going on and on about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not it would be ceramic, at least in part. And so I just thought it was interesting, you know, him directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey addressing the fact that this could be in our future somewhere. You never know. GoldMacPro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirmed. Yeah, you heard it here first.
⏹️ ▶️ John This I thought was perhaps the biggest stretch of any answer that he gave.
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand what he was saying, that it’s good for a design group to learn about new materials. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John utility of learning how to work with gold is very limited. So great, so you know how to make solid
⏹️ ▶️ John gold watches. Tell me how in any way that’s going to apply to any other product in your lineup. I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll apply to gold glasses frames in 2050. I don’t know. But it’s just, it’s not particularly,
⏹️ ▶️ John ceramic maybe has more applicability. I did also like the bit that he threw in, which I think was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a brief glimpse into the difficulty of being Johnny Ive, that it was fun to do a product that you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to make in large quantities,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey talking about the edition. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, everything we make, we have to make like 10 million of them. It’s nice to be able to make this gold thing that we have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John like 20 of them, because nobody buys them, right? Obviously he wouldn’t give sales numbers, But that was that was a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John glimpse into like, it’s so much less stressful. Like, I don’t everything I do, I don’t have to think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, will this take an extra half a second during manufacturing, which multiply it out by the number we’re going to make is
⏹️ ▶️ John an extra six months on the schedule or something. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. I noticed that as well. And then my final poll quote, which I think might have been my favorite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will call this Johnny discovers the Internet. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to the writer, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hodinkee writer, whose name I’ve already forgotten, Benjamin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said, with regard to Ben’s review of one of the prior Apple watches, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now Johnny talking, that was the other thing that struck me about the feedback to your review, the vitriol from some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the commenters. It’s not surprising, but it is unnecessary. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unnecessary. Thanks, dad. It’s unnecessary to criticize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. It’s unnecessary to be a jerk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John about it. I mean, but here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing I was most surprised about is that he a read the review and be read the comments. All right, fine. You read
⏹️ ▶️ John the review. Maybe you read easy because again, maybe he reads this website because it’s apparently the website that people like expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John watches read, right? But then you read the comments. Like, don’t read the
⏹️ ▶️ John comments, Johnny. Everyone knows that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey apparently not him. I mean, he’s just like, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, it’s not surprising. so it’s not like he’s shocked that people are mean on the internet but his advice it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unnecessary oh thanks now then now that they know it’s unnecessary sure they’ll stop.
Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon. For 20% off your first order visit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MackWeldon.com enter code ATP at checkout. I can tell you a little secret.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been wearing Mack Weldon underwear for every single show that we’ve recorded in the last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I bought my first set of Mack Weldon stuff last year about last April and it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good I’ve just kept buying more. It’s and this is the first time we’re sponsoring. I did that on my own volition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally unbiased it just is that good. I’m currently wearing their socks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their t-shirt, and the underwear and next to me is their hoodie and their waffle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warm knit shirt over there in the coat closet is more of the stuff. My drawer upstairs has I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably about ten of their t-shirts and a few of their long-sleeve shirts also known as the Merlin shirts. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just great quality clothing. These are mostly focused on men’s essentials
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so So underwear, socks, t-shirts, they have sweatpants and workout gear now, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I work out, everything I wear except for my shoes is made by Mack Welder. I have the shorts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sock, everything. It’s just all so good. And they know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good. They’re so confident that it’s good. Order your first pair of underwear. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t like it, you can keep it. They don’t want it back. They’ll give you a full refund. You can still keep it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how confident they are that you’re going to like it. So they have this wonderful line of silver thread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are naturally antimicrobial. This includes at least shirts, socks, and underwear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wear these in the summertime, and honestly, you don’t stink when you wear them. It’s shocking. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what converted me, is how good they are in hot weather. And in the summertime, I’m telling you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to get their underwear and their shirts. And of course, if you don’t need the silver or you don’t want to wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome fabric for some reason, they have lots of other fabrics as well, and they’re all really nice. long sleeve stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their short sleeve stuff, their underwear, their socks. I highly suggest you try Mack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weldon. I would not tell you, they can’t pay me to say that. They can pay me to read their script. They cannot pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to tell you that I’m wearing their stuff right now, that I love it, that I’ve been wearing it for the last year. I begged them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to become a sponsor just so I could tell you how good this is. So see for yourself at MackWeldon.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can get 20% off your first order by using code ATP at checkout
Google Duplex demo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. That is macweldon.com with code ATP for 20% off your first order.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trust me on this. You got to give this a try. Thank you so much to Mac Weldon for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for keeping me comfortable and not stinking all summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google I O is happening. Or at least it’s happening as we record this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched bits It’s in pieces of the general keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I only saw a tiny bit of what I would call the State of the Union, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget exactly what they called it, but it’s basically the nerd keynote that follows the general purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keynote. I don’t know how you guys want to handle this. I guess I’ll just go in the order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of whatever, I guess, was John put together in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John show notes. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. No, don’t. You have to. You should have read
⏹️ ▶️ John did any of us watch the whole thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I watched the 14 minute verge recut of it, which I consider fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Casey, did you watch it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched most of the general public keynote, but not all of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and almost none of the other keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I watched as much of it as I could, which was maybe a quarter of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You laughed at me watching the 14 minute cut and you couldn’t even watch
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing? No, for time constraints, not like I was bailing out, for time constraints.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also had time constraints. I had a lot of napping to do today. It was more important than
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Anyway, yeah, because I had a podcast last night so I couldn’t watch last night and tonight I did as much as I could in
⏹️ ▶️ John between making dinner and coming here anyway. So I and I put a bunch of comments in here from from tweets
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff when it was going on. But I think clearly as far as everything that I’ve seen and maybe Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John with the 14 minutes supercut can tell me if I’m missing something. There is one aspect of this keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think is worth discussing in isolation. And if we have more next week after all
⏹️ ▶️ John of us have either seen more of Google I or decided that nothing there was nothing else interesting we can talk about it then but I think we should
⏹️ ▶️ John concentrate this discussion on one particular demo and we all know the demo we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about because I think it is the most interesting and it is emblematic of Google itself
⏹️ ▶️ John and the whole rest of the thing and the other things that they announced similarly tie into
⏹️ ▶️ John it um and I guess I’ll let our chief summarizer and chief describe that demo since I’m sure he’s seen it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh that is one of the things I saw and my initial reaction,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I will explain what it is momentarily, my initial reaction was my chin hitting the floor and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like in Looney Tunes, my tongue like rolling out like a red carpet across the room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a gross carpet. Yeah, right. I have since had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some different thoughts about it, but my initial reaction was, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just witnessed the future and it happened today. So what am I talking about? I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly how they set up the context, but what they were trying to say was, hey, what if you really wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a dinner reservation? You really wanted to make it for four people at a particular restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you knew you wanted it to be perhaps on a certain day, or you just knew that it needed to fit in your schedule,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your calendar. What if you didn’t actually want to call that restaurant though? Maybe they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very difficult to get a hold of, maybe you just can’t be bothered, whatever. So Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it’s the Google Assistant, which is their kind of Siri, if you will, if I’m not mistaken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will actually, or it is capable of placing a telephone call to that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restaurant on your behalf, which in and of itself, okay, fine, you know, that’s surprise, that’s not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprising. I can just imagine, you know, imagine, you know, hello, Ritzy restaurant in New York City. Hello,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is Google, you know, or something like that. But they played a recording of this conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it could not have been further from what I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sounded unnervingly like a human. And I’m not talking about Uncanny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Valley unnervingly. I’m saying we started in, you know, hello, hello, fellow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey children. We started there, walked right through the Uncanny Valley and went into,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy crap, that’s real. That almost sounds like a recording of a human being.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the most fascinating thing about it was, aside from the fact that it was conversational,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most fascinating thing about it was it actually said like, um, hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the maitre d’ or whomever on the other end of the line says, oh, you know, we don’t have any availability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 9th. With the 10th work, and then Google said, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that should be fine. You know, it inserted these synthetic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pauses and stumbles and ums and hmms in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was mind-blowing. I could not believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was watching. And there are implications, many implications of this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we could just for a moment focus on what we saw and not really unpack the meaning of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, is that a fair characterization? Like Marco, what did you think when you saw the 14-minute recap?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I too am very impressed with the technology behind this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think this is such a typical like Silicon Valley and in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google thing to do where you have amazing technical smarts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re applying them in a way that probably has some unintended consequences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least you don’t care about the consequences, whether you intend them or not, and is also kind of creepy and a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unsettling. You know, it’s so stereotypically Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great AI, great big data service, kind of creepy, and not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the human problems here. There’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdness about this. So one big thing is, like, you know, some people have pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re basically doing is turning the workers at restaurants and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into unpaid API endpoints. You know, so that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John little bit weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is like you know like you know I like when I get pizza my pizza guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has like two iPads at the register that are both running like different apps for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different like menu ordering services and pickup services and everything that he has to run like his side of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like you look in like any restaurant these days like they’re busy. They have to be dealing with all these online ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems, all these apps and everything in addition to people actually calling on the phone and people coming into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the place. The last thing they need is for robo calls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that pretend not to be robo calls, which is a big problem to be calling them and making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these like kind of human like, but a little bit off requests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via voice and kind of taking up their time the phone like it’s just it’s kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a number of levels. It does seem like Google is taking advantage of the people on the other end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that and these are people who don’t have time to deal with BS from Google like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the user of this couldn’t be bothered to not pick up the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re probably already holding the phone, but to tap a different spot on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone to make the phone call to actually just be human for two seconds and talk to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I get we don’t like making phone calls. I get that. I don’t like making phone calls either,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would feel way worse about initiating one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, on the back end on my behalf, than I would about actually placing that phone call. It’s just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s dehumanizing to the people on the other end. It’s wasteful of their time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s a little bit insulting to try to hide the fact that you are a bot calling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them like I think that what they should do if they’re going to do this at all and I’m not sure they should,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they’re going to do this at all, they should begin the call with you know a quick way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of basically saying what’s going on to be say basically saying hi this is the Google assistant calling on behalf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of John Syracuse. Do you have a reservation for this day like make it very clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stop with the fake um and like that all All that is doing is trying to trick people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is not in good faith. That is trying to take advantage of people and try to trick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them into playing into your API without being willing participants of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and that’s just that’s just kind of sleazy. I just I don’t like that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they did it the the robotic way like where they actually just say what it is and they’re they’re up front about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that at least is you know it’s not trying to trick anybody. It is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasteful people’s time and I still would feel bad about initiating that call, but I at least wouldn’t feel like I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I don’t know just like you had deceiving people. It’s just it’s just a weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know there’s there’s another feature that I think one of you wants to bring up about calling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about holiday hours where apparently like on holidays where hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be different. They will call the the place like once in the morning to see what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours are and then they’ll just cash those results so that allegedly it saves them from all these phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calls all day. What if they miss that call? What if they misinterpret
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the results from that call? When you think about the ramifications of before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the person on the other end of the phone, you know, said the wrong thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once in the morning to one person, it affected one potential customer. Now if you slip up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say the wrong thing once in the morning, it could affect all your customers that day who would have come there from search. There are ramifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to these kinds of things that really just seem not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really that good for the local businesses that are on the other side of this. And it’s all all of this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create minor conveniences for lazy tech dudes who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t not just pick up the phone because the phone’s already in their hand, but can’t literally push one button on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tap that phone number and call them instead. And I think that I think this is a step too far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when it involves deception of the person on the other end and potentially wasting their time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I want to talk about the technology behind this because I think that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you know Casey’s first impression was based on the the dazzling tech and that’s how I
⏹️ ▶️ John think about these things and think about how how they could find themselves in a position where they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John this technology in this particular way. But first you have to talk about the tech. Um, and the tech they’re showing
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s obviously, uh, you know, speech to text because
⏹️ ▶️ John the person on the other end of the phone call says things and Google assistant has to figure out what it is they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. So it’s going to convert their speech into text. Then it has to have some understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John of what it is that they said. And then it also has to have some understanding of what its mission is. I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to try to get a reservation for this time for this many people, right? And the parameters
⏹️ ▶️ John of that mission, uh, you know, all the different things like what if nothing’s available?
⏹️ ▶️ John What if they don’t have, they have a particular call where they couldn’t reserve a table for that many people like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so it has to have that mission and has to understand what the person says. And then then it has to be able to engage in a conversation, a back
⏹️ ▶️ John and forth of saying, you said this. Now I say this and keeping the state of it all in
⏹️ ▶️ John its mind, you know sort of semantic analysis of when when you say that that you
⏹️ ▶️ John when you make that sound thing on the other end of the phone it means these words and these words mean this
⏹️ ▶️ John actual you know message or meaning and that applies to what we’ve said in the past in this way
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the that’s the tech that they’re trying to show there and researching
⏹️ ▶️ John and developing that tech I think is really important a really important area of research
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you can do that that better than we currently
⏹️ ▶️ John can by some appreciable degree. Many interesting opportunities
⏹️ ▶️ John come up. Like if I if I told you that even if it’s for a very narrow domain, like making an appointment or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you know, pick it, pick the narrow domain you’re choosing. If I told you I could get a computer to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning behind things that you say and to engage you in a conversation to to accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ John a goal. If you’ve been listening to me talk about cylinders in the show for a long time. It’s been my
⏹️ ▶️ John push on the past several months worth of shows when we were talking about HomePod and everything that I want to engage
⏹️ ▶️ John my cylinder in a conversation and work towards a goal, right? It’s the same exact tech.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only the difference here is I’m initiating the conversation. I know I’m talking to a cylinder because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in my own house and it’s sitting right there. There’s no deception involved, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I would find that interaction better than having to
⏹️ ▶️ John initiate a series of commands or make a macro for myself or no particular syntax
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And even just within the realm of the things that a cylinder is supposed to already do to
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to have the extra smarts on display here to understand nuances of speech
⏹️ ▶️ John and to to understand like the overall mission of what I’m trying to accomplish and to help me refine
⏹️ ▶️ John it and narrow it and to be helpful. That technology is incredibly important and
⏹️ ▶️ John should be developed. And so I applaud Google for doing that. This
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the places where this technology could be applied, I would not have even predicted that this would be where they
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have a thing called Google Assistant. This is just like this. They’re a cylinder in my house with Google Assistant on it. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have phones like isn’t that the first most obvious application of that anyway, but setting
⏹️ ▶️ John that aside, second aspect related to the application that they that they are showing here,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is all we’re gonna make a phone call for you for you behind the scenes, which, by the way, you don’t get to hear this phone call. You just talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John the assistant and it says, Okay, I’ll make that reservation for you. And then you just wait and wait and wait. And in the background, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John having a phone call that you don’t get to hear and don’t participate in any way. Right. And then it comes back to you and says, Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John totally made that reservation for you. in that particular application
⏹️ ▶️ John of this technology, the pitch is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you don’t have to be involved with this. Don’t worry about the details, but Google system will handle it. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that Marco was talking about, you know, how, uh, how receptive it is and how
⏹️ ▶️ John disrespectful it is to the person that they ran and how it like how it isn’t that hard to think of a much more
⏹️ ▶️ John respectful way to do this, like by pre announcing yourself and so on and so forth. But that’s not what they chose to do, that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really leaning on the fact that they can, you know, fake you out by pretending to be human, which by the way, I think, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there still are in the uncanny valley. Uh, you can, you can tell these things are not quite human, just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, there’s, there’s still in the uncanny valley. It’s not totally going to, it’s way better than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even, even in the can demo they did it like the way when, when they, when it asked for noon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it said, you know, we don’t have anything and like the way, the way that the assistant like re asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you have anything between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. No one talks like that. This is your demo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is your canned demo. It’s obviously like almost any response you get from a human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being has a pretty high chance of not being of being some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like slightly exceptional condition or things that require more explanation that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Google Assistant will respond in some way that makes it clear like either this is a really weird person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this is not a person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s something seems very unlike a person that leads me to my next point about this tech
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same point I made about self-driving cars in the past and it also
⏹️ ▶️ John You know is related to the deception angle here This thing no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how good it is no matter how long it’s in beta It’s going to fall over
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot and when it does because it’s a really hard problem like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s It’s you you can you will be trivially easy to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John stump this thing and to have it start saying nonsensical computery things that are not related to what you
⏹️ ▶️ John say that are to the point where the person would hang up on it right because everyone sees this
⏹️ ▶️ John down it’s like oh it’s how 9000 were there it’s like you are not there like that last 10% just
⏹️ ▶️ John like self-driving cars that level five automation right that last little bit is that’s a mountain that’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than you think it is right and so even though it seems like we’re right around the corner and it’s like oh more is love will be there in two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s way harder than you think. And so if you start off this conversation with the deception, like if that’s your goal,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be 100 times worse when the thing falls on its face and it will fall on its face
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. Uh, and from, from the businesses perspective, obviously, ideally
⏹️ ▶️ John they would all have actual API, so not humans, but if they don’t want to do that from the businesses perspective, they want
⏹️ ▶️ John your business, they want this reservation. If you pre announced and said, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Google assistant, I’m a computer acting on behalf of a person, blah, blah, blah. After the first four
⏹️ ▶️ John or five calls of that type, the person on the other end would know how to most efficiently deal with the stupid computer
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to get the reservation because they want the reservation. They want the money, right? It’s the whole reason people
⏹️ ▶️ John set up like with all these apps and everything, right? And maybe it will motivate them to get on one of these apps and I have to deal with these stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John computer phone calls. But they’ll you know, it’s better than not getting a reservation at all, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if the thing’s gonna fall over, like like like phone trees, like when we you know when you call
⏹️ ▶️ John the support thing we all know their phone trees and we all know their their various failure modes by this point
⏹️ ▶️ John and we know how to navigate them efficiently I would much rather have that than something that tries to fool me into
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking it’s human but then like goes berserk and now I have to go I waste all this time talking to you like a human
⏹️ ▶️ John when I should have just been playing you like a video game to get to the point where we we make the reservation
⏹️ ▶️ John like let’s just let me you know a text adventure all over again. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t even if people see this and they think this is a great feature
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has important applicability in my life is that’s another point in this that some of the comments I
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled out here like there are places where this exact feature is actually really important for people who literally can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make that reservation themselves and do want to appear as human as possible, right? There’s an accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John angle to this. But even in those situations, even in the most optimistic scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John my advice to anyone watching this is do not expect this to work even as well as it did in
⏹️ ▶️ John that demos all the time because it won’t like it will. It will work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it doesn’t always work with humans. Sometimes it’s difficult for a human to make a reservation. Sometimes you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hear anything in the restaurant. Sometimes people are ornery. Sometimes they hang up on you. Sometimes you lose your cell signal, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John the success rate of this thing is going to be way lower than people think it does. We are a long
⏹️ ▶️ John way off from even with limited domain, we are a long way off from basically
⏹️ ▶️ John from passing the Turing test. Now it doesn’t mean your reservation is not going to be a success because once the other person on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other end figures out that it’s a computer, they’ll play the little game and they’ll get the reservation because they want the sale, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But don’t get starry-eyed about how amazing. I mean, it is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John leap from anything that we may have seen before, but it is still so far from the whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the equivalent of level five self-driving automation is for having a conversation with
⏹️ ▶️ John a human even within a limited domain because humans are inscrutable and it’s really difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John you just can’t account for everything that they’re going to say and do you can’t account for all the nuances you just it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they work at all is because when the computer acts like a like a pig-headed computer the
⏹️ ▶️ John person eventually best case reverts to thinking this is just a pig-headed person who’s not listening to
⏹️ ▶️ John what I say, and like they’re just they just have a one track mind and they just want to make this reservation and
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t understand what I said back to them because they’re just not paying attention or maybe they’re driving
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and then you just roll their eyes like that’s the best case scenario. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when they actually launched us I can’t wait to see all of the the conversations that
⏹️ ▶️ John people managed to get this thing into where it just goes completely off the rails because it’s a hard problem and that’s why we’re also impressed
⏹️ ▶️ John by it’s such a hard problem. It’s like I didn’t even you know we were this far along. Surely we’re within striking distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think that we are not within striking distance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and you can even just picture, like, you know, what if the person on the other end has follow-up questions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, you want a reservation? Where? What part of the restaurant? It’s simply like that. Or like, oh, do you want a table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside or inside? You know, or like, you’re ordering a pizza. Oh, do you want a medium or a large?
⏹️ ▶️ John The most misguided one was when he’s, you know, obviously, it’s forward-looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pichai was the person doing the thing, I think. I don’t know. Anyway, the presenter said, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we don’t have a lot of time. So maybe like your your kid is sick And you need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a doctor’s reser a doctor’s appointment for them Like have you ever made a doctor’s appointment for a
⏹️ ▶️ John sick kid? Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John involves a lot of questions about what’s wrong with your kid And did you take their temperature and how
⏹️ ▶️ John are they feeling and when’s the last time they threw up and you know, but like No computer is
⏹️ ▶️ John for I help I get on that call and I feel like I have to have like like, information ready,
⏹️ ▶️ John like to be like, when’s the last time they came in? When’s this? But you know, like, there is no way I would let a computer make
⏹️ ▶️ John that call. I barely think I myself am competent to make that call, right? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I would let them make the call to the school to tell them that they’re not going to be in that day. But really, the schools just have a website where you can click something
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s stupid. But like, that was that was the wrong example. Ordering
⏹️ ▶️ John food, making a reservation, something with a business transaction where the person on the other end is motivated to deal with my crap,
⏹️ ▶️ John computerized crap or otherwise because I’m sure those people deal with people crap all the time to people being rude
⏹️ ▶️ John when they make reservations just generally being inscrutable right they’re motivated at least to do that but like
⏹️ ▶️ John my doctor is not motivated to listen to my computer my doctor like the whoever answers the desk
⏹️ ▶️ John has a ton of questions about my kid very specific questions to determine whether you should
⏹️ ▶️ John even come in oh we don’t take pink guy in the office you should do this and that and what do you want to do and what pharmacy is near like
⏹️ ▶️ John no way a computer can handle that so I think they’re there
⏹️ ▶️ John I hesitate to say the heart is in the right place I actually think it is I think the heart is in the right place in terms of doing this research
⏹️ ▶️ John and and having the overall goal of trying to help people but the way they’re going about it
⏹️ ▶️ John baffles me because like I said they have they have a cylinder that they sell you that I would love to talk to in this way
⏹️ ▶️ John they would not involve deception at all and if my cylinder could talk to me like this within the limited domain
⏹️ ▶️ John of music appointments or whatever, it would be an amazing advance of how I talked over how I talked to my cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John day. But they didn’t demo that. They demoed it making phone calls, though, which just boggles my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is, in some my eyes, a very good example of just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we can doesn’t mean we should, which is basically the summary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all of Silicon Valley, in my personal opinion. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so obvious. After I saw the technology, which again, I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stress enough, I think the technology is amazing. And like you said, which is what I was going to bring up, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, there’s an accessibility angle wherein I think this is more reasonable. Like if I am mute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I literally cannot talk on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or if you have a speech impediment, or if you have, say, like maybe you have to call a place where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t speak their language very well, or you have a thick accent that’s sometimes misunderstood a lot. Like there’s lots of accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons for this kind of technology. But sheer laziness
⏹️ ▶️ John is not it. But the application would be different there. You’d be speaking through it. You would like, you would want to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in on the conversation. In other words, you wouldn’t want it to go off and do it completely on its own. You would want to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in most situations where someone has a synthetic voice speaking for them, they don’t want to leave the room when it’s happening. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if they can be there and see your face or hear you or hear the other end of the conversation monitor it
⏹️ ▶️ John or otherwise nudge it in the right direction. Like, they want to be some kind of participant and not just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, set it sail and just let the computer do what it’s going to do. Like, and getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the cases like you just because you can doesn’t mean you should like, it’s, it’s more subtle than that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they can and should develop this technology. But it’s exactly it’s exactly how you choose
⏹️ ▶️ John to apply it. And the subtle difference between what they demoed and talking to your cylinder, which seemed like it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the same thing. It’s a human talking to a computer having this conversation but the difference like the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John is subtle and it’s telling that this is how they chose to show us off maybe because it’s seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ John the most impressive but it is the the most ill-conceived um
⏹️ ▶️ John and like and and i don’t even think like i say it’s ill-conceived just because of the world we live in now
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be as many have pointed out that like you know once this genie’s out of the bottle
⏹️ ▶️ John we will deal with it the same way we deal with those stupid phone trees which we could have had the same exact conversation about because they they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of the same problems. Disrespectful of the caller. Sometimes you get tricked into thinking it’s human,
⏹️ ▶️ John but eventually we just all get used to it. We get used to the disrespect. We all learn to very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up on the cues of whether this is a pre recorded human’s voice or not, right? Despite how they
⏹️ ▶️ John try to fool us, and I do try to fool you on those stupid phone trees. Sometimes we just all get used to it and we accept it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I fully expected this. This turns out to be popular. This could totally happen with that technology as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I still maintain that if you have this technology and are advancing it, this is not the
⏹️ ▶️ John most bang for your buck. There are better ways to apply this technology that will be more useful
⏹️ ▶️ John and more helpful to more people than this specific detailed implementation even for
⏹️ ▶️ John the accessibility angle. I most people would want to probably identify themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John as I’m speaking through this thing, right? Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe I’m wrong with I don’t know. But it seems like that
⏹️ ▶️ John when things fall apart, you’d want there to be some kind of explanation. Like if you see someone in person
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re using an assistive device to talk to you understand what the deal is and you can accommodate that, right? But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John think you’re just talking to a regular person, don’t realize that someone who has to use this to communicate with you
⏹️ ▶️ John give, you know, have a some sort of allowance that I think that would help as well. So you know, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even gonna go so far as to say that this is a way this technology should never be used.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to believe that this is a way this technology will be used that when we’re all at it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John so boring that no one will even talk about it anymore. But right here and now I’m gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ John like there are richer veins to be mined than this. Can you imagine if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri making these calls? It’d be like, hi, can I have an appointment between 10 and noon? And the other person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, sure, I have one at 10. And Siri would be like, what do you want to convert 10 to? Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found this on the internet for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so tough because I can’t stress enough, my, my initial reaction was so overwhelmingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positive. But then the moment I really started thinking about this, I was like, Oh, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is kind of creepy. And I don’t know, I, I, maybe it’s just me, but I feel like this is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Silicon Valley in a nutshell. Like it’s a bunch of, it’s a bunch of people, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dudes, probably entitled dudes, just thinking, you know what, I really just don’t want to be bothered making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reservation. Like I’m, I’m too good for that. My time is too valuable. So what can I do? I can use the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of human technology to fake something that sounds like a human to make that reservation
⏹️ ▶️ John I could see where you’d come away with that on this, but I really think that there is actually a little kernel of the
⏹️ ▶️ John 70s era Silicon Valley idealism in this as well, perhaps a naive idealism, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John also part of it. But you know, it was phrased as saving you time and you can say, OK, it’s got to save you
⏹️ ▶️ John time because you’re so important. Your time is so valuable because you’re, you know, a rich tech nerd. But first
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, this technology is not exclusively available to rich people. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Android is very democratizing technology. It’s available on cheapo phones everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of it happens on the servers. You don’t need to have an expensive device. And the way it was framed for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part was we’re trying to help people with their lives. People have
⏹️ ▶️ John challenges in their lives. Everybody does. And we want to help them
⏹️ ▶️ John solve the problems they have in their life. this is, you know, the biggest problem or the way people would
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be solved. That was the stated motivation. Andy and I had very optimistic take on this when he was
⏹️ ▶️ John tweeting it in real time. And he kept coming back to the message that Google was
⏹️ ▶️ John sending out throughout the presentation. Not directly most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but more or less indirectly contrasting themselves with Facebook. Basically, this is Andy
⏹️ ▶️ John interpreting what they’re saying. they mean Google are trying to say Facebook uses its power
⏹️ ▶️ John to abuse your privacy and exploit you and undermine institutions. We use our power. We mean Google to help
⏹️ ▶️ John you and improve your life. And that was the message. Use Google products because you
⏹️ ▶️ John have challenges in your lives and Google products will help you overcome them. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, I see the elite angle on there, but I think the, the populist
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of techno optimism of we take amazing technology, it available
⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody for free or cheap and it helps them with their lives is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of 70s Silicon Valley bicycle for the mind personal computer on every desk utopian
⏹️ ▶️ John philosophy again perhaps naive but I think like I said the heart is in the right place for this type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and they you know there are other aspects of the presentation I’ll probably talk about next week like the digital well-being
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff um what was the other thing like the well the developing
⏹️ ▶️ John a chromebooks the whole chromebook angle too why they even do that. They have these cheapo computers like there’s I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I mostly give Google the benefit of the doubt on this front, especially because, uh, well, I was gonna say,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially because it’s, it’s, it is less clearly tied to advertising. It’s still tied
⏹️ ▶️ John to commerce, right? But it’s less clearly tied to this is a way for us to show you more ads,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I mean, it’s a way to gather more information about you so they can show you more ads. But anyway, I really believe that people working on this project
⏹️ ▶️ John think that the technology they’re developing, the ability of a computer to understand and negate it in conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little limited problem domain can help humanity. I believe it can help humanity,
⏹️ ▶️ John just that I’m not sure they’ve figured out quite how yet.
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. Finally, Wi-Fi that works. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all know that one Wi-Fi router does not cover most places very well because there’s things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like walls that no matter how many antennas you put on your router, there’s going to be like small dead zones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rooms where it doesn’t reach or the very edge of your yard where you have a smart bulb that you really want it to reach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it just doesn’t. What you need is a distributed system that broadcasts Wi-Fi from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple physical points in a big mesh. Now this is what schools and businesses and things have used for years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they have these, you know, expensive and hard to administer enterprise stuff. Eero brings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enterprise grade hardware and features to consumers in an incredibly easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use package. It’s the easiest setup I’ve ever seen of any router, let alone a mesh system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s incredibly easy. You launch the Eero app, it sets you through the whole thing. You start out with the Eero base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco station. You connect that the same way you can take the router, you connect it to your internet connection. you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug in the Eero beacons that you have the additional Eero beacons and these are going to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that base station and broadcast a nice mesh of Wi-Fi all around your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The app will help you place the beacons in effective locations, you can measure their speed to make sure you’re putting them places where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re actually going to work and not like stepping on each other’s toes or anything and your experience is seamless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You walk around your house you’re gonna you only see one network and it just covers everything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful and again I can’t stress how easy it is to use. If you need any help they do have great support as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I have a feeling you won’t need it. So see for yourself how easy Eero is. I’ve never seen an easier system to set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for Wi-Fi and it works really well. For free overnight shipping to the US and Canada
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visit Eero.com, select overnight shipping and then enter promo code ATP to make that shipping.
20 years of USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. Once again, visit Eero.com. That’s E-E-R-O.com. And at checkout, select
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overnight shipping, then enter promo code ATP to make it free to the US or Canada. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to Eero for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this past week was the 20th anniversary of the original iMac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of our friends in the Apple and writing world have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given wonderful retrospectives and lots of our podcasting friends have had lots of great talks about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When the iMac came out in 1998 right yeah I was still a PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person. I mostly ignored it like I ignored almost everything Apple did back then because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a PC person. But I do want to talk about one part of the iMac that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did have a lot to do with the PC world because we shared it with them. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have retrospective instead of instead about the iMac, my retrospective is about USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and quite how much USB changed the world. Back then, it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was like this new port and it was hyped and it was you know everything that any new technology product got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then, you know, standard level of hype, but I didn’t fully realize like until a few years in quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how how much USB changed things. For one, it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very inexpensive standard on all sides. It was inexpensive to host in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer side, It was inexpensive to make USB devices. The logic on devices was very simplistic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just very cheap and simple to implement. This is why it beat FireWire at pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. This is why it beat Thunderbolt at pretty much everything and still does. USB is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap to implement. It also uses really cheap simple cables and connectors. USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables were standardized a long time ago and so even as the user when you’re buying USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, it’s generally not only does it cost less to to buy up front but also like you probably already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a cable for it. So for things that don’t come with cables you don’t usually have to buy one. You usually have them and you can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB cables around and use them with lots of different devices over time. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very inexpensive on all sides and that benefits pretty much everybody. Also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to other things at the time you know when USB was introduced in the late 90s the competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the PC side were basically serial ports, ports, parallel ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and scuzzy and and scuzzy was very rare on PCs like it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You see it like on high-end workstations and servers. I know Max used a little bit more, but on PC most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no PC sold to consumers had scuzzy cards. You could buy one, but it was just it would they were expensive and scuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was you know it was like a big ribbon cable interface. It was just a big parallel thing. It was a big pain in the butt. You had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like scuzzy terminators on the end of the scuzzy chain. It was just a big pain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came and replaced all of that on the PC side with these small connectors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with small thin cables the cables could be way longer they could be up to 15 feet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long they were widely available pretty much everywhere you can get them in lots of different lanes different colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted USB also introduced I think for the first time in the PC side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bus powered devices keyboards might have their own power to the PS2 port but like other low-powered devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could get get their power from the port so they wouldn’t need their own power supplies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is again like another massive innovation in usb and and I mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of innovations in usb. This is why I was thinking about this on my dog walk yesterday. Like I was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enumerating my head like all the all the things that usb changed for the first time. It’s a huge list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So another another big thing just the sheer number of ports you could have on a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know until recently, usb ports were quite plentiful. You know, like couldn’t help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Could you know of course not most pcs sold back then had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two serial ports and one parallel port and two ps2 ports. Those are keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mouse, but then almost all your peripherals had to be a serial port, which only two of or the parallel port,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was usually your printer and that’s it. Otherwise, if you want to add on more than that, you usually had to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an expansion card and stick into one of your card slots with USB you could have more ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually you know the very first USB controllers came with two ports and fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon in PC history for became standard and now there’s even way more than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then also huge game changer hubs to add more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports this was not possible with serial ports or parallel ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and scuzzy could do like a chain up to a certain amount, but it was a pain and anyway again that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pretty much unheard of in consumer PCs. There was never there was no such thing as a serial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port hub or a parallel port hub that could multiply your parallel port into more more parallel ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again adding more ports meant adding expansion cards or just not having more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. So that was another massive change then on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top of that was the whole family of things that went into what was called at the time breathlessly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we made fun of Microsoft relentlessly for how bad plug and play was in windows ninety five and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the fact is there is a number of things about USB that changed everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about peripheral. So number one you could connect and disconnect things without turning off the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer or having to reboot to get them to start working. This was huge like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to install a new you know device on one of your other ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times you have to reboot or turn the computer physically off to do it either safely or in a way that worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously also if you’re putting in cards then you have to turn the computer all the way off and but leave it put in so it’s grounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody ever did that but anyway that was a huge huge pain right there solved by actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot plugging and unplugging things then the way devices would communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the computer before USB there really wasn’t a way for devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to self identify with the computer the way the architecture worked would be like you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install a sound card and the sound card would have jumpers or dip switches on it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would pre configure it like it would hard configure it to be addressable by a certain i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco o address and certain interrupt certain irq and dmas remember all this oh yeah when you would set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up your sound card in your game that you were playing or whatever you would have to tell the game okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a SoundBlaster 16 it’s at IO address 220 IRQ 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DMA 1 and you had to make sure that was right according to the jumpers on the card because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it wasn’t it just wouldn’t work right there was no way for your card to tell the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a SoundBlaster 16 I’m an audio device here’s how you talk to me here’s where I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB brought all of that in one standard in addition to you know the nice cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ports and hubs and everything it brought device self identification and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto configuring of things like how to address it that changed so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many things it made so many things better and then combined with that the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive change with USB is that it introduced something called standard class compliant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profiles so this includes we still hear these terms sometimes today HID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB audio and USB mass storage profiles. So what this means is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could for the first time I think you could make like a standard USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound card and you could plug it into a computer the computer would see it because of plug-and-play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would know how to address it and you could make it so that it required no drivers at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it could it would just conform to the USB audio class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compliance standard same thing you could do the same thing with keyboards mice gamepads joysticks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then eventually mass storage hard drives SD card stuff like that like all anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there was this whole class network cards video capture devices all of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be driverless that people could sell a you know a device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever that you didn’t have to install their terrible driver on I can’t tell you how much hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had to either give up using or that never worked right at all because of random problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their drivers in the PC world like or that or they wouldn’t update their driver for Windows 98 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever like it was it was always a pain and so the more you could do without drivers better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB brought that world before USB you had to do pretty much everything with custom drivers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with USB you had standard class-compliant profiles that also meant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Macs and Linux PCs were usually able to use them too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we still see those advantages today because when you have USB standard-class compliant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they also for instance work on iOS devices through the camera connection kit with no configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no drivers nothing like that all of this was back like in 1998 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of what made the iMac possible and what made it great and what made it work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really USB. And you know, we complain a lot about the current standards and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like USB still has all these things and all of that started back then. So all of our friends are talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how the iMac changed everything for Apple and that’s great. I think they’re right, but I wasn’t there for that part. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in the PC world and what we saw was that USB changed everything
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a couple minor corrections for Marco in the PC world. It’s the old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. The I agree with what you said, but, uh, scuzzy on the Mac scuzzy was everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the early days of the Mac, it wasn’t just like a, a, a niche feature that was on just the high end Max. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Cause Max were expensive. Law. Yeah, that’s true. Um, uh, USB,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, was part of a transition that started
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly before USB when the, the IO chips and, and basically the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of compute and, uh, uh, went down to the point where there was a realization
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could get less expensive and faster I. O. By having,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, by doing a very fast serial interface than a parallel one like scuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ John was kind of the culmination of like, look, we need lots of data and we needed to go fast. So let’s send it all at once in parallel down
⏹️ ▶️ John these gigantic cables and be really careful with electrical interference, induced terminators and blah, blah, blah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, because that was the way, you know, it’s kind of like, you know, we need we need more traffic on this road. Let’s they had more
⏹️ ▶️ John lanes, right? And then the analogy falls down here with the cars thing. But imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John you say, no, instead of having a bunch of lanes with lots of cars in them, let’s just have one
⏹️ ▶️ John lane and send the cars at the speed of light and have something that can somehow deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John shoving the cars quickly into this little tiny string straw. So the price of compute went to the point where they realized serial
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces were the future, not parallel interfaces. We’d basically taken parallel interfaces as far as they could go. We
⏹️ ▶️ John realized how problematic they were. They’re just finicky and big.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I had SCSI cables that were like the thickness of like a hot dog. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John huge, huge non-bending cables that just very, very delicate,
⏹️ ▶️ John very finicky, very capable. And you could daisy chain them, which was interesting, but serial
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces were the future. And on that front, what Apple had for a long time before USB
⏹️ ▶️ John came along, which had a lot of the benefits that you cited, was Apple Desktop Bus. ADB was used to
⏹️ ▶️ John connect essentially the keyboard and mouse. And they had serial ports that had a similar looking connector for printers and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that worked more like you would expect a PC serial port to do. But keyboard and mice,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there were ever any ADB hubs, although I suppose there could have been. But the keyboard had an
⏹️ ▶️ John ADB port on one side that you would connect to the computer, and you could connect your mouse to a port
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other side of the keyboard, which should look familiar to anybody who has a USB keyboard with two USB
⏹️ ▶️ John ports on it where you connect your wired mouse to the keyboard if you still have a wired mouse back in the day, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You could plug and unplug ADB peripherals while the computer was on and sparks did not fly and the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John understood what you were doing and whatever you plugged in your computer would find it and configure it. Obviously it’s Apple desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John bus, it’s proprietary, it’s not an industry standard. Of course Apple could do this because they understood where all the peripherals came from
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had their own standards for how they identified themselves. And ADB
⏹️ ▶️ John was a serial bus mostly because you know it was for low bandwidth things and they didn’t have to make it parallel right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But those benefits, a lot of the benefits of the usability
⏹️ ▶️ John of USB and the convenience of it, Apple had been enjoying since the Mac SE and the Mac 2
⏹️ ▶️ John or whenever ADB was introduced. I think that’s when they both came out. When
⏹️ ▶️ John USB came along, it seemed like the next logical step, because it’s a serial interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we can make serial interfaces fast and cheap. The cables are thin and not giant,
⏹️ ▶️ John thick, disgusting, scuzzy things. The connectors were, despite all our complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John about the externally symmetrical and internally asymmetrical, incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-A connectors, they definitely looked more modern than ADB, because ADB had actual little
⏹️ ▶️ John pins inside it. It was from the old era of pins going into little holes in the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of your thing with a metal sheath around it. And Apple did a pretty good job trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so you understood the orientation, because the connector itself was round, but it only went in one way. you had
⏹️ ▶️ John to line the pins up, so they made the actual casing of them flat on one side, so you
⏹️ ▶️ John always knew the flat side went up, and that’s how you could figure out how to plug them in, but it was a little bit fidgety. But anyway, USB
⏹️ ▶️ John was an upgrade in that regard. And you mentioned FireWire before, and how
⏹️ ▶️ John USB was more popular than FireWire. FireWire was another one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces that came out of the idea that we can make really fast serial interfaces and give up on parallel.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was the high-end one. It was like, how do we replace the highest of the high bandwidth stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace SCSI with something that has way more bandwidth than USB and that has guarantees
⏹️ ▶️ John about timing and that can be chained together and that you can have high bandwidth without
⏹️ ▶️ John involving the then anemic CPU on the computer, which is how USB saved a lot of money, by having the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU do a lot of the work and not having to put those smarts in the interface chips, which made
⏹️ ▶️ John the interface chips cheaper on both the host device and the actual peripheral, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as if Firewire quote unquote lost to USB. It was clearly aimed at a different segment,
⏹️ ▶️ John the less populous segment, the high-end segment. You know, it ended up being used for digital video
⏹️ ▶️ John on camcorders and stuff like that. And you know, it lasted a pretty long time, all things considered, because it was very expensive, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, there was never gonna be a Firewire mouse. Let’s put it that way, it’s nonsensical, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s part of the same family of serial over parallel. And so, and finally on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac front, Yeah, like, as you know, the iMac, the most important thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about the iMac was not the fact that it, you know, that it came with USB,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say like, but lots of other podcasts have talked about the more important aspects of it. That’s what I thought we were going to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about here. But now we’re out of time. So I’m not going to dwell on it any longer. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it, you know, not that it had USB, but as
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason’s now pointed out, as the Macrochrome, that it dropped all the other ports that are on Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the, in terms of ports, the most shocking factor about
⏹️ ▶️ John it for an Apple user because we had peripherals, we had ADB peripherals,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the benefits of USB over ADB, especially like when
⏹️ ▶️ John USB is first coming on the scene, it’s like, what does this do that my ADB stuff doesn’t do? I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already got an ADB trackpad, an ADB extended keyboard, an ADB mouse, like, why do I need
⏹️ ▶️ John this new interface? I can’t use any peripherals. What the hell happened to my SCSI port? I have stacks and stacks of SCSI hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drives here. I have a SCSI RAID. How do I connect these to my iMac? This thing is useless, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t connect my printer to it. My printer’s not USB. Who ever heard of a USB printer? I have a serial printer and it
⏹️ ▶️ John got plugged into the serial port, the same serial port that’s been on my Mac since, you know, 1986, right? I can’t plug
⏹️ ▶️ John this in anywhere. How the hell do I print? And then of course the no floppy drive thing or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as a Mac user, as Jason pointed out, the iMac was met with some hostility by people who
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch of peripherals that they can’t plug in. And unlike our current USB-C situation, there was not
⏹️ ▶️ John any real hope of dongles. There was ADB USB dongles, which I think Gruber is still using to use his
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Extended 2 keyboard, right? But in general, it’s not as if you bought a dongle for your
⏹️ ▶️ John style writer and just used it for years and years after that. It’s like, no, everyone got USB printers. Like what happened is USB slipped
⏹️ ▶️ John through the whole industry for the reasons Margo stated. And we just all got new stuff. And we said, Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is better because instead of having a SCSI port and two serial ports and a TV ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I just have USB and then firewire for the for the expensive high bandwidth stuff. And that was
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And that was the future. And like, I think this is like a positive version of this, of
⏹️ ▶️ John what the, of the USBC story where there’s a lot of parallels and they seem very similar, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sure taking a lot longer than did with USB for the USBC revolution to
⏹️ ▶️ John come along and sweep us all away and we’re still kind of grumbling about dongles and kind of wishing we had some of our other ports back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also just it says quite a lot about just how groundbreaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forward-looking USB was that now 20 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later you can take a USB device that was released 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago for USB 1.1 and plug it in to to an iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without a dongle and it’ll probably like if it still works at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will work on that computer. That’s that’s my like nothing else in computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has lasted as long as USB has it’s incredible. I’ll be j
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah well yeah that’s not really used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anymore. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you wish you wish it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used well yeah. I know projectors and stuff, but yeah like most like most people in their house are not using VGA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that’s it’s all HDMI and DVI and stuff even DVI is
⏹️ ▶️ John gone I’m amazed at the number of people take like their you know their retina max and
⏹️ ▶️ John plug them into a series of dongles that culminate in a VGA port so they can project all
⏹️ ▶️ John time at work and I’m just like just that is not the you are not getting the maximum value for your
⏹️ ▶️ John money out of that computer.
Sponsor: Casper (code atp100)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Casper and the new Wave mattress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For $100 off your Wave purchase visit casper.com slash ATP 100 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use promo code ATP 100. Terms and conditions apply. The Wave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most innovative mattress from the sleep experts at Casper. It is the first mattress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its kind to relieve pressure at 36 different points so you can feel relaxed in ways you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never thought possible. The Wave has advanced temperature railing technology to help you sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool and comfortable without overheating. Only the Wave has five layers of superior foam,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including a cushioning top layer for maximum comfort. The Wave is Casper’s biggest breakthrough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in sleep technology for exceptional comfort and deep restorative sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It supports you in all the right places, whether you’re a back, stomach, or side sleeper. The Casper Wave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives you the support and relief you need for a good night’s sleep. Thanks to its patent-pending contouring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, it adjusts to your body and its natural curves. And it’s designed to stay sturdy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep its original form for years to come, no matter how much time you spend on it. All of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an incredible value compared to similar high-end mattresses on the market. Experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casper’s most innovative mattress yourself. And this is the one I sleep on. I sleep on the Casper Wave. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, is it good. I can’t even tell you how good it is. I stopped caring about mattresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I got this one because it’s like, all right, I’m done. This is great. I don’t I never need to look again. So you too can see this for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience it in your own home for 100 nights risk free and it gets delivered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right to your home in a small box and all wave purchases come with in home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white glove delivery and setup for free. So see for yourself with that 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night home trial you can’t go wrong for $100 off your wave purchase visit casper.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP 100 and use promo code
#askatp: Finder preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s casper.com slash ATP 100 promo code ATP 100.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Terms and conditions apply. Thank you so much to Casper and the wonderful new wave for sponsoring our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show and supporting me while I sleep. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And let’s begin with Kymer who asks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you find or configure? Do you view as icons or lists or columns? Do you show tab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey path status bars range by name, date, none, icons in the toolbar, tags, etc. Does it differ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per folder, one config system-wide, or do you adjust it as you go? I adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I go. I also don’t find this question terribly interesting, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I try to keep the path bar, whatever it’s called, at the bottom on, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey status bar at the bottom bottom on, and other than that, everything gets adjusted periodically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have just learned what the path bar is as you said that wow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that could be useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t even read my reviews I use list view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco status bar on so I can see disk space and I don’t know that’s a you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know list view that’s about it I I normally I’m sorting by name but in open save dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m viewing either the desktop or the downloads folder I will sort those by date descending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that the new stuff always shows up on top because usually what I’m dealing with is the newest stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you only have, let’s cap you at 35 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if you don’t mind. No, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go into all the details of this, but how I use the Finder, I continue to try to use the Finder
⏹️ ▶️ John like I used to use the Finder in my first 16 years of Mac use.
⏹️ ▶️ John The current Mac Finder does not wanna be used that way and it fights me
⏹️ ▶️ John every step of the way, but I continue to wage that battle. Mostly because it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to forgive its forgetfulness and just, you know, repeat actions over and over again
⏹️ ▶️ John just to get the experience they want. So the experience I’m looking for for people to know how the finder used to work is the two main views
⏹️ ▶️ John of user icon view and list view, uh, icon view, a couple of windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John I try to keep the icons arranged and the window size the way I want them, like the applications window and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Sort of, you know, windows without a lot of stuff in list view for almost everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else for anything that has lots of stuff in it. Um, and I’m very into the little disclosure triangles
⏹️ ▶️ John of disclosing different hierarchies and changing the sort order and stuff like that. I never have the sidebar visible,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t have the path bar or anything like that. I always have the status bar visible because I always want to see the available disk space.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you were to look at my Finder desktop, chances are good that you would probably see
⏹️ ▶️ John one icon view window, if any, and just a bunch of list view windows with various parts disclosed,
⏹️ ▶️ John all with the little status bar visible on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised you close the sidebar. I actually like the sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t use it. I don’t use the finder as a browser is what I’m getting at. I do not use it as a browser. I try to use it as
⏹️ ▶️ John the old finder, which is very difficult because it, you know, every once in a while to give you an
⏹️ ▶️ John example, the applications window, which occasionally I find myself in, you know, messing with applications or dragging something over disk
⏹️ ▶️ John image or whatever, right? Um, every once in a while, the application
⏹️ ▶️ John window, which I have sized and arranged in a particular way, decides, Nope, I’m going to be a different size in a different position.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to the sidebar now. Why does it decide that? I don’t know. It just does. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I turn off the sidebar on it and I put it back where I thought it was supposed to be and I readjust the view
⏹️ ▶️ John settings for it and then I close it and hope it remembers again next time. But you know, at least like
⏹️ ▶️ John once a month or something, some window that I had previously positioned and configured in a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John way will decide now it wants to be this weird, you know, metal browser thing. It’s not metal
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore I know, but no, I don’t, I don’t want to use it as a browser.
#askatp: Volvo + Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andreas Ekagren writes, what are your thoughts on Volvo using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android and Google Maps and Google Assistant for their census system in the future? I think it’s first for car manufacturers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as Chief Summarizer and Chief, what this is referring to is Volvo in the last few days has announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that for their, quote unquote, iDrive, if you will, they’re going to be working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Google to embed the voice-controlled Google Assistant, Google Play Store, Google Maps, and other Google services into its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next generation census infotainment system, which will be based on Android. As an owner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a almost brand new Volvo, I find this very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am tentatively optimistic about this. I would be very perturbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this meant, as I presume it might, that I couldn’t use CarPlay anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, this is for the next generation, so it’s not gonna affect Aaron’s car, but in the future, if it ends up that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only use Android Auto and not CarPlay, that would really annoy me. But that being said, it would be pretty sweet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have Google Maps as the actual onboard, like first party, so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mapping application, which I think would be super cool. So like, Marco, obviously this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relevant to you because you don’t own a Volvo, but like, how would you feel about hypothetically Tesla saying, hey, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Google Maps from now on? Or do they already, and I don’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They do use Google Maps for the map tiles and the map view. They don’t use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting, okay. So do you think this would do anything for you then? I guess it’s sort of already there for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s well, this is it’s not using like, you know, Android and Google Assistant and everything else. So Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this this would be a step forward or a step significantly in that direction from where Tesla is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now ultimately I Buy a car for its other factors and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with whatever entertainment system it has So I would just deal with whatever they did
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like Google Assistant in my car because I think it does a really good job of figuring out what the heck I want doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John and my like my my hilarious infotainment system on my court like it
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you do voice calling which occasionally I use I know why don’t I just
⏹️ ▶️ John do talk to my phone I don’t because I don’t have hey dingus enabled and anyway it’s a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons why I don’t use the phone thing but my car itself has a way to do voice calls and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible it is it’s real it’s like a difficult text adventure
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hard I know exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what to do And I still fail like 25% of the time, but I use it because my hands can be on the wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I don’t know anyway so I would love for my car or any future car to have a Google assistant
⏹️ ▶️ John and And Google Maps and Google navigation because I think all those things are really good and surely better than
⏹️ ▶️ John what any car manufacturer would come up On their own and also better than what car manufacturers would you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Buy from some third party like Tom Tom or whatever whoever is selling and entertaining them systems now So I
⏹️ ▶️ John applaud Volvo for making a deal with the best-in-class assistant and maps
⏹️ ▶️ John for their car and I wish more people would do it.
#askatp: Downloading games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Hudson Hayward asks, do you buy, it was asked as PlayStation 4, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to expand it. Do you buy video games, console video games on disc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash cartridge or is digital downloads? I generally like having physical cartridges or discs, but find the noise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the spinning disc to be excessive sometimes. I generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, prefer cartridges for the Switch because I can hand them to somebody else so they can play it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a minute. So I don’t have to worry about like installing an SD card or anything in the Switch, which is not difficult for the record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t, you know, I don’t have an extra micro SD, whatever it is lying around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I will say that I deeply, deeply regret not downloading Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kart because a game like Mario Kart is, it’s one of the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games I’m ever going to play with friends on the Switch. And it would be super convenient if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have, say, the Zelda cartridge in the Switch, but then just pop over and play Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kart for a minute with my friends and then go back to Zelda when I’m by myself. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big enough deal that I would buy Mario Kart again in order to do it, but I do wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had—for games like that where I know I’m going to be playing with friends kind of at a moment’s notice, I would recommend downloading.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Otherwise, I personally like the cartridges, but to each their own. John, how do you feel about this? John
⏹️ ▶️ John Greenewald I searched to see if we had been asked this question before because it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t find it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John We are only one or two console generations away from these things not having a physical media port on them
⏹️ ▶️ John I have never had a plastic disc inside my ps4 at all I download all my games if I can possibly do
⏹️ ▶️ John it The only card I have for my switch is zelda because I bought the special fancy edition and you had to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a cart with that like they didn’t have a digital one because it came with this big box with a bunch of Accessories and
⏹️ ▶️ John doohickeys and stuff like that Uh digital downloads. They are the way to go I recommend it for everybody do
⏹️ ▶️ John not buy physical media if you can at all help it But it does mean that you might have to expand the storage on your system.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does mean you have to understand how this affects your ability to transfer games and have save state
⏹️ ▶️ John and what happens when you run a roof and so on and so forth. But we are in we are in transition period and I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re at the tail end of the transition period. Digital only is the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, I’m with you. I very first thing I did when I got the switch was by a 200 gig micro SD card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once I knew I could do that, I bought zero cartridges. The only I have one game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for switch on a cartridge and it’s the Mario Rabbids game that I bought on Black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Friday because it was on sale. I have yet to play it, but the cartridge has been in my switch for since Black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Friday because you know we all of our games are downloaded. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s great is you know it kind of avoids Casey’s Mario Kart problem. All of your games are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessible to you. You can just always play whatever you want. You don’t have to worry. Oh, I left that one at home or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have that one with me right now. There is a real downside, as Casey said, that you can’t just hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your copy of the game to someone else to play. Or if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to have multiple switches in your family and you can’t easily just transfer the games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them. So that’s kind of annoying in certain cases. You also can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resell downloads back to GameStop or whatever for zero dollars. They can resell it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more than that. You can’t trade with friends. There are definite downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the way download downloads are usually implemented, but as somebody who doesn’t usually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those things and who is said very lazy, I love the fact that I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick up the switch or turn on the TV with the switch and all the games that we have are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just in a menu and you can just pick whatever you want to play and it just starts
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of those limitations you mentioned are actually just policy ones and Nintendo historically has not been the best on the policy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for example on PlayStation four there’s many games that I bought one copy of that I can play on
⏹️ ▶️ John both of my PS fours in the house. My son can play on his account on his PS four because it’s like a sub
⏹️ ▶️ John account of mine or whatever. Like they they have a way for a lot of games, not all, but a lot of games
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to buy one copy of it and have two people playing it on different playstations on different accounts, which is a much
⏹️ ▶️ John better policy than the Nintendo policy, right? So it really is up to and they could even do reselling
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that if they want. So it really is up to the individual company. why I say become familiar with what the
⏹️ ▶️ John those the policies related to digital downloads on your console
⏹️ ▶️ John and figure out if they’re you know if they’re an issue if you never resell them you probably don’t care about that but if you do want to buy one copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of a game and have multiple people in the house playing it find out if that’s possible and you might be pleasantly surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way I know I said it myself earlier like you know I don’t buy games on
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic I prefer digital obviously the digital and plastic too. This is just like mechanical keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John nonsensical things. It’s like, oh, so you like digital games. Yeah, I get my games
⏹️ ▶️ John on vinyl. They’re all analog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The graphics are way better that way. Much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warmer. It’s more about the ritual. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Iroh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Casper and we’ll see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, accidental, tech
Post-show: Nintendo online
⏹️ ▶️ John God, we just got another Switch cart in the house and I realized that I had had the Zelda
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch cart in my cart slot so long that I forgot where the cart
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco slot was on my Switch. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John We got some dancing game for my daughter. She’s going to use it at her birthday party. I’m trying to think, how do we end up getting this and
⏹️ ▶️ John not downloading it? But anyway, we have a second physical cart in the house now, which I’m already regretting because
⏹️ ▶️ John then I have to take out my tiny little Zelda thing and put it somewhere where I don’t lose it. I can’t wait for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the, uh, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with this, the Nintendo online service that we’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John currently enjoying a free trial of or whatever is going to become commercial and as part of that there’s gonna be cloud saves
⏹️ ▶️ John thank God so finally my all my Zelda progress will be somewhat safer than it is now I just
⏹️ ▶️ John I fear like that the kids are gonna spill a drink on my switch and I’m gonna lose like 150 hours of Zelda
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I’m worried about that for all of our saves too yeah when is that launching it’s not not soon
⏹️ ▶️ John right forget September maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John know Google for Nintendo switch online you’ll see I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. I just saw the feature set,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s before the end of the year and I think maybe the fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And apparently we’re going to be able to play Mario three multiplayer over
⏹️ ▶️ John the Internet. I was just more NES games. By the way, you’ll be able to play more NES
⏹️ ▶️ John games. Surprise. Yeah, we all kind of saw that coming. I think they’re giving you a bunch of good ones are free. I think they’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you like Mario Mario three. I figure what they were anyway. Just go over the story to see details. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cheap. It’s like $35 for a 7-person family per year. And
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud saves. That’s all I need to hear. I would, you know, have no idea how much I would pay for cloud saves. I’m so paranoid