310: Apple Playstore
24 Jan 2019Our internets of things, our YouTube careers, and our theories on teenagers.
Episode Description:
- SLACCIDENTAL TECH PODCAST SHIRTS!!
Order right now or you'll miss it! Orders stop 8 PM Monday evening - Follow-up:
- The Terminator saga continues
- "Apple One" feedback
- Instagram, friendstagrams, and spam accounts
- John's Internet of Things
- Casey's [Broader] Internet of Things
- MacBook Pro "stage light" fault and iterative development
#askatp- What happens to projects like homebrew if the ARM transition happens? (via Andrew Jaffe)
- How do we avoid crapping on future tech that we don't inherently understand? (via John Wilander)
- How do we handle snark? Why is it so prevalent in tech? (via Mike McPhaden)
- Post-show: What would you say it is you do here, Casey?
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Chapters
- 🏳️
- Shirt 🖼️
- Follow-up: The other T2
- Apple video service
- Sponsor: Arq Backup
- John explains teenagers
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- John’s Internet of Things
- Sponsor: Handy (code ATP)
- MBP “Stage Light” fault
- #askatp: Homebrew ARM
- #askatp: Kids these days
- #askatp: Jerks per capita
- Ending theme
- Casey explains himself
🏳️
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My car’s in the shop. I have a loaner. No, no, no, shut up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that you managed to buy two new cars in the last like three seconds and it’s already in the shop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, no, no. It’s okay. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. So I have a white Jetta loaner because it has to be white. Of course it’s white. How could it not be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t ask for it. That’s how it happens. It happens to be white. It happened to me, Marco. You don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you don’t understand. is the only option.
Shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should start by telling everyone that if you are not actively driving your car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and are interested in a shirt that reflects the show art from the last episode and probably this episode as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should stop everything unless you’re driving and order one right now because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are only going to be available until what is it Tuesday, Monday evening our time. So the 28th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically a few days from now. Right. Right. So this is not the sort of thing where, Oh, I’m sure I’ll remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you want one of our gag Slack’s dental tech podcast shirts, don’t do just stop. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop what you’re doing. Stop listening to me. Go right now. ATP.fm slash store. There’s a link there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please go. We, we had a bunch of people that have asked for this and we, we kind of kicked around between the three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there going to be more than 10 people that really want this? Is this stupid or is anyone going to care? But we talked to the people at cotton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bureau and they said, Hey, yeah, we can do it and we’ll try to ship it as quick as we can. It turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, we don’t know whether it’s stupid. It probably is still stupid. But a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John people end up wanting it anyway. It’s definitely stupid. You have to hurry to buy this before it stops being remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John But the best thing is, I’ve thought about this for our shirts, I think if we could graph this somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bumpy, but there’s a trend to our shirts becoming more and more difficult to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John to people. I guess you could explain it to a podcast shirt, but beyond that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, those Those are the shapes of computers and they’re rainbow colored because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re Apple computers, but they’re not all the Apple computers. They’re professional ones. What does that have to do with the podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey podcast, they
⏹️ ▶️ John like to talk about it. And then this one with the Slack logo made out of Mac Pros is like, there’s a lot of explaining that has to go on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is a really good gag and it is a really good shirt. I think it looks, I mean, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it, forget the joke or anything about it. I think it looks nice. I think it’s just a nice looking shirt. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very short-lived gag. So you buy it now, and then when the thing is threadbare in 10 years, you can explain
⏹️ ▶️ John to someone in the grocery store what the hell this shirt is that you’re wearing. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explain the one Mac Pro that was ever made after that point that’s not included on the shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, indeed. So anyway, if you would like to buy them, this is… When we do the shirts around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC time, we really genuinely think of that as a way to support the show. This is that too, but it’s also mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John this is entirely a gag thing for the people who want it. people asked for it. They said, I want the, that’s a funny thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should put that on the shirt. Okay, here you go. It’s on a shirt. You’re really selling it, John. You want a bumper?
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine. Here’s a bumper. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this, we will not make you feel guilty if you do not buy this shirt. But if you have a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extra bucks, quite a few extra bucks that you can throw our way, I think we could all be made happy by this ridiculous shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I actually should, I wasn’t planning to do this, but come to think of it, I should congratulate our resident artist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Arment, putting this together.
⏹️ ▶️ John both the idea and the execution, both superb. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually come to think of it, I don’t recall there being any requested edits from John which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but still that is that is unheard
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a good gag, well executed. That is yeah, that is unheard of. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you are interested, please check it out. Obviously we deeply appreciate it. But this is we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will make you feel guilty in June over what ridiculous merchandise we come up with then. We’re not going to make you feel guilty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this. This is just for funsies. So. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not making anybody feel guilty about anything. Why are you even bringing this up? It’s such a terrible notion. Anyway, pins are still
⏹️ ▶️ John for sale too if you want some.
Follow-up: The other T2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about Terminator 2 and our friend Todd Vaziri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we talked about my woes with Terminator Audio Sync, and I had mentioned that I wanted my kids to
⏹️ ▶️ John see Terminator, but not Terminator 2, but not before they’d seen Terminator 1.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the first movie is rated R, and I said that the second movie wasn’t. That’s not true. Terminator 2
⏹️ ▶️ John is, in fact, rated R. It is a much softer R. It’s mostly, is it like rolling
⏹️ ▶️ John the R? R for cursing and
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of gore, right? But it’s not like, I don’t know, like, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John probably hasn’t seen Terminator 2 and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Casey probably
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t remember it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems very much PG-13. I feel like if it was released today it might still be PG-13, but it was in fact rated
⏹️ ▶️ John R, so thank you Todd Vaziri for that correction. Indeed. Oh, and I have further Terminator
⏹️ ▶️ John updates. So when last we left I was like resigned to the fact that I was going to have bad audio sync,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and we’d already all watched the movie anyway, so who cares? I did actually engage with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to say, like, go through the process of like either getting a refund or telling them there’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people sent me a link to the page where you can supposedly do that, like, go here, you can get a refund, but it really just
⏹️ ▶️ John says report a problem. So you can report a problem. And I did report a problem. And then I went back and forth an email with somebody who was
⏹️ ▶️ John conversing with me in not particularly well constructed English, which is always difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looked like it was a lot of copy and paste into templates of like answers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then the customized pieces were just not grammatically correct in a way that makes me think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a native English speaker. So it was difficult to go back and forth. Eventually we arrived at
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that they were trying to get me to delete the download and redownload it essentially, but there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to actually do that from the Apple TV and they were sending me instructions on how to delete it from iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. I’m like, okay, but you do understand that I’m watching it on Apple TV, not an iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had already deleted it from iTunes. I already downloaded it to iTunes, saw that the audio was in sync, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it was dropping frames, and then I deleted it to save disk space. So I’d done that once before. Nevertheless, I did it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I downloaded it back again on the same exact Mac on iTunes and then
⏹️ ▶️ John deleted it. And I’m like, okay, well, I did that. And then I went back to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV a day later and played the movie and the audio was and it’s like, is it because I
⏹️ ▶️ John deleted it? Or is it just because something other people using the Apple TV had pushed the old version out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John cache, right? Like, because, you know, it’s, the Apple TV will actually download the movie for you and just let it sit there
⏹️ ▶️ John on the little, on the SSD, but it will get pushed out because it’s just a cache. It’s not like you have it permanently on there as
⏹️ ▶️ John offline storage or anything like that. So anyway, the problem cured itself
⏹️ ▶️ John and or my complaint over the course of a week, conversing over email to try to come to a solution
⏹️ ▶️ John had triggered someone to fix the thing somewhere and then it redownloaded. I don’t know, anyway, problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I didn’t get a refund. I would have liked it if I could have just gone straight to just give me a refund because I felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need to keep this movie, you can have the money back. But if they fix it, that’s just as good, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, Apple’s really hurting these days, they really need the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent way more than $13 worth of this support person’s time. And way more than $13
⏹️ ▶️ John worth of my time, which is again, usually why I don’t wanna engage in this, to have to go back and forth with
⏹️ ▶️ John someone over email trying to, you know, I felt the pain on the other end. Like I feel the pain when I try
⏹️ ▶️ John to help out people in my family remotely, asynchronously over the course of many days to solve a tech problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I was on the other end and it wasn’t any more fun.
Apple video service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got some feedback about Apple Prime or Apple one or whatever this like music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video bundle would be Do you want to talk about that John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one thing I thought we had mentioned But I was listening back to last week’s episode waiting for that part to come and it never
⏹️ ▶️ John came So I guess we didn’t we did talk about like tying Apple’s video service to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Music to say hey you get Apple music Guess what you get this video thing whether you like it or not as a sort of the prime model
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course we were talking about an Apple one thing which is just a bundle of a whole bunch of stuff. And we, you know, discuss different
⏹️ ▶️ John things that could be in that bundle and we’ll get to that in a second. But one thing we didn’t mention, which I think we needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to is despite us talking about Apple one or Apple prime as this big all encompassing thing that has
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of cool stuff in it, it is much more likely that Apple will instead offer
⏹️ ▶️ John a product, you know, they’ll call this thing, whatever Apple video or whatever, you know, they ended up calling it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there’s Apple music and you can get both the music and the video service together in a bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John that may or may not be discounted. That is almost certainly going to happen no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ John independent of all those other talking and that is I think that’s subtly different but importantly different than oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just Apple Music. And by the way, the video thing gets shoved in for free because this would be Apple introduces some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of video streaming service. And you pay this amount more for more for each month. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re already an Apple Music subscriber, maybe you don’t want to pay for Apple Music and Apple Video, fine, then you can get a combined
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and you get one bill and you get both services and that is so much more likely than any of the things any of the scenarios that we were
⏹️ ▶️ John spinning out that I think they pretty much have to do it and that should have been mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it has been. All righty. All right, no, I forgot my second part,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pregnant pause for me, so I filled it, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I forgot about it, I’m old. Speaking of bundles
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bunch more stuff in them than just music and video, I thought the feedback on our discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John was interesting and that everyone else who is sending us notes and tweets and emails was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the same things we are on the show. Well, a little bit of the same things we’re on the show, which is envisioning
⏹️ ▶️ John a bundle of things that includes only the things that you want it to include and
⏹️ ▶️ John also a discount of some kind, right? So It was like everyone wants to build their Apple one
⏹️ ▶️ John bundle that excludes all the services they don’t care about, includes all the services
⏹️ ▶️ John they currently subscribe to, plus one more that they can’t bring themselves to pay for and get it all at a discount, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the way the bundle is going to work. Like no one can tailor build their bundle. As Marco pointed out last
⏹️ ▶️ John time, you can’t buy the shipping only prime or the shipping and video only prime, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not get the music part. Like the point of the bundle is Apple packages it in a way that is advantageous
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple. And that is also advantageous to enough customers to make it worthwhile.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not going to be an a la carte to build your own bundle out of the things that you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what we’re trying to think of last show is what kind of bundle makes the most sense for Apple to get adoption?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s easy as a consumer to think, oh, I don’t care about what works for Apple. Here are the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John I want. And just put those in the bundle, but nothing that I don’t want. And I don’t think that’s going to happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have that in your mind, dismiss it from your mind because a there might not even be an
⏹️ ▶️ John all-encompassing bundle like this and b if there is an all-encompassing bundle it’s going to include stuff you don’t care about and that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up paying for oh yeah and you know keep in mind this is still apple so what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely going to happen if they if they do a bundle like this i can guarantee you of three things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to include things you don’t want to pay for it’s going to cost more than you think it should cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more than you want to pay and it’s going to have a really weird confusing name that we make fun of for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few weeks and then we get used to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we have that discussion in Slack about, you know, Apple one and Apple Prime. All those names
⏹️ ▶️ John are just derived from other services that already exist. So Google has Google one and Amazon has Amazon Prime.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what is the Microsoft one? I forget, but I think they use one for one drive anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of the names are taken and, you know, Apple Video
⏹️ ▶️ John is what Casey said he thought the video service would be, which is certainly be straight up Apple’s the alley with like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Music, Apple Video, Apple TV, it says Apple and then just plain old noun, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you wanted to name one service that included both Apple Music and Apple Video, unfortunately for Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ John fortunately for us, Google has taken the modern day Apple obvious name,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is Play. Apple would call this service Apple Play if they could, but Google has
⏹️ ▶️ John squatted all over that it’s Google Play the Google Play Store, because what do you do with music and video? What
⏹️ ▶️ John what one word unifies them? You’re not going to call it about Apple media, Apple sensory input, Apple content,
⏹️ ▶️ John those Apple digital bits, like it doesn’t, you know, whatever, it’s Apple Play. It would be perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they can’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, I got it. So, you know, remember how when Apple first launched the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they trademarked the word App Store within certain contexts, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost had a fight with Amazon, when Amazon launched the Fire tablets, Amazon launched their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store, and they just called it App Store. And to avoid a problem, Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deleted the space between app and store and just made the S lowercase. So it’s just one word, the Amazon App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple had the app space store. And that was apparently enough that they didn’t fight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over it. So I wonder if maybe Apple can call theirs like Play Store, just one word,
⏹️ ▶️ John Store. So I don’t think they’re gonna do that. Although I think Marco is right, that like all
⏹️ ▶️ John the good names are taken. So whatever name they pick, it’s gonna be like, at best the best we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be like, okay, and then we’ll just get used to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. Unless it just
⏹️ ▶️ John goes away like ping and then we’ll just forget it because ping is not a great name either but blessedly it just disappeared before we had to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, you know, last episode when Casey said he thinks it’s Apple video, I turned it in and said I agree. I think it is probably Apple video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m actually I’m doubting that now. I think after more thought, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most likely outcome, the most likely name of such a service is just Apple music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I think they just add video to apple music.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know man. I find that hard to believe. I hope they don’t do that, but I think that’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ John will do. I’m gonna put it put everything in iTunes and put all their services in apple music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you look at what they’re probably likely to do like they’re probably going to put it on to apple music and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe raise the price of a few dollars for new people and and say look at this great stuff you’re all getting and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know they don’t nobody wants to launch a video service that has no subscribers built in like the you know the bundling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very powerful because if they do it that way, then they launch a video service and it already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts with millions of subscribers. Like, that’s why I honestly think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be just part of Apple Music. And we’re gonna get over the confusion in like a year, and it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think they still will inevitably end up rebranding it at some point, but like I was trying to think of names
⏹️ ▶️ John like following that formula of Apple, boring word, and there’s honestly not a lot of good ones left. I kept thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple Stream, which is terrible, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have done photo
⏹️ ▶️ John stream, they have done photo stream, which shows that they’re willing to go with stream as a customer facing product
⏹️ ▶️ John name. But boy, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be an exciting part of, probably more exciting than the service, because the service is like, okay, we know what it’s gonna be like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna go to a place and watch video, and then we care about what the shows are, perhaps, but the name actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John the most interesting part of this product in the time now before it’s been released.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so people who are naming this inside Apple, Good luck.
Sponsor: Arq Backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Arc, a rock-solid backup app for your Mac or PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve actually talked about Arc before, before they were a sponsor, because I honestly love this app. Arc’s cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup plan starts at just $5.99 per month for 1TB of storage, and you can share that between an unlimited
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s software, and you can backup to your own cloud storage account instead of or in addition to theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can use Amazon S3, its clones like Wasabi, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or even your own network-detect storage or external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Arc has you covered for your backup storage, whether you want to use their service, someone else’s, or your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own storage. And the features are great too. Because since you’re paying for the storage yourself, Arc imposes
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco from all of them. So you can easily, for instance, download files you left at home while you’re on vacation. I’ve actually done that many
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage, which is an amazing value. And I loved it so much, I actually migrated my desktop to that setup as well.
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John explains teenagers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARQ is spelled A-R-Q, so once again, that’s A-R-Q, ARCbackup.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to ARC for backing up my data and for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪♪ Christian Pallage writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Instagram Close Friends. This is something I was aware of, although it’s a different name for it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think to bring it up last episode, and I guess not everyone knew about this, so here we are bringing it up. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christian writes, pertaining to Instagram’s recent addition of Close Friends, I was wondering if any of you were aware of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concept of spam accounts. I’m still in high school and nearly every teenager here in Canada has two Instagram accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One that is public where you post all your nice pictures and selfies and a private one where you only have a few dozen followers reserved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your friends. Here they tend to be called quote unquote spam accounts, although I’ve always heard this as friends-stagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a very casey name by the way, but anyway, and have been used for years for the exact use case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the close friends feature fulfills. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea of having multiple accounts versus one feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you were bound to mess up occasionally and share personal things to the world. Again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t feel like the risk of sharing personal things is that strong. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d much prefer to have everything under one roof, so to speak. And I don’t personally like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a friend’s Instagram or a spam account if you go the other direction or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I certainly have heard from a handful of people, including a mutual friend of the three of ours, that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have accidentally gone and put something on their public stories that they intended for close friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So maybe I’m just a close friends ninja or something like that, or wizard, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t personally see the need for this. Marco, I know you are not the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prolific Instagram user and John even less so, but what are your thoughts on this, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, wouldn’t you have the same risk of accidentally making something public as you would accidentally publishing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something on the wrong account?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I guess that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s unwise for anybody who’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a teenager to speculate on the behaviors of teenagers and their motivation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have their own world and we don’t understand it and we never will and it’s just better off that we don’t try.
⏹️ ▶️ John I disagree with this perspective entirely. Yes, they are different, but here they are telling us that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John conveying information. Do not reject the information, accept
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. Now, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is completely explicable from the perspective of a product designer, right? If you find
⏹️ ▶️ John out, like, so you make Instagram, right? And people are using it, and you have to learn from how they’re using it. And you see how they’re using it, and you see
⏹️ ▶️ John these people, lots of people are making multiple accounts for this reason. This is like them
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you that your product does not fulfill one of their use cases. And their use case is, I wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ John one set of people that can see one set of things, another set of people that can see another set of things. Doing it with multiple accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John is a, you know, it’s a brute force way that people were forced to use your product because this is the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John they could get what they wanted. But the application is not designed for that. So you could say, we can solve this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in our product by making it really easy to switch accounts. Like a lot of Twitter clients do that. Like I have a bunch of Twitter accounts and Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John makes it pretty easy to switch accounts as even a gesture for it, right? And so that’s one possible solution. But another solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is, we don’t want that model. We want one person, one account, probably for advertising reasons, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s instead make it so that you don’t have to have two separate accounts. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John keep our application and the idea you’re always logged into your one and only account, but you can target different audiences
⏹️ ▶️ John to your close friends or your non close friends, two different ways to address the same issue. But by your users
⏹️ ▶️ John using your application in this way, they’re telling you that there is some need that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John fulfilled by your current model. And so it’s always really important, like whenever you make any kind of product to see what people are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually doing with it in the wild, to see like they’re, they might not tell you this is what I want, or
⏹️ ▶️ John they might think, I just really need need a really good way to switch accounts. But if you find out what they really
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do, which is show some people one thing and some people another thing, you can come up with different solutions. So I thought this was an interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, case of, of instagram catching up with the needs of this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John set of users. Um, and as for spam accounts, I know this isn’t the same thing, but when I see it, I was reminded once again
⏹️ ▶️ John that my mother still stubbornly refuses to have a single email account and it causes no
⏹️ ▶️ John end of headaches. Why does she have maintained and use two email accounts. One of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does the other one not get spam?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right? No, of course not. They all they all get spam. I just love that same game. One of them is for
⏹️ ▶️ John spam and I say, but they both get spam pretty much in equal amounts because guess why the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John of them is for spam and I can’t I can’t get her to give one up. I can’t I can’t like I
⏹️ ▶️ John can forward them all to each other. I can let you mail through both of them, they’re like, there’ll be no loss in functionality, but
⏹️ ▶️ John magically you only need to go to one place to check your mail. Oh my God, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do it. Does she check the spam account? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course. Like this 50% of her mail goes to one, she calls it spam, like when she buys things online, she
⏹️ ▶️ John uses the spam account, but she’s like, I don’t want those people to have my other emails. Like, you’re checking both accounts anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I can’t do it. I can’t get her to do it. And also that makes it means every time she uses it,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever she uses to read her email, she has to deal with multiple accounts in your email client, which makes dealing with any email
⏹️ ▶️ John client much more complicated because you have the unified inbox of what account this comes through, and you have, if you try to organize
⏹️ ▶️ John your mail, are you organizing in one account or the other? And it’s like, I just, I also can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John my sister off Hotmail, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have many familial technological
⏹️ ▶️ John failings that bug me. But so far, I think none of them have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram accounts, and if they do, I would probably redirect them to close friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny, it just now occurred to me that this smells a lot to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, uh, Google pluses circles, which I actually thought was a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever idea. So if you were lucky enough to miss the hot second that Google, Google plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a thing, one of the cool things that Google plus did is that you could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if a range is the right word, but kind of group contacts into one or more circles. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could, for example, have work friends versus regular friends, or you could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey college friends versus work friends or whatever the case may be. And as you shared things, you could choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the audience to which you would share. And Google Plus was a disaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many ways, and it was force-fed down all our mouths for several years and occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was up until very recently. But that whole idea, which wasn’t that from Andy Hertzfeld, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not mistaken, But whoever it was from, it was, I thought, very ahead of its time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was from Google being very jealous of Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s what it was from.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is, like, I give them credit. They saw what Facebook was and did a lot of things better
⏹️ ▶️ John in Google+. Like, it wasn’t for a lack of ideas or execution that Google+, was a failure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was sort of all the surrounding context and the timing and the fact that they tried to integrate it forcibly
⏹️ ▶️ John into all the other services and and just like they were just too late, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I mean, that’s true. It’s a perfect example of like, the better thing doesn’t always win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came along trying to do the exact same thing as Facebook, but like to win on features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that just never works. Like when you have an established incumbent with massive network effects, like you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come around and be the next Facebook because you have better features.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but they did. And there were definitely some good ideas there. Although like, also a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John good ideas to be like, that’s clever and that appeals to us. Like just because
⏹️ ▶️ John the the feature provides like functionality in an elegant way
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not provided elsewhere, it doesn’t mean it isn’t already too complicated for most people. Like there’s something to be said for like
⏹️ ▶️ John the success of Twitter where like so simple in the beginning, so straightforward and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can add crap later, but you have to start off with something that people really understand. Whereas circles is daunting in the same way,
⏹️ ▶️ John the multiple windows is daunting to people who just like like what do I have to? Is there some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John do I have to arrange people like any kind of service where someone who’s excited about the service comes to you and says let me show you how to set your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John up probably has a bit of a barrier to entry to regular people if you’re trying to go for
⏹️ ▶️ John a Facebook level audience it has to be as simple as let me just see if my high school friends got fat
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s your that’s your tractor there.
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John’s Internet of Things
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about your internet of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have one. I have an internet and there are things in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost as dumb a name as mechanical keyboard because honestly, everything that I have on the internet is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now I have things that are on the internet that are categorized
⏹️ ▶️ John as internet of things. I have this because Adam Justice from ConnectSense sent me a smart
⏹️ ▶️ John outlet squared. They’re not a sponsor, but they did send me this outlet for free. So just keep that in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was hemming and hawing about buying one. Remember I was asking around, like, hey, I just want like something to plug because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any smart, like, well, I do have some wifi light bulbs upstairs, but I didn’t want to buy smart like switches
⏹️ ▶️ John or lights. I just, I have crap in my house. I’m like, they plug into the wall. Let me just get one of the outlets, like a smart outlet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ll just plug lights into the smart outlet and then I’ll just see how things go. It’s like I was asking around, like can you
⏹️ ▶️ John connect it up to multiple services in the same outlet and some, you know, what’s one with good reviews that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap and Marco was telling me about the ones that he bought that replaced all his other ones or whatever. So I didn’t know what to buy and I
⏹️ ▶️ John just wasn’t thinking of buying anything and having this one sent to me for free is like, right, I’ll give it a try. So I got
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s two plugs, two outlets. I plugged it into a thing. I plugged my lights into the thing. There was a little
⏹️ ▶️ John QR code for HomeKit on the paper manual that it came with, so I scanned that with their little app
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone and it did, ba-bloop, ba-bloop, and it said, name your things, and I named my things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I named the two lamps and it’s like, put them in a room, and I’m like, okay, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I put them in the living room and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. Let me jump in right there because I also got one of these, and I also have several WeMo devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a Belkin brand, and it is worth noting that, And I don’t think this is unique
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the ConnectSense stuff, but it was the first time I personally had seen it. When you do the setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it has HomeKit support, like John said, you scan that QR code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what’s interesting is it takes care of like getting on the Wi-Fi basically in one step. This is in contrast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like a Wemo or I actually got, figuratively speaking, bequeathed some TP-Link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. I think it’s Kasa, K-A-S-A. It doesn’t really matter what it is. But the point is, the way those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all work is, They, by default, broadcast their own Wi-Fi and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use the app. And then when the app says, okay, wait for it, go, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you connect to the device’s Wi-Fi only long enough for the app to tell the device, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Wi-Fi information, and sometimes you have to enter it by hand, sometimes you don’t. And then it did, then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drops its Wi-Fi service, if you will, and then comes back onto your house Wi-Fi. And it’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multi-step process that is not particularly difficult, but is kind of frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas the ConnectSense thing, which again I think might be unique to HomeKit, not necessarily ConnectSense, you just scan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the QR code, wait a few seconds, and everything’s done. And it just works, which is really cool. So carry on, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I could say during that step that it was doing it, that’s like sharing the Wi-Fi connection and everything, because otherwise how would anything
⏹️ ▶️ John work? But it was nice that it didn’t have to prompt me. So then, as soon as that was done, then
⏹️ ▶️ John I wondered when I was setting up, I was like, I have to download the ConnectSense app? Why do I need to do that? Why can’t I do everything through HomeKit?
⏹️ ▶️ John and I keep forgetting these apps that Apple gives you, the Health Kit app and the Home Kit app or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, is it just called Home and Health? I forget what the actual app names are. Those are more like
⏹️ ▶️ John clearinghouse front ends for the underlying database that contains it, kind of like your contact database, and you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John separate contact apps. I suppose you need the device-specific app to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of bootstrap the process, but once you’re done, as far as I’m aware, I don’t ever need to
⏹️ ▶️ John use that ConnectSense app ever again. I can just use the home app because in the home app, the arrangement that I said in the
⏹️ ▶️ John connections app, the fact that these are lights, this is what they’re named and this is what room they’re in. It’s reflected in the home app because those are all
⏹️ ▶️ John constructs of the home kit data model on the underlying home kit data model. Right. And so that’s nice. I’m like, great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and then I just talked to the air and I turn individual lights off. And I also just said,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, Hey dingus, turn all the lights off. And because of the only two, only two lights that home
⏹️ ▶️ John kit knows about, it turned all the lights off. I’m like, great. if I went nuts and started
⏹️ ▶️ John going around my house, I put a million of these things in, I couldn’t say turn all the lights off anymore. Because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John HomeKit, maybe Marco can tell me, does HomeKit have an idea that like, that it’s in the living room along
⏹️ ▶️ John with those lights? Or would it turn like every light off that it knows that if I said turn all the lights off or turn the lights off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, boy, I, I’ve only been using HomeKit for like two seconds. But you can you can define
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zones, you can say like turn off everything upstairs, downstairs, you can group things, but sort of only with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some limitations. I don’t know if there’s any built in things to say turn off everything, but you can create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenes that turn on or off or some combination of on and off any number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things you want. So like one of the scenes says like goodnight. And so you can say, hey, thing, goodnight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have it turn off everything downstairs, but turn on a couple of lamps in my bedroom.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like what I was most interested in is the fact that, of course, I can address the lights individually by the names that I gave
⏹️ ▶️ John them, but I can also say, Hey, dingus, turn off the lights, which it has to understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you didn’t tell me what light to turn off, but I will assume that you mean all the lights that I know about in another
⏹️ ▶️ John state, which I thought was nice. And if that convenience goes away, if I get more lights, demotivating me from getting more
⏹️ ▶️ John lights, because I like the ability to just say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, but you, I think there are fixes for this. Marco kind of glanced off of this a second ago. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are two different constructs in, in the home kit that I’ve become familiar there is what room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a device is in. So you can say that this is in the living room and this other device is in the bedroom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or so on and so forth. And you can address an entire room. So I can say, hey, Dingus, turn off Michaela room,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will turn off all the devices in that room. But as Marco said a moment ago, there’s also the concept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a zone and the typical example of this is upstairs versus downstairs. So I can also say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn on upstairs and it will turn on all of the devices that are upstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you get, if you have anything other than those two constructs, like if you, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, uh, something that’s, that’s both a device downstairs and a device upstairs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s when you start getting, that’s where it starts to fall apart and I think that’s what Marco was talking about a second ago. And that’s where you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scenes, which is basically kind of like an automation from what I can tell of, you know, Hey, take these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise disparate devices and do this one, you know, collective operation on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like what I’m looking for mostly is I don’t want to play a text adventure. I don’t want to say turn on upstairs because it’s not a sentence
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes sense to humans. It’s a sentence that I like I’m constructing for the thing. I don’t want to say turn on living room because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what I would say. Like I just want to be able to speak to a conversationally and have it know what I mean. And I can
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly do that in this limited scenario. But as things get more complicated, then I have to start speaking text adventure and that’s no fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I still had the name the lights which was also an interesting challenge because usually I don’t at least give my lights
⏹️ ▶️ John names right but if I want I actually do want to individually address these lights like there’s a reason I put these
⏹️ ▶️ John two lights on it because they’re both kind of annoying to walk to and one of them reflects in the tv
⏹️ ▶️ John if you watch at night so I just want the other one on anyway it worked really well but then I immediately thought okay
⏹️ ▶️ John well the whole point of me getting this and playing with it is just to you know to dip my toe into this and also to see
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’ve got got all these little cylinders in the house listening to me. So I want this thing to be hooked up to all the cylinders. I’m like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John hooked it up to home kit following the little instructions in the book, which is like, turn it on, get the app, scan the code done,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? How do I get it hooked up to my Amazon echo thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe I may have maybe tried Google home first. I don’t read either one. I couldn’t figure
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. Because like, the connect sense app is like, you’re all set. Everything’s good. I’m like, yeah, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what if I want to connect to other things? So I looked at the box again, It’s like supports all these different services. So I had to actually go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the website and say, how do I hook it up to, and I guess this is not a thing that most people would do. Like, I want it hooked up to
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the cylinders. And I was like, how many cylinders do you have? Well, just don’t ask. I have a bunch.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and my main problem is, I’d never hooked anything up to those other cylinders. So
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Echo thing, I already had the, I can’t, they called their app the
⏹️ ▶️ John Trigger Word. I can’t even talk about their damn app. The app that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John named after the Trigger Word for the Echo devices. And I went in that and I’m like, add device,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to, I’m trying to, you know, I’m like, I’m searching around. And I probably
⏹️ ▶️ John would have found it eventually, but at that point I went to the web, and it’s like, oh, I have to add the skill. I forgot, they do everything in skills, that’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John vocabulary. And you can’t just add the device, you have to add the skill, because if you don’t add the skill, you can’t add the device, because the
⏹️ ▶️ John skill lets you know that the device, blah, blah. Anyway, add the skill, find it, does the thing, works
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, blah, blah. The Google Home took me a little bit longer to puzzle out. At this point, I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John remember how I did it. They don’t have skills, but you do have to end up going, the equivalent of skills, like searching for the
⏹️ ▶️ John Connect Sense brand name in their big list of like, drivers for stuff or whatever. You find it, you hook it
⏹️ ▶️ John up, it does all the things, right? So then it was time for a yell at the cylinders contest
⏹️ ▶️ John to see who turns on off the lights the fastest and who gives me the most back talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at first, you know, Apple’s HomePod was kicking butt because it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing microphones, it’s in the same room with the thing, And it was like instant. I was like really
⏹️ ▶️ John happy with how fast I did things. The only thing I was unhappy with, which is not the fault of any of the cylinders, was that there is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little relay in there that you can hear go, chk, chk. And I’m like, oh, you need to make that
⏹️ ▶️ John sound. But that’s an electromechanical difficulty that it’s not up to the stuff. And Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, oh, I blew it. I was going, I was on such a streak. Anyway, the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John was so great because it would turn the lights on and off instantly and wasn’t making a peep. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, all right, your move. And I tried the Google dingus, and the Google would be like, OK, turned it on
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. I’m like, oh, no good. And I would talk to the Echo, and it also had sometimes a thing to say to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John or a bloop. I’m like, well, this is amazing. The HomePod is the only one that just does what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately without saying anything. And I was so happy. And then I came in like 20 minutes later, and I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John my newfound magical spell powers. And I tell the HomePod to turn on one of the lights, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John says, OK, I turned it on for you. I’m like, what happened? What happened, HomePod? You were doing so well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now you wanna have a conversation with me about which light you turned on, and I don’t wanna hear it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s basically where I’m at. I have put the internet things into my house. I have talked to cylinders to
⏹️ ▶️ John make things happen. I thought I had a good friend who would do just what I wanted immediately, but now the good friend wants to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me about what’s going on in their life every time they turn the light on and off. And
⏹️ ▶️ John my next step is to find out, is there a way to get it to be quiet? Can I put my echo
⏹️ ▶️ John into that, whatever Margo is talking about, this sort of terse, don’t bother me
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the brief response mode or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. Either way, and then of course the final
⏹️ ▶️ John challenge. The final challenge is now I have a bunch of plain old dumb lamps
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged into a smart outlet and a bunch of people in the house who are used to going over to those lamps and turning
⏹️ ▶️ John them on with the switches on the lamps. And that’s not going to work anymore if I’ve turned them off with the smart outlets.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I have to retrain a house of people to start yelling into the air to their cylinder of choice to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John lights turned on and off. So that is a work in progress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how you got Siri to ever not be very verbose in a response. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John either. I just talked to it and it was just totally dead silent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s that’s impressive. Maybe it’s a bug. Yeah, right. Maybe it was actually a failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like getting server
⏹️ ▶️ John It tried to try to play the speech, but it had never downloaded that
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the other thing is one thing that we’ve been told by a number of people and I I haven’t confirmed it since then, that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even know last time we talked about HomeKit, is that HomeKit is executed locally, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own network and on device. It’s not sending basic HomeKit commands to the cloud and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. So, and I’ve been experimenting, and it actually, when Siri hears me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is most of the time, and when I’m asking for a direct command of turning on and off a named
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device, it is faster to turn that thing on and off than the Echo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the only thing that Siri is fast at for me. Like everything else, like setting timers or asking questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or music commands, Siri’s way slower to respond for me than the Echo. But HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff is way faster than the Echo’s smart home control stuff. So that’s nice. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so fast that oftentimes the devices that I’m asking to be turned on and off will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have already responded before Siri even speaks a response. And then it’s like, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I’m hearing a response, I’ll say like, hey, turn on whatever. And then I’ll hear a click and it’ll turn on. And then Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will say, one second, communicating. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are on. It’s like, okay, thanks. The other thing is Siri’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know if there’s a way to like recategorize things. Siri is very sensitive to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vocabulary for the literal device that it is. So in your case, you’re not turning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and off lights. You’re turning on and off outlets. And so Siri will say like, the outlets are on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I call the outlets near lamp and far lamp. That’s what the outlets are called.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but slow down. You can also, you can go into HomeKit and change the
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. Like I did, they’re categorized as lights now. Like they’re named as lights and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re no longer categorized as outlets. They’re categorized as lights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I didn’t know you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could change that. That’s awesome, I’ll do that. Yeah, but yeah, like it’s, the other thing is Siri does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to be a little too smart sometimes with like overriding the meanings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of words And the same thing it does with reminders and to do creation. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you call something lamps or light or something like that, that can sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause weird vocabulary misinterpretations by Siri, where you’ll say like, turn on the lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll look for all devices that are classified as lights rather than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that you’ve called light or a synonym of light such as lamp. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned last week, I used to, I have these lamps in my living room that for like two years now, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commanding via the Echo, calling them as a group lamps. Turn on lamps. They’re the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lamps in the house that are like this. So when you say lamps and I cannot get them to work with Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with HomeKit because Siri overrides what lamps means. So I had to call them like living room lamps, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is cumbersome, but like it’s still, I don’t know. I overall, I think I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the HomeKit in practice setup more than the Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice setup, but it’s a close call. I wish Siri was smarter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would make up for how amazingly fast it is to execute locally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I like the local execution as well. I remember reading a couple of emails about that. Also, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure what the data models are behind the Amazon and the Google stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Connect Sense app, you could set up your stuff or whatever, but it also lets you set up automations for scheduled things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, that’s just all part of the HomeKit data model. So yeah, you can set that in the Connect Sense app, but then when you go over to the Home
⏹️ ▶️ John app, I’m pretty sure all that stuff is reflected there as well. I did set up an automation
⏹️ ▶️ John of just like, basically to turn off the lights so after everyone’s in bed, if someone forgets to turn off the lights, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John that is likely to happen, but I just wanted to use the automation. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like these type of services from Apple. HealthKit, HomeKit, Calendar,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea where the operating system provides an underlying
⏹️ ▶️ John data model and third party applications can write applications against it. And Apple will ride some applications
⏹️ ▶️ John of its own and that it gets everyone working together because like both health kit and home kit
⏹️ ▶️ John would be such disasters if every application of you know, if every vendor of every smart thing had to
⏹️ ▶️ John have its own app with its own stuff and like, then it would basically mean that only the big players could play. Like it would
⏹️ ▶️ John just be like Amazon, Google and Apple and no one else could make their own products
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like because is then you’d have to build your whole own ecosystems. Like, well, you can use this app to control everything in your house
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as it’s ConnectSense brand. I’ve never even heard of a ConnectSense. It’s not a company the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of Amazon or Google. But ConnectSense can play in the home automation space because of these standards
⏹️ ▶️ John and because of these OS level data models. And it’s kind of amazing that we
⏹️ ▶️ John actually get to do that with Calendar. Because in other areas, Apple is not so generous with allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John third party access to underlying core OS features. but
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly I imagine for historical reasons, they are for calendars and they are for forward-looking reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John with health and home. So I think it was a pretty good first experience. I get granted I’m waiting like 10 to 20 years
⏹️ ▶️ John into like early adopters getting into home automation to try it for the first time. But if you wait that long, things
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much work on the first try and they’re pretty cheap and it’s all fine. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Belkin, I forget what it’s called, but like smart switch or something like that. Basically Belkin has, the Wemo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say, Belkin has, and Wemo have a series of smart switches and one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is updatable via software to get HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support. So for the longest time, Wemo had Amazon support, but it did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have HomeKit support and most Wemo devices still do not. But this one particular thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which we have a couple of them now got support via software. And this was also interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because early on to get HomeKit support, you had to have hardware that Apple gives you kind of like the lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug, but now you can do it via software. So I did the software update and suddenly I had my first HomeKit devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then that got me thinking, you know, it would be really cool if I could get the rest of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wemo stuff onto HomeKit. And through a meandering series of events, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came to realize that, wait a second, HomeBridge is a thing. And HomeBridge, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not familiar, is a software thing. I almost said product. It’s not for sale. It’s open source.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a piece of software written in node that is, as you can guess, a bridge between other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices and HomeKit. So the idea is somebody wrote the general, you know, backing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system. And then there’s a ton of different people that have written a ton of different plugins to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of different smart home stuff onto HomeKit, even stuff that it doesn’t have native HomeKit support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I realized, wait a second, there’s a Docker container
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Homebridge. Now, if you’re not familiar with Docker, I’m going to get this technically wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t email me. But the general idea of Docker is that it’s, it’s virtualization, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like a virtual machine, but a little bit lighter weight. So you don’t have to fall, you don’t have to emulate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything, you’re kind of running against the local operating system. So but it’s sandboxed. So it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a halfway VM, if you will. And that’s all you need to know for the purposes of this conversation. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized there’s a Docker container that has home homebridge pre installed. And wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second, our Synologies have Docker support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This just got interesting. So I found some instructions on how to how to do a home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bridge with Docker and the Synology. And within literally 10 minutes, I suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had all of my Wemo devices, including the ones that have no HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support within HomeKit. A few minutes later, I have some very kludgy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wonky support from my Ring video doorbell, which I can’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend, but it’s cool that that’s kind of a thing. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also started investigating writing my own support for my thermostat because now I’ve gotten this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like bug in my ear, if you will, about how I just must have all the things on HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now I, and then I found a Node package, not a HomeKit or HomeBridge package, mind but a node
⏹️ ▶️ Casey package for my thermostat, which I have been editing and now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to, well, I forked and then made some changes to, and now I’m going to attempt to make a home bridge plugin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my weirdo thermostat. And I bring all this up to say that, A, this is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re willing to fiddle. B, I had never used Docker before and I was only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaguely familiar with the purpose of it, but holy crap, guys, Docker is sweet. Welcome to 2014,
⏹️ ▶️ John your turn to adopt the technology 10 years after, not 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But holy cow, it was so cool because I just said to the Synology, hey, go grab this container
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then run it. And then it was there. I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to do anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should try making a container with some software that you care about. They make it really easy. There’s lots of stupidity
⏹️ ▶️ John like any open source project, but to get yourself up and running of a container with some simple software
⏹️ ▶️ John in it that you choose, it’s very quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So now I have this little teeny tiny, not VM, don’t call it a VM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VM that’s running on my Synology, which is always on anyway, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey providing me a bridge between HomeKit and all the devices that don’t actually support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomeKit, which is super awesome. Because it’s all Node and JavaScript, and yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can all snark about Node, we can definitely snark about JavaScript, but I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feasibly write my own plugin for my thermostat. And that is incredibly cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as a developer, I find that incredibly empowering. And now I’ve been procrastinationing, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Marco slash Mike term was for it. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Trying to get all my devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this is so cool that between Docker and HomeBridge, this was literally 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes to get this working. And you don’t have to have a Synology to run Docker. You can do this on a Raspberry Pi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can do this on your Mac if your Mac stays on all the time. And I want to echo what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys were saying earlier, that HomeKit is incredibly quick. It is typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quicker than my Amazon device. And I’ve really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been liking it. And plus you can do timed things like every day at 645
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we go up to start the bedtime process, I tell it to turn all the upstairs lights on, which is super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And I can tell it to turn like the humidifiers on that are in the kids’ rooms, which are on these outlets,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is super cool. It’s all of this is just incredibly neat. And I was so scared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of running home bridge because I thought the configuration would be terrible and it’s, it’s not great, but it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s well within the reason or within the realm of something that any reasonable developer can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even from what I can tell, writing my own plugin for it isn’t bad, but there are like literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were 70 some pages on NPM of home bridge plugins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s almost anything under the sun that has a plugin. And I just find this all fascinating. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad that I finally had an excuse to use Docker for something. And all of this is so cool. And you should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check it out if you are at all interested in this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I started looking into thermostats too because our thermostat is ancient. And the only reason I was looking into
⏹️ ▶️ John it, not because I want new features from our thermostat or even want to control them from HomeKit or have anything to do with it, but just because
⏹️ ▶️ John I look at my thermostat and it’s been getting a little wonky lately. Like I tried to, I think some of
⏹️ ▶️ John the buttons are failing on it. I tried to change the time that the heat came on in the morning and it wasn’t working.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, let me just back away from this slowly. And just, it’s really old. Basically, I’m afraid it’s gonna break.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it does break, I’ll have to get a new thermostat. So I’m like, well, let me start the multi-year process of
⏹️ ▶️ John slow motion researching
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thermostats before I, you know. The only thing I know already is that I don’t-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is it gonna take you multiple years?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I don’t really want a smart thermostat. Like, I don’t want a Nest for sure, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want any smart features at all. but it’s like trying to find a non-smart phone that’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John now, like good luck, right? Try to find a non-smart thermostat. And the smart ones that aren’t Nest
⏹️ ▶️ John are even more terrifying in terms of how terrible their software must be and how badly supported they’re gonna be and how
⏹️ ▶️ John unreliable they’re gonna be. And I don’t have the, I just have the, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the whatever, the C-wire thing that provides voltage to it, so I’d have to fish a wire up from the
⏹️ ▶️ John basement too. And so I’m just looking at all this stuff and saying, can I find a basically a dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John thermostat that is not horrendously, you know, ugly and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I wanted something better than what I have and that it will last a long time, but I don’t want something so much better that it will become
⏹️ ▶️ John obsolete. So I poked around at that for a little bit, but then, you know, I- Spoiler, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t planning on getting anything. Like here’s a pro tip. Do not replace your thermostat when it’s two degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I wasn’t, you know- Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like not looking at this. But in the spring or summer, if your house has no air conditioning like mine,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the perfect time to replace your thermostat because probably you’ll be fine. But I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll still look into it. I would like something that is slightly better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the ancient monochrome LCD, little
⏹️ ▶️ John seven segment letters. It’s not a seven segment display, it’s more than that, so you can make little lowercase letters out of stuff too.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s basically what it is. I need something a little bit better than that, but I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want anything smart. I kind of wish Nest made one, because I use a bunch of their products now,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think for the most part they’re okay. I just don’t want any of the smarts. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John Nest made a dumb thermostat, like it doesn’t attempt to learn from anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can set it, that’s how I’ve had mine. Like I’ve had Nest thermostats in my house for about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six years now, and I have been using it in dumb mode for about 5.9 years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I like we work at home. Our schedules are a little bit different every day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so like all the the smarts are all optimized for like if you have a same schedule every day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for where all the members of the house leave the house during work and school hours and then everyone comes back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the same time and you have weekends like that’s what it’s made for for the learning stuff. If you deviate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that at all, the learning stuff is useless to you, but I turn that off almost immediately and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I still have smart remotely controlled, programmable, nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m just always afraid though, because the Nest product is not designed to be like that, that I’m running counter to what they want
⏹️ ▶️ John the product to be and that some software update is gonna remove my ability to have it work like that. Like I really want a product that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that as one of its design criteria is, this is a programmable thermostat that lets you set
⏹️ ▶️ John time and days for temperatures. Like that’s all I need. I’m not lacking features
⏹️ ▶️ John and my house is one giant zone. Like it is a very old house. it’s very like there’s no there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy I can do I’m not remodeling my house I just want a simple thing that does the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John job of my current thermostat that is probably older than both of you. I just want that
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe like maybe I could you know control it from my smartphone and override
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing like if I’m on the way home or like I would take a couple of interesting features but I don’t want any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of learning and Nest seems to be all about the learning and so I’m hesitant to buy one and they’re also very
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive, hesitant to buy one and then disable all of its signature features and hope that they never get turned back on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you, it’s been fine for almost six years. Like that, that should not be a concern at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is totally fine. The only concern should be you need the common wire. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. You need the common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wire. So you’ll have to have somebody run that. But it’s not that it’s a low voltage wire. It isn’t that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can run that myself. Like it’s not that. Yeah, I could do this. But the thing is, like, why spend the extra
⏹️ ▶️ John money? Like someone’s suggesting this eco B thing, which is like half the price of a nest. And there are even cheaper ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John they all kind of ape the nest looking feel at this point too. Like I don’t, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll think about it. It’s not, it’s not a big deal, but uh, I, it’s the type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John if that thing breaks, I want to know exactly what I’m going to buy and then I’ll just buy it. And if some summer comes along
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking for some home project to do, this is a reasonable one that I could probably do in, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in an afternoon if all goes well and in a weekend, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey famous last words,
⏹️ ▶️ John anytime, anytime you’re like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Anytime you’re doing a home project, and it seems really simple, you,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s what do you call it, the parable of the Home Depot trips.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you’re lucky, and you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do have everything you need, it’ll take two seconds too. If you’re unlucky, you realize you thought you were ready to do that project,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re missing one thing from Home Depot, and then you go there and come back on the weekend, it takes longer than you thought, and you start doing the project,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get the thing half disassembled, and you’re ready to put it back together, and you find out you’re missing another part, so you go back to Home Depot, and
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s what I’m trying to avoid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you, just get the Nest. That’s it, that’s your answer. get the nest, run the command line, wherever you need to run it, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might happen, we’ll see.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s apparently a stage light fault for MacBook Pros, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I guess, just a funny way of describing the problem. But I read this in the show notes and I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess what’s happening is the way that Apple is doing the, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it? The backlight cable from the bottom of the laptops to behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the whole display cable, the thing that basically sends a signal to the display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. There you go. It used to be thick and now it’s thin. I’m obviously oversimplifying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s causing some wonkiness as it begins to fail because every time you open and close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your laptop, you’re putting a little stress on this cable. And what ends up happening is it looks like a series of spotlights going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the bottom of your display and that’s what your backlight looks like, which is obviously not desirable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I fixed it as weighed in on this and said, hey, to replace this cable is like six bucks. But hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess what? Because Apple mounted it in this ridiculous way, it costs $600
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix this and replace the $6 cable. Cool. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t put the story in specifically for this issue because anyone who has had Mac laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, like this is not the first time a cable that that snakes from the laptop body into the display has
⏹️ ▶️ John failed, causing display problems like I think it’s happened at least three times before in the past. And I mean, you can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the engineering challenge like you do open and close that lid. Like I’m not sure most people have a laptop. I haven’t really thought
⏹️ ▶️ John about the idea of like, there’s a hinge here, But there is also
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of connection between the main part of the computer and the display to power the backlight and send
⏹️ ▶️ John a display signal. So there’s got to be something somewhere inside that hinge that is turning
⏹️ ▶️ John with the hinge and flexing, especially as displays have gotten thinner and laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John have gotten thinner and the hinge part has gotten tighter. So it’s not a new problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this case, one of the main complaints was that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of having the cable have like connectors on both ends, which again would make it thicker and more complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John the cable is like sort of integral to the display, that’s why it costs $600, because you have to replace the entire display. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can just yank out the cable and stick in a new cable, and you know, and that wouldn’t even solve the problem, you just reset the timer on the
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing flexing, right? And it’s thin cable versus thick, and yada, yada, yada. But the reason I put this in here is a
⏹️ ▶️ John topic that I think I’ve talked about in the past, And this made me think of it again. And I haven’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John boiled it down into a pithy saying or phrase or whatever. So every time it comes up, I just try to re-describe
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I thought I’d take another run at it this time. And I’ll do it with a car analogy, because that’s where I
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly think about it. Yes. It’s sort of the impossible dream of car
⏹️ ▶️ John design, which we just spoke about the 911, which may or may not make it into the show earlier. It won’t. Earlier this evening, we
⏹️ ▶️ John were talking about the Porsche 911. It’s probably one of the closest to this ideal. And the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is of iterative development, where you make some kind of product, whatever it may be. You make a car,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you sell it to a bunch of people. And maybe you’re lucky you made a pretty good car and a bunch of people like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s always going to be issues with the car. I love my 911, but the seats are kind of wonky.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have really good support, and the steering wheel doesn’t have a good
⏹️ ▶️ John place to put your hands. And maybe those are the only two things to know you about your car, but otherwise you love
⏹️ ▶️ John your 911. Right? When this comes time to get a new 911 in your
⏹️ ▶️ John life, or when they make a new generation or whatever, you may go look at it, you’re like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John these new ones are really totally different. And there’s a different set of trade offs,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s the way it is buying most cars, not 911s, maybe like the new generation of Accord,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re both Accords, they’re both four door cars or whatever, but they’re very different from each other, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you might be thinking, even if you’re a 911 owner, what I would have liked is like my old 911,
⏹️ ▶️ John but fix the steering wheel and fix the seats and maybe get a little bit more power and maybe restyle
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But like, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but just fix the things that are bad. And the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John being that over time, if you just took this, this car, and this isn’t to be clear, this is not what 911s do,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that people say they all look the same. This is not what they do, but it’s, you know, it’s close because it has
⏹️ ▶️ John that appearance from the outside, is every time you have to make a new one, just look at the current
⏹️ ▶️ John one and assess every part of it in terms of the performance criteria you set for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John How durable is it? How much do people like it? How pleasing is it to use? How well does it perform for its desired
⏹️ ▶️ John function? How heavy is it? You know, how strong is it? Is it holding paint well? Does
⏹️ ▶️ John it ever make any noises? Like every part of the car subject to that. And every year
⏹️ ▶️ John find something that has a problem and improve it. But the things that don’t have problems, don’t break them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you imagine a laptop that was like that, there would have been like one laptop design a really long time ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And then we’d just slowly be refining and it would slowly be getting thinner and smaller. But in general, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if some year they made like a ribbon cable that flexed and broke and had a problem, like whenever the first time that happened 15, 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, they would say, okay, we need to come up with a solution with this flexing cable problem, right? First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John one characteristic is it needs to be cheap to repair because they do fail, right? That can happen. So let’s make sure that the cable is detachable,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? and maybe you do that in the next one. And the next one they say, okay, it’s easy to repair, but it’s still breaking. What can we do to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it not break as much? We can make the cable thicker. Okay, well, then the next year you’re like, well, it’s so thick now, we wanna make our laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner. How can we make it durable, easy to repair, but not as thick? And you just keep trying to refine
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But never do you go to the point where you say, we need to make it thinner, but let’s not worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about durability and repairability. Let’s make it non-replaceable and make it even thinner than it was before. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now we’ve, you know, done like, you would never regress. You would always say it has to have all the good characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ John that we care about and just improve on the ones that are bad The reason real products don’t do that is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s incredibly boring like that Even 9-11 doesn’t do it because they you want it to be a new car all new interior
⏹️ ▶️ John all new exterior different wheels different engine like in significant ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that You’re not just taking the same air-cooled engine even though this for a long time very similar air-cooled
⏹️ ▶️ John engines and just improving at a certain Point you have to go to water cooling because it’s just that’s the next step and it’s a scary difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John step or whatever but you know the interior everything’s different the radio controls are different the gauges are different like
⏹️ ▶️ John the pedals are placed differently that the ergonomics of the car are different the window openings like just change
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote for the sake of change right but it’s i mean it’s not it’s it’s because people
⏹️ ▶️ John want new interesting products and you can’t keep trying to design for your customers that liked
⏹️ ▶️ John your original product forever it’s ridiculous but it’s a balance between those two things so there is never going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the extreme of like you make make the one laptop and you just refine it over years and years. If they had done that, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard would be bulletproof by now because it would be like, we made the keyboards, you know, we made one keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we fixed everything about it. We made it maybe thinner as a criteria. So you make it thinner, make it more durable, make it feel better,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it more reliable, make it waterproof, make it so no matter how acidic and alien
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger grease is, you don’t wear off the key cap, the note letters on the right, but just knock them down one
⏹️ ▶️ John by one to just make like by the by the end of development, like an amazingly solid keyboard that
⏹️ ▶️ John does everything that you couldn’t just jump to that keyboard design. You had to do it by trial and error over years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years by keeping the good and getting rid of and improving the bad in a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of trial and error. And every time I see like the umpteenth time they’ve screwed this up, or the fact that they’ve sacrificed
⏹️ ▶️ John repairability or reliability for the sake of thinness, it’s like you are you are not practicing
⏹️ ▶️ John the ideal of iterative development and like you’re too far in one direction, you can’t go all the way to the the other direction because you end
⏹️ ▶️ John up with boring products and selling to like your worst customers, you do have to make new and interesting and appealing things. But on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other hand, you should try mightily to like learn from your past mistakes and not regress.
⏹️ ▶️ John repairability is important. Making something thin, but also durable is important. Surely they
⏹️ ▶️ John have some kind of test that open and closes their laptops a million times to the robot arm, right? That should have found
⏹️ ▶️ John this failure. And when they found this failure, they said this is really bad, because the only way to replace it is to replace the entire screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe some account and did some math and said, well, it still works out. You know, we think the product has enough appeal to
⏹️ ▶️ John make up for the fact it’s a $600 repair and most will be under warranty and yada, yada, yada. And if it’s outside warranty, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably some reason this all makes sense in someone’s spreadsheet. But from the perspective of consumer, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is too far away from the ideal of the product that in all aspects gets better
⏹️ ▶️ John and better. Like and you know, the final one is that I think about this most when I’m sitting in cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think about door handles, both interior and exterior, because they’re, they’re the part of cars that are
⏹️ ▶️ John like such a big factor of the user interface, like the non driving unit race, every time you
⏹️ ▶️ John get in and out of the car, you use them. And they change absolutely for
⏹️ ▶️ John the sake of change all the time on every car model. And I wish someone
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, we have refined the handles of our cars, both interior and exterior
⏹️ ▶️ John to be durable, pleasing, not sharp, not pointy, not too hot, not too cold,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t catch your fingers on it, are in the right place for people with most arms, very durable, don’t freeze in the winter,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get too hot in the sun, like all the things that can make handles good, work on every single one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those to make just the perfect door handles and don’t change them every three years,
⏹️ ▶️ John like entirely change them or door locks, right? Just think of all the cars you’ve owned. How many
⏹️ ▶️ John have had remotely the same design for interior door handles? They’re so radically
⏹️ ▶️ John different and there is no reason for that and every time I get a new generation of car, I’m like, well, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the old handles in some ways and worse than the other. You are not making progress. Sometimes it’s way worse overall. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit better overall, but there is no trend line of you learning from your mistakes of making door handles
⏹️ ▶️ John or shift handles or steering wheels or so many other things. So sorry for the long winded rant, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I don’t think iterative development is the right word, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. I just really wish
⏹️ ▶️ John in addition to all the other complaints we have about Apple laptops and stuff that for devices like this, they would build
⏹️ ▶️ John on the designs of the past to come to an increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfying product rather than radically changing everything every time and just remaking all the same mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you bring up door handles. And this is kind of tangential to the point you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make. But I was watching a really, really great documentary put on or created
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the Everyday Day Driver folks, which is a YouTube channel that does car reviews with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much bigger budgets and with much more skill than me. But they did this movie, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentary, American Original, which is about every Corvette from the C1 and 54 all the way up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through today and a little bit of chatter about the forthcoming mid-engine that. And of course, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re driving all these different Corvettes, they’re showing plenty of interior shots. I’m looking at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the pictures of these door handles and thinking, God, that looks like it’s from 50 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though it’s a 20 year old car. And the difference in the door handle between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a early nineties ZR1 and today on a, just any modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car, it’s a tremendous difference. You would never think so. And this is exactly what you’re talking about, John. Like this seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should have been a solved problem, but now, but yet. The door handles look so antiquated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and weird in the, in those older cars. and my dad has a year old Z06,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where there is no interior door handle. You hit a button, you hit a push button, and then it pops the door open for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This should be a solved problem, but it is not a solved problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, and to address some of the people in the chat room, the idea is not like something like the Volkswagen Beetle where you literally don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change it. Because not changing it at all is the worst, because you’re not improving that. Surely there is something
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with the original Beetle’s door handles, or I don’t even know if this applies to, but there’s always something wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with it, there’s always something that can be improved, even if it’s invisible, even if it’s like, everybody loved these door handles, but they broke
⏹️ ▶️ John after 300,000 miles. Fine, so work on that, right? Everyone loved them, but they got a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John hot when they were in the sun. Like there’s always something you can address. So they should be changing over time, but they should only be changing
⏹️ ▶️ John in ways to address shortcomings without sacrificing the attributes that they had. Like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John something like the shift knobs, my wife’s Accord is like the special edition that’s got like a metal top to the shift knob.
⏹️ ▶️ John It gets hot in the summer. The top of the shift knob gets hot. She puts a little sock over it, right? The all the
⏹️ ▶️ John previous shift knobs we’ve had in all of our other stick shift accords and other Hondas have not gotten hot
⏹️ ▶️ John like that Right. So this is a regression and no one thought like one of the characteristics we care about for our shift levers
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and why did it change? It’s entirely different There is no part of the shelf of the shift lever that is shared
⏹️ ▶️ John with the shift lever of like the two-year earlier car Let alone you like zero part of it is the same It is an entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John different thing that you put in your hand. The boot is different the everything about it is different, right? right? Did
⏹️ ▶️ John every single part of it need to be changed? I bet not. And I know one part that didn’t need to be changed, the part that gets super hot
⏹️ ▶️ John that burns the palm of your hand when it’s in the sun, right? And because no one thought to think like, what are the performance characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ John of our current knobs? What is our criteria for a good shift lever and make sure we don’t regress, make sure we don’t take something
⏹️ ▶️ John that was better at like not absorbing and radiating the heat back or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John replace it with something that is right. So I you want progress and you want change. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you do have to have change for the sake of change and fashion. And you do have to reassess at a certain point that maybe we shouldn’t have shifting
⏹️ ▶️ John at all and the car should be electric. Like you gotta do that every once in a while. I’m just saying for the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that, you know, laptops still have hinges and they still have displays. Let’s work on getting the hinge display
⏹️ ▶️ John assembly, getting all the characteristics of that to be better over time. So, you know, we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John hearing the 900th story about, you know, a hinge display issue. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John solve the problem. Don’t just keep making new and different laptops that have new varieties of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People probably come to me and expect me to get really, really super mad about this. I’ve heard a lot of people on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today about this so far, because everyone knows that I don’t like this generation of laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the fact that there is a flaw like this, that in isolation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every generation of Apple laptops has had flaws, they’ve all had hardware flaws,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple doesn’t handle them very well. Simple as that, like when Apple has a hardware flaw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in something they sell, they really don’t handle it well. If you are one of the buyers of that thing, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been there. The previous generation had problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nvidia GPUs like desoldering themselves, screen delaminations, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are problems, even with the generations that I like, which is all the ones before this. There’s always been problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some sort or another. But man, it sure does seem like this generation has a lot of these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This generation has had so many engineering problems. You have all the keyboard reliability issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thermal throttling, you have the popping and cracking that seems to be thermal expansion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues that changes the characteristics or reliability of the keyboard or other parts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on the temperature of the machine, even in regular temperature ranges. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with the earlier ones, especially the 2016s with USB-C devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make the Wi-Fi cut out. Like, it’s just, there have been so many problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these generations. We don’t know how they will be resolved long-term. We don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple’s hearing us yet until they actually make something new that’s a new generation. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, though, that we can look at the MacBook Air and learn a little bit from it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a relevant area here, that when iFixit tore it apart, they noted a few areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that made it more repairable than the other laptops of this generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially things like the batteries and the glue and stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are small steps, and they’re not gonna make these things suddenly as repairable as previous generations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have been. But it is possible that Apple is learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the repairability angle at least, and I hope that this really has kicked them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt in terms of the numbers on these. Apple pays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for warranty repairs out of their own pocket, for things that are still under warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So things that are very expensive and challenging to repair, that hits Apple too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That hits their bottom line too, because for all the ones that are under warranty, they foot that bill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And granted, you know, they’re getting the wholesale price on these repairs, but still, like, Apple’s footing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bill. And so I have to hope that they made these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices so incredibly expensive to repair, and they need such common repairs, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic keyboard stuff, and now this screen issue. I would hope that enough of them are under warranty when these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen, that Apple is seeing these numbers. Because it’s very clear to me the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason we have these laptops, the only reason that they are still on the market and the redesign has not happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because of numbers. It’s because they’ve decided to just stick it out, repair what needs to be repaired,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get their value out of this product line before they redesign it. But there have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just been so many problems with this generation. Even if you like the keyboard, There’s been so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many other engineering and hardware and reliability problems this generation. And no generation is perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but boy, this does seem like a real lemon. And so I really hope that this era ends soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really hope this ends in 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the topic of repairability, like there is a point that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John of approached in a few of its products now where you do have to, like repairability is just
⏹️ ▶️ John one aspect of product quality. There’s lots of criteria that make it. Is it pleasing to use? Does it feel nice? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it durable? Does it, you know, does it break easily? If it does break, how easy is it to repair? So on and
⏹️ ▶️ John so forth on the repairability angle, specifically, some products, probably the watch will get here sooner than anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John The correct solution might be eventually like, right, so we have this thing and it has lots of parts and the parts are very
⏹️ ▶️ John small. And sometimes we have to use glue because there’s no way to use fasteners or the fasteners end up like getting
⏹️ ▶️ John looser, having a place where water can get in or whatever. So we’d end up gluing it together, but then like the glue can
⏹️ ▶️ John come apart. Like this, you’re kind of in this uncontrolled middle zone where you’re like, I can’t really make this repairable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not, it’s not that type of thing. But when I try to make the product as well as I can, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels and looks good, like it uses techniques that that have problems. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can imagine like getting over the hump and saying, actually, like the Apple Watch 17
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically completely sealed in like lucite or quartz crystal crystal. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is entirely sealed. Like there’s no way for anything to get into it in any way. Like there’s no metal
⏹️ ▶️ John touching the outside. Everything is like wireless and inductive or whatever. And it’s like one solid, complete,
⏹️ ▶️ John lightweight thing. Like it just looks like, if you can imagine, it wouldn’t, you know, a modern piece of lucite with like
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of paper inside the middle of it. And you’re like, it’s incredibly durable. Nothing comes unglued because
⏹️ ▶️ John there is nothing to be glued, but it is a hundred percent unrepairable. And if it has any problem whatsoever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to throw it out and get a new one. But that ends up being the right call because it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much less likely to break. And the cost of the entire thing, I mean, this is a fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John world, but imagine it’s much cheaper than it is now because of technological advances or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes that’s the right call. And it’s like we are 100% sacrificing repairability for essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John disposability or say recyclability. Say it literally was made entirely of recyclable plastic with some
⏹️ ▶️ John nano things in there for display and compute. And you just melt it down and it just becomes completely
⏹️ ▶️ John inert, totally recyclable plastic that you use to make more Apple watches, right? So when you bring it in and there’s any problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just drop it in a little bin, that bin goes off to a place, it gets melted down and goes back, you know, like it doesn’t even have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be like an econ, like an environmental problem. Like sometimes, quote unquote, disposability
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually the right move if you get to the point where that’s the better thing to do. And I think Apple sometimes thinks they’re at that point, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, our products are so thin now that we need to make this ribbon cable super thin and we don’t have room for a connector,
⏹️ ▶️ John so let’s just hook it up to display and this will never break anyway. And they like, they miscalculate. And now what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve made is a situation where this flexi cable that has a problem that has happened in like
⏹️ ▶️ John seven of your other laptops of the last two decades, not a new problem. Not only have you not solved it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you have, you know, your hubris has made you make it worse. So now when it, if, and when it does
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, you have to throw out the entire screen, which is incredibly expensive and incredibly wasteful. And just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, runs up your repairs and bills and stuff like that. So I think Apple sometimes feels like they’re much closer to that
⏹️ ▶️ John threshold of like, let’s just make it all in one. Another example is the Unibody, which is a great innovation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s take this laptop and refine it, refine it, and at some point someone says, I’ve got an idea, why don’t we stop making this
⏹️ ▶️ John chassis and frame and parts that we’ve been refining and making better and stiffer over the years? That’s like from going
⏹️ ▶️ John body and frame to Unibody. There’s a new tech, literally, Unibody, they use the same term. There’s a new technology
⏹️ ▶️ John we can use to make the frame of our laptops better. And it’s a big risk and it’s gonna be totally different, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we think it’s gonna be better overall. And I think they have those same notions about like a ribbon cable
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, uh, that is, uh, you know, totally connected to the display and can’t be removed, but they’re wrong in that case. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s, it’s difficult. I’m not saying it’s not difficult, but like, I still think about
⏹️ ▶️ John the dream of the door whose car handles over the course of 50 years, just get better and better instead of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the car whose door handles change every five years for no discernible reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s not really an apples to apples comparison, but as I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older as developer, I found that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever code is less and less appealing to me. Like when I was right out of school, if I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write something really clever or cram a whole bunch of different things onto one line, I always thought I was such a badass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, oh, look at me and look at this cool thing I’ve done. And the older I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a developer and as a dude, the more I’ve come to value you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understandable and repairable code, you know, something that’s easy to understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and easy to maintain as being more valuable and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more useful than clever code. And I would much rather write something in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hundred lines where a hundred of those lines are easy to understand than to write something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 10 lines where it takes even future me two hours to figure out what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was thinking. And that may not be the case for everyone. And it may not be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case always, but I, I rarely regret being more direct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and being more clear. And I think the analogy here to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twist this to hardware is that, you know, being repairable is important. Now, again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a perfect apples to apples comparison, but having something that’s repairable is important, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the volume that Apple works with because if you are shipping that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many Mac laptops, it is inevitable that some of them will have problems and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of them will need to be repaired. Maybe they’ll have problems because of manufacturing defects. Maybe they’ll have problems because people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop them. But one way or another, these should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be easily repairable. And in the effort of going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinner and lighter, we have lost a lot of that repairability. Now, I am not one to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shake my fist at the sky because I can no longer add RAM myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would be cool if I could add RAM to an Apple laptop myself, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly embittered that I can’t. So there are some ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think these trade-offs are worth it because I am willing to solder RAM onto the board in order to have something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much thinner and lighter. But clearly these keyboards should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a much easier thing to repair. It appears that these ribbon cables for the display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be easier to repair. And as much as I will tell you, I freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love my MacBook One, and I love it specifically because it’s thin and light.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At the same time, I would sacrifice a little bit of that thinness and lightness to make it that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much easier to repair. And the same thing that the three of us particularly have been beating our chests about for years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would take a slightly thicker iPhone if it meant I had a considerably more battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s a very, it’s, it’s, it’s chess. It’s not checkers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To quote Tensel Washington. It’s very complex and I’m deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oversimplifying it, but there are so many ways in which I feel like maybe we have gone too far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both in terms of software development, in terms of hardware design, you know, could we, could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get a little bit of that thickness back to make these things so much easier to repair.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the example of SSD and RAM is a good one because there they traded repairability for reliability.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it was the right trade-off because they actually did get so much more reliability in
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange for having to replace the entire motherboard if your RAM goes bad. But when you had
⏹️ ▶️ John SO DIMMs or whatever they were, you had all those different contact points and you were
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely to have some kind of RAM issue go bad because it’s just inherently less reliable to have
⏹️ ▶️ John two pieces of metal pressing up against each other, this giant array of pins and contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John where corrosion can come and any kind of moisture can get in there and things can wiggle loose. Soldering it on
⏹️ ▶️ John is way more reliable. And it’s so much more reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John that it ends up being a huge net win for like, yeah, sometimes the RAM goes bad and you have to replace the entire motherboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that happens so much less than DIMMs going bad did, right? And SSD, it feels worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those actually can be socketed, but then they soldered them on and it’s like, well, you could maybe make that socket so I could upgrade or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, with reliability. So there’s always trade-offs to be made there. But when they
⏹️ ▶️ John make the right trade-offs, we’re happy. But when they make, they trade
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. When they just trade it all in. Like just, this laptop shares nothing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous laptop. Like that makes me feel bad. Like I always think in my Hondas that, despite them changing the stupid door handles
⏹️ ▶️ John every generation, surely there are some parts of the car probably in the engine and the suspension components that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, if you look at that part of the engine, it’s basically been the same for the past 50 years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they just like, when they make the new engine, they basically take the part from the old engine and they maybe make it a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit stronger in the places where it failed and maybe change some material here and there, but they don’t change it that much because people
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t see it. Like I have to think that’s how Honda and Toyota get to the point where they’re as reliable as they are, is that sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John internal workings that you don’t see, they don’t reinvent the wheel every time. They just take like
⏹️ ▶️ John their seatbelt buckle that they’ve always had and just improve it slightly and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John put a different skin on the outside. But the internals, they’re not redesigning that from scratch every time because they just wanna,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s an important safety component or it goes to reliability and it’s like, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish that applied to the door handles too, but I’m sure that the most reliable car companies do that because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way you get a car with all these, especially internal combustion car, with all these parts to
⏹️ ▶️ John be as reliable as they are if you haven’t spent literally decades refining those parts so that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sure that they won’t freeze in the winter and won’t crack when you go over a bump and won’t be squeaky after 200,000 miles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also like repairability is one of those things that like, it’s almost like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insurance. It’s like, if you’ve never had anything bad happen to your products that needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco repair, you might think, oh, I want them to keep making things thinner. I want them, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want the thinnest thing possible and I’ll just deal with whatever happens. And your view changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time that bites you. The first time that you have to eat the cost of a repair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that you’re stuck with a model of something that ends up being a lemon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certain generations of products just end up having known problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a while that they can do a repair extension program and replace the thing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few times over a few years, but you’re still going to have that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you happen to be the unlucky person who buys that tough luck,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re you know the solution is by the new one and hopefully dump the old one for some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price that you can stomach and so like there are certain models that are just lemons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and certain percentage of all models will break and need repair and until that happens to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’re probably thinking like you know, please make a thinner, but once that does happen you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize oh boy, I really wish these things were a little bit easier to repair and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require massive part replacements that cost $700 or whatever. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like Apple has to be the grown-up here and make the decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their customers like, look, we know that what you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the extra half millimeter that we might be able to shave off of this thing by making these parts a little bit thinner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and weaker over time. But what we are giving you is what you should have, which is something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable and when it does break, repairable. There’s so many I mean look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world made a lot of mistakes in 2016. I Really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can fix this one this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see Three men can dream. That’s all we know.
#askatp: Homebrew ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Let’s do some Ask ATP, beginning with Andrew Jaffe, who writes, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what happens to projects like Homebrew when the ARM transition happens? Lots of developers and scientists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like me rely on these tools. And I imagine that they won’t all just trivially compile for ARM. Do we need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ISH like emulation? What do we do? So if you’re not familiar with Homebrew, Homebrew is a kind of a package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manager. So something like FFmpeg or YouTube DL, those are both open source projects. And Homebrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes it very, very, very easy to just say, Hey, I would like FFmpeg, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will figure out how to fetch it, download it, and in some cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not many, compile it, and then put it in the appropriate places so you can run it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to hear your answer to this, both of you guys. To me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume that this shouldn’t be a big deal, as I knock on wood, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of these things are written in languages that are high enough on the stack that it should be able to be recompiled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But maybe I’m missing something. So, Marco, do you have any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there are certain, like, you know, packages and everything that won’t compile under ARM unmodified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and would require some work and that might never get that work that, you know, that like you might lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some packages. But the good thing is that if Apple does go ARM,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they won’t be the first ARM computer that has demand for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server side software and packages like you know Nginx and memcache
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and PHP and Python and Ruby and and FFmpeg and YouTube DL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like all the stuff you might install from homebrew they won’t be the first ones to need that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only does arm have a small but growing server presence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also Raspberry Pis are all arm and they run Linux and there’s been demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Raspberry Pis to run arm versions of common Linux tools for years. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while you won’t have everything necessarily on day one, there is already a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of arm demand out there for Linux tools to work. And so I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like Apple wouldn’t be going into this as the very first people. We wouldn’t be starting from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero. So it would take some work, but I have a feeling most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those tools would come over within not too long of a time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though this is a question about source code and stuff, it actually does help a surprising amount
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple now controls this entire compiler tool chain. Like we’ve gone through these transitions before
⏹️ ▶️ John and at various times, Apple has had much less control over its compiler tool chain than it does now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, do people do need to update their source? But compiler differences and compiler flag differences are
⏹️ ▶️ John like half the battle and dealing with like just getting something to build. Like you know, because so
⏹️ ▶️ John much source code uses like macros or other supposedly platform independent things and just you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John tripped up on issues that are not actually portability issues they’re just issues in different you know an entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John compiler for a different architecture like from 68k to power pc or whatever and so i
⏹️ ▶️ John i imagine this transition will go as good as if not better than the the ones x86
⏹️ ▶️ John because arm isn’t arm is not like arm is not a new architecture it’s also not a new architecture for apple
⏹️ ▶️ John uh you’ll just have to wait for stuff to get updated uh but the stuff you care about will
⏹️ ▶️ John and the the esoteric stuff, you’ll get left behind, but you won’t care. Fair
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. Because that’s what happened the past two times. Like things got left behind in 68K, things got left behind in PowerPC,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all the stuff that we care about came along and so much new stuff happened. You know, we just mentioned Docker. Like, I don’t think anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John ever has worried about Docker running on a PowerPC Mac because by the time it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Docker is five years old now or something, PowerPC Macs weren’t really a thing anymore. So they don’t have to worry about it. So
#askatp: Kids these days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Wielander writes, it took me four years to convince my mom to buy me a computer as a kid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I went on to build my career on computers. Now that I’m a dad, I worry I’ll do the same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my kids. So for example, what future thing do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think there will be that you’re going to miss? Do you share this fear? How do you deal with it? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think John’s asking, computers seemed like a bunch of malarkey when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were the sizes of rooms, but suddenly when they got smaller, should parents of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time encourage kids to use them even though they seemed like they were just a time waster?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think about this a lot actually, and what things do I think are silly that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll kind of poo-poo that I’m really doing a disservice to my kids by doing so. So a great example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me of something that I don’t understand and seems silly to me, but I feel like there’s something there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Minecraft. I have no particular understanding of Minecraft. Never played it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I will. Don’t worry. I know. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only have a vague understanding of it, but it seems like the sort of thing that left my own devices, I’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just go grab some Legos, man. Like why? Or sorry, Europeans go grab some Lego,
⏹️ ▶️ John rigs for trademark toys and bricks. You, you won’t have that feeling once you you’ve played enough video games that
⏹️ ▶️ John once you actually do play Minecraft for a short period of time, you’ll get it. I I’m guaranteed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. But you get my point, right? that it seems on the surface like something that’s easily dismissible, but in reality, I think is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really good way to build a lot of really good skills. And, and I don’t know what that’ll be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I keep trying to remind myself that even if something isn’t important or really understandable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be understandable to either of my kids or not going to be important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to either of my kids. And really, it seems like if my kids are excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about almost anything, I should probably encourage them and encourage them to pull on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thread and see what’s there, because even if it’s something as silly, like, you know, Declan is four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he is obsessed with Paw Patrol, which to me seems like it’s mostly saccharine in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it’s a TV show that’s mostly saccharine and I don’t know what he would really get out of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if him playing with Paw Patrol, where one of the dogs is like a firefighter, what if that leads him into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a career as a firefighter or something like that? So I guess I’m saying in a roundabout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that I feel like I should at the least get out of my kid’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to these things, not poo-poo stuff just because I don’t get it. If I’m really good and really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart, I will encourage whatever it may be and encourage them to kind of see where the logical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conclusion of whatever their interests are. I don’t know. John, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald So this specific experience, I don’t know how old our question asker is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this experience of having to beg your parents to get you a or like I had that experience too. But I think of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are around our age, part of it is that computers used to be really expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John second part is that maybe you grew up in a house where you didn’t have that kind of disposable
⏹️ ▶️ John income anyway. Like they could cost as much as a car. Like they were a new thing, but they were also like a new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that was like a serious financial commitment for the family. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a precocious five-year-old asking your parents to spend more than their last car
⏹️ ▶️ John cost for a thing that they also don’t understand. It’s a much bigger ask than, hey, I’m playing Minecraft,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t understand it, and it’s just like a free to download game or whatever. As to the specific question, what things you worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about, the things that you might poo-poo or whatever, it’s not going to do. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to be, if we all live long enough, it’s not going to be the case of a technology product or an
⏹️ ▶️ John app or something like that, because we’re all just too comfortable with that. I’m not saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John is what it’s going to be, an example of something that would induce this feeling. Say, in 10 or 15 or 20 years, our
⏹️ ▶️ John kids are grown, and they’re having children of their own,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody is genetically engineering their children. They’re choosing the eye color. They’re choosing the hair color.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re screening out and basically biological manipulation of DNA
⏹️ ▶️ John becoming commonplace. That’s the type of thing that people in our generation would be like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand the technology, but I just don’t think it’s right. I think you should just have your kids the old fashioned way and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, let the dice go where they may and just like, like it’s, there’d be incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John pushback from our generation. I’m not saying I actually believe this, but like it would make people are an iteration uncomfortable because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not accustomed to, you know, uh, elective genetic engineering as a
⏹️ ▶️ John casual thing. And it seems wrong and weird and we don’t understand it and we would rail against it. We
⏹️ ▶️ John collectively as a generation, not me specifically, right? That’s the type of discomfort that you have to expect. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s going to be, oh, computers, but different and more so in like different apps and different cultural
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But like, what about something entirely different that you thought was outside the realm of things that you mess with at all? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s incredibly dangerous. Don’t do that. Like, you see the level of genetically modified food or whatever. It’s, it’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ John domain that makes you uncomfortable. So think of the generation before computers seeing computers, that’s a new domain of thing. There
⏹️ ▶️ John was nothing like that. There was no, it’s not just like a much more complicated, like, machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John or much more complicated internal combustion engine. It’s this new thing made of transistors and just completely
⏹️ ▶️ John inexplicable and weird. It can seem scary and dangerous. So I think if it does happen to us, it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. It’s not going to be something in a category we’re already comfortable
#askatp: Jerks per capita
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Mike McFadden writes, Apple’s recent financial woes have prompted a spike in online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commentary snide, rude, and grumpy comments are so common. It makes me wonder how you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys handle it. Does the tech world have more jerks per capita than other sectors?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, listen to basically the entire run of analog for my thoughts on this issue. Um, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, one, when, when you have an audience as we do and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are small potatoes compared to a lot of people, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people. But when you come to have any audience, you start to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realize that no matter what you say or do or think, someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will disagree with you. And oftentimes when it comes to the Internet, they will disagree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you violently, maybe not be the right choice of words, but very, very emphatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And especially if you’re on Twitter, you typically know how emphatic a person will disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you by how much of their real name appears in their information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you know, Joe Smith with a egg as an avatar is going to be extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vile in disagreeing with you. Whereas Marco Armand with a picture that looks like him is probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be more respectful. Anonymity breeds idiots and breeds meanies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfortunately. But over time, you just kind of get used to it, which is really a terrible answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sometimes I’ll be in a bad mood and I’ll see something really ticks me off and I’ll call somebody on it and be like, hey, you remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a person, right? Like I have feelings. This isn’t really necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to answer the other part of the question, why more jerks per per capita than other sectors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s because we are often for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time. Like when I was growing up, because I understood computers, I revered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is too strong a word, but it was like, Oh, he understands computers. He gets something that most people don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that gives you a false sense of, again, not the right word, but like not power, but authority maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And over time you start to believe your own hype and think, Oh yeah, I understand this stuff. All these plebeian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idiots don’t get it. So of course I’m right about this. And additionally, you just end up forming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strong opinions. Like how could you use Facebook, which by the way I do, but how could you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Facebook because they’re so clearly an entire company of evil people? Like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an, even that joking opinion that I just gave is, is, is very much a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not true opinion. There are plenty of not true fact. There’s plenty of people at Facebook who are genuinely well-meaning and nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if the company as a whole is kind of well, evil. It’s just, I don’t know, I think it’s this self-professed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or this kind of, I don’t want to say human centipede, but I can’t think of a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word for it, where it’s just, we all escalate on how certain we are about our particular viewpoints until it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just gets to the point that it’s unsustainable. And I don’t know when this is all going to break, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s gross. It’s gross in the tech sector, and I don’t think it’s limited to tech either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things that you learn when you exit childhood and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become an adult, and some people don’t learn this for a while, but one of the things that you hopefully eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn is that just because somebody is, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a doctor, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a good doctor, or that they’re smart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There There are idiots in every field. And any titles or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professions or statuses that children look up to and kind of think like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this person’s a doctor. They of course know what they’re doing because doctors are smart. As the adult,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you learn that there’s idiots everywhere and they seem to be pretty evenly distributed actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Someone’s at the bottom of those med school classes and could be your doctor. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similarly, I think there’s jerks everywhere. Like, I don’t think necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tech sector have more jerks per capita than anywhere else. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think ultimately there’s jerks everywhere and they’re probably distributed in roughly even proportions in most places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there are some factors that can maybe boost the percentages. You know, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you touched on this a little bit where like, you know, culturally, tech nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growing up in the 70s through 90s, tech was very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a mainstream thing, and those who were into it were usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more likely to be nerds. And there was this sense of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you said of, you were probably one of the smart kids, at least people thought you were, and people kept telling you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you had this reinforcement of, yeah, I’m smart, I know what I’m doing. And you oftentimes, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before there was much internet usage, you often didn’t have a lot of people around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knew as much as you did. And so you weren’t being challenged very much, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really were able to get really far up your own butt. But ultimately, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really stopped being the case probably a good 15 years ago, at least now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Computers became mainstream a while ago now, and knowing a lot about tech and being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super into tech is no longer a geek thing. It’s a mainstream thing. And the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who grew up after that transition happened seemed to have about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same percentage of jerks as the people who grew up before it, like us. And so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that is a contributing factor anymore. Like I don’t think that that is substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaning changing anything about how many people in tech are jerks. People in tech are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at building systems. Like we’re really good at building tools to spread jerkiness. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so maybe there’s like a higher percentage of jerk spread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening because of our own undoing that we’ve built. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s worse than any other field. I mean, you look at a lot of other fields and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see similar issues everywhere. The hopefully uplifting flip side of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that while there are jerks everywhere, there’s also good people everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And usually there’s more of the good people. And there are things that you can do to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the good people louder or make their message carry further.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so anywhere you can do that, I suggest you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I have to add is the question, does tech sector have more jerks per capita than other sectors? I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer is yes. And the explanation is fairly simple. If you want to see how many
⏹️ ▶️ John jerks per capita your particular section of the world has, whether it be
⏹️ ▶️ John sports or model trains or woodworking or computers, just look at the ratio
⏹️ ▶️ John of men to women. Because the cultural forces, the cultural
⏹️ ▶️ John gender roles that we have in this country of how men are supposed to behave
⏹️ ▶️ John align things such that the more men you have, the more conflict, rudeness,
⏹️ ▶️ John and pissiness there will be. Because the more they are forever trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John prove their performative masculinity and joust with each other over
⏹️ ▶️ John the best gauge of model train or the best way to paint Warcraft figures
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, the sports team that is, you know, like, it just, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you needed a single variable that you could determine how hostile an environment would be, just look at the ratio
⏹️ ▶️ John of men to women. And I don’t think it’s because there’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I’m not speculating about the reasons, but I’m going to say like, the culture is a big part of it. Toxic masculinity and
⏹️ ▶️ John what drives boys to become men to become people who who act in this way is
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is the like, that is the structure that they’re working within. And that’s what they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to prove that they are to each other. And it just, it causes
⏹️ ▶️ John a stabbing, right? And Margo’s right, that there’s more good people than bad. And everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has bad days and good. But the reason I think tech actually is worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than other hobby areas or topic areas that have a better gender
⏹️ ▶️ John balance is just because there are more men. And that’s true of any place where there are more men than women. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not to say that there aren’t mean women and jerky women. I’m just saying, when you run the numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you gave me a blind test and you measured how much toxicity there
⏹️ ▶️ John was in an online environment, and the only thing you gave me was the percentage of men, I bet I could
⏹️ ▶️ John stack rank them pretty easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a frustratingly good point and I bet you’re exactly right. Well, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Handy, and ARK, and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse. It’s accidental. It’s accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcasts, so
Casey explains himself
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I have anything else exciting going on in my house. What’s happening in your homes? Casey, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are you doing with yourself? That’s a good place to start. What are
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing with your… Explain yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, explain
⏹️ ▶️ John myself. I mean, like I see sometimes that there’s some kind of car video thing going
⏹️ ▶️ John on in the house and yet no car videos emanate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the house. I know! It’s like, I keep… What is it? Good is the enemy of perfect? Good enough is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco or something? Other way around, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perfect is the enemy of good
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. learning how to use Final Cut Pro, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Yeah, well, enough time has passed and I’ve forgotten everything I once knew. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really truly hand on heart believe I’m on the precipice of releasing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next video, which was filmed in August, excuse me. And so hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will be done in the next week or so, which really means it’ll be in February. Well, I guess that will be February regardless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Matz Herds are going to be like, wow, Casey really does live in the South. Look at all those green leaves
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in the trees. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And he’s in shorts. Wow. It’s so cold here. It’ll actually, you know what it is? It’s just, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care about my Australian viewers, all seven of them. And, and I really wanted them to feel at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, no, I, I, I’ve been working on this and I think part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the, so there’s several problems with this video that, and I’m already doing a good job of selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video, it hasn’t even come out yet. So this was filmed between the Golf R and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GTI, but because the R and the GTI were so similar, I just shelved this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one and released the GTI video really quickly. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly compared to the speed in which I’ve released this one, but it was really quick regardless. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem I’m running into is a couple of things all at once. First of all, I did not do a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good job of like cataloging and organizing and getting all of my footage together because you have to remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m filming across three different cameras, my phone and two GoPros. I’m recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio on two different devices, depending on which one happened to be near me at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And all of these files just like landed on my stenology. And as I’m talking, I’ll look at how big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are or what the total sum of all of these is. But there’s a lot of media here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I took all of this in August. And then I just walked away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from it for like six months. And that’s all of this. Everything I’ve just said is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely self-created problem. Like this is all the person I need to blame for all this is me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But because of that, it’s taken a long time to like piece it all back together. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it’s a car that belongs to friends of mine. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel some amounts of compulsion to not give it an even shake. Like I’m truthful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, but there are places where I was a little more brutal than I think was absolutely necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m trying to be a little bit cognizant of that. But it’s 111
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of data, which is about 200 files that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recorded. So that’s audio, that’s video, that’s everything. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another problem I have is that the GTI video, I learned from the mistakes I made in this video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but now because this is coming out after the GTI video, I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to find a way to fake it so that it looks like I had all the knowledge I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had during the GTI video before the GTI video was filmed. Does that make any sense at all? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want it to look like it’s a regression because in reality it is a regression because I filmed it before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I filmed that GTI video. And so obviously I learned things in doing this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a Honda CRV that I’ve recorded. I’ve learned things in doing this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I leveraged on the GTI video, but I can’t go back in time and fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. yeah, I could borrow my friend’s car again, but they were all already kind enough to let me use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week when they were gone, I don’t feel like it’s really necessary to go back to them and be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I, I really need your car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like another day or two. That’s cool. Right. And so, um, so I, I feel like I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten pretty close. Like this is not a flawless video by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like I’ve cleaned up a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. Um, I’m really trying hard to, to make sure I don’t repeat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself a lot on this video, cause I think that was one of the biggest downfalls I had in the GTI videos, I made the same point 85
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times or the same, you know, six points, 20 times a piece. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really trying to cut it down. The runtime is, I actually don’t have final cut pro open at the moment, but the runtime is right around 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. I feel like I could probably get it down a little bit more, but I’m struggling to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see where. And I actually just swapped out where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, there’s a space where I talk about the interior quality and I, and that was, you know, all of a minute long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And then I found other footage where I actually show what I’m talking about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, ah, I should probably use that, but it’s like two minutes. So now I’ve got to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slim it. I don’t have to, but I’d like to figure out how to slim that down. So I’m both talking and showing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m doing so more concisely than I did when I recorded this back in August. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, uh, it’s, it’s all self-created and it’s just, it’s just taking me for freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever. And it’s not going to be any better for the next one because the next one that I have queued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up is I spent one like five or six hour window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording a Tesla Model 3 and a Tesla Model S and comparing the two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did so, I was rushing the whole time. I didn’t get a chance to like properly set up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, which was again, a self-created problem. And so I’m going to have the same issue again, where I did this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this, this other thing, the Tesla’s I did in November, and I did a better job of organizing all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my footage this time in terms of what was strewn across the Synology, but it’s still a similar problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I’ve got to like recreate, re remind myself what I’ve done, recreate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like create a story in my head and try to make it not look like garbage. Now, this one, I plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be clear about the fact that I only had it for, you I only had the cars for a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s not going to be quite as nice and as fancy as some of my other Casio cars, if you consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them either nice or fancy. But it’s still, it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grab ass by comparison. And so if I can get through the CRV one, which I really, really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my heart think I’m close. And then I can figure out a way to get through this Tesla one or, I mean, or I’d shelve it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’d rather not. Then after that, then I think I can really crank because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my next one I’ll I’ll probably do after that is our XC90. I’m probably going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, you know, here’s the Golf R a few months after. What do I like? What do I not like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve gotten some tentative good vibes from my parents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have a few cars that I think are worth reviewing, including the aforementioned Corvette
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my dad has. I don’t know if he’ll ever let me get my hands on that, but we’ll see. But they have a couple other cars that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think are interesting. So I really feel like if I can get myself in the groove,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have probably four to six videos I can get out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I do one a month, which I’d rather do more, but if I’m realistic, if I do one a month, that’s half a year’s worth of car videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s saying something, but we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John One a month. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Maybe spend less time automating your home through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s the other thing, is that I seriously nerd sniped myself. And now I’m like, ooh, I really want to see if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can figure out how to get this thermostat on HomeKit. Do I need to?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Do I ever expect to set anything on this thermostat? No, but I’ve allowed myself to get nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sniped and I just want to be able to prove to myself that I can do it. And I think that there’s some utility in this because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially when I wrote my podcast, quote unquote, editor, and I talked about this on a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent episodes of Analog, it was good to prevent my iOS muscles from atrophying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce the word, but hopefully you get what I mean. And I think it was good to remind myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to write iOS apps because I was starting to kind of lose my chops a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like this is somewhat defensible because I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really written Node since 2014 when I was writing my blog engine. And hey, guess what? Node has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed a lot and even JavaScript has changed quite a bit in those five years. And so I think that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful, but you’re right in saying it is not what I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be working on. It’s just the new shiny thing that I want to be working on. And so today, I only worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this morning when I was sitting down to do work work. I only did it for a little bit, like, I don’t know, maybe half an hour or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. And then I moved on to doing several hours of Final Cut Pro, which is why you see, you saw tweets fly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by with me asking how to do the most basic of basic things in Final Cut.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, who’s to say should, but the only reason I bring it up is it’s clear that you still want to produce car
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t. So it’s a disconnect between your desired outcome and the actual outcomes. And it’s not, who’s to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that what you should be doing with your time is making car videos and not
⏹️ ▶️ John animation stuff and node. But it’s so clear that you still do wanna make car videos. So I’m just encouraging you to do
⏹️ ▶️ John so. It’s only a matter of time before Mike brings you over to the dark side of time tracking or whatever the hell stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. Oh, I tried it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hated it. Yeah, I know. Like, you think it’s gone away, but it’ll be, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably. Well, also, like, if you wanna make more videos, the last thing you should do is track the value of your time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly. I thought the
⏹️ ▶️ John value was just like, if I want to make any progress on videos, I have to spend a non-zero amount of time working
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you look at how you spend your time during the week and you see, I
⏹️ ▶️ John spent 17 minutes making videos, like boy, it’s going to take a while to make that video at this rate. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not about you being productive, it’s about you being honest about what you have actually spent your time doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the other thing is, I’m actually, I’m really excited to get into filming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more videos because I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I feel like-
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the part you like is the driving the cars in the filming not so much making the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey videos. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, and no as I as I do more and more of this and get more and more confident in Final Cut. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my My desire to be a better editor gets stronger and stronger and Marco has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked a lot about this in the past that that in Jumping when you’re ready Marco But it’s I think some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Marco’s most interesting work on this very show is not the things that he says during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show but the choices he makes in the editing room, if you will. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that, Marco, you enjoy—maybe not enjoy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot of enjoyment you get. I was going to say you enjoy it more, the editing more, and I don’t know if that’s fair, but it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like you get an immense amount of enjoyment from editing this show, more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks than not, in ways that I don’t think you expected early on. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, totally. I had no idea how much editing could be a creative outlet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Well put. Well put. And so, as I’m getting more and more confident with my tools, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m more and more interested in the editing side of doing all this. Plus, I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to compel myself to not repeat myself and cut the footage where I do repeat myself, even if I think that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that’s visually clever. And I’m trying to figure out ways where like if I’m calling it, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an example on the CRV, there’s this like bar, this, I’ll call it a light bar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s this bar at the top of the dashboard or the instrument cluster that glows green when you’re driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey efficiently and glows silver when you’re not. And I have a scene where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showing a view of the dash and I figured out a way in Final Cut to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zoom in on the thing I’m trying to call attention to. This is not advanced Final Cut by any stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the imagination. In fact, this is final cut 101 or maybe even remedial final cut, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s something I’ve never done before. And I thought it was interesting and I was able to figure it out. And, and it’s stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. That’s getting me more excited. But right now I feel like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a whole bunch of footage between the CRV and the Teslas that was done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in not the best way. Like I’ve, I’ve stolen, I have some persistent audio problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think I understand what’s going on and I think I know how to fix them, but I didn’t have the chance to fix it for the Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And I didn’t realize it was a problem on the, on the CRV stuff. So, uh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really getting anxious to get these two out the door. And so I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey film be at the golf bar or the XC90 or one of my parents’ cars. So I can film
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those and do it right now, inevitably, once I get to that point and I filmed the XC90, I’ll tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, Oh God, there’s so many things that I would screwed up on the XC90. I’m so excited for the next one where I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix all those problems. And I know this is a never ending cycle, but, but I dunno, for the longest time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I definitely procrastinated on getting this video out because I felt like the footage I had was garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as I waited through it, I realized it’s not garbage. It just needs a lot more editing than I wanted that I initially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to give it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Those green lights on my courts to, uh, thank God, uh, Honda has adopted enough of the BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, settings mania that you can turn that off in mine. I don’t know if you can turn it off in the CRV, but there’s lots of settings for,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t have that green light. I can’t, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s like off, immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. I mean, I wouldn’t want it in my car, but that’s because I have different car driving priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than this. And that’s basically the short, short version of this entire video, spoiler alert, is that it’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car if you want different things than what I want. But it is not a great car if you want the sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things that I want, which is of no great surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a great car if you hate yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not like that. It’s just that I value speed and comfort and—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great car if you don’t value comfort. You’re going to get a Wrangler.
⏹️ ▶️ John no, that’s- Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those things. Yes, but the whole point of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ John is to not have any of those things. Yeah, I’m going to get the opposite of the kind of car I want. Yes. Wraps around, you see.
⏹️ ▶️ John You shoot the moon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s why I didn’t end up doing it. But anyway, I am way more proud of this video as it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sits in Final Cut Pro today, still in need of some edits. I’m way more proud of this video than I expect it to be, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot of problems. And not so many that I’m, that I think it’s worth shelving. I do think it’s worth releasing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I definitely would like to get through it, get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the Tesla one, which I might shelve. I certainly do not plan on, but I might shelve it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I really feel like, and then I know this is what everyone says, but it really, it’s the next one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys next year is a year of Linux on the desktop. Next video. The next one is the one that’s just going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get me to Doug DeMuro levels. But I don’t know. I really believe that it’s going to get better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus, I got a new big camera that can finally shoot 4K, so I’m no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be using my iPhone for exterior video, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really anxious for that, because it’ll have the nice bokeh and whatnot. And silly things like that, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are gonna make a big difference. So I’m getting there, I’m just not there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if you’re gonna beat me. Spoiler, you’d have to be really slow to not beat me. Challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accepted! Getting your next
⏹️ ▶️ John video out. You’ve got like a year and a half your next video right yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I like ever since my my lost coffee roasting video with because of that 30 minute limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I haven’t shot a single thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah yeah well I knew was it like that happened right before like Christmas stuff and so I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been very busy with Christmas stuff and now I’ve been busy with stuff after Christmas and I like stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is finally slowing down and getting back to like a regular work schedule basically like this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been this it’s been that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long no I’m glad you say that I’m really not being snarky at all. I’m not being sarcastic. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like from about Thanksgiving until about this week, I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanksgiving, I’ve had Christmas, I’ve had New Year’s, I’ve had Michaela’s birthday. I feel like it’s just been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non- and actually right before Thanksgiving was Declan’s birthday. Not to say I haven’t done any work, you know, since October. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to say that at all, but I just feel like I haven’t been in the groove since like late October.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, And it has felt like about this week that the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not getting more work done on the videos because I frigging nerd snipe myself with HomeKit, not because I haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time. And I know that sounds so ridiculous to John because I remember when Marco said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these things it sounded so ridiculous to me when I had an actual job. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating and weird. The time just does disappear and it’s not like I’m trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it go away. I’m not deliberately procrastinating as much as I joke. I’m not deliberately procrastinating on this stuff. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, I feel like for three or four months now, I’ve just been swooped up in other things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are important. They’re important. And some things like take a while, like something as silly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as figuring out healthcare. That was like a one or two day affair right there. And that has to happen at the end of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know, we’re going, I’m starting to get into tax stuff and that, that is, you know, that’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a multi, multi, multi day affair. And so, and even though I have a tax person to make a lot of this go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away, They can only make it go away once I give them all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco information I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. And I still have to prepare the things that they need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And there’s nobody that can do that but me. And it’s just…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have to cut all this out because I sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like I’m not… Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is staying in. We’ve talked on Under the Radar a few times about how we will go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks or even months sometimes without getting any substantial work done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our apps because we’re working on other stuff. stuff like that. It just happens like or like you know there’s family stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens or you know something comes up in life that you need to deal with like that stuff happens and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that’s part of part of this wonderful indie life that that we’ve now stolen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you into is that you actually can deal with those things like you know regular people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to still go to work and just try to deal with stuff that happened in their life or deal with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy times of the year while also still doing their full-time job, we have the luxury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of being able to put stuff in the parking lot for a little while and deal with something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the foreground that we need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, I don’t mean to sound unappreciative because I am so lucky,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco is so lucky that we have the flexibility to do these things. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunning how quickly that time really can disappear. And again, if you have a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jobby job like John, this probably sounds not only deeply obnoxious, but just preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, just months ago, Marco would, you know, kvatch about these sorts of things. I go, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, Marco, sure, your life is so hard. But really, it is stunning once you’re living this life,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how quickly that time can just disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really is. But anyway, so at some point in the next two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, Either I or you or both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey will release a YouTube video to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. Well, hopefully.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll see if I can get it out at least two or three more destiny videos during that time