319: We Should Probably Get to the Apple Event
28 Mar 2019ATP+ on the new Apple+ Services+.
Episode Description:
- ATP Live at WWDC 2019
- Tickets are $29 and go on sale Friday, March 29
- Hammer Theatre, Monday June 3, 6:00 PM
- Follow-up:
- "Pro" iPad Mini
- AMD vs. NVIDIA
- iMacs with spinning disks
- Marco and HDMI-CEC
- Joe and Scott's tip
- Ivan's tip
- Joanna Stern on the butterfly keyboards
- Casey's Mail.app gets broken in 10.14.4
- Review of the new AirPods
- Apple March 25 Event
- Post-show: Incorrectly slicing a bagel
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Chapters
- 100% plant-based podcast
- Live at WWDC
- Pro Mini
- AMD is way behind NVIDIA
- Spinning-disk iMacs
- HDMI-CEC update
- WSJ on butterfly keyboards
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- macOS 10.14.4
- New AirPods review
- Sponsor: Hullo
- Apple’s March event
- Apple News+
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
- Apple Card
- Apple Arcade
- TV app, Channels
- Apple TV+
- Ending theme
- Bread-sliced Boston accents 🖼️
100% plant-based podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it’s a little early to really give much information on this front, but basically, I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a bad mood because I’ve been doing a low-carb diet for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about almost a year now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say, this is nothing new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had our annual physical for the first time now, and it turns out that this diet has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made me eat way too much meat and cheese, and my cholesterol is crazy high.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, define crazy high. I have a story about this as well. Define crazy high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 40% higher on both numbers than what it should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, okay. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to my doctor for the first time in five years and I had, I think, my regular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my overall cholesterol. I don’t really understand this quite obviously, but my overall cholesterol was like a few points
⏹️ ▶️ Casey higher than 200, which I guess is the threshold between good and bad. But my bad cholesterols
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were definitely considerably higher than they should have been. I don’t know if it was to the tune of 40%, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a lot. And so I have been avoiding red meat like the plague.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know that there’s some cholesterol and plenty of other things, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve been avoiding red meat like the plague, eating considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more salads than I usually do because I have to get my blood drawn in a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks, which is basically a month after I went. So you and I are high cholesterol buddies. Hooray. Paul Matzko,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jr.: You got to get in on some of this purebred Mediterranean genetics, guys, because I eat terribly.
⏹️ ▶️ John My cholesterol is lower than both of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half Mediterranean genetics and that doesn’t seem to help at all. Not enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I’m a quarter or something like that, but clearly that ain’t enough either.
⏹️ ▶️ John 100 percent, that’s what you need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what action are you taking in order to rectify this then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well he recommends something that I think is a marvelous rebranding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He recommends something called a 100 percent plant-based diet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he said this a few times, and about halfway through, he had a lot to say about it, and about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco halfway through, I’m like, so just to clarify, basically you mean vegan, right? And he’s like, yeah, basically vegan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s 100% plant-based diet, and then he never said the word vegan again. Just all avocados
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, which is great, because I’m allergic to them, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the fattiest fruit you can find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t been able to eat avocados or bananas for about 10 years without getting a massive stomach ache, so we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sucks, because both of those, I personally think that both of those are quite tasty fruits. I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel bad for you. Yeah, those are both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite filling vegan foods. sorry, 100% plant-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t laugh because I feel for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love like, I love he didn’t want to say that because like no one who’s not a vegan thinks that’s a good word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s considered like an unfun, horrible thing by people who don’t practice it usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I love like the rebranding of this as 100% plant-based. So anyway, so we’re going to try that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I had to like, about two hours ago I was like out shopping for like all new groceries and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’ve been the keto chef of the family. I’ve been in charge of all shopping and all cooking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the whole diet, and it’s gone fine. And I was just getting pretty good at that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am just totally lost with this. And so I have to relearn how to shop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what to shop for, and what goes into a meal. And now I have to, and we were eating lots of vegetables before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I wasn’t relying on them to be the main course, or the primary part of the fillingness of the meal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like I just have so much more to learn and I have to now like Totally cook a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new cuisine that I’ve never cooked before that I’ve barely even eaten before And I like it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I like all of the the foods that go into it Like I don’t I don’t mind all the various like meat substitute things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like pretty much all vegetables and pretty much all like, you know grains and everything nuts legumes I like them all like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t think I’m have a problem finding things. I like my main concerns are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How the heck do I shop for this? how the heck do I cook for this, and how do I make things that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filling without going so carb heavy that I gain all the weight back? But the good thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, I’ve learned through the low carb diet, I’ve learned to become,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve become more comfortable at a restaurant just asking for exceptions to things, to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I’ll have the burger, but without the bun. I used to just never feel comfortable asking for things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to develop that to do this diet all this time. So now I can say, yeah, I’ll have this salad, just don’t add the cheese, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s fine, you know? I was always so terrified to even ask, and it turns out every single restaurant hears so many exceptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day that not a single person ever bat an eye. They were just like, all right. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making me sad. You’re making me sad thinking about this, Mark. Can I pitch you on my diet plan? Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, Dr. Syracuse, let’s go. What do you got? My
⏹️ ▶️ John super secret diet plan is you basically eat whatever you want, but
⏹️ ▶️ John less of it than you normally would, and that’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose weight. Well, at this point, I’ve lost most of the weight I want to lose. At this point, I just want to maintain.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just have a healthy diet that has a reasonable balance of stuff in it, because you went to one extreme. Right, but also not
⏹️ ▶️ John have a heart attack. You went to one extreme where it was like, get out all the carbs in your place, it was like proteins
⏹️ ▶️ John and fatty things, and that wasn’t bad. And now you’re going to go to another extreme. How about just a basic, regular,
⏹️ ▶️ John balanced diet with a reasonable balance of all the different kinds of food, just slightly less, enough that
⏹️ ▶️ John you maintain whatever weight it is you want to maintain. That’s it. That’s my plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you look good. You got that going for you. Your outsides look good, even if your insides look like garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one can see your
Live at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP will be recording a live episode at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The tickets will go on sale this coming Friday, the 29th at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either noon ATP time or 3 ATP time. I’m not entirely sure yet. There’s been a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most likely noon Eastern, but it might end up being noon Pacific, depending on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the logistics of getting the
⏹️ ▶️ John site up. There’s a countdown on the page. So you just go to the page, you’ll see like a countdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey timer. So if you go to atp.fm slash WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will see all of the information there. Again, tickets on sale this coming Friday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere between noon and 3 p.m. ATP time, which is American Eastern time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tickets will be $29 a piece. It will be at the Hammer Theater, which you may know from last year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relay show. It’s a very, very lovely venue. I’m really enthusiastic and excited to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No WWDC ticket is required for entry. This is coincident,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time as the WWDC festivities, but it is not an officially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sanctioned event. Doors will open at 5 on Monday, June 3rd. The show will be at 6, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that first Monday of WWDC in San Jose. If you’re there, if you’re nearby,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’d love to see you. We appreciate it if you even consider throwing a few bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our way to come see the three of us do our thing.
Pro Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about the Pro Mini, somebody who put this in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is that? That was me. I just put it in one of those little notes to remind myself of one of the things we forgot to talk about last week
⏹️ ▶️ John where all the new iPads came out. And we talked about the new iPad Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John and how the line is separated into like the Pro ones with the flat sides and the new pencils and face ID and the non-Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that have their own weird names and how the lines made sense based on the ages of those
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies. But there’s one, and setting aside the super cheap iPad which we didn’t really talk much about
⏹️ ▶️ John but continues to exist at $329 or whatever it is. But there’s one thing that still
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t quite make sense, the nice uniform line that it could be, and that is the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mini only comes in one style. There is no Pro Mini. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro style Mini. Now maybe there’s no market for that and it makes sense, but it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John non-uniformity and so I’m sure fans of the Mini are just overjoyed to have a new modern Mini at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. at all, but if someone wants to spend an obscene amount of money on a very
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful USB-C sporting Face ID Apple Pencil 2 powered
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad mini, that doesn’t exist. And I’m wondering, I mean, right now probably no one cares, but if Apple wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep this up and actually is going to update the mini, I think there might be a market for a Pro mini. I don’t know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m wrong, but I don’t know. I don’t know, we didn’t even mention that last week and I thought it was worth noting.
AMD is way behind NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, Julian Heatherbell writes, It’s hard to overstate how not even close AMD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in GPUs right now. Ever since Kepler in 2013, NVIDIA’s generally had the absolute fastest offering,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you look at performance per watt, AMD hasn’t been close in six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. The disparity’s worse today than it’s ever been. The new AMD Radeon VII is on a smaller process, which is 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nanometers, than NVIDIA’s offerings, yet it’s slower than NVIDIA’s card at the same price point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the RTX 2080, apparently. It’s also louder, hotter, less efficient, and less forward-looking. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no ray tracing support. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what we were getting at before, that like, Radeon was, you know, AMD is like, they got to 7 nanometers
⏹️ ▶️ John first, and the card they put out just barely matched some existing NVIDIA cards on larger processors.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, it’s not only are they the slowest, but they’re also less power efficient. So, it’s not a good look. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s basically making do with second-best GPUs on the top
⏹️ ▶️ John end of its desktop offerings. As we said in past shows, they could solve
⏹️ ▶️ John this in theory by making their own amazing GPUs like they do for their
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads and phones, sort of, but I haven’t even heard any rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John about that, so I assume it’s not anywhere in our near future.
Spinning-disk iMacs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anthony Rosbach writes with regard to IMAX with spinning disks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some interesting stuff about how schools work with this. I don’t really understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the things that are being said. Can you decode this for me, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I’m talking about like why do IMAX exist with spinning disks? Who would want such a thing? It’s such a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, yada, yada, yada. And what Anthony was bringing up is the, you know, the idea that SSDs can’t –
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs wear out after a certain number of writes. You’re like, oh, sure, fine. after a certain number of writes, but what kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John application is going to put that kind of write volume on an SSD? Like, it shouldn’t be a concern,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the context where you might get a huge amount of writes
⏹️ ▶️ John is having Macs in a situation where the user’s profiles
⏹️ ▶️ John are on a server somewhere, and every time someone logs in, it brings apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple gigabytes of data down to the local machine. So it’s like you log in
⏹️ ▶️ John and it, you know, the example he gives is like, if the SSD wear rating is 50% fail rate at
⏹️ ▶️ John five gigabytes of writes per day for five years, if you have a shared system with network users over
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple server that writes 20 gigabytes per day of user data, you can burn through all that in a year. So you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this SSD system and just put it in a school and have people using it for a year and get to a 50% fail rate
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’ve just done 20 gigabytes of writes per day, which is an incredible amount of writes,
⏹️ ▶️ John an unexpected amount of writes for a system, even a system in constant use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because normal people, you don’t generate that much data. Or if you do, you’re putting in an external disk or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. So I can understand why. And by the way, Fusion
⏹️ ▶️ John drives won’t really help here, because you’ll just wear through the SSD part of the Fusion drive with all the writes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the solution here, though, is not spinning disks. The solution here is a system that doesn’t require multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabytes to be written to disk every time a user logs in. I mean, that kind of goes without saying, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there aren’t many alternatives. And Apple is slow to evolve this aspect of their system. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t, there are many possible technical solutions that can exist and have existed on other systems and on
⏹️ ▶️ John unique systems in the past, but the brute force technique of just taking all the user’s data and pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John it down over the network and writing it to the local disk temporarily can work because of fast, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast SSDs and fast networks, but it seems like a terrible system. I mean, the other obvious solution is
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs that are more highly over-provisioned so that they can support more
⏹️ ▶️ John writes before wearing through, like they have more spare storage or whatever. So I still think
⏹️ ▶️ John that iMac with just a plain spinning hard drive is pretty terrible because who cares if it can support the
⏹️ ▶️ John writes if the act of using that iMac day after day is miserable for all those students. But
⏹️ ▶️ John something’s gotta give here. It just seems like there’s no good solution given the current mixes
⏹️ ▶️ John of technology and I think the thing that should change is the system for dealing with multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John users on a Mac, not the storage mechanism.
HDMI-CEC update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have some follow-up about my HDMI CEC problem from last week’s after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ah, tell me more. Twitter users Joe Chrysler and Scott Shukart both recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I turn off a feature called Quick Start Plus. I did, and the problem is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved. There was one case where I got into a loop where like the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Nintendo Switch kept stealing the input back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey forth like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two seconds between themselves. Whoops. I don’t know how or why that happened, but I somehow got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to stop, and it hasn’t happened since, and otherwise it’s been solid. Also, Ivan Sekulic recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a factory reinstall of the TV, basically the TV version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey format and reinstall. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t tried that yet, but if I continue to have problems with Quick Start Plus disabled, I will try that next.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But reinstalling your TV is unpleasant, and I have to redo all my settings, and I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. Do you remember when the TV was just a TV, man? Like, forgive me for sounding so old, But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh man, it’s wild to me how complex everything has become these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, in some ways it’s great, in some ways it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of resetting stuff, I was having some problems with my HomePod the other day where every time I would ask it to do something,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would do whatever I asked it to do, but then it would recite a message about, something has gone wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re sorry, please try again later. Like it had some canned message that it would read every time, despite the fact that it would do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, something was
⏹️ ▶️ John going wrong. I suppose, I suppose that that’s right. kind of a circular logic there. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I said to it, Hey, dingus, reboot yourself. And the voice helpfully said,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, I can’t restart your home pod. It’s like, well, you know, you know what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you had someone wrote a
⏹️ ▶️ John message to tell me that it can’t do it. Just do it. Um, and so I, you know, I went
⏹️ ▶️ John over and I was like, how do you, how do you restart your home pod? Like, I just wanted to reboot it. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, well, something’s messed up. So let me just re do either one of you know how to reboot your HomePod? I just unplug
⏹️ ▶️ John it and plug it back in. That’s the answer, which is a little bit terrifying because, you know, if you’re trained, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do that to computers. It’s bad. And we all know what’s inside the HomePod. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not some magic pixie dust. This is a little iOS computer in there, right? Or whatever it is, audio
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. But yeah, there’s even from like the home thing doesn’t have a way to reset it. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to reset it from your phone or anything like that. And I googled and it came up with an Apple page that, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was talking about how to do a fairly large reset. But yeah, if you want to reboot it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John recommends you pull the plug and plug it back in, which is barbaric, which is what I did. And now the thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet again, but I didn’t like that. I mean, voice control should reboot the thing. I can even reboot
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV. The Apple TV has a way to reboot without unplugging it, so should the HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No empathy for the machine, am I right, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have too much empathy. I don’t want to yank the cord out. Who knows what it’s in the middle of doing? Does it even, I guess it has APFS now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if it’s in the middle of some HFS Plus thing and I corrupt my disk.
WSJ on butterfly keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally, I wanted to call attention to, I’m sure most people have seen this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joanna Stern wrote an absolutely tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey essay, I guess you could call it, or post about the butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the way this was done, this is in the Wall Street Journal, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mistaken. Trevor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Burrus So good. Michael Masnick The way this was done was that by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The article does not include any instances of the letter E, because apparently her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey E key on her keyboard has broken, or any instances of the letter R. Now, you can toggle them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on to make it readable, but by default, you will look at this article the way it would come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off of her broken-ass keyboard. So it is absolutely worth looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at. And the video is like five minutes or less, and it’s also very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved this and I thought it was extremely well done. Wait, there’s something wrong with Apple’s keyboards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing, nothing, everything’s fine. And this is, and to be clear, this is about the brand new 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. With the dust membrane and all, like, you know, basically, yeah. Listeners of our show are, you know, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news to you, but the good thing is that A, this is news to a lot of people, so this is good to get it out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there for a major publication, and B, an Apple spokesperson actually gave a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comment on this that included the words, we’re sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but they say they’ll give that statement about anything. Think of the
⏹️ ▶️ John most obscure hardware problem you could possibly have. Like, oh, there’s a dead pixel on my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. You can get a statement from Apple that says, if anyone is having trouble with their iPhone screen with dead pixels, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, bring it to Apple and we’ll repair it under warranty or whatever. Which is exactly what they said about
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard. It’s like, okay, you can get that answer from anyone about any problem. It doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John address the systemic issue. But I think the reason we’re mentioning this at all is obviously not to inform ATP listeners that there’s a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with the keyboard, which ATP listeners well know. It’s because, like Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is in the Wall Street Journal. This issue has crept up from people like us complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about it on obscure tech podcasts for years and years to people complaining about it on websites that
⏹️ ▶️ John are not strictly related to tech but tangentially related to tech to major newspapers that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really have anything to do with tech. It’s gone all the way up to the highest level of the
⏹️ ▶️ John non-tech sphere, to the point where it does get a canned response from Apple PR
⏹️ ▶️ John and people are talking about it and I bet many more people will know about it. And the 2018 keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if you’re listening to tech podcasts like us, you know the 2018s didn’t solve the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But perhaps the last time this story bubbled up, the world was convinced the 2018s fixed the issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of that, finally, and we mentioned this back when the keyboard repair extension program came
⏹️ ▶️ John out. The repair extension program, whatever the hell it was called, does not include the 2018
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards. At the time they came out with that, we’re like, well, maybe the 2018s fixed the problem, so they don’t need to include them into this repair program.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now we will know, as we’ve discussed on past episodes, that the 2018 keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John do not definitively solve this problem and yet still are not covered under the extension program. But in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still all under their first year warranty because, you know, it’s still 2018. Well, here we are in 2019
⏹️ ▶️ John and I forget what month those July keyboards came out and so I guess we’re still within the first year,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s something to watch for. By the end of this year, I would hope that the 2018 keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John are included in this fairly expansive repair extension program once they all start falling
⏹️ ▶️ John out of warranty because if they don’t, it actually makes them the worst keyboards to get, worse than
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2016s or 2015 MacBook or 2017s because at least there’s an repair extension program
⏹️ ▶️ John for those, but the 2018s, it’s like, you’re on your own with your
⏹️ ▶️ John regular warranty. So we’ll revisit that story, I suppose, in late summer to see if Apple actually
⏹️ ▶️ John has expanded the umbrella of repair extension and annoyance to
⏹️ ▶️ John encompass the 2018 Keyboards.
Sponsor: Backblaze
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macOS 10.14.4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, backblaze.com slash ATP for a 15 day free trial.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suppose we have some topics tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we do have a couple things to talk about. I would like to talk about something that’s gone wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I upgraded to 10.14.4 on my Mac and on my laptop because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was having an issue with with the Swift CLI app, and I didn’t realize the reason why. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought, oh, I’ll just upgrade, and that’ll fix it. And it did. And I can explain what happened, if anyone cares. But nobody does. However.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love all the people who are listening to this episode who just can’t wait for us to get to the event. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re making them sit through all this other stuff first. Sorry, guys. This is how we roll. I mean, they shouldn’t be too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised. This is kind of how we roll.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So 10.14.4, I upgraded. Everything was going well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then mail said, we need you to log into Gmail again, because I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Apps for my domain from forever ago as my email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service of choice. And so it said, you need to open Safari, or basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mail app will open Safari, and you need to log in again. So I did that. And then I went back to mail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mail said, yes, thank you. Can you please open Safari and log in again? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did that. And then the same dance happened again. And I realized, uh-oh, something’s broken. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I think it happened first on my laptop, cause it was what I happened to be using at the time. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it happened again on my iMac. And now neither of my desktop computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can actually use the mail app with my email, with my particular email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server, which is just a little annoying. Apparently this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey known thing. There’s a MacRumors thread we’ll put in the show notes about it. I am so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoyed by this. And I know people that work in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey QA and they take their jobs very seriously. But guys, what are you doing? Does, does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody think about these sorts of things ever? How does this, how does, how does this happen now? Maybe it’s a Google, maybe it’s something on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Google side. I don’t know, but I can tell you that this whole login flow looks different in 10.14.4 than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it did in 10.14.3 or whatever came before. I’m going to guess it’s Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. Uh, what’s going on guys? How do you let this out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Functional high ground, ring a bell? Oops, sorry, too soon. Anyway, how do you let this out? What’s going on here? John, have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, well, you use the web interface like an animal, so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sitting pretty.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to figure out your whole description of G Suite. Do you use something different than what I use? Do you have like
⏹️ ▶️ John Google for your domain or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. So it’s an old term for it. I think it is just G Suite. But way back when,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, way, way back when, probably 10 plus years ago, when Gmail’s whole infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was extended such that you can use Gmail on a different domain. So instead of at gmail.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be say, I don’t know, at caselist.com. At the time it was called Google Apps for your domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at the time, if you were not a business, you could get it for free. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called Google Apps for your domain anymore. I think it’s called G Suite to your point. And I don’t think it’s free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. I’m not sure about that though. But anyways, But yeah, basically I’m using, you know, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google cloud offering on caselist.com and so my email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Gmail, but it’s not, you know, gmail.com. It’s caselist.com. And that, and I was using it with mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. A lot of people say that that’s ridiculous. I don’t care. It’s what I like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think mail app is fine on both iOS and the Mac. It works for me. If it doesn’t work for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine, but you’re not me. And right now it doesn’t work for me. So the joke’s on me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mike, is this bug limited to people who do what you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I think maybe, but I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if it is, that would explain why it would pass QA, because they surely QA it with Gmail, but they’d be like, well, who pays
⏹️ ▶️ John for that weird thing where you get to have your own domain for Google services? You find a tiny, tiny fraction
⏹️ ▶️ John of people, and they probably didn’t even test this at all, and we’re just as surprised as you are,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll fix it in another point update. That’s what you get for using obscure stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just be glad it’s not so obscure that they are going to fix it. Let’s say you use like Fastmail or something and it didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would never fix that. Fastmail will have to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. That is true. But I mean, consider that the same mechanism that I used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use at work, which was all G Suite, is the same mechanism I use for my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal email. And I thought your company was on G Suite at least up until
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it was all Microsoft for emails. all Outlook and Exchange and all the other crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so I would assume that a lot of people that have G Suite at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work, which is from what I gather, a lot of people, I would think that this would apply to them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well, or maybe I just got unlucky twice. I don’t know. But IT
⏹️ ▶️ John departments won’t allow the update to happen if they know there’s incompatibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is true. We had a thing at work with the upgrade to whatever, I think it was the upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John to Mojave or maybe some point release of Mojave that they released after doing all this testing. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, go forth and update. And then people updated and they started having problems and they pulled the release.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the way they pulled it is if you launch the updater or the installer, they would kill minus nine in the process.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like not even a nice kill. People were saying, this isn’t a console log. It says this thing was killed, signal
⏹️ ▶️ John nine. What’s going on here? It’s like, yeah, that’s us. We’re stopping you from upgrading. But I thought you said we can upgrade. Yeah, we did say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we changed our mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aye aye aye. All right, so if you happen to work at Apple or know somebody that does, that may be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix this. I’d appreciate it. Tom Casey sent you.
New AirPods review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then, I’d like to turn this frown upside down and do a quick QiPods review because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my new AirPods came in earlier today. I’ve only been able to use them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very briefly, but I love them. They are tremendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that I can just use the Qi charger for them. I can’t say that I really had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a problem with plugging in the lightning cord, but as with all things, I am of the opinion that fewer wires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is better. Now, one thing I wanted to specifically call out is that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to get into this whole HomeKit thing, which is both bliss and a total dumpster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fire, depending on which particular part of HomeKit you’re working with. I don’t really want to get into a HomeKit rant right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Maybe I’ll do that another day. But as part of the bedtime process for Michaela, I need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell her lamp in her room to turn off. And previously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I was listening to a podcast as I was just like rocking her to sleep or or something like that. What I found myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing was using Hey Dingus with my watch, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I tried to do it with my phone, after a while, it just refused to listen to me when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my AirPods were connected. It may be a hardware issue with my particular AirPods, I’m not sure what was going on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there was a problem where it just wouldn’t hear me on my phone. So I would use Hey Dingus on my watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it would work, although it would take a little while. Today, as I was doing, as I was putting her to sleep, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought, oh, these new AirPods are supposed to use Hey Dingus as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I said, you know, Hey Dingus, turn off Michaela’s lamp. And sure enough, it worked no problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I waited a few seconds and overcast came back on as you would expect. I didn’t have any of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that awful thing where it falls from, I think we were talking about this last episode where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it falls from, uh, like the high quality audio back to headset audio, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then forgets to go back to high quality audio. You know what I’m talking about? Yep. didn’t have any problem with that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that alone, I am really genuinely excited about having HeyDingus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my AirPods just for that one moment each day. I don’t think I’ll use it that often other than that, but just that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one moment, I’m really excited. And again, the Qi charging, I’m also really stoked about. Now, did either of you guys, I don’t recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did either of you guys order AirPods? John, you did, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was supposed to get them delivered today, but I forgot that you have to sign for everything that comes from Apple. So they bounced off
⏹️ ▶️ John my house, but I’ll get them as soon as I can be here to sign for them, I will get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Marco, did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother? I didn’t, but are we glossing over something? Do you listen to podcasts while you’re putting your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this is the like, whatever, she’s just going to sleep phase of it. I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use, I need, I need whatever, she, hey, just leave that alone for now. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like getting into it, but suffice to say, she doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s fine. There will come a time that she’s going to know what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on, and that’s not going to work anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John She knows. Very smart. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. And I also have quite a lot of smart home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ramblings, but I’m going to save those for another day because we should probably get to the Apple event.
⏹️ ▶️ John One quick more thing about the AirPods. Do they have a different hinge on the case? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so. It looks the same. Feels the same. Someone mentioned it. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want someone to confirm. All right, just wondering.
Sponsor: Hullo
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can, you know, if you want it fluffier, you can add more. If you want it less fluffy, you can take some out. You can take it all out if you want to totally
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has actually been a thing for a while. And they actually, they sent me one, and I used it for a while, and I loved it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use it anymore because now it is next to me at night. It was stolen from me. It’s so good it was stolen.
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Apple’s March event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, HulloPillow.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Hullo for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think we might be done procrastinating now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we should probably talk about this March 25th event. So I feel like I would like to summarize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my thoughts on this by kind of sort of quoting two different people. First
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, something that friend of the show Mike Hurley has been saying a lot lately, or at least I’m pretty sure it’s been Mike, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s not the only one of course, but especially Mike, is in so many words, this ain’t your daddy’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. And I think something that’s been interesting for me to come to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of terms with, and I got to imagine it’s really weird for John to come to terms with because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I came to Apple at about the same time, is that the Apple that I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’ll permit me, grew up on, which isn’t actually true, but you get the idea, The apple that I grew up on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a very different apple than we’re seeing today. And that isn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad, but it’s different and it’s something we have to get used to. And so Mike has been saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, for a long time, this ain’t the same apple anymore and you know, basically get on board. And I think there’s a lot of truth to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and we’ll talk a lot more about that in a minute. And the other thing I wanted to bring up is a friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who by the way has a Patreon that we’ll link to in the show notes for his company. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said, and this is a direct quote, Apple at its best is a company that announces something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you want right now and can get in a short time. That was not today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or really the 25th, but he wrote it on the 25th. And I think that that was really, really astute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because anything that they’ve announced that I’ve been really, really amped about, AirPods being a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great example, they were announced, well, the new ones anyway, were announced as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available now. Well, that is to say available for order now, you’ll get them in a week. And phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically work that way, with the, of course, exception of the original iPhone. And iPads were like that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was like a week or two lead time. New Macs and MacBooks, with the exception of the MacBook Pro, or excuse me, the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, are not announced until they’re basically ready. And I do think that Craig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is right, that that’s when Apple is at their best. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was not what we saw on Monday. So that’s kind of my opening statement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any other openings thoughts, or do we just want to kind of crawl through this, this whole thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll crawl through it, but let me comment on what you said or your, your ageist comments about how it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be the most upsetting for me for Apple to have changed. You got that exactly backwards. Uh, anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has been following the company for as long as I have is so used to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John transforming and reinventing itself like Madonna.
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no change that we find particularly jarring. You have no idea how different the older apples were
⏹️ ▶️ John from the apple today. Short-time Apple fans have their definitive Apple that they
⏹️ ▶️ John think, whether it’s the iPod era, or the iMac era, or the iPhone era.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they have a short time with that that’s cemented in their
⏹️ ▶️ John minds, the one and only Apple. Then there’s this weird time where it’s different. And then there’s the current Apple that is different still. And they’re like, why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it just be that one apple? The longer you spent with the company, the more you realize there is never one Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a series of them. So I don’t find this change jarring at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, you can debate the merits of the change because there’s such a thing as good change and bad change. And we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John each of those in each of the services we do in turn. But people shouldn’t fear change. People should
⏹️ ▶️ John expect it. And I think the older you are when it comes to Apple fandom,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more accustomed you are to this kind of dramatic change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s an interesting point. I definitely did not think of it that way, but I totally get what you’re saying. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m proud of you, John. That’s a good way of looking
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I think when Mike calls it out, like all the younger people call it out, it’s because they feel
⏹️ ▶️ John it a little bit themselves, but realize that it’s an instinct they have to fight against. Like, oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just always gonna be the Apple of the iPhone or the Apple of the iMac or whatever. It’s going to change. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John get called out on it, but they see people who are yelling about how Apple is changing
⏹️ ▶️ John in a bad way, and they’re like, no, I had that feeling briefly too, but I thought better of it and you should be, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s I feel like it’s a more of a conversation among younger people
⏹️ ▶️ John then Then the old-timers who are grizzled
⏹️ ▶️ John of the transforming Apple. Anyway, that’s it. That’s my comment on your opening statement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco anything from you or shall I just carry on through the event?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my summary of this event is is we’re bringing together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artists and storytellers to tell stories about artists, bringing us together with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is storytelling important, Marco? Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could not have been more heavy handed with all that language, but the technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry is very big, it’s very, very, and it’s always growing even bigger. And there’s a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that we just don’t cover, because it’s either out of our expertise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or we don’t care that much about it, or we just don’t have time to cover it, you know, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three opinionated people talking for two hours every week. Like, you can’t cover everything that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, so like, there’s things like, we hardly cover Android at all. There’s important issues going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on in tech that we often just don’t have time to cover or haven’t covered yet. Things like the new EU copyright directive, we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered that at all. We haven’t talked about Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up all the tech companies at all. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, we don’t have time to cover everything. It’s a huge industry. But until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly recently, I think we did have time to cover everything Apple did. And we were interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in covering everything Apple was doing. And I think part of the discomfort here, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me at least, and I think for a lot of people like us, is that Apple’s starting to do a lot more stuff that we just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about, or that we don’t know anything about. You know, Apple’s a big company searching for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of new ways to make billions of dollars that they haven’t made before, but they’re just doing billions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars. And so they’re gonna do a lot of boring big company stuff. And part of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, discomfort that I have with it is like Apple’s doing a bunch of stuff now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I either don’t care at all about and or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think is actually really kind of un-Apple-like in my own definition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what that means. But, you know, that’s, what is Apple-like evolves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. And the reality is that my version of it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like when people complain about every generation of BMWs that came after the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one they bought first. Right, like it’s like, oh, after that it got, it ruined,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they ruined it, but that was the best one. It’s like, whenever you came to Apple, that’s like what you view as like, that’s what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple like. And everything that comes after that, that the company does afterwards, you’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not the same anymore. And so I think we’re feeling a lot of that as they do a lot of things here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they tell a lot of stories with artists and storytelling and stories that just are not at all things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let’s go through this. Um, I will try to hurry us along as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly as possible but we’re so good at that. Yeah, we’re real good at that.
Apple News+
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that. But we start with Apple News Plus. Plus is a theme throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this event, which at first I was kind of like, really? But I actually think it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John It saves them from the naming problem because we were like, oh, what are they going to call this stuff? And by the way, no bundle spoilers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’d be like, what are they going to call these things? What are they going to call their video service? They’re going to call it Apple Video. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John came up with a novel solution similar to the I in front of all their old products, which is we’ll just put a plus on
⏹️ ▶️ John the end. And that solves the problem of coming up with new product names because you just take an existing product and you add a plus to it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a whole new product name. And they can add additional pluses. Unlike Swift, they’re brave
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to do that. Courage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they didn’t announce a bundle today. But I think that’s partly because the stuff is super early,
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t bundle what you don’t have ready
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to ship. Exactly. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most of these things aren’t even available for purchase for the next six months, and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even announce pricing for a lot of them. So I think a bundle can still come. and I think when and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bundle does come, and I still think it really should, the obvious name for it is Apple Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still don’t think they’re gonna do that. I think they’ll, if they put a plus on it, they’ll have to,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing about the plus. If you have an existing product name, you have to add the plus to differentiate the plus version
⏹️ ▶️ John from the non-plus version. But if you don’t have an existing product name, you don’t need to add the plus. I made a joke during
⏹️ ▶️ John the stream that I’m gonna wait for Apple Card Plus. Because Apple Card, who the hell wants the Apple Card? doesn’t even have a plus
⏹️ ▶️ John after it. What the hell is that? It’s a little bit confusing. Anyway, let’s get to the products. Apple News
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one thing that is available now. We all have it on our phones and Macs if we update it foolishly by Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking our email. The fact that we have it on our
⏹️ ▶️ John computing device doesn’t mean that it works. I have the new Apple News app on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John at work which is updated to the latest version of macOS and it crashes
⏹️ ▶️ John on launch every single time for the past two days. Oh, neat. I’ve never successfully launched it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you look, Steve Trout and Smith’s been doing a lot of sleuthing on Apple News and discovering a lot of problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it’s implemented, including that apparently there’s some bad data being fed from the servers that’s causing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some index out of bounds exception or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yep, that’s basically what it is if you look at the crash log. And it’s like, that’s not great. A, it’s not great that you’ve got poison data
⏹️ ▶️ John in your CDNs and you should find a way to fix that. But B, it’s not great that your app crashes when that happens either.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, well, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens to the best of us. But I think, I mean, so out of curiosity, like have either of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you subscribed to News Plus? Because I have, and I have some thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t. Yep, I subscribed because it’s got a one month free trial. So just put a reminder in your calendar to cancel
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t cancel as soon as you subscribe because the cancellation happens immediately. And there’s a month to try
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. And I totally tried it out, despite the fact that I really despise Apple News. I’m like, I’ll try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I didn’t try the Apple News Plus yet, but I will say, and this is only tangentially related,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have found myself in the evenings, like as I’m getting ready to go to sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey popping open Apple News, particularly on my iPad, and just checking out like what’s being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about, which I really like as a kind of brief way to see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rest of the world seems to think is important. And so I probably will at some point try Apple News+,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I haven’t had the chance to yet. But Marco, you said you also have?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve tried it. And I actually, so I was, I had to renew my driver’s license this week. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right before I went to the DMV, which I knew would be a long, boring wait in a building with very poor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cell reception, I downloaded a bunch of magazines to read in Apple News+.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way that this is implemented, I think is smart. You know, a lot of people are saying, like, isn’t this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the new newsstand? Like what Apple previously launched as newsstand in, I believe, iOS 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it kind of flopped and didn’t really go anywhere. Newsstand was challenging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this as somebody who published a magazine briefly in Newsstand, it was the epitome of the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, Apple’s old idea of like, just let people build apps. Let every company who wants to be in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new store build their own app. And you can see a lot of parallels to the way they did TV later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the result was similar with Newsstand. The result was some companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made good apps, but most companies didn’t. And so you had really like, you know, must read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important big name content, mostly being served in a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible collection of apps. Like, they were inconsistent, every app worked differently, they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all bad, they all had their own separate subscriptions that you had to do and everything, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though the App Store made it somewhat easy to manage subscriptions, it was still nowhere near as nice as like, having a built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business model of everyone just pays, you know, people just pay once and get everything. So, this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new way of doing this is, Apple writes the app, the publishers simply provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the content feed, whatever that is, whether it’s the Apple News format or the weirdo PDF ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, like that’s fine, because that’s all publishers know how to do. Publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t and shouldn’t write their own apps every time. So having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one app that you can see all the content in, Apple can make that one app really good, in a few ways they haven’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they can make that app really good, and it can be consistently formatted, consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigated, and to have the built-in business model of you just pay once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple splits it up among the publishers however they do it while taking a giant cut. That solves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of problems that Newsstand had. And so I think this is way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for publishers in general. Maybe not for certain ones, but in general, way better for publishers and way better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users than what Newsstand was. Because it just, it makes everything consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easier and it lets publishers specialize in what they should be specializing in, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content. and not trying to build a good app every single time. So from that point of view,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like the way they’re doing News+, I think it’s good. I think $10 a month is a great price for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re getting here. And that’s why I signed up. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was gonna go sit for a while somewhere offline, so I thought, all right, let me download some magazines. It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not an Apple News expert, I haven’t usually used Apple News, so most of the UI was new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. that you can browse magazines literally just alphabetically like A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through N or A through M and N through Z is the two sections. So you go through and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta find the ones you want and you can hit the little like cloud download icon on the ones that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna download. So I went through, I downloaded like six or seven magazines figuring I’ll check these all out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see how they are and everything. I’ll find something to read. And I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to download like the newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, like those are big newspapers. I want to see how those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, I want to download those. Could not figure out how to do that. And maybe I just missed it, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not obvious, not an obvious place. Anyway, so I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the DMV and I sit there for about an hour as I expected, and I go back to news and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could not for the life of me find a list of the ones I had downloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only way I could navigate these was to go back into those giant A through M, N through Z
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sections and just scroll, scroll, scroll, and find them just by looking at which ones were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloaded by their cloud icon. And as far as I can tell, there is no apparent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, at least no way I could find, to say these are my magazines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna subscribe, quote, to these six magazines and always be notified when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have new issues and have them always be downloaded. I couldn’t find that functionality anywhere. Yeah, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John favorites feature. It’s very hard to find, but there is a favorites feature. I spent a while trying to find it because I did see the heart
⏹️ ▶️ John at one point. I’m like, oh, let’s you favorite things. Great. It was for magazines, not for newspapers. But then I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, so I can favorite things. And at some point I lost that screen. I’m like, how do you favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John again? So I did that iOS thing that we all do. It’s basically like the equivalent of right-clicking or searching through the menus
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Mac. It’s like, I’m presented with an interface. I’m pretty sure the functionality’s there. I don’t know where it is. Let me just
⏹️ ▶️ John hold my finger down on this thing for a really long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Or maybe try force pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John it or not, what it popped up was one of those, I don’t know what this is called, Marco. you would know the thing that pops up that has
⏹️ ▶️ John like cut and copy on it and like look up or define like that black popup
⏹️ ▶️ John segmented control. I think it’s just called UI menu controller. Yeah, great name for it. Anyway, that thing popped
⏹️ ▶️ John up and one of the little black bar segments was favorite. I’m like, are you kidding me?
⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But yeah, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a way to favorite it, it’s just not particularly obvious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, yeah, so I didn’t find it. So thank you, I’ll try that. But anyway, so it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And so I eventually scrolled through the giant list and found the magazines I had downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and read some articles. And it was indeed a really good experience reading the articles. It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think all the ones I read were Apple News format because they were all perfectly formatted for my phone instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the PDF type. So I read like some things in the Atlantic and the New Yorker and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was fine. They were mostly fine. I love there’s no ads. I had no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with any formatting or content or anything like that. except I realized, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just hate magazines. It turns out I don’t like reading the news because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of what I was able to find was like, turns out, kind of interesting stuff, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like modern political stuff, which I just don’t wanna read all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it was all stuff that’s either gonna like make me sad or angry or like not very deep articles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things I actually cared about. So it turns out I just don’t like the news. And then I, earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the aforementioned Joanna Stern article on the Wall Street Journal about the keyboard was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released, I first hit the link and hit the Wall Street Journal paywall somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in some little web browser window. So I thought, okay, let me go to Apple News and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search for this title, which I did yesterday to read a Wall Street Journal article and it worked fine. Let me go to the, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and granted, keep in mind, like, we have universal links. We, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I can’t just say like, open in news from a webpage and have it open in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my paid for news subscription in the news app, but okay, we’ll set that aside for now. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complete lack of the news app interacting with the web and URLs, set that aside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the moment. And so anyway, so I decided to look for the Joanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stern thing so I could read it, and it’s not there. And I think I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her tell somebody on Twitter like earlier today, like, oh yeah, it isn’t there it’s part of some dynamic thing and some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s some section of the Wall Street Journal that isn’t being made available. So it’s just like I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying so hard to like News Plus, but I think it’s just not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s giving me access to a bunch of content I don’t want, it turns out, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of, and the news and stuff that I actually do want is really hard to navigate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there were actually a lot of publications that I wanted to be in it that weren’t. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first thing I looked for that wasn’t there was The Economist. Harper’s isn’t there. New York Times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t there. These are pretty big names that, and yes, they all have their own subscription things, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have liked if those were there and they’re not. And the interface for browsing the actual newspapers is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly non-existent and barely there. So, yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a really nice looking implementation of something that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want and has some functional problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that Joanna Stern’s article brings up a good point. I’m not sure what reason she gave for it
⏹️ ▶️ John not being there. And there was some debate about what parts of the Wall Street Journal are visible in Apple News Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John versus the ones that are only available through search in Apple News Plus or whatever. But practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve seen that Wall Street Journal article, which by the way it’s behind a paywall but if you search for the headline in Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Google search result, it’ll let you see the whole thing. As Casey described, it has these little iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John style toggle switches on the page that let you turn on and off the letter E’s and the letter R’s and stuff, it’s part of the gag,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s a web page. And it’s got a bunch of these custom,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, little widgets powered by JavaScript in the article because it’s kind of like a one-off fun
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting thing to do in an article. On the web, that’s something you can do. You can have a CMS and have a
⏹️ ▶️ John system for publishing articles, but you can have the one off and like, Oh, we’re going to put these cool little controls in here and write some JavaScript and have
⏹️ ▶️ John some people do that. Right. In anything like Apple news or magazines
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s like, whatever the a and F Apple news format, whatever thing, and then you can also
⏹️ ▶️ John publish magazines in PDF, which is kind of gross, but a lot of people do it because it’s easy because they already have to make something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that for their print editions. It’s not the web. Uh, you touched on it with the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the, the linking structure, the fact that you can’t send these things to Instapaper, and limited control
⏹️ ▶️ John over font sizes and other things that you would have in web browsers. Apple News is not the web. Much of that content is on
⏹️ ▶️ John the web. There is a Washington Post website, there is a New York Times website, and you can look at them in web browsers
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone and have a separate subscription. Being not the web, as far as I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned, is a big downside to this service. Now is it a downside to the success of
⏹️ ▶️ John this service? Like maybe it’ll be super successful because it’s not the web, right? I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it’s not the web, because the web has an entire ecosystem of tools and, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, software surrounding it that lets people navigate and read the web. Same kind of thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John like RSS readers, where RSS I feel like is part of the web doesn’t dictate how you read the
⏹️ ▶️ John content. In fact, it usually sends you to a web browser or uses a web view, but you have the option to do either. And either
⏹️ ▶️ John way, they’re all URLs, right? I like the idea of content being
⏹️ ▶️ John on the web, call me
⏹️ ▶️ John Newspaper, newspaper, magazines, like all these things exist on the web. Lots of magazines that I read in paper
⏹️ ▶️ John edition have websites and so do newspapers and some of those websites and newspapers have paywalls and ways to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for them and so on and so forth. So very often I look at Apple News and like, is this solving a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John for me? I mean $10 a month for tons of content. Yeah, that’s solving a problem. It’s letting me get more content for less money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, good. But it introduces its own set of problems, you get less content for more money,
⏹️ ▶️ John or reverse of that, swap that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John get more content for less money. But on the downside, it’s no longer on the web,
⏹️ ▶️ John really. And all the things that you might wanna do with content on the web, or the ways you wanna read it, or experience it,
⏹️ ▶️ John or save it, or whatever, most of that’s not gonna be available for you. Even just sharing it with other people, and being able
⏹️ ▶️ John to give people links. Like, for years now, when I’ve seen an Apple News link in someone’s tweet,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have frowned. I don’t click it, if I, you know, if I can possibly avoid it, I don’t click
⏹️ ▶️ John it. If I hit one accidentally because it was gone through some other link shortener or something I didn’t notice it was an Apple News
⏹️ ▶️ John URL, I get pissed off when it launches Apple News. Like if you link me something, link it on the web. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I’m concerned, the only function of Apple News that is a net win
⏹️ ▶️ John for me is the ability to read lots of magazines for a lower price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, Margo, Car and Driver is in there, which I know you don’t subscribe to, but I think it’s a really good magazine
⏹️ ▶️ John despite some of the strange political opinions you will find in there. You should check it out because it’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ John your subscription. And so is wired, which I stopped subscribing to years ago and it was very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to make that happen. But now it’s back on my phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did download wire, but I had to scroll down to W. And so I forgot to do it when I was trying to actually read.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh, by the way, the phone. I was just looking at the favoriting thing. The phone interface seems like subtly different than the iPad one. The
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod one has the sidebar or whatever. Anyway, if you want to favorite something, either one of them, you have to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John the title of the publication is visible and like a little banner at the top. Right. If you scroll it goes away, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John go up to the top, there’s a title. Tap on the title, which will bring you to the page of the publication itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the issue, and then there’ll be hearts. It’s not a great interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John not a fan of Apple News because it’s not part of the web, but if you want to get some magazines for cheap on your phone or iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently they really are taking a 50% cut, which seems insane to me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t tell they’re taking a 50% cut because this is the hilarious part. I think the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal both had stories about the cut
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s taking. know the cut that Apple’s taking, but the wall
⏹️ ▶️ John between editorial and business is such that the articles have to be written from the perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John of sources familiar with the matter, like reporters in the paper, where the executives
⏹️ ▶️ John of the paper know what the deal is, but maybe the reporters don’t, like leak to their very, it’s a silly game,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah. In terms of the economics of how this is helping or hurting journalism, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a thing that many publications may find themselves having to
⏹️ ▶️ John do because it is in the end advantageous to them money-wise just because there are so many people, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t seem, like that’s not the way they would really want it to happen. I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the way any of us really want it to happen, but I mean, it’s like they bragged about on stage. Did you know that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John News is the most used news application on the iPhone? Did you guys know that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You don’t say. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s installed by default, people. Like it doesn’t mean it’s the best news application. It doesn’t mean it’s the most satisfying.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean it’s the most conducive to the future health of the news industry in this country, all
⏹️ ▶️ John it means is that it’s installed by default. And I feel like bragging about it on a slide is just rubbing salt in people’s wounds because,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, wanna get some magazines for cheap, Go for it, Apple News+.
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Apple Card
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we go to Apple Card, which will be available this summer in America.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Apple Card, I kid you not, is a Apple branded MasterCard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is backed by Goldman Sachs. I guess the sell of it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s designed by Apple, both a physical card that’s made of titanium that is designed by Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire experience is designed by Apple. So it’s integrated with Apple Wallet, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s supposed to be a much better experience for you to manage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s supposed to surface where you’re spending your money and how you’re spending your money in slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever and interesting ways. supposed to help you with your financial health in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is very clear about what, if you only pay, you know, the minimum payment, this is how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long it will take you to pay off the credit card. And we really recommend you pay more. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there’s like a little circular wheel where you can kind of fine tune how much you want to pay, et cetera, et
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cetera. And then the arguably most interesting piece of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that there’s a cashback structure. So if you buy something at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including it seems things in the app store, you get 3% back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everything else in the world, you get 2% back. And then you only get 1% if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use that fancy pants, physical, tight titanium card that they will eventually send you. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they pitched the card in, in said though, there’s no fees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the APRs or the interest rate is really, really good. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to maybe be some really good marketing spin because the APR, the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest rate seems to be about the same as any other credit card, which is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve heard very conflicting reports as to whether or not there will be say like foreign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transaction fees and stuff like that. In fact, somebody pointed out, I don’t have the tweet handy, but somebody pointed out that in their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own slide, they, one of their own slides, they made mention of a foreign transaction fee, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may have been taken out of context or wrong or something. I’m not sure. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure what to think of this. I don’t think I have a problem with it. I think it’s weird for Apple to be a bank, but I mean, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already kind of halfway there as it is. I should mention that the cashback stuff rides via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Pay Cash, which is to say their kind of debit card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within Apple Pay that you can use for person-to-person transfers. and transfers. So this cash back, it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every single day. That was the other thing. It comes every single day rather than like once every quarter or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So every evening or morning or what have you, you’ll get your three, two or 1% put back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But instead of being put back onto the card, it’s put back into your Apple Pay Cash virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey debit card. So I think the idea is that you’re just kind of sucked or your money anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s kind of sucked within Apple’s ecosystem forevermore. I think that’s kind of my executive summary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Marco, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, just for a quick clarification, you can get Apple Cash out of that into your bank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just by linking a debit card or anything. So it isn’t trapped in there forever. But clearly Apple, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, wants you to… Wants it. You know, this is one of those things where again, like Apple’s doing some boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big company thing. They’re trying to make this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound like they’re doing you a favor by keeping your data private and everything else. But look, this is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get more of your money in a pretty bland and kind of shameless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. This is still a credit card and Apple pays a certain percent of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their transaction volume to credit card processors that aren’t them and they want to capture that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that they can keep it instead of the other credit card processors. It’s as simple as that. This is a way for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get more money in this kind of boring big company way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are not the first unrelated to credit cards company to launch a credit card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost every major retailer has one. Amazon has one, another big tech company, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually has better rewards if you buy a lot of stuff on Amazon. So this is not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally uncharted waters here. This is like a big company doing boring big company thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it does look really nice. I don’t know if I have much of a use for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have enough credit cards, and that is two. I consider that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, as a quick summary of my strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of a vacation a couple years ago where both my one credit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card and my debit card to my bank were locked and compromised within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time I was on the trip, such that I had no more credit cards or a way to get cashed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while on vacation. To alleviate that, I now have a separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco policy where my debit card only ever goes into an ATM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by my bank. It never goes into anything else but that. It is never used online for any purchases ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my credit card, I basically had to get a second credit card because my first credit card was an American
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express. And not everyone takes American Express, so I wanted something else to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gap where it would be accepted everywhere. And so I got a second credit card that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Visa. And so now everything gets charged to one of those two things, and my debit card is used for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing except ATMs of my bank. And so for the Apple, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s card to be another credit card doesn’t really solve any problems I personally have, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a MasterCard, and while I can’t think of any time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I saw something that accepted Visa but not MasterCard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that Visa is the most widely accepted one of all these things. So if I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have one, or have one be like my maybe not accepted everywhere card, I would want it to be Visa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a MasterCard. Anyway, all that is to say, this looks fine for you. It looks like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more for a world in which Apple Pay is everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in my world, that’s not the case. And maybe that’s true for more people. In my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, Apple Pay is not everywhere. It’s actually still a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco novel thing that, oh, you take Apple Pay, how nice. And so the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this card when you’re not using Apple Pay are significantly reduced and less competitive compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other cards. And so I just don’t think that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be that compelling of an option for me and for a lot of people, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. And if you don’t object to having more credit cards than you might need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be a nice option to get those rewards on Apple purchases. And I might eventually get it just for that 3%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on Apple purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but ultimately, like, you know, the interest rates are just like everyone else’s interest rates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s still the ability to get into financial trouble with it. They’re making certain things nicer, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. I’m proud of them, but it’s still at the end of the day, a credit card. And my concern with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is that Apple now has a strong financial incentive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make using other credit cards worse on their platforms. To
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push this credit card heavily and to provide it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abilities that other credit cards don’t get or to add speed bumps to the use of other credit cards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to push more people into theirs. And Apple already plays fast and loose with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule against promoting stuff via push notifications, things like that with their own apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I just see a future in which Apple keeps building more and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incentives for them to be a little bit crappy to us, to make themselves more money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the company already can’t prevent Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from spamming people with notifications to extend their free trial or whatever. They already can’t keep that under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control. This is gonna be worse. they’re going to be sending us push notifications for marketing their stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit card. And that’s, I don’t love that at all. I think we’re heading into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a period of this kind of like just shameless corporate mediocrity here that’s gonna annoy us with spam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately. And I don’t like seeing Apple build systems that will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incentivize this, but that’s what they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a credit card is an interesting, vaguely Apple-like
⏹️ ▶️ John area to get into. is if you think about a couple of their recent big product introductions, and obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John their biggest, most recent one, the background behind it
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically like, there’s a thing vaguely related to the skillset of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple that most people don’t like. And a while back that was smartphones. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are phones out there, but most people don’t really like their cell phones. Like, I ask around the room,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of Apple executives, who really loves their phone? And we were like, I love a Blackberry, it’s awesome. like, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John is it really great or do you just love what it does for you? And then other people are like, I don’t really like my phone at all because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not into BlackBerrys and it’s just an annoying, like, find an area, find a
⏹️ ▶️ John product area where everybody has one and some of them are okay, but for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part, people don’t love them. And can we go there? Can we make a big difference there? Can we make a phone that people
⏹️ ▶️ John will absolutely be head over heels for? And that was the iPhone, right? Credit cards are very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people have them. almost everybody in the US probably, who really loves
⏹️ ▶️ John their credit card. Like maybe you have one that you like more than the other, maybe you enjoy whatever cash back
⏹️ ▶️ John or airline miles that you get, but there’s always annoying stuff with cards. So it’s like an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to enter a very crowded field where there’s 100% market saturation,
⏹️ ▶️ John like cell phones or personal computers for that matter, depending on what area you decide to
⏹️ ▶️ John put that starting poll in, and make it better in all the Apple ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, Apple’s not the first company to do this. Lots of other companies, I think Simple is one, or there’s a couple other companies with similar
⏹️ ▶️ John names that I can’t remember, they tried to say, banking is annoying. Here is a less annoying bank.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s difficult to do because there are, you know, large companies
⏹️ ▶️ John and large barriers to entry, and you can’t, like even the cell phone thing, Apple thought about but couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John become its own cell carrier, right? So it had to partner with Singular and AT&T, and like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always a little bit harder than you think, even if you have something as amazing as the iPhone. So here comes Apple credit card,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make a credit card that is better, slightly less annoying than existing credit cards, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a credit card that people will love. And it has some innovation, like the innovation, they have all these slides with the check marks,
⏹️ ▶️ John that they touted all the things they’re gonna do for it, and a bunch of them were focused on privacy and security,
⏹️ ▶️ John and sort of modernization and convenience. So like, you didn’t really lean on this too heavily, but the big
⏹️ ▶️ John selling point of this card is like, it’s essentially a virtual card. I know we said there’s a physical card, but they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even get to the physical card until later in the presentation. It’s like, how do I get this card? Through your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, you can ask for this card. And we can give it to you if we decide to on your iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, by that point in the presentation, they hadn’t even mentioned a physical card. It’s like, you use it with Apple Pay and it’s magic
⏹️ ▶️ John and it integrates with Apple Wallet. So here we have a platform advantage, an easy use advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bundling advantage like Apple News. It’ll come on your iPhone like no other credit card lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you sign up for it from the home screen of your iPhone that comes straight out of the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got the security of Apple Pay. And we have this cool application to let you know how you’re spending your
⏹️ ▶️ John money. And unlike those other credit cards that are annoying and have obscure bills with hard to read transactions on
⏹️ ▶️ John them we’re gonna do that thing where we figure out what the actual store is and put a nice little icon and show you what your budget is and like
⏹️ ▶️ John a nicer credit card. And even the physical card doesn’t have a card number on it which
⏹️ ▶️ John seems inconvenient if you have to enter a card number somewhere, but of course Apple wants all the websites to use Apple Pay, and realistically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, when websites do use Apple Pay, I think Apple fans like it because it’s easier than having to enter all your info.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it’s more secure because it’ll have one-time use card numbers and do all this other stuff. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is trying to be a better credit card through the power of technology and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s platforms. But, like, kind of like a cell phone is probably even worse. At the end of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a mastercard. It’s not like Apple is, you know, having its own payment network. They’re partnering
⏹️ ▶️ John with Golden Saks, which is not a fuzzy teddy bear of a company that we all love.
⏹️ ▶️ John The cashback deals are not as good as the cashback deals for other particular vendors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon gives 5% back on its card when you buy from Amazon. Other companies give even more valuable things back if
⏹️ ▶️ John you do some specific thing, whether it’s going on a certain airline or buying from a certain store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you’re a super duper bargain hunter, this is not the greatest card for you, it punishes
⏹️ ▶️ John you for using the physical card, which will probably be annoying because there is no actual, you know, number on
⏹️ ▶️ John it and no no CVV code on the back. Like it’s, it’s a little bit weird to use, you probably need a
⏹️ ▶️ John regular credit card, the interest rates, maybe go down a little bit lower than other people, but otherwise, they’re about the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I feel like it’s this kind of, it makes sense that Apple’s doing this. And I think there
⏹️ ▶️ John is room for them to innovate, and they are innovating. And I like the idea of them pushing the industry forward to the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of mostly virtual credit cards without fixed numbers on them, because that’s all kind of archaic,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But there’s only so much it can push because, you know, just as it was not a cell phone carrier, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s not a bank and Apple is not a you know, a payment network, it has to partner and why
⏹️ ▶️ John is it MasterCard not visa despite the fact of visas bigger, presumably because MasterCard gave them a better deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, I’m, it’s probably actually surprisingly one of the announcements that I’m the most excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about just because I like the idea of getting 3% back on my Mac Pro, which, which by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John is you, that is, it’s not tremendously higher than you get back. Like if I, if I, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, pay on any other credit card, you’ll probably get like 2% back. Um, and you can also
⏹️ ▶️ John compound this, I assume with like the, whatever the business discount you get from Apple business reps, plus the 3%
⏹️ ▶️ John for the direct purchase with this card. Right. So this was a question a lot of people had. I think I’m going to get this card. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Marco will get this car. I think he’s, we’ll probably get this car just because it’ll be so easy to do from our stupid phones. and we’ll use it for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple purchases to get 3% back. But I don’t know how much it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to change our lives, because if you can’t use it everywhere and the world hasn’t converted to Apple Pay, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes another tool in your tool belt,
⏹️ ▶️ John in your financial tool belt. And I have way more credit cards than Marco does, and I feel like at each opportunity,
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the knowing how to navigate the world financially is knowing which card is the best to use
⏹️ ▶️ John in which context to give you the most benefits or protection or cash back or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this just adds one more item to the list, but I think it’s a welcome item. I’m happy to have a cool looking card.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m happy to have a little titanium thing. I’m happy to have a virtual card with better security things. I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about their literal financial planning thing, but it’s an area for them to innovate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m ready to get 3% back on my Mac Pro. If it ever ships.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I was a little disappointed by was there was no discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really expect there to be, but even after the event, I haven’t heard any mention of any idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like a joint accounts or, or, or having another, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user that has permission to use the account. So what I mean by that is, you know, Aaron and I share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one credit card, you know, there’s, it’s issued in both our names and 80 to 90,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe even damn near a hundred percent of the purchases we make outside of like bills we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do against this one credit card, it’s nice having the family’s purchases roll up into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one place. And so if let’s say I wanted to ditch that credit card and switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple card, that wouldn’t be the case anymore. It would now be that Erin has her card and I have my card,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is that a big deal? No, but it’s a big enough deal to me that I don’t, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would ever be able to go all in on this until there was some mechanism for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a family account, which is funny because so much of this, this entire presentation was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how families can share all of these things. And in this case, that’s not true. Now, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be in the future, or maybe we just haven’t heard about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. Yeah. They didn’t say one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would imagine because it’s not Apple, I mean, Apple’s doing part of this, but in the end it’s MasterCard and you can’t have a joint
⏹️ ▶️ John MasterCard, I believe that I’m not ruling it out. But on the other hand, look how long it took them to add family
⏹️ ▶️ John support to literally any of their other products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Exactly. Also, we should note that there was a really good Twitter thread by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gentleman by the name of Peter Berg, who kind of went through a lot of the motivations from this that he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected from Apple’s side. And it’s worth reading that. It kind of went around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our circle a few days ago. But if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth reading. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
Apple Arcade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Arcade. This was something that I really didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect to be that impressed by and ended up really impressed by. So this is coming in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fall. Price was not even alluded to. And the idea here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Apple is becoming, I guess, kind of a publisher. I’m not big enough into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arcade or really any games to be able to know where the lines are. But basically Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to be kind of sort of bankrolling the creation of some of these somewhat more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indie titles by a bunch of developers that seem to really know what they’re doing. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this portion of the entire keynote went the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall the presenter’s name and I apologize, but she did a great job. I thought that it was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tight. I thought they showed more than told, which is a problem that they ran into later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the event. I’m actually kind of excited for this, even though I almost never play games,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really anywhere, but particularly on my iOS devices. I think this looks real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good and I think it’s interesting that you should be able to use these same games on your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV and even, God forbid, your Mac. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you are maybe a little bit more into games than me, maybe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we probably are close. What did you think about Apple Arcade?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually really excited about it. I look forward to paying $10 a month for games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I tell myself I will play and then never will. But like, it looks really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice because, you know, Apple has some challenges here in the game market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they want to make good stuff. They want good stuff to be on their platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, they want more service revenue, but set that aside. They want good stuff to be on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms. But the economics of the App Store really favor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free-to-play games that have these weird psychological tricks and gambling mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to basically pump money out of people in not that comfortable, sleazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. Then there’s all these wonderful indie games that don’t do that, that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just try to compete on quality. But the market for those is really hard. Some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it and they do okay, but most people who try to just make a high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game never get found, never get seen, or if they do get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found, they get ripped off immediately by a bunch of clones and they undercut them on price and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a hard market. It’s a very risky market and it’s a market that doesn’t easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reward investing in quality. And so what Apple is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I think, is very smart on a number of fronts. So number one, this is a service that they can include
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a bundle that will make them money. Number two, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking an actual publisher relationship, they are fronting money to the game studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to the game makers, and picking the game that they want to do this for, and supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them both with money and then with visibility down the road, presumably as part of the service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple is helping them succeed. They’re also enforcing standards. So anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved in Apple Arcade, they said, as you mentioned, it’s gonna run on all their platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is awesome. Like all the games that are part of this to have running on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, all be what sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a requirement with seamless iCloud switching between them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can like progress through the game and pick up where you left off on a different device. That sounded like it was also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a requirement they were enforcing. no in-app purchases, you get everything up front, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, no data collection without consent, so it sounds like no data collection without using Apple’s built-in system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s great. And family sharing included, which was kind of a theme of all these services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is also great. This sounds really awesome. This is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to fix the problem of the iOS game market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of just being crappy in kind of uncomfortable ways. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get really great games made that I’m very excited about, in addition to boosting Apple’s platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, boosting, especially boosting the Apple TV and the Mac, which you only need it. I mean, heck, even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. A lot of great games never really make good iPad versions. So this is gonna help all these platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think this makes it clearer than ever. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at both Apple News+, the new TV app, which we’ll get to, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially looking at Apple Arcade and this cross-platform stuff, I think we’re seeing why Marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is made. Marzipan was not made to make it easier for me to make overcast for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac. Marzipan, I think, was made because it’s gonna make it easier for Apple to do all their stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for things like games to be more easily ported, and things like that, and for them to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write one TV app and have it run everywhere. Whatever the reason, the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this is that they appear to be treating the Mac like a first-class citizen. for the first time in
⏹️ ▶️ John What? I wouldn’t go that far. Still a second class citizen, but it’s no longer a ninth class citizen.
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things that are launching in the fall, it’s because they need new OSs. And the new OSs are going to be announced at WWC, and they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John ship in the fall. So it needs the thing that lets iOS games be easily ported to the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which isn’t going to be released until the new OS, which hasn’t been announced. So all the fall ones, when you see fall,
⏹️ ▶️ John just think Marzipan, right? And it’s not the Marzipan that we know today in Mojave. It’s the new, improved Marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ll announce the WWDC and give an official name to and tell developers to write for and everything like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s great to see the thing being required on all platforms. But that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of the whole the whole marzipan strategy is, I mean, you said it’s not for overcast to be on the Mac, but it is it’s for everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that is on iOS, to be more easily ported to the Mac and their other devices. And of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John that includes Apple’s own applications, and their services that rely on it. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John could have just said, it works on all of the platforms we care about, but not the Mac. Like they could have done
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but they didn’t because they’ve got this thing that lets them not do that anymore, basically by letting iOS stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John run on the Mac. And by the way, everything you just described, like, you know, I agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that this app blockade is actually a good thing. But what you just described is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of the budding, you know, springtime sprout of what console makers have
⏹️ ▶️ John been doing forever. Having a curated collection of games, partially funded, where
⏹️ ▶️ John there are standards where you have to conform to you have to use cloud syncing, you have to be available on this, you have to do that, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the rules for what you have to do for console games, it varies from console to console. And from year to year, depending on what the
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturer does. But that’s, that’s the point of console games that, you know, you have to support
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud sync, you have to support downloadable thing, you have to support these resolutions, you have to have this minimum frame rate, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have this minimum quality, right. And that’s why when Apple would get into games and thinking like we’re the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John game maker or whatever, like the two slams are always, Apple’s not that into games
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple doesn’t really get games. I think those two slams still apply,
⏹️ ▶️ John but less because they’re learning. They’re saying, what works to make high quality games? It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a mystery. Apple’s out here like, we sell more games than anything, but people don’t like our games because they’re like little mini casinos for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do people like? It’s not a mystery.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like consoles have existed forever and people love them. Like, why do people love Nintendo?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, when is Apple gonna buy Nintendo? We’ve been saying, you know, we’ve been saying for years, like Nintendo was the most Apple-like of consoles.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the difference between Nintendo and the iOS App Store? And it doesn’t take a genius to look at it, like, how are they
⏹️ ▶️ John different? Oh, well, it’s not anybody can make a game for insert your favorite console here. And their
⏹️ ▶️ John games are really high quality. And that’s how they get the charge 60 bucks for them. And people are happy to pay it because the games are
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. How is that not the same as Angry Birds? What’s the difference between Angry Birds and Zelda? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John study it for a couple of years and say, you know what, we could pay for people to make games. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John could forbid them from doing casino like things. And we can forbid in app purchases entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John and just say like you buy the game and you get the game. And we can do it as a subscription service and they get on the service
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue and blah, blah, blah. So they go off in their own direction, but they’ve learned a little bit. They’ve learned a little bit from the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the gaming industry. And they’re trying to take some of those lessons and incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John it into their plan. Now, all that said, there’s a lot of questions about whether this is going to work because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not eliminating the kiddie casino, right? That’s still going to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are paying for a bunch of content to be made. But as we’re going to, we’ll talk about if we ever have time in the show a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit later, game and as console makers know, paying
⏹️ ▶️ John for games to be made is not a thing where money just buys you success because it’s a creative
⏹️ ▶️ John process and you can throw money at the wrong people or the wrong ideas or the development process can
⏹️ ▶️ John go wrong. It is a creative endeavor like making movies or music or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is an aspect of it, like sort of talent cultivation, knowing a good game when you see
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I am entirely not convinced that the people controlling the money for funding games
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple are as good at picking good games
⏹️ ▶️ John as people with more experience in this area like the console makers. Everyone has hits and misses
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re lucky when you get some amazing game that just turns out way better than you thought it would. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain amount of both judgment and and patience that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes into this. Like a good example is one of my favorite games that I talk about all the time, Journey, which Sony funded.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a small group of people. Sony funds lots of people all the time. You never know which games are really good, which games can be crap, which
⏹️ ▶️ John games are ever going to ship. ship. Journey took way longer than than Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted was way over budget. And I think if Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John funding it, would they have had the wherewithal to say, Okay, you can have an extra six months, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put more money in because if by all aspects, until the game ships, it looks like an abject failure. They said they were
⏹️ ▶️ John going to bring us game, it’s crap, they don’t have a game finished, you’re already over your budget, the time is up how much more time you need, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John given you three extensions already. It takes someone with the experience of a Sony to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is how this business works sometimes. Sometimes the production of the movie is disaster and all
⏹️ ▶️ John our stars are drowning and there are injuries on set and it goes way over budget and takes way too long.
⏹️ ▶️ John But sometimes at the end you get Titanic. It takes experience to know, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be Titanic or is this gonna be a water world? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think Apple, that was about the trouble with the production of Titanic, I switched from Journey. But the same thing with Journey, it like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to tell when you’re in the midst of it whether you are throwing money down a pit because sometimes you are sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re throwing money down a pit and you don’t find out until the game ships and everyone hates it and it costs you tons of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John All I’m saying is that this is a difficult skill that Apple has thus far not had experience in doing in the games
⏹️ ▶️ John industry. So they’re just you know spreading the money around and to be fair all the games I saw on their page they look amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John right lots of games look amazing in the trailers it’s difficult to tell which which is going to you know be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John game which will resonate with people right um especially with these type of games
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea is not to be super addictive like candy crush the idea is to be entertaining and
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoyable in the way that you know nintendo games are right that where they don’t rely
⏹️ ▶️ John on energy mechanics or time limiting or you know manipulative things they rely on the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re fun and they’re manipulative in a different way but hopefully in a nicer way right uh
⏹️ ▶️ John and so i hope apple is successful with this endeavor, successful enough that
⏹️ ▶️ John the money they put in to make these games they make back in subscriptions, successful enough that the studios that made
⏹️ ▶️ John the games, their cut of that subscription revenue is enough to fund their next game,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the game industry as a whole, it’s very difficult. Very often a studio like
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes an amazing game like journey that’s critically acclaimed will still end up going practically bankrupt, because they did go over budget.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people did work for free for a certain period of time. And they don’t have a next game. And it’s exclusive to Sony for a certain number
⏹️ ▶️ John of years and they have to regroup. Like, it’s a difficult business. But Apple is finally
⏹️ ▶️ John doing some things that look from the outside more like what everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else is doing. And if they do them reasonably well, and or they are very patient and willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John throw lots of money at it and try and try again, they could hopefully build a tiny corner
⏹️ ▶️ John of the App Store for games in which the games that they ship are
⏹️ ▶️ John viewed positively by all involved. the developers, the users,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, everybody. I wish them the best of luck because I want this to succeed, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I recognize that it is not a thing that Apple has done before, and no amount of money can pay for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to get good at it. I just hope they either have already hired the right people or do hire the right people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know how this stuff works to give them the best chance of success.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to quickly reiterate what Marco said, which is that I found this really, really exciting as someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who really doesn’t find games that exciting. So I’m, uh, I’m curious. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very curious how much it would cost. I said to Marco on Twitter yesterday, the day before that I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it being less than 20 bucks. And between Marco and some others telling me about other services
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was not previously aware of all costing $10. I think Marco, you’re probably right. That $10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe 15 will be the answer, but I don’t know. Well, we’ll see. It seems like if they knew they should have just told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, but one way or another, this is more exciting than I expected. and I’m really interested to see what games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come from Apple Arcade.
TV app, Channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV. There are four different things now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are Apple TV. There’s an app, there’s Apple TV plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is some content that’s made by Apple, which we’ll talk about in a minute. There’s Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4k, which is a box and Apple TV HD, which is the boxes that preceded the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV 4k. But for now we need to talk about the Apple TV app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which apparently is coming in May, and it is going to be revamped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in ways that I honestly couldn’t notice. So it’s better now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Question mark? What’s, what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ John here? The best part of that demo, they had someone up on stage demoing the new Apple TV app before
⏹️ ▶️ John they revealed all of the other stuff that we’re going to talk about their original content and their channels and blah blah. They’re just demoing, here’s the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV app and here’s the ways that it’s better. And this poor person has the Apple TV remote
⏹️ ▶️ John that we all know and hate, Connected by a wire to avoid any weird presumably Bluetooth like, you know stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like you don’t want when you’re demo You don’t want any weird signal stuff with the room full of people with computers fine. It’s connected by a wire
⏹️ ▶️ John She’s holding the thing in the traditional Apple TV remote way Gingerly with
⏹️ ▶️ John her thumb hovering over it because if you touch any part of it with your thumb something will happen She’s going through her
⏹️ ▶️ John scripted demo Which is I might like show X and show X is highlighted
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the upper left show or I might like to see what the next episode of show why is I don’t remember what the show is for
⏹️ ▶️ John what she’s supposed to do is move the selection from the upper left to
⏹️ ▶️ John To the right one space to highlight the next show because that’s that’s part of her can demo But she
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t pull it off. You know why it’s really hard to use that goddamn swipe pad
⏹️ ▶️ John She tries to swipe to the right but ends up swiping down which causes the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire gigantic beautiful screen behind her to scroll the image of the tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ John UI up and then she has to scroll it back down and then make a second attempt at the swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John and if we get any more proof that that remote is terrible that even an incredibly rehearsed carefully constructed
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple demo cannot successfully demonstrate basic use of the remote
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a simple function like move one item to the right in a UI. God I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that remote. Now hold on, I have many times defended this remote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so now it’s my time to tell you that this thing is a piece of shit and I’m totally on your side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has taken me this long to finally come around to this point of view. But I think I said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on the last episode, maybe it was on analog, somewhere I told the story of Erin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost throwing the thing across the room, which is very uncharacteristic of her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because she couldn’t get the darn thing to work. And I found that, I don’t know if it’s I’m becoming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’m getting older and I’m shaky. I don’t know. But something is happening where I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am becoming more inept at operating a remote that I’ve had for like two years now or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. And it is getting to the point that even I, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey previous defender of this remote, have decided I’ve had enough and I am on your side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys, and I think this thing has got to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the opposite of OXO Good Grips, like a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey designed for people with limited
⏹️ ▶️ John mobility. It’s like, this is designed, it’s like experts only. Make it the most
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to use remote you can. And if you have amazing dexterity and never lose things and never
⏹️ ▶️ John inappropriately touch anything you want and can move your hands in precise angles and don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John see things with your eyeballs and can carefully feel for the ring so you know which direction it’s in, but don’t reach too high
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’ll touch the touch pad. If you can do all of that, you will be successful. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know when it should be talking about the remote. This is about the app. Anyway, the app has minor improvements that don’t seem to
⏹️ ▶️ John dramatically change things that we don’t care about. And we have lots of stuff to talk about. So I think we should move on. Suffice to say, there’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the TV app that will be coming to all your platforms. By the way, Mark Gurman pointed out that
⏹️ ▶️ John in this the the seeds for the iOS 12.3 beta and TVOS 12.3 beta,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s also an update for the old non TVOS Apple TV, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that that doesn’t run TVOS, the one that was before that. And that could mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John the new TV app and the TV Plus stuff might even be coming to that old Apple TV box, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is interesting and plausible because as we’ll get to in a second, and as
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about in many past shows, once Apple is paying billions of dollars to make original
⏹️ ▶️ John content, anything that stands in the way of people being able to watch and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for that content is bad. And one thing that might stand in the way is, I’ve got an Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning the stupid box, but it’s an old one. And so I can’t watch
⏹️ ▶️ John or pay for Apple’s new programs. And Apple might say, no, we are going to launch
⏹️ ▶️ John a updated version of the TV app for the old Apple TV because we don’t want you to
⏹️ ▶️ John not be able to watch any of our shows because we want your money to watch them because we’ve had a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of money to make them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right, so next in the trifecta of Apple TV things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the Apple TV channels package, which is also coming in May.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that allows you to subscribe to channels and all of these channels can have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their stuff consumed in the aforementioned app. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, do I care? Why, why do I care about
⏹️ ▶️ John this? Well, if you’ve tried to use the TV app in TVOS before or any OS, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV app, it’s the,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s got an icon, it says TV on it, right? It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I use so I don’t have to use the Amazon Prime Video app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Although you are, I believe, in effect using it, because it’s just a central interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John But once you start playing things, it chucks you out to the app that plays the content. It’s always been kind of weird. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like this clearinghouse of stuff, but it’s not really centralized because some things,
⏹️ ▶️ John namely Netflix, are not there. And chucking you out to another
⏹️ ▶️ John application was weird. Right, so the new one is, it’s the same model, essentially, where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a TV app where you supposedly see all your stuff accumulated there and it tries to do a good job
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying, we think you were just watching this, so you might wanna continue watching that and whatever. Like it tries to do that type
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff. The new one will play all your stuff in the app. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John controls the player. Hopefully they make a good player with basic functionality in it that allows you to pause
⏹️ ▶️ John and skip forward and back by fixed amounts. And God, I don’t wanna go off on
⏹️ ▶️ John too much of a tangent here, but like players for video, I there is a minimum set of functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it should be required. And honestly, that minimum is is too low. Maybe I’m the only person who finds
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves in the situation, but very often you’ll be watching television program and some, you know, some will pass a note to
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody or there’ll be some text on the screen or something and I’ll want to be able to read it. Like I want to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to pause it so I can read, you know, the text, right? Even if it’s just like an Easter
⏹️ ▶️ John egg and you weren’t even supposed to read it, but sometimes even you were supposed to read, I want to be able to read it at my leisure and think about how it affects the plot
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Getting the thing paused on the frame that contains a
⏹️ ▶️ John non-motion blurred version of that text is incredibly difficult because so
⏹️ ▶️ John many players have controls that disappear. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the pause button and it’s paused and you hit play, the controls that let you pause disappear after
⏹️ ▶️ John a moment and then you wanna pause, what, no, I wanna pause there, oh, but the controls are gone, so my first tap actually just brings the controls
⏹️ ▶️ John back and now it’s too far. And then you need a fixed amount skip forward or back. If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have a fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John amount. By the way, see also the touch bar. If you don’t have a fixed amount skip forward or back, then you’re forced to
⏹️ ▶️ John scrub. Good luck scrubbing back 30 seconds in a two hour progress bar. Forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. So now you’re, no. So let’s say you have a scrub forward or back. If it’s 30 seconds, now you’ve gotta wait
⏹️ ▶️ John 30, 29, 20 something seconds to get back to where you were. And then you have to pre-stage the pause button. Tap to make the controls
⏹️ ▶️ John visible. Oh, they disappeared. Tap to, you have to like pre-stage it. And then when you get close, you have to do play, pause,
⏹️ ▶️ John play, pause, play, pause, play, pause, just to creep. It’s like, for God’s sake, people, this is so easy on
⏹️ ▶️ John the QuickTime Player 7, which will soon be gone, where you can just pause at any point, use the arrow keys to go forward and backward a
⏹️ ▶️ John frame at a time. Maybe these are expert controls, maybe I’m asking for too much, but all I’m saying is when Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John centralized the player into one place, that’s the opportunity to have a way, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just for experts, to do everything I’m just describing. and back by frame amounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Play, pause, skip forward and back by perhaps even configurable amounts that are non you know, I mean, even
⏹️ ▶️ John even overcast the application that doesn’t want to add weird features, that’s you to specify how much you want to skip forward or back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s anyway, sorry for that tangent, but I have I have hopes for the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple player that Apple’s because Apple’s players usually are pretty good in terms of scrubbing
⏹️ ▶️ John and features and skipping and stuff like that. Oh, and by the way, have a way to turn on subtitles without going through seven sub menus, plex.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, that’s the that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John television thing and the channels packages within television. You can subscribe to channels
⏹️ ▶️ John like Showtime and HBO and a lot of this stuff. And it’s like you can do that from within the channel. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then when you play them, you don’t go to the HBO application. You don’t go to the Showtime app. You don’t have to remember what the hell is the name of the Showtime
⏹️ ▶️ John app? Is it HBO now or HBO Go? Like, it’s all in one place. So anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s TV channels thing. I think it is is an improvement, a clear improvement over the over the current system
⏹️ ▶️ John where they try to do this, but not particularly well. It still has the same lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of Netflix, which makes sense because Netflix is massively the market leader. And why would Netflix subsume
⏹️ ▶️ John itself to this Apple interface like it doesn’t make any sense. Also, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even I mean, it’s hard to tell because we haven’t used this, but based on the demos, I would say that the Netflix interface to
⏹️ ▶️ John letting you continue what you were watching before and to presenting you with stuff you might want to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John is still probably better than apples because Netflix is pretty good at that. Not not perfect. And you know, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be better because Netflix really, really wants you to like kind of like YouTube really wants you
⏹️ ▶️ John to ride the algorithmic wave, right? They don’t want you to build your list of things you want to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just want to like we know what you want to watch because is either what you were watching before or what our system thinks you wanna watch. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John also have the ability to add things to quote unquote my list, but getting to my list in the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John is sometimes tricky because they don’t want you to use it like a cue, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little, but anyway, Netflix is good at figuring out what you might wanna watch and it is good about letting you resume
⏹️ ▶️ John where you picked up. Unlike, I don’t wanna go on another stupid rant on this. Unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey by the way, so many
⏹️ ▶️ John other video apps where like, I forget which one this is because I subscribe to
⏹️ ▶️ John so many freaking things. I think it might be Hulu or maybe it’s a CBS app. Some show that I watched season one of
⏹️ ▶️ John and I started watching season two of somehow because of its bad ability to sync playback position between different devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’d watch it on my TV, on my iPad, so on and so forth, thinks that I was partially
⏹️ ▶️ John through an episode in season one, or maybe I even went back to it to review something. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks my play position is like season one, episode seven, like 2% through.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m actually watching like season two, episode five. But every time I launched the app, It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want to continue watching season one, episode seven? It’s like, no, I don’t. I watched that whole season and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way in the application to tell it. I’ve watched the show. I even tried going to the episode, bringing the scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ John to the end and letting it naturally play off the end to let it think I played that episode. And I couldn’t get through it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John thick skull. So the whole continue watching feature, they throw in your face, you launch the app. And it’s like, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to continue watching season one, episode seven? Like, I do not. It’s not where I am in the series, you
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid application. Again, basics that Netflix mostly gets right. and hopefully Apple will get right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you wouldn’t think there’s that many features to showing video, but, and there’s only like a page of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you don’t have them all or you have a bug related to them, it is maddening. So I have some hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will do well here, but I’m kind of glad that the Netflix app is still separate because I think, despite my frustrations
⏹️ ▶️ John with their application, they’re probably one of the best. And I think that actually their closed caption thing is only two taps away.
⏹️ ▶️ John One tap away would be ideal people, closed caption on or off. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and yeah, I guess on the same thing we were touching on before, Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ John you to be able to watch your stuff everywhere. This new Apple TV app will be on smart TVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung TVs in the spring and not all the other TV manufacturers later, which means you don’t need an Apple TV box
⏹️ ▶️ John to use this TV application. Previously, the only way you could get this application with this UI, this wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ John UI that we just talked about would be on a little black Apple TV box. You’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it on your smart TV. You’ll also be able to get it on Roku and Fire TV. The other little black
⏹️ ▶️ John box is not made by Apple, which is kind of amazing because it means Apple is essentially developing applications
⏹️ ▶️ John for Roku and Fire TV. Like. You know, the SDK is for those systems
⏹️ ▶️ John are not the same as iOS, and I don’t think Apple is has made like a miniature iOS emulator, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John it when it was like QuickTime for Windows. They made like a miniature version of like the Mac toolbox calls that they needed to run QuickTime on Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re making considerable effort to make sure if you want to watch And at this point, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the presentation, they hadn’t yet announced all the original Apple shows. So it was kind of mysterious. But we all know the next
⏹️ ▶️ John item will be all the original Apple shows. If you want to pay Apple to watch those shows, watch it on your Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, watch it on your fire TV, watch on your Roku, watch on your LG TV, watch on your Sony televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John like we don’t care. Just watch it. Just pay us and watch it. So I’m glad they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John pursuing this strategy. As far as I can tell, there’s still no way to watch it on the Web because Apple’s like Web.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s that? which is weird because Apple Music is on Android. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems the strategy is pretty clearly Apple TV and this Apple TV application, which
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple seems proud of, but which I think is just kind of middle of the road. They want that to be available everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just on their little black puck boxes, not just on their iPads. Hell, there’s going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac version of it for crying out loud. A Mac version of the TV app. How are they going to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine some Marzipan magic. Although it says this stuff is coming in May,
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not entirely sure how they’re gonna do that. I mean, obviously we’re all running Mars band apps right now, so it’s not outside the realm
⏹️ ▶️ John of possibility that Apple can ship an Apple TV app that is in fact Mars pan, but uh, we’ll see. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, it’s in a hundred more than a hundred countries, which every time we talk about any kind of service that we’re interested in, lots of people come and
⏹️ ▶️ John tell us, well, that’s great, but that service is only available in the U S and Canada and some of Europe, but not where I live or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, so they’re going to try to go global with this. So I think overall this announcement, the Apple TV channels
⏹️ ▶️ John package and stuff, It’s all improvements. It’s available more places. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ John better application than it was before Even if still not at best in class So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John looking forward to it.
Apple TV+
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV Plus, we finally have a name. We have timing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have no idea the price. It’s coming in fall 2019. And this is the original TV and movie content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’ve been hearing deals about, you know, hearing about the deals for months and months and months, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a couple of years now. I really disliked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this part of the presentation. I thought it was really hard to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What ended up happening was they brought all of these content creators on stage one by one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell us about the things that they’re making and why they made them. I did think the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they just kind of had people appear on stage from, you know, a black, dark stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of a sudden, oh, there’s Steven Spielberg, and all of a sudden, oh, there’s Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that was well done, but outside of, um, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the guy who’s the stand-up comedian? I always forget the guy’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kumail Nanjiani. Thank you. He was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the best. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away the best. Clearly, he was comfortable being the only guy on stage just kind of riffing.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s a stand-up comedian, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Yeah, exactly, which is why I think he was the best. But most of this I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceedingly boring and exceedingly uninteresting. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of get why it was done, but I feel like it could have been a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tenth as long and potentially even just done with like a little trailer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie or something like a Johnny Ives style, you know, in the white room or in this case black room sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thing. Maybe a white room with black curtains, who knows? Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is I just felt like it dragged on forever and I really disliked it. But what did you guys think? Like John, were you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also bored to tears or were you really riveted by
⏹️ ▶️ John this? So they have a bunch of stuff that they paid for. Some of it is presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John done or mostly done, but a lot of it isn’t done or mostly done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And ideally, if you have a bunch of video content that you’ve made, the way you
⏹️ ▶️ John pitch it is to show people like trailers for it, like show
⏹️ ▶️ John me video about the video that you made. That’s why movie trailers are not a person who comes up in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John the movie theater and describes the movie. All right, so it’s like the other Avengers, but there’s even more characters. It has a different title
⏹️ ▶️ John and people fight each other in it and it’s probably going to be pretty good. Now They show a trailer, right? You wanna show
⏹️ ▶️ John video. And I think the problem was that they just didn’t have enough
⏹️ ▶️ John video ready to do trailers for everything. They had like their sizzle reel thing where they show select
⏹️ ▶️ John scenes from a few shows, like all combined and kind of like a medley. But I just, I honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they had enough to show you a trailer for all of the shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it would be weird and or, you know, kind of unfair or probably not great marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John to just show the one or two that happened to be farthest along in production that they have a trailer for. And you do
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have the celebrities there. Like if they had all the trailers, they would probably still want the star power, but it wouldn’t then be
⏹️ ▶️ John up to the celebrities to explain to you in words, the video project that they were
⏹️ ▶️ John working on. You know, like that, and that’s, that’s the job they had in front of them. And some, you know, some celebrities
⏹️ ▶️ John did it better than other, like, you know, I think, I think Kumail was the best one because he’s a standup comedian. He got to be entertaining.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s interesting to hear people pitch their shows, you know, to describe them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But in the end, we wanna see the shows and
⏹️ ▶️ John failing that we wanna see trailers for them. So I don’t, I kind of understand Apple’s position. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think they should have waited. Like, oh, they shouldn’t have shown this until they had trailers for them. No, it’s, they should announce it now
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think now is a reasonable time to announce it. They didn’t announce a price. It’s only coming in the fall,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they did tell us, Here are the people who are making the shows, and here’s roughly what those shows are gonna be,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is better than nothing. And honestly, like no one cares about, or will remember
⏹️ ▶️ John how boring the presentation of people talking about their shows were.
⏹️ ▶️ John All we care about, as you said a million times, is are the shows good? And kind of like the discussion about
⏹️ ▶️ John games, just because you have lots of money doesn’t mean you know how to convert that
⏹️ ▶️ John money into good television shows. Unlike the game area, Apple hired a bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ John that have lots of experience in this area and have a tracker for it of knowing how to pick pay for him
⏹️ ▶️ John and cause to be produced high quality content. And that those people in turn picked other people
⏹️ ▶️ John and give the money and it rolls down. And so like, I feel like they have a reasonable shot of producing one or two good things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not easy. It’s hard to like, I mean, Netflix did it pretty amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ John well, like putting all their money behind a couple of big name shows, all of which turned out to to be pretty good for them, and then they were
⏹️ ▶️ John able to diversify. Apple is behind everyone else in this area, and they’re spending a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money, but not Netflix-style money quite yet, which I think is smart, because you don’t want to pay $10 billion your first
⏹️ ▶️ John year if you have no idea what you’re doing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking forward to this video service. I’m going to pay for this video service. There is at least one or two shows
⏹️ ▶️ John on this video service that, after hearing them described, I’d be interested in watching,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think have a chance of being good and being interested to me. I think it will probably cost
⏹️ ▶️ John around about the same as all the other video services I’ve subscribed to costs, but that’s fine with me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I’m glad Apple has finally picked the name for the service and announced
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is real. And we all have a date and a concrete thing to look forward to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m mostly gonna give a pass to the weird presentations where the celebrities talk for a little bit too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was basically the TV show version of the endless parade of game demos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we often see like at WBDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the game demos show the actual games. Imagine if the game demos was just the developer talking about their
⏹️ ▶️ John game, but they didn’t show anything on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re gonna have a game later this fall that’s gonna really help you explore people’s storytelling and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artists and their stories.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be like, it’s a great racing game and the cars go really fast and the roads have a lot of turns and
⏹️ ▶️ John there are like items that you can shoot. we’re really going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. And I said, like, the Oprah intro. My favorite tweet was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mr. Rebo on Twitter, Christ himself would be embarrassed by
⏹️ ▶️ John intro. It was very overblown. And Oprah was basically the one more thing. And the intro they had was like their little,
⏹️ ▶️ John they had to have a video. It was like their little words and dots about the voice that we need to hear and
⏹️ ▶️ John that has been gone for too long. I was like, what, is it Louis CK? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I thought it was gonna be Obama at first. Like some of it would have lined up with that, but no, it’s just like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was just too overblown. And I think as we were discussing in Slack, like it’s interesting line to
⏹️ ▶️ John walk, because creative things can often get away with that, like the big emotional appeal, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of right that like the whole storytelling thing does connect with people emotionally, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get dramatic lead-ups like that that resonate with people, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a valued property or story where there’s an audience connection or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even in the technology world, like we were talking about the incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John over the top intro to the iPhone, like there’s been, you know, whatever it was, three
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing revolutionary things in the history of Apple. And it’s like so incredibly overblown. And yet in hindsight,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably undersold the iPhone, which is amazing because like, they didn’t know, I mean, they thought
⏹️ ▶️ John they had an amazing thing and they did, but like you could go back in time with hindsight
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, actually, we can crank up the hyperbole here because you don’t realize this, but the iPhone is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John way bigger than you think it is, right? So you never know. Like I give Apple mostly a pass because
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like their heart’s in the right place. They wanted it to be a thing that connected with audiences,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they went for it. And if it fell on its face a little bit, that’s a great example of the
⏹️ ▶️ John experience of making and funding creative content. You have to go into it with your full
⏹️ ▶️ John heart, and sometimes you go splat on your face, and you gotta get back up and try again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a very hard time getting too excited about this because the iPhone was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone. This is like 10 TV shows. It’s fine. One of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be good though. That’s probably about the ratio to expect, that’s realistic, but even if one is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, and even if, heck, let’s say they do really well and they’ve done a really good job with these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say five of them are really good. We’re adding to the world five TV shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of really good TV shows already and don’t forget another recurring subscription to pay for those TV shows. Don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that part exactly like I just I this is this is gonna be one of those areas like Android phones where like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not in this world at all like I have I’m gonna have a very hard time ever covering this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area of like news or topics because like you know if honestly if you want this kind of stuff listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade upgrade is a way better job of covering like the TV and entertainment side of this than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we ever can. So yeah, just listen up great for this because I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is super excited about their new TV series and that’s great. Apple knows more about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they showed. What we saw was not very exciting. Maybe it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be exciting. Maybe these will be good, but none of that was shown to us. What was shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us was a parade of celebrities that was that really was very long and drawn out and that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was hyping way more than what was warranted for the amount they were actually ready to reveal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, though, you know, looking back up the stack at all the Apple TV things combined,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does make a fairly compelling Apple related television story,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Despite the fact that they obviously didn’t announce any new hardware or anything in that remote, it still sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John What they’ve done with the their improved app things, their channel deal,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all the economics of Apple finding new ways to get cuts of people subscription for their services while improving
⏹️ ▶️ John the user experience. Like it adds up to a story that certainly makes sense to Apple from a financial perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know, recurring revenue and cuts of other people’s subscriptions make sense to the user as a general
⏹️ ▶️ John improvement to the experience of using the Apple TV applications. Despite the fact that that’s surely not the center of many people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lives, it is a part of a lot of people’s lives and making that part better is good. Expanding
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be available to way more people. Like you don’t have to have one of those black pucks anymore. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And funding original content, which as we know, table stakes for getting in on the business and being able to get your own recurring revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John of original content. It adds up to a fairly comprehensive, fairly good
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple style baseline level table stakes, Apple entering the streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John video original content market, which is basically what we expected. So I mean, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what people other than having a better presentation or having like shows that everyone agrees are going to be amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John even before they see them. There’s not much more or better they could have done. There’s not some aspect of this
⏹️ ▶️ John who are going to say, oh, they really they really messed up there, or they really didn’t announce this thing. They’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John all the pieces here. And they all begin with Apple TV, right? And which is, you know, so that
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a consistent brand for them. I think it’s a good start for
⏹️ ▶️ John for their endeavors, as long as they kind of like the game thing, as long as they stick to it. And like when maybe maybe all
⏹️ ▶️ John their original first shows flop or whatever, you just got to keep trying. Just to be a player.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not they’re going to come to dominate, it’s not they’re going going to, you know, buy Netflix, which they maybe should have done a long time ago, but too late for that now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that they’re going to become the center for all our entertainment, because inevitably there’s lots of competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just want to be a player. I think it’s important for them to be a player. I think it’s good for them to be a player. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John being a player in this market forces them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t like explain expand their software experience
⏹️ ▶️ John out to other platforms and make sure that you know the Mac can do this stuff as well. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like I don’t want to be negative about this section because I think every single one of our announcements
⏹️ ▶️ John was good. There are just still question marks. And because it’s kind of all out in our future,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the little kind of like hurry up and wait thing of like, well, you told us about some stuff. The presentation was awkward. What do I do about
⏹️ ▶️ John it now? Maybe I’m not that into it. Wake me up when it’s something compelling. And I see that
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective. But as somebody who subscribes to every video service under the sun, and we’ll watch a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of these shows. I’m actually kind of excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. Yeah, and I actually am excited to sees me on these shows too, but it’s not like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, great, my interest is slightly peaked after a very long presentation, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to wait six months before any of that can be resolved. Like, it just seemed like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was more of a presentation for Apple’s own sake than for ours. And I’m sure they have their reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, they had to announce something. Like, we know they’re making shows. I didn’t want them to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John six months to announce this service. I don’t want them to wait until all the shows are available streaming today. I think right now
⏹️ ▶️ John was a perfectly good time to announce
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. Because the more time they wait, the more there are gonna be details of the shows revealed, the more we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, who’s making all these shows for what Apple service? Announce the service, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I think it’s perfectly good. If anything, I’m a little bit anxious to get the Apple TV app update, because if you use that
⏹️ ▶️ John app at all, any significant improvement to
⏹️ ▶️ John it is welcome. So bring it on, and that’s coming in May, So that’s not that long,
⏹️ ▶️ John too far in the future. So I mean, I can see the perspective, you know, from the presentation, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, again, that this presentation will fade in our memories very quickly. And most people don’t even know this presentation took place.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way they’ll learn about it is there’ll be an iOS update that will, or an app store update
⏹️ ▶️ John that will update their Apple TV app and they’ll have a better app. And they’re like, Oh, they, they made an improvement. The app it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better now. And then sometime in the more distant future, they’ll buy a new TV or something
⏹️ ▶️ John and see the fact that they have an Apple TV app and they’ll see original shows in it and maybe hear about one
⏹️ ▶️ John from a friend who says, oh, you gotta check out that C show where everybody’s blind. And they’ll be like, how do you do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s on Apple TV something or other. And they’ll figure out how to watch it on their TV and they’ll watch a TV show
⏹️ ▶️ John and boom, Apple is now a player in a market where once they weren’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hullo Pillow, Backblaze and Linode. and we will see you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check podcast so long
Bread-sliced Boston accents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People keep asking us about quote bread slicing a bagel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and which seems to be just like basically slicing it up into discs instead of like big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circles like you slice it a whole bunch of ways as if you’re putting it through a bread slicer so that it slices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as a bunch of thin discs. What is this for besides making bad bagel
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s for I mean I feel like it’s a basic acknowledgement that when people get
⏹️ ▶️ John these are from Panera when people get quote-unquote quote, bagels from Panera, they’re not really bagels, and people don’t wanna eat them like
⏹️ ▶️ John bagels. It’s just round bread with a hole in the middle. It isn’t that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John good, but when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that. Panera’s bagels are not that bad. They are very bad. They’re on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of Bruegger’s bagels, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. No, they are so much worse than Bruegger’s, so much worse. I would not eat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bagel. They’re not quite as good as Bruegger’s, but I don’t think there’s a very big gap between
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I think there’s a big gap. Anyway, when you buy bagels
⏹️ ▶️ John like that for a group, because no one is like, oh, awesome bagels, I love bagels, and is going to take
⏹️ ▶️ John one and cut it in half like a bagel and eat it like a bagel, like no one wants it that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you bread slice it, what it turns into is a bunch of little pieces of bread that people
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, I don’t really want a bagel, but I’ll take one of these little pieces of bread and maybe smear some cream cheese on it. So they’re kind of acknowledging
⏹️ ▶️ John that these are not bagel enough for people to treat and and eat them and get excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John them like bagels, but sometimes people might want a slice of bread, so let’s go with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, like seeing the bread sliced bagel, I actually do kind of respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as a choice because you’re right, like basically, if you just slice them regularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you don’t slice them at all, in a communal setting like this, you’re forced to take a lot more bagel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you’re forced to take at least half a bagel, and inevitably people like start cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them themselves anyway, and like they’ll like cut it in half and leave the other half for somebody else and then you get a bunch of bagel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butts nobody wants. Or just start
⏹️ ▶️ John tearing pieces off like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco animals. Yeah, and so the bread slice thing makes sense if what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do is have a small amount of bagel and this also dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increases the surface area ratio of cream and cheesable surface area to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of bagel you’re eating. So if you want to optimize for cream and cheesable surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area, this is the way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. I guess in a work environment, maybe this would make sense, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word, in any normal scenario this is just blasphemy. And
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an acknowledgement that you don’t have bagels. Because if you took real bagels and did that to it, you should be set on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But for these
⏹️ ▶️ John Panera things, it’s like, whatever. Whatever it takes to get people to
⏹️ ▶️ John actually consume and in some way receive some enjoyment from this
⏹️ ▶️ John food item, then go for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yeah, I mean, I would have expected this of Montreal, but it seems so very weird to come from St.
⏹️ ▶️ John Louis. It’s going to shove that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in there, don’t you? Can’t help myself. Can’t help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself. The funny thing is Montreal bagels are actually too thin. Like, they would, they actually wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey work very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. And they are tasty. They’re just not the canonical bagel, if you ask me. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know why you do it to yourself, Casey. Why do you have to antagonize the Canadians? They just want to be polite and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. That’s right. At least they don’t incorporate. I can’t even do it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ve said this to you before. What are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to say? Incorporate is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct. He’s trying to say you’re not Boston accent. That you insist you don’t have. With my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accent? Yes. Whatever you say. It’s like Marco’s query.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s called the Long Island accent. Marco, you married
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John someone with it. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god. It’s not. You have a Boston accent. You don’t even realize it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not. Incorporate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t even know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say. It was not perfect, but it was much closer than mine. Much, much closer than
⏹️ ▶️ John mine. If I park the car in Harvard Yard, then you’ll let me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, but I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no. No, not that. The other Boston accent, the one that sounds like a Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really doesn’t. Believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’m not weighing in on whether you are or do or do not have a Long Island accent, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will say that your incorporate sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John ears. Incorporate? I don’t think I say it weird at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Incorporate. No, you said it normally there, but when
⏹️ ▶️ John say it- I’ll try to say it abnormally. How do I supposed to say it abnormally? Incorporate?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you with me on this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco? Yeah, when John says certain like, you know, vowel next to R sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will often come out in a slightly Boston-ish way. And he insists he does not have this kind of accent.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think, A, I don’t think you know what slightly Boston-ish means, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey B, I disagree that they come out in any weird
⏹️ ▶️ John way. I do say coffee instead of coffee or whatever the hell normal people say, but that’s a New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accent, it’s not Boston. You can’t possibly live somewhere for as long as you’ve lived
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I certainly, I don’t interact with people with a Boston accent. I just, I go to work with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of programmers who are all also not from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Massachusetts. You’ve been there, how long have you lived there? Like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decade or more? At least 15, 20 years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t, when do I encounter people, the most I encounter people with Boston accents is
⏹️ ▶️ John you, well, if you watch movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t, I don’t. No, I’m not talking about like the Ben Affleck or Tom Hanks, like terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John accent. Tom Hanks, please. Where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Tom Hanks come from? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they both have done bad Boston accents and movie roles before, but like it and they’re not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it. I’m not talking about that kind of exaggerated like Boston like that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You the way you form certain vowel sounds you have influence from
⏹️ ▶️ John Boston. Well, you still haven’t given me an example of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. Listen back to this episode, John, and when you say incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way like an hour ago, you’ll probably won’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it, but you should.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing is, here’s the other thing. Because it’s late at night and I’m tired and I
⏹️ ▶️ John mumble, I often say words in totally weird ways, some of which I can imagine coincidentally landing
⏹️ ▶️ John on an unrecognizable accent, but most of the time it’s just random-ass slurring of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey words. Incorporate is every
⏹️ ▶️ John time. I just said it 20 times for you! Incorporate, incorporate, incorporate!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s how I say it! No, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you- no, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey now you’re thinking about it! Incorporate! Incorporate!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Incorporate! Here’s the thing though, Marco. If John said, I need to go park the car down by Havard Yard or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell it is, he would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, I know I can’t because it’s so wrong, he would still say that that is just the particular street
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he grew up on in Long Island and that’s where the accent
⏹️ ▶️ John comes from. I know what a Long Island accent is and I know what a Boston accent is and apparently you know about neither.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can keep thinking you don’t have an
⏹️ ▶️ John accent. Next we’re going to tell me Casey has a Southern accent because he lives in the South. No he
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And he probably doesn’t interact with people with Southern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accents frequently. John is the only person on Earth who has not been influenced at all by the place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s lived for over a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, some people are susceptible to it and some people aren’t. And I am not susceptible. I maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John my own original accent. Oh, I see how it is. Some people are susceptible. Like my mother, when she
⏹️ ▶️ John goes down south and talks to her sister who lives in the south, immediately picks up a southern accent. Or people, when
⏹️ ▶️ John they visit England, suddenly have English accents, right? Everyone knows people like that, where they’re there for three days and all of a sudden they’ve got the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accent. No, but here’s the thing, I have resisted some Virginia-isms pretty badly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Richmond’s a melting pot where you do definitely hear a Southern accent, I’m not trying to say you don’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s plenty of transplants from all over the place. But I have noticed, having been in Virginia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since 2000, that I’m starting to elongate, I think I’ve made this speech on either this show or Analog recently, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey elongated some words. So I’ve noticed that mile is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey creeping ever closer to mile, which is a very Virginia thing, and I keep trying to correct it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John happens. I haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And you’re surrounded, like, even if the people around you don’t have thick accents,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still are in a region where it’s just, you’re surrounded by something, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t possibly not be affected. Like, I have a slight change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the way I talk now compared to when I lived in Ohio or Pittsburgh, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m around a bunch of New Yorkers now, and I’ve lived here for 10 years, or more than that, actually, 12 years now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I know that there are certain words that I say a little bit differently, certain vowel sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are slightly different. It isn’t a huge influence. I wouldn’t describe myself as having a New York accent, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the New York accent has affected the way I talk, and there is some influence
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Right, yeah. The main effect that living in Massachusetts had on me is lessened my New York accent,
⏹️ ▶️ John making me more neutral, because I can’t say coffee here as much as I used to because everyone else isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John saying coffee, so I end up saying coffee, which is a slight softening, but it is not a Bostonification.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is merely a more neutralization of it. My New York accent
⏹️ ▶️ John gets thicker. If I go to Long Island and start talking with people at a deli, suddenly it gets thicker because I’m back home
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like you’re talking in the same wavelength. Here it becomes more neutral and kind of just, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the awes go down, right? But the idea that it’s a Boston accent is mostly for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what a Boston accent is, hearing a accent and thinking it must be Boston.
⏹️ ▶️ John on this one. And sightingly incorporating, now I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey remember that. There it is!
⏹️ ▶️ John That was it. Citing the incorporate thing, that’s a New York accent, cooperate, C-A-W,
⏹️ ▶️ John incorporate. Well, now for the record. Citing that, the one time I said it, it was one of those weird
⏹️ ▶️ John tongue twister mangle things like when I mangled the word developers in the Schiller interview. It’s not like that’s an accent, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistake of speech. You do it every time except when we brought it to your attention. And for the record, I am not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey claiming. Incorporate! I could say it a hundred times to you. I can’t mimic it, but for the record,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not the one that’s blaming this on Boston, Although I do agree with Marco that there is a natural,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be it a softening or an
⏹️ ▶️ John adoption. And like I said, I think the natural thing is for me to soften my New York accent to not be as extreme
⏹️ ▶️ John and say coffee talk. But I still say dog and dog, log and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco log, all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. None of that is how you actually say any of those words.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way I say it, the thing I was getting at is, in elsewhere in the country, the word L-O-G
⏹️ ▶️ John and the word D-O-G rhyme, but where I’m from, they do not. And they still don’t because I still say dog and log.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re pronounced, they don’t rhyme with each other. Dog and log. I don’t say dog and log, because I was in Long Island,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how I would say it, but I say dog and log. The softening of that from dog to dog is
⏹️ ▶️ John what happens from living in Massachusetts. But it doesn’t make me say them rhyming anymore. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do they rhyme when you say them? Dog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and log? No, I feel like dog and log. Does that rhyme?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does. I don’t think they rhyme the way other people say it, John. I think maybe you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boston hearing now. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know. Dog and
⏹️ ▶️ John log. You said dog and dog. Say it like with a Long Island accent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and log. My assertion is that they’re always a little bit different. Even like in the Midwest, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit different sounding.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re not. Some people say them exactly the same. but it’s true.