494: Ultra-Wideband Park Bench
04 Aug 2022John got a new television.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Geometry Dash
- Follow-up:
- John on M1 MacBook Air vs. M2 MacBook Air speakers
- You can set up Fastmail to have a catch-all
- Find My on vacation
- Steps via Steve J. Stutz
- Open
Find My - Tap
Devices - Tap on the device you want to silence
- Scroll down and under
Notificationstoggle offNotify When Left Behind
- Open
- Paul Squires understood the assignment
- Steps via Steve J. Stutz
- HomeKit automation & locations
- Derek Martin has tips regarding how to transfer to a new home address
- Jim Bruhn provides instructions for how to disable hub features:
SettingsAirplay and HomeKitHome Hub→My Home- Switch to
Disconnected
- Are there any decent AppleTV photo-viewer apps? (via Torb Lunde Mirada)
- Contact address ordering
- Reorder It! from @takaaki024app (via philuop)
- Robb Woodring saves the day with changing default messaging address/number
- Go to an existing thread
- Tap the name of the person at the top
- Tap
Info - Tap and hold the
Message/bubble icon - Select the appropriate number
- Unlocking automotive features
- Blaine Toups’ Jaguar F-Type’s two extra cylinders
- Tesla’s Acceleration Boost (via Josh Rapoport)
- Sean Harding makes a good point about API deprecation
- John’s New TV
- Post-show: Is it okay to copy a competitor’s API?
Sponsored by:
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code atp for 10% off your first order.
- Instabug: The visibility you need to build top-quality apps.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Geometry Dash
- Shop Different
- The good old days
- Sponsor: Instabug
- M1 vs. M2 MBA speakers
- Catch-all email (*@you.tld)
- Find My follow-up
- Home-hub follow-up
- Apple TV photos follow-up
- Contact-ordering follow-up
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- In-car purchases
- Sponsor: Linode
- John’s new television 🖼️
- Ending theme
- S3 clones
Geometry Dash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you or your kids or have you or your kids discover geometry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Geometry dash I have no idea what you’re talking about. Is that like number munchers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s a game. So this is like My kid has been obsessed with this game for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of months now And it’s one of those games that like spreads to every child’s friend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the basic gameplay It’s kind of like Flappy Bird where you’re like, you know jumping up and down but taken to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most ridiculous extreme possible to the point where it’s this now it’s a huge world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the game itself not only does it have a million levels that I have just huge amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity tons of visual distractions it’s like crack for your brain if you if your brain works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain way like it’s just this huge amount of stuff on screen all to for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this basically you know this like instant death kind of frustrating hardcore kind of jumping game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what’s interesting about so There’s also a level editor in it. And so, of course, my kid has gotten into making his own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels, and you can submit your levels, it’s all right in the game. And what I love about this thing, this is not an ad for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Geometry Dash, what I love about this thing is that there are no in-app purchases, as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You pay two bucks for the game, and you just have it, and that’s it. Impossible. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the guy, I think he does very well, based on the number of people who play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And it’s been around for a long time, but it’s still going strong. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my kid tells me there’s like a hundred levels added all, like every day or something by people and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get featured every day and like there’s all, and it’s this huge community. There’s YouTubers playing it, talking about it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s presumably how he found it. Like, it is, it is kind of a joy to me to see this game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco succeeding in the way it does because it’s succeeding in the way that iOS games used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back before everything was internet purchase garbage fest. It’s just a game that you pay for and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. and there’s stuff you can level up to in the game. You can get better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suits or skins or whatever, but you do that by playing the game, just by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beating levels. It’s not by, you don’t spend 10 bucks on a coin pack to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a treasure loot chest to possibly get, it’s none of that garbage. It’s just a game that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play and you get stuff in the game and you can make stuff in the game. It’s this whole thing and it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so nice and wholesome that, you know, it’s this rare, and I mean, this is not a new game. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone out there who’s an iOS gamer has probably gotten tired of this game 10 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as somebody who has only seen it recently, I’m very impressed by just how nice of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little world this game has created. And just, and like, when you see some of the levels that are made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of work and complexity and artistry that go into it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is quite something. I can’t play the game for crap. Like, this is the kind of game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you play it, you jump a few times, you die, you jump a few times again, you die again. And I’m like, all right, I wanna throw the iPad out the window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have the kind of personality to play this kind of game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a tip? She finished the last.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, this is, I’m very impressed by Geometry Dash and the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around it. And it’s pretty cool. So if you have kids with iPads, check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John A developer should talk to the current Unity CEO, former EA CEO, who recently said that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t think about monetization during the creative process, you are a quote, effing idiot. So Geometry
⏹️ ▶️ John Dash developer, sorry, the Unity CEO doesn’t like you. Well, EA deserve that guy. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John seriously. Oh no, but Unity’s got him now. He’s the CEO of Unity. We talked about, you know, 3D engines last time? Oh well.
Shop Different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m curious, like, so, so, you know, my kid’s also trying to get into, um, you know, coding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and game creation, and we talked about this probably a year ago, uh, got a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of recommendations from listeners. I don’t think he was quite ready for those at the time. We tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few, nothing really stuck, but he did recently finish the first, um, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batch of Swift Playgrounds, and wants to jump into making a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple game now. However, you know, he’s still young. I think attention span is still a very challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And he suggested trying Unity because he’s heard from YouTubers that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. And then I heard on the talk show this week, John had on, I forget the guy’s name, the guy who made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Store time machine thing called Shop Different, which is amazing. I went through it a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days ago, like, wow. That’s a whole thing. Like, I was very impressed with that. Just like most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them, I didn’t, you know, I was kind of more impressed academically. But then when I went to the Fifth Avenue New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glass Cube recreation, I’ve been to that store a lot during that time period that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it represented and it felt like going there again. It was an incredible recreation. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did nail exactly how it felt. To walk through that and be like, I’ve been here before, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, when it looked like this, that was really quite something. Anyway, the creator of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned that he made it in Unity and that he’s not much of a programmer but you know it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was apparently easier just like import stuff I don’t even know you know I know that unity is a game engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than that I don’t know anything about unity I like I you know I couldn’t pick out a lineup
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a full ID it’s like a full ID for a 3d environment so you could do like modeling texturing
⏹️ ▶️ John arranging geometry still hard to do it’s all complicated like I remember last time you were looking into like pulp the
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you call it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah there’s the playdate thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then we looked into oh Oh God, I forget the names of all these things. The little like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, Pico something? Pico 8.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the pulp you can do all on the web and it’s programming optional. You’re basically dragging tiles around and setting up
⏹️ ▶️ John rules and then you can dive into the code if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So anyway, I’m looking at, we’re gonna look back into stuff like that again, but Unity I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things that’s on the table for like, hey, he’s motivated to do it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s good about that is that if he runs into questions or problems, he can just look up the answer on YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is how he finds information anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, I can give you one better. He can ask me because- What? Do you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, wait, not because I don’t know crap about Unity or 3D programming, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you know what Unity’s scripting engine is written using? C-sharp, baby. It’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So he can ask, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’s that make you feel, Marco? Feel good? Do you need a shower now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So he just needs to learn Java and he basically knows it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ooh, sick burn, but mostly true. Honestly, I haven’t written C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sharp in 10, 15 years, something like that, 10 years? No, maybe less than that. I don’t know. It’s been a while though, and I’ve probably forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything I once knew. There was a brief window of time that I was a pretty good C Sharp developer, but that was many years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know. I don’t think those muscles have entirely atrophied quite yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so that’s going to be an area that we’re looking into.
The good old days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, all this is to say, Geometry Dash, thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is news to me. I’ll have to check this out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love those new in-app purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was this brief period, relatively now in retrospect, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brief period back in, from 2008 when the apps were launched until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through, I would say, the first year or two of the iPads, like 2010 and 2011. Remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that first batch of iPad games was also this way. It was really, they were really good games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had no in-app purchases or at least very few. I think in-app purchase, I don’t think it was available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco till iOS 5, I think. Oh, I don’t remember. And the iPad launched with iOS 3.2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think there was a two-year span there. But anyway, the first year or two of the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically predated the use of in-app purchase widespread in games. And the games that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out during those early iPad years were great, they were so much fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You had the first versions of Field Runners, Plants vs. Zombies, the plane landing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game, what was that called, Flight Control. There were so many great, amazing games and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco due to a number of unfortunate factors, most of them you can’t even play anymore, even if you wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was Cut the Rope in that era? I know it eventually had all in-app purchases, but I wonder if Cut the Rope predated it and then added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so, Cut the Rope I think was later. At least I didn’t hear about it until well into the in-app purchase era.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but those early iPad games were so good, and that era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just gone, and most of those games are gone, and they’ve all been either totally killed, and their companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even exist anymore, or they got acquired forever ago by somebody like EA and shut down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or they’ve been remade as modern sequels that are just in-app purchase casino garbage games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just such a shame, because those first games were so fun, and that’s why something like Geometry Dash comes along,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rather sticks around, and it’s just so refreshing to see that now when you’re used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Like if somebody recommends an iOS game to me today, I usually won’t even play it because I know it’s gonna be full of in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase garbage. Like unless it’s a Zach Gage game, I’m usually out. But to see something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this that’s still doing well and that has the old model is both rare and
⏹️ ▶️ John Jump to Dash kind of looks like a combination of an infinite runner and a VVVVV for kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never got into that one. What? Six Vs. It’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally primitive looking, extremely difficult, unforgiving, platformy jumping game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not heard of this either.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it reminded me a little bit of Geometry Dash, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I only played
⏹️ ▶️ John Geometry Dash for two seconds, but it seems like it’s mostly left to right, whereas 6Vs is all over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also all over the place. There’s like, and there’s different modes that turn you into different, you know, objects with different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movement characteristics. You can reverse, you can speed up, you can slow down. There’s all sorts of craziness in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Trust me. Show
⏹️ ▶️ John Adam this the V’s game which I’m not gonna say the name of again because if he likes geometry
⏹️ ▶️ John dash You might know I like this game as well I mean I think I think this relies on a little bit of nostalgia that he obviously doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have but it is Similarly punishing mechanics and you should get him into like from soft games eventually like the
⏹️ ▶️ John souls games when he’s older Like some forgiving games. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he very much does and it’s like it’s kind of rhythm based because the the levels have music and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the the jumps that you need to do will correspond to beats in the music. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that aspect and the music is very like, you know, electronic style, which is right up his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alley. So that also helps. So it’s a whole picture thing that really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hits him. He loves it and I love that it’s so kind of wholesome and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a purchase garbage fest. And so it’s wonderful.
Sponsor: Instabug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by instabug. Building and maintaining mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps is not simple. Bugs, crashes and performance issues can be a nightmare for developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me. So what if you could not only detect and dissect these issues, but also get a holistic understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your apps performance? With instabug, you can. Through comprehensive bug and crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reports, performance monitoring and real time user feedback, instabug gives you the visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to build top quality apps. You can observe and fix issues like UI hangs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow apps and screen loads, network failures, and anything else that may be affecting your user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. You can get a quick read on their impact on your users and access all of the granular data relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the issue in seconds, so you can prioritize, assign and debug before your next update is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released. It only takes a minute to integrate Instabug’s SDK into your app, and it fits right into your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflow, with integration for Jira, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Zendesk, and many more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flying blonde in your mobile app issues, try Instabug today. Go to instabug.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get the visibility you need to start delivering superior app performance and better user experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, that’s instabug.com to get started. Thank you so much to Instabug for sponsoring
M1 vs. M2 MBA speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some follow up. John, you promised us last week, or we assigned homework last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, that you should compare the M1 MacBook Air speakers and the M2 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speakers. Have you done your homework, John, that we should never have assigned you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have. Both speakers are not good. I told
⏹️ ▶️ John you. It goes without saying, I was comparing them. I honestly had never listened to them. Like I said, these are
⏹️ ▶️ John my son’s laptops and he uses headphones all the time. And maybe I hear like the system beep if I’m ever doing something, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And I’m not, you know, that makes it difficult to compare which
⏹️ ▶️ John one is less bad, but I think pretty definitively the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air is better. They both sound bad, but- The old one is better?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. I mean, you can try it yourself. I don’t have particularly attuned ears, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just felt like the M2 who was even more inside a tin can than the M1, I played music
⏹️ ▶️ John on them, right? And I was playing the same song on both of them and I’d play one and then play the other and play one and play the other. And it’s like, oh, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both really bad. But it was just, you know, I just feel like the M1 is better. I mean, it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John that because the speakers are like up firing instead of bouncing off the screen, that could be the entirety of the difference. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just, to my ears, the M1 MacBook Air sounded better. Hmm, wow. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John by a lot, they’re both bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John was really difficult for me to tell I would not play music on either one, that’s for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny every time that I use my MacBook Pro as a laptop because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t do that often. It definitely happens, but it’s not often that I’m going and doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work and sitting down and doing something serious on my MacBook Pro and using it as it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, not connected to screens and all sorts of other paraphernalia. And today I went to my beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra wideband park bench, as I described a few weeks ago. And actually, as a quick aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday, I think it was yesterday, we went to a museum and then went to lunch in quasi-downtown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richmond. And I was sitting at lunch and I noticed I was on ultra wideband and I did a speed test over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three gigabits down, over three. That’s three times faster than my own connection. It still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blows my mind. I don’t know what I would ever do with this, but it’s still cool that it exists. Technology, baby. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was at my beloved ultra wideband park bench earlier today and it occurred to me, you know, the screen on these MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pros is really fricking good. And although I only use the speakers for but a moment because it’s rude to do that in public,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the speakers on the MacBook Pro, all things considered, are pretty darn good too. So I’m not saying that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook Air is wrong for most people or for really everyone, including probably me. It probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is sufficient for my needs for the most part. But no, these computers are really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite spectacular and I sometimes forget how amazing they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, the speaker difference between, again, as I mentioned last week, between the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the 14-inch MacBook Pro, it’s a different league. It’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would think, oh, they made it one inch bigger, the speakers a little bit better. No, totally different ball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game, not even close. I love the MacBook Air, trust me. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the MacBook Air, but the speakers are really god-awful compared to the larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. So yeah, it’s no comparison, not even close.
Catch-all email (*@you.tld)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along. I was reminded by an anonymous contributor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can set up a catch-all email on a lot of services, but including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my beloved FastMail, www.caselist.com slash FastMail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But anyways, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the context for this was, but we were talking about something last week that brought this on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You were setting up like the single-use email addresses and you had to go to FastMail and click and make one and then you go use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you. A couple of things here. First of all, you can set up a catch-all email which is a little bit weird the way they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you set it up, but it works exactly right. And so what I can do is I can sign up for, I’m making this up, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could sign up for Instagram and have the email address. I give Instagram, Instagram at kcliss.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then fast mail. And again, this isn’t unique to fast mail, but fast mail or whatever will forward that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my actual email address. And so this way I can tell where it came from. Uh, Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Gmail people would often do this, uh, where you would do username plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service. So it would be like John plus Instagram at Syracuse.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the case may be. And that also works on FastMail. I’m pretty darn sure it does, but you can set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a catch all, which makes this sort of thing pretty neat as well, which is something worth considering. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went back and forth with a few people on Twitter and a happy way. And I was reminded that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one password eight, which is the electron one, which has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its whole, you know, you have some issues with that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you go that route.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, and I’ve been on 1Password7 because I had been waiting for the stick to force me into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1Password8, but eventually they gave me a carrot in the last 24 hours and they said, oh, by the way, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1Password8 and only 1Password8, you can do the whole fast mail, mass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email or whatever they call it, the, you know, hidden email address thing, a one-time use email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey address thing. you can do that automatically within 1Password. So what that means is you’re signing up for a new service,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say Instagram, using the web on your computer, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use 1Password to just automatically generate a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy.farts at caselist.com or whatever they come up with in order to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email that isn’t going to be something useful and that you can kill pretty easily. And you can do that all through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1Password with 1Password 8, which is worth considering if you happen to be a FastMail user.
⏹️ ▶️ John That email wildcarding thing really maximizes your surface area for spam though. I mean, if they have any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of auto thing that’s trying like well-known addresses at every domain or whatever, you’re gonna get all that spam
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can put any word in front of the ad sign and it will all go to your one email address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they still do this, but FastMail in their control panel to enable the catch all email address, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even used to warn you, like warning you will get a lot of spam. And I actually used that mode for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of years. It turned, you know, I just, I kept getting more and more spam. And I’m like, you know what, this is stupid. I don’t. And so what I did was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like, I searched my inbox or sorted it somehow. I figured out how I did this to basically find like the only aliases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ever actually used for anything, turned off the catch all alias and just made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made that list of all the aliases that I actually needed and just stopped, you know, using new ones anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was much, it was a much better situation. Spam wise. Also, can I just say from somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals with customers and their email logins for both my app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m trying so hard to not have anybody use emails, but some people still insist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from our wonderful members who we love, http.fm.join, nerds who think they’re being clever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they use these custom aliases and so it’ll have like, you know, overcast at mydomain.whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, ATPM membership at mydomain.whatever. You always forget. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you write in and then we have to find your account. It’s too clever for your own good most of the time. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, it’s something that like, it causes headaches for everybody, for you and for the services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use. And the reality is like, yeah, you know what? Great. You’re going to know if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sells your email address. Great. Everyone sells your email address all the time. It’s already out there. Who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the gain that you’re getting with that, that you think you’re getting with that, I don’t think is worth all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s an interesting point for sure.
Find My follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last week was one of those weeks where I thought we were really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear on the things we were talking about and asking about. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either nobody heard us or we didn’t clarify quickly enough because we got a mountain of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where everyone was explaining to us, oh, did you know you can turn off the notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for devices and air tags and things when you leave them behind? And I thought that John especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I thought I was too, but particularly John, I thought was very clear that, Yes, we’re aware that that is a thing that can happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we don’t want to permanently turn it off for like a vacation home or a hotel room or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We just want to maybe turn it off for a few days. And that was the real complaint we had. But half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the internet wrote in to tell us, no, this is what you need to do. But for the record, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you did want to do that slightly dangerous thing of turning off the notifications for a particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey location forever, how do you go about doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Steve Stutz gave a concise instructions on how to do it. So you open the Find My app, you
⏹️ ▶️ John tap on Devices, which is down at the bottom, and then you tap on the device you wanna deal with, and then you scroll down under
⏹️ ▶️ John the heading Notifications, tap the Notify When Left Behind section. And what you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John probably see in that section for any of your devices, it says, “‘Notify when left behind,’ and it will say that it’s on,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, and it will say, “‘Except at one location,’ and you’ll be like, wait a second, did I already use this feature? What is the
⏹️ ▶️ John one location that it’s supposed to not notify me of? It says, “‘Notify when left behind,’ “‘Except at this one place,’ what is that one place,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey?’ Home. That’s right. Your home is already there. So it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the home is explicitly put there. So you can add a second location or a third or fourth or fifth,
⏹️ ▶️ John but your home, if you have your home kit stuff set up, is already there. That’s why every time you leave your house, you don’t get notified that you left
⏹️ ▶️ John all your stuff behind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then Paul Squires writes, on the Find My alerts from a hotel, in general, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep those on. I may be going to dinner, but I could also be going to an office. So I want those devices with me. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely want them on for checkout day. This is an extremely succinct summary of what John and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were trying to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the tricky part about this feature because like, oh, I don’t want it to keep bothering me unless I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to the office and I do want them. And oh, and by the way, when I check out, I want it too. So it’s not easy to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John this off. It’s not as simple as we were saying in the show, like, oh, I’m gonna be here for a week and just turn them off until a week later,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because if you are somewhere for work, you want it on every day that you’re going to the office,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not on the days that you’re not, but you definitely want it on for checkout days so you know if you left stuff behind. Hard problem
Home-hub follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then with regard to HomeKit automation and locations, so the context here is my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV at the beach house deciding that that was my permanent home, which was a little wonky. So we had a few different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pieces of feedback about this, but in particular, Derek Martin writes, I recently had my HomeKit home self-identify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as two properties at once, the new house we just bought and are in the process of moving into, and the old house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’ve had for a while and are in the process of leaving. Whenever I arrived at or left either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey location, HomeKit would offer to run my location-based automations. you get one guess as to how I fix this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, that’s right, I had to go into my contact and rename the old house to something other than home, leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the new house named home, and then all of my automations worked properly again. Is there anything to indicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this in the UI? No. Did I figure it out by pure fluke on my first try? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Derek got very lucky there. Additionally, Jim Bruin writes, if you take your Apple TV outside your home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and don’t want the offsite device to become the default hub, and this is exactly what I did when I got home, I just didn’t know to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this in advance. Anyway, Jim writes, go to Settings, Airplane Home Kit, and under the My Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting, switch from Connected to Disabled. Then the hub will transfer to another device at your home. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, this is what I did to kind of fix everything once I was back home. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t until I was already dead, the damage had already been done, that I had thought to do this.
Apple TV photos follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, with regard to the Apple TV, Tor Blund Miranda writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve tried many different Apple TV photo apps, Flickr, Plex, and some others. Apple Photos is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far and away the one that’s the best for looking at photos on Apple TV. It loads photos fast, and as long as it’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own library, they load in high quality, completely sharp over 4K, not over compressed, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know a single other photos app for Apple TV that does this well. It’s not being able to handle John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo library notwithstanding, but let’s be real, It’s John with his enormous photo library that has the weird way of dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos, not Casey. Boom! Got him. Anyway, I’d love to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there are any others that are good enough. For the record, I did not put this in the show notes, but I was very happy when I read this email.
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand what I’m doing is weird. I’m using Apple’s solution in the boring way that Apple says. Take pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in your photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library. It’s not, it’s nothing weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. Honestly, I think I actually agree with you, but I was so happy to see somebody defend me, so I’ll take the victory
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, so I saw this and like, okay, well, I complained about the Apple TV photos thing every few years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should look at it again to see how it’s doing. So I loaded up on my, you know, Apple TV and ran
⏹️ ▶️ John into a couple of issues. Since the last time I did it, I think they changed like the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way user accounts work on Apple TV. I think it used to be that you just, there was just, there was no
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts and you just put which Apple ID do you want to get your photos from and you sign into it or whatever. But now there are accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John and the main user account is mine and that has all the home home screen sync stuff and like, you know, everything is set up like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, okay, I’ll just add a user account for my wife. Why? Because we’re still not over the hump of iOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ John and Ventura and everything. And so there’s no shared family photo library. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to use her Apple ID because she’s got the family photo library. So I made an account for her, and we created
⏹️ ▶️ John an account with her Apple ID, it’s signed in or whatever. But it seems like the photos app only
⏹️ ▶️ John shows the photos for the default user, which is me and
⏹️ ▶️ John not her. If you go into her settings, it shows a bunch of stuff about purchases and so on and so forth, but it doesn’t have a section for
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud photo library. So I couldn’t even see her iCloud photo library unless I was willing to, I guess, maybe delete my account or make
⏹️ ▶️ John her the default user or something like that. And I wasn’t willing to do that for the purpose of this test.
⏹️ ▶️ John So instead I use my Apple ID and my comparatively dinky photo library, which consists
⏹️ ▶️ John only of photos I’ve taken on my phone. So it’s not the 150,000 photo family library. It’s just my phone photos, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is way smaller than that. And sure enough, most of them are thumbnails
⏹️ ▶️ John and they take forever to load. And if you were trying to use it to actually show something you’d just be staring at, you know, squares with question marks in
⏹️ ▶️ John them for just minutes and minutes while everyone uncomfortably shifted on the couch saying, so are we gonna see some pictures?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is no, you’re probably not. Like one or two thumbnails will load and maybe you can wait, it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you want it to do, which is you want everyone to sit down and you wanna click things in the remote and say, oh, look, pictures. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you look at them and smile and go to the next one. Nope, I don’t know what the problem is. I don’t know why it has a hard time loading
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I have a super fast internet connection. on the same network via ethernet of all the other devices that have
⏹️ ▶️ John these photos on them, it just doesn’t do the job. And like I said, it’s not because it was 150,000 photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a fraction of that. So I don’t know what the deal is, but still no good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. Yeah, I don’t know of any particular answers for this. I’m sorry to say, but if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a good suggestion, then please let us know.
⏹️ ▶️ John 29,000 photos, just if you want concrete numbers, that’s how many I’ve got on my phone.
Contact-ordering follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Contacts, address, ordering. Tell me about this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re still talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about this? I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is hilarious, right? So what was it? In a previous show, we were talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ John the existence of a particular application is an indictment of Apple because it’s a type of thing that shouldn’t be necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I think it was the Sleep Aid thing, the thing that keeps track of what’s waking and making your Mac sleep. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that that Mac app has to exist shows that there are difficult-to-solve problems having to do with sleeping
⏹️ ▶️ John and waking in macOS that necessitate the third party application. It makes a third party opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to address the shortcomings in Apple’s OS. Well, we also talked about contacts and how people can
⏹️ ▶️ John have multiple phone numbers and multiple email addresses. And there’s an order
⏹️ ▶️ John to them in contacts, but it’s difficult to discern whether that order has any meaning. And if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to have meaning, you can do what I did and reorder them by deleting them all and adding them back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John order that you want them to appear in. Well, apparently there is a dedicated application called reorder
⏹️ ▶️ John it exclamation point, just like Yahoo exclamation point,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only thing this app does is lets you reorder contacts personally by deleting them and re-adding them in
⏹️ ▶️ John the order that you want. That boggles my mind. Because it shows that some people are just annoyed by the fact that they can’t reorder
⏹️ ▶️ John them in the contacts app. And it’s actually, if someone has four email addresses, deleting them all and re-adding them all is
⏹️ ▶️ John tedious. So try reorder it, I guess. Yay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about the default addresses and messages, please, John. Rob
⏹️ ▶️ John Woodring gets the brass ring by giving me the actual solution to my problem. So remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John this all started with me talking about multiple addresses. Everything is like every time I try to share something via messages with
⏹️ ▶️ John my son, if he’s not one of the little recently sent message bubble things that I have to hit
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual messages app icon and then I have to type his name, A L and let the autocomplete fill it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would always autocomplete to his contact. But underneath his contact, it would have his phone number. and I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John it to send it to his Apple ID and not his phone number for reasons we discussed on past shows. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to make that happen. People had a lot of different ideas. Last week, the one that I heard from a lot of people is just delete
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole message thread and restart it because whatever you use to start that message thread with the person
⏹️ ▶️ John forever, when you auto-complete in messages, it will auto-complete to that because it’s basically saying, hey, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to put this in the existing conversation I have? And the existing conversation that I have in messages was started
⏹️ ▶️ John seven years ago to a phone number, not to an Apple ID. Well, here’s the actual solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rob says, you can change what you are messaging without losing your previous message history. Go to an existing
⏹️ ▶️ John message thread, tap the name of the person at the top, then tap info, then tap and hold the messages
⏹️ ▶️ John bubble icon and select an alternate email or phone number. This has worked for me to switch between phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John and email and back to a different phone number later when my dad switched to an Android phone. The message thread was preserved,
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures and all. I’ve tried this and it worked. This is the solution. And it’s very close to the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about before where you go to the contact and hold like long press on the little message bubble and pick, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do it. That doesn’t change the thread. You have to go to the messages thread, then do the thing at the top and
⏹️ ▶️ John long press or whatever. And from now on, whenever I type my son’s name, it auto completes and shows the Apple ID. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John was glad I didn’t delete the message thread before because now I have all my messages preserved and now I had to know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix this. So it only took, what, a month of talking about it on a podcast with dozens of people sending
⏹️ ▶️ John solutions, including people at Apple, Rob Woodring found the real solution. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, can you walk me through this? Because I don’t think I see where this is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Find a message thread with somebody in messages that you want to change this for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, okay, so I’m just choosing my dad arbitrarily because we exchanged texts like right before the show. So I tapped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and I see- Tap his name at the
⏹️ ▶️ John info thing on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that was the piece I missed, I’m sorry. Okay, so you have to tap the info thing. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John long press on message, and now you see the list and then pick whichever one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got, okay, it was the info piece that I missed. I’m sorry, I’m with you now. Oh, that is a very good tip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew that there was some mechanism by which to do this, but I certainly did not know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exact incantation. So like you said, Rob Woodring gets the gold star for today.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for building your brand, growing your business online, or making any kind of website. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand out, engage with your customers, and sell whatever you want with the business, your products, your content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even your time. Squarespace makes it super easy to make all different kinds of websites,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s a few pages of info for you or your business or your hobby, all the way up to an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storefront, where you’re selling digital or physical goods, or maybe even you’re selling gated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content like videos or courses you create, or selling newsletters. All of that and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is possible with Squarespace, and there’s no coding required anywhere. You don’t have to be a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a designer to make a really great website on Squarespace, and of course Squarespace websites don’t let you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with all the problems and, you know, hassles of running your own CMS. You don’t have to deal with security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrades or software patches or uptime and dealing with influxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of traffic. None of that is your problem. Squarespace takes care of all of that for you. They have amazing support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need it, although frankly, it’s so easy to use you probably won’t need their support for anything. It’s that easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can just do so much with Squarespace. They have analytics built in, custom templates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SEO tools, you can have email campaigns, so much functionality built into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace. So see for yourself with a free trial at Squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. And what I love about Squarespace is free trials is that when you have an idea for a website,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just go there and build it. You never have to give them a credit card. There’s no like automatic renewal if you forget to cancel the trial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just a real free trial. And you can build the whole site in trial mode. So you can see if Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really right for you. And when you decide it is and trust me, you will decide because it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. When you’re ready to launch use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or domain. Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP offer code ATP to save 10% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
In-car purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a little bit of feedback with regard to unlocking automotive features. A couple of things that I was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey familiar with or aware of. Blaine Toups wrote in, it’s not exactly what John meant when he said it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like they’re going to put a V8 when you buy a V6, but my Jaguar F-Type is pretty close. The V6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses the same engine block as the V8, just with the last two cylinders closed off. This allows for the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mounting points and supercharger to be used for both engines at at the cost of hauling around an extra 50 pounds of unused weight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the V6. The extra material cost of the unused bit of the V8 block is offset by only having to engineer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey produce one version of the rest of the engine bay. I find this utterly fascinating. This is like a cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of, what was it, Aston Martin, or not, excuse me, not Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took the Ferrari motor and like lopped off two cylinders and called it a day, but they full-on cut them off. In this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, it would be like, oh, we just aren’t going to include a couple, or aren’t going to use a couple of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like cylinder binning. It’s like the way Jeep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are disabled on the M2. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a very Jaguar move though, because it always, for the past, I don’t know, several decades, it’s always seemed like Jaguar
⏹️ ▶️ John is just kind of like, even though they’re supposed to be a luxury brand, it’s just, they just always kind of got
⏹️ ▶️ John like, not great technology, a lot of hand-me-downs, maybe some Ford parts bin
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff back in the day. Like, you don’t deserve that. The things they do with these supposed expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John cars to save weight and you’re gonna leave two unused cylinders in the block,
⏹️ ▶️ John only an extra 50 pounds?
⏹️ ▶️ John not good. You don’t want this. I wouldn’t talk about this and say, oh yeah, sure, it’s great. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ John ugh, no. It’s all the weight of a V8, but the power of a V6. No thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, it’s so fascinating to me that this is a thing, though, I just thought that was really cool. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Josh Rappaport writes, Tesla offers something called Acceleration Boost on the Model 3 and Y Long Range.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the 3, it also unlocks a track mode, and supposedly that functionality is coming to the Y as well. It’s a $2,000 US in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase. I’m not sure it’s really an in-app purchase if it’s in your car, but so be it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get your point. Do they pay Apple 30%? Right? Yeah. That decreases the 0
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 60 time by about half a second. Looks like these IAPs are unlocked on the car for future owners as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, rumor has it that at their introduction, the Long Range and Performance variants of the cars had the same motor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and drivetrain, though it seems like they may have moved to more of a binning or slightly differentiated set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of components in the more recent times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla’s always sold various things that basically you’re paying to abuse the internals of
⏹️ ▶️ John your car more, like the acceleration motor or whatever. Like they lock it out as a premium feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those type of things like, oh, get that extra half second, is stressing the internals
⏹️ ▶️ John and the circuitry and the battery of your car a little bit more to get that extra power. And for that privilege,
⏹️ ▶️ John you pay them $2,000. It’s like, maybe just don’t worry about the extra half second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And then finally, Sean Harding writes, on the BMW subscriptions, what happens in seven years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the API gets deprecated and your car can’t verify the subscription status anymore? My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Audi long ago stopped getting software updates, but the heated seats still work perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well put. That is a very good question. Because I was just mentioning a few minutes ago how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those old iPad games from that first generation of iPad stuff through various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like digital unfortunateness, you really can’t play those anymore. Like unless you happen to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old iPad that happens to have them already installed on it, there’s really no way for you to get those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I ran into this problem a couple years ago, last year, whenever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I booted up my old iPhone. And I believe I talked about it on the show, like my very first gen iPhone. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just tried to figure out like, okay, what can I do with this? What can it still do? And of course, as you can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the original iPhone can’t run any recent software. I think the latest it can run was iOS 3.1, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at any rate, it couldn’t do anything, really, because all of the SSL certificates on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that it was capable of using had expired or had been upgraded to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher levels of encryption that it can’t support. And so now that we’re in this era of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is encrypted, everything is secure, everything is signed, old software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on old platforms almost can’t run. Like there’s very few cases in which old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough software actually runs because something expires somewhere along the way and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are so connected with services in the modern world that if your old hardware can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect to a web service anymore, a lot of times it doesn’t work or can’t work. And that’s something worth thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about with something that has as long of a lifespan as a car. For some of these BMWs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you have Casey’s luck with BMWs, they’re probably gonna last at least 10 years of active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service on the road. And how many times does a 10 year old computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually have good luck accessing its services? I think it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem that we’re gonna have to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if they actually are doing online verification or just flipping a switch internally. This is the type of thing where if
⏹️ ▶️ John they try to prevent people from hacking it and do all these things, that’s when you do, oh, we have to have online
⏹️ ▶️ John checks and we have to have all this and that’ll sort of mess you up. But if they’re smarter about it, let us be like, ah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a software lockout. And when we unlock it, it unlocks locally and we never recheck online to
⏹️ ▶️ John see if you have it unlocked and we just take the hit or whatever. I mean, this is another situation like any software
⏹️ ▶️ John where it really depends on the company that you’re buying from. To give an example, when a good
⏹️ ▶️ John software company stops developing an application, what they normally do is say, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna make this app anymore. It doesn’t make us any money. It’s time has passed or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on our way out the door, here it is. If anyone wants it, here’s a version where you don’t have to register,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s free. You can have, it’s, you know, we’re not gonna sell it anymore. Anyone who paid for it in the past six months
⏹️ ▶️ John will give you a refund. And forevermore, it’s unsupported, but you can download it from our
⏹️ ▶️ John website, right? And so the car version of that would be, we’re deprecating the API that we used
⏹️ ▶️ John to do online checks for the heated seats, but it’s unlocked for everybody now. Like we send one last thing out that said, that, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you cars out there that are checking this API endpoint for unlock for heated seats, we built the system
⏹️ ▶️ John such that when we shut this endpoint down, the way they’ll fail is saying, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John send them one last message that said, it’s unlocked for everybody and don’t bother checking again, right? That would be the good thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that a good car company would do. The example I had in mind with a good software company was Panic, and the example
⏹️ ▶️ John I have with a good car company in mind was Nobody because they’re all bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, really, the correct good thing to do would be, hey, this feature that’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap that you can actually ship it for everyone and just selectively disable it in software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how about just make that a stock feature of the car? Because these aren’t cheap cars. It’s like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is already a premium car. You know what? Maybe make this just a stock feature if it’s that cheap for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the Unity CEO would say you’re an effin’ idiot. You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about monetization when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making these seats. Because there’s no way to monetize a car besides in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John purchases and subscriptions, right? No, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no service model for cars. Car services? Unheard of. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Have we talked about this? Maybe, we might’ve talked about this, I don’t remember. But if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is obsessed with services and Apple is making a car, if that’s true, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the services for the Apple car? Like, what is that going to look like?
⏹️ ▶️ John All those wear items, same as everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I mean like the in-app purchase sort of things or like the subscription sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Yeah, can you imagine Apple like using someone else’s tires and brake pads, no way. It’s gonna be all custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, that’s not how the controversy
⏹️ ▶️ John works and that’s why the Apple haven’t made a car yet maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you imagine? Like, I’m just thinking about stuff like that. Like all the parts on a car that have someone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand name on them, Apple would not stand for any of that. Like, you know, like they’re not gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tires that say Goodyear on the side. Like they’re gonna, whoever makes their tires for them, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna make them give them brandless tires.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Again, I don’t think that’s, I don’t think it’s really possible to make a car that way unless you’re willing to sink way more of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s money than they thus far have been willing to sink to this and spend even more time. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a funny thing
⏹️ ▶️ John like, on a, you know, more car rebuilding channel thing. Sorry, so you’ve got OEM parts, sorry I’m watching all about
⏹️ ▶️ John rebuilding BMWs. And you have whatever company that actually made this plastic doohickey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, BMW doesn’t make it, right? And if you buy it from the BMW dealer, of course it costs 10
⏹️ ▶️ John times as much or whatever, but you can get that same part from the manufacturer that makes it for
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW, but when you buy it from the manufacturer, like the part that they make
⏹️ ▶️ John has BMW stamped on it, right? BMW didn’t make it, this other company made it, but it’s got BMW. But when you buy it from
⏹️ ▶️ John the manufacturer, they have to file off the BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So they make it
⏹️ ▶️ John with BMW stamped on it, but they’re not allowed to sell it with BMW stamped on it. So they literally take a finished
⏹️ ▶️ John part and modify it by scrubbing or filing or melting off the BMW logo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you get the two parts. Here’s genuine, here’s the copy. as opposed to adding it afterwards. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the car industry is weird. And I really don’t think Apple’s gonna have tires that have apples on the side, and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say Goodyear or Michelin. But, you know, I mean, Apple hasn’t made a car yet, so we’ll see, but it’s just, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not the way the car industry works. And if you’re gonna say, we’re gonna do everything ourself, look inside Apple’s laptops. The chips
⏹️ ▶️ John say, like, you know, the memory chips say micron and stuff. Like, they don’t say Apple on all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. Yeah, but the customer doesn’t see those. Like, you see the tires on your car, and you see if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a brand name on them. There is no way. Mark my words, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can quote this later in 10 years when Apple actually ships the car. There is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s gonna launch a car where the tires have someone else’s name printed on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s gonna have to be a tire manufacturer because I’m not sure any tire manufacturer is not gonna have their name on that tire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they would just, I’m sure they would make a deal. They would custom order it from whoever would say yes first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would take them a while. But I mean, honestly, maybe this is why. Two million
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar hypercars have Michelin, you know. Cause they don’t care. Or Goodyear on the side of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look before the iPhone, $600 smartphones had Verizon logos on the back of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of those things where like Apple would, Apple’s going to go in there with just the most stubborn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position in the world. And eventually somebody will do it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for the right price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of the desperate singular. I mean, Apple had the word Verizon on its phones back before the notch when they could fit it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Wait, well, oh, in the status bar a little bit. No, but I’m saying like on the phone, I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand, I’m just saying that brand names have been on iPhones, you know, yes, they’re on, yes, it’s on the screen, but they could
⏹️ ▶️ John have just put an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over it. Verizon is still on the screen. Is it? Yeah, on the lock screen anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess it is, it’s still there. I was wondering if there was room at the notch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the lock screen. It’s not on the, you know, once it’s unlocked, but it is on the lock screen.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visit linode.com slash ATP and see why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius. And I would give them that award too if I had one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I host tons of servers and resources at Linode. It is by far my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web host I have ever used because look, I’m a nerd. I run a bunch of servers. Many of you out there, you need to run servers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason, whether it’s, you know, backends for websites or web apps or regular apps, or whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re running game servers or whatever it is, if you need servers, check out Linode, they have amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support, amazing pricing, and amazing capabilities. So all sorts of resource levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you might need at all different price points, all of them are extremely price competitive. These
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the best values in the business I’ve looked around I always look around I’ve been with Linode for a long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. And they’re always the best value in the business. I frankly don’t know how they do it. But I’m glad they do because I take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantage I run a lot of servers there. So I’m saving a bunch of money on Linode compared to what I would be spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere else. And they have all sorts of additional options. New services have recently launched including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco managed databases. This is fully managed MySQL, Postgres and Mongo with Redis coming later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. It’s super easy to deploy built in backups, secure access, flexible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plans, everything you might need with managed database service. They also have a block storage service for large disks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and an object storage service, which is an s3 compatible object storage, I actually just started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using object storage on Linode today, I just started coding as it and I literally just pointed my s3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library at their hostname and change nothing else. And it worked. It’s kind of amazing. And I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much looking forward to diving more into that. So see for yourself at Linode comm slash ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a free account there and you get $100 in credit. again, Linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP new accounts there get $100 in credit. Let Linode make your cloud computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast, simple and affordable. So you can focus on your projects, not your infrastructure. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring
John’s new television
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about something that is truly important because it has been a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming. I feel like, you know, on this show, Adam pre-existed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, but on this show, Declan was born, Michaela was born,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Mac Pro, your current Mac Pro was born. But perhaps more important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything else, you’ve gotten a new television. a new birth in the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is John’s television.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did get a new television. I think I had the stats on the last Ruckdoss. I think it’s been like eight
⏹️ ▶️ John years-ish, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, then we might’ve been there for the last one. It depends on when it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It was 2013. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like March-ish. Yeah, we started in 2013. December,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John December-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So then we were here for it. All right. So I apologize. All right. I don’t care. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John move on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that was just that. That was where I panic bought the last great plasma. I had recently quote unquote recently bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a plasma a couple of years before. And I was like, oh, they’re going to not make plazas anymore. I better get the best one right
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And like I get the last best Panasonic plasma and then they stop making.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. Yeah. I think we were around for this one. All right. Well, never mind. I take it all back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it’s been a long time. So I had sort of I’ve been working on this buying. I
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about some past shows on some of my podcasts buying the parts because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I was afraid that if I waited until like everything was ready to come, Then I’d be like, all right, let me order everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that I exhaustively researched for the past eight years. And they’d be like, oh, sorry, not in stock or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as I decided what I was getting, I just started buying stuff. So for literally months, I’ve had a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ John receiver and a Blu-ray player that we talked about on a past show that I did some surgery on. Sitting in my house,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought the stand for the TV because I can’t use the one that it comes with because of my weird house situation. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that I half assembled and stuck in a closet, gathering dust, all waiting for the TV to
⏹️ ▶️ John come. While this was happening, the day before the TV was supposed to be delivered, which was like delivered by this
⏹️ ▶️ John special courier or whatever. I bought it from sony.com directly because it was the only place you could order it. I don’t know if it’s available anyplace
⏹️ ▶️ John else. I’m sure it will be eventually, but I bought it like within 60 seconds of
⏹️ ▶️ John it becoming available on
⏹️ ▶️ John I was not announced, so thank you to all the people on Twitter who told me, hey, it’s live on Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John because there was no announced date or time that I was aware of. But anyway, I got my order in and then they
⏹️ ▶️ John had it delivered to this courier who then had to call me and arrange for a time for delivery, which was convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John because I was out of town when they wanted to deliver it. And I said, can you wait until I get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco back in time? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they said, fine. But anyway, while I was waiting for the TV to come, I could do some stuff. I can take
⏹️ ▶️ John my old TV off, take everything out, cause everything has to go. The only thing that I didn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John remove from the entertainment center was my T-Mob, was that staying, but it did like, you know, move it to clean under it or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Took out the old receiver, box it up, put it away, unhooked all the game consoles,
⏹️ ▶️ John took out all the other junk off of there, Got it all cleaned out. And then I put in the new receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new Blu-ray player. And to me, the receiver’s a pain because I connect all the speaker wires and it’s just a logistical
⏹️ ▶️ John nightmare. But anyway, I plugged it all in, put everything back that I could, put the Blu-ray player back where the PlayStation 3
⏹️ ▶️ John was because that used to be my Blu-ray player. I can have my center channel speaker actually centered on my TV now,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is nice because it didn’t fit on top of the George Foreman grill that was the PS3. I
⏹️ ▶️ John had a PS3 slim, but still, it’s rounded on top so you couldn’t put a speaker. It’s all relative. Yeah, you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put a speaker on top of it because it would just skitter off. So anyway, I was happy with that setup. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ John put the old TV back temporarily just so I could have a TV to see the screen. Because what I was gonna do is set up
⏹️ ▶️ John my surround thing. If you haven’t set up a receiver in recent years, the way most of them work is
⏹️ ▶️ John you put your receiver in, you hook up all your speakers and everything. And then they mostly have either a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John you do with an on-screen menu, or in modern days, a thing you can do with like an app on your phone or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they give you, you might be confused when you see this in the box, a very, very, very long thin cord with
⏹️ ▶️ John a little like disc or puck or knob at the end of it. And that’s a microphone. And what they want
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do is run whatever their software is, put that little microphone basically where your
⏹️ ▶️ John head would be as you sit on the couch, and it will play through all the speakers in your room and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust the volume and phase and all the other stuff of the speakers so that it sounds good in that seating position.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of different software that does this. Even my old receiver, which was years and years ago, had a system for doing this. What about the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who sit on the other parts of the couch? Well, so the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fancier software says
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t just measure one position. We can. It has like a 3D model of the room and it says put it in. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can imagine like the volume of the room with various spots in it. The the software I was using
⏹️ ▶️ John had up to 17 positions that you could measure and it would try to sort of average it together
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to make it sound OK in most of the positions with no bad things. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is important to me because my room is weirdly shaped. My speakers are weirdly placed. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John not like every time you see one of these things on TV, it’s like, I live in a rectangular room and my television is directly in front of me and my
⏹️ ▶️ John couch is right in front of the TV and my surround speakers are exactly at the corner. Like, I don’t know who lives like that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you build like a dedicated home theater room, but it’s definitely not my room. My room is weird shape, my
⏹️ ▶️ John TV is in the corner. Nothing is at right angles to anything. Nothing is at the height you expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have to do this sound adjustment thing. The receiver I bought supports two different
⏹️ ▶️ John sound adjustment things. One that’s like the easier one that’s older, older and
⏹️ ▶️ John easier and built in. I forget what the name of it’s called, but it has some acronym MCCR, whatever, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the other one, which is the fancy one that all the reviews, if you look on YouTube say, oh, this is the best, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are they called? Room compensation. It’s the best room compensation feature. It’s called Dirac Live, D-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John space live. I think you can do it on your phone. I tried to do it on the phone and it seemed to be wanting me to download a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app, so I did. It’s more comfortable that anyway. And you run the Mac app, and I was using like my tripod
⏹️ ▶️ John for my camera, because the little microphone screws into the little tripod top, and it tells you
⏹️ ▶️ John where to put it around the room with the tripod. You know, put it in this seating position, that position, in front of the couch, behind the couch, high, low, 17
⏹️ ▶️ John different positions. This sounds awful. You also do volume adjustment. It’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John fun because, I mean, the app takes you through kind of like a wizard, and it says, first, we’re gonna test all your speakers to make sure this
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to be left front. This is the right. You gotta make sure you got them wired correctly, right? And then it does volume adjustment, and it plays
⏹️ ▶️ John like white noise through each of the speakers. It reminded me when I had an infant at home, it’s just white noise through the house. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ John it does the sound testing, it’s like, don’t make any noise. If like a dog barks or a kid talks or something
⏹️ ▶️ John falls down, it will invalidate the test and you have to adjust the microphone gain. Anyway, it’s not a fun thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. None of this sounds fun. Nope. It makes weird noises like, cause it does, it goes like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it makes like various frequency noises and like echolocation things and low and high volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those high frequency noises can hurt. Yeah, they have a whole thing of like, be careful, start with the volume low and
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it up. But you have to have it a certain minimum volume. If the volume is too low, it will complain and say, but this test didn’t work because your volume’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too low, turn the volume up, you know. So I spent a while doing that. Again, this is with the old TV, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John new receiver, because, you know, the receiver and the speakers aren’t gonna change, and the TV isn’t really involved in this process at all, except
⏹️ ▶️ John showing me the onscreen menus to set things up, basically. And then I’m sitting there with the Mac laptop, which was pretty neat. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John wirelessly controlling everything through wifi, because the receiver’s on wifi, of course, in this modern era. The app,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they say like, you know, the simpler one is built in and this is the more complicated one, I shouldn’t just use
⏹️ ▶️ John the simpler one. The more complicated one was really complicated and really time consuming. And I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell everyone in my house, everyone has to be quiet. My dog was the least of my problem. The kids were like, I’m just gonna walk up
⏹️ ▶️ John and down stairs. And because if you move anywhere in my house, it makes noise. My house makes noise if you move, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco an old creaky
⏹️ ▶️ John house. Every door clanks, every floorboard squeaks. So it was a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John onerous and didn’t particularly enjoy but it’s really important because like I said, my room is weird. So when delivery
⏹️ ▶️ John finally came, I’m like, oh, this fancy delivery service was expensive too. Yeah, they probably don’t want to send it FedEx
⏹️ ▶️ John or UPS. They want to send their own dedicated thing. And so it’s a courier from the airport.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re gonna call someone up and they’re gonna arrange for a time. I did all that. I double checked
⏹️ ▶️ John because they send all these automated emails. It’s like, your delivery has been delayed. Because I was like, is that because I delayed it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It turns out, yeah, it was because I did. So I called back up and said, I’m getting a delivery today. And they said, yeah, you are. Anyway, who
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to my house? It’s a van with one guy. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John One guy? You send one guy with a 65 inch television? He’s got a little cart with wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, but I went out there and helped him because I’m like, look, whatever. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony pays for this delivery, but this thing should be carried by two people. The box had like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a typical sort of, something has punched through this box and made a C-shaped hole. So there’s a little flap
⏹️ ▶️ John that did it. Oh! It was like, how far did that go in? Right? You know, and I’m like pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John on it or whatever. Luckily that was the backside of the TV and it didn’t go into very far, but it did. I took pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of it just in case. And interestingly, since I had just boxed up my old TV, yes, of course I had the original box
⏹️ ▶️ John to my old TV. Since I had just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco boxed up my old TV. Those are not small.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. No, it’s not small. It was very big box. That was a 55
⏹️ ▶️ John inch plasma. And that 55 inch plasma weighs more than this TV. And the box is substantially
⏹️ ▶️ John larger. I was surprised when I saw this box. I know, you know, OLEDs are way less than plasmas. Plasma’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just big, heavy things. I mean, this plasma had fans in the back of it, a big glass, you know, big bezels around it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new box was smaller. In all dimensions, I think it was smaller. It just had less stuff in it. And, you know, I was like, oh, maybe you should
⏹️ ▶️ John put more padding in this thing. Anyway, the way my old box works, things were so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the old days when Panasonic was still selling things here. It’s a very large box.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you read the instructions of how you’re supposed to get your TV out of it, It’s basically like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a base where the TV is stuck in a bunch of styrofoam, you know, like vertically. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of the box comes off. The top of the box goes onto that base and touches the ground.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only thing that’s holding that together are four holes that are through both
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of top and the base and these little plastic sort of grommets that
⏹️ ▶️ John go through both of them and snap in. That’s literally the, when you’re picking that box up by like the little handles
⏹️ ▶️ John on the side, you are picking up the cover, the top of the box, and that in turn is
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling on those grommets and it’s picking up the bottom part of the box. And it’s like, oh, that always seems for like a hundred something
⏹️ ▶️ John pound box with the base and everything in it, it seems unsafe or whatever. So the Sony comes, we bring it into the
⏹️ ▶️ John house. Luckily the guy wasn’t some weird setup service thing. And we were just like, all right, I’m done. I brought it into your
⏹️ ▶️ John house. I’m like, good. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As if you would let them set it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? No, but the plasma people, like we have to open it up and make sure it works. Otherwise we won’t, you know, cause if you blame
⏹️ ▶️ John us for a delivery, we have to like confirm that it works or whatever, and I was like, I don’t want it, but this guy didn’t have to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m like, okay, how do you open this one up? So I look at the little instructions and it says, oh, the top lifts right off.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is gonna, someone from Sony will explain to me how this works, but I was like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I open up the top of the box and I take some styrofoam out and then I see the piece of paper that says, oh, the top lifts off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I take the styrofoam out and I can see the box, and so I saw, oh, the hole was in the back of the box and it didn’t hit the TV, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good. I was relieved about that. And then it said just the top of the box lifts off. And I lift the top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John box off and I’m left with the base with styrofoam and the TV sticking out of it. And I, you know, continue to just, you know, take
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV out of the styrofoam and put it down on the ground because I was gonna have to attach the stand to the back and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only later did it occur to me, hey, wait a second. What was holding the top of the box
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the bottom of the box? I do not have that answer right now. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you when I reassembled the box, there is no visible connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t cut any tape, I didn’t remove any grommets, and if you put the box
⏹️ ▶️ John back together and put your hands in the handles inside and pick it up, it just lifts the top back up again. The bottom just stays behind.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know this because the bottom, like the stand that it comes with, weighs like 50 pounds. It’s like the heaviest thing in the box,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not using that, so I left that in the box. So I put that in the box, put the top back on, put my hands
⏹️ ▶️ John in the handles, lift it up, and the top comes right off. It’s very confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I can think of is that the styrofoam that’s in there, your hands go into handles and grab the styrofoam,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that styrofoam doesn’t extend to the bottom. Maybe that styrofoam grips the TV somehow?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s confusing. And it doesn’t make me feel safe either. Anyway, got the TV out. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John put the stand on the back. It’s a third-party stand because I can’t use the one that it came with because it’s too wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like a pedestal stand. It’s from Amazon. It’s just some random brand. It is the
⏹️ ▶️ John most sturdy looking, least embarrassing looking one that I could find.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of them are embarrassing, like Casey’s Visa mounts. He’s sitting in front of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s ugly, I would not put that on my thing. This is just a rectangle with a thing coming out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn’t rotate or anything, because I didn’t want one that doesn’t move, tilt, bend, rotate. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, everything is perpendicular, because that’s the way I want it. I never want to rotate it, I never want to tilt it, I never want to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. And luckily the back of the Sony is flat. I was excited by
⏹️ ▶️ John that. No weird humps, nothing weird like that. And there was lots of different connections, things to put
⏹️ ▶️ John it on with washers and everything and attach that. Put it on the stand, connected the cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John So much fewer cables than I had before because before I had so many things connected to it. Back in my last TV, I couldn’t really commit
⏹️ ▶️ John to having everything go through the receiver. Every game console was directly connected to the TV and
⏹️ ▶️ John also could be connected through the receiver. And I had like two HDMI things hanging out in the back of ones
⏹️ ▶️ John and I could swap them if I wanted like a little lower latency than going through the receiver. Didn’t do that this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just one, well, start off with two and eventually down to one connection from the receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John to the television and everything else goes to the receiver. Most of my game consoles are now decorative.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I removed all the power bricks and everything. Oh my goodness. Like they used to, you don’t realize how big the power bricks are.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have, just to list three of them, if you have the Wii,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wii U and the GameCube, they all have giant external power bricks and wads of cords and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. It’s just a mess back there. I was glad to get rid of that, but I still have those consoles there as decorations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see what else I’m gonna do to this thing. The back panels are neat. Like there’s like the, there is a place to route the cables
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s these little sort of snap on, speaking of cars, you know, if you ever know what body clips look like
⏹️ ▶️ John on cars, where parts of the outside of your car, if you see how cars
⏹️ ▶️ John are assembled and disassembled, it really makes you wonder how they don’t fall apart more often because
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things are glued and lots of things are just clipped of these little plastic clips, like a little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just plastic clips that probably break when you disassemble them, because it’s something that snaps into a little slot or whatever. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John these things work. And it’s pretty nice, because it’s easy to take on and off, and they snap into place,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they hold firmly. Very happy with everything about the setup process. It went surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothly. It just barely fits in my house. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the measurements beforehand. I’m like, I think it’ll clear the radiator. I think it won’t hit the wall. I think I won’t have to move any furniture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thumbs up on all accounts, but I cannot get a bigger television. This is a good, a good wake up call to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John 65 is the limit. My house cannot accommodate a larger television. It will literally hit walls.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do want to leave room for me to like worm behind it to get back there and mess with stuff. The remote it comes with is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John As with so many things, it embarrasses the Apple remote. Not because it’s an amazing remote, but it just shows that it’s not hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to do better than the Apple remote. We loved it so much because the old one was so bad, but this is, the Sony remote is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got sort of like a textured plastic on the back. so it’s more grippy than the smooth Apple one. It’s still too
⏹️ ▶️ John small, but it’s bigger than the Apple one, both length and width. It has a pleasing heft to
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and the way that they used to make electronics feel expensive by making them feel dense, they do that with this. I don’t know what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with, probably literally like a lead weights or whatever, but hey, it works. It’s got light up buttons that only
⏹️ ▶️ John light up when you pick the thing up. It’s got a speaker on it, so you can say something and it will make a beeping noise, so you can find the remote if you lose
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Not that that would ever happen to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John got a very clicky circular wheel on it. It’s not as good as a TiVo remote,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it feels expensive. And it’s the first of several remotes that came
⏹️ ▶️ John with this setup that now exist in my house and have Netflix buttons and Amazon Prime buttons and whatever the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John other branded buttons that are on the things. It’s just the way of the world. The television itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically edge-to-edge screen. It does have a tiny little chin, like less than an inch
⏹️ ▶️ John high and on a 65 inch TV, you don’t even notice that. And it’s black. In terms of condition, the only
⏹️ ▶️ John place I found blemishes on the TV were a couple little very small scratches on the metal
⏹️ ▶️ John chin that runs along the bottom. So small that you have to be like inches away from it to see them. I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John them when I was peeling off the little static clear plastic, whatever that stuff is called,
⏹️ ▶️ John that they put in all appliances now and that people leave on because they don’t realize it’s there. And honestly, I would not have seen this either
⏹️ ▶️ John if I hadn’t been really close to the TV, like messing with the stand. But yeah, there was a little plastic thing over the front and I peeled
⏹️ ▶️ John that off and there’s a couple little nicks in the metal chin, but not anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would ever do anything about. And that’s where the lights on the front of the television are. There, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe one or two of them, both of which you can disable. Woo!
⏹️ ▶️ John Software features, because, you know, I’m going through the settings and turning everything off. It also comes with a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that clips onto the back and, you know, points towards you. I thought that was like an
⏹️ ▶️ John optional extra, but it’s bundled with the TV. should be for this price anyway. I don’t know the quality of the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was attaching it, it’s got magnets. It’s got two little magnets that magnetically, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe, but it’s got two little magnets that click it into this, the thing where it connects and it’s got a bunch of like little pin connectory
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s a proprietary connection, right? But just when you click it in like that, it’s still wobbly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they made it flexible. So, you know, if, cause it was stiff and you tried to like, you know, move it or something, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John crack it or whatever, but it’s like flexible. And the reason I bring this up is because I connected it And the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t seem to see the camera at all. And so I couldn’t find out how can I use this camera? I downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Google meeting app or something to see if it would do something and it didn’t work. And I was like, is this camera used for anything?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’d read reviews and they said, oh, the TV will scold you if kids sit too close to the TV, if it sees them on the camera or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this wasn’t, I’m like, is it not connected? So I kept disconnecting the camera and reconnecting
⏹️ ▶️ John and disconnecting and reconnecting. Eventually I found out the TV knows the camera is there because there is a mechanical shutter on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, plastic thing that slides in front of the camera that you can keep closed if you don’t want it to be on and you’re paranoid or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you close that, a message pops up on the TV screen says, your camera, whatever thing is closed,
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t work until you open it. It’s like, aha, you know the camera’s there and you know that I closed it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing uses it. Someone sent me a picture of their same TV with a feature like in the settings that
⏹️ ▶️ John sees that the camera’s there, but mine doesn’t see it yet. And the manual said, you may need a software update or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got the latest software up. Anyway, further news on this camera. Eventually if I can’t get it to work I’m just gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ John it off and stick the little panel that covers the plug in it But I’m still willing to believe that the camera might do something someday
⏹️ ▶️ John Setup process was fine. It’s first time I’ve ever used Google TV. It’s Android II.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine It’s not as responsive as Apple TV. It makes me appreciate Apple TV a little bit, but it’s plenty responsive
⏹️ ▶️ John You can download apps. It’s got all the things you would expect built in I have yet another way to watch Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John blu-ray player has a way to watch Netflix as well You know, everything has a way to watch Netflix. What wouldn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it has Apple TV built in, but I think it does. I think it’s also an AirPlay receiver without the Apple TV as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mostly do things through the Apple TV, but just FYI, it has a smart TV OS thing that’s built in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only stumbling block I came upon when I was setting things up was a lot of things, a lot of TV
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, when you set them up, have a thing where, you know, like if you’re trying to sign into a YouTube app or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, just launch YouTube on your phone and you’ll see a little notification. You can just say, let me in, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s as opposed to the old ways in the olden days, you would say, go to youtube.com slash activate and type in
⏹️ ▶️ John this three letter code, right? Well, a lot of the apps that do that would say, just make sure your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is on the same wifi network as your TV. And you’ll see a thing pop up and they’ll say
⏹️ ▶️ John that it may take up to 30 seconds, so be patient. Apparently I’m not patient, because I would launch these things and I would
⏹️ ▶️ John launch the app on my phone and it would say, wait 30 seconds. And I would look at it and I would look at it and I realized
⏹️ ▶️ John this TV isn’t on the same wifi network as my phone. In fact, this TV is not on wifi at all because
⏹️ ▶️ John why would I do that? Everything’s connected to ethernet back there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The old TV’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John ethernet, the television, the Blu-ray player, all the game consoles, everything is ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John because wires. All right, they can be, they’re better. Yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have like a 10 port ethernet switch by my TV entertainment center.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that means it’s not on wifi. So I’m like, I can solve that. Let’s put it on wifi for during the setup process.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I went to wifi, it found my network, It’s an enter your password for your network I enter the password and it
⏹️ ▶️ John shows a little spinner for a while and this thing spins for I guess 60 seconds and it says
⏹️ ▶️ John Couldn’t find your network. Sorry. I tried my guest network. I tried re-entering the password for both of them
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple times This TV will not connect to any of my Wi-Fi I googled
⏹️ ▶️ John for it and you Google for Sony TV can’t connect to Wi-Fi All you find is like SEO
⏹️ ▶️ John spam pages that are just like I don’t know copypasta of random things like reboot your router or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever And then real articles from people who just can’t get their Wi-Fi to work or whatever so
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently it’s not a widespread problem or at least not that I know of but Never
⏹️ ▶️ John get it connected to Wi-Fi. Like I don’t need it to be connected to Wi-Fi. I don’t want it connected to Wi-Fi It’s on Ethernet. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine and Impractical purpose. I think it probably would have eventually worked because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is on the same network as my phone It’s just not on the same Wi-Fi as my phone and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John when they say make sure it’s on the same Wi-Fi I either just assume everyone uses Wi-Fi and not wire connections, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a kind of a sticking point. It’s the one thing so far that, besides the camera, that I absolutely have not
⏹️ ▶️ John been able to get to work. The TV just will not connect to Wi-Fi. And each time it tries, it spins for like 60 seconds. So it’s kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John to work through all of that. I went through all the settings. Boy, there are a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John settings. And for me, you’re going through no, off,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, no. I was disappointed to learn, I don’t know why I hadn’t realized this, but Sony is one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the holdout companies that’s not doing filmmaker mode in the TVs. This is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I don’t know, the entertainment industry convinced the television industry to do. Filmmaker mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John all caps, it’s always in all caps, probably because of some branding reason or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, really? That’s like a standardized name? Like, mine has it, but I just figured that was just like, you know, what they were calling it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s like an entertainment industry group, like people who make movies, like the movie studios got together
⏹️ ▶️ John with the TV manufacturers and came up with this thing. it is a specific
⏹️ ▶️ John trademarked thing. It’s kind of like, you know, Dolby Digital or whatever, right, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the individual thing. And it’s always all caps, right? And the IDB time filmmaker
⏹️ ▶️ John mode is a mode in television where the television won’t screw up the picture, basically, no
⏹️ ▶️ John motion smoothing, no denoising, no over brightening, no vibrance adding, no
⏹️ ▶️ John messing with the darks, no changing the frame rate, like no nothing. Show it the
⏹️ ▶️ John way it is on the disc or on the stream or whatever, right? It’s the most accurate
⏹️ ▶️ John picture mode. You’re not allowed to enable, like that’s in the standard filmmaker mode. Sony, this
⏹️ ▶️ John TV does not have filmmaker mode. So you have to basically make it yourself. The custom
⏹️ ▶️ John setting, what they describe it as is they say, this is the most accurate, blah, blah, blah. But you still have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John through in custom mode and turn off reality creation, turn off CineMotion
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Blend or whatever. What the hell, all these things. All the Sony brand names for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the denoise filtering, the sharpening, like just gotta turn all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John off. And by the way, don’t forget, you gotta do that for every input.
⏹️ ▶️ John have that many inputs because of the receiver, but I did, my receiver confused me, I should have read the manual for it first. It had
⏹️ ▶️ John two HDMI outs. It had one called main and one called sub. I’m like, why does it have
⏹️ ▶️ John two? I mean, I guess you can, so you can put two TVs, but only one of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. Is the sub for HDMI arc for setting to a sound bar
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I forget which one supports e-arc, but that’s a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John no, there is a dedicated arc, e-arc port. But in the receiver, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can say, one of the settings I found was like, where do you wanna do Dolby Vision? You wanna do it main or sub?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, I can see it’s kind of like zone two, you know, zone two for the audio. I think sub is like zone two
⏹️ ▶️ John for if you wanna have literally two televisions showing two different things, but only one of them can do double vision. So like, oh, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’m just not connecting anything to sub, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main. And just for the obvious thing here, it does not have a subwoofer somehow? I mean, I suppose- No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an HDMI port. No, there is dedicated subwoofer ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are subwoofers that accept HDMI for some reason or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m right there with you, Marco. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but I had the exact same thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it only send the darkest parts of the picture to that port? Right. Right. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a crossover setting you can change there. So I just have main connected.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have anything connected to sub, but then I had two HDMI ports connected to it. That was a little bit confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to set the settings in both places. Doing this, having, you know, television screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John a receiver, Blu-ray player, Apple TV box or whatever, there’s a lot of fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John for what goes on on the screen. Because every one of those devices has something they want to display
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen that relates to the configuration of that device. The receiver, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John can take over the whole screen with just its UI, which looks kind of like early
⏹️ ▶️ John 2000s web 2.0, kind of like lots of gradients and artwork showing
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever. And you can configure the receiver that way, right? The Blu-ray
⏹️ ▶️ John player has like a menu system that’s like, it looks older
⏹️ ▶️ John than the receiver. It looks like a very blurry, low resolution web page, incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John slow animation, like slower than any computer has ever been at like moving the focus
⏹️ ▶️ John ring from one thing to the other, so slow that you would never wanna use it. So yeah, my Blu-ray player will do like
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon Prime video and Netflix or whatever, but you would never want to do anything. I was like, it’s so slow,
⏹️ ▶️ John so horrible. And then of course, the receiver also has another way to put UI
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the screen. And it’s the way, kind of reminds me of when like Mac OS X was maybe public beta
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe the developer preview. One of the screenshots I included was like a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of a Mac desktop or the desktop background or the boot screen or something, like the, you know, Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X GUI, but with a bunch of Unix text coming down
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, blacking out, like the text is light text on a black background and everywhere there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John text, the line of text has like a black border around it, right? It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of, I don’t know, I’m not describing it well, but it’s as if Unix had come and scribbled over Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like when you’re in flight monitor on the back of the seat crashes and it starts rebooting its Linux thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it’s spinning all over the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But imagine that going over the Mac UI only blacking out the parts where the lines are So if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a short line of text like a little short black that area or whatever That’s what the receiver it also
⏹️ ▶️ John has a mode where it puts up like it looks like a VCR Kind of on-screen display from like the
⏹️ ▶️ John late 80s, right? I’ve like a fixed width font very bit mappy or whatever it can put that
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen as well for a whole other set of features. And so everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has a way to, and the TV itself can do a bar at the bottom, can do multiple different bars at the bottom. We could also
⏹️ ▶️ John do a full screen thing. And of course, Apple TV does the full screen thing. And it’s, there’s a lot of UI going. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have not settled this down to the point where I’m ready to explain to the family how
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the new TV. But the good thing about that is that I am
⏹️ ▶️ John now, and hopefully by the time you hear this recording, an HDMI CEC unicorn, because now
⏹️ ▶️ John in this setup is in every place except for the Apple TV and the TiVo. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you pick up the Apple TV remote.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, if you pick up the Apple TV remote, everything’s turned off. Pick up the Apple TV remote, hit the power button on it, turns
⏹️ ▶️ John TV on, switch to the Apple TV, turns the receiver on, just everything works. If you turn it off, turns
⏹️ ▶️ John everything off. I didn’t do anything. The Apple TV remote can change the volume and do everything with
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The TV remote can control the volume and can also control the Apple TV somehow with like
⏹️ ▶️ John the four way thing. Everything just knows about each other and everything works together. I’m just like, don’t touch anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t do anything to set this up. This is just the way it worked. The only bad thing is occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you turn stuff on, sometimes the TV wants to show its UI. There’s a setting that says, hey, when I turn on, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want me to do? And I said, show your last input. Don’t go to the home screen. But sometimes people like, they wanna use the TiVo, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ John oldest device. You’ll turn the TiVo on and it’ll turn everything on, but it’ll show the Google TV menu,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to basically dismiss the full screen Google TV menu. It’s on the right input, but you have to dismiss the Google UI
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the TiVo UI that’s underneath it. Kind of confusing, still working on it. The reason I mentioned the receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John on-screen display, like Linux crashed thing or whatever, is because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI that you have to go to to select the configuration
⏹️ ▶️ John that you saved with Dirac Live. It’s not in the web 2.0 gradient
⏹️ ▶️ John illustrations of RCA connector and speakers and stuff. It’s not there.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you use the Mac app and you save it, it’s like saving a game on like N64. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John save this in slot one and you have three slots. So I saved my configuration to slot one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you have to use the weird Linux crash desktop UI to select it from slot one. And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John realize, like, I’m trying to watch things. I’m trying to watch shows, test things out, make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John everything works, get the Apple TV to, you know, output Dolby Vision 4K and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And it’s just a battle every step of the way because you’re like, what menu makes this possible?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you have to go into the receiver and say, oh, do you want your output to be 4K or 4K enhanced? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why does 4K not enhanced exist? Like change all the outputs to enhanced. Oh, now I can
⏹️ ▶️ John do Dolby Vision or whatever. And we watched it, we actually watched a television show. Watched television show, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wow, so watch the new TV or whatever. Two things, one, it was a TV show that we had started on Disney Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John already, like not started, started, but I have a habit where I will go to the next
⏹️ ▶️ John episode and get it to like one second into the next episode and pause it so that when we’re ready to watch the next
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, I don’t have to do anything. It’s already ready to go the next episode, right? This is my way of avoiding the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen where I can never find what I was watching. So we had already started to watch this episode
⏹️ ▶️ John of the show on Disney Plus, but we started to watch it on the old TV, which was not 4K and
⏹️ ▶️ John not HDR. So we watched the whole episode on the new TV. I’m like, this doesn’t look like it’s HDR. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, maybe the show is in HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John also doesn’t look like it’s 4K. Well, maybe this is not a 4K show or whatever. We watched the whole episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I’m watching it, the sound is wonky too. I’m like, was my old surround just not configured
⏹️ ▶️ John well? Does this sounds like some of the channels sound louder than they should be and the mix is weird. Then it started
⏹️ ▶️ John playing the next episode and it was 4K and HDR. I’m like, whoa. So apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I had started the stream, Like it just kept streaming the thing that it had been streaming which wasn’t for the new TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and second thing is I figured out Oh, I haven’t selected slot one The Dirac live
⏹️ ▶️ John configuration and so I watched that show with it just on the default configuration Which doesn’t compensate
⏹️ ▶️ John for my rooms weirdness and it sounded terrible So it took you a few
⏹️ ▶️ John attempts to dial things in once I enabled the Dirac live Configuration slot was like oh everything sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John way better And there’s a lot of that with like the different inputs and making sure things are configured
⏹️ ▶️ John and making sure everything is sending it in the enhanced mode and making sure everything is set to
⏹️ ▶️ John choose the best quality and just got so many menus so I Think I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ John I did round one and round one of a fixing then I slept on it Did more internet
⏹️ ▶️ John research did round two of fixing and I guess I’ll do round three You know, I don’t know like
⏹️ ▶️ John as I watch more things, but I’m getting close. I’m getting close to to everything working correctly, but
⏹️ ▶️ John things went pretty smoothly, I have to say. Like there was no, other than not being able to get on the wifi, everything eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John worked. Oh, one more barrier was the TiVo remote. I don’t know if people remember the TiVo remotes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you could make the TiVo remote control the power, volume, mute, blah, blah, blah for your television.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the way you do that is you have to type in this four digit code for your remote. It’s like a universal remote code
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that lets it know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how to talk to your TV. And in the TiVo menu thing, you go
⏹️ ▶️ John through there and you say, what brand of TV do you have? And you pick and it says, okay, well it’s gonna be one of these six codes or one of these 12 codes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hold down these two buttons for five seconds to let the red light comes on, then type the code and then try the power button
⏹️ ▶️ John and just keep doing that. I did that for all the codes and none of them worked. And then I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a brand new TV, let me search online. I found a bunch more codes for Sony televisions, typed them all in,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of them worked. And then eventually one of them turned off the TV, I’m like, oh, that one worked, okay, but the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John seems wonky, so I tried some more codes. Like, oh, none of those work either. let me go back to the one that worked. And then that one wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work either. And that’s when I started having, you know, the debugger, the programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John debugger thinking, and I think, all right, what explains this phenomenon? And of course it’s like, replace the batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, depending on like, if I was an inch or two, you know, like how far away I was from the television, replace the batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now like six of the codes work. And so that problem is mostly solved. The volume is still wonky, but mostly I just need the power
⏹️ ▶️ John button to work. But yeah, everything was pretty smooth. There’s a lot to explore on this TV. I am never
⏹️ ▶️ John going to use the Blu-ray’s interface except to play Blu-ray discs, because that thing is super janky. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope I never have to use the receiver interface once I get everything tuned in. I did try my PlayStation 5 on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to, you know, I played Destiny in HDR, 120 frames per second, and it was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sweet, but not sweet enough to burn in my OLED, and
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good in PVP as my gaming monitor, because it helps for my old eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John to be really close and see everything in crisp pixels. Like I’m really close to my 27 inch monitor and I’m like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John feet away from my 65 inch TV. So it looked real nice, but honestly 120 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second versus 60, it doesn’t affect, my reflexes are too slow to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a difference. Like the input, the lag difference or whatever, it’s not gonna save me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you do 120, it drops it to 1080 in Destiny because the PlayStation 5 can’t do a 120 4K. So I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John prefer a 4K 60. But anyway, the PS5 went back to the gaming monitor, but I did try that out. I played
⏹️ ▶️ John Blu-rays, I played movies, I played a bunch of 4K HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John demo footage on YouTube, which was fun. Oh, and the other thing, I had heard about YouTube TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, oh, hey, when you get a 4K TV, you should look at YouTube TV, which is one of those services that lets you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, replace your cable with something that in theory gives you like all the regular channels. You know, you pay for HBO and Showtime,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get local channels, and it’s like a cable package, but over the internet, right? There’s a lot of those things. But the YouTube TV’s
⏹️ ▶️ John selling point is they have 4K channels. So I pay for whatever the most expensive thing Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John sells me as part of my Fios package to get all the channels, which is nice because I don’t have to pay individually for HBO
⏹️ ▶️ John and Showtime, they come as part of my cable package, but I still get to use the HBO Max app and the Showtime app and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that other stuff. So that’s convenient. But they’re not, when you watch them on a TV, like when I watch them on my
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo, which is not 4K anyway, but like the signal that comes to my television through my cable card is
⏹️ ▶️ John not 4K. But if you use U2 TV and my fast internet connection also from Verizon.
⏹️ ▶️ John This episode’s been sponsored by
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Verizon. Is it Verizon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultra fast nationwide 5G ultra wideband network?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not 5G, thankfully. It is fiber optic and it’s very fast. And YouTube TV has channels in
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K. And you know, so if you wanna watch HDTV in 4K, you can, but not through your
⏹️ ▶️ John cable company, only through YouTube TV. So I tried out YouTube TV, but it was like a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing. It seemed pretty expensive, because it was like 50 bucks for the base thing, plus like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for each one of the HBO Showtime, or whatever, another 12 or whatever bucks, plus a $9 like blanket surcharge
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want 4K, because that’s the thing. But anyway, I did the free trial with everything enabled, 4K, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sure enough, you can get 4K versions of channels, but their UI for like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John going through the guide, it only goes one guide slide at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so, you know, you’re on channel five, not that that’s the channel number, but anyway, you’re on channel five and you
⏹️ ▶️ John swipe down or move the five way, it goes to channel six, then seven, then eight. like on the big guide grid that
⏹️ ▶️ John you see, no one’s got time to do that. It’s not smooth, there’s no way to flick scroll it,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Just one at a time. And there are so many channels. At least on TiVo, you have page
⏹️ ▶️ John up, page down. You go through screen falls at a time when you’re looking at the guide. Or on Apple TV, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John use the touch pad and it would have momentum scrolling. I’m sorry, YouTube TV, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John is literally the reason I canceled that services because I cannot imagine going through
⏹️ ▶️ John this UI to find things to watch or record. Like does a DVR type thing as well. A server
⏹️ ▶️ John side DVR. It didn’t seem to have a season pass manager either. When I canceled it, they sent me this big survey like, why’d
⏹️ ▶️ John you cancel? I’m like, just copy everything to you Oded because you have no idea what you’re doing. So helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good 4K content, terrible UI. I tried the YouTube TV app on the television itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a Google, you know, it runs Google TV. And I also tried the YouTube TV app on Apple TV and they were
⏹️ ▶️ John both very bad. So it’s not even as good as the Netflix UI in terms of recommendations and everything, they’ve got a
⏹️ ▶️ John long way to go. So I was disappointed by that, but at least it saves me some money. So anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John give the whole experience a big thumbs up. I am much more excited and impressed by this television than anyone else in my
⏹️ ▶️ John family, I can tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ John the surprise. Yeah, no, it’s just, they don’t care. I mean, I show them
⏹️ ▶️ John the footage of the honey dripping onto the thing on a black background. How are you not impressed
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no blooming, it’s HDR, every pixel is individually lit up. It looks amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody cared. I’m like, do you understand? Like, you can’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think we need to buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John second worst television to put next to it and say, see what a mess this looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll send you guys a picture. I did take a picture of my, a beauty shot on my television. If I can find
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I will send it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I’m sorry. I should have asked this a long, long time ago, but I didn’t want to ruin your whole moment. What is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual model number for this TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the Sony A95K. In my opinion, unless you are a hardcore
⏹️ ▶️ John gamer with a modern console that you wanna play at 4K, 120 frames per second, it is the best
⏹️ ▶️ John television you can buy right now. Quantum.OLED television, Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John A95K. The name just rolls off the tongue. You can buy it on Amazon starting in a couple of weeks. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was wondering when it was gonna appear. Amazon says it’ll be released on August 11th. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s nice. So check out the picture. You can, see what you can see in this. This probably won’t be in the show, It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a picture of my house, but you can see the center channel speaker is now in the center. See the stand? Very
⏹️ ▶️ John boring. Yeah, that’s a very boring stand. Here’s an important quality of the stand. I can hide
⏹️ ▶️ John cables behind it. That is actually really nice. If you remember before I had that V-shaped thing, where
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a hole in the middle, so you had to run the cables down the V. This, I just have it stuck to the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of that thing. Totally hidden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This actually looks pretty nice. I mean, I know this is, you know, right after cleanup and setup and rewiring and everything, so of course this is like as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice as it’s ever gonna look.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it never changes from this. This is always how it looks. You can ask anyone in my family. Nothing about this setup changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once I get settled on the order of the little DVD things, which are also decorative, by the way, those also never
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can see the right edge of
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV, see how it’s over the radiator and almost touching the wall? Yep. And on the left side, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big enough channel for if I move those plastic bins, I can squeeze myself
⏹️ ▶️ John through there, putting my butt into the window, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like to reach behind it for the wiring?
⏹️ ▶️ John to get behind it to do all the wiring stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, no, you’re right. This is as big as you can go in that spot, for sure. Like, unless you somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rearrange that room to have the TV not in the corner, but I don’t know. You can’t put it over to the left, right? Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there a mantle there?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a gigantic fireplace and a mantle there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so you can’t, yeah, so I think this is it. This is as big as you
⏹️ ▶️ John can go. Yeah, and that shade on the left is light blocking shade, right, so you don’t get any light behind the thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can see the stupid camera on the top of it. I do like this stand. It’s served me well. It’s got glass
⏹️ ▶️ John shelves, holds everything up pretty well. I did micro level it,
⏹️ ▶️ John because of course nothing in my house is level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is micro leveling?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s mostly level. If you put a level on it and you look at the little bubble, it’s between the two lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John But is it in the middle between the two lines? Oh my gosh. Almost.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when I micro leveled it, I leveled everything. What I wanted to tell was, is the third party stand
⏹️ ▶️ John level? Because maybe the third party stand is wonky, right? So that’s why I was looking at it with the level again, and I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ John man, the right side could go up a little. And I didn’t wanna try to put any tiny shims under the right side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of furniture because it’s so heavy with all that stuff on it, and I only needed to go up small. So what I did was I
⏹️ ▶️ John took some cardboard out of the recycling, not cardboard, like corrugated cardboard, but like the cardboard that like
⏹️ ▶️ John a cardboard box that plastic Ziploc bags come in, that kind of cardboard, and I cut
⏹️ ▶️ John one thickness of that, one tiny square of that, and I put one of those underneath each of
⏹️ ▶️ John the right hand feet on this, on the stand. Now it’s really level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. I’m so happy for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it bother you? I don’t wanna, you know, I don’t even want it, nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, go ahead and tell me. Is there something, some problem with my television that I need to address? I’m prepared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it bother you that the bezel is thicker on the bottom than the other sides of it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, no, it’s fine. Like I said, it is, that’s the only place where there’s a bezel that there’s like that less than one inch wide metal
⏹️ ▶️ John strip across the whole thing. I think this is also before I turned off the LED. so I think it’s on in this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a status indicator for the microphone because of course this thing has a microphone that you can make listening or whatever. But no, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John chin, but like it’s the smallest chin you’ve ever seen. I was saying it was disconcerting
⏹️ ▶️ John to her that the image like went to the edge of the thing. Oh, and I mean, you know this about Quantum.OLEDs, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the viewing angle is unbelievable. Plasmas have good viewing angles and so do most OLEDs, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because this thing is on an angle, you can get some pretty harsh angles if you’re coming in the room against the wall or whatever. It never
⏹️ ▶️ John changes. It’s the same brightness, the same colors from any direction. It’s phenomenal
⏹️ ▶️ John looking, but yeah, no, the chin doesn’t bother me at all. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our beach TV is the stupid Samsung frame, which is LCD, and not even a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LCD. It’s just like a bog standard kind of edge-lit LCD. And every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we go to Westchester and I have my old OLED there, every time I’m like, whoa, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, good to see the Minecraft HUD burned in still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second of all, oh my God, it looks so much better. Like it’s, when I go from LCD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to OLED, oh my God, such a big difference. It is so
⏹️ ▶️ John And QD OLED versus WRGB OLED is yet a step farther in viewing that because
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular OLEDs do color tint off axis and get a little bit dimmer, not as bad as LCDs, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a little bit, but this QD OLED just does not change from any angle. It’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of disconcerting. It’s pretty amazing. And we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John those plastic bins you see next to the thing that just have a bunch of like old GameCube controllers and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. And my wife was like, well now that you don’t have the GameCube connecting bar, we can get rid of those
⏹️ ▶️ John bins. I’m like, eh, I don’t know. They’re kind of an important decorative element of the setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, those just live there for like all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I mean that’s where all,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to use one of the consoles, that’s where like the Wiimotes are and the GameCube controllers which are wired,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a wavered in there, the memory cards, like all that stuff is in there. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV setup is so carefully curated to look nice and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t just have plastic bins sitting next to it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the plastic bins are also carefully curated. Like for example, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You gotta have that nicer. If that stuff has to be there, you gotta have some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice little piece there. It can’t just be, you know, plastic bins, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so like I said, that white GameCube controller that you can see in the bottom bin, the one handle of, That is a
⏹️ ▶️ John brand new, never been used white GameCube controller just sitting there pristine inside the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that is not on display, John. That’s just in a bin.
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of on display.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, it’s just in a bin. That’s just in a bin. I look at it
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think about it. Anyway, they’re nicely, also the important function is we have to put something there because there’s that outlet behind there
⏹️ ▶️ John that things are plugged into, not attractive looking things. So like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a clock on the mandle, but it’s a USB powered clock and it’s connected through like a USB cable that plugs
⏹️ ▶️ John into a wall wart type thing. So I do need something to block, like the speaker wires go by there. You can’t really see them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the speaker wires are going that direction too. So I need something there to hide the shame of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but you have to put something that doesn’t add its own shame. Clear plastic bins full of stuff are their own shame.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like, I’m comforted by the idea of having clear plastic bins filled with console controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also a very slim PS2 inside there as well. And there’s a couple of spare HDMI cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could be a little bit neater. there was a little bit of a disruption to the stuff in there, let’s say, when I was,
⏹️ ▶️ John removing, so I could rearrange them a little bit, but I actually kind of like having bins full of old console
⏹️ ▶️ John controllers next to my television. It makes me feel good. Same reason, like, why do I have all those things on the TV? Things that are DVD-sized
⏹️ ▶️ John cases? First of all, they’re DVD-sized cases instead of Blu-rays, because DVD cases are taller. They’re basically filling
⏹️ ▶️ John space, and what they are are games that I really like, mostly in the order that I like them,
⏹️ ▶️ John modulo A in order that makes the color arrangement nice. The right hand side, I just don’t need to adjust.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit off. But yeah, that’s decorative
⏹️ ▶️ John and also it’s displaying favorites. And if you were to look to the left, you’ll see another
⏹️ ▶️ John area filled with decorative slash favorites of more DVD cases than Blu-ray cases. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal, but it’s kind of what I’ve gotten used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, that’s something like, I think your arrangement of anachronistic DVD cases and game discs that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t play anymore, that actually I think looks nice. But then when you compare it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plastic bins of crap to the left, those don’t look right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Crap, that’s not crap. Those GameCube controllers alone could put kids through college. People want those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Completely unused, original Nintendo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So sell them now while they’re still worth anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, they’re priceless to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you want those is what you’re saying. No one else wants them as much as you
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Oh, another happy coincidence, right? So you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco see the TiVo there.
⏹️ ▶️ John On top of the TiVo is my new Blu-ray player, which is just a black rectangular, whatever. I would have reversed that arrangement,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the TiVo is deeper, so I got to put the bigger one on the bottom. And then above that is my center channel speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is zero space. That speaker is literally touching the
⏹️ ▶️ John top thing. You slide it and it goes, like it is touching the underside of that table. I did not plan
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but it exactly fits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which means that you can never replace the TiVo or the Blu-ray player.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. Well, what would I buy? They don’t make any different Blu-ray players. and the TiVo, someone was just offering
⏹️ ▶️ John me a potentially another TiVo Romeo Pro, which is the model I have, which is the best TiVo that has ever been made.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you buy a brand new TiVo today, you cannot get one with as much storage space as the one that’s sitting there, which boggles my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that thing is what, five years old, six? Like hard drive sizes are huge now, but now they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller and crappier. Anyway, I hope it never breaks. If it does, I might just leave it there as a
⏹️ ▶️ John decorative element.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we were speaking of, you know, Sean Harding had talked to us about the Audi, you know, end points and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deprecations. I guarantee that TiVo is not going to be around much longer. It’s just-
⏹️ ▶️ John They should have been dead a million times over. I don’t understand how they’re still functioning and yet they do. And the TiVo still
⏹️ ▶️ John has an amazing responsive interface that is nicer to use than any of the modern things. It looks old
⏹️ ▶️ John and dated now, but just how fast it plays, pauses, jumps forward and backwards, and auto
⏹️ ▶️ John skips commercials by hitting the green button, like nothing matches that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it seems like at this point, TiVo is kind of undead. Like I think it seems like it should have died so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. It seems like it shouldn’t still be working and yet it is. At this point, it seems like it’s unkillable and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect it to outlast probably everything else in this picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. I mean, a Blu-ray player is the same one I’ve been selling for six years or whatever, so I just continue to sell that
⏹️ ▶️ John as a Blu-ray classic. I can’t get enough. I really should take them some screenshots of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John or some movies of it. You would, however bad you think it is, it’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, John, I’m genuinely happy for you. I am glad that after a long, arduous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight years, you are finally in a position to get a brand new television. And it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you aren’t gonna need to buy one again for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope not. Or, I mean, I kind of feel like when I got my Power Mac G5, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was buying, you know, the first, like, people don’t remember, there was a big
⏹️ ▶️ John discontinuity with the Power Mac G5, because the G4 was stuck for a really long time with a slow
⏹️ ▶️ John front side bus, and it’s like, when are they gonna make a tower computer that’s worthy of the processor or whatever. And they came out with
⏹️ ▶️ John the G5, which had amazing specs that leaked, but no one believed because they were so amazing. And it was the very first generation
⏹️ ▶️ John of that product. And it had problems and it was weird. Like my power supply chirped and it was, you know, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would work it out. You know, it produced a lot of heat. The fans were a little bit noisy. They would make better
⏹️ ▶️ John G5 tower computers later and eventually much better Intel-based Mac Pros in the same case,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? This is the very first generation Quantum.OLED television. There’s a Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John one and there’s this one. That’s it. And they come in 55 and 65 inch sizes. I’m buying a first generation product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s a little bit scary, but A, I didn’t want to wait any longer. And B, I think for our first gen product,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless there’s some catastrophic problem that we haven’t figured out yet, I’m doing okay. And if this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I have to replace this television, like if something goes wrong, or it turns out the first gen products, they all died after two years,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just buy another QD OLED. And by then they would have worked out the kinks and it hopefully won’t be as horrendously expensive as this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m living in your future. Someday you will all listeners and co-hosts have
⏹️ ▶️ John a quantum.oled television probably and you’ll like it a lot because it’s really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think too, like, you know, first generation, it would be one thing if this was the first OLED, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not. It’s the first of an evolution of existing technologies. The very first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLEDs probably had significant more problems with like burn-in and stuff like that, or, you know, the blue pixels dying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more over time or whatever it is. But, you know, this is, I would expect this being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a minor evolution really of OLED technology, I would expect this to be pretty safe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, they have learned a lot from the other OLEDs, but technologically speaking, this screen just operates differently than the other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. It has a different backlight, it has different pixel structures, they’re manufactured in a different way. It’s learned a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot from the other ones, but the technologies that are in the very best WRGB OLEDs are actually slightly different
⏹️ ▶️ John than this. Like the way they deal with their issues, like I think the new WRGB OLEDs use like deuterium or something
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to like avoid burn-in. Like they have different approaches, whereas this one has
⏹️ ▶️ John defense against burn-in for different reasons, because it doesn’t have to make the backlight as
⏹️ ▶️ John bright, because more of the light gets transmitted so they can turn the backlight down and they can match
⏹️ ▶️ John the brightness of your RGB OLEDs at a fraction of the power and a fraction of the actual light output,
⏹️ ▶️ John because more light actually makes it to your eyeballs. Same thing with the polarizer and everything and the pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John being kind of closer to the surface of the screen, not really, but looking like that, because there’s less crap
⏹️ ▶️ John between the thing that makes the color and your eyeballs. That’s why the viewing angles are good. That’s why the color purity
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. There’s no white subpixels. So it’s just a red, green, and blue on all of them. The pixels are
⏹️ ▶️ John in a different arrangement. So if you looked at this next to WRGB OLED, it actually looks definitely different. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a potential for this to be catastrophically terrible. And me to regret this in two years, but I really hope not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think you will. I think you’re gonna be very happy with this, probably for longer than you should. Ahem, TiVo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahem, all your Mac pros. Ahem, your last TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine if they made a 4K TiVo Romeo Pro? Boy, I would love that. Amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re the only one left who would buy it. Yeah, just me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I would pay a lot for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Instabug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atv.fm slash join. we will talk to
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
S3 clones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, forever ago, I put in a thing in the show notes for the after show that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought we would get to at some point, and we just haven’t yet. That’s fine. And what I wrote was, is it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay to copy a competitor’s API? And I don’t remember what specifically got me thinking about this, but I thought about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android didn’t necessarily copy an API as much as they copied all of Java. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll probably have the details wrong about that, but you get the idea. And then, semi-recently, Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out with this R2 thing, which I guess is like an Amazon S3 clone or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now this is suddenly relevant anew. So, Marco, what’s been up to lately?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, the reason I brought this up, or the reason I thought today was good for this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally just today, I used an S3 clone service for the first time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was our sponsor, Linode. It was their Linode object storage service, which is another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S3 clone. Backblaze has their own to Backblaze B2 it’s called, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned before, because that’s one of the storage backends that you can use with various backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools for things like Synology backups and things like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most of these services do is they implement the S3 API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an S3 like service behind it. I don’t know. So Linode seems to be running this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software package called Ceph, C-E-P-H. I don’t know how many of them are Ceph-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Based on my experience with Ceph, I’d worry about that a little bit. But I can tell you on this, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just services like B2 and this Cloudflare thing. Everybody implements
⏹️ ▶️ John the S3 API. If you buy, quote-unquote, enterprise storage, like you buy like a hardware with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of boxes that you’re going to put in your data center from like EMC or Dell or IBM, they
⏹️ ▶️ John also, all those boxes also support the S3 API. It has become the standard storage API
⏹️ ▶️ John across the entire enterprise storage industry. And by the way, when they say we implement the S3 API,
⏹️ ▶️ John they always mean we implement a subset of the S3
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco API as it existed
⏹️ ▶️ John in whatever we made this. Because the S3 API is always changing and nobody implements all of it. Doesn’t matter if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing gets and puts and stuff like that, but the S3 API does not stand still and nobody implements all the
⏹️ ▶️ John features. But it is standardized. this is relevant to the discussion, it is standardized across the entire industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody implements the S3 API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the most part, and you’re right, it is always a subset and it is oftentimes outdated. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, when you look at Amazon’s full S3 feature set, there is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much complexity available there that almost no users of it actually need. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re one of the people who needs it, obviously, great, good for you. But most usage of S3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and its various clone services or compatible services, whatever you wanna call them, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just basic stuff, you know, get, put, list, you know, stuff like that. It’s- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like of the million features they have though, it’s kind of like the thing where like, you have a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John customers each of which needs one one thousandth of your feature set and it’s spread over the whole thing. Cause those features
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t exist for no reason. Companies ask for them. I have this experience on my past job.
⏹️ ▶️ John We wanted features from S3 that S3 didn’t provide and through the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of giving them millions of dollars for AWS services and waiting several years, those features appeared
⏹️ ▶️ John in S3 and we used them and it made our lives better. We may be the only people who,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is probably not a feature, we weren’t the only people, I think it’s a common thing or whatever, but like every one of those features
⏹️ ▶️ John is in S3 is there because some big company that pays AWS millions and millions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted it and they put it there and those companies use it and they’re never gonna remove it because you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-million dollar customers using it. But when you’re using a third party thing, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what you wanna call it, but like a clone service or whatever, they just implement whatever subset they feel like they wanna support. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not as big as AWS, and they probably don’t have customers paying them a million dollars. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we do the basic file operations and people are happy, but those things that are in ST aren’t there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no, agreed. It’s not for no reason, but yeah, but I think it’s usually very narrow appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most of them. And this is true, you know, most of AWS, like when you, you know, if you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me, originally used AWS, you know, in like 2008, or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like back back when it was much younger and much simpler. If you look at it today, it’s almost unrecognizable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with how much complexity there is in various parts of it. But there is a large market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that simpler subset of things. And, you know, for most people like me, like, you know, making a web app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that uses some kind of, you know, storage or something, whatever subset is implemented by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these clone services is everything we need plus more. So anyway, the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was looking at this is that I’ve been looking to, with my Overcast servers, I’ve been looking to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both reduce cost if possible and where possible, and also increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resiliency to reduce the amount of headroom I have performance-wise and to reduce the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incident of problems that I have to deal with, because if things get overloaded or whatever. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the ways I was doing that was kind of taking advantage of S3 as both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infinite space and cheap space, and as kind of infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load capacity for high requested things, and to offload certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high volume requests off of my main infrastructure. Because you know, I’ve run all these servers at Linode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have all these app servers, I have a couple of load balancers in front of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more requests I can not even send there, the easier the load is on those servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can save money on those servers and save resources and have more headroom and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using S3 and also putting CloudFlare in front of it, not CloudFront, not the Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CDN, CloudFlare, the entirely separate service. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John CloudFlare. CloudWatch, not CloudFlare, not CloudFront.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the trick with Cloudflare is that it’s a CDN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is flat rate and does not charge you for transfer. It’s unlimited,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever that means in technology, you know, there’s always a bunch of asterisks, but it’s at least unmetered, seemingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfer. You don’t pay per byte served. And it’s not that expensive. You know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a free plan. I’m using the one that’s 200 bucks a month, and I’m sending hundreds of gigs. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sending much more bandwidth through it than what that would normally buy. You know, it’s like hundreds of gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per day that I’m serving through there. It’s a large amount of bandwidth for a $200 a month plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And frankly, I think I actually could be fine on the free plan. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside of Cloudflare being your CDN is that its retention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty crappy. So you get what you pay for in terms of its cash retention. And so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does have to go back to the origin a lot, which in my case is S3. And you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay for that. Because Amazon charges you not only some small amount per request,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they also charge you most significantly in transfer costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Whatever. Egress only, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do anything within AWS. It’s so many asterisks on how they charge for
⏹️ ▶️ John S3, including data transfer. You have to know where you’re sending from, where you’re sending to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. However, and that being said, I think you can look at a lot of Amazon Web Services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing and some of it’s reasonable. The data transfer, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco egress fees are exorbitant. They have very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very healthy profits on those. This is like Apple RAM pricing for transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s different though because in AWS, people don’t pay those prices. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kind of like- Well, I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but yeah, if you’re, big companies don’t pay the prices that you see little people who are doing
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing yet that’s what you pay but
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody is a big company pays the prices that you see listed on AWS. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so I’m serving a couple of things here. I’m serving the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork thumbnails from there. So that way like we know when you bring up the directory when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you search those thumbnails load really fast. I’m also in the latest update of Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m serving the kind of like Overcast custom JSON format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of episode list data. So like the list of episodes that are in a feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my data format that is sent to the app, that is now being served from the CDN. And the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is when a podcast publishes a new episode, that gets updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the server sent a push notification to all the copies of the app saying, hey, update this and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the copies of the app that are subscribed to that feed all have to pull that same file within a few minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I figured a CDN is perfect for that because not only will it be faster but that’s a whole bunch of cache
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hits that won’t hit any part of my infrastructure. So it’ll save on my end, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save you know those big load spikes which it does and it’s been great. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside is that again the the Cloudflare hit rate is not great because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because their retention rate isn’t very good, because, you know, I mean, I’m talking hundreds of gigs of data here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are potentially being cached, and they’re not gonna spend hundreds of gigs of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM holding all my data in memory for 200 bucks a month. So that makes sense, you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not blaming them. You know, it is what it is. So anyway, so I started looking for options that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would save money, because I learned, I just started doing all of this in the month of July,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is now August, and my July bill for AWS is comically large, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it could almost buy John’s TV. So I’m like, all right, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of this that was supposed to be saving me money is not working. It’s actually now costing me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to host things this way than it was in the old way. So let me revisit the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle of this. And so there’s a couple of options. So there’s apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a deal between Backblaze and Cloudflare that if you use Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as clone, B2 service, they don’t charge you for bandwidth when it’s being sent to Cloudflare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s an option that I can I could use the Backblaze B2 service as my back end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of S3 and pay no fees in transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Another option, which is the one I’m trying first, is Linode, frequent sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the show including this episode and the place I host all my servers. And by the way, I pay, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode does not pay for my servers for me, like, they pay us for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, but my account is a regular account that I just pay for, you know, Overcast pays at full price, I don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any special discounts or anything like that. So I buy a lot of Linode servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Linode has their object storage service, which is their S3 clone. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like five times cheaper than S3, like, for the transfer fees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I’m reading the docs correctly, I think first it exhausts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transfer that I’m already paying for in my Linode plan. Because every Linode server that you buy comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, you know, 2,000 gigs a month or something like that of transfer. And I buy so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers that I never come close to using all that. I have a massive surplus of transfer every month from Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t use. So not only is it five times cheaper when you are paying per gig,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think I am actually not going to be paying much at all because I think I’m going to actually be fitting within my giant surplus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have from all my servers. So I’m trying that now first. And all this is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first adopted all of this with my code base over the last month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so, you know, first, I’ve written against S3 since Tumblr. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used S3 for a very long time. Tumblr stored every image that people have loaded in S3. So I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written against it using PHP for a very long time. I’ve been through the various complexities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they, you know, went to their complex ACL system, their complex user system, when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change the signature method from the old, you know, really basic AWS signature thing to the new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, signature version two, I’ve gone through all that. And when I went to go integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I’m like, you know, let me let me look and you know, let me make sure you know, overcast has been using s3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since its beginning, because I had the file upload feature. But that was using the old v1 signature method and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of these like, you know, 15 line functions I wrote to, you know, just do basic s3 commands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I thought, well, if I’m gonna be building, you know, this significant part of my infrastructure now on s3, let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure I’m doing everything the most up to date way. That way, you know, I don’t have to worry so much about deprecations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a longer time, etc. So I learned about, you know, the various different ways you’re supposed to now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address s3, including the new signature method, I did all that. Because I looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco s3 library for PHP, I’m supposed to be using from them. And it’s like 100 files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s thousands of lines of code, many thousands of lines of code. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word. And because S3 is now this monster of a service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside of Amazon Web Services, which is this monster of a suite of services, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far beyond what I need, which literally what I need is like, get, put, list, delete, and generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco authenticated URLs. That’s it. Like, what I need is the feature set it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2008. I just need that today. Like, I literally don’t need anything else. Like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTTPS support. Like, that’s… that might be… I don’t even need that! Like, that’s just optional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… anyway… So I see, like… When I look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to do to use their PHP library, and… The amount of bloat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and… You know, and I look at the code, and it’s talking… it’s like a… Middleware factory? I’m like, I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what half these words mean. Like, and I don’t even know what this is doing. The old way of doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a 15-line function in my utilities file. So clearly there has to be a simpler way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So of course I wrote my own, of course, right? It’s nobody’s surprise. You? And I so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have my entire S3 class that does everything I need to do in the most modern way is 250 lines of code in one file.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the class is just called S3. There’s no like namespace garbage with PHP’s backslashes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this crap like no it’s just one file called S3 and it’s 250 lines and it’s very very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple and it does everything the new signature and everything anyway. So all this is to say, of course, I wrote my own and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took a couple days to do it, but it was totally worth it, in my opinion, for my needs and goals. So when I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing with when I started deciding, all right, I’m going to use I’m going to try out these these clone services and see what works for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, well, crap, I wrote all of this to the brand new, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess not brand new, but to the newest, you know, AWS signature v2 and all these like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ways of addressing the host name and everything. And I thought, there is no way all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these clone services are gonna, like, I’m gonna have to rewrite the old method in my new file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and figure out how to do it and everything. But I’m like, let me just try it first. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried literally just swapping out the host name to the Linode endpoint,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just worked. And that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because all the stuff you were describing as new was like five years ago. It’s like, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but even then, like, you know, that’s, Who knows how long these services have been around? Who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, whenever Ceph started, they probably forked it then and haven’t really updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it since. User in the chat, Heavy Machinery says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should write my own S3 called Overcast O2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fantastic, I totally would. I thought about it. I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for my own use, just for cheap hosting reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of did that in my last job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. I’m sure this is not an uncommon thing. But anyway. Don’t recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just use S3. But yeah, so anyway, I think ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my needs are simple enough that hopefully I can use one of these other services because the cost is literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like five times less or even cheaper. So I’m trying that out. But anyway, I was just, all this is to say I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressed by how it literally was just a drop-in replacement. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the documentation for these services that say how to access them, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even tell you just use Amazon’s library and just change the endpoint to this one host name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very impressed by so far by Linode object storage. I decided not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try CloudFlare R2 because I asked on Twitter and people say there’s actually no way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve files publicly from it that’s built in. you have to write a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cloudflare worker, which is their own custom type of thing that can run on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their CDN endpoint nodes. It’s a very powerful thing from what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear, but I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t wanna get into that right now. So I’m not gonna do Cloudflare R2. I’m gonna try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode’s thing first, and if it doesn’t end up working for me, I’ll try Backblaze B2. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very impressed by these things so far. As for the original question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posed in the show notes is it okay to copy competitors API with something like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, s3 just became the standard. And then so and then other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made their own alternatives that work with it. Like, I don’t think that’s that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you ask the AWS, I think they’d be happy that this happened. And I mean, so some sometimes competitors aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John happy when it happens, like, Oh, we made this API, it’s our thing, you’re copying us, you’re taking advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we did this work in the market to say, Hey, here’s a storage API, right, your application gets and you just copied our API.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can get our customers and they don’t have to change their code, right. But the only reason to really be mad about that is if you’re afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John that your customers will do a better job than you do at providing an s3 compatible service. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the history behind this AWS. But I can tell you that what has actually happened is everybody into one of the s3
⏹️ ▶️ John API, all these storage vendors that used to have their own proprietary HTTP based APIs, because they did, they’re like, they saw
⏹️ ▶️ John s3, we’ll do our own thing, right? All of them had to add s3, because it became the standard, because no one wanted to change their software.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the end, Amazon still provides the best, most full-featured,
⏹️ ▶️ John highest specs, and often best priced if you’re a giant corporation. Highest priced, at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the best price, because they send a team of people who are going to be your AWS agents
⏹️ ▶️ John to work with your company. In the world of big bucks. That team of people is not coming
⏹️ ▶️ John to Fire Island. No, they are not. You do not have a team of people working with you. but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you spent a few dozen million more dollars in AWS, you would have a team of people. Anyway, and so Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ John this has been great for Amazon, because it is the de facto storage API standard and Amazon 100% controls it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when Amazon adds a feature that enough of its customers want, now Dell has to add
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature too in the next year or two. And by the way, they’re always perpetually behind what Amazon is doing, because Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls it out and you don’t find that, Dell and EMC don’t find out about it until AWS Inventor,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you hear it announced. And then, like I said, if it’s a popular feature, customers
⏹️ ▶️ John get cranky, like, oh, I wanna use that cool new feature, but your supposedly S3 compatible API doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and then they need to add it. They’re always behind, right? And that would be fine if they could beat them on price or
⏹️ ▶️ John performance and stuff, but it’s difficult to keep up with AWS. So AWS has control
⏹️ ▶️ John of the API that everyone else essentially is forced to use, and they’re always one step ahead of everyone else. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John s3 and AWS are actually pretty good services, like in terms of the specs and features and performance. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, in the end, I mean, maybe 80 years was pissed about this in the beginning, and maybe sued some people. I don’t know the history behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But right now they’re sitting pretty, like who wouldn’t want to and it’s not even like an industry standard that has a consortium
⏹️ ▶️ John doing Amazon can do what they want with this three, and everyone else just has to scramble to copy them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s and there’s so many benefits like when like to use use the tooling, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the tools has been invaluable to me when doing S3 development is transmit by panic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which most people know as an FTP app. But transmit has a ton of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like languages that speaks to servers to interact with them, including the S3 protocol. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can open up your S3 buckets in transmit, and it looks like a file system and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can go and you can browse things and you can quick look things and you can edit and delete. And when you’re developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an S3 based something, actually really useful. And I was able to like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just they have like in their in their screen to set up a new profile in transmit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You pick S3 as a protocol, but then you can give it a custom host name. So I just gave it the you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US East one little objects.com in there and it’s talking to my Linode like object storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just exactly the same way. Like that’s, that’s awesome like to have all of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tooling support and everything. It’s just very, it’s very wonderful as a developer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as to whether it’s like, you know, okay for the source company, you know, John, you’re right about, you know, strategically speaking, it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for Amazon, because the value that they are providing is not the API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the service behind it and all the different capabilities and the integration with other AWS services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s the value they’re providing. So I don’t think it really hurts them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have other people offering, you know, competing things for the basics. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, they have all these advantages by having this become the industry standard that they are still in full control of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of the high-end use will still go to them. But then the low-end use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, it greatly benefits people like me who are more value conscious. And that’s pretty great for us,
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of the value services, if you’re trying to undercut AWS on cost, A, it’s hard if you’re an enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John because, again, and they get the fancy enterprise pricing that they don’t pay at the retail thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John B, they’re just not gonna match AWS’s specs because they don’t have to. If you want to be on lower price,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to give up stuff. You can’t have 800 storage tiers. You can’t have 11 nines of data
⏹️ ▶️ John durability, which is what S3 has, right? If you wanna save some money, you don’t need 11 nines of data durability
⏹️ ▶️ John for your things. I’m assuming you don’t. You’d take seven nines probably. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty of nines for you, right? Some people don’t need any nines. And like, although AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John has models for that too, that, you know, they have the storage tiers where, you know, it’s only one location and you don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John if it goes away or whatever. So it’s difficult to compete even on the low end, but that’s the place where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly, you know, using Ceph, which is an open source cluster file system, using Ceph as the backend,
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you not have to essentially re-implement S3 because some open source thing did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is Ceph as good as S3? No, it’s not. It’s absolutely not. But if you wanna undercut
⏹️ ▶️ John AWS on price for regular people who aren’t giant enterprises and you don’t care about all those fancy features and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the safety and performance. Yeah, that’s the little niche
⏹️ ▶️ John that these companies can carve out for themselves. And it’s, I honestly, when I see a lot of these services,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder how many of them are just front ends for S3. And you may think, how
⏹️ ▶️ John is that possible? How can they undercut S3’s pricing? Volume discounts. Right, exactly, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you pay them
⏹️ ▶️ John what you think is less than the manufacturer suggested retail price for the service you’re getting, but they pay
⏹️ ▶️ John S3 the, you are a multi-million dollar corporation price. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so they’re just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just skimming off the top and they’re essentially giving you access to their,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, enterprise company discount S3, but saving a little bit for themselves. I don’t know if any of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing that. It’s just, that is a plausible thing that could be done. That’s amazing. That is kind of amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The magic of enterprise pricing, the world of, you know, enterprise software corporate services