The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► What kind of microphone do you have?

00:00:01 ◼   ► I know you were gonna give me like a

00:00:03 ◼   ► how to improve my audio, some help a while ago

00:00:06 ◼   ► and then we never followed through.

00:00:07 ◼   ► What kind of mic do you have?

00:00:09 ◼   ► - So I have both of the ones that everyone says

00:00:12 ◼   ► are the best mics for this purpose.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I have the Heil PR40 that Dan Benjamin

00:00:16 ◼   ► and all those people use, and I have the Shure SM7B.

00:00:20 ◼   ► And I prefer the Shure, I prefer the way my voice

00:00:22 ◼   ► sounds with the Shure.

00:00:23 ◼   ► The Heil PR40 makes people sound a little bit more nasal

00:00:26 ◼   ► and has like weird, it's like,

00:00:28 ◼   ► It's missing like the mid bass, but it has a lot of the lower bass.

00:00:32 ◼   ► So you sound like really bassy but not that present and not that warm with the PR-40.

00:00:38 ◼   ► So the SM7B is a really, really nice sounding mic, probably the best sounding mic for this purpose,

00:00:44 ◼   ► but has the giant asterisk that it needs a really nice and generally very expensive preamp to power it properly.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Yeah, screw that.

00:00:52 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:00:54 ◼   ► So that's what I use, of course.

00:00:56 ◼   ► I've got the old road podcaster, which is probably I don't I could I guess I could do better

00:01:01 ◼   ► You could I mean there's a question on how much it matters because your show has guests

00:01:07 ◼   ► It entered that rotate out every week

00:01:09 ◼   ► Like you don't want to sound that different from the guests now

00:01:11 ◼   ► There have been a lot of episodes your show where I think you sound worse than the guests

00:01:15 ◼   ► But that might be because of like weird EQ or going on or something else going on

00:01:19 ◼   ► You know, that might be something else in the process being not that great. I don't know

00:01:25 ◼   ► And the other thing is how do you talk into your mic I keep the mic

00:01:29 ◼   ► Underneath my face like I'm not it's sticking straight up and I'm you know, it's close to my mouth

00:01:36 ◼   ► But I have it where it's underneath my face. It's more or less like at my chin and going down. Yeah, you're doing it wrong

00:01:42 ◼   ► Yeah, you're supposed to I'm supposed to be like staring right into it, right?

00:01:46 ◼   ► Yeah, pretty much like my and and like yeah like so for mine like because I have the the crazy low output sm7b

00:01:52 ◼   ► I am like my lips are almost touching the pop filter. Sometimes they do touch the pop filter

00:01:57 ◼   ► I'm like right on top of it talking directly straight on into it

00:02:00 ◼   ► Yeah, see what happened. I'm asking all these questions because I came in

00:02:04 ◼   ► I spent a big chunk of the holidays not working in my home office was downstairs, you know, Nick dining room

00:02:11 ◼   ► you know being more of a

00:02:13 ◼   ► You know part of the family

00:02:15 ◼   ► And I came up to record the

00:02:22 ◼   ► Star Wars episode of the show with Sir Q'son Guy.

00:02:27 ◼   ► - That was good, by the way.

00:02:29 ◼   ► I thought I would hate that, 'cause it was so long.

00:02:31 ◼   ► I don't care that much about Star Wars,

00:02:33 ◼   ► but that was actually really good.

00:02:34 ◼   ► I really enjoyed it.

00:02:35 ◼   ► I listen to those people. - Those are the compliments

00:02:36 ◼   ► from people who said, "I don't even like Star Wars,

00:02:38 ◼   ► but I like that show."

00:02:38 ◼   ► That, to me, was, that's all that matters.

00:02:40 ◼   ► That meant that it came out the way I wanted it to.

00:02:43 ◼   ► I came up to my office, and my mic arm was on the ground

00:02:47 ◼   ► in front of my desk, and I thought,

00:02:50 ◼   ► I knew I didn't put it there,

00:02:51 ◼   ► And Amy records her show up here.

00:02:54 ◼   ► And I didn't think she'd recorded her episode recently.

00:02:57 ◼   ► But I thought it must have been her.

00:02:58 ◼   ► And I was like, why in the world would she disconnect it from the desk

00:03:01 ◼   ► and put it on the floor?

00:03:02 ◼   ► And I was a little annoyed.

00:03:04 ◼   ► And then I looked, and it was the fact that the arm mount had broken.

00:03:07 ◼   ► It just like-- just right where you would think,

00:03:09 ◼   ► right where the clamp goes on the desk, just like a stress fracture.

00:03:15 ◼   ► Which kind of makes sense, because it supports a fair amount of weight.

00:03:18 ◼   ► And it's the same arm that I had had ever since I started doing the first run of the show

00:03:22 ◼   ► Which I think was like 2007. I don't even know when the when that was so

00:03:26 ◼   ► But anyway, I had to get a new podcast arm and

00:03:30 ◼   ► Of course, I didn't set it up until right when we were supposed to record tonight

00:03:35 ◼   ► Naturally, and I'm looking at the instructions and it's like wow

00:03:38 ◼   ► They're showing me to set this mic up in a very different way than I have ever

00:03:42 ◼   ► Ever used the microphone

00:03:45 ◼   ► Yeah, no, you're definitely doing it wrong. I mean certain mics are made to be addressed like on the side

00:03:50 ◼   ► But that's not one of them. Yeah, but I'm not talking into the side. I am talking into the top of it

00:03:55 ◼   ► Well, you're kind of talking like over the top of it like you play. Yeah. Yeah, exactly exactly. Yeah, that's not good. I

00:04:01 ◼   ► Don't know. Maybe I could try to fix it right now

00:04:04 ◼   ► It seems to me though that if I do it their way

00:04:06 ◼   ► I'm gonna it's what I'm gonna be seeing I won't be able to see like my computer or anything

00:04:10 ◼   ► Yeah, you kind of got to like look through them like through the arm and kind of look, you know

00:04:14 ◼   ► I mean yeah I don't know maybe I'll put it at an angle or something does this

00:04:21 ◼   ► sound any better um yeah you sound a little bit louder a little bit clearer I

00:04:25 ◼   ► mean it's not a huge difference but it's a little different all right if this if

00:04:30 ◼   ► you see here a terrible noise it means that I've unscrewed this thing I mean

00:04:35 ◼   ► the road podcaster is not an amazing mic like you're not gonna see you're never

00:04:38 ◼   ► gonna sound amazing from it but you can sound good enough from it I can't get

00:04:43 ◼   ► the thing screws on to it. Alright. Oh shit. This will make for excellent audio. What a

00:04:50 ◼   ► broadcast. Alright. Now it's all floppy. These things are ridiculous.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Also the Rode Boom Arm that I assume you're using, I'm also using one. It's not the best

00:05:05 ◼   ► arm. It's pretty shitty. It works, but like mine, any slight vibration anywhere like this

00:05:12 ◼   ► Anywhere like in the desk or anything a spring inside the arm rattles

00:05:16 ◼   ► Which is completely opposite of the kind of thing. It's supposed to do

00:05:19 ◼   ► And it's just like I just I haven't ever

00:05:23 ◼   ► Replaced it because like, you know, it's not broken yet

00:05:26 ◼   ► It still works, but I even had the thought when I had the real when I had to order one

00:05:30 ◼   ► I just went to Amazon and I saw that it said road and I thought well, I've got a road Mike might as well get it

00:05:35 ◼   ► Yeah

00:05:36 ◼   ► You know and the old one was a heil. Is that you pronounce it? Yeah

00:05:39 ◼   ► That's how other people pronounce it. I don't know. All right

00:05:42 ◼   ► And even though I like I said it was seven years old and I sort of don't I'm not really angry that it broke

00:05:48 ◼   ► I still feel like well it broke. I'm not gonna buy another Heil, right?

00:05:51 ◼   ► So I just bought the road but then I had this and it was one of those things where I you know

00:05:56 ◼   ► Amazon makes it so easy. So it's like that's my thought process. My thought process was not a Heil

00:06:02 ◼   ► I already have a road mic and

00:06:05 ◼   ► It looked highly rated on Amazon and so like two clicks later

00:06:09 ◼   ► It was on its way. And so then with a little bit of thought I thought hmm, maybe I should have

00:06:14 ◼   ► Taken the usual advice and ask Marco

00:06:16 ◼   ► No, I mean that's what I'm I'm using the exact same arm like the road, you know, PS whatever arm. It's their only arm

00:06:22 ◼   ► I think I'm using the same one just because I had the podcaster

00:06:26 ◼   ► I like I bought the kit for five by five and then I upgraded my mic but never upgraded the boom arm because it still

00:06:32 ◼   ► Works the desk lamp does look sturdier than the aisle like the heil

00:06:35 ◼   ► After having looked at it. It's like I'm kind of surprised it didn't snap off right away

00:06:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm like, I don't really know where the road one would break

00:06:43 ◼   ► Like looking at the construction like, you know what? I don't know what part of this would be the weak point

00:06:47 ◼   ► But I don't think I mean

00:06:49 ◼   ► I think it's more likely that like one of the springs in the arm would snap and it would lose tension and just drop to

00:06:55 ◼   ► The desk. Yeah, I think that we're likely to fail

00:06:57 ◼   ► Yeah

00:06:58 ◼   ► And that actually was starting to happen with my house that it was starting starting to lose some tension and I could not there's no way

00:07:03 ◼   ► to like adjust that

00:07:05 ◼   ► Yeah, the road has these weird screws on the arm, but I don't know if those do anything.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Yeah. What are these Velcro straps for?

00:07:13 ◼   ► Those are for attaching the cable. Like, you basically attach the cable to the arm on its

00:07:19 ◼   ► way down using those. So that way you can have, like, a nice tidy cable going down to the base

00:07:24 ◼   ► of the arm. Oh, that would be nice. Yeah, that's what they're for.

00:07:28 ◼   ► All right, anyway. Yeah, I'll take a picture of my setup.

00:07:31 ◼   ► Quiet week for you. Yeah.

00:07:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:34 ◼   ► Yeah, nothing's ever going on.

00:07:37 ◼   ► For the record, we're recording on Thursday the 8th,

00:07:43 ◼   ► which is a night after you recorded ATP,

00:07:47 ◼   ► where I presume you talked about probably

00:07:48 ◼   ► all the same things we're gonna talk about tonight,

00:07:50 ◼   ► but I couldn't have listened to it yet

00:07:52 ◼   ► because I didn't catch the live broadcast.

00:07:55 ◼   ► But people like you, they won't mind hearing you

00:07:57 ◼   ► talk about it twice.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Yeah, they should be all right.

00:08:01 ◼   ► When did you publish your piece, Sunday?

00:08:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was Sunday night.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Part of the problem, I think, was that I published it

00:08:08 ◼   ► on a Sunday night, right before a,

00:08:13 ◼   ► right as a holiday vacation for a lot of people was ending,

00:08:16 ◼   ► and there's nothing going on in the news.

00:08:18 ◼   ► - Right.

00:08:19 ◼   ► - And so, a lot of the places that picked it up,

00:08:22 ◼   ► a lot of people were telling me,

00:08:23 ◼   ► yeah, never publish things at that time,

00:08:25 ◼   ► because people are so desperate for news

00:08:29 ◼   ► at some of these bigger sites,

00:08:30 ◼   ► that like, you know, there's nothing going on in tech,

00:08:33 ◼   ► you know, on a random Monday.

00:08:35 ◼   ► I mean, CES was starting,

00:08:36 ◼   ► but nothing had really been announced of any meaning yet.

00:08:40 ◼   ► And so everyone was saying like,

00:08:43 ◼   ► I couldn't have possibly had worse timing

00:08:45 ◼   ► if I didn't want it to be that noticed.

00:08:47 ◼   ► - Like if you had published the exact same piece,

00:08:49 ◼   ► word for word, not changed one bit, but maybe on Wednesday,

00:08:54 ◼   ► it might've, you know,

00:08:56 ◼   ► I think it would have gotten the attention it deserved,

00:09:00 ◼   ► but it wouldn't have gotten the attention it didn't deserve?

00:09:03 ◼   ► I don't know how even to put it.

00:09:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's basically it.

00:09:06 ◼   ► I mean, honestly, it didn't deserve the attention it got,

00:09:10 ◼   ► that's for sure.

00:09:11 ◼   ► It wasn't good.

00:09:14 ◼   ► The regret I have about it is that it just wasn't very good.

00:09:17 ◼   ► It was nowhere near my best work.

00:09:19 ◼   ► I didn't put enough effort into it.

00:09:23 ◼   ► I made a bunch of little mistakes in it,

00:09:25 ◼   ► and it just wasn't very good.

00:09:26 ◼   ► And then for that to become extremely widespread

00:09:30 ◼   ► and to have it be under quite a bit of scrutiny,

00:09:34 ◼   ► that is just frustrating.

00:09:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, so for the record--

00:09:37 ◼   ► - And it's my fault.

00:09:39 ◼   ► - People listening extemporaneously,

00:09:41 ◼   ► people who are listening when this episode first comes out

00:09:43 ◼   ► will know exactly what we're talking about,

00:09:44 ◼   ► but for the record, we should say what it was,

00:09:47 ◼   ► which is that on Sunday,

00:09:48 ◼   ► you published an article titled,

00:09:50 ◼   ► headlined, "Apple Has Lost the Functional High Ground."

00:09:54 ◼   ► I think if if I may a nutshell summary is I you've detected that over the last few years the quality of Apple's

00:10:02 ◼   ► Software has gotten worse

00:10:04 ◼   ► Correct. Not any one particular thing

00:10:07 ◼   ► just in general and that it concerns you about the future of the company and

00:10:13 ◼   ► It's the reason you've switched to the Mac in the first place a decade ago is that you were sick of having little stupid things

00:10:19 ◼   ► Like little annoying bugs here there everywhere all day long

00:10:24 ◼   ► that it just works factor is sort of fading from Apple's software platforms.

00:10:29 ◼   ► Right, and like a lot of the a lot of the pushback I mean the reason it spread so

00:10:35 ◼   ► quickly so incredibly quickly I mean it had hundreds of retweets within a few

00:10:40 ◼   ► hours of publishing it and then it spread from there. The reason it spread

00:10:45 ◼   ► I think is because a lot of people agree and and a lot of people still argued

00:10:50 ◼   ► with it, of course. But I think if I was totally wrong, it

00:10:54 ◼   ► wouldn't have spread. You know, it's not like I'm publishing

00:10:55 ◼   ► this on some major news site where people like you would make

00:10:58 ◼   ► fun of me if I got it wrong. Like, I'm publishing this on my

00:11:01 ◼   ► personal site. Like, it's not widely read most of the time.

00:11:04 ◼   ► And so, you know, I don't think it would have spread if there

00:11:08 ◼   ► wasn't some truth there.

00:11:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the word I used and I saw a couple of other

00:11:13 ◼   ► people use it. I know Hockenberry did too. And I think

00:11:15 ◼   ► it's because it's the perfect word that it resonated.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Right. Or it hit a nerve one of those.

00:11:20 ◼   ► I think Resonate is better.

00:11:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, probably.

00:11:23 ◼   ► That's why you're the pro writer.

00:11:26 ◼   ► - I don't know, to me Resonate is exactly what happened.

00:11:29 ◼   ► It's like it felt true more so than thought true.

00:11:34 ◼   ► It just felt right.

00:11:35 ◼   ► - Right, and very few people have said

00:11:38 ◼   ► you are completely wrong.

00:11:39 ◼   ► Most people have just said,

00:11:41 ◼   ► well, I would have said it differently,

00:11:43 ◼   ► or it isn't as severe as you say.

00:11:45 ◼   ► And that's like, what I regret,

00:11:47 ◼   ► and where I felt my failing was that

00:11:50 ◼   ► I worded some things too severely,

00:11:52 ◼   ► and which of course is a frequent problem I have.

00:11:56 ◼   ► But so I worded some things too severely

00:11:58 ◼   ► and that detracted from the validity of what I wrote.

00:12:02 ◼   ► But the fact is, I think the overall sentiment

00:12:06 ◼   ► of Apple's software has some quality problems

00:12:09 ◼   ► in recent years and it doesn't seem to be getting better,

00:12:13 ◼   ► that I think is what resonated with people

00:12:15 ◼   ► pretty unambiguously.

00:12:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, you do, you have a sort of,

00:12:20 ◼   ► it's almost like a no-nonsense style.

00:12:21 ◼   ► Like, and I'll vouch for it.

00:12:24 ◼   ► You certainly aren't doing it.

00:12:25 ◼   ► You're not sensational.

00:12:26 ◼   ► You don't overstate things for sensational purposes

00:12:30 ◼   ► because you're not looking for hits or page views

00:12:33 ◼   ► 'cause you don't even have, you know, you use the deck.

00:12:35 ◼   ► You don't even get paid by page views.

00:12:37 ◼   ► You know, like, you're not gonna get extra this month

00:12:39 ◼   ► because you had an explosive story this week

00:12:41 ◼   ► that got, you know, a couple hundred thousand

00:12:43 ◼   ► extra page views.

00:12:44 ◼   ► It doesn't give you a nickel.

00:12:44 ◼   ► In fact, it could actually cost me money if I end up going over some bandwidth allocations at my host

00:12:49 ◼   ► So right more popular an article is it actually might cost me more money. That's funny. It's actually true, right?

00:12:54 ◼   ► Which is the opposite of when you know?

00:12:56 ◼   ► You know when Dan Lyons trumps up something at Valley wag

00:13:02 ◼   ► It's because you know, they measure their success month to month by page views. You're not in that game

00:13:07 ◼   ► You know, that's not why that's not the way that you overstated it. It's just sort of a no-nonsense style

00:13:13 ◼   ► Well, but you know and and you're right that that's what I intended

00:13:17 ◼   ► But because I did I did use like so what like one of these samples like I originally said quality has taken a nosedive

00:13:24 ◼   ► And that was the wrong word really it hasn't taken a nosedive

00:13:28 ◼   ► It's been a gradual decline and what I meant really was a decline

00:13:31 ◼   ► That's just now in really bad shape

00:13:33 ◼   ► But a nosedive suggests like an acceleration of like all of a sudden. It's now dropping quickly, and that's not really the case

00:13:40 ◼   ► case. It's more of a gradual progression. But anyway, so like, you know, there are things

00:13:43 ◼   ► like that. And yeah, overall, like, I regret having written it simply because it put some

00:13:51 ◼   ► of my most mediocre to worst work in front of so many people and put my name on it forever.

00:13:58 ◼   ► Whereas like, I don't regret having said that Apple has problems. I just regret that I didn't

00:14:04 ◼   ► say it better.

00:14:05 ◼   ► >> Right. And what happened then is that it really went explosive.

00:14:08 ◼   ► I mean, like you --

00:14:09 ◼   ► >> Oh, my God.

00:14:09 ◼   ► >> You even said -- I guess it was your Google Analytics, but whatever.

00:14:12 ◼   ► You -- you know, you had -- your analytics showed that it was more popular

00:14:16 ◼   ► than anything you had written in all of 2014.

00:14:18 ◼   ► >> Correct.

00:14:19 ◼   ► >> Which is amazing, really, that, you know,

00:14:21 ◼   ► five days into the year you've already topped last year.

00:14:24 ◼   ► It just got picked up.

00:14:25 ◼   ► It got picked up and relinked and relinked and relinked.

00:14:28 ◼   ► And I guess Business Insider got it started.

00:14:31 ◼   ► Here's their headline.

00:14:33 ◼   ► Apple's software is in a quote, nose dive, end quote,

00:14:37 ◼   ► that is deeply concerning longtime Apple supporters,

00:14:40 ◼   ► as Jairo writing a perfect Business Insider headline.

00:14:45 ◼   ► - Right, and the thing is, like, usually,

00:14:47 ◼   ► I could pick on Business Insider and say,

00:14:49 ◼   ► "You guys are such pieces of shit for this,"

00:14:51 ◼   ► 'cause usually they are.

00:14:52 ◼   ► In this case, they really, the original version

00:14:55 ◼   ► had a couple of, like, paraphrases in it

00:14:58 ◼   ► that were not what I said, that were more inflammatory,

00:15:01 ◼   ► but I since complained about them

00:15:03 ◼   ► and he updated them to be more accurate.

00:15:05 ◼   ► So over, and the headline, like, I did say that.

00:15:09 ◼   ► I didn't really mean to say it that severely,

00:15:12 ◼   ► but I did say that.

00:15:13 ◼   ► So overall, of all the hat jobs they've done to me

00:15:16 ◼   ► over the years, this is one of the better ones.

00:15:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it's, I guess it's not, yeah,

00:15:22 ◼   ► it's not necessarily that as it stands right now

00:15:24 ◼   ► that it's unfair, but it's fuel to the fire.

00:15:28 ◼   ► - Right, and actually,

00:15:30 ◼   ► A lot of people don't realize this.

00:15:32 ◼   ► A lot of people have no clue how insanely popular

00:15:38 ◼   ► and pervasive Business Insider is.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Like, whenever I mention on Business Insider any context,

00:15:45 ◼   ► I will have everybody who has ever met me,

00:15:49 ◼   ► my mom's friends, my friends' parents,

00:15:52 ◼   ► like people who are outside of the tech news sphere,

00:15:57 ◼   ► they will all contact me and be like,

00:16:00 ◼   ► "Oh my God, I read this article about you

00:16:01 ◼   ► on Business Insider, congratulations."

00:16:04 ◼   ► They consider it a good thing whenever I mention there,

00:16:05 ◼   ► even though it's always so trashy.

00:16:07 ◼   ► Sometimes one of my products will occasionally get mentioned

00:16:12 ◼   ► in some major tech publication like Mac World,

00:16:15 ◼   ► or occasionally I've even been in New York Times

00:16:17 ◼   ► or Wall Street Journal or something like that.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Never a peep from anybody.

00:16:21 ◼   ► When I'm in Business Insider

00:16:23 ◼   ► for the stupidest smallest thing,

00:16:25 ◼   ► everyone in my life comes forward,

00:16:26 ◼   ► "Oh my God, I haven't seen you in 15 years,

00:16:29 ◼   ► but I read this article about you in Business Insider.

00:16:31 ◼   ► That site, I don't know why it's so popular,

00:16:34 ◼   ► but it is really popular.

00:16:36 ◼   ► And so whenever they write anything about me

00:16:39 ◼   ► or one of my products, it gets picked up everywhere.

00:16:43 ◼   ► It gets carried everywhere,

00:16:45 ◼   ► and they ultimately dictate the narrative.

00:16:47 ◼   ► If you look, almost every other site

00:16:50 ◼   ► that republished this article

00:16:52 ◼   ► was republishing from Business Insider.

00:16:54 ◼   ► A lot of them were linking back to Business Insider

00:16:55 ◼   ► instead of my site.

00:16:56 ◼   ► A lot of them were taking the Business Insider headlines

00:16:59 ◼   ► in quotes word for word.

00:17:00 ◼   ► It really was Business Insider that led the promotion

00:17:05 ◼   ► on this, whether willingly or not, I don't know,

00:17:08 ◼   ► it doesn't really matter, but people do not realize,

00:17:11 ◼   ► your site seeds all the tech sites.

00:17:14 ◼   ► Whenever you write about something,

00:17:16 ◼   ► all the tech sites write about it a day later.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Business Insider seeds everything else.

00:17:20 ◼   ► It's really weird, and I wish it wasn't that way,

00:17:23 ◼   ► but it really is.

00:17:24 ◼   ► - It's sort of the opposite of my sort of popularity.

00:17:28 ◼   ► My popularity is super niche.

00:17:30 ◼   ► And so it is a big deal for some people.

00:17:32 ◼   ► Like if I link to somebody,

00:17:34 ◼   ► first time I ever linked to their blog,

00:17:36 ◼   ► a lot of people will tweet to me like,

00:17:38 ◼   ► "Oh my God, you just made my day."

00:17:39 ◼   ► And that's hard for me.

00:17:42 ◼   ► I don't, I'm still not yet.

00:17:44 ◼   ► I can't say I'll ever get used to that,

00:17:45 ◼   ► but I understand it.

00:17:47 ◼   ► I know.

00:17:48 ◼   ► I know what it was like.

00:17:49 ◼   ► I know what it was like the first time

00:17:51 ◼   ► that Slashdot linked to Daring Fireball way back in 2002.

00:17:54 ◼   ► And it was just crazy.

00:17:55 ◼   ► And it's not even that I loved Slashdot,

00:17:57 ◼   ► but it's like I knew that holy shit, that's a big deal.

00:18:00 ◼   ► - Right, it was like getting on the dig front page

00:18:01 ◼   ► back in 2006.

00:18:03 ◼   ► - Right, I also remember that my site didn't go down

00:18:05 ◼   ► and it was, I thought, up until that point,

00:18:09 ◼   ► I had no idea whether, there was no way for me to fake it.

00:18:12 ◼   ► I couldn't know if I would survive a slash starting.

00:18:15 ◼   ► But I don't think it, like some guy,

00:18:21 ◼   ► somebody writes a blog post,

00:18:22 ◼   ► I've never linked to them before, I link to them.

00:18:24 ◼   ► They're not gonna get their mom calling them and say,

00:18:26 ◼   ► "Hey, I saw a Daring Fireball link to you."

00:18:28 ◼   ► 'Cause her mom doesn't know who I am either.

00:18:31 ◼   ► - Unless the mom is really cool.

00:18:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it would be an exception.

00:18:34 ◼   ► It would have to be like Brent Simmons,

00:18:36 ◼   ► where his mom's like a programmer and stuff.

00:18:38 ◼   ► - Right, right.

00:18:39 ◼   ► - And I shouldn't even say mom, dad, anybody,

00:18:41 ◼   ► who's not in the thing

00:18:43 ◼   ► and is already one of my regular readers.

00:18:44 ◼   ► Whereas Business Insider has a very, for whatever reason,

00:18:47 ◼   ► has a very broad readership of typical people.

00:18:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, what they write goes very far.

00:18:53 ◼   ► Which is really unfortunate, 'cause it's so bad usually.

00:18:56 ◼   ► Yeah, it's something to do with, you know, that they're a certain brand of, I don't know, sensationalizing stuff.

00:19:03 ◼   ► Well, look, I mean, you know, there are things in the world that, like, there are choices people can make

00:19:09 ◼   ► where you can do things like the good, high-quality, morally sound way,

00:19:15 ◼   ► or you take this one little shortcut here, if you're willing to give up a little bit of integrity here,

00:19:20 ◼   ► or a little bit of sensationalism here, you can boost your numbers by 15, 20, 30%.

00:19:25 ◼   ► and they choose the latter all the time.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Like, so, like, whereas you choose the former,

00:19:31 ◼   ► and that's what we consider in our community to be, like,

00:19:34 ◼   ► the right way to do it, if you're shameless enough,

00:19:39 ◼   ► and if you prioritize numbers and success in that kind

00:19:43 ◼   ► over integrity and quality,

00:19:46 ◼   ► then you can get insane numbers and insane popularity,

00:19:49 ◼   ► and they have chosen that.

00:19:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and let's not overstate things here either.

00:19:53 ◼   ► They're certainly not the worst.

00:19:55 ◼   ► They're there, you know and the other thing too they have talented people and they have had talented people Dan Fromer used to write there

00:20:01 ◼   ► Yeah, that's where I met him. I used to hate him and then like he came to the tumblr offices

00:20:04 ◼   ► I met him there first and then like he left and became a normal good person

00:20:08 ◼   ► It was amazing and I know Jay Jay arrow who wrote this piece on you. I uh, you know, he's good. He's smart

00:20:14 ◼   ► You know, I you could just tell from like reading some Twitter

00:20:17 ◼   ► Nick Carlson who I think is his name the guy who just wrote the published the book on Yahoo and Marissa Meyer

00:20:24 ◼   ► You know, he's a good reporter and yes, I'll give him that. Yeah, you know, and I think it's interesting too

00:20:30 ◼   ► I think I think the success he's having promoting his book because it seems I'm reading a lot of stuff about his book

00:20:35 ◼   ► It's just popping up a lot of places

00:20:37 ◼   ► I think it just goes to show that at Business Insider, they're good at promoting stuff including themselves

00:20:42 ◼   ► You know like that's part. It's not just that they're whether you're good bad or whatever as a writer a reporter

00:20:49 ◼   ► Being able to self promote is a skill and that it's to me is part of there a big part of their success

00:20:54 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know and Henry Blodgett's always had that to founder of the site

00:21:00 ◼   ► Among some other issues, but that's fine

00:21:02 ◼   ► But that's a definite thing though, you know, it's like there's there's certain people, you know, like he's good at getting on TV

00:21:11 ◼   ► You know and there's that certain type of Wall Street person who?

00:21:15 ◼   ► Is like just goes on CNBC all the time and I would drive me nuts. I I would hate going on TV

00:21:21 ◼   ► I would I wouldn't think I'd want to go on once I

00:21:23 ◼   ► Can't imagine like the the amount of stress that would bring

00:21:27 ◼   ► Hey, I would I would definitely if I was ever invited I would definitely decline

00:21:32 ◼   ► I've had invitations many times and I almost oh

00:21:34 ◼   ► I mean I went on Charlie Rose that one time and that was cool and it was also pretty easy because it was like five

00:21:39 ◼   ► in the afternoon

00:21:40 ◼   ► Getting to New York at five in the afternoon is super easy

00:21:43 ◼   ► I just take like a one o'clock train from Philly and I like going to Manhattan anyway

00:21:48 ◼   ► So that was cool. And that was I had a blast and it was well worth, you know

00:21:51 ◼   ► It wasn't that much of a time commitment

00:21:54 ◼   ► But like I've had offers to go on like Bloomberg TV and it's like, you know, they want me in New York by like 5 a.m

00:22:01 ◼   ► Eastern yeah, and it's like no it's not gonna work and but it really doesn't

00:22:06 ◼   ► Compute with them that somebody would not want to be on TV like people who are in TV

00:22:12 ◼   ► seem to be people who've

00:22:14 ◼   ► Whether they're on the air or not like that or whether they're just working as like a producer or whatever

00:22:19 ◼   ► It seems like the TV industry is only composed of people who've spent their whole lives wanting to be in the TV industry

00:22:24 ◼   ► And they can't it just doesn't compute it doesn't they can't grasp it and I say, you know

00:22:30 ◼   ► I I really don't think I ever want to be on your show. Thanks for asking. I'm flattered but

00:22:34 ◼   ► You know being in New York by 5 a.m

00:22:37 ◼   ► It's not gonna work.

00:22:39 ◼   ► - Well also, it's similar to the whole,

00:22:42 ◼   ► you should do this for exposure kind of arguments.

00:22:45 ◼   ► A lot of times they can't imagine why anybody would say no

00:22:49 ◼   ► to this great honor that they're bestowing upon you.

00:22:51 ◼   ► And the fact is, there's a cost to you being on TV,

00:22:54 ◼   ► and there's risks to you being on TV,

00:22:57 ◼   ► and it just might not be worth it.

00:22:59 ◼   ► That's how I'm realizing as I'm getting older

00:23:03 ◼   ► and hopefully wiser, but I keep making the same mistakes

00:23:05 ◼   ► over and over again, so probably not wiser,

00:23:07 ◼   ► but as I at least get older, I'm realizing that

00:23:10 ◼   ► talking to journalists for interviews,

00:23:12 ◼   ► for stories about anything,

00:23:14 ◼   ► when they call you for a quote or anything,

00:23:17 ◼   ► it is almost never worth agreeing to that

00:23:20 ◼   ► because the risk is so high that

00:23:22 ◼   ► they're going to distort your words to fit their narrative

00:23:25 ◼   ► in a way that you don't approve of,

00:23:27 ◼   ► that you can't, that's totally out of your control.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And it's like, in this day and age,

00:23:31 ◼   ► if I have something to say, I can say it on my blog.

00:23:34 ◼   ► Now granted, now that has the other problem,

00:23:36 ◼   ► just happen, which is like, I better be sure I say it well there, and everything I write

00:23:41 ◼   ► there can be taken and quoted elsewhere, but at least I wrote it my way. Like, it seems

00:23:46 ◼   ► like less of a risk to do it that way than, like, to just be quoted in some random news

00:23:50 ◼   ► story and, like, you have no control over that, you usually, unless you have a very

00:23:55 ◼   ► strong relationship with them, usually you can't get, like, review, like, quote review

00:23:58 ◼   ► or anything, and if somebody screws up and publishes something that you didn't quite

00:24:03 ◼   ► there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.

00:24:05 ◼   ► Even if they publish a correction, the damage is done.

00:24:08 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:24:09 ◼   ► - So it's, and going on TV is probably even worse,

00:24:12 ◼   ► because you're live, you can't even carefully

00:24:15 ◼   ► think about your words for very long.

00:24:16 ◼   ► You're live, you need to get a comment right now

00:24:19 ◼   ► and try to sound smart, and it just,

00:24:22 ◼   ► and everyone's watching.

00:24:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's also, it's not leisurely.

00:24:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:24:27 ◼   ► - I think I, it's funny, I was gonna say,

00:24:31 ◼   ► think I did pretty well on Charlie Rose but they've never asked me back so maybe

00:24:34 ◼   ► not I remember I think I watched it I remember just like like you know I think

00:24:39 ◼   ► I immediately forgot about it so it couldn't have been good or bad really it

00:24:42 ◼   ► was me and David Pogue talking about the iPhone 5 I want to say like I'm gonna

00:24:48 ◼   ► place it two years ago pretty sure it was iPhone 5 well you probably did

00:24:53 ◼   ► exactly what you what is like the optimal scenario for a TV appearance

00:24:57 ◼   ► like that, which is be good but completely forgettable

00:25:01 ◼   ► because we all forgot it.

00:25:03 ◼   ► And that's good because it could go a lot worse.

00:25:06 ◼   ► It can't really go much better.

00:25:08 ◼   ► And so that's, and now you can say,

00:25:11 ◼   ► I've been on the Charlie Rose show.

00:25:13 ◼   ► You can tell your parents, they can see it.

00:25:15 ◼   ► Like, it's all good.

00:25:16 ◼   ► So you have all the benefits, but nothing went wrong.

00:25:20 ◼   ► - Sitting in a chair that was warmed by Matt Damon's ass.

00:25:24 ◼   ► - Is that an honor?

00:25:25 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:25:26 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:25:26 ◼   ► they're walking into a room as he walks out.

00:25:30 ◼   ► Did you stop by and say, hey, I like your site, man.

00:25:33 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, he wanted a t-shirt.

00:25:36 ◼   ► Sure he's a reader.

00:25:36 ◼   ► No, I learned what to do in that scenario from Merlin Mann.

00:25:41 ◼   ► It's such great advice that you just

00:25:43 ◼   ► have to know this before-- just think about it now,

00:25:46 ◼   ► before when there's no famous people around.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And if you ever meet somebody who's famous, truly famous,

00:25:51 ◼   ► and you're going to get a chance to say something,

00:25:53 ◼   ► all you say is, "Huge fan of your work."

00:25:57 ◼   ► - Oh, that's good.

00:25:58 ◼   ► Merlin's so good. - That's it.

00:25:59 ◼   ► You just say, "Huge fan of your work," and you mean it.

00:26:01 ◼   ► Don't say it if you don't mean it.

00:26:02 ◼   ► Just look at him and say,

00:26:03 ◼   ► "Hey, great to meet you.

00:26:04 ◼   ► "A huge, huge fan of your work."

00:26:06 ◼   ► And then that's it.

00:26:07 ◼   ► And then you let him go.

00:26:08 ◼   ► You just, maybe neither, I think with Damon,

00:26:10 ◼   ► we didn't even stop walking.

00:26:12 ◼   ► But it was, there was a moment, I could say something,

00:26:15 ◼   ► I just said, "Hey, huge fan of your work."

00:26:17 ◼   ► And he goes, "Thanks."

00:26:18 ◼   ► And then he left.

00:26:20 ◼   ► - See, and you have that story too.

00:26:22 ◼   ► So it worked out.

00:26:23 ◼   ► Right?

00:26:24 ◼   ► Yeah, and anyway, what you said is exactly right, though,

00:26:29 ◼   ► about talking to reporters, where,

00:26:31 ◼   ► and it's definitely my experience,

00:26:32 ◼   ► where almost all of them have the story written,

00:26:35 ◼   ► whether it's actually written, written,

00:26:37 ◼   ► or it's just like an outline in their head.

00:26:39 ◼   ► They've already got it written,

00:26:41 ◼   ► and they will take your quote and make it fit

00:26:43 ◼   ► what they've already written, nine times out of 10.

00:26:45 ◼   ► So I don't talk to reporters anymore, either,

00:26:47 ◼   ► unless I know them, unless I know,

00:26:49 ◼   ► either know them personally,

00:26:50 ◼   ► or if I'm familiar with their work and trust them.

00:26:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's different when you know them personally.

00:26:57 ◼   ► And I'll talk to people I know,

00:26:58 ◼   ► but that's a pretty small list, really.

00:27:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, or just familiar with their work.

00:27:04 ◼   ► But yeah, again, but Joe Schmo from Bloomberg, no way.

00:27:08 ◼   ► - Not a, yeah, terrible idea.

00:27:10 ◼   ► It can only go badly, and it probably will.

00:27:12 ◼   ► - Right.

00:27:13 ◼   ► - I almost worked there.

00:27:16 ◼   ► - At Bloomberg?

00:27:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, when I was interviewing

00:27:18 ◼   ► for what became the Tumblr job,

00:27:21 ◼   ► I was weighing those two offers.

00:27:22 ◼   ► I had gotten an offer from both,

00:27:23 ◼   ► I interviewed at both places.

00:27:25 ◼   ► And I got to choose between Bloomberg

00:27:28 ◼   ► and this giant glass building

00:27:30 ◼   ► where all the walls inside were glass,

00:27:32 ◼   ► and this caused problems because you couldn't see

00:27:34 ◼   ► how to exit the conference room you were in.

00:27:36 ◼   ► There's like optical illusions everywhere.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And they told me they had to add this like row of stickers

00:27:43 ◼   ► that were just like the company logo.

00:27:45 ◼   ► This row of decals on every wall

00:27:47 ◼   ► that approximately eye level,

00:27:49 ◼   ► just so you wouldn't run into things,

00:27:50 ◼   ► like run into walls.

00:27:52 ◼   ► You know, a typical corporate design of like,

00:27:54 ◼   ► it looks really cool, it doesn't work at all.

00:27:57 ◼   ► And so I get to weigh that,

00:27:59 ◼   ► of crashing into glass walls

00:28:01 ◼   ► and sitting in a very long table

00:28:04 ◼   ► with about four feet of width of the table assigned to me.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Little six inch rim around the desk,

00:28:11 ◼   ► like not even cubicle wall,

00:28:12 ◼   ► it's like a six inch rim around my little four foot space,

00:28:15 ◼   ► typing on a PC working on Fortran code.

00:28:19 ◼   ► - No. - Or.

00:28:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, that was the job.

00:28:22 ◼   ► - Really?

00:28:23 ◼   ► - And everyone I interviewed with was not that nice,

00:28:27 ◼   ► and I thought I bombed the interview.

00:28:29 ◼   ► And so I got an offer for an interview

00:28:32 ◼   ► that I thought I bombed from people

00:28:34 ◼   ► I don't really wanna work with

00:28:35 ◼   ► in this terrible environment,

00:28:37 ◼   ► like this giant boiler room kind of environment,

00:28:39 ◼   ► just like this little strip of a desk

00:28:41 ◼   ► with a Fortran terminal.

00:28:42 ◼   ► Or I could go work for this guy who looks like he's 15, David Karp, and he's working

00:28:49 ◼   ► out of some office that I don't quite understand that a bunch of other people are in, but he

00:28:53 ◼   ► doesn't work for them.

00:28:54 ◼   ► There's some arrangement where they're sharing the office or something.

00:28:56 ◼   ► Everything is red and colorful, and the office is full of children's toys.

00:29:00 ◼   ► And he told me that he'd buy me a Mac and I could work on a Mac.

00:29:04 ◼   ► So I went with that.

00:29:06 ◼   ► That was literally why I went there.

00:29:08 ◼   ► I can't believe they've still got Fortran code in production.

00:29:11 ◼   ► I mean, that was literally a joke.

00:29:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:29:12 ◼   ► - I think it was this week's Simpsons.

00:29:15 ◼   ► - No, I actually, I was recently,

00:29:17 ◼   ► I was on a flight recently sitting next to

00:29:19 ◼   ► a guy who works for IBM and he was a young guy.

00:29:22 ◼   ► He was in his probably mid-20s.

00:29:24 ◼   ► But he works in IBM's mainframe division,

00:29:28 ◼   ► which is still running and there's like, you know,

00:29:30 ◼   ► big banks and insurance companies and things like,

00:29:32 ◼   ► they still use IBM mainframes.

00:29:35 ◼   ► And he writes all in Fortran or, no, I think it was COBOL.

00:29:38 ◼   ► One of those two, like that's what he does all day,

00:29:41 ◼   ► is write low-level mainframe operating system code

00:29:45 ◼   ► in Cobalt or Fortran.

00:29:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's crazy.

00:29:48 ◼   ► - In this, and he's, I mean, he wasn't even born

00:29:50 ◼   ► when this thing was originally written.

00:29:53 ◼   ► - I feel bad 'cause there's probably people

00:29:54 ◼   ► who listen to the show who have a job like that.

00:29:56 ◼   ► - Oh, I'm sure.

00:29:57 ◼   ► It's more common than you think.

00:29:58 ◼   ► That's the crazy part.

00:30:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't really wanna make fun,

00:30:01 ◼   ► I'm not trying to make fun.

00:30:02 ◼   ► I'm just sort of stunned that there's that much,

00:30:05 ◼   ► what would you call it, like inertia

00:30:10 ◼   ► with programming languages, that they just,

00:30:12 ◼   ► once they get any kind of mass success, they just never die.

00:30:15 ◼   ► - Well, in a system like that, I mean,

00:30:17 ◼   ► if you think about it like from like a programmer

00:30:20 ◼   ► out of college viewpoint, and you think,

00:30:22 ◼   ► why are you using Fortran for your bank's large systems?

00:30:26 ◼   ► You're stupid, that's dumb, I wanna rewrite this whole thing

00:30:28 ◼   ► in Node or whatever. (laughs)

00:30:31 ◼   ► And then, you know, but the reality is like,

00:30:33 ◼   ► the wise programmer would look at that and be like,

00:30:35 ◼   ► all right, this bank's massive financial backend

00:30:38 ◼   ► that has been running fine for the most part

00:30:40 ◼   ► for like 30 years is written in some crazy language,

00:30:44 ◼   ► do I want the job of rewriting it from scratch?

00:30:48 ◼   ► Hell no.

00:30:48 ◼   ► Like that's it, that has red flags all over it.

00:30:51 ◼   ► You do not want that kind of responsibility.

00:30:54 ◼   ► Get out of there.

00:30:55 ◼   ► I don't know any wise programmers who would take that job.

00:30:59 ◼   ► - It's sort of if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

00:31:02 ◼   ► If it ain't broke, don't rewrite it.

00:31:04 ◼   ► - And certainly don't touch it

00:31:05 ◼   ► when there's like massive amounts of money at stake.

00:31:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:09 ◼   ► Crazy.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Let's take a break, I'll do the first sponsor,

00:31:12 ◼   ► and it is our good friends at Fracture.

00:31:16 ◼   ► You guys remember Fracture?

00:31:17 ◼   ► You send them your photos,

00:31:21 ◼   ► and they send them back to you printed directly on glass.

00:31:25 ◼   ► Not paper with a piece of glass in front of it on the frame,

00:31:30 ◼   ► the picture is printed right on the glass.

00:31:32 ◼   ► I've never seen anything else like it.

00:31:34 ◼   ► You really do kinda have to see it to believe it.

00:31:37 ◼   ► It really makes it seem as though it's right there on the surface.

00:31:40 ◼   ► I always compare it to like when the iPhone switched to the laminated displays,

00:31:45 ◼   ► putting the pixels closer to the glass.

00:31:47 ◼   ► It's exactly that sort of effect, but with an analog print of your photos.

00:31:53 ◼   ► They have all sorts of sizes to choose from.

00:31:56 ◼   ► The square ones that Marco has made famous for

00:31:58 ◼   ► printing your app icons for every time he sells an app to somebody,

00:32:01 ◼   ► he makes a copy, looks really nice.

00:32:05 ◼   ► been in Marco's office they look great on the wall. Two really really big ones

00:32:09 ◼   ► you know big rectangular ones they ship in these amazing containers that double

00:32:15 ◼   ► as like the frame that you can use to hang on the wall or to put on your desk

00:32:21 ◼   ► propped up right there in this nifty cardboard shipping container you don't

00:32:26 ◼   ► have to buy an extra frame to put the thing in you can mount them directly on

00:32:29 ◼   ► the wall just as the glass they look really cool so there's nothing else to

00:32:34 ◼   ► buy it's not like when you get printouts and then you have to go put them in a frame and

00:32:38 ◼   ► you have to take the frame apart and then it's easy so easy you just send them your

00:32:43 ◼   ► pictures they send you back printouts of them on glass where do you go to find out more

00:32:51 ◼   ► go to their website fracture I think it's fractureme.com that's correct and there's

00:32:58 ◼   ► a new coupon code. Use this code daring fireball all one word and you will save 15% on whatever

00:33:07 ◼   ► you order. So that's great. The price is already fantastic. Save 15% they'll use that code

00:33:12 ◼   ► daring fireball and go to fracture me.com and see for yourself. Great sponsor. Really,

00:33:21 ◼   ► really recommend them.

00:33:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm looking right at five fracture prints in my office right now.

00:33:27 ◼   ► Oh my god, they're all we have them all over the place and they're great gift idea, too

00:33:31 ◼   ► So, I don't know the immediate backlash not backlash over over

00:33:38 ◼   ► Over

00:33:41 ◼   ► Representation of your thing is kind of interesting and it's sad and depressing but I feel like the better topic is to actually talk about

00:33:48 ◼   ► some of the problems apple software has

00:33:51 ◼   ► Yeah, because one of the things I got

00:33:53 ◼   ► Is it definitely because it hits such a mainstream media thing? I mean people within Apple definitely noticed and I

00:34:01 ◼   ► Heard from a couple friends at Apple not like PR not like Apple PR reach out and telling me, you know

00:34:08 ◼   ► Trying to spin it or anything just you know, like engineers and some of them

00:34:12 ◼   ► III it was really interesting what they said all of them said different things but like one of them was pretty surprised and

00:34:17 ◼   ► More or less of do you really think that because I you know, I you know

00:34:21 ◼   ► This is the friend at apples more or less paraphrase that you know, I think that we've been doing pretty good

00:34:29 ◼   ► It seems to me like, you know the bug, you know, the open bugs and radar are lower than they used to be years ago

00:34:35 ◼   ► Do you really think that I said I have to say there is something to it though

00:34:39 ◼   ► It seems to me like there's more annoyances than there used to be

00:34:43 ◼   ► But there were definitely some people with an apple who disagreed and then there were some who did agree

00:34:48 ◼   ► But I'm curious I'm curious specifically like because that's one thing your article didn't have it didn't really have like a list of here's some

00:34:56 ◼   ► of the bugs right and and that was

00:34:58 ◼   ► That was ultimately a failing. I wasn't really talking about like here's five things that are that are the problems today

00:35:06 ◼   ► I was really talking about the general trend and so it's hard to give a

00:35:10 ◼   ► comprehensive list of examples because many of these things are like little annoyances or little, you know, occasional failures or occasional bugs.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I

00:35:20 ◼   ► heard from from from a few different engineers and and and I read a couple of reddit comments

00:35:25 ◼   ► from people who are who are allegedly with an Apple and stuff and and it seems to be a

00:35:31 ◼   ► few people thought that everything's fine, but most of the people seem to think that that yeah, like finally

00:35:40 ◼   ► "Thank you for saying this," like that kind of attitude,

00:35:42 ◼   ► like, "Yes, this is a, like, no one listens,"

00:35:45 ◼   ► that kind of thing.

00:35:46 ◼   ► And it's hard to get a read on what the truth is,

00:35:48 ◼   ► or even with these people, or the real people, you know,

00:35:50 ◼   ► who actually work at Apple, who knows?

00:35:53 ◼   ► It could've just been some random person on the internet.

00:35:55 ◼   ► But I think there's, like, your comment about, like,

00:35:59 ◼   ► you know, the number of radars, like,

00:36:01 ◼   ► Apple could be measuring things that don't reflect

00:36:06 ◼   ► the overall usage of annoyances and bugs

00:36:10 ◼   ► that actually hit people in real life.

00:36:12 ◼   ► They could just be measuring the wrong things

00:36:14 ◼   ► or the things they're measuring aren't changing.

00:36:16 ◼   ► And so for instance, they have the built-in crash reporter

00:36:20 ◼   ► in every recent version of every OS

00:36:23 ◼   ► that you can say automatically send diagnostics to Apple

00:36:25 ◼   ► when stuff breaks.

00:36:27 ◼   ► But that only will send a report if a crash happened.

00:36:32 ◼   ► Like if you hit a bug that wasn't a crash,

00:36:36 ◼   ► That's not gonna include that.

00:36:38 ◼   ► And most of the bugs I see recently aren't crashes.

00:36:42 ◼   ► Like, I'm not getting kernel panics at my computers,

00:36:44 ◼   ► you know, or back when I was,

00:36:46 ◼   ► that was the fault of some IO driver, you know.

00:36:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's one of the things I heard

00:36:51 ◼   ► from one of the people who was sort of

00:36:53 ◼   ► not really believing in that.

00:36:55 ◼   ► It was that, specifically, that crashes are down.

00:36:58 ◼   ► You know, and that's something that they can measure

00:37:00 ◼   ► because they have a crash reporter,

00:37:02 ◼   ► and that it just made him surprised

00:37:06 ◼   ► that this was a thing.

00:37:08 ◼   ► And it really was, it was not like a defensive take.

00:37:12 ◼   ► It's like typical Apple person, very thoughtful.

00:37:15 ◼   ► Really, really genuinely curious

00:37:17 ◼   ► because he found it surprising.

00:37:19 ◼   ► Really wanted to know.

00:37:20 ◼   ► And also absolutely believed in the sort of,

00:37:24 ◼   ► hey, when there's smoke, there's fire.

00:37:27 ◼   ► Clearly this, Marco's post resonated with a lot of people.

00:37:30 ◼   ► So I wanna get to the bottom of what this is.

00:37:34 ◼   ► But crashes definitely aren't it.

00:37:36 ◼   ► - Exactly, and like earlier tonight,

00:37:39 ◼   ► one of the many annoyances when using an Apple TV,

00:37:42 ◼   ► you know, I turn on the Apple TV

00:37:45 ◼   ► after it being asleep for most of the day,

00:37:48 ◼   ► and it shows three prompts in a row that say,

00:37:51 ◼   ► "Your Apple TV is not gonna connect to the internet."

00:37:53 ◼   ► Like you hit Menu and it just shows you another one.

00:37:55 ◼   ► And like, so there's three of those that were queued up.

00:37:57 ◼   ► So those aren't being coalesced.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And then I go back to the home screen,

00:38:02 ◼   ► It is connected the internet and we're showing new stuff

00:38:05 ◼   ► So they were pointy to weren't canceled right at which point those things should have been

00:38:09 ◼   ► Disregarded anyway never mind it right file under nevermind, right?

00:38:13 ◼   ► Why were they even showing when it was asleep and nobody was trying to do anything with it? Good question there, too

00:38:17 ◼   ► So those are all quality issues right not crashes

00:38:21 ◼   ► They're not gonna show up any bug reports because I'm not gonna report it. Look I'm talking with you

00:38:24 ◼   ► I I'm not gonna report that on radar like it's not worth the time to even type it up and go through the all the

00:38:29 ◼   ► forms

00:38:31 ◼   ► Then I hit menu a couple times to get out of the the like deep hierarchy of the movie structure

00:38:38 ◼   ► I was in to get back to the home screen. I know you can just hold it down, but I didn't

00:38:41 ◼   ► The first time I hit it it went boop and it did it did its thing and then the second time I hit it

00:38:46 ◼   ► It just went boop boop boop boop and I kept hitting it and nothing was happening and all the clicks just queued up and queued up

00:38:52 ◼   ► And queued up and nothing happened and I'm like, all right

00:38:54 ◼   ► Do I do I reset it and then like 30 seconds later it executes all of them like these they had all queued up

00:39:00 ◼   ► So everything's moving around like crazy.

00:39:01 ◼   ► I'm like, "No, no, no, no, that's not what I wanted."

00:39:04 ◼   ► Again, another bug.

00:39:06 ◼   ► Two nights ago, I had to actually unplug it

00:39:09 ◼   ► and plug it back in to get it to respond

00:39:11 ◼   ► to any remote commands.

00:39:13 ◼   ► I tried two different remotes.

00:39:15 ◼   ► We have multiple Apple TVs in the house.

00:39:17 ◼   ► They both have similar bugs,

00:39:18 ◼   ► so I know it's not just one of them being dying or flaky.

00:39:21 ◼   ► And I know, I mean, certainly Merlin has talked a lot

00:39:25 ◼   ► about his Apple TV issues too.

00:39:27 ◼   ► That there's issues with authenticating content.

00:39:29 ◼   ► It's like that. He's like the Jeffrey Zeldman of Apple TV, you know, like the way everything

00:39:33 ◼   ► Zeldman just has the worst Murphy's Law with anything technology like like Merlin clearly has it has caught like the Apple TV

00:39:41 ◼   ► branch of that that syndrome

00:39:43 ◼   ► Right, exactly. And I don't think I'm common, you know and like, you know

00:39:48 ◼   ► I so often like we'll go to watch a movie and

00:39:50 ◼   ► It'll sit there on authorizing forever and then eventually fail and it's really like come on. I bought this at these are movies

00:39:57 ◼   ► We bought my kid is like sitting down. He wants to watch something if it doesn't show him in a minute

00:40:02 ◼   ► He's gonna start getting antsy and possibly scream like come on. Just just come on work

00:40:06 ◼   ► That's all like and this is just the Apple TV, right and and and airplay to the Apple TV

00:40:12 ◼   ► Works about a quarter of the time and it doesn't work

00:40:16 ◼   ► I can vouch for the fact that it doesn't work with a two or three year old to

00:40:20 ◼   ► Try to explain how in the old in the old days

00:40:23 ◼   ► We'd have to get in the car and drive to blockbuster and the disc might be scratched

00:40:27 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, it does. Yeah kids kids don't want to hear it kids expect the thing that they see on the screen to

00:40:33 ◼   ► Play when you punch the button exactly so

00:40:37 ◼   ► And so this is just Apple TV

00:40:39 ◼   ► This is just like one week's worth of just like what I can recall not even one week

00:40:45 ◼   ► What I can recall over the last two days

00:40:47 ◼   ► This is like this is what comes over the Apple TV and that's not even not even including various like

00:40:53 ◼   ► infinite timeouts and failures with Netflix,

00:40:56 ◼   ► which I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt

00:40:58 ◼   ► and assume that's Netflix's problem.

00:41:00 ◼   ► But even with Apple stuff,

00:41:02 ◼   ► authorizing the Apple purchase stuff,

00:41:03 ◼   ► even that, that has all those problems.

00:41:05 ◼   ► So that's just one product, right?

00:41:07 ◼   ► And it's an AirPlay, and I hear from everybody

00:41:10 ◼   ► that AirPlay doesn't work well for them.

00:41:12 ◼   ► AirPlay works fine for me if I'm going to

00:41:15 ◼   ► an airport express that I have

00:41:17 ◼   ► connected to a speaker in my kitchen.

00:41:19 ◼   ► It works fine for that.

00:41:20 ◼   ► It fails every time for Apple TV.

00:41:22 ◼   ► or sorry, it fails 75% of the time for Apple TV.

00:41:25 ◼   ► Like I'll do it a couple times, eventually it will take.

00:41:27 ◼   ► - AirPlay is on my list and it's high on the list

00:41:31 ◼   ► and in terms of like Canary and the coal mine,

00:41:34 ◼   ► because it used to be rock solid for me.

00:41:36 ◼   ► And my typical AirPlay scenario is almost always

00:41:40 ◼   ► is either from my phone or from an iPad to Apple TV.

00:41:44 ◼   ► A good example of it is we didn't have Amazon instant video

00:41:51 ◼   ► on TV until we got a new TiVo sometime like I think in the last year and it has Amazon

00:41:56 ◼   ► built in because Amazon I don't know why but they don't have an app on Apple TV whether

00:42:01 ◼   ► it's politics or what but if you wanted to watch something.

00:42:05 ◼   ► Oh it's definitely politics.

00:42:06 ◼   ► Yeah I'm guessing it's politics.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Why do you think they're advertising watches so heavily to every man who visits the site?

00:42:13 ◼   ► Are they really?

00:42:14 ◼   ► Yeah ask any ask any man who visited Amazon recently like what's on the front page and

00:42:20 ◼   ► It's the bottom of the first screen

00:42:24 ◼   ► on Amazon.com's front page is all top men's watches.

00:42:28 ◼   ► I have never viewed a link to a watch on Amazon.

00:42:31 ◼   ► I've never searched for a watch on Amazon.

00:42:33 ◼   ► I have done nothing that would influence that recommendation

00:42:36 ◼   ► and it's heavily promoting watches.

00:42:37 ◼   ► And I've heard, I tweeted about it a couple weeks ago

00:42:40 ◼   ► and a bunch of other guys were like, yeah, me too.

00:42:41 ◼   ► They showed screenshots.

00:42:42 ◼   ► Like, they're so heavily pushing watches right now.

00:42:45 ◼   ► It's like, come on, obviously this is about politics.

00:42:48 ◼   ► Mine is literally men's blue dial luxury watches.

00:42:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:54 ◼   ► I swear to God, I'm gonna send you the link right now.

00:42:56 ◼   ► - And have you ever looked at a watch on Amazon?

00:42:58 ◼   ► - See, that's the thing, that's why--

00:43:00 ◼   ► - You might have, all right.

00:43:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause I don't own, I only own two watches,

00:43:03 ◼   ► but I love, I've always loved watches,

00:43:05 ◼   ► but it's like, I only buy them

00:43:07 ◼   ► if I think they're absolutely perfect,

00:43:08 ◼   ► which is why I've only got two.

00:43:10 ◼   ► But I look at watches all the time.

00:43:13 ◼   ► I don't, and I don't really look for them on Amazon,

00:43:14 ◼   ► because Amazon, I don't think it's the type of place

00:43:16 ◼   ► where I would buy a watch.

00:43:17 ◼   ► I did actually I did buy one there years ago. I bought my my citizen there, but

00:43:22 ◼   ► No, I didn't actually I did the right thing with the citizen where I found it on Amazon

00:43:26 ◼   ► But I wanted to see it in person and I went to a jewelry store here in Philadelphia

00:43:30 ◼   ► So I could see it and it was $15 more expensive in the jewelry store

00:43:34 ◼   ► And I thought well, this is exactly what I should do

00:43:36 ◼   ► I'm gonna buy it right here because I I'm so glad there's a jewelry store here where I could see it

00:43:41 ◼   ► You know, I wanted to give him 15 more dollars. Wow, you know room. That's great, right?

00:43:45 ◼   ► I know that that's like and I thought you know what? I'm like the I'm not like the 1% like top financial people

00:43:51 ◼   ► I'm the 1% you know who shops thinking like that like

00:43:55 ◼   ► The Amazon 1%

00:43:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it reminds me there was a New Yorker a couple weeks ago around the cover. There was a woman

00:44:03 ◼   ► Answering her door to take an Amazon box from UPS

00:44:08 ◼   ► That was clearly like the size of the ones that they ship the books in

00:44:12 ◼   ► Looking awkwardly at her neighbor who runs a little neighborhood bookstore

00:44:16 ◼   ► But anyway, I do have men's blue dial luxury watches right on the front page of my Amazon, right

00:44:25 ◼   ► So anyway, so Apple TV, so I had to I although until we had the TiVo

00:44:29 ◼   ► I had to airplay Amazon to the Apple TV and

00:44:32 ◼   ► It always worked. It just worked. It was great and a couple days ago. I wanted to watch

00:44:39 ◼   ► Alpha house, which is a cool a really fun show. I like on Amazon

00:44:43 ◼   ► and I was too lazy to switch the TV from Apple TV where I already was to

00:44:49 ◼   ► TiVo and the TiVo is such a pain in the ass anyway

00:44:53 ◼   ► so I tried using an airplane and and it I just got like a spinner and it just spun and spun and spun and

00:44:59 ◼   ► Spun and spun and eventually I just did have to switch to the TiVo and use the Amazon app there

00:45:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that spinner should be the Apple TV logo

00:45:07 ◼   ► It used to run on the front for me. It used to work very very very consistently

00:45:13 ◼   ► Well any any video that wasn't you know, I think there's a flag you can set to say don't you can't airplay?

00:45:19 ◼   ► But almost nobody said it back then almost any video that I could watch on iPhone or iPad I could

00:45:25 ◼   ► Switch I could just flick it continuity style to the Apple TV in I don't know how many seconds but a few enough seconds that

00:45:33 ◼   ► It felt like magic every time and now it's really really a crap shoot

00:45:37 ◼   ► - Exactly, and yeah, I mean, I've owned every generation

00:45:41 ◼   ► of Apple TV, and we use them constantly,

00:45:43 ◼   ► 'cause we don't have cable, like that's,

00:45:45 ◼   ► the Apple TV is our primary video player.

00:45:48 ◼   ► We are, like, the only media playback we have in our house

00:45:51 ◼   ► is Apple TV and a PS3 for Blu-ray discs, that's it.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And so we use them heavily, and it has definitely

00:46:00 ◼   ► been a noticeable decline, like they weren't,

00:46:02 ◼   ► they didn't used to be this bad.

00:46:04 ◼   ► And so again, we can sit here all night

00:46:05 ◼   ► and point out things about the Apple TV.

00:46:07 ◼   ► I mean, like, it's, which is, I mean,

00:46:09 ◼   ► this is probably as interesting as hearing somebody's

00:46:11 ◼   ► like terrible airline story,

00:46:13 ◼   ► or their dream from last night, you know?

00:46:14 ◼   ► So I don't want to bore the audience

00:46:16 ◼   ► with all the different little nitpicks

00:46:18 ◼   ► of like how my stuff has failed.

00:46:20 ◼   ► But you can look at a lot of their products recently

00:46:23 ◼   ► and see a lot of stories like this from everybody.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Glenn Fleischman solicited things on Twitter

00:46:28 ◼   ► and had a really good post, like kind of summarizing,

00:46:30 ◼   ► like here's what everyone's complaining about.

00:46:32 ◼   ► - Oh, did he? I didn't see that.

00:46:33 ◼   ► Where did he post that?

00:46:34 ◼   ► - On glog.glennf.com.

00:46:36 ◼   ► And I think, yeah, check it, anyway.

00:46:40 ◼   ► You can sort through his tweets for the last two days

00:46:42 ◼   ► to try to find a link if you're brave.

00:46:44 ◼   ► - My Twitter client doesn't go back that far.

00:46:46 ◼   ► It's a carry two days of Glenn Fleischman tweets.

00:46:51 ◼   ► - So-- - I don't know what client

00:46:53 ◼   ► you use.

00:46:54 ◼   ► I think you'd need like a special API.

00:46:56 ◼   ► I don't even think the Twitter API can handle.

00:46:57 ◼   ► Anyway, it is on the front page of his blog

00:47:00 ◼   ► and I will put it in the show notes.

00:47:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, so do that.

00:47:03 ◼   ► And then so that's part of it.

00:47:04 ◼   ► And I've had issues with Yosemite,

00:47:08 ◼   ► similar to, I know Neven Murgen was talking on Twitter

00:47:11 ◼   ► a couple of weeks back about,

00:47:14 ◼   ► he showed a screenshot of how many copies of his computer

00:47:17 ◼   ► there were in the finder source list

00:47:19 ◼   ► of the network share area of the finder left pane.

00:47:22 ◼   ► And it was like, "Neven Murgen's laptop, two, three, four,

00:47:25 ◼   ► five, six," and it's this giant list

00:47:27 ◼   ► of all these different copies.

00:47:29 ◼   ► I've had a lot of issues with that of things,

00:47:32 ◼   ► losing my original computer's name,

00:47:34 ◼   ► showing up as parentheses two,

00:47:36 ◼   ► or certain computers just disappearing off my network.

00:47:39 ◼   ► We have three computers on our home network here,

00:47:41 ◼   ► and one printer, and a NAS box in the closet

00:47:46 ◼   ► for network share stuff.

00:47:47 ◼   ► And at any given time, I can usually only see

00:47:50 ◼   ► between zero and two of them.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Usually you have to reboot, not the one that's browsing,

00:47:57 ◼   ► but you have to reboot the one that's not showing up.

00:48:00 ◼   ► - I haven't read Glenn's article yet.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Obviously, since I was unaware of it,

00:48:03 ◼   ► but I can't wait to.

00:48:04 ◼   ► But I don't know if his summary goes like this,

00:48:07 ◼   ► but yours does so far,

00:48:08 ◼   ► and a couple that I have jotted down

00:48:10 ◼   ► all fit in the category of things

00:48:13 ◼   ► that don't even have error,

00:48:14 ◼   ► they're not crashers,

00:48:15 ◼   ► and they don't have error messages.

00:48:17 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:48:18 ◼   ► - They're just silent failures.

00:48:20 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:48:21 ◼   ► And even-- - And so printing is--

00:48:23 ◼   ► - And there are some crashers,

00:48:24 ◼   ► but usually, like most people aren't hitting them

00:48:26 ◼   ► most of the time, I think.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Like, you know, there are, like,

00:48:29 ◼   ► crashers, they're a bigger problem on iOS, I think.

00:48:32 ◼   ► And iOS 7, I think, was worse than iOS 8

00:48:35 ◼   ► in regards to crashes.

00:48:36 ◼   ► But, so for instance, on iOS 8,

00:48:38 ◼   ► Overcast crashes more than it did on iOS 7

00:48:42 ◼   ► in a few key areas.

00:48:43 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's my fault or not,

00:48:44 ◼   ► but I've heard from a lot of other developers too.

00:48:46 ◼   ► One developer even posted stats.

00:48:48 ◼   ► Their app still runs on both, and they posted stats

00:48:50 ◼   ► like percentage of installs that have crashed

00:48:52 ◼   ► on 7 versus 8, and the percentage on 8

00:48:56 ◼   ► was five times higher.

00:48:57 ◼   ► And I've had crashes like deep in system frameworks.

00:49:02 ◼   ► like image IO, I have crashes,

00:49:04 ◼   ► like decoding JPEGs for show art.

00:49:07 ◼   ► That crashes a lot, and I always say it never happened on 7.

00:49:10 ◼   ► Stuff like that, and the background downloading system

00:49:15 ◼   ► occasionally has crashes.

00:49:16 ◼   ► The audio subsystem will crash

00:49:18 ◼   ► and everyone will blame me for it.

00:49:19 ◼   ► There's so many subsystem or API,

00:49:24 ◼   ► like low-level failures or crashes

00:49:26 ◼   ► that happen just rarely enough

00:49:28 ◼   ► that it's really hard to ever track it down,

00:49:30 ◼   ► but frequently enough that if you have a crash logger

00:49:32 ◼   ► in your app, you're gonna see a lot of reports for it.

00:49:35 ◼   ► - Another one for me, and I tweeted about this,

00:49:38 ◼   ► and I actually got somebody from Apple reached out

00:49:40 ◼   ► and they said they're gonna look into it,

00:49:42 ◼   ► but for me, it's the keyboard shortcuts,

00:49:46 ◼   ► not command keys, but like when you have

00:49:48 ◼   ► T-E-H go to T-E--

00:49:52 ◼   ► - Oh, like the Texas Band of Rip-Off?

00:49:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I think that, all right, yeah,

00:49:58 ◼   ► the Texas Band of Rip-Off.

00:49:59 ◼   ► - Well, okay, the feature is similar to TextExpander.

00:50:02 ◼   ► Go ahead.

00:50:03 ◼   ► - I think that's a perfect example, though,

00:50:05 ◼   ► of them adding a feature to the system

00:50:08 ◼   ► in an appropriate way where it still leaves

00:50:11 ◼   ► TextExpander plenty of room.

00:50:13 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah. - Right?

00:50:14 ◼   ► 'Cause they just do, you type this, you get that,

00:50:17 ◼   ► whereas TextExpander has all of the interactive stuff

00:50:20 ◼   ► where you can have, you know--

00:50:22 ◼   ► - You have like forms almost from TextExpander.

00:50:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, or like I've got the TextExpander ones

00:50:26 ◼   ► to put the date in certain formats.

00:50:27 ◼   ► - Right, right. - So I just type,

00:50:28 ◼   ► you know, type my key, you know, my little shortcut

00:50:30 ◼   ► and I get today's date right the way I like it.

00:50:32 ◼   ► You can't do that, you know, dynamic ones, variables.

00:50:35 ◼   ► Anyway, but they used to sync between devices

00:50:40 ◼   ► and then they stopped syncing.

00:50:44 ◼   ► And they stopped syncing when I switched

00:50:46 ◼   ► to the iCloud documents in the cloud beta.

00:50:51 ◼   ► - The drive?

00:50:52 ◼   ► - iCloud drive beta, which I had to do over summer,

00:50:53 ◼   ► I didn't have to, but I did over summer

00:50:55 ◼   ► 'cause I was beta testing some stuff that, you know,

00:50:58 ◼   ► I wanted to use it and try it.

00:50:59 ◼   ► And so the fact that it stopped working then, I understood.

00:51:02 ◼   ► Because maybe they were using, you know,

00:51:03 ◼   ► and they warn you, hey, when you switch, you can't go back,

00:51:06 ◼   ► you know, you're always on it.

00:51:07 ◼   ► And so I thought, oh, so that's interesting.

00:51:09 ◼   ► They must have been using the old storage APIs

00:51:12 ◼   ► for these keyboard shortcuts, and that's how they did it.

00:51:15 ◼   ► But now, you know, here it was like two months

00:51:17 ◼   ► after everything had come out of beta, you know.

00:51:19 ◼   ► I was running a new phone, running iOS 9.

00:51:23 ◼   ► I was running a new,

00:51:26 ◼   ► It's just to make it even more likely that it should work,

00:51:29 ◼   ► a brand new retina MacBook Pro

00:51:32 ◼   ► running the non-beta version of Yosemite.

00:51:36 ◼   ► And they still weren't syncing.

00:51:40 ◼   ► Nothing was syncing.

00:51:41 ◼   ► None of the most shortcuts were syncing.

00:51:43 ◼   ► And then, and this to me emblemizes the sort of thing

00:51:48 ◼   ► I'm thinking that is the modern Apple unsteady software.

00:51:55 ◼   ► They did start syncing, but not all of them.

00:51:58 ◼   ► And now, like on my phone and on my Mac,

00:52:02 ◼   ► almost all of them are the same.

00:52:06 ◼   ► And I definitely never once,

00:52:07 ◼   ► 'cause I wanted to see what would happen.

00:52:09 ◼   ► I never once said, okay, just take 10 minutes

00:52:11 ◼   ► and reproduce them in both places so you have them all.

00:52:15 ◼   ► I just waited, and they're mostly there.

00:52:16 ◼   ► But there's one in particular,

00:52:18 ◼   ► it's sort of like a game of Where's Waldo,

00:52:20 ◼   ► like scrolling the two lists,

00:52:21 ◼   ► trying to find the ones that are missing.

00:52:22 ◼   ► And it's even made more difficult

00:52:23 ◼   ► because they sort in a different order,

00:52:26 ◼   ► in terms of the way ones that--

00:52:28 ◼   ► - Terrible.

00:52:29 ◼   ► - The way that ones, like, regular,

00:52:31 ◼   ► if it's just alphabetical characters,

00:52:33 ◼   ► they sort alphabetically,

00:52:34 ◼   ► but the Mac puts the ones with punctua,

00:52:36 ◼   ► leading punctuation at the top,

00:52:38 ◼   ► and the iPhone puts ones with leading punctuation

00:52:40 ◼   ► at the bottom.

00:52:41 ◼   ► So it's a little hard to compare them.

00:52:44 ◼   ► - Again, none of this is a reportable bug,

00:52:47 ◼   ► like, or rather, none of this will report itself to Apple.

00:52:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's so hard, but I know, for example,

00:52:53 ◼   ► I have a custom one because you can use it to add custom words.

00:52:57 ◼   ► It's not even like an expansion, but I use the word navbar as all one word,

00:53:03 ◼   ► N-A-V-B-A-R, all the time when I'm talking with Dave Whiskus about Vesper.

00:53:08 ◼   ► It's just why I call the thing at the top the navbar.

00:53:12 ◼   ► And it's always on the iPhone, like when I'd be iMessaging him,

00:53:16 ◼   ► auto-correcting it into who knows what.

00:53:18 ◼   ► Just random guesses from the dictionary that were close.

00:53:21 ◼   ► So I put it in my thing, and it's on my phone, which is the place where I need it, but it's

00:53:26 ◼   ► not on my Mac.

00:53:28 ◼   ► Whereas the other, I don't know, there's maybe 30 of them, seem mostly in sync.

00:53:33 ◼   ► Crazy.

00:53:34 ◼   ► And there's never an error message, there's never an error on any device that says, "Hey,

00:53:39 ◼   ► you've got a problem with your keyboard shortcut syncing, turn it off, turn it back on again,"

00:53:44 ◼   ► or anything.

00:53:45 ◼   ► Nothing.

00:53:46 ◼   ► No errors.

00:53:47 ◼   ► I just don't have some of them on both devices.

00:53:49 ◼   ► It's even worse with this cloud stuff because you have so little insight as to what the

00:53:53 ◼   ► problem is, if there's even a problem, or how to fix a problem once it happens.

00:53:59 ◼   ► So if you look at Apple's crash rate history, let's say somebody inside Apple is looking

00:54:07 ◼   ► at like, "Well, we have the same rate of crashes now that we did five years ago," or whatever

00:54:12 ◼   ► it is.

00:54:14 ◼   ► I think you have to also consider that now

00:54:17 ◼   ► we are doing a lot more with our devices and our computers.

00:54:21 ◼   ► We have more devices and computers interacting

00:54:23 ◼   ► with each other per person, especially around

00:54:26 ◼   ► in these crowds.

00:54:27 ◼   ► And the cloud services are this other factor.

00:54:31 ◼   ► And so I said this in ATP, so I won't go too far

00:54:34 ◼   ► into it here, but let's say you have like a 1% bug rate

00:54:39 ◼   ► for like, when you're using this app or this service

00:54:43 ◼   ► of the OS, 1% of the time it won't work right.

00:54:46 ◼   ► Obviously this is made up, but bear with me.

00:54:48 ◼   ► If then you consider the interaction

00:54:52 ◼   ► of two different apps or services that have the same rate,

00:54:55 ◼   ► it's 2%.

00:54:57 ◼   ► If you consider it again, it's not three,

00:55:00 ◼   ► if you consider a third one, it's not 3%, it's 4%.

00:55:02 ◼   ► 'Cause these things don't add, they multiply.

00:55:05 ◼   ► Because every, as you add more possible ways

00:55:08 ◼   ► of interaction between applications, services,

00:55:11 ◼   ► cloud services, devices, all those failure rates,

00:55:15 ◼   ► the chances that any one thing is gonna go wrong somehow

00:55:18 ◼   ► is the multiple, the product of all of those factors,

00:55:23 ◼   ► not the sum.

00:55:24 ◼   ► So this grows geometrically.

00:55:26 ◼   ► And so as you make things more complicated,

00:55:28 ◼   ► as our devices can do more,

00:55:30 ◼   ► as we have more devices interacting with each other

00:55:32 ◼   ► and also interacting with the cloud services,

00:55:34 ◼   ► all of these error factors are all multiplied.

00:55:38 ◼   ► And so you have to, you can't just keep quality

00:55:41 ◼   ► the same as it used to be,

00:55:43 ◼   ► like the quality rate per service or per app.

00:55:47 ◼   ► It has to actually get better over time

00:55:49 ◼   ► to keep the same overall error rate

00:55:51 ◼   ► from happening to somebody.

00:55:53 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:55:54 ◼   ► Yeah, and I'm not accusing anybody at Apple of incompetence,

00:55:59 ◼   ► 'cause I don't think any of these bugs are universal.

00:56:02 ◼   ► It's not like nobody can play AirPlay.

00:56:04 ◼   ► I'm sure-- - And I've written

00:56:05 ◼   ► worse bugs today.

00:56:06 ◼   ► I mean like I fixed a really embarrassing bug two hours ago in overcast like really embarrassing. I would bet good

00:56:13 ◼   ► I mean, that's how real bugs are real bugs are edge cases to some degree

00:56:17 ◼   ► Maybe that's a big edge, but it's you know, something you didn't think of this is a big edge

00:56:20 ◼   ► I'm thinking most of the time I'm thinking if you go to an Apple store and buy a new Apple TV and you pick up

00:56:27 ◼   ► a new iPhone or iPad and you set them up and create a brand new iCloud account and

00:56:34 ◼   ► Go to use airplay. It'll just work. It'll I'll bet 99 times out of 100 that will just work

00:56:41 ◼   ► There's no bug that's keeping most people from doing it

00:56:44 ◼   ► But there's clearly some bugs that you know, and who knows it might be like a hundred different bugs

00:56:49 ◼   ► you know that result in the same thing and they're all you know, just

00:56:52 ◼   ► 1/10 of 1% of people have taken that path

00:56:57 ◼   ► But then it in the aggregate it winds up where there's a lot of people who are having trouble trouble with stuff like this

00:57:03 ◼   ► - Exactly, and again, so many of these things

00:57:06 ◼   ► are hard to report or too minor to report

00:57:10 ◼   ► individual problems through the bug reporter system.

00:57:12 ◼   ► And the bug reporter system too

00:57:14 ◼   ► is about as hostile as it can be.

00:57:17 ◼   ► If you go to actually report a bug on Apple's bug reporter,

00:57:22 ◼   ► you'll be greeted, first of all,

00:57:24 ◼   ► is it still iOS 6 themed?

00:57:26 ◼   ► I think it is, right?

00:57:28 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:57:29 ◼   ► - So you-- - Which was a big improvement

00:57:30 ◼   ► over the Aqua theme it used to have.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Well, they gave it the iOS 6 theme like three days before iOS 7 was unveiled

00:57:37 ◼   ► Remember it had but it had like a 10-point Oh

00:57:40 ◼   ► I don't like like when it was bad when aqua was really stripy

00:57:45 ◼   ► it had the big pinstripes horizontal pinstripes a long time and

00:57:48 ◼   ► Yeah, they updated it to like an iOS 6

00:57:52 ◼   ► Look right right before iOS 7 came it was like it was like days or weeks before it was hilarious

00:57:58 ◼   ► Like it was like obviously these two groups weren't talking to each other about that. Oh anyway

00:58:02 ◼   ► So you're greeted with this pretty terrible web app,

00:58:07 ◼   ► first of all, and it asks you for like 17 different fields,

00:58:12 ◼   ► and then you fill your stuff out,

00:58:13 ◼   ► and then you submit it, and they say,

00:58:15 ◼   ► "All right, thanks, we'll look into it, here's a number."

00:58:18 ◼   ► And in most cases of bugs I've filed,

00:58:21 ◼   ► I've filed maybe, I don't know,

00:58:22 ◼   ► 50 bugs so far in my life with Apple,

00:58:26 ◼   ► in almost every case you will never hear about it again.

00:58:28 ◼   ► They won't even tell you if it's a duplicate,

00:58:30 ◼   ► they won't even tell you if it's closed,

00:58:31 ◼   ► it'll sit there open forever.

00:58:34 ◼   ► Sometimes they will tell you after like three months,

00:58:39 ◼   ► this is a known bug, it's a duplicate of this other bug ID,

00:58:42 ◼   ► thank you.

00:58:43 ◼   ► But then you lose all visibility.

00:58:45 ◼   ► Then you can't tell when that other bug ID is closed.

00:58:47 ◼   ► Like they just basically close your bug saying,

00:58:50 ◼   ► all right, thanks.

00:58:51 ◼   ► - All right, I just logged into my radar account

00:58:53 ◼   ► and here's one that I filed on the 20th of March, 2009.

00:58:59 ◼   ► state open rank no value and it's here's what I said I said when you control it said products

00:59:06 ◼   ► of fari when you control click right click on a background tab in safari for you get

00:59:12 ◼   ► a menu with options for things like creating a new tab closing the tab reloading the tab

00:59:16 ◼   ► and so forth it would be nice if there were an option to copy the URL for that tab that

00:59:22 ◼   ► way you could copy the URL for a background tab in a background window without either

00:59:26 ◼   ► activating that window or that particular tab. I think it's a reasonable

00:59:30 ◼   ► request. I'm not saying it's great, but it's the fact that it's just

00:59:34 ◼   ► there green open. Yep, like still waiting for response from Apple and that's and

00:59:40 ◼   ► it's this is this is not uncommon. This is the common case. I'm not mad that they

00:59:47 ◼   ► haven't done it. Actually let me see. No, you still can't copy a tab. Nope, it's the

00:59:55 ◼   ► the same option for our listing.

00:59:56 ◼   ► So I'm not mad that they haven't taken my suggestion

00:59:58 ◼   ► and done something.

00:59:59 ◼   ► But that's what, for everybody at Apple always telling me,

01:00:02 ◼   ► that's what I should do with an idea like that,

01:00:04 ◼   ► is file a radar.

01:00:05 ◼   ► - Right. - Right?

01:00:06 ◼   ► But the fact that it's open,

01:00:07 ◼   ► like I wouldn't mind if they just said closed,

01:00:09 ◼   ► no, we don't think copy belongs in that menu.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Okay, you know, thanks for considering the idea.

01:00:15 ◼   ► It's the fact that it looks to me

01:00:16 ◼   ► as though nobody's ever looked at it.

01:00:18 ◼   ► - Right, and they probably never will until at some point,

01:00:21 ◼   ► some intern is tasked with going through that list,

01:00:24 ◼   ► and they just like bulk close them all

01:00:25 ◼   ► or send like a form letter to all of them saying,

01:00:28 ◼   ► all right, you know, is this still a problem?

01:00:30 ◼   ► Please provide a sample project to illustrate the problem.

01:00:32 ◼   ► And then if you don't,

01:00:33 ◼   ► this will automatically close in a day.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Like that's the kind of thing you get.

01:00:37 ◼   ► I mean, it's just, I mean, let's see, I have,

01:00:40 ◼   ► so my oldest is 2011.

01:00:43 ◼   ► I have four bugs here in one of my accounts,

01:00:47 ◼   ► 2011, 2011, 2013, all green, no responses.

01:00:52 ◼   ► I mean, so this is the problem I have with,

01:00:54 ◼   ► you know, the typical Apple answer is,

01:00:57 ◼   ► well, please, you have to file a bug for any bugs you find

01:01:00 ◼   ► or any feature requests you have or et cetera.

01:01:02 ◼   ► If you're gonna say that,

01:01:04 ◼   ► if that's gonna be your default response,

01:01:07 ◼   ► this system has to be better.

01:01:08 ◼   ► This system has to, it has to be less hostile

01:01:11 ◼   ► and it has to somehow give some kind of satisfactory result.

01:01:16 ◼   ► Even if it's as simple as after like a week,

01:01:20 ◼   ► You say, thanks, we're taking this into consideration,

01:01:24 ◼   ► or we'll have somebody look at this and then close it.

01:01:27 ◼   ► Some kind of something that indicates

01:01:29 ◼   ► to the person who filed the bug

01:01:31 ◼   ► that it was worth their time to have filed it.

01:01:34 ◼   ► And that's the problem.

01:01:35 ◼   ► Right now you don't have that.

01:01:36 ◼   ► And so there's no incentive for individuals to file bugs

01:01:41 ◼   ► if you think anyone else will have ever filed the same bug.

01:01:44 ◼   ► - Well, there's the adage that insanity

01:01:46 ◼   ► is doing the same thing, the definition of insanity

01:01:49 ◼   ► is doing the same thing over and over and over again

01:01:51 ◼   ► and expecting different results.

01:01:54 ◼   ► And it's, you know, that makes a lot of sense,

01:01:57 ◼   ► it's actually true.

01:01:58 ◼   ► That's, to me, it seems almost insane

01:02:00 ◼   ► to keep filing radars when you,

01:02:04 ◼   ► expecting them to be dealt with when your experience is,

01:02:08 ◼   ► this is just a waste of my time.

01:02:09 ◼   ► - Exactly, and I've had so many people

01:02:11 ◼   ► who work at Apple tell me, please file radars,

01:02:14 ◼   ► they really do matter, they really do help,

01:02:16 ◼   ► please keep filing them.

01:02:18 ◼   ► And they all say too, they all say that they get

01:02:20 ◼   ► a surprisingly low number of radars filed.

01:02:24 ◼   ► Like you would expect certain things to have a lot

01:02:26 ◼   ► and they say certain feature requests

01:02:27 ◼   ► or major feature requests will have like seven radars

01:02:30 ◼   ► ever filed on them or something.

01:02:31 ◼   ► But the problem is they're yelling at us saying,

01:02:35 ◼   ► "Please file bugs."

01:02:36 ◼   ► Their actions don't back that up.

01:02:39 ◼   ► What we see on the outside is extremely hostile

01:02:43 ◼   ► and demotivating.

01:02:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, hold that thought 'cause I wanna come back to that.

01:02:47 ◼   ► But yes, I want to come back to it with a big section, but I'll do a break

01:02:51 ◼   ► But before I take the break, I just wanted to say another thing too

01:02:53 ◼   ► was

01:02:55 ◼   ► That your article that one of the things that had me nodding my head with your article as sort of

01:02:59 ◼   ► yeah, like now I kind of feel like one of them being like a Windows user is

01:03:04 ◼   ► So we've got a laser printer here

01:03:07 ◼   ► It's an HP and I'm pretty happy with the quality and it does Wi-Fi and you want the same one I did right? Ah

01:03:13 ◼   ► maybe I do it's the

01:03:15 ◼   ► CP 1525NW.

01:03:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's one of HP's wonderful,

01:03:22 ◼   ► yeah, you asked me what to buy and I told you,

01:03:24 ◼   ► but get that one.

01:03:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, I did take my usual just ask Marco.

01:03:28 ◼   ► Yeah, and it exposes--

01:03:29 ◼   ► - I still have mine, it works fine.

01:03:31 ◼   ► - It exposes it? - Well, except when it dies,

01:03:32 ◼   ► except when it disappears from my network for--

01:03:34 ◼   ► - And it lies, oh, it lies so bad

01:03:36 ◼   ► about how much toner it has left.

01:03:37 ◼   ► It lies like a thief in the night.

01:03:39 ◼   ► - Mine has been saying it has extremely low supply levels

01:03:42 ◼   ► for about three years and is still printing just fine.

01:03:45 ◼   ► It is telling me I'm low on color.

01:03:48 ◼   ► I print color, I swear to God, like once a year Jonas has like a school product that

01:03:52 ◼   ► needs color.

01:03:53 ◼   ► I print everything black and white.

01:03:54 ◼   ► I know you've got plenty of color.

01:03:56 ◼   ► You lying bastards.

01:03:58 ◼   ► Anyway, and you know what?

01:04:00 ◼   ► With the black, it told me that I ran out of black and eventually I really did run out.

01:04:04 ◼   ► But it was telling me, it was like giving me this error message like, "I've got no toner,

01:04:08 ◼   ► none, nothing."

01:04:09 ◼   ► And then the paper would come out and it looks great.

01:04:11 ◼   ► It just looks great. And I know what I've from working as

01:04:15 ◼   ► student newspapers and doing print graphic design for years before I know what low toner looks like it's pretty obvious

01:04:23 ◼   ► It's not a subtle change like this. It's like yeah when when your printer is actually running a toner

01:04:28 ◼   ► It looks like it like yeah, it's right there right into your face. Like it looks exactly what it sounds like

01:04:34 ◼   ► It's like wow, I can hardly read this. The letters are almost right. Everything's all spotted and yeah, like you could definitely tell anyway

01:04:40 ◼   ► it exposes itself over bonjour and so yeah I don't know but so that set it up

01:04:48 ◼   ► is really kind of easy and I'm gonna have to say and going back even further

01:04:53 ◼   ► the thing that cracked me up about the Business Insider headline is calling you

01:04:56 ◼   ► a longtime Mac user or longtime Apple supporter I don't know it's like anybody

01:05:00 ◼   ► who joined the team in 2003 you're not a long time 2004 I was even and I was

01:05:05 ◼   ► using Windows until 2005 like I was in them both for a while one of the things

01:05:09 ◼   ► that was never as good on Mac OS X as classic Mac OS was setting up printers.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Like in the old days, because you know, and it used to be that you had to get

01:05:17 ◼   ► like an Apple printer, like either one from Apple, Apple believe it or not used

01:05:21 ◼   ► to make printers, or you know like some kind of Apple compatible printer. But it

01:05:25 ◼   ► always just worked. It was the the maybe the one of the canonical examples of the

01:05:31 ◼   ► differences between Apple's it just works experience and the PC world. You

01:05:36 ◼   ► never had to worry about drivers, anything like that. You just plug it in

01:05:39 ◼   ► There it is shows up in your chooser you pick the printer and boom it works like just it was never a problem and

01:05:46 ◼   ► In Mac OS X I thought that just got worse and it was sort of the shift to industry standard printers and short of

01:05:53 ◼   ► just the

01:05:56 ◼   ► that those

01:05:57 ◼   ► Underpinnings of next were never as hooked up to like, you know

01:06:01 ◼   ► The print world is Apple's classic Mac OS was but anyway, it got better for a while

01:06:07 ◼   ► This printer when I first got it was great

01:06:09 ◼   ► It's you go to the printer thing and system preferences and there it is listed you hit plus there it is listed

01:06:15 ◼   ► It's like here's a bone sure printer. Is this the one you want? Yes, there it is

01:06:18 ◼   ► just the last week I went to print something and it

01:06:23 ◼   ► You know and I it's the only printer I have the only printer I use I hadn't

01:06:28 ◼   ► Changed it and it just said it, you know printer can't be reached or something and nothing would it just wouldn't come out

01:06:34 ◼   ► Like it was just the jobs were queuing up in that thing in the dock

01:06:38 ◼   ► So I deleted it

01:06:39 ◼   ► I deleted the printer and I went to read it and it wasn't even listed and in the old and I you know what I did

01:06:45 ◼   ► I just thought I screw it

01:06:47 ◼   ► I'll print from Amy's and I like went to it emailed it to Amy and printed from Amy's computer

01:06:51 ◼   ► and it worked and then I just left it at that and I realized when I read your article that in the old days like

01:07:00 ◼   ► three four or five years ago when I I would have instantly thought it's got to be the printer and

01:07:04 ◼   ► went upstairs and just turned the printer on and off and in fact that actually worked I did

01:07:10 ◼   ► After you know, it was your article that made me test it

01:07:12 ◼   ► I went up turn the printer off turn it back on and then boom it just worked

01:07:15 ◼   ► Reconnecting it to my Mac. So it was the printers fault, but in the old days

01:07:20 ◼   ► I would have just assumed it was the printers fault. Whereas now I thought screw it something's wrong with Yosemite. I

01:07:27 ◼   ► I think, well, I've had the same issue, and it's like I have the same issue with other Yosemite

01:07:33 ◼   ► Macs that are on the network. So I think it's an issue with Yosemite losing its connection to the

01:07:40 ◼   ► printer, like losing its discovery of the printer. So Yosemite, they rewrote some part of the

01:07:46 ◼   ► networking stack. I don't know the details, but they basically combined some of the discovery and

01:07:51 ◼   ► and that related stuff into this new thing

01:07:53 ◼   ► called Discovery-D.

01:07:55 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:07:56 ◼   ► - And people keep reporting a lot of WiFi

01:08:00 ◼   ► and network discovery issues with Yosemite.

01:08:02 ◼   ► It's probably related to that,

01:08:04 ◼   ► because they changed a bunch of that

01:08:05 ◼   ► to enable things like continuity and handoff

01:08:07 ◼   ► and stuff like that,

01:08:08 ◼   ► and airdrops between the two.

01:08:10 ◼   ► So that stuff all changed in Yosemite,

01:08:13 ◼   ► so that's most likely the source of the problem.

01:08:14 ◼   ► - So my spidey sense that it was Yosemite

01:08:16 ◼   ► probably is right.

01:08:17 ◼   ► It's just that the solution of turning the printer

01:08:19 ◼   ► off and on probably isn't even HP's fault.

01:08:23 ◼   ► - No, it almost certainly isn't,

01:08:24 ◼   ► 'cause I have the same problem

01:08:25 ◼   ► with every Mac on the network.

01:08:27 ◼   ► - I believe it.

01:08:28 ◼   ► Networking problems in general,

01:08:31 ◼   ► and again, not one networking issue,

01:08:33 ◼   ► but just Hockenberry's description of it

01:08:36 ◼   ► as a thousand paper cuts is exactly right,

01:08:38 ◼   ► is a big chunk of them seem to be networking.

01:08:40 ◼   ► - And networking is hard.

01:08:41 ◼   ► This is what, as you said earlier,

01:08:45 ◼   ► we know Apple has great people working for them.

01:08:48 ◼   ► we know that these aren't idiots doing this.

01:08:51 ◼   ► But the fact is, my point in the piece was,

01:08:55 ◼   ► they're doing too much, and it's really starting to show,

01:08:58 ◼   ► it always feels like we're using a 1.0 release or a beta.

01:09:03 ◼   ► There used to be some kind of stability

01:09:07 ◼   ► between betas and the GMs.

01:09:10 ◼   ► It was never perfect, but there used to be

01:09:13 ◼   ► a differentiator, like, okay, well,

01:09:14 ◼   ► stuff's gonna stop changing right before the GM

01:09:17 ◼   ► by some interval of time, and the GM will be a higher degree of quality than the betas

01:09:22 ◼   ► were, and then a couple revisions down the line, once you have like a .3, .4 kind of

01:09:27 ◼   ► range, it'll be really stable for the next year and a half until they release a new major

01:09:32 ◼   ► version.

01:09:33 ◼   ► If you treat it, it used to be, I think, for a number of years, and I would say it probably

01:09:36 ◼   ► covers the years, your early years on the platform, like that 2004 to 2008-ish, '09-ish

01:09:43 ◼   ► period.

01:09:44 ◼   ► you just had the conservative patience to treat every release as like minus one

01:09:51 ◼   ► you do pretty well so in other words trust that the betas are gonna suck and

01:09:57 ◼   ► trust that the GM is really just a beta and then trust that the 1.0 release of

01:10:04 ◼   ► the OS is really like a public beta and wait for like the first major public

01:10:10 ◼   ► update after the 1.0, you know, after system, you know, iOS 5.0 ships. Wait for 5.01 or

01:10:18 ◼   ► maybe 5.02 and you'll have a really solid OS.

01:10:23 ◼   ► Exactly. And these days it feels like we never reach that point of like a few point X's in

01:10:31 ◼   ► and now it's stable. Like now we're always in the beta 1.0, 1.1 loop it seems. And I

01:10:37 ◼   ► though like, you know, technically version wise, they've they've passed 1.1 with some of these but like it just seems like yeah

01:10:43 ◼   ► we and any and the GM seem

01:10:45 ◼   ► so

01:10:47 ◼   ► Minimally different from the betas in terms of quality like even worse than they used than they used to be like

01:10:51 ◼   ► It seems like we're just always in beta now seems like they're they only get around to fixing the crashers

01:10:56 ◼   ► You know the big one, right and they never get around to the cleanup and it's guy

01:10:59 ◼   ► English's point that the annual cycle means that and you know

01:11:03 ◼   ► we're probably hitting that point right now where a lot of engineering talent at Apple is probably going towards the

01:11:10 ◼   ► WWDC releases of what I you know are I'm guessing will be iOS

01:11:16 ◼   ► 9 9 and

01:11:19 ◼   ► System 10.11 exactly like this cycle. It doesn't leave time for

01:11:25 ◼   ► stability really it doesn't leave time for all those boring little bug fixes to be applied to the old ancient version that we're all still using

01:11:33 ◼   ► because nothing ever gets that old.

01:11:36 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:11:37 ◼   ► Let me take a break and thank our second sponsor

01:11:40 ◼   ► and it is your and my, everybody's very good friends

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01:12:20 ◼   ► And they have a brand new Squarespace 7.

01:12:22 ◼   ► That's the latest version.

01:12:23 ◼   ► You can go to squarespace.com/7, spell it out like the movie, S-E-V-E-N, and see all

01:12:30 ◼   ► the new stuff.

01:12:31 ◼   ► You guys know, we talk about Squarespace all the time, they sponsor shows for years.

01:12:36 ◼   ► So you're familiar with it.

01:12:37 ◼   ► Go to that URL, slash seven at their site and find out the new stuff, but at the highlights.

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01:12:43 ◼   ► That's huge for people who are using this with companies that use Google Apps.

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01:12:53 ◼   ► They have a partnership with Getty Images now, so you can get stock photos and images

01:12:58 ◼   ► right there from within the Squarespace interface, new templates, things like cover pages so

01:13:05 ◼   ► you can have like a splash screen, splash screens are back.

01:13:09 ◼   ► And probably best of all, the best thing that they have, I think, isn't even technical.

01:13:13 ◼   ► It's their tech support.

01:13:14 ◼   ► 24/7, all hours, all days, you can get tech support via live chat and email.

01:13:20 ◼   ► And the whole thing, it starts at eight bucks a month.

01:13:25 ◼   ► You just can't lose.

01:13:27 ◼   ► And you get, I forget how much, I don't know, what is it?

01:13:32 ◼   ► A month?

01:13:33 ◼   ► What do you get, a month free?

01:13:34 ◼   ► - The trial?

01:13:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, they don't even tell you how much.

01:13:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, they don't even tell you.

01:13:37 ◼   ► I think it starts out as a week, but then when you hit that week, they'll send you an

01:13:42 ◼   ► email saying, "Hey, do you want more time?"

01:13:43 ◼   ► And you just click a link and they give you another week.

01:13:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's how confident they are that you're gonna stick with it, because once your

01:13:50 ◼   ► free trial's over, eventually, you're gonna be like, "I'd be nuts to leave, this is great."

01:13:56 ◼   ► You do it with no credit card required.

01:13:58 ◼   ► Just go there and start creating a website.

01:14:02 ◼   ► Free.

01:14:03 ◼   ► So, the URL to know that they came from the show is squarespace.com/gruber.

01:14:11 ◼   ► And the code when you sign up is my initials, JG.

01:14:14 ◼   ► I don't know why they don't match up.

01:14:17 ◼   ► But it's that code that you need.

01:14:18 ◼   ► You need to keep that in mind because it really doesn't matter what you do when you sign up.

01:14:21 ◼   ► Go there, just go to squarespace.com and sign up because you're going to get a free trial.

01:14:25 ◼   ► pay you know take the free trial to start it's when the free trial is over

01:14:28 ◼   ► you got to remember the code JG and when you use that code you'll save 10% so not

01:14:34 ◼   ► only will you help support the show but you'll save some of your own money as

01:14:38 ◼   ► well so my thanks to Squarespace if you need a website you're nuts if you don't

01:14:42 ◼   ► look at Squarespace first that's my new slogan for Squarespace I could have you

01:14:48 ◼   ► do all my ad for each so much better I like yours I like the one because you

01:14:51 ◼   ► actually had this story about your kid's school where the preschool or whatever

01:14:56 ◼   ► and they were gonna spend $7,000 on a website. I think it was three it was

01:15:00 ◼   ► three or thirty five hundred. I don't know anybody and if you everybody knows there is not a

01:15:05 ◼   ► schools don't have money to burn it's no it's like a little co-op preschool like

01:15:10 ◼   ► this is not like they don't have money it is like the kudos to you for being an

01:15:16 ◼   ► involved parent at the school but you were like will you give me like two days

01:15:19 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:15:20 ◼   ► You took like two days and billed them a website and now they pay...

01:15:26 ◼   ► Two hours and days.

01:15:27 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:15:28 ◼   ► Now they pay $8 a month.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Yeah, instead of $3,000.

01:15:31 ◼   ► Which for a website, let's face it, who knows who they were going to pay the $3,500 to,

01:15:36 ◼   ► but you know what?

01:15:37 ◼   ► It was probably going to suck.

01:15:38 ◼   ► Anyway, I love that story.

01:15:39 ◼   ► That was great.

01:15:40 ◼   ► Yeah, it's such a clear win for Squares.

01:15:42 ◼   ► And now, and like, I'm not even the person who's responsible for keeping the website

01:15:45 ◼   ► updated.

01:15:46 ◼   ► Somebody else does that.

01:15:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:48 ◼   ► to like have something that they can use that isn't like my crappy CMS or some really complicated

01:15:54 ◼   ► WordPress install and then if they need support I'm not their tech support. Squarespace is their

01:15:59 ◼   ► tech support. I'm totally out of it. Like I did my job, my job is done, my hands are clean,

01:16:03 ◼   ► and it's all like their system now that they can do whatever they want to and when they have a

01:16:08 ◼   ► question they can get support from Squarespace and not me. It's perfect. Yeah, 10 years ago that same

01:16:12 ◼   ► story might have been, you know, that you would have said "hey, hey" and then go sign them up for

01:16:17 ◼   ► like an $8 a month hosting account and put up an install of WordPress and

01:16:22 ◼   ► Pick a theme and do this and get like mostly the same thing

01:16:25 ◼   ► But that you're exactly right though then like like six months later and you're reading tech meme and there's like a big

01:16:30 ◼   ► Vulnerability and WordPress that was exposed and you're like, I don't think that's cool. That's cool

01:16:35 ◼   ► You know, there's no way they know and it's on you whether you just like

01:16:39 ◼   ► silently whistle and let the school keep going or whether now you're you know,

01:16:43 ◼   ► You're permanently on the hook for being like the you know, the guy who's gonna fix it or they're like, hey

01:16:48 ◼   ► You know, we want to add another widget to the sidebar

01:16:50 ◼   ► Can you do that for us because there's no clear way for them to do it, you know stuff like that

01:16:54 ◼   ► It's just it's so much better to just outsource this to Squarespace

01:16:57 ◼   ► The other thing I love about that anecdote of yours is I feel like it perfectly exemplifies why Squarespace

01:17:03 ◼   ► Advertises the way that they do that the way that they advertise over and over and over again on shows like ours

01:17:09 ◼   ► Never used to make sense to me, but I think it's so that you know

01:17:13 ◼   ► How many people really need to make a website right now?

01:17:16 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:17:17 ◼   ► Probably very few.

01:17:18 ◼   ► But how many over the course of the next year

01:17:20 ◼   ► are gonna find themselves in a situation

01:17:22 ◼   ► where they do need to make a website?

01:17:23 ◼   ► And at that moment,

01:17:24 ◼   ► if the first thing they think of is Squarespace,

01:17:27 ◼   ► boom, they go there.

01:17:28 ◼   ► - Exactly, yeah.

01:17:29 ◼   ► I think it works out very well for them that way.

01:17:31 ◼   ► - Right.

01:17:32 ◼   ► It's not about needing a website

01:17:33 ◼   ► while you're listening to it on the show.

01:17:34 ◼   ► It's seeding it in your mind

01:17:35 ◼   ► so that when you hit that situation

01:17:38 ◼   ► where your school wants to spend $4,000 on a website

01:17:41 ◼   ► that you say, "No, don't do that."

01:17:44 ◼   ► I wanna go back to what you were talking about.

01:17:48 ◼   ► And here's the, I have this in my notes here for the show,

01:17:51 ◼   ► and talk about dev relations.

01:17:53 ◼   ► And I think it's a big part of the problem

01:17:56 ◼   ► that we're talking about here.

01:17:58 ◼   ► And I think Apple's developer relations is overwhelmed.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Now, I don't know the numbers,

01:18:06 ◼   ► and so it's this ballpark figure.

01:18:09 ◼   ► But talking with somebody at Apple,

01:18:12 ◼   ► their rough estimate is that

01:18:15 ◼   ► Microsoft's developer relations team

01:18:19 ◼   ► is somewhere between 10 and 50 times larger than Apple's.

01:18:24 ◼   ► And I said, "50?"

01:18:26 ◼   ► And he was like, "Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised."

01:18:29 ◼   ► And if you're like a serious,

01:18:31 ◼   ► and you might know more about this than I do.

01:18:32 ◼   ► I've never been at,

01:18:33 ◼   ► I've never written a goddamn line of code for Windows.

01:18:37 ◼   ► But the basic idea is if you're a professional developer

01:18:42 ◼   ► and doing some kind of serious work on Windows,

01:18:44 ◼   ► you can get the attention of somebody competent

01:18:48 ◼   ► and who can get stuff done on their developer relations team.

01:18:52 ◼   ► And so if you're being driven up the wall

01:18:54 ◼   ► by this obscure bug in a framework,

01:18:59 ◼   ► you may not get a solution right away.

01:19:01 ◼   ► And you certainly may not get a version of Windows release

01:19:06 ◼   ► that has a fix for it right away.

01:19:08 ◼   ► But you can at least get somebody's attention

01:19:10 ◼   ► to get it in front of the right people.

01:19:13 ◼   ► And it doesn't feel like when you're reporting things

01:19:16 ◼   ► to Microsoft, it doesn't feel like you're, you know,

01:19:20 ◼   ► just filing things into a black hole.

01:19:23 ◼   ► And that Apple's developer relations,

01:19:26 ◼   ► not that they're not well-meaning,

01:19:27 ◼   ► but that they're just overwhelmed,

01:19:29 ◼   ► absolutely positively overwhelmed.

01:19:31 ◼   ► and it's like Microsoft's developer relations team

01:19:36 ◼   ► is of a size that is appropriate for a company

01:19:40 ◼   ► that had and saw as its rightful place

01:19:44 ◼   ► that 90 some percent of all software in the world

01:19:47 ◼   ► is written for it.

01:19:49 ◼   ► And Apple's developer relations is still of a scale

01:19:52 ◼   ► of a company that has like three or 4%

01:19:55 ◼   ► of the software in the world.

01:19:57 ◼   ► - Well also like the whole structure of how

01:20:00 ◼   ► like how it's set up with the public or with the developers

01:20:03 ◼   ► is radically different.

01:20:06 ◼   ► Now, I don't know how Microsoft is set up,

01:20:07 ◼   ► but the way Apple is set up is,

01:20:09 ◼   ► it's fairly hostile at first.

01:20:13 ◼   ► Like, Apple appears to just be this brick wall

01:20:17 ◼   ► that you have no way in.

01:20:20 ◼   ► Like, there is nowhere on, as far as I know,

01:20:23 ◼   ► I don't think there's like, you know,

01:20:25 ◼   ► a list or an email address to say like,

01:20:27 ◼   ► "Hey, ask a developer evangelist a question."

01:20:29 ◼   ► So I just searched, I've always wondered,

01:20:34 ◼   ► is there a public list anywhere

01:20:35 ◼   ► of who the Apple evangelists even are?

01:20:39 ◼   ► And if you search Google for Apple developer evangelists,

01:20:42 ◼   ► nowhere on the first page is anything from Apple.

01:20:45 ◼   ► There's a GitHub gist where somebody else,

01:20:48 ◼   ► some random person just compiled the list from WVDC

01:20:51 ◼   ► and there's a bunch of question marks on it too.

01:20:59 ◼   ► Every year at WBC, you can always tell,

01:21:03 ◼   ► again, in the first few days,

01:21:05 ◼   ► if you look around some of the bigger sessions,

01:21:07 ◼   ► the very last slide, they will show the presenter's name,

01:21:11 ◼   ► their email address, and their title.

01:21:13 ◼   ► That is usually the first time you see their title.

01:21:17 ◼   ► It is almost certainly the first time

01:21:19 ◼   ► you see their email address.

01:21:20 ◼   ► And you look around the room,

01:21:21 ◼   ► and when that slide is on screen for about eight seconds,

01:21:23 ◼   ► and you see half the room racing

01:21:25 ◼   ► to write down that email address.

01:21:27 ◼   ► - Taking pictures of it.

01:21:28 ◼   ► Yeah. I've noticed that in recent years now. Right. He has an iPhone. Yeah, because like,

01:21:34 ◼   ► that's like the that's like the first time that most people see like, Oh, my God, there's an

01:21:39 ◼   ► email address with somebody who works in Apple, in the developer group somewhere that I can contact.

01:21:43 ◼   ► Plus, I think people worry rightfully, that they want to write it down or get a picture of it now.

01:21:49 ◼   ► Because who knows if they're going to cut it out of the published version of the video,

01:21:53 ◼   ► because they cut a lot out of those videos. Right? cut mistakes out. Who knows?

01:21:57 ◼   ► Who knows it?

01:21:58 ◼   ► They cut out laughter and applause.

01:21:59 ◼   ► They cut out a lot.

01:22:00 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:01 ◼   ► Like if all of a sudden this guy gets overwhelmed with email, maybe they're going to take his

01:22:04 ◼   ► email out.

01:22:05 ◼   ► So you better get it down while you can.

01:22:07 ◼   ► I know exactly what you're talking about.

01:22:10 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:11 ◼   ► And that's weird.

01:22:12 ◼   ► If these people's job is to interact with the public, with the developers at least,

01:22:17 ◼   ► with the developer public about these frameworks and these areas of development, there's no

01:22:22 ◼   ► list on Apple's site anywhere that lists them?

01:22:24 ◼   ► Like that's weird, isn't it?

01:22:26 ◼   ► I don't think that it's malice. I don't think it's that they don't mean well.

01:22:30 ◼   ► I, and in fact,

01:22:31 ◼   ► the people I know in Apple developer relations for the most part are great

01:22:34 ◼   ► people. And at least I've never met anybody who's like,

01:22:36 ◼   ► I would call unpleasant. I would say really sharp.

01:22:39 ◼   ► I think that they are overwhelmed though. I think that they,

01:22:42 ◼   ► I'm sure they've staffed up somewhat, but I think for the most part,

01:22:45 ◼   ► they're of a basic magnitude that was appropriate for Apple

01:22:50 ◼   ► 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. And now they're one of,

01:22:55 ◼   ► if not the most popular developer platform in the world,

01:22:58 ◼   ► and they're just overwhelmed.

01:23:00 ◼   ► Again, the number that I heard from somebody,

01:23:02 ◼   ► again, a rough estimate, but that Microsoft's team

01:23:04 ◼   ► is 10 to 50 times larger.

01:23:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean-- - It's entirely different.

01:23:10 ◼   ► - And this list on GitHub of who the evangelists are

01:23:12 ◼   ► at Apple has like 12 people on it.

01:23:14 ◼   ► It's a pretty small list.

01:23:16 ◼   ► So, and like, and they are, if they're overwhelmed,

01:23:21 ◼   ► that would explain a lot because, you know,

01:23:23 ◼   ► Even like, there's developer relations managers

01:23:27 ◼   ► or representatives, like people will say,

01:23:29 ◼   ► oh, I talked to a developer rep or my developer rep.

01:23:32 ◼   ► I don't know how you go about getting a developer rep.

01:23:36 ◼   ► For the first, I don't know, five years

01:23:40 ◼   ► that I had an app in the app, for all of Instapaper

01:23:42 ◼   ► and all of the magazine, I could never find one,

01:23:46 ◼   ► no one ever contacted me.

01:23:48 ◼   ► I didn't have a developer rep, if that even is a thing.

01:23:52 ◼   ► It wasn't until Overcast that somebody emailed me

01:23:57 ◼   ► from some press thing, like they reached out.

01:24:00 ◼   ► And so it wasn't really until that

01:24:04 ◼   ► that I had a contact that I could email at Apple

01:24:08 ◼   ► to ask a question to or to bring a concern to.

01:24:12 ◼   ► It wasn't until last year.

01:24:15 ◼   ► And I've been in the App Store since 2008.

01:24:21 ◼   ► And when I mentioned this to the person, they--

01:24:24 ◼   ► - Let's just, and let's not mince words,

01:24:26 ◼   ► with some success. (laughs)

01:24:28 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:24:29 ◼   ► - I mean, it's, again, I'm not, you know,

01:24:31 ◼   ► it's not like you wrote YouTube, but, you know,

01:24:35 ◼   ► pretty popular apps.

01:24:36 ◼   ► - Right, and yeah, it didn't matter.

01:24:38 ◼   ► And when I mentioned this to this person

01:24:40 ◼   ► that I had never found any contacts

01:24:42 ◼   ► in Developed Relations before,

01:24:43 ◼   ► they were like, they were surprised,

01:24:44 ◼   ► they were like, "Really?

01:24:45 ◼   ► "Are you sure?"

01:24:46 ◼   ► Like, that, really?

01:24:48 ◼   ► Like, that's, like, they were even surprised at that.

01:24:50 ◼   ► But I don't think that people in the developer relations

01:24:54 ◼   ► division, I don't think they have a good idea of how it

01:24:58 ◼   ► looks from the outside, of how the developer relations system

01:25:03 ◼   ► and how Apple as a whole appears to and communicates

01:25:07 ◼   ► with developers who are not in with somebody.

01:25:10 ◼   ► - The gist of it, what I've heard, and I believe it,

01:25:13 ◼   ► and it definitely plays on developer relations,

01:25:15 ◼   ► but they're so overwhelmed, developer relations,

01:25:17 ◼   ► that the reps are just, and they're not, and not known,

01:25:21 ◼   ► and hard to initiate contact with,

01:25:24 ◼   ► and even once they do, it just never becomes a priority

01:25:27 ◼   ► that the whole internal, I'm gonna call it radar,

01:25:30 ◼   ► but maybe it's not just radar,

01:25:32 ◼   ► maybe radar's just the database,

01:25:34 ◼   ► but the whole radar system is entirely geared internally

01:25:37 ◼   ► toward fixing bugs from within Apple itself, right?

01:25:41 ◼   ► So if you're one of the engineers on pages

01:25:45 ◼   ► and you run into a text kit bug,

01:25:48 ◼   ► it gets taken care of exactly as you would think.

01:25:51 ◼   ► And it goes up the post

01:25:52 ◼   ► and it gets put in front of the right person

01:25:54 ◼   ► and they run your example project and say,

01:25:57 ◼   ► "Oh, I see," and fix it.

01:25:58 ◼   ► And then, you know, it just works.

01:26:01 ◼   ► It's all, but it's,

01:26:02 ◼   ► there's nothing like that from the outside.

01:26:04 ◼   ► Like it's like 99% internal and like 1% external.

01:26:09 ◼   ► And I'm not saying the balance should be 50/50.

01:26:12 ◼   ► you know, I think it's obvious that of course Apple's gonna fix their own bugs first, but

01:26:18 ◼   ► it's just not even close. And it's not even like, "Oh, poor us, poor third-party developers,

01:26:25 ◼   ► we're not getting our bugs fixed." These are things that affect users, everybody. We're

01:26:30 ◼   ► fighting for these bugs because they affect the experience of the users.

01:26:34 ◼   ► Right, exactly. I don't know. I don't know how you solve this problem except by making

01:26:41 ◼   ► certain parts of Apple much bigger and that's obviously not an easy thing to do

01:26:45 ◼   ► like you know they're all they like Mythical Man month kind of things like

01:26:48 ◼   ► and I think it's a staff up I think it's a scary thing for them to do too because

01:26:53 ◼   ► you know they've seen it over the you know everybody's seen this industry for

01:26:58 ◼   ► 20 years and everybody knows that Microsoft got a lot bigger and then it

01:27:02 ◼   ► got it got slow and lumbering right and and they also you know they're gonna

01:27:08 ◼   ► to have trouble staffing up possibly because when you work for Apple you have, you know,

01:27:14 ◼   ► you have to, first of all you have to be there. Like they don't do remote work for most things.

01:27:19 ◼   ► They have a couple of remote offices for certain like isolated projects but for the most part

01:27:23 ◼   ► they don't do remote work. So you have to be there. They're competing with everyone

01:27:28 ◼   ► else in the Silicon Valley region for top talent and that is, that is extremely competitive.

01:27:36 ◼   ► And I would imagine they probably have trouble retaining a lot of these good people because

01:27:41 ◼   ► like, I mean, you know, we know tons of like our friends and people we knew at Apple who

01:27:46 ◼   ► like they were at Apple for a while and then they want to go out and try being an iOS developer

01:27:50 ◼   ► or being a Mac developer themselves like independently because when you're in Apple you can't really

01:27:55 ◼   ► have side projects.

01:27:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's funny I bet being a developer relations rep is even more easily poached

01:28:02 ◼   ► because your whole job is reaching out to other people and they're going to be like,

01:28:05 ◼   ► you're awesome, you can work for us. Right, yeah. I bet it happens. Yeah, and if you're like an iOS

01:28:11 ◼   ► expert who has worked for Apple, that's a pretty good qualifier. I would imagine it makes you

01:28:16 ◼   ► pretty valuable on the market. So I expect that they probably have a lot of trouble first

01:28:23 ◼   ► attracting and then retaining great talent there, in addition to any cultural issues and challenges

01:28:29 ◼   ► that would come with trying to grow the company substantially larger. But I don't really see a way

01:28:34 ◼   ► around that being the eventual outcome. Like, I don't think they can keep the company the

01:28:40 ◼   ► current size. And I know they also have issues with, like, they don't have the space. Like,

01:28:44 ◼   ► that's why they're building this giant new campus. Like, they're out of room, too. But,

01:28:47 ◼   ► you know, it's--there's all these problems. But, you know, these problems aren't just

01:28:51 ◼   ► going to disappear. Like, and I think they are working towards that. I hope they're working

01:28:57 ◼   ► towards that. But I think there's going to be some uncomfortable migration, uncomfortable

01:29:01 ◼   ► growth as the company becomes a bigger organization, but I think it has to be.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I think people are, third-party developers are exercising things that

01:29:11 ◼   ► just don't get exercised within Apple, you know. I would say like the extensions

01:29:17 ◼   ► are a perfect example of that, like the sharing extensions, where Apple knew what

01:29:22 ◼   ► they would be used for, but the things that Apple itself really wants in there,

01:29:26 ◼   ► they were already there anyway, because if Apple is collectively agreed,

01:29:30 ◼   ► "Hey, this should be in the sharing extension for everybody."

01:29:33 ◼   ► Then it was built into the systems sharing panel.

01:29:36 ◼   ► It was only when third-party developers started doing it.

01:29:38 ◼   ► But that thing is so full of little tiny bugs,

01:29:41 ◼   ► like the way that when you reorder them,

01:29:43 ◼   ► the order doesn't stick.

01:29:44 ◼   ► And there's just a bunch of little things like that.

01:29:48 ◼   ► It's just a perfect example of something

01:29:49 ◼   ► that to me doesn't quite work right.

01:29:52 ◼   ► - Right, and there was a couple of little limitations

01:29:56 ◼   ► that ended up having pretty big ramifications.

01:29:58 ◼   ► I believe it was Brian Irae of Tumblr,

01:30:00 ◼   ► made a nice blog post right before iOS 8 came out,

01:30:04 ◼   ► listing all the little challenges

01:30:06 ◼   ► that they had with the Tumblr extension.

01:30:07 ◼   ► - It was Brian Iraes.

01:30:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, and he did the right thing.

01:30:10 ◼   ► He reported them all as radars

01:30:11 ◼   ► and listed all the radar numbers in the post and everything.

01:30:14 ◼   ► But they actually, I remember,

01:30:19 ◼   ► well, I don't know if that's public.

01:30:21 ◼   ► Anyway. (laughs)

01:30:24 ◼   ► - What we learned building the iOS,

01:30:26 ◼   ► Tumblr iOS share extension.

01:30:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:30:30 ◼   ► It will be in the show notes.

01:30:32 ◼   ► - So we have, you know, the system itself, it has bugs,

01:30:35 ◼   ► it has all these limitations, it's, you know,

01:30:37 ◼   ► that's gotta get better, and you know, hopefully it will.

01:30:39 ◼   ► Over time it probably will.

01:30:41 ◼   ► But I think, you know, and all the stuff

01:30:44 ◼   ► around the app rejection is pretty substantially worse too.

01:30:48 ◼   ► Like all the rejections around this,

01:30:49 ◼   ► I think what we're seeing is the policy

01:30:54 ◼   ► from Apple is pretty clear.

01:30:56 ◼   ► The policy is, the implied policy rather,

01:31:00 ◼   ► is keyboards should not contain anything

01:31:03 ◼   ► that isn't a keyboard.

01:31:04 ◼   ► Like, you know, it shouldn't be able to do anything

01:31:07 ◼   ► that is not like text entry.

01:31:09 ◼   ► You know, it shouldn't have any other cool features

01:31:13 ◼   ► built in, like a calculator built into your keyboard.

01:31:15 ◼   ► Like, they obviously, like, this is the implied rule.

01:31:18 ◼   ► Your keyboard should only be a keyboard of some sort.

01:31:21 ◼   ► - Yeah. - No extras.

01:31:23 ◼   ► - Can't put a version of Desert Golfing in as a keyboard.

01:31:25 ◼   ► - Correct, similarly, your today view,

01:31:28 ◼   ► your today extension or widget, whatever they're called,

01:31:30 ◼   ► your today view should or must be in general

01:31:35 ◼   ► a quick glance kind of thing.

01:31:37 ◼   ► It shouldn't be the place where you spend time,

01:31:39 ◼   ► it shouldn't be a place where you complete

01:31:41 ◼   ► a long running task, it should just be a quick view.

01:31:45 ◼   ► Those are the implied rules.

01:31:47 ◼   ► But they won't come out and say that.

01:31:48 ◼   ► Like they won't codify that and say, this is the rule,

01:31:51 ◼   ► it's a high level rule, this should only be used for this.

01:31:55 ◼   ► Like, that's clearly what they want,

01:31:58 ◼   ► but what they're saying instead is,

01:32:01 ◼   ► well, we're gonna try to draw the line exactly where,

01:32:04 ◼   ► like more precisely where they should be, more lower level,

01:32:06 ◼   ► and they're gonna say, well, you can't have buttons

01:32:07 ◼   ► that launch your app, or you can't complete the task,

01:32:09 ◼   ► or you can't have too many buttons,

01:32:11 ◼   ► or you can't have this kind of button,

01:32:12 ◼   ► or you can't simulate a keyboard in here today,

01:32:14 ◼   ► or you're like, they try to come up

01:32:15 ◼   ► with all these little tiny explanations

01:32:17 ◼   ► of lower level implementation detail rules,

01:32:21 ◼   ► but that's clearly not, like, those are all just,

01:32:24 ◼   ► you know, that is somebody not wanting to state

01:32:27 ◼   ► the real rule, the higher level rule,

01:32:30 ◼   ► which is this system is intended only for this,

01:32:33 ◼   ► you're only allowed to do this.

01:32:35 ◼   ► And it's just not, I don't know,

01:32:39 ◼   ► I don't know why they won't just say the higher level rule,

01:32:41 ◼   ► because I think that would actually generate

01:32:44 ◼   ► less controversy and would be easier

01:32:46 ◼   ► for developers to follow and to know,

01:32:48 ◼   ► like, certainly some developers would be like,

01:32:50 ◼   ► well, does this count?

01:32:51 ◼   ► But you know, you see the high level rule

01:32:52 ◼   ► and that would at least give you some idea

01:32:54 ◼   ► Like if I stray from this, it's gonna be rocky territory

01:32:57 ◼   ► and a rejection risk.

01:32:58 ◼   ► - I think the App Store stuff definitely plays into it.

01:33:01 ◼   ► I don't know how different that is

01:33:02 ◼   ► from typical dev relations, but it ought to be tied up

01:33:05 ◼   ► because it's, in Apple's view, the App Store is,

01:33:08 ◼   ► and for iOS, it absolutely is the only way,

01:33:11 ◼   ► other than the enterprise stuff, you know,

01:33:13 ◼   ► it's the only way, it's an inextricable part

01:33:16 ◼   ► of the development process.

01:33:17 ◼   ► So App Store problems should be considered

01:33:19 ◼   ► developer relation problems.

01:33:21 ◼   ► The whole thing, like with the recent things,

01:33:24 ◼   ► panic has gone through and like where they had the the issue with their

01:33:28 ◼   ► Saving feature in transmit where you know

01:33:34 ◼   ► they didn't want them to be able to save to iCloud Drive and therefore they had to take the whole thing out because

01:33:38 ◼   ► Even the stuff that hooks up to Dropbox and box.net because there's no control over that

01:33:43 ◼   ► And then you know, I wrote about it a couple other people wrote about it

01:33:47 ◼   ► And then you know, saner saner mines prevailed and okay

01:33:51 ◼   ► They got it fixed and there's this whole angle that everybody agrees on everybody that you shouldn't have to have you know

01:33:57 ◼   ► Daring fireball publish it to get your story fixed

01:34:02 ◼   ► you shouldn't have to go public to get that and you shouldn't have to be of the

01:34:07 ◼   ► prominence of panic

01:34:11 ◼   ► To do that, you know like some upstart who nobody's heard of yet should be able to get this, you know the same reasonable

01:34:17 ◼   ► correction

01:34:19 ◼   ► with an App Store problem that Panic got.

01:34:22 ◼   ► Right, and they have the appeal system set up there. So like in theory this it should work.

01:34:29 ◼   ► You should be able to go to the appeal which like, you know, from what I understand,

01:34:33 ◼   ► so, you know, you have the reviewers on one level and from what I understand the appeal doesn't just go to the same people, it

01:34:38 ◼   ► goes to like a level above those people. And so if some reviewer just made a bad call,

01:34:42 ◼   ► the appeal should work. The system that's in place there should work.

01:34:47 ◼   ► The question is why doesn't it work as well as we're into the press like right we're into the press and making a big stink

01:34:54 ◼   ► Yeah, that's gonna work just by the way PR works that that's gonna work a little bit better. You know on occasion, but

01:34:59 ◼   ► It shouldn't work so much better

01:35:02 ◼   ► It shouldn't be like like and and in panic even said I mean panic will say these things in the nicest way possible

01:35:07 ◼   ► Because you know they don't want to start on a any stuff, but but you know they even said like it's unfortunate

01:35:14 ◼   ► But you know this method is what works. Yeah, and we've gotten a queue branch

01:35:19 ◼   ► we've gotten bugs fixed because we know people who work on the framework that we're having the problem with and we could

01:35:27 ◼   ► You know

01:35:28 ◼   ► I think literally at at WWDC Brent had like coffee with somebody and showed

01:35:33 ◼   ► The example product which he had already submitted months ago in a radar, you know

01:35:37 ◼   ► Here's a simple 13 line example prod project that shows the bug exactly

01:35:41 ◼   ► But he got to show it to a guy from the framework team

01:35:44 ◼   ► Right in his face, you know, not not a confrontation, you know Brent

01:35:48 ◼   ► But it was like drinking, you know drinking coffee at the hotel bar and the guy was like, oh I see

01:35:52 ◼   ► Oh, I bet I know what that is

01:35:53 ◼   ► And he like, you know made a note of it and but you shouldn't have to know somebody and have coffee with an engineer

01:35:59 ◼   ► You know, it's just because Brent knew that, you know knew him for years

01:36:02 ◼   ► That doesn't scale to say that that doesn't scale is you know?

01:36:08 ◼   ► self-evident. Right, I mean, so you have, in the reality of the iOS ecosystem and the

01:36:14 ◼   ► Mac, the reality of the Apple dev ecosystem is that you have the official channels up

01:36:20 ◼   ► that are just this tremendous wall and filter. And what you said earlier makes sense that

01:36:26 ◼   ► they are extremely understaffed in these areas or they're not skilling very well. That explains

01:36:31 ◼   ► a lot because it seems like where the general public is shown to go is just a wall that

01:36:38 ◼   ► is extremely ineffective, has very few ways in, and it is just very off-putting and just,

01:36:45 ◼   ► you know, they're trying to deflect everyone. It's like when you call a big company and

01:36:49 ◼   ► you get put on hold for 35 minutes on some touch-tone menu that really wants you to follow

01:36:53 ◼   ► its self-help options. Like, they don't want you to get in through the public way because

01:36:58 ◼   ► they can't handle it all. Then you have all of us going through, like, the side door because

01:37:03 ◼   ► we know somebody, and that ends up working better. That's not good. Like, that should

01:37:08 ◼   ► be embarrassing that should be a major problem.

01:37:10 ◼   ► And it seems like something they could fix because you know, like, and again, I think

01:37:14 ◼   ► the biggest problem is what you said, which is just that hiring talented people in general

01:37:18 ◼   ► is hard. And it's especially hard in the valley. But, you know, guess what works money and

01:37:25 ◼   ► guess what Apple has to have money. So I can't help but think it is fixable.

01:37:30 ◼   ► Well, and you know, who's to say they have to always keep everybody in Cupertino? Right?

01:37:36 ◼   ► Like there are parts of their business that can be easily at some other location.

01:37:41 ◼   ► Like I work as in Pittsburgh.

01:37:43 ◼   ► Like there are parts of Apple's business that can be other places.

01:37:47 ◼   ► And I think Gus was saying they're opening up an office in Seattle.

01:37:51 ◼   ► So like it looks like they might be starting to be more willing to branch this out a little

01:37:55 ◼   ► bit.

01:37:56 ◼   ► But yeah, I think the Seattle office is going to be cloud stuff.

01:37:59 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:38:00 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the rumor.

01:38:01 ◼   ► I don't know if we have any good info on that yet.

01:38:04 ◼   ► So I think they need to start breaking down some of these barriers with themselves of

01:38:12 ◼   ► the way they've always done things or the rules they have internally.

01:38:17 ◼   ► If they say everyone has to work on site, you better make more sites and more places

01:38:22 ◼   ► because they have to become a bigger company.

01:38:26 ◼   ► There are so many areas where they are clearly understaffed or under-resourced.

01:38:30 ◼   ► And as you said, it's not for money.

01:38:32 ◼   ► It's not because of money.

01:38:33 ◼   ► far as we can tell. Unless they foresee a near-term future where they're not

01:38:39 ◼   ► going to have so many third-party developers, and I don't see how they

01:38:42 ◼   ► could possibly think that because it doesn't seem, I don't see how that's

01:38:46 ◼   ► possible, they really need a bigger developer relations team. Much bigger.

01:38:51 ◼   ► Like factor of ten. With not just headcount but with authority within the

01:38:57 ◼   ► company to get issues escalated and put in front of the right people. And as

01:39:03 ◼   ► this week has gone on and this has been the topic of the week, I'm thinking, my

01:39:07 ◼   ► thinking has shifted more and more that it's a lot more a developer relations

01:39:11 ◼   ► problem and a lot less due to what I initially had been thinking for a long

01:39:16 ◼   ► time, which is the annual release cycle of the two OSes. Well, I think there's two

01:39:21 ◼   ► different problems. I mean, I think there's, I think it's, you know, it's

01:39:25 ◼   ► clearly multi-variable and those are both definitely two of the variables,

01:39:29 ◼   ► Absolutely, but my thinking has shifted in terms of which one is a bigger problem and I

01:39:35 ◼   ► Think to which one to my eyes meshes with the timeline of what I'm seeing

01:39:43 ◼   ► I've you know, I think that it's as iOS has gotten more complicated and therefore there are more things that could go wrong

01:39:51 ◼   ► and as the the the

01:39:55 ◼   ► ratio of developers to

01:39:58 ◼   ► developer relations people within Apple

01:40:00 ◼   ► has gotten more and more absurd,

01:40:03 ◼   ► that correlates to me, to my eyes,

01:40:05 ◼   ► with the shift in quality.

01:40:08 ◼   ► And again, I think Hockenberry nailed it.

01:40:10 ◼   ► It's like loose screws.

01:40:13 ◼   ► It's the software equivalent of loose screws.

01:40:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, just like sloppy little flaws that aren't fatal,

01:40:19 ◼   ► but yeah, I mean, and I think these problems are intertwined.

01:40:23 ◼   ► You know, like, it's hard to say,

01:40:27 ◼   ► well, developer relations is responsible

01:40:28 ◼   ► for a general decline in quality

01:40:31 ◼   ► in Apple software and services.

01:40:32 ◼   ► - Right, that's too simple, that's way too simple.

01:40:34 ◼   ► - Right, but-- - And that's why--

01:40:36 ◼   ► - But you can look at certain parts,

01:40:37 ◼   ► you can say like, well, if they're saying

01:40:41 ◼   ► that they're not seeing more bugs being reported,

01:40:43 ◼   ► and therefore they don't know what problems to fix,

01:40:45 ◼   ► they don't have enough information to fix them,

01:40:47 ◼   ► why aren't more bugs being reported?

01:40:49 ◼   ► And then you can start following that rabbit hole,

01:40:50 ◼   ► and be like, oh, well, actually,

01:40:52 ◼   ► this is related to developer relations,

01:40:54 ◼   ► or related to the bug reporter system,

01:40:56 ◼   ► or related to the image Apple has among developers,

01:40:58 ◼   ► and the personality, 'cause the personality

01:41:02 ◼   ► of individual people within Apple I've spoken with

01:41:04 ◼   ► or that I know couldn't possibly be more different

01:41:08 ◼   ► than the public persona of Apple.

01:41:10 ◼   ► The public persona of Apple is, as I said,

01:41:12 ◼   ► it's a brick wall and it's pretty terse

01:41:15 ◼   ► and it's pretty unwelcoming to developers

01:41:18 ◼   ► and to public input of any kind, really.

01:41:21 ◼   ► But the individual people I've met and spoken with at Apple

01:41:25 ◼   ► are the complete opposite.

01:41:26 ◼   ► They're friendly, normal people.

01:41:27 ◼   ► They're a lot of our friends.

01:41:29 ◼   ► So why is that disconnect there?

01:41:31 ◼   ► - They take enormous pride in their work.

01:41:33 ◼   ► Like if you are lucky enough to get your bug

01:41:36 ◼   ► in front of the person who can,

01:41:37 ◼   ► like an engineer who can fix it,

01:41:39 ◼   ► they're gonna take care of it.

01:41:40 ◼   ► They are offended by any and all bugs.

01:41:43 ◼   ► - Right, because they're good engineers.

01:41:45 ◼   ► So what is the disconnect here?

01:41:47 ◼   ► Is it a process issue?

01:41:49 ◼   ► Is it a policy issue?

01:41:50 ◼   ► Is it just like inertia going in the wrong direction

01:41:54 ◼   ► and certain things?

01:41:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:41:55 ◼   ► But the issues at Apple are seemingly deep rooted.

01:42:00 ◼   ► It's something that's like not budging,

01:42:03 ◼   ► you know, like some part of the culture inside

01:42:05 ◼   ► or the process, the way things are done

01:42:08 ◼   ► is it needs to be modernized and it hasn't been yet.

01:42:12 ◼   ► And that's not an easy thing to do.

01:42:13 ◼   ► You know, that's, I mean,

01:42:14 ◼   ► I don't know anything about big companies, but.

01:42:16 ◼   ► - I wonder how much too, that the historical artifacts

01:42:20 ◼   ► of the size of their developer relations team

01:42:23 ◼   ► being relatively small,

01:42:24 ◼   ► how much of that relates to not just the fact that 10, 15,

01:42:28 ◼   ► 20 years ago, Apple was a smaller company,

01:42:32 ◼   ► B had far fewer users and C had far fewer developers,

01:42:36 ◼   ► but also with the peculiar nature of the third party

01:42:41 ◼   ► to modernize peculiar to our current eyes of that,

01:42:44 ◼   ► it was dominated by just like three or four huge companies,

01:42:48 ◼   ► Adobe, Microsoft, you know, go so far as the macro media.

01:42:53 ◼   ► Macromedia, you know, just a hand, you know,

01:42:57 ◼   ► maybe more than four or five, but you know,

01:42:58 ◼   ► that you, just 10, 11, 12 big, big developers

01:43:02 ◼   ► who I think, and by all accounts that I've heard,

01:43:05 ◼   ► you know, did have, you know, like,