The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► So, in the news this week, it seems like there's one of the things that's come up. It seems

00:00:04 ◼   ► like this is the week. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just what I read

00:00:07 ◼   ► this week. But it seems like this is the week where everybody has sort of come to the conclusion

00:00:11 ◼   ► that Windows 8 is a failure.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I was just, yeah, I was actually thinking about that too. And it's not that, it's not

00:00:20 ◼   ► that literally nobody is buying it.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Mm-mm. Not at all. Not a Vista type thing.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Was it like 100 million people had bought it or something like that?

00:00:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:29 ◼   ► of people, but it seems to me that this is one of these things where Microsoft has to

00:00:35 ◼   ► not just approach expectations, but has to far exceed expectations in order to be thought

00:00:43 ◼   ► of as really doing well.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Windows Phone is a similar example, and I've posted about this many times, which is this

00:00:53 ◼   ► is not a place where they can just do okay.

00:00:56 ◼   ► this is so important to the future of Microsoft

00:00:59 ◼   ► that just doing okay is a massive failure here.

00:01:02 ◼   ► And only huge success would be,

00:01:05 ◼   ► you know, is the only acceptable solution there.

00:01:07 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:01:09 ◼   ► - I think that's exactly what we're seeing.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Is that it is pretty good and it's pretty popular,

00:01:14 ◼   ► but that's just not good enough.

00:01:16 ◼   ► - Especially as, you know, the PC market itself

00:01:21 ◼   ► heads into the toilet basically.

00:01:24 ◼   ► and the future of what, you know, if this trend holds up, the shift to tablets and mobile

00:01:32 ◼   ► devices, you know, the share of Windows on those devices is, you know, single digit or

00:01:38 ◼   ► low double digit.

00:01:42 ◼   ► That's not going to work for the best, for the biggest software company in the world.

00:01:46 ◼   ► You know, they can, sure, they have the enterprise business and all that sort of stuff, which

00:01:50 ◼   ► could very well be a large profitable business for Microsoft, but hard to see that being

00:01:56 ◼   ► as big or as dominant as Windows was now more than 10 years ago.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah, and I think I nailed half of it two years ago when they first announced Windows

00:02:11 ◼   ► 8, and I wrote a piece about how it's—I forget the title, but something about how

00:02:14 ◼   ► it was a bad idea to compete against the iPad. And my argument, and I think it has proven

00:02:21 ◼   ► to be exactly right, is that the appeal of the iPad is largely based on all of the things

00:02:28 ◼   ► that it can't do because it makes it so simple. And having a system where you have all of

00:02:33 ◼   ► the complexity of Windows and a simple interface over there to the side isn't going to do it.

00:02:40 ◼   ► And I think that's proven right.

00:02:43 ◼   ► But that's only really half the story, which is that Windows 8 wasn't going to be competitive

00:02:48 ◼   ► against the iPad in this new space of tablet-type devices.

00:02:53 ◼   ► The part that I didn't really think about, and it just never really occurred to me, was

00:02:59 ◼   ► that it was going to also prove unpopular as a PC operating system for people using

00:03:05 ◼   ► it on desktops and traditional laptops.

00:03:08 ◼   ► Right, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it.

00:03:15 ◼   ► The reason I still do all my work on a Mac and not on iOS is that there are certain functions

00:03:21 ◼   ► that lend themselves very well to having a keyboard and a trackpad, shifting between

00:03:26 ◼   ► many windows at a time, being able to go and look at an old email while I'm writing a new

00:03:31 ◼   ► email.

00:03:32 ◼   ► Those are things that iOS does very poorly and that the Mac still does extremely well.

00:03:37 ◼   ► I certainly wouldn't want to run iOS on my Mac, at least not anytime soon. So I could see how that

00:03:43 ◼   ► would kind of cloud the Windows experience too right now is that Metro or what used to be called

00:03:51 ◼   ► Metro isn't really something you want on your desktop and the old Windows is definitely not

00:03:57 ◼   ► something you want on your tablet. So... I just never really thought about that other half of

00:04:02 ◼   ► the story. And the thing that I keep seeing, I've seen it in a couple of stories this week,

00:04:06 ◼   ► And I believe it is that a lot of people get it and honestly they have trouble putting their

00:04:10 ◼   ► computer to sleep or turning their computer off because they can't figure it out because

00:04:15 ◼   ► the only thing they've ever known what to do is you go to the start menu and that's where you

00:04:19 ◼   ► go to shut down. And it's actually that old, you know, everybody used to make fun of it is

00:04:23 ◼   ► how do you shut down a Windows computer, go to the start menu, right? Which is kind of linguistically

00:04:30 ◼   ► counterintuitive. But everybody knew to do that and now that the start menu is gone, nobody knows

00:04:35 ◼   ► how the hell to shut off their computer.

00:04:36 ◼   ► And it's it's stupid thing, right?

00:04:40 ◼   ► But I understand why. Because think about the iPad, right?

00:04:44 ◼   ► How do you shut off the iPad within the software? There is no way because it's,

00:04:49 ◼   ► you know, it's this one cohesive, it's, it's not,

00:04:51 ◼   ► it's not just a operating system, it's a device.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And so they put this big obvious power button up in the corner and that's,

00:04:59 ◼   ► you just tap that button.

00:05:02 ◼   ► or if you're my wife, you just put it in your purse

00:05:06 ◼   ► without turning it off and then purse dial me.

00:05:08 ◼   ► But that was mean, I shouldn't have said that.

00:05:12 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - Oh, that's okay.

00:05:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, so--

00:05:19 ◼   ► - You actually can do that though.

00:05:20 ◼   ► If you just put your iPad in your purse or whatever

00:05:23 ◼   ► without turning it off, it will shut off

00:05:25 ◼   ► in a couple of minutes.

00:05:26 ◼   ► - It will, it will.

00:05:27 ◼   ► - I mean, unless I guess, unless you leave it,

00:05:29 ◼   ► unless you leave it streaming Netflix or something.

00:05:31 ◼   ► Right. Sometimes it'll accidentally do stuff like call me or something like that. I used

00:05:39 ◼   ► to call that the pants style. In fact, that was my pride of age 25, I think, when I was

00:05:44 ◼   ► working at Forbes was saying the term pants style on CBS radio. That was like, "Yeah!"

00:05:50 ◼   ► The lady is... Yeah, everyone was confused and amused.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Right. Pants is obviously one of the best words in the English language because nobody

00:05:59 ◼   ► will argue that it's even vaguely scandalous, but there is something vaguely inappropriate

00:06:05 ◼   ► about it.

00:06:06 ◼   ► And it's funny. It just sounds funny. And it looks funny. It's a great word.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Right. Hence, Letterman's production company.

00:06:12 ◼   ► Right.

00:06:13 ◼   ► World Wide Pants. It's one of the greatest names in the history of the universe.

00:06:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I like that.

00:06:22 ◼   ► Because the other, I guess the flip side of this thing with Windows 8 is this, is it official,

00:06:30 ◼   ► this is the thing I'm not 100% on, has Microsoft officially come out and said that the start

00:06:35 ◼   ► menu is coming back?

00:06:36 ◼   ► That I don't know. I haven't been following that very closely.

00:06:40 ◼   ► It seems as though people in the know like Mary Jo Foley and other really well-sourced

00:06:46 ◼   ► Microsoft reporters are saying it. I mean, it seems like you could bet money on it, but

00:06:52 ◼   ► that there's going to be, what are they calling it?

00:06:54 ◼   ► Windows Blue.

00:06:55 ◼   ► And I know, I think they officially said

00:06:58 ◼   ► it's slated for later this calendar year.

00:07:00 ◼   ► It's gonna come out sometime in 2013.

00:07:02 ◼   ► But that it's going to have like a preference

00:07:06 ◼   ► that, and I guess OEMs can turn it on by default

00:07:09 ◼   ► to boot to the traditional Windows look

00:07:13 ◼   ► if that's appropriate for your device.

00:07:15 ◼   ► - Is this like a service pack or something like that?

00:07:17 ◼   ► I mean-- - Yeah, I think it's

00:07:18 ◼   ► in between, you know, I don't think,

00:07:20 ◼   ► I think it doesn't really fit. It's like an in-between update. It's not like a .1 update,

00:07:28 ◼   ► but it's not like a major new version of Windows Update. It's like a big service pack. I don't

00:07:33 ◼   ► really call them service packs anymore. I think they've kind of gotten away from that.

00:07:36 ◼   ► But that song with the cover band, I think, ruined it. I don't know. The Vista SP-1 song,

00:07:43 ◼   ► which I still sing all the time, constantly.

00:07:47 ◼   ► The Bruce Springsteen cover band.

00:07:49 ◼   ► Well, honestly, I think that makes sense.

00:07:52 ◼   ► I mean, if people are saying,

00:07:53 ◼   ► "Hey, look, we don't really care that much

00:07:57 ◼   ► "about how Windows works,

00:07:58 ◼   ► "but don't take away our start button,"

00:08:00 ◼   ► I think that may be a fair compromise.

00:08:02 ◼   ► I mean, the idea that Windows 8 is going to be

00:08:06 ◼   ► some vast change in how Windows works

00:08:11 ◼   ► and how people think of it,

00:08:13 ◼   ► obviously is not going to the ideal plans.

00:08:17 ◼   ► And also isn't the guy who kind of designed

00:08:20 ◼   ► all this stuff gone anyway?

00:08:21 ◼   ► So-- - Sinofsky.

00:08:22 ◼   ► - Right, so perfect opportunity for Microsoft to go,

00:08:26 ◼   ► "All right, well, those guys are gone.

00:08:28 ◼   ► "We're gonna fix Windows and make it the way

00:08:30 ◼   ► "that you and I both love it," or something like that.

00:08:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:08:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, you never know, though, from the outside,

00:08:37 ◼   ► who knows, maybe Sinofsky actually wasn't endorsing

00:08:42 ◼   ► the idea of making everybody see Metro

00:08:46 ◼   ► as their default look, you never know.

00:08:48 ◼   ► I mean, maybe he lost an argument

00:08:49 ◼   ► and maybe that's partially why he left.

00:08:52 ◼   ► But you get the feeling though

00:08:53 ◼   ► that it probably was his idea,

00:08:55 ◼   ► 'cause his reputation was that

00:08:56 ◼   ► he had a lot of control over it.

00:08:58 ◼   ► - I really like your old idea,

00:08:59 ◼   ► which was that they should have made something

00:09:01 ◼   ► that maybe even only booted on a Mac at first

00:09:04 ◼   ► and just made some new OS

00:09:06 ◼   ► that the people could get excited about,

00:09:08 ◼   ► it didn't have all the baggage,

00:09:10 ◼   ► and that would be a way for them to really move forward without having to support 30

00:09:16 ◼   ► years of stuff.

00:09:18 ◼   ► And it seemed like it could have been cool.

00:09:21 ◼   ► Maybe I would have even installed it.

00:09:23 ◼   ► Whereas Windows 8, I just have no curiosity about it at all.

00:09:27 ◼   ► And it seems like the surface is basically, they copied the wrong iPad.

00:09:32 ◼   ► You know, it seems like something that would have been maybe interesting a few years ago,

00:09:37 ◼   ► but not right now.

00:09:41 ◼   ► My old idea, and I came up with this with my friend Jason Hoffman, who's the, I think

00:09:45 ◼   ► he's CTO at Joyent, it was years ago. I mean, I think the time to do it would have been

00:09:50 ◼   ► years ago, like around 2008 or so. But it was all stemming from that picture. Remember

00:09:55 ◼   ► that picture that was widely circulated of the college class? It was like a college lecturer.

00:10:01 ◼   ► 97% of the kids in the lecture room had a Mac notebook in front of them, and there's

00:10:06 ◼   ► like one poor kid in the front with a Dell or something like that. And it was, you know,

00:10:12 ◼   ► I forget, it was just some random university in the middle of the country, and it wasn't any kind

00:10:18 ◼   ► of—there was no particular reason why it should be Apple-centric. Was it the Mac Meetup or

00:10:22 ◼   ► something like that? No, it was—yeah, it wasn't anything like that. It was just like, you know,

00:10:26 ◼   ► like Chem 101 and kids taking lecture notes, you know, and it just showed how

00:10:31 ◼   ► overwhelmingly popular Apple notebooks had become. And our idea was that what

00:10:38 ◼   ► Microsoft should do is they should just put together, put one guy in charge, let

00:10:42 ◼   ► them pick a hundred engineers, take a hundred engineers, go off and be like, you

00:10:47 ◼   ► know, like the Mac team was in 1984. Put a pirate flag up and make their own new

00:10:52 ◼   ► operating system and do whatever they want. If they want to start with Linux

00:10:57 ◼   ► instead of the Windows kernel, let them do it. You know, do whatever you want

00:11:00 ◼   ► under the hood. For compatibility, they could use something like VMware, you know,

00:11:06 ◼   ► that type of thing. Microsoft even has something like that. And let it run

00:11:10 ◼   ► Windows in an emulation layer, you know, like classic, like the classic Mac OS was.

00:11:14 ◼   ► If you want, I mean, because they're Microsoft, they could do whatever they

00:11:17 ◼   ► want with Windows, right? So if they want to put Windows into a compatibility

00:11:21 ◼   ► thing. Let them do it if you want. But go, you know, go blue sky and tell everybody once

00:11:27 ◼   ► you release it that this is not the new version of Windows. This is a new thing. We're still

00:11:31 ◼   ► developing Windows. Windows is on its own track. There's, you know, Windows, the next

00:11:35 ◼   ► version is coming right out. We're, you know, we're just working on the future on this thing.

00:11:40 ◼   ► And then the brilliant, yeah, the brilliant idea I think would have been if, if as a beta

00:11:44 ◼   ► you said and as the beta it only runs on Macs, just because then you'd have this small

00:11:50 ◼   ► target of hardware to support. And the idea would be to try to get people who, you know,

00:11:59 ◼   ► young people and curious people to, you know, play around with it. I think the opportunity

00:12:04 ◼   ► for that was over. Because if a Mac can be the best computer to run Windows, why can't

00:12:12 ◼   ► a Mac also be the best PC? Right, no, that's exactly true. And I, you know, there was just

00:12:17 ◼   ► that poll the other week that came out where somebody, you know, I forget who it was, but

00:12:20 ◼   ► it wasn't like a Mac publication. It was like some PC publication, but that, you know, the

00:12:26 ◼   ► Macs hands down were like the best Windows machines. You can have the best experience

00:12:33 ◼   ► running Windows 8 is on a Mac or a MacBook or something like that. See, and the reason

00:12:38 ◼   ► that the time I say the time for that has passed is because a new operating system that

00:12:43 ◼   ► runs on PCs is chasing the wrong, chasing the wrong train. You know, you gotta, you

00:12:50 ◼   ► know, the future is with these post PC things and the opportunity's gone for that sort of

00:12:54 ◼   ► back door, try to get Apple people to switch and go back because you can't, as far as I know,

00:13:02 ◼   ► I don't think you could make an operating system that ran on iPads. You know, it's too,

00:13:06 ◼   ► they're too tightly coupled with the hardware firmware and stuff like that.

00:13:10 ◼   ► And the operating system is hardly the main advantage there.

00:13:16 ◼   ► It's the way that the operating system and the content ecosystem and all those things

00:13:20 ◼   ► work together now.

00:13:21 ◼   ► It's not just that you can replace the OS.

00:13:26 ◼   ► Just to the advantage of some companies, Facebook is using the fact that they don't have to

00:13:31 ◼   ► replace Android to jump onto those phones.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Even if I could install Windows 8 on my iPad, I don't think I would.

00:13:42 ◼   ► It just doesn't seem like something I'd want to do.

00:13:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:45 ◼   ► Like, the curiosity just isn't there.

00:13:48 ◼   ► But if they had done something all new three, four, five years ago, I would have jumped

00:13:53 ◼   ► on it, at least to play with it.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Sure, yeah.

00:13:57 ◼   ► So I actually wanted to ask you about something.

00:14:01 ◼   ► Okay.

00:14:02 ◼   ► I know you wanted to talk to me about Netflix.

00:14:03 ◼   ► Let's do that in a bit.

00:14:04 ◼   ► I've been thinking about something that is kind of bigger picture and for the last several

00:14:12 ◼   ► weeks I've been thinking like, "Oh, I'll write a post about this someday," but I just don't

00:14:16 ◼   ► have time.

00:14:17 ◼   ► I'm too busy with City Notes now, my travel startup.

00:14:23 ◼   ► The thing I've been thinking about is, this is kind of the big picture with Apple, which

00:14:28 ◼   ► is why has Apple done so well over the last few years and what can we learn from that

00:14:36 ◼   ► that would help us determine whether it's going to continue to do so well over the next

00:14:42 ◼   ► several years.

00:14:45 ◼   ► There are several reasons why people continue to buy Apple stuff.

00:14:48 ◼   ► For people like you and I who've used Macs for the last 10, 15, 20 years, it's because

00:14:55 ◼   ► because we know them well and we've used them our whole lives and we're loyal to them.

00:15:00 ◼   ► To some people, it's the quality of Apple products.

00:15:03 ◼   ► But I think there's also a population, and I don't know how big it is, but people who

00:15:09 ◼   ► if you look at those great Asymco charts of the growth of the iPad being so much faster

00:15:15 ◼   ► than the growth of the iPhone, which was so much faster than the growth of the iPod and

00:15:19 ◼   ► the Mac.

00:15:20 ◼   ► It's the people who've joined Apple the most recently that's maybe the biggest population.

00:15:26 ◼   ► I wonder how loyal they'll be.

00:15:29 ◼   ► I wonder if what's attracted them to Apple is not necessarily the quality or the legacy,

00:15:35 ◼   ► but just that it's new and cool.

00:15:40 ◼   ► How sustainable is that?

00:15:41 ◼   ► That's kind of what I've been wondering.

00:15:44 ◼   ► People often say, "Oh, Apple needs a disruptive new product or a new product category," or

00:15:49 ◼   ► something like that, and then the response to them is, "Well, hey, we got two in the

00:15:52 ◼   ► last five years and three in the last decade."

00:15:57 ◼   ► You're asking a lot to have another one so quickly after that.

00:16:00 ◼   ► But maybe that's what people are looking for.

00:16:02 ◼   ► They're looking for that new, that sense of newness.

00:16:07 ◼   ► Not to say that Apple is necessarily in a faddish state, but that people maybe aren't

00:16:13 ◼   ► so tied to the experience or the quality,

00:16:16 ◼   ► but they are attracted to that sense of newness.

00:16:19 ◼   ► And I was curious what you thought about that.

00:16:21 ◼   ► - It's a good question.

00:16:23 ◼   ► I mean, I think traditionally Apple's customers

00:16:26 ◼   ► have been exceedingly loyal, almost extraordinarily so.

00:16:29 ◼   ► And I think you can easily make the case

00:16:32 ◼   ► that it's their customer loyalty that saved them

00:16:37 ◼   ► at their low point in the mid '90s

00:16:40 ◼   ► when, you know, before the next acquisition and et cetera.

00:16:43 ◼   ► It was the loyalty of the people who remained

00:16:46 ◼   ► that saved them because there was, you know,

00:16:49 ◼   ► enough people to buy, you know, a million or so max a quarter

00:16:53 ◼   ► for a few years until they turned the ship around,

00:16:55 ◼   ► you know, which was not that big a number

00:16:58 ◼   ► compared to the whole PC industry,

00:17:00 ◼   ► but, you know, a million, 2,000 or so dollar computers

00:17:04 ◼   ► per quarter is enough money to keep Apple, you know, alive.

00:17:09 ◼   ► And now when they're selling, what are they,

00:17:12 ◼   ► what do they sell, about 40, 30, 40, 50 million iOS devices

00:17:17 ◼   ► a quarter, something like that?

00:17:20 ◼   ► - Something like, yeah, 55 million iOS plus iPods,

00:17:24 ◼   ► so probably 60 million a quarter.

00:17:26 ◼   ► - Roughly, and obviously that fluctuates

00:17:28 ◼   ► with the holiday quarter and with a big,

00:17:31 ◼   ► combined with the fact that the holiday quarter

00:17:33 ◼   ► has now seems to be the new device quarter.

00:17:37 ◼   ► So it fluctuates, but that's huge.

00:17:40 ◼   ► And it's really, it's a radically different number

00:17:43 ◼   ► than the million or so Macs

00:17:45 ◼   ► that they used to sell per quarter.

00:17:47 ◼   ► How loyal are those people to Apple?

00:17:51 ◼   ► That's a good question.

00:17:52 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:17:53 ◼   ► I think that they're probably pretty loyal though.

00:17:57 ◼   ► I think they're more loyal than those,

00:18:00 ◼   ► than most companies' customers,

00:18:02 ◼   ► and less loyal than the traditional Mac user base.

00:18:07 ◼   ► Like I think it's in between.

00:18:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause if you look at all of the devices

00:18:13 ◼   ► Apple has ever sold, I would not be surprised

00:18:16 ◼   ► if something crazy like 90% of them

00:18:19 ◼   ► have been sold in the last five years.

00:18:20 ◼   ► I just made that number up, but that would surprise me.

00:18:23 ◼   ► - I think it probably does work out like that though,

00:18:25 ◼   ► I really do.

00:18:26 ◼   ► - Or like even in the last 10 years or something like that,

00:18:29 ◼   ► or 75% or something like that.

00:18:31 ◼   ► I think it's heavily front-loaded in the last couple of years.

00:18:34 ◼   ► And the other thing, too, especially in the last five years,

00:18:39 ◼   ► the iPhone to iPad era, is really the first time

00:18:42 ◼   ► when you would think most of their customers

00:18:45 ◼   ► have multiple devices.

00:18:47 ◼   ► Because before the iPhone, there were certainly

00:18:51 ◼   ► professional people who had both a desktop Mac and a MacBook

00:18:56 ◼   ► or a-- go back-- a PowerBook or an iBook or whatever--

00:19:00 ◼   ► however far back you want to go.

00:19:02 ◼   ► But, you know, normal people usually only have one computer.

00:19:06 ◼   ► I mean, that's, you know, 'cause computers, you know,

00:19:08 ◼   ► especially with the further back in time you go,

00:19:10 ◼   ► the more expensive they were.

00:19:12 ◼   ► - Right.

00:19:13 ◼   ► - And so now I think is the, you know--

00:19:15 ◼   ► - You wouldn't have a Quadra and a Performa.

00:19:18 ◼   ► - Right.

00:19:19 ◼   ► Or you would replace one and it would be on a, you know,

00:19:21 ◼   ► you know, you use it for as many years as you could.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Whereas now I think that there's sort of an expectation

00:19:28 ◼   ► that the typical Apple user has both an iPad and an iPhone.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And if they do buy, you know, if they do switch from Windows

00:19:38 ◼   ► they're gonna buy a MacBook.

00:19:40 ◼   ► - Right, if you look at the tray at the airport,

00:19:42 ◼   ► it's a MacBook and an iPad and an iPhone

00:19:46 ◼   ► sitting on top of each other.

00:19:47 ◼   ► Which theoretically, especially if iCloud does its job,

00:19:52 ◼   ► should force loyalty.

00:19:55 ◼   ► not force it, but should encourage loyalty.

00:19:59 ◼   ► And that was one of the things that people

00:20:01 ◼   ► thought about the app store, that, oh, I

00:20:02 ◼   ► got all these apps on my phone.

00:20:04 ◼   ► I'm not going to switch away because if I get Android,

00:20:09 ◼   ► then I won't have any of my apps or something like that.

00:20:13 ◼   ► But it's funny, I was sitting in a bar with a good old friend

00:20:16 ◼   ► of mine who, he had a PC in high school

00:20:19 ◼   ► and probably has a Mac now and has an iPhone.

00:20:23 ◼   ► And he's like, I think I'm going to get rid of this iPhone

00:20:25 ◼   ► and get a Samsung.

00:20:26 ◼   ► And I'm like, why, why would you do that?

00:20:28 ◼   ► He's like, I don't know.

00:20:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's funny.

00:20:31 ◼   ► - Most of the people I would guess that had Windows

00:20:35 ◼   ► in the PC era didn't have Windows

00:20:39 ◼   ► because they thought it was great or because they loved it.

00:20:41 ◼   ► They just had Windows because it was what you would get.

00:20:45 ◼   ► Some of them, for app compatibility or Office,

00:20:48 ◼   ► a lot of it I think was the cost.

00:20:51 ◼   ► Windows PCs were always much cheaper.

00:20:53 ◼   ► But now, you know, this guy's like, you know, he likes his iPhone.

00:20:59 ◼   ► He's got no problems with it, but he's like, maybe I'll get a Samsung.

00:21:02 ◼   ► I don't know why.

00:21:03 ◼   ► And I just thought that was interesting.

00:21:06 ◼   ► And a lot of the people who have bought Apple stuff again, you know, if it's something crazy,

00:21:09 ◼   ► like 75 to 90% who've who were first time Apple customers in the last five to 10 years.

00:21:17 ◼   ► You know, what if what if they drift a little?

00:21:19 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Now, that said, there are certainly more people on the planet left who have not become Apple

00:21:25 ◼   ► customers left than those who have.

00:21:28 ◼   ► That's why you see all the stuff that they are doing in China and maybe not so successfully

00:21:34 ◼   ► in other places like India.

00:21:36 ◼   ► But I don't know, that's just something I was thinking about and I was trying to come

00:21:40 ◼   ► up with a post to do it, but it kept getting too long in my head.

00:21:44 ◼   ► So I was like, "I'll just talk about it and then I don't have to write anything."

00:21:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I do that a lot

00:21:49 ◼   ► And I think that there is a big difference with the App Store versus

00:21:53 ◼   ► What Windows software was at the heyday of Windows monopoly, which is that at that point?

00:22:00 ◼   ► There was a real compatibility problem where?

00:22:03 ◼   ► You know just take the office stuff. Well, you know where if you had you know

00:22:08 ◼   ► doc files and excel files

00:22:13 ◼   ► It was really really hard to get by if you had to

00:22:17 ◼   ► Get them somebody who you work with was going to give you one and you had to use the tracking changes thing in Word or whatever

00:22:24 ◼   ► It was almost impossible and still might really be effectively impossible even today to get by using anything other than

00:22:32 ◼   ► Word

00:22:34 ◼   ► You really needed it. Well, what was that?

00:22:37 ◼   ► What was the software that we used to have that would convert PC files to Mac files?

00:22:42 ◼   ► I forgot the name of it. I know what you mean, but it never worked good. No

00:22:46 ◼   ► I mean it would work good enough that you could read it

00:22:48 ◼   ► But it didn't work well enough to seamlessly interchange and go back and forth right, you know

00:22:53 ◼   ► without because I'm and then because Apple the Mac floppy drives could read PC disks and write them but the

00:23:02 ◼   ► PC ones couldn't read and write Mac disks. So right I was even operating for a while and

00:23:06 ◼   ► using my Mac with PC formatted floppy disks just so I could

00:23:11 ◼   ► Give them to a friend at school or something like that

00:23:14 ◼   ► like that was so it wasn't just that that the office wouldn't run on the Mac it was that you needed a

00:23:20 ◼   ► Form a conversion software and the right format of a floppy disk to transfer that file

00:23:26 ◼   ► Whereas nowadays, you know, you just throw it on Dropbox or you know, a lot of it's even just web-based

00:23:32 ◼   ► There are no files or you know JPEGs are very cross-platform

00:23:36 ◼   ► right like software as a whole has moved to being just front ends to services and

00:23:45 ◼   ► Formats that are standard and all just come in over the air by HTTP, right?

00:23:49 ◼   ► I mean, it's like if you switch to Android you still can get Instagram and

00:23:54 ◼   ► you're still gonna get your Facebook and Twitter and you can still hook up your email and

00:23:59 ◼   ► you're still gonna browse the same web and

00:24:02 ◼   ► And I don't think, I mean, I think that the software

00:24:07 ◼   ► as a whole is still janky.

00:24:10 ◼   ► It's nowhere near as nice, but you don't really miss out.

00:24:14 ◼   ► If your friend dropped his iPhone in the toilet

00:24:20 ◼   ► and had to make the decision tomorrow,

00:24:22 ◼   ► and he just is like, "To hell with it.

00:24:23 ◼   ► "I'm just gonna go with the Samsung."

00:24:25 ◼   ► It's not like when you switch from a Mac to a PC

00:24:29 ◼   ► you've got this huge hassle of moving over a 60 gigabyte hard drive and all these files

00:24:34 ◼   ► and worrying about how the for—you know, you don't have to worry about any of that.

00:24:37 ◼   ► You just, you know, you just sort of go with it and just assume that most of your shit

00:24:41 ◼   ► is in the cloud anyway.

00:24:44 ◼   ► And I, you know, and not to disparage anyone, but I kind of assume that most people don't

00:24:49 ◼   ► necessarily notice or care that much of the difference in the software jankiness to begin

00:24:54 ◼   ► with. That certainly didn't really hold Windows back.

00:24:58 ◼   ► I think that they notice it, but I don't think it's the deal breaker that it is for picky people like us, right?

00:25:03 ◼   ► You know, I think that they notice it but that it's just not a deal breaker

00:25:07 ◼   ► Same thing with build quality of the phones. I think everybody can kind of tell that like a samsung in particular

00:25:14 ◼   ► Because for example everybody, you know, it's you know, we're seeing a really weird thing. I think

00:25:20 ◼   ► We'll see how the results go

00:25:22 ◼   ► But everybody seems to acknowledge that just leave the iphone out of it take the whole apple versus android politics out of it

00:25:28 ◼   ► Everybody seems to acknowledge that the best Android phone on the market today is the HTC One.

00:25:33 ◼   ► That it's a better hardware. It certainly looks way nicer. They're very beautiful devices.

00:25:40 ◼   ► And even the software looks better. It just seems much more tastefully designed, and it's not

00:25:46 ◼   ► selling. It seems like Samsung is still going to win because the dynamics of that are not...

00:25:56 ◼   ► being better alone is not enough.

00:25:59 ◼   ► HTC almost seems to be in the position Apple used to be in

00:26:02 ◼   ► a long time ago, where they're designing better stuff,

00:26:05 ◼   ► but they're just not gaining traction.

00:26:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, although unlike Apple,

00:26:10 ◼   ► I don't think it's something that they can easily

00:26:13 ◼   ► kind of dig themselves out of.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Well, not that it was easy for Apple,

00:26:15 ◼   ► but they made it work.

00:26:17 ◼   ► - Right.

00:26:18 ◼   ► Well, and so it gets back to your question

00:26:20 ◼   ► of how loyal the people are.

00:26:21 ◼   ► Maybe loyalty is the wrong way to think about it.

00:26:23 ◼   ► And I think that the traditional problem

00:26:27 ◼   ► that Apple used to have was that people just didn't even

00:26:31 ◼   ► consider buying a Mac.

00:26:33 ◼   ► It just didn't enter their brains.

00:26:35 ◼   ► They just didn't have the mind share, this mass market,

00:26:39 ◼   ► people even considering it.

00:26:41 ◼   ► And I've said this before, and I've still never been able

00:26:44 ◼   ► to find a URL to it, but it was a long time ago,

00:26:47 ◼   ► and it was in the '90s.

00:26:48 ◼   ► I think it was even Apple maybe even commissioned

00:26:50 ◼   ► the survey, but it was, you know,

00:26:52 ◼   ► And the exact numbers don't really matter.

00:26:54 ◼   ► But the gist of it was, though, that in the personal computer

00:26:59 ◼   ► market, meaning not the enterprise,

00:27:01 ◼   ► people buying computers for themselves,

00:27:05 ◼   ► it was like 90% of all consumers never even

00:27:11 ◼   ► considered buying a Mac.

00:27:13 ◼   ► And of the 10% who did, half of them did buy a Mac.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And that was where Apple's 5% market share came from.

00:27:22 ◼   ► So they only had like 5% market share,

00:27:24 ◼   ► but it was 50% of the people

00:27:26 ◼   ► who even considered buying a Mac.

00:27:28 ◼   ► And they just could not break through

00:27:30 ◼   ► and get more people to even think about it.

00:27:32 ◼   ► And clearly, that's no longer a problem for them.

00:27:35 ◼   ► And that's why their market share has done so well.

00:27:39 ◼   ► And so I don't know that loyalty's it.

00:27:43 ◼   ► I think that the reason that Apple's in pretty good shape

00:27:46 ◼   ► for the, let's say, the next five years,

00:27:49 ◼   ► is that at the very least, almost anybody in the markets where they're strong, like

00:27:57 ◼   ► North America and Western Europe, if you're in the market for a new cell phone or in the

00:28:06 ◼   ► market for a tablet, you're at least going to think about an iPhone or an iPad.

00:28:10 ◼   ► Right, there's a level of awareness that's different now.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Is that fashion or is that legitimate awareness of product?

00:28:24 ◼   ► It seems like there could be an element of fashion involved where people got iPods and

00:28:31 ◼   ► Macs because they were cool or because cool people were using them.

00:28:36 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:28:40 ◼   ► I don't think it's gonna be a significant upheaval

00:28:44 ◼   ► or anything like that, but I do question

00:28:48 ◼   ► just how kind of tied in everyone is.

00:28:51 ◼   ► - Right, and there is, so like the stickiness today

00:28:54 ◼   ► and the equivalent of like,

00:28:57 ◼   ► where people were tied to Windows in the long ago days

00:29:01 ◼   ► because you had to have Word, you had to have Excel,

00:29:03 ◼   ► you needed something that could read these floppies,

00:29:05 ◼   ► you needed a computer that could hook up

00:29:07 ◼   ► to Exchange in your office.

00:29:09 ◼   ► And so it had to be Windows.

00:29:11 ◼   ► Like it's not the operating system anymore

00:29:13 ◼   ► that people are tied to,

00:29:14 ◼   ► but they're tied to things like their Gmail account, right?

00:29:18 ◼   ► Because nobody who has 20,000 emails in Gmail

00:29:21 ◼   ► and who enjoys using Gmail

00:29:23 ◼   ► is gonna switch to something else.

00:29:25 ◼   ► So they're only gonna use,

00:29:26 ◼   ► they're only gonna buy a device that Gmail works well on.

00:29:29 ◼   ► How sticky is iCloud for people like that?

00:29:34 ◼   ► Like I don't think the App Store is the sticky thing.

00:29:36 ◼   ► I think iCloud is the thing that needs to be sticky.

00:29:38 ◼   ► people need to be addicted to having their photos and photo stream.

00:29:43 ◼   ► The same way that you can type in your Twitter and Instagram credentials on any,

00:29:48 ◼   ► you know, anything nowadays and have, you know,

00:29:50 ◼   ► your whole history there in front of you, that should be the goal for iCloud.

00:29:55 ◼   ► And, um, you know, as, as has been well-documented, uh,

00:29:59 ◼   ► I would say that's going questionably so far. Uh, I sent you a, uh, a link though.

00:30:04 ◼   ► I don't know if you see it. Yeah, I do. I have it. So this,

00:30:07 ◼   ► This is something that I used to...

00:30:09 ◼   ► Apple had this thing called the Mac Advocate Program, and this is from 1997.

00:30:16 ◼   ► You would go on their website and sign up for these CD-ROMs, and they would send them

00:30:21 ◼   ► to you for free.

00:30:22 ◼   ► I think I ordered the maximum, which was like 10, and of course I still have like seven

00:30:27 ◼   ► of them left.

00:30:28 ◼   ► They were pretty amazing.

00:30:31 ◼   ► They were full of Apple propaganda ranging from this video of Guy Kawasaki welcoming

00:30:37 ◼   ► you.

00:30:40 ◼   ► They weren't hypercards, but they kind of seem like them.

00:30:44 ◼   ► Almost PowerPoint presentations about how you can convince your friends to buy a Mac.

00:30:50 ◼   ► The graphics are hilarious, like really cheesy stock videos.

00:30:54 ◼   ► Maybe you should throw in the show notes if there is such a thing.

00:30:58 ◼   ► I recently found this when I went back home to Chicago and I booted up my sister's old

00:31:06 ◼   ► Blue iMac and took a bunch of screenshots of it and posted it last year.

00:31:10 ◼   ► So there's some pretty great stuff on here and all the Apple commercials.

00:31:15 ◼   ► And of course the video busted.

00:31:17 ◼   ► Here's Bill Gates talking about the Mac, how awesome it is.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:31:21 ◼   ► This is the best thing, the very best thing of this.

00:31:23 ◼   ► I'm looking through it, but this is great.

00:31:25 ◼   ► It's a slide that says why Apple is the best choice, ease of use.

00:31:29 ◼   ► And it's true that it was – you could make – you should have been able to make an ease

00:31:34 ◼   ► of use argument, but their example is it's simple to increase the performance of software

00:31:40 ◼   ► applications by selecting more memory right from the desktop.

00:31:43 ◼   ► And it's that old thing – people aren't going to believe this if they didn't use

00:31:48 ◼   ► the classic Mac OS, but what you would do is select the app in the Finder, do get info,

00:31:52 ◼   ► part of the info panel for the app was memory requirements, and there was a suggested size

00:31:58 ◼   ► from the app—a minimum size and a preferred size—and you could edit the minimum and

00:32:02 ◼   ► preferred size, and that was how much RAM the application got. Like, when you launched

00:32:07 ◼   ► the app, it got as much RAM as you, the user, assigned to it, which is—it's insane to

00:32:15 ◼   ► think that that's how the Mac used to work. And it's even more insane—it's quadruply

00:32:21 ◼   ► insane that Apple was advertising that as a feature in 1997.

00:32:26 ◼   ► Yeah, you'd have to go in and give Photoshop more RAM and take some away from WordPerfect

00:32:32 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:32:33 ◼   ► It was a—

00:32:34 ◼   ► And the really good apps, like—and I think Photoshop was on, but I know BB Edit.

00:32:38 ◼   ► BB Edit was—part of the reason that BB Edit was so brilliant was BB Edit, you didn't

00:32:42 ◼   ► give more memory.

00:32:43 ◼   ► BB Edit somehow was smart enough to be able to allocate memory on its own on the fly from

00:32:48 ◼   ► the system heap.

00:32:49 ◼   ► So it actually was bad to give BB Edit more.

00:32:52 ◼   ► Just let BB Edit have its default, which was really low,

00:32:55 ◼   ► and then it would open, it would grab more memory on its own

00:32:59 ◼   ► and let go of it when you close big documents.

00:33:01 ◼   ► And I think Photoshop worked like that too.

00:33:03 ◼   ► - Well, one of them, and it was either Photoshop,

00:33:05 ◼   ► I think, or Quark, also had a separate memory section

00:33:09 ◼   ► in its own preferences file

00:33:11 ◼   ► where you could set some of that stuff.

00:33:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think it was Photoshop

00:33:14 ◼   ► and it was with the scratch disk space too.

00:33:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:33:18 ◼   ► But this is great.

00:33:18 ◼   ► I mean, it looks like someone went nuts with like Kai's power tools or something

00:33:22 ◼   ► like that, like this 40% of people surfing the net are using a Mac and

00:33:26 ◼   ► it's great, like 3d graphic.

00:33:29 ◼   ► Um, anyway, this is something I thought it was hard to believe that

00:33:32 ◼   ► these graphics came out of Apple.

00:33:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:34 ◼   ► And this was like, um, and I had, there was a followup.

00:33:38 ◼   ► There was like a second disc, but it wasn't really, it wasn't as good.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Cause this is actually kind of cheesy.

00:33:42 ◼   ► Like it's, it's pretty funny.

00:33:44 ◼   ► And this was after jobs came back too.

00:33:46 ◼   ► I mean, this is like one of the worst things they did.

00:33:48 ◼   ► a look at mail in cyber dog

00:33:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean and I hate to laugh at cyber dog because the I mean god we could do a whole show on cyber dog

00:33:57 ◼   ► we should someday but

00:33:59 ◼   ► It never really shipped

00:34:01 ◼   ► Like nobody ever really got to use cyber dog. I never I never used it. I

00:34:06 ◼   ► In fact, I had kind of forgotten about it until I saw this

00:34:10 ◼   ► I forgot that it was real I remember cyber dog as like the you know, Apple at the time maybe one of the worst things

00:34:18 ◼   ► You know, who knows if Apple suffers again and if going forward it probably won't be in any way a mirror of what happened to Apple

00:34:26 ◼   ► In the 90s, but one of the many problems with Apple in the 90s was that they would repeatedly

00:34:31 ◼   ► hype

00:34:33 ◼   ► something that was

00:34:34 ◼   ► Supposed to come a year later and never actually came it was never you know

00:34:40 ◼   ► Like to paraphrase Yoda, you know

00:34:43 ◼   ► Never your mind on where you are or whatever the hell Yoda tells Luke, you know

00:34:47 ◼   ► It was never about what Apple actually had for you to use and buy right now. It was always like this great new operating system

00:34:54 ◼   ► intelligent, you know our cyber dog

00:34:57 ◼   ► We're gonna revolutionize email and web browsing but not yet. It's gonna come next year and in the meantime, you know, you've got this, you know

00:35:04 ◼   ► Web browser that's nowhere near as good as you know what you could get on Windows

00:35:09 ◼   ► Right. Well

00:35:11 ◼   ► And that's kind of where they seem to have done a 180 and now

00:35:15 ◼   ► Kind of lead the world at not over over hyping stuff and not announcing stuff until it's ready

00:35:20 ◼   ► Whereas pretty much everyone else is still you know

00:35:24 ◼   ► especially the video game guys like there are six levels of teasing before you get to before they ship a

00:35:31 ◼   ► video game console and that kind of stuff which

00:35:33 ◼   ► Seems a little ridiculous, but it does let me take a break and let me thank our first sponsor

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00:38:15 ◼   ► Here's where you go to find out more.

00:38:16 ◼   ► Go to mailroute, M-A-I-L-R-O-U-T-E.net/the talk show.

00:38:21 ◼   ► Mailroute.net/the talk show.

00:38:26 ◼   ► sign up for a 15-day free trial.

00:38:28 ◼   ► Great, great service.

00:38:30 ◼   ► Do one thing, do it well, that type of service.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Really, really good stuff.

00:38:35 ◼   ► - And I'm always fascinated by how few,

00:38:39 ◼   ► I would think there'd be more services like that

00:38:41 ◼   ► that plug in, 'cause mail is such an open thing,

00:38:43 ◼   ► that plug in and do a lot of smart stuff

00:38:47 ◼   ► on the server side and then present it to you

00:38:50 ◼   ► in your inbox.

00:38:53 ◼   ► - I would think so.

00:38:54 ◼   ► It is crazy.

00:38:55 ◼   ► Can you imagine launching a service today that's like email,

00:39:00 ◼   ► where anybody and anyone who just knows your name

00:39:04 ◼   ► can just send you stuff?

00:39:06 ◼   ► In hindsight, it is just kind of insane,

00:39:09 ◼   ► and it just shows how naive the old internet

00:39:13 ◼   ► from the '70s and '80s really was.

00:39:16 ◼   ► - Right, it would never happen now

00:39:18 ◼   ► because the companies are in so in control of their...

00:39:23 ◼   ► Like, how many decades did it take

00:39:24 ◼   ► to open up instant messaging between various services.

00:39:28 ◼   ► - Yeah. - You know, being able

00:39:31 ◼   ► to aim someone on Gmail or something like that.

00:39:34 ◼   ► - I don't know, the genius of these guys,

00:39:36 ◼   ► and I really encourage everybody,

00:39:37 ◼   ► just go check it out and read,

00:39:39 ◼   ► 'cause it's fascinating to see

00:39:40 ◼   ► how they describe attacking it.

00:39:41 ◼   ► But I really like, the thing that, to me,

00:39:43 ◼   ► was a real eye-opener is that they're not just analyzing

00:39:45 ◼   ► the messages, you know, and like doing a Bayesian analysis

00:39:49 ◼   ► of the content of the message to see if it's spam,

00:39:51 ◼   ► is that they're trying to identify the machines that are actually sending spam.

00:39:57 ◼   ► And, you know, it seems like most of that spam is all coming from these hacked PCs.

00:40:02 ◼   ► And they've figured out ways to figure out, "Hey, this is not a legitimate mail server."

00:40:06 ◼   ► You there?

00:40:08 ◼   ► Yes, sir.

00:40:11 ◼   ► Cool.

00:40:12 ◼   ► It's like we suddenly got silent.

00:40:15 ◼   ► I was respectfully staying quiet during your...

00:40:19 ◼   ► So Netflix.

00:40:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:21 ◼   ► Yeah. There was a big story in Business Week on Netflix and how well they've been doing.

00:40:31 ◼   ► By all accounts, not just, and Apple's a perfect example that the stock market doesn't necessarily

00:40:37 ◼   ► track the actual success of the company, but Netflix has done really, really well in the

00:40:43 ◼   ► the time after the debacle when they first tried to dump the mailing disk thing, when

00:40:52 ◼   ► they tried to get out of the disk business and spin that off and the stock price tanked

00:40:56 ◼   ► and the customers were leaving. And ever since then, though, they're really doing great.

00:41:00 ◼   ► The stock is way up. Viewership's way up. People are signing up.

00:41:06 ◼   ► So here's the stat from Business Week is that on a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for

00:41:10 ◼   ► almost one-third of all internet traffic entering North American homes, more than YouTube, Hulu,

00:41:16 ◼   ► Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined." Who knows if that's actually true,

00:41:24 ◼   ► but it's, you know, I've seen that a lot though. It seems, you know, and it seems like it's probably

00:41:29 ◼   ► a legit statistic. The thing that would, yeah, I guess so. I mean, maybe BitTorrent surprises me a

00:41:35 ◼   ► a little, but I guess that that has always been kind of an edge activity, not a mainstream

00:41:41 ◼   ► thing.

00:41:43 ◼   ► To me it makes sense.

00:41:44 ◼   ► Netflix is the mainstream long-form video service on the internet.

00:41:51 ◼   ► You'll watch YouTube for a couple minutes and often at a low bit rate, so it doesn't

00:41:56 ◼   ► matter how much bandwidth you're using.

00:41:58 ◼   ► But Netflix, you will watch for hours in high def, and that makes sense to me.

00:42:05 ◼   ► else is the bandwidth? It's not like it's possible bandwidth usage period. It's actual

00:42:13 ◼   ► usage. So it's not like the potential capacity of all home internet connections in the country.

00:42:21 ◼   ► It's actual downloads.

00:42:24 ◼   ► Another factor too is that they've done a really good job of working out partnerships

00:42:32 ◼   ► with just about anybody who has a set-top box that's plugged into a TV. They're on Apple TV.

00:42:40 ◼   ► They're on, I think they're on PlayStation. Are they on PlayStation?

00:42:45 ◼   ► I think so, yeah. They're on pretty much all of those. Every brand of television,

00:42:51 ◼   ► every game system, I think they're even on the Wii now. Every tablet, every phone.

00:43:00 ◼   ► Basically anything with a screen can play Netflix which is something that I don't think any other service has

00:43:07 ◼   ► approached that level of ubiquity

00:43:09 ◼   ► certainly not iTunes because Apple won't put it on anything that's not made by Apple and

00:43:15 ◼   ► Amazon is not as widely distributed. So I guess the one that would surprise me is YouTube. Like why doesn't YouTube

00:43:23 ◼   ► do more but I think I think they're doing more and they're trying to but I think it's because YouTube people think

00:43:30 ◼   ► of YouTube as a place where you go and watch four-minute videos, you know? Music videos

00:43:36 ◼   ► and a cat riding a skateboard and shit like that. Whereas nobody really thinks, "I'm

00:43:42 ◼   ► going to go watch a feature film or a show." I mean, and obviously, I think a big part

00:43:47 ◼   ► of Netflix's success is that's where people go to binge-watch shows. You know? I'm going

00:43:53 ◼   ► to go get into Homefront or I don't even know if Homefront's on Netflix, but if you

00:43:58 ◼   ► do probably is you start watching Netflix and that's where these out you

00:44:06 ◼   ► know 48 minute TV episodes come in and then you watch the next one and then the

00:44:11 ◼   ► next one and so I think that's where I wouldn't be surprised if people watch

00:44:15 ◼   ► more individual videos from YouTube but that's not as much aggregate video

00:44:21 ◼   ► watching right and YouTube is trying to get more into the longer form stuff but

00:44:27 ◼   ► But not like it's their only goal, because actually their business model, show a bunch

00:44:32 ◼   ► of ads, works better with short form, I would think.

00:44:36 ◼   ► Instead of interrupting a movie eight times, get someone to watch 24-minute videos or something

00:44:43 ◼   ► like that, and then you could put an ad between all of them.

00:44:46 ◼   ► Whereas Netflix, as a subscription-based service, they're happy to have you watch an unlimited

00:44:51 ◼   ► amount of video as long as you're paying your eight bucks a month.

00:44:55 ◼   ► I was skeptical about Netflix when their Starz deal elapsed, because the Starz thing was

00:45:04 ◼   ► where Starz is like this sort of obscure, at least to me, sort of HBO-type cable channel,

00:45:10 ◼   ► where they have, you know, it's like HBO where they have feature films and I don't even know

00:45:15 ◼   ► if they have original programming, but Starz has feature films. And good ones, too. They had

00:45:23 ◼   ► all the Disney stuff. Right, like a big, a deep archive of old movies that they had the right,

00:45:30 ◼   ► yeah, exactly, like lots and lots of old Disney movies. Toy Story 3, I actually wrote a post,

00:45:34 ◼   ► "10 stars movies to stream on Netflix before they go away." And it was like Scarface, Toy Story 3,

00:45:40 ◼   ► Mallrats, so not like necessarily the newest new releases, but still movies that you would have

00:45:47 ◼   ► heard of before on like a lot of the stuff on Netflix. Right, and what happened, it was,

00:45:51 ◼   ► It's sort of like a beautiful bit of you know, everybody loves to complain about lawyers

00:45:56 ◼   ► but some somewhere there was a lawyer who did you know, this is like like

00:46:00 ◼   ► Lawyering at its best

00:46:03 ◼   ► Somebody figured out that stars had worked out a contract with their standard contract with all these studios allowed them

00:46:10 ◼   ► not just to put these things on their cable channel, but to also

00:46:13 ◼   ► put them on the internet and

00:46:16 ◼   ► They had no way stars didn't have like apps or anything like I don't know when these contracts were written

00:46:21 ◼   ► but it seems like everybody agreed to it because nobody actually thought it was going to happen.

00:46:26 ◼   ► You know, it was just like a clause in there that, you know, among the rights that they have

00:46:30 ◼   ► for these movies for this time period is the right to put it on the internet. And furthermore,

00:46:35 ◼   ► I guess somebody, you know, figured out, probably at Netflix, that the contract also didn't—or

00:46:41 ◼   ► also allowed them to resell those rights or to partner with somebody else to have those rights.

00:46:47 ◼   ► So Netflix had all of these movies, not because Netflix worked out the rights to have them

00:46:54 ◼   ► through all these studios, but all they did is have a deal with Starz to allow them to

00:46:58 ◼   ► broadcast the movies that Starz did.

00:47:01 ◼   ► And so you'd know this because whenever you started those movies, there would be a little

00:47:05 ◼   ► Starz bumper at the beginning of it.

00:47:08 ◼   ► You know, like the equivalent of the HBO, "da-dun, da-dun, da-dun, da-dun," you know,

00:47:15 ◼   ► that thing.

00:47:17 ◼   ► the stars equivalent was before it.

00:47:19 ◼   ► So when that deal expired,

00:47:21 ◼   ► and that was what, like a year and a half ago?

00:47:22 ◼   ► When did you write your post?

00:47:24 ◼   ► - February, 2012.

00:47:26 ◼   ► - Right, so I was pretty close.

00:47:27 ◼   ► So a little bit over a year ago.

00:47:29 ◼   ► I really thought Netflix was in trouble

00:47:30 ◼   ► because that's what I used Netflix most for.

00:47:33 ◼   ► Almost all of my Netflix viewing was movies

00:47:36 ◼   ► that they'd had through stars.

00:47:38 ◼   ► And they really don't, Netflix does not have

00:47:42 ◼   ► a good selection of movies anymore, I think, I don't think.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Well, at that point, they had said that Stars was 8% of their viewing.

00:47:53 ◼   ► Actually, it was before that.

00:47:59 ◼   ► I think that shows that it was me being an atypical Netflix user, not that Stars was

00:48:04 ◼   ► that essential to it.

00:48:06 ◼   ► I was a little too self-centered about what I thought other people were doing on Netflix.

00:48:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:14 ◼   ► Another thing Netflix always did well, even going back to the DVD days, was having this

00:48:20 ◼   ► extremely deep library of stuff.

00:48:25 ◼   ► In fact, I actually just last week resubscribed to DVDs to get a couple things that I couldn't

00:48:31 ◼   ► get anywhere online.

00:48:35 ◼   ► I get a free month, so I've been getting just some random stuff sent to me.

00:48:38 ◼   ► Some of it is very obscure, like a documentary about Ron Santo, the old Cubs player.

00:48:44 ◼   ► I don't think I'd ever find online, but sure enough, there it is on DVD at Netflix.

00:48:51 ◼   ► But it's interesting, they have signed some more deals to get more stuff, but other studios

00:48:58 ◼   ► are also going away.

00:49:02 ◼   ► And Netflix, meanwhile, is doing its own content as well, House of Cards, Arrested Development,

00:49:09 ◼   ► and so far they've done quite well with it, I think.

00:49:11 ◼   ► I don't know if you watched House of Cards.

00:49:14 ◼   ► I haven't yet. I'm definitely going to. There's 100% chance that I'm going to watch it, but I haven't.

00:49:18 ◼   ► It's good. I mean, it's not like I wouldn't. I didn't watch the West Wing. I'm not really a DC

00:49:24 ◼   ► politics kind of guy, but Kevin Spacey is good. I mean, it's a little weird at the beginning,

00:49:29 ◼   ► but it gets really good. And apparently that got them a lot of new subscribers.

00:49:35 ◼   ► And Arrested Development probably will too. And it seems to be that Netflix is like the

00:49:43 ◼   ► sane person, you know, something that belongs in every sane household. Anyone who watches TV

00:49:48 ◼   ► should probably have a reason to subscribe to Netflix at this point. But I don't know,

00:49:54 ◼   ► you know, I don't know if that's something that's going to last for a long time or not.

00:49:57 ◼   ► Yeah. And it's an interesting business model because they're not asking a lot. I mean,

00:50:02 ◼   ► you know, $8 a month is... Here, that's how much a beer costs. So it's like,

00:50:09 ◼   ► That's nothing here, but right. I mean, so you know, it's what you're talking in the ballpark of $100 a year

00:50:14 ◼   ► Which is not nothing but it's certainly nothing compared to what we're used to paying for cable

00:50:19 ◼   ► Which is for me over $100 a month

00:50:22 ◼   ► So and I think it is for most people and we probably watch as much Netflix as cable

00:50:28 ◼   ► Sometimes maybe not all the time but but sometimes especially when we're binging through a series or something like that. So yeah, I

00:50:36 ◼   ► I think they're doing well. I think that they're on to something and I think that the original programming is obviously a big part of it.

00:50:42 ◼   ► Well, I posted a chart earlier this week, which you link to and actually it's funny every time I write about AOL

00:50:50 ◼   ► The chart showed how basically as AOL has lost subscribers over the last 10 years

00:50:56 ◼   ► Netflix has gained them in

00:50:59 ◼   ► almost perfect symmetry

00:51:01 ◼   ► Although Netflix is now bigger than AOL ever was but it's kind of a cool chart

00:51:06 ◼   ► It's one of my favorite charts visually that I've ever made, which is kind of showing this,

00:51:11 ◼   ► it looks like a comb almost, of AOL declining and Netflix growing.

00:51:16 ◼   ► And a guy who writes for RealClear Technology, one of the things I asked in the post was,

00:51:24 ◼   ► "What's going to hurt Netflix eventually?

00:51:27 ◼   ► What's going to cause them to eventually fizzle out, if anything?

00:51:30 ◼   ► Is it something that's going to be mobile-oriented that Netflix can't do, or what's it going

00:51:35 ◼   ► to be.

00:51:38 ◼   ► The guy had some interesting points.

00:51:40 ◼   ► One of them was the potential for internet providers to, and we talk about how Netflix

00:51:47 ◼   ► is maybe a third of the bandwidth used, if they were to charge for bandwidth by the gigabyte

00:51:54 ◼   ► the way that they do on wireless networks, and all of a sudden Netflix costs a lot more

00:52:00 ◼   ► than eight bucks a month to use, that's certainly potentially not good for them.

00:52:07 ◼   ► Another one could be that they would continue to lose contracts for content.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Until now, Netflix has been a source of new revenue for a lot of the TV studios who all

00:52:19 ◼   ► of a sudden had a place where they could make money off their old shows.

00:52:23 ◼   ► No one's going to pay 40 bucks on iTunes for seasons one through five of Mad Men, but someone

00:52:29 ◼   ► will certainly tear through them on Netflix. But at some point, more content owners, studios,

00:52:38 ◼   ► TV networks may kind of figure out, "Oh, well, if there's an audience for this stuff,

00:52:44 ◼   ► maybe we should own that. Maybe we should have the Warner Brothers." And I think Warner

00:52:47 ◼   ► Brothers is actually building their own online subscription-based movie service.

00:52:53 ◼   ► Yeah, you know what I don't like about that, though, is most people have no idea what the

00:52:58 ◼   ► the hell studio made certain movies like who nobody thinks like that nobody

00:53:02 ◼   ► thinks let's go watch a Warner Brothers movie no one does I mean I guess you

00:53:06 ◼   ► kind of have to do that with TV shows like where if you want to watch Game of

00:53:10 ◼   ► Thrones you know you got to go to HBO go

00:53:14 ◼   ► but right but there's only four TV networks right or you know the no

00:53:19 ◼   ► right how many movie studios are there and who who has ever even thought about

00:53:22 ◼   ► what movie studio owns and besides maybe Disney I guess that's probably the one

00:53:26 ◼   ► that has the most recognition, but.

00:53:28 ◼   ► - And even so, even if you know it,

00:53:30 ◼   ► I think that's why though Netflix is doing so well,

00:53:33 ◼   ► is that you just know,

00:53:34 ◼   ► all you have to know is go to Netflix,

00:53:36 ◼   ► open up Netflix on your Apple TV

00:53:38 ◼   ► or fire it up on your PlayStation

00:53:40 ◼   ► or on your iPad or something like that,

00:53:41 ◼   ► and you can find something

00:53:43 ◼   ► and you don't have to worry about who made it.

00:53:45 ◼   ► Was it Warner Brothers or was it Universal

00:53:48 ◼   ► or Fox or whatever, it's just there.

00:53:51 ◼   ► Nobody wants to think like that.

00:53:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I don't,

00:53:54 ◼   ► And then, can all those, even if they were to do that,

00:53:58 ◼   ► would they get the distribution deals that Netflix has?

00:54:01 ◼   ► And probably not.

00:54:02 ◼   ► Apple TV is not gonna have, at least at this point,

00:54:05 ◼   ► maybe if there's an app platform on Apple TV in a year.

00:54:08 ◼   ► God, I think it was three years ago I predicted,

00:54:11 ◼   ► this year will be the year of the Apple TV App Store.

00:54:15 ◼   ► - Right. - Whoops.

00:54:16 ◼   ► - Who knows that?

00:54:17 ◼   ► I wouldn't be surprised.

00:54:19 ◼   ► I think it's coming, but I don't know.

00:54:20 ◼   ► - It has to be.

00:54:22 ◼   ► there have been so few changes to that software and so many new

00:54:26 ◼   ► people buying and using it that they got to do something eventually.

00:54:30 ◼   ► I think we're waiting on a better remote. I think it's,

00:54:34 ◼   ► it's going to be a next generation Apple TV with some kind of better remote.

00:54:38 ◼   ► I don't know. You know, I'm not gonna make any prediction about what it's going

00:54:40 ◼   ► to be, but I think something better than an infrared up, down, left,

00:54:45 ◼   ► right play, pause remote to,

00:54:48 ◼   ► to facilitate more than just play/pause apps.

00:54:52 ◼   ► - Well, the best thing of that is that for whatever reason,

00:54:55 ◼   ► my TV remote and the Apple TV remote

00:54:57 ◼   ► are on the same whatever frequency or something.

00:55:00 ◼   ► So whenever I go left, right on the Apple TV,

00:55:04 ◼   ► it changes the input on my TV also.

00:55:06 ◼   ► So I have to wait.

00:55:08 ◼   ► - Oh, damn it, that's horrible.

00:55:09 ◼   ► Infrared is such a hack.

00:55:11 ◼   ► - But I'd love to see FaceTime on there and stuff like that.

00:55:15 ◼   ► - Right.

00:55:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, it seems like a natural.

00:55:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, it'd be great in the living room.

00:55:20 ◼   ► - The insidious part about what Netflix is competing against

00:55:22 ◼   ► is the way that the interests of internet providers

00:55:26 ◼   ► are not, 'cause almost nobody who's an internet provider

00:55:31 ◼   ► is really just an internet provider.

00:55:33 ◼   ► They're the cable companies, right?

00:55:35 ◼   ► And the cable companies don't want to just sell you

00:55:38 ◼   ► a $20 a month internet connection.

00:55:40 ◼   ► They wanna sell you these, what are we paying,

00:55:43 ◼   ► $120, $130 a month package that has TV and internet.

00:55:47 ◼   ► And so it's not in their interest

00:55:51 ◼   ► to have people using Netflix, right,

00:55:53 ◼   ► and getting used to it and thinking

00:55:54 ◼   ► all they need is Netflix.

00:55:56 ◼   ► So that's, you know, it's not really,

00:55:58 ◼   ► I think that the complaints from cable companies about,

00:56:01 ◼   ► "Oh, we have to charge by the gigabyte

00:56:03 ◼   ► "because it's, you know, poor us."

00:56:06 ◼   ► It's not really that they have to

00:56:08 ◼   ► or that they can't make money doing it.

00:56:09 ◼   ► It's that it busts up their monopoly

00:56:12 ◼   ► that lets them charge what I think is, you know,

00:56:15 ◼   ► not what the fair market value is

00:56:17 ◼   ► for all the video content you get from cable.

00:56:20 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, exactly.

00:56:21 ◼   ► And if they start to see that, you know,

00:56:25 ◼   ► 25 or even 50% someday of video watching

00:56:29 ◼   ► is happening over the internet and not over the cable,

00:56:33 ◼   ► you know.

00:56:35 ◼   ► - We overpay vastly for cable TV, we as consumers.

00:56:39 ◼   ► And the cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner

00:56:42 ◼   ► profit from that.

00:56:44 ◼   ► But the channels do, too.

00:56:45 ◼   ► There's this-- you can Google all these stories

00:56:48 ◼   ► about how that works, where you pay your cable bill of $120

00:56:52 ◼   ► a month or whatever.

00:56:53 ◼   ► $3 goes to ESPN, and $2 goes to CNN,

00:56:57 ◼   ► and a lot of these flagship channels.

00:57:00 ◼   ► So even if you're subsidizing--

00:57:01 ◼   ► $5 to ESPN.

00:57:03 ◼   ► Yeah, is it really?

00:57:04 ◼   ► Yep.

00:57:04 ◼   ► I believe it.

00:57:05 ◼   ► You absolutely have to have ESPN,

00:57:08 ◼   ► because people who watch sports absolutely have to have it.

00:57:11 ◼   ► And I'm sure that this audience,

00:57:13 ◼   ► the nerds out there listening to this show,

00:57:16 ◼   ► I'm sure there's a ton of them

00:57:17 ◼   ► who haven't put ESPN on ever in their life

00:57:20 ◼   ► because they don't watch sports.

00:57:23 ◼   ► And yet they're paying $5 a month every month,

00:57:26 ◼   ► 60 bucks a year,

00:57:27 ◼   ► which is almost what you pay for Netflix, right?

00:57:31 ◼   ► To watch what you want,

00:57:33 ◼   ► and you choose to do it and cancel at any time, right?

00:57:35 ◼   ► Obviously the fair way to price it would be a la carte and the only people who would pay for ESPN are the people who watch

00:57:40 ◼   ► ESPN but that busts up the monopoly and you end up paying everybody would end up paying a lot less

00:57:47 ◼   ► Well, but anyone who wanted ESPN would have to pay more 20 bucks a month, right?

00:57:54 ◼   ► exactly exactly if you know

00:57:57 ◼   ► If only a quarter of the people are watching ESPN and you they still have to make the same amount of money

00:58:02 ◼   ► Although Peter Kafka wrote this story a couple days ago, or maybe yesterday about what would happen this circumstance

00:58:08 ◼   ► Which is basically ESPN would go to the the sports leagues and say alright

00:58:12 ◼   ► Well can't pay you a billion dollars anymore for for your games anymore

00:58:16 ◼   ► So good luck, you know, good luck with that, right?

00:58:19 ◼   ► So they would recoup some of their expenses somehow

00:58:21 ◼   ► But it would still it costs a lot more per channel and a lot of the channels we would have

00:58:25 ◼   ► Let's just go away which I think is fine. Actually, you know what it's good for them. That's disruption, right?

00:58:31 ◼   ► But there's an awful lot of entrenched business interests that are all based on the idea that

00:58:38 ◼   ► every household is paying $70, $80, $90, $100, $120 a month for cable and that there's

00:58:45 ◼   ► this big mountain of money and that they're not watching it, right? So when Fox pays $4

00:58:50 ◼   ► billion a year to broadcast Sunday NFC games, it's not because everybody watches NFC games,

00:58:57 ◼   ► but everybody's paying for it.

00:58:59 ◼   ► Right. Let me do the second sponsor and then we'll wrap up the show. But our second sponsor

00:59:08 ◼   ► is great. They're the same as last week. It's Transporter. Did you listen to the show last

00:59:13 ◼   ► week? Transporter is a hardware product you buy and it's file storage. You put it on.

00:59:19 ◼   ► You connect it to your home network and then it gives you – it's effectively – and

00:59:25 ◼   ► And this is their language, not mine. It's effectively your own private Dropbox. So you

00:59:29 ◼   ► hook up the transporter. You can get it with a hard drive or you can buy one without it

00:59:34 ◼   ► and supply your own 2.5-inch drive. Put it on your network. You sign up with transporter

00:59:40 ◼   ► people with an account, and all the account does, the cloud part, all it does is poke

00:59:46 ◼   ► a hole through your firewall at home so that you can access this thing from everywhere.

00:59:51 ◼   ► stuff doesn't get stored on their servers. It gets stored on the device you bought and

00:59:57 ◼   ► own and control. And it's peer-to-peer. So you can have two of them and they'll mirror

01:00:02 ◼   ► each other. And you can have one of them upstairs, one of them downstairs. You can have one in

01:00:05 ◼   ► your house, one at your office. You can have one at your house, one at your folks' house

01:00:10 ◼   ► so that you have a backup so that the whole thing is mirrored between the two. And it

01:00:15 ◼   ► all just goes peer-to-peer. And you can share files and folders with other people, just

01:00:22 ◼   ► like with Dropbox. You can say, "Here's a shared folder for me and Dan, and only me

01:00:27 ◼   ► and you can see it, but it's stored on my file transporter." And if you have a file

01:00:33 ◼   ► transporter, it would be mirrored on yours as well, so it would be faster because it

01:00:37 ◼   ► would be right there on your local network. It's a really clever idea. The big emphasis

01:00:41 ◼   ► Why would you use this? Well, the big thing is privacy, right? Because you control the

01:00:45 ◼   ► hardware. You know that the only place where your stuff is stored is on this device that

01:00:50 ◼   ► you have in your hands, you can see, you can hold, and you can control. Like I said, you

01:00:56 ◼   ► can buy one without a drive, supply your own 2.5-inch drive, 199. Or even easier, you could

01:01:02 ◼   ► just buy a one-terabyte model, 299, or a two-terabyte model, 399. That's the only cost involved.

01:01:09 ◼   ► They're sort of like Apple. They just want to sell you hardware. $199, $299, $399 for

01:01:16 ◼   ► zero, one, or two terabytes. And that's the only thing you pay. Your account is free.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And that's all there is to it. It's really, really great. Very great idea. And it's

01:01:28 ◼   ► from the people who originally made the Drobo. This is the engineering and design team that

01:01:32 ◼   ► made the Drobo. And so what that did for personal file storage, now they're doing for distributed

01:01:37 ◼   ► cloud file storage. I encourage you, go find out more at filetransporter.com/talk. That's

01:01:46 ◼   ► so they'll know you came from the show. Filetransporter.com/talk and find out more. And listeners of the show,

01:01:53 ◼   ► you can save 10% on your purchase by using the discount code TALK, all lowercase, T-A-L-K,

01:02:01 ◼   ► and save 10% on those prices I just told you about at filetransporter.com/talk.

01:02:04 ◼   ► I actually did hear last week's show and I looked at this and I'm in the market for something

01:02:11 ◼   ► like this right now.

01:02:14 ◼   ► It sounds interesting to me the biggest thing like there's a couple options.

01:02:18 ◼   ► There would be something like this and then there would be uploading everything to some

01:02:21 ◼   ► sort of cloud storage.

01:02:24 ◼   ► But one of the things holding me back from the cloud storage is that it would take me

01:02:28 ◼   ► probably a month or two months just to upload everything.

01:02:31 ◼   ► I have over a terabyte of stuff on my computer.

01:02:34 ◼   ► I don't even know if Time Warner would let me upload all that somewhere.

01:02:37 ◼   ► Uh, I tried, you know, I looked at signing up for a photo sharing, like a photo

01:02:42 ◼   ► library site the other day, and I realized that I have 400 gigabytes of pictures.

01:02:47 ◼   ► You know, like how do, how do you even upload that somewhere?

01:02:50 ◼   ► So, so like this is where it's local and you can kind of pick and choose on demand.

01:02:55 ◼   ► Oh, I need this, this folder.

01:02:56 ◼   ► Uh, and so the big file transfer would only go on your local network.

01:03:00 ◼   ► It's right there, just in your house.

01:03:02 ◼   ► never goes anywhere outside, just from your computer to the file transporter. And then

01:03:05 ◼   ► you can access it from anywhere. And they have—I didn't even mention they have iPhone

01:03:08 ◼   ► and iPad apps. So you can just access the thing from anywhere if you wanted to get it,

01:03:12 ◼   ► your 400 gigabyte selection of files or photos or something like that.

01:03:16 ◼   ► Right, yeah, which I only ever need one or two at a time. So I'm going to check this

01:03:21 ◼   ► one out.

01:03:22 ◼   ► All right. One last thing before we end the show. Here's the last thing I want to talk

01:03:25 ◼   ► about is I saw a tweet from you yesterday. I forget who you were tweeting at here. Was

01:03:29 ◼   ► Was it Patton Oswald or P. Oswald? I don't know who the hell that is, but you're so—

01:03:32 ◼   ► Oh, it's my buddy in Tokyo, Paul Oswald.

01:03:36 ◼   ► You said that your phone got—your iPhone, I presume, got terrible battery life in Japan,

01:03:43 ◼   ► and you think it's because you were roaming on 3G as opposed to getting LTE. And I really

01:03:48 ◼   ► struck a chord. Yeah, I'll tell you what. When I was in Dublin for the OOL conference

01:03:52 ◼   ► last month or two—I guess it was last month—my iPhone had the worst battery life. And I did

01:03:58 ◼   ► the thing where I got a because I have a Verizon iPhone I can just put a local sim card in I just

01:04:03 ◼   ► paid like 20 bucks and got a local sim card with you know a couple hundred megabytes of data so I

01:04:08 ◼   ► didn't have to pay any money it was or I paid 20 bucks but I didn't have to pay any roaming but my

01:04:13 ◼   ► battery life in Dublin was shit I mean by the end of the day I was just out I mean I was you know

01:04:19 ◼   ► looking around for power chargers and stuff and I think it's because I was on 3g all the time yeah

01:04:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I've had this problem.

01:04:25 ◼   ► Since I had the iPhone 5, I've been abroad three times, I think.

01:04:32 ◼   ► When I was in Japan hanging out with my friend last December, it was terrible.

01:04:39 ◼   ► My iPhone 5 in New York, when I go to bed, I'm rarely below 30%, usually even 50%.

01:04:50 ◼   ► It's not because it's plugged in all day.

01:04:52 ◼   ► It's not plugged in all day.

01:04:53 ◼   ► It's just very efficient.

01:04:55 ◼   ► I have a very strong Verizon signal everywhere I go.

01:04:59 ◼   ► My battery is not even on the top 10 complaints about the iPhone 5.

01:05:05 ◼   ► But when I was in Japan, which it's funny, how long were we made fun of in the US for

01:05:13 ◼   ► having horrible wireless?

01:05:15 ◼   ► And now you go to places like Asia and Europe where forever they were making fun of us.

01:05:20 ◼   ► Then you go there and you're like, "This isn't actually that good.

01:05:22 ◼   ► What are you guys talking about?

01:05:25 ◼   ► But yeah, when I was there, I was the guy begging a random hotel to let me charge my

01:05:31 ◼   ► phone in their lamp cord in their lobby because my phone was dead and I couldn't get in touch

01:05:39 ◼   ► with my friends.

01:05:42 ◼   ► And when we were in Europe too, I had the same problem in France.

01:05:45 ◼   ► It was funny, it was on one carrier and then the second time I went back and I had a different

01:05:50 ◼   ► SIM card from a different French carrier, the battery life was better.

01:05:54 ◼   ► So I wonder, this is me making stuff up now, I wonder if there's a specific, I guess in

01:06:01 ◼   ► France it wouldn't make sense because everything's kind of on the same frequency levels there,

01:06:05 ◼   ► but when I was in Japan, I was roaming on two different carriers.

01:06:10 ◼   ► One was SoftBank, which is GSM based, and the other was CDMA based.

01:06:17 ◼   ► And the CDMA was the worst.

01:06:18 ◼   ► The battery would just die so quickly,

01:06:21 ◼   ► whereas the GSM one was a little better.

01:06:23 ◼   ► But even still, nothing like I get at home.

01:06:27 ◼   ► I would have to charge it at least twice a day fully.

01:06:32 ◼   ► And at that point, I didn't have one of the new Mophies.

01:06:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, I had the-- - No, I'm all good, but.

01:06:40 ◼   ► - I had the, I still don't have the case Mophie

01:06:43 ◼   ► for the iPhone 5.

01:06:44 ◼   ► I just have the standalone--

01:06:46 ◼   ► - Yes. - I don't know what they call

01:06:47 ◼   ► the thing, but it's a little brick that you can plug in.

01:06:51 ◼   ► - I'm done buying case Mophies.

01:06:54 ◼   ► - I think I am too.

01:06:55 ◼   ► - This would have been my third one.

01:06:56 ◼   ► And you know, how many times have I used them?

01:07:01 ◼   ► - Right, and I hate putting it,

01:07:02 ◼   ► I hate putting my phone in stupid thing anyway.

01:07:04 ◼   ► So even when I did use the case,

01:07:06 ◼   ► I'd carry it in my other pocket,

01:07:07 ◼   ► and then I'd only put it on when I need it.

01:07:09 ◼   ► But then it takes up as much space in my pocket

01:07:11 ◼   ► as the brick thing does.

01:07:12 ◼   ► The only hassle with the brick thing

01:07:13 ◼   ► is that you have to have a cable.

01:07:15 ◼   ► - Right.

01:07:16 ◼   ► that it just had like a little fold out lightning plug, you know, that you could just fold out

01:07:24 ◼   ► and snap it into your iPhone. But that it's like they don't want to pay Apple for the

01:07:27 ◼   ► lightning thing, I guess. So here's another post that I never did, which was I even did

01:07:34 ◼   ► a whole photo shoot and everything. What I want is a lightning to USB stick the size

01:07:41 ◼   ► of the OS X install rescue disk.

01:07:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, like a key.

01:07:49 ◼   ► - Yeah. - As flat as a key.

01:07:50 ◼   ► - As flat as a key that you put in your wallet.

01:07:52 ◼   ► And all it is is it's the USB sensors on one side

01:07:56 ◼   ► and the lightning bolt, what is it, lightning?

01:07:58 ◼   ► I forgot.

01:07:59 ◼   ► The thunderbolt, lightning, I don't know.

01:08:00 ◼   ► - Lightning. - Lightning connectors

01:08:02 ◼   ► on the other and you can just pass power through it.

01:08:03 ◼   ► So if you were, you could even just go to a cash register

01:08:06 ◼   ► at some store and stick your phone in there

01:08:07 ◼   ► for a few minutes and charge up for something like that.

01:08:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I would think you would make it

01:08:11 ◼   ► out of something that's pretty stiff, but not super stiff,

01:08:14 ◼   ► so it would bend a little bit, like a slightly rubberiness,

01:08:17 ◼   ► so that if your phone, you plug it in from a MacBook

01:08:22 ◼   ► to a phone, you could put the phone on the table.

01:08:24 ◼   ► It wouldn't be just sticking up in the air,

01:08:26 ◼   ► and you could snap it off, just enough give.

01:08:29 ◼   ► That'd be a great, great product.

01:08:31 ◼   ► I would buy that in a second.

01:08:33 ◼   ► - Someone Kickstarter that, please.

01:08:35 ◼   ► I'm in for that, but I think that'd be really cool.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And I tied together.

01:08:39 ◼   ► I did all the stupid stuff.

01:08:43 ◼   ► If I had only posted half the stuff that I come up with--

01:08:46 ◼   ► Half my memory at OOL was me and Michael Lopp,

01:08:50 ◼   ► who both had the Mophie bricks, either letting other people

01:08:54 ◼   ► borrow them or fishing them out so that we could use them

01:08:56 ◼   ► to recharge our phones because the phones were dying so quick.

01:08:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:59 ◼   ► So I imagine we're now going to hear

01:09:00 ◼   ► from 75 electrical engineers about why exactly this--

01:09:06 ◼   ► either we're full of it and we're just using our phones

01:09:08 ◼   ► more because we're not at home or something like that. But I really do think that there's

01:09:13 ◼   ► something there that maybe the 3G network is less efficient or it's polling for a signal

01:09:19 ◼   ► harder or something like that that's making the battery life worse.

01:09:23 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing, too—and we could have done some research before the show, but

01:09:27 ◼   ► instead, why not let our smart readers just tell us how stupid we are? Here's my other

01:09:30 ◼   ► theory—and I could be all wet on this, maybe I'm just pulling it right out of my ass—is

01:09:34 ◼   ► maybe because we have Verizon iPhones, the way the antennas are tuned, when you are on

01:09:38 ◼   ► GSM through a, you know, a SIM, maybe it's not wired, you know, it's not optimized for that.

01:09:46 ◼   ► Interesting.

01:09:48 ◼   ► And maybe that's why we get worse battery life. But I remember, and it's not, I remember thinking,

01:09:53 ◼   ► maybe I am using it more than I am, but I remember even the day that I spoke at all, and I spent like

01:09:59 ◼   ► two hours before I spoke rehearsing, and then I spoke for an hour, and then immediately it went to

01:10:06 ◼   ► Dinner in the venue

01:10:08 ◼   ► So I that was like a four-hour period where I was not on the phone at all because I'd spent two hours

01:10:13 ◼   ► Rehearsing and going over my notes and then an hour talking and then like at least an hour at dinner

01:10:19 ◼   ► Before I even like really even took out my phone and did anything with it

01:10:22 ◼   ► And I remember noting that the battery had gone down significantly in the time. I hadn't even taken it out of my pocket. I don't think

01:10:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I know. I think I think we're onto something. I don't know what it is. But

01:10:34 ◼   ► Well anybody anybody out there who knows what's going on? Let me know and I'll

01:10:37 ◼   ► Do what is Syracuse to call it a F you F you I'll do an F you next week

01:10:44 ◼   ► All right, I can fix this. Please fix it. Yeah, Dan Fromer do out where people should go and

01:10:49 ◼   ► Check out the city notes. What's going on with city notes before I let you go. Yes city notes is my travel guide startup

01:10:56 ◼   ► City notes dot IO is our website. We have a freshly updated guide to New York City

01:11:03 ◼   ► If you're traveling to New York this summer and want to know only the best places to hang

01:11:08 ◼   ► out, restaurants, cafes, don't waste your time on Yelp or some garbage like that, check

01:11:17 ◼   ► out City Notes.

01:11:18 ◼   ► We're going to be releasing new guides over the next several weeks to places like Paris

01:11:23 ◼   ► and a separate one for Brooklyn and hopefully Tokyo, Chicago, and LA.

01:11:31 ◼   ► It's kind of my full-time job now.

01:11:32 ◼   ► I'm pretty much winding down my time on Splat F

01:11:36 ◼   ► at the moment and really pushing hard on this.

01:11:38 ◼   ► So check it out at citynotes.io

01:11:42 ◼   ► or follow us on Twitter, it's citynotestravel

01:11:46 ◼   ► 'cause someone is squatting on citynotes.

01:11:48 ◼   ► - I hate that. - Yeah.

01:11:50 ◼   ► - All right, well that's great.

01:11:51 ◼   ► Everybody should check it out.

01:11:52 ◼   ► We've talked about it before a couple months ago,

01:11:53 ◼   ► but it's really worth your time.

01:11:54 ◼   ► It's a great, really, really great stuff.

01:11:57 ◼   ► - Thank you. - Dan Fromer, thank you.