ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Anyway, we should start the show while I'm not coughing, which is a very brief window of time.

00:00:04 ◼   ► - Fair enough. - Too late.

00:00:07 ◼   ► - There it is. Comedy, ladies and gentlemen, it's all about timing. All about timing.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Oh, man. All right, so while Marco is dying, let's cover the most important piece of follow-up right

00:00:26 ◼   ► up top. Is it Yanny or Laurel? Go ahead, Jon. Jon Moffett

00:00:32 ◼   ► I don't like that one as much as the dress, although I had a thought about both the dress

00:00:36 ◼   ► and that Yanny/Laurel thing. They both kind of—the sound one much more than the visual one,

00:00:45 ◼   ► but they both highlight the fact that even though we're all reading the same internet,

00:00:51 ◼   ► the output devices we're all using vary so incredibly widely. The visual one's less than

00:00:58 ◼   ► the auditory ones, but both vary a lot. We all think like, you know, "I looked at this picture

00:01:02 ◼   ► and I think X and I looked at the picture and I think Y like with the dress thing," right? But

00:01:06 ◼   ► we're not all looking at the same picture. This is setting aside for a moment the input device,

00:01:11 ◼   ► like ourselves, like that people vary from person to person, which is also more true of the auditory

00:01:15 ◼   ► one than the visual one, I think, just due to people getting old and their hearing going bad.

00:01:20 ◼   ► versus color sensing colors which probably changes the age but maybe not as much.

00:01:26 ◼   ► But anyway, setting aside the person, the device that we're looking at, monitors have different gamma,

00:01:32 ◼   ► you're looking at different lighting conditions, so on and so forth, but speakers, especially in the smartphone age, vary incredibly widely.

00:01:40 ◼   ► So for something like the anti-loral thing, where it changes based on how much, where the frequency cutoff is, right?

00:01:47 ◼   ► get rid of all the bass, it sounds like one thing, get rid of all the high frequencies,

00:01:50 ◼   ► it sounds like the other.

00:01:51 ◼   ► And I think that makes that one more boring to me, but it shows like the reason people

00:01:55 ◼   ► are so convinced is because they think we're all listening to the same sound and we're

00:01:58 ◼   ► not.

00:01:59 ◼   ► The sound you get out of your tinny, crappy phone speakers is very different than the

00:02:01 ◼   ► sound you get out of your desktop speakers or your laptop speakers or whatever.

00:02:06 ◼   ► And then of course the input device if you have cold or you have trouble hearing at certain

00:02:09 ◼   ► frequencies or whatever.

00:02:11 ◼   ► So anyway, I think it's dumb.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I think the stress one was also dumb but slightly less dumb because you could look at the same

00:02:20 ◼   ► picture and convince yourself one way or the other, but the audio one, if the frequencies

00:02:25 ◼   ► are not going through your ear, there's not much you can do to convince yourself it sounds

00:02:28 ◼   ► like the other one.

00:02:29 ◼   ► Where it's the same picture, you could go back and forth on it.

00:02:31 ◼   ► If you change the frequency cutoff so it's kind of in the middle, you can hear both of

00:02:34 ◼   ► them, but that's like altering the sound.

00:02:36 ◼   ► I have heard all of the different variations of hearing both of them, or well, I've heard

00:02:41 ◼   ► many of the variations and I can only hear one but but John you know you

00:02:45 ◼   ► know the New York Times one like they do if you do a hard frequency cut off of

00:02:48 ◼   ► all the low or all the high it's impossible to hear the other one of the

00:02:51 ◼   ► extremes so what did you that's why it's kind of what did you hear so anyway it

00:02:55 ◼   ► also shows how crappy people speakers are because I have no speakers that I

00:02:58 ◼   ► own they can make me hear though the one with all the low frequencies cut off I

00:03:03 ◼   ► guess all of my speakers including my crappy earpods and all of my iOS devices

00:03:08 ◼   ► have enough bass in them that I can't get it to sound like the one with just

00:03:12 ◼   ► high frequencies. Well part of that's also that all your speakers are ancient.

00:03:15 ◼   ► And so basically... Like your ears. Yeah like like new new speakers from a lot of different people,

00:03:22 ◼   ► especially speakers in smartphones as you mentioned, they do a lot of

00:03:25 ◼   ► processing to try to make up for the inherent crappiness of a speaker that's

00:03:29 ◼   ► that small and/or cheap. Like if you actually profile, if you like you know

00:03:33 ◼   ► play a test sound out of the iPhone speaker and profile it with some kind of

00:03:37 ◼   ► measurement thing, it's shocking how flat of a response curve it doesn't have. They

00:03:44 ◼   ► do a heck of a lot of processing with almost all modern phone speakers and anything with

00:03:51 ◼   ► anything like the home voice assistant cylinders and everything. There's so much processing

00:03:55 ◼   ► to try to make up for physics and economics that you want a very small device, but you

00:04:01 ◼   ► want it to sound great. Whereas older speakers, they didn't have the electronic resources

00:04:07 ◼   ► to do that kind of processing.

00:04:08 ◼   ► So they just rely on physics and quality and size.

00:04:12 ◼   ► So old speakers, you will never have the kind of processing,

00:04:19 ◼   ► unless something's really going wrong,

00:04:21 ◼   ► maybe with the crossovers,

00:04:22 ◼   ► you would never have the kind of processing

00:04:23 ◼   ► that would heavily alter that sound

00:04:25 ◼   ► to sound that different to people.

00:04:27 ◼   ► That being said, people's hearing is also very different,

00:04:30 ◼   ► as you mentioned, and it changes throughout your life as well.

00:04:34 ◼   ► We all know that young people can hear higher frequencies

00:04:39 ◼   ► than older people, but also your hearing

00:04:42 ◼   ► does not have a flat frequency response curve either.

00:04:45 ◼   ► You have peaks and valleys in certain frequencies

00:04:48 ◼   ► you hear more strongly than others

00:04:51 ◼   ► or have more distortion than others,

00:04:52 ◼   ► and that's just the realities of us

00:04:54 ◼   ► being these big bags of analog meat.

00:04:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:57 ◼   ► - Wait, but Jon, you never actually answered the question,

00:04:59 ◼   ► did you?

00:05:00 ◼   ► - It's pronounced Sir-ah-koo-sah.

00:05:01 ◼   ► - Like I said, in its normal form,

00:05:04 ◼   ► being played being like unmodified like you know not using one of those tools

00:05:08 ◼   ► that actually cuts off frequencies in the source sound but just playing it

00:05:11 ◼   ► through all my speakers playing it through my air pods playing it through

00:05:14 ◼   ► my phone speaker my iPad speakers my laptop speakers it's Laurel for me all

00:05:18 ◼   ► the time all the time and I have to really cut off a lot of low frequencies

00:05:21 ◼   ► before it switches to Yanni like at the source not and you know so I don't I

00:05:26 ◼   ► don't have any speakers that have so little bass or to Marcos point I don't

00:05:29 ◼   ► have any speakers that do not massively process the sound to make sure that

00:05:32 ◼   ► there is some bass to ever hear the Yanni one. And I am old, so obviously the high frequencies

00:05:38 ◼   ► are probably much less audible to me than they are to younger people. So maybe my speakers

00:05:42 ◼   ► are playing them and I just can't hear them.

00:05:44 ◼   ► Marko?

00:05:45 ◼   ► I know what you're talking about, but only just barely, and I didn't listen.

00:05:50 ◼   ► All right, well, at this very moment, you can drop in a clip for the listeners to hear

00:05:54 ◼   ► exactly what I'm talking about.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Yay. Yay.

00:05:58 ◼   ► "Yeah." But basically it's like the blue, what was it, blue and gold dress where you can either hear

00:06:04 ◼   ► one thing or hear another, although obviously the dress was seeing one thing or seeing another.

00:06:07 ◼   ► But, but, like, it would be like the dress one, but they'd say, "Oh, but if you can't see the

00:06:11 ◼   ► other color, apply this filter that turns everything blue. Don't you see it blue now?"

00:06:15 ◼   ► It's like, "Yeah, of course I see it blue now," because you changed the source, right? So the ones

00:06:18 ◼   ► that, if you can't hear it the other way, cut off all the low frequencies. "Oh, great. Well,

00:06:22 ◼   ► you're right. Now it sounds different. Good job. You changed the source."

00:06:26 ◼   ► Alright, hold on. Let me listen to it. The New York Times one is the best because it

00:06:30 ◼   ► has a slider for frequency cutoff, so if you leave it in the middle…

00:06:33 ◼   ► Alright, one sec. I'll listen to it, but I won't be able to hear you. One sec.

00:06:37 ◼   ► Okay, it's clearly Laurel. It's not even close.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Right, but that's just the speaker, so go to the ones that have the cutoff. And the

00:06:44 ◼   ► worst part is…

00:06:45 ◼   ► - Hold on, I need to do this too, so I'm gonna--

00:06:47 ◼   ► Laurel, Laurel, Laurel, Laurel, Yanny, Yanny, Yanny, Yanny,

00:06:52 ◼   ► Yanny, Yanny, Yanny, Yanny.

00:07:02 ◼   ► Oh, I can kind of, sort of hear Yanny, kind of,

00:07:10 ◼   ► when I crank it all the way over.

00:07:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, so listening in my regular headphones

00:07:14 ◼   ► through my decent setup, not even my good headphones,

00:07:16 ◼   ► just my regular headphones, I can only hear Yanni

00:07:20 ◼   ► on the New York Times one in the rightmost two notches,

00:07:23 ◼   ► like the far right and the one right before it.

00:07:25 ◼   ► And the one right before it is really kind of

00:07:27 ◼   ► a crossover point anyway, so you really gotta go

00:07:29 ◼   ► pretty far right.

00:07:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think the middle is the like unmodified,

00:07:33 ◼   ► I forget what the unmodified is.

00:07:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, the middle is like not frequency modified.

00:07:37 ◼   ► - Hold on, let's bring it back to the show.

00:07:38 ◼   ► So we left the show on you going to listen to it

00:07:40 ◼   ► as far as I'm concerned.

00:07:41 ◼   ► - You don't know when we left the show.

00:07:42 ◼   ► Marco decides when we leave the show.

00:07:43 ◼   ► "Oh my god, just work with me here."

00:07:45 ◼   ► - It's power.

00:07:47 ◼   ► There's no question it's Laurel.

00:07:48 ◼   ► If you're not hearing Laurel,

00:07:49 ◼   ► you have seriously messed up speakers or ears.

00:07:53 ◼   ► And that's fine, I'm not gonna judge your speakers or ears,

00:07:54 ◼   ► but just so you know, they're not normal.

00:07:56 ◼   ► - Although I have something to add to what you hear.

00:07:59 ◼   ► The thing that really makes this sound also not great is,

00:08:04 ◼   ► when you hear Laurel,

00:08:06 ◼   ► it sounds like someone saying someone's name.

00:08:08 ◼   ► Or, you know, 'cause that's what it sounds like.

00:08:10 ◼   ► When you hear Yanny,

00:08:12 ◼   ► it does not really sound like a human anymore.

00:08:14 ◼   ► It sounds like an audio artifact

00:08:15 ◼   ► or a heavily processed person's voice

00:08:17 ◼   ► that's been pitch shifted

00:08:18 ◼   ► does not sound like a person saying that

00:08:20 ◼   ► because no one who is saying that word

00:08:22 ◼   ► would say it in such a weird way.

00:08:24 ◼   ► So I feel like at its root, this recording,

00:08:28 ◼   ► it's someone saying Laurel

00:08:29 ◼   ► with lots of high-frequency noise

00:08:30 ◼   ► that happens to sound like a word

00:08:31 ◼   ► in the same way that when you play stuff backwards,

00:08:34 ◼   ► sometimes it sounds like other words.

00:08:35 ◼   ► - So I had only ever heard Laurel

00:08:40 ◼   ► until you pointed out this New York Times thing.

00:08:42 ◼   ► And when I crank it all the way to the right-hand side,

00:08:44 ◼   ► which is Yanny or Yanny or whatever,

00:08:46 ◼   ► it's however you pronounce it,

00:08:47 ◼   ► I can sort of kind of hear it,

00:08:49 ◼   ► but it's still difficult for me to get it.

00:08:52 ◼   ► To me, the raw version is so unequivocally laurel

00:08:57 ◼   ► that it stupefies me

00:08:59 ◼   ► that anyone can hear anything different.

00:09:01 ◼   ► - So it's gotta be either we're all old enough

00:09:03 ◼   ► that our high-frequency hearing is shot.

00:09:05 ◼   ► And I think, I forget when your high-frequency hearing

00:09:06 ◼   ► really falls off a cliff,

00:09:07 ◼   ► but we might all be past that age.

00:09:09 ◼   ► - Or people are using speakers that really have just

00:09:12 ◼   ► no bass whatsoever and no processing.

00:09:14 ◼   ► And so all they get is the high frequencies

00:09:16 ◼   ► and then it sounds like some mutant alien saying, "Meh."

00:09:19 ◼   ► - I mean basically where you might,

00:09:21 ◼   ► where you'd probably hear it, I'm not gonna test it now,

00:09:22 ◼   ► but where you'd probably hear it is using the built-in

00:09:24 ◼   ► speaker on a phone because that's an area where like

00:09:26 ◼   ► you have a tiny little speaker that is,

00:09:29 ◼   ► it's pretty much impossible to get bass out of like

00:09:32 ◼   ► the built-in speaker on the, you know,

00:09:35 ◼   ► seven millimeter thick side of a phone.

00:09:37 ◼   ► Like that's, you're never gonna get bass out of that.

00:09:39 ◼   ► So it makes total sense that maybe out of phone speakers,

00:09:42 ◼   ► especially crappier ones, then you might hear that.

00:09:46 ◼   ► But any kind of headphone or regular-sized speaker,

00:09:50 ◼   ► I can't see how you could.

00:09:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, none on my phone.

00:09:52 ◼   ► So on my phone, it's 100% Loral to me.

00:09:55 ◼   ► - Keep in mind, also Apple speakers

00:09:57 ◼   ► have been really good recently.

00:09:58 ◼   ► In the last few years, the physical speakers

00:10:02 ◼   ► in Apple products have gotten significantly better

00:10:04 ◼   ► than not only where they were before,

00:10:06 ◼   ► but where the competition is.

00:10:08 ◼   ► So anybody on an iPhone, you're probably not hearing what other people are hearing

00:10:12 ◼   ► here if they're listening on their phones.

00:10:14 ◼   ► So the next time one of these things comes up, depending on what it is, is remember the

00:10:18 ◼   ► key – the thing that kills the source of fascination is the idea that we're all experiencing

00:10:24 ◼   ► the same thing and coming away with different impressions, and that's not true.

00:10:28 ◼   ► We're all experiencing different things.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And then on top of that, even if we were experiencing the same thing, we would have different impressions

00:10:35 ◼   ► of it.

00:10:36 ◼   ► Maybe the part that really kills all these is we're not looking at the same picture and

00:10:40 ◼   ► we're not hearing the same sound waves going through the air.

00:10:45 ◼   ► And after that there's even more crap.

00:10:47 ◼   ► But even before that, the whole premise of the fascination is killed.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Maybe if we have—if Apple ruled the world and everything was carefully color-corrected

00:10:56 ◼   ► at the factory for all of us, maybe it would be closer.

00:10:58 ◼   ► But it's like when you go see someone else's television set.

00:11:02 ◼   ► Output devices vary widely.

00:11:04 ◼   ► and input devices also.

00:11:05 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

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00:13:02 ◼   ► [Music]

00:13:06 ◼   ► We have plenty of Google follow-up to do, but before we get there, we have a little

00:13:10 ◼   ► bit of a Race to Listen follow-up. Ricky Bright writes in to say, "Race to Listen is a

00:13:15 ◼   ► BIG deal for China, as it's a pain to type. The default behavior makes sense there. Maybe

00:13:23 ◼   ► change the default based on the region." Cool.

00:13:25 ◼   ► All right, Bob Burrow, who I guess was the next Apple employee or something like that,

00:13:30 ◼   ► writes in—or wrote on Twitter, I shouldn't say writes in—wrote on Twitter that instead

00:13:35 ◼   ► of just crawling websites, Google was going to start crawling people.

00:13:39 ◼   ► That is deeply disturbing and also accurate.

00:13:41 ◼   ► That was in reference to Google having automated calls to businesses to find out what their

00:13:46 ◼   ► hours are on holidays or whatever.

00:13:49 ◼   ► And it really is, you know, the web crawler visits websites periodically and updates their

00:13:53 ◼   ► Google search index and stuff like that. And I guess their web caller would be crawling

00:13:57 ◼   ► websites and trying to pull, you know, hot hours and hours from the website so that Google

00:14:02 ◼   ► can surface that to people who are doing searches. But in cases where they can't get that information,

00:14:07 ◼   ► they will stop crawling the web. And I like this, you know, this of crawling people saying,

00:14:12 ◼   ► we are Google and our computers may contact you to extract information from you for the

00:14:16 ◼   ► purpose of serving that information to millions of people who search for things. And it sounds

00:14:21 ◼   ► Oh, it is creepy.

00:14:23 ◼   ► Well, you know, like I said about the creepiness, things that initially sound creepy you eventually

00:14:28 ◼   ► just come to get used to.

00:14:30 ◼   ► As a user of the service, I can see the value in having accurate information that would

00:14:35 ◼   ► otherwise be impossible to get without doing it by humans.

00:14:39 ◼   ► I guess the Amazon way to do it would be to hire a bunch of low-wage people whose life

00:14:44 ◼   ► is partially funded by government subsidies so you can pay them less than a living wage

00:14:49 ◼   ► and have them call all the businesses and find out the answers, and the Google way is

00:14:54 ◼   ► to pay a smaller number of people to write a program to do that same job.

00:14:58 ◼   ► That's a pretty accurate summary. Michael Love writes, "Another Google Assistant voice call issue,

00:15:04 ◼   ► isn't it recording the call? And so wouldn't it be running afoul of the law and two-party

00:15:09 ◼   ► consent states? What that means, and I am not a lawyer, what that means is you can only record

00:15:12 ◼   ► a conversation if both parties have agreed to the fact that it's going to be recorded.

00:15:17 ◼   ► If it's not recording a call, the call continues, Michael.

00:15:20 ◼   ► How can I check its work and make sure the appointment

00:15:22 ◼   ► was actually made as I requested?

00:15:24 ◼   ► - Although I will say that if you're wanting to listen

00:15:27 ◼   ► to the recordings of the call that were placed

00:15:29 ◼   ► on your behalf, then maybe you shouldn't be placing

00:15:31 ◼   ► these calls through a robot.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Like that kind of seems to ruin the point

00:15:34 ◼   ► of the convenience of this.

00:15:37 ◼   ► - Well, that's the accessibility angle.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Like I was saying before that I'd imagine in cases

00:15:40 ◼   ► where you need the computer to help you make a call

00:15:42 ◼   ► just as an assistive device.

00:15:44 ◼   ► - Right, yeah.

00:15:45 ◼   ► - You would want to participate,

00:15:47 ◼   ► not just listen to it afterwards, but like be there when it's happening. Again, so you can

00:15:51 ◼   ► nudge the conversation in a particular direction because you are trying to use it as an assistive

00:15:56 ◼   ► device. You are not delegating responsibility to do this, right? So, but anyway, as for the

00:16:01 ◼   ► recording thing, I assume it's not recording for the reasons they said. Like, it just doesn't seem

00:16:05 ◼   ► like a thing you can do because it's using regular phone lines and the laws having to do with regular

00:16:09 ◼   ► phone lines were from a bygone era when we made laws that tried to protect people's privacy,

00:16:14 ◼   ► and they're much stricter for what you can do over telephones than they are what you can do over the

00:16:17 ◼   ► internet. You can do whatever the hell you want to get you can get away with, but the the laws for

00:16:21 ◼   ► phones are very clear. So I imagine they're not recording it, which I think as I said last week,

00:16:27 ◼   ► if you're trusting this thing to be successful, like if I, you know, I've talked about how I

00:16:33 ◼   ► had trouble with phone trees when they first came out, but I think for something like this,

00:16:36 ◼   ► especially in the beginning, since it's going to fail so much of the time, say I used this thing

00:16:41 ◼   ► and said, you know, "Hey, Dingus, make me an appointment, make me a reservation at a

00:16:46 ◼   ► restaurant, blah, blah, blah."

00:16:48 ◼   ► I would spend the rest of the day wondering whether the confirmation that it has made

00:16:53 ◼   ► that reservation for me is true.

00:16:55 ◼   ► I'd be like, "But did you?"

00:16:58 ◼   ► And you'd wonder, and you'd get to the restaurant, and you'd be like, "God, my phone told me

00:17:01 ◼   ► it made a reservation, but the thing breaks all the time.

00:17:05 ◼   ► Did it actually make a reservation?"

00:17:06 ◼   ► And you would get there, and it'd be like, "We have no idea who you are, and we have

00:17:08 ◼   ► no idea what reservation you're talking to."

00:17:10 ◼   ► What are you going to say?

00:17:11 ◼   ► "I think I told my phone to call you."

00:17:13 ◼   ► Yeah, what evidence do you have of that?

00:17:16 ◼   ► Look at this message.

00:17:17 ◼   ► That just says, that's just a text message.

00:17:19 ◼   ► That didn't call us at all.

00:17:20 ◼   ► It's like, "No, but I told it this, and then it called you behind the scenes, and

00:17:24 ◼   ► then it told me I had a reservation."

00:17:25 ◼   ► And you'd be like, "Well, your phone lied to you."

00:17:29 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:17:30 ◼   ► I just wouldn't trust it.

00:17:31 ◼   ► And to trust something like that, kind of like the difference between Siri in the early

00:17:34 ◼   ► days and maybe still today and the Amazon Echo, is you learn to trust it after it's

00:17:39 ◼   ► successful a lot of times, right? Like you just realize, "Oh, the echo can hear me,"

00:17:45 ◼   ► and it does do what I asked. So the first couple of times you're a little bit shaky,

00:17:48 ◼   ► eventually you come to trust it. But like I said, I don't think people are going to

00:17:53 ◼   ► come to trust this because I think its reliability will be very, very low.

00:17:57 ◼   ► So to go back a half step with regard to recording, we don't know if they are being recorded

00:18:02 ◼   ► as far as I'm aware anyway. But a friend of the show, Matt Drance, wrote a couple of

00:18:07 ◼   ► tweets about this and so Matt writes, "So I have some questions about this section of

00:18:10 ◼   ► the duplex blog post." And he posts a screenshot and a link and the summary of the screenshot

00:18:17 ◼   ► is that Google is saying that duplex is capable of carrying out sophisticated conversations

00:18:23 ◼   ► and it completes the majority of its tasks fully and autonomously without human involvement.

00:18:28 ◼   ► The system has a self-monitoring capability which allows it to recognize the tasks it

00:18:31 ◼   ► cannot complete autonomously and in this case it signals to a human operator who can complete

00:18:36 ◼   ► the task. To train the system in a new domain, we use real-time supervised training. This

00:18:41 ◼   ► is comparable to the training practices of many disciplines, blah, blah, blah. But what

00:18:46 ◼   ► Matt points out is, and now I'm quoting from him, "So you throw a request over the fence

00:18:51 ◼   ► to assistant, which may or may not bring a total stranger into the call with my doctor,

00:18:56 ◼   ► my therapist, my lawyer. Please tell me I'm missing something." And that was a use case

00:19:04 ◼   ► or not really use case, but that was just a wrinkle that I had never even considered,

00:19:09 ◼   ► which I thought was really fascinating, is we're potentially exposing really, really

00:19:13 ◼   ► private information or data, I guess, about ourselves to potentially humans at Google

00:19:19 ◼   ► that we may not particularly want to have that information about.

00:19:22 ◼   ► But you don't have to worry about that because the user agreement they make you blindly click

00:19:27 ◼   ► through to get to it, signs over all your rights to every piece of privacy in your entire

00:19:31 ◼   ► life to Google and says that you agree that it's okay that Google knows everything about

00:19:34 ◼   ► So don't worry, Google won't get in trouble.

00:19:36 ◼   ► True.

00:19:37 ◼   ► But I don't know, it just seemed really, really weird to me.

00:19:40 ◼   ► And it's tough because I do appreciate, as we mentioned last episode, as you mentioned,

00:19:48 ◼   ► Jon, a minute ago, I do appreciate that there are people for whom this could be a just world-changing

00:19:54 ◼   ► product in that you either are incapable of using the phone or perhaps using the phone

00:20:01 ◼   ► is very, very difficult or something like that.

00:20:05 ◼   ► And so for an accessibility purpose,

00:20:07 ◼   ► this is really, really brilliant technology.

00:20:09 ◼   ► But I think the thing that we all keep coming back to,

00:20:11 ◼   ► and I don't remember if it was Marco

00:20:12 ◼   ► or maybe Jason or Mike on upgrade,

00:20:14 ◼   ► somebody said recently, you know,

00:20:16 ◼   ► the thing that I think we all find most creepy

00:20:19 ◼   ► is that it's not identifying itself as a computer,

00:20:22 ◼   ► which brings us to our next bit of follow-up.

00:20:24 ◼   ► Google says its human sounding robot

00:20:26 ◼   ► will identify itself on the phone calls.

00:20:28 ◼   ► So apparently Google noticed that the internet was not happy.

00:20:33 ◼   ► And they're saying that, you know, that in the future they will identify themselves as

00:20:38 ◼   ► non-human at some point during the call.

00:20:41 ◼   ► That really takes the wind out of their sails though, because most of the wow factor of

00:20:45 ◼   ► that demo was the fact that the computer sounded a lot like a person down to the pauses and

00:20:50 ◼   ► the ums and the whatever.

00:20:51 ◼   ► If you take out the ums and, you know, just leave the time gap pauses, it really highlights

00:20:57 ◼   ► It's the parts where you notice this thing on the other end of the line says the same

00:21:02 ◼   ► word exactly the same way every time, like it doesn't have much variety, right?

00:21:05 ◼   ► You can tell it's artificial, and the ums really sell it.

00:21:08 ◼   ► But if it identifies itself as an automation, but then it does um and stuff, it's like,

00:21:13 ◼   ► "Come on, come on, computer, I don't have time for you to play human.

00:21:18 ◼   ► You identified yourself as not human.

00:21:21 ◼   ► Don't keep trying to do things that humans do.

00:21:23 ◼   ► Be efficient.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Be a machine and get the job done.

00:21:26 ◼   ► the reservation, whatever.

00:21:27 ◼   ► Also, Hey You DVD just posted a link to Reddit in the chat, and I'm going to read this whole

00:21:34 ◼   ► thing. It's not very long, but it's fascinating. It's titled "Today I Realized I Live in the

00:21:38 ◼   ► Future," and it reads, "I got a call at work today. A woman called me claiming to be Google

00:21:42 ◼   ► Maps and she wanted to know our opening hours. We went through what hours we were open for,

00:21:46 ◼   ► weekdays, clarified the weekends, and said goodbye. She never told me her name and her

00:21:49 ◼   ► responses were a bit odd, but I put it down to a language or cultural barrier, though

00:21:53 ◼   ► she spoke very cleanly in English as her accent was Southeast Asian, I live in Australia.

00:21:58 ◼   ► It was otherwise unremarkable. I told the store manager, I'm an assistant manager, and

00:22:01 ◼   ► their first response was, "Was it a person?" I said, "Yeah, of course." He said, "Are you

00:22:07 ◼   ► sure?" Then it dawned on me, I checked Google and our hours were already updated, but one

00:22:11 ◼   ► day was slightly wrong. It's logistically impossible to have the manpower to call every

00:22:15 ◼   ► establishment and confirm their opening hours. I wasn't talking to someone from Google Maps,

00:22:18 ◼   ► I was talking to Google Maps. I was talking to a computer, and I had absolutely no idea.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Wow.

00:22:25 ◼   ► Yeah, the main thing these things have going for them in terms of making people think they're

00:22:30 ◼   ► humans is that humans have widely varying behavior on the phone, right? Especially with

00:22:36 ◼   ► the fidelity of phone lines, you can't hear the sort of audio artifacting and computeriness

00:22:42 ◼   ► of the actual speech synthesis, because it all just becomes mush over a pot system. And

00:22:50 ◼   ► then you're just left with, "Oh, this person just sounded weird, and maybe they weren't

00:22:53 ◼   ► a native speaker, but they didn't have an accent, but anyway, people are weird," whatever.

00:22:57 ◼   ► A couple of quick topics to start us off. First, I wanted to recognize that on Re/Code,

00:23:06 ◼   ► actually a couple weeks ago almost, there was a post which is entitled "Amazon employees

00:23:10 ◼   ► are outraged by their company's opposition to a plan to add more diversity to its board."

00:23:16 ◼   ► And my understanding of this entire story is that Amazon did the same thing Apple did,

00:23:22 ◼   ► which is they said, "No, no, no, we're not going to go out of our way to add diversity

00:23:24 ◼   ► to our board.

00:23:25 ◼   ► Our board is our board, and basically go screw yourselves."

00:23:28 ◼   ► But apparently a whole bunch of Amazon employees have been getting really angry about this,

00:23:34 ◼   ► And seemingly Amazon has said, "Okay, no, actually, we'll take this seriously and we'll

00:23:41 ◼   ► try to make our board a little more diverse."

00:23:43 ◼   ► And I just wanted to call attention to this because Apple has gone through this exact

00:23:47 ◼   ► same thing and they basically told us to pound sand.

00:23:51 ◼   ► And well, not us specifically, but they've told the people who brought this complaint

00:23:55 ◼   ► to pound sand and I just find that kind of gross.

00:23:59 ◼   ► And I just wanted to say that, "Hey, this is kind of cool that Amazon is doing something

00:24:02 ◼   ► that Apple refuses to, and that's neat.

00:24:05 ◼   ► I still think it's, like I said when we last discussed this, there's little actually to

00:24:10 ◼   ► do with the nature of the shareholder proposal, right?

00:24:15 ◼   ► Like it doesn't matter what it is, it could be like we should all wear blue hats on Wednesday,

00:24:18 ◼   ► and a lot to do with the fact that companies like Amazon and Apple and any big company

00:24:24 ◼   ► does not want to be told what to do by a section of shareholders, right?

00:24:29 ◼   ► They'll be told what to do by majority shareholders or very large percentage shareholders, but

00:24:34 ◼   ► small activist group of shareholders trying to tell the company what to do, not just like

00:24:40 ◼   ► broadly speaking, but specifically you must agree to this plan and it becomes a thing

00:24:44 ◼   ► that you have to do as a public company.

00:24:46 ◼   ► They don't want to be boss around and say, "You're not the boss of me," right?

00:24:48 ◼   ► And so it looks bad when the thing they're telling you to do is probably a thing that

00:24:50 ◼   ► you want to do.

00:24:51 ◼   ► Like Apple has tons of diversity initiatives and so on and so forth, but these things usually

00:24:55 ◼   ► come down to, "You must do exactly X, Y, and Z."

00:24:58 ◼   ► And Apple says, "All right, if we want to improve diversity on our board, we want to

00:25:03 ◼   ► do it our way.

00:25:04 ◼   ► We don't want the terms to be dictated to.

00:25:05 ◼   ► We don't want you, small group of shareholders, to convince a larger group to vote for this

00:25:10 ◼   ► thing and now we're beholden to your exact plan of an exact milestones and everything."

00:25:15 ◼   ► And so it's not a good look for any of the companies.

00:25:18 ◼   ► And Amazon seems like they're handling it much better.

00:25:20 ◼   ► But I bet the outcome is Amazon says, "We now have a new program to improve the diversity

00:25:24 ◼   ► of our board, but they won't be bound by it in the same way they would have been if

00:25:28 ◼   ► all the shareholders voted for this thing, you know what I mean? So that's why these

00:25:32 ◼   ► companies just reflexively recommend against any shareholder recommendation to do anything

00:25:36 ◼   ► ever because shareholders are not the boss of them until they are.

00:25:42 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:25:43 ◼   ► Exactly. And so rounding out the Casey complaints about every public company episode, Twitter

00:25:50 ◼   ► is a bunch of jerks. And as much as I love Twitter, basically they can go f*** themselves

00:25:56 ◼   ► because they have announced today, as we record, that they are replacing the API they provide

00:26:06 ◼   ► that basically is behind any of the third-party Twitter clients that any of us may use. And

00:26:11 ◼   ► they're replacing it with their Twitter's Account Activity API, which is not nearly

00:26:17 ◼   ► as full featured as what it replaces and is hilariously expensive.

00:26:22 ◼   ► So Sean Heber of the Twitterific folks at IconFactory, he wrote, "The public pricing

00:26:30 ◼   ► that I'm seeing shows Twitter's account activity API pricing is $2,899 a month to get activity

00:26:35 ◼   ► updates for 250 users.

00:26:39 ◼   ► Needless to say, we have more than 250 users.

00:26:41 ◼   ► It's possible an enterprise deal could be made, but it seems likely to be affordable."

00:26:46 ◼   ► And so you can assume that the, you know, that, that Twitterific, that, that Tweetbot

00:26:50 ◼   ► has many, many thousands of users, if not tens of thousands of users.

00:26:55 ◼   ► And you can see how this quickly becomes unsustainable.

00:26:57 ◼   ► And in fact, friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry wrote, "The math works out to about $10, $10

00:27:02 ◼   ► per user per month to get push notifications."

00:27:05 ◼   ► And that means that they would have to, in order to, you know, stay afloat, they would

00:27:08 ◼   ► have to push that cost down to all of their users.

00:27:12 ◼   ► So Craig continues, "On a platform where people balk at spending 99 cents."

00:27:16 ◼   ► Don't forget about Apple's 30% cut.

00:27:18 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:27:20 ◼   ► So it's really like, what is it, $15, $16 or something like that per user per month?

00:27:23 ◼   ► It's just not tenable.

00:27:26 ◼   ► And so, you know, Gruber wrote earlier tonight, and I don't have the quote in front of me

00:27:30 ◼   ► at the moment, but he had a really good analogy and he said in so many words, "It's like breaking

00:27:34 ◼   ► up with somebody by just being a really, really big jerk until they go away."

00:27:38 ◼   ► kind of what Twitter is doing with third-party clients right now. And it just not only makes

00:27:45 ◼   ► me sad, but it makes me friggin angry. I don't know, maybe I'm going through the five stages,

00:27:48 ◼   ► right? But it just makes me angry because it seems unnecessary. Like they already have

00:27:53 ◼   ► something that is working, and it doesn't seem like they're doing a lot to update it.

00:27:58 ◼   ► I can't imagine that just keeping it working as is is that terribly expensive or difficult.

00:28:04 ◼   ► But they really want to tell all of the third-party developers to, as I said earlier, pound sand.

00:28:11 ◼   ► And it's just frustrating.

00:28:12 ◼   ► But they have—I saw the thread that Craig linked to, of like there was some part of

00:28:18 ◼   ► you from Twitter saying, "Oh, well, we have a new set of microservices that are implemented

00:28:22 ◼   ► in a more robust way, and we're transitioning to them."

00:28:25 ◼   ► And like that could be a reason, but the most frustrating thing to me from the outside of

00:28:30 ◼   ► of looking at this eternal struggle between third-party developers and Twitter is that

00:28:35 ◼   ► Twitter does things that affect third-party clients and explains them in a way that never

00:28:39 ◼   ► mentions third-party clients. They always explain them, like, "Oh, we're doing this

00:28:42 ◼   ► for this reason and for that," or whatever. It's like, "Yeah, but you see how it's doing

00:28:46 ◼   ► this bad thing. Hey, Twitter, how do you feel about this bad thing? Is it a side effect?"

00:28:51 ◼   ► You can't say you're not aware of it. You know it's happening. Last time, I remember

00:28:54 ◼   ► they were going to do this and said, "Oh, we have to think about it for a while. We'll

00:28:56 ◼   ► delay it." And I was like, "How does that help you? All you're doing is trying to wait

00:28:59 ◼   ► until the…"

00:29:00 ◼   ► weeks, yeah, waiting for the bad PR to die down and just do the same thing again. And

00:29:04 ◼   ► it's like, address it head on. I think I said this in the rectives episode where Merlin

00:29:09 ◼   ► and I were yelling about Twitter clients, like, "Decide what you want. Do you want

00:29:13 ◼   ► third-party clients or do you not? If you don't want them, get rid of them. If you

00:29:16 ◼   ► do want them, support them." But like, you know, address the issue head on instead of

00:29:20 ◼   ► just constantly saying other things other than, you know, people out there saying, "You're

00:29:25 ◼   ► killing us," and they're like, "We're really improving our API," and blah, blah, blah.

00:29:30 ◼   ► But you have to talk to those people. You have to say, "We're sorry, but that's just

00:29:35 ◼   ► the way it is. You should stop making third-party clients." So you have to say, "We're sorry,

00:29:38 ◼   ► and we won't do this." But instead of saying, "Well, actually, we're doing it for this reason.

00:29:41 ◼   ► I don't care what reason you're doing it for. These are the effects that it's having, and

00:29:45 ◼   ► you should address them head-on." And they don't seem capable of doing it.

00:29:48 ◼   ► I mean, I have a slightly different take on this. First of all, there was a great alternative

00:29:53 ◼   ► take on Connected this week, led I think mostly by Mike, where basically like basically saying

00:29:59 ◼   ► like this kind of doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Even if you use these apps,

00:30:04 ◼   ► this kind of this kind of this none of these things are like should be deal killers for

00:30:08 ◼   ► you as a user. Now whether they are for the apps is a different story. But you know, as

00:30:12 ◼   ► the user, this is not the end of the world probably.

00:30:14 ◼   ► Well, the DM one is kind of the end of the world. There's now you got to use a different

00:30:18 ◼   ► app for DMS.

00:30:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a bigger problem, but it's easy for us

00:30:23 ◼   ► as fans and users, well, as users of Twitter,

00:30:27 ◼   ► it's easy for us who've been using third party

00:30:32 ◼   ► Twitter apps forever to look at this

00:30:35 ◼   ► and to look at the continued slow jerkiness of Twitter

00:30:38 ◼   ► towards third party apps since like 2012

00:30:42 ◼   ► and to ascribe all of their actions to this motive

00:30:47 ◼   ► of Gruber's excellent analogy of

00:30:49 ◼   ► like somebody who's just trying to break up with their significant other and just being

00:30:52 ◼   ► a jerk about it instead of just telling them. And that could be possible. That could be

00:30:56 ◼   ► what's happening here.

00:30:57 ◼   ► - That's what it's like. Not that that's their motivation, because again, if their motivation

00:31:01 ◼   ► was to get rid of third-party clients, they would just do it. It's like from the outside,

00:31:06 ◼   ► it seems like that's what's happening, but like neglect or like just not caring or apathy

00:31:12 ◼   ► or just equally reasonable explanations. But from the outside, it just seems to us that

00:31:18 ◼   ► They're just being a jerk and we're trying to figure out

00:31:20 ◼   ► why are you trying to be a jerk?

00:31:21 ◼   ► Either break up with us or don't.

00:31:22 ◼   ► - Right, but I think ultimately though,

00:31:24 ◼   ► I think it is a combination of ignorance and apathy

00:31:28 ◼   ► and just like, because look at the way Twitter runs

00:31:31 ◼   ► the rest of Twitter.

00:31:33 ◼   ► You think they can have a coherent vision and solid plan

00:31:36 ◼   ► that ran from 2012 until now about anything?

00:31:39 ◼   ► Twitter doesn't even understand Twitter themselves.

00:31:41 ◼   ► They don't even understand the basics of their own service.

00:31:43 ◼   ► They don't like, they can,

00:31:44 ◼   ► they're barely keeping that company running.

00:31:47 ◼   ► they're barely keeping the product usable.

00:31:49 ◼   ► They're actively fighting against the product

00:31:51 ◼   ► and its users all the time with tons of crazy mismanagement,

00:31:55 ◼   ► horrible directions they go in and then abandon.

00:31:58 ◼   ► Twitter sucks at running Twitter.

00:32:00 ◼   ► So I think it's very, very likely that the actual causes

00:32:05 ◼   ► of their behavior here are not some gradual plan

00:32:09 ◼   ► to kill third-party apps.

00:32:11 ◼   ► I think they just are doing things that they see

00:32:14 ◼   ► as reactionary to other forces, other API desires,

00:32:18 ◼   ► or other platform initiatives,

00:32:21 ◼   ► or God knows what else they call it,

00:32:23 ◼   ► that happen to hit third-party apps on the way,

00:32:26 ◼   ► but I don't think anybody influential inside Twitter

00:32:29 ◼   ► gives two seconds of thought to any third-party apps.

00:32:33 ◼   ► So I think all of this is just collateral damage

00:32:36 ◼   ► from things inside that have nothing to do with them at all.

00:32:40 ◼   ► - But last time they did delay the thing, though.

00:32:42 ◼   ► They were like, "Oh, people are angry.

00:32:44 ◼   ► they immediately had to reply and said,

00:32:45 ◼   ► "I see lots of people are angry.

00:32:46 ◼   ► "We'll, you know, we'll, sure,

00:32:48 ◼   ► "we'll give you 90 days notice."

00:32:49 ◼   ► And that was an immediate reaction.

00:32:51 ◼   ► So I think they are hearing it,

00:32:52 ◼   ► but they're like kind of, you know, spindler style.

00:32:55 ◼   ► You guys don't get that reference.

00:32:56 ◼   ► They're hiding under their desk when the people get angry.

00:32:58 ◼   ► And they're like, "We realize something we're doing

00:32:59 ◼   ► "is making some people angry and we don't really,

00:33:02 ◼   ► "I don't care about those people,

00:33:03 ◼   ► "but I don't like being yelled at.

00:33:04 ◼   ► "So if I just hide under my desk for a while,"

00:33:07 ◼   ► and they're like, "Wait, are they calmed down now?

00:33:09 ◼   ► "Okay, let's go back to what we were doing."

00:33:10 ◼   ► 'Cause they don't care.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And you're right, there's no six-year sustained plan to do anything at Twitter.

00:33:14 ◼   ► But the frustrating thing, corporate communication-wise, is you should at least address the issue

00:33:19 ◼   ► people are mad at you about.

00:33:22 ◼   ► Every answer that I've seen from Twitter about the specific issue never says head-on anything

00:33:27 ◼   ► about the third-party clients or whatever.

00:33:31 ◼   ► And so, yeah, it's continued indecision.

00:33:34 ◼   ► And indecision eventually becomes a decision, and it becomes like, "Oh, in effect, you're

00:33:38 ◼   ► or being a jerk to us for six years

00:33:39 ◼   ► and eventually we'll go away.

00:33:41 ◼   ► But if that is a goal of yours

00:33:43 ◼   ► to get rid of third-party clients,

00:33:45 ◼   ► you would have done it already

00:33:47 ◼   ► because you were entirely empowered to do it.

00:33:48 ◼   ► So it's like, it's not a goal

00:33:51 ◼   ► and we don't like being yelled at,

00:33:53 ◼   ► but if we do it eventually as a side effect

00:33:57 ◼   ► of a bunch of other flailings that we're doing,

00:33:59 ◼   ► we're mostly okay with that,

00:34:01 ◼   ► but we'll never tell you any of this.

00:34:02 ◼   ► And every time you ask about it,

00:34:04 ◼   ► we'll just say something else

00:34:07 ◼   ► about why we're making these changes.

00:34:08 ◼   ► And I bet the reasons they're making the changes are true.

00:34:10 ◼   ► I bet they are changing to new API endpoints

00:34:12 ◼   ► that are better and have better performance.

00:34:14 ◼   ► And I bet they are phasing out the old API endpoints

00:34:16 ◼   ► 'cause they were badly implemented and inefficient.

00:34:17 ◼   ► All of that is probably 100% true,

00:34:19 ◼   ► but that's not what people wanna hear.

00:34:21 ◼   ► They wanna, people wanna hear,

00:34:22 ◼   ► "Yeah, but by doing this, you're having this effect.

00:34:24 ◼   ► How do you feel about that?

00:34:26 ◼   ► We don't like it.

00:34:27 ◼   ► We're being hurt by it.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Can you help us out?"

00:34:29 ◼   ► And last time they said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa,

00:34:31 ◼   ► don't yell at us.

00:34:32 ◼   ► We'll take the time to think about this."

00:34:33 ◼   ► Now they're just like, "Okay, how about now?

00:34:36 ◼   ► Can we just do the same thing now?

00:34:38 ◼   ► It's just, it's incredibly frustrating.

00:34:40 ◼   ► Especially since, as many people pointed out,

00:34:43 ◼   ► like, oh, they don't want people to use third-party clients,

00:34:45 ◼   ► that, you know, or at least they don't care

00:34:47 ◼   ► about third-party clients.

00:34:49 ◼   ► First of all, most people don't use third-party clients,

00:34:51 ◼   ► so it's not like this is a big problem.

00:34:52 ◼   ► Oh, half our user base is using third-party clients,

00:34:54 ◼   ► we can't control their user experience.

00:34:56 ◼   ► No, it's not true, it's vanishing a small percentage.

00:34:58 ◼   ► And second of all, we want them

00:35:00 ◼   ► to use our first-party clients.

00:35:01 ◼   ► They can their first-party clients for the Mac,

00:35:03 ◼   ► so they just want people to use their website, I guess,

00:35:06 ◼   ► which is their first party client.

00:35:07 ◼   ► iOS, you know, they still have the client.

00:35:09 ◼   ► Anyway, they're just making a mess

00:35:11 ◼   ► and you know, it's disappointing

00:35:15 ◼   ► and I'm glad that a lot of the features

00:35:18 ◼   ► that they're canning or destroying

00:35:19 ◼   ► don't affect me that much

00:35:20 ◼   ► 'cause I don't care about notifications.

00:35:21 ◼   ► I don't have any push stuff enabled.

00:35:23 ◼   ► But DMs would affect me

00:35:25 ◼   ► and if I lose the ability to use Twitter DMs,

00:35:27 ◼   ► I will just stop using Twitter DMs

00:35:28 ◼   ► and I'll just use something else for that,

00:35:30 ◼   ► use iMessage or whatever

00:35:32 ◼   ► 'cause I'm not gonna use a DM API

00:35:34 ◼   ► it as like a three to six minute lag every time I send a message.

00:35:38 ◼   ► Just makes me sad. I mean, to be honest, it's probably for the best that I slowly wean myself

00:35:44 ◼   ► off Twitter because I spend too much damn time on it. But it just makes me sad. And

00:35:49 ◼   ► again, it's, I guess in a way the same problem I have with the Google Duplex thing. Like

00:35:54 ◼   ► just call a spade a spade. You know, "Hi, this is a computer calling you on behalf of

00:35:58 ◼   ► Casey List. I'd like to schedule an appointment, please. Hi, I'm Twitter and I want third party

00:36:02 ◼   ► clients to go away. So this is what we're doing.

00:36:05 ◼   ► But they don't. If they want them to go away, they could make them go away. They're

00:36:07 ◼   ► just sort of, it's benign, it's benign neglect.

00:36:10 ◼   ► Well I think the thing is they want them to go away, but they don't want to be the

00:36:13 ◼   ► one with the smoking gun after it's over.

00:36:16 ◼   ► If they want to not make people mad at them, the six-year strategy of making people constantly

00:36:20 ◼   ► mad at them is not like those same people. Like, those people aren't like, you know,

00:36:26 ◼   ► if you had to say this was a strategy, it would be a strategy of like barely appeasing

00:36:31 ◼   ► them. But as Marco pointed out, the idea that Twitter had any six-year strategy that was

00:36:36 ◼   ► consistent is ridiculous anyway. So it's not like they're consciously barely appeasing

00:36:40 ◼   ► them, but in effect, because they're so reactive when people yell at them, they are always

00:36:45 ◼   ► walking that line between just making people incredibly angry at them all the time and

00:36:48 ◼   ► then slightly appeasing and then angry and then appease them a little bit and then angry

00:36:52 ◼   ► and then it's just... And meanwhile, the state of third-party Twitter clients just gets worse

00:36:58 ◼   ► and worse over time.

00:36:59 ◼   ► - You know what we should do?

00:37:00 ◼   ► We should just have all the white Nazis

00:37:01 ◼   ► use third-party apps,

00:37:02 ◼   ► and then they will get priority support,

00:37:04 ◼   ► and Twitter will do everything they want.

00:37:06 ◼   ► - Oh, good thinking!

00:37:06 ◼   ► - And then all this stuff will get fixed.

00:37:09 ◼   ► - Brilliant idea.

00:37:10 ◼   ► - That reminds me of the hell-banning feature

00:37:12 ◼   ► that they just added.

00:37:13 ◼   ► Do you know about that Twitter ad, hell-banning?

00:37:15 ◼   ► Do you know what hell-banning is?

00:37:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, where it's like where you post,

00:37:17 ◼   ► and you don't realize no one's seeing your stuff,

00:37:20 ◼   ► but no one's seeing your stuff.

00:37:21 ◼   ► - Yep, so it's not actually quite that bad

00:37:24 ◼   ► as that no one sees it,

00:37:24 ◼   ► like basically certain people's tweets do not appear in a thread.

00:37:31 ◼   ► So if you're looking at a thread, if anybody's looking at a thread and they participated

00:37:35 ◼   ► in the thread, certain people's tweets don't appear.

00:37:38 ◼   ► You know, the bad people, bot accounts, Nazis, all that sort of stuff like that, right?

00:37:42 ◼   ► Which sounds like a good idea because it's like, it's well, it's been tried many times

00:37:48 ◼   ► in forums and everything and it's kind of good if you don't like getting yelled at because

00:37:51 ◼   ► what you're just hoping is that the people don't realize that they're hell-banned.

00:37:54 ◼   ► the whole idea. Eventually in forums people could realize, but in Twitter maybe they just

00:37:58 ◼   ► think people are ignoring them, and most of the time they're just like, "Create a new

00:38:02 ◼   ► account, spew a bunch of invective, get your account suspended, repeat," you know, loops

00:38:05 ◼   ► so they'll never care, right? They're hell-banned. But the key with all these things is, okay,

00:38:11 ◼   ► how does Twitter decide who gets hell-banned? And the first place I saw anything having

00:38:15 ◼   ► to do with hell-banning on Twitter was because some person's account was hell-banned because

00:38:20 ◼   ► they like told a Nazi to go screw themselves, right? That was the person who was hell-banned,

00:38:25 ◼   ► the person who told the Nazi to go screw themselves because they used like screw or something or said

00:38:28 ◼   ► like an insulting word. The whole point of online trolls is they figure out how your system works

00:38:36 ◼   ► and then they make 500 sock puppet accounts to report your account and get it hell-banned and

00:38:40 ◼   ► you don't notice. And so like the concept of hell-banning I'm not entirely against,

00:38:46 ◼   ► but the idea that Twitter would correctly identify the accounts to actually ban versus

00:38:51 ◼   ► having the system entirely gamed by the bad people to essentially hell-ban everyone else

00:38:56 ◼   ► who's against them.

00:38:58 ◼   ► It's just, there's so little that Twitter could do these days where I think the results

00:39:03 ◼   ► of it will be an improvement to the service, even when they ostensibly are doing more or

00:39:07 ◼   ► less the right thing.

00:39:08 ◼   ► So anyway, I'm assuming I'm hell-banned right now.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Sorry if you can't see my tweets.

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00:41:06 ◼   ► What else happened at Google I/O?

00:41:07 ◼   ► We talked a whole lot about the Google Duplex thing.

00:41:12 ◼   ► Was there anything else interesting that happened?

00:41:14 ◼   ► What else went on?

00:41:15 ◼   ► - Well, first of all, let's preface that by saying,

00:41:18 ◼   ► are any of us qualified to even know what's relevant,

00:41:21 ◼   ► let alone to have seen enough of it to talk about it,

00:41:23 ◼   ► let alone to talk about it well?

00:41:25 ◼   ► - I watched it.

00:41:26 ◼   ► I did my homework.

00:41:27 ◼   ► I assume you two didn't.

00:41:28 ◼   ► - No, of course not.

00:41:29 ◼   ► I already gave 14 minutes of my life for that,

00:41:32 ◼   ► and that was too many.

00:41:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was pretty long.

00:41:34 ◼   ► There's some downtime sections there,

00:41:36 ◼   ► But it's good to see the whole thing to see how Google is presenting its face to the world.

00:41:41 ◼   ► That middle section on duplex really was the important part, though.

00:41:44 ◼   ► But yeah, there's just a few odds and ends here.

00:41:46 ◼   ► One of them is about that Google is now on the bandwagon with their assistant where they

00:41:50 ◼   ► have a, what do they call it, continued conversation where you don't have to say, "Hey, dingus,"

00:41:55 ◼   ► in front of every single command.

00:41:56 ◼   ► You say, "Hey, dingus," and then a command, and then it's still listening to you for a

00:41:59 ◼   ► little period of time.

00:42:00 ◼   ► So I think we talked about that with Amazon a couple months ago.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And then now Google has got it.

00:42:06 ◼   ► I'm sure Apple will have it in like six to eight years, so it'll be fine.

00:42:11 ◼   ► Compound commands was something that they demoed.

00:42:14 ◼   ► And we talked about that as well, of being able to, you know, say play the song and turn

00:42:19 ◼   ► the volume up, which is something that HomePod can already do, at least in the domain of

00:42:23 ◼   ► music.

00:42:24 ◼   ► Google was showing off in particular how they handle interesting compounds.

00:42:29 ◼   ► This was a good demo where it seems like an easy problem because you just look for like

00:42:33 ◼   ► an "and" or something and then you know where to split the thing up, but they showed two

00:42:38 ◼   ► commands that if you just blindly split an "and" it would get the wrong answer, so it

00:42:42 ◼   ► has to understand the sentences and understand this is part one of the command and this is

00:42:46 ◼   ► the second command as opposed to a compound command that is applying to two things that

00:42:50 ◼   ► are "and"ed in it.

00:42:51 ◼   ► So I thought that was neat.

00:42:53 ◼   ► And like I said, that's an area where I think HomePod actually can do that in the limited

00:42:57 ◼   ► domain of music, although probably not as sophisticated as Google Assistant can do.

00:43:05 ◼   ► There was pretty please mode, which this is starting to get into Google's sort of lifestyle

00:43:10 ◼   ► part where they're trying to...

00:43:11 ◼   ► This is interesting.

00:43:12 ◼   ► Apple does this a little bit, but Nintendo does it a little bit too.

00:43:15 ◼   ► This is the first time I'd really seen Google leaning on this.

00:43:18 ◼   ► The idea that we make electronics and software and servers, and we recognize that sometimes

00:43:29 ◼   ► people use our products more than they want to.

00:43:33 ◼   ► I don't know how else to phrase that.

00:43:35 ◼   ► We make things and we give them to you and you can use them, but sometimes you feel bad

00:43:39 ◼   ► like you're using them too much.

00:43:41 ◼   ► I'm on my phone too much.

00:43:42 ◼   ► I spend too long browsing the web, right?

00:43:45 ◼   ► Whatever it may be.

00:43:46 ◼   ► I would imagine that like for the audio things, no one is like, "This is a great stereo system,

00:43:51 ◼   ► but we also have a feature just in case you feel guilty for listening to too much music."

00:43:56 ◼   ► Every once in a while, our stereo will come on and say, "You've been listening to music

00:43:59 ◼   ► for about an hour.

00:44:00 ◼   ► Are you sure you don't want to stop and go outside?"

00:44:02 ◼   ► That doesn't happen with stereo systems for the most part.

00:44:05 ◼   ► But for products like a lot of the products that Google and Apple and lots of other tech

00:44:10 ◼   ► companies make, that is a common feature.

00:44:13 ◼   ► Nintendo's consoles for a little while now have said, "You've been playing games for

00:44:15 ◼   ► two hours maybe you should get up and stretch or go outside because the perception is that

00:44:19 ◼   ► if you play games for two hours maybe you should take a break but no one wants a stereo

00:44:23 ◼   ► that says you've been listening to music for two hours maybe you should take a break anyway

00:44:27 ◼   ► google has a whole wing of their products now that's like you seem like you've been

00:44:32 ◼   ► using your phone a lot maybe you should do something else for a little while and they

00:44:38 ◼   ► call this digital well-being and there's another feature about that i'll get to in a second

00:44:42 ◼   ► But the pretty please mode is similar to that in that say you are someone who has a bunch

00:44:48 ◼   ► of cylinders in your house like all of us do and you have kids like all of us do and

00:44:52 ◼   ► the kids talk to the cylinders.

00:44:54 ◼   ► There is this – I'm not going to say alarmist parenting.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Parents are alarmed about many things.

00:45:01 ◼   ► Oh my goodness, what's happening to our children?

00:45:04 ◼   ► Something is different in my children's life than it was in my life.

00:45:06 ◼   ► Are we accidentally teaching our children something bad?

00:45:10 ◼   ► Are we losing our children?

00:45:11 ◼   ► The first one is, are we teaching our children to be rude by having them order around our

00:45:16 ◼   ► cylinders?

00:45:17 ◼   ► Like my child is mean when it talks to my cylinder and demands that the cylinder do

00:45:21 ◼   ► things, right?

00:45:22 ◼   ► I think that's a little silly because if your child is a jerk, it's not the fault of the

00:45:26 ◼   ► cylinder probably.

00:45:28 ◼   ► But you know, parents have concerns and want to deal with it.

00:45:31 ◼   ► And so pretty please mode is a mode in which your cylinder, I don't know if it requires,

00:45:35 ◼   ► but it really wants you to ask it to do something in a nice way.

00:45:40 ◼   ► And when you do ask it in a nice way by saying please or whatever, the cylinder acknowledges

00:45:45 ◼   ► that you've done that and say, "And thank you for asking so nicely."

00:45:48 ◼   ► Right?

00:45:49 ◼   ► I don't know if it's a jerk about it and says, "Ah, ah, ah, you didn't say Simon says."

00:45:53 ◼   ► But the idea is that our products are too efficient and little kids can use them and

00:45:59 ◼   ► maybe little kids are being bossy.

00:46:00 ◼   ► So let's change our product to make it worse but make it so the kids learn politeness.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Which as a parent I'm going to say if your cylinder could help my kid learn to be more

00:46:10 ◼   ► polite I'm not going to argue with that but I think adults would not particularly like

00:46:15 ◼   ► that.

00:46:16 ◼   ► I wonder if it only works for kids because Google cylinders can identify different voices.

00:46:20 ◼   ► The other digital wellbeing thing was like say it's night time and it seems like you're

00:46:24 ◼   ► on your phone a lot.

00:46:25 ◼   ► Digital wellbeing has a wind down feature that you can tell it to say if it's like 11

00:46:32 ◼   ► and I'm still on my phone, please try to encourage me to go to bed."

00:46:36 ◼   ► So the new version of Android will transition the entire UI to black and white to try to

00:46:42 ◼   ► make the phone less engaging to you, and it will remind you to go to bed.

00:46:45 ◼   ► And I love the idea of taking all the color out of your phone.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Like transitioning your phone to black, I'd be like, "Haha, you fool, I used a monochrome

00:46:52 ◼   ► Mac for many years.

00:46:53 ◼   ► This is not less appealing to me.

00:46:55 ◼   ► Do you know how many hours I spent staring at a monochrome screen?

00:46:59 ◼   ► Not even grayscale.

00:47:00 ◼   ► It's just black pixels and white pixels.

00:47:01 ◼   ► It wasn't less engaging, you couldn't get me off that thing.

00:47:04 ◼   ► But it's like, Google's literally,

00:47:07 ◼   ► it has a feature to make its products worse

00:47:09 ◼   ► to encourage you to stop using them.

00:47:12 ◼   ► And it sounds absurd, but this is a thing

00:47:15 ◼   ► I think people want because I think,

00:47:17 ◼   ► well, I talked about this on Directives, like self-hacks.

00:47:20 ◼   ► Sometimes the way you can accomplish a goal,

00:47:24 ◼   ► like I wish I used my phone less,

00:47:26 ◼   ► is not by remembering to use your phone less,

00:47:28 ◼   ► but by in your moments of clarity and rationality

00:47:32 ◼   ► where you realize you wanna use your phone list,

00:47:34 ◼   ► sabotage your own life in a way that will

00:47:37 ◼   ► either remind you to use your phone list

00:47:39 ◼   ► or force you to use your phone list.

00:47:40 ◼   ► Like self-hacks, I need to make this change in my life

00:47:43 ◼   ► because if I don't, willpower alone

00:47:45 ◼   ► won't cause me to do this.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Like I said on the show, not having ice cream in the house

00:47:49 ◼   ► if you're trying not to eat ice cream.

00:47:50 ◼   ► You could just not eat ice cream,

00:47:52 ◼   ► but it's much easier to not eat ice cream

00:47:53 ◼   ► when it's not in the house.

00:47:54 ◼   ► So when you're in the mindset, I really wanna do this.

00:47:56 ◼   ► when you're at the store, don't buy the ice cream because you know future you will thank

00:48:02 ◼   ► you for that because you're like, "You know what? If there was ice cream in the house,

00:48:04 ◼   ► I would eat it now." But thankfully, before, I had the presence of mind to hack myself.

00:48:08 ◼   ► So I suppose when the wind down feature comes on, you'd be like, "Oh, but I still want to

00:48:11 ◼   ► use my phone." But now it'll be like, "Oh, but my phone is getting annoying and I should

00:48:16 ◼   ► really go to bed anyway." Just giving you that little extra nudge. So I wouldn't be

00:48:20 ◼   ► surprised to see Apple introducing features like this because as absurd as they sound,

00:48:26 ◼   ► And I think they're features that people might actually like and use.

00:48:29 ◼   ► I don't know, would either of you ever configure one of your electronics to tell you to stop

00:48:35 ◼   ► using it?

00:48:36 ◼   ► No.

00:48:37 ◼   ► I think I would.

00:48:41 ◼   ► I don't do the best with putting my phone down or away in times when it shouldn't be

00:48:47 ◼   ► in my hand.

00:48:48 ◼   ► And so, like, I've done a lot of these self-hacks with varying degrees of success.

00:48:54 ◼   ► Lately, I've been leaving my phone on a different floor of the house.

00:48:58 ◼   ► So when I think, "Oh, I wonder, you know, if so-and-so was in such-and-such TV show."

00:49:04 ◼   ► Like, it doesn't matter.

00:49:05 ◼   ► I don't need to look that up.

00:49:06 ◼   ► You should ask your cylinder.

00:49:07 ◼   ► It knows.

00:49:08 ◼   ► Well, and actually, yeah, now I can ask the cylinder.

00:49:09 ◼   ► But I'm just trying to think of a stupid example.

00:49:11 ◼   ► And so I've been leaving the phone on the wrong floor, if you will.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Additionally, I've had Do Not Disturb come on by five in the evening.

00:49:18 ◼   ► I used to have it come on at ten, which is about when I go to bed, except on Wednesdays.

00:49:21 ◼   ► Hi, fellas.

00:49:22 ◼   ► And so I've moved it up to five in the evening,

00:49:26 ◼   ► such that basically once I'm home from work,

00:49:29 ◼   ► I really won't be bothered unless somebody

00:49:31 ◼   ► really wants to get ahold of me.

00:49:33 ◼   ► And so I've been doing little things like that.

00:49:36 ◼   ► So I think I would probably turn on these sorts of

00:49:40 ◼   ► warnings or reminders or what have you.

00:49:44 ◼   ► And like do not disturb while driving.

00:49:48 ◼   ► I think that's another good example.

00:49:49 ◼   ► I have that on.

00:49:50 ◼   ► And sometimes when I'm at a stoplight,

00:49:52 ◼   ► I tell it shut up and go away, but sometimes I see it and I'm like, you know what, I really

00:49:56 ◼   ► should not do the thing I'm trying to do right now.

00:49:59 ◼   ► So I would do it, but that's just me.

00:50:01 ◼   ► What do you think about the pretty please cylinder thing?

00:50:04 ◼   ► If you could put your cylinder into a mode that requires you to be nice to it.

00:50:08 ◼   ► So given that we have a three and a half year old in the house, and he, I like to think

00:50:12 ◼   ► of him as pretty polite.

00:50:14 ◼   ► You know, he's my perfect little precious angel.

00:50:16 ◼   ► He does no wrong.

00:50:17 ◼   ► I think anything we could do to encourage consistency on "please" and "thank you" would be helpful.

00:50:22 ◼   ► And I don't really actually care if he says "please" or "thank you" to Alexa, but

00:50:29 ◼   ► I do care that he says "please" and "thank you" to people, and I don't think it's useful to try to explain to him,

00:50:36 ◼   ► "No, no, no, that's not really a person, so you don't have to worry about them."

00:50:39 ◼   ► But when you're talking to mommy or daddy or other people, you do need to say "please" and "thank you."

00:50:44 ◼   ► And so I have been meaning to turn this on, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

00:50:49 ◼   ► But I'm on board with it.

00:50:51 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Marco, you're going to say please and thank

00:50:53 ◼   ► you to your cylinders?

00:50:54 ◼   ► **Marco Koppelman** No.

00:50:55 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** See, if I think about it from the kid angle,

00:50:57 ◼   ► again, parents will take anything they can get to help along with parenting. Like you said,

00:51:04 ◼   ► it was going to make my kid more polite. Great. But there is another aspect of parenting a child

00:51:09 ◼   ► in a house full of cylinders, you know, as preparing them for their future life,

00:51:13 ◼   ► and essentially making the distinction between something that's a person and something that's

00:51:18 ◼   ► not a person. And I get that like the habits that you build on the non-person can transfer

00:51:24 ◼   ► to the person, but on the other hand, efficiently navigating a world of computer agents and stuff

00:51:31 ◼   ► is a skill, and it's not particularly efficient to pretend the computer is a person, right?

00:51:39 ◼   ► Especially for very young kids, I guess it's a fun thing to do.

00:51:43 ◼   ► Kids believe lots of magical things, but at a certain point, the skill that you want your

00:51:47 ◼   ► kid to have transitions from "learn to be nice to inanimate objects" to "learn to efficiently

00:51:52 ◼   ► use computers to accomplish tasks," because that will be part of your life.

00:51:56 ◼   ► And even perhaps to the fact of "learn to identify when it's not a person on the other

00:52:02 ◼   ► end of the phone line," or whatever, so that you can switch modes essentially and switch

00:52:06 ◼   ► into, you know, you know, last week's show was playing the video game.

00:52:11 ◼   ► Playing it like a video game.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Yeah, playing it like a video game, because that's a skill you should have.

00:52:16 ◼   ► Like you should understand how these systems work, you should know that they exist, and

00:52:18 ◼   ► you should treat them.

00:52:21 ◼   ► It's not about being nice or not nice, but it's about, you know, having the appropriate

00:52:26 ◼   ► interactions with them.

00:52:27 ◼   ► Because the appropriate interactions, like what's next, like you're gonna put "please"

00:52:30 ◼   ► in your Google queries?

00:52:31 ◼   ► Of course you're not, because that's not efficient, and you know Google is not a person.

00:52:34 ◼   ► It's just that if you start making it sound a little bit like a person—I'm not saying

00:52:38 ◼   ► be abusive.

00:52:39 ◼   ► I think that was—when the hell did that come up?

00:52:41 ◼   ► I think that was IRL talk, if you should be mean to your robot butler.

00:52:45 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Oh, yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep.

00:52:46 ◼   ► John "Slick" Baum: Right.

00:52:47 ◼   ► So there is a crossover point where you actually are training people to be terrible to humans,

00:52:51 ◼   ► but I think the voice is not quite at that crossover point.

00:52:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:52:54 ◼   ► I have to think about it some more.

00:52:55 ◼   ► I would like to try it just to see what the failure modes are and if it is really mean

00:52:58 ◼   ► to you and won't do what you said because you didn't say please.

00:53:01 ◼   ► Because people do like positive reinforcement, and if you say please and it's nice to you

00:53:05 ◼   ► back, that actually could make the product feel better to people.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Because they're like, "Oh, my cylinder was nice to me."

00:53:12 ◼   ► It's already kind of nice.

00:53:14 ◼   ► It sets my timers and tells me about stuff that I ask, and it's generally pleasant when

00:53:19 ◼   ► it doesn't.

00:53:20 ◼   ► But if it congratulated me on being polite, I think I would say, "Oh, I feel better about

00:53:24 ◼   ► that," even though I know you're just a computer program.

00:53:26 ◼   ► So that could actually be a user benefit, not so much changing my behavior as making

00:53:31 ◼   ► me feel better each time I use it.

00:53:33 ◼   ► I totally hear you about teaching the kids the difference between computers and not computers,

00:53:40 ◼   ► but at three and a half, I don't think that that's the battle I want to fight.

00:53:45 ◼   ► The battle I want to fight at three and a half is say please and thank you.

00:53:48 ◼   ► At, I don't know, five or seven, I don't know what the appropriate age is, I will absolutely

00:53:52 ◼   ► fight the battle—well, not fight the battle, but explain, you don't really need to say

00:53:56 ◼   ► please to a thing that doesn't exist or that's not, you know, a human, but you should

00:54:00 ◼   ► say please to other people. I do need to navigate that. I agree with you. I just don't think

00:54:06 ◼   ► that for my particular family at this particular stage in our lives, I don't think Declan

00:54:12 ◼   ► needs to be worrying about the distinction between the two. And maybe I'm wrong. I

00:54:16 ◼   ► don't know. But that's the way I look at it.

00:54:17 ◼   ► And also, like I said, it really depends on your kids.

00:54:21 ◼   ► We just had a sleepover party here

00:54:23 ◼   ► with a bunch of 10 and 11-year-old girls in the house,

00:54:26 ◼   ► and they love talking to cylinders

00:54:28 ◼   ► and asking them to play music.

00:54:30 ◼   ► And they're all talking at once,

00:54:31 ◼   ► and they're all yelling over each other,

00:54:33 ◼   ► and they're all excited about what they can do.

00:54:34 ◼   ► And I can say, I heard everything they said.

00:54:37 ◼   ► You couldn't help but hear them.

00:54:38 ◼   ► They're very loud.

00:54:40 ◼   ► It's a small house.

00:54:40 ◼   ► And they were never mean to the cylinders.

00:54:44 ◼   ► They were excited about the cylinders.

00:54:45 ◼   ► they laugh when the cylinder would make a mistake.

00:54:48 ◼   ► I did eventually convince them.

00:54:49 ◼   ► I had to force them.

00:54:50 ◼   ► I went into the room and nudged them,

00:54:51 ◼   ► because they were playing music on the Google Home Mini,

00:54:53 ◼   ► and the HomePod is like five feet away.

00:54:55 ◼   ► And I'm like, come on, people.

00:54:57 ◼   ► Come on.

00:54:58 ◼   ► They're cranking the volume on the Google Home Mini

00:55:00 ◼   ► is the size of a softball.

00:55:02 ◼   ► And the HomePod's sitting there going,

00:55:04 ◼   ► I have 20 speakers that fire in a million directions.

00:55:06 ◼   ► It can adjust to the room shape.

00:55:07 ◼   ► And they're like, oh, we'll play it.

00:55:09 ◼   ► So I got them to change and talk to the HomePod.

00:55:11 ◼   ► And they get confused about the trigger words

00:55:13 ◼   ► a lot, which is, you know, they don't care about these distinctions, they just want the

00:55:16 ◼   ► stuff to happen. Sometimes they'd both be playing at the same time, or slightly offset,

00:55:20 ◼   ► which was, you know, it was a little bit of a mess. Anyway, they were never mean. They

00:55:22 ◼   ► were never mean to the cylinders. They never got mad at them, they never, you know, were

00:55:27 ◼   ► bossy or whatever. And so I feel like if, it's kind of like if your kid was being bossy

00:55:32 ◼   ► to their teddy bear, it's not the teddy bear's fault. There's no alteration in the teddy

00:55:36 ◼   ► bear's demeanor or appearance that will change your child from yelling at it. The kid's being

00:55:40 ◼   ► bossy to the teddy bear is a sign that something else is wrong. Why is your kid angry? You

00:55:44 ◼   ► know, whatever the problem is, it's probably not the teddy bear. So if your kid is yelling

00:55:48 ◼   ► at their cylinder, changing the cylinder to ask them to be polite is addressing the symptom

00:55:53 ◼   ► and not the root problem, I would say.

00:55:56 ◼   ► All right. We have probably half an hour to an hour left of the show, so I think we still

00:56:02 ◼   ► have time possibly to bring up the next topic. Let's talk about keyboards, Marco. There's

00:56:08 ◼   ► There's a class action lawsuit, and apparently one of you wants to talk about it, and that

00:56:13 ◼   ► is not me.

00:56:14 ◼   ► - I didn't put it in here, so it must be John.

00:56:16 ◼   ► I was just hoping to say that, you know, Apple gets class action lawsuits filed against it

00:56:21 ◼   ► all the time.

00:56:23 ◼   ► They usually are BS, they go nowhere.

00:56:26 ◼   ► Class action lawsuits are generally scams, because the only people who tend to make any

00:56:32 ◼   ► real money out of them are the lawyers.

00:56:34 ◼   ► Usually they're not news.

00:56:35 ◼   ► I'm still not sure this one is news,

00:56:39 ◼   ► but it happens to be on a topic that I talk about a lot,

00:56:41 ◼   ► so I suppose that's why it's in here.

00:56:45 ◼   ► But yeah, there has been a class action lawsuit

00:56:47 ◼   ► filed in California that alleges that,

00:56:51 ◼   ► so it's regarding the keyboards in the 12 inch MacBook

00:56:54 ◼   ► and 2016 forward MacBook Pros that I love to bag on so much

00:56:58 ◼   ► because they are highly controversial in feel and attributes

00:57:03 ◼   ► and I fall on the "they suck" side of that controversy, but of course they're also fairly

00:57:08 ◼   ► unreliable compared to the previous ones. So anyway, this lawsuit alleges not only that

00:57:12 ◼   ► they are unreliable and that Apple is refusing to fix them under warranty the way they should,

00:57:16 ◼   ► but also that Apple knowingly put them in the MacBook Pros after knowing after the 2015

00:57:24 ◼   ► 12-inch MacBook that basically it's alleging they knew they were defective and put them

00:57:30 ◼   ► in the other laptops and have been continuing to sell them anyway, even knowing that they

00:57:34 ◼   ► would fail at a high rate and be defective.

00:57:37 ◼   ► And that's honestly plausible.

00:57:41 ◼   ► If you look at the sequence of events, I've been saying this for a long time now.

00:57:47 ◼   ► Apple released the 12-inch MacBook, it had the butterfly keyboard for the first time,

00:57:51 ◼   ► and those failed at a very high rate, seemingly anecdotally.

00:57:54 ◼   ► And you can say this is all anecdotes and everything, but that's all we have.

00:57:59 ◼   ► isn't reveal these numbers so it's all we have is you can ask around, you can hear on

00:58:03 ◼   ► Twitter or stuff like that. And it did seem like right from the start there was a seemingly

00:58:09 ◼   ► unusually high failure rate on those keyboards, even the 12 inch, and this was a year and

00:58:15 ◼   ► a half before the MacBook Pros shipped with them. So anyway, this lawsuit is alleging

00:58:21 ◼   ► that Apple knew they were higher than usual failing rates and shipped them in all their

00:58:25 ◼   ► computers anyway and that does seem plausible.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Apple might have known.

00:58:30 ◼   ► We're probably never gonna know.

00:58:31 ◼   ► This is probably never gonna reach a court

00:58:33 ◼   ► and Apple's probably never gonna have any kind of testimony

00:58:35 ◼   ► put on the record.

00:58:36 ◼   ► Chances are it's either gonna fizzle out

00:58:38 ◼   ► or it's gonna settle for some thing that makes the lawyers

00:58:41 ◼   ► a lot of money and makes nothing for any of the people

00:58:43 ◼   ► who have these laptops.

00:58:45 ◼   ► So chances are this will go nowhere

00:58:48 ◼   ► but I think it is noteworthy that it has reached this point.

00:58:51 ◼   ► This is not the first time this has happened.

00:58:53 ◼   ► Apple has had class actions in the past

00:58:55 ◼   ► for various product flaws, some of them valid,

00:58:57 ◼   ► most of them not.

00:58:59 ◼   ► So again, it's hard to know how newsworthy this is

00:59:02 ◼   ► or how valid this is, or if this will actually

00:59:05 ◼   ► change anything at all.

00:59:06 ◼   ► But it is at least noteworthy that it does seem

00:59:10 ◼   ► to be an actual problem.

00:59:11 ◼   ► What they're alleging is both pretty horrible

00:59:14 ◼   ► on Apple's part and also kind of plausible.

00:59:17 ◼   ► So it's worth looking back on in a year

00:59:22 ◼   ► and seeing where it ended up.

00:59:23 ◼   ► But it's probably not going to have breaking news

00:59:26 ◼   ► all the time.

00:59:28 ◼   ► So the reason I put it in here-- and I should have actually put

00:59:31 ◼   ► the petition.

00:59:31 ◼   ► I think there was a petition, online petition,

00:59:34 ◼   ► change.org online petition, too.

00:59:35 ◼   ► I forgot what they were asking.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Probably something similar like extend warranty repairs

00:59:41 ◼   ► and fix your keyboards or whatever.

00:59:42 ◼   ► And class action lawsuit, because lots of people

00:59:44 ◼   ► send these to us.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Hey, did you hear about this class action lawsuit?

00:59:47 ◼   ► Did you sign this petition?

00:59:48 ◼   ► Can you amplify this?

00:59:50 ◼   ► Can you retweet it?

00:59:51 ◼   ► can you send it to all your people so they will sign the petition and so they will learn

00:59:56 ◼   ► about the class action lawsuit.

00:59:58 ◼   ► I wanted to put them in here to explain basically why I tend not to do that.

01:00:02 ◼   ► And I think Marco explained it well.

01:00:05 ◼   ► Class action lawsuits are not, you know, just because it's a class action lawsuit doesn't

01:00:09 ◼   ► mean anything.

01:00:10 ◼   ► You can sue anyone for anything, right?

01:00:11 ◼   ► It doesn't mean you're going to succeed or it doesn't mean that even if you get a big

01:00:14 ◼   ► settlement it doesn't mean that you were right.

01:00:16 ◼   ► It just means that lawyers smell money.

01:00:18 ◼   ► So yes, this particular problem, like so many problems before it, has raised to the level

01:00:23 ◼   ► where lawyers think and are probably right that they can extract money from Apple over

01:00:28 ◼   ► it, which says nothing about the validity of the issue.

01:00:32 ◼   ► We've discussed the validity of the issue at length, and my opinion of the validity

01:00:36 ◼   ► of the issue is not changed by the filing of the lawsuit.

01:00:39 ◼   ► Similarly, online petitions are an interesting signal to say, "Are people worked up enough

01:00:45 ◼   ► about this to click a couple buttons on a web page?"

01:00:48 ◼   ► That's a pretty low bar.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Like, I've seen online petitions with five to ten to a hundred times as many signatures

01:00:54 ◼   ► for a minor change in a video game.

01:00:56 ◼   ► So you know, like, just because people are willing to click on a webpage and sign a petition

01:01:03 ◼   ► doesn't really mean anything about the importance, severity, or correctness of an issue.

01:01:08 ◼   ► But it's another signal.

01:01:09 ◼   ► It shows that the bad publicity about this particular issue has reached a stage where

01:01:14 ◼   ► Someone decided to make a petition and a lot of people signed it.

01:01:17 ◼   ► And again, it doesn't mean that the issue is valid because lots of people have signed

01:01:24 ◼   ► lots of petitions about lots of things related to Apple over the years.

01:01:27 ◼   ► But it does mean that this particular issue, which we all think has some validity, is

01:01:32 ◼   ► getting traction among more people than just a slightly bigger circle than just Apple

01:01:39 ◼   ► podcasters, I suppose.

01:01:44 ◼   ► And all this signal, it's a signal to us

01:01:46 ◼   ► and to know how things are progressing,

01:01:48 ◼   ► but it's also a signal to Apple.

01:01:49 ◼   ► And I think Apple also has a similar opinion on this.

01:01:52 ◼   ► Class action lawsuits, we get sued all the time.

01:01:55 ◼   ► Some Apple lawyer should come on and say,

01:01:57 ◼   ► "How many times a year does Apple get sued?"

01:01:58 ◼   ► It's probably like seven times a second or something.

01:02:00 ◼   ► It's like how fast they sell iPhones.

01:02:02 ◼   ► People love to sue companies with a lot of money.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Those are the best people to sue

01:02:05 ◼   ► because that's where the money is, right?

01:02:08 ◼   ► It's just a small input into their system.

01:02:11 ◼   ► I think the class action lawsuit

01:02:13 ◼   ► is a slightly bigger signal to Apple

01:02:15 ◼   ► than the online petition, which Apple, I'm sure,

01:02:17 ◼   ► is used to entirely ignoring, but they're both signals.

01:02:21 ◼   ► And so if Apple wants to know how annoyed people are

01:02:24 ◼   ► about the keyboard, valid or invalid,

01:02:26 ◼   ► they can look at those signals and find out.

01:02:28 ◼   ► But yeah, it's not, class action lawsuits,

01:02:32 ◼   ► you know, it's hard for me to get worked up

01:02:34 ◼   ► about any of these things, but class action lawsuits

01:02:36 ◼   ► in particular bother me by their nature

01:02:38 ◼   ► for the reasons that Marco said,

01:02:40 ◼   ► that like it promises like justice but it feels bad to a lot of people that the justice

01:02:48 ◼   ► accrues in a very small measure to everyone in the class so great great you get a $12

01:02:54 ◼   ► check right but the three lawyers involved become multi-millionaires and like it just

01:03:01 ◼   ► it seems unfair it's like one of those things that people like you did so little work and

01:03:04 ◼   ► made so much money you shot on the movie for three days and you made $20 million that seems

01:03:08 ◼   ► so unfair. But at least movie stars, you understand like, well, people really want to see this

01:03:12 ◼   ► person. But no one knows or cares who the lawyers are in a class action lawsuit. And

01:03:16 ◼   ► the fact that they get so much money out of it disproportionately to the people who are

01:03:19 ◼   ► part of the class just doesn't leave a good taste in a lot of people's mouths. But anyway,

01:03:24 ◼   ► people just want to see Apple lose a lawsuit or they want to get their $12 check and feel

01:03:28 ◼   ► as just as involved. And finally on this topic, as I think Marco pointed out in a tweet and

01:03:32 ◼   ► many people have pointed out, like, we all kind of know how this is going to go down.

01:03:36 ◼   ► unless something dramatic happens, unless like some Apple employee comes out as

01:03:41 ◼   ► like a whistleblower and says "yes Apple knew they were defecting" you know unless

01:03:44 ◼   ► something very dramatic happens, it's gonna happen the way we always knew it

01:03:47 ◼   ► was gonna happen and that Apple will probably do something in their future

01:03:51 ◼   ► laptops to have a different keyboard. Hopefully it'll be better but you know

01:03:54 ◼   ► they'll do something different right? Just like they did something different

01:03:57 ◼   ► with the antennas on their phones eventually and like many other hardware

01:04:01 ◼   ► issues they've had they'll probably do a repair extension program for these

01:04:06 ◼   ► things and it may or may not be a good repair extension that may or may not leave a big

01:04:09 ◼   ► like gap in the poor suckers who bought them at the wrong time and will never be covered.

01:04:15 ◼   ► And they'll move on with, you know, they'll live and learn, right?

01:04:19 ◼   ► So I don't, you know, I don't think even if this class action lawsuit was wildly successful,

01:04:23 ◼   ► they're not going to say, "Refunds for everybody who bought a MacBook Pro with this keyboard,"

01:04:27 ◼   ► or "You can trade it in for a new computer," or whatever.

01:04:31 ◼   ► Like, we know how this is going to turn out with or without the class action lawsuit.

01:04:35 ◼   ► So we're all just kind of like waiting out

01:04:38 ◼   ► the reliability of issues of this keyboard

01:04:42 ◼   ► and hoping that the next one is better.

01:04:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the sad thing is, like,

01:04:47 ◼   ► I've wanted, for a while now, I've wanted to, like,

01:04:51 ◼   ► start a campaign to announce to people on a regular basis,

01:04:54 ◼   ► you know, here on Twitter, like,

01:04:56 ◼   ► all Apple knows about officially,

01:04:58 ◼   ► all that's hidden them, like, where it counts,

01:05:00 ◼   ► which is their data and their wallet,

01:05:02 ◼   ► is when they're brought in for warranty repair,

01:05:04 ◼   ► when Apple has to foot the bill

01:05:06 ◼   ► for replacing an entire top case for one dead key.

01:05:10 ◼   ► So I've been wanting for a while to encourage people,

01:05:13 ◼   ► if you have one that has a bad key,

01:05:16 ◼   ► bring it in and make them replace it.

01:05:18 ◼   ► You know, and so that way you are counted,

01:05:20 ◼   ► because there's a whole lot of people out there

01:05:22 ◼   ► who have brought them in,

01:05:23 ◼   ► who have been getting them replaced.

01:05:24 ◼   ► There's also a whole lot of people out there

01:05:26 ◼   ► who have flaky keys and just don't bring them in

01:05:29 ◼   ► because it's a huge pain.

01:05:31 ◼   ► And the reason I haven't encouraged people to do that,

01:05:35 ◼   ► and the reason I keep like convincing myself

01:05:37 ◼   ► to not announce this everywhere,

01:05:40 ◼   ► is because I know in reality, I wouldn't bring it in

01:05:44 ◼   ► if that was my only laptop or my main laptop,

01:05:46 ◼   ► because it is a pain.

01:05:47 ◼   ► It's so disruptive to bring in your computer to Apple,

01:05:52 ◼   ► give them a stupid account with a stupid password

01:05:56 ◼   ► so they can log in and do whatever they need

01:05:57 ◼   ► and look at all your data.

01:05:58 ◼   ► You should never, ever, ever have to give your password

01:06:01 ◼   ► anybody in this day and age, I don't know why they still

01:06:04 ◼   ► insist on that, but okay.

01:06:06 ◼   ► It's a pain to be without your computer.

01:06:10 ◼   ► The reason, like, if you're buying a $1500 plus laptop,

01:06:14 ◼   ► chances are you need it for something in your life,

01:06:19 ◼   ► and chances are you need it regularly.

01:06:22 ◼   ► And especially if it's your only computer,

01:06:25 ◼   ► it's quite an intrusion to go without it.

01:06:27 ◼   ► I mean, look at how long I tolerated my terrible image

01:06:30 ◼   ► on my last iMac because I didn't want to go

01:06:33 ◼   ► without my main computer for a week,

01:06:35 ◼   ► which is almost what it took when I finally did do it

01:06:38 ◼   ► in the last week of the warranty.

01:06:41 ◼   ► And this is another reason why when people say,

01:06:44 ◼   ► like when there is a flaw with an Apple product

01:06:47 ◼   ► and a lot of times the defenders of this product

01:06:50 ◼   ► will say, well just bring it in, get it serviced,

01:06:52 ◼   ► just bring it in, just bring it in.

01:06:53 ◼   ► It's like, that's not actually a good answer.

01:06:56 ◼   ► That's actually, 'cause most Apple products

01:06:59 ◼   ► that I have bought.

01:07:00 ◼   ► I have never needed to bring in for service.

01:07:02 ◼   ► Most products of any type that I have bought,

01:07:05 ◼   ► I have never needed to bring in for service.

01:07:07 ◼   ► Bringing things in for service is hugely invasive

01:07:11 ◼   ► and costly to a lot of people in various ways.

01:07:15 ◼   ► The fact that it can be fixed in service

01:07:17 ◼   ► is not a great excuse.

01:07:19 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:07:20 ◼   ► So anyway, I totally get why people would be hesitant

01:07:25 ◼   ► to bring in their computers for service,

01:07:27 ◼   ► Especially if the first time they bring them in,

01:07:29 ◼   ► they get the runaround from the genius on the other side

01:07:32 ◼   ► after the pain in the ass of making the appointment,

01:07:33 ◼   ► and then somebody eventually tells them,

01:07:35 ◼   ► well, this is user damage

01:07:36 ◼   ► 'cause you caused the dust to go to that keycap.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Like what happened to Steven Hackett?

01:07:40 ◼   ► I get so much why nobody wants to bring in their laptops.

01:07:45 ◼   ► But honestly, if you can bring it in,

01:07:47 ◼   ► if it's not a big pain for you,

01:07:49 ◼   ► bring in any broken butterfly keyboard laptop that you have

01:07:54 ◼   ► and make them service under warranty.

01:07:56 ◼   ► because if you want this problem to actually be fixed,

01:08:00 ◼   ► we need to hit them where it counts.

01:08:01 ◼   ► They don't give two craps about 16,000 signatures

01:08:05 ◼   ► on a petition, they don't give two craps

01:08:07 ◼   ► about people like me complaining on Twitter.

01:08:10 ◼   ► They do give a number of craps about their spreadsheet.

01:08:13 ◼   ► And so, if you have one of these keyboards,

01:08:16 ◼   ► again, if this is affecting you,

01:08:18 ◼   ► if you can bring it in for service

01:08:19 ◼   ► while it's under warranty and make them replace it,

01:08:21 ◼   ► please do.

01:08:22 ◼   ► However, if that's a huge imposition on you,

01:08:25 ◼   ► I totally understand.

01:08:27 ◼   ► So I'm not saying you have to do it,

01:08:30 ◼   ► but if you can do it, do it.

01:08:34 ◼   ► - You can do the old people thing.

01:08:36 ◼   ► I'm thinking of the people who,

01:08:37 ◼   ► and this will start happening more and more, I assume,

01:08:40 ◼   ► who go in with a broken key

01:08:43 ◼   ► and their thing is out of warranty

01:08:46 ◼   ► and they find out to fix their broken key, it's $400,

01:08:48 ◼   ► now they have to pay out of pocket.

01:08:50 ◼   ► You may or may not be able to yell and scream

01:08:54 ◼   ► and make Apple give you a better deal or do it under warranty, assuming there's no warranty

01:08:58 ◼   ► extension program by now.

01:09:01 ◼   ► But one thing you can do, regardless of whether you choose to have the repair, is go back

01:09:05 ◼   ► home and write a long, sad letter to Apple to say, "Dear Tim, I've used your products

01:09:12 ◼   ► for years and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:09:14 ◼   ► Then I went in and one key broke and it's disappointing enough that the key broke.

01:09:17 ◼   ► But then when I learned to fix the keyboard, they have to replace the whole top of the

01:09:19 ◼   ► computer.

01:09:20 ◼   ► It's going to cost me $400.

01:09:21 ◼   ► only a year old or whatever, you know, like,

01:09:24 ◼   ► like one of those letters,

01:09:26 ◼   ► and I mean like an actual physical letter,

01:09:28 ◼   ► but even could be an email, taking the time,

01:09:30 ◼   ► and this is a good outlet for your anger too,

01:09:32 ◼   ► with like the company,

01:09:33 ◼   ► regardless of whether you actually paid it.

01:09:34 ◼   ► So you can say you didn't pay it,

01:09:36 ◼   ► or you can say you did pay it,

01:09:37 ◼   ► and it was a big hardship, and you're disappointed,

01:09:39 ◼   ► and you're never gonna buy all the products again

01:09:40 ◼   ► or whatever, but kind of like, you know,

01:09:43 ◼   ► say with, you know, political campaigns,

01:09:46 ◼   ► that a bunch of automated signatures is weighed less than,

01:09:49 ◼   ► A real signature is weighed less than a real handwritten letter, you know, like the sort

01:09:53 ◼   ► of hierarchy of how much time did the person who sent this to me spend on it and how does

01:09:59 ◼   ► that represent how passionately they feel about it and how many more people do I multiply

01:10:04 ◼   ► this by to know that for every one handwritten letter we get, there's 10 people behind the

01:10:08 ◼   ► scenes who couldn't be bothered to write a letter.

01:10:10 ◼   ► I remember my mother doing the same thing when I got my Mac SE30 and speaking of young

01:10:15 ◼   ► hearing, I think I've told this story before, the power supply made a high-pitched wine

01:10:19 ◼   ► that only I could hear because I was like, you know, 12 and had really good hearing.

01:10:24 ◼   ► And the adults at the repair center, this was before Apple source, the adults at the

01:10:27 ◼   ► repair center said, "This thing isn't making any noise."

01:10:31 ◼   ► And I felt like I was being gaslighted and I was like, "But it's making this terrible

01:10:34 ◼   ► high-pitched screaming noise.

01:10:35 ◼   ► How can you not hear it?"

01:10:37 ◼   ► And we went back and forth and the repair center said they did something and gave it

01:10:42 ◼   ► back and it was just as bad or worse.

01:10:45 ◼   ► And you know, and so it was like, it was all under warranty.

01:10:48 ◼   ► So we weren't paying any money for it, but it went back and forth to the authorized Apple

01:10:52 ◼   ► reseller as they were known in those days, and still are I assume, back and forth lots

01:10:57 ◼   ► of times.

01:10:58 ◼   ► And eventually my mother wrote a handwritten letter to Apple saying, "We've used your computers

01:11:01 ◼   ► for years.

01:11:02 ◼   ► My son is really into your computers.

01:11:04 ◼   ► We've been trying to get this repaired and we haven't had any success and they're kind

01:11:07 ◼   ► of giving us the runaround and blah, blah, blah."

01:11:09 ◼   ► Eventually we ended up finding a different repair center that did replace the power supply

01:11:14 ◼   ► with a new one that didn't make the noise.

01:11:15 ◼   ► But that type of letter I imagine goes a lot farther than a signature or participation

01:11:24 ◼   ► in a class action lawsuit or anything like that.

01:11:26 ◼   ► Obviously Marco's right, the thing that goes the farther is making Apple pay their own

01:11:28 ◼   ► money out of pocket for the repair because that really hits them where it hurts.

01:11:32 ◼   ► But if you can't do that, like for instance you're out of warranty and Apple's not going

01:11:35 ◼   ► to pay for it and neither are you because honestly I would have serious doubts about

01:11:39 ◼   ► paying $500 to repair a key on an out of warranty laptop that's probably going to have that

01:11:43 ◼   ► key go bad on the new keyboard because the new keyboard is the same as the old keyboard.

01:11:46 ◼   ► I really think twice about that. Write an angry long letter. You know, you can be polite.

01:11:52 ◼   ► You know, you could say, "I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed." However you want to do

01:11:55 ◼   ► it. I think they will weight that a lot more than you clicking on that online petition.

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01:13:29 ◼   ► List

01:13:40 ◼   ► of

01:13:52 ◼   ► and can somebody fill in as chief summarizer and chief?

01:13:55 ◼   ► - John?

01:13:56 ◼   ► - Did you even look at this, Marco?

01:13:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, I tweeted about it.

01:13:59 ◼   ► Everyone got mad at me.

01:14:00 ◼   ► - All right.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Anyway, what was your tweet?

01:14:03 ◼   ► Why did everyone get mad?

01:14:04 ◼   ► - I basically said, I was kinda snarkily saying

01:14:07 ◼   ► that Apple and Apple's defenders

01:14:10 ◼   ► have basically been advancing the argument seemingly,

01:14:13 ◼   ► either by words in the case of the outsiders

01:14:16 ◼   ► or by inaction in the case of Apple,

01:14:18 ◼   ► that the Mac is kind of done and complete

01:14:21 ◼   ► and there's nowhere else for the Mac to go,

01:14:23 ◼   ► might as well just, it's kind of in maintenance mode

01:14:24 ◼   ► and we can occasionally make good new hardware

01:14:27 ◼   ► to make more money, but you know,

01:14:29 ◼   ► we don't really need to advance the OS meaningfully

01:14:31 ◼   ► in any significant direction.

01:14:32 ◼   ► And then Microsoft comes into crazy stuff like this.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Like Microsoft has like, the entire Surface line

01:14:39 ◼   ► has been, you know, very ambitious hardware

01:14:42 ◼   ► and software directions, ambitious new takes

01:14:46 ◼   ► on what a computer can and should be, what it can do.

01:14:51 ◼   ► blurring the lines between computers and tablets

01:14:53 ◼   ► and things like that.

01:14:54 ◼   ► Microsoft is doing tons of crazy experimentation

01:14:58 ◼   ► and yeah, most of it is weird

01:14:59 ◼   ► and most of it doesn't go anywhere

01:15:01 ◼   ► and people also try to argue like,

01:15:03 ◼   ► "Well, look at their sales numbers,

01:15:04 ◼   ► "they don't sell very many."

01:15:05 ◼   ► Look, I don't give two craps about anyone's sales numbers

01:15:08 ◼   ► that when I'm discussing what's a good product

01:15:10 ◼   ► and what isn't.

01:15:11 ◼   ► So there's lots of resistance to me saying stuff like this

01:15:15 ◼   ► but basically, I applaud Microsoft

01:15:19 ◼   ► we're trying things like this because

01:15:22 ◼   ► there's this perception in our community that

01:15:26 ◼   ► the PC, and by that I also include the Mac

01:15:29 ◼   ► in the category of things that are PC and PC-like,

01:15:33 ◼   ► there's this perception that the PC is just dead,

01:15:35 ◼   ► or it's the past, or it's done, it's complete.

01:15:38 ◼   ► And that's just so short-sighted and ignorant.

01:15:42 ◼   ► We in technology always want things

01:15:44 ◼   ► that come along that are new to, quote,

01:15:47 ◼   ► kill the old things and the old things are dead.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And in reality, that hardly ever happens.

01:15:52 ◼   ► In reality, most technology that comes out

01:15:54 ◼   ► is additive to what came before it.

01:15:58 ◼   ► Like when phones came out,

01:16:00 ◼   ► we didn't all just move everything we did to phones.

01:16:02 ◼   ► We used phones a lot, but we also still use computers.

01:16:06 ◼   ► And when tablets came out, tablets didn't kill phones,

01:16:10 ◼   ► we just used tablets and phones and computers.

01:16:13 ◼   ► And now we have smartwatches and smart cylinders.

01:16:16 ◼   ► When the smartwatch was first kind of in its early rumblings,

01:16:18 ◼   ► everyone's like, "Oh, this is gonna kill the phone!

01:16:20 ◼   ► "Everything's gonna move to your wrist!"

01:16:22 ◼   ► Guess what, it hasn't,

01:16:24 ◼   ► and there's no sign of that happening anytime soon.

01:16:27 ◼   ► And so, guess what, we still use smartwatches,

01:16:30 ◼   ► and phones, and tablets, and computers, and cylinders.

01:16:34 ◼   ► Now we're talking about AR.

01:16:37 ◼   ► AR's gonna replace everything

01:16:39 ◼   ► with all this magic hardware that doesn't exist yet,

01:16:41 ◼   ► but it's gonna replace everything

01:16:43 ◼   ► with all these killer apps we can't think of.

01:16:45 ◼   ► it's gonna replace your phone,

01:16:46 ◼   ► and it's gonna replace your computer,

01:16:47 ◼   ► you're gonna be just standing there

01:16:48 ◼   ► sitting in front of a blank wall in your cubicle

01:16:51 ◼   ► and moving things through the air.

01:16:53 ◼   ► And that might happen, but what's more likely to happen

01:16:57 ◼   ► is that it's gonna come out and we're gonna buy AR glasses

01:17:01 ◼   ► and watches and cylinders and tablets and phones and PCs.

01:17:05 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:17:06 ◼   ► So anyway, all of this is a long way of saying

01:17:10 ◼   ► that I think that the world of PCs and Macs

01:17:14 ◼   ► has gone through a period over the last five to 10 years

01:17:20 ◼   ► of creative rethinking by Microsoft

01:17:23 ◼   ► and negligent underinvestment by Apple.

01:17:28 ◼   ► And that makes me sad because I don't want to use Windows,

01:17:32 ◼   ► I don't want to use PCs,

01:17:35 ◼   ► I still want to keep using Macs and Mac OS.

01:17:37 ◼   ► It does seem like maybe this is turning around on the hardware side recently.

01:17:43 ◼   ► Not so much on the software side, unfortunately, but maybe on the hardware side we're getting

01:17:47 ◼   ► some movement here.

01:17:48 ◼   ► You know, the iMac Pro is excellent, the Mac Pro is coming, but you know, the laptops are

01:17:53 ◼   ► kind of a mess.

01:17:54 ◼   ► The touch bars seem like they're one experiment in this area and it wasn't very good and it

01:17:59 ◼   ► hasn't gone anywhere since it launched two years ago.

01:18:01 ◼   ► So basically my position on the Surface whatever this is called, the Surface Smart Board, is

01:18:07 ◼   ► this is a thing I'm never going to see in real life,

01:18:09 ◼   ► it's a thing I'm never going to use,

01:18:10 ◼   ► it's a thing that very few people will ever see

01:18:12 ◼   ► or use in real life.

01:18:13 ◼   ► However, gotta give Microsoft credit,

01:18:16 ◼   ► they are trying to advance the PC

01:18:19 ◼   ► in a way that seemingly no one else is.

01:18:23 ◼   ► So even though it's crazy,

01:18:25 ◼   ► and even though it's probably not gonna go anywhere,

01:18:27 ◼   ► and even though their sales numbers

01:18:29 ◼   ► are nothing to pay attention to,

01:18:31 ◼   ► still, they are trying to move the PC forward.

01:18:34 ◼   ► And the reality is, most of us still use PCs

01:18:38 ◼   ► to do most of our work most of the time.

01:18:43 ◼   ► So it benefits all of society that someone

01:18:47 ◼   ► is trying to move these things forward.

01:18:49 ◼   ► And unfortunately, Apple's not really,

01:18:52 ◼   ► they're not doing enough.

01:18:54 ◼   ► Whatever they are trying, it isn't enough.

01:18:55 ◼   ► So I'm glad someone is, I wish everyone was,

01:18:59 ◼   ► but ultimately the PC and PC-like things

01:19:03 ◼   ► are a part of our life, they are still a part of our life,

01:19:07 ◼   ► they will be a part of our life for the foreseeable future,

01:19:10 ◼   ► and good job, Microsoft, for trying to advance them.

01:19:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, when I look at this, I knew what your take would be

01:19:16 ◼   ► and we've all talked about this before,

01:19:18 ◼   ► about how Microsoft's trying all sorts of interesting things

01:19:20 ◼   ► I think we talked about the, oh, goddamn Surface Book Pro,

01:19:23 ◼   ► Surface Studio, I cannot remember their damn names.

01:19:26 ◼   ► - The Studio is the iMac thing with the knob,

01:19:28 ◼   ► the Book Pro is the detachable laptop/tablet thing, I think.

01:19:31 ◼   ► Which one's the MacBook Air with the carpet keyboard?

01:19:33 ◼   ► I have no idea.

01:19:36 ◼   ► I see it in the picture here.

01:19:37 ◼   ► I just don't know what it's called.

01:19:38 ◼   ► That's just a Surface, isn't it?

01:19:40 ◼   ► I have no idea.

01:19:41 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:19:42 ◼   ► Is it the Surface Air, maybe?

01:19:43 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Is that a thing?

01:19:46 ◼   ► But with all these things, to varying degrees, sometimes the one that looks like a big iMac,

01:19:52 ◼   ► it's like that's a thing that Apple—I would have liked to have seen from Apple—but

01:19:55 ◼   ► for this particular one, and for people who don't know what we're talking about, it's

01:19:57 ◼   ► called the—we'll put the link—it's called the—

01:20:00 ◼   ► - Surface Hub 2. - Surface Hub 2,

01:20:03 ◼   ► which means there was a Surface Hub 1

01:20:04 ◼   ► that I've probably already forgotten about

01:20:06 ◼   ► if I knew about it at all.

01:20:07 ◼   ► - Well, do you remember what the original Surface was?

01:20:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, the big table thing.

01:20:10 ◼   ► I don't know, I don't remember that.

01:20:12 ◼   ► So these things are very big,

01:20:13 ◼   ► like the size of a television set,

01:20:15 ◼   ► oriented vertically in most of the things I see,

01:20:18 ◼   ► although they do rotate.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Like a big TV, like a, I don't know, 40-something inch TV.

01:20:23 ◼   ► I don't know how big that is.

01:20:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, it looks like a 42-inch TV

01:20:24 ◼   ► rotated into portrait orientation.

01:20:26 ◼   ► - Right, and on it is running some variant of Windows,

01:20:30 ◼   ► like everything else that Microsoft does,

01:20:31 ◼   ► and it's a touchscreen, and it has a camera on it,

01:20:34 ◼   ► I assume that's what the thing is,

01:20:35 ◼   ► it looks like the old Apple iSight,

01:20:36 ◼   ► it's like a cylinder, it's like,

01:20:37 ◼   ► you couldn't build that into the display?

01:20:38 ◼   ► Anyway, and use it as a touchscreen,

01:20:42 ◼   ► and you can gang together multiple ones that have one,

01:20:44 ◼   ► or you can connect all four of them,

01:20:45 ◼   ► and show an image across all four,

01:20:46 ◼   ► and they always showed all sort of in the wall of an office

01:20:48 ◼   ► where you can project from your little laptop-y thing

01:20:51 ◼   ► onto the big screen, and people can walk up to the screen,

01:20:53 ◼   ► and scroll, and point to things,

01:20:54 ◼   ► and manipulate it on the screen with your two hands,

01:20:56 ◼   ► and it's really big, like it's not,

01:20:58 ◼   ► The resolution is only like a 4K TV, so it's not, if you get close to it I'm sure you can

01:21:02 ◼   ► see big chunky pixels and stuff, but it's more of like a large display type device.

01:21:06 ◼   ► And unlike the thing that looks like an iMac, when I see something like this, I think it's

01:21:11 ◼   ► not so much showing that they're trying new things in the PC space, it's more like they're

01:21:18 ◼   ► trying new things in the tablet space.

01:21:20 ◼   ► So if Apple was going to do something like this, like not just Apple, I think the appropriate

01:21:26 ◼   ► that software for this kind of hardware is more like iOS in that you want something like

01:21:32 ◼   ► this to behave like an appliance.

01:21:34 ◼   ► You want it to have the less complicated, more reliable, more sort of, you know, less

01:21:40 ◼   ► flexible but more appliance-like operating system.

01:21:43 ◼   ► And in Apple's ecosystem, that's iOS.

01:21:46 ◼   ► No one wants to see a big set of these displays with some weird Windows Update message popped

01:21:50 ◼   ► up in the corner, which I see all the time, or worse yet, a blue screen.

01:21:54 ◼   ► You know, just sort of the Windows desktop PC nags about things that you have to do, right?

01:22:00 ◼   ► And I suppose that dialogue can come up on iOS as well.

01:22:02 ◼   ► But like this should be a really big iPad.

01:22:06 ◼   ► I mean, we saw that with Panic Software, their great status board application

01:22:12 ◼   ► that they eventually gave up on after some struggles with Apple.

01:22:16 ◼   ► They had a big television set showing the output of an iOS device showing status board.

01:22:23 ◼   ► And this wasn't even a touch screen.

01:22:24 ◼   ► It wasn't for input.

01:22:25 ◼   ► It was purely an output device, just

01:22:27 ◼   ► to have a big screen in their office showing them

01:22:29 ◼   ► cool graphs of information that's relevant to the company

01:22:32 ◼   ► that they updated from an iOS app

01:22:33 ◼   ► that they wrote using a clever API.

01:22:37 ◼   ► That looks like a lot what this is without the touching.

01:22:39 ◼   ► This is adding the input aspect.

01:22:41 ◼   ► If I wanted to have a gigantic iPad that I could swipe around

01:22:44 ◼   ► on to show people things, you could gang together

01:22:46 ◼   ► multiple ones of them, that's this.

01:22:47 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's a great idea.

01:22:49 ◼   ► Maybe it's a terrible idea.

01:22:50 ◼   ► Maybe no one will buy them or whatever.

01:22:52 ◼   ► This is a case where Apple is actually better positioned than Microsoft to field a product

01:22:57 ◼   ► like this if it turns out that people want a product like this.

01:22:59 ◼   ► Now in this particular case, I'm going to guess that there's not a lot of market for

01:23:05 ◼   ► this.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Even if it is great at fulfilling its need and every company in the United States has

01:23:09 ◼   ► this, there are far fewer companies than there are people and so this would be sort of an

01:23:13 ◼   ► enterprise type sale, which is Microsoft's bread and butter these days.

01:23:17 ◼   ► So maybe it is a product that will work for them.

01:23:19 ◼   ► But you know, it's not just about, oh, Apple's not being daring enough by trying things with

01:23:25 ◼   ► the Mac.

01:23:26 ◼   ► Apple's not being daring enough by trying things with the iPad either.

01:23:28 ◼   ► I think they're probably being appropriately daring with the iPhone.

01:23:31 ◼   ► But for both the iPad and the Mac, the Mac seems not to be advancing just because they're

01:23:37 ◼   ► like, you know, it's less prioritized and too cautious.

01:23:40 ◼   ► But then the iPad, as many, many people have pointed out over many, many years, that's

01:23:43 ◼   ► not advancing either.

01:23:45 ◼   ► And that's supposed to be the platform Apple cares about, like the OS platform that Apple

01:23:49 ◼   ► cares about.

01:23:50 ◼   ► Obviously it's not the hardware form factor that Apple cares about as much, but it's the

01:23:53 ◼   ► same OS as the phone, and so it feels like a shame that Apple isn't making -- it took

01:23:58 ◼   ► them so long to make a bigger iPad, and I still think they should make an even bigger

01:24:01 ◼   ► one.

01:24:02 ◼   ► Here's a huge iPad!

01:24:03 ◼   ► And no, you don't carry a 40-inch iPad around, it's ridiculous, but it's mounted on the wall,

01:24:06 ◼   ► and it can run iOS, and you can do lots of cool things with it, and then Pang can bring

01:24:09 ◼   ► back Status Board, and everything would be good.

01:24:11 ◼   ► I don't know, man.

01:24:13 ◼   ► I simultaneously can't get too excited about this because, as one of you just said, I don't

01:24:19 ◼   ► think I'll ever see it in my entire life.

01:24:21 ◼   ► But I also respect, like Marco was saying, that at least Microsoft's throwing something

01:24:25 ◼   ► at the wall and seeing if it sticks, which is weird because I think the line that an

01:24:30 ◼   ► Apple fan should tow is, "Oh, they should just have an opinion and figure it out once

01:24:35 ◼   ► and for all and go with it and not throw a bunch of stuff against the wall."

01:24:38 ◼   ► But I think we're so thirsty for Apple to do anything.

01:24:43 ◼   ► The Touch Bar wasn't that long ago,

01:24:47 ◼   ► but it was not that exciting to most of us.

01:24:51 ◼   ► And I mean, sir, I don't even have one yet.

01:24:53 ◼   ► I've never owned a computer with a Touch Bar,

01:24:55 ◼   ► even what, two years on or whatever it is.

01:24:56 ◼   ► - You're not missing much.

01:24:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I know.

01:24:59 ◼   ► And so I think we're all just thirsty

01:25:01 ◼   ► for something interesting.

01:25:03 ◼   ► And I think, Jon, you were right in saying

01:25:04 ◼   ► that they are doing interesting things on the phone.

01:25:07 ◼   ► I guess maybe they're doing interesting things on the iPad,

01:25:11 ◼   ► but again, that doesn't personally affect me.

01:25:14 ◼   ► - They're not.

01:25:15 ◼   ► Like on the iPad, they've been so cautious.

01:25:17 ◼   ► There have been so few features that are even iPad specific.

01:25:19 ◼   ► Forget about what the features do,

01:25:20 ◼   ► just how many features are unique to the iPad.

01:25:23 ◼   ► There are not that many of them as compared to the phone.

01:25:25 ◼   ► So it just gets like phone leftovers

01:25:26 ◼   ► plus a little bit of iPad stuff.

01:25:28 ◼   ► And what you could do,

01:25:30 ◼   ► I mean, what you can do with a much bigger,

01:25:32 ◼   ► more complicated iPad,

01:25:34 ◼   ► what you could do with multitasking

01:25:36 ◼   ► that was more capable and flexible and configurable

01:25:39 ◼   ► than the current split-screen stuff,

01:25:40 ◼   ► which itself is a huge leap over

01:25:42 ◼   ► like not having anything before

01:25:43 ◼   ► or like having a very primitive multitasking

01:25:46 ◼   ► to make these devices more capable.

01:25:49 ◼   ► And we used to talk about them becoming capable enough

01:25:51 ◼   ► to replace your Mac, but at this point I'm saying,

01:25:53 ◼   ► just forget about that as a goal for now

01:25:55 ◼   ► and just say, they're so powerful hardware-wise,

01:25:58 ◼   ► it's like that power is being squandered

01:26:01 ◼   ► to make a truly pro iPad and yeah,

01:26:04 ◼   ► maybe make something that you can stick on a wall,

01:26:05 ◼   ► Who knows, but they're not really,

01:26:08 ◼   ► change in the iPad world is slow.

01:26:11 ◼   ► How many years did it exist before we got the bigger ones?

01:26:14 ◼   ► And the bigger ones weren't that much bigger.

01:26:16 ◼   ► How many years did it exist

01:26:17 ◼   ► before we got an Apple-supported stylus?

01:26:19 ◼   ► And even then, it hasn't changed much since then.

01:26:21 ◼   ► So I think there's plenty of room

01:26:25 ◼   ► for hardware and software innovation in the iPad realm.

01:26:29 ◼   ► It's just happening very slowly.

01:26:31 ◼   ► - All right, so that actually kind of segues

01:26:34 ◼   ► relatively nicely to Ask ATP for this week.

01:26:38 ◼   ► So Ish Abaz writes,

01:26:40 ◼   ► "What would you say Apple's focus is at the moment?"

01:26:44 ◼   ► And naturally Apple's a big company

01:26:45 ◼   ► and it focuses on many, many, many different things.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And so I will even extend this to say,

01:26:52 ◼   ► what is their focus and/or what should their focus be?

01:26:57 ◼   ► And I will start us off by saying,

01:27:01 ◼   ► I think their focus is pretty heavily on iOS and specifically the iPhone.

01:27:06 ◼   ► I don't think that's a particularly revolutionary point of view to have.

01:27:09 ◼   ► And similarly, unrevolutionary, their focus really—I want their focus to be actually

01:27:16 ◼   ► possibly more than anything else on Siri.

01:27:19 ◼   ► Because now that I have a competing cylinder in the house and a competing, you know, person

01:27:24 ◼   ► in a tube in the house, it's becoming ever more obvious to me how much I really dislike

01:27:30 ◼   ► like Siri and don't trust it for anything.

01:27:32 ◼   ► And I kinda hope they're focusing on that,

01:27:35 ◼   ► and we'll see if they really are.

01:27:36 ◼   ► Marco, what's your thoughts?

01:27:38 ◼   ► - First of all, credit to Askar Ishchabaz,

01:27:42 ◼   ► he's a really cool indie iOS developer,

01:27:44 ◼   ► and you should look at his stuff.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Anyway. - Also true.

01:27:47 ◼   ► - In broad stories, I basically have two answers to this.

01:27:49 ◼   ► Number one, I think you should listen

01:27:51 ◼   ► to last week's episode of the talk show with Jon Gruber.

01:27:54 ◼   ► He and Ben Thompson got into a very interesting discussion

01:27:57 ◼   ► about basically where Apple's growth in their revenue is,

01:28:01 ◼   ► is really in services.

01:28:02 ◼   ► And if you look at how that services thing breaks down,

01:28:06 ◼   ► number one is the app store revenue,

01:28:08 ◼   ► like their 30% cut, and then number two is iCloud storage.

01:28:12 ◼   ► And so you look at things like, you know,

01:28:17 ◼   ► are they likely to lower the cut to app developers?

01:28:20 ◼   ► Nope.

01:28:21 ◼   ► Are they likely to make better deals on iCloud storage

01:28:24 ◼   ► or increase the free tier?

01:28:25 ◼   ► Nope.

01:28:26 ◼   ► And there was an interesting discussion about how

01:28:29 ◼   ► Apple in the past was all about selling you new hardware,

01:28:33 ◼   ► which the interest of what's best for Apple

01:28:37 ◼   ► aligned well with what's best for the customers.

01:28:40 ◼   ► But as they get into more services revenue,

01:28:42 ◼   ► those interests start to diverge.

01:28:45 ◼   ► And it's a very interesting problem to have,

01:28:48 ◼   ► probably not a good problem to have,

01:28:50 ◼   ► where in order to make more from services,

01:28:54 ◼   ► you have to start doing a little more user hostile stuff

01:28:56 ◼   ► or like taxing your users in more and more ways.

01:28:59 ◼   ► And I think that's gonna conflict

01:29:01 ◼   ► with what's best for the user more often than not.

01:29:06 ◼   ► But anyway, I think I can summarize this in part,

01:29:10 ◼   ► what their priority is versus what their priority should be.

01:29:15 ◼   ► I think Apple used to be a software company

01:29:20 ◼   ► that was funded by the sales of their hardware.

01:29:23 ◼   ► And I think today's Apple is a hardware company

01:29:27 ◼   ► that just uses software to provide basic support

01:29:30 ◼   ► for their hardware.

01:29:32 ◼   ► And I don't think Apple's leadership sees the difference

01:29:36 ◼   ► between those two things.

01:29:37 ◼   ► But there's a pretty big difference,

01:29:38 ◼   ► there's a huge difference between those two things.

01:29:41 ◼   ► To sell good products, good computing products,

01:29:45 ◼   ► the software is really what sells them.

01:29:47 ◼   ► For almost all these things,

01:29:49 ◼   ► the software is what matters here.

01:29:51 ◼   ► The hardware is nice, and it's great to have nice hardware,

01:29:55 ◼   ► and good for Apple for continuing to make nice hardware

01:29:59 ◼   ► most of the time, but it seems like the software

01:30:04 ◼   ► is really stretched thin.

01:30:05 ◼   ► Ultimately, it seems like Tim Cook's solution

01:30:08 ◼   ► to a lot of problems is just make a new hardware platform,

01:30:13 ◼   ► and then just throw some software on there

01:30:15 ◼   ► that you might maintain.

01:30:17 ◼   ► Maybe throw another App Store on there

01:30:20 ◼   ► to get more App Store revenue.

01:30:22 ◼   ► But how's Apple TV doing?

01:30:24 ◼   ► How's the HomePod doing?

01:30:25 ◼   ► How's the iPad software doing?

01:30:27 ◼   ► You just mentioned, they kinda can't

01:30:31 ◼   ► keep up with it very well.

01:30:33 ◼   ► How's the Watch doing?

01:30:34 ◼   ► How's WatchOS doing?

01:30:36 ◼   ► How's the iMessage store doing?

01:30:38 ◼   ► There's lots of app stores that keep being launched,

01:30:41 ◼   ► lots of new software platforms that have launched

01:30:43 ◼   ► over the last five years or so,

01:30:45 ◼   ► and it just seems like Apple has neither the resources

01:30:49 ◼   ► more seemingly the interest to maintain them

01:30:52 ◼   ► and to bring them forward and to maintain quality levels

01:30:55 ◼   ► on the software side.

01:30:57 ◼   ► All they wanna do is sell us more and more hardware.

01:30:59 ◼   ► Here, have a dongle factory laptop.

01:31:00 ◼   ► This laptop exists purely to sell dongles.

01:31:02 ◼   ► Like, your solution, here, have a HomePod.

01:31:06 ◼   ► Here's an expensive home speaker

01:31:09 ◼   ► that we're gonna put minimal effort on the software into

01:31:12 ◼   ► and make it barely function with the assistant.

01:31:15 ◼   ► I think that's a huge divide between philosophies

01:31:19 ◼   ► and ultimately I don't think Tim Cook

01:31:21 ◼   ► understands software at all,

01:31:23 ◼   ► and I question how much Johnny does.

01:31:26 ◼   ► And so the company's gonna keep being run this way

01:31:29 ◼   ► for a while.

01:31:30 ◼   ► Ultimately Steve was a software person

01:31:34 ◼   ► who used hardware to make that happen,

01:31:37 ◼   ► and I miss that.

01:31:39 ◼   ► - I hate any analysis of Apple that includes it

01:31:43 ◼   ► being described as either a software company

01:31:45 ◼   ► or a hardware company, so I will set aside that.

01:31:47 ◼   ► But setting aside that whole part

01:31:49 ◼   ► where Marco went into his usual downward spiral into being sad about Apple.

01:31:53 ◼   ► I agree with the short version of the answer, which is where is Apple's focus at this moment?

01:31:59 ◼   ► iPhone and services, that's where it is.

01:32:01 ◼   ► Where should Apple's focus be?

01:32:04 ◼   ► Probably iPhone and services, and in particular, the services that have to do with voice assistance,

01:32:10 ◼   ► as Casey pointed out.

01:32:11 ◼   ► So I think Apple's focus is more or less in the appropriate place, and there are some

01:32:15 ◼   ► tweaks here and there.

01:32:17 ◼   ► But clearly that's where it is.

01:32:19 ◼   ► And all that stuff that Marco listed, that is Apple's version of "let's see what's

01:32:25 ◼   ► stick, maybe people want to buy iMessage apps, let's try that" or whatever.

01:32:29 ◼   ► That's not where their focus is though.

01:32:31 ◼   ► They do that, that is a pattern that they've done, and it's disappointing to us who want

01:32:36 ◼   ► things to be there well supported or not to exist, but that's not where their focus is.

01:32:42 ◼   ► Like that's clearly not where their focus is.

01:32:44 ◼   ► If they were focusing there, they'd be constantly improving it or ditching it.

01:32:48 ◼   ► I mean, you know, I could just answer it with one word. What's their focus? Margins.

01:32:52 ◼   ► That's their entire focus. Margins. Talk about what does Tim Cook care about? Margins.

01:32:59 ◼   ► I don't think that actually is there. I don't think the focus is margins. To do the nicer

01:33:04 ◼   ► explanation of like, you know, Apple being a software company or hardware company, like

01:33:07 ◼   ► I think if you asked Apple, like in Apple's best version of itself, speaking as an institution

01:33:13 ◼   ► or any individual person who's supposed to be an avatar for the institution, they would

01:33:17 ◼   ► say that they're trying to sell you products. Like, it's the whole package. The whole point

01:33:21 ◼   ► of Apple is it's the whole package. Like, they make the whole thing and it's supposed

01:33:24 ◼   ► to solve a problem for you. It's supposed to provide an experience. And lots of their

01:33:28 ◼   ► products have been like that. The iPod is a great example. Portable music playing. Like,

01:33:33 ◼   ► is it a hardware product? Is it a software product? Like, at various times you could

01:33:36 ◼   ► say, "Oh, the software no one cares about. It was all about the hardware. Oh, maybe the

01:33:39 ◼   ► hardware doesn't matter. It's all about the software once you get to the iPhone or whatever."

01:33:42 ◼   ► Like, they're selling you products or solutions or, you know, there is a benefit that comes

01:33:50 ◼   ► as a unit and then we break it down into pieces and see how each part is being maintained

01:33:53 ◼   ► and what they're emphasizing and where they're able to innovate and how software affects

01:33:57 ◼   ► the quality of the product and, you know, with the keyboard, how hardware affects your

01:34:01 ◼   ► experience with the product and all that other stuff.

01:34:02 ◼   ► But I'm not particularly cynical or pessimistic about where Apple's heart is.

01:34:08 ◼   ► I think it comes down to implementation.

01:34:12 ◼   ► Are they achieving their stated and I believe real goal

01:34:15 ◼   ► to provide good products that people like?

01:34:17 ◼   ► Where can they improve that?

01:34:20 ◼   ► But focus is slightly different.

01:34:21 ◼   ► I think what this question is getting at

01:34:23 ◼   ► but a lot of people are talking about is like,

01:34:25 ◼   ► we often complain about areas

01:34:29 ◼   ► where Apple's focus doesn't exist

01:34:30 ◼   ► and we very frequently acknowledge

01:34:33 ◼   ► that Apple shouldn't be focused on the Mac

01:34:35 ◼   ► more than the iPhone.

01:34:36 ◼   ► That would be the wrong thing to do.

01:34:38 ◼   ► Like every aspect, not just how much money it makes

01:34:41 ◼   ► But in the end, how important the product is.

01:34:44 ◼   ► The iPhone is a more important product.

01:34:45 ◼   ► Not just a more important product to Apple, but a more important product, period, than

01:34:49 ◼   ► the Mac.

01:34:50 ◼   ► It just is, right?

01:34:51 ◼   ► And so if that's where the company's focus is, it's in the right place.

01:34:55 ◼   ► And as we always say, they're doing pretty good with the phones, for the most part, right?

01:34:59 ◼   ► So I think this question leads me to say that despite all of our complaining, Apple is focused

01:35:05 ◼   ► in the right place, more or less.

01:35:07 ◼   ► All right.

01:35:08 ◼   ► Owl City writes, "Yes, seriously.

01:35:11 ◼   ► Do you think the new Mac Pro will have only USB-C ports?

01:35:14 ◼   ► I'm not so sure.

01:35:16 ◼   ► I do think any new MacBook Pro absolutely

01:35:19 ◼   ► will have only USB-C ports,

01:35:20 ◼   ► no matter how much any of us, ahem, Marco, wish it didn't.

01:35:23 ◼   ► But the new Mac Pro,

01:35:25 ◼   ► given that the iMac Pro came with some old USB ports,

01:35:28 ◼   ► I think there's a pretty solid chance

01:35:30 ◼   ► there'll be at least one or two.

01:35:32 ◼   ► What is it, USB-A or B?

01:35:33 ◼   ► I always get it wrong, A?

01:35:35 ◼   ► - A. - A.

01:35:35 ◼   ► - It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't really matter anyway.

01:35:37 ◼   ► But USB-A ports, I think there'll be a couple on there,

01:35:39 ◼   ► but I think it will be very heavy on USB-C,

01:35:42 ◼   ► unless obviously they go ARM,

01:35:44 ◼   ► in which all bets are off,

01:35:45 ◼   ► but I don't think that's gonna happen.

01:35:46 ◼   ► John, what do you think?

01:35:48 ◼   ► - Can you clarify, did you ever get a clarification

01:35:51 ◼   ► of what this question actually means?

01:35:52 ◼   ► 'Cause I think there'll be a power plug on it.

01:35:54 ◼   ► - Well. (laughs)

01:35:55 ◼   ► - I mean, like, what does this mean?

01:35:56 ◼   ► - Come on, man, come on.

01:35:57 ◼   ► - Well, we don't have them on the MacBook.

01:35:59 ◼   ► You'll just have power over USB PD.

01:36:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I'm saying the Mac Pro will have a power plug.

01:36:05 ◼   ► It won't be powered by USB-C.

01:36:06 ◼   ► I'm gonna come out on a limb and say that.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Yeah, they just mean, like, will it have any USB port that is not a C?

01:36:12 ◼   ► Is that your interpretation of this question?

01:36:14 ◼   ► Yes, correct.

01:36:15 ◼   ► You can plug in any of the six USB-C ports into the power adapter.

01:36:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I think there is a reasonable chance that it will have USB-A, and the iMac Pro

01:36:24 ◼   ► is the—like, that was my question.

01:36:27 ◼   ► I forget if I actually suggested it to somebody, maybe to Gruber before he did his interview

01:36:33 ◼   ► or whatever, but the question would have been, why does the iMac Pro have USB-A ports?

01:36:37 ◼   ► Like if you're going to get Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, or whatever, or Johnny Ive,

01:36:41 ◼   ► or anybody involved with the creation of this product, since you have to be so careful about

01:36:46 ◼   ► how you ask things to Apple to get any reasonable answer, the simple question would be, why

01:36:49 ◼   ► does the iMac Pro have USB-A ports?

01:36:52 ◼   ► And it's a trap.

01:36:53 ◼   ► The question is a trap, because the idea is they'll give you some explanation, and the

01:36:56 ◼   ► follow-up is, how does that explanation not apply to insert product that you're angry

01:37:00 ◼   ► about not having USB-A ports on, right?

01:37:02 ◼   ► Like that's how that goes.

01:37:03 ◼   ► But the answer, I think, is why it has USB-A ports is because there's room for them and

01:37:08 ◼   ► some of our customers want them.

01:37:10 ◼   ► And so I'd say, "Okay, so is there not room for them on your laptops or do people not

01:37:14 ◼   ► want them on your laptops?"

01:37:15 ◼   ► Right?

01:37:16 ◼   ► Anyway, that's how that goes.

01:37:17 ◼   ► But I think that is the answer.

01:37:19 ◼   ► The answer is that there's room on the iMac Pro and some people want them.

01:37:22 ◼   ► And they're cheap, that's another thing, and so they put them there.

01:37:25 ◼   ► And I really hope on the iMac Pro there will be room for them because the iMac Pro should

01:37:29 ◼   ► not be the size of a softball.

01:37:30 ◼   ► On the Mac Pro you mean?

01:37:31 ◼   ► Yeah, the Mac Pro.

01:37:32 ◼   ► There'll be room for them because it'll be big.

01:37:35 ◼   ► I think people do want them.

01:37:36 ◼   ► It's convenient.

01:37:37 ◼   ► You got all this space in the back of this damn computer.

01:37:39 ◼   ► You can't throw some A ports.

01:37:40 ◼   ► It's just easier not to have to have an adapter.

01:37:43 ◼   ► And they're cheap.

01:37:44 ◼   ► So I would give it a 50/50 odds that the Mac Pro has USB-A ports on it.

01:37:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I would give it almost 100% odds because the iMac Pro has them.

01:37:54 ◼   ► By the way, and I agree with you, Casey, I think likelihood of MacBook Pros being released

01:38:00 ◼   ► that ever have USB-A ports are pretty much zero.

01:38:03 ◼   ► I think best we can hope for on new MacBook Pros

01:38:06 ◼   ► is maybe the return of the SD slot.

01:38:09 ◼   ► That's about, and that's the best we can hope for,

01:38:12 ◼   ► for like the return or addition of old ports.

01:38:14 ◼   ► So I would not be, you know,

01:38:16 ◼   ► I wouldn't be hoping for anything more than that.

01:38:17 ◼   ► You know, on the laptops, you can make a reasonable argument

01:38:20 ◼   ► that you really can't fit most of the legacy ports,

01:38:23 ◼   ► including USB-A, with the current thickness of those cases.

01:38:27 ◼   ► Like, it just doesn't fit.

01:38:29 ◼   ► The whole reason that we can have it on the desktop

01:38:31 ◼   ► so easily is because, you know, Apple has made this

01:38:35 ◼   ► very expensive decision to tie Thunderbolt 3 into USB-C

01:38:40 ◼   ► and to have all of their USB-C ports,

01:38:44 ◼   ► except the one on the 12-inch MacBook,

01:38:46 ◼   ► be Thunderbolt 3 ports.

01:38:48 ◼   ► So therefore, the number of USB-C ports

01:38:51 ◼   ► on any of their computers is limited

01:38:54 ◼   ► by the amount of Thunderbolt ports

01:38:56 ◼   ► that the chipset can support bandwidth-wise

01:38:58 ◼   ► controller wise.

01:38:59 ◼   ► So that's why you have four on most of the

01:39:03 ◼   ► high end products, you have two on the lower end ones,

01:39:05 ◼   ► and you have zero on the 12 inch MacBook

01:39:07 ◼   ► 'cause that chip set doesn't actually support Thunderbolt.

01:39:10 ◼   ► So on the iMac Pro, they have these two wonderful

01:39:14 ◼   ► Thunderbolt 3 controllers that supply tons of bandwidth

01:39:15 ◼   ► to those USB-C ports, but that's kind of a waste

01:39:19 ◼   ► if you're using your USB ports mostly to plug in

01:39:22 ◼   ► like keyboards and mice and charging cables

01:39:24 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:39:25 ◼   ► I think it does totally make sense if you have

01:39:28 ◼   ► the physical space to include regular old USB-A ports

01:39:32 ◼   ► that are not Thunderbolt 3 ports.

01:39:34 ◼   ► Now, they could make USB-C ports

01:39:38 ◼   ► that aren't Thunderbolt 3 ports.

01:39:40 ◼   ► They do in the MacBook, but they could decide,

01:39:44 ◼   ► like, all right, the rightmost four of them have Thunderbolt

01:39:47 ◼   ► and the leftmost four of them are just USB over USB-C.

01:39:52 ◼   ► But I think they probably don't want

01:39:54 ◼   ► that kind of port confusion.

01:39:55 ◼   ► So that's why they restricted Thunderbolt 3 to,

01:39:59 ◼   ► or they restricted USB-C to only be Thunderbolt 3

01:40:02 ◼   ► on most of their products.

01:40:03 ◼   ► But again, I think that was a bad choice,

01:40:04 ◼   ► especially since most of the time on the laptops,

01:40:07 ◼   ► one of those is being used for power,

01:40:09 ◼   ► at least one of the other ones is probably being used

01:40:11 ◼   ► for some kind of low-speed USB device,

01:40:14 ◼   ► or charging a phone or something like that.

01:40:16 ◼   ► But anyway, on the desktops, they have the space.

01:40:19 ◼   ► They already have USB built into the chipset

01:40:21 ◼   ► that Intel supplies them, so all they have to do