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ATP

242: These Arms Are Coming Off

 

00:00:00   I looked at the show notes for this week. A lot of it is shit I really don't care about.

00:00:04   Cool.

00:00:05   So, I might not have a lot to say this week.

00:00:07   Well, you can adjust it to be things you do care about.

00:00:09   That's fine. The thing is, so the thing that's in the show notes that I think, that I don't care about, that I expect to talk, that we'll be talking about for a while is the Echo.

00:00:19   And the thing with the Echo is that I'm the one that doesn't care about it. It's not like the world doesn't care about it, you know what I mean?

00:00:25   You know what I mean?

00:00:25   Nobody cares about the Mac Pro except YouTube numbskulls,

00:00:28   but everyone cares about the Echo.

00:00:33   So it's not one of those things like the Mac Pro

00:00:36   that I would at least attempt to railroad YouTube

00:00:41   and change the subject.

00:00:42   This one I know is worth talking about.

00:00:44   I just don't have anything to say.

00:00:45   - I mean, if it would make you more interested,

00:00:47   we could talk about the new Google rectangles

00:00:49   of whatever they launched.

00:00:51   - Yeah, you know, we should maybe make

00:00:53   passing mention of that.

00:00:54   In fact, I guess we can do it now because all my--

00:00:56   - No, I'm serious. - I don't know about

00:00:57   any of those things.

00:00:58   What did they announce today?

00:00:59   - Some new phones and laptops no one's gonna buy.

00:01:01   - I didn't know about the laptops,

00:01:02   but I knew about the phones.

00:01:04   - It's a new Chromebook that no one's gonna buy

00:01:05   because it's way too expensive,

00:01:06   just like their previous Pixelbook or whatever it was.

00:01:09   - Yeah, so they also announced the Pixel 2, I believe it is,

00:01:12   which is their rough equivalent,

00:01:15   I would say more equivalent to the iPhone 8

00:01:17   than the iPhone 10.

00:01:18   What is the official ATP stance on 10 versus X?

00:01:21   Are we ignoring the official ruling?

00:01:25   I'm assuming Jon is not.

00:01:26   - I don't know why people are rebelling us.

00:01:27   Let's just say 10.

00:01:28   - I don't like it.

00:01:29   - We did it for like a decade and a half with Mac OS X

00:01:32   and somehow now we've just lost that ability.

00:01:34   - I'm gonna try really hard to just avoid saying it

00:01:37   for a while because I do not like that it's called 10.

00:01:40   I really think it should have been called X

00:01:42   if they were gonna spell it like that.

00:01:43   - Yeah, me too.

00:01:44   - And there are so many better reasons to call it X

00:01:46   and the fact is the entire world is going to call it X.

00:01:51   like I bet you could go into an apple store and ask people about this thing

00:01:55   and not a single person there including the staff would say ten everybody calls

00:02:01   it X so it's gonna be like this pedantic thing that Apple nerds are gonna be

00:02:05   battling for the next year or more depending on how long this name is

00:02:09   relevant and we're just gonna be sitting saying it's ten don't you know

00:02:14   it's ten and it like no no one knows everyone's going to say X like we we

00:02:18   We probably already have lost this battle

00:02:22   on such a massively bigger scale

00:02:25   than we ever were even trying to battle on Mac OS X or X,

00:02:30   and the fact is most people didn't ever really have to say

00:02:34   OS X, you know, but everyone says the name of the iPhone,

00:02:38   and a lot more people have them than have ever had Macs.

00:02:42   So, I think, you know, calling it the X was a bad move,

00:02:48   and also they're going to lose the public perception

00:02:52   of this name if they haven't already.

00:02:54   So, I don't think we're ever gonna convince Jon

00:02:58   to have the show have an official position other than 10.

00:03:01   However, I will file a dissenting opinion

00:03:04   that I believe it should be called X,

00:03:08   and I might occasionally call it X

00:03:10   because that's what I call it in my head,

00:03:12   and I'll try to say 10 around you guys,

00:03:14   just like I appreciate when people try to say

00:03:18   online instead of in line in front of New Yorkers,

00:03:21   but I don't think I'm gonna be able to do it.

00:03:24   I'm going to slip up and we're gonna have to be okay

00:03:26   with that because the entire world

00:03:28   is going to call it iPhone X.

00:03:31   - I don't see how this is any different than Mac OS X

00:03:32   except for by scale.

00:03:33   The whole world called it X for the Mac OS too,

00:03:36   but that didn't stop everyone who knows the difference

00:03:40   in the Mac community from saying 10.

00:03:41   I think it should be the same way.

00:03:42   Of course, yeah, you slip up every once in a while,

00:03:43   but to take a contrary stance and to purposely say X instead,

00:03:47   That's silly and all the reasons everyone else is going to say X instead of 10 don't

00:03:51   apply to us because we know how it's said.

00:03:54   Well, but it's a little different too because like it's when you like almost no one ever

00:03:58   has to give the full name of the OS of their computer that they have where like but if

00:04:03   they're if they were all called power books and like people would always say power book

00:04:10   and we'd be like, you know, it's power book like that that would be way more ridiculous

00:04:14   seeming you don't have to correct people though.

00:04:16   Like just because you say 10 doesn't mean you have to be the person who corrects other

00:04:20   people, right?

00:04:21   Just, all we're just talking about is what will you say or try to say because obviously

00:04:24   you slip up and you say X, whatever, right?

00:04:26   That's it.

00:04:27   It doesn't mean when people say X, you're going to correct them or be obnoxious about

00:04:32   it or whatever, but it's just what about what we're going to say.

00:04:35   And again, I don't think this is, we didn't have this discussion about Mac OS 10.

00:04:38   I heard who's going to say X. No, we just, we just all said 10.

00:04:41   And if you messed up and said X, oh well, but it has nothing to do with what other people

00:04:46   say or whether you should correct them. So I don't think there's any debate to be

00:04:49   had. Well, but Mac OS is not, Mac OS is a terrible analogy for a couple of reasons.

00:04:55   Number one, it was established before most people came to the Mac. And yes, I know, Jon,

00:04:59   you've been using the Mac since 1912, blah, blah, blah. But for like Marco and I, we came

00:05:04   to the Mac when it was already clearly established and a couple versions in to OS X. So this

00:05:09   train had already left the station. But it was clearly established that everyone said

00:05:14   The only people who said 10 was Apple nerds.

00:05:16   That's it.

00:05:17   Everyone else said X.

00:05:18   Because it was literally never said.

00:05:21   It's like the 10 commercials.

00:05:23   They just show the text.

00:05:25   They don't really have an announcer talking about it.

00:05:28   So it's the same situation.

00:05:29   Anyway, it'll be fine.

00:05:30   Just say 10.

00:05:31   You'll be fine.

00:05:32   Well, the other thing is if you were communicating to somebody who thought that it was X, if

00:05:37   you say Mac OS X, I think they can figure that out pretty easily.

00:05:41   If you say iPhone 10 to a person who thinks it's iPhone X, they're not going to know what

00:05:47   you're talking about.

00:05:49   That'll be fine.

00:05:50   It's like GIF/GIF.

00:05:51   They'll figure it out.

00:05:52   Oh, don't even start with that.

00:05:53   And like GIF/GIF, I feel like if you surrender to the other person's incorrect pronunciation,

00:05:59   that is, you lose, right?

00:06:00   So just you say it the right way and eventually they'll bend to your will.

00:06:03   Yeah, that always works.

00:06:04   In a conversation, it will.

00:06:06   Like in a GIF/GIF conversation, the first person to give and to use the other person's

00:06:09   pronunciation loses. I see what you're saying there. But the other thing the

00:06:16   other thing I was gonna say earlier you know other than then OS X having already

00:06:19   been established by the time Mark when I got there is that nobody really gives a

00:06:22   crap about Mac OS. I do, you two do, but nobody in the grand scheme of things

00:06:26   gives crap about Mac OS. Whereas there are many many many many people who give

00:06:31   a crap and many more people who give a crap about iPhones. They don't give a crap about iPhone

00:06:36   - I don't know names, believe me.

00:06:37   5C, 5S, 6S, 6S Plus, only we know those names

00:06:41   that people, once they buy those phones,

00:06:43   it's like whatever, I got the Plus, do you have the Plus?

00:06:45   - No, everyone knows which iPhone they have.

00:06:49   They all know that, believe me.

00:06:50   - I don't know about that.

00:06:51   - People know, it's like oh, I have a 6S,

00:06:53   or like people know that.

00:06:55   - I don't think they do.

00:06:56   (laughing)

00:06:57   I think they, especially since they all look the same.

00:07:00   Anyway, it'll be fine, we'll just,

00:07:02   - We should set an example for everybody else by saying 10.

00:07:07   - I do not agree.

00:07:08   - So anyway, so Google released the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.

00:07:13   Let me start by saying that I did not watch

00:07:16   any of the keynote because I was in meetings.

00:07:18   And all I knew was that this thing happened.

00:07:23   And most of my coworkers that are local in my office

00:07:28   are all Android users, the coworkers on the mobile team.

00:07:31   And so I get a lot of the bleed from them being enthusiastic.

00:07:39   Just because they're enthusiastic,

00:07:40   I'm interested in what's going on.

00:07:42   And so I asked one of them, what's the executive summary?

00:07:45   And they actually linked me to The Verge,

00:07:47   which I am not the biggest Verge fan,

00:07:49   but it's a pretty good executive summary of what's going on here.

00:07:52   And I'll talk about it in a minute.

00:07:53   But what was most fascinating and frustrating to me

00:07:57   was that one of my co-workers, one of the QA guys, he's the iOS QA person, but his personal

00:08:04   phone is an Android phone. And he sent me a screenshot of his reservation or order or

00:08:10   whatever it was for his brand new Pixel 2. He sent this to me like 10 minutes after the

00:08:16   keynote. Imagine that, gentlemen. Imagine moments after the keynote, you could go to

00:08:21   a company that actually understands that the internet is a thing, and you could order your

00:08:25   device right then and there in the middle of the day like an adult instead of having

00:08:31   to wake up like a friggin animal at three in the morning just throw money at Apple because

00:08:35   we're all idiots that just need it pulsing through our veins. It made me so angry when

00:08:40   I found out that he could just order right then and there like it was nothing.

00:08:43   Jared Ranere Well, I mean, in all fairness, a nobody comparably

00:08:48   buys these things or wants them and B, Google screws up lots of other stuff about selling

00:08:55   phones directly, things like support, returns, there's no retail angle really. I mean,

00:09:00   there's also, Apple's way ahead of Google when it comes to the business of selling people

00:09:05   phones and then supporting them by so many miles that it's comical to even compare

00:09:11   them. But yeah, I mean really what this really comes down to ultimately is that they can

00:09:15   open up pre-orders for this thing immediately and sell it, you know, and start selling it

00:09:18   immediately because the numbers are so much dramatically smaller than what Apple sells

00:09:24   and so comparably few people are even paying attention, let alone ordering these things

00:09:29   and using them and owning them, that it's a totally different game.

00:09:34   You know who's paying attention? I'm paying attention to the fact that you tried to skip

00:09:37   follow-up and Ask ATP.

00:09:39   No, no, no, no, no. This is pre-show. This is pre-show.

00:09:42   This is pre-show? We're going to do the Google I/O in a pre-show?

00:09:45   Yeah. Because I don't think I--

00:09:47   Well, I need you to send me links to these things. I googled for them and I don't see

00:09:51   what you're talking about.

00:09:52   I will put a link in the show notes, in the chat, in the robot, it will be everywhere.

00:09:56   But the reason that this ran long was because we got talking about names and how stupid

00:10:02   iPhone X is, and then we're getting sidetracked with me moaning about having to wake up at

00:10:06   three in the morning to spend an absurd amount of money that I should be so lucky as to have

00:10:10   on a phone that I don't need.

00:10:11   So moving on from first world problems.

00:10:13   That's amazing.

00:10:14   Moving on from my first world problems, the most fascinating thing to me, well there's

00:10:19   couple interesting things to me about these Pixel 2 devices. One is the aesthetic look

00:10:25   of them. So if you go to the Verge post and, you know, they have this tremendous video

00:10:28   right up front, and then you scroll down a little bit and you see these phones. And in

00:10:33   a lot of ways they remind me of like older iPhones when you look at the top half. And

00:10:39   I can't really put my finger on why. I guess it's because it's, you know, more rectangular,

00:10:43   I guess. But then as you scroll down the page, maybe it's just because my window is smaller,

00:10:48   But anyway, as I scroll down, I see the bottom of the phone.

00:10:50   I realize, is it upside down?

00:10:52   Because the top and bottom look exactly the same.

00:10:55   And that's a little bit peculiar to me.

00:10:57   Now, in the defense of this phone, I believe, you know, both of these are certainly speakers.

00:11:02   And having like stereo speakers that are pointed at you rather than having the bottom speaker

00:11:07   pointed down and the top speaker pointed at your face, that's kind of cool.

00:11:11   But aesthetically, this looks odd to me.

00:11:15   You can squeeze it to get Google Assistant.

00:11:17   - Yes, that's right, I forgot about that.

00:11:18   That's a good point, I wouldn't have brought that up,

00:11:20   and so I'm glad you reminded me, but yeah.

00:11:22   What do they call it?

00:11:23   They had some truly terrible marketing name for it,

00:11:25   like Active something or something like that?

00:11:26   Shoot, I don't remember what it was.

00:11:28   - Active squeeze, force squeeze, who knows?

00:11:30   - Active edge, squeezable sides, there you go.

00:11:32   (laughing)

00:11:34   - That's awful.

00:11:34   - Active edge, how truly terrible is that?

00:11:37   - That's even worse than Apple's modern,

00:11:40   like, undiscoverable gestures.

00:11:41   (laughing)

00:11:44   That's like, what do you think is worse,

00:11:45   like squeeze for assistant or shake to undo?

00:11:48   - I don't know, it's a tough call.

00:11:49   But the thing that was most interesting to me about this

00:11:53   was the way they're doing portrait mode.

00:11:55   And I mean this genuinely, I'm not trying to snark.

00:11:58   The way they're doing portrait mode is,

00:12:02   and I'm probably gonna get the details slightly wrong,

00:12:04   but in the single rear lens,

00:12:07   they don't do a two lens setup like Apple does,

00:12:10   or 16 lens setup like our friends at Light do,

00:12:13   but they do a single lens.

00:12:14   But what's interesting is each of the pixels in the sensor is apparently two different

00:12:20   pixels.

00:12:21   And I know that doesn't make sense, and that's the best I can do to explain it without really

00:12:26   going into nuance.

00:12:27   But suffice to say, they've effectively got a two-lens system, or really I guess I should

00:12:33   say a two-sensor system, because the actual single sensor does a two-for-one, I guess

00:12:40   I guess to close out sale on pixels or whatever,

00:12:43   but anyway, it has two pixels for,

00:12:46   I guess one pixel's worth of data,

00:12:50   if that makes any sense at all.

00:12:51   So, what they do is they kinda have the two,

00:12:55   I'm saying lens, and I don't mean that, I guess, literally,

00:12:57   but they have a similar setup to the two-lens system

00:13:00   that Apple has, but they have it with only one lens,

00:13:03   and then they use machine learning,

00:13:05   which is Google's favorite thing,

00:13:06   and you know what, I don't blame 'em,

00:13:07   because they actually can do it pretty well.

00:13:09   They use machine learning to kind of extrapolate and interpret what these two pixels are seeing

00:13:15   in order to get their own portrait mode, which coincidentally they've literally called

00:13:20   portrait mode.

00:13:21   I just thought that was kind of cool and a clever approach, because having the two lenses

00:13:27   on the back, I mean, it doesn't offend me, but I don't think it looks particularly

00:13:32   great, especially with the camera bump, which this does not have.

00:13:35   Yeah, it's a camera bump.

00:13:36   I know, I'm sorry, it does have a camera bump.

00:13:37   No, no, you're right, you're right.

00:13:38   - It's got a fingerprint sensor on the back too, right?

00:13:39   - Yes it does, and I apologize,

00:13:41   you were absolutely right about the camera bump.

00:13:42   - Yeah, I mean, these phones, and just superficially,

00:13:46   the regular Pixel 2, the regular sized one,

00:13:49   not the plus sized one, the top and bottom bezels

00:13:53   look comically large by today's standards.

00:13:55   It's funny, the iPhone 10 comes out

00:14:00   and immediately ruins the look

00:14:04   of all previous iPhone proportions forever, right?

00:14:07   And like the Pixel 2 has pretty much all iPhone proportions

00:14:12   and it looks just impossibly old now.

00:14:14   The Pixel 2 XL has much more of like an S8 style proportion

00:14:19   where it's almost, it's kind of like what people want Apple

00:14:27   to do with the iPhone X where they lop off the top

00:14:30   and bottom and just make it black

00:14:32   and just give like a curved thing in the middle.

00:14:34   And I don't think it's that attractive honestly,

00:14:37   So maybe this is kind of why Apple didn't do that.

00:14:41   Like maybe they found the same thing, they tried it

00:14:43   and they're like, oh, it just doesn't look as good.

00:14:45   I don't know.

00:14:45   But anyway, every time that like a new Google official

00:14:50   phone comes out, back when they were called Nexus's

00:14:52   and now that they're called Pixels,

00:14:54   here's what's gonna happen.

00:14:56   All the gadget nerds are going to fawn all over

00:14:59   certain features of this.

00:15:00   They're all gonna say, man, this is the best phone

00:15:02   at, you know, feature X, Y, or Z.

00:15:05   or this is the best Android phone ever made.

00:15:08   And then like in three months,

00:15:10   Samsung's gonna come out with a better one,

00:15:12   and no one will actually keep using this phone long term.

00:15:16   Everybody will tell you like how great it is,

00:15:19   and they're so glad Google's making these awesome phones,

00:15:21   and this is the best at these certain things,

00:15:24   but none of them will actually switch to it permanently.

00:15:26   They're all gonna either go back to their iPhones,

00:15:29   or they're going to go to whatever Samsung launches next,

00:15:32   or go back to what Samsung launched recently.

00:15:35   because Google just does not,

00:15:38   they make this great hardware that's like good in reviews,

00:15:42   but it's usually not class leading in the big picture,

00:15:46   and also, they never sell very many of them,

00:15:50   comparably speaking, because their retail distribution game

00:15:55   is crap compared to all their competitors,

00:15:57   or at least compared to Samsung and Apple.

00:16:00   So it's funny, it's fun to me to look at these things

00:16:04   when they come out and say, "Oh, that's interesting."

00:16:06   Just like everyone else, but it's hard for me

00:16:08   to ever see Google's launches like this

00:16:11   having a major impact in the market, really.

00:16:13   They have a major impact on reviews

00:16:15   that make it seem like they're gonna have

00:16:16   a major impact on the market, but they never do.

00:16:19   - I don't know if that's entirely true, though,

00:16:20   because I think these are the darling phones

00:16:22   of the people that are like us, but like Android.

00:16:26   And so, your point is 90% true, I think,

00:16:30   but these certainly do make a big splash

00:16:32   and I think are held onto by the people

00:16:34   who really, really, truly love Android.

00:16:37   Now, I won't make any snarky comments

00:16:39   about how many people that is,

00:16:41   and I won't guess publicly that it's about 10,

00:16:44   but nevertheless, I do think it's important that--

00:16:46   - Do they all work for the Verge?

00:16:48   - Potentially.

00:16:49   The other thing about this phone,

00:16:50   like the front, I agree with you

00:16:52   that the proportions look wrong

00:16:54   now that I've seen an iPhone 10,

00:16:56   but the back, this two-tone thing, do not want,

00:17:01   like if you scroll down the Verge article,

00:17:03   almost all the way at the bottom.

00:17:05   This two-tone that they've had for two years running now

00:17:08   does not work for me at all.

00:17:10   I think it looks like garbage.

00:17:12   - Yeah, I mean, no one's buying this phone for the looks,

00:17:14   let's be honest, same as other Google stuff in the past.

00:17:17   Like, the people who buy this are reviewers

00:17:21   and people who really, like, tech nerds

00:17:23   who very closely follow, like, Google and the Android world.

00:17:27   Like, it's not gonna be a lot of normal consumers.

00:17:31   - Yeah.

00:17:32   I thought it was worth bringing up and I'm sorry that we have an extended pre-show this time, Mr. Syracuse.

00:17:38   I kind of like the black and white one with the little orange button on the side. It's kind of stormtrooper-y.

00:17:42   It's always a good look.

00:17:45   The most offensive thing about the back of it is that terrible G logo.

00:17:47   Yeah, I noticed that too. It's pretty bad.

00:17:50   And I guess the touch sensor.

00:17:52   How does the squeeze part work if you have a case? Like, does that impair squeezability?

00:17:56   Do you have to get a squeezable case?

00:17:58   Do they live little cutouts for both the belly button and and the squeeze sides right like you can imagine a case

00:18:03   It's like rigid all around but then has squishy areas for the squeeze

00:18:06   No, I mean like

00:18:09   You know everything I said earlier like I I don't want this to be the case like I want

00:18:14   somebody in the Android world to make phones that are really really nice and that really

00:18:21   Kick Apple on the pans and and make everyone compete on a higher level

00:18:27   Samsung doesn't do that.

00:18:29   Samsung makes phones that have great specs,

00:18:33   but usually have lots of downsides.

00:18:36   I gotta say, they are getting better

00:18:40   at the physical design side,

00:18:42   but they still always have a lot of weird,

00:18:44   bizarre, dumb features and downsides and weird decisions.

00:18:48   I think Google is coming closest

00:18:51   to being able to compete with really nice stuff

00:18:55   in the Android world,

00:18:57   but they're just so far from actually being

00:18:59   on the same level that I don't think Apple

00:19:01   looks at this at all and is threatened by this.

00:19:03   I also think that, again, their lack of having

00:19:06   much retail power or distribution power

00:19:08   to get these things sold in large volumes,

00:19:10   I think that just doesn't intimidate Apple at all.

00:19:13   I wish there was higher level competition here,

00:19:16   but there just isn't yet.

00:19:18   - Yeah, I agree.

00:19:20   Alright, 20 minutes later, are we done with the pre-show?

00:19:23   (laughing)

00:19:24   (electronic beeping)

00:19:26   I'm sorry, Jon.

00:19:28   Oh man, all right.

00:19:29   So let's quote unquote start with some follow up.

00:19:34   Jon, how's your fan?

00:19:35   Do you hear the fan in your Apple TV?

00:19:38   - And that's the thing, just one follow up item this week.

00:19:40   It's just poor planning.

00:19:41   It's just poor planning.

00:19:42   It could have gone on topics.

00:19:44   And like I said, what about Ask ATP?

00:19:46   Like, you know, how soon we all forget.

00:19:49   Anyway, one follow up item this week, just one.

00:19:52   I do have my Apple TV 4K.

00:19:56   I rotated my Apple TVs, a couple of notes about the thing.

00:20:00   First, just to confirm about the output format thing,

00:20:04   the person who wrote in to tell us that you can change

00:20:06   to 24 Hertz, but only in 4K, I found that also to be

00:20:10   the case, despite the fact that my television can accept

00:20:13   24 Hertz input, the Apple TV will not send it

00:20:16   because it's not a 4K TV.

00:20:17   So if I had a 4K TV, I could do 24 Hertz,

00:20:19   but because I have a 1080p TV, I can't.

00:20:22   Second thing is setting up the Apple TV.

00:20:24   It's got that thing where you bring the phone near it.

00:20:26   Was that in the old one or is that the new HomePod thing?

00:20:28   - I thought it was. - It was in the old one.

00:20:30   - Oh, anyway, that was nice.

00:20:32   But then I realized, oh, I have to re-download

00:20:35   all my purchased apps and then remember

00:20:37   how they were arranged and stuff like that.

00:20:39   If you're setting up a new Apple TV 4K

00:20:41   and find yourself in that situation,

00:20:43   stop because there is a setting somewhere in settings,

00:20:47   in the settings app that, I forget what it's called,

00:20:49   like home screen sync or something.

00:20:51   you can tell it to make this Apple TV

00:20:54   like all your other Apple TVs.

00:20:55   In other words, keep the home screens

00:20:57   in sync with each other.

00:20:58   And so you turn that on and it will,

00:20:59   I think it'll automatically download the apps,

00:21:01   but certainly it will rearrange them to be in the same order

00:21:03   as they were on your other Apple TV,

00:21:05   which saves a lot of time.

00:21:06   Unfortunately, you still have to log in

00:21:10   with all your applications and doing that is a super pain.

00:21:13   Like there's this feature, I don't know if it's new,

00:21:16   because I haven't set up an Apple TV in forever,

00:21:18   but when you're launching an app

00:21:21   and it wants you to like log in,

00:21:22   like not log into the Netflix app, right?

00:21:24   And you have to log in with your email address and password,

00:21:28   which is how you just log into Netflix everywhere.

00:21:31   And when you do that,

00:21:32   Apple TV tries to remember the email address you entered

00:21:35   because it's such a pain to enter things with a remote

00:21:37   so that the next time you go to a different app to log in,

00:21:39   it will give you a choice of recently used email addresses.

00:21:43   There's actually a section in settings

00:21:44   that shows all your recently used email addresses,

00:21:46   which sounds like a good idea because hey,

00:21:48   I don't want to type that email address more than one time.

00:21:51   But since I use the remote app on my phone to type things in,

00:21:54   instead of using the terrible Apple TV remote,

00:21:57   there's some weird interaction.

00:21:59   Apparently no one at Apple ever did this,

00:22:01   because I enter the email address, da da da da da da da.

00:22:04   And it works fine.

00:22:05   I sign in and everything like that.

00:22:07   And then I go to the second app and it says,

00:22:08   choose from your recent email addresses.

00:22:10   And it shows my iCloud email, because it

00:22:12   knows that one because I'm signed into iCloud on my old TV.

00:22:14   And then the other choice is the first letter only

00:22:16   of my previous email address, like a single letter.

00:22:19   And as I entered in multiple email addresses

00:22:21   to sign into multiple services, it

00:22:23   would only save the first letter.

00:22:24   And I think it's because I was typing it all on my phone,

00:22:27   like the phone remote app.

00:22:29   That's a stupid, terrible bug.

00:22:30   I'm like, all right, well, I'll go into settings,

00:22:32   and I'll be able to edit those.

00:22:33   Nope, all you can do is delete them in settings.

00:22:35   So I had to delete all the single character email

00:22:37   addresses.

00:22:38   But that's a dumb bug, and they should fix that.

00:22:40   But I do like the idea of it remembering the feature.

00:22:43   For the other things, there's like the please

00:22:45   select your television provider.

00:22:47   And my television provider is on the list.

00:22:49   And like, oh, this is great.

00:22:50   This is that single sign-on thing.

00:22:52   I'm not quite sure what it's doing with my provider,

00:22:55   like what part of the process it's streamlining,

00:22:57   but having signed into umpteen applications

00:22:59   for all the services that I subscribe to

00:23:01   and being bounced from webpage to application

00:23:03   to around and around in circles

00:23:05   and going to like youtube.com/activate

00:23:07   and all these other URLs and typing in four letter codes,

00:23:10   I don't think there was any single sign-on

00:23:12   that entering my television provider saved me from.

00:23:15   In fact, the worst offender was,

00:23:16   I think it was Showtime or something.

00:23:18   As far as I could tell, they want you,

00:23:20   they launch the app and it says,

00:23:21   "Please go to like ShowtimeAnytime.com/activate."

00:23:25   And you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna do that.

00:23:26   I'm gonna type in this code."

00:23:28   When you go there, as far as I can tell,

00:23:30   it demands that you download their iOS app

00:23:32   just so you can activate their app on your Apple TV.

00:23:36   You download the iOS app,

00:23:37   and that's the only time you get to type in the code.

00:23:40   It's, logging into television apps is the worst thing ever.

00:23:42   So home screen sync is great.

00:23:44   I wish it also synced the fact

00:23:45   that I'm logged into in my other services.

00:23:47   And someone added one final item here

00:23:51   about remote improvements.

00:23:52   As far as I can tell, there are none that I can detect

00:23:56   other than the raised ring,

00:23:57   which helps less than I thought it would,

00:24:00   because I think my main complaint,

00:24:02   I mean, I guess I don't pick it up backwards

00:24:04   as much as most people because I look at it.

00:24:06   And the reason I look at it is because it's like,

00:24:07   I said, it's like a mousetrap or like a game of operation.

00:24:10   Like you just, you have to look at it

00:24:11   to gingerly pick it up so that you don't accidentally

00:24:14   cause something to happen.

00:24:15   saying that it is better about accidental input, but I don't like it when the progress bar comes

00:24:19   up and overlays the show that people are watching. Frequently I will pick it up to just use the

00:24:24   volume or something like that and accidentally graze the touchpad and now you gotta do a five

00:24:29   count for the progress bar to disappear off the screen. I don't like that remote. It's still bad.

00:24:35   - I mean, I will say that the ring around the menu button

00:24:40   does help, because it is noticeably raised,

00:24:46   and so it now does feel different if you hold it wrong,

00:24:50   and you can orient yourself by feel with that button.

00:24:54   But that's the only problem it solves.

00:24:56   This remote has lots of other problems.

00:24:58   - It doesn't really solve that problem, though,

00:24:59   because if you grab it upside down, and you go,

00:25:01   oh, I don't feel the ridge,

00:25:03   so I know I'm holding it upside down,

00:25:04   Well guess what, your palm has been all over that touchpad

00:25:06   by this point, and it has done,

00:25:08   it certainly has brought up the progress bar,

00:25:10   and who knows what else it might have done,

00:25:11   especially if you've gripped it firmly,

00:25:12   instead of gingerly like the beautiful,

00:25:14   delicate little insect that it is, right?

00:25:16   If you actually grab the remote,

00:25:17   you probably not only grazed the touchpad,

00:25:19   but activated the pressure sensitive button,

00:25:21   and who knows what you did, it's the worst.

00:25:23   - Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite as hard on it as you

00:25:26   in this regard, however, the white circle,

00:25:30   the raised white circle on this button does help,

00:25:33   but the remote is still a terrible remote.

00:25:36   And I wish they would have done substantially more

00:25:39   to actually redesign this thing

00:25:41   instead of basically digging in and saying,

00:25:44   no, this is fine, here, take a stupid white ring.

00:25:46   Like that's basically what this revision says.

00:25:49   - Oh, and I was frequently faced with the prompt that says,

00:25:51   hold down the speaker button to speak.

00:25:52   Like very often, you know, it's like,

00:25:54   let me just speak this thing that I have to enter here

00:25:56   instead of typing,

00:25:57   'cause even just typing on your phone

00:25:58   gets tedious after a while.

00:25:59   Like I'm not very good with the phone size keyboard

00:26:01   or whatever.

00:26:02   So I'm like, "Okay, it's prompting me with a little speaker on it.

00:26:05   It says, 'Hold down the button and talk into your microphone.'"

00:26:07   And that often works if you just want to say, like, watch Game of Thrones.

00:26:10   It will do that.

00:26:11   Like, that part of the Apple TV experience is great.

00:26:13   Anytime you don't have to use the remote, you're like, "Yes!"

00:26:15   Right?

00:26:16   And so I'm in a text field of some kind, and it's telling me, "Hold down the remote and

00:26:20   talk."

00:26:21   And I would hold down the remote and start to talk, and as soon as I started to talk,

00:26:23   it would just go "bloop," and it would, like, stop listening to me.

00:26:26   And then it would say, "Hold down the remote and try to talk," and I would hold down the

00:26:28   remote and started talking to go bloop and stop listening to me like it's I

00:26:32   wouldn't it wouldn't maybe I'd get like one character out or I wouldn't type

00:26:35   anything it was just like why why what is happening why do you hate me you're a

00:26:40   brand new thing out of the box you're presenting me a native text field with

00:26:42   the native you know the little picker with the the alphabet and and the three

00:26:47   things oh yeah and during the setup experience they had this crazy on screen

00:26:51   prompt they're asking a bunch of questions and a series of like sort of

00:26:55   wizard type screens that are asking you questions, there would be a thing highlighted and below

00:27:00   it like the corners of a triangle, like, were two buttons. And your highlight would be on

00:27:06   like the top point of the triangle, like that button, and there would be a button, you know,

00:27:12   sort of southwest and a button southeast. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out

00:27:17   which direction it wanted me to swipe to get to the southwest or southeast button, because

00:27:22   swiping south did nothing right and you're like I don't swipe west to get

00:27:28   southwest and as far as I could tell it was like any direction you swipe to do

00:27:33   anything would always bring you to the default button and then if you didn't

00:27:36   want the default you could swipe right because the default button was on the

00:27:39   left there was like this weird puzzle game of figuring out how I moved the

00:27:43   selection basically down into the left it was it was the worst I don't know how

00:27:49   Did you experience this when you were setting it up, Marco?

00:27:53   - No, my setup experience was pretty flawless,

00:27:57   and in fact, I was actually also gonna compliment

00:28:00   that my keep the home screens in sync thing worked great.

00:28:05   I mean, probably because I use far fewer apps

00:28:07   than it sounds like you do,

00:28:08   and I have far fewer accounts for things

00:28:11   that I need to sign into.

00:28:12   For me, it's basically just like Netflix

00:28:14   and HBO Now Go thing.

00:28:17   That's it.

00:28:19   I don't really have anything else on there.

00:28:20   - You did have to re-sign into those,

00:28:22   but I thought it was like a wizard at the beginning

00:28:23   that forced you to pick all the things that I was picking

00:28:25   that gave you the triangle buttons,

00:28:27   where I forget what the highlight is on,

00:28:29   but yeah, the dragging Southwest,

00:28:31   I would like swipe what I would think was Southwest

00:28:34   and the selection would just not move.

00:28:35   It would just not move.

00:28:36   And so I would do South.

00:28:37   It wouldn't move.

00:28:38   I think it wanted you to go like dead West

00:28:41   to select an item on the screen Southwest, infuriating.

00:28:44   I should have taken pictures of the screen.

00:28:46   - No, I did not have those issues,

00:28:48   But I mean, a lot of this UI has been like three quarters

00:28:52   baked for two years now and doesn't seem to be getting

00:28:55   put back in the oven.

00:28:57   So wouldn't surprise me.

00:28:59   - Anyway, that's it.

00:29:00   I've got my 4K Apple TV.

00:29:01   I rotated all the Apple TVs and now I have one free one.

00:29:03   Like my Apple TV three is now like the travel TV.

00:29:06   Oh, and I usually use, this is a TiVo compiler.

00:29:10   I usually use the, I have an old TiVo remote

00:29:13   that I use with an old Apple TV.

00:29:15   And I trained it on the TV that rotated up to the bedroom.

00:29:17   But the problem is the new stupid bent TiVo that I have up there, like they're top of

00:29:22   the line box essentially.

00:29:23   As far as I can tell there is no way to get it to not receive signals from my TiVo remote.

00:29:29   I even have, the technique I used before is TiVo remote used to have a one/two switch

00:29:33   on them.

00:29:34   You could switch to the one side or the two sides.

00:29:35   You could have two TiVos hooked up to your TV and you'd have one remote set to one and

00:29:38   one remote set to two so they wouldn't interfere with each other, which was a great idea.

00:29:40   TiVo is really smart.

00:29:42   the new TiVo's no matter what I set any of the remotes to this bent TiVo sees

00:29:47   it obeys the commands of any TiVo remote so you can't use the TiVo remote with

00:29:52   the Apple TV but you can but you will realize that you are blindly going

00:29:56   through menus accidentally who knows possibly you know deleting stuff or

00:30:00   recording things you don't want because every time you press a button the TiVo

00:30:04   registers the command in addition to the Apple TV so that's kind of crappy so I

00:30:08   We have to use the crappy Apple TV remote upstairs now.

00:30:12   I'm sorry, Jon.

00:30:13   I know that's hard for you.

00:30:14   I think you can turn off the IR on the thing and then just make it do Bluetooth only, but

00:30:18   then you can't do the volume control because the volume control is IR.

00:30:20   It's a complicated situation.

00:30:22   I also have a piece of tinfoil covering the other TiVo that's up there.

00:30:25   I have two TiVos in Apple TV up there.

00:30:28   The tinfoil works great, though, by the way.

00:30:30   How do I -- where is the IR sensor?

00:30:32   How do I stop the IR?

00:30:33   Guess what?

00:30:34   Tinfoil over the whole front of it.

00:30:35   Oh, my God.

00:30:36   Solves that problem.

00:30:37   And when you don't need it to block your TiVo,

00:30:39   you can wear it as a hat.

00:30:40   - Yeah, no, I wanted to just get rid of it,

00:30:42   but we have tons of prerecorded stuff on there.

00:30:44   So we're slowly and painfully transferring it

00:30:47   from the old TV to the new TiVo,

00:30:48   which takes forever for a variety of dumb reasons.

00:30:51   Most of which have to do with the weak wifi signal

00:30:54   that I have like in that corner of the house

00:30:55   where the TV is.

00:30:57   And the fact that I think it's like 802.11b or something,

00:31:01   like it doesn't even have wifi built in the old one.

00:31:03   So it's like got a little adapter hanging out the end.

00:31:05   So the Wi-Fi speeds are super slow.

00:31:08   Anyway, eventually we will get rid of that box

00:31:10   and the aluminum will go.

00:31:13   And someone in the chat room is asking me,

00:31:14   have I heard of Eero?

00:31:15   We do have Eero.

00:31:16   We have five bars, five, you know,

00:31:17   full signal strength in there,

00:31:18   but like the Wi-Fi adapter dongle thing is bad.

00:31:22   And in general, TiVo's got really bad transfer speeds,

00:31:25   not even limited by the network.

00:31:26   So who knows what its problem is,

00:31:27   but it takes a long time.

00:31:29   Oh, I forgot about the fan.

00:31:31   (laughing)

00:31:33   All this time.

00:31:34   Yeah, I just looked at the thing.

00:31:36   All right, so I actually forgot, I did forget about it.

00:31:38   I hooked it up, I'm doing CV setup and everything.

00:31:40   Like, oh, I forgot I should go look at the fan.

00:31:42   So by this point it's connected to my television

00:31:45   and I've been using it to like set up all the applications

00:31:47   and do all the setup stuff.

00:31:48   And I actually played a few games with it

00:31:51   and to see if the performance was better

00:31:53   and stuff like that.

00:31:54   Then I had to go over to the TV, grab the little thing.

00:31:57   And of course I can't pull it away

00:31:58   from the entertainment center very far

00:32:00   because it's got an HDMI cable in the back

00:32:02   and the power cord and stuff like that.

00:32:03   And if I unplug the power cord, obviously the fan will be off.

00:32:06   And on my television, I have, at the very least,

00:32:09   a TV with the fans on.

00:32:11   My television itself has fans in it,

00:32:12   so this is a pretty noisy environment.

00:32:14   Nevertheless, held that thing up to my ear.

00:32:17   I can hear the fan in it.

00:32:18   I'm like, oh, that's not fair.

00:32:19   I did a lot of setup.

00:32:20   I was playing games.

00:32:20   I just let it sit.

00:32:21   So the next morning, after the Apple TV had been sleeping all

00:32:24   night long, I came, activated the Apple TV

00:32:28   so the little light turns on, put it up to my ear.

00:32:30   I can still hear it.

00:32:31   So you can hear it if you shove it up to your ear.

00:32:33   But I guarantee you get four inches away

00:32:36   And you cannot hear it even if it was in a dead sound room

00:32:40   And it's not it is in my entertainment center with my TiVo fan and my television fan so noise is absolutely not a concern with

00:32:46   This I think the fan is always spinning you can hear it if you put it up to your ear

00:32:50   And if you have better hearing than apparently Jason Snell and Marco

00:32:54   You can hear it it wasn't even close like you can hear it. I didn't put it

00:33:00   I didn't put my ear right against the case. I just move my ear close to it

00:33:05   No, you have to pick it up and hold it to your ear like you're like you're uh, you know

00:33:09   What do you call like it when you ever see the movies where some some?

00:33:11   Record producer is trying to listen to some music and get into the groove and takes a pair of headphones up

00:33:16   But he only holds one ear of the headphones against his ear. Oh, yeah that yep do that

00:33:20   No

00:33:23   Anyway, if you have any concerns about this fan that gets the John Siracusa seal of approval

00:33:28   It is inaudible to humans. You're fine

00:33:31   Wow, can we get like an actual seal made to that effect? I don't put stickers on things

00:33:36   Also, did you just imply that you're not human

00:33:40   Did we just get confirmation that you are a robot? It's inaudible to humans unless you're holding it to your ear

00:33:45   You're not supposed to use the hells of you hold literally holding it to your ear like a like a seashell

00:33:50   You know, you can hear the ocean and shell Marco. Has that even taught you this now that you're a beach bum? Yes

00:33:54   Yeah, all right good anyway. Uh that's there you go do that. Maybe he's a superhero wouldn't surprise me

00:34:01   Maybe I just don't have it last time. I just have my yearly physical and the last time I had my yearly physical

00:34:06   Oh my god. Are we really going they did they did the hearing test?

00:34:10   you know where they did the different tones in your ears and

00:34:12   Last year I failed a bunch of the tones in my right ear and she's like oh, it's probably just because you have a cold

00:34:17   Like oh my god, I'm going deaf. I'm old but turns out just because I had a cold this year. I got them all

00:34:21   The long national nightmare is over

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00:35:44   Betterment, rethink what your money can do.

00:35:47   So, let's move on to Ask ATP, and the curiously named "Null" wrote in to ask, "What do Marco

00:35:56   and Casey use for iOS error logging?

00:35:58   Existing frameworks or something homegrown?

00:36:00   #noob" and it looks like this was spelled correctly with two zeros, so I applaud you,

00:36:04   Null.

00:36:05   Anyway, "noob ios-dev."

00:36:06   Since I'm talking, I will go ahead and start.

00:36:09   The company I work for uses Fabric, which was...

00:36:11   I don't even know the relationship with Crashlytics.

00:36:14   It either was Crashlytics or Crashlytics is now considered

00:36:17   a product within--

00:36:18   - Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter.

00:36:19   Twitter rolled it into a larger thing called Fabric,

00:36:22   then Google bought Fabric from Twitter.

00:36:23   - Right, okay, there you go.

00:36:24   So that is what we are currently using.

00:36:27   It is sufficient.

00:36:28   I don't really have any-- - For error logging?

00:36:31   Is this, I don't, does this include,

00:36:33   is this just crash reporting or,

00:36:34   I took this to mean like, NSLog kind of error logging.

00:36:37   - Oh, that is not how I took this.

00:36:39   I took this to mean crash reporting,

00:36:40   which is exactly what you expected.

00:36:42   And for that, we use Fabric.

00:36:43   like nslog sort of thing we don't we don't do anything you just use nslog yeah well i

00:36:48   mean we don't have any mechanism by which that's reported anywhere is what i mean like

00:36:52   we we use well really we use print because we're not stuck in 1987 on objective c but

00:36:59   anyway um we we just use the effectively nslog for you know local debugging and development

00:37:05   and stuff like that but we don't that never gets reported to a server anywhere or not

00:37:09   knowingly anyway i'm sure somebody's gonna write in and tell me no you idiot crash litigates

00:37:12   is getting all that too, and that very well may be the case,

00:37:14   but I've never seen it.

00:37:15   - Probably.

00:37:16   Yeah, I use nslog in development.

00:37:19   In production, I don't think my app logs much of anything.

00:37:23   I usually remove them, or I use macros to have a debug log

00:37:27   that calls nslog in development,

00:37:29   but not in production, stuff like that.

00:37:32   And then I don't have any mechanism

00:37:33   for the instances of the app out in the field

00:37:36   to be reporting back to me what they have logged.

00:37:39   I don't have that.

00:37:41   - Right, same here.

00:37:41   had the need for it ever. That seems like a lot of data to deal with. I also, I know

00:37:45   that last year they introduced this whole unified logging framework thing among all

00:37:51   the systems and I honestly have, I don't know anything about it. I never saw the session.

00:37:57   I haven't looked at it at all and the only thing I see from that is that ever since they

00:38:04   introduced that new logging system, console app is completely useless. The phone console

00:38:10   is covered in garbage when I look in Xcode,

00:38:12   and that even when I do a build and run in Xcode,

00:38:16   all the system crap still logs to that console

00:38:19   and makes it very hard for me to use NS Logging

00:38:21   for anything else.

00:38:22   So the new system has not made a good impression on me

00:38:25   having not used it, because now it just seems like

00:38:28   everything in the OS is constantly spewing crap

00:38:31   into the logs, and that can't be good

00:38:33   no matter how lightweight they've made it.

00:38:35   - Yeah, yeah.

00:38:36   Alex writes in, "Is there any meaningful difference

00:38:38   between the $50 Qi, is that right?

00:38:41   Is that how you pronounce this?

00:38:42   - Yes.

00:38:42   - Thank you, Qi chargers, Apple's promoting,

00:38:45   and the $15 no-name ones on Amazon.

00:38:47   - It's pronounced 10.

00:38:48   - I don't have the faintest idea

00:38:52   what the answer to this question is.

00:38:52   I understand the question, but I don't know.

00:38:54   I don't have any Qi capable devices in my house right now.

00:38:58   - So the reason I put this in here

00:39:00   is because a bunch of people have been using

00:39:02   their iPhone 8s with the non-Apple Qi chargers

00:39:06   and having varying experiences with exactly how carefully you have to position the phone

00:39:12   on the mat, both orient and position it. And the basic tale of woe is, I woke up and my phone was

00:39:19   10% charged because I didn't put it on the mat quite the right way. And a lot of people are

00:39:26   saying that this is the reason why, this is the space for Apple to innovate. They already said

00:39:31   that they have some things that you can do with the AirPower mat that you can't do with a regular

00:39:36   Qi charger like charge multiple devices at once and have them you know do all the things they

00:39:40   showed in the keynote right that's what AirPower will do but another possible thing that the AirPower

00:39:43   mat might do is you know be better about positioning now I think this question is about

00:39:50   what about the ones that you know from Belkin or whoever that Apple's running 50 bucks versus

00:39:54   the $15 ones I would imagine that one possible difference is exactly how picky they are about

00:40:00   how you place your thing on it, right? It's probably very easy to make a technically Qi-compatible

00:40:07   charger that is super finicky about where you put your phone and maybe the more expensive ones

00:40:14   have either larger areas where you can put them or have multiple orientation things or something

00:40:19   like that. That would be my guess, having not used any of these things and not torn any of them apart.

00:40:24   But at the very least I wanted to bring this up because I hope that that's exactly what Apple does.

00:40:30   That regardless of the possible difference between $50 and $15, it could just be one's Belkin branded and you pay, you know, an extra $35 for that or whatever.

00:40:38   But Apple, we already know that they're doing multi-device.

00:40:42   One of the things that they should, one of the attributes of their fancy AirPower, Matt, which I'm sure won't cost $50, is that it should be able to charge in lots of different positions.

00:40:53   And with them showing multiple phones and a watch all in the same pad, surely that means

00:41:00   that you can put them more or less anywhere on the pad and they'll be fine.

00:41:03   Because it's not as if there's three preset positions and you have to put them exactly

00:41:06   on that, especially since as far as I can tell the surface of the AirPower is completely

00:41:09   featureless.

00:41:10   Like there's no red X that says put your phone here and put your watch here and put your

00:41:14   whatever here.

00:41:15   So that is my hope and that is a possible reason to maybe wait for the AirPower thing

00:41:20   to come out before you take a dive into the wireless charging world.

00:41:25   Finally, Mike Bolton, you know, it's too bad—

00:41:27   Is that your real name?

00:41:29   Yeah, it's too bad that No Talent Ass Clown ruined it for everyone.

00:41:32   Mike Bolton writes in, "Who's the fastest typist?

00:41:36   If you guys play for the best 2 out of 3 on Type Racer or a similar head-to-head typing

00:41:40   thingy, I'll donate $100 to the charity if you're choosing."

00:41:44   We didn't yet do an actual, like, simultaneous head-to-head thing, which I am willing to

00:41:49   to do right now if Marco's willing to edit it all out.

00:41:52   But we each, well, two thirds of us,

00:41:55   those of us who believe in homework,

00:41:57   did the homework and filled out the appropriate entry

00:42:00   in the show notes indicating what our scores were.

00:42:03   Marco, have you done this?

00:42:04   - I have, I just didn't put my entry in the show notes

00:42:06   'cause of course when you ask me for a list

00:42:10   with a certain number of items in it, in this case one,

00:42:12   I can't give my top one list.

00:42:14   It has more than one entry.

00:42:16   - Oh my God.

00:42:17   - He's trying to build suspense.

00:42:19   And by the way, going into this, I assumed that I would have the slowest typing speed.

00:42:22   And even though Marco hasn't entered his time, I'm going to say that I will have the slowest

00:42:26   typing speed, mostly because I don't type correctly.

00:42:29   Like the correct way with the fingers on the home keys.

00:42:31   I took typing courses on IBM Selectric typewriters in my youth.

00:42:36   I took many years of typing courses, and I apparently successfully resisted everything

00:42:41   they had to teach me.

00:42:42   And I typed totally the wrong way, and so I'm slow.

00:42:46   I used to hunt and peck for the longest time, and when I was still pretty young, I think

00:42:51   before I started taking like keyboarding class in school, I decided one day I was going to

00:42:57   force myself to learn to touch type, and I basically forced myself to use the home row.

00:43:01   And after, given how much time I spent on a computer, even my youth, it took me all

00:43:05   of a couple of weeks to get okay.

00:43:08   And now, well for a long time now, I've been in the just truly tremendous position where

00:43:13   I don't have to think about where to put my fingers.

00:43:15   Words just magically appear on the screen.

00:43:17   And I know I'm not unique in that way.

00:43:19   It's just getting to that point is amazing.

00:43:23   So anyway, so what I did was I took the test.

00:43:28   I did the little typing thing once, and then they ask you to

00:43:31   verify that you're a human by taking another little test.

00:43:34   And the second test that I took, so the verification

00:43:37   test, indicated that I could type at 125 words per minute.

00:43:41   If I had seen Marco's score, which I'm assuming is higher than 125 words per minute,

00:43:46   I assure you I would have spent hours getting to the point that I beat it.

00:43:49   But based on one time and one time—or I guess really two times—I scored 125 words per minute.

00:43:56   That was without any sort of warm-up. I think it was early in the morning.

00:43:59   I would blame it on coffee, but coffee is evil, and so I don't drink coffee.

00:44:03   But that was my score. John, what was your score?

00:44:07   So I did a couple of runs to get warmed up, and I put 79 down, even though that wasn't

00:44:11   my very best run, because I did a little bit after that.

00:44:14   And you can, especially once you learn the passages that they're having you type, half

00:44:19   my problem typing these things is like, I wouldn't put a comma there, I wouldn't word

00:44:22   it that way, and you get hung up on that, right?

00:44:25   But once you've done that, sometimes they repeat or whatever.

00:44:27   So 79 is what I'm entering here.

00:44:29   I think that is representative of my typing skill.

00:44:31   I can go faster by like hammering away at that and get into the 80s or 90s, but realistically

00:44:35   speaking I'm not typing that fast. I only kind of wish they asked us to write, I was

00:44:39   cheating, but if they asked us to write Perl code I think I would do a pretty good job.

00:44:42   Oh my god. Despite the fact that my hands are not in the right place, I'm really good

00:44:48   at dollar signs, at signs, curly braces, and square brackets. Fastest dollar sign in the

00:44:53   east you guys. Because I type them so much, I spent 20 years typing tremendous amount

00:44:57   of dollar signs and parentheses and at signs and curly braces. And despite the fact that

00:45:03   I'm only at 79 and more which is not fast in the grand scheme of things. I can also

00:45:06   type without looking at the keyboard and words just come out and code just comes out. Very often

00:45:11   I will just be staring at the screen and code is just coming out and not just that I'm going to the

00:45:16   arrow because I type incorrectly I'm going to the arrow keys home and my hands are all over that

00:45:21   keyboard and I'm just looking at the screen. I'm selecting you know command option shift up down

00:45:27   arrow selecting text cut pasting you know like you get in the zone. I'm not fast when I'm doing it

00:45:32   but it's not as if I'm staring at the keyboard

00:45:34   hunting and pecking.

00:45:35   - Alright Marco, tell me how much faster you were

00:45:39   than the two of us.

00:45:41   - So my first test, just cold, was 91 words per minute.

00:45:45   It was not that accurate.

00:45:47   Basically, I got slowed down a lot

00:45:50   if I ever made any mistakes,

00:45:51   because like Jon, if a passage was written

00:45:54   in a way that I wouldn't write it,

00:45:55   it would kind of trip me up a little bit.

00:45:57   I'd have to go back and be like, "Wait a minute."

00:45:58   That didn't make sense, where if it was something

00:46:00   that flowed the way I would write something,

00:46:03   I was way faster.

00:46:05   So I took a second test a few minutes later at 125,

00:46:10   then I got prompted for that human qualifier thing,

00:46:13   that one was 132, then I took two more,

00:46:16   I got 116 and 122.

00:46:18   So it's kind of all over the place,

00:46:21   but I would say-- - I would consider that

00:46:21   a draw. - Yeah.

00:46:22   It seems like me and you were in the same range.

00:46:25   - Yeah, I think you guys are even.

00:46:27   You had the correct mistakes, right?

00:46:29   - I was never quite clear on that.

00:46:30   You weren't allowed to just blindly continue on, right?

00:46:33   'Cause I lost a lot of time realizing

00:46:34   that I had missed a comma or something like that

00:46:37   and then having to backspace

00:46:39   and make sure I'm getting the right,

00:46:41   that really ate up my time.

00:46:43   - The other thing is typing speed tests

00:46:46   are a fun little thing like this,

00:46:47   but I don't get a lot of value out of this

00:46:50   because there is very little time that I'm at my computer

00:46:54   that I am typing at full blast for more than a few seconds.

00:46:58   because I'm not transcribing things

00:47:01   or spewing out tons and tons of paragraphs.

00:47:04   - That's the thing about these tasks.

00:47:06   They're asking you to transcribe,

00:47:08   which is something I never do on a computer

00:47:09   and find incredibly tedious.

00:47:10   I'm always either writing words from my brain

00:47:12   or writing code from my brain.

00:47:14   I'm never transcribing.

00:47:16   So it is actually a very foreign skill for me

00:47:18   for me to be typing some words

00:47:21   that I'm reading off of the screen.

00:47:22   That's what copy and paste are for.

00:47:24   I am a strong, strong proponent of copy and paste.

00:47:28   and give my few nuggets of copy and paste device

00:47:31   for the people listening.

00:47:31   I think I already gave Merlin some of these.

00:47:33   Never type a process ID,

00:47:35   'cause you're just asking to kill the wrong,

00:47:37   if you like root on a system

00:47:38   and you want to kill a process ID, never type it.

00:47:40   No, I just ran PS, let me just transcribe that process ID.

00:47:44   You only have to like kill the process ID

00:47:50   belonging to some kernel thing

00:47:51   to like halt your entire machine.

00:47:54   Like you only have to do that once.

00:47:55   You just always copy and paste it.

00:47:57   Always copy and paste any piece of information

00:48:00   you're entering like email addresses

00:48:03   or the type of thing that's authentication information,

00:48:05   copy and paste it.

00:48:06   Obviously not passwords,

00:48:07   'cause you shouldn't be copying and pasting those,

00:48:08   but everything else, copy and paste.

00:48:10   Encode variable names, copy and paste.

00:48:13   The way you can tell if you're correctly using

00:48:14   copy and paste is if you initially misspelled the variable,

00:48:17   it should be misspelled consistently

00:48:18   through your entire file,

00:48:19   because you never typed it again.

00:48:20   You either auto-completed it

00:48:21   or copied and pasted it from elsewhere.

00:48:23   So copy and paste is your friend, don't transcribe.

00:48:25   And I feel that people who are really fast typists

00:48:29   resist that, but like I can retype it faster

00:48:31   than I can copy and paste it.

00:48:32   You probably can.

00:48:33   You can also accidentally type it the wrong way

00:48:35   'cause there's nothing's gonna highlight red for you

00:48:37   like it does in these typing tests.

00:48:39   - So what we've learned today is if you want us

00:48:42   to do something stupid,

00:48:43   just swear that you'll donate $100 to charity.

00:48:46   And we never defined which charity.

00:48:48   Somebody put the show notes, St. Jude,

00:48:50   I am totally fine with that.

00:48:52   I would also like to pitch as an option

00:48:54   the Brady Center to prevent gun violence,

00:48:55   which seems to be a pretty pertinent thing

00:48:57   to donate a little money to these days.

00:49:00   - Or maybe Puerto Rico relief efforts.

00:49:02   - Or Puerto Rico relief efforts.

00:49:03   So actually, so yeah, how about we'll go with those three.

00:49:05   Mike Bolton, take your pick amongst

00:49:08   whatever one of those three you would like to donate to.

00:49:10   And I will put at least me on the spot

00:49:13   and say, send me a receipt and I'll match it.

00:49:15   - Me too.

00:49:16   - No pressure, Jon.

00:49:18   Anyway, I'll move on so you don't have to answer.

00:49:21   Let's talk some topics.

00:49:23   - Yeah, I'll do it too.

00:49:24   - We usually save our charity stuff

00:49:26   towards the end of the year, but no problem moving it up.

00:49:29   - We are sponsored this week by HulloPillow

00:49:32   at hullopillow.com/atp.

00:49:35   Hullo makes these pretty cool buckwheat hull pillows.

00:49:39   So this is totally different from regular pillows

00:49:42   that are filled with some kind of like soft springy material.

00:49:45   It's almost like a giant bean bag full of buckwheat hulls.

00:49:49   So it supports your head and neck however you set it up

00:49:52   and it kind of just stays there.

00:49:53   It doesn't like slowly collapse over the course of the night

00:49:56   or squish around.

00:49:58   It just stays where you put it.

00:49:59   It's also really cool.

00:50:01   Like it helps you keep cool at night.

00:50:03   It doesn't get hot the way most pillow fill does.

00:50:07   And so it is by far, in my opinion,

00:50:09   they sent me a couple and it is by far

00:50:12   the coolest feeling pillow I have ever used.

00:50:14   I love that part of it, it's really nice.

00:50:17   You can also add and remove buckwheat hulls

00:50:19   as you see fit.

00:50:20   So like if it's a little bit too big for you,

00:50:23   you want like a smaller or kind of looser filled pillow,

00:50:26   you can just unzip the side and pour some out.

00:50:29   Or if you want more, or if you want to kind of rejuvenate

00:50:32   an old Hello pillow over time, you can go to their website

00:50:34   and just order more fill and just dump it in.

00:50:37   It's kind of amazing.

00:50:39   People have been sleeping on buckwheat pillows for centuries

00:50:42   they've been used extensively in Japan

00:50:44   and they remain relatively popular to this day

00:50:47   and it's really a more natural way to sleep.

00:50:49   'Cause what are you laying your head on every night?

00:50:51   Perhaps it's a bag of bird feathers

00:50:53   or sometimes they're petroleum based foams,

00:50:55   that's no good.

00:50:56   Hullo is made in the USA with quality construction

00:51:00   and quality buckwheat hulls and materials.

00:51:02   They have certified organic cotton cases

00:51:05   that's cut and sewn for durability

00:51:06   and the buckwheat is grown and milled in the United States.

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00:51:10   you can sleep on a Hullo pillow for 60 nights.

00:51:13   If it isn't for you, just send it back

00:51:15   and they will give you a refund.

00:51:17   Go to hullopillow.com/atp.

00:51:19   If you wanna get more than one,

00:51:21   you can get a discount of up to $20 per pillow

00:51:23   depending on the size.

00:51:24   And every order comes with fast and free shipping.

00:51:27   And 1% of all profits are donated to The Nature Conservancy.

00:51:32   So check out Hullo today at hullopillow.com/atp.

00:51:36   Thank you so much to Hullo for sponsoring our show.

00:51:38   (upbeat music)

00:51:41   - All right, so this is the portion of the show

00:51:45   wherein I take a little power snooze.

00:51:47   Tell me about the new Amazon Echo stuff.

00:51:49   And I say I'm gonna take a Power Snooze because

00:51:52   I bet you if I had an Echo I would really like it,

00:51:54   but because I've never experienced it, I don't really care.

00:51:58   But there's new Echo news

00:52:00   and there's new Sonos news as well.

00:52:02   So one of you take it away, tell me what's going on.

00:52:06   - All right, so basically Amazon held the secret event

00:52:09   where the existence of the event itself

00:52:11   was embargoed, which is hilarious,

00:52:14   the other day and they announced

00:52:16   a whole new line of Echo products, which is pretty cool.

00:52:20   I've been a big fan of the Echo, not since it came out,

00:52:24   but since our friends got one and I saw it

00:52:27   and used it myself at their house,

00:52:29   which is a big important distinction here

00:52:31   for any kind of Echo announcement.

00:52:34   When the Echo first came out, it came kind of out

00:52:36   of nowhere and it had this really weird,

00:52:38   creepy promo video on Amazon's site,

00:52:40   and we all, the entire tech world,

00:52:43   relentlessly made fun of them for it.

00:52:45   And because it really did seem like the creepiest thing

00:52:49   advertised and promoted in the creepiest way,

00:52:53   and it seemed like, you know,

00:52:54   oh, another crazy thing from the company

00:52:56   that brought you the Fire Phone.

00:52:57   It turned out that it was actually really awesome,

00:53:00   and that the Echo ends up being surprisingly useful

00:53:04   and just fun and very satisfying to have in our houses.

00:53:09   And as a result, over the last couple years,

00:53:12   I think it came out two years ago, maybe even three.

00:53:16   But as a result, over the last couple years,

00:53:18   many people around these parts have gotten them

00:53:21   and they're quite fun.

00:53:23   Last Christmas, I know many of us gave them

00:53:24   as gifts to family and stuff.

00:53:26   Only great things have reviews from family

00:53:29   and everything about the Echos.

00:53:31   So very good product line.

00:53:33   However, Amazon also releases a whole bunch of garbage.

00:53:37   Like they release a whole bunch of weird products.

00:53:39   They are kind of taking the spaghetti against the wall

00:53:43   approach to new Echo hardware.

00:53:45   So they have all sorts of crazy things.

00:53:49   They launched the Echo Show, which is the weird,

00:53:52   ugly thing with the screen.

00:53:54   They launched the Echo Look, the weird bedroom camera

00:53:56   where you're supposed to take pictures of yourself

00:53:57   getting dressed every day.

00:53:59   And those kind of fell on their face.

00:54:01   I don't know a lot of people who really enjoy those.

00:54:05   So you kind of don't know, when Amazon announces

00:54:08   something new in the Echo world.

00:54:12   The initial reaction to things has very little bearing,

00:54:16   and the initial appearance of things really,

00:54:18   has very little bearing on how good they'll end up being

00:54:21   and how much they'll end up liking them

00:54:22   or how well they will sell.

00:54:24   So Amazon announced a whole bunch of new Echo stuff

00:54:28   the other day and so now there is,

00:54:31   they finally revised the core product line.

00:54:35   There is finally a second generation

00:54:37   of the tall cylinder version of the Echo.

00:54:40   That used to be the only version of the Echo.

00:54:42   There is now a kind of shorter, stubbier,

00:54:45   optionally cloth-covered cylinder

00:54:48   that looks almost like a tiny HomePod.

00:54:51   And now there's also this little alarm clock thing

00:54:54   with a circular screen that can sit on your nightstand

00:54:57   but also has a camera, so it's kind of like a mini Echo Show

00:55:00   that can also be an alarm clock,

00:55:01   which is kind of interesting.

00:55:03   And there's a whole bunch, right?

00:55:06   - The Echo Connect thing that connects to your phone line

00:55:10   so you can make telephone calls.

00:55:11   - Yeah, it's like a bridge to your landlines

00:55:14   that you can make calls using your Echo

00:55:16   that are routed over your hardwired landline

00:55:18   if you actually have a landline.

00:55:21   That's, I think that's gonna go down into the weird category

00:55:26   that we're probably never gonna hear about again,

00:55:27   but I'm sure somebody will use it.

00:55:28   - Got the Fire TV 4K.

00:55:30   - Right, yeah, and the new stick

00:55:32   that hangs diagonally off your TV.

00:55:35   So these are very different things.

00:55:37   So the Fire TV's, I don't know much about the Fire TV world.

00:55:41   I bought a Fire TV box like two years ago,

00:55:44   didn't really care for its UI at all,

00:55:47   so I ended up just selling it.

00:55:49   Do you use them at all, John?

00:55:51   I forget.

00:55:51   - No, I've seen, my friend who has them,

00:55:54   and I looked at them, they're not bad.

00:55:55   Like, the UI is very Amazon-y, but the performance is okay.

00:55:59   The remote is better than Apple's, like it is--

00:56:02   - Well, that's not what I wanted to do.

00:56:04   Right, it is very similar to the old one and it's got like a ring on it, but at least my

00:56:08   recollection of the old Fire TV thing, it's not flat on the bottom, it's more like shaped

00:56:12   like a triangle, so it actually sits in your hand a little bit like an actual remote, right,

00:56:16   and it doesn't have a touchpad on the whole top of the thing.

00:56:20   Anyway, it's fine.

00:56:24   It has always been cheaper than the Apple TV, and I would say like almost as good, but

00:56:28   of course you can't watch iTunes content on it, so it was never anything that I was going

00:56:32   to get. Maybe if it did 24 hertz output I would have considered it to run like

00:56:35   Plex on it or whatever but it doesn't seem like it never seemed like a speed

00:56:39   demon. Certainly the Apple TV 4k feels faster. The new one doesn't support Dolby

00:56:46   vision which is kind of a shame but maybe they'll add that after the fact. It

00:56:51   does support Dolby Atmos which Apple TV 4k doesn't but I feel but Apple TV 4k

00:56:57   is supposed to get that support but remember this is $100 cheaper than the

00:57:01   Apple TV 4k. It's not just like $15 cheaper, it's significantly cheaper. The form factor

00:57:07   of what Marco was alluding to before, that it dangles off your TV, it is like an HDMI

00:57:12   connector, a ribbon cable, and then a box hanging from its corner off of the ribbon

00:57:17   cable. And the ribbon cable is like 3 inches long. So this is not a box you put in your

00:57:21   entertainment center, it is a thing that you hang off the back of your TV. Which is kind

00:57:26   of interesting. I have actually have a Google, what is it called, the Google thing that I

00:57:31   hangs off the back of your TV. The Chromecast, right? The hang off your back

00:57:35   of the back of your TV thing, it's neat. It's like an acknowledgement that we can

00:57:39   make this thing so small that there's no reason it has to be in your entertainment

00:57:42   center. But it's also not neat in the neat and tidy sense and that you have

00:57:47   this little thing hanging off your TV and just always hangs awkwardly and

00:57:51   you're hoping that no one has a view of that television. Like what if your

00:57:54   television is in a place where someone walking to the room can see the side of

00:57:57   it and now you got this thing hanging off it. It's just it's just not tidy. It's

00:58:01   unseemly it's like a wart like purposely adding a wart to your thing never mind

00:58:04   that you know the idea of hanging even a small amount of weight off of the end of

00:58:08   your HDMI port I suppose it's probably weighs less than a very long cord but

00:58:11   either way thumbs down on that form factor but as far as you know people who

00:58:18   don't have any investment at all in the iTunes world this versus Roku and stuff

00:58:24   though they're all reasonable choices I would have no problem recommending a

00:58:28   Fire TV for someone who wants to have to look at Amazon content and to have access to be

00:58:35   able to watch YouTube on the TV and Netflix. If they happen to have one of the televisions

00:58:39   doesn't have that crap all built in, or if they have a television where that's all built

00:58:43   in, but the built in apps are terrible. The Fire TV apps are better than the built in

00:58:48   ones on most television. So it's an okay product. I don't think it'll change things up. I think

00:58:52   it's just, you know, status quo.

00:58:55   I have a Fire TV Stick.

00:58:56   I think it's the original generation.

00:58:58   And I hadn't used it in probably a year

00:59:03   and then had to, wanted to get it like all updated

00:59:05   and whatnot before we went to the beach a couple months back.

00:59:08   And doing that update took like a day

00:59:11   because I had to do an update, wait, reboot,

00:59:14   do an update, wait, reboot.

00:59:15   It was like updating Windows for goodness sakes.

00:59:17   But the new revamped UI that came with it was very nice.

00:59:21   And as a portable thing that's easy to travel with,

00:59:26   I love my Fire TV Stick.

00:59:27   As something that's an alternative to say an Apple TV,

00:59:30   no thank you, I'd much rather have an Apple TV.

00:59:33   But the user interface is fine.

00:59:35   It got a lot better with this revamp

00:59:36   that happened sometime in the last 12 months.

00:59:39   And it's fast enough to do the sorts of things I wanna do.

00:59:41   But if I was living with it every day,

00:59:44   like especially your situation, Marco,

00:59:46   where all of your TV consumption happens

00:59:49   via some sort of box,

00:59:50   I would not recommend a Fire TV stick.

00:59:52   Now that is very different than the 4K,

00:59:54   which presumably is considerably faster, better, et cetera.

00:59:57   But in terms of UI, it's fine.

00:59:59   - Yeah, so anyway, the whole Amazon Fire TV thing

01:00:04   is not an area that I play in.

01:00:07   But the Echo very much is.

01:00:10   And so all of these new Echos,

01:00:11   I'm really glad that Amazon's finally doing more

01:00:16   with just the base model Echo,

01:00:18   not just making new, weird accessory versions

01:00:21   and different things that serve different roles,

01:00:24   but also just finally revving the main speaker.

01:00:28   The main problem the Echo has always had for me is,

01:00:32   well, it's not the most attractive thing in the world,

01:00:34   but the main problem for me has always been

01:00:36   that it doesn't sound very good.

01:00:39   It doesn't get that loud,

01:00:41   and the sound quality is not very good,

01:00:43   'cause it really is just,

01:00:45   It's one speaker pointed downwards above a second driver

01:00:50   for being a woofer.

01:00:51   It's just like a single tweeter, a single woofer.

01:00:53   They point down and they don't sound very good.

01:00:57   The microphones have always been excellent.

01:00:59   It doesn't seem to have trouble hearing me

01:01:00   compared to anything else,

01:01:01   but the sound quality is just really poor.

01:01:06   And it really says a lot about how convenient the Echo is

01:01:10   and how compelling the whole package is

01:01:13   that we listen to, with the exception of my desk

01:01:18   with headphones while I'm working,

01:01:20   while we're out in the house,

01:01:22   we listen to far more music on the Echo,

01:01:25   even though it sounds like crap,

01:01:27   than any other mechanism by which we have to play music.

01:01:30   And that includes, we have a whole nice speaker setup

01:01:34   with an Apple TV that could feed it through AirPlay

01:01:36   if we wanted to, or the Apple TV playing music itself.

01:01:41   We have Sonos, which we'll get to,

01:01:43   and we never use these things to play music,

01:01:45   comparably speaking, because the Echo is just so much

01:01:48   more convenient to just say, "Hey, name of thing,

01:01:51   "play fish," and that's it.

01:01:52   Or, "Play a song from the '90s."

01:01:54   It's just really, really nice and compelling to use that,

01:01:57   so much so that we've been willing to overlook

01:02:00   the relatively poor sound quality,

01:02:03   because most people simply don't care.

01:02:05   And even I, who do care, I would rather just have it

01:02:07   be easy then to have to set up some fiddly thing

01:02:10   on a better, nicer system.

01:02:13   - To echo that, haha, we have the Google Home,

01:02:15   but it's the same thing.

01:02:16   It's got a terrible speaker in it.

01:02:18   Like it's probably worse than the Echo.

01:02:19   It's so, you know, the Google Home is actually even smaller

01:02:22   than the big Echo.

01:02:23   And I think it's probably just got one terrible speaker

01:02:25   in there. It does not sound good.

01:02:26   And yet, when my daughter has her friends over,

01:02:29   all they do is ask that thing to play music.

01:02:31   Like that is their favorite activity.

01:02:33   More music has been played on that thing

01:02:35   than any other device in their house easily.

01:02:37   And that's like, you know, cause again, we have,

01:02:39   I've got my television speakers,

01:02:42   and you could play things through the Apple TV

01:02:43   on the television or through the receiver on the television

01:02:45   without even turning the television on,

01:02:48   but they just wanted to talk to the thing

01:02:50   and make it play songs.

01:02:51   Because what other, they just say words in the air,

01:02:55   speculatively, and it finds the song that they want

01:02:59   and plays it, and they love it,

01:03:00   even though it sounds like crap.

01:03:02   - And I will say too, I have been trying to give Siri

01:03:08   more chances in my life, 'cause everyone keeps saying

01:03:11   how good it is, how good it's getting,

01:03:12   how it's so much better than it used to be.

01:03:15   And so I have tried in many occasions recently

01:03:19   to have Siri play me music as well,

01:03:21   to just kinda get a sense.

01:03:22   So I'll issue it similar queries,

01:03:24   like play songs by cake or whatever.

01:03:27   Like I'll issue it a fairly simple music query.

01:03:31   And Siri gets it right about a quarter of the time.

01:03:36   And it's really frustrating.

01:03:38   Whereas the Echo gets it right almost every time.

01:03:42   It's really quite shocking how different the two are

01:03:46   in reliability and speed and just the sensibility

01:03:51   of responses for things like music.

01:03:54   - Yeah, similarly, Google Home,

01:03:56   like my daughter and her friends say things like,

01:03:58   play song whatever but the one with whatever in it.

01:04:02   Like there are variants of songs

01:04:03   where multiple artists cover them

01:04:04   and they will say a sentence describing the song they want

01:04:07   and it will find the thing for them.

01:04:09   And not only that, it will say,

01:04:10   "Okay, I found blah, blah, blah featuring blah, blah, blah."

01:04:13   Like, I don't know if it's just doing fuzzy word matching

01:04:16   of finding like song title plus the name of the person

01:04:20   they said, but they ramble on these whole sentences

01:04:22   and I'm like, "Listen, I'm amazed it finds the song

01:04:25   that they were asking about."

01:04:27   When I don't think a human could have found it.

01:04:29   A Google search probably could have,

01:04:30   maybe that's what they're doing.

01:04:31   They're just like literally doing a Google search

01:04:33   and taking the first hit.

01:04:34   But the fact that it works is all, it's magic.

01:04:36   And saying that to Siri would just be this word salad

01:04:39   of misheard, you know, you know what it does

01:04:41   when you say stuff and it doesn't understand what you say?

01:04:43   It would assemble that and then it would be like,

01:04:45   I'm sorry, I can't help with that because it doesn't,

01:04:48   I don't think it has the fallback of,

01:04:50   can't make heads or tails of this,

01:04:51   throw it into the magic that is Google

01:04:53   and try the number one hit.

01:04:55   - Yeah, exactly.

01:04:57   And the assistant, like the Amazon assistant,

01:05:01   I don't know if Google does this too, it probably does,

01:05:03   but it even does lyrics search.

01:05:05   You can say, "Play the song that goes blah,"

01:05:08   and it will search for those lyrics.

01:05:10   And it's just incredible how good it is.

01:05:14   And honestly, one of the reasons why I am not that excited

01:05:19   about the HomePod is that I know,

01:05:23   like just judging on how Siri does,

01:05:26   if you have an iPhone or an iPad or an Apple TV,

01:05:28   giving it these same queries,

01:05:30   I know that these other systems are gonna be better than it

01:05:32   in that regard at least.

01:05:36   - You gotta do the chained,

01:05:38   a lot of YouTube videos showing this,

01:05:39   chaining the assistants to talk to each other.

01:05:41   So they're like, you know, dingus,

01:05:43   tell the other dingus to play songs by whatever, you know?

01:05:46   Or just like have this big chain,

01:05:48   let the smart ones figure out what song you want

01:05:50   and convey to the one with the good speaker to play it now.

01:05:53   - So that is actually a great segue into this other thing.

01:05:58   - I know, I said that for you.

01:05:59   - Thanks, John.

01:06:00   So today, we've had a couple days to digest this Echo stuff,

01:06:04   but today there was a Sonos announcement.

01:06:08   Sonos has made wonderful sounding speakers

01:06:14   and very like, they're basically products

01:06:17   that are designed to be sold on Apple stores.

01:06:20   It's like, I know they weren't officially,

01:06:23   but like they are really, really like high end speakers.

01:06:28   Well, they're high priced speakers that sound pretty good.

01:06:33   And they don't sound amazing and credible

01:06:37   compared to high end audio file speakers,

01:06:39   but for consumer grade, I guess, gear,

01:06:44   they sound very good.

01:06:46   And compared to all these other smart cylinders,

01:06:50   they sound great.

01:06:51   And Sonos have been around for a very long time,

01:06:54   and they have focused mainly on multi-room audio

01:06:57   and this kind of library management of things.

01:07:01   And in fact, much of the benefit of AirPlay 2

01:07:05   is what Sonos has been doing all this time,

01:07:06   where basically it hands off the playback

01:07:09   to the speaker itself.

01:07:11   So you're not just playing a constant stream from the phone.

01:07:15   You're telling the speaker, here's this file, play it.

01:07:18   Or here's the next 15 minutes of audio, play it.

01:07:21   Or go to this URL and just play what you find there,

01:07:24   'cause they're all networked, which is nice.

01:07:26   it has lots of benefits like if one person leaves the house

01:07:30   with the phone that was controlling it,

01:07:32   the music doesn't stop.

01:07:34   And it doesn't skip if you bend over

01:07:36   and your waist is blocking your pocket or something.

01:07:40   It's a really nice architecture

01:07:42   and it also makes things like multi-room audio

01:07:44   significantly easier to do.

01:07:46   And so anyway, Sonos has had this for years

01:07:49   and years and years and they really have owned

01:07:51   the high-end multi-room audio market.

01:07:55   The main problem with Sonos in recent years

01:07:58   is that when the Echo came out, everyone's like,

01:08:01   well, it's a lot easier to just do this.

01:08:03   I mean, playing stuff through Sonos is cumbersome

01:08:05   because their app is really quite poor.

01:08:08   It's unintuitive, it's incredibly complicated

01:08:11   'cause it can do so much and it's laid out

01:08:13   in a not that intuitive way.

01:08:15   Honestly, it feels like an Android app

01:08:18   and I don't mean much disrespect by that

01:08:22   but it just feels like, it feels like an app designed

01:08:24   by the Windows and Android aesthetic.

01:08:27   And so it's just very cumbersome to play stuff

01:08:31   on a Sonos system, even though when you finally do,

01:08:34   it sounds great and you can do multi-room stuff

01:08:36   really easily and stuff like that.

01:08:38   So the Echo comes out and it's really crappy

01:08:43   at sound quality and initially doesn't have

01:08:46   multi-room audio support, but it's really, really,

01:08:49   really, really easy to get stuff playing.

01:08:52   You can say what you want and it just starts playing.

01:08:54   And it turns out that's incredibly compelling

01:08:55   as we said earlier.

01:08:56   And so many Sonos owners, myself included,

01:09:01   our Sonos stuff has basically been gathering dust

01:09:04   ever since the Echo came out.

01:09:06   So today, Sonos announced that they have partnered

01:09:10   with Amazon at some seemingly fairly deep level.

01:09:14   And they announced a partnership like months ago,

01:09:17   but who knew if anything was ever gonna come out of it?

01:09:20   Well, now it is.

01:09:21   They now have a version of what used to be called

01:09:24   the Play One speaker, their lowest end, smallest little,

01:09:28   it's like a little cube almost, speaker.

01:09:30   They now have a version of that

01:09:32   that is basically also an Echo inside of it.

01:09:36   Has the little microphone ring up top

01:09:39   and a couple of extra buttons

01:09:41   and now they basically have a Sonos Echo.

01:09:45   And they also have integration

01:09:46   with the Echo Assistant platform

01:09:49   so that you can tell your Echos to play things

01:09:53   on your Sonos and stuff like that.

01:09:55   And forgive me, I haven't looked into too many

01:09:56   of the details on that yet,

01:09:57   'cause I haven't had time yet,

01:09:58   because this all came out today.

01:10:01   So some of the finer details of this

01:10:04   might be wrong or incomplete.

01:10:06   But basically they announced what looks like

01:10:09   surprisingly deep and comprehensive integration

01:10:12   between the Echo products and Sonos products,

01:10:15   along with this new Sonos speaker that has a built-in Echo.

01:10:18   And if this works as they are advertising,

01:10:23   it's gonna be awesome.

01:10:25   And it's actually not that ridiculous of a price too.

01:10:28   Like the new Sonos One, which is their new version

01:10:32   of the Play One speaker, is 200 bucks.

01:10:36   And it's positioned roughly, like market wise,

01:10:40   roughly where like the tall Echo cylinder is positioned.

01:10:44   It's not supposed to be a HomePod competitor.

01:10:46   The HomePod competitor is kind of supposed to be

01:10:49   their next one up, which they haven't updated

01:10:50   with Alexa yet, sorry, with the Amazon Assistant yet.

01:10:54   (laughs)

01:10:55   - Why is it not supposed to be a HomePod competitor?

01:10:57   'Cause it looks like a HomePod to me.

01:10:58   It is a single thing with one speaker,

01:11:01   you know, with one set of speakers in it.

01:11:03   It's about the same size as the HomePod.

01:11:04   Is it just because it's like 100 something bucks cheaper?

01:11:06   Like, it seems like a HomePod competitor to me.

01:11:09   - Well, it's going to serve as a HomePod competitor,

01:11:12   effectively, but one of the reasons why Apple,

01:11:16   when they were doing price comparisons,

01:11:18   they positioned the HomePod against the Sonos Play 3,

01:11:21   the next speaker up that's more expensive.

01:11:23   And I think part of that is because the Play 1

01:11:26   only has one driver, or it's just like the Echo,

01:11:29   it has two drivers that it's just forming one channel,

01:11:33   whereas the HomePod has, didn't the HomePod

01:11:35   have tweeters and a big circle around the whole top of it,

01:11:38   and maybe one big woofer in the middle

01:11:40   or something like that?

01:11:40   - Yeah, but how does that change the sound?

01:11:44   - You're not getting stereo out of it.

01:11:46   We've talked about this before,

01:11:46   about how it's doing all the channels

01:11:48   through the single location,

01:11:50   so you're not getting a right channel,

01:11:51   a left channel that's separated by six feet

01:11:53   from either one of these devices.

01:11:55   - Well, when you only have a single driver set

01:12:00   pointing in one direction,

01:12:02   you can't really do anything with stereo imaging.

01:12:05   It's gonna be mono.

01:12:07   But the HomePod is kind of this weird hybrid

01:12:10   where because it has drivers pointing all around it,

01:12:14   It can do things by bouncing stuff off the walls

01:12:16   and everything to try to kind of simulate things

01:12:17   in different directions, because it actually

01:12:19   is firing sound in multiple directions.

01:12:22   Whereas the Sonos One series only fires it straight ahead,

01:12:27   and the Echo fires one set of drivers straight down,

01:12:31   so it kind of has like a ring effect,

01:12:33   but it can't control what goes left, what goes right.

01:12:37   So these other things are effectively mono,

01:12:41   whereas the HomePod and the higher-end Sonos models

01:12:45   have multiple speakers that they could adjust

01:12:48   and direct in different ways.

01:12:51   So I think it's, in practice, this is a HomePod competitor

01:12:55   in the same way the Echo's a HomePod competitor.

01:12:57   But if you ask Apple marketing,

01:12:59   what is the HomePod competing against,

01:13:00   they're gonna go with the higher-end models

01:13:02   in part because of those technicalities,

01:13:04   in part because of just sheer physical size,

01:13:06   and in part because they're more expensive.

01:13:08   - Yeah, the Play 3 looks more like the iPod Hi-Fi.

01:13:10   it's a rectangular thing.

01:13:13   - Yeah, so anyway, this is good.

01:13:15   I hope, I really hope this works,

01:13:17   and I hope that it does smart things integrating with,

01:13:20   so like, for instance, I already have other Sonos speakers.

01:13:25   I have a few other ones throughout the house.

01:13:27   You know, can I only buy one of these things?

01:13:30   Do I even have to buy any of these things,

01:13:31   or can I just have the Echos connect to the Sonoses

01:13:34   through the apps?

01:13:35   I think they can do that, actually, but I don't know yet.

01:13:37   So this is, I have a lot of research to do,

01:13:39   and we have a lot of, you know, just,

01:13:42   no one has actually used this device.

01:13:44   I don't think there's any reviews of it,

01:13:45   except there was this one on Wired

01:13:47   that was kind of not that specific.

01:13:50   So, I don't know, we'll see, but,

01:13:52   I hope this works as well as their advertising does,

01:13:58   because if it does, this is going to be a total game changer

01:14:02   in the Echo market, because it will be finally

01:14:05   a fusion between the good sounding world of Sonos

01:14:10   and the really convenient world of Echo.

01:14:12   It's gonna be a problem for the HomePod, I think.

01:14:15   I mean, the HomePod is already,

01:14:16   given the HomePod's price

01:14:20   and relatively limited apparent capabilities,

01:14:25   I think the HomePod's gonna have a hard time in the market.

01:14:28   Now I think it's gonna have an even harder time than before

01:14:32   because if this works at all,

01:14:34   The Sonos Play One is, sorry, the Sonos One,

01:14:37   the new one with the Echo built in,

01:14:40   is going to be a very compelling alternative

01:14:43   for a lot of people.

01:14:45   - So a lot of people are asking after the story came out,

01:14:47   why doesn't Amazon just buy Sonos?

01:14:49   They seem to buy everybody.

01:14:50   Like this type of integration,

01:14:51   this type of partnership is practically unheard of.

01:14:54   Like it's basically Sonos saying,

01:14:55   we're never gonna do all this stuff that Amazon does.

01:14:57   And Amazon apparently saying,

01:14:59   we don't wanna build a really nice speaker.

01:15:01   We'll just, our new version of, as you noted,

01:15:03   the new version, the new good version of the Echo,

01:15:06   didn't really make a lot of progress sound.

01:15:08   I think it's a little dull be like,

01:15:09   oh, we'll make it sound better,

01:15:10   but they didn't change the hardware in a way

01:15:12   that makes it sound like they are serious

01:15:14   about audio quality.

01:15:15   They just tweak the, you know, but like, so they said,

01:15:18   okay, well Sonos, you do the sound part

01:15:20   and we will do the software part.

01:15:22   I'm not entirely sure what's in it for Amazon

01:15:25   to continue that relationship.

01:15:28   Like why, why not take, you know,

01:15:31   those nice profits that Sonos is making by selling expensive speakers? Why doesn't Amazon

01:15:35   want those too? Like arguably Amazon is providing the majority of the value in this arrangement

01:15:41   because I think it is easier to make a nice speaker than it is to make a thing that understands

01:15:48   words that you say and does intelligent things like they've got all the back end that is

01:15:51   finding that music for you and you know playing it back and the music subscription service

01:15:56   and all sorts of other things making a speaker compared to that is relatively easy and I

01:16:00   And I suppose Sonos's secret sauce is the multi-room stuff.

01:16:02   But anyway, there seems to be a natural synergy

01:16:05   between these companies.

01:16:06   And given the fact that Amazon bought things like IMDB

01:16:08   and other companies that seem like it should be--

01:16:11   or Whole Foods, right?

01:16:14   I mean, buy-- like, how is that just buy Sonos?

01:16:17   Like, what are you even waiting for?

01:16:19   It makes me uncomfortable as a consumer,

01:16:21   if I was into these type of products,

01:16:24   to know that I'm buying a thing between two companies that

01:16:28   frenemies, right? They're competitors, but they're also in this mutually beneficial arrangement.

01:16:35   It just seems like there's a tension there, and I'm not sure how that is sustainable.

01:16:39   Not that I'm for big companies buying up all the small companies, but Sonos kind of had its

01:16:46   chance to figure out the, you know, make something that you can talk to, and they've essentially

01:16:52   outsourced it to Amazon, so I don't know.

01:16:55   - Yeah, I'm with you too.

01:16:57   I don't see why Amazon gets enough out of this deal

01:17:00   to make it worth it.

01:17:01   Like even the integration, it's such that also,

01:17:05   like when I went to go pre-order the Sonos One today,

01:17:10   you can't buy it on Amazon.

01:17:12   Like you couldn't buy every other Sonos on Amazon,

01:17:15   but this one you can pre-order only

01:17:17   on Sonos's website right now.

01:17:19   It's like they couldn't even coordinate that?

01:17:21   Can you like order toilet paper from the Sonos One?

01:17:24   - I think, the way it's advertised

01:17:26   and the way the product page positions it,

01:17:29   it looks like it has full Echo integration,

01:17:32   like a full Echo built into it basically.

01:17:34   So I think you should be able to do

01:17:36   everything the Echo can do.

01:17:38   So I don't, that's the thing, it's very,

01:17:41   a lot of this will depend on like

01:17:42   when we actually get these things,

01:17:43   like does it actually do those things?

01:17:46   Is it actually as good?

01:17:47   You know, what if there's other problems?

01:17:48   Like what if the microphones aren't as good

01:17:50   as on a real Echo.

01:17:51   You know, there's gonna be issues like that,

01:17:54   but the good thing is though,

01:17:56   if this integration works the way it appears to

01:18:00   on all their advertisements and in the apps and everything,

01:18:03   you might not even need to buy the Sonos One.

01:18:06   Like, from what everyone's saying,

01:18:08   you can just connect your Sonos account

01:18:10   in the Alexa app and just start sending commands to it

01:18:15   and you can just start controlling them.

01:18:18   Like that's kind of incredible if that's true.

01:18:21   And so like, again, like I don't,

01:18:23   this will all depend on how well this stuff is implemented.

01:18:26   But yeah, basically I ask again in a couple weeks.

01:18:29   But I'm really happy about this.

01:18:32   As recently as two months ago,

01:18:35   I was saying that I would be surprised

01:18:38   if Sonos was still in business in a year.

01:18:40   'Cause it seemed like things weren't going well for them.

01:18:43   But this could really turn things around for them.

01:18:47   if this makes a lot of people buy more Sonos stuff.

01:18:50   And also, one area that maybe we're not seeing

01:18:54   by looking at just the speaker,

01:18:56   like the little portable speaker side of this thing,

01:18:58   one area in which maybe Amazon wanted to get in

01:19:01   that they couldn't easily do themselves is home theater.

01:19:05   Sonos in recent years has dramatically gotten

01:19:10   into the home theater business with their soundbar products

01:19:13   and then later on like the subwoofer,

01:19:16   I think they play bass in the subwoofer.

01:19:19   Their names are a little confusing,

01:19:20   so I forget which is which.

01:19:21   But they launched their first soundbar a couple years back,

01:19:24   and I think they have a second one,

01:19:26   I don't even know anymore.

01:19:28   But I think those actually sell really well.

01:19:30   And Sonos, I think, does pretty well

01:19:32   in the soundbar business now.

01:19:35   So if Amazon wanted to get more like Echo Music playback

01:19:39   into home theater systems,

01:19:42   maybe this is what they get out of this deal.

01:19:44   maybe they get access to this market

01:19:45   of high-end home theater stuff.

01:19:47   That the Echo hardware being this kind of like,

01:19:51   you know, inexpensive, kind of crappy audio products,

01:19:55   we're probably never gonna get into that business.

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01:21:34   Hi, I'm back.

01:21:38   Ready to talk about alarm clocks, Casey?

01:21:42   I am so excited to talk about alarm clocks.

01:21:46   Tell me more.

01:21:48   This is just a coincidence.

01:21:49   I did not have any inside information about Amazon's product announcements, but a show

01:21:55   or two ago, I mentioned offhand how I was looking for something to replace my clock

01:22:01   radio from the '80s.

01:22:02   that would just perform one function that wouldn't be, you know, I wasn't gonna use

01:22:06   my iOS devices which potentially travel around the house and I have to remember to put it

01:22:10   on my bedside and plug in, just wanted something that was always on my bedside that I could

01:22:14   look at and always showed me the time and then had an alarm on it and that's about it.

01:22:20   And what Amazon came out with is this little ball thing.

01:22:23   It's like the Amazon Echo Show in that it's like a screen and it shows you the weather

01:22:28   and tells you what time it is and I guess shows you news stories that you don't want

01:22:31   see and annoys you with all the other stuff like that. But anyway, it's got a circular screen on it

01:22:35   and it's 130 bucks and it's basically a smart, dedicated, looks like an alarm clock thing.

01:22:43   And a lot of people saying, "Hey, is what you were asking for someone, probably not Apple,

01:22:48   to make some kind of dedicated alarm clock electronic component thing?" And guess what?

01:22:53   Amazon did it because, as Jason Snell, I think it's Jason Snell, said in his article about it,

01:22:58   god bless amazon with her at every single form factor and seeing what people might buy

01:23:02   they that's the thing that amazon does they they just make a bunch of crap and

01:23:06   you know maybe people like this maybe they won't we'll just keep trying um it's cute i'll give it

01:23:12   that but and you know 130 is kind of ridiculous um but the thing that makes it uh makes me pretty

01:23:20   sure i'm never gonna buy this is that it has a camera on it and i'm not one of those people who's

01:23:24   paranoid about cameras but of all the places I'm not going to stick a camera of dubious

01:23:28   security it's next to my bed.

01:23:30   So sorry Amazon.

01:23:34   If this thing didn't have a camera then I would probably still not buy it because my

01:23:39   next fallback position would be Marco hated the screen and it was really annoying and

01:23:42   this has the same screen so unless someone told me "oh the screen they solved that problem

01:23:45   you can make it to the screen it's not annoying or not too bright or whatever" I probably

01:23:49   still wouldn't get it but the camera no deal for me.

01:23:53   And that's despite the fact that when we talked about the Amazon Look, the thing that takes

01:23:56   pictures of your outfits and stuff, that I totally endorse the idea of having more cameras

01:24:00   in the house for functions like that.

01:24:02   But for me personally, my bedside table is a no-go.

01:24:05   That's just my position.

01:24:06   If you don't mind it and if you're not concerned about security or whatever, then by all means

01:24:10   go for it and tell me how annoying it is.

01:24:12   But I'm not getting this thing.

01:24:13   That's a different lifestyle.

01:24:14   No, I mean, I think there's a theme of my opinions of Amazon products, basically.

01:24:22   and that is that when Amazon does things

01:24:24   that are related to sheer functionality

01:24:27   or voice response and voice interfaces,

01:24:31   I really like the way they do things most of the time.

01:24:33   When it comes to UI, I really don't like

01:24:38   almost any visual interface that Amazon makes.

01:24:42   The Echo Show, I really did not like.

01:24:45   This thing I think would have the exact same problem

01:24:47   as you mentioned with just like, you know,

01:24:49   Like, it takes a certain degree of standards and taste

01:24:54   and good decision making to do a user interface

01:24:58   like this well, and I don't think Amazon has that talent

01:25:01   right now, or at least they don't let it shine.

01:25:04   They just, they have not shown that they can make

01:25:07   a good interface.

01:25:09   The Kindles have always been interface disasters.

01:25:11   The only reason anybody enjoyed using Kindles

01:25:13   is because for most of the heyday of the black and white

01:25:17   E Ink models, there just wasn't much of an interface there,

01:25:22   so Amazon's mediocrity at interface design

01:25:25   was less of a problem with this primitive thing

01:25:27   that just couldn't do that much.

01:25:30   But they have gotten progressively more and more annoying

01:25:33   as the technology has gotten better,

01:25:35   and now that they have these full color screens,

01:25:38   the interface design is about as good as it is

01:25:40   on their tablets and their TV boxes,

01:25:42   which is not that good.

01:25:45   So this is the kind of product that if Apple made something

01:25:49   like this, it might be really good.

01:25:53   Although you could argue they do.

01:25:54   It's an Apple Watch at nightstand mode.

01:25:56   (laughing)

01:25:57   - Yep.

01:25:58   - But you know, or an iPhone and a dock.

01:26:01   But anyway, yeah, this is the kind of thing

01:26:04   that I don't think Amazon should make

01:26:07   with their current talent.

01:26:09   And also, you know, the camera I think is going to be

01:26:12   one of the most turn-offish factors of it,

01:26:16   why does this need a camera?

01:26:18   And the only reason I can think of

01:26:19   is they really wanna push their video calling thing.

01:26:22   They're trying, obviously, very hard to make that a thing,

01:26:25   even though I don't think anybody actually wants it,

01:26:26   but if this didn't have the camera,

01:26:30   not only could it maybe be five bucks cheaper,

01:26:33   but I think more people would buy it lacking a camera

01:26:36   than anybody who's gonna buy it with a camera.

01:26:39   This seems like one of those corporate strategy tax things

01:26:41   Like they're obviously trying so hard to push

01:26:44   calling people on the Echos that they're putting

01:26:47   the cameras in all these different models

01:26:49   that like really probably shouldn't have them.

01:26:52   And I think this would be a much better product without it.

01:26:54   So yeah, I just, I don't see this being a good thing

01:26:58   with the combination of the camera

01:27:00   and Amazon's terrible UI taste.

01:27:03   But the concept is a good concept.

01:27:06   And I hope someone, Amazon or not, does it right.

01:27:09   because I think that would be a really nice market.

01:27:12   Maybe you put it in a kitchen, it wouldn't be as bad.

01:27:14   Like there's nothing that says this is supposed to be on your bedside table.

01:27:17   That's just the where I was interested in putting it.

01:27:18   But if you put it in your kitchen, it is less ugly and gigantic.

01:27:22   Or I don't know how gigantic it is because I don't have one.

01:27:24   But like the the other one certainly looks big.

01:27:26   I know it's not actually that big when you get it in person,

01:27:28   but it's like it's like a rectangular monolith.

01:27:30   This is a cute little ball.

01:27:32   And so maybe it would fit in more places in people's lives.

01:27:35   And the camera, because it's so cheap, it just feels like a hedge.

01:27:38   like maybe we'll think of something cool to do with this, or maybe you can hold things

01:27:40   up to it and we'll find them on Amazon and buy them for you, you know, and that is the

01:27:44   video conferencing angle too, but the camera just gives you a lot of possibilities, so

01:27:47   I understand why it's there, it's just that for me it makes it not a choice for the bedroom,

01:27:54   but for something in the kitchen or whatever, that's where I wouldn't mind it, I already

01:27:58   have a camera in my kitchen to watch my dog, so I'm obviously, that's not a problem for

01:28:01   me.

01:28:02   So here's, I just noticed in the specs of the,

01:28:06   of this little ball thing, it has a line out for sound.

01:28:10   That's interesting.

01:28:12   So that basically makes it a fancy expensive Echo Dot.

01:28:17   So you could use this to add a small screen

01:28:22   to a smart speaker somewhere in your house.

01:28:24   Like, if you take it out of the bedroom,

01:28:27   that I think makes it a more interesting proposition.

01:28:31   Anyway, so I wish them luck with these things

01:28:33   and we'll see, I mean probably next year

01:28:36   between me and John, Casey I know you're not gonna buy

01:28:39   any of these things, but between me and John

01:28:41   we're probably gonna own one of each of these things.

01:28:44   - That means you're gonna buy every single one of them

01:28:46   'cause I don't think I'm buying any of these.

01:28:47   - Yeah, just wait.

01:28:48   - I mean I thought about having another,

01:28:51   having Echo and the Google Home in the house

01:28:54   at the same time, but I don't know.

01:28:56   I think what I'm more likely to do at this point

01:28:59   is buy more cameras for my house, more dedicated cameras

01:29:01   'cause now that I have one to watch the dog,

01:29:03   I'm like, I can get a better angle on the dog

01:29:04   when she's in a different room.

01:29:06   Like maybe a second camera or something like that.

01:29:09   Or maybe I'll finally get into like the light bulbs

01:29:12   and stuff and then I'll get an Echo

01:29:13   and some other room to do light control.

01:29:16   But we'll see.

01:29:17   None of these are making me wanna run out

01:29:19   and buy any of them.

01:29:20   I'll let you buy all of them and tell me what they're like.

01:29:22   - Okay, thanks.

01:29:23   - I'm back again.

01:29:25   What did I miss?

01:29:27   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:29:28   Casper, Betterment, and Hullo.

01:29:30   and we will see you next week

01:29:37   didn't even mean to begin.

01:29:39   'Cause it was accidental.

01:29:41   (Accidental)

01:29:42   Oh, it was accidental.

01:29:44   (Accidental)

01:29:45   John didn't do any research.

01:29:47   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:29:49   'Cause it was accidental.

01:29:51   (Accidental)

01:29:52   Oh, it was accidental.

01:29:54   (Accidental)

01:29:55   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:30:00   And if you're into Twitter,

01:30:03   You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:30:10   So that's Kasey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:30:14   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C

01:30:19   U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:30:22   It's accidental (It's accidental)

01:30:25   They didn't mean to accidental (Accidental)

01:30:30   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:30:33   - What do we got for the after show?

01:30:36   - You got fancy chairs.

01:30:38   - Oh yeah, this time it was John that spent

01:30:42   an exorbitant amount of money.

01:30:44   - Yeah, I got a lot of chair issues

01:30:49   in my little computer room that also has my PS4 in it.

01:30:52   I've got a chair in front of my wife's computer,

01:30:54   which is a 5K iMac.

01:30:55   I've got a chair in front of my old Mac Pro,

01:30:58   I've got a third chair in front of my ps4 where I play destiny and all these chairs are bad chairs. Oh

01:31:04   Two of them two of them are bad chairs. One of them is just really old

01:31:09   So my wife's chair is some crappy like office max staples, whatever

01:31:14   Cheap chair that is actually not even good for the amount that we paid for it. Like it's like well it was a cheap

01:31:21   But it's okay. It's it wobbles. It was never very comfortable. It's ugly. It's just not a good chair

01:31:27   The PS4 chair is like not actually a chair that's supposed to be in front of a desk. It's like

01:31:33   Sort of a casual. I don't know what it is like

01:31:37   It's not like a folding chair what you take out when company comes over, but it's like one step removed

01:31:41   No, it's not a folding chair

01:31:42   But it is like it's not a computer chair at all

01:31:45   And I don't like it because it puts weird marks on the carpet

01:31:48   And we have like a pillow on top of it to make it marginally comfortable and like it's kind of falling apart

01:31:55   So that's not great. And then finally my computer chair, which is the one I'm excluding from calling a bad chair

01:32:02   It's just it seemed better days

01:32:03   I bought this chair for a two hundred and fifty dollars which seemed like a huge amount of money

01:32:07   When I lived in Georgia, which was at least what 20 years ago

01:32:11   Right, and you know, I was I was just out of school just married living in our first apartment

01:32:17   Oh, you know away from home. We're buying furniture for our stuff

01:32:21   I bought myself a desk which I'm not using anymore. Actually, my wife's using it, but the desk that my wife is using,

01:32:26   so that thing survives. And I needed to get a chair for it, and I spent what I thought was a lot of money,

01:32:31   $250 for a chair in like 1997, 98. Boy, that's a lot of money. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that expensive.

01:32:38   But anyway, that $250 chair has lasted me, you know, 20 years.

01:32:43   And it still works okay. The cushion is absolutely shot.

01:32:48   It is shredded and it also any foam that might have been in there is compressed

01:32:53   You know beyond belief from 20 years of me sitting on it, but nothing on it is broken

01:32:58   Doesn't really rattle the pneumatic up and down thingy

01:33:02   Has a little bit of spring in it when it shouldn't like this sort of goes down

01:33:07   Compresses when you sit on that no matter what but it's pretty heroic like kind of like my Mac Pro

01:33:12   You know it's it's fast this time

01:33:15   But it is pretty but anyway it has never been a particularly comfortable or good chair

01:33:19   And I just feel like I needed a better one, and I've been putting this off for years

01:33:23   It's not like I'm buying new new fancy chairs on a whim for years and years

01:33:27   I've been like we need new chairs all our chairs are crap

01:33:29   And I'm sitting on a 15 year old chair now. I'm sitting on an 18 year old chair now

01:33:33   I'm sitting on a 20 year old chair and for whatever reason

01:33:35   finally

01:33:37   Got the wherewithal to say we just just need to get new chairs, and I've been resisting mostly because

01:33:43   Fancy chairs cost huge amounts of money if you've never looked at fancy chairs

01:33:47   And you think that $250 one was too much money. Don't look it's terrifying

01:33:51   They cost too much money, and I would be like I don't like my chair, but no do I not like it that much

01:33:57   the answer is usually no I was working during the dot-com boom right and

01:34:03   That means I had occasion to encounter air on chairs which is one of the first

01:34:09   fancy chairs. And I sat on them, and they're interesting, but they never seemed like they

01:34:15   could justify the price. So I always had an excuse in my head of like, "Yeah, okay, fancy chairs may

01:34:19   be nice, but they're not that nice." And I had some foundation in it, having actually like sit on

01:34:24   some kinds of fancy chairs for an extended period of time. But obviously I changed my mind on that,

01:34:30   and I'm sure Marco has, Marco as always has a compelling case for why people should spend

01:34:34   money. So I'll allow him to provide that now before I explain why I did it.

01:34:37   - Well, okay, so chairs are one of the many categories

01:34:42   of products in modern life where the middle class is gone.

01:34:48   There is no more middle class.

01:34:53   It's one of those products where you can go to a store

01:34:55   and you can buy one for 100 bucks or 150 bucks.

01:34:59   That's like the typical Staples or Office Max

01:35:05   base model of decent desk chair with arms on it.

01:35:09   It's gonna be about 150 bucks, something like that.

01:35:14   You could also get the one for 250,

01:35:18   but these days, maybe when you bought yours,

01:35:19   things were different, John, probably not, but maybe.

01:35:22   But these days, the $250 one,

01:35:25   you're not really getting higher quality

01:35:28   than the cheaper one.

01:35:30   You're just getting a higher price

01:35:31   with some features thrown on

01:35:33   to make you pay that higher price,

01:35:34   but it's not really a higher quality.

01:35:36   It's the kind of thing where like,

01:35:38   there's basically one quality level

01:35:41   that they used to assign multiple price points to

01:35:43   for marketing and profit, basically.

01:35:47   But you're getting like the same crap quality

01:35:50   just with a nicer finish on the arms or something like that,

01:35:55   like minor cosmetic differences.

01:35:57   This is true of so many things.

01:35:58   This is true of appliances, so many things,

01:36:01   where everything's basically cheap crap.

01:36:04   And to get the next level of quality up,

01:36:07   you have to go from like $150 to $1,000.

01:36:10   Like there's nothing, everything in between,

01:36:14   you're being ripped off, basically.

01:36:15   It's like the $400 one's gonna be the same

01:36:19   as the $100 one.

01:36:20   The $600 one's probably gonna be similar quality.

01:36:23   Like you're gonna, you have to make a big jump

01:36:26   to go much higher end to get a noticeable increase

01:36:30   in quality if you want that,

01:36:31   because the middle class has just kind of

01:36:32   just been hollowed out by cheapness and decontenting

01:36:37   and outsourcing and just crap over time

01:36:39   that now all the low end stuff is all made the same way

01:36:42   and only the high end stuff can afford

01:36:44   to have any quality left in it.

01:36:46   - And of course the high end stuff,

01:36:47   as with all high end stuff, has tremendous margins.

01:36:49   So I don't know if you consider it being getting ripped off

01:36:52   but you, because the middle is gone,

01:36:56   your choice is narrow margins on crap

01:36:59   for huge margins on expensive stuff.

01:37:01   Because expensive stuff always has huge margins.

01:37:03   So I feel like the high-end stuff,

01:37:05   not only is it expensive,

01:37:06   you feel like you're getting ripped off.

01:37:07   Because you're like, okay, this is better.

01:37:09   And maybe I'll say it's two times better,

01:37:11   but it's not four times better.

01:37:13   And it's four times the price.

01:37:14   And that's just the price you pay

01:37:16   on the high-end for anything.

01:37:17   It is never proportional.

01:37:18   Like, you know, your Mercedes S-Class

01:37:21   is three times as good as the Honda Accord,

01:37:24   but it costs way more than three times the price.

01:37:27   and that's just the way of the world and the high end.

01:37:30   It's tough to stomach and it's the reason

01:37:31   I've been sitting on the same chair for 20 years

01:37:33   is 'cause I'm just like, I can't do it.

01:37:35   - Yeah, and by the way, the $100 chair at Staples,

01:37:39   there's a pretty good margin on that too.

01:37:41   Don't get, that chair is made out of sawdust

01:37:45   and thin plastic, there's no--

01:37:46   - Percentage-wise, maybe, but in absolute dollars,

01:37:50   it's $20 you're making off that chair.

01:37:53   - Yeah, yeah, well, anyway.

01:37:56   So I did those cheap chairs for years.

01:38:00   The reason why I finally upgraded,

01:38:03   so I finally upgraded to a good chair

01:38:06   when I started working from home full time

01:38:08   because I decided, you know,

01:38:10   if I'm gonna be here all the time,

01:38:11   I need something actually good.

01:38:13   (laughs)

01:38:14   'Cause at work, I would sit in decent office chairs.

01:38:18   I think at Tumblr the whole time, I think I had an Aeron.

01:38:21   Before, the job before that, I had like,

01:38:23   not like the super fancy chair,

01:38:25   but like a mid-range office company chair.

01:38:28   When you're sitting in something for like one hour a day

01:38:33   at home when you come home from work,

01:38:35   that has very different needs

01:38:37   than when you're sitting in it all day every day.

01:38:38   Like that's one of the reasons why offices

01:38:40   tend to have pretty nice chairs.

01:38:42   Anyway, so I decided a chair lasts a pretty long time.

01:38:46   If you spent $100 on that chair,

01:38:50   or if you spent $1,000 on that chair,

01:38:52   over the course of 20 years,

01:38:54   you're not really gonna notice that much.

01:38:55   Like over the time span of what you're using,

01:38:58   that actually is not that ridiculous.

01:39:01   So anyway, I decided to get nice chairs

01:39:04   when I started the home office.

01:39:06   I have one, Tiff has one, and they are wonderful.

01:39:11   I will tell you what they are

01:39:11   after you tell me what you bought,

01:39:14   but I think you already know, and yeah, it's wonderful.

01:39:17   So what did you decide to do?

01:39:19   - Well, so I did what everybody does these days,

01:39:21   I went to the Wirecutter, also known as Wirecutter, no need for the "the".

01:39:26   And I looked at their chair reviews and the thing is, because I've been looking at this

01:39:29   for years, I have some experience with what's out there in the high-end chair market.

01:39:34   And also, by the way, probably even more experience with the crap chairs, because every few years

01:39:40   I'll go into an office store and sit on every single one of the chairs and just see if there's

01:39:45   any that I can tolerate or that make me want to pay the $150 or whatever.

01:39:50   In my travels around the working world and friends' houses who have expensive chairs,

01:39:56   I've sat in not a lot of the expensive chairs, but a couple of them.

01:40:02   And I work at a job where some people have fancy chairs at work, and there's always the

01:40:07   ubiquitous leftover errands from the dot-com boom.

01:40:09   And so I'm familiar with a lot of these chairs.

01:40:13   And part of the reason why I bought a new one is just my old chairs were just getting

01:40:17   older and creakier.

01:40:19   And really I really just wanted to buy my wife a new chair because hers is the worst.

01:40:22   And I always felt like we could, once I'm getting her one I'm like well then we should

01:40:26   just get us both one and then I can rotate my old chair to the PlayStation and get rid

01:40:29   of that other chair and just, you know, I don't know.

01:40:31   It just seemed like the time to do it.

01:40:34   The wire cutter recommendation is this thing called the steel case gesture.

01:40:38   I was looking at that and I figured, and the other alternative is the chair that Marco

01:40:43   has and the chair that I think Underscore also has.

01:40:45   Don't you both have the same chair?

01:40:47   I forget, probably.

01:40:49   - Pretty sure you do, because I think I've sat

01:40:51   in both your chairs.

01:40:52   When I visited both your houses, I made it a point

01:40:53   to sit in your expensive chairs to see what they're like.

01:40:56   And the gesture's cheaper, and it was the number one pick,

01:40:59   and part of the reasoning of the number one pick

01:41:01   is like the Margot's chair, which is the Herman Miller

01:41:04   and body, is $300 more expensive,

01:41:08   but doesn't seem $300 better.

01:41:11   Like the gesture was a better deal.

01:41:16   And one of the factors in buying my chair,

01:41:18   the chairs I'm getting is that I tend not to like arm rests

01:41:21   at all, I don't want them on my chairs at all.

01:41:23   All the chairs I've ever had,

01:41:24   I either remove the arms from them at work and at home

01:41:26   or I buy chairs without arm rests.

01:41:28   I just find they get in the way of my,

01:41:30   I've got long arms and I find they get in the way

01:41:31   of my arms and my elbows.

01:41:32   And when I rotate my chair, the arms hit my keyboard tray

01:41:36   'cause I use a keyboard tray everywhere that's down low.

01:41:38   I just don't like the arms.

01:41:39   And both the gesture and the embody look like

01:41:43   they have the possibility that if you remove the arms,

01:41:45   there would be no stubby things poking you.

01:41:47   Like the gesture arms are way back,

01:41:49   like by the sides of the seat back

01:41:51   and the embody arms are way down below and back by the side.

01:41:55   So I'm like, oh, those are both good.

01:41:56   When it came time for me to start ordering,

01:41:58   my plan was by one embody and one gesture

01:42:00   and my wife and I would try both of them

01:42:01   and then we would decide if we each like one of each

01:42:05   then we would just use the chairs

01:42:06   and if we both like one, didn't like the other,

01:42:07   we would return one and get another one.

01:42:09   So then it came down to the company's return policies

01:42:12   and Steelcase's return policy was crap.

01:42:15   they had a 20% restocking fee and like, no thanks.

01:42:18   You can buy them through Amazon.

01:42:20   And as far as I could tell,

01:42:21   you'd be subject to Amazon's return policy,

01:42:24   which is like 30 days return, blah, blah, blah,

01:42:27   in reasonable new condition.

01:42:29   But I wasn't so sure about that.

01:42:30   And then the final alternative is to find a local store

01:42:34   and go there and see what their return policy is.

01:42:36   But it's just about, you're busy, you're working.

01:42:40   And I'm like, oh, if I have to find a store to do it,

01:42:42   maybe it's a long drive and I'll never end up doing it.

01:42:44   and the places that are close to me didn't carry the gesture,

01:42:47   they just carried other steel case chairs and just,

01:42:51   I didn't want to go through that.

01:42:52   So anyway, we're trying an experiment

01:42:54   and I decided I'm gonna buy,

01:42:56   the Herman Miller one by the way,

01:42:58   has a 30 day return policy buying direct from Herman Miller

01:43:02   with no restocking fee,

01:43:03   and it has a 12 year warranty on the chairs

01:43:05   for whatever that's worth in case like it's damaged

01:43:07   or whatever.

01:43:08   So I figured I'll try the Herman Miller Embody

01:43:10   mostly because I found YouTube videos of removing the arms

01:43:14   and it looked very straightforward,

01:43:15   like it's not some complicated thing,

01:43:17   because I have sat in it at Marco's house

01:43:19   and Dunder Skor's house.

01:43:21   And because the wire cutter basically said,

01:43:24   it's, you know, we pick gesture as our number one,

01:43:26   but that has a lot to do with price.

01:43:28   The Embody is a good chair too.

01:43:29   This is all, despite the fact that I think

01:43:33   all Herman Miller chairs, including the Aeron,

01:43:34   the Embody are ridiculously over engineered

01:43:37   and have things on them that do not make them better chairs.

01:43:40   There's a lot of that sort of high end

01:43:43   has to be fancy and weird to make you feel like you're justified spending this money

01:43:46   that I really think does not actually make it a better chair. But despite all that stuff, it is

01:43:53   also seems like a sturdy chair and sitting on it feels solid. Like it feels, if you're most solid

01:44:00   than any of the chairs in my house and I'm just hoping it would be comfortable. So I've been

01:44:04   sitting on it, I'm sitting on it now, I just got it today. I've been sitting on it during this whole

01:44:07   podcast. And it takes some getting used to. Maybe I don't have it quite adjusted the way

01:44:13   I want yet. The arms, I've tried the experiment with the arms on. These arms are coming off

01:44:17   because I cannot stand the arms. They have to come off. Luckily, they're easy to come

01:44:21   off. And then I'll have my wife try it for a little while as well. And after 30 days,

01:44:26   we'll decide are we keeping this or are we buying a second one or are we going to try

01:44:29   something else? So this is an experiment. And in case you're wondering how much this

01:44:33   chair cost you can go to Herman Miller.com and find out and you can customize this kind of like a Porsche

01:44:38   where you can get a different fabric on it for an additional $150 like those are the kind of

01:44:43   options they have for you or an additional $90 to get a different finish on the bottom of the chair

01:44:47   this gives you an idea of of what it's like but the cheapest you can come out with one of these

01:44:51   things is about $1,300 for a chair which sounds very very ridiculous and honestly it is ridiculous

01:44:59   But if you have recently shopped for say a non Casper mattress or a nice couch

01:45:04   not from IKEA

01:45:07   Furniture is really expensive or a dining room table not even like a high-end dining room table

01:45:12   But just like a middle-of-the-road dining room table with six chairs and a leaf

01:45:15   furniture is expensive so

01:45:19   Anyway, good furniture is expensive, but it's not good like we have an expensive dining room table, but it's not good

01:45:25   It's just from Jordan's furniture. Jordan's furniture is not a high-end furniture store. It's the local chain

01:45:30   You probably don't know about if you don't live in Massachusetts, but it's not IKEA. It's not cheap furniture, but it's not

01:45:36   Fancy expensive furniture. It is solidly middle-of-the-road mainstream for and same thing with mattresses like again

01:45:42   Not you Casper mattresses seem like they're expensive go real mattress shopping one day and find out how much like a real queen size mattress

01:45:48   Costs that's not the cheapest one in the entire store. They're ridiculously expensive, right? So then anyway, I'm not gonna pretend

01:45:55   this is not an expensive chair, it is a ridiculously expensive chair, the margins on it are big

01:45:59   and like I said a lot of the design amounts I feel are there, kind of like that uh, what's

01:46:05   the Apple dude with the uh, the expensive hourglass and crap like that. Mark Newson?

01:46:12   Yeah, like a lot, there's a lot of Mark Newson style flourishes on Herman Miller chairs and

01:46:17   the steel case ones as well that I just feel like don't add that much. So anyway, my initial

01:46:22   impressions of this chair having just sat on it for a couple hours of podcasting.

01:46:26   And again, I'm familiar with the chairs, I've sat on other people's.

01:46:29   It feels like the other people's do, the base feels very solid and very wide.

01:46:33   The chair itself is way heavier than my old chair.

01:46:36   That manifests in me not being able to roll it on carpet as easily.

01:46:40   I've got the carpet casters on it, so in theory I've got the right feet on it so it doesn't

01:46:45   sink in or whatever.

01:46:46   But it is just so much heavier, it's like twice as heavy as my other chair.

01:46:50   rolling it is harder to do. this chair despite the fact that it's all fancy is

01:46:57   not believe it or not as adjustable as my other chair because the backrest can't go

01:47:01   up and down like vertically like towards the ceiling and towards the floor

01:47:04   because it's sort of one continuous piece and I'm a tall person with a long

01:47:07   torso so I'm not entirely sure that I'm getting the support I need from the back

01:47:11   of it but you know I'm willing to wait and see using it for a while how I feel

01:47:16   sitting in the chair long term. Bottom part of it feels okay so far. Arms are definitely

01:47:22   going to come off. Anyway, it's an experiment and even if I don't love it, you know, I'll

01:47:28   see if my wife likes it and if neither one of us do, we will try to return it somehow.

01:47:33   I'm trying to save the box and packing materials but it's a lot of stuff. And even if we do

01:47:41   like it maybe we'll try another one of these for my wife and or me or maybe I'll try a gesture if

01:47:47   I can find a way to buy without returning it and if you're thinking of using a chair like this the

01:47:52   best way to do it is to find a local store that you can sit in with and then when you can talk

01:47:56   to somebody about like what if I don't like it can I return it I just didn't have the time to

01:48:01   do that and I just I felt like if I tried to if I tried to pursue that as I have in the past what

01:48:06   would actually happen is I would never find time to go to the store or I would go to a store and

01:48:10   and they would have one or two chairs and I would try them and not know and I just wouldn't

01:48:12   do anything and I just needed to jump in the pool.

01:48:16   Oh and you do get to pick all the different colors and finishes which is just stress inducing.

01:48:20   This by the way is why I always like I spend a lot of time thinking about what I would

01:48:24   do if I ever had to order like a Ferrari or a Bentley because you get to pick like everything

01:48:29   about the inside of them.

01:48:30   What color leather do you want?

01:48:31   What color carpet do you want?

01:48:32   What materials do you want here?

01:48:33   Would like they will do anything for you especially like you know Bentley and Rolls because they're

01:48:37   basically building their car just for you.

01:48:40   And I would be paralyzed about it.

01:48:41   I'm like, I don't know, I don't want to spend 400 grand on a car and end up with this monstrosity

01:48:45   because I have bad taste.

01:48:46   Like, they should really limit it to...

01:48:48   And I know they do have some presets, like, just pick these presets, but it's a lot of

01:48:51   pressure being able to customize all that stuff.

01:48:53   This is why rich people have other people pick them out for them or whatever.

01:48:57   But anyway, I picked the options on this chair mostly to keep it inexpensive.

01:49:01   So mine is all black.

01:49:02   It's just black, black, black, black, black.

01:49:04   With the cheap fabric.

01:49:05   - Yeah, so for whatever it's worth,

01:49:08   so we have two of these in our office,

01:49:09   one for me, one for Tiff.

01:49:10   I bought them both in 2010,

01:49:12   so they're like seven and a half years old now.

01:49:15   We have sat in them,

01:49:18   I'm sitting here more than Tiff is,

01:49:21   so mine is a little more worn than hers.

01:49:23   And ours are both like the typical black and black,

01:49:27   whatever the fabric is that used to be the only fabric,

01:49:31   because when I bought these,

01:49:33   there were very few options,

01:49:34   'cause the Embody in 2010 was still fairly new,

01:49:38   so there weren't that many options.

01:49:40   But anyway, it has held up so remarkably well.

01:49:42   Like not only is the support and everything still wonderful,

01:49:45   as far as I can tell, flawless,

01:49:48   but even the fabric covering,

01:49:50   like you expect a chair that is totally covered in fabric,

01:49:53   like the Aeron, the more famous one from the dot-com era,

01:49:57   the Aeron has a whole lot of plastic framing around it,

01:50:00   so a lot of the pressure or the friction

01:50:03   of you moving around and sitting on the chair

01:50:05   is on some of those plastic pieces.

01:50:07   I think one of the biggest sources of wear on a chair

01:50:09   is probably like the front rim of it,

01:50:12   and on the air on that's all plastic,

01:50:13   like what goes under your knees basically.

01:50:16   With the Embody, everything is wrapped in fabric basically.

01:50:19   Every edge that you touch is fabric covered,

01:50:22   including that front lip.

01:50:23   So you would expect these chairs after seven years

01:50:26   of having my rear end on it constantly,

01:50:30   I don't use this chair a little bit.

01:50:32   I'm really good at sitting in my office.

01:50:34   So like you would think after all that time,

01:50:38   there would be a lot of wear and tear on this chair.

01:50:40   And I have two tiny little spots on the fabric,

01:50:45   on that front lip where like the edge,

01:50:48   there's like an edge support that kind of comes in

01:50:50   from the sides and there's these two little worn away dots

01:50:53   in the fabric.

01:50:55   And that's the only visible wear on the entire chair.

01:50:58   Tiff uses hers a little bit less than me.

01:51:00   Hers is still perfect.

01:51:01   hers doesn't have those dots, and so it's just like nowhere.

01:51:04   And this is after seven and a half years

01:51:08   of fairly heavy use.

01:51:09   - You should get that repaired under warranty

01:51:11   'cause you're still under warranty.

01:51:12   You say, "Hey, fabric wore through.

01:51:13   "Give me a new fabric."

01:51:15   - Yeah, actually, I probably will.

01:51:17   - You didn't do it for your iMac.

01:51:18   I forgot to remind you about that last show.

01:51:20   I remember it again, re-listening to the show.

01:51:22   This is the part where I meant to tell Marco

01:51:23   that he needs to bring his iMac in

01:51:24   before the warranty expires.

01:51:26   - You know what it is?

01:51:27   I still don't have,

01:51:28   I'd have to use my laptop without a monitor

01:51:30   have to go to the beach, get the LG monitor that I hate

01:51:33   and bring it here.

01:51:34   - Just do it, the warranty's expiring,

01:51:36   it's worth just trying, you should do it.

01:51:37   - I know, it's expiring in a few weeks,

01:51:38   but I really don't want to go without having a nice computer

01:51:43   right now.

01:51:45   Like, with all the lead up to the iPhone 10 development,

01:51:50   it's very, very, this is a very bad time for me to be

01:51:54   without a fast computer with a giant screen.

01:51:56   - You just waited too long.

01:51:57   - Yeah.

01:51:58   Anyway, speaking of chairs and lips, the Aeron, as most people know who have any experience

01:52:04   with them, the Aeron has mesh seats, which is good if you get hot in the seat because

01:52:08   you let the air flow up through it, but it is basically mesh stretched over a plastic

01:52:11   frame and especially the front lip, like the front plastic rim that is holding the mesh

01:52:16   in, like think of it like a tennis racket, that rim, if you don't sit in it just the

01:52:21   right way so that your butt is sitting on the mesh, that rim digs into the bottom of

01:52:27   your thighs behind your knees and is very uncomfortable and can cut off circulation.

01:52:30   If you're sitting in it the right way it's not a problem, but people sit in all sorts

01:52:34   of different ways like slouching and sliding to the side, especially if you're in the chair

01:52:37   a long time even though you're not supposed to or whatever.

01:52:40   That's the main complaint about that and you know, errands, you know if you don't like

01:52:44   the mesh you're not gonna like it.

01:52:45   But anyway, I sat on enough errands to know that I don't like that, that I sit in weird

01:52:48   positions and that digs in.

01:52:50   So the M'Bai doesn't have that problem but that's one of the big things that the various

01:52:54   reviews I've read including the wire cutter said about the gestures that it's even better

01:52:57   in that the entire bottom cushion is very large and all the edges are not just fabric

01:53:03   covered but also kind of squishy so you can sit in all sorts of weird positions with your

01:53:07   limbs draped off at all different angles and no place will you have your circulation cut

01:53:13   off.

01:53:14   So I am still interested to try a gesture I just need to find somewhere where I can

01:53:19   one so that I can return it if I want to because the gesture is a $1,000 chair instead of a

01:53:24   $1,300 one, but still pretty expensive.

01:53:26   Yeah. Also, if anybody's looking to get these things for less money, for a better deal,

01:53:32   there's a couple things you should know. First of all, I heard, I should probably verify

01:53:35   this, but I haven't verified this, but I heard when I was shopping for mine that if you don't

01:53:39   buy new from an authorized reseller, Herman Miller's warranty does not apply to you. So

01:53:45   If you're buying from a used sale or a discount site,

01:53:49   be careful with that.

01:53:50   I would say do some research

01:53:51   to figure out if that's true or not.

01:53:52   Secondly, if you're buying an Aeron used,

01:53:55   or anywhere for that matter,

01:53:57   what John just described about the front lip

01:53:59   digging into your knees, if you don't sit on it just right,

01:54:01   is exacerbated by the fact

01:54:02   that it comes in three different sizes.

01:54:04   So make sure if you're buying an Aeron,

01:54:07   look up what the sizes are

01:54:08   and make sure you're buying the right size for you.

01:54:11   If you buy one that is too large,

01:54:13   that will dig into your knees way more than it should.

01:54:17   Most people who find the Aeron uncomfortable

01:54:20   were sitting in one that was the wrong size for them.

01:54:23   Fortunately, if you go for the Embody,

01:54:25   which I think you should,

01:54:26   there's a reason why it was the kind of sequel to the Aeron,

01:54:29   it's better.

01:54:30   But if you go with the Embody, you don't have that problem,

01:54:33   that's why the Embody only comes in one size,

01:54:36   'cause it's just a better design.

01:54:38   The Aeron takes a lot of adjustment to be good

01:54:42   to fit you well, the Embody doesn't really have much of anything that can be adjusted

01:54:48   and comes in exactly one size. And it's great and it fits almost everybody really well.

01:54:53   And that size is fat ass basically. Like this seat, if you want your butt to feel small,

01:54:58   sit in an Embody because the bottom of the seat is just tremendous. Like you need, I

01:55:02   do not have the bottom to fill this seat. I feel inadequate to the task of filling this

01:55:06   seat with my butt.

01:55:08   'Cause it is wide.

01:55:09   I have like six inches on either side of me here.

01:55:12   It's a big seat.

01:55:14   - You got some work to do, Joe.

01:55:16   - Yeah, I'm working on it.

01:55:17   I'll just keep getting down.

01:55:18   I almost ate an entire pint of Häagen-Dazs last night,

01:55:20   so I'm working on it.

01:55:21   You're on your way.

01:55:23   - Man, the Aeron chair looks pretty dated to me now.

01:55:27   It was so iconic for the time that now it looks like 2004.

01:55:34   - Yeah, and again, the Aeron had some innovations.

01:55:36   I feel like the mesh is an innovation

01:55:39   because of the breathability and stuff,

01:55:42   but some aspects of it are just not,

01:55:45   like the lumbar support, that's not great.

01:55:48   Like that little, oh, well, you get this thing

01:55:50   for more money that shoves a plastic lump in your back.

01:55:53   That's not well considered.

01:55:54   - That thing never, or like a lot of people

01:55:56   will put these weird headrests on them too.

01:55:59   - Yeah, you can get headrests for the body too.

01:56:00   You get headrests for everything.

01:56:01   Like, no, then you're in a dentist chair.

01:56:03   That feels weird to me.

01:56:04   yeah, that never worked out for me like in all in, especially

01:56:08   like in the tumbler office. There were always like a

01:56:09   million different errands around like of like different

01:56:12   eras and sizes that were bought because it was a shared office

01:56:15   for most for all the time. I was there so like it was there

01:56:18   were like twenty five different errands in the office that were

01:56:22   all bought at different times, and so they were in various

01:56:25   stages of like adjustment from previous people who had worked

01:56:28   there and everything else. It was always like this bizarre

01:56:31   combination of weird chairs and yeah, none of them. I can

01:56:35   like I finally found the one that fit me right in the office

01:56:39   and like it was like a red state situation like

01:56:43   occasionally like when somebody would be in the office and

01:56:45   like take my chair to some other desk and would like put

01:56:47   some other chair back at my desk when they were done. I

01:56:49   would notice immediately like where's where's my chair like

01:56:51   this is a problem when I was when I was out for work during

01:56:55   the summer like we moved all everyone in the whole building

01:56:58   did another. You know we move all the time over anyway. We

01:57:00   - I did some kind of shuffle.

01:57:01   And I, as I always do, put labels on my chair.

01:57:05   So like, this is my chair or whatever.

01:57:07   And I came back to like set up my new stuff at my new desk

01:57:11   and to put them on a new keyboard tray,

01:57:12   like two days into my long break, my chair was there.

01:57:16   And then I came back at the end of the summer

01:57:19   to come back for good, chair was gone.

01:57:21   I'm like, what? - No.

01:57:22   - Like, I wanna know what my coworkers,

01:57:23   I said, like I said to them, and they're like,

01:57:25   watch my chair and like, ha ha, yeah, John and his chair.

01:57:28   No, seriously, you should have watched my chair

01:57:30   I had to search the entire floor and to go into every conference room and eventually I found that it was like it was totally

01:57:36   Like missed you guys both played missed. I

01:57:38   Yeah, I played it for like 10 minutes

01:57:41   So I didn't actually be there anything everyone in the chat room who hasn't played miss close your ears is a miss spoiler

01:57:46   It was just like missed in it. I thought I had spoiled missed in 2017. I totally can

01:57:51   I thought I had checked every single conference room for my chair and it's easy to recognize

01:57:57   And I recognized, guess what, it's the one with no arms on it, right?

01:58:00   It's a particular variety of chair.

01:58:01   It's an older variety of chair, because I've been at the company for a long time.

01:58:04   But it's the only one in the office with no arms on it, so it should be easy to find.

01:58:07   And I checked everywhere, and I was like, asking people around, "Have you seen my chair?"

01:58:11   Like, where could it have gone?

01:58:13   It was, you had to go into one of the more serious conference rooms, and then turn around

01:58:18   and look at the door you came through, and against the wall next to the door, hidden

01:58:22   behind a thing, right?

01:58:24   Because you just go into a room, and you don't think to turn around and look at the door

01:58:26   where you just came through. That's where it was. It was like behind the open door to

01:58:31   the conference room. You come and you open the door and the door blocks your view of

01:58:34   the chair. And I found it. And this is after I feel bad. This is after I took one of the

01:58:37   chairs of a similar model and removed the arms. I said, I'm going to make a new facsimile

01:58:42   of my old chair. But it wasn't the same. Like it was a similar model, but not exactly the

01:58:47   same model. And I couldn't remember, like my butt's been in that chair at work for eight

01:58:51   I've got eight years of butt time in that chariot hours a day.

01:58:55   So thank God I found it.

01:58:59   And I remember when I found it that I had to put like puffy stickers of animals on it

01:59:03   to even further reinforce that it's mine, like on the back of it.

01:59:06   So it is totally my red stapler work.

01:59:09   If I could chain it to my desk, I would.

01:59:10   [BEEPING]

01:59:14   [