ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I didn't see you out there swimming in the waves. In fact, I've never seen you swimming in them.

00:00:06 ◼   ► There's a reason for that.

00:00:07 ◼   ► That's the next level of your beach education, learning how to swim in the ocean.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Yeah, that's unlikely. Because the ocean is full of things that eat you and stuff.

00:00:14 ◼   ► They're not going to eat you, it's fine. Don't you see all the people playing? They live, they go back to their homes, it's fine.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Most of them.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Yeah, every day, every day. The jellyfish are just taking people.

00:00:28 ◼   ► So we haven't spoken to each other in like a week and a half, two weeks, something like that.

00:00:32 ◼   ► But we are back together again, back on the normal schedule.

00:00:35 ◼   ► We'll be back on the normal schedule, as far as we know, for at least a little while.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Probably until the holidays start picking up.

00:00:40 ◼   ► And, you know, if things are gonna go back to normal, we have to do what we always do.

00:00:44 ◼   ► And that is your favorite segment, and mine, and especially Jon's.

00:00:48 ◼   ► -Ask ATP? -Yeah, that's it.

00:00:51 ◼   ► No, it's follow-up.

00:00:52 ◼   ► So, we are starting with the streaming music iPod shuffle-like thing, which is apparently

00:00:59 ◼   ► something that Spotify—I don't know if it's—is it First Party?

00:01:04 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:05 ◼   ► Anyway, it's a thing that's for Spotify that's called Mighty, which is a peculiar name, that

00:01:10 ◼   ► is basically an iPod shuffle, but for Spotify, from what I've gathered.

00:01:13 ◼   ► So John, can you tell me a little more about this?

00:01:15 ◼   ► Everybody sent us links to this thing, and eventually The Verge picked it up, too, so

00:01:20 ◼   ► That's what we'll link in the show notes because we're talking about placing the market for

00:01:26 ◼   ► something like an iPod shuffle.

00:01:28 ◼   ► But this doesn't really qualify because first of all it's not 50 bucks, it's 85.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Second it does not have cell data access, it only has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

00:01:38 ◼   ► So you know we're saying last show, was it last show?

00:01:41 ◼   ► Maybe the show before.

00:01:43 ◼   ► Eventually you'll be able to make one of these for 50 bucks that can just stream music.

00:01:46 ◼   ► We're not there yet, but this one definitely looks like

00:01:49 ◼   ► Doesn't look like an iPod shuffle. It looks like a

00:01:52 ◼   ► Fisher Price version

00:01:55 ◼   ► It's probably better

00:01:56 ◼   ► This is the thing I was annoying about the shuffles that it's so minimal and you needed to like

00:02:01 ◼   ► Feel your hand on it to do like a volume up or down or next previous track, right?

00:02:06 ◼   ► You could find the middle button pretty well

00:02:07 ◼   ► But because it was a circle trying to make sure that you're hitting up on the circle instead of right or left

00:02:15 ◼   ► Which could be very bad if you're in the middle of a podcast especially before they got the software updated or if your track got

00:02:20 ◼   ► Rude wasn't marked as a podcast and iTunes and it was just a song and you hit the button and just lose your place entirely

00:02:25 ◼   ► You couldn't feel with your finger. What is up and what is down?

00:02:29 ◼   ► This was a little bit better because the center thing is a square so you could feel the flat edge anyway

00:02:33 ◼   ► It's just another coincidence of a product that is kind of like what we're talking about but not really like it

00:02:41 ◼   ► So we'll come back in ten years

00:02:43 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:45 ◼   ► - All right, Marco, tell me about audio bit depth,

00:02:48 ◼   ► because apparently we got that ever so slightly wrong.

00:02:51 ◼   ► - Well, I wouldn't say that.

00:02:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:53 ◼   ► - Oh, here we go.

00:02:55 ◼   ► - So last year we had some discussion about

00:02:57 ◼   ► whether Apple should or ever will sell

00:03:00 ◼   ► higher resolution music, you know,

00:03:02 ◼   ► so like the audiophile world loves high bit rate,

00:03:05 ◼   ► high sample rate music like 24, 192, and stuff like that.

00:03:08 ◼   ► So Amaya Matra writes in to say,

00:03:11 ◼   ► "Well, I understand high resolution audio

00:03:12 ◼   ► "and for everybody, I was disappointed that you guys

00:03:14 ◼   ► "get the basic terminology wrong.

00:03:15 ◼   ► "Given the technical bias of your show and audience,

00:03:17 ◼   ► "a follow-up item addressing the difference

00:03:18 ◼   ► "between bit depth and bit rate would be appreciated."

00:03:22 ◼   ► So bit rate is how many bits an encoding scheme

00:03:29 ◼   ► is using usually per second to encode the total music.

00:03:32 ◼   ► So in a lossy scheme, this basically, like MP3,

00:03:35 ◼   ► there would be like 128 kilobits per second.

00:03:38 ◼   ► And that is just like the quality level

00:03:40 ◼   ► of the music that you're getting.

00:03:41 ◼   ► it's how many bits it will allocate to representing it,

00:03:44 ◼   ► and usually the more bits you allocate to it,

00:03:46 ◼   ► the higher quality you can achieve

00:03:47 ◼   ► and the less you have to throw away.

00:03:49 ◼   ► Bit depth is basically talking about

00:03:52 ◼   ► how precise the samples are.

00:03:54 ◼   ► You know, everybody can kind of picture

00:03:56 ◼   ► what a wave looks like, you know,

00:03:58 ◼   ► that's how sound waves come in

00:03:59 ◼   ► and are represented in the uncompressed form.

00:04:01 ◼   ► This actually doesn't apply to things like MP3

00:04:04 ◼   ► quite the same way because the way

00:04:06 ◼   ► the sound is represented is different,

00:04:08 ◼   ► but basically when you're looking at just a pure waveform,

00:04:11 ◼   ► and the way that's represented in like a lossless file

00:04:14 ◼   ► or a wave or AIFF.

00:04:17 ◼   ► Every sample of audio, so you have a sample rate

00:04:20 ◼   ► of like 44,100 samples per second

00:04:22 ◼   ► or whatever else represented as hertz,

00:04:24 ◼   ► every one of those samples, it's representing

00:04:26 ◼   ► the amplitude of that wave as a number.

00:04:30 ◼   ► And the bit depth is the precision of those numbers.

00:04:33 ◼   ► So if it's 16-bit like CDs, then that is represented

00:04:36 ◼   ► by a 16-bit signed integer.

00:04:38 ◼   ► If it's 24-bit, you have more bits.

00:04:40 ◼   ► if it's usually, I think a 24, or I think beyond 24,

00:04:44 ◼   ► I think it's always float,

00:04:45 ◼   ► and you have floating point representations.

00:04:48 ◼   ► And the reason these matter is that

00:04:51 ◼   ► as you're encoding the music to these samples,

00:04:54 ◼   ► you have to fit a number, the value that you're getting

00:04:58 ◼   ► from the analog or whatever,

00:05:00 ◼   ► you have to fit the value of that into this many bits

00:05:03 ◼   ► of a number per sample.

00:05:05 ◼   ► And so there's a certain degree of rounding that happens,

00:05:08 ◼   ► and a certain degree of error that's introduced

00:05:10 ◼   ► as part of that rounding.

00:05:12 ◼   ► If you only have 16 bits, then that kinda limits

00:05:15 ◼   ► your resolution of how precise of a number

00:05:18 ◼   ► you can represent there.

00:05:20 ◼   ► And so there's all sorts of complicated things

00:05:21 ◼   ► that go on in DAX and ADCs about basically

00:05:25 ◼   ► how you round the numbers in such a way

00:05:28 ◼   ► to minimize the error or to hide the error

00:05:31 ◼   ► in different noise patterns and everything else.

00:05:34 ◼   ► As you increase the error rate,

00:05:37 ◼   ► you increase the noise floor.

00:05:39 ◼   ► So you reduce the signal to noise ratio,

00:05:42 ◼   ► that's the difference between the loudest sound you can hear

00:05:44 ◼   ► and the quietest sound that can be represented,

00:05:46 ◼   ► but you know, below the noise floor.

00:05:47 ◼   ► So you basically increase like the hiss level

00:05:49 ◼   ► at the very bottom of the track.

00:05:51 ◼   ► The reason why audio files freak out about this

00:05:54 ◼   ► is because when you go from 16 bit to 24 bit,

00:05:57 ◼   ► which is where they usually go,

00:05:59 ◼   ► the noise floor does drop considerably.

00:06:01 ◼   ► There's a great Wikipedia article titled

00:06:02 ◼   ► Audio Bit Depth, you should check it out.

00:06:05 ◼   ► Basically the noise floor at 24 bits for bit depth

00:06:10 ◼   ► is 144 decibels, and at 16 bits, the regular CD standard,

00:06:14 ◼   ► it's only 96.

00:06:15 ◼   ► So that's a pretty big difference.

00:06:18 ◼   ► However, the reason this doesn't really matter

00:06:21 ◼   ► for the most part is that 96 decibels

00:06:24 ◼   ► of signal to noise ratio covers the human audible

00:06:27 ◼   ► hearing range pretty well.

00:06:29 ◼   ► The actual human audible hearing range

00:06:30 ◼   ► is something like 120 decibels.

00:06:32 ◼   ► It varies per person a little bit,

00:06:33 ◼   ► but it's around 120 decibels.

00:06:35 ◼   ► So it actually isn't representing

00:06:36 ◼   ► the entire human audible hearing range,

00:06:40 ◼   ► but it's like you don't want to turn your speakers up

00:06:43 ◼   ► so loud that you're actually damaging your eardrums.

00:06:47 ◼   ► Like the human hearing range can go much higher in volume

00:06:51 ◼   ► than what you actually should ever be listening to

00:06:53 ◼   ► on a sustained basis.

00:06:54 ◼   ► Like that's like a rock concert

00:06:56 ◼   ► or a jet airplane flying overhead or things like that.

00:06:59 ◼   ► If you listen at any reasonable length

00:07:02 ◼   ► to something that loud, you're gonna damage your hearing

00:07:04 ◼   ► pretty quickly, permanently.

00:07:06 ◼   ► So, 96 decibels of signal to noise ratio,

00:07:09 ◼   ► which is what you get from CD quality 16-bit audio,

00:07:13 ◼   ► is good enough upon listening.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Where it matters is if you are editing,

00:07:19 ◼   ► if you're recording, like I record my end of the show

00:07:22 ◼   ► as 24-bit, I record audio as 24-bit whenever I can,

00:07:25 ◼   ► or as float even, whenever I can,

00:07:26 ◼   ► which is 32-bit usually, because when you're editing,

00:07:29 ◼   ► you're changing the numbers, you're processing the audio.

00:07:31 ◼   ► And so if you have rounding error, over time that could add

00:07:34 ◼   ► up after you apply a certain number of like filters

00:07:37 ◼   ► or adjustments or anything like that.

00:07:39 ◼   ► And then that 96 decibels of noise floor that was in the

00:07:41 ◼   ► original signal, once you process it a few times

00:07:44 ◼   ► and you're rounding off the numbers a few more times,

00:07:46 ◼   ► you might actually have more error in the signal than that.

00:07:49 ◼   ► And the noise floor might start to become audible.

00:07:52 ◼   ► So where higher bit rate audio makes sense is in mastering

00:07:56 ◼   ► and editing and recording.

00:07:58 ◼   ► But the final shift version that you release to the public

00:08:01 ◼   ► or the version that you, the listener, are listening to

00:08:04 ◼   ► doesn't need to be more than 16-bit

00:08:06 ◼   ► for almost any reason whatsoever.

00:08:08 ◼   ► - All right.

00:08:10 ◼   ► - Sorry. - Well, that solves that.

00:08:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:08:13 ◼   ► It's as though, Marco, that you really care about audio.

00:08:17 ◼   ► I don't understand where this comes from.

00:08:18 ◼   ► - If you want, also, there's a wonderful video

00:08:21 ◼   ► that explains a lot of this.

00:08:23 ◼   ► There's a guy, Monty, I think his full name

00:08:24 ◼   ► is Chris Montgomery.

00:08:25 ◼   ► He is either the guy or one of the people

00:08:28 ◼   ► who invented the Ogg Vorbis audio codec.

00:08:30 ◼   ► and he has a lot of great explainers out there

00:08:34 ◼   ► about basically like why you don't need

00:08:36 ◼   ► higher than CD quality audio as a listener.

00:08:39 ◼   ► And explains a lot of that stuff.

00:08:40 ◼   ► I learned a lot from that and some other research,

00:08:42 ◼   ► but we'll put both these links in the show notes,

00:08:44 ◼   ► both that video and the Wikipedia article

00:08:46 ◼   ► on audio bit depth.

00:08:48 ◼   ► - Excellent.

00:08:49 ◼   ► So we had a couple of thoughts,

00:08:51 ◼   ► or listeners had a couple of thoughts

00:08:53 ◼   ► about the iPhone Pro Notch.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And I'm embarrassed to admit that there's one thought

00:08:59 ◼   ► that I didn't consider. So I'm in the camp that I think, not having seen anything of course,

00:09:05 ◼   ► that it makes the most sense to kind of hide the notch. So hypothetically, the area adjacent to the

00:09:12 ◼   ► notch would be all black, so it would all kind of blend together and it would just look like

00:09:15 ◼   ► empty screen in the center, and it would look not too dissimilar from the way a phone looks today.

00:09:20 ◼   ► But somebody, maybe it was one of you guys, thought, "Well, okay smart guy, what happens

00:09:25 ◼   ► when you go landscape?

00:09:27 ◼   ► And I don't have a good answer for that.

00:09:29 ◼   ► So I'm really ashamed of myself

00:09:33 ◼   ► that I didn't even think about this

00:09:34 ◼   ► until I saw this in the show notes.

00:09:35 ◼   ► So Marco, what do you think about what happens

00:09:38 ◼   ► when you put this supposed phone in landscape?

00:09:42 ◼   ► - So obviously it depends on like

00:09:43 ◼   ► how they handle the notch in the UI.

00:09:45 ◼   ► If the notch is basically hidden

00:09:47 ◼   ► and you just have like status bar black on left and right

00:09:50 ◼   ► and then you have like a square window below it

00:09:52 ◼   ► that takes up the rest of the screen,

00:09:54 ◼   ► which as I mentioned previously,

00:09:55 ◼   ► that's what I kinda hope they do.

00:09:57 ◼   ► If that's what they do, then I think it's pretty easy.

00:10:00 ◼   ► In landscape, you just leave those little strips black

00:10:04 ◼   ► and you don't use them at all.

00:10:07 ◼   ► That's probably not what they will do.

00:10:08 ◼   ► I have a feeling what they actually will do is

00:10:11 ◼   ► shove translucent UI under those

00:10:13 ◼   ► and have ways to actually use it

00:10:16 ◼   ► in a way that might be kind of awkward.

00:10:18 ◼   ► Now in landscape, the only reason I think anybody

00:10:21 ◼   ► used their phones in landscape,

00:10:23 ◼   ► I think probably the big ones are watching video,

00:10:26 ◼   ► although even that, a lot of people watch it

00:10:28 ◼   ► in portrait anyway, just because that's how they are used

00:10:31 ◼   ► to holding their phones.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Also, certain games play in landscape,

00:10:35 ◼   ► although again, I think the most successful ones

00:10:36 ◼   ► play in portrait on the phone.

00:10:38 ◼   ► And then the other thing is, I guess,

00:10:40 ◼   ► when you're taking video or shooting with the camera,

00:10:42 ◼   ► you might rotate it.

00:10:43 ◼   ► So all those things could, they could make ways

00:10:46 ◼   ► to use the notch in a few clever ways,

00:10:50 ◼   ► like maybe a game could show some controls in there,

00:10:53 ◼   ► maybe the camera can shove some controls in there.

00:10:55 ◼   ► But I have a feeling most of what we're gonna see

00:10:57 ◼   ► is basically going to be in landscape,

00:10:59 ◼   ► the notch just becomes black and you don't see it at all.

00:11:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think you can't do anything

00:11:05 ◼   ► with the notch in landscape

00:11:08 ◼   ► because anything that you would think of doing

00:11:10 ◼   ► would represent data loss to the content.

00:11:13 ◼   ► In portrait, the status bar is not your content,

00:11:16 ◼   ► it's part of the UI.

00:11:17 ◼   ► So you can do whatever dance you wanna do

00:11:19 ◼   ► with the status bar, whether it hides in there

00:11:21 ◼   ► or the status bar is below or whatever, but if you're in landscape and you're doing video

00:11:27 ◼   ► or something, even if the OS lets you go edge to edge and use the notches, what if you want

00:11:32 ◼   ► to see what's under the camera things?

00:11:34 ◼   ► It's like, oh, something's in my way.

00:11:35 ◼   ► I can't see what the camera's shooting there.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Maybe that's not important.

00:11:39 ◼   ► What was it?

00:11:40 ◼   ► There was something that I was angry about.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Oh, I think it was like QuickTime Player many years ago, maybe still now.

00:11:47 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:11:48 ◼   ► I still use QuickTime Player 7.

00:11:49 ◼   ► At one point, Apple, I believe Apple, released a video player, I think it was the QuickTime

00:11:55 ◼   ► player, that would show video in a window with rounded corners.

00:12:01 ◼   ► And it was like, "Don't chop off the corners, there's video in those corners."

00:12:05 ◼   ► Well, not that there's a lot of video, but there is video there.

00:12:08 ◼   ► And you're just like, "No, you don't need to see that, because it's more important for

00:12:11 ◼   ► this window to have rounded corners than for you to see the video that's in that corner."

00:12:16 ◼   ► And I know it's a small thing, but just on the principle, it's like, if you do that,

00:12:21 ◼   ► I don't even have the option to see what's under the notch, right?

00:12:26 ◼   ► So I think you have to just when you go into landscape, I feel like the OS should just

00:12:32 ◼   ► enforce entirely.

00:12:33 ◼   ► Maybe games can come up with something clever to do, like little men climb on the notch,

00:12:36 ◼   ► right?

00:12:37 ◼   ► Or the notch is like a little gun turd or something.

00:12:38 ◼   ► But beyond that, that'd be awesome.

00:12:40 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, because you can incorporate it and be fun, but it would only work in this

00:12:44 ◼   ► one model of phone.

00:12:45 ◼   ► It's just so much safer to say when it goes in landscape.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Forget about the notch.

00:12:48 ◼   ► We don't light up the pixels on either side of it.

00:12:50 ◼   ► The thing is just, you know, it's just a straight line

00:12:53 ◼   ► down the edge.

00:12:54 ◼   ► I also saw, by the way, another mock-up image a while ago

00:12:59 ◼   ► showing screen real estate-wise, what do you

00:13:02 ◼   ► get with the edge-to-edge phone.

00:13:03 ◼   ► And I know this can't be true because this one's

00:13:05 ◼   ► got to be wider than the iPhone 7 II,

00:13:06 ◼   ► but it was like basically trying to say you don't really

00:13:10 ◼   ► get any new space because all the new pixels on the bottom

00:13:13 ◼   ► are taken up essentially with the home button area

00:13:15 ◼   ► and whatever they're gonna do there.

00:13:17 ◼   ► And this thing was assuming that like the UI nav bar

00:13:20 ◼   ► wasn't gonna throw stuff there.

00:13:21 ◼   ► And at the top, you've got the notch

00:13:23 ◼   ► and then you got a little sliver of space

00:13:27 ◼   ► and then you've got the normal iPhone size screen

00:13:29 ◼   ► in between those two things.

00:13:30 ◼   ► And a little sliver of space was like,

00:13:33 ◼   ► look like a little status bar.

00:13:34 ◼   ► So the idea was that,

00:13:36 ◼   ► I guess if you had a non optimized

00:13:38 ◼   ► for iPhone pro application,

00:13:42 ◼   ► it would show its status bar below the notch

00:13:44 ◼   ► in the traditional way,

00:13:45 ◼   ► because between the bottom of the notch

00:13:47 ◼   ► and the top of the software home button area

00:13:50 ◼   ► would be a screen that is the same resolution

00:13:52 ◼   ► as some existing iPhone.

00:13:54 ◼   ► Anyway, that's the impression I got from this image.

00:13:56 ◼   ► But the more I think about it,

00:13:57 ◼   ► the more I think that can't possibly be the case

00:13:59 ◼   ► because at the very least it should be wider

00:14:00 ◼   ► than the other stuff.

00:14:01 ◼   ► But it would be weird if there was like

00:14:04 ◼   ► a backward compatibility mode for unmodified apps

00:14:08 ◼   ► that were not like notch savvy.

00:14:11 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:14:12 ◼   ► Like, they could, they,

00:14:13 ◼   ► 'cause they, you know, and he was like,

00:14:15 ◼   ► Apple wouldn't do that, it's inelegant.

00:14:16 ◼   ► They took, they, you know, phone apps run at 2X

00:14:18 ◼   ► on your iPad to this day, and it looks terrible.

00:14:20 ◼   ► And they zoom things that have not been updated

00:14:23 ◼   ► for the iPhone 5 form, but like,

00:14:26 ◼   ► in the past they've done that,

00:14:28 ◼   ► and it's been a good choice, because like,

00:14:29 ◼   ► look, if people don't update their apps,

00:14:31 ◼   ► we'll make them run as close as possible

00:14:32 ◼   ► to the way they used to run.

00:14:34 ◼   ► So the app has no idea that it's running

00:14:35 ◼   ► on a totally new, weird phone.

00:14:37 ◼   ► It just looks a little bit strange,

00:14:39 ◼   ► but it's completely compatible,

00:14:40 ◼   ► because we don't do anything weird.

00:14:41 ◼   ► And I can imagine that happening with this new phone,

00:14:45 ◼   ► which will be bad, but I guess it'll motivate people

00:14:49 ◼   ► to incorporate the notch into their applications.

00:14:52 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:14:55 ◼   ► Now why bother having the notch in the first place?

00:14:57 ◼   ► - Again, this is one of my thoughts.

00:15:00 ◼   ► Why are we doing this?

00:15:03 ◼   ► We have a notch, like the edge to edge screen.

00:15:06 ◼   ► All right, yeah, we want to have an edge to edge screen,

00:15:07 ◼   ► but why do we have to have a notch to that?

00:15:09 ◼   ► You can go all the way to the left edge,

00:15:11 ◼   ► all the way to the right edge,

00:15:12 ◼   ► and all the way to the bottom edge.

00:15:14 ◼   ► All you had to do is not go all the way to the top edge.

00:15:16 ◼   ► Instead of having a notch,

00:15:18 ◼   ► you have a presumably very thin little forehead.

00:15:22 ◼   ► It would still be a quote unquote edge to edge screen

00:15:25 ◼   ► as compared to all iPhones previously

00:15:28 ◼   ► which had very large chins and foreheads, right?

00:15:31 ◼   ► The notch is asymmetrical

00:15:33 ◼   ► and so would the skinny little forehead version.

00:15:37 ◼   ► but it's less asymmetrical, John, the notch, I mean.

00:15:41 ◼   ► - Well, but the whole point is there's something on top

00:15:45 ◼   ► that's not on the bottom,

00:15:46 ◼   ► whether it's a skinny thing that's on top, anyway.

00:15:49 ◼   ► And it would just eliminate an entire class

00:15:52 ◼   ► of weird solver problems.

00:15:53 ◼   ► So presumably Apple has done a lot of work in the OS

00:15:56 ◼   ► and in the frameworks, figuring out the answers

00:15:58 ◼   ► to all these questions that we're just guessing at now.

00:16:00 ◼   ► They've figured out answers to all of these.

00:16:02 ◼   ► They've decided what they're gonna do

00:16:03 ◼   ► in all these different cases, tested applications,

00:16:06 ◼   ► test the new API so you can be notch savvy

00:16:08 ◼   ► and do all this stuff, right?

00:16:10 ◼   ► All of that work would go away

00:16:11 ◼   ► if they just made the notch go from edge to edge,

00:16:14 ◼   ► but I guess the phone wouldn't look as cool.

00:16:16 ◼   ► And then, you know, I don't know,

00:16:18 ◼   ► like does anyone else have a notch?

00:16:19 ◼   ► Is Apple gonna be the first notch?

00:16:21 ◼   ► I know there are phones out there

00:16:22 ◼   ► that already look like edge to edge screen,

00:16:24 ◼   ► but with a little skinny forehead.

00:16:25 ◼   ► So maybe Apple just didn't wanna look like that.

00:16:26 ◼   ► - Can't innovate anymore, my ass.

00:16:29 ◼   ► - This would be one of those things where

00:16:31 ◼   ► if Apple was like other companies

00:16:35 ◼   ► And like, you could, they have like interviews

00:16:38 ◼   ► with the designers, like you get the whole team

00:16:40 ◼   ► that designed the new iPhone and they'd have to do

00:16:42 ◼   ► a big article and like wired or something and be like,

00:16:44 ◼   ► tell me about your motivation for designing that.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And they would like explain why they went with the notch.

00:16:49 ◼   ► Right? But we never get those reasons.

00:16:50 ◼   ► Just like, this is the phone, here it is.

00:16:52 ◼   ► Maybe there's a sentence and a keynote about it,

00:16:55 ◼   ► which Apple will never ever elaborate on.

00:16:57 ◼   ► And like, so we just, we just have to wait 20 years

00:17:01 ◼   ► for the tell all books, but it's a bit of a head scratcher

00:17:04 ◼   ► for me because I think it looks cool with the notch.

00:17:07 ◼   ► I think there's gonna be some interesting possibilities

00:17:09 ◼   ► there, but it is a heck of a lot of work.

00:17:11 ◼   ► And it seems like a stop gap.

00:17:14 ◼   ► Like are we gonna have notches forever?

00:17:16 ◼   ► Presumably whatever tech issues necessitate the notch

00:17:20 ◼   ► will diminish over time.

00:17:22 ◼   ► Either you're able to embed those sensors someplace else,

00:17:24 ◼   ► or you'll be able to make such a skinny forehead

00:17:26 ◼   ► that it won't even be a forehead,

00:17:27 ◼   ► and it'll just be like the thing goes to edge to edge.

00:17:29 ◼   ► I don't know, this is not the permanent state of all,

00:17:32 ◼   ► Like will all future iPhones have notches

00:17:35 ◼   ► for the next seven years?

00:17:36 ◼   ► There's just gonna be notches from here to there,

00:17:37 ◼   ► but they're doing all this work with the OS and everything.

00:17:40 ◼   ► It would seem like a waste if it's just like,

00:17:43 ◼   ► remember that time we rejiggered all the frameworks

00:17:46 ◼   ► in the OS for this one phone,

00:17:47 ◼   ► and it was the only one that ended up having a notch?

00:17:49 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:17:51 ◼   ► We'll find out in the fall, I guess.

00:17:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is why what I want to happen,

00:17:56 ◼   ► although I don't think this is what will happen again,

00:17:58 ◼   ► but what I want to happen here is

00:18:01 ◼   ► I want the notch to basically be invisible in the software.

00:18:05 ◼   ► Like, I want it to just have a status bar on left and right.

00:18:08 ◼   ► Then you get the extra 20 point height

00:18:11 ◼   ► that the status bar would have taken up in the main screen.

00:18:13 ◼   ► You can shove that up into this little side area

00:18:16 ◼   ► where there is no center, but you can rearrange status bar,

00:18:19 ◼   ► and the application frame is just everything below that.

00:18:22 ◼   ► I would love that that was the solution.

00:18:24 ◼   ► I don't want, as a user and as a programmer of apps

00:18:27 ◼   ► for this thing, and as a designer of the app,

00:18:29 ◼   ► I do not want to have to deal with the notch.

00:18:31 ◼   ► I think it will be clunky and weird

00:18:34 ◼   ► and I think it will look weird as a user.

00:18:35 ◼   ► I'm not looking forward to that at all

00:18:36 ◼   ► and I do think it looks like an inelegant hack

00:18:40 ◼   ► and if Samsung would have released that notch

00:18:43 ◼   ► and Apple didn't, we'd make fun of them for it.

00:18:45 ◼   ► That's exactly the kind of thing where we'd be like,

00:18:47 ◼   ► oh, you guys are bad at design, look at this stupid notch.

00:18:49 ◼   ► Just like the flat tire Moto 360 watch.

00:18:52 ◼   ► We made fun of that relentlessly.

00:18:54 ◼   ► Everyone in Apple World did

00:18:56 ◼   ► because that was like a bad design hack

00:18:59 ◼   ► to get around a physical shortcoming.

00:19:01 ◼   ► I don't see how the notch is any different.

00:19:03 ◼   ► That looks like a bad design hack

00:19:04 ◼   ► to get around a physical shortcoming to me.

00:19:06 ◼   ► Again, we'll see what happens

00:19:07 ◼   ► when we see the final software,

00:19:09 ◼   ► but I really do not want the UI in any way

00:19:13 ◼   ► to wrap around that except the status bar

00:19:16 ◼   ► in a way that you barely even notice.

00:19:18 ◼   ► But because of that leaked image from the HomeBot firmware

00:19:21 ◼   ► showing that notch as like the recognizable iconic shape

00:19:25 ◼   ► of this phone, that's the reason I'm concerned

00:19:28 ◼   ► that they're not doing it that way.

00:19:29 ◼   ► - That would just be the lock screen, like you said.

00:19:31 ◼   ► - It may, yeah, maybe just the lock screen.

00:19:32 ◼   ► That wouldn't be too bad.

00:19:34 ◼   ► But if it's any other parts of the UI,

00:19:36 ◼   ► like if they scroll translucent bars under there

00:19:38 ◼   ► or anything like that, I really,

00:19:40 ◼   ► I don't think I'm going to like that.

00:19:42 ◼   ► Again, that seems like a bad design hack, not good design.

00:19:47 ◼   ► - So people in the chat room are posting pictures

00:19:49 ◼   ► of, of course, Android phones

00:19:51 ◼   ► that have their own little notches.

00:19:53 ◼   ► The one they're showing here is a very tiny notch

00:19:55 ◼   ► It just wraps around one little front-facing camera because obviously the, you know, why

00:19:59 ◼   ► does the new phone supposedly have a notch instead of just this little tiny button-like

00:20:04 ◼   ► cutout?

00:20:05 ◼   ► Because it's got to have more than just a camera there.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Maybe it'll have two front-facing cameras.

00:20:08 ◼   ► Certainly it's got the IR sensor for depth of the face stuff.

00:20:10 ◼   ► Like who knows what's in that notch.

00:20:12 ◼   ► But it can't be as small as this.

00:20:13 ◼   ► But anyway, as in all things, Android phones have done it first.

00:20:19 ◼   ► So I think actually Simpsons did it first, Jon.

00:20:21 ◼   ► Then Opera.

00:20:22 ◼   ► Then Opera.

00:20:23 ◼   ► That's right.

00:20:24 ◼   ► "Did it" is the line. "Opera did it first" is that joke, so I think Opera wins this one.

00:20:30 ◼   ► Thank you. Did you really just well actually me?

00:20:33 ◼   ► You sure did. The sad part is he's right.

00:20:37 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week by Eero. Go to Eero.com and use code ATP for free overnight

00:20:43 ◼   ► shipping. Wi-Fi, when you only have one router, just doesn't cover houses very well. Because

00:20:48 ◼   ► Wi-Fi waves don't go through walls as well as they go through open spaces and you get

00:20:52 ◼   ► these dead zones and everything else.

00:20:54 ◼   ► Eero is designed to solve that problem.

00:20:56 ◼   ► Because businesses and schools and campuses

00:20:59 ◼   ► have done this for a long time,

00:21:01 ◼   ► they use multiple access points.

00:21:02 ◼   ► And if you did this for your home,

00:21:04 ◼   ► it was very, very complicated before Eero.

00:21:06 ◼   ► Eero makes it incredibly easy to have

00:21:09 ◼   ► a distributed Wi-Fi system, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi,

00:21:13 ◼   ► in your home with the easiest setup

00:21:15 ◼   ► of any system I've ever seen.

00:21:17 ◼   ► All you do, you plug it in, you use their app

00:21:19 ◼   ► on your iPhone or your Android phone,

00:21:21 ◼   ► and it sets it up and you have to do literally almost nothing.

00:21:24 ◼   ► So you get the one main unit.

00:21:26 ◼   ► And they've actually just updated their hardware.

00:21:28 ◼   ► The old ones are great too, but they just

00:21:30 ◼   ► did the Generation 2 system.

00:21:32 ◼   ► So this has the main unit, which is now tri-band and twice

00:21:36 ◼   ► as fast as the first one.

00:21:37 ◼   ► Has a whole other radio.

00:21:39 ◼   ► You have now these secondary units.

00:21:41 ◼   ► They used to be the same as the main unit.

00:21:43 ◼   ► Now they have these little ones called beacons.

00:21:45 ◼   ► And they are even smaller, even simpler.

00:21:47 ◼   ► They look like kind of just slightly larger

00:21:49 ◼   ► than a nightlight.

00:21:50 ◼   ► and you just plug it in and it sits flush in your outlet.

00:21:52 ◼   ► It looks amazing, it's tiny, it's unobtrusive.

00:21:54 ◼   ► They even actually have night lights

00:21:56 ◼   ► in the bottom of the beacons, which is pretty cool.

00:21:59 ◼   ► So if you put it like in a hallway or anything.

00:22:00 ◼   ► And it makes it so easy to place anywhere.

00:22:02 ◼   ► And that covers the whole house.

00:22:04 ◼   ► And they don't have to be wired to each other.

00:22:06 ◼   ► Only the first one has to be wired

00:22:08 ◼   ► to your home's internet connection.

00:22:09 ◼   ► And the other ones, they distribute the wifi

00:22:13 ◼   ► with a mesh network between themselves.

00:22:15 ◼   ► So you don't have to worry about running ethernet wires

00:22:17 ◼   ► to your access points or anything else.

00:22:19 ◼   ► It's super, super easy.

00:22:21 ◼   ► With the new second generation and the Eero Beacon,

00:22:23 ◼   ► performance is even better, the looks are even nicer,

00:22:26 ◼   ► and it's even smaller.

00:22:27 ◼   ► What you need is this kind of system.

00:22:29 ◼   ► Single routers are not good enough anymore.

00:22:31 ◼   ► They don't cover houses, we all know that.

00:22:33 ◼   ► We've all done that for years.

00:22:34 ◼   ► No matter how many antennas you put on one,

00:22:36 ◼   ► it doesn't cover everything.

00:22:37 ◼   ► And Eero is by far the easiest way to do this

00:22:39 ◼   ► I've ever seen.

00:22:40 ◼   ► So check it out, they have great support if you need it.

00:22:42 ◼   ► They have great pricing.

00:22:43 ◼   ► Go to Eero.com and use promo code ATP

00:22:47 ◼   ► to get free overnight shipping.

00:22:49 ◼   ► Thanks to Eero for sponsoring our show.

00:22:51 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:22:54 ◼   ► - Anyway, Rustam Karimov of 1Password,

00:22:58 ◼   ► I believe a co-founder if I'm not mistaken,

00:23:00 ◼   ► has written a blog post to say among other things,

00:23:02 ◼   ► 1Password 7th Windows will be getting support

00:23:04 ◼   ► for standalone vaults,

00:23:05 ◼   ► which is the thing that started the big kerfuffle

00:23:07 ◼   ► a few weeks ago.

00:23:09 ◼   ► Also WLAN sync and different license related information.

00:23:14 ◼   ► John, any other thoughts you wanna add on this?

00:23:17 ◼   ► No, just that this is another in the pattern we've seen for a couple of years now, like

00:23:23 ◼   ► a company will change some part of its product, either the features or the business model

00:23:28 ◼   ► or both, and then a bunch of people get angry about it, and then there's always the follow-up

00:23:33 ◼   ► where they've incorporated the feedback from their customers.

00:23:36 ◼   ► They were taken by surprise by how angry people were about a particular thing, and they were

00:23:42 ◼   ► like, "All right, well, we can change that."

00:23:43 ◼   ► reassure people that like we're not gonna you know the description thing is

00:23:46 ◼   ► not going to take away your ability to have all your stuff locally you don't

00:23:49 ◼   ► have to use the cloud so on and so forth so looks like they are doing the right

00:23:53 ◼   ► things yeah I saw a lot of feedback about this a lot of people talked about

00:24:00 ◼   ► well if if everything goes subscription then I'm not gonna have any money for

00:24:06 ◼   ► anything anymore and I don't know I feel like we should address that perhaps

00:24:11 ◼   ► again. I don't know, did we talk about this before? I think Marco covered it the last time we talked

00:24:16 ◼   ► about it. I agree. It's fresh in my memory because I listened to those shows just recently to catch

00:24:22 ◼   ► up on them. But yeah, like, I mean, it's kind of a slippery slope argument, but so far it hasn't

00:24:26 ◼   ► happened. And there's a natural counterbalance, which is, well, if people don't like it, they

00:24:31 ◼   ► won't buy it. And if they don't buy it, people won't do it. Like, so it's, you know, there's,

00:24:34 ◼   ► there aren't many forces in the mix here that are going to cause this dystopia to

00:24:41 ◼   ► happen despite the fact that users don't want it. Like it's possible for there to

00:24:46 ◼   ► be countervailing forces for example if Apple said hey guess what the only way

00:24:50 ◼   ► you could sell applications in the app course is subscription but that that's

00:24:53 ◼   ► not the way things are so it's not not time to be worried about it now. Don't

00:24:58 ◼   ► like it don't buy it. Exactly exactly what I was gonna say if something if

00:25:02 ◼   ► If something that you like but don't love suddenly becomes subscription, then guess

00:25:06 ◼   ► what?

00:25:07 ◼   ► You have an option, which is not to get a subscription.

00:25:10 ◼   ► That's okay.

00:25:11 ◼   ► The one thing I will say, though, is that if an app goes from not subscription to subscription,

00:25:17 ◼   ► there's no way around that that's going to happen from time to time.

00:25:21 ◼   ► And that is tough, right?

00:25:22 ◼   ► Because here it is, you thought you paid for something in some cases that you would have

00:25:26 ◼   ► for a while, although you should not have expected that you have it forever.

00:25:29 ◼   ► And then the cost changes.

00:25:31 ◼   ► And that's a bummer like I don't mean to be sarcastic at all about that that really is a bummer

00:25:36 ◼   ► But there's different trade-offs to like that one person who said like what if I lose my job

00:25:40 ◼   ► I don't want to also lose all my programs because I can't afford to pay their monthly bills anymore

00:25:44 ◼   ► Well, you know that's the smile I wait for lose my job

00:25:47 ◼   ► I don't want to lose cable TV because I can't afford the bill anymore

00:25:49 ◼   ► Well, you know I was like well

00:25:50 ◼   ► I need the software to do my job like there presumably every single application in an entire category won't be subscription

00:25:57 ◼   ► Right, or even if it is maybe they'll have varying subscriptions and right now the subscriptions are like three bucks a month

00:26:03 ◼   ► So I feel like if you can't script either three dollars a month

00:26:05 ◼   ► You have much bigger problems than not being able to use your graphics program to produce spec work

00:26:10 ◼   ► Which you shouldn't be doing anyway to get your next job. So anyway

00:26:13 ◼   ► You know

00:26:15 ◼   ► In times of hardship many things are difficult

00:26:18 ◼   ► From paying your rent to your food your health insurance

00:26:21 ◼   ► Your software licenses are just another one of those potential things that could be a problem

00:26:27 ◼   ► But, you know, if there's a need for this, and if this is a real problem, someone will

00:26:31 ◼   ► fill it by selling a program for a fixed price and, you know, selling upgrades in the traditional

00:26:37 ◼   ► way or going out of business because they can't sustain their one application.

00:26:41 ◼   ► But hey, you've got it until it stops working.

00:26:43 ◼   ► I mean, there's always options, too.

00:26:44 ◼   ► Like, you know, look at what, like, high school kids and college kids and people in developing

00:26:49 ◼   ► countries, like, there's a lot of markets of people who can't afford a bunch of software

00:26:53 ◼   ► licenses or subscriptions, and they find other options.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Piracy maybe is not the best option,

00:26:59 ◼   ► but it's certainly a widespread one.

00:27:01 ◼   ► A much better option is free software alternatives.

00:27:04 ◼   ► Almost every kind of task you can do in a computer today

00:27:07 ◼   ► has some kind of free software alternative

00:27:09 ◼   ► to the big name one.

00:27:10 ◼   ► Photoshop, Illustrator, audio processing stuff,

00:27:14 ◼   ► almost all these big creative apps or productivity apps,

00:27:18 ◼   ► they almost all have freeware alternatives,

00:27:20 ◼   ► free open source, if not just free alternatives.

00:27:24 ◼   ► And not to mention, all the stuff built into the OS

00:27:27 ◼   ► these days or doing things on iOS and Android where the apps cost very, very little money

00:27:33 ◼   ► usually and usually you buy it once if anything and it's free and you can do a lot of free

00:27:39 ◼   ► stuff there or do a lot of inexpensive stuff there with tools that are really good these

00:27:43 ◼   ► days. There's lots of options now. I think the "I can't afford all my software subscriptions"

00:27:51 ◼   ► is mostly a complaint from people who very much

00:27:55 ◼   ► can afford them and are just looking for a reason

00:27:58 ◼   ► to be upset about a pricing change.

00:28:00 ◼   ► Because when you change the business model,

00:28:02 ◼   ► that's when people get upset.

00:28:04 ◼   ► It matters a lot less what you change it to

00:28:06 ◼   ► than the fact that you changed it and people feel

00:28:09 ◼   ► maybe surprised or caught off guard by that

00:28:12 ◼   ► or feel like they're being taken advantage of

00:28:14 ◼   ► like after the fact you're changing the deal,

00:28:16 ◼   ► you know, after the fact, you know, I know,

00:28:17 ◼   ► pray you don't answer it further, et cetera.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Again, I don't think this is a real issue.

00:28:22 ◼   ► I don't think this is something that anybody

00:28:24 ◼   ► is actually facing hardship over in any real numbers.

00:28:28 ◼   ► This is people complaining who very much can't afford it

00:28:31 ◼   ► and are just mad.

00:28:33 ◼   ► And for the people who truly can't afford it,

00:28:34 ◼   ► there's lots of great options out there

00:28:36 ◼   ► that are either inexpensive or free.

00:28:39 ◼   ► And many of them are built into the OS you already have

00:28:42 ◼   ► and whatever isn't, you can get in your app store of choice

00:28:45 ◼   ► or your online repository of software of choice

00:28:49 ◼   ► for very little money or nothing usually.

00:28:51 ◼   ► Because this is not like, people have used computers

00:28:54 ◼   ► without paying for things on them for a very long time.

00:28:57 ◼   ► And this is a solved problem in so many ways.

00:29:01 ◼   ► - All right, Giaro wants to know,

00:29:03 ◼   ► is there any reason not to use

00:29:04 ◼   ► the built-in calibration tools on the Apple TV?

00:29:07 ◼   ► You can get to that from the Apple TV settings,

00:29:09 ◼   ► audio and video calibrate.

00:29:11 ◼   ► - You can use them, but they're terrible.

00:29:13 ◼   ► I mean, like they're,

00:29:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:29:15 ◼   ► - Of course you can. - They're not terrible,

00:29:16 ◼   ► they're limited.

00:29:17 ◼   ► I think that all it does is like screen bounds and maybe like one other thing.

00:29:23 ◼   ► Like it doesn't do all the color, white balance, grayscale, brightness, contrast, you know,

00:29:30 ◼   ► it doesn't do all that stuff.

00:29:31 ◼   ► If they want to improve that in the future versions of UEOS it would be great, but the

00:29:35 ◼   ► current one and I believe the one in the betas is still just very limited.

00:29:40 ◼   ► It's better than nothing so by all means do it and so you can see if you're in a casey

00:29:43 ◼   ► like situation where you're missing half the pixels on your screen because not half,

00:29:47 ◼   ► but some portion of the pixels on your screen because you have your thing in overscan mode.

00:29:50 ◼   ► And that may make you sad to know that, but beyond that you still need a calibration app.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Fine, fine.

00:29:57 ◼   ► All right, apparently Samir Mizrahi listens to our show, or at least that's what I'm going

00:30:02 ◼   ► to claim, because mere weeks, maybe even a few days after we had discussed how frustrating

00:30:10 ◼   ► it is to hear the first song in your library every time you reconnect via Bluetooth, this

00:30:16 ◼   ► individual has released a single on iTunes called A A A A A Very Good Song. And it is

00:30:25 ◼   ► a little less than 10 minutes of silence because apparently any more than 10 minutes and iTunes

00:30:29 ◼   ► charges you for a whole album. And the idea is because it's a space, a space, a space,

00:30:34 ◼   ► a space, a space, very good song, it is very likely to be the very first song in your library.

00:30:40 ◼   ► So every time you plug in your phone

00:30:43 ◼   ► or start Bluetooth or what have you,

00:30:45 ◼   ► you don't hear the same, in my case,

00:30:48 ◼   ► track by Aliyah every single time.

00:30:50 ◼   ► So this is an absolutely brilliant solution

00:30:53 ◼   ► to a problem that none of us should really have.

00:30:56 ◼   ► - My favorite thing about this is

00:30:57 ◼   ► how far up the charts it was climbing.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Like, we saw some articles about it here and there.

00:31:03 ◼   ► I don't have anything handy, unfortunately,

00:31:05 ◼   ► 'cause I'm a slacker on vacation.

00:31:06 ◼   ► But it was noticeably ranking

00:31:10 ◼   ► the iTunes top singles chart somewhere.

00:31:12 ◼   ► Why do you not allowed to start with like a space or you know a punctuation character

00:31:19 ◼   ► or a number all the other things that would have sorted before the A's because I feel

00:31:23 ◼   ► like now now this is now you've started a war now for who can be the earliest right

00:31:27 ◼   ► no don't get that AA track you need my track which is one one one oh don't get mine it's

00:31:32 ◼   ► it's space space space exclamation point anyway um well I feel like that's kind of like a

00:31:37 ◼   ► like a million dollar homepage problem.

00:31:40 ◼   ► Like anybody else who tries the same thing is not going to get anywhere.

00:31:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm just saying for sorting purposes, not for like actually selling the thing.

00:31:50 ◼   ► But you know, everyone sent us this obviously, but it doesn't solve the problem at all.

00:31:53 ◼   ► In fact, I think it makes it worse.

00:31:55 ◼   ► The fact that it's silent makes it worse because if I had this track, I would be like waiting

00:32:02 ◼   ► and thinking, "Am I hearing the silent track or is it just taking a long time to start

00:32:06 ◼   ► playing?

00:32:07 ◼   ► overcast in the background. And like, you know, the problem is not I keep hearing the first,

00:32:13 ◼   ► you know, few notes of a song, because the alphabetically first song in my playlist I like,

00:32:18 ◼   ► it's a good song, and I'm not sick of it because I never listened to the whole thing. I'm frustrated

00:32:22 ◼   ► by the fact that it has picked the wrong source. And by the way, after I said like, "Oh, most of

00:32:27 ◼   ► the time it does the right thing, maybe 15% of the time I get the wrong thing," this thing has taken

00:32:31 ◼   ► revenge on me in my last like 50 trips in the car. 100% of the time it has started playing

00:32:37 ◼   ► music even if I was just playing. I don't know if it's the overcast beta is crashing or I don't know

00:32:42 ◼   ► what the hell's going on but anyway it's really bad for me. Wait there is no current beta you

00:32:46 ◼   ► should be using the app store version. Well maybe that's the problem do I have a little dot next to

00:32:50 ◼   ► overcast on my phone? Let me see. That's a bug dot right now. I do have a dot next to it. Oh get rid

00:32:55 ◼   ► of that. All right anyway maybe that's my problem but either way this this track would not solve my

00:33:01 ◼   ► problem and I mean what it should really be is a voice that says it happened again.

00:33:07 ◼   ► You thought different audio would be playing but instead it's playing the song from your

00:33:10 ◼   ► playlist.

00:33:11 ◼   ► Pull over safely and then fiddle with your phone.

00:33:14 ◼   ► Don't try to do it while you're driving because you'll run somebody over or you'll die.

00:33:18 ◼   ► But then you'd be sick of hearing that.

00:33:20 ◼   ► Bottom line is there is no safe track to put there and I don't think the silent one solves

00:33:22 ◼   ► the problem.

00:33:23 ◼   ► I think it makes it worse.

00:33:24 ◼   ► But more power to this person for selling people the sounds of silence.

00:33:28 ◼   ► All right, A, I don't know how to sell music on iTunes, but can we cut that out and actually

00:33:31 ◼   ► try this?

00:33:32 ◼   ► And then B, the way to solve this, I know we have some listeners inside of Apple.

00:33:38 ◼   ► I don't know how high up they go, but the way to solve this is to somehow get a hold

00:33:43 ◼   ► of Johnny Ives or Tim Cook's iPhone and sync a single track to it that is a renamed version

00:33:50 ◼   ► of some very annoying song that is renamed to be like A-A-A-A-A.

00:33:55 ◼   ► I don't know the the the possibilities are endless of what's on this could be

00:33:59 ◼   ► [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:34:28 ◼   ► You know, something that would really drive the most.

00:34:31 ◼   ► This problem will get solved in the next version of iOS.

00:34:35 ◼   ► - Phil's car will just be,

00:34:35 ◼   ► "Can't innovate more of my ass on a loop."

00:34:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:34:40 ◼   ► - Oh, my word.

00:34:42 ◼   ► So we actually did get some feedback about this,

00:34:44 ◼   ► and this individual wrote to say,

00:34:47 ◼   ► "Bluetooth has two major ways to start playback in a car.

00:34:50 ◼   ► "The good old simple play command

00:34:51 ◼   ► "and a newer set of advanced browsing commands

00:34:53 ◼   ► "that allows the car to control the apps

00:34:55 ◼   ► "and navigate the media library on the phone.

00:34:57 ◼   ► With a play command, the active media player is chosen by the phone, and that from time

00:35:02 ◼   ► to time gets a little buggy.

00:35:05 ◼   ► According to this person, it is quite likely that this whole little subsystem was written

00:35:08 ◼   ► by one person who may have then been moved somewhere else within Apple, and who even

00:35:13 ◼   ► knows.

00:35:14 ◼   ► But with the new browsing stuff, then the car can decide how it wants to select, you

00:35:19 ◼   ► know, like the active media player and a playlist and an album and blah blah blah.

00:35:23 ◼   ► And so now you're letting the car make choices that it probably shouldn't be making.

00:35:29 ◼   ► And so that makes everything a little bit dodgy.

00:35:32 ◼   ► So this is surely in part Apple's fault, but it is not by necessity entirely Apple's fault,

00:35:39 ◼   ► depending on the car, depending on how it's connecting, etc. etc. etc.

00:35:45 ◼   ► We're sponsored this week by Aftershokz Bone Conduction Headphones.

00:35:48 ◼   ► Go to ATP.Aftershokz.com to learn more.

00:35:53 ◼   ► Aftershocks headphones work by bone conduction.

00:35:55 ◼   ► So these small transducers rest in front of your ears,

00:35:58 ◼   ► not inside or around them like most headphones,

00:36:00 ◼   ► and they send mini vibrations through your cheekbones

00:36:03 ◼   ► directly to your inner ear.

00:36:05 ◼   ► It totally bypasses your ears and your eardrums.

00:36:08 ◼   ► So unlike every other kind of headphone,

00:36:10 ◼   ► bone conduction leaves your ears completely open

00:36:13 ◼   ► with nothing in them.

00:36:14 ◼   ► So for a lot of people like me,

00:36:16 ◼   ► we can't wear earbuds or in-ear monitors

00:36:18 ◼   ► 'cause they get physically uncomfortable in our ear canals.

00:36:21 ◼   ► Aftershocks don't have this problem because nothing is sitting in your ear and because they don't cover your ear

00:36:27 ◼   ► I find them far less sweaty than regular headphones in the summertime

00:36:31 ◼   ► And they're even IP IP 55 certified for water-resistant

00:36:34 ◼   ► So you can you can run with them in the rain or you can just sweat all over them all gross and it's totally fine

00:36:39 ◼   ► I have found that I use these more than any other headphones in the summertime

00:36:44 ◼   ► In fact, I'm on vacation right now for a few weeks and I brought only these headphones for walking

00:36:50 ◼   ► All other portable headphones I've left at home because I will I only want to use these here because I'm walking a lot

00:36:55 ◼   ► I'm using these multiple hours a day. I'm sweating a lot

00:36:58 ◼   ► I'm sometimes using them in the rain and it's totally fine

00:37:00 ◼   ► And the great thing about it is that because nothing blocks your ears at all

00:37:04 ◼   ► You hear the whole world around you so you can be walking or you know

00:37:08 ◼   ► Maybe cycling or running where you really want to hear the world around you for safety reasons or just to enjoy it and you need

00:37:15 ◼   ► Something that doesn't block your ear and that's what bone conduction is great at

00:37:18 ◼   ► It's also great if you want to listen around the house, you know

00:37:21 ◼   ► If you want to like take a phone call because you know

00:37:23 ◼   ► These are obviously bluetooth they can do phone calls if you want to take a phone call with them

00:37:26 ◼   ► And maybe you want to hear if anything happens in your house in the process you can do that, too

00:37:30 ◼   ► And so if I'm honest the downsides here are they're not the best for sound quality and they don't get very loud if you're in

00:37:35 ◼   ► A very loud environment because they're so open to the world if you're in like a lot like a subway station

00:37:41 ◼   ► These wouldn't be the pick for you

00:37:42 ◼   ► But they're amazing for walking around outside, for any kind of exercise use, for around the house,

00:37:48 ◼   ► and anywhere, anything you want, you want to hear the world around you. That's where the

00:37:52 ◼   ► Aftershocks are great. And again, they're so awesome for minimizing sweatiness too.

00:37:56 ◼   ► So the Aftershocks Trex titanium that I use here retails for 130 bucks. Listeners can get

00:38:01 ◼   ► a pair for yourself for just $100, 99.95 by visiting ATP.aftershocks.com. That is

00:38:07 ◼   ► atp.aftershocks.com. Thanks to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.

00:38:14 ◼   ► Apparently Ask ATP is really a thing. John, I think you said you wanted it to be a thing

00:38:21 ◼   ► and Marco you might have said the same. Apparently it's a thing.

00:38:24 ◼   ► Well the question is where does it go? Does it go after follow up or does it go after

00:38:27 ◼   ► topics? Or does it go in the after show? Where does it go?

00:38:29 ◼   ► No, I think it goes after follow up. Yeah, that sounds good.

00:38:32 ◼   ► I think that was right. Don't you feel like it's going to... you always

00:38:36 ◼   ► don't want to keep us away from our topics if we have long ask ATP we're even less likely

00:38:40 ◼   ► to get to topics.

00:38:41 ◼   ► You know what we could do, Jon? Now stick with me here, I know this is wild, but we

00:38:45 ◼   ► could have a little bit less follow-up.

00:38:48 ◼   ► We just did. We just did do that.

00:38:51 ◼   ► Are you sure? We've been recording 45 minutes.

00:38:54 ◼   ► I didn't add an item about talking about bit depth for 20 minutes. That was Margot.

00:38:58 ◼   ► That wasn't 20 minutes. Anyway, Cain asks, "How do you guys sync your home directories

00:39:02 ◼   ► between your Macs, and I will go first, I don't.

00:39:05 ◼   ► I use Dropbox for a handful of things, but generally speaking, it's all in the cloud,

00:39:10 ◼   ► man, so who cares.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Same.

00:39:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't sync my home directories, that's not a thing.

00:39:16 ◼   ► I doubt many people do that.

00:39:18 ◼   ► I think there used to be a way to...

00:39:19 ◼   ► No, I'm thinking of the server thing, never mind.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Anyway, what people do is they just use cloud stuff, whether it's iCloud Drive or Dropbox,

00:39:27 ◼   ► and that's the stuff that syncs, but they don't sync their entire home directories,

00:39:30 ◼   ► And it probably wouldn't be a good idea to sync your entire home directories, because

00:39:33 ◼   ► probably in the library directory and your home directory, there's crap that is machine-specific,

00:39:37 ◼   ► somewhere lurking in there, so you probably don't want to do a naive full sync of your

00:39:40 ◼   ► entire home directory.

00:39:42 ◼   ► And in general, sync is really hard to get right, and don't try to set up something yourself

00:39:45 ◼   ► to do it, because you'll just end up hosing yourself and you'll be sad.

00:39:50 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:39:51 ◼   ► This is a truly great question, which, outside of the obvious, I don't have a really good

00:39:56 ◼   ► answer to.

00:39:57 ◼   ► is from, let me get a full name if I can, Peter Cam. Peter Cam asks, "What's one piece of old tech

00:40:05 ◼   ► that is still in use, not hidden in an attic, and I think he's really talking to you, Jon,

00:40:11 ◼   ► due to superior qualities or retro joy? So for example, CRT TV, old video game consoles, iPods,

00:40:19 ◼   ► etc. I will start again. The obvious answer to this is that I have a turntable that I still use

00:40:25 ◼   ► almost daily. However, I just received that turntable as a Christmas present and it was

00:40:30 ◼   ► brand new at the time. So it is old technology, however it is a new device. In terms of old

00:40:37 ◼   ► technology that's still in use, I can't think of anything offhand. I'm sure there's something. I'm

00:40:43 ◼   ► not debating that I have something barbaric and old that I still use, but darn if I can think of

00:40:48 ◼   ► what it would be. So Marco went first last time. John, anything old that's outside of your attic?

00:40:54 ◼   ► Was gonna say my plasma TV, but it's not superior quality anymore. It's not retro joy

00:40:59 ◼   ► So I guess that's probably just the example of something old my consoles are probably it. I have a bunch of old consoles hooked up

00:41:05 ◼   ► Journey on ps4 helps me not have to use my ps3 for that

00:41:09 ◼   ► But if I want to play ego or shadow of the Colossus, I still have to use the ps3

00:41:12 ◼   ► So it is still connected to my TV

00:41:14 ◼   ► There's gonna be a ps4 port of shadow of the Colossus leaving only ego like my ps3 is hanging on

00:41:22 ◼   ► Same thing with my Wii which is basically used to play GameCube games most of the time

00:41:26 ◼   ► Almost all my old consoles are still hooked up

00:41:29 ◼   ► It's kind of gonna be a shame when I eventually get a 4k TV because I doubt the 4k TV will have

00:41:34 ◼   ► component video input to which I can connect my GameCube so I have to buy some kind of adapter and then I'd probably go and

00:41:40 ◼   ► Don't even bother right same thing with the Wii. I have we is got component video going into my TV

00:41:46 ◼   ► I would have to buy an adapter for that as well

00:41:49 ◼   ► But for now, yeah, I got a lot of old consoles hooked up.

00:41:53 ◼   ► - You know, I should point out that Marco

00:41:55 ◼   ► is probably going to say the same thing I forgot about,

00:41:58 ◼   ► which is I do have a mechanical watch

00:41:59 ◼   ► that is also not terribly old,

00:42:01 ◼   ► but I do like using it when I'm dressing up

00:42:04 ◼   ► for something special.

00:42:05 ◼   ► So now that I've stolen your thunder, Marco, what about you?

00:42:08 ◼   ► - Honestly, that was what I was thinking of

00:42:11 ◼   ► as the best thing I could say here.

00:42:14 ◼   ► Most of the things that I use are,

00:42:18 ◼   ► The things that I use that are actually quote old

00:42:20 ◼   ► in tech terms are not old enough to be interesting.

00:42:23 ◼   ► So I'll have an old speaker ramp for my desk or something,

00:42:28 ◼   ► but that's an old desktop computer speaker ramp

00:42:33 ◼   ► being like six years old.

00:42:35 ◼   ► Or for a while I was using my first Fujitsu

00:42:39 ◼   ► ScanSnap scanner, which I got about nine years ago,

00:42:44 ◼   ► but I actually replaced that about last year

00:42:46 ◼   ► because I was tired of replacing the rollers

00:42:48 ◼   ► and the new ones were super fast

00:42:49 ◼   ► and so I just got a new one.

00:42:51 ◼   ► Yeah, for me, I think the best answer here

00:42:53 ◼   ► is mechanical watches.

00:42:56 ◼   ► It's not a very interesting answer

00:42:58 ◼   ► and it's not a new answer

00:42:59 ◼   ► for people who have heard me talk ever.

00:43:01 ◼   ► So that's why I kinda wanted,

00:43:03 ◼   ► I wanted to go with something better

00:43:05 ◼   ► but I was not able to.

00:43:06 ◼   ► I do have mechanical watches that are somewhat old.

00:43:11 ◼   ► My oldest one is from 1968, so that's fairly old.

00:43:14 ◼   ► So I guess that counts.

00:43:15 ◼   ► Awesome. And that's the end of Ask ATP for this week. So let's move on to some topics.

00:43:21 ◼   ► Johnny, are you really going to let me get away with this?

00:43:24 ◼   ► So fast. It's a really quick one. It's a really quick one. That's another question.

00:43:28 ◼   ► How many questions did we do? I just did three because that's how many I could put before I ran out of time before the show.

00:43:32 ◼   ► So Chris Johnson, thank you Chris, writes in blah blah destiny two blah blah blah.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Try again.

00:43:40 ◼   ► Which destiny two class and subclass will you start with?

00:43:43 ◼   ► with. Marco, you want to take that? How about NSObject and Subclass would be...

00:43:53 ◼   ► How about NSMutableSet? I like that one a lot. You need to get on with the Swift Foundation classes here.

00:44:00 ◼   ► Yeah, they dropped the NS prefix a while ago, man. Come on. So I'm going to do... I was a

00:44:06 ◼   ► Warlock main in Destiny 1. I barely... I had a Titan that my son played and a

00:44:11 ◼   ► Hunter that I barely played. I did level the Titan and Hunter up so they will be ported

00:44:16 ◼   ► over to Destiny 2 along with my Warlock, but I'm going to be Warlock main in Destiny

00:44:19 ◼   ► 2 and I'm probably going to start with Dawnblade because it's the new one.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Was any of that English? Because it didn't sound like it.

00:44:26 ◼   ► People know. First episode of Ask ATP, a rousing success.

00:44:34 ◼   ► No one else remembered about the thing and I had to rush to get the things in there in

00:44:38 ◼   ► between trying to get my kids and my dog settled down before the show. Feel free to—I'm

00:44:42 ◼   ► pulling from that same sheet—feel free to pull your own questions in there and throw

00:44:46 ◼   ► them in the little section.

00:44:47 ◼   ► You know, the right answer—which will never work—but the rightest answer is for each

00:44:52 ◼   ► of us to pull our favorite question each week. But I guarantee Marco will forget and/or not

00:44:56 ◼   ► care. And I give myself one chance in three of actually remembering.

00:45:00 ◼   ► No, in the absence of anybody else, I will pull questions and throw them in there. But,

00:45:04 ◼   ► You know, we wouldn't have the section at all if I hadn't remembered it, so.

00:45:09 ◼   ► It's true.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Oh, where would we be without you, Jon?

00:45:12 ◼   ► And speaking of, Jon, tell us about this kerfuffle with Google and this diversity memo, which

00:45:18 ◼   ► I'm not sure is even the right way to describe it.

00:45:20 ◼   ► Yeah, this is old, kind of old news by now, but we haven't recorded it in a long time.

00:45:25 ◼   ► And there, in the world of politics and discrimination, there is newer news, but it is not really

00:45:34 ◼   ► tech related but this certainly is tech related it's a story that everybody probably knows by now

00:45:39 ◼   ► the google employee wrote i don't know why they call it a memo i guess the old parlance wrote a

00:45:45 ◼   ► big thing sort of talking to google internally saying we're all googlers here here's what i

00:45:52 ◼   ► think about what the company's doing and here's my opinion on it so on and so forth and it caused a

00:45:56 ◼   ► big stink we will put a link to the document in the show notes on the off chance that you haven't

00:46:02 ◼   ► already read it it's not that long if you like oh it's 10 pages and the grand

00:46:06 ◼   ► scheme of things it's not that long because we don't have pages in the web

00:46:08 ◼   ► you just scroll and also what we'll have in the show notes are what I think are

00:46:15 ◼   ► some of the best responses to the Google thing so anyway the game back to the

00:46:22 ◼   ► story here being a chief summarized in chief and in the case of doing this the

00:46:29 ◼   ► The upshot is that the person who wrote this was fired because it contained, I forget what

00:46:35 ◼   ► the phrasing was, but it contained a bunch of ideas and opinions that are counter to

00:46:41 ◼   ► the way Google operates and then people are angry that the person got fired and people

00:46:45 ◼   ► argued on the internet about it and so on and so forth.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Again, this is a well-covered story and I feel like if you don't know what we're talking

00:46:52 ◼   ► about or don't or have only read one or two things about it, just read the five links

00:46:57 ◼   ► that we put in there, I feel like you will have covered

00:46:59 ◼   ► the range of how people are reacting to it.

00:47:01 ◼   ► But on this show, what I wanted to talk about,

00:47:04 ◼   ► you guys can feel free to take whatever angle

00:47:06 ◼   ► you want on this thing, is the idea that people dismissed

00:47:11 ◼   ► the memo, that people like read it and just didn't address

00:47:21 ◼   ► it at all, didn't take it seriously,

00:47:26 ◼   ► They just dismissed it out of hand.

00:47:27 ◼   ► And a lot of people were angry about that, that like,

00:47:31 ◼   ► why won't you engage with this?

00:47:33 ◼   ► Why won't you talk about the idea?

00:47:35 ◼   ► There's lots of yelling about like,

00:47:37 ◼   ► someone said something bad about it,

00:47:38 ◼   ► but you didn't even talk about any of the points

00:47:40 ◼   ► that are in the memo.

00:47:42 ◼   ► Like, why are you being so dismissive?

00:47:44 ◼   ► And I understand where people are coming from with that,

00:47:47 ◼   ► but I think there is an explanation,

00:47:49 ◼   ► and it's a frustrating explanation,

00:47:51 ◼   ► but it's something you encounter again and again.

00:47:54 ◼   ► When I read that memo, nothing in it was new because I'd seen every idea put forward in

00:48:01 ◼   ► the memo many, many times before because there weren't a lot of new ideas, there weren't

00:48:06 ◼   ► any new ideas in there.

00:48:08 ◼   ► Everything in there is something that someone else has said in a very similar form many,

00:48:12 ◼   ► many, many, many, many times in the past.

00:48:16 ◼   ► And if you enter any field, whatever it is, whether it's woodworking, programming, diversity,

00:48:25 ◼   ► whatever it is, and you lay out all your opinions, but you are not an expert in the field, chance,

00:48:34 ◼   ► especially if you say something controversial or you're addressing some point that is a

00:48:36 ◼   ► point of contention, chances are very good that the people who have been arguing about

00:48:41 ◼   ► this same topic and who have studied this topic and are just like are well versed in

00:48:46 ◼   ► this topic, chances are very good that they've heard everything you're going to say before

00:48:51 ◼   ► and they've argued about it amongst themselves for years and years and years.

00:48:55 ◼   ► And so when you come out with this thing and they roll their eyes and dismiss you, it's

00:49:01 ◼   ► because to them it's like the 900th time someone is saying these exact same things and they've

00:49:07 ◼   ► already been discussed.

00:49:08 ◼   ► it from the outside. It's like, why are you not addressing my points? I feel like I have

00:49:12 ◼   ► important things to say here, and how can you just dismiss me? It's not a valid argument,

00:49:18 ◼   ► obviously. Maybe I'm right and you're just afraid to address my blah blah blah. This

00:49:23 ◼   ► is going to happen no matter what the topic is. And in some ways you have to recognize

00:49:32 ◼   ► where you are in the range of knowledge about this topic. Do I have a PhD in this topic?

00:49:37 ◼   ► I study this topic for 50 years and well versed in all the literature and like or am I just somebody who thought about this

00:49:43 ◼   ► for the past year or two and has some ideas like

00:49:45 ◼   ► You're never you know

00:49:47 ◼   ► And maybe you say they shouldn't dismiss me and what they should do is if someone is a novice and says something that's been said

00:49:53 ◼   ► Before then, please tell me point by laborious point

00:49:57 ◼   ► Bring me up to speed on the state of the art in this area of study

00:50:01 ◼   ► That's not a reasonable request because then it's like everybody who stumbles into a math forum and says I just think I

00:50:07 ◼   ► I've you know, what about this and have you guys ever thought of that?

00:50:11 ◼   ► They got to teach you all the math you need to know to get to the point

00:50:14 ◼   ► You realize the thing that you're saying has been discussed many times before and like either proven or disproven or here the different, you know

00:50:19 ◼   ► like it's

00:50:21 ◼   ► That's not a valid position

00:50:22 ◼   ► I know a little bit about something and I have an opinion and here's this thing and they're like, oh well

00:50:28 ◼   ► we've seen people say that thing a

00:50:30 ◼   ► Million times we've already discussed it amongst ourselves and we already know what everyone else in the field thinks about this

00:50:34 ◼   ► We don't have time to bring you up to speed on this entire field of study and that feels like you're being dismissed

00:50:41 ◼   ► And so I understand why people are angry the guy who wrote it's angry about being dismissed people who?

00:50:45 ◼   ► Sympathize with what is in the thing are angry that that this thing is dismissed. They feel like you know, you know, whatever

00:50:52 ◼   ► It's being silenced. No one's taking him seriously, whatever now first of all, that's like that's an initial reaction

00:50:58 ◼   ► But second all these links in the show notes show that that's not true that some

00:51:01 ◼   ► some poor people

00:51:04 ◼   ► went there and just went point by laborious point and tried mightily to explain, and these

00:51:10 ◼   ► aren't even experts in the field for the most part.

00:51:12 ◼   ► These are just people who happen to know a little bit more or have a little bit clearer,

00:51:16 ◼   ► you know, train of thinking about this.

00:51:19 ◼   ► Or really just even if they have no expertise in the field but have been around the block

00:51:23 ◼   ► a few times and have argued on the internet a few times, they can say, "Listen, I don't

00:51:26 ◼   ► even know anything about this subject, but I can tell you, Memo writer, that you have

00:51:30 ◼   ► no idea what you're doing."

00:51:32 ◼   ► You know, that even without knowing anything about this topic, I can see that your points

00:51:37 ◼   ► don't connect and you're doing a bad job arguing this.

00:51:40 ◼   ► And again, if you argued on Usenet in the 90s, if you argued in person in college campuses

00:51:46 ◼   ► in the 80s and 70s and 60s, you know the person who wrote this memo.

00:51:51 ◼   ► You know their thinking, you know what they're saying, you recognize their enthusiasm and

00:51:59 ◼   ► And fervor and like it just, this is the thing about getting old.

00:52:03 ◼   ► Like everything slows down and your hearing goes bad and your eyes get worse and just

00:52:08 ◼   ► all sorts of bad things happen.

00:52:09 ◼   ► But there's something to that wisdom thing.

00:52:11 ◼   ► I mean, not wisdom, maybe it's just experience.

00:52:13 ◼   ► Like that's why in all sorts of sci-fi things when there's some really old creature, like

00:52:17 ◼   ► they're always just like, "Ugh."

00:52:18 ◼   ► It's like you've seen it all, right?

00:52:21 ◼   ► And I know that's like the worst thing.

00:52:23 ◼   ► It's like, you know, that itself is a logical fallacy.

00:52:26 ◼   ► Like you know, appeal to authority.

00:52:28 ◼   ► You should trust me because I know a lot about this topic, but it's not what it is.

00:52:31 ◼   ► It's more like just exhaustion.

00:52:34 ◼   ► If pressed, if the fate of the universe depended on it, experts in the field could take this

00:52:39 ◼   ► person into a room and over the course of the next 20 years educate them to the point

00:52:42 ◼   ► where they understand what is wrong with this memo, right?

00:52:46 ◼   ► And I feel like that should be the goal of a lot of, you know, if you trust that this

00:52:50 ◼   ► is the case, and I'm not just like blowing smoke beer, but that the goal should be like,

00:52:56 ◼   ► If you read this memo and you think that there are some good, solid points in there, your

00:53:01 ◼   ► goal should be to learn more about it until you get on the same page with everyone else

00:53:08 ◼   ► who sees this for what it is.

00:53:11 ◼   ► Or learn so much about it that you actually reveal the real truth of it that nobody knows.

00:53:16 ◼   ► But I can tell you this memo is not the real truth of it that nobody knows because this

00:53:20 ◼   ► memo are the same tired ideas that have been discussed again and again and again by people

00:53:24 ◼   ► and every single field related to this, right?

00:53:26 ◼   ► And that, like, again, this is the meta point

00:53:32 ◼   ► and people like, they don't wanna hear it

00:53:34 ◼   ► and there's no way to convince them of it.

00:53:35 ◼   ► And I'm not really here to convince people

00:53:37 ◼   ► that this is the case, but like,

00:53:38 ◼   ► that's why people get angry about it.

00:53:40 ◼   ► That's why it feels frustrating.

00:53:42 ◼   ► And I want, I'm trying to stay away from the topic itself

00:53:44 ◼   ► because I want people to understand this is gonna be true

00:53:47 ◼   ► when you come in and tell people

00:53:48 ◼   ► about a particular kind of glue

00:53:50 ◼   ► we're putting together remote control boats.

00:53:52 ◼   ► And the remote control boat builders

00:53:54 ◼   ► had discussions about this kind of glue 50 years ago,

00:53:57 ◼   ► and they just roll their eyes and be like,

00:53:59 ◼   ► "Look, I know it seems like that kind of glue

00:54:01 ◼   ► is the kind of glue you wanna use.

00:54:02 ◼   ► I know you have a lot of information

00:54:03 ◼   ► that you think supports your idea

00:54:05 ◼   ► that that kind of glue is the, trust me.

00:54:06 ◼   ► We've been debating this glue for 50 years,

00:54:09 ◼   ► and 25 years ago, we all came to this conclusion,

00:54:11 ◼   ► and we revisit this topic from time to time

00:54:13 ◼   ► to see if things have changed, but they haven't,

00:54:15 ◼   ► and you're wrong, and we don't have time

00:54:16 ◼   ► to explain to you laborious."

00:54:18 ◼   ► And again, glue for model boats

00:54:20 ◼   ► is much simpler than this topic, right?

00:54:23 ◼   ► So that's my reaction as a tired old person who is beaten down by even worse things happening in the world, right?

00:54:29 ◼   ► That I see this, I see the young person who is writing it, I know where that person is coming from,

00:54:36 ◼   ► I know that person and I've seen, you know, these exact arguments on these exact specific topics and it is depressing

00:54:44 ◼   ► to have to have this argument again. It's depressing that these tired ideas get any kind of traction and yet

00:54:51 ◼   ► people go out of their way to do the hard work to explain to this person and to anybody who reads

00:54:58 ◼   ► this and you know like to explain to the world like you know isn't that your job to educate me

00:55:03 ◼   ► about blup not really but we're gonna do it anyway because we know it's you know it's it's

00:55:07 ◼   ► we have to do something we can't just let it stand as it is so many many people did you know

00:55:12 ◼   ► tried to explain what's wrong with this and i'm not going to try to explain it here because i feel

00:55:16 ◼   ► like the problem with this topic a lot of times on the show is and any kind of haggis like this is

00:55:21 ◼   ► I think what I described in the hypercritical days as having a slow-motion argument with the internet,

00:55:25 ◼   ► a one-sided slow-motion argument with the internet where you'll say a bunch of stuff,

00:55:28 ◼   ► but there's no one on the show who actually is there to disagree with you, so you can't

00:55:31 ◼   ► actually have a debate. So you have to debate the hypothetical person who's out there, and then you

00:55:36 ◼   ► put the podcast out into the world, and then you wait a week, and a bunch of people reply and say,

00:55:40 ◼   ► "That's not what I think at all. Actually, I think X, Y, and Z." And then you

00:55:42 ◼   ► debate those people's feedback, but then what about people who don't care about that topic

00:55:47 ◼   ► anymore, it's just impossible to have a slow-motion debate with a hypothetical person.

00:55:51 ◼   ► So that's why I'm trying to take this meta.

00:55:54 ◼   ► And also because, like I said, I think there's some really good articles about this.

00:55:57 ◼   ► And to be clear, this manifesto is totally bogus.

00:56:02 ◼   ► The ideas embodied in it are not the right ideas.

00:56:06 ◼   ► They are just, you know, explicable by all of the sort of—they're explicable by the

00:56:16 ◼   ► experiences and the biases that the person who wrote it is bound to have had. And so I think this

00:56:21 ◼   ► is a learning opportunity for everybody involved. Why did he get fired? Do you think you should have

00:56:24 ◼   ► been fired? That's the, I guess the controversy thing. Yeah, I don't see how you can't fire him,

00:56:29 ◼   ► because how can you have an employee in your company who thinks women on average are genetically

00:56:33 ◼   ► less capable than men to do the job? Like, how can you have that person doing performance reviews or

00:56:39 ◼   ► leading a team of people? Like, how can you have that? Like, if that's in people's secret hearts,

00:56:42 ◼   ► and you don't know about it, fine.

00:56:44 ◼   ► But if someone comes out and says,

00:56:45 ◼   ► this is what I believe, you can't have that person

00:56:47 ◼   ► doing performance reviews for women,

00:56:48 ◼   ► what are you gonna do, have a segregated company

00:56:50 ◼   ► and then segregate by everybody's biases?

00:56:52 ◼   ► And nevermind that these are all at will employees,

00:56:54 ◼   ► they can be fired for pretty much any reason,

00:56:57 ◼   ► and misogyny is not a protected class, it's an idea.

00:57:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:57:01 ◼   ► It's not like he's being fired

00:57:02 ◼   ► because he's a pregnant woman, right?

00:57:05 ◼   ► Yeah, guess what?

00:57:06 ◼   ► If you call your boss a jerk every day

00:57:10 ◼   ► and give him the finger, you're also gonna get fired.

00:57:12 ◼   ► because people who call their boss a jerk

00:57:14 ◼   ► and give him the finger are not a protected class.

00:57:16 ◼   ► Like there are so many things you can do to get fired.

00:57:19 ◼   ► This of all the things that Lisa's like pretty high minded

00:57:22 ◼   ► in terms of things you're getting fired for, believe me,

00:57:24 ◼   ► you can get fired for way stupider stuff

00:57:27 ◼   ► because that's the way employment works.

00:57:29 ◼   ► And so, but yeah, like there's, yeah, you have to fire it.

00:57:32 ◼   ► And in fact, it probably should have been fired faster

00:57:35 ◼   ► but I'm sure you gotta go through all the legal things

00:57:36 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:57:39 ◼   ► So anyway, I think I'm starting to get into the realm

00:57:42 ◼   ► of where I'm gonna start having a slow motion argument

00:57:44 ◼   ► with the internet, and I don't wanna do that.

00:57:47 ◼   ► What do you two have to say about this?

00:57:49 ◼   ► - I have very little to add,

00:57:50 ◼   ► because you just did a really good job of covering it,

00:57:52 ◼   ► and I also don't wanna get into the slow motion argument

00:57:54 ◼   ► with the internet.

00:57:56 ◼   ► The common people's grasp on what free speech

00:58:01 ◼   ► protects them from is about as good as their grasp

00:58:05 ◼   ► on fair use and copyright, which is not that good.

00:58:09 ◼   ► - No copy intended?

00:58:10 ◼   ► - No copyright intended, Marco.

00:58:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:58:12 ◼   ► - So, yeah, I would, before making an argument

00:58:16 ◼   ► about free speech, I would investigate

00:58:19 ◼   ► with some basic research what free speech actually gets you

00:58:23 ◼   ► and what is actually an assurance of what it actually means

00:58:27 ◼   ► and what it doesn't mean.

00:58:28 ◼   ► And yeah, Jon, I think he coded very well.

00:58:30 ◼   ► I have to admit, I did not fully read James's memo

00:58:37 ◼   ► or whatever it was, manifesto, whatever it was.

00:58:39 ◼   ► You know, life is short, and I could tell pretty soon

00:58:42 ◼   ► into it that this was not going to be worth the time

00:58:45 ◼   ► that I was going to spend reading it, so I didn't.

00:58:47 ◼   ► I decided to do anything else with my time,

00:58:48 ◼   ► just had to read this, honestly, rear-end openings memo

00:58:53 ◼   ► on what he thinks about people.

00:58:56 ◼   ► So I decided not to.

00:58:58 ◼   ► - Yep, same here.

00:58:59 ◼   ► - He provided a summary at the top,

00:59:01 ◼   ► although he called it a TLDR because he's an millennial.

00:59:04 ◼   ► But yeah, the summary at the top,

00:59:05 ◼   ► like you don't have to read the 10 pages.

00:59:06 ◼   ► read the five, six point summary or whatever.

00:59:09 ◼   ► It is a, I mean he wrote the summary himself.

00:59:11 ◼   ► It is a fair encapsulation of the points made in the thing.

00:59:15 ◼   ► You can look at only the summary and see,

00:59:17 ◼   ► yep, no, I've seen this idiot before.

00:59:19 ◼   ► Yep, I understand where he's coming from.

00:59:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I got about that far and then I was like,

00:59:23 ◼   ► yeah, this is, and then once, I thought that was the memo.

00:59:27 ◼   ► And then once I saw that was simply the summary,

00:59:29 ◼   ► I was like, oh my God, close tab.

00:59:31 ◼   ► That's it, I'm done.

00:59:32 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:59:33 ◼   ► And I would also say that I think it's worth,

00:59:37 ◼   ► it's worth Google doing some introspection here

00:59:40 ◼   ► about their own culture and about what is it

00:59:43 ◼   ► about Google's culture that would hire somebody

00:59:48 ◼   ► who holds these ideas, that would foster

00:59:51 ◼   ► someone's intellectual development who would hold

00:59:52 ◼   ► these ideas, and that would make somebody think

00:59:55 ◼   ► that it would be a good idea and would not get them fired

00:59:59 ◼   ► to actually write this and circulate this

01:00:01 ◼   ► within the company.

01:00:02 ◼   ► That reveals, I think, cultural problems in that company.

01:00:06 ◼   ► Which should be a surprise to nobody, but.

01:00:08 ◼   ► - It should reveal some good aspects of culture too,

01:00:11 ◼   ► because the fact that he felt like he could say this

01:00:14 ◼   ► shows that they have a culture where people feel like

01:00:16 ◼   ► they can express themselves.

01:00:18 ◼   ► Now, again, a culture where you can express yourselves

01:00:21 ◼   ► doesn't mean you could say, you know what?

01:00:24 ◼   ► I think we should eat babies and be surprised

01:00:26 ◼   ► by people like gasp, right?

01:00:28 ◼   ► You're gonna have to give them back to the baby eating.

01:00:30 ◼   ► It's good to have an open culture,

01:00:32 ◼   ► but you also have to be aware of, you know,

01:00:36 ◼   ► what people might think of what you say, right?

01:00:38 ◼   ► And a lot of companies, people would be afraid to say

01:00:43 ◼   ► anything remotely about, controversial about,

01:00:46 ◼   ► like any HR policy, like even the HR policy is like,

01:00:48 ◼   ► for example, imagine Apple getting the Apple Park thing,

01:00:50 ◼   ► like, oh, people aren't gonna have as many offices, right?

01:00:53 ◼   ► If Apple had a culture where everybody was terrified

01:00:56 ◼   ► to make any kind of complaint about,

01:00:58 ◼   ► hey, I kind of wish we still had offices,

01:00:59 ◼   ► I don't wanna be in open office space, right?

01:01:01 ◼   ► that would be a bad company culture.

01:01:03 ◼   ► You want to have a company culture

01:01:04 ◼   ► where if people are super pissed about not having an office,

01:01:06 ◼   ► they feel like they can say,

01:01:08 ◼   ► hey, I don't want to lose my office, Apple.

01:01:11 ◼   ► I don't like the new Apple Park and complain, right?

01:01:13 ◼   ► 'Cause that, and just being a general adult in the world,

01:01:17 ◼   ► you could understand if you do it in a constructive way,

01:01:20 ◼   ► this is a reasonable avenue of feedback within the company.

01:01:23 ◼   ► And a good company culture encourages people to do that.

01:01:26 ◼   ► 'Cause you don't want them to be secretly hating you

01:01:28 ◼   ► and then quitting like you want.

01:01:29 ◼   ► You want to hear what the employees have to say.

01:01:31 ◼   ► But if their complaint is,

01:01:32 ◼   ► I don't want to work next to a woman,

01:01:35 ◼   ► you should at least be aware enough to know,

01:01:37 ◼   ► if you say that, they're gonna get rid of you,

01:01:39 ◼   ► because you can't have an employee like that.

01:01:42 ◼   ► It's like, how is it any different from offices?

01:01:44 ◼   ► If you can't see the difference, like start there.

01:01:47 ◼   ► What's different about saying,

01:01:48 ◼   ► I prefer offices to cubicles versus,

01:01:51 ◼   ► I can't be next to a woman when I work?

01:01:53 ◼   ► Like figure it out, like work on it.

01:01:54 ◼   ► Like I feel, you know,

01:01:55 ◼   ► those are my first and only comments about this,

01:01:59 ◼   ► which is snarky granted,

01:02:00 ◼   ► you know, I'm allowed some snark on Twitter, was like the irony of someone at Google writing this memo,

01:02:07 ◼   ► who so clearly has not even done the most cursory Google search on the topic. It's like, "No, he's done

01:02:11 ◼   ► Google searches, look at all these things he's citing." Like, no, I mean actually, you know,

01:02:16 ◼   ► actually learning about the topic. Like, because Google is right there. You can Google yourself

01:02:20 ◼   ► every one of these points and find, you know, everything about them and why they're BS, like

01:02:26 ◼   ► everywhere. Instead, the only thing he googled for was cherry-picked things that he thinks

01:02:31 ◼   ► supports his ideas and that he can string together into this completely broken chain

01:02:36 ◼   ► of logic. Anyway, I don't want to go there. You can read the links to one of our other

01:02:40 ◼   ► stuff. But it's right there. No time has it been easier for you to educate yourself about

01:02:44 ◼   ► this topic without having to be led by the nose by people more versed in the field. Everything's

01:02:49 ◼   ► right there. The person works for Google. That just blew my mind.

01:02:55 ◼   ► The incuriosity and being content, as the economist's response that one of the links

01:03:01 ◼   ► will put in there, the motivated reasoning, that no amount of access to the world's

01:03:05 ◼   ► information can avoid that.

01:03:06 ◼   ► Yeah, the thing that struck me about this was the little bit of feedback we got about

01:03:12 ◼   ► it, which was a couple of people saying, "Please don't talk about this, but here's some

01:03:18 ◼   ► anonymous feedback about why I think this guy was on the money."

01:03:22 ◼   ► This was amazing to me.

01:03:24 ◼   ► We actually got multiple pieces of feedback

01:03:27 ◼   ► from people who were basically yelling at us

01:03:30 ◼   ► in support of this James hole

01:03:33 ◼   ► before we ever talked about it.

01:03:34 ◼   ► - Right, right, it just happened,

01:03:35 ◼   ► and they knew in the future

01:03:37 ◼   ► there would be an episode of ATP recorded,

01:03:38 ◼   ► and people said, "I know you're gonna wanna talk about this,

01:03:40 ◼   ► "but don't."

01:03:41 ◼   ► Well, we did, sorry.

01:03:43 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:03:44 ◼   ► - You don't talk about this, but here's what I think,

01:03:48 ◼   ► and if anyone thinks otherwise,

01:03:51 ◼   ► that's them silencing us, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah.

01:03:54 ◼   ► It was more than, well, the thing was, if it was just one individual, okay, fine.

01:04:01 ◼   ► But this happened two or three times and it was the same thing both times.

01:04:07 ◼   ► Please guys, don't talk about this.

01:04:09 ◼   ► But if you do, you should consider the following.

01:04:13 ◼   ► And by the way, to be clear, my example of like a difference between I like offices instead

01:04:17 ◼   ► of cubes versus I can't work next to a woman.

01:04:19 ◼   ► Neither one of those things in the memo.

01:04:21 ◼   ► I'm giving hypothetical examples to understand different classes of things that you might

01:04:24 ◼   ► want feedback.

01:04:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:26 ◼   ► But actually getting back to Marco's point, I think the fact that this person felt free

01:04:30 ◼   ► to say this is a good reflection on Google's culture of letting people feel like they are

01:04:35 ◼   ► free to give feedback.

01:04:37 ◼   ► The fact that this particular, to have open discussions, the content of this shows, it

01:04:43 ◼   ► doesn't reflect poorly on Google other than their hiring practices or not being aware

01:04:47 ◼   ► that this is happening.

01:04:50 ◼   ► This is on the person who wrote the thing, not so much on Google.

01:04:52 ◼   ► If you want to place blame on it, it's not the culture that let him post the memo, because

01:04:57 ◼   ► that is more of just sort of like lack of self-awareness, not understanding that other

01:05:03 ◼   ► people exist in the world and how they might react to what you have to say, right?

01:05:08 ◼   ► But this is true of a lot of tech companies.

01:05:10 ◼   ► If the interview was all coding on a whiteboard and solving brain teasers and making sure

01:05:19 ◼   ► you had a good education and making sure you are reasonably personable and polite and then most critically

01:05:23 ◼   ► Making sure that the people who you interview with say oh, yeah, I could work with this person. Yeah, it seems like a person because

01:05:30 ◼   ► You'll people will say oh I could work this person. He's just like me. Yeah, I'm

01:05:35 ◼   ► I'm a dude who is a CS major who likes video games and blah blah

01:05:40 ◼   ► yeah, not like if that's all the reason your interview is technical stuff and and

01:05:45 ◼   ► Brain teasers and education and work history and do you feel like you could work with this person?

01:05:51 ◼   ► It's very easy to get into you know, speaking of echo chamber, which is one of the complaints thing

01:05:55 ◼   ► It's very easy to get into a situation where people hire other people that they're comfortable with

01:05:58 ◼   ► And so you may never dig deeper to say oh and by the way again, this is not in the memo

01:06:04 ◼   ► This is my silly example that's supposed to make you you know realize anyway

01:06:07 ◼   ► Would you have a for any problem working on a team with a woman? I

01:06:11 ◼   ► Maybe you can't ask that legally. I don't even know like there's all sorts of weird things about hiring

01:06:15 ◼   ► you can and can't ask. But figuring that out, like if the person says, "Oh, I would never

01:06:21 ◼   ► work on a team with a woman," don't hire that person, right? Don't hire that person.

01:06:26 ◼   ► And if you never figure out that that's, again, that's not what this person said. I'm trying to

01:06:32 ◼   ► give an extreme example. I know people get confused by that. Like there's a hypothetical extreme

01:06:36 ◼   ► example, right? If you're not figuring that out, if you don't have an interview process that weeds

01:06:40 ◼   ► that out, you'll never have a chance of weeding out the much more subtle things, which is like,

01:06:44 ◼   ► like maybe this person has some slightly less well-examined ideas about gender and diversity.

01:06:52 ◼   ► And again, like, I don't think this person is super terrible. I heard they were vaguely

01:06:56 ◼   ► involved in Gamergate, but who knows, I haven't been following this. But anyway, I think the

01:07:01 ◼   ► ideas in this memo are ideas that a lot of smart white dudes, basically, who have never

01:07:09 ◼   ► faced any sort of oppression based on their gender or race end up having. Not because

01:07:17 ◼   ► they're bad people or they're evil or whatever, but it's like, again, there's a reason all

01:07:21 ◼   ► these ideas have come up before. It's not a logical conclusion, but it's like you find

01:07:27 ◼   ► yourself going down these alleys, you find yourself having these thoughts, you find yourself

01:07:30 ◼   ► coming to these conclusions. And especially if you have a slightly rebellious bent, there

01:07:36 ◼   ► is something for you to rebel against, which is all these diversity ideas. There's a reason

01:07:42 ◼   ► it's common. I don't think this person is an aberration or a terrible person. It's just

01:07:48 ◼   ► they have some things to learn. They have some living to do. They have some experience to gain.

01:07:55 ◼   ► And you are able to get that experience and live that life and learn and change. Because most

01:08:00 ◼   ► people who are on the other side of this started out somewhere more like this memo writer and

01:08:07 ◼   ► changed and learned things like that. They're not born like, "Oh, I'm a perfect angel from

01:08:11 ◼   ► the beginning and I know everything and I don't have any prejudices and biases." No,

01:08:14 ◼   ► especially if they have similar backgrounds to this person. They had to walk that same

01:08:18 ◼   ► road and figure things out and stick their foot in the mouth and do stupid stuff and

01:08:24 ◼   ► learn things the hard way, right? No, we're not super enlightened, wonderful, we know

01:08:27 ◼   ► everything in the beginning, like my hope for this person is that he grows and evolves and,

01:08:34 ◼   ► you know, comes, you know, that the people have to mean to say that he grows up, but like that's part

01:08:40 ◼   ► it's not he's already an adult, but you know, just you don't stop growing up when you become

01:08:44 ◼   ► quote unquote an adult. You keep growing up throughout your whole life, hopefully.

01:08:48 ◼   ► And that's that's my hope for this person.

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01:10:56 ◼   ► Apple apparently has said they're budgeting a billion dollars,

01:11:01 ◼   ► that's B, one billion, for original TV shows and movies

01:11:05 ◼   ► because apparently that's a thing we need.

01:11:09 ◼   ► So I'm not sure what to make of this.

01:11:12 ◼   ► Like in and of itself, I have no issues with Apple

01:11:15 ◼   ► trying to get into the content business, excuse me.

01:11:18 ◼   ► But so far they have not shown us

01:11:23 ◼   ► that they're terribly good at doing this sort of thing.

01:11:26 ◼   ► So, I don't know.

01:11:27 ◼   ► Marco, what do you think about this?

01:11:32 ◼   ► - So, with the actual budget and how it compares

01:11:36 ◼   ► to other services and everything,

01:11:38 ◼   ► people have commentary on whether this is enough money,

01:11:40 ◼   ► whether it's a lot, whether it's little.

01:11:42 ◼   ► I don't know enough about the business

01:11:44 ◼   ► of TV and movie production to even know what this buys you.

01:11:47 ◼   ► All I do know is that so far,

01:11:49 ◼   ► Apple's original content for video,

01:11:52 ◼   ► which for some reason appears on Apple Music,

01:11:54 ◼   ► is bizarre at best and mostly pretty bad.

01:11:58 ◼   ► Whatever has caused them to produce

01:12:01 ◼   ► what they've produced so far,

01:12:04 ◼   ► I think is the same thing that caused them to do

01:12:06 ◼   ► the whole like, you know, U2 finger touch thing

01:12:09 ◼   ► and then shoving Songs of Innocence

01:12:10 ◼   ► into everyone's libraries and, you know,

01:12:12 ◼   ► it's like they seem to have this like,

01:12:15 ◼   ► most of what they make is pretty cool

01:12:19 ◼   ► and is pretty well considered

01:12:21 ◼   ► And then there's like the certain like blind spot

01:12:23 ◼   ► that they get around certain types of content

01:12:26 ◼   ► or celebrity things, which everything they make

01:12:29 ◼   ► seems to be profoundly uncool and just fall on its face.

01:12:32 ◼   ► A lot of the various like you know,

01:12:34 ◼   ► celebrity tie-ins they've done,

01:12:36 ◼   ► much of the efforts they've tried to do around Apple Music,

01:12:39 ◼   ► sometimes like the weird intro videos to the conferences,

01:12:42 ◼   ► stuff like that, like a lot of the stuff

01:12:45 ◼   ► just seems profoundly uncool and just flops.

01:12:48 ◼   ► Certainly I think Planet of the Apps qualifies big time

01:12:52 ◼   ► for that list, and I suspect the Carpool Karaoke version

01:12:55 ◼   ► they're doing, while I haven't seen it,

01:12:58 ◼   ► the early impressions of it are similarly not very positive.

01:13:02 ◼   ► So whatever is causing these things to be greenlit

01:13:07 ◼   ► and to then be terrible, I hope they figure this out

01:13:11 ◼   ► and fix that.

01:13:12 ◼   ► For Apple to become a company that represents bad content,

01:13:16 ◼   ► I think that hurts the whole brand.

01:13:18 ◼   ► So it's a big risk they're taking here,

01:13:20 ◼   ► and so far it seems like it's not paying off at all.

01:13:23 ◼   ► So far it seems like it's actually harming them.

01:13:26 ◼   ► If they do it right, it could be great.

01:13:28 ◼   ► They could be, they could produce things

01:13:30 ◼   ► as good as what Netflix and Amazon and HBO are making.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Like they could make great original content,

01:13:35 ◼   ► but they've made such bad original content so far

01:13:37 ◼   ► that it's just kind of hard to see

01:13:40 ◼   ► how they get from here to there.

01:13:42 ◼   ► - I think the last time we talked about this,

01:13:44 ◼   ► I made the same point because I found it occurring

01:13:46 ◼   ► to me again, I'm like, oh, I think I talked about that

01:13:47 ◼   ► But like if you if you fund content

01:13:50 ◼   ► You shouldn't like other than some vague sort of overarching

01:13:56 ◼   ► Theme like Disney in general makes kind of family-friendly stuff

01:14:01 ◼   ► You shouldn't be influencing the things that you make so everything that Apple makes doesn't have to be an applet thing obviously

01:14:08 ◼   ► Planet of the Apps is super aptly

01:14:10 ◼   ► Carpool karaoke not really aptly so that's that's an okay one

01:14:14 ◼   ► But you know HBO makes all sorts of shows make Western sci-fi fantasy drama like just comedies

01:14:21 ◼   ► stand-up comedy specials documentaries like

01:14:23 ◼   ► You know insofar as there is an HBO brand the brand is

01:14:28 ◼   ► Good television for adults right Disney is like family-friendly stuff Marvel is you know?

01:14:35 ◼   ► Yeah, superhero movies like start the Star Wars like just like there are overarching brands for things, but in general you don't want

01:14:43 ◼   ► Apple to make like Apple stuff and that that is something they have to get out from under because almost everything Apple does is an Apple

01:14:50 ◼   ► thing and if you're making content you have to

01:14:52 ◼   ► Basically just be the money people. Here's a big bucket of money then get a bunch of people who know how to

01:14:59 ◼   ► Find talent and you know develop the shows and that's what they're doing

01:15:04 ◼   ► They hired a bunch of people who had previously

01:15:06 ◼   ► Done this same job for for other people like they hired the guy from Sony

01:15:10 ◼   ► television or something that has had a bunch of things under his belt and they hurt somebody

01:15:14 ◼   ► else like it's a different kind of business and it's not an easy business because it's

01:15:19 ◼   ► like how you know how do I know what's the next Breaking Bad and what's the next planet

01:15:25 ◼   ► of the apps like can I tell the difference between those two when they're being pitched

01:15:28 ◼   ► to me right if I get a pitch for the next Breaking Bad can I actually develop it give

01:15:33 ◼   ► them the right amount of money and get the right talent involved like you know this was

01:15:37 ◼   ► said about the phone business. Apple's not just going to walk in. The entertainment business

01:15:41 ◼   ► is a similarly difficult problem, but it's much farther from Apple's wheelhouse. And

01:15:47 ◼   ► Apple can't use all its old tricks of, "We're going to build every show like we do an Apple

01:15:51 ◼   ► product." Nope, nope. The shows can't be an Apple product. Some shows have to be the opposite

01:15:56 ◼   ► of an Apple product. They have to be intense and involve sex and violence, or they have

01:16:02 ◼   ► have to be goofy comedies, you know, or like things that just don't fit in the Apple way.

01:16:10 ◼   ► And again, you can have a brand, you can be, you know, like Disney or like Pixar and have

01:16:16 ◼   ► a brand and put everything under that umbrella, but its competitors brands are in general

01:16:22 ◼   ► content that wouldn't air network television, expensive television made for adults.

01:16:28 ◼   ► So that's kind of what Amazon and Netflix and HBO have been doing.

01:16:34 ◼   ► They're all spending more money on it than Apple still, which is fine.

01:16:36 ◼   ► Apple's just getting started.

01:16:38 ◼   ► Netflix's budget is $7 billion compared to Apple's budget of $1 billion.

01:16:41 ◼   ► I think that's fine.

01:16:43 ◼   ► Apple should not be putting $7 billion towards something it doesn't know how to do yet.

01:16:45 ◼   ► So you're going to figure out how to do it.

01:16:48 ◼   ► Amazon's $4.5 billion.

01:16:49 ◼   ► These are mostly estimates from this article we'll link in the show notes.

01:16:52 ◼   ► And HBO is $2 billion.

01:16:54 ◼   ► HBO's got a lot of bang for its buck because they apparently really know how to do it.

01:16:58 ◼   ► develop shows. They don't make a lot of shows, but the ones they make have a pretty good

01:17:02 ◼   ► hit ratio and their hits are really big hits.

01:17:04 ◼   ► I mean, they've been doing it for quite some time. They developed the skill over a very

01:17:07 ◼   ► long time.

01:17:08 ◼   ► Yeah. And it's people. It sets different people who know different people who know how to

01:17:15 ◼   ► get things developed, know what to buy, what not to buy, know how to make sure that the

01:17:19 ◼   ► things produced in the same way that Apple knows how to like, "Oh, I have an idea for

01:17:24 ◼   ► a product, but how do I make that product? What people do I need to make that product

01:17:27 ◼   ► a reality so that it actually works and what partners do I have to do it like

01:17:31 ◼   ► it's a difficult business um getting back to the the broader issue of this

01:17:35 ◼   ► thing like the reason apple is doing this as we've discussed in the past is

01:17:39 ◼   ► if apple wants to be in this business of selling you video over the internet

01:17:44 ◼   ► everybody else is doing it uh it is an important differentiator

01:17:47 ◼   ► like eventually if everybody else has original content like this is why i get

01:17:51 ◼   ► hulu this is why i get netflix like because

01:17:54 ◼   ► of these specific shows and Apple doesn't have any of those, it has no more differentiator.

01:18:00 ◼   ► Like other than, oh, I bought a bunch of movies on iTunes and unless I go and remove the D

01:18:06 ◼   ► around them, I need an Apple TV to view them.

01:18:11 ◼   ► Very quickly, these streaming services have stopped being differentiated by the fact that,

01:18:16 ◼   ► wow, I can watch a video over the internet because they can all do that.

01:18:19 ◼   ► And they all have clients, this is another thing, they all have clients everywhere.

01:18:21 ◼   ► This is a question someone had on Twitter. I think maybe directed us or maybe someone else

01:18:25 ◼   ► It's like am I gonna need an Apple TV to watch this original TV content or will I be able to watch it?

01:18:30 ◼   ► Not on an Apple TV. Could I watch it in a web browser?

01:18:33 ◼   ► Could I you know could I watch it?

01:18:36 ◼   ► Is it built into my television and the answer so far as albums Apple's been like well

01:18:40 ◼   ► No, you can watch on your iPad your iPhone and your Apple TV

01:18:42 ◼   ► No place else. Can you watch it's not built into your TV. You can't watch from a web browser

01:18:46 ◼   ► You can't watch it in Windows and it's like

01:18:48 ◼   ► What nobody else is doing that if you want to watch Netflix you can watch it everywhere you go

01:18:53 ◼   ► I can it flex on your on your wristwatch on you know, it's it's everywhere. Nothing doesn't have Netflix on it

01:18:58 ◼   ► That's the strategy and you do if you want to compete so

01:19:00 ◼   ► That's the other thing I'm looking for is will Apple go iPod on this and say yes, we're gonna make the iPod for Windows

01:19:07 ◼   ► Yes, we're gonna let you watch

01:19:08 ◼   ► Whatever they're gonna and I have to divorce her from Apple music obviously too because it's silly to continue with that charade, right?

01:19:15 ◼   ► If they really want to play with their big competitors, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Hulu, everybody

01:19:22 ◼   ► else who's got some kind of -- is funding some kind of original content, table stakes

01:19:26 ◼   ► is, I can view it anywhere I want, and the original content is actually worth getting

01:19:30 ◼   ► the service for, and they've got a long way to go to get there.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Someone pointed out that maybe you can watch it on iTunes and Windows.

01:19:37 ◼   ► Probably true, but iTunes and Windows is probably not the ideal viewing experience, and we're

01:19:41 ◼   ► all rooting for iTunes to die anyway, right?

01:19:44 ◼   ► I feel like this is one of those things too,

01:19:45 ◼   ► like for this to succeed,

01:19:49 ◼   ► you have to really go all in on it.

01:19:51 ◼   ► You have to, like you were saying,

01:19:53 ◼   ► right now it seems like these original content efforts

01:19:57 ◼   ► are just these kind of like side projects

01:20:00 ◼   ► that are a little bit promoted, a little bit funded,

01:20:04 ◼   ► a little bit prioritized, and they're kind of these things

01:20:07 ◼   ► that are made to try to boost Apple Music,

01:20:10 ◼   ► Buzz, and subscriptions, which is totally wrong.

01:20:12 ◼   ► Like that's not how you compete in the music space.

01:20:15 ◼   ► You don't compete there with video services

01:20:16 ◼   ► that with two or three original content lines.

01:20:20 ◼   ► Like that's not at all how that works.

01:20:22 ◼   ► But I feel like if Apple really wants to do this,

01:20:24 ◼   ► really do it.

01:20:25 ◼   ► Like really go all in, make it a big thing,

01:20:28 ◼   ► maybe buy somebody like Netflix or HBO or something.

01:20:31 ◼   ► Like really go all out and really do it.

01:20:34 ◼   ► I just, I don't see the value in kind of half butting it

01:20:38 ◼   ► like they've been doing seemingly so far.

01:20:40 ◼   ► Like why do a little bit of this kind of buried in this product that no one's looking for video in?

01:20:45 ◼   ► Either don't do it or do it, right?

01:20:47 ◼   ► Maybe like a slow start like I don't know what the budget was before

01:20:51 ◼   ► But again 1 billion is a smaller budget like there

01:20:53 ◼   ► They're obviously getting serious about it and hot trying to hire more of the right people, but it's a slow start

01:20:57 ◼   ► Like they're not they're not coming in on day one and said we got we're gonna put 10 billion dollars because they just blow it

01:21:03 ◼   ► They blow that 10 billion. They have no idea what to do with that money

01:21:05 ◼   ► Like it's not so I mean the slow start would be better if the few little things they made were actually good

01:21:10 ◼   ► Even if they're weird appended just Apple music, but I mean the Apple music thing

01:21:15 ◼   ► I think it's a learning experience. Who knows maybe the carpool karaoke is gonna be insanely popular

01:21:19 ◼   ► Just because we don't watch it. Like I know what carpool karaoke is people seem to like it

01:21:23 ◼   ► It's you know, even if it's not my particular thing

01:21:26 ◼   ► sometimes they're amusing right and the reality show was a flop but like

01:21:30 ◼   ► You know reality some reality shows are hit some aren't it wasn't it wasn't a crazy idea

01:21:35 ◼   ► They just blew it. They didn't make something that people really want to watch.

01:21:38 ◼   ► Probably, again, because I feel like they want to have some kind of Apple. "We're Apple. What

01:21:43 ◼   ► kind of synergy do we have?" Like, no, no. You don't need any synergy. Breaking Bad has no

01:21:47 ◼   ► synergy with the people who fund it. It's just a good show. You just need to make stuff that people

01:21:54 ◼   ► want to watch. And it's really, really hard. And I can't help you with it. I don't know how to do

01:21:57 ◼   ► it either. But hiring people who have done it in the past is a good start. That's the difficulty

01:22:02 ◼   ► about a lot of these things like again with Apple, very small teams, small numbers of people.

01:22:07 ◼   ► The one or two or three people you have in charge of this with the most power are going to have

01:22:12 ◼   ► a big influence and if you end up hiring the wrong people, you know, then that's bad. Like you get a

01:22:21 ◼   ► paper message situation or even if you just get like a four stall can't get along with Ive and

01:22:27 ◼   ► you have to can one of them, it's you know, these are big companies with a lot of money at stake

01:22:32 ◼   ► but in the end it comes down to just a small number of people.

01:22:35 ◼   ► So Marco, you blogged for the first time in forever recently. I'm very proud of you.

01:22:40 ◼   ► This is very exciting.

01:22:42 ◼   ► Does it really count?

01:22:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it counts. It turns out that Marco.org is still a thing.

01:22:48 ◼   ► It hadn't been a thing for almost three months, but it is still a thing.

01:22:53 ◼   ► However, Marco giveth and Marco taketh away.

01:22:56 ◼   ► What happened to Send to Watch and Overcast?

01:22:59 ◼   ► Basically I had to pull it.

01:23:01 ◼   ► I've already covered this pretty well

01:23:02 ◼   ► both in the blog post and in Under the Radar

01:23:05 ◼   ► about two weeks ago, so I don't wanna cover it

01:23:07 ◼   ► too much here, but basically I was using a crazy hack

01:23:12 ◼   ► that would allow me to use good audio APIs

01:23:15 ◼   ► on the Apple Watch.

01:23:16 ◼   ► In watchOS 4 that doesn't work anymore.

01:23:19 ◼   ► So now the only way to write this feature

01:23:20 ◼   ► is to stop using the good audio APIs

01:23:23 ◼   ► that allow my process to keep running

01:23:25 ◼   ► and monitoring with AV audio player.

01:23:28 ◼   ► And the only way to make this happen now

01:23:29 ◼   ► is to use the old WK Audio File Player Watch Playback API,

01:23:34 ◼   ► which basically is used in practice

01:23:40 ◼   ► by I think almost nothing.

01:23:41 ◼   ► Apple doesn't seem to use it for anything,

01:23:44 ◼   ► which is probably why it's so incomplete and buggy.

01:23:47 ◼   ► And it's a much larger, more complex pile of hacks

01:23:52 ◼   ► because it involves transferring control

01:23:54 ◼   ► of the playback to the system

01:23:56 ◼   ► and your app stops running in the background.

01:23:58 ◼   ► And then the system will wake you up occasionally, maybe,

01:24:02 ◼   ► if you are lucky when things happen like the queue runs out

01:24:06 ◼   ► or the track is over or something else,

01:24:07 ◼   ► but that's about it.

01:24:08 ◼   ► It forces a certain type of interaction

01:24:10 ◼   ► with the now playing glance

01:24:12 ◼   ► that does not work at all for podcasts.

01:24:14 ◼   ► It makes a very bad experience for podcasts.

01:24:16 ◼   ► So things like if you hit the seek forward button,

01:24:20 ◼   ► it immediately stops playing the current podcast

01:24:23 ◼   ► and either moves to the next one if there is one

01:24:25 ◼   ► or just stops.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Instead of like skipping forward 15 seconds

01:24:29 ◼   ► or whatever you actually want.

01:24:31 ◼   ► Things like that, there's all sorts

01:24:32 ◼   ► of little shortcomings like that.

01:24:34 ◼   ► This API was designed for music.

01:24:37 ◼   ► It was clearly designed so that somebody,

01:24:40 ◼   ► you know, somebody like a Spotify or something

01:24:42 ◼   ► could make a sync to Apple Watch feature

01:24:44 ◼   ► and have the Apple Watch play a playlist of music.

01:24:47 ◼   ► When you apply the same API to podcasts,

01:24:49 ◼   ► there are so many shortcomings and bugs

01:24:51 ◼   ► and weird behaviors with the system

01:24:52 ◼   ► that are just not at all what podcast listeners

01:24:54 ◼   ► want or need, that it makes for a very bad experience.

01:24:57 ◼   ► So early on when I was developing the send to watch feature,

01:25:01 ◼   ► I was basing it on this API,

01:25:03 ◼   ► 'cause this seemed to be the only way to do it.

01:25:05 ◼   ► And I actually decided to not ship it.

01:25:08 ◼   ► Like I spent months on it.

01:25:10 ◼   ► And after fighting with this API over and over again,

01:25:13 ◼   ► I decided it was so bad I can't ship this feature.

01:25:16 ◼   ► So I didn't.

01:25:17 ◼   ► I filed a bunch of bugs.

01:25:18 ◼   ► I talked to people in Apple to make sure

01:25:20 ◼   ► they knew about them and everything.

01:25:21 ◼   ► And how many apps are using this?

01:25:23 ◼   ► of all the needs that watchOS has.

01:25:26 ◼   ► This might satisfy like 10 apps maybe,

01:25:29 ◼   ► like almost nobody needs this feature.

01:25:31 ◼   ► So I can understand why this doesn't seem to be a priority

01:25:33 ◼   ► for them to really improve audio playback APIs on the watch.

01:25:37 ◼   ► Especially because this one probably works okay enough

01:25:40 ◼   ► for music syncing, so it's really only podcasts

01:25:43 ◼   ► and audiobook and other long form audio syncing

01:25:45 ◼   ► that would actually need this.

01:25:47 ◼   ► My hack that allowed me to use AV audio player

01:25:51 ◼   ► allowed me to ship a version of this feature

01:25:53 ◼   ► that was minimally acceptable.

01:25:57 ◼   ► It still wasn't good.

01:25:59 ◼   ► There's still lots of other problems with the feature,

01:26:00 ◼   ► like how long it takes to transfer data,

01:26:03 ◼   ► how I as the, basically as the programmer

01:26:07 ◼   ► and that therefore you as the user

01:26:10 ◼   ► don't have any indication of whether a transfer

01:26:12 ◼   ► is in progress or how long it's going to take.

01:26:15 ◼   ► Like the reason that's not exposed in the UI

01:26:17 ◼   ► is that I don't have that information.

01:26:18 ◼   ► The API doesn't provide that information.

01:26:21 ◼   ► So there's all sorts of shortcomings in the APIs

01:26:24 ◼   ► and the technical limitations of these platforms.

01:26:28 ◼   ► Most of which are very understandable

01:26:29 ◼   ► because most of which are like, yeah, you know what,

01:26:31 ◼   ► the watch is a low power device.

01:26:33 ◼   ► It needs to squeeze every bit of power it can

01:26:35 ◼   ► out of the tiny little parts and batteries that it has.

01:26:39 ◼   ► Most of these are very understandable things.

01:26:41 ◼   ► But the reality is it was barely possible

01:26:45 ◼   ► to make a barely acceptable version of this feature.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And now that the audio API has changed

01:26:49 ◼   ► and has forced me to go back to the old one

01:26:52 ◼   ► that I deemed unshippable probably nine months ago

01:26:55 ◼   ► when I first tried to do this,

01:26:57 ◼   ► that has now made this feature unshippable again.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Unfortunately, I've already shipped it.

01:27:03 ◼   ► So I had to remove this feature, and that's never easy.

01:27:07 ◼   ► That's never an easy decision to make.

01:27:09 ◼   ► It's not a very popular thing to do.

01:27:13 ◼   ► I'm getting a good number of one-star reviews from it,

01:27:15 ◼   ► which I expected.

01:27:16 ◼   ► That was part of the calculus to do it.

01:27:18 ◼   ► I had to weigh that, but I removed the feature now,

01:27:21 ◼   ► and if I can bring it back in the future,

01:27:25 ◼   ► as the APIs and the hardware mature,

01:27:28 ◼   ► I would love to do that, 'cause I already wrote

01:27:30 ◼   ► most of the hard stuff to do this.

01:27:32 ◼   ► But there is simply no good way to play podcasts

01:27:37 ◼   ► in the background on the Apple Watch in watchOS 4.

01:27:40 ◼   ► And hopefully that'll change over time.

01:27:42 ◼   ► - Do you have any hopes of them changing it?

01:27:46 ◼   ► Maybe if Apple ads offline and watch playback of podcasts

01:27:49 ◼   ► to their podcast app, do you know, do you have any info

01:27:53 ◼   ► like, oh, you know, not this release,

01:27:54 ◼   ► this release you're stuck, but next year

01:27:58 ◼   ► they'll be updating all these APIs to be podcast savvy

01:28:00 ◼   ► because podcasts are not, you know, not obscure.

01:28:03 ◼   ► Like it seems not, they're obviously not as important

01:28:04 ◼   ► as music, right?

01:28:05 ◼   ► But in this release, they did the thing that lets you

01:28:08 ◼   ► mess with the music during your workout in an easier way.

01:28:10 ◼   ► So they understand that people are controlling

01:28:13 ◼   ► audio playback on their watches.

01:28:14 ◼   ► So do you think next year, you know,

01:28:17 ◼   ► do you have expectations at WWBC,

01:28:19 ◼   ► but like, oh, new APIs that make it possible

01:28:21 ◼   ► to do this again, or are you just like,

01:28:23 ◼   ► have no real hope of them addressing this

01:28:25 ◼   ► because it doesn't seem like a thing they care about?

01:28:28 ◼   ► - Well, there's still a lot of technical limitations.

01:28:30 ◼   ► So with the new like music syncing,

01:28:33 ◼   ► there's been, in watchOS 4, they demoed during the keynote

01:28:35 ◼   ► that there's this kind of like new automatic

01:28:37 ◼   ► music syncing kind of thing,

01:28:39 ◼   ► where it just kind of automatically can like sync a playlist

01:28:43 ◼   ► based on what you like, based on what you've sliced it,

01:28:45 ◼   ► or whatever else.

01:28:46 ◼   ► And so, I think the way this seems to work

01:28:51 ◼   ► is overnight, while it's charging on the charger,

01:28:54 ◼   ► it's doing these data transfers that can be large

01:28:56 ◼   ► and time consuming.

01:28:57 ◼   ► So that way it doesn't have to worry about speed being low

01:29:00 ◼   ► or about using too much power.

01:29:02 ◼   ► For a podcast-like feature to work,

01:29:06 ◼   ► that's probably how it really has to be.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Because problem number one, which I never solved,

01:29:10 ◼   ► was it's too slow to transfer data to the watch.

01:29:13 ◼   ► And I did all sorts of crazy hacks,

01:29:14 ◼   ► like I wrote a whole transcoding engine

01:29:17 ◼   ► that would transcode to a lower bit rate and then send it,

01:29:19 ◼   ► because that was actually faster

01:29:21 ◼   ► than just sending it to begin with,

01:29:23 ◼   ► at its original size.

01:29:24 ◼   ► So solving that speed problem, that's a huge problem,

01:29:28 ◼   ► and it's going to take, I think,

01:29:30 ◼   ► multiple generations probably of the hardware

01:29:33 ◼   ► being improved before that's no longer a big problem.

01:29:36 ◼   ► So as long as data transfer to the watch is still slow,

01:29:40 ◼   ► syncing podcasts to it is always going to be awkward

01:29:43 ◼   ► or clunky because podcasts don't work the same way as music.

01:29:46 ◼   ► With music, you can sync a playlist overnight

01:29:48 ◼   ► and that's it, you're done.

01:29:50 ◼   ► You're probably not going to want to change that

01:29:54 ◼   ► in the middle of the day by sending all of a sudden

01:29:57 ◼   ► 60 megs of new information to it

01:29:59 ◼   ► that you really want to be available

01:30:00 ◼   ► right this second right now.

01:30:02 ◼   ► Whereas with podcasts, that happens.

01:30:04 ◼   ► An episode comes, if this works the same way

01:30:07 ◼   ► that it worked in the iPod days,

01:30:08 ◼   ► back when podcasts first came out a decade ago,

01:30:11 ◼   ► the idea of an episode coming out

01:30:13 ◼   ► and then you having to wait till you got home

01:30:15 ◼   ► to sync it to your iPod and listen to it maybe the next day,

01:30:19 ◼   ► that was how we did things back then.

01:30:21 ◼   ► But now things are better.

01:30:22 ◼   ► Now we don't live in the stone age anymore.

01:30:25 ◼   ► Now, when a new episode comes out,

01:30:27 ◼   ► you expect to be able to hit play immediately

01:30:29 ◼   ► and start playing it.

01:30:31 ◼   ► And so to have that kind of experience

01:30:33 ◼   ► with the watch with podcasts,

01:30:37 ◼   ► You can't wait for it to sync overnight.

01:30:39 ◼   ► You can't wait for like, oh, next time I plug in the watch,

01:30:41 ◼   ► I'll have some kind of system to automatically sync stuff

01:30:43 ◼   ► over while charging overnight.

01:30:44 ◼   ► Like that's not a good enough experience.

01:30:46 ◼   ► What you need is something that you can say,

01:30:47 ◼   ► I wanna listen to this right now, go,

01:30:49 ◼   ► and have it be not a significant amount of time

01:30:52 ◼   ► before you can do that.

01:30:53 ◼   ► I think long term, the way this is solved is

01:30:56 ◼   ► the watch becomes a full-blown client of the app

01:30:59 ◼   ► with its own downloads and its own sync to the servers

01:31:02 ◼   ► and is no longer tethered to the phone app

01:31:05 ◼   ► as much as it is now.

01:31:07 ◼   ► Long term, that is probably the right solution.

01:31:09 ◼   ► But that requires large advances in the hardware

01:31:13 ◼   ► and software before that's possible.

01:31:14 ◼   ► That would require, first of all,

01:31:16 ◼   ► the rumored cellular watch,

01:31:18 ◼   ► or at least more frequent WiFi connectivity,

01:31:20 ◼   ► or whatever, that would require things

01:31:22 ◼   ► that we don't have today, really,

01:31:23 ◼   ► to do that very well.

01:31:25 ◼   ► The other thing is, on the software side,

01:31:27 ◼   ► I don't know the fine details of this,

01:31:29 ◼   ► in fact, I bet Steve Trouton Smith

01:31:31 ◼   ► probably knows a lot more about this than I do.

01:31:33 ◼   ► When you write apps for the iPhone,

01:31:36 ◼   ► most of the APIs you're using

01:31:38 ◼   ► are the exact same APIs that Apple uses.

01:31:41 ◼   ► The incentive is pretty strong

01:31:43 ◼   ► for Apple to keep those things up to date

01:31:45 ◼   ► because they use them too.

01:31:46 ◼   ► So if there's like a bug in UIKit,

01:31:49 ◼   ► it's probably gonna affect Apple also

01:31:51 ◼   ► in their own apps and their own development.

01:31:53 ◼   ► So they have a pretty strong incentive to fix that.

01:31:55 ◼   ► Whereas on the watch,

01:31:57 ◼   ► developers have only had access to WatchKit.

01:32:01 ◼   ► We don't have straight UIKit.

01:32:03 ◼   ► It seems, I think, I'm not positive on this,

01:32:06 ◼   ► but I think Apple is using lower level APIs.

01:32:09 ◼   ► Apple seems to be using something like UIKit

01:32:11 ◼   ► to make their apps on the watch.

01:32:13 ◼   ► But we developers are using this kind of subset

01:32:16 ◼   ► that we're kind of being forced to use,

01:32:18 ◼   ► and we can't use like the real APIs on the watch.

01:32:21 ◼   ► And so what we are using, Apple doesn't seem to have

01:32:25 ◼   ► a very strong incentive to fix what we use,

01:32:29 ◼   ► because I don't think they're using it.

01:32:32 ◼   ► And especially like the audio playback APIs,

01:32:36 ◼   ► what I have seen so far with the limitations

01:32:41 ◼   ► and bugs that they have,

01:32:43 ◼   ► I don't think Apple uses any of them

01:32:45 ◼   ► on the watch that we use.

01:32:47 ◼   ► I honestly don't, like Apple is probably using

01:32:50 ◼   ► AV Foundation directly on the watch,

01:32:53 ◼   ► but we don't have access to that in any kind of way

01:32:55 ◼   ► that we can actually background on the watch.

01:32:57 ◼   ► We only have foreground access to some of those things

01:33:00 ◼   ► and background access to this awful WK audio file player

01:33:03 ◼   ► thing that has all the bugs.

01:33:05 ◼   ► So until that changes, like until Apple's using

01:33:09 ◼   ► the same things we are using on the watch,

01:33:11 ◼   ► I don't think it's ever gonna be an amazing

01:33:14 ◼   ► development platform to make advanced type of apps

01:33:17 ◼   ► like a podcast player.

01:33:18 ◼   ► I hope that changes, I really do.

01:33:21 ◼   ► But so far, it seems like we are using these kind of

01:33:26 ◼   ► baby APIs, these training wheel APIs on the watch,

01:33:29 ◼   ► that existed at first because it was just so limited

01:33:32 ◼   ► and so low powered and the first watch kit

01:33:34 ◼   ► was this huge hack that were the thing around the phone

01:33:36 ◼   ► and was kind of beamed over.

01:33:37 ◼   ► So it made sense then a little bit,

01:33:40 ◼   ► but now I want real API access on the watch.

01:33:43 ◼   ► I want low level UI frameworks

01:33:47 ◼   ► and full blown audio frameworks

01:33:49 ◼   ► and exactly what we have on the phone

01:33:51 ◼   ► in regards to what I mentioned earlier about how,

01:33:56 ◼   ► When the watch crazy API, if a user hits next track

01:33:59 ◼   ► or forward, it just stops a podcast if it's playing

01:34:02 ◼   ► in the background and like the podcast player on the watch

01:34:06 ◼   ► can't do what we've done on iOS for ages,

01:34:08 ◼   ► which is interpret the remote control event manually.

01:34:11 ◼   ► Interpret the event that is sent from a headphone clicker

01:34:14 ◼   ► or the lock screen or your car Bluetooth or whatever

01:34:17 ◼   ► that says next track and instead of doing next track

01:34:20 ◼   ► on iOS, we can say oh, we'll just move it forward

01:34:22 ◼   ► 15 seconds or we can respond however we want to that.

01:34:25 ◼   ► on the watch, none of those APIs are there.

01:34:27 ◼   ► We have no way to interact with the remote controls.

01:34:30 ◼   ► We have no way to set what appears

01:34:32 ◼   ► on the now playing screen besides a very, very limited thing

01:34:36 ◼   ► with this crazy audio player API.

01:34:39 ◼   ► You can kind of set it, but then it's kind of unreliable.

01:34:42 ◼   ► Even basic stuff I found, like, if you hit pause,

01:34:46 ◼   ► it doesn't pause.

01:34:47 ◼   ► Like, it's half the time, like,

01:34:49 ◼   ► two seconds after you hit play or pause,

01:34:51 ◼   ► the button flips over back the other way.

01:34:53 ◼   ► It's like crazy stuff that just doesn't work.

01:34:56 ◼   ► Every time I've worked against those APIs,

01:34:58 ◼   ► I have felt like I'm the first person

01:35:00 ◼   ► to ever have used them.

01:35:01 ◼   ► So to answer the actual question

01:35:04 ◼   ► you asked me 25 minutes ago,

01:35:06 ◼   ► I think it will eventually, hopefully become possible

01:35:08 ◼   ► to write a good standalone podcast player on the watch,

01:35:13 ◼   ► but I don't think that's coming soon,

01:35:15 ◼   ► because too much has to mature.

01:35:17 ◼   ► We need hardware advancements for battery

01:35:20 ◼   ► and power and data transfer speeds,

01:35:23 ◼   ► we need all those things to improve,

01:35:24 ◼   ► we need the ability for apps to actually stay running

01:35:27 ◼   ► in the background as they're playing audio,

01:35:29 ◼   ► not just do what watchOS tries to do now

01:35:32 ◼   ► and kill us in the background

01:35:34 ◼   ► and leave this weird standalone file player

01:35:36 ◼   ► that's run by the system.

01:35:37 ◼   ► No, we need what we have on the phone, basically.

01:35:39 ◼   ► The phone had this a very long time ago,

01:35:41 ◼   ► so maybe we weren't that far off, who knows?

01:35:43 ◼   ► But whatever it is, we need API parity

01:35:48 ◼   ► in a lot of these areas between the watch and the phone.

01:35:50 ◼   ► And not only do we not have that,

01:35:52 ◼   ► but it almost feels like Apple doesn't want

01:35:54 ◼   ► to do that on the watch.

01:35:55 ◼   ► It seems like they think that this is all the audio exposure

01:35:59 ◼   ► we need right now, and I don't know

01:36:01 ◼   ► if that's an ideological thing,

01:36:02 ◼   ► or if that's reacting to limitations of the current hardware.

01:36:05 ◼   ► Either way, that has to change, and that's a big change,

01:36:09 ◼   ► so I don't expect for it to be soon.

01:36:11 ◼   ► - So if you got, I'm trying to think of the minimal stuff

01:36:16 ◼   ► that you would need for this,

01:36:17 ◼   ► because it's gonna be a while before you get like full access to the

01:36:20 ◼   ► APIs that OWL has, if ever. If you just got cell data and the ability to run in

01:36:28 ◼   ► the background, at the very least you could make a very simple streaming only

01:36:35 ◼   ► player that communicates with, that pulls the data from wherever the

01:36:40 ◼   ► podcast is and that communicates with your server in a lightweight way to keep

01:36:44 ◼   ► sort of the timestamp updated, right? Because that's not heavy background work. You're like,

01:36:49 ◼   ► you know, pulling data for this podcast, you know, you have plenty of time to slurp it up when your

01:36:54 ◼   ► connection is good and then just sleep for a while, you know, whatever. So the input of the

01:36:58 ◼   ► audio data is fine and you kind of communicate with your server a little bit every, you know,

01:37:02 ◼   ► you can do it every minute, who knows? Like just say, oh, update the play position, update the play

01:37:06 ◼   ► position or whatever. And then I guess minimal interface to the controls to understand what you,

01:37:12 ◼   ► you know, how to have control over when you hit the next and previous to do something different than

01:37:16 ◼   ► doing something ridiculous. And that, I think, you know, I know this is, this entire section is

01:37:21 ◼   ► about offline watch playback, but this I think would fulfill all the needs. Like, I don't need

01:37:26 ◼   ► to bring my phone with me, I can just wear my watch and I can listen to my podcast. And,

01:37:30 ◼   ► but what I was mostly getting at with that, with the question about do you have any expectations,

01:37:34 ◼   ► A, if you had any inside information about it, but presumably Apple will eventually,

01:37:40 ◼   ► on its list of things that we want to add to the watch get to the point where people like yeah

01:37:43 ◼   ► people do like to listen to music on their watch they also would like to probably listen to podcasts

01:37:47 ◼   ► on their watch they know how many people listen to podcasts they have their stats for the podcast app

01:37:51 ◼   ► that comes bundled with your phone podcasts are a thing again not as big as music eventually i think

01:37:57 ◼   ► apple will get around to the idea of like oh it's silly that you can't listen to podcasts on your

01:38:01 ◼   ► watch without your phone with you especially now that we have the second generation of this watch

01:38:05 ◼   ► with cell date access right so they will get to it eventually so i feel like there's hope for you

01:38:09 ◼   ► You're not just like swinging in the wind where like they're just never going to get

01:38:12 ◼   ► to me.

01:38:13 ◼   ► But I don't know what the timeline looks like on that.

01:38:14 ◼   ► It's very difficult to tell how much Apple cares about podcasts sometimes.

01:38:19 ◼   ► Well, it's also, this is the kind of feature that, believe me, I've run into lots of these.

01:38:25 ◼   ► If you ask people if they want this feature, a certain number of them will say, "Yes, of

01:38:31 ◼   ► course I want that feature."

01:38:32 ◼   ► Or a certain number of them will email you without you even asking, saying, "Please,

01:38:35 ◼   ► I want this feature."

01:38:36 ◼   ► But then if you actually give it to them,

01:38:39 ◼   ► the number of people who actually use it

01:38:41 ◼   ► is usually, or not usually, often,

01:38:44 ◼   ► for some of these features, way, way lower

01:38:46 ◼   ► than what they thought before they had it.

01:38:49 ◼   ► - It's also the usability.

01:38:51 ◼   ► I remember when I tried to send it to the watch,

01:38:53 ◼   ► it's not easy to just figure out even how to do it.

01:38:55 ◼   ► And then when you do figure out how to do it,

01:38:57 ◼   ► the fact that it doesn't work that well

01:38:59 ◼   ► will discourage people from using it.

01:39:01 ◼   ► - Sure, and I think a lot of people

01:39:02 ◼   ► had that same experience with playing music on the watch

01:39:05 ◼   ► through Apple's apps.

01:39:07 ◼   ► The reason they had to do this kind of overnight

01:39:09 ◼   ► automatic syncing thing with watchOS 4

01:39:12 ◼   ► is because before that when you had to kind of manually

01:39:14 ◼   ► pick stuff to sync over and then wait forever for transfer,

01:39:17 ◼   ► that was terrible.

01:39:18 ◼   ► It was so bad most people didn't do it.

01:39:20 ◼   ► Even now on the watch I find the playback experience,

01:39:23 ◼   ► even if you can get the data there,

01:39:26 ◼   ► the playback and control experience on the watch

01:39:29 ◼   ► is really rough compared to what you have on the phone.

01:39:32 ◼   ► Again, this goes back to my thing of never bet

01:39:33 ◼   ► against the smartphone.

01:39:34 ◼   ► The smartphone is really good at this stuff.

01:39:37 ◼   ► It is very rare that I do something on my watch

01:39:42 ◼   ► to interact with a podcast that is at all non-trivial

01:39:45 ◼   ► that I don't regret not just taking out my phone

01:39:48 ◼   ► and doing it there.

01:39:49 ◼   ► If you're doing something like,

01:39:51 ◼   ► skip to the next chapter, fine.

01:39:53 ◼   ► Take out the watch app, do it there, it's fast.

01:39:55 ◼   ► If you're walking with me, that's fine.

01:39:58 ◼   ► But for anything non-trivial,

01:40:01 ◼   ► I find it very hard to do anything on the watch.

01:40:04 ◼   ► not even just with audio in general.

01:40:06 ◼   ► And so, and there have been lots of other overcast features

01:40:08 ◼   ► where people have asked for it or wanted it.

01:40:12 ◼   ► Some of the things I haven't even released

01:40:13 ◼   ► because, for example, the Sonos integration.

01:40:17 ◼   ► Right now there's, as I mentioned,

01:40:20 ◼   ► I think somewhere on Twitter or something,

01:40:22 ◼   ► there's an API limitation that basically makes it,

01:40:23 ◼   ► in my opinion, not good enough to ship.

01:40:25 ◼   ► Sound familiar?

01:40:26 ◼   ► So I'm not shipping it.

01:40:28 ◼   ► But I found in my testing of the Sonos integration,

01:40:33 ◼   ► it was not a very good experience.

01:40:35 ◼   ► And I mostly just preferred to have podcasts playing

01:40:40 ◼   ► through my phone speaker sitting on the counter,

01:40:42 ◼   ► or eventually upgraded to an iPad Pro

01:40:44 ◼   ► with big speakers in it, so that's the way,

01:40:46 ◼   ► and so an iPad Pro on the counter is by far

01:40:49 ◼   ► the best way to play podcasts out in the open at home,

01:40:52 ◼   ► by a long shot.

01:40:53 ◼   ► It's way better than Sonos, way better than Echo,

01:40:55 ◼   ► it's just a way better experience.

01:40:57 ◼   ► Because you don't listen to podcasts

01:40:59 ◼   ► the same way you listen to music.

01:41:01 ◼   ► There's a lot more interaction involved,

01:41:03 ◼   ► and you have different, like you wanna look at,

01:41:06 ◼   ► if somebody mentions a link,