ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Oh, goodness. John, how was your trip to Long Island?

00:00:04 ◼   ► Just lovely.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. Do you like the beach? I hear you're plugging your phone in.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I am. I'm really muted when I do that when you ask me a question, so now you get to hear.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Behind the scenes, I plug in my phone so it charges while I record. It's exciting.

00:00:17 ◼   ► Why? Why not just do that when you go to bed?

00:00:20 ◼   ► I do. How long of a time span is it between when the podcast ends and when you go to bed, usually?

00:00:25 ◼   ► You never know.

00:00:27 ◼   ► Vacation was good.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Anything interesting to report?

00:00:30 ◼   ► You rented a camera.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Would you like to?

00:00:32 ◼   ► Yeah, a whole camera, right?

00:00:33 ◼   ► Would you like to talk about that at all?

00:00:34 ◼   ► Yeah, a camera and a bunch of lenses.

00:00:36 ◼   ► This was Marco's recommendation of what camera I should rent.

00:00:38 ◼   ► And the only reason I was doing it at all is because my wife

00:00:40 ◼   ► is going off on a cruise with her mother, which is a thing

00:00:43 ◼   ► to do.

00:00:43 ◼   ► Maybe we'll talk about later.

00:00:45 ◼   ► And she decided that our camera is not good enough.

00:00:49 ◼   ► She's had too much proximity exposure to Marco's fancy cameras

00:00:54 ◼   ► and other people's fancy cameras and it's like rubbing off on her. So she's like we should get

00:00:59 ◼   ► a better camera. I don't want to get a better... She's gonna go on this vacation and she wants to

00:01:03 ◼   ► have good pictures and she doesn't feel like our camera is up to the task. I think our camera is

00:01:07 ◼   ► plenty up to the task, but she disagrees. So I don't want to buy a new camera, but I know

00:01:12 ◼   ► Marco rents cameras so I asked him about his the camera rental service that he uses and he gave me

00:01:17 ◼   ► the URL and suggested a camera that we should rent because we didn't want something as big as

00:01:23 ◼   ► - I think it's Marcos, Marcos is not big,

00:01:24 ◼   ► it's not as big as like the 5D,

00:01:26 ◼   ► or it's not like a giant full frame SLR, but--

00:01:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's about as big as a mirrorless camera can get

00:01:32 ◼   ► and still be a mirrorless camera.

00:01:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's still full frame,

00:01:35 ◼   ► but it doesn't have the mirrors in it.

00:01:37 ◼   ► - To add some clarity here, since everybody will be asking,

00:01:40 ◼   ► the site that I recommended you rent from

00:01:42 ◼   ► is lensrentals.com.

00:01:43 ◼   ► There are a couple other sites,

00:01:45 ◼   ► that's the one I've used a lot over like--

00:01:47 ◼   ► - Same here. - Oh, geez, I don't know,

00:01:48 ◼   ► maybe over a decade?

00:01:49 ◼   ► I've used it for a long time.

00:01:52 ◼   ► They've been great, no complaints.

00:01:54 ◼   ► I've rented both lenses and entire cameras from them.

00:01:56 ◼   ► They've been great, lensrentals.com.

00:01:58 ◼   ► This is not a sponsorship.

00:01:59 ◼   ► The camera I recommended that you rent

00:02:01 ◼   ► is the Sony A6300.

00:02:03 ◼   ► It is Sony's new high-end, but still crop sensor

00:02:08 ◼   ► mirrorless camera.

00:02:09 ◼   ► It runs, I think like $1200, something in that range.

00:02:12 ◼   ► It's a very, very good camera.

00:02:14 ◼   ► It's about as good as you can get

00:02:15 ◼   ► without being a full-frame sensor.

00:02:18 ◼   ► The camera that I have is the Sony A7R II,

00:02:20 ◼   ► which is a full frame sensor, is a lot more money,

00:02:23 ◼   ► but is a lot bigger and is a lot higher quality images.

00:02:25 ◼   ► But the A6300 that I had, John Rent, is incredibly good.

00:02:30 ◼   ► And I would say if you're looking for a mirrorless camera

00:02:34 ◼   ► in the like $1000 range, that seems like it would be a really

00:02:38 ◼   ► it should be very high on your list.

00:02:40 ◼   ► That said, I have not actually used it.

00:02:41 ◼   ► This is all based on review info and experience

00:02:43 ◼   ► with other Sony cameras.

00:02:44 ◼   ► So John, how is the A6300?

00:02:46 ◼   ► - Well, looking at it compared to your camera,

00:02:49 ◼   ► I was surprised to see that there are a couple of specs

00:02:51 ◼   ► where the smaller, lesser camera is better.

00:02:54 ◼   ► For instance, a number of photos

00:02:55 ◼   ► it can take per second for burst mode.

00:02:57 ◼   ► It's like double the, maybe even triple

00:03:00 ◼   ► in the highest setting, what yours does.

00:03:03 ◼   ► And I think it had, I don't know what these specs mean,

00:03:07 ◼   ► but like the number of areas of phase detection

00:03:09 ◼   ► for auto focus was higher on this thing.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Like there's a couple of attributes that make me think

00:03:15 ◼   ► that this camera and this sensor came out after yours.

00:03:18 ◼   ► Is that the case?

00:03:19 ◼   ► - It did, yeah, and also when you have a smaller,

00:03:21 ◼   ► and yeah, they came out, I think it was like six months

00:03:23 ◼   ► or maybe a year after mine, and well, yeah,

00:03:27 ◼   ► between six and nine months, I think, after mine.

00:03:29 ◼   ► And also when you have a, so a full frame sensor

00:03:31 ◼   ► is a lot larger, I think it's 60% larger by area,

00:03:35 ◼   ► something like that.

00:03:36 ◼   ► - It's double the megapixels too, yours is 42,

00:03:38 ◼   ► this is 24, so it's close to double.

00:03:40 ◼   ► - Right, right, and so when you have a larger sensor

00:03:42 ◼   ► and you have more pixels, it is much harder

00:03:45 ◼   ► to make the surrounding electronics able to deal

00:03:48 ◼   ► with the sensor dumping like 100 photos a second off of it.

00:03:52 ◼   ► And so usually the smaller sensors

00:03:54 ◼   ► will have higher slow-mo video frame rates

00:03:57 ◼   ► and higher burst per second capacity

00:04:00 ◼   ► simply because there's a lot less data to deal with

00:04:03 ◼   ► and that has to be pulled off that sensor.

00:04:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the reason we weren't looking

00:04:06 ◼   ► at Marco's camera specifically is not particularly

00:04:08 ◼   ► because it's too expensive because the whole idea

00:04:10 ◼   ► was we were gonna rent it, but just because it's big

00:04:12 ◼   ► and we're going from a much smaller--

00:04:15 ◼   ► - It's all relative.

00:04:16 ◼   ► Well, much smaller, much lighter camera,

00:04:18 ◼   ► non-interchangeable lens camera.

00:04:20 ◼   ► We always have super zooms and they're all made of plastic.

00:04:22 ◼   ► So they're very light and they're small.

00:04:25 ◼   ► And if you're gonna be walking all over Europe,

00:04:27 ◼   ► maybe you don't wanna go right from a small light camera

00:04:29 ◼   ► to something as big as a marketer.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Which again is not as big as a full frame SLR,

00:04:33 ◼   ► but it's still pretty big.

00:04:35 ◼   ► And the magnesium aluminum body is not as heavy

00:04:38 ◼   ► as like a steel body or something,

00:04:39 ◼   ► but it's way heavier than a plastic one.

00:04:41 ◼   ► So this was a kind of a good choice for like,

00:04:44 ◼   ► it's gonna take good pictures,

00:04:45 ◼   ► But it's really, it's a very small body.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Like it's so small that a lot of the lenses look comical.

00:04:49 ◼   ► Like a lot of the Sonys have looked like this,

00:04:51 ◼   ► like they would the NEX series and all that.

00:04:53 ◼   ► They always looked like the lens was too big for the body

00:04:56 ◼   ► because Sony made these very small,

00:04:58 ◼   ► that's what you can do with mirrorless cameras,

00:04:59 ◼   ► very small looking bodies with pretty good sensors in them.

00:05:02 ◼   ► Sometimes to a fault,

00:05:03 ◼   ► because my brother has one of the earlier Sonys

00:05:05 ◼   ► and it was very often difficult to hold them,

00:05:07 ◼   ► like to find a place where you could grip them.

00:05:09 ◼   ► And Sony was making them kind of like

00:05:11 ◼   ► their PlayStation controllers,

00:05:12 ◼   ► like little pieces of art made of like conical sections

00:05:14 ◼   ► ideal solids and stuff, instead of saying no you have to you have to make it grippy.

00:05:18 ◼   ► So that's why when I used Marco's camera when I first saw his I was

00:05:21 ◼   ► happy to see that Sony has learned hey you should put grippy stuff on the part

00:05:24 ◼   ► where you grip. It's got like nice grippy rubber you know like camera grip stuff.

00:05:28 ◼   ► If you make the whole thing a smooth beautiful rectangle with a little bulge

00:05:31 ◼   ► it falls out of your hand and you're sad. So the a6300 is basically like a shrunken version of

00:05:36 ◼   ► Marco's. It's very small, it's still relatively heavy but most of the weight is in the lenses if

00:05:42 ◼   ► you use a larger lens and lenses I got was that the silly little kit lens that it comes with which

00:05:46 ◼   ► is like a I forget it was like 15 to 50 or something power zoom something like that yeah

00:05:50 ◼   ► something like that it's it's a it's a very small zoom range a very compact uh lens and it doesn't

00:05:57 ◼   ► seem to be very good um and I got a 50 millimeter prime and I got a what was it 30 to 140 to 105

00:06:07 ◼   ► zoom all these were Sony branded lenses that's another possible issue with these

00:06:13 ◼   ► things is that supposedly the Sony can take third-party lenses and do autofocus

00:06:17 ◼   ► on them but Marcos has the advantage that all the image stabilization stuff

00:06:21 ◼   ► is in the body not in the lens is this correct I'm not that's right well it's

00:06:27 ◼   ► both I mean a lot of the lenses have it but but yeah it mine has in body

00:06:31 ◼   ► stabilization right and this one doesn't so it relies somewhat on its ability to

00:06:35 ◼   ► work with lenses but there's a bunch of adapters for the lenses stuff anyway I

00:06:38 ◼   ► just got Sony lenses and I used it on vacation normally on my Long Island

00:06:41 ◼   ► vacations I take pictures you know just of the family hanging around at the

00:06:45 ◼   ► beach but I also take a lot of pictures of my family playing in the ocean and

00:06:48 ◼   ► when I take those pictures I'm usually up to my knees or my waist in the ocean

00:06:52 ◼   ► in the ocean waves in the surf and that's not a really good place to be

00:06:56 ◼   ► with an expensive camera I've always assumed that one year a wave will get me

00:07:01 ◼   ► and I will drop my camera but what is I don't know we're going on five years ten

00:07:05 ◼   ► years so far has not gotten me and the street continues but I plan to not even

00:07:10 ◼   ► bring the fancy camera to the ocean because I was like well you know I'll

00:07:13 ◼   ► use that one for all the pictures except the ocean pictures and also by the way

00:07:16 ◼   ► my super zoom is a 600 millimeter zoom it's ridiculous like it helps me get

00:07:20 ◼   ► when the surf is like far out I can be up to my knees and they can be way far

00:07:23 ◼   ► out and I can still get close-ups I really I really like my camera my super

00:07:26 ◼   ► zoom by the way is the Canon fz200 but when it came down to it I'd taken so

00:07:32 ◼   ► many pictures with the Sony I didn't want to leave it at home so I brought it

00:07:34 ◼   ► beach with me, in fact I brought both cameras to the beach, and I took a bunch of pictures with my

00:07:38 ◼   ► other camera and I'm like, you know what, I could probably take a few with the Sony, maybe go a

00:07:41 ◼   ► little deeper, maybe go up to my knees, go up to my, you know, the main thing that was holding me

00:07:45 ◼   ► back in the Sony is the zoom was just not, you know, it was only 105 millimeters. It's not, it

00:07:49 ◼   ► wasn't getting me close enough, it was, so some of the pictures were kind of far-right, but then it

00:07:54 ◼   ► gets 24 megapixels compared to whatever 12 or whatever my other thing is, so I could crop a lot

00:07:58 ◼   ► of them to get the same image quality out of it. But I kept it out of the ocean, I think I got a

00:08:03 ◼   ► couple of drops of water splashed on it but none on the lens. I'm pretty good at

00:08:08 ◼   ► staying away from all that and protecting the camera. The results were

00:08:12 ◼   ► really nice. Henry liked it and she's definitely gonna bring it on her

00:08:16 ◼   ► vacation. The only decision I have now is whether we're going to rent it again for

00:08:19 ◼   ► her vacation or just buy it. Yeah, I mean, so first of all I should point out that

00:08:23 ◼   ► Lensrentals has an incredibly broad insurance add-on that you can buy so

00:08:29 ◼   ► that would cover, I think it would cover your ocean fears. That you have to pay

00:08:33 ◼   ► 10% still. I paid for like whatever the most expensive insurance was against damage and theft,

00:08:38 ◼   ► but even if the worst happens, you still have to pay 10%. And I had like, what was it like,

00:08:42 ◼   ► a $600 lens, a $150 lens, a $100 lens, and a $1000 body or whatever. So 10% of that is

00:08:49 ◼   ► still something I didn't want to pay. So how many lenses did you say you rented?

00:08:53 ◼   ► Just three. Just the prime, the zoom, and the little kit lens thing. Because I didn't know

00:08:57 ◼   ► which one I would end up using more of. As it turns out, what I ended up using was,

00:09:01 ◼   ► I almost never used the little kit lensy thing because I had two optically better lenses with me.

00:09:07 ◼   ► And indoors I used the prime because it was the F1.8, it was the one that took the best

00:09:13 ◼   ► low light pictures. And outdoors I used the zoom even though it was relatively huge just because

00:09:20 ◼   ► it gave me the most flexibility. And in all fairness your battle between like the reach

00:09:25 ◼   ► of the super zoom and the quality of the nice camera.

00:09:30 ◼   ► In all fairness, I did recommend that you consider the Sony RX10, which is its super

00:09:35 ◼   ► zoom.

00:09:36 ◼   ► But it doesn't have the same reach as this one.

00:09:37 ◼   ► I'm like, "I'm not going to get a super zoom.

00:09:38 ◼   ► I'm not going to get one that stops at 400 or something."

00:09:41 ◼   ► The RX10 II maybe does go to 600, but there was some other aspect of it that was worse

00:09:45 ◼   ► than my camera.

00:09:46 ◼   ► I think the most recent one actually might go out that far.

00:09:48 ◼   ► It's got a pretty big update.

00:09:50 ◼   ► But it's not f/2.8 through the whole zoom range, like this thing is.

00:09:53 ◼   ► No, that's pretty rare.

00:09:55 ◼   ► I mean, basically to achieve that you have to have a very small sensor.

00:09:58 ◼   ► I know, well then I do.

00:09:59 ◼   ► So anyway, not only is there no Sony SuperZoom that I can get at any price that I feel like

00:10:04 ◼   ► has better feature set, universally better than the one I have, but there's no Panasonic

00:10:09 ◼   ► one.

00:10:10 ◼   ► The Panasonic upgraded my camera too and made it worse for my purposes.

00:10:13 ◼   ► But anyway, that's the problem with the zoom lenses.

00:10:15 ◼   ► The problem with all the Sony lenses is that I don't know, the lenses get expensive really

00:10:20 ◼   ► fast.

00:10:21 ◼   ► There's no sort of, maybe I could talk to you about what lenses I should get if I actually

00:10:24 ◼   ► buy this thing, but there's no reasonably expensive zoom lens above like 100 something

00:10:31 ◼   ► millimeter of zoom. Like, forget about a 600, forget about a 400. I mean, I think I can

00:10:35 ◼   ► get like a 400 for $12,000. That's how much I can.

00:10:40 ◼   ► So you know, the problem is like what you're looking at here is you're looking at a lens

00:10:44 ◼   ► system that spans from prosumer to really like low to kind of mid-range pro. The Sony

00:10:52 ◼   ► full frame sensors like the A7 series have become very popular very quickly among high-end

00:10:58 ◼   ► users. And we can have lots of debates over whether they are considered pro cameras or

00:11:03 ◼   ► not, but it's kind of like asking whether the iPad is a computer. Whether or not they

00:11:08 ◼   ► are pro cameras, by some people's definitions, they are still being used by a lot of pros

00:11:11 ◼   ► for professional use. So it doesn't really matter whether you think they're a pro camera

00:11:15 ◼   ► or not because they are just incredibly good and incredibly compelling for a lot of reasons.

00:11:20 ◼   ► Anyway, so the problem is that when you have these large,

00:11:25 ◼   ► very dense, very high quality sensors,

00:11:28 ◼   ► you need really good lens glass in front of those

00:11:32 ◼   ► to be able to resolve enough detail

00:11:34 ◼   ► to really take advantage of what those sensors have to offer.

00:11:38 ◼   ► And so you can look at your little super zooms,

00:11:41 ◼   ► and super zooms, they sacrifice a lot of image quality

00:11:46 ◼   ► and optical quality to be able to put a large zoom range

00:11:50 ◼   ► into a relatively compact and relatively inexpensive body.

00:11:54 ◼   ► That's not really possible to,

00:11:56 ◼   ► it's like something has to give there.

00:11:58 ◼   ► If you're gonna have to serve a very large, nice sensor

00:12:02 ◼   ► with lots of megapixels of detail

00:12:05 ◼   ► and not have a bunch of distortion in the image,

00:12:07 ◼   ► I mean, some of that you can correct with software,

00:12:08 ◼   ► but still, try to avoid it if you can,

00:12:11 ◼   ► then you have to either shorten the range

00:12:15 ◼   ► in order to have less glass that needs to be in place

00:12:17 ◼   ► to get that high-quality image

00:12:18 ◼   ► to this high quality sensor without distorting,

00:12:21 ◼   ► or you have to put just a ton of glass

00:12:23 ◼   ► in front of that thing, tons of like highly engineered

00:12:27 ◼   ► lens elements and these very expensive,

00:12:29 ◼   ► very large, very heavy lenses.

00:12:30 ◼   ► And so it's just this trade off

00:12:33 ◼   ► between all these different factors of like,

00:12:34 ◼   ► well, if you wanna have something that is small and light

00:12:38 ◼   ► and probably cheap and also has big zoom range,

00:12:41 ◼   ► it can't have good optical quality.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And if you want something that is small

00:12:45 ◼   ► with good optical quality,

00:12:46 ◼   ► you should really be probably using a prime.

00:12:48 ◼   ► If you want something large with good optical quality

00:12:51 ◼   ► and you have a limited budget

00:12:54 ◼   ► and you don't mind carrying these giant heavy lenses,

00:12:57 ◼   ► the lenses you see in the new high-end Sony FE lineup,

00:13:01 ◼   ► that's the market they're targeting.

00:13:02 ◼   ► They're targeting the Canon L series lenses and stuff

00:13:05 ◼   ► and whatever the Nikon,

00:13:06 ◼   ► I forget what the Nikon Pro ones are called.

00:13:08 ◼   ► They're targeting that market of pro photographers,

00:13:10 ◼   ► the people you see on the sidelines of sports games,

00:13:13 ◼   ► the giant white lenses.

00:13:14 ◼   ► They're targeting that market now

00:13:16 ◼   ► because their cameras are so good,

00:13:18 ◼   ► they're starting to be used in that kind of industry,

00:13:19 ◼   ► which is pretty impressive for a mirrorless to begin with.

00:13:22 ◼   ► But anyway, so for what you're looking for,

00:13:26 ◼   ► you should probably honestly consider the RX10,

00:13:29 ◼   ► their super zoom, or at least only consider using the Sony

00:13:34 ◼   ► for occasions in which you don't really need massive reach

00:13:38 ◼   ► of a telephoto zoom, because that's just like,

00:13:41 ◼   ► you're looking at a market that is designed

00:13:43 ◼   ► for very different needs and is optimizing

00:13:45 ◼   ► for very different factors in that trade-off of lens design,

00:13:48 ◼   ► you're trying to get out of that market

00:13:50 ◼   ► like a 600 millimeter lens,

00:13:53 ◼   ► try to find a 600 millimeter Canon L lens

00:13:55 ◼   ► and you will see quite what this kind of quality

00:13:58 ◼   ► and what this kind of market is like.

00:14:01 ◼   ► They get pretty ridiculous pretty fast.

00:14:03 ◼   ► I would say this is kind of like your Mac Pro

00:14:06 ◼   ► versus gaming PC thing, right?

00:14:08 ◼   ► You kind of want the impossible out of this high-end thing,

00:14:11 ◼   ► but what you really actually need is a low-end thing.

00:14:13 ◼   ► No, there's no 2008 Mac Pro equivalent.

00:14:15 ◼   ► This 2008 Mac Pro was perfect in 2008.

00:14:18 ◼   ► Did everything.

00:14:19 ◼   ► But no, so what I learned on the vacation is that

00:14:21 ◼   ► I'm willing to give up the zoom range

00:14:23 ◼   ► for the better quality.

00:14:24 ◼   ► 'Cause first of all, with the Prime,

00:14:26 ◼   ► this can take pictures indoors

00:14:28 ◼   ► that nothing else I have could take.

00:14:29 ◼   ► This is the reason I never wanted to get a high-end camera

00:14:31 ◼   ► 'cause you get used to it and you're like,

00:14:32 ◼   ► well, no, I can't go back.

00:14:33 ◼   ► How can you go back from using, you know,

00:14:36 ◼   ► a reasonably good camera for indoor photography?

00:14:39 ◼   ► Like you can't go back 'cause all the pictures,

00:14:42 ◼   ► other pictures are garbage indoors

00:14:43 ◼   ► there's no light and your phone can't get the light and nothing else can and you know so and

00:14:48 ◼   ► Then then at the beach when I had the choice between both cameras. I had them both right there

00:14:52 ◼   ► I was using both of them eventually by the last day. We were at the ocean

00:14:56 ◼   ► I just didn't even take out the Panasonic the whole time. I used the Sony the whole time

00:14:59 ◼   ► You know and by that

00:15:01 ◼   ► Then I was brave enough to go in the water with it

00:15:03 ◼   ► And I didn't mind the fact that I was a little bit farther away

00:15:05 ◼   ► Because the you know had more megapixels and I could crop them if I really needed to but in the end

00:15:11 ◼   ► Even if I was a little bit farther away the increased image quality was was worth it to me

00:15:15 ◼   ► I mean, so maybe I like a little bit bigger zoom American, you know, I'll shop around but like I'm looking at Sony's lenses now

00:15:22 ◼   ► They're 500 millimeter. You're right that the signal is when the lens is white run away. It's probably like a rhyme

00:15:27 ◼   ► Lens is white. The price is not right the 500 millimeter f4g SSM. Whatever those letters stand for

00:15:34 ◼   ► $12,999 so I don't think I'll be skipping that lens. There's also the size of a truck like

00:15:40 ◼   ► It's also a bad sign when the lens itself is the thing that mounts to the tripod and not the camera because now the camera

00:15:45 ◼   ► Is just hanging off the end of the lens. These are all bad signs for your budget

00:15:48 ◼   ► 300 millimeter one for only seven thousand five hundred

00:15:52 ◼   ► Anyway, I'll probably just end up getting this camera with the kit lens and a prime and then save up for a zoom

00:15:59 ◼   ► Because I mean I enjoyed it that much like it was it was heavier but not that much heavier and the size wise it was

00:16:08 ◼   ► okay

00:16:09 ◼   ► ergonomically and UI wise I still think cameras have a long way to go like I

00:16:13 ◼   ► Mean I recognize this is a big improvement over the old Sony's who's got my brother had an older one

00:16:17 ◼   ► like this is this is better doesn't have a touchscreen which would help but

00:16:20 ◼   ► camera manufacturers need to need to get over the idea that the the best way to arrange all your options is

00:16:27 ◼   ► In a big linear list over a series of screens like this one has tabs and then within each tabs

00:16:34 ◼   ► There's a number line like search results that has seven screens

00:16:37 ◼   ► is just a bunch of text things like that's not it's it's organized kind of but you can imagine

00:16:43 ◼   ► a much better ui to organize because i can never remember where the hell is the feature this thing

00:16:47 ◼   ► like they weren't organized in any logical way other than like these are the camera settings

00:16:51 ◼   ► these are the ones under gear these are settings but not camera related set it's just it's a

00:16:55 ◼   ► terrible organization but at least they've gotten on the bmw page and said look we put a bunch of

00:16:59 ◼   ► buttons on this thing and most cameras do this but apparently so many have been bad about this

00:17:02 ◼   ► in the past we have a bunch of buttons you can program they're all to do anything you want we

00:17:06 ◼   ► We printed something next to the buttons that have little abbreviations that tell you what

00:17:09 ◼   ► they do by default, but if you don't like that, you can make any button do anything

00:17:14 ◼   ► for the most part, which is another business in the universe.

00:17:16 ◼   ► Like, what do you want this button to do?

00:17:17 ◼   ► Scroll through this list of literally 70 options and find the thing you want.

00:17:21 ◼   ► It's really terrible.

00:17:22 ◼   ► And then everything cameras want to do on camera, like there's a tab that says apps.

00:17:26 ◼   ► Just no, Sony.

00:17:27 ◼   ► There are no apps that I want to run.

00:17:28 ◼   ► I want your camera to take pictures, maybe on camera convert to JPEG, which by the way,

00:17:33 ◼   ► this one doesn't even do.

00:17:34 ◼   ► It's just the raws you have to pull off.

00:17:36 ◼   ► But everything else...

00:17:37 ◼   ► Wait, what?

00:17:38 ◼   ► It doesn't convert to...

00:17:39 ◼   ► You can't do like in-camera conversion where you shoot in raw and then fiddle with it and

00:17:44 ◼   ► then do a conversion to JPEG before you pull it off.

00:17:47 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

00:17:48 ◼   ► I see what you mean.

00:17:49 ◼   ► You can shoot JPEG plus raw, you can shoot raw, you can shoot JPEG, but a lot of cameras

00:17:52 ◼   ► have a thing where you shoot in raw and then on the camera screw with the whatever you're

00:17:56 ◼   ► gonna screw with to get the, you know, pull out the detail from the shadows and blah,

00:17:59 ◼   ► blah, blah.

00:18:00 ◼   ► And then just pull off JPEGs that are burned in like that.

00:18:03 ◼   ► Why would you want to do that?

00:18:05 ◼   ► Okay, well, okay.

00:18:05 ◼   ► - To save room.

00:18:07 ◼   ► You know, because that's another thing.

00:18:08 ◼   ► Like, and now I understand why my brother has the problem

00:18:10 ◼   ► that he can't use iCloud library

00:18:13 ◼   ► because he has more than one terabyte of photos.

00:18:16 ◼   ► And why does he have more than one terabyte of photos?

00:18:18 ◼   ► Because he shoots raw on his little Sony.

00:18:20 ◼   ► And so, yeah, each of these raws is like 25 megs each

00:18:23 ◼   ► compared to like three or four megs in JPEG

00:18:28 ◼   ► and even smaller.

00:18:28 ◼   ► And so I filled the 64 gig card

00:18:32 ◼   ► and a little bit of another card.

00:18:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean in all fairness,

00:18:35 ◼   ► buying a larger SD card is probably a lot easier

00:18:39 ◼   ► and they're pretty cheap now than having to fiddle

00:18:42 ◼   ► with like taking up space on the camera

00:18:44 ◼   ► because the other thing too is like,

00:18:46 ◼   ► a larger SD card is a gettable easily,

00:18:50 ◼   ► you know, pretty easily thing.

00:18:51 ◼   ► What is not so easy is to get these cameras batteries

00:18:55 ◼   ► to last very long when the screens are on.

00:18:57 ◼   ► And I mean that's the one thing like Sony,

00:19:00 ◼   ► I love my camera.

00:19:01 ◼   ► I love almost everything about it,

00:19:02 ◼   ► but the battery life is embarrassing.

00:19:04 ◼   ► And I have all these different power-saving tips.

00:19:07 ◼   ► It has Wi-Fi, but you can put it in airplane mode

00:19:09 ◼   ► to turn the Wi-Fi up.

00:19:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, I did that immediately,

00:19:11 ◼   ► as soon as I took this out of the box.

00:19:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, my camera has always been in airplane mode.

00:19:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:19:15 ◼   ► Because the battery life is so bad,

00:19:17 ◼   ► I need all the help I can get. (laughing)

00:19:19 ◼   ► - I had to turn the back screen on sunny day mode.

00:19:22 ◼   ► I'm sure you don't have yours in sunny day mode,

00:19:24 ◼   ► because sunny day mode means max brightness on the screen.

00:19:27 ◼   ► And guess what?

00:19:28 ◼   ► I needed that because it was a sunny day at the beach,

00:19:29 ◼   ► otherwise I couldn't see a thing

00:19:30 ◼   ► and I couldn't use the viewfinder the whole time.

00:19:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I usually when I'm shooting,

00:19:33 ◼   ► I will almost always be using the optical viewfinder

00:19:36 ◼   ► just because I prefer the additional detail

00:19:38 ◼   ► that I'm able to see just because it is closer to my eye

00:19:41 ◼   ► and there's no outside light coming in and everything else.

00:19:44 ◼   ► So anyway, so yeah, I mean, honestly I recommend

00:19:48 ◼   ► possibly giving up on the idea of zooms for the most part

00:19:52 ◼   ► because honestly, like, the trade-off is so big

00:19:56 ◼   ► in terms of quality or size and money.

00:19:59 ◼   ► You can get Zooms that are,

00:20:03 ◼   ► and there's only very few of them that this is true for,

00:20:06 ◼   ► but you can get Zooms that are about as good as most Primes.

00:20:10 ◼   ► They do exist, but they're massive, heavy,

00:20:13 ◼   ► and very expensive, and there aren't that many of them.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Most Zooms, you're giving up a lot of quality

00:20:20 ◼   ► to get that Zoom flexibility.

00:20:22 ◼   ► And if you think about, when you shoot with your iPhone,

00:20:25 ◼   ► you have a prime on there, except for the next

00:20:28 ◼   ► large iPhone Plus that's gonna have the optical zoom.

00:20:31 ◼   ► So when you shoot with your iPhone,

00:20:33 ◼   ► you're shooting with effectively a 35 millimeter prime.

00:20:36 ◼   ► And you've been shooting with that 35 millimeter prime

00:20:38 ◼   ► on your iPhone for the last seven years or whatever,

00:20:41 ◼   ► however long it's been, well you haven't John,

00:20:42 ◼   ► everyone else has. (laughing)

00:20:46 ◼   ► You know, it's been a while and we've gotten used to that

00:20:48 ◼   ► and it's fine and it turns out that when you just have

00:20:51 ◼   ► like a decent prime in the wide to normal range,

00:20:55 ◼   ► you can get pretty much all of your photography done

00:20:57 ◼   ► that way most of the time, and it's great.

00:21:01 ◼   ► And the trade-off is worth it of like,

00:21:02 ◼   ► well, if you have a prime here,

00:21:03 ◼   ► then you can make this thing much smaller and cheaper

00:21:05 ◼   ► and have higher quality and everything.

00:21:07 ◼   ► Same thing is true for any size camera.

00:21:09 ◼   ► Anybody listening, if you have an SLR,

00:21:12 ◼   ► anything with interchangeable lenses,

00:21:13 ◼   ► if you don't have a prime lens,

00:21:15 ◼   ► which means it's fixed at one focal length,

00:21:16 ◼   ► you can't zoom it, you zoom with your feet,

00:21:19 ◼   ► if you don't have a prime lens,

00:21:22 ◼   ► whatever camera system you own,

00:21:24 ◼   ► get the cheap 50 millimeter prime lens for it.

00:21:27 ◼   ► There is, it is, almost every camera system

00:21:29 ◼   ► has something like this where it is 50 millimeter

00:21:31 ◼   ► or whatever the equivalent is for your sensor size.

00:21:35 ◼   ► Usually it's f1.8 and usually it's like 100 bucks

00:21:38 ◼   ► in that range, it's fairly inexpensive for a lens.

00:21:41 ◼   ► The optical quality you can get out of those

00:21:44 ◼   ► is it just kicks the butts of zoom lenses.

00:21:47 ◼   ► It's so, and you know, like you were saying earlier, John,

00:21:50 ◼   ► that's the one you were saying you were using indoors

00:21:52 ◼   ► because when you're indoors or when it's not that much light,

00:21:56 ◼   ► you can really get a lot of light in there.

00:21:57 ◼   ► And even when you have lots of light,

00:21:59 ◼   ► the sharpness and the color and just the optical quality

00:22:03 ◼   ► that you get out of these lenses is amazing

00:22:05 ◼   ► because they can be so much simpler than a zoom.

00:22:07 ◼   ► Like, just there's fewer elements.

00:22:09 ◼   ► The elements, you know, they can afford

00:22:10 ◼   ► to get higher quality optics in there at that price point

00:22:13 ◼   ► when you don't have all those elements to zoom things

00:22:15 ◼   ► or to have a weird perspective

00:22:17 ◼   ► or the extreme, you know, wide or extreme narrow.

00:22:20 ◼   ► Primes are just so nice.

00:22:22 ◼   ► It's like I've found that even when I have a big camera,

00:22:25 ◼   ► I spend the vast majority of my time using primes,

00:22:29 ◼   ► and even when I've used zooms,

00:22:31 ◼   ► I mostly have not liked the pictures that I get from them.

00:22:34 ◼   ► The primes are just so much better.

00:22:36 ◼   ► And so I urge anybody with cameras out there

00:22:39 ◼   ► to consider just shooting with primes,

00:22:41 ◼   ► because it really is incredible.

00:22:43 ◼   ► And there are situations where you quote, "need a zoom,"

00:22:46 ◼   ► but I bet there's a lot fewer of those than you expect,

00:22:49 ◼   ► and for a lot of camera owners,

00:22:50 ◼   ► You basically never have those.

00:22:53 ◼   ► And a lot of those can be covered by renting.

00:22:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, so we're going on a trip soon

00:22:58 ◼   ► and I have rented a lens from lensrentals.com.

00:23:01 ◼   ► I did so a few days ago because I also use lens rentals,

00:23:03 ◼   ► although probably a lot less frequently.

00:23:05 ◼   ► I rented a 35 to 100 millimeter zoom

00:23:09 ◼   ► for my Micro Four Thirds camera.

00:23:11 ◼   ► And I did that because I want to be able to be a creeper.

00:23:15 ◼   ► Basically, I wanna be able to capture,

00:23:18 ◼   ► what I mean by that is with my own family.

00:23:20 ◼   ► Oh God, taking out of context, that sounds terrible.

00:23:23 ◼   ► - Yes. (laughs)

00:23:24 ◼   ► - Dear God.

00:23:25 ◼   ► No, what I mean by that is, so if we're all at a beach

00:23:28 ◼   ► or if we're all in a rented house together,

00:23:31 ◼   ► so it's only people I know,

00:23:33 ◼   ► I don't want to have to get up in somebody's face

00:23:37 ◼   ► in order to take a really good picture of them.

00:23:38 ◼   ► I wanna be able to be across the room

00:23:40 ◼   ► where they don't even know I'm taking a picture,

00:23:42 ◼   ► so it's a lot more natural.

00:23:43 ◼   ► But that being said, generally speaking,

00:23:45 ◼   ► the only lens that is ever on my camera is a 25 millimeter.

00:23:49 ◼   ► I have no idea what the equivalent of that is in a SLR, but it's a 25mm.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I think it is a 50mm equivalent.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Your pictures look just like 50 pictures.

00:23:57 ◼   ► Okay, so it's a 25mm f1.4 that Sean Blanc had recommended, and it is very expensive.

00:24:03 ◼   ► It was like $600, but it is an unbelievably phenomenally good lens to my eye, and I don't

00:24:08 ◼   ► know crap about this stuff.

00:24:10 ◼   ► And if I ever take a decent picture, it's because I've gotten lucky and because of this

00:24:14 ◼   ► lens.

00:24:15 ◼   ► rented this zoom just like Marco said because I want to have something to take the pictures

00:24:20 ◼   ► you know maybe in the surf or something like John was describing or or take pictures from

00:24:24 ◼   ► across the room but generally speaking I never bother with a zoom and I do have the kit zoom

00:24:28 ◼   ► for this Olympus camera that I have and it's freaking terrible. I can't give up on the zoom

00:24:32 ◼   ► though like the one I was using this is a cheap zoom lens I don't like $600 18 to 105 millimeter

00:24:37 ◼   ► Sony zoom lens it's for it's for the APS-C format it's not a full frame lens so maybe that's why

00:24:44 ◼   ► why it's cheaper. And I was really happy with the pictures it took outdoors in the bright

00:24:48 ◼   ► sunlight on the beach. And it's the same reason Casey said, most of the time I like to have

00:24:52 ◼   ► candid pictures and either I don't want to or can't get close. So like people are all

00:24:56 ◼   ► around I can't get close to them. If I do they start acting weird. So I have to, you

00:25:01 ◼   ► know, or they're far out on the water. Like they see you coming with the camera and they

00:25:05 ◼   ► all turn and smile and ham it up and I like candid pictures better. And so I can capture

00:25:10 ◼   ► them like 100 millimeter zoom is enough for like in an outdoor gathering of people to get close

00:25:15 ◼   ► enough to get groups of people as if you're right next to them without being on next to them. The

00:25:18 ◼   ► surface a little bit it's a little bit low but again I can I can crop and I mean to my eye

00:25:25 ◼   ► obviously the the aperture wasn't like it was on the prime like so you couldn't you know open it up

00:25:31 ◼   ► super wide and get the entire you know background nice and blurred and everything sharp and maybe

00:25:35 ◼   ► that I had you know I did a little f1.8 50 millimeter prime that Marco was

00:25:40 ◼   ► talking about cheap but good but I mostly outdoors I use the big zoom and I

00:25:45 ◼   ► thought I would be bothered by how darn big it is but it was I was able to

00:25:49 ◼   ► wrangle it fairly easily and I felt like it was worth it like that's that's lens

00:25:53 ◼   ► believe it or not that I ended up using the most I thought I would end up using

00:25:56 ◼   ► the prime the most but I end up using this fairly large zoom the most so I

00:25:59 ◼   ► don't know what I'm gonna do maybe I'll just get that same lens it's only $600

00:26:02 ◼   ► but in the beginning I'll probably just get the prime and the kit lens or maybe

00:26:05 ◼   ► Maybe I'll buy the body without a lens and just get the Prime for it just to save some

00:26:09 ◼   ► money.

00:26:10 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:26:11 ◼   ► I haven't decided yet.

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00:28:21 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:28:24 ◼   ► - Our days, Marco, of lording over John

00:28:27 ◼   ► and feeling superior to him,

00:28:29 ◼   ► I'm sad to say they're over, because John now has a blue checkmark.

00:28:34 ◼   ► I was afraid you were going to say he finally got a new computer.

00:28:36 ◼   ► Oh, God, no. Come on. Let's not get ridiculous.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Yeah, so, John, congrats on your blue checkmark, my friend.

00:28:42 ◼   ► My computer's still better than yours too, KZ.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Is it? It doesn't crash.

00:28:46 ◼   ► I was waiting for it. That's why I didn't say anything, because I knew that was coming.

00:28:49 ◼   ► Before we go to the checkmarks, what is the status of your computer? Has the problem recurred?

00:28:53 ◼   ► It has not and I haven't lost power for let's see

00:28:57 ◼   ► Six days 14 hours and 28 minutes still stock RAM in it is your computer plugged into the UPS yet?

00:29:02 ◼   ► No, it's not because I don't want to reboot it. That's why because I wanted to I wanted to keep this damn run going

00:29:08 ◼   ► It has not lost power does not rebooted. It does still have the OEM RAM in it. So I am still

00:29:14 ◼   ► Perhaps perhaps unfairly. I'm still convinced. It's the max sales RAM

00:29:20 ◼   ► Okay, well you should get a get on getting that replaced then did you know that mem test x64 thing that does like the super duper?

00:29:28 ◼   ► Thorough ram test I did not x86 come on

00:29:30 ◼   ► Whatever it is. That's what I that's what I said in my head, but my mouth did something different

00:29:35 ◼   ► You're such not a PC nerd every piece of nerd knows that

00:29:39 ◼   ► That's what I said in my head, but the words came out differently. It's pronounced 1086 now, but what did I actually say?

00:29:45 ◼   ► You said x64.

00:29:46 ◼   ► Oh, I was probably thinking, you know, the modern instruction set.

00:29:51 ◼   ► They should rename their memory test.

00:29:53 ◼   ► So anyway, the point is this is still going strong on the OEM RAM, and whenever this thing

00:30:00 ◼   ► decides to reboot itself or I lose power next or after like two to four weeks I haven't

00:30:05 ◼   ► decided what I consider to be a long enough run, then at that point I will officially

00:30:10 ◼   ► start the RMA process with Maxells.

00:30:13 ◼   ► - Didn't you have to install the 10 whatever,

00:30:16 ◼   ► six update recently?

00:30:17 ◼   ► The really critical security updates

00:30:19 ◼   ► with the image parsing?

00:30:20 ◼   ► - I don't recall.

00:30:22 ◼   ► I know what you're talking about.

00:30:23 ◼   ► I don't recall if I did it or not.

00:30:24 ◼   ► - You should do that if you haven't yet.

00:30:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, well.

00:30:27 ◼   ► All right, well, we'll see.

00:30:29 ◼   ► Maybe I'll just not use my computer for the next week.

00:30:32 ◼   ► Swear I don't have to reboot it.

00:30:35 ◼   ► I don't know, we'll see what happens.

00:30:36 ◼   ► But anyway, so to come back on point,

00:30:38 ◼   ► John, you are verified.

00:30:39 ◼   ► Congratulations, you are a sellout just like me.

00:30:41 ◼   ► We are not good enough like Marco

00:30:42 ◼   ► to have received our check marks without solicitation.

00:30:46 ◼   ► - In all fairness, I did basically ask for it,

00:30:48 ◼   ► just not directly.

00:30:49 ◼   ► - Hell yeah, I guess that's true.

00:30:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, he just did the informal version

00:30:52 ◼   ► of the same thing that you did.

00:30:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:30:53 ◼   ► But yeah, but most importantly now,

00:30:54 ◼   ► we are the Fully Verified podcast, obviously.

00:30:57 ◼   ► So is Analog for that matter.

00:30:58 ◼   ► Many of our Fully Verified podcasts are happening now.

00:31:01 ◼   ► Let's just put, by the way,

00:31:03 ◼   ► so I got my check mark,

00:31:05 ◼   ► Petitchi did not get his,

00:31:07 ◼   ► Brianna did not get hers, so there is still--

00:31:09 ◼   ► - Renee.

00:31:10 ◼   ► - Renee didn't get his?

00:31:11 ◼   ► Nope.

00:31:12 ◼   ► Did he still read it?

00:31:12 ◼   ► Did he get rejected or just hasn't heard back yet?

00:31:13 ◼   ► Rejected.

00:31:14 ◼   ► No, he got rejected.

00:31:15 ◼   ► Rejected!

00:31:16 ◼   ► I don't know what the world's coming to.

00:31:17 ◼   ► I don't know what the hell's going on.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Anyway, there's still massive injustice in this world.

00:31:22 ◼   ► There is.

00:31:23 ◼   ► For those of us who don't actually need it on this podcast, guess what?

00:31:25 ◼   ► We got it.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Makes no sense.

00:31:27 ◼   ► Oh, and people are asking me if I'm going to change my bio that I complained about,

00:31:31 ◼   ► mostly on Rec. Diff's, about having to write this silly bio.

00:31:34 ◼   ► Now I'm afraid to change it, because I'm afraid if I change it, I'll lose my checkmark.

00:31:37 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:31:39 ◼   ► So I just have to leave this silly, embarrassing bio there forever?

00:31:44 ◼   ► Or maybe just give it a year and then it's safe for me to change it?

00:31:46 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:31:47 ◼   ► So do I have to be influencer forever?

00:31:51 ◼   ► I think you can change it.

00:31:52 ◼   ► I'm not sure if you make it go away if they'll get upset, because part of what you have to

00:31:56 ◼   ► do to have a checkmark is to have a bio.

00:31:59 ◼   ► The funny thing about this whole experience for me is that I have apparently become—I

00:32:04 ◼   ► don't know how to put this.

00:32:06 ◼   ► I've become like the litmus test for like, "Oh, Casey got verified. Of course, insert

00:32:12 ◼   ► person here, should totally be verified." So I saw that about Renee, I saw that about

00:32:16 ◼   ► Federico. Dude, Casey got verified. Of course this person should be verified. So that's

00:32:22 ◼   ► my new claim to fame. I should change my bio. I'm that guy you couldn't believe got verified.

00:32:27 ◼   ► That's me.

00:32:28 ◼   ► You just have to find someone who you think is even less deserving of being verified and

00:32:31 ◼   ► then you just point to them.

00:32:32 ◼   ► Yeah, right. God, I don't know, whatever. But yeah, so I get to see those tweets fly

00:32:35 ◼   ► that fly by every few hours.

00:32:38 ◼   ► Dude, Renee didn't get his thing?

00:32:40 ◼   ► I can't believe that.

00:32:41 ◼   ► Casey got one.

00:32:42 ◼   ► Gah!

00:32:43 ◼   ► - My favorite thing is how when people are

00:32:45 ◼   ► just backhand insulting you like this,

00:32:47 ◼   ► they feel the need to mention you, to @mention you.

00:32:50 ◼   ► - Right, exactly, exactly.

00:32:52 ◼   ► It's so true.

00:32:53 ◼   ► Like, okay, if you wanna think that,

00:32:55 ◼   ► I mean, knowing me, I'll probably find it

00:32:56 ◼   ► in a vanity search because hello.

00:32:58 ◼   ► But at least have the decency not to mention me.

00:33:02 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:03 ◼   ► So anyway, so we are the Fully Verified Podcast,

00:33:05 ◼   ► That's very exciting.

00:33:06 ◼   ► All right, moving on.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Where is Tif these days, Marco?

00:33:11 ◼   ► I don't know how to pronounce the more specific location.

00:33:14 ◼   ► However, the general location is France.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:33:18 ◼   ► Yeah, Tif, my wife, is on a vacation for the week, so I am solo parenting this week.

00:33:23 ◼   ► How's that going?

00:33:24 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it's only been like three days so far, so for these three days it's

00:33:28 ◼   ► been totally fine.

00:33:29 ◼   ► But there's four more?

00:33:31 ◼   ► Something like that?

00:33:32 ◼   ► Yeah, so there's still a while to go.

00:33:34 ◼   ► I'm mainly finding it challenging that like last night,

00:33:38 ◼   ► so last night was Sunday night,

00:33:39 ◼   ► and he's in like a school day camp,

00:33:43 ◼   ► just like a day camp at his preschool,

00:33:44 ◼   ► 'cause it's summertime.

00:33:45 ◼   ► I have to pack his lunch every day,

00:33:47 ◼   ► and I realized last night that like a big part

00:33:49 ◼   ► of what we pack is fruit of some kind,

00:33:52 ◼   ► like raspberries or strawberries or something.

00:33:55 ◼   ► And there was just nothing in the fridge,

00:33:56 ◼   ► so we had none.

00:33:57 ◼   ► And he was already in bed.

00:33:58 ◼   ► It was like 10 o'clock at night.

00:34:00 ◼   ► - Oh no. - And I'm like,

00:34:01 ◼   ► "Well also, Marco doesn't know where food comes from."

00:34:03 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:34:04 ◼   ► No, food usually comes from me going shopping for it,

00:34:07 ◼   ► but I can't leave the house with him asleep.

00:34:09 ◼   ► - You gotta go shopping with the kid, imagine that.

00:34:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what we did today.

00:34:13 ◼   ► But yeah, there's just little things like that

00:34:15 ◼   ► that I had to realize, like, oh,

00:34:18 ◼   ► when you have two parents in the house,

00:34:19 ◼   ► one of them can leave and go run an errand

00:34:22 ◼   ► and you don't go to jail.

00:34:24 ◼   ► You know, so it's--

00:34:24 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:34:27 ◼   ► So it's been a slight limited experience like that,

00:34:29 ◼   ► but otherwise, yeah, things have been going pretty,

00:34:31 ◼   ► you know, like I've had him before alone,

00:34:33 ◼   ► I think this is the longest span that we've ever had.

00:34:37 ◼   ► Now see the chat room, see this is a rookie mistake here.

00:34:40 ◼   ► So, Sup in the chat room has suggested

00:34:43 ◼   ► that I go food shopping while he is at camp.

00:34:46 ◼   ► That is an interesting idea, Sup, I thought of that.

00:34:49 ◼   ► However, then after school in the six hours

00:34:53 ◼   ► before he goes to bed, that's one less thing

00:34:56 ◼   ► we could do together.

00:34:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:34:58 ◼   ► We have a whole week here, a whole week.

00:35:01 ◼   ► So any Aaron that I can run with him,

00:35:04 ◼   ► I'm going to run with him.

00:35:06 ◼   ► - Yep, I know those feels.

00:35:08 ◼   ► And that actually segues somewhat nicely

00:35:11 ◼   ► into a brief bit of follow-up I wanted to discuss,

00:35:14 ◼   ► which was a friend of the show, _DavidSmith,

00:35:17 ◼   ► came down to visit on Friday evening into Saturday morning.

00:35:21 ◼   ► We watched "The Hunt for an October" together

00:35:23 ◼   ► because it's one of the best movies in the entire world,

00:35:25 ◼   ► come at me.

00:35:26 ◼   ► And then Saturday morning, which is,

00:35:28 ◼   ► I think you guys do Sunday, Marco,

00:35:30 ◼   ► But in the List household, we do Saturday morning into naptime, daddy time.

00:35:37 ◼   ► And Dave joined me on this, and we took his Tesla to Cars and Coffee.

00:35:42 ◼   ► It was Underscore and Declan and myself.

00:35:45 ◼   ► And we took the Tesla to Cars and Coffee, and it was funny because I had promised him

00:35:50 ◼   ► that we would try to find the self-organizing group of Teslas.

00:35:55 ◼   ► That always shows up.

00:35:56 ◼   ► There's typically three or four of them.

00:35:58 ◼   ► I even saw a Model X there one or two times ago, which was surprising.

00:36:02 ◼   ► But anyway, we showed up in the Tesla and I drove there, which I was slightly perturbed

00:36:06 ◼   ► by only because I felt like this was Dave's big moment.

00:36:09 ◼   ► And here it is, he can get out of his car and be like, "Yes, well, this is so not _style,

00:36:14 ◼   ► but yes, look at me in my Tesla.

00:36:15 ◼   ► This is mine and I am proud of it."

00:36:18 ◼   ► But instead it was me.

00:36:19 ◼   ► Instead it was me who got out of the driver's seat.

00:36:21 ◼   ► And of course, we stepped out of the driver's seat, or I stepped out of the driver's seat.

00:36:24 ◼   ► Within, I kid you not, 15 seconds, somebody came running over to ask questions.

00:36:27 ◼   ► I basically threw my hands in the air and waved them like I just don't care.

00:36:30 ◼   ► No, I threw my hands in the air and said, "Dude, it's his car.

00:36:33 ◼   ► You should ask him about it."

00:36:34 ◼   ► But yeah, it made quite a splash.

00:36:36 ◼   ► People quite liked it.

00:36:37 ◼   ► We were backed in, as you do, because I'm not an animal, and I was backed in against

00:36:42 ◼   ► a Maserati.

00:36:43 ◼   ► So, it was pretty interesting.

00:36:45 ◼   ► But it was funny how many people were just completely impressed by and interested in

00:36:51 ◼   ► the Tesla.

00:36:52 ◼   ► And perhaps even more surprisingly, really loved the rear jump seats.

00:36:56 ◼   ► They really thought the rear jump seats were interesting, to the point that I think it

00:37:00 ◼   ► was a kid, it was like a 15, 18 year old, something like that, asked if he could jump

00:37:05 ◼   ► in the jump seats just to see how they felt, which Underscore, because he's the nicest

00:37:10 ◼   ► man alive, was like, "Yeah, sure, definitely feel free."

00:37:14 ◼   ► But it was funny, and Underscore is hysterical watching him do this because he's like the

00:37:19 ◼   ► most easygoing guy.

00:37:20 ◼   ► Meanwhile, I wouldn't be able to hide the fact that my, you know, my plumage had come

00:37:25 ◼   ► come out in full force, if you will, if it were me.

00:37:28 ◼   ► But Underscore's just like, yeah, you know, it's a thing.

00:37:30 ◼   ► He's just so much better than I am.

00:37:32 ◼   ► - He's just way cooler than all of us.

00:37:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, pretty much.

00:37:35 ◼   ► What a nice car, though.

00:37:36 ◼   ► I kind of am mad at him now,

00:37:37 ◼   ► because I've forgotten how much I hate my car.

00:37:39 ◼   ► I had forgotten how much I hate my car,

00:37:41 ◼   ► and then I drove his Tesla again,

00:37:42 ◼   ► and now I hate my car again.

00:37:43 ◼   ► - You have a very nice car.

00:37:45 ◼   ► Just the Tesla's better.

00:37:46 ◼   ► - I have a wonderful car, I truly do.

00:37:49 ◼   ► But, God, the Tesla's so nice.

00:37:50 ◼   ► - I saw a white M3 today and thought of you.

00:37:52 ◼   ► - Aw, thanks, buddy.

00:37:54 ◼   ► - Is it a new one or an older one?

00:37:55 ◼   ► - That was the last generation, the one that you like,

00:37:57 ◼   ► but it was the two-door convertible.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I think it was convertible, it was at least two-door,

00:38:01 ◼   ► so it was the weird one.

00:38:03 ◼   ► - Snap question, I know we're not really

00:38:05 ◼   ► in the neutral part of the show, but I have to ask.

00:38:06 ◼   ► A friend of the show who will remain nameless

00:38:10 ◼   ► has been debating between M2 and Boxster S.

00:38:14 ◼   ► What do you think?

00:38:15 ◼   ► - So with the caveat that I've driven neither,

00:38:17 ◼   ► I would say, I mean, those are very different cars.

00:38:19 ◼   ► The Boxster is, it's convertible, I assume, right?

00:38:23 ◼   ► the Caymans, the dog convertible, right?

00:38:25 ◼   ► So yeah, so it's convertible, it's probably smaller

00:38:27 ◼   ► if I had to take a guess.

00:38:28 ◼   ► I would guess the Boxster's probably more expensive.

00:38:30 ◼   ► - It is.

00:38:31 ◼   ► - Why are you waffling?

00:38:32 ◼   ► There's an obvious answer here.

00:38:34 ◼   ► - Marco finished your thought,

00:38:34 ◼   ► then I wanna hear the obvious answer.

00:38:36 ◼   ► - So get the M2.

00:38:37 ◼   ► - That's not it, that's not the answer.

00:38:38 ◼   ► The correct answer is to get,

00:38:40 ◼   ► first of all, don't get the new generation Boxster,

00:38:42 ◼   ► like the one with the turbo engine.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Get the previous generation Boxster.

00:38:46 ◼   ► If it's still on sale, it's not get like a used one,

00:38:49 ◼   ► that's the obvious choice.

00:38:50 ◼   ► It's so much better than the M2

00:38:52 ◼   ► in every possible way, the car will make you happier.

00:38:54 ◼   ► 'Cause if you're already shopping for M2 or Boxster,

00:38:56 ◼   ► you're already not looking for like,

00:38:57 ◼   ► oh I need something to haul the groceries to the kids.

00:38:59 ◼   ► Get the previous generation non-turbocharged Boxster.

00:39:04 ◼   ► - Well so again, having driven none of these two cars,

00:39:07 ◼   ► and now the third I'm about to mention,

00:39:09 ◼   ► why get the Boxster when you can get the Cayman?

00:39:11 ◼   ► Isn't the Cayman better in every way

00:39:13 ◼   ► and has all the same advantage as the Boxster?

00:39:15 ◼   ► - This person wants a convertible obviously

00:39:17 ◼   ► if they're shopping Boxster.

00:39:18 ◼   ► I mean it's convertible, the top comes,

00:39:19 ◼   ► it's a big difference.

00:39:20 ◼   ► If you're shopping for a convertible,

00:39:21 ◼   ► You're not confused about whether you know you want to convert you want a convertible nobody wants a convertible people like them. No no

00:39:27 ◼   ► It's no convertible

00:39:29 ◼   ► It's it's one of those decisions that you should you should sway people away from like no you trust me

00:39:33 ◼   ► You don't want a convertible. No there this well this person wants one, and I think it's fine

00:39:37 ◼   ► And the box the box are just a more special car yes

00:39:39 ◼   ► It is more expensive the m2 is a good car if you were shopping like m2 versus m3

00:39:43 ◼   ► Then we could have a real discussion, but if it's m2 versus boxer no contest boxer previous gen

00:39:48 ◼   ► I know you want to wear socks with sandals, but trust me, you don't want to wear socks with sandals.

00:39:53 ◼   ► You don't want a convertible. Convertibles are not socks with sandals. Convertibles are fun experiences.

00:39:58 ◼   ► We're not talking about like Jaguar convertibles from the 80s that are gonna leak water all over you and short out.

00:40:03 ◼   ► The modern convertibles are fine. No, they're not. They're never fine. I don't know. Convertible is a fine car in general.

00:40:09 ◼   ► I really do like convertibles.

00:40:11 ◼   ► But yeah, this particular individual, let's just say that they're always on vacation.

00:40:15 ◼   ► So it wouldn't make sense for this particular individual to be shopping a convertible.

00:40:20 ◼   ► But anyway, yeah, I was just curious. Years ago, in like, I don't know, 2005,

00:40:26 ◼   ► a friend of a friend had a Boxter S, and this was when they were still pretty new.

00:40:31 ◼   ► And I drove that Boxter S, and I got in that car thinking, "Oh, this is just an imposter 9/11.

00:40:38 ◼   ► I'm gonna hate this piece of garbage." And oh my god, did I love it. It was phenomenally good.

00:40:43 ◼   ► I was stunned. I could see how the non S Boxster would be kind of a dog and kind of boring, but

00:40:49 ◼   ► man, the Boxster S was nice. This was way back in '05. I haven't driven an M2. There is a friend

00:40:55 ◼   ► at work that has an M235i that I have yet to drive, but he promised me I could at some point,

00:41:00 ◼   ► and this obviously is just that, but more. But yeah, the old Boxsters anyway were super nice.

00:41:06 ◼   ► I'm curious to see how this new one is. We are all sponsored this week by Warby Parker,

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00:42:53 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:42:55 ◼   ► - Quick follow up on the neutral thing.

00:42:59 ◼   ► Apparently the 2016 model is the bad Boxster.

00:43:02 ◼   ► It's when they added 718 to the public facing name,

00:43:04 ◼   ► the Porsche 718 Boxster.

00:43:06 ◼   ► That's the 2016 model.

00:43:08 ◼   ► Don't get that one.

00:43:09 ◼   ► You want the 2015 Boxster,

00:43:12 ◼   ► which doesn't have a number in the name.

00:43:14 ◼   ► It does have a number.

00:43:15 ◼   ► 981 is the number behind the scenes,

00:43:17 ◼   ► but it's just called Boxster.

00:43:18 ◼   ► So it's confusing, I know,

00:43:20 ◼   ► because car model years always are,

00:43:21 ◼   ► and they do look very similar,

00:43:22 ◼   ► but the 2016 one with the turbo four-cylinder engine

00:43:27 ◼   ► thumbs down.

00:43:28 ◼   ► - So we thought the neutral part of the show was over,

00:43:31 ◼   ► but turns out it's not.

00:43:32 ◼   ► Apple has hired somebody from QNX,

00:43:35 ◼   ► which is interesting.

00:43:37 ◼   ► So QNX is a company that makes an operating system

00:43:42 ◼   ► also called QNX.

00:43:44 ◼   ► And that operating system,

00:43:46 ◼   ► I understand to run a bunch of embedded systems,

00:43:49 ◼   ► not the least of which is,

00:43:50 ◼   ► is it the entertainment system in cars

00:43:53 ◼   ► or is it the actual like ECU in cars?

00:43:55 ◼   ► - I don't think it's, well, it might be the ECU,

00:43:58 ◼   ► but I think what it's most known for is like,

00:44:01 ◼   ► the reason people care about QNX at all

00:44:02 ◼   ► is because it's a real time operating system.

00:44:04 ◼   ► So you would never need a real-time operating system to run like your infotainment because those things are slow as molasses anyway

00:44:09 ◼   ► Oh my god, so slow. Yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes about what the Wikipedia entry on real-time operating system

00:44:14 ◼   ► Which describes you pretty well

00:44:15 ◼   ► But basically a real-time operating system is the only situation where you can make guarantees

00:44:21 ◼   ► About when things will happen so you can say we guarantee that

00:44:26 ◼   ► This thing will be serviced in a maximum of this amount of time right if it's hard real time and soft real time soft real time

00:44:33 ◼   ► you know tries very hard to to give you know computing time to certain things in certain intervals and hard real time is like look

00:44:40 ◼   ► This is a part of the system

00:44:42 ◼   ► You are going to be able to service this in a certain interval at minimum and use hard real-time systems for things like

00:44:48 ◼   ► space probes or flight control systems where you can't have like a space probe whizzing around the solar system and

00:44:56 ◼   ► have it go to do something that has to be done with millisecond precision and then have a

00:45:01 ◼   ► memory allocation happen or an interrupt happen when you didn't expect it and

00:45:04 ◼   ► Not have your routine serviced for an extra couple of milliseconds because there was like a little hiccup, right?

00:45:09 ◼   ► On our personal computers those little hiccups and glitches happen all the time

00:45:13 ◼   ► But in real-time operating systems, especially hard real-time operating systems, the whole design is made so that can't happen ever

00:45:19 ◼   ► And the reason this comes up for automotive things is there are some things in automotive systems that are like that

00:45:25 ◼   ► You know anti-lock brakes possibly also engine control things where you can't ever have any kind of hiccup

00:45:32 ◼   ► You always have to have things done on a certain timeline, but within a certain deadline with some fuzz on either side of it

00:45:38 ◼   ► But like there are limits that you need things to happen right now guaranteed every single time

00:45:43 ◼   ► No possibility that it could it could happen

00:45:45 ◼   ► So I think we talked about this when we were talking about like what kind of what could Apple bring to cars with software?

00:45:50 ◼   ► and we talked a lot about like like barcodes the

00:45:52 ◼   ► infotainment systems and the UI and the things that Tesla does on its big touchscreen and that's all well and good and Apple probably be

00:45:58 ◼   ► Good at that and you could basically run iOS on that and you'll be fine

00:46:00 ◼   ► but for the other parts of the car the driving parts whether they be self driving or just simply driver aids or

00:46:07 ◼   ► Smart cruise control or engine control and stuff like that. That stuff has to be real-time because it's a safety issue. You can't have

00:46:16 ◼   ► You know, you can't have any like stutter or whatever that you see in regular operating systems

00:46:20 ◼   ► And you know offering systems like OS X do have things where they try to give you guaranteed times like audio processing

00:46:26 ◼   ► But anyone who's ever used audio on a Mac knows that it's not a hard real-time operating system

00:46:31 ◼   ► You can get it into situations

00:46:32 ◼   ► So you have under flow and you have a little stutter and you know your disk isn't fast enough or whatever parts of the whole

00:46:37 ◼   ► chain

00:46:38 ◼   ► Can fall down to give you a failure and whether it be audio or video but a hard real-time system just simply can't do that

00:46:44 ◼   ► It has to give guaranteed time slices to all the software that's running, which means it's

00:46:49 ◼   ► much a very different thing for you to create. You wouldn't create a real-time operating system,

00:46:53 ◼   ► even for something like the watch, it would be silly. But it's very different than anything

00:46:57 ◼   ► Apple has ever created to my knowledge. And so that's why it's interesting to see this person

00:47:02 ◼   ► who I think it was like the founder of QNX or something. Some big wig in QNX. It's not like he's

00:47:07 ◼   ► the one writing the real-time operating system, but he was well in the beginning, but you know

00:47:11 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:47:12 ◼   ► Like now I'm sure Apple's not hiring them

00:47:13 ◼   ► to write their operating system.

00:47:14 ◼   ► But if you're gonna hire someone to be in charge

00:47:16 ◼   ► of the real-time operating system effort

00:47:19 ◼   ► for your car or whatever,

00:47:21 ◼   ► the guy who is the founder of QNX

00:47:24 ◼   ► is a pretty darn good hire.

00:47:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, and a real-time follow-up from Wikipedia

00:47:29 ◼   ► where everything is guaranteed to be true.

00:47:31 ◼   ► At the Geneva Motor Show, Apple demonstrated CarPlay,

00:47:33 ◼   ► which provides an iOS-like user interface

00:47:35 ◼   ► to head units and compatible devices.

00:47:36 ◼   ► Once configured by the manufacturer,

00:47:37 ◼   ► QNX can be programmed to hand off its display

00:47:40 ◼   ► certain functionality to an Apple CarPlay device. So it seems, at least for now, that

00:47:45 ◼   ► QNX will be used for CarPlay, but like Jon has described, maybe even more than that.

00:47:50 ◼   ► And BlackBerry bought QNX. Like, it's not as if QNX is only useful for real-time. Like,

00:47:54 ◼   ► BlackBerry bought them like, "Oh, they can be our phone OS." QNX is a flexible operating

00:47:58 ◼   ► system. You make do whatever you want. But if Apple's ever going to do any self-driving

00:48:02 ◼   ► stuff or even just like the, you know, the barrier to entry for just a basic car with

00:48:07 ◼   ► with simple smart cruise control and lane departure warning and stuff like that, or

00:48:11 ◼   ► even just anti-lock braking systems or whatever, you need a real-time operating system to do

00:48:16 ◼   ► that type of functionality.

00:48:19 ◼   ► And the question was always, is Apple going to invent one in-house?

00:48:22 ◼   ► Does it already have one in-house?

00:48:24 ◼   ► Is it going to, I mean, obviously it hired this guy who didn't buy QNX.

00:48:28 ◼   ► I forget who owns the assets of QNX.

00:48:30 ◼   ► Maybe is Blackberry still around?

00:48:31 ◼   ► I guess they still own it at this point.

00:48:34 ◼   ► this is a problem that they need solved if they're ever going to make a car, like

00:48:40 ◼   ► an actual complete car instead of just like some component of a car, the

00:48:43 ◼   ► software system for a car. So I think this is the first public signal that

00:48:50 ◼   ► they are serious about this aspect of the car as opposed to all the rumors

00:48:53 ◼   ► like well of course it's gonna be self-driving and of course it's gonna do

00:48:56 ◼   ► that. This hire really only makes sense in that in the context of car software

00:49:03 ◼   ► that does the car stuff, the safety-related car stuff.

00:49:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the gentleman's name is Dan Dodge,

00:49:08 ◼   ► for the record.

00:49:09 ◼   ► - The unfortunate name for our car.

00:49:12 ◼   ► - Well, he ended up in automotive, sort of,

00:49:13 ◼   ► so I guess that makes sense, right?

00:49:15 ◼   ► - I know, but Dodge is not really the brand

00:49:17 ◼   ► that Apple probably wants to evoke.

00:49:19 ◼   ► - Eh, I don't know, whatever.

00:49:21 ◼   ► I'm at least in part a product of a Mopar family,

00:49:23 ◼   ► so nobody's perfect.

00:49:25 ◼   ► But yeah, it's really interesting.

00:49:27 ◼   ► Like you said, Jon, I think what's most interesting

00:49:28 ◼   ► about this to me is that it's a public signal

00:49:31 ◼   ► that Apple is moving towards automotive.

00:49:33 ◼   ► I mean, sure, you could interpret this in many other ways.

00:49:36 ◼   ► Sure, QNX does seem to underpin BlackBerry 10,

00:49:40 ◼   ► or the newest BlackBerry operating system, I think.

00:49:43 ◼   ► But anyway, the point is,

00:49:45 ◼   ► all signs point to this being an automotive-related hire,

00:49:48 ◼   ► and a high-profile one.

00:49:50 ◼   ► So, I don't know whether there's smoke, there's fire,

00:49:53 ◼   ► and there's ever-increasing amounts of smoke.

00:49:55 ◼   ► - It seems like Apple is kind of like

00:49:57 ◼   ► decreasingly coy about their car plans.

00:50:01 ◼   ► They're just not even denying them anymore.

00:50:03 ◼   ► And they're just like, yeah, okay,

00:50:05 ◼   ► you guys all know we're making a car, right?

00:50:07 ◼   ► - And something they could do,

00:50:08 ◼   ► which is definitely an Apple move,

00:50:09 ◼   ► is for the first car that comes out in 2020 or whatever,

00:50:12 ◼   ► like if they're just starting

00:50:13 ◼   ► their real-time operating system ever now,

00:50:15 ◼   ► it's not gonna be ready in time for that, right?

00:50:17 ◼   ► So what they can do is release a car

00:50:19 ◼   ► that's not self-driving,

00:50:21 ◼   ► that merely uses third-party components

00:50:24 ◼   ► for its engine control and its anti-lock brakes

00:50:26 ◼   ► and it's airbags and it's smart cruise control.

00:50:29 ◼   ► These are all things that you can buy, you know,

00:50:30 ◼   ► from various manufacturers off the shelf.

00:50:33 ◼   ► Then Apple does the carplay part of the car, right?

00:50:35 ◼   ► And the UI and all the things that are not real time

00:50:37 ◼   ► that are just, you know, UI type things.

00:50:40 ◼   ► And that's still a perfectly good Apple car.

00:50:43 ◼   ► And in the meantime, over the next three or four

00:50:45 ◼   ► or five years, they work on their self-driving thing

00:50:48 ◼   ► with their own real-time operating system.

00:50:49 ◼   ► It's kind of like the iPod approach of where, you know,

00:50:51 ◼   ► they have that PixOS thing or whatever that they,

00:50:54 ◼   ► from a third party that they licensed

00:50:55 ◼   ► and using their iPods.

00:50:56 ◼   ► But when it came time to do the iPhone,

00:50:58 ◼   ► they didn't port that over.

00:50:59 ◼   ► Although that was one of the competing options internally.

00:51:01 ◼   ► They did their own thing.

00:51:03 ◼   ► It takes a long time to do your own thing.

00:51:04 ◼   ► I'm not sure, depending on what stage they're at now,

00:51:07 ◼   ► if that is coming on board to shepherd

00:51:10 ◼   ► their multi-year running real-time operating system effort

00:51:14 ◼   ► to just make sure like it's on track and to get it going,

00:51:16 ◼   ► then maybe they can hit 2020.

00:51:19 ◼   ► But if they're just starting their effort now

00:51:20 ◼   ► and staffing up, I don't think they're gonna be ready

00:51:22 ◼   ► in time for a car in 2020.

00:51:23 ◼   ► And I don't think they need to be

00:51:24 ◼   ► because nobody has produced a completely self-driving car

00:51:27 ◼   ► at this point they can drive in any roads.

00:51:29 ◼   ► And I don't think Apple's going to in 2020 either.

00:51:31 ◼   ► So it might be smart to put out a car that is impressive

00:51:35 ◼   ► and good in all the ways that Apple's cars can be good,

00:51:38 ◼   ► but that Apple outsources all the parts

00:51:39 ◼   ► that it's not innovating in essentially.

00:51:42 ◼   ► Like they don't have any particular innovation

00:51:44 ◼   ► to add to anti-lock braking or adaptive cruise control

00:51:47 ◼   ► or engine control.

00:51:48 ◼   ► And so there's no reason for them to put their own offerings.

00:51:50 ◼   ► In fact, it's a huge risk to do that.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Just, they're third-party vendors who make parts for the rest of the car industry that

00:51:56 ◼   ► you can buy those things from, both software and hardware, and they should just do that

00:51:59 ◼   ► and put all their effort into the design of the car and the UI and the parts that they're

00:52:03 ◼   ► good at.

00:52:04 ◼   ► All right, so I guess we're out of the neutral portion of the show, which means I only have

00:52:07 ◼   ► one thing left to talk about, and then we might have to go through the stupid TiVo section.

00:52:11 ◼   ► I offer—I can explain the MP3 file format to you if you want and why podcasts apparently

00:52:16 ◼   ► aren't and maybe can't be VBR.

00:52:17 ◼   ► Oh yeah, where did that go?

00:52:19 ◼   ► was in the show notes and it disappeared.

00:52:21 ◼   ► John demoted it right before the show.

00:52:23 ◼   ► I almost demoted the Swift thing too, I don't think there's much to say, but you put it

00:52:27 ◼   ► there Casey, so what do you have to say about the Swift update?

00:52:29 ◼   ► It's gonna be quick to be honest.

00:52:31 ◼   ► Mostly I just wanted to hear your reaction to the line about the goal being to be better

00:52:37 ◼   ► at regular expressions than Perl.

00:52:39 ◼   ► You don't even remember it.

00:52:42 ◼   ► I'm on the Swift evolution mailing list.

00:52:43 ◼   ► I read all these things.

00:52:45 ◼   ► I'm soaking in it.

00:52:47 ◼   ► There's nothing you can tell me about Swift that is going to be a surprise.

00:52:50 ◼   ► That's a reference to an ad that was on before you were both born.

00:52:53 ◼   ► Delightful.

00:52:54 ◼   ► Anyway, so tell me, Jon, what you think about this claim that Swift will be better than

00:52:59 ◼   ► string processing than Perl.

00:53:01 ◼   ► It's not a claim, it's a goal.

00:53:02 ◼   ► And a goal is not a promise, if you know if you read the thing.

00:53:05 ◼   ► I did read it, I did read it.

00:53:07 ◼   ► I'm just trying to get a rise out of you.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Anyway, tell me about it.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Yeah, no, but it's fine.

00:53:12 ◼   ► So like, Swift 3, it had a lot of lofty goals.

00:53:15 ◼   ► Some of them they missed, particularly ABI stability,

00:53:17 ◼   ► they didn't get, not API, ABI, application binary interface,

00:53:21 ◼   ► which basically means can Apple build a library in Swift

00:53:26 ◼   ► and ship it with their operating system,

00:53:27 ◼   ► and then people ship applications

00:53:29 ◼   ► that link to that binary,

00:53:31 ◼   ► and then can they update that binary

00:53:32 ◼   ► in the next version of the operating system

00:53:33 ◼   ► and not break people's applications,

00:53:35 ◼   ► because the applications are linking into the library

00:53:38 ◼   ► and expecting things to be in certain places

00:53:40 ◼   ► and find certain symbols.

00:53:41 ◼   ► How do you update that?

00:53:42 ◼   ► You need ABI stability.

00:53:43 ◼   ► you change the calling convention for your libraries

00:53:46 ◼   ► and you release a new version of that library,

00:53:48 ◼   ► it will break everybody's applications

00:53:50 ◼   ► 'cause their binaries expect to call into it

00:53:52 ◼   ► in a different way.

00:53:52 ◼   ► So Swift is still at the point

00:53:53 ◼   ► where they haven't nailed that down.

00:53:55 ◼   ► And they wanted to do that for Swift 3,

00:53:57 ◼   ► but they didn't make it.

00:53:58 ◼   ► A lot of the things they did do in Swift 3 are the reason,

00:54:01 ◼   ► because they're still trying to nail down generics

00:54:03 ◼   ► and some other features that affect ABI

00:54:06 ◼   ► and also this resiliency stuff where it's like,

00:54:08 ◼   ► if we change aspects of the language,

00:54:11 ◼   ► Again, can we make a new version of the library

00:54:13 ◼   ► and have the old applications still work with it?

00:54:15 ◼   ► This is important for,

00:54:17 ◼   ► it's mostly important for an OS vendor

00:54:18 ◼   ► because that's what Apple does.

00:54:19 ◼   ► They ship libraries like UIKit and many other,

00:54:21 ◼   ► you know, that's an umbrella framework, but whatever.

00:54:24 ◼   ► Huge libraries that applications link against,

00:54:26 ◼   ► individual application developers for the most part,

00:54:28 ◼   ► unless they have like a suite of applications

00:54:30 ◼   ► and they have their own frameworks

00:54:31 ◼   ► that they share between them,

00:54:32 ◼   ► you can always as an application vendor

00:54:34 ◼   ► just statically link your whole thing,

00:54:35 ◼   ► but you're going to dynamically link to the OS libraries.

00:54:37 ◼   ► But up until this point,

00:54:39 ◼   ► everyone shipping a Swift app was sort of shifting,

00:54:42 ◼   ► shipping with the entire Swift standard library

00:54:46 ◼   ► as part of their application,

00:54:47 ◼   ► because it was the only safe way to do that.

00:54:48 ◼   ► And that's sort of untenable even for applications

00:54:51 ◼   ► to be shipped that way.

00:54:52 ◼   ► So Apple's gonna fix that problem in Swift 4.

00:54:55 ◼   ► That is now their goal for Swift 4.

00:54:56 ◼   ► They still have some issues to work out,

00:54:59 ◼   ► leftover stuff from Swift 3 to make that possible.

00:55:02 ◼   ► And they're trying to do Swift 4 in two phases.

00:55:04 ◼   ► One is like the important stuff.

00:55:05 ◼   ► And then it's like the frills.

00:55:08 ◼   ► Interestingly, in the important stuff section,

00:55:10 ◼   ► the stage one of Swift 4,

00:55:11 ◼   ► was the thing that Casey was talking about,

00:55:13 ◼   ► is that they're gonna take another crack at their strings.

00:55:15 ◼   ► They've changed their strings a couple of times already,

00:55:17 ◼   ► and they're gonna fill with them again.

00:55:19 ◼   ► And their goal is to be as good at string handling

00:55:21 ◼   ► as Perl is, which is actually a fairly lofty goal,

00:55:24 ◼   ► because Perl, for all its historic weirdness,

00:55:27 ◼   ► is actually really fast at dealing with strings,

00:55:30 ◼   ► and can do things that most other languages can't do

00:55:33 ◼   ► in terms of Unicode, and all sorts of cool stuff like that.

00:55:36 ◼   ► - All right, so hold on.

00:55:37 ◼   ► I was going to ask you about this. Now I am not trying to needle you. I'm honestly asking,

00:55:42 ◼   ► what makes Perl so good at string processing? I know that like regular expressions are, I guess,

00:55:47 ◼   ► like a first-class citizen or something, but I've written very little Perl in my life, and it was a

00:55:51 ◼   ► long time ago. So can you give like an executive summary of what makes Perl so darn good at this?

00:55:55 ◼   ► Because it seems universally accepted that it is. So why?

00:55:59 ◼   ► Well, there's two aspects. One is string representation, which is weird in Perl for

00:56:04 ◼   ► for historical reasons and is actually very complicated. But for example, in a language

00:56:09 ◼   ► like Objective-C that doesn't sort of have native strings, like you've got, you know,

00:56:14 ◼   ► character pointers, which are no good for you because we live in the modern world, and

00:56:18 ◼   ► then you've got NSString. And NSString is like UTF-16 under the covers. And there's

00:56:23 ◼   ► all sorts of methods to get what you want, but it's not a particularly efficient format.

00:56:26 ◼   ► If you had to pick, like, you would never pick UTF-16 as an internal representation

00:56:30 ◼   ► format because it's just not, it's not the way to do things in the modern world. It's

00:56:34 ◼   ► than you want it to be. It's still not fixed size because you have things that take, you know,

00:56:38 ◼   ► it's not every one of the, you know, you have characters that take multiple

00:56:41 ◼   ► sets of bytes. And, you know, it's not, it's not uniform, like an array, like it has all

00:56:48 ◼   ► the disadvantages, none of the advantages. Perl's representation used to just be bag of bytes,

00:56:54 ◼   ► and they were smart enough to switch to UTF-8 internally. Perl can do everything every other

00:56:59 ◼   ► language can in terms of it has libraries that you could encode and decode however you want.

00:57:03 ◼   ► The way you want to write things in Perl is when you pull data into Perl from whatever,

00:57:09 ◼   ► from the disk, from the network or whatever, that's string data. You have to know the encoding,

00:57:13 ◼   ► obviously, because otherwise how do you know how to deal with it? And you want to sort of decode

00:57:17 ◼   ► it into Perl's internal representation, then all through your Perl program you want to deal with,

00:57:23 ◼   ► I don't know what you want to call them, like Perl strings, where they are just strings that Perl

00:57:29 ◼   ► understands that you don't have to deal with the encoding. And all of Perl's functions in terms of

00:57:33 ◼   ► regular expressions and substring matching and all sorts of other stuff, deal with them as logical

00:57:39 ◼   ► sets of characters or I don't want to call them characters, but anyway as Unicode code points,

00:57:42 ◼   ► right? And when you output them, whether it be a disk file or a terminal or over the network,

00:57:49 ◼   ► whatever, at that point, you decide how you want to encode it for transmission. You turn it back

00:57:53 ◼   ► into a byte sequence, whether it be UTF-8, 16, so on and so forth. And because the modern world

00:57:58 ◼   ► basically uses UTF-8 everywhere, and Perl, secret secret, unbeknownst to you, uses UTF-8

00:58:04 ◼   ► internally as its internal representation, you can go through that whole cycle without

00:58:08 ◼   ► ever having to encode and decode, which is not the case for NSString, which isn't a

00:58:12 ◼   ► native feature of Objective-C, and every time you come from UTF-8 into NSString and from

00:58:16 ◼   ► NSString back to UTF-8, it's an expensive process.

00:58:20 ◼   ► So that's just like at the most fundamental level.

00:58:22 ◼   ► Why is it convenient to deal with stuff in Perl?

00:58:24 ◼   ► Because they picked a good internal representation format because they have a system that says

00:58:27 ◼   ► we decode on the way in, our entire working with the string in the program,

00:58:32 ◼   ► you don't have to worry about the representation, but trust us it'll be

00:58:34 ◼   ► efficient. And on output you encode to whatever you want it to be, and that's a

00:58:38 ◼   ► no op if it's UTF-8 through the whole way. And then after that it's like okay

00:58:41 ◼   ► well then your representation is good, your algorithms are efficient in terms

00:58:45 ◼   ► of pre-allocating buffers for strings when you start appending and it realizes

00:58:49 ◼   ► you're gonna keep appending, so pre-allocate it, you know, like all sorts of

00:58:51 ◼   ► smart things like that. Perl's regular expression engine is, you know, the gold

00:58:56 ◼   ► standard of regular expression engines in terms of the number of years that have been

00:59:00 ◼   ► put into both the syntax and the engine itself with all sorts of crazy efficiencies where

00:59:04 ◼   ► you can look at your regular expression and figure out, "You know what? I can see that

00:59:08 ◼   ► there's a faster way to do this than using just a regular expression engine. I can do

00:59:13 ◼   ► something simpler because I can shortcut this by looking at the anchor and optimizing it

00:59:18 ◼   ► to an index lookup or use a DFA when it's faster than an NFA, a regular expression engine

00:59:22 ◼   ► because I can look at the regular expression.

00:59:24 ◼   ► It's very clever optimizations

00:59:27 ◼   ► to a regular expression engine

00:59:28 ◼   ► in addition to all of the features.

00:59:30 ◼   ► I think what they're talking about for the Swift stuff is

00:59:32 ◼   ► they just want their strings

00:59:34 ◼   ► to be as powerful as Perl strings.

00:59:35 ◼   ► It's convenient to deal with,

00:59:37 ◼   ► to have all the nice convenient methods for doing things,

00:59:38 ◼   ► and that when you use those methods, things are fast.

00:59:42 ◼   ► Because you can get in trouble really fast with strings

00:59:43 ◼   ► if you have to keep changing representation internally,

00:59:46 ◼   ► or if your internal representation is weird,

00:59:48 ◼   ► and anytime you have to do any operation,

00:59:49 ◼   ► you have to walk the whole string

00:59:50 ◼   ► to find boundaries between things or whatever.

00:59:53 ◼   ► There's lots of chances for inefficiencies.

00:59:56 ◼   ► There even is just like you have a string

00:59:57 ◼   ► and you're repeatedly appending

00:59:58 ◼   ► and making a bigger and bigger string.

01:00:00 ◼   ► That can be massively inefficient too

01:00:01 ◼   ► if you're not careful about how you allocate memory.

01:00:04 ◼   ► So Perl, for all of its weirdness,

01:00:06 ◼   ► and there is weirdness related to this

01:00:07 ◼   ► that I didn't wanna go into,

01:00:09 ◼   ► is very fast and has like all the features

01:00:13 ◼   ► you could possibly imagine, some of which may be obscure,

01:00:15 ◼   ► but that's what Swift is going for.

01:00:16 ◼   ► They wanna be faster than NSString, which they didn't list,

01:00:19 ◼   ► they're not going to throw their own stuff under the bus that much, but faster and better than NSString,

01:00:23 ◼   ► native to the language, and really efficient internally with lots of operations. And then

01:00:29 ◼   ► regular expressions were in the phase two, where it's like, that's a nice dab. We just need to get

01:00:32 ◼   ► the string representation and the basic features down, and then we can add regular expressions at

01:00:36 ◼   ► any point after that. And that's a whole other project of like, how do we make a really fast

01:00:40 ◼   ► regular expression engine? But that's in the phase two box. The phase two is the goodies,

01:00:44 ◼   ► in the phase one is like, eat your vegetables

01:00:47 ◼   ► and get our house in order, get our ABI stability down,

01:00:50 ◼   ► figure out what generic is gonna be.

01:00:51 ◼   ► And by the way, async stuff,

01:00:53 ◼   ► that's even farther in the history.

01:00:55 ◼   ► It's not even gonna be in Swift 4 probably.

01:00:57 ◼   ► - No, like I saw async await

01:00:59 ◼   ► and I actually didn't get to use that too much

01:01:01 ◼   ► in my C# days, but I know enough to know

01:01:03 ◼   ► that that's super awesome.

01:01:04 ◼   ► But you know what I did use a lot in my C# days

01:01:06 ◼   ► and I'm really excited about?

01:01:08 ◼   ► Reflection, I'm super stoked about that.

01:01:11 ◼   ► - Was that in stage one?

01:01:11 ◼   ► I forget, was reflection in stage one?

01:01:13 ◼   ► Stage two. So reflection is basically, it allows you to, it allows your code to look at itself,

01:01:20 ◼   ► hence reflection, and make decisions about things. And I think I like it so much because it's my

01:01:27 ◼   ► favorite hammer and so everything looks like a nail to me. And there's certainly appropriate

01:01:31 ◼   ► times and ways to use reflection and inappropriate times and ways to use reflection. But there are

01:01:36 ◼   ► some times, and I can't think of a contrived example right off the top of my head, but there

01:01:39 ◼   ► But there are some times when reflection is a very powerful way to solve a problem.

01:01:44 ◼   ► And I think a lot of the kvetching that was going on in the past about how Swift is not

01:01:49 ◼   ► dynamic enough for some of the developers, generally speaking the old Objective-C guard,

01:01:56 ◼   ► a lot of that would potentially, a lot of that complaining would potentially go away

01:02:01 ◼   ► with more robust reflection.

01:02:03 ◼   ► Because there is some support in Swift, but it's really, really crappy.

01:02:06 ◼   ► Swift today, but it's really crappy.

01:02:08 ◼   ► I don't know, I'm excited about what's coming.

01:02:11 ◼   ► I think everything in this post by Chris Latner, which we'll link in the show notes, all of

01:02:17 ◼   ► it is worth reading.

01:02:18 ◼   ► I don't think there's any really wasted words, and I'm really curious to see where this goes.

01:02:22 ◼   ► It seems like they're learning from their mistakes, they're learning from over-promising

01:02:25 ◼   ► and under-delivering.

01:02:27 ◼   ► Or maybe it seems from their perspective they didn't necessarily promise ABI stability in

01:02:32 ◼   ► but they didn't do a good job of stating what their intention was, whether or not you agree with that, whatever.

01:02:39 ◼   ► But the point is they're trying to be a lot better about that in the future.

01:02:42 ◼   ► ABI stability was a goal of Swift 3, but as they got into Swift 3, I think they realized a couple things.

01:02:47 ◼   ► One, the appetite for syntax changes in Swift seems to be waning.

01:02:54 ◼   ► Like, as in people are kind of like, "I just learned Swift 2, or Swift 2.1, or Swift 2.1, and then we're going to change it again in Swift 3."

01:03:00 ◼   ► Swift 3. And so there was kind of eventually a rush to say, "Look, this is probably our last

01:03:06 ◼   ► big chance to change syntax stuff." So everybody let's like, if there's any other syntax crap in

01:03:12 ◼   ► the language, "Oh, we're using equals here," or "We should have used a colons," or "Casing of things

01:03:16 ◼   ► is inconsistent between this and that," and picking new keywords, like, now is the time to do it. I

01:03:20 ◼   ► spent a lot of time in Swift 3 doing syntax breaking changes, non-backward compatible

01:03:26 ◼   ► changes to the language itself, to the characters that you type to make your programs.

01:03:30 ◼   ► because they're trying to really say,

01:03:32 ◼   ► "We've got a little trailing end of syntax changes,"

01:03:36 ◼   ► and then we're shutting the door on that,

01:03:37 ◼   ► and we're saying not that we're never going to have them again,

01:03:40 ◼   ► but they're going to have to be really justified.

01:03:43 ◼   ► There has to be a really strong reason to do them.

01:03:45 ◼   ► We're going to try to maintain source compatibility from here on.

01:03:48 ◼   ► So there's a big rush to get those things in.

01:03:50 ◼   ► And then the second part is, when dealing with the ABI stuff,

01:03:54 ◼   ► they still hadn't sorted out all of their generic system

01:03:56 ◼   ► and other things that affect the ABI

01:03:59 ◼   ► because they have to figure out what kind of things are we going to be calling in what ways

01:04:03 ◼   ► and everything before they can nail down the ABI. And if they hadn't sorted out that part of the

01:04:08 ◼   ► language, it's impossible to do the ABI. So it was kind of like they weren't ready to do the ABI yet

01:04:13 ◼   ► because they had other things that they had to do first. Not like they went off into the weeds and

01:04:17 ◼   ► were dancing through the daisies and doing other frivolous things, right? They realized that

01:04:21 ◼   ► actually we're not at the point yet where we can do ABI stability. We haven't figured out all these

01:04:26 ◼   ► these things that are prerequisites for it.

01:04:28 ◼   ► So they spent all their time trying to sort of get all that

01:04:31 ◼   ► painful stuff out of the way and do all that.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And they're still doing that and do all the prerequisites.

01:04:35 ◼   ► And then hopefully in the Swift 4 stage one timeframe,

01:04:38 ◼   ► they will have all that.

01:04:39 ◼   ► I'm not sure, you know, again,

01:04:41 ◼   ► they were trying to be careful and say,

01:04:41 ◼   ► this is a goal or whatever, not a promise.

01:04:44 ◼   ► It's still not a promise for the Swift stage one thing,

01:04:46 ◼   ► who knows how this will turn out because you can't,

01:04:48 ◼   ► like the worst mistake they can make is to rush the ABI

01:04:51 ◼   ► stability and be stuck with a dumb calling convention that

01:04:54 ◼   ► prevents them from adding features later.

01:04:55 ◼   ► This is like the most important time to not rush

01:04:59 ◼   ► to nail things down and set it in concrete.

01:05:01 ◼   ► Because once you do that and Apple starts shipping frameworks

01:05:04 ◼   ► that people link their apps against, that's it.

01:05:06 ◼   ► You can't renege on that.

01:05:07 ◼   ► You can't like, oh, we're breaking all your apps

01:05:09 ◼   ► in this next release, recompile everything, right?

01:05:11 ◼   ► I mean, they really, really don't wanna do that.

01:05:13 ◼   ► It kind of like, you know, for an OS vendor,

01:05:15 ◼   ► for a platform vendor, API promises are something

01:05:19 ◼   ► you really don't wanna break.

01:05:20 ◼   ► Or if you do break them, you wanna do a Carbon 64

01:05:23 ◼   ► and break it before you actually ship to customers.

01:05:24 ◼   ► And they're still pissed off about that

01:05:25 ◼   ► because they all developed their applications against it

01:05:28 ◼   ► and plan their products and so on and so forth.

01:05:29 ◼   ► But it's even worse if you ship it to customers

01:05:31 ◼   ► and then a year later say, "Oh, you know what?

01:05:33 ◼   ► "All your ops don't work anymore

01:05:34 ◼   ► "when people update their operating system.

01:05:36 ◼   ► "Sorry about that."

01:05:37 ◼   ► So this is really a critical time in Swift

01:05:41 ◼   ► and it's much, much better for them to continue to miss dates

01:05:44 ◼   ► and to make sure they have it solid

01:05:45 ◼   ► because once you set this in stone

01:05:47 ◼   ► and start shipping it in frameworks,

01:05:49 ◼   ► that's it for many, many, many years.

01:05:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, it makes sense.

01:05:54 ◼   ► Marco, I know you have a lot to add on this.

01:05:56 ◼   ► What would you like to add about this whole Swift thing?

01:05:59 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:06:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:06:01 ◼   ► - Our final sponsor tonight is Eero.

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01:07:16 ◼   ► It isn't just like a repeater.

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01:07:25 ◼   ► - Yep, yep, I have a set that they sent me of three

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01:08:45 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:08:48 ◼   ► - It's time whether you end the show or not,

01:08:51 ◼   ► because if you try to end the show now,

01:08:52 ◼   ► it's just gonna be in the after show,

01:08:54 ◼   ► but that's still part of the show.

01:08:55 ◼   ► But it's time. - So the thing of it is,

01:08:56 ◼   ► I swear to God this is true.

01:08:58 ◼   ► I opened an iMessage window and started writing to Marco,

01:09:02 ◼   ► you should just end the show after the Swift update.

01:09:04 ◼   ► - I know, I know you're playing.

01:09:05 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if you do it.

01:09:06 ◼   ► You go ahead, end the show.

01:09:07 ◼   ► We're just gonna do it in the after show.

01:09:09 ◼   ► - I didn't send it.

01:09:10 ◼   ► I was going to have, you know,

01:09:12 ◼   ► I was gonna tell him just end the show and then we'll do it in the after show, but it'll

01:09:16 ◼   ► be a funny moment.

01:09:18 ◼   ► But then as I was typing that iMessage, I swear to God this is true, I was typing the

01:09:21 ◼   ► iMessage, it occurred to me we had one more sponsor to do, and then I resigned myself

01:09:26 ◼   ► to my fate.

01:09:27 ◼   ► Jon, tell us everything that I'm so excited to know about TiVo.

01:09:30 ◼   ► Wait, you don't want to hear about MP3 file formats?

01:09:33 ◼   ► I would love to, but somebody had to move it down.

01:09:36 ◼   ► No, that doesn't deserve the place that it got.

01:09:39 ◼   ► That's bound by how we handle email now.

01:09:41 ◼   ► TiVo! TiVo was purchased by Rovi a long, long time ago. So long, in April? Maybe? A long

01:09:48 ◼   ► time ago.

01:09:51 ◼   ► I tried so hard, you guys.

01:09:52 ◼   ► Let's go over the list of things that have happened since then.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Yeah. Rovi is, used to be Gemstar, if anyone remembers them. They make like on-screen TV

01:10:01 ◼   ► guides, like that big grid where you pick different channels. And Macrovision, do either

01:10:04 ◼   ► you two actually remember Macrovision, like when it was a thing? I do.

01:10:07 ◼   ► No.

01:10:08 ◼   ► It was like copy protection for VHS tapes, like analog copy protection, so that if you

01:10:12 ◼   ► bought a VHS that had a movie on it and you tried to make a copy of it and didn't have

01:10:16 ◼   ► the right equipment, the copy would have all these little fuzzy things on it.

01:10:19 ◼   ► It wouldn't look good.

01:10:20 ◼   ► It was very silly.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it had this weird alternating bright and dark line that was in the overscan range

01:10:26 ◼   ► of the TV picture so that it wouldn't show up on a TV, but the idea was to throw off

01:10:31 ◼   ► the automatic gain control of the VCR because it would oscillate from bright to dark and

01:10:35 ◼   ► show weird things in this one line.

01:10:37 ◼   ► So it would be like, alright, well the maximum brightness of the signal is really high right

01:10:41 ◼   ► now so turn the automatic gain control down and then like, then it would go back low and

01:10:45 ◼   ► then alright, now turn the automatic gain control up.

01:10:47 ◼   ► And so if you made a copy of a movie with this with the VCR, and you know most VCRs

01:10:51 ◼   ► would try to automatically balance the brightness of the picture, the movie would just oscillate

01:10:56 ◼   ► every few seconds from light to dark and light to dark as it was adjusting for this line

01:11:00 ◼   ► that was actually off screen.

01:11:01 ◼   ► Yeah, the copy protection has always been crappy.

01:11:04 ◼   ► But anyway, this is the company that bought TiVo.

01:11:06 ◼   ► It's kind of similar to how the M3 file format works, actually.

01:11:09 ◼   ► Yeah, tell me more.

01:11:10 ◼   ► No, we're not talking about that now.

01:11:12 ◼   ► So the company Rovi is a combination

01:11:15 ◼   ► of Gemstar and Macrovision.

01:11:16 ◼   ► So this is not a company that really makes products

01:11:20 ◼   ► that people love, like who love Macrovision.

01:11:22 ◼   ► I guess content owners did.

01:11:24 ◼   ► I mean, throw in Rambus.

01:11:25 ◼   ► And you have Rambus on LODSYS, and then you have really

01:11:28 ◼   ► a favorite team here.

01:11:30 ◼   ► But Rambus made, in theory, their patents

01:11:34 ◼   ► were used in products that people liked.

01:11:36 ◼   ► But yeah, until they were convicted for fraud because of patent dealings.

01:11:40 ◼   ► Did anyone like the, you know, the Gemstar on-screen TV guides?

01:11:44 ◼   ► Like the Gemstar stuff is enterprise software.

01:11:46 ◼   ► It was sold to people who make cable boxes.

01:11:48 ◼   ► And MacriVision was licensed to people who, you know, content owners for making their

01:11:53 ◼   ► things.

01:11:54 ◼   ► So this is the company that bought TiVo.

01:11:55 ◼   ► Just give a very, very brief TiVo recap for people who don't know what TiVo is because

01:11:59 ◼   ► it's an increasingly large number of people.

01:12:02 ◼   ► TiVo was one of the original and probably the best known makers of DVRs, digital video

01:12:07 ◼   ► recorders, which is like VCR, but instead of recording television onto a bunch of tapes,

01:12:11 ◼   ► it records a video onto your hard drive.

01:12:14 ◼   ► In the beginning they would take analog video in and record it onto a hard drive, and eventually

01:12:18 ◼   ► they worked with cable cards and digital stuff or whatever.

01:12:22 ◼   ► And not a lot of people bought TiVos in the grand scheme of things.

01:12:24 ◼   ► People who bought them early on, early adopters, it changed their lives.

01:12:28 ◼   ► It changed our lives.

01:12:29 ◼   ► We got one around the same time we had kids,

01:12:31 ◼   ► when we couldn't like schedule your lives around like,

01:12:34 ◼   ► "Oh, a television show is gonna be on at eight.

01:12:36 ◼   ► I better be at the TV at eight."

01:12:37 ◼   ► Like that's impossible with children.

01:12:38 ◼   ► So along with getting a digital camera,

01:12:41 ◼   ► getting a TiVo around the same time we had kids

01:12:42 ◼   ► was a really smart move,

01:12:43 ◼   ► because now we no longer had to be

01:12:45 ◼   ► on the schedule of televisions.

01:12:46 ◼   ► And it really totally changed your life

01:12:50 ◼   ► in terms of how you deal with television.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Everyone has a TiVo, especially if you bought it early on.

01:12:54 ◼   ► Like the fact that you could pause live television,

01:12:55 ◼   ► that you recorded anything you want,

01:12:56 ◼   ► that you could choose the shows you wanted to record

01:12:59 ◼   ► By picking the shows instead of programming your VCR to say, "Record channel 4 at 8pm

01:13:03 ◼   ► and stop recording at 9pm."

01:13:06 ◼   ► You wouldn't have to do that, it just had a built-in guide that showed up in the show.

01:13:09 ◼   ► So you could do a season pass for a show to say, "I want to watch The X-Files whenever

01:13:13 ◼   ► The X-Files is on is recorded.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Only record the new episodes, don't record the repeats."

01:13:17 ◼   ► All sorts of good stuff like that.

01:13:19 ◼   ► It just became the way we watch television.

01:13:20 ◼   ► You never actually watch live television anymore.

01:13:22 ◼   ► And of course, the most important feature is the skip button where you could skip 30

01:13:27 ◼   ► at a time so you wouldn't have to see any commercials because your Tivo would record

01:13:31 ◼   ► the commercials but you would skip over them when you watch because who wants to watch that.

01:13:34 ◼   ► The current version of Tivo has a series, I'm assuming a series of humans, figuring out where

01:13:39 ◼   ► all the commercial break boundaries are in shows so now when you're watching Tivo when the

01:13:44 ◼   ► commercials start you can hit one button it just jumps past all the commercials in a single button

01:13:47 ◼   ► press. You may ask yourself "hey why do I have to even push the button? Why doesn't the Tivo just

01:13:51 ◼   ► excise the commercials for me?" Well Replay TV did something like that, a competitor to Tivo and

01:13:56 ◼   ► and they got sued out of existence so TiVo was kind of dancing around that. But anyway, I love TiVos. I keep buying them

01:14:02 ◼   ► I always buy the most expensive biggest best TiVo I possibly can and when a new one comes out

01:14:06 ◼   ► I buy that one and keep replacing them

01:14:08 ◼   ► They're fairly expensive

01:14:10 ◼   ► There's either a monthly fee or you pay a huge amount of money for like a lifetime service

01:14:14 ◼   ► And I usually just do that because you know we use the TiVos and they just rotate around the house

01:14:18 ◼   ► I'm a big proponent of TiVo for many many years

01:14:22 ◼   ► I've complained that their software and hardware has been terrible for the amount of money you pay

01:14:26 ◼   ► It should be incredibly fast and responsive and it hasn't been they've improved that in recent years

01:14:30 ◼   ► But apparently not enough to make people buy their products

01:14:32 ◼   ► So, um if you listen to I don't know hypercritical of me complaining about TiVo or many podcasts

01:14:38 ◼   ► I've complained about it. It's same way we complain about a cap Apple. It's like it's product. Well for me anyway, it's a product

01:14:43 ◼   ► I love that I think is the best in the industry, but that it could be better in obvious ways

01:14:49 ◼   ► And I've always complained that the company seems not to know how to be successful and doesn't understand what it's got like

01:14:55 ◼   ► Many times I was asking to charge me more money for a higher-end product that had higher margins

01:15:00 ◼   ► Like I was ready and willing to pay but apparently they were going down market to try to grow their

01:15:04 ◼   ► Their user base. Anyway, everything I did didn't work. They were never able to really make any money

01:15:10 ◼   ► Their streaming services came and started to eat their lunch

01:15:13 ◼   ► and I was sad about that because I think you know until

01:15:18 ◼   ► Cable companies release their death grip on all the content that we all love which is happening slowly like a lot of

01:15:23 ◼   ► Increasing number of the shows that I watch are not on quote unquote TV like stranger things that I just watched is on Netflix

01:15:29 ◼   ► And not anywhere else orange is the new black house of cards

01:15:33 ◼   ► What was that?

01:15:35 ◼   ► Man, the high castles on Amazon there is lots of original content coming there, but there's still a lot of stuff

01:15:40 ◼   ► That's only on television

01:15:41 ◼   ► Oh HBO now Marco can get the HBO thing that he can never remember the name of but it's now

01:15:45 ◼   ► The one that doesn't require you to have the the cable subscription, right?

01:15:49 ◼   ► so things are happening to eventually take us out of the death grip of cable companies, but

01:15:54 ◼   ► For many many years and still today in many

01:15:58 ◼   ► Depending on what shows you're interested in the only place to get this content is on television

01:16:02 ◼   ► The only place to get it in real time in high quality

01:16:05 ◼   ► Without having to wait, you know is on television and the only civilized way to watch television

01:16:11 ◼   ► vision in my opinion is to use a TiVo not to use the DVR that comes from your cable

01:16:16 ◼   ► company which are universally very bad but TiVo has been bought by this company

01:16:20 ◼   ► and the question was well what is Rovi gonna do with them? Rovi mostly licenses

01:16:23 ◼   ► intellectual property and does their on-screen guide stuff it doesn't look

01:16:27 ◼   ► promising Rovi has a lot of patents TiVo has a lot of patents related to DVR stuff

01:16:32 ◼   ► so everyone's worried like oh you know they just bought TiVo for the patents

01:16:35 ◼   ► there were a couple of good signs when they bought them by the way they bought

01:16:37 ◼   ► them for 1.1 billion dollars which is not you know it's not bad that's like an

01:16:40 ◼   ► Instagram in a bit, right? For a company that everyone thought like TiVo, are they

01:16:44 ◼   ► still in business? It's pretty good because they have a lot of important

01:16:48 ◼   ► patents. They're also taking the name of TiVo, which I thought was a good sign.

01:16:52 ◼   ► Like, Rovi didn't buy them and say the TiVo name is no more, now it's just Rovi

01:16:55 ◼   ► and we will just stop selling, TiVo will stop selling hardware to customers and

01:17:00 ◼   ► we will just stop everything about the company and just like license the

01:17:04 ◼   ► patents and become like a patent troll or whatever. But the fact that they're

01:17:08 ◼   ► taking the name TiVo over the new company, I thought was a good sign, at least in their

01:17:13 ◼   ► initial announcement. Then they started saying, "Well, we don't really feel like we might,

01:17:18 ◼   ► we have to make these plastic boxes with hard drives in them and give them to customers,

01:17:21 ◼   ► because that seems like a loser business to us." So we're looking into other options and

01:17:26 ◼   ► people are panicking like, "Oh no, like, when my TiVo dies, will I not be able to buy another

01:17:32 ◼   ► box that does the same thing?" This is my big fear, because we're a TiVo household,

01:17:36 ◼   ► and we keep buying them. And if I ever catch wind of that happening, kind of like with the plasmas,

01:17:40 ◼   ► when I knew Panasonic was stopping making plasmas, I'm going to buy like three of these things and

01:17:44 ◼   ► just hope they continue to work until they all break. Aren't they dependent on a service run

01:17:50 ◼   ► by TiVo? Yeah, kind of. I mean, I feel like that's a surmountable problem where I don't know what

01:17:58 ◼   ► their commitments are legally to people who bought their products to keep that service up and running

01:18:04 ◼   ► for a certain period of time, but even if they stop selling the plastic boxes, I'm assuming

01:18:08 ◼   ► they'll keep running the service, because the service, like if you don't pay for a lifetime,

01:18:12 ◼   ► you're paying the monthly fee for the service, and it's got to be hugely profitable to just run the

01:18:16 ◼   ► service, because it's not, you know, whatever the fee is, it's pretty expensive, and it's not costing

01:18:20 ◼   ► them that much per user to keep the service up and running, so I'm assuming they'll keep the service

01:18:24 ◼   ► running for a while. But that is very optimistic. Well, so here's the angle, like the statements,

01:18:30 ◼   ► the most recent statement I've seen from them is basically the new owners of the company

01:18:36 ◼   ► hinting at the idea that they don't want to make the boxes, but they will gladly let somebody else

01:18:41 ◼   ► make a box and TiVo branded, which they've done before. They did the Direct TiVo, which was the

01:18:47 ◼   ► TiVo branded for DirecTV. If you sign up for DirecTV, you would get essentially a TiVo box

01:18:52 ◼   ► integrated with a DirecTV thing in a single unit. So that, you know, from your cable company or your

01:18:57 ◼   ► or your television provider,

01:18:58 ◼   ► instead of doing the crappy set-top box that they have now,

01:19:01 ◼   ► they would let them use TiVo software and TiVo services

01:19:04 ◼   ► to give you a TiVo-powered, TiVo-branded box

01:19:08 ◼   ► that is not sold to you by TiVo.

01:19:09 ◼   ► So they're kind of like ARM,

01:19:10 ◼   ► where they would just license to them

01:19:12 ◼   ► the intellectual property, the software and the hardware,

01:19:14 ◼   ► and maybe they would still run the service or whatever.

01:19:17 ◼   ► But that would give you a larger variety

01:19:19 ◼   ► of potential TiVo boxes, all tied to the cable companies,

01:19:22 ◼   ► which, if I had to pick,

01:19:24 ◼   ► I'd rather them continue to make their own hardware

01:19:26 ◼   ► and just be better at it.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Like that's choice number one.

01:19:29 ◼   ► Second choice of having a bunch of cable companies

01:19:33 ◼   ► make TiVo branded boxes.

01:19:36 ◼   ► That's not terrible I suppose.

01:19:38 ◼   ► The worst is no more TiVo boxes at all.

01:19:40 ◼   ► And I have to use the current, you know, cable company DVRs.

01:19:43 ◼   ► That's my nightmare scenario.

01:19:45 ◼   ► So keeps you up at night.

01:19:47 ◼   ► It does because like,

01:19:49 ◼   ► this is literally how we watch television in the house.

01:19:51 ◼   ► If it's not on Netflix or Amazon video, it's TiVo.

01:19:53 ◼   ► That's how, or Apple TV, you know,

01:19:55 ◼   ► or Apple TV users or Client Box or Netflix or whatever.

01:19:58 ◼   ► That's how we watch television in the house.

01:20:00 ◼   ► And I'm just waiting my finger on the trigger

01:20:04 ◼   ► to spend like one or two grand on a bunch

01:20:06 ◼   ► of the highest end TiVo's before they stop making them.

01:20:08 ◼   ► And if I catch wind of that, I'm going to.

01:20:11 ◼   ► - I love like your nightmare scenario.

01:20:13 ◼   ► Like it's, like one of the reasons why I criticize Apple,

01:20:16 ◼   ► you know we had to throw this into the show somewhere.

01:20:18 ◼   ► One of the reasons why I criticize Apple

01:20:21 ◼   ► is that I love using the Mac so much

01:20:24 ◼   ► And I worry, if the Mac ever became something

01:20:27 ◼   ► that I couldn't or didn't want to use anymore for my work,

01:20:31 ◼   ► I'd have to switch back to Windows.

01:20:33 ◼   ► And the thought of that, I mean, I don't say,

01:20:35 ◼   ► I might even try Linux instead,

01:20:37 ◼   ► the thought of going back to Windows is so,

01:20:40 ◼   ► like, turns my stomach, that's how little I want to do that.

01:20:44 ◼   ► You seem to be having that kind of reaction

01:20:46 ◼   ► with the thought of going from a TiVo

01:20:48 ◼   ► to the cable company's DVR.

01:20:50 ◼   ► - You just, you can't go back.

01:20:52 ◼   ► Like, just ask anybody who has a TiVo.

01:20:53 ◼   ► Like they'll have complaints about it.

01:20:54 ◼   ► It's not the greatest product in the world,

01:20:55 ◼   ► but you can't go back to watching regular,

01:20:58 ◼   ► like live television is barbaric.

01:21:00 ◼   ► Like, first of all, you see commercials,

01:21:01 ◼   ► which is you can't go back to that

01:21:03 ◼   ► if you're just never ever seeing commercials.

01:21:05 ◼   ► And second of all,

01:21:06 ◼   ► like just losing the ability to pause live television

01:21:10 ◼   ► or to skip around and let a buffer queue up.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Like you just can't, there's no replacement for that

01:21:15 ◼   ► because it was, oh, why don't you just do screaming?

01:21:16 ◼   ► Well, you know what it's like

01:21:17 ◼   ► when Game of Thrones comes on,

01:21:19 ◼   ► like there's no commercials in that to skip,

01:21:20 ◼   ► but like I can watch it every time.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Whereas when their servers go down because everyone's trying to watch the episode at the same time, I don't have to deal with that

01:21:26 ◼   ► I'm above the fray on that like it is the TiVo for all of its faults and all that slow software

01:21:32 ◼   ► passes the bar of being like as

01:21:35 ◼   ► Reliable for the most part as TV is supposed to be when we were growing up you turn on the television

01:21:41 ◼   ► And there's a picture there, right?

01:21:42 ◼   ► Especially if you had cable unless the cable is out in which case you see nothing, right?

01:21:46 ◼   ► But if the cable is not out you turn it on and the picture is there and you change the channel and you can see

01:21:51 ◼   ► what's on that channel and never is buffering and never can't find the servers and never ask for your iCloud password and it never does

01:21:58 ◼   ► Anything like it's just there like it is it passes that level of reliability does way way more and is only ever slow slightly less

01:22:05 ◼   ► Reliable I can't remember the last time I had any kind of crash or problem at all with my Tivo

01:22:10 ◼   ► It just sits there like an appliance on all the time 24 hours a day never have to do anything to it and it just runs

01:22:17 ◼   ► And it's an incredibly high bar that I've been using them since the the series 2 which is not the original one

01:22:23 ◼   ► But it was still back in the analog days and every TiVo box

01:22:25 ◼   ► I've had I've been frustrated that it's not faster and doesn't have better hardware in it and I can't get it with a faster CPU

01:22:31 ◼   ► And more RAM and a bigger hard drive, but other than that the alternative was just unthinkable to me

01:22:36 ◼   ► So eventually like when all the streaming services get better and all the content I care about is no longer on quote-unquote real TV

01:22:42 ◼   ► But it's all on streaming

01:22:44 ◼   ► Then I'll be able to leave TiVo behind but until then I want something like that and back in the old hypercritical episode

01:22:50 ◼   ► About this I talked about what I really wanted Apple to make this is back before Apple definitively closed the door on

01:22:56 ◼   ► Ever doing anything TiVo like when Steve Jobs went like one of his uh, most like d3 talks or something like that

01:23:02 ◼   ► And basically explained exactly why they're never gonna TiVo box and made me super sad

01:23:06 ◼   ► What I always wanted was a company that's better at this than TiVo

01:23:10 ◼   ► To do what I called an omnivorous box because my idea back then was like look video comes from a million different places

01:23:17 ◼   ► Even back then there was Netflix and there was cable and there was over the air and there was local TV and all sorts of

01:23:23 ◼   ► Other places where you can get video from and iTunes and all that stuff

01:23:26 ◼   ► It's like I don't want to deal with all those places the video comes from I don't want to deal with 10 remotes

01:23:31 ◼   ► I don't want to deal with 10 services

01:23:33 ◼   ► I don't want to deal with figuring out where it is and how I get it and what input I have switched to or anything

01:23:38 ◼   ► like that

01:23:39 ◼   ► But on the other hand I realized that all the different people who own those things are never gonna get together and say we should

01:23:44 ◼   ► Make this easier for customers because everybody owns their different content and their different islands

01:23:48 ◼   ► It has their different licensing deals for the NFL and Major League Baseball and all the HBO shows and network

01:23:53 ◼   ► Programming and all the different channels and cable bundle like they're never gonna get together

01:23:56 ◼   ► So the only way to solve this technologically is to do what TiVo did but even bigger to make a box that will eat

01:24:03 ◼   ► Any kind of input an omnivorous box that says I will sit in front of your television

01:24:07 ◼   ► and you just throw all your video crap at me,

01:24:10 ◼   ► and then a bunch of people will figure out

01:24:12 ◼   ► how to integrate with all those services,

01:24:14 ◼   ► and they will make the software for it,

01:24:15 ◼   ► and figure out how to do all the integration,

01:24:18 ◼   ► and your only interface will be with that omnivorous box,

01:24:21 ◼   ► and it takes in all your input,

01:24:22 ◼   ► and it can record it locally, it can stream it,

01:24:24 ◼   ► it can do everything,

01:24:25 ◼   ► and it doesn't matter where it's coming from,

01:24:28 ◼   ► as far as you're concerned, it's one unified interface,

01:24:30 ◼   ► and that's an incredibly hard thing to do.

01:24:32 ◼   ► Google tried to do it, TiVo has been trying to do it,

01:24:34 ◼   ► because you can do Netflix from TiVo,

01:24:35 ◼   ► and Amazon Video from TiVo, and stuff like that,

01:24:37 ◼   ► but they're not great at it either.

01:24:39 ◼   ► No one has ever made that

01:24:40 ◼   ► because it's an incredibly hard problem.

01:24:41 ◼   ► Every other one of those companies would be your enemy

01:24:43 ◼   ► because they don't want you doing that.

01:24:44 ◼   ► They don't want you being the one

01:24:45 ◼   ► and only enterprise television.

01:24:46 ◼   ► Like the cable companies want to do it with a set-top box

01:24:48 ◼   ► and Netflix wants to do that

01:24:50 ◼   ► to have your client and everything.

01:24:51 ◼   ► Like it's incredibly hard thing to do.

01:24:53 ◼   ► No one has ever even attempted to do it

01:24:55 ◼   ► except for maybe Google

01:24:56 ◼   ► and they've failed pretty much miserably.

01:24:58 ◼   ► TiVo has come the closest.

01:24:59 ◼   ► TiVo does it for plain old cable television.

01:25:02 ◼   ► And they were able to do that

01:25:03 ◼   ► because of the cable card thing

01:25:04 ◼   ► where you can totally replace your,

01:25:06 ◼   ► I don't have to have a cable box at all.

01:25:07 ◼   ► I haven't had a cable box in my house ever.

01:25:10 ◼   ► Maybe I had it when I was in Georgia before I had a TiVo.

01:25:12 ◼   ► But since I've had a TiVo,

01:25:13 ◼   ► I have not had a cable box in my house, period.

01:25:15 ◼   ► I've only had TiVos,

01:25:17 ◼   ► which is a thing you can do because of cable card,

01:25:18 ◼   ► which is an FCC thing they did,

01:25:20 ◼   ► which is not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

01:25:23 ◼   ► And the TiVo, it's not omnivorous,

01:25:26 ◼   ► but it will accept all like quote unquote real TV input.

01:25:29 ◼   ► And then slowly but surely they added features

01:25:31 ◼   ► for like Netflix clients and Amazon video clients

01:25:34 ◼   ► and the ability to play video from one TiVo

01:25:36 ◼   ► to another TiVo and they added an iOS app which is actually pretty good where I can do everything

01:25:39 ◼   ► on my TiVo from my phone or my iPad anywhere in the world. I can delete shows, I can set up season

01:25:44 ◼   ► passes, I can watch video on it from my TiVo anywhere kind of like sling block style. I can,

01:25:49 ◼   ► you know, watch shows on one TiVo on the TiVo downstairs. There's a little extender box you can

01:25:53 ◼   ► do if you don't need a full-fledged TiVo. They actually have a pretty good system and a pretty

01:25:57 ◼   ► good product at this point. It's just sad that they could never get enough customers to make it work

01:26:02 ◼   ► financially. I really hope that someone would buy them that had a lot of money that could do a really

01:26:07 ◼   ► good job at the product, but Apple sort of put its stake in the ground and said "no, we're doing the

01:26:10 ◼   ► Apple TV puck thing, we're never going to record locally, we're just going to do streaming, that's

01:26:14 ◼   ► the future. Forget about the TiVo thing." And Rovi seems like their plan is "we will take a piece of

01:26:22 ◼   ► every cable box sold by letting your cable box have TiVo hardware and software in it." And I didn't

01:26:26 ◼   ► even talk about the remote, which is another TiVo innovation of having an actual good remote with

01:26:31 ◼   ► a nice shape and distinct buttons that you can use in the dark by feel.

01:26:34 ◼   ► Boy, there's a lot of things I like about TiVo and I will be sad when they're gone.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And right now with Rovi owning them, it's kind of like a quiet period where nothing's happening,

01:26:44 ◼   ► but I just really, really hope that I can still, I'm begging this company, let me give you that

01:26:49 ◼   ► literally thousands of dollars to buy the most expensive DVR with TiVo software that I possibly

01:26:56 ◼   ► can that works with my cable cards. And I will keep doing that for a long, long time.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Cool.

01:27:02 ◼   ► I don't understand why either one of you two don't have T-boxes.

01:27:05 ◼   ► We'll save that for the next episode and follow up.

01:27:07 ◼   ► You two can both explain why you don't have T-boxes.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Oh, I can tell you right now, the files box is just fine.

01:27:12 ◼   ► It's not, though.

01:27:13 ◼   ► I don't have cable.

01:27:14 ◼   ► You don't have cable, right?

01:27:15 ◼   ► It's a really quick response.

01:27:16 ◼   ► I mean--

01:27:17 ◼   ► [SIGHS]

01:27:18 ◼   ► Casey doesn't care, and I can't use it.

01:27:21 ◼   ► So there you go.

01:27:22 ◼   ► Actually, all kidding aside, that

01:27:23 ◼   ► is the executive summary right there.

01:27:25 ◼   ► [LAUGHS]

01:27:26 ◼   ► But here's the thing, though.

01:27:27 ◼   ► For Casey, if you got one, you would never

01:27:29 ◼   ► be able to get rid of one.

01:27:29 ◼   ► It's like the Tesla thing like you can't you can't go back

01:27:31 ◼   ► No one gets a TiVo uses it and then is like I'll go back to the old way

01:27:35 ◼   ► It's apparently a lot of people did otherwise TiVo wouldn't be out of business

01:27:38 ◼   ► No, it's not enough people got them to begin with because it was so much more expensive like the cable box is like

01:27:43 ◼   ► Oh, it's part of my cable

01:27:44 ◼   ► It's only ten dollars a month to rent or whatever and no one does the math to figure out that if you just bought a TiVo

01:27:48 ◼   ► You would have come out anyway. Go ahead. You're gonna end the show

01:27:50 ◼   ► Thanks for the responses this week Casper Warby Parker and Eero and we'll see you next week

01:27:58 ◼   ► week.

01:28:05 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey

01:28:15 ◼   ► wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:28:22 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow

01:28:31 ◼   ► Follow them @CASEYLISS

01:28:36 ◼   ► So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:28:41 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C

01:28:46 ◼   ► USA, Syracuse

01:28:48 ◼   ► It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:28:51 ◼   ► They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)

01:28:56 ◼   ► ♫ Tech podcast so long

01:29:00 ◼   ► - The files box is not good.

01:29:04 ◼   ► As much as I'm trying to get a rise out of you,

01:29:06 ◼   ► it's not good, but it's sufficient for the basic needs

01:29:09 ◼   ► that I have out of the DVR.

01:29:10 ◼   ► - I really think the Windows comparison here is apt.

01:29:14 ◼   ► Every DVR that's not a TiVo is mediocre at best,

01:29:18 ◼   ► and that's really being generous.

01:29:21 ◼   ► The interfaces to these things are all awful.

01:29:24 ◼   ► unlike Jon, I actually have used and lived with

01:29:27 ◼   ► a cable company DVR before.

01:29:29 ◼   ► And yeah, they're horrible, really.

01:29:32 ◼   ► However, the whole reason TiVo doesn't really have

01:29:36 ◼   ► much of a business left anymore is because,

01:29:38 ◼   ► as you said, most people don't care.

01:29:40 ◼   ► They will just be happy to get the one

01:29:43 ◼   ► their cable company offers them

01:29:44 ◼   ► for a few dollars extra a month,

01:29:46 ◼   ► and that's all they know.

01:29:48 ◼   ► That's probably the only kind they've ever seen.

01:29:50 ◼   ► - Well, it's not that they don't care.

01:29:51 ◼   ► It's just that they don't wanna pay more.

01:29:53 ◼   ► That's what it comes down to,

01:29:54 ◼   ► because TiVo, you have to pay for the box,

01:29:55 ◼   ► which is expensive,

01:29:56 ◼   ► and then you have to pay for a monthly service

01:29:58 ◼   ► on top of that, that's not part of your cable bill,

01:30:00 ◼   ► which is the key feature, right?

01:30:02 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:30:03 ◼   ► - And so they were just never able to come

01:30:06 ◼   ► with a business model.

01:30:07 ◼   ► The customers that they got,

01:30:08 ◼   ► for the most part, if you did their customer sat,

01:30:10 ◼   ► they'd be super happy,

01:30:10 ◼   ► but they could never figure out a way

01:30:12 ◼   ► to get people over the barrier.

01:30:13 ◼   ► And it was a substantial barrier

01:30:14 ◼   ► because the boxes have always been expensive.

01:30:16 ◼   ► Lifetime has always been super expensive,

01:30:18 ◼   ► and the monthly bills have also,

01:30:20 ◼   ► I think they've gone down,

01:30:21 ◼   ► but they used to be like equal to or more than Netflix.

01:30:23 ◼   ► And I was like, what am I getting for this?

01:30:25 ◼   ► Like, you know, it was hard to understand

01:30:26 ◼   ► what you're even paying for.

01:30:27 ◼   ► So it's mostly just a bunch of, you know,

01:30:29 ◼   ► rich people essentially who have these boxes

01:30:31 ◼   ► and who enjoy them, which is a shame.

01:30:32 ◼   ► And the Windows comparison, I would do it like this.

01:30:34 ◼   ► I think TiVo is the Windows, where it's like,

01:30:37 ◼   ► that's good enough.

01:30:38 ◼   ► It's like maybe the Windows 95.

01:30:39 ◼   ► There is no Apple that's actually good in all respects.

01:30:42 ◼   ► Like there is no iOS.

01:30:43 ◼   ► And then the cable boxes are, I guess, like DOS maybe,

01:30:46 ◼   ► or like punch cards, like, you know,

01:30:49 ◼   ► and some cable boxes are better than that.

01:30:50 ◼   ► Like I've seen a lot of these cable boxes and I've used them.

01:30:53 ◼   ► Some of them have interesting technological solutions.

01:30:55 ◼   ► Some of them actually, I think some companies do

01:30:58 ◼   ► server-side DVRing and then just stream it to you over there

01:31:00 ◼   ► which is an interesting solution to keep hard drives

01:31:02 ◼   ► out of people's houses, but the UIs are all terrible.

01:31:05 ◼   ► The capacities are like maybe they're okay

01:31:08 ◼   ► for regular people, but I feel like part of the thing

01:31:10 ◼   ► about Tevos and part of the reason I think

01:31:12 ◼   ► that I think most Tevo customers buy the fancy ones

01:31:14 ◼   ► is the people who buy it are like enthusiasts essentially.

01:31:18 ◼   ► They will, you know, what is the biggest hard drive

01:31:20 ◼   ► you can get?

01:31:20 ◼   ► The biggest hard drive I had in my house was like

01:31:22 ◼   ► when they came out with a three terabyte hard drive,

01:31:25 ◼   ► this, that was the biggest hard drive in my house

01:31:27 ◼   ► was the one in my TiVo.

01:31:28 ◼   ► Why did I need all that capacity?

01:31:29 ◼   ► Because you realize when you have a lot of room,

01:31:32 ◼   ► you can do things, you can treat it differently.

01:31:35 ◼   ► You can't have like, oh, I'm just gonna do a season pass

01:31:37 ◼   ► and then I'll watch them.

01:31:38 ◼   ► You can record an entire season of a show

01:31:40 ◼   ► and just have it sitting there for like the period

01:31:42 ◼   ► with time when no new shows are coming out.

01:31:44 ◼   ► And then just, you know, and again, this is barbaric.

01:31:46 ◼   ► People are like, oh, well, you know,

01:31:47 ◼   ► Netflix has the whole season of House of Cards and I can watch it whenever I want.

01:31:50 ◼   ► Why do I need to have a recorder?"

01:31:51 ◼   ► But these are for shows that are not available through streaming or are only available through

01:31:55 ◼   ► purchase on iTunes or are delayed or whatever.

01:31:58 ◼   ► Again, it's getting better.

01:32:00 ◼   ► Back in the day, this was literally the only place to get a lot of stuff.

01:32:03 ◼   ► These days, it's almost never the only place, but it is still often the best place.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

01:32:09 ◼   ► The reason why Apple never got into this business is very obvious, that the DVR as a thing is

01:32:15 ◼   ► is just an incredible pile of messy hacks.

01:32:19 ◼   ► Everything about it is a messy hack.

01:32:21 ◼   ► - It's a beautiful hack though.

01:32:23 ◼   ► - There is no way to make it good.

01:32:25 ◼   ► There is no way to make it reliable and perfect.

01:32:28 ◼   ► There's no way to get what,

01:32:29 ◼   ► like what it tries to do is turn broadcast TV,

01:32:34 ◼   ► and whether it's broadcast over the air or cable,

01:32:36 ◼   ► I'm not distinguishing here,

01:32:37 ◼   ► effectively into on-demand video,

01:32:40 ◼   ► but with a ton of asterisks on that.

01:32:42 ◼   ► And where, you know, it's,

01:32:43 ◼   ► Well it turns it into on demand video, sort of, and most of the time.

01:32:47 ◼   ► It does a phenomenal job with it.

01:32:49 ◼   ► The only place where it falls down is, like I said, it falls down on the omnivorous thing

01:32:53 ◼   ► where it only consumes broadcast television.

01:32:55 ◼   ► And with broadcast television it does a really, really good job.

01:32:57 ◼   ► They're really good at that, but it doesn't take input from any other source and treat

01:33:02 ◼   ► it the same way.

01:33:03 ◼   ► It's like if you want to watch Netflix, oh you can load the Netflix client.

01:33:05 ◼   ► And the Netflix client on TiVo is not good.

01:33:07 ◼   ► And neither is the Amazon.

01:33:08 ◼   ► Like they're just, this is not their strength, right?

01:33:10 ◼   ► So there is no omnivorous box.

01:33:12 ◼   ► But for broadcast TV, TiVo got pretty darn good at it.

01:33:15 ◼   ► And the number of caveats is really small.

01:33:17 ◼   ► And if the alternative is just watch it when it's on

01:33:20 ◼   ► and use the cable company DVR, it's night and day.

01:33:23 ◼   ► - Ultimately, this is, it's a really complex,

01:33:27 ◼   ► hacky solution to a problem that shouldn't really exist

01:33:31 ◼   ► and the world is moving away from needing to exist.