ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► - Aye yai yai, where's Jon?

00:00:02 ◼   ► Why do we not have Jon?

00:00:02 ◼   ► - I'm working on it, I can't get him to connect yet.

00:00:05 ◼   ► - It might be just you and me, my friend.

00:00:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:08 ◼   ► Oh God, can you imagine the internet revolt

00:00:11 ◼   ► that would happen?

00:00:12 ◼   ► - What do you think they would hate more,

00:00:13 ◼   ► two hours of fish or the show without Jon?

00:00:16 ◼   ► - Probably the show without Jon.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I think they would prefer the two hours of fish.

00:00:20 ◼   ► - I think you're right.

00:00:21 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:23 ◼   ► Oh, hey, Jon's here.

00:00:25 ◼   ► - Oh, hi Jon.

00:00:26 ◼   ► what would you think people would dislike more?

00:00:30 ◼   ► Would people dislike hearing fish for two hours

00:00:34 ◼   ► more than hearing the show without you,

00:00:38 ◼   ► or would people dislike hearing the show without you

00:00:41 ◼   ► and prefer to hear fish for two hours?

00:00:44 ◼   ► - Oh. (laughing)

00:00:46 ◼   ► I think they would prefer to hear the fish.

00:00:50 ◼   ► - That's exactly what we concluded.

00:00:52 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:00:53 ◼   ► that the internet would find and smite, smote Marco and I,

00:00:58 ◼   ► if you were not here.

00:00:59 ◼   ► - I think I don't really hear any fish,

00:01:01 ◼   ► 'cause again, I never listened to the live stream,

00:01:03 ◼   ► but the few moments I remember hearing,

00:01:05 ◼   ► it's like, it's not terrible, right?

00:01:07 ◼   ► It's like they play guitars and bass and drums and,

00:01:11 ◼   ► you know, and then someone says something

00:01:13 ◼   ► for like two seconds in the middle, and then, you know,

00:01:16 ◼   ► even if you don't like it,

00:01:17 ◼   ► it's not like you're making people listen to, you know,

00:01:20 ◼   ► scream music or something, I don't know.

00:01:22 ◼   ► I think we'll be fine.

00:01:24 ◼   ► I mean, to be fair, I think more people like fish than like us.

00:01:28 ◼   ► It might not be these people, but in total.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:01:32 ◼   ► It is currently the 13th of April. It is a Wednesday night.

00:01:40 ◼   ► We just released this week's episode, or Marco did, a few hours ago,

00:01:44 ◼   ► but because Jon is disappearing for a little bit,

00:01:48 ◼   ► we are going to be where we are obviously recording right now.

00:01:51 ◼   ► So we expect that Apple will buy Nintendo on the 14th of April, and we won't get a chance to talk about it until, I think, the 22nd, which is the next time we'll be recording.

00:02:01 ◼   ► So expect all the juicy and interesting things to happen over the next week. You're welcome.

00:02:06 ◼   ► I mean, at least my car was made obsolete yesterday.

00:02:09 ◼   ► That's true, actually. I completely forgot about that. Yeah, they hit the Tesla with the ugly stick. Come at me, haters.

00:02:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't really regret not getting the new one.

00:02:21 ◼   ► 'Cause they literally just did a facelift yesterday

00:02:25 ◼   ► and my car is something like two and a half weeks old.

00:02:28 ◼   ► But the new one I think overall is probably better.

00:02:32 ◼   ► It has better headlights, it has a center console,

00:02:37 ◼   ► which I had to buy a separate third party center console

00:02:39 ◼   ► to shove in there, it comes with one.

00:02:41 ◼   ► - Oh, I didn't realize it was third party,

00:02:43 ◼   ► that's interesting.

00:02:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, well they had a first party one,

00:02:45 ◼   ► but the reviews were terrible.

00:02:47 ◼   ► So then they stopped selling it.

00:02:49 ◼   ► So, you know, there's a couple of minor improvements,

00:02:52 ◼   ► but nothing that really makes me unhappy

00:02:55 ◼   ► that I bought, you know, two and a half weeks ago,

00:02:57 ◼   ► rather than today.

00:02:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, the front kind of grill, fascia area,

00:03:04 ◼   ► just, I don't dig it.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And a lot of people were coming after me,

00:03:09 ◼   ► and you know, kind of rightfully so,

00:03:11 ◼   ► and saying, oh well, you're just judging it

00:03:13 ◼   ► because it doesn't look like an old car.

00:03:15 ◼   ► It doesn't look like something that blows up old plants and dinosaurs and you're just being a stupid old man.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And yeah, you know, I might be guilty as charged.

00:03:24 ◼   ► And maybe in a few years I won't need to see a grill up front.

00:03:28 ◼   ► But sitting here today, I just don't think it's pretty.

00:03:33 ◼   ► And somebody had tweeted, I can't recall who it was, but somebody tweeted and it's been making the rounds endlessly.

00:03:40 ◼   ► The picture of Keanu Reeves as Mr. Anderson, and when in the first movie, his lips disappear

00:03:51 ◼   ► and his face just is, you know, it's all kind of one big flat area.

00:03:57 ◼   ► And it is a very, very similar likeness to the updated Tesla Model S and the Model 3

00:04:05 ◼   ► as well.

00:04:06 ◼   ► And the X.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Because like the Model S, basically this all started with the X.

00:04:10 ◼   ► - That's true, I've forgotten about that.

00:04:11 ◼   ► - I mean, ultimately, I don't think it's really

00:04:13 ◼   ► gonna be that big of a deal.

00:04:14 ◼   ► I think it's more just like we are not used to seeing cars

00:04:17 ◼   ► that are designed this way, and that's why it looks weird

00:04:20 ◼   ► because it's unfamiliar, but I think within a few months,

00:04:23 ◼   ► once you start seeing these on the road and everything,

00:04:25 ◼   ► everyone's just gonna be like,

00:04:25 ◼   ► "Okay, that's just how cars look sometimes."

00:04:28 ◼   ► - No, no, no, that's not it.

00:04:30 ◼   ► We talked about this last week.

00:04:31 ◼   ► We just forgot everything we talked about.

00:04:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:34 ◼   ► The Model 3 was the one where the Keanu lip sewing shut

00:04:38 ◼   ► Disappearing matrix thing was going around because the model 3 what we've seen of it anyway because again who knows what's final

00:04:44 ◼   ► But what we've seen with model 3 is there's nothing there. There's no

00:04:47 ◼   ► Dividing line different color patch different material. It is just one continuous schnoz and

00:04:54 ◼   ► And as as we talked about last week like it's it's not so much that

00:05:03 ◼   ► That we demand to have a grill, right?

00:05:06 ◼   ► It's that the car looks like it has a place where a grill should go

00:05:09 ◼   ► Like the that they haven't fully embraced the idea that they don't need to pull air into that spot

00:05:14 ◼   ► They have built a car with a spot where grill would go

00:05:17 ◼   ► But just neglected to put the same reason a face looks weird with a big smooth spot where the mouth should go because we know

00:05:22 ◼   ► That's where the mouth goes if you want to draw something that doesn't have a mouth

00:05:26 ◼   ► Don't draw the place where the mouth goes and then just erase it right that the X and the add the new s

00:05:31 ◼   ► They have a grill they have a little t-shaped thing which I think is pretty good for Tesla tea

00:05:36 ◼   ► You know every brand has some sort of like signature grill shape that they go with and they change it over the years

00:05:40 ◼   ► But you know Audi's got that big sort of big mouth trapezoid thing they go with

00:05:44 ◼   ► Well, it does look a little bit like a creepy partial mustache like the skinny stash

00:05:48 ◼   ► It looks a little bit like Alfa Romeo - like it's not like every band, you know BMW has the kidneys

00:05:55 ◼   ► So that is a pretty big signature there

00:05:57 ◼   ► But other brands have changed their shape over the years and sometimes they stick with it for like three or four model generations

00:06:02 ◼   ► And they go with a different shape. Anyway, this Tesla thing with the little T with their actual T logo inside it. That's fine

00:06:08 ◼   ► It's kind of like a grill. I

00:06:10 ◼   ► Have to see this one in person because from some angles the little

00:06:14 ◼   ► Little mustache they have there

00:06:17 ◼   ► Suffices as far as I'm concerned visually because they put a place for the grill and they put a grill on

00:06:22 ◼   ► I mean that basically is a grill

00:06:23 ◼   ► It's not a big grill

00:06:23 ◼   ► But it's a grill like why else have a big like opening in black air because because other internal combustion engine cars have one

00:06:29 ◼   ► The model 3 has the same place for that thing to go, but there's nothing there. So it looks weird

00:06:33 ◼   ► And like I said last show

00:06:37 ◼   ► If they if they want to go with the no grill in the front because they can fine go for it embrace it make it

00:06:43 ◼   ► look

00:06:44 ◼   ► But make it look like a car that

00:06:46 ◼   ► Never had a grill was never intended to have a grill and they kind of can't do that with the model s because they decided

00:06:51 ◼   ► With Marco's car to put the big giant ball gag thing there. It looks like a big black grill, but it's just

00:06:56 ◼   ► Clear plastic like someone shoved a rubber ball into the mouth of the car. It's like

00:07:00 ◼   ► but

00:07:03 ◼   ► But that you know that they made the decision you can't really reshape the whole car

00:07:07 ◼   ► The other thing that's a factor is

00:07:08 ◼   ► Pedestrian safety and crash standards probably dictate at the very least the minimum height of the front of the car

00:07:14 ◼   ► So you can't really go whole hog into a styling that totally neglects the grill

00:07:18 ◼   ► So I'm not entirely sure what to do to resolve this but I know the answer is not what the three did which is make

00:07:22 ◼   ► A car with a place for a grill and just failed to put one there. Yeah the side view

00:07:27 ◼   ► I'm looking at this post on jalopnik

00:07:29 ◼   ► Which will have in the show notes if you look at it from the side of the car

00:07:32 ◼   ► It actually doesn't look bad at all, but any sort of front angle

00:07:35 ◼   ► Just looks it's just this this this vast

00:07:39 ◼   ► Emptiness and it just I agree with you John

00:07:42 ◼   ► It looks like a grill belongs there, but isn't there isn't there and I think I prefer this to the Audi

00:07:48 ◼   ► I will swallow the world grill that's become so trendy for Audi these days

00:07:53 ◼   ► Which is just awful or the new Lexus ones too and the new Lexus and Toyota. Oh, you're right

00:07:58 ◼   ► Lexus the bowtie shape. Yeah, it's kind of like goes

00:08:02 ◼   ► That's even worse. Yeah, and it's like the entire front of the car. Yeah, it's so bad

00:08:08 ◼   ► But that's efficient efficient for cooling if they use all that space

00:08:11 ◼   ► But are you talking about you're still saying that you don't like the S because Casey the S has a grill like that little the little

00:08:17 ◼   ► mustache

00:08:18 ◼   ► See, that's just it doesn't fill the area

00:08:21 ◼   ► I see there's a big expanse under that you feel like right a place where more real show and there is exactly and they actually

00:08:26 ◼   ► Exaggerated because if you look they actually extend down like the thing that's around the fog lamps the the material goes down even farther

00:08:33 ◼   ► Making room even more room for the non-existing grill. Yep, exactly. I just don't care for it

00:08:38 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm sure it looks fine, and once I see them in person, which, you know,

00:08:41 ◼   ► should be any day now as soon as they start signing them because they're all over here,

00:08:44 ◼   ► I'll have to render judgment of seeing it in person, but I think it looks better than

00:08:49 ◼   ► the three by far.

00:08:50 ◼   ► Yeah, it does look better than the three.

00:08:51 ◼   ► I think so too, and I think of all their, like including, if you look at the X and the

00:08:56 ◼   ► S and the three together, I think it looks the best out of all three of them, out of

00:09:00 ◼   ► the current ones they're producing.

00:09:02 ◼   ► Although one concern I have for all three of them is that front area that is body color

00:09:08 ◼   ► is just gonna get full of bugs and chips.

00:09:11 ◼   ► - Ooh, good point.

00:09:12 ◼   ► - You know, that's always the most damaged area

00:09:15 ◼   ► of any car I have, 'cause it's always just covered in--

00:09:18 ◼   ► - Just put a bra on it.

00:09:19 ◼   ► - Oh, God, are we starting there again?

00:09:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, are we going back to this?

00:09:23 ◼   ► Oh, God.

00:09:25 ◼   ► Anyway, so I agree, I understand that this will probably,

00:09:30 ◼   ► at some point, look normal to me,

00:09:33 ◼   ► but today, I don't care for it, and I think it looks ugly.

00:09:37 ◼   ► All right, so let's not talk about Teslas anymore,

00:09:40 ◼   ► and let's start the follow-up.

00:09:41 ◼   ► And our first follow-up item is let's talk about Teslas,

00:09:44 ◼   ► and let's talk about superchargers and charging at night.

00:09:48 ◼   ► - Now you're following instructions.

00:09:49 ◼   ► This is another thing, by the way,

00:09:50 ◼   ► that the chat room was also right about this last show.

00:09:54 ◼   ► We just didn't get a chance to pull them out.

00:09:55 ◼   ► I meant to do it, but we had moved on by then.

00:09:57 ◼   ► In the discussion about how many supercharger stations

00:10:00 ◼   ► there are versus how many gas stations,

00:10:02 ◼   ► and factoring how long it takes to charge,

00:10:04 ◼   ► and all the other infrastructure needed

00:10:06 ◼   ► we were to convert all of the existing cars to electric with a snap of our fingers and

00:10:09 ◼   ► so on and so forth.

00:10:10 ◼   ► One point we didn't bring up, but again which the chat room did, was that even though superchargers

00:10:15 ◼   ► take a long time to charge, you can get, you can fill up your electric car someplace other

00:10:22 ◼   ► than the quote-unquote gas station.

00:10:24 ◼   ► You know, when you drive it back to your house you just plug it in and a lot of people were

00:10:27 ◼   ► saying that as long as you don't drive more than half the range of your car per day, you

00:10:34 ◼   ► You never need to go to a supercharger unless you're going on a long trip, so you need far

00:10:37 ◼   ► fewer superchargers because just when you go back home, you plug it in.

00:10:40 ◼   ► And I was thinking about this when I was discussing the charge thing last time, and it's kind

00:10:46 ◼   ► of in the middle because, I mean, Marco can tell us, but like I recall him saying somewhere

00:10:52 ◼   ► on Twitter that it takes like three days to charge his car to full capacity from the plain

00:10:56 ◼   ► old wall outlet.

00:10:57 ◼   ► Yeah, so if you only have a plain old wall outlet, it's about three days for a full charge.

00:11:02 ◼   ► But if you're spending this much on a car, I don't think it's that much to ask to spend

00:11:06 ◼   ► another few hundred to at most a couple thousand dollars to do whatever it takes to get a high

00:11:12 ◼   ► powered outlet in your garage.

00:11:13 ◼   ► If you have a 50 amp outlet, the NEMA 1450 that Tesla recommends, that charges the entire

00:11:18 ◼   ► car in something like seven hours, depending on how big a battery you have.

00:11:22 ◼   ► So if you're buying a 70 or 80,000 or 35,000 dollar car, maybe, but as these things come

00:11:26 ◼   ► down in price, like basically I would say if you're asking people to change their home

00:11:31 ◼   ► in some way, they basically become like a little charging station. Like that's part

00:11:35 ◼   ► of the infrastructure. Part of the infrastructure, you don't have to build gas stations, but

00:11:38 ◼   ► every single person who owns one of these cars has to at least have a dryer outlet in

00:11:41 ◼   ► their garage or buy one of the big supercharger things or whatever, which is fine, like you

00:11:44 ◼   ► said, for people with Model S and the Model 3.

00:11:46 ◼   ► Well, not every person. Like, you know, Underscore, our friend Underscore David Smith, he is still,

00:11:50 ◼   ► you know, he bought the car like in December. He still just only has the regular outlet

00:11:55 ◼   ► and he drives a few enough miles that it doesn't really matter unless he's taking a trip, in

00:11:59 ◼   ► case using superchargers. And right now, I still have that too, because electricians

00:12:03 ◼   ► in New York take a while to get back to you. So I still have the Plano outlet as well,

00:12:06 ◼   ► and so far it's been totally fine because I'm not driving hundreds of miles a day.

00:12:11 ◼   ► It would only be a problem if I was driving like 100 or more miles a day.

00:12:14 ◼   ► What I'm getting at is that the math is not as long as you drive half the range. It's

00:12:19 ◼   ► more like if you drive a third of the range or whatever. And the other thing is that since

00:12:24 ◼   ► Since these are the first round of like minimally viable electric cars to compete with gas cars,

00:12:29 ◼   ► they don't have the same range as a long range gas car, but they're close enough that, you

00:12:33 ◼   ► know, that it's fine, right?

00:12:34 ◼   ► This is not like the LEAF where it's intended to be a very short range car.

00:12:38 ◼   ► I would assume that the capacity of electric cars will go up as batteries become cheaper.

00:12:44 ◼   ► Maybe not that much, maybe they'll stop around a 300 mile range, like an easy 300 mile range

00:12:48 ◼   ► for everybody.

00:12:50 ◼   ► And so that will just only add to charging time.

00:12:53 ◼   ► So it seems like some necessary part of the infrastructure of the electric car world is

00:12:58 ◼   ► every home to have a little bit better charging capacity.

00:13:01 ◼   ► It doesn't mean they need to have a big supercharger or the $3,000 thing or whatever, probably

00:13:04 ◼   ► just an extra dryer outlet.

00:13:06 ◼   ► And since most people, I would imagine, go way less than a third of the range of their

00:13:10 ◼   ► electric car or even a quarter of the range of their electric car, they'll probably be

00:13:13 ◼   ► fine.

00:13:14 ◼   ► And that will definitely save on the supercharger, the number of superchargers needed.

00:13:17 ◼   ► The flip side of that, though, is that the places that need superchargers are going to

00:13:21 ◼   ► need a lot of them.

00:13:22 ◼   ► along Interstate 90 where there's nobody else in the entire world. Everybody is

00:13:26 ◼   ► stopping somewhere along Interstate 90. If all the cars were

00:13:28 ◼   ► electric, no one is going across New York State. You know, you got to stop them for your

00:13:32 ◼   ► gas somewhere if you're going from like, you know, Boston to Buffalo or something.

00:13:36 ◼   ► And it's just a giant corridor of a bunch of cars that need to do that and

00:13:39 ◼   ► they're used to pulling off at one of the service stations, getting gas, you

00:13:42 ◼   ► know, and then just continuing on. And if it takes you even just 15 minutes, that's

00:13:47 ◼   ► gonna, you know, you're gonna have big backups and starls. As you can tell if

00:13:50 ◼   ► anything at all goes wrong at any of the toll stations

00:13:53 ◼   ► along the way that you're sitting in traffic

00:13:55 ◼   ► for hours and hours.

00:13:55 ◼   ► So it seems like superchargers are gonna be concentrated

00:13:58 ◼   ► along the major thoroughfares and then in suburban areas,

00:14:01 ◼   ► maybe you could have one that covers a tremendous area

00:14:03 ◼   ► because only people who are passing through

00:14:05 ◼   ► need everyone else to charge at their house.

00:14:07 ◼   ► - Well also, I think another major problem to tackle

00:14:10 ◼   ► is that if you don't have a house with a garage

00:14:14 ◼   ► or a permanent parking spot and a driveway,

00:14:16 ◼   ► it's kind of impractical to have an electric car

00:14:18 ◼   ► because you have, like, so many people live in apartments

00:14:21 ◼   ► or in, you know, street parking only areas

00:14:24 ◼   ► where you're parking your car on the street overnight,

00:14:26 ◼   ► you know, you don't have a driveway,

00:14:27 ◼   ► you don't have a garage.

00:14:29 ◼   ► How do you charge, you know, on a regular basis out there?

00:14:34 ◼   ► That's trickier to solve, I think.

00:14:36 ◼   ► - Inductive charging mats,

00:14:38 ◼   ► you just drive your car over the top of it.

00:14:40 ◼   ► - Those exist.

00:14:41 ◼   ► - You never know.

00:14:42 ◼   ► - I know, they'll just put them in the road

00:14:44 ◼   ► when they're putting the little sensors

00:14:45 ◼   ► for these automated cars,

00:14:46 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Also put chargers

00:14:46 ◼   ► at every stoplight.

00:14:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, why not?

00:14:49 ◼   ► Marco, what's the nearest supercharger to you

00:14:51 ◼   ► in terms of distance?

00:14:52 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't know.

00:14:53 ◼   ► I mean, there's one in Newburgh,

00:14:54 ◼   ► but that's, which is pretty far out.

00:14:55 ◼   ► I mean, it's something like,

00:14:56 ◼   ► what direction am I headed, is the more relevant question.

00:14:59 ◼   ► If I'm going upstate, the closest one is Newburgh,

00:15:01 ◼   ► which is something like a half hour up or an hour up.

00:15:04 ◼   ► If I'm going into Pennsylvania, New Jersey area,

00:15:08 ◼   ► then I'm sure it's a different one.

00:15:09 ◼   ► If I'm going through Connecticut,

00:15:10 ◼   ► I think there's a couple over there.

00:15:12 ◼   ► So it depends on where I'm going, really.

00:15:15 ◼   ► Yeah, the reason I'm asking is, like, I see there's one in Greenwich, Connecticut, which

00:15:18 ◼   ► looks to my eye like it's pretty close to you.

00:15:20 ◼   ► Yeah, that's very close.

00:15:21 ◼   ► There's one in Paramus, New Jersey, which also looks fairly close, so it looks like

00:15:24 ◼   ► Greenwich is probably closer.

00:15:26 ◼   ► It is.

00:15:27 ◼   ► And anyway, what I'm driving at, though, is let's suppose for the sake of discussion that

00:15:32 ◼   ► you don't ever do anything to the home, and you only have a regular outlet, and you would

00:15:36 ◼   ► have to charge over the span of three days.

00:15:38 ◼   ► In a desperation scenario, you could drive what to my eye looks like half an hour or

00:15:43 ◼   ► or less to say Greenwich, and you could use the supercharger there and drive back, and

00:15:49 ◼   ► that's what, like probably 20, 30 miles, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, and that

00:15:53 ◼   ► would in a pinch solve the problem as long as you had an hour to spare, to go charge.

00:16:00 ◼   ► - I always have an hour for Greenwich. They have amazing watch stores there and a good

00:16:03 ◼   ► lunch place.

00:16:04 ◼   ► - Oh my God, how's the chicken salad?

00:16:06 ◼   ► - You know, I haven't had that yet.

00:16:08 ◼   ► - Fair enough. But anyway, but you see what I'm driving at is, you know, maybe--

00:16:10 ◼   ► - I haven't been there that many times.

00:16:12 ◼   ► Maybe you can avoid doing the home modification until the next time you do a demo on the house,

00:16:18 ◼   ► which for you seems to be every couple of years.

00:16:21 ◼   ► But…

00:16:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:23 ◼   ► I have one of the situations, I think like Underscore, where my circuit breaker panel

00:16:26 ◼   ► is full and so the electrician is quoting me a couple thousand dollars to do like a…

00:16:31 ◼   ► I don't need a panel upgrade, but I need a sub-panel.

00:16:33 ◼   ► And then once you throw in the cost of all the local permits and everything else, all

00:16:37 ◼   ► all the fees for the town and everything,

00:16:40 ◼   ► it's probably gonna be maybe two or three thousand dollars.

00:16:42 ◼   ► And that does make you pause and you're like,

00:16:45 ◼   ► "Well, is it really?

00:16:46 ◼   ► "Am I really ever going to need that necessarily

00:16:50 ◼   ► "compared to the regular outlet?"

00:16:51 ◼   ► And I might not.

00:16:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's interesting.

00:16:53 ◼   ► You know, I find this all fascinating.

00:16:55 ◼   ► I don't suspect that I'm going to have

00:16:57 ◼   ► an electric car anytime soon.

00:16:59 ◼   ► Not necessarily from lack of desire,

00:17:01 ◼   ► but because those that are available today

00:17:03 ◼   ► don't really do it for me, or are exorbitantly expensive,

00:17:06 ◼   ► Or are the Model 3 that even if I reserve one now,

00:17:10 ◼   ► I won't get until Declan's graduating college.

00:17:13 ◼   ► So I don't suspect I'm gonna get

00:17:15 ◼   ► an electric car anytime soon,

00:17:16 ◼   ► but I am fascinated by all the differences

00:17:19 ◼   ► and the different thoughts and concerns

00:17:20 ◼   ► and worries that one has,

00:17:22 ◼   ► like should I modify my home

00:17:24 ◼   ► in order to support charging this quicker?

00:17:27 ◼   ► That's so different than what I'm used to thinking about,

00:17:29 ◼   ► and I just find it very interesting.

00:17:30 ◼   ► - I mean, in all fairness, the modification to your home,

00:17:34 ◼   ► If your home is at all modern or new or has modern electric service in it, is usually

00:17:40 ◼   ► very minimal.

00:17:41 ◼   ► It's usually a couple hundred dollars to have an electrician install a high power outlet

00:17:45 ◼   ► usually really close to where your breaker was anyway because so many breakers are in

00:17:48 ◼   ► garages.

00:17:49 ◼   ► So it's, you know, for most homes out there in the country that are fairly young, I think

00:17:55 ◼   ► it would be a very inexpensive modification.

00:17:57 ◼   ► And most people I don't think really think too much about it.

00:18:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:01 ◼   ► All right.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Well, sort of moving on.

00:18:04 ◼   ► Jon, do you want to tell us about this next item?

00:18:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I meant to look up what SAE stands for, but one of you and/or the chat room will do that while I'm addressing one last point on the superchargers.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Also brought up by the chat room, also related to SAE, which is connector standards.

00:18:18 ◼   ► Tesla's apparently got its own connector. It's got like the two little things. Does it have like a T-shape in it? I seem to remember it had like kind of a branding theme. But anyway.

00:18:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I think there's four pins in there, maybe?

00:18:28 ◼   ► Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE stands for.

00:18:33 ◼   ► They have a standard connector for electric cars, which is not the same as the Tesla connector,

00:18:38 ◼   ► so I mean, we'll see how this works out in terms of, you know, adapters don't seem like

00:18:42 ◼   ► it's rocket science if you have any kind of station that can provide electricity to the

00:18:45 ◼   ► cars.

00:18:46 ◼   ► Obviously Tesla has its own brand of supercharger stations, they don't care if you can charge

00:18:49 ◼   ► anyone else's car there, I think, but I see no reason why they couldn't.

00:18:53 ◼   ► I feel like that will work itself out.

00:18:55 ◼   ► If it turns out that Tesla builds a million supercharger stations before anybody builds

00:18:58 ◼   ► anything, guess what?

00:18:59 ◼   ► The standard connector is Tesla's, not this SAE standard.

00:19:03 ◼   ► But speaking of SAE standards, SAE has a standard measurement system for self-driving cars,

00:19:09 ◼   ► which why wouldn't they?

00:19:10 ◼   ► Because they're sitting around all day trying to come up with standards like, "Ooh, ooh,

00:19:12 ◼   ► self-driving cars.

00:19:13 ◼   ► How about we can make up standards for things that don't exist?"

00:19:15 ◼   ► So they did.

00:19:16 ◼   ► Zero, it goes from zero to five.

00:19:18 ◼   ► Zero is no automation, and five is full automation.

00:19:20 ◼   ► And they divide it into two regions of three each, because they start from zero because

00:19:23 ◼   ► they're programmers.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Zero, one, and two is human driver monitors' driving engagement.

00:19:30 ◼   ► Basically, there needs to be a human driver, and they need to monitor everything.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And three, four, and five is automated driving system monitors' driving environment.

00:19:37 ◼   ► I didn't read this entire PDF, so I'm not quite sure how they break it down much farther.

00:19:41 ◼   ► But again, my criteria is, do I need to know how to drive a car to get into this car?

00:19:46 ◼   ► I guess you could do it simpler as, do I get to sit in the back seat?

00:19:49 ◼   ► Because that boils down to the same thing.

00:19:50 ◼   ► If you get to sit in the back seat and no one is in the front seat, that's complete

00:19:54 ◼   ► self-driving car, right?

00:19:55 ◼   ► Can I fall asleep?

00:19:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:57 ◼   ► If you have to sit in the front seat

00:19:59 ◼   ► and have to know how to drive a car

00:20:01 ◼   ► because you may be called upon to do so,

00:20:03 ◼   ► you're still in the lower range.

00:20:04 ◼   ► So that's really the barrier that I carry.

00:20:06 ◼   ► But it's good that the Society of Automotive Engineers

00:20:08 ◼   ► has decided to come up with a scale for this.

00:20:10 ◼   ► And I wonder where they would--

00:20:11 ◼   ► I mean, I guess your Tesla is on two, which

00:20:15 ◼   ► they call partial automation.

00:20:16 ◼   ► It's like no automation, driver assistance, partial automation,

00:20:19 ◼   ► conditional automation, high automation, full automation,

00:20:21 ◼   ► auto standards, bodies.

00:20:22 ◼   ► Is there anything you can't standardize?

00:20:24 ◼   ► Apparently not.

00:20:25 ◼   ► So anyway, be watching for SAE numbers to be quoted on your cars just like the SAE engine

00:20:31 ◼   ► power ratings that no one reads.

00:20:33 ◼   ► Except you.

00:20:34 ◼   ► All right.

00:20:36 ◼   ► John, do you think—and this is Robin Malhotra that's asked us this—do you think, John,

00:20:44 ◼   ► that Apple's new file system or truly autonomous vehicles will come first?

00:20:48 ◼   ► Truly autonomous, according to my definition, just laid out, as in you can sit in the backseat

00:20:51 ◼   ► and don't have to drive, Apple's file system will come first easily.

00:20:55 ◼   ► I tend to agree, but you never really know.

00:20:59 ◼   ► All right.

00:21:00 ◼   ► Cameron Palm has written in and made some interesting points

00:21:06 ◼   ► about the Amazon Echo and Amazon in general.

00:21:12 ◼   ► He or she has said, "Well, I'm sure Amazon Echo and Dash buttons

00:21:15 ◼   ► are interesting.

00:21:15 ◼   ► Its products are a couple of key issues.

00:21:17 ◼   ► Number one, Amazon is a US thing.

00:21:18 ◼   ► It works in the US because of cheap shipping.

00:21:21 ◼   ► It doesn't work/exist in most of the world, including Europe, not in the US sense.

00:21:26 ◼   ► The Echo is also only available in American English.

00:21:29 ◼   ► Siri on the other hand, and he or she provides a link, is available in many, many, many places.

00:21:35 ◼   ► And there's a link that we'll put in the show notes for future availability for Siri.

00:21:40 ◼   ► This happens a lot when we bring up things.

00:21:41 ◼   ► I forget, maybe Netflix was another one.

00:21:42 ◼   ► A lot of things that we don't realize are US-centric or US-only.

00:21:47 ◼   ► So if there are other people listening in the US and who are just thinking, "Oh, Amazon,

00:21:50 ◼   ► Everyone has Amazon, right?

00:21:52 ◼   ► Apparently a lot of the stuff Amazon does

00:21:53 ◼   ► is really confined to the US.

00:21:56 ◼   ► In ways that you wouldn't imagine it would be.

00:21:58 ◼   ► Is there anything specific about the Echo

00:22:00 ◼   ► that has to be so US?

00:22:01 ◼   ► It seems like they could make one for other countries.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Maybe they just don't have enough server farms over there,

00:22:06 ◼   ► they don't have the expertise to do the translation

00:22:08 ◼   ► and the detection in different languages, either way.

00:22:11 ◼   ► It's always seemed kind of weird to me

00:22:12 ◼   ► that such a big company like Amazon

00:22:13 ◼   ► seems to have such grand ambitions with the whole

00:22:16 ◼   ► EC2 and S3 and selling things all over the world.

00:22:19 ◼   ► I can understand maybe not being able to sell

00:22:20 ◼   ► physical goods all over the world,

00:22:21 ◼   ► but for all their electronic products and network services,

00:22:25 ◼   ► they should expand more.

00:22:28 ◼   ► - Well, and I think this is,

00:22:29 ◼   ► I think we're seeing here a strategy tax at Amazon,

00:22:32 ◼   ► which is the Echo does lots of things

00:22:35 ◼   ► that don't use their services, their storefronts at all,

00:22:39 ◼   ► and don't depend on their storefronts at all,

00:22:40 ◼   ► but one of the main reasons that all Amazon hardware exists

00:22:43 ◼   ► is to get you to buy more content

00:22:47 ◼   ► or media or stuff from Amazon.

00:22:49 ◼   ► And so I bet they don't want to even bother supporting it

00:22:52 ◼   ► in countries and languages where they also don't have

00:22:56 ◼   ► widespread store coverage for their stores.

00:22:59 ◼   ► And Amazon is historically notoriously US-centric

00:23:03 ◼   ► in their storefronts.

00:23:04 ◼   ► So that's probably the reason, the main reason why

00:23:07 ◼   ► is that the Echo couldn't do like half the things

00:23:11 ◼   ► that Amazon wants it to be doing.

00:23:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, maybe, but like you have to just think like long-term

00:23:16 ◼   ► I mean Amazon is such a long-term thinking company. I mean the CEO is making spaceships and stuff. So

00:23:22 ◼   ► Long term if you are if China if you're not selling in China

00:23:26 ◼   ► You've got a big problem because China has a lot of an India for that matter China India

00:23:30 ◼   ► Guess what? They have a lot of people and those people are in many cases

00:23:34 ◼   ► crawling up into the

00:23:37 ◼   ► The income class where they can buy your products like that those countries are they're not developing countries. They're like

00:23:45 ◼   ► Developed like you know, they're entering the middle-class type of thing. They're ready to buy expensive frivolous electronics, right?

00:23:51 ◼   ► And it's happening faster and faster

00:23:54 ◼   ► So like if you no matter how I put it this way, you know

00:23:56 ◼   ► Even if Amazon gets 100% of the market for physical goods in the United States

00:24:00 ◼   ► If you just fast forward enough years

00:24:03 ◼   ► The whoever gets 100% of the market in China and India is going to gobble them up

00:24:08 ◼   ► Because having 100% of the u.s. Is meaningless when when they get billions of people in Asia

00:24:14 ◼   ► Yep. All right, who wants to talk about Ubiquiti's 8-port Power over Ethernet switch?

00:24:20 ◼   ► Probably Margo.

00:24:21 ◼   ► Our first sponsor this week... Are we really going to talk about a switch?

00:24:25 ◼   ► I am, briefly. Go ahead, sponsor. You're fine.

00:24:30 ◼   ► Our first sponsor this week is Meh.com. This is a new sponsor. It's Meh... Am I pronouncing

00:24:35 ◼   ► that right? M-E-H? Meh.

00:24:37 ◼   ► Meh.

00:24:38 ◼   ► I've never actually said this word.

00:24:39 ◼   ► Yeah, you have to sound more apathetic.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Meh.

00:24:42 ◼   ► You got it.

00:24:43 ◼   ► That's better. That's better.

00:24:44 ◼   ► meh.com, these are the people, long ago they founded a site called woot.com and woot was

00:24:50 ◼   ► like a one thing a day, daily deal kind of site and the things were like, things that

00:24:55 ◼   ► appealed to geeks. So it was you know like cheap, crappy little hardware, like what,

00:24:59 ◼   ► and what I was saying last week and the week before like just being blown away by how cheap

00:25:03 ◼   ► hardware is these days and it especially costs nothing if you get it from a place like meh.

00:25:08 ◼   ► So what they do is one deal a day and this is how Amazon ruined it, so Amazon bought

00:25:13 ◼   ► woot, forever ago. The team behind it, the founders behind it, eventually got fed up

00:25:18 ◼   ► because Amazon was ruining it. They were, they like made it instead of being one deal

00:25:22 ◼   ► a day, it would be, oh now there's just a whole bunch of deals and it's kind of just

00:25:26 ◼   ► Amazon at that point. It kind of lost its personality and kind of lost what made it

00:25:30 ◼   ► special. So they were all unhappy with this so they just left and they went and founded

00:25:33 ◼   ► a company called Mediocre Labs, which I love, and they made this site called Meh. And I

00:25:38 ◼   ► love the attitude at this site. If you read their copy, this is like the best copywriting

00:25:42 ◼   ► for trying to just barely sell a product.

00:25:45 ◼   ► For this ad, there's no coupon code,

00:25:47 ◼   ► there's no tracking URL, I was given no script,

00:25:50 ◼   ► they just said just wing it.

00:25:51 ◼   ► If you see that they sponsor Daring Fireball a lot,

00:25:53 ◼   ► you can almost barely tell that they are sponsoring.

00:25:56 ◼   ► Like the way they want those posts to be written,

00:25:59 ◼   ► it almost seems like, wait, who's the sponsor here?

00:26:01 ◼   ► They hide the link.

00:26:03 ◼   ► They do fun, kinda quirky stuff like that

00:26:05 ◼   ► because this is obviously laid back people

00:26:08 ◼   ► who know that they are selling really cheap hardware

00:26:11 ◼   ► And it's like surprisingly cheap so today that the one in there today is it looks kind of like an Apple watch shape

00:26:17 ◼   ► But it's actually a speaker that goes on your wrist

00:26:19 ◼   ► It looks it's like who would wear this and they even say like who would wear this

00:26:24 ◼   ► And it's eight dollars, and that's today, and it changes every day changes at midnight once the things sell out. They're just gone

00:26:31 ◼   ► That's it. There's no like advance notice of like hey tomorrow

00:26:34 ◼   ► We're gonna have a Chromebook or whatever and sometimes they you know so they have all this like awesome like cheap

00:26:39 ◼   ► crappy hardware that you can't believe it's that cheap and that has anything in it that works and

00:26:43 ◼   ► They also sometimes have good stuff like they they had last week. They had a really impressive

00:26:48 ◼   ► Home theater receiver that does 3d sound which I didn't even know this was a thing until I read their site

00:26:53 ◼   ► They had Apple watch on there before the Apple watch sport on there a few weeks back or a few months back

00:26:58 ◼   ► They have some really nice stuff as well. I love their copywriting more than anything else

00:27:02 ◼   ► I love how they sell these products just barely the attitude is hilarious

00:27:07 ◼   ► It's you can like sign up to become a special member which is the very mediocre person VMP not VIP

00:27:12 ◼   ► There's all sorts of little benefits you can get here. Check it out. It's meh.com MEH.com

00:27:17 ◼   ► Meh, that's that's pretty much spot-on. Okay, good. I feel like I need more facial hair to say it correctly

00:27:24 ◼   ► No, you just need a lot of indifference. They just you need to be overflowing with indifference

00:27:31 ◼   ► It's this is a hard ad read to do because usually I'm supposed to sound enthusiastic about the sponsor

00:27:35 ◼   ► Not this time. I love I love the way these people do business. So check it out math calm. Thanks for sponsoring me

00:27:43 ◼   ► There we go. That's how I'm supposed to say it

00:27:45 ◼   ► So why don't we talk about this 8-port power over Ethernet switch I am right edge of my seat I'm so excited

00:27:53 ◼   ► Last week I was talking about me trying to find just a simple 8-port switch that has no fan is silent is reliable and

00:28:01 ◼   ► You know just sits there

00:28:02 ◼   ► I did my other requirement by the way is that

00:28:04 ◼   ► The power and the ports be on the same side just because of the way I have these very switches arranged

00:28:09 ◼   ► It's kind of annoying to have the kind that are meant to be in Iraq where the ports are on the front

00:28:12 ◼   ► But the power comes in the back

00:28:14 ◼   ► Cuz that's just not a good arrangement for things that are sitting on the edge of a table or something anyway

00:28:19 ◼   ► and Marco brought up and linked to his the

00:28:22 ◼   ► HP thing that he likes and actually I saved the bookmark for that next time I need one

00:28:26 ◼   ► I'm gonna give that one to try I still have a couple of extras at home

00:28:29 ◼   ► I'm waiting for them to die, but once they die,

00:28:32 ◼   ► I'll try that one.

00:28:33 ◼   ► - Well also, if you just need one big one,

00:28:34 ◼   ► I actually use, I forgot to mention,

00:28:36 ◼   ► I actually use a rack mount HP switch in my garage.

00:28:39 ◼   ► 'Cause when we had our big renovations done,

00:28:41 ◼   ► I had the house wired for ethernet.

00:28:44 ◼   ► So I have something like 12 or 15 ports

00:28:48 ◼   ► that all go into this big HP,

00:28:49 ◼   ► I think it's an 1810, something like that?

00:28:53 ◼   ► That's probably, yeah, something like that.

00:28:54 ◼   ► It's some kind of gigabit HP semi-managed or managed switch.

00:28:58 ◼   ► It was a couple hundred dollars,

00:28:59 ◼   ► and that's also been rock solid.

00:29:01 ◼   ► I've never rebooted that, never had a port die,

00:29:04 ◼   ► never had any problems with it whatsoever.

00:29:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, if I had it in a garage or in the basement

00:29:08 ◼   ► or someplace like that, I would just get a big rack mat one

00:29:11 ◼   ► and just put it wherever the heck I wanted it,

00:29:12 ◼   ► and who would care as long as it was reliable.

00:29:14 ◼   ► But unfortunately, due to the way I have the wires running,

00:29:16 ◼   ► I have lots of these little ones around.

00:29:17 ◼   ► I have an eight-port one on my TV.

00:29:19 ◼   ► I have an eight-port one in the computer room.

00:29:22 ◼   ► I have an eight-port one next to my NAS and stuff downstairs.

00:29:25 ◼   ► And so there's a bunch of these little ones,

00:29:27 ◼   ► many of which are in spaces where people have to be, so they have to be quiet. So the HP one,

00:29:31 ◼   ► it's fanless, if it's reliable, you know, I'll give it a try, that sounds good, but I was surprised

00:29:34 ◼   ► that Marco didn't suggest Ubiquiti, because we talked about Ubiquiti hardware last week,

00:29:38 ◼   ► and you were saying how much you loved it, they make an eight port switch too, and Ars Technica

00:29:42 ◼   ► actually reviewed it recently, and it looks weird and enterprisey and Ubiquiti and stuff like that,

00:29:48 ◼   ► but I'm like, hey, well, if it's solid and reliable, it's exactly what you're looking for,

00:29:50 ◼   ► right? This is a fanless one, their eight part one doesn't have any fans in it. It has a bunch of

00:29:54 ◼   ► fancy features that I'm not interested in like the you know all these things that can do with traffic shaping and

00:30:00 ◼   ► You know management and all sorts of other stuff

00:30:04 ◼   ► But of course it's $200. So I pretty much noped out of that once I saw the price

00:30:10 ◼   ► Completely unwilling to pay a lot of you know, most of the time it's like alright

00:30:17 ◼   ► Well, if this is a good one and it's reliable pay money for but just it's just so much more than like the 50 bucks

00:30:21 ◼   ► I'm used to paying and I

00:30:23 ◼   ► It's like well if you keep buying $50 switches

00:30:25 ◼   ► You're gonna get a crappy one and they're gonna make noise and go dead or whatever

00:30:28 ◼   ► But the thing is I had these dealing switches that were attractive and reliable for a really long time like

00:30:36 ◼   ► Six years seven years. No, it's gotta be longer. That's at least eight years

00:30:40 ◼   ► That's all my Mac is and I figured out them before that. No, I just want that again

00:30:44 ◼   ► You know, maybe I just got lucky and I found like it was I think about them for like $35 like eight years ago

00:30:49 ◼   ► I just want that again eight years for $35 is much better than you know

00:30:52 ◼   ► know, how long would a $200 thing need to last? So anyway, I think I am not in the market

00:30:57 ◼   ► for these Ubiquiti switches, but who knows? Maybe I'll get burned by enough $30 boxes

00:31:01 ◼   ► that I will regret not buying this fancy managed 8-port switch from the fancy Marco brand.

00:31:08 ◼   ► Yeah, and also, you know, a little more follow-up on Ubiquiti before we leave so we stop getting

00:31:12 ◼   ► email about it. Apparently Ubiquiti also sells IP cameras. And I did look very briefly into

00:31:20 ◼   ► those, but Amazon didn't stock a lot of them.

00:31:21 ◼   ► It looks like they're transitioning their model

00:31:22 ◼   ► line into a new model that's like out of stock

00:31:24 ◼   ► everywhere right now.

00:31:25 ◼   ► So I kind of just missed it.

00:31:27 ◼   ► So that's why I didn't look into that.

00:31:28 ◼   ► They're also a little more money.

00:31:29 ◼   ► And also a few people wrote in to say that they also now

00:31:33 ◼   ► have, I was talking last week about how there's this

00:31:35 ◼   ► annoying Java 8 wireless access point based controller

00:31:40 ◼   ► software that you need if you have certain advanced

00:31:42 ◼   ► features enabled, which I don't.

00:31:44 ◼   ► And you also need it for initial setup of any of their

00:31:47 ◼   ► wireless access points.

00:31:49 ◼   ► And it turns out that they also sell this little,

00:31:51 ◼   ► kind of like one of those Intel USB,

00:31:54 ◼   ► it looks like a USB stick,

00:31:55 ◼   ► but it's actually like a whole mini computer in there,

00:31:57 ◼   ► you know what I'm talking about?

00:31:58 ◼   ► The NUCs, is that?

00:31:59 ◼   ► Whatever those are.

00:32:00 ◼   ► They sell something that looks just like that,

00:32:02 ◼   ► and it runs their software in this little mini computer

00:32:06 ◼   ► thing, so you don't need to run it on one of your

00:32:10 ◼   ► real computers if you don't want to.

00:32:11 ◼   ► But those things are also sold out everywhere.

00:32:13 ◼   ► But when they're in stock,

00:32:14 ◼   ► they're supposed to only be like 70 or 80 bucks.

00:32:16 ◼   ► So you can pay 70 or 80 bucks to avoid installing

00:32:19 ◼   ► Java somewhere, which I would probably do.

00:32:22 ◼   ► - And what was the name of that product, do you remember?

00:32:24 ◼   ► - I have no idea.

00:32:25 ◼   ► It doesn't matter because it's out of stock everywhere,

00:32:29 ◼   ► it's Ubiquiti, it's like some kind of cloud controller

00:32:31 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:32:33 ◼   ► - Interesting, all right.

00:32:34 ◼   ► - Ubiquiti makes routers and WiFi access points

00:32:38 ◼   ► and IP cameras and switches.

00:32:40 ◼   ► - They also make long range WiFi antennas.

00:32:43 ◼   ► So if you wanna beam Wi-Fi from one building

00:32:46 ◼   ► to a whole different building that might be far away,

00:32:49 ◼   ► they make a whole bunch of stuff to do that.

00:32:51 ◼   ► That also costs suspiciously little,

00:32:53 ◼   ► but everyone says works very well.

00:32:55 ◼   ► - It's like this company is everywhere.

00:32:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I think they,

00:32:58 ◼   ► it turns out there's a pretty big business

00:33:00 ◼   ► in taking something that's controlled

00:33:02 ◼   ► by a very small number of very high-margin companies

00:33:06 ◼   ► and doing the same thing for a lot less money.

00:33:08 ◼   ► - I'm glad Casey got my joke.

00:33:10 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:33:11 ◼   ► - I'm here for you.

00:33:12 ◼   ► - Thank you.

00:33:13 ◼   ► All right, so right after we recorded the last episode,

00:33:17 ◼   ► Smile Software ended up changing,

00:33:22 ◼   ► oh, it is for Smile, okay,

00:33:23 ◼   ► changing some of the stuff about the new pricing

00:33:27 ◼   ► for TextExpander.

00:33:30 ◼   ► What it basically amounted to was,

00:33:32 ◼   ► well, most of the things are the same,

00:33:35 ◼   ► we're gonna give you a little bit of a discount

00:33:36 ◼   ► if you're already a customer,

00:33:37 ◼   ► and we'll keep the old thing around

00:33:38 ◼   ► for some undetermined amount of time.

00:33:40 ◼   ► Is that a relatively fair summary?

00:33:42 ◼   ► I think the most important thing is that they did something because that was what we were talking about last week like oh

00:33:46 ◼   ► Let's see what they did. Let's think maybe they meant this maybe they meant that blah blah blah, but it's like alright

00:33:51 ◼   ► Well, we see what their their announcement of Texas Spanish six is doing to the market now. We wait to see is

00:33:57 ◼   ► This what they wanted to do because a lot of the discussion last show was like well

00:34:01 ◼   ► This is what they did and it doesn't seem crazy to expect

00:34:04 ◼   ► To have these results come out of it surely they must have thought of this

00:34:08 ◼   ► but on the other hand, maybe they've made a huge mistake and we'll find out if

00:34:12 ◼   ► they

00:34:14 ◼   ► Do anything about it like oh no, we hear your feedback. We're gonna and this is what I did

00:34:18 ◼   ► It was faster than I ever thought they would so it's so clear that whatever it is. They thought they were doing

00:34:22 ◼   ► They did not expect the reaction they got because there was was like two days after the answer one day

00:34:28 ◼   ► It was very quickly afterwards. They have this post it says no. No. No. All right

00:34:32 ◼   ► We heard your feedback blah blah blah and then we come to the announcement. Did they hear people's feedback?

00:34:37 ◼   ► is what they've done actually addressing people's concerns?

00:34:42 ◼   ► And I'll let Marco say,

00:34:44 ◼   ► because I know he has a pretty strong opinion

00:34:45 ◼   ► that they're not addressing the concerns really.

00:34:48 ◼   ► - Well, it's, you know, I mean, honestly,

00:34:50 ◼   ► I don't care that strongly about this topic in general,

00:34:53 ◼   ► because as I said, I'm not really a TechSpinner user.

00:34:56 ◼   ► And also, I am a developer who sells something

00:34:58 ◼   ► that's subscription priced,

00:34:59 ◼   ► and so I do sympathize with their economic needs here.

00:35:03 ◼   ► However, you know, what they announced is basically that,

00:35:06 ◼   ► They moved this product that was a traditionally sold,

00:35:10 ◼   ► like you pay 40 or something dollars for this product.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Every time you do a major upgrade,

00:35:15 ◼   ► you might get an upgrade, discount or whatever,

00:35:17 ◼   ► but for the most part, it's like you pay

00:35:18 ◼   ► a decent amount up front,

00:35:20 ◼   ► and then you can use it as long as you want,

00:35:21 ◼   ► and then when we make new ones every couple of years

00:35:23 ◼   ► or every year, you can choose to upgrade or not.

00:35:26 ◼   ► And they moved it from that model to,

00:35:29 ◼   ► it's now a web service with a required $5 a month

00:35:32 ◼   ► subscription with these client apps that are now free.

00:35:35 ◼   ► And so the people who used it were very angry

00:35:39 ◼   ► for basically two main reasons.

00:35:42 ◼   ► Number one, as we discussed last episode,

00:35:43 ◼   ► a lot of people just don't like subscription pricing,

00:35:45 ◼   ► especially for things that they don't expect it on

00:35:48 ◼   ► or that they don't see the value in.

00:35:50 ◼   ► Whether or not it's there,

00:35:51 ◼   ► it's what people expect for pricing models.

00:35:54 ◼   ► Whether I don't wanna pay per month for a USB hub,

00:35:59 ◼   ► it's just a USB hub, it does its job, right?

00:36:01 ◼   ► Why shouldn't you pay per month for that?

00:36:03 ◼   ► Some people view software that way,

00:36:05 ◼   ► even though it kind of isn't in practice.

00:36:06 ◼   ► But anyway, so there was that complaint.

00:36:09 ◼   ► And if you have that complaint, the new announcement,

00:36:13 ◼   ► which is basically, we're dropping the price

00:36:15 ◼   ► on the subscription for people who had the old version,

00:36:18 ◼   ► and we're gonna keep the old version updated

00:36:20 ◼   ► for an unspecified amount of time.

00:36:23 ◼   ► And so if you had the objection that this thing

00:36:27 ◼   ► should not be subscription priced, period,

00:36:30 ◼   ► this will not affect you at all,

00:36:31 ◼   ► you will still be upset about this.

00:36:34 ◼   ► If you had the opinion that, "Well, I'm upset about this not because it's subscription

00:36:39 ◼   ► priced but because I will end up paying a lot more than I did before," then this will

00:36:44 ◼   ► probably make you happy because now it has removed, I think, most or all of that complaint.

00:36:49 ◼   ► I haven't done all the numbers but it's something like, you know, I think you'll

00:36:52 ◼   ► end up paying roughly the same that you were paying before if you upgraded every few years.

00:36:56 ◼   ► So it will address some of the complaints and the ones that were primarily about just

00:37:00 ◼   ► like total price over time.

00:37:03 ◼   ► But it will not address the people who are really upset

00:37:05 ◼   ► that they are moving to this model.

00:37:08 ◼   ► And also, they also have this other problem

00:37:11 ◼   ► where they removed their sync features.

00:37:15 ◼   ► 'Cause one of the ways they're justifying

00:37:17 ◼   ► the new subscription service is you can now sync

00:37:20 ◼   ► through their web service.

00:37:21 ◼   ► In fact, you have to sync through their web service.

00:37:23 ◼   ► Before, TextExpander, which works by having full

00:37:27 ◼   ► keyboard access, so it can read every keystroke,

00:37:30 ◼   ► it has to read every keystroke you're typing.

00:37:32 ◼   ► So it is functionally a key logger.

00:37:35 ◼   ► And before it didn't need internet access.

00:37:38 ◼   ► Because before it supported sync

00:37:40 ◼   ► through lots of different means.

00:37:41 ◼   ► Basically like it would store its data in a file somewhere

00:37:45 ◼   ► and you could sync that file through many different means.

00:37:47 ◼   ► I think Dropbox was probably the most common one

00:37:49 ◼   ► people used from people who I know who used it.

00:37:52 ◼   ► So before this key logger effectively

00:37:56 ◼   ► didn't need network access.

00:37:58 ◼   ► Now it does.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And so there's also the concerns about

00:38:01 ◼   ► the security around this.

00:38:03 ◼   ► It's kind of tricky to combine something

00:38:06 ◼   ► that has full key logging access

00:38:07 ◼   ► with something that has a network connection

00:38:09 ◼   ► to third party servers that you don't control.

00:38:11 ◼   ► And then there's a question around

00:38:13 ◼   ► whether they are encrypting the snippets

00:38:15 ◼   ► that you are storing there.

00:38:16 ◼   ► And of course the answer, I'm pretty sure the answer

00:38:18 ◼   ► is that they're not, but they're just relying

00:38:20 ◼   ► on the other security measures around

00:38:21 ◼   ► just your login and stuff to protect them.

00:38:23 ◼   ► So there's a whole bunch of concerns here that people had.

00:38:26 ◼   ► A whole bunch of objections that people had

00:38:28 ◼   ► this new model, and they have addressed one of them, which is the total price over time.

00:38:33 ◼   ► But that's all they've addressed so far.

00:38:35 ◼   ► What about TextExpander 5?

00:38:38 ◼   ► Their change on that, they said, "We will continue this from their press release.

00:38:41 ◼   ► We will continue to sell and support TextExpander 5 for OS X and TextExpander 3 plus custom

00:38:45 ◼   ► keyboard for iOS for those who need it."

00:38:48 ◼   ► And they don't give any time scales.

00:38:50 ◼   ► We will continue to sell and support, continue for how long?

00:38:52 ◼   ► Forever?

00:38:53 ◼   ► A year?

00:38:54 ◼   ► A month?

00:38:55 ◼   ► A week?

00:38:56 ◼   ► Five days?

00:38:57 ◼   ► for the next version of OS X, will it be updated?

00:39:02 ◼   ► So many questions that, again, I have to think, they know these questions, like they've been

00:39:06 ◼   ► getting tons and tons of feedback.

00:39:08 ◼   ► Huge number of those questions must have said, how long will Texas Defender 5 be supported?

00:39:12 ◼   ► Will you update it?

00:39:13 ◼   ► How long will, you know, how long will your old versions that didn't do the subscription

00:39:16 ◼   ► pricing, how long will they be supported?

00:39:18 ◼   ► Will you continue to update them?

00:39:20 ◼   ► And they just didn't answer it at all.

00:39:21 ◼   ► And you have to think it's because they think people won't like the answer, not because,

00:39:25 ◼   ► "Oh, it didn't occur to us to address that question because they must have got that question

00:39:28 ◼   ► thousands of times already."

00:39:29 ◼   ► Yeah, because the answer is, you know, if you think about it, just think about it from

00:39:33 ◼   ► their point of view. They're not trying to be like greedy or evil or anything. They can't

00:39:37 ◼   ► support an old version of this app forever. There's going to be, on an infinite time scale,

00:39:42 ◼   ► there's going to be an end to the support for this version of this app. So, and, you

00:39:47 ◼   ► know, when are they going to do that? They, what they've said in this post, it really

00:39:52 ◼   ► just I think honestly makes the problem a little bit worse because it implies that this

00:39:57 ◼   ► will be supported indefinitely. But in practice, there's going to be an end and I don't think

00:40:03 ◼   ► we or they know when that end will be yet, but I think they're creating an unmaintainable

00:40:08 ◼   ► expectation here.

00:40:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, like to the naive person reading this, someone's going to read, "We will continue

00:40:15 ◼   ► to sell and support Tech Expander 5," and be like, "Oh, I'm so satisfied. This price

00:40:18 ◼   ► press release made me feel so much better. Thank you, smile. We love you." But what they

00:40:22 ◼   ► have in their head is, "And I'll continue to use Texas Commander 5 forever." And eventually,

00:40:27 ◼   ► like you said, "Texas Commander 5 will not work." And they're going to be so angry then,

00:40:32 ◼   ► because they're going to be like, "But you put out this press release that said you will

00:40:34 ◼   ► continue to sell and support Texas Commander 5." And then that's going to be like, "Well,

00:40:37 ◼   ► we continue to support Texas Commander 5, but unfortunately, Texas Commander 5 is a

00:40:40 ◼   ► product that is only compatible with versions X, Y, and Z, and blah, blah, blah." And they'll

00:40:43 ◼   ► be like, "But you said..." People aren't reading lawyers. They're not reading for the nuance.

00:40:48 ◼   ► And they don't know, like why should you expect a customer to understand what is involved

00:40:53 ◼   ► in maintaining an application across multiple releases of various OSs?

00:40:57 ◼   ► Like there is some, especially for like a system wide utility like Texas Band or whether

00:41:00 ◼   ► it's an iOS or an OS 10, there's always going to be stuff you have to do to maintain it.

00:41:04 ◼   ► It's not as simple as just a standalone application that you just run it and then it quits.

00:41:07 ◼   ► And even that needs to be maintained.

00:41:08 ◼   ► So I don't know if they're setting themselves up for failure, but like if I think about

00:41:12 ◼   ► how much do I think they're going to support Texas Band or five?

00:41:15 ◼   ► They don't want to support two different versions of their product like who would want like the whole point of that

00:41:20 ◼   ► They want to have sustainable development as a whole bunch of description pricing. You can't say okay now

00:41:24 ◼   ► We're gonna have two teams one that's just maintaining the old versions and ones maintaining the new version. Nobody wants to do that

00:41:29 ◼   ► so my gut reaction is someone who's seen a lot of software is the Texas manner 5 and

00:41:34 ◼   ► Texas manner 3 for iOS

00:41:37 ◼   ► They'll probably work with this version of OS 10 and the next version of iOS and the next version probably but when they break

00:41:43 ◼   ► I don't think Smile will invest too much in fixing them,

00:41:45 ◼   ► but they'll be like, look, you had your time,

00:41:48 ◼   ► now it's time to move on to the other one,

00:41:50 ◼   ► to whatever, six or seven or whatever they're up to now.

00:41:53 ◼   ► - Right, and in Smile's defense,

00:41:55 ◼   ► this is why I don't wanna gang up on them

00:41:58 ◼   ► or attribute malice to them,

00:42:02 ◼   ► but there are these problems

00:42:04 ◼   ► with every way you choose to take money.

00:42:06 ◼   ► If they continue doing the old way of here's a paid app,

00:42:10 ◼   ► you buy it once, and then in a couple years

00:42:12 ◼   ► you might buy an upgrade.

00:42:13 ◼   ► That method also has to cut off support

00:42:16 ◼   ► for old versions eventually, and when that happens,

00:42:18 ◼   ► that also angers people.

00:42:20 ◼   ► And so, no matter what you do,

00:42:23 ◼   ► no matter where you choose to take money,

00:42:24 ◼   ► it will anger somebody, and a lot of somebodies,

00:42:27 ◼   ► if you have a good customer base,

00:42:29 ◼   ► you know, if you have a good-sized customer base,

00:42:30 ◼   ► it's gonna anger a lot of people regardless of what you do.

00:42:33 ◼   ► If you don't charge for anything, that'll anger people

00:42:35 ◼   ► who are afraid that you're gonna sell their data.

00:42:37 ◼   ► If you put ads in, that'll anger people who don't like ads,

00:42:40 ◼   ► or don't like what they're doing.

00:42:42 ◼   ► No matter what you do, you're gonna anger people.

00:42:44 ◼   ► I don't envy the position that smiles in here

00:42:47 ◼   ► because what they're clearly saying,

00:42:49 ◼   ► if not directly then implying,

00:42:51 ◼   ► what they're clearly saying is,

00:42:53 ◼   ► we need to get more money from TextExpander.

00:42:56 ◼   ► Like whatever, this isn't working for us,

00:42:57 ◼   ► we need more revenue from it somehow.

00:43:00 ◼   ► And the way we're gonna do that

00:43:02 ◼   ► is gonna have this short-term pain for somebody.

00:43:04 ◼   ► And it seems like they're trying

00:43:07 ◼   ► to address people's concerns, but ultimately they're not able to, they can't, because

00:43:13 ◼   ► they have to make money somewhere. So like, there's always going to be people who are

00:43:17 ◼   ► mad about this, and they're going to have to choose to make some of them mad. I think

00:43:21 ◼   ► the only two good options here are either that they continue doing the subscription

00:43:27 ◼   ► model, which honestly I don't think is a good idea. It seems deeply flawed for the

00:43:33 ◼   ► kind of product it is and the kind of audience that it had, as far as I know. But again,

00:43:37 ◼   ► I'm not them, I don't know who the customers are,

00:43:39 ◼   ► so I could be wrong.

00:43:40 ◼   ► So that's one option, is to just go whole hog

00:43:42 ◼   ► in the subscriptions the way they were before,

00:43:45 ◼   ► and just be honest, like look, support for five

00:43:47 ◼   ► will end after next OS 10 version or something like that.

00:43:51 ◼   ► Set a date or set a version where it'll just say,

00:43:53 ◼   ► all right, it'll stop after this,

00:43:54 ◼   ► and then you're on your own,

00:43:55 ◼   ► and you gotta move to our service now or not.

00:43:58 ◼   ► Or completely bring back the old model of licensing.

00:44:01 ◼   ► Whether they continue doing the subscription model also

00:44:04 ◼   ► or not, I don't know,

00:44:06 ◼   ► But the alternative here is you bring back the old model

00:44:10 ◼   ► where okay, now, you know, TextExpander 6

00:44:12 ◼   ► is a regular software release that you can buy

00:44:14 ◼   ► for 40 bucks or whatever, and you can own it

00:44:18 ◼   ► with no monthly fees after that for, you know,

00:44:20 ◼   ► until you decide to stop using it or until it breaks

00:44:21 ◼   ► with some distant future OS X version.

00:44:24 ◼   ► I don't see another option here.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Like, what they're doing now is trying to bridge

00:44:29 ◼   ► the benefits of both.

00:44:30 ◼   ► They're trying to please people who want both

00:44:34 ◼   ► without giving up their subscription idea.

00:44:37 ◼   ► Because this is obviously,

00:44:38 ◼   ► they've obviously invested a lot into setting this up,

00:44:41 ◼   ► migrating their product over to this kind of system.

00:44:44 ◼   ► Somebody's using it,

00:44:45 ◼   ► so if they kill the subscription service now,

00:44:48 ◼   ► they're gonna anger the people who are using it

00:44:49 ◼   ► and who do like it.

00:44:51 ◼   ► So this is not an end-to-end position to be in.

00:44:54 ◼   ► And I don't wanna make light of this

00:44:56 ◼   ► because, as I said, this is all hard stuff.

00:45:00 ◼   ► And in the current software landscape,

00:45:04 ◼   ► It is incredibly difficult to make a healthy profit

00:45:08 ◼   ► selling software today.

00:45:11 ◼   ► It's just hard.

00:45:11 ◼   ► And they have a staff they have to support.

00:45:14 ◼   ► And you can argue, oh well, maybe software should be free,

00:45:18 ◼   ► or maybe there's a lot of competition,

00:45:20 ◼   ► or maybe they should lower their costs or whatever,

00:45:23 ◼   ► but none of those things are easy things to address

00:45:24 ◼   ► or easy things to actually follow through on

00:45:27 ◼   ► and often have uncomfortable side effects.

00:45:29 ◼   ► So this is not, the solution might just be,

00:45:33 ◼   ► It's kind of like when the minimum wage goes up,

00:45:36 ◼   ► yeah, I'm sorry if we're going political here.

00:45:38 ◼   ► - Oh God, here we go.

00:45:39 ◼   ► - When the minimum wage goes up,

00:45:40 ◼   ► one of the problems that economists cite when that happens

00:45:44 ◼   ► is it basically prices out a whole bunch of jobs

00:45:47 ◼   ► from being doable because like, well now,

00:45:50 ◼   ► if the minimum I have to pay a legal full-time employee

00:45:54 ◼   ► is, or legal employee is X,

00:45:56 ◼   ► then any job that costs less than X,

00:45:59 ◼   ► I just can't pay somebody to do that really.

00:46:02 ◼   ► or any job that's only worth something below X.

00:46:06 ◼   ► That kind of problem happens now with software,

00:46:09 ◼   ► which is like a lot of software that could be created

00:46:12 ◼   ► and that could have value to people

00:46:14 ◼   ► just is not going to do well enough in the market

00:46:16 ◼   ► or people won't pay enough for it for it to be sustained.

00:46:20 ◼   ► So a lot of that software just won't get created

00:46:23 ◼   ► or it will get created and then get abandoned.

00:46:25 ◼   ► So there's all sorts of economic,

00:46:27 ◼   ► uncomfortable truths about this.

00:46:30 ◼   ► However you think about software pricing,

00:46:33 ◼   ► however you think things should be priced,

00:46:34 ◼   ► or whatever you're willing to pay for them,

00:46:37 ◼   ► it's a very tricky area, and I don't envy SMILE at all

00:46:40 ◼   ► for the position they're in right now.

00:46:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I certainly don't either.

00:46:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, I kind of think of Adobe,

00:46:47 ◼   ► when they went through a similar transition of,

00:46:49 ◼   ► I think Adobe was making plenty of money,

00:46:51 ◼   ► but they said, "You know what?

00:46:52 ◼   ► "We think it would be better for us financially

00:46:55 ◼   ► "if you could pay for our applications

00:46:58 ◼   ► "on a subscription basis, rather than us

00:46:59 ◼   ► selling you a box with software in it or selling you a download or whatever and for the most

00:47:03 ◼   ► part they made a transition to that and Microsoft is going through the same thing now trying

00:47:06 ◼   ► to sell Office 365 subscriptions and everything like that.

00:47:11 ◼   ► Smile obviously is much smaller than Adobe or Microsoft, looked like it was trying to

00:47:14 ◼   ► make a similar transition and it's almost it's almost like I feel like ripping off the

00:47:19 ◼   ► band-aid and just plowing bravely forward.

00:47:22 ◼   ► Certainly from the outside that would be a cleaner situation but from the inside it may

00:47:26 ◼   ► be like no that wasn't even an option like we would have died the product would not be

00:47:29 ◼   ► viable we tried it it's not working too many people are angry we're not selling enough

00:47:33 ◼   ► subscriptions we have to immediately do an about face and so i guess you know better

00:47:36 ◼   ► now than six months from now or whatever but anyway this is surely not the way they hoped

00:47:42 ◼   ► this transition would go um and i think their attempt to to uh fix it with the discount

00:47:49 ◼   ► and the vague promise of support for the old versions.

00:47:54 ◼   ► I don't know if it makes it worse, but boy,

00:47:58 ◼   ► like I don't know if it gives them

00:48:01 ◼   ► a higher chance of success either.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Like I just feel like they're signing them.

00:48:05 ◼   ► All they've done is deferred the anger to a later period.

00:48:09 ◼   ► The discount I think is probably fine

00:48:12 ◼   ► because I think a discount is actually like

00:48:14 ◼   ► maybe the mistake they just made

00:48:15 ◼   ► was making the subscription price too high.

00:48:17 ◼   ► That could have been something they decided to,

00:48:18 ◼   ► are, we're getting less angry feedback, we're not selling enough subscriptions, again I'm

00:48:21 ◼   ► speculating here, maybe the price is just too high.

00:48:25 ◼   ► Like if you told people they could use TechExpander, you get it for free and you have to pay a

00:48:28 ◼   ► penny a month, everyone's fine with that.

00:48:30 ◼   ► Suddenly it's not some sort of philosophical objection to subscription pricing, I don't

00:48:34 ◼   ► want to pay a penny a month, it's too much.

00:48:35 ◼   ► No, everybody's fine with that, it's below their level of concern, right?

00:48:39 ◼   ► But $5 a month or whatever it is was above people's, you know, so the 50% discount for

00:48:43 ◼   ► life. If that brings it down below people's threshold, then we'll see, like

00:48:48 ◼   ► Margo said, do they really object philosophically to subscriptions period

00:48:52 ◼   ► or is it merely that the price is too high? The promise for text expander is

00:48:56 ◼   ► like, and also we're not even really sure the subscription thing is a good idea so

00:49:01 ◼   ► you can have this thing for some undefined period of time but probably it

00:49:04 ◼   ► will go away but you probably don't know that and it just makes me depressed but

00:49:08 ◼   ► you know anyway we'll see how it works out for them like Margo said is

00:49:11 ◼   ► difficult but the final part is you can't somehow can't get your way out of

00:49:15 ◼   ► a press release without something terrible appearing and I feel like it's

00:49:20 ◼   ► I'm not a PR person I don't know how to do a PR person's job I'm not gonna say

00:49:25 ◼   ► that I could have written this better but as someone who reads a lot of press

00:49:31 ◼   ► releases reading this does not make me feel better about the company and I

00:49:34 ◼   ► imagine that's what press releases are supposed to do the last part of it was

00:49:37 ◼   ► this is supposed to be like you know person to person like have empathy for

00:49:40 ◼   ► so on and so forth. This was a big change. There were a number of things we could have done better.

00:49:44 ◼   ► All right, this sounds like the start of a paragraph where they're saying basically like

00:49:47 ◼   ► acknowledging, okay, our bad, you know, you are angry at us and we have to at this point

00:49:52 ◼   ► acknowledge that you are angry at us with reasons. There are things that didn't turn out the way we

00:49:56 ◼   ► wanted them to, you know, we're sorry, you're mad, we acknowledge your anger like that, right? Seems

00:50:02 ◼   ► like it's going fine so far. We genuinely want to bring you the best Texas Banner experience we can.

00:50:06 ◼   ► Unfortunately, not all of accents had the intended effects. Still good so far. For example,

00:50:10 ◼   ► comma, we staggered our customer emails over three days to ensure smooth server capacity

00:50:15 ◼   ► so that everyone would have a good initial experience with the service.

00:50:17 ◼   ► The server held up, but many customers learned of the new text expander from news sites,

00:50:22 ◼   ► or Twitter, rather than from Smile."

00:50:24 ◼   ► That is not an example of the bad things that people are yelling at you about.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Like because they found out the news from a site other than you, as if somehow if they

00:50:32 ◼   ► found it from you, they would have choked it down and it would have been more palatable.

00:50:36 ◼   ► They're angry about what happened.

00:50:38 ◼   ► out what happened from news sites rather than from you. That's a component of that maybe.

00:50:42 ◼   ► Like why do I got to hear this on Twitter instead of from you directly, smile? But

00:50:45 ◼   ► substantively, if you're going to pick the thing that people are angry about, that's not it. This

00:50:49 ◼   ► whole press release was addressing their issues, none of which were, "I found out about this from

00:50:53 ◼   ► Twitter," instead of, "Smile." Don't end your press release like that. It's like,

00:50:56 ◼   ► you know, what is your greatest weakness? Oh, I'm a little bit, I'm such a hard worker sometimes.

00:51:01 ◼   ► They were so close, they were right there. For example, and the example they gave is

00:51:08 ◼   ► is not what people are angry with. It's not even in like the top three that people are

00:51:11 ◼   ► angry about. So close.

00:51:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a feeling the story is not over.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Yeah, we've heard you and actually it's going to be 25% of the original price for life and

00:51:24 ◼   ► Texas Banner 5 will be supported indefinitely and we're canceling Texas Banner 6, but wait!

00:51:28 ◼   ► We heard you Texas Banner 6 users, you want to keep... alright. I give them one. They're

00:51:34 ◼   ► They're allowed to, you try something, doesn't work,

00:51:37 ◼   ► you react fast, good.

00:51:39 ◼   ► If they come back again with another press release,

00:51:41 ◼   ► then we're just gonna have to have dedicated

00:51:42 ◼   ► Texas Matter podcast, I guess.

00:51:44 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:51:47 ◼   ► - All right, well, we have one more quick piece of follow-up

00:51:49 ◼   ► and then we can move on to some other stuff.

00:51:51 ◼   ► - These weren't the topics.

00:51:53 ◼   ► - They were, we're in that gray area.

00:51:56 ◼   ► - It's not gray area, Texas Matter is follow-up.

00:51:58 ◼   ► - So is Apple.

00:51:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, fair enough.

00:52:00 ◼   ► Jon, you finally got your wish,

00:52:01 ◼   ► you got your bleeps and bloops,

00:52:03 ◼   ► and how's that going?

00:52:05 ◼   ► - Not my wish.

00:52:06 ◼   ► I wanted a bleeps and bloops theme song

00:52:08 ◼   ► that we had in one episode way back when.

00:52:10 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:52:13 ◼   ► But Marco took it upon itself to add bleeps and bloops

00:52:19 ◼   ► before and after the ads.

00:52:21 ◼   ► I think because he listens to too much Hello Internet

00:52:24 ◼   ► or some other reason, but anyway,

00:52:25 ◼   ► we've gotten a lot of feedback about that

00:52:27 ◼   ► and I thought Marco should explain what he's doing and why.

00:52:30 ◼   ► - We've gotten like three people who don't like it.

00:52:32 ◼   ► - It's more than that, but man, the people who don't like it.

00:52:35 ◼   ► - I mean, I can say the sky is blue,

00:52:37 ◼   ► and more people will tell me I'm an idiot and wrong

00:52:39 ◼   ► than what we've heard about this.

00:52:41 ◼   ► - Well, that's also true.

00:52:42 ◼   ► - Well, people don't like change, so that's obvious, right?

00:52:44 ◼   ► But what I'm more interested in is why did you add them?

00:52:46 ◼   ► Not why do people not like them, but why did you add them?

00:52:48 ◼   ► - Sure, so first of all, you can quibble over

00:52:51 ◼   ► the choice of sounds.

00:52:52 ◼   ► I chose old Mac sounds.

00:52:53 ◼   ► I wanted to do the Windows XP USB device

00:52:57 ◼   ► plugged in and unplugged sounds,

00:52:59 ◼   ► but I knew John would not allow that.

00:53:02 ◼   ► That's correct, John?

00:53:04 ◼   ► - I don't even know that sound, but no,

00:53:05 ◼   ► that would be terrible.

00:53:06 ◼   ► - It's like, "Boo-doom, boo-doom."

00:53:07 ◼   ► - No, no, no one knows this.

00:53:10 ◼   ► - Anyway, so that's what I wanted to do,

00:53:12 ◼   ► and I knew John would object,

00:53:14 ◼   ► so I chose old Mac sounds instead that kind of just,

00:53:18 ◼   ► the actual origins of them are kind of funny.

00:53:20 ◼   ► One of them's a crash, and one of them's a reboot

00:53:22 ◼   ► of some old Macs.

00:53:23 ◼   ► I didn't pick based on what computers they belong to.

00:53:26 ◼   ► Specifically in the old Apple lineup,

00:53:28 ◼   ► I just picked based on which ones

00:53:29 ◼   ► I thought sounded right for this purpose.

00:53:31 ◼   ► I was thinking about using something like this for a while

00:53:33 ◼   ► because it allows me a lot more flexibility in editing

00:53:37 ◼   ► of when I start the ad and when I end the ad.

00:53:39 ◼   ► It also saves time in the episode

00:53:42 ◼   ► because it removes all the transition lead-in

00:53:46 ◼   ► from like Casey saying, all right, before we cover this,

00:53:49 ◼   ► Marco, why don't you tell me something that's awesome?

00:53:51 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:53:52 ◼   ► It removes the need for a lot of that.

00:53:54 ◼   ► So it does save time, I think,

00:53:56 ◼   ► and it also just gives me the flexibility

00:53:59 ◼   ► to place the ads wherever I want,

00:54:01 ◼   ► Like wherever there's a natural break in conversation,

00:54:04 ◼   ► even if we didn't say at that point in the show,

00:54:06 ◼   ► all right, let's do a sponsor break now.

00:54:08 ◼   ► So it allows flexibility in editing basically

00:54:10 ◼   ► and it makes everything shorter.

00:54:11 ◼   ► It also helps differentiate when the ad has begun

00:54:13 ◼   ► and when the ad has ended.

00:54:15 ◼   ► - It forces you to figure that out too,

00:54:17 ◼   ► which is not always easy. - Yes.

00:54:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it forces it to be like a firmly defined boundary,

00:54:21 ◼   ► which I think is better editorially,

00:54:22 ◼   ► even though I think we were pretty good about that already,

00:54:24 ◼   ► but this does help just a little bit.

00:54:26 ◼   ► Like last week, you talked, John, about Blue Apron

00:54:29 ◼   ► after I had finished doing my script.

00:54:31 ◼   ► And so if I wanted to integrate that into the ad read,

00:54:35 ◼   ► I had to move it in, and I did.

00:54:37 ◼   ► And so I actually rearranged the ending of the ad

00:54:39 ◼   ► to move that into the ad read like explicitly,

00:54:42 ◼   ► and then once the sound played, the ad was over.

00:54:45 ◼   ► So I think that helped also.

00:54:47 ◼   ► And so that's why I did it,

00:54:48 ◼   ► and the reason I started two weeks ago

00:54:51 ◼   ► is because all three live reads I did that recording,

00:54:56 ◼   ► I hated them all.

00:54:57 ◼   ► And so I recorded them all the next morning

00:54:59 ◼   ► and when I do a recording after the fact,

00:55:02 ◼   ► which I occasionally do if I mess up a read too badly

00:55:04 ◼   ► or if I just don't like the way it turned out,

00:55:05 ◼   ► I will of course always sound slightly different

00:55:08 ◼   ► from the way I sounded the night before.

00:55:10 ◼   ► Just because people's voices change throughout the day

00:55:12 ◼   ► and throughout each day you might have different voices

00:55:14 ◼   ► than yesterday by just how tired you are,

00:55:17 ◼   ► whether you're sick, whether there's allergies, whatever.

00:55:19 ◼   ► So I didn't like all three of the ads I did two weeks ago.

00:55:21 ◼   ► I replaced them all the morning after

00:55:23 ◼   ► and decided this would be a good time to use these sounds

00:55:25 ◼   ► because it would help people not notice

00:55:27 ◼   ► that I sounded different in the ads.

00:55:29 ◼   ► And these did, as far as I know, these did originate,

00:55:32 ◼   ► like the idea of ad bumper sounds,

00:55:35 ◼   ► I first heard it on Hello Internet.

00:55:37 ◼   ► I don't know if they invented it,

00:55:38 ◼   ► but that is certainly where I first heard it.

00:55:40 ◼   ► - They did not invent it just like underscore

00:55:42 ◼   ► didn't invent exploding the eyes or as yes.

00:55:44 ◼   ► - Didn't I heard it first on Core Induition, I thought.

00:55:47 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:55:50 ◼   ► - I think it's probably from the radio,

00:55:52 ◼   ► the invention of radio.

00:55:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean-- - How about that?

00:55:54 ◼   ► - Well-- - Within podcasts.

00:55:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, radio, yeah, everyone does it

00:55:58 ◼   ► a little bit differently, but the idea of just like,

00:56:00 ◼   ► kind of like a quick opening and closing sound effect,

00:56:03 ◼   ► I first heard that on Hello Internet,

00:56:05 ◼   ► so they get full credit because they are awesome

00:56:06 ◼   ► and they are still my favorite podcast.

00:56:08 ◼   ► I don't know, I'm just gonna assume

00:56:09 ◼   ► they stole something from us at some point

00:56:10 ◼   ► and we'll call it even, and yeah, that's about it.

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00:58:37 ◼   ► - Unlike SMILE, we need to actually wrap up addressing

00:58:41 ◼   ► the various complaints of the bleeps and bloops.

00:58:42 ◼   ► So collecting the bleeps and bloops complaints,

00:58:46 ◼   ► one category of complaint is I don't like change.

00:58:49 ◼   ► That's like the meta category, which you know,

00:58:52 ◼   ► you can't dismiss out of hand because who wants their thing

00:58:55 ◼   ► to, you know, you kind of get used to a certain structure.

00:58:57 ◼   ► You don't like change, right?

00:58:58 ◼   ► - All right, well listen to episode one

00:59:00 ◼   ► and tell me you don't like change.

00:59:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, so we'll put that aside for now.

00:59:03 ◼   ► But it is a thing people said.

00:59:06 ◼   ► The other one, surprising number of people

00:59:09 ◼   ► listen to the podcast.

00:59:11 ◼   ► I don't know how we should take this,

00:59:13 ◼   ► while drifting off to sleep or to help them,

00:59:14 ◼   ► or this help them get to sleep.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Like, I mean, great.

00:59:17 ◼   ► If I'm happy to make a product that you enjoy for whatever purpose you want to use

00:59:22 ◼   ► it for.

00:59:23 ◼   ► If that's how you want to use it, that's fine.

00:59:24 ◼   ► But apparently the bleeps and bloops are harshing their mellow and jangling them out

00:59:28 ◼   ► of the slumber that they were drifting into.

00:59:30 ◼   ► So perhaps toning down the volume or picking different sounds could help out there with

00:59:34 ◼   ► those people.

00:59:35 ◼   ► But again, a surprising number of people said that.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Yeah, that seems to be – I think that's the only complaint I would consider valid

00:59:42 ◼   ► that we've received so far.

00:59:43 ◼   ► And again, like you, I'm not sure how I feel about people complaining that they're

00:59:46 ◼   ► having a hard time falling asleep through our podcast. But that is a semi-valid complaint.

00:59:54 ◼   ► If that's how they're using the podcast, then we're helping make their life better

00:59:57 ◼   ► by helping them drift off to sleep. More power to them, so maybe the volume down.

01:00:01 ◼   ► Can you imagine people who hear us as the last thing they hear before they go to sleep?

01:00:05 ◼   ► Is that mentally healthy?

01:00:07 ◼   ► That's fine. We'll give them awesome dreams about USB hubs. USB hubs and new Mac Pros.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Oh god, those are nightmares my friend, not dreams.

01:00:16 ◼   ► Yeah, my complaint is I don't like the sounds.

01:00:19 ◼   ► Like I know you went through all the lists of sounds, but because you have no sort of

01:00:22 ◼   ► background of what those sounds are, where they came from, it is weird to hear the sounds

01:00:26 ◼   ► that you picked in there.

01:00:29 ◼   ► So I feel like better sounds could be found.

01:00:31 ◼   ► I like that they're max sounds, but I don't like that one of them is a crash sound, and

01:00:34 ◼   ► of all the star beeps you pick, you pick that one.

01:00:37 ◼   ► Not my favorites.

01:00:39 ◼   ► So I think there's an area where we could potentially improve to try to make, because

01:00:43 ◼   ► all the reasons you cited for the sounds sound good to me, like I think they're all good,

01:00:47 ◼   ► and we just need to tamp down the negatives, I feel like.

01:00:52 ◼   ► - Sure, so if the issue is just like the volume of the sounds, I thought I had a good balance,

01:00:56 ◼   ► I did reduce the volume on them from their stock configuration, like from the raw sound,

01:01:01 ◼   ► just because it didn't match the levels really well otherwise, but if I have to reduce them

01:01:05 ◼   ► further, that's fine.

01:01:06 ◼   ► As for the choice of sounds, it's tricky, when you're choosing sound effects for a

01:01:09 ◼   ► I know this is really inside baseball,

01:01:10 ◼   ► I'm sorry for everybody who doesn't care.

01:01:11 ◼   ► You can just skip over this chapter.

01:01:13 ◼   ► When you're choosing sound effects to go in a pod,

01:01:15 ◼   ► 'cause I learned this in the early days of neutral,

01:01:17 ◼   ► 'cause I would use to delineate the ads in neutral,

01:01:20 ◼   ► I would use, oh wait a minute,

01:01:21 ◼   ► that was before Hello Internet.

01:01:23 ◼   ► - Say they stole everything from us.

01:01:25 ◼   ► - All right, so we used the BMW chime

01:01:30 ◼   ► from the E whatever series, whatever that--

01:01:33 ◼   ► - E90. - Yeah,

01:01:34 ◼   ► whatever the pleasant little chime is

01:01:36 ◼   ► when you leave your door open or start the car or whatever.

01:01:38 ◼   ► I recorded one of those from my three series and we used that as our ad bumpers.

01:01:43 ◼   ► And we got complaints from people.

01:01:44 ◼   ► This is also why when I bleep a swear word, I don't use the horn honking sound.

01:01:53 ◼   ► There was a couple early episodes of Neutral Wire where I would use all sorts of car sounds

01:01:56 ◼   ► and I settled on just using a handbrake or a trunk slamming sound because when you're

01:02:00 ◼   ► in a car and you hear that sound effect, it kind of throws you off.

01:02:04 ◼   ► You don't know whether, like, is that a real horn honking outside?

01:02:07 ◼   ► it kind of scares you or jostles you out of what you're supposed to be paying attention

01:02:12 ◼   ► to.

01:02:13 ◼   ► Is that the sound of my engine or is that? No, it's MP3. Nevermind.

01:02:16 ◼   ► Nice. Nicely done. So anyway.

01:02:18 ◼   ► Never get old. Did you know other car makers are doing that now, by the way? Not just BMW?

01:02:21 ◼   ► I think I read, I forget what it was. Maybe it was Volkswagen or some other, but like

01:02:23 ◼   ► just non luxury, non fancy brands are doing it. Anyway, it's terrible.

01:02:27 ◼   ► BMW leads the way and lots of things, good and bad. Anyway, so I learned like you got

01:02:32 ◼   ► to be careful not to, basically not to use like current sounds. So when I chose these

01:02:37 ◼   ► sounds, I chose them specifically so that they wouldn't sound like the more recent

01:02:42 ◼   ► Mac sound effects. So like I didn't use the current Mac startup chime, which has actually

01:02:46 ◼   ► been in use for quite some time. I didn't use that because it was, I didn't want people

01:02:52 ◼   ► to think that like the computer behind them was rebooting and they were like, "Oh crap,

01:02:56 ◼   ► did a kernel panic?" Like you know, I don't want to like freak people out, so I had to

01:03:00 ◼   ► pick sounds that were not recent. And it would be funny to troll the Windows XP users with

01:03:04 ◼   ► the USB sounds and they are also quieter and simpler and they wouldn't annoy you because

01:03:08 ◼   ► they would match each other, Jon.

01:03:09 ◼   ► It's not that non-matching, it's just that I know those sounds from history and life

01:03:13 ◼   ► and they, you know, I think everything you said is a good idea not to use modern sounds,

01:03:17 ◼   ► don't use sounds that could be confused with car sounds, like all good, but just these

01:03:20 ◼   ► particular ones, they just don't work for me. Like, on "Reconcilable Differences,"

01:03:26 ◼   ► has a little guitar jangle that he does at the beginning and end.

01:03:35 ◼   ► Obviously that's probably not appropriate for us, but on that show it works especially

01:03:38 ◼   ► because it fits in with the sort of intro theme thing.

01:03:42 ◼   ► Anyway I think we can do better here.

01:03:43 ◼   ► Here's the other angle that no one brought up for the people who like don't like change

01:03:46 ◼   ► and stuff.

01:03:49 ◼   ► Having things like this, no matter what sounds we end up landing on and what volume they're

01:03:53 ◼   ► at or whatever, having regular features of the show like the song in the middle and the

01:03:59 ◼   ► little ringy things and the car door opening and stuff like that, that stuff is incredibly

01:04:04 ◼   ► addictive. Like Pavlov with ringing the bell and making the dogs salivate. Like this is

01:04:09 ◼   ► a literal bell. So for all the people who it's weird for you because we're changing

01:04:13 ◼   ► it totally understand that, but for the people who are just starting to listen to the show

01:04:16 ◼   ► now or for people a year from now after we've been doing this for a while, that will become

01:04:20 ◼   ► such an integral part of the show that if we ever took it away, people would flip out,

01:04:24 ◼   ► because humans are just silly little monkeys. So what I'm saying is, hang in there. Eventually,

01:04:31 ◼   ► you will come to love the bells. Maybe not these particular chimes. We feel like we will

01:04:35 ◼   ► get the kinks worked out, and version two and three of these sounds or whatever, eventually

01:04:40 ◼   ► you won't be able to live without them.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's one of the reasons we have our theme song. So Jonathan Mann, the author

01:04:46 ◼   ► of our theme song. We did the first few episodes without a theme song. I forget how many we

01:04:52 ◼   ► did beforehand, but it was a few. And one time we complained that we didn't know how

01:04:56 ◼   ► to end the show and everything, so he wrote this theme song. And at the same time, I had

01:05:00 ◼   ► actually asked Merlin Mann a week or so earlier if he could write us a theme song. All those

01:05:07 ◼   ► musical things, I'm pretty sure it's just him playing guitar or playing in a garage

01:05:11 ◼   ► band or something. He is a musician.

01:05:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's him.

01:05:13 ◼   ► - You know, "Back to Work," that theme song was his high school band or whatever.

01:05:16 ◼   ► High school band. I hope he's not listening.

01:05:18 ◼   ► What, was it after high school? I don't know. Anyway.

01:05:20 ◼   ► They're a serious band, you know.

01:05:22 ◼   ► I bought their album. Anyway. It's Bacon Ray, right?

01:05:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that one is.

01:05:26 ◼   ► Yeah. So I actually asked Merlin, before Jonathan wrote what is now our theme song,

01:05:35 ◼   ► I asked Merlin to write something for us. And then when Jonathan wrote his theme song,

01:05:39 ◼   ► we were like, "This is so good." Like, it was getting stuck in all of our heads all day.

01:05:44 ◼   ► And we were like, "I think we have to just use this.

01:05:47 ◼   ► "It's too good, we have to use this.

01:05:49 ◼   ► "It's so infectious, it gets in all of our heads so much.

01:05:52 ◼   ► "We don't have a choice."

01:05:53 ◼   ► So I went to Merlin, I'm like, "Look, I'm sorry.

01:05:55 ◼   ► "If you start anything, please stop."

01:05:56 ◼   ► And fortunately, he hadn't gotten to it yet,

01:05:58 ◼   ► so it wasn't a huge deal.

01:06:00 ◼   ► At least I don't think Merlin hates me forever for that,

01:06:02 ◼   ► 'cause that was three years ago,

01:06:03 ◼   ► and I think we're still friends.

01:06:04 ◼   ► But yeah, we knew when we heard the Jonathan Mann song,

01:06:08 ◼   ► we knew we had to do it.

01:06:09 ◼   ► By the way, quick plug for Jonathan Mann.

01:06:11 ◼   ► He is launching a new podcast called Songonauts

01:06:15 ◼   ► on The Truth, one of the Radio Topia shows,

01:06:17 ◼   ► you know The Truth?

01:06:18 ◼   ► It's a big podcast on Radio Topia.

01:06:19 ◼   ► Anyway, so check out Songonauts by Jonathan Mann,

01:06:22 ◼   ► which I think is launching shortly,

01:06:24 ◼   ► or might have launched by the time we aired the show.

01:06:25 ◼   ► Anyway, quick plug for Jonathan,

01:06:26 ◼   ► 'cause we like him a lot, 'cause he wrote a theme song.

01:06:29 ◼   ► So anyway, that is why we do fun stuff like this,

01:06:34 ◼   ► 'cause it gets in our heads

01:06:34 ◼   ► and it becomes part of the personality of the show.

01:06:37 ◼   ► And I do, I like, John, your statement of basically like,

01:06:40 ◼   ► - Oh, just stop your whining,

01:06:42 ◼   ► you'll get used to it eventually.

01:06:43 ◼   ► - It's not stop your whining,

01:06:44 ◼   ► it's that you will not just get used to it,

01:06:46 ◼   ► you will come to crave it,

01:06:47 ◼   ► you will need it to be there,

01:06:48 ◼   ► we will become a comforting regular,

01:06:50 ◼   ► as any sort of routine,

01:06:51 ◼   ► as any parent of a toddler knows,

01:06:53 ◼   ► regular, you know, having a routine,

01:06:54 ◼   ► this is the time when we do this,

01:06:55 ◼   ► it is comforting to have a routine,

01:06:57 ◼   ► to know that no matter what crazy stuff

01:06:59 ◼   ► goes on during the show,

01:07:00 ◼   ► at a certain point,

01:07:01 ◼   ► there's gonna be these little jingles

01:07:03 ◼   ► that demark the ads,

01:07:04 ◼   ► and there's gonna be a song,

01:07:05 ◼   ► and maybe there's gonna be a car sound,

01:07:06 ◼   ► like those regular things,

01:07:08 ◼   ► those routines, those traditions become comfort.

01:07:11 ◼   ► You will come to love them

01:07:13 ◼   ► as long as we don't pick terrible sounds.

01:07:15 ◼   ► - Or as long as we don't charge you five bucks a month.

01:07:17 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:07:18 ◼   ► - All right, so you wanna talk about a topic

01:07:19 ◼   ► or do we just wanna end here?

01:07:21 ◼   ► - We have one more sponsor to do if you want.

01:07:23 ◼   ► - I'm kidding.

01:07:24 ◼   ► We talked last week, see this is even a great topic.

01:07:27 ◼   ► This is like halfway between follow-up and not.

01:07:30 ◼   ► We talked last week about Apple's 40th birthday

01:07:32 ◼   ► and we went on a journey together

01:07:34 ◼   ► through our finding the Mac and finding Apple.

01:07:39 ◼   ► And we didn't talk much about the iMac,

01:07:42 ◼   ► or at least not enough for Jon.

01:07:43 ◼   ► So Jon, tell us about Apple turning 40 and the iMac.

01:07:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, we were running over in our 40th thing,

01:07:48 ◼   ► so I kind of cut that out of where I would have talked

01:07:50 ◼   ► about my stuff, but I think it is an important part

01:07:53 ◼   ► to acknowledge, and maybe you guys can relate to it,

01:07:55 ◼   ► 'cause maybe you have opinions on it,

01:07:58 ◼   ► looking at it from afar.

01:07:59 ◼   ► But so the iMac was 1998,

01:08:01 ◼   ► and Steve Jobs had come back to Apple.

01:08:04 ◼   ► And that, people don't remember, they usually think of the iPod as the important turnaround

01:08:08 ◼   ► product but the iMac was just as important, if not more important, for Apple as a company,

01:08:13 ◼   ► not particularly for the industry because in the end they're like, "Oh, whatever, it

01:08:15 ◼   ► was just a computer, people have made computers before."

01:08:18 ◼   ► The important thing that the iMac did for Apple is it seemed like from the outside that

01:08:23 ◼   ► it gave the entire company like a little measure of pride back, like that it made them believe,

01:08:29 ◼   ► "Oh yeah, we can make cool things that people like that we're proud of."

01:08:32 ◼   ► there was, you know, especially with Apple being near death in 1997 and going through

01:08:38 ◼   ► different CEOs in the years before that and running out of money and having layoffs and

01:08:43 ◼   ► having products that people weren't particularly happy with and not being able to field next

01:08:46 ◼   ► generation OS after repeated tries and Windows 95 coming and just stomping all over their

01:08:52 ◼   ► face and Marco feeling bad for people having Macs, it was getting harder and harder to

01:08:57 ◼   ► be proud to be an employee of Apple.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And so Steve Jobs and his typical hit, what would become his typical thing of having a

01:09:04 ◼   ► secret group work on a secret project that no one knew about and having Johnny Ive make

01:09:07 ◼   ► this amazing design for it that nobody saw, including the people who were working on it.

01:09:12 ◼   ► The rumor mill, the Mac rumor mill, which was definitely still a thing back then, I

01:09:16 ◼   ► remember them thinking it was a set-top box because I think the people working on the

01:09:19 ◼   ► hardware, they didn't get to see what case it would go in.

01:09:22 ◼   ► So to them it just looked like a little flat box.

01:09:25 ◼   ► And so the rumors that came out was like Apple's making a television set-top box, which by

01:09:28 ◼   ► the way they did at one point and and do now but it's not much of a set top it's

01:09:33 ◼   ► more of a set top coaster anyway the segregation of the team's working on

01:09:37 ◼   ► this and the big dramatic reveal of we made a new computer all right so what

01:09:40 ◼   ► Apple you made a new computer you know you made a new max so what there's a

01:09:43 ◼   ► million max and it is both minimizing and maximizes to say that what was most

01:09:51 ◼   ► important about it was the way the thing looked it looked weird for a computer it

01:09:55 ◼   ► It was teal.

01:09:56 ◼   ► The color of blue was the name of a beach that I'm not going to pronounce after a long

01:09:59 ◼   ► flame war on the Slack channel that I did not want to get involved in.

01:10:03 ◼   ► But it was a particular kind of blue.

01:10:06 ◼   ► And it was translucent, and it was cute, like the original Mac.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And it was a super important product, both for Apple, because I feel like it made them

01:10:14 ◼   ► proud of themselves again and set them on the road to greatness.

01:10:18 ◼   ► And also for the entire industry, because with that product, the fact that there was

01:10:22 ◼   ► such a reaction to it when, despite the fact that it was mostly just a run-of-the-mill

01:10:27 ◼   ► Mac, and yeah, they ditched legacy ports and did other important things for Apple, like

01:10:29 ◼   ► we're setting that aside for now, but it convinced the world, essentially, that the way computers

01:10:36 ◼   ► look is a factor, which sounds so stupid, it's like saying, "Oh, this was the first

01:10:39 ◼   ► car that convinced the world that cars should look good." We just, everyone accepts that

01:10:42 ◼   ► cars have to look good. Everyone accepts there are ugly cars and pretty cars, and so many

01:10:45 ◼   ► people factor in how a car looks and their car-buying decisions, and cars cost thousands

01:10:49 ◼   ► and thousands of dollars more than computers in most cases.

01:10:52 ◼   ► And yet somehow we were always okay with cars having that for our lifetime, right?

01:10:57 ◼   ► It took Apple to say, "These computers, you should care how they look too, because who

01:11:01 ◼   ► wants an ugly one?"

01:11:02 ◼   ► And for years Apple had been making nice ones, but they were still somewhat constrained by

01:11:06 ◼   ► the orthodoxy of the industry in terms of they were off-white or black or gray.

01:11:13 ◼   ► Like they weren't grape colored, right?

01:11:15 ◼   ► You know, there was still within the limits of the computer as defined by Apple itself

01:11:21 ◼   ► in the early days of the Apple II and everything, and all the other companies that made computers

01:11:25 ◼   ► big and small, they sort of defined a boring aesthetic.

01:11:30 ◼   ► And it took Apple to break out of that on the mass scale and say, "We think this is

01:11:35 ◼   ► cool, and you know what?

01:11:36 ◼   ► I think customers will be tickled by the idea of a green computer, and we'll sell them to

01:11:40 ◼   ► them, and they will buy a green computer, and they will love it because it's green."

01:11:45 ◼   ► And it's just, that doesn't sound, it sounds like such a stupid thing in the age where

01:11:50 ◼   ► we sell everything based on colors and all, you know, our phones come in different colors

01:11:54 ◼   ► and all sorts of, you know, cases and everything like that.

01:11:57 ◼   ► But back then, that was a very important revelation.

01:11:59 ◼   ► So in the big timeline of Apple 40 years, you have to credit them along with the bringing

01:12:05 ◼   ► the GUI to the world, to the mass market.

01:12:09 ◼   ► You have to also credit them.

01:12:10 ◼   ► And again, it's not, they weren't the first one, they only went to ever do this, but they

01:12:12 ◼   ► essentially brought the idea to the mass market that it is important how computers look and

01:12:17 ◼   ► people will enjoy our products more if they like how they look. Which again, sounds so

01:12:23 ◼   ► stupid in retrospect, but was super important for the entire industry and led the way for

01:12:27 ◼   ► everything that came after it. It's the reason you had translucent teal irons and canopers

01:12:33 ◼   ► and stuff following the IMAC because people got the wrong idea of like, "Oh, we just need

01:12:36 ◼   ► to make everything translucent and teal." It's like, "You're taking the wrong... I like

01:12:40 ◼   ► you're enthusiastic, good enthusiasm, you may be taking the wrong idea from things, or maybe you're

01:12:44 ◼   ► just trying to cash in on the iMac trend. Either way, the whole industry of consumer electronics,

01:12:49 ◼   ► I feel like, has circled out from, rippled out from that iMac in that people are no longer afraid

01:12:56 ◼   ► to do interesting things with their hardware, even if everything isn't as exuberant as lifesavers.

01:13:00 ◼   ► Obviously, they went to an extreme to make a point, you know. But today, the variety of

01:13:06 ◼   ► shapes and textures and yes, even colors of electronics is much greater thanks in no small

01:13:12 ◼   ► part to Apple.

01:13:13 ◼   ► David Tompa Yeah, I remember, I mean, I was in college

01:13:16 ◼   ► from 2000 to 2004 and, you know, it was, you know, it was like a full, you know, full-time

01:13:22 ◼   ► college kind of thing. So we were in a dorm room and everybody else in the dorm had appliances

01:13:29 ◼   ► that they had purchased for their dorm room that were, you know, designed in '99, 2000,

01:13:35 ◼   ► right after the iMac came out and made this big splash.

01:13:38 ◼   ► And so they were all, as you mentioned,

01:13:39 ◼   ► like translucent plastic microwaves and phones,

01:13:43 ◼   ► and like old corded and wireless phones,

01:13:45 ◼   ► not like cell phones.

01:13:47 ◼   ► Any kind of appliance you could buy

01:13:51 ◼   ► that was relatively inexpensive.

01:13:52 ◼   ► Also, the other computers.

01:13:54 ◼   ► I mean, the look of like compact towers at the time,

01:13:59 ◼   ► and oh God, e-machines.

01:14:02 ◼   ► - They would just snap on a face plate.

01:14:04 ◼   ► They had the same beige box, but like,

01:14:06 ◼   ► all right, the one piece of this is plastic,

01:14:08 ◼   ► can we just mold that piece of plastic

01:14:09 ◼   ► out of colored translucent plastic?

01:14:11 ◼   ► Done.

01:14:12 ◼   ► It's like, no, it's just a little beige box

01:14:13 ◼   ► with a thing stuck on the front.

01:14:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it was really,

01:14:17 ◼   ► it was like the very first time, I think,

01:14:19 ◼   ► in a while that the entire rest of the industry

01:14:22 ◼   ► copied what Apple did at a remarkable pace

01:14:25 ◼   ► and did so, so poorly.

01:14:27 ◼   ► As you know, they're totally missing the point

01:14:30 ◼   ► of why this was good and what parts of it made it good.

01:14:33 ◼   ► Everyone else just kind of copied like the high level design brief.

01:14:37 ◼   ► The service details, which is not like, I mean, that's something because it lets them

01:14:41 ◼   ► not have to redesign everything.

01:14:42 ◼   ► It lets them not have to have a design department like Apple does, right?

01:14:46 ◼   ► And it lets them cash in slightly on people who have a vague notion that they saw a cool

01:14:50 ◼   ► teal computer and they wander into Best Buy.

01:14:52 ◼   ► But in the subsequent years, I think companies are way better now at copying not just Apple

01:14:57 ◼   ► but anyone.

01:14:58 ◼   ► everybody, I'm continually impressed by these formerly very, you know, sort of boring and

01:15:05 ◼   ► uninteresting and risk-averse PC makers, all of which are obviously hiring their own design

01:15:12 ◼   ► departments to make interesting computer designs.

01:15:15 ◼   ► I mean, I like them, but they are way more interesting than they used to be, like the

01:15:21 ◼   ► Microsoft Surface is interesting with that weird hinge thing, that HP one that's super

01:15:24 ◼   ► slim with the little shiny chrome hinges and everything. There's no way that the PC industry

01:15:30 ◼   ► of the 90s, those companies would even have a clue how to do that. So they're not just taking their

01:15:35 ◼   ► existing computers and tacking a bunch of faceplates onto them. Even when they were copying

01:15:39 ◼   ► Apple by saying we're going to make silver aluminum laptops that look exactly like Apple's ones,

01:15:44 ◼   ► they still did a better job of that than they did of copying the iMac. At times of the iMac,

01:15:49 ◼   ► they didn't know their butt from their elbow. They had no idea what they were doing. They were just

01:15:53 ◼   ► just like, put something teal on it.

01:15:55 ◼   ► Are we done now?

01:15:56 ◼   ► I think so, good, ship it.

01:15:59 ◼   ► - It was literally just bolted on.

01:16:00 ◼   ► Like they already had the regular mid tower

01:16:03 ◼   ► that they were shipping, and they just shoved

01:16:05 ◼   ► this giant bulbous face plate on it

01:16:07 ◼   ► that had this little translucent section

01:16:09 ◼   ► you could pop out and replace the color

01:16:10 ◼   ► if you really wanted to.

01:16:11 ◼   ► Like, wow, it was a really dark time for PCs.

01:16:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, but at least they got the message.

01:16:18 ◼   ► The message was, and it's not like iMac was selling so much,

01:16:21 ◼   ► It's not like the iMac was selling millions and millions and millions more than they were selling.

01:16:24 ◼   ► They were still selling more than Apple, especially in those days.

01:16:26 ◼   ► It's just that they saw the splash it made.

01:16:28 ◼   ► It's like, why don't people care about our computer like they care about that?

01:16:31 ◼   ► Are our computers boring?

01:16:33 ◼   ► Do people want their computers to look nice?

01:16:35 ◼   ► Like it was this strange awakening of, again, things that sound so stupid and obvious to us now.

01:16:40 ◼   ► But back then, if you didn't live through it, it may seem crazy to think that so many of the most dominant computer makers in the world,

01:16:47 ◼   ► this kind of design was not even on their radar.

01:16:49 ◼   ► And as far as they were concerned, a Mac 2CI was exactly the same as a PC XT case, which

01:16:56 ◼   ► just was not the case.

01:16:57 ◼   ► And Mac users could see it, but nobody else could until Apple made something teal and

01:17:01 ◼   ► translucent.

01:17:02 ◼   ► This is tangentially related, but Marco talking about college and people with iMacs and not

01:17:08 ◼   ► having iMacs and whatnot made me remember that Marco and I are the same age, so we went

01:17:13 ◼   ► to school at the same time.

01:17:14 ◼   ► And when I was at Virginia Tech, they had, and I believe still do, a very, very large

01:17:20 ◼   ► off-campus computer lab called the Math Emporium.

01:17:24 ◼   ► And it was specifically suited for math-related work, but it had, at the time, a gazillion

01:17:30 ◼   ► Macs in it.

01:17:32 ◼   ► And I remember two things vividly about the Mac Emporium in terms of the hardware there.

01:17:37 ◼   ► Number one, the hockey puck mouse is the worst mouse that's ever been created in the history

01:17:41 ◼   ► of man.

01:17:42 ◼   ► Number two, I vividly remember there being G4 cubes all over it when I was there.

01:17:48 ◼   ► There were like hundreds of them.

01:17:50 ◼   ► And I remember going to this place and thinking, "Wow, that is a very peculiar design for a

01:17:54 ◼   ► computer, but man, that's kind of cool."

01:17:57 ◼   ► And I remember also VNC-ing into my full tower desktop that I had in my dorm room, and I

01:18:02 ◼   ► thought I was the coolest kid in the world, because a guy down the hall showed me what

01:18:06 ◼   ► VNC was.

01:18:08 ◼   ► And the fact that I could log into my computer from somewhere else, it was mind-blowing.

01:18:11 ◼   ► blowing.

01:18:12 ◼   ► Oh, that was amazing back then.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:18:14 ◼   ► You didn't have the X window system on your college campus?

01:18:17 ◼   ► No.

01:18:18 ◼   ► You could run programs on a different computer and have the result displayed on your computer.

01:18:23 ◼   ► Like it was a terminal for the X window system.

01:18:26 ◼   ► You called it an X term.

01:18:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I know what you're saying.

01:18:28 ◼   ► And actually, I think that the Math Emporium was largely running on some sort of Citrix

01:18:33 ◼   ► setup, which is a similar idea.

01:18:36 ◼   ► But yeah, I just remember just a sea of G4 cubes.

01:18:40 ◼   ► Wonder where though I had never seen a like I'd seen people who had been suckered into buying a lot of various kinds of computers

01:18:46 ◼   ► Not suckered but you know

01:18:48 ◼   ► Like a computer that later turned out to not be a particular popular popular model sort of faded away like one

01:18:54 ◼   ► I remember is that Rose Hellman which is a small college somewhere that a friend of mine went to

01:18:58 ◼   ► The next salesman visited Rose Holman and convinced them that next computers were the best thing slice since sliced bread

01:19:04 ◼   ► And honestly, they were the best thing since sliced bread. They sold next computers to Rose Holman. They were everywhere

01:19:10 ◼   ► And then next was not so much into selling hardware pretty shortly after that which must have felt bad

01:19:15 ◼   ► If you were the one in charge of buying hardware for Rose-Hulman

01:19:18 ◼   ► But on the other hand if you went to Rose-Hulman during that time everybody got to use like next cubes and next labs

01:19:22 ◼   ► which is which was like living in the future really because even though it was kind of boring and gray and a lot of the

01:19:27 ◼   ► Displays were grayscale instead of full-color

01:19:30 ◼   ► Next step was still pretty amazing that hardware looked awesome. I got a bunch of it in my attic

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01:20:48 ◼   ► - I think we found bumper sounds.

01:20:53 ◼   ► Why don't we just have all of us make sounds

01:20:55 ◼   ► with our mouth meant, we'll just put them in.

01:20:57 ◼   ► It will solve the problem of like, this is too jarring

01:20:59 ◼   ► because I just want to hear your voices. This will be our voices. It won't be a familiar

01:21:04 ◼   ► sound in a car or of a modern computer. And it's royalty free, right?

01:21:09 ◼   ► I don't know. I might run a royalty on mine. Yeah, seriously. One of us might change our

01:21:13 ◼   ► minds. Now that you're a recording artist, the vocal

01:21:16 ◼   ► stylings of Marco Armin. Yeah. Does that change the licensing of how

01:21:20 ◼   ► we can use clips? Do I have to go through ASCAP or whatever?

01:21:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, a few days ago, as we record, actually

01:21:27 ◼   ► just a couple days ago, I wrote a post coming to the defense of the Apple Watch. The post

01:21:32 ◼   ► was entitled "Poor Apple Watch." And I just feel like lately it's been very trendy to

01:21:41 ◼   ► poop all over the Apple Watch. "Oh, it's a piece of crap. It's so slow. It's too fat.

01:21:45 ◼   ► The software doesn't do anything useful. It's not cool. Look at me. I'm going to get either

01:21:52 ◼   ► mechanical watch or not use a watch at all. And that's fine, you know, if that's fine for you or

01:21:58 ◼   ► for Merlin or for Marco, that's fine. Do what you gotta do. But I feel like nobody was coming to the

01:22:03 ◼   ► defense of the Apple Watch. And so I thought, you know what, I will come to the defense of the Apple

01:22:09 ◼   ► Watch. And I just wrote a post saying that, you know what, I like my watch and it is fat and it is

01:22:16 ◼   ► slow and the apps are pretty much entirely useless. But for me, that's okay. I still

01:22:24 ◼   ► like having the smart features of my smartwatch on my wrist. I think a lot of this may come

01:22:30 ◼   ► from the fact that I leave the house to go to work, and I'm not saying that to be snarky

01:22:35 ◼   ► or smug. I'm saying that genuinely, that I have appointments and meetings and things

01:22:41 ◼   ► that happen throughout my day, obligations throughout my day, that have to happen at

01:22:47 ◼   ► certain times. And so having my next calendar appointment on my watch face is very convenient.

01:22:54 ◼   ► Additionally, I don't get to leave the building at work and occasionally the house if Declan's

01:23:01 ◼   ► awake. I don't get to leave where I am whenever I want, just on a lark. And so having the

01:23:08 ◼   ► temperature on my watch face is really nice. And on top of that I like having

01:23:13 ◼   ► the activity rings, particularly the stand ring, because as we all know I

01:23:17 ◼   ► happen to be a blue ring stud. So yes, there's a lot to dislike about the Apple

01:23:21 ◼   ► Watch, full stop. I completely agree. The apps are useless, I never use them, I

01:23:25 ◼   ► really never use Glances for the most part. I wish we had custom watch faces. I

01:23:30 ◼   ► would love to be able to do more with complications, either have more of them

01:23:34 ◼   ► on the screen or maybe have them be more intelligent somehow. I'm not even

01:23:38 ◼   ► sure how, but all in all, I still really like my Apple Watch, and I'm looking around and I'm

01:23:45 ◼   ► starting to feel like I'm the only one. Jon, are you wearing yours?

01:23:48 ◼   ► No, I, I, we talked about this a while ago, but yeah, I bailed on using it mostly because

01:23:54 ◼   ► I found myself going through entire days without having any meaningful interaction with it,

01:24:00 ◼   ► including checking it for the time, which is not a habit I had, and I'm not a watch wearer,

01:24:04 ◼   ► and it annoys me to have a thing on my wrist. So I have built-in negatives in that anything you

01:24:09 ◼   ► put on my wrist has to overcome my aversion to ever having anything on my wrist ever,

01:24:12 ◼   ► and I don't have any habits built in for watches, so I needed a positive to offset that,

01:24:16 ◼   ► and when the positives evaporated, I stopped wearing it. And the positives were, the positives

01:24:21 ◼   ► were like, you know, I like the notifications, I like the texts, and I like the activity tracking,

01:24:25 ◼   ► but that wasn't enough to overcome my desire to not have something on my wrist. Although,

01:24:29 ◼   ► now that I'm about to, you know, travel, I'm going to bring my watch with me and probably wear it

01:24:33 ◼   ► on a vacation because if I'm walking around a different city it is convenient to be able to,

01:24:37 ◼   ► for example, set a destination on your phone and then put your phone in your pocket and not have

01:24:41 ◼   ► to take it out again and just walk there and have your wrist tell you which way to go. Same thing

01:24:44 ◼   ► for driving, I kind of like that, you know, I don't need it when I'm going to and from work every day,

01:24:48 ◼   ► you know, there's no directions I need to have, but if you're an unfamiliar place driving around

01:24:52 ◼   ► it's nice to have that. So I still think it has value, I still like it, I still like how it looks,

01:24:58 ◼   ► I still don't like wearing a watch. So yeah, that's pretty much where it is. It spends most

01:25:04 ◼   ► of its time on my dresser. Do you hate having something on your wrist because of your shag

01:25:08 ◼   ► carpet arm hair or just because you hate having something on your wrist? I think it's mostly

01:25:13 ◼   ► because of RSI actually. Like the same reason I stopped wearing my wedding ring is that I'm

01:25:17 ◼   ► very sensitive to have anything in that area as I'm sitting there and typing all day. Just everything

01:25:21 ◼   ► about it is sensitive. I don't want any pressure on it. I don't want anything grabbing it. I don't

01:25:24 ◼   ► I don't want anything rubbing against it.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Even like the wrong kind of like sleeve cuffs

01:25:28 ◼   ► when I wear long sleeves can bother me.

01:25:30 ◼   ► So yeah, and that I don't have any ingrained habits

01:25:34 ◼   ► of like I'm always looking at my wrists.

01:25:35 ◼   ► I just, again, I think we discussed this before last time

01:25:37 ◼   ► I wore a watch was like middle school

01:25:39 ◼   ► and I just became old enough to have a watch

01:25:41 ◼   ► and wanted to try it out.

01:25:41 ◼   ► And I wore it for a little while,

01:25:43 ◼   ► like some plastic digital watch

01:25:45 ◼   ► and decided it wasn't for me.

01:25:46 ◼   ► So I'm just not a watch person.

01:25:48 ◼   ► - Fair enough, all right.

01:25:49 ◼   ► So I wanted to save you for last, Marco, to your worst.

01:25:53 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, first of all, I think it's not a very good

01:25:57 ◼   ► argument to say like, well, it seems trendy to hate

01:25:59 ◼   ► this thing right now.

01:26:00 ◼   ► You know, that's just whoever you're reading,

01:26:02 ◼   ► which includes people like me who are not,

01:26:04 ◼   ► you know, who are cooling or have cooled

01:26:07 ◼   ► on the Apple Watch.

01:26:08 ◼   ► I think what we're seeing here, I mean,

01:26:10 ◼   ► there's a number of factors here.

01:26:12 ◼   ► I don't question the Apple Watch utility

01:26:14 ◼   ► for a lot of people.

01:26:15 ◼   ► And in fact, you know, I found a lot of utility

01:26:18 ◼   ► that when I wore it as well, it just, you know,

01:26:20 ◼   ► the downsides of it just bothered me too much

01:26:22 ◼   ► and I found that I preferred regular watches.

01:26:25 ◼   ► I went from no watch to an Apple Watch

01:26:29 ◼   ► to oh, I like watches, turns out,

01:26:31 ◼   ► but most of what I do is tell the time

01:26:33 ◼   ► and regular watches just do a way better job of that

01:26:36 ◼   ► for my purposes because they're always on

01:26:39 ◼   ► and you don't have to charge them, et cetera.

01:26:41 ◼   ► What I found that, I think if you look globally,

01:26:45 ◼   ► if you step back from what any individual's personal needs

01:26:49 ◼   ► are and personal opinions about the Apple Watch are,

01:26:52 ◼   ► I think you can step back and you can see this product

01:26:54 ◼   ► as really a really mixed bag as a 1.0 product.

01:26:59 ◼   ► And there's a few things that exacerbate this.

01:27:01 ◼   ► One of which is that it's going more than a year as a 1.0.

01:27:06 ◼   ► And as we, I mean we talked about this before,

01:27:08 ◼   ► so I don't wanna go too far into it,

01:27:09 ◼   ► but like it's looking like we're not gonna get

01:27:11 ◼   ► a good successor to it for at least now,

01:27:15 ◼   ► which is now is like a year after it came out,

01:27:17 ◼   ► we're at least not getting it now.

01:27:18 ◼   ► We might not even get it until the summer or the fall

01:27:22 ◼   ► or even next spring.

01:27:23 ◼   ► We don't actually know when there's gonna be

01:27:25 ◼   ► second generation and where the second generation

01:27:27 ◼   ► will be very good or very much of an improvement

01:27:30 ◼   ► in the areas that any person thinks that it needs it.

01:27:34 ◼   ► So we are still judging this thing on generation one,

01:27:36 ◼   ► but generation one is not only longer

01:27:39 ◼   ► than these things usually are.

01:27:40 ◼   ► Usually they're a year or less.

01:27:42 ◼   ► So it's not only being a long generation one,

01:27:44 ◼   ► but also I feel like the generation one hardware

01:27:47 ◼   ► and software were both pretty mediocre on the scale

01:27:52 ◼   ► of like various Apple first gen products.

01:27:55 ◼   ► Certainly not every Apple first gen product

01:27:58 ◼   ► is a great product or is a huge hit,

01:28:00 ◼   ► but I think as they go, especially in recent years,

01:28:03 ◼   ► as they go, I think the watch has been a pretty mediocre one

01:28:06 ◼   ► in terms of like bugs, performance, limitations,

01:28:10 ◼   ► things like that.

01:28:11 ◼   ► What we're finding with Apple, I've talked before

01:28:14 ◼   ► about this issue with the low-hanging fruit

01:28:17 ◼   ► has all been picked everywhere.

01:28:19 ◼   ► And so what we have now is the kind of baseline products,

01:28:24 ◼   ► the Macs, the iPhones, to most of a degree the iPads,

01:28:30 ◼   ► these things are mature.

01:28:32 ◼   ► The innovation on them has slowed,

01:28:34 ◼   ► but they're pretty awesome.

01:28:36 ◼   ► They have great performance,

01:28:40 ◼   ► they have great physical characteristics,

01:28:41 ◼   ► a great balance between size and weight

01:28:44 ◼   ► and battery life for the most part,

01:28:46 ◼   ► you know, very few exceptions.

01:28:48 ◼   ► These are all very mature products.

01:28:50 ◼   ► But Apple is a company that depends on

01:28:53 ◼   ► trying to sell its customers more devices

01:28:57 ◼   ► and trying to sell devices to more customers.

01:29:00 ◼   ► So it is Apple's job as a hardware maker

01:29:04 ◼   ► to just try stuff in the market,

01:29:06 ◼   ► to say, you know, hey, everybody has a phone.

01:29:08 ◼   ► A lot of people have computers, most people have computers.

01:29:10 ◼   ► Does everybody also need a tablet?

01:29:12 ◼   ► Let's try.

01:29:13 ◼   ► Does everybody also need a watch?

01:29:14 ◼   ► Let's try.

01:29:15 ◼   ► Does everybody also need a TV box?

01:29:16 ◼   ► Let's try.

01:29:17 ◼   ► You know, that is their job.

01:29:20 ◼   ► But all these mature things that are like the core

01:29:22 ◼   ► of things, you know, basically the computers and the phones

01:29:24 ◼   ► and maybe the tablets, that covers most people's needs.

01:29:28 ◼   ► So we are accustomed to judging Apple and their products

01:29:31 ◼   ► based on those products, those core products,

01:29:33 ◼   ► mostly the computer and the phone,

01:29:35 ◼   ► which is like, yeah, sure, almost everyone could use those.

01:29:39 ◼   ► And so it's easy to look at that and say,

01:29:42 ◼   ► well, if Apple makes a computer or a phone

01:29:44 ◼   ► that sucks for me, then that kinda sucks for everybody.

01:29:48 ◼   ► And why do they do it?

01:29:50 ◼   ► And whether that's true or not,

01:29:51 ◼   ► it's easy for people to look at it that way.

01:29:53 ◼   ► With the watch, I feel like we went into it

01:29:56 ◼   ► with that kind of expectation.

01:29:57 ◼   ► And a lot of people bought it based on that expectation

01:30:00 ◼   ► of like, it's a new, high-profile Apple product line.

01:30:04 ◼   ► Of course it's gonna be for me.

01:30:06 ◼   ► Of course it's gonna be for everybody.

01:30:09 ◼   ► And of course it's gonna be good.

01:30:11 ◼   ► And I think what we're seeing is it's hard to find new things that are for everybody

01:30:16 ◼   ► in technology, new things that are going to be potentially as big as phones or computers

01:30:20 ◼   ► or tablets or anything else.

01:30:23 ◼   ► These are hard problems.

01:30:25 ◼   ► And the watch, you know, because of the incredibly strong demands, the conflicting demands of

01:30:32 ◼   ► that kind of product, you have severe size constraints, severe power constraints, it's

01:30:38 ◼   ► really severe cost constraints. It's just very hard to get a good smart watch product

01:30:45 ◼   ► on the market. It's just really hard to do. And I think what we're seeing is this is an

01:30:51 ◼   ► Apple product that we thought was going to be for everybody, but just isn't. It's just

01:30:56 ◼   ► not, you know, it's just like you can look at any kind of watch and you can, you know,

01:31:01 ◼   ► no kind of watch is for everybody, not even Rolex or Omega, Omega people, sorry. Not every

01:31:07 ◼   ► free watches for everybody.

01:31:08 ◼   ► And the Apple Watch has not replaced all watches,

01:31:12 ◼   ► and has not replaced everybody's phones

01:31:13 ◼   ► or anything like that, and never will.

01:31:16 ◼   ► It is a product that is gonna work for some people,

01:31:20 ◼   ► but it's not a home run for everybody,

01:31:23 ◼   ► or even the people who it works for.

01:31:24 ◼   ► It's not even a home run necessarily for them.

01:31:26 ◼   ► It's just decent maybe, you know, but it's hard

01:31:30 ◼   ► to make new stuff that is gonna be really great anymore,

01:31:33 ◼   ► because so much of it's already been made

01:31:34 ◼   ► and has already matured in these areas,

01:31:36 ◼   ► the areas of technology and things like this

01:31:39 ◼   ► that people are working on in this industry.

01:31:43 ◼   ► So I don't think it's bad to say the Apple Watch

01:31:48 ◼   ► isn't for me, and I don't think it's a sign

01:31:50 ◼   ► that the watch has failed if a lot of people

01:31:55 ◼   ► think it's not for them, but I also think

01:31:57 ◼   ► that the watch as a 1.0 product was really done

01:32:00 ◼   ► with a lot of mediocrity, and it is not unfair

01:32:04 ◼   ► to criticize that, these are real shortcomings it has. It has real problems, real shortcomings,

01:32:12 ◼   ► real design question marks and missed opportunities and weird choices that they made. And all

01:32:18 ◼   ► of this will probably be fixed over time. I hope it is. And maybe someday I'll go

01:32:22 ◼   ► back to it as a product that I use on a regular basis. Because there are things about it that

01:32:26 ◼   ► I do miss. I think I mostly miss it while driving. To have the quick glance of like,

01:32:31 ◼   ► Why did my phone just vibrate in my pocket while I'm driving?

01:32:35 ◼   ► Which is probably unsafe and I probably shouldn't even look at the watch, but that is when I

01:32:38 ◼   ► miss it.

01:32:39 ◼   ► And so overall though, I think, again, these are hard problems.

01:32:45 ◼   ► And we are in an era now where the new things that Apple makes are not going to be guaranteed

01:32:52 ◼   ► to be mass market.

01:32:53 ◼   ► And that's probably okay.

01:32:56 ◼   ► I think the watch was a good bet for mass market though because wearables have a much

01:33:02 ◼   ► broader appeal than computing devices because many more people spend more time wearing things

01:33:08 ◼   ► during the day than they spend using computers.

01:33:10 ◼   ► I'm not saying everybody's a watch wearer but just wearables as a category.

01:33:14 ◼   ► Like if you had to pick a category of areas that Apple should get into, they're kind of

01:33:17 ◼   ► on the cusp of like, well, we mostly do computery things and we're getting to the point where

01:33:22 ◼   ► you can have a computery thing that's part of clothing or jewelry in some way.

01:33:28 ◼   ► Does that mean glasses like Google is doing?

01:33:30 ◼   ► Does it mean watches?

01:33:31 ◼   ► Does it mean like a little fitness turd like Fitbit is doing or something else?

01:33:36 ◼   ► As a category, I think this was a very smart bet for Apple to get into.

01:33:41 ◼   ► Their first entry in the category, you know, they'll learn, they'll move on.

01:33:44 ◼   ► I hope they don't abandon it because if you're looking for another mass market thing, the

01:33:51 ◼   ► they're looking at are all potential winners. Lots of people watch television or watch a

01:33:55 ◼   ► video, so something having to do with TV is a good idea. Lots of people have cell phones,

01:33:59 ◼   ► that was a good market for them. Lots of people wear things, also a good market, and as computers

01:34:05 ◼   ► get smaller and lighter weight and the power requirements go down and so on and so forth,

01:34:11 ◼   ► that entire category will only become more viable. So if I had to look like broad strokes,

01:34:17 ◼   ► term product strategy. I think it was really smart for Apple to get into wearables and

01:34:22 ◼   ► I really hope they do stick it out, learn their lessons, make better products, keep

01:34:25 ◼   ► iterating and innovating because these type of products play to all their strengths. Miniturization,

01:34:32 ◼   ► mass manufacturing of beautiful objects, especially the ability to make things that are appealing

01:34:36 ◼   ► to people visually that we just talked about with the iMac. That's important when you're

01:34:39 ◼   ► wearing it. Apple has shown with their watch bands and their watch designs within the constraints

01:34:43 ◼   ► of the tech available, they're actually pretty good at that part of it too. They just have

01:34:46 ◼   ► to figure out how to make the product part of it.

01:34:48 ◼   ► And if I think about the first iPod,

01:34:51 ◼   ► it was pretty crappy too.

01:34:52 ◼   ► It's just that the first iPod had such a huge positive

01:34:55 ◼   ► to outweigh its negatives, and the watch is like,

01:34:57 ◼   ► it has some positives to outweigh some of its negatives,

01:34:59 ◼   ► but net, it is not as compelling a product.

01:35:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, and ultimately, I think what gives me concern

01:35:07 ◼   ► about the watch is the apparent slow pace of progress.

01:35:11 ◼   ► And we will see what happens the next time

01:35:13 ◼   ► there is a substantial update to either the hardware

01:35:16 ◼   ► or the software.

01:35:17 ◼   ► We'll see, you know, this could totally change

01:35:19 ◼   ► my tone about it, but right now,

01:35:21 ◼   ► it appears to be moving pretty slowly.

01:35:24 ◼   ► - I don't know, I don't outright disagree

01:35:27 ◼   ► with anything you just said, but if we really step back

01:35:31 ◼   ► and think about it, first of all, as someone who works

01:35:36 ◼   ► in an office building like Jon does,

01:35:38 ◼   ► I see so many Fitbit, bracelet-y, watch-y things.

01:35:43 ◼   ► I can't even count them.

01:35:45 ◼   ► And I concur with what John said, that wearables are a

01:35:50 ◼   ► market that I think it's going to be a bigger and bigger

01:35:55 ◼   ► market with time.

01:35:56 ◼   ► And I think that Apple playing in this

01:35:57 ◼   ► market is a wise choice.

01:36:01 ◼   ► Recently, it was a day or two ago, I watched that classic

01:36:05 ◼   ► Louis CK or Louis CK video when he was on Conan about

01:36:10 ◼   ► people getting pissed off about not having Wi-Fi in their flying tube.

01:36:15 ◼   ► People getting all upset about the fact that they're in an airplane and don't have Wi-Fi.

01:36:19 ◼   ► And this is not the same as people getting upset about their watch.

01:36:24 ◼   ► But at the same time, I have a mini computer on my friggin' wrist that can, with limitations,

01:36:33 ◼   ► connect to almost all the known information on the planet on the internet.

01:36:38 ◼   ► That's pretty friggin' amazing.

01:36:39 ◼   ► And I agree that there's a lot that's frustrating about my watch.

01:36:43 ◼   ► I never use apps for several different reasons, number one of which, it's so, so slow to do

01:36:52 ◼   ► anything.

01:36:53 ◼   ► And it's infuriating.

01:36:55 ◼   ► But nevertheless, I have this device that tracks my heartbeat, it tracks how much I'm

01:37:02 ◼   ► standing, how much I'm moving, it tracks when my next appointment is.

01:37:05 ◼   ► Like John was saying, if I'm in a city that I'm not familiar with and I'm walking around,

01:37:09 ◼   ► I can do so without having my phone out, screaming, "I'm a tourist, please rob me."

01:37:14 ◼   ► There's so many things for me that I really like about this, and that impressed me so

01:37:20 ◼   ► deeply about it, especially given the unbelievable engineering constraints that this product

01:37:25 ◼   ► was made under.

01:37:28 ◼   ► To me, it's such an impressive product, and there is so much that could be done to make

01:37:34 ◼   ► it better, Marco.

01:37:35 ◼   ► You're absolutely right about that.

01:37:36 ◼   ► I mean, I can't argue with that at all.

01:37:38 ◼   ► But for me, it's still something that adds value to my life, and I still like it.

01:37:45 ◼   ► And I just feel like--I think the thing of it is that it was like a switch flipped, and

01:37:50 ◼   ► suddenly everyone was talking about how much they don't want to wear an Apple Watch anymore.

01:37:54 ◼   ► And in and of itself, that's fine, but it just seemed weird to me.

01:37:57 ◼   ► And I felt bad for the poor little Apple Watch.

01:37:59 ◼   ► And I still feel bad for the poor little Apple Watch.

01:38:01 ◼   ► It's a cute little feller.

01:38:03 ◼   ► And I feel like somebody needed to build it up a little bit.

01:38:05 ◼   ► I don't know enough people who are not

01:38:07 ◼   ► Tech nerds who have an Apple watch know how it's playing in the non tech nerd crowd

01:38:12 ◼   ► Because obviously we're all talking to other tech nerds and they're the ones writing things about how they're not using their watch and whatever

01:38:17 ◼   ► And yeah, it did kind of all come together

01:38:18 ◼   ► It's because I think people slowly stopped wearing them and then the people who needed to tell the world that they slowly stopped wearing them

01:38:25 ◼   ► Had to write stories about it and then other people saw those stories and it felt safe that they could now admit that they slowly stopped

01:38:30 ◼   ► Wearing them which is fine

01:38:31 ◼   ► Like that's how the press cycle goes, but it's still all within just these sort of tech nerd circles

01:38:36 ◼   ► And I'm sure the watch is selling outside tech nerd circles

01:38:39 ◼   ► You can tell by the huge spike in sales that they seem to have from everything. We're able to understand from

01:38:44 ◼   ► Apple's

01:38:46 ◼   ► Closely guarded secrets about how much how many watches they're selling exactly during the holidays

01:38:50 ◼   ► Because tech nerds don't save their spending for the holidays. They buy it as soon as released

01:38:54 ◼   ► No, I've actually you know anecdotally I've seen

01:38:57 ◼   ► Since the holidays I've seen a lot more Apple watches in the real world

01:39:01 ◼   ► Oftentimes on on you know non geeks or at least people whose geek status is unknown to me

01:39:05 ◼   ► Yeah, that's I'm saying they must be selling them

01:39:09 ◼   ► I just I don't know those people so I can't sort of get a read on like not none of my

01:39:13 ◼   ► Family or friends who are not tech nerds have an Apple watch so I would love to know what regular people think of the Apple

01:39:18 ◼   ► Watch it's just still kind of an unknown to us surely Apple knows because it's their job to know I can imagine regular people

01:39:25 ◼   ► Not being as picky about it

01:39:27 ◼   ► But also not becoming eternally addicted to it like they were once you started selling

01:39:32 ◼   ► iPods to regular people once it wasn't a $400 accessory

01:39:35 ◼   ► They only work with Macs like once you know you had the the mini and stuff people love their iPods man

01:39:40 ◼   ► They love them like do people love their Apple watch or do they say it's pretty cool

01:39:44 ◼   ► And it was a good Christmas present that I got

01:39:46 ◼   ► But I don't know if they are

01:39:48 ◼   ► So incredibly in love with it as they were with their smartphones or their their iPods or whatever

01:39:54 ◼   ► So we'll see next Christmas and how they iterate on this. I'm entirely open to the idea that

01:39:59 ◼   ► Apple can try other kinds of wearables whether it's a fitness turd or

01:40:04 ◼   ► You know an earring or a ring or something involving glasses and there was discussion on Twitter today about Apple

01:40:12 ◼   ► Cable sass or panic was disappointed that Apple wasn't

01:40:15 ◼   ► Anywhere on the radar when it came to VR and if you wanted to do VR

01:40:19 ◼   ► You had to basically build a PC because no Mac we are just us

01:40:23 ◼   ► No Mac you can buy is viable for which isn't entirely true because the Mac is technically capable of doing a VR experience

01:40:28 ◼   ► But the current VR products the the pioneers of the VR industry are either

01:40:32 ◼   ► You know, you need a gaming console or you need a PC and no matter what Mac you have forget it

01:40:38 ◼   ► And so he was cable was concerned that Apple is missing out on this that they are watching this one go by and again

01:40:44 ◼   ► We've talked many times about the supposed rumored VR things that Apple is surely toying with internally, but as far as I'm aware

01:40:50 ◼   ► There's no there's no credible rumors about Apple fielding any products in that area

01:40:55 ◼   ► I think they should be experimenting with it and same thing with wearables

01:41:00 ◼   ► I think they should be experimenting with everything having to do with wearables not just watches

01:41:03 ◼   ► And some people some feedback we got recently was like you guys say that Apple spread too thin

01:41:10 ◼   ► But on the other hand, you're always saying Apple has to be checking out everything

01:41:13 ◼   ► There's a difference between fielding a product

01:41:17 ◼   ► to their platform or investigating it.

01:41:19 ◼   ► Like Apple's job is to try everything,

01:41:22 ◼   ► to see, you know, not in the market,

01:41:24 ◼   ► but like try it out internally,

01:41:25 ◼   ► make sure someone is working on VR,

01:41:26 ◼   ► make sure someone's working on this,

01:41:27 ◼   ► that maybe not cars, right?

01:41:28 ◼   ► But everything that's close to their industry,

01:41:31 ◼   ► be, don't let it catch you by surprise.

01:41:34 ◼   ► And then figure out out of all those things,

01:41:36 ◼   ► is this someplace where we can sell a good product?

01:41:38 ◼   ► You know, can we, can we, you know,

01:41:41 ◼   ► make a significant contribution to this market?

01:41:42 ◼   ► How big is the potential market?

01:41:44 ◼   ► Like that's what they should be doing internally.

01:41:45 ◼   ► What you can't do is actually say,

01:41:48 ◼   ► we need to be in every single market

01:41:49 ◼   ► like Microsoft in the 90s.

01:41:50 ◼   ► We need to make, if there's a technological thing

01:41:53 ◼   ► that can run software, we need to make one of them

01:41:54 ◼   ► and we need to sell it as a product

01:41:56 ◼   ► and we need to support it forever

01:41:57 ◼   ► because then you just end up with too much crap.

01:41:58 ◼   ► So it's being spread too thin is when you do more

01:42:01 ◼   ► than you can do externally.