ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Alright, so I guess do you want to get started on the actual show?

00:00:04 ◼   ► We do a show, you know.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Oh, we do?

00:00:06 ◼   ► This is a song about Alice.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Oh, is that Alice's restaurant?

00:00:11 ◼   ► Wow.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Were you seriously quoting Guthrie?

00:00:15 ◼   ► Arlo Guthrie?

00:00:16 ◼   ► Is that right?

00:00:17 ◼   ► We all did music podcasts in like the last week, didn't we?

00:00:19 ◼   ► A week or two.

00:00:20 ◼   ► You did one too, John?

00:00:21 ◼   ► Yeah, no, everyone's doing it.

00:00:24 ◼   ► So alright, let's do some follow-up.

00:00:26 ◼   ► John, why don't you tell us about LLVM IR?

00:00:29 ◼   ► week, it got so long ago, whenever it was, we talked about LLVM IR, which is also known

00:00:35 ◼   ► as bitcode in its sort of binary representation, and whether or not that helps Apple to be

00:00:40 ◼   ► able to move any of their platforms to different CPU architectures in the future.

00:00:45 ◼   ► We basically decided that it doesn't help or hurt, that it is an orthogonal concern,

00:00:52 ◼   ► mostly having to do with taking advantage of new instructions and new processors, being

00:00:56 ◼   ► Being able to remove instructions from processors when they're no longer needed, all without

00:01:00 ◼   ► asking developers to re-upload new binary versions of their applications and recompile

00:01:05 ◼   ► them for new architectures and stuff.

00:01:07 ◼   ► So a bunch of people sent me good links.

00:01:09 ◼   ► Someone sent me -- I forgot who this was, unfortunately -- a 2011 -- I think it's Usenet

00:01:15 ◼   ► post -- no, a mailing list post from Dan Goleman at Apple.

00:01:20 ◼   ► Presumably he works on the LLVM team, or did at least in 2011.

00:01:23 ◼   ► I'll put the link in the show notes.

00:01:25 ◼   ► can read it. He outlines the reasons why he thinks LLVM IR is a poor system for building

00:01:30 ◼   ► a platform, by which he means any system where LLVM IR would be a format in which programs

00:01:35 ◼   ► are stored or transmitted for subsequent use on multiple underlying architectures, which

00:01:39 ◼   ► is exactly the question we were asking before. Again, this is 2011, things may have changed,

00:01:44 ◼   ► but in general he says if you're going to make some kind of a multi-CPU architecture

00:01:50 ◼   ► intermediary form LLVM IR would not be it and he lists the reasons.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Someone named Jacob Stokelyn Olson, hope I got that right, sent us an email with some

00:02:03 ◼   ► more good information about what is platform specific about bitcode, what is it that makes

00:02:08 ◼   ► bitcode not portable.

00:02:09 ◼   ► It says one of the biggest sources of bitcode differences is the target ABI, meaning Application

00:02:14 ◼   ► Binary Interface.

00:02:16 ◼   ► generates functions that are able to call C functions

00:02:18 ◼   ► compiled by other compilers by following the ABI

00:02:21 ◼   ► for that platform.

00:02:21 ◼   ► That's basically what an ABI is like.

00:02:23 ◼   ► So that everything doesn't have to be compiled

00:02:24 ◼   ► by the same compiler.

00:02:25 ◼   ► You compile with one compiler

00:02:27 ◼   ► or have a compiled library or whatever,

00:02:28 ◼   ► I can call you, you can call back into me.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Like we all know how we're gonna call each other's functions

00:02:32 ◼   ► is the ABI defines how function arguments

00:02:34 ◼   ► and return values are laid out in memory or register

00:02:36 ◼   ► is like, you know, you put your address here

00:02:38 ◼   ► and the return value is gonna be in this register.

00:02:40 ◼   ► That's the ABI.

00:02:41 ◼   ► Everyone has to agree on that

00:02:42 ◼   ► or you can't call into other code.

00:02:43 ◼   ► And one of the requirements for a bit code

00:02:46 ◼   ► and for any of Apple's compiler stuff

00:02:47 ◼   ► is that you have to be able to compile code

00:02:49 ◼   ► and has to be able to call functions

00:02:50 ◼   ► that were compiled with another compiler,

00:02:52 ◼   ► even if it's just an earlier version of the same compiler.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Otherwise, every time a new OS came out

00:02:56 ◼   ► that was compiled with a new compiler,

00:02:57 ◼   ► everyone would have to recompile their apps

00:02:59 ◼   ► if the ABI changed.

00:03:00 ◼   ► It doesn't, and so this is a sort of hard

00:03:01 ◼   ► and fast requirement of what Apple does with its compilers.

00:03:05 ◼   ► Now, Jacob goes on.

00:03:06 ◼   ► "In general, the Clang front end is using

00:03:08 ◼   ► a combination of LLVM types and argument flags

00:03:10 ◼   ► to get the code generator to generate

00:03:11 ◼   ► the correct function calling sequence.

00:03:13 ◼   ► It knows how the code generator

00:03:14 ◼   ► if a selected target architecture behaves.

00:03:17 ◼   ► He says you can even get different bitcode

00:03:18 ◼   ► when using different ABIs

00:03:20 ◼   ► on the same instruction set architecture.

00:03:22 ◼   ► So even on a single chip,

00:03:23 ◼   ► you could have multiple ABIs defined

00:03:25 ◼   ► and you get different bitcode if you target different ABIs.

00:03:27 ◼   ► He ends here by saying it would be possible

00:03:30 ◼   ► to create LLVM IR that can be compiled

00:03:32 ◼   ► on multiple CB architectures only by giving up

00:03:34 ◼   ► on the ability to call native functions

00:03:35 ◼   ► compiled with other compilers.

00:03:37 ◼   ► You could define a virtual ABI that specifies the layouts,

00:03:40 ◼   ► the struct layouts and how C function calls

00:03:42 ◼   ► are mapped to LLVM IR.

00:03:43 ◼   ► This is essentially what Google's PNACL, the Portable Native Client Project, does.

00:03:48 ◼   ► It works since the code only has to run inside Chrome sandbox and calling functions provided

00:03:51 ◼   ► by Chrome.

00:03:52 ◼   ► So lots of theoretical possibilities, but in the practical real world of what Apple

00:03:57 ◼   ► uses its compilers for, bitcode and LLVM IR are not the answer to portability across platforms.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Okay then.

00:04:05 ◼   ► And why don't you tell us about what Chris Latner has been saying lately?

00:04:10 ◼   ► This is some info from Kai Shin, who says,

00:04:13 ◼   ► "Chris Latner was asked a question."

00:04:14 ◼   ► These are all paraphrases.

00:04:15 ◼   ► "Was asked a question, and I'm assuming this is a WWDC,"

00:04:17 ◼   ► he didn't say.

00:04:19 ◼   ► "Any plans to write Swift in Swift?"

00:04:20 ◼   ► We talked about self-hosting last week.

00:04:22 ◼   ► Self-hosting turns out to be the right definition.

00:04:24 ◼   ► I just failed to read the Wikipedia page correctly.

00:04:26 ◼   ► Anyway, and what he said was,

00:04:29 ◼   ► what Chris Latner said was,

00:04:30 ◼   ► "His goal is to make the best language

00:04:31 ◼   ► "for writing consumer-facing software, not compilers."

00:04:34 ◼   ► And he mentioned that if you started writing a compiler

00:04:35 ◼   ► in Swift, it would end up being a great language

00:04:38 ◼   ► for writing low-level code,

00:04:39 ◼   ► but inadequate for writing iOS and Mac apps, which is kind of like the politically correct

00:04:43 ◼   ► answer.

00:04:44 ◼   ► For self-hosting, I thought it would be neat.

00:04:47 ◼   ► It's kind of a shame that the people who are actually writing Swift are spending their

00:04:50 ◼   ► whole day writing C++ when they love to use this new language they've invented to do

00:04:55 ◼   ► their work as well.

00:04:56 ◼   ► And I got a lot of replies like this.

00:04:58 ◼   ► It's like, "No, I asked Chris Latner that and he says, 'If we did that, then Swift

00:05:02 ◼   ► would be a really good language for writing compilers.'"

00:05:04 ◼   ► And that's not what they're making.

00:05:05 ◼   ► They're trying to make a really good language for writing iOS and Mac apps, which technically,

00:05:09 ◼   ► According to a submission statement in the Apple book published on the topic, they're

00:05:12 ◼   ► trying to make a language that spans the range.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Compilers would be in that range.

00:05:16 ◼   ► I think it would prove the language can do that type of task.

00:05:20 ◼   ► But anyway, luckily we live in the age of Twitter and the new age of the open Apple,

00:05:25 ◼   ► not the one from the Apple II keyboard.

00:05:27 ◼   ► Nice.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:29 ◼   ► And Chris Latner replied on Twitter to a thread involving us and he said, we'll put links

00:05:32 ◼   ► to his tweets, "Many of us would love to rewrite the Swift compiler at Swift.

00:05:36 ◼   ► It would crash a lot less and be a lot more dreadful for us."

00:05:39 ◼   ► That said, we have a ton of higher priorities that affect users of Swift.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Poor compiler hackers would just have to suffer for now.

00:05:45 ◼   ► So the cobbler's children have no shoes or whatever that expression is.

00:05:49 ◼   ► So contrary to the many tales of Chris Latner saying, I'm sure he did say this, that if

00:05:56 ◼   ► we wrote our compiler in Swift, if that's what we were using sort of to dogfood our

00:06:02 ◼   ► language, we would end up making a language that's really good at writing compilers, which

00:06:04 ◼   ► Which is true if they did it to exclusion or everything else, but in the grand scheme

00:06:08 ◼   ► of things, Chris Latterly says that many of us would love to write the compiler in Swift.

00:06:12 ◼   ► Like, of course they would like that they're making this new language, of course they like

00:06:14 ◼   ► the language, of course they like to use it in their work, but it is not really a high

00:06:17 ◼   ► priority, their main priority of course is making it a great language to write iOS and

00:06:21 ◼   ► Mac apps, because that's the most important part of Swift.

00:06:25 ◼   ► So there you have it.

00:06:26 ◼   ► I think this is a great example of like, direct, accurate quotes from people can be misleading

00:06:31 ◼   ► if the only thing you ever hear is that, and which is why I think Chris felt the need to

00:06:34 ◼   ► say even though I said that and it's true it's not the entire story like there are many dimensions to

00:06:39 ◼   ► all these decisions it's not like oh Chris Latner hates Swift and would never want to write his

00:06:42 ◼   ► compiler in it or the reverse Chris Latner would love to write it in Swift but mean old apple won't

00:06:46 ◼   ► let him like everyone is always looking for the sensational headline type story especially if

00:06:50 ◼   ► something gets repeated around and around and if everyone in apple like if the people who the

00:06:55 ◼   ► source of information were silent any one of these things could have like spiraled into like three

00:06:59 ◼   ► years from now it becomes accepted wisdom that Chris Latner never wanted to write the compiler

00:07:03 ◼   ► and Swift, which is just BS.

00:07:05 ◼   ► And I just love the fact, in the age of Twitter,

00:07:07 ◼   ► he can say, you know what, tweet, tweet, done.

00:07:10 ◼   ► I have now sort of like adjusted the record

00:07:13 ◼   ► to more accurately represent the complex nuanced position

00:07:17 ◼   ► that I have.

00:07:18 ◼   ► And you can do that in two tweets, right?

00:07:19 ◼   ► Combined with all the things he apparently said to people,

00:07:21 ◼   ► WLDC.

00:07:23 ◼   ► - That is yet another example of a whole new Apple PR world,

00:07:27 ◼   ► which is exciting.

00:07:29 ◼   ► Final bit of follow up,

00:07:30 ◼   ► why don't you tell us about Trim Support?

00:07:32 ◼   ► I think it was also last episode where we talked about trim force, the command that

00:07:36 ◼   ► will let you enable trim on your SSDs even though Apple doesn't want to and it has that

00:07:40 ◼   ► big scary warning that says, "You can enable it, but if you lose data, don't blame us."

00:07:44 ◼   ► So 10.10.4 is out now.

00:07:47 ◼   ► It has this thing in it, I believe.

00:07:48 ◼   ► I upgraded it at work.

00:07:49 ◼   ► I didn't upgrade it at home yet.

00:07:50 ◼   ► I didn't look for the command, but I'm assuming it's there.

00:07:53 ◼   ► And the last show I said, "You know, like, I'm not going to use it until I have problems."

00:07:58 ◼   ► And I had said something like, "I know probably people have the same SSD as me and they have

00:08:01 ◼   ► trim-enabled and everything is fine, but I don't want to be the guinea pig and I'm not

00:08:05 ◼   ► going to take the risk until I have problems.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And a bunch of people sent me links to a couple of stories that describe some of the solid

00:08:15 ◼   ► state drives that do have problems with the trim command.

00:08:17 ◼   ► If you enable trim on them, they accidentally erase the wrong blocks of data and just destroy

00:08:22 ◼   ► your data for you.

00:08:24 ◼   ► And on that list of drives that may or may not have this problem according to various

00:08:27 ◼   ► people's stories is my drive.

00:08:30 ◼   ► And so I'm very glad that I didn't enable TRIM and now I'm probably not going to enable

00:08:34 ◼   ► TRIM.

00:08:35 ◼   ► I don't know the technical details of the thing, like does it depend on firmware version,

00:08:39 ◼   ► is it just for queued TRIM requests or for all of them, or some people think it doesn't

00:08:44 ◼   ► matter that Drive reports that supports queued TRIM commands, but it really doesn't.

00:08:49 ◼   ► And most of the stories involve Linux, not OS X, so I don't know what to think, but safe

00:08:53 ◼   ► bet, don't mess with TRIM force unless you're feeling adventurous and don't mind losing

00:08:57 ◼   ► any data or unless you have some amount of information that you're sure that like other

00:09:02 ◼   ► people are doing this it's safe it's been taught or tested so yeah I'm kind of leaving

00:09:07 ◼   ► my drive the way it is for now. And for the record don't you have a very popular and well-regarded

00:09:12 ◼   ► Samsung SSD? Yeah it's like super expensive it's a terabyte it's their it's their latest

00:09:18 ◼   ► greatest best model and you know it works. It's an 850 Pro? Yeah it's the 850 Pro. That's

00:09:23 ◼   ► That's a very common, popular, well-regarded SSD.

00:09:27 ◼   ► That's a little scary that that's on that list.

00:09:29 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, it's scary,

00:09:31 ◼   ► but the OSes are doing the right thing.

00:09:33 ◼   ► It's blacklisted in Linux.

00:09:34 ◼   ► I'm assuming Windows does the right thing.

00:09:35 ◼   ► OS X does the right thing with it.

00:09:37 ◼   ► The right thing, in this case, turns out to be luck.

00:09:38 ◼   ► Apple didn't test it and verify that it behaves correctly,

00:09:40 ◼   ► so no trim for you, right?

00:09:42 ◼   ► And it's bad because we know that eventually

00:09:45 ◼   ► the thing's gonna fill up and slow down and everything,

00:09:47 ◼   ► but it's better than losing data, so I don't know.

00:09:50 ◼   ► This is thread that you can follow.

00:09:52 ◼   ► I put a link to a comment thread in Ars Technica that

00:09:55 ◼   ► has links that you can chase down to a Samsung bug reporting

00:09:59 ◼   ► website where Linux users are complaining about it.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And Samsung's like, this isn't our problem.

00:10:03 ◼   ► Linux is open source.

00:10:04 ◼   ► Fix it yourself or whatever.

00:10:07 ◼   ► That's not what they say.

00:10:08 ◼   ► They basically end up saying, it's not a supported platform.

00:10:11 ◼   ► That's what they end up saying.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And they mention open source in that.

00:10:13 ◼   ► And people are like, what are you saying?

00:10:14 ◼   ► Because it's open source, we have to fix it ourselves.

00:10:16 ◼   ► What it comes down to is Samsung doesn't care

00:10:17 ◼   ► that it doesn't work on Linux.

00:10:18 ◼   ► But OS X, that's an Apple's court.

00:10:21 ◼   ► Apple can validate this or not, and Apple can file bugs,

00:10:24 ◼   ► or, 'cause anyone can file bugs against it,

00:10:26 ◼   ► like they can enable it on OS X

00:10:27 ◼   ► and you get a reproduction of a problem

00:10:29 ◼   ► and say, "Hey, your drive with this firmware

00:10:31 ◼   ► does this thing wrong."

00:10:32 ◼   ► I don't know, anyway, I'm happy with my SSD.

00:10:35 ◼   ► It's still really fast, it's still nice and quiet,

00:10:38 ◼   ► it's still got a terabyte of storage.

00:10:39 ◼   ► As far as I'm aware, it has not corrupted my data yet,

00:10:42 ◼   ► so, so far so good.

00:10:44 ◼   ► - Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

00:10:47 ◼   ► Wasn't the whole point of the more advanced SSD controller,

00:10:51 ◼   ► starting with the Sand Forest thing forever ago.

00:10:53 ◼   ► Wasn't the whole point of that to kind of like

00:10:56 ◼   ► use different tricks, like different leveling techniques

00:10:59 ◼   ► and everything to keep drive performance pretty good

00:11:02 ◼   ► even without trim support?

00:11:03 ◼   ► - All those things are true, that they're trying

00:11:06 ◼   ► to make performance better by doing tricks,

00:11:07 ◼   ► but you need to have trim because when you,

00:11:11 ◼   ► that episode we talked about trim,

00:11:12 ◼   ► when the operating system deletes a file,

00:11:14 ◼   ► it doesn't go and overwrite every block with zeros

00:11:17 ◼   ► or it doesn't tell the SSD that all those blocks are gone.

00:11:21 ◼   ► It just updates like a single little piece of information

00:11:24 ◼   ► and its file system metadata structure that says,

00:11:26 ◼   ► you know what, this area that was previously taken

00:11:28 ◼   ► is now free, so it updates a bitmap thing

00:11:31 ◼   ► and an HFS+ or some other metadata and some other,

00:11:33 ◼   ► and the only thing that gets written to the disk,

00:11:35 ◼   ► as far as the disk mechanism is concerned,

00:11:36 ◼   ► it sees right to this area of the disk,

00:11:39 ◼   ► and that area of the disk is the metadata area.

00:11:41 ◼   ► It's not actually touching the data of the file.

00:11:43 ◼   ► It just says, oh, I received a write to this metadata area.

00:11:45 ◼   ► The disk has no idea what that write is.

00:11:48 ◼   ► It just says that's write to address 123.

00:11:50 ◼   ► It has no idea what's in address 123.

00:11:52 ◼   ► It has no idea that address 123 is the thing

00:11:54 ◼   ► that tells you that these blocks are allocated.

00:11:56 ◼   ► It doesn't know where those blocks are.

00:11:57 ◼   ► It doesn't understand the file system.

00:11:59 ◼   ► It's just a big block addressable storage device.

00:12:02 ◼   ► The SSD mechanism has no way to know,

00:12:06 ◼   ► oh, by the file system writing that piece of information,

00:12:09 ◼   ► what that means is all these blocks

00:12:11 ◼   ► that belong to this one gig file are now technically free.

00:12:14 ◼   ► I should feel free to reuse them for any other rights that get sent to me.

00:12:17 ◼   ► It doesn't know that.

00:12:18 ◼   ► It's just like, if it sees a write come in, it says, "Where can I put this data?

00:12:21 ◼   ► Where can I put this data?"

00:12:22 ◼   ► It doesn't think it can put it where that 1 gig file was, because the only write that

00:12:26 ◼   ► got sent was the "Hey, write to address 123 with these numbers."

00:12:30 ◼   ► It doesn't know what those numbers mean, that 1 gig of space is now being freed up.

00:12:33 ◼   ► That's what the TRMM command is for, to send it to say, "By the way, the operating system

00:12:38 ◼   ► would say, 'Write to this area of the disk to note that this file is gone now, and also

00:12:42 ◼   ► send the disk controller a command to mark all of these blocks of data as you can use

00:12:48 ◼   ► those again if a subsequent write comes in.

00:12:50 ◼   ► So there is literally no way that the drive can know, it's a different layer of the storage

00:12:55 ◼   ► hard, the drive can know that.

00:12:56 ◼   ► So inevitably, without TRIM, no matter what tricks you do, everything will fill up, which

00:13:00 ◼   ► will mean every single write also involves clearing out some area first.

00:13:05 ◼   ► Our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And they asked us not to read a sponsor read and instead sent Jon another toaster to review.

00:13:14 ◼   ► [music]

00:13:25 ◼   ► Jon, what is the toaster this week?

00:13:26 ◼   ► This week's toaster is another one from Black & Decker, model T-01322SBD.

00:13:33 ◼   ► This thing is a two-knob, fairly small toaster.

00:13:36 ◼   ► I remember we had the three knob blackened decker early on, and it was kind of like middle

00:13:40 ◼   ► of the road.

00:13:41 ◼   ► This two knob thing does most of the bad things that have been discussed previously in all

00:13:46 ◼   ► other toasters, right?

00:13:47 ◼   ► It's a nice tour of things that are wrong with toaster ovens.

00:13:50 ◼   ► So you like it.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's got two knobs, one of which is a timer knob that you have to repeatedly

00:13:56 ◼   ► turn to a precise angle for consistent toasting.

00:13:59 ◼   ► That's a common flaw.

00:14:01 ◼   ► The other knob also has to be in the right mode.

00:14:03 ◼   ► So you still have to make sure two knobs are adjusted to the right thing to make it to

00:14:06 ◼   ► toast anything you gotta make sure the top one's on toast because if you just

00:14:08 ◼   ► turn the bottom one oh I forgot to turn the top one it was on bacon I'm slowly

00:14:12 ◼   ► making my bread warm instead of toasting it it's got a single heating element on

00:14:16 ◼   ► the top and the bottom right in the middle they are shielded at least so

00:14:19 ◼   ► that's good but the single heating on top and bottom are just not adequate for

00:14:23 ◼   ► a toaster of this size leading to a ridiculous five minute plus toast time I

00:14:27 ◼   ► thought it was broken I tried it multiple times maybe the bread was a

00:14:30 ◼   ► little bit cold maybe it was thicker like crazy long toast time it's just got

00:14:34 ◼   ► One helmet on top, one helmet on the bottom,

00:14:35 ◼   ► there's just not enough for a toaster of the size.

00:14:37 ◼   ► It's not a big toaster,

00:14:38 ◼   ► but whatever it is, it's not getting the job done.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Really, really thin wire rack.

00:14:42 ◼   ► Like I feel like I could crumple it up in my hand,

00:14:45 ◼   ► that kind of thing, you know, not that it matters.

00:14:47 ◼   ► It's not like the bread is gonna fall through the rack,

00:14:49 ◼   ► but sort of like the, I was gonna say intangibles,

00:14:52 ◼   ► but it's not, it's the opposite, it's tangible.

00:14:54 ◼   ► Like the things that signal quality and durability,

00:14:57 ◼   ► that really thin rack is not it.

00:14:59 ◼   ► The door doesn't really open all the way to 90 degrees.

00:15:03 ◼   ► like it opens almost to 90 degrees,

00:15:05 ◼   ► and at the limit of its travel,

00:15:07 ◼   ► it's like springy and bendy,

00:15:08 ◼   ► it felt like it was gonna break off,

00:15:10 ◼   ► it's just not a nice feeling door.

00:15:12 ◼   ► The crumb tray that's underneath,

00:15:14 ◼   ► like a little metal crumb tape,

00:15:16 ◼   ► you have to tilt the crumb tray to get it out,

00:15:17 ◼   ► another flaw that we've seen in other toasters,

00:15:19 ◼   ► which is terrible because if you're not careful,

00:15:21 ◼   ► you'll tilt it and just spill all the crumbs

00:15:22 ◼   ► that are on the crumb tray back into the toaster,

00:15:24 ◼   ► and now how do you get them out?

00:15:25 ◼   ► It's the whole point of the crumb tray,

00:15:27 ◼   ► you're supposed to take the crumb tray out

00:15:28 ◼   ► with the crumbs on it and dump them

00:15:29 ◼   ► so you don't have to take your whole toaster

00:15:30 ◼   ► over the garbage or sink or shake it

00:15:32 ◼   ► to get the crumbs out.

00:15:33 ◼   ► I mean, it's not as bad as that hybrid toaster,

00:15:35 ◼   ► which was just terrible.

00:15:35 ◼   ► Like if you bought this, it would be okay.

00:15:38 ◼   ► It would get the job done.

00:15:39 ◼   ► The three knob black conductor is way better.

00:15:41 ◼   ► I didn't look at the price of this one.

00:15:42 ◼   ► What is the price on this?

00:15:43 ◼   ► - 38 bucks on Amazon right now.

00:15:45 ◼   ► - It seems, I don't know what the three knob one was.

00:15:47 ◼   ► The three knob one was better than this one

00:15:48 ◼   ► in all possible ways.

00:15:50 ◼   ► This is not a great toaster.

00:15:51 ◼   ► It's like, and I was in a department store recently

00:15:54 ◼   ► looking at like the toaster oven section.

00:15:56 ◼   ► - Of course you were.

00:15:57 ◼   ► - A lot of the ones that were in there,

00:15:59 ◼   ► I had actually reviewed.

00:16:00 ◼   ► So that was interesting.

00:16:01 ◼   ► I was just looking at them again to survey the field of all these things we're seeing.

00:16:04 ◼   ► Am I just getting crappy toasters?

00:16:06 ◼   ► Because still, none of them have been as good as my super expensive toaster.

00:16:09 ◼   ► And even my super expensive toaster I have complaints about.

00:16:11 ◼   ► So I saw the fancier version of my super expensive toaster in the store.

00:16:15 ◼   ► It has crappy knobs too.

00:16:16 ◼   ► They're better than my knobs a little bit, but still pretty crappy.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Lots of just terrible knobs in very expensive toasters.

00:16:21 ◼   ► It's not hard, people.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Remember when we had the Hamilton Beach one that actually had good knobs even though they

00:16:27 ◼   ► felt good to turn, even though you couldn't tell where the heck they were pointing?

00:16:30 ◼   ► always blow it. Yeah there was no indicator. There was but it's really hard

00:16:33 ◼   ► to see. They always blow it in some way like lots of bad doors like if I was if

00:16:39 ◼   ► I could talk to the people who are designing toasters like I understand you

00:16:42 ◼   ► have to make it cheaply you know you have to have your margins I'm not saying

00:16:45 ◼   ► every toaster has to be $200 right? I think you can make a decent 40 or $50

00:16:50 ◼   ► toaster if you just concentrate on the right things make make the controls

00:16:54 ◼   ► reasonable it doesn't cost any more money to have a good control you don't

00:16:58 ◼   ► have to put a fancy LCD screen or whatever, if you're just going to have a bunch of knobs,

00:17:01 ◼   ► just don't make the mistakes of like having to turn a little ticking thing to the right

00:17:04 ◼   ► angle every time.

00:17:05 ◼   ► Oh, and by the way, this toaster also ticks.

00:17:07 ◼   ► It's a quieter tick, but it does tick.

00:17:10 ◼   ► Like having buttons, like I feel like you can do a reasonable set of controls that combines

00:17:15 ◼   ► the best of knobs and buttons.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Have a door that feels good to open and close.

00:17:19 ◼   ► Have a wire rack that feels like it's sturdy.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Does that really cost that much more?

00:17:22 ◼   ► It's like it's a box with a door and some knobs and a tray.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Concentrate on those things.

00:17:29 ◼   ► Make a nice door.

00:17:30 ◼   ► Make some nice knobs.

00:17:31 ◼   ► Make a nice tray.

00:17:33 ◼   ► I don't think that's asking for everything.

00:17:35 ◼   ► And I feel like it's almost like they should take some lessons from kids' toys, which also

00:17:40 ◼   ► have to be cheap, but they also have to be durable.

00:17:42 ◼   ► The toys on the doors and stuff, on the little Fisher Price toys and everything, feel so

00:17:47 ◼   ► much better than all these toasters.

00:17:48 ◼   ► So I continue to be disappointed with the state of toaster ovens.

00:17:51 ◼   ► This one is not as bad as the hybrid toaster, which is the new low bar, but I do not recommend

00:17:55 ◼   ► it.

00:17:56 ◼   ► - I mean, it seems like there's only basically two prices

00:18:00 ◼   ► that toaster ovens are.

00:18:01 ◼   ► They're either $40 or $200.

00:18:04 ◼   ► And it seems like among the $40 ones that you've reviewed,

00:18:08 ◼   ► that they almost all, like you can get good elements

00:18:12 ◼   ► in all of them.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Like, if you take the best parts of each one

00:18:16 ◼   ► and put them all together, you could make a good toaster.

00:18:19 ◼   ► So it seems like it is--

00:18:20 ◼   ► - Or an okay toaster.

00:18:21 ◼   ► Like, we're not asking for it, it's not amazing,

00:18:23 ◼   ► but there's nothing in it that's embarrassing.

00:18:25 ◼   ► doesn't feel like it's gonna fall apart.

00:18:27 ◼   ► It does the job consistently and in a reasonable manner.

00:18:32 ◼   ► - Now this toaster I see on the front here,

00:18:34 ◼   ► it's advertising that it has even toast technology.

00:18:38 ◼   ► Were you able to test the even toast technology

00:18:40 ◼   ► and does it stand up to that claim?

00:18:41 ◼   ► - It was reasonably even, but for five minutes,

00:18:44 ◼   ► it's probably pretty easy to do even toasting

00:18:46 ◼   ► if you do it super slow.

00:18:49 ◼   ► When you have a really hot element,

00:18:50 ◼   ► that's when you get hot spots.

00:18:51 ◼   ► If you take five minutes, sure, yeah,

00:18:53 ◼   ► it's nice and even across the bread.

00:18:54 ◼   ► And being right in the middle of each thing probably helps.

00:18:58 ◼   ► Because if you have four elements,

00:18:59 ◼   ► if you have two on bottom and two on top

00:19:00 ◼   ► and you just have the two pieces of toast,

00:19:03 ◼   ► if you don't sort of center them over the elements,

00:19:05 ◼   ► but this toaster is small enough

00:19:06 ◼   ► and there's only one element and it's in the middle

00:19:08 ◼   ► that if you just stick toast in there and don't think about it

00:19:10 ◼   ► you're probably gonna stick it somewhere around the middle,

00:19:11 ◼   ► back to front wise and it will come out even.

00:19:13 ◼   ► So it was fine.

00:19:14 ◼   ► If you wanna wait five minutes for your toast,

00:19:17 ◼   ► it will get the job done.

00:19:18 ◼   ► - And finally, did the staff at the store recognize you?

00:19:22 ◼   ► No, this was just a Kohl's.

00:19:25 ◼   ► But how many professional toaster oven reviewers are there in the world?

00:19:29 ◼   ► Maybe like three?

00:19:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:19:32 ◼   ► No one came to help me at all, which is what Kohl's is like.

00:19:35 ◼   ► I didn't need any help, which is fine.

00:19:39 ◼   ► You mentioned the two price ranges, like $40 and $200.

00:19:42 ◼   ► The other thing that kills me is the $200 ones don't feel like $200 appliances.

00:19:45 ◼   ► Again, if you had to make a metal box with a door and knobs and you gave me $200 to do

00:19:49 ◼   ► it, I would make damn sure that those doors...

00:19:51 ◼   ► The doors are better.

00:19:52 ◼   ► The doors have little rubber stops in them, they open and close in a reasonable way except

00:19:56 ◼   ► for the door on my actual toaster which still springs closed and tries to burn you.

00:19:59 ◼   ► But like I said, I think that's just my particular unit and not all of this model.

00:20:05 ◼   ► Because everyone else I ask who has this toaster, they say, "No, my door stays open fine."

00:20:08 ◼   ► But anyway, the doors are better, but the knobs, they're just… and maybe it's

00:20:12 ◼   ► just the Breville ones.

00:20:13 ◼   ► How can you make such a terrible knob?

00:20:14 ◼   ► It feels like a snapped together plastic model from the 80s.

00:20:18 ◼   ► The knobs are just barely hanging on there.

00:20:20 ◼   ► they feel terrible to turn, they're wobbly.

00:20:22 ◼   ► Like on the fancy one they made them like fake chrome,

00:20:24 ◼   ► like shiny, you know, again like a snap together model,

00:20:27 ◼   ► like when you have the chrome finished wheels

00:20:30 ◼   ► on your snap together model car.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Like they're shiny plastic for $250.

00:20:36 ◼   ► I'm not saying you have to give me a metal knob,

00:20:38 ◼   ► but give me a knob that at least feels good to turn

00:20:40 ◼   ► and doesn't wobble in my hand.

00:20:42 ◼   ► - Well this is, I mean this is like,

00:20:44 ◼   ► what you've identified here is like,

00:20:46 ◼   ► this applies to so many different categories of things.

00:20:48 ◼   ► where like, you know, well, thanks to Left of Cards

00:20:51 ◼   ► Against Humanity for sponsoring our show once again.

00:20:54 ◼   ► So what, this applies--

00:20:56 ◼   ► - Way to get out of the ad.

00:20:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, so, well, 'cause I'm gonna run over the time

00:20:59 ◼   ► that I allot for the ads now, so.

00:21:01 ◼   ► ♫ Syracuse and Toaster

00:21:04 ◼   ► ♫ Reviews all day every single day

00:21:06 ◼   ► ♫ Hear 'em talk about Toaster

00:21:09 ◼   ► ♫ And I'm whisked away

00:21:11 ◼   ► ♫ I can love my toaster

00:21:12 ◼   ► But like, this applies to so many things,

00:21:14 ◼   ► like, you know, you have, you have like,

00:21:17 ◼   ► It used to have like, you know, cheap, good,

00:21:20 ◼   ► and then commercial/pro in so many things.

00:21:23 ◼   ► Electronics, you know, appliances, stuff like that.

00:21:26 ◼   ► And now you still have cheap, good,

00:21:29 ◼   ► and commercial/pro price points on things,

00:21:33 ◼   ► but it seems like the middle tier there,

00:21:35 ◼   ► like the prosumer kind of level,

00:21:39 ◼   ► that in so many things is now just like

00:21:42 ◼   ► the same cheap garbage that the cheap one is made out of

00:21:46 ◼   ► doesn't last any longer, isn't of much higher quality,

00:21:49 ◼   ► just has more bells and whistles on it.

00:21:51 ◼   ► But it's still a cheap, quality thing

00:21:54 ◼   ► that you're just paying $200 for.

00:21:56 ◼   ► - And I think toaster ovens in particular,

00:21:58 ◼   ► the original Hyper Critical episode about this

00:22:00 ◼   ► was titled "Worse and More Diverse"

00:22:01 ◼   ► because there are so many more toasters

00:22:03 ◼   ► in all different shapes and sizes,

00:22:05 ◼   ► but all of them are crappier.

00:22:06 ◼   ► And I don't think that's true across the board.

00:22:08 ◼   ► The great example is any Japanese car,

00:22:11 ◼   ► Honda Toyota cars, the knobs and stuff in those

00:22:13 ◼   ► feel great compared to toaster knobs.

00:22:15 ◼   ► They're not as nice as obviously BMW or Lexus or Mercedes controls, but they are really,

00:22:20 ◼   ► really good.

00:22:21 ◼   ► They put every toaster to shame.

00:22:22 ◼   ► And you can get that in a Honda Fit for like $15,000.

00:22:24 ◼   ► The cheapest car you can get.

00:22:26 ◼   ► They still have nice turn stalks.

00:22:29 ◼   ► In the grand scheme of things, nothing like just these pieces of crap that are on a $200

00:22:34 ◼   ► toaster.

00:22:35 ◼   ► I feel like it is possible at the price points they want to hit if they cared about it, because

00:22:40 ◼   ► you don't have to do all the bells and whistles.

00:22:41 ◼   ► You don't have to do the actual expensive things of having more healing elements, of

00:22:44 ◼   ► having a little computer and having an LCD screen and crap like that.

00:22:47 ◼   ► Like we understand you have to hit a price point.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Pair it down to just heating elements, simple, you know, mechanical analog controls for them,

00:22:56 ◼   ► a box and a door, and just concentrate on the few elements that you touch and make them

00:22:59 ◼   ► nice.

00:23:00 ◼   ► And that's what the cheap car companies do.

00:23:01 ◼   ► These cars don't have fancy features.

00:23:02 ◼   ► A Honda Fit does not have a camera that shows you all around your car, but composited out

00:23:06 ◼   ► of a bunch of cameras at the corners of your car so you can park without scraping your

00:23:09 ◼   ► --

00:23:10 ◼   ► It's such a great feature.

00:23:11 ◼   ► -- your wheels and things.

00:23:12 ◼   ► I know it is.

00:23:13 ◼   ► money for that. They have the money for a bunch of plastic on a dashboard, a plastic

00:23:18 ◼   ► wheel, and they find a way to make parts that are cheap, that are simple to assemble, and

00:23:25 ◼   ► that feel not like pieces of crap.

00:23:28 ◼   ► Okay. So, what's our first topic this week?

00:23:31 ◼   ► We have follow-up from the chat room. Do you want to – I missed this one. I'm assuming

00:23:35 ◼   ► Casey put this in there.

00:23:36 ◼   ► I have no idea what you're talking about.

00:23:37 ◼   ► The SSG thing.

00:23:38 ◼   ► Yeah, if they say it in the chat room, we say it's real-time follow-up from our secret

00:23:42 ◼   ► anonymous tipster who foolishly hangs out in the chatroom every week or as far as we're

00:23:46 ◼   ► able to tell, same guy, says "Apple Samsung 800, 8xxx meaning the 840, 850, whatever series

00:23:52 ◼   ► firmware is not the same as retail drives, we fix the bugs." I don't know what that means

00:23:57 ◼   ► because I bought mine from Amazon or whatever, it's not Apple's thing, but does Apple ship

00:24:01 ◼   ► devices with Samsung 800 series SSDs in them? Well they have like Samsung manufactured sticks

00:24:08 ◼   ► in their various, like the Mac Pro, I think that's a Samsung SSD stick and stuff like

00:24:14 ◼   ► that, but it's not packaged in a 2.5 inch drive enclosure with the serial ATA port in

00:24:18 ◼   ► the back. It's just like, it's in those little sticks they put in all their computers.

00:24:22 ◼   ► So that counts as like the 800 series, even though obviously it looks nothing like the

00:24:25 ◼   ► things you buy from retail?

00:24:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, yeah, the tips are saying now, those are just variants of normal Samsung

00:24:31 ◼   ► SSDs, so yeah, I'm sure like, you know, the Samsung giant serial number, you know, MSATA

00:24:36 ◼   ► thing is, say, a rebranded 840 Pro or something.

00:24:40 ◼   ► Yeah, well, that doesn't help me or doesn't help anyone else who bought a, you know, commercial

00:24:44 ◼   ► third party, buy it directly from, you know, Samsung branded thing that looks like a, you

00:24:50 ◼   ► know, little two and a half inch drive but actually has a bunch of chips inside it. But

00:24:53 ◼   ► anyway, yeah, Apple tends to do that. That's what it means. You know, Apple qualifies their

00:24:56 ◼   ► drives to work with trim or not. And, you know, they test them and they make sure they

00:25:02 ◼   ► and so if you're buying third-party stuff,

00:25:04 ◼   ► Apple's default is, "No, we won't enable trim for you

00:25:07 ◼   ► "because we haven't tested your thing,

00:25:09 ◼   ► "and be careful if you haven't tested it either."

00:25:12 ◼   ► I don't know if people have the option

00:25:15 ◼   ► of trying to fix the firmware

00:25:16 ◼   ► in their Samsung 850 retail drives.

00:25:18 ◼   ► I would not recommend that.

00:25:19 ◼   ► - And the tipster is saying that, yes,

00:25:23 ◼   ► the Apple drives are just variants of normal Samsung SSDs.

00:25:28 ◼   ► - Have you guys ever run a firmware update

00:25:30 ◼   ► on a disk of any sort?

00:25:32 ◼   ► - I think I have in the past.

00:25:34 ◼   ► You used to have to boot into DOS to do it,

00:25:36 ◼   ► like give you a floppy drive, do you remember that?

00:25:38 ◼   ► And so I would use like virtual PC,

00:25:41 ◼   ► this is back in the day, you know, before x86 Max,

00:25:43 ◼   ► use virtual PC to be able to use

00:25:47 ◼   ► the virtual floppy drive thing to get it to see my drive.

00:25:50 ◼   ► It was this convoluted, terrifying thing.

00:25:52 ◼   ► But at that point, the drive is empty.

00:25:54 ◼   ► I would make sure, before I attempt this,

00:25:56 ◼   ► get all the data off the drive,

00:25:57 ◼   ► so then I guess worst case scenario,

00:25:59 ◼   ► I brick it and have to send it back

00:26:01 ◼   ► and they send me a new one, but I have done it.

00:26:03 ◼   ► - I don't think I have.

00:26:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, I did it like once and it was one of those,

00:26:07 ◼   ► it was like, it was embarrassingly late in technology

00:26:10 ◼   ► that it was requiring me to use a DOS floppy.

00:26:13 ◼   ► It was like to the point where I had to figure out

00:26:15 ◼   ► how to boot a DOS floppy image

00:26:17 ◼   ► because the computer I had of course didn't have,

00:26:19 ◼   ► it was like 2007, it was like something very late time

00:26:23 ◼   ► that's like, wow, we stopped using floppies

00:26:25 ◼   ► like 10 years beforehand.

00:26:26 ◼   ► - You have to edit your config.sys, right?

00:26:28 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:26:29 ◼   ► - Wow, that's, I actually never was brave enough

00:26:31 ◼   ► to do that, even when I was a PC guy.

00:26:32 ◼   ► - I think that the line was in an Apple ad,

00:26:34 ◼   ► back when they were trying to make fun of DOS,

00:26:36 ◼   ► which was, you know, the appropriate thing to do,

00:26:38 ◼   ► because it was ridiculous at the time,

00:26:39 ◼   ► but they had some kid in the ad say,

00:26:41 ◼   ► you need to add it to your config.sys.

00:26:42 ◼   ► - Nice.

00:26:43 ◼   ► So, Apple Music.

00:26:48 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:26:48 ◼   ► - Have you guys listened to Taylor Swift yet?

00:26:50 ◼   ► - Nope.

00:26:51 ◼   ► - What do you mean yet?

00:26:52 ◼   ► Most of us have heard Taylor Swift already,

00:26:54 ◼   ► but I like the fact that it took a large new product

00:26:57 ◼   ► initiative from Apple to get you to listen to the songs that everyone has been listening

00:27:01 ◼   ► to.

00:27:02 ◼   ► To get me to listen to like the number one selling album of like the last two years or

00:27:06 ◼   ► whatever.

00:27:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Yeah, well, yeah.

00:27:09 ◼   ► So it seems like a pretty good service.

00:27:11 ◼   ► I mean, did you guys, have you guys used streaming services before?

00:27:15 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm a Spotify user and a fairly devout one.

00:27:20 ◼   ► Devout enough that I'm happy enough with it that I've never tried Beats.

00:27:24 ◼   ► I've never tried RDO.

00:27:26 ◼   ► That doesn't mean they're not better, it doesn't mean that I wouldn't like them more, it's

00:27:30 ◼   ► just I've been happy with Spotify and I haven't had any compelling reason to mess with my

00:27:34 ◼   ► setup.

00:27:35 ◼   ► And so I've been fiddling with Apple Music over the last 24 hours as we record this,

00:27:40 ◼   ► we're recording it on Wednesday night and Apple Music launched roughly midday yesterday.

00:27:46 ◼   ► And I didn't play much with the streaming portion of it until today.

00:27:51 ◼   ► I was mostly just listening to Beats 1 because I was really curious to hear how it was.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Like Beats 1 I thought it was entertaining. I thought the music selections were good and varied

00:28:00 ◼   ► pretty early on

00:28:03 ◼   ► They played a

00:28:06 ◼   ► Non English song which took me aback and then I thought you know what that's pretty cool

00:28:11 ◼   ► Actually if this really is worldwide I forget the slogan they use over and over and over again

00:28:16 ◼   ► But apparently not enough yeah, that's right because it would have been burned in by now

00:28:23 ◼   ► But anyways, since it's a worldwide radio station or so they say

00:28:26 ◼   ► The fact that they were playing non English songs, I thought was kind of cool

00:28:31 ◼   ► I don't know Zane Lowe or any of the other DJs from anything, but they all seem pretty entertaining

00:28:37 ◼   ► Today, however, I started playing with what I would call the Spotify like

00:28:42 ◼   ► features of

00:28:45 ◼   ► Apple music so that is to say I want to play

00:28:48 ◼   ► such-and-such album by such-and-such artist right now and

00:28:53 ◼   ► And it worked just fine, but I've been thinking about it a lot since I've been fiddling with

00:29:00 ◼   ► it around lunchtime today, and I haven't come up with a good way to describe it, but I don't

00:29:05 ◼   ► like it.

00:29:07 ◼   ► And I feel the best way I can describe it, and I can't decide if this was the opinion

00:29:14 ◼   ► I had before I even tried it, and so now I'm just fitting my experience to my previously

00:29:19 ◼   ► held opinion, but it felt like it's a bunch of stuff just stapled onto the side of iTunes,

00:29:25 ◼   ► which is already relatively confusing to me to begin with because I don't use iTunes very

00:29:30 ◼   ► often.

00:29:31 ◼   ► And it just felt weird.

00:29:34 ◼   ► Whereas Spotify, it has many of its own UI issues.

00:29:38 ◼   ► It has many, many problems and many, many poor choices.

00:29:43 ◼   ► But by and large, it does not take me long to figure out how to go to a particular album

00:29:48 ◼   ► to a particular artist or to perform a particular operation.

00:29:52 ◼   ► Whereas, as an example, I wanted to listen to,

00:29:56 ◼   ► or I wanted to see the activity-based playlists that they had set up.

00:30:00 ◼   ► A friend of the show, Underscore, had snarkily pointed out that

00:30:04 ◼   ► they have a "Getting It On" playlist, I believe it's called.

00:30:08 ◼   ► And so I was going to look and see what these playlists were and what options they were,

00:30:11 ◼   ► and it took me literally five minutes to find it.

00:30:14 ◼   ► Because I thought it would be in the, either the playlists section,

00:30:17 ◼   ► section, but no, that was my playlist in iTunes, traditional iTunes. Then I thought it would

00:30:22 ◼   ► be in the "For You" section, but no, they weren't for me. And so I went looking in every

00:30:28 ◼   ► section except the section that it was in, which was, I think, new. Because clearly all

00:30:32 ◼   ► these playlists should be in the "New" section. And so, I don't know, I just, I'm not saying

00:30:38 ◼   ► I don't like it, I'm not saying I'm not going to switch to it. I very well may switch to

00:30:42 ◼   ► But my initial impression is Beats 1 thumbs up, Apple Music as a streaming on-demand service,

00:30:49 ◼   ► thumb to the side.

00:30:51 ◼   ► Haven't really decided yet.

00:30:52 ◼   ► You know, when Apple did photos recently, I felt like they kind of wiped the slate clean

00:30:59 ◼   ► of all their past efforts.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Like they had accumulated a lot of history with Aperture and iPhoto, and clearly they

00:31:05 ◼   ► were like, "All right, do over.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Start over from scratch.

00:31:08 ◼   ► Let's bring only what we need with us and give it a sort of migration path.

00:31:13 ◼   ► And the same thing with the photo streams, they kind of kept those on, but they get reconceptualized

00:31:17 ◼   ► a little bit in the new service with an icon photo library.

00:31:22 ◼   ► It was their chance to put a big reset button.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And Apple Music, product naming-wise, looks like, oh, what crap are we doing with iTunes

00:31:30 ◼   ► and iTunes match and this, that, and the other thing.

00:31:32 ◼   ► Apple Music, let's reset, new name, we're just going to start over.

00:31:36 ◼   ► But as Casey just pointed out, they didn't.

00:31:38 ◼   ► What they did was took the existing mess, which involves iTunes and a bunch of other

00:31:41 ◼   ► crap, and added more stuff to it.

00:31:44 ◼   ► Even iTunes Match is still around and is confusingly different.

00:31:47 ◼   ► We should put this link in the show.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Not Serenity had a good article today explaining, "Do I need iTunes Match if I have Apple Music?

00:31:53 ◼   ► Do I just want one or the other?

00:31:55 ◼   ► Are there differences?

00:31:56 ◼   ► What are those differences?"

00:31:57 ◼   ► It's super confusing.

00:31:58 ◼   ► That's before you even get into, "So the little icon on my iPhone has changed and now I can't

00:32:02 ◼   ► find anything anymore.

00:32:03 ◼   ► And by the way, iTunes 12.2 continues, you know, doesn't even have Apple Music in it,

00:32:07 ◼   ► but continues to have more different changes.

00:32:10 ◼   ► It doesn't have Apple Music, right?

00:32:11 ◼   ► Like it doesn't have the streaming stuff in it?

00:32:13 ◼   ► iTunes, now, iTunes on the desktop, the new version that came out like a few hours after

00:32:17 ◼   ► Beats launched, sorry, Apple Music launched, that has everything.

00:32:20 ◼   ► Oh, all right.

00:32:21 ◼   ► So it must have been one before it had been updated because the one came out for iOS first.

00:32:25 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:32:26 ◼   ► But anyway, like, this is, these are features on top of all the existing other features.

00:32:30 ◼   ► Some features are superseded and replaced by new ones.

00:32:32 ◼   ► Some are not, and some things have different names and they're in different places, so

00:32:36 ◼   ► it's not the sort of clean sheet reset.

00:32:38 ◼   ► Which makes some sense because it is an additive thing.

00:32:40 ◼   ► It's like, well we already had the thing where you could download and buy music, and we already

00:32:43 ◼   ► had the thing where you could rip your CDs and organize music, and we already had all

00:32:46 ◼   ► these other things in podcasts and syncing your iOS devices and all the other crap you

00:32:50 ◼   ► can do in iTunes.

00:32:51 ◼   ► But we didn't have a streaming service, now we have a streaming service and we also have

00:32:55 ◼   ► this radio station and we also have, like, boy there's a lot of crap in there.

00:32:59 ◼   ► And for someone like me who doesn't, like I have Spotify installed and I've used it

00:33:02 ◼   ► a few times, but for someone like me who's not, like I tend to just want to listen to

00:33:05 ◼   ► my music.

00:33:07 ◼   ► All this other stuff is, I look at all this other stuff and think, in what way does this

00:33:14 ◼   ► either help or hurt my ability to listen to music the way I normally listen to it?

00:33:18 ◼   ► Is it going to, for example, scramble all my album and artist metadata as some people

00:33:21 ◼   ► are reporting the new version of iTunes has done to them, if they had previously used

00:33:24 ◼   ► it, iTunes match?

00:33:25 ◼   ► Will it let me say get higher bit rate DRMP versions of songs that I ripped from CD many

00:33:30 ◼   ► years ago?

00:33:31 ◼   ► iTunes match did that.

00:33:32 ◼   ► That was a good feature.

00:33:33 ◼   ► It was a plus.

00:33:34 ◼   ► Will it let me not have access to all of my music on my iPhone but not have to have all

00:33:38 ◼   ► my music on my iPhone?

00:33:39 ◼   ► Again, iTunes match did that.

00:33:40 ◼   ► That was a plus.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Apple Music stuff I feel like is neutral or a minus because it makes it harder for me

00:33:44 ◼   ► to find things that I want to find and the sort of teething bugs .0 release or whatever

00:33:51 ◼   ► even though this is kind of like Beats Music 2, or whatever their service was called before,

00:33:56 ◼   ► make me worry about it.

00:33:58 ◼   ► So I did sign up for the trial, but I'm a little bit afraid of the new version of iTunes

00:34:02 ◼   ► on my Mac, and I guess maybe I'll look into the streaming things and try it, but it's

00:34:08 ◼   ► not a slam on their service, I can't really judge it because I'm not a streaming music

00:34:11 ◼   ► kind of person, like I was never into any of the other ones I installed either.

00:34:14 ◼   ► I'm mostly looking at it as a potential harm to my existing music listening habits, which

00:34:21 ◼   ► you know, to Apple's credit, they're still trying to support that.

00:34:23 ◼   ► Like, you can still listen to music that way if you want to.

00:34:26 ◼   ► And maybe you might still want to subscribe to Apple Music for the iCloud syncing features,

00:34:31 ◼   ► but maybe not if you already subscribe to iTunes Match, which is way cheaper.

00:34:36 ◼   ► So anyway, I feel like this is a very confusing situation for me, and I'm not sure what to

00:34:40 ◼   ► make of it.

00:34:41 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems like, you know, I totally agree with you on, you know, the problem of bolting

00:34:46 ◼   ► all this onto their existing very complicated iTunes/music setup that, you know, they have

00:34:53 ◼   ► so much legacy there. And, you know, comparing it with Photos was apt, you know, but, you

00:34:58 ◼   ► know, with Photos, they did a clean start and that was a massive engineering effort,

00:35:03 ◼   ► it seems. I mean, it seemed like it, first of all, I think it was late, but it was also,

00:35:09 ◼   ► you know, just it was a massive effort, I would imagine, to get to basically, you know,

00:35:16 ◼   ► try to replace iPhoto and Aperture with this new thing

00:35:19 ◼   ► and do a pretty decent job at a 1.0,

00:35:21 ◼   ► plus this massive cloud backend stuff

00:35:23 ◼   ► and having iOS match up the whole time with the desktop,

00:35:27 ◼   ► like that's just a massive effort

00:35:29 ◼   ► that had to go into photos to make that happen.

00:35:32 ◼   ► I would love if they did the same thing with iTunes

00:35:35 ◼   ► and deprecate iTunes and have a new app

00:35:38 ◼   ► just called Music, even on Mac,

00:35:41 ◼   ► and have a new music.app that only does music,

00:35:45 ◼   ► and even leave videos and stuff, make a separate videos app.

00:35:51 ◼   ► Just like they split off iBooks, and that was fine.

00:35:54 ◼   ► They even now kicked audiobooks out of the music on iOS

00:35:59 ◼   ► and left that in the iBooks app now.

00:36:01 ◼   ► They can do the same thing on Mac.

00:36:03 ◼   ► Basically, slowly divest iTunes of the things

00:36:06 ◼   ► that it does that aren't music.

00:36:08 ◼   ► - And fold iTunes Match into it.

00:36:10 ◼   ► - The fact that iTunes Match still exists,

00:36:13 ◼   ► there should be one new thing that encompasses,

00:36:15 ◼   ► functionality is fine, but there should be one new thing

00:36:18 ◼   ► with various different price points and features.

00:36:21 ◼   ► It should supersede iTunes Match.

00:36:22 ◼   ► In the same way that photo streams still exist

00:36:25 ◼   ► in the new photos things, but they're re-conceptualized

00:36:27 ◼   ► as a share section of iPhoto.

00:36:29 ◼   ► So if you had existing ones, they're there,

00:36:30 ◼   ► and you can make new ones, but it's like,

00:36:32 ◼   ► it's under a new umbrella, a new name,

00:36:35 ◼   ► a new pricing structure, there's just one thing

00:36:37 ◼   ► you have to know about, not seven layers of legacy things

00:36:39 ◼   ► that you have to know about and understand

00:36:40 ◼   ► how they interact.

00:36:42 ◼   ► That's how it should be presented and conceptualized.

00:36:44 ◼   ► And like you said, the implementation-wise,

00:36:46 ◼   ► if you're gonna try to conceptualize it,

00:36:47 ◼   ► is that you also have to get it out of the app

00:36:49 ◼   ► that you use to sync your iPod Shuffle or whatever.

00:36:52 ◼   ► - Exactly, and I think that's the main problem,

00:36:54 ◼   ► is they have all this massive legacy stuff

00:36:56 ◼   ► that iTunes still has to do.

00:36:58 ◼   ► There's still nothing else that can do a lot of these roles.

00:37:01 ◼   ► And yes, you have iOS devices that can set themselves up now

00:37:06 ◼   ► without a computer and never be synced to iTunes at all,

00:37:08 ◼   ► but there's still, A, there's still a lot of people

00:37:11 ◼   ► who do sync it to iTunes, or who do use iTunes

00:37:13 ◼   ► to manage their iOS devices, and B,

00:37:15 ◼   ► there's all those devices they keep selling called iPods

00:37:18 ◼   ► that still need iTunes, so it's like,

00:37:20 ◼   ► there's still, and granted, they're not selling

00:37:22 ◼   ► a ton of iPods, but they are still selling them,

00:37:24 ◼   ► and they might be getting new colors

00:37:25 ◼   ► in a couple of weeks or whatever,

00:37:26 ◼   ► like it doesn't, it seems like the massive amount

00:37:30 ◼   ► of engineering effort that was required

00:37:33 ◼   ► to dump iPhoto in Aperture and make this new photos thing

00:37:37 ◼   ► with this new iCloud photos library, the corresponding scale of the job to do

00:37:44 ◼   ► that for iTunes and music was probably just too big to do in a reasonable amount

00:37:49 ◼   ► of time, and it's just it's not time for that yet. I don't know if it ever will

00:37:52 ◼   ► be, but it's I think it's clear that Apple believed it was not time for that

00:37:57 ◼   ► yet and that they probably had to move faster to get you know they were clearly

00:38:02 ◼   ► like like the relevance of of the iTunes music store to to buy music outright. I

00:38:07 ◼   ► I think was declining faster than they probably expected.

00:38:10 ◼   ► - Well, they had plenty of time to react.

00:38:12 ◼   ► That's something we need to say for the context here.

00:38:15 ◼   ► This is a me too move.

00:38:16 ◼   ► Apple should have had a streaming service long ago.

00:38:19 ◼   ► They spent a long time getting one.

00:38:20 ◼   ► They ended up having to acquire a company

00:38:22 ◼   ► to accelerate their ability to have one.

00:38:24 ◼   ► But if you had asked, the rise of all the streaming services,

00:38:28 ◼   ► it's not like this happened overnight.

00:38:30 ◼   ► It seems to have caught Apple flat-footed,

00:38:33 ◼   ► but it shouldn't have because there was plenty of time

00:38:35 ◼   ► for them to realize this is a thing they should have

00:38:37 ◼   ► it seems like they just couldn't get it together and ended up having to make an acquisition

00:38:42 ◼   ► to bring that to bear.

00:38:43 ◼   ► And my favorite hobby horse with the whole server-side stuff, and which to Apple's credit

00:38:48 ◼   ► they're actually making some motions on, is like, "Oh, we did that thing with photos.

00:38:52 ◼   ► It was a big effort.

00:38:53 ◼   ► We've got to do it for music too.

00:38:54 ◼   ► We don't have time.

00:38:55 ◼   ► It's too much effort."

00:38:56 ◼   ► If you concentrate on producing infrastructure for network services, instead of concentrating

00:39:03 ◼   ► "Oh, we've got to redo photos." If you make infrastructure, like say CloudKit, that is

00:39:07 ◼   ► an example of infrastructure. If you do a good job with your general purpose infrastructure,

00:39:12 ◼   ► lots of sort of online powered applications have similar needs. And I've hammered on this

00:39:15 ◼   ► again and again, that's like all Google does it seems like is make incredibly powerful

00:39:19 ◼   ► infrastructure upon which they can build all sorts of applications. Each one of those applications

00:39:24 ◼   ► doesn't have to reinvent the wheel and find a new way to store its data and stuff. So

00:39:27 ◼   ► I would hope that some of the effort they put into the backend for photos would give

00:39:32 ◼   ► them a leg up on potentially in the future rejiggering it.

00:39:37 ◼   ► It's tough to think if they bought it, it's not something they did in house.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Beats is what it is, they can't rewrite all of Beats code overnight or whatever.

00:39:43 ◼   ► But I'm hoping some of that infrastructure work that they're finally doing will pay dividends

00:39:47 ◼   ► in like, now it shouldn't be such a herculean effort to do the same thing you did for Fotos

00:39:51 ◼   ► for iTunes because A, you've done it once before, and B, you should be able to reuse

00:39:55 ◼   ► a lot of that work, a lot of the expertise, a lot of the experience, a lot of the code,

00:39:59 ◼   ► a lot of the server-side stuff, a lot of the frameworks,

00:40:02 ◼   ► that should help you accelerate the-- when they have

00:40:05 ◼   ► to do the music app that is like, oh, it's a total rewrite

00:40:08 ◼   ► or whatever, all the things they did for the Photos app,

00:40:12 ◼   ► that's like framework stuff.

00:40:13 ◼   ► They seem to understand that.

00:40:13 ◼   ► Like, oh, Collection View, that would be useful everywhere.

00:40:15 ◼   ► We should make that and have it everywhere.

00:40:17 ◼   ► Core Animation, that's client-side infrastructure.

00:40:19 ◼   ► We talked about this before.

00:40:20 ◼   ► Server-side infrastructure, how do you store a bunch of data?

00:40:23 ◼   ► How do you get it on demand in a reliable way?

00:40:26 ◼   ► and I have a database to store all the metadata,

00:40:29 ◼   ► how do I make all your stuff be in the cloud

00:40:31 ◼   ► and only parts of it on your devices?

00:40:32 ◼   ► And that's what they're trying to do with photos

00:40:34 ◼   ► and music is actually data volume wise an easier problem

00:40:37 ◼   ► because photos are bigger than music, so for the most part.

00:40:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I think really the challenges we see here

00:40:43 ◼   ► are purely that, it's the same thing like every time iTunes

00:40:47 ◼   ► gets a redesign, like the desktop,

00:40:49 ◼   ► every time there's a new design for iTunes,

00:40:52 ◼   ► it really just makes the app harder and more confusing

00:40:54 ◼   ► to use because they can't actually remove features

00:40:58 ◼   ► from it for various reasons.

00:41:00 ◼   ► So instead, they just hide things in different modes

00:41:04 ◼   ► and drawers and stuff.

00:41:05 ◼   ► And it's just like, it's weird.

00:41:07 ◼   ► You just get this impossible to use application

00:41:09 ◼   ► that is extremely complicated but is trying to look simple.

00:41:12 ◼   ► And they move things around a lot.

00:41:14 ◼   ► And that upsets people who are like,

00:41:15 ◼   ► I knew where that was before.

00:41:16 ◼   ► And now I don't.

00:41:17 ◼   ► And it's like, I bet if you asked them, they'd say, OK.

00:41:20 ◼   ► If you knew where it was before, it's weird that we moved it.

00:41:23 ◼   ► But if you've never used it before,

00:41:24 ◼   ► the new location is better for reasons X, Y, and Z.

00:41:26 ◼   ► And maybe they're right, but for,

00:41:29 ◼   ► and maybe they're even right that there are more new users

00:41:32 ◼   ► than there are existing ones.

00:41:33 ◼   ► But just constantly reshuffling the deck chairs,

00:41:35 ◼   ► especially kind of like when they change

00:41:38 ◼   ► the whole iTunes DJ functionality

00:41:40 ◼   ► and replace it with Up Next.

00:41:42 ◼   ► Not only do people know how the iTunes DJ functionality

00:41:45 ◼   ► worked, but it was around long enough that people

00:41:46 ◼   ► were like, kind of get into a groove with it.

00:41:48 ◼   ► They have kind of like a workflow of how they play music

00:41:50 ◼   ► at parties or whatever involving iTunes DJ

00:41:52 ◼   ► or whatever that feature was called,

00:41:53 ◼   ► and then it was replaced with UpNext,

00:41:55 ◼   ► they can say, "Oh, UpNext is better for reasons X, Y, and Z."

00:41:58 ◼   ► It's like, "But I can't reproduce my workflow."

00:42:00 ◼   ► It's, you know, not that iTunes is, you know,

00:42:02 ◼   ► like a desktop publishing application

00:42:05 ◼   ► or Photoshop or whatever,

00:42:06 ◼   ► but you're just constantly moving things around

00:42:10 ◼   ► to try to find, maybe this arrangement

00:42:12 ◼   ► will be more pleasing, but like you said, Marco,

00:42:14 ◼   ► there's only, if you keep the same set of things

00:42:17 ◼   ► and you don't wanna give up anything,

00:42:19 ◼   ► which you probably don't because it's not like

00:42:20 ◼   ► there's lots of unessential functionality.

00:42:22 ◼   ► It's just like the functionality of seven apps in one.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Moving it around just pisses people off

00:42:28 ◼   ► who you're experienced loyal users,

00:42:30 ◼   ► and you can't actually make it that much simpler,

00:42:33 ◼   ► because all the crap is still there somewhere.

00:42:35 ◼   ► - Right, exactly, and by the way,

00:42:37 ◼   ► there's the big Windows question

00:42:39 ◼   ► of how do you enable these things for people on Windows,

00:42:42 ◼   ► so they need a bunch of crap for that.

00:42:44 ◼   ► There's obviously tons of technical debt here

00:42:47 ◼   ► for things like I still have to quit my music player

00:42:51 ◼   ► when I upgrade my developer compiler tools

00:42:54 ◼   ► because they're related.

00:42:55 ◼   ► It's like there's so many weird little tie-ins to iTunes

00:42:59 ◼   ► that have been accumulating over the years

00:43:01 ◼   ► that I think any kind of meaningful change to it

00:43:05 ◼   ► is extremely unlikely to happen

00:43:07 ◼   ► just because it seems like it's never going to be worth

00:43:11 ◼   ► the probably surprisingly large engineering effort

00:43:14 ◼   ► to substantially improve it and break things up

00:43:17 ◼   ► and start clean.

00:43:19 ◼   ► - Well, you said never and we know about that.

00:43:21 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:43:22 ◼   ► - On a limited time scale.

00:43:23 ◼   ► - Thus far, yeah, that's come up recently.

00:43:26 ◼   ► I'm trying to figure out if I ever actually said that

00:43:28 ◼   ► or if you guys said it as an attempt to characterize

00:43:30 ◼   ► and mock my line of reasoning.

00:43:33 ◼   ► And so far no one has found, they found me saying it

00:43:36 ◼   ► in reply to Casey saying it back to me,

00:43:37 ◼   ► but I don't know if I ever said that.

00:43:39 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:43:40 ◼   ► - Underscore will find it.

00:43:41 ◼   ► He finds everything. - Someone tried

00:43:42 ◼   ► and they thought they had found it,

00:43:43 ◼   ► really they just found Casey saying it snidely.

00:43:46 ◼   ► So it was obvious that at some point previously

00:43:48 ◼   ► that it had come up before.

00:43:50 ◼   ► - If I remember correctly, I think it was

00:43:52 ◼   ► when I was saying Apple didn't really need

00:43:55 ◼   ► to replace Objective-C, and you were saying

00:43:58 ◼   ► on an infinite time scale, yeah.

00:43:59 ◼   ► - The argument you're getting at I did make,

00:44:01 ◼   ► but I'm saying those exact words.

00:44:03 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:44:03 ◼   ► - Because it keeps being called

00:44:04 ◼   ► my infinite time scale argument,

00:44:06 ◼   ► and I guess it's more like that's Marco's name,

00:44:10 ◼   ► Marco's snide characterization of my much more subtle

00:44:13 ◼   ► and nuanced argument.

00:44:15 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, Derpy, Mud Lake.

00:44:17 ◼   ► - Or maybe I actually said that.

00:44:18 ◼   ► I'm willing to believe that I actually said it too,

00:44:20 ◼   ► I just don't remember it because so long ago.

00:44:24 ◼   ► But anyway, yeah, iTunes,

00:44:25 ◼   ► something's gonna have to be done eventually for now.

00:44:29 ◼   ► They just are content to keep changing the icon

00:44:31 ◼   ► and moving crap around in the UI.

00:44:33 ◼   ► But iOS got, I mean, I don't know how new the iOS app is.

00:44:36 ◼   ► Like it's newish, certainly there's less technical debt

00:44:39 ◼   ► in the iOS one and they did move crap around a lot.

00:44:42 ◼   ► And if you, that's the thing, like if you,

00:44:45 ◼   ► even if you don't sign up for Apple Music,

00:44:47 ◼   ► a lot of the options it seems like are moved around

00:44:50 ◼   ► or hidden or not there and you actually have to go

00:44:51 ◼   ► into the settings app and say Apple Music off

00:44:54 ◼   ► and then it looks more like the old music player app.

00:44:57 ◼   ► I did sign up for the trial, and by the way,

00:45:01 ◼   ► if you sign up for the free trial,

00:45:02 ◼   ► there's like a three month free trial,

00:45:03 ◼   ► which is pretty generous as far as free trials go.

00:45:08 ◼   ► It will auto renew for whatever price you sign up for,

00:45:11 ◼   ► but you can turn off the auto renewals.

00:45:12 ◼   ► Somebody tweeted instructions for doing that.

00:45:14 ◼   ► I followed their instructions and it wasn't that bad.

00:45:16 ◼   ► It was like, go to your Apple ID, go to manage,

00:45:18 ◼   ► and then go turn off auto renew.

00:45:20 ◼   ► So it's kind of slimy that they turn auto renew on

00:45:23 ◼   ► by default, I'd rather have it say,

00:45:25 ◼   ► you know, like a Squarespace real free trial,

00:45:27 ◼   ► like it's a free trial, and at the end of that,

00:45:29 ◼   ► then we'll do this, say hey, you've been using this

00:45:31 ◼   ► for three months, if you like it, pay money,

00:45:32 ◼   ► rather than just saying, oh, we're just gonna sign you up

00:45:36 ◼   ► for auto renew. I suppose it would pop up, send the email or whatever like all the subscriptions

00:45:40 ◼   ► do and say, "By the way, your iCloud storage is about to renew in six days to give you

00:45:45 ◼   ► a chance to cancel or whatever." But it would be nicer if they didn't have the auto renew.

00:45:48 ◼   ► But apparently Apple is not that far on the light side of the forest that they're not

00:45:52 ◼   ► going to have any auto renew. But you can turn it off. But anyway, I have signed up

00:45:56 ◼   ► to do that. I can still find my music. I am now slightly fearful from reading the horror

00:46:01 ◼   ► stories of what it might do to my metadata and stuff for all my songs.

00:46:04 ◼   ► So I'm kind of warily watching it and being careful with how I play back my music.

00:46:10 ◼   ► So to turn off this auto-renew, if you are in Apple Music in just about any tab, it looks

00:46:18 ◼   ► like you hit the little avatar profile person in the upper left.

00:46:23 ◼   ► And then there's a button for a row for "view Apple ID."

00:46:28 ◼   ► And then in there, there's a subscription section, there's a manage button, and then

00:46:32 ◼   ► in there, you can say, it says your membership, Apple Music membership, and you can turn it

00:46:38 ◼   ► off in there.

00:46:39 ◼   ► So, just FYI.

00:46:40 ◼   ► >> Yeah, it seems like it's very, very similar to the auto-renewing subscriptions that they

00:46:44 ◼   ► have in iOS for things like Newsstand publications.

00:46:46 ◼   ► By the way, Newsstand is dead, yay!

00:46:48 ◼   ► And other things, any kind of auto-renewing thing.

00:46:51 ◼   ► >> It's funny you bring that up because as I went through the stance to confirm I knew

00:46:55 ◼   ► how to do it, I noticed that I had one other thing in subscriptions. Would you like to

00:46:59 ◼   ► guess what it is?

00:47:00 ◼   ► The magazine?

00:47:01 ◼   ► That's correct.

00:47:02 ◼   ► Nice. Although it shouldn't be billing anymore. I think it's...

00:47:05 ◼   ► No, no, no. It's expired. Yeah. But either way, I thought that was kind of funny. So

00:47:10 ◼   ► why don't you tell us about something else that's cool?

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00:50:24 ◼   ► - All right, so anything else about Apple Music?

00:50:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, I thought the sort of first run experience

00:50:30 ◼   ► where it shows you the artist bubbles,

00:50:33 ◼   ► you can tap them multiple times to make them bigger

00:50:35 ◼   ► and it shows the picture of the artist on them.

00:50:37 ◼   ► They demoed that in the keynote

00:50:39 ◼   ► when they were introducing it and I went through it

00:50:41 ◼   ► and I was disappointed for a couple reasons.

00:50:43 ◼   ► One, the little bubbles it gave me,

00:50:46 ◼   ► I was looking for my favorite bands and they were not there.

00:50:49 ◼   ► So I'm not sure how it was coming up with the button.

00:50:51 ◼   ► You could do like more artists,

00:50:52 ◼   ► I kept hitting more artists,

00:50:53 ◼   ► hoping eventually it would rotate in

00:50:54 ◼   ► some of my favorite bands because I think that,

00:50:56 ◼   ► if it's trying to get an idea of what kind of music I like,

00:50:59 ◼   ► I'd like to tap the bubbles for U2R

00:51:01 ◼   ► Bruce Springsteen Radiohead, like that's a good start right there, right?

00:51:04 ◼   ► You know, we can branch out and keep going, right? And those just weren't there.

00:51:07 ◼   ► But two, I don't think it should have had to ask me at all because I've been an iTunes match

00:51:12 ◼   ► subscriber for a long time. It's got all my play counts for like for years worth of play,

00:51:18 ◼   ► cumulative play counts across all devices. It's got that in the cloud somewhere, right?

00:51:24 ◼   ► Why does it have to ask me who my favorite artists are? Don't ask me. You've got the actual data.

00:51:28 ◼   ► No matter what I say, like I mean you can have both.

00:51:31 ◼   ► I tweeted this, I thought it was ridiculous

00:51:32 ◼   ► that they didn't use this information.

00:51:33 ◼   ► There's a couple of angles to this.

00:51:34 ◼   ► One, the angle is you don't have to do that bubble thing

00:51:37 ◼   ► and if you don't do it,

00:51:38 ◼   ► maybe they do use your thing in the cloud.

00:51:39 ◼   ► If that's the case, then their sort of onboarding process

00:51:43 ◼   ► did not make that clear to me.

00:51:44 ◼   ► That if I just skip the bubbles entirely

00:51:47 ◼   ► and don't deal with it,

00:51:48 ◼   ► it will just use the information

00:51:49 ◼   ► it has about my listening habits.

00:51:51 ◼   ► I didn't, that was not made clear to me during the thing,

00:51:53 ◼   ► if it's even true.

00:51:54 ◼   ► And the second thing is like,

00:51:57 ◼   ► having both of those options,

00:51:58 ◼   ► Maybe I don't want you to use my usage data.

00:51:59 ◼   ► Maybe I think my tastes have changed recently.

00:52:01 ◼   ► Maybe I want to give a time window.

00:52:02 ◼   ► There's lots of, I just felt like there's lots of things

00:52:05 ◼   ► they could have and should have done,

00:52:07 ◼   ► and if they are doing them,

00:52:08 ◼   ► they could have communicated it better.

00:52:09 ◼   ► It wasn't a nice first run experience.

00:52:11 ◼   ► And a lot of people said, well,

00:52:12 ◼   ► that's a Google kind of thing to do,

00:52:14 ◼   ► where they make it clear

00:52:16 ◼   ► that they know you're listening experience.

00:52:17 ◼   ► We know they know.

00:52:19 ◼   ► How do you think your play count,

00:52:20 ◼   ► when you play something on your phone,

00:52:22 ◼   ► that you look at the play count in iTunes,

00:52:23 ◼   ► because you have iTunes matches, it increments over there.

00:52:26 ◼   ► We know they know this information.

00:52:27 ◼   ► We have, that's how iTunes match works, right?

00:52:30 ◼   ► And even if it wasn't in the cloud,

00:52:31 ◼   ► even if it was just on your device,

00:52:32 ◼   ► even on a given device, you have at least like

00:52:35 ◼   ► a couple of weeks or months of years of play count data,

00:52:38 ◼   ► depending on how long you've had the device.

00:52:39 ◼   ► So even if you stayed on device,

00:52:41 ◼   ► you could still look up that information.

00:52:43 ◼   ► I would have liked the onboarding process to say,

00:52:45 ◼   ► we do or do not know something about your habits,

00:52:47 ◼   ► either because you just got this phone,

00:52:49 ◼   ► you've never subscribed to iTunes match,

00:52:50 ◼   ► you don't listen to iTunes, you listen to Spotify.

00:52:52 ◼   ► Like, let it tell the person how much it thinks it knows

00:52:55 ◼   ► about your habits and say,

00:52:57 ◼   ► would you like us to use what we know of your habits

00:52:59 ◼   ► over the X number of months or the X number of,

00:53:02 ◼   ► some way of presenting to them to say,

00:53:03 ◼   ► this is how much we know about you.

00:53:04 ◼   ► Do you want us to use that information

00:53:06 ◼   ► to do your recommendations?

00:53:07 ◼   ► Or do you want to pick new things?

00:53:09 ◼   ► And then go through the bubbles process

00:53:10 ◼   ► and then have the bubbles process be a little bit nicer

00:53:12 ◼   ► about guessing which artist it wants to put in the mix.

00:53:16 ◼   ► Maybe it's because, maybe it's just go by your age.

00:53:18 ◼   ► Like that would be, I don't know what kind of algorithms

00:53:20 ◼   ► they use, but age would probably give them a good start.

00:53:25 ◼   ► Maybe they don't have that demographic information either, but again, I don't know how it's coming up with the bubbles

00:53:29 ◼   ► But whatever algorithm it was using the bubbles were not matching up with me

00:53:32 ◼   ► Like it was bands that I had not heard of that were probably bands that the youngsters like

00:53:36 ◼   ► And it just would not bring up a bubble for any of my like top five or top seven

00:53:42 ◼   ► Favorite bands no matter how many times I had more artists

00:53:46 ◼   ► Yeah, so that was that was disappointing other people were saying that the recommendation bubbles led them to a bunch of playlists

00:53:53 ◼   ► that really nailed their taste.

00:53:54 ◼   ► And even after I went through the bubbles

00:53:56 ◼   ► and picked the best ones that I could,

00:53:57 ◼   ► when I saw the sort of page for you

00:53:59 ◼   ► or recommendations for you, they weren't terrible.

00:54:02 ◼   ► So that makes me think it really is using

00:54:04 ◼   ► the iTunes match information behind the scenes,

00:54:06 ◼   ► which again makes me question why the bubbles were there.

00:54:08 ◼   ► But anyway, the bubbles are a neat UI,

00:54:11 ◼   ► but the onboarding experience for Apple Music

00:54:14 ◼   ► for me was not good.

00:54:15 ◼   ► - So real-time follow-up, sort of, kind of.

00:54:20 ◼   ► I was fiddling with Apple Music on my phone

00:54:22 ◼   ► while I was listening to you guys talk, and I went to the Connect tab to see what was

00:54:28 ◼   ► there. And I'll start by saying that I got subscribed to a bunch of artists I could not

00:54:32 ◼   ► possibly care less about when I first got onboarded with the whole Connect thing. That

00:54:39 ◼   ► said, I went through and unselected most of them, kept the ones I liked, and then selected

00:54:44 ◼   ► a couple others that I really enjoy. And so if I were to pick my favorite band right now,

00:54:49 ◼   ► and this has been the case for a few years, and I've mentioned it I think before, that's this band called Mute Math.

00:54:54 ◼   ► And so I was scrolling through Connect, and the second item after Dave Matthews' entry is an entry from Mute Math

00:55:04 ◼   ► where apparently a local magazine from here in Richmond sat down with them either before or after the concert that Aaron and I went to

00:55:13 ◼   ► that was a couple hours away from here, I think it was last month. And I had no idea this existed.

00:55:18 ◼   ► I follow the entire band on Twitter. I follow the band's account on Twitter. I had no idea

00:55:23 ◼   ► that this was a thing. And so when the show's over tomorrow or something, I'm going to go

00:55:26 ◼   ► ahead and read this interview with with pretty much my favorite band from a local magazine.

00:55:32 ◼   ► I had no earthly idea. So that's a pretty cool thing so far. And, and the connect thing

00:55:37 ◼   ► seems like it's being populated by a handful of people somehow to McGraw's in here. I'm

00:55:41 ◼   ► not really sure why. But, but no, it's that I'm impressed that I've already discovered

00:55:47 ◼   ► or it's something I would not have known about otherwise.

00:55:49 ◼   ► - I think it just makes you follow everybody

00:55:50 ◼   ► and every artist in your collection.

00:55:52 ◼   ► Its initial follow list is everybody

00:55:54 ◼   ► who you have music from.

00:55:55 ◼   ► - Which I think that's great.

00:55:56 ◼   ► I mean, for years I've had this problem

00:55:58 ◼   ► where I will have five albums from a band

00:56:03 ◼   ► and they'll come out with a new album

00:56:04 ◼   ► that I won't know about

00:56:06 ◼   ► 'cause I don't follow the news that well.

00:56:08 ◼   ► And I'll discover it months or years later,

00:56:12 ◼   ► like, oh my God, I would've bought this years ago.

00:56:14 ◼   ► Why didn't I know about this album?

00:56:16 ◼   ► And they've had for a long time some kind of like artist alert system where you could

00:56:21 ◼   ► say like, you know, alert me whenever this artist has a new release or something. But

00:56:24 ◼   ► you had to like manually enable that for everything. And it just seemed like the obvious choice

00:56:29 ◼   ► would be like just look at any music I have, any artist in my collection, especially any

00:56:35 ◼   ► artist for which I own full albums, just notify me whenever, just like, you know, have some

00:56:39 ◼   ► newsfeed area or some notifications somewhere, email me. You email me for all sorts of other

00:56:44 ◼   ► Email me for like whatever the whenever any artist who I've bought music from in the past releases a new album

00:56:50 ◼   ► Do you think that's the right default any artist because I have tons of things that like I have two tracks by his artist one track

00:56:56 ◼   ► But as artists like I think it's okay to have that option because manually following all the artists and your thing would be tedious

00:57:02 ◼   ► but I'm not entirely sure that should be the default like I feel like most people have a

00:57:08 ◼   ► a handful of artists that they're really interested

00:57:10 ◼   ► in new releases from, and a long tail of artists

00:57:13 ◼   ► that they have one or two tracks from.

00:57:14 ◼   ► - Yep, I agree.

00:57:16 ◼   ► - Really?

00:57:17 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe I'm weird

00:57:18 ◼   ► 'cause I'm a full album kind of person, but I don't know.

00:57:21 ◼   ► - I don't know who some of these artists are.

00:57:22 ◼   ► I'm going through it now.

00:57:24 ◼   ► Maybe this is some tracks from my kids or whatever,

00:57:27 ◼   ► but like, "The Secret Sisters,"

00:57:29 ◼   ► I don't even know who that is.

00:57:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, there definitely were entries

00:57:32 ◼   ► that I did not know the artist,

00:57:35 ◼   ► or maybe I had a single track from them

00:57:38 ◼   ► from like back when I was in college

00:57:40 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:57:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I'm not gonna, you know,

00:57:42 ◼   ► I know who Toto is, but I'm not gonna follow them.

00:57:45 ◼   ► I'm not awaiting the new Toto album.

00:57:47 ◼   ► That's gonna be, you know what I mean?

00:57:49 ◼   ► Unfollow.

00:57:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

00:57:51 ◼   ► It's, I didn't like the onboarding experience,

00:57:55 ◼   ► which should sound familiar,

00:57:57 ◼   ► but by and large, I didn't think it was,

00:58:00 ◼   ► I don't think it's bad so far, so we'll see.

00:58:03 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:58:05 ◼   ► anything else about music. Honestly, I I've only listened to it for you know

00:58:10 ◼   ► what a day right now so it's not you know I haven't spent too much time with

00:58:13 ◼   ► it but I like it a lot so far I've already listened to a few albums that I

00:58:19 ◼   ► wouldn't have jumped to buy but because I can listen to them now for free slash

00:58:24 ◼   ► no additional cost I will glad to listen to the album and in on for a couple of

00:58:29 ◼   ► them I thought you know I might want to buy this for a couple of them I thought

00:58:33 ◼   ► you know, I'm really glad I didn't buy this, but that was that was interesting,

00:58:35 ◼   ► you know, like that or, you know, I enjoyed it for those five minutes or for

00:58:38 ◼   ► that 40 minutes, but I don't want to hear it again. And, you know, this, I mean, this

00:58:43 ◼   ► is obviously, you know, this is like me discovering what everybody else in the

00:58:47 ◼   ► world discovered years ago when streaming services started to become a

00:58:50 ◼   ► thing, but this is kind of nice. Like, I like this and I can see why it changes

00:58:57 ◼   ► the way people buy and pay for music so much because it is very compelling and

00:59:02 ◼   ► And this is, if everything they said pans out,

00:59:06 ◼   ► you know, if what they are attempting to do

00:59:11 ◼   ► ends up being what they're actually doing,

00:59:13 ◼   ► in the way that they have the human curation aspect

00:59:16 ◼   ► and the playlist and everything,

00:59:18 ◼   ► if that ends up being good and staying good,

00:59:21 ◼   ► this is gonna be great for me,

00:59:22 ◼   ► because I've tried other services in the past.

00:59:26 ◼   ► At first, a long time ago, I tried Pandora,

00:59:28 ◼   ► I tried Spotify, I briefly tried Ardeo,

00:59:31 ◼   ► and then for like a day I tried Beats

00:59:33 ◼   ► before I realized they didn't even have a real Mac app.

00:59:36 ◼   ► My problem is that I don't find new music

00:59:40 ◼   ► on my own very well.

00:59:42 ◼   ► And the systems they've had in the iTunes store to date,

00:59:47 ◼   ► where they basically just have like,

00:59:49 ◼   ► you know, people who bought this

00:59:50 ◼   ► also bought this list of crap at the bottom,

00:59:53 ◼   ► that has been terrible for me.

00:59:54 ◼   ► I've spent so much time exploring those,

00:59:57 ◼   ► previewing those albums, and trying to see like,

00:59:59 ◼   ► okay, I'll go to a band I love,

01:00:00 ◼   ► and I'll see the people who bought also bought section

01:00:03 ◼   ► at the bottom, and it's just a bunch of garbage.

01:00:06 ◼   ► Like I can't imagine why people buy

01:00:09 ◼   ► those two things together.

01:00:11 ◼   ► So the human curation aspect so far

01:00:14 ◼   ► in the handful of playlists that I've listened to

01:00:17 ◼   ► that have been like the featured playlists kind of things

01:00:18 ◼   ► where it looks like some person was involved,

01:00:20 ◼   ► I've liked it.

01:00:21 ◼   ► It has given me new music.

01:00:22 ◼   ► It has introduced me to new stuff in a way that

01:00:26 ◼   ► all of the algorithmic things in the previous services

01:00:29 ◼   ► tried plus the iTunes recommendations under their purchased albums, those have never gotten

01:00:35 ◼   ► there for me. They've never been good enough to stick with me. So far this looks promising,

01:00:41 ◼   ► so I'm looking forward to this. And that is, that's what everyone always was saying about

01:00:45 ◼   ► beats music when it was called that, that they were very good at that. And the only

01:00:49 ◼   ► reason I didn't give that a chance again was because they didn't really have a Mac app.

01:00:52 ◼   ► Now this seems like this could really be something for people like me who are too old to find

01:00:59 ◼   ► good music on their own. How do you find the recommendations of services

01:01:03 ◼   ► that are better than Apple at doing this type of thing, like maybe Amazon or Netflix? Netflix,

01:01:06 ◼   ► I guess, is the best example. People who like this movie also like this movie. Do you find

01:01:10 ◼   ► that Netflix, you just sort of don't find the people who also like conceptually is a

01:01:18 ◼   ► good thing, or is it just that Apple's implementation is crappy and it just says, "People who

01:01:21 ◼   ► like this also bought Taylor Swift's 1989 because everybody bought it and their algorithm

01:01:25 ◼   ► - I'm stupid.

01:01:26 ◼   ► - I've generally found those recommendation type things

01:01:30 ◼   ► to be better than my opinion of apples.

01:01:33 ◼   ► - Can you tell us about one more thing that's awesome

01:01:35 ◼   ► and then I think I have a couple more thoughts about this

01:01:38 ◼   ► and Jon might as well.

01:01:39 ◼   ► - Absolutely, our final sponsor this week is Casper.

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01:02:36 ◼   ► And you guys have tried it, right?

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01:02:43 ◼   ► in the guest room, and after they went back home,

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01:04:34 ◼   ► - All right, so I wanted to quickly build

01:04:36 ◼   ► on what you were saying, Marco, about streaming services.

01:04:39 ◼   ► I don't, I'm not surprised that neither of you

01:04:42 ◼   ► necessarily said that streaming services

01:04:44 ◼   ► had worked that well for you in the past.

01:04:47 ◼   ► I used to be a music listener like I think you guys are, which is you have a batch of

01:04:52 ◼   ► music that you tend to listen to, you have your library, and you stray here and there,

01:04:57 ◼   ► but generally speaking you're pretty darn content with what you got.

01:05:00 ◼   ► I don't know what switch flipped in my mind, but over time I got more and more into hearing

01:05:06 ◼   ► more and more eclectic things and satisfying very random cravings at very random times.

01:05:12 ◼   ► And what I love about being a Spotify user, and this should be applicable to Apple Music

01:05:16 ◼   ► as well, is that I can listen to damn near anything I want, anytime I want, immediately.

01:05:21 ◼   ► And that's what's so appealing to me about streaming services.

01:05:24 ◼   ► I never even got that into Spotify in terms of, um, in terms of, like, their radio stations,

01:05:32 ◼   ► in terms of whatever curation they may have.

01:05:35 ◼   ► And I agree that I've heard constantly about how great the curation is on Beats Music.

01:05:40 ◼   ► And so I just loved being able to listen to anything, anytime.

01:05:45 ◼   ► Spotify also has some really great community features, particularly around playlists. So

01:05:49 ◼   ► for example, Aaron and myself have football season tickets to the University of Virginia,

01:05:55 ◼   ► and we have a shared playlist with the guy that we go with that we will, any one of the

01:06:01 ◼   ► three of us can just add songs to that playlist on Spotify, which works out really well. I

01:06:05 ◼   ► have no earthly idea if that's possible on Apple Music. I doubt it, but I haven't tried.

01:06:11 ◼   ► And so in a lot of ways Spotify has worked really well for me and I really, really enjoy

01:06:15 ◼   ► it.

01:06:16 ◼   ► And I enjoyed enough that I think it took me a day or two to sign up for the $10 a month

01:06:19 ◼   ► fee for Spotify that I've been paying for like two or three years now.

01:06:23 ◼   ► So I would encourage you to do exactly what you did, Marco, and give it a shot and just

01:06:28 ◼   ► kind of try poking around and seeing what you can find.

01:06:30 ◼   ► Because I think you might be surprised at how much interesting and good music you can

01:06:34 ◼   ► find, even if all that ends up happening is you quit, you common, or you very often fall

01:06:39 ◼   ► back to the things you already know and love. And the other thing I wanted to ask both of

01:06:44 ◼   ► you guys is, did you have a chance to listen to Beats 1 at all? And I'll start with you,

01:06:48 ◼   ► Marco.

01:06:49 ◼   ► You can probably predict my answer.

01:06:51 ◼   ► You either didn't or you heard it for 10 seconds and decided you hated it.

01:06:56 ◼   ► The latter, pretty much. I listened, you know, everyone's saying it's very good. So I listened

01:07:01 ◼   ► for, I don't know, five or six songs. Didn't hear a single thing that I liked at all. Each

01:07:07 ◼   ► Each song I wanted to turn it off during,

01:07:11 ◼   ► but I figured, oh, let me give it a little bit more time.

01:07:14 ◼   ► So it's fine.

01:07:15 ◼   ► I'm sure it's great for a lot of people.

01:07:17 ◼   ► It's just not the kind of music I like.

01:07:19 ◼   ► - So now you know how everyone feels

01:07:20 ◼   ► when they listen to Fish.

01:07:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:07:22 ◼   ► I mean, I think it'll be interesting to see how this does

01:07:27 ◼   ► because it really is bringing many of the benefits

01:07:31 ◼   ► of radio stations kind of back or to a different area

01:07:36 ◼   ► they weren't really before.

01:07:39 ◼   ► But it also brings most of the drawbacks of radio stations.

01:07:41 ◼   ► Everyone's already very tired of hearing their station ID

01:07:45 ◼   ► and their overlay, their talkovers and everything.

01:07:49 ◼   ► You can't skip a song if you don't like it

01:07:51 ◼   ► because it's live.

01:07:53 ◼   ► And there's like, you know, you can't really go back either.

01:07:57 ◼   ► It seems like they have brought most of the annoyances

01:08:00 ◼   ► and limitations of radio stations with them.

01:08:02 ◼   ► And most of that's out of necessity.

01:08:04 ◼   ► You know, if they're going to do this,

01:08:05 ◼   ► they kind of have to do it that way for the most part, so

01:08:08 ◼   ► it seems like it is bringing into the modern age a format

01:08:14 ◼   ► that is it's almost like the skeuomorphism of radio. It's

01:08:18 ◼   ► like they copied all of the limitations and an annoyances,

01:08:22 ◼   ► along with the the you know the the core of it meant much of

01:08:26 ◼   ► which is you know kind of inseparable, so you know it's

01:08:31 ◼   ► fine. I'm sure people will like it. Maybe if I was having a

01:08:34 ◼   ► I might put that on or something,

01:08:37 ◼   ► where I just wanted to put on something

01:08:39 ◼   ► that would make me sound cool,

01:08:40 ◼   ► if that's even possible, probably isn't.

01:08:43 ◼   ► But I don't see myself listening to it, really.

01:08:47 ◼   ► - All right, Jon, have you listened to it at all?

01:08:49 ◼   ► - I didn't bother listening to it,

01:08:51 ◼   ► and my additional point on Apple Music

01:08:53 ◼   ► is basically just made by Marco,

01:08:55 ◼   ► that first of all, actually getting back

01:08:57 ◼   ► to Casey's characterization of the

01:08:59 ◼   ► I have my collection of music and that's that,

01:09:00 ◼   ► I would adjust that slightly to say

01:09:02 ◼   ► The way I listen to music is I have my collection of music,

01:09:06 ◼   ► and I'm always on the lookout for additions,

01:09:08 ◼   ► but the key is I'm looking for additions

01:09:11 ◼   ► to my collection of music.

01:09:13 ◼   ► So if I was ever sort of,

01:09:15 ◼   ► one way you can do it is you can graze,

01:09:16 ◼   ► like just listen to a bunch of music,

01:09:18 ◼   ► travel around links or whatever.

01:09:19 ◼   ► You can also do it the same way I find a lot of things now,

01:09:21 ◼   ► which is recommendations from people who I know

01:09:23 ◼   ► who have similar tastes to me

01:09:24 ◼   ► and things you see on social media

01:09:27 ◼   ► and sort of the overwhelming recommendation

01:09:29 ◼   ► of a bunch of people,

01:09:30 ◼   ► everyone's saying you gotta go see "Fury Road,"

01:09:32 ◼   ► Maybe there's something to that if everybody, if a whole bunch of people in your circle

01:09:35 ◼   ► tell you Lady Gaga is not just another manufactured pop star, even though that's what you think

01:09:40 ◼   ► about them for the first six months they're out, maybe you should look at, you know.

01:09:43 ◼   ► But the whole activity is do a bunch of crap and add to my collection of music.

01:09:48 ◼   ► So it's not a static collection.

01:09:49 ◼   ► It does grow and it grows slowly, right?

01:09:52 ◼   ► But I add not just new songs, but entire new artists and new bands get added to the collection.

01:09:57 ◼   ► So it is a dynamic growing thing, but the essential question is when it comes time to

01:10:01 ◼   ► to listen to music, do you want to listen to a bunch of music picked by somebody else

01:10:05 ◼   ► or listen to "your music"?

01:10:07 ◼   ► And listening to your music doesn't mean that you don't ever want to change your music.

01:10:11 ◼   ► You do.

01:10:12 ◼   ► You want to discover, like Marco, you want to discover new music that you will like.

01:10:16 ◼   ► It's just a difference in when it comes time to do the listening part, not the discovery

01:10:20 ◼   ► part, what do you want to do?

01:10:21 ◼   ► And I just want to listen to my music, right?

01:10:23 ◼   ► So that's why I didn't even bother listening to Beats 1, which I think is probably fine,

01:10:27 ◼   ► but it's just not how I listen to music.

01:10:28 ◼   ► The other angle on Apple Music that Marco was getting at was, and I've seen a lot of other people talking about this,

01:10:33 ◼   ► this is, you know, this, not that, you know, people talk about it as if Apple's the first one to do it,

01:10:37 ◼   ► but this, Spotify, RDO, all these things are

01:10:40 ◼   ► interesting in that they are bringing

01:10:43 ◼   ► radio to a generation of people

01:10:45 ◼   ► who are much younger than us, obviously, who didn't grow up with radio as

01:10:50 ◼   ► as big a dominant force in their life as it was in our lives, right?

01:10:54 ◼   ► Not that they didn't know what radio was and didn't listen to it or whatever, but it, but like,

01:10:57 ◼   ► the kids of the iPod generation when it was technically feasible for you to have a huge collection of music with you at all times

01:11:05 ◼   ► That enabled a lot more people to do what I do

01:11:07 ◼   ► We just have a massive collection of your music and listen to that instead of just saying I'm gonna listen to these

01:11:12 ◼   ► Things coming over the airwaves, you know, cuz you're on your little transistor ready

01:11:16 ◼   ► You couldn't have your whole record collection with you is gigantic

01:11:18 ◼   ► Like you need a record player and needs to be not bouncing around, you know

01:11:21 ◼   ► Even the CD players with skip protection like you could have one or two CDs, right?

01:11:25 ◼   ► The people who grew up in the iPod era, this whole concept of someone else is going to

01:11:30 ◼   ► pick a bunch of songs and play them to me live is something that they're familiar with

01:11:35 ◼   ► tangentially, but wasn't their primary interface to music.

01:11:39 ◼   ► So there's some novelty to it, like the sort of the radio skeuomorphism, it's kind of retro

01:11:45 ◼   ► and it's also novel.

01:11:47 ◼   ► And some people like that type of thing, like if your taste aligns well with the taste of

01:11:50 ◼   ► the person who is programming that radio station, that can be good for you.

01:11:54 ◼   ► And also I'm hoping that these internet reincarnations of radio stations get rid of a lot of the

01:12:01 ◼   ► crap that defined old radio stations in terms of the things that you were played had little

01:12:05 ◼   ► to do with the taste of any individual person, whether that taste is good or bad, and much

01:12:08 ◼   ► more to do with what record companies were pushing or possibly paying to be played.

01:12:14 ◼   ► So I'm hoping it does away with that as well, but like Marco said, the iPod era for people

01:12:19 ◼   ► who grew up with radio freed us from the tyranny of radio stations, because there's usually

01:12:23 ◼   ► maybe only four or five radio stations that came in good at your house, and there's the

01:12:27 ◼   ► classic rock station, the oldie station, the alternative station, the heavy metal station,

01:12:32 ◼   ► and like NPR, and a few, like, your options were so limited, it's like, I don't want to

01:12:37 ◼   ► listen to what other people want to play for me, I know the music that I like, I can bring

01:12:41 ◼   ► my, like, the beauty of the iPod was that it freed us from all of that, and bringing

01:12:45 ◼   ► it back is not tempting me to go back to that old world, but for the people who never experienced

01:12:49 ◼   ► that world or never fled it to go to the iPod, the same people who are asking for an FM tuner

01:12:55 ◼   ► to be added for their iPods for years and years, Beats 1 and that sort of internet radio

01:13:00 ◼   ► station intentionally removing the ability to skip tracks or even pause or rewind or

01:13:06 ◼   ► anything like that could be an interesting novelty.

01:13:08 ◼   ► And if that format is actually a thing and not just an accident of history, not just

01:13:13 ◼   ► like well, back in the old days we had to do radio this way because of these technical

01:13:16 ◼   ► limitations but once we didn't we never did that again.

01:13:19 ◼   ► Like if it turns out that it actually is a way people want to listen to music and not

01:13:23 ◼   ► just a technical limitation, it's good that all these streaming services are also saying,

01:13:28 ◼   ► by the way, not everything about radio is stupid.

01:13:32 ◼   ► There may still be a mass appeal to a DJ'd programmed, you know, quote unquote radio

01:13:39 ◼   ► station on the internet.

01:13:40 ◼   ► So even though I still think it's not for me, it is definitely worthwhile for everyone

01:13:44 ◼   ► to figure out whether that's still a thing.

01:13:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I would say in many ways,

01:13:51 ◼   ► it is similar to the problem that newspapers

01:13:53 ◼   ► and magazines face, especially magazines,

01:13:56 ◼   ► where, and I know, having tried to run one,

01:13:58 ◼   ► and not having succeeded, really,

01:14:02 ◼   ► you know, one of the problems is, like,

01:14:03 ◼   ► when you have something like a magazine

01:14:05 ◼   ► or a radio station, and you are prescribing to people,

01:14:08 ◼   ► here's what you're going to see,

01:14:11 ◼   ► here's the package of things,

01:14:12 ◼   ► you're gonna see this, then this, then this,

01:14:14 ◼   ► and are you gonna hear this and this and this?

01:14:15 ◼   ► And we have moved on from that technologically.

01:14:19 ◼   ► People are accustomed to more freedom.

01:14:21 ◼   ► People are accustomed to being able to pick and choose

01:14:23 ◼   ► and seek around and do whatever they want.

01:14:25 ◼   ► And if you say, in the case of a magazine,

01:14:29 ◼   ► I'm going to charge you X every month

01:14:31 ◼   ► and I'm gonna give you these 10 articles

01:14:34 ◼   ► and they're gonna be on a variety of topics

01:14:36 ◼   ► and you might care about one of them.

01:14:39 ◼   ► That worked for a long time

01:14:40 ◼   ► when there were really no good alternatives,

01:14:41 ◼   ► but now people can just find the few good things

01:14:44 ◼   ► they like online from all sorts of different sources,

01:14:48 ◼   ► not even just you, and they like that better,

01:14:51 ◼   ► and it's kind of better for everybody that way,

01:14:53 ◼   ► except for maybe the publishers,

01:14:54 ◼   ► but it's better for the readers, for the consumers.

01:14:59 ◼   ► And radio, I think, has a similar problem of like,

01:15:02 ◼   ► you already have this world where everybody can have

01:15:04 ◼   ► their own program station tailored exactly to their likes.

01:15:07 ◼   ► If they don't like a song, they can skip it.

01:15:09 ◼   ► If they want to play it again,

01:15:10 ◼   ► they can just play it again.

01:15:10 ◼   ► if they want to buy, you know, it's all integrated and everything like the world

01:15:14 ◼   ► we have that isn't radio stations is really nice and really advanced and we

01:15:18 ◼   ► are all accustomed to that now. So to to try to go back to the way radio was and

01:15:25 ◼   ► I'm using it in the past tense because let's face it radio has been dead for a

01:15:27 ◼   ► long time to go back to the way radio was now once we've all moved on with how

01:15:34 ◼   ► we think music should work and and how music does work everywhere else. I think

01:15:39 ◼   ► it's really a problem.

01:15:40 ◼   ► I think we're all listening right now

01:15:43 ◼   ► 'cause we wanna try it out 'cause it's cool and new.

01:15:45 ◼   ► I'm really curious to see if this actually is something

01:15:48 ◼   ► that has any influence really whatsoever.

01:15:50 ◼   ► Does it have any cultural presence?

01:15:53 ◼   ► Are a lot of people listening to it in six months?

01:15:56 ◼   ► - Our resident secret betraying Apple employee

01:16:00 ◼   ► wants to emphasize that Spotify does not have a DJ.

01:16:02 ◼   ► They just have what he calls a Pandora clone.

01:16:05 ◼   ► So I'm not sure, my familiarity with streaming service

01:16:08 ◼   ► small but like maybe Apple is the first one to try to get you know actual human

01:16:12 ◼   ► DJ's to pick things out as opposed to algorithms and stuff like that but yeah

01:16:16 ◼   ► all like technologically speaking if this turns out to be a thing it's very

01:16:20 ◼   ► presumably very easy for all the other streaming companies to hire their own

01:16:22 ◼   ► people to be DJ like radio DJs I'm sure they're out there looking for work like

01:16:27 ◼   ► it especially if you can pay them Apple size salaries or even Spotify or Pandora

01:16:32 ◼   ► size salaries. So yeah, because I don't listen to music that way, it's hard for me to handicap

01:16:41 ◼   ► the odds that DJs turn out to be a thing. Some other person in the chatroom also said

01:16:46 ◼   ► that a lot of this is, again, as usual from an American perspective, because American

01:16:50 ◼   ► radio stations are crappy and maybe they're not so bad in the rest of the world. And the

01:16:54 ◼   ► idea of a person gaining fame by having good taste and choosing music that other people

01:17:00 ◼   ► here and you sort of trusting them to pick good music for you and coming to have sort

01:17:05 ◼   ► of a relationship with them as a DJ hasn't happened for as much in the US because of

01:17:12 ◼   ► all the radio corruption and top 40 BS and all the other recent things get played in

01:17:16 ◼   ► the radio, but maybe it does happen in the rest of the world.

01:17:18 ◼   ► So maybe they already know the answer to the question I'm asking, which is, is it actually

01:17:22 ◼   ► valuable for a human to program music for lots of people to listen to, even though technology

01:17:27 ◼   ► makes it possible to not have to ever do that again?

01:17:29 ◼   ► I don't know. But one thing I was wondering from earlier is, I don't see, I think part

01:17:38 ◼   ► of the reason why I love Spotify so much is that even in the times when I want to listen

01:17:42 ◼   ► to something that I own, that I have in my iTunes library, I'll just go to Spotify because

01:17:48 ◼   ► it's what I'm used to and it's the first place I think of and I'll look up that album and

01:17:52 ◼   ► I'll just play it. And so yes, like the old curmudgeon in me feels like I'm just renting

01:17:59 ◼   ► access to all of my music, which is true, but nonetheless, I can listen to anything

01:18:05 ◼   ► I want within reason, any time I want to.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Well, yeah, anything I want.

01:18:10 ◼   ► You've said that a few times, and that brings up another topic that has come up for both

01:18:13 ◼   ► me and a few other people I've seen.

01:18:16 ◼   ► Obviously no streaming service has, like, all the music, right?

01:18:19 ◼   ► Sure.

01:18:20 ◼   ► You know, Apple Music doesn't have Beatles, and, you know, what was it, Spotify didn't

01:18:23 ◼   ► have Taylor Swift because of her streaming decision for that sort of thing. You don't

01:18:29 ◼   ► have everything, everything, but they have most things, right? But for people with weird

01:18:34 ◼   ► tastes, like if you're like Dan Morin and really like soundtracks, or if you're like

01:18:37 ◼   ► me and you like basically illegal mashups or video game soundtracks.

01:18:42 ◼   ► Nobody here has weird tastes in music.

01:18:44 ◼   ► Right, well I mean, Phish you think is weird, but Phish is going to be on the iTunes Store.

01:18:48 ◼   ► Not the ones I listen to.

01:18:50 ◼   ► Well, probably not the live ones, right?

01:18:52 ◼   ► But yeah, it's kind of a problem.

01:18:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but yeah, like those things, the things I'm talking about, sometimes they're real

01:18:59 ◼   ► albums that sometimes they're imports from Japan, but a lot of these things I have on

01:19:02 ◼   ► CD, like they're not pirated anything.

01:19:04 ◼   ► This is the official soundtrack for this game put out by the publisher of the game, and

01:19:08 ◼   ► it's not going to be anywhere on their list of things.

01:19:10 ◼   ► And I have, maybe I wouldn't want someone to DJ video game music for me, just like only

01:19:16 ◼   ► the best orchestral arrangements of Zelda songs.

01:19:19 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe that's not enough for someone to DJ a channel of or whatever, but

01:19:24 ◼   ► these things aren't even for sale in the plain old 99 cents per track iTunes store, let alone

01:19:28 ◼   ► available on Apple Music.

01:19:29 ◼   ► So being able to have access to sort of the world's music, the only place that's still

01:19:33 ◼   ► true is if you Google for something with, you know, in URL colon MP3, and then you can

01:19:38 ◼   ► basically find every video game soundtrack you want.

01:19:43 ◼   ► But on Apple Music, the percentage of my music that is available for streaming on Apple Music,

01:19:49 ◼   ► Ignoring obviously like iTunes match and the fact that Apple Music will upload my music like all these things

01:19:53 ◼   ► It's not like I can't listen to my music. I have it. It will let me stream it

01:19:56 ◼   ► I can already do that with iTunes match for you know

01:19:58 ◼   ► 25,000 songs a month or whatever the limit is or a year or whatever

01:20:01 ◼   ► but the catalog of music

01:20:04 ◼   ► really relies on you having musical tastes that are

01:20:08 ◼   ► Least vaguely mainstream as you start to wander into other realms. I can imagine

01:20:14 ◼   ► I don't know anything about this but like classical music or opera

01:20:17 ◼   ► I don't know what their selection is like in that like as you just start to wander away from

01:20:21 ◼   ► Popular music for lack of a better term. It could be that Apple music's overlap with your library is

01:20:28 ◼   ► Small enough that when you go. Oh, I really want to hear the blah blah blah from blah blah blah

01:20:33 ◼   ► And if the blahs are a movie or a video game

01:20:36 ◼   ► Apple music's like I don't know what you're talking about, dude

01:20:38 ◼   ► And if you didn't previously upload that through iTunes match and stream it back down or part of the my music collection

01:20:44 ◼   ► No, you can't like say it's I don't have something in my collection like you know what I have no

01:20:48 ◼   ► Music from Street Fighter in my collection, but right now

01:20:52 ◼   ► I would like to hear like you know the most popular or famous Street Fighter themes Street Fighter had music

01:20:57 ◼   ► Yeah

01:20:58 ◼   ► And if it's if it's not there

01:20:59 ◼   ► Like then the one thing that I would think Apple music is for like Casey was saying like sometimes you just want to say

01:21:05 ◼   ► There a song exists. I know the title. I know the artist type type type two seconds later. I'm listening to it

01:21:10 ◼   ► That's amazing how it works, when it doesn't,

01:21:12 ◼   ► it shakes my faith in the utility of the service for me

01:21:15 ◼   ► in any way, 'cause I don't wanna listen to things

01:21:16 ◼   ► that are DJ'd, I don't wanna listen

01:21:18 ◼   ► to random streaming things, I basically just wanna listen

01:21:20 ◼   ► to my music, the one utility you could have is,

01:21:24 ◼   ► if there's just some song I think of that I haven't heard

01:21:25 ◼   ► in years that I wanna hear right now, just type it in

01:21:28 ◼   ► and it's there, and if that works for me,

01:21:29 ◼   ► even only 80% of the time, that makes me think,

01:21:32 ◼   ► definitely not $7 a month or whatever they're charging.

01:21:36 ◼   ► - In general, you're right, it's worth pointing out

01:21:39 ◼   ► that like you know if you have non mainstream tastes like this that these

01:21:43 ◼   ► services are probably not going to help you discover a lot of new music in that

01:21:46 ◼   ► in those areas and that's worth considering but for for other roles for

01:21:52 ◼   ► for the music they did that does have the fact that Apple service is

01:21:56 ◼   ► integrated with this uploads feature that they have whether it's iTunes match

01:22:00 ◼   ► or whatever they're calling the new thing that's in music that basically

01:22:03 ◼   ► does the same thing that the fact that this is all integrated that I think

01:22:08 ◼   ► gives them a huge leg up on the other services that, like you

01:22:11 ◼   ► know for me, you know, it was always useless for me to try

01:22:14 ◼   ► the services because the I would have you know I would

01:22:17 ◼   ► want to listen to normal people music sometimes and my crazy

01:22:21 ◼   ► fish live shows at other times and I have to keep bouncing

01:22:23 ◼   ► between two different apps and I then you know I'm a picky

01:22:26 ◼   ► jerk and that would drive me crazy, whereas Apple stuff.

01:22:29 ◼   ► They basically built a streaming service into the app.

01:22:34 ◼   ► I was already stubbornly using for all my music listening, so

01:22:37 ◼   ► That to me, and because it integrates all of my stuff

01:22:42 ◼   ► with their stuff, that is very compelling.

01:22:45 ◼   ► And I think, again, it's not, this is not gonna be

01:22:49 ◼   ► a mainstream need, I bet the majority of users

01:22:53 ◼   ► of Apple Music are never going to use these upload features.

01:22:55 ◼   ► But for the people who will use them,

01:22:59 ◼   ► this sets Apple Music apart from every other service.

01:23:02 ◼   ► - I guess what I'm getting at with the catalog selection

01:23:04 ◼   ► is that one of the advantages, one of the supposed

01:23:06 ◼   ► and real, I think, advantages of the internet age is not only can we make the world's music

01:23:13 ◼   ► available to you at your fingertips, but yeah, we can add the video game crap. We can add rights

01:23:18 ◼   ► issues aside, but again, video games are the easiest because these are actual real press CDs

01:23:22 ◼   ► officially from the companies that make the games. This is not illegal stuff or live recordings or

01:23:27 ◼   ► anything of dubious origin. You don't have room for that in the record store. There's no shelf

01:23:33 ◼   ► shelf space, blah, blah, blah.

01:23:34 ◼   ► But there is no shelf space on the internet.

01:23:36 ◼   ► There's no shelf space in Apple Store or in the cloud or whatever.

01:23:38 ◼   ► Like, you know, chase down that long tail.

01:23:41 ◼   ► Put all that crap in there.

01:23:43 ◼   ► Like, why not?

01:23:44 ◼   ► Like, that should be one of the advantages of this type of service is that you can have

01:23:49 ◼   ► a longer, not an infinite tail, but a longer tail than you could have when you had to put

01:23:53 ◼   ► things, when you had to, you know, put things on shelves in stores because then you really

01:23:57 ◼   ► had to make some hard choices.

01:23:59 ◼   ► You have more runway.

01:24:00 ◼   ► That should be, like I said, it certainly is the dream of just Googling.

01:24:03 ◼   ► can find any music anywhere, these streaming services, one of the advantages they should

01:24:08 ◼   ► have among their many is now finally the tail can be longer.

01:24:11 ◼   ► And I think it is.

01:24:12 ◼   ► Obviously the iTunes Music Store has more music in it than any physical record store

01:24:16 ◼   ► that probably ever existed.

01:24:18 ◼   ► But I'm saying, you know, keep chasing that down.

01:24:20 ◼   ► Don't be content with what you have.

01:24:21 ◼   ► Go full-fledged on, you know, just start with like categories.

01:24:25 ◼   ► Movie soundtracks, video game soundtracks, like that's all official music that you can

01:24:29 ◼   ► probably get from somebody.

01:24:31 ◼   ► And if something's not there because only five people are interested in it, I think

01:24:37 ◼   ► that is an advantage that they should leverage.

01:24:39 ◼   ► The size of their catalog should be a bragging right and not just 800 versions of the most

01:24:45 ◼   ► popular top ten songs from every year, but chase down the long tail a little bit more.

01:24:50 ◼   ► Well, and again, I think that's also an area where Apple has an advantage.

01:24:56 ◼   ► Even though they have not done so well in streaming in the last few years and they've

01:25:00 ◼   ► fallen behind in their relevance in music in the last few years as a result.

01:25:04 ◼   ► Despite that, I think they are not only not only do they have like the right

01:25:09 ◼   ► legacy, the right resources, and the right connections, but also now they have what

01:25:13 ◼   ► appears to be what's probably going to be a very very popular and successful

01:25:17 ◼   ► music service for streaming now. I think Apple has the best chances of any of the

01:25:22 ◼   ► players in this game of getting really good deals. Like if the Beatles were ever

01:25:26 ◼   ► going to be streamed anywhere, it's probably going to be Apple Music. You know

01:25:29 ◼   ► stuff like that, like Apple is really good at getting deals,

01:25:32 ◼   ► generally speaking, for this kind of stuff, and they're

01:25:34 ◼   ► going to, you know, they're going to really like sit on

01:25:36 ◼   ► everybody who they can't get until they can get them, and

01:25:40 ◼   ► maybe that extends also to the long tail. I don't know, but I

01:25:43 ◼   ► think if anybody has a chance as Apple and if you are a long

01:25:48 ◼   ► tail rights holder for something and you are trying

01:25:51 ◼   ► to see like where which of these services do you want to

01:25:54 ◼   ► submit your stuff to or get your stuff on again, I think

01:25:58 ◼   ► Apple's gonna have a pretty strong presence there. I mean,

01:26:01 ◼   ► they aren't the biggest streaming service right now, but

01:26:03 ◼   ► in a few years they might be, and they're certainly always

01:26:06 ◼   ► going to be a sizable one that people will think about when

01:26:09 ◼   ► they're trying to figure out, as publishers or as indies,

01:26:12 ◼   ► where do I put my stuff? So, again, I'm pretty optimistic

01:26:16 ◼   ► about Apple Music. I think, if anything, and I've seen only

01:26:20 ◼   ► great things about it so far on Twitter and stuff, if

01:26:24 ◼   ► anything, this all just highlights how clunky the

01:26:25 ◼   ► presentation was because it seems like,

01:26:29 ◼   ► it looks like it's a really good service,

01:26:31 ◼   ► and people really like it, and it's had a lot of things

01:26:33 ◼   ► that other services don't have.

01:26:36 ◼   ► It's a shame that none of that came through, really,

01:26:38 ◼   ► in the presentation, but it doesn't really matter now.

01:26:40 ◼   ► - You don't think, I think that the presentation

01:26:43 ◼   ► and the actual, like we talked about with the iTunes app

01:26:45 ◼   ► and the music app, I think there is a,

01:26:48 ◼   ► there are similar levels of confusion about them,

01:26:50 ◼   ► because it is a very complicated thing

01:26:52 ◼   ► that's difficult to explain.

01:26:53 ◼   ► there shouldn't be this many like,

01:26:55 ◼   ► FAQ articles and explainers about like,

01:26:59 ◼   ► what is Apple Music and what does it really give you

01:27:01 ◼   ► and what do you get and what do you get when you pay for it

01:27:03 ◼   ► and how does it interact with iTunes match

01:27:05 ◼   ► and what does it do with your files?

01:27:05 ◼   ► Like the confusion of like, well, when,

01:27:07 ◼   ► if you just have Apple Music and it matches your track,

01:27:09 ◼   ► it downloads the DRM version,

01:27:10 ◼   ► but if your iTunes match, it downloads the non-DRM version,

01:27:12 ◼   ► but then if you enable iTunes match,

01:27:14 ◼   ► while you still have Apple Music enabled,

01:27:15 ◼   ► you can match against the things and get the non-DRM one

01:27:17 ◼   ► and then not subscribe for it.

01:27:18 ◼   ► Like, it is actually pretty darn complicated.

01:27:21 ◼   ► Like, I think what you're saying is the benefits

01:27:23 ◼   ► are there.

01:27:24 ◼   ► They didn't do a good job of explaining what the benefits are, but I think the product

01:27:28 ◼   ► offering and the touch points of like, "How do I use Apple Music?

01:27:33 ◼   ► How do I use it on my Mac?

01:27:34 ◼   ► How do I use it on my iOS device?

01:27:35 ◼   ► What do I get when I pay my money?

01:27:37 ◼   ► How can I access the things that I got?"

01:27:40 ◼   ► That is just as muddled as the presentation.

01:27:43 ◼   ► Underneath it all, once you start figuring out where everything is, the actual benefits

01:27:46 ◼   ► of, "Oh, now I can listen to music that I like or discover new music," that seems to

01:27:51 ◼   ► be good, but I think, like I said, it is not the clean sheet approach that Photos took

01:27:56 ◼   ► conceptually or software-wise, and that I think is actually a reflection of their poorly

01:28:03 ◼   ► explained at that time not finalized deal for all of their music with all of their products.

01:28:09 ◼   ► So I think there's work to do there, and that may slow adoption.

01:28:13 ◼   ► It doesn't doom Apple Music to a ping-like death.

01:28:16 ◼   ► Basically, you could say pretty much anything that Apple does with music, just because it's

01:28:20 ◼   ► Apple doing it, has a very high chance of succeeding.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Ping is the counter example because that wasn't really about music, but a music streaming

01:28:29 ◼   ► service is a thing.

01:28:30 ◼   ► Apple is not the inventor of that thing, they're late to the game.

01:28:33 ◼   ► Because it is a thing, any streaming service that Apple does, they had to try pretty hard

01:28:37 ◼   ► not to end up being a major player a couple years down the road.

01:28:41 ◼   ► So the complexity of this product offering and the weirdness of the presentation and

01:28:46 ◼   ► the difficulty of really understanding what you're getting I think will only potentially

01:28:50 ◼   ► slow adoption, but in the end, streaming services are the thing that people want, and Apple

01:28:58 ◼   ► has one, and if you actually find your way to start using it, it seems like people think

01:29:02 ◼   ► it's pretty cool.

01:29:03 ◼   ► So I would project reasonable success for this thing over the next few years unless

01:29:08 ◼   ► Apple really drops the ball somehow.

01:29:10 ◼   ► Alright, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Cards Against Humanity, Harry's

01:29:16 ◼   ► and Casper, and we will see you next week.

01:29:19 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was

01:29:30 ◼   ► accidental.

01:29:31 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental,

01:29:38 ◼   ► It was accidental, it was accidental, it was accidental

01:29:43 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow

01:29:52 ◼   ► them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:30:01 ◼   ► ♪ A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N ♪

01:30:04 ◼   ► ♪ S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:30:06 ◼   ► ♪ U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A ♪

01:30:09 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:30:10 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:30:12 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:30:14 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:30:15 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:30:17 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:30:19 ◼   ► ♪ So long ♪

01:30:21 ◼   ► - You guys wanna talk about this whole

01:30:24 ◼   ► Safari considered harmful thing?

01:30:25 ◼   ► - Oh, poor Casey, he's so sick and wants to go to bed.

01:30:28 ◼   ► - I know, and we gotta talk about Safari.

01:30:30 ◼   ► I mean, we could save it for next week, but I feel like--

01:30:32 ◼   ► - I think we should save it for next week,

01:30:34 ◼   ► 'cause I have a lot of things to say about it

01:30:35 ◼   ► I don't wanna talk to poor Casey about.

01:30:37 ◼   ► - Oh, I thought it was gonna be quick,

01:30:39 ◼   ► and I was more than happy to entertain it

01:30:40 ◼   ► if it was gonna be quick.

01:30:41 ◼   ► - No, I don't think it's gonna be quick,

01:30:44 ◼   ► 'cause I have a lot of things to say about it.

01:30:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, me too.

01:30:47 ◼   ► Man, standards people are the worst.

01:30:50 ◼   ► - Non-standard people is what I want.

01:30:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:30:55 ◼   ► - Wow.

01:30:56 ◼   ► - Left-handed people, that means, I guess, right?

01:30:57 ◼   ► - I don't know.

01:30:58 ◼   ► Lefty slam.

01:31:00 ◼   ► The one marginalized group you're still allowed to slam in America, lefties.

01:31:04 ◼   ► Hey, so I was in Florida last week, and holy crap is it hot there.

01:31:10 ◼   ► So you went to Florida in July.

01:31:13 ◼   ► In June.

01:31:14 ◼   ► In late late late June.

01:31:16 ◼   ► What did possess you to go to Florida in late June?

01:31:18 ◼   ► I'm going to be going in the summer too.

01:31:20 ◼   ► It's going to be just as bad.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Yeah, so a good friend of mine was getting married, and so we decided to go down the

01:31:26 ◼   ► week prior, well, like the beginning of the week that he got married. And we went and

01:31:31 ◼   ► visited family and then spent two days in Disney World with Declan, which was less of

01:31:35 ◼   ► a disaster than I thought it would be, and then did the wedding thing. But holy hell,

01:31:41 ◼   ► you know, on paper, I think it was approximately the same temperature, although the humidity

01:31:45 ◼   ► in Florida is about 11 billion percent. And I don't know if it's just a mental thing,

01:31:51 ◼   ► because it's not my weather,

01:31:53 ◼   ► and so I am less tolerant of it.

01:31:55 ◼   ► But one way or another, God was it hot.

01:31:58 ◼   ► I would be outside for literally 45 seconds

01:32:00 ◼   ► and I'd start to sweat.

01:32:02 ◼   ► - Now is it possible, I don't know scientifically,

01:32:05 ◼   ► but is it possible to have a supersaturation of humidity

01:32:08 ◼   ► where you can actually exceed 100% in Florida?

01:32:11 ◼   ► - You would just, when dust goes into the air,

01:32:13 ◼   ► you get like a nucleation site

01:32:14 ◼   ► and just water drops out of the air onto the ground?

01:32:16 ◼   ► That's called rain.

01:32:17 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:32:19 ◼   ► literally in a cloud. I guess it's fog. No, but so I guess these all have things already,

01:32:26 ◼   ► but let's learn about the dew point, kids. Yeah. So, so how was, how was traveling with

01:32:30 ◼   ► Declan? It was fine. The plane was fine. Traveling with, traveling with an infant requires you

01:32:37 ◼   ► to travel with a bunch of crap. We counted, I believe it was nine different items we were

01:32:43 ◼   ► lugging through the airport. There was the stroller, the car seat, the breast pump, the

01:32:52 ◼   ► diaper bag, Aaron's backpack, my travel bag, two suitcases, crap, there's one other thing.

01:33:02 ◼   ► Oh! A portable Pack 'n Play.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:33:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:07 ◼   ► That's, this is a large set of objects.

01:33:08 ◼   ► So how many things did you actually carry onto the plane with you? Because you checked

01:33:12 ◼   ► the bags and stuff so you bring onto the plane. No, I checked one bag. So you're bringing

01:33:16 ◼   ► onto the plane the car seat, the baby, the stroller, the pack and play? Gate check the

01:33:20 ◼   ► stroller? Correct. We gate checked the stroller and the car seat. He was... And the car seat?

01:33:25 ◼   ► Oh, so you didn't get the lovely experience of having to install car seats while everyone

01:33:29 ◼   ► else on the plane stares at the back of your head with daggers. Correct. Yeah, so, 'cause

01:33:34 ◼   ► what is the deal? Is it required? Not if he's under two. Only if you love your children.

01:33:39 ◼   ► Oh, that's cold.

01:33:41 ◼   ► No, they say for like babies of a certain size that I think they have them on your lap.

01:33:46 ◼   ► Under two, I believe it is. Maybe that's wrong, but he was considered a lap infant.

01:33:52 ◼   ► He still had a boarding pass, which isn't entirely surprising,

01:33:57 ◼   ► but I was a little bit surprised by, but the boarding pass had no seat on it.

01:34:01 ◼   ► It just said like "inf" or something.

01:34:03 ◼   ► Was he allowed to keep it in his pocket when he went through the scanner?

01:34:06 ◼   ► Well, we actually this was my first time using pre check and pre check was pretty cool

01:34:10 ◼   ► Does he have pre check? Yes, because he rides on our pre check. He does not however have his own global entry

01:34:18 ◼   ► So we need to file for that shortly

01:34:20 ◼   ► So when so when he's too old to be a lap infant in like two years or a year, whatever

01:34:25 ◼   ► Yeah, can you and Aaron go through pre check or like yes, he gets it until he's like 18

01:34:31 ◼   ► I think or something like that or quite a bit older that he is right now. Okay, that's good. All right

01:34:36 ◼   ► So, man, the car seats, we have not flown with Adam yet,

01:34:41 ◼   ► and one of the reasons why is that I heard on various,

01:34:46 ◼   ► I believe it was your daily Lexes forever ago,

01:34:49 ◼   ► Lex's accounts of traveling with kids

01:34:54 ◼   ► in car seats on planes, and it just sounds awful.

01:34:57 ◼   ► - Oh, it's lots of fun.

01:34:59 ◼   ► I think at one point we did two.

01:35:00 ◼   ► Two kids, two car seats, maybe we never did two.

01:35:03 ◼   ► My wife will probably correct me, but anyway,

01:35:05 ◼   ► the struggle of, like, car seat is big, it's heavy, whatever.

01:35:10 ◼   ► Like, the real problem is getting it installed in the seat

01:35:15 ◼   ► with the airplane buggers and then getting it out again.

01:35:17 ◼   ► I can, the tip I'll give you,

01:35:18 ◼   ► I haven't listened to the episodes

01:35:20 ◼   ► of turning this car around or that you're referencing,

01:35:22 ◼   ► I'm assuming for Lex,

01:35:23 ◼   ► but you know when they showed a little demo

01:35:25 ◼   ► of like lift the flap and the little thing goes into,

01:35:28 ◼   ► you know, the car, you know,

01:35:29 ◼   ► how seat belts work on planes, right?

01:35:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, mm-hmm. - All right.

01:35:33 ◼   ► you don't really pay much attention to that because you're like, "Whatever, I'm gonna put it on my lap,

01:35:37 ◼   ► I'm gonna click it in, when I want to get out I'm gonna lift the buckle."

01:35:39 ◼   ► When you're bringing the car seat on the plane, like, I guess some people probably don't even buckle it in at all,

01:35:45 ◼   ► they just put it on the seat, put the baby in it, and that's done,

01:35:46 ◼   ► which doesn't make much sense to me because then it's just your entire baby and the car seat hurtling up to the ceiling and turbulence

01:35:51 ◼   ► and smashing it, right?

01:35:52 ◼   ► So you really should be buckling the car seat in and you want to do this quickly because everyone is behind you, you know,

01:35:57 ◼   ► wanting to get through and you've got your whole family blocking the aisle and all the crap everywhere,

01:36:02 ◼   ► especially if you have two seats and the kids are screaming and everything, right?

01:36:04 ◼   ► So you you try to buckle the the seat in by taking the seat fishing it through whatever stupid thing you're fishing it through

01:36:11 ◼   ► You know behind and underneath the seat

01:36:14 ◼   ► Clicking it in yanking the thing to tighten it good put the baby and you're done you think you're like we did it, right?

01:36:19 ◼   ► When it comes time to unbuckle that especially if you're a crazy

01:36:23 ◼   ► Parent who like pulls it really tight because you want to get the seat really tight because you've been trained by like the people

01:36:28 ◼   ► the fire department who told you how to put your car seat into your car, you pull it really

01:36:32 ◼   ► tight. When it's time to get off the plane and you're patiently waiting and everything

01:36:35 ◼   ► and you're like, "Well, I don't want to disconnect this seat until we're ready to go, but someone's

01:36:38 ◼   ► got to pick up the infant, then I got to take out the seat," and whatever, you go there

01:36:42 ◼   ► and you realize, "I can't lift the flap because the flap is hard against the back of the plastic

01:36:47 ◼   ► seat that I just tightened down as tight as I possibly could. How do I get this thing

01:36:53 ◼   ► unbuckled?" And now you're like trapped. Again, the kids are screaming, everyone's upset.

01:36:57 ◼   ► just want to get off this plane and you can't lift the flap because it's facing

01:37:01 ◼   ► itself. I'm gonna tell you face the flap away from the seat when you tighten it.

01:37:06 ◼   ► It's not probably the natural way you're gonna do it because if you think of how

01:37:09 ◼   ► it is over your lap the flap is facing, it would be facing the back of the seat,

01:37:12 ◼   ► face the flap the other way otherwise you will be super sad. Oh my god, so out of

01:37:17 ◼   ► curiosity how was that resolved? That was resolved with with anger and muscles.

01:37:23 ◼   ► You can imagine you can pull the belt away from the seat and then like pull it away as hard as you can try to

01:37:29 ◼   ► Make a gap and then shove your hand in there to push but you got to lift the flap up

01:37:33 ◼   ► It's not coming off unless that flapper goes up. So you basically have to as hard as you tightened it

01:37:37 ◼   ► I hope you didn't tighten it as hard as you could be

01:37:38 ◼   ► You have to have a little bit more leverage to like

01:37:40 ◼   ► Pull the strap away from the back of the seat and push that little lever up just enough the thing releases and you know