ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, all right, all right, we can avoid it.

00:00:02 ◼   ► - Now you can have your minutes in the sun here.

00:00:05 ◼   ► - Oh, can I?

00:00:07 ◼   ► Do you even know what this is about?

00:00:10 ◼   ► - No. - Neither do I.

00:00:11 ◼   ► - No, neither one of you.

00:00:12 ◼   ► - Remember back in the day when I used to do an app.net

00:00:18 ◼   ► broadcast when we went live?

00:00:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, you don't do that anymore, do you?

00:00:21 ◼   ► - No, I haven't done that in a while.

00:00:22 ◼   ► - I don't even post the show links to app.net anymore.

00:00:25 ◼   ► - Right, well, with that in mind,

00:00:28 ◼   ► Do you wanna ask me how many people were complaining

00:00:31 ◼   ► about me not doing the app.net broadcast anymore?

00:00:34 ◼   ► - You know, actually, it would not surprise me

00:00:37 ◼   ► if there was like one or two people who did

00:00:39 ◼   ► because it seemed like the kind of person

00:00:40 ◼   ► who ever received an app.net broadcast

00:00:43 ◼   ► probably feels entitled to keep receiving

00:00:45 ◼   ► app.net broadcasts.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Is that correct?

00:00:47 ◼   ► - Actually, no, to my recollection,

00:00:49 ◼   ► not a single soul said anything.

00:00:50 ◼   ► - All right, that's also an equally explainable outcome.

00:00:56 ◼   ► - Right?

00:00:57 ◼   ► - Oh, that's too bad.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Hey, now we're all using "ello."

00:01:00 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, the thing I logged into once.

00:01:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I logged in once, I followed anyone I could find.

00:01:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, define using.

00:01:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:07 ◼   ► - Fair point.

00:01:08 ◼   ► - We have accounts.

00:01:09 ◼   ► I think I did post something,

00:01:11 ◼   ► I were supposed to reply to someone.

00:01:13 ◼   ► Someone sent me a message and I replied.

00:01:15 ◼   ► But I don't know what's going on on that site at all.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I just wanted my username and now I didn't get it

00:01:19 ◼   ► and I'm sad.

00:01:20 ◼   ► - I got set up pretty well, I got my username.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Couldn't get Marco, of course,

00:01:25 ◼   ► but I got Marco Armentoli, so I got my username.

00:01:27 ◼   ► and I found some people to follow

00:01:30 ◼   ► and I'm like, all right, well, now what?

00:01:32 ◼   ► I've followed some people I wanna follow

00:01:34 ◼   ► and what do I put here?

00:01:37 ◼   ► And you can do the kind of like rich media,

00:01:39 ◼   ► it's kind of like halfway between Twitter and Tumblr.

00:01:42 ◼   ► You can do kind of like a rich media thing or combined thing

00:01:45 ◼   ► and this doesn't seem to be any kind of reasonable

00:01:46 ◼   ► post limit or anything like that.

00:01:47 ◼   ► But it's like, I don't really know what to put there

00:01:52 ◼   ► because I use Twitter, I hang out on Twitter,

00:01:55 ◼   ► people I talk to are on Twitter.

00:01:57 ◼   ► It's the exact same problem I had with app.net

00:01:59 ◼   ► even at the beginning, which was not,

00:02:01 ◼   ► it wasn't that nobody was there,

00:02:03 ◼   ► 'cause a lot of people were there,

00:02:04 ◼   ► and LO is the same thing.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Lots of people are on LO officially,

00:02:07 ◼   ► but the question is, when I have a thought

00:02:10 ◼   ► that I want to post, or when I have a question

00:02:12 ◼   ► I want to ask, where do I put it?

00:02:14 ◼   ► If you put it on both, then it's kind of awkward

00:02:17 ◼   ► for people who follow you in both places,

00:02:19 ◼   ► it's kind of annoying.

00:02:20 ◼   ► And if you're only gonna put it on one place,

00:02:22 ◼   ► chances are Twitter is the better place for most purposes.

00:02:26 ◼   ► it doesn't really solve the problem

00:02:28 ◼   ► of how do you split yourself between these two services.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Like if Ello had come out when Twitter was pissing us all off

00:02:35 ◼   ► and App.net came out, it would have had a better chance.

00:02:38 ◼   ► App.net was a decent idea at the right time

00:02:43 ◼   ► for the most part that was not executed that well

00:02:47 ◼   ► and then the motivation for it kind of faded away.

00:02:50 ◼   ► 'Cause Twitter is always going to be shifting

00:02:53 ◼   ► in directions that we don't like.

00:02:56 ◼   ► Twitter's moves are gonna be like the kid these days for us.

00:03:00 ◼   ► It's gonna, they're gonna just keep doing things

00:03:02 ◼   ► that push it in a direction,

00:03:04 ◼   ► 'cause basically Facebook and Twitter

00:03:06 ◼   ► both extremely envy the other

00:03:09 ◼   ► and in ways that make both products substantially worse.

00:03:14 ◼   ► And so I think Twitter is going to keep adopting

00:03:19 ◼   ► the worst things about Facebook.

00:03:21 ◼   ► But they're gonna do it in a way,

00:03:23 ◼   ► it's gonna be like the boiling the frog thing.

00:03:25 ◼   ► They're gonna do like little things here and there

00:03:27 ◼   ► on the way, it's not gonna be like one massive change

00:03:31 ◼   ► that's gonna make all of us run fleeing.

00:03:33 ◼   ► I think five years from now, what Twitter is

00:03:37 ◼   ► would be nearly unrecognizable to us today.

00:03:40 ◼   ► But it's gonna be done that way over, you know,

00:03:43 ◼   ► in a gradual way, it's gonna be done over that span

00:03:46 ◼   ► so that we slowly won't notice that we're being boiled.

00:03:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:51 ◼   ► And so there's never going to be this one event

00:03:55 ◼   ► that kicks all of us off or drives us all

00:03:58 ◼   ► to go switch to something else.

00:04:01 ◼   ► To go like, we're all gonna leave at once,

00:04:03 ◼   ► the whole party's moving over to the bar down the block.

00:04:06 ◼   ► Like, there's not gonna be like one event

00:04:09 ◼   ► that pushes us all.

00:04:11 ◼   ► And if you are the bar down the block at that point,

00:04:15 ◼   ► you could benefit hugely from that,

00:04:16 ◼   ► but that probably won't happen.

00:04:19 ◼   ► And chances are we're gonna lose a bunch of people

00:04:21 ◼   ► on the way to other things, you know?

00:04:24 ◼   ► Like when Napster was shut down,

00:04:25 ◼   ► everyone didn't just go to one thing.

00:04:27 ◼   ► There was like five different things.

00:04:28 ◼   ► You know, like this always happens.

00:04:29 ◼   ► Whenever any kind of like community, major social site,

00:04:32 ◼   ► like when something goes away,

00:04:35 ◼   ► the people kind of scatter and fragment

00:04:37 ◼   ► over different places.

00:04:38 ◼   ► So as long as we want to keep talking to the people

00:04:41 ◼   ► that we're talking to on Twitter,

00:04:42 ◼   ► we're gonna be keeping using Twitter for that.

00:04:44 ◼   ► And no other service stands a chance.

00:04:46 ◼   ► - You know how like when you take copyrighted material,

00:04:49 ◼   ► like they call it piracy or whatever,

00:04:51 ◼   ► but it's not really theft in the digital realm

00:04:53 ◼   ► because when you download an item,

00:04:58 ◼   ► the person who gave it to you still has it.

00:05:02 ◼   ► Like it's not displacement, digital bits,

00:05:04 ◼   ► they get copied and everything.

00:05:05 ◼   ► So it's like, it's a different type of paradigm.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Well, in social networking,

00:05:08 ◼   ► the phenomenon of like LO,

00:05:11 ◼   ► usually the analogy of let's all move the party

00:05:13 ◼   ► to the bar down the block.

00:05:15 ◼   ► When anything like LO comes along,

00:05:17 ◼   ► Even though we're not, we have this baseline dissatisfaction

00:05:21 ◼   ► with Twitter that's kind of always simmering there.

00:05:23 ◼   ► We don't all leave Twitter.

00:05:24 ◼   ► What we do is we all go to the bar down the block,

00:05:27 ◼   ► but we also stay in Twitter.

00:05:29 ◼   ► So it's like when you take digital bits or whatever,

00:05:32 ◼   ► the original person still has them.

00:05:33 ◼   ► We're still on Twitter, but we're also,

00:05:35 ◼   ► we all run over to Ella.

00:05:37 ◼   ► And then when we get there and it's kind of like

00:05:38 ◼   ► this empty white room and it's kind of boring

00:05:41 ◼   ► and we try to get her username and then we leave.

00:05:44 ◼   ► But we never left Twitter.

00:05:46 ◼   ► So it's like the digital equivalent of let's go all to the bar.

00:05:48 ◼   ► We all do.

00:05:49 ◼   ► I think every time something new comes up, like, well, it's kind of like Twitter, but

00:05:52 ◼   ► not Twitter.

00:05:53 ◼   ► Someone asked me on Twitter, what is it that is supposed to be appealing about Ella when

00:05:58 ◼   ► I said it's kind of like Twitter, but not Twitter.

00:06:00 ◼   ► And that's the appeal of all these things.

00:06:02 ◼   ► I would love something that's kind of like Twitter, but isn't Twitter because Twitter

00:06:05 ◼   ► pisses me off in ways X, Y, and Z.

00:06:07 ◼   ► And so we all stay on Twitter, but we dupe ourselves and we go over to not D-U-P-E and

00:06:12 ◼   ► We all go over to, or maybe that as well,

00:06:15 ◼   ► go over to LO or to app.net or whatever,

00:06:18 ◼   ► because it looks, if you squint,

00:06:20 ◼   ► it looks kinda like Twitter,

00:06:22 ◼   ► and we all don't like Twitter,

00:06:23 ◼   ► and maybe this'll be the next thing we get there,

00:06:24 ◼   ► and it's like, meh.

00:06:26 ◼   ► I mean, you're right.

00:06:27 ◼   ► If there was a big event that actually kicked us out,

00:06:29 ◼   ► physically speaking, so we couldn't,

00:06:30 ◼   ► we had to leave Twitter,

00:06:31 ◼   ► but even then, even if we got all pissed,

00:06:33 ◼   ► we would all keep our Twitter accounts.

00:06:34 ◼   ► We would keep using it,

00:06:35 ◼   ► and we're going to keep using it

00:06:36 ◼   ► until something else is out there

00:06:39 ◼   ► that makes us want to move to it

00:06:41 ◼   ► Do stuff there instead. I don't think wherever is ever gonna be a time where we leave Twitter and start using something else in one

00:06:47 ◼   ► Fail swoop. Yeah, you know we're always gonna stay on Twitter and

00:06:50 ◼   ► Be there'll be some kind of transition phase

00:06:53 ◼   ► We just never make it over the hump during the transition and app.net we get pretty far there was conversations happening there

00:06:58 ◼   ► There are lots of people that we knew it. Just you know we also still stayed on Twitter

00:07:02 ◼   ► Yeah, and and Ello also has the the problems of like they seem to get

00:07:08 ◼   ► Really popular really quickly before they were quite ready for it not in a scaling way

00:07:12 ◼   ► I mean me I don't know bad challenges there Twitter did too. So well, that's true. But but in the way that

00:07:17 ◼   ► That like they don't have a mobile app. Their web app is just barely functional. Yeah, they don't have any apps

00:07:25 ◼   ► That's one of the reasons I'm not using it at all. Where's the app for my Mac? Where's the app for my iPod?

00:07:30 ◼   ► It's like well, I'm not gonna go to that website

00:07:32 ◼   ► I mean--

00:07:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:34 ◼   ► That's like, if you are launching

00:07:36 ◼   ► any kind of social product today and you

00:07:39 ◼   ► don't have at least an iPhone app, you're dead in the water.

00:07:44 ◼   ► That's where people go.

00:07:45 ◼   ► Launching in the web browser might seem like a good idea

00:07:48 ◼   ► to some web nerds, but the fact is

00:07:50 ◼   ► the web browser is no longer the preeminent platform

00:07:53 ◼   ► for this sort of thing.

00:07:54 ◼   ► The iPhone app is.

00:07:55 ◼   ► And the web browser is the worst for it.

00:07:58 ◼   ► If you're going to be anything like Twitter,

00:08:00 ◼   ► Twitter's whole thing is it's a text box that

00:08:02 ◼   ► holds a small amount of text and a button,

00:08:03 ◼   ► and then underneath it a big list of other blurbs of text.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Doing that in a webpage is not optimal.

00:08:10 ◼   ► It's practically designed for mobile.

00:08:13 ◼   ► It is the mobile Facebook.

00:08:16 ◼   ► Get rid of everything, just make one text field in a box,

00:08:18 ◼   ► and you put some words in there, not a lot of them,

00:08:21 ◼   ► and you press a button, and then you scroll

00:08:22 ◼   ► through this big giant table view.

00:08:24 ◼   ► Twitter is made for mobile.

00:08:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's true, but you're saying

00:08:28 ◼   ► that you wouldn't want to go to the website,

00:08:30 ◼   ► but don't you use the Gmail web interface

00:08:32 ◼   ► rather than like mail or airmail?

00:08:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, but Gmail is massive.

00:08:36 ◼   ► Emails are not 140 characters.

00:08:38 ◼   ► They're organized in complicated ways.

00:08:40 ◼   ► It's not just a big linear timeline.

00:08:42 ◼   ► So they require actions and filing and replies.

00:08:45 ◼   ► Like the email is not Twitter.

00:08:47 ◼   ► - No, it's not Twitter, but I don't know,

00:08:49 ◼   ► it just struck me odd that you immediately

00:08:52 ◼   ► snubbed the "ello" website.

00:08:55 ◼   ► - And it's also because like you want a dedicated place

00:08:59 ◼   ► to do this thing.

00:09:00 ◼   ► Everything on iOS obviously is dedicated,

00:09:02 ◼   ► takes over the screen or whatever,

00:09:03 ◼   ► but on the Mac, I don't want to dedicate

00:09:05 ◼   ► an entire browser tab to, nevermind that Twitter website

00:09:08 ◼   ► is just not nice these days.

00:09:10 ◼   ► And well, I don't like it anyway.

00:09:12 ◼   ► I know some people do, but--

00:09:13 ◼   ► - It never was nice, I mean, let's be honest.

00:09:15 ◼   ► - It was nicer, like it was, like,

00:09:16 ◼   ► all the things you're talking about Twitter doing

00:09:18 ◼   ► that we don't like, a lot of them manifest in the website

00:09:21 ◼   ► with the crazy lines between posts trying to show

00:09:23 ◼   ► that like, it's just, I just want a big,

00:09:25 ◼   ► linear time-ordered stream, and that's what you get

00:09:28 ◼   ► iOS devices, that's what I get in my little Mac app that I use and everything's good.

00:09:32 ◼   ► Yeah, and Elo, like their business model

00:09:36 ◼   ► their appeal, I think the reason why people are actually

00:09:40 ◼   ► using it is because it's a new thing that's kind of like Twitter

00:09:44 ◼   ► and everyone wants to establish their username there.

00:09:48 ◼   ► Wait, but hold on, is anyone actually using it? Because I'm not trying to like, you know, be funny or anything.

00:09:52 ◼   ► I've seen two or three posts on Elo that have been

00:09:56 ◼   ► linked probably on Twitter, and that's about it.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And I logged into Ello, like we were saying earlier,

00:10:01 ◼   ► once to grab my username and set the bare minimum

00:10:04 ◼   ► of profile information, and I literally

00:10:06 ◼   ► have not logged in since.

00:10:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm the exact same way.

00:10:10 ◼   ► - I left email notifications on,

00:10:11 ◼   ► so just in case some people are trying to contact me there,

00:10:13 ◼   ► I'll get emailed about it, and that happened once,

00:10:15 ◼   ► and I replied, but that's it.

00:10:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's, I think, the best hope

00:10:19 ◼   ► of drawing people in is those notifications

00:10:22 ◼   ► are on by default, but, you know,

00:10:24 ◼   ► And their whole appeal is supposed to be that

00:10:27 ◼   ► they're never gonna have ads, right?

00:10:29 ◼   ► That's what they're saying.

00:10:30 ◼   ► We're never gonna have ads, we're gonna somehow fund

00:10:33 ◼   ► ourself through basically donations and Kickstarter-like

00:10:37 ◼   ► things, something like that, I don't know the details,

00:10:38 ◼   ► but I don't see that working.

00:10:41 ◼   ► - They have their VC funded, they may say whatever they say,

00:10:44 ◼   ► but in reality they're VC funded.

00:10:46 ◼   ► - Right, and the thing is, a company can say

00:10:49 ◼   ► whatever it wants at the beginning.

00:10:50 ◼   ► You can say, and you can mean, I'm not saying

00:10:53 ◼   ► they're planning on lying to us, or that they're planning on changing direction later, I'm

00:10:57 ◼   ► not saying that, the people today can think and say and do whatever they want, but the

00:11:02 ◼   ► fact is, this can always change in the future. At any time in the future, maybe the founders

00:11:09 ◼   ► aren't there anymore, maybe someone else takes over the company. Like, Elo, if it even

00:11:14 ◼   ► started to take off, we would not really be getting anywhere compared to where we are

00:11:19 ◼   ► on Twitter because Twitter is a lot of great things,

00:11:23 ◼   ► but its main downsides for the good of society,

00:11:26 ◼   ► basically, its main downsides are that it's centralized.

00:11:31 ◼   ► And secondarily, it used to have a lot

00:11:34 ◼   ► of big scaling problems, though those are really

00:11:35 ◼   ► mostly a thing of the past now.

00:11:37 ◼   ► Now, if we go to Elo, Elo will have the exact same

00:11:41 ◼   ► scaling challenges if it actually gets enough people

00:11:43 ◼   ► and enough usage to be viable.

00:11:45 ◼   ► They're gonna face all the same scaling things.

00:11:47 ◼   ► we're gonna start again from zero,

00:11:49 ◼   ► start again from like 2005 on LO for scaling, right?

00:11:54 ◼   ► And then at the end, if they actually manage

00:11:57 ◼   ► to have a big mass of people using it,

00:12:00 ◼   ► and it can replace Twitter for us,

00:12:02 ◼   ► we still have one centralized company

00:12:05 ◼   ► controlling this medium.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And Twitter has shown this really is its own medium,

00:12:10 ◼   ► but it's unfortunately a medium tied to its network,

00:12:12 ◼   ► and as we saw with tent.is or whatever,

00:12:17 ◼   ► whatever it's called, didn't they rename it,

00:12:18 ◼   ► whatever that is.

00:12:19 ◼   ► - Cupcake.

00:12:20 ◼   ► - Oh, is that it?

00:12:21 ◼   ► Okay.

00:12:22 ◼   ► - I think it's cupcake.io, maybe.

00:12:23 ◼   ► - Whatever that is or was,

00:12:26 ◼   ► decentralizing this is hard, it's a hard problem.

00:12:29 ◼   ► But, Elo is not solving that problem, neither was App.net.

00:12:32 ◼   ► These companies, they're starting just like a new Twitter.

00:12:36 ◼   ► And it's going to have, in the best case scenario,

00:12:39 ◼   ► if they succeed and actually make these things,

00:12:42 ◼   ► it's going to go through all the same challenges

00:12:44 ◼   ► Twitter has gone through with scaling

00:12:45 ◼   ► and growing the community and moderation or lack thereof

00:12:49 ◼   ► and spam and abuse, those are all gonna hit it.

00:12:53 ◼   ► And then at the end, we're still gonna have this one

00:12:56 ◼   ► centralized company that controls all of this.

00:12:58 ◼   ► And what if that company, you know,

00:13:01 ◼   ► Elo seems like they're nice and customer friendly now,

00:13:04 ◼   ► but so did Twitter when they started.

00:13:07 ◼   ► And that was a long time ago.

00:13:09 ◼   ► Most of those people have moved on

00:13:11 ◼   ► and it's a very different company with very different needs

00:13:13 ◼   ► and different stakeholders now,

00:13:16 ◼   ► and a different controlling party, really.

00:13:18 ◼   ► And so that can happen to any company like this.

00:13:21 ◼   ► What we need to be designing is an alternative

00:13:24 ◼   ► that can satisfy the roles that Twitter serves for us,

00:13:29 ◼   ► but in a way that is a decentralized protocol, a standard.

00:13:33 ◼   ► It is not one central server that does all this work

00:13:36 ◼   ► that is owned by a private company.

00:13:38 ◼   ► It is a protocol like email or DNS.

00:13:40 ◼   ► Like that's what we need.

00:13:42 ◼   ► whether it's RSS-based, I don't really care

00:13:44 ◼   ► about the implementation details.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Dave Weiner can have his RSS world if he wants it,

00:13:48 ◼   ► that's fine.

00:13:50 ◼   ► I don't care how it works,

00:13:51 ◼   ► but that's the kind of thing we need.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And I know people are saying,

00:13:56 ◼   ► 'cause people in the chat are telling me,

00:13:57 ◼   ► I know that's what tent.io/cupcake was or is,

00:14:01 ◼   ► it didn't take off.

00:14:03 ◼   ► And maybe it's because it launched at the same time

00:14:05 ◼   ► as app.net and so it was too competitive, I don't know.

00:14:08 ◼   ► And there are a lot of problems,

00:14:10 ◼   ► There's a lot of challenges in developing that sort of thing

00:14:13 ◼   ► especially with things like identity and discoverability

00:14:15 ◼   ► of other people on the network.

00:14:17 ◼   ► But that is the kind of solution we need

00:14:21 ◼   ► to the Twitter being kind of a problem.

00:14:24 ◼   ► It's not to build another company up to this point.

00:14:29 ◼   ► It's to eliminate the need for these companies

00:14:32 ◼   ► for this medium.

00:14:33 ◼   ► - I just don't see how we're gonna get there.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And I say that because Twitter's really good at grabbing all walks of life.

00:14:43 ◼   ► It started with the super nerds and then it's ending, it's ended, it's carrying on through

00:14:50 ◼   ► superstars.

00:14:52 ◼   ► And I'm not trying to say that popular musicians or popular actors or whatever are not intelligent,

00:14:59 ◼   ► but they value very different things than the nerds do.

00:15:01 ◼   ► And it's taken a series of very specific decisions by Twitter the company in order to make Twitter

00:15:08 ◼   ► the product to be something that appeals kind of to everyone.

00:15:12 ◼   ► And yes, you know, the nerds like me and you, we all grumble about things that they do,

00:15:16 ◼   ► but in the end of the day, as you said before, this is the popular bar.

00:15:19 ◼   ► And what's weird about Twitter is it's a very, I can't think of a better word than democratic

00:15:25 ◼   ► or unifying perhaps.

00:15:26 ◼   ► Everyone is kind of sort of on the same page on Twitter.

00:15:29 ◼   ► yeah, I may have more or less followers than other people,

00:15:32 ◼   ► like I have a lot less followers than you two, for example,

00:15:35 ◼   ► but really anyone can pretty much talk to anyone else.

00:15:38 ◼   ► And that's not something you see in a bar.

00:15:41 ◼   ► It's not something you see in regular society.

00:15:42 ◼   ► And to have a regular shmo deal with something

00:15:46 ◼   ► that's decentralized,

00:15:48 ◼   ► that doesn't have a real easy onboarding experience,

00:15:51 ◼   ► that isn't something like the web

00:15:54 ◼   ► that is so deeply rooted in the internet

00:15:58 ◼   ► that it's gotten past the fact

00:16:01 ◼   ► that it's kind of a weird onboarding

00:16:03 ◼   ► and URLs are funny and what does .com really mean, et cetera.

00:16:06 ◼   ► I just don't see how a dentist,

00:16:08 ◼   ► cupcake, whatever we're calling it,

00:16:10 ◼   ► I don't see how it could get there.

00:16:11 ◼   ► - Well, look at email.

00:16:13 ◼   ► I think email is a great example

00:16:15 ◼   ► of how this kind of thing could happen

00:16:17 ◼   ► and the likely result.

00:16:19 ◼   ► So email is exactly what we're talking about.

00:16:21 ◼   ► It is a decentralized social network

00:16:24 ◼   ► that has, and it has discoverability challenges,

00:16:27 ◼   ► It has problems with spam and abuse,

00:16:30 ◼   ► but we've managed to make it all work.

00:16:32 ◼   ► It is like, we don't have this panacea of geekdom

00:16:36 ◼   ► where everybody has their own domain name

00:16:38 ◼   ► and everyone's, you know,

00:16:39 ◼   ► everyone owns their digital identity.

00:16:41 ◼   ► No, we have a lot of people like that,

00:16:43 ◼   ► but then we also have like Gmail and Yahoo Mail and MSN Mail,

00:16:47 ◼   ► these like massive conglomerates

00:16:48 ◼   ► that let anybody create an email account,

00:16:50 ◼   ► and a lot of people are fine just doing that.

00:16:52 ◼   ► And that is very centralized within that service,

00:16:55 ◼   ► but it still interoperates with everything else,

00:16:57 ◼   ► and none of the services are ever gonna get powerful enough

00:17:00 ◼   ► to control the medium, I hope, Google.

00:17:02 ◼   ► But it doesn't have to be like total decentralized,

00:17:06 ◼   ► like, you know, Bitcoin tour kind of style

00:17:08 ◼   ► of like every nerd has their own thing,

00:17:10 ◼   ► or rather every nerd is required to have their own thing

00:17:13 ◼   ► and every user is required to be a nerd.

00:17:14 ◼   ► It doesn't have to be that way.

00:17:16 ◼   ► It can be more like the way email does work,

00:17:18 ◼   ► which is the nerds can get their own identities

00:17:20 ◼   ► and their own domains if they want them,

00:17:22 ◼   ► and everyone else can go to some central provider.

00:17:24 ◼   ► This is really, isn't this exactly what Tent did?

00:17:27 ◼   ► everyone else can go to a couple of the big,

00:17:29 ◼   ► popular providers and get some kind of free identity

00:17:31 ◼   ► and not worry about it.

00:17:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what Tent did,

00:17:34 ◼   ► but thinking of Casey's problem of how,

00:17:36 ◼   ► how do you get something like Tent,

00:17:37 ◼   ► which has existed for a long time,

00:17:39 ◼   ► or cupcake.io, which is the actual domain name,

00:17:41 ◼   ► how do you get that to catch on?

00:17:42 ◼   ► I think the best shot in the current environment

00:17:45 ◼   ► is for something, I don't know the technical details

00:17:48 ◼   ► of cupcake.io or whatever, but for something like that

00:17:52 ◼   ► to not actually be the product.

00:17:53 ◼   ► So if you can imagine, for instance,

00:17:55 ◼   ► if Bitcoin had caught on better

00:17:56 ◼   ► because it had a better user interface or whatever.

00:17:59 ◼   ► Some kind of sort of peer-to-peer network consensus-based

00:18:04 ◼   ► protocol for doing something that ends up being

00:18:07 ◼   ► very valuable to a lot of people,

00:18:11 ◼   ► like whether it's, you know,

00:18:12 ◼   ► other than people trying to launder money, right?

00:18:14 ◼   ► So I'm picking monetary things

00:18:15 ◼   ► just because Bitcoin is an obvious example,

00:18:17 ◼   ► but like the purpose of the system was like,

00:18:20 ◼   ► well, this is kind of a weird thing,

00:18:21 ◼   ► but actually people totally use it as a way

00:18:24 ◼   ► to transfer money from each other

00:18:25 ◼   ► without a central mediating authority

00:18:27 ◼   ► with consensus-based thing or whatever.

00:18:29 ◼   ► I mean, obviously we know how Bitcoin has ended up

00:18:31 ◼   ► and all the weirdness into her name.

00:18:33 ◼   ► But anyway, something like that,

00:18:34 ◼   ► where someone builds an underlying infrastructure for,

00:18:38 ◼   ► 'cause that's what you need for this.

00:18:39 ◼   ► If you don't have a central server,

00:18:40 ◼   ► you need some way for it to be more or less peer-to-peer,

00:18:43 ◼   ► but for there to be consensus of everybody

00:18:45 ◼   ► about what is the nature of the timeline

00:18:47 ◼   ► and how do we agree that this is the timeline

00:18:50 ◼   ► and that it hasn't been poisoned with fake things.

00:18:53 ◼   ► And you really said,

00:18:54 ◼   ► Because Twitter serves that role in a centralized thing.

00:18:56 ◼   ► Twitter determines what is and isn't a tweet.

00:18:58 ◼   ► They give permalinks for all the things,

00:18:59 ◼   ► all this other stuff.

00:19:00 ◼   ► It's not like email where you can be storing forward

00:19:02 ◼   ► and you have your own private repositories

00:19:03 ◼   ► and you can delete them, it'll be gone.

00:19:05 ◼   ► Every email doesn't have a URL.

00:19:06 ◼   ► So you need some kind of centralized way

00:19:09 ◼   ► to figure out where the,

00:19:11 ◼   ► we're just gonna call it tweets,

00:19:12 ◼   ► where the tweets are, what is the URL of a tweet,

00:19:14 ◼   ► can I prove this tweet was really made,

00:19:16 ◼   ► verified checkmarks, all that stuff.

00:19:18 ◼   ► But you don't wanna have a central authority,

00:19:20 ◼   ► so that's kind of what Bitcoin does

00:19:22 ◼   ► with its weird hash-based consensus thing,

00:19:24 ◼   ► but it's peer-to-peer, but a large mesh network

00:19:28 ◼   ► where no one noticed the big,

00:19:29 ◼   ► and a tent is kinda like that.

00:19:30 ◼   ► A tent is more federated where it's islands,

00:19:32 ◼   ► and there could be very large islands,

00:19:33 ◼   ► the equivalent of Hotmail and Gmail or whatever.

00:19:36 ◼   ► But anyway, a system like that,

00:19:38 ◼   ► but not built for anything having to do with Twitter,

00:19:40 ◼   ► merely built for some other thing

00:19:42 ◼   ► that has a readily explainable, highly lucrative reason

00:19:46 ◼   ► for being that causes it to come into very common use

00:19:51 ◼   ► and to be built out everywhere,

00:19:52 ◼   ► and for every operating system to have it built in,

00:19:54 ◼   ► and to have a client on every platform,

00:19:57 ◼   ► and then it all comes tumbling down,

00:20:00 ◼   ► kind of like Bitcoin may, right?

00:20:02 ◼   ► But during the interim,

00:20:03 ◼   ► when that was getting distributed everywhere,

00:20:05 ◼   ► because lots of people were making money using this network,

00:20:07 ◼   ► the infrastructure that's made for that network,

00:20:10 ◼   ► people said, "Hey, you know what else we can do

00:20:11 ◼   ► on this network?

00:20:12 ◼   ► We can send you to our little messages

00:20:13 ◼   ► to talk about whatever it is we're doing,

00:20:14 ◼   ► transferring the money or whatever other,

00:20:16 ◼   ► even if it's a gaming thing, massively online,

00:20:19 ◼   ► peer-to-peer, multiplayer gaming,

00:20:21 ◼   ► whatever the infrastructure is,

00:20:22 ◼   ► at some point they'll say,

00:20:23 ◼   ► "You know, you could use the same infrastructure

00:20:25 ◼   ► to send tiny little messages to each other."

00:20:28 ◼   ► Kind of like SMS piggybacked

00:20:29 ◼   ► on the voice network for cell phones.

00:20:31 ◼   ► And that is the only way

00:20:33 ◼   ► we're gonna get a Twitter-like thing, I think,

00:20:35 ◼   ► because it has to be sort of snuck in

00:20:38 ◼   ► behind some other thing that pays for

00:20:42 ◼   ► and is the tractor to pull this massive,

00:20:43 ◼   ► really complicated infrastructure

00:20:45 ◼   ► to spread it across all devices and the entire network.

00:20:47 ◼   ► and then someone shoving little messages there

00:20:50 ◼   ► and then have the other thing probably implode or whatever.

00:20:52 ◼   ► And then what you're left with is like,

00:20:53 ◼   ► oh, well now we have all these clients

00:20:55 ◼   ► and all these servers and all this stuff

00:20:57 ◼   ► for this peer-to-peer network

00:21:00 ◼   ► with no centralized authority

00:21:01 ◼   ► to authentically exchange small messages with each other

00:21:04 ◼   ► and we'll just use that.

00:21:05 ◼   ► I mean, maybe, I was trying to think of like iMessage

00:21:08 ◼   ► but that's centralized as well.

00:21:09 ◼   ► But anyway, that I think is the best case scenario,

00:21:13 ◼   ► the most likely scenario,

00:21:14 ◼   ► because I just don't see a way like Casey

00:21:15 ◼   ► where something whose origin is in,

00:21:18 ◼   ► I wanna be a Twitter-like thing, but I'm distributed,

00:21:21 ◼   ► I don't see how that ever gets to critical mass

00:21:22 ◼   ► without being pulled behind something

00:21:24 ◼   ► as sort of camouflage for it.

00:21:27 ◼   ► - Complicating this problem,

00:21:28 ◼   ► like the way social sites grow is kind of random.

00:21:32 ◼   ► It's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like fashion.

00:21:35 ◼   ► It's like, you know, what's gonna succeed and fail?

00:21:37 ◼   ► You can increase your chances or decrease your chances

00:21:39 ◼   ► with choices you make, but ultimately,

00:21:42 ◼   ► it's kind of random what ends up being picked up

00:21:45 ◼   ► and taking off and it has a lot to do with things like,

00:21:48 ◼   ► like, you know, who goes there, exactly when it comes,

00:21:51 ◼   ► like when it comes around, when someone hears about it.

00:21:53 ◼   ► Like, we're all talking about tent like it's already dead.

00:21:56 ◼   ► We don't even know because at the moment

00:21:57 ◼   ► the tent was launched, we looked at it

00:22:00 ◼   ► and it didn't solve our problems at that moment,

00:22:02 ◼   ► so we moved on.

00:22:03 ◼   ► - No, I just logged in and my last message

00:22:05 ◼   ► is from five months ago.

00:22:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:08 ◼   ► - I think I squatted on either lists or KC lists on tent

00:22:12 ◼   ► And just like, hello, never looked back.

00:22:16 ◼   ► What I did want to ask you guys, and this is a genuine

00:22:19 ◼   ► question, have there been any sort of services or protocols

00:22:25 ◼   ► like email, like RSS, that have arisen significantly

00:22:30 ◼   ► after, say, the late '90s when the web and the internet, as

00:22:35 ◼   ► we know it today, kind of took off?

00:22:36 ◼   ► I'm thinking like BitTorrent is a protocol that's taken off

00:22:40 ◼   ► to a degree, but it's still a little bit on the fiddly side.

00:22:44 ◼   ► But there's been no Twitter, there's Facebook, I guess,

00:22:47 ◼   ► but that's still centralized.

00:22:48 ◼   ► Is there anything-

00:22:49 ◼   ► - BitTorrent and Bitcoin combined kind of,

00:22:52 ◼   ► 'cause BitTorrent, its tractor was piracy, right?

00:22:55 ◼   ► That's the thing, like, no one wants to deal

00:22:56 ◼   ► with this stuff, but if it means you can get free stuff,

00:22:59 ◼   ► then, you know, so that spread,

00:23:00 ◼   ► you can get a BitTorrent client for everything, right?

00:23:02 ◼   ► - Although they have the tracker problem,

00:23:04 ◼   ► which like, it's like kind of centralized.

00:23:06 ◼   ► - Exactly, so, but it's not distributed.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Bitcoin, the tractor there was like laundering money

00:23:10 ◼   ► or buying drugs or whatever, like a way to exchange money

00:23:15 ◼   ► between parties who don't trust each other, right?

00:23:17 ◼   ► And, you know, speculative, you know,

00:23:20 ◼   ► trying to get rich quick, but anyway,

00:23:22 ◼   ► like there was a tractor behind Bitcoin as well.

00:23:26 ◼   ► And that is like BitTorrent

00:23:28 ◼   ► in that it had a tractor to pull it.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And also what I was talking about

00:23:31 ◼   ► where there's no central authority

00:23:33 ◼   ► or does have the consensus problems of like,

00:23:34 ◼   ► if anyone gets more than 51%,

00:23:36 ◼   ► more than half of the computing power,

00:23:38 ◼   ► you could in theory poison the blockchain

00:23:39 ◼   ► also that you know go listen to that big long Glen Fleischmann what was it New Disruptors I think?

00:23:44 ◼   ► I think it was a talk show. Maybe it was a talk show but yeah trying to explain anyway Bitcoin

00:23:48 ◼   ► is not it's it's a little bit to wrap your head around but for the most part like it's not a great

00:23:52 ◼   ► system for what I was describing but it's it's like BitTorrent plus this other thing and I feel like

00:23:56 ◼   ► there's something else out there if it's not piracy or buying drugs or laundering money

00:24:02 ◼   ► some maybe it's porn maybe it's games right some other tractor is going to pull whatever the next

00:24:08 ◼   ► iteration of this is because I don't think either one of those is sufficient to be an infrastructure

00:24:13 ◼   ► for a centralized twitter like thing but it proves that if you have a big enough tractor you can make

00:24:17 ◼   ► the craziest weirdest most unfriendly protocols and stuff spread everywhere I mean they're making

00:24:22 ◼   ► dedicated hardware for for bitcoin for right now you just need a tractor that is not like twitter

00:24:27 ◼   ► and then you need that to be successful long enough for someone to say hey we can put messages

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00:28:53 ◼   ► Here's what actually happens in the modern job age.

00:28:56 ◼   ► So if you're lucky, you apply to a job directly

00:28:59 ◼   ► through some crazy website.

00:29:00 ◼   ► If you're unlucky, you end up going through a recruiter.

00:29:02 ◼   ► Either way, no matter how you format your resume,

00:29:05 ◼   ► they will demand it be formatted in some other way,

00:29:07 ◼   ► including possibly pasting blocks of text

00:29:09 ◼   ► into multiple text areas on a webpage.

00:29:12 ◼   ► And that will go through seven different systems

00:29:13 ◼   ► so that by the time you sit down in front of someone,

00:29:15 ◼   ► what they will have done is printed from their web browser

00:29:19 ◼   ► whatever interface they see your resume in

00:29:21 ◼   ► and it will just come out as an unholy mess

00:29:23 ◼   ► of badly wrapped, ugly formatted, ugly,

00:29:27 ◼   ► like it will just look like your resume

00:29:29 ◼   ► had been put through a blender.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And that is what they have in their hand in front of them

00:29:33 ◼   ► when they're looking over quote unquote your resume.

00:29:35 ◼   ► It bears no resemblance whatsoever

00:29:36 ◼   ► to whatever your resume began as.

00:29:38 ◼   ► So actually it would be a huge upgrade

00:29:40 ◼   ► for them to have a piece of paper in their hand

00:29:43 ◼   ► that I printed with my resume formatted

00:29:45 ◼   ► the way I like it, but that's not the way it happens.

00:29:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, yeah.

00:29:48 ◼   ► When I was last applying for jobs, that had already started

00:29:51 ◼   ► and I made this awesomely formatted PDF resume

00:29:55 ◼   ► and everybody wanted either Word or a plain text

00:29:58 ◼   ► paced out of all the keywords.

00:30:00 ◼   ► - Word is an improvement, 'cause at least they can print

00:30:01 ◼   ► the Word document.

00:30:02 ◼   ► The worst is when it goes through a recruiter system

00:30:04 ◼   ► and an HR system then comes back out as a printed web.

00:30:06 ◼   ► But you can tell with the whole, it used to be worse

00:30:09 ◼   ► when the web browsers would put these insane footers

00:30:11 ◼   ► and headers, I don't know, they still do,

00:30:13 ◼   ► At least they use tiny text now, but just, yeah, it's terrible.

00:30:15 ◼   ► I guess that maybe we're just on our way passing through and eventually it'll just be like

00:30:18 ◼   ► my resume's on the web, pull it up on your iPad.

00:30:21 ◼   ► Wow.

00:30:22 ◼   ► So you want to do some follow-up?

00:30:24 ◼   ► Let's do it.

00:30:26 ◼   ► So we had some very interesting emails from Hendrik, who is @pocketpixels on Twitter.

00:30:34 ◼   ► I don't think I'm the most qualified of the three of us to talk about this, but John,

00:30:38 ◼   ► I think you were lamenting it the most.

00:30:40 ◼   ► Would you like to cover this particular piece of follow-up?

00:30:42 ◼   ► So last week we were discussing a piece of information posted to Twitter as an image of text

00:30:50 ◼   ► with no provenance that I could determine and it was discussed as a hypothetical.

00:30:57 ◼   ► If this is true, it would be gross. It turns out that it is not true. What we were talking about was

00:31:02 ◼   ► when viewing 1080p video on an iPhone, what is it, the 6 Plus, on the 6 Plus that actually has a

00:31:10 ◼   ► precisely 1080p pixel screen 1920 by 1080

00:31:14 ◼   ► Does it does the iPhone 6 plus

00:31:18 ◼   ► Blow the movie up to the off-screen 3x eyes and then shrink it back down to 1080 or does it just show it directly at

00:31:25 ◼   ► native 1080

00:31:26 ◼   ► and

00:31:28 ◼   ► That's what the the image of text said that it does that scaling and that was crazy because it's like you've got this you've got

00:31:33 ◼   ► The content you've got the screen there actually pixel for pixel perfect map for each other

00:31:38 ◼   ► Why would you ever pass through any scaling and shrinking process all you're doing is destroying information?

00:31:42 ◼   ► And we went back and forth to discussing that

00:31:44 ◼   ► None of us knew what actually went on what turns out is that they do do the crazy hard thing which we were discussing about

00:31:52 ◼   ► Changing resolutions or changing the native output, or I don't know what how you want to describe it

00:31:57 ◼   ► But the bottom line is that if you show 1080p content

00:32:00 ◼   ► Or if you just make a view of any kind you have the power as a developer on an iPhone 6 plus

00:32:06 ◼   ► To get exactly one to one pixel accurate rendering of whatever it is you want whether it's an OpenGL view or a video thing or

00:32:12 ◼   ► Even even actually I think you can do with just the UI could view I think it has to be OpenGL

00:32:16 ◼   ► I think I didn't look at the if was that native scale thing was that only in GLK view I

00:32:22 ◼   ► Don't have time to look at that

00:32:23 ◼   ► But anyway, this this is we will provide a link for this in the show notes

00:32:26 ◼   ► But it is on Apple's dev forum

00:32:28 ◼   ► So you only be able to follow the link if you have a developer account

00:32:31 ◼   ► But it was someone asking similar question like hey, I've got some content. It's perfect for 1080

00:32:35 ◼   ► I want to get it to be rendered exactly can I do that and they went back and forth the answer as you can and

00:32:40 ◼   ► So Hendrick did a bunch of experiments to see before

00:32:43 ◼   ► Finding these API's everything to show this and what he did was he played 1080p content

00:32:50 ◼   ► And it's very difficult to tell by looking at like we said it's gonna be very difficult tell with the naked eye whether it's scaling

00:32:56 ◼   ► It or not, but he played like one of those test pattern images with very fine lines with they have one pixel lines

00:33:02 ◼   ► Which is why it works.

00:33:03 ◼   ► So you can say is this how it's supposed to look?

00:33:05 ◼   ► Is that an MPEG artifact or whatever?

00:33:07 ◼   ► But the easy way you could tell is he would tap to show the player controls

00:33:11 ◼   ► Which are like, you know, UIKit views and when the UIKit views come on top of the image

00:33:15 ◼   ► Parts that are not covered by the UIKit views change appearance

00:33:19 ◼   ► So they get blurrier or you know

00:33:21 ◼   ► They look different and when those things go away then it goes back to what we assume is native one-to-one mode

00:33:26 ◼   ► So he posted a video of this

00:33:28 ◼   ► You could try it yourself with this Vimeo video, which is the 1080p test image or whatever

00:33:33 ◼   ► but anyway, this that was like the hypothetical practical proof and then the

00:33:37 ◼   ► More technical proof is in that Dev forums thread where you can see people from Apple saying yes

00:33:43 ◼   ► If you want a view that's one to one pixel accurate, you can get it. Here's how you get it

00:33:47 ◼   ► Here's the API as you can use so I

00:33:49 ◼   ► Would assume that in all cases where Apple can

00:33:52 ◼   ► Get that one-to-one like for example playing video without any controls over late on it

00:33:56 ◼   ► that they do, but it's interesting that they're able to

00:33:58 ◼   ► not only switch, but switch sort of seamlessly

00:34:00 ◼   ► when the UI appears and disappears.

00:34:02 ◼   ► Like apparently they're switching all the time,

00:34:04 ◼   ► not just from app to app,

00:34:05 ◼   ► but within a single app when elements appear.

00:34:07 ◼   ► So it seems like Apple has the various different

00:34:11 ◼   ► scaling modes for different views and alignment

00:34:15 ◼   ► with the hardware down to a science here

00:34:18 ◼   ► where they're able to switch at every opportunity

00:34:22 ◼   ► to do whatever is the most efficient

00:34:24 ◼   ► whatever is the best possible choice for the screen.

00:34:27 ◼   ► Yeah, hang on before there is actually a cricket in my office.

00:34:31 ◼   ► I got to go take care of that because you can hear it.

00:34:34 ◼   ► So where's Hopps when you need him? Come on.

00:34:36 ◼   ► He's lying on the rug asleep.

00:34:38 ◼   ► He's totally ignoring this cricket.

00:34:39 ◼   ► For what it's worth, I did find the article that the block O text came from.

00:34:45 ◼   ► Actually, I think somebody linked it to me.

00:34:47 ◼   ► I don't think I found it.

00:34:47 ◼   ► But anyways, it's the register.co.uk.

00:34:50 ◼   ► Actually, I'll just put it in the chat room.

00:34:52 ◼   ► It was in the show notes for last episode.

00:34:53 ◼   ► Well, if I don't see it, that origin is not reassuring.

00:34:57 ◼   ► Well, and the best part is the title

00:34:59 ◼   ► of this article on the register.co.uk

00:35:02 ◼   ► is Apple iPhone 6 Plus.

00:35:04 ◼   ► Gorgeous fat Pixel Destiny-- Density, excuse me.

00:35:08 ◼   ► But it's wasted.

00:35:10 ◼   ► Yeah, so whoever posted that or the registered people

00:35:14 ◼   ► were confused by the fact that it doesn't matter.

00:35:16 ◼   ► Screenshots always are taken in the high resolution,

00:35:18 ◼   ► even when you can prove to yourself,

00:35:20 ◼   ► either with your own code or with your own sample videos,

00:35:22 ◼   ► that it really is showing native one to one 1080 without any scaling up or down.

00:35:27 ◼   ► If you take a screenshot of that, it still ends up larger.

00:35:30 ◼   ► Like the screenshotting mechanism blows it up.

00:35:32 ◼   ► I can't find it. Nice.

00:35:34 ◼   ► So going back to that video can give me giving me a clean edit point here.

00:35:37 ◼   ► Did you say anything that we need to keep?

00:35:40 ◼   ► We found Casey.

00:35:42 ◼   ► Someone sent Casey a link to the video that that screen there is text was

00:35:47 ◼   ► so much for clean edit point.

00:35:51 ◼   ► This dog is supposed to eat these crickets.

00:35:53 ◼   ► Oh, OK.

00:35:56 ◼   ► The problem is no longer existing.

00:35:59 ◼   ► Murderer.

00:35:59 ◼   ► AF Waller, you know what I meant.

00:36:01 ◼   ► It's the same thing if they're taken in native resolution, but saved and higher.

00:36:04 ◼   ► The point is the file on disk is ends up at high res.

00:36:06 ◼   ► You want to go into arguments about what stage does it become high res?

00:36:11 ◼   ► Is it or is it not a living soul?

00:36:15 ◼   ► When is it? When is it a life job?

00:36:17 ◼   ► I don't understand the distinction you would be drawing there.

00:36:20 ◼   ► They're taken and made at rest, but say, at what point is it taken but not saved?

00:36:25 ◼   ► Are we discussing the memory buffers now?

00:36:27 ◼   ► Now we have to argue about whether the—well, technically, it's not really saved.

00:36:31 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:36:33 ◼   ► See, and if people ever wonder why we sometimes leave, like, these somewhat flippant responses

00:36:40 ◼   ► to pedantic points and questions, this is why.

00:36:44 ◼   ► Because all we do is get people being completely pedantic to us.

00:36:47 ◼   ► Uh, F Waller said he was trolling me, so congratulations, you successfully trolled.

00:36:51 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:36:53 ◼   ► Oh man, this show is such a train wreck, I love it.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Is your cricket dead now?

00:36:58 ◼   ► I don't want to talk about the cricket.

00:37:00 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:37:01 ◼   ► So what, did it go badly? Mistakes were made?

00:37:03 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:37:05 ◼   ► Well, I did my usual move of just dropping something heavy on it and just leaving it there.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And I'll deal with it later.

00:37:11 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:37:14 ◼   ► That is

00:37:16 ◼   ► Truly a new low of procrastination. What's even worse is what is that I what I dropped on it was a

00:37:22 ◼   ► iPad 2 in a in one of those like bookcases

00:37:25 ◼   ► Because that was like the nearest thing that was big enough and flat enough to do what I wanted to do and gosh darn it

00:37:32 ◼   ► people like me

00:37:34 ◼   ► So Tiff I hope you didn't if you're listening I hope you didn't need your old iPad 2 case anymore

00:37:39 ◼   ► Because it's going to be sacrificed forever

00:37:43 ◼   ► It should it should be cleanable easily. Yeah, I hope she makes you clean the guts off of it

00:37:48 ◼   ► But and I have found a use for an iPad 2

00:37:50 ◼   ► I'm not even drinking and this is the best. Oh man. All right

00:37:57 ◼   ► So do we want to actually try to come back to this f you are we just gonna give up on this one?

00:38:00 ◼   ► No, so I actually I actually put the test video on my six plus to see how you know, how noticeable is this?

00:38:08 ◼   ► You know in the last episode almost everything I said was wrong

00:38:11 ◼   ► in the last episode. I had said both, "you won't notice the quality difference" and

00:38:18 ◼   ► there's no way Apple went through the trouble of making this work because who cares, it

00:38:22 ◼   ► doesn't matter, they probably just double scale it. And so it turns out they did go

00:38:26 ◼   ► through the trouble to make this work, they did care, and on the test video, showing a

00:38:31 ◼   ► test pattern, the quality difference is noticeable. And not, you know, I don't think it would

00:38:37 ◼   ► think it would be noticeable in regular video watching. I don't think anybody would ever

00:38:42 ◼   ► notice but if you watch the test video, you know, when it's full screen you see it unscaled

00:38:49 ◼   ► and then if you tap the screen to show the bars you see it get scaled and everything

00:38:53 ◼   ► kind of, well the lines, the way it alternates one pixel black, one pixel white in these

00:39:00 ◼   ► lines so that way you can see if it gets blurred at all because it just turns gray. It's very

00:39:06 ◼   ► clear, like the switch is obvious. So it's interesting, but

00:39:10 ◼   ► again, I still don't think it's worth the effort to just do it for this

00:39:14 ◼   ► I think the way they did it was clearly for OpenGL

00:39:18 ◼   ► that makes more sense. Like they can bypass the scaler for OpenGL

00:39:22 ◼   ► to have direct access to the pixels, that makes a lot of sense. I totally understand

00:39:26 ◼   ► why that is there, and I just didn't think of that as a potential reason

00:39:30 ◼   ► why else this would have to exist when I was saying this wouldn't be worth it. Because I still

00:39:34 ◼   ► maintain that while you can see the difference in the test

00:39:36 ◼   ► video, I don't think it matters for video playback.

00:39:39 ◼   ► And the interesting thing is, as pointed out by Hendrik,

00:39:41 ◼   ► which I assume he confirmed with experimentation,

00:39:43 ◼   ► if you put an opaque UIKit view on top, it does not scale.

00:39:47 ◼   ► Like, it knows it only needs to do it

00:39:49 ◼   ► if it needs to composite it.

00:39:50 ◼   ► So like I said, they're taking every opportunity to say,

00:39:52 ◼   ► do we really have to go up and then down again?

00:39:55 ◼   ► And if every single view on top of your OpenGL view is opaque,

00:39:59 ◼   ► the answer is no, you don't.

00:40:00 ◼   ► I can still go direct to screen.

00:40:02 ◼   ► So it's going direct to screen with the UI.

00:40:04 ◼   ► I mean, I suppose I would wonder,

00:40:06 ◼   ► I guess even if you had like a 3X image

00:40:09 ◼   ► as part of your UI, right,

00:40:10 ◼   ► it would scale that image in the off-screen

00:40:13 ◼   ► and then put that and composite it together,

00:40:15 ◼   ► or not composite it together,

00:40:16 ◼   ► just split it together because it's completely opaque.

00:40:19 ◼   ► So even though you had a 3X resource,

00:40:21 ◼   ► it would be displayed at native,

00:40:23 ◼   ► a scaled native down version of itself.

00:40:26 ◼   ► So I think they did the best you could expect

00:40:30 ◼   ► with the hardware that they had on hand.

00:40:32 ◼   ► And there was another little piece of information

00:40:35 ◼   ► added about this, I forget if it was the same person,

00:40:39 ◼   ► it was Hendrik or somebody else,

00:40:40 ◼   ► but they're talking about why would you ever,

00:40:43 ◼   ► why did you wanna take video

00:40:45 ◼   ► and then there was a perfectly native fit for the screen

00:40:47 ◼   ► and scale it up and scale it back down, that's crazy.

00:40:49 ◼   ► And this bit of information is offered

00:40:52 ◼   ► for a somewhat related scenario, but not quite,

00:40:55 ◼   ► in the realm of digital video,

00:40:57 ◼   ► where if you shoot video in a certain resolution,

00:41:02 ◼   ► and then you, the question is why would you ever scale

00:41:05 ◼   ► that video up to be a much higher resolution

00:41:08 ◼   ► for editing purposes, only to scale it back down later

00:41:12 ◼   ► for the final product, or not scale it back down?

00:41:14 ◼   ► Like why would you ever want to do that?

00:41:16 ◼   ► Or scale it back down not to the original size

00:41:18 ◼   ► but slightly smaller size?

00:41:19 ◼   ► And the answer was that, and this forum post

00:41:22 ◼   ► that we'll put in the show anyway,

00:41:23 ◼   ► was that when you scale something up,

00:41:26 ◼   ► you're making it like blurrier and you're stretching it out

00:41:28 ◼   ► and you're doing all that stuff.

00:41:29 ◼   ► But you're essentially adding information.

00:41:32 ◼   ► Now it's interpolated information

00:41:33 ◼   ► based on the information that was there.

00:41:34 ◼   ► You're synthesizing information,

00:41:36 ◼   ► that's how the scaling works.

00:41:38 ◼   ► But by synthesizing that additional information,

00:41:40 ◼   ► it does actually add information for the image.

00:41:42 ◼   ► Fake information, made up information, guesses,

00:41:45 ◼   ► but that information is added.

00:41:46 ◼   ► So when you scale it back down,

00:41:48 ◼   ► if you don't scale it all the way back down,

00:41:49 ◼   ► what you get in the end is an image

00:41:51 ◼   ► with more visible detail than the one you started with

00:41:54 ◼   ► because it made up the details.

00:41:55 ◼   ► and made up when it interpolated them.

00:41:56 ◼   ► So if you take a 2K image, scale it up to 4K,

00:41:59 ◼   ► and then, well, that's, you know,

00:42:00 ◼   ► take a 2K image, scale it up to 8K,

00:42:02 ◼   ► and then back down to 4K, it will look better

00:42:04 ◼   ► than if you just took the 2K image and scale it up to 4K,

00:42:06 ◼   ► because you added all that information,

00:42:08 ◼   ► and then you shoved it, and then you made it,

00:42:10 ◼   ► you know, you shrunk it back down.

00:42:12 ◼   ► And that was the argument anyway.

00:42:14 ◼   ► I don't know anything about film editing.

00:42:14 ◼   ► That's the argument in this film editing forum,

00:42:16 ◼   ► and you can read about it.

00:42:18 ◼   ► But that's an interesting point.

00:42:19 ◼   ► I don't think it applies to UIs,

00:42:20 ◼   ► which are not photographic images,

00:42:22 ◼   ► but for video, I can understand how you might say,

00:42:25 ◼   ► well, fake information made up by, you know,

00:42:29 ◼   ► bicubic interpolation is better

00:42:31 ◼   ► than not having the information at all

00:42:32 ◼   ► because it will leave you with a more detailed image.

00:42:35 ◼   ► - Our second sponsor this week is,

00:42:38 ◼   ► I think they're new to our show,

00:42:39 ◼   ► but anyway, they're not new to us.

00:42:41 ◼   ► It's Studio Neat.

00:42:43 ◼   ► So you've probably heard of Studio Neat

00:42:45 ◼   ► or at least one of their products.

00:42:47 ◼   ► They've made a couple of things that I really enjoyed.

00:42:49 ◼   ► So they started out with the Glyph, G-L-I-F.

00:42:53 ◼   ► They started out as a Kickstarter project, I believe.

00:42:55 ◼   ► Right, that was Kickstarter first?

00:42:57 ◼   ► - I believe that's right.

00:42:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:42:59 ◼   ► I think most of the stuff has been Kickstarter first.

00:43:01 ◼   ► Anyway, started out with the Glyph,

00:43:03 ◼   ► which is a tripod mount and a stand for iPhones.

00:43:07 ◼   ► And what's interesting too is that they made this adjustable

00:43:10 ◼   ► at the outset, and so because it's adjustable,

00:43:14 ◼   ► it already works with the new iPhones,

00:43:16 ◼   ► including the 6 Plus with or without cases,

00:43:19 ◼   ► which is pretty awesome.

00:43:20 ◼   ► There's a lot of iPhone accessories out there

00:43:22 ◼   ► that many of which become effectively worthless

00:43:26 ◼   ► and unusable once the size of the iPhone changes.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And they've by foresight and probably some luck

00:43:34 ◼   ► been able to buck that trend

00:43:37 ◼   ► and their stuff ends up staying useful.

00:43:38 ◼   ► So good on them for that anyway.

00:43:41 ◼   ► So that's the Glyph Studio needs tripod mount

00:43:43 ◼   ► and stand for iPhones.

00:43:46 ◼   ► But what we're actually talking about today

00:43:48 ◼   ► is that they've moved on to cocktails

00:43:50 ◼   ► and cocktail related products.

00:43:52 ◼   ► So this is Casey's wheelhouse here.

00:43:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:43:54 ◼   ► Not the parking lot, right?

00:43:55 ◼   ► Do you drink in the parking lot?

00:43:57 ◼   ► - It does happen before a football game,

00:43:59 ◼   ► but you wouldn't know about that either.

00:44:01 ◼   ► - I'm from Ohio, I know about that.

00:44:02 ◼   ► So anyway, Studio Neat has moved on to cocktails

00:44:06 ◼   ► with the Neat Ice Kit.

00:44:08 ◼   ► And now Casey, both you and I have Neat Ice Kits.

00:44:11 ◼   ► - We do.

00:44:12 ◼   ► - So Tom and Dan, the guys at Studio Neat,

00:44:14 ◼   ► they're on a mission to convince you

00:44:16 ◼   ► that making awesome cocktails at home is not that hard.

00:44:19 ◼   ► Cocktails are simple.

00:44:20 ◼   ► You just need a few readily available ingredients.

00:44:23 ◼   ► And you already have access to everything

00:44:25 ◼   ► a fancy cocktail bar does,

00:44:27 ◼   ► except for clear and correctly sized ice.

00:44:31 ◼   ► So to fix this, Tom and Dan made the Neat Ice Kit.

00:44:34 ◼   ► The Neat Ice Kit is a set of tools

00:44:36 ◼   ► for creating the right ice for your at-home cocktails.

00:44:39 ◼   ► So Casey, can you describe how this works?

00:44:43 ◼   ► - Sure, so the way this works is you order a kit

00:44:45 ◼   ► and it has some foam insulation,

00:44:48 ◼   ► and within that you place this, what is it, silicone mold.

00:44:53 ◼   ► And you fill this mold with just tap water,

00:44:56 ◼   ► or maybe if you really fancy stuff

00:44:58 ◼   ► out of a pure water filter,

00:45:00 ◼   ► and you put that silicone mold in the foam insulation,

00:45:05 ◼   ► you put all of it into the freezer,

00:45:07 ◼   ► and you let it sit for around a day.

00:45:09 ◼   ► And then a day later, what happens is you have this,

00:45:12 ◼   ► I think it's about two inches wide

00:45:14 ◼   ► by two inches long by four inches deep,

00:45:17 ◼   ► recta-- or not a cube, what's the word I'm looking for?

00:45:20 ◼   ► - A rectangular solid.

00:45:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, that.

00:45:23 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:45:24 ◼   ► So anyway, so you have this basically 3D rectangle

00:45:26 ◼   ► and you, half of it is really cloudy

00:45:28 ◼   ► and the top half of it is perfectly, perfectly clear.

00:45:32 ◼   ► And the reason that happens from what I understand

00:45:34 ◼   ► is as the foam insulation keeps the bottom

00:45:38 ◼   ► and sides insulated, the top is exposed to the freezer air.

00:45:42 ◼   ► and so it freezes from top down and so all the impurities end up at the bottom.

00:45:46 ◼   ► Well, then they give you a mallet and a chisel and you can break this rectangular prism,

00:45:52 ◼   ► whatever Marco just called it, in half.

00:45:54 ◼   ► Solid.

00:45:55 ◼   ► Thank you, solid.

00:45:57 ◼   ► And then you have now a two by two by two perfectly clear block of ice.

00:46:02 ◼   ► It is extremely fussy, extremely silly.

00:46:07 ◼   ► It is by most arguments a complete waste of time and every time I have a drink, this is

00:46:12 ◼   ► exactly what I do and I love it and I am so jealous. I mean we are kind of paid to say this

00:46:17 ◼   ► but hand on heart this is absolutely true. I love my neat ice kit. I love it so much that I actually

00:46:24 ◼   ► stockpile uncut bricks. So if for some reason someone comes over unexpectedly or maybe I've

00:46:30 ◼   ► just had a very bad day then I have plenty of crystal clear big ass ice cubes as they call them

00:46:38 ◼   ► in order to put my vodka on top of.

00:46:40 ◼   ► And I cannot recommend it enough.

00:46:43 ◼   ► It really is fantastic.

00:46:44 ◼   ► I did a review of it on my website,

00:46:46 ◼   ► which we may or may not remember to put in the show notes,

00:46:48 ◼   ► but buy 10 of them because they're awesome.

00:46:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I actually ordered one for myself

00:46:54 ◼   ► before they sponsored the show

00:46:56 ◼   ► just 'cause I thought it was interesting.

00:46:57 ◼   ► And they didn't tell me to say this,

00:46:59 ◼   ► but I've tried a few of the other solutions out there

00:47:02 ◼   ► to try to make fancy ice at home.

00:47:05 ◼   ► and none of the other ones were as easy to use as this one.

00:47:10 ◼   ► So anyway, each Neat Ice Kit includes the mold,

00:47:14 ◼   ► the chisel, the chisel also includes a bottle opener

00:47:16 ◼   ► right in it, so it's pretty cool,

00:47:18 ◼   ► a club that doubles as a muddler, and a Lewis bag.

00:47:21 ◼   ► And I didn't know this, but apparently a Lewis bag

00:47:23 ◼   ► is a bag you crush ice in.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Like you put the ice in the bag,

00:47:26 ◼   ► you hit the bag with your club,

00:47:28 ◼   ► and then out comes crushed ice.

00:47:29 ◼   ► Is that roughly correct, Casey?

00:47:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the idea.

00:47:31 ◼   ► So if you had a situation where you have

00:47:34 ◼   ► cocktail that requires a thin but tall glass and I forget which ones they are

00:47:38 ◼   ► off the top of my head but you could take your big-ass crystal-clear ice cube and

00:47:42 ◼   ► then chop it up a couple more times throw that ice into the Lewis bag use

00:47:46 ◼   ► that muddler like Marco was talking about bang bang bang and crush all that

00:47:50 ◼   ► ice in the Lewis bag and now you've got crystal-clear crushed ice instead of a

00:47:54 ◼   ► cube right or you can even you can you can crush up the cloudy half of the cube

00:47:59 ◼   ► that you would have otherwise put in your dog bowl like I did but because

00:48:03 ◼   ► Hopstich did not care about the cloudiness. He was happy to have ice in his bowl regardless

00:48:06 ◼   ► of whether it was clear or not, but people care. So we can have the cool clear ice for

00:48:11 ◼   ► ourselves. Anyway, the Neat Ice Kit also makes an amazing gift for the holidays, for weddings.

00:48:15 ◼   ► I actually, they, I ordered one for myself and they also sent me one like two weeks later

00:48:20 ◼   ► just because they like me. And so I gave the second one away. I regifted actually, yeah,

00:48:25 ◼   ► but I gave it away because it makes a great gift. So anyway, check it out. Go to StudioNeat.com

00:48:31 ◼   ► Use code ATP when you check out to get 10% off anything in their store

00:48:35 ◼   ► Really? I love these guys. I they have so many great products can't recommend them enough studio neat calm. Don't forget code ATP

00:48:42 ◼   ► Thank you very much. I could go on forever about studio neat and they're such nice guys

00:48:47 ◼   ► Yeah, they're awesome. Like it's even better that they're such nice guys. Oh, yeah, I would still go on and on I've met them

00:48:53 ◼   ► They're they're fantastic. They're that nice in person as well. Yeah

00:48:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and I would go on and on about the neat ice kid

00:48:58 ◼   ► even if they were jerks because it's that wonderful,

00:49:00 ◼   ► but they are also that wonderful.

00:49:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm a big fan of their Cosmonaut.

00:49:04 ◼   ► It's a stylus for iPads.

00:49:07 ◼   ► - I've got that one.

00:49:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like, I've tried, that's another thing,

00:49:10 ◼   ► I've tried a lot of Styleye for text devices

00:49:13 ◼   ► and none of them really worked for me

00:49:17 ◼   ► as well as the Cosmonaut does.

00:49:18 ◼   ► I even have the fancy one from Paper, the Pencil,

00:49:21 ◼   ► and I'm not an artist at all,

00:49:24 ◼   ► and so it doesn't really work for me,

00:49:26 ◼   ► but the Cosmonaut is awesome.

00:49:28 ◼   ► It's like a dry erase marker, basically.

00:49:31 ◼   ► Like that's the feel it has,

00:49:33 ◼   ► which the reason they made it so big and chunky like that

00:49:35 ◼   ► is because that's roughly the precision you have

00:49:39 ◼   ► with any of these things.

00:49:40 ◼   ► And so they made it kind of fit that.

00:49:43 ◼   ► They made the form of it fit the precision

00:49:45 ◼   ► that you actually get.

00:49:46 ◼   ► And so it just makes it feel like more right, you know?

00:49:49 ◼   ► - I hear you.

00:49:51 ◼   ► - Anyway.

00:49:51 ◼   ► - I'm attempting to make it through this episode

00:49:53 ◼   ► and get to a topic, but it's not looking good so far.

00:49:56 ◼   ► - It's not gonna happen.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Now, so let's talk about some bent iPhone tests,

00:50:00 ◼   ► because we haven't done that enough.

00:50:01 ◼   ► - Technically we started with a topic.

00:50:03 ◼   ► - That's true.

00:50:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's Marco's new move,

00:50:06 ◼   ► is he derails either before or just in the beginning

00:50:09 ◼   ► of the follow up, he just adds whatever he wants

00:50:10 ◼   ► to talk about to make sure we get to it,

00:50:12 ◼   ► even though it's not follow up.

00:50:13 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:50:14 ◼   ► - Add that to the bingo board, people.

00:50:15 ◼   ► - Hey, it works, otherwise we'd be all follow up every week.

00:50:18 ◼   ► Nobody wants that.

00:50:19 ◼   ► - No, it would be the same total amount of time,

00:50:22 ◼   ► whether that part is at the beginning or the end,

00:50:23 ◼   ► it would just be appropriate if it was at the end.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Anyway, last week we talked about the Consumer Reports test

00:50:28 ◼   ► and I mentioned a bunch of stuff that I didn't see

00:50:32 ◼   ► in that report, apparently it was there

00:50:33 ◼   ► and either I missed it or I saw an early version

00:50:35 ◼   ► of the report or maybe a reblog of the report

00:50:37 ◼   ► that didn't quite correctly copy and paste the content.

00:50:39 ◼   ► It's hard to tell when you're following things from Twitter

00:50:41 ◼   ► and your iOS device doesn't show the full URL anyway.

00:50:45 ◼   ► But anyway, Consumer Reports did test not just

00:50:48 ◼   ► how much force does it take to break these things

00:50:50 ◼   ► but also how much force can be applied

00:50:52 ◼   ► before what they call deformation,

00:50:54 ◼   ► which is what I was saying.

00:50:55 ◼   ► How much force can you apply before it doesn't spring back?

00:51:00 ◼   ► And so you can see, we'll put the link in the show notes again to those consumer reports.

00:51:03 ◼   ► As you can see, they tested that for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus as well.

00:51:08 ◼   ► And speaking of bending iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and warranty repairs, we got some interesting

00:51:15 ◼   ► feedback from listener Jared.

00:51:18 ◼   ► And he says, "I made the mistake of looking at my iPhone 6 from the side, bending from

00:51:22 ◼   ► carrying it in my not at all skinny jeans.

00:51:25 ◼   ► That was his emphasis.

00:51:26 ◼   ► Uh, I'm sorry.

00:51:28 ◼   ► Skinny jeans and suit pants.

00:51:29 ◼   ► Bent point is right at the bottom of the lower volume bot button.

00:51:32 ◼   ► Went to the Apple store yesterday, Chicago's Lincoln's Lincoln park, which

00:51:36 ◼   ► is usually super awesome and accommodating.

00:51:38 ◼   ► And here's where it gets interesting.

00:51:39 ◼   ► The genius proceeded to tell me that based on an article in scare quotes, they had

00:51:45 ◼   ► received as of October 3rd, that the bending of the phone only occurs because

00:51:50 ◼   ► a lot of pressure or blunt force and the scratches on my case, which were because of keys in

00:51:55 ◼   ► my pocket by accident, was an indication that my phone had been mistreated and they wouldn't

00:52:00 ◼   ► cover the bend under warranty.

00:52:01 ◼   ► Thus, I would have to pay them $300 on top of the $900 that he already shelled out because

00:52:08 ◼   ► he bought a T-Mobile 128 gig non-contract phone.

00:52:12 ◼   ► So that's a change.

00:52:15 ◼   ► And it seemed at first that Apple was pretty happy

00:52:17 ◼   ► to do a warranty return or exchange on these,

00:52:20 ◼   ► and now apparently not so much.

00:52:23 ◼   ► - Well, it didn't seem that way.

00:52:24 ◼   ► That's what Marco said.

00:52:24 ◼   ► He thought that if you brought it to an Apple store

00:52:27 ◼   ► and had a bend and it was still under warranty,

00:52:29 ◼   ► maybe Apple would be nice and replace it.

00:52:31 ◼   ► - Well, because we had heard reports

00:52:33 ◼   ► from people who did that.

00:52:34 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:52:35 ◼   ► - Did we get one from someone who said that they--

00:52:36 ◼   ► - I don't know whether it was Twitter or feedback,

00:52:38 ◼   ► but I did read reports like the second or third day

00:52:41 ◼   ► after this started coming out that this might happen,

00:52:44 ◼   ► They were saying people who brought us to the Genius Bar

00:52:46 ◼   ► and they were like, oh yeah, that shouldn't have happened,

00:52:49 ◼   ► here's a new one.

00:52:50 ◼   ► And now we've heard not just from Jared,

00:52:53 ◼   ► but we've heard from a number of people.

00:52:55 ◼   ► I've seen, we have at least two feedback emails here

00:52:58 ◼   ► and I got a couple of tweets to this point as well

00:53:01 ◼   ► that it sounds like in the last few days,

00:53:04 ◼   ► Apple has changed their policy

00:53:06 ◼   ► and has issued some kind of directive from above

00:53:08 ◼   ► saying they're no longer gonna replace phones for being bent

00:53:12 ◼   ► And I don't know, I mean,

00:53:15 ◼   ► I think we don't know enough about this problem yet

00:53:17 ◼   ► to know whether it's actually a real problem or not.

00:53:19 ◼   ► It was sounding at first like it was gonna be a big problem

00:53:22 ◼   ► and then the Consumer Reports thing came out

00:53:24 ◼   ► and then it's like, oh well, it's not really a problem

00:53:26 ◼   ► as much, maybe, probably not.

00:53:28 ◼   ► But we're not gonna know for like six months.

00:53:31 ◼   ► Like in six months, if half the people you know

00:53:34 ◼   ► who have iPhone 6s, they're bent

00:53:36 ◼   ► and these people aren't like totally abusive,

00:53:39 ◼   ► then I think we'll know,

00:53:40 ◼   ► oh, yeah, this actually was a bit of a problem.

00:53:42 ◼   ► - Well, the Consumer Reports does give us the information

00:53:45 ◼   ► because they test, they show a range.

00:53:48 ◼   ► And let me look, did they do the 5S in that test as well?

00:53:51 ◼   ► 'Cause that's what we can compare it to

00:53:52 ◼   ► is the most recent Apple phone that we may be familiar with.

00:53:56 ◼   ► I mean, the iPhone 6 was not super weak.

00:53:59 ◼   ► Like the 6 and 6 Plus were not the bottom of the barrel.

00:54:02 ◼   ► They were more towards the middle, middle-low end,

00:54:04 ◼   ► but it wasn't, yeah.

00:54:06 ◼   ► So they were the same as the HTC One.

00:54:08 ◼   ► And you haven't heard lots of stories about the HTC One M8

00:54:11 ◼   ► getting bent, right?

00:54:12 ◼   ► But the HTC One was the weakest.

00:54:14 ◼   ► - There's no one's buying it.

00:54:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, you know.

00:54:16 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:54:18 ◼   ► HTC One was the weakest in their test.

00:54:19 ◼   ► The 6 was the second weakest.

00:54:21 ◼   ► The 6 Plus was the third weakest.

00:54:23 ◼   ► But the range is not astronomical.

00:54:25 ◼   ► Yeah, so the iPhone 5 was considerably stronger.

00:54:30 ◼   ► It didn't get deformed until 130 pounds of pressure

00:54:33 ◼   ► versus the 6, which deforms at 70,

00:54:35 ◼   ► and the 6 Plus, which deforms at 90.

00:54:37 ◼   ► So this is a range from 70 to 150 pounds of pressure

00:54:40 ◼   ► for the deformation for best to worst, right?

00:54:43 ◼   ► And so the iPhone 6 Plus is just shy of the middle,

00:54:46 ◼   ► it's on the low end and they, you know, so,

00:54:48 ◼   ► but like those seem like ballparks and like,

00:54:50 ◼   ► is it a difference?

00:54:52 ◼   ► That's why I got into what I talked about last show,

00:54:54 ◼   ► which is, all right, so these tests tell us

00:54:56 ◼   ► what they deform at,

00:54:57 ◼   ► but we don't know what the expected range of pressures

00:55:01 ◼   ► that a phone in your pocket gets subjected to are.

00:55:04 ◼   ► Both based on the length of the phone,

00:55:05 ◼   ► which is what I was talking about last week,

00:55:06 ◼   ► but also just forget the length of the phone,

00:55:08 ◼   ► just say uniform phone length.

00:55:10 ◼   ► If it turns out that the pressures in a person's pocket

00:55:14 ◼   ► generally peak around 100 pounds of pressure,

00:55:17 ◼   ► that means that Apple's iPhone 5

00:55:19 ◼   ► was comfortably above that range,

00:55:21 ◼   ► and now the line of phones they've released

00:55:23 ◼   ► is below that range, right?

00:55:24 ◼   ► And so it could just be there's just a threshold,

00:55:26 ◼   ► like in general, you know,

00:55:28 ◼   ► the worst you're gonna feel in a pocket

00:55:30 ◼   ► is 100 pounds of pressure.

00:55:31 ◼   ► So as long as your phone clears 100 pounds, you're fine.

00:55:32 ◼   ► Like we don't know where that dividing line is.

00:55:34 ◼   ► What is the expectation of pressure?

00:55:36 ◼   ► And so this second email from Chris M

00:55:39 ◼   ► is sort of a contrast to the previous one.

00:55:42 ◼   ► It says he had a phone that was kept in his left pocket

00:55:45 ◼   ► while he played a podcast during a flight.

00:55:48 ◼   ► He said there was no tightness in my pocket

00:55:51 ◼   ► nor was it pressing against anything, et cetera.

00:55:53 ◼   ► Not a mark on it, took it to the Genius Bar.

00:55:56 ◼   ► The Genius person agreed that it had not been mistreated,

00:55:58 ◼   ► it looked perfect, but couldn't replace it under warranty

00:56:01 ◼   ► because of this aforementioned order from above

00:56:03 ◼   ► that they're not doing that anymore, right?

00:56:05 ◼   ► Now, we've seen the numbers for the pressure,

00:56:08 ◼   ► and you say, "Oh, I've never felt any tightness."

00:56:10 ◼   ► Like, these things aren't bending themselves.

00:56:11 ◼   ► It's not Uri Geller bending your phone.

00:56:13 ◼   ► It's like, they're bending because pressure

00:56:14 ◼   ► is being applied to them.

00:56:16 ◼   ► It could be that the pressure is applied in such a way

00:56:17 ◼   ► that it's distributed across your leg so you don't feel it,

00:56:20 ◼   ► but somewhere, somehow, there's at least 70 pounds

00:56:23 ◼   ► of pressure being applied to the center of that.

00:56:25 ◼   ► That's like best case, because it would be harder to bend it

00:56:27 ◼   ► if you apply it 70 pounds of pressure to someplace

00:56:28 ◼   ► other than directly in the middle,

00:56:30 ◼   ► using the edges of the fulcrum.

00:56:31 ◼   ► Like, they're using a three-point press,

00:56:32 ◼   ► holding the very edges, putting the pressure right.

00:56:34 ◼   ► That's the worst case scenario, right?

00:56:36 ◼   ► You would have to apply more pressure

00:56:38 ◼   ► if you were applying it,

00:56:39 ◼   ► if the distance from the fulcrum

00:56:42 ◼   ► and the edge of the thing was shorter.

00:56:44 ◼   ► So somehow pressure is being applied to these phones.

00:56:47 ◼   ► The thing we're missing now is the expected,

00:56:50 ◼   ► what is the environment of the pocket like

00:56:52 ◼   ► in terms of pressures?

00:56:53 ◼   ► And if you're going to build something

00:56:55 ◼   ► to withstand those pressures,

00:56:57 ◼   ► is this phone just under a warranty?

00:57:00 ◼   ► And that I guess we'll find out, like Margo said,

00:57:02 ◼   ► experimentally, it's just like all your friends

00:57:04 ◼   ► who keep their phones in their pockets

00:57:05 ◼   ► are all of them slightly bent in a couple months.

00:57:08 ◼   ► - Right, and when a new iPhone comes out,

00:57:11 ◼   ► when it has any kind of potential physical or design flaw,

00:57:14 ◼   ► you don't really know until a few months in

00:57:17 ◼   ► how bad is it really.

00:57:18 ◼   ► The iPhone 5 came out and the edges scuffed up pretty easily

00:57:21 ◼   ► and showed the lighter color metal underneath.

00:57:23 ◼   ► It took us a while to figure out

00:57:25 ◼   ► that that was gonna be a thing, right?

00:57:26 ◼   ► The iPhone 4 came out,

00:57:27 ◼   ► everyone thought Intenagate was the big problem

00:57:29 ◼   ► when really the big problem with the iPhone 4

00:57:30 ◼   ► was the proximity sensor.

00:57:32 ◼   ► - Was it the home button too on that one?

00:57:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was the one where the home button always died.

00:57:36 ◼   ► And you know, so like there's, you don't really know,

00:57:38 ◼   ► like not every iPhone is perfect,

00:57:40 ◼   ► some are better than others.

00:57:41 ◼   ► I think with this one,

00:57:42 ◼   ► I see, I'm actually seeing this table on Consumer Reports,

00:57:47 ◼   ► case separation I don't really care about,

00:57:49 ◼   ► 'cause I don't think, like I think the deformation

00:57:52 ◼   ► is the more important column,

00:57:53 ◼   ► the one that people will actually more likely to hit

00:57:55 ◼   ► and get upset by in regular use.

00:57:58 ◼   ► What's interesting, two things, first of all,

00:58:00 ◼   ► that by their measurements, the 6 Plus was actually

00:58:03 ◼   ► stronger than the 6, which I think is the opposite

00:58:06 ◼   ► of what you'd probably expect.

00:58:07 ◼   ► Secondly, the 6 withstood only slightly more than

00:58:12 ◼   ► half as much force as the iPhone 5.

00:58:17 ◼   ► And so that's a pretty big difference.

00:58:20 ◼   ► To only be able to withstand roughly half the force,

00:58:23 ◼   ► that's substantially weaker.

00:58:26 ◼   ► And again, because this test is synthetic,

00:58:28 ◼   ► and you're right, we don't know how this will hold up

00:58:31 ◼   ► in practice, but that does look like a problem.

00:58:36 ◼   ► - The round numbers make me worry about it a little bit too.

00:58:39 ◼   ► Why is it 70, 90, 130?

00:58:42 ◼   ► I don't know if they're just kind of saying

00:58:45 ◼   ► this reflects the imprecision in our experiment

00:58:47 ◼   ► and we didn't wanna show you the exact numbers

00:58:49 ◼   ► because that would show a degree of certainty

00:58:52 ◼   ► that doesn't actually exist in the experiment.

00:58:55 ◼   ► I mean, there are a lot of variables here.

00:58:57 ◼   ► These devices are not uniform solids.

00:58:59 ◼   ► They vary on the inside.

00:59:01 ◼   ► They have different materials at different points,

00:59:03 ◼   ► and there's the weak points with the volume buttons,

00:59:05 ◼   ► but little strengthening strips,

00:59:06 ◼   ► and there's a printed circuit board on one side,

00:59:08 ◼   ► and a battery on the other.

00:59:09 ◼   ► So there's all sorts of variables going on here.

00:59:11 ◼   ► So it's not a straightforward test,

00:59:13 ◼   ► but like I said, what really matters is the environment,

00:59:16 ◼   ► the environment that these phones are subjected to.

00:59:20 ◼   ► But the HTC One up there showing similar,

00:59:23 ◼   ► being the weakest in the test,

00:59:24 ◼   ► and being a phone that's been out for a while,

00:59:26 ◼   ► and that we've heard nothing about bending,

00:59:29 ◼   ► makes you think it can't be that terrible

00:59:31 ◼   ► because if there's gonna be a group of people

00:59:33 ◼   ► who are going to baby their phones,

00:59:34 ◼   ► it's not going to be HTC One owners.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Like the Apple ones are the people who are gonna care

00:59:39 ◼   ► about their little device

00:59:40 ◼   ► and not getting scratches on and stuff like that.

00:59:42 ◼   ► I know the HTC devices are really nice

00:59:43 ◼   ► and appeal to people who like nice things.

00:59:45 ◼   ► I think that HTC makes really good looking phones.

00:59:47 ◼   ► But if I had to take entire groups,

00:59:51 ◼   ► iPhone owners versus HTC One owners and say,

00:59:54 ◼   ► of these groups,

00:59:55 ◼   ► which one will treat their phones nicer.

00:59:56 ◼   ► I'm gonna pick the iPhone one,

00:59:57 ◼   ► 'cause I think it attracts a certain kind of hardware nerd.

01:00:01 ◼   ► And so if we haven't heard anything

01:00:02 ◼   ► about HTC One and yes,

01:00:03 ◼   ► is it because they haven't sold any of them?

01:00:05 ◼   ► It's because you don't get any excitement

01:00:08 ◼   ► from telling people that HTC One is bending.

01:00:09 ◼   ► I think we would have seen the story anyway,

01:00:11 ◼   ► if it was a big deal, just because we'd be like,

01:00:13 ◼   ► "Oh, HTC, they can't catch a break.

01:00:14 ◼   ► "They make these great phones that no one seems to buy,

01:00:16 ◼   ► "and now they made one and it bends."

01:00:18 ◼   ► - Honestly, I don't think that's,

01:00:20 ◼   ► I think the things that you just kind of disregarded

01:00:24 ◼   ► are pretty big things.

01:00:26 ◼   ► Like, yeah, no one's buying HTC phones in general,

01:00:29 ◼   ► which is part of the problem HTC is having

01:00:31 ◼   ► with their business.

01:00:31 ◼   ► And you never hear about like minor physical flaws

01:00:36 ◼   ► or minor design flaws of Android phones.

01:00:39 ◼   ► It just doesn't happen.

01:00:40 ◼   ► They're not nearly as high profile.

01:00:42 ◼   ► There is not nearly as much money and attention

01:00:44 ◼   ► to be had by pointing out flaws in them.

01:00:46 ◼   ► It like, it just doesn't happen.

01:00:48 ◼   ► Like that is not a fair comparison.

01:00:49 ◼   ► - I still think it would get reported though.

01:00:52 ◼   ► I mean, the HTC One got reviewed everywhere.

01:00:54 ◼   ► I've seen them in practice.

01:00:55 ◼   ► I've seen people have them.

01:00:56 ◼   ► Like it's not, they're not so rare that you're like,

01:00:58 ◼   ► I've still never seen anyone using a Surface in real life,

01:01:00 ◼   ► but I've seen plenty of HSC ones.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And they got reviewed on all the major sites.

01:01:04 ◼   ► Why would they review it if no one buys HSC?

01:01:06 ◼   ► Like it's not, wouldn't be a big story.

01:01:08 ◼   ► It wouldn't be the Wall Street Journal, right?

01:01:09 ◼   ► But on the sites that we travel in,

01:01:11 ◼   ► I think we would have seen it by now if it was a problem.

01:01:14 ◼   ► - Let me do our final sponsor for the week.

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01:05:21 ◼   ► - We're almost through the follow-up.

01:05:24 ◼   ► - No, we're done, skip everything else.

01:05:26 ◼   ► - Oh, I thought you wanted to defend your iPhone grip,

01:05:29 ◼   ► which is wrong.

01:05:29 ◼   ► - No, someone gave us that link last weekend,

01:05:31 ◼   ► you never put it in the show notes,

01:05:32 ◼   ► now it's stale, but whatever.

01:05:34 ◼   ► - You know, I do wanna mention one more thing

01:05:35 ◼   ► about the iPhone 6 physical design and grip.

01:05:38 ◼   ► So first of all, I used my 5s briefly today

01:05:41 ◼   ► to set up the live streamer.

01:05:42 ◼   ► And yeah, the 5s is such a better looking phone.

01:05:46 ◼   ► Especially the back.

01:05:47 ◼   ► You look at the back and it's like, man, this thing--

01:05:49 ◼   ► the 5s looks downright sexy on the back.

01:05:51 ◼   ► And the 6 and 6 Plus look stupid on the back.

01:05:55 ◼   ► I don't like how the 5 looks on the back.

01:05:57 ◼   ► I can see the argument for the 6 looking worse on the back,

01:06:00 ◼   ► but I just do not like the back.

01:06:01 ◼   ► It just looks so boring to me.

01:06:02 ◼   ► The 5 I'll give you-- the 5s I disagree with.

01:06:05 ◼   ► Because the 5s, the way they change

01:06:07 ◼   ► tone of the of the dark color I know but like it like all the things that look

01:06:10 ◼   ► good about the 5 and 5s back look good in Apple's close-up shots from a human

01:06:15 ◼   ► distance not and met with macro photography it's just a a matte metal

01:06:21 ◼   ► bathtub with you know chamfered edges that are probably nicked no but like the

01:06:26 ◼   ► whit like they'd with like the two-tone back with like the glass windows and

01:06:29 ◼   ► everything that it's just I think it looks so much anyway anyway so first of

01:06:33 ◼   ► all yes impression going back to it is oh my god this thing is tiny secondly oh

01:06:37 ◼   ► my god I can reach everything this is glorious because I'm still still having

01:06:43 ◼   ► trouble reaching everything yeah and and I've definitely I've decided this week

01:06:47 ◼   ► Tiff gave in and got a case for hers and I've decided I'm gonna get a case too

01:06:51 ◼   ► and I have never had a case on my phone before I carried phones I carried Palm

01:06:57 ◼   ► pilots I never had a case on those I have never had a case on an electronic

01:07:01 ◼   ► device I've ever carried around, as far as I can remember.

01:07:04 ◼   ► I might be wrong, but as far as I can remember,

01:07:05 ◼   ► I've never had.

01:07:06 ◼   ► The closest I came was I had like this leather,

01:07:09 ◼   ► like a leather cling stick-on thing

01:07:12 ◼   ► on the back glass panel of my 4 and 4S, which is awesome.

01:07:14 ◼   ► And actually, I ordered new ones to try on the big phone,

01:07:18 ◼   ► or on the current phone.

01:07:19 ◼   ► - You just killed a cricket with a case, didn't you?

01:07:22 ◼   ► - That was Tiff's iPad.

01:07:23 ◼   ► - All right. (laughs)

01:07:24 ◼   ► - She has used cases before, although never on phones.

01:07:27 ◼   ► But I have never used one, as far as I can remember.

01:07:30 ◼   ► - So what did you get case wise?

01:07:32 ◼   ► - Tiff got the Apple leather case.

01:07:34 ◼   ► I am waiting for my leather thing to come in the mail

01:07:36 ◼   ► to see if that will be enough.

01:07:39 ◼   ► Which is great, it's actually only,

01:07:40 ◼   ► it's like 20 bucks so it's great but.

01:07:41 ◼   ► - So why are you getting the case though?

01:07:43 ◼   ► Why have you decided this is the one you need a case for?

01:07:46 ◼   ► - It's because when I hold this phone on my hand,

01:07:50 ◼   ► it just feels slippery.

01:07:51 ◼   ► And I know that was, you know,

01:07:54 ◼   ► everyone says the new phones feel slippery

01:07:55 ◼   ► when new phones come out.

01:07:57 ◼   ► This is, even when the 4 and 4S came out

01:07:59 ◼   ► the glass back, which actually grips pretty well.

01:08:01 ◼   ► People said it felt slippery

01:08:02 ◼   ► because it did compare to the 3GS.

01:08:04 ◼   ► People always say that, but this time,

01:08:06 ◼   ► I've now been using this phone for what,

01:08:08 ◼   ► two and a half weeks, however long it's been?

01:08:10 ◼   ► And it still feels very precarious.

01:08:12 ◼   ► I have almost dropped it many times.

01:08:14 ◼   ► And I have never, as far as I can remember,

01:08:16 ◼   ► I've never dropped an iPhone or any other electronic device.

01:08:20 ◼   ► - So you think it's the rounded edges, the thinness?

01:08:23 ◼   ► It's not the material.

01:08:24 ◼   ► - I think it's a combination of all,

01:08:25 ◼   ► I think it's a combination of the rounded edges,

01:08:28 ◼   ► the thinness and the back.

01:08:30 ◼   ► - Well you think, do the, you can do the tilt test right now.

01:08:33 ◼   ► Do the tilt test with the 5S and the 6,

01:08:35 ◼   ► just to see at what angle do I have to tilt my hand

01:08:37 ◼   ► before it starts sliding off,

01:08:38 ◼   ► 'cause everyone I've known who's done that test

01:08:40 ◼   ► has said that the 6 is either more grippier

01:08:42 ◼   ► or equally grippy with the 5

01:08:44 ◼   ► in terms of just, you know, friction with your skin.

01:08:46 ◼   ► But the rounded edges and the thinness

01:08:48 ◼   ► do make it feel slipperier.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Like that, you know, like it's like a little,

01:08:51 ◼   ► you don't have the sharp edges

01:08:53 ◼   ► that you feel like you're gonna hold onto.

01:08:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, I guess try to do the tilt test,

01:08:56 ◼   ► and I can't, I can't, I mean, I'm not gonna drop them,

01:08:58 ◼   ► but I can get almost 90 degrees.

01:08:59 ◼   ► So that's not really, but mostly 'cause my hands

01:09:01 ◼   ► are slightly moist 'cause I'm warm, but anyway.

01:09:03 ◼   ► - But you just put the five and the six next to each other

01:09:06 ◼   ► in the same hand and it's not a problem.

01:09:07 ◼   ► Anyway, the point is like, I don't think the material

01:09:09 ◼   ► is at fault, but the rounded edges and the thinness

01:09:11 ◼   ► definitely need to make it feel like that.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Maybe this one is getting, finally has crossed

01:09:14 ◼   ► your naked robotic core threshold where you're like,

01:09:16 ◼   ► okay, now this is clearly not the device.

01:09:19 ◼   ► This is clearly the core of the device

01:09:22 ◼   ► that I will slot into something that I'm going to hold.

01:09:25 ◼   ► - Well, it's a combination of factors.

01:09:26 ◼   ► To me, the big things that make this phone

01:09:29 ◼   ► feel more precarious and possibly be more precarious

01:09:32 ◼   ► to hold are the combination of the side design,

01:09:36 ◼   ► like the sides themselves don't dig into your hands at all.

01:09:39 ◼   ► They don't grip your hand.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Like the sides of the five with the squared side

01:09:44 ◼   ► and like the sharp edges,

01:09:45 ◼   ► that does kind of nicely grip your hand.

01:09:48 ◼   ► There's like a big surface there

01:09:49 ◼   ► for friction to stay in place.

01:09:51 ◼   ► So that's a big part of it.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Secondly, I think the possibly bigger part,

01:09:56 ◼   ► besides not having grippy sides,

01:09:59 ◼   ► is that I have to so often change my grip on the phone

01:10:04 ◼   ► in use to be able to reach something.

01:10:07 ◼   ► And that I think is by far the biggest risk

01:10:12 ◼   ► to dropping it, is like when you're holding it one handed,

01:10:14 ◼   ► you're walking around, you're holding it, doing something,

01:10:17 ◼   ► and you gotta go hit a button in the upper corner

01:10:19 ◼   ► that you can't reach.

01:10:20 ◼   ► And so you gotta change your grip,

01:10:21 ◼   ► you gotta like choke up on it,

01:10:23 ◼   ► and then it is much more precarious in your hand

01:10:25 ◼   ► at that point because you have lost your supporting pinky,

01:10:29 ◼   ► your load-bearing pinky at the bottom,

01:10:31 ◼   ► or you've just used your grip the whole time,

01:10:32 ◼   ► which God knows how that works.

01:10:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:10:36 ◼   ► And so I have to reach up and you have a lot less support

01:10:41 ◼   ► in that time and you are literally,

01:10:43 ◼   ► you're scooting the phone down your hand

01:10:47 ◼   ► so that you are intentionally loosening your grip on it

01:10:50 ◼   ► to change where you're holding it.

01:10:51 ◼   ► And so what I'm looking for,

01:10:54 ◼   ► so I still don't have a case on my phone yet,

01:10:58 ◼   ► but I picked up TIFs a couple times in the last couple days

01:11:02 ◼   ► to check something on it, and it feels glorious.

01:11:05 ◼   ► I'm like, oh my god, I need this,

01:11:06 ◼   ► with the Apple leather case on it.

01:11:08 ◼   ► That is how I want this phone to feel.

01:11:12 ◼   ► It improves so many things.

01:11:13 ◼   ► And it does make the edge swipe gestures a little,

01:11:17 ◼   ► it's slightly annoying to do,

01:11:19 ◼   ► 'cause you have to hit the edge of the case

01:11:20 ◼   ► with your finger.

01:11:21 ◼   ► However, when I'm not using the case on the phone,

01:11:26 ◼   ► which is how I'm using my phone,

01:11:27 ◼   ► there's a different problem,

01:11:28 ◼   ► which is that you have to make sure

01:11:31 ◼   ► that you're not accidentally touching the screen

01:11:33 ◼   ► with any part of your grip.

01:11:34 ◼   ► Because the screen is so close to the edges

01:11:36 ◼   ► and they are so nicely rounded,

01:11:38 ◼   ► that it's very easy to accidentally

01:11:40 ◼   ► touch the edge of the screen.

01:11:41 ◼   ► Especially if you're reaching across it.

01:11:44 ◼   ► If you're like diagonally reaching across

01:11:45 ◼   ► with your thumb to one of the upper corners,

01:11:47 ◼   ► then like the pad of your hand below your thumb,

01:11:49 ◼   ► it's very easy to accidentally hit the screen with that.

01:11:52 ◼   ► And so there's all these problems,

01:11:54 ◼   ► and I even thought the other day

01:11:57 ◼   ► that the digitizer on my phone was broken around the edges

01:12:00 ◼   ► because all of my edge tasks were not registering

01:12:02 ◼   ► and I frequently have problems

01:12:04 ◼   ► bringing up the lock screen camera, which is an edge drag.

01:12:08 ◼   ► And a bunch of people tweeted back

01:12:10 ◼   ► basically saying they've had the same thing

01:12:12 ◼   ► even on their 5Ss after iOS 8.

01:12:15 ◼   ► So it appears to be a software bug

01:12:16 ◼   ► of the automatic finger rejection

01:12:18 ◼   ► that's always been more prevalent on the iPad.

01:12:20 ◼   ► They're applying it to the iPhones now as well.

01:12:22 ◼   ► I don't know if they always have,

01:12:23 ◼   ► but it's at least doing it in iOS 8.

01:12:25 ◼   ► The new phones, the screen goes so close to the edge

01:12:29 ◼   ► that they have to do that.

01:12:30 ◼   ► So, and it seems like it calibrates

01:12:33 ◼   ► based on whenever you unlock the phone.

01:12:34 ◼   ► Like if you lock it and then unlock it,

01:12:36 ◼   ► it seems to recalibrate.

01:12:38 ◼   ► And so if you're getting edge tapped, ignore, do that,

01:12:41 ◼   ► it tends to fix it.

01:12:42 ◼   ► But like, if you have a case on it,

01:12:44 ◼   ► you are far less likely to accidentally be touching the edge

01:12:47 ◼   ► So it will also improve the reliability

01:12:50 ◼   ► of edge touch gestures in normal use.

01:12:53 ◼   ► So I feel like this is the first phone

01:12:56 ◼   ► where the stock design of it

01:13:01 ◼   ► is just not that compatible with me.

01:13:04 ◼   ► Like it's the first iPhone where I felt this way

01:13:06 ◼   ► where I actually need a case or something

01:13:10 ◼   ► to make this more ergonomic and more usable to me.

01:13:15 ◼   ► And I'm hearing very similar complaints

01:13:19 ◼   ► from a lot of people.

01:13:21 ◼   ► I think we're going to look back on this design

01:13:24 ◼   ► in the future once we have a different design

01:13:26 ◼   ► and once we've had the benefits of hindsight and time,

01:13:30 ◼   ► I think we're gonna look back on the iPhone 6 design

01:13:33 ◼   ► as a low point.

01:13:34 ◼   ► Not to say it's a failure,

01:13:36 ◼   ► but that it's not up to the usual standards

01:13:39 ◼   ► of what we come to expect from iPhone designs.

01:13:42 ◼   ► - Do you think the curved glass,

01:13:44 ◼   ► The fact that the screen, so I assume this is the case,

01:13:47 ◼   ► I didn't look closely at the one when I was handling it,

01:13:48 ◼   ► but there's part of the glass in the front of the iPhone 6

01:13:52 ◼   ► that is not the screen.

01:13:54 ◼   ► - That's right.

01:13:55 ◼   ► - Because the curved part, the screen image is not displayed

01:13:57 ◼   ► on the entire curved part.

01:13:58 ◼   ► At a certain point the screen stops,

01:13:59 ◼   ► but the glass keeps going.

01:14:01 ◼   ► So it doesn't make it clear to your finger

01:14:04 ◼   ► or any part of you, I'm touching glass now,

01:14:06 ◼   ► but is this part of the glass that I'm touching

01:14:08 ◼   ► part of the screen image or part of the digitizer

01:14:11 ◼   ► that detects my touch?

01:14:12 ◼   ► And that, I think, could lead to some confusion,

01:14:16 ◼   ► both about edge touches and touch rejection

01:14:19 ◼   ► and just feeling in your hand what it is that you're doing.

01:14:23 ◼   ► Whereas before, I think--

01:14:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:14:26 ◼   ► I don't have my iPod touch with me.

01:14:27 ◼   ► I think the screen image went up to something

01:14:29 ◼   ► that you could feel.

01:14:30 ◼   ► Do you have an iOS device?

01:14:31 ◼   ► And you look at it and tell me if that's the case?

01:14:34 ◼   ► I have every iOS device.

01:14:37 ◼   ► So screen images go to the edge of the--

01:14:39 ◼   ► can you feel where the lights stop or no?

01:14:42 ◼   ► - No, no, and I can't on a 5S either.

01:14:44 ◼   ► - All right, well, nevermind.

01:14:45 ◼   ► - But on a 5S, like on a 5S, you never had any reason

01:14:48 ◼   ► for any part of your finger or hand to be resting

01:14:50 ◼   ► on the front face of the phone

01:14:51 ◼   ► that was not going to the screen.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Whereas because of the curved edge,

01:14:54 ◼   ► you're kind of always partially on it.

01:14:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, you can feel the edge now.

01:14:58 ◼   ► That would be your dividing point for feeling in your hand.

01:15:01 ◼   ► Am I touching the screen?

01:15:02 ◼   ► Or I mean, not since that corner is there.

01:15:03 ◼   ► Like, well, once I round the corner,

01:15:05 ◼   ► even though that's not technically the screen right there,

01:15:07 ◼   ► you would keep your hands out

01:15:08 ◼   ► where the curve can sort of lead you into touching it.

01:15:11 ◼   ► I've had cases on all of my iPod touches always I used to always use silicone cases because they were the most grippy and that's

01:15:17 ◼   ► what I wanted and then I eventually gave up on that because I couldn't find a good one for my

01:15:21 ◼   ► Current gen iPod touch and moved to TPU which I like as well and now Apple's making a silicone case

01:15:27 ◼   ► Where were they, you know five years ago?

01:15:28 ◼   ► But I'm probably gonna try their so okay

01:15:30 ◼   ► So I get one of these because I like it to be super grippy

01:15:33 ◼   ► For all the reasons that you said it, but I've just always felt that way

01:15:36 ◼   ► I've always felt that all the iPod touches were too thin and slippery for me to use without a case

01:15:39 ◼   ► So I'd like to go back a minute and explore what happened in your head when you picked up that 5S.

01:15:46 ◼   ► And Erin is still on the 5S by her own choice. And I use her phone probably once every day, once every couple of days, because it's the nearest one and I need to look something up.

01:15:59 ◼   ► And every time I pick up Aaron's phone, the first thought I have, which is what you said, Marco, is, "Holy crap, this feels so much better in my hand."

01:16:11 ◼   ► I think I actually prefer, from a feel point of view, I prefer having the flat sides. Certainly, I can reach everything, which is marvelous because I never realized how much I use my iPhone with only one hand.

01:16:26 ◼   ► But the second thought I have is,

01:16:30 ◼   ► holy crap, the screen is a postage stamp.

01:16:33 ◼   ► And when I was expecting what came to be the six,

01:16:38 ◼   ► I didn't think I really was yearning

01:16:41 ◼   ► for more screen real estate.

01:16:43 ◼   ► And now that I have it,

01:16:44 ◼   ► which is exactly what everyone said would happen,

01:16:46 ◼   ► I really don't like going back.

01:16:48 ◼   ► But the hardware is so much better.

01:16:51 ◼   ► And so I was curious, Marco,

01:16:52 ◼   ► do you also get that feeling of,

01:16:54 ◼   ► oh my gosh, this is so cramped

01:16:56 ◼   ► when you're using the phone?

01:16:58 ◼   ► - I mean, granted, I haven't used it that much.

01:17:00 ◼   ► I just picked it up and played with a few things

01:17:02 ◼   ► for minutes here and there, but what I notice is that

01:17:07 ◼   ► I think the screen is really tiny.

01:17:09 ◼   ► I think, oh my God, I can never go back to this.

01:17:12 ◼   ► However, then I notice, not only does it feel better,

01:17:15 ◼   ► not only can I reach everything,

01:17:17 ◼   ► but because of those two factors,

01:17:19 ◼   ► I can actually use it much faster.

01:17:21 ◼   ► Like, whatever I'm trying to do on the 5S,

01:17:23 ◼   ► I can do faster than I can do it on the six.

01:17:26 ◼   ► And this is even after now being pretty used to the six.

01:17:29 ◼   ► And I think it's because I can reach everything

01:17:32 ◼   ► so much faster.

01:17:33 ◼   ► And I wanted more screen space.

01:17:36 ◼   ► I was on the side of people that said,

01:17:38 ◼   ► "Please give us bigger screens."

01:17:40 ◼   ► I think Louis Mantilla, he tweeted, I think it was him,

01:17:43 ◼   ► he tweeted like, I don't know, a week ago,

01:17:46 ◼   ► something along the lines of,

01:17:48 ◼   ► "They should have done two different sizes."

01:17:51 ◼   ► like I think he said like 4.5 and 5.0 and I don't know what the big one you

01:17:57 ◼   ► know people who have the big phone like it so maybe 5.5 was the right size for

01:18:00 ◼   ► the big one but I think 4.5 rather than 4.7 might have been the better size for

01:18:06 ◼   ► the 6. I think that would have made it you know a little closer to to the 4

01:18:12 ◼   ► inch thing that was so easy to feel and reach everything for so many people you

01:18:15 ◼   ► know obviously 0.2 inches is not a big difference but it is it is a noticeable

01:18:19 ◼   ► I don't think we even really know yet the full value

01:18:23 ◼   ► of having more screen space on the phones

01:18:25 ◼   ► because so much software doesn't take advantage of it yet.

01:18:27 ◼   ► So all this might change in a year

01:18:30 ◼   ► when more apps are updated, you know,

01:18:31 ◼   ► but for now I think it's kind of like the,

01:18:35 ◼   ► like you know, buying the contrast ETV in the store.

01:18:38 ◼   ► When I look at the six and I look at the screen,

01:18:40 ◼   ► I would much rather, like it's more appealing to me,

01:18:43 ◼   ► but when I actually try to use the phone,

01:18:45 ◼   ► The 5S, I think, is more usable for me.

01:18:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, I would agree with that.

01:18:52 ◼   ► It's funny because I don't know

01:18:57 ◼   ► if I were to do it all over again,

01:18:59 ◼   ► and let's suppose in some hypothetical world

01:19:01 ◼   ► I could have the six internals in a 5S case.

01:19:05 ◼   ► I'm leaning toward I would choose the,

01:19:09 ◼   ► I don't know, hypothetical iPhone 6 mini,

01:19:12 ◼   ► but it's a tough call.

01:19:13 ◼   ► And what I'm really curious to see,

01:19:15 ◼   ► and I'd be curious to hear what you guys think.

01:19:16 ◼   ► Do you think that next year,

01:19:19 ◼   ► Apple will make a iPhone 6S in a four inch form factor?

01:19:24 ◼   ► I'm leaning towards no, but I think I want them to.

01:19:29 ◼   ► - I think they gotta look at the sales numbers though.

01:19:32 ◼   ► It's like, they don't have to make that decision right away.

01:19:35 ◼   ► Although they already probably have

01:19:36 ◼   ► enough sales information.

01:19:37 ◼   ► Like they know, you know,

01:19:38 ◼   ► how well did the 4S sell when we put out the five?

01:19:41 ◼   ► How well did the five, well, five selling,

01:19:43 ◼   ► but the 5S like,

01:19:44 ◼   ► If it looks like the 5S and 5C are selling way out

01:19:49 ◼   ► of proportion to the numbers we would expect

01:19:50 ◼   ► for like last year's phone, they're gonna be like,

01:19:52 ◼   ► okay, this shows there is an appetite for the smaller model

01:19:57 ◼   ► that is disproportionate to it.

01:19:59 ◼   ► Like every year someone always buys last year's model,

01:20:01 ◼   ► but this year we sold like five times as many

01:20:04 ◼   ► of last year's model, and what we're showing is that

01:20:06 ◼   ► people who had fives rather than upgraded to sixes

01:20:09 ◼   ► chose to get last year's model.

01:20:13 ◼   ► I think those numbers will be compelling to Apple,

01:20:15 ◼   ► but in the absence of those numbers,

01:20:17 ◼   ► if it just looks like, oh, well, it's the same as every year

01:20:19 ◼   ► a couple of people buy the last year's phone

01:20:21 ◼   ► and then more people buy the new one.

01:20:23 ◼   ► It seems like if they wanted one in that size,

01:20:26 ◼   ► with, you know, if they wanted to keep one in that category,

01:20:30 ◼   ► they would have maybe done something to,

01:20:33 ◼   ► besides leaving the 5S and 5C exactly as they are.

01:20:35 ◼   ► I don't know, like if they had come out

01:20:37 ◼   ► with three different size phones,

01:20:38 ◼   ► would we have all freaked out?

01:20:39 ◼   ► Two phones, three phones?

01:20:41 ◼   ► What's one phone more or less?

01:20:42 ◼   ► Just feel like they have the manufacturing lines up for those other ones

01:20:45 ◼   ► They're just gonna keep making them

01:20:45 ◼   ► But once those age out and God knows how long that'll be cuz are they still selling the 4s somewhere in the world

01:20:50 ◼   ► maybe anyway

01:20:53 ◼   ► The lesson is are they selling 3.5 inches anymore? No, they're not so like

01:20:58 ◼   ► If the if their sales patterns match every every other sales pattern that they've done when they've bumped the size

01:21:04 ◼   ► They will let the smaller size age out if the sales patterns are do not match that phenomenon in a significant way

01:21:09 ◼   ► They're gonna say oh now we have to backfill that with a different phone

01:21:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

01:21:14 ◼   ► I'm with you on that.

01:21:15 ◼   ► I think it will depend, like right now,

01:21:18 ◼   ► for this next year at least, or at least right now,

01:21:21 ◼   ► you can get a 5S, 32 gig for 150 on contract.

01:21:25 ◼   ► And that's a pretty good deal,

01:21:27 ◼   ► and that's a pretty good phone,

01:21:29 ◼   ► and in many respects it's very close to the 6.

01:21:32 ◼   ► Going from the 5S to the 6 is,

01:21:36 ◼   ► if you don't care about the screen size difference,

01:21:40 ◼   ► In other respects, it's a fairly small difference,

01:21:43 ◼   ► except unfortunately the camera is noticeably better.

01:21:46 ◼   ► - I would also add that the battery life,

01:21:49 ◼   ► even a couple weeks in on my 6,

01:21:51 ◼   ► yes, I understand it's a brand new battery,

01:21:53 ◼   ► yes, I understand the 5S battery was a year old,

01:21:55 ◼   ► but I feel like the battery life is noticeably better

01:22:00 ◼   ► on my 6 than it was on my--

01:22:02 ◼   ► - It's rated higher, isn't it?

01:22:03 ◼   ► Like Apple's numbers put it as higher, right?

01:22:05 ◼   ► - I honestly don't know.

01:22:07 ◼   ► - I think it's like an hour or two over,

01:22:08 ◼   ► Yeah, like any you know like we said before like the numbers when you look at them on Apple spec sheet

01:22:12 ◼   ► There's an oh the success slightly higher numbers than the 5s, but slightly higher like those are hours

01:22:18 ◼   ► They're showing even if it's one higher one extra hour feels like an eternity like oh my god

01:22:23 ◼   ► I still have a whole hour to go on this phone. It's amazing you know so

01:22:25 ◼   ► Yeah, like that. I said the new battery stuff last time a lot of people can been complaining about that

01:22:30 ◼   ► That's to remind people that it's that that advantage is going to be massively exaggerated with your one or two year old phone

01:22:36 ◼   ► But I'm pretty sure Apple actually in the specs shows it as being yes the 6 gets better battery life than the 5s

01:22:41 ◼   ► Even if they were both brand new out of the box. I

01:22:43 ◼   ► think if enough people either buy the 5s in the next year like more more than however many people usually buy the year-old phone and

01:22:52 ◼   ► If enough and and you know say next year

01:22:55 ◼   ► I wouldn't expect them to bring out a new 4 inch phone next year, you know next year is like the s cycle

01:23:01 ◼   ► I'll likelihood it they'll be like, you know the 6s and the 6s plus or whatever

01:23:05 ◼   ► But the year after that, when it's time for a likely

01:23:09 ◼   ► redesign, on a two year redesign cycle,

01:23:12 ◼   ► it wouldn't surprise me if they had a smaller phone

01:23:16 ◼   ► as part of that next redesign.

01:23:17 ◼   ► So I'm thinking for small phone fans,

01:23:18 ◼   ► it's gonna be a rough next two years.

01:23:20 ◼   ► Or yeah, it's gonna be a rough next two years,

01:23:22 ◼   ► but then there might be something.

01:23:25 ◼   ► Because the thing is, with the screen size,

01:23:28 ◼   ► there is not a lot of ways they could have better executed

01:23:33 ◼   ► the physical design of this phone

01:23:35 ◼   ► that would have made the screen not be too big

01:23:39 ◼   ► to the people who think the screen is too big today.

01:23:41 ◼   ► Like, or that think the phone is too big.

01:23:43 ◼   ► Because there's already,

01:23:45 ◼   ► like they couldn't really make the phone

01:23:47 ◼   ► that much smaller than what it is right now

01:23:49 ◼   ► and still have this size screen.

01:23:51 ◼   ► So I think if the 6 is too big for you,

01:23:54 ◼   ► any phone with a 4.7 inch screen in the future

01:23:57 ◼   ► is likely to be too big for you.

01:23:59 ◼   ► I don't think they can fix this problem

01:24:01 ◼   ► with design improvements, really.

01:24:03 ◼   ► So either the problem will go away

01:24:06 ◼   ► and people will just deal with it

01:24:07 ◼   ► 'cause they want the other advantages of the phone

01:24:11 ◼   ► or those people will start choosing non-Apple phones

01:24:14 ◼   ► which I'm sure Apple does not want.

01:24:16 ◼   ► So we'll see what happens there, I guess.

01:24:18 ◼   ► - So if Apple on either the 6S or the 7,

01:24:23 ◼   ► they bring back the four inch form factor,

01:24:25 ◼   ► how do they spin that from a marketing perspective?

01:24:29 ◼   ► - They completely ignore it

01:24:30 ◼   ► and they say give it some cool name like iPhone Air,

01:24:33 ◼   ► iPhone Mini, iPhone Nano.

01:24:34 ◼   ► - They don't have to spin it because if they time it right,

01:24:37 ◼   ► all they'll be doing is making sure that they continue

01:24:39 ◼   ► to have a phone of that size in their lineup.

01:24:41 ◼   ► Because they have phones of that size in their lineup now,

01:24:43 ◼   ► the 5C will eventually go away,

01:24:45 ◼   ► you're left with the 5S, the 5S goes away,

01:24:47 ◼   ► and that's the point you replace it

01:24:48 ◼   ► with your new four inch phone.

01:24:50 ◼   ► I don't think that requires any explanation.

01:24:52 ◼   ► - All right, we good?

01:24:54 ◼   ► - Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,

01:24:56 ◼   ► Hova, Studio Neat, and Squarespace,