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73: Notifications Duck

 

00:00:00   Which one did you listen to? The stupid one with Mike Daisy from way back when?

00:00:03   No, the one with the Long Island Jeep dealer or whatever it was.

00:00:06   Yeah, that was a pretty good episode. You still do your fake, like, "This is how we think people

00:00:11   are on Long Island," after hearing people on Long Island talk for an entire show?

00:00:15   Yeah.

00:00:16   And you're still going to do that? It didn't take hearing all the actual people from Long

00:00:19   Island talk? You're just going to go back to that because you think that is somehow representative

00:00:24   of something?

00:00:24   No, I think it makes you mad, and I think that's funny.

00:00:26   So Richmond's in the South, right?

00:00:29   Yeah, once upon a time it was the capital of the Confederacy.

00:00:32   Too bad it's so small it doesn't even have an Apple store.

00:00:34   No, Richmond does. You're thinking of Charlottesville, which is an hour west.

00:00:38   You're just trying to get me angry so you can go to bed.

00:00:41   I really want to go to bed. My throat's all dry. I just took my last sip of water. I'm so tired.

00:00:47   Just think of the editing job you have ahead. You're going to have to listen back to all this

00:00:50   crap again to try to extract some value from it. So you have double punishment.

00:00:55   Right, so we have some follow-up.

00:00:58   Alright, take it out of the parking lot.

00:01:00   Alright, so the first follow-up is from me and it's from

00:01:05   Al. I don't know if that's Al or Al or what. I'm gonna say Alabama.

00:01:10   You know, I think that's right. I think this person's name is Alabama. So anyway, he or she

00:01:16   made a point with regard to the

00:01:20   Android, people switching from Android to iOS, which you had said

00:01:24   Kind of off the cuff an episode or episode or two ago

00:01:27   And so reading from his or her feedback in my immediate circle of friends and colleagues 15 people have switched from iOS to Android

00:01:35   None have switched from Android to iOS

00:01:37   The main reason and this is what I thought was interesting the main reason after an iOS update their one-plus-year-old iPhone

00:01:44   Officially supported by Apple slowed down and made them mad now on Android

00:01:48   95% of them don't get updates, but everything keeps working as

00:01:54   "fast" as it did when they got the phone.

00:01:58   And I thought that was very interesting

00:01:59   because I've not heard this personally,

00:02:01   but I could see that being,

00:02:04   I don't know if I should use the word legitimate,

00:02:05   but perhaps justifiable reason for not upgrading,

00:02:09   or not upgrading your iPhone

00:02:10   or alternatively going to Android.

00:02:12   And I was just curious if you two had any thoughts on that.

00:02:14   - I mean, it's kind of a weak argument.

00:02:17   I mean, first of all, it's totally anecdotal.

00:02:18   Now, my statement was,

00:02:20   I forget exactly my words,

00:02:23   but it was saying that not a lot of people

00:02:26   ever move from iOS to Android,

00:02:29   but people do move from Android to iOS.

00:02:31   And I didn't back it up with anything,

00:02:33   and I don't really have a lot of strong support for that,

00:02:35   except that just from what I've seen online,

00:02:37   I've seen occasional studies and surveys

00:02:39   and reports here and there that some Android people

00:02:42   move to iOS after having an Android phone.

00:02:44   And I've never seen a report that says otherwise,

00:02:47   I mean, that says the opposite,

00:02:48   that some statistically significant number of people

00:02:52   move from iOS to Android after having an iPhone.

00:02:55   Those numbers might be out there,

00:02:58   but I've only ever seen the former,

00:03:00   and I've never seen the latter being reported

00:03:02   in an actual study or report of real numbers

00:03:05   with real people.

00:03:06   So anybody can have anecdotes saying,

00:03:09   oh well, I switched, or my friends all switched

00:03:11   in the other direction, but I would love to know

00:03:13   if anybody has actual numbers backing that up

00:03:15   in either direction or both directions

00:03:16   or in either direction.

00:03:18   I would love to see actual numbers for that

00:03:20   because neither of us really do really have anything

00:03:23   to support this, me or--

00:03:25   ow!

00:03:27   I like this anecdote, though, because it highlights

00:03:31   a phenomenon that I've seen a lot in that when you have

00:03:37   a study of a large group of people,

00:03:38   you want to see larger trends or whatever.

00:03:40   But that's just like--

00:03:43   those big numbers are good for sort

00:03:45   of seeing where the industry or the population is going.

00:03:48   But in any small pocket of people, this phenomenon that this person is describing is something

00:03:53   that I've seen a lot of.

00:03:56   And that, like, how do people decide to, you know, change platforms, switch from a Mac

00:04:03   to a PC, like, whatever sort of technology purchasing decision and platform it is, how

00:04:10   do they change?

00:04:11   Do they change on an individual basis?

00:04:13   Most of the time what I see is what this person described is that social groups move kind

00:04:18   of as a herd in that it will become socially accepted within some small or large group

00:04:24   of people, whether it's just five friends or an entire family or an entire community.

00:04:28   Darrell Bock Or a "framily."

00:04:29   What?

00:04:30   Adam Boff Yeah, and it will become like common wisdom.

00:04:34   Everybody knows that X is true of Y, and it starts becoming socially unacceptable to still

00:04:42   be using X when everybody knows X has this problem Y and you should all change to Z.

00:04:46   Whatever it may be, whether it's about cars, dishwashers, car seats, daycares, I'm thinking

00:04:53   of parenting things, but like, you know, and also with phones. And I've seen this as well

00:04:58   in small groups of people. Everyone just knows like, oh, you know, like the original was like

00:05:04   with the iPhone, oh, your phone is crappy. You should get an iPhone because it's better

00:05:08   at the web or whatever. And then not everyone, or it's the cool thing, or they have apps and

00:05:12   and apps are cool.

00:05:12   And on the other side, you know, in this group,

00:05:15   like, oh, you should get off Apple phones

00:05:17   'cause Apple doesn't support their old products

00:05:19   and they intentionally slow things down.

00:05:21   Everybody knows that.

00:05:22   You should try Android or whatever.

00:05:24   It doesn't really matter whether the thing

00:05:25   they're talking about is true or not,

00:05:27   or whether it's true for a brief period of time,

00:05:29   or was true in the past, is no longer true,

00:05:31   or was never true.

00:05:32   It doesn't really matter.

00:05:33   All it matters is that like the social proof

00:05:36   of a group of friends or family or whatever

00:05:40   can move these little pockets of people.

00:05:42   And the pocket phenomena has almost nothing to do

00:05:47   with the larger trend, because there could be pockets going,

00:05:49   especially if they're basing their movement

00:05:51   on things that aren't true anyway.

00:05:53   These pockets could be just Brownian motion,

00:05:54   just like random movement of these little pockets.

00:05:56   But I think it's interesting that it's not a uniform motion,

00:06:01   and the decisions aren't made on an individual basis.

00:06:04   It's sort of social proof and hearsay

00:06:08   and half-truths and stuff like that that cause these little pockets to move in one direction

00:06:13   or the other. And that, I think, is fascinating no matter which direction they're moving in.

00:06:16   Fascinating and a little bit depressing, but I've long since learned that there's no use

00:06:21   trying to dissuade people of whatever notion that they've decided about whatever it is they're

00:06:27   talking about, whether it's vacuum cleaners or cars or certainly parenting and also things like

00:06:32   phones. And they tend to go in cycles, so whenever I hear someone say something like,

00:06:35   I'm always going to get Android phones because iOS phones don't have flash and I need flash.

00:06:43   Just don't -- it's difficult to discuss that topic in a constructive way with them

00:06:48   about the utility of flash on the web and how many Android phones have flash

00:06:54   or how useful it is in the mobile web or whatever.

00:06:56   Once they've decided that, they're not going to change their mind until the new thing is,

00:07:00   you know, Android phones are unreliable.

00:07:03   I'm gonna get Apple because my last two Android phones broke or something equally

00:07:07   Unfounded or random or whatever

00:07:10   What I think I think Al's specific

00:07:12   Instance here that he's saying that his friends and he all switched because they were mad because their one-year-old iPhone

00:07:21   got a software update from Apple that made it slower and

00:07:24   This is actually an interesting conundrum. Like, you know, what should Apple do here now?

00:07:30   I've never heard anybody say that about an Android phone that it got a software update

00:07:34   Period but also

00:07:38   But also that that a software update slowed it down and maybe that's because they they so rarely get updates

00:07:42   I don't know but whatever the reason I've never heard people say that I think a lot of this has to do with

00:07:47   This like cultural narrative that people especially Apple skeptics and anti Apple people

00:07:53   Have have had about Apple for a while, which is their products are overpriced, right?

00:07:58   right, nevermind that the iPhone is often sold at retail

00:08:02   at the same price as similar Android phones, whatever,

00:08:04   and you can make those arguments all day about,

00:08:07   oh, we'll configure a PC with similar hardware

00:08:09   as a MacBook Pro and it's a similar price.

00:08:11   You can make those arguments all day.

00:08:12   It doesn't matter, as John, you just said.

00:08:14   It's hard to ever convince these people otherwise

00:08:16   once they have these long-running beliefs,

00:08:19   but the commonly held,

00:08:22   and I've heard people say this all the time,

00:08:23   the commonly held thing here is Apple's update

00:08:26   made my old phone slower to force me to buy a new one

00:08:29   because they want more money.

00:08:31   Now, again, I've never heard anybody say,

00:08:34   Samsung updated my phone to make me buy a new one

00:08:36   and intentionally made it slower

00:08:37   so I'd buy a new Samsung phone.

00:08:39   I've never heard a single person say that.

00:08:41   Again, this is anecdotal, who knows if people do.

00:08:43   But the motive is ascribed to Apple

00:08:46   that if a new version of the software is slower,

00:08:49   or if I just perceive it to be slower even if it's not,

00:08:52   or if it is slower but for a reason

00:08:54   that's not the fault of the operating system,

00:08:56   Maybe I'm like running more apps and stuff and some app is slowing stuff down or killing

00:08:59   the battery, you know, whatever the reason.

00:09:01   They ascribe the blame to "Oh, Apple is greedy because their products are expensive

00:09:04   and they want more of my money."

00:09:06   However, what would happen if Apple did not give software updates to one-year-old phones?

00:09:14   Then you'd have these exact same people making the exact same complaint.

00:09:19   Apple is so greedy they won't let me have the new software, they made my phone obsolete

00:09:23   they will use the word obsolete even though it does not mean what they think it means but they will use the word anyway

00:09:27   Apple made my phone obsolete to force me to buy a new one because they want more money and they're so greedy

00:09:32   Like it would be the exact same argument if they did it the other direction

00:09:34   and so this is one of those things like I don't think I think this is it's just like it's a it's a cultural like

00:09:41   rumor or or meme or just

00:09:44   norm that

00:09:46   this certain pretty sizable group of people just thinks this about Apple and will always describe that motive of

00:09:52   their stuff is expensive, therefore anything they do

00:09:54   is to make me go spend more money on their stuff.

00:09:57   And occasionally that might be the reason they do something,

00:10:00   but I think it's pretty occasional.

00:10:01   I think that's more like a happy side effect

00:10:04   of moving things forward and making new stuff every year

00:10:07   and moving the requirements forward every year.

00:10:09   But what do you expect them to do

00:10:11   with your 18 month old iPhone 4?

00:10:13   Like do you expect them to, either way,

00:10:16   if they support this old hardware forever,

00:10:19   it will get slower over time as the OS gets more complicated

00:10:21   more advanced. If they don't support it forever, you'll scream that they stopped

00:10:25   supporting it.

00:10:26   Well, it's the social aspect of it that's important, because I think what happens in

00:10:29   these little pockets that move around is that one or two people with stature in the social

00:10:34   group will get unreasonably angry about something, and then the other people will feel that they

00:10:42   will be looked upon as foolish if they continue to have dealings with the company that's

00:10:46   been denounced by the person with a higher social standing. And they'd be chided about

00:10:51   it and said like, "Oh, you're still doing the Apple stuff?"

00:10:54   It becomes socially unacceptable.

00:10:56   Even if that individual, if left to their own devices, doesn't have a problem, their

00:11:00   device didn't get slower, or they upgraded and didn't notice any problems or whatever,

00:11:04   it becomes a problem socially speaking because of the one or two people who are angry.

00:11:08   And you see this in the opposite thing too.

00:11:10   Marco, recently you posted a link on your website about the guys' experience at Google

00:11:17   I/O versus WWDC.

00:11:19   In our social circle, or at least in some social circles, there is a stigma about Android

00:11:23   phones, about how they're crappy and there's nothing good on them.

00:11:25   And if you were seen with an Android phone, whether you like the Android phone or not,

00:11:29   if you're in a social group where that is looked down upon, you'll get crap about having

00:11:33   an Android phone.

00:11:35   Now, I've never experienced that with the groups that I've traveled in.

00:11:39   I don't think people care that much, but I know it is definitely a thing because I've

00:11:42   seen this opposite thing as well.

00:11:43   And it has, if you're in that social group, it doesn't matter if you are perfectly happy

00:11:47   with your Android phone, at a certain point you begin to feel foolish for having an Android

00:11:54   phone because all these other people that you respect say that you shouldn't have one

00:11:57   and they're crappy, or you get teased about it or whatever.

00:12:00   And so groups will move, you know, groups of teenagers, families, groups of coworkers.

00:12:07   And again, these individual bubbles mean nothing about the larger trend.

00:12:10   They are just lumps in the real world data.

00:12:13   But I think it's fascinating how these little groups are moving.

00:12:16   I think the group can spread quite widely. Obviously the macro phenomenon is if something

00:12:23   happens to some kind of news story that lets you learn that like Company X is evil because

00:12:27   they sell children into slavery or whatever, that bubble will just grow and cover everybody

00:12:31   and it'll be like, well, I'm not going to, you know, forget it. We're not buying anything

00:12:35   for that anymore. The company goes out of business. Like the bubbles can end up growing

00:12:38   and connect with each other and just cover the entire map. But these type of bubbles,

00:12:42   In my experience, tend to be focused on one or two people with high social standing who

00:12:47   have a bad experience with whatever, and that spreads to one or two degrees of connections

00:12:53   from the person.

00:12:54   The only exception is cases—and this one always cracks me up—where there are no good

00:12:58   alternatives.

00:12:59   Where someone with high social standing has a bad experience with an airline, and they

00:13:02   say they will never fly that airline again, it's like, "Well, five down, six more to

00:13:09   go, and you will be out of airlines," because they're all terrible.

00:13:11   It's like, I'm never dealing with Comcast again.

00:13:14   It's okay, well, so you have probably one, two,

00:13:17   possibly zero other cable companies.

00:13:20   Eventually you will hate them all,

00:13:21   and then what will you do?

00:13:22   Then you'll have to pick the least bad one,

00:13:23   which is what we're all doing anyway.

00:13:24   So that one I think people have learned to ignore,

00:13:26   because it used to be like, oh, well, I'll never fly Delta.

00:13:28   Our family doesn't fly Delta.

00:13:30   Delta's terrible.

00:13:31   Sorry, Delta, I'm just picking your name out of the hat.

00:13:32   Is Delta still in business?

00:13:33   - Yes, and they are terrible,

00:13:34   but it doesn't really matter, 'cause they're all terrible.

00:13:36   - Right, but at this point, everyone sort of knows,

00:13:39   look, they're all terrible.

00:13:40   If someone in your family or work group or whatever is super mad at some airline, it

00:13:46   is not reason for you to not fly that airline.

00:13:49   If anyone gives you crap about flying an airline because they'll tell you about the horrible

00:13:52   experience they had, you say, "Look, every airline has those stories.

00:13:56   They're all terrible."

00:13:57   Right?

00:13:58   But with the phone things, I still think this is going in cycles.

00:14:01   And with Apple stuff as well.

00:14:02   Like, I have relatives who were on Macs for years and then a bubble forums about, like,

00:14:07   Mac broke and I didn't feel like I was getting the support I need or I felt like it was obsolete

00:14:11   before it was supposed to be or it is unreliable or I no longer understand it.

00:14:15   So they switched to PC.

00:14:16   Or my, you know, I don't like Apple and I've switched from Mac to PC so now I'm going to

00:14:21   get an Android phone on general principles because I'm mad at Apple about the whatever

00:14:24   thing.

00:14:25   Like, that can happen anywhere but like, wait ten years and it could be back around the

00:14:29   other side again.

00:14:30   I'm never getting an Android phone again, these things are terrible, I don't like them

00:14:32   for whatever reason they decide, I'm only getting, you know, Microsoft phones or Windows

00:14:38   phones or whatever. And very few of these decisions have anything to do with logic and

00:14:41   they just end up being noise. But this is the source of anecdotes. So anytime you hear

00:14:45   an anecdote, just think of one of these bubbles and think of what is making this bubble move

00:14:48   from one camp to the other for any reason.

00:14:51   So you're saying that you never got made fun of for your flip phone, say in the lobby of

00:14:56   the Park 55 at WWDC?

00:14:59   That doesn't run Android.

00:15:00   (laughing)

00:15:00   - Fluff phone is a whole,

00:15:01   that's a whole other category of thing,

00:15:04   and that's like gentle teasing.

00:15:05   I didn't feel like I'm excluded from the group

00:15:07   because I have one.

00:15:08   It's like, "I can't hang out with you guys.

00:15:09   "I don't have an iPhone."

00:15:10   Like, no one really cares.

00:15:11   - Well, I don't think we made fun of you.

00:15:13   I just took a picture and posted it on Instagram

00:15:16   and got 400 people to make fun of you.

00:15:18   - That's a whole other category of things.

00:15:20   Like, you're not even participating.

00:15:21   You don't even have a smartphone.

00:15:22   You still have a dumb phone.

00:15:23   It's like I would,

00:15:24   if I showed up running a penny-farthing bicycle or something.

00:15:27   I mean, it's like, whatever.

00:15:28   But, you know.

00:15:29   It's funny because I'm not going to laugh at anyone using a flip phone.

00:15:33   I will laugh at you using a flip phone because it's funny that you, of all people, don't

00:15:37   have a smartphone.

00:15:38   It's actually not funny.

00:15:39   It's been explained many, many times.

00:15:40   But anyway, people who are excited about it can be excited about it.

00:15:44   But the point is, it's not like I felt as if I wasn't welcome in the group.

00:15:48   Whereas that was the angle with the Google I/O thing where you're hanging out at WWDC

00:15:52   and you pull out of your Android phone and you somehow feel like you can't participate

00:15:56   in the group anymore.

00:15:59   you're not allowed in, you're not with the cool kids or whatever.

00:16:03   I've never personally experienced that phenomenon.

00:16:05   Maybe I don't care enough about what phone I have, maybe other people don't care enough

00:16:08   about what other phone I have, but I imagine it's entirely real, depending on who you're

00:16:12   hanging out with.

00:16:13   Yeah, I've also never seen that, but I've also very rarely ever seen somebody take out

00:16:17   an Android phone, period, at WWDC.

00:16:20   And I think in the groups that we hang out in, if we were hanging out in some abroad

00:16:23   Android phone, I think our reaction would be curiosity.

00:16:25   You would all want to know, show me something cool in that phone.

00:16:29   Why are you using that phone?

00:16:30   Not as a challenge, but show me the thing that that phone can do that the iPhone can't

00:16:34   do.

00:16:35   Again, not as a challenge, but because we're interested in, A, most of us don't want to

00:16:38   know a lot about Android, and B, in the circles we travel in, if anyone we know pulls out

00:16:42   something, we assume because they are someone we respect and are friends with or whatever

00:16:46   and knows tech stuff, that there must be a reason they're using it and we would want

00:16:49   to know that reason.

00:16:50   I feel like curiosity would be the reaction.

00:16:53   Yeah, it's like if somebody, you know, showed up to a party on an elephant. Like, okay, well, we all drove here,

00:16:58   you took the elephant, that's on you. I haven't seen an elephant being ridden in a while, especially to parties like this.

00:17:04   Please tell me why you were the elephant here, and can you show me, you know, can I have a ride maybe? Like, what's going on?

00:17:10   Can I see the trunk?

00:17:12   Sorry, that joke was too bad to pass up.

00:17:14   A tangible example of this is, I went to dinner with Justin Williams and a couple other people when I was at

00:17:22   And he's rocking, or he was at the time rocking a 5C, which that's exactly what happened.

00:17:28   It led to a very brief discussion of a 5C, why not a 5S?

00:17:31   What the hell is wrong with you?

00:17:32   Why aren't you rocking a 5S?

00:17:34   What makes a 5C so much better?

00:17:36   And it was more about, you know, it was playful ribbing, but more about, "Geez, tell me why

00:17:41   you prefer this because you're someone whose opinion I trust and I respect.

00:17:46   you've taken what could be called a contrarian opinion or a contrarian position, tell me

00:17:54   why.

00:17:55   Or even, it doesn't even need to have to be contrarian, it's just unusual. Like,

00:17:58   you're the only person that I've seen in this entire conference so far have a 5C.

00:18:02   You know, out of curiosity, why?

00:18:04   And the answer is because it's super comfortable and smooth on the back and everything. It's

00:18:08   just a better form factor than the, uh…

00:18:10   So, actually, I think that was pretty much his answer.

00:18:12   And it comes in colors.

00:18:13   That's it.

00:18:14   Yeah.

00:18:15   about something awesome and then we'll continue with follow-up.

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00:19:54   Now they sent me a sample pack and I gotta say it, I'm really impressed.

00:19:58   Like I've actually been like a secret shaving nerd for a long time.

00:20:02   And I did all this stuff years ago with like the straight razor, not the straight razor,

00:20:06   but the double edge safety razor and the brushes and everything.

00:20:10   And I eventually went back to,

00:20:12   I currently use the Gillette Fusion.

00:20:14   And I gotta say, the quality of their shave

00:20:19   matches the Gillette Fusion quality.

00:20:21   And I didn't think it was,

00:20:22   I've tried a lot of other ones,

00:20:23   I've never found anything else that matched it,

00:20:25   they match it.

00:20:26   And the cream was nice too,

00:20:28   and the handle's actually really,

00:20:30   it's a nice weighty handle.

00:20:32   I think there's some kind of metal in the middle somewhere.

00:20:35   It's a nice weighty handle,

00:20:37   and certainly looks a lot nicer,

00:20:39   It feels a lot nicer in the hand and is more substantial

00:20:42   than the Gillette ones.

00:20:43   So anyway, that's my experience with it.

00:20:46   So anyway, back to the script.

00:20:47   You get the convenience and ease of ordering online.

00:20:50   You get high quality blades, a great handle

00:20:52   and shaving cream, and excellent customer service

00:20:54   at half the price of competitors.

00:20:56   They have, their blade packages,

00:20:59   it's like less than $2 per blade.

00:21:01   And just for reference, I compared it on Amazon

00:21:03   before the show, the price I paid for Gillette Fusion blades

00:21:07   is like $3.50, $3.75, $4, so it's like per blade

00:21:11   once you get the multi-packs and everything.

00:21:13   So they're under $2 a blade,

00:21:15   so they are really about half the price of Gillette.

00:21:17   So really, what they've been able to achieve

00:21:21   with pricing is pretty impressive to me.

00:21:23   Anyway, get started with a set that includes the handle,

00:21:26   three blades, and shaving cream for just 15 bucks,

00:21:30   and that's including shipping to your door.

00:21:32   They even offer a custom engraving option

00:21:34   on the handle if you want.

00:21:36   So thanks a lot to Harry's.

00:21:37   go to harrys.com and use the promo code ATP

00:21:40   to save $5 off your first purchase.

00:21:44   - So we have some follow-up about the biomedical stuff,

00:21:49   and then we also have some follow-up about iPhoto.

00:21:54   Do you wanna cover that real quick, actually?

00:21:56   - So I said last week that the way iPhoto did raw editing

00:21:59   back in the day was that you'd have the first edit

00:22:03   of a raw photo would be kind of losslessly operating

00:22:06   and then it would bake that into the JPEG

00:22:08   and then in future edits would lose

00:22:09   a little raw badge in the corner

00:22:10   and you would be working on the JPEG only

00:22:12   and if you wanted to go back and do a real adjustment

00:22:15   to the raw, you'd have to reprocess it and reset everything.

00:22:18   Apparently in newer versions of iPhoto,

00:22:19   that is no longer the case, which is awesome.

00:22:21   So now in new versions, I've had multiple people tell me

00:22:23   that, I haven't actually tested it yet,

00:22:25   but I've had multiple people tell me

00:22:26   that in current versions of iPhoto,

00:22:29   you always get the raw editing

00:22:31   if you're working on a raw file.

00:22:32   It doesn't do the thing where it bakes the edits in

00:22:33   after the first one and then you're working on a JPEG.

00:22:35   So good on that.

00:22:37   I got that wrong, and that's it.

00:22:39   Got another quick one here about the alarms going off

00:22:44   in hospitals and how things are always beeping because

00:22:48   the devices don't know enough to know whether something is

00:22:50   normal or abnormal, there's malfunctions and stuff like

00:22:52   that.

00:22:53   And Adam Gaines wrote in to tell us that the proper name

00:22:56   for this is alarm fatigue.

00:22:58   And we'll put a link in the show notes talking about--

00:23:01   it's an NPR story talking about alarm fatigue.

00:23:03   But it makes sense this is already a term for this

00:23:05   because it's definitely a thing.

00:23:07   - That's a nice term too, I like that.

00:23:08   - We got notification fatigue on mobile devices, I guess,

00:23:12   or on those watches that are always buzzing on your wrists

00:23:14   every time you get a notification.

00:23:15   Although I don't know how people deal with it

00:23:17   with their phones.

00:23:18   Like sometimes I briefly use someone else's phone

00:23:20   and the thing is always beeping and buzzing

00:23:21   and things are going off.

00:23:22   Like I disable like every notification.

00:23:25   Almost everything is disabled.

00:23:27   - Yeah, I talked about this before,

00:23:29   but I keep them so low that like I can sleep

00:23:32   with my phone on next to my bed

00:23:34   with the volume on every night.

00:23:35   And I expect to hear nothing all night

00:23:36   unless something is really important and happening.

00:23:38   And that's, I've done that for years and it's been fine.

00:23:41   And you know, I think people are criticizing

00:23:43   these Android Wear watches for buzzing constantly

00:23:46   and showing them all these notifications constantly,

00:23:48   but that's not really the watch's problem.

00:23:50   That's your problem as the user

00:23:51   for having all the notifications configured.

00:23:54   And you know, maybe you could say that the platform

00:23:56   should add some kind of granularity setting,

00:23:58   like priorities of notifications that,

00:23:59   I don't know if they do or not.

00:24:00   I'm assuming they don't,

00:24:01   or at least the watches don't integrate

00:24:03   with anything like that yet.

00:24:04   But that's not a great solution.

00:24:06   That's kind of a, that's like a programmer hack solution.

00:24:08   That's not really a good solution.

00:24:10   The good solution is to exercise a little bit

00:24:13   more self-control over the notifications

00:24:15   that you choose to receive.

00:24:16   And if you don't want to have your wrist buzzing

00:24:18   all the time, maybe it isn't important enough

00:24:20   to have a notification for it.

00:24:22   So that's really, like I don't, that's another thing.

00:24:23   Like people are arguing, or they're criticizing

00:24:26   these watches for that.

00:24:27   It's like that's not really, like that's your fault,

00:24:29   not the watch's fault.

00:24:30   - The thing that really blows me away for like,

00:24:32   iOS users are, most people don't read Twitter the way I do

00:24:35   and that they don't read every single tweet in the feed,

00:24:37   right, which is fine, that's a different way to use Twitter.

00:24:40   But then those same people who don't read their entire feed

00:24:43   have notifications turned on for their @mentions.

00:24:46   And that combination just doesn't make any sense to me.

00:24:48   You're not interested enough that you're gonna read

00:24:51   every single tweet of all the people you follow,

00:24:53   but you are interested enough when any random person

00:24:56   @mentions you that your phone is gonna buzz

00:24:58   and vibrate and bleep, are you kidding?

00:25:02   I have no notifications for Twitter, I have no notifications for email.

00:25:05   The only thing that could make my iPod make any kind of noise, I think, is iMessage, and

00:25:10   I almost never use that unless I'm like @WWDC.

00:25:13   How does that not make sense?

00:25:15   Because I don't necessarily care about the crap that everyone else is shouting into the

00:25:20   world.

00:25:21   But hey, if you're talking to me, I want to know.

00:25:23   So you don't care—the list of people you decide to follow, you don't care enough to

00:25:26   read everything they say, but anybody in the entire world, that mentions you and you need

00:25:30   to know about it right now. Any jerk from anywhere has more control over your attention

00:25:35   than the people you have chosen to follow.

00:25:37   I mean, to be clear, I'm just playing devil's advocate, but yes. I mean, I don't think that's

00:25:41   a surprising conclusion for any normal human to reach. Humans are selfish bastards, and

00:25:47   that's what we're programmed to be. So it's all about us, it's all about me, me, me, and

00:25:53   it's not surprising to me that people would skip what everyone else is saying unless it

00:25:58   pertains to me.

00:25:59   Maybe if people get very, very few @mentions, it's not a problem, but most of the people

00:26:03   that I know do get a lot of @mentions, and I bet at least half of them are bad.

00:26:08   So it's like you're running that Facebook experiment on yourself where you're making

00:26:11   yourself feel bad by making your phone ring with a 50% chance that it's going to be someone

00:26:14   saying something that's going to make you feel bad.

00:26:16   But you need to, "Oh, now it's time for my phone to vibrate.

00:26:18   I got to pull that out.

00:26:19   Let me see what Random Jerk 123 had to say about me.

00:26:22   50/50 shot, it's going to make me feel bad."

00:26:24   Which is exactly why I recently came to the conclusion

00:26:29   that having notifications for all @mentions is insane.

00:26:33   And I am a completionist like you, for the record.

00:26:35   But anyway, I instead have notifications only for people

00:26:39   that mention me that I also follow.

00:26:42   So the assumption here is that if somebody that I follow

00:26:46   is mentioning me, the signal-to-noise ratio

00:26:48   is quite a bit higher.

00:26:49   I still think it's not a reason to be

00:26:51   notified right now about it.

00:26:53   You can have a separate view of your Twitter feed

00:26:55   that shows you @mentions by people you follow.

00:26:57   Like I can understand viewing your feed, filtering your feed that way to show you stuff, but

00:27:01   it's not a reason to, like I don't need to know right now that someone @ mentioned me

00:27:05   on Twitter, right?

00:27:06   If I was, if I'm in the middle of reading Twitter, then fine, but like just, I, again,

00:27:10   I have a low tolerance for anything making my phone vibrate unless it's like a family

00:27:14   member giving me information I need to have right now.

00:27:16   Unless it's basically the equivalent of a phone call, the modern day equivalent of a

00:27:19   phone call where it's like real, real time information that I need to know now.

00:27:23   Whereas even if it's someone I follow and they @ mentioned me, I don't need to know

00:27:26   that now. Well you're much you have much more self-control than I do and I and I

00:27:31   need to be more like you and I'm not saying that to patronize you. I feel

00:27:36   like I want to know if somebody's talking to me because I feel like

00:27:39   Twitter's just a half step less important than a text message which goes

00:27:43   back to my appearance on IRL talk but but I I should turn off all @mention

00:27:48   notifications but I don't know I just I want to know I want to know if

00:27:51   somebody's talking about me. You'll find out when you when you have a chance to

00:27:54   look at twitter then you will see what they had to say about you but you need to know this second i

00:27:58   mean i would just again it gets back to just i have so few notifications turned on at all period

00:28:03   like there is very little that happens on my phone that i think requires me to service it immediately

00:28:09   like it's like it's servicing an interrupt you know not that kind of service interrupt service

00:28:14   routine anyway to be clear i don't have sounds on so it shows up on my home screen but i don't have

00:28:22   have any sort of buzzing or anything like that.

00:28:25   - Yeah, I'm actually, so Overcast has push notifications

00:28:29   for the episodes, and the way it works is I send

00:28:31   a content available push, which is silent,

00:28:33   which doesn't alert the user.

00:28:34   The app wakes up, downloads new stuff,

00:28:36   and if there's something new that the user

00:28:38   should be notified about, it shows a local notification.

00:28:41   And I actually intentionally set no sound for it,

00:28:46   and so far in the beta, no one has said anything about that,

00:28:48   and I'm wondering--

00:28:50   - I was gonna mention that to you,

00:28:51   but I didn't want to report bugs in the podcast.

00:28:53   But I don't, well actually this may be a separate thing.

00:28:55   I'll be listening to a podcast, right?

00:28:57   And then the sound will duck,

00:28:59   as in, you know, go lower volume, briefly.

00:29:02   And that is my cue to know that some notification

00:29:04   has happened on my system.

00:29:05   But I don't know what notification it was

00:29:07   because no banner goes down

00:29:08   'cause I have no notifications turned on,

00:29:09   but I know that something has happened.

00:29:11   And so frequently I will pause the audio,

00:29:13   go back and see that that was a message or something.

00:29:15   And is that because my settings are screwed up

00:29:17   that it didn't make any noise?

00:29:18   The audio ducked, so clearly Overcast

00:29:20   knew that something was happening.

00:29:21   but no other noise came through my headphones.

00:29:23   - Well, that one's not, thank God that's not my bug.

00:29:25   In fact, not only is that not my bug,

00:29:27   but applications don't even get a notification

00:29:29   when they're being ducked.

00:29:30   Like, I can't really do anything in response to that.

00:29:33   - So am I supposed to be here?

00:29:34   Like, in theory, am I supposed to be hearing something?

00:29:37   - Probably, but fortunately that's not my bug.

00:29:39   - All right, well anyway, the ducking audio,

00:29:41   at first I thought there was like

00:29:42   a podcast production problem.

00:29:44   Like, boy, you know, in our podcast

00:29:46   or someone else's like, oh, why the audio ducking?

00:29:48   But now I learned that it's something else

00:29:49   going on in my phone.

00:29:50   Anyway, notifications suck.

00:29:52   (laughing)

00:29:54   - Tell me how you really feel.

00:29:55   Don't hold back.

00:29:56   - We are also sponsored this week by our friends

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00:32:15   Do we want to do this biomedical stuff and follow up?

00:32:18   We should read it. It's brief. This is Ben Griffell who wrote it before, and he's correcting

00:32:23   himself, so I think that in that spirit…

00:32:25   He could have a podcast.

00:32:27   Yeah.

00:32:28   He could do follow-up.

00:32:29   Yeah, I'm just going to read it because it's fairly concise. "There are a few

00:32:32   watches out there that can determine your heart rate optically using infrared light

00:32:35   shine through your skin.

00:32:42   Some reviews suggest this method works fairly well.

00:32:44   This changes the equation about what you can and can't do with the watches.

00:32:47   Long-term continuous heart rate monitoring becomes feasible, which can give you all kinds

00:32:50   of health information, including heart rate variability.

00:32:53   It also makes the process of getting continuous heart rate during exercise much more convenient.

00:32:57   However, a lot of my other points still stand.

00:33:00   The bigger is, what can you do with this information, and will people really care?

00:33:03   You can't use this information to diagnose or treat any conditions with FDA approval,

00:33:07   and studies still show that for most people this kind of data just becomes boring noise.

00:33:11   It might motivate some people to exercise in the short run, but long-term it just doesn't

00:33:14   happen.

00:33:15   This was a big point of his previous feedback that I didn't mention, like the idea that

00:33:18   Fitbit and those other kind of tracker things, it's kind of like a short-term boost, but

00:33:22   then people get bored of them and go back to their old habits.

00:33:24   Which I don't think that's a slam on Fitbit, that's true of all diet and exercise regimes

00:33:28   everyone eventually backslides, because that's the way people are.

00:33:33   So he says, "I just don't see this as a big field.

00:33:35   Easy to use home blood pressure monitors have been around for ages and they're not exactly

00:33:38   flying off the shelves."

00:33:40   The only thing I'll add to this, other than allowing him to do his self-follow-up to say

00:33:44   that he was wrong about not having a way to measure heart rate, is that...

00:33:49   Well, actually, let me read the second bit of follow-up, which is from a different person,

00:33:54   is also fairly short before I go for the other tangent.

00:33:57   This is from Josh Brock.

00:33:58   He says, "The doctor..."

00:33:59   This is the other person who gave feedback was a doctor, not...

00:34:02   We had a biomedical engineer and a doctor.

00:34:04   So this is Josh Brock addressing the doctor's points.

00:34:07   The doctor that was so pessimistic about the potential medical use of health book style

00:34:11   devices wasn't wrong, but he was thinking too narrowly.

00:34:14   While one day's worth of data probably isn't useful or interesting, having a year's worth

00:34:17   of prior data could be very useful.

00:34:19   Physicians frequently know very little about an individual's healthy vital signs or long-term

00:34:22   health.

00:34:24   Most healthy people only have their heart data monitored a few times a year at most.

00:34:27   Even people with serious health problems are typically only seen by a physician intermittently

00:34:30   and only fully monitored while actually in the hospital.

00:34:33   So being able to see a long history of data

00:34:36   with long-term trends could open up new opportunities

00:34:38   for diagnosis and treatment.

00:34:40   So this is what we talked about a little bit

00:34:42   in the last thing that while the information

00:34:45   may not be particularly interesting to you

00:34:46   or useful to you and may not vary that much,

00:34:49   it does, if you have long-term information

00:34:52   and your doctor can see that,

00:34:54   whether they're monitoring it in real time

00:34:55   or whether you just get dumped on them off of your phone

00:34:58   or a wrist thing, whatever,

00:35:00   It's kind of a better equivalent of the log books

00:35:03   that doctors have people keep

00:35:04   if they have chronic health conditions,

00:35:05   keeping a log of how they felt,

00:35:07   what they did in response to it,

00:35:09   what medications they took.

00:35:11   The doctors will look at that

00:35:12   because they just get to see you for a brief period of time

00:35:13   and what they wanna know is essentially your history

00:35:16   and you just verbally telling them what happened

00:35:18   is probably not that reliable.

00:35:20   You keeping a log book, probably more reliable,

00:35:23   but having a device monitor things for you is probably,

00:35:26   I mean, aside from bad reading and stuff like that,

00:35:28   the device's memory is gonna be better than yours.

00:35:30   And if it's something that you wear all the time,

00:35:32   I'm sure a doctor would love that

00:35:33   in addition to hearing what you had to say

00:35:35   about how you felt and what you did.

00:35:37   The point I wanted to get to

00:35:38   about these things not flying off the shelves

00:35:40   is that we keep talking about Apple and wearables

00:35:43   in terms of all the sensors they're gonna have

00:35:45   and whether it's gonna have a screen or not,

00:35:47   or whether the screen is gonna be a touchscreen or not,

00:35:48   or what kind of integration with the phone.

00:35:51   But one aspect of the wearables that we talked about

00:35:55   way back when that we haven't talked about much recently

00:35:57   is things you can use it for besides sensing your health

00:36:01   and integrating with your phone.

00:36:02   And one of the ones that I think should come back around

00:36:06   if it hasn't already in the rumor mill

00:36:08   is using it as a form of identity.

00:36:10   Didn't we talk about that like months

00:36:12   and months and months ago?

00:36:13   - Oh, I don't remember, probably.

00:36:14   - Having this thing on you as a way of identifying yourself,

00:36:19   sort of like the location-based unlocking thing

00:36:22   that the Apple patent was going around the news this week.

00:36:24   Like basically, if you pick up your phone,

00:36:27   you don't have to use touch ID to unlock it.

00:36:29   You don't have to enter a code

00:36:30   because you're wearing your wrist thing

00:36:31   and that identifies you as you.

00:36:32   And you walk up to your Mac, it unlocks the screen

00:36:34   because you're wearing the wrist thing

00:36:35   and that identifies you as you.

00:36:36   Sort of a touch ID without touching type of identity thing.

00:36:41   Because I think, not that I think this is a slam dunk

00:36:44   that this is what Apple's gonna do

00:36:45   with their wearable stuff,

00:36:46   but so much of the wearable stuff has been focused on,

00:36:49   ironically, not on timekeeping,

00:36:51   not on being able to tell what time it is,

00:36:53   But on saying this, something called a watch

00:36:55   and what it's gonna do is measure your vitals

00:36:57   and record them.

00:36:58   And that just seems weird to me

00:37:00   that it's such an incredible health focus.

00:37:02   I mean, maybe not that weird

00:37:04   'cause Apple does have the health kit thing,

00:37:05   but they also have HomeKit

00:37:07   and no one is talking about using your wrist thing

00:37:08   as a way to turn on lights as you wander through your house

00:37:10   or open your garage door as you drive up or whatever.

00:37:13   I don't know.

00:37:15   Just throwing that out there

00:37:16   so we can get in every possibility

00:37:18   before Apple releases something that's wearable

00:37:20   and then we can say, "See, we talked about that

00:37:22   on some show in the past.

00:37:24   - To me this is like yet another thing

00:37:26   that is not a very compelling justification

00:37:29   for these devices to exist.

00:37:30   It's like yet another thing where, okay,

00:37:32   well first of all, there are some security issues with that.

00:37:35   (laughs)

00:37:36   There's also some creepiness issues

00:37:38   if this becomes your identity.

00:37:40   And I don't know, it solves problems

00:37:43   that most people I don't think really have

00:37:46   in ways that are substantial enough

00:37:48   where the gains will be big enough

00:37:50   that it would be worth having another thing

00:37:52   to maintain, buy, and charge.

00:37:54   - Well, I mean, you assume there would be some combination.

00:37:56   But what did you think about that patent, though,

00:37:58   for the location-based thing?

00:37:59   Basically, not having to enter your unlock code

00:38:01   or use Touch ID when you're in your house with your phone

00:38:02   or something like that.

00:38:03   Is that something you think is worthwhile?

00:38:05   - Oh, hell yeah.

00:38:06   I'm already using that with my Mac,

00:38:07   with Control Plane, Control P-L-A-N-E.

00:38:11   If I remember, we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:38:13   But I think the slogan they use is context-aware computing,

00:38:19   Which I may have talked about in the past on the show, but supposed to say based on

00:38:23   like the network address I have based on what device, what external monitor I'm

00:38:28   connected to based on what Bluetooth devices are nearby, this thing will

00:38:32   basically perform, perform a series of macros to turn on or off my screen

00:38:38   saver password, or to set a default printer or things like that.

00:38:42   And it's wonderful.

00:38:43   And I love it because when I come home after work, It will automatically

00:38:47   figure out, Oh, he's at home now.

00:38:48   Well, let me turn off VMware Fusion.

00:38:50   Let me turn off Outlook.

00:38:51   Let me turn off Link, which has probably crashed anyway,

00:38:54   and so on.

00:38:55   And it's wonderful.

00:38:56   And I really love it.

00:38:57   And I'd love to have that for my phone.

00:38:59   And Marco, you talked about that not being a particularly

00:39:01   compelling benefit.

00:39:02   In and of itself, perhaps not.

00:39:03   But just think of how life-changing

00:39:05   it was when you all got proximity

00:39:06   keys for your fancy German cars, right?

00:39:08   And how you don't want to go back to having to fish out

00:39:11   a key and stick it-- you know, like, it's not that big a deal.

00:39:15   But it's a big enough deal that you have trouble

00:39:17   going back to that type of thing.

00:39:19   And if you are in, you know, it's kind of like Touch ID.

00:39:22   Like I'm a pretty big Touch ID convert, despite the fact that I don't have a Touch ID device.

00:39:25   Every time I pick up my wife's phone, I don't even know her security code thing.

00:39:30   I just have my one thumb encoded on the thing, and I have a very high success rate with Touch

00:39:35   ID.

00:39:36   And it's much better than me having to ask her where her code is and then never remembering

00:39:40   it the next time or have her unlock the thing or whatever.

00:39:42   I just pick it up and use the Touch thing.

00:39:44   If I'm not gonna say this is a reason I'm gonna wear a thing around my wrist

00:39:48   But presumably there's other reasons that you're gonna wear whatever this wearable thing is if this is there on top of everything else

00:39:54   Like I would definitely use it. I'm sick of typing in my password to unlock my screen at work. I think it's ridiculous

00:40:00   I mean you have to have a screen lock because you know corporate policies or whatever every time I get up

00:40:04   I I lock the screen dutifully and I have to unlock it when I come back no matter how long I'm gone

00:40:08   I would love to have a thing on my wrist. I would wear it at work just for this one feature, you know

00:40:14   But I don't think I would buy it just for this one feature.

00:40:17   So anyway, Apple has to come up with a reason

00:40:19   for us to all buy this thing and keep it charged

00:40:22   and all that good stuff.

00:40:23   This is just another possible thing

00:40:24   because I definitely wouldn't buy it to track my vitals.

00:40:27   So that is also not compelling to me.

00:40:29   I don't know, it's gotta do something.

00:40:32   Or it could just be another thing

00:40:33   that Apple introduces that I don't buy, so.

00:40:36   - Add it to the list.

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00:41:05   I was at my mom's house for the day,

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00:41:10   to show her that AirPlay exists on her Apple TV.

00:41:13   And I didn't have that album on my laptop,

00:41:17   and iTunes Match, as usual, was failing for me,

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00:42:57   - Have we ever gone through all three sponsors

00:43:00   during followup?

00:43:01   'Cause we still have a little bit more.

00:43:03   I feel like we're in hypercritical right now.

00:43:06   - Yeah, actually Tiff and I went back and listened

00:43:08   to the Hypercritical on the first episode

00:43:11   on game controllers, I believe they were two and a half,

00:43:13   but we went back and listened to that

00:43:16   on the way up to my mom's house yesterday.

00:43:18   And when we pulled into her driveway,

00:43:22   we were just finishing follow-up.

00:43:24   (laughing)

00:43:25   It was like 70 minutes in.

00:43:27   - That's magnificent.

00:43:28   So we have one last piece of follow-up,

00:43:29   which is about the death of plasma.

00:43:31   And I actually might have some thoughts on this,

00:43:34   but Jon, go ahead.

00:43:35   It's not really the death of Plasma because I think LG is still making Plasmas unless

00:43:39   I'm not mistaken.

00:43:40   But anyway, the story that was going around this past week was that Samsung is stopping

00:43:44   production of its Plasma TVs.

00:43:46   Panasonic already stopped production of their Plasma TVs.

00:43:50   After Panasonic stopped, it's like, "Well, they were the best ones, but you can still

00:43:52   buy Samsung."

00:43:53   So those were the second best.

00:43:54   Buy that instead.

00:43:55   I think the Wirecutter updated their TV review things.

00:43:58   They had previously recommended Panasonic Plasmas and eventually had to say, "Well,

00:44:02   you can't get those anymore."

00:44:04   So our next choice is the Samsung Plasmas.

00:44:08   Now they're going to have to update it again because now Samsung's not going to be making

00:44:10   them anymore.

00:44:11   Like I said, I think maybe LG is.

00:44:13   But yeah, the days of Plasma are going.

00:44:15   There's a bunch of stories going around the web about mourning the end of Plasma.

00:44:18   A lot of them were retreads of when Panasonic stopped.

00:44:21   For all the people who care about picture quality, saying basically, "These TVs that

00:44:25   are discontinuing have better picture quality than any TVs that have been introduced after

00:44:32   them or that you can buy for any price anywhere, which is a shame. And again, plasmas do have

00:44:36   their downsides. We talked about them on past shows. They're not perfect. But if you care

00:44:39   about picture quality, many people are willing to put up with their downsides in exchange for

00:44:44   having a better picture. It doesn't surprise me for the reasons I think we talked about in past

00:44:48   shows. Nobody was putting in the money to try to make a 4K plasma, and 4K is clearly the future as

00:44:54   far as television manufacturers are concerned anyway. It may not even be technically possible

00:44:59   to make a reasonable plasma at 4K because the size of the little, whatever you call

00:45:04   it, the little pits or thingies that make the picture images are so tiny at 4K that

00:45:09   we don't really have manufacturing processes.

00:45:11   I mean, they could develop it, but we already have 4K in LCDs and even OLED, which was supposed

00:45:18   to save us from the scourge of LCD, that's kind of been back-burned as well.

00:45:22   So it seems like we're just going to be LCD with LED backlights, standard high-definition,

00:45:29   and 4K for the foreseeable future, which is kind of a shame, but I'm glad I brought my

00:45:35   Panasonic when I did, and I just hope it lasts a long time.

00:45:38   Did you ever even think about a 4K TV?

00:45:42   No.

00:45:43   I mean, there's no content available for it that I care about.

00:45:47   And really, there is something to be said about screen size and viewing distance.

00:45:52   And 720, 1080, I can kind of tell the difference between my seating distance.

00:45:59   4K, I don't know, I mean, if the content was good enough, maybe I could tell the difference,

00:46:04   but nothing I care about is in 4K.

00:46:07   Everything I care about is in HD, and I figure by the time things that I care about are in

00:46:10   4K, it will be time for me to get a new TV in several years.

00:46:13   But I don't know how long that's going to take.

00:46:15   I mean, 4K is a tougher sell than...

00:46:18   Standard F to HD is a more compelling consumer case than HD to 4K.

00:46:23   So it's up to content creators and television manufacturers to convince us that we need

00:46:28   to go from 1080p to 4K.

00:46:32   It was-- and look how difficult it was to convince

00:46:34   us to go from standard def.

00:46:35   And I think that was just like, as soon as someone

00:46:37   sees a high definition television,

00:46:39   if they have good vision or if they're

00:46:41   into sports or something else where you care

00:46:43   about small details, that's a pretty easy sell.

00:46:46   But 4K, I don't know.

00:46:48   I mean, I guess maybe--

00:46:49   I haven't been to CES and seen the fanciest new 4K TVs.

00:46:55   I haven't seen an OLED 4K TV of those things exist.

00:46:59   So maybe they're more convincing, but I figure I have many years of service left in this

00:47:04   plasma.

00:47:05   Well, I tend to agree.

00:47:06   And the reason I ask is my parents have just recently moved down to pretty close to where

00:47:11   Aaron and I are.

00:47:12   And so a couple of weeks ago, my dad and I went to a Crutchfield store, which those of

00:47:17   you who were into car audio in the '90s probably know what Crutchfield is.

00:47:21   And their home office is in Charlottesville, which I brought up periodically on the show.

00:47:25   Well, anyway, we went to the store and looked at a few 4K TVs and we were looking for mom and dad's house

00:47:31   Which the viewing distance or the seating distance what have you it's like 15 feet or something like that for where this is going to be

00:47:38   and I

00:47:40   Looked at these 4k displays a lot of which were curved by the way, which I don't really understand

00:47:46   The whole curved TV thing. Maybe maybe there's a point but I don't get it. But anyways the 4k displays

00:47:52   I mean they looked beautiful when you were a foot or two away, but I completely agree at 5, 10, certainly 10 and

00:47:58   definitely 15 feet, I

00:48:01   don't get it. And I'm maybe in five or ten years when content is available, I will get it. But today I agree with you,

00:48:09   I don't understand.

00:48:10   Well if you can make the screen the size of your wall or something like that because we have some if we have some technology

00:48:15   that could you know or projectors or whatever like

00:48:18   4k has a place because eventually the screen becomes way way bigger, but for television set size screens

00:48:24   Where it's like a thing that's sitting on

00:48:27   You know some kind of pedestal or something

00:48:30   it I

00:48:33   Don't know 4k like I think a lot of it has to do with the content

00:48:36   What kind of things are you trying to show but at a certain point?

00:48:39   It's like when people get old their vision gets bad

00:48:41   You can't make out that kind of detail on a screen

00:48:45   that's only like, you know, 50, 60, 70 inches, and that's a pretty big modern TV.

00:48:50   But in the movie theater, when the screen is gigantic, then, yeah, that resolution,

00:48:55   you know, can be useful.

00:48:56   Well, that's the thing, is we're looking at these, like, 70, 75-inch TVs, and, yeah,

00:49:01   I mean, you can maybe make out a difference, and to be fair, my eyes are not the best.

00:49:06   But certainly, at the 10 or 15 feet that Mom and Dad's house's viewing distance is at,

00:49:12   I do not see the need, even in like a 75-inch TV,

00:49:17   I don't see the need for 4K.

00:49:18   And the other thing is, and you just mentioned this,

00:49:21   we talked to the salespeople both at Crutchfield

00:49:24   and at Best Buy, and we were like,

00:49:25   so what content is 4K these days?

00:49:27   'Cause this is well out of my wheelhouse,

00:49:29   and I don't keep up with this stuff.

00:49:31   And so they're like, well, some stuff on Netflix.

00:49:36   And that's about it.

00:49:37   And that's about all you get.

00:49:38   - And even like what device can output 4K?

00:49:41   - Right, exactly.

00:49:43   - I mean, well, I guess the TV could have it built in.

00:49:44   - Yeah, I mean, like my, for example,

00:49:46   my audio video receiver has 4K passthrough.

00:49:49   Like a lot of devices are 4K capable at this point.

00:49:51   So in theory, if I was getting Netflix at 4K

00:49:54   on a device, they could get out, but 4K,

00:49:57   could, you know, the pieces are there

00:49:59   that it's possible to view it.

00:50:00   That's why Netflix is running these kind of experiments.

00:50:03   The topically named Pan and Scan in the chat room

00:50:05   has a point where 4K isn't just about resolution,

00:50:09   but also, you know, we talked about this before,

00:50:11   color depth and refresh rates and other parts of the 4K standard that are a step up from

00:50:16   HD.

00:50:19   I think they're even less compelling to consumers, but as an image quality nerd, maybe that's

00:50:26   why I would notice more.

00:50:27   Yeah, on my small-ish, by projector standards, 55-inch TV, the resolution difference wouldn't

00:50:34   be that big, but the color gamut difference could be significant, assuming we get some

00:50:39   kind of television technology that has reasonable black levels. So yeah anyway I

00:50:44   don't think it's in the imminent future which is why I felt entirely safe buying

00:50:47   a plain old normal high-definition television last year or whenever I bought

00:50:51   this thing. Cool. All right. Do we have any topics today? Any other follow-up? Is this it?

00:50:58   Are we done? Is this the show? Is this what people tune in for? So we saw a

00:51:03   a YouTube video from somebody who I am not familiar with,

00:51:08   who seems to have an iPhone 6 sapphire display.

00:51:15   What do we think about this?

00:51:17   - I mean, it's very impressive.

00:51:19   Regardless of whether, there's a bunch of things

00:51:22   we don't know.

00:51:23   The big two are, we don't know if this is actually

00:51:26   an iPhone part or a part for something else

00:51:28   or a fake or something else, and we also don't know

00:51:31   whether it's actually sapphire.

00:51:32   - Yeah, that was gonna be my big point.

00:51:34   - Those are the two big ones that we don't know.

00:51:35   - My big point, that's why I put sapphire in quotes,

00:51:38   because I have no idea if that's sapphire or not.

00:51:42   Maybe a Gorilla Glass of that exact same thickness

00:51:44   behaves in the exact same way.

00:51:46   I don't know, I've never taken a piece of Gorilla Glass

00:51:48   and tried to bend it or stab it with a knife.

00:51:50   So I have no idea if this is impressive at all,

00:51:52   or if that's exactly what all existing phones are like now.

00:51:56   And I don't know how they would tell.

00:51:57   I don't blame the person for not doing due diligence

00:51:59   or whatever, it's like, I don't know how you would tell

00:52:01   with sapphire, like a spectrometer or something.

00:52:04   - Whatever is being shown in the video,

00:52:06   whether or not it's a real iPhone part

00:52:08   and whether or not it's actually sapphire,

00:52:10   does seem to have impressive physical characteristics

00:52:12   and does seem to have very good resistance

00:52:14   to both scratching and bending.

00:52:16   I don't know enough about either of these things

00:52:20   to say whether that's likely to be

00:52:22   a fancy Gorilla Glass product or sapphire,

00:52:25   I have no idea.

00:52:26   - Well, whatever it is, it's a laminate, obviously.

00:52:27   I mean, like, even if it was sapphire,

00:52:29   what they mean is that Sapphire laminated against something else that's flexible laminate.

00:52:33   Like it's obviously some kind of laminate because you can't, I don't know if the glass

00:52:37   ones are, maybe the grill glass is not a laminate, but anything with Sapphire I think would have

00:52:41   to be some kind of laminate if you're using the screen.

00:52:43   But I think the most interesting thing about this, even if you assume this is entirely

00:52:46   fake is that it shows, I mean they didn't measure it, I wish they had measured it, but

00:52:50   it shows a 4.7 inch thing presumably next to a regular iPhone to give you kind of a

00:52:55   size comparison of like, well, it's bigger, it's not gigantic, but it does seem, it's

00:53:00   definitely noticeably bigger.

00:53:02   And they, I think they tried to show like a fake image on what the screen would look

00:53:06   like, but they used the same number of icons as if the res was just scaled up.

00:53:10   So I'm not sure what they were, but I put this in a category in the topics of iPhone

00:53:15   6 parts leaks.

00:53:16   I haven't been pursuing parts leaks, but there's tons of them all.

00:53:18   This is just the one I happened to see because it bubbled up in my feed.

00:53:21   And to be fair, about half of them are this part.

00:53:23   Yeah, and all sorts of leaks.

00:53:25   And this guy also had a mock-up of what he thought the back could look like based on

00:53:28   all of the leaked specs and leaked drawings.

00:53:33   As is the case with most of the past iPhones, all these leaks, as the parts start to come

00:53:39   out, I would think the idea that it's going to be kind of rounded on the back, kind of

00:53:44   like the iPad Mini is, and they're going to be bigger, and 4.7 keeps coming up, and this

00:53:50   thing if it's 4.7 inches is, you know, reasonable odds that it could be a part of some kind.

00:53:56   We're starting to get close to the season where we start to see things that are real.

00:53:59   So I don't entirely discount this either.

00:54:02   I just thought it was interesting that it's not just, here's a picture of the part, take

00:54:06   a look at it, like the torture test type phenomenon.

00:54:09   I would like to see someone do that as soon as the iPhone 6 comes out, take apart an actual

00:54:13   iPhone 6 and do the same experiments, do the same experiments with the 5S or whatever.

00:54:17   where I guess this starts getting expensive,

00:54:18   but maybe the iFixit people could tackle it,

00:54:20   because I really don't know the properties

00:54:22   of the existing parts for iPhones.

00:54:26   - You know, I think it's very likely

00:54:27   this probably is a real iPhone part.

00:54:31   The timing is right, it matches all the things we've heard

00:54:33   from general rumor, voting, it's matching all the stuff.

00:54:38   It is very likely to be a real iPhone part.

00:54:40   The big question mark is whether it's actually Sapphire,

00:54:42   and you're right, whether if you took the same part

00:54:46   or the closest similar part,

00:54:48   the cover glass of an iPhone 5S,

00:54:51   and did the same things, how would it react?

00:54:53   What would it withstand?

00:54:54   Would it be similar or not?

00:54:56   The scratch resistance is one thing,

00:54:59   but I think the real problem that needs to be solved

00:55:04   in iPhone cover glass, if it's possible to easily solve it,

00:55:07   is not bending, it's shatter resistance.

00:55:10   Like what happens if you drop it on a corner?

00:55:14   Does the glass shatter as easily

00:55:16   or does it shatter less often?

00:55:19   That's the problem people usually have.

00:55:20   If they can improve that, that's big news.

00:55:24   One thing to consider, and I don't know if this,

00:55:28   I don't know what I'm talking about

00:55:29   with manufacturing stuff, so who knows,

00:55:30   but if they're gonna use Sapphire

00:55:33   for the screen glass of all the new iPhones,

00:55:38   the two new sizes, and backing up a second,

00:55:40   there was on the talk show a couple of weeks ago,

00:55:44   Gruber had Paul Kifasas on and they were talking

00:55:46   and they were both kind of agreeing that

00:55:48   they didn't actually want a 4.7 inch phone

00:55:50   to be the new smallest size,

00:55:52   that they both are perfectly fine with the current five size

00:55:55   and don't want it to get any bigger.

00:55:57   And so the question, if you believe that line of thinking,

00:56:00   is, okay, well, is there a new four inch phone

00:56:05   and a new 4.7 inch and a new 5.5 inch?

00:56:08   The question is, is there a new four inch phone or not?

00:56:12   And I think the answer is very simple.

00:56:14   for anyone still doubting this.

00:56:15   I think the answer is 4.7 will be the new small size, period.

00:56:20   And maybe there might be like a 6S or a 6C

00:56:24   that still uses the four inch size,

00:56:25   but that's gonna be phased out in the next new model lines

00:56:28   as the big size goes down in the line.

00:56:31   I think 4.7 is the new size,

00:56:33   and we're gonna have a handful of people saying,

00:56:35   "No, I want my phone to stay small."

00:56:37   And it's gonna be the exact same thing that happened

00:56:39   when they went from three and a half inch

00:56:41   to four inch with the five.

00:56:42   there's gonna be those handful of people that say,

00:56:44   "No, I don't want the phone to be any bigger than this."

00:56:47   And a new one will come out, it won't be that much bigger,

00:56:50   and it won't be a big deal,

00:56:51   and it'll probably even be thinner and lighter,

00:56:53   and so everyone will just deal with it,

00:56:55   and everyone will forget about their complaints

00:56:57   within six months, and that'll just be the new size.

00:56:59   Anyway, going back to the beginning

00:57:01   of this massive paragraph,

00:57:03   if they're gonna use Sapphire for the screens

00:57:07   of these new phones, that's a lot of Sapphire.

00:57:11   it's really hard to properly communicate

00:57:15   how much they have to make of this stuff.

00:57:17   Just materials, supply-wise, like manufacturing.

00:57:21   They make so many iPhones.

00:57:23   Anything that goes into the iPhone

00:57:25   has to be available in quantity.

00:57:28   It has to have very high manufacturing yields,

00:57:30   very high consistency, easily sourced.

00:57:34   And I don't know if,

00:57:36   I know they have that big Sapphire thing

00:57:37   in Arizona or wherever,

00:57:38   but it would surprise me if they could make enough sapphire

00:57:42   all of a sudden to be able to be the glass on every iPhone.

00:57:46   - Well, like I said, I think it's a laminate

00:57:48   and it could be some deposition process.

00:57:49   Again, I don't know anything about the manufacturing,

00:57:51   but I think it's within the realm of reason

00:57:56   that they could, because you're only putting the sapphire

00:57:59   there for scratch resistance.

00:58:00   Sapphire's not giving you anything in terms of bend

00:58:02   or shadow resistance, I would imagine.

00:58:05   But anyway, I don't think you have to make

00:58:06   the whole thing out of it.

00:58:07   I think it just needs to be the surface coating.

00:58:08   Like it's hardness is this thing

00:58:11   and then you back it by other materials,

00:58:12   whether they be, you know, gorilla glass

00:58:14   or some thin piece of plastic or something like that.

00:58:18   So I don't know.

00:58:21   If they keep saying it's Sapphire,

00:58:22   if everybody's saying it's Sapphire,

00:58:25   I don't know how they can tell.

00:58:27   I don't think anyone is measuring it.

00:58:29   I'm sure we'll know as soon as Apple introduces it

00:58:31   because if it's Sapphire, I'm sure they will emphasize that.

00:58:34   - Oh yeah, definitely.

00:58:35   I just I was stunned by the

00:58:37   Bend resistance. I don't know if that's the right word

00:58:41   I'm looking for but the the way in which this handled bending which may or may not have anything to do with sapphire

00:58:46   But my goodness this thing was bent a lot and didn't crack and certainly the scratch resistance was incredible

00:58:55   But the the dude in the video noted that he didn't really have an appropriate way to test

00:59:02   Dropping it on a corner, which is what you guys brought up a minute ago because he didn't have the rest of an iPhone

00:59:07   To mount this thing against but I agree that that's the real test because pretty much anyone

00:59:13   I know with an issue with their iPhone display or

00:59:16   Android display for that matter is because they've dropped it in some way and it shattered

00:59:21   Yeah, I've seen scratches on screens too like little nicks or whatever

00:59:24   But I've seen like it's hard to notice them because they're small what you notice is the person using a phone with an actual crack

00:59:30   in it.

00:59:31   And no one is ever going to bend their screen like that, because if you bend it that much,

00:59:34   the rest of the phone is broken now.

00:59:35   It doesn't matter if the screen can bend that much.

00:59:38   The printed circuit board can't bend that much.

00:59:40   And so if you ever bend your phone that much, it's dead.

00:59:43   But if you drop your phone into the concrete and it lands on a corner or smacks face down

00:59:46   and it shatters, then you have the choice of getting the screen replaced or just sitting

00:59:51   there as I see so many people doing and swiping their thumbs across fractured pieces of glass

00:59:56   just to make you think they're going to cut themselves.

00:59:58   Or you just spend 15 bucks at the Apple store

01:00:00   and get one of those horrible stick-on screen protectors

01:00:03   and just hope that covers it up enough.

01:00:05   Might even hold it together a little bit.

01:00:07   - All right, anything else on the iPhone 6?

01:00:10   Oh, I should note, I'll answer my own question.

01:00:13   I agree with both Gruber and Kefasis

01:00:15   in that I don't want a bigger iPhone,

01:00:17   but I think you're right, Marco,

01:00:18   that the 4.7 or whatever, the smaller of the new ones

01:00:23   I think will be the smallest high-end iPhone.

01:00:28   And I think I can get behind a 4.7,

01:00:31   but goodness, this 5 or 5.5 or whatever it was,

01:00:35   I do not want that in my life.

01:00:39   That just seems like a darn tablet.

01:00:41   - I'm gonna have a very hard time choosing between the two

01:00:45   if the screen size is the only substantial difference.

01:00:47   You know, if there's something else,

01:00:49   if there's rumors that the camera might be different,

01:00:51   if the camera is substantially better

01:00:53   one or the other, I will almost certainly get the one with the better camera.

01:00:56   I can't imagine, just marketing wise, it would be very strange if the biggest one wasn't

01:01:01   the best one.

01:01:03   And so chances are the biggest iPhone, whether it's called the iPhone Air, the iPhone 6

01:01:11   Plus, whatever, the five and a half inch iPhone if it's real, it's very likely to have

01:01:15   the best of everything that Apple has to offer.

01:01:17   And so it's very likely that some of us are going to convince ourselves to buy it.

01:01:20   If the best one is the huge one, then I'll probably try it.

01:01:24   And I'll take the bullet for all of us.

01:01:25   I know, Jon, you're not going to buy anything.

01:01:27   And Casey, you're going to stick with the small one, or you're going to wait two years

01:01:30   and I can make fun of you.

01:01:32   Exactly.

01:01:33   I'm in and off here this year, so I've got another year to wait.

01:01:36   Do we have parts leaks for the 5.5, rumored 5.5 inch?

01:01:41   That's a good question.

01:01:42   And still I see some parts leaks for that.

01:01:43   I continue to think that, as Casey said, diversification, fine, but a new 4.7 size, why don't you just

01:01:50   while keeping around the old 5S in a different case or whatever, or even in the same case,

01:01:55   that's reasonable diversification. I'm not sure they need a 5.5. Maybe they're going

01:01:59   to have one? Who knows? But I would like to see parts leaks for that. Because more or

01:02:04   less I want to see what it looks like proportion wise and line up all three of them and show

01:02:09   them next to a hand and see what that would be like.

01:02:12   I don't feel like I have, and I think I've said this before, I don't feel like I have

01:02:16   that much excess pocket space in order to stuff a five and a half inch phone.

01:02:21   And for those of us who leave the house, ahem everyone but Marco, uh, that's

01:02:27   kind of an issue and I don't, I don't have a purse, I don't have a man purse.

01:02:33   And so my phone lives in my pocket and I don't think I want a five and a

01:02:39   half inch phone in my pocket.

01:02:40   I just don't.

01:02:41   But whatever.

01:02:43   We'll see.

01:02:44   Remind me of this when I buy one in a year and a half or whatever, but sitting here today,

01:02:48   I don't think I want that in my life.

01:02:50   Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harrys, Lynda.com, and Backblaze, and we will

01:02:57   see you next week.

01:02:59   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it

01:03:10   was accidental.

01:03:11   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:03:17   'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

01:03:22   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:03:27   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:03:32   Follow them @CASEYLISS

01:03:37   So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:03:41   E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C

01:03:46   U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:03:48   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:03:52   They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)

01:03:57   Tech podcast so long.

01:04:01   Because Jon insists on using stupid Google docs for our show notes, I keep the

01:04:08   show bot open in Chrome because Google, Chrome is my Google, what did you call

01:04:13   quarantine?

01:04:13   Hell, whatever you called it, Marco.

01:04:15   Yeah.

01:04:15   Well anyways, so, uh, about an hour ago, uh, somebody Hunter H suggested question

01:04:20   mark in a box in a question mark in a box, which is because stupid Chrome still

01:04:25   doesn't support emoji.

01:04:26   It's ridiculous.

01:04:28   - That is so evil of Google.

01:04:30   - It is.

01:04:31   - It's the real reason you don't use Chrome.

01:04:32   - Open always wins.

01:04:33   So I've been working on a very basic web interface

01:04:38   for Overcast.

01:04:39   - And why have you been doing that, Marco?

01:04:41   - Because it had to be done?

01:04:44   - No, it's because I whined to you about the fact

01:04:46   that there wasn't a web player.

01:04:48   - That too, okay.

01:04:49   So anyway, some people whined to me about it.

01:04:52   So I made a very basic web player.

01:04:56   and I turned on content security policy in very strict mode

01:05:01   so that it disables any of the things

01:05:02   that begin with unsafe.

01:05:04   Which the hardest thing about that is that

01:05:07   you can't use inline style or script tags.

01:05:10   - What?

01:05:10   - Script tags were easy to pull out.

01:05:12   Inline style tags are not that easy to pull out

01:05:14   if you've already written a whole bunch of code.

01:05:16   The advantage of content security policy is that,

01:05:21   so for those of you who don't know,

01:05:22   it's still pretty rarely used, I think,

01:05:25   It's pretty new and pretty hard to use,

01:05:27   but there's these couple of headers you set

01:05:29   as a web programmer.

01:05:30   You set a couple of headers, or one header,

01:05:32   but three times to put all the stupid vendor prefixes,

01:05:35   'cause web programming is awesome.

01:05:36   And the header basically says,

01:05:40   only permit JavaScript from these sources,

01:05:43   only permit style stuff, CSS styles from these sources,

01:05:46   only permit images from these sources, and so on.

01:05:49   And the spec even kind of inherently yells at you.

01:05:52   if you enable content security policy at all,

01:05:56   if you want these things, like by default,

01:05:58   it I believe won't allow anything,

01:06:00   and if you want the ability to use

01:06:03   like an inline style attribute on something

01:06:05   or an inline script, you have to say,

01:06:07   allow unsafe-inline, or unsafe eval,

01:06:12   'cause eval is also unsafe,

01:06:13   and like it's a pretty well implemented standard,

01:06:17   or well designed standard I think,

01:06:19   because it's designed to inherently yell at you

01:06:22   if you set things unsafely.

01:06:24   So anyway, so I've now made my entire interface with it.

01:06:29   Yeah, it's a very small interface.

01:06:30   It's a very small app so far,

01:06:31   but I now have my thing where it only allows things

01:06:35   from its own host and the host of the CDN.

01:06:40   That's the service from the static pages, and that's it.

01:06:43   And it's great.

01:06:45   And I'm wondering, Casey, why don't you play with this also?

01:06:49   Why don't you use this on Showbot?

01:06:50   'cause it would help dramatically reduce the number

01:06:54   of people who would ever be exposed to XSS on your site

01:06:58   if you were to miss a vulnerability.

01:07:01   - I probably should, but I don't need to

01:07:04   because the show bot's still up.

01:07:05   What now?

01:07:07   - Well, yeah, but--

01:07:08   - I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

01:07:09   I understand your point.

01:07:10   I probably should.

01:07:11   To be honest, this was not something I was familiar with,

01:07:13   so I'll have to look into it.

01:07:14   - Do sort by votes first, please.

01:07:17   - Yeah, actually, that's, yeah, please do that first.

01:07:18   - That's a fair request, that's a fair request.

01:07:20   sort my foots first.

01:07:21   No, it's a cool standard.

01:07:22   I learned about it roughly a year ago, I think,

01:07:25   when GitHub enabled it.

01:07:27   And the way I learned about it is that at first,

01:07:31   like when it was very first implemented by browsers,

01:07:34   most of them would also block bookmarklet execution,

01:07:38   'cause that was a script that didn't come from blah, blah,

01:07:40   blah, and the standard specifically says

01:07:42   bookmarklets should not be interfered with,

01:07:44   but the browsers all missed that the first time,

01:07:46   and so it broke bookmarklets for a little while.

01:07:49   But now, certainly Chrome and Safari have fixed that.

01:07:53   Firefox was the last one to fix it.

01:07:55   I don't know if they have yet, but who cares, it's Firefox.

01:07:58   - Do you remember back in the day

01:07:59   when that was lean and mean?

01:08:00   I know we've been over this at some point, but--

01:08:02   - Yeah, my name's on the poster when they launched.

01:08:05   I donated like 50 bucks and got my name in the big ad,

01:08:08   the big full page ad that they were running

01:08:10   in some, maybe it was New Times, I don't know.

01:08:13   Yeah, I was like a backer of Firefox,

01:08:15   and I wrote Firefox extensions at my first job in 2004,

01:08:19   which was a terrible time to write Firefox extensions.

01:08:21   It was like, I believe when I started,

01:08:24   it was still called Phoenix, whatever .7 was.

01:08:27   Yeah, Firefox was awesome back in the day.

01:08:31   The problem is the world moved on

01:08:33   and Firefox really didn't.

01:08:36   - Well, it became what it was trying to solve

01:08:38   because remember Netscape was just this bloated,

01:08:41   disgusting mess and so Firefox was all lean and mean

01:08:44   And it was a small download, and it was fast as hell.

01:08:49   And then, next thing you know, fast forward like four years, and it's the disgusting,

01:08:53   bloated mess that Netscape once was.

01:08:54   Well, it was standards compliant.

01:08:56   In addition to being lean and mean, it was like, "We're going to write to standards."

01:08:59   And they did do that, because all the browsers that supplanted it conformed to standards,

01:09:03   with the exception of IE until very recently, and even then, still annoyingly.

01:09:07   But it succeeded in that mission.

01:09:08   It's just that other people picked up the mantle and moved on, because it's got the—Firefox

01:09:12   Firefox has the oldest code base. Well, I don't know, is KHTML as old as Mozilla?

01:09:17   Anyway, it's got it's certainly got the creakiest code base. The other ones have

01:09:20   had much more recent attention to get them cleaned up. I mean, aren't the Mozilla

01:09:25   guys trying to write a new rendering engine in Rust? That's why they're doing

01:09:28   the whole Rust thing, so maybe they will rise again. But they did, you know, they

01:09:33   became, they were the flagship for standards, and now we have standards

01:09:38   everywhere and standards are what we want and IE-isms are mostly dead with the exception

01:09:43   of the ones that are still supported by the versions of IE that we still have to deal

01:09:46   with.

01:09:47   So it kind of succeeded in its mission.

01:09:48   So I don't think it died by getting fat and ugly and it failed its mission.

01:09:53   It succeeded, it's just that now it's a little long in the tooth.

01:09:56   I remember I used to use Firefox because Firebug was the best and only reasonable way to debug

01:10:02   stuff on the web and it just gradually shifted off onto, for a while I was using Safari's

01:10:07   dev tools when the WebKit ones were really good. Now I use Chrome's dev tools, which

01:10:10   I think Safari covers all the same bases, but I've just kind of gotten to use it to

01:10:13   Chrome's dev tools interface, kind of like where things are until they change it, I guess.

01:10:19   But no, I haven't launched Firefox in forever.

01:10:22   Yeah, I cannot remember the last time I've launched Firefox.

01:10:26   I use it to post to Twitter when we make a new episode of the show, because I leave Firefox

01:10:32   signed in to that account on Twitter, and that's it.

01:10:35   You have a quarantine for everything.

01:10:37   How many browsers do you have?

01:10:39   - Well Chrome, I used Chrome for some other Twitter login.

01:10:42   I forget which one.

01:10:43   So I wanted to keep them separate.

01:10:45   I really should just install the Twitter app again

01:10:47   on my desktop is what I'm saying, but.

01:10:49   - You don't have like Tweetbot on your desktop or anything?

01:10:51   - No, I deleted it in a fit of productivity boosting.

01:10:56   'Cause I use this app called Rescue Time

01:10:58   that tracks how long you spend doing things

01:11:00   and then sends you a report every week saying like,

01:11:02   you spent 16 hours in Xcode, four hours in Logic,

01:11:05   blah, blah, blah. And it kept telling me every week that I was apparently spending roughly

01:11:10   four hours a week using Twitter. And that wasn't just one week, that was consistent.

01:11:18   And so I realized, you know what, I should really not be spending that much time with

01:11:23   it. And so to force myself not to spend much time with it, I deleted the complete app.

01:11:27   Because it's one thing, you can just re-download an app, but with a Twitter app you have to

01:11:31   into each of the accounts separately and that's a pain in the butt. So I knew that

01:11:35   I knew that it would it would be a significant barrier barrier to put it

01:11:40   back. I was actually just thinking about putting it back earlier today because in

01:11:44   my effort not to have it on my desktop what I haven't said so right now I have

01:11:48   my laptop which I still have it installed during during our show I keep

01:11:53   tweet bot open so I can see replies coming in from people similar to how I

01:11:58   have the chat window open. So during our show I have to have my laptop next to me

01:12:01   over here as the second screen just showing Twitter.

01:12:04   During the day, if I post a tweet,

01:12:06   I still can post tweets from Notification Center,

01:12:10   but I can't read the responses I get.

01:12:12   But many times I have to have a conversation

01:12:14   with somebody over Twitter DMs.

01:12:16   And sometimes it's personal, sometimes it's business,

01:12:18   either way, it's a way that a lot of people communicate.

01:12:20   And so I frequently have to have the Twitter website

01:12:24   open in a tab so I can use the DM thing there,

01:12:26   so I can type quickly instead of using my phone,

01:12:30   or like I'll have the laptop on this side,

01:12:32   which is annoying, and then it's open anyway,

01:12:33   and then it's just a different computer,

01:12:34   and then I have to copy links back and forth

01:12:36   between the two, and it's annoying.

01:12:37   And so I have to, or like I'll ask a question on Twitter,

01:12:41   and then I'll be reading the responses on my phone,

01:12:43   on my desk, bent over, and it's just like,

01:12:46   I'm jumping through a lot of hoops

01:12:48   to still use Twitter anyway.

01:12:51   And so my rationale is like, I should probably add it back

01:12:54   because I'm using it anyway,

01:12:56   just in ways that Rescue Time

01:12:58   doesn't really track as easily, but I'm using it anyway.

01:13:01   And it would actually be faster if I had the real app

01:13:04   on my desktop again, because all these things,

01:13:06   I wouldn't have to get up through as many hoops,

01:13:08   they wouldn't be transferring things back and forth

01:13:10   between devices, I'd be able to do things

01:13:12   with keyboard shortcuts and type faster,

01:13:13   so it's, I think I should just put it back,

01:13:17   but I don't know.

01:13:18   Isn't that really exciting, I love that, yeah.

01:13:21   Lots of discussion about workflows.

01:13:24   - Someone put in the chat room a link

01:13:26   to the Wikipedia article showing the rendering,

01:13:27   web rendering engine timelines among Gecko, KHTML,

01:13:32   and WebKit.

01:13:33   Gecko is slightly older than KHTML,

01:13:36   and also older than Trident,

01:13:37   which I think is what IE uses now.

01:13:39   - The reason why I think most people abandoned Firefox

01:13:42   over the last few years didn't have a lot to do with Gecko,

01:13:46   and had more to do with the Firefox interface,

01:13:49   being based on Zool, and having a whole bunch of crap

01:13:53   being able to be thrown in, and having extensions,

01:13:55   extensions kind of made and broke Firefox.

01:13:59   They made it in that a lot of people used it for a while,

01:14:03   a lot of people still use it because certain extensions

01:14:06   are only there or even only possible there.

01:14:10   But what made those extensions possible

01:14:13   was that the whole Firefox interface is built on,

01:14:16   I assume it still is, please tell me

01:14:17   if this is out of date information,

01:14:19   but was built on this big XML specification

01:14:23   where the whole browser was specified in XML

01:14:26   and had all these complexities.

01:14:27   And that's one of the reasons why it never really looks

01:14:30   quite native and never looks quite right on any platform

01:14:32   and why it's very slow.

01:14:34   Because it's basically a web page.

01:14:37   And it's more complicated than that,

01:14:39   but that's kind of the gist of it.

01:14:42   It's specified in this very heavy customizable language

01:14:45   so that it can be so flexible.

01:14:46   So extensions can do anything.

01:14:47   Extensions are written in the same language.

01:14:49   Extensions can control everything, do everything.

01:14:52   the browser was like this giant, slow interpreter

01:14:56   to run all this crap, including its own interface.

01:14:59   And that, I think, made Firefox feel much heavier

01:15:02   and slower and more bloated.

01:15:05   And it certainly made it look pretty bad

01:15:06   that they didn't have very good design either.

01:15:09   So it felt big and slow, it was big and slow,

01:15:12   and it looked big and slow.

01:15:14   And in the era where now everything needs to be efficient

01:15:16   and fast and getting better and JavaScript getting better

01:15:18   and everything's getting better and faster,

01:15:20   and Firefox is this big bloated slow thing in the corner.

01:15:23   - Yeah, hasn't been good in a while as far as I'm concerned.

01:15:27   That's right.

01:15:28   Hey, can we talk about something important?

01:15:30   - (laughs)

01:15:31   Your Showbot, my Twitter productivity,

01:15:33   or Firefox, the most current topic in the world.

01:15:37   What's more important than these things?

01:15:39   - So what's more important than these things

01:15:40   is what I just put in the chat room,

01:15:42   which is somebody dynoed a new M3.

01:15:46   - Can you translate to English for those of us

01:15:48   who are not experts in this field.

01:15:50   Does this refer to a dinosaur in any way?

01:15:54   - No.

01:15:55   So somebody put a new M3 on a dynamometer

01:15:58   which measures how much power the car produces

01:16:03   and they compared it to the prior generation M3

01:16:06   which is from my generation and my goodness,

01:16:09   you should see the torque curve on this thing.

01:16:11   It goes from no torques, to use a top gear-ism,

01:16:15   to darn near all of its torques in 1000 RPM.

01:16:19   It's ridiculous.

01:16:20   You're the worst.

01:16:24   John, do you at least slightly appreciate this?

01:16:26   Somebody help me out here.

01:16:27   - The magic of turbos.

01:16:28   - Yep.

01:16:29   - So it is the magic of turbos.

01:16:31   However, my car actually doesn't have a curve

01:16:35   that different from this.

01:16:37   And I can tell you it's mostly useless

01:16:39   because if you actually give it full power at low revs,

01:16:42   you just lose grip and the tires spin.

01:16:45   Like you can't actually use all of your torque off the line,

01:16:49   which is where I think it matters most.

01:16:51   You can't use it all because it's too much power

01:16:54   for two wheels to put down.

01:16:57   - If only you had a four wheel drive M car.

01:16:58   - I know, well there is one, but it's terrible.

01:17:00   I wish they would make some better ones.

01:17:02   - Don't you have launch control on that thing?

01:17:04   - Yeah, how many times have you tried it?

01:17:06   - Zero.

01:17:07   Isn't the point of launch control

01:17:08   to spin the wheels even more?

01:17:10   - No! - No, no.

01:17:12   The computer controls making sure that you get the car moving as fast as possible, so

01:17:17   it's going to modulate the throttle.

01:17:18   Does it modulate the brakes as well?

01:17:21   Anyway, it wants to maintain friction, right on the ragged edge of you losing traction

01:17:25   but not going over it, kind of like anti-lock brakes, in a way that you couldn't do yourself

01:17:30   if you were modulating it.

01:17:31   That's why most of the most recent Car and Driver, they have the Porsche 918 going to

01:17:36   60 in 2.2 seconds.

01:17:38   That's launch control.

01:17:39   God, that's insane.

01:17:41   To me, this is exciting.

01:17:43   It's exciting in that the M cars keep getting much better

01:17:46   and they're able to get this much power

01:17:48   out of a six cylinder again.

01:17:49   So the cars are getting smaller, lighter,

01:17:52   or at least making the same weight

01:17:54   and getting more powerful close enough.

01:17:55   But they don't need more power.

01:17:57   Power is not the challenge right now.

01:17:59   They need lower weight and they need better traction.

01:18:03   And I think they're pretty much at the limits.

01:18:05   On the BMW side, I think they're pretty much

01:18:07   at the limits of how much torque you can apply

01:18:09   the two wheels and have it be reasonably useful,

01:18:12   I think they need to move to an all-wheel drive system

01:18:14   in the M cars, that's it.

01:18:15   There's too much power there,

01:18:17   and this is with the current generation.

01:18:19   What are they gonna do with the next generation

01:18:21   of these things?

01:18:22   Where presumably the powers are gonna go even further up,

01:18:25   and the weight's gonna go down,

01:18:27   how are you gonna apply those power to the road?

01:18:30   - Yeah, I'm not so sure you're right,

01:18:31   but we'll argue about this forevermore.

01:18:33   But to come back to what Jon was saying,

01:18:35   so I'm attempting and failing, there we go,

01:18:38   to put a link in the chat room of me this past--

01:18:41   I think it was this past winter--

01:18:43   in my car doing a four-wheel burnout in snow.

01:18:46   And I took the video-- or actually, Aaron took the video

01:18:50   using one of our iPhones in high frame rate mode.

01:18:54   And if you look at the front tire,

01:18:57   you can see it slowing down, speeding up, slowing down,

01:18:59   speeding up, slowing down, speeding up,

01:19:01   because the traction control is trying

01:19:03   to keep me moving forward.

01:19:06   And so it's a very fascinating video seeing it in slow-mo

01:19:09   because I can assure you that when you see this

01:19:11   at full speed, it did not look like

01:19:13   that was happening at all.

01:19:15   And as a quick aside, a friend of mine

01:19:17   who has a chipped rear drive 335 said to me

01:19:22   that he went through rear brakes extremely quickly

01:19:28   because the traction control was just melting

01:19:30   all the rear brakes trying to keep him moving forward.

01:19:34   And I just thought that was hysterical.

01:19:35   I don't think launch control does the same things as traction control, though.

01:19:38   I think the idea of launch control is there.

01:19:40   I mean, someone corrected me wrong, but it's not using the brakes as much as traction control

01:19:46   on a slippery surface is.

01:19:48   I think you're right.

01:19:49   I think it's more about clutch application and how many revs you have when you pretty

01:19:52   much dump the clutch.

01:19:54   But I think at least in part it uses brakes in order to get everything moving forward,

01:20:02   although an M-Card actually has limited slip, which I guess helps.

01:20:05   See, now I don't feel bad at all about talking for like two minutes about my Twitter productivity

01:20:10   challenges because now you've spent time on this.

01:20:13   Well, you, I was never going to cut all this out.

01:20:16   No, I want everyone to know how boring we are.