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ATP

69: Welcome to the Web, Casey

 

00:00:00   Time was when all AOL users were behind one big proxy.

00:00:04   We have important follow up this week.

00:00:08   First of all, if you got two t-shirts, that is fine.

00:00:12   That was supposed to happen. What happened was the first t-shirt

00:00:16   had some printing problems, mostly on the back, where

00:00:20   the font wasn't rendered, so it like

00:00:24   fell back to a default font and it printed our monospace code

00:00:28   in a fixed width font.

00:00:29   - Variable width font you mean.

00:00:31   - Yes, sorry, thank you.

00:00:32   I've missed you, John.

00:00:34   And then--

00:00:35   (laughing)

00:00:36   - I was just picturing all the feedback

00:00:38   if we just left that slide.

00:00:39   - Thanks.

00:00:40   So anyway, yeah, so the second one is

00:00:43   it has the fixed font issue,

00:00:45   'cause it also messed up all the spacing

00:00:47   and everything, it was really weird looking before.

00:00:49   So Teespring was kind enough to reprint all the shirts

00:00:52   at no cost and send them to everybody.

00:00:55   That was supposed to happen, so it was no mistake

00:00:57   if you got a second one that's in fact it might be a mistake if you didn't and

00:01:01   You don't have to return the other ones that you got or anything

00:01:04   Just you know, keep them with teespring's compliments and we thank teespring for fixing the error so quickly and fully

00:01:11   And the question is which shirt now is more valuable

00:01:14   As we mentioned in the past shows about that the shirt being printed if the printing on the back messes up

00:01:19   It's like the upside-down airplane stamps and now you have two shirts

00:01:22   you have one where the printing on the back is totally messed up and it's like

00:01:27   In a variable with font but the metrics of the letter spacing are like the metrics of a mod the mono space font

00:01:32   Yeah, crazy amounts of space. It just looks terrible

00:01:35   And then there's the one printed the way we intended which one of those shirts is better now because you could be like I've got

00:01:41   One of the ATP shirts with the printing here, but everybody's got one with with the printing error at this point

00:01:45   Anyone who's got any teachers, right?

00:01:47   It's the same amount of both and it will always be the same amount of both because it's not like you can go order the

00:01:52   shirt now and get the fixed one only. It's the same quantity of both shirts that will

00:01:57   probably ever exist.

00:01:58   Yeah, so next year we'll probably have a different shirt and we'll see how this turns

00:02:02   out. But we've been fielding a lot of tweets and emails from people asking about the double

00:02:06   shirts. Just keep them. And a lot of emails and tweets from people who said they got two

00:02:11   shirts but did not notice any difference between them. And that was surprising to me for listeners

00:02:16   of the show.

00:02:17   Don't tell Teespring.

00:02:18   (laughing)

00:02:20   - Well, but there's definitely a difference.

00:02:21   I feel like once we tell them,

00:02:22   oh, there was a problem with the printing on the back,

00:02:24   and they lay them both down and look at the two backs,

00:02:26   there's a big difference between them.

00:02:28   - Yeah, also the ATP badge on the front,

00:02:32   on the new shirt is a little bit lighter in the shades

00:02:34   because when you give somebody a color to print on a shirt,

00:02:38   it has to go through color conversion

00:02:40   and become a print color,

00:02:41   and that entire world just sucks in every possible way.

00:02:45   The entire world of color converting for print

00:02:47   and trying to get colors to look right in print.

00:02:49   It's just a terrible, terrible existence.

00:02:52   And here's to Teespring for living in that world

00:02:55   so that we all don't have to.

00:02:57   - Yep, now that was very nice of them to write that wrong.

00:03:00   And regardless of who was at fault,

00:03:02   it sounds like it might have been a little bit

00:03:03   of column A, a little bit of column B, but--

00:03:05   - Oh no, Teespring was entirely at fault.

00:03:06   That's not saying it was at fault.

00:03:08   Because, I mean, so here's the thing.

00:03:10   Like, I feel bad for them.

00:03:11   It's good, Teespring has always been good to me

00:03:13   and they've taken action to correct problems,

00:03:17   but it's better if you don't have the problem to begin with.

00:03:19   And I'm speaking mostly from Teespring's perspective,

00:03:21   because from the customer's perspective,

00:03:22   everybody got two shirts for the price of one.

00:03:25   So it's great for customers, but for Teespring,

00:03:27   like Marco said, it's like, you know,

00:03:28   he uploaded the thing, it looked correct in the preview,

00:03:31   and they printed a huge number of shirts.

00:03:33   Like, no human looked at them to compare them

00:03:35   to the preview on their website.

00:03:37   Like, you figured you'd print one, look at it and say,

00:03:39   "Yep, okay, print a thousand or so of those," right?

00:03:42   So I feel like they need to amend their process,

00:03:45   because they're a great company that they're eating

00:03:47   that cost and doing it, but on the other hand,

00:03:49   it's kind of their fault, and I'd feel like they would have

00:03:52   processes in place to do a human sanity check

00:03:55   of runs over a thousand shirts or something.

00:03:57   - Well yeah, and in their defense,

00:04:00   as soon as they became aware of the problem,

00:04:02   they were in contact with me a lot,

00:04:04   and I had talked to like three different people there,

00:04:06   and everyone was trying to resolve the thing,

00:04:08   they wanted me to send them the original file

00:04:09   that caused the error so they could fix it,

00:04:11   and they told me they're changing all these policies,

00:04:13   So I think it scared them enough and probably caused

00:04:16   them to lose enough money that they made some changes

00:04:20   as a result.

00:04:21   I mean, they bent over backwards for my hypercritical shirts

00:04:23   as well.

00:04:24   They've definitely been--

00:04:25   I feel like they have that part of the business down

00:04:27   where you're responsive to customers

00:04:28   and do the right thing.

00:04:29   They've just got to work on the other part of the business

00:04:31   where you don't make mistakes to begin with.

00:04:33   And I mean, if I wanted to dink Marco for anything,

00:04:35   I assumed you were uploading outlines.

00:04:36   If I had known you were uploading text,

00:04:38   I would have advised you to upload outlines.

00:04:40   But--

00:04:40   In my defense, yeah.

00:04:41   So the issue was they recommend you upload an EPS.

00:04:44   Okay, and I don't know anything about this stuff.

00:04:46   This was one of the first times I'd ever used Illustrator

00:04:48   was to do this.

00:04:49   And I uploaded the EPS and I checked

00:04:52   that it had the embedded font.

00:04:54   And I didn't convert to outlines.

00:04:56   I didn't know that was a thing that you could or should do.

00:04:58   So I didn't convert to outlines.

00:04:59   I just uploaded the EPS with the embedded copy of the font.

00:05:03   And every designer, once we had the problem

00:05:06   and I mentioned this, every designer was like,

00:05:07   "Oh no, you never do that

00:05:09   "because printers so often screw up."

00:05:10   "Oh, I didn't know that.

00:05:11   "I didn't have the experience to know that."

00:05:12   And so I thought, I put the embedded font, it's fine, right?

00:05:16   And then the bigger problem, I think,

00:05:18   was that in their image preview on the site,

00:05:22   it rendered it correctly because the thing

00:05:25   that generates the image preview has a different rasterizer

00:05:29   than the thing that actually prints onto the shirts.

00:05:31   And so that's kind of a problem.

00:05:33   - Yeah, and that's why it's ultimately Teespring's fault.

00:05:36   Marco is the inexperienced of not converting to Outline

00:05:38   because he hadn't been using Illustrator since Illustrator 88

00:05:42   on his black and white Mac and comparing things to outlines.

00:05:45   But the preview shows one thing, and you

00:05:48   get something else printed.

00:05:50   That's the whole basis of the site.

00:05:51   It's like you click these buttons, you see a picture,

00:05:53   you say, yes, I want that picture to become a real thing.

00:05:55   You click some more buttons, and then a real shirt

00:05:58   shows up at your house.

00:05:59   Right.

00:05:59   And in their defense, one of the things they asked me for

00:06:02   was a copy of the original file, because they

00:06:04   said their rasterizer should have used the embedded font.

00:06:07   that was not intended behavior that it didn't,

00:06:09   and they didn't want to require everyone to use outlines

00:06:11   'cause Teespring's used by a lot of amateurs.

00:06:14   It's not always professional designers using it.

00:06:16   It's oftentimes like some group making shirts

00:06:20   to raise money for their youth group or something.

00:06:22   And so they want it to work with people

00:06:26   who are not Illustrator experts.

00:06:28   So they, anyway, they resolved it well,

00:06:30   so I'm happy with them.

00:06:31   Anyway, let's move on.

00:06:33   We have a lot of feedback.

00:06:34   Our feedback is like 15 pages long in our document.

00:06:37   What is all this?

00:06:38   I know.

00:06:39   I think it's mostly John because I certainly didn't do it, but another really quick one.

00:06:43   We were all obviously in San Francisco last week for WWDC and I just wanted to quickly

00:06:49   say thank you to everyone who said hi to us, to everyone that purchased and then wore a

00:06:56   shirt, to anyone who went to the talk show and to Gruber for having us all on the talk

00:07:01   show.

00:07:02   I had a really fantastic week.

00:07:03   I think I speak for the two of you guys as well in saying so and so again anyone who

00:07:08   Spent any amount of time with us even if it was just to say hey

00:07:11   Thank thank you for that and I have some more follow-up on the talk show

00:07:16   Oh, and it goes in addition to saying yeah, I agree. That was awesome. Thank you

00:07:20   You know the the the the ditto of what Casey you said?

00:07:22   I was completely wrong about how cloud kit limits work and I I

00:07:28   Definitely said the wrong thing on the talk show and I think I even said the wrong thing on our show last week

00:07:33   where the CloudKit limits are raised per user by something like 1 meg of database use, 100

00:07:41   megs of assets use, but each user is not limited to that 1 meg and that 100 megs.

00:07:47   That simply, every user adds that amount to your total pool, and the resources are pooled

00:07:52   between everybody.

00:07:53   So that does dramatically change things for how you can use CloudKit and whether you can

00:07:59   rely on it being sufficient for you or not.

00:08:02   It still leaves a few questions, like we still don't really know what happens when you hit

00:08:08   that limit, and anything involving like, you know, what happens if one user is a complete

00:08:17   outlier and uses like a gig of the database somehow because they have some script going

00:08:22   that runs awry or something, you know, like how do you solve issues like that with it?

00:08:26   So there's still some issues, but it isn't nearly as scary as I assumed it was because

00:08:31   the resources are pooled by that amount, not limited per user.

00:08:35   I'm not sure that clarification is important, but I'm not sure it changes it entirely.

00:08:41   We were talking about the example of "Could you do Instagram on this?"

00:08:46   Even though users will have varying amounts, if it's only 100 megs of blob storage per

00:08:51   user, any user who uses Instagram will blow through that in a year if they're regular

00:08:56   users.

00:08:57   It's like your average user will blow through that.

00:08:59   It opens it up a little bit to more variability.

00:09:03   If you think most of your users are gonna use like one meg

00:09:05   and a couple of people are gonna use like 500 megs,

00:09:07   then yeah, having it add 100 megs to the pool

00:09:11   for each user for blob storage is good.

00:09:14   But anything that's involving serious amounts of data,

00:09:16   you immediately get to that question,

00:09:18   all right, well, if I start my own little Instagram,

00:09:20   after a year, everybody's gonna have

00:09:22   more than 100 megs of photos, right?

00:09:23   So then what happens?

00:09:25   - Right, but the instance I gave on the talk show,

00:09:28   which was, could they use this for Vesper?

00:09:30   You know, Vesper is a note-taking app

00:09:31   that supports image blob attachments.

00:09:34   But most people don't use a lot of images,

00:09:36   most people just use it for text,

00:09:37   and most people would have a hard time

00:09:39   making a megabyte of text notes,

00:09:41   unless they used it very, very heavily.

00:09:42   But you know, so in Vesper's case,

00:09:44   it might be a bad idea to say,

00:09:47   you can only have up to a megabyte of text notes,

00:09:50   but I bet their average is so far below a megabyte

00:09:54   that they would be okay to use it if they wanted to.

00:09:57   I would pull stats from all active users

00:09:59   before I committed to that, you know what I mean?

00:10:01   Like, see what the average, find out,

00:10:03   you can find out what the average is,

00:10:05   like make sure, you know, whatever your user data

00:10:07   collection agreement allows for this or whatever,

00:10:09   and then just see what the average size is,

00:10:10   because who knows what people are doing with Vesper,

00:10:13   you know, like maybe people are using it

00:10:14   as a photo collecting app for all we know.

00:10:17   - One of the discussions they were having

00:10:19   before they launched the sync service was,

00:10:22   you know, like they don't actually know,

00:10:24   'cause you know, before there was a sync service

00:10:25   a few weeks ago, they didn't actually know

00:10:27   what the average usage was of these things.

00:10:29   How much people actually, how many pictures,

00:10:31   'cause you know, hosting pictures is obviously

00:10:33   a lot more data than hosting text,

00:10:35   and they're like, well how many pictures

00:10:36   do people take with a Vesper?

00:10:37   Are there a lot of image notes?

00:10:39   Are the images very large?

00:10:40   Are there outliers that have just tons and tons and tons

00:10:43   of image notes?

00:10:44   And you don't know that.

00:10:46   I'm facing this with Overcast now.

00:10:47   I'm actually getting reasonably close to launch now,

00:10:50   and I have no idea what to expect on the server side,

00:10:53   and therefore the cost side.

00:10:55   It's very hard to predict these things.

00:10:57   That's one of the reasons why CloudKit is very attractive

00:11:00   to a lot of people because if you have this rockin' lunch

00:11:05   where you get way more people than you thought you would,

00:11:09   your costs are not going to skyrocket,

00:11:12   well, unless you hit one of those master limits

00:11:16   that's really, really high,

00:11:17   but I think that would be quite difficult.

00:11:21   the unpredictability of your initial cost

00:11:24   and initial server needs is kind of removed

00:11:27   as a stress and pain and possible business model pain point.

00:11:31   So it is a very attractive option

00:11:34   and I think a lot of people are gonna use it.

00:11:37   - I hope somebody does so that we can see

00:11:39   if things have really improved

00:11:41   because I can think back to when you mentioned

00:11:43   if you have a really big launch,

00:11:44   you'll be happy you did this.

00:11:45   - Letterpress?

00:11:46   - Yeah, letterpress.

00:11:48   What's the first really popular app

00:11:50   to use this Apple-provided cloud service.

00:11:52   And in the case of Game Center, it was letterpress,

00:11:55   it was very popular, and Game Center fell over

00:11:58   and cried like a little baby.

00:12:00   Well, apparently, Apple's new Photos app and the Photos Sync

00:12:04   service is supposedly all built on CloudKit.

00:12:07   It's the same thing.

00:12:09   And who knows, they probably have some kind of reserve

00:12:11   capacity maybe, but I don't know.

00:12:13   Supposedly, that is what they are doing.

00:12:16   So in other news, it is currently 9/15 and I was trying to use my Showbot and Marco tried

00:12:26   to tell me…

00:12:27   It broke already.

00:12:28   Hold on.

00:12:29   Marco tried to tell me when I was writing the Showbot a couple of weeks ago that people

00:12:35   – these are my words, not Marco's – that people are jerks and they're going to do

00:12:39   whatever they can to mess with the Showbot.

00:12:41   And I said, "No, no, it'll be fine.

00:12:44   Our listeners are great.

00:12:46   They're awesome.

00:12:47   And all of a sudden while you were talking, I look at the Showbot, which is all run kind

00:12:52   of real-time using WebSockets, and next thing I know I see that the "Does Casey Showbot

00:12:59   Actually Work?"

00:13:00   title just skyrocketing in votes.

00:13:03   And so someone apparently has decided to make Web API requests or WebSocket requests to

00:13:12   add a vote to that particular item and then eventually crash the showbot.

00:13:17   They're not being jerks, they're being good testers.

00:13:19   Yeah, maybe. But anyway, so the point is that it lasted 15 minutes and that is how long

00:13:26   the chat room can handle a new toy to play with and then subsequently break.

00:13:33   You're gonna be a good father.

00:13:34   Have I mentioned that your showbot has never worked for me?

00:13:38   I mean it's never worked.

00:13:39   It is. Remember, I tried to use it once from work, and I said, "Oh, maybe it's not working

00:13:42   because of a firewall, because of some weird WebSocket thing," and I've tried it from home,

00:13:46   and all I ever see is the word "connecting." That's all I've ever seen of your Showbot.

00:13:49   Well, if you want, you can see that now.

00:13:50   Oh, shut up. I just restarted.

00:13:53   I know. And I'm looking at it now, and it says "connecting." So, I'm, you know, "Marko's

00:13:59   crappy PHP thing 1, Casey's Node Showbot 0."

00:14:03   Well, that's what I get for trying to do something fancy.

00:14:05   his is AJAX-y. It's even better, it's WebSockets. He leapt right past AJAX.

00:14:10   He went too far. Oh, wait, something happened. Now it says titles. No, something's happening.

00:14:14   So that was like a seven-minute load time.

00:14:17   If you remember, Casey, what I also told you is, you know, it would be nice if it had some

00:14:21   kind of persistent storage. That way, if it crashes, you don't lose all the titles that

00:14:25   have been suggested up until that point.

00:14:27   I know, I know. The problem is…

00:14:28   So it would be nice if it could write it out to a file every few seconds.

00:14:31   Well, but that's the thing. It's all kidding aside, I did look into this, and the problem

00:14:34   is because this is hosted on Heroku, because I generally like Heroku, the file system is

00:14:40   ephemeral. And so even if I dump something to file, then if I do anything, that file

00:14:46   will go away. Like if I restart the dyno like I just did, the file will go away.

00:14:50   Well, I should just make a web request to someone who's running a real web server.

00:14:55   I was waiting for it.

00:14:58   You know, I hate to tell you Casey, but my servers can save files. It's this crazy

00:15:02   I know it's bleeding edge brand new technology,

00:15:05   but my servers are actually able to save data to disk.

00:15:08   - Well, and that's the thing, is what I need to do

00:15:09   is, as people are recommending in the chat,

00:15:11   I need to use Postgres or some other SQL

00:15:13   or something like that.

00:15:15   - You don't need to use Postgres for show titles,

00:15:17   for crying out loud.

00:15:18   Make a file with numbers in it.

00:15:20   - That's why I didn't!

00:15:21   That's why I didn't.

00:15:22   But apparently Heroku's file system is all ephemeral,

00:15:25   or maybe it isn't, and I just don't realize it.

00:15:27   But the only reason I was supposed to,

00:15:28   or that was trying to bring this up,

00:15:30   was to point out that it took virtually no time for the chat room to just completely tear apart my

00:15:36   showbot. Now they're putting in script tags, putting in long titles.

00:15:41   Welcome to the web, Casey.

00:15:42   Have you ever used a computer?

00:15:44   Oh my god, this is why you a**holes don't have nice things. This is ridiculous.

00:15:48   I quit. I quit the show and I quit you all. Well, not you two, everyone else.

00:15:53   I love that you were so naive that you didn't think this would happen.

00:15:56   You're such a nice person, Casey. You really are.

00:15:59   I had faith in humanity and God how wrong I was.

00:16:02   I'm sorry.

00:16:03   Anyway, we can carry on.

00:16:05   I'm just going to ignore my own creation, whatever, you big jerks.

00:16:10   The three of us are cool.

00:16:11   It's everyone else I don't like.

00:16:14   Anyway, moving on.

00:16:16   All right, so we have some follow-up.

00:16:18   Next bit of follow-up.

00:16:19   This is after WWDC, a bunch of people tweeted this at me and I thought it was clever.

00:16:23   We didn't get to it in the actual WWDC show.

00:16:27   And I haven't actually looked into this because I have not seen any of the sessions related

00:16:30   to this because they're mostly iOS related and everything, but in the keynote they mentioned

00:16:35   bundles.

00:16:36   You can sell a bunch of apps on the App Store together for one price.

00:16:39   And apparently, kind of like in iTunes where there's the "complete this album" button where

00:16:43   you buy the album minus the cost of the songs you already bought in the album, there's the

00:16:50   "complete this bundle" thing on the App Store—I'm assuming there is because these people were

00:16:54   were telling me there was, where if you bought one app in a two app bundle, you could complete

00:16:58   this bundle by simply paying the difference for the second app. And people were proposing

00:17:03   this as a terrible confusing way to do upgrade pricing. Because what you would do is when

00:17:09   you have a new version of your app, you keep the first version of the app on the store,

00:17:12   you introduce the new version at whatever price you want to sell to new users. And then

00:17:16   you make a bundle that includes the old version and the new version for less than the sum

00:17:20   of their prices, which allows people who already own the old version to complete this bundle,

00:17:25   effectively giving them an upgrade price. Which, again, like I said, I think that is

00:17:28   terrible and confusing and not obvious, but it is a clever hack of the rules as presented

00:17:34   to me by these people who sent me this information. Do either of you know if that stuff is accurate

00:17:38   about "Complete this Bundle"?

00:17:39   I do not.

00:17:41   Are there any bundles actually in the store yet that we could even see? I don't think

00:17:43   there are. I don't think you can make them yet.

00:17:45   If this is all true and it actually works like this, people will do this for their upgrades

00:17:50   for upgrade pricing and it will be confusing to users.

00:17:53   And so that's a shame.

00:17:55   Imagine people on their websites trying to tell people like, "If you want upgrade pricing,

00:18:00   go get the bundle, but do complete this bundle."

00:18:02   And ugh, I don't know.

00:18:05   This is like, if this loophole exists, Apple needs to close it, not because it's terrible

00:18:09   to allow upgrade pricing, but because it's so confusing and you know developers will

00:18:12   jump on it in a second, everyone will have these stupid instructions on their website

00:18:16   telling people how to get upgrade pricing by buying a bundle, which is not obvious.

00:18:19   Yeah, well also, I mean, the biggest thing that I think would blow a hole in this is,

00:18:24   do you have to have all the apps that are in the bundle still in the app store by themselves?

00:18:29   Because if you do, that means you have to have your old version still for sale while

00:18:33   your new version is for sale, and that's terrible.

00:18:35   Well, so the idea, I mean, again, the terrible proposed idea is you keep the old one in the

00:18:40   store for a limited time because the upgrade pricing would be some window of

00:18:44   like a couple months and you raise the individual price of the like the

00:18:47   standalone old version to something crazy that no one would accidentally buy

00:18:50   of course you know that's like you hope no more actually buy until someone

00:18:54   actually buys your you know 999 dollar app and it's pissed off at you or

00:18:58   whatever but that all this is just like a terrible workaround to get into a

00:19:02   loophole to give your existing customers a cheaper price for your new app but it

00:19:06   has so many bad side effects they just need they need to close this whole and I

00:19:09   I don't know how they will close it,

00:19:10   because if they have a complete this bundle thing,

00:19:13   I don't know how you stop this from happening.

00:19:16   - Yeah, I think it's just one of those things,

00:19:17   like developers are, they're so desperate to,

00:19:20   they, we, are so desperate to get ongoing revenue,

00:19:25   because you know what happens in the app store,

00:19:26   when you have a paid app, this is what always happens,

00:19:28   you launch and you get this nice big spike of sales,

00:19:31   but then it starts dropping,

00:19:32   and sometimes that drop can be pretty steep.

00:19:35   So eventually, you know, you start making not enough money

00:19:38   from your current version and you're like,

00:19:39   okay, well now I wanna work on this new version

00:19:42   or we have been working on this new version,

00:19:43   I gotta release it, gotta make more money from this.

00:19:47   Now, in the olden days, you release a new version

00:19:50   and charge an upgrade price,

00:19:51   because the full price was generally high enough,

00:19:55   you know, if you're charging 100 bucks

00:19:57   for the full price of your app,

00:19:59   and then you release a new version,

00:20:00   your existing customers would like it a lot

00:20:02   if you gave them the new version for maybe 50 bucks

00:20:04   or 40 bucks or whatever.

00:20:05   So the upgrade discount thing happened.

00:20:07   Well now in the iOS app store,

00:20:11   there's pretty much no good way to do it,

00:20:13   or the Mac app store,

00:20:14   there's pretty much no good way to do that.

00:20:15   And developers are always looking for a way

00:20:18   to get around this and to do this,

00:20:20   but the reality is all these things are terrible hacks.

00:20:24   And they will all anger some portion of your customers

00:20:28   to some degree no matter how you do them.

00:20:30   And or cause you lots of support costs.

00:20:34   And so it just, it never, there is no good solution to this.

00:20:38   The only solution to this is what Apple's doing

00:20:42   with their apps in the App Store.

00:20:43   The few Apple apps that they still charge money for

00:20:46   in the App Store, which that number keeps going down,

00:20:48   but the few apps, like the Pro apps, they charge money for,

00:20:52   you know, Logic, Aperture, stuff like that, Final Cut,

00:20:55   they just, they drop all the prices down

00:20:57   to a fraction of what they used to be.

00:20:58   You know, these things used to be like $300, $600, $1,000.

00:21:02   Now, things that were $1,000 are now $300,

00:21:06   things that were $300 are now like 70 bucks,

00:21:09   Logic is only 200.

00:21:11   They dropped all their prices,

00:21:12   and then when a new version comes out,

00:21:14   it's just like Apple hardware.

00:21:16   The new version costs the same thing as the old version.

00:21:18   If you bought the old version, too bad.

00:21:19   You want the new one, pay full price.

00:21:21   And that's a little more palatable now than it used to be

00:21:24   because the prices have gotten lower.

00:21:26   It still kinda sucks, but in a lot of ways,

00:21:29   it's quote, fair.

00:21:31   It's also, from Apple's point of view,

00:21:32   it's also very, very simple.

00:21:34   The new version of the app is a brand new standalone app.

00:21:38   The old version is removed from the store,

00:21:40   so you can only buy the new one.

00:21:41   And upgrades are, you know, well,

00:21:44   you're paying less than you used to pay, be happy.

00:21:47   And so that same model applies to iOS,

00:21:50   but the prices of course are even lower.

00:21:52   Instead of $100, you're paying $1 or $5 at most.

00:21:55   You know, almost no one's paying over $5 on iOS

00:21:58   for anything really.

00:22:00   "If you buy Tweetbot one for three bucks

00:22:04   "and then next week, Tweetbot two comes out

00:22:06   "and it's another three bucks, too bad."

00:22:09   Like that's the attitude that we have to have.

00:22:12   That's their only choice really.

00:22:13   That's what Apple has done with their stuff.

00:22:15   They're leading the way on that

00:22:16   and I think people are pretty much used to it.

00:22:19   I mean people will complain no matter what you do

00:22:20   if you charge money.

00:22:21   There's always gonna be people who complain

00:22:22   but I don't think you'd have fewer people complaining

00:22:26   if you had upgrade pricing.

00:22:28   And so the reality is this is the world we live in now.

00:22:30   This is, you know, Apple has been very clear that

00:22:35   if you want to do some kind of upgrade pricing scheme,

00:22:37   figure out a way to make an in-app purchase.

00:22:38   You know, the in-app purchase is the way that you

00:22:41   add features to an existing app

00:22:42   and try to get more money from them.

00:22:44   That's it.

00:22:46   - So the chat room has come through

00:22:47   and linked us to the documentation for the app bundles

00:22:51   and two relevant rules from this page.

00:22:53   From Apple, app contains in a bundle must be available

00:22:56   for sale on their own as well,

00:22:57   so you do have to keep that other older app for sale in the store.

00:23:01   And app bundles also support Complete My Bundle.

00:23:04   Complete My Bundle provides customers who previously purchased one or more of the apps

00:23:07   included within the bundle an additional discount on the app bundle.

00:23:10   So I don't know if it's a straight subtraction of price or whatever, but...

00:23:13   Perfect.

00:23:14   So you can do this, but it's a terrible idea, too.

00:23:15   Yeah, and I assume people will do it, and I'm not sure how Apple will react to it.

00:23:20   Because if they just sort of shrug and go, "Well, they're within the rules we defined,"

00:23:25   I expect there to be some confusion and sadness.

00:23:27   but it's the App Store.

00:23:29   - If you have both versions of your app in the store

00:23:31   at the same time and they're both paid apps,

00:23:33   you're gonna get so many angry customers,

00:23:35   so many angry support emails, so many one-star reviews.

00:23:38   I think that problem will be self-correcting.

00:23:40   It's a terrible, terrible idea to have both versions

00:23:43   in the store at the same time

00:23:44   because people will accidentally buy the old one

00:23:46   and then be very angry that you spent money

00:23:48   on an obsolete app that doesn't entitle them to much

00:23:51   or any of a discount on the new one in total.

00:23:53   And yeah, it's--

00:23:55   - Although, I mean, there's the whole thing

00:23:56   cranking the price up on the old one and then just refunding anyone who

00:23:59   accidentally buys it and eating 30% of that. But you can't refund them. Apple has to

00:24:03   refund. That's the thing. Like you as the developer, you can't just push a refund

00:24:06   button when they email you and say, "Oh, sorry, I corrected that for you. You can't, you

00:24:08   have no control over that." It's, this is why it's a terrible idea. Developers,

00:24:12   please do not do this. It is, you will regret it. Your customers will be upset.

00:24:16   It is, it is just a very, very bad idea. I wonder if the people who are most

00:24:21   likely to do this are the very few people on the App Store who still have

00:24:25   expensive apps like over 50 bucks and they want to offer upgrade pricing because like

00:24:29   you said upgrade pricing is pointless when you're selling $3 apps right but if it's like

00:24:34   $50 $100 are there any of those left I don't even know used to be that Apple was close

00:24:38   to that range but now not really anymore these days although was aperture like 80 or something

00:24:43   yep anyway Apple stop playing the game the Apple service home I'm playing it so I wonder

00:24:46   if there's someone out there with like some specialty CAD application that wants to offer

00:24:50   upgrade pricing and tries this and then we can wait for their blog post where they cry

00:24:54   about their customers getting angry at them or people being confused.

00:24:58   Yeah, I could see, you know, obviously the higher the priced app, the more sense it might

00:25:03   make to try a scheme like this, but I just think it's a terrible idea from the start.

00:25:08   And speaking of looking at web pages at developer.apple.com and reading about them on the air, there was

00:25:14   a lot of confusion during the week about what the hell was the NDA situation for WWDC, because

00:25:20   all of us were at the beginning of every session they had the little announcer person come on and say

00:25:25   reminder everything under the in the session is NDA and blah blah blah and like you know so

00:25:30   it the boilerplate text and speech that we encountered at wwc was the same as every year

00:25:34   which is basically the keynote is public it's streamed to the world all the sessions are under

00:25:38   NDA and they are but the content of that NDA according to various blog posts included this

00:25:43   new clause that said oh by the way you're allowed to talk about any technical information you see

00:25:47   in these things you just can't like post screenshots copy and paste text from slides

00:25:51   or distribute the software or review products or something to that effect but i'm not a lawyer i

00:25:57   didn't know what that text meant so we've all been very cautious about it but here i think is the

00:26:00   kicker after coming home from wwc i think we all realize that anybody and in any web browser can

00:26:08   go to apple's developer website without having an account of any kind without signing anybody

00:26:12   agreeing to anything and simply play videos from WWDC. You can watch videos of all the sessions of

00:26:18   WWDC this year for free without signing any agreement with Apple. Which means basically

00:26:23   that anything contained in those videos we're allowed to talk about because anybody can see

00:26:27   them because it's essentially public information. I know enough about Apple's NDAs to know that if

00:26:30   it's public information you can talk about it. So that is a relief in one respect and that we don't

00:26:35   have to tiptoe around this stuff because if it was in a WWDC session we can talk about it because you

00:26:39   You can just go watch the video right now and on the other hand what it means is that?

00:26:42   anybody who cares can sit there watch every video from WBC and then we'll have no reason to read my os10 review because

00:26:49   Everything everything in those videos you will know more than you're going to learn from my review because all I do is summarize

00:26:55   WBC but no one wants to watch all those videos

00:26:58   So you're probably read it anyway because as long as my review is it is still way shorter than watching everybody from WBC

00:27:03   Yeah, I think you'll be alright

00:27:05   Anyway, our first sponsor this week is a new sponsor.

00:27:10   It is Automattic.

00:27:12   This is a relatively new product that actually got the domain name, Automattic.com.

00:27:16   Even spelled the normal way, not like the WordPress way.

00:27:18   It's spelled the actual way that you spell the word "Automatic."

00:27:22   Automattic is your smart driving assistant for your smartphone.

00:27:26   So if you go to Automattic.com, you can see this thing.

00:27:29   We talked about this in neutral, in I think the second to last episode, or the third to

00:27:32   last episode of neutral.

00:27:33   We actually talked about this, and we are probably irresponsible enough drivers, well

00:27:38   Casey and I are at least, that this would have probably some bad news for us.

00:27:43   Because here's what it does.

00:27:44   So this plugs in, they have this little, I think it's a Bluetooth dongle, but they

00:27:48   have a little dongle that plugs into the OBD, which one's the wrapper, which one's the

00:27:53   port?

00:27:54   Oh, on board data, OBD-C, right?

00:27:57   OBD-2.

00:27:58   Oh yeah, sorry, yes, yes, yes.

00:28:01   It's that port in your car that it's usually in the driver's foot well and it's what they

00:28:06   plug the diagnostic thing into when you go get service.

00:28:10   They have a little dongle that plugs into that and then that can connect to an app on

00:28:12   your phone that they have.

00:28:15   This diagnostic port in almost any modern car can dump out tons of useful information

00:28:19   from the engine, like what kind of gas mileage you're getting, what the engine is doing,

00:28:23   what kind of condition the engine is in, if there's any problems with the engine.

00:28:27   When the check engine light comes on, what that really means is there is an error.

00:28:32   It's just a Boolean.

00:28:33   Like, there is something in your car reporting an error code.

00:28:37   This thing can actually tell you what those codes mean.

00:28:40   It can decode them from almost all popular car types.

00:28:42   You can go on their website and learn more about which ones are supported and everything,

00:28:45   but it's great.

00:28:46   So then it can even tell you how you've been doing on your gas mileage.

00:28:50   You can see all these pretty graphs and averages, and you can kind of compete with yourself.

00:28:56   You can see how you've been doing,

00:28:57   how much fuel is costing around your area,

00:28:59   and how much your driving style is helping

00:29:01   or hurting your fuel cost goals.

00:29:03   It can also remember where you parked.

00:29:06   And you can locate your car on a nice little map,

00:29:08   and look at their app.

00:29:09   It's all very Apple design-y.

00:29:12   It's a very well-made app.

00:29:14   Right now it is iPhone only.

00:29:15   It is coming soon to Android.

00:29:18   Oh, one more little benefit,

00:29:19   well, big benefit potentially.

00:29:22   If you are in a crash, in a serious crash,

00:29:25   They can actually automatically detect that from the OBD port.

00:29:31   And they can notify local authorities automatically

00:29:35   if you're in a crash, so this thing could really help you out.

00:29:37   Hopefully you won't need that feature, but if you do,

00:29:40   you might be glad you have it.

00:29:41   So anyway, iPhone only coming soon to Android.

00:29:43   This ships in only two business days.

00:29:45   And there's a 45-day return policy.

00:29:47   So just get it.

00:29:48   Try it out.

00:29:48   See if you like it.

00:29:49   I bet you will.

00:29:50   There's free shipping.

00:29:51   Anyway, go to automatic.com/ATP.

00:29:55   Normally, it's $99.95.

00:29:57   And there's, by the way, no subscription fees,

00:29:58   nothing per month for that service.

00:30:00   You just buy the thing and that's it.

00:30:02   No subscription fees.

00:30:03   So $100 normally, you can get 20% off.

00:30:06   Get this thing for just $80 at automatic.com/ATP.

00:30:10   Thanks a lot to Automatic for sponsoring our show.

00:30:13   When we talked about this on "Neutral," it was sort of

00:30:15   in the context of car manufacturers should be ashamed

00:30:19   of themselves, that they're not already doing this.

00:30:21   right, but now here we are a year or two later, whatever it's been and

00:30:25   That's the new status quo with Apple doing carplay

00:30:29   It's like give up on car makers trying to do something Apple's just like look just let us take over your screen

00:30:34   We will project a UI onto it from our device and it's like sort of

00:30:38   externalizing the

00:30:39   Technology part into a part that you upgrade faster than you upgrade your car and never relying on the kind of manufacturers do anything

00:30:45   So it's like, you know with automatic there's this port it has information car manufacturers have been really slow

00:30:51   to put that information to use, especially in non-high-end cars, but they all have this

00:30:57   port, so why don't we sell this thing that people can buy, stick in there and use in

00:31:00   conjunction with their smartphone or whatever to sort of add technology to their otherwise

00:31:06   inexpensive and woefully under-technologicalified, that's not a word, but sounds good, car.

00:31:13   Now it is.

00:31:14   So, one more thing on the WWC NDA stuff. As people have noted, if you go to the video

00:31:20   page which we will put in the show notes for anyone who wants to watch WWDC videos.

00:31:24   The ones that they pretty much never release on video in my recollection are the lunchtime

00:31:29   sessions, which are not technical sessions presented by Apple, but Apple invites in guest

00:31:33   speakers from various places.

00:31:36   A couple years ago Pixar did it, J.J. Abrams was there one year.

00:31:39   This year the lunch session that I went to was presented by someone who works for Lucasfilm

00:31:44   on the Star Wars franchise, and he was talking about the new animated show that he's working

00:31:49   on but kind of did a big tour of the Star Wars universe and his history with it, those

00:31:56   you're not going to be able to find.

00:31:58   And it's not because I don't think there's any NDA type things, it's just that I think

00:32:01   their deal with the people who want to come in and speak is, "We're not going to film

00:32:04   you, we're not going to release your film, just come and talk to the people who are attending

00:32:07   our conference as a nice thing to do."

00:32:09   And that's probably an easier sell than, "Hey, famous person, come here and we'll film you,

00:32:13   and then we'll sell access to your video or release it for free."

00:32:16   So you won't find the Star Wars session, which is the one most nerds are interested in this

00:32:20   year.

00:32:21   I was there, and it was good, and it was fun, and it's a shame you can't see it, but oh

00:32:25   well.

00:32:26   All right, so we have a mountain more follow-up to get through.

00:32:29   This might be a hypercritical-style 80% follow-up episode.

00:32:32   Geez.

00:32:33   Well, I was going to say we could just do this next item and then leave the rev, because

00:32:37   there's one item on cloud and then two items on medical stuff that I think maybe we mentioned

00:32:42   in the previous episode.

00:32:43   I just wanted to read this Apple and cloud feedback because it was the first time that

00:32:47   I had heard this information, although I think one of you two had alluded to it before.

00:32:52   This is from anonymous source, who knows if it's real, whatever, anyway.

00:32:58   Typical caveats about feedback, do not take this as gospel, but here's what this person

00:33:02   said in regards to Apple and the cloud.

00:33:05   They said, "iTunes, iCloud, and the majority of server-based interfacing are handled by

00:33:09   a huge division of Apple that acts almost like its own company due to sheer size.

00:33:13   They employ mostly contractors, including offshore.

00:33:15   From my experience, they were the slowest responding division by far and seemed to be

00:33:19   completely locked in politics."

00:33:21   This is like the scenario that we imagined thinking about Apple's cloud stuff.

00:33:26   It seems like the people who do that aren't as good as the people who do the other stuff.

00:33:30   Wait, hold on.

00:33:31   I didn't say they weren't as good.

00:33:32   I said they seem like they're not getting the resources or the priority that they need

00:33:36   to be good.

00:33:37   Well, so here's the next bit of his.

00:33:39   software developer outside the division who needed to work with them in parallel to build something,

00:33:43   it's a nightmare. Imagine submitting a request to the NSA to give you information and receiving

00:33:47   a piece of paper saying they can't due to technical reasons six months later.

00:33:51   It's not just that they're under-resourced, it's that they seem to be not as responsive.

00:33:58   They're not working on the same team. Within Apple, you imagine, "All right, we've got to

00:34:02   get the new iPhone out, and the OS needs to be done, and whatever frameworks for these new

00:34:06   new features need to be on there,

00:34:08   and the hardware design,

00:34:09   like it's all, everyone's working together

00:34:11   to just get this job done.

00:34:12   And then there's this other entity far away,

00:34:14   disconnected with a huge latency,

00:34:16   where every time you have to deal with them,

00:34:17   it's like a big turnaround time,

00:34:19   and it seems like they're not on the same page as you.

00:34:20   Is it just because they're under resources?

00:34:22   Is it just because they're remote?

00:34:23   I don't know, but this, you could,

00:34:25   if this is true, this would explain

00:34:27   whether Cloud stuff has such problems,

00:34:28   because it's almost like it's not Apple doing it.

00:34:31   It's like this other entity that's not,

00:34:34   that's not running the same race with them.

00:34:35   It's not sort of together on producing this big thing,

00:34:38   but outsourcing, as the Spolsky thinks,

00:34:42   don't outsource your core competency.

00:34:43   If cloud is an Apple's core competency at this point,

00:34:46   then what is?

00:34:47   Like, they need to bring that back in

00:34:49   if it really is outsourced like this,

00:34:50   'cause if this is true,

00:34:52   it is very depressing and a bad situation.

00:34:54   - It's almost as if they need increased collaboration.

00:34:58   - Now, that was just increased collaboration

00:34:59   amongst the hardware and software guys

00:35:01   to stop them from fighting.

00:35:02   Those are the people who already were working

00:35:03   pretty well together.

00:35:04   this is, who knows what this is.

00:35:05   So again, I don't know if any of this is true.

00:35:08   Anonymous sources, who knows, but if it is true,

00:35:11   it confirms my worst fears and presumably it is changing.

00:35:15   Like the CloudKit stuff would indicate a change

00:35:17   in that direction because it sure seems like, you know,

00:35:20   that Apple is dogfooding its own stuff

00:35:22   and to a degree that they hadn't before

00:35:25   and that CloudKit looks like a much more sane API

00:35:29   than the previous ones, much more like the APIs

00:35:31   that everyone was building for themselves.

00:35:33   So things are looking up in this area.

00:35:35   This is a sort of a look backward

00:35:37   on how things might have been if this is all accurate.

00:35:39   - Yeah, and that does corroborate what I had heard,

00:35:43   although that's more detailed than I had heard,

00:35:45   but also I heard from some, so we had somebody else,

00:35:48   I don't know if it was the same person or not,

00:35:49   or maybe it was a random conversation I had somewhere,

00:35:51   but somebody else said that this actually was

00:35:54   like actively changing and so like Federighi

00:35:58   was now able to like kind of push against that

00:36:01   to some degree and get stuff moving

00:36:04   and that apparently changes were happening.

00:36:05   And that's all that we know really,

00:36:08   that we don't even really know that.

00:36:10   But it basically sounds like it has been bad

00:36:15   and it is still a little bit bad but is making progress.

00:36:19   And I think what Apple is showing, what they're announcing,

00:36:22   and even just how their stuff is performing recently,

00:36:25   I think the results seem to be bearing that out.

00:36:29   That seems like a plausible explanation

00:36:31   of what we're seeing.

00:36:32   Anyway, before we move on to the official topics,

00:36:35   let me get one more sponsorship out of the way,

00:36:36   because we were a little late to the first one.

00:36:39   Our second sponsor this week is lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A dot com.

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00:37:35   so that way, when a new version of Photoshop comes out,

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00:38:14   you'd want to be interested in,

00:38:15   but watch a few minutes of it and see.

00:38:17   And then you might be like,

00:38:18   oh, I always assumed that would be harder.

00:38:20   Or, oh, that's how you can do this cool thing.

00:38:22   I never knew that.

00:38:23   So anyway, go to lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com.

00:38:27   slash ATP, and you can get a free seven day trial.

00:38:32   Go check it out, see for yourself.

00:38:34   We've all, all three of us have watched stuff on there.

00:38:36   I've learned a lot from their stuff,

00:38:38   especially with some of the podcast production stuff

00:38:39   that I've done, and chances are I'll probably go on there

00:38:42   to learn Swift or JSON or, sorry, Node or all sorts of stuff.

00:38:45   They have all sorts of language courses.

00:38:47   You can even learn PHP if you're the only person

00:38:49   on Earth who doesn't know it yet, John,

00:38:52   and you can learn all sorts of new stuff there.

00:38:55   3D printing, they even have 3D printing.

00:38:57   I mean, they have this crazy list of stuff.

00:38:59   Go check it out.

00:39:00   These are nicely produced professional video tutorials.

00:39:03   Go to L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash ATP.

00:39:07   That is Linda dot com with a Y.

00:39:09   Linda dot com slash ATP.

00:39:11   Thanks a lot to Linda for sponsoring our show once again.

00:39:14   - Pretty sure I've written more PHP than Casey.

00:39:16   - That's possible but not necessarily true.

00:39:20   When Aaron and I got engaged,

00:39:24   I had an old ThinkPad running some flavor of Ubuntu and I wrote our wedding website

00:39:34   in PHP and this was actually my first exposure to databases because I had always been writing

00:39:39   client-side apps.

00:39:41   And so I wrote a wedding website which allowed you to RSVP online and I was extremely proud

00:39:48   of myself.

00:39:49   That was all PHP.

00:39:50   And I thought that went really well until my friend who had an apostrophe in his surname

00:39:57   went to register and all of a sudden everything took a turn because I didn't properly escape

00:40:02   everything.

00:40:03   But like I said, it was my first experience and that went pretty well.

00:40:06   And we didn't have to use the "not" in order to do that because, I don't know,

00:40:11   everyone used the "not" at that point and I didn't want to.

00:40:14   So.

00:40:15   JAYLEE STIFFER You really wanted to show Erin right up front

00:40:17   what she was getting into.

00:40:18   Basically, yes.

00:40:20   - Yeah.

00:40:20   - And she's still here.

00:40:21   - That's good, yeah.

00:40:23   You found the right one.

00:40:24   - So anyway, what are we talking about tonight?

00:40:27   - Talking about Marco's Mac Pro woes.

00:40:29   - Oh yes, how could I forget?

00:40:31   So--

00:40:32   - That was fun, yeah.

00:40:33   - So what happened?

00:40:34   - I woke up to a computer that was showing

00:40:37   signs of disk failure.

00:40:39   Basically it had totally locked up.

00:40:42   Like you could still move the mouse and everything.

00:40:43   You could still like launch bar.

00:40:45   You could still invoke commands and click on stuff

00:40:48   and move stuff, but anything that would cause a disk access

00:40:51   would just freeze whatever you were using.

00:40:54   And so I tried, like I couldn't even launch console,

00:40:58   like I tried to launch a console app

00:41:00   to see if it was showing me anything useful,

00:41:02   and I couldn't even do that

00:41:02   because that would require reading from the disk.

00:41:05   So I thought, oh crap, my SSD is dead.

00:41:08   And I rebooted and rebooted and rebooted

00:41:13   and could never get past the gray spinner.

00:41:16   in verbose mode it would stop at the,

00:41:19   how do you pronounce the FSCK, Disc Command Checking thing?

00:41:22   - Just spell it out, it's fine.

00:41:23   - Anyway, it wouldn't get,

00:41:25   it was doing that and would never finish it.

00:41:27   I gave it lots of time, I gave it an hour to see,

00:41:30   like is it taking a while to finish?

00:41:32   No, it wasn't, it was just stuck.

00:41:35   And you know, I restored it from a super duper clone,

00:41:39   which is by far the fastest recovery method.

00:41:42   And so I did that and it was fine,

00:41:45   and so I'm fine, I'm back up now and everything's fine.

00:41:48   It seems, oh, and for whatever it's worth,

00:41:52   while it was in the unbootable state,

00:41:55   I booted from the clone and ran Disk Utility

00:41:58   against the damaged disk.

00:42:00   It appeared to have no errors.

00:42:02   I did the whole repair, verify everything.

00:42:04   It reported nothing wrong.

00:42:07   In conclusion, it appears as though

00:42:09   this was almost certainly a file system related problem.

00:42:14   You know, I don't know.

00:42:15   Anyway, this is boring, but I had an issue that caused

00:42:18   enough disk corruption to make the disk unbootable,

00:42:21   and it seems to have been related to the file system

00:42:25   I was using, which was HFS+.

00:42:28   - Ding! - Yep.

00:42:29   That's it.

00:42:31   - We're doing the verbal sound effects now.

00:42:33   - Yeah, well, I don't have one of those crazy sound boards,

00:42:36   like on Bionic, where I can just hit a button.

00:42:38   (laughing)

00:42:39   I love Bionic.

00:42:40   Bionic is--

00:42:42   - Oh, it's so good, but I couldn't even tell you why.

00:42:45   It's just so good.

00:42:46   - It's so bad that it's so good, and they know it.

00:42:49   That's the, like, it's the show that,

00:42:52   it's like, it's like Milton, the guy from Office Space,

00:42:56   like, you know, it's like, you know,

00:42:57   the show got fired six years ago and no one told them,

00:43:01   and they just keep going in every day.

00:43:03   It's just this ongoing piece of performance art.

00:43:06   (laughing)

00:43:07   Between two people who are very funny together

00:43:11   and just have nothing to talk about

00:43:13   because the show is like totally off the rails.

00:43:16   - Oh, it's so wonderful.

00:43:17   - And it is comical, like it is such good humor

00:43:21   and the funniest part is you're sitting there listening

00:43:24   and thinking, why am I still listening to this?

00:43:26   And they're sitting there producing it saying,

00:43:28   why are we still producing this?

00:43:29   And yet it works, I don't know why it works,

00:43:32   but it does work and it's hilarious and I really enjoy it.

00:43:35   - Oh, I agree.

00:43:36   - I hope they didn't pay for that spot

00:43:37   because I'm not sure you're really selling it there.

00:43:39   (laughing)

00:43:40   "Why am I still listening to this?" says Marco Armond.

00:43:43   - No, nobody should be listening to it,

00:43:45   but I listen to it and I love it.

00:43:46   - Oh, I completely agree with everything you just said.

00:43:48   It's so good.

00:43:49   - And I think they would agree with me.

00:43:50   I think they would say don't listen to it.

00:43:52   - Oh, it's so wonderful because it really has got,

00:43:54   it's like the entire show,

00:43:55   like if you think "Back to Work" is a show of in-jokes,

00:43:58   you have no idea because Bionic is one entire show

00:44:02   made of nothing but in-jokes.

00:44:04   It's ridiculous and it's wonderful in every possible way.

00:44:07   - Yeah, it is really quite good.

00:44:10   Anyway, I forgot we were even talking about that.

00:44:15   How did we even get there?

00:44:16   - Ding soundboard, HFS Plus.

00:44:18   - Nice, right, okay.

00:44:19   - There you go.

00:44:20   - Anyway.

00:44:21   - So I put the link of the show notes to this article

00:44:23   that a bazillion people have sent me on Twitter

00:44:25   from this person complaining about HFS Plus

00:44:27   because they had a bunch of photos

00:44:30   and it was something like 15,000 photos

00:44:33   stored over six years and he ran some checksums to compare.

00:44:37   I guess he had valid checksums someplace

00:44:39   compared it to the the file store in hms plus and he lost 28 files over six years and these are images

00:44:45   and some of them some of these like jpegs would half load some of them would load completely again

00:44:49   this is what we're talking about uh bit rot you know that digital storage is not forever uh errors

00:44:56   will be introduced and if they're introduced in your images uh you may lose some or all of

00:45:01   individual pictures like if the error is towards the end maybe you'll be able to see most of the

00:45:05   picture for the errors in the middle you go see the top half of the picture maybe there's some

00:45:08   clever thing they could recover from those. Maybe the whole file is host and you just get a bunch of

00:45:11   static or garbage. But anyway, that's a shame if that's the only copy of the picture you had.

00:45:15   And this article talks about HFS+ and how it's old and how it's crappy and so on and so forth.

00:45:19   And a lot of people sent me this thing going, "See, you're always talking about the HFS+ right?

00:45:22   Look at this poor guy. He's backing you up saying HFS+ is crappy." And I didn't respond to most of

00:45:29   these people and I didn't really tweet out the link to the article because this article is not

00:45:33   really about HFS+ being crappy. I already wrote a bit about HFS+ being crappy in one of my reviews,

00:45:38   that is linked to in this article at the end in an addendum.

00:45:43   HFS+ is crappy, and it does corrupt itself.

00:45:46   And I'm not even sure that's what happened to Marco's thing, because

00:45:49   Disk Utility said everything was okay, so HFS+ probably didn't

00:45:52   corrupt its metadata structure. It probably does think it's keeping track of everything.

00:45:57   But bitrot is something that is sort of a separate issue, where

00:46:02   when data goes bad on disk, the metadata keeping track of where that data is

00:46:07   could be perfectly valid. Like, HFS+ has not corrupted itself, it knows where all of your

00:46:11   data is for every single file, it's just that that data itself is garbage. And HFS+ does

00:46:16   not care what the content of that data is, it just needs to keep track of it and remember

00:46:20   where it is and how much is available free and how much is occupied and where each piece

00:46:25   of individual files are and what order they go in. And HFS+ does fail in many respects

00:46:31   in doing that job, and that is one of my complaints about HFS+. But the second complaint about

00:46:35   and all sort of file systems that predate the ZFS dawning of reliability, of getting

00:46:43   religion about reliability, they don't care what your data is either.

00:46:46   They just cross their fingers and hope that the disk storage system is reliable.

00:46:49   And ZFS was the first popular file system to get serious about saying that we're going

00:46:56   to take responsibility for keeping track of whether the stuff you wrote to disk is what

00:47:02   is still there.

00:47:03   do that with checksums, not just checksums on the metadata,

00:47:05   but also checksums on the data itself,

00:47:07   which is computationally expensive and takes memory

00:47:09   and has all these other limits.

00:47:11   But ZFS would be able to detect errors

00:47:12   in the storage system.

00:47:13   Sometimes there are errors in the hard drive,

00:47:15   sometimes there are errors in the disk controller,

00:47:16   sometimes there are errors in the driver stack

00:47:19   and in the operating system.

00:47:21   No matter where the source of the error is,

00:47:22   ZFS's thing was like end-to-end data protection,

00:47:25   where if we write data and then later on go to read it,

00:47:29   and if what we read is not what we wrote originally,

00:47:31   we will tell you that there's a problem.

00:47:34   That doesn't save your data, it's still garbage,

00:47:36   but then you can, if you have the ability

00:47:37   to detect when something went wrong,

00:47:39   if you're using any form of redundant storage,

00:47:41   which the EFS offered itself,

00:47:42   where it could store your data twice on disk

00:47:44   or three times on disk, you could use a multi-disk scenario,

00:47:47   you could have backups, so on and so forth,

00:47:49   the key is having the file system let you know immediately,

00:47:51   oh, this data is bad,

00:47:54   but I know I have another copy of this data over there,

00:47:56   and I can tell if that data is good,

00:47:58   so I don't just have to guess,

00:47:59   like, oh, this one is bad, that other one must be good.

00:48:01   I can also check that one.

00:48:02   Oh, that data is good.

00:48:02   Let me write it back on top of this one.

00:48:04   Let me, you know, it could, you know,

00:48:06   sort of the self healing file system.

00:48:08   Not knowing whether your data is bad,

00:48:10   like this person manually made a bunch of checksums

00:48:11   or whatever, and then compared them.

00:48:13   If you don't know your data is bad,

00:48:15   you won't find out that your data is hosed

00:48:17   until that corrupt data has like spread

00:48:19   to all of your backups.

00:48:20   It's been pushed to your cloud backup.

00:48:22   It's all, it's, you know,

00:48:23   your last three months worth of backups

00:48:24   have long since been overwritten.

00:48:25   And all you have is the corrupt data

00:48:27   because you don't have your data going back

00:48:29   to the beginning of time.

00:48:30   have is multiple copies of your corrupt data. And you won't know that again until like you're

00:48:34   trying to get out pictures for someone's high school graduation and you want a baby picture

00:48:37   and you realize the baby picture you wanted is corrupt. If you had a file system that

00:48:43   had end-to-end data integrity, the file system could have notified you of that immediately

00:48:48   when it happened and could have potentially repaired it from a good copy. So that's I

00:48:53   think what this article is really complaining about, that all file systems are not like

00:48:58   ZFS and offer data integrity guarantees and not so much that oh yeah HFS is

00:49:03   crappy because it loses track of where your data is which does happen

00:49:06   and people do tweet about that all the time but that's not really what this

00:49:09   article is about. We are sponsored this week by Backblaze. Our friends at

00:49:14   Backblaze. It is unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated, available anywhere. You can

00:49:19   try it for free with no credit card required so go to backblaze.com/ATP.

00:49:24   This is awesome online backup.

00:49:27   And believe me, this is a great time to have them

00:49:29   as a sponsor because when my hard drive,

00:49:32   when I thought my drive had died this morning,

00:49:35   and either way, regardless of what I thought,

00:49:37   I had to wipe it and start fresh,

00:49:40   I was never nervous that I was going to lose data

00:49:42   because I know that yes, I have my time machine here.

00:49:46   I also have my super duper clone here,

00:49:48   which is what gave me a very fast recovery today.

00:49:51   But I also knew that no matter what,

00:49:53   Backblaze would have my data also.

00:49:55   And so there's always this other place.

00:49:57   There's always this backup for you.

00:49:59   And actually, I met the two founders,

00:50:01   I think they were the two founders.

00:50:02   I met two high up people at Backblaze

00:50:04   for tea in San Francisco,

00:50:06   and they actually bought me an $11 tea,

00:50:08   which is very generous of them,

00:50:09   'cause nothing at Semivar tea lounge or whatever is cheap.

00:50:12   It was quite good though.

00:50:14   Also quite large.

00:50:15   I don't know how anybody can drink a tea

00:50:16   that size of what they serve there.

00:50:17   Like, it was like a 20 ounce pitcher of tea

00:50:20   for one person anyway.

00:50:22   So these guys are really sharp.

00:50:24   They know their stuff.

00:50:25   And they're just nice people.

00:50:28   You can tell when you use the product.

00:50:29   You can tell when you look at the website.

00:50:30   You can tell when you read their blog

00:50:32   where they explain technical details of things like,

00:50:34   here's how we built these crazy storage pods

00:50:36   that have all these hard drives in them.

00:50:37   Here's the plans.

00:50:38   Here's what we do.

00:50:39   Here's how we get drives that are cheap

00:50:42   by driving all around the country

00:50:43   and doing crazy stuff with rebates.

00:50:44   Like, they're just good people and they know their stuff.

00:50:48   It was founded by ex-Apple engineers,

00:50:49   so their software on the Mac is great.

00:50:51   They have all this new stuff.

00:50:52   They have email alert notifications.

00:50:54   You can get like a report every couple of weeks saying,

00:50:58   hey, this is what we have.

00:50:59   Just so you know, we have this much data.

00:51:00   It was last backed up at this time.

00:51:02   They'll send you an alert

00:51:03   if they haven't heard from your computer in a while.

00:51:04   So that way, if you like pause the backup

00:51:07   and you're recording a podcast from it

00:51:08   and then you forget to unpause it,

00:51:10   they will send you an email alert in a couple of days

00:51:12   saying, hey, by the way, we haven't heard from you.

00:51:13   This is unusual.

00:51:15   You should probably know about this and fix it.

00:51:17   It is fantastic.

00:51:18   They have a 15 day free trial with no credit card required.

00:51:22   You just enter an email and password and that's it,

00:51:24   you're off.

00:51:25   And this is really, it's $5 a month and that's it.

00:51:28   There's no add-ons, there's no gimmicks,

00:51:30   there's no tacked on charges or fees or surcharges.

00:51:33   $5 a month per computer for unlimited space.

00:51:36   And we, I mean, jeez, my wife has about

00:51:39   three terabytes on hers.

00:51:41   I have about a terabyte and a half on mine.

00:51:44   My mom has a whole 38 gigs on hers.

00:51:47   Obviously a big range here, but it doesn't matter.

00:51:49   Same price, five bucks a month, easy.

00:51:51   They don't have to charge you more if you go

00:51:52   to the three gig, or three terabyte limit like my wife,

00:51:55   it's fine.

00:51:56   It is the simplest online backup,

00:51:57   and in my experience, it's also the fastest.

00:52:00   Just so you know, if you have a nice fast upstream,

00:52:02   I've had very good experience with getting stuff

00:52:03   to Backblaze very quickly.

00:52:05   So, go to backblaze.com/atp.

00:52:09   If you mistype it as Blackblaze,

00:52:11   they actually own that domain name too.

00:52:13   Don't look up what it used to be.

00:52:14   Just go to backblaze.com/atp.

00:52:17   Thank you very much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show

00:52:19   once again and for buying me tea last week.

00:52:22   - Okay, so let's talk about metal

00:52:24   and I do not mean the flavor of music.

00:52:27   So I am not at all qualified to talk about

00:52:30   any 3D programming, anything,

00:52:31   because I've never really done it.

00:52:32   And Marco, I don't believe you have either.

00:52:35   - That is not true.

00:52:36   - Oh, really?

00:52:37   - I am slightly,

00:52:39   slightly a hair above completely unqualified.

00:52:43   - Excellent.

00:52:43   because I, in college, I tried writing a 3D version

00:52:48   of Scorched Earth, and I tried it in like three

00:52:51   different languages using at least two different

00:52:54   graphics APIs, using DirectX first, then OpenGL,

00:52:57   and then something else using OpenGL.

00:52:59   It was basically, it was my way of fooling around

00:53:02   with various 3D stuff that I was learning in college,

00:53:04   and then I kinda used my most recent version of that

00:53:07   as a demo to get myself my first job,

00:53:10   and then I never looked at 3D programming again.

00:53:11   So I know enough, I know very basics of 3D programming

00:53:16   as it stood in 2003 and 2004.

00:53:19   So it's probably completely useless by today's standards.

00:53:22   And I would never consider myself

00:53:24   a knowledgeable programmer at all.

00:53:26   However, I at least know like the kinds of things

00:53:29   that low-level graphic APIs do.

00:53:31   - Right, so John, why don't you tell us about M

00:53:35   - I don't know why you think I know any more about,

00:53:37   I mean, I've done about the same amount of 3D programming

00:53:39   Marco like demo apps on the SGIs in college, you know, where you just get something up

00:53:44   on the screen and maybe move it around and you're like, "Well, that was really hard.

00:53:46   I'm not doing this anymore," because it's super hard to get anything impressive up on

00:53:51   the screen, especially back then. But I mean, that—

00:53:53   I mean, really, if you want to know about Metal as an API, just start listening to debug,

00:53:57   and eventually Guy English will say enough things, because he actually is qualified to

00:54:01   know, and, like, because he's actually a real game programmer. So listen to what he says

00:54:06   about Metal, and you'll learn more about it from him than from us.

00:54:11   But the executive summary is what's important. I mean, we're going to talk about it from

00:54:14   a business perspective, but it's like, so OpenGL and OpenGL ES is what Apple was using

00:54:19   previously. These are open standards that are in theory not controlled by any one company.

00:54:23   There's a consortium, blah, blah, blah. These are very old standards that have evolved

00:54:26   over the years. When these standards were created, the current crop of 3D hardware,

00:54:32   current GPUs did not exist in this form. And so the API, even though it has evolved over

00:54:37   the years, it's had to maintain backward compatibility, it is not well suited to current hardware.

00:54:45   Not just in the particular details, because a lot of that is handled by a driver, but

00:54:48   just in terms of the programming model. Like, what do you do? You issue a series of function

00:54:52   calls that set things up and then cause them to be drawn. And the sequence of events that

00:54:58   presented through an OpenGL API have almost no bearing on what's actually happening with

00:55:02   the hardware in terms of when does something happen, when do commands get sent to the GPU,

00:55:07   when do the things that are going to be drawn get sent to the GPU's memory, how do things get

00:55:12   written back, how does that affect this? A lot of that happens in the driver, but that's just

00:55:15   another level of indirection, so you're there doing things step by step in your program,

00:55:20   and there's this whole other program going on behind the scenes to manage that stuff to say,

00:55:24   "All right, when should I ship this stuff off to the GPU so it's available in time?

00:55:28   oh wait, the program just read something back from the GPU.

00:55:30   Actually, we have to stall and read that back from the GPU.

00:55:33   So previously, the GPU was two frames ahead of the CPU,

00:55:35   but now the CPU wants to read that data back,

00:55:37   so we have to wait for it to catch up and resynchronize.

00:55:39   There's latency between the GPU and the CPU,

00:55:42   but if you don't accept that latency,

00:55:44   you might not be completely utilizing the GPU.

00:55:46   And all sorts of details that come from the mismatch

00:55:49   between this relatively high-level API

00:55:52   that does not acknowledge the existence of the GPU

00:55:55   in its current form,

00:55:56   and what's actually going on behind the scenes.

00:55:57   So that requires game programmers to do all sorts of voodoo stuff where they're like,

00:56:02   "Well, I know if I do these sequence of events and do this little thing here, it will force

00:56:06   these things to all be uploaded to the GPU.

00:56:08   And I know if I do this, my shaders will be compiled and we'll be ready for me."

00:56:13   That's another thing with OpenGL.

00:56:14   There's OpenGL shader language, and that's sort of a high-level language, but it has

00:56:18   to be compiled for the individual GPU.

00:56:20   And whether that happens at the time your program runs or at the time it draws a frame

00:56:25   or you want your shadies to be precompiled,

00:56:27   and DirectX has this method where they precompile them down to sort of a,

00:56:31   not bytecode, but more compact form,

00:56:33   and then Apple's drivers had to use LLVM for that back in the day.

00:56:36   Anyway, it's an extremely complicated world,

00:56:39   and what developers who do 3D programming wanted to do is say,

00:56:43   "This is way too complicated.

00:56:44   I can't keep track of all the different machines

00:56:46   and the Rube Goldberg device that causes graphics to go up on the screen."

00:56:50   If you just gave me a programming model

00:56:53   that was a closer match to the way things actually happen, it would be a lot easier

00:56:57   to get something that performs well on a wide range of hardware. Metal is an interesting

00:57:03   entry into that field because, first of all, Metal right now only works on iOS and only works on the

00:57:08   A7. So certainly it's not helping people deploy their, you know, write code that's going to work

00:57:15   on a wide variety of platforms or a wide variety of hardware. Going forward, I'm sure they will

00:57:19   expand support for it, I'm sure it supports the A8 now and all that other good stuff,

00:57:23   and who knows what it'll support in the future,

00:57:25   but for now it's very narrowly constrained.

00:57:27   But the programming model of Metal

00:57:29   does fit closer to the way things work.

00:57:31   It shows you, here's a command buffer,

00:57:34   batch your commands up, batch your things up,

00:57:37   ship them off to the GPU in the correct order.

00:57:40   Like we're exposing all these things

00:57:41   that were previously happening in the driver

00:57:43   that were completely opaque to you,

00:57:44   we expose them as objects,

00:57:45   and you have a programming language

00:57:47   that lets you construct them, package them up,

00:57:49   send them off, you know,

00:57:51   and it's much cleaner than OpenGL,

00:57:53   and it's a great fit for the way modern GPUs work today.

00:57:57   And the reason Apple thinks this is something

00:58:00   that's going to help people is not because they think

00:58:02   people are going to write their programs in Metal

00:58:04   and target only A7 devices or greater,

00:58:06   but because the people who make the game engines,

00:58:09   which they had all on the stage during the keynote,

00:58:11   that's why they had Epic up there with their Unreal engine,

00:58:13   and they showed Unity and all the other game engines

00:58:16   out there whose names I can't remember,

00:58:18   like the big four engine makers for 3D engines.

00:58:21   That's what most game makers use

00:58:23   because writing a 3D engine is super hard.

00:58:25   Well, if the engine middleware makers

00:58:30   make sure their engines are able to run with metal

00:58:32   when they're running on the A7, then anyone

00:58:35   who develops a game on top of that engine gets the advantage of,

00:58:38   oh, if you play my game on an A7, I'll get better performance.

00:58:42   So it's an interesting move by Apple

00:58:44   to sort of try to get away from OpenGL

00:58:47   and take control of their own destiny with a more modern API.

00:58:50   And it's also interesting that they didn't choose

00:58:52   do what Microsoft did, which is Microsoft wanted to compete with OpenGL years and years

00:58:55   ago and they made DirectX, which learned from OpenGL's mistakes and was more modern, but

00:59:00   is not that new.

00:59:01   I mean, Metal is much newer than OpenGL.

00:59:03   And of course AMD has Mantle, which is a similar type of thing to Metal.

00:59:07   As far as I'm aware, I have not read a lot about Mantle, but sort of closer to the Metal,

00:59:12   which is I'm assuming where Apple got its name.

00:59:14   Mantle isn't closer to the Metal API.

00:59:17   It's one of the few areas in computing where the APIs are actually getting not so much

00:59:22   lower level, but exposing more of the foibles of the hardware rather than going the other

00:59:28   direction rather than abstracting it all.

00:59:30   Because OpenGL is more distant from the hardware than either Mantle or Metal or probably DirectX

00:59:37   for that matter.

00:59:38   So that's the situation with Metal, that's what Apple is doing, and when Apple announced

00:59:41   Metal in the keynote I tweeted something to the effect of, "So is Apple going to make

00:59:46   a game console or what? Because they just made their own sort of low-level game console-y

00:59:52   type 3D API. They've got a little box that you connect to a TV. They've got controller

00:59:58   support APIs built into iOS. Everyone keeps expecting them to offer some way to put apps

01:00:03   on the Apple TV. What's the deal here? Are they going to make one? Are they not going

01:00:08   to make one? Are they just going to dance around this until they have all the pieces

01:00:10   but then just refuse to do anything? Kind of like they did with eBooks for years and

01:00:13   years where they had all the pieces in place to be the world's dominant ebook maker and

01:00:17   then just let Amazon do it because they couldn't be bothered. And this comes up because there

01:00:22   was a strategic repost today that says Apple TV might disrupt Microsoft and Sony that talks

01:00:29   about the same issue. Have you guys read this?

01:00:31   Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, it's definitely true. One of Ben's main arguments

01:00:37   there is that the official high profile game consoles out there are these very high end,

01:00:46   hot, expensive devices and that it is necessarily keeping them high end because there are these

01:00:53   $400 boxes that it kind of locks out casual gamers who it's just not worth them spending

01:01:01   $400 on this box. Meanwhile, so many people are now getting things like the Apple TV or

01:01:07   Roku or the new Amazon fiery box, whatever it is, that, well, Merlin says it's good.

01:01:14   Anyway, so many people are getting these little cheap boxes that can stream video or watch

01:01:19   Netflix or whatever and that model, like that market, is probably very likely to disrupt

01:01:27   the gaming market at some point soon. That's kind of the gist, right?

01:01:31   I mean, basically.

01:01:32   I mean, I think if you look at Metal, I mean, Metal is really interesting just because,

01:01:37   you know, "Oh, look, it's a new level API that is a lot faster." But it's worth

01:01:41   asking why they made Metal. You know, why did Apple put so much effort into something

01:01:48   that is entirely about games? Because Apple historically has, hell, we were talking about

01:01:54   this a couple of weeks ago, how Apple just doesn't really seem to care about games.

01:01:58   Obviously they do. Obviously we were at least partially wrong on that.

01:02:01   I don't think it's entirely about games, though.

01:02:04   Well--

01:02:05   Because, I mean, think about--

01:02:07   the games is one big aspect of it, definitely.

01:02:10   But their whole UI uses OpenGL.

01:02:12   And viewed through the lens of iOS,

01:02:17   Metal starts to look more like a battery saving feature, where

01:02:20   they can more efficiently use the GPU with more precision,

01:02:22   exactly doling out the commands to it in the right order,

01:02:26   and having 10 times faster draw call performance,

01:02:30   and all these things.

01:02:31   That makes their UI snappier and has a potential battery savings

01:02:36   because you're spending less time flogging the GPU

01:02:38   to get your stuff done.

01:02:39   And their whole UI is basically-- it's not a 3D game,

01:02:42   but it's all OpenGL on iOS and on the Mac, for that matter,

01:02:46   these days.

01:02:47   So there is a platform benefit to it,

01:02:50   even if no game maker ever used it.

01:02:52   I don't think they would have gone through the effort

01:02:53   if no game maker used it.

01:02:55   And clearly, game makers like Metal

01:02:58   because all the big engines are saying,

01:03:00   yes we're going to support it. And I don't think Apple had to twist their arms because

01:03:03   this is what game makers want. They want their games to go faster. They don't like fighting

01:03:06   with OpenGL ES, trying to figure out what weird incantations they have to do to get

01:03:10   good performance. And game makers want good battery life too. They don't want people

01:03:14   to play a game and have it destroy your phone's battery.

01:03:16   That's fair. And I also think it's very obvious that there are a number of major strategic

01:03:22   benefits here. Obviously a lot of people are saying, "Oh well, this will encourage

01:03:26   people to write games only for iOS. And I think the number of people who will make that

01:03:32   decision based on Metal is probably very, very small because most people aren't writing

01:03:36   this low-level code. I mean, as you see, the people who make the engines, they're writing

01:03:41   code at this level, and they're possibly investing into making Metal ports for their

01:03:46   engines that will, you know, they're not going to stop making OpenGL versions. You

01:03:50   know, they're still going to, like, the big engines out there that everyone licenses

01:03:53   or uses, they're still going to have OpenGL versions so they can keep running on Android

01:03:56   and everything else. They're not going to just stop doing that. But it will reinforce

01:04:02   the pretty frequent idea that games, while they might run on Android stuff, they usually

01:04:10   run better on iOS. And it's usually because most Android stuff out there has a pretty

01:04:14   wide range of GPUs and GPU power. And some of the cheap Android stuff, like some of the

01:04:19   cheap Android tablets, historically have had very weak GPU power compared to comparable

01:04:24   iOS devices, partially at a cost,

01:04:26   partially out of other concerns, who knows,

01:04:28   but for whatever reason,

01:04:29   Android GPUs have historically sucked.

01:04:32   And yes, I know there are some devices that have good ones,

01:04:34   but I think the average is pretty bad

01:04:36   for what's actually sold.

01:04:37   ♪ It's not a toxic health stew ♪

01:04:40   ♪ Toxic health stew ♪

01:04:41   And I think this is a way for Apple to keep that lead going

01:04:45   for a while longer, you know,

01:04:46   like as the Android stuff gets better hardware

01:04:48   and starts catching up,

01:04:50   I think this is a way to just be like,

01:04:52   all right, let's keep that lead going.

01:04:53   but ultimately I think this does,

01:04:56   they were very specific that this is for the A7.

01:04:59   - Well, and for the A8, you assume,

01:05:01   I mean, like obviously.

01:05:03   But yeah, like, I mean, it's a total Apple thing to do.

01:05:06   What other company could even, you know,

01:05:09   could feasibly do this?

01:05:10   Because Apple has such a limited line

01:05:12   and is so relentless about moving things forward

01:05:16   and doesn't really care that this API

01:05:18   doesn't apply to their old things,

01:05:19   it's going to apply to all of their iOS devices

01:05:21   from this time forward, assuming the iPod Touch gets the A7 this year.

01:05:25   Oh yeah, the iPod Touch exists. Yeah, no, I mean, I think the fact that this is A7 only,

01:05:32   or A7 and above only, probably signifies that if Apple's going to enter the game market,

01:05:38   the way they're going to do it is by waiting until there's an A7 in the Apple TV, and then

01:05:42   they're like, "All right, hey, now we have this thing, start making games for it." And

01:05:47   I think we're waiting until that becomes economical.

01:05:50   And I think that's why we don't have an Apple TV SDK yet.

01:05:53   I think that's why the Apple TV hardware has done

01:05:56   very little in the last few years,

01:05:57   like has moved forward very little.

01:05:58   I think they're just waiting for economics

01:06:00   until they can combine this thing.

01:06:03   Keep the same price point, 100 bucks,

01:06:04   maybe even drop it by 20, 30 bucks,

01:06:06   but probably keep it at 100 bucks

01:06:09   and eventually put an A7 in there.

01:06:11   And that, heck, that might be this fall.

01:06:14   It would be a little aggressive,

01:06:15   but they could probably do it if they wanted to.

01:06:17   I think there's a very good chance of that happening

01:06:19   and of that happening soon.

01:06:21   That might even be the big fall thing is,

01:06:24   hey, you guys are all talking about wearables

01:06:26   that nobody wants.

01:06:27   We kind of made a game system that's gonna kick butt

01:06:29   in the market because we're gonna sell a ton of them anyway

01:06:32   and then you can start making games for it

01:06:33   using all of our existing infrastructure, using Metal,

01:06:36   and here's a new controller

01:06:37   so the controlling doesn't suck and that's it.

01:06:39   I mean, that would be a pretty amazing fall.

01:06:42   - Like I said during the V

01:06:42   Like I said during the W3C keynote,

01:06:44   Apple has all the pieces to make a run

01:06:48   of this exact strategy.

01:06:49   An inexpensive box with pretty good 3D performance.

01:06:53   They've got their own chip, they've got their own GPU,

01:06:57   they've got their own OS,

01:06:59   they've got now a low level console style API

01:07:01   for doing 3D and taking advantage of that hardware.

01:07:05   They've got the API for controller support.

01:07:08   All the pieces are there.

01:07:10   Unfortunately, all those pieces, the technology pieces,

01:07:13   are not the hard part of being successful

01:07:15   in the game console business.

01:07:17   Just ask Microsoft.

01:07:18   Getting the technology right is good,

01:07:21   but I don't think it's even necessary.

01:07:23   It's not like a necessary but sufficient thing.

01:07:25   I don't think it's even necessary to get the tech right.

01:07:27   The Wii's technology was disgusting,

01:07:29   and they were successful in the market, right?

01:07:31   So the hard part of being successful in the game market

01:07:34   is how do you get people who spend money on games

01:07:39   to buy your thing?

01:07:40   And the answer to that would be like,

01:07:41   oh, they'll buy it because it's like,

01:07:43   you know, it's a great TV puck to watch Netflix on

01:07:45   and whatever, and it's cheap,

01:07:47   so that'll get people to buy things.

01:07:48   And then how do you get game developers

01:07:51   to develop good games for your platform?

01:07:53   And just ask the Ouya people how easy that is to do.

01:07:56   It is really, really hard,

01:07:58   and probably costs potentially billions of dollars

01:08:01   if you want to make a run at this market

01:08:04   and get all those people who are currently buying

01:08:06   $60 games for their PS4s.

01:08:08   and like we've talked about before,

01:08:09   the next generation of consoles was announced,

01:08:11   the question was, is there still a place in the market

01:08:13   for big expensive devices that play mostly or only games?

01:08:17   The answer is yes, people love the PS4,

01:08:20   it is selling pretty well,

01:08:21   certainly well enough to make Sony happy.

01:08:23   Microsoft's console is selling pretty well as well,

01:08:25   no one wants the Wii U because it's crappy.

01:08:27   Maybe their, you know, E3 was this past week,

01:08:31   so maybe Nintendo's fortunes will rise next year,

01:08:34   we don't know.

01:08:35   But this generation of consoles, I would say,

01:08:37   is a success. And when this generation ends, the next generation will ask the same question again.

01:08:42   Does anyone want these stupid $400 boxes? Do people want to pay $60 per game? That question

01:08:46   will be asked again. But for this generation, it's true. If no one wants those boxes, and there's not

01:08:53   enough people out there to sustain that, the potential for the entire gaming market to switch

01:08:58   to $99 pucks, I think most gamers would consider that kind of a bad situation. And the question is,

01:09:04   Sorry, well if there's so few of those people it doesn't matter what they think they'll be sad, but oh well who cares

01:09:09   It's like the command line people being sad when the GUI came and took over everything and they just went and played with Linux and no

01:09:14   One cared about them anymore

01:09:16   I don't think that scenario is likely though even though these so-called core gamers

01:09:21   And I hate that term because it makes no sense, but the so-called core gamers even though they are not the majority

01:09:25   They sure as hell spend a lot of money

01:09:28   When when when a game as someone just been the chat room in the game like Grand Theft Auto 5 comes out and makes a hoe

01:09:33   billion dollars, casual gamers are not buying that, right? Hardcore gamers are

01:09:38   paying $60 a pot for these games, they're doing it willingly, they're happy with

01:09:42   the results, and they pump a huge amount of money into the ecosystem. And it's not

01:09:46   like just a few whales like on Candy Crush where most of the money is made

01:09:48   off of these poor addicted small group of people when everyone else just kind

01:09:52   of uses it for a little while or whatever. Everybody pays $60 to get

01:09:56   grant that thought of. And those people are still willing to do it. And that I

01:10:01   I think is the business that Apple would have a seriously hard time getting into, because

01:10:05   as we've discussed previously, it doesn't seem like Apple's that into games. If you're

01:10:09   not that into games, there's no way you're going to do what it takes to woo the good

01:10:13   developers. Plus, they would have to have some IP of their own, like Microsoft said

01:10:16   Halo and Sony's got its own first-party games, Nintendo's got Mario and Donkey Kong and all

01:10:22   that stuff. I don't think Apple can be a player in that market.

01:10:25   Well, I don't think Apple wants to be a player in that market.

01:10:28   Well, that was the question like and then I said to Ben Thompson is like

01:10:31   That's the things that they have are the technical ingredients to be a player in that market

01:10:36   But it sure seems like Apple doesn't want that market

01:10:38   Why would you want to be part of what by all accounts is a declining market?

01:10:42   Despite the fact that is clearly feasible now and makes tons of money

01:10:46   Why would Apple want in on that market?

01:10:48   Is that a market that's taking off like a rocket ship to the Sun and is gonna be super awesome for years to come?

01:10:54   Doesn't seem like it right now. So why would Apple be saying we really need to get in on this market

01:10:59   We really need to make a device that's competitive with the ps5 and the Xbox whatever the hell they're gonna call it

01:11:04   I don't see Apple thinking that that is a good thing to do regardless of whether they could do it

01:11:09   Yeah, but that wasn't that wasn't Ben's point though was it I thought Ben's point was more to grab the portion of the market

01:11:16   That's more like Marco and I where we don't really take games too seriously

01:11:20   But we do enjoy it and hey man if we've already got this Apple TV box sitting

01:11:26   Oh, well, I mean presumably a new one. You know I just bought this Apple TV

01:11:29   Oh, you know I guess it plays games

01:11:31   Maybe I should give that a shot and see if that's any good and yes, they may have this white this world-class

01:11:37   Okay, that might be a stretch, but they may have this really really great hardware and really really great tool chain

01:11:43   But that's kind of ancillary to the thought that here's a low-cost box

01:11:48   that makes for really easy consumption.

01:11:52   And I think that was more Ben's point.

01:11:55   - Yeah, but Apple already has that market.

01:11:56   It's called the iPhone.

01:11:58   - You know, if you look at what the existing game consoles

01:12:00   do, and you look at the direction they are going,

01:12:03   they have all decided, even the previous generation,

01:12:06   I mean, not the PS2, but the PS3, the Xbox 360,

01:12:11   and the Wii, the first Wii, they all started adding

01:12:15   all these media center features.

01:12:16   Once streaming Netflix became a thing

01:12:18   and all these streaming video sites,

01:12:21   that all happened in the last generation of consoles.

01:12:24   And they all added these features

01:12:25   and they all took advantage of that.

01:12:26   And they all, with their current generation,

01:12:28   the new generation, with the exception of the Wii U,

01:12:31   which didn't really do this kind of stuff,

01:12:33   but the other ones moved much further

01:12:36   towards that media center role.

01:12:39   'Cause you know, people who buy these things,

01:12:41   if you have very little interest in playing games,

01:12:44   you're probably not buying an Xbox One, the new Xbox One stupid name, or the PS4. You're

01:12:51   probably not going to think that's worth it, which is what Ben's article says. This

01:12:56   must be really frustrating because Ben's in the chat room listening to us mangle his

01:12:58   article but, sorry Ben, but you know if you aren't that into games you're not buying

01:13:05   those things period. Like you're not going to be getting those unless maybe your kids

01:13:09   want one so you get it for your kids but you're probably, as the parent, you're probably

01:13:12   not gonna use that yourself very much if you can help it. There's this whole other market

01:13:18   of people like me and Casey, people who primarily want it for its media functions and if it

01:13:25   can also play games, great. But we weren't going out there and spending 60 bucks to buy

01:13:29   GTA 6. Like that was not us. That was possibly never us. It's definitely not us now and

01:13:37   there's a lot of us like this. And I think the game console makers realize that they're

01:13:42   market is declining because they're trying to be this media boxes also.

01:13:46   They're trying to push in this direction.

01:13:48   Apple already has a very successful little media box people buy and put on their TVs

01:13:53   and Apple is going to approach it from the other way.

01:13:56   The same way the Amazon Firebox is doing it.

01:14:01   Here's a mid-powered cheap box that you can plug into your TV.

01:14:05   Here's a game controller for it and an app store where you can spend $3 to buy a game

01:14:09   for it if you want to.

01:14:10   and it's not gonna be a AAA awesome world-class game

01:14:15   with a $50 million budget, it's gonna be Flappy Bird 3.

01:14:18   And you're gonna like it and that's it.

01:14:20   And it's a totally different market.

01:14:23   - Apple TV will add games the same way

01:14:25   that the other consoles added TV features.

01:14:27   They'll add it because it's right there,

01:14:29   you might as well do it, you have the hardware available,

01:14:32   but people are not buying a PlayStation

01:14:34   so they can watch TV shows and people are not gonna buy

01:14:37   the Apple thing to play games unless Apple gets serious

01:14:39   about games, because what Apple will be competing with is the $99 box from PlayStation, which

01:14:45   they've had out for a while in Europe and they just renamed and are introducing the

01:14:49   US as PlayStation TV.

01:14:52   Why would you buy the $99 box from PlayStation that streams Netflix and does whatever the

01:14:56   hell they're going to do, you know, like does all the same things that these little TV-connected

01:14:59   pucks do?

01:15:00   Why would you buy the PlayStation 1 and not the Amazon one?

01:15:02   Why would you buy the Amazon one and not the Apple one?

01:15:04   Well, if you care anything about games, of course you're going to buy the PlayStation

01:15:07   because they have that thing where you can play old PS3 games on it with a streaming service,

01:15:11   it plays Vita games natively, it's always going to have the better games. But if you don't care

01:15:16   about games, you'll buy the Amazon Fire TV and play Angry Birds, or you'll buy the Apple one

01:15:20   and play whatever iOS games are ported to it. That bifurcation in the market already exists,

01:15:25   and everyone thought the iOS app store was going to totally disrupt the gaming space,

01:15:29   and in many respects it did in terms of what kinds of games most people play,

01:15:34   But it didn't disrupt it to the degree that the home console business became unviable.

01:15:39   And so if that split just continues on the television, I think that you'll still end up

01:15:44   with the same split scenario where you have the core gamer market and the casual gamer market.

01:15:48   And I don't think anyone will buy the Apple Puck to play games on if the PlayStation Puck exists,

01:15:54   or the Microsoft Puck, or whatever. It's going to be the same thing in the Puck Wars on the TV,

01:15:58   where it's just which one you want depends on what you care about more.

01:16:02   the way you win in the game space is not having the tech and not having the APIs,

01:16:05   not having the price point, you gotta have the games.

01:16:08   And Apple has certain kinds of games that they have locked up.

01:16:11   Like, you know, the iOS-style games, they have them first, they have them best,

01:16:15   they run the best there, but they don't have the kinds of games that people tend to sit in front

01:16:19   of a TV and play. And I'm not sure that the casual type of games that Apple is dominant on,

01:16:24   if ported to the television, if that's the type of thing that people will sit in front of the TV

01:16:28   and play on a couch. I think once they sit on a couch and are going to play games in that context,

01:16:32   they would prefer to get the PlayStation puck for a similar price and play those games.

01:16:38   You're coming at this all wrong because you're coming at this from the perspective of a gamer,

01:16:42   and I don't think that's what Ben is trying to portray. He's trying to say it's a more

01:16:46   opportunistic attention grab based on the fact that Marco and I both have these brand new Apple

01:16:52   TVs, and you know what? I wouldn't mind playing an okay game every once in a while. I don't give

01:16:57   crap about Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or any or what have you I just want

01:17:01   to occasionally sit down and blow some crap up and for that this phantom Apple

01:17:06   TV is perfect. We're gonna make our buying decisions not not based on which

01:17:12   of these pucks has the games we want we're gonna make it based on other

01:17:15   factors like if we if we use if we have Amazon Prime and this fire TV is really

01:17:21   cheap and comes with this this video streaming service that we're already

01:17:23   paying for with Prime is like well might as well get that if we if we if we buy a

01:17:27   a lot of stuff on iTunes, if we buy a lot of movies and TV shows on iTunes, we're

01:17:31   going to buy the Apple TV puck because the PlayStation puck can't play those videos.

01:17:34   And so it's like, if we're going to buy a puck anyway, you know, if we only want

01:17:39   to have one or if we only can afford one, then the other factors that go into these

01:17:44   various media ecosystems that these things are made to play are going to play a big role

01:17:49   in that decision. And so you're going to have Amazon customers buying the Amazon one

01:17:52   and iTunes customers buying the Apple one.

01:17:54   Well, that's what I said before, that if you're choosing based on games, you're going to choose the Sony one,

01:17:59   but if you're not choosing based on games, you'll choose the Amazon one or the Apple one.

01:18:02   But the whole, the premise of this article is how Apple might disrupt Microsoft and Sony.

01:18:06   And it's not disrupting Microsoft and Sony if people are not changing their purchase decisions.

01:18:09   If you were going to always buy an Apple TV and now games are just a bonus,

01:18:12   you are not, you know, disrupting Microsoft or Sony unless you were previously going to buy a PS5 or an Xbox, whatever,

01:18:19   and you decide, you know what, instead, I'm going to buy the Apple thing because that's good enough,

01:18:22   or I'm going to buy the Sony puck because that's good enough. To disrupt the market you have to basically take your low-end thing and

01:18:28   buy that instead of the high-end thing

01:18:31   and you have to eat your way up the chain. And I'm saying eating your way up the chain at a certain point you cannot

01:18:36   eat up any higher because you just don't have the games. And it's not saying Apple could not do this,

01:18:41   I'm saying the hard part is not the technology,

01:18:44   the hard part is getting the games to consume up in the higher end. And again people thought this was gonna happen in the

01:18:49   the mobile game space like oh you think these mobile games are crappy and casual but soon they're gonna just destroy the entire market and

01:18:55   No one's gonna be able to like low-end disruption you you poo-poo these games

01:18:58   You think Angry Birds is stupid and no one should play that and Candy Crush is dumb

01:19:01   But you just wait in five years there won't even be a high-end market because low-end disruption will destroy them

01:19:05   That has not yet happened. It doesn't seem like it's happening

01:19:08   I think you cannot you cannot disrupt the big players in the game market without having really good games

01:19:15   And I don't think it doesn't mean they have to be as high-tech or whatever

01:19:18   you just have to have the really good games.

01:19:19   And thus far, Apple has not shown that it's willing

01:19:22   to do what it takes to get the really good games

01:19:24   to stop people from saying, you know what,

01:19:26   I was gonna buy a PS5, but I don't need it anymore.

01:19:28   All my gaming needs are now met by this Apple device.

01:19:31   - I get your point.

01:19:32   Your point is correct that Apple will not take over

01:19:35   the high end, but I think Apple or boxes like this,

01:19:40   if Amazon continues their effort,

01:19:42   if it actually succeeds with games,

01:19:44   I think the big risk here is not that these media companies

01:19:47   you're gonna take over the high end of gaming,

01:19:49   it's that they're going to be good enough

01:19:51   and with such a massive price advantage,

01:19:54   I mean you see this all the time,

01:19:55   this is a classic disruption.

01:19:56   - Well, I was just saying,

01:19:57   there would be no more high end,

01:19:58   that's low end disruption.

01:19:59   There is no, the high end is not viable,

01:20:01   then no one can be a high end.

01:20:02   They don't have to take over the high end,

01:20:03   then no one can be the high end 'cause it's not viable.

01:20:04   But that's what I'm saying.

01:20:06   If this was gonna happen,

01:20:07   I would think we'd be seeing it happen already.

01:20:09   Like, that there is no more room for high end.

01:20:13   The $60 games are not a thing.

01:20:15   Apple doesn't have to get those customers,

01:20:17   just have to starve the companies that make them to death to say you can keep

01:20:20   trying to do that but we're gonna make your business unviable and then we're

01:20:22   all that's left in the end and I don't think that can happen because I think

01:20:26   enough people want really good games the kind of which Apple has thus far shown

01:20:31   it is not willing or able to get made for its platform maybe anyway the one

01:20:39   thing Apple has going for it is that in the realm of TV connected pucks Apple

01:20:45   Apple has a good store, Amazon has a pretty good store.

01:20:49   The game console makers are not that great about having nice, convenient app stores that

01:20:54   regular people can use that don't suck, that don't have your credit cards stolen from them,

01:20:57   speaking of Sony.

01:20:59   Microsoft may be doing a little bit better.

01:21:02   The one advantage that Apple has is they have experience in selling you $3 things electronically,

01:21:09   and people are familiar with their stores, and if they can leverage their iOS advantage

01:21:13   that you can say, oh, you buy it here and you can play it on your TV as well and all

01:21:16   these other things like that.

01:21:17   That is an advantage they have in the gaming space for casual gaming, but the way I see

01:21:21   it playing out, unless something changes seriously, is that your TV will become just like every

01:21:27   other part of the current market where there's a split between the people who want the big

01:21:33   expensive thing and buy $60 games and the people who want everything else.

01:21:36   And the ratios, I imagine, would be similar there.

01:21:39   And I do think it's a declining market.

01:21:40   I think the people who want $60 games is declining, it's just not declining so precipitously that

01:21:45   I'm willing to say that Apple or Microsoft, or Sony for that matter, are poised to disrupt

01:21:51   the high-end gaming market by making it unviable.

01:21:55   Sony clearly is hedging its bets with its little TV puck thing, saying, "Well, if it's

01:21:58   going to happen, we should do it to ourselves, and they'll sell this puck and they'll see

01:22:01   how it sells, and if it starts to catch on, I'm sure Sony has no problem redirecting their

01:22:05   attention in the next generation to puck-like devices."

01:22:08   I don't know if Microsoft's planning to have a puck, but it wouldn't surprise me.

01:22:11   So everyone is kind of hedging their bets, but I think the success of the PS4 and Xbox

01:22:15   One are making people say, "Alright, we've got one more generation breathing room.

01:22:18   Let's start planning our next gen and see how things shake out."

01:22:22   So thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Automatic, Lynda.com, and Backblaze.

01:22:30   And we will see you next week.

01:22:32   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:22:39   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:22:45   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:22:50   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:22:56   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:23:01   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:23:09   So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:23:14   Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-Uza

01:23:21   It's accidental (It's accidental)

01:23:24   They didn't mean to (accidental)

01:23:29   Tech, podcast, so long

01:23:34   We have a special guest tonight. It is my wonderful wife, Tiff.

01:23:38   And because Tiff actually did my homework for me.

01:23:42   Oh, that's right!

01:23:44   Tiff has played Journey. After years of listening to John tell us about Journey and why we should all be playing Journey,

01:23:53   Tiff actually played it because John discovered while talking to Tiff at WVDC this week that she is a gamer.

01:24:00   that I have apparently hidden this fact from all of you guys until this point,

01:24:04   but she is a gamer sometimes and she's actually better than me at almost

01:24:11   every game that we've both played. And anyway, so she did my homework for me and

01:24:15   here she is. Hey, what's going on? Lay it on me, Tiff. All right, well, wait, now

01:24:22   before you do anything, if I hypothetically did eventually want to

01:24:25   play this game, is this gonna spoil everything? Yeah, you should probably

01:24:28   leave. And neither should Mark over that. Did he watch you play? He watched me play enough that he

01:24:32   knows what's going on because he's never going to play. I know him. He's so terrible. Yeah, I'm

01:24:36   never going to play either. I don't have a PlayStation, so I'm never going to play.

01:24:39   Casey, you should not listen. I'm telling you you should go away and come back later.

01:24:43   Yeah, where's that big spoiler bell? Do you really want me to not listen?

01:24:47   Because the likelihood of me playing is- The spoiler bell. Jason Snell is crying

01:24:49   somewhere. It's a spoiler horn, isn't it? Do you really want me to go away?

01:24:55   Yes, you should. You played Monument Valley. You could potentially play this. I think you

01:24:59   should go away and come back. Well, just to be clear, I cannot play this game until somebody...

01:25:05   You'll be able to play it on your $99 PlayStation puck in about a year or so.

01:25:09   All right. I'm going to take my headphones off and just watch the chat ruin everything for me.

01:25:13   It's just going to be you and me, John. Yay!

01:25:15   That's all we need. We don't need those jokers.

01:25:17   Wow! Zing! All right, I'm taking my headphones off.

01:25:21   Bye. Is he gone?

01:25:24   Yes, we're safe.

01:25:25   Okay.

01:25:26   So, where should I start?

01:25:28   I guess at the beginning.

01:25:29   I've done all my homework.

01:25:30   I played the game now four times, and I listened to The Incomparable, and I read your article.

01:25:37   So, homework done.

01:25:39   So you tweeted after you played with an emoji.

01:25:41   I'm not emoji-convercent enough to know what you meant by that emoji, but it was like the

01:25:48   biting down teeth kind of like...

01:25:50   What it made it seem like is that you did not like this game when you first played it.

01:25:53   Well, the first time I played it without anything, just sitting down playing it, knowing nothing.

01:25:59   I didn't like it.

01:26:00   All right. So, so explain that.

01:26:01   Well, I thought, first of all, so spoiler bell, I thought like the people who I was

01:26:06   with were AI. So I was like, Oh, this is just stupid. This person just walking around with

01:26:11   me. I'm just doubled. And then I felt like it was a game that like you got siphoned through.

01:26:16   See that is super interesting because that's why I don't want people to know. Like I told

01:26:21   Marco to make sure that the PlayStation was connected to the network but not to tell you that it was a network game because I

01:26:25   Don't want people to know that the people are real people and it's interesting to see

01:26:28   Some people play the game and immediately realize those are other people some people play the entire game and just assume their AI the entire

01:26:35   Game right and that's what I assumed and then because there's a really no like challenge

01:26:39   You just kind of like ooze through this world and you do some things and you know certain things will attack you

01:26:45   But there are no real quads like no consequences for it. So I

01:26:50   Just like this is just boring. See here's what I was hoping. I was hoping that as a gamer you would

01:26:57   Realize when the people are interacting with you that they couldn't possibly be AI because they exhibit behaviors in no way

01:27:03   I could possibly exhibit well

01:27:04   Maybe like the people that I played with were just kind of like helping me like jump and walking around with me

01:27:09   They weren't doing anything extraordinary

01:27:11   but the

01:27:12   after I listened to the incomparable and then realized that they were real people and then I started getting into like everything that you

01:27:18   guys were talking about on that episode about why it was a beautiful game and why it was

01:27:22   good and why it was fun and the whole the article that you wrote about people being

01:27:26   nice to each other and all that that made me want to play the game again. So when I

01:27:30   played it the second time, I really felt like I got it, you know, because then I was also

01:27:35   playing with someone who was like showing me where things were so I can get my scarf

01:27:40   really long. So that was fun. So I was like following him around. And so I felt like that

01:27:45   was I guess more of the right way to play the game.

01:27:49   Yeah, you only get one chance to play it for the first time, which is kind of a bummer.

01:27:52   And like I said, I think I said on the incomparable, I feel lucky that my first playthrough was

01:27:56   so perfect in the way that it was. The other thing I was hoping you as a gamer who like

01:28:00   plays things on hard mode was that you wouldn't, that you wouldn't like realize that there

01:28:06   are no consequences for failure because you wouldn't fail like that you wouldn't be attacked

01:28:10   by those things and have your scarf being eaten and realize, oh, no matter how many

01:28:14   times attack I never died as my scarf get shorter until a certain point I don't actually

01:28:18   die as I said in the incomparable the great thing about the game is it doesn't tell you

01:28:23   what the consequences are so you don't you don't have a health meter you don't know what

01:28:26   it takes for you to die or if you can die it also so if you're in a particular mindset

01:28:30   you might be like I don't know what's going to happen here I have nothing to fall back

01:28:33   on I can't look at my number of hearts up on the screen and know that I'm okay if I

01:28:36   get hit once for all I know it's single hit death and I don't want to die because I'm

01:28:40   in the middle of this experience with this other person, or even depending on what kind

01:28:44   of gamer you are, even if you assume it's an AI, I'm the type of person who could find

01:28:48   themselves getting attached to an AI. Like if there was just a really good AI in a game

01:28:52   and I felt like protective of it or attached to it as a companion, I would be sad if it

01:28:57   died or like in my journey experience when I was playing with that person, even though

01:29:01   I realized it was a person, even if it was AI, I would feel like they let them down by

01:29:04   like when you're hiding in those little, in the little pieces in the snowy part and someone

01:29:08   pokes out and like, oh, now you're both screwed because you made a mistake. And I just felt

01:29:12   terrible that I did that to that person. It was like attention for the rest of the game

01:29:16   that I had let this person down, you know? Yeah. I mean, I totally get that. And I especially

01:29:20   felt that the second time through, like I was really upset when I lost my, my companion

01:29:25   the second time I played it. Cause he was helping me do all this stuff and we got separated

01:29:29   avarice, you know, one part with the dragon and I was really upset and I was like waiting

01:29:33   for him and like singing my little song in the dark, like at the end, like waiting and

01:29:37   he wasn't showing up. And then I ended up in the next level with some little tiny short

01:29:43   scarf noob jumping up and down. And I'm like, "Oh, that was me yesterday." And he was singing

01:29:47   and yelling and jumping. And I'm like, "I can't help you. I don't know what I'm doing

01:29:50   either." So I just left him in the dust and I kept on going. And then my long scarf friend

01:29:54   showed up again. And so I was like, "We rejoice and sang little songs together." And so that

01:29:58   was really great. But that was, again, my second experience when I knew it was a real

01:30:03   And then but the first time I played through right at the end, the when you're going up

01:30:09   the tower, the snow tower, my like little buddy who I was with, who I thought was an

01:30:13   AI like froze to death, he just like sat down and was like shivering and not moving. And

01:30:18   I was like singing Adam and nothing was happening. So I just went on alone. And when I was the

01:30:23   first time I thought like, Okay, so I had a companion through the middle of the game,

01:30:27   I didn't have one in the beginning. And then he kind of like froze to death at the end.

01:30:31   So I had to like do the end alone.

01:30:33   I'm like, oh, okay, I guess this is just the time that I don't have a double of me that

01:30:37   I go up with.

01:30:38   So it was definitely the first time around wasn't as fun as the second time.

01:30:44   What I told my wife when she was asking that I said that I thought you didn't like the

01:30:47   game and she was asking why I said my theory was that since you are a gamer, that I didn't

01:30:53   know that you had the did that you thought it was an AI the whole time.

01:30:56   But this fits is that if you feel like you're playing a game, the whole time you're playing

01:31:01   this game, and this would fit for somebody who plays games on hard because you want a

01:31:04   challenge.

01:31:05   If you were always in the headspace of "I am playing a game," it's kind of like if you

01:31:09   watch a movie and you're always in the headspace of "I am watching a movie."

01:31:12   The movies that get you, you forget you're watching a movie and you feel like you're

01:31:15   experiencing what you're experiencing.

01:31:18   Journey relies entirely on that happening, because not every game does.

01:31:21   If you're playing a first-person shooter in super hard mode, you could feel like you're

01:31:24   playing a game the whole time and it's totally satisfying.

01:31:26   Oh yeah, you have to be engaged.

01:31:28   thing about Journey was that I felt like when sometimes you're going through some of the areas,

01:31:32   I felt like I could just let go of my controller and it would just go there for me. You know,

01:31:36   like I was just being funneled through the game. Well, yeah, like it is you can't feel like you're

01:31:41   playing a game. Like because yes, if you think about it for two seconds, you realize, oh,

01:31:43   this section is on rails, I can let go. But it's like, you know, you can't think that way. You have

01:31:49   to think I am here, this is happening to me and why would I ever want to let go. So for the

01:31:53   sections where you're sort of surfing down the hill and stuff, the reason I found those levels

01:31:57   so amazing is because like early in the game you realize you can slide and it's just it's just like there's no point there

01:32:03   There's no you're not you don't get extra points for going through the little stanchions

01:32:08   You know the little gates that you can go that's that's not there like oh you have to do that in your extra bonus

01:32:12   No, it's all about just having fun

01:32:14   You have to feel like you're there and enjoying the little sort of

01:32:16   Dolphin things diving through the sand and going the why because do you get some reward when you jump on their heads?

01:32:22   No, you jump in their heads because it's fun and you really have to just feel like you're there

01:32:25   And if the entire time you feel like you're playing a game, then it's like well this game is not challenging

01:32:29   This game is not interesting this game doesn't offer me anything doesn't offer me

01:32:33   Extra power-up extra weapons all the type of things that you would you know in a game in a game where you can be okay?

01:32:38   feeling like you're playing a game you have to

01:32:40   Not feel like you're playing a game for this and feel like you're having experience and realizing there are other people probably helps you with

01:32:45   That because then it's like oh

01:32:46   I'm not playing a game in the same way that suddenly you feel like you know you ever see people like texting walking down the street

01:32:52   And the expressions on their face are you know?

01:32:54   angry or joyful. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're holy, they're going through all the emotions of

01:32:59   what's happening, but nothing's happening to them, really. And what they're using is an app that has

01:33:03   a text box and a bunch of little text box over and over and over, but their experience is like,

01:33:08   oh, no, no, they're connected to the person on the other end of this. Like, and Journey does that

01:33:12   with significantly better graphics than the messages app on iOS, right? And can elicit the

01:33:16   same type of emotions because like I said in the article, they shave off every possible way that

01:33:21   person can be a jerk to you and all that's left is the good and in general people are

01:33:25   good to each other. And even if they try to be a jerk, it just comes off as like, you

01:33:29   know, craziness or disinterest, like they can't do anything to harm you. So it's like

01:33:32   a relentlessly positive experience.

01:33:34   With it with that whole argument, though, that's exactly why I disagree with you that

01:33:37   when you first play the game that someone should know that you're playing with other

01:33:41   people because the game was infinitely more enjoyable for me when I realized that it was

01:33:46   just another person with me, instead of just an AI. And so I didn't enjoy the game when

01:33:51   I thought it was AI, but I love the game after I found out it was a real person. And I've

01:33:56   gone back twice now and played it once I played under Marco's name and I had to go get my

01:33:59   own name so I can get my own scarf stuff. And I didn't have Tumblr more. What was it?

01:34:04   In the paper Marco. They're like, you played with instapaper Marco. It's like, no, you

01:34:09   played with Tiff Arman, whoever I am. I don't know. But like, that's, you know, that that

01:34:15   whole experience of with other people made it so much better. And I would have never

01:34:20   played the game again, if it was anything like the first time I played it.

01:34:23   I was hoping that you would not know that think they're AI initially, but fine, but

01:34:28   figure it out after like five minutes, because that realization that it's another person

01:34:32   is a fun realization. Because, you know, again, if you don't like that, that's the common

01:34:37   experiences. If they don't know it's AI, they initially think it is AI, but then figure

01:34:40   out that it's not

01:34:41   the it's kind of like the reverse Blair Witch Project. Like if you see the movie, and then

01:34:45   you and you think it's real, it's great the first time you see it, and then you realize

01:34:49   it's not real and it sucks. It's the worst movie ever. So journey is reverse Blair Witch Project.

01:34:55   Yeah. People do go back and play journey. I mean, do you have your white robe yet? Are you

01:34:59   on the path to get that? Well, no, because now I've got cheated out of a, out of an entire

01:35:03   playthrough because I played on Marco's account. And so then I had to create my own account.

01:35:08   And so I only have two play throughs on mine. Although I found like this crazy shortcut where

01:35:14   you can like jump to any level. And I accidentally did that tonight. And all of a sudden I skipped

01:35:17   half the game and I was like, well, yeah, that's the hub. That's the hub level you you

01:35:21   want to get the white, right? The white robe is the one thing that is game like in this

01:35:25   and it's to reward multiple playthroughs. You don't have to play a certain number of

01:35:28   times although there is something that happens as you play a multiple number of times but

01:35:31   you can play through once and have the white robe. Well, your robe gets all like in much

01:35:34   more intricate on the bottom. So right now I have like a whole bunch of intricate orange

01:35:38   bits. Yeah, and that keeps going until it reaches like it fills up entirely but the

01:35:42   white robe is not dependent on that filling up you could fill up that entire thing and

01:35:46   still want to have a white robe and you could do one play through and get the white robe.

01:35:49   Yeah, I still got to find all the little symbols everywhere because yeah, I think I could do

01:35:53   much better. And there's not much you know, this that's the only collectible in the game

01:35:57   is little symbols and like I said in the article like when you get the symbol and you're playing

01:36:00   with someone else they get it too. You don't steal it from them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think

01:36:04   that that's great because then you can do that's what the one part of the second time

01:36:06   I played through the person was showing me where everything was and helping me get them

01:36:10   so we like both had the same length scarf and that was just fantastic and just tonight

01:36:14   I found like a little new person and I was like, come with me.

01:36:17   I know where these things are.

01:36:18   Yeah.

01:36:18   And then once you, once you have those long scarves, like when you get into

01:36:21   the levels that have danger, then it's like, I mean, even though the stakes

01:36:24   are like, like you said, you can't die.

01:36:25   You don't want to lose your scarf.

01:36:26   Right.

01:36:27   Yeah.

01:36:27   And you don't want your new, you want to protect your new person.

01:36:29   If there's someone new with you, or if you have a long scarf yourself,

01:36:31   you're like, look, I, I worked for the earlier part of this game to get this.

01:36:34   I don't want it to be taken from me.

01:36:36   And then, so exactly.

01:36:37   So what do you think of the ending part where you're in the snow and going up

01:36:40   the mountain and everything and how that ends is that I thought I died. I was like, No,

01:36:44   I thought I don't know. I thought I failed the first time I played I was I was alone.

01:36:49   And it was cold and windy. And like, no, I'm like, that's it. It's over. I need to do something

01:36:54   again. I need to go back and do it again. But then you know, I started flying and I'm

01:36:57   such a spaz sometimes and you know, when you go up after you die in the snow and or whatever

01:37:03   happens to you in the snow and you go up to the mountain, I crash right into the side

01:37:08   of the mountain, I'm stuck under the mountain and I'm jumping. Oh, it was horrible. I'm

01:37:12   like, this is supposed to be my moment. And I'm like, I'm all caught underneath the mountain.

01:37:17   So the for the story part of the game, were you? Were you on board with that? Were you

01:37:21   paying attention to the cutscenes and the first or second playthrough and like deciphering

01:37:25   the story and then you know, connecting it to the ending?

01:37:27   Oh, yeah, definitely. And like how all the little markers are all really graves and you

01:37:32   know, all this stuff and I liked how just like we talked about in the incomparable where

01:37:36   know, you when you have a companion with you, it shows it on the wall that there's someone

01:37:40   else with you or you're alone in certain parts. And yeah, I thought it was I thought it was

01:37:45   a really nice story that it was simple. It was uplifting, you know, like it, it moved

01:37:49   you along and I liked it a lot. Yeah. For my one playthrough that you know, you only

01:37:55   have one chance to make the first playthrough. I'm so happy that I happened to that I played

01:37:59   alone in the beginning to get the feel of the game and then found someone that had a

01:38:02   sort of experience with them in which I disappointed them but that we did end up going through

01:38:06   the light together in the end. You know, where like you get up to that final sort of snowy

01:38:10   part where it's quiet and your scarf is gone and the light is right there, the thing you've

01:38:15   been trying to get through the whole time. Oh, so you had someone going with you? I like

01:38:18   keep waiting at the time. I waited at the top the last game and... Yeah, that's the

01:38:22   thing. Waiting at the top, you're like, "Is that person going to come?" Nobody showed

01:38:26   up! I was like, "Beep, beep!" Like, you know, beeping my little... And no one's coming,

01:38:30   because I keep crashing into the mountain when I get up there, so I'm always behind.

01:38:33   Yeah, I've waited at the top several times for people.

01:38:37   Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't.

01:38:38   But the first time we kind of like—I mean, the first time, you know, you don't know

01:38:41   what's going to happen in that snowy thing.

01:38:42   And I was with the person going up the snowy thing, and we both pitch over into the snow.

01:38:46   I thought, like you, that that's the end of the game, because, like, you know, I mean,

01:38:49   I don't know if you saw the ending of The Sopranos, but all sorts of things.

01:38:52   And that's one way it could end.

01:38:55   But that wasn't the end.

01:38:56   Like, you know, you were in—you end up in that other place, and for me it was with that

01:39:02   of the person and we sort of swoop to the top of that mountain together joyously, not

01:39:07   crashing to the side of the mountain, luckily.

01:39:08   Yeah, because I listened to you and you were saying that, "Oh, this is your freedom moment,"

01:39:13   and you get to play around. And I'm there crashing to the side of the mountain, stuck

01:39:17   underneath this snowy bank, and I'm walking. I'm like, "This is so pathetic. Everyone

01:39:21   else is flying. It's like happy music, and the scarves are everywhere, and the friendly

01:39:26   little carpet dogs are like woof woof woof," and everything's happening, and I'm stuck

01:39:30   under this mountain. I'm like, what kind of a hell gamer am I? It's just terrible.

01:39:34   The carpet dogs. I always call them dolphins, but since you have hops around, I can see

01:39:39   how they might look like carpet dogs to you. Yeah, well, they're all loyal and they come

01:39:42   by, especially that sad one in the snow. Oh, it kills me. So sad. It's like, "I'm so cold

01:39:47   and you can't take it with you." Yeah. Terrible. Well, so I'm sad that your first playthrough

01:39:52   wasn't everything that it could be, but like you can't control. Well, I guess I wanted

01:39:55   it to be so much because you're like, "It's going to be so good." And you know, I had

01:39:59   all these expectations. And I'm like, Really? John likes this game. It's just kind of like

01:40:02   a funnel game. That's what I call them. They just you just want to let go of the controller

01:40:05   and let it happen to you. And you're like, this is right, but you need to be engaged

01:40:09   to not like you need to not be thinking that's a possibility because there is no controller.

01:40:12   What do you mean to control you're walking through a desert? There's no controller like

01:40:14   you need to get into that headspace. Yeah, appreciate it. But I'm glad you haven't said

01:40:18   and that's why I said like in the episode, it was titled one of our past atps was a journey

01:40:22   would be wasted on Marco or something like that. Oh, yeah, he would just be like, this

01:40:26   was why did I just do this? He's like, he would be like, Why did I just play this game?

01:40:30   Because he would never get into that headspace like it like, you know, you're getting into

01:40:32   it on second playthroughs and now you're having like the actual experience of the game or

01:40:35   whatever you have to you have to be there in the game and you have to like be absorbed

01:40:41   in the story and be appreciative of a pretty desert and a cute little frozen cloth thing

01:40:46   and the scary dragons and like, if you're never going to get into that space and you're

01:40:50   always just think I'm sitting on a couch holding a controller, you'll never enjoy the game.

01:40:54   Yeah. And you know, honestly that I would have been, I would have just stopped right there if

01:40:57   it were my first playthrough and that's what then, but I did all my homework. I, you know,

01:41:02   listened to the uncomfortable. I read your article and that, that sucked me back in. So

01:41:05   it ends up, uh, I really do like the game. So what are we playing next? Huh?

01:41:10   Yeah. I was super sad when, when it seemed like you didn't like it, because I'm like,

01:41:13   Oh, all these other recommendations I had for her now, I'm not even going to give them because

01:41:17   if she didn't like, if she didn't like journey, it's clear, it's clear our taste in games differs.

01:41:21   No, it's like, you know, some people don't like the same type of games and you're unlike Marco

01:41:25   It's totally clear that you're a gamer

01:41:26   But maybe you just don't like the same type of games that I do or you know

01:41:28   Like if you're gonna recommend a movie to someone you recommend like a Fellini movie and they hate it

01:41:32   It's like well you I guess we like different kinds of movies. It's not necessarily a bad movie

01:41:36   But if you came around on journey, I can continue

01:41:38   Your list of games that you can play I do I can be I can be very open-minded with most games

01:41:44   Like I just been I just finished limbo because now I'm all in a gaming mood and then I can go like, you know

01:41:49   to the shoot 'em up Halo, you know, all that Half-Life kind of stuff game. So I'm pretty versatile.

01:41:55   So what are you in the mood for? Are you in the mood for a game that is more kind of like,

01:41:59   not too hard, not too challenging, all about atmosphere and relationships?

01:42:03   Well, definitely games I could play during nap time. That's good.

01:42:06   Because two ways to go on this, like my traditional thing is if you have a PlayStation

01:42:12   3, you need to play Eco, Shadow of the Colossus and Journey and The Last of Us. And The Last of

01:42:19   of us is the most traditional game, straight up AAA game with shooting things and zombies

01:42:24   and everything you're thinking of, but it's like a very well done one of those games that

01:42:28   is one of the few, as I usually don't like games like that. So that if you're in the

01:42:31   mood for that type of game, that is the one to get it will satisfy you on all the levels

01:42:35   that those type of games satisfy people if you're into that.

01:42:38   Yeah, that sounds good. Someone write that down.

01:42:40   And then if, if you get through that, maybe you will have like had enough junk food that

01:42:45   you'll be in the mood for eco and shadow of the colossus. Shadow of the colossus is...

01:42:49   Oh, I already played walking dead chat room. Uh, you didn't though. Did we talk about this?

01:42:53   No. Oh no, no, not walking dead. No, no. The other two zombie ones. Yeah, I recommend it.

01:42:57   I recommended walking dead. You can play that on your Mac, but I don't, I need to see what

01:43:01   your taste is like more. So we see, we've gotten one end of the spectrum, which is journey.

01:43:05   Last of Us is pretty much on the other end of the spectrum. It's not, I guess grand theft

01:43:08   auto would be the other end of the spectrum, but no, no, I played that one too. So right.

01:43:12   But last of us is more serious. You'll see that all my games are like put it this way

01:43:16   I like one hour dramas on TV the games I recommend are all the type of games

01:43:21   You'd see recommended by someone who watches one hour dramas on TV

01:43:23   well, that's pretty much what we watch so I think that would totally work although I did watch the

01:43:27   Like a preview gameplay of Ico eco. Yeah. Yeah. It was very like Zelda II right Zelda esque

01:43:35   It's nothing like Zelda in gameplay

01:43:37   That's what it looked like.

01:43:38   It looks like it, but it is like Journey in that you have to be there, otherwise you

01:43:43   feel like, "This game is not hard.

01:43:45   There are no exciting power-ups.

01:43:47   There's no level meter.

01:43:48   I'm not leveling this."

01:43:51   All those things that you're complaining about, you would have exactly the same complaints

01:43:53   about Ico.

01:43:54   But I think it's like Journey.

01:43:56   Before Journey, it was my go-to games as art, PlayStation 3 type game.

01:44:00   It is considerably longer than Journey.

01:44:02   It's like 11 hours.

01:44:03   It is a little bit harder in terms of puzzles, and if you have a low tolerance for puzzles,

01:44:06   You might find it frustrating or annoying, but I really love it.

01:44:09   And then Shadow of the Colossus is like an in-between stage where Shadow of the Colossus

01:44:12   is actually pretty darn hard and to the point where I'm not sure that you would actually

01:44:16   finish the game because you'd be like, "You know what?

01:44:18   I've seen what this game--"

01:44:19   Oh, now that's a challenge.

01:44:20   "I see what this game has to offer.

01:44:21   I see how it's going to go, and I don't want to grind through it," especially if you hate

01:44:25   the PlayStation controller like I hate it.

01:44:27   Yeah, it's not the best controller.

01:44:28   Yeah, but it has the same mood as Ico.

01:44:31   It's from the same developer, and it's sort of all of a piece.

01:44:35   So I would say go to Last of Us next because that is very straight ahead and I think one

01:44:40   of the best games for the PlayStation 3 for people like traditional games.

01:44:43   And if you make it through that, that should be like what, 16, 20 hours, something like

01:44:47   that.

01:44:49   Then we'll revisit the RDR games.

01:44:50   Excellent.

01:44:51   Well, Adam's been taking two to three hour naps, so that plus some evenings I think I

01:44:56   can plow through it.

01:44:58   So we'll see.

01:44:59   That sounds great and we'll have you back on to hear.

01:45:01   Maybe Marco is just a lost cause.

01:45:04   Maybe Marco can play Last of Us with you or watch you play because he's a spaz, but who

01:45:08   knows.

01:45:09   Well, he walks by while he's getting coffee and will check out my video game and be like,

01:45:12   "Oh, what's happening here?"

01:45:13   And then he'll make some Snyder mark about it and be like, "Duh duh duh duh duh."

01:45:16   And then he'll go sit in his chair and bang on his keyboard without him.

01:45:19   Yeah, exactly.

01:45:20   He'll put on his fish and he'll disappear to the world and that'll be it.

01:45:24   He's missing out.

01:45:25   All right, poor Casey is out there.

01:45:27   How do we get him back?

01:45:28   I can tell him to come back.

01:45:29   All right, do we?

01:45:30   Should I put Marco back?

01:45:31   to me about journey. Sure, anytime. Anytime you want to kick Marco off the show you can come on.

01:45:37   Oh excellent. Hear that? You're out. I'm in. All right, bye John. Bye Tiff. All right. Hi, hello.

01:45:47   Yeah, as we said at WWDC, what we learned from WWDC is that in the Marco Tiff marriage,

01:45:57   Marco is my wife and Tiff is me.

01:46:00   Pretty much.

01:46:00   - Can we just get a clip, a sound clip

01:46:04   of you saying Marco is my wife?

01:46:06   That's all we need.

01:46:07   [ Silence ]