ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► What do you keep saying? You'll be at what?

00:00:02 ◼   ► Prom.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Well, I don't know what that is. I don't know how to spell what you're saying.

00:00:05 ◼   ► P-R-O-M. High school prom.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Oh, you're one of those people who leaves off the "the".

00:00:08 ◼   ► Probably Marco does too, because he's from Ohio.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Yeah, there was never a "the".

00:00:12 ◼   ► Yeah, there's never a "the".

00:00:13 ◼   ► Yeah, where I'm from, there's a "the" in front of it.

00:00:15 ◼   ► You're going to the prom?

00:00:17 ◼   ► Yep.

00:00:17 ◼   ► That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

00:00:19 ◼   ► No, the rest of the country is dumb. New York is right, as always.

00:00:21 ◼   ► F***ing angel. You are the worst.

00:00:24 ◼   ► We also don't put mustard on our hamburgers, and that's right!

00:00:28 ◼   ► Say that again, you don't put mustard on the hamburgers?

00:00:30 ◼   ► No, McDonald's does not put mustard on its hamburgers in the New York metro area.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Interesting.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I thought, I didn't know they did in the rest of the country until I went to Boston and asked

00:00:39 ◼   ► for a hamburger from McDonald's that had mustard on it. I'm like, what the hell's going on?

00:00:41 ◼   ► So, what's going on this week?

00:00:45 ◼   ► Well, let's start with Overcast. Something happened over the last few days.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I shipped the Overcast beta and it's been really awesome, actually. I've been extremely

00:00:57 ◼   ► impressed and happy and

00:00:59 ◼   ► just overwhelmed and humbled by the amount of feedback I've gotten from the beta. The beta went out to about, you know,

00:01:05 ◼   ► 30 or so people and

00:01:07 ◼   ► And let me interrupt you right there. You are not currently seeking any more testers. Is that correct?

00:01:11 ◼   ► That's right. Well, I'm running low on UDIDs because the problem is like, you know, you have these 30 people

00:01:17 ◼   ► You know, that's plus my own device. That's about 40 devices. You only get a hundred per year and

00:01:22 ◼   ► I have to realize also like in the fall

00:01:26 ◼   ► half these people are gonna get new phones.

00:01:27 ◼   ► So if I wanna have them keep testing,

00:01:29 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to overlap for a little while.

00:01:32 ◼   ► And your device limit resets

00:01:36 ◼   ► like on some calendar anniversary

00:01:38 ◼   ► of your developer account or something.

00:01:39 ◼   ► And I don't even know when,

00:01:40 ◼   ► I think that's like in July for me or something.

00:01:42 ◼   ► So it's sometime not ideal for the iPhone release cycle.

00:01:45 ◼   ► So basically I have to like keep my number

00:01:49 ◼   ► of actual devices I care about under 50.

00:01:52 ◼   ► Plus if I ever make an iPad version,

00:01:53 ◼   ► I gotta account for people's iPads

00:01:55 ◼   ► and that's a whole other thing,

00:01:56 ◼   ► so it's really a pain in the butt.

00:01:58 ◼   ► But overall, the beta's going fantastically.

00:02:01 ◼   ► I'm getting tons of feedback.

00:02:03 ◼   ► I'm extremely happy about it.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Meanwhile, Casey, you have way better news than that.

00:02:07 ◼   ► (Casey laughs)

00:02:08 ◼   ► - Yes, indeed.

00:02:09 ◼   ► So the great news is my blogging engine works

00:02:12 ◼   ► and can sustain traffic from your site,

00:02:15 ◼   ► which is significant.

00:02:16 ◼   ► - Great, moving on.

00:02:17 ◼   ► - Moving on. - No, just kidding.

00:02:18 ◼   ► - The reason I know that is because I announced

00:02:22 ◼   ► couple days ago that Aaron is pregnant finally which is extremely exciting

00:02:28 ◼   ► congratulations thank you we have been working on this for quite literally

00:02:31 ◼   ► three-and-a-half years and I won't go into the details here on the show because

00:02:36 ◼   ► we aren't an explicit show yeah right well here's what we did we went to the

00:02:40 ◼   ► bedroom so anyway I wrote a blog post about this which I entitled finally

00:02:47 ◼   ► which I thought was hysterical and only a couple people I think really picked up

00:02:51 ◼   ► on the joke there. But anyway, I wrote a blog post about this, which Marco you linked to

00:02:55 ◼   ► and tweeted about and John you tweeted about and that was very kind of you guys. And so

00:03:01 ◼   ► I went into kind of the nitty-gritty of the journey from saying in 2010, "Hey, we should

00:03:07 ◼   ► probably start trying to have kids," to being here we are all the way in 2014 saying, "Oh

00:03:12 ◼   ► my God, we're finally pregnant." And it was a long and difficult road, but we are here

00:03:17 ◼   ► And that's all that matters and so far everything

00:03:20 ◼   ► Sounds good and is healthy and we'll meet our little sprout as we're calling it in the first week of November

00:03:26 ◼   ► So we're seriously seriously excited. I'm glad to see that you got to go public before overcast it

00:03:31 ◼   ► Yes, although if I'm honest

00:03:35 ◼   ► It's still it's still wearing on me that I haven't gotten my iOS 7 update for fast text out because I cannot

00:03:43 ◼   ► get auto layout working right and I'm too stubborn to revert to springs and struts and

00:03:47 ◼   ► I've got something the the composed message view is just not working properly

00:03:52 ◼   ► And I think it's the what is it the content inset or something like that so basically I have a I wasn't planning on going

00:03:59 ◼   ► Into this but since I have oh is it under the navbar yep, that's a very common thing yeah

00:04:03 ◼   ► Yeah, and I haven't figured out how to fix it yet, and I've been trying to go back and look at the old the auto layout

00:04:09 ◼   ► Talks from old WWDCs, but I haven't really had time because well, we've had something else going on lately

00:04:15 ◼   ► That's a pretty good reason. Yeah, so I like to think of it as a good reason

00:04:19 ◼   ► But I was real I well I will be upset if I don't get the iOS 7 update in before overcast ships

00:04:26 ◼   ► I won't be necessarily upset if I don't get it in before iOS 8 is in beta

00:04:29 ◼   ► But I will be upset if I don't get it in before overcast ship

00:04:32 ◼   ► So I got to find some time to do that you have some time don't worry

00:04:34 ◼   ► to bring this back around

00:04:37 ◼   ► Camel my blogging engine which I believe I mentioned I had open-sourced a week and a half ago something like that that did survive

00:04:42 ◼   ► So I'm pretty excited about that

00:04:44 ◼   ► It seems like it didn't crumble Heroku

00:04:48 ◼   ► Although I will say that and I probably shouldn't but I will say that I noticed in my Google Analytics refers some

00:04:55 ◼   ► Domain, I genuinely don't remember what it was, but it was like daily something dot Heroku comm which I tried to load and it

00:05:04 ◼   ► challenged me for authentication, which makes me wonder if I had actually

00:05:07 ◼   ► Hit some sort of threshold wherein the Heroku people were like

00:05:12 ◼   ► Hmm what's going on over there? But to this to this moment

00:05:17 ◼   ► I'm running on a single dyno which is Heroku speak for you know one process and I'm using node and

00:05:24 ◼   ► Things haven't crumbled so a lot of big things going on. This is really this is like the year of Casey. This is great

00:05:31 ◼   ► Well, it's weird to be in the spotlight, which probably sounds really weird given that

00:05:36 ◼   ► I'm on this podcast, but it's weird to be in the spotlight.

00:05:38 ◼   ► It sounds like you.

00:05:39 ◼   ► But that's true.

00:05:42 ◼   ► But no, we're super, super excited.

00:05:44 ◼   ► And oh, I'm such a jerk.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I forgot to mention that after I put up this post, a lot of people came out of the woodwork

00:05:51 ◼   ► to send emails and tweets and just unbelievably, unbelievably kind things.

00:05:56 ◼   ► And if you were one of those people, thank you so very, very much.

00:05:59 ◼   ► I'm still going through all the email and trying to reply to every single one of them,

00:06:03 ◼   ► and I will at some point.

00:06:04 ◼   ► But the support has been amazing, and not to completely get us derailed, but it's

00:06:12 ◼   ► been interesting seeing how many people come out of the woodwork and say, "We too had

00:06:15 ◼   ► fertility problems," or alternatively, "We know someone who has had fertility problems,

00:06:21 ◼   ► and oh man, this really rings true."

00:06:24 ◼   ► And that's been really kind of—well, it's sad in that I would never wish this upon anyone,

00:06:30 ◼   ► but also really awesome to know that it's not just us and that people appreciate talking

00:06:37 ◼   ► about something that's actually fairly taboo and not something you hear talked about a

00:06:40 ◼   ► lot.

00:06:41 ◼   ► So I'm happy as can be.

00:06:43 ◼   ► Erin is overjoyed.

00:06:45 ◼   ► It is a tragedy that Erin isn't already a mom because I think she'll be a great mom.

00:06:49 ◼   ► So I'm really, really excited.

00:06:51 ◼   ► Awesome.

00:06:52 ◼   ► Let's hope the year of Casey goes better than the year of Luigi.

00:06:55 ◼   ► I wish I understood that joke.

00:06:57 ◼   ► That's okay.

00:06:58 ◼   ► Is that a Nintendo joke about their...

00:07:00 ◼   ► Yeah, you're going to have to explain that one, sorry.

00:07:05 ◼   ► I believe it was the beginning of 2013 Nintendo said this is going to be the year of Luigi,

00:07:10 ◼   ► which means they were going to release games featuring Luigi more prominently, and 2013

00:07:16 ◼   ► was not a good year financially for the company.

00:07:18 ◼   ► You should never have me explain these references to you on the show.

00:07:21 ◼   ► You just let them go by.

00:07:22 ◼   ► You too can acknowledge that you don't get them, but rest assured I was surprised that

00:07:26 ◼   ► the chat room didn't already make this joke, so I'm just kind of disappointed in them.

00:07:29 ◼   ► But you too, expect it.

00:07:31 ◼   ► But like, whoever liked Luigi?

00:07:33 ◼   ► That's the whole point of this, the whole point is the year of Luigi.

00:07:35 ◼   ► Oh, who cares about Luigi?

00:07:37 ◼   ► Well, this is the year of Luigi.

00:07:38 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Right, that's terrible.

00:07:40 ◼   ► Like, who has ever, in the million years, who has ever said like, "You know what Nintendo

00:07:44 ◼   ► needs?

00:07:45 ◼   ► More Luigi."

00:07:46 ◼   ► You know, I would like to play more games with Luigi, please.

00:07:49 ◼   ► And the games that support multiple players, I want to spend more time playing as Luigi.

00:07:53 ◼   ► They launched the GameCube with Luigi, with Luigi's Manson, because they didn't have

00:07:56 ◼   ► a Mario game ready.

00:07:57 ◼   ► Yeah, look how well that went.

00:07:58 ◼   ► Well, the GameCube did much better than the Wii U, I'll tell you that.

00:08:02 ◼   ► Well, everything is done better than the Wii U, and we'll probably get to that later.

00:08:05 ◼   ► I think the 3DO did better than the Wii U.

00:08:07 ◼   ► No.

00:08:08 ◼   ► Wow.

00:08:09 ◼   ► We have another piece of follow-up, and speaking of things that are expected, Marco, did you

00:08:12 ◼   ► do your homework?

00:08:13 ◼   ► Of course not.

00:08:14 ◼   ► Okay.

00:08:15 ◼   ► did my homework, John? Do I get a gold star?

00:08:18 ◼   ► I thought maybe you tweeting a screenshot would have shamed Marco or reminded him that

00:08:23 ◼   ► this homework existed. Let's start with that. Reminded him that it existed because we know

00:08:26 ◼   ► he's not looking at the notes file, so.

00:08:28 ◼   ► Well to be fair, last night I told Tiff about the game and she installed it and she played

00:08:34 ◼   ► it next to me in bed, so I heard some of it.

00:08:37 ◼   ► Wow.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And she thinks it's pretty good.

00:08:40 ◼   ► Did she finish it? It doesn't take long, right, Casey? I'm assuming you finished it?

00:08:43 ◼   ► Yes, well, and that's the funny thing is, okay, so let me back up.

00:08:47 ◼   ► So we're talking about Monument Valley, which came out, what would you say, a couple

00:08:50 ◼   ► months ago maybe?

00:08:51 ◼   ► A month ago?

00:08:52 ◼   ► Something like that, I don't remember.

00:08:53 ◼   ► Okay.

00:08:54 ◼   ► So it came out fairly recently.

00:08:55 ◼   ► And as we've talked about in the past, it seems that there are oftentimes premier iOS

00:09:02 ◼   ► games.

00:09:03 ◼   ► You know, Letterpress is a great example.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Threes is a great example.

00:09:06 ◼   ► Flight Control way back when was a great example.

00:09:08 ◼   ► And so Monument Valley was one of the premier games recently.

00:09:12 ◼   ► And so I downloaded it last night and started playing it and Erin was watching over my shoulder

00:09:18 ◼   ► and was like, "Hmm, that looks kind of interesting."

00:09:20 ◼   ► And so we share an iTunes store account and so she had it already.

00:09:25 ◼   ► And so there we were sitting on our iPads next to each other playing Monument Valley.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And I definitely have some thoughts about it, but the funny yet frustrating thing about

00:09:32 ◼   ► it was I had started playing somewhere between five and 30 minutes before Erin.

00:09:37 ◼   ► I wasn't paying close attention.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And sure enough, by the time we finished, which was only about an hour to an hour and

00:09:42 ◼   ► a half later, she finished easily just a couple minutes after I did.

00:09:47 ◼   ► And we had started quite a bit more than a couple minutes apart.

00:09:51 ◼   ► So I was a little annoyed by that, but I guess she's the smart one in the family.

00:09:55 ◼   ► Nevertheless, it was very good.

00:09:57 ◼   ► It was very, very good.

00:09:58 ◼   ► I quite liked it.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Did you want us to play it for any particular reason, Jon?

00:10:02 ◼   ► Well, no.

00:10:03 ◼   ► It was the last show when we talked about the game.

00:10:06 ◼   ► I was mentioning that a lot of people said they had gotten stuck on it or that it was hard, but

00:10:10 ◼   ► that I couldn't tell if they were joking because I thought it was just relentlessly linear and

00:10:13 ◼   ► extremely easy. And then I thought since you two hadn't been playing a lot of the kind of games you

00:10:19 ◼   ► used to play, but playing more casual games, that this was the casual game that you might enjoy.

00:10:23 ◼   ► I thought it had some interesting aspects to it, like the artwork I thought was great and the idea

00:10:29 ◼   ► was very clever. And it took advantage of touch in an interesting way. It's a type of game that

00:10:34 ◼   ► that wouldn't have been as interesting if you did it on a console or on a PC.

00:10:38 ◼   ► And so I figured you should give it a try.

00:10:40 ◼   ► So the two things I wanted to know was basically, did you find it easy and what did you think

00:10:46 ◼   ► of it overall?

00:10:47 ◼   ► At the beginning, I most certainly did not find it easy.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And when you download Monument Valley, which you should do, it was absolutely a great game

00:10:55 ◼   ► and it's worth the, what was it, $4?

00:10:58 ◼   ► But we'll get to that later.

00:11:00 ◼   ► When you download it, they kind of just dump you in a level.

00:11:03 ◼   ► And I almost thought something was wrong because they don't explain anything and I've seen this before but it seemed

00:11:11 ◼   ► Surprising how little explanation there was and and it took me a minute to realize what the crap I had to do

00:11:19 ◼   ► And monument valley if I were to summarize it is kind of a game playing off the drawings of it was MCS sure

00:11:25 ◼   ► Is that correct? Yeah, you got it. Okay, so stairs guy. Yeah the stairs guy

00:11:30 ◼   ► So it's it's geometry that can't really be real but you know, it's I don't know how to explain this

00:11:37 ◼   ► I won't try but suffice to say I had to explain it to my kids and this is what I came up with

00:11:41 ◼   ► If it looks like it touches it touches

00:11:43 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it and two things that look like they shouldn't be able to touch with one in with

00:11:49 ◼   ► the same intermediary piece

00:11:51 ◼   ► Depending on how things are set up may actually touch if you like spin that intermittent intermediary piece around

00:11:57 ◼   ► So anyways, so they dump you into this game and it didn't have a lot of explanation and at first

00:12:03 ◼   ► I was like what the crap is going on and I was I almost started to get frustrated at the very beginning and then right when

00:12:09 ◼   ► I was going from this is weird to oh my god. What the hell that's when I figured it out

00:12:13 ◼   ► And then I was okay. And so for the first

00:12:16 ◼   ► Half to two-thirds of the game. I did not find it easy. I found it to be the correct balance of

00:12:23 ◼   ► hard but not annoying and I also would not say it was terribly linear in

00:12:28 ◼   ► At least the way I experienced it because I had to think about things then there were a couple levels

00:12:33 ◼   ► I should have taken a note on which ones they were but there were a couple levels where I was like, okay

00:12:37 ◼   ► This is seriously linear and it's beautiful and it sounds great

00:12:41 ◼   ► And I didn't realize that I should have been wearing headphones to play it

00:12:44 ◼   ► But I heard after the fact that it's it I guess it uses, you know stereo to its advantage or whatever, but it sounds great

00:12:51 ◼   ► It's beautiful, but there were some levels. I think there was one going into like a dungeon

00:12:56 ◼   ► It actually I think is what leads up to the picture

00:12:58 ◼   ► I tweeted that it was extremely linear and as you're tapping about moving this little girl around the stage that you're playing

00:13:05 ◼   ► things are happening so it's not like

00:13:08 ◼   ► Boring, but nevertheless it was very linear then after that there were other levels like the one with the box that I

00:13:15 ◼   ► Just took forever to figure out and I did and I wouldn't have said it was linear at all

00:13:19 ◼   ► What did you think John? Well, here's what I mean by linear what I mean by linear and the sense of this game is that

00:13:25 ◼   ► every time you

00:13:28 ◼   ► Solve some problem you're presented with a new problem and there's one way to do it more or less like, you know

00:13:34 ◼   ► If you hit this switch it opens up the door

00:13:36 ◼   ► Next step is that you're gonna go through that door and then you're not gonna be able to go anyplace except for one place and

00:13:41 ◼   ► To get that place you do something that it takes you there. Like it faces solve this problem. Here's your new problem solve this problem

00:13:46 ◼   ► here's your new problem, you know, like not linear

00:13:49 ◼   ► in that it's like a long series of corridors or whatever,

00:13:51 ◼   ► but gameplay-wise and flowchart-wise,

00:13:53 ◼   ► it doesn't make you do 10 things at once.

00:13:56 ◼   ► It doesn't make you like, okay,

00:13:57 ◼   ► I'm gonna set this up over here,

00:13:58 ◼   ► let me set that up over there,

00:13:59 ◼   ► let me go through and do this and do this

00:14:01 ◼   ► and then go over there and do that and then come back here

00:14:02 ◼   ► and when I come back here, it doesn't ask that of you,

00:14:05 ◼   ► which many games for more experienced gamers do.

00:14:08 ◼   ► So this is definitely in the category of casual game.

00:14:11 ◼   ► And it's more of like a game-like experience

00:14:14 ◼   ► in that you feel like you're participating in the narrative

00:14:16 ◼   ► but it's very clearly you're just pushing the character

00:14:19 ◼   ► along a certain little arc.

00:14:20 ◼   ► My main complaint is not so much with the casualness,

00:14:23 ◼   ► because again, like I said in the past show,

00:14:25 ◼   ► a lot of people can make the same complaint about Journey.

00:14:27 ◼   ► It's very linear, it's relentlessly linear.

00:14:29 ◼   ► It's just that there's more freedom within the linearity

00:14:32 ◼   ► and there's more of an overarching story

00:14:34 ◼   ► to get you wrapped up.

00:14:35 ◼   ► And this one had kind of like a hint of a story,

00:14:37 ◼   ► but it didn't, you know,

00:14:39 ◼   ► I don't want to ruin Journey for people,

00:14:40 ◼   ► but I think comparing Monument Valley to Journey

00:14:43 ◼   ► would be very instructive for a game design perspective because they are so similar in

00:14:48 ◼   ► so many ways and yet the experience of playing them is so very, very different.

00:14:51 ◼   ► People like Monument Valley is getting good reviews, but I don't think any game critic

00:14:55 ◼   ► would hold it anywhere near Journey.

00:14:58 ◼   ► Figuring out why, why is Journey so much better than Monument Valley, despite them sharing

00:15:03 ◼   ► so many characteristics, that I think is an interesting thing to think about that I would

00:15:09 ◼   ► probably blog about if I ever blogged.

00:15:11 ◼   ► Yeah, and the funny thing is, if I were to describe Monument Valley in just a couple

00:15:18 ◼   ► of words, it would be broken promises.

00:15:20 ◼   ► And an example of this is the level selector, which I didn't realize when it was first

00:15:27 ◼   ► introduced to you.

00:15:28 ◼   ► So this is kind of like, and I'm using huge air quotes here, the menuing system.

00:15:32 ◼   ► It's a building, and you twist the building to advance from level one to two to three,

00:15:37 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera.

00:15:38 ◼   ► When they show you this building originally they spin the building around and I didn't pay close attention

00:15:43 ◼   ► So I get through level one level two level three level four and at this point

00:15:48 ◼   ► I've seen all four sides of the building and so I'm like, okay

00:15:52 ◼   ► well, am I gonna see a new building now or what's gonna happen and sure enough there's a fifth side of the building and

00:15:57 ◼   ► that was a silly example of just a

00:16:00 ◼   ► continual series of broken promises

00:16:03 ◼   ► But that's part, didn't you catch that being part of the theme?

00:16:06 ◼   ► Like how can something have more than four sides, the impossible geometries?

00:16:10 ◼   ► Absolutely. And it's not a bad thing. I don't mean to make that sound like it's a bad thing,

00:16:14 ◼   ► but any time that you didn't think that something was an option, like for example,

00:16:18 ◼   ► walking vertically or walking off the side of something where in the real world you would just

00:16:24 ◼   ► fall right off, when you, or at least I didn't suspect that such moves were legal, and then you

00:16:31 ◼   ► find out, "Oh, you can do that." And so it's like one series of broken promise,

00:16:36 ◼   ► one broken promise after the other, which is what made it so magical and wonderful.

00:16:40 ◼   ► But at the same time, it was like, "Oh, okay, I guess that's a thing." So I really liked it.

00:16:45 ◼   ► The only thing is, and I didn't get a chance to press Erin on this because I really wanted to

00:16:50 ◼   ► hear her opinion and we didn't do any research, but when it was all over and it lasted, like I

00:16:56 ◼   ► said, about an hour, hour and a half, it was all over and Erin said, "Wait, that's it?

00:17:01 ◼   ► How much did we pay for this? And it was so interesting to me because my first reaction,

00:17:06 ◼   ► which I didn't say out loud, was, "Wait, that's it? How much did I pay for this?"

00:17:11 ◼   ► And then immediately after that, I was like, "Well, a lot of work went into this game."

00:17:14 ◼   ► It costs half as much as a movie ticket and it lasted about as long as half a movie, right?

00:17:19 ◼   ► It's funny you say that because I didn't talk to Aaron about this,

00:17:22 ◼   ► but that's exactly what I thought to myself. And in our case, we shared this

00:17:26 ◼   ► quote-unquote movie ticket because we have the same store account.

00:17:29 ◼   ► So we paid $4 once and each got an hour to an hour and a half of enjoyment out of it.

00:17:36 ◼   ► So really it's a great deal, but something about software has just programmed both of

00:17:43 ◼   ► us.

00:17:44 ◼   ► I wish I could – I don't mean this that way, but I kind of wish I could throw Erin

00:17:46 ◼   ► under the bus and be like, "Oh, well, she doesn't know what she's talking about.

00:17:49 ◼   ► She's not a developer."

00:17:50 ◼   ► But no, I had the same thought.

00:17:51 ◼   ► And it's really kind of crummy that there's this race to the bottom and race to free,

00:17:56 ◼   ► but I enjoyed it.

00:17:57 ◼   ► I'd recommend spending the four dollars.

00:17:59 ◼   ► I would have done it again, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think to myself, "Wow,

00:18:05 ◼   ► that was short."

00:18:06 ◼   ► Well, see, I have to say that the production values were super high, though.

00:18:09 ◼   ► Like that game is so polished.

00:18:12 ◼   ► There's no part of that game that looks like it's broken, that looks artificial.

00:18:16 ◼   ► Every part of it, even like you said, the menu system, it's all of a piece.

00:18:19 ◼   ► It is a beautifully made game.

00:18:21 ◼   ► I mean, if there's a bug in that game, I didn't find it.

00:18:25 ◼   ► If there's some visual element out of place,

00:18:28 ◼   ► I didn't find it.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And it's not a simple game.

00:18:30 ◼   ► It's not like, oh, I mean, not to say that Threes is simple,

00:18:33 ◼   ► but like graphics-wise and gameplay-wise,

00:18:37 ◼   ► Threes is a much simpler game

00:18:39 ◼   ► than the things that "Mind and Value" pulls off.

00:18:41 ◼   ► It is an amazingly well-made game

00:18:43 ◼   ► in terms of just the construction

00:18:44 ◼   ► of how the pieces are put together.

00:18:45 ◼   ► So production values are high,

00:18:46 ◼   ► so I don't mind paying more for it.

00:18:48 ◼   ► And I don't buy things based on length and price or anything like that.

00:18:51 ◼   ► I just wish that if it's not going to have difficult gameplay for experienced gamers,

00:18:56 ◼   ► it should have a more compelling story.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Like Year Walk was like that.

00:19:00 ◼   ► And the gameplay in Year Walk is not particularly difficult for anyone who's played point

00:19:04 ◼   ► and click adventures their entire life.

00:19:05 ◼   ► But the atmosphere and mood and story pulls you in and feels and like makes it feel like

00:19:12 ◼   ► more of an experience. I felt like Year Walk was a better game overall, but also one that

00:19:16 ◼   ► would probably repel most casual players.

00:19:17 ◼   ► At Monument Valley, I don't know, like, I hate coming down with a mediocre opinion on

00:19:25 ◼   ► this and people feel like I'm pushing them away like you shouldn't get this game.

00:19:30 ◼   ► That's why I wanted you to play it, to see if someone who doesn't consider himself a

00:19:35 ◼   ► gamer doesn't play games all the time, will they find this game much more compelling than

00:19:39 ◼   ► I did?

00:19:40 ◼   ► And it seems like you identified a lot of the same problems as I did.

00:19:44 ◼   ► And the one thing you brought up that I didn't realize was that I didn't think of is that

00:19:47 ◼   ► if you're not familiar with sort of the the joke like the not the joke or that the background or the thing like the

00:19:53 ◼   ► Moment I saw a screenshot of this game. I'm like, oh it's an MCS game

00:19:57 ◼   ► I know exactly what to expect of the entire game because I played a lot of games

00:20:00 ◼   ► I know what MCS sure is I know I'm gonna go walking on walls

00:20:02 ◼   ► I know if it looks like it touches it touches like I

00:20:04 ◼   ► See the whole game before I before I even installed the thing

00:20:08 ◼   ► Whereas if you come into a cold and have some vague memory of some water or impossible waterfall looking thing

00:20:13 ◼   ► Or you're not a you know a big gamer. Maybe you won't realize immediately. Oh, that's what this game is gonna be about

00:20:19 ◼   ► I think that's a lot of the complaints that the gamers have about this is that you show them a screenshot and they feel like

00:20:24 ◼   ► They've played the whole game and then you played the whole game. You're like, yeah, that's more or less what I expected

00:20:27 ◼   ► So we beautifully made, you know nicely constructed, but they didn't add a lot on top of that

00:20:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I would agree and I was familiar with Escher but not

00:20:35 ◼   ► Intimately familiar in so I knew what the point of the game was

00:20:40 ◼   ► But it still took thought in order to figure out

00:20:44 ◼   ► what I needed to do to accomplish things and as a casual gamer, I absolutely recommend it. I thought it was very good.

00:20:52 ◼   ► I will say the story

00:20:54 ◼   ► either was way over my head or was way too

00:20:58 ◼   ► esoteric for me to understand what they were saying and I'm not going to spoil it or anything but

00:21:04 ◼   ► I

00:21:05 ◼   ► I definitely think the game is worth it. It is to John's point about half as well

00:21:10 ◼   ► Probably at this point a third as much as a movie ticket and will probably keep you occupied

00:21:14 ◼   ► About half as long so Marco. I do recommend playing it. It's only about an hour

00:21:19 ◼   ► Maybe two of time to spend but it's really really good and I definitely definitely liked it Marco let Adam play it

00:21:27 ◼   ► I think he'll be able to do well on it. He's two. All right, so maybe maybe a couple years

00:21:34 ◼   ► He can play it and report back to you.

00:21:37 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week, once again,

00:21:39 ◼   ► by our friends at Smile Software.

00:21:40 ◼   ► They are promoting this week, PDF/Pen Scan Plus.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Now, PDF/Pen Scan Plus, they recently did a great update

00:21:48 ◼   ► to the software.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Now, what this is, is it's a scanning and OCR app

00:21:52 ◼   ► for iPhone and iPad.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And all the OCR takes place locally, right on the device.

00:21:58 ◼   ► So it doesn't have to upload your file

00:22:00 ◼   ► to some cloud OCR service, get the OCR results,

00:22:03 ◼   ► send it back. It's all happening right there locally on your device.

00:22:07 ◼   ► And Smile Software, I'll tell you what, I use a lot of their stuff, I use PDF Pen

00:22:11 ◼   ► and they make high quality stuff, they really do.

00:22:15 ◼   ► It's the kind of stuff that like, you might think you don't need

00:22:19 ◼   ► some kind of PDF adjustment tool until you do, and then you go to them.

00:22:23 ◼   ► And their software has saved my butt so many times

00:22:27 ◼   ► doing some quick thing or doing an edit or having to sign something, send it back.

00:22:31 ◼   ► And yeah, you can do some of this stuff

00:22:32 ◼   ► with preview on the Mac, but trust me,

00:22:34 ◼   ► you can do a lot more with PDF Pen.

00:22:36 ◼   ► And I end up turning to it quite a lot.

00:22:39 ◼   ► So PDF Pen Scan Plus for iPhone and iPad

00:22:42 ◼   ► lets you scan directly from your iPhone or iPad camera.

00:22:46 ◼   ► And they have batch scanning.

00:22:48 ◼   ► Batch scanning is speedy with,

00:22:50 ◼   ► you can do post-processing and editing there.

00:22:53 ◼   ► You can automatically crop the scan

00:22:55 ◼   ► or you can do it manually, quickly and precisely.

00:22:58 ◼   ► You can preview the results

00:22:59 ◼   ► and then you can copy the text out immediately for use elsewhere. So if you want to scan a document,

00:23:03 ◼   ► copy the text, paste it into something else, edit it, email it, whatever you want to do,

00:23:07 ◼   ► put it in draft and do a billion things with it, you can do all that stuff right there with

00:23:11 ◼   ► PDF/Pen Scan Plus. This new update has been updated for maximum

00:23:15 ◼   ► usability. It has not only an improved UI,

00:23:19 ◼   ► but effortless multi-page scans with post-process image editing. They have

00:23:23 ◼   ► custom paper size settings for receipts. You can also customize the paper

00:23:27 ◼   ► to whatever you want. You can preview the OCR text overlaid

00:23:31 ◼   ► right on the page which helps you proofread, make sure it got everything right.

00:23:35 ◼   ► So really, and of course they're always improving the accuracy

00:23:39 ◼   ► of the OCR engine and the text layout and everything. So

00:23:43 ◼   ► really it's a fantastic update, it's gotten critical acclaim. And once again this is from Smile Software

00:23:47 ◼   ► and they make really good stuff. The whole PDF/Pen family is really great.

00:23:51 ◼   ► To learn more about this, go to Smilesoftware.com/ATP

00:23:55 ◼   ► Once again, that is SmilesSoftware.com/ATP.

00:23:59 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to them and to PDF/Pen/Scan+

00:24:02 ◼   ► for iPhone and iPad.

00:24:03 ◼   ► - All right, so there's breaking news.

00:24:06 ◼   ► - Breaking?

00:24:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, about an hour or two ago.

00:24:10 ◼   ► And apparently, Apple and Google are sitting in a tree now.

00:24:15 ◼   ► K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

00:24:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, what is that about?

00:24:17 ◼   ► I don't know if we can really talk about that yet,

00:24:19 ◼   ► 'cause it just happened, we don't really know it.

00:24:21 ◼   ► - Well, we know enough.

00:24:22 ◼   ► I mean, the one I posted in the notes

00:24:24 ◼   ► that you should be looking at is enough.

00:24:25 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:24:27 ◼   ► People will know about it by the time they listen to this,

00:24:29 ◼   ► of course, or whatever.

00:24:31 ◼   ► So Apple and Google have been suing each other over patents

00:24:34 ◼   ► because that's what big companies do these days.

00:24:35 ◼   ► I mean, I'd love to see,

00:24:37 ◼   ► they had this diagram in some article once,

00:24:39 ◼   ► like the diagram of who's suing who,

00:24:41 ◼   ► everyone's suing everybody.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Anyway, but Apple and Google were suing each other

00:24:44 ◼   ► over what you'd expect, iPhone patents and Android stuff

00:24:47 ◼   ► and who knows what else.

00:24:49 ◼   ► And now they're not anymore.

00:24:50 ◼   ► They have agreed to dismiss all current lawsuits

00:24:53 ◼   ► that exists between the two companies.

00:24:56 ◼   ► And they've agreed to work together

00:24:57 ◼   ► on patent reform of some form.

00:25:00 ◼   ► They haven't said what,

00:25:01 ◼   ► I'm assuming nothing will come with that.

00:25:03 ◼   ► But anyway, they basically agreed to put their guns back

00:25:07 ◼   ► in the holsters for now on the patent.

00:25:10 ◼   ► They're not doing a patent cross-license,

00:25:11 ◼   ► which is what Apple has done with Microsoft in the past,

00:25:14 ◼   ► which is, okay, you can use my patents

00:25:15 ◼   ► and I can use your patents.

00:25:16 ◼   ► So they're keeping their own patent.

00:25:18 ◼   ► I don't know how that works.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Like, we just agreed we won't sue each other anymore.

00:25:21 ◼   ► They don't even agree to that.

00:25:22 ◼   ► they're stopping all current lawsuits. I guess they probably both reserve the right to sue

00:25:25 ◼   ► each other about it later, and they declined to comment as to why. And so both companies,

00:25:30 ◼   ► this is like the net neutrality thing, technology companies, I mean, I heard some comedians talk

00:25:37 ◼   ► about net neutrality, and they assume that technology companies like Microsoft, Apple,

00:25:42 ◼   ► Google, or if they're really old, comedian, IBM, are on the bad side of net neutrality,

00:25:48 ◼   ► that are against it. That's not the case. In fact, companies like Apple, Google, and even AOL,

00:25:53 ◼   ► I saw recently, are on the good side of net neutrality. They're in favor of net neutrality.

00:25:59 ◼   ► And Apple and Google, they hate patents. Yeah, they have millions of patents because they have

00:26:01 ◼   ► to have them. But they don't like the systems any more than anyone else does. It's just a cost of

00:26:05 ◼   ► doing business. It's a terrible cost center for them. They have to spend billions of dollars on

00:26:09 ◼   ► defending their patent. I mean, maybe Steve Jobs would disagree. He

00:26:14 ◼   ► seem to love patents and love patenting things. But in general, technology companies,

00:26:18 ◼   ► I think, would all agree that patents, there's a problem with the current patent system, and it's

00:26:23 ◼   ► just an annoying thing they have to do. So these two companies agreeing now in Steve Jobs's absence,

00:26:27 ◼   ► perhaps, to say, "Okay, let's stop all these lawsuits. They're just costing us money.

00:26:32 ◼   ► No one's going to really win definitively. It's just going to distract us for a long time, and

00:26:36 ◼   ► let's concentrate our lobbying efforts in Washington, however meager they may be,

00:26:41 ◼   ► on getting some sane form of patent reform through. And my first reaction to this, which I

00:26:47 ◼   ► tweeted and also put in the show notes, was, I guess it's Tim Cook holding up a picture of Samsung's

00:26:53 ◼   ► logo and saying "Fight the real enemy" and then tearing it up on screen, which is a reference that

00:26:57 ◼   ► I assume neither one of you would get. So I put it in the—

00:26:59 ◼   ► I actually did. I did. I honestly did.

00:27:01 ◼   ► Yay, Casey. Maybe this is the year of Casey. Marco, do you get that reference or not?

00:27:07 ◼   ► No, of course not. Come on.

00:27:08 ◼   ► All right, but anyway, it's in the show notes and I tweeted it so you can look at it.

00:27:11 ◼   ► But I mean, that's just the knee-jerk reaction.

00:27:13 ◼   ► The idea being that Apple and Google, that's not the real problem.

00:27:17 ◼   ► Apple's real problem is Samsung, which is ripping off not just their patents, but their

00:27:21 ◼   ► entire phone inexperience or whatever.

00:27:23 ◼   ► And to be clear, this doesn't really have anything to do with Apple fighting Samsung.

00:27:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it's just cool.

00:27:28 ◼   ► The whole idea is to fight the real enemy and saying, "Oh, maybe Google's not your

00:27:31 ◼   ► real enemy," or whatever.

00:27:32 ◼   ► So I think this is a good thing overall for both companies, because lawsuits really are

00:27:35 ◼   ► stupid distraction and they are expensive and after the Samsung, you know, whatever that the

00:27:41 ◼   ► result that lawsuit where Apple got peanuts, you know, like cost the problem. They probably

00:27:45 ◼   ► don't even cover the cost of litigation. They got like $120 million set them on or something after

00:27:49 ◼   ► years of fighting like I think river was saying that he thought it was like the principle of it

00:27:54 ◼   ► like well, see, we're willing to waste all of our money and just fight you in court to the death,

00:27:59 ◼   ► even though we know we're not gonna win anything at the end just so how mad we are at you how to

00:28:03 ◼   ► to show how Apple is irrationally aggressive

00:28:05 ◼   ► with his intellectual property

00:28:06 ◼   ► and to try to stop people from stealing their things.

00:28:08 ◼   ► But if that is their purpose, which I don't think it is,

00:28:12 ◼   ► it's stupid because what everyone else has learned

00:28:13 ◼   ► from this is if you have deep enough pockets,

00:28:15 ◼   ► you can steal everything Apple does

00:28:17 ◼   ► and you'll get a slap on the wrist after a couple years,

00:28:19 ◼   ► but you will reap the huge market benefits

00:28:21 ◼   ► of having stolen their stuff.

00:28:23 ◼   ► Again, this presumes that you believe in patents

00:28:25 ◼   ► and all the other stuff, which I do not

00:28:27 ◼   ► and I don't think Marco does either.

00:28:28 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm glad to see Apple and Google

00:28:31 ◼   ► dismiss their current lawsuits.

00:28:33 ◼   ► I'm glad to see them concentrate on doing better things,

00:28:37 ◼   ► making their products better,

00:28:38 ◼   ► and maybe helping patent reform.

00:28:40 ◼   ► - Maybe.

00:28:41 ◼   ► - Do we really think that, A,

00:28:43 ◼   ► they're actually going to do anything

00:28:45 ◼   ► to try to reform patents,

00:28:47 ◼   ► and B, even if they want to,

00:28:49 ◼   ► is there anything they can really do?

00:28:51 ◼   ► - I think they will.

00:28:51 ◼   ► Like, they do lobbying.

00:28:53 ◼   ► Apple and Google do lobby for their interests in Washington.

00:28:55 ◼   ► It's just that their money is massively outweighed

00:28:57 ◼   ► by the people on the other side of this.

00:29:00 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I mean,

00:29:01 ◼   ► It's good to see more of the good guys, good guys being people that I agree with, obviously,

00:29:06 ◼   ► getting into the fight. But realistically speaking, the bad guys on the other side have

00:29:13 ◼   ► way more money and way more influence. And the whole thing is about patents. Like,

00:29:17 ◼   ► that's the reason when I talk about patents at Hypercritical that I didn't talk at all

00:29:20 ◼   ► about changing the system, because it's in the Constitution. Like, good luck with that.

00:29:24 ◼   ► You can't get people to agree. You can't even get laws passed that 90 percent of the people

00:29:28 ◼   ► in the country agree with. Good luck trying to get something that's in the Constitution. So,

00:29:31 ◼   ► So I have dim hopes that things will get fixed there.

00:29:34 ◼   ► But I do like to see these companies actually

00:29:38 ◼   ► fighting for their interests when their interests align

00:29:41 ◼   ► with mine.

00:29:42 ◼   ► We are also sponsored this week by our friends at Backblaze.

00:29:45 ◼   ► So Backblaze is, quite simply, it is online backup.

00:29:49 ◼   ► It's $5 a month.

00:29:51 ◼   ► It is native to the Mac.

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00:30:14 ◼   ► I have, from my computer, I have about a terabyte.

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00:30:50 ◼   ► They also have iOS and Android apps, I believe.

00:30:53 ◼   ► At least they have iOS apps.

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00:30:56 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm going to go with that at least.

00:30:58 ◼   ► They have an iOS app where you can access any of your files that are backup to backblaze

00:31:02 ◼   ► from anywhere you are from your iOS device, simply and securely.

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00:32:07 ◼   ► There's another reason you should go to backblaze.com. They have a great blog where they do what

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00:32:30 ◼   ► failure rates with temperature changes.

00:32:32 ◼   ► It's just awesome stuff if you care about storage,

00:32:34 ◼   ► just to look at, you know, it's kind of like, you know,

00:32:38 ◼   ► open source type development where they discover things

00:32:42 ◼   ► as over the course of doing their work

00:32:44 ◼   ► and then they write about it in this sort of an open way.

00:32:46 ◼   ► And you're like, oh, don't you want your competitors

00:32:47 ◼   ► not knowing how you do things?

00:32:48 ◼   ► So like, they don't care.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Here's everything we learned.

00:32:50 ◼   ► Here's the reliability rates for hard drives

00:32:53 ◼   ► over multiple years.

00:32:54 ◼   ► They have like, what did they say?

00:32:55 ◼   ► Like 34,000 hard drives or something?

00:32:56 ◼   ► So they have a pretty good sample size going.

00:32:58 ◼   ► I love reading that stuff.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And it makes it, it should be unrelated to the product,

00:33:02 ◼   ► but it makes me feel better using the product,

00:33:04 ◼   ► reading those blog posts.

00:33:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, I definitely enjoy those myself as well.

00:33:08 ◼   ► So Beats.

00:33:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, Apple supposedly is spending some serious money.

00:33:14 ◼   ► - Well, that's the best part of the story

00:33:16 ◼   ► before we even get to the story.

00:33:17 ◼   ► The best, my favorite part of the story is the,

00:33:20 ◼   ► and I'm sure you two both do the same thing,

00:33:23 ◼   ► you'll see some tweets go by

00:33:25 ◼   ► and you can infer what it is they're about.

00:33:28 ◼   ► 'Cause they're like the first,

00:33:29 ◼   ► maybe the first couple of tweets you see

00:33:30 ◼   ► don't link to any story,

00:33:31 ◼   ► but they make some kind of vague comment.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And you know something's up.

00:33:34 ◼   ► Sometimes you know a company's involved,

00:33:37 ◼   ► but you're not sure what the deal is.

00:33:38 ◼   ► And then you have to like scroll and you see a couple more.

00:33:41 ◼   ► If you're lucky, some person will put a link in,

00:33:43 ◼   ► a link to a story that explains what it's talking about.

00:33:45 ◼   ► But a lot of the times, in my experience anyway,

00:33:47 ◼   ► I'll just get the commentary.

00:33:48 ◼   ► I won't get the story.

00:33:49 ◼   ► and I had to figure out what it's about.

00:33:51 ◼   ► And so, you know, and do my own,

00:33:53 ◼   ► sometimes you go to Google

00:33:54 ◼   ► and you just type in a couple of keywords

00:33:55 ◼   ► and then you find like the top result.

00:33:57 ◼   ► And so this one was that, you know,

00:33:58 ◼   ► Apple was supposedly in talks to buy Beats,

00:34:01 ◼   ► the music company that makes the headphones

00:34:04 ◼   ► and has the streaming media,

00:34:05 ◼   ► music service and stuff like that.

00:34:07 ◼   ► And the next question is, did they already buy them

00:34:10 ◼   ► and people are writing snarky tweets

00:34:11 ◼   ► about the fact that it happened or is it just a rumor?

00:34:13 ◼   ► And so more googling around, you find,

00:34:15 ◼   ► oh, it's just like, you know, an article that says

00:34:18 ◼   ► Apple is in talks to blah, blah, blah, right?

00:34:21 ◼   ► And that process repeated itself

00:34:22 ◼   ► and continues to repeat itself to this very day.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Every time I see people tweeting about it,

00:34:26 ◼   ► people will write headlines like why Apple bought Beats.

00:34:29 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, did they announce it?

00:34:30 ◼   ► Nope, nope, not yet.

00:34:31 ◼   ► Why Apple should buy Beats?

00:34:33 ◼   ► Okay, I kind of get that one.

00:34:34 ◼   ► You know, it's like why Apple buying Beats

00:34:36 ◼   ► is the best thing ever, I can't really tell.

00:34:38 ◼   ► So I'm constantly, every time I see tweet,

00:34:39 ◼   ► it's like, did they announce it?

00:34:40 ◼   ► Did they announce it?

00:34:41 ◼   ► And since it's been going on for what, a week now?

00:34:43 ◼   ► More than a week?

00:34:44 ◼   ► It's just, it's both frustrating and hysterical

00:34:47 ◼   ► that this can be a story without actually there being an announcement yet.

00:34:51 ◼   ► So suppose it's real because I think there's there's enough.

00:34:57 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. No, there's tons of smoke.

00:35:00 ◼   ► It's just and there's been no denials from anybody. Yeah, right.

00:35:03 ◼   ► And it's been it was reported by The Wall Street Journal at first.

00:35:06 ◼   ► Like these are you know, there's this is pretty substantial smoke.

00:35:09 ◼   ► So I would say it's very likely to be real at this point.

00:35:12 ◼   ► All right. So the next question is, why has it not been announced?

00:35:15 ◼   ► assuming we all believe that it's real and with everything points in that direction,

00:35:20 ◼   ► why no announcement?

00:35:21 ◼   ► Well, you know, they could just be delaying it until WWDC to combine it into one big PR

00:35:25 ◼   ► announcement. It could just really not be finished, you know, not be a done deal yet,

00:35:29 ◼   ► so they kind of can't and shouldn't talk about it yet. You know, there's lots of plausible

00:35:32 ◼   ► reasons why it was, you know, leaked but not announced yet.

00:35:36 ◼   ► WWDC was my guess as well, but then, like, why leak so early? That seems like if it was

00:35:41 ◼   ► a planned leak--

00:35:42 ◼   ► It's not that early.

00:35:43 ◼   ► I guess maybe I'm in denial about when I'm going to have to be on a plane for six hours,

00:35:46 ◼   ► but it's coming up soon, isn't it?

00:35:50 ◼   ► But yeah, I think this is a little bit weird because normally Apple's sort of planned leaks

00:35:54 ◼   ► happen in closer proximity.

00:35:58 ◼   ► Maybe this was just an unplanned leak or whatever.

00:36:00 ◼   ► But anyway, it's a weird story, the fact that it just lives on in the zombie mode.

00:36:05 ◼   ► Everyone is writing as if it has already happened, which will be funny if it doesn't happen for

00:36:10 ◼   ► some weird reason, but just like we've moved on now.

00:36:13 ◼   ► Now we're just talking about the repercussions of this deal

00:36:15 ◼   ► that hasn't been announced.

00:36:16 ◼   ► All right, so anyway, we can talk about the actual deal.

00:36:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, so if it's true,

00:36:21 ◼   ► let's assume for now it's true.

00:36:22 ◼   ► So it's really interesting, 'cause first of all,

00:36:26 ◼   ► yeah, it's for $3 billion,

00:36:27 ◼   ► and that's more than what they bought Next for,

00:36:28 ◼   ► but these days, that's a mid-priced acquisition.

00:36:33 ◼   ► That's not even a massive acquisition in tech anymore.

00:36:36 ◼   ► So okay, it's a lot of money,

00:36:38 ◼   ► but they are a profitable hardware company.

00:36:41 ◼   ► I think somebody said that Beats makes

00:36:43 ◼   ► like a billion dollars a year, something like that.

00:36:46 ◼   ► So the price really isn't that crazy for that.

00:36:50 ◼   ► But anyway, so it's unusual for Apple.

00:36:54 ◼   ► It's worth mentioning because this is not

00:36:57 ◼   ► the kind of acquisition Apple has really ever done.

00:36:59 ◼   ► You know, normally they buy small technology companies

00:37:02 ◼   ► that are doing something cool and they buy them

00:37:04 ◼   ► for the technology or for the people

00:37:06 ◼   ► and you never hear about it.

00:37:09 ◼   ► They don't buy big established consumer brands

00:37:12 ◼   ► and like Beats and do God knows what with it.

00:37:17 ◼   ► This is very unlike Apple.

00:37:18 ◼   ► But this is a new Apple, this is Tim Cook's Apple

00:37:22 ◼   ► and it's a shifting landscape

00:37:24 ◼   ► and Apple does what they think is best

00:37:26 ◼   ► and I think there's a lot of reasons why this makes sense.

00:37:30 ◼   ► A lot of people are like, "What are they gonna do?

00:37:31 ◼   ► This doesn't make any sense, this is stupid."

00:37:33 ◼   ► I think this makes tons of sense.

00:37:36 ◼   ► Before I explain why, what do you guys think about it?

00:37:39 ◼   ► - I don't really have that much of an opinion,

00:37:42 ◼   ► which bothers me because I know I should.

00:37:44 ◼   ► But I've thought about it on and off

00:37:46 ◼   ► since we heard this going on.

00:37:49 ◼   ► And the only opinion I have about it

00:37:53 ◼   ► is that I'm really pissed off

00:37:54 ◼   ► that I didn't immediately think to pitch Dr. Dre

00:37:58 ◼   ► as the WWDC Beer Bash artist.

00:38:01 ◼   ► It took me a couple days to think of that joke.

00:38:03 ◼   ► - He's way too big for that.

00:38:05 ◼   ► - Oh, I know.

00:38:05 ◼   ► It took me a couple days to think of that joke though and I'm a little bothered by that.

00:38:08 ◼   ► But I mean, I guess it makes sense.

00:38:10 ◼   ► It's hard to...

00:38:12 ◼   ► There are two wildly different businesses that Beats has.

00:38:16 ◼   ► There's the streaming music service, kind of similar to Spotify, although I've never

00:38:19 ◼   ► used it.

00:38:21 ◼   ► And then there's the headphones.

00:38:23 ◼   ► And from everything I've heard from audio files, which I don't want to piss them off

00:38:29 ◼   ► ever again, because by God, that was a mistake.

00:38:32 ◼   ► That was awesome.

00:38:33 ◼   ► You and I have different definitions of awesome.

00:38:36 ◼   ► Anyway, every audiophile I've ever heard who has had a set of Beats headphones on their

00:38:42 ◼   ► head says that they're terrible.

00:38:44 ◼   ► Now I am not saying that's right, I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm just saying that's

00:38:49 ◼   ► what I've heard.

00:38:50 ◼   ► And I've never tried them.

00:38:51 ◼   ► I probably should find a pair somewhere that's been on 3,000 years because they're at like

00:38:55 ◼   ► a Best Buy or whatever and try them.

00:38:57 ◼   ► But there's the hardware business and then there's the streaming music business, which

00:39:02 ◼   ► which supposedly is very, very good.

00:39:04 ◼   ► And then once you talk about the streaming music business,

00:39:07 ◼   ► do they get, does Apple get licenses?

00:39:09 ◼   ► If they just buy up Beats and otherwise leave them alone,

00:39:14 ◼   ► does Beats keep the licenses?

00:39:15 ◼   ► There's like so many different moving parts here.

00:39:17 ◼   ► And I just, I don't know what to make of it.

00:39:19 ◼   ► And I can't decide if it's good, bad,

00:39:22 ◼   ► or somewhere in between.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Jon, what do you think?

00:39:25 ◼   ► - This is weird in a couple of ways.

00:39:26 ◼   ► A lot of them have to be speculative ways

00:39:28 ◼   ► because it hasn't been announced.

00:39:31 ◼   ► we don't know anything about it. And so everyone has to first decide, okay, assuming it's true,

00:39:35 ◼   ► does Apple keep the Beats brand or do they fold it in? Does Apple keep the streaming service or

00:39:40 ◼   ► just use the technology to make a new service? Does Apple keep the headphones or ditch them?

00:39:43 ◼   ► And so everyone has to sort of build their own Beats acquisition. It's like a kid.

00:39:47 ◼   ► So I think they're going to keep the brand. They're going to drop the headphones. They're

00:39:51 ◼   ► going to integrate the streaming service with iTunes Radio. I think they're going to keep the

00:39:53 ◼   ► brand and keep the streaming service but drop the headphones. I think they're going to keep

00:39:56 ◼   ► the headphones but drop the streaming service and keep, you know, there's so many possible

00:39:59 ◼   ► I think the licenses won't come with them because they'll have to be renegotiated. No, actually I think licenses will come with them

00:40:04 ◼   ► Actually, I don't think it doesn't matter because they're gonna have the Beats guys negotiate with the record labels instead of Apple

00:40:08 ◼   ► No do better. Why will they do better? Isn't it? Once they become part of Apple don't they become the enemy as well?

00:40:13 ◼   ► You know, it's like so many permutations and so many unknowns. It's hard to solve for things a few things

00:40:17 ◼   ► I think we can address and I think Marco talked about some of them already here

00:40:20 ◼   ► One the people saying this is a sign of weakness because if Apple has to go outside for this stuff

00:40:26 ◼   ► It shouldn't have to go outside the company for this. This is in its strength

00:40:28 ◼   ► Why does it have to buy another company to do streaming music? Why does that divide on the company to do headphones?

00:40:33 ◼   ► Why does have to buy another company to do to make deals with record labels?

00:40:36 ◼   ► It's a sign of weakness that strategy always worked for Microsoft keep everything in-house

00:40:40 ◼   ► Don't never look anything outside never admit anything outside is better than what you have

00:40:43 ◼   ► Well, the thing is Apple has never been like that when they wanted to get semiconductor manufacturing expertise

00:40:48 ◼   ► They bought PA semi when they wanted to you know

00:40:52 ◼   ► well, this is a bad example,

00:40:53 ◼   ► they wanted to upgrade their store,

00:40:54 ◼   ► they bought that company that did the app store thing,

00:40:57 ◼   ► that Chomper or whatever it was.

00:40:59 ◼   ► They're constantly buying outside companies

00:41:00 ◼   ► right in the areas of expertise

00:41:02 ◼   ► because it's hard to staff up,

00:41:04 ◼   ► and it's much easier to buy a bunch of experienced people

00:41:07 ◼   ► who've already done what you want.

00:41:08 ◼   ► They're constantly buying,

00:41:09 ◼   ► these small companies they're buying,

00:41:10 ◼   ► it's because they have people and technology

00:41:12 ◼   ► that Apple wants, and yes, they do fold them in,

00:41:14 ◼   ► but that's a separate question.

00:41:15 ◼   ► So I don't think this acquisition

00:41:16 ◼   ► is a sign of Apple's weakness,

00:41:17 ◼   ► and I don't think it's unprecedented to acquire companies

00:41:22 ◼   ► that have things that Apple wants

00:41:23 ◼   ► instead of building them all in-house.

00:41:25 ◼   ► So that's all fine.

00:41:26 ◼   ► Unprecedented would be keeping the Beats brand

00:41:28 ◼   ► and keeping it separate from Apple,

00:41:29 ◼   ► 'cause they don't do that.

00:41:30 ◼   ► Once you get acquired by Apple historically,

00:41:32 ◼   ► your people and your technology become part

00:41:33 ◼   ► of the Apple fold and whatever branding

00:41:35 ◼   ► and product you have before it goes away.

00:41:37 ◼   ► And that works with small companies,

00:41:38 ◼   ► but once you're buying companies

00:41:39 ◼   ► for multiple billions of dollars,

00:41:40 ◼   ► it's like, do we really wanna throw away that brand?

00:41:43 ◼   ► And that brings me to me,

00:41:44 ◼   ► to what I think this acquisition is about,

00:41:46 ◼   ► this phantom acquisition with no announced parameters,

00:41:49 ◼   ► so that I have to just speculate about.

00:41:51 ◼   ► And this says one thing to me and one thing about the future of Apple, and we'll talk

00:41:55 ◼   ► about it if we ever talk about wearables, is fashion, which has always been a part of

00:41:59 ◼   ► what Apple does.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Every part of the research in Apple has been about fashion in some way from the Bondi Blue

00:42:06 ◼   ► iMac to the iPod and all their advertisements on television with the dancing silhouette

00:42:14 ◼   ► people.

00:42:15 ◼   ► Yes, fashion has always been part of Apple.

00:42:17 ◼   ► I think is going further down that road with a possible wearable coming out the line and what does beats bring?

00:42:24 ◼   ► Beats is a fashion phenomenon. You talked about the the quality of the headphones not being a great in fashion

00:42:30 ◼   ► It doesn't matter that much when the quality of the headphones is

00:42:33 ◼   ► It's the fact that they're cool and that people like them and you can say they're right or wrong to like them

00:42:38 ◼   ► But they are definitely in fashion the streaming

00:42:40 ◼   ► Service as well

00:42:43 ◼   ► Could Apple do a streaming service sure, you know Beats is not a big streaming services, you know Spotify and RDO are way bigger

00:42:49 ◼   ► But beats seems to have a good brand and it's possible and people like their streaming service

00:42:55 ◼   ► And if Apple got behind it they could get the numbers up

00:42:58 ◼   ► but this just I mean without knowing anything this definitely seems like a

00:43:02 ◼   ► Fashion acquisition and when you buy something with fashion like if Apple bought Versace or something, which I'm probably mispronouncing. Sorry fashion people

00:43:10 ◼   ► They would not get rid of the brand like you buy Calvin Klein

00:43:13 ◼   ► You don't say and we're not gonna use the Calvin Klein name anymore

00:43:15 ◼   ► Of course, you're gonna use the name like that's what you bought

00:43:17 ◼   ► So if I'm right and that Apple has bought beats because of for fashion reasons

00:43:22 ◼   ► I have to think that it's going to keep the brand because you don't buy something

00:43:25 ◼   ► You don't buy a fashion company and then throw away the name brand

00:43:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I think you're on the right track with all this. I mean

00:43:33 ◼   ► So I think again first to address that questions everyone's asking, you know, what will they do with the beats brand?

00:43:38 ◼   ► I think it's a no-brainer. The beats brand is really strong

00:43:40 ◼   ► They're gonna keep it, no question.

00:43:42 ◼   ► Like it would be royally stupid to shut all this down

00:43:47 ◼   ► and be like, all right, these are now just Apple headphones

00:43:50 ◼   ► and this is now the new iTunes Radio 2.0.

00:43:52 ◼   ► That would be a huge mistake.

00:43:54 ◼   ► I really, I don't think Apple is stupid in this regard.

00:43:58 ◼   ► That would be royally stupid.

00:44:00 ◼   ► So that's one thing.

00:44:01 ◼   ► The other thing is, if you look at,

00:44:06 ◼   ► this is two very different businesses, right?

00:44:08 ◼   ► This is headphones, headphone hardware,

00:44:11 ◼   ► that's the premium price segment that is very high margin

00:44:15 ◼   ► versus this music service which is probably very low margin

00:44:20 ◼   ► and not very popular yet.

00:44:23 ◼   ► So here's what I think.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Basically, the Beats headphones,

00:44:29 ◼   ► people think I'm all up in arms about Beats headphones

00:44:32 ◼   ► because they're bad.

00:44:33 ◼   ► And the fact is I don't think they're that bad.

00:44:35 ◼   ► They're not great and you can,

00:44:37 ◼   ► It's like Bose, Bose headphones are not bad headphones.

00:44:42 ◼   ► You can just get better sound quality

00:44:44 ◼   ► at those prices from other brands.

00:44:47 ◼   ► Or you can get better sound quality for less,

00:44:49 ◼   ► usually from other brands that are less well known

00:44:52 ◼   ► or less fashionable or just targeted differently

00:44:56 ◼   ► or prioritized differently.

00:44:58 ◼   ► So Beats headphones are not terrible.

00:45:01 ◼   ► They're better than the earbuds, certainly.

00:45:03 ◼   ► They're better than any earbud I've ever tried.

00:45:06 ◼   ► And they look nice and they're pretty comfortable.

00:45:11 ◼   ► Most of them are.

00:45:12 ◼   ► So really, that's pretty good.

00:45:15 ◼   ► And they don't necessarily sound accurate.

00:45:19 ◼   ► They do not accurately represent

00:45:21 ◼   ► with a flat frequency response.

00:45:23 ◼   ► But most people don't like flat frequency responses.

00:45:25 ◼   ► Most people like a boost in bass and treble.

00:45:28 ◼   ► And that's what they supposedly do.

00:45:30 ◼   ► And so they make the sound more appealing,

00:45:34 ◼   ► even if it's artificial.

00:45:36 ◼   ► And so you combine the whole package here,

00:45:40 ◼   ► it's pretty appealing to people.

00:45:42 ◼   ► You have good looking headphones that are cool,

00:45:45 ◼   ► they're from a popular brand,

00:45:47 ◼   ► and they sound appealing to you,

00:45:50 ◼   ► and they make you look good,

00:45:52 ◼   ► or they make you look like a status symbol.

00:45:54 ◼   ► That's a very appealing thing.

00:45:57 ◼   ► Now, I was in an Apple store a couple days ago,

00:46:00 ◼   ► and they had these two giant tables set up

00:46:03 ◼   ► with all premium headphones.

00:46:05 ◼   ► Like the cheapest pair of headphones on these tables

00:46:07 ◼   ► was I think 200 bucks, probably the Bose AE series.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And I tried a bunch of them

00:46:12 ◼   ► 'cause I had to wait a little while.

00:46:13 ◼   ► And the Beats ones were fine.

00:46:15 ◼   ► Like, you know, they didn't sound amazing,

00:46:18 ◼   ► but they sounded good, you know, just not great.

00:46:21 ◼   ► They didn't sound like $300,

00:46:23 ◼   ► but they sounded like maybe 80 bucks.

00:46:26 ◼   ► You know, like I've had $80 headphones

00:46:28 ◼   ► that sounded worse than that.

00:46:29 ◼   ► - Now really quickly, what is the price point

00:46:31 ◼   ► for a set of Beats headphones?

00:46:33 ◼   ► Because I genuinely don't know.

00:46:34 ◼   ► - I believe they span two to four,

00:46:36 ◼   ► or two to three at least.

00:46:37 ◼   ► - A hundred?

00:46:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, something like that.

00:46:39 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:46:40 ◼   ► - And I'm actually not that familiar with the product line.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Like I'll try them out in the Apple store

00:46:43 ◼   ► every once in a while,

00:46:43 ◼   ► but I don't usually do more than that.

00:46:47 ◼   ► But if you look at everything else

00:46:49 ◼   ► in that segment in the store,

00:46:50 ◼   ► everything else they have at the Apple store

00:46:52 ◼   ► on those tables,

00:46:53 ◼   ► they're all these like premium fashiony brands,

00:46:56 ◼   ► brands like Bose or Bang and Olufsen,

00:46:58 ◼   ► like these like super high end brands

00:47:00 ◼   ► that audio files really don't even look twice at

00:47:03 ◼   ► because their sound profiles are almost never very neutral.

00:47:07 ◼   ► They usually have a pretty, pretty wacky sound profile

00:47:12 ◼   ► like the frequency response line is nowhere near flat.

00:47:15 ◼   ► And so, you know, for audio files,

00:47:18 ◼   ► that's not really what we're looking for

00:47:20 ◼   ► but the fact is these headphones are popular.

00:47:23 ◼   ► They're expensive, they're nice, they're well made,

00:47:26 ◼   ► they look cool, they are usually extremely comfortable

00:47:29 ◼   ► lightweight. Some of them have noise canceling, which is a very useful feature for travelers,

00:47:33 ◼   ► air travelers especially. So like, they're useful to people, they're practical. So it's a very

00:47:38 ◼   ► successful headphone brand in a very successful segment that is booming partially, in fact,

00:47:43 ◼   ► a lot because of Beats. Beats has made this segment popular among young people who were

00:47:48 ◼   ► previously just wearing crappy earbuds. So if you like Beats to me, and I mean this in the good and

00:47:55 ◼   ► in bad ways, there are good ways here,

00:47:58 ◼   ► Beats has done to headphones what Starbucks did for coffee.

00:48:01 ◼   ► You know, it isn't the best coffee,

00:48:04 ◼   ► but it brought coffee to the masses

00:48:06 ◼   ► that was above and beyond both the price

00:48:10 ◼   ► and the quality of like 7-Eleven crap

00:48:12 ◼   ► that you'd get at gas stations.

00:48:13 ◼   ► And that's, you know, Beats has done that to headphones.

00:48:15 ◼   ► It's way better than earbuds by a long shot.

00:48:19 ◼   ► It's way better than the crappy little,

00:48:20 ◼   ► you know, $20 things you get, you know, at the drugstore.

00:48:24 ◼   ► It's a lot more expensive and you can do a lot better,

00:48:29 ◼   ► but it's bringing, it brought full-sized headphones

00:48:32 ◼   ► to the masses again.

00:48:34 ◼   ► And it's bringing this whole category

00:48:36 ◼   ► of expensive headphones to the masses

00:48:39 ◼   ► and making that cool, making it cool to walk around

00:48:41 ◼   ► wearing anything beyond earbuds.

00:48:43 ◼   ► I mean, I would love to walk around

00:48:46 ◼   ► wearing nice big headphones that sound good,

00:48:48 ◼   ► but until about this year,

00:48:50 ◼   ► I would have felt like an idiot walking around like that

00:48:52 ◼   ► 'cause I would look ridiculous.

00:48:54 ◼   ► Now, everyone's wearing big headphones,

00:48:57 ◼   ► and that was largely started by Beats.

00:48:59 ◼   ► So anyway, it's a very good headphone brand.

00:49:02 ◼   ► It's not for me, but it's a very good successful brand.

00:49:06 ◼   ► And they're selling a lot of $300 things in Apple stores.

00:49:09 ◼   ► And it's a very high margin business.

00:49:11 ◼   ► So I look at this primarily as a retail buy.

00:49:15 ◼   ► Like I think the music service,

00:49:16 ◼   ► I'll get to that in a second,

00:49:17 ◼   ► but I think the music service

00:49:18 ◼   ► is actually a secondary deal here.

00:49:20 ◼   ► I think this is primarily about the retail headphone brand.

00:49:23 ◼   ► and they already have tons of real estate in Apple stores.

00:49:27 ◼   ► Apple sells a ton of them,

00:49:28 ◼   ► and they're gonna get a nice boost

00:49:30 ◼   ► in just retail margins from this.

00:49:33 ◼   ► - But do they really need that?

00:49:34 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know.

00:49:35 ◼   ► I don't buy that they're not going to make Beats headphones

00:49:39 ◼   ► become Apple headphones,

00:49:41 ◼   ► 'cause they don't need more money.

00:49:42 ◼   ► I mean, they're freaking printing money, Apple is.

00:49:45 ◼   ► - Well, no, but think of it as a strategic thing,

00:49:47 ◼   ► like about wearables.

00:49:48 ◼   ► How many things does Apple sell that you wear

00:49:50 ◼   ► that they're successful selling?

00:49:52 ◼   ► I mean, the earbuds.

00:49:54 ◼   ► - I guess them and it kind of like the iPod Nano

00:49:57 ◼   ► at various times has clipped to you

00:49:59 ◼   ► or the shuffle stuff like that.

00:50:00 ◼   ► But like, it's clear that,

00:50:02 ◼   ► seems clear that Apple wants to get into wearables.

00:50:04 ◼   ► Beats is a company that sells something you wear

00:50:07 ◼   ► that is very popular.

00:50:09 ◼   ► And like, and even though I said,

00:50:10 ◼   ► I think they'll keep the brand,

00:50:12 ◼   ► the reason this build your own acquisition thing

00:50:14 ◼   ► is so much fun is all scenarios are plausible

00:50:17 ◼   ► 'cause it would be plausible that they bought Beats,

00:50:20 ◼   ► they will destroy the Beats brand

00:50:22 ◼   ► never use it and merely have bought it because they want the expertise of people who know how

00:50:27 ◼   ► to sell something expensive that you wear that is cool and say please do that for us and they want

00:50:31 ◼   ► Jimmy Iovine to do deals with the record labels because he knows them or whatever like that is

00:50:36 ◼   ► less likely than what I think but it's not it's not outside the realm of possibility like most

00:50:39 ◼   ► people aren't talking about that but do you guys think that's impossible that they would ditch the

00:50:43 ◼   ► headphones turn the streaming service into an apple streaming service and what they would be

00:50:48 ◼   ► be getting out of deals is relationships with music companies, if not necessarily license

00:50:51 ◼   ► agreements depending what the legality is, and the expertise of a company that had figured

00:50:56 ◼   ► out how to build something with 300 bucks that people wear that they'll happily buy.

00:51:00 ◼   ► Well, so let's get to the music thing then, because I think, again, I think the headphone

00:51:06 ◼   ► business is way too big and successful for Apple to shut down that brand or get rid of

00:51:12 ◼   ► that.

00:51:13 ◼   ► Mmm, I still disagree.

00:51:15 ◼   ► People love Beats.

00:51:16 ◼   ► Everyone except audiophiles loves Beats.

00:51:18 ◼   ► But see, if they killed the business, it would leave a vacuum in the market.

00:51:21 ◼   ► Because as Marco pointed out, this is like the Starbucks moment for big headphones.

00:51:26 ◼   ► Kind of like a retread of the '70s where big headphones were in briefly, or the '60s and

00:51:29 ◼   ► '70s where big headphones were in then, mostly because you couldn't have decent sounding

00:51:32 ◼   ► small headphones.

00:51:34 ◼   ► But I don't think it's implausible that they would ditch it entirely.

00:51:40 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:51:41 ◼   ► anything they would become Beats by Apple and then it would become just Apple.

00:51:46 ◼   ► Like maybe they don't flush the Beats brand in its entirety immediately, but I don't know

00:51:51 ◼   ► if they're after headphones at all, which obviously none of us know if that's the case,

00:51:55 ◼   ► but if they're after headphones, I don't see the point in owning a company that continues

00:52:01 ◼   ► to operate autonomously when you've already got a crap load of money.

00:52:06 ◼   ► It'd be one thing if Apple was barely profitable and then they buy this hugely profitable business,

00:52:10 ◼   ► Okay, well in that case don't mess with what works but Apple, like I said, they're printing

00:52:16 ◼   ► money.

00:52:17 ◼   ► Why would they not fold that into the Apple brand and hopefully bring those customers

00:52:22 ◼   ► with them?

00:52:23 ◼   ► But they would, by getting rid of the Beats brand, you'd be putting a void in the market

00:52:27 ◼   ► and who fills that void?

00:52:28 ◼   ► You're hoping it will be Apple to fill that void but you'd be immediately created.

00:52:31 ◼   ► It's like if Starbucks folded and then it would be like, well, but someone's got to

00:52:34 ◼   ► buy their, you know, high priced coffee from somewhere.

00:52:36 ◼   ► I'm not saying stop having Starbucks stores.

00:52:39 ◼   ► I'm saying put the words blue bottle on the store

00:52:44 ◼   ► instead of Starbucks, you know, or whatever.

00:52:45 ◼   ► - Please email Casey.

00:52:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, but what they're selling is the brand though.

00:52:50 ◼   ► Like, you know what I mean?

00:52:50 ◼   ► Like Beats is not the headphone.

00:52:53 ◼   ► If someone else sold the headphone

00:52:55 ◼   ► that looks slightly different

00:52:56 ◼   ► and didn't have the word Beats in front of it,

00:52:57 ◼   ► someone would ask you, hey, is that a new pair of Beats?

00:52:59 ◼   ► You'd say, no, it's what, insert name of credit knockoff.

00:53:02 ◼   ► You'd be creating a void in the market

00:53:04 ◼   ► that would have to be filled by somebody.

00:53:05 ◼   ► And it would be up to Apple to fight

00:53:07 ◼   ► with all the other people to fill that void.

00:53:09 ◼   ► "Oh, please buy our Apple headphones."

00:53:10 ◼   ► They're designed by the same guys who designed Beats.

00:53:12 ◼   ► - Fine, Beats by Apple.

00:53:13 ◼   ► - That will take over the cache that Beats had established.

00:53:17 ◼   ► And I mean, it's fashion, you know?

00:53:18 ◼   ► If Calvin Klein goes away,

00:53:20 ◼   ► you don't immediately get their market share

00:53:22 ◼   ► because you made them go away.

00:53:23 ◼   ► Like if you acquire Calvin Klein and sunset the brand,

00:53:26 ◼   ► you don't get all those customers automatically.

00:53:28 ◼   ► Everyone's gotta fight for them again.

00:53:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, and also like,

00:53:31 ◼   ► you can't underestimate the impact

00:53:32 ◼   ► that Beats has had on the market.

00:53:34 ◼   ► If you look around at any other headphone company,

00:53:37 ◼   ► like even old companies like Sennheiser, AKG,

00:53:41 ◼   ► you know, these big old headphone companies

00:53:43 ◼   ► that are making these things forever,

00:53:45 ◼   ► they all now have headphones in the $1 to $300 range

00:53:49 ◼   ► that have certain colors, colored cables,

00:53:52 ◼   ► like all this stuff, like all these design cues

00:53:55 ◼   ► and adjustments and these brands, brands,

00:53:58 ◼   ► all these like, these old boring brands

00:54:02 ◼   ► made these like new young model names

00:54:05 ◼   ► and like the Sennheiser Momentum and all this stuff

00:54:07 ◼   ► and they all look like Beats.

00:54:10 ◼   ► They all took all those design cues.

00:54:12 ◼   ► It's clearly inspired by Beats, if nothing else.

00:54:17 ◼   ► And yeah, they sound way better.

00:54:18 ◼   ► I would have the Sennheiser Momentum over Beats any day

00:54:20 ◼   ► even though I didn't even like the Momentum that much.

00:54:22 ◼   ► But it's impossible to understate

00:54:27 ◼   ► how dominant Beats is in this market

00:54:29 ◼   ► and how much their brand is really worth

00:54:32 ◼   ► and how much people have been inspired by it

00:54:34 ◼   ► and are aspiring to be like them.

00:54:37 ◼   ► And other headphone brands are copying them left and right,

00:54:39 ◼   ► trying to be more like them,

00:54:41 ◼   ► but they are dominant in this market.

00:54:42 ◼   ► So here's why I think this all ties in.

00:54:45 ◼   ► So the hardware business I think is very good.

00:54:49 ◼   ► It's a nice boost to their retail margins

00:54:51 ◼   ► and everything else, that's fine.

00:54:53 ◼   ► I think the bigger, and John, I think you're right

00:54:55 ◼   ► that this is more about Apple becoming a fashion

00:54:58 ◼   ► and lifestyle company.

00:54:59 ◼   ► That is a very, very good reason for this.

00:55:02 ◼   ► But I think the music angle and the cool factor is the biggest.

00:55:07 ◼   ► If you look at what iTunes is, iTunes is, it's never been that financially important

00:55:13 ◼   ► to Apple, but it's always been spiritually important and important for their public perception

00:55:19 ◼   ► in marketing and branding.

00:55:21 ◼   ► Steve Jobs said a long time ago, he had dismissed streaming services or the demand for them,

00:55:29 ◼   ► saying that people want to own their music.

00:55:32 ◼   ► And that has proven to be wrong.

00:55:34 ◼   ► Like many Steve Jobs dismissals over time.

00:55:38 ◼   ► I'm sure if he was still around today,

00:55:39 ◼   ► he would totally deny that and say,

00:55:41 ◼   ► oh yeah, streaming services are great,

00:55:42 ◼   ► 'cause now we have one, you know,

00:55:43 ◼   ► but in typical Jobs style.

00:55:46 ◼   ► But Steve Jobs was wrong.

00:55:49 ◼   ► And it turns out, sorry Merlin,

00:55:53 ◼   ► turns out that a lot of people don't care

00:55:55 ◼   ► about owning their music.

00:55:56 ◼   ► And a lot of people want streaming

00:55:57 ◼   ► and that's all they want.

00:55:58 ◼   ► I know so many people, I mean listen to the prompt,

00:56:00 ◼   ► every week I talk about this.

00:56:02 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:56:03 ◼   ► So many people just use streaming music now

00:56:06 ◼   ► and they don't even keep iTunes libraries anymore.

00:56:10 ◼   ► iTunes, like Apple is dominant in the digital music realm,

00:56:15 ◼   ► like in selling digital music.

00:56:17 ◼   ► But I think the world of selling digital music

00:56:19 ◼   ► is on the decline.

00:56:20 ◼   ► Like iTunes posted pretty disappointing numbers recently

00:56:22 ◼   ► and this has been kinda in the analysis

00:56:26 ◼   ► or in the analyst world a little bit.

00:56:28 ◼   ► but I think it's pretty clear that Apple

00:56:31 ◼   ► is the king of a sinking ship here.

00:56:32 ◼   ► This is a terrible mixed metaphor.

00:56:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:56:35 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:56:36 ◼   ► You know, Apple is so dominant in this world

00:56:41 ◼   ► that a whole bunch of people no longer care about.

00:56:45 ◼   ► And they try to get into streaming with iTunes Radio,

00:56:49 ◼   ► and nobody cares.

00:56:50 ◼   ► iTunes Radio is not that good.

00:56:51 ◼   ► I've used it here and there,

00:56:53 ◼   ► 'cause I don't use streaming enough

00:56:54 ◼   ► to get one of the better services,

00:56:56 ◼   ► but even I can look at iTunes Radio

00:56:57 ◼   ► and say this is, I think, the worst of the streaming

00:57:00 ◼   ► services.

00:57:01 ◼   ► And they're just not--

00:57:05 ◼   ► they're not getting it.

00:57:08 ◼   ► And Beats-- if you look at the other streaming services that

00:57:12 ◼   ► are more successful than Beats and raw user numbers,

00:57:14 ◼   ► I think they're a little bit less Apple-like.

00:57:17 ◼   ► Beats is much more about editorial choice

00:57:21 ◼   ► and featured playlists made by actual artists and editors

00:57:24 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:57:25 ◼   ► it's less about just pure algorithms.

00:57:28 ◼   ► And I think that's more Apple's style,

00:57:30 ◼   ► and I think that would fit in better with the iTunes store

00:57:32 ◼   ► if it was ever merged in,

00:57:33 ◼   ► where it's more about editorial curation

00:57:37 ◼   ► from the music industry.

00:57:38 ◼   ► That is kind of very Apple versus RDO or Spotify,

00:57:43 ◼   ► or the other ones.

00:57:44 ◼   ► I think it makes sense for them to buy,

00:57:46 ◼   ► and I think there's only,

00:57:48 ◼   ► they have to be realizing that Apple is run by a,

00:57:53 ◼   ► for the most part, the same very long standing group

00:57:57 ◼   ► of pretty uncool middle aged white guys

00:58:00 ◼   ► who work at a tech company in California.

00:58:03 ◼   ► And that was cool for a while,

00:58:05 ◼   ► and I think that time has passed, and I think they know it.

00:58:07 ◼   ► And it's pretty clear now that Apple is no longer

00:58:10 ◼   ► like inherently cool.

00:58:12 ◼   ► They make good stuff here and there that people like,

00:58:14 ◼   ► but Apple as a brand is no longer like just the coolest

00:58:19 ◼   ► thing in the world, where it was, you know,

00:58:22 ◼   ► three to five years ago, say.

00:58:23 ◼   ► It is no longer up in that peak.

00:58:25 ◼   ► And Beats is, you know, it's not as big as Apple,

00:58:30 ◼   ► but it is probably better regarded.

00:58:32 ◼   ► And it's certainly, in the area of music alone,

00:58:35 ◼   ► you know, obviously Beats doesn't make phones

00:58:37 ◼   ► and everything, in the area of music alone,

00:58:39 ◼   ► I think Beats is a way better and more promising brand

00:58:43 ◼   ► now and in the future than iTunes is.

00:58:46 ◼   ► I think iTunes is really on its way out of dominance

00:58:49 ◼   ► just because the thing it does is falling out of favor

00:58:51 ◼   ► so quickly and probably more quickly

00:58:53 ◼   ► than Apple even imagined.

00:58:54 ◼   ► And Beats is really good at it

00:58:56 ◼   ► and it has a really good foundation

00:58:58 ◼   ► and they can bring these people in,

00:58:59 ◼   ► they're gonna bring in the executives from Beats

00:59:02 ◼   ► and if the rumors are true,

00:59:05 ◼   ► they're gonna take on executive roles

00:59:06 ◼   ► and lead the music division at Apple,

00:59:08 ◼   ► that's awesome 'cause that's exactly what Apple needs.

00:59:11 ◼   ► - Let's think about why downloads,

00:59:14 ◼   ► why Steve Jobs thought the streaming wasn't a thing

00:59:18 ◼   ► and the downloads would be better.

00:59:20 ◼   ► I mean, a lot of it is that times change,

00:59:22 ◼   ► and the infrastructure changes that

00:59:25 ◼   ► make streaming more feasible.

00:59:26 ◼   ► But even when he said it, if he had thought about it

00:59:29 ◼   ► a little bit differently, I think

00:59:31 ◼   ► he would have realized that streaming was inevitable.

00:59:33 ◼   ► And maybe he did, because he very often did not

00:59:35 ◼   ► reveal his inner thinking about these things.

00:59:37 ◼   ► But it was like he was coming from an era

00:59:38 ◼   ► where there was two ways to get music.

00:59:41 ◼   ► You bought a record at the record store,

00:59:42 ◼   ► or you turn on the radio and listen to it.

00:59:44 ◼   ► And one, you controlled entirely,

00:59:45 ◼   ► and you purchased music, and you owned it.

00:59:46 ◼   ► You could pick which songs you wanted.

00:59:48 ◼   ► You could go to the store and buy them.

00:59:49 ◼   ► You could play them whenever you want.

00:59:51 ◼   ► And the other one you had no control over other than changing the radio station.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Even that was limited control due to payola and limited bandwidth and various other things.

00:59:59 ◼   ► But he should have seen coming is that, okay, we're offering a digital version of you going

01:00:03 ◼   ► to the record store and buying music.

01:00:05 ◼   ► There will be a digital version of the radio, but you will have some control over it.

01:00:09 ◼   ► It won't be like the radio radio where it's broadcast over certain wavelengths and you

01:00:13 ◼   ► all just receive it in a certain number of stations.

01:00:16 ◼   ► Why shouldn't the listener be able to have almost as much control over what they listen

01:00:20 ◼   ► to on a streaming service as they do buying things?

01:00:22 ◼   ► That's basically what's happened.

01:00:23 ◼   ► No one wants to listen to just a radio station that just plays music.

01:00:29 ◼   ► Oh yeah, radio sucks.

01:00:30 ◼   ► They want control.

01:00:32 ◼   ► These services are like, "Fine, we can give you that.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Give us a seed and we'll make you a playlist.

01:00:36 ◼   ► We'll have people editorially pick things.

01:00:38 ◼   ► We'll have you be able to say songs you don't want to hear again or songs that you do like."

01:00:43 ◼   ► All that technology is there.

01:00:45 ◼   ► Once that's there, you've got the buying music,

01:00:48 ◼   ► and now you've got the listening to the radio,

01:00:50 ◼   ► but the listening to the radio starts to have

01:00:51 ◼   ► almost all the advantages, in fact, some advantages

01:00:53 ◼   ► that buying music doesn't have, which is you're surprised

01:00:55 ◼   ► what's gonna come next, you're gonna discover

01:00:57 ◼   ► new music that way.

01:00:59 ◼   ► And yeah, the business model's different,

01:01:00 ◼   ► it's not free within terminal ads,

01:01:01 ◼   ► you have to pay some money for it,

01:01:03 ◼   ► or iTunes does have ads.

01:01:06 ◼   ► Is there a pay tier for iTunes radio?

01:01:07 ◼   ► I don't even know.

01:01:08 ◼   ► - It's heightened to iTunes match,

01:01:10 ◼   ► if you pay for iTunes match,

01:01:11 ◼   ► you don't get ads on iTunes radio.

01:01:12 ◼   ► Yeah. But anyway, it's streaming, but it's streaming with many, many of the advantages

01:01:19 ◼   ► of purchasing music. So it seems like it was almost inevitable that radio's been popular

01:01:23 ◼   ► forever. Why were people willing to put up with that crap? Well, it was a nice way to

01:01:26 ◼   ► ambiently have music on the go and be surprised, relatively.

01:01:29 ◼   ► No, it wasn't. Just our standards were lower. We had fewer alternatives. Radio has always

01:01:34 ◼   ► been terrible.

01:01:35 ◼   ► The idea that somehow purchasing music of your own would completely replace any kind

01:01:39 ◼   ► of broadcast medium, that was never going to happen, and it was clear that streaming

01:01:43 ◼   ► would be able to become the thing that it is today.

01:01:46 ◼   ► And interesting about Beats, and speaking of streaming and everything, people talk about

01:01:49 ◼   ► how Beats, and I just said it earlier, is so small in the streaming market compared

01:01:53 ◼   ► to the big players in the streaming market.

01:01:55 ◼   ► And even in the headphones market, I mean, yeah, they're the big gorilla in big expensive

01:01:59 ◼   ► headphones, but in the grand scheme of things, which I think is what Casey was getting at,

01:02:04 ◼   ► how much money is that?

01:02:05 ◼   ► A billion here, a billion there, Apple loses that in its sofa, right?

01:02:09 ◼   ► So when you're going to buy a company, and we talked about this with Facebook, you want

01:02:14 ◼   ► to buy it before you have to pay $19 billion.

01:02:17 ◼   ► If you think a company is going to be a $19 billion company, buy it when you can get them

01:02:21 ◼   ► for $3 billion.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And so all the people are saying, "Why would they buy this small company?"

01:02:27 ◼   ► It's buy low, sell high, or buy low, sell never.

01:02:30 ◼   ► It's not wait until they're gigantic and say, "Oh, I want to buy the number one streaming

01:02:34 ◼   ► company."

01:02:35 ◼   ► you know, the number one streaming company that is Spotify at this point, it would probably

01:02:39 ◼   ► cost them more, and it's not—this is a safer bet, because like I said, $3 billion,

01:02:44 ◼   ► if it goes out, the beats fizzle out, because fashion things often do, it ends up not being

01:02:49 ◼   ► Calvin Klein, but it ends up being, like, I don't know, the Swatch Watch or something

01:02:54 ◼   ► else from the 80s that kind of came and went. But that happens in fashion all the time.

01:02:58 ◼   ► Hey, you're only out $3 billion. No big deal, right?

01:03:03 ◼   ► Also, I mean and this is probably a much smaller concern, but it might it might grow to be a bigger one

01:03:07 ◼   ► Beats is on all the platforms or at least on Android. I mean who cares about Windows mobile, but it's on you know

01:03:14 ◼   ► So beats might be a way. I don't think Apple would ever swallow its pride and bring iTunes to Android

01:03:20 ◼   ► But but having beats radio, whatever. What's the music service called? Just called beats the beats music maybe yes beats music

01:03:28 ◼   ► OK, I don't think Apple would be opposed to keeping Beats Music

01:03:32 ◼   ► on Android and maintaining it and growing that business there

01:03:34 ◼   ► too.

01:03:35 ◼   ► So it's a way for them to--

01:03:36 ◼   ► for their music streaming business

01:03:39 ◼   ► to get to as many people as possible.

01:03:42 ◼   ► iTunes for Windows.

01:03:43 ◼   ► I mean, that's the precedent is sometimes

01:03:45 ◼   ► in some businesses that Apple wants to be in,

01:03:48 ◼   ► you have to be on other platforms.

01:03:51 ◼   ► If you want to be $0.70 market share of digital music players,

01:03:54 ◼   ► you need iTunes for Windows.

01:03:55 ◼   ► And if Apple ever wants to be some big number market

01:03:58 ◼   ► share in streaming music, they're gonna have to be

01:04:01 ◼   ► another platforms.

01:04:02 ◼   ► - Where is Beats Music available?

01:04:04 ◼   ► Is it only in the States?

01:04:06 ◼   ► - I think so, but it's a very young service.

01:04:09 ◼   ► Like usually, the streaming services start out

01:04:11 ◼   ► in one country and they broaden as they can negotiate

01:04:14 ◼   ► the rights everywhere else.

01:04:15 ◼   ► Beats has only been around for a few months, right?

01:04:18 ◼   ► It's a very young service.

01:04:19 ◼   ► - Launched at the end of January.

01:04:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it's, I'm pretty sure,

01:04:24 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that's not really that much of a concern

01:04:26 ◼   ► Like I'm sure if Apple really is buying Beats that they will make it available

01:04:30 ◼   ► worldwide as soon as they can negotiate all that. And I don't think that this is going to come inherently with the deals that Beats

01:04:36 ◼   ► negotiated already. I have a feeling there's got to be a clause in those contracts that says that they're that they get renegotiated

01:04:41 ◼   ► on acquisition.

01:04:43 ◼   ► But yeah, I should also point out that Beats apparently was MOG way back when and MOG was available is available or was

01:04:50 ◼   ► available in the US and Australia.

01:04:52 ◼   ► But I believe Beats is only available in the US. I think you're right.

01:04:56 ◼   ► But, well you know what's available worldwide?

01:04:58 ◼   ► Tell us Marco. Our next sponsor,

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01:06:41 ◼   ► - I'm hoping they put that in there

01:06:42 ◼   ► knowing how to read it like that.

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01:07:17 ◼   ► sorry, ASP.NET, sorry.

01:07:19 ◼   ► App.net, that would not be very useful these days.

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01:08:00 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

01:08:01 ◼   ► - Okay, so there's been some interesting developments

01:08:05 ◼   ► in the JavaScript world lately.

01:08:06 ◼   ► - There have?

01:08:07 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:08:08 ◼   ► - It's like he doesn't even read my Twitter feed.

01:08:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:08:11 ◼   ► - Or the show notes.

01:08:12 ◼   ► - I've been a little busy.

01:08:14 ◼   ► - Overcast isn't gonna ship this year,

01:08:15 ◼   ► so why are you bothering?

01:08:16 ◼   ► Hey-o!

01:08:17 ◼   ► So, there's been some interesting motion in WebKit and JavaScript.

01:08:24 ◼   ► And it's funny because I put a link in the show notes and I'm going to put it in the

01:08:28 ◼   ► chat and it's about how Java, or excuse me, WebKit is leveraging LLVM to do some

01:08:37 ◼   ► optimizations.

01:08:38 ◼   ► We'll get into what that means in just a second.

01:08:40 ◼   ► But it's funny because in the show notes, I knew that one or both of you, probably just

01:08:44 ◼   ► Marco was going to get snarky about JavaScript.

01:08:47 ◼   ► And so in the show notes I have JavaScript Optimization WebKit using LLVM, which is the

01:08:50 ◼   ► link.

01:08:51 ◼   ► Then in the show notes I have, or in our show notes I have, when do we realize that JavaScript

01:08:55 ◼   ► is for real?

01:08:56 ◼   ► Marco, explain to us how this is worse than HHVM.

01:09:00 ◼   ► And I don't want you to go there yet, but start thinking.

01:09:02 ◼   ► So what the crap are we talking about?

01:09:04 ◼   ► So I'm a little fuzzy on the boundaries, and John, interrupt me whenever you're ready.

01:09:08 ◼   ► But basically when you run JavaScript in WebKit, there are different stages of compilation

01:09:14 ◼   ► and an interpretation that the JavaScript will go through.

01:09:18 ◼   ► So at first crack, it'll just run the JavaScript

01:09:21 ◼   ► interpreted, which is very quick to get going,

01:09:24 ◼   ► but not terribly efficient, because it doesn't look

01:09:26 ◼   ► for ways to make the code that other people have written

01:09:30 ◼   ► to be a little leaner and a little more efficient.

01:09:33 ◼   ► If your code, if any bit of code runs so many times that it

01:09:37 ◼   ► crosses a threshold-- and this is where I start to get fuzzy--

01:09:41 ◼   ► it will do like a kind of quickie compilation into native code. Is that right, Jon? Or am

01:09:48 ◼   ► I already going off the rails? You should have stuck with broader generalities,

01:09:52 ◼   ► but I confess that I don't know the specifics either.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Okay. Well, let's keep it broad then. That's fine. Good call. So basically, with time,

01:09:58 ◼   ► you can go through several stages where each further stage requires a little bit more upfront

01:10:05 ◼   ► work, and in some cases, a lot more upfront work, but the results are that much quicker.

01:10:11 ◼   ► And the final stage was--

01:10:15 ◼   ► after the final stage, I should say--

01:10:17 ◼   ► the WebKit developers started thinking to themselves, well,

01:10:19 ◼   ► you know what?

01:10:19 ◼   ► We really should optimize this code that we've generated.

01:10:22 ◼   ► So we've taken JavaScript and kind of translated it into a

01:10:25 ◼   ► different kind of code.

01:10:26 ◼   ► We should try to optimize this really well.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Because if you've gotten all the way down this path, this

01:10:32 ◼   ► is something that we feel like is running a lot.

01:10:34 ◼   ► Oh, and to be clear, WebKit is the rendering engine that's

01:10:37 ◼   ► used in Safari and Chrome.

01:10:38 ◼   ► So if you've gotten all the way to stage three, which is

01:10:41 ◼   ► the maximum stage up until now, then you're running this code a lot.

01:10:45 ◼   ► It's already made as quick as can be without some serious optimizations.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Well they thought, "All right, well let's optimize this code and start trying to cut

01:10:52 ◼   ► things out that we don't need."

01:10:54 ◼   ► Kind of like MP3s, if you will.

01:10:55 ◼   ► And so then they decided—

01:10:57 ◼   ► Wait, it's lossy?

01:10:58 ◼   ► Okay, fair enough.

01:10:59 ◼   ► That was a poor analogy.

01:11:00 ◼   ► All right, but I'm going to get here.

01:11:01 ◼   ► I'm going to get there.

01:11:02 ◼   ► That would be amazing.

01:11:03 ◼   ► Give me time.

01:11:04 ◼   ► I'm going to get there.

01:11:06 ◼   ► So they decided, "Well, you know what?

01:11:08 ◼   ► another project that's really, really, really good and that is about optimizing, and that's

01:11:13 ◼   ► LLVM, which is half of the Clang and LLVM compilation combo.

01:11:18 ◼   ► And so they thought, "Well, why don't we just leverage LLVM to do this optimization for

01:11:23 ◼   ► us?"

01:11:24 ◼   ► And so if you've got JavaScript that runs in WebKit so often that it escalates all the

01:11:29 ◼   ► way to this fourth level or fourth tier, I believe they call it, compilation and optimization,

01:11:37 ◼   ► In theory, it will get optimized the same way native Objective-C code gets optimized.

01:11:43 ◼   ► And so in principle, it should run pretty darn fast.

01:11:47 ◼   ► Okay, that's the setup.

01:11:49 ◼   ► Jon, go ahead and tear me apart or add what you have to add.

01:11:53 ◼   ► Here's how I would have summarized it because I don't have the thing in front of me, so

01:11:56 ◼   ► I wouldn't go to the details of the thing.

01:11:58 ◼   ► You basically hit all the points, but for people who want the even shorter summary of

01:12:03 ◼   ► of it, it's basically, JavaScript comes down

01:12:06 ◼   ► as a bunch of text, and you have to,

01:12:09 ◼   ► you have a trait, two things you have to balance here.

01:12:11 ◼   ► One is how fast can I start running code,

01:12:13 ◼   ► and second is how fast is that code when I run it.

01:12:16 ◼   ► And that's an important trade off,

01:12:17 ◼   ► because if you have some tiny little snippet of JavaScript,

01:12:20 ◼   ► you don't wanna wait like, I'm gonna make up numbers here,

01:12:23 ◼   ► these aren't real, but you don't wanna wait a second

01:12:25 ◼   ► to start running it and then run the code

01:12:27 ◼   ► for like a tenth of a second, that's a waste.

01:12:30 ◼   ► You wanna start running immediately, right?

01:12:32 ◼   ► And that continuum exists.

01:12:33 ◼   ► They had three tiers previously to do this.

01:12:36 ◼   ► We can run code immediately,

01:12:38 ◼   ► but it's not gonna be that fast.

01:12:39 ◼   ► We can take a little bit longer

01:12:40 ◼   ► and then the code will be a little bit faster.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And we can take even longer than that

01:12:42 ◼   ► and the code will be really fast.

01:12:43 ◼   ► And they're adding a fourth tier.

01:12:45 ◼   ► This is the FTL, what is it?

01:12:47 ◼   ► Fourth tier, someone look up what that is.

01:12:51 ◼   ► - I'm looking, but I can't find it.

01:12:52 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:12:56 ◼   ► Oh, fourth tier LLVM.

01:12:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, fourth tier LLVM.

01:12:58 ◼   ► The joke I made on Twitter is that,

01:13:00 ◼   ► And people think FTL, they think faster than light, obviously.

01:13:04 ◼   ► But the secret internal code name

01:13:05 ◼   ► might as well be, as far as I'm concerned, F this language.

01:13:08 ◼   ► Because they've already had an existing three tiers

01:13:12 ◼   ► of figuring out how can we run this language fast.

01:13:16 ◼   ► We want to start running immediately

01:13:18 ◼   ► and also have it run fast and figure out

01:13:19 ◼   ► which one of these tiers to do everything at.

01:13:21 ◼   ► So that's the trade-off they're making.

01:13:22 ◼   ► And the fourth tier is, all right, for code that--

01:13:26 ◼   ► we've gone through all three of those other tiers,

01:13:28 ◼   ► and we still want to go faster.

01:13:29 ◼   ► and this is just in this piece of code that's running,

01:13:31 ◼   ► you know, it's running all the time,

01:13:33 ◼   ► it's in some tight loop, it's using a lot of CPU,

01:13:36 ◼   ► we will take a huge amount of time, relatively speaking,

01:13:39 ◼   ► and figure out how to compile it with our actual compiler,

01:13:42 ◼   ► our actual, you know, their core compiler system,

01:13:44 ◼   ► LLVM system.

01:13:45 ◼   ► And the tricky part of this,

01:13:46 ◼   ► and the reason why I say it's F this language,

01:13:48 ◼   ► is because all along those three tiers,

01:13:51 ◼   ► you don't wanna stop and be like,

01:13:52 ◼   ► "Okay, we compiled everything with the really fast ones

01:13:54 ◼   ► that starts running stuff immediately,

01:13:56 ◼   ► but it's kinda slow when it's running."

01:13:57 ◼   ► You know, we got up and running really fast,

01:13:59 ◼   ► but it's kind of slow when it's running.

01:14:00 ◼   ► We would like to, for this function,

01:14:02 ◼   ► and this function, and this function, use the second tier.

01:14:04 ◼   ► You can't pause the world and say,

01:14:06 ◼   ► "Wait a second, wait a second.

01:14:07 ◼   ► "It turns out these two functions are called a lot.

01:14:09 ◼   ► "I want to take a little some time here

01:14:11 ◼   ► "to compile this in a faster form and run it."

01:14:14 ◼   ► You can't pause execution.

01:14:15 ◼   ► That will kill your performance.

01:14:17 ◼   ► You have to sort of, you know,

01:14:18 ◼   ► the old programmer analogy,

01:14:19 ◼   ► you have to swap the engine

01:14:21 ◼   ► while the airplane is in the air, right?

01:14:24 ◼   ► So you have to let everything run along

01:14:25 ◼   ► and make an optimized version of this thing

01:14:28 ◼   ► on another thread in the background

01:14:29 ◼   ► and swap it in for the new one and all the way down the line.

01:14:32 ◼   ► And the same thing with the LLVM thing,

01:14:33 ◼   ► the fourth tier is it's gonna take you

01:14:35 ◼   ► a long time to compile.

01:14:36 ◼   ► You know, you find something,

01:14:37 ◼   ► you think this is running so much,

01:14:39 ◼   ► we really want this to be super fast,

01:14:40 ◼   ► we're gonna spend the time to compile this

01:14:42 ◼   ► with our actual compiler.

01:14:44 ◼   ► You cannot pause execution when that's going on.

01:14:46 ◼   ► You have to compile it with the compiler

01:14:48 ◼   ► and then when it's ready, swap it in.

01:14:51 ◼   ► And this technology for swapping in the faster versions

01:14:53 ◼   ► of functions take longer to compile.

01:14:54 ◼   ► They already had more or less,

01:14:56 ◼   ► and this fourth tier is more difficult

01:14:57 ◼   ► because what they're compiling is like,

01:14:59 ◼   ► LVM is used to compiling more static languages like C, C++,

01:15:04 ◼   ► where variables don't change their type, for example,

01:15:07 ◼   ► and where you know the type of things up front.

01:15:09 ◼   ► And they had to put in,

01:15:10 ◼   ► they have to make a compiled version

01:15:11 ◼   ► that they can sort of self modify to say,

01:15:13 ◼   ► oh, well, it turns out this optimization

01:15:16 ◼   ► or this assumption is violated.

01:15:18 ◼   ► So bump back down to one of the slower versions

01:15:20 ◼   ► that has the more dynamic properties.

01:15:21 ◼   ► Oh, it turns out with this,

01:15:23 ◼   ► we don't actually know the type of this,

01:15:25 ◼   ► it's actually a different type now,

01:15:26 ◼   ► swap in a different type there.

01:15:27 ◼   ► You can read the article which we put in the show,

01:15:28 ◼   ► it's very long and very complicated,

01:15:30 ◼   ► but this is essentially the trick they're doing,

01:15:32 ◼   ► is they're doing this trade off between

01:15:34 ◼   ► how fast can we start running and how fast do we run,

01:15:36 ◼   ► and they're doing this thing all in parallel

01:15:38 ◼   ► where they don't stop the running of the program

01:15:40 ◼   ► to swap in the faster versions.

01:15:42 ◼   ► And finally in the fourth tier,

01:15:44 ◼   ► they're shoving in a much more rigidly optimized version

01:15:47 ◼   ► in the hopes that all their assumptions

01:15:49 ◼   ► about the version will be correct,

01:15:50 ◼   ► and when they're not correct, they have fallbacks.

01:15:52 ◼   ► And it's a really great article,

01:15:55 ◼   ► in the same sense as the backlays thing,

01:15:57 ◼   ► telling you the internals of how they decided to do something.

01:16:01 ◼   ► It's great insight into how do you make JavaScript fast, essentially.

01:16:06 ◼   ► How do you F this language?

01:16:08 ◼   ► How do you apply brains and engineering experience and say, "We're going to make JavaScript

01:16:13 ◼   ► fast.

01:16:14 ◼   ► I don't care if this is a terrible language that is incredibly resistant to optimization.

01:16:19 ◼   ► We're just going to throw engineering resources at it until we get fast."

01:16:21 ◼   ► I mean, same thing with the PHP and HHVM.

01:16:24 ◼   ► If you have enough money and enough engineering resources, you can make them with any language

01:16:28 ◼   ► fast.

01:16:29 ◼   ► And that's what they're doing.

01:16:30 ◼   ► And it's an amazing engineering feat.

01:16:33 ◼   ► And by the way, the other JavaScript engines that are used by Firefox and that Chrome is

01:16:39 ◼   ► doing with their V8 engine, Google's doing with the V8 engine.

01:16:42 ◼   ► And by the way, Casey, you said that WebKit is used by Chrome.

01:16:45 ◼   ► It's not.

01:16:46 ◼   ► That's Blink now, which is a fork of WebKit.

01:16:47 ◼   ► But anyway.

01:16:48 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

01:16:50 ◼   ► They all have similar things to this.

01:16:51 ◼   ► They all have to make the same exact trade-off.

01:16:53 ◼   ► How do we start running immediately, but also be able to run the thing that runs a lot faster?

01:16:58 ◼   ► And they do similar type of things with tracing execution, seeing which things are run frequently

01:17:03 ◼   ► and compiling them into a faster form and swapping them in.

01:17:05 ◼   ► Like this is not an amazing breakthrough from Apple that is unprecedented in the JavaScript

01:17:09 ◼   ► industry.

01:17:10 ◼   ► We have tons of really smart people all trying to make JavaScript faster.

01:17:14 ◼   ► And as to your question, Casey, when do you realize JavaScript is for real?

01:17:19 ◼   ► I think everyone realizes we're stuck with it.

01:17:21 ◼   ► except for maybe Google is trying to make Dart,

01:17:23 ◼   ► like it's in web browsers everywhere.

01:17:26 ◼   ► And so that's why we're like,

01:17:27 ◼   ► well, we're just gonna have to make it faster.

01:17:28 ◼   ► And we're trying to make JavaScript better,

01:17:30 ◼   ► but that's such a slow process.

01:17:31 ◼   ► You have to wait for all the web browsers to turn over

01:17:33 ◼   ► and to get a new version of ECMAScript approved.

01:17:35 ◼   ► And it's just such a long timeline.

01:17:37 ◼   ► It's like, JavaScript is what we've got.

01:17:39 ◼   ► Is it for real?

01:17:41 ◼   ► Well, it's what we're stuck with.

01:17:42 ◼   ► And so we're just gonna do what we can to make it fast.

01:17:44 ◼   ► And I think everybody who is

01:17:47 ◼   ► into dynamic programming languages,

01:17:49 ◼   ► pick your favorite PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby.

01:17:53 ◼   ► We all wish that we had the engineering resources

01:17:56 ◼   ► put towards our favorite language to make it fast

01:17:58 ◼   ► because it suffers from all the same hard to optimize bits

01:18:00 ◼   ► about, you know, type list variables or dynamic types

01:18:03 ◼   ► or things that could be faster.

01:18:05 ◼   ► It's like, man, can you imagine how fast Python would run

01:18:09 ◼   ► if it had this amount of engineering resources thrown at it

01:18:12 ◼   ► or Ruby or Perl or I mean,

01:18:13 ◼   ► PHP is kind of getting a similar amount of resources

01:18:16 ◼   ► thrown at it by at least by one company.

01:18:17 ◼   ► So it's interesting, not so much because it's novel,

01:18:21 ◼   ► but just because you get to see Apple

01:18:23 ◼   ► doing what it does best, which is great engineering.

01:18:25 ◼   ► The WebKit team is very skilled.

01:18:27 ◼   ► And yes, they're doing something similar

01:18:29 ◼   ► to what other people have done,

01:18:30 ◼   ► but in a slightly different way.

01:18:31 ◼   ► And it's smart of them to leverage the compiler

01:18:34 ◼   ► that they've sort of brought up

01:18:35 ◼   ► to be a world-class compiler, which is, it's open source.

01:18:39 ◼   ► Other people could have used LLVM as well.

01:18:40 ◼   ► And I think I saw a lot of people poo-pooing LLVM saying,

01:18:43 ◼   ► "Well, it's too slow.

01:18:44 ◼   ► "You can't use that for a just-in-time compiler."

01:18:45 ◼   ► No, you can't.

01:18:46 ◼   ► have to save it for the bits that you really know are going to be running quickly and you

01:18:49 ◼   ► have to be able to swap them in.

01:18:50 ◼   ► And they did some clever changes to LLVM itself to make this happen, which is nice when you're

01:18:55 ◼   ► kind of steering the LLVM project as well.

01:18:57 ◼   ► So I think I tweeted, I don't know whether to give a standing ovation or weep.

01:19:03 ◼   ► And the standing ovation would be, good job, guys.

01:19:05 ◼   ► This is great engineering.

01:19:06 ◼   ► You know, it's interesting.

01:19:08 ◼   ► Great blog post about it.

01:19:09 ◼   ► Thumbs up.

01:19:11 ◼   ► You know, I like JavaScript being faster.

01:19:12 ◼   ► weep to say, "You guys have got to go through heroic measures to make JavaScript fast."

01:19:17 ◼   ► And why?

01:19:18 ◼   ► Because it's the language we're all stuck with.

01:19:20 ◼   ► So I guess I've turned a new leaf in my appreciation for JavaScript because it, in so many ways,

01:19:28 ◼   ► it really is a terrible, terrible language.

01:19:30 ◼   ► And I forget the name of the—oh, Gary Barnhart did a great, like, literally two or three

01:19:36 ◼   ► minute video about how JavaScript and Ruby are really kind of wonky and we'll put a link

01:19:43 ◼   ► in the show notes.

01:19:45 ◼   ► But be that as it may, I feel like JavaScript, like it or not, whether or not it's academically

01:19:53 ◼   ► a good language, it is, just like you said John, it's here.

01:19:57 ◼   ► And this is the real deal and this is what we're using for certain things at certain

01:20:04 ◼   ► times.

01:20:05 ◼   ► come back to I've started to write a lot or do a lot more DOM manipulation my day

01:20:11 ◼   ► job with JavaScript and jQuery and the things you can get done are really

01:20:16 ◼   ► really impressive with not that much code. I wrote not a lot of code to get my

01:20:20 ◼   ► blogging engine going. Now granted I stood on the work of many other people

01:20:24 ◼   ► in a lot of code that they wrote but I didn't write that much and I feel like

01:20:29 ◼   ► in this the same guy Gary Barnhart did a really great talk about the birth and

01:20:32 ◼   ► death of JavaScript we'll put that in the show notes this one is about half an

01:20:35 ◼   ► hour, but it's worth it. And really, I agree that JavaScript is academically

01:20:41 ◼   ► just a terrible language in so many ways, but at what point do we realize, you know

01:20:47 ◼   ► what, it's good enough. And to me, I don't see why it's that terribly different

01:20:54 ◼   ► than PHP, which in some ways is far superior academically, but really in the

01:21:01 ◼   ► same boat. It's kind of slow, or slow enough that you need

01:21:05 ◼   ► HHVM to make it quick. So Marco, I'm trolling, but I'm also honestly

01:21:09 ◼   ► asking you, how do you feel like PHP and JavaScript are not

01:21:13 ◼   ► very similar? Why do you like PHP so much?

01:21:17 ◼   ► No, why do you like PHP so much? I'm not talking about the particulars of the language. Why do you like PHP so much

01:21:21 ◼   ► and why do you snicker so much at JavaScript? PHP is actually

01:21:25 ◼   ► a pretty C-like language. There's a lot

01:21:29 ◼   ► that I like about it that is because it resembles the way C works.

01:21:33 ◼   ► And not at the low level of course, but conceptually, syntactically,

01:21:37 ◼   ► a lot of the direct mappings to C libraries that are available

01:21:41 ◼   ► within it, stuff like that. I like that about it.

01:21:45 ◼   ► I like that it's everywhere. It is way faster than JavaScript.

01:21:49 ◼   ► Even like five years ago it was way faster than JavaScript. Like even before

01:21:53 ◼   ► HHVM, just inherently it is

01:21:57 ◼   ► possible to make way faster I think. I don't know if I'm about to say that for sure but it at least

01:22:01 ◼   ► always has been way faster and I'm like no one has ever really complained that oh my god the PHP on my

01:22:07 ◼   ► server is too slow except Facebook only because they have a billion servers so it actually matters

01:22:12 ◼   ► for them but PHP in general is has always been very fast there's lots of other problems with it

01:22:17 ◼   ► but but performance has never been one of them and you know obviously it's not as fast as like C or

01:22:23 ◼   ► a really fancy compiler like the way HVN can make it super optimized and just

01:22:29 ◼   ► compile it and everything but it's still really fast for what it is. So I don't

01:22:34 ◼   ► see a whole lot of parallels here honestly except that they're both

01:22:38 ◼   ► academically bad languages that we are stuck with by ubiquity. That's a very

01:22:43 ◼   ► good point. Or by familiarity you know like I still like I don't like JavaScript

01:22:47 ◼   ► to me I I still don't look forward to having to use JavaScript to do anything

01:22:52 ◼   ► I try to avoid it where possible. Even on the web, I will use it sparingly.

01:22:58 ◼   ► And I certainly have never been tempted by Node because of the language that it is.

01:23:04 ◼   ► I like the idea of Node, of its structure and its event-driven system.

01:23:10 ◼   ► I don't like the JavaScript language at all. And so that's why I've never been tempted by it.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Can I try to tempt you for a moment?

01:23:17 ◼   ► Yeah, sure.

01:23:18 ◼   ► So the temptation that should get you into JavaScript is that it lets you run your code

01:23:24 ◼   ► on other people's computers instead of your servers, and it lets you make your servers

01:23:28 ◼   ► act more like boring transaction processors that send and receive JSON in response to

01:23:32 ◼   ► like RESTful requests.

01:23:35 ◼   ► And it's kind of refreshing, as someone who's sort of gone from the server-side programming

01:23:38 ◼   ► to the client-side programming throughout the history of the web, to suddenly be able

01:23:42 ◼   ► to run all your crap on someone else's computer, because their computer is way faster than

01:23:47 ◼   ► the proportion of your server that they're going to get, right?

01:23:50 ◼   ► They're not going to get your entire server, they're going to get one eight-thousandth

01:23:53 ◼   ► of it, depending on how many people are hitting it.

01:23:56 ◼   ► And there's a lot of freedom in that.

01:23:57 ◼   ► And then it lets you write your server in a more sort of structured, boring way, where

01:24:03 ◼   ► it is just like, you end up just writing an API.

01:24:07 ◼   ► It doesn't make the language any better, but it is kind of an interesting change.

01:24:11 ◼   ► If you think of web development as, "Oh, I have to write things on the server that spit

01:24:14 ◼   ► out HTML to my clients with a little bit of JavaScript, and changing it to "I send my

01:24:19 ◼   ► clients something once and they run a persistent JavaScript application that talks to my server

01:24:23 ◼   ► through API endpoints that just talk in data."

01:24:26 ◼   ► That is a refreshing change for web development.

01:24:29 ◼   ► It may make you think on it less harshly.

01:24:32 ◼   ► I mean, that's certainly interesting, and there are some benefits to that by all means.

01:24:38 ◼   ► I'm not denying that at all, especially with modern browser support for things like pushing

01:24:43 ◼   ► onto the URL bars without actually making a request so that you can take over the back

01:24:48 ◼   ► button and kind of simulate a hierarchy without actually causing page reloads, stuff like

01:24:52 ◼   ► that.

01:24:53 ◼   ► There are a lot of benefits to that, to a lot of different application types, but I

01:24:56 ◼   ► hardly write web applications anymore.

01:24:58 ◼   ► I hardly have a rhythm to begin with and usually I write web backends and then I started writing

01:25:04 ◼   ► iOS frontends.

01:25:06 ◼   ► And my web applications have always been like, I'll do the minimum required to get the job

01:25:11 ◼   ► done. But as I mentioned in the past, like I'm really not, I'm not into it. Like I'm

01:25:17 ◼   ► not driven to make an amazing web front end for anything. I don't care.

01:25:23 ◼   ► If you ever needed one, though, since you have to write the backends to talk to your

01:25:26 ◼   ► iOS app, you've already got a back end that's ready for your JavaScript app to talk to like

01:25:30 ◼   ► you wouldn't have to you wouldn't have to, you know, duplicate that code and like having

01:25:34 ◼   ► direct queries from your PHP to your database that does the same thing with the API endpoint,

01:25:38 ◼   ► If you do it once for your iOS app,

01:25:40 ◼   ► you could use that same back end if you've done a good job

01:25:42 ◼   ► to do your web front end as well.

01:25:44 ◼   ► And that would save you some time.

01:25:46 ◼   ► - Right, and one of the things I like,

01:25:48 ◼   ► like in Overcast, I'm actually using a CDN

01:25:53 ◼   ► for part of the API as a way to,

01:25:56 ◼   ► and I'm thinking about what API requests

01:25:58 ◼   ► can be cacheable at the CDN layer.

01:26:01 ◼   ► So it's another layer of caching that is

01:26:03 ◼   ► both faster for clients to access

01:26:05 ◼   ► and doesn't involve many hits to my server.

01:26:08 ◼   ► And so that'll make scaling a lot easier

01:26:10 ◼   ► because not every single request will hit me.

01:26:13 ◼   ► And so if I'm looking at it from a JavaScript perspective,

01:26:17 ◼   ► that could be useful there too.

01:26:18 ◼   ► If I can pull feed or episode data off of the CDN,

01:26:23 ◼   ► 'cause a feed, no matter who's looking at it,

01:26:25 ◼   ► has the same episodes in it,

01:26:27 ◼   ► which might have different progress,

01:26:29 ◼   ► different settings, stuff like that,

01:26:31 ◼   ► but the episode list itself is shared data.

01:26:36 ◼   ► So there's cool things I could do with that,

01:26:38 ◼   ► but I don't see myself putting that much effort

01:26:42 ◼   ► into the web side of things.

01:26:43 ◼   ► So I'm a bad example to even be asking this question to,

01:26:46 ◼   ► but I don't know, I see this whole thing

01:26:49 ◼   ► with JavaScript optimization is a really technically

01:26:54 ◼   ► interesting progress and solution to a problem

01:26:58 ◼   ► I just don't care about and that I don't really

01:27:00 ◼   ► personally have very often.

01:27:02 ◼   ► I don't even use very many heavy JavaScript web apps.

01:27:06 ◼   ► I use Google Maps on the web, but that's it.

01:27:08 ◼   ► Like I don't use Gmail,

01:27:09 ◼   ► I don't use a whole lot of like crazy web stuff like that.

01:27:12 ◼   ► So I don't even, this will benefit a lot of people,

01:27:15 ◼   ► but not me.

01:27:16 ◼   ► - It will definitely benefit you,

01:27:17 ◼   ► because the bottleneck on mobile clients still

01:27:21 ◼   ► is JavaScript execution speed.

01:27:23 ◼   ► You don't think it is,

01:27:24 ◼   ► you think, oh, this page is loading slowly,

01:27:26 ◼   ► but JavaScript, there's tons of it everywhere.

01:27:28 ◼   ► And the speed of JavaScript execution on mobile phones

01:27:31 ◼   ► is still a limiting factor.

01:27:33 ◼   ► I mean, just compare the render times on desktop

01:27:35 ◼   ► versus, you know, it's not like over the same connection,

01:27:37 ◼   ► desktop versus mobile, yeah, phones are getting faster,

01:27:40 ◼   ► but JavaScript is not, you know,

01:27:42 ◼   ► it's difficult to optimize.

01:27:43 ◼   ► Look at all these things they're doing to optimize it.

01:27:45 ◼   ► So you'll benefit from it as a user

01:27:46 ◼   ► more than a developer perhaps.

01:27:48 ◼   ► You know, if they do a good job, it should,

01:27:51 ◼   ► again, not in web views probably,

01:27:52 ◼   ► 'cause we assume this is all gonna only be in Safari,

01:27:54 ◼   ► but hey, at least in mobile Safari,

01:27:56 ◼   ► things will get a little bit faster.

01:27:58 ◼   ► Like in some respects, what Apple is doing here

01:28:00 ◼   ► is just the cost of being in the web browser business.

01:28:02 ◼   ► If you want to be in this business,

01:28:04 ◼   ► which is we make a web rendering engine

01:28:06 ◼   ► and Apple does want to and should be in it,

01:28:08 ◼   ► you've got to keep up with the Joneses

01:28:09 ◼   ► and competition is good and everyone's getting faster

01:28:12 ◼   ► along the same rate.

01:28:13 ◼   ► So I think you will benefit from it.

01:28:17 ◼   ► And if you don't think you will,

01:28:18 ◼   ► try loading the same webpage,

01:28:20 ◼   ► pick one of these web pages that you think

01:28:21 ◼   ► doesn't use any JavaScript to speak of,

01:28:23 ◼   ► load it in a web view,

01:28:24 ◼   ► which presumably run without the optimizations

01:28:26 ◼   ► and then load it in mobile Safari and just time it

01:28:28 ◼   ► and see which one takes longer

01:28:29 ◼   ► before you can interact with the page before it renders.

01:28:32 ◼   ► I think you'll be able to measure the difference

01:28:33 ◼   ► with a stopwatch.

01:28:34 ◼   ► Now, Jon, out of curiosity, I didn't

01:28:37 ◼   ► think you did very much front end development at your day job.

01:28:42 ◼   ► So what is the stack that you're using?

01:28:44 ◼   ► Are you using Angular or something like that?

01:28:46 ◼   ► I know you're using--

01:28:47 ◼   ► A full stack developer, Casey.

01:28:49 ◼   ► Didn't we do this?

01:28:49 ◼   ► That's what they call it in the resumes.

01:28:52 ◼   ► We need a full stack developer.

01:28:53 ◼   ► Anyway, web development, as I've said--

01:28:56 ◼   ► Ninja Rockstar.

01:28:57 ◼   ► As I've said in the past, yeah, right.

01:28:59 ◼   ► Being in web development means you-- in most places,

01:29:03 ◼   ► They don't have these regimented roles where you are a backend and you are a frontend.

01:29:08 ◼   ► You end up having to learn everything, the full stack.

01:29:12 ◼   ► It's not a ridiculous term to say "full stack developer."

01:29:15 ◼   ► I've used a lot of different frameworks.

01:29:17 ◼   ► The thing about JavaScript that people love and hate is that the framework that's popular

01:29:21 ◼   ► now will not be popular in 18 months.

01:29:23 ◼   ► It's a lot of churn.

01:29:24 ◼   ► There's a lot of the Cambrian explosion of different species, and we're hoping there's

01:29:30 ◼   ► some sort of consolidation, but it never seems to come.

01:29:32 ◼   ► So it is a young and vibrant community.

01:29:35 ◼   ► And yeah, I've tried a lot of the ones that are out there.

01:29:38 ◼   ► At a certain point, each project has to commit to one library or framework or a set of them,

01:29:43 ◼   ► and then you use them for a long period of time, and then the next thing you do will

01:29:46 ◼   ► go through the same process and you'll make different choices, including new things that

01:29:50 ◼   ► didn't exist when you made the first choice.

01:29:52 ◼   ► So what's the flavor of the month over at where you work?

01:29:55 ◼   ► Well, I mean, jQuery seems to have more or less won out over the alternatives.

01:30:00 ◼   ► The alternatives are still out there and people still like them, so it hasn't totally squashed

01:30:03 ◼   ► them, but jQuery is fairly dominant in the realm of "let me manipulate the DOM without

01:30:07 ◼   ► crying," that category of thing.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Underscore and Backbone, I'm not saying they have their individual markets sewn up, but

01:30:16 ◼   ► they seem to be pretty popular these days.

01:30:17 ◼   ► I don't even know what those are.

01:30:20 ◼   ► Yeah, well, so that's why you hate JavaScript so much.

01:30:23 ◼   ► They take away some of the pain.

01:30:25 ◼   ► Like in the same—you know what jQuery is, right?

01:30:27 ◼   ► So jQuery—

01:30:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Although I've hardly used it, honestly.

01:30:30 ◼   ► jQuery very little, because I just haven't needed to.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Most of my DOM stuff is simple, and I just

01:30:36 ◼   ► use the DOM straight for it.

01:30:38 ◼   ► Yeah, so using the DOM straight used to be a nightmare,

01:30:40 ◼   ► because of IE, right?

01:30:41 ◼   ► And maybe you missed those days, but like--

01:30:43 ◼   ► Oh, I just never cared about supporting it.

01:30:44 ◼   ► Yeah, part of the big selling point initially of jQuery

01:30:47 ◼   ► is, oh, god, thank god I don't have to do the 8,000 things I

01:30:49 ◼   ► have to do to manipulate the DOM directly,

01:30:51 ◼   ► because the APIs were just so incredibly different,

01:30:53 ◼   ► semantically, and different function names and everything.

01:30:55 ◼   ► It's like, I need something to paper over that.

01:30:58 ◼   ► And these days, the DOM APIs are more or less the same

01:31:03 ◼   ► on all popular browsers.

01:31:04 ◼   ► You still don't want to use them directly

01:31:06 ◼   ► 'cause you want to do stuff like use CSS selectors

01:31:08 ◼   ► to select elements and you're relying on jQuery

01:31:09 ◼   ► to do something that's fast.

01:31:11 ◼   ► It's kind of like using a database where you're like,

01:31:12 ◼   ► oh, I can just type arbitrary CSS selectors into jQuery

01:31:15 ◼   ► and I'll get the elements that I want

01:31:16 ◼   ► and my problems are all solved.

01:31:18 ◼   ► And that's like the honeymoon period of jQuery.

01:31:20 ◼   ► Do you realize, like the query planner

01:31:22 ◼   ► that makes poor life choices,

01:31:23 ◼   ► you say, I'm assuming right now it will do,

01:31:26 ◼   ► get elements by class name, which is native,

01:31:27 ◼   ► And then I assume after it does that, it will do it.

01:31:29 ◼   ► No, it is not.

01:31:31 ◼   ► The query optimizer in jQuery, again,

01:31:32 ◼   ► it has to do the same trade-off.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Trade-off between start doing what you asked me to do

01:31:36 ◼   ► right now or spend some time thinking about

01:31:38 ◼   ► what you asked me to do.

01:31:39 ◼   ► Come up with a really awesome plan and execute that.

01:31:41 ◼   ► And so like in a database, you have to learn,

01:31:44 ◼   ► well, you can write this expression in jQuery,

01:31:46 ◼   ► but your code will be 10 times faster

01:31:47 ◼   ► if you split it up into two jQuery selectors,

01:31:50 ◼   ► or if you use native DOM to get these elements

01:31:52 ◼   ► and then use jQuery on them.

01:31:53 ◼   ► And anyway, I think I've lost my thread.

01:31:56 ◼   ► and wondering and discussion of jQuery.

01:31:58 ◼   ► The question was, what is your framework or frameworks

01:32:01 ◼   ► du jour at the moment?

01:32:02 ◼   ► You had mentioned underscore and jQuery and one other one

01:32:07 ◼   ► that is--

01:32:07 ◼   ► Backbone for-- I don't know.

01:32:09 ◼   ► What else are we using that's--

01:32:11 ◼   ► Wait, are we talking about David Smith

01:32:12 ◼   ► or a different underscore?

01:32:13 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:32:14 ◼   ► It's a different underscore, yeah.

01:32:15 ◼   ► I'm surprised people don't make that joke anymore often.

01:32:17 ◼   ► Maybe different circles.

01:32:19 ◼   ► And the other thing is, how do you modularize JavaScript?

01:32:23 ◼   ► Because the JavaScript designers were kind enough

01:32:25 ◼   ► not to include namespaces, just like some other language we are all familiar with.

01:32:28 ◼   ► >> Yep. >> And so the various conventions for

01:32:33 ◼   ► defining JavaScript modules, which are standardized into AMD modules. I don't know if that's an ECMA

01:32:37 ◼   ► thing or not. But anyway, there's RequireJS, which is AMD-like modules, and there's Node's module

01:32:43 ◼   ► system, which actually is AMD, I believe, and then they're half compatible with shims. And

01:32:47 ◼   ► this whole practice of how do I write a JavaScript application, because you're not going to write

01:32:52 ◼   ► write your JavaScript application by writing a big long single .js file from top to bottom,

01:32:56 ◼   ► right? That's not PHP we're talking about here. You're gonna do it in modules and how

01:33:01 ◼   ► do the modules require each other and integrate with each other and stay out of each other's

01:33:06 ◼   ► namespaces and then, you know, that's, I mean, Casey's familiar with it because he's done

01:33:10 ◼   ► a little bit of the Node stuff, but that's what modern JavaScript looks like these days

01:33:14 ◼   ► and it's not great, but you can, every part of it, if you squint at it, you're like, "Yeah,

01:33:18 ◼   ► I can kind of see why if you're going to write a serious application you need something that

01:33:21 ◼   ► does this, and you need something that does that, and if you're going to manipulate the DOM, it would

01:33:24 ◼   ► be nice to have something like jQuery that can paper over some of the weird things for you and

01:33:27 ◼   ► provide some conveniences. And if you want to go really insane, you can talk about what's the

01:33:32 ◼   ► meteor thing that lets you query the database directly from JavaScript, which seems like a

01:33:38 ◼   ► terrible idea to me. But anyway, there's lots of interesting things out there. Ember and Angular

01:33:43 ◼   ► are the cool things that I've only vaguely looked at if not used to do anything serious. So maybe

01:33:49 ◼   ► be Casey can write his next blogging engine using one of those and tell us how it is.

01:33:53 ◼   ► A couple of coworkers using Angular and have very good things to say about it. I'd like

01:33:56 ◼   ► to check out React, both React and JavaScript and reactive Cocoa, but I haven't had the

01:34:03 ◼   ► time. And shoot, oh, I was going to say the other reason that JavaScript is really appealing

01:34:07 ◼   ► to me, which will mean nothing to Marco, is that in my day job I tend to work on top of

01:34:15 ◼   ► content management systems. Things like SharePoint, although not always SharePoint, and a recent project we did,

01:34:20 ◼   ► we did it using this

01:34:23 ◼   ► really not awesome cloud-based

01:34:26 ◼   ► content management system where we had not a lot of control over what the CMS was doing.