ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► They introduced the iMac. It was on a pedestal. The G4 Cube came up from the floor.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Phil Scheller had to jump onto an airbag. That's real power.

00:00:09 ◼   ► [

00:00:09 ◼   ► So, we got some email from an Apple store genius.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Yeah, last week we were talking about iCloud and who buys more storage for iCloud, and

00:00:21 ◼   ► I think I said that I imagined that people would go in, not knowing what this error message

00:00:26 ◼   ► on their phone means, saying "It says something about iCloud, blah blah blah, fix it, Mr.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Genius person at the bar."

00:00:33 ◼   ► And what I assumed they would do is say, you know, the genius would tell them, "Oh, it's

00:00:38 ◼   ► iCloud we only give you a certain amount of storage for free, you've run out of that,

00:00:40 ◼   ► if you want more you have to pay blah blah blah, and the customer would be pissed and

00:00:43 ◼   ► they would say I don't want to pay more money for this stupid thing or whatever, but I figured

00:00:46 ◼   ► they would eventually just pay because they just want to keep using their phone the way

00:00:49 ◼   ► they used to use it.

00:00:51 ◼   ► And then at the end of that I joke that it said oh I guess they could just turn back

00:00:54 ◼   ► off stuff entirely if they think nothing will ever happen to their phone.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Well according to this Apple store genius who's been there for two years, people do

00:01:01 ◼   ► come in with the message that they don't understand what it means, it says not enough storage,

00:01:05 ◼   ► And he says, "The customer's first reaction is not to pay for something they don't understand.

00:01:09 ◼   ► They just turn iCloud backup off and never think about it again."

00:01:12 ◼   ► So there you go.

00:01:13 ◼   ► Oh, God, that's so painful, but that's extremely believable.

00:01:18 ◼   ► The other thing is, "Or they don't understand how to turn the prompt off and will just hit

00:01:20 ◼   ► OK every morning when an iCloud backup was attempted."

00:01:23 ◼   ► So that's their new way they use the phone.

00:01:25 ◼   ► It's like, every morning there's this dialog box, then I hit OK and it goes away.

00:01:28 ◼   ► It doesn't bother me until the next few days.

00:01:30 ◼   ► And he says, "There are very few people who have actually paid for iCloud storage.

00:01:33 ◼   ► In recent memory, the only people I can think of that bought it are people that assume iCloud

00:01:36 ◼   ► storage will increase with the size of the phone's storage capacity.

00:01:41 ◼   ► We talked about that before, like how ideally, you know, whatever they're going to do with

00:01:46 ◼   ► iCloud storage, it would match the size of the total sum size of the devices you have.

00:01:51 ◼   ► So whether that's free or whether it's a fee or whatever, it seems like as you buy more

00:01:55 ◼   ► devices, your storage should expand.

00:01:56 ◼   ► Apple should somehow build that into the price of the devices or build that into the price

00:01:59 ◼   ► of iCloud, but they don't.

00:02:00 ◼   ► They give you its freemium.

00:02:02 ◼   ► They learned it from the App Store.

00:02:03 ◼   ► They give you a little bit for free,

00:02:06 ◼   ► and then you inevitably reach the limit,

00:02:08 ◼   ► and you get some sad thinking of people going,

00:02:10 ◼   ► oh, I know how to fix this.

00:02:10 ◼   ► I'll just turn iCloud backups off.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Done and done.

00:02:13 ◼   ► - If the problem is I get this box every morning

00:02:15 ◼   ► that's annoying, it does fix the problem, in quotes.

00:02:18 ◼   ► You know, I don't know.

00:02:20 ◼   ► I think this, you know, the more we hear about

00:02:24 ◼   ► these stories of how regular people hit these walls

00:02:27 ◼   ► on their iOS devices of this photo storage wall

00:02:31 ◼   ► like what to do once you've hit that wall.

00:02:34 ◼   ► It's just so sad.

00:02:36 ◼   ► Really, it's tragic how many people lose their photos

00:02:41 ◼   ► that they've taken.

00:02:42 ◼   ► And you know, keep in mind, a lot of people,

00:02:44 ◼   ► their phone is their primary or only camera.

00:02:47 ◼   ► And you know, they could be taking like the only pictures

00:02:48 ◼   ► they have of their kid.

00:02:50 ◼   ► You know, and look, actually I know somebody

00:02:52 ◼   ► who this happened to.

00:02:53 ◼   ► So, you know, these problems really are affecting

00:02:57 ◼   ► a lot of people in very big ways.

00:02:59 ◼   ► And I have to imagine, you know, what we have now with iCloud photo backup, this can't be

00:03:07 ◼   ► like it. Like this can't be the solution to this problem, period. Apple really has to

00:03:12 ◼   ► address this in a more serious way. And you know, we've talked so much in the past, I

00:03:17 ◼   ► don't want to go over it too much, we've talked so much in the past about the challenges of

00:03:20 ◼   ► things like upstream bandwidth and uploading all your photos and especially what the heck

00:03:24 ◼   ► you do with videos that gain space on the device way faster than most people could upload

00:03:30 ◼   ► them to a web service. But I think there's such a huge gap between the ideal of backing

00:03:37 ◼   ► up everything and where we are now of backing up kind of partially some things that are

00:03:43 ◼   ► very confusing. I think there's a lot of middle ground between those two that we can still

00:03:47 ◼   ► achieve today, you know, that Apple could still achieve today if they wanted to. And

00:03:51 ◼   ► It just seems like either they can't get their act together on that yet or it's not a priority

00:03:55 ◼   ► enough.

00:03:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and I actually have some sort of related follow-up.

00:03:59 ◼   ► So last episode, I lamented the fact that I had what I thought was multiple gigabytes

00:04:05 ◼   ► of messages data on my iPhone, and it was so much that it was preventing iCloud from

00:04:11 ◼   ► backing up my iPhone because I was running out of space and I hadn't paid for any extra,

00:04:15 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera.

00:04:16 ◼   ► So I don't remember if I had hard facts at the time we recorded, but I can tell you I'm

00:04:19 ◼   ► I'm looking at my iPhone right now, and I have three and a half gigabytes of messages

00:04:24 ◼   ► data as per the settings than I believe it's general than usage, yeah, general than usage.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And so I concluded that I really need to get this off of my phone, and as much as I love

00:04:36 ◼   ► my animated GIFs, I can find them elsewhere.

00:04:39 ◼   ► And so tonight I paid $35 for iExplorer, which used to be known as iPhone Explorer, and I'm

00:04:45 ◼   ► sure someone will write and tell me, "No, you idiot, you should have done it this way,

00:04:48 ◼   ► Here's the secret hack to get to these things, but nevertheless I paid for this app, and it will let me extract

00:04:55 ◼   ► SMSes from an unencrypted iTunes backup, so I had to do an unencrypted iTunes backup well anyways

00:05:01 ◼   ► It will do many things it will save PDFs of your iTunes of your messages. It'll save

00:05:07 ◼   ► CSVs and it'll also save

00:05:10 ◼   ► text files and I

00:05:13 ◼   ► exported just

00:05:15 ◼   ► My conversations with Aaron my wife and as a PDF which does like the little chat bubbles and everything it was

00:05:21 ◼   ► 217 megs as a CSV file where it's nothing but text it was still two megs of messages

00:05:28 ◼   ► and that's because I haven't deleted any to my recollection since I got my

00:05:31 ◼   ► 3gs in what either 2008 or 2010 I always get that wrong so anyway

00:05:36 ◼   ► so the point is there I had a lot of messages on my phone, and I don't view this as

00:05:41 ◼   ► something abnormal and and this is something that I feel like a lot of regular people do and and I'm really

00:05:49 ◼   ► I'm surprised that Apple hasn't found a better way to handle this and it makes sense because

00:05:55 ◼   ► In Apple's perspective it stands to reason they wouldn't have to handle this because maybe normal people do delete their messages

00:06:02 ◼   ► But I would assume that not all normal people do and certainly I think of myself as slightly normal and I didn't

00:06:07 ◼   ► So this is kind of a bummer and and hopefully after the show

00:06:11 ◼   ► I'll be able to go through and delete all of these text messages and

00:06:15 ◼   ► all of the animated gifs and emojis that are associated with them and

00:06:19 ◼   ► Hopefully reclaim all that three and a half gigs and then be able to use iCloud for backups again

00:06:24 ◼   ► So I guess you don't need this new

00:06:26 ◼   ► romantic matic application

00:06:28 ◼   ► Do you know about this? No

00:06:31 ◼   ► Someone made an application. I think I think it was Greg Noss or somebody I know from the incomparable

00:06:36 ◼   ► Oh, is this the thing that pings you?

00:06:38 ◼   ► Reminds you to send the nice text messages to your significant other.

00:06:41 ◼   ► It seems like you're all set in that regard.

00:06:44 ◼   ► Oh, that could have been a fast text feature.

00:06:46 ◼   ► It could have been.

00:06:47 ◼   ► He doesn't need it, obviously.

00:06:49 ◼   ► Clearly not.

00:06:50 ◼   ► Which, by the way, I have a new icon for fast text.

00:06:53 ◼   ► My internet friend, Jacob Swydek, has been working with me.

00:06:57 ◼   ► That poor guy.

00:06:58 ◼   ► And I have a new icon.

00:07:00 ◼   ► I haven't quite finished the update to fast text,

00:07:03 ◼   ► but I don't need to hear any more complaining from John and Marco about the icons soon.

00:07:07 ◼   ► I'm going to complain if the new one doesn't have feet.

00:07:10 ◼   ► Doesn't have feet.

00:07:11 ◼   ► No!

00:07:11 ◼   ► I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

00:07:14 ◼   ► But the icon is so much better. Oh my goodness, it's so much better.

00:07:17 ◼   ► No feet, no sale.

00:07:19 ◼   ► Going back, I said to the photo thing, and the messages thing too. It's one of those problems

00:07:29 ◼   ► where iOS has this kind of idealized picture of conditions of usage. And this has been

00:07:38 ◼   ► a problem with a lot of Apple software, you know, the iPhoto storage and organization

00:07:43 ◼   ► methods, iTunes, etc. There's these idealized situations that I guess the designers at Apple

00:07:51 ◼   ► figure this is how people use this thing. And they try to hide the complexity of dealing

00:07:57 ◼   ► with computers and the reality of computers. And when you get to something like the photo

00:08:02 ◼   ► storage and backup issues on iOS, and even things like messages taking up a ton of space,

00:08:10 ◼   ► I think the big problem is that you're hitting these places where it's, to use a Joel on

00:08:15 ◼   ► Software term, it's a leaky abstraction. Like, you can't hide the realities of computing

00:08:21 ◼   ► devices have limited storage space, and photos and videos shot by good cameras are huge,

00:08:27 ◼   ► and upstream bandwidth in most places is not great, and oftentimes not free for very long.

00:08:34 ◼   ► And there's all these kind of inconvenient truths in the reality of using these computing

00:08:39 ◼   ► systems that iOS either ignores or buries so deeply that people do have to deal with

00:08:48 ◼   ► the problem of storage space. That's a reasonable thing to expect somebody using a computer

00:08:53 ◼   ► device to do is like, well, you have this much space and you're trying to store more

00:08:58 ◼   ► stuff than it holds, so you've got to make some decisions here. And iOS really makes

00:09:02 ◼   ► that hard. You know, Merlin talked about this a lot too. It makes it very hard to know where

00:09:07 ◼   ► the storage is being used. It's very hard to control that, to delete things intelligently,

00:09:13 ◼   ► to make space intelligently, to know what's being backed up somewhere and what isn't.

00:09:18 ◼   ► You know, a lot of the blame for this lays on the design of iOS for trying to pretend

00:09:24 ◼   ► like these realities don't exist, when in fact they're extremely common.

00:09:28 ◼   ► iOS loves to do the thing where, like the usage screen where I spend a lot of my time

00:09:32 ◼   ► because I always buy 32 gig iOS devices and I can barely fit my stuff on them. So I'm

00:09:37 ◼   ► always right up against the storage limit because of like movies for the kids and other

00:09:40 ◼   ► random things that I put on there. You know, video always pushes me over the edge. So I

00:09:43 ◼   ► So I spend a lot of time on the usage screen looking at that stupid scrolling list and

00:09:46 ◼   ► expanding it and seeing it.

00:09:47 ◼   ► And the solution to your out of room is look at that big list, find the application that's

00:09:55 ◼   ► like that's big that you don't think that you need or whatever and delete the entire

00:09:58 ◼   ► application because you're like, "Well, can't I just delete a couple of the things in that

00:10:03 ◼   ► application?"

00:10:04 ◼   ► In some cases you can, like video you can delete individual videos from the video application.

00:10:06 ◼   ► But in other cases, applications are not designed to say, "Hey, I'm Application Foo and here's

00:10:11 ◼   ► all the list of the data that I'm storing and you want, I can purge my caches, I can

00:10:15 ◼   ► delete these old things that you haven't seen in a while. I can, you know, just some way

00:10:19 ◼   ► to manage the data in the application. The only solution is, you know, hold down, go

00:10:23 ◼   ► into wiggle mode, hit the little X, nuke the whole application. I mean, I recently had

00:10:27 ◼   ► to do that with Instapaper because I was up to like 1.2 gigs. Instapaper was 1.2 gigs.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Instapaper doesn't have any way like within it to like trim its data or whatever. I could

00:10:36 ◼   ► have gone through the individual things and deleted them off or whatever. The easiest

00:10:40 ◼   ► thing for me to do, because luckily Instapaper has a server-side component, was to delete

00:10:44 ◼   ► the whole app and then reinstall it. And there was basically no loss in functionality, but

00:10:48 ◼   ► whatever the hell Instapaper was keeping around was gone, and then Instapaper shrunk back

00:10:51 ◼   ► down to its normal size. And I'm sure it's slowly growing back up as I go. I mean, that's

00:10:55 ◼   ► an extreme case or whatever, but same thing with the SMS thing. You could have gone through

00:10:59 ◼   ► the SMS app and deleted individual messages if you wanted, but nobody, after a certain

00:11:03 ◼   ► - once you hit that limit with SMS, I know so many people have hit this limit in iOS,

00:11:07 ◼   ► No one's going to go back and delete individual messages.

00:11:10 ◼   ► And there's nothing in the messages application

00:11:12 ◼   ► that says delete messages older than x,

00:11:14 ◼   ► delete messages from, you know, do something complicated.

00:11:18 ◼   ► Do like a search query, find all those, delete.

00:11:20 ◼   ► Like there's not a lot of good solutions

00:11:21 ◼   ► and you can't delete the messages application

00:11:23 ◼   ► as far as I know.

00:11:24 ◼   ► So iOS tries to simplify things,

00:11:26 ◼   ► but then it ends up chunking it

00:11:27 ◼   ► into these big immutable blobs of data.

00:11:30 ◼   ► And people are forced to make choices like,

00:11:32 ◼   ► should I delete this entire application?

00:11:34 ◼   ► I guess it's my only choice.

00:11:35 ◼   ► I mean, and some people, maybe they don't even know

00:11:37 ◼   ► that you can go into the video

00:11:38 ◼   ► and delete individual videos, but yeah,

00:11:41 ◼   ► it's a difficult situation.

00:11:42 ◼   ► It will kind of be better if,

00:11:44 ◼   ► when Apple does a storage shift,

00:11:47 ◼   ► because I think most people can get away

00:11:49 ◼   ► with like a 64 gig device and be pretty sloppy,

00:11:52 ◼   ► but lots of people are buying 16s,

00:11:53 ◼   ► and that's just not enough for anybody to use

00:11:55 ◼   ► for more than like a year and not run out of room.

00:11:58 ◼   ► - Well, in either way, if you have the 16 gig device,

00:12:01 ◼   ► and if you have 16 gigs of legitimate data on it,

00:12:04 ◼   ► that's not gonna get backed up to iCloud

00:12:06 ◼   ► unless you pony up some money.

00:12:07 ◼   ► And this is where, like you guys had mentioned earlier

00:12:10 ◼   ► in Bradley Chambers,

00:12:10 ◼   ► I think was the first place I've seen this,

00:12:12 ◼   ► said, well, the amount of iCloud backup you have

00:12:15 ◼   ► should be the cumulative size of all of your devices

00:12:19 ◼   ► associated with that account.

00:12:20 ◼   ► So if you have a 32 gig phone and a 32 gig iPad,

00:12:24 ◼   ► then as far as we're concerned,

00:12:26 ◼   ► the size of the, your iCloud allotment should be 64 gigs,

00:12:32 ◼   ► which is a lot more than five obviously.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Even then though, like, I mean obviously we're not talking about, you know, desktop size

00:12:39 ◼   ► backup sets, but even that might hit problems with upstream limits.

00:12:43 ◼   ► Yeah, very much so. But I mean at least it's a step, it's an improvement.

00:12:48 ◼   ► True, yeah, definitely.

00:12:50 ◼   ► All right, we are sponsored this week. Our first sponsor is lynda.com. L-Y-N-D-A dot

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00:15:03 ◼   ► So I mean, John, I imagine you want

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00:15:54 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Linda, lynda.com/atp.

00:15:59 ◼   ► - So, we talked a lot about Google last episode

00:16:03 ◼   ► and buying Nest and so on and so forth,

00:16:05 ◼   ► and we've had at least a couple of people write in

00:16:08 ◼   ► and actually have some really interesting feedback

00:16:11 ◼   ► about that, but John, I believe it was you

00:16:13 ◼   ► that added something in particular?

00:16:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, I just wanted to note this one thing

00:16:17 ◼   ► that, not to go into too much depth,

00:16:19 ◼   ► but we were talking about why they buy Nest.

00:16:20 ◼   ► Is it because they want to get into consumer products,

00:16:22 ◼   ► because they want more information, blah, blah, blah.

00:16:24 ◼   ► And Troy Diamond wrote in to mention one specific product

00:16:28 ◼   ► that is actually directly connected to what Nest does,

00:16:30 ◼   ► which doesn't necessarily mean that it has anything to do

00:16:32 ◼   ► with why they bought Nest,

00:16:33 ◼   ► but it's an interesting coincidence.

00:16:36 ◼   ► There's this Genie project that they were doing.

00:16:38 ◼   ► It's about creating like a smart building

00:16:41 ◼   ► for sustainable construction

00:16:43 ◼   ► and environmentally friendly buildings and stuff like that.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And this was part another one of their pie in the sky things that Google does like self-driving cars or whatever

00:16:52 ◼   ► And apparently they spun it off into another company

00:16:56 ◼   ► So I don't know how much bearing this has a nest but it just goes to show that the type of things that nest is

00:17:01 ◼   ► Doing albeit on a very small scale using technology to make things that we all have that we've you know

00:17:07 ◼   ► We don't question like our thermostats or smoke detectors or whatever more intelligent to try to make for more efficient building

00:17:13 ◼   ► Google's already gone down that road

00:17:15 ◼   ► partially with this project.

00:17:17 ◼   ► I should put this link in the show

00:17:18 ◼   ► once people want to know more.

00:17:19 ◼   ► Again, I don't think this has much to do with Nest at all,

00:17:21 ◼   ► but it just goes to show the similarity of thinking.

00:17:24 ◼   ► Nest is not too far from something

00:17:25 ◼   ► that Google might have done, although the way Google does it

00:17:27 ◼   ► is to do some crazy far-reaching sci-fi thing

00:17:31 ◼   ► and then just lose interest and spin it off.

00:17:33 ◼   ► But Nest actually focuses on one small area

00:17:35 ◼   ► and ships a product that people might want to buy.

00:17:37 ◼   ► So I think this might turn into the John Syracuse show,

00:17:41 ◼   ► which will probably make a lot of people,

00:17:43 ◼   ► including me, very happy.

00:17:45 ◼   ► I hear that there's some things going on with TiVo that happened right before we recorded

00:17:50 ◼   ► and were recording on Wednesday night.

00:17:52 ◼   ► Yeah, so this is late breaking, so there's not much info right before I was going in

00:17:59 ◼   ► to set up my computer to record.

00:18:01 ◼   ► Someone tweeted some link to a Wired story that TiVo had laid off most of its hardware

00:18:08 ◼   ► design teams, supposedly, and that they're getting out of the hardware business, which

00:18:12 ◼   ► really annoys me mostly because I don't want to buy the new TiVo that came out. Like when it came

00:18:17 ◼   ► out people are like "oh aren't you gonna get this new TiVo it's supposedly faster" so on and so forth

00:18:21 ◼   ► and I read all the reviews and I said "no just wait for the next one" right? Well doesn't maybe

00:18:25 ◼   ► there won't be a next one. It's a confusing article where it says they laid off five people

00:18:29 ◼   ► and that was most of their hardware design team. I mean I guess that would explain some things but

00:18:33 ◼   ► I don't know it's still too early to know if this is like a a rumor gone bad and they just did some

00:18:38 ◼   ► some sort of reshuffling or whatever,

00:18:40 ◼   ► but it seems like TiVo wants to get into the business

00:18:43 ◼   ► of supplying software to other people who make set-top boxes

00:18:46 ◼   ► and doing server-side DVRs like the AT&T U-verse thing,

00:18:51 ◼   ► rather than selling you a box with a hard drive

00:18:53 ◼   ► and a CPU that you put in your home.

00:18:54 ◼   ► And I kind of like the box with the hard drive

00:18:56 ◼   ► and a CPU that you put in your home.

00:18:58 ◼   ► So as I tweeted, does this mean now I have to get

00:19:02 ◼   ► one of these TiVos because like my television,

00:19:06 ◼   ► it's like, well, it's the last one they're making

00:19:07 ◼   ► when it goes away, who knows what you'll be able to buy?

00:19:10 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:19:11 ◼   ► I just priced one out, and even with a discount code

00:19:14 ◼   ► that you get for filling out their stupid monthly survey

00:19:16 ◼   ► things, it's still like $900 something

00:19:20 ◼   ► dollars for me to get the big Honk and Tebow that I

00:19:23 ◼   ► want with lifetime service.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Wait, what?

00:19:26 ◼   ► Are you serious?

00:19:27 ◼   ► Half of that is the service cost.

00:19:29 ◼   ► So the box itself is $500 or less

00:19:32 ◼   ► for the big one that holds like 450 hours of HD content

00:19:35 ◼   ► with six tuners.

00:19:37 ◼   ► This is what we're talking about here.

00:19:38 ◼   ► This is the big guns.

00:19:39 ◼   ► I don't shop down at the low end of the range.

00:19:41 ◼   ► And then double that price for the service contract.

00:19:46 ◼   ► And the service contract is basically paying for them to send you program information for

00:19:51 ◼   ► the life of the device.

00:19:52 ◼   ► You could pay like $12 a month if you want to do it month by month, or you can pay some

00:19:56 ◼   ► big amount of money and get lifetime.

00:19:58 ◼   ► And I usually get lifetime because I keep my TiVo boxes for years.

00:20:01 ◼   ► I slowly rotate them and retire them out.

00:20:03 ◼   ► But most of the time, the lifetime thing more than pays for itself because I retire the

00:20:06 ◼   ► TiVo after 3, 4, or 5 years and it's, you know, at $12 a month doesn't take too many

00:20:11 ◼   ► years to equal like $100, $200 or whatever it used to be for lifetime.

00:20:14 ◼   ► But they keep bringing the prices up and I don't want to pay month to month so I always

00:20:18 ◼   ► look at the lifetime thing.

00:20:19 ◼   ► But my current lifetime on my TiVo Premier is not close to being paid for.

00:20:23 ◼   ► I forget what I paid for that lifetime thing.

00:20:25 ◼   ► But that's another reason I didn't buy the new Romeo DVR when it came out, even though

00:20:30 ◼   ► it does look like it's faster and nicer than mine.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Some of the menus still were in HD and I said, "Oh, I'll just wait for the next one.

00:20:35 ◼   ► I'm still in the middle of my lifetime in this, I don't need a new TiVo, my current

00:20:39 ◼   ► TiVo is fine, such as it is.

00:20:42 ◼   ► But now that they're getting out of this business, now I have to play that stupid game where

00:20:46 ◼   ► I wait and see if I can get one of these when they become cheap or maybe they'll never become

00:20:49 ◼   ► cheap and they'll just disappear.

00:20:51 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:20:52 ◼   ► I'm kind of sad about it though.

00:20:54 ◼   ► So everything you like is disappearing from under you.

00:20:57 ◼   ► I'm surprised there's a new Mac Pro.

00:20:59 ◼   ► Well...

00:21:00 ◼   ► Sort of.

00:21:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:02 ◼   ► It's not that like, the TV thing is just like a fluke kind of where, because there will be better

00:21:08 ◼   ► TVs eventually, like OLEDs will eventually become cheaper and they'll be way better than what I have

00:21:11 ◼   ► now, but it's just, you know, that we're in a lull period where the thing that I want is going away

00:21:18 ◼   ► and something better will come and replace it, but I don't know when that will be. But the television

00:21:24 ◼   ► I was, you know, it was a clear choice because my old TV, like you could buy almost any modern TV

00:21:29 ◼   ► and it would be better than my old one, just because technology had moved on in four years

00:21:33 ◼   ► for Plasmas.

00:21:34 ◼   ► But for TiVo, my current one is still pretty darn good.

00:21:38 ◼   ► It's very reliable.

00:21:39 ◼   ► Four tuners, I don't need six tuners.

00:21:41 ◼   ► Four tuners is enough.

00:21:42 ◼   ► The only reason I would get the new one is because the UI is faster, and that's the thing

00:21:45 ◼   ► that drives me crazy about my current one, that and the stupid ads.

00:21:50 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:21:51 ◼   ► I haven't decided what I'm going to do, but I'm sad that they're apparently getting out

00:21:55 ◼   ► of the hard...

00:21:56 ◼   ► Like, I still think there's a market for this product.

00:21:58 ◼   ► What it does is amazing.

00:21:59 ◼   ► People who I know who have never had TiVo and they happen to buy one, like Scott McEltee

00:22:03 ◼   ► from The Incomparable had never had a TiVo I think and he bought one recently and he's

00:22:06 ◼   ► just amazed by it.

00:22:07 ◼   ► He's like, "Wow, this is great."

00:22:08 ◼   ► I'm like, "Yes, I could not watch television without TiVo.

00:22:13 ◼   ► I would never want to use a cable company's DVR.

00:22:15 ◼   ► I would never want to not have a DVR.

00:22:17 ◼   ► This is how I want to do it.

00:22:19 ◼   ► It's just that this hardware could be so much better.

00:22:21 ◼   ► It just needs a little bit of finesse and know-how applied to it to make the CPUs faster,

00:22:26 ◼   ► make everything about it better, improve the software.

00:22:30 ◼   ► It's so close and it's so much better than everything else, but to see them bail on the

00:22:35 ◼   ► business and just decide they're going to get in bed with the cable companies and just

00:22:38 ◼   ► supply software.

00:22:39 ◼   ► I don't know where their expertise lies.

00:22:42 ◼   ► Are they great at making hardware?

00:22:44 ◼   ► No, not really.

00:22:45 ◼   ► Are they great at making software?

00:22:46 ◼   ► No, not really.

00:22:47 ◼   ► The combination is something that didn't exist before.

00:22:48 ◼   ► The box that you could have in your house is kind of like transport.

00:22:50 ◼   ► A box in your house with the hard drive, with stuff on it, no cloud stuff needed.

00:22:55 ◼   ► program information you can come down and it's got a lot of features now like

00:22:58 ◼   ► the iOS apps aren't that bad. You can control your TiVo from the other side of

00:23:02 ◼   ► the country with your phone or your iPad. You could stream to your

00:23:06 ◼   ► iPad from your house and what there's all sorts of things you can do with the

00:23:09 ◼   ► hardware that they have. They finally started to kind of get some useful

00:23:12 ◼   ► features under them. It's just that the hardware was not great and their

00:23:16 ◼   ► software was a little bit creaky. I don't know. I'm sad.

00:23:21 ◼   ► Well, if that makes you sad, what do you think of the Nintendo stuff?

00:23:26 ◼   ► Oh, you're evil.

00:23:28 ◼   ► That actually makes me less sad, yes.

00:23:30 ◼   ► That's the next thing I'll say.

00:23:31 ◼   ► But before we leave this topic, I want to ask you guys, do either one of you guys have

00:23:33 ◼   ► a TiVo?

00:23:34 ◼   ► No, I have Verizon's DVR that comes—well, I shouldn't say "comes" with your cable

00:23:41 ◼   ► service, but just a year ago, Aaron and I finally decided that I think $10 or $15 a

00:23:48 ◼   ► month was worth it for DVR.

00:23:49 ◼   ► So everyone else on the planet had had a DVR for easily five years and we just got one,

00:23:56 ◼   ► like I said, around a year ago.

00:23:58 ◼   ► And I really like it, but I feel like I could live without it and I don't find it to be,

00:24:04 ◼   ► I find it to be sufficient because I've never really used a Tebow.

00:24:08 ◼   ► All I needed to do is record the shows I want and play the show I want when I ask it to

00:24:12 ◼   ► play it.

00:24:13 ◼   ► I guess maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't see why you need anything more than that.

00:24:18 ◼   ► And my menus, if memory serves, are in HD.

00:24:22 ◼   ► How much programming can you fit on your...

00:24:25 ◼   ► Oh, I don't have the faintest idea.

00:24:26 ◼   ► We don't watch enough TV to ever get that close.

00:24:30 ◼   ► To me, I always avoided this stuff.

00:24:32 ◼   ► I had a DVR box from the cable company for a few years, and then I was one of those people

00:24:41 ◼   ► who cut cable.

00:24:43 ◼   ► And that was a while ago.

00:24:44 ◼   ► I mean, that was in like 2007, 2008 maybe?

00:24:48 ◼   ► So it was a while ago.

00:24:50 ◼   ► And to me, one of the reasons I did that is because,

00:24:54 ◼   ► like as a nerd, looking at DVRs,

00:24:57 ◼   ► it's just such a terrible hack.

00:24:59 ◼   ► And it's hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks.

00:25:02 ◼   ► Mixing in TiVo is even more hacky,

00:25:04 ◼   ► 'cause then you have to deal with your cable company's crap

00:25:06 ◼   ► and it's like, it's layers upon layers of fragile,

00:25:09 ◼   ► hacky things that can and often do fail or break.

00:25:12 ◼   ► And I would rather just put the same amount of money

00:25:17 ◼   ► really or less, what ends up being less most of the time, into Netflix and iTunes purchases.

00:25:24 ◼   ► And it works for us because the shows we watch are available that way and the money works

00:25:29 ◼   ► out where we don't watch so many shows where that would be prohibitively expensive. It

00:25:35 ◼   ► doesn't work for everybody, of course. If you like live sports and stuff like that,

00:25:39 ◼   ► it's not going to work. But for us, it works very well. And so to me, that's a much more

00:25:44 ◼   ► elegant solution if you can fit within it,

00:25:47 ◼   ► 'cause then you don't have to fast forward

00:25:48 ◼   ► through commercials, you don't have to worry about

00:25:49 ◼   ► what if the thing missed the start time by five minutes

00:25:52 ◼   ► 'cause something changed at the last second.

00:25:54 ◼   ► All that crazy stuff you have to deal with with DVR,

00:25:56 ◼   ► storage space, I mean, all that crazy stuff,

00:25:59 ◼   ► I prefer to just do the 80% solution of,

00:26:03 ◼   ► I can get 80% of what we want in this far better way

00:26:08 ◼   ► that's usually cheaper and has all these other advantages,

00:26:11 ◼   ► like for example, no commercials ever.

00:26:12 ◼   ► all these other advantages.

00:26:14 ◼   ► It's just, to me, that's a much more elegant future.

00:26:16 ◼   ► And so the idea of buying a really decked out DVR for me

00:26:21 ◼   ► seems like investing in the wrong future.

00:26:25 ◼   ► But again, it's only because my consumption habits

00:26:28 ◼   ► fit within the way I've chosen to do things.

00:26:30 ◼   ► There are some advantages, even if you're not a heavy TV

00:26:32 ◼   ► watcher.

00:26:33 ◼   ► If you're a heavy TV watcher, like I am and my whole family

00:26:36 ◼   ► is, then you can't use a cable company to provide DVR

00:26:39 ◼   ► because they don't have enough storage space.

00:26:41 ◼   ► My thing has, I think it has like a three terabyte drive in there and we fill it constantly.

00:26:45 ◼   ► We're deleting stuff to make room for things.

00:26:47 ◼   ► So we fill the thing up because it's just four people's worth of programming in there.

00:26:51 ◼   ► Actually we have another two terabytes upstairs and we use the superset of that storage.

00:26:57 ◼   ► So if you're a heavy TV viewer, it's obvious that you can't get by with any other solution.

00:27:03 ◼   ► And if you're a heavy TV viewer, that also means you're not content to wait until they

00:27:06 ◼   ► show up on iTunes.

00:27:07 ◼   ► It's not even the money thing.

00:27:08 ◼   ► It's just like, can I watch it right now?

00:27:09 ◼   ► It's on right now.

00:27:10 ◼   ► I watch it right now or have one you're just torrented isn't available although

00:27:13 ◼   ► I have a good deal with the torrenting and stuff like that

00:27:15 ◼   ► It's like this this is the the solution that gets you the programming you want

00:27:19 ◼   ► When you want it more or less

00:27:22 ◼   ► And if you don't care about that then yeah, there's solutions better

00:27:25 ◼   ► But I would say even

00:27:25 ◼   ► Even if you're not a heavy TV watcher and even if you don't care about a little bit delay the main feature that I think

00:27:30 ◼   ► Of all these DVRs in the age of cable card is they make it so you don't have to have a cable box if you think

00:27:35 ◼   ► You want to have cable for whatever reason I can't imagine having a cable box

00:27:39 ◼   ► I've never had a cable box.

00:27:41 ◼   ► I've never had a cable box in any house that I-- let me see,

00:27:44 ◼   ► maybe in the apartment?

00:27:45 ◼   ► I don't think in any house that I've owned.

00:27:47 ◼   ► I've had a cable box at all.

00:27:48 ◼   ► When before, maybe before or around the time

00:27:51 ◼   ► my first child was born, we said, OK, we're

00:27:53 ◼   ► not going to have time to watch our TV shows the way

00:27:55 ◼   ► we normally have.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Because once you have a kid, you can't be like, oh, it's

00:27:57 ◼   ► 8 o'clock.

00:27:58 ◼   ► Let's go sit down and watch the TV.

00:27:59 ◼   ► Because that doesn't work anymore.

00:28:01 ◼   ► And that's when I sort of said my goodbyes to live TV.

00:28:04 ◼   ► It's like saying your goodbyes to the light

00:28:06 ◼   ► when you become a vampire.

00:28:07 ◼   ► When I got my first TiVo like nine, ten years ago, that was it.

00:28:10 ◼   ► I said goodbye to live television.

00:28:12 ◼   ► I will never watch live television again.

00:28:14 ◼   ► I will never see a commercial again that I don't skip through with a 30-second skip

00:28:16 ◼   ► button.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Live television is dead to me.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Flipping through channels is dead to me.

00:28:21 ◼   ► All that, totally gone.

00:28:22 ◼   ► From that point on, for like the past decade of my life, television is like, go in front

00:28:26 ◼   ► of my television, turn it on, go to some box that's connected to it and select what I want

00:28:30 ◼   ► to watch from it.

00:28:31 ◼   ► And it just so happens that TiVo is filled with all the programming that I want to record.

00:28:37 ◼   ► in sort of real time. And even when we watch "live television" we always wait for the commercials

00:28:41 ◼   ► to queue up. We don't start watching our 8 o'clock programs until 8.30 because we know

00:28:45 ◼   ► we'll never have to see a commercial that way. You don't have to do it with HBO shows,

00:28:48 ◼   ► we can watch them in real time because they have no commercials. So I just think it's

00:28:51 ◼   ► a more civilized way to watch television because cable boxes, DVRs or no, cable boxes are disgusting.

00:28:57 ◼   ► Just terrible black boxes with those big red LEDs on them and the horrible remotes they

00:29:02 ◼   ► give you. I never want one of those things in my house at all. And this is like, you

00:29:05 ◼   ► You can buy your own box, get this little cable car,

00:29:07 ◼   ► put it in there, and get FiOS or something in the basement,

00:29:10 ◼   ► run the coax up there.

00:29:12 ◼   ► It's the same reason I don't use

00:29:13 ◼   ► the cable company's router.

00:29:14 ◼   ► I don't want their box, I don't want their router,

00:29:16 ◼   ► I don't want anything in the house.

00:29:18 ◼   ► So for that reason alone, I think if you subscribe to cable,

00:29:21 ◼   ► it is better to have one of the smaller TiVo DVRs

00:29:26 ◼   ► than to take their cable box.

00:29:28 ◼   ► But if you don't want cable,

00:29:29 ◼   ► then yeah, the TiVo's not doing anything for you.

00:29:32 ◼   ► And if you can get by with the, I think even Casey,

00:29:34 ◼   ► Depending on how much you use your Verizon DVR thing, you would probably like a TiVo

00:29:40 ◼   ► better but probably not to be worth the amount of money that it costs.

00:29:43 ◼   ► Although how much do you pay per month for that DVR thing?

00:29:46 ◼   ► I think it's about $15.

00:29:47 ◼   ► And I don't debate that a TiVo is surely better in every measurable way.

00:29:52 ◼   ► And probably a bunch of immeasurable ones as well.

00:29:55 ◼   ► But to me, having never had a DVR before, I'm just excited that I have a thing, a machine

00:30:02 ◼   ► if you will, that will record the television shows that we do watch without me having to

00:30:07 ◼   ► intervene. And to your point a moment ago, I used the Verizon piece of crap Action Tech

00:30:13 ◼   ► router that I was given when we moved into the house in 2008. And I haven't...

00:30:18 ◼   ► It's some kind of intervention.

00:30:20 ◼   ► Probably. But it hasn't caused me any issues. Now for Wi-Fi, I use a slightly old airport

00:30:29 ◼   ► extreme so really the only thing that this router is doing is getting internet to my

00:30:35 ◼   ► set top boxes and getting internet to my airport extreme.

00:30:39 ◼   ► And for that, it's fine.

00:30:43 ◼   ► And again, I completely understand and agree that not having to use the Verizon router

00:30:48 ◼   ► would probably be better and not having to use the Verizon DVR would probably be better

00:30:52 ◼   ► but it serves my needs just fine and so I don't have any compelling reason to upgrade

00:30:57 ◼   ► that I'm aware of.

00:30:58 ◼   ► 15 dollars a month though, that adds up.

00:31:01 ◼   ► You should wait until they have a fire sale in the last Tivo Romeos and get one of the

00:31:04 ◼   ► small ones and just try it.

00:31:05 ◼   ► I think cost-wise it may end up being cheaper and it will be a nicer experience.

00:31:11 ◼   ► Probably.

00:31:12 ◼   ► And the chat room is saying, "Oh well, you're renting that equipment."

00:31:15 ◼   ► I'm absolutely renting the DVR.

00:31:18 ◼   ► I don't recall if I'm renting the router.

00:31:21 ◼   ► It stands to reason I am.

00:31:24 ◼   ► But again, for me it's sufficient and I mean our Verizon bill is somewhere around

00:31:30 ◼   ► $150, $160 for the baller but not obscene internet.

00:31:36 ◼   ► So not quite Marco level but really good internet and reasonable cable.

00:31:42 ◼   ► We have HD service of course but we don't get any like Cinemax or HBO or anything like

00:31:47 ◼   ► that and we even have a home telephone for a reason I haven't quite figured out yet.

00:31:51 ◼   ► And for that it's about $150.

00:31:53 ◼   ► And I actually, I love my Fios.

00:31:55 ◼   ► I would be devastated if we ever moved to a place

00:32:00 ◼   ► that didn't have Verizon Fios.

00:32:01 ◼   ► So, I mean, I don't think that that's a terrible deal,

00:32:04 ◼   ► but I don't know, maybe I'm missing out.

00:32:07 ◼   ► - Our second sponsor this week is our friends at Harvest.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Harvest is a beautifully crafted business tool

00:32:14 ◼   ► for tracking the time spent on client projects.

00:32:17 ◼   ► Now you guys, well, Casey, especially,

00:32:19 ◼   ► you do client work a lot in your business life,

00:32:22 ◼   ► and you are very aware of just how many time tracking tools

00:32:27 ◼   ► there are out there and how terrible most of them are, right?

00:32:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, and in fact, when I was a C++ developer

00:32:33 ◼   ► many years ago, I taught myself C#

00:32:35 ◼   ► by writing my own time tracking tool,

00:32:37 ◼   ► which was indeed terrible.

00:32:39 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:32:40 ◼   ► - Nice.

00:32:41 ◼   ► Well, Harvest fixes all that.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Harvest is this great, beautifully crafted tool.

00:32:47 ◼   ► You can work from anywhere.

00:32:48 ◼   ► You can start a time tracker via your web browser.

00:32:51 ◼   ► You can also start on your iPhone or Android device.

00:32:55 ◼   ► You won't have to go searching for your timer app

00:32:57 ◼   ► or you know, just one more thing.

00:32:58 ◼   ► You just go to harvest from any device.

00:33:00 ◼   ► You can start a timer.

00:33:02 ◼   ► You won't play the memory game later with your time sheet.

00:33:04 ◼   ► You can stay focused on the task at hand.

00:33:07 ◼   ► Just start the timer anywhere and get to work.

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00:34:14 ◼   ► All right, so we never actually got to Nintendo, right?

00:34:16 ◼   ► Or am I crazy?

00:34:17 ◼   ► No, we didn't.

00:34:18 ◼   ► I'm delighted.

00:34:18 ◼   ► OK.

00:34:19 ◼   ► OK.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Are they dead yet?

00:34:20 ◼   ► Oh.

00:34:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it's going to be a while.

00:34:24 ◼   ► Yeah, so they announced their financials,

00:34:26 ◼   ► or their expected financials or projections.

00:34:29 ◼   ► And they are forecasting a $240 million annual loss,

00:34:33 ◼   ► because the Wii U is not selling.

00:34:35 ◼   ► And they're cutting their forecast

00:34:36 ◼   ► on how many Wii U's they think they're going to sell.

00:34:39 ◼   ► They previously had saying they were going to sell 9 million, and now they're saying

00:34:42 ◼   ► they're going to sell 2.8 million.

00:34:44 ◼   ► And even Wii U games, they cut that from saying they were going to sell 38 million Wii U games,

00:34:49 ◼   ► saying they were going to sell 19 million.

00:34:52 ◼   ► So you know, everyone knows that Wii U is not selling.

00:34:55 ◼   ► Nintendo has not done anything to make it sell any better.

00:34:59 ◼   ► 3DS is doing okay.

00:35:01 ◼   ► Not great, not terrible.

00:35:02 ◼   ► It was actually the best-selling console of all of 2013, which is not that impressive

00:35:06 ◼   ► because what did it compete with in 2013?

00:35:09 ◼   ► A bunch of old consoles that were on their way out the door,

00:35:11 ◼   ► but it was also the best-selling console in December,

00:35:14 ◼   ► which is kind of impressive because in December

00:35:15 ◼   ► the new consoles were just coming out

00:35:17 ◼   ► and you think they sold like a million dollars

00:35:19 ◼   ► in the million units in the first day or whatever.

00:35:21 ◼   ► So I mean, compared to the DS numbers, 3DS isn't big,

00:35:25 ◼   ► but compared to how dedicated gaming devices are selling now

00:35:28 ◼   ► 3DS is doing pretty well for itself.

00:35:30 ◼   ► Wow, someone, real-time follow-up in the chat room,

00:35:34 ◼   ► someone, TiVo refutes the rumors and said hardware

00:35:36 ◼   ► a core component of its business." Okay, well, I'll read that link later to see.

00:35:39 ◼   ► Like, you know, I read that when somebody posted it earlier, and the actual response from the

00:35:46 ◼   ► TiVo person, it kind of... Double speak.

00:35:50 ◼   ► It basically sounds like they're trying not to scare people away from buying the Romeos.

00:35:56 ◼   ► So it's basically saying, like, "We're going to keep supporting the Romeo." But it doesn't...

00:36:00 ◼   ► It's a lot of double speak that basically sounds like, "We're going to keep supporting that,

00:36:04 ◼   ► but don't expect much else because we're focusing on cloud. Yeah, that's kind of like when Panasonic

00:36:10 ◼   ► was getting out of the plasma business for like a year leading up to that, there was like there'd

00:36:15 ◼   ► be a story saying, "Oh, Panasonic is getting out of the plasma business." Panasonic would issue some

00:36:19 ◼   ► statement that neither confirms nor denies, but kind of tries to tell you, "No, it's okay. You

00:36:23 ◼   ► should buy our existing TVs because we have inventory to clear," but never officially saying,

00:36:27 ◼   ► "We're getting out of the business," until like the whole year is up and then Panasonic then

00:36:30 ◼   ► finally officially says, "Yes, it's true. We're getting out of... So where there's smoke,

00:36:33 ◼   ► this fire but we'll continue with that. I'll look at that story after the show. That's

00:36:38 ◼   ► why I prefaced it with saying I just saw this link just before we came in. Who knows how

00:36:41 ◼   ► accurate it is. It's kind of fuzzy information but the signs don't look good. But anyway,

00:36:46 ◼   ► Nintendo, I don't think there's any news here. Like we all knew that the Wii U wasn't selling

00:36:50 ◼   ► that well. I guess they could have sold gangbusters in December but even if it did, I mean the

00:36:57 ◼   ► PS4 and Xbox One sold pretty well in December. Like they're coming out of the gate strong

00:37:03 ◼   ► and they got outsold by the 3DS.

00:37:06 ◼   ► And what I've always said about Nintendo,

00:37:08 ◼   ► and this is the time of year when people

00:37:10 ◼   ► are gonna keep posting more stories about it,

00:37:11 ◼   ► what Nintendo should or shouldn't do or whatever,

00:37:14 ◼   ► is that as long as there's a market

00:37:16 ◼   ► for dedicated gaming devices, Nintendo can,

00:37:19 ◼   ► Nintendo has a way to thrive and to be successful

00:37:23 ◼   ► and to be the Nintendo we want it to be.

00:37:25 ◼   ► Just because there is a way for them to do that

00:37:26 ◼   ► doesn't mean they will do it.

00:37:28 ◼   ► That's the distinction that,

00:37:30 ◼   ► you know, subtlety is that most people

00:37:32 ◼   ► will probably forget about. There is a way for Nintendo to win as long as people are

00:37:38 ◼   ► willing to buy hardware that mostly just plays games. If people stop being willing to buy

00:37:43 ◼   ► hardware that just plays games, Nintendo can't play anymore because Nintendo can't make a

00:37:48 ◼   ► general purpose OS, I don't think. They don't have the expertise. They can barely make a

00:37:51 ◼   ► dedicated gaming console software stack. They can't make something based on Android. They

00:37:57 ◼   ► can't make their own iOS. They can't be a platform. They just can't do that. They don't

00:38:00 ◼   ► don't have the people do that. It's very difficult to do. So as long as people keep buying dedicated

00:38:06 ◼   ► gaming devices, all Nintendo needs to do is make really good dedicated gaming devices

00:38:10 ◼   ► with really good games that people want to buy. That's it. It sounds easy, doesn't it?

00:38:14 ◼   ► Well, if they don't make game hardware that people want to buy and games that people want

00:38:19 ◼   ► to buy, they can still fail under that scenario, but at least it won't be like, "Well, it's

00:38:22 ◼   ► out of the question." They can't. I think there's nothing they can do to say, "We're

00:38:27 ◼   ► going to make our own operating system and our own app store and our own general purpose

00:38:30 ◼   ► platform that does more than games. That's just out of the question for them. The only

00:38:34 ◼   ► thing they can do and the only thing I think they should do is try to make game devices

00:38:39 ◼   ► that people really want to buy with great games that people want to buy on them. And

00:38:43 ◼   ► that's it. And they're not doing that now. They made the Wii U and no one seems to want

00:38:47 ◼   ► it for I think what should be fairly obvious reasons at this point. It's weak, it has bad

00:38:52 ◼   ► third-party game support because it's weak. It's like a previous-gen console that no one

00:38:57 ◼   ► is really interested in and that the novelty this time of the second screen is not catching

00:39:01 ◼   ► on with people and Nintendo hasn't demonstrated why it should catch on. It's just a bad situation.

00:39:07 ◼   ► But they do have $14 billion in the bank. As I said, I think a couple months ago when

00:39:11 ◼   ► this came up in the first round of Nintendo WoW, it's like they just need to reset and

00:39:16 ◼   ► think about what they're going to do for their next thing. They don't need to give up on

00:39:20 ◼   ► Wii U. They still need to put out whatever games they have planned for the Wii U, even if it doesn't

00:39:24 ◼   ► sell a lot of units, and third-party support is just disappearing for the Wii U, because who the

00:39:27 ◼   ► hell is going to make a game for a crappy console that can't run modern games and has very few,

00:39:33 ◼   ► you know, and is not selling a lot of units? No one's going to sign up to make games for that.

00:39:36 ◼   ► It's just grim. But Nintendo will make games for it, because Nintendo will make money off its games

00:39:40 ◼   ► for it. And, you know, what choice do they have? So I think that will just make games for the Wii U,

00:39:46 ◼   ► put them out, the thing will sort of fade away, and Nintendo just needs to think about what it's

00:39:50 ◼   ► going to do next. Spend that part of that $14 billion wisely and come out with a good idea,

00:39:56 ◼   ► with a good platform, and hope that by the time they do that, that the market for dedicated gaming

00:40:01 ◼   ► hardware has not disappeared. As I've said many times, I think there is room for one more

00:40:05 ◼   ► generation of dedicated gaming hardware, and this is it. PS4 and Xbox One. After the PS4 and Xbox One,

00:40:11 ◼   ► seven, eight years from now, I'll have to revisit that question and say, is there still a market for

00:40:15 ◼   ► for dedicated gaming hardware, maybe then the answer will be no and then Nintendo is

00:40:18 ◼   ► screwed. But for now, Nintendo just did a big swing and a miss this generation with

00:40:22 ◼   ► their consoles and maybe got like a foul tip with their handhelds.

00:40:27 ◼   ► Which, do you think, are they in worse shape now as they were when they launched the GameCube?

00:40:32 ◼   ► I know the GameCube was not a huge success, was it?

00:40:36 ◼   ► They're worse off now in terms of sales, but I'm assuming they have much more money in

00:40:40 ◼   ► the bank now than they did back then. Because the GameCube, you know, if you look at the

00:40:44 ◼   ► the GameCube sold more than, easily more than the Wii U. Like, if there were all the problems that

00:40:50 ◼   ► the GameCube had, Nintendo would kill if they get GameCube-like numbers on the Wii U. They do not

00:40:55 ◼   ► have that now. And the DS sold way better than the 3DS. But a lot of that is kind of like,

00:41:00 ◼   ► look at the downward trend of dedicated gaming devices. Like, overall, the market is slowly

00:41:05 ◼   ► declining. And so everything's like relative. It's like, well, the 3DS is doing well now,

00:41:10 ◼   ► but nothing compared to the DS. And the GameCube was seen as a failure because it was a third-place

00:41:14 ◼   ► console then, but boy, what Nintendo would give to sell GameCube-like numbers of Wii

00:41:19 ◼   ► U at this point.

00:41:21 ◼   ► So if you take off your Nintendo fanboy, and I mean that in a good way, hat, you're the

00:41:26 ◼   ► only one of us that has a Wii U, and when we visited I played it for five minutes, and

00:41:32 ◼   ► it seemed nice, but whatever.

00:41:35 ◼   ► Taking off the hat, the fanboy hat, is it a good system?

00:41:38 ◼   ► I know what you just said about it being not very powerful, but just in general, is it

00:41:42 ◼   ► good?

00:41:43 ◼   ► that Nintendo will make for the Wii U, and that they already have made, demonstrated

00:41:48 ◼   ► as a platform that you can have fun games on.

00:41:51 ◼   ► And as I said before, you can have kinds of fun and kinds of games on the Wii U that you

00:41:56 ◼   ► can't have on any other console because of that weird second screen thing.

00:42:00 ◼   ► It doesn't mean that they're the most amazing games in the world, but there's experiences

00:42:03 ◼   ► you can't have other places.

00:42:06 ◼   ► And like Nintendo Land, the thing that demonstrates, like here's umpteen different ways you can

00:42:10 ◼   ► use our combination of hardware.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Some of them are fun, some of them aren't, but out of that big collection of minigames,

00:42:15 ◼   ► there's three or four in there that are really interesting and novel that can't be matched

00:42:19 ◼   ► anywhere else.

00:42:20 ◼   ► And so if you're into games and you want to say, "Show me a new way to be entertained,"

00:42:23 ◼   ► instead of just another first-person shooter, Nintendo is showing you that.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Kind of like on the Xbox One and the Xbox 360 with Kinect, Microsoft said, "You can

00:42:33 ◼   ► stand up in front of the TV and wave your arms and legs around.

00:42:35 ◼   ► That's a new way to play games.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Try that.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Do you like it?

00:42:39 ◼   ► Is it fun?"

00:42:40 ◼   ► something you can't experience on the other consoles because they don't have the Kinect.

00:42:43 ◼   ► You know, they may have the eye toy and the other things, the cameras or whatever, but

00:42:46 ◼   ► Nintendo does have something novel with the Wii U. And so that's one aspect of it.

00:42:53 ◼   ► The second aspect is Nintendo makes great games and their games are going to be on the Wii U,

00:42:58 ◼   ► their games are not going to be on any of the other consoles. So if you're interested in playing

00:43:03 ◼   ► the next Zelda game, there's only one place to do that. And maybe the next Zelda game won't take

00:43:07 ◼   ► advantage of any of the Wii U unique features at all, but it'll still be a great game.

00:43:12 ◼   ► It's kind of the same reason I got a PlayStation 3 to play The Last Guardian, which has still

00:43:16 ◼   ► not been released. But you know, Journey is an example. Journey is not available on any

00:43:20 ◼   ► other platform. I would buy a PS3 just to play Journey. Journey could be on any platform,

00:43:24 ◼   ► it doesn't use any unique features, it's like analog stick and buttons, it's not like

00:43:27 ◼   ► you need the Kinect board, it's not like you need a second screen. It's a very straightforward

00:43:31 ◼   ► game, it could be a PC game, hell, it could probably even exist on iOS, god forbid.

00:43:35 ◼   ► but it was only on the PS3, so that's why I bought a PS3. And I continue to think that that's the way

00:43:43 ◼   ► forward for Nintendo is make awesome hardware that people want that third parties are willing

00:43:47 ◼   ► to support that sells in big numbers, and also make your very best games and put them only on

00:43:51 ◼   ► your hardware. That's it. Just simple as that. Nintendo, I don't know, see what the problem is.

00:43:55 ◼   ► You just got to make awesome games and hardware that people love.

00:43:58 ◼   ► [Joey] In order to win, you have to do well, geez.

00:44:00 ◼   ► [Joey] Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, like, people keep talking about structural things, like,

00:44:04 ◼   ► "Oh, they need a different strategy." Even Nintendo itself saying, "You know, we'll have to look at smartphones and do this and do that."

00:44:10 ◼   ► It's like, I don't think that's a winning strategy for Nintendo because I don't think Nintendo can

00:44:15 ◼   ► can do what it does. You know, people keep making this analogy and saying, "Well, it's not apt or whatever,"

00:44:21 ◼   ► but there's enough aspects of it that I think are apt that it's worth revisiting and thinking about. Again,

00:44:25 ◼   ► it's kind of like when Apple was in trouble and they were totally in trouble, like in the 90s, and people were saying, "Apple needs

00:44:30 ◼   ► to get out of the hardware business and just put Mac OS on Windows PCs."

00:44:34 ◼   ► Because what they're doing now is not working.

00:44:37 ◼   ► They're not making hardware that people want to buy.

00:44:39 ◼   ► People kind of like their software.

00:44:40 ◼   ► Why not just put that software on other people's hardware?

00:44:43 ◼   ► And you could argue that had Steve Jobs not returned, Apple would have gone down the tubes

00:44:48 ◼   ► and gone bankrupt and people would have said, "See?

00:44:50 ◼   ► You should have just put macOS on PC hardware.

00:44:53 ◼   ► Your stupid thing of selling it, you know, why did you keep doing that?

00:44:56 ◼   ► Why did you keep keeping your software just to your hardware that nobody wanted?

00:44:59 ◼   ► Why didn't you just put it on generic x86 hardware?"

00:45:03 ◼   ► And now you're out of business.

00:45:04 ◼   ► listen to me. But instead Steve Jobs came back and did the thing that I'm teasingly saying is so easy.

00:45:08 ◼   ► How about you just make computers that people actually want to buy? And then you put your good

00:45:13 ◼   ► software on it, you make that even better too. And then when you have hardware and software that

00:45:16 ◼   ► people want to buy, you can become successful. That's not as simple as that because Apple did

00:45:21 ◼   ► other things as well, but there is a definite analogy in that what Nintendo makes is a

00:45:27 ◼   ► combination of hardware and software that gives a unique experience that is potentially better

00:45:31 ◼   ► than all of its competitors and that's why people buy it. People bought the Wii because

00:45:35 ◼   ► it was crazy waggly remote mixed with some software that made that crazy waggly remote

00:45:39 ◼   ► fun. That's it. All you gotta do is make something that people want to buy. And if you said,

00:45:46 ◼   ► "Okay, well why don't you just make software?" All you gotta do is make software that people

00:45:49 ◼   ► want to buy. How many copies of software does Intender need to sell for iOS to make the

00:45:55 ◼   ► kind of money they make even off of their crappy failing Wii U and their so-so 3DS.

00:46:01 ◼   ► You know, 3DS games are like $30 a pop, Wii U games are like $60 a pop, and they gotta

00:46:08 ◼   ► be making money in the Wii U consoles itself. Nintendo can't come into iOS, put out $60

00:46:14 ◼   ► games and expect, like, I mean, just do the revenue graphs, I'm like, "Well, if I sell

00:46:17 ◼   ► it $1, how many do I have to sell? If I sell it $60, we know how much I'll sell compared

00:46:21 ◼   ► if I sell at $1.

00:46:22 ◼   ► Does Nintendo have to start making freemium games?

00:46:25 ◼   ► It's a whole different market.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Never mind what kind of games could you make on iOS.

00:46:29 ◼   ► And now you're dependent on a different hardware vendor, and you can't innovate gameplay because

00:46:34 ◼   ► you're at the mercy of what kind of hardware Apple wants to put out and how well they're

00:46:37 ◼   ► going to support your games.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And whole category games can't even exist without the physical controllers.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Oh, well, you just sell to people with physical controllers.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Nintendo can make a physical controller.

00:46:45 ◼   ► Now you're selling to a fraction of a fraction of a market.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Anybody willing to buy a physical controller to play Nintendo games on their iOS device

00:46:51 ◼   ► would also be willing to buy a 3DS.

00:46:54 ◼   ► And television game consoles with a controller there, they could just buy a Bluetooth controller

00:46:59 ◼   ► and AirPlay their iOS device and you worry about the lag.

00:47:02 ◼   ► There is no good way out for Nintendo in those areas.

00:47:04 ◼   ► I think Nintendo should pay no attention to the smartphone space because they can't be

00:47:09 ◼   ► a player there.

00:47:10 ◼   ► They're never going to have their own platform.

00:47:11 ◼   ► They're never going to have their own OS.

00:47:13 ◼   ► That becomes the price of doing business.

00:47:15 ◼   ► They're doomed.

00:47:16 ◼   ► For now, it looks like there's still a market for dedicated game consoles.

00:47:19 ◼   ► They should just make one that people want to buy.

00:47:22 ◼   ► Sounds easy.

00:47:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:24 ◼   ► I don't know why they didn't consult me before they made the Wii U.

00:47:26 ◼   ► I would have told them.

00:47:27 ◼   ► There's a couple of articles like, you know, the hindsight of 2020 articles, kind of like,

00:47:31 ◼   ► I was at a game developer and they showed us the Wii U and I totally knew that they

00:47:34 ◼   ► shouldn't be making this because the hardware was too weak.

00:47:39 ◼   ► You know, it's easy to say that in retrospect, but I mean, they probably would have said

00:47:42 ◼   ► the same thing about the Wii.

00:47:43 ◼   ► A standard definition of game console?

00:47:44 ◼   ► Everyone else go in HD.

00:47:45 ◼   ► doomed, well, they weren't so doomed there. But yeah, I think they could pull that off

00:47:50 ◼   ► a second time and they didn't.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I think part of the problem with that is that the Wii was really successful because

00:47:57 ◼   ► of this fad that it introduced.

00:48:00 ◼   ► No, it is totally not a fad. A fad is something that comes and goes quickly and has no lasting

00:48:06 ◼   ► value. Motion control—

00:48:08 ◼   ► I would say that is—what you just said—comes and goes quickly and has no lasting value.

00:48:14 ◼   ► I bet that is the pattern for the majority of Wii owners of how they use their Wii.

00:48:19 ◼   ► It lasted an entire generation. The Wii dominated the entire generation. Motion control is not going

00:48:25 ◼   ► away. Every single modern console has motion control coming out the butt. It's like saying,

00:48:31 ◼   ► "Well, the Macintosh," because the Macintosh lost the--

00:48:33 ◼   ► That sounds uncomfortable.

00:48:35 ◼   ► The Macintosh lost to Windows because that GUI thing was just a fad. And yeah,

00:48:39 ◼   ► now every modern computer has a GUI, but they're not Macintosh, so I guess that whole GUI thing was

00:48:42 ◼   ► a fad. Motion control was not a fad.

00:48:44 ◼   ► Well, that's not a fair assessment. I think because, you know, stuff like a GUI is, you

00:48:52 ◼   ► use it and then you keep using it and it keeps being awesome. Whereas the Wii, I bet, almost

00:48:58 ◼   ► everyone I've ever heard from who has a Wii has said that they had the same problem where

00:49:03 ◼   ► they got it, they played it, they played the crap out of it for like, you know, a couple

00:49:07 ◼   ► of weeks or months, and then they never turn it on again, and then it eventually goes in

00:49:12 ◼   ► in the closet and then it eventually goes away.

00:49:13 ◼   ► - Like a computer, it needs software.

00:49:15 ◼   ► So if you got a Macintosh and then people just stopped

00:49:17 ◼   ► making applications for it and Doom wasn't out for the Mac

00:49:19 ◼   ► and like all these other programs you wanted to play

00:49:21 ◼   ► weren't out for the Mac, you're just like,

00:49:23 ◼   ► well, I had a Mac and I used it a lot,

00:49:24 ◼   ► but then like I'd played the few games that I had

00:49:28 ◼   ► and I'd used the software I had,

00:49:29 ◼   ► but all the new applications were coming out for Windows.

00:49:32 ◼   ► So I put the Mac in the closet and I got a Windows machine

00:49:34 ◼   ► and I used their GUI apps.

00:49:35 ◼   ► Like it's a platform, you do need software

00:49:37 ◼   ► to be released for it.

00:49:38 ◼   ► And making it standard definition didn't help.

00:49:40 ◼   ► And Nintendo's relationship with third parties didn't help.

00:49:43 ◼   ► And eventually the only thing available on the Wii

00:49:44 ◼   ► were terrible crappy shovelware ports

00:49:47 ◼   ► of like ancient PC games or last gen console games.

00:49:51 ◼   ► And all the new titles that people wanted to play

00:49:53 ◼   ► weren't available for the Wii at all.

00:49:54 ◼   ► So what are you gonna do?

00:49:55 ◼   ► Keep playing Wii Sports for eight years?

00:49:56 ◼   ► Of course you're not gonna.

00:49:57 ◼   ► Of course it's gonna go into the closet.

00:49:58 ◼   ► It's a platform, right?

00:50:00 ◼   ► But you can't say that the motion control was a fad

00:50:03 ◼   ► and it went away and that's why.

00:50:04 ◼   ► It's because no one made new games for it.

00:50:06 ◼   ► No one made new exciting popular games for it.

00:50:08 ◼   ► where everyone else wanted to play, like Mass Effect and the new Halo games, and even in

00:50:13 ◼   ► the exclusive titles, you know, multiplayer, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare,

00:50:18 ◼   ► like all these games came out, they're available for PC, 360, and PS3. PC, 360, or PS3. Never

00:50:24 ◼   ► the Wii, because the Wii can't play because it was too weak, it just aged out, and no

00:50:28 ◼   ► one made new software for it.

00:50:30 ◼   ► So what you're saying is I was right.

00:50:32 ◼   ► No, it's not that the motion control was a fad, you're saying like, oh, but--

00:50:35 ◼   ► I didn't say the motion control was a fad, I said the Wii was a fad.

00:50:38 ◼   ► The Wii is not a fan.

00:50:40 ◼   ► The Wii was just a console that didn't have good third-party support.

00:50:42 ◼   ► The GameCube was similar.

00:50:43 ◼   ► As the GameCube got older, third-party games came out for the other platforms and not for

00:50:48 ◼   ► the GameCube.

00:50:49 ◼   ► Nintendo was really bad about third-party support because it's caught between, "Well,

00:50:53 ◼   ► we can support our own platform with our first-party games," and, "Well, we kind of want third-party

00:50:57 ◼   ► games to round out the platform, but we don't really care if those guys make any money."

00:51:00 ◼   ► And then people are like, "Well, screw you.

00:51:01 ◼   ► We're not going to make games for your platform anymore unless you sell in huge numbers."

00:51:05 ◼   ► Even when they sold huge numbers, all they did was attract the vultures to say, "Well,

00:51:08 ◼   ► I'll make a stupid tying game for my movie and sell a Wii version just to get some free

00:51:12 ◼   ► cash because there's so many Wiis out there in the world."

00:51:15 ◼   ► And then people would buy the crappy movie tying game for the Wii, and the kids would

00:51:18 ◼   ► play it and say, "This sucks."

00:51:19 ◼   ► And it was like the 2600, the Atari, where eventually everybody was making 2600 games,

00:51:26 ◼   ► and it just devalued the entire concept.

00:51:28 ◼   ► So the Wii as a product was a good idea and a good product.

00:51:33 ◼   ► the relationship with third parties was terrible and they didn't support it and it just fizzled

00:51:37 ◼   ► out. I mean, any console can do that. Like, if any of the other console makers had the

00:51:41 ◼   ► same problem, if they put out hardware that was too weak to play modern games and didn't

00:51:44 ◼   ► have a good relationship with third parties, they would fizzle out and die too. If Nintendo

00:51:48 ◼   ► had simply made a PlayStation 4 with a second screen on it and had Sony or Microsoft level

00:51:54 ◼   ► of intelligence about third party support, then we would be selling like hotcakes. Because

00:51:58 ◼   ► who wouldn't want a PS4 that can play the next Mario and Zelda game? Everybody would.

00:52:01 ◼   ► you have your cake and eat it too. There's no reason you have to choose between those two things,

00:52:05 ◼   ► except for price. But Nintendo has always said, "Well, we want to keep it as cheap as possible,

00:52:11 ◼   ► and we think that'll work great," and it did with the Wii, kind of, but even that ran into

00:52:15 ◼   ► their stupidity about third-party relationships. Well, the reason I brought up this thing inside

00:52:20 ◼   ► of this big fire is because it's always a strategic flaw in business if you don't really recognize

00:52:31 ◼   ► why you have been successful in the past or the present.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Because if you attribute present or past success to the wrong factors, then you'll probably

00:52:43 ◼   ► do the wrong things on your next project in your upcoming direction.

00:52:46 ◼   ► And so I think for Nintendo to say, "Oh, well, the Wii sold really, really well, and therefore

00:52:52 ◼   ► we have to keep doing gimmicks like this."

00:52:56 ◼   ► It's not a gimmick.

00:52:57 ◼   ► Well, hold on.

00:52:58 ◼   ► So this has kind of been Nintendo's MO in the last few generations of consoles, where,

00:53:04 ◼   ► you know, it used to be in the olden days of like 8 and 16 bit, and even the N64, Nintendo

00:53:09 ◼   ► was basically doing the same kinds of things as everyone else, and in some ways they would

00:53:15 ◼   ► do things better. And then they had these awesome games to carry them and to really

00:53:19 ◼   ► be the foundation of their business. The Wii was this new hardware gimmick that, excuse

00:53:26 ◼   ► me, this new hardware method that was very successful in the market, briefly, you know,

00:53:34 ◼   ► at least in that one generation.

00:53:35 ◼   ► For eight years, yeah, briefly for eight years.

00:53:37 ◼   ► Well, okay, regardless, it was very successful and it had this new hardware thing, this new

00:53:43 ◼   ► kind of thing. The DS had these two screens. That was very successful, right? But is the

00:53:50 ◼   ► reason it was very successful because it had two screens or because Nintendo made really

00:53:54 ◼   ► good games and they happen to make the best portable game system and it happened to have

00:53:58 ◼   ► two screens. You're right that they're misattributing things but it's not that

00:54:01 ◼   ► misattribution because the Wii sold and the Amazing Numbers did because it had a novel input

00:54:06 ◼   ► method, right? Their problem, here's the Nintendo's problem, is they competed with Sony and the

00:54:13 ◼   ► original PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64, that was kind of where the turning point was for them.

00:54:17 ◼   ► And a little bit of the SNES as well. And they didn't do as well as they thought they should.

00:54:21 ◼   ► They said, "We have a great product.

00:54:23 ◼   ► We have great games.

00:54:25 ◼   ► Why are we losing to Sony, this newcomer into the market?

00:54:28 ◼   ► Why are we having trouble with Sega and their Genesis and stuff like that?

00:54:32 ◼   ► We should be crushing them.

00:54:33 ◼   ► We're Nintendo.

00:54:34 ◼   ► We should do great."

00:54:35 ◼   ► And the GameCube really brought that to a head because the GameCube is just an amazing

00:54:39 ◼   ► piece of hardware.

00:54:41 ◼   ► It was the best console of that generation hardware-wise.

00:54:44 ◼   ► And they're like, "We should really be killing these guys.

00:54:47 ◼   ► We made this thing and we came in last place.

00:54:50 ◼   ► Why?

00:54:51 ◼   ► people want to buy our stuff?

00:54:52 ◼   ► Aren't our games good?

00:54:54 ◼   ► And so when the Wii came around, they're like,

00:54:56 ◼   ► we keep failing, we need to do something different.

00:54:58 ◼   ► And they look back at why they had failed and they said,

00:55:01 ◼   ► I think we failed because we're not giving people

00:55:03 ◼   ► something different.

00:55:04 ◼   ► We're just trying to make the same thing as everyone else.

00:55:06 ◼   ► And they said, here's what we can do,

00:55:08 ◼   ► but we'll make something different.

00:55:09 ◼   ► How about we use motion control?

00:55:11 ◼   ► And they were actually thinking about motion control

00:55:12 ◼   ► for the GameCube as well.

00:55:13 ◼   ► We'll do motion control.

00:55:13 ◼   ► And they couldn't figure out why they kept losing.

00:55:16 ◼   ► And they're losing because they're just obstinate

00:55:18 ◼   ► in about third-party relationships with other developers.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Like Sony won because it was nice to third parties

00:55:23 ◼   ► and Nintendo always wanted to screw them.

00:55:24 ◼   ► Because Nintendo said, "We sell our first party games

00:55:26 ◼   ► "and you pay us through the nose

00:55:28 ◼   ► "for the privilege of being on our platform."

00:55:29 ◼   ► And another company came in there and said,

00:55:31 ◼   ► "We won't be such bastards to third parties."

00:55:34 ◼   ► And Nintendo continues to refuse to believe

00:55:36 ◼   ► that that's why everyone is crushing you.

00:55:37 ◼   ► It's not because they make better hardware.

00:55:39 ◼   ► It's sure as hell not because they make

00:55:40 ◼   ► better first party games.

00:55:42 ◼   ► It's because they're not jerks to the third parties.

00:55:44 ◼   ► And Nintendo doesn't wanna hear that.

00:55:46 ◼   ► And unfortunately, the idea that,

00:55:49 ◼   ► here's what the problem was.

00:55:50 ◼   ► problem was we didn't make something that was interesting enough. We're just doing the same

00:55:53 ◼   ► thing as everyone else. It's just something interesting. That worked for them. They said,

00:55:55 ◼   ► "Aha! See, that was it." It wasn't that all that stuff people were saying about us not having a

00:55:59 ◼   ► good relationship with third parties. It was just because we wanted to give people something new.

00:56:01 ◼   ► So when it came time to make the Wii U, they said, "We can do that thing again where we make

00:56:05 ◼   ► something new." And so they made something new, and it is new, and it is interesting. It's just

00:56:09 ◼   ► not as interesting as motion control was coming from a previous world without motion control. And

00:56:14 ◼   ► and they kept having the weak hardware and it fell on its face because

00:56:18 ◼   ► you know they continue not to realize that the reason they keep failing is

00:56:22 ◼   ► because they don't have good third-party resources. Again

00:56:24 ◼   ► if you could buy a Nintendo console and had all the modern games on it, all of the

00:56:28 ◼   ► you know, it had Grand Theft Auto, it had Call of Duty, it had everything, it looked great, it was

00:56:32 ◼   ► competitive with everybody else

00:56:33 ◼   ► any third-party game came out for the next eight years you should be sure it will be on the

00:56:37 ◼   ► new Nintendo console

00:56:38 ◼   ► it was just like the 360 or the PS3 sometimes on the 360, sometimes on the PS3

00:56:43 ◼   ► It's probably on the PC.

00:56:44 ◼   ► Nintendo is not even in that conversation for multiple generations now.

00:56:48 ◼   ► And if they can't be in that conversation, the only people who are going to buy a Nintendo

00:56:51 ◼   ► console are people who just want it for the first-party games.

00:56:54 ◼   ► And they're stupidly limiting themselves.

00:56:56 ◼   ► I almost wonder if there's a parallel to Apple here, in that Apple is getting more and more

00:57:05 ◼   ► anger directed at them by third-party developers.

00:57:10 ◼   ► You know, we've gone through the ratings kerfuffle a thousand times and the review kerfuffle a thousand times and

00:57:18 ◼   ► I was fiddling with

00:57:21 ◼   ► with certificates and provisioning profiles last night for fast text and I wanted to throw myself off the roof of my house and

00:57:27 ◼   ► I'm definitely reaching here, but I

00:57:31 ◼   ► can't help but wonder if

00:57:36 ◼   ► Nintendo and Apple both were were or are in a position where

00:57:41 ◼   ► they had the ability to be smug and to act like the king of the world and

00:57:47 ◼   ► Eventually what we've seen with Nintendo is that

00:57:51 ◼   ► didn't last and the more friendly to third-party developers upstarts came around and ate their lunch and

00:57:59 ◼   ► I'm being overdramatic, but I can't help but wonder if that's the future for Apple if if they don't start

00:58:05 ◼   ► improving things like iTunes Connect, improving things like developer relations, and they

00:58:10 ◼   ► certainly have gotten a heck of a lot better.

00:58:12 ◼   ► Marco, you would know better than any of us how much better it's gotten, but I don't know,

00:58:16 ◼   ► it strikes me as a vaguely parallel path.

00:58:18 ◼   ► Yeah, the difference with Nintendo is that their heyday when they really were the king

00:58:23 ◼   ► was back with the NES.

00:58:24 ◼   ► That was so long ago, and maybe the SNES, and it's just like, it's that carryover.

00:58:28 ◼   ► It's kind of more like Microsoft, where they weren't as dominant as long as Microsoft was,

00:58:33 ◼   ► But they were as dominant as Microsoft for a brief moment in time.

00:58:36 ◼   ► And that's their image of themselves.

00:58:38 ◼   ► And even a change of CEOs, like the change of CEOs, the old guy Yamauchi got pulled back

00:58:43 ◼   ► and like, finally, now we'll get someone who realizes they're not the king of the world

00:58:46 ◼   ► anymore.

00:58:47 ◼   ► And the new guy did the Wii, which looks like, hey, new guy comes in.

00:58:49 ◼   ► It's kind of like the return of a new job.

00:58:51 ◼   ► New guy comes in and suddenly Nintendo is back on top of the console heat.

00:58:54 ◼   ► But again, they were on top.

00:58:56 ◼   ► Like they didn't recognize their previous problems.

00:58:58 ◼   ► They just happened to find something else that would give them a turbo boost above everyone

00:59:02 ◼   ► but they kept all the same old attitudes, like the expectation that you can make a new console

00:59:06 ◼   ► and do it just like the Wii again and think that everything will work out fine because

00:59:11 ◼   ► you'll just be that much more amazing than everyone else. It's like Microsoft thinking that

00:59:16 ◼   ► for so long, "Well, we're Microsoft. When we make a tablet, people will buy it. And when we make a

00:59:20 ◼   ► phone, OS people will buy it. And Windows Phone will soon be the dominant phone platformer. We'll

00:59:23 ◼   ► be in strong second place or whatever." You just get that image in your head of like, "We're

00:59:28 ◼   ► Microsoft. We're the king of everything. Obviously, anything we do is going to be successful."

00:59:32 ◼   ► and it takes repeated failures to get through your corporate head that actually, no, you're

00:59:37 ◼   ► not going to automatically win. You can't do that. You have to know developer tools.

00:59:41 ◼   ► It's more like Apple did it to the other developer tools with PhoneOS. If you look at Apple's

00:59:49 ◼   ► developer tools for writing apps for iOS, yeah, we may complain about them and everything,

00:59:53 ◼   ► but compare it to phone development before the iPhone. Using Xcode to write applications for iOS

01:00:00 ◼   ► is so far beyond using whatever SDK to write Nokia apps or whatever. It's like night and

01:00:07 ◼   ► day. And so no wonder suddenly Apple has tons of third-party support for applications and

01:00:12 ◼   ► every other phone platform just goes away. At this point, Nintendo's not that bad compared

01:00:17 ◼   ► to their competitors, but Nintendo's strength is not making developer tools or middleware

01:00:23 ◼   ► or other things. Not that it's really Sony's or Microsoft's strength either, but Sony and

01:00:26 ◼   ► Microsoft have gotten better at it faster than Nintendo. Same thing with online. Xbox

01:00:30 ◼   ► Live and the PlayStation Network, again, they're not great at it, but Nintendo was terrible.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And so it's kind of like, Nintendo was the king a long time ago, and it does everything

01:00:39 ◼   ► worse than all of its competitors now except make fun games. And that stuff is coming home

01:00:44 ◼   ► to roost.

01:00:45 ◼   ► Do you think some part of it also is, you know, back in the 8 and 16 bit era, I mean

01:00:52 ◼   ► actually even 32/64 era, the first one, that back then the best games for a platform, both

01:01:03 ◼   ► the best critically acclaimed ones and the ones that would sell the most, were usually

01:01:07 ◼   ► first party games by the platform vendor. And that is no longer the case these days

01:01:12 ◼   ► as far as I know, it seems like these days the big blockbuster games are made by third

01:01:16 ◼   ► parties who have really no reason, unless they have some kind of big pricey business

01:01:20 ◼   ► deal, they really have no reason to limit themselves to just one of the consoles. And

01:01:24 ◼   ► so it becomes, you know, like if you want to play the latest Call of Duty or the latest

01:01:28 ◼   ► Madden Football you can do it on anything. And it's in their best interest to put out

01:01:32 ◼   ► the games for all the consoles and so it's a lot less of an advantage to have the strong

01:01:38 ◼   ► first-party library as it used to be because most of the games people are buying and getting excited about are available on all the platforms

01:01:44 ◼   ► It's so expensive now to make a triple-a title that

01:01:47 ◼   ► People can't afford to have exclusives like if you're going if you're going to be EA or something

01:01:52 ◼   ► You're gonna make Madden and someone wants you to make it exclusive to their platform

01:01:56 ◼   ► He's gonna be like do you realize how much money you'd have to pass to do that?

01:01:59 ◼   ► Because in a sort of even horse race between one, you know between two or three competitors

01:02:05 ◼   ► It's like, are you going to pay for all the copies that we could have sold on the Xbox?

01:02:09 ◼   ► You know, if Sony wants it to be exclusive?

01:02:12 ◼   ► Pick any game like that.

01:02:14 ◼   ► You can't afford to pay them.

01:02:15 ◼   ► That's why these people buy studios, because Microsoft buys Bungie.

01:02:18 ◼   ► Well, now we don't have to pay you to make Halo exclusive to the Xbox.

01:02:21 ◼   ► We bought your whole company.

01:02:22 ◼   ► Make it for the Xbox only, right?

01:02:24 ◼   ► And even that Bungie found a way to wriggle its way out so its next game could be multiplatform.

01:02:28 ◼   ► It's just so expensive.

01:02:30 ◼   ► The only people who can afford to make a game exclusive to a platform are like gaming studios

01:02:35 ◼   ► that are going down the tubes and need tons of money and they'll take whatever cash payout

01:02:39 ◼   ► they can to go exclusive, or first parties.

01:02:43 ◼   ► I don't know if there was ever a heyday where the first party games are always the best.

01:02:45 ◼   ► I guess maybe in the NES days, Nintendo's first party games have always been among the

01:02:51 ◼   ► best on any platform anywhere, so that's an easy one.

01:02:54 ◼   ► Sega, I guess they had Sonic in the Genesis days, but was that really the best games?

01:02:59 ◼   ► the only one who's been so dumb. Sega had a lot of, I was a Sega guy back then, they had a lot of

01:03:03 ◼   ► really good games in the 8 and 16-bit era. Even, I would even say for the Saturn, you know, which

01:03:08 ◼   ► didn't sell well. Well, yeah, that was, they were the only games for the Saturn. Right, yeah, that's

01:03:12 ◼   ► true. Even for that generation, you know, I think Sega had the best Saturn games, I think Nintendo

01:03:16 ◼   ► had by far the best N64 games. PlayStation changed that though, like that was their deal.

01:03:21 ◼   ► Like, think of the first-party PlayStation games like Crash Bandicoot, you know. Well,

01:03:25 ◼   ► Well, the first-- the PS1 games really were not that great.

01:03:29 ◼   ► The PS1 mainly succeeded because the Saturn was a bomb.

01:03:32 ◼   ► I mean, the Saturn kind of made space for it, and the N64 wasn't out yet.

01:03:38 ◼   ► And it used cartridges when it came out.

01:03:40 ◼   ► Right.

01:03:41 ◼   ► Although, I will stand by that being a good decision, actually.

01:03:44 ◼   ► Looking back at the load times and everything, like--

01:03:47 ◼   ► Well, it was a really bad decision for Nintendo.

01:03:50 ◼   ► It had advantages, but like, the reason Nintendo did it was because A, they're stubborn, and

01:03:54 ◼   ► be they, people would pay Nintendo to make their cartridges. If you wanted to make a

01:03:58 ◼   ► game for N64, Nintendo, like they did with the other stuff, you'd have to pay Nintendo

01:04:03 ◼   ► to make your cartridges for you. And Nintendo charged profit on that. It was like free money.

01:04:08 ◼   ► Like, why would we let you make a 10 cent CD when we can charge you for these cartridges?

01:04:13 ◼   ► Right. But, you know, my point is that in this new era of most of the big, popular games

01:04:20 ◼   ► are multi-platform. Nintendo will always lose that battle because they're not in

01:04:25 ◼   ► the cutting-edge hardware and ecosystem game. Like, they're not in that game at

01:04:28 ◼   ► all and so they're going to keep losing. But they could be though, like, the GameCube

01:04:32 ◼   ► proves that they could be because the GameCube, hardware-wise, was more than a

01:04:37 ◼   ► match for its competitors. Like, there's no reason that they can't be because

01:04:40 ◼   ► they don't make, you know, they pay ATI and IBM or whoever makes, you know, they

01:04:44 ◼   ► like, look at the PS4 or the Xbox One. Is it AMD? They both have AMD CPUs with, you

01:04:49 ◼   ► know, it's like, they could, Nintendo can go to the same vendors, just like they did

01:04:53 ◼   ► with the GameCube. You know, the GameCube is even more extreme because IBM and ATI

01:04:57 ◼   ► were also in the Xbox 360, so it was like, you know, it was right there. Like,

01:05:03 ◼   ► we're all using the same vendors, you don't have to make this stuff yourself.

01:05:06 ◼   ► They just chose not to compete in that. It's not, there's not something

01:05:09 ◼   ► structural about Nintendo that prevents them from making a console that can host

01:05:13 ◼   ► all the modern games. It's a business choice. Well, I don't know, it's because it

01:05:17 ◼   ► isn't just about the hardware anywhere. Now it's about these online services, integration

01:05:21 ◼   ► with cable boxes and stuff like that. It's all these things that Nintendo really has

01:05:25 ◼   ► never shown any interest in doing.

01:05:28 ◼   ► Sony is terrible at that too, and they've been slowly like... Microsoft is the only

01:05:31 ◼   ► company that knew anything about online, because they're a PC company, they know about platforms,

01:05:36 ◼   ► they know about networking, stuff like that. Sony didn't know anything about that. Sony's

01:05:38 ◼   ► stuff sucked, and they slowly learned, and Nintendo's stuff has always sucked, continues

01:05:43 ◼   ► to suck. It sucks slightly more than Sony. But it's not outside. I think this is something

01:05:49 ◼   ► that Nintendo can do. Nintendo can make online games they have. Nintendo can make social lobby

01:05:55 ◼   ► type things. They have done that. They just do it badly. Sony also does it badly. Microsoft does it

01:06:00 ◼   ► less badly. But there's nobody who's like... I guess maybe Microsoft is out ahead of both of

01:06:04 ◼   ► the other ones. But Sony's pretty crappy at that too. So the bar is low. I feel like they could

01:06:09 ◼   ► crossed that hurdle. And again, now it may be a little bit too late, but they had so many years.

01:06:14 ◼   ► Xbox Live came out so many years ago. Nintendo, if they got their head out of the butt, would have

01:06:18 ◼   ► said, "All right, we suck at this now. Let's get good at it slowly over many years." This was what

01:06:23 ◼   ► Sony did, and Sony is still terrible at it. They lost all those passwords, and their service is not

01:06:27 ◼   ► as good as Xbox Live. But when the PS4 came out, it has integration with streaming and the headset

01:06:33 ◼   ► support and stuff. I think they learned it's possible. Nintendo is just a much slower learner,

01:06:38 ◼   ► and or too stubborn or whatever but I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.

01:06:43 ◼   ► Our final sponsor this week is our good friends at Fracture. Fracture prints photos in vivid color

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01:08:45 ◼   ► All right, what else do we want to talk about?

01:08:48 ◼   ► Should we breach the net neutrality topic?

01:08:50 ◼   ► Because this could go for hours.

01:08:52 ◼   ► Even I have a lot to say about this.

01:08:55 ◼   ► There's a lot there.

01:08:56 ◼   ► I think any loss of net neutrality is really bad and really, frankly, a

01:09:01 ◼   ► likely disaster for our industry and many others. But I legally, I don't know enough

01:09:06 ◼   ► about what just happened. I don't have a good legal understanding of it and I haven't done

01:09:10 ◼   ► all the reading on it. I still have to read New Life Patel's article on it. So I don't

01:09:16 ◼   ► really have a lot to say on that right now.

01:09:17 ◼   ► Well, I just wanted to briefly add, and then John, I'll ask for your two cents. Somebody

01:09:22 ◼   ► tweeted, and I'll put a link in the show notes and in the chat, and this may not be the original

01:09:28 ◼   ► instance of it, but somebody tweeted a really interesting graphic that basically said,

01:09:33 ◼   ► "Hey, if you want really fast Netflix, that's an additional $10 a month, and if you want really

01:09:39 ◼   ► fast blah blah blah, that's an additional $15 a month." And it was extremely interesting and

01:09:45 ◼   ► a really ominous sign of what net neutrality could mean, or the loss of net neutrality could

01:09:52 ◼   ► mean for the future. And it was a really clever way to hammer it home that if not all traffic is

01:09:57 ◼   ► is created equal, that could lead to some very bad things. And it's very frightening.

01:10:02 ◼   ► And just like you said, Marco, it's very, very potentially dangerous for the industry.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Also I thought the Fred Wilson post was really good too. Fred Wilson is, in case you don't

01:10:10 ◼   ► know him, he's a big investor. I actually know him, he's a really nice guy. And his

01:10:14 ◼   ► blog is avc.com because he is a VC. Anyway, he had this great post on it, basically just

01:10:21 ◼   ► like these scenarios of these theoretical future investor meetings where he's meeting

01:10:26 ◼   ► some young startup founder who wants to get some funding and they're describing like,

01:10:32 ◼   ► "Oh, well, I had this great idea for this new music startup where this is like a new

01:10:36 ◼   ► streaming service. It's going to have these differences from other streaming services."

01:10:39 ◼   ► And he's like, "Sorry, we can't take that because Apple and RDO and Spotify and Beats

01:10:45 ◼   ► have all paid all the telcos to get their transfer to not count towards your data allotment."

01:10:50 ◼   ► and you won't have that power or money,

01:10:52 ◼   ► so no one's gonna buy your service

01:10:55 ◼   ► because it's gonna count against their data,

01:10:56 ◼   ► so we're not gonna fund you.

01:10:58 ◼   ► And that's gonna happen, that kind of thing where

01:11:01 ◼   ► it's not gonna affect everything.

01:11:03 ◼   ► If you're running text and transmitting text all around,

01:11:06 ◼   ► it's probably not gonna be big enough to matter

01:11:08 ◼   ► or get throttled like that, but you don't know.

01:11:10 ◼   ► And there's all these other,

01:11:13 ◼   ► it dramatically affects any kind of large transfers.

01:11:16 ◼   ► Definitely would affect podcasts, no question about it.

01:11:18 ◼   ► And so that hits home for me, certainly.

01:11:21 ◼   ► And it showed it for you if you're listening.

01:11:23 ◼   ► And so there's that aspect.

01:11:25 ◼   ► There's also, one thing I liked a lot

01:11:27 ◼   ► was Matt Drance's piece on Apple outsider,

01:11:32 ◼   ► where he also, not only does he link

01:11:33 ◼   ► to all these other good ones, but he also says,

01:11:35 ◼   ► there's also a problem of privacy,

01:11:37 ◼   ► where now, yeah, right now your ISP

01:11:40 ◼   ► can look at everything passing through and where it's going,

01:11:43 ◼   ► but there's not really much of a reason for them to.

01:11:45 ◼   ► There's no business case for it,

01:11:46 ◼   ► so they probably aren't and generally there's not, you know, they don't really have motivation

01:11:51 ◼   ► to do that. But with this, they would have to look at everything you're doing and they

01:11:56 ◼   ► would have business reasons to do it. And so there's massive privacy implications for

01:11:59 ◼   ► it as well. And so there's all these problems with, you know, what a lack of net neutrality

01:12:06 ◼   ► will cause. And, you know, the arguments about free markets and everything else and, you

01:12:14 ◼   ► regulations, benefits in some cases, don't really apply because there's not a lot of

01:12:19 ◼   ► competition in most broadband markets. And mobile, the rules are different. And again,

01:12:25 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm about to really talk at length, but the rules are different for mobile

01:12:28 ◼   ► networks. And you could look at that and say, well, mobile is competition for the broadband,

01:12:33 ◼   ► which it is. But, you know, as long as mobile data caps can be burned up with like watching

01:12:40 ◼   ► Netflix for an hour. I don't think we're in the same league here. And so, you know, home

01:12:45 ◼   ► broadband still has a big role for a lot of people. And as the cable companies and phone

01:12:51 ◼   ► companies and these home broadband companies, as they add things like phone service to them

01:12:56 ◼   ► and their own on-demand video, and as people start cutting cable service to say, "Oh, well,

01:13:02 ◼   ► I don't need to pay for your TV service because I just buy everything online," those ISPs

01:13:06 ◼   ► are going to have more and more really big business reasons to do evil crap like this,

01:13:12 ◼   ► to do things like throttle Netflix, throttle Skype, you know, all these, all these, you

01:13:17 ◼   ► know, I mean look at what happened with Vonage forever ago, that was one of these first cases.

01:13:22 ◼   ► They're going to have reasons to do all this stuff, big business reasons, and so you know

01:13:25 ◼   ► they're going to do it. It's not like they have morals and are sitting around saying,

01:13:28 ◼   ► "Oh yeah, you know, oh yeah, we're Verizon, we're Comcast, we're just going to be nice

01:13:32 ◼   ► to our customers." No, they're going to screw you at every chance you possibly get. I mean,

01:13:36 ◼   ► I can't become on these companies the they they have in their DNA to be

01:13:40 ◼   ► complete everybody that's every company that that's how companies work that's

01:13:44 ◼   ► you know that's the if there's a business case to do some big thing

01:13:46 ◼   ► they're gonna do it

01:13:48 ◼   ► and so it would be foolish to think

01:13:51 ◼   ► that if these companies were permitted to do stuff like this that they wouldn't

01:13:53 ◼   ► do it of course they're gonna do it

01:13:55 ◼   ► and where you gonna turn there's nowhere to go there's

01:13:58 ◼   ► chances are you know most people have

01:14:01 ◼   ► at most

01:14:02 ◼   ► to options for their broadband at home usually usually you can choose between

01:14:06 ◼   ► one cable company and one D-cell company in the US. And I think in the rest of the world,

01:14:10 ◼   ► it's some places are better, some places are worse. I think overall it's not that much better

01:14:14 ◼   ► on average. It might even be worse. Yeah, generally speaking, you have between one and two broadband

01:14:21 ◼   ► companies to choose from in the US. And so, you know, if... and in most places, those one or two

01:14:28 ◼   ► are like the same one or two. Like there's not that many ISPs. There's like five or six big ones

01:14:32 ◼   ► in the whole country maybe. And so it doesn't take much. Like if Comcast or Verizon say,

01:14:38 ◼   ► "Okay, we're not doing this thing," that's going to affect like a quarter of the country

01:14:43 ◼   ► or something. It's a big number. And so this is a big deal and we need regulation.

01:14:51 ◼   ► The role of government regulation is where the market can't do the right thing for whatever

01:14:57 ◼   ► a reason, where it's dysfunctional or impossible or completely impractical for the market to

01:15:04 ◼   ► do the things that are best for the people, best for the overall industry.

01:15:09 ◼   ► That's when government regulation is most needed.

01:15:14 ◼   ► And that's definitely the case with broadband.

01:15:16 ◼   ► Broadband, there is no competition, and we need the government regulation, and it's

01:15:20 ◼   ► not happening, and that's really scary.

01:15:21 ◼   ► JE: Yeah, the problem with net neutrality—and I've experienced this problem myself with

01:15:26 ◼   ► trying to explain it to my mother and for all the people who are going to complain that I always use

01:15:30 ◼   ► my mother as an example and that's insulting because who's to say that mothers don't know

01:15:34 ◼   ► stuff about technology. I'm using my mother example in this case and in many other cases because

01:15:38 ◼   ► she's the one of my parents who is most interested in and knowledgeable about technology. So she's the

01:15:43 ◼   ► one who's actually willing to entertain the discussion with me about net neutrality,

01:15:47 ◼   ► not because she's less competent. So let's get the mother as a it's it's not a hypothetical this is

01:15:52 ◼   ► my actual mother and I actually explained to her and that's the reason I explained it to her and

01:15:55 ◼   ► and not my father because my father doesn't care, doesn't know about it, doesn't give

01:15:59 ◼   ► a crap about this.

01:16:00 ◼   ► Anyway, I try to explain net neutrality to her, and it's difficult.

01:16:03 ◼   ► That image that Casey was talking about showed the big price sheet of like, "So you want

01:16:08 ◼   ► internet access?

01:16:09 ◼   ► Well, for an extra five bucks you get Netflix, or ten bucks."

01:16:11 ◼   ► My impression was that you get faster Netflix.

01:16:13 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, so you want Netflix with your internet?

01:16:15 ◼   ► That'll be five extra dollars.

01:16:16 ◼   ► Oh, so you want to have HBO go with it?

01:16:19 ◼   ► That'll be ten extra dollars.

01:16:20 ◼   ► Oh, you want to go on Facebook?

01:16:21 ◼   ► That'll be twelve extra dollars."

01:16:23 ◼   ► It's made to look just like it does when you buy cable now.

01:16:25 ◼   ► You want cable TV?

01:16:26 ◼   ► Okay, well here's the base price.

01:16:27 ◼   ► If you want ESPN, it'll be this price, and if you want HBO, it's part of our premium

01:16:30 ◼   ► package.

01:16:31 ◼   ► That's $12.

01:16:32 ◼   ► It's like buying a BMW.

01:16:33 ◼   ► You know, you got to get the whole other package.

01:16:35 ◼   ► The problem with that image, as terrifying as it is to nerds, is that to a regular person,

01:16:40 ◼   ► you're like, "Oh, that's already how I buy TV, and that's not that bad."

01:16:42 ◼   ► We're like, "No, it's terrible when you buy TV.

01:16:44 ◼   ► Don't you understand?"

01:16:45 ◼   ► And with the television, it's terrible in some ways, but on the other hand, it also

01:16:49 ◼   ► subsidizes a lot of channels, so there are good things about bundling and bad things,

01:16:53 ◼   ► But in general, if you go from a situation,

01:16:56 ◼   ► like it's different because those are services

01:16:58 ◼   ► that are being bundled together in a package

01:17:01 ◼   ► of things that you have to pay for

01:17:02 ◼   ► and all those things you have to pay for.

01:17:03 ◼   ► This is basically taking a wire and saying,

01:17:06 ◼   ► we're only gonna let certain,

01:17:07 ◼   ► it's a negative instead of a positive.

01:17:09 ◼   ► We're only gonna let certain things through on it.

01:17:10 ◼   ► Oh, so you want us to let Netflix traffic in?

01:17:12 ◼   ► Pay us this amount of money,

01:17:13 ◼   ► and now we'll let Netflix traffic go through your house.

01:17:15 ◼   ► That's not an internet service provider anymore.

01:17:17 ◼   ► I don't know what that is,

01:17:18 ◼   ► but that's not someone providing you access to the internet.

01:17:21 ◼   ► someone preventing you from having access to the internet to varying degrees based on

01:17:25 ◼   ► how much you're going to pay them or how much they're going to pay the companies or whatever.

01:17:29 ◼   ► The problem with that image, I think, is it looks too familiar to people, and it won't

01:17:32 ◼   ► be terrifying to people because they won't realize the implications.

01:17:35 ◼   ► And this is the difficulty I have trying to explain net neutrality to my mother or to

01:17:39 ◼   ► anyone else, is that it's very difficult to impart on them the thing that we all know

01:17:44 ◼   ► in our gut, that this is the end of the internet as we know it.

01:17:47 ◼   ► But if you don't have an interconnected network of computers that can all talk to each other,

01:17:52 ◼   ► but instead have an interconnected series of toll booths that you have to pay money

01:17:56 ◼   ► for for information to get one person to the other, that defeats the entire purpose of

01:17:59 ◼   ► the internet.

01:18:00 ◼   ► And ISPs don't want to be dumb pipes, and we all want them to be dumb pipes.

01:18:04 ◼   ► And that's the constant tension that's there between us and them.

01:18:07 ◼   ► And the role of government regulation, like in any free market type system, it's not like

01:18:14 ◼   ► companies can't do the right thing. The incentives are aligned for companies to maximize their profits.

01:18:21 ◼   ► And if those are the only incentives in the system, then yeah, the companies will go off and

01:18:26 ◼   ► do those things that will cause incredible damage in the long run because that will make them the

01:18:31 ◼   ► most profits. They'll become monopolies, we have anti-monopoly laws. And if they will end net

01:18:37 ◼   ► neutrality because it will make them more money, we need a counterbalance to that. And the

01:18:40 ◼   ► counterbalance can't be other private market companies. Like that's something someone said

01:18:43 ◼   ► me on Twitter. Well, if ISPs do this, won't other net neutral ISPs crop up to compete with them?

01:18:50 ◼   ► That's an interesting fantasy scenario. But unfortunately, with the exception of wireless,

01:18:55 ◼   ► all of the wires and fiber optic cables going to people's houses is the barrier to entry to

01:19:01 ◼   ► saying, "Okay, well, Comcast is terrible and Verizon is terrible, and they're all net neutral

01:19:05 ◼   ► anymore. I'm going to start my own ISP. Great. Well, let me know when you run wires to everybody's

01:19:09 ◼   ► house in the United States. That's a significant barrier to entry. Or even for wireless, let

01:19:16 ◼   ► me know when you paid for all the spectrum you plan to use. And again, the regulations

01:19:19 ◼   ► are different about divvying up spectrum between people and common carrier stuff. And the same

01:19:23 ◼   ► thing with the wires. There's some regulations in this area already. But you can't rely on

01:19:27 ◼   ► the private market not to totally remove net neutrality, because it will make them more

01:19:33 ◼   ► money. And if there are companies that are trying to make more money, that are not trying

01:19:36 ◼   ► be magnanimous or advanced civilization. They're trying to make more profit. So there needs to be

01:19:41 ◼   ► a counterbalance to that. And that's why all the nerds are hoping the government will fulfill its

01:19:45 ◼   ► role as being a counterbalance to private industry to prevent private industry from doing what it

01:19:50 ◼   ► does. Like those machines are aligned in a certain way to make money. And we should let them run off

01:19:55 ◼   ► and do that right up to the point where they start causing damage and there needs to be a

01:19:58 ◼   ► counterbalance. And it's just, it's too esoteric and weird and nerdy. And even if it slowly happens,

01:20:06 ◼   ► It would just happen in pieces one at a time, and everyone who it was happening to would

01:20:10 ◼   ► just simply accept it as the way things are until two generations from now, the internet

01:20:14 ◼   ► could be dead as we know it, and no one would care, and no one would ever have put up a

01:20:17 ◼   ► fuss.

01:20:18 ◼   ► It's one of those type of things, like a slow-moving type of disaster, where you have to be a little

01:20:23 ◼   ► bit chicken little and say the sky is falling to get people's attention.

01:20:25 ◼   ► Otherwise, this terrible thing will slowly happen to them, and they'll accept it.

01:20:31 ◼   ► They won't even wake up one day and be in a dystopia.

01:20:33 ◼   ► They'll just be like, "Well, it's just the way things are.

01:20:35 ◼   ► the way things have always been, oh well.

01:20:37 ◼   ► You know, I'm glad we don't have much to say about this.

01:20:40 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll have to talk about it some other time.

01:20:42 ◼   ► Well, we weren't talking about the events.

01:20:44 ◼   ► We were just talking about net neutrality in general as a concept.

01:20:46 ◼   ► And that, I think, is enough.

01:20:48 ◼   ► Instead of talking about what happened in this court case or how is the battle going

01:20:52 ◼   ► for net neutrality, just the concept of net neutrality, the concept that one computer

01:20:56 ◼   ► could talk to another computer and send data through it, and they all pay for internet

01:21:00 ◼   ► access to get access to the internet and it's undifferentiated and the ones and zeros flow

01:21:06 ◼   ► through the tubes.

01:21:08 ◼   ► That doesn't sound like much, but if you take that away and turn it into some crazy toll

01:21:12 ◼   ► booth thing, it just destroys the whole endeavor.

01:21:14 ◼   ► It destroys every part of it.

01:21:16 ◼   ► And even as someone who doesn't directly make my living on the internet in the same way

01:21:22 ◼   ► that say Marco does, obviously I still indirectly make my living on the internet because the

01:21:27 ◼   ► consulting that I do in my day job is all web-based.

01:21:31 ◼   ► And even despite being slightly removed from all this, it absolutely scares me.

01:21:37 ◼   ► It petrifies me, the thought of losing net neutrality.

01:21:41 ◼   ► And net neutrality was the great equalizer that, you know, there's no reason that Marco

01:21:47 ◼   ► couldn't make a read later service or that Marco and David couldn't make a new blogging

01:21:52 ◼   ► engine because they had the same right to the same pipes as everyone else did.

01:21:57 ◼   ► And to take that away, that's scary.

01:22:00 ◼   ► You know, we're in such a wonderful time right now where anyone in a—well, I guess

01:22:06 ◼   ► you could argue anyone in the garage could always do something incredible, but it's

01:22:10 ◼   ► so much easier now.

01:22:11 ◼   ► I mean, hey, look at the three of us.

01:22:12 ◼   ► Three people in three, you know, converted bedrooms in three houses across the eastern

01:22:17 ◼   ► United States are able to reach tens of thousands of people on a weekly basis, and that's

01:22:22 ◼   ► really powerful and really incredible and we're very lucky for that. The three of

01:22:25 ◼   ► us most especially, but I like to thank all of our listeners as well. And just like Marco

01:22:31 ◼   ► alluded to earlier, you know, imagine if we had to subsidize, the three of us had to subsidize

01:22:37 ◼   ► getting our podcast to our listeners. You think ads are bad now, my goodness, the show

01:22:41 ◼   ► would be 80% ads if that were the case.

01:22:43 ◼   ► Right. Well, and the funny thing is like we already pay for that. Like the cable companies

01:22:49 ◼   ► and stuff wanting payments from like Verizon and Google and Apple and Netflix and stuff

01:22:55 ◼   ► like that. Google and Apple and Netflix are already paying to upload that data. They're

01:23:01 ◼   ► already paying for their data centers to have connectivity to all the big backbones. And

01:23:06 ◼   ► we already pay for the bandwidth for this show. And thank God Libsyn is unlimited because

01:23:11 ◼   ► if Libsyn wasn't unlimited, this show would cost like $1,000 a month in bandwidth alone.

01:23:16 ◼   ► And we already pay for that. Everyone already pays for their upstream bandwidth. And the

01:23:20 ◼   ► cable companies don't get that money directly. They are offering access to these big backbones.

01:23:27 ◼   ► And I don't, unfortunately, know the details of how all of that works and the way peering

01:23:31 ◼   ► agreements work and who pays who and all the cases and everything. But they didn't build

01:23:35 ◼   ► that infrastructure. They have parts of it. They have their own infrastructure to their

01:23:38 ◼   ► home. But they are offering you this product that's out there that everyone else is already

01:23:43 ◼   ► paying to be into, and they want money too. They want a cut too, even though no one's ever had to

01:23:49 ◼   ► pay for that before, to get to that final, that last mile. The thing is, data is not water. There's

01:23:55 ◼   ► not a volume of water going through pipes. Like, well, a certain volume of water goes through our

01:24:00 ◼   ► pipes, and they wear down our pipes, and we have maintenance for our valves in the pipes. And there

01:24:03 ◼   ► is telecom equipment that you have to have, but at a certain point, once you have the equipment set

01:24:09 ◼   ► up, the amount of data going through it, if it's anything less than 100% or 90% of the capacity,

01:24:13 ◼   ► where if you're using 1% of the capacity of the hardware, that's just wasted. It's not as if,

01:24:17 ◼   ► well, there'll be less wear and tear on our routers now that there's less traffic on them.

01:24:21 ◼   ► I guess someone's going to write it and say, well, the heat generated by a fully-stressed

01:24:24 ◼   ► restaurant. You know what I mean? But it's not the same as cars going over roads. Cars destroy

01:24:31 ◼   ► roads as they go over them, right? And it's not water through a pipe. At a certain point,

01:24:38 ◼   ► the marginal cost of putting extra data, which is why they have these peering agreements. It's like,

01:24:42 ◼   ► well, otherwise this bandwidth would just be idle, so I'll pay you and you'll pay me and it'll all

01:24:47 ◼   ► work out. And there's all this strange kind of make-believe money changing hands or peering

01:24:52 ◼   ► agreements just to make the entire internet work, because the data has to change hands,

01:24:55 ◼   ► it has to go from one place to the other, and everyone is always jockeying for a position of

01:24:58 ◼   ► who can make a little bit more money off of this. But in the end, what we just want it to be is the

01:25:03 ◼   ► internet, this conceptual thing, kind of like iCloud, that is just a giant umbrella term for

01:25:08 ◼   ► for these huge networks of computers and hardware and wires and software that is run by a giant

01:25:13 ◼   ► conglomeration of people all trying to make this one big sort of emergent living entity

01:25:17 ◼   ► called the internet work where any computer can talk to any other computer if it has its

01:25:20 ◼   ► IP address.

01:25:21 ◼   ► IPv6 will be a topic for another show.

01:25:24 ◼   ► And that's the system we're trying to preserve here.

01:25:27 ◼   ► And at every turn, companies are trying to say, "Yeah, but we can make more money if

01:25:32 ◼   ► X, Y, and Z."

01:25:33 ◼   ► And it's terrible.

01:25:34 ◼   ► And the worst argument I hear about this is the free market thing.

01:25:37 ◼   ► regulation is bad, you're stifling competition and blah, blah, blah. Marco talked about it before.

01:25:43 ◼   ► The net neutral internet has been the largest driver of free market capitalism and economic

01:25:51 ◼   ► growth that the world has ever seen. Two guys start Tumblr and it makes how many, what is it,

01:25:57 ◼   ► how many billion dollars did Yahoo pay for it or whatever? If you don't have a net neutral internet

01:26:02 ◼   ► and can't let two guys, like, it is, if you take that away and say, well, now only the big guys

01:26:07 ◼   ► can, like, you have destroyed so much more of the economy, like, yes, you made the ISPs get richer,

01:26:12 ◼   ► the price has been, like, a huge amount of innovation and market value that you've totally

01:26:18 ◼   ► destroyed by not making it easy to enter this market. Like, it's so incredibly short-sighted

01:26:23 ◼   ► for people to say government regulation is always bad, free market is better, because, you know,

01:26:27 ◼   ► You know, the Internet is the free market.

01:26:29 ◼   ► It is the thing that has enabled more businesses to spring into existence, to add value to

01:26:34 ◼   ► the economy, to employ people than any other invention in the entire world.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And to destroy that just so ISPs can make more money, it's so insane.

01:26:42 ◼   ► And again, this entire concept and all this is so hard to explain to people who don't

01:26:46 ◼   ► know or care about it, which is why I fear every day that people never have sane laws

01:26:50 ◼   ► in this area, because no one understands the issues involved.

01:26:54 ◼   ► No lawmakers do.

01:26:55 ◼   ► If you look at the history of actions taken by the FCC in the last 15, 20 years,

01:27:02 ◼   ► there's not a lot of things in there that give you a lot of confidence that they're going to do the right thing here.

01:27:06 ◼   ► No. It's terrible. It's too nuanced and esoteric.

01:27:13 ◼   ► And even when I say like Lawrence Lessig up there and other people who are trying to explain it,

01:27:17 ◼   ► they do such a good job explaining it. I'm like, "Surely now you must understand it. He did such a good job explaining that."

01:27:22 ◼   ► that and like nope still don't get it I need campaign donations from Comcast I'm

01:27:27 ◼   ► screwing everybody it's miserable well with that let's wrap it up for the week

01:27:33 ◼   ► thanks a lot to our three sponsors lynda.com harvest and fracture and we will

01:27:39 ◼   ► see you next week

01:27:42 ◼   ► now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental

01:27:50 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:27:52 ◼   ► John didn't do any research.

01:27:55 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:27:58 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental.

01:28:00 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:28:03 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:28:08 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at

01:28:14 ◼   ► at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A,

01:28:29 ◼   ► [music]

01:28:36 ◼   ► So I ended us on a sour note. Sorry about that.

01:28:47 ◼   ► Any discussion of technology and politics is going to be sad.

01:28:51 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

01:28:53 ◼   ► Oh, it's so painful.

01:28:55 ◼   ► You want to talk about the iPad Pro at all?

01:28:57 ◼   ► with the after show. Save that for another show, because I think it's worth being an

01:29:01 ◼   ► actual topic. Well, unfortunately, the prompt kind of beat us to it, and they did a better

01:29:03 ◼   ► job of it. Did you hear Federico Vatici's discussion about this with, I think it was

01:29:10 ◼   ► just Mike that week, on the prompt, like, I think last week or two weeks ago. I think

01:29:15 ◼   ► it was last week. I'm still in the middle of the giant iPhone keynote episode. That's

01:29:19 ◼   ► good. I'm kind of mad that we didn't think of doing that, you know? Oh, I know, me too.

01:29:24 ◼   ► - So good.

01:29:25 ◼   ► - I don't think I'd want to record that episode,

01:29:26 ◼   ► but I'll listen to it.

01:29:28 ◼   ► - Exactly, well, that's one of those things,

01:29:29 ◼   ► like when they put that out there,

01:29:32 ◼   ► I saw that in my list, and I was skeptical.

01:29:36 ◼   ► I was like, man, I gotta listen to a two hour plus podcast.

01:29:40 ◼   ► Come on, I heard the iPhone keynote.

01:29:42 ◼   ► You know, I watched it.

01:29:44 ◼   ► Like, I don't need to watch this or listen to this.

01:29:46 ◼   ► And I listened to it, and it was so good.

01:29:48 ◼   ► And when it ended, I was like, oh, that's it?

01:29:51 ◼   ► Like, that's when you know that you don't need

01:29:53 ◼   ► worry about cutting your show any shorter. Like, if people are going to listen to it

01:29:56 ◼   ► and say, "Wow, that's, like, I'm kind of upset there's not more of that," even after,

01:30:01 ◼   ► you know, two hours and ten minutes or whatever it was, that's really good. And they, they

01:30:05 ◼   ► hit it out of the park with that. That was so good.

01:30:06 ◼   ► Yeah, the show was good in gen--or really good in general, but God, that episode was

01:30:10 ◼   ► so annoyingly good, and I'm really jealous, and I'm bitter it wasn't us.

01:30:13 ◼   ► Well, 'cause what was good about it was that they didn't just go through the Apple keynote

01:30:17 ◼   ► and say, "Oh, here's what happened, then this happened." They, they gave really good context

01:30:22 ◼   ► of what the situation was at that time

01:30:26 ◼   ► and right before that time,

01:30:27 ◼   ► and why some of these things were so groundbreaking,

01:30:31 ◼   ► and a lot of that stuff I had forgotten about.

01:30:33 ◼   ► You know, like, why some of that stuff was so impressive,

01:30:36 ◼   ► how, you know, how the room reacted to seeing, like,

01:30:40 ◼   ► scrolling a table view for the first time by touch.

01:30:43 ◼   ► Like, that was a big reaction.

01:30:44 ◼   ► And like, you think about it,

01:30:46 ◼   ► why that was a big reaction,

01:30:47 ◼   ► because of what we had before the iPhone,

01:30:51 ◼   ► And it was really good.

01:30:55 ◼   ► The context they provided was very, very good,

01:30:57 ◼   ► and made it extremely listenable, and very interesting,

01:31:01 ◼   ► and very upsetting when it ended.

01:31:03 ◼   ► Even if you've heard the iPhone keynote a million times before,

01:31:06 ◼   ► it's still worth it.

01:31:07 ◼   ► They needed more old people on the show, though,

01:31:09 ◼   ► because a lot of them, their history of watching Apple

01:31:12 ◼   ► had started around the time of the iPhone.

01:31:14 ◼   ► That wasn't Apple's first keynote.

01:31:16 ◼   ► They'd kind of been doing this whole keynote thing for a while

01:31:18 ◼   ► since then.

01:31:19 ◼   ► So as always I wanted an old person like me on the show to say well, you know

01:31:23 ◼   ► Well, they introduced the iMac. It was on a pedestal

01:31:26 ◼   ► G4 Cube came up from the floor

01:31:29 ◼   ► Phil Schiller had to jump onto an airbag. That's real power

01:31:33 ◼   ► Well the reference that none of you will get all right, it's fine

01:31:39 ◼   ► No, I was just started listening to Marco and unprofessional and realizing that realizing the depths of his

01:31:45 ◼   ► his pop culture lack of knowledge

01:31:48 ◼   ► Sorry.

01:31:49 ◼   ► It's all right.

01:31:50 ◼   ► I don't know what Casey's excuse is.

01:31:54 ◼   ► Well, why does Marco have an excuse?

01:31:57 ◼   ► Well, he's unique.

01:31:59 ◼   ► Maybe you have proximity to Marco has prevented you from engaging in the culture of producing

01:32:06 ◼   ► entertainment.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

01:32:10 ◼   ► I just don't – I feel like I watch a crud-load of TV, and apparently I don't watch any,

01:32:17 ◼   ► I just watched the wrong TV.

01:32:19 ◼   ► - Are you watching NCIS with the senior citizens?

01:32:22 ◼   ► - No, but I did watch CSI for a long time.

01:32:24 ◼   ► - Oh, well, you're getting close.

01:32:25 ◼   ► I was close.

01:32:26 ◼   ► - Enhance. - I'm zooming out.

01:32:28 ◼   ► - Rotate it around, enhance again.

01:32:30 ◼   ► Look, a license plate.

01:32:31 ◼   ► - If Casey was born 20 years early,

01:32:34 ◼   ► he'd be watching "Matlock."

01:32:36 ◼   ► - You're such a jerk, but you're probably right.

01:32:39 ◼   ► - Go back a sec.

01:32:41 ◼   ► So the reason I brought up the prompt and the iPad Pro,

01:32:44 ◼   ► They had a good discussion last week where, you know, Federico Viteix, you brought up

01:32:49 ◼   ► the really good point, because he's like the iPad Pro.

01:32:52 ◼   ► Like he is the iPad Pro user.

01:32:55 ◼   ► He might be the only one.

01:32:56 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:32:57 ◼   ► Maybe him and Dr. Drang.

01:32:58 ◼   ► No, I don't think he even uses one.

01:32:59 ◼   ► Anyway, the reason why -- so the rumors are that Apple is going to make a larger iPad

01:33:04 ◼   ► maybe 12.9 inches-ish, and this will be a, quote, iPad Pro of some sort.

01:33:12 ◼   ► And the rumors are all really confused and inconsistent as to whether this is going to

01:33:16 ◼   ► also be a convertible MacBook Air with a keyboard, you know, an optional keyboard, there's one

01:33:22 ◼   ► that would fold back like a convertible tablet, or whether, you know, whether it would even

01:33:26 ◼   ► run OS X or iOS, whether it will have an Intel or an ARM processor, whether it has an ARM

01:33:30 ◼   ► processor that runs OS X, who knows?

01:33:35 ◼   ► And so the problem with all these rumors is that, and, you know, maybe the OS thing is

01:33:41 ◼   ► is more interesting, but the problem is that the size of the iPad is not really what's

01:33:48 ◼   ► holding it back for most types of quote "pro uses" whatever that means, that's a whole

01:33:54 ◼   ► discussion of what that even might mean. The size is not holding it back. There are uses

01:33:59 ◼   ► of the iPad where people want a bigger, so I was like, I had asked on Twitter a couple

01:34:03 ◼   ► of weeks ago when this rumor first came out, like, you know, what would a bigger iPad even

01:34:08 ◼   ► solve. Who's really asking for that? And the most common responses were either, "Nobody,

01:34:15 ◼   ► I like my Mini," or it was, of course, it was, you know, a bunch of geeks following

01:34:19 ◼   ► me, so it was that, mostly. But it was also, a lot of people who do music production in

01:34:24 ◼   ► particular said they would love a lot more screen space. And there's a few other verticals

01:34:30 ◼   ► like this where more screen space would be nice on the iPad and would be worth the extra

01:34:36 ◼   ► size, but for the most part I certainly don't think it's mass market. And the problem is

01:34:42 ◼   ► that the size of the screen is not holding back pro usage. What's holding back pro usage,

01:34:49 ◼   ► and this is what they were talking about in the prompt, is iOS and the structure and the

01:34:55 ◼   ► restrictions of iOS. And this is not an easy problem to solve. This is, like, the multitasking

01:35:01 ◼   ► system is really extremely rudimentary in iOS and very limited. Document models and

01:35:08 ◼   ► file storage and sharing data between applications, all that stuff is extremely primitive on iOS

01:35:16 ◼   ► and is just so limited. That's really most of the problem. And if you're going to make

01:35:21 ◼   ► a "pro iOS device", iOS itself needs major changes and that's not going to happen quickly

01:35:29 ◼   ► or easily, and many of those changes would actually make iOS worse at its core functions.

01:35:35 ◼   ► And so they probably aren't--like, I'm guessing that this kind of pro iOS is probably not

01:35:39 ◼   ► really happening. And I think the iPad Pro, the Pro Super Compact Mac is the MacBook Air,

01:35:49 ◼   ► or a Super Compact Apple device. I think it's the MacBook Air. I think--and we've answered

01:35:54 ◼   ► about this before, which I got some flack for, but actually in the prompt--it's funny,

01:35:58 ◼   ► On the prompt, Federico was arguing with a point that I didn't make, and he clarified

01:36:04 ◼   ► that at the very beginning, but most listeners, I think, missed that. And so they were telling

01:36:08 ◼   ► me, "Oh, he was ripping you apart on the prompt," and he actually wasn't. He actually

01:36:12 ◼   ► agreed with most of what I said, I think.

01:36:14 ◼   ► But anyway, if you're hitting these massive barriers with the iPad and having to jump

01:36:21 ◼   ► through all these different hoops of bouncing between 10 different apps and these weird

01:36:24 ◼   ► URL schemes that are kind of hacked together and trying to share data and weird methods

01:36:30 ◼   ► because you can't share it directly. If you're jumping through all these hoops and doing

01:36:34 ◼   ► all these weird hacks, maybe a Mac is really the better solution for you. And for pro work,

01:36:41 ◼   ► if what you want to do does not fit comfortably in an iPad, an 11-inch MacBook Air is really

01:36:47 ◼   ► not that much bigger. And it's not that much more money than a reasonably well-equipped

01:36:51 ◼   ► iPad and it will last longer probably.

01:36:55 ◼   ► And you know, it's just... I think the border is

01:36:59 ◼   ► if you are needing to use a keyboard

01:37:03 ◼   ► on the iPad frequently, like if you're buying a hardware keyboard

01:37:07 ◼   ► and using it frequently, you're probably going to be better served by a Mac.

01:37:11 ◼   ► See, I wanted to save this for a regular show, but no.

01:37:15 ◼   ► Our topic list is so long, I knew this would be quick,

01:37:19 ◼   ► I figured I'd burn it.

01:37:20 ◼   ► I mean, I actually have a quick thing to say about it, because I think Al Simpsons did

01:37:24 ◼   ► it again and say that I'm pretty sure I'm the first person who I recall-- like, I didn't

01:37:30 ◼   ► hear anyone else say iPad Pro when I talked about it on a Hyperk

01:37:30 ◼   ► hear anyone else say iPad Pro when I talked about a hyper-credits episode years ago. I

01:37:34 ◼   ► don't remember how it came up, but I mentioned that I'm very interested in a larger, more

01:37:39 ◼   ► powerful iPad. I don't remember if I said iPad Pro, I probably did, because that's the

01:37:43 ◼   ► obvious name for it. Years and years ago, basically as soon as the first iPad came out,

01:37:48 ◼   ► way well before there was a mini, I wanted a bigger, more powerful iPad, an iPad Pro.

01:37:53 ◼   ► And I said that's not going to happen anytime soon. And Marco's question on Twitter reminded

01:37:58 ◼   ► me of this because he was like, who the hell's asking for a bigger iPad?

01:38:01 ◼   ► Because Marco's old now and he had forgotten or not listened to that episode of Hypercritical

01:38:05 ◼   ► where I'd asked for it.

01:38:06 ◼   ► I'm asking for a bigger iPad Pro.

01:38:08 ◼   ► And the reason I'm also not a mini user, but anyway, the reason I keep thinking about an

01:38:12 ◼   ► iPad Pro and the reason I was thinking of an iPad Pro all those years ago and continue

01:38:15 ◼   ► to, it's very simple.

01:38:16 ◼   ► It has nothing to do with these rumors, which as many people have pointed out could just

01:38:20 ◼   ► be the new 12-inch MacBook Air form factor, whatever.

01:38:23 ◼   ► You can't-- I love screen size rumors.

01:38:27 ◼   ► Apple is ordering screens of X size, therefore--

01:38:29 ◼   ► and then every product, they could possibly

01:38:30 ◼   ► fit that screen in it.

01:38:31 ◼   ► It's the new Retina Mac Pro.

01:38:33 ◼   ► They're going to put seven of those screens together.

01:38:35 ◼   ► Anyway, ignoring that, why do we care about an iPad Pro?

01:38:40 ◼   ► Why do I think this iPad Pro is the thing?

01:38:42 ◼   ► And it's very, very simple.

01:38:44 ◼   ► iOS is a better user experience than the Mac for most people.

01:38:48 ◼   ► I think everyone would agree on that, which probably means

01:38:51 ◼   ► that iOS or something like iOS is

01:38:52 ◼   ► the future of computing. And if iOS is the future of computing or something like it,

01:38:57 ◼   ► that means that anything we can do on our Mac today will want to do on something that's

01:39:01 ◼   ► more like iOS in the future. And that will mean that iOS devices need to get bigger and

01:39:06 ◼   ► more powerful. Yes, the hardware, yes, also the software. It's just simple logical progression.

01:39:11 ◼   ► You're going to want to do more stuff with iOS devices because iOS is the future. iOS

01:39:16 ◼   ► devices are going to have to get both bigger and smaller, probably not much smaller than

01:39:19 ◼   ► they are now, they're gonna have to get bigger and more powerful.

01:39:21 ◼   ► Some day, not all probably, but some of the things we do on our Mac that we can't do on

01:39:26 ◼   ► iPads today, we will have to be able to do on iPads, because they're the future.

01:39:30 ◼   ► So they're gonna have to get bigger, they're gonna have to get more powerful, and yes,

01:39:32 ◼   ► they're gonna have to get more capable.

01:39:34 ◼   ► And that's it.

01:39:35 ◼   ► That's the calculus.

01:39:36 ◼   ► You don't have to say they're gonna come out now or this year or next year, or they can't

01:39:39 ◼   ► come out until software changes.

01:39:40 ◼   ► Of course, all that is true.

01:39:41 ◼   ► But all the things that iOS gets rid of that we don't like anymore, they're not coming

01:39:46 ◼   ► back.

01:39:47 ◼   ► device that comes out that's more complicated than the Mac.

01:39:50 ◼   ► Like it's going, it's the other direction, right?

01:39:52 ◼   ► Now the iOS is going to have to get more capable and hopefully not get as complicated as the

01:39:56 ◼   ► Mac.

01:39:57 ◼   ► Like it's the whole continuum, iOS on one end and the Mac on the other.

01:40:00 ◼   ► Where do they meet in the middle?

01:40:01 ◼   ► What happens?

01:40:02 ◼   ► But that form factor, a tablet form factor, is going to become more capable.

01:40:06 ◼   ► You're going to be able to do more stuff with it.

01:40:08 ◼   ► So they have to have a bigger, more powerful one someday.

01:40:10 ◼   ► I don't know when that day is, but I continue to wait for it because as soon as you see

01:40:13 ◼   ► iOS, as soon as you see a tablet OS, you're like, "Well, I can barely do anything on this

01:40:17 ◼   ► thing now, but I can imagine a future where I can do way more with this thing, and that

01:40:24 ◼   ► way more is going to require a bigger screen and more power."

01:40:27 ◼   ► And so that's my simple explanation for the iPad Pro, because it has to assume some of

01:40:32 ◼   ► the mantle of the Mac eventually.

01:40:34 ◼   ► It will assume some of the mantle of the Mac eventually, or it will just go away and be

01:40:37 ◼   ► replaced by something different.

01:40:39 ◼   ► But it has to, you know, tablet form factor has to do that, and so it's going to get bigger.

01:40:43 ◼   ► Yeah, but that doesn't—well, nothing you just said implies a difference.

01:40:48 ◼   ► So when I hear iPad Pro, what that indicates to me is that there's going to be a clear

01:40:52 ◼   ► delineation between iPad regular and iPad Pro, be that a much larger screen size, which

01:40:59 ◼   ► to me is a weak line, a dashed line, if you will, or a much better processor, a much more

01:41:04 ◼   ► RAM, or a much bigger—

01:41:07 ◼   ► It's got to have a bigger screen size, though.

01:41:09 ◼   ► But see, I just—I don't see why.

01:41:12 ◼   ► Because one of the things that a Mac can do that iOS devices can't do is a bunch of stuff

01:41:17 ◼   ► at once.

01:41:18 ◼   ► And a bunch of stuff at once means the thing you're doing probably can't take up the entire

01:41:22 ◼   ► screen.

01:41:23 ◼   ► And if you're going to divide the screen up in any possible way, you need more screen.

01:41:26 ◼   ► That's it.

01:41:27 ◼   ► But iOS, some of the beauty of iOS is not being able to do more than one thing at once.

01:41:33 ◼   ► True.

01:41:34 ◼   ► All true.

01:41:35 ◼   ► Like, I'm not saying that's going to go away.

01:41:36 ◼   ► I'm saying, well, you wouldn't want to divvy up.

01:41:38 ◼   ► You would never, like, imagine divvying up an iPhone screen.

01:41:40 ◼   ► Now you can have two iPhone apps side by side,

01:41:42 ◼   ► no, it's too small, right?

01:41:44 ◼   ► And even a full-size current iPad screen,

01:41:47 ◼   ► I don't think you wanna divvy that up.

01:41:49 ◼   ► But if you're gonna be using a tablet device

01:41:51 ◼   ► to do development, like the new version of Xcode in 2027

01:41:54 ◼   ► only runs on iOS, right?

01:41:57 ◼   ► You're gonna wanna see more than one thing at once.

01:41:59 ◼   ► And you need more screen space to do that.

01:42:01 ◼   ► It's the same reason we all have multiple windows on our Mac.

01:42:03 ◼   ► Now, it's not gonna be a multi-window interface,

01:42:05 ◼   ► like that's too complicated, right?

01:42:07 ◼   ► But it's a continuum.

01:42:08 ◼   ► And if you want to do more stuff with iOS, you need to see more things at once.

01:42:12 ◼   ► And it's not a smart idea to take existing screen sizes and chop them up.

01:42:16 ◼   ► So I think it's inevitable that at a certain point you need more screen space to do.

01:42:20 ◼   ► Otherwise it would be saying Mac's going to be around forever, and there's nothing you

01:42:23 ◼   ► can do on a Mac today that you can't do on iOS that's ever going to jump ship to like,

01:42:27 ◼   ► "Well, previously you couldn't do that on iOS, but now you can.

01:42:29 ◼   ► And previously you needed a Mac to do that, but now you can actually get away with it

01:42:32 ◼   ► on iOS."

01:42:33 ◼   ► We've already seen that happen in small degrees.

01:42:36 ◼   ► we're going to reach a point where you say, "Well, the only way we could ever do that

01:42:38 ◼   ► on iOS is we need to be able to see more than one thing at once, and we can't do that on

01:42:43 ◼   ► existing screen sizes, so we need a bigger screen." And a new OS and a new paradigm for

01:42:47 ◼   ► how we're doing that, whether it's the Windows 8 way with Divi in half, or... They've got

01:42:51 ◼   ► to come up with some of that, because the need to do more than one thing at once and

01:42:54 ◼   ► see more than one thing at once is not going away.

01:42:56 ◼   ► Well, but we've had, throughout computing history, we've always had specialty devices

01:43:03 ◼   ► that could do less that still had a place in the market, but they never took over. So

01:43:08 ◼   ► things like game consoles are probably the best example of this. Where you have, like,

01:43:13 ◼   ► no one was ever saying, "Eventually game consoles are going to be so good they're going to replace

01:43:18 ◼   ► computers."

01:43:19 ◼   ► No, no, no, you're forgetting the GUI again. It could do less than the command line, but

01:43:22 ◼   ► it took over.

01:43:23 ◼   ► The problem I see with trying to make tablets replace computers, the biggest problem by

01:43:30 ◼   ► far, is the same thing I was saying on my blog, which was horrible in 2009, when I was

01:43:37 ◼   ► basically, there were all these rumors that Apple was going to make a tablet, and I wrote

01:43:42 ◼   ► a few articles that were, the gist of it was, Apple's going to have to solve the input problem,

01:43:47 ◼   ► because the biggest problem with tablets, and the reason they've never taken off before,

01:43:53 ◼   ► is because of input and because you have this weird thing

01:43:58 ◼   ► where it's trying to do computer tasks

01:44:01 ◼   ► but keyboards for tablets have always sucked

01:44:06 ◼   ► unless they've been full on laptops

01:44:08 ◼   ► that do the convertible thing,

01:44:10 ◼   ► in which case they're big and kind of crappy tablets.

01:44:13 ◼   ► And so what are they gonna do to solve this, right?

01:44:17 ◼   ► And in fact, they didn't solve it.

01:44:20 ◼   ► They just punted.

01:44:21 ◼   ► They basically said, you know what,

01:44:23 ◼   ► "We're just gonna keep the on-screen keyboard that we had on the iPhone and it's gonna work

01:44:26 ◼   ► okay."

01:44:27 ◼   ► And they did, and it does.

01:44:28 ◼   ► It works okay.

01:44:29 ◼   ► You know, it doesn't work amazingly.

01:44:32 ◼   ► It's very limited.

01:44:33 ◼   ► And there's a lot of things that people are demanding real keyboards for for very good

01:44:37 ◼   ► reason because real keyboards work way better.

01:44:40 ◼   ► And so they didn't solve that problem with the iPad.

01:44:44 ◼   ► That doesn't mean they ever will.

01:44:45 ◼   ► That doesn't mean that, like, I think multitasking on a full computer kind of requires good advantage

01:44:53 ◼   ► advanced fast input. And so, you know, I'd only have to solve the keyboard problem of--

01:44:57 ◼   ► Who's to say an iPad Pro wouldn't have a keyboard?

01:45:00 ◼   ► Well, so, okay, so maybe it will. So, the bigger problem is, what do you do with the

01:45:04 ◼   ► mouse? Because iOS doesn't--and there was a good discussion on the talk show this week

01:45:09 ◼   ► about this, too. iOS is not built for a mouse cursor. A mouse cursor doesn't really--I mean,

01:45:16 ◼   ► you could, like, you can do it in the simulator, but it kind of sucks, and it's very clearly

01:45:20 ◼   ► not made for that. The experience of using a hardware keyboard with an iPad and having

01:45:25 ◼   ► to keep reaching up to the screen with your finger to touch things is really terrible.

01:45:30 ◼   ► And so there's these major, major problems with iOS that they would have to solve. I

01:45:36 ◼   ► mean, it's a problem only in the sense of trying to make it replace computers.

01:45:40 ◼   ► Well, they're not trying to replace computers. They're just trying to take some of the functionality

01:45:43 ◼   ► that currently requires computer and allow it to be done on the iPad. That's the history

01:45:48 ◼   ► of iOS and the iPad. Things that previously required a computer are now feasible on iOS

01:45:53 ◼   ► devices.

01:45:54 ◼   ► Well, yeah, but that's always been the case with iOS. It's always been expanding its reach

01:45:59 ◼   ► a little bit, but there are these major barriers that it doesn't really easily cross because

01:46:05 ◼   ► of things like input and multitasking.

01:46:07 ◼   ► It's going to be difficult. Yeah, even the multitasking problem is not technically difficult

01:46:10 ◼   ► but UI-wise. But I think it has to happen because the alternative is relegating the

01:46:15 ◼   ► human race to have to use windowed personal computers of the type that we know now forever.

01:46:20 ◼   ► And they're just too complicated for regular people to use. The windowed interface with

01:46:25 ◼   ► file system access and folders, we all love it. We all think it's great. It will always

01:46:29 ◼   ► exist for expert users, but humanity has voted and they want things that they can touch that

01:46:34 ◼   ► are not as complicated. And so we are tasked with, we have to find a way to make more things possible

01:46:42 ◼   ► with these things that people actually want to use that are harder to screw up, like that's

01:46:45 ◼   ► just progress. Like make it so it's not so complicated, so there's not so much to know,

01:46:48 ◼   ► so it's harder to break, so it's more reliable. Like we've done that with iOS. We've done it by

01:46:53 ◼   ► shedding almost everything that you can do with a personal computer, but we'll say how much of that

01:46:57 ◼   ► can we get back without compromising the complexity? And if we screw it up and bring

01:47:01 ◼   ► too much of the computer stuff over to iOS, then maybe we'll need another reboot and let's try this

01:47:05 ◼   ► again and start over with a different paradigm sometime in the future. But I think this is what's

01:47:10 ◼   ► What's going to happen is this is our opportunity is to make iOS more capable.

01:47:15 ◼   ► Does it include putting a keyboard on it?

01:47:17 ◼   ► Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

01:47:18 ◼   ► Maybe, you know, what can you do without a keyboard?

01:47:20 ◼   ► Or do we need a mouse or do we not need a mouse?

01:47:22 ◼   ► We don't like to reach up for the thing.

01:47:24 ◼   ► Like do we want to have it on our lap?

01:47:25 ◼   ► Do you want to have a better virtual keyboard?

01:47:27 ◼   ► Like I don't know what the solutions are to these things, but like baby steps would just

01:47:31 ◼   ► be, you know, Windows 8 is already doing it with like if you've got a big enough screen,

01:47:35 ◼   ► sometimes you want to see a Twitter app on the side while you're working in another app.

01:47:38 ◼   ► or sometimes you want to copy and paste from one app to the other without doing a switch

01:47:41 ◼   ► type thing.

01:47:42 ◼   ► Like, the larger screen being able to see more than anything at once is a small step

01:47:45 ◼   ► in that direction, and if done well, can open up lots of functionality that I haven't listed

01:47:51 ◼   ► in this episode of the podcast you're talking about, but it can open up a lot of functionality

01:47:54 ◼   ► that I assume they're complaining about.

01:47:55 ◼   ► It's like, "Look, I just want to do a simple workflow where I've got a graphic editor and

01:47:59 ◼   ► some links and a web page and I'm writing text."

01:48:01 ◼   ► You know, just blogging.

01:48:02 ◼   ► How much easier it is blogging on a Mac because you have all those things kind of in play

01:48:06 ◼   ► at once versus trying to do an iOS and you feel like you're constantly switching stuff,

01:48:10 ◼   ► that is a surmountable barrier with some clever software and a larger screen.

01:48:16 ◼   ► Ignoring the keyboard input and just keeping with our fingers, just being able to do a

01:48:20 ◼   ► simple blog post synthesizing from some graphics and text and links and stuff.

01:48:25 ◼   ► That's our next step.

01:48:26 ◼   ► See, I don't think that's the next step.

01:48:28 ◼   ► I feel like the next step is—and I know everyone's been beating this to death—but

01:48:34 ◼   ► better inter-app communication. Because if you look at what Viticci is doing with x call

01:48:39 ◼   ► back URL and URL schemes and chaining just ridiculous things together, I feel like if

01:48:47 ◼   ► that was less user hostile, and it will probably always be a power user sort of thing to do,

01:48:54 ◼   ► but just a less user hostile way of doing things. Like whatever Android does or like

01:48:59 ◼   ► Windows phones, contracts, whatever they're called, that's not the right word for it.

01:49:03 ◼   ► I forget what it is now, but...

01:49:04 ◼   ► >> Now that was a... it's intense on Android, I think, and contracts on Windows 8, right?

01:49:08 ◼   ► >> Oh, it is?

01:49:09 ◼   ► Okay.

01:49:10 ◼   ► I think you're right now that you say that.

01:49:11 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

01:49:12 ◼   ► You get the idea.

01:49:13 ◼   ► >> I would love that on iOS.

01:49:14 ◼   ► >> Right?

01:49:15 ◼   ► And it would be so much nicer.

01:49:16 ◼   ► But it would enable us to do a lot of things.

01:49:19 ◼   ► Like, if you're doing a blog post, yes, it would be in a perfect world.

01:49:21 ◼   ► Nice to look at something that you're commenting or writing a post about on the left-hand side

01:49:26 ◼   ► of a landscape screen and your editor window on the right.

01:49:30 ◼   ► But to be honest, using your four fingers on an iPad to shimmy back and forth between

01:49:35 ◼   ► apps and do the fast app switching, that's sufficient.

01:49:38 ◼   ► And I'd almost rather have the hurdle of swapping between apps to see something that

01:49:45 ◼   ► I'm commenting on and then comment on it.

01:49:47 ◼   ► I'd rather do that than have some crazy scheme of having, I don't know, two iPhone

01:49:55 ◼   ► apps side by side or something where the screen is split in half. It seems to me like that

01:50:02 ◼   ► would be not fun.

01:50:03 ◼   ► Well, we're talking about the same thing, because that's the plumbing that would have

01:50:06 ◼   ► to underpin all this. The display issues are kind of neither here nor there, because again,

01:50:11 ◼   ► the same ability to do more than one thing, like to have more balls in the air at once,

01:50:16 ◼   ► would still also probably exist on the full-size iPad, even though they would probably never

01:50:19 ◼   ► want to split that screen. It's the plumbing that makes it work. It's just that when you

01:50:23 ◼   ► have more screen space, think of it this way.

01:50:26 ◼   ► Remember when people first got 24-inch monitors or 21-inch monitors?

01:50:31 ◼   ► The monitors were way bigger than they previously had.

01:50:32 ◼   ► It was like you'd have a 14-inch and all of a sudden you got a 21-inch.

01:50:35 ◼   ► You'd see the Windows users with their new 21-inch monitor be like, "This is awesome.

01:50:38 ◼   ► I have a gigantic monitor."

01:50:39 ◼   ► Then they would take their Notepad window and zoom it to full screen.

01:50:42 ◼   ► It would fill their entire screen.

01:50:44 ◼   ► Their text would be in a little column in the upper left and the whole vestibule would

01:50:47 ◼   ► be in expansive white.

01:50:48 ◼   ► It's like, "I think you're missing the advantage of having a larger monitor.

01:50:52 ◼   ► It's not so you can take all your existing windows and make them huge because I mean people would eventually learn if it was wrapping wasn't

01:50:57 ◼   ► On the trying to read a line of text that go that's two feet wide is not comfortable like there's a comfortable width for a column

01:51:03 ◼   ► Of text so you can your eyes you know and then once you've made it narrow

01:51:06 ◼   ► What are you gonna do with all you can put something else in that space like?

01:51:08 ◼   ► And that's why I'm getting back to iPad Pro not that it's what everyone's gonna use instead of a PC or not that everyone who?

01:51:13 ◼   ► Has an iPad is gonna get one just that there will exist this it's kind of like the Mac Pro of the iPad line there

01:51:18 ◼   ► will exist a

01:51:20 ◼   ► tablet type device for artists for graphic designers

01:51:23 ◼   ► Maybe even for coders if like you put a keyboard in front of it an Xcode would like

01:51:26 ◼   ► Instead imagine architects drafting table with a keyboard in front of it where it's all flat

01:51:31 ◼   ► You're not reaching up at a screen or whatever like there are

01:51:34 ◼   ► Endeavors that you might be able to do where you're like this is less complicated than a Mac

01:51:38 ◼   ► I can get all the same things not and once you get a larger screen like that you're gonna like well

01:51:42 ◼   ► You know all the plumbings there. I could do this with the four finger swipe or whatever, but I've got this gigantic screen

01:51:48 ◼   ► that's like 19, 20 inches, and it's a beautiful touch screen, I can do these amazing things

01:51:52 ◼   ► with it and everything, but sometimes I just want to see more than one thing on it.

01:51:55 ◼   ► So they have to come up with some solution to that, and the solution can't be a bunch

01:51:58 ◼   ► of windows because that sucks and we're just making the same stuff come back that we had

01:52:01 ◼   ► before.

01:52:02 ◼   ► So I don't know what the solution is, but I think that's inevitable if we ever want

01:52:07 ◼   ► to leave behind the crappy things that computers make us endure now, but still get some of

01:52:14 ◼   ► those advantages in some realms.

01:52:15 ◼   ► It will still be all the single screen phones, it will still be the regular sized iPads that

01:52:19 ◼   ► normal people use.

01:52:20 ◼   ► I'm just thinking if this is the reason the Pro is in the name.

01:52:23 ◼   ► The iPad Pro used by 3D modelers, graphic designers, people doing page layout if pages

01:52:30 ◼   ► still exist anywhere, maybe people doing web development, maybe even people working in

01:52:34 ◼   ► Xcode doing iOS devices.

01:52:36 ◼   ► Hell, maybe you could have one of the other windows could be your simulator while you

01:52:40 ◼   ► do real-time updates in Xcode and it recompiles your stuff in real-time and you watch the

01:52:45 ◼   ► changes take effect in real-time on the other thing.

01:52:47 ◼   ► It's like you had a dynamic programming language, but not really.

01:52:50 ◼   ► And that would be very cool.

01:52:53 ◼   ► But doesn't the move for OS X to be more iOS-like, most specifically around full-screen

01:53:00 ◼   ► windows and how that support has gotten a lot better in Mavericks and it's actually

01:53:05 ◼   ► kind of usable now?

01:53:09 ◼   ► That makes me feel like some sort of windowing system isn't the right answer.

01:53:14 ◼   ► And I know I'm harping on something that I really shouldn't harp on, but I just don't

01:53:17 ◼   ► see how any sort of windowing is really the right answer.

01:53:21 ◼   ► I think it's something else.

01:53:22 ◼   ► Well, it can't be that kind of window system.

01:53:25 ◼   ► Like with OS X, again, OS X is trying to become more iOS-like, and iOS is trying to do more

01:53:30 ◼   ► things that previously only OS X could do.

01:53:32 ◼   ► And I don't know who will lurch more in which direction and how that will go.

01:53:38 ◼   ► like it. My impression is that it's harder to make Mac OS X simpler or OS X simpler than

01:53:43 ◼   ► it is to make iOS more capable. So I would imagine, that's why I think the future is

01:53:46 ◼   ► making iOS more capable and not, we can simplify OS X until it's just as simple as iOS. You'll

01:53:51 ◼   ► never do it, nor should you ever. It would just be a disaster. Better to start with what

01:53:56 ◼   ► you, they were so smart to start really simple on iOS and just don't screw it up. And it's

01:54:00 ◼   ► probably not going to be Windows. Like full screen mode on OS X is a great example because

01:54:04 ◼   ► Like, now we've made it simpler.

01:54:05 ◼   ► No, you've actually just made it more complicated.

01:54:07 ◼   ► Because you left all the existing ones,

01:54:09 ◼   ► because you can't get rid of the existing windowing system,

01:54:11 ◼   ► nor should you.

01:54:12 ◼   ► But now you have another mode to go into.

01:54:14 ◼   ► And on iOS, they have the opportunity

01:54:17 ◼   ► to do something better.

01:54:19 ◼   ► And I'm not sure what it is or how it will work,

01:54:21 ◼   ► but it can't be like OS X Windows.

01:54:23 ◼   ► So it seems like the kind of jobs forestall dynasty

01:54:29 ◼   ► was pushing for the Mac to become more iOS-like,

01:54:33 ◼   ► for iOS to get better. But for the most part, that era of Apple was pulling the Mac towards

01:54:42 ◼   ► iOS. And it seems like now in the Tim Cook era and the restructuring of the divisions,

01:54:50 ◼   ► it seems like Apple has become more confident in keeping the Mac the Mac and not trying

01:54:56 ◼   ► to make the Mac iOS. And you know, all of this talk, and John, you've kind of been on

01:55:02 ◼   ► this too, like all of this talk about these two merging eventually has this built-in assumption

01:55:10 ◼   ► that that would be a good idea and that that's inevitable. And I would question both of those

01:55:14 ◼   ► things. I would say that we saw what happened when Apple tried to make the Mac more iOS-like.

01:55:23 ◼   ► kind of sucked. And everything you're talking about, about what iOS would need to become

01:55:30 ◼   ► more pro, in a lot of ways that would make iOS worse.

01:55:34 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it's like I said in the Mavericks review, it's picking the right things. What

01:55:38 ◼   ► they forced all jobs thing was like, they were picking the wrong things to make the

01:55:42 ◼   ► Mac iOS. They picked some of the right things, but the right things they did pick, we like.

01:55:48 ◼   ► For example, the App Store is a better way to deal with--

01:55:52 ◼   ► ignoring the policy stuff, just in terms of the mechanics

01:55:55 ◼   ► of installing applications.

01:55:57 ◼   ► It's better the App Store way than it used to be,

01:55:59 ◼   ► where you go to a web page, download a DMG,

01:56:01 ◼   ► mount a blah, blah, blah.

01:56:02 ◼   ► That's a simplification that came from iOS.

01:56:04 ◼   ► It doesn't necessarily have to look like iOS

01:56:06 ◼   ► or work the same way.

01:56:07 ◼   ► The finder doesn't need to be replaced with a launch pad

01:56:10 ◼   ► with little shaky icons.

01:56:11 ◼   ► And Access really did that, too.

01:56:13 ◼   ► But the key feature is dealing with installing applications

01:56:17 ◼   ► pain in the butt, it's not a pain in the butt on iOS, can we bring that simplicity to the

01:56:21 ◼   ► Mac?" And they did, and they brought a bunch of other crappy baggage with it. It's just

01:56:24 ◼   ► about picking the right thing. So if you're going to do it the other direction and say,