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43: Brilliance Enhancer

 

00:00:00   There's no way this is going on the show.

00:00:03   I know.

00:00:04   This is not nearly exciting enough.

00:00:06   Well, it was embarrassing for me, so I thought there was a pretty good shot you'd wanted

00:00:09   in there.

00:00:11   So we have a little bit of follow-up.

00:00:13   The first thing is, and I'm a little disappointed that this has gotten a little bit of publicity

00:00:18   because I was hoping to wow everyone with revealing this on the show, but there is a

00:00:25   listener who wrote far and away my favorite thing I've ever read on the

00:00:28   internet. His name is Joe Steele, if I'm not mistaken, and he wrote a screenplay

00:00:36   review of the Accidental Tech podcast. And as it turns out, I didn't realize

00:00:40   this at the time, as it turns out he's actually done several of these. And he

00:00:45   even has a little Tumblr where he posts them. So he's done one, he did one for the

00:00:48   prompt, which is falsely advertised as greatest podcast in the world. He did one

00:00:54   for Bionic, which I actually thought was quite funny. And he's done it for several others.

00:00:58   The Incomparable, he did one, and I forget what the other ones are. But they're really,

00:01:02   really, really funny, and I absolutely adored ours. I thought it was hysterical.

00:01:07   And so many thanks to Joe Steele for writing that inventive and hilarious review. And if you ever

00:01:15   want to trick us into mentioning your name on the show, that's how you do it, is by writing

00:01:20   an awesome review that's hysterical. **Matt Stauffer**

00:01:22   That's not a trick. That's a legitimate way to do it.

00:01:24   [laughter]

00:01:26   Speaking of Bionic, have you guys heard Bionic since the beginning?

00:01:30   No. I only started listening a handful of episodes back, but don't tell Mike or Matt about that.

00:01:35   So I always assumed it was about comics, so I didn't listen to it. And then when Merlin was

00:01:39   on as a guest host, I listened to that one, and I kept listening after that. And I don't know

00:01:45   what's going on in that show. Neither did I.

00:01:48   However, I couldn't tell you what it's about.

00:01:51   I heard them say that it used to be about ecosystems,

00:01:53   so that's as good of an explanation as any.

00:01:56   But I like it.

00:01:57   It's really weird, but it's funny.

00:02:00   You can tell that you're walking in on what's clearly

00:02:04   a long-running series of inside jokes,

00:02:06   but they manage to make it funny.

00:02:08   Even if you don't know the back story,

00:02:10   you can figure out enough that you can laugh with it.

00:02:14   And then there's occasionally actual tech discussion.

00:02:16   So it's pretty cool.

00:02:17   I actually really like Bionic now.

00:02:19   - Yeah, I agree.

00:02:20   I also didn't listen to it because I thought

00:02:24   I was way too late in the inside joke category,

00:02:27   which is to some degree one of the excuses I use

00:02:30   for you look nice today and you don't have to lecture me.

00:02:32   I know I need to listen to it.

00:02:33   It's on the list.

00:02:34   But yeah, so I never jumped into Bionic until,

00:02:37   I don't know, maybe five-ish episodes ago, like I said.

00:02:39   And it's actually quite entertaining.

00:02:41   I'm not sure I understand what's going on ever,

00:02:45   but I still enjoy it nevertheless.

00:02:48   - Yeah, I can pretty much say the same thing.

00:02:51   Well, that's good.

00:02:52   We also had some follow-up on the retina display.

00:02:56   We talked at the end of last episode

00:02:58   about possibilities for what Apple could release

00:03:00   or what anybody could release for that matter.

00:03:03   In regards to a retina desktop display,

00:03:06   we looked at the new Dell ones that are coming out.

00:03:09   And John brought up in his Mavericks review or somewhere

00:03:12   that, right, John?

00:03:13   When did you bring up the wallpaper size?

00:03:15   Was it the Mavericks review?

00:03:16   Yeah, it was the Mavericks review.

00:03:17   So you brought up there about how the wallpaper that comes with the system is available in

00:03:23   exactly 5120 by 2880, which is exactly double each dimension of the current 27 inch cinema

00:03:31   display.

00:03:32   And that would be awesome to have that as a retina screen.

00:03:36   We haven't seen any monitors come out with that resolution, though.

00:03:38   The highest we've seen is 4K 3840 by 2160.

00:03:44   And we had talked at the end of last episode, what if Apple releases that resolution, 3840

00:03:49   wide, as the Retina display rather than like the full Retina 27 inch which would be 5120

00:03:55   wide.

00:03:56   And we got a number of people pointing out that actually the current versions of even

00:04:01   Thunderbolt 2 and DisplayPort 1.2, the two current ways to connect a monitor to a video

00:04:07   card. Those don't support enough bandwidth to run 5120 wide at 60 frames a second. They

00:04:14   just can't do it. That takes roughly 28 gigabits per second, and they both top out at about

00:04:20   20. And so we're actually pretty far from that. DisplayPort 1.3 is the next upcoming

00:04:25   version of DisplayPort. That will support up to 8K resolution at 60 hertz, because it

00:04:30   raises the bandwidth. But that's not available yet.

00:04:32   Where are you getting the DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth from?

00:04:36   I looked up at Wikipedia and it said like 17 something and you have it here as 21 in

00:04:40   the notes file.

00:04:42   It was unclear to me exactly what it was but it says in this little sidebar that you can

00:04:47   have up to four channels at whatever that divided by four is so I guess multiply that

00:04:51   and say that's probably the theoretical max but either way it's neither Thunderbolt 2

00:04:56   nor DisplayPort 1.2 which is the current best version of both of those things.

00:05:00   of those can drive a display of the size that you want. And for the

00:05:05   5120 by 2880, how many bits per pixel is that, assuming? That was at 32, however it

00:05:11   also doesn't work at 24. Why would it be 32 bits per pixel? I don't know, that's

00:05:16   how everyone else was calculating it, so I did that, but even at 24 bits per

00:05:19   pixel it's still too much. At 24 bits per pixel it's like 21 or

00:05:22   something gigabits, which is still over the 17-ish that 1.2 puts out, but yeah,

00:05:27   Yeah, you know, have to wait a little bit longer. It's sad.

00:05:30   Either way, you can't do it.

00:05:33   Like there's possibilities that you can have resolutions in between there, but who the

00:05:35   hell knows? Like it always bothers me that 4K isn't really 4,000 of anything, but I think

00:05:40   4K is kind of an umbrella term. It doesn't apply to any specific resolution. It's one

00:05:44   of those BS things.

00:05:45   Right. There's like four or five different ones that all are kind of considered 4K.

00:05:49   Yeah. The link I threw in there was the many stories about the Sharp 4K display appearing

00:05:54   in some European Apple store briefly before disappearing.

00:05:57   Yeah, I don't really think that indicates anything useful.

00:06:01   People obviously send that to all of us a lot when it came out and the news hit a few

00:06:04   days ago.

00:06:06   And I mean Apple has sold third-party monitors and stuff before in their store.

00:06:11   So I don't think it indicates anything whether Apple released their own or not.

00:06:15   I really don't think it says anything.

00:06:17   But it was another 3840, 2160.

00:06:19   Yeah, exactly.

00:06:20   So I really think that's what we're going to be sticking with for the next few years.

00:06:24   I think that's going to be the highest resolution you can get, because nothing can drive anything better than that.

00:06:28   And I'm guessing...

00:06:29   You still think Apple will make one of these, though?

00:06:32   I think they will. I'm not necessarily sure when they'll make it.

00:06:36   Maybe we'll see on the iMac first, and then at the end of next year.

00:06:41   Well, Dell's making one now.

00:06:43   The fact that they put the Mac Pro up there and said, "And it can drive three 4K displays."

00:06:47   Are they really expecting us to buy those 4K displays from someone other than them,

00:06:51   because the margins are too low on these displays and they don't care because it's just...

00:06:56   maybe pros would never use the Apple displays anyway because they have their specialty.

00:07:00   I don't quite understand that.

00:07:02   It's kind of like when Apple discontinued the X-Star Raid and said, "Oh, just buy these

00:07:05   other ugly, purple, weird, plastic-y raid things instead."

00:07:09   That was not a very Apple-like thing to do.

00:07:10   It was very strange seeing them do that.

00:07:12   Do you remember that time?

00:07:13   Oh, yeah.

00:07:14   I mean, I really think what we're in for here is Dell's going to release theirs if it isn't

00:07:20   it's not already out I don't think but I think it's coming soon like very soon

00:07:24   so Dell's gonna release theirs I think they said it was what 1500 bucks 1400

00:07:28   bucks something like that for the for the 24 inch one I think that's going to

00:07:32   be the new hotness for nerds like us assuming that it can be driven by the

00:07:37   new Mac Pro and new retina MacBook Pros at that resolution and be treated as 2x

00:07:41   I think people gonna buy that a lot of Apple doesn't make their own and I if

00:07:47   If Apple releases a 27 inch version of that, and the Dell one works fine at 24 inches,

00:07:53   I really might go with the Dell one. I don't know. I mean, I've had Dell displays before,

00:07:57   they've been fine. They've been, you know, like, like, they've always, like, the plastic around

00:08:00   them is crap, the stand is crap, the buttons always flake and fall off or spin around and

00:08:06   stop working. I mean, they're built like crap, but the panels are always really good. Like,

00:08:10   it's always really good image quality for a really good price, and usually with tons of inputs and

00:08:15   card readers and USB hubs and all that other stuff. So I've been, I've had perfectly fine

00:08:20   experiences with Dell displays. I've actually never had an Apple display. I've always used

00:08:23   third-party displays. So I would be fine with that. But if Apple makes one at the right

00:08:29   side, like if Apple makes a 24, which I don't honestly think they would, if they made a

00:08:34   24, I'd buy that, no question. But if the Dell one and the Apple one will end up working

00:08:37   the same, like if I can use the Dell one at retina, like being treated as a retina monitor

00:08:43   by the computer, with no really horrible flaky hacks that fail constantly, I don't see a

00:08:49   lot of reason not to do that.

00:08:51   High DPI mode is not that much of a flaky hack.

00:08:54   The fact that you have to use a dev tool to enable it is not that big a deal.

00:08:58   As far as I can tell, it's the same code path everywhere as if you had a retina display

00:09:02   hooked up.

00:09:03   All the software running is outputting at double resolution, just like it would be if

00:09:07   it was displayed at that resolution.

00:09:09   I don't think there's any additional weirdness about it, except for maybe on like the login

00:09:14   screens, because I do a lot on my OS X testing, especially for Mavericks, since all the screenshots

00:09:18   for Retina and I don't have a Retina Mac, had to be done in this mode.

00:09:22   And once you put it in this mode, even the login screen will be in this mode too.

00:09:26   And it's kind of weird then when you go to the login screen and you log into someone's

00:09:28   account who doesn't have that setting set, or log out of one, and back in...

00:09:32   It's a little bit weird there, but if you just kept it in that mode the whole time,

00:09:36   I think it would be okay.

00:09:38   And you would imagine that a point update of OS X would recognize a Dell or some other

00:09:45   4K-ish display and treat it like a retina screen.

00:09:50   You wouldn't have to do that hack.

00:09:51   Why would Apple make you do that?

00:09:52   It's not a big deal for them to just show those supported resolutions.

00:09:57   I don't know.

00:09:58   I bet they would make you do that hack, honestly.

00:10:01   But I mentioned iFriendly last week, the utility to swap the resolutions on the MacBook Pro.

00:10:07   I bet all those utilities and default to write tricks,

00:10:12   and all those system preference tricks

00:10:15   that let you enable modes that Apple doesn't officially think

00:10:19   that your monitor can support,

00:10:20   I bet those same tricks will work to do this.

00:10:23   - But if Apple doesn't have their own displays,

00:10:25   if their solution is like it was for the XServe raid,

00:10:27   oh, just buy this third-party monitor.

00:10:28   They can't tell you to buy the third-party monitor,

00:10:31   then also expect you to Google for

00:10:33   how to get the graphics tools out of the Xcode password

00:10:36   package and run the quartz debug thing and flip the little option. Like, if they're

00:10:40   going to go third party, it's got to support the third party. If they have their own first

00:10:44   party one, then maybe you'll have to enable this mode manually.

00:10:48   Until the Mac Pro actually comes out and Apple doesn't have this monitor available, I'm still

00:10:53   going to keep believing there's hope for it.

00:10:55   Oh, you're setting yourself up here.

00:10:58   But again, now that this Dell one is out, which, and I'm pretty sure Apple... So now

00:11:04   we have this info about bandwidth limits. I'm positive that Apple will not release one

00:11:09   that is the full 5120 wide. I'm also not positive, but I'm fairly sure that if they did release

00:11:17   a 4K monitor, it would be probably 27 inches. I don't see them releasing a smaller monitor

00:11:21   than that, because it's not that big of a market for them. So since we can't have the

00:11:28   the Super Retina resolution at 27 inches, what's better? Two 1920s? Two 3840 resolution

00:11:38   ones that are treated as 1920s at 24 inches? That might be better. As we said last show,

00:11:44   but obviously I know, Jon, you are a monitor monogamist.

00:11:47   Yeah, I still think no monitors this year. Mac Pro will come out. There might be some

00:11:51   third-party options, but no monitors. Because I don't understand why they would keep the

00:11:57   monitor so secret for so long and then just say "oh and by the way the Mac Pro is out

00:12:01   and here's these new Apple monitors" but I just see no monitors this year from Apple.

00:12:06   Do you think that we're going to get a Mac Pro before the end of the year? I know they

00:12:08   said December and I know December isn't over but we're running out of time.

00:12:12   If it's ready they'll ship it. Who was, it's almost like we said last show that it doesn't

00:12:16   matter for the holidays because this is not a seasonal item but someone said that it would

00:12:20   matter for like their Q4 sales or something. I don't even think it would matter there because

00:12:23   I think the volumes are so low that it wouldn't make a difference.

00:12:27   I think iPads and iPhones, and especially iPhones,

00:12:30   that matters for their Q4 sales.

00:12:33   I don't think what's probably the lowest selling Mac

00:12:36   is going to make a drop in the bucket.

00:12:38   - One other piece of follow up,

00:12:40   or I believe this is follow up,

00:12:41   and I think, John, that you added to this,

00:12:44   to these show notes,

00:12:45   do you wanna briefly talk about Squarespace?

00:12:47   - Yeah, this is not actually a sponsor break,

00:12:48   but I mentioned on a couple shows back

00:12:51   a business plan based on implementing Squarespace sites

00:12:54   for people who have terrible websites

00:12:56   and don't realize that they could have a nice website if they'd spend five minutes on Squarespace

00:12:59   and pay a couple bucks.

00:13:01   And so if they don't want to go through that, why not start a business as a facilitator

00:13:05   of that, where you charge somebody presumably a lot more than Squarespace charges, and for

00:13:10   the money, you set up a Squarespace site for somebody, and obviously you design work and

00:13:14   content and everything else.

00:13:15   Well apparently there's a page at Squarespace that somebody sent me that I did not keep

00:13:18   track of.

00:13:19   it's at specialist.squarespace.com that lists a pretty small list of people who do,

00:13:27   people or companies who do exactly this. You engage with them as a business and they use

00:13:32   Squarespace to set up your site. So basically they're like design firms, they don't have to

00:13:36   do any of the programming or any of the annoying other stuff and they will set you up. I bet that

00:13:39   these people will probably also set you up a commerce site or whatever because Squarespace

00:13:43   can do that as well, right? So anyway, Squarespace is out ahead of this apparently. They're

00:13:49   they're already cultivating this group of-- I wondered actually if Squarespace didn't

00:13:52   want you reselling their services or whatever, but apparently they think this is a good thing,

00:13:57   and they've already got a site set up for it, and if you're one of those people who

00:14:00   does this for a living, a couple of people contacted me and said, "Oh, I've set up three

00:14:03   different clients already all using Squarespace." This is a thing that Squarespace does, so check

00:14:09   it out.

00:14:10   And now it is a sponsor break. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, shockingly,

00:14:15   the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website

00:14:18   or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to squarespace.com

00:14:24   and use offer code ATP12 to help support our show.

00:14:29   Squarespace is constantly improving their platform with new features, new designs, and

00:14:32   even better support. They have beautiful designs for you to start with and all the style options

00:14:37   you need to create a unique website for you or your business. Or apparently this guy's

00:14:41   business or all these people's businesses. Every design automatically includes a unique,

00:14:46   responsive design experience that matches the overall style of your site.

00:14:50   So your content will look great on every device, every time.

00:14:53   Squarespace is incredibly easy to use, but if you want some help, they have an amazing support team.

00:14:58   They work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, right here in New York City.

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00:15:12   And the best thing is you can start a free trial with no credit card required.

00:15:17   You know, it's not like one of those crap free trials that a lot of places do where

00:15:20   it's like, "Well, free trial if you enter all your information for billing and we know

00:15:23   you're probably going to forget, and if you actually want to cancel, you got to like talk

00:15:26   to one of those chatbot things and it'll probably fail and probably bill you anyway."

00:15:31   It's not one of those.

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00:15:39   When you do decide to sign up, make sure you use our offer code ATP12, as I said earlier.

00:15:43   ATP12 will get you 10% off your initial purchase and to support our show.

00:15:49   Squarespace is everything you need to create an exceptional website.

00:15:51   Thank you very much for your support, Squarespace.

00:15:55   So in the spirit of random musings from Geek Friday or IRL Talk, I had a random musing

00:16:01   of my own the other day.

00:16:03   I don't know if there's much to be said here, but I was on my Mac and for whatever reason

00:16:10   I wanted to buy some iOS app and I forget which one it was and it doesn't really matter

00:16:14   But my initial inclination was okay. Well, I'll go to the App Store to buy that app it wait

00:16:19   No, no, I have to go to iTunes to do that and it occurred to me

00:16:24   Why is it that all of the iOS app purchases aren't in the App Store because?

00:16:30   to my subconscious apparently as well to I would as well as to I would imagine most normal people

00:16:36   The App Store is the App Store is the App Store doesn't matter if you're buying Mac or iOS

00:16:41   You're just trying to buy an app and you should do that in the App Store

00:16:45   And I thought it was just a little wonky that that was all happening on iTunes and naturally there's a there's a million

00:16:50   logical and obvious explanations. It's always been in iTunes. It started in iTunes. It would muddy up the Mac App Store etc, etc

00:16:58   et cetera, but I just thought it was really, really weird

00:17:01   and I didn't really, maybe I missed it,

00:17:02   but I haven't really seen anyone talking about this.

00:17:05   I don't know if you guys had any input

00:17:06   and if not, we can just move along,

00:17:07   but I don't know, what do you think?

00:17:10   - Well, certainly one problem would be that,

00:17:12   you know, like you see on the iPad app store,

00:17:15   one of the problems is if you sell an app on the iPad,

00:17:18   if you also have a separate iPhone version,

00:17:20   a lot of people will mistakenly buy the iPhone one

00:17:23   who wanna run it on an iPad.

00:17:24   And then that's a crappy support experience,

00:17:26   it's a crappy customer experience,

00:17:27   like, because things are blended together.

00:17:30   Obviously, if they did that on the Mac,

00:17:32   if they integrated everything in,

00:17:33   it would be a little easier in that they could at least,

00:17:36   like, I don't know, talk to iTunes

00:17:38   and figure out if you have an iPhone or iPad

00:17:41   and not even show those results if you don't,

00:17:43   something like that.

00:17:44   But for the most part, though,

00:17:46   it would still be a weird experience.

00:17:47   You'd still have a lot of people

00:17:48   who would buy the wrong thing.

00:17:49   It kind of clutters up the store.

00:17:51   Like, I think, I don't think Apple would ever do this,

00:17:55   but I think it would actually be a way better experience

00:17:57   on the iPad if it didn't show

00:18:01   iPhone only apps at all in a store. Like, you know, maybe you could download them from

00:18:05   like your

00:18:05   your purchase tab or something else, but if it made it really really hard to find them or if it just

00:18:09   hid them completely,

00:18:10   first of all, developers would be more forced to

00:18:14   make iPad versions of their apps, even if they suck. They would still have to

00:18:17   like customize it somewhat

00:18:19   rather than showing it like just in the little 2x window

00:18:22   for the doubled up iPhone mode.

00:18:26   But I think it would be way better, because when you blend the stores like that, it just

00:18:29   creates problems.

00:18:30   Doesn't it already do that?

00:18:32   Doesn't the iOS app store not show you iPhone apps by default?

00:18:36   I never find myself seeing phone apps in the store when I'm on my iPad, but maybe I'm

00:18:40   just not searching for hybrid apps.

00:18:41   They show you the ones with the little pluses that work on both, but don't they hide the

00:18:44   iPhone apps?

00:18:46   I believe it will.

00:18:47   I think there's a filter or toggle at the top that you can say either "show me everything"

00:18:52   or "show me iPad only."

00:18:54   I'm pretty sure that's right.

00:18:55   I was going to say before, the reason all these things are on the Mac is another one

00:18:58   of those stupid iTunes legacy things where that used to be how you did everything is

00:19:01   you'd do it on your Mac and you'd connect your thing with the USB cable and you'd, you

00:19:04   know, the whole nine yards.

00:19:07   It's annoying to me mostly because of the reset that the E's did to storage space, because

00:19:15   if you have a bunch of 32 or 64 gigabyte iOS devices and they're all filled with crap and

00:19:23   and you actually sync them with iTunes,

00:19:25   that means when you get Infinity Blade 2 or 3

00:19:28   or whatever the heck they're up to,

00:19:29   it's like a gigabyte game,

00:19:30   that's sitting on your Mac's hard drive

00:19:32   taking up space for no good reason.

00:19:34   Same thing with all the other stuff you have

00:19:35   and it adds up.

00:19:37   The podcast that you download with the podcast syncing,

00:19:40   that kind of syncing,

00:19:41   where instead of the stuff being in the cloud,

00:19:42   which is so dumb because Apple knows what you bought,

00:19:44   Apple knows what you own,

00:19:46   there's no reason that that data has to be on your Mac

00:19:48   and on your thing so it can sync around

00:19:49   and everything like that.

00:19:50   So that is one of those lazy things

00:19:52   That's another reason a lot of people go to,

00:19:55   I'm not going to hook up my iOS device to my Mac anymore.

00:19:57   And there are so many benefits to that.

00:19:59   And one of them is you get a bunch of hard drive space back.

00:20:01   You have to pay for iCloud backup

00:20:03   if you're over the limit for your, whatever, disposable data

00:20:08   that you have to back up to iCloud.

00:20:09   But I'll be glad when all that stuff finally leaves iTunes

00:20:14   and we don't have to have our data duplicated

00:20:17   in multiple places and have to deal with all that stuff.

00:20:19   And the worst part is that if you just manage your device

00:20:22   from iOS, you can kind of sort of feel like you have control over it.

00:20:26   And then if for some reason you have to hook it up to your Mac, because you want

00:20:29   to like do a file copy into like the documents folder and the, on a Kindle or

00:20:33   some thing, you know, you want to do something that only iTunes can do, or

00:20:36   that only iTunes can do easily.

00:20:38   You would think that it wouldn't mess with anything else, but it does inevitably

00:20:41   new icons appear on your home screens because it sinks them over it.

00:20:45   I don't understand how it decides how to blend the state of things that are on

00:20:49   your Mac with state of things in your iOS device, but it always pisses me off.

00:20:51   when it does.

00:20:52   Well, you should also consider that if you back up your device to iTunes, even selectively,

00:20:58   those backups, or at least in my experience, tend to be quite big, like gigabytes big.

00:21:03   And so, to your point, Jon, if you don't sync, or specifically if you don't back up against

00:21:08   your iTunes library, you're saving gigabytes that way as well.

00:21:11   I mean, it all adds up really, really fast.

00:21:13   Someone in the chat room asked, "What about backing up the data of apps?

00:21:17   Not every app backs up to iCloud?"

00:21:18   When you do iCloud backups, it backs up all your data.

00:21:21   It's not up to the applications to back up to iCloud. When you do iCloud backups to your

00:21:25   iOS device, it basically just wanders through all the document containers and pulls out

00:21:28   all the documents. That's right, Marco, right?

00:21:30   Well, yeah, there's this weird thing with temp folder versus document folders where

00:21:35   it won't back up things that are in temp folders, but it will also wipe them randomly. So then

00:21:40   it's up to developers. Like for me, I'm writing this podcast app, and a podcast, you wouldn't

00:21:45   want that to be in the temp folder because you wouldn't want the system to randomly come

00:21:50   by and delete it if it's low on space. Because then people would launch your app thinking

00:21:53   they have all the stuff downloaded and see, "Oh, all my stuff's gone." That's bad.

00:21:57   But you also don't want iCloud to back that up because it would take up everyone's iCloud

00:22:01   space and it would have to retransmit everything up and down. So it's up to the developers

00:22:05   to set a "don't backup" flag on anything outside of the temp folders. And some developers do

00:22:11   it right, and as you can expect, many don't.

00:22:13   Does that mean that the iTunes backup is still safer because it just copies everything, or

00:22:18   is the iTunes backup also on or that stuff?

00:22:20   The iTunes backup will copy over those files, which is nice,

00:22:23   because then if you have to do a restore on your phone,

00:22:26   if you get it repaired or if it messes up,

00:22:29   they will be copied back over on a restore, which is nice.

00:22:32   And you don't have to redownload everything.

00:22:33   But then those also on your hard drive,

00:22:34   so it's kind of a mixed bag.

00:22:36   Yeah, that's another-- well, so this is another case

00:22:38   where if they got rid of the iTunes aspect of this,

00:22:40   it would kind of force developers

00:22:42   to do-- to manage their data in the correct way.

00:22:44   Otherwise, they'd have disgruntled customers,

00:22:47   Whereas now they get some percentage of disgruntled customers.

00:22:49   Because if they're doing it wrong and someone had an iCloud backup and then they restore

00:22:52   from the iCloud backup and the restore for that app didn't work right, they're pissed

00:22:57   off at, you know, probably at Apple, but maybe at the app developer too.

00:23:00   Whereas all the people who use iTunes for it are fine because they backed up everything.

00:23:04   Does iCloud backup save your passwords?

00:23:06   Because I know on iTunes you have to encrypt your backup to do that.

00:23:09   No.

00:23:10   No, it doesn't.

00:23:11   Well, I can't say that authoritatively.

00:23:13   It didn't when it launched.

00:23:14   I can tell you that.

00:23:15   know if there's an option now to do it. I'm guessing not, though, but that's, yeah,

00:23:20   because Apple, the iTunes engineers, like even, like I talked to some of them at WWDC

00:23:24   about, you know, what would be appropriate to store in iCloud for, like, you know, they

00:23:28   say don't store, if you're a developer, they say don't store passwords in iCloud.

00:23:31   Okay, how about a login token? Does that count? Login cookie? Auth token? OAuth tokens? And

00:23:39   they were a little iffy on that. You could tell that they really don't want to be responsible

00:23:43   for that. They really don't want you storing any kind of sensitive stuff in iCloud.

00:23:49   And you can kind of see how they're approaching iCloud Keychain, and they really want you

00:23:53   to have the passcode and have all that encrypted and everything and have that be very secure

00:23:56   and controlled and limited. So I'm guessing it doesn't simply because—can anybody confirm

00:24:03   that? I'm guessing it doesn't just because they seem very reluctant to take on password

00:24:08   storage.

00:24:09   And it probably is encrypted, but it's just that it's so easy to pull that data down that you know

00:24:14   They they didn't want to it like you said I think I cloud keychain is the one place that they're willing to put

00:24:19   passwords and other types of information

00:24:21   With the advent of that there should be a way for you to take all that information that you would have you know those all

00:24:26   OAuth tokens and stuff that you would have put someplace else and maybe shove them to iCloud keychain where Apple says you're allowed to

00:24:30   Put that stuff who knows?

00:24:32   There aren't there an authentic speaking of that there are some authenticated. I

00:24:37   on iPod. Podcast feeds?

00:24:39   There are. I'm not supporting them. But there are.

00:24:42   Someone asked about that on Twitter. I'm like, "I haven't run across one of those."

00:24:45   I used to have an authenticated RSS feed back in the day when the Derek Fireball feed was

00:24:48   like that.

00:24:50   And for all of the reasons why John Gruber stopped doing that, it's pretty hard for

00:24:55   podcasts also. It's very hard to support that in an app. Because I'm doing server-side

00:24:59   crawling and everything revolves around this. And there's pretty much no good way. I'm

00:25:03   I'm not going to ask everyone for their passwords to an auth fee.

00:25:06   That's crazy.

00:25:07   I'm not going to—there's so many reasons why that's a terrible idea.

00:25:11   So I'm not going to support that.

00:25:14   Although I think downcast does support that.

00:25:16   I'm pretty sure it does.

00:25:17   So if you need that, use downcast.

00:25:19   So, John, I hear Christmas came early at your house.

00:25:23   It's not really Christmas.

00:25:25   It happens to coincide with Christmas.

00:25:26   But this has been in the works as soon as it became clear that Panasonic was probably

00:25:32   probably going to stop making plasma TVs.

00:25:34   And that was like a year ago, they were rumbling about that, and then Panasonic would say something,

00:25:38   and they would say, "Oh no, we still have plans," and blah, blah, blah.

00:25:41   But it was clear the writing was on the wall.

00:25:42   And then I think like a couple months ago, six months ago, they made the official announcement

00:25:46   they're not going to make plasma TVs anymore.

00:25:48   So then I had to make a decision, and I knew I was going to have to, which is, do I just

00:25:52   keep using the TV I have, or do I buy one of the last Panasonic plasmas before they

00:25:57   go away for good?

00:25:59   And the reason I was thinking about this has to do with the still terrible state of television

00:26:05   technology.

00:26:06   I should have written down the show number in here, but I didn't.

00:26:07   But I talked about TV tech on an old Hypercritical.

00:26:10   Does any of you remember the episode number?

00:26:13   Anyway, that was several years ago.

00:26:15   I think it was like 2011.

00:26:16   I actually bought my TV in 2009, and I was just talking about it in 2011, a Hypercritical.

00:26:23   And the problem with TV tech is after the CRT era, the kids ask your parents, the big

00:26:28   giant, very deep glass tubes with a little electron gun in the back of it that scans

00:26:34   a little line across these little phosphors.

00:26:36   The things that you see on everyone's curb sitting there for weeks getting rained on

00:26:40   and nobody wants them and nobody will even take them for free.

00:26:42   Exactly.

00:26:43   Yeah, they can't throw them in the garbage because they have lead in them.

00:26:45   You have to get the special people to come and pick them up and, yeah, those things.

00:26:48   That technology was around for a long time, and I wouldn't say it was perfected because

00:26:51   it always had problems, but it was clear that if you bought a TV, you were going to get

00:26:56   a cathode ray tube for a long time.

00:26:58   was clear—and they made them pretty darn good.

00:27:01   The Sony Trinitron was sort of the premier consumer brand for good televisions, at first

00:27:09   because they only curved in one direction, so they were cylindrical instead of being

00:27:12   bubble-shaped, and then eventually they became entirely flat.

00:27:16   And they had disadvantages and advantages, but there weren't that many options.

00:27:20   So you're like, "Well, the best TV I can get is the best CRT I can get."

00:27:24   And then the waters started to get muddied when they came out with DLP and other stuff

00:27:27   like that. But I don't know if you guys remember the DLP stuff, the projection TVs. They always

00:27:33   had terrible disadvantages versus the CRT. And it was still clear that if you cared about

00:27:37   the best looking TV, just get a CRT. Get the best CRT you can get, which is probably a

00:27:41   Sony Tran-Tron. Projection might be bigger, but it's just so dim off angle and the colors

00:27:46   are all messed up. And all sorts of compromises that made you think, "Unless I need one of

00:27:51   the special features like giant size, for example, if I want just a television television,

00:27:56   I'm getting a CRT."

00:27:57   The chat room looked it up and it was episode 16.

00:27:59   We'll put that in the show.

00:28:00   It's episode 16 of Hypercritical.

00:28:03   So when High Definition Television came out, that just made things very confusing because

00:28:08   they did make a couple of high definition CRTs, but CRT was on its way out and the new

00:28:12   flat screens were in.

00:28:13   First DLP and other rear projection things that were not as deep as a CRT, because I

00:28:20   had one of the giant CRTs and if you got a CRT that was over 35 or 34 inches or whatever,

00:28:25   was super deep and really heavy, whereas you could make a not-quite-as-deep projection

00:28:30   television of that size. So very quickly we got into the "flat screens," which were either

00:28:34   LCD or plasma. I think plasmas came first, because LCDs were too expensive of that size.

00:28:40   And that's where all the crap started, because both LCD and plasma have compromises that

00:28:45   CRTs didn't have. I guess the one compromise that CRTs had, of course, that the flat screens

00:28:50   didn't, was that they were gigantic and heavy. But that was it. People would find a room

00:28:55   in their house for, you know, they used to make it, build them into pieces of furniture.

00:28:59   CRTs were gigantic, but you'd find a place for it. Every other part of them was fine.

00:29:02   Wait, I can't let that go.

00:29:04   Convergence, Aperture Grill weirdness, all the various analog artifacts that could show up.

00:29:11   Well, they were only showing, I'm talking about for standard death, they're only showing standard

00:29:15   death, so you didn't care about all the, you know, you're not missing, it was always going to be

00:29:19   fuzzy. It was low resolution, right? And so, in the fuzz, I think towards the end, the trinitrons,

00:29:24   in terms of convergence and everything like that were amazingly good. Like as good as you could

00:29:28   hope with a cruddy analog signal. And in fact, the fuzziness kind of helped it blend together.

00:29:33   Because if you've got something that was just a series of square pixels, the size,

00:29:36   you know, the number of lines on a CRT, that would look gross. Like CRTs sort of had a distinctive

00:29:42   look. And again, they weren't perfected, perfected, but they were pretty solid. But they didn't have

00:29:46   all the crazy compromises that plasmas and LCD had. Plasmas in the beginning were super hot and

00:29:53   powerful and like, you know, build up tons of heat and didn't look that good and, you

00:29:59   know, had this weird, a lot of weird artifacts in them.

00:30:02   And LCDs were even worse because they, the way LCD works is you've got a light shining

00:30:08   through this liquid crystal and the crystal turns on and off.

00:30:13   It lets light through or not.

00:30:15   And the problem was when you turn them all off and said, "Don't let any light through,"

00:30:18   you still had that big backlight back there trying to get through and a little bit of

00:30:22   it would leak through.

00:30:23   And so your black screen, if you just made an LCD entirely black, would not actually

00:30:27   be black.

00:30:28   In fact, you could light up a room with a black screen, especially in the beginning

00:30:30   in LCDs.

00:30:31   And so they had to come up with ways to fix that.

00:30:34   We're like, "Okay, well, we won't leave the backlight on all the time.

00:30:35   If they make an entirely black screen, we'll just turn the backlight off.

00:30:38   Isn't that awesome?

00:30:39   Well, that's great until you have a bunch of white words in the middle.

00:30:42   Say you're rolling the credits for a movie.

00:30:44   Well, you need the words to be white on the black background, so we need to turn on the

00:30:47   backlight behind the white words."

00:30:50   But the backlight wasn't like one backlight per pixel.

00:30:52   it was like one backlight per four square inches, or at least a square inch or whatever,

00:30:57   so you'd have to turn on some chunky subset of the backlight to make the white words show

00:31:01   up, and that white backlight would make all the black around the white words glow, like

00:31:07   the previous glowing black display that wasn't really black.

00:31:10   This is all black level stuff.

00:31:12   The LCDs had compromises as well.

00:31:14   And so none of these technologies were as a no-brainer buy for if you didn't want a

00:31:20   a projection screen, didn't need something gigantic or whatever, you just wanted a really

00:31:23   good nice looking TV, you couldn't get plasma or LCD because they both had compromises.

00:31:29   And they jockeyed for position in the market, eventually LCD won because everything else

00:31:33   in the world uses LCD and it became cheaper, even though the picture quality of LCD was

00:31:37   never as good as plasma, still isn't as good as plasma.

00:31:40   Again getting back to the black level stuff, the dynamic backlights turned out to be too

00:31:44   expensive and complicated and they decided the consumers didn't care about black levels

00:31:48   anyway so they just went to edge lit where the LCDs where they don't have an array of

00:31:51   backlights behind the monitor that can turn on and off in different sectors and so they

00:31:55   are like "ahh just light the whole thing up and it'll be fine and use mirrors to bounce

00:31:58   it off the edge because then we can make them super thin."

00:32:00   I don't understand this obsession like once they get to be like one inch or a half an

00:32:03   inch thick is it really important to go "oh this is 0.75 inches thick" it's like an Apple

00:32:08   style obsession and unlike handheld things where I think the thinness does have a big

00:32:12   payoff down the line when your thing is like the size of a credit card and maybe when you

00:32:17   you can paint your TV on your wall, it pays off. But going to edge lit this early seems

00:32:23   weird to me that they're, you know, "Oh, look, it's a way to sell your thing in the store.

00:32:27   Look how thin it is. Ooh, you never look at it from the side. If it was an inch thick,

00:32:31   would you say turn up your nose at it because it looks gross? This is 0.75 inches thick

00:32:35   that it's nicer." The compromises they did on LCD TVs in particular in terms of picture

00:32:41   quality just to get them another quarter inch thinner, I do not understand. But that's the

00:32:47   way the market went. And that's why the plasma started to go out, because everybody wanted

00:32:51   LCD. The other problem plasma had is burn-in, and CRTs had this to some degree as well,

00:32:56   where if you leave the same image on the screen a long time, eventually when you put it on

00:32:59   a different image, you'll still be able to see that other image. You see it a lot, and

00:33:04   actually you see it on LCDs as well occasionally, where there'll be a cash register, a point

00:33:08   of sale system or something, and there'll be some banner that was on there, and it will

00:33:12   change from the other screen, and you'll still see that banner there, or you'll still see

00:33:15   the stock ticker on some TV that's been showing financial news 24 hours a day for six months.

00:33:22   Plasmas have that burn-in problem, so you can't leave the same image on the screen for a long

00:33:26   time. Otherwise, you will get what they call image retention instead of burn-in.

00:33:29   Now, let me interrupt real quick. So you described the technology behind LCD. So what makes plasma

00:33:37   plasma then? I don't know the details, and I'm pretty sure it's like excited particles going

00:33:43   from the back of something and hitting up against a material that glows, only it's

00:33:48   not like a bunch of tiny little CRTs, but it's similar in concept to that, in that

00:33:52   it's not a backlight shining through a thing that lets light through or not. It's

00:33:57   particles being excited and going from the back of something to the front of something

00:34:01   and hitting it and that emits light. I don't know the details beyond that, but it's close

00:34:06   enough that they both have—that CRTs and plasmas both have burn-in issues, and it requires

00:34:13   more power than an LCD, because with the LCDs you can have the LED backlights, and LEDs

00:34:18   are very power-efficient and they're very bright and stuff like that.

00:34:20   That's another thing.

00:34:21   LCD televisions with LED backlights can be much brighter than plasma televisions, and

00:34:25   that's important if you've got a bright room where you want things to be bright.

00:34:28   So all of these are compromises.

00:34:30   All the current technologies for high-definition televisions are compromises that have problems.

00:34:35   And I was killing myself trying to see what I didn't buy HDTV for so long because I'm

00:34:38   like I'll just wait until the good technology comes out.

00:34:41   Whether it be like there's something called SED or OLED becomes inexpensive or some other

00:34:46   technology that's supposed to not have all the compromises of both plasma and LCD.

00:34:50   And eventually I couldn't wait any longer.

00:34:52   In 2009 I bought myself a plasma television.

00:34:55   And you can listen to episode 16 of Hypercritical to hear how that went because I originally

00:34:57   went in trying to look for an LCD television because everything's LCD, right?

00:35:02   And I ended up coming out with a plasma because it was cheaper and had a better picture quality.

00:35:07   If you were willing to accept all the other compromises of plasma, more power, thicker,

00:35:11   heavier, possibility of burn-in if you're not careful, you got better picture for less

00:35:16   money for a plasma.

00:35:17   And it seemed like a no-brainer to me.

00:35:19   Well, so now they're getting rid of the plasmas.

00:35:21   If they got rid of the plasmas and I kept my current TV, I would have to, like, what

00:35:26   would I do if my current TV broke or I wanted to get a new one?

00:35:29   There would be nothing on the market for me to buy because the number of people making

00:35:33   plasma television is just going down to zero.

00:35:35   Samsung still makes them, but Samsung's heart is really in LCD like everybody else, and

00:35:40   everybody's eventually going to OLED.

00:35:42   But I didn't want to be stuck with an older television that I can't replace because there's

00:35:45   nothing on the market that I want to buy.

00:35:47   And the second issue is that the television I bought, despite extensively researching

00:35:50   and everything, turned out to have a problem where the black level got worse after the

00:35:54   first few years that you used it.

00:35:55   This is a problem, I guess, with, you know, back then and still now, new TVs come out

00:36:00   every year, and you can read a review.

00:36:01   "Oh, here's the new crop of TVs for 2014, and I'll read all the reviews, and I'll do

00:36:04   all the research, and I'll look at them in the showrooms and decide which one I want."

00:36:07   Well, if any one of them has a problem that doesn't show up until a year later, you're

00:36:10   not going to know about that, because by next year, the new TVs will be out, and if you

00:36:14   bought one this year, you're going to end up stuck with one.

00:36:16   So I had one of those televisions where the black level that started out as being amazingly

00:36:20   good became mediocre later in life with the television.

00:36:24   Well, and even if somebody did a long-term review to tell you that, it wouldn't be useful

00:36:28   to anybody, because if they're telling you, "I bought this TV a year and a half ago,

00:36:31   and it's still great," you can't go buy that TV anymore.

00:36:34   Yeah, they go off the market. It's very difficult to find. And the other problem I have with

00:36:39   the television that I bought, and this is something I didn't even think to check, it

00:36:43   wasn't even on my radar, was, "Does this television have fans inside it?" Which is

00:36:48   not something—I mean, I never owned a CRT that had a fan. I guess DLPs had a fan because

00:36:52   of that one light source, it could get really hot and they'd have fans in them occasionally,

00:36:56   but I didn't even think to check that.

00:36:58   And so I got into my house, and there are four gigantic fans in the back.

00:37:01   And why are there fans in the back?

00:37:02   Because plasmas take a lot of power and run really hot.

00:37:05   And the fancier the plasma, the more likely you were to have fans in it.

00:37:07   The cheap ones didn't have fans, but the fancy one that I got did have fans.

00:37:12   So I kept that TV for four years, and I really liked it, did everything I asked of it.

00:37:15   I never had any problems with burning because I was careful with it, I assume.

00:37:20   You know, I didn't let my kids leave a television show paused on the Plasma.

00:37:23   The rule was, if we call you in for dinner, hit the pause button and then also hit the

00:37:27   power button.

00:37:28   It's not that hard to do.

00:37:29   Managed to do it with two little kids, no burn-in on the screen at all.

00:37:31   It's perfect.

00:37:32   The black levels are not what they were when it was new, but I still think it looks really

00:37:35   good.

00:37:36   But I just kept thinking, "Look, I paid all this money for this fancy TV.

00:37:39   It's four years old now.

00:37:40   At this point, I could buy a much cheaper television that has better picture quality.

00:37:45   And if I'm going to do so, I better do so now before Plasma exits the business."

00:37:48   before Panasonic exits the plasma business, and then my only choice will be an LCD television

00:37:53   or maybe a Samsung plasma, none of which I particularly like.

00:37:58   So that was the situation I found myself in, and this entire year I've been thinking about

00:38:02   whether I'm going to do it.

00:38:03   At many points during the year, I got up to the purchase stage in Amazon and didn't click

00:38:08   on the button.

00:38:09   Like months ago, I did that, and then three months before that, I did that, and I bailed

00:38:13   out at the last minute.

00:38:14   I was just driving myself crazy.

00:38:16   I'm just really just like agonizing like your hands like hovering above the mouse

00:38:22   really with your finger pointing down ready just click and I can't do it

00:38:28   I'm picturing Federiki like the first Federiki presentation when he was all

00:38:33   nervous and shaky trying to do the mouse gestures I'm picturing you with like

00:38:36   that that's shaking nervous hand wondering should I do it I can't I can't

00:38:41   I'll tell you I'll tell you what was preventing me from doing it but we

00:38:45   probably do a sponsor break first. I was just about to say, why don't we hear about something

00:38:50   else that's awesome. Alright, this episode, this is a first time sponsor for us, although

00:38:54   not for podcasting in general because they're awesome. This episode is also sponsored by

00:38:58   Pixelmator. Or is it Pixelmator? It's Pixelmator. Alright, I'll go with Pixelmator. Pixelmator

00:39:08   is a full featured image editing app for the Mac. They don't, I mean, they don't tell

00:39:13   you it's like Photoshop because I don't know I guess it's not cool to mention

00:39:16   your competitors like that but it's basically like Photoshop but 30 bucks

00:39:20   and better in a lot of ways and so it's 30 bucks in the Mac App Store I'll say

00:39:26   that right now pixelmator go to the Mac App Store it's frequently featured it

00:39:30   shouldn't be hard to find or you can go to pixelmator.com now pixelmator it's

00:39:35   you look at what it can do and first of all if you go to their site it's really

00:39:38   it's a fantastically designed site and it shows off a lot of the cool features

00:39:42   you can see all sorts of stuff they have.

00:39:45   They have everything from image editing down to drawing

00:39:49   and even vector drawing tools all in one app.

00:39:52   And it's kept very much in the modern Mac ways

00:39:57   of doing everything right.

00:40:00   It seems like they are geniuses at optimizing for the Mac

00:40:05   and keeping everything up to date.

00:40:06   So not only are they already optimized for Mavericks,

00:40:08   but they already use OpenCL,

00:40:10   They use the Accelerate framework to use a lot of the vectorizing functions,

00:40:14   and they have amazing performance on Mac.

00:40:16   Everything is very Mac-like.

00:40:18   It's everything that you wished pro editing apps were in regards

00:40:23   to being super Mac-like and friendly, but unfortunately,

00:40:25   the other ones usually aren't.

00:40:28   So they recently released a big update, and it's pretty impressive.

00:40:31   It's called Pixelmator 3.0 FX.

00:40:34   It's a major upgrade featuring a lot of new tools to play with,

00:40:38   including non-destructive layer styles,

00:40:40   a very advanced feature,

00:40:42   a liquify tool, and an all new image editing engine

00:40:46   that using all these cool things,

00:40:48   grand central dispatch, parallelization,

00:40:50   multiple thread support, everything else,

00:40:53   OpenCL, all these GPU acceleration support,

00:40:56   the new engine is almost twice as fast as the old engine,

00:40:59   and the old engine was pretty fast already.

00:41:01   That's saying a lot.

00:41:02   They fully support Mavericks with tags, multiple displays.

00:41:05   They're good power citizens.

00:41:07   They use AppNap and everything else.

00:41:10   And Pixelmator 3.0 FX is a free upgrade

00:41:13   to all existing Pixelmator customers.

00:41:15   Actually, in their script, they wrote the word "costumers" here.

00:41:18   Or maybe Lex wrote that.

00:41:20   I'm going to blame Lex.

00:41:21   So whether you're an existing Pixelmator

00:41:23   costumer or an existing Pixelmator customer,

00:41:26   it's a free upgrade.

00:41:29   And it's only $30 if you're not.

00:41:31   And this is not the first free upgrade they've done.

00:41:34   I think I got upgraded one to two for free anyway.

00:41:38   They're really great to support, and you can't beat this price point.

00:41:40   Thirty bucks for an app with this amount of power.

00:41:42   It almost seems unreal.

00:41:45   So check it out.

00:41:46   Pixelmator.com.

00:41:47   It's a full-featured image editing app for the Mac.

00:41:50   Very Mac-like, very awesome, and this great new 3.0 FX upgrade is really impressive.

00:41:55   So thanks a lot to Pixelmator for sponsoring the show.

00:41:57   You guys probably don't remember this, but back in the 8-bit days, 8-bit graphic days,

00:42:03   There was a whole suite of Mac applications that you do graphics in 256 colors.

00:42:09   And they were pretty expensive.

00:42:10   They were way more than 30 bucks each, right?

00:42:13   And then the 32-bit error, where, you know, 24-bit, 32-bit error, there was, of course,

00:42:18   Adobe Photoshop, which eventually became the big dog.

00:42:20   But there were also other things, like what I want to call live picture or something,

00:42:24   and a couple other ones.

00:42:25   And to play in that game, to play in the 8-bit space, a lot of people could play there, because

00:42:29   it's 256 colors.

00:42:31   You can make a little pixel editor.

00:42:32   But to play in the Photoshop realm of like, oh, true color images, you had to write your

00:42:38   own graphics engine, and that was a difficult thing to do.

00:42:41   And a lot of the market was like, well, I can't just do what Photoshop did.

00:42:44   I have to do something different.

00:42:45   And so live picture was like, not resolution independent or nondestructive, but a similar

00:42:49   type of thing where their image engine was very different than Photoshop's.

00:42:53   And it turns out that the Photoshop-style image engine won.

00:42:56   And then for a long time, it was just Photoshop, and that's all there was, with a couple other

00:43:00   minor competitors and they really got a foothold. But nowadays it's amazing that Apple has improved

00:43:06   the Mac platform enough, and just the Mac platform, as you don't see this as much on Windows and stuff,

00:43:10   to the point where a small developer can make an amazing high-performance application without

00:43:16   having to make their own graphics engine, but simply by taking advantage of all the graphics

00:43:20   technologies that Apple provides and combining them into a nice friendly application, and offer

00:43:25   it for 30 bucks as compared to hundreds of dollars that Photoshop costs or that Photoshop competitors

00:43:29   than use it at cost. Every time I see a pixelmator, I think of them as like the poster child for

00:43:35   look at what Apple helps you do if you write apps on their platform. Like all the APIs they give you

00:43:41   at every WWDC is like, "Well, who's using all these things?" Well, pixelmator is.

00:43:44   Well, and I was going to say that I love that they know the audience to know that we should mention

00:43:51   in the read OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, and AppNap, because our audience is going to know

00:43:57   what all those things mean.

00:43:58   I mean, if you look at their site, it looks like an Apple page. Like, it looks like this

00:44:04   is the page for Apple's new image editor. Like, if you read the site, and it uses Apple's

00:44:09   styling, it's very well designed like Apple's sites, it uses a lot of modern HTML tricks

00:44:15   and stuff like animations and transitions and, you know, as you scroll things move and

00:44:19   stuff like that. Like, it's really very modern variable designed page for it even. And so

00:44:23   So it really does look like this is Apple's pro image editing app that they never actually

00:44:27   made.

00:44:28   Yeah, remember those rumors?

00:44:29   Maybe you don't.

00:44:30   Apple's making a Photoshop competitor.

00:44:32   I think iPhoto, some of the Game of Telephone rumors about iPhoto before it was released,

00:44:36   was that Apple's making a Photoshop killer application.

00:44:38   And Aperture.

00:44:39   Yeah, every time they do anything in graphics, it's like, "Well, Apple's finally going to

00:44:43   make a Photoshop killer.

00:44:44   Well, they should just buy a pixelmator."

00:44:46   No, they shouldn't.

00:44:47   Pixelmator should stay exactly as it is.

00:44:48   Because, I mean, look at how Apple treats Aperture.

00:44:51   And iPhoto for that matter.

00:44:52   I mean, at this point, I don't think Apple needs more major applications to take care

00:44:57   of.

00:44:58   Fair enough.

00:44:59   Well, thanks again to Pixelmator/Pixelmator for sponsoring.

00:45:04   All right, so John, we interrupted you, or you sort of interrupted yourself during your

00:45:10   talk about your TV.

00:45:11   So your hand is hovering over the mouse on Amazon, you're ready to buy, and then you

00:45:16   finally click the button.

00:45:17   So what did you get?

00:45:18   Well, no, before we get to that, I would say why I wasn't buying all those other times.

00:45:21   Why was I not buying?

00:45:22   was my hesitation.

00:45:24   And the hesitation was knowing everything I know now.

00:45:28   People in the chat room are amazed that I

00:45:30   didn't know to ask about fans.

00:45:32   I didn't even think it was a thing I should look for.

00:45:34   And when I saw the televisions in person in the store,

00:45:36   you can't hear a thing in a retail store

00:45:38   because it's just that background white noise.

00:45:40   So you don't hear anything in there.

00:45:42   I just did not even think to look for them.

00:45:45   But now I know all these things.

00:45:47   So the television I wanted to buy, like the sort of equivalent in the model line television

00:45:54   from the one I bought before, had fans.

00:45:56   And I knew it had fans.

00:45:57   And all I would do is spend all day reading through old style forum entries, page after

00:46:02   page after page, of people saying, "I bought this fancy new TV and it's got fans and they

00:46:06   are super loud and it's driving me insane."

00:46:09   And just like 117 old style forum pages, one after the other in different forums, hundreds

00:46:16   of pages of people having these fancy TVs and telling their stories about, "I tried

00:46:20   this and I bolted this to the back of my TV and I had Panasonic come in.

00:46:24   They were supposed to do a fix, but they did the fix and I think it's better and no one

00:46:27   says they did the fix and it didn't help at all."

00:46:29   And then people like, "It's a placebo effect.

00:46:30   You think it helped, but it really didn't and it really shouldn't make any noise at

00:46:33   all."

00:46:34   And just, you know what it's like?

00:46:35   It's like looking for symptoms on WebMD and everything leads to cancer, right?

00:46:41   If you read these forums enough, you think that these televisions just all sound like

00:46:45   leaf blowers in your living room. And I would keep going through the threads going, "Okay,

00:46:50   well, these people got the very first model, so maybe Panasonic fixed something about them."

00:46:53   People are like, "Oh, what's the build date on yours?" And people say, "I got one that

00:46:56   was built six months after yours, and it still sounds terrible, and I'm returning it. And

00:47:00   Panasonic took three weeks to come out, and the guy they sent was a gorilla, and he scratched

00:47:03   up my TV trying to open it up, and it didn't help anyway. And how could I buy? I can't

00:47:09   buy that, right?" So I started looking down my level. "Let me find the cheap Panasonic

00:47:13   plasmas that don't have fans. But the problem is the current crop of cheap panasonic plasmas

00:47:17   that don't have fans have terrible input lag, which is another thing that I did know about

00:47:21   on my past TV, but it was impossible to find. Input lag is when you're playing a video game

00:47:27   and you do something on the video game system, like press the fire button, how long does

00:47:31   it take for you to see the gun fire on your television screen? And you would think that

00:47:35   it would have to do with the game system, and it does, but the television itself can

00:47:39   also introduce some amount of lag. Like the video game system can put out the image over

00:47:43   over its HDMI port of that gun firing,

00:47:45   and it takes some number of milliseconds

00:47:47   for the television to take the signal

00:47:49   that just got off the HDMI from that frame

00:47:51   and display it as little lights on the screen.

00:47:54   And the reason the delay is there

00:47:55   is because of image processing and other stuff

00:47:57   that televisions do to make a nice picture.

00:47:59   And the higher end of television,

00:48:01   you could potentially have more image processing.

00:48:03   But also the higher end of the television,

00:48:05   you could have faster processors

00:48:07   to process the image more quickly

00:48:09   than the cheap television.

00:48:10   So you never know.

00:48:11   Do more expensive televisions have better input lag or worse?

00:48:14   And back in 2009, I knew all about input lag, but nobody who was reviewing televisions ever

00:48:18   mentioned input lag.

00:48:19   It was just a bunch of gamers sitting there with complicated camera setups filming little

00:48:25   microsecond clocks and going frame by frame and trying to figure out what the input lag

00:48:29   was.

00:48:30   Well, fast forward four years, and now, finally, most television review sites will give you

00:48:34   input lag measurements, which vary wildly from site to site, but presumably within a

00:48:37   a single site that uses the same methodologies, you can compare within a site.

00:48:43   So I would look up the input lag numbers, and the input lag of the cheap, fanless Panasonic

00:48:50   Plasma is terrible.

00:48:51   And it used to be great, like two or three model years ago, the cheap one had awesome

00:48:55   input lag, but now it's super terrible.

00:48:58   And the stupid Plasma with the fans had significantly better input lag.

00:49:03   So my choice is, do I care about fans more or input lag?

00:49:06   And also, by the way, the cheaper Plasma has worse image quality.

00:49:08   Like, the fancier one has better image quality as well.

00:49:11   And so every time I would almost buy, I would just take another stroll through the forum

00:49:16   entries with the fan noise and go, "No, I can't do it."

00:49:18   And every time I would almost buy the cheap one, I'd be like, "No, I can't do the input

00:49:21   lag."

00:49:22   And then I'd say, "What do you care?

00:49:23   You never noticed that input lag anyway.

00:49:26   You don't play fighting games.

00:49:27   It's not like it's going to affect."

00:49:28   And I'd be like, "But why?

00:49:29   Why would I buy worse television?

00:49:30   This is supposed to be getting a better television."

00:49:33   because my old television had pretty good input lag because it was expensive and had

00:49:36   fast processors in it, and it had better input lag than the current cheap Panasonic. So I

00:49:42   just did that for a year, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And eventually,

00:49:48   one of the things that put me over the edge was Casey's friend who got this very same

00:49:51   television that I was looking at. And Casey's friend says, "Fans are silent. Can't hear

00:49:55   him at all." Right? You can tell me what he was saying. It's like that it was just totally

00:50:00   a non-issue, right? Yeah, that is pretty much accurate. This is my friend Brian, who had gotten

00:50:04   the same TV, and so I was talking to John after I was talking to Brian saying, "Oh, my friend just

00:50:10   got this Panasonic. Is this what you wanted? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ask him about the fans. Ask

00:50:13   about the fans." Now, see, I have a Panasonic Plasma that does have fans, and I can't hear them,

00:50:20   but I would never be brave enough to tell John, "Well, mine are silent, so go ahead and buy it." I

00:50:26   I would never in a million years say that, because he'd hear them.

00:50:29   It's funny you say that because immediately after Brian said, "Oh, you can't hear him."

00:50:32   I mean, I'll listen again, but you can't hear him.

00:50:35   The first thing I said to, I think both John and Brian was, "Well, Brian says that he can't

00:50:41   hear them, but we both know that John is not going to believe that."

00:50:45   Yeah, I mean, how could you?

00:50:47   It was like, it's so difficult to—the best example was my old television, which had four

00:50:52   gigantic fans in it that didn't make an annoying sound.

00:50:55   they're very big fans so it makes it kind of a low volume kind of rushing air sound.

00:50:59   They're not asymmetrical, that would have been nice. But my wife claims that either

00:51:02   she couldn't hear them or they don't bother her and it's like, well, if you can't hear that,

00:51:06   because it's like night and day, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it's just like,

00:51:09   if you can't hear those four fans, then obviously an individual person sitting in front of a

00:51:13   television has a very different experience of whether they can or can't hear fans or whether

00:51:16   they bother them or not. And again, I had this television with the four giant fans for four

00:51:20   years. I just decided to live with it because it wasn't that bad. I mean, you're listening with

00:51:23   audio on, it's not like, you know, it's, you get used to it. The picture quality made up

00:51:29   for it, all the other aspects of television, you know, and what was I going to do at that

00:51:33   point? I had the same problem. If I returned it, I would have to get it one with worse

00:51:36   image quality without fans or something. And the other thing about plazas, by the way,

00:51:40   since they use so much more power than LCDs, and since apparently the analog electronics

00:51:45   industry does not care about ambient noise, which drives me insane, see also my big rant

00:51:49   about my Power Mac G5's power supply, which chirped.

00:51:53   Transformers and other analog components

00:51:57   that actually move, as in vibrate, can make noise.

00:52:00   Because moving things make noise.

00:52:02   And sometimes that noise is amplified

00:52:04   through the printed circuit board

00:52:05   that these little components are attached to,

00:52:07   acting like a big speaker type thing, making a terrible noise.

00:52:10   Well, plasmas use a lot of power,

00:52:11   have transformers on printed circuit boards,

00:52:14   and they make a buzzing sound, an audible buzzing sound.

00:52:16   They're called the plasma buzz.

00:52:18   I think there's no reason for that stupid buzzing sound to exist.

00:52:21   If Apple designed one of these things, they could design it and...

00:52:23   I say that after the turbing G5 power supply, but anyway, it is possible to design these

00:52:28   analog electronics in such a way that they do not make a noise that is audible to the

00:52:32   person watching the television.

00:52:33   And yet no television manufacturer does that because nobody cares or they're inside entertainment

00:52:37   centers or they're up against the wall or some other thing that muffles them or people

00:52:41   can't hear them.

00:52:42   But you can totally hear transformed buzz on almost any plasma television if you go

00:52:46   into a completely silent room, make the entire screen white, you will hear a buzz. Then change

00:52:50   it to black, the buzz goes down or off. Then change it back to white, and it goes up. That's

00:52:55   in addition to the fan noise, right? So I knew that was there as well. Like, I'm aware

00:52:58   of all the noises that televisions make at this point. And people had problems with Panasonic

00:53:02   plasmas and other plasmas where the transformer would crack and make a super terrible buzzing

00:53:06   noise and people would make YouTube videos of it. The problem with these ubiquitous cameras

00:53:10   that everyone has on their phones now is that those cameras are designed to remove background

00:53:15   noise so people can hear you talking on the phone.

00:53:18   So that's absolutely the worst camera to ever use to try to record background noise.

00:53:21   So a lot of people had videos where they would say, "Here's my new television, and do you

00:53:25   hear that noise of the fan or the buzzing?"

00:53:27   And you didn't, because the phones cancel the noise out.

00:53:31   But they'd bring the phone around to the back of the television with the camera video recording,

00:53:34   and they'd put it right up next to the fan, and then you could hear at least the sound

00:53:37   quality of the fan.

00:53:39   But then they'd go, "Oh, look, I'm backing away here," and you can't hear it at all.

00:53:41   It's like, well, of course you can't hear it at all.

00:53:42   The phone is removing that noise.

00:53:44   And that's how I felt about individual people's reports of, "Oh, I can't hear the fan."

00:53:48   Well, maybe your high-frequency hearing is gone because you're 50 years old.

00:53:52   Or maybe there's a giant fan blowing in the room because you're hot all the time but you

00:53:56   don't like air conditioning.

00:53:57   Or maybe your air conditioning is on and you can't.

00:53:58   Who knows why you can't hear the fan?

00:53:59   But I knew if there was something spinning, moving air in the back of that thing, I'd

00:54:02   be able to hear it.

00:54:05   But enough people, you know, Casey's friend, other people who own them on forums and stuff

00:54:11   like that said that it's an overblown problem.

00:54:14   And yes, if you read these 100-page threads about people who have televisions and make

00:54:18   too much noise, maybe they have some sort of problematic unit there, or maybe they're

00:54:22   blowing it over.

00:54:23   But I figured I have to make a decision.

00:54:25   It's almost the end of the year.

00:54:26   These models are going to go away.

00:54:28   I'll buy it.

00:54:29   I'll make sure I have a 30-day return window, and if it's too loud, I'll return it.

00:54:32   So I actually clicked the button to get the thing delivered.

00:54:34   I ordered it from Amazon, which I'd never done with the big TV before.

00:54:37   I bought my last one from Best Buy, mostly because I wanted Best Buy to haul away my

00:54:41   350-pound CRT thing, and they did, and they took it away for free, and that was more than

00:54:45   worth the price of buying it at Best Buy.

00:54:48   And Amazon has sales tax now as well, so there's not even an advantage of buying it at Amazon

00:54:52   to get rid of the sales tax.

00:54:53   But I did it.

00:54:55   I had a pretty good delivery experience to the people who brought the television in,

00:54:58   although the styrofoam in the box was cracked.

00:55:01   I wonder how high did this television have to be dropped from for the styrofoam surrounding

00:55:07   to get the crack. Because these are not small pieces of styrofoam. These are big, giant

00:55:10   blocks of styrofoam, cracked almost all the way through. But the television itself was

00:55:13   entirely undamaged. They unpacked it before they left, and before I signed anything, just

00:55:18   inspect the television. They plugged it in, turned it on, made sure it actually worked.

00:55:21   Everything looked good. I hooked it up. It has fans in it. There's two fans instead of

00:55:26   four. I can hear them. But the thing is, and I didn't think about this before I was thinking

00:55:32   about the television, is it's not so much that I don't want to be able to hear the fans.

00:55:37   that they were quieter than my old television's fans. And that, I said, "Well, it's still

00:55:41   an upgrade. It's still quieter than it was." And these fans are significantly quieter than

00:55:45   my old television's fans. So much so that now I can hear the Transformer buzz way better

00:55:49   than I could have my old television. Because the old fans were so overwhelming that they

00:55:55   totally blanked out the Transformer buzz. But now the fans are so quiet that I can hear

00:56:01   the Transformer buzz better.

00:56:05   That's wonderful. That's just truly fantastic.

00:56:07   But you know, I haven't made a final decision yet, but I've pretty much decided that I'm

00:56:11   going to keep it. Mostly because it is so much better than my old television in all

00:56:16   ways. Like, it has fan noise, but the fan noise is quieter. It has transformer buds,

00:56:19   but it's probably about the same as my old TV. The picture quality is so much better

00:56:23   because in four years, things have just gotten better. It's thinner than my old television.

00:56:26   It's fancier looking. The only major disadvantage it has over my old television, and this is

00:56:31   true of all televisions these days, and I'm not going to say I don't know why, but it's

00:56:34   probably just cost cutting, is it has fewer inputs. My old television had four HDMI inputs,

00:56:40   a bunch of S-video that I was never going to use, and two component inputs. And I had

00:56:44   stuff hooked up to all those inputs, and I was basically out of inputs. If I got a PS4,

00:56:48   I would have had no place to put it. This one has three HDMI, so I lose an HDMI here.

00:56:52   Only one component, and of course no S-video or any of those other stuff. And I don't understand

00:56:58   why high-end televisions have been losing inputs. Low-end televisions, sure, give it

00:57:02   one, two HDMI ports. But high-end televisions just have like 10 HDMI ports back there. But

00:57:05   I guess the philosophy is that if you buy high-end television, you really only need

00:57:09   one HDMI point because you're going to have an AV receiver that does all your switching

00:57:13   for you and all that stuff. And that's probably my next purchase decision thing that I have

00:57:17   to deal with, which is a whole other topic entirely.

00:57:19   I can't wait to hear about that.

00:57:21   Yes.

00:57:22   But I've got the TV. It looks really good. I'm kind of trapped in calibration hell, which

00:57:27   is that the place you go when you buy a fancy television and realize that it has a million

00:57:31   adjustments and you're obsessive compulsive like me and you try to keep adjusting them

00:57:35   to get the picture you want without paying somebody 300 bucks to come to your house and

00:57:39   do it with $10,000 worth of video equipment because then you just feel like Marco.

00:57:43   Nice.

00:57:44   Did you ever get your television professionally calibrated, Marco?

00:57:50   No.

00:57:51   I didn't even know that was a thing.

00:57:52   Yeah, I also didn't.

00:57:54   Oh, it's a thing.

00:57:55   is definitely a thing. And the thing is, the calibration, like, if you had the equipment

00:58:01   to do the calibration, I feel like you could probably do it yourself because the software

00:58:04   they have that works with it is, I mean, it's probably complicated, but I get a couple of

00:58:10   tries, you could probably put it all, but the equipment is expensive because you need

00:58:12   like a computer hooked up to a light meter that attaches to your screen that puts out

00:58:16   a known signal and measures it and does all this stuff. And it's sufficiently complicated

00:58:20   that it's difficult to do at home. But mostly I'm just trying to pin down the basic stuff

00:58:24   of black levels, light levels, contrast, and the other basics.

00:58:30   One more thing before we get off the television thing.

00:58:32   I didn't even talk about this, but the other reason I didn't want to buy an LCD is because

00:58:36   they don't do well with motion.

00:58:37   They used to be terrible with motion, now they're a little bit better.

00:58:41   But remember the old days when your cursor on your crappy PC laptop would have trails

00:58:46   behind it?

00:58:47   Mm-hmm.

00:58:48   That was a feature.

00:58:51   Not the cursor trails, not the intentional ones that Windows put in, but the accidental

00:58:54   ones where everything, alright.

00:58:57   That was way, way, way back in the beginning days of LCD.

00:59:01   That's gone now, but LCDs still don't show motion as well as plasmas do for a variety

00:59:07   of reasons, and what LCD televisions do to try to make things look more natural is that

00:59:13   they will put frames that didn't exist in the source material in between.

00:59:16   So if your video is 24 frames per second, but your LCD is refreshed at 60 frames per

00:59:21   second, instead of just showing the same frame a whole bunch of times, and then showing the

00:59:25   next frame a whole bunch of times, and showing the next frame a whole bunch of times, if

00:59:27   you do that on a modern LCD, it looks weird.

00:59:29   It doesn't look right.

00:59:30   It looks stuttery and jerky and strange for reasons having to do with visual perception

00:59:36   that I don't entirely understand, but that you can Google and find out.

00:59:41   And that's not a problem on plasmas, because they're more like CRTs, because they, I guess

00:59:44   I think it's because they pulse the output and it's kind of like a bunch of bright lights

00:59:49   punctuated by periods of no light if you slow down viewing of a screen.

00:59:53   So it's more like a CRT and it looks more natural to you.

00:59:56   So plasmas don't have to do this, this motion interpolation, but LCDs all do it.

01:00:00   And they do it like crazy.

01:00:02   If you look at an LCD television that's doing motion interpolation, there's this thing they

01:00:05   call the soap opera effect because it makes all the shows you're watching look like they're

01:00:09   shot like a soap opera.

01:00:10   I don't know if you've ever watched television and then you flip through the channels and

01:00:13   you come across a soap opera and you can tell, like just because of the lighting and the

01:00:17   sets and stuff, you can just tell, "Oh, that's a soap opera," versus like, "Oh, that's a

01:00:20   movie," like they look different to you. I don't think the soap opera effects looks like

01:00:24   soap operas, but it looks weird. And even regular people notice it. In fact, my parents

01:00:28   recently asked me, you know, years after I tried to explain this to them, they probably

01:00:32   half-remembered, and they said, "I'm looking at television, and the people look a little

01:00:35   bit weird, like they're moving strangely. That's motion interpolation. Every LCD television

01:00:39   does it, and it's on by default in LCD television, and plasmas don't have the problem at all,

01:00:43   which is why they're "better for sports if you care about motion," that you should just

01:00:47   buy a plasma television because they don't have to do all this weird stuff to affect

01:00:50   the video signal.

01:00:51   Well, this plasma television that I got actually had a setting for motion interpolation, and

01:00:56   it was on by default.

01:00:57   I couldn't believe it.

01:00:58   Like, why would you do this?

01:01:00   Like, poor people are buying these plasmas, leaving that setting on and thinking that's

01:01:03   the way the video is supposed to look.

01:01:05   Because I was sitting there right in front of the television after I'd just set it up,

01:01:07   and I pulled the menus down, and I saw the video moving behind the menus, and it looked

01:01:11   all weird to me.

01:01:12   I'm like, "What the hell's going on there?

01:01:13   Did the menu slow down the video on this television?

01:01:16   And I found the motion interpolation setting.

01:01:17   I couldn't believe it.

01:01:18   Why would this setting even exist?

01:01:20   So I immediately turned that off, and there were like 75 other settings that this television

01:01:24   does, all of which everybody should turn off.

01:01:27   Brilliance Enhancer, Black Extension, Automatic Gamma Correction, Digital Remaster.

01:01:33   Like there's a million settings in this thing.

01:01:36   They should all be off.

01:01:38   This is why calibration should be on.

01:01:39   If you buy a fancy television, do not leave it the way it is, because they have tons of

01:01:43   settings that basically screw with the picture to try to make it look better and shir-- like,

01:01:47   a brilliance enhancer?

01:01:48   What the hell is that supposed to do?

01:01:50   It makes things sparkly and bright, you know?

01:01:52   It just screws up your picture.

01:01:54   Turn all those off.

01:01:55   And it probably also adds input lag, not that it matters, because game mode usually turns

01:01:58   all of them off anyway.

01:01:59   So part of my calibration exercise is going through these extensive menus and turning

01:02:03   off every single one of these stupid features that has some crazy made-up marketing name.

01:02:07   thing for sound, you know, like fake surround sound and stuff, turn all that crap off. Maybe

01:02:13   the only one that I would allow a little bit is like noise reduction and put that one on

01:02:17   low, but even that is iffy. So if you have a fancy new television, whether it's LCD or

01:02:22   plasma, turn off all those crazy settings. Try to, you don't have to get it calibrated

01:02:26   by somebody, but you can at least do like the self calibration things where you sit

01:02:30   there and look at a test image and follow the instructions. You can get pretty close

01:02:33   to not a correct image, but an image doesn't look like the crap that the things come out

01:02:38   of the box looking like or that they look like in the showroom.

01:02:41   So that's my advice for if you get a television.

01:02:45   And people say, "What television should I buy?"

01:02:46   I can't advise that you get a plasma.

01:02:48   I just told you all the things about it.

01:02:49   Burn-in fans, power, transformer buzz, LCDs, terrible black levels, weird motion, soap

01:02:56   opera effect.

01:02:57   I think the colors are not quite as nice and natural-looking as they are on plasmas, although

01:03:01   they have gotten a lot better.

01:03:02   There's no good television to buy, so you have to make your own choices with those compromises.

01:03:07   But if one were to get the television that you just bought, what would one be buying?

01:03:12   I bought a Panasonic VT60.

01:03:16   They call it short on the internet, but it's like TCP and then the screen size and then

01:03:22   the letters and numbers.

01:03:23   And Panasonic's V series has been their fancy series.

01:03:25   The old one was the TCP50 V10, and they added the T at some point, back I think around the

01:03:31   VT50 they added it. Anyway, this year's models are TCP55, VT60, or 65, VT60. I think 55 is

01:03:39   the small size this television comes in.

01:03:41   Yeah, what the heck is that about?

01:03:43   What, they don't come small?

01:03:44   They don't come smaller than 55?

01:03:46   Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. When I bought a television for upstairs, I'm like, "Oh,

01:03:49   I need a small television for my bedroom. I don't want it to be this—you don't have

01:03:52   room in a bedroom for a gigantic television." I could not find a plasma that I was willing

01:03:56   to buy that was below 50 inches. And I'm not putting a 50-inch television in it, it's

01:04:01   too big. I don't have room for that. So I had to buy an LCD television for upstairs.

01:04:04   It was crushing to me, but you know, like, what can you do? And yeah, the fancier the

01:04:09   TV, they don't come in the small sizes. Like, 50 was the smallest size I could get my old

01:04:14   TV in. Actually, no, I think it came in a 42. But yeah, 55 is the smallest for this

01:04:18   one.

01:04:19   So I'm sorry. So yours is 65, though? The one you actually ended up with?

01:04:23   No, 55. The 50-inch television I had barely fit in the place that I had. And the nice

01:04:28   thing about the March of Progress is the 55-inch television, its external dimensions are almost

01:04:32   identical to my 50-inch, they just made the bezel smaller, right? So that's nice, you

01:04:37   know, the new television I have has more screen area but takes up about the same amount in

01:04:42   my house. And the reason I got the VT60 instead of, there's actually a model up from that,

01:04:47   they added a Z series, the ZT60, and the only difference with the ZT60 is it has slightly

01:04:52   better image quality in exchange for slightly reduced brightness, but it doesn't have the

01:04:57   nice speakers that this has, and it's like, who cares about the speakers that are built

01:04:59   into the television? Well, I do, because I'm still sorting out the surround sound situation,

01:05:03   which, again, is another topic for another show. And so I actually care about the built-in

01:05:07   speakers, and I like them to be high quality. And the VT had, like, this stupid built-in

01:05:11   camera, which is terrible, and who cares about that? And it was cheaper. So I was like, why

01:05:16   am I going to buy the more expensive TV with fewer features? I went with the VT instead

01:05:21   of the ZT.

01:05:22   - All right, so anything you'd like to add, John,

01:05:25   about the TV?

01:05:26   - I can talk about the software and the television,

01:05:28   but I'll just save that for another show,

01:05:30   because I think that's a whole other,

01:05:31   that gets back to my hypercritical.co blog post

01:05:35   of worst products through software,

01:05:37   and that is totally the case with television.

01:05:39   - All right, Marco, is there anything else that's awesome

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01:05:43   - There is, there is one more in fact.

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01:09:25   any transporter from their store.

01:09:27   Thanks a lot to Transporter for sponsoring the show.

01:09:28   Once again, it's a really cool product that I'm pretty sure is unmatched and it's really

01:09:33   great, so thanks a lot to Transporter.

01:09:35   Also no fans in the transporter.

01:09:37   That is correct.

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01:09:51   >> It's just power and Ethernet.

01:09:52   >> Yep.

01:09:53   Very simple.

01:09:54   >> Apparently, there's something that nobody's talking about that we should be talking about.

01:09:59   >> Oh, I added that and I didn't add it for the reasons you think I added it.

01:10:03   This is a tweet from somebody who I'm not going to name because I'm not going to say

01:10:08   things about this tweet, but I'm not trying to slam this person.

01:10:11   This is not about the verge

01:10:13   No, this is a phenomenon that I see all the time and I thought it's worth talking about

01:10:18   I just saw it today

01:10:20   All right

01:10:20   So this tweet has a bunch of at names at the front of it including me daring fireball Marco Josh Topolsky not about the verge

01:10:27   So that this this right away is a pattern

01:10:30   I'm sure Marco seen this because he gets he's on a lot of these same things

01:10:33   where it's at this person at that person at that person at that person and then and then like a

01:10:38   question or a statement. And you look at the list of, like the to list effectively, or

01:10:43   the tweet, and you're like, "What is it that made this person try to address all these

01:10:47   people at once?" It's the same effect that if you send an email, at least the email has

01:10:51   to have a, well, you can put a bunch of people at two. But it's like an email sent to five

01:10:55   people. No one feels the responsibility to actually respond to it. And it's like shotgun

01:10:58   blasting. And if you're shotgun blasting a bunch of people that are only vaguely related,

01:11:02   like I'm on a podcast with Marco, Daring Fireball is not John Gruber's account, but it's his

01:11:07   website's account, but I know him and I know the website. Josh Topolski runs The Verge,

01:11:11   or is involved with The Verge in some way, which is also a tech site, but there's just

01:11:15   basically a bunch of vaguely tech-related people. So it's kind of like saying,

01:11:19   "Hey, people whose name I know on Twitter who are involved in technology,

01:11:23   hear me!" And then you say something, right? And the thing that they said,

01:11:28   that the first bit is just an aside of like, if you're trying to effectively communicate on

01:11:33   and Twitter, don't @ mention a whole bunch of people who you don't know who are just

01:11:36   vaguely related to the topic in general, because you're not going to get a reply, because every

01:11:39   person in that chain doesn't feel a responsibility that they have to reply, right?

01:11:44   And so like either everybody ignores it, or even if you think it needs to have a reply,

01:11:48   you're like, "Well, I don't feel like it's my responsibility to reply.

01:11:51   One of the other guys will surely reply."

01:11:52   And then what ends up is nobody replies.

01:11:54   So this is not an effective strategy.

01:11:55   But the second part is the question.

01:11:57   The question is, "Why isn't anybody talking about the iOS notification sync and OS X that

01:12:01   never shipped?"

01:12:02   And I think this is a great example of, I don't know, when I see things like this, I

01:12:14   actually want to engage in it.

01:12:15   I did try to engage in this a little bit, it didn't have the effect that I thought it

01:12:17   would because it never does, like when you engage with people.

01:12:20   I'm trying to, Casey knows about this and so does Marco probably too, you know the five

01:12:25   whys thing that they tell you in corporate speak.

01:12:29   I've only heard it from you.

01:12:30   Yeah, well anyway, it's like another one of those--

01:12:34   in the future show, we'll talk about work methodologies

01:12:36   and stuff like that.

01:12:37   But it's another one of those like fun games

01:12:40   that they try to play to teach you critical thinking.

01:12:44   And so what I replied to this person

01:12:46   was what I feel like replying to so many people

01:12:48   when they say things.

01:12:49   When they say, why isn't anybody talking about this new feature

01:12:52   that Apple said was going to ship,

01:12:53   it didn't ship, or whatever?

01:12:55   I said, you tell me.

01:12:56   And what I'm trying to get them to do is answer

01:12:59   their own question because I feel like if you could think about it for like if

01:13:04   you thought about it for a little while surely you can come up with just as good

01:13:07   as answer as anybody who put the thing it was like what you're looking for the

01:13:12   sensational version is there's a conspiracy theory here like you know

01:13:15   they they pulled the guards away from the embassy just before the terrorists

01:13:20   came and it's a big conspiracy and they don't want you to know I'm not getting

01:13:22   political again anyway like the conspiracy theories one angle why is

01:13:26   Why is nobody talking about this?

01:13:28   Surely everybody's been paid off by Apple or this conspiracy against this feature or

01:13:32   whatever.

01:13:33   That's the crazy version.

01:13:34   And you can't, this is not implied in, there's nothing in this message that implies this

01:13:37   person thinks it's a conspiracy theory.

01:13:38   But that's one way, one reason someone would direct this type of question.

01:13:42   Like, you guys should be talking about it and you're not.

01:13:45   And the extreme version is it's because you've all been paid off by Apple.

01:13:48   That's why you're not talking about this topic.

01:13:49   Never mind that only a couple of people in this thing have websites where they get paid

01:13:53   to talk about tech.

01:13:54   Don't forget the f-word

01:13:56   What's that? We're all fanboys with an I on the end because that makes it worse somehow

01:14:00   Well, yeah, but but I don't I mean I don't think that's in this question as well

01:14:04   But like a lot of the questions that are like this is like why why isn't anybody talking about it's a leading question, right?

01:14:09   But the idea like assume that's not the case

01:14:11   So this person is not a crazy conspiracy theorist and he's looking for some sort of like

01:14:14   We're all colluding with each other not to talk about this and it's really a terrible shame

01:14:17   And he's the only person who sees through the the facade of fanboys who were on the take from Apple

01:14:23   Like that's ridiculous, right?

01:14:24   So assuming we put aside that ridiculous thing, right?

01:14:26   And say, well, what's left there?

01:14:28   I mean, I'll pose it to you too.

01:14:30   Like, what is, what do you think?

01:14:32   I mean, none of us actually knows, right?

01:14:33   Cause none of us works at Apple.

01:14:34   And if we did, we couldn't say none of us actually knows the answer.

01:14:36   And surely the person answering, asking this question knows that

01:14:39   none of us work at Apple.

01:14:40   And if we did, we couldn't say, so all he's looking for is for us to

01:14:44   provide an answer that he thinks we're more able to provide than he is.

01:14:47   And I don't think we're any more able to provide this answer.

01:14:50   And I'm going to ask you to, what do you think is the answer to this

01:14:53   question. Why isn't anybody talking about the iOS notification sync in OS 10 that never

01:14:57   shipped? Either one of you want to take it?

01:14:59   Well, I'm not allowed to talk about it. I can't. My take would get removed or something.

01:15:05   I'm serious. Either one of you. But what is your best guess at the answer to that question?

01:15:11   Why isn't anybody talking about it?

01:15:13   I forgot.

01:15:15   For whatever reason, it got deprioritized. Well, why hasn't it happened? It got deprioritized

01:15:20   or isn't done, why isn't anyone talking about it? Just like Marco said, I completely

01:15:23   forgot that was a thing, or going to be a thing, I should say.

01:15:26   That's more or less the answer I would give. Because sometimes features don't make it

01:15:31   into software, and it's not a feature that anyone really cared about that much anyway.

01:15:34   So the answer to "Why isn't anybody talking about this feature that didn't ship?" is

01:15:37   because features don't ship in software all the time, and this wasn't a particularly

01:15:41   highly anticipated feature anyway. That's the answer. I don't know 100% certainty,

01:15:46   But that is the literal answer to why isn't anybody talking about obscure features that

01:15:49   didn't ship.

01:15:50   Because, like, it's not a conspiracy theory, features don't ship all the time, and not

01:15:56   a lot of people care about it.

01:15:58   That's pretty much the answer.

01:16:00   And I feel like the person who asked that question could have arrived at that very same

01:16:04   answer if they had looked inward instead of outward with this question.

01:16:09   Like merely asked himself, "Why is it that no one is talking about that?"

01:16:13   And if the answer they arrive at is, "It's a conspiracy theory," well then I can't help

01:16:16   them unless they have some evidence that that's the case.

01:16:20   But like, it has the most—is this worth sending to five people this question that

01:16:24   you would answer yourself?

01:16:25   Like, it's a boring answer and no one wants to hear it, but I really think that's the

01:16:29   answer.

01:16:30   And this model of, "I get my tech information or information about the latest and greatest

01:16:37   cars or drum sets or whatever from these set of people who know more about the topic,"

01:16:42   Like that only goes so far.

01:16:44   At a certain point you have to sort of engage your own critical thinking and see if you

01:16:48   can come up with something on your own.

01:16:49   Because all the other people you're asking are doing this exact same thing you could

01:16:53   do.

01:16:54   Like sometimes you have inside information or inside a historical context, but in very

01:16:57   specific instances like this it's like no one cares about it.

01:17:00   That's why no one's talking about it.

01:17:02   And it didn't ship because sometimes things don't ship.

01:17:04   And maybe that's not true.

01:17:06   Maybe this person knows something that I don't.

01:17:08   That there was a big dramatic fight with Apple executives and they demanded this thing not

01:17:12   ship and, you know, who knows? But I don't know that, you don't know that, and surely

01:17:15   this group of five people is not expecting those details either. And that's the only

01:17:19   reason I include this. Not to yell at the person for asking it because you're not

01:17:22   supposed to ask questions, because people ask, you know, whatever. Everyone does it.

01:17:25   I @-mention random celebrities and say things all the time and then they respond like, "We

01:17:29   all do it," right? But I just thought it was a good example of ineffective @-mentioning

01:17:36   and asking a question that they themselves, I feel like, could have answered just as well

01:17:39   as we could have.

01:17:40   I have nothing to add to that because you pretty much nailed it. I don't know Marco. Do you have anything?

01:17:45   Yeah, I'm pretty much the same. I I think this is probably it's probably a really boring story

01:17:51   It's probably like oh, you know either either we couldn't get it in time and it wasn't that important

01:17:56   So, you know, we'll work on it for the next release or for you know, a point something or they you know

01:18:03   They could have figured out something, you know between when it was announced and when it was shipped

01:18:08   They could have figured out, you know, oh actually it has this really weird horrible problem that makes it a really bad idea to do it all.

01:18:15   You know, I mean I find stuff like that all the time, which is one of the reasons

01:18:18   I don't usually pronounce features. It's like I'll have some some feature I'll work on, like oh this is gonna be great.

01:18:23   And then I like 90% through with it and I realize oh

01:18:26   wait a minute.

01:18:29   This is actually impossible to be

01:18:31   good or even shippable because of this particular condition or problem or edge case or anything else.

01:18:37   And so maybe they hit something like that.

01:18:38   At the scale they're working on, they're probably

01:18:40   having a little time.

01:18:41   And I think the questions, I guess,

01:18:43   are actually kind of a trap, getting back

01:18:45   to the stuff we talked about in, I think, 41 or whatever

01:18:47   we were talking about, like online criticism and stuff.

01:18:49   Leading questions like this that seem

01:18:51   like vaguely accusatory for no reason directed

01:18:53   at multiple people, seeking some kind of engagement on a topic

01:18:57   where there's no real engagement we have,

01:18:59   it's very easy to get into a pointless flame

01:19:01   war over nothing by responding to these type of questions.

01:19:04   Because again, maybe the person's intent

01:19:06   not, you know, the feeling that we get reading that is probably very different from the intent

01:19:10   of the person asking it. But the way it's phrased is like, all you random people, I demand no Y, X,

01:19:18   Y, and Z. And none of us actually know. And all we can give is the same exact answer that he can

01:19:23   give himself. If you try to say anything back, like if, like try imagining to walk the line in

01:19:29   Twitter of trying to say what I said in big long rambling version back to this person on Twitter

01:19:34   and say, well, features don't ship in software all the time because they don't make the shipping

01:19:40   deadline and it wasn't as highly anticipated and demanded and important enough to be worth

01:19:47   reporting on the fact that it didn't ship. If you could fit that into a tweet and reply,

01:19:53   that's like you've started an argument. Well, this is very important. Don't you understand

01:19:56   how many people want this feature? It's super important. And let me tell you why. You're

01:19:59   going to argue with the person about why you think it's important. It's like, it doesn't

01:20:01   matter if you think it's important. I'm telling you why I think it didn't ship. It only matters

01:20:06   if people who run websites and blogs think it's important. It doesn't matter if an individual

01:20:10   person thinks it's important. It matters in aggregate. Did most people? Did a majority of

01:20:13   people? Did enough people? Did it's noticeable? Did anybody write about this? Well, now I'm

01:20:17   Googling it. I found one guy who did write about it. You just get into this giant rat hole. It's

01:20:21   like, what are we even arguing about? I would much rather be engaging people at all. It's like,

01:20:26   you tell me the answer. So many people send me Twitter messages and emails where I feel like,

01:20:31   "I don't want to answer this, I want you to arrive at the answer yourself, even if it's

01:20:35   a different answer than I would give, because I have no extra knowledge about this than

01:20:40   you do."

01:20:41   It's kind of like the tech support thing, which is a whole other topic that I don't

01:20:44   want to get into now.

01:20:45   And again, I don't want to make it seem like I feel put upon by these things, because I

01:20:48   have no problem just not responding to these tweets when they come, especially when they

01:20:51   have a million @ names in them.

01:20:53   And I assume everybody else in these giant threads doesn't respond, although occasionally

01:20:55   I check and I see Marco will answer these people, and I don't understand why he's doing

01:20:59   it.

01:21:00   Oh, you think he's bad?

01:21:01   I am such a sucker for these sorts of things.

01:21:03   I always bite.

01:21:04   If there's a little worm in front of me, I'm always biting.

01:21:07   Yeah, I have no problem just not responding to them.

01:21:12   But so many times I just want to call them up on the phone and say, "Why do you think?"

01:21:17   I would love for that to happen.

01:21:20   And I want them to just think about it themselves.

01:21:24   They don't want it.

01:21:25   They're like, "Well, they're trying to anticipate."

01:21:27   Like I said, like, I'm now I'm doing a leading question, like, well, what do you think?

01:21:31   Like they think I have an answer in mind, and I'm trying to trigger them to say it.

01:21:34   I'm just I just want them to focus their thought process on it and come up with an answer.

01:21:40   Like I would like to turn it around and say, this is an area where we both have equal and

01:21:44   very little knowledge.

01:21:46   I have a theory.

01:21:47   Do you have a theory?

01:21:48   Let's share our theories with each other and done like not not, you know, not turn it into

01:21:52   an argument.

01:21:53   So next time that you want to ask all of us, including Jean, one of those questions on

01:21:57   on Twitter include a phone number?

01:22:00   You never know.

01:22:01   So many times, we talk about all the online stuff.

01:22:04   That's part of podcasting.

01:22:06   I feel like the bandwidth, the expressive bandwidth, not data

01:22:11   bandwidth, of instant message, email, and stuff like that

01:22:15   is still so much less than voice communication.

01:22:17   That so many times, whether it's in an argument

01:22:19   or trying to help somebody, like trying

01:22:21   to help my parents get something working on their computer

01:22:24   or whatever, I just immediately want

01:22:25   to run to the higher bandwidth connection.

01:22:27   They're like, "Just let me talk to you on the phone.

01:22:30   I can talk to you through this," although it's kind of hard when you're like, "Do

01:22:32   you see a box on the screen?

01:22:33   Is it a gray box?

01:22:34   Does it have a..."

01:22:35   You know, tech support is difficult.

01:22:37   But for arguments or where you have a disagreement or whatever, especially when you're constrained

01:22:40   by Twitter, they're just like, "I just want to call this person up.

01:22:44   I feel like we could settle this in 10 minutes.

01:22:47   Can't do it."

01:22:48   Yeah, I hear you.

01:22:50   And to go back just a quick step, you mentioned episode 41, which is where we were talking

01:22:54   about online criticism and things like that. This week's Back to Work, which was episode

01:22:58   149, Merlin had a typically awesome, and I mean that with no sarcasm, Merlin, I don't

01:23:04   know if I'd call it a rant, but a monologue about, kind of, sort of vaguely inspired by

01:23:10   what we had said on episode 41. It's really, really good. So if you haven't heard that,

01:23:15   even if you're not a normal listener, you should check that out because it's very,

01:23:17   very, very good.

01:23:18   Yeah, we'll link it up in the show notes. And with that, let's wrap it up for this

01:23:22   week. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Pixelmator/Pixelmator, File Transporter

01:23:28   and Squarespace and we will see you next week.

01:23:30   [music]

01:23:31   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it

01:23:41   was accidental. John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it

01:23:49   It was accidental It was accidental

01:23:55   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow

01:24:04   them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:24:13   T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C-T-M-A-R-C

01:24:43   I officially announced today and oh my goodness does the m3 look good

01:24:47   The m4 is still that banana color

01:24:50   That moldy metallic rotten banana color. I can't I can't get over it. It's only available in that color

01:24:57   I can't I can't get over it

01:24:59   I don't know what's going on over there in Germany that they think this is acceptable, but oh god

01:25:04   Did you see the m3? Oh it looks so good. It really does. Oh god

01:25:08   I still think that like that the M5, not the M5, the regular 5 series is still by far the most attractive

01:25:15   card that BMW makes in this generation and their kind of obsession with

01:25:19   putting these, they look kind of like skin flaps, like their styling architecture of like

01:25:24   oh we're gonna make the the more aggressive looking body cladding and front fascia and everything and it does look more aggressive and it mostly

01:25:30   looks good, but the whole

01:25:32   the whole skin flappy design where it's kind of organic curves overlapping and stuff

01:25:37   I find less appealing than a more mechanical, or on the other side of the spectrum, more

01:25:43   sort of sculptural type of thing like a Ferrari inlet.

01:25:47   I'm not entirely happy with the, basically the plastic bolt-on bits that they put on

01:25:50   the M's.

01:25:51   In a lot of cases the M's still do look much better and more aggressive than the regulars,

01:25:56   but then in the minute details of the front and rear I'm a little bit iffy on.

01:26:01   Not that this will affect my life too much because I'm not getting any one of those cars,

01:26:04   but.

01:26:05   compared to the regular 5 Series that you like so much, if you put the M Sport option on the 5 Series,

01:26:12   I think it's almost identical externally. There's very, very few differences.

01:26:16   Yeah. It's like the Carrera 4S, where they get the turbo bodywork, but not the turbo.

01:26:21   Yeah. The thing is, the 5 Series has good bones, kind of. The structure, the proportions,

01:26:27   where the headlights are, everything about it is nicely, it's all... And it's just in the little

01:26:32   of details where you can screw up a little bit. I think the M5 for the more aggressive

01:26:35   front and rear plastic bolt-on thing looks a little bit fussy for me, whereas the regular

01:26:40   five looks sort of more stately and subdued and fitting with the car.

01:26:45   But the M3 and M4, it's the same type of thing. Like the M4, I like the shape of it, the coupe

01:26:49   shape. They really, you know, it looks nice and aggressive. But then the details around

01:26:52   the bumpers and sort of the haunches, it gets a little bit fussy and weird for me.

01:26:57   The front air dam on the very, very, very extreme outsides, it has kind of Ferrari-ish,

01:27:04   kind of like in the out, the upper part comes down and around, but the inner part doesn't

01:27:09   meet up with it.

01:27:10   It's like, I don't know, like lips almost.

01:27:13   Not ellips, but a set of lips.

01:27:15   And then on the back, it has like a similar like quasi L shape on the very extreme edges.

01:27:21   That I'm not in love with.

01:27:22   I kind of wish it was a little simpler, like my era.

01:27:24   Skin flaps.

01:27:25   Yeah, there are kind of skin.

01:27:27   Yeah, you know, you're right. Skin flap is a very good way to describe it. But generally,

01:27:31   overall, I just think the M3 particularly looks incredible. I want one so hard and I'm

01:27:37   -- I don't think I could ever afford my car brand new. I mean, it was -- we've talked

01:27:42   about this ad nauseum. It was like $55,000 or something like that new. This, I forget

01:27:46   what the starting price is going to be, but I'm sure it's going to be insane and just

01:27:50   stupid expensive.

01:27:51   What about $70,000, do you think?

01:27:53   I thought they announced it, perhaps not in US dollars.

01:27:56   But anyway, it doesn't matter.

01:27:57   The point is it'll probably be, I would say, 70-ish.

01:28:00   Certainly, 70 to 75 option the way you would want.

01:28:03   And so Panda 19 in the chat just asked, well,

01:28:06   when am I getting one?

01:28:07   I'll get one when it's actually affordable as a used car, which

01:28:10   is like a decade from now.

01:28:12   I'm guessing you'll have one in four years.

01:28:13   Get it in black, though.

01:28:15   I will not get it in black.

01:28:16   Actually, to be honest, I was discussing

01:28:17   with the same friend, Brian, that we

01:28:19   were talking TVs with.

01:28:20   And I forget what the name of the silver was.

01:28:22   Maybe Silverstone?

01:28:25   You would get it in silver?

01:28:27   Well no, so here's the thing.

01:28:28   The blue that they have in the press shots, what is it, Mola?

01:28:32   Is that right?

01:28:33   I forget.

01:28:34   The blue, the light blue.

01:28:35   It's iPad Smart Cover Blue.

01:28:36   Yeah, it really is.

01:28:37   Yeah.

01:28:38   I like it, but I don't love it.

01:28:41   However, the silver that I'm speaking of, it's a silver, but with like this weird

01:28:45   bluish hue to it that I actually kind of like.

01:28:49   I don't think I would get it white. If I could, if I could ever find one, I would definitely

01:28:53   or if I were to be able to afford one brand new, I'd get it individual with Lamon Blue

01:28:59   if such a thing was affordable and possible. But if not that, I'd probably get it Silverstone

01:29:03   or Silverstone or whatever it is. But oh man, it looks so good. It was like what, 450-ish

01:29:08   horsepower? I'm trying to find the stats.

01:29:11   425.

01:29:12   400 pound feet of torque from about 2 RPM, and yet the fuel economy is actually up quite

01:29:19   a bit. Again, I don't have numbers in front of me, but whatever it was, it was very, very,

01:29:23   very good. I mean, for an M3, anyway.

01:29:26   What do you think about the little Chrysler-esque things behind the little vents behind the

01:29:32   front wheels with the little chrome?

01:29:35   Before Marco jumps in, what do you think of them, John?

01:29:40   I'm kind of okay with doing those details on just on the M series, but the actual execution

01:29:45   of this particular detail, I think the chrome thing coming out of it is too much, and I

01:29:49   don't think the scoop fits in with the rest of the bodywork.

01:29:52   It looks a little bit, like, a little bit tacked on, kind of.

01:29:56   I do like the little M symbol on the brake pad.

01:29:59   Like brake caliper, rather.

01:30:02   I actually agree with you on the side vent.

01:30:05   I think, and the side event is, in general,

01:30:09   it is one of my favorite little features of the M cars,

01:30:12   and it annoys me that you can go and see it

01:30:16   like on every Ford, Taurus, and crappy Kia ripoff

01:30:19   that they totally rip that styling off of the M cars.

01:30:22   I'm pretty sure the M cars did that

01:30:24   a long time before anyone else.

01:30:25   - Not from the M cars.

01:30:26   - They've been doing that for like more than 10 years.

01:30:29   - It's a, on regular, on racing cars

01:30:33   and other high performance cars,

01:30:34   that on many of them it is a functional thing. Yes, on the American ones it's usually not

01:30:37   functional, it's just a service detail, but BMW did not invent whatever that vent is that's

01:30:42   behind the front wheel.

01:30:43   Well, but like with the little chrome accent, like it looks very, like when other people

01:30:47   do it, it looks very BMW-ish. But anyway, I love that little vent, and that's one of

01:30:52   the reasons I got the M5 is I love that little vent so much. I will say on this new M3 and

01:30:56   M4, I don't love it as much. I agree that it doesn't really fit in that well. It's not,

01:31:03   Like the way that little chrome piece is just kind of stuck on there, like the way it's

01:31:07   done on the 5, it's actually like wrapped, like the vent itself is trimmed in chrome

01:31:14   and like that's it.

01:31:16   This is like the vent itself is just made of metal and they like stuck a chrome thing

01:31:19   right in the middle of it instead.

01:31:20   I don't know, I'm not a big fan of that.

01:31:23   I don't think it makes the car look worse, but I don't think it makes it look better.

01:31:28   They should bring back the stealth style

01:31:31   that BMW used to have, where their fast cars--

01:31:34   and Mercedes had this back in the late '80s, early '90s--

01:31:37   where the high performance versions of the cars

01:31:39   looked very similar to the regular ones.

01:31:42   And you couldn't tell.

01:31:43   You'd blend in with traffic.

01:31:45   Basically, take this M3 and pop off those plastic bits

01:31:48   and put the boring plastic bits back on,

01:31:50   but still have it be an M3 underneath, right?

01:31:52   See, and what you're describing, in my personal opinion,

01:31:54   is the E39 M5, which is the early 2000s.

01:31:58   And I was discussing this with somebody on Twitter earlier today.

01:32:02   It is the pinnacle of understated power, you know, the kind of sleeper approach, which

01:32:07   was there were a couple of places where you could tell it was an M5.

01:32:10   The front air dam is a great example.

01:32:12   It was quad exhaust, which you never saw and still don't really see on BMWs unless it's

01:32:16   an M car.

01:32:17   But by and large, it didn't have like 350 M badges on it.

01:32:21   And even though I really do enjoy Marco's car and I think it's a fantastic automobile,

01:32:25   it has M's everywhere.

01:32:26   And it's kind of ridiculous.

01:32:28   And the E39 M5 was not like that.

01:32:30   And I, to this day, every great once in a while,

01:32:34   I'll go poking through AutoTrader,

01:32:35   telling myself I'm gonna get one,

01:32:37   and then I wuss out because they are so old now,

01:32:39   and so expensive to keep on the road.

01:32:42   But, oh man, it was the best.

01:32:44   - I also did, speaking of too many M logos everywhere,

01:32:47   I saw on one of these posts last night,

01:32:49   has it been confirmed that apparently there's a feature

01:32:52   where there's M logos on the back of the seats

01:32:54   that light up?

01:32:56   - Yeah, I read that and I haven't seen a picture,

01:32:58   And it's terrible.

01:32:59   And then they play engine noise out of them.

01:33:01   I mean, if that's a real feature, that's pretty bad.

01:33:05   Like that's...

01:33:06   Well, I can do worse.

01:33:07   I can do worse.

01:33:08   They have a... so there's launch control, which is that thing on your car that you've

01:33:11   never tried.

01:33:12   That's right.

01:33:13   But there's also, they have, and I'm going to get the name wrong, but it's something

01:33:16   as lame as "Smokey Burnout Mode."

01:33:19   Yeah, what is that?

01:33:20   It's like launch control, but they do not try to get traction.

01:33:24   Precisely.

01:33:25   No, I'm not kidding.

01:33:26   Really?

01:33:27   Oh my god.

01:33:28   So this way if you want to do like a, if you want to be a total hooligan and show off a

01:33:33   little bit and roast your $1500 tires or whatever they are, you can put it in smokey burnout

01:33:38   mode and it will let you do a burnout of some magnitude.

01:33:43   Can't you just turn off the traction control and stomp on the gas?

01:33:46   Isn't that effectively the same thing?

01:33:48   One would think, especially in a stick you can just dump the clutch when the engine's

01:33:52   at 2000 RPM which is like 8 million torques.

01:33:55   Oh, it works in a DCT too.

01:33:57   Oh, that's true.

01:33:58   Well, in reverse, as we found out on the snow.

01:34:02   But anyway, yes, so there's a smokey burnout mode.

01:34:04   And it was funny because I believe Ford just announced this for the Mustang.

01:34:09   And so BMW has also come out with this.

01:34:12   It's appropriate for the Mustang.

01:34:13   The Mustang is supposed to do a smokey burnout.

01:34:16   Yeah.

01:34:17   But anyway, I just wanted to bring it up because I think—

01:34:19   Those are tacky features.

01:34:21   They kind of are.

01:34:22   Launch control I can understand.

01:34:24   Because in the same Brian, in his R32, he had launch control, which he had done a launch

01:34:29   control launch, if that's not redundant, once or twice with me in the car.

01:34:34   And so the R32 was this Volkswagen with the V6 in it and a Hal-Dex all-wheel drive system.

01:34:40   And I tell you what, when he did a launch control launch, it was something incredible.

01:34:45   I mean, you were getting shot out of a cannon because it was all-wheel drive and it had

01:34:50   a decent amount of torque.

01:34:51   it wasn't stupidly heavy, and so it was quick.

01:34:55   But I should go back a step and mention that the Smokey Burnout Mode, in every spelling

01:34:58   I've seen, it's S-M-O-K-E-Y, which just makes it even worse.

01:35:02   Maybe they mean the bear.

01:35:04   Yeah, who knows?

01:35:05   I don't know.

01:35:06   It's just terrible.

01:35:07   But anyway, all in all, the M3, in principle, having never seen one in real life, having

01:35:12   only read things on the internets, gets two very enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

01:35:18   Do we know, has anybody reviewed the steering yet?

01:35:20   'Cause it has electric power steering,

01:35:22   and everyone hates electric power steering so far.

01:35:24   And they say that in this one they fixed it,

01:35:27   and now it's like, now it has enough feedback

01:35:29   and responsiveness, but I don't think a reviewer

01:35:32   has actually driven one and evaluated that yet.

01:35:35   - I don't think so.

01:35:35   - The car driver drove the M4.

01:35:38   I don't remember they said anything significant

01:35:39   about the steering, but I think they said

01:35:41   that they overall they liked it,

01:35:42   but it was just a first impression thing.

01:35:43   But that's how you'll know, because car drivers

01:35:45   been slamming the steering on the electric power steering, and being on these in particular,

01:35:50   like a scorned lover, because Car and Driver has been the magazine that for decades has

01:35:54   been like, "Oh, BMW wins every comparison," and just in this current generation when they

01:35:58   brought out the electrical power steering everywhere, that they've been all pissy about

01:36:01   it. So I'll let you know when I get that Car and Driver if they finally brought them back

01:36:06   around, but right now they're very cranky about it.

01:36:09   I've never driven an EPS system that was good.

01:36:13   And my current car does not have that.

01:36:16   And my current car has hydraulic steering.

01:36:18   And all the other 5 Serieses have EPS.

01:36:23   The M5 does not.

01:36:24   It still has hydraulic.

01:36:25   Car and Driver hates your car for other reasons, though.

01:36:27   That's true. That's fine.

01:36:28   And some of them I agree with, and most of them I don't.

01:36:32   But I'm like, this is going to be my John Gruber keyboard.

01:36:36   board. Like, I'm going to hold onto this forever until somebody makes, like, one that's actually,

01:36:41   you know, that matches this somehow, which might never happen.

01:36:43   Yeah, you would think, like, if not the second generation by the third try, all the car makers

01:36:48   will have gotten it by their third try, I assume. Because, like, it's all the same,

01:36:52   like, they all use ZF transmissions, like, whoever is supplying these electrical power

01:36:57   assist things plus whatever program they figure out, they'll figure out. Just take a couple

01:37:00   generations.

01:37:01   Now, does TIFF's new car, does that have electric steering? It does, doesn't it?

01:37:06   only does it have it, but she noticed it on the very first drive, on the drive home from

01:37:10   the dealership. After taking that drive, she asked me, she's like, "You know, the steering

01:37:14   feels kind of weird. It's like it's not taking any effort, and it doesn't really quite feel

01:37:19   right. It feels like it's steering almost too much around certain tight corners, because

01:37:23   you're just instantly there and it doesn't feel right."

01:37:26   Just wait until they do drive-by-wire, because Nissan, I think, has a drive-by-wire system.

01:37:30   A couple of makers have drive-by-wire things, so that's going to be even weirder. So that's

01:37:33   It's like they'll probably get the electrical assisted power steering working OK, but then

01:37:37   everyone will switch over again to drive-by-wire, and then we'll have to go through another

01:37:40   three generations of that feeling weird.

01:37:42   So anyway, so yeah, so this, I just wanted to bring it up.

01:37:46   I think it's really awesome.

01:37:47   Now Marco, you had briefly said that you might consider an M3 as your next car.

01:37:53   If you know, obviously it's a few years out, but just hypothetically, are you still

01:37:57   thinking that's the case based on what little you know so far?

01:38:00   I would really have to drive one first to really say.

01:38:03   Sure, absolutely.

01:38:04   Now that I've seen, so I've been in Tiff's car, Tiff just got her 3GT and it's fantastic

01:38:10   for everything that we needed her car to be and she loves it and it's really nice.

01:38:15   I will say I'm very jealous of two features that it has that were not available on my

01:38:19   car, the automatic high beam thing and radar cruise control.

01:38:24   Both of those I thought might be gimmicky and useless.

01:38:27   And they just were not available on the M5, which is

01:38:29   unfortunate.

01:38:30   So that being said, having driven a 5 Series for all

01:38:36   these months and going back to the 3 Series for a couple of

01:38:39   drives that we've taken with her car together, I actually

01:38:42   missed a lot of the 5 Series luxuries.

01:38:45   And I didn't think I would.

01:38:47   But the 5 Series is more substantial, more luxurious in

01:38:51   a few ways.

01:38:51   And I really did miss that difference when I was driving

01:38:54   and I really did miss that difference when I was driving her car.

01:38:57   It's still a very nice car and compared to almost anything else on the road,

01:39:02   it's fantastic and fairly luxurious, but there is a difference and it would in some ways be a step down.

01:39:09   You know, it's like John stepping down his monitor size.

01:39:13   So that would hurt a little bit.

01:39:16   The big thing though is that I'm just so incredibly happy with the M5.

01:39:21   I really am. I was telling this privately, but I'll tell it for the air because I didn't say it yet, that

01:39:27   you know the M cars, like most BMWs and like many cars, are on like a seven year

01:39:32   generation life cycle roughly.

01:39:35   And so I have this on a three year lease. At the end of the lease,

01:39:40   it's not going to be the new generation yet. It's still going to be like two years before the generation switchover probably.

01:39:45   So I

01:39:47   don't know what to do at the end of this lease.

01:39:50   I'm like if I it would be stupid to just get a new one just like the one I have

01:39:54   Like that would be incredibly wasteful and costly and you know just wouldn't really make sense

01:39:59   I'm probably just gonna buy this one out at the end of the lease and then wait until the new one comes out and then trade

01:40:04   It into a new lease because I like it so much

01:40:07   It really is perfect for me, and and I have no major complaints at all unless the new one is ugly

01:40:14   That's the other thing you know

01:40:15   The new one could be ugly. That's true it very well could be but

01:40:19   But I'm betting the next M5 has all-wheel drive.

01:40:24   I would be almost certain it will have it--

01:40:27   I don't think it'll be standard, but I bet it will be available.

01:40:31   Yeah, you say that, but watch.

01:40:33   Just watch.

01:40:34   It'll weigh 5,000 pounds.

01:40:36   It already does.

01:40:37   It's not 5,000.

01:40:38   It's like 44 or something.

01:40:40   It's 43.

01:40:41   I was going to say, my car's over 3,500.

01:40:43   And this is like-- they don't use a lot.

01:40:47   I don't even know if they use any carbon fiber in the M5 today.

01:40:51   The new M3 makes extensive use of carbon fiber in lots of different places.

01:40:56   So they were focused on weight savings for the new M3.

01:41:00   Now they're developing the new 7 series, which is also using all this weight saving stuff.

01:41:06   After that, I bet they're ready to design the 5 series with the same weight saving stuff,

01:41:10   and then they do the M5.

01:41:11   So I'm guessing that's going to be one of their focuses for the new one, is saving a

01:41:16   a bunch of weight and maybe it won't be like,

01:41:19   it's not gonna be a thousand pounds,

01:41:21   but maybe it'll be two or three hundred.

01:41:23   It's gonna be enough to make a difference.

01:41:25   And I think they have to add all-wheel drive

01:41:27   because already it has more power

01:41:30   than it can really put down on the road at low speed.

01:41:33   Like they need more places to put this power.

01:41:36   The engine's generating so much power,

01:41:38   like it just can't use it all properly.

01:41:41   - Well, with that said, you had the car out

01:41:43   at least in the driveway in the snow.

01:41:45   Did you take it past the end of the driveway?

01:41:47   - I did, yeah, I did.

01:41:48   In fact, so I discussed on neutral this situation

01:41:52   where I got stuck in the 1M a year ago,

01:41:55   where I tried taking it out in really slippery,

01:41:58   packed slush ice conditions,

01:42:00   and I got stuck in a grocery store parking lot.

01:42:03   Well, this year, I have the M5,

01:42:05   and I have snow tires for the very first time.

01:42:07   The 1M had its all season, or sorry, its summer tires on,

01:42:12   that not only were they summer tires,

01:42:13   were also pretty bald by that point,

01:42:15   so they were really worn down summer times,

01:42:18   so they had no grip at all.

01:42:20   So I got stuck in this parking lot

01:42:21   and couldn't move and it was awful.

01:42:23   So I went out with my winter tires

01:42:26   for the first time in this car, in our first snowfall.

01:42:28   We've only gotten two inches of snow,

01:42:30   but I went out at the worst of it

01:42:32   to try to test this out to see how bad it is.

01:42:34   So I went out, I took my car down

01:42:37   to the exact same grocery store parking lot.

01:42:39   It was similar conditions, but not as bad.

01:42:43   parking lot, but you would still be hitting pavement

01:42:47   most of the time.

01:42:47   So I can't say for sure if it's a huge difference yet.

01:42:50   But I tried lots of things.

01:42:51   I tried stopping short.

01:42:53   I tried turning tightly.

01:42:54   I tried pushing the gas a little too aggressively to see

01:42:58   if I'd spin around at all, or at least trigger the traction

01:43:01   control light.

01:43:02   And it was just like driving on dry pavement.

01:43:05   It was shockingly good.

01:43:07   It was a massive difference compared to the

01:43:10   massive difference compared to the bald summer tires.

01:43:14   Having brand new winter tires on a car with a more advanced

01:43:19   differential and a little better balance and a lot more

01:43:22   weight made a huge difference.

01:43:24   So, so far I'm pretty confident this is actually

01:43:26   gonna work out pretty well.

01:43:28   - I'm gonna choose not to be smug about this yet,

01:43:31   because I believe you and I went back and forth

01:43:33   about this forever, and just like you always end up

01:43:35   convincing me and I always end up being glad that you did,

01:43:40   So far it sounds like I might have convinced you the right way, but I don't want to count

01:43:44   my chickens quite yet.

01:43:46   Yeah, I think you're right. I think, you know, let's wait until the rest of the winter

01:43:49   happens and, like, wait till I have to deal with way worse conditions than that to see

01:43:54   really for sure, like, you know, was this a huge mistake to not get all-wheel drive?

01:43:59   But so far I'm very pleased with them. But again, it's, there was only, you know, one

01:44:04   snowstorm and it was fairly mild. So it's hard to say yet.

01:44:08   All right, so after much delay, because I had to be a total BMW fanboy with an eye,

01:44:15   John, what's some more accord complaints?

01:44:18   We talked about what?

01:44:19   Key fobs last time.

01:44:20   What else did we talk about?

01:44:22   I don't recall.

01:44:23   The stalks, the headrests, yeah.

01:44:26   Here's a question that I hadn't thought about until I got the new car.

01:44:28   Where in the car should the dead pedal be?

01:44:34   Is there an option?

01:44:35   It should be all the way on the left, probably against the side of the car, and it should

01:44:41   be flat, and it should be about the size of your foot.

01:44:45   How far away should it be?

01:44:46   From the clutch?

01:44:47   I don't know.

01:44:48   No, I don't mean horizontally, I mean distance from the seat.

01:44:52   Oh, it should be like you should be able to rest on it as if you were resting on the pedal,

01:44:58   but not pressed at all.

01:44:59   I would agree with that.

01:45:01   See, my previous Accord, and I think the previous Civics as well, had the dead pedal at the

01:45:07   distance from you where the clutch is like partially depressed.

01:45:11   So it was basically, if the clutch is totally up, the dead pedal is past where it is.

01:45:15   And I found that much more comfortable because I have long legs, to rest my foot on something

01:45:19   that's farther back than the totally untouched clutch pedal.

01:45:24   And the new Accord, the dead pedal is, as you described it, is basically the same distance

01:45:28   from the seat as the untouched clutch or the brake pad or whatever, kind of in that same

01:45:33   plane of pedals, and that feels way too close to me.

01:45:36   And part of that is that all the pedals feel too close, they're not adjustable and the

01:45:40   steering wheel doesn't telescope, so my choice is, and plus I have the seat back, lean back

01:45:45   and everything, I feel like my knees are squished up a little bit, because if I move the seat

01:45:50   back so that my knees aren't squished up like that, then I feel like the steering wheel

01:45:53   is too far away, because the seat back is pushed back so much.

01:45:56   cars are not made, I mean they're made for big Americans, maybe they're not made for

01:45:59   6'2" people or whatever, but the dead pedal in particular, and the pedal distance is probably

01:46:04   not that bad, but the dead pedal in particular just feels way too close, and it's because

01:46:06   of what I'm used to, I'm used to all my other Hondas where the dead pedal was farther back

01:46:11   than the untouched clutch pedal, so it's not the end of the world, but it's there, and

01:46:14   you know, I feel like it could have been fixed either with adjustable pedals, which a lot

01:46:18   of American cars are offering, which I think are a great idea, you know, because then you

01:46:20   can make, it's ergonomically better to have adjustable pedals and adjustable steering

01:46:25   columns so then small people and big people can find a good position.

01:46:28   Or at the very least a telescoping wheel, but I don't have yet a...

01:46:31   It is a tilting wheel and I will give Honda props for finally making a car where I can

01:46:37   adjust the steering wheel so that I can see all the gauges through the little half moon

01:46:41   shape that the steering wheel makes.

01:46:42   Because if you're very tall, inevitably the steering wheel cuts off like the top of the

01:46:47   speedometer or whatever thing is at the top.

01:46:50   This one I can see all the gauges exactly through the thing when I tilt the wheel to

01:46:53   the correct position.

01:46:54   So that's nice.

01:46:56   Now Marco and I learned-- well, Marco, you probably

01:46:59   learned this at your first event.

01:47:00   But Marco and Underscore and I learned at the BMW thing

01:47:04   we went to that the correct distance from the wheel

01:47:07   is that if you put your arms straight out

01:47:09   and you rest your wrists on the top of the steering wheel,

01:47:13   you should be able to flop your hands down.

01:47:16   I don't know if that was the best way of describing it.

01:47:18   But basically, you should be able to put your wrists

01:47:21   on the top of the wheel without being terribly uncomfortable.

01:47:24   and that's how far away you should be from the wheel.

01:47:26   - Yeah, and the seat back, see the thing is like,

01:47:28   I'm already farther away than that,

01:47:30   and a lot of it has to do with the seat back position,

01:47:32   because I have to tilt it back because of the headrest,

01:47:34   and also because, you know, if I start sitting

01:47:37   a more upright in my hair, my head starts to get closer

01:47:39   to the ceiling and all that other stuff.

01:47:40   So I think my hands are already farther away than that.

01:47:43   If I put my shoulder blades against the back of the seat,

01:47:45   and I should, you know, push my shoulders back and say,

01:47:47   okay, now I'm fully in the seat, put my hands forward,

01:47:50   I don't know, I'll have to measure it in the car tomorrow.

01:47:52   The driving position, it feels okay,

01:47:53   just the pedals feel a little bit close.

01:47:56   And the clutch also feels a little bit light, which I don't notice until I go into the old

01:47:59   accord and it feels heavier, but that's again just what you get used to.

01:48:04   It doesn't feel unpleasingly light, in fact it feels pretty good, because of course, you

01:48:07   know, the stick shifts slowly deteriorate as you use the car and they start feeling

01:48:11   a little bit notchier and more gross, and this still feels like a new car stick shift

01:48:15   and a new car clutch, which is nice.

01:48:17   We already talked about the iPod playback last time with no pause button.

01:48:21   I guess the final one for today is that I'll talk more about the screens in another show

01:48:29   and the on-screen displays and everything.

01:48:31   I think this Honda does a reasonable job of striking a balance between physical controls

01:48:36   and screen controls, partly because I didn't get the option that has the fancy screen with

01:48:41   navigation and everything because I didn't want to pay for it.

01:48:44   And honestly, I prefer the physical controls because when they put that screen in there

01:48:48   It's actually a second screen in the sauna.

01:48:50   When they put that screen in, it takes the place

01:48:52   of lots of physical controls.

01:48:53   So my car has physical controls for fan speed, vent position,

01:48:58   auto climate control on/off, and the different temperatures

01:49:02   for the passenger.

01:49:03   It has physical controls.

01:49:05   But the physical controls they chose to use

01:49:07   were a bunch of buttons that are all flush with each other,

01:49:10   right up against each other with nothing in between them

01:49:13   except a thin gap of--

01:49:15   there's not even a little plastic flange between them.

01:49:17   like button button button on all in one smooth continuous thing they are

01:49:20   impossible to find and hit without touching and it's like dials people

01:49:24   dials I can reach for a dial and you know you can feel this the five

01:49:28   positions maybe if you even if you just memorize the endpoints crank all the way

01:49:32   to the left crank all the way to the right heat all the way up heat all the

01:49:34   way down I don't want a button to go up up up down down down I have to look at

01:49:37   the digital display I don't want to have to search around this smooth featureless

01:49:41   expanse of buttons feeling the seams to try to guess which one of these like the

01:49:45   The fan speed up and down buttons are next to each other, and is the left one down and

01:49:49   the right one up, or the right one down and the left one down?

01:49:50   Never mind, they're in the middle of a series of identical buttons, all completely smooth.

01:49:55   It's terrible.

01:49:56   What I wouldn't give for a couple of dials.

01:49:59   It's good that they provide physical controls so they don't have such a screen to deal with

01:50:01   this stuff, but dials, people, it's so easy.

01:50:04   One dial for fan speed, one dial for air position.

01:50:07   They had it for generations, for decades.

01:50:11   They got out of it in the gauge consoles where they used to have the numbers, and they said,

01:50:13   people like dials better, you know, you can actually look at the angle of the thing without

01:50:16   reading the numbers.

01:50:17   Same thing on the dashboard.

01:50:18   I wish they would put more dials, more physical dials and fewer identical buttons.

01:50:24   One of the things I like about my BMW, and this is true of Marco's as well, is that there

01:50:30   are a lot of physical buttons for things, and they're differentiable without having

01:50:37   to look down or by glancing down at most.

01:50:39   the iDrive, as we talked about quite a long time in the actual neutral episodes, having

01:50:45   a tactile control input is to me a whole lot better.

01:50:52   A friend of mine has an early 2000s Honda Pilot with a touchscreen navigation system,

01:50:58   which I just don't care for at all.

01:50:59   Because even as a passenger, if I try to operate that as I'm going down the road, it's just

01:51:04   impossible to have any sort of accuracy.

01:51:06   So I totally agree with you.

01:51:08   And I also like, as much as I nostalgically enjoy the all-digital dashes of the Corvettes

01:51:15   of the '80s, for example, late '80s, it's so much easier to just get a vague notion

01:51:21   of where you are in a gauge by looking down at a needle rather than having to read and

01:51:25   compute what your speed is, for example.

01:51:28   Although I guess, to be fair, that didn't bother me as much on Marco's fancy pants

01:51:32   heads-up display.

01:51:33   Yeah, if it's in your field of vision, it's not as bad.

01:51:36   The dials I would absentmindedly fiddle, and even though this car does have automatic climate

01:51:39   control, I still find that I want to micromanage my fan speed, just because I do.

01:51:43   And I can absentmindedly micromanage fan speed with a dial without even thinking about it.

01:51:48   It's as automatic as driving for me in my other cars.

01:51:50   I'd be constantly adjusting the fan speed or the temperature with dials.

01:51:54   And now that they both have buttons and digital readouts, it's so much worse.

01:51:58   I can't even find the fan speed buttons absentmindedly, let alone adjusted absentmindedly.

01:52:03   It's just not a gesture, like find the up button, hit it three times to go up three

01:52:08   degrees or fan speed up to one of the eight positions, like, "Dials, dials!"

01:52:15   I can't take it.

01:52:16   I mean, I was going to say, it's as if they gave you—no one has really had the guts

01:52:20   so far, as far as I know, to not have a volume dial.

01:52:24   Like they'll have the up and down volume buttons in the steering wheel, and that's better because

01:52:27   you're hitting them with your thumb, like you don't want to dial on the steering wheel,

01:52:30   you want like the little pads.

01:52:32   The steering wheel controls are good. They're actually like little D-pads or five-way switches,

01:52:35   where there's a center button and then a four-way thing, and the volume is up and down. So I can

01:52:39   absent-mindedly adjust the volume with my left thumb, no problem. Although I still find myself

01:52:44   occasionally adjusting it with a dial anyway, just because I like dials better. But forget

01:52:48   about adjusting fan speed or even temperature with these things. I would challenge the Honda

01:52:52   people who design this, put a blindfold on them and say, "Find the fan speed up button,

01:52:57   and if you hit any button other than the fan speed up button, we will give you electrical shock."

01:53:00   and all those people.

01:53:01   What is it, Operation?

01:53:04   It's impossible to do.

01:53:05   Impossible.

01:53:06   It's like the old game Operation where you zap yourself, you hit the side of the opening.

01:53:10   My daughter asks that for Christmas, actually, so they must still be running ads on it somewhere,

01:53:14   and she must have somehow seen one of these ads.

01:53:16   I occasionally find her watching commercials on the TiVo, and I say, "No, we skipped commercials

01:53:19   in this house!"

01:53:20   I have to remind her, commercials are insidious, man.

01:53:22   Like, she'll start seeing one of them play after a show because she hasn't gotten to

01:53:25   the remote fast enough, and she'll become mesmerized.

01:53:27   And it's like, no, no advertising.

01:53:31   30 second skip.

01:53:33   [BLANK_AUDIO]