ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► But where's my data? But I had a backup! I used Time Machine!

00:00:07 ◼   ► Alright, is this the show? I guess.

00:00:11 ◼   ► I don't even know. John, you have some FU, don't you?

00:00:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I sure do. Last week we talked about Cisco VPN, Enterprise Software, and all that stuff.

00:00:19 ◼   ► And I was trying to, like, I was telling a story from my life with a broader point about Enterprise Software.

00:00:25 ◼   ► But the specifics of it were what most of you got responses to.

00:00:30 ◼   ► One of the big responses was, "Hey, do you need that new version of the Cisco VPN software?

00:00:35 ◼   ► Because even though you couldn't get it because you don't have a service contract or whatever,

00:00:39 ◼   ► here are various places where you can get it, or do you want me to email it to you?

00:00:42 ◼   ► If you do a Google search for this, you'll find it," or so on and so forth.

00:00:44 ◼   ► So a lot of people were nice in offering me this piece of software, which I don't know

00:00:48 ◼   ► if it's like, is that illegal software copying?

00:00:51 ◼   ► Is that a—

00:00:52 ◼   ► Probably.

00:00:53 ◼   ► —a commercial piece of software?

00:00:54 ◼   ► Thank everyone for their offers.

00:00:56 ◼   ► I did not take anyone up on their offer

00:00:57 ◼   ► 'cause as I think I said at the end

00:00:59 ◼   ► of the little segment last week,

00:01:02 ◼   ► the final result of that was that it was partly my fault

00:01:05 ◼   ► for not reading the message

00:01:06 ◼   ► and that even if I could get the software,

00:01:07 ◼   ► it didn't matter because I had to wait

00:01:10 ◼   ► for my IT department to approve it for use.

00:01:12 ◼   ► Like it has to be, this new version has to be approved

00:01:14 ◼   ► for use with all the other stuff they do

00:01:15 ◼   ► and then when it's approved for use,

00:01:17 ◼   ► they will put it up on their download thing

00:01:20 ◼   ► that you gotta go through the Java applet for or whatever.

00:01:21 ◼   ► So anyway, even if I can get the software,

00:01:23 ◼   ► which I totally could if I wanted to Google for the things that people tell me to Google

00:01:26 ◼   ► for or whatever.

00:01:27 ◼   ► It wouldn't do me any good because it's against our IT department's policy to install it.

00:01:31 ◼   ► So I'm just now patiently waiting.

00:01:33 ◼   ► So thanks for all the help, but I don't need it right now.

00:01:37 ◼   ► And the second bit is from the—this is an AnyConnect Twitter account.

00:01:41 ◼   ► Of course there is.

00:01:42 ◼   ► I don't know why I didn't think this VPN software—this specific VPN software product wouldn't have

00:01:45 ◼   ► a Twitter account, but it does.

00:01:47 ◼   ► And the AnyConnect Twitter account responded a few times to me, and one of the things they

00:01:51 ◼   ► they said was that about Cisco being clueless about 10.9,

00:01:55 ◼   ► they said that Cisco had announced this issue publicly

00:01:58 ◼   ► and reported it to Apple prior to the release.

00:02:00 ◼   ► And a couple of other people said that

00:02:02 ◼   ► there was some networking-related change really late

00:02:05 ◼   ► in the beta period, like maybe right before GM

00:02:08 ◼   ► that caught a lot of people off guard.

00:02:09 ◼   ► So apparently, if you were following the right places

00:02:11 ◼   ► that I wasn't following, you would have known

00:02:14 ◼   ► that they were gonna be incompatible with 10.9

00:02:16 ◼   ► and that they weren't ready in time of the GM.

00:02:18 ◼   ► So apologies to Cisco for saying that they did not know

00:02:21 ◼   ► 10.9 was coming. Obviously they did. They had an issue. They filed with Apple. They

00:02:24 ◼   ► just didn't get their stuff working in time for the 10.9 release. They did get it working

00:02:28 ◼   ► a couple weeks afterwards. And now I'm just waiting on my IT department, however long that will take.

00:02:32 ◼   ► That's always fun.

00:02:36 ◼   ► Yeah. And the other thing I found out is a lot of people were recommending third party

00:02:40 ◼   ► Cisco VPN compatible clients. One thing I think some people are confused about is that

00:02:45 ◼   ► the built-in OS 10 VPN works with some Cisco VPNs,

00:02:49 ◼   ► and we used to have a Cisco VPN that the built-in one worked with,

00:02:52 ◼   ► and that was great, because no software to install,

00:02:54 ◼   ► your OS works with it out of the box, it worked in 10.8, I think it worked in 10.7,

00:02:58 ◼   ► but this new Cisco product they bought doesn't work with the built-in VPN.

00:03:02 ◼   ► So a lot of people are saying, "Oh, here's how you can decrypt this file

00:03:05 ◼   ► and get the right things to enter into the OS VPN preferences."

00:03:09 ◼   ► I had already done that, I already had figured out all that stuff

00:03:11 ◼   ► and it was working, but they upgraded, side-graded, whatever,

00:03:14 ◼   ► change to AnyConnect which doesn't work with the built-in VPN but there are third-party

00:03:18 ◼   ► products that you can buy not from Cisco that will apparently work with Cisco AnyConnect.

00:03:23 ◼   ► One of them was called OpenConnect, it's like an open source project or whatever that looked

00:03:25 ◼   ► like a little bit too much work for me to try to install.

00:03:28 ◼   ► Another one is called Shimo which I checked out.

00:03:31 ◼   ► I could not get it to work and I didn't want to fight with it because if I fail to get

00:03:35 ◼   ► it to work three times in a row I get locked out which I did.

00:03:38 ◼   ► I didn't really have to call someone on the phone.

00:03:39 ◼   ► I asked them to unlock my thing for me so I'm just going to stick with the Cisco AnyConnect

00:03:44 ◼   ► VPN, wait for my work to approve it for use, and then upgrade everything and continue my

00:03:50 ◼   ► life.

00:03:51 ◼   ► All right.

00:03:52 ◼   ► We also had a great bit of follow-up from a guy named Jared who asks, "I'm wondering

00:03:58 ◼   ► what you might perceive as a market for better enterprise software.

00:04:02 ◼   ► I know that's a big question, but is there a place for a smaller company whose focus

00:04:07 ◼   ► is enterprise software to come in and disrupt one of the big guys with something vastly

00:04:11 ◼   ► better without the name recognition?

00:04:13 ◼   ► I've been fighting with enterprise accounting software and seriously considering writing

00:04:16 ◼   ► my own to try and combat the insanity that is most accounting software, but I'd be

00:04:20 ◼   ► fighting an uphill battle.

00:04:21 ◼   ► I'd love to hear your thoughts."

00:04:24 ◼   ► So I picked this as something I wanted to talk about because my first job out of college

00:04:29 ◼   ► was actually at a small enterprise software company trying to disrupt a bigger enterprise

00:04:33 ◼   ► software market.

00:04:35 ◼   ► And so I learned a lot there.

00:04:38 ◼   ► And most of what I learned was just because I was a smart-ass college kid just out of

00:04:43 ◼   ► school and thinking I knew everything and entering the workforce.

00:04:46 ◼   ► And I was working with a bunch of way smarter people than me who were way better programmers

00:04:50 ◼   ► and had much more wisdom accumulated among them.

00:04:53 ◼   ► And so I got my butt kicked pretty severely in the best possible way during that first

00:04:59 ◼   ► year or two, just like learning how to be a real professional software developer instead

00:05:04 ◼   ► of just some college kid who runs a program. Part of that growing up process is that I

00:05:13 ◼   ► think every programmer when they leave college is very likely to be the kind of person, and

00:05:17 ◼   ► I certainly was, who looks at anything else and says, "Oh, well that's stupid. Why

00:05:22 ◼   ► do they do it that way? Why don't they just do X, Y, Z?" Like, you think everything's

00:05:26 ◼   ► a simple problem, and you think everyone else is an idiot. And obviously the reason why

00:05:30 ◼   ► this sucks is because they're all stupid, and I know better, and I can walk in there

00:05:34 ◼   ► and take over, you know, or I would do it better.

00:05:39 ◼   ► And so I had a look at this market from that point of view.

00:05:43 ◼   ► I'm not saying that's Jared's point of view, it probably isn't.

00:05:45 ◼   ► He's probably, you know, more experienced than that, but that was certainly my point

00:05:48 ◼   ► of view.

00:05:49 ◼   ► And I learned kind of the hard way why enterprise software is so hard.

00:05:54 ◼   ► And it really is.

00:05:55 ◼   ► It's not as simple as, oh, well, crappy programmers write it because they didn't want to work

00:05:59 ◼   ► on consumer stuff.

00:06:00 ◼   ► It's not that at all.

00:06:01 ◼   ► It's also not that the developers of enterprise software are just, you know, they don't

00:06:07 ◼   ► care about interface or they don't care about quality.

00:06:09 ◼   ► It isn't that at all.

00:06:10 ◼   ► It's that the enterprise market is really, really complicated and it's not nearly as

00:06:16 ◼   ► easy as the consumer market to enter.

00:06:18 ◼   ► So one of the biggest reasons is just the buyers.

00:06:21 ◼   ► When you think about the culture of a company, and in case you mentioned this a little bit

00:06:25 ◼   ► last episode with meetings and people wanting to be heard and wanting to not get fired and

00:06:29 ◼   ► relevant. One of the biggest problems is that, you know, you've heard the phrase, "Nobody

00:06:37 ◼   ► ever got fired for buying IBM." And if you think about, like, if you're a big business

00:06:43 ◼   ► buying a big enterprise software product and you're the IT manager or you're the CIO, whatever

00:06:48 ◼   ► they do, you know, something like that, I don't know enough about these terms to know

00:06:52 ◼   ► who makes these decisions usually, but let's call it the IT manager. If you install some

00:06:58 ◼   ► crazy email system from a startup and the guy before you was running Lotus Notes, which

00:07:04 ◼   ► is horrible for the users. It's horrendous for the users. But it's like, you know,

00:07:08 ◼   ► quote enterprise and it's well known. You know, nobody ever got fired for installing

00:07:11 ◼   ► Lotus Notes, although they probably should. Which by the way, Lotus is owned by IBM.

00:07:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I know. It makes that extra funny. But although I don't think that it was always

00:07:21 ◼   ► that way. But anyway, it doesn't matter. If you devote your whole company's budget

00:07:29 ◼   ► for Category X and all this effort to install it and everything, and it turns out to kind

00:07:34 ◼   ► of suck for you, if that's a really well-known thing, like Microsoft Office or the Exchange

00:07:40 ◼   ► server, no one's going to fire you for that because that was a reasonable decision to

00:07:44 ◼   ► make. If you go buy some kind of crazy startup thing and that doesn't work very well or

00:07:48 ◼   ► or people just don't like it, that's on you.

00:07:50 ◼   ► And so there's a lot of pressure just from the situation

00:07:53 ◼   ► you're in there.

00:07:54 ◼   ► There's a lot of pressure to go with

00:07:55 ◼   ► the big established things.

00:07:56 ◼   ► It's also a very human intensive sales process.

00:08:02 ◼   ► You hear, there's an article forever ago

00:08:06 ◼   ► that I'll have to link to on Joel on Software

00:08:08 ◼   ► about software pricing, which I've probably linked to

00:08:10 ◼   ► like 10 times over the last five years for various things.

00:08:14 ◼   ► But one of the things he mentions is that

00:08:17 ◼   ► there's really not a lot of software between $1,000 and $50,000. Because once you get above

00:08:24 ◼   ► a certain price threshold, you have to start flying a sales force out to meet with potential

00:08:29 ◼   ► customers and play golf with them and schmooze with them and go out there to support everything.

00:08:35 ◼   ► And so it becomes a much more expensive proposition for you, the software vendor, to even sell

00:08:41 ◼   ► software to big enterprises. So you have to charge a massive amount.

00:08:46 ◼   ► That same process, that big sales process,

00:08:48 ◼   ► makes it so that you basically have to have

00:08:51 ◼   ► a very large sales force and a dedicated sales force

00:08:54 ◼   ► to fly out and meet with people all the time

00:08:58 ◼   ► if you want to sell enterprise software

00:09:00 ◼   ► in any meaningful volume.

00:09:01 ◼   ► You can't, for the most part, you can't just like

00:09:04 ◼   ► have a website and a download button and that's it.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Like much of the software, you gotta fly people out,

00:09:09 ◼   ► schmooze with them, meet with them for months, et cetera.

00:09:13 ◼   ► And then once you get the software built,

00:09:16 ◼   ► Let's say you actually sell it to them, or you come close.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Then you have to deal with their requirements.

00:09:22 ◼   ► And this is one of the reasons why enterprise software is

00:09:25 ◼   ► so expensive and why there's not a whole lot of choices

00:09:28 ◼   ► for a lot of the stuff there.

00:09:31 ◼   ► Enterprise stuff has to work at much larger scales and much

00:09:35 ◼   ► higher reliability than a lot of consumer software.

00:09:39 ◼   ► You might design your app thinking that, oh,

00:09:43 ◼   ► what's the maximum number of database records

00:09:45 ◼   ► that I'm going to have to handle in this app. What is it, maybe a million? And then

00:09:49 ◼   ► you find out that your customer has to import 15 million records a year from the last 30

00:09:56 ◼   ► years from their ancient system that was running on a mainframe that some contractors built

00:10:00 ◼   ► in the 80s. It's that kind of scale that you're operating at with so many companies.

00:10:08 ◼   ► You also have all these needs, like what John was saying last week. You have security needs,

00:10:13 ◼   ► you have regulatory needs, you have logging and auditing and fine grain access control

00:10:17 ◼   ► and groups and permissions and all these things that are so often required by enterprise customers

00:10:25 ◼   ► that that's, you know, consumer stuff doesn't need most of that stuff or can get away with

00:10:29 ◼   ► a smaller scale version of that or a less, a less official version of things like that.

00:10:33 ◼   ► There's also, you know, you might have requirements in certain industries about like they might

00:10:39 ◼   ► might want to know how you run your company.

00:10:41 ◼   ► They might want to have security audits of your company.

00:10:44 ◼   ► Quality audits of things like Six Sigma quality

00:10:48 ◼   ► certifications, stuff like that.

00:10:50 ◼   ► I don't know enough about it to say more of them.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Stuff like that.

00:10:54 ◼   ► They might put the burden on you to say,

00:10:55 ◼   ► well, for us to buy your software,

00:10:58 ◼   ► we have to have these organizations or regulatory bodies

00:11:01 ◼   ► verify that your company is legit and secure.

00:11:05 ◼   ► A lot like PCI compliance in the payment industry,

00:11:07 ◼   ► that kind of thing.

00:11:08 ◼   ► Can I interject real quick?

00:11:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:10 ◼   ► As somebody who has either worked for big enterprises

00:11:14 ◼   ► as a consultant, or I also spent some time at a huge company--

00:11:17 ◼   ► it wasn't a software company, but it was a huge company,

00:11:19 ◼   ► nevertheless-- this is absolutely true.

00:11:22 ◼   ► And a lot of times, you'll have really progressive and really

00:11:27 ◼   ► smart developers putting in-- I touched on this last episode--

00:11:30 ◼   ► putting in a situation where, because of all

00:11:33 ◼   ► the requirements put on them about code reviews

00:11:35 ◼   ► and about even the version control you use,

00:11:38 ◼   ► Like in a past job, I had to use the rational suite where I couldn't check in code unless

00:11:43 ◼   ► I associated it with a task in the bug/work tracking part of that same tool.

00:11:51 ◼   ► So I couldn't make a change to the code unless I was tagging it and associating it with something

00:11:57 ◼   ► that somebody else more important than me told me to do.

00:12:00 ◼   ► And that's extremely, extremely frustrating.

00:12:03 ◼   ► And the other thing is with big companies, they've typically been around long enough

00:12:07 ◼   ► that they have screwed up in every possible way.

00:12:10 ◼   ► And the answer to screwing up when you're in a big company

00:12:13 ◼   ► is to make a procedure so you don't do that exact thing

00:12:16 ◼   ► again.

00:12:17 ◼   ► And so now you have a million and five procedures.

00:12:20 ◼   ► And Marco, you were touching on this

00:12:21 ◼   ► with Six Sigma and blah, blah, blah.

00:12:23 ◼   ► You have a million and five procedures in place

00:12:25 ◼   ► to avoid you pretty much getting work done

00:12:28 ◼   ► with any sort of urgency or speed.

00:12:30 ◼   ► And it's very, very difficult and very frustrating.

00:12:33 ◼   ► You're absolutely right.

00:12:35 ◼   ► And then, and the sales process is also weird,

00:12:38 ◼   ► because first of all, there's analyst reports.

00:12:40 ◼   ► These things are so big, and there's so much money at stake,

00:12:43 ◼   ► one of the things analysts are paid to do

00:12:45 ◼   ► is tell companies what kind of enterprise software

00:12:47 ◼   ► they should be buying.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And the analyst game at that scale is kind of a scam.

00:12:53 ◼   ► You, as a software vendor, basically have

00:12:56 ◼   ► to pay massive sums of money to become members or clients

00:13:01 ◼   ► of the analyst firms, and then they'll start recommending you.

00:13:04 ◼   ► And it's not ever actually said that way,

00:13:07 ◼   ► but that's kind of how it works in practice.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And so there's a lot of companies

00:13:10 ◼   ► that they'll only buy what some analyst tells them to buy,

00:13:14 ◼   ► and so you have to kind of get in that game.

00:13:15 ◼   ► And it's a very expensive game to get into.

00:13:17 ◼   ► And then even when you get in, it's like, well,

00:13:19 ◼   ► they might not recommend you, or they might not put you

00:13:20 ◼   ► in the right boxes or something.

00:13:22 ◼   ► - Compliance is like that, too.

00:13:24 ◼   ► I've been through a lot of compliance things,

00:13:26 ◼   ► and those are basically like extortion scams.

00:13:28 ◼   ► Because the company will come, you'll pay a company

00:13:32 ◼   ► to come to tell you whether you are compliant with something,

00:13:35 ◼   ► whether it be PCI or a million other acronym standards

00:13:38 ◼   ► that you have to comply with.

00:13:39 ◼   ► And they'll tell you which things

00:13:41 ◼   ► you are non-compliant about.

00:13:43 ◼   ► And then they will sell you consulting services

00:13:45 ◼   ► to make you compliant.

00:13:46 ◼   ► And after you pay this very same company the money

00:13:49 ◼   ► to help remediate your failures to comply,

00:13:52 ◼   ► then they will give you your certification.

00:13:55 ◼   ► And once you get that critical mass of everybody

00:13:58 ◼   ► in the X industry needs to have Y certification compliance just

00:14:02 ◼   ► to be a player because people start putting it on each other's requirements. Marco talked

00:14:07 ◼   ► about the requirements. Once everyone starts putting it on their requirements and everyone

00:14:10 ◼   ► decides they have to be on it, the culture of companies that build up around allowing

00:14:14 ◼   ► companies to get that compliance as a sort of little cabal, it's kind of like I was saying

00:14:20 ◼   ► before with the startups all passing money back and forth to each other until the venture

00:14:24 ◼   ► capital money ran out. Only this is for actual profitable companies and they're passing money

00:14:27 ◼   ► back and forth to these middlemen who give them the compliance so that they can continue

00:14:31 ◼   ► to sell to people and the little people who can't afford to play that compliance game.

00:14:34 ◼   ► I'll let these compliance things start with the right intentions, especially government

00:14:39 ◼   ► compliance, like in general, have some good intentions to begin with.

00:14:45 ◼   ► And then there are just people finding little nooks and crannies of profit where they can

00:14:52 ◼   ► live as the big sucker fish on the government shark or on the compliance shark and say,

00:14:55 ◼   ► "We have found a little area where we can be profitable by helping other companies comply

00:14:59 ◼   ► with these stupid things, it's not a pleasant place to be, this whole enterprise environment.

00:15:05 ◼   ► And I've talked about it on past shows, where I think this whole environment that we just

00:15:10 ◼   ► described, all these different things about that are weird and terrible and that people

00:15:13 ◼   ► have to do, it eventually produces companies that are not able to compete.

00:15:19 ◼   ► In the short term and the medium term, it produces companies that can crush other companies.

00:15:22 ◼   ► But in the long term, it resigns you to death.

00:15:26 ◼   ► Because once you're completely ossified with procedures and compliance and all that other

00:15:29 ◼   ► stuff and you were the king of your mountain of these other big companies that are all

00:15:33 ◼   ► playing the same game and you've defeated them all and there's like two or three of

00:15:36 ◼   ► you left and you think you're the winner, some other little furry mammal comes up and

00:15:42 ◼   ► the comet comes and you die and the furry mammal grows up to be the next dinosaur.

00:15:46 ◼   ► Like that's the evolutionary process.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And getting back to this question from Jared about like what do we think about some small

00:15:52 ◼   ► company disrupting, stuff like that. This is happening all the time, this constant turnover

00:15:57 ◼   ► of like the little company comes, then they become the big company, then they become a

00:16:01 ◼   ► giant behemoth that can't do anything, and then they die, and the next one comes. That's

00:16:05 ◼   ► always taking place. And in the enterprise market, a lot of places that are small, like

00:16:11 ◼   ► I'm thinking of Igloo, one of our past sponsors with the whole big internet software. It's

00:16:15 ◼   ► so easy to make a product that end users want to use more than the things that they're forced

00:16:20 ◼   ► to use. The trick is for those companies to either be so incredibly desirable that the

00:16:26 ◼   ► important people want it, and that's like the iPhone approach, where like, it doesn't

00:16:29 ◼   ► matter, the CEO has an iPhone, the CTO has an iPhone, all the CLL executives have iPhones,

00:16:34 ◼   ► IT department, you're going to make iPhones work with our network. I don't care, I don't

00:16:38 ◼   ► want to hear about BlackBerry, just make it work. Like that's one way to go in there,

00:16:40 ◼   ► and that's sort of like a, you know, from the top down type of approach. And the other

00:16:45 ◼   ► one is the bottom up approach, where in our company at least, like we have SharePoint,

00:16:50 ◼   ► which Casey can tell us all about how wonderful that is.

00:16:53 ◼   ► And we all hate it, and it's terrible.

00:16:55 ◼   ► And people just, you know, individual people,

00:16:58 ◼   ► not developers, but just like regular,

00:17:00 ◼   ► everybody, anybody in the company,

00:17:01 ◼   ► salespeople, managers, everybody,

00:17:03 ◼   ► just start using their own Dropbox accounts,

00:17:05 ◼   ► or making shared Dropbox accounts with like, you know,

00:17:08 ◼   ► just random names, then sharing them amongst all the people,

00:17:10 ◼   ► because it was easier to share files with Dropbox.

00:17:12 ◼   ► But that's not compliant with all our compliance stuff.

00:17:14 ◼   ► So then it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

00:17:16 ◼   ► you can't be using Dropbox, we have all these requirements,

00:17:18 ◼   ► Data has to be in-house, has to be encrypted,

00:17:20 ◼   ► but you know, blah, blah, blah.

00:17:22 ◼   ► And what we're switching to now is box.net,

00:17:25 ◼   ► which is like a secure Dropbox type of thing

00:17:28 ◼   ► that lets you self-host and stuff like that.

00:17:30 ◼   ► That's kind of like the igloo approach,

00:17:31 ◼   ► where you take a product that any users really like,

00:17:34 ◼   ► but they may not have enough of the requirements

00:17:38 ◼   ► to get into an enterprise,

00:17:39 ◼   ► and you go from the consumer side and you say,

00:17:41 ◼   ► what if we just add just enough features and compliance

00:17:44 ◼   ► to get us into not all enterprises,

00:17:46 ◼   ► not even the biggest enterprises,

00:17:47 ◼   ► But now we're a player in the small to medium business type of thing where we'll take a

00:17:52 ◼   ► product that everybody loves.

00:17:54 ◼   ► Apple did it itself with the iPhone.

00:17:55 ◼   ► Take the iPhone that everybody loves and don't make it into a Blackberry, but give it enough

00:18:00 ◼   ► enterprise features like remote wipe, the little bit of a management service or whatever.

00:18:03 ◼   ► You don't bend over backwards and pervert your product to make it into a true enterprise

00:18:06 ◼   ► software.

00:18:07 ◼   ► You merely take a really desirable product that consumers love and you do what it takes

00:18:11 ◼   ► to get in the door.

00:18:13 ◼   ► And that's a bottom-up type approach.

00:18:14 ◼   ► And there's a new Dropbox for business announcement as well.

00:18:17 ◼   ► So now everyone's kind of doing that, where you can get into the enterprise without the

00:18:21 ◼   ► fleet of salespeople and without being like, "We'll do anything for you in the big support

00:18:26 ◼   ► contracts and stuff like that," by just taking a successful consumer product that you know

00:18:29 ◼   ► people are using anyway, sort of on the sly or illegally, quote unquote, and just do what

00:18:33 ◼   ► it takes to get in the door of a couple of businesses.

00:18:36 ◼   ► I think that is a viable strategy for disruption.

00:18:39 ◼   ► We'll see 30 years from now what the state of file sharing within large enterprises looks

00:18:43 ◼   ► like.

00:18:44 ◼   ► I was talking at work with somebody today, just today actually, and he was saying that

00:18:51 ◼   ► he was talking to big banks at some conference a while ago.

00:18:55 ◼   ► That must have been fun.

00:18:57 ◼   ► Well, you would think not, but actually I guess it was very interesting.

00:19:00 ◼   ► My coworker was saying he was talking to, I guess, like a director of innovation or

00:19:04 ◼   ► something like that at a big bank.

00:19:06 ◼   ► This particular gentleman said, "You know, I don't fear the other big banks, and I genuinely

00:19:12 ◼   ► don't know which bank it was.

00:19:13 ◼   ► But for the sake of conversation, let's say it was Bank of America.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And the guy from Bank of America said, "I don't fear Capital One and I don't fear

00:19:20 ◼   ► Wells Fargo."

00:19:21 ◼   ► You know who I fear?

00:19:22 ◼   ► The little startups because they can move so much faster than we can and there's nothing

00:19:28 ◼   ► I can do about that.

00:19:29 ◼   ► And that makes me think of, say, Square.

00:19:31 ◼   ► And Square is never going to replace the Bank of America, but Square is my go-to mechanism

00:19:36 ◼   ► for giving money to friends in sums more than like $10 or whatever I would have in my wallet.

00:19:42 ◼   ► And if I have to pay a friend that I don't see on a regular basis because he did me a

00:19:46 ◼   ► favor or I bought something from them secondhand or whatever the case may be, you know what

00:19:51 ◼   ► I do?

00:19:52 ◼   ► I use square cash.

00:19:53 ◼   ► And it's that sort of disruption—I hate to use that word, I'm probably misusing

00:19:57 ◼   ► it—but that sort of air-quote disruption that I think is scary.

00:20:01 ◼   ► I think Jared's spot on in saying, you know, maybe that's possible.

00:20:05 ◼   ► And if you make a great product, it could happen.

00:20:09 ◼   ► This week's first sponsor is a repeat sponsor, I think.

00:20:13 ◼   ► But anyway, we've had other things from them before.

00:20:17 ◼   ► This week it is Ting.

00:20:19 ◼   ► Ting is from the people at Two Cows.

00:20:21 ◼   ► They are the same company, the parent company of Hover

00:20:23 ◼   ► and so many good things.

00:20:24 ◼   ► Ting is mobile that makes sense.

00:20:27 ◼   ► They're a no BS, simple to use mobile service provider.

00:20:31 ◼   ► They're a reseller on the, they're an MVNO,

00:20:33 ◼   ► if anybody remembers that acronym.

00:20:35 ◼   ► They're an MVNO reseller of the US nationwide Sprint network.

00:20:40 ◼   ► If you go to our special URL, ATP.Ting.com, to get $25 off a new device or a $25 service

00:20:48 ◼   ► credit if you bring your own.

00:20:50 ◼   ► So Ting has great rates, and there's no contracts or early termination fees.

00:20:55 ◼   ► You buy and own your device outright from the start.

00:20:58 ◼   ► So they don't need you to have a contract or come back or pay these big ETFs.

00:21:02 ◼   ► And what's most interesting about them, I think,

00:21:04 ◼   ► is that they have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.

00:21:08 ◼   ► You pay a base price of $6 per month per device,

00:21:11 ◼   ► and then above that, you're just automatically billed

00:21:13 ◼   ► for the actual amount of minutes or messages or megabytes

00:21:16 ◼   ► that you actually use each month.

00:21:18 ◼   ► So for instance, if you never use voice or messages,

00:21:21 ◼   ► you don't pay for them.

00:21:22 ◼   ► If you use, let's say you use 100 megs of data this month,

00:21:25 ◼   ► that's a total of just $9,

00:21:27 ◼   ► including that $6 per device base cost, nine bucks.

00:21:30 ◼   ► And then next month, let's say you're traveling

00:21:32 ◼   ► and use a gig.

00:21:33 ◼   ► Then you'll pay 30 bucks.

00:21:35 ◼   ► You don't need to guess what you're gonna need in advance,

00:21:38 ◼   ► or remember to change it next month.

00:21:39 ◼   ► Like if you boost up your data this month

00:21:41 ◼   ► 'cause you're gonna be traveling

00:21:42 ◼   ► and then next month you gotta bring it back down,

00:21:44 ◼   ► no, you don't have to do that.

00:21:45 ◼   ► You just pay for what you use,

00:21:46 ◼   ► they charge you properly in these little buckets

00:21:48 ◼   ► and you can go on their site and see, it's really great.

00:21:51 ◼   ► On top of that, there's a few small regulatory

00:21:53 ◼   ► surcharges each month,

00:21:54 ◼   ► but only what they're legally required to collect.

00:21:57 ◼   ► They don't charge any mysterious or misleading

00:21:59 ◼   ► like recovery fees that you see on most other wireless

00:22:02 ◼   ► bills, you see all these random fees and you're like,

00:22:04 ◼   ► oh, I wonder what those are.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And some of them are legally required,

00:22:07 ◼   ► some of them aren't and it's kind of shady.

00:22:08 ◼   ► Well, Ting only charges you the minimum

00:22:10 ◼   ► that they need to charge you for those.

00:22:12 ◼   ► And you can add as many devices to your account

00:22:15 ◼   ► as you'd like.

00:22:16 ◼   ► You can use their awesome web interface

00:22:19 ◼   ► to manage a big fleet of devices.

00:22:21 ◼   ► If you have like a big pool of devices you wanna manage,

00:22:23 ◼   ► you can do that.

00:22:24 ◼   ► And it's really great.

00:22:26 ◼   ► So one idea I had for how to use Ting is it'd be great for developers like me.

00:22:31 ◼   ► If you want to have an Android test phone, let's say you're an iOS developer and you're

00:22:35 ◼   ► making an Android version of your app or you need to test out your website on an Android

00:22:39 ◼   ► phone or something like that.

00:22:42 ◼   ► Tablets are fairly easy to get these days, but data plans really aren't and phones really

00:22:45 ◼   ► aren't still.

00:22:47 ◼   ► With Ting, you can get your own Android phone, you can buy a used one or you can get it new

00:22:51 ◼   ► from them.

00:22:52 ◼   ► an Android phone and just have this barely minimal data plane.

00:22:56 ◼   ► You can pay $6 a month most months when it's sitting

00:22:58 ◼   ► in the drawer.

00:22:59 ◼   ► And then you can take it out.

00:23:01 ◼   ► And you can say, oh, I'm going to take this around and test

00:23:03 ◼   ► something out in the world with real service on my phone.

00:23:06 ◼   ► And you'll end up paying like $3 or $4 that month.

00:23:08 ◼   ► It's great.

00:23:09 ◼   ► So I think that's a really great use case for Ting.

00:23:12 ◼   ► You're a developer, you want a test device, boom.

00:23:15 ◼   ► In fact, they even have this cool new thing.

00:23:17 ◼   ► You can even buy a Nexus 5 from the Google Play Store.

00:23:21 ◼   ► and then you can bring that to Ting

00:23:23 ◼   ► to have a first-class Android phablet.

00:23:26 ◼   ► Yes, I said phablet at a fantastic price.

00:23:30 ◼   ► So go to ATP.Ting.com and you can check out this thing

00:23:34 ◼   ► they have on there called the Savings Calculator.

00:23:37 ◼   ► You can look at your current carrier's bills,

00:23:38 ◼   ► you can enter in your actual usage and prices

00:23:40 ◼   ► from the last few months, and it'll show you

00:23:41 ◼   ► how much Ting will save over time.

00:23:44 ◼   ► If you have Verizon, they will even, if you want,

00:23:46 ◼   ► they will take your credentials to log into Verizon

00:23:48 ◼   ► and they'll scrape all your info out of Verizon for you

00:23:51 ◼   ► to do it all automatically.

00:23:53 ◼   ► And then here's another cool thing.

00:23:54 ◼   ► If you're stuck in a contract

00:23:56 ◼   ► and you need to pay an early termination fee

00:23:57 ◼   ► to get yourself to Ting, they have you covered.

00:24:00 ◼   ► They will give you 25% of your ETF

00:24:03 ◼   ► back in service credit up to $75.

00:24:05 ◼   ► So that's pretty cool.

00:24:07 ◼   ► So go to ATP.Ting.com.

00:24:10 ◼   ► You can look, you can see you can bring your own device

00:24:12 ◼   ► or you can buy a new device, you can buy a used device.

00:24:14 ◼   ► Any, or not every, most Sprint devices are compatible.

00:24:17 ◼   ► You can go there to see exactly which ones

00:24:19 ◼   ► and you can buy one from them or bring your own.

00:24:22 ◼   ► Remember, there's no contract

00:24:23 ◼   ► and no early termination fees,

00:24:24 ◼   ► so these are devices you just buy them,

00:24:26 ◼   ► you own them outright, and you pay for whatever you use.

00:24:29 ◼   ► Check out Ting at ATP.Ting.com,

00:24:32 ◼   ► and thank you very much to Ting for sponsoring the show.

00:24:35 ◼   ► - I have one quick bit of follow-up

00:24:37 ◼   ► to end the follow-up train,

00:24:38 ◼   ► and it vaguely relates to Everpix,

00:24:41 ◼   ► which is going to really make everyone excited.

00:24:44 ◼   ► The two Windows phone users came out of the woodwork

00:24:47 ◼   ► over the last week to complain about the fact

00:24:50 ◼   ► that I called it Windows Phone Series 7 Mobile Series phone,

00:24:54 ◼   ► Metro not Metro phone.

00:24:56 ◼   ► And to be honest-- - I think that was fair.

00:24:58 ◼   ► - Well, to be honest, I mean, I think they're right.

00:25:00 ◼   ► And I got some tweets from RB and an email from Chris M

00:25:05 ◼   ► where they took issue with what I was saying

00:25:08 ◼   ► and to some degree, I think they were right.

00:25:10 ◼   ► And so let me read a quote from this email,

00:25:13 ◼   ► which I never actually got blessing to read from,

00:25:14 ◼   ► but whatever.

00:25:16 ◼   ► They were talking about, among other things, and we saw this from other people as well,

00:25:20 ◼   ► that SkyDrive apparently is kind of Everpix for Windows Phone pictures.

00:25:25 ◼   ► And so this is Chris who emailed me, "When I jumped from iOS to Windows Phone because

00:25:31 ◼   ► it was just too gaudy in 2010, I got something very, very nice, indefinite photo backups.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I just looked at my SkyDrive and saw that I've got 8,581 photos backed up.

00:25:42 ◼   ► That's many photos I've taken for just over three years on my phone.

00:25:45 ◼   ► That whole ever picks debacle, that whole does or doesn't

00:25:48 ◼   ► iCloud backup more than 1,000 photos,

00:25:50 ◼   ► we don't have that problem, all 4% of us.

00:25:54 ◼   ► And so it is worth noting that this is a really cool thing.

00:26:00 ◼   ► And I didn't look into it any more than these emails

00:26:02 ◼   ► and tweets that we got.

00:26:03 ◼   ► But that's what I wanted from Apple.

00:26:06 ◼   ► And it seems that Microsoft can do it,

00:26:08 ◼   ► and perhaps they can do it because they have 4%

00:26:10 ◼   ► of the users, like Chris said.

00:26:12 ◼   ► But it is very compelling, and it is very interesting.

00:26:15 ◼   ► And I should give Microsoft some credit for that.

00:26:17 ◼   ► So my apologies to the Windows Phone users of the world,

00:26:21 ◼   ► and I appreciate you guys pointing that out.

00:26:23 ◼   ► The thing about all these, though, is that even though it

00:26:26 ◼   ► seems like they're being magnanimous and doing this out

00:26:29 ◼   ► of the goodness of their heart to help you keep your photos

00:26:31 ◼   ► safe and maybe make you more satisfied with your Windows

00:26:34 ◼   ► Phone or your Google Phone or whatever,

00:26:36 ◼   ► it is also a form of platform lock-in.

00:26:39 ◼   ► Because--

00:26:39 ◼   ► Oh, sure.

00:26:40 ◼   ► Say every one of these, say Microsoft, Google, and Apple all protect all your photos forever.

00:26:45 ◼   ► Which one of those companies, if any, gives you a way to switch platforms?

00:26:50 ◼   ► Say, "Oh, I've decided I don't like Windows Phone anymore.

00:26:52 ◼   ► Now I'm going to try an Android phone.

00:26:54 ◼   ► I'm going to try Google Nexus," whatever number they're up to.

00:26:57 ◼   ► And then you think, "Oh, hey, wait a second.

00:27:00 ◼   ► All my pictures are on Microsoft SkyDrive.

00:27:03 ◼   ► When I buy my new Google phone and set it up, where are all my pictures going to be?

00:27:08 ◼   ► How am I going to see them?

00:27:09 ◼   ► Is Microsoft going to bend over backwards to say,

00:27:11 ◼   ► oh, it's easy, you can just export all your photos here

00:27:13 ◼   ► and put them in there.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Do you assume that all the photos in your SkyDrive

00:27:16 ◼   ► also exist on your local disk

00:27:18 ◼   ► 'cause they're mirror dropbox style?

00:27:19 ◼   ► Or do you have backups of them?

00:27:20 ◼   ► Like this siloing effect,

00:27:23 ◼   ► I mean, it's good for all the individual companies.

00:27:25 ◼   ► And I would think out of all the companies,

00:27:26 ◼   ► Google is the most likely to give you a way

00:27:28 ◼   ► to get your data out because they're pretty good thus far

00:27:30 ◼   ► about giving you some sort of gigantic,

00:27:32 ◼   ► give me my data out in a non-proprietary format.

00:27:34 ◼   ► But certainly Apple is not good about that.

00:27:36 ◼   ► And I imagine Microsoft would not be either.

00:27:39 ◼   ► So that's something we didn't even talk about last time.

00:27:40 ◼   ► Like, assume we snap our fingers and everybody

00:27:43 ◼   ► provides a way to protect all our data,

00:27:45 ◼   ► including our photos forever up in the cloud

00:27:47 ◼   ► and blah, blah, blah.

00:27:48 ◼   ► Now we're all locked in even further to the platforms

00:27:52 ◼   ► that we're using, probably.

00:27:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I think it's wise,

00:27:56 ◼   ► when you're looking at how you're gonna do

00:27:59 ◼   ► something like this, it's wise to break that hard link

00:28:02 ◼   ► with one of these major platform vendors

00:28:05 ◼   ► who's gonna have all these different strategy barriers.

00:28:08 ◼   ► they're gonna probably erect.

00:28:10 ◼   ► And I think it's better to go with something

00:28:12 ◼   ► either self-managed, where it's on all your stuff,

00:28:14 ◼   ► like a hard drive and transporter and Dropbox,

00:28:17 ◼   ► stuff like that, or go with something like Everpix,

00:28:20 ◼   ► which is a service that is kind of neutral

00:28:22 ◼   ► and unlikely to be bought, well actually,

00:28:26 ◼   ► I guess, sorry, I can't really say that.

00:28:29 ◼   ► - If Everpix had stayed in business, fine,

00:28:30 ◼   ► but then once they get acquired,

00:28:32 ◼   ► kind of like how Facebook's always snapped,

00:28:33 ◼   ► how Facebook bought Instagram and everything,

00:28:35 ◼   ► you thought you were using this independent service

00:28:36 ◼   ► and now it's part of the Facebook empire,

00:28:38 ◼   ► like that's just something you have to watch for.

00:28:40 ◼   ► Like we said in the last thing,

00:28:41 ◼   ► none of these things are gonna be your solution forever.

00:28:43 ◼   ► It's your responsibility to have all these different things

00:28:47 ◼   ► and then when one of them goes away, gets acquired,

00:28:50 ◼   ► starts behaving in a way you don't like or whatever,

00:28:52 ◼   ► then you swap it out for what you are.

00:28:54 ◼   ► Like you're never gonna be all set forever.

00:28:57 ◼   ► You're always going to have to keep an eye on these things

00:29:00 ◼   ► and decide when some service or vendor

00:29:03 ◼   ► is now across the line into something you don't like

00:29:05 ◼   ► then you've got to switch.

00:29:08 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:29:09 ◼   ► So totally changing topics.

00:29:10 ◼   ► Jon, I assume you have been following the reviews of the PS4 and Xbone.

00:29:17 ◼   ► I haven't even actually read any of the reviews, but I've read so much about both of them beforehand.

00:29:21 ◼   ► It's almost like now that people actually have them, what are they going to say that

00:29:25 ◼   ► I didn't already know about it?

00:29:27 ◼   ► But the one thing that we all didn't know about any of these things is how many people

00:29:31 ◼   ► are going to buy them.

00:29:32 ◼   ► And now for the PS4 at the very least we do have sales numbers proudly announced by Sony

00:29:37 ◼   ► itself.

00:29:39 ◼   ► They said that they sold a million of these in the first 24 hours in North America alone.

00:29:44 ◼   ► And that doesn't sound like a lot compared to how many iPhones sell on the first day.

00:29:47 ◼   ► There was like 9 million that first weekend or something for the 5S.

00:29:51 ◼   ► But in the world of game consoles, I put a link into this Economist story which I think

00:29:56 ◼   ► had some nice graphs about it, or some interesting graphs anyway, but in the world of game consoles

00:30:01 ◼   ► Those numbers are actually pretty good.

00:30:04 ◼   ► The PlayStation 4 sold more consoles in its first 24 hours

00:30:09 ◼   ► than any other previous console sold in, I think,

00:30:11 ◼   ► its first week or maybe its first month.

00:30:14 ◼   ► It's really big opening day numbers.

00:30:17 ◼   ► And the reason I bring this up is

00:30:20 ◼   ► because we had a conversation about Nintendo-- I don't know,

00:30:25 ◼   ► a couple months ago when everyone was talking about Nintendo.

00:30:27 ◼   ► I did this post on Hypercritical Nintendo in Crisis.

00:30:30 ◼   ► We should put that in the show notes.

00:30:31 ◼   ► And one of the things I said in it was that if the market for dedicated

00:30:36 ◼   ► gaming hardware goes away, then Nintendo is probably in big trouble because I

00:30:40 ◼   ► don't think Nintendo has the ability to put out a full fledged platform, like for

00:30:45 ◼   ► applications and everything in the style of iOS or Android, just doesn't seem like

00:30:49 ◼   ► that's in the, you know, it's just something that the company is not able to

00:30:52 ◼   ► do.

00:30:52 ◼   ► And to be fair, very few companies are able to do that.

00:30:55 ◼   ► Who is able to produce a platform for mobile desktop or anything?

00:30:59 ◼   ► Many companies have tried and most of them have failed.

00:31:03 ◼   ► And we've got Windows Phone barely, Android,

00:31:06 ◼   ► and we've got iOS.

00:31:07 ◼   ► And on the desktop, we've got Windows, the Mac,

00:31:09 ◼   ► and maybe Linux if you want to throw that in there.

00:31:12 ◼   ► And dead bodies of all the past companies

00:31:14 ◼   ► that have tried from Palm OS to Amiga to OS 2 and BOS,

00:31:21 ◼   ► all these companies that couldn't do it.

00:31:23 ◼   ► So I don't think Nintendo is a platform company.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And I think their survival depends

00:31:28 ◼   ► there being a market for dedicated gaming hardware.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Now out of the next generation consoles, the PlayStation 4 is the most dedicated gaming

00:31:35 ◼   ► hardware.

00:31:36 ◼   ► The Xbox One tries to be like, we do television stuff and you can do Skype with your friends

00:31:42 ◼   ► and you can overlay a web browser on top of your game, on top of your, you know, it is

00:31:45 ◼   ► trying to, it has an HDMI input for crying out loud, it is trying to be a television

00:31:50 ◼   ► experience with the Kinect built in and all of that stuff.

00:31:53 ◼   ► The Wii U, I don't know quite what that is, I guess you would call it a dedicated gaming

00:31:57 ◼   ► console as well, but it's actually very strange with the handheld tablet thing and everything

00:32:01 ◼   ► like that.

00:32:02 ◼   ► The PlayStation 4 is straight up the middle.

00:32:03 ◼   ► It's a box that has controllers, plugs into your TV, you put a game disc in it, you play

00:32:08 ◼   ► the game with the controller on the TV.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Very straightforward.

00:32:13 ◼   ► And so what does the very big opening day sales of the PlayStation 4 say about the viability

00:32:20 ◼   ► of dedicated gaming hardware?

00:32:22 ◼   ► I think, do you guys have the Economist thing open with those charts?

00:32:26 ◼   ► Mmm, I don't but I can I don't do my homework click it in the link. It's in the show notes

00:32:30 ◼   ► All right. I got it. Yeah, I I think these charts are interesting for a couple of reasons

00:32:36 ◼   ► This shows that the generations of game consoles. I don't know how they come up with these numbers

00:32:41 ◼   ► They're probably from the Wikipedia pages

00:32:42 ◼   ► But the sixth generation is listed as the ps2 game cube and Xbox 7th is the Wii ps3 and Xbox 360 and the 8th is

00:32:49 ◼   ► ps4 Xbox one and Wii U

00:32:51 ◼   ► You guys all have the charts up now. Yeah

00:32:54 ◼   ► You can look in the sixth generation and you can see how massively the ps2 dominated like if you're not into games

00:33:00 ◼   ► Or don't follow the industry you might think oh that was the time when these three consoles existed

00:33:05 ◼   ► And if your friends house who you always went over if they had an Xbox the original Xbox you would have thought yeah

00:33:10 ◼   ► That generation was pretty much evenly split between like Xbox and ps2 and I don't know anybody with a GameCube or you might say

00:33:15 ◼   ► Oh, I had a GameCube and it sold about as many as the ps2 and Xbox right now

00:33:20 ◼   ► You look at these graphs, and it's very clear that was the ps2 generation

00:33:23 ◼   ► Xbox and GameCube also existed as products, more or less.

00:33:27 ◼   ► It's not, you know, it was a blowout.

00:33:29 ◼   ► And then you look at the seventh generation

00:33:31 ◼   ► with the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360,

00:33:33 ◼   ► and you can see the Wii just shooting up like a rocket ship

00:33:36 ◼   ► and then coming down like a rocket ship, you know.

00:33:40 ◼   ► (both laughing)

00:33:41 ◼   ► But still massively dominating that generation

00:33:44 ◼   ► because the PS3 and the 360

00:33:46 ◼   ► are just these little lumps underneath.

00:33:48 ◼   ► And even though they had more longevity than the Wii,

00:33:50 ◼   ► they could not come back from that just,

00:33:53 ◼   ► I mean, look at the slope of that thing.

00:33:54 ◼   ► It's just unbelievable.

00:33:55 ◼   ► - All right, it's the model rocket trajectory.

00:33:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, but clearly the Wii dominated that generation.

00:34:01 ◼   ► It may have had a big fall, but it went up twice as high.

00:34:04 ◼   ► Actually, I think I pulled numbers from Wikipedia

00:34:06 ◼   ► for that to see what the heck was in there.

00:34:08 ◼   ► Wii was 100 million, PS3 ended up being around 80 million,

00:34:11 ◼   ► Xbox 360 ended up being 76 million.

00:34:13 ◼   ► And most of that is because the Wii's sales just dropped off

00:34:16 ◼   ► and the PS3 and Xbox kept chipping away.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Like the longer that generation went on,

00:34:20 ◼   ► the more the PS3 and 360 would start to catch up.

00:34:22 ◼   ► But it was a blowout in the beginning and middle.

00:34:25 ◼   ► And then the hilarious eighth generation chart

00:34:28 ◼   ► they have here, you notice that gray area that says Fcast,

00:34:32 ◼   ► which I guess is the hip way to say forecast.

00:34:35 ◼   ► They're trying to forecast into the future.

00:34:37 ◼   ► Each one of these charts has an area where they're

00:34:39 ◼   ► forecasting into the future.

00:34:40 ◼   ► But the eighth generation chart is all in the Fcast zone.

00:34:43 ◼   ► It's all forecast.

00:34:45 ◼   ► There's one data point that's not in the forecast.

00:34:47 ◼   ► Right, well, the Wii U has been out for a little while,

00:34:50 ◼   ► and the PS4 has been out for a day.

00:34:52 ◼   ► and the Xbox One is not out yet.

00:34:53 ◼   ► So they said, let's just make stuff up.

00:34:55 ◼   ► Here's what we think the future of this thing will be.

00:34:57 ◼   ► And they draw a bunch of lines,

00:34:59 ◼   ► and they show the Wii U being small,

00:35:00 ◼   ► that's probably a safe bet.

00:35:02 ◼   ► And then they show the Xbox One and PS4,

00:35:04 ◼   ► the PS4 being higher,

00:35:06 ◼   ► but none of those lines come close to reaching

00:35:08 ◼   ► the peaks of the Wii U or the PS2.

00:35:11 ◼   ► Like they're having the PS4 top out

00:35:13 ◼   ► around like 15 million, I guess a year or two from now.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I don't know where they come up with these numbers, but.

00:35:20 ◼   ► well if you look at the previous generation it looks like they're

00:35:22 ◼   ► basically assuming that the ps4 is going to sell about as well as the ps3

00:35:26 ◼   ► yeah and that the xbox one will be worse than the 360

00:35:29 ◼   ► but see i think i would disagree with that because i i think if you look at this

00:35:32 ◼   ► generation it's very clear

00:35:34 ◼   ► as you said like that that sony is really

00:35:36 ◼   ► targeting like gamers this is a gaming machine we're not gonna try to do a

00:35:40 ◼   ► whole lot of other multimedia things

00:35:41 ◼   ► we're not gonna try to be a tv pass through with you know all this other stuff that

00:35:45 ◼   ► the xbone is doing

00:35:46 ◼   ► they're really just trying to be

00:35:48 ◼   ► a really good gaming machine

00:35:49 ◼   ► And so I think they're probably going to do a lot better

00:35:54 ◼   ► this time than Microsoft will.

00:35:57 ◼   ► And I think they're probably gonna sell a lot more units

00:36:00 ◼   ► than what's in this Fcast zone in this graph.

00:36:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I said on a past podcast that,

00:36:05 ◼   ► I think it was when I was on talk show

00:36:06 ◼   ► talking about this with Gruber,

00:36:08 ◼   ► that my premise, like, Nintendo better hope

00:36:12 ◼   ► that there's a market for dedicated gaming hardware

00:36:13 ◼   ► because they can't, they're doomed if there's not,

00:36:15 ◼   ► because they can't do anything

00:36:16 ◼   ► but dedicated gaming hardware.

00:36:18 ◼   ► And I said, I think there is at least one more generation

00:36:23 ◼   ► of dedicated gaming hardware,

00:36:25 ◼   ► that it will be viable for one more generation.

00:36:26 ◼   ► 'Cause at that time, none of these things were out yet,

00:36:28 ◼   ► except for the Wii U.

00:36:28 ◼   ► And even though it wasn't doing that well,

00:36:30 ◼   ► I said, I think maybe dedicated gaming hardware

00:36:32 ◼   ► does go away.

00:36:33 ◼   ► And we all play this on our phones wirelessly to our TVs

00:36:36 ◼   ► or a little Apple TV style puck or whatever,

00:36:39 ◼   ► but not this generation.

00:36:40 ◼   ► We are at least one more generation

00:36:41 ◼   ► of what we know as actual game consoles,

00:36:44 ◼   ► whether they have fancy other functionality as well.

00:36:46 ◼   ► And the reason I think that is because the last console generation was like seven to

00:36:50 ◼   ► eight years long, which is pretty long for a console generation, especially at the pace

00:36:54 ◼   ► things develop in the electronics industry these days.

00:36:58 ◼   ► And so there's a whole generation of kids who grew up with these consoles who have never

00:37:02 ◼   ► seen a new console launch.

00:37:03 ◼   ► Like they started playing when they were seven, eight, or nine years old, and now they're

00:37:07 ◼   ► like a teenager entering college, or maybe they're in their early to mid 20s or something.

00:37:12 ◼   ► grown up their entire life with just one game console or like one one generation

00:37:17 ◼   ► of game consoles. They're at that age where they have a job, they don't have

00:37:20 ◼   ► anything else to spend on except for like, you know, entertainment, going to the

00:37:25 ◼   ► movies, buying video games, and buying game consoles, going out like they don't

00:37:29 ◼   ► have a mortgage or family or whatever. These people are absolutely positively

00:37:33 ◼   ► ready to experience the thrill and excitement that people my age have

00:37:37 ◼   ► experienced many times over of a new game console generation. Maybe they

00:37:41 ◼   ► heard from the old folkies like us, like "Oh, the Nintendo 64 came out, Mario 64 blew our

00:37:45 ◼   ► mind, and oh, the SNES, it was so amazing, got to play JRPGs," and like, you know, they've

00:37:51 ◼   ► never had that. Their whole life has just been this. Imagine if your whole life, like

00:37:54 ◼   ► the computer that you played with when you were eight, you were still playing with that

00:37:57 ◼   ► same computer when you were 16. That feels like just way longer from the ages of eight

00:38:00 ◼   ► to 16 than, you know, the same eight years for an adult. They are ready to buy, and it

00:38:06 ◼   ► not surprise me that a million of them went out and bought the PS4 on day one, because

00:38:11 ◼   ► these people who played with the PS3 and maybe their older brothers' PS2 and maybe they even

00:38:15 ◼   ► went back to the PS1, but they have never been through a console launch.

00:38:18 ◼   ► So boom, a million out the door.

00:38:19 ◼   ► I think the Xbox One launch will also go pretty well.

00:38:23 ◼   ► So far, so good for the idea of there being a viable market for dedicated gaming hardware.

00:38:28 ◼   ► But I'm not sure that these one million buyers who bought on day one represent anything more

00:38:33 ◼   ► than the most enthusiastic gamers.

00:38:35 ◼   ► I'm not sure that they, like if you look at these graphs, is it going to be something

00:38:38 ◼   ► more like the Wii graph where it goes up really steeply and then it takes a turn?

00:38:44 ◼   ► I don't know if this kind of sales pace can be sustained.

00:38:47 ◼   ► I think the PS4 is a great product and I think that at the very least everybody who bought

00:38:52 ◼   ► a 360 or a PS3 would be perfectly satisfied with a PS4 or Xbox One.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I'm just not sure how many of them think that this is something that they need to go out

00:39:00 ◼   ► and buy.

00:39:02 ◼   ► So I'm keeping my eye on this to see, not just like, oh, great opening day sales.

00:39:07 ◼   ► If it was a negative result, like if no one went out and bought it on day one, that would

00:39:10 ◼   ► be a terrible, terrible sign.

00:39:11 ◼   ► But having it be such an overwhelmingly positive result, like, wow, biggest first day sales

00:39:16 ◼   ► of a new console ever in the history of anything, that is merely neutral, I think.

00:39:21 ◼   ► It doesn't preclude the idea that these sales will taper off and never get up to the levels

00:39:27 ◼   ► of the PS2 or the Wii in the past generations.

00:39:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I think there was a really good quote that I wanted to relay from the AnandTech

00:39:36 ◼   ► review today that basically he has his hands on an Xbone and a PS4 and so he compares them

00:39:43 ◼   ► and stuff.

00:39:44 ◼   ► And first of all, I think it's really interesting to see the...

00:39:46 ◼   ► He took side-by-side videos and screenshots so you can see the differences in the same

00:39:50 ◼   ► game ported to both systems and the graphical difference between the two.

00:39:55 ◼   ► And man, to my eye, the PS4 version looks way better.

00:39:59 ◼   ► But on the very last page she says, "Being an early adopter of an XGen console is rarely

00:40:04 ◼   ► a fun thing.

00:40:06 ◼   ► Literally all of my friends are on Xbox 360s or PS3s, meaning online multiplayer with people

00:40:11 ◼   ► I know is pretty much out of the question for at least a year or so."

00:40:14 ◼   ► And then this is the part that I thought was most interesting.

00:40:17 ◼   ► The launch lineup for both platforms is reasonable but could be a lot better.

00:40:21 ◼   ► Having just played Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us, I'm going to need more than

00:40:24 ◼   ► COD or NBA 2K14 to really draw me into the Xbox One or PS4.

00:40:29 ◼   ► This is how the story goes with any new console launch.

00:40:32 ◼   ► And I think that's, you know, I haven't heard of any must-have games for all three

00:40:38 ◼   ► of these consoles.

00:40:39 ◼   ► I mean, Jon, how's the Wii U doing on that front?

00:40:41 ◼   ► Like -- Nintendo actually usually does pretty good about system selling games.

00:40:45 ◼   ► They've really dropped the ball on the Wii U, but even they had more games out of the

00:40:49 ◼   ► -- like, one of the reasons I don't have a PS4 yet is because there were no launch

00:40:52 ◼   ► titles that I said I need to have that title, which is very often the case.

00:40:55 ◼   ► And Anand's right about this.

00:40:56 ◼   ► enough to have lived through many console launches. And it's gotten worse now that the console makers

00:41:01 ◼   ► are on the hook to not necessarily produce a platform like iOS or Android, but they're on the

00:41:06 ◼   ► hook to provide network services, social networking, digital downloads, fancy features. All these

00:41:12 ◼   ► consoles are launching without the full complement of features that were promised in all the previous

00:41:17 ◼   ► keynote speeches, the PS4 in particular. And all of them, even if they did launch with all the

00:41:21 ◼   ► features, they won't work for months or years. Like this is the long game. It's not like an iPad

00:41:25 ◼   ► where Apple releases a new iPad, and it better be the M Good, because next year another one's coming out.

00:41:29 ◼   ► There's not gonna be another console for like six, seven, eight years, maybe longer.

00:41:33 ◼   ► This is a long game for these guys, and out of the gate, their software platforms suck.

00:41:38 ◼   ► They don't have the features that they want, they don't have, they don't work right, the ones that are there, like,

00:41:42 ◼   ► all these things that the hardware is capable of, uh, you know,

00:41:46 ◼   ► it just, like, the PS4 doesn't even have a standby mode, like, where you don't have to have to turn the thing entirely off,

00:41:50 ◼   ► you got to turn it totally off, and then it's got to boot totally up, which is like,

00:41:53 ◼   ► It's like didn't you have all these presentations saying oh the PS4 is going to have an auxiliary

00:41:58 ◼   ► chip to keep it on, do all this stuff?

00:41:59 ◼   ► Nope, doesn't do any of that stuff out of the gate.

00:42:01 ◼   ► So anybody who's buying this console stuff, especially if you were an early adopter of

00:42:05 ◼   ► the PS3 or the 360, is used to this now.

00:42:08 ◼   ► Because when the PS3 launched the software was horrendous, like you couldn't even download

00:42:11 ◼   ► games in the background.

00:42:12 ◼   ► And the 360 has gone through many major revisions.

00:42:15 ◼   ► So all the people buying this, I think especially on day one, they realize I'm getting a day

00:42:19 ◼   ► one console.

00:42:20 ◼   ► It's going to be a piece of crap.

00:42:21 ◼   ► It's not going to work right.

00:42:23 ◼   ► this exact same hardware three, four years from now, boy, it'll really be singing.

00:42:27 ◼   ► They won't have to do any upgrades, they won't have to buy a new video card, they won't have

00:42:30 ◼   ► to do anything except for apply software updates, which presumably will come down faster, and

00:42:34 ◼   ► people using the PS4 have said, "Thank God, it downloads software updates much better

00:42:38 ◼   ► than it used to."

00:42:40 ◼   ► All that being said, like you were getting at before, the main thing about this is, okay,

00:42:45 ◼   ► fine.

00:42:46 ◼   ► It's gonna be buggy, it's gonna have many missing features that I was promised, I'm

00:42:48 ◼   ► I'm assuming they'll come later, but as long as it has GameX that I really want to play

00:42:54 ◼   ► in amazing next generation graphics with next generation features in the new controller,

00:42:58 ◼   ► whatever, I'll buy it.

00:43:00 ◼   ► And I don't think the PlayStation 4 has any of those games at this point, and that's not

00:43:04 ◼   ► a very strong launch.

00:43:05 ◼   ► They sold a million systems in 24 hours without any system selling games.

00:43:09 ◼   ► There is no Mario 64 for the PS4.

00:43:12 ◼   ► It didn't even launch with Last Guardian for the crazy people like me.

00:43:16 ◼   ► There's no launch title out there that people say, "I wasn't going to get a PS4, but once

00:43:20 ◼   ► I saw I had GameX, I had to get it."

00:43:22 ◼   ► And that's, I guess, also still a positive sign.

00:43:25 ◼   ► It's a negative sign for the PS4's game library, but I think with these sales numbers and the

00:43:30 ◼   ► pipeline of games, we don't have to worry about there not being a lot of games for the

00:43:32 ◼   ► PS4, but it was not a Nintendo-style launch where the only reason people buy the system

00:43:36 ◼   ► is because there's one game on it that you absolutely have to play.

00:43:40 ◼   ► So I think everyone involved in this process understands that this is not a sprint, it's

00:43:50 ◼   ► a marathon.

00:43:51 ◼   ► And I don't even know if the Wii U will be finishing that marathon at this rate.

00:43:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm really not positive on my outlook of the Wii U's future.

00:44:01 ◼   ► I really do think that this is going to be a PS4-dominated generation, and the X-Bone

00:44:06 ◼   ► is going to be second place, probably half the volume of the PS4 over time. And I don't

00:44:13 ◼   ► think the Wii U is going to show up much on the chart.

00:44:16 ◼   ► I give the Xbox more. I don't think that the PS4 is going to be double it. But ask me again

00:44:21 ◼   ► after the Xbox One line.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll talk about it again in a year.

00:44:24 ◼   ► Yeah, because they do--the thing about the Xbox One is it's a good game machine and also

00:44:30 ◼   ► X, Y, and Z. And Microsoft does online, and its software stacks so much better than Sony,

00:44:35 ◼   ► that is increasingly important.

00:44:38 ◼   ► I don't-- it's tough to handicap this,

00:44:41 ◼   ► because they are very complementary.

00:44:44 ◼   ► There's not a lot of overlap in their strengths.

00:44:46 ◼   ► Microsoft is so strong in the areas

00:44:47 ◼   ► that Sony is so weak and vice versa.

00:44:50 ◼   ► So we'll have to wait and see.

00:44:52 ◼   ► And these days, system-selling games are hard to come by.

00:44:55 ◼   ► Like with Xbox, Halo is the reason the Xbox exists at all.

00:44:58 ◼   ► If the Halo franchise did not exist,

00:45:00 ◼   ► I don't think Microsoft would have

00:45:01 ◼   ► been willing to put that much money into the console.

00:45:04 ◼   ► and Sony had lots of systems selling Final Fantasy VII and all that stuff that made Sony,

00:45:08 ◼   ► Sony. But nowadays, these launch titles that you see, I guess Killzone, everyone's got

00:45:16 ◼   ► their one exclusive first-person shooter, but is that even the most popular first-person

00:45:19 ◼   ► shooter? What about Call of Duty and all the other things that are multi-platform?

00:45:22 ◼   ► Right, and all the big sports franchises are all multi-platform.

00:45:25 ◼   ► Grand Theft Auto, so many things are multi-platform. And even when you think get an exclusive,

00:45:30 ◼   ► all that means is it'll be on your platform in a year or six months or whatever. That's

00:45:33 ◼   ► That's what exclusive means these days.

00:45:35 ◼   ► So the only things that are exclusive exclusive are first party games, which I don't think

00:45:40 ◼   ► even Halo is at this point.

00:45:41 ◼   ► Oh no, is Halo?

00:45:42 ◼   ► Yeah, Microsoft still owns Halo and they're having 343 Studios or whatever do it, and

00:45:47 ◼   ► Bungie is off doing Destiny, which is multi-platform by the way.

00:45:49 ◼   ► Sony has its own little arty in-house things and stuff like Gran Turismo and stuff like

00:45:55 ◼   ► that.

00:45:56 ◼   ► And Nintendo, of course, their entire business is built on first party.

00:45:58 ◼   ► Those are never available anywhere, and that's the only reason anyone buys Nintendo hardware

00:46:03 ◼   ► anymore is because the hardware/software synergy and you can't get that software anywhere else.

00:46:06 ◼   ► So that continues to be Nintendo's hope for success. I think we should do one more sponsor

00:46:13 ◼   ► and then I have a little bit more about Nintendo afterwards to wrap up this segment.

00:46:18 ◼   ► I'm actually really upset that Sony killed the Wipeout Studio, so there's not going to

00:46:22 ◼   ► be a Wipeout for PS4.

00:46:23 ◼   ► They sold more games that would have survived.

00:46:26 ◼   ► I probably would have bought a PS4 to play the next Wipeout. That's how much I love Wipeout.

00:46:30 ◼   ► It is the only game I own for my PS3.

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00:47:20 ◼   ► I actually looked before the show

00:47:22 ◼   ► and looked at some of their stuff.

00:47:23 ◼   ► They have metals I'd never even heard of yet.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Like they have all the golds and platinums

00:47:27 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:47:28 ◼   ► But they even had, there's something called rose gold now,

00:47:29 ◼   ► Do you guys even know where this existed?

00:47:31 ◼   ► - No.

00:47:33 ◼   ► - I'm sure, John, you're an expert on this.

00:47:35 ◼   ► - Rose gold?

00:47:36 ◼   ► Is that like the new color of the next iPhone?

00:47:39 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughs)

00:47:40 ◼   ► No, it's actually, it's like a darker shade.

00:47:43 ◼   ► It's interesting, it's a different shade of gold.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Like, it's not white gold, they have white, yellow,

00:47:48 ◼   ► and then there's rose, which is interesting.

00:47:49 ◼   ► - I see it on the website, it looks nice.

00:47:51 ◼   ► It looks kind of like copper-ish.

00:47:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, like a little bit of like a pinkish, reddish,

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00:48:02 ◼   ► So each Gemwara piece is made to order,

00:48:05 ◼   ► and it gets delivered in less than two weeks.

00:48:08 ◼   ► And for pieces that can be engraved,

00:48:09 ◼   ► it'll even do engraving for free.

00:48:12 ◼   ► Gemwara offers free ring resizing if it doesn't fit,

00:48:15 ◼   ► and they have a 101-day return policy.

00:48:18 ◼   ► So you can buy well in advance of a holiday

00:48:20 ◼   ► or special occasion if you need to.

00:48:23 ◼   ► If you still have questions or if you need any help at all,

00:48:25 ◼   ► Gemwara's jewelry consultants work 24/7 to help you out.

00:48:29 ◼   ► So check out Gemvara. That's G-E-M-V-A-R-A dot com. They're the revolutionary leader

00:48:35 ◼   ► of custom-made fine jewelry shopping online. Thanks a lot to Gemvara for sponsoring the

00:48:40 ◼   ► show.

00:48:41 ◼   ► You know, like with these sponsors like Gemvara and Warby Parker, where it's a web version

00:48:47 ◼   ► to buy something that previously you'd always like, "Oh, I always have to buy those in

00:48:50 ◼   ► person because of reasons X, Y, Z." I'm like fast-forwarding 50 years in the future,

00:48:56 ◼   ► And instead of just having a website where you can build your own custom ring out of

00:48:59 ◼   ► like, pick this, pick the gem, pick the accent thing, pick the metal color, pick the design,

00:49:03 ◼   ► and like sort of building your own thing, like, I guess it's in sci-fi territory where

00:49:07 ◼   ► it's like, why can't I just 3D print anything that I want?

00:49:10 ◼   ► And I'll just go to a website and the replicator machine will make me, you know, tea or a grey

00:49:15 ◼   ► hot or whatever it is that I ask for.

00:49:17 ◼   ► And we're creeping up on that.

00:49:18 ◼   ► And I think that that sales process of sitting in front of your computer and clicking a bunch

00:49:22 ◼   ► of buttons and seeing some nicely rendered graphics update with the thing it is that

00:49:26 ◼   ► you are potentially manufacturing or having manufactured on your behalf is so much nicer

00:49:30 ◼   ► than driving to a store and talking to salespeople and going from store to store and sitting

00:49:36 ◼   ► in traffic.

00:49:37 ◼   ► Just sitting at a website and clicking buttons until you get what you want is much nicer.

00:49:41 ◼   ► So we're creeping up on the replicator machines a little bit.

00:49:44 ◼   ► There may be a web interface instead of a voice interface and a box in the wall.

00:49:48 ◼   ► Awesome.

00:49:49 ◼   ► All right, John.

00:49:52 ◼   ► You said you had some more stuff about video games.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Yeah, one final bit on Nintendo and their prospects.

00:50:00 ◼   ► There was some rumors-- there's always rumors about Nintendo.

00:50:03 ◼   ► And I don't know how founder these are,

00:50:04 ◼   ► but just maybe think of this.

00:50:05 ◼   ► The rumors were like, oh, Nintendo making an Android

00:50:07 ◼   ► tablet or whatever.

00:50:08 ◼   ► I think these have been going around for months and months.

00:50:10 ◼   ► They're resurfacing.

00:50:11 ◼   ► That's ridiculous.

00:50:12 ◼   ► And everyone always wants to hear,

00:50:15 ◼   ► Nintendo's making apps for iOS.

00:50:16 ◼   ► Nintendo's going to do this for Android.

00:50:18 ◼   ► All these things that they think, oh, Nintendo's problem

00:50:21 ◼   ► a real platform and they don't have one and they can't make one, therefore they have to

00:50:25 ◼   ► like join one, you know, instead of doing their own thing.

00:50:29 ◼   ► And the reason I bring this up is because there is an aspect of it that can make the

00:50:34 ◼   ► people who wrote those stories claim victory later.

00:50:37 ◼   ► Like it's not as crazy as it sounds because Nintendo devices do need some kind of operating

00:50:41 ◼   ► system, you know, these days because they don't just, it's not just you stick a cartridge

00:50:45 ◼   ► in like a Nintendo and it just like plays the cartridge.

00:50:48 ◼   ► They do other things.

00:50:49 ◼   ► is sort of like an OS type layer.

00:50:51 ◼   ► And if Nintendo decides that it's easier or better

00:50:53 ◼   ► to use Android as its OS instead of whatever the heck they're

00:50:56 ◼   ► using now as their sort of embedded OS,

00:50:58 ◼   ► and they're sick of maintaining it and developing it

00:51:00 ◼   ► and they just want to base it on Android, that's fine.

00:51:03 ◼   ► But that is an entirely separate question

00:51:05 ◼   ► from whether or not their devices will suddenly become

00:51:08 ◼   ► quote unquote "Android devices," whether you'll

00:51:10 ◼   ► be able to run Android apps that'll

00:51:11 ◼   ► be part of the Android ecosystem,

00:51:13 ◼   ► even to the degree that the Kindles are.

00:51:14 ◼   ► Like, the Kindles like, oh, are Android a name only barely,

00:51:18 ◼   ► but they can run applications that are built for Android or close to it, right?

00:51:23 ◼   ► They're not entirely walled off.

00:51:25 ◼   ► And my take on this is, for all we know, for all the average person knows, I know better

00:51:28 ◼   ► and most gamers do as well, but for all the average person knows, the Wii U and the 3DS

00:51:33 ◼   ► could be running Android right now.

00:51:34 ◼   ► Like, it would make no difference to them, because what OS it runs under the covers has

00:51:39 ◼   ► no bearing on what it feels like to use the device, you know what I mean?

00:51:44 ◼   ► And actually when I was trying to look it up, I'm like, "What OS do those things run?"

00:51:48 ◼   ► I was reminded that the Wii, not the Wii U, but the Wii U runs something called iOS, with

00:51:52 ◼   ► a capital I in front of the OS.

00:51:54 ◼   ► I think it predates the iPhone, maybe it doesn't.

00:51:57 ◼   ► Is it a Cisco router?

00:51:58 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the other iOS, right?

00:52:01 ◼   ► It's the same type of thing.

00:52:02 ◼   ► It's their firmware.

00:52:03 ◼   ► It's not the OS OS, but it's the firmware that controls IO and stuff like that.

00:52:07 ◼   ► I just thought that was funny.

00:52:08 ◼   ► But anyway, the rumors of Nintendo, Android stuff, keep that in mind.

00:52:12 ◼   ► if someday down the road someone says "oh my god, confirmed, Nintendo is going to Android"

00:52:18 ◼   ► I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for them to use Android as part of building

00:52:22 ◼   ► their products, but I don't think they would ever say the word Android, and I don't think

00:52:24 ◼   ► you would ever know they were using Android under the covers. It would have nothing to

00:52:29 ◼   ► do with their actual business strategy and everything to do with just internal implementation

00:52:32 ◼   ► details of their software stack.

00:52:34 ◼   ► And they probably wouldn't be selling their games on the Android marketplace.

00:52:37 ◼   ► No, no, that's a whole different thing, and that's something else that people want, but

00:52:41 ◼   ► You know, they don't get too tied up into, you know, what people are using under the

00:52:45 ◼   ► covers.

00:52:46 ◼   ► Like, "Oh my God, Google is moving to Linux.

00:52:48 ◼   ► I hear Android is based on Linux.

00:52:49 ◼   ► Don't tell anybody."

00:52:50 ◼   ► You know, or they're going to use Java, but they call it Dalvik.

00:52:53 ◼   ► These are all implementation details that have little to do with their business strategies.

00:52:59 ◼   ► So I got a Retina iPad Mini, and I'm very excited about it.

00:53:04 ◼   ► It has terrible burn-in, or image retention, or whatever you call it, image retention.

00:53:09 ◼   ► and I'm choosing not to care because I'm not Marco.

00:53:12 ◼   ► - Wait, hold on, to be fair, I have also chosen not to care

00:53:14 ◼   ► because I went to the mall and waited in the Apple store

00:53:18 ◼   ► for 40 minutes for them to get to me,

00:53:21 ◼   ► even though it was 10 in the morning.

00:53:22 ◼   ► I even took a picture to show how empty the store was.

00:53:25 ◼   ► Like, there was very few people there.

00:53:27 ◼   ► But I waited for 40 minutes, plus the trip to the mall.

00:53:31 ◼   ► Overall, I spent an hour and a half of my life

00:53:33 ◼   ► trading in my old iPad for,

00:53:35 ◼   ► or trading in the one I just bought

00:53:36 ◼   ► with this image retention problem

00:53:38 ◼   ► for another one that also has an image retention problem.

00:53:41 ◼   ► And it was the only one they had in stock.

00:53:43 ◼   ► And I'm like, you know what, I'll just take this.

00:53:46 ◼   ► I'm gonna choose not to not care anymore.

00:53:48 ◼   ► - Have you found a way to get the screen manufacturer

00:53:51 ◼   ► out of the firmware with some crazy thing yet or no?

00:53:54 ◼   ► - No, I wasn't able to.

00:53:56 ◼   ► I mean, nobody told me anything

00:53:57 ◼   ► and I didn't really poke around.

00:53:58 ◼   ► I've chosen to not care because in day-to-day use,

00:54:02 ◼   ► you don't really notice it.

00:54:03 ◼   ► The image retention in general on LCDs,

00:54:06 ◼   ► It can be very noticeable when it gets really bad.

00:54:09 ◼   ► It can be like, you know, you'll still see

00:54:11 ◼   ► the Safari address bar when you move away from Safari.

00:54:14 ◼   ► That's like an element that's always there.

00:54:17 ◼   ► In reality, on the minis, I don't think it's bad enough

00:54:20 ◼   ► to cause that for most people.

00:54:22 ◼   ► Certainly, you know, if you do exactly the right,

00:54:24 ◼   ► like if you're in one app that has

00:54:26 ◼   ► this interface element on it for five, 10 minutes,

00:54:29 ◼   ► and then you switch to an all white screen,

00:54:30 ◼   ► you'd probably see that.

00:54:32 ◼   ► But in reality, that doesn't come up very often for me,

00:54:35 ◼   ► and I think for most people.

00:54:36 ◼   ► - I saw it all the time on some of the first gen

00:54:39 ◼   ► 15 inch Retina MacBook Pros, the ones with the bad screens.

00:54:43 ◼   ► And I don't know if there's something about the Mac,

00:54:45 ◼   ► like having a windowed environment where certain elements

00:54:47 ◼   ► like the dock or the menu bar or a text window

00:54:51 ◼   ► that's in the background and then you switch to another app

00:54:54 ◼   ► that has a bunch of empty documents and you see the text

00:54:56 ◼   ► from the previous text window.

00:54:57 ◼   ► I would not be able to have stood that out.

00:55:00 ◼   ► I'm assuming, like you tested the ones in the Apple Store,

00:55:02 ◼   ► right, you were taking pictures like,

00:55:03 ◼   ► Look at these demo units.

00:55:04 ◼   ► They totally don't have any image retention whatsoever.

00:55:07 ◼   ► I ended up testing all four that they had on the iPad table.

00:55:13 ◼   ► All four of them passed the test.

00:55:14 ◼   ► None of them had any retention at all.

00:55:16 ◼   ► However, they were also all for Wi-Fi models.

00:55:19 ◼   ► I'm hearing mostly from people who

00:55:21 ◼   ► are saying that their LTE ones have the problem.

00:55:24 ◼   ► And so it really does seem like the LTE ones were made

00:55:26 ◼   ► in smaller quantities.

00:55:28 ◼   ► Maybe they had to get a lot of them out in time.

00:55:30 ◼   ► Maybe they, either there's a bad batch of screens

00:55:34 ◼   ► in the first big chunk of the LTE ones they manufactured,

00:55:37 ◼   ► or they just have to get so many of them out on time

00:55:39 ◼   ► that they lower their standards for the LTE ones.

00:55:41 ◼   ► Either way, it kinda sucks, but it's also not that unusual.

00:55:45 ◼   ► People were saying, I've had tons of people run the test

00:55:48 ◼   ► on the first gen iPad mini, and it's way worse.

00:55:53 ◼   ► And it's more around the edges,

00:55:55 ◼   ► but it has way worse retention.

00:55:56 ◼   ► The iPad 2 had way worse retention.

00:55:58 ◼   ► So this actually is not like a totally unique thing

00:56:02 ◼   ► to just the new mini, it's actually common

00:56:05 ◼   ► in a lot of products that we've never noticed before.

00:56:06 ◼   ► So it's not that big of a deal.

00:56:08 ◼   ► I think other people have made a much bigger deal

00:56:10 ◼   ► out of it than I would and wanted to.

00:56:13 ◼   ► - Well, on the Red and Mac Pro's though,

00:56:15 ◼   ► wasn't it like they had like screen stuff,

00:56:17 ◼   ► chat room will tell me if I'm getting wrong,

00:56:18 ◼   ► but it was like from LG and Samsung

00:56:21 ◼   ► and like the LG ones had it much worse

00:56:22 ◼   ► than the Samsung screens.

00:56:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I actually have one of the bad ones,

00:56:25 ◼   ► which is why I made that test a year ago in the first place.

00:56:27 ◼   ► That's the whole reason I made that test,

00:56:29 ◼   ► was because I've read about that on a forum,

00:56:30 ◼   ► and I'm like, oh, I wonder how mine is.

00:56:31 ◼   ► And I made a little test to test it, and mine failed.

00:56:35 ◼   ► But what you're describing with being able to see it

00:56:38 ◼   ► in regular use, I've never had that problem with this.

00:56:41 ◼   ► So maybe mine is not as bad as the worst.

00:56:44 ◼   ► But whatever brand it was that was the bad screen,

00:56:46 ◼   ► I do have that brand of screen in the MacBook Pro,

00:56:48 ◼   ► because you can tell in software.

00:56:50 ◼   ► So I do have that screen, but it isn't that bad.

00:56:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's what bothers me a little bit,

00:56:55 ◼   ► is that on the first retina of MacBook Pros,

00:56:57 ◼   ► okay fine, it's your first retina device, there's going to be growing pains or whatever,

00:57:01 ◼   ► you'll sort it out, and presumably they did. But at this point now, they should know, okay look,

00:57:06 ◼   ► it seems like let's do image retention testing as part of our qualifications of vendors for screens.

00:57:10 ◼   ► Like maybe I would have to think the only reason they would do this is either because they don't

00:57:15 ◼   ► take the issue seriously enough yet, which I think they should, or because what choice do they have?

00:57:20 ◼   ► Like there's one vendor that passes all their tests with flying colors, whoever that happens

00:57:24 ◼   ► happens to be, but one vendor cannot provide them the capacity they need to meet the holiday

00:57:28 ◼   ► season.

00:57:29 ◼   ► So they're forced to go with the second best vendor, which has worse image retention problems,

00:57:33 ◼   ► simply because no one else can provide them the number of screens that they need.

00:57:37 ◼   ► And that strikes me as plausible, but either way, it's disappointing to me that image retention

00:57:42 ◼   ► was an issue, continues to be an issue, and frequently we're in the situation where one

00:57:47 ◼   ► manufacturer gets the "good screen," the other one gets the bad screen.

00:57:51 ◼   ► have no way to tell, and obviously it is possible to make it without retention, but not everyone

00:57:56 ◼   ► gets it. And that's kind of like the bad old days of dead pixels, where I was terrified to buy my

00:58:01 ◼   ► 22-inch Apple Cinema Display because of the dead pixels. And sure enough, I had like three dead

00:58:06 ◼   ► pixels, which was not within the replacement threshold, and I just had to spend three years

00:58:11 ◼   ► consciously not looking at the one pixel that was stuck on white and the one pixel that was

00:58:14 ◼   ► stuck on red. And I knew exactly where they are, and I could picture them in my mind right now and

00:58:18 ◼   ► and point you to them exactly where they are on the screen.

00:58:20 ◼   ► Like, that bothers me.

00:58:22 ◼   ► Obviously, it bothers me way more than it

00:58:24 ◼   ► bothers normal people.

00:58:24 ◼   ► I understand that.

00:58:25 ◼   ► But Apple needs to get on the ball with that,

00:58:28 ◼   ► because I forgive them, their first generation product,

00:58:30 ◼   ► maybe their second generation.

00:58:31 ◼   ► But at this point, they need to make it like-- they need

00:58:35 ◼   ► to just say, look, this is our-- same way

00:58:37 ◼   ► they do with color gamut and viewing angles and stuff.

00:58:40 ◼   ► They just have to draw a hard line if they possibly can

00:58:42 ◼   ► and say, this image retention stuff has to stop.

00:58:45 ◼   ► I'm sure it's very similar to the dead pixel thing,

00:58:49 ◼   ► where it's not that they will tolerate no image retention,

00:58:54 ◼   ► it's that they have some kind of threshold.

00:58:56 ◼   ► And I mean, these days dead pixels, I think,

00:58:58 ◼   ► they don't-- I don't think I've ever seen a dead pixel

00:59:00 ◼   ► on an Apple device.

00:59:01 ◼   ► Yeah, no, we've come out of the dead pixel.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Like at this point, I think if you had even a single one,

00:59:06 ◼   ► you could probably get a replacement.

00:59:07 ◼   ► But there were years where they had--

00:59:08 ◼   ► if it's three within three inches of each other

00:59:11 ◼   ► or whatever, but the thing with the image retention

00:59:12 ◼   ► is there's like the good manufacturer and the bad one.

00:59:14 ◼   ► It's like, no, why can't they all be the good one?

00:59:16 ◼   ► I will accept that this is the best we can do.

00:59:19 ◼   ► But obviously, one vendor can do way better

00:59:22 ◼   ► than the other one, and I have to think it's just

00:59:24 ◼   ► because that one vendor can't make enough screens.

00:59:25 ◼   ► But I wish that one vendor would buy the other one.

00:59:28 ◼   ► - They all could be the good one in a year.

00:59:31 ◼   ► Like, for us to get the Retina Mini this year,

00:59:34 ◼   ► we had to accept crap like this, I think.

00:59:36 ◼   ► - But see, the thing is, that's when the first

00:59:39 ◼   ► Retina macro pros were like, okay,

00:59:40 ◼   ► they haven't had it sorted out, but surely a year from now,

00:59:42 ◼   ► everyone will get on the same page.

00:59:43 ◼   ► But no, we just keep going through this again and again with each thing.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Is the Retina Mac Pro screen?

00:59:47 ◼   ► Well, I guess they are, because the new IGZO thing, I-G-Z-O, I forget what it stands for,

00:59:51 ◼   ► indium, gallium, zinc, oxide, whatever the hell.

00:59:55 ◼   ► The new low-power Retina screens is what lets you have these Retina devices, because you

01:00:00 ◼   ► could not have them with the old Retina screens, because they just took too much power from

01:00:04 ◼   ► the backlights, right?

01:00:05 ◼   ► So I guess I'll go back on what I said.

01:00:07 ◼   ► Maybe I'll give them a pass on this, because I forgot they just changed screen technology.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Maybe this is the sorting out year or the sorting out generation or two for this new

01:00:15 ◼   ► LCD screen technology.

01:00:17 ◼   ► But I really – the moral of the story is I really, really hate image retention.

01:00:22 ◼   ► Okay.

01:00:23 ◼   ► There was also – because I know we're going to get emailed about this – there was a

01:00:27 ◼   ► test that was widely linked a couple of days ago from I believe DisplayMate, a company

01:00:34 ◼   ► that measures and benchmarks display quality.

01:00:37 ◼   ► and they ran their tests on all the modern,

01:00:41 ◼   ► tiny Retina tablets that they had.

01:00:42 ◼   ► The iPad Mini Retina, the Google Nexus,

01:00:46 ◼   ► was it the Nexus 7, I think, the new Nexus 7?

01:00:49 ◼   ► I don't know the line, what I want to say.

01:00:50 ◼   ► The Kindle HDX, and I think that was it.

01:00:54 ◼   ► And they came away saying that--

01:00:56 ◼   ► - The iPad Air still as well.

01:00:57 ◼   ► - Oh, and the iPad Air, right.

01:00:58 ◼   ► And basically the--

01:01:00 ◼   ► - Kindle was the best screen, yeah.

01:01:02 ◼   ► I meant to bring this up last week.

01:01:03 ◼   ► - Yes, and it uses a whole different thing.

01:01:05 ◼   ► uses low temperature poly something LT.

01:01:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, and Apple couldn't, that's not an option for Apple

01:01:10 ◼   ► because they sell too many units.

01:01:12 ◼   ► - Right, and that's the problem.

01:01:14 ◼   ► You can make a tablet with a better display,

01:01:17 ◼   ► but you probably can't make it at Apple's volume.

01:01:20 ◼   ► And that's the problem they face

01:01:22 ◼   ► with a lot of these component decisions.

01:01:23 ◼   ► They never use OLED, and there's a few,

01:01:27 ◼   ► there's things that they can't really use

01:01:29 ◼   ► because of yield issues, that they just have to make

01:01:31 ◼   ► so many of these things.

01:01:32 ◼   ► That being said though, I am a little disappointed.

01:01:35 ◼   ► Like seeing that test result, seeing the color gamut

01:01:38 ◼   ► kinda sucks on the Mini 2.

01:01:40 ◼   ► The iPad Air display has a much better color gamut.

01:01:43 ◼   ► The Mini has, especially like in the red,

01:01:45 ◼   ► it's a little bit muted and a little bit inaccurate.

01:01:48 ◼   ► And that I think was disappointing to see.

01:01:51 ◼   ► That being said, again, in regular use,

01:01:52 ◼   ► I haven't noticed it at all, and I probably never will.

01:01:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, Apple has to be on the cutting edge,

01:01:58 ◼   ► but they can't be on the cutting cutting edge.

01:01:59 ◼   ► When your volumes are low, like Amazon,

01:02:01 ◼   ► or lower anyway, you can afford to be on that super.

01:02:05 ◼   ► Apple could have gone, Ixo displays,

01:02:07 ◼   ► I don't even know if that's how people pronounce it,

01:02:08 ◼   ► I don't feel like saying the letters every time.

01:02:10 ◼   ► But anyway, those are out like a year ago.

01:02:11 ◼   ► Like it's not like they didn't exist,

01:02:13 ◼   ► it's just that, oh, well, they're too new.

01:02:15 ◼   ► No one can make them in big enough volume.

01:02:16 ◼   ► So Apple can't ever be on the cutting, cutting edge.

01:02:19 ◼   ► They have to wait until,

01:02:20 ◼   ► and I think they're barely making it into like,

01:02:23 ◼   ► can we have enough of these Ixo screens

01:02:26 ◼   ► to support our holiday product line this year?

01:02:29 ◼   ► I think they barely scraped by with that.

01:02:31 ◼   ► So the low temperature polysilicon stuff is just like maybe next year, right?

01:02:36 ◼   ► And then OLED existed forever, but there's been no OLEDs that have satisfied all of Apple's

01:02:41 ◼   ► requirements for power, viewing angle, color gamut.

01:02:45 ◼   ► Lyle Troxell, Jr.

01:02:46 ◼   ► Lyle Troxell, Jr.

01:02:47 ◼   ► Lyle Troxell, Jr.

01:02:48 ◼   ► All that stuff.

01:02:49 ◼   ► I mean, it's the same reason they had seven-inch tablets that were retina years ago from companies

01:02:50 ◼   ► other than Apple.

01:02:51 ◼   ► It's like, why can't Apple be retina?

01:02:54 ◼   ► Because they can't go until...

01:02:56 ◼   ► That's the price of being as big as Apple is.

01:02:58 ◼   ► They can push the cutting edge, and they can be like the first one to have really high

01:03:02 ◼   ► volumes of this great technology, but they can't be the very, very first anymore, unless

01:03:07 ◼   ► they do something like they seem to be doing with that big quartz factory in Arizona or

01:03:10 ◼   ► whatever where nobody has the capacity to make quartz-coated glass screens or whatever.

01:03:17 ◼   ► We're going to be the only company in the world that has that capacity, and we're going

01:03:19 ◼   ► to pay half a billion dollars to make our own factory that we don't own, but we paid

01:03:22 ◼   ► for most of it, and they will exclusively build stuff for us, and that's how we will

01:03:28 ◼   ► get the advanced new technology and get it in the volumes we need before anyone else.

01:03:32 ◼   ► But that's pretty much their only road to being on the very, very cutting edge as compared

01:03:38 ◼   ► to companies that sell in lower volumes. Someone says, I mean, Sapphire instead of Quartz.

01:03:42 ◼   ► Maybe I do mean Sapphire instead of Quartz. I don't know. Is it? It's that thing in Arizona.

01:03:45 ◼   ► I don't remember.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it's Sapphire. So anyway, so Casey, what do you think about the Mini?

01:03:52 ◼   ► I'm sorry, are we still here? Is this the show? So yeah, so the Mini, I like it quite

01:03:56 ◼   ► a bit. So I'm coming from, I still have my iPhone 5s, I had an iPad 3rd gen, so the first

01:04:03 ◼   ► of the retina iPads. My iPhone is AT&T, I am still on the unlimited plan, thus I cannot

01:04:11 ◼   ► tether because AT&T is a bunch of jerks. I bought a Verizon iPad mini, which is the first

01:04:16 ◼   ► time I've gotten an LTE iPad, and coincidentally, day before yesterday, my Verizon FiOS for

01:04:23 ◼   ► for the first time in five years, conked out.

01:04:26 ◼   ► And it was a very excellent time to have an LTE iPad

01:04:30 ◼   ► so I could get online,

01:04:32 ◼   ► even despite not having internet connection at home.

01:04:35 ◼   ► I should also note that additionally,

01:04:37 ◼   ► I went to the T-Mobile store today

01:04:39 ◼   ► and for $10 and 50 some cents because of sales tax,

01:04:42 ◼   ► I picked up a T-Mobile SIM

01:04:44 ◼   ► and plugged that into my iPhone mini,

01:04:46 ◼   ► or excuse me, iPad mini,

01:04:48 ◼   ► and was able to get cellular data for free because,

01:04:52 ◼   ► well, if you accept the $10 for the SIM.

01:04:54 ◼   ► And so that T-Mobile thing that people keep talking about,

01:04:57 ◼   ► it was easy peasy.

01:04:59 ◼   ► It took a little while at the store,

01:05:00 ◼   ► but I don't know if that was a sales representative thing

01:05:03 ◼   ► or if it's just that it takes a little while

01:05:05 ◼   ► to get the stuff squared away.

01:05:07 ◼   ► But now I have a T-Mobile SIM

01:05:09 ◼   ► that'll get me 200 megs a month for free.

01:05:11 ◼   ► I have a Verizon SIM that came with it

01:05:13 ◼   ► that I can pay for for data.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And what was really cool was I'd use the Verizon SIM

01:05:19 ◼   ► for a bit and put something like 80 megs on the sim,

01:05:23 ◼   ► or I don't know, it's a poor way of phrasing it,

01:05:25 ◼   ► but I'd used about 80 megs of data on my Verizon sim.

01:05:28 ◼   ► I popped that out, plugged in the T-Mobile sim,

01:05:30 ◼   ► used like two or three megs just to prove to myself

01:05:33 ◼   ► that it worked, popped the Verizon sim back in,

01:05:36 ◼   ► and my cellular usage went back to 80 megs.

01:05:39 ◼   ► So I was very pleased to see that the iPad was smart enough

01:05:42 ◼   ► to keep the two separate

01:05:43 ◼   ► and continue to track the two of them.

01:05:46 ◼   ► So if you happen to have an iPad, an LTE iPad

01:05:49 ◼   ► is unlocked, then you can spend your $10 and get your T-Mobile SIM if you live in the United

01:05:55 ◼   ► States and get some free data, which is pretty awesome.

01:05:57 ◼   ► Yeah, that's fantastic. Do you know, does anybody know, does it work on old iPads too?

01:06:01 ◼   ► I mean, probably, maybe you need an LTE once, maybe it's like iPad 3, Mini, and Air, and

01:06:09 ◼   ► 4. But that would be a great thing to do, like if you have, like if you just replaced

01:06:13 ◼   ► an iPad and you're going to give it to your mom or something like that. That'd be a

01:06:17 ◼   ► a great thing to just get one of these T-Mobile things, put it in, you know, if it's not going

01:06:21 ◼   ► to use a lot of data, but you at least have then the option to have this thing be connected

01:06:25 ◼   ► somewhere if you need it, or if you're giving it to somebody who's going to use it pretty

01:06:28 ◼   ► lightly.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Yeah, Nick Finn in the chat says it worked with an iPad 3, with a Verizon iPad 3.

01:06:33 ◼   ► That's great.

01:06:34 ◼   ► Which I agree, it is a very cool idea.

01:06:37 ◼   ► And it worked really well.

01:06:38 ◼   ► 200 megs obviously isn't a lot of data, but it's enough to get you by in a pinch, which

01:06:43 ◼   ► is really fantastic.

01:06:44 ◼   ► So I'm pretty pleased with that.

01:06:46 ◼   ► Now the only problem is I have two nano SIMs

01:06:49 ◼   ► and I have no idea what to do with the other one,

01:06:51 ◼   ► in the sense that it's so tiny,

01:06:55 ◼   ► I'm inevitably gonna lose it, but that's okay.

01:06:58 ◼   ► - One thing I was surprised by,

01:06:59 ◼   ► when I moved my Verizon service

01:07:01 ◼   ► from my first gen iPad Mini to my new iPad Mini,

01:07:04 ◼   ► it actually said on the first gen,

01:07:07 ◼   ► when I deactivated it,

01:07:08 ◼   ► it basically said that it was bricking that SIM,

01:07:11 ◼   ► that I can't even reactivate with that same SIM

01:07:13 ◼   ► and if I ever wanna reactivate,

01:07:14 ◼   ► to go to Verizon store and buy a new sim. And I don't know if that's true, I didn't

01:07:18 ◼   ► try reactivating it, but that's kind of crappy.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Did the magic smoke escape?

01:07:23 ◼   ► I don't think, I didn't see one, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

01:07:25 ◼   ► It's like the Mission Impossible thing. Oh, and by the way, we're nuking your sim.

01:07:29 ◼   ► Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

01:07:29 ◼   ► Smoke comes out of the side.

01:07:32 ◼   ► And I've been asked, I was asked on Twitter earlier today, "What happens when you run

01:07:36 ◼   ► out of your 200 megs?"

01:07:38 ◼   ► I don't know, to be honest.

01:07:39 ◼   ► I would assume that they just stop giving you data.

01:07:42 ◼   ► I did pay for my $10 SIM with a credit card just because it was easier, but the gentleman

01:07:48 ◼   ► that had rung me up had said, "Are you paying with cash or credit or debit or whatever?"

01:07:53 ◼   ► So I bring that up because it seemed to me like during the activation process, he never

01:07:58 ◼   ► took a credit card for sure, and I don't think that me having paid for the $10

01:08:02 ◼   ► with a credit card is indicative of the fact that they have my credit card

01:08:06 ◼   ► information for anything other than that one sale. Well it probably works just

01:08:09 ◼   ► like other iPad data plans always have, which is there is no automatic pushing

01:08:14 ◼   ► you up into a new plan, which is awesome, and however Apple negotiated that it was

01:08:18 ◼   ► genius. But probably Steve Jobs was probably involved, but you know it what

01:08:24 ◼   ► they do is you know let's say you buy a 1 gig plan from Verizon or something,

01:08:27 ◼   ► once you use that one gig, it'll start warning you

01:08:29 ◼   ► when you get close, and then it just cuts off the data

01:08:32 ◼   ► when you hit that limit, and it says,

01:08:33 ◼   ► go to settings if you want to buy more.

01:08:35 ◼   ► Or you'll get more on this date,

01:08:37 ◼   ► which is like the one month anniversary next month.

01:08:40 ◼   ► So that's probably how this is gonna work too,

01:08:42 ◼   ► which is you can just use it and there's no auto billing,

01:08:45 ◼   ► you can just use it until you hit 200 megs

01:08:47 ◼   ► and then it'll just yell at you and stop,

01:08:49 ◼   ► and you can go buy more if you want,

01:08:51 ◼   ► or you can just wait.

01:08:53 ◼   ► That's how I bet it's gonna work,

01:08:54 ◼   ► but I don't know that for sure.

01:08:55 ◼   ► - That's exactly what I expected as well,

01:08:57 ◼   ► I haven't run into that yet so I can't say that with any sort of authority.

01:09:02 ◼   ► Sam the Geek in the chat says as far as he understands they throttle to dial up is what

01:09:06 ◼   ► he said.

01:09:08 ◼   ► He wasn't absolutely positive that that was the case but in other words they give you

01:09:12 ◼   ► just unbelievably crummy throughput or like Marco said and that's what I would expect

01:09:17 ◼   ► they just cut you off entirely.

01:09:20 ◼   ► But in terms of the screen you'll burn in, I keep calling it burn in, retention issues

01:09:23 ◼   ► aside it's a beautiful screen.

01:09:26 ◼   ► The iPad is very, very nice and it is a little bit heavier.

01:09:31 ◼   ► I can definitely tell that it's a little bit heavier than the iPad Mini I had previously,

01:09:35 ◼   ► which was not LTE.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And I should also note that a friend at work got an iPad Air, which was not LTE, and I

01:09:43 ◼   ► held my LTE iPad Mini and his Air that was not LTE, one in each hand, and I could tell

01:09:51 ◼   ► you I couldn't tell the difference.

01:09:53 ◼   ► And I looked at Apple's website and the iPad mini with LTE, the Retina iPad mini with LTE

01:09:59 ◼   ► is 341 grams.

01:10:02 ◼   ► The iPad Air without LTE is 469 grams, which is what, 120 grams-ish.

01:10:09 ◼   ► But in my hand, my hand was not sensitive enough to tell the difference.

01:10:12 ◼   ► They felt like they were the same darn weight.

01:10:14 ◼   ► And that was a really great testament to how thin and light the iPad Air is because I swear

01:10:21 ◼   ► to you. To me anyway, it felt the same as the iPad Mini in my hand. I know Marco, you,

01:10:26 ◼   ► Tiff has an iPad Air, doesn't she?

01:10:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. It's actually her first new iPad. She kept using my hand-me-downs. This

01:10:32 ◼   ► is her first new one. She moved from an iPad 2 to this, so it was a pretty big jump. But,

01:10:37 ◼   ► yeah. And, you know, looking at these two devices, again, I think I'll echo what everyone

01:10:42 ◼   ► else has said, like all the reviewers have said. You really can't go wrong with either

01:10:46 ◼   ► of them, and you're basically just buying for screen size. You know, there is that very

01:10:51 ◼   ► minor performance difference. I don't think anybody would really notice it in practice,

01:10:56 ◼   ► to be honest. You're really just buying what screen size do you like better. And one way

01:11:02 ◼   ► you can make an easy decision is just buy whatever screen size you were using before.

01:11:07 ◼   ► So if you were using a first gen mini and you really got used to that size and you really

01:11:13 ◼   ► want, you love that portability and everything, the Air is probably going to feel too big

01:11:17 ◼   ► for you. And so you should just get another mini if you're going to upgrade, you know,

01:11:22 ◼   ► get the Retina one. But if you're coming from a full-size iPad and you don't necessarily

01:11:26 ◼   ► need it to get smaller and you do things that benefit from a bigger screen, like watching

01:11:30 ◼   ► video or like drawing or sketching apps or, you know, certain games, things like that,

01:11:34 ◼   ► that will benefit from a bigger screen, then by all means get the Air because, you know,

01:11:39 ◼   ► it's a substantial improvement from the 3 and 4 and there's pretty much no downside

01:11:44 ◼   ► except that it's a little bit bigger physically in size.

01:11:47 ◼   ► There is a weight difference, but in practice,

01:11:51 ◼   ► the bigger difference is that this is a much larger

01:11:55 ◼   ► rectangle, and so when you hold it, it's gonna have

01:12:00 ◼   ► different forces as you hold it if you're holding it

01:12:01 ◼   ► up in bed, like the mini will be easier to hold

01:12:03 ◼   ► for long periods, but the reality is, whichever one

01:12:08 ◼   ► you've been using before, I would say use that one.

01:12:13 ◼   ► whatever size class you were in before, you can probably stay in your size class and be

01:12:16 ◼   ► perfectly happy. And obviously, the best thing to do is go to a store and try them both and

01:12:21 ◼   ► see how you feel. But if I had to make an assumption to recommend without you trying

01:12:27 ◼   ► anything, I would just say, stick within the size class that you already liked.

01:12:32 ◼   ► Speaking of that performance deficit between the Air and the Mini that you mentioned that

01:12:36 ◼   ► you probably can't tell, what is it, like 7% or something like that, just the clock

01:12:40 ◼   ► speed?

01:12:41 ◼   ► versus 1.4 gigahertz, but there's also the thermal issues that, again, an Antec did an

01:12:47 ◼   ► awesome graph of this where the CPUs in all the A7s, so the iPhone 5s, the Retina Mini

01:12:54 ◼   ► and the iPad Air, all have this thermal throttling behavior where they can work at really awesome

01:13:00 ◼   ► speed for like a minute or two at max load and they start throttling down for heat reasons.

01:13:07 ◼   ► And so the iPad Air has the highest ceiling for that.

01:13:11 ◼   ► So the iPad Air can work at full speed for the longest.

01:13:14 ◼   ► And then when it does throttle, it doesn't throttle down as far as the Retina Mini and

01:13:19 ◼   ► the iPhone 5S, even though they all have roughly the same CPU.

01:13:23 ◼   ► Just the Air has a more thermal mass to cool and everything.

01:13:26 ◼   ► So I was going to recommend that article.

01:13:28 ◼   ► We should put it in the show notes.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Not only because of the actual iPad Air testing, but he snuck in there and in the Mini review

01:13:33 ◼   ► too, I think.

01:13:34 ◼   ► But he snuck in the Air one.

01:13:35 ◼   ► lot more information about the A7 CPU.

01:13:38 ◼   ► And I was excited to see that there's

01:13:41 ◼   ► some advantage to actually knowing less about this stuff

01:13:44 ◼   ► on a concrete level.

01:13:45 ◼   ► Because obviously, those guys who work at Anand Tech

01:13:48 ◼   ► know so much more about the individual part numbers

01:13:50 ◼   ► and the supply chains and what the other vendors are doing

01:13:54 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:13:55 ◼   ► And I remember reading one of his--

01:13:57 ◼   ► I think it was the 5S review when he was talking about the A7

01:14:00 ◼   ► and saying how--

01:14:01 ◼   ► he was speculating because he didn't know at that point.

01:14:03 ◼   ► Like Apple didn't release any information.

01:14:05 ◼   ► They didn't have any specs, and no one had cut the top off the chip yet.

01:14:07 ◼   ► So we had to kind of guess of like, what, you know, Apple claims 2x speed, let's do

01:14:11 ◼   ► some benchmarks, and sure enough it is like 2x speed, and what's making that happen or

01:14:15 ◼   ► whatever.

01:14:17 ◼   ► And we had a show where we talked about it as well, and I don't know all the details

01:14:21 ◼   ► of all these chips or whatever, but I'm like, well, if they have 2x speed, you're not going

01:14:24 ◼   ► to get that, we talked about obviously not going to get that from 64-bit, which may make

01:14:27 ◼   ► you go slower, all the things being equal.

01:14:30 ◼   ► And then the other thing was like, so how are they getting 2x speed?

01:14:33 ◼   ► It's not going to be 2x class speed or whatever.

01:14:36 ◼   ► And me knowing nothing about the details of this said, well, there has to be more execution

01:14:41 ◼   ► units.

01:14:42 ◼   ► I mean, you can't just be the same chip running faster or some small tweaks.

01:14:46 ◼   ► You need actual more hardware to do stuff.

01:14:49 ◼   ► And not in hindsight knowing more about the details.

01:14:52 ◼   ► So they're like, well, it's not going to be double the width or triple the width in terms

01:14:57 ◼   ► of execution units as the A6, because that's crazy.

01:15:00 ◼   ► I mean, even the A15 doesn't have that kind of size,

01:15:02 ◼   ► so it must be something else or whatever.

01:15:04 ◼   ► And he was cursed with the knowledge

01:15:05 ◼   ► of the individual details of how many execution units

01:15:07 ◼   ► each one of these things have,

01:15:08 ◼   ► which I didn't know off the top of my head.

01:15:11 ◼   ► But it caused him to make the wrong call,

01:15:12 ◼   ► because sure enough, when they cut the top off of this thing,

01:15:14 ◼   ► it's like a six-wide machine with like,

01:15:17 ◼   ► you can do simultaneously four integer, two floating point,

01:15:19 ◼   ► whereas the other machine was like three wide,

01:15:21 ◼   ► but you can only do like one and a half

01:15:23 ◼   ► because there was dependencies on integer and floating point.

01:15:25 ◼   ► And the A7 really is, in Apple's marketing speak, a desktop-class machine.

01:15:30 ◼   ► In terms of the width and the number of execution units of the machine,

01:15:33 ◼   ► out of order, being out of order like a desktop machine is,

01:15:36 ◼   ► and it really is such a huge leap over the A6 that no one expected.

01:15:40 ◼   ► And it's like, how could you get that machine into a laptop or into a phone, for crying out loud?

01:15:47 ◼   ► And this iPad Air article and other things explain how they did it.

01:15:51 ◼   ► like they cut the memory bus width in half,

01:15:56 ◼   ► they do all these, they have four megabytes of on die SRAM,

01:16:01 ◼   ► serving as sort of an L3,

01:16:04 ◼   ► 'cause they had to say,

01:16:05 ◼   ► look, we're gonna cut the memory bandwidth in half,

01:16:06 ◼   ► but we still need to run an iPad right in the screen,

01:16:08 ◼   ► how are we gonna do that?

01:16:09 ◼   ► Well, we'll put this huge SRAM thing here,

01:16:11 ◼   ► and they said that for power savings,

01:16:14 ◼   ► instead of doing simultaneously fetching from DRAM

01:16:16 ◼   ► and from the L3, they check L3 first,

01:16:19 ◼   ► And if it's not there, then they do a second request

01:16:22 ◼   ► for a thing of DRAM.

01:16:24 ◼   ► And if you're making a desktop CPU, you would never do that,

01:16:26 ◼   ► but you have to make compromises for power.

01:16:28 ◼   ► So they basically found a way to wedge

01:16:30 ◼   ► a twice as wide machine into the same thing

01:16:33 ◼   ► by making it worse than the A6 in many different measures,

01:16:37 ◼   ► but overall being twice as fast.

01:16:38 ◼   ► And it's an amazing balancing act

01:16:39 ◼   ► when you look at what they did with this thing,

01:16:41 ◼   ► because they did this seemingly impossible thing.

01:16:43 ◼   ► When you learn details like, oh, it wasn't impossible.

01:16:45 ◼   ► It was just really, really wise trade-offs

01:16:48 ◼   ► give them, from the outside, what looks like an impossibility. A machine that's twice as

01:16:52 ◼   ► fast at a similar clock speed in the same power envelope. It seems like it shouldn't

01:16:55 ◼   ► be possible, but it's like, "Oh, I see where they compromised." And if I know how to tickle

01:16:58 ◼   ► it just right, I can show you a benchmark where the A6 crushes the A7, but no real application

01:17:03 ◼   ► is ever going to do that. So, thumbs up for Apple and on TechSight and scientific progress

01:17:09 ◼   ► in general. Yay.

01:17:12 ◼   ► It's pretty amazing when you look at the lineup. Now that we've had the whole fall lineup revealed

01:17:16 ◼   ► for us, it's pretty amazing that the A7 is in all three of these products. And it's basically

01:17:24 ◼   ► the same, it's almost the same performance in all three. And when you look at now, when

01:17:31 ◼   ► the iPhone 5S came out, we were all like, "Whoa, that was like a bigger jump than we

01:17:35 ◼   ► expected." Because now looking at it, you would expect that to be only in the iPad Air.

01:17:42 ◼   ► And then the iPad mini should have had a die-shrunk A6, and then the iPhone should have had an

01:17:49 ◼   ► A7 that was much lower clocked than the iPad.

01:17:53 ◼   ► That's how you would have expected this to go.

01:17:55 ◼   ► And in reality, you have basically the high-end iPad chip in all three devices with very minor

01:18:01 ◼   ► differences, and that's really impressive.

01:18:03 ◼   ► It was just the difference in thermal throttling and minor clock speed deficits, and that's

01:18:10 ◼   ► it.

01:18:11 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:18:12 ◼   ► It's the same with memory bus, the same SRAM, the same, like, what it comes down to is that

01:18:16 ◼   ► the iPhone 5S, that CPU has the ability to drive a Retina iPad screen, which is unbelievable.

01:18:21 ◼   ► Exactly. I mean, it's really, really good. And this, you know, now we're starting to

01:18:27 ◼   ► see, every year since the A4, when, you know, like, shortly before that they had acquired

01:18:32 ◼   ► PA Semi and they were talking about, you know, doing their own silicon, or the rumors were

01:18:37 ◼   ► at least, every year so far we're seeing quite how much that's paying off as they

01:18:42 ◼   ► get more and more advanced into the kind of diversions they can achieve from everyone

01:18:49 ◼   ► else's ARM chips. When you start seeing all the custom stuff they're doing, last

01:18:54 ◼   ► year with the A6 you got to see their awesome new core design and now you're seeing these

01:19:00 ◼   ► other trade-offs like the SRAM and stuff like that. It's really impressive what they're

01:19:04 ◼   ► doing, and what's really interesting is why isn't Samsung doing something like this?

01:19:11 ◼   ► Why aren't the other manufacturers able to match this as closely?

01:19:16 ◼   ► It could be that Apple's just a little bit ahead. I would assume the next generation

01:19:21 ◼   ► of ARM parts from other people are going to have similar—Apple's just there first.

01:19:25 ◼   ► Sometimes Apple gets there first by two months, by six months, by eight months, by an entire

01:19:29 ◼   ► year, we'll see. But I would assume everyone's just there first. That's the depressing

01:19:33 ◼   ► thing about this from my perspective is that all these things we're seeing, going from an

01:19:38 ◼   ► inner and a machine to going out of order, making the machine wider, putting on-die RAM,

01:19:43 ◼   ► it's just a replay of the history of the desktop CPUs. Because if you go back, back, back in time,

01:19:49 ◼   ► like back to the 386, 486, and Pentium, we're seeing in mobile the exact same evolution we saw

01:19:57 ◼   ► there, only in a crazily constrained power envelope. So all the tricks you're seeing here,

01:20:02 ◼   ► It used to be back in Ars Technica when John Stokes was doing all his articles about PowerPC

01:20:08 ◼   ► versus Intel, and Itanium came out with Intel's new instruction set, and they were doing predication

01:20:14 ◼   ► where they would execute two instruction streams at the same time, then discard the results of one.

01:20:18 ◼   ► All these interesting ideas, some of them didn't pan out, some of them did.

01:20:22 ◼   ► We went through this whole evolution to see how much instruction-level parallelism can you

01:20:29 ◼   ► extract from regular programs that are compiled by people. How wide can you make machine before

01:20:33 ◼   ► the point of diminishing returns? And then the multi-core and then cache coherency and multi-level.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Like we did it all already and then we had to reset the clock to go, "Okay, here's a risk machine.

01:20:41 ◼   ► It's in order. It sucks, but it fits in a phone." And then we have to go back through the exact same

01:20:46 ◼   ► evolutionary cycle, hopefully with the knowledge of hindsight of like, "Oh, we know exactly how

01:20:50 ◼   ► to make this faster," because jumping right to the A7, that takes into account those designers

01:20:55 ◼   ► of the people who know what we did on the desktop. But there are still so many obvious things that,

01:21:00 ◼   ► if you just look at the current generation Xeon, that has stuff inside that we just can't fit into

01:21:05 ◼   ► a phone power output, but it's just waiting there. We know how to do it. It will make your software

01:21:11 ◼   ► faster. We can clock it higher. Its branch prediction will be better. You'll have a higher

01:21:16 ◼   ► cache hit rate. We have all these awesome things. You just can't fit them in a phone yet.

01:21:20 ◼   ► And so we're just waiting patiently. And hopefully we will get back up to the point,

01:21:25 ◼   ► You know like it seems like desktop CPUs like that's not where the money is anymore and people aren't interested in advancing them

01:21:29 ◼   ► So we have to wait for the mobile CPUs and the process that makes them to catch us up to sort of where we are

01:21:35 ◼   ► on the state of the art on desktop, and then we can finally start making sort of

01:21:37 ◼   ► forward progress in the absolute realm sort of like whatever IBM is doing with the power 8 or whatever the hell power number they're up to

01:21:44 ◼   ► Where they're always just like give an unlimited money and power budget

01:21:47 ◼   ► How fast can we make a CPU for crazy supercomputing stuff assuming anyone besides the government and the NSA are available to buy it from us?

01:21:54 ◼   ► It's kind of disappointing to me to see a replay of that in the mobile space.

01:21:58 ◼   ► It's kind of exciting to have it in the palm of your hand, but on the other hand, I'm

01:22:01 ◼   ► always interesting, you know, as with my love of the Mac Pro and everything, I'm always

01:22:05 ◼   ► interested with the "let's see how fast we can really go" type of advancement, not merely

01:22:10 ◼   ► "let's see how small we can really go with stuff that we already did on the desktop five,

01:22:14 ◼   ► ten years ago."

01:22:15 ◼   ► So, on a final note, John, I hear that you're having some disk woes.

01:22:20 ◼   ► Care to share?

01:22:23 ◼   ► I had them.

01:22:24 ◼   ► This was like a couple of weeks ago.

01:22:25 ◼   ► I just forgot to talk about it.

01:22:27 ◼   ► It kept being at the bottom of my notes.

01:22:29 ◼   ► This is a boring story.

01:22:31 ◼   ► It's not that long.

01:22:32 ◼   ► But again, I think there's a nice moral at the end.

01:22:34 ◼   ► So I was running disk first aid on my wife's boot drive

01:22:37 ◼   ► and her MacBook Air, which is an SSD.

01:22:39 ◼   ► And why was I doing that?

01:22:41 ◼   ► Because that's one of the things that I do.

01:22:43 ◼   ► I run-- it's not called disk first aid anymore, right?

01:22:46 ◼   ► I run disk utility and go to the first aid tab, whatever.

01:22:48 ◼   ► But it's like FSCK, whatever you want to call it.

01:22:51 ◼   ► Check your file system metadata structures

01:22:53 ◼   ► to make sure they know where everything is on disk.

01:22:55 ◼   ► They keep track of which bits are allocated,

01:22:57 ◼   ► to which files, which bits aren't allocated,

01:22:59 ◼   ► how many of these free blocks are available here,

01:23:01 ◼   ► this, that.

01:23:02 ◼   ► They keep track of all that information.

01:23:03 ◼   ► And that information gets out of sync because HRS+ sucks.

01:23:06 ◼   ► So I run this periodically.

01:23:08 ◼   ► You know, I didn't know you thought that.

01:23:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:10 ◼   ► And I don't know how many people do this.

01:23:12 ◼   ► Do either one of you run disk first aid

01:23:14 ◼   ► on your disks or disk utility on your disk with any regularity

01:23:17 ◼   ► ever, just for no reason?

01:23:18 ◼   ► No.

01:23:19 ◼   ► No.

01:23:19 ◼   ► You should.

01:23:20 ◼   ► You totally should.

01:23:22 ◼   ► And that's the thing, like when I brought this up on one of my first shows about file systems,

01:23:25 ◼   ► I said, "Just try this, go up to..."

01:23:27 ◼   ► People were like, "HFS flux first find errors, any problems?"

01:23:29 ◼   ► I'm like, "Okay, well, if you think that,

01:23:31 ◼   ► go and look at one of your disks or run disk first aid on it and see if it finds any errors.

01:23:35 ◼   ► If it finds any errors, that means something screwed up in the past.

01:23:37 ◼   ► And eventually, if those errors accumulate, you will be sad because

01:23:40 ◼   ► whole directories will go away and bad things will happen.

01:23:44 ◼   ► Maybe it'll never happen to you, maybe you'll buy a new computer before that happens.

01:23:46 ◼   ► You could be fine.

01:23:47 ◼   ► But, things are going wrong on your disk and you may not know about it.

01:23:50 ◼   ► the worst kind of failure. Anyway, I run it periodically, I think everybody should too,

01:23:55 ◼   ► and I ran it and it found errors. Very often it does find errors, and there's a repair

01:24:00 ◼   ► button, you can repair it, but when it's your boot drive you can't repair your boot drive,

01:24:02 ◼   ► you can only verify it, you have to reboot from another drive. So great, use, you know,

01:24:05 ◼   ► hold down command R, reboot into recovery mode or whatever it is, and then you can run

01:24:09 ◼   ► repair on your boot volume, even though you're still booting from the same disk as the recovery

01:24:13 ◼   ► partition. But anyway, I hit repair and repair fails. And when that happens, like, when you

01:24:19 ◼   ► When you try to use Disk Utility, it says,

01:24:20 ◼   ► "Well, there were problems with Disk,

01:24:21 ◼   ► "and I couldn't repair them."

01:24:23 ◼   ► Your choices are limited at that point.

01:24:25 ◼   ► You can buy a third-party product that can repair it,

01:24:27 ◼   ► like Disk Warrior or something.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Many third-party products can repair things

01:24:31 ◼   ► Disk Utility can't repair.

01:24:33 ◼   ► So if you already have one of those,

01:24:35 ◼   ► or if you desperately wanna repair it,

01:24:37 ◼   ► I would recommend that.

01:24:38 ◼   ► I had an old version of Disk Warrior,

01:24:40 ◼   ► but I don't have an update one.

01:24:41 ◼   ► I didn't wanna pay for it again.

01:24:42 ◼   ► And I said, "Well, fine."

01:24:43 ◼   ► So Disk Utility can't repair it.

01:24:45 ◼   ► No big deal.

01:24:46 ◼   ► I'll restore from Time Machine, right?

01:24:48 ◼   ► So before I restore from Time Machine,

01:24:51 ◼   ► this is another thing I think not enough people do,

01:24:52 ◼   ► and I don't even know if the Genius Bar people do it,

01:24:55 ◼   ► run a disk utility first aid check

01:24:57 ◼   ► on your Time Machine volume before you restore from it.

01:25:02 ◼   ► Because if you don't do that,

01:25:03 ◼   ► you could be restoring some crazy garbage

01:25:05 ◼   ► onto your boot drive from your Time Machine volume.

01:25:07 ◼   ► So I ran the first aid on my Time Machine volume,

01:25:11 ◼   ► and it found errors.

01:25:13 ◼   ► I said, "Okay, I will repair the Time Machine volume,

01:25:15 ◼   ► "which I can do without rebooting."

01:25:16 ◼   ► I tell it to repair, it says sorry, can't repair.

01:25:19 ◼   ► So now I have two disks, the disk utility says

01:25:21 ◼   ► that there are errors on and it can't repair.

01:25:23 ◼   ► And not only that, now the time machine volume

01:25:25 ◼   ► won't mount anymore and it's grayed out in disk utility.

01:25:28 ◼   ► And when I try to repair again, it hangs in disk utility

01:25:31 ◼   ► and eventually says after many minutes,

01:25:32 ◼   ► couldn't unmount volume, which makes no sense to me

01:25:34 ◼   ► because it's not mounted as far as I can tell

01:25:37 ◼   ► and it's grayed out in disk utility.

01:25:38 ◼   ► And I said, all right, well, fine,

01:25:41 ◼   ► let me erase this time machine disk.

01:25:42 ◼   ► I'll get to why I can do that in a second.

01:25:44 ◼   ► It wouldn't even let me erase it.

01:25:45 ◼   ► I'm like, all right, screw it.

01:25:46 ◼   ► Unplug that drive from the computer, put it away.

01:25:48 ◼   ► At this point, most people would be screwed,

01:25:50 ◼   ► 'cause most people don't have it back

01:25:51 ◼   ► to the first place.

01:25:52 ◼   ► They're like, well, there's errors,

01:25:53 ◼   ► but the disk is still working.

01:25:54 ◼   ► The time machine volume I hosed by trying to repair

01:25:57 ◼   ► with Apple's own Disk Utility Tool.

01:25:58 ◼   ► So that must have been really far gone, right?

01:26:01 ◼   ► But me being the paranoid maniac that I am,

01:26:03 ◼   ► I still have my second time machine volume on my Synology,

01:26:07 ◼   ► my super duper clone, and a crash plan backup.

01:26:10 ◼   ► So I still have three viable backups,

01:26:12 ◼   ► hopefully viable backups,

01:26:13 ◼   ► even though I've not really lost my boot drive,

01:26:16 ◼   ► but it has errors and my time machine volume

01:26:18 ◼   ► is totally hosed because it couldn't even be repaired.

01:26:21 ◼   ► So what I decided to do,

01:26:22 ◼   ► I have lots of options at this point,

01:26:23 ◼   ► lots of options that most people don't have.

01:26:25 ◼   ► What I decided to do at this point was

01:26:27 ◼   ► go with the SuperDuper clone.

01:26:31 ◼   ► And my SuperDuper clone hadn't been made that recently,

01:26:34 ◼   ► so I manually copied the few files

01:26:36 ◼   ► that I know have been modified

01:26:37 ◼   ► since my SuperDuper clone was made

01:26:40 ◼   ► onto a spare partition on another disk.

01:26:43 ◼   ► Then I erased my boot disk and I restored it from the Super Duper Clone.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Oh, and by the way, I ran Disk First Aid on the Super Duper Clone before I did the restore

01:26:49 ◼   ► and it checked out, right?

01:26:51 ◼   ► Always run Disk First Aid on your things before you do anything with them, especially in a

01:26:55 ◼   ► backup scenario, because the worst thing you want to do is to just start spreading corruption

01:26:59 ◼   ► all around and think you've recovered and you haven't.

01:27:04 ◼   ► And then after I had restored, the very next thing I did was ran Disk First Aid on every

01:27:10 ◼   ► single thing, I ran it on all the volumes that were connected, and I did fresh backups

01:27:14 ◼   ► on all destinations except for the super duper backup and the second time machine volume.

01:27:20 ◼   ► So I did a new time machine backup to my local disk, which I finally did get erased through

01:27:24 ◼   ► many reboots on another machine, and did full backups and everything else, ran disk first

01:27:29 ◼   ► and then said now I'm back into a stable state where I have multiple backups, they're all

01:27:32 ◼   ► check out, they're all in sync with each other, but I saved two to be the old thing, just

01:27:37 ◼   ► Just in case there was something going wrong and I waited a few days after I had done this

01:27:41 ◼   ► recovery process to see, now is it safe for me to finally toss my one good one that I

01:27:47 ◼   ► think is good that I restored from, one other backup of time machine volume saying like,

01:27:52 ◼   ► this hasn't been touched ever, it's perfectly fine, in worst case I can fall back on that.

01:27:58 ◼   ► Everything was fine and eventually I just allowed those to sync up too.

01:28:00 ◼   ► So I guess lessons you get out of this is one backup is very often not enough.

01:28:04 ◼   ► Because say I just had that time machine volume.

01:28:06 ◼   ► I mean, I didn't really lose the boob disk.

01:28:07 ◼   ► It just had errors on it, but they were unrepairable errors.

01:28:10 ◼   ► So what was I supposed to do in that case?

01:28:11 ◼   ► Just leave them there forever and cross my fingers and hope new ones didn't accumulate

01:28:14 ◼   ► or whatever error was.

01:28:15 ◼   ► It wasn't important, you know?

01:28:16 ◼   ► Yeah, that's nuts.

01:28:17 ◼   ► I mean, for me, like, I treat any disk error as fatal and, I mean, well, I guess HFS, but

01:28:24 ◼   ► anything, any kind of, like, hardware error, to me, that disk is dead to me.

01:28:27 ◼   ► That's it.

01:28:28 ◼   ► It's gone.

01:28:29 ◼   ► But it's not a hardware error.

01:28:30 ◼   ► This is a software.

01:28:31 ◼   ► It's like a wrong number of hard link counts or, you know, I don't know the exact details.

01:28:35 ◼   ► So it's like HFS+ metadata structure.

01:28:37 ◼   ► It's not a hardware problem.

01:28:38 ◼   ► That's an important distinction that people don't make

01:28:39 ◼   ► 'cause they think, you know,

01:28:40 ◼   ► my hard drive is dying.

01:28:41 ◼   ► If you have a hardware problem,

01:28:42 ◼   ► usually you know it because it manifests in ways

01:28:45 ◼   ► that are not visible in disk utility in any meaningful way.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Like, you know, things freeze up on your computer

01:28:51 ◼   ► and nothing happens.

01:28:52 ◼   ► Terrible noises come from your hard drive,

01:28:53 ◼   ► it's mechanical, you can detect those.

01:28:55 ◼   ► This is just merely software corruptions.

01:28:57 ◼   ► The disks are fine, right?

01:28:58 ◼   ► Second lesson is that more backups give you more options.

01:29:03 ◼   ► not just like, oh, and now I'm safe,

01:29:05 ◼   ► it's that you have options, right?

01:29:06 ◼   ► And the third lesson is that disk clones and time machine,

01:29:10 ◼   ► stuff like that, have different pros and cons.

01:29:13 ◼   ► So that when you have more options,

01:29:14 ◼   ► if you have, I have a time machine one,

01:29:16 ◼   ► I have a Super Duper one, I have an online backup,

01:29:19 ◼   ► like disk clones, I really like, I really like Super Duper,

01:29:22 ◼   ► because it's simpler and less can go wrong,

01:29:24 ◼   ► and it's often faster to recover from,

01:29:27 ◼   ► because it's just a plain old copy.

01:29:29 ◼   ► In fact, you can boot from that clone if you need to.

01:29:30 ◼   ► You can be a backup in a second

01:29:32 ◼   ► if you just boot from that clone.

01:29:33 ◼   ► it's a bootable clone. On the other hand, Time Machine gives you multiple backups. So

01:29:36 ◼   ► if your SuperDuper clone was made after something terrible happened, it's no good to you because

01:29:39 ◼   ► you really want like three weeks ago or whatever. So I highly recommend having more than one

01:29:44 ◼   ► backup, more than one type of backup, and I also recommend running Disk First Aid. Not

01:29:49 ◼   ► every day, not every week, but just once in a while, just to see what's going on there.

01:29:54 ◼   ► So this whole story started with you electing to run Disk Utility?

01:29:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I do it all the time. I do it, you know, whenever I feel paranoid.

01:30:02 ◼   ► hourly? It's not all the time, but like, and the thing is I don't, I suspect computers

01:30:11 ◼   ► with externally attached drives more than internally attached ones, so I run it more

01:30:15 ◼   ► often on my wife's computer than mine. Hers is also more likely to someone like bump out

01:30:20 ◼   ► the cable or she unplugs her laptop from the Thunderbolt cable without unmounting the drives

01:30:25 ◼   ► that are attached through the firewire thing connected to the back of her Thunderbolt display.

01:30:32 ◼   ► All the things that can go wrong with their system that are less likely to go wrong with

01:30:34 ◼   ► my internal SATA drives.

01:30:36 ◼   ► But yeah, I do it at work too.

01:30:38 ◼   ► Make sure my backups are fresh, make sure they're still working, make sure...

01:30:41 ◼   ► I mean, disk first aid is the most minimal check.

01:30:43 ◼   ► It's not checking whether your data could be totally hosed.

01:30:45 ◼   ► All it's checking is, "Hey, I'm a file system and I know where all the blocks on the disk

01:30:50 ◼   ► are.

01:30:51 ◼   ► I know which ones are allocated, I know which files they belong to, I know how many of them

01:30:53 ◼   ► there are."

01:30:54 ◼   ► That's all we're asking of the file system.

01:30:55 ◼   ► Just keep track of that stuff.

01:30:57 ◼   ► And when it loses track, sometimes it's not a big deal.

01:30:59 ◼   ► it thought there were only 15 free blocks here, but there's actually 17.

01:31:03 ◼   ► So what? It's not causing your data to be gone, but

01:31:06 ◼   ► the accumulation of those little errors is eventually what causes

01:31:10 ◼   ► software-based "disk failures".

01:31:13 ◼   ► Disk hardware is fine, but your data is hosed in some way

01:31:17 ◼   ► that you might need something like Disk Warrior or whatever that's going to brute force

01:31:20 ◼   ► reconstruct the appropriate metadata for your disk and then write a new directory structure back out.

01:31:25 ◼   ► I just wish I didn't have to do any of this, but I do, so I do.

01:31:28 ◼   ► You know John, I have a pro tip for you. Ignorance is bliss.

01:31:33 ◼   ► No, no it's not. It's bliss right up to the point where the crying starts.

01:31:38 ◼   ► Yay!

01:31:39 ◼   ► Where's my data? But I had a backup! I used Time Machine!

01:31:44 ◼   ► Wow.

01:31:46 ◼   ► I think we just found the beginning of the show.

01:31:48 ◼   ► We have, and let's find the end of the show now.

01:31:50 ◼   ► So thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Gemvara and Ting.

01:31:54 ◼   ► And we will see you next week.

01:31:55 ◼   ► week.

01:32:02 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental, accidental, it was accidental, accidental

01:32:08 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:32:12 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental, accidental, it was accidental, accidental

01:32:18 ◼   ► You can find the show notes at ee.f.l, and you can read the twitter

01:32:25 ◼   ► Show them on Twitter

01:32:27 ◼   ► Sure

01:32:28 ◼   ► C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:32:31 ◼   ► That's K-C-L-A-R-C-O-A-R-L

01:32:35 ◼   ► E-N-T Marco Armin

01:32:38 ◼   ► S-I-R-A-C

01:32:40 ◼   ► USA Syracuse-o

01:32:43 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental

01:32:44 ◼   ► Accidental

01:32:46 ◼   ► They didn't need to

01:32:48 ◼   ► Accidental

01:32:50 ◼   ► Tech podcast

01:32:52 ◼   ► You two should both just immediately run Disk Utility on all your disks.

01:32:59 ◼   ► See the horrors that await you.

01:33:02 ◼   ► Well now I'm curious.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Well, the thing is, the worst thing is that like, if you have, I have like four, literally

01:33:08 ◼   ► four million files on like my average disk, like my average, you know, boot volume or

01:33:13 ◼   ► whatever, it takes, it takes forever.

01:33:15 ◼   ► Man, are you talking about verified disk permissions or verified disk?

01:33:19 ◼   ► Not permissions, I should have said that on the show. Please, please don't verify permissions.

01:33:22 ◼   ► I mean, that does almost nothing.

01:33:25 ◼   ► It does something.

01:33:26 ◼   ► Doesn't sound anything useful.

01:33:27 ◼   ► You go to the first aid.

01:33:29 ◼   ► - My computer might be slow or unresponsive.

01:33:30 ◼   ► Should I--

01:33:31 ◼   ► - No, don't run, no, no, no.

01:33:33 ◼   ► Don't run on your boot disk now.

01:33:34 ◼   ► Yes, well, running it on your boot disk

01:33:37 ◼   ► while you're booted into that disk will just walk away.

01:33:40 ◼   ► You can run verify and it will tell you if there's errors,

01:33:45 ◼   ► but I always just run repair on it.

01:33:47 ◼   ► Because if there are any errors,

01:33:47 ◼   ► my next thing I'm gonna run is repair

01:33:49 ◼   ► and it takes so long anyway.

01:33:50 ◼   ► So just pick an external drive.

01:33:51 ◼   ► And by the way, when you select it in the sidebar, it shows the disk and then indented

01:33:55 ◼   ► underneath it is the volumes that are on that disk.

01:33:58 ◼   ► Running it on the top disk just checks the partition map, sort of.

01:34:02 ◼   ► You have to select the volume below to actually check the structures on that volume.

01:34:06 ◼   ► So usually checking the partition map is really fast and it'll almost always check out, and

01:34:10 ◼   ► if it doesn't, you've got big problems if it doesn't know where the volumes are.

01:34:14 ◼   ► But then running it on the individual disks is a thing that takes forever.

01:34:16 ◼   ► And it'll find something small, like an incorrect number of...

01:34:20 ◼   ► I don't even know what these messages are, but like they're just I my impression is the hfs+ keeps a lot of

01:34:25 ◼   ► sort of

01:34:27 ◼   ► denormalized counts of other structures

01:34:30 ◼   ► So it'll have like a bunch of structures and then it'll have a number that indicates how many are available and how many are there?

01:34:35 ◼   ► And it can reconstruct that count by walking the tree and finding out how many and writing the number there and that number gets out

01:34:40 ◼   ► of sync

01:34:41 ◼   ► Somehow and it's usually not a big deal as well like the easiest type of errors to fix

01:34:45 ◼   ► But there are more serious ones getting all the way down to

01:34:47 ◼   ► Could not repair your disk and by the way it will never mount again say goodbye to it

01:34:51 ◼   ► And you can't even erase it that one really frustrated me because I was like what I can't even erase the disk

01:34:56 ◼   ► I know I took I took the disk off. I put it on a whole different computer I

01:35:00 ◼   ► Rebooted that computer a few times. I eventually got it to erase that disk

01:35:04 ◼   ► I don't know idea what the hell its problem was but that disk is out of rotation now

01:35:07 ◼   ► So that one that one is done enough wonky stuff to me that I'm like all right. You're you're having a timeout

01:35:12 ◼   ► I used to test the next build of 1010 or something, but I was becoming a magnet donor

01:35:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I swapped in a what one of my vast collection of caviar blacks and another enclosure

01:35:23 ◼   ► So while we're on the topic of hard drives, I can't imagine this coming up quite like this again

01:35:28 ◼   ► I recently decided to make a change in my hard drive buying policy

01:35:33 ◼   ► It my policy used to be that I would I would look at the current

01:35:38 ◼   ► you know, best bang for the buck capacity and buy like one or two of those, you know,

01:35:43 ◼   ► for the either storage or maybe buy two of them to put them in a raid or something like

01:35:48 ◼   ► that. And usually that was, you know, like today that's probably three terabyte. You

01:35:54 ◼   ► know, in the past it's usually like one or two levels down from the biggest drive

01:35:57 ◼   ► that exists on the market that day.

01:35:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I never like buying the biggest. That makes me nervous.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Well, so I think I'm deciding to change that policy and now just buy the biggest,

01:36:08 ◼   ► because what happens is now I have this drawer full of like one terabyte hard drives.

01:36:14 ◼   ► And a bunch of them went into the Synology, but I don't even have room for all of the

01:36:19 ◼   ► hard drives I have in the Synology.

01:36:22 ◼   ► Because now the problem is that when you buy anything but the biggest, its useful lifespan

01:36:29 ◼   ► can be much shorter.

01:36:31 ◼   ► I think that's an asset.

01:36:33 ◼   ► Because then it keeps you from using a disk.

01:36:35 ◼   ► What was that thing that had the--

01:36:37 ◼   ► I tweeted it.

01:36:38 ◼   ► Backblaze was showing the hard disk lifetime graph.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Did you see that?

01:36:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:42 ◼   ► Did you see what happened at three years?

01:36:45 ◼   ► The knee of the graph goes, and now you're screwed.

01:36:48 ◼   ► So I don't want to have a disk.

01:36:50 ◼   ► Wow, it's at such a capacity.

01:36:51 ◼   ► I could use it for four years.

01:36:53 ◼   ► No, don't do that.

01:36:54 ◼   ► I would rather have it age out because it's too small.

01:36:57 ◼   ► that's a positive force in the ecosystem of my spinning storage, I feel like.

01:37:02 ◼   ► That's a fair counterpoint. I can totally see that. I guess so, yeah. It depends on how long

01:37:09 ◼   ► you want to use it. But I mean, I was having some problems where I would buy two one terabyte disks

01:37:15 ◼   ► to make a really fast RAID array, and then 18 months later, I outgrow that space and need more,

01:37:21 ◼   ► and that sucks. Yeah, well, I mean, the size is now, I think, it's making it harder for you

01:37:26 ◼   ► outgrow it now because like three terabyte is now kind of the not biggest size you can get.

01:37:31 ◼   ► And it will take you longer to fill that. Your data needs have not tripled since one terabyte

01:37:36 ◼   ► drives were the sweet spot. So now three terabyte drives are the sweet spot, but you can get away

01:37:40 ◼   ► with it for longer. But in scenarios where you're putting them into a box where it's going to be

01:37:45 ◼   ► some sort of RAID setup and redundancy, then yeah, I think it's better to go with the biggest

01:37:49 ◼   ► possible capacity because you have built-in hardware redundancy. You're putting these in

01:37:55 ◼   ► there, you're putting them in there to die. Like, I need the space. Because you have to overprovision

01:38:00 ◼   ► so much for these RAID schemes or the Drobo-type schemes or anything else like that. Like, you have

01:38:03 ◼   ► to just overprovision the space so much. And the only advantage you're getting is like, it's okay,

01:38:09 ◼   ► one of you can die. Even two of you can die since I'm so massively overprovisioned. And then, yeah,

01:38:13 ◼   ► just go up to the max. But what I'm mostly talking about is like individual drives that I use just as

01:38:18 ◼   ► plain old drives, you know, internal. Like, in fact, sometimes I do multiple volumes on them.

01:38:22 ◼   ► I'm the opposite of RAID. I tend to do multiple volumes per disk instead of multiple disks per

01:38:26 ◼   ► volume. But yeah, I'm new to the box that holds a bunch of disks phenomenon. You want to do titles?

01:38:33 ◼   ► Let's do titles. The Compliance Shark? Who said that one?

01:38:36 ◼   ► You did. No, I didn't.

01:38:38 ◼   ► Yes, you did. Maybe I mumbled something that sounded like The Compliance Shark.

01:38:42 ◼   ► You totally said it. I'm going to cut it in. You'll see.

01:38:46 ◼   ► Can anyone remember the context? It was early on we were talking

01:38:51 ◼   ► about like enterprise software.

01:38:53 ◼   ► Oh, it was like a sucker fish on the shark?

01:38:54 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:38:55 ◼   ► Man, I might have said it.

01:38:56 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:38:57 ◼   ► You did say it.

01:38:58 ◼   ► I say a lot of things.

01:39:02 ◼   ► Nooks and crannies of profit where they can like sort of live as the big sucker fish on

01:39:06 ◼   ► the government shark or on the compliance shark and say, "compliant shark, compliance

01:39:10 ◼   ► shark."

01:39:11 ◼   ► One of my favorites was accidental F cast.

01:39:16 ◼   ► Let's make up some numbers here.

01:39:18 ◼   ► And it's so precise.

01:39:20 ◼   ► It's not even like vague, like, "No, we know exactly.

01:39:22 ◼   ► It's these exact little kinks in the lines."

01:39:26 ◼   ► What rant I wanted to make in the show, but we didn't have time for, maybe I'll do it

01:39:30 ◼   ► next week, or maybe it should be a blog post, I don't know, is I look at people who are

01:39:37 ◼   ► doing, they're trying to get away with just using an iPad.

01:39:40 ◼   ► There was a great post that Fraser Spears mentioned how he records his podcast on just

01:39:46 ◼   ► an iPad and Dan Benjamin was talking to Merlin on this week's Back to Work about possibly

01:39:52 ◼   ► going iPad only for himself when he travels and it just like people will jump through

01:39:57 ◼   ► the most ridiculous set of hoops to try to cram their life into going iPad only when

01:40:03 ◼   ► it really doesn't serve their needs particularly well. Like it's like you can do that but maybe

01:40:08 ◼   ► you shouldn't like SimCity 2000 on the Super Nintendo. Like you can yes you can do that

01:40:14 ◼   ► but it's not ideal. You probably shouldn't. You should probably just use a computer for that.

01:40:19 ◼   ► I was going to say, when people see me using my iPad with the keyboard attachment and little

01:40:24 ◼   ► wing stand thing at WWDC, I would love to have a MacBook Air. I'm not doing that. But look at me,

01:40:30 ◼   ► I'm living off my iPad. It's because I don't have an Air and they cost a lot of money and I already

01:40:34 ◼   ► have an iPad. I'm doing it for cost reasons only. And every time I'm there, every year, I'm like,

01:40:38 ◼   ► "Next year, I need to just rent a MacBook Air." It would be so much better for me. I do not want

01:40:43 ◼   ► of these two things, like it's like the Microsoft Surface, like the keyboard is not attached

01:40:48 ◼   ► to the thing.

01:40:49 ◼   ► As much as I love my iPad, that environment is made for the MacBook Air and my wife.

01:40:54 ◼   ► Well, let me take hers and I don't have an 11-inch so I get by with it.

01:40:57 ◼   ► But yeah, when I see people doing it as a virtue, it's like the Airs are pretty light

01:41:01 ◼   ► now, you know?

01:41:02 ◼   ► And they, like it was, I guess maybe when it was 10 hours battery life versus three

01:41:06 ◼   ► or four, then you could be like, "Okay, actually the iPad is better for your use."

01:41:10 ◼   ► But now, maybe not the 11-inch, but the 13-inch versus the iPad Air, the battery lives are