ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hey, how's the review, John?

00:00:02 ◼   ► They changed a bunch of stuff in DP8.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Had to change a bunch of stuff, make new screenshots.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:00:07 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Still on the ship date, still no price.

00:00:10 ◼   ► So have you been drinking things other than water lately?

00:00:12 ◼   ► Have you gotten some soda to get over the angst?

00:00:15 ◼   ► Nope.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Maybe a Diet Pepsi or something?

00:00:19 ◼   ► What was your treat drink?

00:00:21 ◼   ► Like a Sprite?

00:00:22 ◼   ► Diet.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Yeah, Sprite is my restaurant drink when I go out.

00:00:25 ◼   ► The only time I ever have Sprite is when I go to a restaurant.

00:00:27 ◼   ► That's what I get.

00:00:29 ◼   ► I get anything. Sometimes I still get water restaurants, but Sprite is my go-to.

00:00:34 ◼   ► I've learned the difference between living in Richmond, Virginia and living in a major

00:00:40 ◼   ► metropolitan area like Boston or New York. Because I went into the Apple Store to do

00:00:45 ◼   ► the easy pay thing, and I needed to pick up a lightning cable for my parents who were

00:00:51 ◼   ► visiting and they had only one lightning cable with them and it was busted because it was

00:00:57 ◼   ► third party one blah blah blah so I went to do the easy easy pay thing and I ended up just by pure

00:01:03 ◼   ► happenstance seeing a friend of mine in there so I get to talking to the guy and then one of the

00:01:07 ◼   ► Apple employees in a blue shirt kind of does a double take and says wait wait wait are you Casey?

00:01:13 ◼   ► Yes. You should not have said yes. You don't know what the correct answer to that question was.

00:01:22 ◼   ► Of course. Who the hell is Casey?

00:01:26 ◼   ► There's the one opportunity to say that in a legitimate context.

00:01:29 ◼   ► Oh my god, I'm so mad at myself.

00:01:31 ◼   ► I didn't even think about it.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Who the hell is K.T.?

00:01:35 ◼   ► So anyway, it gets better though because I lose track of this individual because I was

00:01:39 ◼   ► talking to my friend for a little bit and then all of a sudden, and I don't know this

00:01:43 ◼   ► for sure, but all of a sudden two other blue shirts come swooping in from the middle of

00:01:49 ◼   ► nowhere.

00:01:50 ◼   ► Were there people inside of them?

00:01:51 ◼   ► Yeah, it was weird.

00:01:53 ◼   ► No, so there were people inside the blue shirts.

00:01:57 ◼   ► So anyway, it almost seemed like the first individual went into the back room to say,

00:02:04 ◼   ► "Oh my God, guess who's here?"

00:02:05 ◼   ► And then the other two came swooping out, and it was the most flattering and ridiculous

00:02:09 ◼   ► thing I've ever seen.

00:02:10 ◼   ► And so it's good to live in a smaller town.

00:02:14 ◼   ► So John, when you go in with your busted, or is it your wife's busted, cinema display

00:02:19 ◼   ► or whatever Thunderbolt display that I'm very jealous of, and you don't get special

00:02:22 ◼   ► special treatment? Well, I didn't get special treatment.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Special treatment, I just don't want to have to drive back to my house and get my ID that I

00:02:27 ◼   ► forgot. Like, that's it. That's all. The one time I didn't, and it wasn't like it's not to

00:02:32 ◼   ► be flatter my ego. It's for like practical purposes. Like most of the time I do not want

00:02:37 ◼   ► to be recognized. I don't want to get in, want to get out. But this one time, just this one time.

00:02:41 ◼   ► And yeah, it is depressing that I've literally never been recognized in an Apple store. That's

00:02:47 ◼   ► okay. Don't you know who I am? I'm a professional complainer.

00:02:50 ◼   ► Like, I just didn't want to get back in the car, but it's like you drive out, you make

00:02:54 ◼   ► a trip, you know, bring the whole thing, you drive out there, I don't want to get back

00:02:57 ◼   ► in my car and drive back.

00:02:58 ◼   ► It's my fault, like, I'm the one who forgot my ID.

00:03:00 ◼   ► I'm not blaming the staff of the store for it at all, but like, boy, I just wanted it

00:03:05 ◼   ► this one time to save me a car trip, and it did not work.

00:03:08 ◼   ► So now I will never ever forget my ID again.

00:03:11 ◼   ► I still have to bring the thing back.

00:03:12 ◼   ► I almost brought the display back again because I thought my warranty that I had extended

00:03:16 ◼   ► was about to run out, but turns out I have another year, so I'll continue to let it sit

00:03:19 ◼   ► here with a broken camera because I said I better get it in for repairs and get it back

00:03:24 ◼   ► in time for my Mavericks review, but now when I learned I had an extra year, I'm just

00:03:27 ◼   ► going to wait until the review is done to send it in again.

00:03:31 ◼   ► Yeah, so in summary, Andrew and Scott, I believe were their names, thanks for being nice to

00:03:37 ◼   ► me and saying hi. If this actually ends up in the show, which it doesn't because it's

00:03:40 ◼   ► boring.

00:03:41 ◼   ► It probably will. I think we made it fun enough.

00:03:43 ◼   ► Fair enough. All right, so anything happen this week? Oh, anyway, hold on. We got a crud

00:03:47 ◼   ► load of follow up.

00:03:48 ◼   ► We do?

00:03:49 ◼   ► Is it in the document that I'm not looking at?

00:03:51 ◼   ► Yes it is. Do we want to skip it since we have a busy night or do we want to do it?

00:03:55 ◼   ► Well, we aren't allowed to do it at the end.

00:03:57 ◼   ► That is true. We established that because some moron asked if you could do follow-up at the end, and clearly that's just fully unacceptable.

00:04:03 ◼   ► Now, can we even entertain this topic? Is this far enough into the show that we can't do it anymore? Have we crossed the follow-up threshold?

00:04:08 ◼   ► No, you can still do follow-up at this point.

00:04:11 ◼   ► You are the arbiter of all things follow-up.

00:04:14 ◼   ► All right, so actually this is mostly your portion of the show, John, is it not?

00:04:19 ◼   ► In the sense that you have the most follow-up.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Well, there's SnappyCam stuff that Marco should talk about, but since he's totally unprepared

00:04:25 ◼   ► for this, then he can't talk about it.

00:04:26 ◼   ► So he'll save that for another time.

00:04:27 ◼   ► Wait, hold on.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Well, yeah.

00:04:29 ◼   ► So the developer of SnappyCam emailed us and gave us a lot of great information.

00:04:34 ◼   ► I don't know how much of it is that relevant to read out on a podcast, but it was basically,

00:04:40 ◼   ► You know, we -- our statements about it being awesomely engineered sound like they were

00:04:45 ◼   ► pretty accurate.

00:04:46 ◼   ► He built quite a system there.

00:04:49 ◼   ► And he believes that he has not been Sherlocked and that there is a bright future ahead.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And I was wrong, actually, when I said I thought 120 FPS was on one of the slides.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Turns out 60 FPS was on one of the slides, and that was referring to the capabilities

00:05:04 ◼   ► of the iPhone 5 hardware.

00:05:06 ◼   ► So besides that correction.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Although now, I believe the NDA is officially up as of today, right?

00:05:14 ◼   ► I believe that's right, which is why we have a busy show.

00:05:16 ◼   ► So now we can talk about all the stuff that we had been holding back by the NDA, which

00:05:20 ◼   ► actually isn't that much stuff, but I'm sure that we will make it big.

00:05:25 ◼   ► I mean, we've had entire shows where we've said, "Oh yeah, we only have two things

00:05:28 ◼   ► to talk about," and then 90 minutes later, we're just finishing the second thing.

00:05:32 ◼   ► Wasn't that like the last three episodes—well, not the very last episode in neutral, but

00:05:35 ◼   ► like the three prior?

00:05:36 ◼   ► I think it's every episode.

00:05:37 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:05:40 ◼   ► All right, so John, you want to talk about the Synology

00:05:42 ◼   ► for a couple minutes?

00:05:44 ◼   ► Yeah, we talked a lot about Synology a couple shows ago.

00:05:46 ◼   ► But one topic we didn't get to at all that a couple people

00:05:48 ◼   ► asked about is my favorite hobby horse, Data Integrity.

00:05:53 ◼   ► And people were asking, so now you've got all this storage.

00:05:55 ◼   ► Aren't you worried about Data Integrity and Bitrot

00:05:58 ◼   ► and all those things?

00:06:00 ◼   ► And the answer is yes, I am still worried about that.

00:06:03 ◼   ► because Synology does not currently support ZFS unless you use it as an iSCSI device.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Because of course if you use it as an iSCSI device, then it's just like it's directly

00:06:14 ◼   ► attached storage as far as your computer is concerned, and if your computer supports ZFS,

00:06:18 ◼   ► then you can format it however you want.

00:06:20 ◼   ► Of course, using a Mac, that's a problem for me because OS X solutions for ZFS are not

00:06:27 ◼   ► great, not particularly stable.

00:06:29 ◼   ► Although that was the new OpenZFS project, but that's really sort of a conglomeration

00:06:33 ◼   ► of existing projects.

00:06:35 ◼   ► But anyway, the upshot is that Synology runs, I think it's EXT4, you could probably change

00:06:41 ◼   ► it to something else if you wanted.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Again, if you use it as iSCSI, you can format it as whatever you want.

00:06:47 ◼   ► And EXT4, to my knowledge, does not have any features like ZFS that do checksumming on

00:06:51 ◼   ► all data and metadata, let alone things like duplicating blocks and all that stuff.

00:06:59 ◼   ► That's not the one that was written by the murderer, was it?

00:07:02 ◼   ► No, that's RiserFS.

00:07:04 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, that's right.

00:07:06 ◼   ► Which also doesn't have data integrity features as far as I know.

00:07:10 ◼   ► Obviously, the guy has no integrity.

00:07:13 ◼   ► A lot of file systems will do metadata checksumming, but very few of them do complete checksumming

00:07:20 ◼   ► of data and metadata.

00:07:23 ◼   ► The big thing is that it's not just checksums of the stuff, it's end-to-end data integrity,

00:07:27 ◼   ► So it's checking everything to make sure your data makes

00:07:29 ◼   ► a healthy round trip all the way through your entire storage

00:07:33 ◼   ► system, through your drivers, through the network,

00:07:34 ◼   ► through all the firmware on the disk,

00:07:36 ◼   ► through all the caching, through all the RAID stuff,

00:07:38 ◼   ► whatever things are in the way, ZFS

00:07:40 ◼   ► makes sure that your data is making a round trip

00:07:42 ◼   ► and it's safe.

00:07:44 ◼   ► So obviously, I would prefer it if it had ZFS on it,

00:07:50 ◼   ► but not so much that I'm going to go the iSCSI route,

00:07:52 ◼   ► because we've just discussed in previous shows

00:07:54 ◼   ► that I want to install a kernel extension.

00:07:55 ◼   ► I don't want to pay for a kernel extension.

00:07:57 ◼   ► I'd rather use it as network attached storage,

00:07:59 ◼   ► because there's more flexibility,

00:08:00 ◼   ► and the performance has been great and everything.

00:08:02 ◼   ► And because even if I did that,

00:08:04 ◼   ► then I would be forced to try to deal with whatever ZFS

00:08:07 ◼   ► for OS X software is out there and deal with all its bugs

00:08:10 ◼   ► and how well it works and everything like that.

00:08:12 ◼   ► So I'm not ready for that.

00:08:14 ◼   ► The one thing this analogy has going for it over me

00:08:17 ◼   ► just having a bunch of external disks

00:08:18 ◼   ► is that I have slightly more faith

00:08:20 ◼   ► that ext4 will not corrupt itself

00:08:23 ◼   ► in the way that HFS+ routinely does

00:08:25 ◼   ► in terms of losing track of which blocks are allocated

00:08:28 ◼   ► and how many files are in which directories

00:08:29 ◼   ► and all that stuff.

00:08:30 ◼   ► During the course of normal operation,

00:08:32 ◼   ► of course I don't have enough experience with the XD4,

00:08:35 ◼   ► to say this for a fact, because I've used the XD2 extensively.

00:08:38 ◼   ► I haven't used the XD3, was there even an XD3?

00:08:41 ◼   ► Probably was.

00:08:42 ◼   ► But this is my first use of the XD4,

00:08:44 ◼   ► but I feel confident based on my experience with the XD2

00:08:47 ◼   ► and my vast experience with AWS Plus,

00:08:50 ◼   ► that at the very least, this is not a bit rod issue,

00:08:52 ◼   ► but at the very least,

00:08:53 ◼   ► the file system should not corrupt itself

00:08:55 ◼   ► to the point where I lose data due to that reason.

00:08:58 ◼   ► All the bits that are on there still could be randomly

00:09:00 ◼   ► fluffing themselves.

00:09:01 ◼   ► My data could be corrupting itself,

00:09:03 ◼   ► and then duplicating that corruption

00:09:04 ◼   ► onto all my other disks, and then duplicating that corruption

00:09:06 ◼   ► into the cloud.

00:09:06 ◼   ► That is all still entirely true.

00:09:10 ◼   ► I have not reached CFS-based nirvana,

00:09:12 ◼   ► but I am waiting patiently.

00:09:14 ◼   ► I filed a feature request with Synology on their web form

00:09:17 ◼   ► that said I would like some features that

00:09:20 ◼   ► do data integrity checking.

00:09:21 ◼   ► I would love it if they could support CFS natively

00:09:23 ◼   ► and do all that stuff.

00:09:24 ◼   ► We'll see if anything ever comes of that.

00:09:26 ◼   ► - And on the topic of waiting for ZFS,

00:09:28 ◼   ► I also wanted to point out that I was listening

00:09:30 ◼   ► to the Debug Podcast with Guy English and Rene Ritchie.

00:09:33 ◼   ► It's a very good show, you should all be listening to it.

00:09:35 ◼   ► And number 20, they were interviewing Ryan Nielsen.

00:09:39 ◼   ► He was formerly a, I believe, product or project manager.

00:09:43 ◼   ► I don't know the difference,

00:09:44 ◼   ► and I know there's a big difference,

00:09:45 ◼   ► and I don't know which one he was.

00:09:47 ◼   ► Formerly on the OS X team.

00:09:49 ◼   ► And he very briefly talked about John Siracusa

00:09:53 ◼   ► and file systems in ZFS.

00:09:55 ◼   ► And you know, X-Apple people can't really say a whole lot,

00:09:58 ◼   ► but it sounded like the implication was that

00:10:02 ◼   ► it's never gonna happen.

00:10:03 ◼   ► That ZFS support on Mac OS X will never be worth

00:10:08 ◼   ► the incredible effort required to really do it properly.

00:10:11 ◼   ► - Well, his take, and he was clearly on the bad side

00:10:15 ◼   ► inside Apple, his take was that,

00:10:17 ◼   ► like they asked about file systems,

00:10:18 ◼   ► like what's the holdup or whatever,

00:10:20 ◼   ► and he was like, well, you know,

00:10:21 ◼   ► HFS+ works OK, and changing it would be a difficult transition.

00:10:26 ◼   ► And the advantages of changing it are the resources

00:10:31 ◼   ► it would take to change it-- the number of engineers you need

00:10:34 ◼   ► the amount of time, how you'd have

00:10:35 ◼   ► to deal with customers in the transition phase.

00:10:37 ◼   ► That's a big cost on one side.

00:10:38 ◼   ► It's in the con column.

00:10:39 ◼   ► And on the pro side of the column,

00:10:41 ◼   ► he's like, well, those pros are outweighed by the cons.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And he saw that as being the case, I don't know,

00:10:47 ◼   ► in perpetuity, but certainly now.

00:10:50 ◼   ► So I can understand that perspective, but it's a little bit crazy to have that position,

00:10:57 ◼   ► sort of an absolutist type position, because so many things that Apple has done and will do in

00:11:03 ◼   ► the future are completely counter to that philosophy. You could take all the arguments

00:11:09 ◼   ► he had against why Apple has not and should not currently switch to a new file system and apply

00:11:14 ◼   ► them to, "Oh, I don't know. Why should we make an entirely new operating system that's barely

00:11:19 ◼   ► backward compatible with the previous one. His entire job and the existence of his entire project

00:11:23 ◼   ► on Mac OS X is based on an effort with a tremendous number of cons and the pros that are many years

00:11:28 ◼   ► off in the future and potentially only theoretical and may not ever come to pass.

00:11:31 ◼   ► Mac OS X itself is the best example of that. It was a huge undertaking with huge risks.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Talk about a transition, like a potentially company destroying transitional period,

00:11:43 ◼   ► but it had to be done. You can't just keep going with the old thing forever.

00:11:46 ◼   ► And that is entirely true of H of S Plus.

00:11:49 ◼   ► You know, OS down.

00:11:50 ◼   ► It's a little bit different, though,

00:11:51 ◼   ► in that the OS X transition had to happen because they

00:11:55 ◼   ► were in severe pain without it.

00:11:56 ◼   ► Their old OS was really, really outdated to a point

00:12:00 ◼   ► where they were losing a lot because if they were losing

00:12:03 ◼   ► sales, they were losing people, they were losing developers.

00:12:06 ◼   ► They were in terrible shape.

00:12:08 ◼   ► The pain level was high there.

00:12:09 ◼   ► In this case, it seems like the pain level really

00:12:12 ◼   ► isn't substantial.

00:12:14 ◼   ► And so what do you think would ever motivate them to make a big change like that?

00:12:19 ◼   ► The pane level is only smaller in proportion to the size of the feature.

00:12:22 ◼   ► So it's like the entire OS and then there's a large pane level to go with it.

00:12:25 ◼   ► And then you have something small like the file system,

00:12:27 ◼   ► but I think the file system is in just as bad technical shape as the OS was.

00:12:31 ◼   ► It's just that the file system is only one small part of an OS, so obviously it's less important.

00:12:36 ◼   ► But if you just look at that particular view,

00:12:38 ◼   ► like how big of a portion of the entire experience is the file system

00:12:42 ◼   ► and then how terrible is it versus how big a part of the entire experience is the operating system

00:12:46 ◼   ► and how terrible is it. I think probably HFS+ is more terrible in proportion to its importance

00:12:51 ◼   ► than Mac OS 9 was because Mac OS 9 was terrible, but the OS is like all important. Whereas

00:12:55 ◼   ► the file system is only minor importance, but it's just, it's much more terrible than OS 9 was.

00:13:00 ◼   ► I think it's just, I mean, it could be that, you know, I, I, you don't have to go to ZFS,

00:13:05 ◼   ► like ZFS could say, oh, that's just an incremental step. This is just another kind of regular file

00:13:08 ◼   ► Maybe we just need to skip something entirely

00:13:10 ◼   ► to some sort of virtualized storage model

00:13:13 ◼   ► where everything is memory mapped

00:13:15 ◼   ► and it's all just one big giant open field of RAM

00:13:18 ◼   ► from the perspective of your application

00:13:20 ◼   ► and everything is solid state behind it.

00:13:22 ◼   ► Who knows what they switched to, right?

00:13:24 ◼   ► But you need to change to something.

00:13:26 ◼   ► You can't go with HLS+ forever.

00:13:27 ◼   ► It's just not tenable in the same way

00:13:29 ◼   ► that you can't go with OS 9 forever.

00:13:30 ◼   ► At a certain point, you reach a breaking point.

00:13:32 ◼   ► You could say we're not at that breaking point now,

00:13:34 ◼   ► but even now, I would say, as the volumes of data

00:13:36 ◼   ► we deal with go up, not having any control over whether that data is good into the future,

00:13:43 ◼   ► but merely just copying it around and just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best

00:13:46 ◼   ► and just saying, "Ah, occasionally it'll get corrupted. You might lose some things." Whatever.

00:13:50 ◼   ► You can't go on that path forever. And all of their competitors are ahead of them by

00:13:57 ◼   ► varying amounts in terms of the file system technology they're using. So there is a gap

00:14:01 ◼   ► there as well. And the other examples like HFS to HFS+. Apple did that transition for

00:14:07 ◼   ► very incremental gain, because they had to quote unquote because the block size, they didn't have

00:14:11 ◼   ► enough blocks, you had to make like 32 kilobyte minimum block size because hard drives were

00:14:15 ◼   ► getting bigger. It was kind of good, they gave them the kick in the pants to do that, but they

00:14:18 ◼   ► had the exact same problems. How do you deal with people not being able to read your disks,

00:14:22 ◼   ► try to do an in-place translation of the file system, which was terrible with HFS to HFS+,

00:14:26 ◼   ► like these are all problems we know about. And maybe Apple will even go through it again with

00:14:31 ◼   ► with another architecture transition,

00:14:33 ◼   ► if they ever go to ARM or something.

00:14:35 ◼   ► These type of transitions are painful,

00:14:37 ◼   ► but they're also necessary.

00:14:38 ◼   ► So I don't fault someone for saying

00:14:40 ◼   ► at various times this came up,

00:14:42 ◼   ► we decided that the pros outweighed the cons,

00:14:45 ◼   ► but once you say,

00:14:46 ◼   ► and it's never going to be important enough to change,

00:14:49 ◼   ► that's where I part ways and say, no, never is a long time.

00:14:52 ◼   ► Something will replace it.

00:14:53 ◼   ► And if you don't plan for something to replace it,

00:14:56 ◼   ► if you don't take an active role

00:14:57 ◼   ► in the eventual replacement

00:14:59 ◼   ► of every piece of technology you're dealing with,

00:15:00 ◼   ► it will sneak up on you and you will have problems.

00:15:02 ◼   ► So best to plan for it.

00:15:03 ◼   ► And to Apple's credit, I think they have been planning for it.

00:15:06 ◼   ► They were looking at ZFS.

00:15:07 ◼   ► They went so far as to put it up on web pages on their website

00:15:11 ◼   ► to say it's coming.

00:15:12 ◼   ► Didn't work out for reasons beyond their control,

00:15:15 ◼   ► legal issues, blah, blah, blah, maybe even technical issues.

00:15:17 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:15:18 ◼   ► That's fine.

00:15:19 ◼   ► But that's not an excuse to say, well,

00:15:21 ◼   ► we're never going to look at file systems again.

00:15:24 ◼   ► You know, you really do just love any excuse

00:15:27 ◼   ► to talk about file systems, don't you?

00:15:28 ◼   ► I do.

00:15:29 ◼   ► If I was on that podcast, I'd like everything he said. But when he said like, "You know,

00:15:33 ◼   ► it's never going to be important enough." Never? No. I don't even know if he said never.

00:15:36 ◼   ► Like, the implication was that the time has come and gone for that, but it's just like HFS+ Forever.

00:15:42 ◼   ► It's not HFS+ Forever. It's going to have to change. And if Apple doesn't take a role in

00:15:46 ◼   ► changing it, they'll find themselves in another crisis situation.

00:15:50 ◼   ► I would love if you were on that show with him at that moment. I mean, the show already,

00:15:55 ◼   ► the conversation was so long I had to split it into two episodes. I would imagine,

00:15:59 ◼   ► you know, if you went on there, it would have been at least three or four.

00:16:02 ◼   ► This is the only thing I had to quibble with. Everything else I loved hearing about all the

00:16:05 ◼   ► details. I loved everything I said, comparing the cultures between Microsoft and Apple in terms of

00:16:10 ◼   ► their development systems and everything. It's all great.

00:16:13 ◼   ► All right, so to keep moving along, because we do have a lot to talk about,

00:16:17 ◼   ► another piece of quick follow-up, and I think the last piece about the Synology,

00:16:21 ◼   ► I'd asked Marco what it was like using the Synology for photograph storage

00:16:26 ◼   ► as a photographer because I know a couple friends have asked me about it.

00:16:30 ◼   ► And Mark Gebaltz, I don't know if I butchered that, I probably did, I'm sorry Mark, but anyway,

00:16:35 ◼   ► he said, "I used Lightroom with the library residing on a Synology for a few years and it

00:16:39 ◼   ► works just great. At first I was even connected to it through Wi-Fi, just a little too slow to be fun,

00:16:44 ◼   ► so I finally drilled a hole through the wall to connect with an Ethernet cable." But FYI,

00:16:48 ◼   ► according to Mark, it works great.

00:16:50 ◼   ► And that's all the follow up I had.

00:16:53 ◼   ► Actually, one more brief thing on this analogy

00:16:55 ◼   ► with the ZFS bit.

00:16:57 ◼   ► This is yet another reason why you

00:16:59 ◼   ► might want to build your own ZFS, you know,

00:17:01 ◼   ► FreeBSD, whatever, you know, build your own NAS.

00:17:04 ◼   ► All the people who build their own NASs

00:17:06 ◼   ► and who are willing to sink the time into that to get it done,

00:17:10 ◼   ► in exchange for their time and possibly their sanity,

00:17:13 ◼   ► they will end up with a solution that has data integrity.

00:17:17 ◼   ► and you can't get that if you buy a Synology to this plus another plus one in the column of

00:17:22 ◼   ► Building your own thing although as the person who sent in this email about that one of the emails about this topic said

00:17:28 ◼   ► Taking that route trying to build your own nest is kind of a time vampire, and I think that's a good good description of it

00:17:35 ◼   ► nice

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00:19:50 ◼   ► Why doesn't everybody do that?

00:19:53 ◼   ► The no credit card with free trials?

00:19:55 ◼   ► That was like a business innovation back when Squarespace started doing it.

00:19:58 ◼   ► But at this point, why doesn't everybody do that?

00:20:01 ◼   ► Obviously-

00:20:02 ◼   ► point that everyone knows, you know, the same reason why, why don't they just drop the price

00:20:06 ◼   ► instead of doing mail-in rebates? Because they know that some percentage of people are going

00:20:10 ◼   ► to forget, and they'll make a little bit more money. That's why companies do that.

00:20:13 ◼   ► That seems like an anti-pattern, though. Like, yeah, I understand the concept of like,

00:20:16 ◼   ► oh, I'll forget that it's there, I'll get charged. But you hate companies that do that. And it seems

00:20:20 ◼   ► like this would have come around by now that people would be like, we don't want people to

00:20:23 ◼   ► hate us. Like, some companies do want you to hate them. I understand like why scummy, scummy

00:20:26 ◼   ► companies do it. Like, because that's their business model, right? Like even getting up to,

00:20:30 ◼   ► to PayPal or Facebook.

00:20:32 ◼   ► They kind of want you to hate them.

00:20:33 ◼   ► So they'll do the scummy things, right?

00:20:35 ◼   ► But for these dot-com-y startup, cool, trendy companies

00:20:39 ◼   ► that appeal to nerds-- anybody who would advertise this--

00:20:41 ◼   ► everyone should copy Squarespace's free trial

00:20:43 ◼   ► with no credit card.

00:20:44 ◼   ► Because there's nothing worse than when

00:20:45 ◼   ► I go to sign up for something to try it out,

00:20:47 ◼   ► and they want a credit card.

00:20:48 ◼   ► It's just like-- most of the time, I turn back.

00:20:51 ◼   ► So why would-- you're just turning customer-wise.

00:20:54 ◼   ► Everyone should copy Squarespace.

00:20:56 ◼   ► That's free advice for all people

00:20:57 ◼   ► who are listening to the show.

00:20:59 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I mean even before they were a sponsor,

00:21:01 ◼   ► when I was building the site for Neutral,

00:21:03 ◼   ► which they actually ended up sponsoring the entire show,

00:21:05 ◼   ► but when I was building the site for that,

00:21:07 ◼   ► I was looking around and I'd heard about Squarespace

00:21:09 ◼   ► on other podcasts and everything,

00:21:10 ◼   ► and that's, the no credit card trial is actually

00:21:13 ◼   ► the biggest reason I think why I signed up,

00:21:15 ◼   ► because you're right, I'm the same way.

00:21:16 ◼   ► If I see something, it's like, oh, free trial,

00:21:18 ◼   ► just create an entire big account,

00:21:20 ◼   ► give us all your personal information,

00:21:21 ◼   ► give us your phone number,

00:21:22 ◼   ► give us your mother's maiden name,

00:21:23 ◼   ► give us your entire credit card number and everything,

00:21:25 ◼   ► and if you don't cancel,

00:21:26 ◼   ► we're gonna charge you $100 in a week.

00:21:28 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, that's--

00:21:30 ◼   ► - And then you assume you have to like talk to some,

00:21:32 ◼   ► like either call someone on the phone

00:21:33 ◼   ► or do some sort of online chat to cancel the service.

00:21:35 ◼   ► Like I had to deal with Adobe support recently

00:21:38 ◼   ► and they love making you talk to those people in the chat.

00:21:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I had to do, I canceled my GoGo WiFi

00:21:44 ◼   ► in the plane plan 'cause like last time I flew somewhere

00:21:46 ◼   ► I was like, you could pay some amount for the flight

00:21:51 ◼   ► or you could pay less than double that for a whole month.

00:21:54 ◼   ► I was like, well, I'm gonna fly here, I'm gonna fly back.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Let me do that, I'll sign up for their stupid plan

00:21:58 ◼   ► and then cancel when I get home.

00:21:59 ◼   ► And yeah, I had to like talk to the online chat bot,

00:22:02 ◼   ► which they're not technically a bot, I don't think,

00:22:04 ◼   ► but they might as well be, and it was a whole ordeal.

00:22:07 ◼   ► I got to convince them, they try to upsell you,

00:22:08 ◼   ► "Oh well, we can keep you on with this plan,

00:22:10 ◼   ► "and are you sure you want to cancel?"

00:22:12 ◼   ► And all this stuff.

00:22:13 ◼   ► Terrible.

00:22:15 ◼   ► - Although, pro tip, if you buy from GoGo

00:22:17 ◼   ► before you get on the plane,

00:22:18 ◼   ► it is a few dollars cheaper, I believe.

00:22:20 ◼   ► - You know, I've heard that, but I never remember to do it.

00:22:24 ◼   ► - So then you can fail to get a usable connection

00:22:26 ◼   ► for less money.

00:22:28 ◼   ► - That's true, and the other problem is too,

00:22:30 ◼   ► like I don't, a lot of times I don't know

00:22:32 ◼   ► if I'm gonna actually have that available.

00:22:34 ◼   ► Like the plane might have, like one flight I took,

00:22:38 ◼   ► it was either on Virgin or JetBlue,

00:22:39 ◼   ► where they usually have the Wi-Fi,

00:22:41 ◼   ► but like on one flight it was just down,

00:22:43 ◼   ► like it just broke and they're like,

00:22:45 ◼   ► oh sorry, we don't have it this flight.

00:22:47 ◼   ► And so if I would have bought it in advance,

00:22:48 ◼   ► then I would have had to go back

00:22:49 ◼   ► to that same chat bot person and say,

00:22:52 ◼   ► oh sorry, I need a refund, and they'll do it,

00:22:54 ◼   ► but it's a pain in the butt to do all that.

00:22:56 ◼   ► Or you just hold on to that code for the next flight.

00:22:58 ◼   ► But I'm with you.

00:23:00 ◼   ► So to keep things moving, John, at the end of the last episode,

00:23:04 ◼   ► after the episode, you got a little upset about something.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Do you want to explore that a little bit?

00:23:09 ◼   ► Didn't we already do that?

00:23:10 ◼   ► I thought Marco put that all in the episode.

00:23:11 ◼   ► I put just a reference.

00:23:13 ◼   ► It was a pointer.

00:23:14 ◼   ► It was a 64-bit long pointer.

00:23:16 ◼   ► It was a pointer to this so that you can discuss the storage

00:23:19 ◼   ► capacity issue.

00:23:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:22 ◼   ► How do you feel about the storage capacities

00:23:24 ◼   ► in the new iPhone?

00:23:25 ◼   ► I feel bad about it.

00:23:25 ◼   ► Everyone should feel bad about it

00:23:27 ◼   ► because this is a bad situation.

00:23:28 ◼   ► No storage shift.

00:23:30 ◼   ► So what I'm talking about here is that like Apple offers

00:23:32 ◼   ► three sizes in terms of flash storage on its iOS devices.

00:23:36 ◼   ► The low end one has 16, the middle one has 32,

00:23:39 ◼   ► and the big one has 64.

00:23:40 ◼   ► And you know, in typical Apple fashion,

00:23:43 ◼   ► I have to find some way to put most of their margins.

00:23:45 ◼   ► They put a lot of it into the storage capacity

00:23:48 ◼   ► because like the 64 costs $100 more than the 32.

00:23:50 ◼   ► And I think the 32 costs $100 more than the 16.

00:23:53 ◼   ► And for anyone who knows anything about pricing

00:23:54 ◼   ► flash memory, those numbers do not reflect the cost of goods in any rational way. You know,

00:24:00 ◼   ► extra 16 gigabytes of flash does not cost a hundred dollars in any universe, right? So that's

00:24:06 ◼   ► fine, whatever, that's how they segment their stuff. But for years and years I've been buying

00:24:11 ◼   ► the middle model, 32 gigabytes. And I think the very first one I ever bought was 32. Maybe that

00:24:16 ◼   ► was the high end at that point, I forget. And that's kind of like barely enough to hold all my stuff.

00:24:22 ◼   ► But as the years pass, I would expect that they would shift just as they did once before,

00:24:28 ◼   ► because there used to be an 8GB model, I think, on one of the phones.

00:24:31 ◼   ► There used to be a 4.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I don't remember how small they went with the original iPhone,

00:24:35 ◼   ► because I wasn't buying the original iPhone just by an iPad.

00:24:37 ◼   ► Yeah, they have to shift the line. So then the 16 goes away, the 32 becomes the smallest one,

00:24:42 ◼   ► the 64 is the middle one, and then a 128 is the highest, or whatever sizes you want.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Doesn't have to be doubling, whatever. It could be 16, 32, and now, you know, 32,

00:24:51 ◼   ► 250, I don't know, make as many numbers as you want.

00:24:55 ◼   ► I just want to see the storage shift.

00:24:56 ◼   ► And on the Mac line, they did the same thing.

00:24:58 ◼   ► It used to be that Macs came with, you know,

00:25:00 ◼   ► whatever minimum amount of RAM it was going to be.

00:25:02 ◼   ► One megabyte, two megabytes, one gigabyte,

00:25:07 ◼   ► two gigabytes, four gigabytes.

00:25:08 ◼   ► And on the Macs, it was terrible for years

00:25:10 ◼   ► because they would give you so little RAM,

00:25:11 ◼   ► especially with Mac OS X, they were like,

00:25:12 ◼   ► "Okay, well Mac OS X will boot on a system

00:25:14 ◼   ► with two gigs of RAM."

00:25:15 ◼   ► And coincidentally, that is the minimum configuration

00:25:18 ◼   ► of whatever Mac you wanted to buy.

00:25:19 ◼   ► And I would just beg people if they were buying it back

00:25:21 ◼   ► do not buy it with a default amount of RAM,

00:25:23 ◼   ► because Mac OS X, with the minimum supported amount of RAM,

00:25:26 ◼   ► was terrible.

00:25:27 ◼   ► It would just thrash the disk all the time,

00:25:29 ◼   ► especially in the early versions,

00:25:30 ◼   ► and the disks were really slow.

00:25:31 ◼   ► It's like, buy more RAM and don't buy it from Apple,

00:25:33 ◼   ► because they gouge you on it, right?

00:25:36 ◼   ► Well, so here we are.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I don't know, I didn't look this up on Wikipedia,

00:25:39 ◼   ► but what year are we in of the 1632-64?

00:25:41 ◼   ► It seems like we're in like the third year in a row.

00:25:43 ◼   ► Is it the fourth year in a row?

00:25:45 ◼   ► Whatever it is, it's way too long.

00:25:47 ◼   ► And I was hoping that this would be the year

00:25:49 ◼   ► where they would do a storage shift

00:25:50 ◼   ► and move everything down the line, but they didn't.

00:25:52 ◼   ► 64 is still the top of the line, 32 is still the middle.

00:25:56 ◼   ► And so once again, like my wife is probably

00:25:58 ◼   ► gonna get a new iPhone, we'll talk about that later

00:26:01 ◼   ► in the show maybe, she's gonna end up getting a 32

00:26:03 ◼   ► because 64 is obscenely expensive,

00:26:06 ◼   ► an extra $100 over the extra hundred,

00:26:08 ◼   ► already paying over the 16.

00:26:09 ◼   ► The 16 is too small, so she's gonna end up with 32 again.

00:26:12 ◼   ► And this is another thing that Apple

00:26:14 ◼   ► should really move on with.

00:26:15 ◼   ► I mean, at the very least, the iPhone 6,

00:26:17 ◼   ► this is now my number one feature

00:26:19 ◼   ► for the iPhone 6 next year, they'd better do a storage shift.

00:26:22 ◼   ► Because you can't just keep selling 16, 32, and 64 forever.

00:26:25 ◼   ► It's kind of like HFS Plus.

00:26:26 ◼   ► At a certain point, it just becomes embarrassing.

00:26:28 ◼   ► Like, you have to change.

00:26:30 ◼   ► Maybe they won't even be able to get 16 gigabytes of flash

00:26:34 ◼   ► anymore, because no one will sell flash that small

00:26:36 ◼   ► in a few years, because the cereal boxes will come with 16

00:26:38 ◼   ► gigabytes of flash inside them.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Well, I can tell you that my 4S is 64 gig.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And I don't think the 4 had that as an option,

00:26:47 ◼   ► but I'm not 100% sure.

00:26:48 ◼   ► I think I believe that's correct.

00:26:50 ◼   ► - So it's at least been, what is that,

00:26:51 ◼   ► four S, five, and five S, that's three years now?

00:26:55 ◼   ► I mean, you're right, it's a long time.

00:26:57 ◼   ► - It's too long.

00:26:58 ◼   ► I think one year is too long,

00:26:59 ◼   ► because from year to year, prices go down.

00:27:02 ◼   ► So one year is probably too long.

00:27:03 ◼   ► But like, okay, find your Apple,

00:27:04 ◼   ► you wanna bring every last penny you can

00:27:06 ◼   ► out of these things, so maybe hold on for two years.

00:27:08 ◼   ► But three years, no, that's way too long.

00:27:10 ◼   ► Now I say no, they have to shift.

00:27:12 ◼   ► - And they also, they did add a 128 gig iPad,

00:27:15 ◼   ► I believe, last year.

00:27:16 ◼   ► It was not with the iPad launch,

00:27:18 ◼   ► It was like a few months later, right?

00:27:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, but they didn't shift it though.

00:27:22 ◼   ► That was just like a new super high end.

00:27:23 ◼   ► - Right, they just added, right,

00:27:24 ◼   ► for like another 100 bucks, I think.

00:27:26 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:27:27 ◼   ► Every storage bump is another $100.

00:27:29 ◼   ► If they add one gigabyte, it would be like,

00:27:30 ◼   ► "Well, we have a 64 gigabyte model,

00:27:32 ◼   ► "and then a 65 gigabyte model for $100 more."

00:27:35 ◼   ► Like, no matter how little they add, it's always $100.

00:27:38 ◼   ► Like, we have to change the storage at all, it's 100 bucks.

00:27:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and especially now, like the cameras,

00:27:45 ◼   ► they're just getting better,

00:27:45 ◼   ► and shooting 120 frames per second 720p video.

00:27:50 ◼   ► - And a burst mode is crazy.

00:27:51 ◼   ► - Right, like seriously, like you're giving us new ways

00:27:54 ◼   ► and iTunes match and the cloud sync,

00:27:56 ◼   ► like all these new ways to get tremendous amounts of data,

00:28:00 ◼   ► retina graphics and all our games and everything

00:28:02 ◼   ► onto our iPods and yet the storage doesn't change.

00:28:04 ◼   ► It's just pressing people up against the limits

00:28:06 ◼   ► of their iOS device storage

00:28:08 ◼   ► and as we talked about in last shows,

00:28:10 ◼   ► dealing with storage and iOS and backups and photo stream

00:28:13 ◼   ► and all that stuff is already a pain.

00:28:15 ◼   ► they're just applying more pressure to the problem by keeping the storage

00:28:20 ◼   ► capacity as low, especially when like the people who are price conscious,

00:28:22 ◼   ► they're getting 16s and they're not knowing like maybe 16 will be fine with

00:28:27 ◼   ► them, but if they have any pension for video, 16 will not be fine and they'll be

00:28:30 ◼   ► sad. And that's a bad experience for customers.

00:28:33 ◼   ► And they're like, well, you got the 16 because it was the cheapest, but now

00:28:36 ◼   ► you're having a lousy experience.

00:28:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Well, I mean, I think iTunes match is actually designed to help with this

00:28:42 ◼   ► because the principle goes that you can just stream or download on the fly, whatever you

00:28:45 ◼   ► want to listen to. But in general, you're completely right. And Erin has a 16 gig for

00:28:50 ◼   ► us. And we haven't talked much about what we're going to do come Friday. And I think

00:28:55 ◼   ► all three of us should talk about this, but I suspect I'm going to get her 32 just to

00:29:00 ◼   ► future proof. And even though strictly speaking, I don't think I need a 64. I might do it just

00:29:05 ◼   ► because I don't want to regret it later. So with that in mind, let's talk about what we're

00:29:11 ◼   ► getting and how we're getting it. So obviously I just told you I think Aaron's going to get a 32,

00:29:16 ◼   ► although I haven't completely concluded. And obviously she has input on this, but generally

00:29:22 ◼   ► speaking when it comes to things like this she just says whatever you think is best. And I'm

00:29:26 ◼   ► going to be probably getting a 64, both Space Gray, both 5Ss. My plan currently, and we'll see

00:29:32 ◼   ► what I end up doing, is to wake up at 3 Eastern and that's when they go on sale, attempt to buy

00:29:39 ◼   ► the two phones from Apple online, cry as I usually do when it doesn't work as it

00:29:45 ◼   ► usually doesn't, and then potentially go back to that Apple store at 3 in the

00:29:49 ◼   ► morning and get in line. I'm curious to hear what the two of you are gonna be

00:29:53 ◼   ► doing, especially you John, since you said that that Tina might be getting a new

00:29:57 ◼   ► one, but let's start with Marco. Well, so I I'm gonna try to get one. My my flaw

00:30:05 ◼   ► though in my usual plan of usually if it's a pre-order yeah I'll wake up at

00:30:09 ◼   ► at three in the morning and try it,

00:30:11 ◼   ► but I'm not as willing to do that,

00:30:14 ◼   ► I'm not as willing to get up and wait online

00:30:16 ◼   ► in front of a store forever.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Usually I'll just go and get on the line

00:30:21 ◼   ► like 20 minutes before the store opens,

00:30:24 ◼   ► not like six hours ahead of time.

00:30:26 ◼   ► Just get wherever the line is,

00:30:27 ◼   ► get on the line 20 minutes before the store opens,

00:30:29 ◼   ► and I've always been able to get one.

00:30:30 ◼   ► It's never been a problem.

00:30:31 ◼   ► I've never not gotten what I wanted.

00:30:33 ◼   ► - Now hold on, now is that at the Fifth Avenue store

00:30:35 ◼   ► or is that at various different stores?

00:30:38 ◼   ► It was mostly at the Fifth Avenue, the last one I did here in Westchester at the mall.

00:30:46 ◼   ► But yeah, I've done the Fifth Avenue store before and even I got the original iPad at

00:30:51 ◼   ► one of their Manhattan stores, the one that's around 14th Street, wherever that one is.

00:31:02 ◼   ► My theory has always been, and I believe this will hold true now, we've heard a lot that

00:31:07 ◼   ► The 5S might be supply constrained because of some of these really advanced components

00:31:10 ◼   ► it has.

00:31:12 ◼   ► That will probably be true, but that's true of almost every new iPhone that comes out.

00:31:16 ◼   ► I think the 5C is the exception this year, where the 5C is helping to kind of dampen

00:31:21 ◼   ► some of the demand for the 5S, and that's easy to make because they have all these components

00:31:29 ◼   ► from the 5 they've been making for a year.

00:31:31 ◼   ► But normally, your best bet, you know, everybody, every single iPhone and iPad release, especially

00:31:37 ◼   ► iPhones, everybody is always like, "Oh, I know this one little Verizon store that no

00:31:42 ◼   ► one knows about.

00:31:43 ◼   ► I'm gonna go there."

00:31:44 ◼   ► They have like this plan.

00:31:45 ◼   ► They're gonna go to like this little obscure carrier store that they know about, or like

00:31:48 ◼   ► a Best Buy where they know somebody who works there, or something like that, you know, something

00:31:52 ◼   ► that's not an Apple store.

00:31:54 ◼   ► And the problem is, yeah, nobody knows about those, nobody goes there, but Apple doesn't

00:31:58 ◼   ► usually send them any stock either or they'll get like one or two units.

00:32:01 ◼   ► So the chances that you're going to get one there are pretty low.

00:32:04 ◼   ► Whereas if you go to one of Apple's flagship stores, the chances you're going to get one

00:32:07 ◼   ► are pretty good.

00:32:09 ◼   ► That's why I would always go to the Fifth Avenue store.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Because I knew if anyone's going to have a lot of stock, it's the Fifth Avenue store.

00:32:14 ◼   ► Yeah, and more than that, what if you go to this random AT&T or Verizon store and they

00:32:19 ◼   ► get one 64 gold and one 16 gig white, and you really wanted space gray.

00:32:27 ◼   ► Now what?

00:32:28 ◼   ► Now you're not so smart anymore, are you guy?

00:32:31 ◼   ► So yeah, I completely hear you.

00:32:32 ◼   ► And the problem that I'm running into with us is that if, you may not know the geography

00:32:38 ◼   ► of Virginia, but suffice to say, most of the population is in the greater DC area, which

00:32:43 ◼   ► is way in northern Virginia.

00:32:45 ◼   ► Which part is the south?

00:32:47 ◼   ► I would, we're getting into a nuanced conversation now, but I would say, no, not all of it.

00:32:52 ◼   ► Trust me, spend some time in DC and it's not quite the south.

00:32:56 ◼   ► But anyway, the point is, there's Virginia Beach, which is way on, obviously, the coast.

00:33:02 ◼   ► There's DC, there's Richmond, and then there's not a lot of civilization outside of that.

00:33:07 ◼   ► And even Charlottesville, which is a reasonably large city an hour west of us, they don't

00:33:12 ◼   ► have an Apple store yet.

00:33:13 ◼   ► So for like two-thirds of the state of Virginia, you could pose a legitimate argument that

00:33:19 ◼   ► my Apple store is the nearest Apple store.

00:33:22 ◼   ► So I'm really worried that if I don't get online at like three in the morning, there's

00:33:25 ◼   ► zero chance that I'm going to get one. We'll see what happens. The number of

00:33:29 ◼   ► people that get on the line relative to the time

00:33:35 ◼   ► until the opening of the store accelerates a lot as that time approaches.

00:33:40 ◼   ► So it's similar to the W2C keynote lines where you can

00:33:44 ◼   ► get online at midnight the night before, but you could also just go at

00:33:48 ◼   ► 7 in the morning and be not that far back. Not that

00:33:52 ◼   ► different from if you went at midnight the night before.

00:33:55 ◼   ► So that's why I've always just gone half hour to an hour

00:33:58 ◼   ► before they open.

00:33:59 ◼   ► In fact, the iPad 1 launch, I was late,

00:34:03 ◼   ► and I got there like 15 minutes after they opened the doors,

00:34:05 ◼   ► and I still got one.

00:34:06 ◼   ► And Apple stocks their stores a lot,

00:34:09 ◼   ► especially if you're in a major city.

00:34:10 ◼   ► I don't think you're going to have any problems.

00:34:13 ◼   ► I mean, I would say that Apple has Apple stores.

00:34:16 ◼   ► I don't think you're going to have any major problems.

00:34:18 ◼   ► There was one time when the iPad 3 came out, I was forced to either not get one or get

00:34:27 ◼   ► a 64 gig when I was looking for a 32.

00:34:30 ◼   ► So I chose to just, you know, screw it, I'm already here, I waited on line, I'll get

00:34:34 ◼   ► the 64.

00:34:35 ◼   ► So that does happen where, especially with the iPad where you have so many models, I

00:34:38 ◼   ► guess now the iPhone's going to be the same way.

00:34:40 ◼   ► There's so many models.

00:34:42 ◼   ► So you have to be prepared that if you want the 16 gig black one, you might have some

00:34:49 ◼   ► problems if you get there late.

00:34:52 ◼   ► But the reason why I go through all this on day one is because historically with these

00:34:57 ◼   ► things, with iPhones and iPad releases, generally speaking, Apple has been producing these for

00:35:02 ◼   ► a while.

00:35:04 ◼   ► They produce as much as they can for launch weekend.

00:35:07 ◼   ► That way they can not only get a bunch of them in people's hands and get a bunch of

00:35:09 ◼   ► but then they can announce these big numbers saying,

00:35:11 ◼   ► "On launch weekend, we sold millions and millions of phones."

00:35:14 ◼   ► So meanwhile, though, after launch weekend,

00:35:18 ◼   ► that whole stock is then blown out,

00:35:20 ◼   ► and they've got to then trickle them in as they're made after that.

00:35:23 ◼   ► So you generally have a much better chance of getting one on launch day

00:35:28 ◼   ► than you do for the next two weeks.

00:35:31 ◼   ► It's way, way easier to get one on day one

00:35:34 ◼   ► than it is to get one on day two, three, four, or five.

00:35:36 ◼   ► So that's why I'm actually flying to go to a conference.

00:35:41 ◼   ► I have to leave for the airport at like 1 p.m.

00:35:45 ◼   ► and I'm actually going to go to my mall, to the Apple Store,

00:35:49 ◼   ► try to get there for the 8 a.m. opening, maybe a little bit before,

00:35:53 ◼   ► and see if I can get a phone, get out of there by like 11 in the morning.

00:35:57 ◼   ► Which I might, I don't know. There's a good possibility I might have to just,

00:36:02 ◼   ► I'll be standing online near the front at 11,

00:36:06 ◼   ► and I might have said, "Sorry, I gotta bail out.

00:36:08 ◼   ► "I'm out of time."

00:36:09 ◼   ► So, we'll see.

00:36:11 ◼   ► - That would stink.

00:36:12 ◼   ► - And I've thought about waking up at three

00:36:14 ◼   ► to try the online ordering,

00:36:15 ◼   ► but I don't have any faith that would actually work.

00:36:18 ◼   ► So I don't know. - I don't either.

00:36:21 ◼   ► I don't either.

00:36:22 ◼   ► I suspect I'm gonna have to get in the car.

00:36:24 ◼   ► - And if I'm waking up at like six

00:36:27 ◼   ► to go to the store and get online,

00:36:30 ◼   ► Also waking up at three would not be great

00:36:33 ◼   ► for my mood that day.

00:36:35 ◼   ► So we'll see.

00:36:37 ◼   ► But I do plan to get,

00:36:38 ◼   ► Tiff and I are both upgrading this year.

00:36:41 ◼   ► I do plan to get the 64 gig black,

00:36:46 ◼   ► which is now space gray,

00:36:47 ◼   ► which I have expressed my so far,

00:36:52 ◼   ► my like for that color and my dislike

00:36:53 ◼   ► for the previous slate black that the iPhone 5 had.

00:36:57 ◼   ► So I'm gonna get the black 64 AT&T,

00:36:59 ◼   ► Tiff is getting the white 64 AT&T.

00:37:01 ◼   ► We both treat ourselves to 64s on iPhones,

00:37:04 ◼   ► but not an iPad 'cause we use the iPhones way more

00:37:06 ◼   ► and we actually do take tons of photos and videos.

00:37:10 ◼   ► So we have space issues on the smaller devices.

00:37:14 ◼   ► So, and AT&T simply because Verizon

00:37:17 ◼   ► does not work in our house.

00:37:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, and we're sticking with AT&T as well.

00:37:22 ◼   ► We went AT&T from Verizon when I got my iPhone,

00:37:24 ◼   ► which was my first iPhone, which was a 3GS.

00:37:27 ◼   ► And to be honest, we don't really have any issues with it.

00:37:29 ◼   ► So we're sticking with it as well.

00:37:31 ◼   ► And I should point out that a friend of the show, Jason Snell, said in the chat, "China's

00:37:36 ◼   ► getting it the same day that we are this year, so perhaps some of that gray market stuff."

00:37:43 ◼   ► So the bad news is they're going to get a lot of stock.

00:37:45 ◼   ► But the good news is you won't have a bunch of gray market buyers competing for the stock

00:37:51 ◼   ► that you and I are going to want, if that makes any sense at all.

00:37:54 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that's actually a good point.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Well, not from China, but what about other countries that aren't getting it on day

00:37:58 ◼   ► one. I mean, China was always a big one, but I think we're still going to see a lot of

00:38:04 ◼   ► people who are looking to scalp them.

00:38:05 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll see what happens. So anyway, I'm sorry. So John, we haven't given you a chance.

00:38:09 ◼   ► So tell me about what's going on in the Syracuse household.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Well, actually, the first thing, thinking of you two waking up at three in the morning

00:38:15 ◼   ► or going to the store when it opens and getting in line, the interesting thing that I want

00:38:19 ◼   ► to know on launch day is for the poor suckers at the end of the line, when they run out

00:38:24 ◼   ► of stock or when the stock started to get low. What do those people hear? Because I

00:38:29 ◼   ► remember back in the iPhone 4 days, what all those people heard is, "I'm sorry, all

00:38:34 ◼   ► you've got left is white 64 gigs." Remember that? The white 64 gigs? Those were the last

00:38:39 ◼   ► ones to go. And we don't know if it's because of the ratios they predicted or whatever,

00:38:42 ◼   ► but across the entire country, it was like, "What's left?" White was the unpopular

00:38:46 ◼   ► color and it's always the super expensive whites. Or maybe it's white 16s and white

00:38:50 ◼   ► 64s, the white 32s go, you know? So that's what I'm most interested in, because we don't

00:38:56 ◼   ► get breakdowns by color or capacity or anything interesting from Apple, but we get our own

00:39:01 ◼   ► little research by everyone going to the Apple stores on launch days, waiting in lines, and

00:39:06 ◼   ► if the lines are long enough in the very popular stores, the people at the ends of those lines

00:39:09 ◼   ► start to have to make those hard choices, like Marco had to get a 64 because that's

00:39:12 ◼   ► all they had left. What are the undesirables? Is there one color that like every store has

00:39:17 ◼   ► a bunch of golds left, or every store has a bunch of whites left, is there one capacity?

00:39:21 ◼   ► That's what I'm watching for on launch day. And that's all I'm going to be doing on launch

00:39:24 ◼   ► day because I'm not waiting on line, I'm not ordering anything on the internet, I'm not

00:39:28 ◼   ► doing anything on launch day for myself or for my wife because neither one of us is going

00:39:33 ◼   ► to get up at three in the morning to get a phone or anything like that. We're probably

00:39:37 ◼   ► just going to wait until stocks go back up. We wait a month, maybe we have to wait until

00:39:43 ◼   ► the new year. Any of those things is fine as far as I'm concerned because I'm not getting

00:39:47 ◼   ► anything and my wife is planning on getting a new 5S. I don't know what color she wants.

00:39:55 ◼   ► She has said that she likes the gold. I don't know. She may have been shamed by the Internet

00:40:01 ◼   ► into not getting the gold. I don't know. We'll see what happens.

00:40:04 ◼   ► By the way, how funny is it that Groomer's review and it's for a pink 5C and a gold 5S?

00:40:09 ◼   ► That is fantastic. There's nothing funny about pink. People

00:40:11 ◼   ► that's having fun of pink as if it's like a color that he shouldn't have, it's perfectly fine. I

00:40:16 ◼   ► think the pink is not particularly attractive because it's kind of more of like a dirty,

00:40:20 ◼   ► chalky, like Pepto-Bismol pink. But if you like that color, it's fine. I don't think there's any

00:40:25 ◼   ► reason to make fun of the gold. On the other hand, I do find something funny about it.

00:40:30 ◼   ► Yeah, we didn't talk about this when the old gold shows, but I finally put my finger on,

00:40:34 ◼   ► well, I don't know, I just found a connection with why don't I like the gold one,

00:40:38 ◼   ► having not seen it in person. And the thing that it gives me bad flashbacks to is back when the

00:40:43 ◼   ► Lexus first came out with the LS 400, this always turns into neutral, sorry guys, it was Toyota's

00:40:49 ◼   ► luxury brand and around then all the Japanese makers were making their luxury brands. Nissan

00:40:53 ◼   ► had Infiniti, Toyota had Lexus, and Mazda was going to have a Motti but didn't. Anyway, Lexus,

00:40:59 ◼   ► their cars came out and wanted to make them look fancy so they tried to make them look a lot like

00:41:03 ◼   ► Mercedes S-Class, but one thing Lexus offered on, I think it was like all of its initial run of models,

00:41:09 ◼   ► or maybe it was maybe this wasn't even a factory thing, maybe it was a dealer installed thing, is

00:41:12 ◼   ► that you could get the car with gold trim on it. So instead of on the back it would say LS 400 in

00:41:20 ◼   ► like the fake silver plastic letters like every car says in the back of it, you could get all that

00:41:25 ◼   ► stuff in gold. The little tiny accent lines around the window. On Long Island this gold trim was very

00:41:32 ◼   ► popular and it was the tackiest thing in the entire universe and I just could not stand

00:41:36 ◼   ► it and I couldn't imagine anybody because otherwise the cards look fairly distinguished,

00:41:40 ◼   ► you know, and nice looking.

00:41:42 ◼   ► And then it wasn't a lot of gold, it was just a little bit of gold, but all the accents

00:41:46 ◼   ► were gold and it looked terrible to me.

00:41:48 ◼   ► And that's all I can think of when I see pictures of the gold iPhone, that it's just like you

00:41:52 ◼   ► could have got a regular iPhone and you just opted for the gold trim and it just makes

00:41:56 ◼   ► the whole thing tacky.

00:41:57 ◼   ► Again, I say this not having seen one in person.

00:42:00 ◼   ► The thing you've just done is you've told me that there's an arrow in the FedEx logo

00:42:04 ◼   ► in the negative space, and now I'll never be able to not think of the LS400 when I see

00:42:08 ◼   ► a gold iPhone.

00:42:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I think we did it for the S300 as well.

00:42:12 ◼   ► And again, I don't even know if this was a factory option or just a dealer-installed

00:42:15 ◼   ► option for Long Island, because many things on Long Island are tacky, and this fitted

00:42:18 ◼   ► right in with them.

00:42:19 ◼   ► I saw those too.

00:42:20 ◼   ► They were everywhere.

00:42:21 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:42:22 ◼   ► All right, before you tell me about something awesome.

00:42:27 ◼   ► John, so I thought your wife already had a 5, no?

00:42:31 ◼   ► No, she has a 4S. She finally broke down and got her an iPhone. 4S was the best one. You

00:42:36 ◼   ► could get this, what she got. She keeps trying to want to trade in her 4S. She's like, "Oh,

00:42:41 ◼   ► Verizon will give me $200 for my 4S. I can practically get a free 5S. And Gazelle will

00:42:46 ◼   ► give me this much and all these things." I'm like, "No, you can't sell it. It has to...

00:42:49 ◼   ► We have to keep it." Goes into the museum. And it's mostly because I really like that form

00:42:56 ◼   ► factor as I mentioned in the last show. I really like how that thing looks as an object,

00:43:01 ◼   ► not so much as a phone that I hold in my hand, but as an object I really like it. I even

00:43:04 ◼   ► like the bumper that she's got on it, so we're definitely keeping that one.

00:43:07 ◼   ► I want to add also, Stephen Hackett, our friend in the chat, pointed out a little bit ago

00:43:12 ◼   ► that before we move on that Apple's been doing this thing with the last couple of releases

00:43:16 ◼   ► where if you wait on the lines in front of the stores, they go around and they pass out

00:43:20 ◼   ► little cards. They ask you what you're waiting for, how many, what model, and they give you

00:43:24 ◼   ► like a card to represent that model.

00:43:25 ◼   ► And I think the implication is that they have the right number

00:43:30 ◼   ► of cards that represent their stock,

00:43:32 ◼   ► so that they can then tell you, OK, just bring this ticket

00:43:36 ◼   ► to the front, and we still have enough that you'll get one.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Consequently, if you're too far back in the line,

00:43:41 ◼   ► they will be able to tell everybody after this point,

00:43:43 ◼   ► sorry, we're not going to have any more for you.

00:43:46 ◼   ► By the time you get there, they'll be gone.

00:43:48 ◼   ► Which is nice, actually, because then you

00:43:50 ◼   ► won't be waiting on line for hours for something

00:43:53 ◼   ► that you'll end up not getting.

00:43:55 ◼   ► Yeah, so then early in the morning, you'll know,

00:43:57 ◼   ► OK, guys at the back of the line, what we've got left

00:44:00 ◼   ► are 16 gigabyte white 5Ss.

00:44:02 ◼   ► And whatever the unpopular ones are,

00:44:04 ◼   ► and then you just have to watch the people at the back

00:44:05 ◼   ► of the line squirm and go, do I buy it?

00:44:07 ◼   ► Do I really want to have a phone today?

00:44:09 ◼   ► Or do I want to come back?

00:44:11 ◼   ► And by the way, for the people making those choices,

00:44:13 ◼   ► unless you are, like Marco, about to get on a plane

00:44:15 ◼   ► and you need to have this phone, come back a different day.

00:44:18 ◼   ► Because you'll have to live with your choice.

00:44:20 ◼   ► Unless they're urging you to get the bigger model.

00:44:21 ◼   ► because if they're urging you to get the bigger model

00:44:23 ◼   ► and you can actually afford it, that's fine.

00:44:26 ◼   ► But if you find yourself getting like a 16

00:44:28 ◼   ► or a color that you don't want,

00:44:30 ◼   ► you will suffer through that,

00:44:31 ◼   ► either by looking at an ugly phone that makes you sad

00:44:33 ◼   ► or by not being able to fit your stuff in

00:44:35 ◼   ► for your two-year contract or whatever you have.

00:44:38 ◼   ► So stay strong.

00:44:39 ◼   ► - If for whatever reason I was forced to choose,

00:44:42 ◼   ► I would choose gold before I choose 16 gigs.

00:44:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:44:46 ◼   ► - Strong language there, but you should choose neither.

00:44:49 ◼   ► - I could at least put a case on it

00:44:50 ◼   ► one of those anodizing services or something.

00:44:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's true. - 16 gigs,

00:44:54 ◼   ► you suffer every day.

00:44:55 ◼   ► Like every time you take a picture

00:44:56 ◼   ► or try to download a podcast, you suffer.

00:44:58 ◼   ► - You know, I should point out that

00:45:01 ◼   ► someone is either your wife, John,

00:45:03 ◼   ► or masquerading as your wife in the chat,

00:45:05 ◼   ► trying to enlist the chat room to argue with you

00:45:07 ◼   ► about how you're running out of space in the museum.

00:45:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:45:12 ◼   ► - The iPhone 4S is tiny.

00:45:15 ◼   ► - That's what I said, but still, I do find it awesome.

00:45:17 ◼   ► - The 5 is thinner. - That's not big.

00:45:18 ◼   ► And by the way, like people,

00:45:19 ◼   ► I'm surprised no one complained.

00:45:22 ◼   ► I just spent a while complaining that it's $100 to move up to the next storage size,

00:45:25 ◼   ► and yet I'm willing to forego $200 simply to keep an old phone.

00:45:29 ◼   ► It's the principle of the matter.

00:45:31 ◼   ► No, that's how my priorities work out.

00:45:33 ◼   ► What's more important?

00:45:34 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:45:37 ◼   ► I don't want to pay the extra $100 for the 64, and by not paying an extra $100 for the

00:45:41 ◼   ► 64 over the course of many years allows me to afford to keep my $200 resale value phone

00:45:46 ◼   ► in my museum.

00:45:49 ◼   ► quick so you're not going to take your wife's old 4s and put it on some sort of

00:45:54 ◼   ► plan that you're going to use it? No you can't go back to that screen after using

00:45:58 ◼   ► the iPhone 5 size screen in my touch plus the thing is like twice as thick

00:46:02 ◼   ► yeah you can't go back to that. This screen is just the screen is nicer than

00:46:05 ◼   ► her screen and in all ways I can't go back. Fair enough. All right Marco after

00:46:10 ◼   ► long delay would you tell me about something else that's awesome? Absolutely

00:46:13 ◼   ► this week we are happy to welcome back another repeat sponsor MailRoute and I

00:46:18 ◼   ► talked to them on the phone today, and they said "route,"

00:46:21 ◼   ► not "root."

00:46:22 ◼   ► So that answered my question from last week.

00:46:24 ◼   ► MailRoute is a hosted service that

00:46:27 ◼   ► filters out viruses and spam from email

00:46:30 ◼   ► in a really advanced way.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And let me start from the beginning here.

00:46:37 ◼   ► Email hosting sucks.

00:46:38 ◼   ► It just really sucks trying to run your own email host.

00:46:41 ◼   ► And there have been all these things

00:46:43 ◼   ► like Google, Gmail, and Microsoft,

00:46:47 ◼   ► whatever their thing is called, and you know, the thing, not just Outlook, but is it live,

00:46:51 ◼   ► and there's 365 something or other, anyway. Everyone has these hosted mail services. Now,

00:46:56 ◼   ► the problem we're having as recently as all this NSA stuff, but even before that, is that

00:47:02 ◼   ► a lot of people, geeks like us included, are not that happy with the idea of other people

00:47:07 ◼   ► hosting our email anymore, or at least these big services that are ad-driven and big enough

00:47:13 ◼   ► that the NSA would have a deal with them and stuff like that.

00:47:16 ◼   ► So a lot of people are moving to hosting their own email.

00:47:19 ◼   ► I've always been a big fan of hosting my own email.

00:47:21 ◼   ► I mean, not running the IMAP server myself.

00:47:23 ◼   ► I use Fastmail for the host, but not

00:47:26 ◼   ► using one of the big web mail providers.

00:47:28 ◼   ► So one of the biggest flaws of hosting your own email

00:47:32 ◼   ► or using one of these places like Fastmail

00:47:35 ◼   ► is that their spam filtering is not nearly as good as somebody

00:47:39 ◼   ► like Gmail.

00:47:41 ◼   ► And if you're running your own server,

00:47:43 ◼   ► you're going to get a ridiculous amount of spam

00:47:45 ◼   ► that you'll have to process and deal with.

00:47:47 ◼   ► This is especially relevant for people

00:47:49 ◼   ► who run, say, small companies or IT departments

00:47:52 ◼   ► where you're hosting mail for a lot of people.

00:47:55 ◼   ► MailRoute is a service that you basically route your mail DNS

00:47:59 ◼   ► records through them first.

00:48:00 ◼   ► They act as an intermediary in front of your mail servers,

00:48:03 ◼   ► and they filter out all the crap before it gets to you.

00:48:05 ◼   ► So not only do you have amazing spam filtering

00:48:09 ◼   ► from your own inbox, that you won't be bothered

00:48:12 ◼   ► seeing all these messages.

00:48:13 ◼   ► But your servers won't be dealing with them.

00:48:15 ◼   ► So that means so much.

00:48:17 ◼   ► It means if you're using a hosted service,

00:48:18 ◼   ► you'll save a lot of space, because a lot of those messages

00:48:21 ◼   ► won't be sitting there in your junk mail folder

00:48:22 ◼   ► or your archive, sitting there taking up all that space.

00:48:25 ◼   ► If you're hosting your own servers,

00:48:26 ◼   ► you can probably do with a lot less of them.

00:48:29 ◼   ► They told me one story where one of their customers

00:48:31 ◼   ► had 11 mail servers that were running full tilt,

00:48:34 ◼   ► just really heavy load, 11 servers.

00:48:37 ◼   ► Then they switched to putting mail around

00:48:39 ◼   ► in front of the servers, and they went down to three.

00:48:40 ◼   ► And they barely even needed the three.

00:48:42 ◼   ► It was mostly just for redundancy at that point.

00:48:45 ◼   ► They estimate that well over 90% of email

00:48:49 ◼   ► is set on the internet today as spam.

00:48:50 ◼   ► So imagine your server, your mail server

00:48:53 ◼   ► is dealing with 90% less stuff, or even more than that.

00:48:56 ◼   ► So it's a pretty big deal.

00:48:58 ◼   ► And this is something really cool, too.

00:49:01 ◼   ► So when I initially talked to them,

00:49:03 ◼   ► I said, look, one of your spam fighting techniques

00:49:05 ◼   ► is gray listing.

00:49:06 ◼   ► and gray listing doesn't work for me.

00:49:09 ◼   ► And they said, no problem.

00:49:10 ◼   ► We can turn gray listing off for just your account.

00:49:13 ◼   ► If you want, we could even do turn off gray listing

00:49:15 ◼   ► for certain usernames or certain mailboxes under your domain.

00:49:19 ◼   ► They have this entire customization engine

00:49:22 ◼   ► below all this.

00:49:23 ◼   ► They can customize it at your request

00:49:25 ◼   ► to fit you, the customer's needs.

00:49:27 ◼   ► So if you want gray listing off, they can do that.

00:49:30 ◼   ► If you want to turn on or off quarantines

00:49:33 ◼   ► or get a quarantine digest sent every couple hours,

00:49:35 ◼   ► they can do that too.

00:49:37 ◼   ► They have a whole platform that they've

00:49:39 ◼   ► engineered from the ground up to be incredibly efficient

00:49:42 ◼   ► and incredibly customizable to each customer's needs.

00:49:47 ◼   ► And they have a ridiculous track record.

00:49:49 ◼   ► The guy was telling me today all the things

00:49:51 ◼   ► he's done before this.

00:49:53 ◼   ► This company is built by really good engineers

00:49:56 ◼   ► with a solid track record in the industry.

00:49:59 ◼   ► They come from Microsoft and other places,

00:50:01 ◼   ► and they really know what they're doing.

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00:50:06 ◼   ► say if it's Postini, Forefront, all these other big business

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00:50:44 ◼   ► and use promo code ATP to get 10% off.

00:50:46 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to MailRoute for sponsoring the show.

00:50:49 ◼   ► - That's how you give a discount, for the entire lifetime?

00:50:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's classy right there.

00:50:53 ◼   ► - That's some serious stuff.

00:50:54 ◼   ► All right, do we wanna talk about chips,

00:50:58 ◼   ► or do we want to talk about post NDA stuff?

00:51:02 ◼   ► - G-hips.

00:51:04 ◼   ► - I had a feeling you would vote that way.

00:51:05 ◼   ► - Well, the big news today is that a lot of people

00:51:08 ◼   ► have iOS 7 and nobody, except for like 10 reviewers,

00:51:11 ◼   ► has iPhone 5Ss.

00:51:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I don't know, is there much more to say

00:51:16 ◼   ► about that particular issue?

00:51:17 ◼   ► - Actually, there is.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Watching, I mean, obviously by the time this,

00:51:20 ◼   ► we're gonna try to publish this episode tomorrow,

00:51:22 ◼   ► so on Thursday, but already there is this thing

00:51:25 ◼   ► on Mixpanel.com, they're measuring iOS 7 adoption

00:51:29 ◼   ► like basically by the hour, by 15 minutes.

00:51:32 ◼   ► So as of right now, iOS 7 is already at 19.94%.

00:51:37 ◼   ► So basically 20% adoption, a mere hours,

00:51:43 ◼   ► I mean what's it been like five or six hours

00:51:44 ◼   ► since it's been officially released?

00:51:46 ◼   ► So hours after it's released, it's already at 20% here.

00:51:49 ◼   ► And then our friend _DavidSmith is also running one

00:51:53 ◼   ► at david-smith.org/iosversionstats,

00:51:56 ◼   ► also running one just among his apps and the data

00:51:58 ◼   ► that he collects from his apps.

00:52:00 ◼   ► And he's already at-- let me see.

00:52:03 ◼   ► I believe it's just about 9% now.

00:52:05 ◼   ► So he's already seeing among people

00:52:07 ◼   ► who use his apps already have 9% adoption, which I would assume

00:52:11 ◼   ► means they've not only downloaded the update,

00:52:14 ◼   ► but have already launched one of his apps in the meantime.

00:52:17 ◼   ► So this is amazing for day one to have

00:52:23 ◼   ► between 10 and 20 percent or possibly even more than that mere hours after its release.

00:52:29 ◼   ► Well, I'm sure KitKat will be easily twice this in half as much time.

00:52:34 ◼   ► Because isn't that how Android goes?

00:52:36 ◼   ► It's instant adoption across the entire hardware line?

00:52:39 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, because right now everyone's using 4.3, right?

00:52:41 ◼   ► John, do you want to tell me who's fabbing the A7?

00:52:46 ◼   ► Nobody knows, do they?

00:52:48 ◼   ► I haven't kept up with the news, but there were some rumors earlier in the week that

00:52:52 ◼   ► "Well, maybe Intel's doing it because some people are doing back of the envelope calculations."

00:52:56 ◼   ► I'm like, "Well, they gave us the number of transistors, roughly, and they gave us the

00:53:00 ◼   ► die area, and we can do some math and say, 'Well, the only way they could fit that number

00:53:03 ◼   ► of transistors in this die area is if I just take a proportional scaling from the previous

00:53:07 ◼   ► thing and it's got to be 22 or 20 nanometers, and the only person who could fab that is

00:53:12 ◼   ► Intel, so maybe Intel's fabbing the A7.'"

00:53:15 ◼   ► I don't know who's fabbing the A7, but it's kind of a shame that Anand did his...that

00:53:22 ◼   ► Tech did his review of the 5S, because I basically agree with everything he said in there, and

00:53:26 ◼   ► I would have looked a lot smarter if I could have said it before he published his review.

00:53:31 ◼   ► But we didn't record then.

00:53:32 ◼   ► But yeah, I agree with his guess that it's 28 nanometers.

00:53:37 ◼   ► I don't know who's fabbing it.

00:53:38 ◼   ► I don't think it's Intel.

00:53:40 ◼   ► But even if it is, it's 28 nanometers.

00:53:42 ◼   ► It's not a big deal.

00:53:44 ◼   ► I don't think it needs to be 20 or 22 to fit in that dye area, because you can't just do

00:53:48 ◼   ► that kind of math.

00:53:49 ◼   ► the space transistors take up on a chip

00:53:52 ◼   ► depends on how they're laid out.

00:53:55 ◼   ► It's not like-- you can't just do a number of transistors

00:53:57 ◼   ► per unit area, because RAM has a different density

00:54:00 ◼   ► than regularized structures.

00:54:01 ◼   ► Like repeated GPU cores has a different density

00:54:04 ◼   ► than core logic has a different density than the cache areas.

00:54:07 ◼   ► And hand layout versus auto layout.

00:54:10 ◼   ► And there's so many factors that go

00:54:12 ◼   ► into how many transistors can fit in a particular unit area.

00:54:16 ◼   ► I don't think you can do any math that

00:54:18 ◼   ► prove conclusively that this thing is 20 or 22 nanometers. It's probably 28. And if Intel

00:54:23 ◼   ► was fabbing it, I think we would know by now by some kind of leak. But anyway, I don't

00:54:28 ◼   ► care who's fabbing it. All I care is what the feature size is. And I don't think it's

00:54:34 ◼   ► 20 or 22. I think it's 28. And somebody on Twitter, I'm sorry, I forgot

00:54:37 ◼   ► who, somebody was replying to us talking about these rumors saying that there really haven't

00:54:45 ◼   ► seen any signs of Intel massively ramping up their capacity. And if they were going

00:54:50 ◼   ► to do something like take on, like be the only manufacturer of the next iPhone, of the

00:54:55 ◼   ► next flagship iPhone CPU, they would probably have to add substantial capacity.

00:55:00 ◼   ► Well, Intel has been…

00:55:03 ◼   ► Intel has been adding fab capacity that appears to be out of proportion with how many of their

00:55:08 ◼   ► own chips they're going to make. So there's been a lot of, over the past several years,

00:55:11 ◼   ► like it looks like Intel might start getting more into the business of fabbing chips for

00:55:15 ◼   ► other people. And that's why all these Apple Intel rumors have been swirling around. It's like, okay,

00:55:20 ◼   ► well, that kind of makes sense for Intel to do because it's hedging their bets. If they can't win

00:55:25 ◼   ► this architecture war in mobile with their x86 chips, their hedge is that, hey, we're still the

00:55:32 ◼   ► best fab in the world. And that's not a terrible business to be in either, especially since they

00:55:38 ◼   ► have basically no competitors at this point. Taiwan Semiconductor is still behind them,

00:55:44 ◼   ► may be kind of nipping at their heels, but I don't know, they have a bad track record there.

00:55:48 ◼   ► But Intel is number one with the bullet, right? So they want their chips to be the best in the

00:55:53 ◼   ► world and be everywhere. But if they can't make that work, their fallback plan is,

00:55:56 ◼   ► "Well, we're still the best fab in the world." And ideally, they'd like to be both.

00:55:59 ◼   ► So I'm guessing that no deal has been struck for the A7 and the negotiations continue for the A8 or

00:56:06 ◼   ► whatever. But that review, which we should put in the show notes, the 5S review, talks a lot about

00:56:11 ◼   ► about the A7, has to do a lot of guesswork,

00:56:13 ◼   ► like in terms of testing it and running software against it

00:56:16 ◼   ► because no one has sliced the thing open yet.

00:56:17 ◼   ► So we don't know for sure,

00:56:18 ◼   ► but it looks like it's dual core,

00:56:21 ◼   ► cache measurements is like it has double the L1,

00:56:25 ◼   ► he was trying to estimate pipeline depths.

00:56:27 ◼   ► It's a lot of guesswork at this point,

00:56:28 ◼   ► but it's pretty much what we expected it to be.

00:56:32 ◼   ► No big surprise there.

00:56:33 ◼   ► Although actually, I think there were a couple of surprises

00:56:35 ◼   ► when they were doing the benchmarking,

00:56:37 ◼   ► to see the areas where it regressed versus the A6?

00:56:41 ◼   ► Yeah, especially the GPU, because it's

00:56:43 ◼   ► a different architecture.

00:56:44 ◼   ► That was a big one.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Yeah, or even-- yeah, the different architecture

00:56:47 ◼   ► on the GPU was like, instead of having

00:56:49 ◼   ► a full-featured repeated core that has just lots of shader

00:56:53 ◼   ► hardware, but not repeating the entire GPU core,

00:56:59 ◼   ► merely just repeating the shader hardware

00:57:00 ◼   ► to give you good performance on shader type things,

00:57:03 ◼   ► but not quite as good performance in triangle setup

00:57:05 ◼   ► and other type of things.

00:57:06 ◼   ► which is a good trade off to make in terms of power consumption, everything,

00:57:09 ◼   ► but an artificial benchmarks does show some regressions.

00:57:12 ◼   ► And even I think there was some benchmarks that were just like simple scalar

00:57:15 ◼   ► math type things, uh,

00:57:17 ◼   ► where it was falling behind due to like 64 bit issues and stuff like that.

00:57:20 ◼   ► But that just goes to show that synthetic benchmarks like that,

00:57:24 ◼   ► like give you a good idea of what's inside the chip,

00:57:27 ◼   ► but are almost meaningless in terms of the actual use of, you know,

00:57:31 ◼   ► performance using chip,

00:57:32 ◼   ► because that's exactly what Apple or any chip designer designing for.

00:57:35 ◼   ► They're trying to trade areas that you won't notice

00:57:37 ◼   ► and in exchange for lower power consumption

00:57:40 ◼   ► or using more transistors

00:57:43 ◼   ► and more power in some other area of the chip.

00:57:44 ◼   ► So they're finding where can we cheat?

00:57:46 ◼   ► Where can we actually regress

00:57:48 ◼   ► and use less and wimpier hardware?

00:57:50 ◼   ► And in exchange for that,

00:57:51 ◼   ► put that time, energy, resources, dye area,

00:57:54 ◼   ► power consumption into another part of the chip

00:57:56 ◼   ► to make it faster.

00:57:57 ◼   ► And that's what you want it to be.

00:57:59 ◼   ► If it had been like a shrink to 20 nanometers,

00:58:01 ◼   ► then you can have your cake and eat it too.

00:58:03 ◼   ► You're like, all right, we don't have to do any trade offs.

00:58:04 ◼   ► We're going to get lower power.

00:58:05 ◼   ► We're going to get everything.

00:58:06 ◼   ► And it'll be faster in all possible ways.

00:58:08 ◼   ► But the A7 is not that chip, especially

00:58:11 ◼   ► since they went up to 64 bits at the same time.

00:58:13 ◼   ► So basically what you're saying is chip design

00:58:15 ◼   ► is like the MP3 codec.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Oh, you can't hear that anyways, so screw it.

00:58:18 ◼   ► Let's cut it out.

00:58:19 ◼   ► Well, in this case it is, because they made trade-offs.

00:58:23 ◼   ► It's pretty amazing what they've been

00:58:26 ◼   ► able to achieve of getting more or less double real world

00:58:29 ◼   ► performance in several end user application areas,

00:58:34 ◼   ► while not being a massive shrink and not using double the power.

00:58:39 ◼   ► It's a pretty amazing balancing act to get such a huge performance boost with almost no downside.

00:58:46 ◼   ► It is more power hunger than the A6. They have to compensate for that for giving it a bigger battery,

00:58:50 ◼   ► and it still comes in a little bit behind in a few energy usage areas than the A6.

00:58:56 ◼   ► But overall, it's a pretty amazing achievement, what they've done with the A7.

00:59:01 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I mean, like the more, especially reading that awesome AnandTech review, the

00:59:05 ◼   ► more we learn about this chip, the more impressive that it looks. And I mean, these performance

00:59:11 ◼   ► gains are incredible. And, you know, I've been looking into, you know, what are the

00:59:16 ◼   ► differences between the 32 and 64-bit instruction sets. And, you know, it's not, when the desktop

00:59:23 ◼   ► CPUs went through this, AMD basically took Intel's instruction set and just extended

00:59:28 ◼   ► They added to it to make it work and to make it backwards compatible.

00:59:32 ◼   ► The ARMv8 instruction set does not do that. It's actually a whole different instruction set.

00:59:37 ◼   ► And the chip just switches modes between the two, and it can switch modes without much of a penalty.

00:59:43 ◼   ► And the chip just implements both. And in the future it doesn't have to, but right now they will for backwards compatibility.

00:59:50 ◼   ► That's just incredible to have this kind of technology

00:59:54 ◼   ► in a mobile chip that is performing as well as desktop

00:59:58 ◼   ► did like three or four years ago,

00:59:59 ◼   ► or four or five years ago,

01:00:01 ◼   ► performing to those kind of levels

01:00:03 ◼   ► and being able to have these advanced features

01:00:07 ◼   ► like 64-bit and hardware accelerated encryption instructions

01:00:11 ◼   ► and two different instruction sets

01:00:13 ◼   ► that can switch between on a whim.

01:00:15 ◼   ► Like that's just awesome.

01:00:17 ◼   ► This is really advanced stuff.

01:00:19 ◼   ► There is one equivalent in the x86 to x86-64 transition, and that's the floating point stuff,

01:00:25 ◼   ► where the old x86 had stack-based floating point, and the x86-64 did all that stuff with its own

01:00:31 ◼   ► SSE instructions and everything. And so yeah, the stack-based floating point was still supported,

01:00:35 ◼   ► but every compiler that targeted x86-64 was like, "Look, don't ever generate stack-based

01:00:40 ◼   ► floating point code." And so there was a similar instance where it's like two instruction sets for

01:00:45 ◼   ► for floating point calculations.

01:00:47 ◼   ► And as soon as you didn't have to use the old one anymore,

01:00:49 ◼   ► compilers stopped emitting that code.

01:00:51 ◼   ► And so it was kind of like the same thing,

01:00:53 ◼   ► where you have the ARM V4,

01:00:56 ◼   ► or whatever the instruction set is, the old 32-bit one.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Yeah, V7.

01:01:00 ◼   ► That one is like off to the side,

01:01:02 ◼   ► and we'll just turn off the hardware when it's not in use.

01:01:04 ◼   ► And ideally, it will never be in use,

01:01:06 ◼   ► because no one who is emitting code for a 64-bit thing

01:01:10 ◼   ► will ever emit code for that,

01:01:11 ◼   ► because it's an entirely different instruction set.

01:01:13 ◼   ► Well, same thing on x86.

01:01:14 ◼   ► no one was putting out stack-based floating point code anymore.

01:01:17 ◼   ► And so even though that area needs to be on the chip, they don't need to make it good.

01:01:20 ◼   ► It doesn't have to be fast. It can be powered down most of the time.

01:01:23 ◼   ► So that's one small corner of that transition that's like the ARM transition.

01:01:27 ◼   ► But yeah, it's a little bit easier to do what they did, like make it back more compatible with ARM32

01:01:34 ◼   ► while kind of having a unique implementation of 64, because as weird as the 32-bit ARM

01:01:42 ◼   ► architecture was, it's nowhere near as weird and Byzantine as x86.

01:01:45 ◼   ► Right, well it's much younger.

01:01:47 ◼   ► It had a lot of the advantage of hindsight in its design.

01:01:51 ◼   ► And it's risky.

01:01:53 ◼   ► It's not a CIS construction set where you have to deal with these crazy things that

01:01:56 ◼   ► blow up into a million micro-coded instructions on the real architecture that the chip has

01:02:02 ◼   ► made.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I will say though, and looking at various links and supporting things, it really does

01:02:08 ◼   ► look like, going back for a second, that Intel is almost certainly not fabbing this, that

01:02:13 ◼   ► it's almost definitely Samsung 28nm.

01:02:16 ◼   ► But it's worth talking about why that would be a big deal if Intel was fabbing this using,

01:02:23 ◼   ► say, what are they at, 22nm for their high-end CPUs now?

01:02:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:28 ◼   ► Or 20.

01:02:29 ◼   ► 22.

01:02:30 ◼   ► 22.

01:02:31 ◼   ► If they're at that kind of feature size, then they – and assuming that they struck some

01:02:37 ◼   ► kind of deal with Apple where they wouldn't fab anyone else's mobile chips for a couple

01:02:41 ◼   ► years, say, then Apple could basically be like an entire generation or two ahead of

01:02:48 ◼   ► what everyone else in the smartphone and tablet space was doing with regard to power efficiency.

01:02:53 ◼   ► So they could have like either twice the CPU battery life or they could have twice the

01:02:58 ◼   ► performance with the same battery life, you know, that kind of level of a difference there.

01:03:03 ◼   ► And they could maintain that as long as they had Intel as their manufacturer and no one

01:03:07 ◼   ► else was having Intel as their manufacturer.

01:03:09 ◼   ► It's a really big deal.

01:03:10 ◼   ► Well, so here's the problem with the scenario and probably the reason it hasn't happened.

01:03:14 ◼   ► Intel would rather that Apple use its x86-based chips in its tablets and phones.

01:03:20 ◼   ► And that is not-- right now, Intel's not ready to give up on that, nor should they be.

01:03:24 ◼   ► Because if you look at those AnandTech benchmarks, they've got Bay Trail in there, which is their

01:03:27 ◼   ► Atom processor.

01:03:28 ◼   ► And that's a tablet processor, not a phone processor, so it's not really a fair fight.

01:03:33 ◼   ► But it's not a desktop processor, right?

01:03:35 ◼   ► And Bay Trail matches the A7 and beats it in a few benchmarks.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Granted, Bay Trail's not shipping.

01:03:40 ◼   ► And again, it's a tablet instead of a phone thing.

01:03:42 ◼   ► But the question is, how good is Intel

01:03:44 ◼   ► getting at making low power x86 parts that could conceivably

01:03:49 ◼   ► be in a tablet or phone?

01:03:50 ◼   ► And the answer is, they're getting really close.

01:03:52 ◼   ► Because this amazing A7 that we think

01:03:54 ◼   ► is all wonderful and everything, Intel

01:03:56 ◼   ► has a chip that's not out yet, but will be out soon,

01:03:59 ◼   ► that gives it a run for its money in tablets,

01:04:01 ◼   ► if not in phones.

01:04:02 ◼   ► And Intel, like Apple, is nothing if not determined.

01:04:05 ◼   ► Like, this is not the end of the line.

01:04:07 ◼   ► They've finally gotten religion about low-power chips,

01:04:09 ◼   ► and they're finally targeting things.

01:04:10 ◼   ► So once Intel turns its attention to a market,

01:04:12 ◼   ► kind of like how they lost track of the ball

01:04:15 ◼   ► with the NetBurst market architecture

01:04:16 ◼   ► and the Pentium 4s and chasing clock speed,

01:04:18 ◼   ► once they put their mind to it

01:04:19 ◼   ► and came out with the core architecture,

01:04:21 ◼   ► like, they just blew everyone away.

01:04:22 ◼   ► So Intel is currently turning the company around

01:04:25 ◼   ► and saying, "We need to make chips

01:04:27 ◼   ► "that can fit in phones and tablets."

01:04:29 ◼   ► And you can be sure they're going to Samsung,

01:04:31 ◼   ► Apple and everybody else is saying, here's our roadmap.

01:04:34 ◼   ► In two, three years, we're going to have a 14 nanometer chip,

01:04:38 ◼   ► and it's going to have this power and whatever.

01:04:40 ◼   ► Compare that to your internal roadmap,

01:04:42 ◼   ► well, we think you should put x86--

01:04:44 ◼   ► like, this is the flip side of the thing we talked about,

01:04:45 ◼   ► like, oh, 64-bit ARM chips, they're

01:04:47 ◼   ► going to put them in a MacBook Air.

01:04:48 ◼   ► The flip side is Intel says, no, no, no, no, Apple.

01:04:51 ◼   ► Don't put ARM chips in your MacBook Air.

01:04:53 ◼   ► Put x86 chips in all your iOS devices.

01:04:56 ◼   ► And that's not crazy.

01:05:00 ◼   ► There's an appeal to that, which is, hey, same instruction

01:05:02 ◼   ► set on a Mac and iOS.

01:05:04 ◼   ► That's good, right?

01:05:05 ◼   ► Everyone likes that.

01:05:06 ◼   ► And if Intel can say, no one is going

01:05:08 ◼   ► to be able to match the power and performance that we're

01:05:11 ◼   ► going to have two or three years out because look

01:05:13 ◼   ► at this roadmap, that's credible coming from Intel.

01:05:16 ◼   ► Given their track record, you can't say, oh,

01:05:18 ◼   ► forget about that.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Apple will always be able to do something better

01:05:20 ◼   ► with its own ARM architecture.

01:05:21 ◼   ► Of course, Apple likes controlling its destiny

01:05:24 ◼   ► more than Intel will let it control its destiny,

01:05:26 ◼   ► so that is an ongoing negotiation, I'm sure.

01:05:28 ◼   ► But I'm not writing them off.

01:05:29 ◼   ► I'm not writing off x86 or Intel in this space until I see

01:05:33 ◼   ► Until I see what they have to offer like they're just beginning to be competitive

01:05:37 ◼   ► But seeing that bay trail those bay trail numbers up against the a7

01:05:40 ◼   ► Let's you know that like you know by the way Intel is out there

01:05:44 ◼   ► And they're a giant 800 pound gorilla, and they know what the heck they're doing and maybe not this year

01:05:48 ◼   ► Don't worry about it this year, but next year like they should be on your radar. So that's what I'd be watching for

01:05:53 ◼   ► That's the flip side of the Oh MacBook, Iris with 64-bit ARM CPUs in them story

01:05:59 ◼   ► So do you feel like that we're going to come to the point where we're just waiting for this

01:06:04 ◼   ► marriage like we did in the United States between Apple and Verizon? Does that question make sense?

01:06:09 ◼   ► Apple already married Intel for the max, and what everyone's waiting for now is a divorce.

01:06:16 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, they're going to split up, and Apple's going to make ARM CPUs everywhere,"

01:06:20 ◼   ► and everything like that. But we have to see how this turns out. It's not a slam dunk that Intel

01:06:25 ◼   ► is going to have chips that beat everything that Apple does. They're just barely starting

01:06:28 ◼   ► to be competitive now, and x86 does have a disadvantage being disgusting at all, even

01:06:33 ◼   ► the 64-bit variants, compared to the ARM things. And Apple is a control freak and does really

01:06:39 ◼   ► prefer getting an architecture license from ARM and then doing everything themselves.

01:06:43 ◼   ► Apple would prefer if they could just do everything themselves and get Intel to fab them with

01:06:46 ◼   ► their super awesome fabs that in two or three years' time would be 14 nanometer, right?

01:06:51 ◼   ► And Intel prefers x86 everywhere because that's something that they can own and control to

01:06:55 ◼   ► to some degree, or to a larger degree than ARM.

01:06:59 ◼   ► So we are in a transitional period.

01:07:03 ◼   ► And I would love to be in the multi-year long boardroom

01:07:05 ◼   ► meetings between those two companies trying to negotiate

01:07:08 ◼   ► how this is going to turn out.

01:07:09 ◼   ► It's actually very interesting.

01:07:11 ◼   ► I will point out, though, before we leave this topic,

01:07:15 ◼   ► that the Bay Trail CPUs that Intel has not only are not yet

01:07:19 ◼   ► in a phone compatible power envelope,

01:07:22 ◼   ► but I just looked up on Wikipedia,

01:07:24 ◼   ► and they are using 22 nanometer.

01:07:26 ◼   ► So the idea that Intel is only able to basically match

01:07:30 ◼   ► the A7 in most ways in performance,

01:07:34 ◼   ► they're only able to match it, not beat it,

01:07:36 ◼   ► using this entire generation ahead of process technology

01:07:41 ◼   ► and using more power than the A7.

01:07:45 ◼   ► That is significant, that's a substantial difference.

01:07:49 ◼   ► - Well, they used to be even crappier.

01:07:51 ◼   ► Like if you look at Intel's previous efforts to do anything low power, they have come a

01:07:57 ◼   ► really, really long way.

01:07:58 ◼   ► And like I said, they're not there yet, but I wouldn't count them out.

01:08:03 ◼   ► They should be doing better than they are.

01:08:05 ◼   ► For years it's like, "Intel, what's your problem?

01:08:07 ◼   ► Why don't you just make a decent mobile chip?"

01:08:09 ◼   ► And they're like, "Well, we have these Atom processors and they're kind of good and cheap

01:08:13 ◼   ► PCs."

01:08:14 ◼   ► Like, "No, no, we need something that fits in a phone or a tablet."

01:08:16 ◼   ► "Oh, okay, we'll make something."

01:08:18 ◼   ► Like they've just been making crap.

01:08:19 ◼   ► they haven't really been putting their A-team on it.

01:08:21 ◼   ► And so now they're finally waking up.

01:08:24 ◼   ► And there are other issues in terms

01:08:25 ◼   ► of doing system-on-a-chip services individual CPUs

01:08:27 ◼   ► that Intel needs to gain expertise in.

01:08:30 ◼   ► So there is a bit of a learning curve there.

01:08:33 ◼   ► But their roadmap-- and Tech's done a couple of articles

01:08:37 ◼   ► on this as well.

01:08:38 ◼   ► Like, look at the roadmap three chips down,

01:08:40 ◼   ► what Intel says they're going to have on the low end

01:08:43 ◼   ► and on the high end, and how they start

01:08:45 ◼   ► converging into a continuum of chips

01:08:47 ◼   ► to go all the way from phone power envelopes

01:08:50 ◼   ► all the way up into Mac Pro power envelopes

01:08:52 ◼   ► and how Intel sees eventually a unified architecture

01:08:55 ◼   ► that spans that range.

01:08:56 ◼   ► And you can't count them out.

01:08:59 ◼   ► I don't look at those slides and say,

01:09:02 ◼   ► "Oh, forget it, that'll never happen."

01:09:04 ◼   ► Because if you had said the same thing

01:09:05 ◼   ► when they had the Pentium 4s

01:09:07 ◼   ► and it looked like AMD was kicking their butt

01:09:09 ◼   ► and they showed you the core architecture thing,

01:09:10 ◼   ► you'd be like, "Nah, whatever, I'll believe it when I see it."

01:09:12 ◼   ► Well, they did it there.

01:09:13 ◼   ► So I have faith in Intel still.

01:09:16 ◼   ► I don't know, I would have severe doubts that Apple would ever give up that control again.

01:09:23 ◼   ► For Apple to have done the A7 and the whole A series, to have all this chip design in-house

01:09:29 ◼   ► where they're making exclusive chips that, you know, Intel can go sell their chips to

01:09:33 ◼   ► Samsung and everyone else, they don't care.

01:09:36 ◼   ► For Apple to have exclusive chips that are totally under their control and they can have

01:09:42 ◼   ► pretty much anyone they want within a very, very small group of people who are capable

01:09:46 ◼   ► but they can have anybody they want manufacture it.

01:09:49 ◼   ► They can set their own schedule for the most part.

01:09:51 ◼   ► They can get a lot of price gains by being the designers

01:09:55 ◼   ► and basically just using somebody else as a dumb fab.

01:09:59 ◼   ► I don't see-- it's different in the Macs.

01:10:02 ◼   ► In the Macs, Apple hardly sells any Macs

01:10:04 ◼   ► relative to the number of iOS devices they sell.

01:10:07 ◼   ► The Mac business, they can-- and there's

01:10:09 ◼   ► no really good alternative in the Mac and PC space

01:10:13 ◼   ► besides Intel right now.

01:10:14 ◼   ► But for them to give up such an important component, to go backwards in the direction

01:10:21 ◼   ► they've been trying so hard to go, to switch to someone else's processor and system on

01:10:27 ◼   ► a chip, and to let anybody else sell the exact same chip in their own phones, I don't see

01:10:34 ◼   ► Apple ever doing that.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Well, that's all part of the negotiation.

01:10:36 ◼   ► Who's to say that Intel would let anyone else buy that chip?

01:10:39 ◼   ► Wouldn't that be part of the negotiation?

01:10:41 ◼   ► And the other thing about, "Oh, well, Apple can now have anybody fab it."

01:10:43 ◼   ► So far, they've been having Samsung fab them, which is not good.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Apple does not want...

01:10:49 ◼   ► Apple wants Taiwan Semiconductor to fab them, and they're not online yet, right?

01:10:55 ◼   ► So it's an uncomfortable situation for everybody.

01:10:59 ◼   ► Everyone's got something to offer, and everyone's got something they don't want to give up.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Apple wants to get off Samsung.

01:11:04 ◼   ► They want to have someone else fab their stuff.

01:11:05 ◼   ► They want to retain complete control, but they would also like to be fabbing things

01:11:08 ◼   ► at competitive or superior levels.

01:11:12 ◼   ► So maybe-- and Intel wants to get into this space.

01:11:15 ◼   ► So maybe Intel and Apple could reach deals.

01:11:17 ◼   ► OK, we will fab your ARM chips for you.

01:11:20 ◼   ► And then the next year, you promise to buy our chips.

01:11:22 ◼   ► But we'll only sell you the system on chip.

01:11:24 ◼   ► We won't sell it to anyone else.

01:11:25 ◼   ► It'll be an exclusive contract, provided you can provide such

01:11:28 ◼   ► and such a volume.

01:11:29 ◼   ► Like, the business deals to be made here,

01:11:31 ◼   ► there are sort of win-win scenarios for Apple and Intel

01:11:35 ◼   ► if they could just figure out the right balance of control

01:11:39 ◼   ► versus money versus guaranteed sales versus volumes

01:11:41 ◼   ► versus not helping our competitors and the whole nine yards. And if Apple won't talk

01:11:45 ◼   ► until it's surely talking to Samsung as well and everybody else. So it's a delicate

01:11:51 ◼   ► dance between these giants in the phone business to see who is everyone negotiating for a superior

01:11:57 ◼   ► position down the line.

01:11:59 ◼   ► You know what I think is most cool about all of this though is that this mobile space is

01:12:04 ◼   ► interesting from the hardware straight through the software. It's not like there's any

01:12:07 ◼   ► part of this ecosystem that's boring.

01:12:11 ◼   ► Everything is in flux, everything is moving and very quickly, and it's a heck of a lot

01:12:17 ◼   ► of fun to watch, that's for sure.

01:12:19 ◼   ► Much better than the PC space where it was just like Windows and Intel for so long and

01:12:22 ◼   ► then AMD kind of made it interesting briefly before Intel smushed them.

01:12:26 ◼   ► Yep.

01:12:27 ◼   ► All right, and with that, let's wrap it up this week.

01:12:30 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Squarespace and MailRoute.

01:12:33 ◼   ► We'll see you next week.

01:12:34 ◼   ► [MUSIC]

01:12:44 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:12:46 ◼   ► John didn't do any research.

01:12:49 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental.

01:12:54 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:12:57 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:13:02 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at

01:13:08 ◼   ► C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

01:13:16 ◼   ► N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A,

01:13:23 ◼   ► it's accidental.

01:13:27 ◼   ► They didn't mean to, accidental.

01:13:32 ◼   ► Tech podcast, so long.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Titles are lacking today. What the hell's wrong with the chatroom?

01:13:40 ◼   ► I guess we weren't that funny today. I guess not.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Swimming at 16GB gold is pretty good.

01:13:46 ◼   ► You just gotta decide whether you have the space after the 16.

01:13:49 ◼   ► Yeah, non-breaking space.

01:13:51 ◼   ► Wow. Don't put anything like that into podcast titles with strange characters as they get mangled.

01:13:56 ◼   ► I'm so disappointed with RSS feed readers, because now that I have an RSS feed on my hypercritical site,

01:14:03 ◼   ► site, which never gets updated because I never post anything to it.

01:14:07 ◼   ► But anyway, I get complaints and say, "Oh, your feed is broken."

01:14:11 ◼   ► And my feed is so not broken.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Everything shows up as one giant paragraph.

01:14:17 ◼   ► The feed has p-tags in it.

01:14:19 ◼   ► It validates.

01:14:20 ◼   ► It's a valid Atom feed.

01:14:21 ◼   ► You can run it through the validator.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Wait, but are the p-tags direct descendants of the item tag, or are they encoded as HTML?

01:14:28 ◼   ► I'm using the namespace support in Atom, where you can say, in the item, this section that I'm

01:14:34 ◼   ► going to tell you now is HTML namespace. I'm not making this stuff up. I'm following the standards.

01:14:39 ◼   ► The problem is the readers don't follow the standards. The readers are like half-assed,

01:14:46 ◼   ► heuristic kind of-- they're not following the standard. The standard provides a way for you

01:14:50 ◼   ► to put HTML inside there without escaping it. Because that's the other thing. You can do like,

01:14:54 ◼   ► OK, well, I'm just going to escape everything. It's going to be ampersand, lt, semicolons,

01:14:57 ◼   ► all over the place, right?

01:14:58 ◼   ► Then you have to worry about the readers not correctly

01:15:00 ◼   ► unescaping that, right?

01:15:02 ◼   ► So I was trying to avoid that by saying, look,

01:15:03 ◼   ► I'll make it easy for you.

01:15:04 ◼   ► There's a way in the Atom standard to put HTML in there

01:15:08 ◼   ► and have actual HTML tags and tell--

01:15:11 ◼   ► with XML namespaces, used to be you were looking at Atom feed.

01:15:14 ◼   ► Now you're about to look at HTML.

01:15:16 ◼   ► And all that's in the HTML is just p tags and whatever.

01:15:18 ◼   ► Things just swallow it up and don't show

01:15:21 ◼   ► the breaks between paragraphs.

01:15:23 ◼   ► Some of them do.

01:15:23 ◼   ► Some of them read it fine.

01:15:24 ◼   ► But other ones don't.

01:15:25 ◼   ► So it's just this constant struggle

01:15:27 ◼   ► to find the authors of these feed reader applications,

01:15:31 ◼   ► send them the URL of my feed, tell them that it's valid,

01:15:34 ◼   ► tell them that their thing should render it correctly,

01:15:36 ◼   ► and then never hear from them again.

01:15:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, how does that work out when you do that?

01:15:40 ◼   ► - Occasionally, there were a couple bugs

01:15:42 ◼   ► that were easier to find, didn't have to do with formatting.

01:15:45 ◼   ► I think the reader guy I sent in stuff about that,

01:15:47 ◼   ► he's like, "Oh, I found that that's a bug."

01:15:49 ◼   ► I think it was like, actually,

01:15:50 ◼   ► it wasn't the feed itself, it was subscribing.

01:15:51 ◼   ► They'd click on the little link to subscribe

01:15:53 ◼   ► happen. They couldn't handle it because my subscription things didn't have a file name

01:15:58 ◼   ► extension or some other crazy thing. Or their URL parsing didn't recognize .co as a domain

01:16:05 ◼   ► specifier, and so it would treat the entire thing as a search string.

01:16:11 ◼   ► I didn't even know you could do this in this feed. I'm looking at your feed. Yeah, the

01:16:14 ◼   ► way you just embed the HTML directly, I had no idea you could even do that.

01:16:17 ◼   ► Run it through an Atom validator. It's a miracle.

01:16:20 ◼   ► Here's your problem. You have two problems. First of all, your link in your header is

01:16:23 ◼   ► RSS and the feed is actually Adam. That's against all standards. Second of all, Adam's

01:16:29 ◼   ► terrible. That's your problem right there. See, the reason why Adam is terrible to parse

01:16:34 ◼   ► is – and not parse the XML, but I guess the reason why it's terrible to interpret

01:16:39 ◼   ► the tree that is parsed is that you can do a million different things in Adam. And a

01:16:46 ◼   ► lot of it. Because RSS was designed by a couple of crazy people. And so it's really simple,

01:16:52 ◼   ► and it works, and it's really easy to deal with. Adam was designed by a committee in response to

01:16:57 ◼   ► limitations in RSS. So it was doomed to be this ridiculous bloated thing that could encompass

01:17:04 ◼   ► every possible thing you might ever want to do with anything in a feed. But Adam is a closed

01:17:09 ◼   ► standard. It's not like where you have to interpret 8,000 different date formats. Adam defines what

01:17:14 ◼   ► what the format is, and that's all you-- if you just follow the Adam standard, you're

01:17:17 ◼   ► fine. That's why I picked it.

01:17:18 ◼   ► Well, but for somebody implementing, like, you know, a feed parser, following the standard,

01:17:22 ◼   ► first of all, you have to have a bunch of, like, weird fuzzy logic and exceptions to

01:17:26 ◼   ► deal with feeds that aren't properly formed. But second of all, dealing with Adam, it's

01:17:30 ◼   ► just such a pain because there are so many different possibilities. Like, to say, "All

01:17:34 ◼   ► right, well, you know, what is the date that I should display for this article?" Well,

01:17:38 ◼   ► there's like 16 different ways to represent dates, and they all have slightly different

01:17:41 ◼   ► semantic meanings. And some people have one or two of them. Some people have none of them.

01:17:45 ◼   ► Some people have these three, but one of them will be 60 years in the future for some reason.

01:17:48 ◼   ► You've got to deal with that.

01:17:49 ◼   ► Well, that's RSS you're describing, not Adam.

01:17:51 ◼   ► Well, RSS, there are a lot fewer value types. It's a lot simpler of a structure. Adam tries

01:17:59 ◼   ► to represent every possible thing. It's very complex as a result. And the possible—the

01:18:08 ◼   ► The range of possible situations and meanings that can be encompassed by Atom is so much

01:18:13 ◼   ► bigger that in practice it leads to not only much harder to write parsers for it, but a

01:18:19 ◼   ► lot more likely errors if you are relying on it being parsed properly.

01:18:24 ◼   ► I think it's harder to write an RSS parser because I think it's more Wild West.

01:18:28 ◼   ► I'm not using esoteric Atom features.

01:18:30 ◼   ► You can look at that Atom feed with your eyes and understand every single piece of it.

01:18:35 ◼   ► I'm not even doing any set of attachments or anything like that.

01:18:38 ◼   ► It's very simple and straightforward, and there is no ambiguity, there's no data in there that could possibly be in any other format,

01:18:44 ◼   ► and so it appeals to me.

01:18:45 ◼   ► And no, I don't think the fact that the text of the Lynx as RSS has anything to do with it.

01:18:49 ◼   ► This is so, like, this perfectly represents you versus me right here.

01:18:53 ◼   ► Like, you are the Atom feed, and I'm the RSS parser.

01:18:58 ◼   ► Mine's like all like pragmatic and simple and, you know, not technically that correct, but it just works.

01:19:06 ◼   ► And you're like, "Well, what about this?"

01:19:09 ◼   ► It doesn't just work.

01:19:10 ◼   ► RSS feeds have tons of problems all the time because people produce junk RSS feeds.

01:19:17 ◼   ► I'm totally a proponent of, "Don't put out junk and make people have to handle it."

01:19:21 ◼   ► That's the whole thing of Postel's law of, "Be liberal in what you consume and conservative

01:19:25 ◼   ► in what you output," and parsers that die as soon as they find something that's invalid

01:19:30 ◼   ► versus parsers that just stumble along.

01:19:32 ◼   ► I think HTML5 is the correct approach, which is don't immediately die if you encounter any error,

01:19:38 ◼   ► but document your error handling precisely so that everyone can render it the same way.

01:19:42 ◼   ► And I think the web has proven that that model is the correct one, because the old one where

01:19:46 ◼   ► everyone was just writing crap and then parsers doing whatever the hell they want was untenable.

01:19:49 ◼   ► And the one where you don't show anything on the page if a single thing is broken,

01:19:53 ◼   ► it's also untenable. And the correct solution is to have a well-defined standard all the way down

01:19:58 ◼   ► to how you handle error conditions so that everybody can implement their parsers in exactly

01:20:02 ◼   ► the same way that don't blow up when you have an error, but that all pages still look the same.

01:20:06 ◼   ► And so I think it's perfectly possible to implement an Adam parser using that same thing.

01:20:11 ◼   ► All right, go for it.

01:20:11 ◼   ► No, I don't want to. Who wants to parse Adam feeds?

01:20:15 ◼   ► [MUSIC]

01:20:25 ◼   ► We accidentally podcasted John Tiracusa, wise old soul

01:20:31 ◼   ► Sam

01:20:31 ◼   ► He's saving his panties for a new track pro

01:20:34 ◼   ► Marco Orment, he's a product man

01:20:37 ◼   ► He's selling them off just as fast as he can

01:20:40 ◼   ► Casey!

01:20:41 ◼   ► Who the hell is Casey?

01:20:43 ◼   ► Who the hell is Casey? Who the hell is Casey?

01:20:46 ◼   ► It was an accident, it was an accident

01:20:49 ◼   ► Accidentally podcasted accident

01:20:53 ◼   ► It was an accident

01:20:55 ◼   ► Accidentally podcasted accident

01:20:59 ◼   ► It was an accident!

01:21:01 ◼   ► Accidentally podcasted!

01:21:04 ◼   ► Well, hopefully two of the three of us will have new phones next week.

01:21:08 ◼   ► And all of our wives will.

01:21:09 ◼   ► Yeah, hopefully.

01:21:11 ◼   ► Not next week.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Like I said, Tina's probably not going to get hers until they come back.

01:21:14 ◼   ► Was that her in the chat?

01:21:16 ◼   ► Until it's boring.

01:21:17 ◼   ► That really was her.

01:21:18 ◼   ► I checked her IP.

01:21:19 ◼   ► I love how that's how you find out.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Can we please put that in the show?

01:21:25 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:21:26 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:21:27 ◼   ► How else are you going to know?

01:21:28 ◼   ► I'm going to get up from my...

01:21:29 ◼   ► She's not in the room with me.

01:21:30 ◼   ► This is another part of the house.

01:21:31 ◼   ► Couldn't have sent her like a text message or something.

01:21:33 ◼   ► Jesus Christ.

01:21:34 ◼   ► That's fantastic.