ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► You're doing like in-line and online.

00:00:02 ◼   ► You know the one that started me nuts lately that I keep seeing online, meaning on the

00:00:06 ◼   ► internet, is grown people, I guess, also intelligent people, saying "on accident."

00:00:14 ◼   ► Oh, god, it's the worst.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Oh, rather than "by accident."

00:00:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:18 ◼   ► And not ironically, not isolated cases, but just it's rampant.

00:00:23 ◼   ► I think there's whole sections of the adult population that think that's a perfectly

00:00:26 ◼   ► acceptable way to talk, and don't think anything of it.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Most of them go there because the weather is nice. That's why they go to Florida.

00:00:34 ◼   ► But the weather in Florida is terrible.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Oh, no, it's—

00:00:36 ◼   ► They don't go in the winter! They don't go in the summer.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Right. That's the whole snowbird phenomenon. They go down in the winter to Florida, and

00:00:42 ◼   ► then come back to New York in the summer. That's what my grandparents do. My Jewish

00:00:47 ◼   ► grandparents that live in Boca Raton, like every other set of Jewish grandparents in

00:00:51 ◼   ► the world.

00:00:52 ◼   ► I think I'm outnumbered on this show in the pronunciation of that state, too, so I'll

00:00:54 ◼   ► just let that one slide.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Florida. Yeah, keep practicing. You're supposed to be a New Yorker now. You're doing a piss-poor job.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I'm from Ohio, give me a break. I know, I know. Oh, Tiff's supposed to whip you into shape.

00:01:04 ◼   ► I don't even speak well for an Ohioan if it makes you feel any better. No, no, you're just a,

00:01:09 ◼   ► you're a mongrel without a home. I'm supposed to say, I think, I think being from Ohio,

00:01:13 ◼   ► I'm supposed to say things like "warsh" and the shopping cart is a "buggy." No, but you do say,

00:01:18 ◼   ► you do say the word- Get my groceries and some sacks. You say the word q-u-e-r-y, like either

00:01:23 ◼   ► either an Ohioan or a Pennsylvania.

00:01:26 ◼   ► Crazy person.

00:01:27 ◼   ► Or a crazy person.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not "query," it's "query."

00:01:30 ◼   ► It's what?

00:01:31 ◼   ► Oh, forget it.

00:01:32 ◼   ► We're not going to do word pronunciation.

00:01:35 ◼   ► We have follow-up to get through here.

00:01:37 ◼   ► Let's do some follow-up.

00:01:38 ◼   ► The very first item is an ancient follow-up that we never managed to mention.

00:01:41 ◼   ► I think one past show I was saying how I couldn't figure out what version of Bugshot I was running

00:01:45 ◼   ► and couldn't think of a way to look up the version in the app.

00:01:49 ◼   ► And many people wrote in to tell us if you go to "settings," "general usage," and select

00:01:52 ◼   ► app that you can see the version number. I could swear I did that, but apparently I didn't.

00:01:56 ◼   ► So there you go. The iSCSI one I think we did address, so you could actually delete

00:02:00 ◼   ► that one. The fact that even if you use iSCSI, you can't just take the drive out and put

00:02:05 ◼   ► it in your Mac. It depends on the implementation of the enclosure, whether it has raw disk

00:02:10 ◼   ► access or whether it uses some other intermediary layer. And NAS probably doesn't, but maybe

00:02:15 ◼   ► just some box with a disk in it might. That being said, I still haven't tried iSCSI with

00:02:21 ◼   ► with my NAS yet, so I still can't actually tell you whether, like, Synology does or not.

00:02:25 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. We're going to talk about that today, eventually, someday. We have tons of

00:02:30 ◼   ► topics, I know. Yeah.

00:02:32 ◼   ► Yeah, we do need to talk about that. Did you open your present yet or not?

00:02:35 ◼   ► I did. I could not resist.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Oh, man, it's so good. But let's keep with the follow-up. Keep with the follow-up.

00:02:41 ◼   ► We can save it for another show. All right. And so the real follow-up here is from people

00:02:44 ◼   ► talking to me about backups, because we talked about on the "Three Phones Ago" show about

00:02:51 ◼   ► the problem of preserving your photos on your phone or otherwise.

00:02:55 ◼   ► The first one is from Ben Griffell, and he says, "One thing came to mind.

00:03:01 ◼   ► What if backing up photos simply isn't as important to the current or younger generation

00:03:05 ◼   ► of people?

00:03:06 ◼   ► When you have a thousand photos on your phone, how important is any one photo?"

00:03:08 ◼   ► I thought I mentioned that on the show.

00:03:10 ◼   ► Maybe Apple's idea is, "Don't worry about it.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Don't be such a pack rat.

00:03:15 ◼   ► Take your pictures, enjoy them, look at them, and ten years from now, yeah, you won't have

00:03:19 ◼   ► these photos, but so what?

00:03:21 ◼   ► I don't think that's the case.

00:03:23 ◼   ► I think it's really just that trying to deal with all of everybody's photos is just such

00:03:31 ◼   ► a large-scale problem and has so many other problems that we discussed with things like

00:03:35 ◼   ► upload bandwidth and storage, things like that.

00:03:38 ◼   ► Videos are a whole other problem where these devices can capture new data so quickly.

00:03:46 ◼   ► if you open up your iPhone and record a 30 second video,

00:03:49 ◼   ► that's a few hundred megs, right?

00:03:51 ◼   ► And something like that.

00:03:52 ◼   ► - And something like that.

00:03:53 ◼   ► - You know, it's these devices,

00:03:55 ◼   ► and the photos aren't that much better.

00:03:57 ◼   ► You know, if you snap a bunch of photos in the night,

00:03:58 ◼   ► that could be 50 megs.

00:03:59 ◼   ► - Photos are way better.

00:04:00 ◼   ► I mean, I think, like I said, I'm sure,

00:04:02 ◼   ► I think photos are in the realm of possibility.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Video, forget it, like there's no chance of that.

00:04:06 ◼   ► Just, I mean, storage capacity alone.

00:04:09 ◼   ► You can't even store it on, you know, so.

00:04:11 ◼   ► - Well, right, but. - For photos,

00:04:11 ◼   ► for photos it's within the realm of reason, but.

00:04:13 ◼   ► - But it's like a dirty problem to Apple.

00:04:16 ◼   ► Like Apple, they know that they can't do online backup

00:04:19 ◼   ► of all your photos and all your videos,

00:04:21 ◼   ► even though these devices try to make those two things

00:04:23 ◼   ► very easy to capture and encourage you to capture them

00:04:25 ◼   ► and they put them all together in one big bin on the device.

00:04:29 ◼   ► That's why I think like, since they can't really do it well

00:04:33 ◼   ► and they probably won't be able to do it well

00:04:35 ◼   ► for the foreseeable future of backing up

00:04:36 ◼   ► all of your photos forever and all your videos forever,

00:04:39 ◼   ► I think they just kind of say, you know what,

00:04:42 ◼   ► you're on your own for that,

00:04:43 ◼   ► even though whatever we think about that solution,

00:04:45 ◼   ► I think that's the clear message from them, which is like, you're on your own.

00:04:47 ◼   ► I think they would like to do it, they're just doing a bad job of it.

00:04:51 ◼   ► And actually, if we—well, I want to get to this follow-up, and then we can talk more

00:04:54 ◼   ► about some other things that have come up related to this.

00:04:57 ◼   ► But—

00:04:58 ◼   ► Technically, it's a follow-up.

00:04:59 ◼   ► Yeah, but Ben's point is that maybe it's not important to the consumers, to the current

00:05:03 ◼   ► or younger generation.

00:05:04 ◼   ► Like, we're talking about if we're old or whatever, but maybe younger people don't care.

00:05:09 ◼   ► I suppose that's possible, but I have a hard time believing that there's such a generation

00:05:14 ◼   ► gap, change in values in terms of memories. It's true that the younger generations are

00:05:21 ◼   ► producing much more of it, so maybe that makes each individual photo worth a lot less. But

00:05:26 ◼   ► I think the idea that you'll want to see pictures from your honeymoon or your wedding or from

00:05:32 ◼   ► when your baby was born or from when you graduated college or when you were in high school, the

00:05:37 ◼   ► desire to see those and to preserve those in some form somewhere is not a generational

00:05:43 ◼   ► thing. People will want to do that. And that's the killer. It's not so much like, "Oh, I

00:05:49 ◼   ► don't care about the photo I took last year." It's 10 years from now, 15 years from now,

00:05:53 ◼   ► 20 years from now, you almost certainly will want to see something. Maybe not every single

00:05:57 ◼   ► picture, but you want to see something. Maybe that would actually be a viable strategy of

00:06:01 ◼   ► just thinning out your pictures as you go through the past, but I don't think that's

00:06:04 ◼   ► reasonable, because I think storage capacities will increase so much that that won't be necessary.

00:06:09 ◼   ► But anyway, that was one interesting point.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Another one, this is both from Twitter, no one was email and this one's Twitter.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Jared Tate said he said, "It should not be anyone else's responsibility but the end user

00:06:20 ◼   ► for backups," he means.

00:06:22 ◼   ► And he says, "Obviously it's too complex an issue to discuss via tweet," I agree with

00:06:26 ◼   ► that, "but ignorance is not a good enough reason to force autonomous backups."

00:06:29 ◼   ► So this person's position seems to be that, I was asking for Apple to take care of this

00:06:36 ◼   ► and said, "It's not Apple's problem.

00:06:38 ◼   ► It's not Apple's responsibility.

00:06:40 ◼   ► The only person who has responsibility is the end user's responsibility.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And ignorance, as in you don't know enough to know how to do your backups, is not a good

00:06:46 ◼   ► enough reason to force autonomous backups, as in like it's like the state or the Apple

00:06:51 ◼   ► or whatever forcing you or putting upon you this automated backup system.

00:06:56 ◼   ► And there's no justification for that.

00:06:58 ◼   ► I guess this person doesn't want Apple getting in their business or pulling their photos

00:07:01 ◼   ► down or whatever.

00:07:04 ◼   ► So there's a little bit of tinfoil hatery in here, but again, Twitter is kind of short

00:07:07 ◼   ► to understand this.

00:07:09 ◼   ► The whole idea that it's not anyone's responsibility, but the end user, there's a time for those

00:07:16 ◼   ► type of feelings, but the time passes.

00:07:21 ◼   ► It shouldn't be anyone else's responsibility but the driver's to figure out what the correct

00:07:25 ◼   ► fuel air mixture is at a given temperature and barometric pressure and RPM and throttle

00:07:32 ◼   ► position.

00:07:33 ◼   ► Really, it's not really the responsibility.

00:07:35 ◼   ► You know, seriously, drivers have to take some responsibility for themselves and, you

00:07:38 ◼   ► know, what was it, they'd have like a choke knob or something they used to have in the

00:07:42 ◼   ► car, right?

00:07:43 ◼   ► Yeah, boats have those, right?

00:07:44 ◼   ► Or they used to, at least.

00:07:45 ◼   ► Right, yeah, and it's like, you know, that's your responsibility as a driver.

00:07:48 ◼   ► You should not be pushing that off under the car manufacturers.

00:07:50 ◼   ► But now that sounds crazy, right?

00:07:52 ◼   ► You know, so the bar shifts.

00:07:54 ◼   ► Like things that used to be the responsibility of the operator and people get self-righteous

00:07:57 ◼   ► about like, you know, we were just talking about shifting and everything.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Well, that should be the responsibility of the driver and it's fun to do and it makes

00:08:02 ◼   ► you a real driver and so on and so forth.

00:08:04 ◼   ► none of us would be like, "I really need to control the fuel injectors, because otherwise

00:08:10 ◼   ► I don't feel like I'm really driving." I'm not surprised this guy even heard our show,

00:08:14 ◼   ► because I'm guessing. I mean, what do you think the chances are that he's a desktop

00:08:17 ◼   ► Linux user? I don't know. You can't tell from two tweets. It's a very difficult sketch voice.

00:08:23 ◼   ► If he's a desktop Linux user, and we only encode this show as an MP3. We don't do Ogg

00:08:29 ◼   ► Vorbis. And so I'm actually kind of surprised he has heard the show at all.

00:08:33 ◼   ► Please email Marco.

00:08:34 ◼   ► I mean, like, the idea—it's easy to make fun of that, of like people saying, you know,

00:08:41 ◼   ► you should take responsibility. Like, because we've all had that feeling, especially when

00:08:44 ◼   ► we're younger, at certain points of like that these skills that you have that you're

00:08:49 ◼   ► proud of that other people don't have, they don't deserve the benefits that come with

00:08:52 ◼   ► that skill. So if you can't figure out how to do your own backups, fine. It's not Apple's

00:08:55 ◼   ► problem to solve your problem, you know. It's a kind of a nanny state kind of, oh, they're

00:08:58 ◼   ► to come and solve all your stuff. That's not their problem. That's your problem.

00:09:00 ◼   ► But it's ridiculous. What do you think you're paying Apple for? They're giving you a device

00:09:06 ◼   ► that does things, and every year it does more and better things. Previously, it didn't do

00:09:10 ◼   ► these things. You want them to solve your problems for you. If one of your problems

00:09:14 ◼   ► is I'm worried that 30 years from now I won't have any pictures of my children, yes, of

00:09:18 ◼   ► course. Is Apple a responsibility? No, they're not held at gunpoint having to do this, but

00:09:22 ◼   ► they want to make a product that people want to buy, so you've got to give features that

00:09:25 ◼   ► people want. So if this person doesn't want those features and is happy taking responsibility

00:09:29 ◼   ► for his own backups, that's perfectly fine. But that's not how Apple stays in business

00:09:34 ◼   ► and makes products that people want to buy, and I think he has a minority opinion.

00:09:39 ◼   ► You figure there's also probably some—and I'm sure this is a relatively small effect—but

00:09:44 ◼   ► there would be some effect where if somebody had some kind of horrible disaster, which

00:09:51 ◼   ► really isn't that uncommon these days—let's say a phone goes down the toilet, lightning

00:09:54 ◼   ► strikes their house and people break in and steal their disconnected drives.

00:09:57 ◼   ► So all their stuff is gone.

00:09:59 ◼   ► They get some new stuff from their insurance companies to check.

00:10:02 ◼   ► They go to the Apple store, get a new MacBook.

00:10:05 ◼   ► They log into their stuff and all their stuff is back.

00:10:07 ◼   ► All their photos are back.

00:10:08 ◼   ► All their kids' memories are all back.

00:10:11 ◼   ► That could make them incredibly loyal customers for life.

00:10:14 ◼   ► In the same way that, bringing in another car analogy, a lot of the people who have

00:10:19 ◼   ► been in a serious car accident in which their car has performed extremely well in safety

00:10:23 ◼   ► and really protected them. A lot of times then after that, they only will ever buy that

00:10:28 ◼   ► kind of car because it treated them so well.

00:10:30 ◼   ► Which doesn't make that much sense. And neither does the Apple thing. Really what you want

00:10:33 ◼   ► to happen is for it to go past. That's the honeymoon period transition. You want it to

00:10:36 ◼   ► go to the point where no one is overjoyed that their pictures are preserved or their

00:10:40 ◼   ► house burns down, but they're furious if every single picture is not preserved. That's the

00:10:44 ◼   ► next phase where you're like, "Everyone takes it for granted."

00:10:46 ◼   ► That's true.

00:10:47 ◼   ► And there's only a downside as a vendor. We're not even close to that. So you're right. There

00:10:50 ◼   ► would definitely be a period, like I was saying in the last show, if you were the company

00:10:53 ◼   ► need to do this first." Everyone else would be like, "Oh, I lost these pictures," and

00:10:57 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah. And you'd be like, "Well, I don't have to worry about that because,"

00:10:59 ◼   ► insert name of company or product or service, "that it's proven itself again and again to

00:11:03 ◼   ► keep your crap."

00:11:04 ◼   ► Lots of people are emailing me and Twittering me and saying, "Why isn't iCloud back up

00:11:09 ◼   ► enough? Isn't that sufficient?" Except for the fact that you have to pay, which I think

00:11:12 ◼   ► I complained about on Hypercritical Even Once. Making it be like a small amount and then

00:11:17 ◼   ► saying, "Oh, you got to pay to actually back up everything that's on your phone," I think

00:11:20 ◼   ► is cruel and stupid, but the money is what it is.

00:11:24 ◼   ► And on the last show I said, "Fine, you can charge for it or whatever."

00:11:26 ◼   ► But they're saying, "Well, all right, so if you charge money and you pay for iCloud

00:11:29 ◼   ► back up your phone, isn't that a perfect solution?"

00:11:31 ◼   ► And I was amazed at the number of people who came up with that.

00:11:33 ◼   ► And I was like, "Children were born before 2007.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Just screw them, I guess.

00:11:40 ◼   ► Their pictures aren't on the phone.

00:11:42 ◼   ► You didn't take them on the phone because you didn't have an iPhone."

00:11:44 ◼   ► And people have these things called cameras, and I know they're so rare and stuff like

00:11:47 ◼   ► that.

00:11:48 ◼   ► And some people were saying, "Most people just take all their pictures on their phone."

00:11:50 ◼   ► I know phones are popular, but I think people still have cameras.

00:11:54 ◼   ► I think that is a big enough thing that you can't ignore it.

00:11:57 ◼   ► People have cameras, and people have children born before in 2007 or before they got an

00:12:00 ◼   ► iPhone.

00:12:01 ◼   ► There exist pictures that are not on their phone.

00:12:03 ◼   ► It's just not a tenable solution.

00:12:05 ◼   ► Storage of phones is not increasing rapidly enough, especially if people are going to

00:12:09 ◼   ► take any video at all, for you to be able to have your whole library on your phone.

00:12:12 ◼   ► Even if your entire phone is completely backed up with iCloud and all that good stuff because

00:12:16 ◼   ► you pay for it, that does not solve your photo problem for your family or even for your individual

00:12:20 ◼   ► life unless you have no cameras and no memories that you care about before

00:12:25 ◼   ► you got your first iPhone that you've been schlepping your pictures

00:12:29 ◼   ► from one phone to the other. So I think that is currently not a tenable solution.

00:12:32 ◼   ► Maybe in the future no one will have cameras and all the babies born before

00:12:35 ◼   ► 2007 don't care about them anymore and they'll just be like, "Well, I'm, you know,

00:12:39 ◼   ► I came of age in the age of the iPhone, all my pictures always been on my phone,

00:12:42 ◼   ► every year I transfer every single one of my pictures to my new phone, they're all

00:12:45 ◼   ► backed up on iCloud and I pay for it every year and therefore I'd never

00:12:49 ◼   ► have to worry about my photos. But I think that is incredibly rare, and we're not there

00:12:53 ◼   ► yet.

00:12:54 ◼   ► So let me ask a stupid question of the night. Why doesn't Apple, with their $8 gazillion

00:12:59 ◼   ► in the bank, just buy Crash Plan or – I'm drawing a blank on the one that's very similar.

00:13:04 ◼   ► Or Everpix.

00:13:05 ◼   ► Or Everpix, yeah.

00:13:06 ◼   ► I just signed up for Everpix after the last show. I'd known about it for a while, and

00:13:10 ◼   ► I'm like, "You know what? After that last show, why don't I just try out this Everpix

00:13:12 ◼   ► thing?"

00:13:13 ◼   ► Is it good?

00:13:14 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know if I'm going to keep using it. It was like $50 for a year. I just

00:13:18 ◼   ► paid for the whole year. I just wanted to see how they did. How long will it take them

00:13:21 ◼   ► to get all my photos? How good will they be about pulling my photos?

00:13:23 ◼   ► Everypix is a service, by the way, that takes all your photos and, like the name says, they

00:13:27 ◼   ► keep them forever. Full resolution, they organize them for you, and they will suck them from

00:13:32 ◼   ► any one of your devices. By the way, many people wrote in and told me that Google+ promises

00:13:35 ◼   ► to do something similar. If you take it on your Android 4, then they get pulled into

00:13:38 ◼   ► Google+. That'll be around forever. That's the thing I thought about with people saying,

00:13:43 ◼   ► "Oh, Google+ will do that for you." Are you kidding? They have a long way to go before

00:13:48 ◼   ► or I'm going to trust them to take care of all my pictures forever.

00:13:50 ◼   ► Like, I don't even trust them to keep track of my email forever.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Like, every piece of email that's in Gmail I have on my own computer

00:13:55 ◼   ► that's backed up, you know what I mean?

00:13:56 ◼   ► Like, they have not earned that.

00:13:58 ◼   ► Whereas every pics, at least you said,

00:13:59 ◼   ► look, that's their whole business.

00:14:00 ◼   ► It's in their friggin' name.

00:14:01 ◼   ► Like, maybe they're going to go to a business, maybe they're a startup,

00:14:03 ◼   ► maybe Apple's going to buy them and shut them down.

00:14:05 ◼   ► But clearly, for as long as they're in business,

00:14:07 ◼   ► they are totally serious about keeping your pictures.

00:14:10 ◼   ► And so I signed up for it.

00:14:12 ◼   ► It pulled in all my pictures.

00:14:14 ◼   ► First, I just let it go on my little library,

00:14:16 ◼   ► and I saw that it was working.

00:14:17 ◼   ► and then I said, "All right," and that was the free trial.

00:14:19 ◼   ► Then I signed up for my account for my wife,

00:14:21 ◼   ► because she's got the family iPhoto library on her computer.

00:14:24 ◼   ► It pulled them all in.

00:14:25 ◼   ► I mean, granted, I have a big upload connection,

00:14:28 ◼   ► but it was pretty seamless.

00:14:29 ◼   ► It worked.

00:14:30 ◼   ► Their web interface is probably not how I'd want

00:14:33 ◼   ► to manage my pictures, but it's interesting

00:14:34 ◼   ► that if someone says, "Oh, where is that picture

00:14:36 ◼   ► "of whatever," now, no matter where I am in the world,

00:14:38 ◼   ► I can just go to everpix.com and find the picture

00:14:40 ◼   ► that they're asking about and give them the full result.

00:14:42 ◼   ► I did it already after I came back from my vacation.

00:14:45 ◼   ► My mom asked, "Where is that picture of us

00:14:46 ◼   ► with the grandkids because I hadn't copied onto their SD cards. We took it on the last

00:14:49 ◼   ► day we were there right before we left, right? And she sent me that email when I was at work.

00:14:53 ◼   ► I just pulled up the website, pulled out the high-rise pictures, emailed them to her. So

00:14:57 ◼   ► I give the service a thumbs up. I still think Apple should buy them and just like, because

00:15:01 ◼   ► again, they seem to have worked out most of these things here. Why doesn't Apple do that?

00:15:05 ◼   ► Charge a similar amount of money, maybe less, build it into every iPhone. I know they're

00:15:09 ◼   ► kind of trying to do the same thing with PhotoStream, but nobody I know, even the supergeeks, knows

00:15:14 ◼   ► all the rules about how PhotoStream works, and we shouldn't have to think it should just

00:15:17 ◼   ► be like Everpix. What are the rules of Everpix? We grab all your photos as soon as we can

00:15:20 ◼   ► and keep them forever. That's easy to remember.

00:15:24 ◼   ► That being said, though, it's great. I haven't actually used it yet, although I've heard

00:15:29 ◼   ► great things. They even sponsored the talk show a year ago or something, and I heard

00:15:33 ◼   ► that then.

00:15:34 ◼   ► They're in Fireball. They didn't sponsor the talk show. They sponsored Daring Fireball.

00:15:36 ◼   ► I thought the same thing.

00:15:37 ◼   ► I don't know. Anyway.

00:15:38 ◼   ► That's what Lex told me. What does he know?

00:15:41 ◼   ► I think maybe there's a bunch of both.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Anyway, I think it's a great service for the role

00:15:50 ◼   ► you just described of having instant access to everything

00:15:55 ◼   ► from anywhere.

00:15:56 ◼   ► That's fantastic.

00:15:57 ◼   ► That being said, though, I still don't

00:15:59 ◼   ► think it's wise to trust any web service for the primary storage

00:16:04 ◼   ► and backup of your photos.

00:16:06 ◼   ► Oh, no.

00:16:06 ◼   ► I wouldn't-- it's just like what comes after tertiary.

00:16:10 ◼   ► Whatever comes after tertiary backup.

00:16:11 ◼   ► That sounds better.

00:16:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's what it is, because I've got backups and local backups and have crash

00:16:16 ◼   ► plans.

00:16:17 ◼   ► This is one more, because is it cheaper?

00:16:18 ◼   ► I guess it is cheaper.

00:16:19 ◼   ► $50 for the year or something?

00:16:20 ◼   ► It seemed cheap to me at the time.

00:16:22 ◼   ► That's about what backplace costs.

00:16:23 ◼   ► Yeah, but it was unlimited.

00:16:25 ◼   ► It was so focused on photos.

00:16:26 ◼   ► I like the idea that this would be an extra backup, because I'm willing to spend the extra

00:16:30 ◼   ► money not to back up all of my crap to yet another service, but just like now we're getting

00:16:35 ◼   ► down to brass tacks.

00:16:36 ◼   ► What do you really care about, right?

00:16:37 ◼   ► and I don't think it does any video, but like, I'll pay extra to have that. So like I said,

00:16:41 ◼   ► when the year is up, I'll think about whether I want to do it again, whether it's earned

00:16:44 ◼   ► its value, but I would definitely say like, "Oh, now that I've done this, I don't need

00:16:47 ◼   ► to back up my iPhone library." No, no, definitely not. It's just, you know, it's another backstop

00:16:53 ◼   ► against disaster.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Right. But I think a lot of people wouldn't use it like that. Like, a lot of people use

00:16:58 ◼   ► these things as primary storage.

00:17:00 ◼   ► It would be better than nothing, though, wouldn't you be glad?

00:17:03 ◼   ► Well, that's true.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Like, if someone, someone, if someone who wasn't doing any backups before, and there's

00:17:06 ◼   ► way you're going to be able to convince them to even use Time Machine because it's

00:17:09 ◼   ► too complicated for whatever you're like, "Look, sign up for the service." At least

00:17:12 ◼   ► then you feel like, "All right." At least you have some backstop. That's your version

00:17:15 ◼   ► of Crash Plan for them.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Yeah, but the problem with photos, as you said, you care less about a photo you took

00:17:22 ◼   ► one year ago and more about a photo you might have taken 10 years ago. I got my first digital

00:17:27 ◼   ► camera 13 years ago. I have pictures. I have a good number of regularly taken pictures,

00:17:36 ◼   ► not like two or three a year like in the film days, but you know I have a good

00:17:39 ◼   ► number of pictures being taken from the year 2000 forward and back then I mean

00:17:47 ◼   ► first of all they look like crap because even though it was a really nice camera

00:17:50 ◼   ► it was low resolution by today's standards I believe it was like 1.3 megapixels or

00:17:54 ◼   ► something. No it was 2.0 it was very high end 2.0. But isn't that the awful

00:17:58 ◼   ► paradox that these ones that you care about from ten years ago that... Oh they look

00:18:01 ◼   ► terrible. And you care about them so deeply. Cry me a river mine were

00:18:05 ◼   ► taken with disc cameras, remember disc cameras? Nice! Yeah, the floppy disc, yeah. Those were

00:18:10 ◼   ► not like, I think each negative was like the size of my pinky thumb, pinky fingernail.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Yeah, those are rough. But, but yeah, like, you know, I still have these in Lightroom,

00:18:19 ◼   ► although at some point along the way I lost full resolution versions of many of them,

00:18:24 ◼   ► and so I only have like thumbnails, I believe, like from Aperture six years ago or something

00:18:28 ◼   ► like that. But anyway, you know, there's a whole lot of these that I really care a lot

00:18:33 ◼   ► about and I would love to keep, and certainly the older I get, the more I will want to keep

00:18:38 ◼   ► them because they'll be further away, more distant memories. But any kind of web service

00:18:45 ◼   ► will never satisfy that kind of time scale. The web just doesn't work that way. I mean,

00:18:49 ◼   ► it's hard enough to keep moving between computers.

00:18:51 ◼   ► I don't know if that's true, though. Are you saying that no web service will be around

00:18:54 ◼   ► that long?

00:18:55 ◼   ► I'm saying it's very unlikely that a photo storage and backup service or feature will

00:19:02 ◼   ► service or feature of a bigger service will generally be around for greater than 10 year

00:19:07 ◼   ► time scales.

00:19:08 ◼   ► But they don't have to be.

00:19:09 ◼   ► Like, they absolutely don't have to be.

00:19:11 ◼   ► All they have to do is have duplicate copies of everything that you have somewhere else.

00:19:15 ◼   ► And when they go out of business, it's on you to find an alternate service to take to

00:19:19 ◼   ► be your backstop.

00:19:20 ◼   ► And by then, maybe some other backup service will come up.

00:19:22 ◼   ► So you're not expecting a single thing.

00:19:24 ◼   ► It's kind of like your data.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Your data isn't expected to live on whatever hardware it was created on.

00:19:28 ◼   ► you carry it along with you, and as storage increases,

00:19:31 ◼   ► you just keep bringing it, copying it from thing to thing.

00:19:33 ◼   ► So I envisioned this having various backup services,

00:19:36 ◼   ► and they're either gonna go out of business,

00:19:37 ◼   ► or I'll prefer one to the other, whatever.

00:19:39 ◼   ► I will stop using that one or they will disappear,

00:19:41 ◼   ► and I will take, 'cause that's my backup,

00:19:43 ◼   ► I will take that data, which I already have a copy of,

00:19:45 ◼   ► that's just one of the many backups,

00:19:47 ◼   ► and put it onto another service

00:19:48 ◼   ► and let it go out of another service.

00:19:49 ◼   ► Like, I think that's a reasonable way,

00:19:51 ◼   ► the only way, really, to bring your data along with you

00:19:54 ◼   ► through your life is to constantly move it

00:19:56 ◼   ► from service to service, hardware to hardware. So I don't think you have to worry about the

00:19:59 ◼   ► longevity of the companies except within, like, you don't want to go for a company that's

00:20:02 ◼   ► going to go out of business next week because then it was kind of a waste of your time.

00:20:05 ◼   ► But other than that, I think I'm comfortable with that.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Oh yeah, but we're nerds. We're okay doing that kind of management and redundancy and

00:20:12 ◼   ► everything. For web services, you don't think regular

00:20:14 ◼   ► people could do that? Mm.

00:20:16 ◼   ► Like because they just sign up and then— Well, the problem is, if you're relying only

00:20:20 ◼   ► on a web service, like, you know, let's say all your photos are backed up to Apple's magical

00:20:24 ◼   ► that doesn't exist. Let's say it starts existing and all your photos are back up to iCloud.

00:20:29 ◼   ► Let's say in four years, Apple stuff starts to really suck and you want to switch to Android

00:20:34 ◼   ► or whatever is existing in four years. How do you do that?

00:20:39 ◼   ► Yeah, well you stop using Apple services but you should still have all of your photos because

00:20:44 ◼   ► they were just the backup. That wasn't the only copy of them that you had. I mean, that's another place where Google actually excels,

00:20:49 ◼   ► good about letting you get your crap out.

00:20:51 ◼   ► Granted, it is a little bit techy, but at least you can get it.

00:20:54 ◼   ► With the online services, you just discontinue use of those services, discontinue use of

00:20:58 ◼   ► those products, and when you set up your new thing, you copy all your old crap onto your

00:21:03 ◼   ► new thing.

00:21:04 ◼   ► If the new thing really is better and is smart, they'll probably have some kind of migration

00:21:08 ◼   ► assistance.

00:21:09 ◼   ► I think Apple even has a Windows migration assistant to grab your crap off Windows and

00:21:12 ◼   ► put it on your Mac so you don't lose your Excel file that you keep your taxes in or

00:21:16 ◼   ► whatever.

00:21:18 ◼   ► I think it's just part of the process.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Online services, I think, are the easiest to switch up,

00:21:22 ◼   ► because it's usually just a matter of stop using a website,

00:21:25 ◼   ► stop paying the bill, cancel hopefully through their website,

00:21:28 ◼   ► and sign up for another one in a web form.

00:21:29 ◼   ► That's easier, I think, than transferring your data

00:21:31 ◼   ► with a migration assistant when you upgrade from one computer

00:21:34 ◼   ► to another.

00:21:35 ◼   ► It's not as easy as it could be, but I

00:21:41 ◼   ► think we're within the realm of possibility.

00:21:43 ◼   ► And I would be happy if everyone in my family

00:21:45 ◼   ► just used Everpix or something similar,

00:21:46 ◼   ► Because even though I know that's inadequate, I've tried to get them all to use Time Machine,

00:21:51 ◼   ► and mounting and unmounting volumes is beyond the realm of normal computers, apparently.

00:21:59 ◼   ► But that's why you get a time capsule, and it all happens magically through the air.

00:22:03 ◼   ► Very slowly, but magically.

00:22:05 ◼   ► I can't imagine time capsules sell that well.

00:22:07 ◼   ► Think about the sales proposition there.

00:22:11 ◼   ► Already, airport extremes are way more expensive than most wireless routers.

00:22:16 ◼   ► And most people now have internet service, if they have broadband at home in the US at

00:22:19 ◼   ► least, usually your internet service comes with a wireless router.

00:22:23 ◼   ► Or they talk you into leasing theirs every month because they tell you that you need

00:22:27 ◼   ► it.

00:22:29 ◼   ► And so the market for wireless routers is already pretty cheap and commodity oriented.

00:22:35 ◼   ► But then Apple comes out with a $200 router, which of course we have but nobody else does

00:22:40 ◼   ► because everyone else is sane.

00:22:43 ◼   ► And if you want, you can spend like $400 to get this one with this giant disk inside of

00:22:48 ◼   ► it.

00:22:49 ◼   ► It's a refrigerator toaster, because you're combining what with what?

00:22:51 ◼   ► I want a router, and I want something like a network-attached storage backup thing.

00:22:56 ◼   ► Those both sound like good things, but why would I combine them?

00:22:58 ◼   ► Because then you're tying, "What if you want more storage, but your router is still fine?"

00:23:01 ◼   ► Or, "What if you want a new router, but your storage is fine?"

00:23:04 ◼   ► You're combining two things that don't need to be combined and tying them.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Plus, they had a terrible reputation for reliability, and I still think time machine over the network

00:23:11 ◼   ► is not great. But I don't know. Conceptually, it sounds good, but realistically speaking,

00:23:18 ◼   ► the product wasn't great. And I think you're right. I think it's not that popular, because

00:23:21 ◼   ► that's a tough sell. I guess it's probably for rich people who come into the Apple Store

00:23:24 ◼   ► and they're like, "Oh, well, if you want the really good one, this will do your backups

00:23:28 ◼   ► automatically." That sounds good to people in the store. Like, "Oh, I don't want to have

00:23:31 ◼   ► to worry about backups. I'll do this." And most normal people would be like, "Yeah, but

00:23:35 ◼   ► $400." But you got a lot of money, you're like, "All right." And then you'll regret

00:23:38 ◼   ► it later.

00:23:39 ◼   ► I have to disagree with you guys because if you, and okay, so I'll agree with the part

00:23:42 ◼   ► that you said, well, if you have a little bit extra money, because yeah, they're expensive,

00:23:45 ◼   ► but let's say you just got burned and you just lost a bunch of data and you're a Mac

00:23:49 ◼   ► user and you just want the problem to be solved.

00:23:52 ◼   ► What do you do?

00:23:53 ◼   ► You find out that there's this thing called Time Machine and you need an external drive

00:23:57 ◼   ► to do it on and you don't want to, you're not a fiddly kind of person, so you don't

00:24:01 ◼   ► want to go to Amazon and get an enclosure or even get an enclosure with a drive in it.

00:24:04 ◼   ► You just want one box that will solve all of these problems.

00:24:08 ◼   ► And whether or not it actually solves these problems, I think to Joe Consumer, that's

00:24:13 ◼   ► maybe just slightly more, not intelligent, but has the wherewithal to think about backing

00:24:19 ◼   ► things up, I think a time capsule is a really good solution for that person.

00:24:24 ◼   ► Now granted, technically it may not be the best, it's very slow, backing up over the

00:24:27 ◼   ► network is kind of crummy, but if you just want the problem to go away, you just want

00:24:31 ◼   ► to throw a little bit of money at the problem and make it go away, I think it's a pretty

00:24:34 ◼   ► reasonable answer.

00:24:35 ◼   ► But if Time Machine actually did that, then-- not Time Machine.

00:24:38 ◼   ► If Time Cap did that, maybe you'd have a point.

00:24:40 ◼   ► But I still think the price would be a big barrier there.

00:24:43 ◼   ► I think it's easier.

00:24:43 ◼   ► I think at this point, it's easier

00:24:44 ◼   ► to sell people on spending a little bit extra for the iCloud

00:24:47 ◼   ► backup than it would be for them to lay out ahead of time,

00:24:49 ◼   ► even though the iCloud backup could end up

00:24:51 ◼   ► costing them more over the long haul or whatever.

00:24:52 ◼   ► That's not how people think.

00:24:54 ◼   ► But the product just doesn't do-- it just

00:24:56 ◼   ► doesn't do what they say it's going to do.

00:24:57 ◼   ► It does not solve your problems.

00:24:59 ◼   ► It lets you experience the joy of hearing questions of,

00:25:02 ◼   ► that thing on my menu bar is always spinning.

00:25:04 ◼   ► Is there a reason for that?

00:25:05 ◼   ► And when does it say your last backup was?

00:25:07 ◼   ► Oh, like six months ago?

00:25:08 ◼   ► You're like, oh, time capsule, yay.

00:25:10 ◼   ► If it had actually pulled it off, if it worked reliably--

00:25:18 ◼   ► eventually we'll talk about NAS stuff.

00:25:20 ◼   ► But the transporter, which I have now and I've been using,

00:25:24 ◼   ► that works the way you expect it to work.

00:25:26 ◼   ► It works as advertised.

00:25:27 ◼   ► Whereas the time capsule, the whole thing

00:25:29 ◼   ► is I'm going to do time machine backups to it.

00:25:31 ◼   ► And it's not really the time capsule harbor's fault,

00:25:34 ◼   ► probably, but many things conspire to make network time machine backups and time machine

00:25:39 ◼   ► in general less efficient and good and potentially have the potential to get wedged.

00:25:45 ◼   ► My new thing is that now time machine deals so poorly with when the disk fills up, it's

00:25:50 ◼   ► such a bad judge of how much room it's going to need.

00:25:53 ◼   ► Now I'm just sitting there with TMUtil manually deleting old backups because it can't figure

00:25:56 ◼   ► out.

00:25:57 ◼   ► It takes days to figure out, "Look, just delete half the backups.

00:26:01 ◼   ► You're not going to make it."

00:26:02 ◼   ► It tries again and again.

00:26:03 ◼   ► and it goes all the way through, hits the limit, fills the disk, starts over again,

00:26:06 ◼   ► goes all the way through, hits the limit, it just takes hours and hours for it to figure

00:26:09 ◼   ► out that, oh, I didn't make enough free space. I know you didn't, so there I am, TMU chill

00:26:14 ◼   ► deleting all day long, so I can finally get enough free space to make a complete backup.

00:26:18 ◼   ► Now, that is absolutely painful. You're absolutely right.

00:26:20 ◼   ► I mean, whenever I've, like, I haven't actually had the new, my Synology setup, I haven't

00:26:25 ◼   ► had it fill up yet, because it's a giant disk in there, but when that does fill up, like,

00:26:29 ◼   ► Basically, what I've done whenever my time machine fills up is I just format the partition.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Yeah, wipe and start over.

00:26:35 ◼   ► I do.

00:26:36 ◼   ► I just delete the partition because it's way faster than deleting all the files.

00:26:38 ◼   ► Just repartition the disk and start over.

00:26:42 ◼   ► If I lose data during that time, I have backblaze.

00:26:47 ◼   ► Time machine does do okay with small incremental backups, but if you use VMware at all—this

00:26:53 ◼   ► happens at work all the time—any modification to a couple of my big VMs, and it's like,

00:26:57 ◼   ► I got another three gigabytes to back up because you just touch lots of pages on these little two gigabytes stripe files to VMware

00:27:03 ◼   ► Brights out and you just see time machine going like you are not gonna make enough free space for that

00:27:07 ◼   ► I don't know why you're not going to but you are not going to and so sure enough

00:27:11 ◼   ► It says oh backup failed then I manually delete but small backups like 50 megs 100 megs

00:27:16 ◼   ► It can make it through it's the big ones where it loses track of stuff

00:27:19 ◼   ► But yeah, there's lots of technical reasons. So a file time machine the way it does everything is

00:27:24 ◼   ► inefficient and crappy and

00:27:26 ◼   ► Like when it first came out like I'll give them a chance to doing a whole files at a time really inefficient and the crazy hard

00:27:31 ◼   ► Link thing, but I'm sure they'll enhance it over the years. Nope. Not really

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00:31:00 ◼   ► from scratch.

00:31:01 ◼   ► Because no one's going to say, "Well, I was going to listen to that podcast, but this

00:31:03 ◼   ► podcast does their website by hand." You can't even tell. The odds that you're, especially

00:31:08 ◼   ► for most people, the odds that you're going to hand-roll a website that looks and works

00:31:10 ◼   ► better than the Squarespace one are slim.

00:31:13 ◼   ► And also, have you seen other podcast websites? They're usually pretty bad. I mean, Dan built

00:31:17 ◼   ► something good at 5x5, but a lot of the other podcast sites out there are terrible.

00:31:21 ◼   ► It's not a core part of the podcast experience. People just arrive on their phone or whatever.

00:31:26 ◼   ► That's how it works. And we have to have a website, and it has to be there, and that's

00:31:28 ◼   ► what the RSS gets to. There's reasons for it, but it's like, is that where you want

00:31:32 ◼   ► to spend your time? The answer is, I'd rather delegate that.

00:31:36 ◼   ► All right, anyway, what's next on our topic list? Because I have a few things I could

00:31:42 ◼   ► bring up, but we have such a long list, might as well get through it.

00:31:44 ◼   ► Why don't you look at the file like the rest of us? Why have you shunned the file?

00:31:47 ◼   ► I was busy reading our Squarespace ad tab.

00:31:49 ◼   ► Yeah, anyway, what do we have listed?

00:31:51 ◼   ► Children, children. All right, I think the first item we should probably save for last.

00:31:56 ◼   ► That makes sense.

00:31:57 ◼   ► But, I don't know.

00:31:59 ◼   ► Oh, that's going to be good.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Yeah, that is gonna be good.

00:32:03 ◼   ► Alright, so what else do you guys want to talk about?

00:32:05 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:32:06 ◼   ► Do you want to talk about if this, then that and Twitter?

00:32:10 ◼   ► I read that article and the only thing I could come up with was to tease Panzer about something

00:32:13 ◼   ► he wrote, but the rest of it— Oh, please do!

00:32:16 ◼   ► Friend of the show, Matthew Panzareno.

00:32:17 ◼   ► Yeah, writing for TechCrunch now.

00:32:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:21 ◼   ► Did he leave the next web or is he writing for both?

00:32:23 ◼   ► He did.

00:32:24 ◼   ► Yeah, he left the next web and got quite a promotion at TechCrunch, actually.

00:32:27 ◼   ► Alright, well anyway, he did write that they didn't jive J-I-V-E with the new tweet display

00:32:33 ◼   ► rules, and so I went to shame him for that publicly.

00:32:36 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a jibe, right?

00:32:38 ◼   ► Yeah, J-I-V-E.

00:32:39 ◼   ► I just stay away from those words, because I'm like, it's like "whom," you know?

00:32:43 ◼   ► And yes, we know who that is.

00:32:44 ◼   ► Oh my goodness, don't even get me started on that.

00:32:48 ◼   ► Everyone send Casey the oatmeal comic.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Oh god, every person on all of the internet has sent me that link, and I appreciate every

00:32:56 ◼   ► one of you for sending me that one.

00:32:58 ◼   ► Well, Casey, this is part of being, you know, F-list famous or whatever we want to say we

00:33:03 ◼   ► are.

00:33:04 ◼   ► It's like, you have to—that angry feeling you're getting, like, you have to use the

00:33:10 ◼   ► rational part of your brain to wrangle that, because each person who's sending it to

00:33:14 ◼   ► you doesn't know about all the other people sending it to you.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Oh, I know, I know.

00:33:18 ◼   ► And it's not really—it's not reasonable to ask them, "Please, before you send me

00:33:22 ◼   ► anything, check my @ replies to make sure 800 people also haven't sent.

00:33:26 ◼   ► People are still sending me that pop art culture, whatever, poster you can buy of all the video

00:33:32 ◼   ► game controllers.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:33:34 ◼   ► I still get that every week, right?

00:33:37 ◼   ► Your inclination as a lizard brain, hairless ape, is to be like, "Stop sending me these

00:33:43 ◼   ► things I know!

00:33:44 ◼   ► Don't you know I know?"

00:33:45 ◼   ► But the human part of your brain should be like, "No, they don't know you know, nor should

00:33:49 ◼   ► they have to know you know.

00:33:51 ◼   ► just trying to do something nice for you, so don't get frustrated.

00:33:53 ◼   ► No, and it is nice.

00:33:54 ◼   ► When you can actually not be frustrated, like, phase one is like being frustrated.

00:33:58 ◼   ► Phase two is realizing you shouldn't be frustrated and tamping it down, and phase

00:34:01 ◼   ► three is actually not getting frustrated.

00:34:03 ◼   ► So I'm rooting for you to break through, Casey.

00:34:05 ◼   ► This is like training meals for you.

00:34:07 ◼   ► It is nice because, you know, it is nice to know that people think of me and that I, it

00:34:12 ◼   ► amazes me that anyone thinks that I exist outside of the hour or two that they listen

00:34:16 ◼   ► to this podcast.

00:34:17 ◼   ► That being said, I got a million copies of it now, and I was like, "My goodness, this is a lot."

00:34:24 ◼   ► One thing you can do, though, because you do know that we're getting it, is not CC us on them in your replies to those people.

00:34:29 ◼   ► Like, when you reply to them to say something, you don't have to include me and Marco, because you actually do know that we're getting it.

00:34:34 ◼   ► I usually don't. Sometimes I do, but usually I don't. I used to do it a lot when we--this is terrible, we should talk about something else.

00:34:41 ◼   ► But all right well before we leave that they're like the other thing about this is the first person who sends it to you

00:34:48 ◼   ► Actually is providing a service because before the first person sent it to you you hadn't seen it

00:34:53 ◼   ► And then you had and every other person is doing exactly the same thing as that first person did so the gratitude

00:34:58 ◼   ► That you should you feel for that first person should extend to all those people because any one of them could have been the first

00:35:02 ◼   ► Person and if no one sent it to you you would be living a life not having seen that oatmeal comic unless you read them

00:35:07 ◼   ► every day, which I assume you don't.

00:35:09 ◼   ► Actually I do follow the oatmeal on Twitter, which was the worst part of all, is that I

00:35:13 ◼   ► see this link fly by and I'm like, "Oh crap, I know what's up.

00:35:17 ◼   ► Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."

00:35:18 ◼   ► And I'm getting like @ replies from the entire internet.

00:35:21 ◼   ► I do appreciate it.

00:35:22 ◼   ► It was funny.

00:35:23 ◼   ► Did it help you learn or no?

00:35:26 ◼   ► The funny thing is somebody had said to me a while ago, "Here's what you do."

00:35:30 ◼   ► This was via Twitter and I apologize to whomever you are.

00:35:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's right.

00:35:37 ◼   ► I apologize to whomever that is, but they said just substitute either he or him and

00:35:41 ◼   ► figure it out.

00:35:42 ◼   ► And if it's he, it's who.

00:35:43 ◼   ► And if it's him, it's whom.

00:35:44 ◼   ► Yeah, this is not a new thing.

00:35:45 ◼   ► They've been teaching that in elementary schools for 100 years.

00:35:50 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:35:52 ◼   ► So I don't remember what you were asking.

00:35:55 ◼   ► Did it actually help you?

00:35:57 ◼   ► Like many oatmeal things, it's kind of a humorous rehash of things that people have seen before.

00:36:01 ◼   ► It's all about the presentation and delivery.

00:36:03 ◼   ► And people crap on the oatmeal for that, because they're like, "Oh, all you're doing is gathering

00:36:08 ◼   ► humorous things from the internet and packaging up in an attractive form in a single place."

00:36:12 ◼   ► Yeah, that's called entertainment.

00:36:15 ◼   ► I don't get all the oatmeal hate.

00:36:17 ◼   ► He gets so much crap, and he seems like he's a really nice guy.

00:36:20 ◼   ► That's totally what it is, because his mistake was being honest about, "Look, I find things

00:36:26 ◼   ► that are funny on the internet and synthesize a single funny thing out of them that hopefully

00:36:32 ◼   ► is greater than the sum of its part, and people say, "I've seen that before," or "That's

00:36:36 ◼   ► derivative," which is ridiculous because that's what all art is. He was just more honest about

00:36:40 ◼   ► it, and that freaks people out.

00:36:42 ◼   ► Also, he is really funny. I love his stuff. I have his picture about—or his poster about

00:36:48 ◼   ► dogs. I have it on my bathroom wall. I love his art. I love his style. I love his humor.

00:36:54 ◼   ► I think he's really funny, and he gets an amazing amount of crap from people. I really

00:36:58 ◼   ► don't get it.

00:36:59 ◼   ► Humor is subjective. Here's someone in the chat room saying, "The funniest thing about

00:37:05 ◼   ► the O'Meal is that it exists, but it's not funny." Well, if you don't find it funny,

00:37:07 ◼   ► you don't find it funny. Humor is subjective. I think the guy can be obnoxious, and if obnoxious

00:37:12 ◼   ► humor is annoying, and if you don't find it funny, if you don't find the art style funny,

00:37:16 ◼   ► you don't have to like it. But you're right. He gets a lot of crap, and I think he gets

00:37:20 ◼   ► a lot of crap because he's honest about how he makes things, and it seems low class. He

00:37:25 ◼   ► seems fine with it, but people are like, "No, I want you to do things, be inspired and completely

00:37:31 ◼   ► original and not derivative in any way and not tell me the crass commercialism that enters

00:37:37 ◼   ► into your calculus." That's how he makes his living. That's part of being good at

00:37:40 ◼   ► what he does, and he's good at it. So like it or don't.

00:37:44 ◼   ► So there's two funny things that come out of what you guys just said. Firstly, with

00:37:47 ◼   ► regard to the oatmeal, I am the king of sending the "their" versus "their" comic to

00:37:54 ◼   ► people because that drives me nuts when people confuse T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E with T-H-E-I-R

00:38:01 ◼   ► and T-H-E-R-E and that drives me insane.

00:38:03 ◼   ► And so I've been sending these links to people forever and so really I deserve every one

00:38:07 ◼   ► of these links and all the links that will come after I've made that statement.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Do you converse with elementary school children a lot?

00:38:12 ◼   ► Who's messing up there, there, and there?

00:38:14 ◼   ► Oh, you have no idea.

00:38:15 ◼   ► I don't want to know.

00:38:16 ◼   ► Don't tell me.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Do you ever read an email from anybody?

00:38:18 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:38:19 ◼   ► I only converse with people who have impeccable grammar apparently.

00:38:21 ◼   ► What about the Itzes?

00:38:23 ◼   ► The Itzes I don't blame people for anymore in the age of autocorrect.

00:38:27 ◼   ► Because the friggin' autocorrect will always pick the wrong one.

00:38:29 ◼   ► And you won't notice. You'll see.

00:38:31 ◼   ► I notice.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Even my fingers, my fingers type the wrong ones all the time.

00:38:36 ◼   ► And I totally believe your fingers.

00:38:38 ◼   ► No, it happens.

00:38:40 ◼   ► The controller's broken, that's why I told you.

00:38:42 ◼   ► No, no, no, my fingers type the wrong one.

00:38:44 ◼   ► And I totally know the right one. I've never had any confusion about Itzes.

00:38:47 ◼   ► I don't know why I never had any confusion.

00:38:49 ◼   ► rule when I was in third grade and just never forgot it. Any confusion. And yet, they come

00:38:53 ◼   ► out of your fingers like that. But there, there, and there, those are spelled entirely

00:38:56 ◼   ► different. It's not like one key is different.

00:38:58 ◼   ► Oh, it's the worst. And you're and you're. But anyway, the other thing I wanted to say

00:39:01 ◼   ► is with regard to Marco having the poster, pro tip, if you ever happen to be in the Armond

00:39:07 ◼   ► household, go to the bathrooms because that's where the best art is.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Well yeah, because Tiff won't let me keep a lot of the best art in general purpose rooms

00:39:16 ◼   ► so I can hide in the bathrooms.

00:39:17 ◼   ► So you get the bathroom.

00:39:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:39:19 ◼   ► That's like a raw deal.

00:39:23 ◼   ► You should get the computer room.

00:39:24 ◼   ► Why isn't that the place you can put up your…

00:39:26 ◼   ► Actually, I do.

00:39:27 ◼   ► But unfortunately, I've filled up the walls in the computer room, and so I have to expand…

00:39:30 ◼   ► That's your overflow gallery?

00:39:31 ◼   ► Yeah, pretty much.

00:39:32 ◼   ► I have to expand into the bathroom.

00:39:34 ◼   ► So to speak.

00:39:35 ◼   ► Overflow gallery.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Oh, you don't want to call it overflow gallery in the bathroom.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:39:40 ◼   ► Goodness.

00:39:41 ◼   ► All right.

00:39:42 ◼   ► So do we have anything to say about if this and that in Twitter?

00:39:44 ◼   ► I guess not.

00:39:45 ◼   ► I didn't even…

00:39:46 ◼   ► I totally missed that story.

00:39:47 ◼   ► I read the article.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I think there wasn't even there. You tell me.

00:39:50 ◼   ► I just thought it was interesting that there, as I phrased it in the show notes, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,

00:39:55 ◼   ► just in that Twitter is allowing, or worked with If This, Then That, even more than just allowing it,

00:40:01 ◼   ► they worked together in order to get that integration back. And I thought that was kind of cool, in a positive step.

00:40:07 ◼   ► It's only a story if you think this is part of a turnaround at Twitter, and I do not.

00:40:11 ◼   ► No, that's very fair.

00:40:13 ◼   ► say not. I mean, if this, then that. They have funding and everything, right? And they

00:40:17 ◼   ► have a staff, right? Isn't that?

00:40:19 ◼   ► I think so.

00:40:20 ◼   ► So the fact is, Twitter will give API access to partners. And so if you're willing to devote

00:40:27 ◼   ► enough time and money into courting them with salespeople and relations and everything else,

00:40:33 ◼   ► you can become a partner. And so it's not that surprising that a company with funding

00:40:39 ◼   ► and a staff was able to convince Twitter

00:40:41 ◼   ► to give them API access.

00:40:42 ◼   ► And especially since they're really not in any way

00:40:46 ◼   ► competitive with Twitter, and they

00:40:48 ◼   ► don't look like they ever will be competitive with Twitter.

00:40:51 ◼   ► Facebook being cut off from their products

00:40:53 ◼   ► and interacting with Twitter and vice versa,

00:40:55 ◼   ► that's because Twitter's afraid of the competition

00:40:58 ◼   ► and of boosting some of the social network

00:41:00 ◼   ► or some of the social network coming in

00:41:01 ◼   ► and stealing all the following relationships away from Twitter

00:41:04 ◼   ► and all the traffic and everything.

00:41:07 ◼   ► if this and that is not really a threat at all. They're big enough that Twitter can

00:41:12 ◼   ► make a deal with them, but they're small enough and narrow enough in scope of what

00:41:17 ◼   ► they do that they're really never going to be a threat. It's very, very clear. They're

00:41:21 ◼   ► not looking to take over and replace Twitter. It doesn't surprise me that they were able

00:41:26 ◼   ► to make a deal.

00:41:27 ◼   ► Yeah. All right. Do we want to talk about the gold iPhone that's not gold?

00:41:31 ◼   ► Champagne.

00:41:32 ◼   ► Is there anything to say about that?

00:41:34 ◼   ► Why is it not gold?

00:41:35 ◼   ► It's champagne.

00:41:36 ◼   ► Is that, I'm keeping up on the rumors, did someone, did someone rumor that that is what

00:41:40 ◼   ► they're going to call the color, or are people just saying that as a backlash against the

00:41:43 ◼   ► really really gold-looking phones?

00:41:44 ◼   ► They're saying it as a description of what the color is.

00:41:48 ◼   ► Is there any doubt that Apple would call it gold instead of champagne?

00:41:51 ◼   ► If they make a phone that's a goldish color, they're gonna call it gold.

00:41:54 ◼   ► Like they don't do the thing of like calling it like "Midnight Mist."

00:41:57 ◼   ► Really?

00:41:58 ◼   ► Because the one in my pocket's called "Slate" or something, right?

00:42:00 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's reasonable, but they usually, like, if it's gold it's gonna be gold.

00:42:04 ◼   ► I mean the iPod mini was gold, they called it gold.

00:42:07 ◼   ► I feel like if it's gold, they'll call it gold.

00:42:09 ◼   ► The other thing that I was expecting is, you know, what was the, you guys won't know this,

00:42:14 ◼   ► but the PowerBook G3 with the bronze keyboard, or was it a G3?

00:42:19 ◼   ► I mean it was a PowerBook with a bronze keyboard.

00:42:22 ◼   ► And bronze perfectly fits with the description of that color too, so maybe they could call

00:42:26 ◼   ► it bronze.

00:42:27 ◼   ► But gold, bronze, yellowish, whatever, they've made uglier devices before.

00:42:33 ◼   ► They were, iPods came in like lime green and pink and like this terrible teal and pastels

00:42:38 ◼   ► and gold is not outside the realm of something that Apple would make.

00:42:43 ◼   ► If they make it, good for them.

00:42:44 ◼   ► I mean even the iPod touch has come in pretty terrible colors.

00:42:47 ◼   ► I would say, I would say the current yellowish green, whatever that yellow green color is

00:42:53 ◼   ► for the iPod touch, that's a terrible color.

00:42:55 ◼   ► It's hideous.

00:42:56 ◼   ► Kids like it.

00:42:57 ◼   ► But they make it and they sell it.

00:42:58 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:42:59 ◼   ► People like it.

00:43:00 ◼   ► Obviously, all the rumors are pointing pretty solidly to this iPhone 5C having this plastic

00:43:07 ◼   ► back and being cheap and coming in all these iOS 7 palette colors, or at least three or

00:43:15 ◼   ► four of them. That looks pretty likely, and that makes a lot of sense.

00:43:20 ◼   ► They just need to name it after a hipster beer, and it will sell like hotcakes. Find

00:43:24 ◼   ► some beer that's the same shade. I don't know enough about beer as many marketers.

00:43:27 ◼   ► some beer that is the same color as this phone is and there you go, call it that.

00:43:31 ◼   ► The funny thing is they get so much crap for the, every, every phone that's come out pretty

00:43:35 ◼   ► much since the iPhone 4, they've gotten so much crap for it not being different enough,

00:43:39 ◼   ► not being new enough, not being innovative, all that crap, mostly for superficial reasons,

00:43:44 ◼   ► mostly because they didn't change the case. Or even when the iPhone 5 came out, which

00:43:48 ◼   ► was a massive change, people say, "Well, it looks kind of similar." Like it's, like

00:43:52 ◼   ► people... It's a rectangle with a screen on it.

00:43:53 ◼   ► They get so much crap for that. I think now that they're going to have what appears to

00:43:57 ◼   ► be two different models with one model being totally new exterior-wise and the other model

00:44:04 ◼   ► being the same, quote, as the iPhone 5, but having new guts, new camera probably, a new

00:44:11 ◼   ► faster CPU probably, and having this extra color that's radically different looking

00:44:15 ◼   ► from the other two. I think people will be very happy with this release. I think they'll

00:44:20 ◼   ► actually say, "Wow, finally we got new stuff!" And then iOS 7 also looks very new in the

00:44:26 ◼   ► software. I think this is an overall massive reactionary storm that's going to all hit

00:44:32 ◼   ► at once in response to the last three or four years of everyone saying Apple wasn't innovating

00:44:37 ◼   ► at all.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Well, we talked to several shows back about if they could have an iPhone 6 as the new

00:44:41 ◼   ► form factor, boy, that would really just bring it home. But they probably wouldn't because

00:44:47 ◼   ► they're probably going to do a 5S, and that seems like, I mean, they've got to do what

00:44:50 ◼   ► they've got to do. You can't just magically say, "Oh, you know what would also be great

00:44:54 ◼   ► if we had a brand new iPhone 6, well, it seems like they're not going to unless they really,

00:44:57 ◼   ► really surprise us. But what they have rumored, if all those rumored things are true, that

00:45:01 ◼   ► is totally adequate, more than adequate.

00:45:04 ◼   ► Now, what do you think, you know, my statement on Twitter a couple of days back was that,

00:45:10 ◼   ► you know, it looks, because right now, iPhones, we can predict pretty well in advance these

00:45:16 ◼   ► days because the supply chain to make enough iPhones to satisfy the demand for them is

00:45:21 ◼   ► so huge and gears up so far ahead of time that it's almost inevitable that the supply

00:45:26 ◼   ► chain will leak in the month leading up to a new iPhone. So that's why we've seen pretty

00:45:30 ◼   ► much the entire iPhone 5C already. We've seen the back shell for the iPhone 5S and who knows,

00:45:38 ◼   ► we probably wouldn't even recognize any difference at the front. So it's pretty obvious now what

00:45:43 ◼   ► we're getting and what we're not getting. And so it is pretty obvious that there's probably

00:45:47 ◼   ► not going to be a "iPhone 6" or anything beyond what we see as the 5C and what we see

00:45:53 ◼   ► as the 5S online.

00:45:56 ◼   ► So I tweeted a few days ago that it appears pretty clear now that we're not going to

00:46:00 ◼   ► get a larger-screened iPhone this year.

00:46:03 ◼   ► I think that's a mistake.

00:46:05 ◼   ► What do you guys think about that?

00:46:06 ◼   ► I think if they could have made a bigger phone this year, they would have, but they can't.

00:46:10 ◼   ► When we talked about the bigger phone, we're like, "They've got to do it.

00:46:14 ◼   ► It's going to happen."

00:46:15 ◼   ► But we were like, "Oh, but can they pull it off this year?"

00:46:16 ◼   ► That's when we started talking about the iPhone 6 and different form factors, but they can't

00:46:21 ◼   ► do it.

00:46:22 ◼   ► The 5C rumor thing is the new form factor this year.

00:46:25 ◼   ► It's probably been planning a long time.

00:46:26 ◼   ► It doesn't seem like they had a larger phone in the pipeline for now, but I'm not as down

00:46:32 ◼   ► on them as it being a mistake as you are, because I think they can last one more holiday

00:46:36 ◼   ► season but just barely.

00:46:38 ◼   ► It would be better if it was out now.

00:46:40 ◼   ► I think they'll survive as it is.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I bet they wish they could have it out sooner, too.

00:46:45 ◼   ► I know some people are giving you crap on Twitter like, "Oh, Mark, are we talking about..."

00:46:48 ◼   ► I mean, the people who don't listen to our podcasts, because they think you're saying

00:46:51 ◼   ► they're going to have one of those ridiculous, gigantic, holding up a lunch tray to your

00:46:56 ◼   ► head things.

00:46:57 ◼   ► We're talking about a slightly larger iPhone.

00:47:01 ◼   ► Not even, you know, not like, you need the context.

00:47:03 ◼   ► Right, maybe four and a half inches, right?

00:47:05 ◼   ► Or maybe not even that big.

00:47:07 ◼   ► You need the context of all those shows that we talked about this to understand that we're

00:47:10 ◼   ► not saying that Apple's going to make a giant phone.

00:47:13 ◼   ► that context, your tweet might seem silly, but we're talking about the "Apple needs

00:47:17 ◼   ► to make a bigger one. It's not going to be massively bigger. They need it sooner rather

00:47:20 ◼   ► than later. I think they'll survive without it." But I bet they're disappointed, too.

00:47:24 ◼   ► I bet they're disappointed that they can't have a larger one now.

00:47:26 ◼   ► Right. Because the fact is, they are definitely losing sales to people who buy Android phones

00:47:31 ◼   ► primarily—not necessarily only—but primarily because of the bigger screens.

00:47:36 ◼   ► Yep. I don't know. I feel—Hefney says you're right. Hefney says you guys are wrong. Firstly,

00:47:41 ◼   ► As someone who has a 4S, I would kill to have the 5 form factor any day now, because I'm

00:47:47 ◼   ► too cheap to get a new phone every year.

00:47:49 ◼   ► You don't have to kill someone for it.

00:47:51 ◼   ► It's a lot cheaper than that.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:47:53 ◼   ► All right, so I guess I'll just have to save my pennies.

00:47:55 ◼   ► But no, you know what I mean.

00:47:56 ◼   ► I'm really excited to have, even if it looks exactly like what you have, Marco, and it's

00:48:01 ◼   ► just a little bit quicker, I'm very, very, very excited for that.

00:48:04 ◼   ► Now, to be fair, there's no chance I'm going to buy an Android phone this year.

00:48:09 ◼   ► I also think that you're right that a lot of people do buy Android phones and I have

00:48:13 ◼   ► heard some people with iPhones on various degrees of the nerd scale say, "I might not

00:48:19 ◼   ► go iPhone this year because I really want something with a bigger screen."

00:48:23 ◼   ► So I think you're right about that.

00:48:24 ◼   ► But I also think that a lot of the reason people buy Android phones is because oftentimes

00:48:28 ◼   ► they're cheaper, especially up front.

00:48:31 ◼   ► Instead of paying $100, $200, $300 or whatever it is these days for a brand new iPhone, and

00:48:35 ◼   ► Granted, this is where the 5C comes in, and so on and so forth, in theory.

00:48:39 ◼   ► But a lot of people today will buy Android phones simply because they're cheaper.

00:48:44 ◼   ► We talked about that, which also goes back as well.

00:48:47 ◼   ► What if the cheaper iPhone is also the bigger one?

00:48:50 ◼   ► That seems like that's not going to be the case.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:52 ◼   ► If that was the case, that would be awkward because it's like, "Well, if you want the

00:48:55 ◼   ► bigger phone, you've got to get the slower one."

00:48:57 ◼   ► It turns out that's not going to be an issue.

00:49:00 ◼   ► The bigger, the slightly, ever so slightly, it's not much bigger.

00:49:05 ◼   ► The iPhone 5 is kind of awkwardly dimensioned because they basically just made it taller,

00:49:09 ◼   ► which is a really weird way, if you think about it, to ever expand.

00:49:12 ◼   ► Can you think of any other device with a screen where the screen expanded in only one dimension

00:49:16 ◼   ► in a significant amount?

00:49:18 ◼   ► It's really weird.

00:49:19 ◼   ► So, it's very tall and very skinny, and it's just like, "Could you just make that a little

00:49:23 ◼   ► bit wider, maybe?

00:49:24 ◼   ► Or just maybe a little bit bigger?"

00:49:25 ◼   ► And again, not going to be the only phone they offer.

00:49:27 ◼   ► People who want smaller ones will have smaller ones, I think.

00:49:30 ◼   ► But slightly bigger would really help.

00:49:34 ◼   ► I agree.

00:49:35 ◼   ► And you know, a couple of things we're not considering, both with the gold iPhone and

00:49:38 ◼   ► the size, is that we're taking an extremely American-centric myopic view of the world.

00:49:43 ◼   ► And I wonder if, like I've heard a lot of reports that the gold or champagne color is

00:49:48 ◼   ► very popular in China.

00:49:49 ◼   ► I have no earthly idea if that's true or not.

00:49:52 ◼   ► Please email anyone but me.

00:49:54 ◼   ► But I've heard a lot of that.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Someone in the chat room said a second ago that, you know, a lot of people in Asia will

00:49:59 ◼   ► buy specifically around screen size.

00:50:02 ◼   ► I don't know if that's factual or not, but...

00:50:03 ◼   ► Well, you can just look at Samsung's sales numbers.

00:50:06 ◼   ► They sell a lot of phones with really big screens, and people are not grudgingly taking

00:50:12 ◼   ► the big screens.

00:50:13 ◼   ► They like them.

00:50:14 ◼   ► They want them.

00:50:15 ◼   ► You can complain whether they should like them or not, or whether it's too big and phones

00:50:17 ◼   ► shouldn't be that big, and Apple should take some sort of principle stand.

00:50:20 ◼   ► People want it.

00:50:21 ◼   ► Like I said, Apple, I don't think, is going to make something comically large.

00:50:25 ◼   ► It's just going to go a little bit bigger, because people want a little bit bigger.

00:50:28 ◼   ► I'd buy it.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:30 ◼   ► you know, you figure if they made it a little bit bigger, they would have room for a lot

00:50:34 ◼   ► more battery volume. And sure, the screen would take up more power because it would

00:50:37 ◼   ► be a larger area. However, I bet it would not take up, I bet it wouldn't totally cancel

00:50:44 ◼   ► out the battery increase. So I bet if they made a larger phone, it would have overall

00:50:48 ◼   ► better battery life than the current five size models.

00:50:51 ◼   ► Did you see that one guy who was tweeting about the internal changes to the iPhone,

00:50:55 ◼   ► changes to the bus and stuff like that?

00:50:57 ◼   ► Yeah, saying apparently the PCI Express bus might come next year to it, which would be

00:51:00 ◼   ► be awesome. Yeah, and what I've said to the thing was

00:51:02 ◼   ► that self-refresh is coming, which is like a feature—not that they're going to be

00:51:05 ◼   ► Intel-based, but like the Haswell chipset. So the video hardware doesn't constantly

00:51:10 ◼   ► have to tell the screen, "Keep displaying that. Keep displaying that. Yep, same thing.

00:51:14 ◼   ► Keep displaying that." Instead, the screen can sit there and not

00:51:18 ◼   ► keep getting signals from the graphics hardware unless the picture is changing, which is a

00:51:22 ◼   ► big power saving thing. I don't even know if it's in the new MacBook

00:51:26 ◼   ► but it's part of Intel's push with their Haswell chipsets for PC hardware, and it makes perfect

00:51:30 ◼   ► sense to do on a phone. Anywhere you can get power savings. So maybe that's part of that,

00:51:35 ◼   ► but yeah, the changing of all the internal buses, and I think this is probably where

00:51:38 ◼   ► the Lightning Connector's design will pay off, because I'm assuming Apple built it so

00:51:41 ◼   ► that when they do change all the internal buses, they won't have to have a new connector,

00:51:45 ◼   ► a new, like, you know, like it's disengaged and isolated from the internals to enough

00:51:49 ◼   ► of a degree that they should be okay with Lightning Connector. I'm hoping that was their

00:51:54 ◼   ► plan all along and now we're seeing their plan come together.

00:51:56 ◼   ► Because the lightning connector, it has enough pins that

00:52:00 ◼   ► if you fudge the spec a little bit on grounding, I believe

00:52:04 ◼   ► you can have a full USB 3 speed out of it at least.

00:52:08 ◼   ► I believe you can just make a USB 3 lightning cable and it pretty much

00:52:12 ◼   ► could work. And so obviously

00:52:16 ◼   ► they made this thing, they didn't just make this thing to last two years. Obviously they made it

00:52:20 ◼   ► it to last a while.

00:52:23 ◼   ► That's why the little adapter has that crazy chip in it that's running the little tiny

00:52:27 ◼   ► embedded OS.

00:52:28 ◼   ► The reason they did that is because the old way was we just hooked up the connector directly

00:52:33 ◼   ► to some hardware that outputted the video signal.

00:52:35 ◼   ► That ties us to, "Oh, we have to continue to output that.

00:52:37 ◼   ► We really need to just totally isolate this bus from the rest of the thing."

00:52:42 ◼   ► And yeah, maybe that'll make it so our adapters have to be weird and stuff, but now we're

00:52:45 ◼   ► not tied to the internal implementation.

00:52:47 ◼   ► So that's the price they're paying.

00:52:49 ◼   ► This is supposedly going to be the payoff of like, we don't have to change the connector.

00:52:52 ◼   ► We don't have to bend over backwards to keep adding things to be sending out signals on

00:52:56 ◼   ► all those pins, because that's what the old one did.

00:53:00 ◼   ► We've pushed that responsibility upwards into the phone and the software and downwards into

00:53:03 ◼   ► the adapter, and then this can just be a nice connector to send the signals through.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Speaking of sending things out of your phone and into it, our second sponsor—I've got

00:53:12 ◼   ► to figure something out.

00:53:13 ◼   ► Look at you segwaying today.

00:53:14 ◼   ► You're very good.

00:53:17 ◼   ► Maybe. All right. It depends on how you define that.

00:53:21 ◼   ► Anyway, speaking of things that we talk about in podcasts, our second sponsor this week

00:53:26 ◼   ► is another return sponsor. It's Audible. Audible is the leading provider of downloadable

00:53:31 ◼   ► audiobooks. They used to have, in our ad script, they used to say over 100,000 titles in their

00:53:37 ◼   ► category, in their library, in virtually every genre. Now, that's been increased. It's

00:53:41 ◼   ► over 150,000 titles. So Audible is constantly growing. It's a huge catalog that's growing

00:53:47 ◼   ► immensely. So if you want to listen to something, Audible has it. You can listen to audiobooks

00:53:53 ◼   ► anytime, anywhere. iPhones, iPads, computers, Kindles, even iPods. They work with all the

00:54:00 ◼   ► iPods. They are DRM, but they have compatibility with all these different hardware platforms

00:54:05 ◼   ► they've worked out. So you play them anywhere. It's great. Audible's offering ATP listeners

00:54:11 ◼   ► a free audiobook along with a 30-day trial. Go to www.audiblepodcast.com/ATP to take advantage

00:54:20 ◼   ► of this special offer. Now guys, Audible, as you know, prefers if the host can come up with a pick,

00:54:28 ◼   ► a recommendation of maybe a good book or audiobook that you've read/listened to recently. Do you guys

00:54:33 ◼   ► have any picks for that? I do, but John, would you like to go? I have a pick as well. Do you

00:54:38 ◼   ► Do you want to save my pick for the next time or do you want to do both of them?

00:54:42 ◼   ► Ooh, that's tough.

00:54:43 ◼   ► All right, Casey, go ahead.

00:54:44 ◼   ► We'll save John's.

00:54:45 ◼   ► All right.

00:54:46 ◼   ► So, a couple of weeks ago when we were in the midst of our crazy recording schedule,

00:54:50 ◼   ► I went to the beach for a few days and I read the book "Ready Player One" on Faith and Jason's

00:54:56 ◼   ► recommendation from a while back now.

00:54:58 ◼   ► And I checked and not only does Audible have the audiobook version of "Ready Player One,"

00:55:03 ◼   ► which by the way is an excellent, very quick read, but they have the one done by Will Wheaton,

00:55:08 ◼   ► which I have not heard, but I have heard through the grapevine, is absolutely incredible. And

00:55:13 ◼   ► so I definitely recommend that.

00:55:15 ◼   ► Great. All right. Well, thanks a lot once again to Audible. Go to audiblepodcast.com/ATP

00:55:22 ◼   ► to get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial. Thanks a lot to Audible. All right. So, I

00:55:28 ◼   ► want to talk about this whole fingerprint scanner home button thing.

00:55:32 ◼   ► No, no. I think it's time for John to get angry.

00:55:36 ◼   ► That's a good idea.

00:55:37 ◼   ► That's way more interesting.

00:55:38 ◼   ► Am I going to get angry about your recommendation of Better Player One?

00:55:40 ◼   ► I just pasted into the chat room our incomparable episode about it.

00:55:43 ◼   ► We did not like it as much as you did.

00:55:45 ◼   ► Really?

00:55:46 ◼   ► Oh, I loved it.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Fine, I'll have to listen.

00:55:49 ◼   ► We can argue about that another time.

00:55:51 ◼   ► But speaking of you being angry about things, how do you like the new TiVo?

00:55:57 ◼   ► I actually had an opportunity to review the new TiVo.

00:56:00 ◼   ► I could have had it in my sweaty little paws and played with it, but I don't have time

00:56:06 ◼   ► to do that for obvious reasons.

00:56:07 ◼   ► So I have not even seen this thing in person, used it, done anything with it at all, because

00:56:11 ◼   ► I don't have time for it.

00:56:13 ◼   ► But in the messaging for it, I was glad to see that one of the items, one of the three

00:56:20 ◼   ► items they were marketing, was that it's faster.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Which is like, whether or not it's really faster, and at this point I have a hard time

00:56:29 ◼   ► actually believing that it's actually going to be faster in the ways that I want it to

00:56:32 ◼   ► be, or if it is faster, it'll be slightly less embarrassingly slow.

00:56:39 ◼   ► At least they have figured out that this is a problem that we have to address and that

00:56:43 ◼   ► we can't just not say anything about it.

00:56:44 ◼   ► We're going to say, "Here's the new TiVo.

00:56:47 ◼   ► It's got X, it's got Y, and the interface is faster."

00:56:50 ◼   ► So I applaud them for that, because they have this thing.

00:56:52 ◼   ► They do surveys of their customers.

00:56:56 ◼   ► I forget what they call it.

00:56:57 ◼   ► name for it or whatever, like a customer server, anyway.

00:57:01 ◼   ► They ask you questions and you answer like demographic stuff that they sell to

00:57:05 ◼   ► advertisers and stuff, but also you get a chance to say like, "What features would you like to see

00:57:09 ◼   ► in the next TiVo, and do you have any general comments?" And I actually answer these surveys every month,

00:57:13 ◼   ► like a dutiful little customer filling out the little boxes for all the movies I'm not going to

00:57:17 ◼   ► see in theaters because I have kids. And when I get to the end part, I always say,

00:57:21 ◼   ► "Please make your user interface faster. Please." Like, I should just save

00:57:25 ◼   ► it as a text expander snippet or something. I'm like, "Please, for the love of God, make

00:57:28 ◼   ► your interface faster." Whether or not they have done it, they have acknowledged that

00:57:33 ◼   ► this is a problem and released this thing here.

00:57:36 ◼   ► I was saying to Lex the other day that he should get TiVo to sponsor the show. I think

00:57:40 ◼   ► a lot of people think that I hate TiVo because I have all these rants about it on old episodes

00:57:45 ◼   ► of Hypercritical and everything. But I feel like someone who's a real Hypercritical fan

00:57:49 ◼   ► and who actually listened to that episode knows that it's certainly not the case. Because

00:57:52 ◼   ► despite all my yelling and screaming about TiVo, what I always say again and again, and I'll say it here again on the show, is

00:57:57 ◼   ► it is the best DVR you can buy. I have them all over my house,

00:58:01 ◼   ► I could not live without them, if someone took away my TiVo I would be very upset.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Is it as good as it could be? No, and that's why I yell and scream about it,

00:58:07 ◼   ► but it's kind of like Apple, like, you know, it's the first DVR worth criticizing.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Like, I've been a TiVo user for ages, and so I think them sponsoring the show would not be crazy, and this new TiVo

00:58:17 ◼   ► Looks to be the best Tivo they've made in a long time is it as responsive as a Tivo series 2?

00:58:22 ◼   ► I don't know. I haven't tried it

00:58:25 ◼   ► I can't say one way or the other but the very least they understand hey the responsiveness or you are our UI is an issue

00:58:30 ◼   ► We should address that I'm disheartened to see all the other features that they're advertising because you know like oh now

00:58:37 ◼   ► You can stream to iOS and it's got this thing built in it's got six tuners instead of four on the high-end model

00:58:42 ◼   ► Also, it's like no no no guys. Don't worry about that stuff. Just constant like regroup

00:58:46 ◼   ► You need to have like a snow leopard release just internals only get rid of the standard definition menus everywhere make the thing blazing fast

00:58:53 ◼   ► Then the next release add like oh we have new feet because like all those little you know we can do Amazon

00:58:59 ◼   ► We can do Netflix. We can do Hulu. We can do this we can do searching across all like I

00:59:02 ◼   ► Know those are not going to be as good as I would want them to be and like at this point

00:59:06 ◼   ► I like ignore the Netflix feature on my TV because in the competition among all the boxes connected to my TV they can do Netflix

00:59:13 ◼   ► TiVo's like in the last place. Maybe it's ahead of the Blu-ray player.

00:59:16 ◼   ► But you know, Apple TV is my number one silent, no-fan,

00:59:20 ◼   ► responsive interface, actually works with Netflix. So I understand that TiVo has to advertise all those fancy features,

00:59:26 ◼   ► but that's not what I want out of TiVo. And if I was telling someone why they should buy TiVo,

00:59:31 ◼   ► I would say to record programs and watch them later. And it does that

00:59:36 ◼   ► amazingly well, and it's reliable, and it doesn't crash.

00:59:40 ◼   ► You just wanted to record the programs and have you watch them later and in that job that indispensable job that my household cannot function

00:59:47 ◼   ► without

00:59:48 ◼   ► TiVo does it and everything else about it. I

00:59:50 ◼   ► I'm not as interested in as those key features, so I

00:59:54 ◼   ► Look forward to trying this out

00:59:56 ◼   ► I did think about like maybe I'll get rid of my existing TiVo is like kind of like a gift to myself this Christmas or

01:00:01 ◼   ► Something it would not be economically wise because I just bought this TiVo like two years ago

01:00:05 ◼   ► It's not even a warranty yet because I bought like the extended three-year warranty

01:00:09 ◼   ► I bought lifetime service for it.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Wait, people buy that?

01:00:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:14 ◼   ► Because all the past T-Bos I've had, lifetime service has been a good deal.

01:00:19 ◼   ► I've had them and used them far past the point where lifetime service—I would have been

01:00:23 ◼   ► paying way more if I had paid monthly or yearly than the lifetime service.

01:00:27 ◼   ► But if I was to get rid of my current T-Bo now, which was the previous top-end T-Bo,

01:00:31 ◼   ► it would not be economically wise to have paid for lifetime service two years ago and

01:00:35 ◼   ► then ditch it.

01:00:36 ◼   ► And you can't transfer lifetime service to that thing.

01:00:38 ◼   ► TiVo is expensive, like, there's no two ways about it. And I don't complain too much about

01:00:42 ◼   ► the expenses, I've always said, "Make a $1500 box, just make it fast, I'll buy it," right?

01:00:47 ◼   ► And this is like $600 plus $400 for the lifetime service, like it's expensive. I don't know

01:00:53 ◼   ► how much, it probably would come out to be under $1000, but I'd be willing to pay a huge

01:00:56 ◼   ► amount of money for this, because it's that important to like, you know, my life and the

01:01:00 ◼   ► functioning of my house. But I can't really, it's like, you just bought a TiVo, and I'd

01:01:06 ◼   ► I think I'd rather spend that money on a PlayStation 4.

01:01:08 ◼   ► So that's probably how that's going to go.

01:01:11 ◼   ► I'm very disappointed that you're not absolutely infuriated

01:01:14 ◼   ► that some of the screens, the user interface screens,

01:01:16 ◼   ► are apparently still standard def.

01:01:18 ◼   ► Well, you know how long I've been living with that?

01:01:20 ◼   ► What I've heard from various people

01:01:22 ◼   ► is that the actual application that's

01:01:27 ◼   ► running TiVo that records all the shows and everything

01:01:29 ◼   ► is standard def.

01:01:30 ◼   ► And all the high definition menus

01:01:32 ◼   ► are just like one of those extra applications

01:01:34 ◼   ► that you launch from the real application that's running Tivo.

01:01:37 ◼   ► So the high definition menus are, you know, that's, that's one more layer up.

01:01:41 ◼   ► Right?

01:01:41 ◼   ► So as soon as you exit out of the high definition menus, then you see the real

01:01:44 ◼   ► interface underneath it.

01:01:45 ◼   ► And if it were you to exit out of that, then you just, you know, the thing

01:01:47 ◼   ► wouldn't be recording stuff anymore.

01:01:48 ◼   ► I don't know how accurate that is in terms of their stack, but like, that's why

01:01:51 ◼   ► the high def, you know, the standard def menus there, because that's the actual

01:01:55 ◼   ► underlying machine and I can kind of understand, you know, why that didn't go

01:02:00 ◼   ► away immediately because you don't want to screw with the reliability.

01:02:02 ◼   ► but now it's been like how many years of television has been high def, it's just embarrassing.

01:02:06 ◼   ► Maybe there's some deep technical reason why they can't get rid of it or whatever.

01:02:10 ◼   ► If I had to choose "crashy and screws up my recordings but has all high def menus"

01:02:15 ◼   ► versus the current situation, I would choose the current one.

01:02:16 ◼   ► I just think it's embarrassing for them technically that they haven't been able to get rid of

01:02:19 ◼   ► these.

01:02:20 ◼   ► But if forced to choose, I would say, "Look, if you feel like you don't have the technical

01:02:24 ◼   ► chops to ditch the underlying thing that's recording all this stuff and has the standard

01:02:28 ◼   ► or deaf men use because you're afraid of instability, I'm willing to believe that your assessment

01:02:33 ◼   ► of your competency is accurate.

01:02:35 ◼   ► And I prefer to have like, because my TiVo, you know, there was times where they've been

01:02:39 ◼   ► a little bit crashy and like, you know, many years ago, this thing has not spontaneously

01:02:44 ◼   ► rebooted, has not crashed, has been like a champ against, you know, MPEG artifacts and

01:02:48 ◼   ► stuff and things that record.

01:02:50 ◼   ► It records four shows all the time.

01:02:51 ◼   ► It's really quiet.

01:02:53 ◼   ► It just works and does what it's supposed to do.

01:02:55 ◼   ► And even though I grit my teeth and think how insane it is that I can't scroll through

01:03:00 ◼   ► the menus, then it's like, "Down, wait for reaction, wait for reaction, oh, it moved,

01:03:05 ◼   ► down, wait for," you know.

01:03:07 ◼   ► That infuriates me, but in sort of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like, "Are the shows

01:03:12 ◼   ► recorded?"

01:03:13 ◼   ► "Yes."

01:03:14 ◼   ► "Can I watch them?"

01:03:15 ◼   ► "Yes."

01:03:16 ◼   ► "Can I navigate them too quickly?"

01:03:17 ◼   ► "No."

01:03:18 ◼   ► But I've got food, shelter, safety, that's about the level we're at.

01:03:24 ◼   ► If anyone wants a DVR, again, I haven't read reviews of this yet except for the Verge preview

01:03:29 ◼   ► thing. People are just getting them now. I would say wait for the reviews, and if they

01:03:33 ◼   ► say it's a good deal, you should get one. I'm very happy with the TiVo's I have.

01:03:37 ◼   ► Like I said, if you took them away from me, I would be pissed because what's my alternative?

01:03:41 ◼   ► A cable company DVR? No, thank you. I've used many of those over relatives' houses,

01:03:46 ◼   ► and they are so much worse.

01:03:47 ◼   ► All right, so with that in mind, I am genuinely not trolling you. The only DVR I've ever

01:03:52 ◼   ► had is the Verizon Fios DVR that we got months ago.

01:03:57 ◼   ► We didn't have a DVR until like six months ago,

01:03:59 ◼   ► because I was too cheap to pay the monthly fee.

01:04:02 ◼   ► What makes a TiVo-- again, I'm really honestly asking,

01:04:04 ◼   ► what makes a TiVo so much better than that?

01:04:07 ◼   ► Well, so the first thing is capacity.

01:04:08 ◼   ► Like, cable company DVRs can hold like nothing,

01:04:11 ◼   ► even if you get the fanciest, shmanciest one.

01:04:13 ◼   ► The current top of the line TiVo holds like 10 times as much.

01:04:16 ◼   ► Like, what is it, like 450 hours of HD?

01:04:19 ◼   ► Do you know how many hours of HD yours holds?

01:04:21 ◼   ► I want him to say it's measured in tens, probably not even 100.

01:04:25 ◼   ► It's not even close.

01:04:26 ◼   ► And that might sound crazy, like, oh, I'm

01:04:28 ◼   ► not going to record that much.

01:04:29 ◼   ► But once you have a bunch of kids and a bunch of season passes

01:04:32 ◼   ► and I have queued up a maximum of five episodes of 17

01:04:36 ◼   ► different shows for all the different kids

01:04:37 ◼   ► and all our own things and a whole series that I let queue up,

01:04:41 ◼   ► that's what I'm paying all this money for this box to do.

01:04:43 ◼   ► Under the dome, I watched the first couple episodes,

01:04:45 ◼   ► and now I'm just like, I'll save that for that.

01:04:47 ◼   ► I'm letting the whole series queue up.

01:04:48 ◼   ► I'll get to it later.

01:04:50 ◼   ► You can't do that unless you have a three terabyte drive in there, or if you have U-verse

01:04:54 ◼   ► and they do it all server-side, but even then, the capacity is not that great.

01:04:57 ◼   ► So that's the biggest thing.

01:04:58 ◼   ► Again, our household would not function.

01:05:01 ◼   ► My wife has no idea.

01:05:02 ◼   ► I always get the one that holds the most that you can possibly hold, and she's still like,

01:05:06 ◼   ► "Oh, it's 80% full.

01:05:07 ◼   ► I've got to delete stuff."

01:05:08 ◼   ► She has that paranoia about the thing filling up or whatever.

01:05:11 ◼   ► I'm like, "Don't worry.

01:05:12 ◼   ► It'll delete off the ones that were not marked to save.

01:05:14 ◼   ► It'll be fine."

01:05:15 ◼   ► But capacity, so that's number one.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Number two, most DVRs that you get from the cable companies can't record four shows at

01:05:24 ◼   ► once or now six shows at once.

01:05:25 ◼   ► And you think, "I'll never need to record six shows at once.

01:05:27 ◼   ► I didn't think I'd ever need to record four shows at once."

01:05:30 ◼   ► But you look at the thing and very frequently all four lights lit up and those are not all

01:05:34 ◼   ► suggestions like it would also record shows that it thinks you want.

01:05:37 ◼   ► I don't really use that feature.

01:05:38 ◼   ► But anyway, I'll see what it's recording.

01:05:40 ◼   ► I'm like, "You know what?

01:05:41 ◼   ► Those are four legitimate shows that are going on at the same time."

01:05:43 ◼   ► Now granted, maybe the two that are recording for the kids we could defer until later for

01:05:46 ◼   ► for a repeat, but I like being able to record all those things at once.

01:05:50 ◼   ► Now to quickly interrupt, that actually does make sense because there has only been once

01:05:53 ◼   ► or twice, but there were a couple times where we were recording two different shows and

01:05:58 ◼   ► then I wanted to watch live TV for whatever reason and not watch those shows at the moment,

01:06:03 ◼   ► and our DVR was like, "Uh-uh, I've got two tuners.

01:06:06 ◼   ► You've got to pick either one of those two shows or leave me alone."

01:06:10 ◼   ► So that actually does make sense.

01:06:11 ◼   ► And the final thing I would say is 30 seconds skip, which is like every time I use someone

01:06:16 ◼   ► else's DVR or U-verse thing or whatever and commercials come on and I have to fast-forward

01:06:20 ◼   ► through them, it's just, it's terrible.

01:06:24 ◼   ► No, the Verizon one does, I don't know how many seconds it is, but it does a bulk skip.

01:06:30 ◼   ► Some of them have some kind of skipping feature, but most of them have the fast-forward scan

01:06:33 ◼   ► feature and then they have varying amounts of overrun where you'll wait until you see

01:06:37 ◼   ► the first scene of the show and then you'll tell it to stop, it'll actually put you like

01:06:40 ◼   ► ten seconds back into the commercial because it thinks you're old and have bad reflexes.

01:06:44 ◼   ► TiVo does exactly the same thing, but TiVo I think is tuned for people with better reflexes,

01:06:49 ◼   ► but 30 seconds skip and 30 seconds forward, 8 seconds back, having that be single button

01:06:54 ◼   ► presses, that's one of the things that pissed me off about the fancy TiVo I have now, is

01:06:57 ◼   ► that 30 seconds skip got slower.

01:06:59 ◼   ► If you press the 30 second skip button really fast, it will stop showing you a different

01:07:03 ◼   ► frame of video, and then you'll have no idea how far you've gone, and you'll have to pause.

01:07:06 ◼   ► That's a performance issue, right?

01:07:09 ◼   ► But even with the performance issue, even with me manually throttling myself, I would

01:07:13 ◼   ► much rather 30 forward, 8 back, or 7 back, or whatever it is, then do fast forward scan

01:07:18 ◼   ► in any other DVR. So I would say those are the cornerstones of why TiVo is essential

01:07:23 ◼   ► to my life and why other DVRs infuriate me. And there's many, many other features that

01:07:27 ◼   ► you could be interested in transferring things. And there's actually a very—this is amazing

01:07:31 ◼   ► to me—they have a nice iOS app. The iOS interface on the iPad or even on the iPhone

01:07:35 ◼   ► is faster, more responsive, everything. It's like, how did you make a nice iOS app? And

01:07:39 ◼   ► The iOS app was crashy early on and has some really--

01:07:42 ◼   ► but when you're using it to move stuff,

01:07:43 ◼   ► you're like, oh, if only the TV interface was like this.

01:07:47 ◼   ► It looks just like the TV interface.

01:07:48 ◼   ► Like, why can't you do this over there?

01:07:50 ◼   ► This iPod Touch costs $200.

01:07:52 ◼   ► Your box costs $600.

01:07:53 ◼   ► Just put the iPod Touch inside the box so that I can--

01:07:57 ◼   ► I don't understand what's going on over there with the hardware.

01:07:59 ◼   ► Maybe this one will be faster.

01:08:00 ◼   ► But anyway, there are all sorts of other features

01:08:02 ◼   ► that other people might be interested in.

01:08:04 ◼   ► But for me, those are the big ones.

01:08:06 ◼   ► It's the Mac Pro of DVRs, basically.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Why do you need a Mac Pro?

01:08:09 ◼   ► Why can't you just get an iMac or an iBook? You could, but I want the Mac Pro, and so I have the Mac Pro of DVRs.

01:08:13 ◼   ► No, that's fair. So, but you sound reasonably optimistic about this.

01:08:19 ◼   ► It's uglier than mine. That's another reason it's keeping me flying.

01:08:23 ◼   ► Are there more fans?

01:08:25 ◼   ► No, it looks, no, the fan is pretty darn good and pretty darn quiet, but the front of it, like, all they did was change the front panel.

01:08:31 ◼   ► Like, it's just a metal box to the front panel, and the new front panel's uglier than the old one, in my opinion, but oh well.

01:08:38 ◼   ► Alright, well, fair enough. Anything else we want to talk about, or do we want to just end slightly early-ish?

01:08:43 ◼   ► Well, I discovered that we will hit the 50 meg limit

01:08:47 ◼   ► with our audio settings roughly at like an hour 40.

01:08:51 ◼   ► Or like, I think an hour 43 is like the exact limit of how long we can go.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Even if you go mono, you hit that thing where you found out you were doing stereo before, right?

01:09:00 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, I've been doing mono now for weeks.

01:09:04 ◼   ► Yeah, so as long as you want to keep 64k mono we guys keep it below an hour 43

01:09:10 ◼   ► It's up to you guys. Let's wrap it up. We have so much to talk about we can save it for next episode

01:09:16 ◼   ► Yeah, why aren't we trying to keep these shows around our I kind of like that then we started going along again

01:09:19 ◼   ► All right. Yeah. Well, it's like we're on that hypercritical show or something. Yeah, it happens like the sale long

01:09:24 ◼   ► We were in today. You'll slide right back into that

01:09:27 ◼   ► Disaster. Thanks a lot. So our two sponsors this week

01:09:31 ◼   ► Squarespace and Audible.

01:09:33 ◼   ► And we will see you next week.

01:09:35 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:09:38 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:09:40 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:09:43 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:09:45 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:09:45 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:09:47 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:09:48 ◼   ► ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:09:50 ◼   ► ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:09:53 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:09:55 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:09:56 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:09:58 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:09:59 ◼   ► ♪ And you can find the show notes ♪

01:10:01 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:10:13 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:10:17 ◼   ► A-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

01:10:25 ◼   ► It's accidental, accidental They didn't mean to

01:10:30 ◼   ► Accidental, accidental Check podcast so long

01:10:37 ◼   ► You can hear the opening chord of the song, can't you?

01:10:42 ◼   ► Accidental, accidental Yeah, that's the thing that people don't

01:10:46 ◼   ► know is like they talk about the song being catchy

01:10:48 ◼   ► It's catchy for us too, like I find myself thinking about it

01:10:51 ◼   ► Why do you think about the song to your own damn podcast?

01:10:53 ◼   ► But it happens!

01:10:54 ◼   ► The whole reason we picked that song was because we couldn't get it out of our own heads.

01:10:59 ◼   ► And because you don't have the good taste to appreciate bleeps and boops.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Oh, God, listen to this guy.

01:11:05 ◼   ► Anything else going on?

01:11:12 ◼   ► No, I mean, there's a whole lot going on, but I guess... Jon, how's the review going?

01:11:16 ◼   ► Yeah, it's going alright. I mean, like I said, at this point, I have another section that I need to write,

01:11:24 ◼   ► But then after that, I'm waiting on Apple.

01:11:26 ◼   ► I'm waiting for another build, waiting

01:11:27 ◼   ► to see what new things work, what screenshots get changed.

01:11:30 ◼   ► I'm doing e-book production, working on all that crap.

01:11:35 ◼   ► Try to get into the iBook store this year.

01:11:37 ◼   ► We'll see how that goes.

01:11:38 ◼   ► Oh, interesting.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Actually, I'm curious.

01:11:41 ◼   ► Has your e-book workflow changed since last year?

01:11:43 ◼   ► Because you described it in a pretty good chunk

01:11:45 ◼   ► of "Hypercritical" back for the last review.

01:11:48 ◼   ► And I know, obviously, the whole world of e-book tools is awful.

01:11:52 ◼   ► So I'm wondering if anything's different this year.

01:11:54 ◼   ► I had the programmer's pile of crap, because I just did a bunch of terrible scripts, and

01:12:01 ◼   ► all I did was copy those bunch of terrible scripts and modify the terribleness inside

01:12:05 ◼   ► them.

01:12:06 ◼   ► At a certain point, maybe I'll feel like, "You know what?

01:12:08 ◼   ► I should make these not crappy."

01:12:10 ◼   ► But I'm just too efficient at modifying the crappy scripts to work with the new thing.

01:12:15 ◼   ► The thing is, I'm leaving old stuff in there and just either commenting it out or like,

01:12:20 ◼   ► "Maybe I'll need that later."

01:12:21 ◼   ► So then they're accumulating residue.

01:12:23 ◼   ► The scripts are terrible.

01:12:24 ◼   ► But yeah, these are all just hand-assembled.

01:12:25 ◼   ► It's just me, BB Edit, and Perl.

01:12:28 ◼   ► And that's all you need to basically make an eBook.

01:12:33 ◼   ► And the thing is, I fought it all last year to make these scripts.

01:12:36 ◼   ► And now I know.

01:12:37 ◼   ► Don't bother looking at the tools.

01:12:38 ◼   ► It's just a bunch of files in a container, in a format.

01:12:42 ◼   ► It's all text.

01:12:43 ◼   ► You zip it up.

01:12:44 ◼   ► You feed it through some executables.

01:12:46 ◼   ► Like whatever.

01:12:47 ◼   ► Whatever you know and it's all and what it comes down to and all these things is it's like it's like Android

01:12:51 ◼   ► It's like you know fragmentation it the process is you know build the book load it on this device see what's crappy build it

01:12:58 ◼   ► Load it's like Jenga. You know like you push something alright now. It looks good on the Kindle touch alright

01:13:02 ◼   ► Let's look at an iBook so now looks bad

01:13:04 ◼   ► They're like the worst one is Kindle because Kindle

01:13:07 ◼   ► Packs them two formats into a single file the mobi format and the kf8 format kf8 is reasonably full featured and mobi is a pile

01:13:14 ◼   ► of crap

01:13:15 ◼   ► But you can't give

01:13:17 ◼   ► Different you know different content to the two formats you have to find some crappy way with CSS

01:13:22 ◼   ► Do you know like do these terrible hacks of like okay?

01:13:25 ◼   ► Well apply this style sheet you can apply style sheets on each of on each device you say this kid this style sheet applies to kf8

01:13:30 ◼   ► and this style sheet applies to mobi and

01:13:32 ◼   ► That is sufficient to do anything you want because you're like fine display none on kf8

01:13:37 ◼   ► And then you know you just you can just hide things, but like come on guys like I'm generating these files

01:13:41 ◼   ► I could generate two totally different files this one would be optimized for Moby this won't be optimized for kf8

01:13:46 ◼   ► But instead I gotta make one set of markup and do stupid-ass CSS hacks

01:13:49 ◼   ► To make it look good in both of them and then by the way make that sure it looks good on you know on

01:13:54 ◼   ► The iPhone screen on the big iPhone on the small iPhone now

01:13:57 ◼   ► I got to check in on iBooks on the Mac as well and on all the different kindles and on the e8 kindles and on

01:14:01 ◼   ► The Kindle fire and use the Kindle preview or to show those other things

01:14:04 ◼   ► But the Kindle preview crashes when you use this particular device you have to use the real device

01:14:07 ◼   ► and how do you get the same book onto all your seven devices and then see where it looks right?

01:14:12 ◼   ► So that process sucks and continues to suck.

01:14:15 ◼   ► So Marco, did you ship all of your old devices up to the Boston area in order for John to test?

01:14:20 ◼   ► I've got plenty. I don't have Marco's collection of Kindles, but I've got sufficient Kindles.

01:14:25 ◼   ► Last year, I did have to ask Scott McNulty from the incomparable, who also has every Kindle

01:14:29 ◼   ► on demand, to test something because I didn't have a Kindle Touch and the simulator was lying to me.

01:14:33 ◼   ► That's the other thing. The previewer, they give you to say, "Here, try it on that device."

01:14:36 ◼   ► That's a piece of garbage.

01:14:37 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a terrible application and it lies, apparently.

01:14:40 ◼   ► Because I previewed it on the Kindle Touch and it looked fine, and then someone sent

01:14:43 ◼   ► me a picture of his Kindle Touch after it had already been uploaded to the Amazon Star

01:14:46 ◼   ► and he bought it and got it and it was like, unreadable.

01:14:48 ◼   ► And it's like, well, that's not what the previewer showed.

01:14:50 ◼   ► No, generally speaking, the Kindle previewer does not tell you anything.

01:14:53 ◼   ► Honestly, you shouldn't even be using it.

01:14:55 ◼   ► It is that bad.

01:14:56 ◼   ► I think it's better than nothing.

01:14:58 ◼   ► It's not.

01:14:59 ◼   ► Because it'll tell you that something looks a certain way and the actual device is nothing

01:15:03 ◼   ► like that.

01:15:04 ◼   ► Like, there's that big of differences.

01:15:05 ◼   ► it is completely useless because it gives you a false sense of security.

01:15:09 ◼   ► It does give me feature support, though. The iOS version of the Kindle

01:15:13 ◼   ► Reader, by the way, is terrible. It doesn't support, like, I don't even

01:15:17 ◼   ► know if it doesn't support KF8. Maybe it doesn't support KF8. Maybe only the Kindle Fire supports

01:15:21 ◼   ► KF8, but I'm amazed that this, you know, KF8's

01:15:25 ◼   ► like a two-year-old, a year-old, and the iOS Reader still acts like an

01:15:29 ◼   ► E-ink Kindle with fancy graphics. It can't do floated images to the side. It's like,

01:15:33 ◼   ► "Oop, can't handle that."

01:15:34 ◼   ► So, you know, that kind of thing of like, is this feature supported in iOS?

01:15:39 ◼   ► The previewer can usually show it, because if you try to float something, it will not

01:15:42 ◼   ► float in the previewer, and it will not float in the iOS app.

01:15:45 ◼   ► So I don't trust it entirely, because I have the devices here, but when I'm making change

01:15:50 ◼   ► after change after change, sometimes I just want to go to the previewer and click three

01:15:54 ◼   ► times and get it to reload the book.

01:15:55 ◼   ► That's the great thing about the Kindle for Mac, which by the way I also have to test

01:15:58 ◼   ► which does display KFA, is you have to right-click the book,

01:16:02 ◼   ► delete the book, go to the finder, find the book,

01:16:05 ◼   ► drag it onto the Kindle thing, because you can't do open from within the app.

01:16:08 ◼   ► And then because it copies it into the Kindle library,

01:16:11 ◼   ► repeatedly doing that task, I should make an AppleScript for it,

01:16:13 ◼   ► because it's so annoying.

01:16:15 ◼   ► You can't just-- you want to say, "Okay, the file's changed, reloaded."

01:16:18 ◼   ► It's like, "What do you mean reloaded? It hasn't changed.

01:16:20 ◼   ► I have my own copy in my library, and that one hasn't changed."

01:16:23 ◼   ► - That sounds awful. - Yeah.

01:16:24 ◼   ► So I went through that process, which in the beginning,

01:16:27 ◼   ► In the beginning, that process is a nice break from writing, but eventually you're like,

01:16:30 ◼   ► "You know what?

01:16:31 ◼   ► This sucks."

01:16:32 ◼   ► But you're feeling—

01:16:33 ◼   ► I'm not Mrs. Bond at all.

01:16:34 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:16:35 ◼   ► This is like—

01:16:36 ◼   ► I bet you don't.

01:16:37 ◼   ► —bad flashbacks.

01:16:38 ◼   ► But you're feeling relatively confident about it?

01:16:40 ◼   ► The review?

01:16:41 ◼   ► Eh, I'm all right.

01:16:42 ◼   ► I mean, I thought it would kind of be a similar length to the Mountain Lion one, and I think

01:16:46 ◼   ► after I finish the Slack session, it will be maybe a little bit shorter.

01:16:50 ◼   ► But it feels longer to me because—I don't know why it feels longer.

01:16:53 ◼   ► Maybe it feels longer because all the screenshots are retina.

01:16:55 ◼   ► I don't think there's more screenshots than there were before.

01:16:58 ◼   ► Maybe there are even less, but all of them are twice as big.

01:17:00 ◼   ► So the production workflow, those big images, and that's the other thing with Kindle.

01:17:04 ◼   ► They charge you for the download.

01:17:05 ◼   ► They charge you per megabyte.

01:17:07 ◼   ► And so now I've just doubled the size of my book.

01:17:09 ◼   ► And it's like, it's a $4 book, and I'm already, you know, Amazon's already, you know, it's

01:17:13 ◼   ► a $5 book.

01:17:14 ◼   ► Amazon's already getting like $4 out of that $5.

01:17:17 ◼   ► You know, I'm going to double the size of it, and they're going to take even more.

01:17:20 ◼   ► I don't want to raise the price of the book, so I had to crush down the images with even

01:17:25 ◼   ► bigger compression in the Kindle one. That's the advantage of the iBooks version. I'm going

01:17:29 ◼   ► to ship full res pings on there because Apple, as far as I know, does not charge anything

01:17:32 ◼   ► for download. So I'm like, "Here you go, 35 megabook. Enjoy."

01:17:35 ◼   ► Oh yeah, Apple. I mean, that's why... What was David Spark's book? Was it Paperless,

01:17:40 ◼   ► the one that he did? It was like a gig, right? And it was fun. Apple doesn't charge anything

01:17:45 ◼   ► different for that. That would cost you $150 in download fees from Amazon's side. Amazon has two

01:17:50 ◼   ► deals. You can do 70% royalty, which is pretty good. So you get 70% of the purchase price

01:17:55 ◼   ► of the book. Of course, you don't get to pick the purchase price because they can change

01:17:58 ◼   ► it for price matching. Anyway, 70%, but there's that per megabyte fee, or you can get 30%

01:18:04 ◼   ► and no per megabyte fee. They know what they're doing over there. I'll be much happier to

01:18:08 ◼   ► get the 70% and also no download fee at iBooks if I can get through the process of submitting

01:18:15 ◼   ► a book to iBooks and getting it published and approved, which is much harder than Kindle

01:18:18 ◼   ► because Amazon's like, "Sure, upload it, click a button, and eventually we'll put it up for

01:18:21 ◼   ► sale, but then we'll refuse to load it onto an iPad for no reason."

01:18:25 ◼   ► Yeah, that was last year's drama.

01:18:28 ◼   ► This year, I don't know what's going to go wrong.

01:18:30 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:18:31 ◼   ► But you're just totally powerless.

01:18:32 ◼   ► You're like, "You can't get in touch with a human."

01:18:35 ◼   ► And days are passing, and people are like, "How could you sell this book?

01:18:38 ◼   ► You can't even load it on an iPad."

01:18:39 ◼   ► And you totally can, but their website says you can't.

01:18:42 ◼   ► And their website refuses to send it to an iPad.

01:18:46 ◼   ► like, you know, like, "Send to my Kindle," it won't even list your iPad. It's like, "Sorry,

01:18:49 ◼   ► this book can't be sent to an iPad." Yes, it can. It totally can. I'm looking at it

01:18:54 ◼   ► right now. And then they fix it, and then we uploaded a new version of the book with

01:18:58 ◼   ► typos fixed, and then it couldn't be loaded on the iPad again. Yeah, that's the whole

01:19:01 ◼   ► episode of Epic Critical about that.

01:19:02 ◼   ► Now, I'm curious, because of the audience—obviously, this is not a good solution for most books—but

01:19:07 ◼   ► because of the audience of an in-depth, you know, tens of thousands of words, Mac OS X

01:19:13 ◼   ► and point release version review.

01:19:15 ◼   ► Obviously this is a somewhat technical audience.

01:19:17 ◼   ► Could you do the thing that I believe O'Reilly does

01:19:21 ◼   ► or one of the big publishers does,

01:19:23 ◼   ► I probably all of them do it,

01:19:24 ◼   ► where you sell the book on your own site

01:19:27 ◼   ► or on ours site or whoever's doing it

01:19:29 ◼   ► and then you can just download a Moby version

01:19:33 ◼   ► for if you want to put it on a Kindle.

01:19:35 ◼   ► Like is that--

01:19:36 ◼   ► - Well ours does that.

01:19:37 ◼   ► If you sign up for a month of like ours premiere,

01:19:40 ◼   ► which is like five bucks the same price

01:19:41 ◼   ► as buying a book in all the stores,

01:19:43 ◼   ► So you get the Kindle version.

01:19:45 ◼   ► I don't know if they put the Kindle version.

01:19:46 ◼   ► But anyway, you get an iBooks-compatible EPUB, no DRM.

01:19:49 ◼   ► You get a PDF version.

01:19:50 ◼   ► And I believe they also put the Kindle version up,

01:19:53 ◼   ► but I forget.

01:19:53 ◼   ► You get the Moby and KFA version.

01:19:55 ◼   ► So that is the best deal if you want to do that.

01:19:58 ◼   ► But then people are wary, like, oh, I

01:19:59 ◼   ► don't want to subscribe to something,

01:20:00 ◼   ► because then I have to remember to cancel,

01:20:02 ◼   ► and all this other stuff.

01:20:03 ◼   ► And it's like, well, for $5, you can

01:20:04 ◼   ► get every single one of these books in every format.

01:20:07 ◼   ► But people just feel comfortable buying from Amazon.

01:20:10 ◼   ► So that's why I put it up on Amazon.

01:20:11 ◼   ► A lot of people ask about iBooks.

01:20:13 ◼   ► If I can get my book up there, I'm going to do that as well.

01:20:17 ◼   ► I think everyone should read it on the web for free.

01:20:18 ◼   ► I think that is by far the best version of this book to read, but sometimes people just

01:20:22 ◼   ► want to give me money.

01:20:23 ◼   ► Sometimes people just really want to read it on their Kindle.

01:20:25 ◼   ► If you're going to read this review on an E Ink Kindle, with the images all grayscale,

01:20:29 ◼   ► some people want to do that.

01:20:30 ◼   ► Who am I to say that they can't give me money?

01:20:32 ◼   ► So I am.

01:20:33 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:20:34 ◼   ► How much of your time and trouble is it really worth to give an amazing experience to these

01:20:39 ◼   ► devices where it's already doomed to be a pretty crappy experience.

01:20:41 ◼   ► It's not amazing. I'm just trying to be acceptable.

01:20:44 ◼   ► Well, but it's pretty much doomed. It's not going to be good. And why not, and especially

01:20:50 ◼   ► dealing with the weird megabyte limitations and Amazon's stupid tools. Every tool Amazon

01:20:56 ◼   ► makes for publishers is ridiculously horrible. And so just dealing with all that stuff is...

01:21:01 ◼   ► Well, you can sign up for KDP Select, and then you get no per megabyte download and

01:21:07 ◼   ► and all this other great stuff,

01:21:08 ◼   ► but your book must be for sale exclusively on Amazon.

01:21:11 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, and that's of course correct.

01:21:12 ◼   ► - So, F that.

01:21:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:21:15 ◼   ► - I mean seriously, why,

01:21:16 ◼   ► the concerns about not wanting to sign up

01:21:21 ◼   ► for a subscription and having to remember to cancel it,

01:21:23 ◼   ► those are very valid.

01:21:25 ◼   ► Why not just, 'cause obviously I'm sure

01:21:29 ◼   ► they're people at ours and they're Conde Nast, right?

01:21:32 ◼   ► I'm sure they want people to subscribe

01:21:35 ◼   ► and that's part of the reason of having it on their site,

01:21:37 ◼   ► but certainly they can also realize the value of

01:21:42 ◼   ► just like make a dedicated page for just this book,

01:21:45 ◼   ► put a Stripe form up there,

01:21:48 ◼   ► and just have some way to pay five bucks

01:21:50 ◼   ► and get the files for download right there

01:21:52 ◼   ► without having to sign up.

01:21:53 ◼   ► You would make so much more,

01:21:55 ◼   ► and they would make so much more from that than--

01:21:57 ◼   ► - It's not that much money in the grand scheme.

01:21:59 ◼   ► It's like not that many people buy the book,

01:22:00 ◼   ► so we don't want to get it too overblown.

01:22:02 ◼   ► And they do sell more books than just mine.

01:22:04 ◼   ► I think you're right.

01:22:05 ◼   ► At this point, they sell like, maybe there's like four ebooks a year that they sell.

01:22:10 ◼   ► They get significant sales.

01:22:12 ◼   ► It's maybe probably worth it for them to do what you said, put up a page, have Stripe

01:22:16 ◼   ► do it or whatever.

01:22:17 ◼   ► But I don't think that's how, that's something that ours would have to make on its own.

01:22:21 ◼   ► Condé Nast has no sort of infrastructure for like, "Hey, we're gonna sell stuff over

01:22:25 ◼   ► the winter."

01:22:26 ◼   ► Wait, how do they sell the other ebooks?

01:22:27 ◼   ► Did they make, you just said they make four a year.

01:22:28 ◼   ► Yeah, they did put them on Amazon.

01:22:30 ◼   ► Most people just put them up on Amazon.

01:22:32 ◼   ► They may have done some on iBooks, I don't remember.

01:22:34 ◼   ► Or I may be the first iBooks one, I don't know.

01:22:36 ◼   ► But if they did it themselves-- but if you

01:22:40 ◼   ► think about the development cost of how many developers

01:22:43 ◼   ► and how much time it would take to do that,

01:22:44 ◼   ► they would eat up the first and second year's sales.

01:22:47 ◼   ► We sell some ebooks, but they're $5 ebooks.

01:22:50 ◼   ► And tons of people read them on the web

01:22:53 ◼   ► and slice off many, many zeros to see how many people who

01:22:57 ◼   ► actually buy them.

01:22:59 ◼   ► It's not that much money.

01:23:00 ◼   ► So I understand it's on the balancing point of, well,

01:23:04 ◼   ► we could have our developers add features to the website

01:23:06 ◼   ► or whatever, or we could have them put up a Stripe page.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And at this point, I think sending them

01:23:11 ◼   ► to Amazon or to iBooks and delegating that

01:23:14 ◼   ► and outsourcing it, I think it's still reasonable.

01:23:16 ◼   ► If they were selling-- if every single article was available

01:23:19 ◼   ► in e-book form or some percentage of them,

01:23:21 ◼   ► but it's really just like four or five high profile

01:23:23 ◼   ► articles a year, and who knows?

01:23:26 ◼   ► It could happen, because they do have good--

01:23:28 ◼   ► They wrote their own live, you know, what do you call it, event, like what was it, cover

01:23:33 ◼   ► it live, those type of things.

01:23:34 ◼   ► Yeah, like when you're covering it.

01:23:36 ◼   ► Yeah, because they kept using third party vendors and they kept crapping out, so they

01:23:39 ◼   ► wrote their own.

01:23:40 ◼   ► But that's like more of a core competency of the site.

01:23:42 ◼   ► Like you go to ours for the live blog, there's like, you know, 20 of those a year and that's

01:23:46 ◼   ► big traffic time.

01:23:47 ◼   ► So they wrote their own one of those and, you know, had their developers do it and it's

01:23:50 ◼   ► awesome.

01:23:51 ◼   ► I don't think they're at that point now for book sales.

01:23:55 ◼   ► Anyway, can we talk about the M4?

01:24:00 ◼   ► Can we talk about--speaking of gold.

01:24:03 ◼   ► Yes, seriously.

01:24:04 ◼   ► What is that color?

01:24:05 ◼   ► Every time I see that, I'm like, "That's gotta be Photoshop.

01:24:08 ◼   ► No real object is that color."

01:24:10 ◼   ► Remember when the Dodge Neon first came out in like '98?

01:24:12 ◼   ► Yes, yes.

01:24:13 ◼   ► And it had like a mustard yellow color.

01:24:16 ◼   ► It just looked terrible.

01:24:17 ◼   ► This is like the exact same color.

01:24:19 ◼   ► I don't know why people do that.

01:24:20 ◼   ► Like, BMW has a bad color gene.

01:24:23 ◼   ► They have that.

01:24:24 ◼   ► Yes.

01:24:25 ◼   ► cars have to be available in like two or three great colors, three or four forgettable colors,

01:24:31 ◼   ► and like two completely awful, I can't believe that's even available colors.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Yeah, and I don't know if that's like a cultural thing, like in Germany those colors

01:24:38 ◼   ► are popular or just no one that like, who thinks that they're attractive?

01:24:40 ◼   ► Well do you remember the taxis? The Munich taxis were, how did you describe it Marco?

01:24:43 ◼   ► It was like old plastic. It was the color of aged plastic. Yeah, it's like this very,

01:24:47 ◼   ► very light beige. It's like, it's plastic from the late 80s that when it was new was

01:24:53 ◼   ► white.

01:24:54 ◼   ► scorched. It's like when you leave old Apple hardware, like old Macs out in the sun, the

01:24:59 ◼   ► orange deepens.

01:25:00 ◼   ► Exactly. Yeah. Same thing. The white MacBook had that problem originally. I had one of

01:25:04 ◼   ► those that had that problem where the entire, what they called the top case, which is the

01:25:08 ◼   ► whole surface that the keyboard is part of, that whole panel would discolor into this

01:25:14 ◼   ► gross orangey looking thing because of heat. And people thought it was because of dirty

01:25:18 ◼   ► hands because it would be a lot of times in the hand resting area. But even if you'd put

01:25:24 ◼   ► on top of it, which I did immediately when it was brand new, you would still get that

01:25:27 ◼   ► discoloration underneath the film. And it turned out they had this problem that it was

01:25:31 ◼   ► just like the plastic was aging poorly with all the heat that it had to deal with being

01:25:35 ◼   ► a laptop, and they eventually replaced them all.

01:25:38 ◼   ► So they probably dealt with that same issue among many others with the white iPhone that

01:25:42 ◼   ► they had so much trouble with. Oh, I'm sure that was part of it.

01:25:45 ◼   ► So yeah, so the M4 was announced. It's this hideous gold, and when we say gold, we don't

01:25:49 ◼   ► mean fun-looking champagne, if you even consider that fun.

01:25:52 ◼   ► No, it's like mustard vomit.

01:25:53 ◼   ► hideous. it's like if you miss mustard and mercury. yes, yes. and it's awful. I think

01:26:00 ◼   ► it's a decent looking car under the paint maybe. it's so hard to see because I'm too

01:26:04 ◼   ► busy cleaning up my own vomit. but they're saying it's a twin-turbo version of my motor,

01:26:10 ◼   ► the M55, which is about the same power output as the V8 E90 M3. wait, they gave engine details?

01:26:17 ◼   ► a little bit. or maybe it was in that autoblog post that I asked. it was expected to be a

01:26:22 ◼   ► triple turbo V6 3.0 with roughly 400 horsepower.

01:26:27 ◼   ► - Can you put a link in the chat room

01:26:30 ◼   ► to that one piece picture?

01:26:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm trying.

01:26:33 ◼   ► I'm trying to multitask, it's not working.

01:26:35 ◼   ► And so the other interesting thing that they announced today

01:26:39 ◼   ► and I'm putting the link in now

01:26:41 ◼   ► is that it's losing the manual transmission,

01:26:42 ◼   ► which makes me extremely--

01:26:43 ◼   ► - Well, but hold on.

01:26:44 ◼   ► That was a rumor that Autoblog reported

01:26:46 ◼   ► that they said their source said,

01:26:47 ◼   ► but then like Beamer Post chimed in and said,

01:26:51 ◼   ► we've actually heard the opposite

01:26:52 ◼   ► And here's a photo of a prototype that was spotted

01:26:55 ◼   ► somewhere that had a stick.

01:26:57 ◼   ► And here's the VIN database that this one says it has a DCT.

01:27:01 ◼   ► And this one doesn't say that.

01:27:03 ◼   ► So it probably has a stick.

01:27:04 ◼   ► Like there's all sorts of pretty good reasons to the contrary.

01:27:10 ◼   ► See, this color-- oh my god, this color--

01:27:12 ◼   ► it's like it's Photoshop.

01:27:13 ◼   ► You know what it looks like?

01:27:15 ◼   ► Marco will know what color that looks like.

01:27:18 ◼   ► Actually, I've dealt with-- you're probably talking

01:27:20 ◼   ► about like infant poop or something?

01:27:22 ◼   ► I am talking about infant poop. After you feed them the peas, that's infant poop color.

01:27:27 ◼   ► Totally. Like, they're not onto solid foods quite—like, it's mostly milk, because their

01:27:31 ◼   ► milk poop is kind of yellowish, but they're like, "You started feeding them the split

01:27:33 ◼   ► pea? That is in the diaper right there."

01:27:35 ◼   ► Yeah, definitely. No, I mean, I've actually spent all day dealing with a sick dog, and

01:27:40 ◼   ► I've seen some of those colors today, actually.

01:27:42 ◼   ► Yeah, it's also dog vomit color, because dog vomit is usually yellowish.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:47 ◼   ► No, I've also seen—and I think I sent this only to Marco. I don't remember if I sent

01:27:51 ◼   ► us to you, John. But somebody found or put together sales numbers or what do they call

01:27:57 ◼   ► them? Take rates for…

01:27:58 ◼   ► Yeah, you sent it to us of how many people are buying the manuals.

01:28:02 ◼   ► Right. The E90 M3 and how when they started offering DCT, you saw the take rate of manual

01:28:08 ◼   ► transmissions just plummet everywhere except the US, which seems totally backwards to me

01:28:14 ◼   ► because nobody in America drives a stick and everyone drives stupid automatics. Whereas

01:28:18 ◼   ► Whereas in Europe, in my experience, everyone drives a stick and nobody drives automatics.

01:28:22 ◼   ► But apparently in the M3 it was reversed.

01:28:24 ◼   ► And so one of the arguments they've had, Marco and I were talking about this earlier and

01:28:28 ◼   ► I am, is well maybe the US will get the stick and nobody else will.

01:28:32 ◼   ► But then it could be like the M5 where like yeah the US gets the stick but it sucks and

01:28:36 ◼   ► no one wants it.

01:28:37 ◼   ► Well yeah, and you know if you look at those take rates it does look like though that you

01:28:40 ◼   ► know the M5 the take rate for the stick was getting pretty bad.

01:28:44 ◼   ► But the M3 take rate for the stick in the US was I think like 50% still.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Right, but the M3 stick was good, and the M5 stick, every review I've read of it, is

01:28:53 ◼   ► like mushy and not satisfying to use.

01:28:55 ◼   ► Like, you gotta make a good stick.

01:28:56 ◼   ► You can't be like, "Oh, fine, here you go, here's a stick."

01:28:58 ◼   ► It wasn't that it was a bad stick.

01:28:59 ◼   ► It was that like the rest of the car designed around the stick was so much better with the

01:29:05 ◼   ► DCT.

01:29:06 ◼   ► Well, hold on.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Every review I've read of it said it's a bad stick.

01:29:08 ◼   ► Well, which M5 are we talking about?

01:29:10 ◼   ► Mine?

01:29:11 ◼   ► Marco's M5.

01:29:12 ◼   ► the E60, which was the V10 M5, universally everything I've ever heard you're absolutely

01:29:17 ◼   ► right, total piece of crap. Where the F10 M5, which is Marcos, I read one article and

01:29:22 ◼   ► it was only one, and to be fair, I think it might have been in the BMW owner's club,

01:29:27 ◼   ► whatever it is, magazine, but they said, "Oh my god, the six-speed F10 M5 is amazing."

01:29:35 ◼   ► And they were extremely effusive about it.

01:29:37 ◼   ► Go read the groupings of magazines from my youth, which I keep reading like an old man.

01:29:42 ◼   ► No, no, I agree.

01:29:43 ◼   ► Car and Driver, Road and Track, Automobile, Motor Trend.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Motor Trend's kind of raggy.

01:29:47 ◼   ► None of them like the stick.

01:29:48 ◼   ► Oh, I completely agree.

01:29:49 ◼   ► This was the only one I saw.

01:29:50 ◼   ► They all thought the DCT version was the one to get.

01:29:54 ◼   ► Even Car and Driver, who's got the whole Save the Manuals campaign, they're like, "We can't

01:29:58 ◼   ► recommend that anyone get this manual.

01:30:01 ◼   ► It's not a good manual.

01:30:02 ◼   ► You should get an M3 car manual."

01:30:06 ◼   ► Well, and maybe not anymore.

01:30:08 ◼   ► You still get an M3 with a manual, but it's not an M4.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems like, I think it would have to.

01:30:13 ◼   ► I totally believe that person who said

01:30:15 ◼   ► that the US is gonna get it.

01:30:16 ◼   ► I do worry though, that it will be like the M5,

01:30:19 ◼   ► like Marco said, not well matched the car,

01:30:20 ◼   ► but also like the M5, not a satisfying manual

01:30:23 ◼   ► by all the reports that I read of it, which is a shame,

01:30:25 ◼   ► 'cause like, it's not a check mark,

01:30:27 ◼   ► so you don't be like, oh, it's got a manual,

01:30:29 ◼   ► check the box, therefore I feel good.

01:30:30 ◼   ► You want to get the enjoyment of the manual,

01:30:32 ◼   ► and BMW manuals are really nice.

01:30:34 ◼   ► I've driven my father's and I've driven his Audi and you know many only different manuals my whole life and the BMW manual

01:30:40 ◼   ► He's got in his car is the nicest feeling one that I've ever driven and they have something there

01:30:44 ◼   ► If they're gonna preserve it for the u.s.

01:30:46 ◼   ► As a kind of a throwback and these people want it at least give the good one

01:30:49 ◼   ► You know something for whatever it's worth also like like I had when I had the 1m that was an amazing stick

01:30:54 ◼   ► It was that was a fantastic stick car fantastic stick experience everything

01:30:59 ◼   ► Now they're replacing that effectively with the new M235i model

01:31:05 ◼   ► that is coming to the US and that for all intents and purposes looks like the sequel to the M1M

01:31:12 ◼   ► That's the kind of thing I bet that's that's gonna be probably the last car in the lineup available with a stick

01:31:18 ◼   ► Yeah, possible because they always said the 1M was as close as you could get to what the E30 M3

01:31:27 ◼   ► You know the original lightweight

01:31:29 ◼   ► relatively high power but extremely lightweight high revving

01:31:31 ◼   ► M3 and they always and everything I read about the 1m was it was very it very it was very similar to that

01:31:37 ◼   ► You drove it as attractive. No, but like, you know, it's I

01:31:41 ◼   ► think

01:31:44 ◼   ► With a car and this is gonna sound crazy

01:31:46 ◼   ► But with the car the size of the 3 series and of course being based on it than the m3 now with with the new

01:31:52 ◼   ► M3 and 4 they have focused a lot on weight savings

01:31:55 ◼   ► That's been like that's one of the reason they went from the v8 to the v6 and they are doing more carbon fiber more aluminum

01:32:01 ◼   ► Like they're saying like one of the main reasons one of the main goals with the m3 and the m4

01:32:05 ◼   ► Was to be lighter weight than their regular non m3 series counterparts. So maybe maybe this won't hold true quite yet, but

01:32:13 ◼   ► I think

01:32:16 ◼   ► Enthusiasts who like the feel of driving a lot and who and who want

01:32:20 ◼   ► that kind of like direct connection between

01:32:24 ◼   ► with a stick and that level of control, I think they're

01:32:27 ◼   ► going to be pushed to smaller and smaller cars.

01:32:30 ◼   ► And I don't think it would be that bad if the M235i comes

01:32:36 ◼   ► out and ends up being awesome.

01:32:38 ◼   ► And maybe five years from now, that's the only BMW

01:32:42 ◼   ► available with a stick.

01:32:43 ◼   ► I don't think that would be that bad, because the

01:32:45 ◼   ► enthusiasts who like having a stick, who like the advantages

01:32:49 ◼   ► that it gives you, tend to also be a little bit more

01:32:52 ◼   ► gives you tend to also like smaller and lighter cars.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Yeah, they'll eventually go too.

01:32:59 ◼   ► You know, a generation of kids will grow up not ever using a stick, not ever desiring

01:33:03 ◼   ► a stick, and they will appreciate all the good things about an automated manual, and

01:33:08 ◼   ► there are many, and then that'll be that.

01:33:10 ◼   ► So eventually we'll all die.

01:33:11 ◼   ► But yeah, it's like, you'll be worried about, you know, what do you call it, adjusting the

01:33:15 ◼   ► fuel mixture with the rods sticking out of the dashboard.

01:33:18 ◼   ► We don't care about that.

01:33:20 ◼   ► People used to.

01:33:21 ◼   ► They all died.

01:33:22 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]