129: Game of Sorrow
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From relay FM, this is Connected, episode 129.
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Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace, Encapsula and Blue Apron.
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My name is Myke Hurley.
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I am joined by Mr Federico Vittucci.
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And Mr Stephen Hackett.
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Howdy partner.
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Happy Valentine's Day to you both.
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I couldn't think of anything better than spending my Valentine's Day with you two talking about
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reality television and that's what we're going to do later on today.
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Nothing came to mind.
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Not sure how to respond to that but thank you.
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Oh no, I have many offers, you know, there are many things I could do but this is the
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one I would choose to do the most.
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You are a very sweet Valentine, Myke.
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It's a pleasure.
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And I would like to wish a happy Valentine's Day to all of our listeners too.
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Can you guess what Valentine's Day is called in Italy?
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Just try to imagine how could we say Valentine's in Italy.
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Is it Valentino?
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Yes, perfect.
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Oh my god, you're pretty good at this.
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Nice job, nice job.
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I've known you for long enough now.
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That's all it takes.
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Can we do some Valentine's Day themed follow-up?
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I don't know if it's necessarily...
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There is a theme, but it's not Valentine's Day.
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Let's do the Valentine's follow-up.
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The theme I follow this week is "Listeners have questions for Federico."
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So, Jim, listener Jim, starts this.
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I love you, Jim.
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Well, it's Valentine's Day.
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"Shouldn't the iPad home screen be able to hold at least as many apps as the iPhone,
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if not more?
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Is there a good reason as to why this is the case?"
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There's no good reason if you ask me.
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It shouldn't be the case, especially on the big iPad Pro, the home screen should be completely
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different than it currently is.
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I feel like Apple has done a lazy job at adapting the iPhone home screen, actually, seven years
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ago when the first iPad came out, then it never changed, they didn't make any functional
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improvements to the home screen, and now the situation is even worse, especially on the
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big iPad Pro.
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So there's no good reason if you ask me, but I'm not the person, you know, I don't know,
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I have no idea just like you.
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I wish I had a plausible explanation other than Apple has just been lazy and they haven't
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done a good job, you know, with many iPhone interfaces and the home screen is the perfect
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My favorite part is that your rows change as you rotate from portrait to landscape because
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it has fewer in portrait and so if you change your
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orientation a bunch your icons move around which is infuriating
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even after this long. I
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have a question for you both. Do you, and I'll start with you Federico, it's the same question,
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do you believe that Apple in the near future, maybe within the next two or
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three years, is likely to change the way that the home screen looks on the iPad?
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I think it would be useful.
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I know it definitely would be. Do you think they're gonna do it?
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I think so. Because I feel like they also know that the current home screen is just an adaptation.
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I feel like the people who work on this stuff, they know, and I feel like it's a problem for them too.
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So I think we will see something, not to the extent that some people imagine like crazy Android-like widgets on the home screen,
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But I think we'll get some new ways to organize apps maybe to pin documents or files or
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You know, I just feel like they are gonna do it not to the extent that we imagine with this, you know
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All these widgets floating around I don't think that's the answer
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But the current situation isn't the answer either so somewhere in the middle. I think Apple will do something
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Because they have to otherwise they're just trying to apply the paradigm
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of the of the iPhone to the iPad and just doesn't work because the home screen works on the iPhone because you just you know you
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Pull up the phone from your pocket
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Then you see icons and you launch stuff on the iPad it needs to be something else
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And and I think they will do something not as crazy as we think so somewhere in the middle
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I think it's a sweet spot for Apple. What do you think Stephen?
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It's been seven years of
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stagnation, why would they change?
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That's the spirit.
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It would be really nice, and I think it would be a way to show the iPad as a more serious
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work machine.
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I mean, to open it and just be a grid of icons is sort of silly.
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I agree, it works really well on the phone, but the iPad deserves more.
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But I mean, it's been seven years.
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If it's on someone's to-do list, it's clearly, it hasn't been very high.
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But I'd love to be proven wrong, so bring it on.
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I think part of the problem with it now is like it's been so long that they kind of have
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to make a really big change if they're going to make a change.
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And I don't know if that really big change is around the corner, honestly.
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Yeah, the thing that I come back to is that you have widgets in Springboard with 3D Touch,
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hard touch, whatever it's called this week.
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And they're kind of already there on the home screen
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if you have one of those devices and the app you want
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supports it and you know how to do it.
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Like they're so close.
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I think they could do widgets on the home screen
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and it'd be nice and it not be junky, but I don't know.
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I think that they're probably gonna stay the course.
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Up next, Jordan, listener Jordan, weighs in on Nintendo and talking about the pricing
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and that would have been more successful if the game was paid up front.
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We'll talk about Super Mario Go, right?
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"Most games on the App Store need to go through some free-to-play shenanigans because they
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won't get enough downloads otherwise."
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I'm quoting Jordan.
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"Nintendo, you know, they're big enough.
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There is pent-up demand for it.
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they have just sold it at $10 up front based on that alone. And he contrasts
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Nintendo and Mario with Minecraft. You know, it's a household name. If you have
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kids who are like my kids ages, like Minecraft is everywhere. And it's paid
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up front and it's consistently on the top of the paid apps list. And Jordan
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thinks that Nintendo could could be there as well. And you know, I was
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wondering what we thought about that and especially like in the the negative
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ratings problem because if you're obviously not familiar you can only
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rate an app if you've purchased it or if you've downloaded it and it free to play
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you can play it for free never pay anything and then like burn down their
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app store ratings and that causes some friction and so Federico and Myke I'm
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curious what you guys think about this is it a fair comparison to bring up
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Minecraft is it something that Nintendo could have done differently and maybe
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be seeing more success? Well I think it makes sense for Minecraft, right? I think
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what Nintendo wanted to do was to be at the top of the top-grossing charts and
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so I think the Minecraft approach works for Minecraft but it wasn't one
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necessarily what Nintendo wanted. They wanted to have this freemium game with a
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single in-app purchase that will let them reach a lot of people with the free
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download and then have those people pay up to play the full game. And they managed to
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stay at the top of the Topicals in Charge for about a week. They weren't happy with
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the results. If you read the latest interview with President Kimishima on Time magazine,
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he said we're almost reaching the number that we're comfortable with in terms of revenue
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from this game and in terms of downloads, because from 78 million downloads they want
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to move past 10% of paid in-app purchases.
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So they're moving towards that number.
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And I don't feel like Nintendo from the get-go wanted to have a Minecraft-like pricing model,
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and I also don't think that there's a market for any more Minecraft games, and in the sense
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that I'm just gonna let Myke go with this point because I think he wants to.
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He knows more about Minecraft than I do but I think the basic problem is
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Minecraft is in a league of its own basically.
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You can't compare anything to Minecraft anymore.
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It has transcended what a usual video game is possible of doing.
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There is no application or game, even Mario, that can be compared to Minecraft because
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Minecraft is an existing property which happens outside of just the App Store.
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People know what Minecraft is before they download it.
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That wasn't the case for Super Mario Go.
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It was a different type of game.
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And I think that Nintendo ultimately made the right move.
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I think if they would have gone paid up front, I can see us easily having the exact inverse
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argument of saying they shouldn't have done paid up front. People need to try out the
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app first. And I think that honestly, I think they probably have made more money this way
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because if they would have put $10 to buy this game, like just straight up front download
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like this is what you're paying to get this. I don't think it would have done very well
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at all. And I know that the rating situation would have been different, but honestly, I
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I don't think that the rating situation is affecting Mario very much people either want it or they don't want it
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I don't think people are looking at me like Mario two stars. No way
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Like it just doesn't seem like a thing to me like yeah
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People are gonna try it if they want to try it and the fact that it's free is fine
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And then you know Nintendo maybe haven't hit the numbers that they wanted
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but that comes from what Nintendo thinks Nintendo is able to do based on Nintendo's history and
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Nintendo has never done this before so I expect that their next games will have adjusted
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Goals on what they're looking to achieve
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But I really don't think that they would have done much better if it would have been a paid up front game
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If it was like straight up, this is Super Mario Brothers. Like this is the game, you know
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Maybe just yeah, just I would just back a truck full of money up to them
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Yeah, it's interesting to think about in a world where, like Jordan wrote, so many games
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are free within that purchase.
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And are there names that are big enough, are there brands that are big enough to go against
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that trend and be successful?
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I found the whole idea very interesting.
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So to round out follow-up, kind of going back to Myke automating his entire house with smart
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light bulbs, you said company over?
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I wanted to ask you, it's not in the notes.
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You just had some family in town.
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- How did they turn lights on?
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Or did they just walk you around in the dark?
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- We had to do the voice activation
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because these family members do not speak English.
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So asking them to speak to the echo
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is not really something that works very well.
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But what they were able to do,
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if they wanted the lights to be on,
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'cause there's only lamps, right?
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We have over the headlights,
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but if they wanted to turn the lamps on,
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They were just like, and they just did this on their own.
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They turned the lamp off and then turned it back on again and it comes on.
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Right. But it's just a regular white light because the hue kind of falls back to that.
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And that worked fine for them. And they were just doing that.
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But they were very impressed by our lights.
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They also found it funny, like how we would ask it to do things, because I've also added
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one more piece of equipment since the last time that we spoke.
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I now have a Logitech Harmony hub.
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as a way to turn on my Dyson fan. So like I was, I've mentioned this, right? The harmony,
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like the Dyson fan, like I've wanted to be able to turn that on and off, but like it's
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not a smart device. So James wrote in to say that, uh, he uses one of these harmony hubs
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and is able to get, like you could, you can then like use a, oh, you said it, you said
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it this time. I know I said it. I said it. You can program it all together. So now I
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can say, hey, it's bedtime or like trigger bedtime. And then the lights go off in the
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front room. They come on in the bedroom and turn on the fan as well, like the heater fan.
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So I'm pretty happy with that arrangement. Uh, but yeah, it worked fine, but they kind
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of found it a little bit amusing. Yeah. Every, every time, every time my, my mom comes to
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visit and I show her around at my latest automations. She's both amazed by what computers can do,
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but also she looks to me and she's like, "So you're spending money on switches to turn
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on the lights?" Like, to an extent, a lot of people are surprised that we're so lazy
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we cannot even get up to turn off the lights. But on the other hand, it's so convenient,
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You know, just to be…
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Yeah it tends to be a mix of like interest and pity.
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I think that's what I'm looking for.
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There's an element of pity in all this.
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Like look at this guy, he cannot even get up.
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I'm really happy for you but like what are you doing with your wife?
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There's an element of that.
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But still, good job getting the Harmony app.
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I love mine because of the way that we can control the television set.
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And especially I don't have to deal with multiple remotes anymore.
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Silvia doesn't like this.
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She hates that we now have a single remote and she doesn't understand the interface.
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I personally love it because I can set up all of my inputs for the PlayStation or for
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the Chromecast.
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I can just say, you know, I can speak to the Echo and I can ask to switch to certain devices,
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which is pretty great.
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Yeah, the problem for us is I can't do any of that because the Harmony Hub is in the
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bedroom because it needs to hit the Dyson fan by IR.
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So like, pretty much all it's doing for me now is controlling, is turning the fan on
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and off, but I'm looking at setting up, because it can find WiFi stuff and you can set up
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scenes and I'm seeing what I can do with it outside of purely just being there to turn
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a device on and off.
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So, in this world, why this is in follow-up is there's a new Kickstarter called Turn Touch,
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and it is a programmable remote control. A guy named Sam makes it, but it's handmade
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out of wood. You could have it out on your coffee tub or something and people are like,
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That's a smart home device.
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It looks beautiful.
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And you can hook it up to a bunch of different stuff.
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So you can turn your Hue lights on and off.
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You can adjust your Nest thermostat.
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It works with some of the smart switches
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and smart lock stuff.
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And the idea is you can have all this
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in a standalone device.
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You don't have to pull your phone out
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to do a bunch of the stuff
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or yell at the lady in the canister.
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This looks awesome.
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I like the way that it looks.
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I like that it doesn't look techy.
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like that you don't have to use your phone.
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And I will admit, I didn't read all of this,
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but I have some questions about how it works.
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Is it just the hardware and it talks to all the software?
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What else do you have to have to make this work?
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What do you guys think about this?
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Yeah, there's an app.
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There's a bunch of apps.
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I think there's a Mac app and an iOS app, which
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you use to pull in all of the different sources,
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like your Hue lights or whatever.
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and then you can say what each of the switches does,
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basically you're able to customize it via the app.
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- Yeah, the iPhone app basically has
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a few built-in utilities.
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Like there's an alarm clock feature, there's a timer,
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and those are like features of the app.
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So when you interact with the remote,
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the remote talks to the app,
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and it's not like it's setting the native iOS timer,
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it's setting timer inside of the iPhone or the Mac app.
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And then there's the Web API stuff,
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the integrations with web services like Philips Hue or other home automation devices. And
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I'm pretty sure there's Sonos integration also. So the goal is to offer this sort of
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mixed environment where there's native apps for the iPhone and the Mac where you can manage
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the remote, where you can set up the shortcuts. And then there's the web stuff. So you can
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connect to web services and connect to other devices. So I know Sam. He makes NewsBlur,
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which is one of the best, I would say along with InoReader, NewsBlur is one of the best
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modern RSS services. And I think this is a very clever idea. It's definitely not what
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I was expecting from Sam, because after so many years of making NewsBlur, a smart home
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remote made of wood, it's not exactly what I was imagining. But I think as someone who
00:18:08
◼
►
a couple of Logitech POP buttons. This looks much better, I think it looks much
00:18:14
◼
►
better for power users also because there's a lot more settings, a lot more
00:18:17
◼
►
options you can set up. Honestly the Logitech POP, the iPhone app is
00:18:24
◼
►
kind of terrible, whereas just from screenshots this thing is looking pretty
00:18:28
◼
►
good to me with all the settings, with all the gestures and the
00:18:34
◼
►
tabs that you can set up. Also there's an iPad app which is good to see on, you know,
00:18:39
◼
►
it's gonna launch with an iPhone and iPad and Mac. So I'm excited about this, I wanna
00:18:44
◼
►
try it. Among the list of support services there's ULights, Belkin WeMo, Nest, Sonos,
00:18:52
◼
►
you know, I'm looking at all these other, Spotify of course, Pandora, which is also
00:18:56
◼
►
launching a new streaming service shortly by the way. So yeah, I'm very excited about
00:19:03
◼
►
this. The Kickstarter project is still, I mean, it has been funded, but there's 23 days
00:19:11
◼
►
to go and a couple of stretch goals that I want to keep an eye on, and particularly there's
00:19:17
◼
►
a HomeKit support and IFTTT support. So, one is, you know, IFTTT is 50k and HomeKit is
00:19:26
◼
►
75k. So, I don't know if it will reach those, but even without HomeKit, I think this will
00:19:32
◼
►
be very useful, especially because unlike the pop switches or the
00:19:37
◼
►
flick buttons, which are another type of product like this, it's a physical thing
00:19:41
◼
►
that you hold and you press and you do stuff around the house, this thing here
00:19:46
◼
►
has like, I think about 10 gestures for remote, so that's pretty cool, you
00:19:52
◼
►
know, that's a good return on investment, you can set up a lot of shortcuts with
00:19:57
◼
►
this. So, yeah, I'm I'm going to check it out.
00:20:01
◼
►
I backed it because I think it looks nice.
00:20:04
◼
►
Right. And also I can just see that I could have a bunch of things that I would want to
00:20:08
◼
►
do with this. I really hope that it hits the IFTTT support because of the things that I
00:20:13
◼
►
would be able to trigger with that.
00:20:14
◼
►
Like there are just just random Web services I could trigger instead of just home
00:20:19
◼
►
automation stuff. That would be very interesting to me.
00:20:23
◼
►
So yeah, I backed it because I think it looks pretty nice and it's just another thing to
00:20:28
◼
►
add to the myriad of internet connected things that are entering my home.
00:20:33
◼
►
Can I ask you a serious question, guys?
00:20:37
◼
►
So I was thinking about this a few days ago.
00:20:40
◼
►
Do you ever get the question from people that you know?
00:20:44
◼
►
And to me that is a dreaded question because I never know how to answer without getting
00:20:49
◼
►
into some kind of heated discussion.
00:20:52
◼
►
you have all of these wireless devices and all of these Bluetooth devices and someone
00:20:57
◼
►
asks you "are you not gonna get cancer from all of these electronic things around the
00:21:02
◼
►
No one's ever asked me that question.
00:21:06
◼
►
Oh man, like I was talking about the AirPods the other day.
00:21:09
◼
►
I was like "oh they're super cool, they're Bluetooth" and this person said "well you
00:21:14
◼
►
know I really don't want to get all of these things, they're gonna make you sick, all of
00:21:19
◼
►
these radios, all of these wireless devices".
00:21:21
◼
►
I was like, no they don't, you know, because there are studies and stuff like that.
00:21:27
◼
►
It seems to me like it's a thing that a lot of people fear.
00:21:33
◼
►
I don't know if it's an Italian thing maybe, but I definitely get asked about this, you
00:21:39
◼
►
know, especially for Bluetooth and wireless devices.
00:21:42
◼
►
You know, I have stuff on my nightstand, for example, the AirPods, the pop switches, I
00:21:48
◼
►
have the echo in my bedroom. So I'm surrounded by wireless radios. And some people are afraid
00:21:54
◼
►
that they're going to get sick because of those. So I just wanted to know if it's a
00:21:59
◼
►
common thing or if just my bad luck of knowing people who think this way.
00:22:03
◼
►
I think there might be a little superstition based in there, you know? Like, I've never
00:22:08
◼
►
had that, but it sounds like the type of argument that would be laced with superstition in some
00:22:14
◼
►
way, right? Where it's like these things are out to get you.
00:22:17
◼
►
Yeah, I've never had it. And if anybody asked me, I'd be like, "Well, you know, what are you gonna do?"
00:22:22
◼
►
Like, we know so little about so many things, like, what am I gonna do?
00:22:26
◼
►
Like, anything could be it. I could... My water could be making me sick for all I know.
00:22:30
◼
►
Like, I don't know.
00:22:31
◼
►
No, I mean, I'm pretty sure that your microwave gives you more radiation that, you know,
00:22:36
◼
►
I use it every day.
00:22:38
◼
►
You know, I never use it, so... I don't even have one, actually, so...
00:22:42
◼
►
Yeah, I just wanted to know if it's, you know, because every time I'm shoving around people,
00:22:47
◼
►
you know, all my wireless things and my devices. Eventually there's someone, at least one person
00:22:52
◼
►
who goes like, "Yeah, you know, these things are gonna make you sick."
00:22:55
◼
►
It's like hiding outside on the balcony.
00:22:57
◼
►
"I'm not coming in that house, there's too many radio waves."
00:23:01
◼
►
Yes, pretty much.
00:23:04
◼
►
So we'll keep an eye on that Kickstarter. I'm happy to see more of this stuff popping up.
00:23:10
◼
►
I love having my home connected to a bunch of random stuff. I've started using the Home
00:23:16
◼
►
complication on my Apple watch. It's a good way to get the lights to turn on
00:23:21
◼
►
enough. Like you just hit the little home complication and it opens up the thing.
00:23:24
◼
►
It's pretty good. Although it's really weird the way that false touch does
00:23:29
◼
►
basically nothing on the Apple watch now. You should be able to force touch so you
00:23:34
◼
►
can change the brightness but you have to hit this little button with an
00:23:37
◼
►
ellipsis on it. It doesn't make it... they totally ripped out the force touch
00:23:41
◼
►
in Watch OS 3. It just doesn't do anything anymore. Most of the times all it does is
00:23:46
◼
►
just makes the screen move. There's no features there anymore.
00:23:50
◼
►
I'm a little surprised that the Series 2 Watch kept that hardware in it, honestly.
00:23:56
◼
►
My guess is that it would slowly go away.
00:23:58
◼
►
It's very strange.
00:24:00
◼
►
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Encapsular for their support of this show and Relay FM. So Tim Cook has been on a European walkabout,
00:25:10
◼
►
spiritual walkabout, and having lots of meetings and seeing lots of art. He got an honorary
00:25:16
◼
►
doctorate, which is pretty cool. But in this walking spiritual tour, he sat down for a couple
00:25:26
◼
►
interviews, and one of these he got into AR again, which is something that he has talked about
00:25:34
◼
►
repeatedly on stage and in interviews really for like a year or 18 months now, if not even longer.
00:25:39
◼
►
this idea that augmented reality is something that he thinks is going to be
00:25:45
◼
►
a big deal. So in an interview he said this, I'm going to quote this for a second,
00:25:52
◼
►
"I regard AR as a big idea like the smartphone. The smartphone is for
00:25:57
◼
►
everyone. We don't have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic or
00:26:01
◼
►
country or vertical market. It's for everyone. I think AR is that big too. It's
00:26:07
◼
►
I get excited because of the things that could be done to improve a lot of lives and be entertaining.
00:26:12
◼
►
I view AR like I view the silicon here in my iPhone.
00:26:15
◼
►
It's not a product per se, it's a core technology.
00:26:18
◼
►
But there are things to discover before that technology is good enough for the mainstream.
00:26:22
◼
►
I do think there can be a lot of things that could really help people out in daily life.
00:26:28
◼
►
Real life things.
00:26:29
◼
►
That's why I get so excited about it.
00:26:31
◼
►
At this point it seems clear to me, I don't think clear to anyone, that Apple is spending
00:26:37
◼
►
some of that giant R&D budget on AR, right?
00:26:41
◼
►
There's a pattern to this.
00:26:42
◼
►
Tim was talking about health sensors and we got the Apple Watch.
00:26:45
◼
►
They were talking about the car being the ultimate mobile device and then, you know,
00:26:51
◼
►
rumors of Project Titan started.
00:26:53
◼
►
And this follows along in that new tradition of Apple, which is very different from the
00:27:02
◼
►
Steve Jobs Apple.
00:27:04
◼
►
But I just wonder, like, what's the end game here?
00:27:10
◼
►
To say that an idea is as big like the smartphone is a bold sentence.
00:27:15
◼
►
And even the iPad, his vision of the future of computing is not as big as the smartphone.
00:27:21
◼
►
smartphone has won and he to him is positioning AR to be next in line they
00:27:29
◼
►
take that mantle from the smartphone potentially and I just have maybe it's a
00:27:34
◼
►
lack of imagination on my part but I have a hard time seeing what this looks
00:27:37
◼
►
like as a product I think you should never say it even if you believe it
00:27:42
◼
►
never say X is gonna be as big as the smartphone don't say like that's a such
00:27:50
◼
►
a dumb thing to say because there has maybe never been something in technology as big
00:27:57
◼
►
as a smartphone. You shouldn't say this phrase. You are only setting yourself up for a problem.
00:28:06
◼
►
Is anything in the near future going to be as big as a revolution as a smartphone? I
00:28:11
◼
►
really don't see it and I think saying it, going on record saying stuff like this is
00:28:17
◼
►
a bad idea. I really don't think that Tim should be saying that. He may well believe
00:28:24
◼
►
that AR in whatever guys Apple are working on will be a big deal, but the last thing
00:28:30
◼
►
that they considered to be a really big deal was the Apple Watch. And I'm just going to
00:28:34
◼
►
say this, it's not setting the world on fire. It is a product that I'm sure Apple is very
00:28:40
◼
►
happy with. I'm sure it's selling more units and making more revenue than many companies,
00:28:46
◼
►
you know, do in a year, right? Like, I'm sure you could build an entire company around the
00:28:52
◼
►
revenue that the Apple Watch is generating.
00:28:54
◼
►
You're listing all of the reasons that we hear every time someone criticizes the Apple
00:29:02
◼
►
Watch. You're just preemptively…
00:29:04
◼
►
I'm preemptively preparing myself for that. But I agree with it. Fine. It makes sense.
00:29:12
◼
►
This is valid to say that the Apple Watch is a success. If they're selling it, they're
00:29:17
◼
►
making money from it, whatever. But it's not something like the smartphone. It's nowhere
00:29:20
◼
►
near it. And I just think that it's a silly thing to say, to make these comparisons. You
00:29:31
◼
►
You can say that, "Oh, I believe that AR is going to be the next big thing."
00:29:35
◼
►
Or, "I believe that AR is going to be the next big computer revolution."
00:29:40
◼
►
You can say these things, but you should never call the smartphone into the discussion.
00:29:45
◼
►
And I know that at this point I'm getting super, like, et-a-pin semantics.
00:29:52
◼
►
What everything Tim Cook says on record is important because he is the head of the biggest
00:29:59
◼
►
company in the world.
00:30:01
◼
►
So every phrase, every word, every sentence should in theory have been confirmed beforehand.
00:30:08
◼
►
Like he has a team of PR people that work with him to make sure that he's saying the
00:30:12
◼
►
right thing at the right time, especially when he knows he's going into interviews.
00:30:16
◼
►
And I just think this is a really weird thing to say.
00:30:19
◼
►
Yeah, but so taking this at face value.
00:30:22
◼
►
So Apple is working on an AR.
00:30:24
◼
►
What could it be?
00:30:26
◼
►
Aside from dedicated devices, which I feel like we cannot really speculate much about
00:30:31
◼
►
because it could be anything, right? It could be glasses, could be headsets, could be, you
00:30:35
◼
►
know, inside a phone, we don't know. I'm just thinking about what could be in iOS and in
00:30:41
◼
►
the system camera app, because I think if Apple's gonna do AR, they're gonna start from
00:30:46
◼
►
an obvious place. And I think the camera app is a relatable, you know, piece of software
00:30:52
◼
►
people know, people use, and I just feel like it could be interesting if some AR features are...
00:30:58
◼
►
Apple starts doing those inside of the camera, maybe inside of maps. I'm just thinking, like,
00:31:06
◼
►
imagine if... we talked about this before, but imagine like any kind of exploration feature
00:31:11
◼
►
that involves maps and the camera could show you overlays of directions. There are already apps
00:31:18
◼
►
on the app store for this. So I'm just imagining what Apple could do on iOS.
00:31:23
◼
►
Based on Tim Cook's statements it sounds like
00:31:27
◼
►
it's not gonna be like a feature of
00:31:30
◼
►
the camera or like a feature of maps. It's gonna be something more.
00:31:34
◼
►
And this is, I think, this here lies the problem.
00:31:38
◼
►
Which is, if you say it's gonna be as big as the smartphone, if you say it's gonna
00:31:44
◼
►
be, you know, for everyone,
00:31:46
◼
►
Are you talking about a feature of the iPhone or are you talking about a new product?
00:31:53
◼
►
Right? And they've been banging this drum for a couple of years now and we have seen nothing, not even an iOS feature.
00:32:03
◼
►
You know, and especially after Pokemon Go, it seems like Team Cook has been really into AR as a thing to say to journalists,
00:32:12
◼
►
but we still haven't seen anything. So I wonder if before we get some kind of AR
00:32:20
◼
►
device, if we ever gonna get some kind of AR device, I wonder if we're gonna get an
00:32:24
◼
►
AR SDK at WWDC. I think it will make a lot of sense for Apple to start laying
00:32:30
◼
►
the foundation of an AR platform by letting iOS developers build on top of
00:32:37
◼
►
the camera APIs for the iPhone with an AR SDK. So that's my theory. Too bad we already
00:32:45
◼
►
did the predictions this year. I should have added this. Is it too late to add this? It's
00:32:49
◼
►
too late to add this. Okay. Okay. Fine. I mean, you can make the prediction, but it's
00:32:52
◼
►
too late to add it to that official set of predictions.
00:32:55
◼
►
Fine. Did we bet money? I forgot. Did we bet money?
00:32:57
◼
►
We didn't. Oh, a dinner? We didn't. Ah, that's too bad.
00:32:59
◼
►
A dinner is good. A dinner. A dinner is good.
00:33:02
◼
►
In Italy, though. Not in elsewhere. We could just do it at a time when we're all going
00:33:06
◼
►
to be in the same place as opposed to like everyone has to come to Italy to have dinner
00:33:11
◼
►
Like the week of WWDC when it's actually in the news.
00:33:16
◼
►
Yeah, I tend to agree with you Federico that I think Apple is going to start by baking
00:33:24
◼
►
some of this stuff into iOS and maybe if it takes off maybe we see some sort of hardware
00:33:29
◼
►
product, but I think that coming out, you know, there was this crazy rumor at the end
00:33:34
◼
►
of the year that Apple was going to release an AR headset. I forget who was peddling that.
00:33:41
◼
►
Oh, it was Robert Scoble, I think. That's right, that's right, because I put a picture
00:33:46
◼
►
of him in his Google Glass in my 5.0 pixels post. He was saying that the phone was going
00:33:50
◼
►
to be flexible and it would wrap around your face. No, the phone was going to be transparent.
00:33:56
◼
►
Yeah, yeah, that's it, that's it. There were two rumors at two separate times. The first
00:34:02
◼
►
one was the phone was going to be see-through, a see-through iPhone. The second rumor was
00:34:06
◼
►
Apple is making with the famous brand, what is it called, Carl Zeiss, they're making these
00:34:13
◼
►
glasses that you put on your face and you see stuff. And the rumor went, "An Apple employee
00:34:20
◼
►
told me at CES..." It was like a whole story around this rumor. It was kind of amusing,
00:34:28
◼
►
Yeah. Yeah, so that seems like a big jump, right? All of a sudden, out of nowhere, magic
00:34:38
◼
►
Step one to step ten.
00:34:40
◼
►
Right. So, you know, if Apple's going to start this, it makes sense to build it into iOS,
00:34:46
◼
►
build it into the iPhone. You know, maybe it's something that only the Plus can do with
00:34:49
◼
►
its, I mean, who knows, right? It's interesting. I, you know, we all three have experienced
00:34:56
◼
►
In fact, I think, you know, we did it together and there was lots of screaming and crying
00:35:05
◼
►
That's one thing, right?
00:35:06
◼
►
This is something totally different.
00:35:07
◼
►
I have not really experienced AR in any meaningful way.
00:35:10
◼
►
I've played with a couple apps that kind of do it, but something like the HoloLens, you
00:35:13
◼
►
know, only very few people have actually experienced that.
00:35:17
◼
►
And so it's hard for me to wrap my head around this because I haven't had that firsthand
00:35:22
◼
►
I understand intellectually what it can do,
00:35:25
◼
►
but I haven't seen what that could mean in the real world.
00:35:28
◼
►
And that's what Tim Cook's quote is all about, right?
00:35:30
◼
►
I want to help people we think can help people
00:35:32
◼
►
in their real life.
00:35:35
◼
►
And that's a very Apple, very Steve Jobsian thing to say.
00:35:38
◼
►
We want to make a product, we just don't want
00:35:39
◼
►
to make technology, and that AR is part of a product.
00:35:42
◼
►
But again, part of me just sort of weirded out
00:35:46
◼
►
that Tim Cook talks about future things
00:35:48
◼
►
in these abstract ways.
00:35:50
◼
►
But I think it's definitely worth keeping an eye on,
00:35:53
◼
►
if anything, just because it seems to be
00:35:56
◼
►
what Apple thinks is next, and that they have
00:35:59
◼
►
so far set out of the VR space entirely.
00:36:03
◼
►
And I mean, they don't even have any VR mode on the iPhone,
00:36:06
◼
►
like the Pixel and these other Android phones have.
00:36:09
◼
►
That they've completely set that aside
00:36:10
◼
►
and seem to be focusing on this is very different
00:36:13
◼
►
than what other companies are doing.
00:36:15
◼
►
- Yep. - I think that's interesting
00:36:16
◼
►
just in and of itself.
00:36:17
◼
►
- It feels to me like if I was gonna maybe try
00:36:19
◼
►
put a pin in what I think he might be getting towards is something more of like an operating
00:36:24
◼
►
system which is AR based.
00:36:28
◼
►
Because he talks about it being not just a feature but like as core to the phones the
00:36:34
◼
►
silicon it feels like that at least Tim sees this as a not just a feature but like as a
00:36:42
◼
►
thing across the entire line like this is something that is going to be a big sweeping
00:36:48
◼
►
move that Apple move towards and I wonder if it is like as core as a part of the operating
00:36:54
◼
►
system or something all new right like AROS or something you know like that is its own
00:37:00
◼
►
thing that Apple are trying to develop I don't know but it I would have you know thought
00:37:05
◼
►
that oh they're just gonna add something they're gonna make an app which looks for the camera
00:37:08
◼
►
right because what we're spoken about but he seems to be like hyping it up way beyond
00:37:13
◼
►
that level. So I don't know. And again, it's like, yeah, we're pulling apart a
00:37:18
◼
►
quote that he gave, but he gave the quote for a reason. Like the quote is given to
00:37:23
◼
►
start people thinking about what he's thinking about and he's really setting
00:37:27
◼
►
this one up to be something quite important, but as of right now we don't
00:37:32
◼
►
know what that's gonna be.
00:37:35
◼
►
This week's episode is also brought to you by Blue Apron, the number one recipe
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chipotle vegetable and farro salad with avocado and crispy tortilla strips. These
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go to blueapron.com/connected and we thank them for their support of this show and Relay FM. Blue
00:39:43
◼
►
Apron, a better way to cook. I have had a song stuck in my head for about a week and a half.
00:39:52
◼
►
Can you sing it for us?
00:39:54
◼
►
[Sings the theme music]
00:39:56
◼
►
This is the theme music, the in-game music to Stagehand, which is a game that we've all been playing.
00:40:04
◼
►
Stagehand is from Big Bucket Games who are responsible for the incident and space age,
00:40:10
◼
►
which are two games that I know that we've all played and really enjoyed.
00:40:14
◼
►
Federica, you wrote a review about Stagehand. Can you explain what this game is?
00:40:21
◼
►
They call it a reverse platformer. So think about Mario games, like the
00:40:26
◼
►
the traditional ones, the 2D Mario games. You control Mario, you run and jump from
00:40:31
◼
►
left to right. You control the character. In stagehand, the character just goes
00:40:37
◼
►
automatically. He runs and jumps on his own. You control the stage. So with your
00:40:44
◼
►
finger you swipe to move the ground around the character. So you swipe to
00:40:49
◼
►
move platforms up and down and you swipe to remove obstacles that kind of come down from
00:40:56
◼
►
the "sky". So you remove these barriers and you move the platforms. And it's a very unique
00:41:03
◼
►
twist and it takes a while to get used to, especially because the game looks and almost
00:41:09
◼
►
feels like a traditional platformer game, you know, like a Mario game. There are some
00:41:14
◼
►
graphical elements that look like a Mario game, so your brain is wired to think "ok,
00:41:19
◼
►
I should control the character", but instead you must control the platforms, and the first
00:41:25
◼
►
ten minutes, I don't know if it's been the same experience for you guys, but at least
00:41:31
◼
►
for me the first ten minutes are like "what am I doing here?
00:41:34
◼
►
What is going on?
00:41:35
◼
►
This game is unplayable".
00:41:36
◼
►
Then if you stick with it, it is a surprisingly fun and strategic game, and it's the kind
00:41:43
◼
►
of game that it's only possible on the iPhone because it's only possible thanks to multi-touch
00:41:48
◼
►
and it's a very difficult game. There are problems, there are things I would have liked
00:41:54
◼
►
to see done better but I think it's in pure big-bucket style. It's a very unique iPhone
00:42:01
◼
►
only, not because of economic decisions but it can only be possible on the smartphone.
00:42:07
◼
►
It's a very unique iPhone game.
00:42:11
◼
►
You mentioned about like you kind of have to get into it and you really do because all
00:42:14
◼
►
of the instincts that you have of a game that looks this way is wrong.
00:42:19
◼
►
And I, you know, I mean, at least the way that I play eventually is I stopped paying
00:42:23
◼
►
attention to the character very much and kind of just look at the path that I know I'm creating.
00:42:28
◼
►
It's a very different way to play these types of games, which I think makes this so fun
00:42:31
◼
►
because it's, it breaks the convention and it's, it makes it weird and fun in its own
00:42:38
◼
►
way, but it does make it hard to come to initially.
00:42:43
◼
►
But I would say give it some time, because when you lock into it, it's awesome.
00:42:48
◼
►
This is such a fun little game.
00:42:50
◼
►
It's one of the nicest iOS games that I've played in a while, because it's doing something
00:42:57
◼
►
that we talk about a lot, which is it's playing to the strengths of the device that it's sitting
00:43:04
◼
►
You can only really make a game like this when there's a touchscreen in front of you.
00:43:09
◼
►
Because trying to do something like this with a controller would be really difficult and
00:43:12
◼
►
it would be a lot more like you would only be able to move one thing at a time.
00:43:16
◼
►
But with stagehand you can move multiple things at a time.
00:43:20
◼
►
You know like I might be pushing up one level to make sure the platform's raised and also
00:43:24
◼
►
raising like something over there so he's got a clear path.
00:43:29
◼
►
And it's really nice to play on all devices in different ways.
00:43:32
◼
►
Like I can play it really easily on my iPhone because I have the whole thing in my hand
00:43:36
◼
►
right there and I can basically get everything with one finger.
00:43:39
◼
►
But when I'm playing with my iPad I use two hands and I'm moving stuff all over the place.
00:43:43
◼
►
It is a great game.
00:43:44
◼
►
I've also put a link in the show notes to a blog post that Cable Sasser wrote.
00:43:49
◼
►
Cable wrote the theme music that's been in my head constantly and it's a really lovely
00:43:55
◼
►
post which kind of goes through the creative process and Cable has included like all of
00:43:59
◼
►
demos that he was creating of the music and it's fun and in a way for me kind of heartwarming
00:44:05
◼
►
to see the way that somebody would create something like a piece of music like this
00:44:08
◼
►
to go from humming it into music memos, we found the person that used music memos by
00:44:13
◼
►
the way, all the way up to like having people playing trumpets in a music studio.
00:44:20
◼
►
Yes, and that was amazing.
00:44:21
◼
►
It's a really like, in a way like I kind of get like choked up reading it and looking
00:44:28
◼
►
at all of the videos and stuff. I just want to say anything the cable does
00:44:32
◼
►
feels heartwarming to me. Because he's the nicest person on the planet.
00:44:36
◼
►
There's something about cable that feels like my mother's hug, you know? It's like it makes
00:44:42
◼
►
me feel nice. If you've never seen Cable's talk at the XOXO
00:44:48
◼
►
festival in 2013, you should watch it. I was there and I cried and it's amazing. It's a
00:44:55
◼
►
a very very good talk about kind of burnout and stuff like that so I recommend going and
00:44:59
◼
►
watching that but yeah I really like stagehand. How much is it Federico?
00:45:05
◼
►
You know I don't even know. Let me go take a look. I'm going to this website called
00:45:13
◼
►
Max stories to see if I can get the price from there.
00:45:16
◼
►
There's no price in my review because I don't put in.
00:45:20
◼
►
Okay. I tend not to put in prices anymore. Why is that?
00:45:24
◼
►
Because I feel like if something has value, you're gonna read the review and you're gonna
00:45:29
◼
►
make up your own mind.
00:45:30
◼
►
And then you're gonna open the app store and see and compare to what I wrote versus the
00:45:36
◼
►
actual price and your thoughts.
00:45:38
◼
►
I feel like putting prices in the review, it kinda... it doesn't put you in the right
00:45:47
◼
►
mood to read the rest of the story.
00:45:50
◼
►
Very philosophical.
00:45:51
◼
►
Because you're just gonna focus on the price.
00:45:54
◼
►
that I want people to think when they're rating. Same with ratings. I have a whole set of weird
00:46:00
◼
►
opinions about prices and ratings. Not the best time to talk about them, but that's what
00:46:06
◼
►
I do. Yeah. Anyway, two dollars. So go get it. It's a great game.
00:46:12
◼
►
Steven, you've been creating your own game of sorts, I think, over the last few days.
00:46:19
◼
►
of sorrow. No, is that a new TV series? So Instapaper starting on February 8th had a
00:46:30
◼
►
extended outage and there's two links in the show notes, one to their blog post and then
00:46:35
◼
►
one to a post written by Brian Donahue who is the lead developer on Instapaper and has
00:46:46
◼
►
been for a while now. And basically what happened, it's not super important for our conversation,
00:46:51
◼
►
their database filled up. There was some information that Brian, his team didn't have, coupled
00:46:58
◼
►
with Amazon's kind of apparently poor reporting of this error led to Instapaper basically
00:47:03
◼
►
filling up its database and needing to be migrated. It was down for like 31 hours. It
00:47:09
◼
►
came back up as of today, February 14th. Instapaper has given us all a Valentine's Day present
00:47:14
◼
►
of our complete archives again. There was no data loss. It was just down for a long
00:47:18
◼
►
time and slow to recover. And anytime this sort of thing happens, I get nervous. You
00:47:25
◼
►
know, I have a lot of data in Instapaper. I've been using it since day one. Like I remember
00:47:30
◼
►
whenever it was, you know, it was like the first day of the App Store a couple days,
00:47:34
◼
►
Marco had it out. I didn't know Marco then, but I wanted something like Instapaper. It
00:47:39
◼
►
fit a need that I had and it's been in the same slot on my home screen ever
00:47:44
◼
►
since, like forever. And I got nervous, you know, it's been through a couple
00:47:49
◼
►
changes of hands. He sold it to Betaworks, Pinterest bought it last year, and I was
00:47:56
◼
►
like, you know, maybe it's time to just explore what else is out there. And this comes on
00:48:00
◼
►
the heels of, Federico, you talking about Safari reading list. We've talked about that,
00:48:04
◼
►
the three of us. I use Chrome on the Mac. Safari just doesn't work with
00:48:09
◼
►
some of the stuff I need to do online so I just use Chrome for everything.
00:48:13
◼
►
Safari reading list is not really an option for me. I don't want to bounce around between
00:48:17
◼
►
browsers. So I spent some time looking at Pocket. I have the same problems with Pocket.
00:48:23
◼
►
I've always had. I don't care for the design. The reading experience isn't
00:48:26
◼
►
nearly as nice as Instapaper. Although it has improved, it used to be that text was
00:48:30
◼
►
always fully justified, which is I hate reading. The fonts used to be really poor.
00:48:34
◼
►
They have improved it greatly, but I still don't really care for some of the aesthetic choices.
00:48:41
◼
►
And so I spent some time looking at Pinboard.
00:48:45
◼
►
Again, I've paid for Pinboard forever.
00:48:47
◼
►
Pinboard, you can save bookmarks basically online.
00:48:51
◼
►
I pay for the full text search.
00:48:53
◼
►
So if I'm researching something or I know I'm going to write an article in the future about something,
00:48:57
◼
►
I'll just send a bunch of stuff to Pinboard and then search for it there later, which is really nice.
00:49:00
◼
►
and because it caches that content,
00:49:03
◼
►
it's easy to find later.
00:49:06
◼
►
And Pinboard, you have a bunch of different
00:49:08
◼
►
kind of privacy options.
00:49:09
◼
►
My account is set to like full private mode
00:49:11
◼
►
so you can't follow me on Pinboard,
00:49:13
◼
►
you can't see what I send there.
00:49:15
◼
►
I've chosen that way, I don't wanna use Pinboard
00:49:18
◼
►
as like a social thing.
00:49:20
◼
►
Which Pocket, by the way, has turned into a social thing,
00:49:23
◼
►
which I hate, like I don't want social stuff
00:49:26
◼
►
in my reader later, so I'm gonna send stuff there,
00:49:28
◼
►
it when I get a chance and then archive it. So my problem I ran into with
00:49:34
◼
►
Pinboard it's easy to send stuff to Pinboard and mark it as read later
00:49:39
◼
►
and so in the Pinboard web on the website there's a tag for read later you
00:49:44
◼
►
can drill right down to it and see everything you've saved. The issue I ran into
00:49:49
◼
►
is iOS apps and so it's easy to send stuff to Pinboard. I looked at several
00:49:56
◼
►
different pinboard clients on iOS the big two that were Pinner and Pushpin a
00:50:03
◼
►
couple others like PinSwift and there's a couple others. There's a real trend in
00:50:06
◼
►
the naming of these. Yeah there should be there should someone should make an app
00:50:11
◼
►
for Pinbird and call it Pinpin I feel like it would be really fun. Just pin
00:50:15
◼
►
Pinboard board for the pinboard. So it's easy to send stuff to Pinboard you can
00:50:25
◼
►
do it with Automator or not Automator, geez, with Workflow.
00:50:31
◼
►
- He's showing his colors.
00:50:33
◼
►
- A little bit.
00:50:34
◼
►
- You can do it with AppleScript.
00:50:35
◼
►
- Yeah, you can do it with a shell script on your iPhone.
00:50:39
◼
►
You can do it with Workflow, just how I was doing it.
00:50:42
◼
►
These apps all have little extensions
00:50:45
◼
►
and you can send stuff to them.
00:50:46
◼
►
The problem I'm having is that all of these apps
00:50:49
◼
►
that I tried, all three or four of them,
00:50:51
◼
►
are really problematic when it comes to syncing
00:50:55
◼
►
with Pinboard, and I think there's two reasons.
00:50:57
◼
►
One, like most of these apps aren't
00:50:58
◼
►
in super active development.
00:51:00
◼
►
In fact, one on Twitter basically was like,
00:51:02
◼
►
yeah, there's some giant bugs, but I can't fix it
00:51:04
◼
►
'cause there's no money in it.
00:51:05
◼
►
I understand, I'm sorry if you're in that situation
00:51:07
◼
►
as a developer, that stinks.
00:51:09
◼
►
But I need an app that works at the same time.
00:51:13
◼
►
But because all of them really struggle
00:51:14
◼
►
to stay in sync with Pinboard,
00:51:15
◼
►
I think part of it is on Pinboard, maybe it's their API.
00:51:18
◼
►
Maybe it's the fact that I have like 25,000 things
00:51:20
◼
►
in Pinboard, maybe it's just too much data.
00:51:23
◼
►
But they don't sync very reliably.
00:51:24
◼
►
So I would send something to Pinboard via workflow.
00:51:28
◼
►
So the Pinboard website would have it like instantly,
00:51:31
◼
►
but these apps would time out.
00:51:32
◼
►
They wouldn't sync, they'd sync incorrect data.
00:51:35
◼
►
And it was just a big nightmare.
00:51:37
◼
►
This should be something that works very well.
00:51:41
◼
►
Like Instapaper Sync works great.
00:51:43
◼
►
Pocket Sync works great.
00:51:44
◼
►
Pinboard apps don't.
00:51:46
◼
►
That doesn't really solve my problem.
00:51:48
◼
►
Pinboard does have a mobile website,
00:51:52
◼
►
but when you pin it to your home screen,
00:51:55
◼
►
it breaks their login authentication.
00:51:58
◼
►
So you try to log in and like the mobile web app,
00:52:02
◼
►
you know, it's on your home screen
00:52:03
◼
►
and it kicks you to mobile Safari
00:52:05
◼
►
and then it won't let you log in.
00:52:06
◼
►
So there's nothing broken there too.
00:52:08
◼
►
So I just gave up and went back to Instapaper.
00:52:11
◼
►
Mainly because Brian's post is so open
00:52:15
◼
►
and so honest about what happened
00:52:17
◼
►
and he takes, I mean, and like takes response.
00:52:20
◼
►
And we've interacted a little bit,
00:52:21
◼
►
I don't know if you know who I am,
00:52:22
◼
►
but we've interacted a little bit on Twitter over the years
00:52:24
◼
►
and he took responsibility for it.
00:52:26
◼
►
He's open and honest saying they screwed up.
00:52:29
◼
►
What happened?
00:52:30
◼
►
They didn't need to go into this detail, but they did.
00:52:32
◼
►
And that makes me feel better.
00:52:35
◼
►
The outage is really bad and no doubt Brian and his team
00:52:37
◼
►
had a terrible week last week.
00:52:39
◼
►
Comments like mine on Twitter didn't help.
00:52:41
◼
►
I was upset.
00:52:42
◼
►
But they were open and honest about it.
00:52:44
◼
►
And they were, I think he's extremely humble in his writing
00:52:48
◼
►
that what went wrong, the buck stops with him
00:52:50
◼
►
as the lead on this, and I think that's great.
00:52:54
◼
►
And for me, that's enough to understand
00:52:58
◼
►
that this is a thing, that they are putting
00:53:00
◼
►
new processes in place, and that clearly Pinterest
00:53:03
◼
►
still cares about the product because they worked
00:53:06
◼
►
really hard to get it fixed, and got it fixed faster
00:53:08
◼
►
than they said they would, and then Brian goes
00:53:10
◼
►
and writes this thing.
00:53:10
◼
►
And so all of that together makes me feel better
00:53:13
◼
►
about the outage, and makes me feel more confident
00:53:17
◼
►
in the service moving forward.
00:53:19
◼
►
So for me, I'm not changing.
00:53:21
◼
►
It was interesting to go spend some time
00:53:23
◼
►
with these other services over the weekend.
00:53:26
◼
►
I kinda wish the pinboard thing worked better
00:53:27
◼
►
because I already have a lot of stuff there.
00:53:29
◼
►
It'd be nice to consolidate a little bit.
00:53:31
◼
►
But if you have an outage,
00:53:33
◼
►
if you have some sort of service disruption,
00:53:36
◼
►
I think the way Incepaper handled it,
00:53:39
◼
►
they were slow at first to explain what was going on,
00:53:41
◼
►
but on the back end, they did a really good job.
00:53:43
◼
►
And I think that that's a really good case study.
00:53:45
◼
►
If you run a service or run a website or anything
00:53:48
◼
►
people depend on and you have a big
00:53:50
◼
►
outage, this is how you should handle it.
00:53:53
◼
►
You should be open, you should be honest.
00:53:55
◼
►
I'm sure it's uncomfortable, right? I'm sure
00:53:56
◼
►
Brian didn't love writing that, but I'm
00:53:59
◼
►
glad that he did and because of it I
00:54:01
◼
►
trust him and I trust that they are
00:54:03
◼
►
going to make sure this sort of thing
00:54:05
◼
►
doesn't happen again. But even if you
00:54:08
◼
►
didn't, you kind of seem a little bit
00:54:10
◼
►
stuck because nothing gives you what you wanted.
00:54:12
◼
►
Okay, honestly, I mean, and honestly what I
00:54:14
◼
►
would probably do is like just use
00:54:16
◼
►
use Pinboard and just log in through Mobile Safari and be done with it.
00:54:19
◼
►
But I like Instapaper.
00:54:21
◼
►
It still provides value to me in my workflow.
00:54:25
◼
►
I use Instapaper as a holding place for reading and for things I want to link to.
00:54:29
◼
►
And so it's been part of that workflow for a long, long time.
00:54:34
◼
►
And I'm glad that I don't have to change it.
00:54:35
◼
►
You should just stop printing stuff.
00:54:39
◼
►
Just print everything.
00:54:42
◼
►
So 500 pixels has a newsletter.
00:54:44
◼
►
I never use it.
00:54:45
◼
►
but I thought about resurrecting it.
00:54:46
◼
►
But what if I resurrected it as an actual newsletter?
00:54:49
◼
►
Like, instead of an email newsletter,
00:54:51
◼
►
I just mail out like a three page newsletter
00:54:53
◼
►
to everybody once a month.
00:54:55
◼
►
- Just articles you wanna read.
00:54:57
◼
►
That's all it is.
00:54:58
◼
►
So you just print them out on the printer
00:55:00
◼
►
and then you pick them up and then you photocopy them
00:55:01
◼
►
and just send them out to everybody.
00:55:03
◼
►
- Yeah, so you don't have to wait for me to link to it.
00:55:04
◼
►
You just wait for the mailman to bring it to you.
00:55:07
◼
►
This is gold.
00:55:08
◼
►
- These are all the things I was kind of interested in.
00:55:10
◼
►
Maybe you can read them and if you are, great.
00:55:12
◼
►
- Yeah, and when you're done,
00:55:13
◼
►
can use this paper to uh you know start a campfire or something. That's a weird use of the paper.
00:55:18
◼
►
I don't know. Okay camping on the mind. Why why why do you have camping on the mind? Because we're
00:55:24
◼
►
doing like we're playing okay we're really off topic now we're playing this like spring break
00:55:28
◼
►
thing with my wife's family we go camping but uh. Federico have you ever been camping?
00:55:33
◼
►
He does it every summer. It's it's not traditional camping it's what the Americans call glamping.
00:55:39
◼
►
It's hipster camping.
00:55:41
◼
►
It's... I also think we're gonna sell it.
00:55:44
◼
►
The glamping house.
00:55:47
◼
►
Not sure yet.
00:55:49
◼
►
We don't go there quite often anymore.
00:55:52
◼
►
But I never did. I cannot do camping. What am I, an animal?
00:55:56
◼
►
You know, live in the woods with tents?
00:55:58
◼
►
You've never slept in a tent.
00:56:00
◼
►
Why would I?
00:56:01
◼
►
Yeah. Music festivals. That's the only time.
00:56:04
◼
►
I did. That's a good point.
00:56:06
◼
►
I did sleep when I was 19 right after graduating high school.
00:56:10
◼
►
We went on a, you know, a graduation trip with my friends.
00:56:14
◼
►
We went to the Benny Cassie music festival. I slept in a tent for nine days.
00:56:19
◼
►
We, two of my closest friends,
00:56:24
◼
►
and it was awful, but we were 19 and we were drunk most of the time.
00:56:28
◼
►
So that was okay. But as an adult, as an adult,
00:56:36
◼
►
As an adult, I've never slept in a tent, nor do I intend to, because I don't see the appeal.
00:56:43
◼
►
It's like those people, it's like they have these crazy hobbies, and they're like, "Oh,
00:56:47
◼
►
do you want to go walking with us in the woods? Why would I? Am I like a Peregrine going on
00:56:52
◼
►
some kind of, you know, I just don't, some kind of walk?" Like these people have some
00:56:58
◼
►
crazy hobbies. It's like I'm comfortable in my city, my house, with my shoes and my car.
00:57:03
◼
►
It's like, why would I go somewhere in the wilderness just because it's a crazy hobby?
00:57:09
◼
►
I mean, I get all that, and I'm not like a hardcore camper.
00:57:13
◼
►
I've been like once in like the last decade.
00:57:14
◼
►
We're gonna go for spring break with the kids, it'll be fun.
00:57:18
◼
►
But it is nice, I cannot believe we're talking about this, it's nice to just break away and
00:57:22
◼
►
like leave all that stuff behind for a weekend.
00:57:24
◼
►
Is it though?
00:57:25
◼
►
Is it though?
00:57:29
◼
►
Every once in a while.
00:57:30
◼
►
Every once in a while.
00:57:31
◼
►
Well, I was in a place, I was in the Alps for New Year and there was no internet. So
00:57:38
◼
►
the first couple of days I was like, okay, I feel like a hippie. There's no internet.
00:57:41
◼
►
It's cool. I'm liberating myself. I'm cleansing right now. This is great. After a couple of
00:57:47
◼
►
days it was awful because any basic human activity was cut off because we couldn't look
00:57:55
◼
►
it up on the internet. It's like, okay, I need to find a doctor. Where do I look? Oh,
00:58:01
◼
►
need to go to the civic billboard. Jesus, I need to go down to the municipal office to
00:58:10
◼
►
look up what the doctor is. It's like, I'm living in a medieval age right now. Just let
00:58:17
◼
►
me go on the internet. It's like, this sucks, this is terrible, I'm never coming back.
00:58:25
◼
►
I expected the answer no. That was all I expected. Do you like camping Puerto Rico? No I don't.
00:58:33
◼
►
Let's move on. I did. Oh my god the civic billboard. Oh dear oh dear. I don't like camping.
00:58:42
◼
►
Never have. Never found it comfortable. It doesn't matter what I do, it's never comfortable
00:58:46
◼
►
for me. I hate camping. I don't like tents, I don't like sleeping bags. It's just not
00:58:51
◼
►
thing that I enjoy. But that's cool, Steven, that's great that you're doing it. I'm glad
00:58:56
◼
►
that you enjoy it. I'm happy that you can do it, you know? I'm happy. Me and Myke, we're
00:59:01
◼
►
just gonna hug, we're just gonna talk on Skype in our sleepers, it's fine. You can go camping,
00:59:08
◼
►
we will be CT-ing. That's what we're gonna do. Yep. Okay. Myke, can you just take over
00:59:16
◼
►
from here. Yes, I will try and wrestle control of the show back. This episode is brought
00:59:22
◼
►
to you by Squarespace and to the offer code world at checkout to get 10% off your first
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camping supplies. Maybe you want to create a portfolio of photography that you've taken
00:59:44
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Make your next move, make your next website.
01:00:49
◼
►
So yesterday evening, the trailer dropped for Planet of the Apps.
01:00:55
◼
►
In case you do not remember what this is, this is the reality TV show that
01:01:01
◼
►
Apple are working, well, that a company and Apple are working,
01:01:06
◼
►
the production company Apple working together to make.
01:01:08
◼
►
It's going to be an Apple Music.
01:01:10
◼
►
Eddy Cue was at the Code Conference yesterday.
01:01:13
◼
►
He had an interview. We'll put some links in the show notes if you want to go check it out.
01:01:16
◼
►
But I think that probably the biggest thing that came out of this, the thing that we want to talk about,
01:01:19
◼
►
is the trailer for Planet of the Apps.
01:01:21
◼
►
So in case you haven't seen it, let me kind of walk through some of it with you.
01:01:24
◼
►
It is very much as we assumed many, many weeks ago.
01:01:28
◼
►
This is basically Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, but for applications.
01:01:33
◼
►
As a panel of judges, so the people that we've heard about, we weren't really sure what their roles were.
01:01:38
◼
►
Will.I.Am, Jessica Alba, Gary Vaynerchuk and Gwyneth Paltrow.
01:01:41
◼
►
They are judges as well as like,
01:01:44
◼
►
I can't remember the exact word that they used, but they're kind of people.
01:01:48
◼
►
They're advisors. That's what they use.
01:01:50
◼
►
So what happens is they're all sitting in chairs
01:01:53
◼
►
and someone comes out and they get on an escalator,
01:01:58
◼
►
which takes 60 seconds to reach the bottom of the floor.
01:02:00
◼
►
And on the when they're on the escalator, they give their elevator pitch.
01:02:05
◼
►
They kind of messed that up a little bit.
01:02:07
◼
►
Like, I know what they're trying to do, and I actually think that that's a fun visual,
01:02:18
◼
►
Like, yes, and it adds tension, right?
01:02:21
◼
►
Because as you're giving your pitch, you're getting closer to the bottom.
01:02:24
◼
►
Like, I can see it.
01:02:26
◼
►
You're literally sinking into the floor the longer you talk.
01:02:29
◼
►
It's like, I know what…
01:02:30
◼
►
You're descending into hell as you talk.
01:02:32
◼
►
I can see how this went, right?
01:02:34
◼
►
There was a meeting at the production staff and they're like, "People are going to get
01:02:37
◼
►
their elevator pitches.
01:02:39
◼
►
What if we put it in an elevator?"
01:02:40
◼
►
Then they consulted somebody who makes sets and they're like, "If you want an elevator
01:02:45
◼
►
that's constantly in motion that takes 60 seconds to move down, the set needs to be
01:02:49
◼
►
150 feet high.
01:02:51
◼
►
It's not going to work."
01:02:52
◼
►
So they created an escalator.
01:02:56
◼
►
So, as they're going down the escalator, they get their pitches.
01:03:00
◼
►
If anybody's interested in the pitch, then they'll say, so one of the advisors will say
01:03:03
◼
►
they're interested. There's then a bit of back and forth between the advisor and the
01:03:07
◼
►
person who's making the pitch. And then this person, the contestant, chooses the advisor
01:03:13
◼
►
that they want to work with. Right. So they show one of the examples of shows there is
01:03:17
◼
►
somebody that both Gary Vaynerchuk and Will.I.Am want to work with and the person chooses Will.I.Am
01:03:22
◼
►
and Will.I.Am because of a joke about his shoes. Then after they've chosen the advisors,
01:03:27
◼
►
this is like stage one of the show and all of the advisors and they've all got their
01:03:32
◼
►
people are all paired up with the companies that they're going to work with. They will
01:03:35
◼
►
kind of take them through the process of making the application. They're going to work with
01:03:39
◼
►
outside successful companies. They call out Uber and Yelp as a couple of companies there.
01:03:44
◼
►
And I guess they will take it from idea to something that they can show. Once they've
01:03:49
◼
►
got that, they go back into the pitch room, but this time they're pitching to a VC firm,
01:03:54
◼
►
Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is such a great name for a company, by the way. Lightspeed
01:03:58
◼
►
adventure partners. I love the name of that. That's so it sounds so fancy.
01:04:02
◼
►
Okay. I like it. This is where they start digging into the like the nitty gritty of it. And if the
01:04:09
◼
►
and then basically the winners of the people that get investment from this company to help them
01:04:15
◼
►
build their applications. And then Apple will also be featuring these apps on the App Store.
01:04:22
◼
►
Okay, right now on the internet today on Twitter I have seen a lot of people saying that they
01:04:29
◼
►
think that this show looks ridiculous and they're really upset about it. I think I'm
01:04:34
◼
►
going to enjoy this show.
01:04:36
◼
►
Oh, okay, I agree with Myke. Okay, I was not expecting this. All right, go on.
01:04:42
◼
►
This is a reality TV show. I can see that and just from everything that's in there,
01:04:48
◼
►
it's going to be awkward, there's going to be a lot of really dramatic music and people
01:04:51
◼
►
looking at each other when there's no need. There's going to be all of this.
01:04:54
◼
►
Slow-mo. Yeah, for sure. Okay.
01:04:56
◼
►
But I actually tend to enjoy these sort of shows. Like I like Dragon's Den. It's called
01:05:02
◼
►
Shark Tank. It's basically the same idea. People come and pitch stuff because I like
01:05:06
◼
►
the fact that there's business to it. And just from the trailer, like you can see, especially
01:05:10
◼
►
when they're in the VC part, there's a lot of business terms being thrown around. And
01:05:14
◼
►
I actually find that stuff kind of interesting to see people talk about their businesses
01:05:18
◼
►
a way to try and convince somebody that they're a good idea. Plus, I like applications. And
01:05:24
◼
►
this is about apps. There are a couple of people in it that I think are kind of interesting.
01:05:28
◼
►
I'm really pleased that Gary Vaynerchuk is going to be one of the advisors because we
01:05:33
◼
►
spoke about this. Like, he is the person that maybe has the closest tie to the type of stuff
01:05:37
◼
►
that we're interested in, right? Like, he is of the internet. And then, well, I am Jessica
01:05:43
◼
►
Alber and Gwyneth Paltrow. Like, they are celebrities that are known for other things,
01:05:47
◼
►
But they also do all own their own companies that make products, right?
01:05:51
◼
►
They have brands.
01:05:53
◼
►
They are people that know business.
01:05:57
◼
►
So I'm fine.
01:05:59
◼
►
I was just looking it up.
01:06:01
◼
►
I knew that Gwyneth Paltrow had her own company.
01:06:03
◼
►
And then I looked up Jessica Alba.
01:06:05
◼
►
She has her own company.
01:06:06
◼
►
Like, I'm fine with that.
01:06:07
◼
►
These are people that they know the businesses that they know.
01:06:10
◼
►
And I mean, everybody knows what they like from applications these days.
01:06:14
◼
►
There are so many jokes like, "Oh, is Gwyneth Paltrow going to teach you about code
01:06:17
◼
►
commits? No, it's not about that, right? Like, I have no time for this type of thing. They
01:06:22
◼
►
are business advisors helping people try to understand their businesses. I am interested
01:06:27
◼
►
in seeing how this show will unfold. I saw the trailer and was like, there is so much
01:06:33
◼
►
cheese in this. I can deal with all of that. I think it's going to be fun.
01:06:38
◼
►
I have, if you allow me, I have a couple of opening statements that I just feel I want
01:06:43
◼
►
get out of the way. So like both of you, we're really busy, I think we work very much. And
01:06:53
◼
►
when it comes, you know, the end of the day, I like to relax with crappy television. It
01:06:59
◼
►
just, I like to unplug and watch something stupid. And I watch comedies, I watch The
01:07:06
◼
►
Big Brother, I watch anything crappy that doesn't make me think. Because it makes me
01:07:12
◼
►
and I worry about the business, I worry about managing a team all day.
01:07:19
◼
►
When it comes, after dinner, I just want to unwind, I just want to unplug, and I watch stupid stuff.
01:07:25
◼
►
That said, I saw a lot of people on Twitter, especially of course, complaining about how this doesn't reflect reality.
01:07:37
◼
►
I honestly don't know what these people were expecting.
01:07:40
◼
►
I mean, were you expecting Apple to explain the concept of apps to people using, I don't know, an Xcode crash course?
01:07:49
◼
►
Or were these people expecting Apple to invite people to WWDC?
01:07:54
◼
►
See, there's a fundamental problem right now, which is a lot of people have no, zero idea what making an app looks like.
01:08:02
◼
►
looks like. We talked about this a long time ago when we discussed how for a lot
01:08:07
◼
►
of people any developer works for Apple. People have no idea where apps come from.
01:08:12
◼
►
So from my perspective, any explanation of the process, even if it's a Hollywood
01:08:19
◼
►
defied watered-down version of that story, can help change the perception of
01:08:26
◼
►
people. And we saw that with startups, right? We have Shark Tank in Italy. I'm
01:08:32
◼
►
I'm not sure what it's called, probably Shark Tank, because we don't change titles.
01:08:35
◼
►
We're not clever enough.
01:08:37
◼
►
But it helps people understand what launching a startup is.
01:08:43
◼
►
And I feel like even if they're not talking about Xcode, they're not talking about code
01:08:49
◼
►
signing, this is not a documentary.
01:08:52
◼
►
Apple is not making a documentary for the National Geographic but about developers instead
01:08:57
◼
►
making a reality TV show and that can help people understand the basics, the very basics of the
01:09:04
◼
►
process in a very television easy consumer format. And I feel like saying "well this doesn't help
01:09:12
◼
►
app discovery" or "well you know they should talk about the developer website". It misses the point
01:09:18
◼
►
entirely. What Apple wants to do here is reality television because people watch it and those people
01:09:25
◼
►
watch it, whether you like it or not. It's millions of people who are not
01:09:29
◼
►
developers, millions of people who have no idea what making apps look like,
01:09:33
◼
►
but also people like me who just for once want to watch something stupid. Not
01:09:38
◼
►
stupid in the sense that it's gonna, you know, set my brain on fire or
01:09:43
◼
►
it's gonna, you know, make me stupid, but stupid in the sense of easy, I don't need
01:09:49
◼
►
think about it. It's probably very dramatized as a story. It's, you know, there's slow motion
01:09:56
◼
►
and epic music. Stupid in the sense of it's not deeply fundamentally intellectual. And, you know,
01:10:06
◼
►
I don't think making a show, a technical show about, oh, okay, in this week's episode of
01:10:11
◼
►
Planning of the Apps, we're gonna talk about code signing universal binaries. Okay, people are gonna
01:10:16
◼
►
understand the App Store for sure, if you do that.
01:10:19
◼
►
So I think it's gonna be in many, many parts awful.
01:10:24
◼
►
It's gonna be super dramatized.
01:10:26
◼
►
There's going to be slow motions, music,
01:10:29
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will.i.am cracking bad jokes,
01:10:31
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such as developers are the rock stars of right now.
01:10:34
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I mean, seriously, it's gonna be terrible in that sense.
01:10:37
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But also if it helps people understand
01:10:41
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►
that developers, point one, don't work for Apple,
01:10:44
◼
►
and two, anyone can become one, I'm gonna call that a victory, because right now we're at zero.
01:10:51
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►
And so even if people understand the very basics, I'm gonna say, "Alright, that's better."
01:10:56
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►
Steven, I expect you are not keen on this.
01:11:01
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►
I'm not, but not for all the nerd angst reasons.
01:11:06
◼
►
Like, I just don't like this kind of television in any genre.
01:11:09
◼
►
- That's perfectly acceptable, because it is terrible, right? - That's fine, yeah.
01:11:12
◼
►
Like there are a lot of things to not like about these sort of shows
01:11:14
◼
►
But if you can accept them like I think this looks like it's gonna be done quite well like the budget looks pretty high
01:11:21
◼
►
I've no doubt like it looks super polished and the year they've got in the eddy-q interview
01:11:27
◼
►
They talk about the history of the TV show like it was pitched to
01:11:29
◼
►
I'm gonna use air quotes regular television people and they were all interested like it looks like it's me really well done
01:11:36
◼
►
It's not it's not like you know me in my office with like a single camera talking about Mac books
01:11:43
◼
►
My thing is I just don't care for this sort of programming
01:11:46
◼
►
but I agree with both of you that like
01:11:49
◼
►
It's fine that's not gonna be nerdy like can you imagine like, you know, there's some like guy crying on the floor as he learns about
01:11:56
◼
►
sandboxing like
01:11:59
◼
►
Like this stuff is gonna happen
01:12:02
◼
►
They're just not maybe not gonna show all of it
01:12:04
◼
►
Like I expect that there will be some things that will be relatable like that
01:12:07
◼
►
they'll try to explain because there has to be some drama there.
01:12:11
◼
►
Like, I don't know what it's going to look like, but like, I think it's going to be really
01:12:14
◼
►
interesting as well.
01:12:16
◼
►
Like the people that observe Apple to see how they want this story to be told.
01:12:22
◼
►
Like, what do Apple want to say about how apps are made?
01:12:26
◼
►
Like that sort of stuff is very interesting to me.
01:12:30
◼
►
And like looking at how these apps are going to be promoted, like, are they going to be
01:12:33
◼
►
like beta applications?
01:12:34
◼
►
Because they're going to be, I assume, being made as the show's going on, but they're going
01:12:38
◼
►
to be in the app store.
01:12:39
◼
►
Like, I'm just interested to see how this is going to unfold.
01:12:44
◼
►
I mean, all this has already been done.
01:12:49
◼
►
They're in post-production, I would assume, at this point.
01:12:52
◼
►
But that is interesting, you know, the app store component.
01:12:55
◼
►
So one of the prizes, I guess if you will, is having your app in some sort of new featured
01:13:03
◼
►
section in the App Store, which is definitely a step beyond Apple's normal editorial control
01:13:10
◼
►
on the App Store.
01:13:11
◼
►
I think some people see this like, "Oh my God, why would Apple do this?"
01:13:14
◼
►
Apple promotes stuff all the time in the App Store.
01:13:15
◼
►
There's a whole department of people who work on editorial in all the App Stores.
01:13:20
◼
►
And there's going to be a new section in there as far as we can tell.
01:13:26
◼
►
That is interesting to me because it is a step beyond what Apple has normally done.
01:13:31
◼
►
And I saw some people on Twitter complaining that I felt slimy or kind of weird.
01:13:35
◼
►
And I understand that point of view and I don't totally disagree with it.
01:13:40
◼
►
There is some weirdness there, but it's not like they're going to stop all their other
01:13:46
◼
►
editorial initiatives.
01:13:47
◼
►
It's just going to be something in addition to it in parallel with that other stuff.
01:13:52
◼
►
And so I understand that point of view, but at the end of the day, I kind of, whatever.
01:13:57
◼
►
whatever, Apple can do what they want
01:14:00
◼
►
with that editorial power.
01:14:01
◼
►
I think at the heart of a lot of this sort of angst
01:14:06
◼
►
that we're seeing is, Myke, you said it,
01:14:09
◼
►
what sort of stories Apple wanna tell about making apps,
01:14:13
◼
►
and I think that the process of pitching to a VC,
01:14:19
◼
►
having sort of a celebrity VC,
01:14:23
◼
►
that is how a lot of apps get made,
01:14:26
◼
►
A lot of apps are back like that.
01:14:28
◼
►
But a lot of apps aren't.
01:14:29
◼
►
And I think the people who are responding to this
01:14:32
◼
►
kind of in a knee-jerk way are people who are like us.
01:14:36
◼
►
The three of us, we all own media companies.
01:14:41
◼
►
We're all successful in our careers.
01:14:43
◼
►
And we're all independent.
01:14:44
◼
►
And we've done that taking no money from anybody else.
01:14:47
◼
►
You started Max Stories, Federico, with your own money.
01:14:51
◼
►
Relay was started, Myke and I poured our life savings
01:14:54
◼
►
that is very different from this world
01:14:58
◼
►
that they are portraying.
01:14:59
◼
►
However fake it may be or however real it may be aside,
01:15:02
◼
►
it's just a different world.
01:15:03
◼
►
And I think some people are just
01:15:04
◼
►
sort of uncomfortable with that.
01:15:06
◼
►
But I have no doubt that they're gonna put it on Apple Music
01:15:09
◼
►
they've got, Eddie Q in his interview said,
01:15:12
◼
►
more, well past 20 million subscribers now,
01:15:15
◼
►
hey, they didn't say how many.
01:15:17
◼
►
I have no doubt it's gonna be successful
01:15:19
◼
►
'cause people like shows like this.
01:15:20
◼
►
Like Shark Tank is successful,
01:15:22
◼
►
It's why it's in all these countries.
01:15:24
◼
►
This is a successful format that people like.
01:15:28
◼
►
And I have no doubt that it will be well received
01:15:30
◼
►
by a lot of Apple Music subscribers who come across
01:15:34
◼
►
and like, "Oh, what is this?"
01:15:35
◼
►
And I think it's important to filter out a little bit
01:15:40
◼
►
some of the nerd circle reaction to it
01:15:41
◼
►
because it's so specifically targeted
01:15:44
◼
►
kind of in our world that I think a lot of our reactions
01:15:49
◼
►
to it aren't going to carry out into the broader audience?
01:15:53
◼
►
- I feel like the closer Apple moves
01:15:58
◼
►
towards the consumer space,
01:16:00
◼
►
and it starts making this mainstream,
01:16:03
◼
►
I don't wanna say content, but that's what it is, right?
01:16:06
◼
►
With Carpool Karaoke or with Planet of the Apps,
01:16:11
◼
►
they invite Drake on stage, they have Beats 1.
01:16:14
◼
►
They're not the Apple, they're not just maybe
01:16:17
◼
►
the Apple making Safari reading list or making the OS anymore.
01:16:24
◼
►
They're trying to position at least one part of the business
01:16:27
◼
►
as a more lifestyle/media company.
01:16:32
◼
►
And I feel like a lot of the people who have been observing
01:16:36
◼
►
Apple, like us, that's tough to accept, right?
01:16:41
◼
►
That they're becoming this sort of Hollywood presence and force
01:16:45
◼
►
much more than in the past.
01:16:48
◼
►
And so when you see Drake on stage at WWDC,
01:16:50
◼
►
when you see Eddie Q talking about this Shark Tank-like
01:16:55
◼
►
television show, or Apple Music starting
01:16:58
◼
►
to feature TV series and more video content,
01:17:02
◼
►
Apple pouring money into original content,
01:17:04
◼
►
that makes a lot of people uneasy.
01:17:06
◼
►
And I think it's going to be a bigger theme that we'll
01:17:09
◼
►
see going forward of the people who observe Apple are going
01:17:13
◼
►
to sort of see Apple in a different way and maybe be a little put off by what the company
01:17:21
◼
►
I think one last thing I want to say on this in regards to the types of apps that are being
01:17:28
◼
►
They are apps, but I think what we're going to end up seeing is services.
01:17:32
◼
►
It's people creating companies, not applications here.
01:17:35
◼
►
But those companies, they interface with their customers via apps.
01:17:39
◼
►
This isn't somebody who is making stagehand, right?
01:17:43
◼
►
This isn't someone who is making a pinboard client.
01:17:47
◼
►
This is a company, one of the ones that they showed was, I'm interested to know more about
01:17:52
◼
►
it, but an application that can suggest to you via AI about shopping habits.
01:17:59
◼
►
These are people that are creating services, but they're services, the interface is applications.
01:18:05
◼
►
I think that that's a thing that's worth pointing out because that is a different business model
01:18:10
◼
►
and that business model does need venture capital and that's what the show is based
01:18:17
◼
►
It's not like that we're going to watch people building applications, we're watching people
01:18:21
◼
►
build companies and looking at what that ends up looking like.
01:18:26
◼
►
So that's a very good point.
01:18:27
◼
►
Planet of the Apps will be premiering on Apple Music in the next few months.
01:18:32
◼
►
There's going to be a companion app, like a second screen type app where people can
01:18:36
◼
►
vote on whether they think the app ideas are interesting as they're being pitched.
01:18:39
◼
►
You can swipe left, swipe right, you can find out more about the applications.
01:18:43
◼
►
All of these big shows now they have companion apps, right?
01:18:46
◼
►
Especially reality television shows.
01:18:48
◼
►
But it is interesting that these things usually work when the show is live because it's polling
01:18:53
◼
►
this data, but that's not going to be the case.
01:18:55
◼
►
They will be released weekly, I guess at a certain time, but there isn't a live TV component
01:19:01
◼
►
It doesn't look like that anyway.
01:19:03
◼
►
I don't know why anybody expected there would be ads, but there's no ads because it's part
01:19:07
◼
►
of a paid service.
01:19:09
◼
►
So that's Planet of the Apps, but that wasn't all.
01:19:12
◼
►
Q was questioned by Peter Caffery.
01:19:14
◼
►
He spoke about a couple of other things that are relatively interesting.
01:19:18
◼
►
He said that Apple is not interested in buying up content like Netflix.
01:19:21
◼
►
They right now just want to help create original programming that fit the sensibilities that
01:19:28
◼
►
were a couple of questions asked around podcasting and Q said that he you know
01:19:33
◼
►
he can say that there is a resurgence right now the iTunes needs to do more
01:19:38
◼
►
they want to do more he seemed to dodge a question about like the fact that
01:19:42
◼
►
Gimlet had asked via Peter Kafka if they can get information about the people to
01:19:46
◼
►
subscribe this is basically pulling up that thing that happened in the New York
01:19:51
◼
►
Times a while ago Eddie shook that off and basically said we've got some stuff
01:19:57
◼
►
that we're working on.
01:20:00
◼
►
I found that particularly interesting.
01:20:02
◼
►
I mean, granted, you and I own a podcast production company, but I really feel like that, so if
01:20:08
◼
►
you subscribed, is this even so accurate, Federico?
01:20:11
◼
►
At least in the newsstand days, if you subscribed to a magazine through the newsstand, you could
01:20:15
◼
►
elect to send some very basic kind of information to that magazine publisher.
01:20:22
◼
►
And to date, I think that's the only exception to Apple's "you don't know who your customers
01:20:29
◼
►
It's the only hole poked through that wall.
01:20:33
◼
►
And I would imagine that Apple only did it for magazine people because they had to.
01:20:38
◼
►
That for some meeting and some planning somewhere, that just had to happen.
01:20:43
◼
►
I don't see them adding that to podcasting and iTunes.
01:20:47
◼
►
And frankly, I don't want it.
01:20:49
◼
►
And it wouldn't be that helpful to us.
01:20:51
◼
►
And so I found that question, I definitely rolled my eyes a little bit at that because
01:20:56
◼
►
there are people who want that in our industry.
01:20:59
◼
►
I think that's not the direction Apple should go and frankly I don't think it's the direction
01:21:02
◼
►
they will go because I really feel like magazines are that exception that they probably didn't
01:21:07
◼
►
even want to do but they had to.
01:21:10
◼
►
But I did find that interesting.
01:21:13
◼
►
Also our friend Aaron Minkie who produces the LoRa podcast got a shout out which is
01:21:17
◼
►
pretty cool.
01:21:18
◼
►
a very successful show that you should check out.
01:21:21
◼
►
- Yep, 'cause it's going to Amazon.
01:21:23
◼
►
They're making a TV show, it's like a whole big thing.
01:21:26
◼
►
It's incredible. - Crazy.
01:21:27
◼
►
There's some other stuff in this article,
01:21:31
◼
►
or in this interview, Q talked about some of their initial
01:21:33
◼
►
like iTunes music negotiations
01:21:36
◼
►
and how they didn't go very well at first.
01:21:39
◼
►
They got pushed on the Amazon Prime not being there
01:21:44
◼
►
and Q basically was like, "We have an open platform."
01:21:47
◼
►
They're welcome any time, which has really cracked me up.
01:21:52
◼
►
And he was asked about Siri in this context of Amazon
01:21:58
◼
►
and their products.
01:22:01
◼
►
And he repeated the line that Phil Schiller has said
01:22:04
◼
►
that we've seen in some of the Apple media
01:22:06
◼
►
that the best assistant is the one you carry with you.
01:22:09
◼
►
And they keep bringing that line out,
01:22:12
◼
►
and I don't know if they're not working on a cylinder
01:22:14
◼
►
with Siri inside of it or that they are and they're just being coy about it, but they just keep
01:22:20
◼
►
rerunning that line and I think every time they say it it feels more and more dated because
01:22:27
◼
►
do so much of these other items and
01:22:29
◼
►
the only thing that Amazon would have to do to like blow that out of the water is
01:22:35
◼
►
create an app on the iPhone that you open it and you tap and you're talking to their
01:22:40
◼
►
their service and there's already a third-party app that does that that I use frequently it's pretty good, but
01:22:46
◼
►
it just seems like a really like a thin ledge to stand on to say that
01:22:51
◼
►
Because Siri is portable with you and on your watch and on your phone that makes it better like that's true
01:22:56
◼
►
Like it is nice to have the same thing with you all the time
01:22:58
◼
►
But if it doesn't work as well something else and that something else could be on your platform easily
01:23:04
◼
►
it's kind of nice but um
01:23:08
◼
►
All in all you know it's it's an Apple executive interview. They're not sharing much
01:23:12
◼
►
They were remarkably open about the process of creating the show and I find I find like the process of media interesting even though the
01:23:19
◼
►
Show is not for me
01:23:20
◼
►
I think that the way they got to the point where they're doing this show is
01:23:25
◼
►
Interesting and they say they're gonna do more of it
01:23:27
◼
►
So I think that we will continue to see Apple music sort of
01:23:30
◼
►
Blossom and and spread out into these other areas which is it's exciting right there
01:23:36
◼
►
They're competing with Netflix and Amazon now in this new space.
01:23:40
◼
►
And I think that's pretty cool.
01:23:41
◼
►
Yeah, I would call it more interesting and exciting.
01:23:44
◼
►
Like, I'm still coming at this with a little bit of trepidation.
01:23:49
◼
►
I know that I know the reason they're doing this, like, is to try and sell Apple
01:23:55
◼
►
music, but like at the same time, I'm also asking the question, why a lot still?
01:24:00
◼
►
Which is I'm just in a little bit of a conflict about it.
01:24:04
◼
►
And if like they also show Carpool Karaoke, they've had some trailers and the trailers look pretty good.
01:24:10
◼
►
So I'm kind of like I know that I will feel how I will feel about this when I actually watch the first episodes of both of these shows.
01:24:17
◼
►
And if they're both really good then fine, like keep going for it.
01:24:21
◼
►
But if they're underwhelming it's going to be like why are you doing this, you know?
01:24:26
◼
►
If Apple were not truly trying to make like excellent programming,
01:24:33
◼
►
I feel like that it's just why, you know, like why? That's my feeling on it and it's quite a
01:24:41
◼
►
complex feeling but I'm looking forward to Planet of the Apps. I'm interested in Cardpool Karaoke
01:24:48
◼
►
just because some of the pairings that they show look kind of fun because but it's not all James
01:24:53
◼
►
Corden which is upsetting to me. I think he's only in one of them because I think he makes the show
01:24:58
◼
►
but we spoke about that in the past but yeah we've got links to all that in the show notes if you
01:25:01
◼
►
If you want to check it out and the rest of our notes are over at relay.fm/connected/129
01:25:07
◼
►
for this week's show.
01:25:08
◼
►
If you want to find us online as a person you can do that.
01:25:10
◼
►
You can go to maxstories.net for Federico's work.
01:25:13
◼
►
He is @Vittici on Twitter, V I T I C C I. Stephen is at ISMH and he's at 512pixels.net
01:25:19
◼
►
and I am @imike.
01:25:22
◼
►
Thanks again to our sponsors this week's episode for helping support the show, Encapsular,
01:25:26
◼
►
Blue Apron and Squarespace and as always thank you for listening.
01:25:30
◼
►
Until then, say goodbye guys.
01:25:31
◼
►
Arrivederci. Adios.