The Chaser Report - The Scott Morrison of Technology

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

If you have a smart speaker in your home, you know the pain. If you don't, let this be a lesson to you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. I am Charles. I am Dom and Charles, what a day. The school holidays are over. My first one ever. My first school holidays ever as a parent. And did you realise just how shit school holidays are? I did, which is why I rather brilliantly arranged to work throughout the

the entire holidays. Oh, brilliant, yes. I had one day with my, with my, both children on Monday, and that was, it was harrowing, Charles harrowing. So I'm not going to do that again. No. I'm going to work full time through the next ones. It's just been awful spending all that time one on one, two on one, chatting about all their

thoughts in the world. Well, Charles, I feel particularly sorry for you because you have high school age children. Yes. And from my understanding, you don't get vacation care, like holiday care programs for high school. No. The theory being that they're old enough to sort of amuse themselves enough. But clearly that's not working.

No, they want to just have conversations with you. Oh, God. Yes. Oh, it's terrible. Yes. And if not you, then they just want to watch YouTube or TikTok. Well, that's the dream, isn't it? And essentially just spending the entire day on the screen.

But then you just feel guilty that they've spent all day on the screen. And it's not like work stops. You just have to do work and also chat to your kids all day. But this is the mystery of how we've set things up as a civilisation, whereby your average worker, I mean, you and I are in a weird sort of work for yourself slash semi-unemployed phase, but your average worker, four weeks a year annual leave, your average public school kid, 12 weeks of holidays a year. And how does that disconnect close to your bridge?

Just by having a shit eight weeks when the kids are at home and you're trying to work? Yes, that's what it is. It's just designed to just be like where if you look after the kids, you feel guilty about not doing your work. And if you do your work, you feel guilty about not providing a good holiday for your kids. Yeah. And so this is the, this is the challenge I've been trying to bridge is how crap can the holidays be for your child? I mean, in January, I took off, I don't know, six weeks or something like that before she started primary school in between, so no more daycare. Could have shipped her off to daycare, but I didn't. And we had a lovely quality time,

did all this stuff, but I'm done. Yeah, but that's enough. That's enough. You've done your six weeks. Or once a lifetime. So she went off to childcare and then the grandparents had her a couple of which was fantastic, how to sleep over, which was fun for her, for my parents, I'm sure, fun up to a point.

And then, yeah, I'm kind of done. Why isn't school all year round, Charles? Yes, I agree. Surely four weeks off is enough. Yeah, well, and the terrible thing is

my eldest has now started getting into really ridiculously messy hobbies. Oh, really? So I don't know whether you saw my backyard then, but... There was dirt.

There's any of the actual dirt around. And what kind of child are you raising that they get their hands dirty, actual dirt? Charles, your people fought so hard to escape from the working class that she purport to represent politically. He's trying to learn how to do bonsai, which I think is also just, instead of animal cruelty, he's into plant cruelty. That's quite lovely in the abstract. Probably up close, it's incredibly annoying. Conceptually, that's very sweet. This is a kid who could be doing screens and usually does.

trying to grow something with his own hands and then stunt it. I told him you should do bonzo marijuana because it's even more useful. Is it a metaphor for how you raised him? Constantly kind of clipping his leaves and keeping him small emotionally. Oh, is that what it is? Yes. This is me, Dad. This is me in the little pot.

I shouldn't have probably put him in that box for the first six years. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, no, but that's not the thing I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is my wonderful, Sonos music system. Oh, Charles, you didn't. You didn't get Sonos. Didn't we talk about this in advance?

I don't think so. No, because I made the same mistake. I can't wait to hear what... Okay. Because this is the point where you and I are quite tech nerdy. We've got the Walk Into the Future podcast as well. Yes. This is a...

Oh, Charles, I feel for you already. What happened? Okay. So, the thing about Sonos is that they have two apps. Yeah. So there's Sonos S1 and then the Sonos app road. And if you made the mistake of making the mistake to get Sonos, like six years ago, or whenever it was, maybe it was 10 years

ago, all those speakers only work on the first app, the Sonos S1 app. And if you press the wrong button, you brick your speaker, which means it will never work again, ever again. The software destroys the hardware, right? Yeah, but Charles, when those, they were sold, didn't they clearly say? we'll only work for, I don't know, three, four, five years, after which we'll completely brick this product and release a different generation.

But if you press the wrong button, so if you then have to then say, and this might be foreshadowing part of the story, right, if you then have to constantly open that app and try and sort out the settings in the S1 app, there is jeopardy the whole time about pressing the wrong button and bricking your speaker forever.

Yeah. Right. Because if you click upgrade, It means, yes, I want to destroy this speaker, right? Upgrading means it will never work again. Yes, that's right. I've seen this. So there's this deal where if you choose Notionally upgrade,

they give you 30% off buying the new one, but brick the old one. So it's like you can't possibly, it's like a shit trade-in. You can't, yeah, it's a shit trade-in where you pay 30% less for an over-priced speaker. Yeah, so you still pay more than it's worth. Yeah, that's right. So, but the point is that I recently, I think it must have been for Christmas, got my wife a beam, you know, one of those Sonos beams. Oh, yeah. Soundbar.

We've got a couple of, we've got a couple of other Sonos products. These will all work together. No, it won't. Because two of them are controllable by one app. The other one's controlled with the other app. Oh, wow. And the thing is, if they're all plugged in, even if they're on the two different apps and the two different systems, they're not supposed to. see each other, they see each other, and you can't, you can't change, like, it doesn't

work, like, they just don't work. So then, what you do is you go, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn off all the ones, except for the one that I want to play. Like, this is just to play a song. So what happened last night is we decided we wanted to play a song on the speaker, right? We're going to play the song on the speaker. I mean, not a, not a controversial choice. No.

And then, for some reason, it wasn't showing. up on the Sonos app. Yep. Right? And then it went, oh, no, no, it's because there's sort of thing. Anyway, so then about an hour into pressing buttons and not being able to get it to work, we just go, okay, we're going to do a hardware reset, and we'll just get it to forget that that speaker ever existed. We'll just add it from the start, right?

Like, we'll just go back to zero. You can't do that. Never do that. Don't do that, right? because it doesn't work. Like, it then goes, but hang on, you've got, that speaker is already on your system, even though you've removed it from the system. Anyway, point is, it doesn't work.

It just doesn't work. I mean, I just, like, we literally spent two hours trying to get the Sonos space. And then it was things like you'd go online and I googled, why is Sonos so shit? Yeah. And there was like 15 different Reddit posts, all of which had different solutions. None of which worked. Like, one was, oh, Sonos doesn't do Wi-Fi very well. Plug it in.

So I plugged it into, like, the Ethernet. And then this other person went, no, no, no, no. It never works if it's plugged in. You have to get it working with Wi-Fi to actually make it work. Oh, wow. I must say, I've never seen you this agitated. We talk a lot about, you know, politics, the environment, all these things. This is the most irritated you've ever been.

Sonos app is the Scott Morrison of technology. It had several jobs. Well, no, it's true, because this is the thing. You invest in this system, and it's not cheap. I mean, at one point, I had a bit of spare money. Yeah. So I went hard on Sonos. I got a whole bunch of stuff.

Yeah, no. It's a speaker which can now only be controlled by the S1 app. And I went, this is not going to work. is on the S2 app. We don't have the very new stuff like you've got, but we said, okay, we're going to... So what's the S2 app? Well, this is the current app.

Right, okay. The new app now called the SONIS app. So that all works within itself. That's fine. And where we had the original one, we went, you know what, let's just do something completely different. And I went and got two home pod minis,

two of the Apple speakers. Oh, yeah. The home pod minis, it's connecting to Apple TV. So I went no more Sonos. Yeah. In this room, in the bedroom, we will have the home pod minies.

Oh, that's nice. Very fancy. Completely separate. They're not as good as speakers as the Sonos, but we're not going to get confused with the son. But they play music. No. I mean, what?

They do. So you can say, hey, Siri, play whatever. And on the seventh, the eighth time of Siri interpreting what you're trying to ask for, you might get the song you wanted. Oh, oh, yes. But we then discovered, because I thought, oh, Apple's going to solve this. I mean, Apple talking to Apple, you know, I have Macs, I have iPads, I have iPhones. They're generally good talking to itself. No, it turns out that if you have a home pod, there's this whole.

other system that appears on your phone with all these different volume controls and setting and we could not for months figure out how to get the Apple TV in our bedroom to send the audio of the TV program it was showing to the HomePod that it could detect right next to itself a few inches away from itself it simply would not manage to do it and you get it to work once and the next time you try to do it it would forget that you had a speaker can I hypothesise what's going on what I think you know how printers aren't really used that much anymore. No.

But the printer market's basically dead. I think all the inventors and engineers involved in making printers that never worked properly have all jumped ship and they've gone into the speaker. Oh, that's what it is. Actually, speaking of Bluetooth, which is where it always comes up,

there's actually a feature, quite nifty feature that the HomePod Mini has, right? Oh, yeah. It looks about the size of a tennis ball, a little bit larger than tennis ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has Bluetooth sensing so that if you bring your phone, if you're playing a song on your phone

or a podcast or something, you bring the phone your iPhone over to the home pod and it sort of vibrates and takes over the audio. Right. So that's brilliant. Yes. But it can't use the Bluetooth to detect the other Bluetooth signal from the Apple TV that's right next to it.

It's got two proximity sensing Bluetooth things and they can't speak to each other. And is there a solution? Well, eventually we've figured out the completely arcane and confusing button that you press to tell the Apple TV which sound source to send it out to. So we don't have to redo that every single time.

Every single time we want to watch a TV show, we have to say, hey, send it to the HomePod. But it does work. The great thing about it, though, is that at least it's not a Sonos. Yes. Oh, God, yes. The Chaser Report, less news, more often. So, Dom, strikes me. You've got a Sonos system set up at home, I hear.

I do. Do you want to buy really good, really good, almost new, soundbar. You know what? Why don't I stop it for the HomePod minis that I've got? They work very well. It sounds like the... It plays as much music as the sound bar.

You know, Charles, I remember growing up, it seems like a different world now. We had things connected by cables. And the thing was, it could be quite fiddly. But once you had the sort of output from a device plugged into the input of another device, plugged into a speaker, it just worked forever. Do you remember that? You didn't have to retell it to can... It actually just was plugged.

plugged in on a permanent basis. It would never work. Where was the fun in that? But the shortcoming of that was, you couldn't say, hey, Siri or OK, Google or whatever, and have it ignore your command. That was the difference of that world. I'll tell you what, though, Siri is particularly shit. Oh, yeah.

Because we've got a little mini at home pod where it is in my 12-year-old's room. And, you know, we do nighttime music rather to helping get to sleep. And the playlist are always kind of, you know, they're always. kind of, you know, there are always things like going to bed now, Angus, you know, like, because they're from when he was quite young. And it all,

so, hey, Siri, play going to bed now. And, and Siri will literally every time go things like, I'll put on mega death mix. Bed of Doom now. The metal remix. This reminds me of our, we've kind of fixed it by upgrading our Wi-Fi,

but when my daughter was sort of two or whatever, I put a little Sonos speaker in her bedroom and I thought this is going to be great I used to play lullabies for her and honestly the sound of silence most times I'd get on the Sonos remote app

and I'd choose the playlist you know whatever it was lullabies whatever and it would be like twinko t'et up right da da da what you're up and she was just like why doesn't it work

and she cried herself to sleep so thank you Sonos because she did eventually get to sleep through all the sobbing and that is that's also true With SONOS, if you, if you ever try and listen to an audio book, it stutters, yeah. That's really good. How fucking stupid are we for spending all this money?

Yeah. We have the same mental illness that makes us spend money on worse technology. If you want to buy a SONOS from me, just contact me through, like leaving a review on the Apple Podcasts. Oh, yes. Five-star review. Please jump on. If you made this far, yes. Go to that, which is very unlikely, unless you have a son-us, in which case,

You love this episode It's the best episode ever Jump on the Apple podcast app And leave us a please a five-star review And mention Sonos And we will just share that pain together Charles, is there a lack of diversity In this podcast?

Do we need someone who doesn't know to Sonos? No, they wouldn't understand us They're too busy listening to music Our Gehr is from Road We're part of the iconoclast network And you can listen to this podcast On your smart speaker by saying Hey Siri,

play the Chaser Report podcast. Let's see if this works, actually. I'm just going to hold the speaker up. No, it won't work. Siri is flashing. Which app to want to listen to this on? Apple Podcasts? No, it's failed.

There you go. Yeah. Just say... It's the technology wonderful. Hey, Siri, listen to the Joe Rogan experience. Actually, probably won't even work on that, was it? I couldn't find it. Are you trying to be a white supremacist?

Okay. See you next time.