Upgrade - 253: Steal The Ball

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

Guest Marco Arment joins Jason and Myke to discuss the possibility of new Apple laptop keyboards at last, his Overcast priorities over the next year, and the future of podcasting. There are also some mild opinions about Jony Ive, the streaming-video wars, and cappuccino.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 253 today's show is brought to you by squarespace pingdom and dubai friday my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hi jason snell wait a second isn't dubai friday a podcast hi mike yes it is we'll talk about that later on it is the summer of fun and i am having my own summer right here with marco arment hi marco arment summer of fun oh hi so we're marco's our special guest today because uh i'm at marco's beach house this is my summer of fun jason just got back from his own summer of fun in hawaii but nobody cares about any of that because we have some hashtag snow talk today. And our question is also a little bit of follow-up. It comes from Steve. Steve says, currently Overcast Smart Speed has saved me an extra 1,794 hours. Do I listen to too many podcasts? So a couple of weeks ago, we spoke about Smart Speed in Ask Upgrade. And as is usual,

whenever we mentioned Smarted on a show, people send in their screenshots of the amount of time that they saved. I think Steve's is probably the highest that I saw at 1,794. So considering we have Marco with us today, I want to talk about that a little bit. But Jason, I will ask you the question

that Steve asked. Does Steve listen to too many podcasts? You can never listen to too many podcasts. Is that the right answer, Mike? That's what i'm supposed to say the exact answer that i was looking for thank you very much especially if you find them at relay.fm slash shows um so marco can you uh you you tweeted because i assume you saw people tagging you again after we spoke about a couple of weeks that was us sorry about that and you tweeted from the overcast account that over 1898 years have been saved in total people hours worth smart speed

that's right and uh and that's that's about the same i haven't i haven't reversed that number today but it's about the same but i can tell you my number is 367 hours which pales in comparison to seven 1700 years but i can also tell you the highest number that overcast knows about among active users is 6008 hours that being said the second highest is 3970 so it's a pretty big drop off i will say that this listener is ranked if assuming that they have you know about one more hour since then, they'll be ranked at approximately the 44th highest number among all Overcast active users. You did it, Steve. Good job. I'm concerned about your mentions now to the people that now want to know their rank.

We didn't ask Marco to provide this data. He did it on his own accord. So, Marco, Game Center integration happening with Overcast now, right? You need a little bit more. Good idea. No, million-dollar idea. I love building on reliable, well-used Apple frameworks. It's always a center. Actually, did you notice in iOS 13, because they added whole um ability and messages to create your basically

apple avatar that uh game center it's like the first change i've seen in game center in years game center now picks that up and it's it's like part of your game center identity i don't know how you do things in game center because they removed all those features like five years ago well they also just got rid of the app right there used to be a game center app which was the felt which became the big color bubbles and then went away yeah so that was our hashtag snow talk question if you would like to submit a question for us to open a future episode of the show just end in a tweet with the hashtag snow talk and just to be clear the answer to steve's question now is very obviously he does not listen to too many podcasts because he's exactly only in like 40th place come on steve come on yeah i mean if you were in the top 10 maybe but at number 44 i think

you're all right we have some follow-up about the ipad os beta uh beta 3 was out uh last week and there are a couple of changes uh one is one we've spoken about on this show before the uh mouse cursor which is for the accessibility settings you can now make it nice and small jason so i'm sure you're very happy about that yeah it's one of those things where um that's that's a good accommodation for people who want the smaller cursor that also doesn't wreck it as an accessibility feature right like you can keep the cursor any size you want i think giving people more options about how big they want that cursor to be is good, right? Because people can then choose.

Do you want a little one? Do you want a big one? It sort of depends on your vision. It depends on how you move the cursor around on the screen. I'm really happy that that happened and so quickly, too. That's awesome. Yeah, me too. Because, again, it's like we've spoken about this before, but understanding what accessibility options that that is actually

solving. And for some people like myself who require a better ergonomic setup, I don't require a very large mouse cursor because it's not a visibility thing that I have. It is just a physical thing. So I'm happy to see that that change came about. And there's also something which is interesting. Sometimes it can be difficult when ipad applications in split for you to know which window is active for the keyboard and they've now added a very subtle indicator of the active windows in split view which is that little pill that sits at the very top like the little grabby pill this is grabby pill that's what we'll call it it sits at the top of split view window which allows you to kind of move them around and resize them. Now flashes with the active window and also the non-active window. The little pill is a bit more dimmer.

Yeah, this would have never happened if Johnny Ive was still at Apple. Can I be the first person to have ever said that? Yes. You might be. You know what, Jason? I actually think that you may be like at least on the podcast the first person to utter that phrase. That's why I did it. No, this is, it's good, but it's super subtle um which is not the best although if you compare it to the

other visible pill you can always sort of see which one is darker so it's it's better than nothing although it does bring up a lot of other questions for me because now that i know for certain which app has focus um i start to ask myself what's the logic of how you gain focus in one versus the other and the answer seems to be you have to initiate a text editing cursor and then it moves and the reason I bring this up is somebody I saw somebody commenting about this who said well isn't it already obvious because it's wherever the text editing cursor is and that's not entirely true because you can be one of them can be in the foreground and you're not editing text in either of them and it's important for keyboard shortcuts yes um that's

the big one is that i don't know whether i'm in safari or in my text editor when i hit a keyboard shortcut on my ipad and i'd like to know because uh hitting command l in safari does things i want and in my text editor does things I don't want. Right. So it's that simple. Um, but, uh, I, what I found when I was tapping around is, is I really, the only way to get Safari to listen to those keyboard shortcuts and to get that little pill to be darker is to basically tap in the URL field and then tap out of it, which brings us back to a classic, I think gray and Mike feature request, which is, wouldn't it be great if there was a keyboard shortcut to change the focus?

That would be nice. That would be a nice little feature. The Summer of Fun was created in part because there's typically not a lot of news in the summer. So Jason was going away. I was going away. We prerecorded our last episode, which came out really well with Andy and Shelley. Then Johnny Ive quit. I was listening to ATP last week and there was one of those things that was, hey, when did Johnny Ive quit last week?

Was that a Thursday or a Friday or when was that exactly? And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I could tell you it was thursday because i flew to hawaii on thursday and when i turned when i landed on maui and turned my phone on out of airplane mode uh then i got pummeled with johnny i've mentions and i thought well i'm on vacation now and that was it so it was thursday literally it happened while i was in the air uh over the pacific ocean so a couple of pieces of follow-up. If you're interested in some quick takes, I was on Presentable with Jeff Veen, and we spoke about it. Jeff was actually really interesting to talk to

as somebody who is from a design background who has managed people. It was very interesting to get Jeff's opinions on Apple's kind of not just losing Johnny, but what seems like a kind of a change in their structure. And then, of course, ATP this past week was also really good about it you guys spoke about it basically for the entire episode thank you so there are a couple of places but jason i have not heard nor read any opinion i'm so relieved that this happened while i was on vacation actually because i'm one

of those people who would have a a mild opinion it, and that's like everybody wants to hear the hot take. My opinion, my feeling on it is mostly a feeling of like, it's like nostalgia-led. Do you have anything like that? I feel more emotional about it than I do concerned about it in any real way. It's just kind of like, oh, it's a shame. That era is over now. Johnny, I think I mentioned this on the six colors podcast last week the members only podcast that's a promotion right there you can listen to me talk to dan more in every week um

the uh the thing that really gets me about this is johnny ive was working at apple he started working at apple about the same time i graduated from college wow uh so before i even started working at apple themed uh magazines and such right like a long time ago and that was in the deep darkest like before the newton was announced like old apple old apple he's been there a long i mean that's a long time to work at any job and i realized that his role has changed dramatically. And obviously, after he was there for five years, Steve Jobs came back and they made a connection and they went on to do some amazing things. But that was my first thought was, he's been there forever. I'm amazed. I mean, probably too long. Let's just say that. In fact, I wonder i wonder again because it's all speculation because no one really knows how apple works who is you know among the people who are pontificating about this

it's very rare that you hear from someone who actually gets it uh based on uh their actual real world inside knowledge uh it's a lot of speculation but i wonder if steve jobs's illness and death actually changed johnny's trajectory not only that he felt that he needed to uphold the legacy and build apple park work with the architects on that but also like not let tim cook down and from a tim cook perspective also the idea that we can't lose steve and johnny simultaneously and there's a good bit on atp this week about distorting Also, the idea that we can't lose Steve and Johnny simultaneously. And there's a good bit on ATP this week about distorting your org chart and distorting your organization because there's somebody that you feel you can't lose. And I thought that that was, as somebody who at one point managed a group of whatever, 50 or 60 people, that's totally true. Like, sometimes you get somebody who's such a key player that you'd do anything to keep them.

That's totally true. Like sometimes you get somebody who's such a key player that you do anything to keep them. And what you end up doing is messing up your organization because you're desperate to keep that person. And and it becomes then you look at the org chart and you're like, this makes no sense. But we wanted to keep this person. It made sense at the time. Yeah. Well, and and this is a good example where it's like, imagine the double whammy if Steve Jobs dies and Johnny Ive quits. Yeah. Like that for Apple, like just even perception of Apple. So, and the other thing that

struck me, and again, ATP covered this a little bit too, is the time delay. Because like, I feel like when they describe what's happening now, they're actually describing what happened a couple of years ago. So when there was that story about Johnny's kind of a higher level presence where he's the chief design officer and he's not involved day-to-day i figure he was probably not involved day-to-day for a year or two before that and they're just codifying that now and saying it publicly and this whole like johnny will occasionally consult on an apple project but he's really not involved at all otherwise uh that they're talking about with this new company of his i bet you that's basically how it's been the last two years right i like i feel like they're talking about with this new company of his i bet you that's basically how it's been

the last two years right i like i feel like they're interesting this is all just i mean he has been moving away um it's it's it's fine but and the other thing that strikes me is very much like when steve jobs died which is apple is simultaneously this company where there are some incredibly talented people you get to know and you're like wow that person's really incredible at the same time our our necessity maybe as human beings to focus on a single person um let's it makes us lose track of the fact that a single person is still literally is a single person they only have 24 hours in the day they've got to sleep they've got to eat you know they've got in johnny's case they've got to be taken up and down the freeway to get to cupertino like key players matter but other people matter too and that's i think that's the great contrast between um when we think about steve jobs and we think

about johnny ive is um that they are incredibly talented people who matter and yet they have to be surrounded by a huge number of other talented people and i think the mistake is when you focus entirely on the one and not on the many um and we learned that lesson with and apple has changed its messaging completely in the last six seven eight years where now we know you could now name 20 important people at apple yes when before you could have named four. And if anything, too, and I went over this a little bit on ATP,

like if anything, it's actually a pretty harmful effect, I think, to have somebody above you in the decision-making chain or the org chart who is too busy to deal with you or too busy to address your needs or too busy to filter through your work and make calls on it.

And so if Johnny was indeed so busy and so remote a lot of the time, then that holds back design, because the people under him can't necessarily keep going after certain points until they get his approval on things, or until he weighs in on something. And anytime you have something like that where you have to wait for a manager above you to make decisions or you have to be afraid of what decisions they might override when they do finally come look at your stuff it it inherently impedes the work yep so i i'm really happy to see that this impediment that has been there for a while in you know in johnny i've being probably a pretty severe bottleneck is now officially removed whatever however it's been last few years like he's now officially gone from like the chain of command and the people

who are who were formerly under him can now probably work a lot better it's got to be very difficult to present your work and then argue with somebody like johnny ive yeah right like if you're working at apple and and he says no i don't think that's a good, how do you argue with him? Right? Like what level do you feel like, oh, I can tell Johnny Ive he's wrong about this. Like, and that is, that is a difficult thing in any organization to be able to tell a superior, like to be able to debate with them on a point, but somebody who is literally legendary, right? Like, like what john was saying john was beautiful and the things he was saying people typically get maybe a shot of doing one thing in their lives that they could be considered like legacy making johnny's done like four of them right like the

things that he has designed or has had a very heavy hand in designing there's been so many huge things like he is a design legend and having to be like no i don't think we should put this button there it's gonna be a really difficult thing to say to him sometimes so who knows maybe it will change stuff remove one button from this and then we'll talk i also think i talked about distorting org charts i wonder a little bit about distorting actual product planning as well with him i mean again i don't have any knowledge of this but i look at something like that car project which started out as being like we're going to build a car and then they laid off a bunch of people and they

apparently folded it way back to let's start with autonomous systems and go from there i look at that first misstep with the car and think is is that because Johnny wanted to design a car? And on one level, that seems ridiculous. And yet I can totally see that happening where, you know, he's been involved in these, so many of these big projects. And as you said, Mike, you know, you get a chance to do this one time and he's had a bunch, but hard not to think that maybe he's, the reason you keep him, the way you keep him is to find some other thing that he can really get his hands on and get enthusiastic about and if you're talking about cars and johnny's really engaged maybe if you're tim cook you're like you know let's let him what if he ends up designing the car that changes the world because he's done it with other stuff let's let

him play we've got money we want to keep him happy let's let him do it and that's and that ends up depending i mean i think what you then look at is the fact that they did kind of kill that as being the discipline part of this which is no actually that was a bad idea we need to stop and that's i to me and this is i know contrary to a lot of pundits but it's like i look at apple saying whoa this car thing is out of hand we're gonna pair it way back and we're gonna just kind of take a loss on it i view that as a good sign because that's apple looking analyzing what it's doing and saying no and that like i think that's discipline i think that's a good indicator for apple that it's still uh critical of its work in progress and is willing to throw something out if

it's not working agreed upstream let's do a piece of upstream news uh this is one that we knew that was going to be coming but i think it's important the office is going to be leaving netflix at the end of 2020 from 2021 it will be exclusive to nbc use service right nbc universal service apparently netflix offered up to 90 million dollars to keep it for five years but this is kind of funny to me mbc paid 100 million but you say to yourself hold on a minute they own it well that so this is one of those hilarious things where these companies get all pushed together by the end of it mbc have paid mbc universal 100 million dollars they effectively move money around on a balance sheet i do this i when i when i file my expense report with my own company i i you know write myself a check and then i go deposit it

it feels great that's what they did and i think i kind of like that it was like well we don't want netflix to have this so we will just offer more than they will offer and then we just get to keep it honestly that's above board because what usually happens in these situations is that the competitor offers 90 million and then you sell it to yourself for 10 million which means you don't have to pay all of the people who have a profit share or a certain like kick in their contract for the value of the streaming rights you you lowball it and then you know steve carell doesn't get his residual based on 100 million which is the actual value or 90 million he gets

it based on the lowball figure so actually the fact that they officially set the prices above netflix is at least good it's good it's also possible that this this was an internal company competition thing where they're like you know this is how they find out whether they really want to bank on uh this streaming service or not is are they willing to write a check to the other division of nbc universal for this so it may not be entirely fake yeah i expect it was happening like but i just think the whole thing is hilarious but yeah it is they're just putting it in there taking it from the front pocket put it in the back pocket all just ladders up to the same balance sheet at the end of the day but yep it's true netflix doing netflix says they've pretty good on social media they tweeted the show will still be ad free until 2021 and they also use this as an opportunity to

promote space force which is the steve carell greg daniels greg daniels who created the office upcoming show about it's kind of like the office in space yeah is what they're trying to make what's the ad free is that like a dig because nbcu service might have ads it will have ads but there will be uh ads tiers and free tiers yeah like hulu like hulu because and this is this is why because they have a whole sales department who is geared at network tv to selling ads and you wouldn't want to give them nothing to do so you create an ad tier and then a free tier or an ad free tier above it like Hulu. Well, and also like if they want to have a free plan, I don't know. Have they announced that?

Is it going to be a free plan? Yes, it seems like it. I don't know. I mean, Hulu charges, even Hulu charges for their ad plan and CBF charges for their ad plan. It's just less. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if they're going to have a free plan, it makes total sense why they would want, you know, an ad division. But if they're just going to do a Hulu thing where you pay a little bit for ads and you pay more for fewer ads and pay even more for no ads or whatever hulu is this year uh that's that doesn't sound great mbc is in the weaker position of the companies doing this so i think they're trying everything yeah as a way to try and make them a a persistent player um talking about the office uh if there's a good this feels like a nice cross promotional point because somehow i manage which is a podcast from the incomparable which is hosted by tiffany allman which is michael's wife so you

can go listen to that and michael sergeant yes of course he's the assistant to the regional manager aren't we all um but michco i wanted to ask you uh just very quickly how do you feel about the amount of streaming services that there are in the world right now and that feel like they're coming um i'm probably a bad example on some level because of you know the the joke that i haven't seen anything um because i actually this is why i wanted to ask you yeah like i don't watch everything that comes out everything that's good like i hear all of you guys talking about it and i i make little mental notes of series i want to watch um but i don't usually watch most of them because

the problem i have i don't watch that much tv like i'll work most of the day and then at night i'll sit down with my wife and we'll watch you know a couple of shows and when that's all you're doing there's not that much time in the day there's not there isn't that much time in in the year to go through a whole lot of new content you can go through some and so you know you tend to pick you know the few biggest most popular things you've heard about but i think now we have the additional asterisk there of the biggest most popular things you've heard about that are on the services you already subscribe to so we subscribe to netflix uh hbo whatever go now whatever it is we don't have hbo uh so netflix hbo and i think that's it currently i guess oh yeah we have amazon prime whatever but we never use it has that yeah because it's terrible um so the reality is we just watch whatever's on netflix most of the time and we

don't have enough time in our day to watch everything else and so i think having more streaming services like if if new stuff launches not on a service that we already have basically not on netflix uh we're probably just not going to watch it and i think largely the the effect that it's going to have when you have all this fragmentation of all these services the the most likely effect is mostly just going to be like audience fragmentation that you're not really going to have easy discovery like back when everybody had cable you if you heard about a show from a friend, chances are you had access to the show. So you could go then start watching it. But now, if you hear about a show, if it's on one of these lower tier

or lower popularity services, if you don't have that service, how likely are you to go sign up for an entire new streaming service just to watch one show that your friend told you you should watch? I think it's going to actually hurt audience discovery of new shows that way for sure for sure um when i do i do the uh tv podcast with tim goodman from

the hollywood reporter every week and uh he is loving this show called perpetual grace limited which is from the guy who did patriot which is on amazon video which is great uh perpetual grace limited is on epics which is literally something that nobody gets and i mean i felt this way with um with counterpart which was on stars which also almost nobody gets and it's one of these cases where they did two seasons it was an amazing show it was maybe my favorite show nobody saw it. And it's still not on any streaming service anywhere. You can buy the episodes on iTunes, but that's it. There's a Blu-ray of the first season. And, you know, it feels to me like that's where we're headed is a world where everybody's got, you know, Netflix, Amazon Prime, maybe.

Maybe Hulu. Maybe not. Maybe Disney. Maybe not. amazon prime maybe maybe hulu maybe not maybe disney maybe not but like everything else is going to be like super niche viewing and maybe you flip you know you hear about a good show and you turn it on for a month and watch it and then turn it back off maybe people do some of that but it feels like there's going to be a small set of big players and then everything else is just going to be um kind of a rumor to you

where you're going to hear about a good show and then be like where is it i i don't get that and then you just let it pass you by and the question is uh how do you build a business about on being epics or on being stars like how do you spend money on original programming if nobody knows that you exist? And is that a viable business at all? And that's what I really wonder. And when we talk about having more than 500 scripted TV shows being made in English right now in the United States in a year, that's a huge number. It's by far the most ever. in a year, that's a huge number.

It's by far the most ever. It's kind of hard to think that they're going to be able to keep it up for more than a couple more years before this just implodes because in the end, you can't watch all this content. There's no way that this amount of money, this amount of money is being spent speculatively in the hopes that you will get a big enough audience to stay in business when all your competitors go out of business. But it's a house of cards ah which is also a streaming show and it's it's the kind of plan that like it works when there's a small number of these things like when there's only

a small number of big streaming services or like in in the in the previous world like when there's only a small number of like hit channels on on tv you can do this kind of stuff and chances are like you'll find an audience and you can develop hit shows but that the the mechanics of that really fall apart hard once you cross a certain threshold of like you know what i don't need to see popular show xyz because i have 50 other amazing shows that i've heard i should watch that i had that i haven't had time for you know that are on the services i already know nobody's ever heard of patriot so how are they going to get to perpetual grace limited when they've not even seen which is on amazon which almost everybody has right which is a service that we all actually ignore the name the name has nothing to do with

the show the show should be called sad spies which is what jason and tim worked out together it is a fantastic television show and i've even seen some of patriot and and the problem i have is that it's an amazon whatever video and i don't i never launch amazon whatever video like we our default app when we turn the apple tv on is netflix yeah and and this is actually when when netflix refused to join apple's uh tv app initiative i initially thought oh that's kind of crappy of them but now i kind kind of see why. Because my home on TV is the Netflix app. Any other app, not only am I not going to it, but if I do try to go to it, even like the HBO app that I subscribe to,

it's a bad app. It feels weird. It doesn't feel right to me. And so there's actually a lot of friction for me to watch something that's not on Netflix, which leads to me watching more things on Netflix. Yeah, though these companies don't want to be sucked into somebody else's branding especially netflix netflix is so strong that it knows that if it's not in the tv app the tv app

can't be all things to all people and if yes that's true then what app is most likely to be all things to all people and it's their app so why would they ever play ball with apple right exactly and like like in a like the world where we have lots of these streaming services i think that where that world can work if the tv app succeeded in its whole like channels initiative where like everything was just like uh like a small button that you could push in the tv app to buy that channel and it would work the same way as all the other channels. But I think the opportunity for that, like that ship has sailed. I don't think we're there anymore.

And I think instead, we're just going to have these little silos like Netflix and HBO, and some of them will play ball, some of them won't. But ultimately, the TV app channels thing, that's what the new Apple TV, quote new, should have been five, six years ago.

But instead, we have all these you know siloed apps and now we have the situation we have now where like you know now i don't want to leave the netflix app to watch another show because it feels wrong and weird all right ready for a break i i am but i'm afraid of what might come next so okay here we go here we go howdy y'all this episode of upgrade is sponsored by the dubai friday program and they've asked me mike hurley to read this important message to the upgrade listeners several months ago in our super secret channel dubai friday host max asked me to purchase and mail him a futuristic sci-fi bicycle helmet that as it turns out may not be technically legal in the united states

i purchased the sci-fi helmet for 2299 and paid shipping on top of that to send it to Max, just because I'm nice and I'm a good friend. After I mailed the helmet to Max, I received a message from Her Majesty's Royal Carrier Service stating that my parcel had been identified as containing items suspected of being prohibited or dangerous. They examined the package and then, quote, disposed of it accordingly. For the last several weeks, Max has been attempting to reimburse me for the cost of the Cypher helmet and shipping. However, I have stubbornly refused to accept these payments, instead telling Max to, quote, buy me dinner next time I'm in Chicago, even though I know full well that neither of us can eat 299 euros worth of food in one sitting. So now, because I have left Max with no other recourse, he has purchased this advertisement on the upgrade program for far more than the initial 299 euro financial outlay so anyway thanks to dubai friday for supporting relay fm and all the great shows now we're even

i think now um you probably owe max some like a dinner no i i already have a plan for this my plan is to invoice max for the amount of money minus the bicycle helmet look out for that invoice mr tampkin it's coming your way awesome we're not even we're never gonna be never gonna end nope all right we have marco armant with us so we should talk about keyboard yes a friend of the show ming chi roger quo has published a report stating code name roger not his actual name code name roger code name roger has published a report stating that apple is revamping its keyboard design once again going back to scissor switches from butterfly switches the report states that these will have better durability more key travel they're going to be

reinforced by glass fiber and apparently while still being expensive to manufacture more expensive than a typical keyboard switch a keyboard scissor switch it will be still more cost effective than the current butterfly switches these first will show up in a 2019 macbook air followed by the macbook pro in 2020 so this is there's a couple of things here that's interesting one let's just say great we all wanted to go back to the switches oh thank god let's just do that right like because we know that they were good let's just do that and we'll hope that apple have gotten that process right i think we can all feel pretty confident they're not gonna mess this one up right like i feel like there is so much on the line to get it correctly i wouldn't necessarily assume that i i'm sure they're trying really hard to not mess it up but you know the fact is we've had the butterfly keyboard debacle going on for, what, about four years?

I can't believe it's been that long. Yeah, since the 2015 MacBook. And the problem is, like, they keep thinking they fixed it. And it turns out they haven't. I don't think they think they fixed it. I think that every single time they're just, like, putting a band-aid on it. Like, they are hobbling along with this current one, hoping that they'll do something to make it a little bit but like these percentage gains on reliability because if they thought they were fixing it they would

just keep going down this path they know this is not a thing but it takes too anyway so but say here's the thing 2019 macbook air to get it first 2020 macbook pro does that mean we're not going to see the macbook pro in 2020 or will they bring out a macbook pro with the butterfly switches first so that yeah so here's the question so you know the the rumor had been that the the alleged 16 inch macbook pro which would be a new physical design incorporating this new keyboard that was rumored fairly recently i think by mark german uh to be released this fall and it would be a little bit odd since they did just uh rev just with you know with minor speed bumps and a minor keyboard revision with the materials they did just rev the the existing line of macbook

pros like a month and a half ago or something so you know so it's pretty recent so it would it would be kind of odd to have a speed bump rev to the existing line, and then to release the 16-inch this fall, unless it was really indeed just a 16-inch that would be positioned above the other two, and the other two would still be for sale for a while. So that's kind of what we were assuming now until this Ming-Chi Kuo report. And normally, I would just think this report is wrong wrong because most of the other stuff we've seen suggests that it's coming in 2019 uh but ming chi kuo is such a good track record uh that i'm not sure i would necessarily um bet against them bet against them if i am in charge of laptops at apple i am not putting a new keyboard in a macbook pro for its first run i'm not doing that that well

i wouldn't do that but on the other hand the macbook pro is the one that needs it the most because it has like the highest end buyers they expect the most you know because if it's still not gonna work i don't want it in that computer i i mean honestly i don't think in any of known like computer history i don't think any reasonable quality brand has put out a scissor switch keyboard that was unreliable but okay what is glass fiber is this new that's a good question this is this is my concern that they're like is it like fiberglass is it that's what it sounds like there was like there was a there was somebody was tweeting uh there was a part of the presentation of the original 12-inch macbook with the original butterfly keyboard uh phil shiller was going over like the difference between scissor switches and these new awesome butterfly

switches that they had made and the scissor switch it was labeled as like the little little like arms that scissor down they were labeled as plastic and then the butterfly switch arms that flap down which by the way as far as i know that component has been reliable um those were labeled as i believe glass reinforced nylon so that's probably what this is like it's just like glass fiber they're using that material yeah so it seems like they're just using they're using that material for the scissor rocking levers which is fine like those parts almost never have problems what you know what has problems are you know large things that can jam under the switches like large crumbs or debris or um the actual like

button pad thing that depresses and makes contact like if that wears out in some way that can cause problems but the actual like rocking of the scissor mechanism rarely has issues so that i'm not i don't i don't think that's that's anything bad it might even be good um and it might it might give apple like the some kind of bragging rights of oh here's a new physical design of why we're not just going back to what we had before we have something brand new that's even better like it kind of lets everything we learned from doing the butterfly switches we found this incredible material and it's going to be reinforced that gets you know it lets them seem like they're moving forward and not just reverting back to what was there before you know i bet they don't call it scissor switches uh well they might have some special apple name yeah right blade switch

but i gotta say like everything that i that we've heard from the rumors of this keyboard sounds great like i'm almost afraid to believe them because of how great it sounds like you know among things like we've heard that has a one millimeter travel which is i think about double the butterfly switches so hot you know one millimeter travel uh the scissor switch which should be way more reliable uh and just feel better um and i've even heard that it's going to have inverted t arrows possibly a hardware escape key next to the touch bar and one of my one of my also little pet peeves the the margins between the keys are too narrow on the butterfly keyboard. And it makes it hard to feel the edges of the keys.

And it makes it easier to hit the wrong key by accident. I've even heard that they have shrunk the keycap size slightly. They are big. Very big. They're too big. And they apparently have also shrunk the keycap size back down to approximately the Magic Keyboard size on the desktop keyboards. Wow. size back down to approximately the magic keyboard size on the desktop keyboards so it basically sounds a lot like the magic keyboard which would be fantastic because the magic keyboard has has you know the two attributes the butterfly keyboard doesn't it is widely agreeable and it's reliable

yep so this sounds awesome and you know if it takes them an extra few months, I have also heard from one source that I heard that it's supported by 10.whatever.1. So that would place it at late fall or early winter, like December maybe. When do they tend to release the.1 update to macOS? Like November, December maybe? So it's possible. Manjuko could be right. They could start taking orders for it in November. And it ships ships in january yeah or maybe it ships in limited quantities in december

and then you it ships more in volume in 2020 technically a 2020 product i mean if they did that they would label it 2019 but still like regardless like that's nitpicking like it's going to probably be closer to the end of the year if it is you know if it is coming out and so you know whether the macbook Air is announced at the same time and maybe ships earlier, who knows? Like, it could be a detail like that. But regardless, I am really happy they're doing this. I'm really happy to see Ming-Chi Kuo

reporting a lot of these details as well, which makes me think they're more reliable of a rumor. Yep, yep. By a lot, actually. Because now it's pots. The pots are being made. Exactly. So that's really good.

And I think one surprise is if the Air is indeed getting this as well, which I actually have heard that, that it's coming to the Air and the Escape as well. Curiously, I have heard nothing about these. The Escape lives? Wait a second here. Yeah. And I've heard nothing about this keyboard coming to a 13 inch macbook

pro with touch bar which is odd and i worry about that because that's that's the machine i use but i've heard only about 16 inches it won't be the machine you use because when they bring out the all-new 16 inch wonderful macbook pro you'll get that one and if they don't even mention the 16 inch and they just bring out a new air with this keyboard i'll buy i'll get an air yeah i'll be i'll be very happy with that because honestly like my needs don't exceed what an air can do a lot of the time so uh i got a couple questions first off i have sort of written off the 13 inch touch barless macbook pro as a as a goner just because it seemed like apple has because i don't know where it fit it fits weirdly unless i suppose there's no 13 inch touch bar in which case it fits less weirdly but that's still a very strange thing and um so that's fascinating like is that product not dead after all and uh

the other thing is i'm fascinated by the whole conversation about the macbook air because one of the things that that i wonder about, okay, so they have this butterfly keyboard and now they've got this new keyboard. Now we do know that the, what, 2018 and 2019 models can get the new latest generation butterfly keyboard. But what really jumps out at me here is the idea that Apple has a new keyboard design that's coming and they're going to be able to put it in the air because they just turned over the air they just redesigned the air which means did they redesign the air knowing that they would you know they would have certain keyboard specs that they could use for a different keyboard because otherwise it seems awfully wasteful like we made this product but now we need to redesign

it a little bit in order to fit the new keyboard in it or is that the commonality that allows those 2018 and 2019 laptops to get the current this brand new version of the butterfly is that like actually also the drop-in size of this new keyboard i don't know i'm that that part baffles me because uh the air is brand new essentially and if they put a new keyboard in it you know did they what do they have to do to get a new keyboard in this design that's only a year old exactly i mean if anything it'll be it'll be even more incredibly frustrating if they can very easily fit this thicker keyboard into their laptop without major design changes yes well i'll be yelling like why didn't you do it could be that there was a stealth design change in 2018 right that could be the answer here is that since they're saying i know you've got the old generation butterfly but if it dies we're going to put the new generation in even

though it's an older model an 18 model anyway um does is that a clue i don't know that maybe that change that allows those things to be swappable, you know, the new keyboard can go in that older model. Is that also the change that makes it be able to accept a new keyboard, a scissor instead of butterfly keyboard? I don't know. But that's my conspiracy theory of the day. Let's just make that today's conspiracy theory. All right. So I feel like I shouldn't say this. I feel like Marco is going to this i feel like marco's gonna maybe jump out of the window we're about halfway through the beta process now there are thereabouts right we're in we're in the approaching middle of july you know i'm sitting next to a sliding

door it's really easy to jump out this window we're about halfway through so i kind of wanted to check in with you as a developer of a very popular application application that many listeners will be using right now which is overcast to listen to the show there was a lot announced at wwdc and i kind of want to get an idea from you as to where your focus is what the stuff is that you're most interested on and looking at maybe what 2019 will look like for overcast so ios 13 it has new features they're not actually the ones that most people are talking about but there is stuff that got into ios 13 uh what is the most appealing things there for your iphone app what is the stuff that you want to do for

overcast whether it be for september or later based upon what was announced i was 13 at wwc this year well are you asking what i want to do or what i have to see this is this is the thing that i keep in our show document and our planning for this mike had this sort of uh do you use your data or do you use sort of like marketing and public opinions and i keep i kept inserting a third option which is do you also just choose what you're interested in doing? Because that's got to be part of the temptation, right? It's like, well, nobody wants this feature, but it's really cool. And I'm kind of interested in implementing it.

And so how do you balance all of those things when you're looking at iOS 13? I mean, the answer in truth is I don't balance those things. I work on what I want to work on. Okay. And sometimes it overlaps with what people care about. And sometimes it doesn't. But that has served me well. That is your way, though. and sometimes it overlaps with what people care about and sometimes it doesn't uh but that that has served me well way though and it's served okay for you so far yeah yeah and you know like

sometimes you know like sometimes i'll get a hit like clip sharing where like that that just kind of came out of nowhere i i you know i heard that interview steven did uh and i wanted it kind of inspired me to finally do it and so I just took a couple of weeks in the middle of an otherwise busy schedule and just, you know, I want to do that feature now. So I just did it. And nobody was really asking for it, but I did it. And it succeeded.

It got a lot of press and got a lot of attention to the app and people started using it. And that, I think, I always want the freedom in my mind to just like, hey, i all of a sudden want to work on something specific let me go work on it and this can get too far i mean right now i have a lot of like half done things that are out there like i have like my whole voice boost to engine and and a lot of things associated with yeah which is part of that airplay too a lot of stuff it's kind of like half done that's blocked by either other tasks

that I need to finish first or like OS problems I have to work around, like in the case of AirPlay 2, or like bugs I have to wait for Apple to fix before I can ship things, you know, stuff like that. So there's some of that for sure. But largely I work on what I want to work on.

And that being said, this is, I think, one of the reasons why the beta period is so hard for me in a year like this because ios 13 breaks a lot of stuff right like i i have to change some things for ios 13 just to make the app work without like weird ui bugs it's stuff you had no intention of touching right and and it's and some of these things are going to be a lot of work and they have been you know some i've started doing some of them and they are a lot of work. And so I'm kind of forced to adopt Apple's schedule during the summertime to some degree, which I have mixed success with most years.

I almost never get done everything I want to get done by the fall. And that is certainly true this year i i'm way behind this year uh i'm i'm there's a bunch of stuff that i want to do that i just haven't gotten to and and a lot of this stuff so so in in in broad strokes the the major areas i want to tackle are like area number one i need to fix incompatibilities or like broken ui or you know glitches with ios 13 and watch os and that is surprisingly difficult watch os in particular has caused me a lot of problems because the watch os beta is so rough and like to give you some idea during beta 2 watch os and the iphone simply wouldn't communicate with each other any message

you sent between the phone and the watch just wouldn't get delivered so you i basically couldn't do almost anything on the watch so and and you know that's you know beta 3 just came out like last week so the watch os is barely usable so far ios 13 is also pretty rough and so it's hard for me to do like you know os compatibility updates when the os's themselves are still in a really rough early beta state can you wait i think i will to a large degree like so here's here's where i'm coming from right now like for for about the last week i started working on other things that aren't related to ios 13 just making the app better in an update that i plan to ship for ios 12 in like a week or two and that has made me very happy because i'm like moving forward again after

after a month and a half of like grinding my gears against these terrible betas i'm finally moving forward again and i feel better about that i'm doing things that my users will benefit from whereas updating for ios 13 is you know it's mostly stuff there my users aren't even going to know that i did like you know i got to update this api to use this new api like they're not even going to know you need to do them though right because otherwise the app might not work yeah exactly so what i will probably do is delay or defer my iOS 13 and watchOS 6 compatibility updates until early August. Give them a chance for a few more betas to really give Apple a chance to solidify the ground that I'm building on first. Because until then, I'm just fighting my tools, and that's no fun.

Now, what this means so there's also all these new apis that i can use on ios 13 like you know there's you know dark mode is going to be easy i already have a theming engine in overcast so all i have to do is like read the system value of dark mode and apply it and probably have a setting where users can say obey the system or maintain a separate setting you will hook your system into that system right and give people a setting to unhook it basically um but i think i will hook it by default and so that's easy that'll take me a day or two at most um shortcuts is is a bigger thing the shortcut system as as i'm sure you're aware uh is almost completely rewritten and like now it supports parameters and everything and so

it's much more complex than before and last year i thought shortcuts were going to be like a three-day thing and turn into like a three-week thing because it was way more complicated to implement than i than i expected and there were there was a lot of like you know bad documentation or fighting the tools like you know just things like that i expect a lot more of that this year too so the new shortcut system i think is going to be very challenging for me to implement quickly and also shortcuts can now do a lot more which in one way is good i you know the parameterized shortcuts are way better than they were before and now there's audio specific intents that i can use for like catalog searching which is great this is stuff

i've been wanting but it is going to take work serious stuff where i could basically say oh oh i telephone play atp i think so i honestly haven't even a chance to play with it yet should It is going to take work. Serious stuff where I could basically say, oh, I telephone, play ATP. I think so. Honestly, I haven't even had a chance to play with it yet. You should be able to do it. Yes, in theory, that kind of thing. Basically, what we all wanted last year, that I think they've added now.

But that's going to take probably two, three weeks at least to get that going. So it's hard to get all that stuff going. And then in addition to that i have these two larger projects uh an independent watch app which i i have kind of my watch app is kind of half independent now like you can play podcasts separately from the phone but it's incredibly unreliable to transfer the files to the phone from the or to the watch from the phone i'm one of to the watch from the phone.

I'm one of your tiny percentage of people who use that feature, by the way. So thank you for, for that. And, and yeah, and that's the other problem is like, it's a pretty tiny percentage of people who use this feature,

but I also, I know that part of it, the chicken and egg problem, like part of it is fewer people use it because it sucks and it's unreliable. And part of it is that, you know, like Apple will feature me more if I have this feature. Like it's good for editorial promotion and everything to have this feature.

So I want more independence on the watch app. I want to have a totally independent, you know, login from login to sync to everything, you know, because I have a feeling Apple is going to be pushing that heavily in the near future because of how they kind of transmitted those ideas in WWDC. So the independent watch app is big but again like watch os right now it's so unreliable i can't build against it like so i don't even want to start yet i haven't started that process yet i'm also swift ui yeah swift ui is part of that too and like i would want to use swift ui a lot in the watch app uh but the reality of swift ui is also

really early you know like it's it's just like when people first built with the very first version of swift five years ago whenever that was like they had it was a lot of work to be an early swift adopter just because swift kept changing and evolving as it was so new swift ui is now doing that like i can jump into swift ui now but it's going to be a lot of work to just keep up with its changes and it's just really you know the tooling is still pretty young it's it's not well documented uh you know there's there's still bugs and shortcomings and everything and it's hard to know where to turn there so working with swift ui right now is going to be actually probably a pretty slow process it's going to be like it's going to have a lot of friction to it um so but

if i do a watch app rewrite i will want to use swift ui so again more friction um and then so so the watch app is probably not going to happen until after the os releases i'm guessing i'll rewrite the watch app maybe later in the fall or early winter and then there's the other big thing the catalyst app for the mac this is something that i've wanted to do for a while and i'm really happy catalyst is there but for me to build in catalyst first of all i have to be using catalina to even you know develop it like i have to be like operating within the catalina environment as my development environment which i installed it on a little partition but i really don't like using it it's it's not my main os it's a beta uh and you know my stuff isn't all

there i'm not as efficient there i run into i run into friction there and even catalyst because it's brand new has a lot of weird rough edges um you know things like in the first beta i haven't looked at it again since then but in the very first beta i couldn't even build the app at all without removing the carplay entitlement from it because the all the tools and everything would not let me they would reject that but i couldn't build like a separate one it was it was a whole thing and then iCloud was broken between mac versions of your app and ios version of your app like they couldn't share iCloud credentials at first either so it's just it's very rough all this stuff is coming in really rough and really broken and so while this stuff will be great to

build on in the future i assume today it's really hard to build on it and it's really inefficient and you end up losing a lot of time uh and and even potentially not even being able to do what you want to do because it's not really fully baked yet so my plan for all of that stuff is to take it a lot more slowly than i initially predicted uh to go you know maybe maybe i'll do the watch app in like you know late fall early winter maybe i'll do the catalyst app in winter and spring uh like once i'm actually running catalina on my mac normally maybe then i'll start working on it uh but and and i want it to be there sooner like in theory a few months ago like when i was when we were hearing about these things happening but the reality is there's just too much more to do even the catalyst app like like i want

to for the cows up i want to have a three-column view because I built it and I did whatever hacks were needed to build it so I could use it and play with it and see what was broken. And the interface is terrible on the Mac the way it is now where the left column is always switching between these two levels of the navigation hierarchy. You have your root level, your list of podcasts and playlists and then the contents of the podcaster playlist that really should be a three column view and so i had to write a three column

view first of all which itself is a good amount of work and then as soon as i got it running i realized oh crap my interface sucks in three columns it looks really weird it is not made for this at all so again the more work i do i keep uncovering more work i have to do to to make it like yeah shippable to at least a minimum quality level that i want so this stuff is all going to be awesome but i have a feeling it's going to be like a year to actually get through all the stuff i want to do now with with all these new releases isn't that nice of apple to give you a year's worth of work at wwdc just there you go here's your next year marco enjoy i i mentioned on when i was on the talk show with john gruber that there was a thread that um canis who's the developer uh at woojee juice who does uh ferrite recording studio which

i love um and it was very similar to what you just said which was okay everybody wants ferrite on the mac that is basically what he's saying that's very nice but and it was very much like i want to do it right i've got a lot of ios 13 things i need to do in my existing app so that it works right um including they deprecated one of the audio apis that he uses that he needs to change to a newer audio api and there's all this other stuff going on by the way i use that as well yeah i know and and then he said you know and when i do the mac app i want it to be right and i want it to be good and so i'm not gonna work on the mac app this summer like you're gonna need to wait because i want to do it right i have pride in again i have pride in the product that i make and i want to have it be um have it be good when i do it and i i feel like

what makes me afraid is that all of those hot catalyst apps that are going to ship with catalina are going to be bad because they're going to be shovelware and that and they will be condemned by people saying see catalyst is bad because all it does is bring lousy poorly translated apps to the mac when you know the truth is maybe that a lot of the better catalyst apps you're just not going to see on day one because those developers are going to be more conscientious about making those apps oh yeah and and and part of it also is you know the market forces here i mean it's it's very different for ferrite like you know for for what is a professional content production app it makes a lot of sense to have that appear on the mac right but there isn't that much demand for most ios apps to come to the

including overcast like there's there's very little demand for overcast on the mac i don't i wouldn't even use it most of the time yeah but casey would get off your back finally so that'll be good like while i want to work on this just because i think it would be cool the reality is i probably shouldn't spend a lot of time on it this summer i need to i need to focus on where what my users actually would benefit from the most and that is number one iphone number two apple watch and then ipad and mac are very distant after that so ultimately the best thing i can focus on is making the iphone app better and so that's that's what i'm doing first and then after that i got to tackle the watch and so like you know catalyst is you know it's i'm really glad it's here but it's going to

take a lot more work than i thought which therefore pushes it back on my priority list significantly. We are three people who have very strong opinions about podcasting in general. So I want to talk a little bit about kind of podcasting today. But before we do, let's thank our second sponsor of this episode, and that's our wonderful friends at Pingdom. Pingdom are amazing because they help keep your sites and the sites that you love online. They monitor your website so you don't have to, giving you real-time feedback so you know exactly what's going on at all times. We've been having some outages because of our caching provider.

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So I was doing some research for this episode and I came across a couple of quotes from this little website called Marco.org. Oh no. The first is in October 2015 in a blog post about, I think it was about app pricing in general you were talking about kind of having overcast as free and talking about subscriptions and stuff like that called pragmatic pricing so this is a quote uh podcasts are hot right now big money is coming they're coming with bad apps you didn't say bad they're coming with bad apps and fantastic

business deals to dominate the market lock down this open medium into proprietary technology and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone's revenue in 2016 you linked to this post in another in another article about stitcher being bought by scripts the newspaper company saying then big money is here i'm really getting started so in 2015 you knew that big money was on the way so venture funding large acquisitions in 2016 scripts was probably the first big one so when stitcher got bought um stitcher slash mid-roll got bought and now it feels like there are acquisitions happening all over the place you know you can look at spot and Anchor and Gimlet.

There are new VC-backed companies popping up left and right, companies like Luminary. And there are a lot of companies now hoping to be the Netflix for podcasting, the something for podcasting, because to a lot of these companies, podcasts need something. Do you think it's working? Are the plans of these companies, companies investing millions and millions of dollars to try and make this medium something that it isn't right now or to take a part of

the market that they think that they can take do you think it's working for them or on a trajectory to work i think it depends on what their goal is. So if you have somebody like Spotify, Spotify has an interesting motivation for podcasts because Spotify has to pay music royalties every time people play music on their service. So the more time that their members are playing podcasts instead of commercial music, Spotify is actually saving money there,

big money over time. The music royalties are a massive cost for them. And don't forget also that the music libraries music spotify is actually saving money they're big money you know over time and it's like you know the music royalties are a massive cost for them and uh don't forget also that the music libraries are essentially not differentiated right they've got essentially the same line where content is the same everywhere they can't do exclusive music really i mean title has tried it but basically you can't it will eventually be everywhere but podcasts can be exclusive all these companies have like all this live album was recorded in our studios. But ultimately, none of those things are moving the dial.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, so exclusives are one angle of this. And even just having podcasts in general is the other angle. Either way, they're not paying music royalties. And then when they have exclusives, they can also use as as you know exclusive content leveraging to get you know new subscribers or whatever so in both of those ways i think it does work if the price is right and i don't know spotify's business really i don't know you know their economics and by the way i should disclose that i made money on spotify buying because i was an investor in gimlet so i'm i'm you know maybe slightly biased here i don't think

you are though yeah i guess you don't have anything good to say like you know it's not good but like you don't necessarily sit there and be like oh this is a good idea no i i honestly i think it was a good idea in the sense that i made money from it but i don't think it was a good idea for you know for them yeah i wasn't gonna tell them not to do it but yeah right yeah no i mean i don't i don't know i don't i don't i honestly i the business side of that i didn't really pay much attention to i think ultimately it's up to you know these companies what these things were worth them there is value in them offering podcasts there is value in them having exclusive content but i do think similar to the earlier discussion we had about streaming services

i don't think it's easy to build an audience based on exclusive podcast content you have on one service it's even worse for podcasting because everything's free in the in the land of streaming services and television it's not free you know you you get a bunch of stuff because you pay money to somebody right you know like you might pay money to a cable provider and you get a bunch of challenge you get a bunch of content but you don't ever think of it as free content podcasting is free content yeah it's true and and that makes a massive difference because you are not only saying subscribe to this because you will get this exclusive stuff you're also saying pay pay because you're not paying so now you have to start paying and then you can get access to something in the place that you're not watching it as well right exactly you have to change your player yes

and also pay yeah and this is why like i think i like compare a lot of these services try to compare it to like oh we want to be the netflix of podcasts i i think a a more useful metaphor instead of trying to compare it to like premium tv shows where they are almost all paid in some way a more useful metaphor might be to try to compare it to premium TV shows where they are almost all paid in some way, a more useful metaphor might be to try to compare it to YouTube. And to say, YouTube is full of lots of free content, much of which is very good. So how successful have things been to try to lure people away from YouTube with premium paid content? And I think the answer is... Or free video.

Yeah, or free, right. And yeah think the answer is free video right yeah or free right and yeah the answer is not very like they have not that has not really worked on youtube because everyone who's watching youtube just watches the free stuff if they're you know if there's any wall put up to something else they just say no because there's enough amazing free stuff on youtube they don't need to go elsewhere i think that's how podcasting is there there's so much great free podcasting out there that it's really hard to get people to to move into some other player and pay some other new fee for something they don't need to the only way i think it works is when you when you make a deal with some somebody with an existing large audience to move their audience

into your paid service and say all right now there's a paywall but even that it doesn't seem like anybody i can't think of anybody who's done that there are people that are like maybe walling off old content and putting it there right during a new show exactly but i don't think there's been any huge name that's gone all right now you've got to pay for this. Because everybody, because look, we are all in the advertising-based business, and advertising revenue is still very good. So you would be giving up good money for the chance of some money. And I think that's why nobody is making this jump right now. Oh, yeah. And even beyond the ads, right now ads are paying better. But even if ads weren't quite paying as well, strategically it would be not a good move

for a successful content producer to take their audience and try to move everybody over to a paywall system because you're going to lose a lot of people in that process. You're going to lose a lot of your audience in that process that you've built up over maybe years. So strategically it's kind of audience suicide, really. And so you're going into this thing, you're losing a bunch of your audience.

And I think the opportunity for future growth of new audience is going to be very limited because if people have to sign up for some service to, to hear you or to, to even give your show a shot, that we, we know what happens. We've seen what happens. No one does it, basically. So not only do you lose a lot of your audience in the transition, but your audience growth drops to zero.

So I don't know any content provider, any podcaster who would do that, who is making good business decisions for themselves. And ultimately, therefore, I don't think listeners are going to do it. And I think we've seen platforms like Luminary trying this at a very large scale. I don't think Luminary is... I don't think they're achieving what they set out to achieve.

I feel like I haven't heard about them since they launched, which is probably not good. Right. And the fact is, you know they you don't raise a hundred million dollars to slowly spend it over five years you raise a hundred million dollars to spend it in 18 months and then raise more money with all the growth you've had in the meantime and i don't see a lot of evidence of that growth happening so far so while it's only been a short time i i'll call it right here i seriously doubt luminaire is going to make it um once they have burned through their money which they have presumably mostly spent already on on like

deals for content um as well as their massive staff but it's probably mostly gone to content deals i can't see how they're going to raise more money because they don't have the growth to back it up because nobody wants to pay for content like this and in the end what you end up with is um the this group of companies that i think are doing well are the ones that are saying we can embrace the existing podcast medium and make money mostly through ads sometimes through platform but using the existing podcast medium that's out there rather than creating this thing because i i you're right in saying it's like youtube i was going to say it's like the old days where everybody got broadcast tv for free and then there was hbo and you're like

pay for for shows that or and movies that seems like a bad idea and then they're like oh but there's this show that everybody's talking about the sopranos is on like oh well maybe i should pay for hbo the problem is we don't live in a three or four TV network world when it comes to this stuff. It's much more the equivalent of YouTube. We have an infinite supply of the best stuff as well as the stuff that is most closely tailored to what you are personally interested in. And that's awfully hard to compete with. There are companies, so like you mentioned Midroll, which our friend Lex Friedman used to work for, and they do some original stuff, and they do have Stitcher, which is their own podcast app. But they sell ads. They have big clients, and they sell ads.

Lex works at Art19 now, right? Similarly, it's like platform measurement and ad sales, and that's what they do. And those are building big businesses on the existing kind of podcast structure, as opposed to these other companies that are sort of like trying to take the ball and go home, you know, steal the ball and go make their own game somewhere else steal the ball pop the ball melt the melt the balls material down turn it into uh a paperweight yeah i think that's so and say people love paperweights like no we we don't they want the ball they just wanted a ball give me the ball back so marco you kind of sit in an interesting position i mean we we all the three of us kind of do, and we are content producers, but then we also run companies that are involved in podcasting, right? But the difference between us, me and Jason, and you

is that you actually have an application, right? You run one of the larger applications that people use to listen to podcasts in. So I wonder wonder do you feel either as a podcast producer or as the creator of a podcast platform and app can you see any specific trends or things that you keep seeing pop up with a good or bad in the industry right now that you're thinking about that's a good question i mean i'm always concerned that one of these big vc plays is going to mess up what we have like in our world over here but so far that there really hasn't been

a lot of evidence of that i start worrying about this and me too and and the reason why and i did this segment on atp so i'll be brief uh but you know the main reason why is that like i kind of compare podcasting to like an old growth tree. The ecosystem in podcasting is very strong. There's not a lot of weaknesses that people could use to attack us from. The reason why YouTube was able to take over video and Facebook was able to take over publishing text and stuff to a large degree because those ecosystems were vulnerable. They had problems problems they were weak you know when when youtube took over video publishing video online was really hard and really expensive to host and there were all these technical challenges that if you just did it on

youtube it would take care of it for you uh publishing text online publishing articles was as jason knows it was a really hard business it still is a really hard business in a lot of ways yeah and and so you and they and publishers became so um desperate for like referral traffic from social networks which is where everybody was going for all their browsing behavior that they basically had to play ball and still have to play ball with places like facebook because that's just where all the traffic is coming from podcasting does not suffer from issues like this right now podcasting is in a great place where they're like usually the way some big power holder or power broker or whatever is able to come in and

take over one of these things is by exploiting some big weakness yeah and like you know the way youtube exploited like the ease and the hosting costs and facebook exploited traffic distribution and everything but podcasting doesn't seem to have one of these things like i mean yeah making a podcast could be easier but everyone's like enough people have figured out how to do it that we have this embarrassing riches of podcasting content if you ever do want to know relay.fm slash upgrade slash 200 yep that's last summer right yeah that was last summer i found episode 200 me and jason broke down everything yeah it's one of my favorite things i've ever done because people ask me a lot how can i and i just send them this link any question of how can i do this

this is the link that you get but yeah and the reality is like hosting like creating and hosting a podcast in any of the ways that we do today with like the open ecosystem that we have which is wonderful if somebody were to come in and make it easier like anchor you know did you know former sponsor probably right so just over there but like you know and now spotify bought them along with gimlet um for them for somebody to come in and try to make a business on making it easier there's only so much easier you can make it yeah and still have a show that he that anybody wants to listen to you can make it easy and they did and anchor do make it easier but it's in a very specific type of way yeah you know they have like an interesting set of tools like the ability to call people in and

leave messages and all that kind of stuff but the actual production of a podcast itself it's not overly complicated once you learn how to do it and then it's just basically like a machine that just runs on its own like using the tools that we have you know like it's it is something that you can learn it is a skill set it's it's like for example saying you know we want to be we want to make photoshop easier for everybody it's like yeah you can make a set of tools image editing tools which can make some stuff more simple but if you really but like the actual process the actual beginning process using photoshop is something you can just learn and it's not massively difficult once you've picked it up video is way harder because the production is harder like the the actual tools that you need to produce is harder like setting

up for video is harder than setting up for audio so having anything taken out of that but the biggest thing for youtube though was the cost it wasn't the the ease and this might be different now and the legal stuff yeah i mean like like you know now if you're if you're doing video you have to be on youtube just because that's where all the people are but right now there isn't one of those things for podcasting and and so for one of those things to form for podcasting you would need to have some massive reason why a whole bunch of audience would move to something else. Or you'd have to have Apple go nuts

and actually start doing crazy lockdown stuff with their player because they're the only ones that have enough market share to do this kind of stuff and matter. But I don't see either of those outcomes really happening. What we've seen so far is, even when somebody like Spotify came in with a major podcast initiative spotify now has a pretty strong market share i think it's in the order of 10 compared to apple having something about something like 60 but and that's in a pretty short time but most of that was additive it was new listeners who

weren't listening to podcasts before now listening i don't think a lot of people picked up and moved away from their podcast app to go to Spotify. And I've heard of zero people who did that for things like Luminary or any other new startup that might come up. So I don't – like I think what we keep seeing over and over again, there's the initial boom of like podcast vc interest back in like the odio days you know whatever 12 years ago whenever that was and uh and it you know if they quickly realized that it was hard to make a lot of money with podcasting using that vc model and so it fizzled out and no one in vc land touched podcasts for a decade i think we're going to see a similar kind of thing happen now but just not quite as extreme i think we're going to see a similar kind of thing happen now but just not quite as extreme i think we're seeing you know a big boost of investment now in podcasting because

people think they can make a bunch of money by locking it down and doing whatever else it's largely or entirely not going to work and so you're going to set you're going to have a few big flame outs most likely including luminary and anything that's going to raise that much money you're going to see some big flame outs and the vc people are going to pull back from it and they're going to realize this is not as easy of an investment as we expected it to be or the return rate is simply too low and they're going to pull away and focus on other things and that's probably going to happen over the next year or two and we're going to go back because the thing is like in the 10 years between these two vc waves podcasting grew and was amazing that's right it's like when all of us started listening to podcasts it's when all of

us started podcasting it's like it all of the entire world that all of our listeners and that we know as the this great world this great world of podcasting all developed and blossomed and succeeded in that span where vcs were like you can't make money in podcasting meanwhile we were all making money in podcasting and so you know it just because the the big vc model might not apply and might fail miserably and they might pull back from it that largely won't affect us our world is largely separated from theirs and so i think we're just going to go back to one of those 10-year periods where we don't hear a lot of big business intrusion into podcasting, and it's fine. And that, I think, is the best outcome for all of us and, honestly, I think the most likely.

If I had to guess, I would say that the presence of Spotify and doing some originals and stuff. I think that will end up working for them, maybe not justify their investment. But I think as an audio platform, trying to throw a podcast in there for the reasons that you mentioned, like, I think it makes sense for them to continue to do that, although maybe not invest at anything like the level they are. I wonder about Apple, similarly, being interested in differentiating Apple's stuff somehow using their authority. They haven't done it yet, but I think it's possible. But I think most of the big footprint in podcasting going forward that is successful, it's going to be, you know, it's gonna be all the stuff that frustrates you as a listener and as the author of Overcast, which is it's gonna be ad tech and other things related to kind of like building layers on top of the existing podcast market and that means yes that that dynamic ad insertion will continue and

maybe be more or less bad who knows we could be optimistic and say less bad but probably not and that there will be a whole realm of like trying to monetize podcasts by offering an ad-free version somewhere where they're removing the dynamic ad search i mean there are other ways to kind of like crank out a little bit more cash that people will try to get uh build businesses around and some of that will work and some of that will fail but it seems like the uh applying the netflix and streaming services model to podcasts i agree with you will kind of fall apart, especially since, as we said, sort of toward the beginning of this episode, we're probably in for a hard time for a lot of those Netflix competitors over the next few years as they realize that there's not enough space for them to survive and i think it's going to be worse with podcasting where there's just you know they're not going to make it but i do think that you know these companies that sell ads and bring audiences uh to advertisers and have their stats that may or may not be real and have their uh you know

ability to dynamically insert ads in random podcasts and stuff i feel like that stuff is probably going to make it because they're building on top of what we already have and it is working for them yeah right now and and the reason it works is because advertising on podcasts works without all of that so i don't know how much more useful honestly a lot of that stuff is but even without the data and without the dynamic insertion and without the geo locating and attempted targeting of users the advertising stuff still works so it kind of works regardless right and maybe you do get a slightly better return um but but that does mean that that technology will continue because the the the industry can support it the industry can support advertising and it can support it well uh mark

you seem to talk a lot about this stuff like in the stuff that you were saying it sounds like you're talking as a podcast producer how does all of this stuff affect you as the creator of overcast the the workings of individual podcasts largely don't affect overcast like if a podcast uses certain tracking things on their side you know like i well i mean i don't support anything dynamic in the show notes or anything so all they can really see for me is like here's an ip address downloading this file from somebody running overcast right that's it and so you know whatever they can do with that that's up to them um and so that's you know that's how you get things like you know location based dynamic ad insertion based but it's only based on like geolocation of

ip addresses so you're you're seeing like you know neighborhood level granularity at best so they don't necessarily know that it's like mike hurley but you know it's somebody who lives in london right so like you know that you see stuff like that and largely i can't do anything about that and so it kind of is outside of my world what does affect overcast is any kind of like like a macroeconomic factor in podcasting so you know anything that that affects the viability of shows uh you know on their own or whatever else anything that affects whether or not shows should go behind their own paywalls whether or not any big shows do go behind their own paywalls or behind paywall services but what's great about about the situation that i'm in with

there is that pretty much anything that a show would do that would negatively affect their ability to be played in overcast would also affect their ability to be played in Apple Podcasts. And Apple Podcasts is so big that almost no show could afford to lose the support of Apple Podcasts. So basically, just because of the way this stuff all works with the RSS backend and everything being direct downloads and everything, as long as Apple doesn't radically change that

with Apple Podcasts, which I honestly don't think they will, As long as Apple doesn't radically change that with Apple Podcasts, which I honestly don't think they will, I think I'm fine because I'm kind of in the shadow of Apple Podcasts and nothing they can do to hurt me wouldn't also affect the hand that feeds them in Apple Podcasts. If I'm right, I think all three of us next year will be celebrating our 10 years in podcasting right something like that yeah yeah yeah i would say it'll be 10 years for the incomparable i mean we had a macro podcast

back in that 2005 period marco was talking about but i was never the regular host of that or anything so isn't that wild 10 years time flies when you're having fun but that that's like backs up you know what you said about the idea of all uh thing it feels like none of these things are gonna are gonna break everything down and i said it doesn't bother me anymore it's because over the last 10 years i've seen lots of things that we're going to destroy everything we know and love about podcasting and none of them have because as you say the foundation is very strong i don't know what that foundation is like outside of technology and nerd focused podcasting, which is what we're in, which is the industry that it's kind of the industry that started 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, this is the one with Leo Laporte, basically.

Right. Like, yeah, we are still in that world. And it is very good for us because we have listeners that love this stuff and they like their shows in particular ways and ways that we like making them, which is why I think we remain sheltered a lot from stuff. But I genuinely think that that's going to remain because the underlying technology is so freaking nerdy, right, that it kind of protects us quite nicely from everything it does and you know the reality is like you know podcasting started out as pretty much being about technology shows public radio shows and then a whole bunch of very tiny specialized interest shows and over time you know now you know 12 15 years later whatever it's been we still have technology shows and public radio shows being very large typically especially the public radio stuff it's like still that's even larger now right and and you know we've added now a significant uh comedy contingent and murder yeah yeah just comedy uh crime fiction and business business is also pretty big these days um but like basically we still have the same those like core pillars of like

public radio and technology as like the strongholds but everything else has also grown up around us so we have you know everything has gotten bigger and stronger and more entrenched in the existing good open ecosystem all categories all demographics they're all like really strong now in podcasting so i just i think we're really okay yeah what i think we're saying is invest in podcasting i I think that's what we're saying. Today's episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. They will let you easily create a website for your next idea or project.

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upgradians and we told them that marco was going to be on the show so we have a bunch of marco themed ask upgrade questions awesome uh first one comes from robert what are your current favorite wireless over ear headphones oh boy um i mean it's kind of hard for me to answer this usefully because wireless over ears are actually my least frequently used type of headphone i pretty much only use them when traveling on a plane okay but that being said they are the ones that you're actually wearing right now the sony wh whatever whatever mark ii uh the current version is the mark iii which is very similar uh basically just swapped out the micro usb port for usbc and made a couple of other minor tweaks but they're basically the same so i haven't upgraded to the

newest ones but i have the yeah the sony wh whatever mark 3 or mark 2 and uh they're they're good for planes the only downside to them is that they only easily pair to one device at a time and so i i kind of clumsily have to switch between my phone which i keep them paired to and my ipad or mac on a plane which i use the wire to connect to because it's it's so clumsy but it's easier than you know repairing both directions all the time um people did i talked about an atp and people recommended i check out the um the beats studio the most recent beat studio which are powered by the w1 chip from the first generation airpods so those should support easier pairing both ways between multiple apple devices but i have not tried those and at this point i would

rather wait until there's a second generation airpods chip based one but the h1 chip because it just it's so much you know faster and better pairing and avoid some audio issues so i i'm very interested to see you know there were rumors apple might address this and make some over your headphones sometime soon yep headpods whatever we're calling them but so that if that happens i i'm very much looking forward to that uh i would buy those immediately but in the meantime the sonys are pretty good i actually bought believe it or not those wh1000 xm3 the new one and used them on my recent trip to hawaii and there's a whole story about how i i was having um i was having a lot of like headaches and stuff after flights and one of the recommendations i had was to not block i realized i was using my in-ear headphones on the plane and i thought that might actually be very bad for my inner ear to have weird pressure dynamics happening

but i wanted something i could use on a long flight uh and i thought noise canceling i heard them talk about it on atp and i thought noise canceling headphones i've never really been into that i don't like over ear headphones but i thought i would give it a try and so i bought these to use on this trip and they were pretty good. Like I still don't love over-ear headphones. It still kind of makes my ears feel weird and sometimes bad, but noise canceling is great. And I didn't have any problems with my inner ear or anything like that because, you know, I think it lets the air move around in a way that they get blocked like a cork in a bottle with my in-ear headphones. And I thought they sounded pretty good. So I, you know,

that's my lukewarm endorsement of those products. But I agree. I realized I had to, every time I wanted to switch from my iPad to my iPhone, I needed to go into the Bluetooth settings and then disconnect and then reconnect. Otherwise, it wouldn't let go of the Bluetooth settings and then disconnect and then reconnect. Otherwise, it wouldn't let go of the previous Apple device, which was a downer coming from AirPods. I don't use any of these headphones because I hate noise canceling. I should clarify, I don't use a noise canceling function. I turn it off every time. Yeah, I currently use a wired pair of the H6. Yeah, the B&O H6 is great.

I bought those now, but honestly, a lot of the time I just use my AirPods. I love the noise canceling, but I'm literally only using it on an airplane. And on the airplane, I was impressed by the noise canceling just because it was a lot quieter and I wasn't hearing the rumble of the plane. But I don't think I would use them in any context other than an airplane quite honestly jam wants to know marco as far as we know you're dual wording aeropressors for your coffee every day but what about espresso do you own or use gear or have any interest in the matter i am actually not really an espresso person i i will drink espresso based drinks you know if they if they're available and if I want them like at a restaurant or something, but I don't really drink espresso at home ever. I have found that, you know, I'm just I'm a drip coffee fan and making good espresso

at home takes a heck of a machine, really. And all those machines need a lot of maintenance and cleaning and everything. It's just more than what I want for a drink I don't care that much about. The good thing is because I'm not really an espresso snob the way I'm a coffee snob, I have found that when I'm traveling, you know, if I try somebody else's regular drip coffee, chances are pretty low I'm going to like it. Especially if I'm traveling, and there's, of course, the rule of hot places, which is hot places usually tend to have the worst drip coffee because nobody's really ordering it except me and so there's not really a lot of pressure from their markets to to have good

drip coffee usually um so if i'm traveling somewhere like las vegas where it's like it's a hot place uh i will almost exclusively drink espresso for uh the main reason that a i don't really care so much about its quality as i do about drip coffee and b i have found that the floor of how bad espresso can be is higher than the floor of how bad drip coffee can be when you're somewhere yes like you can get the worst drip coffee in the world pretty routinely at like restaurants diners you know whatever else hotels airplanes like they they all have terrible drip coffee available to you but usually a place either can't make espresso at all or can make a minimum acceptable espresso and the floor of how bad that

is is significantly higher than the likely floor you're willing to run into with drip coffee i object entirely to this entire line of questioning why are we talking about coffee on the podcast right because finally i can right because you will ignore it and get not let me so i do like espresso drinks mostly and i do have an espresso machine at home which i like very much it's called the barista express in the uk it's called sage but in the us it's breville it's made by breville but they have a like a separate line in the UK with their coffee products called Sage. I love my espresso machine. It's very, very good, and I use it every day.

You can go much, much, much, much more expensive than the one that I use, but I'm very happy as someone who is still kind of trying to learn how to do a lot of this stuff properly uh this one does a fantastic job for me i'm a big fan of it so i recommend it i thought the tea robot was expensive it's not even close espresso machines are very expensive you get like three tea robots for this i do and do you know what jason my espresso machine is not a robot oh it's not a robot the tea robot has also been told i've been told by john syracuse is not a robot because it doesn't crawl around the house the tea not a robot casey not that casey wants to know marco what is your favorite thing to do at the beach

you know i so for me the beach simply means the area temporarily yeah it means living temporarily in the beach town on the beach island and so i i include everything i do here as as part of being at quote the beach even when i'm not actually on the sand that's in front of the ocean and my favorite thing to do here is walk especially walk my dog i it's it's a wonderful walking environment because on fire island there are no cars uh so you can like between all the houses they're just like big wide sidewalks that are like you know they're like boardwalks and you just kind of walk everywhere freely and it's there's not even any real hills it's mostly flat you walk to get groceries you walked you know back and forth to the beach and your house and everything like it's just a very walking culture and i love just walking my dog i i usually

i bring in my uh my you know atp sponsor aftershocks bone conduction headphones i'll pop those in because they're super light and they don't make me hot and i'll listen to podcasts like this one and i'll walk my dog everywhere and it's wonderful it's by far my favorite thing to do jason what is your favorite thing to do when at the bait when at the beach having spent a week on the beach i think um honestly i think reading under a like a maybe under an umbrella but sitting on the sand i really do love that um and then we all and then you just get up and you get in the water and you bob around in the waves a little bit and you cool off and then you go back and you sit back down uh i really like that that i find it very relaxing

and i read like five books on my vacation i was very happy to do that yep my favorite thing is to do nothing yeah let's hear it for we have a an ongoing debate in in my house about whether vacations are a time when you need to do stuff activities at the destination or whether you want to do nothing i like activities on vacations a beach vacation you're going to a beach place, you do nothing. There are no activities. Yes. Well, this is a conflict that occasionally my wife and I have had.

And I feel bad for her because now that I have two lazy teenagers, it's three against one. I like to do things, but I like to not necessarily have lots of plans, right? That's why I kind of think of nothing. So you're doing nothing. Do you want to go do this now? Yeah, let's go do this now. That's what I like about this type of beach living elliot says uh please discuss jason's request the overcast support a catch-up mode syracuse a podcast that you should listen to from the start with new episodes appearing in your queue

automatically marco do you get do you get people who write to you and say i want to listen to atp but i gotta start at the beginning? Because I actually get those for Incomparable, especially, but also some other podcasts. And these people are John Syracuse's people, I guess. But it blows me away that people do this. I do get those. For inappropriate podcasts, like for timely podcasts. I get it for other kinds of podcasts.

Like the Adventure Zone, I started at the beginning. But for Upgrade, you don't need to start with number one an ATP wherever you want you don't need to yeah yeah we we I actually do get those sometimes and it shocks me as well um but yeah so for for this kind of feature I have actually been laying the groundwork for this for a long time um you know because overcast syncs to a server-based backend this gives me a lot of advantages and for a lot of features but when it comes to something like this where you're like modifying like how a feed is processed by the apps and like what's considered a new episode and what isn't and when they come in

having a server backend is actually a hindrance to this kind of development because it takes a lot of server work that is harder than just doing it locally would be so i'm laying the groundwork for this i do plan a long-term feature sometime soon but it's it has been a long time coming and like just doing database changes and back-end updates and everything to be able to even support this well at all so yes i am doing it but i have no date to announce that's great to hear that fair enough yeah final question comes from troy pie or cake oh easy pie okay pie is way better than cake you did a top four about pie didn't you we did i believe yeah and and we had some debate about whether cheesecake was considered a pie or a cake i'm firmly on team

pie on that one cake offers way more potential for visual interest for decoration for like layers and all sorts of you know fun you know visual appeal on a cake but ultimately pie i think offers not only better flavors but more variety of flavors and so ultimately i am 100 on team pie i'll tell you going through the core uh birthday cake getting years of two children as a parent has eliminated any like that i might have possibly had for cake it's pile away if you would like to send in a question for a future episode of the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade marco thank you so much for joining us on today's episode thanks it's been a pleasure if you want to to get Marco's work online, he is the host of the Accidental Tech Podcast, ATP.fm. And at RelayFM, Marco hosts top four and under the radar, and of course,

makes the wonderful application Overcast, which if you use iOS and you've not tried out Overcast, you should. It's free to try it out, and it's wonderful. If you would like to find Jason online, of a cast you should it's free to try it out and it's wonderful um if you would like to find jason online you can find his work at sixcolors.com and he's at jason on twitter jsnll i am at i'm mike i am yke and marco is at m-a-r-c-o-a i forgot the song m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-e-n-t there you go marco arman that's the hardest one of the three in the song for me to remember because he kind of like, Donovan Mann, breaks from the rhythm to fit all your letters in. Yeah, kind of leads in from the previous measure a little bit. It makes it very tricky, but I got there in the end.

If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode, relay.fm slash upgrade slash 253. Thank you to Squarespace, Pingdom, and Dubai Friday for sponsoring this show. Max, it's not over. Hi, Max. We'll be back next time. Say goodbye, everybody.

Howdy, folks. Goodbye.