This Week in Tech 482 (Transcripts)
Leo LaPorte: It’s time for TWIT – This week in Tech. Rafe Needleman is here from Yahoo tech, Chris Breen from
MacWorld.com. We’ll find out why Apple discontinued the iPod Classic – the
answer may surprise you. Andy Rubin is leaving Google, what’s he up to next and
we’ll take a look at his legacy lollipop Android 5.0 plus the amazing athletic
adventures of Jason Howell. It’s all next on TWIT!
Netcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit! Bandwidth for This week
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Leo: This is Twit, This week in Tech, episode 482, recorded November 2nd 2014
The Microsoft
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enter twit.
It’s time for TWIT, This week in Tech, the show that covers the tech
news of the week with the top tech reporters in the field. One of the reasons I
love doing this show is because this is how I learn what it all means. We bring
in really smart people and they explain to me. Let’s say hi to Chris Breen. I
haven’t seen him in ages. He’s from MacWorld.com – one of the few remaining
MacWorld.com employees.
Chris Breen: Yes it’s quality – you
get me on here for the quality.
Leo: Mac 911, but you were already working on the website so it makes
sense that if you shutter print that you keep the web people around. Somebody’s
got to do it.
Chris: Yes we’ve been doing web for a really, really, long time. So it’s the
need for the print business. Things weren’t really happening anymore so they
killed that and no unexpectedly PC World went down last year so it was our turn
and we carry on and we’re going to do what we can.
Leo: You asked me when we started talking about this before the show “when
was the last time you wrote a book?” and it’s true – print…. People like Paul Thurotte who continue to write books, I’m not sure why and
I’m not sure who is buying print books.
Rafe Needleman: If you write a
book you don’t have to have it be printed.
Leo: No, in fact now days a lot of what he does
is online. Hey that’s Rafe Needleman. So nice to see
you, this is kind of a reunion of sorts for all 3 of us. We haven’t had you on
in ages since you were back at Cnet. You went to
Evernote for a while and now you’re editorial director at Yahoo Tech.
Rafe: I’m working with David Pogue…
Leo: Does Katie Couric stop by once in a while and say hi?
Rafe: Yes it’s really, really, awesome to work with a
company that you can get star power like that. It’s really neat, I’m having a great time.
Leo: Do you ever see Marissa?
Rafe: Yes of course.
Leo: Does she stop by once in a while and say how’s it going Rafe?
Rafe: All the time, we chat.
Leo: I have a real soft spot in my heart for Yahoo. Those of us who are
old timers – you know my Yahoo was my start page for a long time on the
internet. Yahoo was my first search engine.
Rafe: You never forget your first search engine.
Leo: You never forget your first engine. So I sometimes feel like some
people in tech press and the public are rooting against Yahoo but I’m rooting
for it. I want it to do well.
Rafe: The interesting thing about Yahoo is that
outside of the tech bubble where its…
Leo: You’re king and tech bubble people don’t know about things like OMG
which is a huge property. It’s the gossip channel tv.com. These are very big
content properties that you’re right – I think normal people know about.
They’re kind of… It’s not the cool new thing.
Rafe: The interesting thing about working for Yahoo
and for the Yahoo audience – I’ve never worked for mainstreamed audience before
and it is so hard – to write in a way that is both accurate and approachable
for everybody.
Leo: Challenging.
Rafe: But it’s really good. I like it.
Leo: That’s one reason why I keep doing the radio shows is because it
keeps you in touch with what normal people are worried about as opposed to what
we in the tech bubble are worried about. This show is a tech bubble show. I
don’t mind saying this show is… because it saves us a lot of time. The internet
is this interconnection of computers all over the world…we don’t have to say
that, we know that you all know that. What is the big story? There were a lot
of big stories this week. I do apologize, we had booked Cara Swisher for this
show and I really wanted to get her on this week and unfortunately her schedule
changed. She had to fly out of town so we didn’t have her one. I was going to
ask her about the Kim Kardashian interview at Recode, which I thought was
interesting. She wrote an article and I wasn’t going to cover this story
without her here but I’m just going to mention it. I don’t think it’s a tech
story for us, I think it’s just a social story – Tim Cook coming out. I wasn’t
actually going to talk about it because it’s not something to do with
technology. She wrote and I think she’s right that it has a lot to do with
somebody in a huge position of power – a very public person coming out is a
really great signal to young gay men and women who might be worried about how
the world is going to receive them. Here’s a guy who is running the most
valuable company in the world and he says it’s a gift from God. Cara wrote a
good article about it and I was going to ask her able it but…
Rafe: Good for him.
Leo: Yes good for him. She says it’s the Tim Cook moment. That’s all we’ll
do because we want to talk about actual technologies as opposed to the kind of
gossip social stuff although I’m not against gossip.
Rafe: Tim Cook coming out isn’t gossip. It’s just a
huge step forward for humanity if you ask me.
Leo: I agree.
Chris: I think it humanizes Apple more and I think that’s something that Tim
is doing since he’s come in. He’s gotten the Steve Jobs monkey off his back.
Leo: That’s clear isn’t it?
Chris: Yes and then they’re talking about things like the environment much
more than they have before. They’ve always kind of had the Green Push
initiative but Tim Cook really means it. They’re talking about social issues
and trying to do something about labor issues in China. I think is where he
really steps up and he walks the walk. In addition to that this is who I am –
he humanizes himself, he humanizes the company and I think he kind of puts this
CEO as superhero but with a touch of evil in them.
Leo: He’s coming out of the mountain is where he’s coming out. He’s not in
his evil lair anymore.
Chris: There was that trend – the Ellison’s and the Ballmer’s and Steve Jobs
and these CEOs that were brilliant but sort of people you wouldn’t want to meet
on the street because they’d kill you. With Tim Cook, he’s more kind of a guy
who has a real life and this is an individual who is willing to talk about
himself and not be that guy as tough as he may be in business to actually show
that he’s a human being.
Leo: He’s talking here at the Wall Street Journal conference (this is a
big story this week) about retailers like CVS and Rite-Aid that are in the MCX
group and aren’t going to do currency. He talks a little bit about that here. This
is all sales stuff. I’m not sure he talks about it in this part. Is it at the
beginning? He’s well spoken, he’s very good at making…
I wanted to have him talk about currency and why he’s not worried about it.
I’ll tell you a good reason why he’s not worried about it. Currency has already
been hacked so that’s a bad start for a system that’s not available for number
1; it’s ridiculously complicated, you have to take a picture of a code and you
have to have the app. You have to then show that code to the camera on the
other side to register it back to the…. It’s really nuts.
Rafe: And it doesn’t hook into the credit card
system.
Leo: That’s the point of it right? So they don’t have to give any money to
the credit card system and they can keep all the information.
Rafe: So I have to give some new system access to my
checking account – thank you very much.
Leo: And apparently they ask for your social, they ask for your home
address and they know all sorts of stuff. So it is cause for concern. The
currency folks said, “Oh no we’re secure”. Customer email addresses were
hacked. Currency says “well it wasn’t us that was hacked, it was a 3rd party that had the email addresses. Well that
doesn’t make me feel better!
Rafe: We did a story on “How to punish stores that
have turned off Apple Pay if you’re really mad at them. It’s a silly thing.
Leo: Do you think people are going to do that?
Rafe: Punish them? The way you punish them is to use
a credit card with the highest possible charge.
Leo: American Express right?
Rafe: Right.
Leo: Just use your Amex from now on at all Rite-Aid stores.
Rafe: I think people are going to be pissed.
Leo: I think it’s a non-starter.
Rafe: What, Currency?
Leo: Yes.
Rafe: It’s just insane because not to sound like a
fan boy but I’m already bored by Apple Pay because it is just so unbelievably
easy. It actually works and it’s such a non-event to use it.
Leo: Right.
Rafe: Chris didn’t you just say that?
Chris: I think it’s a really great system. The take I have on the story is
that Apple Pay is great for us as consumers, it’s great
for credit card companies because they’re going to make more money because
people are going to use the thing more. It’s good for the banks but it’s not so
good for the retailers because they’re trying to get out from under credit
cards. You understand why they’re doing this. But you’re right, it’s terrible
implementation, it’s consumer hostile and so it is
kind of a non-started where people will say “I’ll go to Walgreens instead
because they’re going to accept Apple Pay and you are not.” I think that’s too
bad because I would like to see the retailers get something out of this but
it’s not going to be that way. It’s going to have to be some other method where
either they’re going to get a break somehow on credit card payments or
something, so that they want to be a part of it.
Leo: It is ironic and I wonder maybe if they’ve been targeted by
disgruntled Apple Pay lovers because they aren’t even public. They’re still in
a pilot program and they had to send out an email to their pilot users saying
an un-authorized 3rd party had obtained email addresses. They said
don’t worry a lot of the addresses are dummy accounts for testing purposes.
That’s not a reassurance if you’re not a dummy account. Currency it’s self
wasn’t affected so don’t worry and yes we take your security very seriously.
We’re not any good at it but we take it seriously. I think this is an example
of – this is the nail in the coffin. You couldn’t get much worse than that.
Rafe: By the time it rolls out if it ever rolls out
this will have been forgotten but by then Apple Pay will be – people will be so
accustomed to using it at Whole Foods and Walgreens that they’ll go to a store
and they don’t have Apple Pay and they have to use another system that wants
your social. It’ll be like no thanks. It’s dumb! If you make a customer happy
because a transaction is easy they will come back and buy more stuff. If the
transaction has a lot of friction you’re going to lose money.
Leo: But you can still use cash and a credit card at any one of these
stores right? If Walgreens is right there maybe you’ll use it but if it’s another
mile down the road… it just seems to me people are going to do what is
convenient. I don’t think Apple Pay – does it make you want to shop somewhere
because they have Apple?
Rafe: Because I’m a nerd yes. I think Apple Pay has
been out for a month now?
Leo: Not even that, less, two weeks?
Rafe: Two weeks and it’s already boring and reliable
and it’s only just come out. What is left that Apple can do? Is this is – that
Apple is just going to roll out Apple Pay and that’s it? Where are the coupons,
where are the loyalty programs, where are all the little things you do with
plastic cards that you are now going to be able to do with Apple Pay. This is
just the beginning of how Apple is going to make retail better or try to
anyway.
Leo: As it was pointed out last week on TWIT one benefit of Apple Pay is
the lines move faster and that would get me to go somewhere. If knew the line
was twice as fast at Walgreens I might go across the street just because I
could get out faster. That’s a benefit. I don’t know if we mentioned this last
week; they are talking with China about Ali Pay, Alibaba has its own pay
solution and if they put Apple Pay in China through Ali Pay that is a huge
deal, very big.
Rafe: That opens things up globally.
Leo: I’m trying to remember if we’ve done some of these
last week.
Chris: The whole getting into China thing is huge to the point where you
think of Apple as being a technology and they’re selling lots of iPhones and
I’ve been talking about the iPhone as money forever and I think a lot of us
have and now that it is… what is it, .025 or whatever it is per transaction or
maybe it’s .25 %, that turns out if in the US alone we spend 2 trillion dollars
on credit card purchases and if all of that was going to Apple it would be 3
trillion dollars a year in transactions.
Leo: And remember that doesn’t come out of your pocket directly, it comes
from the credit card companies.
Chris: It comes from the credit card companies so expand that world-wide and
say that’s ridiculous. Of course Apple isn’t going to get all of that but let’s
say they get a 3rd of that over time. That’s still an enormous
amount of money and using a system that people are encouraged to buy with.
First when Tim was talking the sales pitch about we already have a million
people – well of course they do because they sold a ton of iPhone sixes and
people were interested in the novelty of it so of course people signed up in
droves. I think the more people that see that in action and we have more and
devices that do that they’re going to get more people… Not only because of the
security problem with their credit cards – I just had
to renew my credit card for a 3rd time in the past 2 years.
Leo: What a pain right.
Chris: But Apple is selling privacy as a feature now and so the ability to
be able to have a unique transaction with every Apple Pay purchase is
enormously powerful. So you can put that kind of stuff behind you, be
encouraged to use it more and then again on the other side you have the
merchants saying No use this, it’s less secure and we need more information
from you. Do you want that? No – because they’re not going to kick back the
money…
Leo: It’s not like you get it.
Chris: Yes and that could be a feature for them if they make it less
intrusive and say look we’re not paying credit card fees anymore so we’re going
to give you that 2% or 3%. Maybe that’s attractive but they have to scale down
the onerousness of the other stuff first.
Leo: Here’s a quote. When asked about CVS and Rite-Aid, Cook said, “It’s a
skirmish over the long ark of time retailers will step back and say no other
system is more secure…I think that’s been demonstrated now. You’re only
relevant (I don’t know if I agree with this but what do you think?) You’re only
relevant as a retailer if your customers love you.
Chris: Tell that to Comcast.
Leo: Yes! I don’t think I love CVS or Walgreens; it’s just where I go to
get my eye drops. Apple is loved. Apple can say that works for us.
Rafe: Apple wants other companies to treat their
customers the same way that customers feel about Apple.
Leo: Hey if you can get them to love you more power to you. He also
explained why they killed the iPod Classic… “We couldn’t get the parts.”
Rafe: I wonder which part that was? Was it a hard drive? Was it some circuit board?
Leo: Somebody told me the hard drive is a Toshiba hard drive, is that
right?
Rafe: Yes and nobody is making it any more.
Leo: I remember when they first came out with them. They were compact
flash size and I don’t remember how big they were but they were literally in
the hundred sixty gig – in the iPod Classic a spinning hard drive. I’m guessing
they don’t make them anymore. That’s what I’m guessing.
Chris: Yes I think they had them on the shelves for as long as they could. I
thought they’d killed the thing a couple of years ago and they didn’t. I wrote
the obit for it 3 years ago thinking someday… and finally I got to dust it off,
update the dates on it and then it was out right away. I think you’re right;
they stocked them as long as they could and they finally got to the point where
they said ok we’ve finally cleared them out. People that have them love the
things because of the capacity.
Leo: I bought one because just like you I figured this is it. I bought one
because I keep it in my car. That’s my music system in the car. I can just see
that guy – there is some guy and they have shelves of Toshibas and he gets to
the last one, blows off the dust and says that’s it we’re out, we’re done,
close the line. This is the Toshiba mk-1626GCB; it is the 6th Generation iPod Classic, 160g hard drive. I bet you Toshiba just stopped making
them. What Market is there besides the iPod?
Rafe: 160 Gigabytes of storage, eventually flash ram
will be faster and more reliable. Now you could put a flash drive in an iPod
Classic but then you might as well make it a touch. Can you get a touch with
128 gig? You can get an iPhone with 128 gigs. That’s
getting close.
Leo: That’s a good question.
Chris: I don’t think they’ve updated that. I think it’s still the 64.
Leo: There’s still a shop iPod button at the Apple store. I’m amazed… and
then right under it - beats by Drei. I don’t know how
many of these they’re selling. 64 gigs is the largest iPod touch.
Chris: Well if they wanted to they could make a 128.
Leo: Are we in a way moving away from all of this local storage anyway and
moving towards streaming. I feel like I don’t need to have as much storage as I
used to think I needed.
Rafe: There is a story about that which is for the
first time Apple’s revenue on purchased music is going down.
Leo: Yes that’s huge. So you think it’s connected to that? That makes sense, they dropped 13% in 2014 which isn’t even over yet,
13% in revenues on iTunes music.
Rafe: Yes because people are moving to streaming.
That’s my belief.
Leo: I bet you’re right.
Rafe: I’d rather pay what $10 a month for Spotify?
$120 a year, I get all the music I want and I’ve got reliable enough cell
service in the car so I can stream whenever I want. When I want to have
something on the airplane when I’m not connected I download it. Done – I don’t
need to buy music anymore.
Leo: Remember iTunes is the number 1 music retailer. The RIAA reported
that in the US sales of digital singles fell 11% in the first 6 months. The
sales of albums fell 14% in the first 6 months so it’s across the board.
Meanwhile music service revenue jumped 28% in the first 6 months. You’re a
working musician, I have to think this is bad for
musicians?
Chris: Right, streaming isn’t good for musicians.
Leo: You get no money from…
Chris: We’ve seen the stories. There was a Lady Gaga story a couple of years
ago where people streamed 8 trillion spins of her and she made $1.48 on those.
It was ridiculous – such little money; but I look at my daughter who is 13 and
she hasn’t purchased music ever because we have streaming and we’ve had it for
year.
Leo: I look at my kids now and I don’t know – you tell me because you both
have kids who are younger. They don’t even really stream music – they watch Youtube. I guess they stream when they’re in the car. Abby
wants downloads but she’s 22. She’s of a different generation. Chris you’re 16 right? 17?
Chris: (in audience) I download but my sister who is a little bit younger
than me listens to all her music on Youtube.
Leo: Youtube is a very big source of music. In
fact I think that’s another story that Google I think is going to start making
money on Youtube music. They keep saying they’re
going to do that and sell it as a subscription.
Rafe: That makes sense.
Leo: Enough of Apple, everybody’s going “you talk about Apple all the time”.
Ok we’re going to talk about Google and we’re going to talk about Microsoft and
we’re going to talk about Twitter. You know we’re even going to talk about hardware, we’re going to talk about HP. When was the last
time we talked about HP? There is something to say about HP but first let me
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free. Rafe Needleman is here, he’s the editorial
director at Yahoo Tech site. Tech.yahoo.com – great to have
you. He’s @rafe on Twitter. Chris Breen my old
buddy from MacWorld. Macworld.com, he does the Mac
911 column. Keeps us all using our Macs. Macs are back
I feel like.
Chris: Macs are back but we write about all the stuff. The iOS stuff, the
Apple TV stuff, the Mac stuff. Macs are doing quite well.
Leo: Just got the 5k iMac I’ve refuted and now I have it at home because I
bought it.
Chris: How do you like it?
Rafe: You bought it?
Leo: Yes. It’s kind of… I made the mistake of buying a MacPro,
the little beautiful…
Chris: Trashcan.
Leo: Yes trashcan, thanks. Makes me feel even better about it and I’ve
been using it and I spent a lot of money because not only did I get that but
then you have to get external storage, so I got a little big drive and then I
had to get a 4k monitor because… So at the end of the line I’ve spent a ton of
money and it’s not as fast as and it doesn’t look as good as the 5k iMac and
it’s twice as much or more. It kills me.
Chris: It actually depends on what you’re doing with it. If you’re doing
multi core stuff is actually is faster, single core – the iMac yeah…
Leo: We got the i7 Top of the line, it’s 4
gigahertz. I thought we weren’t going to see 4 gigahertz. Didn’t Intel kind of
give up on…they can’t beat it anyway. So it’s the fastest single core processor
out there. You can’t get a 5k screen on the MacPro because you can’t drive it. The Thunderbolt isn’t fast enough.
Rafe: Yes I think Apple is a little confused about it’s MacPro strategy right now. They haven’t even updated the Thunderbolt display – it’s still
the fat… If you want the ultimate computer for editing video it’s not a Pro.
Leo: Right and that’s sad.
Rafe: That’s not the way God intended things to be.
Leo: God had something to do with this. God and Tim
Cook. Andy Rubin is leaving Google. I wonder if this has a little bit to
do with last week’s story that Sandar Pichai has been promoted now to run most of Google. Larry
Pages number 2 guy. Andy Rubin was brought in when
Google bought Android. He was the creator of Android and worked at Danger
before that.
Rafe: Danger, they had the greatest ads with gorillas
walking down the street. Remember that?
Leo: Danger had all the smart guys from Apple like Andy Herzfeld, really
interesting guys and I think the sidekick was their first and only product I’m
thinking.
Rafe: They made a couple of different versions of the
side kick and they had a really creative flip out screen.
Leo: I loved that.
Rafe: That was really a neat product.
Leo: If you want to look dated, if anybody made a movie… This is so funny
but somehow cell phones date you faster than neck ties, hair, anything. Boy
that would look really dated if you had a side kick and remember you flipped it
up like that and you started typing like that.
Rafe: I was always afraid I was going to flip it and
it would kind of just keep going.
Leo: I wonder if my sidekick is around somewhere. I’d love to pull it out.
Rafe: It probably won’t work anymore.
Leo: It won’t work at all, because they killed the server right?
Rafe: Right, it was a proxy server so…
Leo: That was a terrible idea!
Rafe: It was a great idea.
Leo: Well it sped things up but every bit of everything you did was stored
not on your phone but with Danger.
Rafe: Yes.
Chris: Especially when you say it that way.
Leo: It was stored with Danger! My middle name is Danger.
Rafe: It was the only way because the networks were
so slow then it was the only way you could get email and browse the web.
Leo: It was the phone for its time. It’s time didn’t last very long. So
Andy had been running Android until recently when he moved on to do what Google
calls a Moonshot with robots. He was always a robot guy, hence the name
Android. In fact, before he worked at
Danger I think he was doing Robots. Anyway, he's leaving. And I
wonder if this maybe is the beginning of a little bit of a brain drain for
Google, who has shown pretty clearly that Sundar Pichai is the guy.
Rafe: Yeah, you know, I'm pretty cynical about
moves like this, but in this particular case, you know, Andy's done a lot for
Apple— for Google.
Leo: He did work for Apple too.
Rafe: And he was I think doing his dream job, or
anybody's dream job at Google, he was working on robots, and now he's gonna spin off and do an independent incubator on robots.
Leo: Right.
Rafe: If I—I'm not him, but that sounds like a
pretty awesome job.
Leo: Right.
Rafe: You know, basically doing the Google Robot
Moonshots but with you know, his and other people's
money and more interesting entrepreneurs than even you could find at
Google. Sounds pretty
cool to me.
Leo: Google says "We'll continue with our
Robot efforts," but it's a little bit of a loss to lose like the guy.
Rafe: Oh yeah. It is.
Leo: He was the guy who bought those crazy running
robots from Boston dynamics those scary dog robots.
Rafe: Well the other, the conspiracy theory on
this, is that he doesn't want to be part of the military industrial complex,
and Google has said that they're not going to sell their products to the
military, but I mean
Leo: Boston dynamics are big military
contracts.
Rafe: Those Boston dynamics—yeah, so I don't know
how that works out.
Leo: Yeah. An Analyst at IBC says that it sounds surprising, and sounds—here it is. That's the Wildcat. This is the scariest robot ever. First of all, it's really noisy. Go ahead and turn up the sound. And then, imagine that you're like walking
down the street and you see this thing. That's my worst nightmare. Right there. It's
running down—For those that are listening, it's
running. It looks like it's called Big Dog. That one's Big Dog.
Rafe: This is Wildcat.
Leo: That's Wildcat?
Rafe: Big Dog is the one that
Leo: That walks in the woods.
Rafe: That looks like a horse.
Leo: Which would you rather fight?
Chris: Imagine
that charging towards you right now.
Leo: Look how fast it goes.
Chris: That's impressive.
Leo: It doesn't turn very well.
Chris: It doesn't have to.
Leo: So the key is to run serpentine and it
can't—it will get confused. Is that
right? All I have to do is run faster
than Rafe.
Chris: Yeah. You know, it's like they took all the wrong lessons from the Sci-Fi
books from the 1960's and 70's. It's like, "No, this will be really cool if we have
robots that kill people." No.
Leo: Were we supposed to put an on/off
switch? Oh, we forgot.
Chris: Oh gosh. And we gave them intelligence. Who would have thought that would have a problem?
Leo: Oh well. Yeah, it did seem kind of sudden. That's what IDC's analyst said. It seems a little unplanned and a little
sudden, and perhaps involuntary. I don't
think so. I think this is Andy Rubin's
decision. But maybe he had a better
idea, suddenly. In the middle of the
night he woke up and said, "I'm leaving Google." It will be a loss for their robotics
program. Lollipop is coming, the
Google's Nexus phone, Nexus 6 sold out in—we think 20 seconds.
Rafe: Something like that. Yeah, it was quick.
Leo: It was painfully fast for those of us trying
to buy one. This is the phone, it's a six-inch—almost six inch. 5.95-inch phone with kind of, you know, top
of the line specs and it would be the first phone to run Android 5.0
Lollipop. Google said we'll put it on
sale October 29th, so Jason and I both got up early that morning, started refreshing the Google store. Refresh. Refresh. They hadn't put it on sale, but by about, I
think 10:30
Jason: 10 A.M.
Leo: I need to be here by 10:30, so I left the
house at 10:25, I got here at 10:30. It
was sold out. You got one, Jason Howell.
Jason: I did get one. Yes. I
had an elaborate system—
Leo: He had two screens.
Jason: And somehow it worked. I feel like I lucked out more than anything,
because it was quick.
Leo: You're refreshing the left and then the right
and then the left and then the right.
Jason: Different configurations, and then the left
one suddenly goes from "pre-order starts soon" immediately to
"out of inventory." Like
"Oh crap." So then I'm
refreshing on the other one, like as fast as I can and somehow it worked.
Leo: Did you get the midnight blue or the—
Jason: I got the
white 64 gig.
Leo: OK. Good. That's the one I would have
got. So we'll have that when? When are they gonna ship that?
Jason: Supposedly shipping the 21st of November,
although it may be sooner, may be later. Who knows? Google isn't very good
at this whole retail thing online, so who knows.
Leo: Well you got to wonder; do they have only 10
of them?
Jason: Yeah, that's a really good question.
Leo: Or was there such demand?
Jason: Or the fact that it's going to all of the
carriers. Right? At least here in the U.S.
Leo: Maybe that's it. Maybe they did only have a few.
Jason: So there's a supply is split.
Leo: Because Verizon, T Mobile, AT&T, Sprint,
and US Cellular are all going to have it. So maybe I can go there and get it. You think?
Jason: Possibly. And if that ends up being the case, you might even be able to go there
sooner than I will get it through the pre-order through Google Play. Because I think it was expected to be
released sooner than this.
Leo: And this wasn't cheap. I mean, it didn't sell out because this was
an expensive Nexus phone. This was 650
bucks for the one you got?
Jason: The one I got ended up being somewhere around
700.
Leo: Once you get all the taxes.
Jason: Yeah. 700. 750. Right around there. I mean, not inexpensive. This is priced like any other, you know, top
of the line phone.
Leo: well, it is top of the line though.
Jason: Exactly.
Leo: It's a pretty beautiful phone. I'm a little disappointed I was really
looking forward to getting it.
Rafe: Sounds like what people did with the
iPhone. They didn't know that Androids
are the same dedication.
Leo: Apparently.
Rafe: Staying up until the phone's supposed to go on sale. Then hitting all the different screens at once.
Leo: It's very much the same.
Rafe: Yeah. Exactly. Do what you
got to do.
Leo: I don't know what's wrong with me, because I
also waited in line at the Apple Store for five hours. So there's something really wrong with
me.
Rafe: Yeah, I was at the Apple Store yesterday to
pick something up.
Leo: Did they have them in stock?
Rafe: There was a line—
Leo: Still?
Rafe: out the door for iPhones.
Leo: That's bizarre. Boy you'd love to be in that position. A month later.
Rafe: Yeah. It's crazy.
Leo: Unbelievable.
Rafe: I didn't get it. Don't you want to run up to people like that
and it's like "you can buy it online."
Leo: Well I was at the mall, I was going to Hot
Topic to buy some new—a vest and some hot pants, and I saw the Apple Store, and
I thought this would be a good time to pick up an iPhone.
Chris: I could see doing it the first day, you know,
because it's kind of an event, but a month later, I have to think no. Just do it online.
Leo: It actually reflects a deep psyche, a deep
psychological problem in the American populous, or actually the world, because
the same thing happens everywhere. That we somehow think that this new device will make our life
suddenly OK. Like our lives are gonna suddenly get—we're gonna get this shiny thing—
Rafe: It has though. With Apple Pay, right?
Leo: I really think this is like, you know, is it
Neil Postman who wrote Distracted—what did he write John? "Distracted to Death?" The whole idea that, you
know, we just put all of our hopes and fears and everything into these little
shiny gadgets, and we spend ridiculous amounts of money. I mean 700 bucks.
Rafe: And time.
Leo: And time in line. And then we hope that we're gonna get this home and then everything is gonna be somehow better.
Jason: And then we drop it on the concrete. And it cracks and you do it all over
again.
Rafe: Right. That's why I was at the Apple Store yesterday to get an Apple Pay, not
Apple Pay, AppleCare on this thing, just in case.
Leo: Plus? Did you get the Plus?
Rafe: No, I didn't. I have pockets. So no Plus for me.
Leo: I don't think the Plus is a great deal,
because you have to pay, you only get two a year. And you have to
Rafe: AppleCare. You mean the phone Plus.
Leo: Yeah no. The AppleCare plus.
Rafe: There's a Plus AppleCare?
Leo: Yeah, that's the replacement AppleCare.
Rafe: I think that's the one I got. Yeah.
Leo: But it seems like a not a good deal. Because the deductible is
Rafe: 79 bucks.
Leo: Yeah. And then you can only happen twice a year.
Rafe: But, actually no. There is a method to this that my friends who
are excellent scamming these things are, right before you're going to get the
next one, whether it's the 6s or the 7, you drop the phone, you take it in,
they give you a brand new phone, which has an amazingly high re-sale value
because it's never been touched.
Leo: No kidding. You leave it in the box—
Rafe: Yep.
Leo: And you get your new phone.
Rafe: And then you can sell it at the best retail
value.
Leo: Do you know people who do that? Does David Pogue do that? He should not be doing that.
Rafe: David Pogue I do not believe does that. But yes, I know many people who do that.
Leo: I used to know a woman—
Rafe: I work with a bunch of engineers. They game the system.
Leo: who would go buy Manolo Blahnik shoes, you know, thousand dollar shoes, she'd
put duct tape on the bottom of it, wear it to a party, take off the tape so it
looked like it was worn and return it.
Rafe: That's brilliant.
Leo: It's a scam!
Rafe: Yes. It's brilliant.
Leo: Did you ever do that?
Jason: Do not try this at home.
Leo: No. All right. She's
looking at me. Me? No. I
would never do such a thing. Let's
see. They say, the Google folks say,
that they think the higher price, this is how crazy it is, on the Nexus 6, will
actually mean they sell more of them.
Rafe: That doesn't make any sense.
Leo: We are selling Nexus, this is Hiroshi Lockheimer. This is
the best name ever. In fact, why wasn't
I Hiroshi Lockheimer for Halloween? Hiroshi Lockheimer,
vice president of engineering at Android at Google says "We are selling the Nexus 6 in a
way most people are used to buying it." So the decision to go with a more expensive product was a result of
feedback that showed interest in a more premium-feeling Smartphone. But didn't the Nexus 5 feel premium?
Jason: It did, but you could only get it
online. Right? And I think that's the big difference here is
Google is finally stepping up and saying we are now putting our phones where
most people buy their phones, which is at the carrier store.
Leo: That's why. So he says while counterintuitive, Hiroshi Lockheimer said—it sounds like I'm making it up. Hiroshi Lockheimer said he believes the more
traditional price tag will actually spur sales. Google has traditionally promoted the Play store as the primary source
to purchase past Nexus devices, and in fact that's where it was sold out in 20
seconds. But, working with carriers,
they'll be able to sell it subsidized, 200 bucks with a two-year contract, and
people are what's the word?
Chris: I don't know. What word are you looking for?
Leo: Dumb? They think that that means the phone costs 200 bucks. But of course you have to have a two-year
contract and it gets amortized and baked into the cost of the service. So Nexus fans, says Hiroshi Lockheimer, understand the pricing model of an unlocked
device, but outside of that, paying $350 upfront was a foreign concept. Let alone more. You know. 650. So it is, it's a
nice phone. I'm sorry that I didn't get
one we're starting to learn about Lollipop, the features of the new Android 5,
many of which are kind of taken from Motorola. That's another thing that happened this week, the transition to Lenovo
happened. So Motorola is no longer a
Google company, but Google stripped all the good ideas out of it before they
let them go to Lenovo. Lollipop, which
is Android 5, will have the Moto X kind of always the notifications up here.
Rafe: Active display.
Leo: Active display they call it. This is a good article from The Verge. The 12 Lollipop features.
Rafe: Also has the always listening thing, I
believe.
Leo: Yes. You could say "OK Google." That, by the way Google is now doing a deal, or making it possible for
App developers to turn that on so that you'd be able to do it within an
app. And what's interesting is it'll send
it back to the App so that the app can, so let's say it's TripIt. So that you'll have searches that are TripIt specific, so that you'll get back appropriate search
results from Google to the App that you're in. Let's see. What else. You can knock on it, hardware allowing. That's something that 1+ does. Double tap wakes it up. Right?
Jason: You just have to be careful that it doesn't
fire off while you know you're carrying it in your pocket or your bag.
Leo: You said that in the review and they did make
that harder. In the update they turned
on proximity sensor.
Jason: Yeah, right.
Leo: So double tapping it in your pocket, like
your nipples hit it or something, and then
Rafe: You have rock hard nipples don't you?
Jason: Now it has nipple protection.
Leo: Only because I have a OnePlus One phone. It won't wake it up. The other
thing is you had the flashlight coming on.
Jason: Yeah. And that one's almost even worse, right? Because then the flashlight's going off in your pocket, you don't know
until of course your leg burns. But that
burns battery really fast.
Leo: You're glowing.
Jason: Yeah.
Leo: So.
Jason: Face Unlock. Remember this one?
Leo: So it's always looking at you.
Jason: Remember this one?
Leo: Yes. So the Face Unlock, which doesn't work well at all, on Android right?
Jason: The older versions of Android yeah. This is a different implementation of it.
Leo: I usually do a pattern, but you can have it
look at you. You have to be just right
in the right light, you can't do it in the dark. You wait a second and then it unlocks.
Jason: Here's where they got it right this time,
though. Last time, it was how you
unlocked your device. You have to
recognize my face and if you don't then I have to put in my pin code so it took
a ton of time to get into your phone, which doesn't work for a security
method. Now it's an extra thing that
when it works, it bypasses your pin number. When it doesn't work, and basically what you're doing is it's another
layer. If it recognizes your face—
Leo: It starts looking at you as soon as it
can.
Jason: Yes, it does. That's true.
Rafe: So the camera's always on?
Leo: That's one way to put it.
Jason: The camera's on when you unlock.
Leo: When it's locked, and it probably has
proximity also, so when it's no longer in a pocket, it starts looking at
you. Because they said most people are
probably looking at their notifications for a little while before they unlock
it. So it's going to try to get a little
head start on recognizing you.
Rafe: That's cool.
Jason: So what I do, in my case, like I forget that
I've even set that up, right? I just am
used to entering in my pin code. And
then, every once in a while, I don't have to. That's because it recognized my face and it brings me right
through.
Leo: But you could still have the pin code.
Jason: Yeah.
Leo: They'll be notifications in your lock
screen. Richer notifications than before
on your lock screen, including, for instance, now you may have to turn this on,
because you may not want to do this with a lock screen on, but you could
respond to e-mail, you could you know do other stuff with the notifications
without unlocking. Although you can
apparently do a redaction, if you wish, for some Apps so people don't see your
e-mails and stuff. There's something
called priority mode, which lets you set what apps can disturb you and what
can't. So instead of do not disturb on
an iPhone, when you turn on a do not disturb just nothing happens. Now you can
say well you can wake me up, but not you. You can make noise, but not you. This I like because there's a guest mode.
Rafe: Ah good.
Leo: So they're—Android introduced last with
KitKat the idea of multiple users, right? So you could log in.
Jason: Yeah, it's for tablets. You could have
profiles for tablets.
Leo: So now, you can have, just as you do on a
Chromebook a guest mode, you have it on the Mac too, where you don't have to
give someone your login, you give them a phone, they go in a guest mode, they
can do stuff that's erased when they log out.
Rafe: I just want to be able to maybe, Jason you
know this, I just want to be able to give somebody a
phone. So here, look at this great
picture I took of my kid. Give them the
phone and not have them—
Leo: They have that.
Rafe: They do? Good.
Leo: It's called "Pinning." It's good for Leo too, because you can open a
game for instance, say, "Leo you can play this game, but you can't
exit." Or you can have the photo up
and he can't exit. So you'd have to
enter a pass code. I think these are all
nice features. And of course the biggest
one that everybody will notice is this new flat card focused material design.
Rafe: It really does look good.
Leo: But only Jason is going to get it, because he
got the only Nexus 6 on the market.
Jason: Not true. Very soon after—
Leo: Do we know anyone else who got a Nexus 6?
Jason: No.
Leo: Nope. Nobody. Anybody in the chatroom? Any of you? Jason is the only person in the world who got a Nexus 6. I think that's true.
Chris: That's why they sold out so quickly.
Leo: I'm glad I know you sir.
Jason: Believe me, I tried
to get more than one. But I could only
get one. So.
Leo: Anyway. Exciting. Exciting. All right. Let's take a break. We've got
more to talk about. We're learning more
about Windows X and there's some new—I want to talk some more about Fitness
watches, I know you can't talk about that one.
Rafe: I can't—A little. They told me I could talk about it a
little.
Leo: He's wearing an nda'd product on his—he showed it. Rafe Needleman is here from the fabulous Yahoo tech page,
which by the way looks good.
Rafe: Thank you.
Leo: I don't know if it reads well.
Rafe: Try reading it too.
Leo: OK. No. It does. It reads really well. David Pogue of course is your lead there, and
is doing his traditional videos there and is doing a great job.
Rafe: Anchor.
Leo: Anchor. Is that what you call him?
Rafe: It's what I call him, yeah. Spiritual leader.
Leo: Here's Christian Bale and Seth Rogan. So we found out, by the way, this week. We knew Christian Bale would play Steve Jobs;
somebody in your office has photoshopped—
Rafe: No. We got that Photoshop from somebody else's
office.
Leo: You now it's good. Christian Bale is perfect for Steve
Jobs. He’s got the intensity; he's got
the look. He looks kind of like him, but
also, he's like— you feel like he could blow up. Just like Jobs at any moment. In fact, he has. And I think Rogan is very much like
Wozniak. He's cuddly, he's
loveable. I actually wrote to Steve and
said "What do you think?' Well, I wrote to his wife. Steve speaks to me through his wife, Janet
Wozniak, and she said, "Steve's excited. Steve thinks Seth is a good choice." He was less than—
Rafe: This makes three Jobs movies.
Leo: Three? I know two.
Rafe: This is the third, right?
Leo: What's the other one? Well there was that bad bad one.
Rafe: There was the bad one.
Leo: And Steve hated that, by the way.
Rafe: Then there was the other one. I can't remember their names anymore.
Leo: There was another Jobs movie?
Chris: Well there was "Fire in the Valley"
and then there was
Leo: Well
that's a real one.
Chris: Yeah, a real one.
Leo: And the Revenge of the—not Revenge of the
Nerds, "The Empire of the Mind." "Empire of the Nerds."
Chris: Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Leo: Pirates of... whatever it was.
Chris: Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Leo: He was, Noah Wyle
was Steve Jobs. He was the best Jobs. But he's too old now. Noah Wyle was a very good Steve Jobs I
thought. OK. So yeah. If you include that. Yeah. There have been others. The
Ashton Kutcher movie, Mr. Wozniak hated. And was offended.
Rafe: I couldn't watch it.
Leo: I went and saw it in a theatre. It was terrible. But Woz was
offended because for some reasons the makers of the movie, Ashton Kutcher, I
guess, decided that it would be Steve Jobs who would have the vision that the
Apple 2, that people would want a computer, and he had to convince Woz that it was worth doing. And of course everyone knows it was Woz who had the vision. He knew what he was doing. He
wanted a computer. Everybody he knew
wanted a computer. I think this looks
good with Rogan. The
newly slimmed down Seth Rogan as Woz. And I think he has that cuddle factor. Woz is cuddly. Woz is the anti-Jobs. Woz is like you—Woz doesn't like to say no. I know Woz pretty well. He'll say yes to anything. I could see him in that role. I don't know. Anyway, I get distracted by the fabulous Yahoo Tech page.
Rafe: See? There you go. We know what people
like.
Leo: You see how easy it is. Right in there. tech.yahoo.com. Chris Breen, from Macworld.com, he
does the Mac 911 column and a lot more. Oh look. Here's the review of
Sunset overdrive. I love that game.
Rafe: I haven't tried it yet. Our reviewer loved it.
Leo: So good. It's a new Xbox One game. It's
funny. It's great.
Rafe: I don't own a console.
Leo: What? Because Leo.
Rafe: Because of the kids.
Leo: You don't want Leo to get sucked into
it.
Rafe: I don't want my kid to get like—I'd never see
him again.
Leo: Yeah.
Rafe: Already I never see him.
Leo: He plays Minecraft like crazy.
Rafe: Minecraft, Scratch, and now Python programming.
Leo: See, Scratch is good. Oh gosh. I hate it when the kids, you know, that's terrible. They get sucked into Python and you never see
them again. I hate it when that happens.
Rafe: I just want him to send me royalty
checks. Then I'll be happy.
Leo: If only my kid would have gotten sucked
into—that's what I told my kid. I said,
"Look. This is my retirement plan. Would you please become a hacker?"
Rafe: Exactly.
Leo: No. But I have to say. Henry did have
all the consoles, because I wanted them. And he didn't become a, you know, video game nerd. He likes them. It's part of the culture of his generation to
play these games.
Rafe: We're going to get one.
Leo: He's busy enough though. He's got a lot.
Rafe: He's eight.
Leo: We talked to him before the show, and he's a
really smart kid. Very
smart kid. Plays
the piano. He's programming. He's a Minecraft whiz. He says "I want to do a Minecraft add on
where the rails can go upside down." You gonna help him with that?
Rafe: He's beyond me.
Leo: I said, "What language is
that?" And he said, "Well I
think it's java script. I'm not sure. I am learning Python. Eight!
Rafe: Last night he was like hunched over, he was
at the computer and he had the book and he was like
Leo: That's so awesome.
Rafe: I didn't do that until I was fourteen.
Leo: Eight is pretty young. Smart kid. Don't let him play Sunset Overdrive.
Rafe: I'll never see him again. He gets hooked.
Leo: Never see him again. Such a
good game. All
right.
Rafe: I've got to go play it.
Leo: Well, I’m only going to play it for a little
while because Halo Master Chief edition is out soon.
Rafe: Isn't that just old Halo re-boxed?
Leo: It's all the Halos. It's every map. It's like a hundred gigabytes. I've already preordered it. It's been downloading for weeks. Our show today brought to you by Carbonite
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Jason: I believe I do.
Leo: A little kind of "this is what you might
have missed if you missed anything this week."
Jason: Let's check it out.
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Matt Decker: I'm glad to see you dressed up too.
Mike: I see that Alex didn't wear a costume today.
Matt: He never gets in the spirit of Halloween.
Leo: Alex the red shirt Gumpel,
we call him. He's gone. That was—we left him on the planet? We are talking Twit, we are talking
tech. Chris Breen, macworld.com. From Yahoo Tech. My old friend, Rafe Needleman. Did you set your clocks? Did you
remember to set your clocks back or forward or whatever the hell we're supposed
to do?
Rafe: Every year fewer and fewer clocks have to be
set manually.
Leo: Isn't that nice?
Rafe: Yeah. I wake up, my clock; my bedside clock knows what time it is. The hall clock knows what time it is.
Leo: It's the oven. Doesn't know.
Rafe: The oven has a microwave, which has broken
one key, so I have to wait until there's a time without a one in it so I can
set it. Other than that, it's all
automatic.
Leo: And I live with somebody who is a little bit
finicky, so if the clock and the microwave in the oven don't match, that's a
problem.
Rafe: Oh that's the worst. You need two; you have to be within arm's
reach of each other so you can go beep! Set them at the same time.
Leo: You know what frustrates me? I buy radio clocks. Because I want everything to—
Rafe: The automoclock. Yeah.
Leo: But they don't, you have to put them outside
sometimes. They don't sense the
change.
Rafe: Right.
Leo: So I have
to put them—
Rafe: True change comes from within.
Leo: Not in these things! You put them on the deck. And let them sit for a day. I want to begin
right here. Now's the
time to end daylight's savings time forever. Saving.
Rafe: Saving.
Leo: Forever.
Chris: Yeah, you'll be in trouble. You said "savings."
Leo: I know. I guy who works with me comes over and hits me.
Rafe: Move to Arizona.
Leo: They're smart. They got rid of it.
Chris: Or Hawaii.
Leo: So that's even more confusing, because it's
adhered to by some and not by all, we know now that daylight saving time saves
no energy, because in Indiana where they adopted it in bits and pieces you
could see and you could actually say. It
was a net zero change because it turns out yes, people
use lights less, but they use the air conditioner more. Because they're up more in
the warm weather. So it ended up
being a net zero. So that was one
argument. It saves energy. No it doesn't.
Rafe: It's better for farmers.
Leo: No! Great article in the National Geographic last year—
Rafe: But this goes back to the Ben Franklin
era.
Leo: No! That's another canard. It's full
of canards!
Rafe: So when did this start?
Leo: 1940's.
Rafe: No.
Leo: Yes. So Frankln talked about it as a joke.
Rafe: Franklin didn't die until 1952.
Leo: Right. He's often invoked in this thing like: "Oh. It was invented by Ben
Franklin." But it wasn't
implemented until the war. It was a
World War II attempt to save. There's
actually a book—this is a National Geographic article from a year ago, but
there's a book by Professor at Tufts called "Spring Forward: The annual Madness of Daylight Savings
Time." He points out no energy
savings. Farmers in fact were so against
it, they were the only group to actively lobby against it. Farmers don't want it. You know who likes it? And it's, by the way, hazardous to your
health. A 2012 study by the University
of Alabama at Birmingham found the risk of heart attack surges 10% on the
Monday and Tuesday after we turn the clocks ahead.
Chris: Because you're rushing to work and you
suddenly keel over on
Leo: And there's many
more accidents. I mean we know that
also. I don't know why there's more heart attacks. It's because your circadian rhythm is screwed up.
Chris: Only if you look at the clock.
Rafe: Or you're late for a meeting and you're
running around and it's like oh my god! I missed a meeting!
Leo: Oh my god oh my god! Sleep deprivation, the body's circadian
clock, and immune responses all come into play when we consider the reasons
that changing the time by an hour is detrimental to your health. New England
Journal of Medicine showed that in Sweden heart attack risk rose just after the
springtime change. They think it has to do with stirred sleep or maybe just running around like crazy. You’re tired. You’re jet-lagged.
Why are we inflicting this on each other? You know who benefits? The U.S. barbeque industry. The month when you set the
clocks ahead, they make $150M more dollars. And the golf industry estimates
that an extra month of daylight savings time was worth $200-400M because more
golfers are out there. And gas stations. Because we drive
around more. Another reason it doesn’t save energy.
Rafe: So there are powerful forces of evil that lie against the fence of what
is right and good.
Leo: Paying off
Congress.
Rafe: So what else is new?
Leo: The TV
industry. If you look at Neilson ratings during the first week of daylight
savings, even the most popular shows go down 10-15%. Because
everybody’s playing golf.
Chris: And
barbequing.
Leo: And barbequing
while they’re playing golf. It’s an annual cost of $1.7B according to a Utah
State University economist. So let’s stop the insanity. We’ve had now three or
four months to lobby before we have to turn the clocks forward again. Or just
move to Arizona. Arizona, except for residents of the Navaho nation, they
decided they wanted…
Rafe: No, seriously?
Leo: Yes. Hawaii,
Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern
Marianas Islands don’t. They don’t do it.
Rafe: How about Russia?
Leo: If I were a
dictator; if Russia has daylight savings time, there’s no hope. If I were a
dictator I would just eliminate it.
Rafe: The chat room will know because I thought I heard something.
Chris: No, time
changes you in Russia.
Leo: In Russia,
time changes you! There is no excuse for it. I’m sorry, I got on that tangent there.
Chris: What about
Time Clause in the spring though? Because I know as a kid, you’re going to get
a brighter sky the next day. And you’re waiting for Time Clause to come around
with his big sack of clocks and come down the chimney.
Leo: It sounds
like something made up by the golf industry.
Chris: No, Time
Clause, you didn’t sit around and roast little watches over the fire waiting
for…
Leo: Welcome to
Time Clause! Alright, since we’re talking fitness let’s talk about watches and
fitness. There is a new Fitbit coming. I guess you must be into this because
you’re wearing this new Basis watch. I had the original Basis watch. It was
about the smartest watch out there.
Rafe: It looks pretty hideous.
Leo: As did the
old one. It’s very functional.
Rafe: It actually doesn’t look like it’s trying to be something it’s not.
Leo: Intel bought
them, right?
Rafe: Yea, Intel bought them. It does steps. The cool thing is it does heart
rate. Which they all do now. It’s kind of a standard
feature.
Leo: The Moto 360
does heart rate. Not well.
Rafe: The thing on the back.
Leo: Oh look it’s pulsing.
Rafe: It’s trying to measure my heart rate right now.
Leo: Does it do
heart rate when you’re exercising?
Rafe: It does heart rate continuously. There’s an app and it will show you
your heart rate.
Leo: That’s an
improvement. Because a lot of them you have to stand still and not make any
noise.
Rafe: No, no, no. That never happens.
Leo: I know what
goes is that?!
Rafe: No it measures heart rate all the time. The battery is supposed to last
four days. The Bluetooth stuff isn’t turned on yet so it’s not giving me my
alerts. But it does sync to the phone.
Leo: Oh so you do
have some notifications?
Rafe: I’m not getting any notifications.
Leo: But you
would?
Rafe: Theoretically. That’s coming. We’ll see.
Leo: How much?
Rafe: I don’t know.
Leo: Unannounced?
Rafe: $200 or $300. Around there. The problem is the
other companies like Fitbit and Apple, they’re all
about the same price range. And they seem to have more design chops.
Leo: Well Apple
certainly. Not the same price range necessarily.
Rafe: Here’s the thing that gets me with all these things: they’re looking
for a reason to be.
Leo: Right.
Rafe: So they’re all pushing health because that’s what they can actually do
for you that a regular watch can’t. And they all want to also measure your
sleep. Which is a double problem. Because who wants to
wear a watch at night? And you got to charge them all the time.
Leo: Well the
funny thing is Apple apparently has put into its Apple watch; you know it has
the taptic feedback where I’ve been told that it
doesn’t actually buzz. It’s like someone’s tapping you or poking you.
Rafe: That’s pretty cool.
Leo: So they have taptic feedback alarm that will wake you up. But we
also; the Apple watch won’t get through a day without charging. So what good is
that?
Rafe: You buy two.
Chris: Your night
watch and day watch.
Leo: It’s
useless!
Rafe: The tap thing is actually unbelievably cool.
Leo: Have you
felt it?
Rafe: No but the thing about it that I like is the integration with Maps. Did
you hear about that? Where if you have walking directions to somewhere, it will
tap you differently for the left, go straight, go right. So at an intersection
it goes beep beep. Oh that means go left.
Leo: I have the
Moto 360 and I’ve tried a bunch of them including the old Basis. This is the
one I’ve stuck with the longest. And that was one really good use for this was
you could do, Okay Google, take me to the airport. Well actually, this is for
walking around London. So take me to the tower of London. And it would put the
map on the watch face. It would take your next turn would be on the watch face
and it would buzz when it was time to change direction. But then go left,
right, it would just buzz and you’d have to look. But that worked really well.
That was a good use for this.
Chris: So you have
that set when it automatically comes on?
Leo: Yea, that’s
a disadvantage in a way where they’re not like a real watch where they’re
always on.
Rafe: This one is always on. I will say that.
Leo: Yea, that’s
because it looks crappy.
Rafe: It does look pretty crappy. But it’s always crappy, not intermittently
crappy.
Leo: And you can
make this look like a Rolex. There’s all sorts of
faces out there for this. Anyway, Fitbit has some new ones. They really have
kind of owned this market. I remember when it was a Kickstarter, it was some sort of crowd-funded thing… maybe not.
Chris: No. Fitbit I
remember when they announced at a tech launch or launch conference ages ago.
Leo: And nobody
had this idea yet. It was a pedometer, let’s face it.
Chris: Fitbit, it
was something you put on your pants.
Leo: Yea it was a
clip. I have lost many of them.
Rafe: Brilliant design.
Leo: Falls off
like that.
Rafe: Lasts a day.
Leo: San Diego
Zoo has one of my Fitbits. One’s in Paris. Good place to lose a Fitbit. One’s
in the toilet. But they fall off really easily. They’ve gone to the band because
that doesn’t fall off. Their newest ones have been announced. The Fitbit Charge HR and the Surge. They all do the same
thing with the heart rate tracking. As a result they’re kind of bulky. These
will be out early next year. This is a replacement for the Force which was
pulled back because it had nickel in it. And made people
itchy.
Rafe: That was a PR disaster for Fitbit.
Leo: The Jawbone.
Remember the Jawbone Up? What a PR disaster that was. They basically took them
all back.
Rafe: Wait, which one was the one… no seat by association. Jawbone was the
one that irritate people, right?
Leo: No the
Fitbit Force was the one that irritated people.
Rafe: Jawbone broke.
Leo: Jawbone just
didn’t work. This has been a problematic category. I think everybody’s trying
to get these out now before the Apple watch comes out. This has that same heart
rate monitor. Probably the same company that makes it. So that’s all the time. So you would get a graph at the end of the day that
would show how your heart rate would…
Rafe: Yea.
Leo: Oh that’s
cool. That’s useful.
Chris: It shows you
how out of shape you are all the time.
Rafe: It seems like this is kind of like a new PDA category. Or the idea of being that these are the single-use devices. And
once we get something like the Apple watch that’s not only a terminal for your
iPhone but also acts as a trigger for a home kit and a controller for your
Apple TV and the various things it’s going to do, these other things are going
to seem like single-purpose want-to-bes. Why would we
need that anymore? Let’s just get this one device that does everything. And
then we’ll get another one next year because of course it will do a new matchup
of things. And I feel sorry for the people who are getting the gold ones and
spend how many thousands of dollars. They’re like oh, you mean there’s one
that’s thinner and doesn’t require an iPhone?
Leo: Apparently
Apple says we’re going to do a drop-in replacement.
Rafe: I was wondering if they were going to do a rebate or something.
Leo: If you spend
$6000 and that’s what the rough estimates are. We talked about this last week.
At $6000 a gold watch would be a good deal.
Chris: Yea.
Leo: So, even at
$6000 if it’s obsolete next year that’s not good. So the thinking is maybe
Apple will have some sort of upgrade.
Chris: A
subscription service?
Leo: Microsoft is
in this business. Paul Thurrott got his Microsoft
band. He said even after less than a day of use it’s pretty clear that the
Microsoft band is big, bulky, uncomfortable, and complex enough to sway many
from using it. It’s a perfect Microsoft product! He does say there’s magic
here. You’ve got Microsoft Health Services, which he says are more
comprehensive than the health kit or Google’s Health Service thing. But the
band itself, and I’ve heard others say this is just kind of uncomfortably
bulky.
Chris: All of them
are.
Leo: None of them
are great.
Rafe: The thing is for the heart rate thing to work, it has to be pressed
against your skin.
Leo: That’s why.
This is flat. It’s not curved. You can see in the picture.
Rafe: Yea, it’s like the first square Google watches that even though they’re
pretty much the same size as the round one you have, they just don’t sit well.
Leo: He says it’s
like wearing handcuffs. And you’re always aware the device is there. It does
have a very nice screen which does a lot. Including
notifications of course. It’s not just a fitness band. It does have
sleep monitoring. He says the results were not inspiring because I felt like I
slept well. But according to the band I only got 4.5 hours of sleep, one of
which was restful. That’s bad when the band tells you that you had a crappy
night sleep, you thought you felt fine until you saw that.
Chris: It just
sends up an alert that says get a C-PAP.
Leo: You snored
all night and kept me up! Somebody, Feld in the chat room says the new name for
this is the Microsoft Shackle. It does look like you’re under house arrest a
little bit.
Rafe: Yea. Actually you could wear it around the ankle for monitoring. It wouldn’t
be quite so obtrusive.
Leo: I’ve
actually done that with my Fitbit. All of these have one big failing. They
measure walking and running but no other form of exercise. So I row and I work
out for hours rowing and it says you didn’t do anything today. So I’ve started
putting it on my ankle. It doesn’t help. Bicycling, same
thing. It doesn’t help.
Rafe: They should know bicycling. Especially the new ones. The high-end of the Fitbit watch, it says GPS. So it knows how fast you’re
moving. And bicycling exists in a narrow range between walking and driving. So
it should know.
Leo: Oh, a little
GPS action would tell you. Some of these have GPS, most of them don’t because that’s a real battery killer.
Rafe: That’s a new thing. Timex has one that has GPS and a cellular radio.
Leo: And it looks
by the way, it looks like it has GPS and a cellular radio. It looks like it was
invented by the Soviets in 1998.
Rafe: When I do a sci-fi movie, that’s going to be the communicator. It just
looks like it. The Will I Am one…
Leo: The Will I Am one… okay come on, really? Is that a contender?
Rafe: It’s a statement. I’ll say that. It’s huge.
Leo: We got to
get an image of the Will I Am watch.
Rafe: We interviewed Will I Am.
Leo: I thought
this was a joke,
Rafe: No he’s serious. Will I Am is a really interesting, different guy as a
tech entrepreneur. He keeps throwing stuff against the wall.
Leo: He’s a smart
guy. So he says don’t call it a watch. Will I Am, you should know, he’s the
front man from Black Eyed Peas. He’s a great rapper, great performer, great musician. It’s called the Puls?
Rafe: Puls.
Leo: Here’s Will
I Am with CNET. He’s also wearing a backpack. So that makes him a fashion
accessory. What the hell are you wearing? Is that a tennis racket? What is he
wearing on his back?
Rafe: Jet pack. I’m telling you he’s a smart guy.
It’s not a
smart watch, it’s a whole new thing. It’s a new
paradigm. A new category called a Puls.
Over here, your notifications are here. Navigation is here. So you just have to
imagine you have three things here…
Leo: I like it
that some people are trying stuff. We have a long way to go before this stuff
is useful. But he’s trying stuff. Can you buy this?
Rafe: I think that’s the idea. I don’t know if it’s available yet.
Leo: This is
Brian Tong at CNET, interviewing Will I Am on the watch. I like this one. This
is the new one from HP. They got a designer to do this one: Michael Bastian.
Let me show you this one here. It actually looks like a watch. It’s called the
MB Chrono-Wing. An alligator strap for $650. Sapphire
crystal. Anybody?
Rafe: So this one has a little watch insert and a…?
Leo: That’s an
LCD screen. Don’t be fooled.
Rafe: The whole thing is LCD?
Leo: Um, yes.
Rafe: Every picture I’ve seen of this watch has the watch insert in the same
exact space.
Leo: Yes. You
can’t get rid of it. It does not have a touch screen. It is just buttons and
notifications. Lots of buttons. I don’t know, at least
it looks like a watch.
Rafe: This is so cool. Everybody is trying new ideas. And the watch manufacturers
are getting involved, the fashion people are getting involved, and the fitness
people are getting involved. And it’s all this battle for the wrist-top. The wrist-top battle.
Leo: This cannot
track your steps. This cannot measure your heart rate. This does not beep, it
has no touch screen, it has no microphone.
Chris: But it tells
time beautifully!
Leo: It does tell
time. You know what, you credit all this innovation to
the Apple rumor mill because all of these things were created before Apple announced
an Apple watch. But on the basis of the rumor that Apple would be doing a
watch. And everybody said scurry and hurry, get to this market before Apple
does.
Rafe: Still won’t matter.
Chris: Yes,
exactly. Not that it’s going to help very much. You’re right. When Apple comes
out, everything else will disappear or will be also ran and they’ll discount things highly. Then people will see what Apple’s done.
Leo: I’m not
convinced Apple’s got it either.
Rafe: No, I am very excited about the version two Apple watch. They think the
battery life is no good, they’re bulky. The UI is first-gen on almost all of
the products. But I kind of like the idea. But this stuff is too bulky and
itchy. I don’t like itchy products.
Leo: You wouldn’t
have liked my Halloween costume. It was very itchy. HP is going to do a 3D
printer next year. That’s kind of interesting. You get a big company like HP to
do this. They say it is not going to be a hobbyist printer. It will be targeted
at business. Kind of like the big HP printers that the people use for plotting
and big prints and stuff to make billboards and posters. It will be designed to
produce a wide-range of object and industrial components. So this is
interesting. HP, I think you can fairly credit with the inkjet explosion. By
which I do not mean the actual explosion of inkjet material.
Rafe: Sounds like an Ok Go song.
Leo: Although
that has happened. But the sudden growth of the inkjet industry was driven
initially I think by HP. So it will be interesting.
Rafe: You kind of wonder though if they had a big meeting at HP. And so what
do we still do? Well we don’t do medical equipment anymore or this and that. Oh
we still make printers so what’s cutting edge in printers? 3D printing, alright
let’s do that because I’m not sure else HP has going for it. The server stuff
is still happening but they paired down what they used to do to such an extent
that I think they need some sort of product that’s going to step forward and
say no, we’re still in the game. And this is what we’re going to do now to keep
this going.
Chris: HP can’t not do 3D printers. I don’t know
how big the market is.
Leo: Can Epson
not do 3D printers?
Rafe: I think everybody is going to do 3D printers. There will be some
standardized technology like there already is. The price of the print heads
will come down. The price of the epoxy or plastic will go way up. So
everybody’s going to make money. Now they’re going to have to convince us that
we actually need to print stuff in 3D. When was the last time at your house you
needed to make…?
Leo: A knob…?
That’s what everybody says. Oh, my knob fell off and I made one. That’s always
the thing.
Rafe: Right, so it takes right no how long? Like half an hour to an hour to
make enough.
Leo: Made out of
a crappy-looking plastic knob.
Rafe: Which you still have to sand. The first one comes out wrong.
Leo: They say HP
will support Shape Ways. Which I guess is the closest thing to a standard.
That’s the 3D model database. So that’s good. Oh! Amazon figured out what’s wrong
with the Fire Phone. So relieved! They said we just priced it wrong.
Rafe: Yea, you know, that’s what they picked!
Leo: That’s
what’s wrong!
Rafe: No, that is not what’s wrong. I went to…
Leo: You could
give me $50 and I wouldn’t take it.
Rafe: They still priced it wrong because they should give you $100. No,
they’ve been trying to socialize this idea about oh we just priced it wrong as
a reason the phone flopped. I was at an event and some Amazon person told me
this. And I was like sure, okay, whatever you say. What Amazon did was they
underestimated the importance of standards and yes that runs a version of
Android. And yes it has its own app store. But people just want a phone that
exists in an ecosystem they know or bust.
Leo: They could
have looked at Windows and the Windows Phone and realized that was the case. Because Windows Phones are great.
Rafe: And they’re beginning to make headway but it’s taken years. Years for Microsoft to push that phone out to
drive the prices down and to really cozy up to developers to get the apps out
there. And the Windows Phone is actually unique. It’s got a really
innovative and beautiful UI. It’s different from the Android.
Leo: And it still
was too late and wasn’t part of an ecosystem that was either Android or iPhone.
Chris: By the way,
I am not counting out Windows Phones now only because I see them now everywhere
I go.
Leo: Do you
really?
Chris: I do. And
that’s weird to me. Because for the first couple years you
never saw Windows Phones. And now they’re beginning to pop up.
Leo: I’d like to
see that. We could use a third. And I was a little hopeful that Fire OS would
make a fourth. But it isn’t. It’s not enough. Amazon did also announce this
week the Fire TV Stick. Which is an excellent name. And this one they’ve priced right. It’s not out yet. It will be out before
Christmas. $39 for briefly you could get it for $19 if you’re a Prime member.
Rafe: They sold out of those really fast. Did you get one?
Leo: No. I have a
Fire TV and I haven’t hooked it up yet. So I don’t know what I need a Stick
for. It’s the same as the Fire TV.
Rafe: $20, it’s a great stocking stuffer.
Leo: It is good.
Well what would you get? Chromecast or Fire TV Stick?
Rafe: Roku.
Leo: Roku makes a
stick too, but it’s expensive. It’s like $50. Why even bother? I do like the
Chromecast.
Rafe: I don’t have a Chromecast yet. What’s interesting is that Google is now
putting a lot of that Chromecast stuff on other platforms. Like on the Roku.
Leo: Isn’t that
interesting?
Rafe: So this whole battle. It’s not about the hardware.
Leo: What is it
about?
Rafe: It’s about the streaming services and if you’re Amazon you want people
to use Amazon video. If you’re Roku, well you saw the hardware. If you’re
Google, it’s Google Play. But everybody has to support everybody else because
that’s the way the world is right now. And I don’t know if you have to pay
Netflix a couple of pennies to stream a video onto a Roku or something.
Leo: I wouldn’t
think so. Wouldn’t Netflix just want to be everywhere?
Rafe: You’re right. Netflix wants to be everywhere. So all
these guys are trying to be on every platform.
Leo: Netflix is
the only one that is.
Rafe: It’s not about the hardware. Hulu Plus is almost everywhere. Spotify
and Pandora are getting there. Amazon video is pretty
much everywhere Amazon Prime is.
Chris: Except Apple
TV.
Rafe: Oh of course. And Apple TV, I don’t know where they are.
Leo: Well Apple
has the iTunes store and they’re exclusively on Apple TV.
Chris: I think part
of the advantage of this Fire stick is that Apple TV owners are going to want
it. I’ve got Amazon Prime but I can’t get it on my Apple TV. I have a Roku box
but…
Leo: Oh, put
Amazon Prime…
Chris: Just throw
it on there for $20 or $30.
Leo: That makes
sense. Do you think the television companies can end the pain by just putting
this stuff onto the TV?
Rafe: Come on. Have you seen Samsung or LG software?
Leo: I use it and
it’s horrible.
Rafe: I forget what my TV is, it’s LG. And it actually does almost all the
stuff except the interface is so terrible.
Leo: Not well.
Rafe: Yea, the same is true with my receiver. No, I mean Roku, Google,
Amazon, Apple, they know how to make software.
Leo: Not the TV
companies.
Rafe: No. I kick myself every time I’m reminded that I pay extra to have all
these smart TV features. All I need is a monitor. That’s it.
Leo: You don’t
even need a tuner anymore. You’re right. All you need is a screen. It would be
nice to have a bunch of HDMI inputs. Yea, so Panasonic’s not bad. It’s okay;
it’s usable.
Rafe: But why? It doesn’t…
Leo: It doesn’t
do all this stuff. You’re right.
Rafe: The set-top boxes or the sticks do more. So why switch between it?
Leo: Nothing is
worse than Samsung’s TV.
Chris: I haven’t
tried that one.
Leo: Horrible
platform. It’s the Fire Phone of TVs.
Chris: Fire Phone,
that UI with the fake 3D…
Leo: You like
that?
Chris: Let me
qualify that. It’s really cool.
Leo: It’s
interesting.
Chris: It’s no
reason to buy a phone because it’s just glitzy.
Leo: It doesn’t
do anything for value.
Chris: It would.
Leo: Even Fire
Fly doesn’t really.
Chris: The maps are
neat. Because you can look under things.
Leo: Spend all
that time doing this.
Chris: And it has
the potential for games. But unless people actually buy the phone, nobody’s
going to write a game that uses it.
Leo: LG is killing, the last company to make plasma TVs has decided to
go out of the plasma business. So that’s it. It is over for what everybody
agreed was the best TV technology out there.
Chris: The LP of TV
technology.
Leo: Panasonic
which made those great Vieras. That’s what I have.
Those were great plasma TVs. Many agreed the best TVs made. Nope. Samsung, nope. And finally, LG the last
company making plasma. But you know I think O-LED has taken over.
Chris: Yea but
O-LED is still pricy right?
Leo: It’s very
expensive still.
Rafe: I still have two plasmas and I absolutely love them.
Leo: Don’t get
rid of them.
Rafe: No, but one of them broke. And trying to get parts for the thing is
really hard. And this was a Panasonic from just about three years ago. And I
waited six weeks to get a part for the thing. And they had to take it out of
another one that had broken. They’re like Apple, with the parts for the iPad
classic. They do not have a lot on the shelves. So you’re going to have a hard
time if the thing busts.
Leo: I have the
last plasma right here! You can have it. Our show today brought to you by
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And I think that’s what I have. I listen to two books a month easy. And you get
the daily digest of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal so you get to
keep up with what’s going on in the world. Audible is so much fun. I’m
listening to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot right now which is a great techno-thriller
for people who are worried about the NSA. It confirms every fear that you might
have and then some. And it’s funny. Pick a book, pick two books. Go to
audible.com/twit2, sign up for the platinum account. You won’t pay anything for
the first 30 days. In fact if you cancel in the first 30
days, no problem. Nope, you pay nothing. But you get to keep those books
forever so that’s nice. We love it. Audible.com/twit2. I should probably read this; this is Olive Kittredge. This is the new HBO
mini-series that’s coming out Monday and Tuesday. The
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. And I like to read the books before I see
the movies. I still haven’t seen Gone Girl because I haven’t finished the book
yet. I want the book to be the spoiler, not the movie. That’s how much I love
Audible. Audible.com/twit2. Give it a try today. Chris
Breen, Rafe Needleman. We’re talking high-tech. Verizon,
and now I think AT&T have been caught setting perma-cookies.
Wired magazine calls it a privacy-killing machine. This has been going on for
two years. If you use a Verizon phone and you surf using your browser on any
phone, a unique identifier will be sent to the website that advertisers can use
to identify you. I presume Verizon can use it in some way. Jacob Hoffman
Andrews at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said ISPs and in this case
Verizon would be your ISP, are trusted connectors of users. They shouldn’t be
modifying our traffic on the way to the internet. But now we know that AT&T
is doing it too. And I wouldn’t be surprised if all the carriers are doing it.
And maybe your internet service provider.
Rafe: Yea, it’s not what we expected.
Leo: It’s exactly
what I expected! Are you kidding me?!
Rafe: Yea, good point. It’s very sad.
Leo: Yea.
Rafe: So what they’re doing is taking your call through the internet that you
request this page and just adding a little identifier that’s not just your IP. But a machine identifier.
Leo: Right. It’s
not like they’re giving information to these guys. But every time you go to
this page they see it’s you again.
Chris: They start
to correlate this with all the places that you’ve been. And you put this in so
the ad services can… they’re the people that actually link all this stuff
together. Google and Yahoo, that’s what the ad companies do. And they know who
you are from all the different places you’ve been in cross-site cookies. And
this just makes their job so much easier.
Leo: According to
Verizon, there’s no way to turn it off. The Verizon spokesman, Deborah Lewis
says Verizon doesn’t use this UIHDH to create customer profiles. Oh good news.
Chris: Oh it’s just
fine. Why do they have it then?! What’s the point of this if it’s not to sell
us who are advertising friends?
Leo: Well the
funny thing is even if Verizon isn’t taking advantage of it, there’s nothing to
stop any other ad network to take advantage of it. In effect, they’re doing
this for the good of the advertising agencies. I mean everybody benefits.
You’re right, I think ultimately Verizon wants to. But
the irony is even if Verizon doesn’t, anybody else can.
Rafe: Why do they do it? Well because they can. And it’s easier to do it than
not do it if you’re a company like Verizon.
Leo: We spend a
lot of time worrying about the NSA, Google, and Facebook. But I always want to
point out that it’s your internet service provider that’s actually the risk
because they know everything. And they can do stuff like this easily. It’s
trivial. Whether that’s your carrier or your home internet service provider,
they can do this. And you got to think that Comcast isn’t exactly motivated to
protect my privacy.
Rafe: It depends on how you look at it. If a carrier is cavalier with your
privacy they will lose customers.
Leo: If people
find out. I think Verizon figured on nobody would ever notice this. It shows
how stupid they are. They did do it for two years.
Rafe: And people eventually find out. Whether you’re a carrier, and
ad-serving company, or the NSA, eventually people find out. This stuff comes
out. So you can’t just throw tracking stuff without disclosing it into traffic. Into the web. It’ll come out. But the question is how
upset will consumers be. First of all will they
understand what people are talking about when they reveal this? And then how
much of a human cry will there be? It depends.
Leo: Right.
Chris: I think
we’ve been worn down at this point. People are pretty cynical about it. And we
figure well if they’re not doing it, everybody else is going to do it. So do I
really want to go through the trouble of getting out of my contract with
Verizon and going with somebody else or changing ISPs because I don’t think
there’s anybody anyone trusts anymore. And we figure that’s just the way the
world is today. It’s a sad testament. But I do think people are just worn down
and just figure well, you know there is no privacy anymore.
Rafe: What are you going to do?
Leo: I think the
real benefit to Verizon, even if they don’t use it, is that they know a lot of
personal information about you because you had to give them your social
security number, your name, your address. They know all that stuff as a
customer. Now well the ad networks have the UIDH, what if maybe we did a thing
where you tell us the UIDH and we’ll tell you the guy’s name? And for a buck. It’s just a buck. So you can see where this
Nexus could be very bad. FCC though is going to jump right in and protect us,
right? FCC is considering actually what might be a good, I think on the face of it, now I have not delved deep into it which means I
haven’t listened to all the smart people like Cory Doctorow and others. But the
FCC is considering what they would call a hybrid regulatory approach to net
neutrality. Remember the FCC has been trying to find a way through this. And
we’ve talked an awful lot about it. Some people say the FCC should adopt title
three regulation of internet service providers. Call
them common carriers then they would have the right to regulate them. Others
say well that is going to just kill… title two, not title three. It’s of the
communications act of 1934. It’s going to kill having this kind of heavy duty
government oversight is going to kill the internet. And by the way there’s not
even an agreement on places like the EFF where there’s a lot of debate. Who
should protect us? We agree that we need net neutrality but should we expect
lawmakers to do that? We know not particular sophisticated some ham-handed,
they might do a worse job than no regulation at all. So the chairman of the
FCC, Tom Wheeler, who I’ve never considered a friend, considering he comes from
the cable and wireless industries before he was made chairman of the FCC; he’s
actually come up with something interesting. A split-the-baby
approach to net neutrality. A hybrid approach in which
they would use title two for wholesale transactions. So, this is
complicated to explain. But remember the Netflix kerfuffle where Netflix was
basically slowed down by Comcast because Comcast just didn’t spend money on their inter-connect. They let the connection between Netflix
and Comcast become congested and eventually got Netflix to give them some
money. Well we need the money for a better router. Can you just give us a few
million for a better router? A month. And they gave
them the money and now all of a sudden there’s no congestion anymore. That’s the inter-connect. That’s the wholesale internet business.
And then of course there’s the retail internet business between me and Comcast.
So what the FCC is considering is regulating the wholesale transaction but not
regulating the retail transaction. Keep an eye on these inter-connects to make
sure there are no toll lanes on the internet. Which is one of
the key concerns I think we all have. But not get government regulation
into how the internet service provider works with the consumer. Good idea? Is
it too early to know?
Chris: It’s early
to know. I don’t like the idea of the retail side of my relationship with, of
letting the ISPs monkey with toll lanes or not toll lanes.
Leo: It’s not an
accident that I put these two stories together. My point out.
Chris: Between me
and my ISP. Now if my ISP is protected from being charged more for preferral traffic than other traffic by the big
inter-connects, great for them. But I kind of want the same protection.
Leo: And that’s
what some privacy advocates have said. No, no, you should have title two across
the board. I do worry and I have heard from a lot of people, boy government
regulation can be so heavy-handed, it may not be appropriate in this case. They
move slowly.
Chris: The concern
I have is that this can change from administration to administration in terms
of enforcement. They can have these things on the book and say yes, we can
regulate you under title two. But let’s say an administration comes in that’s
very friendly to big business and to lobbyists for these big ISPs and say well
you say it’s up your discretion. Well, we know that you would like us to be
more a free market and therefore get away with some of this stuff. And so even
under title two, I am a little concerned if there aren’t some fairly hardened
fast rules that somebody can say no, you crossed that line; that we’re going to
be in trouble. If it really is discretionary depending on how they happen to
feel or who is in power at that time.
Leo: It’s a very
tricky technical issue. I’m glad the FCC is considering alternatives. I’m
thrilled to hear that they’re at least considering some title two regulation.
Rafe: I wish the market was free enough…
Leo: Then we
wouldn’t have to worry.
Rafe: That consumers would be able to call the
shots.
Leo: If you had a
choice, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Rafe: That’s what is really sad about this.
Leo: It’s a
monopoly at best.
Rafe: That we, one way or the other, the government has to say something
about this. Either we’re going to do this or we’re not going to do this. But
they have to be part of it.
Leo: Or encourage
competition in some way. Maybe there’s some way to facilitate competition.
Rafe: Yea that always works when the government tries to encourage
competition.
Leo: We’re going
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code TWIT. The 20th anniversary of the banner ad. That’s a sad, sad commemoration. Did you see the world’s first…
Rafe: Come on, man.
Leo: Have you
seen this ad? This was the first banner ad. This was on, remember Hotwire? So
that is an ugly… that really does not bode well for the future of the internet
right there.
Rafe: Got to start somewhere.
Leo: Punch the
monkey’s next, right? Where is this story? Let me go back, I just lost it.
Hotwire was trying to figure out a way to I guess make some money. This is from
the internet history podcast and they decided that well maybe we could put ads
on our site. Actually this was one of 12-14 banners which all went live October
27, 1994. When hotwire.com launched. I remember
Hotwire well. It was like a news site. Like an online news site.
Rafe: It was good.
Leo: Did you work
there?
Rafe: No, I worked at CNET in ’96.
Leo: ’96. I was
doing radio by then, talk radio. I was doing Dvorak on Computers. I remember
this. ’94, most people weren’t even online at that point.
Rafe: I think that’s when we put bite.com online. ’94, ’95,
yea. Yep.
Leo: So worth
listening to the internet history podcast. The first banner
ad. And I think one of the guys on the podcast was the guy who thought
it up. So you can boo him when he comes on stage. Um, I think we’ve done most
of these stories in the past. I don’t want to bring back old stories. Kim
Kardashian! That’s all I have to say about that.
Rafe: That’s plenty.
Leo: It was a
good interview with Kara Swisher. There was an interesting body language. Kara
was facing one way, arms folded. We were hoping to get Kara on to talk about
it. But she couldn’t make it. Do we have a big week ahead? Let’s take a look. Mr.
Mike Elgin.
Mobile chip giant Qualcomm reports earnings on Wednesday, November 5th. And AOL will do the same on Thursday, November 6th. Also on
Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans something called the Community
Q&A where he will essentially hold a Reddit-style
AMA for one hour. Anyone can submit questions on Zuckerberg’s blog post
announcing the event. And the session will be streamed live. That’s what’s
coming up this week, Leo. Back to you.
Leo: Mike Elgin
and our Tech News Today. Every Monday through Friday, 10am. We have two new shows every Monday through Friday by the way. I want you to
know if you’re interested in tech news, you can keep up with it. 10am Pacific.
That’s 1pm Eastern time. 1800 UTC, Monday through Friday. And in the afternoon,
it’s Sarah Lane with Tech News Tonight at 4pm Pacific, 7pm Eastern time. And
that would be 2400, right at midnight UTC if you want to get your daily dose of
tech news. I want to thank Mr. Christopher Breen of macworld.com.
Chris: Thanks, Leo.
Leo: It’s good to
see the hair of Breen and the body of Breen.
Chris: There it is.
Leo: So the body
of Breen is your Twitter account?
Chris: Yes I’m body
of Breen. I’m not hair of Breen. There is somebody else who is hair of Breen
and I do not know who that is.
Leo: You do not
have control of the hair?
Chris: I have no
control of the hair, it just does this. I wake up in the morning and this is
what happens.
Leo: It looks
like his hair might have a Twitter account actually.
Chris: I think it’s
doing stuff at night I know nothing about.
Leo: It’s great
to see you, Christopher. I’m glad you survived the massive layoffs at MacWorld. If anybody should still be there, it should be
you. Is that a bad thing to say?
Chris: I don’t
know. No, I’m glad to be there. We’re really kind of working like a startup.
And it’s really interesting. We have a lot more freedom than we have in the
past. It’s more work, it’s harder work. But so far
it’s been pretty rewarding.
Leo: People
should go to macworld.com and not assume it’s gone. Because
there’s great stuff. And there is still a monthly digital edition of MacWorld magazine. So, good stuff. Chris is doing great
stuff.
Chris: Come on by.
Leo: Macalope is still there?
Chris: Oh yea.
Leo: Love Mr. Macalope. We also want to thank Rafe Needleman who’s doing a great job at Yahoo Tech, tech.yahoo.com. This is, let’s
face it, this is why MacWorld and many other
magazines have ceased print. This is a magazine on the web; it’s great. It’s
beautiful. David Pogue’s there with his videos: Pogue’s Basics. And you say
you’re kind of targeting this for the normal person.
Rafe: It’s tech for everybody. Technology is not reserved for just nerds in
the tech bubble. And everybody is a newbie at something. That’s why we have the
new Pogue’s Basics series. Little things that you should
know. That you just assume everybody knows. My mom for example, I just
gave her my old iPhone 5 because I got the iPhone 6. And you think these phones
are all so intuitive. But there’s so much undocumented stuff. All the gestures and the secrets and all that stuff. And I’m
realizing in trying to teach her how to use this phone that it’s going to take
a year before she’s facile on this thing. So that’s why we have Pogue’s Basics
just to help people do the little things. Like squeeze the phone to stop it
from ringing.
Leo: What?
Rafe: You’ll hit a button and it’ll stop ringing. You’ll hit a button and it
will shut off.
Leo: I never
thought of that!
Rafe: It works!
Leo: By the way,
Becky Worley does great stuff for you. This is her review of the PavLok, which is…
Rafe: Some evil genius, some sick whatever managed to take a fitness band and
put a shocker, like a dog collar shocker in it. So if you don’t meet your goal
or walk enough, first it will beep. Then it will buzz you. And then it will
actually zap you.
Leo: And Becky
tried this?!
Rafe: You know, journalism is not all cupcakes and
caviar, man.
Leo: Look at
this. It looks like it hurts. She says, whoa! One of the few people I know who
can look absolutely gorgeous while getting shocked by her wrist watch. Fun. Yea, Becky’s one of your stalwarts
there.
Rafe: She’s great. It’s a good video. She almost smacked herself in the face
with that thing.
Leo: Becky does
these from her kitchen.
Rafe: Yep.
Leo: Love it,
love it. She was a nun for Halloween. Did you see the pictures?
Rafe: I saw her Facebook picture.
Leo: She actually
looked good.
Rafe: None the wiser.
Leo: We want to
thank you for joining us. This show, This Week in Tech every Sunday, 3pm
Pacific, 6pm Eastern time. We did that stupid daylight saving thing and so we
set our clocks back an hour. So while we are still at the same time for us: 3pm
Pacific, 6pm Eastern time; that is now an hour later UTC. So it is, I have to do the math. Three plus 12 is 15 plus eight is
2300 UTC. You’re going to have to do the math to figure out what that is in
your time zone, okay? Thank you for being here. If you can’t make it live; we
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