37 min read

03: Spinn Coffee Sponsorship

This week we discuss getting a sponsorship from Spinn for all the talking we have been doing on the show about them, or getting some free swag. Since our podcast is known as Coffee Code cast it seems like a match made in heaven!
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03: Spinn Coffee Sponsorship
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This week we follow up on Amazon Trunk delivery and Google's response to the Pixel 2 issues.  We discuss a very cool new home automation lighting product called Noon and what home automation products we use at home.  We also talk about our favorite tech companies and what would happen if they no longer existed.

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 No, I mean, I don't want to keep up that kind of a pace. I think doing two a week is plenty. I don't even want to keep up that many. I'd rather just do one a week, but you know, we talked about obviously doing two a week for kind of the first just get some shit out. Three weeks just to get a healthy amount of content. Yeah, I mean, the fact that we could do effectively three hours of talking bullshit. Yes. That's a pretty impressive. we do have a lot of bullshit to talk about. So, I'm impressed. Yeah, I feel really good. I don't even care if people listen. I just want to get some sponsorships. Let's just get some sponsorships. Let's just get some free shit like that would be. - I think the two might be a tightly coupled. I think you might have those people listen to get a sponsorship, but I could be wrong about that. - Well, hey, that's been. That's been, you know, send us some coffee. - Yeah. We're growing our user base and there's a coffee code And so if we had some coffee that would help accelerate our listener base, so you know, we could even add they could be like a full-time sponsor it could be coffee code cast Brought to you by spin or brought to you by spin or the spin coffee code cast the spin. Oh, I love it the spin coffee code cast All it requires is a small donation just to keep our our lights on What is that? 25 bucks. There you go pay for our hosting and we're good to go and throw in a couple coffee makers We already have one on order But send this guy one because he doesn't have one And maybe a bean credit. We should ask for a bean credit. We don't want to be too You know, we should negotiate and we have to make sure we negotiate a little bit I want a few a few bags beans a month for free. I don't want to pay for all that shit I don't think we're asking for too much. Yeah, I don't yeah, I think they're gonna I think they're gonna jump right on this I think they're all about it. I think they're listening now. I mean they already Obviously what we won their you know hearts and minds over yesterday on Twitter. So I think now we just Sent them proposal and we can add whatever we want Let's get that let's get on that two bags of beans each I want two bags a month You should get two bags a month will each get a coffee maker and We'll put their logo on our website for all of our listeners. [laughter] That's awesome. [Music] You got a little whiskey bender last night, huh? You could say that There's no more left in the bottle. Well, there was multiple bottles in the photo that you showed me. Oh He's calling me out on mine fuck Yeah There's definitely evidence of that This morning What's burned that I don't know I well part of it is that doing this intermittent fasting like to be quite honest with you like both Those bottles didn't have a lot of contents in them and so it just didn't take a lot for me. All right Yeah, I've had I had the high west for probably a year or something like that And there's only maybe a shot or two left in there and it just didn't take much But it was a fun night dude. I was listening to some 80s tunes. That's kind of my gig, you know Like when I get into that mode, I just like put out a bunch of 80s music videos and reminisce That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's nothing to maybe sing some some Free bird. Oh Yeah, dude. I actually did play free bird last night. Yeah, I Didn't sing to it in my red hoodie. All right. I didn't want I didn't want you to follow up with a YouTube video this time I don't know if that really falls into the category of cold open bullshit or follow up, but I'm just gonna follow up with saying yesterday was good. We had some feedback from some of our I'd love to say sponsors, but that's not really it. I mean we had some good feedback from some of the products we talked about spin jumped in yesterday on Twitter Had some things to say saw a cool video of some of their manufacturing so they're moving right along in the video that video is cool It doesn't look like it was Quite ready for prime time. I think it still had some sort of like a watermarked audio track But yeah, and the product was missing a few components. It looked like they were just kind of in the warehouse doing some cool shit They were still you know, but it was a great video though. It was well produced. Yeah, it was neat to see where they're at I think that's the you know for all you other product guys out there Communication to me is just the best part. I don't really mind that it's delayed or that they're making improvements and it's going to take another six months. I would love to have it today, but on the other hand, I just like to know what's going on. A little video goes a long way. I was able to see what they're doing and if restored my confidence in the product and in the program, it's like, okay, I'm going to hang tight for a few months. I'm going to go see some family over the holidays and I'll come back and I'll have some spin coffee ready for me in the new year. What would you do? Yeah, I think as long as you're clear and concise and open with what the status is of the product and what's happening actually with the company and so on and so forth, people are much more willing to deal with delays and deal with the problems and things that are occurring as they understand that it's a new product and you're not used to production ramp up and you're not ready for all the hurdles that you're going to run into as you produce a brand new product as long as you're clear with them and open and honest about it, I think people are willing to forgive quite a bit. Well, it seems intuitive to me at least, but that's just not the status quo for a lot of these guys. A lot of these guys go rogue. They go quiet. You don't hear from them for months. People are on social media, begging for updates and there's nothing going on. Nobody responds. Nobody says anything. And I just don't understand why that's the approach that most people go with. like, hey, you know, like no news is bad news. I would just come out with the approach of like, look, we just got to let the mills go on. Whether it's good or not and let it ride. But when you don't say anything at all, it just, I think I go at least. Yeah, I compound the problem. Yeah, I don't, I don't have a positive thought about it. I'm not thinking, oh, they're not saying anything. It must be on the way. I'm thinking, you know, they're not saying anything. And they took my money and went to Jamaica or something like that. So, you know, silence is pretty telling. Yeah, I totally agree with that statement. You know, if they're if they're not talking, then there's a reason for that generally. Yeah. So anyway, not the case with our friends that spend coffee. Those guys sent us a really cool video yesterday and some updates on the product and they're they're doing really good things over there. So we're very happy to get that update and we'll stay tuned. I love to keep pimping them and maybe we can get you a tour or something. Well, maybe we can get you a coffee maker. I mean, you know, since I don't want to check mine in, I'd luggage it a last every time I'm coming out to see it. So, we can get something going for you over there. It'll be kind of nice. See how it compares to the brevel. Right now, spin, all they have is the brevel. So, if you have something that can compete, we might need to have a little alpha beta test. over it, over it, the, uh, cool wizard. The, uh, spin doesn't have a steamer on it, does it? It does. Well, it depends on the model. So I was mentioning there's three different levels that you can buy in. And so I bought in the premium package because that's just how I roll and it looked really good. And it does. It has a milk froth or steamer thing on it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, good, compete. Yeah, I didn't mention that in the video and I kind of left them. It's a short change a little bit there, but it has all the things that you want. It's not just a drip maker. You know, it does really. You can do lattes and do all that kind of stuff too. So. All right. So, one of the items I wanted to quick follow up on was from last episode we were talking about the Amazon. The hell is it called? Kia. And I had made a quick mention of another product that Amazon had kind of toyed around with. I don't know that they ever released it for sure, but it was deliveries that Amazon wanted to effectively drop directly in your car's trunk as you leave it on the road or at work. Yes, you were talking about that and I had never heard of it before. So I'm really interested to hear about this. Yeah, so it was Amazon. I couldn't remember exactly who it was. And it was something that got posted. I think it was in the USA today that they were playing around with the idea of it I don't think they actually have implemented anything like this. It's not nearly as as ready as the Amazon key product is but yeah, I mean it's pretty simple I don't really know how they would actually get the access for the car Well, if they can get into your home, I imagine there's some kind of They probably have you know some way to do it. - Does it hear their in talks with a company called Frame and that's PHRAME and they're a maker of license plates with key storing compartments. - Oh boy. And it sounds like trouble. - And you can unlock it with your smartphone and so it sounds like that's how the delivery man would access your trunk is through this frame, which is interesting that I guess it's the same kind of thing as the key, it's a third party product that they're working to integrate with rather than building it themselves or buying the company straight up. Well, it's smart. And no need to do it, although they could. I don't know if you were paying attention yesterday at the closing bell, but they had it just a killer, killer day. I mean, like, they $62 billion added to their books yesterday. That's, yeah, that's insane. $2 billion. It was more than 450 companies in the S&P 500 or something like that. They almost beat everybody combined. And we were discussing this a little bit over the chat. It was primarily because they purchased a farmer company. Was that it? No, they didn't make any acquisitions, but they did come out and announce that they were going to compete in the space and they kind of unveiled a little bit of their plan with whole foods. So they have 400 whole food stores across the country and they're going to convert all those to, well, not convert. They're going to have pharmacies in all those stores. Amazon everywhere, man, they're taking over the world. Yeah, and it's interesting the ripple effect from this because there was some talk yesterday, too, of who was it? Was it CVS and Signat, inkingatio? Like there's some other acquisition out there. Let's see, at in a stock source on report of potential acquisition by CVS health so so yeah they jump 12% yesterday too. So but the rumor is that a lot of this stuff is now like people are scramble in the background because of what Amazon is trying to do. They don't want to be the next victim because you know what's happened with everything else you know like they just when they get into an industry they definitely disrupt so be interesting to see how this goes Anyway, I divest. I divert. Divest? Divest or digress? Divest. Divest. Yeah, one of those. I think divest sounds like you're removing an investment. It doesn't. Yeah. I'm not splitting any shares that I just get back to what we're talking about. I'm sorry about that. Next piece to follow up is Google is responding to the Pixel 2 issues that they've been having which we talked about. What's our first show as a girl? - It was our first podcast. - Yeah. Thankfully they are. Hopefully they're not saying any more that this is just our standard. This is what we made for you guys. This is the quality that comes out of the goog over here. (laughs) - Well they kind of reiterated that in their statement, but they basically said, you know, based on user feedback, even though we think this is a better screen, we're gonna go ahead and listen to the people and do what they want effectively. Oh, that's nice. So if you weren't familiar with the issues, the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL just recently came out, the screen colors on the XL 2, I believe it is specifically, or sorry, the XL, Pixel 2 XL, appear faded to some people or maybe appear to have a heavy dose of blue on them. Some people would say the color would change as you alter the viewing angle. And some people were complaining also of having some burn-in issues and those sorts of things. So Google has responded and said that they've received all the feedback about the display is not appearing quite as well as they should. They say that we attribute this perception to our choice to calibrate the pixel 2 XL for delivering natural and accurate colors. They continue in their statements saying, "Now based on the feedback we received since announcing the pixel 2 and the pixel 2 XL, we've learn that some users do not want more vibrant colors. So through a software update, they're going to go ahead and change the colors back to-- >> Oh, really? >> -- change them using what they call saturated mode. So they're going to create a new kind of display mode that you can kind of move away from the way that it displays currently. >> Okay. So they're acknowledging something, very little it sounds like, but they're making an acknowledgement and trying to offer something. I was more impressed to actually not with that piece of news, but they did come out yesterday. I don't know if you heard this, but they said they would actually extend the warranty on the new pixels for two years. So they doubled the warranty. Typically you get a one year hardware warranty from the manufacturer. They're going to double it the two years on all pixels so that that was kind of cool. And this is a direct reaction to all of the poor feedback that they've been receiving or why did they move to do that. Right. Yeah, it was related to all the bad publicity they've been getting with the issues at the XL. One of the other issues that was reported was the burn in. And again, they responded and said that they've been actively investigating it. They've been testing it heavily and they seem to believe that the decay of the display is what they refer to it as, seems to be comparable to the other smartphones. So they don't feel at this moment that there's a difference in quality of their screen versus any other screen, which seems to be part for the course in terms of their response in general. It's kind of, hey, you know, the other screens do this. So why can't we hear, you know, we think this is better than the other screen, but maybe in reality, it's not. Well, you could argue that point, I think, with the quality of the saturation, all that are shit they're talking about, but when it comes to the ghosting and when it comes to the burn-in, I don't remember my iPhone having a little burn-in, you know, after I turned it off, a week into having the damn thing. It does say that they are dropping the max brightness down by 50 nits, and then the nav bar buttons that are on the bottom of the screen will fade out when they're not in use, which probably should help, because those are pretty bright white, right and they stay in place all the time. I don't have a pixel to XL so it'd be interesting to know from a user if there's anybody out there that's using this thing you know is this a legit issue for you and what's it look like I mean I'm curious to know I've seen photos I've seen some things online but I'm not sure to what extent this is really a problem or if it's just a fabrication or a little bit of both. Yeah what the actual extent of the issue is or if it's just a few people, a few reports getting kind of blown up or blown out of proportion. Well, it's very nice gesture of these guys, you know, for not having a problem with their phone to extend the warranty to two years. So when, you know, set a reminder in your Google Calendar in 2023 and I have months to light thing on fire, dip it in butter, hot butter, and get the Pixel 3 for free, maybe. It's actually pretty cool when you think of two years as really the shelf life for a smartphone generally. So, I think they've covered the entire life that most people are going to have that smartphone. So, that's actually a pretty cool thing that they've done. It's a very good, in my opinion, of photo-confidence in the product, even if they're having some issues, they're going to resolve those issues. It might be a little painful at first, but yeah, I had the 5X almost two years, not quite two years, and I had to return that thing a couple times, and they were very good about that too. They, you know, I will say this about Google like they've been very, very good with their and very lax on their warranty policy, especially with FI. I received two different replacements to the 5x and one of them was outside of warranty and they didn't question that they just took care of it. I was going to ask about that actually. I'm sure this warranty is going to be just manufacturing defects, right? It's no screen replacements for crack screens or anything to that effect, right? Yeah, that's probably true. I don't think they'll do that, maybe in a case by case thing, but it's probably going to be just, you know, the issues that I had with the thing, there was a lot of problems with the nexus that they call that. It was going into some kind of reboot loop where you couldn't get it to load, you know, load the phone. booting little reboot hell stuff like that yeah they're not gonna cover it if you slip and drop the phone on the concreters and doing that all right moving on the next topic I wanted to talk a little bit about was home automation we both kind of do a little bit of home automation here and there I have quite a bit of it in my house you even in fact had a company based around the whole idea I used to be in home automation and there was a lot different I'll tell you that when I When I was in home automation, this was about 10 years ago, not quite, but it was before the nest and before these hot devices and it was all, you had to have a programmer to do it and you had to have really a lot of bulky gear. It was kind of like the old, it was kind of like the main frame of your, you know, main frame computing back in the day. Big motherboards and a bunch of wiring and a bunch of programming and all that kind of stuff and now you can just, I bought my little and I plugged it in and it works. It wasn't like that. It wasn't like that before. And there's a new product that's on the market. It's called the Noon N-O-O-N. Oh. And what interested me about this is it's a lot like the Phillips-Hue. However, they're tackling the idea from kind of a different angle. So it still controls your lights. Yeah. However, instead of controlling your lights kind of bulb by bulb, the approach that they're trying to take is to have you replace your light switches with effectively smart light switches. Oh, interesting. Which to some degree I think is kind of brilliant because one of the biggest complaints I've always had with you is A, I have to replace every single light bulb in my house with a smart light bulb, which is kind of a pain in the ass and be sometimes especially in the case of my old house, I actually had these bulbs that were called GU24, they're really really efficient bulbs. Yeah. They don't look like they're not like regular screw-in bulbs, they have a different. That's exactly right. They have kind of a two-prong interface. Yeah. And Phillips doesn't make these bulbs. So I couldn't even replace the bulbs in my ceiling, like say the flood lights that are in in my ceiling, for instance, I couldn't even replace them if I wanted to. So this would be a pretty cool workaround to get all the lights in my house if I wanted to, hooked up to a smart system. Yeah. I'm curious to know how they're going to pull this off because, as you probably know, the reason why a lot of these guys go after the bulb is that you can actually control things like dimming and whatnot. When you're dealing with just any bulb, like fluorescent stone dim, you know, like there's issues around getting fluorescence and LEDs. If you have a standard bulb, you know, an incandescent bulb, you can do that, but you can't do that with some of the other types of bulbs. So I'm curious how they're going to get around that. It talks about that and it mentions that the device itself is able to determine and understand how much power is flowing to each bulb. Okay. And based on that it can determine what it's connected to or at least that's the claim. Hmm. Okay. And then it can build a profile of the room and understand how to light it kind of more pleasantly is the way that they describe it. The only demo was done in a pretty beautiful home apparently so it would probably be beautiful almost any way you slice it but that's kind of what they're claiming. So the way that you have to do this is there's kind of a what do they call it a director. this is kind of the smart screen it shows you which lights are on, how bright they are, etc etc and then there's the what do they call the other units there essentially just the light switches and the extensions or it's something like that yeah yeah those are what the light toggle lights on or off. The downside to this is that you can't control lights individually. It's the same as your light switches, so you're going to control them as a set. Right? The other issue is if you have, what do they call them, two-way switches, right? Where you have a switch, maybe say at the bottom of the stairs and a switch at the top of the stairs, something to that effect. If you have something like that, you have to replace both. Because you're going to run into issues where it's going to get out of sync. It's of course, you know, internet connected. You can talk to Alexa and turn all your lights on or off and send them onto routines and scenes and all these other things that you can do with the existing kind of bulbs that exist already today. It has a nice little OLED screen. At least the director does. - Yeah, I'm looking at this photo right now. It's very contemporary. It's at the core of style switch. So it's gonna fit into your, you know, it's going to be a wider profile than your normal toggle switch. But yeah, it has a screen on it and it kind of has this little thing that flares out at the bottom of the switch. I like it. It seems aesthetically to be pretty cool switch. I think it's a cool solution to a problem that that a lot of people probably have, including myself, you know, you might want the whole whole house or at at least more of the house, wired into your smart control system and you just can't do it right now without getting really, really expensive or in some cases like mine and my old house, you just can't do it at all. - Yeah, that's an issue. And I like what these guys are up to. I don't know a whole lot about. It can be kind of pricey doing this too. If you have a lot of switches, you're gonna spend some dollars, but on the other hand, you don't have to have a technician comment and program this for you, you can do it yourself so you can save some money that way, which is good. Yeah, so the system sells as a starter kit, you can buy a starter kit which comes with the the director and two extensions which is effectively your light switches and they're costly. So that's going to cost 400 bucks for that starter kit. Yeah, and then each additional extension that you want is 100 bucks and each additional director that you need is 200 bucks. So not a cheap product, although the directors I don't really feel like you would need probably more than one or two of those. One per floor, maybe something like that. Yeah, that's not really that bad either. Getting back to when I was in the business, when it was all customized, you had to have somebody come in and anything. If you got a new DVD player or a Blu-ray player, you got to get the programmer back out there to update the IR codes and that sort of thing. It's very cost prohibitive. It was only for people that had the money to spend. And so even at this price point, I think it's a pretty good value because it's DIY. If you know anything about electrical, if you know how to wire a switch, you can do it yourself and hook it up and you're ready to go. So what are their home automation stuff do you have in the new apartment there in San Francisco? So I don't have a lot of home automation in the apartment right now. I do have the Phillips Hue because I brought that with me. I already had some Hue devices and I bought a few more bulbs. I have a Nest thermostat, although that's not really gonna work here because the, at least in the unit that I'm in, they have more, it's more like room by room, right? They don't have a central system for HVAC or heating or anything like that. So there's just little electrical heaters that are in each room and there's little wall plate that has thermostat, you can set. So I probably won't use the nest here. I'll use the lighting. I would love to do some door stuff, but like we were talking the other day with Amazon Key, I don't have the right kind of door. I could probably do it on the inside of the apartment because I have a unit on the first floor and so I have access to the street. On one end and I have access to the apartment complex on the other end. And on that side I could probably put a locking system in that would like a deadbolt kind of a thing, but I can't do that on the outside. The exterior door is just a different, you know, different profile. So I'm a little bit limited with my options here. And you know, it's not a big deal. I could maybe put a couple cameras in or do something like that if I wanted to, but I work from home. So I'm watching the dogs all the time. In my case, I just don't need a whole lot of automation. I'm probably ready to, you know, go to go with just some LED lights and Alexa, you know, I can do that from music. So yeah, I have a number of the same things. I have Alexa here as well. I have Philips Hue, as you mentioned. What else do we have? We have, I guess it was Dropcam when we purchased into them, but I guess it's Nest now. I don't have the nest thermostat. I kind of want something like that, but the problem that I have here is we have duckless heating and cooling systems and the way those work is there's a unit up on the wall and then we have remotes like remote controls that control each of the units so there is no wiring into the wall and into these units that controls them. So a traditional thermostat doesn't work for me So what I really kind of need is like a thermostat, I mean it can be on the wall, that's fine, but what I really need is like a thermostat that can effectively replace the remotes and communicate with the devices in the same way the remotes would, but in an intelligent way, I guess. That would be a fun project. There's, I have some ideas around that we should talk about because you could, and they might have an interface, they might have some kind of thing that you could hardwire into. Maybe they have wall units that you could purchase for that, and they could, they could all be tied into a central system or maybe just through IR. If you had the right IR commands, then you could have a remote that could signal commands to all those at the same time. So yeah, I haven't taken the time to really look what's available or if anything's available, but I haven't been here long enough really to have to worry about it so far. Now that it's getting cold, it's becoming a more of an issue. And one of the things that we did see that was kind of interesting is so we have two units, one head, two units, and the way these things work is either they're all cooling, all heating, or you know one's cooling, or one's heating, you can't have a mix, so you can't have one heating and one cooling for instance, it doesn't work. Right, because the central unit has to be operating in one mode, it can't be doing both at the same time. That's right, that's right. So it's a little bit of an annoyance only because let's say you want to switch it from cold to heat upstairs. You have to run downstairs and turn the other one off first or switch it also. So some of this kind of automation would be kind of nice where it would just take care of all that for you and you don't have the hassle of doing that. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So I did when we moved in here, really, really want to get level lower smart blinds. Yeah. But holy shit, those are expensive. - The old motorized shades that would raise and lower, it's sunrise and sunset and that sort of thing. That's pretty fancy. - Exactly. - That's pretty fancy. - That would have been awesome, but yeah, I think those, you know, where the blinds maybe for me currently cost 150 bucks, those would have been 550 or something like that. - Oh boy. Yeah, you're paying the premium for that feature to lower your blinds before you automatically at 8 a.m. Yeah, and we have really large windows in our living room. So I mean, it would have been really, really cool to have that done because the sun is in the south all the time. So we see, you know, the light comes through very, very brightly in the afternoon and into the evening. So it would have been really nice to be able to have that functionality built in where it could keep it, keep the blinds at a level that blocks it out, yeah, consistently. Right. - Yeah, it's just at that point anyway, it was cost prohibitive. Maybe over time I'll switch them slowly, but just throwing down several, $3,000 or something, just for like four windows or something like that was just absurd. - Yeah, maybe you do one or two at a time and parse it out over the course of a few years. You just operate a room or something. - Yep. - Yeah, I've had more automation. I don't really have the need in this place. I'm on a ground floor and I don't have blinds that are out of reach, but in other properties that I've lived in and doplex that I still have back home in the Midwest, that's a pretty cool automation. And so I did have like security and lighting all tied in together, HVAC, and you can do some really cool things with that. So you could have, for example, like if there was a fire in the basement, it was a two-story property with the basement. You could have the lights flicker on and off. And if you had LED lights, you could have them flicker on and off in a red color, something like that to indicate that, hey, there's a problem in the house. You have to evacuate or it could also stop the HVAC system from running because a lot of times you don't want to have air feeding a fire. So if there was a fire and the alarm picked that up, then it would shut off the HVAC system. Really cool things. So I mean, I love automation. I love the fact now that it's becoming DIY. It wasn't the case, you know, as I said, when I was in the business, but there's some really cool things happening with it now. And even little things people don't think about that are really nice to have. So for example, having lighting control in your home. If you wake up at 2 in the morning and you go into the bathroom and you flip the switch on, normally most people are blinded by that because you've been sleeping for a few hours. Well, in my home I had the lights automatically dim to 20% after 10 o'clock. So if I got up in the middle of the night, I had to go to the bathroom turn the lights switch on. At most I was going to get 20% of the light out of that bulb just because of the time. So there's a lot of cool things you can do when you have those systems in the house. Yeah, and we actually utilized one of those functions when we were in France here recently for about a month is Hew has a feature that I think they just moved from kind of their labs function to Primary function where you can have the the lights kind of go on and off automatically They're on a timer per se, but they'll go off say you can set say within 30 minutes either way of the time that you wanted them to turn on And the reason for that is to kind of make it look like people are coming and going at different times rather than very very consistently. So it makes it look like maybe people are home rather than than it just being lights on a timer. Yeah, it's the old really cool home alone thing, you know, he back in the day, Kevin had to have like the Michael Jordan cardboard cut out on a train track, you know, like driving around the living room to make it look like there's people in there, but now you can just have your few lights come on and off at certain times a day in different rooms. It's pretty cool. Or show on our age with that reference buddy. That's gonna be a classic. I don't give a shit. How old you are. Everybody loves some home alone. Well maybe with that we ought to move on. One last note on the noon is it's available immediately. You can order it online and November 15th is when it'll be available in Home Depot stores. Oh, check it out. Very nice. noon to take a look at that. All right, what do we have next? What's on deck here? KJ, Kojo. So yeah, an article I had come across the other day was an article from The Verge, which was titled Apple Is Not America's Favorite Tech Company, which kind of drew my eye a little bit. AI didn't, I don't know that I would have said that they were to be in with and be, I was just kind of curious as to what the contents were. And I'll be honest with you, I haven't completely read through the article, but what I did do is look at a pretty large graph that they have in the middle of the article. And it's a indication of from a scale of one, if they basically ask on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, would you care if the following companies would disappear from the earth, basically. And the companies that they gave were Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. And what was interesting here is that Apple had the second largest group of people that would not care at all if the company disappeared from the planet. Which to me was actually pretty shocking. I mean, I would have not thought that they were the best by any stretch of the imagination, but I did not know that that many people would not care. Well, all I can say to that is, you know, the developer community would be impacted by this. The iPhone user would be impacted by this, but it's probably a small segment when you compare it to some of these other guys. They're more invasive, right? Anybody can be an Amazon shopper, but you have to have some dough if you want to play with Apple. That's probably what it has to do with that a little bit. It's more accessible, but it is surprising to me a little bit too. - So the one company in here that doesn't have any products aside from software is Facebook and that was, they were the number one company. Nobody, they had the highest response rate of people would not care if they went on board. Which, that makes a lot of sense to me because they have no hardware. So therefore nothing really to support the only thing you're losing is software, which... - Yeah, and as much as we're all addicted to the Facebook, I think a lot of times they're not seeing a favorable light either, I think most people would agree that they could spend less time on Facebook and their life would probably improve. It's not something that it's a crutch in the way sometimes. It's not something that provides a lot of value, but it's something that we're drawn towards a lot of the time. - Yeah, and I think Google has a pretty healthy response rate people that would care a lot if it went away. And I think that makes a lot of sense when you think of you know number one, the search platform, which is huge. You know, if that went away, that would be a major problem for a lot of people myself included. And that doesn't even include the Android hardware, which of course a lot of people are using for all sorts of different smartphones. Myself included on that one. I love my new pixel hardware. It's very good, very good hardware. What candy operating system are you running on? We've moved on from candy. We're now onto other types of sweets. This is 8.0 Oreo. Nice, a nice creamy filling in the middle. Now we're on the cookies. Oreo. Mar smello. You know, we've moved on from the candy. That was so last year. But yeah, I thought this was interesting. You know, I'm an Apple user. I have an Apple Macbook, an iPhone user. I have Apple TV. I have a lot of these products and I'll be honest with you. I feel like Apple's lagging heavily. I see a lot of things coming out of Microsoft, for instance, who's been doing some kickass work really. You know, they've come out with their Surface Tablets, their Surface Pros, they've come out with a lot of great hardware. I mean, they have had their issues with a few of those things, but by and large, it's a huge step forward for them and they've built up their Azure platform to compete with AWS. It's a really solid platform. We use that at work all the time. I think they're doing a lot of things correct and I think Apple is going quite the opposite direction. I think they're doing a lot of things that are frustrating people that are frustrating their developers specifically. And they're not really innovating anymore. The only thing that they try to innovate on really is the iPhone and the watch platform. And I feel like the watch platform is a pretty small subset really. Like, I don't know. I feel like that's a wasted segment. You know, I feel like you're abandoning. I feel like you're abandoning your Mac customers. You know, I don't feel like the Mac itself. I feel like it's not getting attention anymore. and that's unfortunate because it used to be, I remember you had one, you introduced me to it, it was like the most rock-solid platform that you could possibly use at the time, and I don't feel like that's the case anymore, I feel like they're getting away from some of their roots. I agree their quality has suffered in recent years, and they used to be perfectionists, right, and everything they did, the UI, the software was perfect, the hardware, And now you've got a situation where if you want to own a Mac, you're going to own 15 dongles just to hook shit up to the fucking thing. I mean, this is what's happened with Apple is that it got the other way where it's not even so much about convenience anymore, just about how can we maximize profitability and charge 30 bucks for a connector to do the same shit that you could just plug into your computer before. I would even add to that and say, design became more of a concern than usability of the product. How so? What are you saying about that? To your point exactly, like you said, the dongles are a thing. The reason that dongles are a thing is because Johnny I have decided to make a more thinner, beautiful, symmetrical design. Let's remove all the ports to make it more symmetrical and beautiful. Yeah, they wanted to have some symmetry in the design. Yeah, I think that would definitely go into the category of bullshit for me. I just don't see how from a UX perspective you're serving your customer that way. Right. Now you have all these other companies that are coming into the fold that are trying to offer some kind of adapters or other tech just so you can still plug shit into your laptop. Yeah, it's unfortunate because they do make, they still make a quality product. It's still a very good product but it used to be in my opinion a lot more robust a lot more full proof. And I noticed even when I was still on the iPhone in the end, before I switched to Android and to Google, Project V, there were more errors. It was error prone. It just didn't have the same quality control standards that they used to have back in the day. These were done very well and things didn't release until they were perfected. It seemed like, and now it's just that there's a lot more compromise, I feel like. In their products and in their software and their hardware, it feels like a compromise instead of the same top notch product that everybody comes to expect from those guys. Yep, that's exactly the way that I feel. Exactly. I don't really have a whole lot more to add to it. I feel like it's a little unfortunate and I've told Christina recently I feel like I feel like Apple to a large degree is in a bit of trouble currently. And the reason that I feel that way is is you see companies like Amazon and Google and even Microsoft and these guys are creating products that are quality. And the more important thing I think is that they're creating platforms that are open and That people can utilize to build even cooler things. So what I'm referring to here is AWS Azure and what's Google's platform called? I can't even think of what it's called The Google the Google cloud And then Azure and Amazon can build on top of their own cloud platform which I'm sure Apple is building their own as well behind the scenes. They have iCloud, they have all that sort of thing. I just don't feel that they're going to continue to be able to innovate as fast as Microsoft and Amazon are with essentially dog fooding their own huge cloud. I mean, they're supporting the world's business plus their own. Whereas Apple is just kind of creating their own little cloud ecosystem, which I don't feel it can be nearly as good. I don't see how it's possible. I agree and say what you want about Microsoft. They're sometimes a dirty word in the industry, right? Like people still, oh, Microsoft, or you're a, oh, you're a .NET guy or whatever you want to say about it, but they've made some incredible strides. I just saw a report this week. Their cloud business was up 90% year over year. So, I mean, they're doing tremendous things to bridge the gap to get after Amazon. And I think AWS is still the clear winner. They still have the best offerings. They still have, they're ahead of the curve and they hadn't really started and they are the foreigner. But Microsoft is not a joke and they're not to be taken lightly. I mean, they've done some really pretty powerful things. - Yeah, and the first thing an Apple person is gonna come back and say is, oh, well Apple's a hardware company, right? Well, that's true, but they're also a software company. I mean, in order for the software, sorry, in order for the hardware to work, they have to build a certain amount of software, in order for the hardware pieces to talk to each other, those are software bits. So they are both companies. And I feel like maybe they can keep on top of their hardware. That's fine. They do still create pretty solid pieces of hardware. I'm not complaining about the hardware, but I think their software engineering and design are lagging behind heavily. Well, there's more pressure on Apple to be honest because they chose that vertical approach to own the hardware and the software. You can't just go and pick up an Apple from any third party, you gotta get it from Apple. So I think there's a reason, you know, the bar's already set pretty high and yeah, they've made some missteps. And they haven't released a lot of new products lately. Okay, you've got the iPhone, which is their big revenue generator now. So there's a lot of focus on that. The watch who really gives a shit never really took off. But even their hardware, their PC, one was the last time that a Mac Mini came out. I mean, there hasn't been a Mac Mini release in a few years. There hasn't been, I don't know, I mean, maybe the Mac Pro gets the most love on the hardware lineup right now next to the iPhone. And they, yeah, they just announced a new Mac Pro. The Mac books just got a a revamp relatively recently. Yeah, but yeah, they don't pay a lot of attention to the MacBook hardware because it's not a focus. The iPhone is the focus. The iPhone is what generates tons and tons and tons of dollars for Apple. And that's a little bit unfortunate because you're leaving the developers who are developing things for the iPhones with dated hardware. - That's just it, they do some dumb shit. And so I'm getting into, as you know, I'm getting into more of the mobile app development space and I'm taking on some projects, doing some cross platform development. And my options aren't great because I can use all kinds of tools to develop. But then I have to have an app to compile the code. I mean, that's a given. You have to have an app to do that. You can't try to do that on a PC. That's right. And so for me, I don't want to have a $3,000 fucking MacBook Pro just to write some code. You know, if I'm, I mean, I'm a small guy. I don't have thousands and thousands of dollars of throw at hardware. And as much as I would love to have a cool MacBook Pro, I'm not going to spend the money on the damn thing. And so yeah, so I wanted, you know, I was looking at Mac mini's last week and they're dated. They don't have shit. I mean, these things are still expensive and they're old. - Yeah, I think the last update on those was three years ago or something to that effect? - Yeah, the chips in those, and that hardware is very dated. So it's disappointing. Yeah, they're definitely losing their edge. And I hate to see that. I hope they have a resurgence because I've always, historically, I really love the products that they put together. I always felt like they built the best hardware and software and they're definitely losing their edge. So yeah, I hope they can course correct. You know, I bought into the Apple ecosystem to some degree, I'd kind of kept one foot out just because I didn't want to completely be blocked into one ecosystem, but I bought into the Apple ecosystem to a little to a little degree with the MacBook and with the iPhone. And I really, really loved the interoperability of those things. They just talked to each other. They know how to work with each other. there was no setup required to make them communicate. And that was one of the beautiful things about them is things just work. Yeah, so hopefully they can get back on course and develop some cool hardware and develop some cool software and compete in the space. But I do have my doubts and I am a little bit afraid of some of the things that Microsoft and some of the competitors are doing. I think they're doing just as good a work, just as good a hardware and we'll see what shakes out. but hopefully they can write the ship and make things that are compelling again. - I agree, 100%. They have a high bar being, again, going back to the vertical thing, they have a high bar, they own the hardware, they own the software. But to your point, people expect when you buy an Apple product and you pay a premium for that, that things just work. Like you said, and I'm even noticing on the Apple TV now, every time I go into the damn thing, it's prompting me for a fucking login, every time I go in. - Oh, that's it. We need your iTunes fucking cloud password. I put that in 10 fucking times like why do I need to do it again? And it happens all the time. It's annoying. It's frustrating and they don't seem to be doing a whole lot to address that so Hope you're right, but if not then Things will play out and somebody else will step in and Yeah, you know Amazon will be worth, you know is a worth 1100 bucks a share now, so There will be new people to to jump in line if they don't get their shit together Well, I guess with that that's the that's all we got for today Did we crank out a show already? Yeah, we did wow over oh my gosh. How do we do that? That's crazy This is easier than I thought it was gonna be on a Saturday morning no doubt Saturday morning. I'm you know coffee. I'm coffeeed up and Whiskeyed up well a little bit of whiskey up still yeah, that was last night, but that's still kind of lingering into the morning here for me Feeling a little better now Yeah, we're making progress. We made a big purchase yesterday. We bought a domain name yesterday Coffee code cast calm Don't go there now. There's nothing there right now. Yeah, don't go there now. It's it's gonna dead end somewhere but I Supposed to just we could just redirect that to the Temporary website for the time being yeah, that would require not too much work, but We could do that all right. Well, we'll see you in the office Tuesday or Tuesday morning I guess bright and early you fly in on Tuesday. I do I fly in Tuesday. It'll be an early morning. I'll probably get up at 3 30 or 4 o'clock and go to the airport. Get on a plane. I'm going to pick up some bo-deen for Doug. Oh, the sourdough bread. Yeah, they open up at 5 a.m. So at the airport. So there you go. I can get a low fresh out of the oven and bring it over. Well, never mind. I'm not going to make that joke. He'll be appreciative of that. You thought about it, you almost won. You can also contact us on Twitter @coffeecodecast. You can contact Mike on his Twitter @PragmaMikePRAGMIKE. You can contact me @KylePJohnson. If you have a question or just want to shout out at us, you can use the hashtag #Ask3C. That's the number three. The website that we were just talking about is www.coffeecodecast.com or if that's not working for you go to www.coffeecodecast.libson.com, L-I-B-S-Y-N.com. You can subscribe to the podcast, through SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play Music, or iTunes. Leave us a comment. Greatest. We'd love to hear from you. [Music]