Gradual Ramp Up To Nothing
All right, so last episode, I mentioned that at my alma mater, which is Virginia Tech, they have been requiring tablets for a while.
And when I say tablets, I don't mean iPads.
I mean, honest to God, those awful Microsoft quasi-computers, not the Surface, like the real old Microsoft tablets.
And so I got some feedback from
I got some from a just graduated or recently graduated student, Alan Fuller, and I got some from somebody who is associated with the teaching part of the college, Joseph G. I'm going to read you a very small excerpt of what Joseph said.
He said, I teach electrical engineering, and I can tell you that most of the students here hate those required tablet PCs.
that they are all required to buy, more expensive and less capable.
The purpose is for everything to be submitted electronically, but it fails so spectacularly at this that I just have them print everything and submit hard copies.
I suspect half of them are browsing Facebook during class anyway.
And I thought that was kind of interesting and different that here it is that the school, if you ask me, was trying to be progressive and say, oh, let's do this wild thing with these tablets.
And as it turns out, apparently everyone hates them anyway, which is of no great surprise.
But I thought it was interesting.
I think it's interesting, too.
I think we are all, especially John, we are all old enough that we didn't really have computers really that prevalent in classrooms when we were in college and certainly high school.
I don't know if they do that in high school yet, but we didn't have... They do.
Not everybody was having laptops on their desk in college when we were there.
Is that fair for you also, Casey?
I know it's fair for John because he's like 50.
Yeah.
Wow.
We did not have laptops in high school when I was in high school.
However, the school in which my wife teaches actually made national news many, many years ago, well, like 10 years ago, because they used to have – what did you call the MacBooks before they were – iBooks.
They used to have iBooks, and they sold them for $50 a pop after they'd been used by middle schoolers for a couple of years.
And they sold them at the Richmond International Raceway, the NASCAR track.
And apparently there were like stampedes in order to get these 50.
Yeah, that's the school district in which Aaron teaches.
That's awesome.
How about that?
But to this day, they have really crummy Dells that all the kids get issued.
And from what I understand, it's a double-edged sword.
I can't imagine getting anything, like paying attention to school at all if I was in high school with a laptop, with an internet connection, even without an internet connection.
Why would you ever pay attention to class?
Right.
I mean, I remember there was... In my senior year of college, we had one class that was in a brand new lab with all these Linux desktops.
And I spent so much time playing Same Nome and browsing the internet and not at all paying attention to what was being said in the class.
And I was lucky that...
Even being a computer science student, most of the classrooms didn't have computers, and they just were like regular classrooms with desks, and you would take notes if you were a good student, or you would stare at the wall like me.
And the idea of having those... I would not have the self-control, and I would imagine... In fact, I know I didn't... When I had that opportunity senior year, I didn't have that self-control.
And I looked around the room, and no one else did either.
And I have to imagine...
uh that's probably going to be a pretty common problem as computers infiltrate and become they probably already are um everyday items now in college classrooms well you know the problem with the virginia tech thing is it's like the minitel effect where a school thinks our technology you know this is the next big thing and the mistake they make is saying not not just that we're going to require everyone to have a computer or this year we'll require everyone to have this computer but like they think that they're going to do they're going to do it like they do with desks like
we've decided that this is the best desk for our school.
And it's got this chair and this height and has this place for your books.
And we're going to order 500 of them.
We're going to use them for the next 20 years.
And so they decided that whatever, you know, this little flippy round screen, tablet, PC thing, like that's the future.
And,
They just went with it and they expect it to be, you know, standardized going forward.
And that stuff is obsolete before it even arrives at the school due to like the delays and purchase orders and everything.
And after they realized that they made or after everyone, after all the students realized that they made a terrible mistake, you know, though, we, you know, don't this is terrible.
Don't do this.
It doesn't work.
Doesn't make our lives easier.
These are crappy computers.
They don't say, oh, yeah, no, we got to stop that.
And they just, you know, they keep going with it.
Oh, we'll get the new version of that tablet PC.
So it's a whole combination of ailments of like not refusing to admit your mistakes and not realizing that standardizing to that degree is always going to come back and bite you.
And the Minitel was this computer they had in France.
I don't know.
Someone in the chat room can look it up on Wikipedia and tell us more about it.
But for a long time, it was, you know.
It was good, and everyone in France could get a Minitel and get onto this little network and do interesting things, and you don't have this in your other countries.
But it's bad in that it lasted forever, and it was just an embarrassment and a joke.
Obviously, the government doing it is the worst-case scenario in terms of standardizing universally and being out of date and taking forever to arrive and not being able to fix mistakes.
But a university is a nice step down from that.
Well, to be fair, Virginia Tech only mandated tablets for the engineers, and they've been mandating computers in general for incoming students for something like 20 or 30 years.
I think it was like mid-80s that they started mandating that all the students would have to have computers.
But it is – I agree with you, John, that it's – I think them saying, ooh, this tablet thing, this is progressive and exciting and we're a progressive school and it ends up biting them in the butt and nobody has got the confidence to hit the brakes and say, man, maybe this is bad.
And also consider that these aren't purchased by the school.
These aren't issued by the school.
These are –
Everyone has to buy their own machine.
Yeah, well, they've taken so much money from you anyway.
Who cares?
That's true.
It's kind of insulting, though, at that point.
It feels bad, but it also feels bad buying hundreds of dollars worth of stupid books every semester, too.
That's true.
I don't know.
The kids still buy books?
We used to buy books.
Oh, yeah.
And they still pull all the same crap with, like...
with, like, you have to buy the professor's own book, and then you have to buy, like, the spiral-bound, like, Xerox piles that are some other thing.
And then, of course, they have the used book ordeal, which there's no better word for it.
It's just a giant scam.
It really is.
I mean, that's... You know, I wonder.
This has been a big problem that's probably beyond the scope of this show, but...
there's a problem now with college being worth it or not.
And I don't know how much this has been a problem in the past, but it seems like
a combination of, of, uh, surprisingly dramatically increasing tuition in the last decade or so.
And then the economy being so terrible, uh, for jobs seems like college is actually becoming a worse and worse deal for students.
I mean, I, again, this is probably way beyond the scope of this show, but, uh, you know, all these things add up and you got to figure, especially like in our industry where so many people get by just fine without a college degree, uh,
it doesn't really help when you're starting out but you can make it work and private college is probably like you know because state schools i think even though the funding is being massively slashed for them i think it still net net i would say you know you're better off going to the cheapest possible state school that you can get into than not because your student debt won't be astronomical like it'll be if you go to someplace that costs you 60 grand a year or something you know what i mean
Plus, if your boss is somebody like me who was pretty much a slacker and just barely got through school, I don't really care what school you went to.
If I'm reviewing your resume, whatever school you went to, I probably haven't heard of it no matter how good it was, so I don't know and I don't care.
I have to imagine that's probably true of many of the mid-level and high-level bosses and tech companies, especially smaller companies run by younger people.
I have to imagine that many of them are being run by slackers.
Once you get to a certain size, though, they do the stupid filtering of, like, they just want a degree for you.
You know, the first level HR pass is just filtering out anybody who doesn't have a degree in something vaguely related.
And, you know, that's stupid.
You could say that's not the way you should run a company, but once companies reach a certain size, they start doing stupid things, and that's one of them.
Yeah, I guess – well, this is probably true in most tech jobs.
If you want a job at a place that has an HR department, you're better off making something that they can buy the company.
You have a better chance of them buying your startup than you do of getting through the HR department's automatic filters and all the keyword filtering and the recruiters and all that crap.
Well, I mean, most people don't.
That's the thing.
Most people don't go through that.
But most people get into companies like that because they know someone who's there or someone inside the company starts to know them online, even if they just follow them on Twitter or something.
And you bypass some or all of that idiotic process by someone inside the company going, yeah, no, no, just bring him in.
We actually want to interview him.
And that short circuits the idiocy.
You know what I mean?
And that's how people get hired, you know, the referrals, friends, stuff like that, and those type of things.
I mean, I don't think I've ever gotten a job by, like, just going through the front door.
Maybe once in my life I get a job by just going through the front door, and every other time it's like you know someone inside the company or you get to know someone inside the company.
You know someone who knows someone, and then you bypass all of that BS, and that's how you get your interview, you know, instead of having to...
jump through the stupid hurdles and pass keyword filters and all that stuff.
Actually, how I got my job, which became Tumblr, was exactly just applying.
Like, David posted a Craigslist ad looking for programmers, and I responded, and that was...
That's how I got that job.
See, I don't think I've ever gotten a job that way.
And by the way, a real-time follow-up as per Twitter, not the chat room.
I'm disappointed in the jackals.
Useless chat room.
I know, seriously.
Can we call them jackals because this isn't 5x5?
We should have our own term.
Heathens?
I never liked calling the 5x5 people jackals either, and I won't call these people jackals either.
It's disrespectful.
These awesome friends in the chat room let us down already.
But Jason Deering in Twitter said, I was a freshman in 97.
It wasn't mandated then.
It was recommended.
And so I quickly looked.
And according to Tech, it wasn't until 98.
And since 98, each coming undergraduate student had been required to own a personal computer, blah, blah, blah.
So real-time follow-up.
But no, I've never gotten a job – to my knowledge or to my recollection, I've never gotten a job just by cold calling someone.
It's always been a friend of a friend or something along those lines that has got me in the door.
So I'm a little surprised, Marco, that that – and I think I knew that story, but I'm a little surprised that's how you ended up at – Well, that was a fluke.
I mean like my first job, even that – like my first job out of college at Vivissimo, even that was a friend already worked there and got me an interview.
Like it was –
And it's so much more important with who you know.
The Davidville that became Tumblr job, that was a fluke.
I mean, that doesn't really ever happen.
That was totally a fluke.
I don't think he had an HR department that you were bypassing either.
Not at all.
Exactly.
I mean, that's like he emailed from the ad.
He requested a code sample.
I showed him some PHP code I had written.
That's what he was looking for.
And that was it.
And then he mailed me two books on Ruby on Rails and said, you start in a few weeks.
Get up to speed on this stuff.
And that was it.
But I think one of the reasons that worked, one of the reasons that that was a totally lucky break for me, is that he didn't really know what he was doing.
So he didn't know that you're supposed to go through all this crazy process and filtering and collect a billion resumes.
All that stuff that everyone else does, because they know that's how it's done, David didn't know that.
He was a young kid when he hired me.
I didn't know that really, but
I had to tell him about things like holidays.
He really didn't know about how things were done in the pro-work world, because he was never really in it, except working for himself, by himself.
So that was a lucky break.
But I think if you don't have a college degree, or if you have a crappy college degree, or if you have... I think my final GPA was something like a 2.3 or something.
It was a terrible GPA.
If you have a terrible GPA like me...
I think you have a way better chance of getting into companies like that that are being run by basically inexperienced young people or companies who are just so desperate that they just need anybody who walks in the door.
You don't usually want those jobs.
But the companies that are run by young people, like the startups...
or end consultancies often and everything like that, I feel like it's so much easier to get a job there because you're more likely to run into somebody like David who doesn't really know how things are supposed to be done in the ways that would rule you out.
All right, so what else are we talking about?
Anyway.
All right, then.
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Absolutely.
Did you ever see an email denial of service attack?
I saw one of those recently.
No, that's pretty crazy.
I've always, honestly, I don't host my own email because hosting email, as MailRoute knows, and as they solve for a lot of people, hosting email is such a pain because you can set it up and you think it's working.
But once you start getting into the complexities of things like spam filtering, being blacklisted or blackhold or whatever it is, graylisting, all the crazy complexity that we've added to our mail infrastructure to usually in response to spam or security problems, it makes hosting your own and getting your own mail delivered to other people reliably so difficult.
Yeah, the graph I recently saw was showing, like, a number of incoming mails per day, and it was labeled with colors, with, you know, one color for spam and one color for good mail.
And you see mostly, like, it's like 50-50 ratio good mail spam.
But those were tiny little slivers, like two pixels high.
And then in the middle of the graph were two gigantic towers that were, like, the height of the screen.
They were all the color of spam with, like, a little tiny frosting on the top of regular mail.
And over the course of two days, like, the spam volume went up by, like, 10,000x.
And then went back down again.
And it's like, is that like a bot gone wild or a coordinated attack?
Or that's the type of, you know, 10x, 100x, 1,000x volume that you just may, oh, guess what?
Today your mail server is getting a bazillion spams.
You don't know why.
You can't control it.
Yeah, not good.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Generally, the best wisdom I can tell the audience is don't host your own mail if you can help it, because hosting your mail sucks.
And this isn't even part of the MailRite ad.
They will help quite a bit in this regard.
If you choose to use MailRite or not, that's up to you.
I think it's a cool service.
But whether or not you do that,
Do not host your own mail.
It is such a world of hurt to use a Steve Jobs or a bag of hurt.
What was the Blu-ray?
It's a bag of hurt.
Yeah, it's such a bag of hurt.
You know, not to get all sad for a moment, but I really do miss Steve Jobs at times like when the Galaxy S4 comes out and it has an easy mode.
You know, I would love to know... Phil Scheller would take a dig at that, too.
Don't worry.
You know, because Steve was always so good about these little quips that he would leak in an email or a comment somewhere or on the earnings call or something.
Somebody would ask him about some competitor's stupid thing, and he would just tear them apart in like seven words.
And I really do miss, like, what would he have to say about... Especially, what would he have to say about Google Glass?
I mean, that's...
Well, the big thing about Steve Jobs is it's twofold.
One, he was a person that a lot of people admired.
And two, Apple as a company was and still is not the kind of company to have like, oh, you could just call them up and get some random obnoxious quote from some random VP.
Like they're very controlled about their messaging.
Yeah.
You always want to hear what an admired person has to say about any topic, right?
So that's one reason we're hanging on his favorite word.
And the second thing is he was the only person in the entire organization who had the authority to make stupid-ass comments.
Exactly.
You couldn't call Apple and say, can you tell us what you guys think of this?
You're never going to get anyone on the phone.
No one will ever give you a line.
But if you're talking to Steve Jobs, you never know who's going to stop him.
And most of the time, he was very controlled and didn't say a thing.
But occasionally, you'd push that one button, and he'd be like, you know what?
That thing is a piece of crap.
Let me tell you why.
And you're like, ooh, this is the stuff.
because you could never get that any other way.
Now it's like Phil Schuller's going to come up and make a quip about easy mode or whatever thing that they're going to be showing for iOS 7 or new iPhones.
They'll make an offhanded quip about something else, but
When the press gets him after the fact, he's just going to repeat his talking points.
He's not going to go off on a three-second diatribe about, you know, like the Bag of Hurt thing.
That's not like a rehearsed talking point.
That was like someone asked him about Blu-ray, and he said, you know what, that stuff is crap.
And if that wasn't in the talking points, it's not going to come out of Tim Cook's mouth or Phil Schiller's mouth.
He was the best when he fired from the hip, and he did it rarely, but when he did it, it was fantastic.
I bet he had that phrase bag of hurt turning over in his head for weeks or months, and he was just waiting for a time to use it.
I bet he had a nice arsenal of what he thinks about X, and he usually just didn't hear it.
Yeah, they're discussed internally.
Anyone who has had these conversations with him internally is going to be like, oh, he's giving greatest hits of the rants we've all had internally.
Normally that stuff would just stay inside the company, but he was the one guy who could let it out when he felt like it, just for the help of it.
I always wonder how much stuff he does ad-libbing like that.
One of the ones that comes to mind, I really hope someone writes a tell-all book about this stuff, was back when he introduced the G5, and I think he said, like,
And they're going to be at three gigahertz in a year.
Someone in the chat room can correct me on the timelines, right?
And it's like, did someone from IBM tell him that?
Or did he go, you know what?
Screw them.
They better be at three gigahertz within a year.
And I'm just going to say they're going to be.
And if they're not, I'm going to blame them later.
And everyone else is going to be like, what are you going to do?
Steve Jobs says whatever the hell he wants.
Exactly.
All right.
Speaking of Apple, you want to discuss this WWDC situation?
I mean, unfortunately, it's only going to be relevant mostly to our live listeners, of which there are now approximately 220, which is kind of crazy to think about.
But it'll only probably be relevant to them because by the time this comes out, of course, it will be going to release this probably on Friday.
So we will already have or not have our tickets.
Well, we should confidently predict what's going to happen so people can laugh at us in retrospect when they find out what actually did happen to us.
That's a fair point.
So I will confidently predict that I will try my darndest to get a ticket, fail, and then go fetal for the rest of the week and weekend, crying miserably about how I didn't get a ticket.
I still feel like I'm going to be able to get one.
Like, what was it, two hours last year or something?
If we're all there, you know, and Marco is starting to get on board with Marco's optimistic predictions.
Like, look, they use it for iPhone orders.
Way more people want an iPhone than want to go to WWDC.
Like, there are many assumptions in that statement, one of which is that this is the same system that's used as iPhones, which I don't necessarily believe.
But, like, hey, you know, it could happen.
The servers could stay up.
And if they do, presumably everyone who's there sitting there at, like, 1 p.m.
going to click,
Don't you think all those people are going to get tickets?
I hope so.
Yeah, but the problem is, I believe, I don't remember the gentleman's name, and I couldn't pronounce it even if I remembered it, but the guy who did the WWDC alerts that you could jump the line if you paid money.
Oh, that poor guy.
Or all those poor people.
Yes.
Well, beside that, I believe... Yeah, I don't feel sorry for the guy at all.
I think he made out quite nicely, and this is probably the last year he ever will.
Well, he's refunding everyone's money, I assume.
I don't know, and I wouldn't – wow.
Email John.
But no, anyway, crap.
I totally lost my train of thought, and now we're doing it live.
Well, you know, and I would imagine that – I mean so what Apple did today to recap for people listening in the far future is for I believe the first time ever – because it's only been necessary for the last, I don't know, five years or so – but for the first time,
Apple announced WWDC and its dates and its availability before the tickets were actually available to buy.
And so they've said basically, buy the tickets tomorrow at this time.
And so it solves a lot of problems.
In previous years, like last year, two years ago, tickets sold out in about 12 hours.
Last year, tickets sold out in about two hours.
And...
And last year, the best time to release a press release in the PR industry is about 8.30 in the morning.
So Apple tends to ship out all their press releases and their new product announcements, and they tend to lift embargoes at like 8.31 a.m.,
And generally, you want to do this not on Monday, if you can help it, because there's a lot of competition from things that built up over the weekend on Monday for coverage.
So you don't want to compete with that.
You also want to do it on Friday, because on Friday, you're about to go into the weekend.
A lot of people aren't paying attention, and there's not going to be a lot of time for people to write up reactions.
And they're going to have the weekend, and then they'll forget about it.
So generally, you want to do it early in the week, but not Monday.
So things are usually announced on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.
And so it was pretty easy to predict that the announcement of this conference was probably going to happen again, just like it did the year before, probably going to happen again at a few minutes after 830 in the morning on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
And sure enough, it did.
And it did it right after the day after the earnings call.
And there's there's I don't know the details of this.
There's the SEC quiet period guidelines, and I'm not qualified, and neither of you guys as far as I know, none of us are qualified to talk about whether Apple is required to stay silent, but it sounds like they're not.
They're not required.
It's not even an SEC thing.
It's just something that people do.
It's like a guideline or a practice.
Yeah, it's a de facto thing as far as I know.
I don't even think the SEC recommends.
It's just what everybody does.
And once everybody does it, by not doing it, you would stick out.
But I don't think the SEC tells you that you should or even recommends that you do.
Well, but it's kind of – it's almost requisite.
You're right.
It's not required, but it's almost requisite.
And my dad actually works for investor relations for a really, really big company.
So he's qualified to talk about it.
And so that would be releasing insider information before the company has released their earnings.
And thus, the logical thing to do is for all these companies to just shut the crap up.
for like two or three weeks.
I don't remember how long it is, but some duration of time right before earnings.
So this way there are no slip-ups.
And so to your point, Marco, it seems reasonable that even though WWDC on the surface doesn't seem like it would affect the stock price or anything like that, for the last couple of years, it's been announced the day after their earnings announcement.
Right.
And so it was fairly easy to predict that the announcement was going to happen this morning.
But
nobody was predicting and i heard a few rumors and i think a few other people did too but nobody was really predicting that this would happen where the announcement was indeed at the predicted time but uh the the on-sale date of the tickets is going to be tomorrow and it solves a lot of problems one of the problems with last year is that people complain about a lot is because it was 8 30 in the morning eastern it really screwed the pacific coast because by the time they all woke up it was sold out
So it was kind of rough on people in the Pacific time zone.
And then, of course, all times around the world, too.
If 8.30 a.m.
Eastern, which is GMT-5, is in the middle of the night for you in your time zone, you're kind of screwed.
So...
This was a really good way to do it, I think.
People were speculating maybe they would have a lottery in place.
I'm actually very glad they don't have that because I know I would lose it because I always lose drawings and raffles and things.
You and me both.
Yeah.
So I'm glad there's not a lottery thing, or at least they aren't all lottery sales.
But...
Well, you're glad now.
Will you be glad?
Lottery is terrible because you want some system that is – you don't want it to be random.
You want some system that has some kind of merit-based selection process, even if that merit is – who wants it the most?
Right.
Who is willing to wake up in the middle of the night?
Who is willing to set up little things to monitor?
Like, maybe that's not the best way to do it, but, like, that's the way anything, you know, anything in life is.
Who wants it the most?
And if those people get it first and you're going to complain, no, Farrah, I don't want to stay up in the middle of the night.
Well, I guess you don't want it as much as that other person wants to go there.
You know what I mean?
And, like, that is so much better than random because then you and your friends can band together.
and be idiots and stay up in the middle of the night on the other side of the world and get tickets, and you can all go together, whereas if it's a lottery, maybe you get to go, but your two friends don't, and then you have a worse experience, and it's just stupid.
Right.
So, we don't know yet.
We will know in less than 24 hours whether the three of us are going or not, or whether some subset of us are going, but...
Yeah, the problem is the old system gave more room for people who really, really cared about it to have an advantage.
Because we would be predicting the times, and we would be waking up early every day in April, basically.
And we would be the ones setting up monitoring systems and hammering the page to see when it changes.
So...
Certainly, now what they've done is made it so that you don't have to be paying that much attention to have a chance at it.
So it is more fair in the sense that it will give way more people who are interested in going a chance at getting tickets.
But at the expense of crazy nerds like us, oh wait, somebody yelled at us.
We're not supposed to say nerds.
Crazy geeks like us who really want it badly.
Yeah, some guy on Twitter.
I don't know.
I don't agree with him, but okay.
We're going to keep saying nerds.
Forget that.
I think you're qualified to set the word on that.
So anyway, nerds like us are now at a slight disadvantage that there's going to be way more competition from people who care a little bit less about it or who would have otherwise been awake at that time anyway.
So we'll see what happens.
The only reason it's slightly worse for us is that...
It brought a few more people into the fold, people who really do want to go, but their alerting thing didn't work, or they were asleep, but they didn't hear their phone go off.
Those people who kind of unfairly got screwed last year, they are now competing with us, but I think that's reasonable.
It's more than that, though, because when I went two years ago, when I went in 2011, my then employer, who I don't work for anymore, my then employer was probably going to fund my trip.
And when the tickets went on sale, I needed to go get final approval.
Marco, you've spoken about this at some point or another in the past.
I needed to go get final approval from my boss in order to spend a whole bunch of money and get it reimbursed.
Right.
So in the point I was going to make earlier when I lost my train of thought is I thought that the gentleman who did the pay to jump the line alert system said he had like 20,000 people in his alert queue.
And there are something to the order of from our friends in the chat room, 5000 tickets that you can buy.
And so even if it's the same system that handles millions of iPhone orders when they are brand new, you're still talking about a whole crud load of people trying to vie for 5,000 seats.
And that's just – I'm really scared that's not going to end well for me.
Yeah, that's actually – that's a bigger ratio than I would have expected because you've got to figure like not everybody who wants to buy a ticket even sign up for that service.
There's probably some percentage of them who did.
But I don't know.
Well, the good thing is that this year, Apple says they're going to release the videos during the conference.
So they won't be live-streamed, I assume, but maybe you can figure out the day after or something.
And also, they don't do that idiotic thing where the only people who get the videos were the people who actually attended WWDC, which was incredibly stupid.
So now, if you were just a paid developer...
They just say a registered developer.
I assume they meet a paid developer for either iOS or the Mac.
And you want to see WWC sessions.
I assume that while WWC is going on during that week, they will slowly be doling out downloads on, you know, the same way they always do on the iTunes, you know, what is it?
It's not iTunes University.
But anyway, the place where you can download videos through iTunes of WWC, only they'll come out as WWC happens instead of having to wait a week or two weeks, which even a week or two weeks isn't a big deal.
But this takes some of the sting out and hopefully will discourage people.
I try to discourage people on Twitter.
Discourage people.
It's expensive.
If you don't live in the area, you have to...
buy a hotel for a week and you have to buy the ticket which is not cheap oh yeah it ends up being like airfare and it's it's a lot of money so stay home and you get almost all the experience uh from home i just watch the videos and that like if i don't get a ticket it's not going to be the end of the world for me because that's will be what i do i may still have to take a week off from work but that's so so you would take a week off of work to sit in your house and watch these videos
Yeah, and the thing about that is you would think that that would work out fine, but the main problem is that the videos would end up being released.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know what kind of lag they are, but the amount of time I can dedicate to watch WWDC videos is much smaller because you've got to get the kids out of the house in the morning and the kids come home from school.
Oh, yeah.
When you're at WWDC, you can just dedicate your heads down whole life to...
uh to just wdc oh i mean like so far every year that i've gone i've gone for i think four years now something like that um every year there have been a few sessions where like they were double booked against something else i wanted to go to so i i made a note and i told myself i'm gonna go and watch this video when it comes out of this other one that i'm not gonna see now
Yeah, and did you ever actually do that?
I never do.
I think I might have watched like two or three videos after the fact total.
And usually that was only because I was about to or already coding against some API that the videos were about and I wanted to like look something up or go back to a video of a session I already did see live to remember like, oh yeah, how did they do this one thing?
Like the scroll view session, I always go back to that because it's full of crazy good stuff.
There's times where I'll go back for reference purposes, but I'm never going to make two hours and sit down and watch a couple of these things.
I've got the WWDC 2003 DVD set.
To my right, I kept it because it came in a metal box.
I don't know if people remember that.
And the first WDC I went to was two years ago, so I was never actually able to go.
But I either knew people who went or knew people who could have gone but got the DVD set and set as part of the – do you remember, Marco, were you – I guess you probably weren't around when they had the –
I'm going to get the name wrong.
I think there was different ADC levels.
It was Select and Premiere.
Yeah, I came in right as that was about to end, so I did see it.
And it was like 500, 1,000, and 3,000, something like that.
I think it was just Select was 500 and Premiere.
I think it was Premiere.
Someone in the chat room can correct me.
And that was like four digits.
I don't remember what it was.
But what you got was like one WWDC ticket, and you got the DVDs, and you got lots of stuff.
Uh, and so anyway, I got, I got a big hardware discount and yeah, I know.
And a big, that's the whole reason we used to do these things.
Right.
Cause you get like 400 bucks off.
Yeah.
We'd go in together and have a bunch of different hardware discounts.
And that was the way I bought all our Macs was the hardware discounts.
But anyway, I had that DVD set and that was where back in the days when I would get those DVD sets and I would watch every single session.
Or just every single one.
I go through them in order.
And these days, when I actually attend, I don't obviously do that because a lot of them I was there for, so I don't have to watch them again.
But I will go back and look at the ones that I didn't see.
The only thing I'll start skipping now is like, now that it's like...
There's a track on, like, web development.
Although I did watch a couple of those from last year.
But, like, I'm not going to watch those.
And even some of the iOS ones I'll skip because I'm mostly in there for the macOS 10 stuff.
But it used to be when it was just Mac and there wasn't, like, a track about how to do CSS or high DPI images or other esoteric things that I, you know, may not really be.
in apple's wheelhouse and you could just learn about or may have already learned about otherwise i would just watch every single session and that sounds boring but like i find maybe i'm when i get as i'm getting older i'm i have less time from that because the kids take a lot of time and everything but i used to just that's the way i would consume things when i was getting into a hobby or something i would read everything there was to read about that hobby when i was learning munix i just bought o'reilly books and just read them from cover to cover and today you read toaster manuals of toasters you don't own
Those are much shorter.
I read Unix Power Tools twice.
I remember getting the end of that and going back to the beginning and reading through it again.
That's not a small book.
Well, but you make an interesting point, Marco, and I know you said that jokingly, but I really shouldn't say this on the show.
Well, actually, it will come out after the fact, so it doesn't matter.
But part of the draw of WWDC is the experiences you have outside of the sessions, and the sessions are unbelievable.
In my two years of going to WWDC, I've only skipped three or four sessions, or three or four slots, I guess I should say.
And some of the best experiences I've had, though, are networking with people.
Like, for example, I met David Smith there, and David just pointed out in the chat room that the gentleman whose first name I don't know how to pronounce, but his surname is Prendiville, who ran the WWDC alert thing, apparently he only had 600 subscribers, which is a lot better than the 20,000 I apparently invented out of thin air.
So thank you, David.
Oh, good.
That's way more encouraging.
Yeah, maybe the Doomsday scenario isn't quite so bad.
But I remember – I think that 20,000 number – I remember last year when – I don't know if they did – did the WWDC Alerts Twitter thing?
It was oversubscribed.
Yeah, that – the WWDC Alerts Twitter thing had something like 20,000.
I forget the exact number, but it was in that range.
And so –
I thought it was eight.
Thousand?
It was more than the tickets that were available.
I think last year they sold something like 5,500 tickets.
They've been at that number pretty comfortably or near that number pretty comfortably for enough time that we can be pretty sure that that's roughly what they think the maximum should be.
Certainly, going there for the last few years, you can see in Moscone, it is packed full.
And it is so hard.
It's just a line after line after line.
You've got to have a session.
If you want to get a popular session, if you want to get in there even, you have to get there like a half hour before it starts and stand in some long line.
Which means you've skipped the session before.
Right.
I mean, it's really quite difficult to maneuver around the conference with the number they have now.
They certainly can't sell more tickets and keep it in that venue.
It's still not the PAX level of waiting, because I find that you don't usually have to actually skip the previous session.
You'll just get a crappier seat, whereas with PAX, you have to skip the previous two sessions to get in line.
The only thing you have to skip sessions for, I think, is if you want to get in the lunch session, like the J.J.
Abrams one, I was in line for that for like an hour and a half.
See, I always miss the crazy good Friday lunch session, because I always have to fly out at like 1 p.m.,
Yep, same here.
Why do you do that to yourself?
I book my tickets.
I hate traveling, so I need an entire day to prepare my mind and body for travel.
So you stay on the Friday night?
Yes, not always.
See, I don't want to stay the extra night, and I, for the love of all that's good and holy, I do not want to do a red-eye.
I never do a red eye, but I want all my flights to be at noon.
It's not always possible, but that's what I'm shooting for.
The entire day is just dedicated to travel, and I don't want to wake up early in the morning.
So David Smith just put in the chat room – God, he's my best friend.
He just said that the original WWDC alerts, this is the unpaid, completely free one, was about $9,000.
Look at that.
I win.
That's actually pretty promising.
Showcase showdown.
Without going over.
Does that mean you win both of the showcases then?
No, it wasn't within $100.
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So before we leave the WWDC topic, are either of you two gentlemen going to go if you don't get a ticket?
Like, John, you said in all likelihood you'll probably take off the time, but you'll probably stay at home.
Yeah, I can't justify going if I don't – what would I do for the week?
Like you said, one of the reasons that I am actually going is that I do have interactions with people outside the sessions, but it's mostly –
So that I can have a dedicated time where there's no distractions and no other demands on my time.
I'm just there to attend sessions.
And secondarily, at a close second, is if after a session is over, I just need one thing clarified and it's not clear from the notes, the guy who gave the presentation is at the front of the room and I can go ask him.
And then third is the thing that everyone says, oh, the people you meet outside and everything.
And that's definitely true as well.
But for business purposes, I guess, for research purposes, it depends on who I'm meeting with, I guess.
If I'm meeting with big fancy people in super secret, then yeah, I get a lot of value out of those meetings.
But I can't bank on that.
I can't guarantee that I'm going to have a private meeting with Tim Cook when I'm there.
You can buy them get coffee.
So I wouldn't go there with no ticket hoping that I'll just happen to catch Craig Federighi on the steps of Moscone and bend his ear for 15 minutes because that's probably not going to happen.
And more importantly, how could I justify it as a business expense for the purpose of writing my review if I don't even have a ticket?
So that's kind of bogus.
So yeah, if I don't get a ticket and if I can't finagle a ticket through whatever crazy please somebody out there from Apple help me love me.
type of system then i'll just stay at home watch the videos you know yeah i don't know what i would do i mean i hopefully we won't have to think about this because we'll get tickets but um if i don't get a ticket i might still see like i i would have a higher chance of going um based on what you just said i would i'd be more likely to go than you but i still wouldn't i wouldn't say right now yes i'm definitely going like i haven't
I have a hotel reservation because it's totally refundable, but I haven't booked a plane yet because I'm not going to book a flight.
I'll pay the extra couple hundred bucks that whatever the price is raised to tomorrow if I get the ticket rather than buy the plane ticket today on the off chance I don't get a ticket tomorrow.
Yeah, we should tell everyone about that because I think that was a good three-way triumph of all of us having the wherewithal and guts to actually buy our hotel tickets, what, a month ahead of time?
Yeah, we bought them in March.
Yeah, and I forget who initiated that, but you can always look at the schedule and ballpark it, and you kind of know, yeah, it's probably going to be like this week.
Every year, that's been the case where you could look at that, but it's one thing to look at the schedule and know that, and it's another thing to actually pull the trigger and get the tickets, but I forget who pointed it out, but...
You know, hotel tickets are refundable 24 hours ahead of time.
So there's no risk in doing it, except if it's some sort of hotel that has an annoying website that makes refunds annoying or you don't have any confidence that they're going to correctly process it and they're going to charge you anyway, even though you don't show up.
Right.
So if you go, if you have a good hotel with a reasonable website, it's worth doing.
And then, you know, so, hey, we had our hotel reservations a month in advance and they are actually were actually cheaper than even the Apple special.
We're reserving a block of rooms for you rates for the same place.
Yeah.
And so to answer the question I asked of the two of you, I don't know what I'm going to do if and when I don't get a ticket.
I've already established I'll go fetal for about three or four days.
But a part of me thinks it's worth going to network.
It's worth going to see people, to see the David Smiths and the Jim Dalrymples of the world and certainly to see Marco or John or whoever is out there.
um but i don't know if i would go for the whole week um our good friend david smith friend of the show david smith has said he's going and i believe he's intending to go for the whole week i don't know what i'm gonna do and i'm i'm such a wimp and so indecisive i can't figure out what i'm gonna do but maybe marco and i maybe we'll commiserate maybe we'll celebrate i don't know
What would you do the whole – like I guess the only advantage is that you could stay out all night, which is not my thing anyway.
But if it's your thing, you can do that and then sleep during the day instead of having to get a person.
But even then, like if that – I guess if you just want to go and like socialize with people.
But I don't – if you're –
You wouldn't be getting much done from a business perspective unless you're going there to try to like, I need a partner for my new venture or I'm trying to recruit a designer to help me and I want to talk to people and meet people.
I guess I am the wrong person to ask about what kind of business value you can get out of social interactions.
Unless you have money falling out of your ears and you don't have any, because that's a week of vacation time if you have a job.
And this is not part of your job.
You know, that's what else could you use that week for?
What else could you use that thousand, really thousands of dollars for?
You know, it's a tough call.
You know, you're absolutely right.
But if now this isn't an oranges to oranges comparison, but if I wasn't at WWDC, what was it, 2011?
Then firstly, I wouldn't have met you.
And secondly, I wouldn't have been there with Marco and Merlin and a friend of mine, Eric Schurter, to buy you a toaster.
So there's something to be said for these social interactions.
It's clearly important.
That was one day, though.
Like I know a lot of people who aren't – if they say, if I don't get tickets, I'll go, but not for the whole week.
And that makes sense to me because you want to be there for like the keynote excitement and the few – maybe you'll arrange with people like, oh, we should go out tonight and then we should – other group of friends should go out the next night.
And then you see the few people you're going to see and then you're out of there.
Well, that's why I'm saying maybe I wouldn't go for a whole week, and I'm making this up, and maybe I'd go arrive Sunday, stay there Monday, Tuesday, and fly back Wednesday or something like that.
I get tired just thinking about WWDC.
Once again, introvert versus extrovert.
Does the thought of seeing all these wonderful people who you love make you feel exhausted?
You may be an introvert.
oh i'm excited i i really hope because like yeah i mean the more i think about it the more i think like if i didn't have a ticket i would i would probably still go but i think it would i think it would suck you know because most conferences like south by southwest is a joke you know like the the sessions south by southwest are terrible the uh you know that they're mostly panels where people just read twitter and and you know bs their way through and it's just
As an audience member, it's pretty hard.
It's pretty unusual to be in a South by Southwest session that was worth your time.
They do exist, but they're certainly the minority.
But that conference is all about drinking and partying and socializing.
And so if you're going to South by Southwest without a ticket, you'll still get almost all of the value of that conference.
But WWDC, for me at least, is not that way.
I mean, it does have drinking and partying, but for me, the great value of that conference is the sessions and even the socializing that happens in Moscone.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Usually I get more socializing done in like the chair areas of Moscone between sessions or like if there's one schedule gap where nothing's really that great, I'll go sit down and, you know, answer email and stuff and talk to people there.
And you want to know why?
Because you can actually hear people.
Right, exactly.
The social environment of yelling at a bar while everyone's drunk is really not that great.
You're not going to get the best development advice from your favorite developer when he's had three drinks in them.
Maybe you'll get the best juicy tips and rumors and you'll have the best trash talking, but...
That's the thing.
If you come out of a session, if some session is about scroll views and something, and you're sitting next to someone who you want to talk to, or you see someone in three rows away, when you come out of the session, that's the perfect opportunity to discuss scroll view performance with a developer who you're lucky enough to meet in real life, because that's in the front of their mind.
Whereas if you come up to them in a bar later and want to discuss scroll view performance, they're going to be like, it's not the time for that now.
Right, exactly.
It's the time for beer.
Yeah, and trash-talking whoever you want to trash-talk at that time and complaining about Apple or AppReview or whatever.
There's plenty of other things you can do as well, but there is something to be said.
It's like an academic-type context where you're learning about your craft and your business, and that's valuable.
A lot of people ask me why I go because I'm not developing an application, but I'd go for my review, obviously.
But if you're actually making an application, I meet so many developers, both iOS and the Mac, who are like,
This one session has made this entire thing worth it for me because now, oh, my God, I can't wait to grab my laptop, run back down to a chair, and implement this thing that they just showed because it's going to make my life so much easier.
And I never realized that it was so much better way to do this.
You know what I mean?
And as long as it's not an iCloud session, that usually turns out pretty well for that developer.
All right.
So I'm sorry.
I prolonged the WWDC talk for a long time.
I feel like we're probably good here.
And so you'll see via Twitter whether or not any of the three of us got tickets.
And I'm sure if I don't, I'll be complaining and moaning like a baby for weeks.
So let's hope for the good of the nation and the world that I actually scored tickets.
If we don't get tickets, Casey, we'll just sit in a Google Hangout together and stare at QuickTime videos synchronized.
You might be joking.
I'm all in.
It's like that scene when Harry and Sally will have the split screen.
We'll both watch the same session at the same time while laying in bed.
Again, you think you might be joking, but I'm not.
I'm there.
The funny thing is it would actually be fairly productive of us to just like arrange like an East Coast meetup for like one week in August where we all just get together and watch the videos back to back.
That's true.
We'll go to the Arment compound.
There you go.
That's true.
We can stay in the guest houses, right, Mark?
Oh, yeah, yeah, on the estate.
Something like that.
The crummy thing is, it's actually, Marco is in the middle of the three of us, but what are you, like two or three hours from John and eight from me?
Yeah, middle is generous.
I'm way closer to John than you.
That's your fault of living down there.
Yeah, but you have 70 mile per hour speed limit roads in your state, so...
No, I think that's just West, right?
No, no.
It's here too.
In full Virginia?
Real Virginia?
In the real Virginia, email Marco.
But also consider that we're not a state.
Do you think anybody in West Virginia is listening to this podcast right now?
Probably not.
I mean, let's be realistic here.
But also consider we are not a state.
We're a commonwealth.
I believe like Massachusetts, if I'm not mistaken.
Yes.
I don't get it.
I don't know what the difference is either.
It's just so the residents can say that to people.
Seriously.
So we can be obnoxious like that.
Exactly.
We're like the hipsters of, I don't know.
You and your states.
Yeah.
We were commonwealths before we were even states.
Anyway.
All right.
What else do we talk about tonight?
Are we done?
Well, I think we can do like another 15 minutes or so if you want.
Do you think – Do you want to talk about earnings or do you want to talk about something else?
I think the earnings thing has a couple of interesting things about it, but not a whole lot.
First of all, I'm glad that the stock price didn't totally just plummet.
It seems to have stayed roughly the same, which is itself an embarrassing level.
But I was expecting doom here because we've talked about in the past, and I've blogged a lot about how I think...
I think Apple is kind of stuck in this rush of extremely negative momentum in the public eye, and especially in the press.
But I hear it from regular people, too, so it's certainly getting out there.
And
I have to think people are going to be crapping on Apple publicly and expressing doom and pessimism about the company and its products and its future.
I was thinking that would be a year or two long cycle.
And I was thinking also, and this is not investment advice because none of us are qualified, but one of the reasons why I sold all my Apple shares back whenever it was, January or February, I sold them at $4.60 something.
And one of the reasons why – oh, it was soon after the holiday earnings call, and the stock took a dive on that call.
And I realized holiday earnings are great usually, and they were.
It's always the highest quarter of the year.
And so I figured that's probably –
the best news they're going to announce for a long time, possibly the whole year, at least as far as the market is concerned.
And so I figure if the stock took a dive on what was probably their best news day of the year, I don't think I want to hold it for the rest of the year.
And so far, that's proven to be a fairly good theory that's panned out, but...
With this, I was thinking the quarter after holiday earnings is always kind of soft, and we'd been hearing all these rumors about how they were having way lower demand than expected, and they were possibly having oversupply of components.
i mean it sounded bad like leading up to this the rumors were pretty bad and then they released the earnings and they're actually pretty decent and uh you know it's not like the holiday quarter but uh they beat their own guidance as they usually do and uh and even wall street didn't seem disappointed by it like they this was supposed to be the different quarter where they were saying we're not going to give you the guidance that we're guaranteed to be this time we're giving you a range and we say we're going to fall within that range and and they felt just above it right
Yeah, right.
And the fact that they were still out of that range would be making me think, if I was an analyst, like, all right, we're on to your game now.
You still gave us an estimate that you knew you could beat, or it could be that they just had better things happen.
But it was just kind of like a wash.
But the thing about that idea that Apple is like...
doom and gloom about apple i feel like the entire industry in some respects is in not so much doom and gloom or a death spiral but like in a holding pattern because we say we notice apple these things but take a look at have you been reading the samsung galaxy s4 reviews yeah they're really mediocre right and so the same it's the same the attitude is basically from consumers and from the market who cares about the market but
from consumers like what have you done for me lately exactly iphone ipad and even like samsung the shining star uh-oh apple's in the doldrums samsung's no the same thing with samsung what have you done for me lately samsung is the galaxy s3 galaxy s4 is the s4 you know so much better than the s3 and they're like oh i guess it's another samsung galaxy phone and
It's got a bunch of things in it, but they're not all that awesome.
We're all in a holding pattern because everyone's waiting for, okay, what's the next big thing?
That's why everyone keeps talking about stupid iWatch because everyone has to have something to be talking about.
And I feel like the entire tech industry is in that holding pattern to say, what's going to be the next breakout thing?
Even if the next breakout thing is, oh, my God, iPad sales are doing a hockey stick and they're going out of control and suddenly people are excited about Apple again and it's in the news again, right?
Yeah.
that could be it too but but everybody isn't like there's no company that's like well apple's just kind of like boring and not really growing like it used to but samsung has got an exciting no samsung's just got another phone and so you know apple's gonna have another phone and samsung's gonna have another phone do you think you know is samsung gonna come out with its you know galaxy watch is that gonna be the exciting thing so everybody is just kind of like all right and now yeah apple was ridiculously punished for you know
burning so brightly before and now it's like all right well you'll be punished by the market and you have you have to go into the corner and stay there right but it's not as if there is someone else sweeping past them to be the new darling of the industry that everyone has pinning their hopes and dreams on whose stock price is going up you know 500x and over the course of two years you know
There is no equivalent to that.
So everyone is just kind of sitting there cross-armed saying, all right, what have you done for me lately?
And it could be true that this entire year goes by and no one does anything for those customers with their hands folded.
But I haven't listened to the audio of the earning call yet, but I read some transcripts and I think Tim Cook was making some
Faints in that direction of like, we might have some, you know, entering new categories, and we're not going to give you any timelines.
Well, he did give a timeline.
He basically said, I mean, in a different comment, what he basically said was, we're going to be releasing new stuff this fall and next year.
So the implication was, don't expect much between now and this fall.
Well, I mean, he wouldn't even get pinned down on that, too.
But all he would say is, we will have new stuff in the fall.
Of course they'll have new stuff in the fall.
I mean, like, obviously.
And if he's not going to be any more specific than new stuff, it could be like, oh, we rev the MacBooks.
But he was firm enough on that, though, that I think what that means is all those rumors about there being an iPhone 5S in the spring, that's all crap.
That's probably not going to happen.
I think his comments made it very clear.
And I think Gruber said, too, it was kind of like setting expectations for what's going to be announced between now and WWDC.
Don't expect a whole lot.
And what was interesting also is that the press release this morning for WWDC confirmed with a quote from Phil that at WWDC we will have new versions of iOS and macOS in developers' hands.
So he came out right out and said that.
So we're going to see 10.9.
Did anyone doubt that?
Well, we've heard rumors that 10.9 was being delayed.
Oh, it is being delayed, but you're going to have some version of it.
It's not going to be GM.
If it's GM, screw it.
You won't want to run it.
It'll be like when iOS 5 was released at WWDC and the thing didn't.
work that well right so it wasn't you know and that's the one i put on my phone yeah yeah yeah no so gruber will never let me forget that oh i i think i also put i was five on my phone it was a big mistake that's terrible 10 9 if 10 9 is gm'd at wwdc and you don't get a ticket john and i don't get a ticket does that mean we don't hang out in a we don't get on a google hangout together because you're gonna be too busy yeah
Oh, yeah.
If 10.9 is... No, I would still have to watch all the videos.
I don't even know what the hell I would do.
If that happened, because that's the problem.
If that happened, all the real tech sites with the people who write every day as their job would have 10.9 reviews up in a day or two, and I would not.
It would be months and months, and it wouldn't be...
For me taking three months to write something, it isn't three months better than someone who wrote theirs in two days.
It's just not.
So that's all fine if I take my three months before the release date and all the reviews arrive on the release date.
You don't care how long it took me, right?
But I don't think I'm going to want to wait for the amount of time it takes.
Oh, you sell yourself short.
I wonder how long I'll be able to spend on my review of your review.
Should I write a review of your review of his review?
You know, I think that might have been my highest traffic post of 2012.
Yeah, you're riding my coattails, I know.
Yeah.
I was, obviously.
And now you have, like, you have, you don't have more Google juice than my actual review, but, like, you're hit number two.
Yeah, exactly.
They were just like, of all the many people who linked to it, you are the second hit.
Wait, I am really?
Yeah, I think so.
Just Google over Syracuse Mountain Line, you'll...
Oh, that's hilarious.
That's fantastic.
You were the number one hit for a while, I think.
Sorry.
How mad did that make you, John Syracuse?
You must have been... I don't think people had trouble finding... Was it?
Or no?
But no, yours was in the title, too.
Oh, no?
Well, kind of.
No, my name's not in the title.
No, yeah, your name is not in the title, so... Yeah, well, I guess if you did Ars Technica Mountain Lion, you wouldn't be as highly ranked.
Oh, that's hilarious.
Rest assured that people are not having trouble finding my review.
Oh, goodness.
Yeah.
That's fantastic.
All right, so anything else about earnings, or is that basically it?
Well, and it's worth thinking about, too.
Like, you know, people who are expecting things earlier than that, like new laptops or anything, look at Intel's roadmap for what they would put into laptops or Mac Pros or iMacs, and it looks like everything's basically waiting on Haswell right now.
But as far as I know, Haswell's not really coming out until third quarter.
Well, I mean, you know the Apple Intel magic of them getting stuff, like, not even ahead so much, just like the first day of the quarter they could have it.
Like, well, it's not really ahead of schedule.
It's exactly what we said it would be.
But we've given Apple preferential treatment, and they were able to arrange it so they can have their stuff out exactly as the stuff arrives.
And the Xeons are still – it's the Ivy Bridge Xeons, right?
It's not even –
Yeah, right now we're still – the current – the E5 series and the E3 series is Sandy Bridge EP, but then they – there's an E3 V2 line, which I just found out when I was looking at servers a couple of days ago.
I totally missed this.
It's basically the Ivy Bridge EP version, but it's just single processor.
There's no dual processor version, so there's no E5 line as far as I can tell.
So they'll put that in the XMac, right?
yeah right yeah well honestly like my favorite cpu right now for servers the best bang for buck that i that i can get on a server right now is the e3 1270 yeah no i'm totally on board with it i'm totally on board with a single processor non-zeon mac pro replacement machine because if you can have if you can get it clocked higher than a zeon you can get it earlier than a zeon and it has other possible advantages you know in terms of
uh, packaging and power consumption.
I, I would not turn my nose up at that.
I would prefer a Xeon and all the other, you know, ECC Ram and all that crazy crap that we should not pay for, but we do.
Uh, but like, you know, better, I'll take, take what I can get.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, even like my current Mac Pro, my, you know, quote, new Mac Pro from the 2010 generation, it's a single socket because the single socket CPU, it's the 6x 3.33 gigahertz one.
And that, for almost every type of workflow, is faster than the dual socket ones because the dual socket ones aren't clocked that high.
It's not like the old days where if you had a single CPU, that meant you had a single thread of execution.
Right.
They also have umpteen cores in them, and it's like, well, you just have one CPU.
It basically just limits your RAM slots at this point.
Yeah.
And so if the next generation of Mac Pro only has one socket in any configuration, that actually wouldn't be that bad because the single socket Xeons now are so good that...
Although, they do make a heck of a lot of profit on the bigger ones, though.
But, I don't know.
We'll see.
I certainly think that my next Mac Pro after this, assuming it still uses Xeons, is probably still going to be a single socket one.
And I bet that's going to be true for a whole lot of buyers.
Yeah.
I would spring for the double if it wasn't like, add another CPU for $2,000.
Like, if it's not ridiculous like it was... No, it would be.
It would be at least $1,500, and it would be lower-clocked.
I mean, look at the prices, because that's all Intel, really.
Look at the prices now.
I'd have to think about it hard, because it's not as if this is a value...
it's not as if i can calculate oh well i really i don't need this you know i don't need it but like it's i buy a new machine every once every five years damn it i want it to be the big beefy one and i'll just have to decide do i think that really is the big beefy one because you know like you said it probably would be lower clocked if they offered a single core they could crank it up but there are too many variables the point is we just want something even if it's not called a mac bro whatever it is something that's not an imac something that's not a laptop something that's not a mac mini
And it's really, really fast.
Didn't Cook say last year that sometime during 2013 they would have something that will make the Mac Pro customers happy?
What he said was later next year.
But we don't know what the later applies to.
But that certainly does correspond well to the next iteration of the Xeons.
Well, and beyond that, I mean, if he just said in so many words that there's not going to be anything until the fall, it sounds like he's running out of time.
Well, he, I shouldn't say he.
Apple is running out of time.
I don't think anyone – there's like seven people waiting for the answer to that question.
Yes, but all seven of you are very, very whiny.
We are very whiny.
We're very loud.
But what he was actually referring to was like –
Whatever, like, again, I have to listen to earning calls, but, like, possibly entering a new product category, whatever that means, it means something more exciting than a new iPhone, a new iPad, or a new Mac.
I mean, that's what... Yes.
And, you know, and even that didn't produce enough excitement to cause any sort of market bump.
It's just like, all right, well, that's what we all expect.
You're right, Tim.
That is what we're waiting for, but we're going to sit here with our arms folded until we get that thing.
And so, meh.
Well, one thing that was also really interesting from the call was the number of iPads sold.
And this was crazy.
Basically, they sold like 19 point something million iPads.
And that was more than they sold in the holiday quarter.
That's crazy.
I think that makes sense because if you look at all Simcoe, Horace Daydew's graphs, if you look at all – whenever he overlays them so you can just see, like, let's just put each product's introduction and pin them to the zero on the x-axis.
And you look at the slopes of the various curves, like here's how the iPad took off and here's how the Mac took off and here's how the iPhone took off.
The iPad always had the steepest slope.
It was like, why?
It was small.
The absolute values weren't very high, but it's like, boy, the iPad is taking off much steeper than the iPhone.
The iPhone took off much steeper than the iPod, and the Mac is just way back as this gradual ramp up to nothing.
So, yeah, it's not a surprise that the iPad continues to rocket up like that.
And that's kind of like the wild card, which if you want to be optimistic about Apple is –
where is the ceiling on iPad sales?
Because it is so capable of replacing a PC for so many people and will only become more capable in time, you know, and they'll keep driving the price down.
And we're just kind of, we're just getting off the ground.
Like we're, we're at like the, the iPhone three GS stage of the iPad right now.
You know what I mean?
Like we got the, the one, and then we got the one that's faster and cooler, but it's fatter.
And now we got the mini, but we're now waiting for the big one to shrink.
Like,
Once the iPad hits the iPhone 4 stage and the iPhone 5 and beyond, I think there is tremendous sales potential for these things as PC replacements, basically.
Not, you have this instead of a PC, but for people who've never had a PC before...
This will get them in the door.
And for people who do have a PC, they're going to buy this as a companion and stop using their PC as much.
And we're nowhere close to the ceiling on that versus the phone market where it's like the competitors are locked in a deadly battle.
And, you know, the number of non-smartphones is dwindling.
I think they just crossed 50% smart non-smartphones and stuff like that.
There is not this, like, ridiculous upside where we're like, oh, by this time next year, there will be 7x as many smartphones sold.
That time is over.
But that time is not over for the iPad.
And the other thing is there's no – the competitors in the tablet market are not making a dent in the iPad so far.
Actually, that's not true.
Are you counting Kindles?
Well, yeah.
I mean, everyone else does.
So, yeah, you have to count Kindles and Nooks.
I don't know if you have to.
Well, yeah, I guess that's true.
And nobody knows how much they've really sold, do they?
I mean, everyone – It's not like where you see the market share graphs where it's like Android versus iPhone and Android is like 50-something percent and iPhone is like 20.
Like it's –
Every time you see a tablet, it's like Apple has like 70 or 80, depending on who's counting what.
I think that is steadily going down.
I think it used to be Apple had like 85 to 90, and then it's been slowly creeping down, and now it's like 79.
They still have, obviously, a dominant hold on it.
But it's okay for that to go on when the overall size of the market is going up so rapidly.
Right.
It's okay to be like – because think of the iPod.
Because it has to move down the market.
The iPod hovered around 70 for a long time, and that was just plain fine.
70 was considered dominant because, like, other plus random, you know, competitors is always going to add up to, like, 30% or something.
But everyone, you know, if you went to buy a music player, you're just going to get an iPod.
I never realized it was that low because, yeah, you know, everyone kind of assumed that the iPod was, like, pretty much the only game in town.
I think if you look at it now, they always pegged the number around 70-something.
It wasn't as dominant as you would think it would because we never would consider anything else.
Like, what are people buying besides iPods?
I wouldn't even know where to go for such a thing, but the world is a big place.
It's one of those things probably where number one is the iPod, number two is like 1%.
Because there's so many entries in that.
What is it?
The second plurality or something?
I don't know.
I don't know math.
I'm just a programmer.
I think it's also worth pointing out, based on what you just said about smartphones and market and everything, that we have crossed an important threshold in the industry.
And I don't think the industry knows it yet, so I'm going to announce it here.
Big news.
You heard it here first.
My mother just purchased her first smartphone.
Really?
How much prompting from you?
I told her not to get one, actually, because I didn't want to support that.
She has a MacBook Air and loves it.
She had an iBook before that.
She actually figured out the computer pretty well.
I was pleasantly surprised because she's really, really non-technical.
um i was pleasantly surprised by how well she does on the computer but i told her you don't need an ipad and you don't need a smartphone because i you know i i know what she does and doesn't do for the most part and uh like you know just and she she abuses her phones and you know so i'm like just get whatever cheap flip phone you can get so she's had a flip phone for years she just got her first smartphone against my advice can you guess what phone she got
A Galaxy Note.
The free iPhone 4.
John, you are correct.
I know you are.
Even though I told her... She was visiting here... She was visiting my library of old iPhones in my house a couple of weeks ago or a month ago.
And I showed her... I'm like, here's the iPhone 4, here's the iPhone 5.
I didn't show her the 4S because who cares?
I knew she wouldn't care about the difference.
So here's the 4, here's the 5.
And I told her specifically...
Do not get the free one.
The one that's even $100 more is way better because the 4S is so much better than the 4.
And I showed her the 5, and I'm like, look, for $200, you can get this one.
It is way better than even the middle one.
And trust me, I was trying to push you with 5.
Just get the 16 gig, the cheapest one.
Trust me, get that.
It's great.
And if you don't want to spend $200, at least spend the $100 and get the 4S.
Do not get the iPhone 4.
She goes and gets the iPhone 4 and calls me afterwards saying, hey, guess what I just got?
And she kept saying, it was free.
I know you told me to get the iPhone, but this one was free.
It's like the Seinfeld episode.
Who buys batteries?
It was so powerful.
That's why this really matters a lot to have that in the free category.
It matters so much.
People aren't thinking about the plan costs over time or how you can just spend $100 on
Over this $2,000 phone contract, spend $100 more and have a way better device the whole time.
Because she actually will keep it the whole two years.
She's not going to upgrade early or anything.
You don't have to sound so judgy.
I'm still rocking my 4S because I'm too cheap to get a new one every year.
But the 4S is a decent phone.
And even by today's standards, it's a heavy, big brick.
But it's decent.
That's why I said in my Apple 2013 to-do list to...
add more variety for the phone lineup like make a purpose-built low-cost you know free phone instead of having the old one because i think you can get a better phone out for similar cost and similar margins than just redoing maybe i'm wrong about that you can tell me about the manufacturing stuff but like think of how much better you would feel if she was getting a free phone with exactly the same power and specs as the iphone 4 but like
not an actual iPhone 4, like made a purpose-built thing, made with old technology, but a newer phone.
Right, like an A5 with a plastic shell.
I mean, you don't have to make it crappy, but you have the technology now to make a better phone than that.
Maybe use die-shrunk versions of components.
Maybe you can make it a little bit smaller and lighter.
Maybe you can bump up the margin a little bit.
I know why they want to keep making the same phone.
You've got the assembly lines going.
You've got the parts going.
You're in a groove.
The cost of everything is going way, way down.
But there's that certain point
Where, like, you know, remember when USB 1 started to become more expensive than USB 2?
There was that crossover point where it was, like, if you actually wanted to put USB 1 on your motherboard or in your computer, you would end up paying more.
Right.
Or, like, when you have old RAM and you want to upgrade, like, you know, if you still have, like, something that uses DDR2 and, you know, trying to find that nowadays is very expensive.
It's not that extreme, but, like...
I think there is definitely a case to be made for, even if only just from a marketing perspective.
Your mother doesn't care that she's getting an old phone, but some people do.
I don't think she knows that it's old.
The iPhone 4, the 4 and the 4S looking the same probably helps in this regard, but...
I would feel bad if I was Apple that people are out there today coming home with a new phone that is just as old as the iPhone 4.
I'd rather them coming home with a phone with similar power but maybe better battery life, maybe a slightly better screen.
Maybe a fixed home button.
Yeah, maybe no glass on the back.
All the things that you can do to make it – I mean you said plastic.
Make it more durable for people who you know aren't going to be as precious about their phones, right?
Yeah.
I don't know how they make that work financially in terms of making the same phone over and over again being cheaper versus making a new one.
But, yeah, the power of free with contract, in the U.S.
anyway, I don't know how it is elsewhere, I would really like to see them do that and come out with a line of phones with the same price points, free, $99, $299, and then the ridiculous phone, but not have, as soon as you go off the top line, have it be like, oh, you're just getting the old phone.
There's something about that that makes me feel like they're leaving money and reputation on the table by continuing to sell old phones that far into the past.
Sell the previous one, fine, but don't go back like two models or three models.
Think about the tech world.
Think about what you were doing and what else was around when the iPhone 4 came out.
The iPhone 4 came out a few months after the iPad 1, for one thing.
Yeah, nobody wants an iPad 1.
Who wants an iPad 1 at this point?
You can't practically give them away.
Even children turn their nose up at them because they don't play the Tokuboku games for the good frame rate.
It came out right after the iPad 1 by a few months.
It was in 2010.
I was still at Tumblr when the iPhone 4 came out.
and just thinking about like how long we've had retina screens like now it seems like we've always had retina screens on our phones maybe not everything else but on our phones of course we've always had retina screens nope it's been since 2010 which was almost three years ago and i i just and i can't believe like there's there's people now getting a4 devices with crappy home buttons and questionable antenna designs but and i'm gonna have to support those a little bit
more ram you know like do a fine make it an a4 make it shrink it make it slightly higher clock and double the ram and then all of a sudden it's not as embarrassing anymore it's not it's not as much a pain for software developers who have to deal with this you know what i mean it's just so it's so much better for everyone involved and then you probably wouldn't care that much that your mom got the iphone free model because you're like oh well it's not that terrible
Oh, see, I disagree because what do you think the likelihood is that the iPhone 4 will run iOS 7 when it comes out?
That's a very good question.
As we know for sure.
Your mom doesn't care if she can run iOS 7.
Well, but as a developer, I have to care.
You know, if they're still selling all these, like last year they were still selling 3GSs until the iPhone 5 came out.
Well, that's why I said double the RAM, because RAM ends up being limited.
That's why multitasking couldn't go on the other phones.
CPU power and GPU power keeps you out of games and stuff, but I think they're probably past the point now where they're adding OS features that can't run because of CPU constraints.
It's always RAM, but they're still relatively RAM-starved, and there's no getting around that.
There's nothing you can do to optimize your code.
If the OS is taking up a bigger portion of RAM, you have less left over for you, and no matter how you optimize your stuff, you can't fix the OS, so...
That's, you know, the 4 is just, it's too old.
Like, the 3GS was even worse hanging around for that long.
It's just...
What were the RAM levels?
What did the 3GS have?
128.
128, and then... No, no, no.
It was 256.
Never mind.
256, and then... Please email Casey.
Yeah, like 512, 1 gig.
If you look at the RAM things, they're doubling, right?
And we're not out of the uncomfortable part.
We're still in... Even with the 1 gig, you feel like, oh, well, if I run a big game, it could be pushing up against the edge there, right?
Well, and Retinist took us back in that regard a little bit, because everything started taking... All the textures and everything started taking way more RAM, four times as much RAM.
Yeah, and we're not even talking about adding swap.
We're saying, fine, still no swap.
We're still okay with that because we don't realize that the performance constraints are the reason for that, right?
But at least get us out of the woods.
If we go through two or three more doubling periods, then we're going to be like, all right, there's nothing they're going to do with the OS and any one individual app that's going to hose...
you know a two gig or a four gig phone and then if your mom has a four if your mom has a four gig phone even if that phone is three years old you're like it's got four gigs it'll be fine right i can't i can't i don't know what they could add that will make a four gig phone say oh don't get that one doesn't have enough ram to run the the os and basic apps all right you want to wrap it up
Sure.
I think we're good.
All right.
Special thanks again to our two sponsors today, MailRoute and Hover.
Go to mailroute.net.
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I think it worked very well.
And yeah, thanks a lot.
And we'll see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental, accidental.
Check.
Is my voice synthetic?
I feel like I'm subconsciously making my voice synthetically deep because there's an audience now.
As though there wasn't an audience before.
Well, maybe it feels more real now.
Yeah, seriously.
Don't overthink it, Casey.
I know, for real.
I'm already dooming myself.
I thought you were coming to this episode lubricated.
Let's just say I had an after work function where I might have had a drink or two, and I definitely have some of my – what do we call the coffee, the fussy coffee?
I have fussy vodka.
What exactly is it?
I mean, I know this is probably not relevant to the show, but who cares?
What exactly is fussy vodka?
I don't think there is really such a thing.
It's just a vodka that you have to special order from our local.
So to get alcohol in Virginia, you have to go to an ABC store, which is a state-run thing.
And so in order to get this particular bottle of vodka, you have to special order it.
And that's what I've done.
So it's marginally fussy.
Okay, I guess that works.
I'm not a coffee drinker, so it's the next best thing, right?
Now, John, I'm curious.
Do you have fussy water?
The fussiest water gets is I let the tap run until the water that's been sitting in the pipes and kind of coming up to room temperature runs out a little bit, and I get the slightly colder water.
That's as fussy as it gets.
Oh, that's fantastic.
So I guess you want to start the show.
Maybe this is the show already.
No, this is not the show.
Good God.