MacBook Shuffle
100 episodes, gentlemen.
I'm proud of us.
Yeah, if I had remembered, we should have planned something better.
But oh well, we just had an episode.
But that's the us thing to do.
Yep, that totally is.
And that's exactly what we did because we're us.
But sometimes I like to think that we can be better than us.
But nope.
actually that should be the pre-show right there yeah feel free it sets expectations exactly what you're gonna get it was a fine show it was a reasonable show it was a regular show we're live hi everybody oh we're very excited is that because this is episode 100 oh my god i didn't i forgot about that now i'm excited i thought about that like a week ago that we were coming up on 100 but i didn't remember it tonight well so this shows for just a
bunch of dudes who don't remember important dates so we all forgot we all forgot our own birthday no case you remember just me and you john we we forgot yeah i guess so hypercritical made it to a to a hundred asterisk what did uh build and analyze get to uh 108 like lost oh okay so if we make it to 101 then we have unequivocally done better than hypercritical is that fair to say
That's not how that works.
Well, I should have said better.
That was a poor choice of words on my part.
Thank you for keeping me honest.
We have perhaps completed more.
Can I get that from you, John?
Completed more episodes?
Yes, that's what it means when one number is bigger than another.
You're the worst.
I mean, we technically have already completed more episodes because there was that one that was just like the promo that was for the movie thing.
And then there was the one that me and Merlin did when John couldn't do it, which isn't really a real episode of Hypercritical.
It's a real episode.
If it's got a number and it's got a title and it's in the RSS feed, that's as real as real can be.
Well, but it didn't have you on it.
It doesn't matter.
It was called hypercritical.
It had a number.
It had a title.
It had a page.
It had show notes.
It had everything that an episode has.
I did think that was, I mean, I haven't listened back, but at the time I was actually very happy with how that turned out.
It didn't feel like hypercritical at all, but I was very happy with it.
I wish Merlin had a tech show.
And maybe it's better for everyone, including him, that he doesn't, that he instead just makes parts of his other shows tech when he has something funny to say about it.
But he is so good with the tech stuff, so incredibly good, and provides a voice for it and opinions for it that we really don't hear from other people.
And I always feel like we're missing that, you know?
If by good you mean makes me want to yell into the podcast.
the best is when they do it on roderick on the line and here the two of them together talking tech just makes me want to throttle them both oh i love it i think it's the best that one they did like three or four episodes ago where like the whole first half was about tech was amazing
All right.
So the show bot is semi-broken.
Just like old times.
Just like old times.
Jerk.
Do you want to... Is this a clip show?
Yeah, right?
Well played.
Our 100th episode spectacular.
Would you like to wager a guess?
What happened?
um did you not properly non-retain the closure to set time out so the memory link all over the place no um that's a good guess but no and i should say that i have not knowingly changed any of the code with relation to the show bot specifically are you now going to rewrite it and go
No, but it is slightly tempting.
Honestly, you probably should.
It's a fun exercise.
If he writes it in Go, his site will pay him money for hosting.
He'll go negative instead of being free.
That's quite possible.
No, that is not the case.
So here it was, I was thinking about making this big grandiose speech about how it really isn't so terrible relying on third-party code because it allows you to do things that are kind of cool.
More specifically, earlier today, I decided that I was really tired of not being able to use Markdown footnotes in my site because all the cool kids use Markdown footnotes.
I want to be a cool kid.
The particular module or whatever that I was using was called Marked.
And it's an NPM module or package, I think is the word I'm looking for.
Anyway, and so I swapped Marked for MarkdownIt, which is a different package that also parses Markdown.
And I was all excited with myself because now I had Markdown footnotes.
The problem that I ran into then was now on my main page, which is the only page that I can think of that has more than one complete post on a single page, what happens when I have two posts that both have footnotes?
Because they're both generated in isolation, and so they'll reuse the same anchors.
And so then I had to go through a humongous song and dance, which ended up being simple at the very end.
But I tried like 34 different iterations to get to the simple answer of what to do and how to make unique each of these Markdown footnote anchors.
So I got that accomplished.
Well, what I didn't think to do was check the show bot, specifically the page that's hosted on my regular site, that...
that handles the show bot and see what the ramifications of this markdown parser switch would be.
And it appears for those of you who are not listening live, if this actually makes it in the show, it appears that somehow it is emitting escaped HTML from,
Only for the links section of the show bot page.
So I'm seeing all the titles just fine, but the links are just the HTML header for the table and nothing else.
So, oops, sorry, everyone.
All right.
Good talk.
All right.
That was our 100th episode spectacular.
Hope everyone is happy.
Yep.
I guess the show's over now because we can't go past 100.
Something like that.
We are joking.
The show is still going on.
Everybody relax.
We've sold ads past 100.
In fact, well past 100.
So we have to keep doing it.
That's actually a really good point.
All right, so let's do some follow-up.
And I'd like to start with some very quick anecdotal thoughts about using USB ports.
So we talked last episode about... Why is that so funny?
And then we're going to watch paint dry.
Oh, come on.
Give me a chance here.
So last episode, we talked about how on the potential...
iPad Pro slash MacBook Air, that there's theoretically only going to be one USB port, it's USB Type-C port, and whether or not that's a big deal.
And particularly John and I were going back and forth as to whether or not that's a big deal.
And so I thought to myself, well, let me ask my family, because they're normal computer users, and see, okay, does anyone actually use USB ports?
Because one of the things I was thinking during the show and hopefully explained during the show was
was, hey, we have a lot of technologies now, like AirDrop, for example, that may obviate, I think that's the word I'm looking for, that may obviate the use of USB keys.
And there's a bunch of other examples, Bluetooth for mice and keyboards.
So I asked my family, what do you use your USB ports for?
And Aaron and my mom both said, well, I charge my Fitbit that way.
Well, you know, that's something you could find other means for doing that, but that's a reasonable answer.
And Erin also has an iPod shuffle.
And so she said, well, I also, you know, load things onto my iPod shuffle that way.
And obviously that's not a big deal for a phone, but for an iPod shuffle, you're really out of luck otherwise.
My immediate younger brother, I have two younger brothers, my immediate younger brother, who is a real adult and works in the video game industry, actually, said that he typically uses his USB ports for keyboard, mouse, iPhone and USB key, oftentimes, but not always simultaneously.
And my youngest brother, who is studying out in California, he's doing a master's.
He said, and I'm quoting, I don't have enough and I have three.
So he was saying that he uses his for a mouse of his phone and oftentimes more than one USB key and additionally, at least one external hard drive.
So it appears that my theory that really you don't need USB ports, maybe not so solid after all.
Well, I think you're seeing – I bet there's like a big bifurcation of the market here where if I had to guess, I would guess that what you have here is a pretty good representative sample actually just by luck.
I mean I don't think your family is like the most average family ever made, but I think –
I think if I had to guess how it was, I would guess this is how it is, which is that most people use very few of them, and the primary reason they use them is to charge things that charge over USB.
Phones, Fitbits, some cameras, stuff like that.
Charging things over USB, I think, is a big thing, especially in recent years when so many devices have become chargeable over USB.
And for that, you don't necessarily need to be using a port on your computer for that, although it is convenient because your computer is right there on your desk and it has these ports and you don't have to take up more outlets and you don't have to bring so many adapters on trips.
So it is definitely convenient, although it isn't strictly necessary.
And then you have the people like Brady, your brother, where three ports is not enough because he has lots of devices.
This will apply to a lot of people who have a bunch of peripherals, who have a bunch of disks, who have a big desk setup with an external keyboard, mouse, disks maybe, other stuff.
If you have a big setup where you're parking the laptop all the time, you're going to need more than that, in which case no number of ports on a laptop is going to be enough, and you're going to be using a hub.
Now, things that are attached via adapters or hubs are inherently less reliable than built-in ports most of the time in my experience.
And as we move towards computers that have fewer and fewer internal devices and ports...
uh i i think this is going to keep being a problem fortunately the need for many of these things is also going away as this transition happens but like you know like you might not need an ethernet port anymore because you just use wireless and especially on a laptop where that's probably very frequently the case um whereas like you know on a desktop you need some of these things now
What I don't want, what I'm not looking forward to is a world in which you have this one port on the computer and then you just have to plug in some random hub from Amazon from God knows what manufacturer with God knows who's chip inside of it.
That has some weird cheapo power supply that's going to flake out and get all weird and start causing weird hard to diagnose errors for the things that are plugged into it or intermittent failures for things that are plugged into it.
um like i don't want to get to the point where i'm dependent on some cheap usb hub from amazon and trying to find like the best one that actually will work because like i have that now and like there's a certain subset of devices that i will only plug in directly to the computer ports because the hubs just are never that reliable and please don't email me saying i bought this hub but it's perfect if you look at every hub i looked at all of them um and and all of them have
mostly reviews that say this is perfect and then a bunch of reviews saying this flaked out on me and it's like it seems like they're all basically the same i bet the number of actual manufacturers of these things is probably pretty small the number of chipsets they use is probably even smaller um so like it's just the kind of thing like being dependent on like the random pc peripheral hardware market to for your stuff to work properly is not a good place to be
Yeah.
So if Apple was going to do this thing where it's like, oh, one port and if you need more, you can always have a hub or a breakout thing.
At the very least, you would think that Apple would have to sign itself up to make a high quality one of these that works.
Because I have problems with hubs all the time too.
And in addition to like...
The things you just mentioned, some things just plain not working, some things being flaky.
The worst, of course, is if you have a drive attached to a hub because the last thing you want to be flaky is your connection to a drive, especially if it's your backup drive and who knows what it's doing over there.
But then also like sleep-wake issues where it won't go to sleep with the hub attached or it won't wake with the hub attached or the hub will wake it up because something will tickle it or it will fire off a little thing and it will make the computer think you've plugged in a USB device when you haven't actually...
so many problems and the and the only way apple can sort of defend against them is that we sell i mean i i can't believe i'm saying this because like the thunderbolt display i had all the problems i had were associated with the ports that were in it was effectively a big giant apple made hub where you plug a thunderbolt cable into your computer and the power thing because it's actually powering your computer too and out of it you get ethernet usb firework all these ports and that was the problematic part of the display not the display part but
uh yeah if that's if that's going to be their solution they should make one and they should test that one and make sure it works and make sure computers sleep and wake with it and when i say that i'm thinking they can't even make sure their computers sleep and wake with nothing attached to them reliably so you know sleep wake problems are you know evergreen when it comes to all laptops and apple laptops i think are the same as any other in that area so
Yeah, but aside from all the reliability concerns, I still come back to the convenience angle, which is like why the whole point of the thing is supposed to be convenience.
And in the absence of some other reason, why not put another one on if it can fit?
All right.
So let's talk about re-clarification of context for the 12-inch air, John.
Yeah, the discussion we had, there's a lot of feedback about it, a lot of tweets.
And these aren't all tweets that were happening while people live tweeting while they listened to the show.
To clarify again how we were discussing the 12-inch air,
uh we weren't making any judgment about the validity of the rumors we didn't spend any time and i don't think we should spend any time discussing like how likely is it that that these rumors are true that apple make this device or whatever we're just considering the rumored device as if it was real and you know saying if apple made this uh would it be something that we would want uh the only thing we did about validity uh and i think it's that the main thing you should do about any rumors is like
is it technically possible and we covered that straight away on the last show uh and that's important because it's the easiest way you can deal with rumors like obviously there's you don't know everything but if someone says that apple is going to come out with like a mac pro the size of a penny that'll be 10 times faster than the current model uh and it's coming out this year you can dismiss it because you know it's not technically feasible like and there's a range like if a rumor has a date or a technology or both you can you know like
Apple is going to drive all of its ports over the headphone jack.
Well, we know that's not possible.
And, you know, barring some crazy thing that we've never heard of.
And if there's a crazy thing we've never heard of, it's probably bad because it would be proprietary and Apple only and whatever.
But yeah, everything else about it, we weren't making guesses about it.
And then I was getting a couple of bits of angry feedback from people.
Mostly tweets.
And when I listened back to the show, I realized what they were all yelling at me about.
I wasn't responding to their tweets because I didn't understand what they were angry about or worked up about.
And it was the part of the episode where I think Marco or Casey was like, what if the rumors are for an iPad Pro and a 12-inch MacBook Air?
And I said, these are not two separate devices.
That was a reference to the iPhone keynote.
But I said it emphatically, like Steve Jobs says it in the keynote.
Thank you.
These are not three separate devices.
This is one device.
For people who haven't memorized every second of that keynote, it's a thing that Steve Jobs said when the iPhone was introduced.
And watch the video and it will make more sense.
But it sounded like, if you just listen back to it, it sounded like I was super emphatic that these are not two separate.
I don't know if they're just, it was just a stupid rumor.
I was making a joke.
Even we got that and we don't get anything.
Yeah, well, if I'm going to make a reference that you're going to get, it's going to be the iPhone keynote, right?
It's not going to, yeah, pop culture.
So we didn't even talk about iPad.
We've talked about iPad Pro in the past, because that story had renderings of mock-ups of this rumored product, and that's what we talked about.
Those renderings, those mock-ups, those rumors.
Right, and the only reason I said that I was suspicious whether this was two separate devices is because the rumors over the last few months have been all pointing towards...
two 12 inch retina ultra portable devices from apple coming at about the same time and i thought you know that the same size display the same like all this stuff like all these rumors all this all this smoke around this you know it's probably fire behind it it's like is this really going to be two different devices that are like the exact same size that are radically different from each other like i i i was skeptical of that
I remain a little skeptical of that, except that I've heard from so many people who claim to have knowledge of this.
And it's all, you know, secondhand, hearsay, all this stuff.
But so many people who claim to have heard authoritatively that, no, this is really two separate devices.
Yeah, well, we just got to wait for the 9to5Mac story with mockups of the iPad Pro.
And then we could talk about that, too.
Because, like, I mean, there are rumors everywhere.
And, like, the reason we discussed the 9to5Mac one is because it was an interesting rumor, at least.
And 9to5Mac's track record is...
It's reasonable enough that we're not just picking some random thing from some website and saying, somebody said this, let's talk about it.
And again, because it was technically feasible.
Because it's a great rumor that takes advantage of known technologies that we have.
Like the USB 3, the connector, and what the bus can carry makes new hardware designs possible.
So it's inevitable that Apple will use that connector in interesting ways on its future Macs.
And this rumor is one possible way that they could do it.
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Okay, so John, would you like to tell us a little bit about Hypercritical back in the day?
Yeah, that's another person reminding me of shows I did that I've forgotten.
This is Jason Becker.
Wait, is hypercritical follow-up carrying over to this show?
Yeah, more or less because people keep reminding me that like, hey, you talked about something on hypercritical that's relevant to what you're talking about in ATP.
And where is it?
Hypercritical I was talking about is probably one of my blog posts at hypercritical.co about things getting thinner.
Yeah.
I think at the time it was about the iMac because people are upset that the iMac was super thin or whatever.
But it's relevant to the rumored 12-inch Air because the whole deal with the 12-inch Air is like they just keep making it thinner.
And Marco was talking about like, why do you got to taper it?
We've talked about this before.
Like, if you don't taper it, you can fit way more battery.
And what does the taper give you?
That's another example of like, you know, give me the reason for this.
The reason I would imagine for the taper is...
perception of thinness and possibly weight those are the two like because the taper does make it feel like wow look at this razor edge type thing you know it feels thinner than every uniform and and making it actually be thinner reduces the weight still maybe there's room for a non-taper version to get more battery but we don't know what the battery life is of this fictional product anyway so we have to wait to see what it's like um but it always comes back to that question that we talked about with the phones
uh and i've always said that i even though it's frustrating that they don't expand the line to give a model that is a little bit thicker and a little bit heavier in exchange for battery life but just rely entirely on third party you know battery cases and stuff or you know third party recharge extra battery packs and other stuff they sell for laptops that you you know plug into it on a long plane flight or whatever uh why do they keep making them thinner why and why do i support that idea and one of the reasons that i supported it is
i think i'll find i have to find this this post on my website and put in the show notes um that you don't if you just keep making them the same thickness and keep making the battery bigger and just keep finding things to do with the space available to you like oh we can use an even hotter gpu and now that the power of everything has gone down we can you know we have so much extra power budget we can make the battery life even longer and you know you could do a lot if you stayed within a similar size but
if you do that you're never going to learn how to make things really thin and it's not like uh you know five years from now someone's going to be uh ready with some new technology like wow with that technology we can make a laptop you know even thinner and you just can't you won't have the expertise to jump from your half inch thick laptop to the one that's the thickness of a credit card or whatever it works better that analogy when you talk about phones but i think that was the analogy i was using is like
uh phones keep getting thinner and it's like stupid soon they're going to be you're going to be able to bend them like we got the the you know the bending issues with the iphone 6 and everything and they just they start becoming thin enough you're like geez we're going in the wrong direction here we just need to stop uh you don't need to stop actually you need to just keep going and go through and you know until your phone ends up
the thickness and weight of a credit card.
And then when you drop it on the ground, who cares?
Because if you drop a credit card on the ground, nothing happens to it, right?
It's flexible, it's thin, it's lighter, it's more durable, but you're not going to get to your phone that is so light and thin and durable that you don't even care about.
You're never going to get there if you keep making your phone the thickness of the original iPhone and you just keep adding more CPU and RAM and battery to that thickness.
So this, I think, is part of the march of progress.
And as it relates to the MacBook Air, rumored 12-inch, or even just any of the MacBook Airs that are out now,
Why do they keep making that thinner?
What are they aiming for now?
I think part of it is weight, because as Marco found out with the iPad Air, even though weight is like, oh, who cares?
A couple of grams here, a couple of grams there.
For things that you either hold all the time, like the iOS devices or carry around a lot, you know, from room to room or put in your backpack.
there are little thresholds of weight uh i think speaking of merlin talking about tech merlin has discussed this on on his podcast a few times how once you pass a certain threshold of weight he doesn't notice when that apple hardware is in his backpack like he says he notices more when if he brings his leatherman with him like you know metal a metal tool he notices when that's in his backpack but he can't even tell is my ipad mini in there or is it not and the macbook air could be getting to that thing where
It's not a factor of like, oh, you ever used to be like, oh, I'm going to have a laptop in my backpack.
I don't want to lug that big thing around.
macbook air has already kind of crossed the threshold of like it's not a big thing to lug around but you kind of know when it's in there and if they keep going along this path and making it thinner and keeping with the taper making it lighter they are they will eventually run up into a durability issue because you can't make aluminum that thin because it doesn't spring back like say carbon fiber would and then they got the screen problem there especially if you use glass anywhere in it for flexibility but they're they're approaching a place where they'll have to do some materials redesign so within the current materials they're using
They're just trying to keep going thinner to get the expertise of how thin can we make this?
How much can we remove?
What is actually essential?
You've got to get Johnny Ive in his white world talking about this stuff.
What is essential for a laptop?
Do you need a keyboard and a screen?
How about just a keyboard?
No screen.
The MacBook Shuffle.
that that's what I'm still thinking about these things, which is why I'm not digging them for so much for why do you got to make it so thin?
The port thing, I complain to them because if you think, if you think you need any ports, uh, why would you have one of them and not to?
And so on.
So we'll get to, there's another followup item about that, but that's, I just wanted to,
Follow that up because, hey, I talked about it on Abercritical and I actually blogged about it and it is relevant to the rumors of this fictional product.
There was a really good post on Six Colors, Jason Snell's new website, with research help from our friend Stephen Hackett, about Apple solving for X with battery life.
And the gist of the post is...
If you look, Apple has clearly decided what the right level of battery life is for iPhones and iPads, and they've kept it fairly consistent, or at least within a very small range.
iPads are exactly the same, and iPhones vary a little bit more, but it's clear Apple has decided through whatever, through research or experimentation or just thinking whatever they think is best—
They've decided clearly like we don't need more battery life than this in this device type.
And so any savings we get from advancements in technology or manufacturing, we can apply to other areas like making it thinner and lighter.
And I think this it's it's it's so obvious when you look at this that, OK, of course, that's what they're doing.
That's what they have been doing.
And so looking at this, I think it's pretty obvious that the, the, the quote MacBook stealth or whatever this thing ends up being called.
That's probably not its name, but whatever this thing ends up being called, if it's real, I think it's pretty obvious that, you know, it's not going to be a quantum leap forward in battery life.
It is most likely going to, you know, they're going to apply those savings towards the Nissan weight.
And I agree, John, with what you said about like, you know, we do need to make progress in those areas over time.
I do think though, like,
I don't know anybody who has an iPhone who is extremely satisfied with its battery life most of the time.
You do now.
I have an iPhone.
I am extremely satisfied with its battery life.
You've had an iPhone for like a day.
I know, but this is how I... Part of the reason I didn't have an iPhone is because I didn't really need one, but now that I have one...
I am completely satisfied with this battery life.
Like, I can forget to charge it for a day, and I'm fine.
I go two days.
Who do you know who uses an iPhone who goes two days with it?
It doesn't mean that it's not appropriate, as I said before, for Apple to have a model of phone that does a different tradeoff for people, or people who do use it heavily, who do barely get through the day on a charge.
There should be a product for them, but...
the current battery life is fine and i think in their little graph they showed like an uptick for the i think it was for the six plus that had the big uptick but i think yeah the six plus is the only big jump on it but the six was up a little bit too i mean we've talked over the past year many many times about the same exact thing uh of like of how of how they they're hold the hold the uh battery life uh constant and then make it thinner if you can
Um, and I, Margo, you were saying that like they've decided, decided that's the best for the, I don't think they've decided anything like that.
I think that's just, that's the battery life they have.
And when they made a fall device, there was a mandate, no regression on battery life, make it thinner if you can.
Uh, and that mandate wavered.
on the ipad 3 again we've discussed this many times and you know so that that has been their mandate but i don't i wouldn't wager too much on them deciding the same way that like they decided like oh this size for the iphone is exactly the right size no that's just the size they made it seemed like a good size at the time later they tried taller that was all right too and then they made it bigger that's all right like it's it's up for grabs right and i think the the battery life on all the products
being held more well as constant is simply a matter of the follow-up product can't be worse than the one that came before but if you try to make it better all the areas that you can make it better battery life is like seems like the last on the list like you're not going to regress you got to make it at least the same because the new phone's got to be better than the one that replaces it but we can make it better in cpu and gpu and screen you know in the interface uh you know in uh
cheapness to manufacture durability like all these different categories and battery life is like just don't regress like it seems to be pretty darn low on the list of things they're prioritizing and i think those are reasonable priorities again for the reason i talked about with the thinness and also because uh you know faster cpus and gpus cell phones more than
battery life you just need to make one model that has a decent battery apple i guess maybe the six plus is that model yeah i think that's pretty clear that's their answer no but i i think you know similar to your arguing about thinness where like we have to make progress gradually over time to to eventually have like a major step forward you know in total
You can apply the same thing to battery life.
And they have made incremental progress over time, but it really has been fairly incremental.
And part of this is just because battery technology changes so incredibly slowly.
And we're not going to have... Compared to the silicon technology, basically.
Not that it changes that.
I mean, it changes and the speed is fine.
It's just compared to almost every other component.
uh you know what you can do with those phones the screens are just like twice as good twice three times the resolution in the lifetime of the phone the batteries have not gotten three times as good in the lifetime of the phone it's just the different rates of technology change right but like and and if you look at the laptops their battery lives have gone up uh substantially over the last few years where it wasn't that long ago that like a five hour battery life was top of the line under the most ideal conditions only um and now we're up to you know seven eight fairly regularly um
Although I've never gotten that, but that could just be because I buy the big four core models.
I don't know.
Anyway, with battery life, where things get interesting, where you get really interesting shifts in what this enables you to do is when you have a really big change in battery life.
When all of a sudden, if your laptop...
if you don't need to be plugging it in all day like if you can actually work on battery all day and not worry like not have range anxiety not worry about bottoming out and having to go plug in like if you can treat it actually like if your laptop genuinely has like 24 hour in use with wi-fi battery life then that enables uses that enables freedoms that you that you might not have before or that you that you couldn't really count on reliably before
that's where things get interesting, is when you can make jumps like that.
And over time, eventually, maybe we'll get there, I hope, maybe.
But if you look at the way Apple does these jumps, it doesn't look like getting there is a very high priority.
Eventually, they might get there accidentally, but it doesn't seem like they're pushing for that.
And I think that's a lost opportunity.
I think the rumored 12-inch...
macbook is an indication of how they might make the next step on that uh because you know as we said like when they when they have this extra capacity like you know the batteries aren't getting better that much faster but what is happening is that every other component that's in the laptop gets lower power and that's how we get like the current good macbook heiress that have you know better battery life than the old ones did uh but for these for this rumored thing this could be a way they make sort of a larger step forward like well the batteries aren't really getting that much better but
But, you know, in the back of some designers' mind, hardware designer or Johnny Iver, both, they have the idea of, well, our components keep getting, but, you know, our screens, even though we went to the Retina 5K IMAX screen, it's actually lower power than the previous screen.
Eventually, they're going to get decent OLEDs in these things, and you'll have an even bigger drop, especially if they make their entire interface black.
lots of lots of the components are going down in power usage but somebody has in the back of their mind can i just rip everything out of this freaking notebook and just have like a a tiny little two centimeter square that's the whole laptop and then just fill the rest of it with battery like what can i pull out of this laptop well you gotta have a keyboard you gotta have a screen all right what else can i remove can i remove everything except can i remove all the ports no you can't remove all the ports we need someplace for power to go in
i mean something like how about i remove every single interface except for one low power usb 3 thing i can get rid of you know if they could have rid of got i think they got rid of audio in i know they have like the hybrid cable that like the headphone jack is the input thing but i'm so like well those those don't offer audio in anymore sorry i should clarify on most hardware the imac does have audio in the mac the mac mini has audio in with the laptops as far as i know the laptops don't have audio in anymore
I mean, that's not really probably a power savings, but maybe like with a chipset or whatever.
Like they just, they want them to be like the phone where it's mostly just a giant battery in a case with a screen.
And then off to the side, there's this tiny little thing that is the entire computer.
And if you look inside the MacBook Air, as you watch the battery slowly eat the rest of the computer over the past few years, it used to be like a board inside there.
And then the board became like two little skinny things.
And it's just like, it's running away from this giant battery that's eating it.
And one of the ways you get power savings back is just to be merciless about what you remove.
I guess we should probably...
skip to that follow-up item because it's related to this troy gall wrote in with some reasons of like i kept asking for why what do i get with one port that i don't have with two why would they do this is there a reason that we can think of he's got two guesses for reasons one is related to power but in a slightly different way that i was talking about i'm like well maybe maybe two means you can't have like maybe ripping out the port means ripping out the supporting chip set because the one port is like i don't you know if there's some
large gain that's not just like incremental like it's you know you you don't need supporting machinery behind it to have two ports the one port wires directly into the thing without a control who knows i don't know what the details might be but no it isn't about i i it is almost certainly not about controller logic inside it's about the amount of power that port could draw by its own spec so if you have like firewire devices i think could draw like 10 watts or something like that so and you know usb is i think
i i don't know sometimes so anyway it's like if you have multiple ports you have to like the laptop has to be able to supply the maximum power draw to each of those ports so it has to have a power supply big enough and so that just shortens the battery life if you have something plugged in like i don't think they're optimizing for the everything plugged in battery life i think they're optimizing for the battery life with nothing plugged in like that's the life they're gonna you know
Whenever they show battery life, they're not saying with a bunch of drives sucking power, self-powered, spinning hard drives sucking power from all your ports.
It's always with nothing.
So I'm thinking, is there some passive power that you need other components?
I think it's more like, because if you have the port that can potentially draw 10 watts or whatever, then the power supply circuitry has to be bigger, the power brick has to be bigger, the total power draw and thermal output of the laptop has to be higher.
Well, the peak power.
But yeah, there could be some passive loss to the larger supply or whatever.
But his angle on it is that if you had two ports, he thinks that they would both have to support charging, like if you're going to charge through it.
And then maybe that would be more complicated electrically.
And that would be the complication.
I would imagine that if they have two ports, they would be perfectly fine.
So you can only only charge through one of them.
It would be the one with the little like charging symbol.
silkscreened on it and laser etched stuff that no human being can see without being two inches away um and his second thought was there's no room for more ports because the keyboard goes edge to edge and you need space for the key travel and they're putting the port in the one place where it can be where it doesn't interfere with the keys going up and down to the thing so damn thin um that doesn't explain why you can't have one on one side and one on the other
And the headphone port, I feel like you could shove that... From looking from these fake mock-ups of a product that doesn't actually exist, it seemed to me that there was room on both sides to have one USB on both sides and still find a place to wedge in the thing.
But you're not constrained by...
a predefined case or a mock-up rendering you get to design the product if you're going to go keyboard edge to edge fine like move it down an extra three millimeters to make room for the you know anyway i i don't find any of these reasons particularly convincing but they are at least new theories
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So we're going a little long on the follow-up, but I want to try to trudge through all the 12-inch air stuff.
Episode 100, all follow-up.
Yep.
It probably will be, and that would be fitting.
So do you want to talk – I think this is mostly aimed at John.
Do you want to talk about what Phil Compton said to us?
There's a couple people who –
talked about the 12 and rumored 12 inch air as he relates to chromebooks and you mentioned it wasn't you casey in the last show talking about uh chromebooks well anyway the whole idea with chromebooks people know it's like it's like a laptop that you know it's like the the network computer all over again
It's a laptop where the laptop itself doesn't have anything important on it.
Everything's on the cloud.
The laptop is just a local cache and it's super simple and super cheap and they like them for education.
And it's like, oh, if your Chromebook just falls off a cliff, whatever, get a new one, plug it in, sign in with your Google account, all your crap's there again.
It's a really great idea.
The videos that Google has shown when they presented it or whatever, like it's essentially the future of computing and Apple and Google is there first.
And it's lonely there because it's not ready yet.
Right.
Yeah.
So but there's two angles in the Chromebook.
People like the Chromebooks for the.
elimination of all the headaches that come with like owning and maintaining a computer to try to move it more towards being a disposable type thing which obviously is the opposite of the way apple designs thing more or less uh and the second aspect of it is they're so damn cheap like remember the netbooks from a long time oh everyone loves network everyone loves cheap things of course everyone and it's like apple needs to make cheap things to compete but that's not how apple competes and we were around in circles about that but the network book and
the chromebook seems to be bringing the issue back again i think the people who learned the lesson in the netbook error are fine but now there's a new crap of people who weren't either weren't around during the netbook thing or have forgotten who are saying apple needs to come out with a 300 laptop although if they don't the chromebook is going to eat their lunch and education they're going to take over the education market because schools are cheap and they want cheap laptops and you know the chromebook is less expensive than ipads even even if you're buying ipad 2s and all the stuff and
Yeah.
So there's a lot of angles for when you see a small, thin, light thing, you're like, oh, that's going to be Apple's competition with the Chromebook.
And every time someone tweeted that at me or sent feedback related to Chromebooks, all I could think was Apple's going to compete with the Chromebook with a product that's four times the price or maybe 10 times the price.
We didn't talk about pricing of the rumored fictional product here, but do any of us expect this laptop to be
less than around a thousand dollars no i mean chromebook started about two hundred dollars right right so it says like it's five x the price like we i'm guessing 1500 start right but and it's the other thing it could be even more expensive like it you know because of the thinness like that's just not how apple works like nobody i don't think anybody thinks this rumored 12 inch air is going to be some super duper cheap thing
Like maybe it'll be cheaper than the current air somehow, possibly because of all the crap they rip out of it.
That's conceivable.
But is it going to be $200?
No.
And so it seems crazy to me to talk about competing with Chromebooks with a product that's not in its price range.
Like that, no matter what you think about competition,
It's very like, there's no sense in saying this can be, it's like saying that my Honda Accord competes with the Ferrari.
Like they don't, there is no competition between them.
You can't entertain thoughts of competition between them.
They're in a different market.
And no matter how much you think that, you know, Ferrari really needs to answer for the new Honda Accord because the Honda Accord is going to eat up their market for like, no, they don't.
They're just, what do you mean answer with us?
Well, actually the new Ferrari, I think that the new Ferrari is, is Ferrari's answer to the new Honda Odyssey.
How is it Ferrari's answer to the new Honda Odyssey?
Well, I know they're not, the pricing is, you know, multiples of each other, but I really do think that's their answer.
No, they're not comparable.
So anytime I see the word Chromebook in relation to this thing,
Again, it's a rumored thing.
I don't know.
Maybe it will cost $200.
That'd be great.
I'll buy three of them, right?
But I really don't think it will.
You wouldn't even buy one.
You'd complain about the price.
Yeah, I don't like laptops.
Exactly.
See, there's no way.
Until there is at least a pricing rumor about this, I don't think it's important.
I do think that Apple's competition is the idea behind the Chromebook.
And
perhaps uh i think i think this was casey was perhaps like their answer to this yeah you were going on the whole thing of like oh we don't need ports anymore we need to remove complications everything can be wireless or whatever that is eventually the future it's just not quite the present and people buy computers they want to use in the present and so in the present you can remove every single port from a laptop except for usb you totally can do that and by the way someone just an hour ago tweeted us a picture showing us
USB Type-C with DisplayPort going over it.
I don't know how many times we have to reiterate this.
Yes, it's not a made-up crazy Apple thing.
You can send DisplayPort over USB Type-C connectors.
It's part of the spec.
And it can power Retina 5K.
It has enough bandwidth for that.
Right.
Just look up the spec.
We'll probably put it in the show notes.
They show you the pinouts.
They show you what goes over those pins.
This is not a crazy proprietary Appleism.
This is an industry-wide spec.
It is not speculation that we're saying this is technically possible.
It really is technically possible.
It's a thing.
Soon you'll be buying products with it.
Anyway.
because i don't know why people keep sending us these things to show us the display can go over yeah we know we said so uh anyway it's just it's baffling to me um so i do think apple has to eventually have an answer to the idea behind the chromebook but i think it's also for now it is trying to field products that fulfill needs that people that you know do the apple thing they're premium products they charge a premium for them they make a
hardware wise we're all talking about here uh and thus far apple has not shown any interest in trying to compete with the various other companies that sell similar devices for massively lower prices and uh i don't see anything in this rumor that makes me think it's going to be massively lower again i can entertain the idea that the entry-level model could have a three-digit price i can't entertain the idea that it'll be 200 bucks
I don't think it'll be anywhere near that cheap.
I think you're both right that it'll be around about $1,000 if it's what we think it is, which, by the way, obviously, it may be totally different.
But if it's less than $1,000, I will be stunned.
I think also, you know, I saw a few people make the comment that Apple has to respond Chromebook style because Chromebooks are apparently selling well to education.
First of all, you know, I think Apple's answer to the Chromebook is the iPad.
I don't think it's a cheap laptop.
And by the way, iPads can push up into a thousand dollars if you buy like the fancy model.
So it's not it's not like iPads are 200 bucks either.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, I mean, certainly the education market's buying like, you know, the $300 and $400 models.
But still, you know, and that's still more than a Chromebook and in many ways harder to manage for a big, you know, school or fleet type use.
But anyway, I don't think Apple holds the educational relationship as some kind of thing that they cannot ever lose.
Education customers are, you know, just like big enterprise customers, there's a lot of buyers out there that will buy stuff, but they're extremely hard to get.
And education, it's like enterprise, but with no money.
There is money in education, but not nearly as much as anybody wants.
You can't fleece them like IBM will do for its corporate customers by charging them insane fees because they know it may look crazy, but they have so much money, they'll pay it.
Right.
And many of the biggest buyers are going to be very high needs, high maintenance customers that you're going to have to come to them on their terms and make concessions to them because they have to buy a couple hundred or thousand of these things and then maintain them over time and justify that to all these different committees and funders and companies.
you know, work within the grants and everything.
Like there's so, so much complexity in that system and it's so hard to get.
And in the end, there's not a whole lot of money to be made there.
And so I don't think Apple looks at that as something that they must keep.
I think education should be looked at just like any other big enterprise customer where like they'll be happy to serve them, but only on Apple's terms.
And they're not that scared to lose them.
And you can look at it and say, well, you want to catch kids early.
But I think the era of kids having their primary computing experience at school is certainly not going away and probably will never totally go away for many demographics and kids.
But I think the relevance of that is being greatly reduced by personal devices, smartphones, iPod Touches, and iPads at home.
I was going to say, Apple doesn't necessarily have to be...
too concerned with keeping the education market it just has to be concerned with keeping the kids i think it's doing pretty well at keeping the kids because like you said the kids have have uh contact with computing devices outside you know computing is everywhere now it's not just in the school or work it's just it's a part of life right so as long as apple keeps the kids you're okay now there is a danger here because like
they if if chromebooks ever did become pervasive which i don't think they you know that chromebooks are doing well but i don't think it's like they're wiping apple out of education but if they do become pervasive it's that's microsoft hates it because all the kids are going to be doing all their work in google docs instead of word uh and apple should hate it because kids will become acclimated to the google ecosystem which does not involve apple and the google ecosystem in terms of their cloud stuff is actually pretty damn good google for your email google for your shared documents good like
That's Google's thing.
A bunch of web applications, lowest common denominator, works everywhere, all your crap synced.
If kids get used to that, it's a short jump from there to a Google phone where all your stuff is right.
So keeping the kids, part of keeping the kids is keeping a toehold in education.
So far in sort of the Jobs 2 era, it seems like Apple's approach to education has been...
If you're our prestige school, if there's going to be a news story about your school getting fancy stuff, we want to have our stuff in the prestige school.
And the prestige school is not necessarily the rich kid's school, but it's the school that's story worthy.
Is it a school that's up and coming, that's doing much better now?
Is it a school that...
Got a big grant.
You want it to be a story.
You want it to be like the important ones.
And then it should be significant.
The kids in that school and teachers in that school should feel lucky to have Apple hardware because it's fancy and shiny, nice and expensive.
And that's where Apple seems to be in education these days.
It's not so much bending over backwards.
with the possible exception of keeping the iPad 2 around for a long time, but they're not doing stuff like, remember, they used to do the eMac and the various Macs that were made just for education.
Those were all pretty short-lived, though.
Well, but they would do that.
They would say, we're going to make a model of Mac that is only for education, and it's going to make compromises that work for education.
Usually, those compromises were ways to make it
cheaper sometimes it would be an education only version i think they still have that on right like they're super cheap iMac and stuff right or keep around a model just for education so they still are doing stuff for the market but i think the days are gone where they design like the giant tooth the big molar you can look up what that is and put in the show notes a computer that only ever sold to education
uh most of those were terrible by the way but they existed and apple's not doing that anymore there's not a there's not a computer with a different name like it's not an iMac it's not a Mac mini or whatever a different name that you can't buy unless you're in education so apple is out of that business
It's funny you mention Education and Apple because right around the time we moved to Richmond, one of the surrounding counties, they were using iBooks and issuing, I believe, all middle schoolers and high schoolers, iBooks.
And they decided it was cheaper and better to go with Dells.
And they've been using Dells ever since.
And you may have heard of this.
Oh, I did.
This was the area in which we live.
It made national news because they were selling these like two or three, no, four year old iBooks for 50 bucks at the NASCAR track in downtown Richmond.
And there were actually like stampedes trying to beat each other up to get to the front of the line so you could buy a $50 four year old iBook.
And that was right around where we live.
And now they've been using Dells for years and they're pieces of crap.
Although to be fair, these iBooks, these iBooks are falling apart by the time they were done with them.
yeah that that's like it's like buying a used police car like there's there's a reason why used police cars usually just become the crappiest taxis for the crappiest taxi services in the world like it is like these devices are in such constant heavy use for those four years like you do not want them afterwards
Although, to be fair to those $50 iBooks, can you imagine a stampede for four-year-old PCs at any price?
No, definitely not.
Yeah, because it's not a fashion item.
It doesn't have the prestige associated.
Even...
even an out of date technology thing still has the fashion cache.
So people are interested in, they feel like it's a, it's a good, it's a steal of 50 bucks.
You know, if you want to make the, uh, the foreign listeners, the non U S listeners feel even more that we live in a third world country, we can describe the other common phenomenon for technologies in schools.
technologies or you know tissues and paper towels which is there's no money in the budget for it at all the only way your school is ever going to get any kind of technology or you know paper towels or tissues for the kids to use is the the parents themselves through the parent teachers association or some other like you know organization thing will raise money and the parents will all pay for the computers for their kids school and that only works where all the parents are rich so you can guess how many people's schools have max in them
uh it's only the schools that are in districts where and even in the districts with rich people even those districts can't pass laws to raise taxes enough to pay for anything for their schools barely can keep the buildings up you know barely can pay the teachers their meager salaries can't afford any computers if you want your classroom to have paper towels napkins or tissues you also have to pay for those and do drives to put around this is in their rich neighborhoods that's the state of education in our country
That's absolutely true.
When I went to high school, it was in Fairfield County, Connecticut, which at the time, as a county, was the single most affluent county in the entire country because they had a whole bunch of silly rich superstars that instead of living in New York, they'd live in Fairfield County.
Now, the particular town I lived in was, I mean, I guess reasonably affluent, but nothing remarkable.
And every spring, without fail, come about March or so,
All of our Xerox paper, our copy machine paper, it was perforated about two-thirds of the way down and then again in half.
And at the bottom, it said Danbury Hospital Radiology Department.
Because despite the fact that we lived in the most affluent county in the entire country—
All of the people that lived in the particular town we lived in didn't want to pay enough money to the schools so that we had copy paper for the entire year.
And we needed to accept donations of like crappy leftover perforated copy paper from the local hospital.
Oh, my God.
That's so sad.
Oh, goodness.
All right.
What other follow up do we have?
One last note.
This is from Oliver Agar.
Apologies, Oliver.
He had tweeted at the three of us.
It's pretty clear now that both Thunderbolt and Lightning are going to be the shortest lived ports ever.
I don't know if I agree with that.
It's certainly possible, but I don't see lightning going away anytime soon.
I think Thunderbolt is more likely to go away, but I'm still skeptical that that's going to be the case.
What do you guys think?
do you think thunderbolt's gonna last just as long as firewire did just because it'll be sticking out the back of that mac pro until apple stops making that computer oh definitely like it doesn't mean it's gonna like thunderbolt sure totally go away from the macbook air if they want because like it can go away from the macbook air because the innovation of thunderbolt that was a simplification hey display ethernet usb all over one port but if usb 3 can do all that too then right
thunderbolt port gone at the very least from the small laptops probably also from the big ones because what you know it's only for basically high speed storage like it's kind of an aberration that thunderbolt ended up being on sort of the low-end laptops because it was like we're not so much into the high-speed storage part we like the idea that there's one connector that you can carry all the sorts of stuff over you can carry the display over it you can carry you could do an ethernet adapter like it was kind of a shame that you know you you could do each one of those things but you had to swap your stupid adapters and crap like that but you could plug it into the thunderbolt display
and get a full complement of ports through one connector i see no reason that usb3 can't usurp that and so then the only reason left to have thunderbolt is all right well actually it's a super high speed thing and of course the mac pro has a million thunderbolt ports on it we'll continue to have them the thunderbolt spot spec will continue to get revised i think they'll still be thunderbolt ports all of those things
uh so i don't think thunderbolt is going away and lightning i definitely don't think it's going away because lightning is still smaller and more importantly thinner thinner and i would imagine potentially more durable than usb3 i don't think apple's going to go through its entire ios line and say oh usb3 type c is here we can get rid of the silly lightning thing and change it nope it's gonna lightning is going to be with us for a long time at least as long as i think the 30 pin connector was with us
Yeah, I totally agree.
I don't I don't I don't see, you know, Thunderbolt, I think, is just like Firewire 800, where it's going to be on the highest end pro products.
And that's about it.
It does have that advantage, as you said, of because it is really just PCI Express over a cable.
You can offer like direct full speed, like bus connected versions of the other ports without a big performance penalty or translation penalty or anything like that.
But all those other ports it's offering are getting less relevant over time and less necessary over time.
So, like, I think the biggest justification for Thunderbolt in two years is not even going to be those, like, PCI card case boxes that you can, like, you know, use an old PCI video processing card in or anything like that.
I don't think that's it at all.
I think Thunderbolt in two years is going to be looked at only as the highest speed port for external SSD arrays and disk arrays.
Like that's what it's mainly for.
And I think that's probably mostly what it's used for today even.
But I think that's going to be like its mainstay.
And everything else is going to go to wireless or USB 3.
And Thunderbolt will have to keep scaling up because like, you know...
i always imagine the mac pros with these thunderbolt things having something to do with like video stuff and it's like a 4k video eventually becomes more common like you just cranked up your bandwidth requirements again so like these giant arrays of super fast storage and the only way you can let that storage run at the full speed that it's capable of running at and get the data into your computer is either to have it inside your computer which apple doesn't make any of those anymore or it's got to be over the fastest possible external bus and right now that is even with usb3
Thunderbolt is still faster, and I imagine they'll just keep making it faster and faster, and it'll become more and more confined to the people who have insane data rates that are necessary to do uncompressed 5K video for Hollywood movies or God knows what they're doing with these Mac Pros these days.
And those enclosures cost more than a MacBook Pro.
Yeah, it's not the realm of regular people.
I'm trying to think, is there any reason for Thunderbolt to remain on, like, the 15-inch MacBook Pro or anything?
Well, it is the highest-end laptop in the lineup, and there's always going to be demand from people who try to do pro work on laptops on the go or on-site or on-set or whatever.
So, like...
There's always going to be demand.
Whether they choose to address that demand is not a guaranteed thing.
They might choose at some point, you know what, we're done with that.
Just like how many things die with the 17-inch MacBook Pro.
I think the 15-inch MacBook Pro is definitely... The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, I think, is going to be the last Apple laptop with Thunderbolt.
But I don't know how soon it's going to come.
If I had to guess, I would say...
maybe two more years before it's relegated to only a handful of models in the lineup i hope that they keep it around for at least a couple more years because i know we just finally got done with the transition at work where every conference room has a you know mini display board aka displayport aka thunderbolt to vga connector so that every mac that comes into the room
can hook up to the credit projector that's in the room and it used to be that that first you know first everyone who had a mac had one of the adapters and they'd write their names on them in a marker but then they'd lose them and then you'd leave one in the conference room and now they're like chained to the conference room so every conference room has one and if apple drops thunderbolt for their entire line it'll be like well we have every conference room has an adapter that has no place to be plugged into any of the new macs and that will be sad because it seems like we haven't had enough time where
anyone with a mac can go into any conference room and plug into the projector then you know i feel like we need to have a couple more years before we have to redo all the adapters again yeah because because they could they could put it over usb3 in displayport mode uh the alternate the alternate mode which we talked about a few minutes ago like
and yeah it's just another 30 adapter at the apple store right just this big daily chain of that going into a mini thunderbolt to the you know hdmi or to dvi to vga you'll have like this five adapter long chain sometimes it's vga sometimes hdmi that's not the problem it's the land the end that connects into the mac it's the problem so it'd be nice to have some stability in that for a little while longer because that's the other thing thunderbolt does it's like well thunderbolt
I don't need high speed stuff.
I don't care that I multiplex multiple things over it.
Then if you don't care about any of those things and you look at the Thunderbolt port, it's like, oh, that's just my external display port.
Like I think, imagine most of the people in my company who have Macs consider that their display port.
Like this is where I hook up external monitors, not knowing all the other things that that one port can do.
right and apple's answer might be like for a big part of the line it might just be well use airplay and have an apple tv which of course is comical yeah there's lots of airplay enabled projectors right exactly anyway our final sponsor this week is fracture they're back once again fracture prints photos in vivid color directly onto glass go to fracture me.com uh to see more so
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Yeah, I actually have a, I think four of them on their way.
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So definitely check them out.
No feed icons?
No feed icons.
I actually, the funny thing is, as you were doing that read, it occurred to me, I don't know why I didn't
put that in that order put fast text in that order like that probably speaks poorly to what i think about fast text these days that's um yeah i know that is sad actually i'm a little upset with myself but anyway well use code atp15 to go order one now yeah exactly
So let's be done with follow-up and let's try to answer the question, what can Apple do to fix the reliability?
What did you call it, Marco?
Nosedive?
Oh, God.
We're still talking about this.
Can we please stop talking about this?
We talked about the issue last time, but we didn't get to like, okay, so we agree that this is an issue.
We may disagree about whether things are worse now than they've ever been or have been in the past X number of years, whatever value you want to pay for X's.
But I think we all agreed that regardless of the history and whether the trend and what the direction of the trend is, the current state of things is not satisfactory for the products and customers that Apple currently has.
The customers are dissatisfied.
They have a lot of products.
They all interoperate with each other.
Mark was like multiplying factor of like,
Your probability of problem here multiplied by the probability of problem there.
The probability that you have a problem somewhere goes up.
It's not just additive because of the way they all interact.
By the way, I'm not clear on that math.
It might actually be exponential or factorial.
Yeah, I'm not 100% confident on that math.
Go ahead.
It's not additive.
Right, yeah.
It's not a linear additive progression.
It is some kind of curve.
Yeah, but you can do the probability things.
If you have one thing and you have a certain probability, it's up 50% of the time, you have 50% reliability, right?
Or you have two things, they're both up 50% of the time, now you need them both to be up, and you can figure it out with...
marbles and jars and all that other stuff and it's not anyway uh it's worse but so we all agree that they have a reliability problem they need to address it i don't yeah and we talked all last show become arguing about whether this is a new problem an old problem whatever but so the question is how how does apple improve its reliability you say how does it fix its problem it sounds like there's something and then someday there's going to be a fix to it i think a better way to phrase it is
how does apple improve the reliability of its products specifically the software reliability uh because the hardware does have issues but whenever hardware has an issue you always wonder if it's like a driver issue or you know sometimes it's actually a hardware issue where something is overheating or some solder joints are bad or you know something like but then sometimes i think the vast majority of time it's like a driver issue or they just never quite get it working right over so what what can apple do to improve it the reliability of its products
We talked a little about this last episode, in that they could either space out the releases between OSs, which I think we all pretty much agree is never going to happen, or just bite off less each time.
I don't agree that it's never going to happen, because I could totally see them taking longer between OSs.
iOS releases or any iOS releases.
Not significantly longer, not like two years, but I can see the Mac going to 18 months and iOS going to like 14 or 15 and slowly drifting through the year, you know what I mean?
Yeah, but they've set such a precedent, which they've broken precedents in the past, but they've set such a precedent of having a new version of iOS every fall.
And there was a time not long ago when I think people, both nerds and non-nerds, got really excited about that every fall.
Now, to be fair, they may not be so excited and we may not be so excited about that anymore.
And so maybe now is the time to break that precedent.
But I'm very skeptical they would do it on iOS and I'm fairly skeptical they would go less frequently than every year on OS X.
But that's certainly one answer.
Or just biting off less each time, doing less new things and keeping yourself at a year release.
I mean, that's another option.
Well, so the obvious option that's sitting in the notes is the one that's been suggested by many people and that I believe we talked about in the past many times is to go to what originally Intel dubbed the TikTok kittens and which Apple has more or less de facto dubbed the
blank blank s cadence you get the four the four s the five the five s and then who knows what they're going to do with the six but the idea is you have uh you do you do a release that's your big release with all your fancy crap in it and then the next one is pretty much the same as the previous one just modified in some way so after the four you have the four s the same hardware design you tweak it you move the antennas around but like it's not a it's not an entire redesign uh and in os 10 apple did the same thing with leopard that was their big release and then snow leopard
is like well it's like leopard but we just improved crap and then they had uh what was it uh lion which is a big release and then they had mountain lion which was supposed to be the oh it's like lion but we just improved some stuff uh they're off of that train and os 10 because mavericks and yosemite are not related to each other in that way i mean yosemite is radically different than mavericks was you could just say mavericks was an in-between release and after yosemite they'll have one that's like yosemite but tweaked but
uh it's very difficult to tell because without i mean the names made it clear with leopard snow leopard uh lion mountain lion uh but then you could argue like well did the contents of those releases reflect the naming only with snow leopard did apple come out and say this is like the no new features release all we're doing is frying stuff and even that was a lie because they added tons of internal crap and so right it was a huge under the hood change just like it didn't look the different to users
Right.
And like the big thing is if you don't add user facing features, even if you make tons of under the hood changes, you can, you can lie to people and say no new features by basically saying no new user facing features.
And if there's no new user facing features, your expectation is that all they did was improve the, the functionality of the existing using feature.
Like people weren't distracted by saying, nevermind about making whatever work, make this new thing, right.
Or work better or whatever.
Um,
That is mostly, I think, a perception issue.
But I think trying to achieve that perception from the customer base influences the way the engineering organization operates.
In the same way that if you're trying to impress people with GWIS features, it influences how you assess risk, reliability, or whatever.
If you said straight out that, oh, this is going to be a no-new feature release, that gives the engineering organization the freedom
to make different trade-offs internally because there's no pressure to make the whizzy new feature that's going to be impressive in a demo because you've already said like the public message was no new features so you don't have to do that and then you can make when you make decisions about what are we going to refactor what are we going to rip out one what giant new internal frameworks like gcd we're going to add you can make all those decisions without the pressure of
having to serve the external need to be impressive.
So it's kind of weird that the phone hardware has been on that cadence for so long, but the phone software has definitely not been on that cadence, right?
Well, and I would argue the hardware, that's kind of a red herring.
Like, if you look at the three S releases of iPhones we've had so far, the 3GS, the 4S, and the 5S,
Those were all major hardware releases.
The S minor revision designation is really only cosmetic in all three of those cases.
But it's not cosmetic because... Yeah, it is cosmetic, but it's like the cosmetics...
are a huge part of the hardware design because it's it's manufacturing lines it's the tooling it's the materials it's the you know it's all that all that part of it is a huge part of the product we think the product is like the tech specs of the cpu and you're right they made they made s things it's like the entire guts of this phone are different how is this like a minor revision there's like no shared part with the previous one but that's just the guts right the the
the big part of these phones is how do you make a million little glass aluminum rectangle thingies to the, to the quality control that Apple wants.
And they put a huge investment into making the production lines and, and the tools and everything that, you know, the materials and the expertise to assemble these phones.
And they want to get their bang for the buck out of that.
So they said, we're going to make two years worth of phones that use the same materials assembled in more or less the same way with only possibly minor external changes to,
You know, like, again, moving the antennas and the breakpoints of the whatever, you know, construction techniques, like whatever they're using, whatever they want to get two years of value out of CPU architecture.
But like the silicon, I think, is easier because that's like, look, silicon revs when it revs.
Right.
But that is a separate thing.
But I'm saying the physical part of it is such a big part of, you know, physical products.
that that's where they want to get the the thing and like the fabs like they don't have to make a new fab you know and when except when they do die shrinks and stuff but it's like once you have the fail up and running if you give it a different design then it just is a different design right and if someone gets a new fit like it's not part of it's not so much part of like the you know the production line for a particular phone i think is more built for that phone than a production line for particular cpu is built for that cpu
yeah but where they're having problems is not you know oh that my my 5s you know the parts don't fit right together that where they're having problems is in the the software and the low level component interactions and the services and stuff like stuff that like but do you think that's hardware related like even the 64-bit transition like i know there was there was problems like going from 32 to 64 and the 64-bit versions were buggy and stuff like that but
I have to imagine, like, you have to pay that transition sometime.
They wanted to be the first out of the gate.
I think they've reaped benefits of being the first.
But other than that, I don't think any other silicon-based transition has been particularly killer to them.
No, no.
I'm just saying that, like, that the idea that the iPhone hardware is on this TikTok cadence, I would say, is mostly wrong.
that it's it is very it is on that tiktok cadence and only the like physical shell way but the parts inside seem to change just as rapidly with every version of the iphone regardless of what letters after its name yeah no i agree on that but i think the the physical shell part is a huge percentage of the hardware product and so that's why i don't think you can dismiss it as like just cosmetics or just the visual thing because like
when you think about the physical hardware product, it's almost as if the silicon part is like, might as well be a separate thing.
Like you have a certain allotted amount of space that you have to fit in, but really the product designers of the iPhone are designing a physical thing.
And, and by the way, this little silicon sliver goes in whatever is left over when we put the battery in.
I mean, I don't know, obviously it's not done that way or whatever, but if you look at the parts inside there, the phone is all everything else.
And then this little tiny thing, that's the actual phone phone.
So,
I just see that as a separate cadence.
And that cadence has not so much been on the... I think they just change everything every year.
From year to year, they change who's going to sell us our radio chip this year.
Forget about the stuff.
Who's going to sell the display controller this year or the battery controller?
From year to year, it's just like whoever has the best chips with the best specs or if Apple needs to do custom designs itself, it just changes all the time.
uh on the phones and that hasn't been a you know a particular source of problems i i think if it is we don't have enough insight to know like oh this one phone had problems because of some flaky chip and you didn't know about it but next year apple picked a different manufacturer and ironed out those problems or you know os 10 or ios was working around this problem with this buggy chipset and you didn't know but it took a lot of engineering effort from apple but
For OS X, Apple, you know, the Mac lines change much more slowly in a much more predictable way with, you know, we kind of know what's going into them with the Intel chipsets.
We know it's available for them to go into.
And I think for the OS X cadence, like Apple is just, again...
uh you know chasing itself chasing its own tail of or as someone said like when i was asking who they're chasing so they're chasing ios it's like well that's just chasing yourself because they are ios as well they can make the decision of how to
move along with the two things and cadence to each other but i think that type of cadence formalized that type of cadence formalized and the reason you have to formalize it it's like perception pr like if you formalize it like intel did intel formalized it too because they recognize that if you just do this internally kind of sort of secretly then the marketing pr organization still has to come up with some reason why everything is awesome every single year whereas if you if you announce this is this is our new strategy for the foreseeable future then
only every other year do you have to impress and everyone just gets used to oh this is this is the year where they just make stuff work better and that becomes a story in itself and people like that like customers like it and you don't get the bad stories about well it was wwc but apple didn't have any new features you just know this is a talk year or whatever i forget which one is the freaking ticker the talk yeah i never i always forget that every time you know what i mean so like it's always it's the opposite of what you think like the tick i think the tick is the minor one
Yeah.
And the talk is like the loud one because it's, I don't know.
It doesn't make sense.
But anyway, a TikTok cadence, Apple has considered and sort of played around with in the past and continues to play around with arguably on the non-silicon part of the hardware side.
I think that has the best sort of, you know, the best features of any solution I can think of other than the silly solution.
People will say, just be more careful and do stuff better.
Like that's not a solution, right?
Because of the external effects of this, because it is a thing that you announce to the world and that announcement frees up things inside your organization to act in a way that they wouldn't be able to if you try to do it only as an internal change.
You know, I read something earlier today that I thought was really fascinating for a bunch of reasons, but it's relevant here.
On Objective CIO, they had an interview with Andy Matushak.
I hope I pronounced that right.
I'm so sorry if I didn't.
Anyway, he used to work on UIKit, if memory serves.
And they had an interview with him.
And the question that they asked was, what effect do you think Swift will have on Apple's framework APIs?
Do you expect something here in the short term?
And his answer is very interesting and relevant.
I don't actually have insider knowledge here, so this is just speculation, but I think it will be a long process.
At least when I was there, the team spent the majority of their time not maintaining and improving frameworks, but really supporting market features like new screen sizes or support for new hardware.
That's what takes most of the time.
So it will take a conscious decision to do anything non-trivial, and I don't see that forthcoming.
Yeah, that actually mirrors what we heard when somebody who works on iWork wrote in to us a couple of, maybe a month or two ago now, who wrote in, because we were complaining about iWork and how there seems to be nobody working on it for years, and all of a sudden it gets rushed together.
And this person who wrote in basically said, that's not the case, that instead the team is constantly working on it, but that iWork always has to show off the latest and greatest OS features and directions of the company's
sharing and cloud platforms and everything and so they're constantly having to keep up with the new marketing features and and the new directions of things like iCloud instead of working on the core product functionality so it's actually very that it sounds like this is possibly uh infecting many parts of Apple and and this is like their their market features are are moving so quickly and are so aggressive and
that the rest of the engineering department is maybe not able to keep up with things like quality and long-term feature maintenance.
Do you think that's fair, based on what we've heard so far?
It certainly sounds right to me.
One thing that gives me hope here, I mentioned this on the talk show, so I'll be quick, but the watch is going to be where Apple focuses most of their PR for the next little while.
And...
And we'll see how it goes, how long that lasts.
Maybe the watch is going to be the primary focus of Apple's marketing for the next year or two or three.
I don't know.
But I think that might help take some of the marketing burden off of the other products.
And so maybe by focusing so much on the watch and first watch kit stuff and then later on the native SDK and then the second generation of the watch hardware, maybe that will be such the focus of the marketing that...
Just like the Mac was kind of playing second fiddle when the iPhone came out, maybe the watch will then make the iPhone and iPad and the Mac now.
It'll give them a break for a little while from being in the spotlight and give them a chance to stabilize.
Yeah, the whole idea of having to support new...
hardware factors or new apis new apis you have a little bit more control over because you can just lay off on that uh but new hardware features that kind of gets back to what kind of company apple is they're trying to make trying to make entire products uh that have hardware and software integrated and trying to improve both aspects of that and it it seems like you know hardware is like oh i want to make a nicer phone a cooler laptop like want to make a better product or whatever and that thing i was just talking about like
you know changing the the chipsets you use for your radios or the manufacturers for your your power controller your display controller inside the phone just changing that all the time because you want to get the one that has the best features the lowest power the best contract deal for parts and all these other things that change year over year i can imagine oh
Lots of time being spent supporting that.
It's like, can't you guys just pick one manufacturer for like the, you know, whatever IO controller for, for iOS devices and keep it for one or two years in a row so that we can do something else or display controller, you know, like that would make their lives easier.
but it would mean, well, but the new one is slightly lower power and it has this extra little feature and we can combine these two things into one chip.
And it's like, if we don't do that, if we try to make it easier for the software guys by trying to make a stable, like a more stable platform, uh, kind of like the Intel, you know, motherboard Intel based motherboards and chipsets are whatever, like a little bit more stable than the other guys will have a better phone than us.
And we want every year we have to be, we have to be better, better battery life, better everything.
Like I think the screen size changes, uh,
That is a big hassle for them to do, but part of that is, like, they're paying the price for their expedience and doing the original version of iOS.
It's like, let's just get it working on this one phone.
Like, they didn't do what Android did, which was forced to do, which is, let's make a generic... Let's try, at least, to make a generic framework for doing UI on variable screen sizes.
And the Apple was like...
we're at the edge of what is even possible just make it work on the original iphone that is the mandate no matter what you have to do and so they've paid the price and like you know they reap the benefits being the first person out with the iphone that no one else could even think was possible and then the price is the engineering compromises you had to do to get there meaning you have a long road ahead of you to be able to support arbitrary resolutions arbitrary screen sizes like and so that how many years has it taken to get to where we are now with like multiple screen sizes and auto layout and all the scaling and the high-res screens like
it was very much unlike os 10 where in the beginning of os 10 they had this model of what the future of the display system is going to be like and the hardware wasn't there to support it and it was terrible and they're just like we just got to hold on for like six more years and this crap will work right uh and even then they had to you know do some fairly large architectural changes to get stuff off the the cpu and onto the gpu so
There's, you know, everything in engineering, software, hardware engineering is a trade-off.
And I just think what we see now and this whole idea of the UI kept people spending their time like treading water and doing marketing features is the result of engineering trade-offs made many, many years earlier, just kind of coming home to roost now.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because 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.
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A hundred episodes in the bag.
God, we're getting old.
So how about the Detroit Auto Show?
Did anything happen to the Detroit Auto Show other than the Ford GT?
The NSX.
Yeah, but everyone knew about it.
Everyone saw pictures.
What was new that we learned about the NSX?
I haven't looked at any of the news, so I'm asking you.
What was new that we learned about the NSX at the Detroit Auto Show?
We learned it's a twin turbo V6.
We learned it.
You didn't know it?
We didn't know that already?
I don't keep up with Honda because I don't drive a Honda, but I didn't know that.
I didn't know for sure it would be mid-engined, although it's a safe assumption and it is mid-engined.
What do you mean you didn't know every minute?
We've seen final pictures of the NSX for like what seems like a year now.
You can just look at the car.
What do you think they're putting the engine?
Really?
Have we seen it?
Yeah, no, yeah, like, more or less, the complete NSX, like, maybe with, like, camouflage or whatever, but, like, we've known what this car is going to look like for a long time.
No, fair enough.
Well, I guess I just don't follow Honda as closely as you do, John.
I don't follow it at all, but I've, you know, it was like a year ago, and they said, this is the new NSX, and they were showing, like, drawings, and then you get to see the one with the camouflage paint all over it, and I guess now this is the first time we're seeing the one, like, you know, painted and presented the way Honda wants to do that, but...
Anyway, I think it's kind of ugly.
You know what I did like is on their intro video, which to my eye looked 100% CGI.
I mean, it was good CGI, but it looked like, to me anyway, it looked like it was completely CGI.
On the bottom of this CGI video of the NSX driving around, it said professional driver closed course.
And it was a completely fabricated video.
Or if it wasn't, it was very poorly recorded because it looked to me.
Yeah, watch the video.
It didn't look CG.
Is that the one with the little kid playing with the toy, old NSX?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It looked like it could be real to me.
I mean, maybe modified after the fact, but...
I don't know.
I just thought that was funny.
The new Ford GT looks good.
I'm not that excited about the NSX.
The GT makes me uncomfortable because I don't like the idea of...
styling driven nostalgia or nostalgia driven styling to the degree that has been practiced by u.s automakers over the past like say decade or two where they make like oh make the new mustang and make it look like a modernized version of a particular model of old mustang which usually makes it look worse
Oh, see, I think they all look good.
Yeah, you live in the South.
But I agree with you that this whole idea is getting pretty played now.
Because, like, it's okay to be inspired by cars of the past, but you have to know what the difference between inspired is and, like, a style parody.
Where, like, not even, like, a style pair.
Like, you're taking the... Like, the Ford GT is a great example.
Like, the previous Ford GT, the GT40 thing, right?
That... Like, it's like the same freaking car as the old one.
It's just, like, you know, puffed up into modern... Like, they're taking the same design.
It's not inspired by it.
It's the same design.
And this new one is more different, but still... I mean...
I don't know if we have enough car listeners.
I know someone right now is writing an angry email that mentions the word 9-11 in it, right?
And we understand.
9-11, you know, it's like... Or the Volkswagen Beetle, for that matter.
But, like, I feel like the 9-11 has come by that honestly by never moving away from that.
The 9-11 is a Volkswagen Beetle.
but you know what i mean like it it has it has not every year they just change it a little bit a little bit a little bit yeah they all look the same and it's all kind of the same family resemblance but it's not like like the difference between 9-11 the beetle is great because the beetle was the beetle and then there was a large gap of time then they made the new beetle which was exactly the same you know it's like let's make a modern version of the old beetle right and then they have the new revision of that or whatever right
the 911 every single revision was just like a little change a little change a little change it just never drifted too far right i feel like that is more honest than waiting for a huge gap of time and then making a new car that looks like an old car i don't like new cars that that are modern versions of old cars all the way down that aren't even a mix of like well this this grille is reminiscent of the grille on the blah blah blah and this tail is reminiscent of this and this is new like that is more appropriate don't just make me a new version of the old one but i have to say the new gt
moves farther away from the old ones you can still kind of see the gt40 and all the predecessors under there but i think i think what is what's the pillar right behind the door the b pillar is that right yes uh from the b pillar to the front it looks almost identical but from the b pillar to the back it looks totally different
yeah and let's see the thing is it's a nice looking car all versions the the original one the the gt40 from like a decade ago or whatever and the new crazy looking one these are all no no you've got that backwards it's the gt from a decade ago and the gt40 from the 60s or 70s or whatever it was you think these are good looking cars
Well, I thought when they did the revision one, it was called the GT.
I don't remember the name.
So the one that Clarkson had that was from like the early 2000s.
That was just called the GT as well?
That's just the Ford GT.
The original one that started it all in the 60s or 70s, whenever it was, that was the GT40.
I'm pretty sure about this.
These are hideous.
I think this is hideous.
I think the NSX is hideous.
The new NSX or the old one?
The new one.
The old one looks, I think, very nice, and I think the design of the old one actually ages fairly well for a car that was designed as long ago as it was.
you know i'm not excited i mean i was never a huge nsx person you know i never got that into high-end cars back then so you know i don't really have any nostalgia either way but like to me you know the gt is is at least like continuing what it has been more recently the nsx is like this car was gone for a long time and now we're bringing it back but you know like to me this is kind of like bringing back to tech for a second uh please get me out of this terrible car conversation because these cars are cars i don't care about but the
Sorry.
It's kind of like the new Star Wars movie.
I am not excited about the new Star Wars movie inherently because it is Star Wars.
Wait, can I make some popcorn?
You're not excited about the old Star Wars movies either.
No, I like them.
I was never that obsessed with them, but I like them.
But to me, like...
Calling this an NSX and calling the new Star Wars movie Star Wars is really just like... It's like licensing the name.
It's a branding thing.
No, no, no.
Because it's totally different people working on it.
What are you talking about?
Yes, of course, but the people who work on the new Mustang have nothing to do with the people who work on the old Mustang.
You still use the Mustang name.
It's a franchise, but every Mustang doesn't have to look like a particular past model.
No, no, I'm not talking about appearance.
I'm talking more about spirit and continuity.
So like...
Making a new Star Wars movie today versus making a new Star Wars movie in 50 years when everyone who made the first one is dead.
Is it any different, really?
You're just taking the name.
Everyone who made the NSX is not dead.
I know, but it's been gone for long enough, and the market has moved on in so many ways.
And I'm sure the people at Honda have changed staff a little bit since then.
I think it's...
We're talking about brand names the way that companies want you to talk about brand names as if they have some kind of major significance with what the product will actually be like.
And the fact is, it's just a nameplate on this.
It's just a nameplate on Star Wars.
It doesn't matter.
That's how cars have always worked.
Ignore movies for a second.
That's how cars have always worked.
There's no relation between the 911 today and the 911.
Yes, you just keep calling it 911.
You keep calling it the Mustang.
You keep calling it the Camaro.
You keep calling it the Corvette.
That's how car labels work.
This is not an aberration.
Right.
The M5 is an abomination compared to the M1 that originally started the whole M moniker.
Or even just M5 compared to M5s.
Compare this M5 to three generations ago.
What do they share?
Just the M5.
It's just a way to, like, that's how car naming works.
So I don't begrudge that at all.
What I complain about is when you make, for the styling specifically, when you pick a particular old car and you say, make a modern version of that, where you don't even mix elements of other cars, but it's just like a, you know...
a complete facsimile and the mustang is and i think they've done a little bit with the new dodge charger like i don't like that it's like it's like saying we can't figure out how to we made a good looking car once in the 60s or 70s we can't figure out how to make a good looking car again so just make us a modern version of that car that we made that was good looking
yeah i mean normally i i totally agree with that that is that is what it is um and normally i would say in this conversation wow you know look at look at how ugly the american car is but honestly i cannot imagine what acura has been thinking with their styling over the last decade or so either like to me these are both hideous cars yeah acura has lost its way with the styling i i'm kind of disappointed that there aren't more cues from the old nsx in the new one
Like, I don't think you need to make a modernized version, but just take some cues like the same way that the kidneys are cute.
Like you can do so much with the kidneys and BMW.
You don't say because a car has kidneys, it looks exactly like, you know, a BMW from two decades ago or something like just styling elements.
There should be some commonality in styling elements.
I think, for example, the modern Cadillac takes that too far where the cars don't look like each other exactly.
But the styling elements are so dominant and they're so repeated everywhere that there's a sameness to them that's boring.
Although that CTS-V, what is it, 600 and change horsepower?
Speaking of ugly cars.
Oh, they've always been ugly.
You've got the ATS if you don't want the fat one, but they look too similar.
Have you guys seen the new Lexus M3?
No.
Oh, it's rough.
Well, Lexus has been rough.
I know, but Lexus' styling was always very comfortable if you wanted to drive an upscale marshmallow for old people.
That's a perfectly valid market, and they've done very well there, and that's well-deserved.
But with their new Sport F line or whatever it is, they're trying to get in on the BMW territory of the Sport sedans and...
oh my god they're hideous in person i i hope you get a chance to see one sometime soon oh my goodness they they are rough it it's so so bad what model of car are you talking about i don't even recognize the lexus m3 well no it's lexus's answer to the m3 so i think it's the isf it's one of the it's like the f sport version the rcf you're talking about the rcf that big giant fat car
no it's a sedan it's it might be the isf no it's the rcf do google for yes you're right you're right it's the rcf now it used to be the isf okay it's fat because it's heavy not because yeah all the the reviews i've read of it is just like too too much weight not can't get out of its own way like it's like a it's like a really bad iteration of the gtr
yeah this is what i'm talking about yep i'm seeing it and also i believe am i wrong did they i think they also have added like f sport trim levels to a lot of the other models they have and that doesn't sound like anything i'm familiar with exactly it's i mean it's it's the same thing i mean it's the same bs the bmw pulls i think it's a every every luxury car maker should have this thing they should you know whether it's the amg model or like in mercedes you need to have two so it had the amg model but also the black
you know so multiple layers of things and sport and m yeah and bmw had to have the m and this you know we can apply that m maybe we get the m sport and so lexus is and same thing with infinity these other companies have taken too long to figure out what they're going to do and i think lexus is finally settling on the f audi has uh the the rs and the uh the the s s model and then the then the rs model so you do need these levels this is like the
the thing that luxury car makers do these days.
And I'm glad Lexus has found one.
I'm sad that whenever they add F to their models, it makes them uglier and crappier.
Did you also see that BMW had a pretty big presence at CES, actually?
Yeah, that was interesting.
They showed off not only their version of CarPlay, their gesture interface, their backseat Samsung tablets, and all sorts of weird stuff.
What annoyed me most about what they showed off there is that
Almost none of it is anything I would actually want, and much of it, I think, was a step backwards.
The key fob with the screen on it, the tuck screen, thank God that will always be a $1,000 option, because I'm never buying that option.
The last thing you want is your key fob to get bigger.
And they're already so big.
They're already so chunky in your pocket.
And you don't want to have to look at it either.
Why would you want to look at it?
You want to be able to do it in your pocket.
If there's anything you need to do with it at all, if there's a proximity key, there shouldn't be anything.
But what if you want to open the trunk?
So you should be able to reach in and press the little thing that opens the trunk.
You shouldn't have to look at the screen like...
And why would you want your key fob to have another battery draining feature on it?
That's a terrible idea.
Like, it's just so many bad ideas about that.
Well, you'd be able to get a new battery for, you get the battery replaced at the dealer for $700, so it'll be fine.
That's true.
John, what was the name of the memory stick for the Dreamcast that had a little display on it?
VMU, visual memory unit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what it reminds me of.
I think it might have a color screen, though.
Yeah, well, that's true.
The VMU had one of those god-awful original Game Boy-style screens.
And unfortunately, the BMW is probably going to sell a lot more of them.
Yep, that's also true.
But yeah, I don't know.
I just thought it was interesting seeing that BMW took CES so seriously.
I still don't totally understand.
Well, I shouldn't even say totally.
I still don't understand the laser headlights.
I mean, I've read that...
they're more directional so they can leave a gap for like people in other cars on the road they're lasers casey what more do you need to know yeah i mean leds aren't cool enough anymore like are you kidding marketing people once marketing people even find out that it's possible to use lasers for lights like do that i don't care what it takes i don't care if they're worse in every possible way laser lights that's true um but i did see also that um they have oled tail lamps now or they're they're
trying them which i thought was very peculiar like i'm not really sure why one would want that but i'm sure there's a good reason i'm not thinking of you can make them thinner for more light output maybe and obviously they're a little bit lower power but i don't think it's a big deal for brake lights but
I don't know.
I'm looking at the NSX here.
It's not too terrible.
It has the schnoz problem that Acuras have had.
Yeah, the cheese grater nose.
It's a beak.
It's not a cheese grater.
It's only head-on, right?
And I think a lot of cars have a little bit of a nose problem lately, too.
But
It's fairly restrained, like, you know, the headlights aren't bad, the little scoops on the side are okay, the back is ugly.
You think this is restrained?
Yeah, well, compared to the new Ford GT, it looks like it's ridiculous, or even just the Corvette.
But compared to good taste, none of these are good examples, including the new Corvette, by the way.
Yeah, no, the Ferrari looks like a car from Knight Rider, it's supposed to look like it.
Yes, I know Knight Rider was not a Corvette.
The new Corvette, of all the cars you mentioned so far, I think the new Corvette is by far the best-looking one.
The back of the Corvette is worse than the back of all these cars.
That's probably true.
If you've seen one in the parking lot, it's just terrible.
It's like the unibrow.
It's like a big, just ugly... The NSX is fine.
It's fine.
I just feel like it's a little bit puffy and there's not enough of the old NSX in it.
And the GT is like...
A mutant amphibian fish version of the previous GT, which was a puffed up version of the original GT.
And none of these cars look as nice as any Ferrari probably, except for the weird four-wheel drive one.
The Ferrari love Ferrari?
No, no.
The one with four-wheel drive that looks like a shoe.
Isn't that the FF?
Yeah.
That four-wheel drive was weird, though.
Did you see how that worked?
Did we talk about that at some point?
Yeah, it is weird.
Didn't it suck?
No, I don't think it sucked.
Oh, I don't know.
Do you think anyone's ever driven one in the snow yet?
That's true.
No, but didn't it have a second driveshaft coming out the front of the motor or something along those lines?
Yeah, it was a really weird layout.
Yeah.
Like I said, the...
That one, even that one, if you just don't look at the back of the car, even the front of the front of that car is much nicer.
But I think they're making, like I said in the past, they're making a not like a regular shaped version of a non like hatchback or whatever you want to call the thing.
So it's basically so you're going to have two 12 cylinder front engine Ferraris.
Why are they different?
Well, this one is four wheel drive and it used to be really ugly.
You can get it.
You can get an ugly version if you like ugly cars.
I don't know that ever.