The Problem Is You
John:
I understood that reference.
Casey:
Boom.
Casey:
We have a not a tremendous amount of follow up today.
Casey:
Everyone look at the time.
Casey:
I think we should.
Casey:
I think we should start by genuinely saying that we got a lot of really, really lovely and wonderful feedback with regard to our Twitter conversation that happened in the after show in the last show.
Casey:
And I hope I don't sound sarcastic because I am really being genuine.
Casey:
We got a ton of really great feedback.
Casey:
And even the feedback that I saw that was constructively criticizing us was constructive.
Casey:
And I was appreciative of that.
Casey:
We had a lot of drive-by tweet thanks and tweet love.
Casey:
And that was extremely refreshing given that we spoke a lot about drive-by tweet hate and
Casey:
So I just want to thank everyone that you guys were really kind to us last week.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure I speak for the other two to say it's very kind of you and we really appreciate it.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We also got a lot of feedback about how many external displays modern Macs can drive.
Casey:
And we got this from several different people, but I think just moments ago we got a pretty good summary.
Casey:
John, do you want to go over that?
John:
Yeah, I think this was the most popular correction from last week.
John:
Everybody just wanted to come in and say that they have a MacBook Pro and that they have more than two external displays on it.
John:
Some people were sending us pictures of their setup.
John:
Some people were confused about which MacBook Pro we were talking about in the last feedback, talking about the most recent models.
John:
But even among those people they sent here, I have the most recent model, and here it is with more than two external displays.
John:
what's up with that and so of course if you go to the macbook pro specs page at apple.com for both the 13 inch and 15 inch it says it talks about their external display capabilities and it says up to two external displays up to two external displays for both of them so what's the deal here um and nathan anderson is not the only person who sent in this information but it happened to come in late breaking and it was a reasonable summary
John:
the deal as far as i can tell based on all the people who sent in both their pictures and their information is that uh if you have a 13 inch macbook pro uh you can only do two external displays if you have a 15 inch you can do more than two if you have the discrete graphics with a nvidia chip and only two if you have the integrated graphics
John:
uh and there's some strangeness about past models uh whether they could or couldn't do integrated so it seems like the the apple's page is giving you a conservative answer if you read that and think you can only use two external displays and you happen to get one with discrete graphics and you can do more than two you'll be pleasantly surprised but you'll never be disappointed because the up to two external displays is true for all the models and if you can do more i mean maybe it's not even officially supported according to apple but it does work
John:
So there we go.
John:
For all the people who wrote in, you know, you're not crazy.
John:
Your particular model may be able to do more than two, but it is apparently a variation that Apple does not consider important enough to delineate on their customer facing spec page.
Marco:
Also, let me just point out how amazing this is because it was only a few years ago when if you wanted to have more than one external display, so more than two displays total, you had to have a Mac Pro.
Marco:
And usually with more than one video card.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So this is pretty amazing that ever since, I believe, the introduction of Thunderbolt, I don't think the mini DisplayPort line could daisy chain them.
Marco:
I don't know if that's correct.
Marco:
But it's only very, very recent since the era of Thunderbolt on all the MacBook and MacBook Pros that you can have more than one external monitor hooked up.
Marco:
And that's pretty amazing.
Casey:
Yeah, that is progress, man.
Marco:
It's good.
Marco:
They definitely have the external monitor high ground.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
We have some people at work who are trying to do like six external monitors, and they're reaching... I'm not sure which limits they're reaching, but basically many of the people who sit around me have reached the limit...
John:
of what their uh their machines can do output wise either physically speaking or for a gpu wise and it is comical to see where the limits are this is a little tiny machine with this huge array of displays on this crazy arm that puts them in a big grid of five or six things and what's what's attached to that giant rat's nest a tiny little laptop
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think the actual limit of displays there is like sanity, desk space slash arm capacity.
Marco:
You know, like, I mean, external monitors are kind of like cats.
Marco:
Like, you know, most people should have between zero and one.
Marco:
And, you know, it's really, really easy once you have more than one to be like, well, what's one more?
Marco:
I can, you know.
Marco:
have all this extra fur in my house like they're like there's some people like no number of monitors is enough for for them and because they haven't adopted a system like yours john where like they have some way to manage lots of windows on whatever space they're given no they need more space and they always need more space and it's like oh i have two why not three oh look maybe monitors are pretty cheap these days why not add two more and let's get a double decker arm now we can have eight and it's just never enough then all of a sudden you have 15 cats and you
John:
it's like the physical incarnation of spaces they're like i'm gonna have one monitor for itunes one monitor for safari one monitor for a mail app one monitor for a text editor that will be in portrait but i'll only ever have one document open at once because i use vi and relaunch it every time i want to edit a file and one monitor open for like my fun window and like they'll they'll pretend windows don't exist and if i need to have another window open i need another monitor now because everything is full screen these are these are probably x windows users oh god
Casey:
All I know is I kind of, I want a rig, I would never do it, but I want a rig that's like six monitors, such a wall of monitors in front of me.
Casey:
I would get lost in it, but God, it sounds so awesome.
John:
You'll never find your cursor.
John:
Let me tell you, people have that at work.
John:
You can never find your cursor.
John:
You'd have to turn on the giant cursor mode that my mom uses.
Casey:
What was the setup that the really nerdy guy in Grandma's Boy used?
Casey:
He had like a chair that was reclined and he had like two or three monitors pitched down at him or something like that.
Casey:
God, I'm going to have to watch that movie again.
Casey:
You ever see that?
Marco:
That sounds like a back problem.
Casey:
Well, trust me.
Casey:
It was like this whole pod thing that the dude had.
Casey:
Have you seen Grandma's Boy, John?
Casey:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
John:
I do not know what you're talking about.
John:
Although I've seen people, I can picture the arrangement you're describing because I've seen pictures on the internet of similar arrangements of people sort of reclining and having monitors suspended above them or the reverse where the monitors are below them and they're leaning face down.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All not good.
John:
Ergonomically speaking, probably.
Casey:
Does this count as a reference that I made that you didn't get?
Casey:
I think so.
John:
Admittedly, it was a very shaky and poor reference, but... Well, I mean, is it something that you had an expectation that I would get?
John:
Is this a staple of pop culture?
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Grandma's Boy?
Casey:
Are you kidding?
Casey:
It's a wonderful movie about computer geeks.
Casey:
All right, if you say so.
Casey:
I'm going to count that as a win in the Casey column.
Casey:
Anyway, we should probably move on.
Casey:
And speaking of movies and video, John, why don't you tell us about your whole scrubber conundrum?
John:
Yep, talked about that last week with the streaming television boxes.
John:
And my big complaint, aside from the video not playing at all, is that any of these streaming television solutions, none of them do moving around in the content in a reliable manner.
John:
And I compared it to YouTube on a web browser, which...
John:
sometimes it's weird and flaky and the html5 player may or may not be playing nicely with your browser but there's a little scrubber thing that you can you know the little circular handle on the timeline and you can move to different positions uh and the video moves around eventually and any streaming television boxes very frequently attempting to do anything with your position other than play at 1x speed
John:
Not only doesn't work and results in a series of spinners or blank screens, but can very often lose your place.
John:
And then you check back to the beginning.
John:
This happens, by the way, the worst case scenario is this is your children are on the couch watching a movie.
John:
They're 30 or 40 minutes in.
John:
One of them accidentally sits on part of the remote because you have too many Bluetooth remotes or because they happen to get unlucky and it was still pointing at the TV.
John:
it starts to fast forward or rewind or do something we do one of those those actions and that throws the thing into a tizzy and then you try to hit pause and hit play again but maybe they maybe it has gone too far forward or back or something and it just loses its place and now your kid is angry because they want the movie to resume playing
John:
where it was but you're back at the beginning of the movie and you can't get to where they were even if you know the exact time stamp because hey how would you get there you would have to move the scrubber essentially to that position and you have no way of doing that because fast forward doesn't work it just you know there's no jump there's no whatever so
John:
uh this this little item in the follow-up was me just to emphasize that like i'm not asking for let me smoothly scan through uh while seeing the video go by really fast like the equivalent of video smart speed like i understand if there's something transcoding down there it's not like you can just uh magically slide forward and backward in time while seeing the video flash before your eyes at variable rates of speed when the video is actually being transcoded on the fly by some weak cpu in a nas in your basement or something right
John:
The minimum, all I'm asking for is, one, don't lose my place no matter what I do.
John:
And two, give me the ability to, in sort of quick time player parlance or YouTube parlance, move the scrubber to an arbitrary position and start playing from there.
John:
I don't have to see anything when that happens.
John:
Make the screen entirely black.
John:
In fact, I prefer that.
John:
I hate it when I can't move the little scrubbery thing, both on the desktop and on a streaming TV box.
John:
where it says no no no you can't you can't move that thing you have to wait for me to to load some more thumbnails or stream some content or transcode things like just stop stop with the video entirely i'm going to move the scrubber to a position it's going to change the time stamp in the corner change the time stamp by all means as i move the scrubber around when i'm done i say now try to start playing from 30 minutes and 42 seconds
John:
Now you can resume whatever it is you were doing.
John:
And people wrote in telling me, oh, you don't understand about B-frames and H.264 and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like, I understand that this is also difficult.
John:
But this, I think, is the minimum bar for any device that plays video.
John:
Don't lose my place and give me some way to start at an arbitrary location.
John:
Anything above and beyond that that you want to do, fine.
John:
Do whatever it is you have to do to make that happen.
John:
pre-scan all the movies to find offsets find the closest offset to the thing that i picked and try to play from there and only show the picture once you get into it like whatever you got to do do it but i just want to emphasize that i'm not asking for the magic ability to see the video fly past my eyes at uh fast and slow speeds because i understand it's very difficult of course that would be nice and i'm hoping that will happen someday but we're very far from that now
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And how about the Koenigsegg and the odd model name that none of us could figure out how you pronounce it?
John:
Yeah, apparently it's like we mentioned that it was like the ratio one horsepower to one kilogram or whatever.
John:
But the name O-N-E colon and numeral one is pronounced one to one.
John:
It's not one one, although I like one one better, but.
John:
Anyway, for people who want to know, if you are considering buying, what is it, like a $2.4 million, $3 million hypercar, it's called the one-to-one, not the one-one.
Casey:
That just sounds like going to visit a psychiatrist's office or something like that.
Casey:
Let's have a one-to-one.
Casey:
That's your one-on-one.
Casey:
Do you have one-on-ones at work?
Casey:
I don't think we call them that, but yes, I do have a meeting with... Check the parking lot.
Casey:
Oh, God, Marco.
Casey:
It's so hard to be retired, isn't it?
Casey:
But yeah, we have meetings with our immediate supervisors, which we call personal development something, PDP, personal development planning, something like that.
Casey:
That's worse.
Casey:
That sounds awful.
Casey:
No, it's sufficiently corporate-speaky, which is funny because our company is all of 70 people or something like that.
Casey:
But yep, that's a thing.
John:
yikes all right uh power pc max and uh x86 hardware compatibility yeah one one person wrote with a story that i thought was funny we were talking about the the rarity of these max that had x86 hardware in them and they were indeed rare and martin wrote in to tell us about his experience with these things he had a set of the the i forget which model it was but it's the the the power max 6100 case it was the first mac to use this case you guys look at the picture that i linked there in the show notes it was the pizza box mac
John:
Very wide, very low, optical drive in the middle, floppy drive on the right, and a hard drive on the left.
John:
And they had a bunch of people who were PC users essentially using these because they sold a version of this with a different model number that had...
John:
486 inside it or maybe it was a pentium or anyway some x86 chip inside it and they had a problem when these pc users would use these machines and i mean i don't know if you if you read this feedback you probably did and spoiled the surprise but if you haven't read the feedback marco perhaps take a look at the picture and tell me uh well the show notes were into hey maybe marco hasn't seen the show notes either um
Casey:
looking at this picture what what problem might pc users have with this mac yeah as soon as i saw the picture i didn't actually make it to the to the rest of the feedback to see why the picture was being cited and the moment i saw the picture i knew exactly where this feedback was going yeah so i don't know if people remember this but it's just so long ago
John:
The big thing about the Mac platform was that it had auto inject and auto eject floppy drives hardware wise.
John:
So auto inject meant that when you push the floppy disk in at a certain point, the mechanism would like suck it out of your hand and seat it.
John:
And auto-eject means that the ejection was initiated by the drive itself.
Marco:
And in the operating system... Well, and the ejection would be triggered by the wonderfully intuitive to PC users activity of dragging the disk that had all the important files on it to the trash.
John:
That was just a shortcut.
John:
You could also select the disk and select eject from the file menu, which was totally intuitive.
John:
Anyway...
John:
Yeah, so you would initiate the unmount, essentially, from the OS.
John:
And unlike PCs, where you could eject the disk at any time by pressing a button next to the thing, and, you know, the OS might complain.
John:
If you did it when the light was blinking, then you may have hosed your data and all sorts of other things that relied on the user to sort of...
John:
know when it's safe to eject the disk.
John:
The Mac operating system always took control over mounted media and you weren't involved in the process of ejecting the disk from a hardware perspective.
John:
From a software perspective, you unmounted the disk and the act of unmounting it also ejected it because the mechanisms all had the ability to essentially spit the disk back out at you.
John:
so uh when pc users use this mac they would see the floppy drive they would stick their disc in and maybe they did or didn't notice the auto inject uh it might have been gone by then i don't know anyway and they'd use their thing blah blah all right and when they were done with their disc they would do what all pc users do is i guess look at the look at the drive to see if there's any blinking lights near it if there's no blinking lights press the button to eject the disc
John:
unfortunately on this pizza box max the button that was in the lower right corner below the floppy drive was not a disc eject button there was no a disc eject button other than the little tiny hole that you can see there where you stick a paper clip to get it out when the thing freezes it was the power button to the entire machine so everybody when they were done and wanted to eject their floppy disk would press the power button the machine turn the entire machine off nice
Marco:
Which must have been hilarious, but still.
Marco:
In PC users at the time, Defense, which I was one.
Marco:
If you look at this machine, the CD-ROM drive immediately adjacent to this has a physical eject button.
Marco:
So it looks like two drives side by side with each with an eject button.
John:
Yeah, if you're coming from the other paradigm, it does make sense.
John:
Although, I mean, there is a giant power symbol on the paradigm.
Marco:
Separately from the paradigm, this is like a consistency design flaw, which is that there is an eject button right next to it in the spot you'd expect.
Marco:
And so it looks like here, you know, here's the hole for disks.
Marco:
Here's the hole for floppies.
Marco:
Here's the eject button for disks.
Marco:
Here's the eject button for floppies.
John:
They're very differently sized buttons.
John:
And like I said, one of them does have a hard button.
John:
I believe if you press the optical drive button, it wouldn't actually eject because I believe the operating system had control over it.
John:
There's a hardware eject button on the optical drives on my Mac Pro, too.
John:
You just have to slide open the little guillotine doors and shove your little finger in there and you can find them.
Marco:
Yeah, and they also don't work until the OS ejects it, but still.
Marco:
You're saying this is a problem with PC users.
Marco:
I'm saying this is a very confusing design for everybody.
John:
Well, it wasn't confusing for Mac users.
John:
It's a paradigm thing.
John:
It's like, do you think the operating system has control over floppy disks, or do you think the user has control over it?
John:
And the right answer is to have the OS have control over it.
John:
But if you come from the other thing where you think the user has control over it, you're looking for a button and you're going to hit whatever button you find.
John:
And that's the only button that's remotely near there.
John:
So that's the one you're going to hit and then you're going to be sad.
John:
I think the right answer is floppy disks were always awful and we're so glad we're past them.
John:
Well, anything with even even thumb drives now, I feel like we have the same exact problem.
John:
We haven't gotten rid of it.
John:
People stick a thumb drive into a computer and like it mounts on desktop and they drag files back and forth and they just want to yank the thumb drive out.
John:
And if you do that on a Mac, it yells at you.
John:
It says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John:
That was not properly ejected.
John:
Blah, blah, blah.
John:
Lost data.
John:
Blah, blah, blah.
John:
Please plug back in.
John:
Blah, blah, blah.
John:
But by then it's too late.
John:
I do it with my cameras because some of my cameras can be unplugged at any time and other cameras have to be unmounted from iPhoto or whatever before they can be unplugged.
John:
and i forget i forget which is which and some importing programs will automatically eject the camera logically after it's imported and some won't so that's also another level of confusion here and there's the power button on the camera even if you don't unplug the usb cable what if you just turn the power button on the camera that will also end effectively unmounted yep yep fun anyway removable media is confusing
Casey:
All right, and then the final piece of follow-up we have is an important service announcement for listeners of the show.
Casey:
And I think, John, that you are best equipped to handle this.
John:
I feel kind of bad talking about this.
John:
How many episodes are we in?
John:
We're over 100, right?
John:
112.
John:
Yeah, so someone who entered ATTACS, A-T-T-A-X, in our feedback form as their name,
John:
says that he'd been listening to the show uh and he's using the ios podcast app on an iphone 6 and he says i have a feeling to listen to atp and only atp that the podcast that jumps around wildly within the episode first few times i thought it was because one edition had finished and it had jumped to the middle of the one before that i hadn't finished but with the bombshell episode i'm certain that i heard the outro and then again discussion about jobs versus cook and then about fabbing ram
John:
This leads me to suspect that there's some evil commercial breaker chapter food going on.
John:
This person thought their podcast app was buggy.
John:
And this is a reasonable conclusion, right?
John:
If you are new, especially if you're new to the show.
John:
And I think we talked about this on Twitter and a bunch of people replied.
John:
So I'll spoil the secret that's not really a secret.
John:
The format of the show is we talk about technology stuff.
John:
We have a bunch of sponsor breaks.
John:
Then a song by Jonathan Mann plays where he reads out our Twitter handles and tells you where you can find the show notes.
John:
And says, now the show is over.
John:
Right.
John:
He says, now the show is over.
John:
I didn't even mean to begin.
John:
The whole big deal.
John:
and after that song is over the show continues often for a substantial period of time that's what we call the after show uh i likened it in the show it's here to the secret menu at in and out knowing that there's an after show the secret menu in and out which by the way i've never been to i would like to try but have never been really yep no i've never been i guess i've been in california but i haven't been to uh one of them i was there anyway
John:
It's not really a secret menu.
John:
Everybody knows about it.
John:
But if you really, really don't know about it, it's not going to occur to you that it exists.
John:
So if you really, really don't know about the after show, when the song says now the show is over, you know, you turn the thing off or go to the next podcast.
John:
Right.
John:
You never know that there's anything after it.
John:
i think actually that's okay if you want to stop listening to the show there whether accidentally or on purpose i think that's fine because the way we structure the show is we try to talk about all the things we're going to talk about before the song and then after the song we feel like we are free to talk about whatever we want whether that's cars something silly that we did but sometimes it's also reflecting on the show we just had and talking about the same targets from a different angle and maybe in a more casual way
John:
That's the after show.
John:
I was just on Upgrade with Jason Snell and we were talking about the format of the show.
John:
What distinguishes the after show from the rest of the show?
John:
Isn't it just more of the same?
John:
Sometimes it seems like that, but from our perspective, it's like we feel like the show is over and now we are talking about, I don't know, like...
John:
Even if we didn't record it, we would probably have that same conversation after the show, right?
John:
But we do record it.
John:
And there's also stuff that happens after the song that we don't put in the show, right?
John:
So there is some distinction between the after show and then like the sort of stuff that's just for the live listeners.
John:
But anyway, if you have been listening to the show for however many episodes and had no idea that after the song we kept talking, we do.
John:
And you can feel free to listen to it if you want or not, like whatever, right?
John:
You can listen however you want.
John:
But what I was surprised by on Twitter was many people...
John:
uh said they had been listening to the show for like 20 episodes before they realized the show continued after the song and that blows my mind if only because like the lazy thing to do is just like just let it keep playing like let play your next podcast on your list rather than hit stop and manually delete the podcast or something like if you just let it play the song will end and we will continue talking um so anyway we're gonna do that again today we've been doing this since the advent of the song i think
John:
There's the show, there's the song, and there's the after show.
John:
And that is the podcast that you were listening to.
John:
If you didn't know that, your mind is now opened.
Marco:
Well, and we also... I mean, we exacerbate this problem not only by never actually saying, you know, oh, we'll see you in the after show.
Marco:
Not by preannouncing it, but also one common complaint that we get, especially from other listeners of the show who live in my house...
Marco:
are that there's no sound or anything to indicate when the actual after show ends, like when the actual episode file ends.
Marco:
There is no closing sound or goodbye.
Marco:
So it's very easy to miss the end of one episode transitioning into the beginning of the next one.
John:
yeah yeah that's true that is also true i don't particularly find that to be a bad thing but i can understand people not uh being confused by that i guess what you can use is the visual marker of looking in your playback app when like the little playhead gets to the end and the new episode starts there are audio markers for when we start talking about cars
John:
and there's an audio marker for when we mention hfs plus um like the secret menu in in and out it is very similar uh like you you learn these things and either by just listening to a lot of shows or being in the community of people listening to a lot of shows and it becomes just accepted as that's the format of the show but if you don't know the things you can still go there and order a burger and it tastes fine like stop listening whenever you feel like you want to stop listening but if you were unaware that we keep talking we do because we can't shut up
Casey:
You know, there's two interesting pieces here, to me anyway.
Casey:
The first is, for the three of you that listen to the show that also look at the show notes, we clearly delineate that there is a post-show section that has usually links and bullet items that are in no way related to anything that we have said thus far in the episode.
Casey:
And so maybe this is a lesson to everyone that you should consider looking at the show notes that Marco and I work on every single week.
John:
Mostly you.
Casey:
Where can you find the show notes, Casey?
Casey:
You can find the show notes for your ATP program at atp.fm slash episode number, which in this case will be 112.
Casey:
So that's atp.fm slash 112.
John:
You're supposed to sing the line from the song.
John:
It's so informative.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I can't sing, but you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
That's right.
John:
That's really all you need to know.
John:
You literally can find them there.
John:
I believe in you.
John:
Even if you're listening to this episode six months from now, I believe you can find them.
John:
That's all that's there.
John:
That is the only thing on the site.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
it's a series of shows with numbers and show notes out for them or if you're in if you're listening to this in overcast you can swipe up on the album art but another thing that people don't know apparently that's not also my fault yeah i i do blink the scroll indicator the way as system standard is like when the screen shows up but no one knows that and it's really hard to it's really easy to miss so yeah that that is a bad design on my part that i have yet to figure out how to resolve in a way that i don't hate
John:
But once you know that it's there, like the after show, if you're using Overcast and you're looking at the now playing screen, the one that shows the big level meters and the big giant album art, just put your finger on that album art and slide upwards and you will see the show notes.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And then the other interesting thing to me that I find a little bit surprising, this is kind of building on what you were saying, John, is we start the after show or the post show.
Casey:
immediately after the song ends.
Casey:
This isn't like a 1997 secret song at the end of the CD that you have a 30-minute track, 20 minutes of which is silence, and then all of a sudden you have this new song 20 minutes after you thought the CD was over.
Casey:
It's immediate.
Casey:
So I agree with you that it's a little kooky to me that people would think, oh, the song's over.
Casey:
Well...
John:
better go change my podcast and not just let it run its course but you know or they stop it because they don't want to hear the song for the umpteenth time it's just as soon as the song starts like well episode over it is a reasonable assumption so uh anyway attacks uh your podcast player is almost certainly not broken that is just the way we structure the show why we do it that way i'm not entirely sure but it is what we do and this is the show yeah
Casey:
All right, let's talk about something that's awesome.
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Igloo.
Marco:
Igloo is an intranet you will actually like.
Marco:
Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Now, corporate intranets are usually really miserable things.
Marco:
Igloo is the intranet really done right.
Marco:
It is done by people who are familiar with the modern web and who respect it.
Marco:
innovations from the modern web.
Marco:
Things like calendars, microblogs, file sharing, task management, things like Twitter, things like wikis, all this.
Marco:
And it brings all this to the corporate intranet space.
Marco:
And so, you can actually have modern functionality and also really good design.
Marco:
And of course, actual functionality on mobile devices, all this stuff.
Marco:
It brings all this to an area that usually is pretty short on those features, let's be honest.
Marco:
So,
Marco:
With Igloo, you can share news, organize your files, coordinate calendars, and manage projects all in one place.
Marco:
It really combines the best of all these consumer web apps with productivity apps and with the needs of the enterprise.
Marco:
All available privately and securely for your company or small group.
Marco:
Your Igloo intranet is highly functional, stylish, and easy to use with a widget-based drag-and-drop interface to change it up or customize it or set it up the way you like.
Marco:
There's an upgrade recently called Viking.
Marco:
It basically revamped how you interact with documents, how you gather feedback, and how you make changes.
Marco:
You can track changes.
Marco:
You can track who has read documents.
Marco:
You can require people to agree that they read certain documents for certain reasons.
Marco:
legal or HR compliance reasons.
Marco:
It's like read receipts in email, but less annoying.
Marco:
This is very important for certain policies and legal reasons and everything.
Marco:
And all this is built on their very advanced platform, all with modern responsive HTML5.
Marco:
And that's why it works on mobile devices.
Marco:
So whatever customizations you make, they work on the mobile view.
Marco:
It's fully responsive.
Marco:
And they've crammed so much into HTML5.
Marco:
You don't need some Flash or Java or whatever if you want to preview an Office document, for example.
Marco:
They built their previewing engine all with HTML5, so that will work on any device, no matter what.
Marco:
Even if it doesn't have Flash, because you're a good person, even if it doesn't have Flash, it'll still work.
Marco:
Even if you're on an iPhone, an Android device, even a BlackBerry, it even works fully functionally on BlackBerrys.
Marco:
they really are committed to making sure it works on every device through HTML5.
Marco:
And when new devices hit the market, when there's new screen sizes or anything, Igloo already works on them.
Marco:
So if your company has a legacy intranet that looks like it was built in the 90s, you should really give Igloo a try.
Marco:
And it's free to use for as long as you want for groups of 10 or fewer people.
Marco:
And for larger groups, it is very reasonably priced.
Marco:
Check it out, igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Igloo.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we are recording this on Wednesday, April 8th.
Casey:
And this morning at about eight o'clock in the One True Time Zone, the watch embargo was lifted.
Casey:
So we had a lot of reading to do.
Casey:
And I'm assuming, Marco, that you read none of it.
Marco:
I actually read most of them.
Marco:
I read all the ones that I found so far.
Marco:
I really enjoyed the one at the Verge by Nilay Patel, even though he hates me, because he really gave his and Joanna Stearns at Wall Street Journal.
Marco:
Those, I think, were my two favorites.
Marco:
because they really gave a lot of like kind of like the everyday usage, like what, like what, what really are the pros and the cons to the everyday usage of these things.
Marco:
And there's also both of them had really good videos, uh, and really good pictures.
Marco:
So I, I was very impressed by these and I, uh,
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
What do you guys think of what you've seen so far?
Marco:
Like, does this make you, is it roughly what you expected?
Marco:
Does it make you more or less excited about the watch?
Marco:
Because one thing I noticed was that none of them really said, oh my God, this is amazing.
Marco:
It's a blockbuster.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Almost all of them were like, yeah, it's pretty good.
Marco:
It does certain things pretty well.
Marco:
Certain things aren't so great.
Marco:
It's definitely a version one.
Marco:
What do you think?
Casey:
You know, I read a handful of them.
Casey:
I did not read Joanna Stearns.
Casey:
I did read Nile Patel's, and I agree with you, Marco, that I thought that one was excellent.
Casey:
I liked the way that he had phrased it or kind of covered it from the perspective of here's what I did throughout the day.
Casey:
It also really made me feel gross that I kind of liked the scroll hijacking frames of video, because I know I should hate that, but I actually kind of liked it.
Marco:
Oh, I hated that so much.
Marco:
That's the one thing, like, I was ranting about this to you privately earlier, but it, oh my god, modern web design drives me crazy.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Because, like, it used to be back in the day of, I don't know, five years ago, not that long ago.
Marco:
It used to be that the most distracting things on a webpage that would make it difficult to read articles were ads all over the sides and top.
Marco:
Now, the most distracting thing about webpages is the content because it's jammed up with all this crazy design, scroll jacking, stuff animating in when you scroll and flying in and everything.
Marco:
It's horrendous.
Marco:
I, like...
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It is so hard for me to read a modern, like, one of these, like, over-designed webpages.
Marco:
Like, it's like these companies have way, way, way too much money and resources devoted to over-producing these articles when the reality is, like, if you would have put Nilay Patel's article into John Gruber's layout...
Marco:
it would have been just as good.
Marco:
It gained nothing from having this giant, overwrought, scroll-jacking, weirdly-loading, distracting, animated garbage all in and out and throughout it.
Marco:
And it wasn't just him.
Marco:
I saw one at Bloomberg that was pretty good by Josh Topolsky.
Marco:
That one also had not as egregious, but similar over-designed issues.
Marco:
I don't know why this is in style right now, but... I can tell you.
Marco:
Don't you remember?
John:
I was trying to remember the term for this, but I think they were... Were they called splash things or entryways or gateways?
John:
I've mercifully forgotten this term.
John:
When you made a site, you had to have a screen that you had to go through to get to the site first.
John:
The splash page.
John:
Designers wanted to show off, and they wanted to...
John:
They wanted to establish their brand.
John:
They were accustomed to the more linear storytelling thing where you have a title sequence in the front of your thing or you have a cover page for a magazine or a book or a title page for a magazine story.
John:
And they said, before anyone gets to my whatever, I want to show them
John:
our awesome logo and maybe it will be animated and maybe we'll be sparkly stars around it not to click through the logo to get through it landing page portal page people are saying anyway i almost don't want to remember this because there was an epidemic and there was there was like a a lot of people who are railing against this zelman was one of them to say this is not how you design the web first of all people can come to your content from anywhere second of all just get to the content right
John:
And that trend went away and people said, you can't do that because it makes no sense.
John:
People don't go through there.
John:
If you try to redirect them to it, just get right to the content, right?
John:
And we had sort of a middle period where things calmed down.
John:
And now, like Marco said, people are able to incorporate all those instincts to show off their brand, to make things that are visually stimulating, to highlight their technical chops, to make a sort of a movie, to turn an article into sort of more of a movie or a slideshow where this trends
John:
It's the resurgence of those landing pages or splash pages only integrated into the article.
John:
I'm going to go one further and say...
John:
I have a theory about why this bothers me specifically, and it's not just the stuff that's in The Verge.
John:
Boy, we're going way off on the watch thing, but I want to talk about this for a while, so much for the tangent.
John:
I'm even annoyed by web pages where when I scroll the web page, basically position fixed in CSS, where anything on the page doesn't move.
John:
you're like what's the big deal about that what about just like a top menu bar like a top navigation bar that stays there when you scroll right or a footer that stays there when it scrolls i'm even annoyed by that because it breaks my it breaks the mental model my mental model of the scroll bar because the scroll bar is on the entire web page content region and yet some things within that region don't scroll the scroll bar is not embedded and embedded scroll bars are
John:
an evil on their own it doesn't really make it better if you put like an iframe in the middle of the page where your article content is and put the scroll bar there i conceptualize a web page and this is you know an old-fashioned notion or whatever but especially when it's a whole bunch of text as a scrollable region and when i move the scroll bar the entire region moves as a piece as if it was yes a printed page i was like well it's not a printed page the web is not print you shouldn't expect it to be like that i don't expect it to be like print in all the ways that you that that you know people mean when they say that like
John:
i want to be able to change the font size i want to be able to make the window bigger and have the text change size i want to have you know responsive design for the images and so on and so forth but when i'm reading a long form article however the thing is rendered doesn't have to be rendered exactly like it would be on paper once i start scrolling it the scrolling model is i move scroll bar content moves right and anything that doesn't move is a violation of that model and it's not so bad when you got a header or a footer but these models are like all
John:
the scroll bar does like dragon's lair the scroll bar just triggers the next animation sequence right you move the scroll bar a certain amount and nothing happens like driving you know an underpowered car you push the gas pedal and nothing happens right and then all of a sudden the giant image that was entirely in the background that wasn't moving slides up and a new one comes in and maybe the text moves but then the background doesn't but then a certain point the background does move and then a new background comes in it's like what and the text fades out and moves up it's like
John:
the model there is paw at the screen until you can see more text and a bunch of crap's gonna get on behind there the scenes that you have no idea has any relation to how you're doing it's just like just make more now i mean apple does it itself on their web pages where you try to scroll and like these mac pro animations are going you just want to get down to the tech spec sections you're not sure if you have to click the dots or scroll more nothing's happening oh wait now it's transitioning this this breaks my model of the way pages looks maybe i'm an old fogey but i feel like
John:
I've seen enough people interact with those pages.
John:
They're not sure what to do either.
John:
And it's like, oh, well, I guess I did something in new text is here.
John:
Maybe I can read it.
John:
It looks cool.
John:
It's interesting.
John:
Apple does it in a tasteful manner, but I just want to scroll and I just want to see the page move.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Even Apple's product pages, though, like when the Mac Pro came out, that was like one of the first ones that really irritated me because it had like those sections you have to scroll between and then wait for the scroll to logically catch up from the JavaScript and everything that scroll jacked everything and then loaded it.
Marco:
And it's like makes it impossible to like
Marco:
If you hit command F to find something in the page you were actually looking for, then everything would break and then it would have to reload.
Marco:
And it was just... I wish people would just keep their brands to themselves.
Marco:
I mean, if these companies that do this... I mean, it's one thing for a product company like Apple.
Marco:
They have different motivations, I guess.
Marco:
It's still not good.
Marco:
But for a content company like The Verge or Bloomberg or any of these big magazines, if they spent half...
Marco:
of the money and resources they spent on those over-designs on actually paying writers and hiring more writers, I think they would see a bigger return and the content would be better.
Marco:
It just seems like a tremendous waste of money to do things that ultimately annoy your readers.
Marco:
And I guess you can look at it and say, well, that kind of looks cool.
Marco:
Yeah, but if you actually try to read the articles, it's miserable.
Marco:
It's full of problems.
Marco:
And what we had before worked great.
Marco:
There was no reason to change it.
Marco:
You know, yeah, update it with the times.
Marco:
Change the font.
Marco:
Maybe, you know, tweet the layout a little bit.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
You can keep it fresh and interesting without making it unreadable.
Casey:
You know, I agree with everything you guys said, but I got to tell you, I actually did kind of like the way the Verge looked.
John:
That's why they do it, because it does look cool and it is interesting.
John:
I think you can incorporate... I can imagine, you know, without breaking the scrolling paradigm, I can imagine a pretty darn flashy thing where there's video going in and when, you know, I'll even allow you to start playing video when I scroll to the region to have it do something interesting, right?
John:
Like, I'm not even opposed to that entirely if it makes for a cool layout, because people do...
John:
find it interesting like it keeps your attention like you know like a jingling keys in front of a toddler like oh you know or just like sitting a kid in front of a tv like oh things are moving things are colorful things are flashy right do those people actually read the articles i mean that's why the top of the article they have the video review which is like you know most people just watch that and feel like they're done but
John:
I feel like it does a disservice to the paradigm of the web when you break scrolling in that way.
John:
Not because scrolling is sacred or anything, but simply because you're inducing a custom one-off mismatch between the user's mental model of how a scroll bar works and how your thing works.
John:
And your thing is going to be different than Bloomberg's thing is going to be different than everybody else's thing.
John:
And it's just...
John:
it's that's that's not good ui design aside from all the other stuff of being is it good branding is it good for traffic dude you know do we a b test these things and see that more people click when we have this crazy scrolling thing like i believe it is possible to do something that's still a noise marco but that is still good ui that's all my argument it's like a
John:
don't you'll never not you know do something flashy that annoys marco but do it in a way that doesn't break people's uh knowledge about how like a scrolling region works in a page in a web page or anything like that it's like breaking the back button
John:
you know it's like it breaks the way people interact with the web or it's like if you tried to move a window you grab the title bar of a window and tried to move it i know people don't do this anymore because they don't understand that windows move but if you did actually try to move a window and instead of the window moving like it didn't move but then all of a sudden it did move when you got halfway across the screen and it like you know like it did that you know the the those things for the mac to do it well but the windows 8 thing where it snaps to fill half the screen or whatever like if it just didn't move you'd be like wait
John:
I clicked and I started dragging and wait, no, now it's moving.
John:
Wait, no, that's what it's like scrolling these things.
John:
You're like, wait, I thought scrolling would make the content move.
John:
But now, wait, no, it is moving.
John:
No, it's fading out.
John:
No, the background is changing.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
Don't do it.
Casey:
So let me ask you guys, let me start with Marco.
Casey:
When the 5K iMac came out...
Casey:
I remember vividly, and I was just looking for it, and I can't find it anymore.
Casey:
They had a picture of a guy in a nature scene, and it was hyper-zoomed in on the guy, and as you scrolled, it zoomed out to kind of indicate how big a 5K image is.
Casey:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Marco:
Yeah, it was in the keynote.
Casey:
Did they put it on the web as well?
Casey:
I'm almost positive it was on the web.
John:
Yeah, I think I recall it being on the web as well.
Casey:
Okay, so let me start with Marco, and then, John, I'd like to hear your two cents.
Casey:
Did you like that as well, or do you also find that to be distasteful?
John:
So at a certain point... You're not Marco.
John:
You're not showing text.
John:
It's not an article.
John:
At a certain point, what you're doing is you have an interactive ad, like a little interactive movie, right?
John:
And you get a lot of leeway if it's like a marketing site and you're trying to demonstrate a feature.
John:
But if I find myself trying to read many, many paragraphs of text that are just a linear series of paragraphs of text from top to bottom, especially something the length of that Verge Apple Watch review, this is not...
John:
a marketing site with two tiny paragraphs of of uh marketing text with a bunch of you know because that's fine like infographics little animations the machine spinning and exploding like i give a lot of leeway leeway for that type of thing but for specifically long form text articles you have to you have to serve that need first and you have a lot less leeway i think to to people are are
Casey:
less comfortable with the idea that this doesn't work like a web page anymore now it's kind of like an interactive advertisement widgety flash whatever thing like a brochure you know so real-time follow-up a few people in the chat uh i think starting with moise have found the page that i was talking about and it is like a hiker explorer guy with his arms in the air and as you scroll down the image zooms way out and you see just how big the the 5k display is
Casey:
And I completely agree with what you guys are saying.
Casey:
Like, I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
But there are times, and this is an example, and I don't know, I really thought the frame-by-frame video on the Verge article, I just think they're really well done and interesting, and I enjoy it.
Casey:
And I know, like, conceptually in my head that I probably shouldn't like these things, but I don't know, I kind of like it.
John:
No, you should.
John:
That's why they put them there, because they're visually attractive.
John:
But I like the iMac site, because the whole point of that site is you're going to look at beauty shots of this thing.
John:
And they're emphasizing one particular part of it.
John:
And the zoom is cool, and it does emphasize the retina part.
John:
Because it's a great example of how do you show people the retina screen when they're probably viewing it on a screen that's not retina?
John:
It's like trying to show someone 3D television, but they're watching it on a 2D TV.
John:
And this is a clever solution.
John:
We're going to show it to you zoomed at 1x pixels on your screen, but then show you how much more there actually is.
John:
in a dramatic way and like this page is mostly pictures and sort of infographics right it's not text i think there's a little bit of a hitch in the middle when you get down to the yosemite section because the image stops scrolling but the text keeps scrolling but then the image catches up again and that's a little bit janky but overall there's like less than a thousand words of text on this like it's probably less than 500 words of text on this page fine uh for the verge thing uh
John:
that's thousands upon thousands of words of text and it impairs the readability of that text and the comfort of reading that text and i get in the situation where i'm afraid did i miss a paragraph did one of the animations scroll something away and i missed an entire section because i didn't realize it because i have no connection between my action with either the page up or page down key or the scroll bar or the scroll reel or my finger swiping or whatever and what's happening on the screen it's very easy to actually miss stuff if they start disconnecting those two things so
Marco:
uh time and a place for everything and you are not wrong to enjoy the cool animated effects you're not wrong to enjoy the video i thought the video was pretty well done as well but it does not serve the needs of the text very well yeah i agree with that and i should point out this the 5k imax site that you're saying is fine the first time i loaded it it didn't load properly and like it like it mostly loaded and i started scrolling and then it popped in and broke and then the thing in the middle where it catches and then scrolls again that broke
Marco:
And it's like, these are assuming, this is like the Facebook designer problem where all these new Facebook apps are so often designed to assume that all your friends are beautiful models with great photography that are always on vacation in California.
Yeah.
Marco:
And with so many of these web designs, it's assuming that it's all going to load immediately and the person navigating it is going to navigate it exactly the way you expect them to and exactly the way you want them to, to stop and see every section.
Marco:
And it's just... Reality doesn't work that way.
Marco:
And the web...
Marco:
To date, the standard web is very adaptable to the way reality works when properly designed.
Marco:
It falls back so that if things haven't loaded fully, it still works for the most part if you do your job right.
Marco:
If you want to jump around, you can do that.
Marco:
If something weirdly breaks or is transformed, or if you're using some kind of assistive technology to actually transform the content or read it in different ways...
Marco:
nothing breaks for the most part.
Marco:
Like, if you do your job right, the web falls back gracefully.
John:
Yeah, graceful degradation does not work very well in these things.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
It doesn't work at all, usually.
Marco:
Usually it breaks horribly, and you're lucky if you can even see any of the content, especially anything that's off the first page.
John:
And these are more like ads because, like, they're optimized for the first-time experience.
John:
But if you want to go back to that page, like this was the Mac Pro page, as you talked about before, is the greatest example.
John:
Like, we all went to it and saw it as, like, you know, whatever, ooh and ah.
John:
But then the next time you go, you're like...
John:
I want to get to the GPU section as fast as possible.
John:
And you can't just take the scroll through them and yank it down to 75% down the bottom of the page because that's, you remember, like the GPU section was near the end.
John:
You can't just do that.
John:
Nothing happens.
John:
You're like, oh, do I have to wait through these animations?
John:
Do I have to click through them?
John:
What do I have to do?
John:
Now you're playing a game.
John:
It's like a puzzle game on iOS where you're like, or it's like you're playing Myst where you have to figure out what do I poke?
John:
Which pixel do I hit?
John:
What do I have to do?
John:
Do I just have to wait here?
John:
You just want to learn about the GPU.
John:
It is not, as soon as you start using it as an informational thing,
John:
There is, you know, it falls down.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Audible.
Marco:
They are the leading provider of downloadable audiobooks with over 150,000 titles and virtually every genre.
Marco:
And they're always adding new titles.
Marco:
So if you want to listen to something, Audible has it.
Marco:
Now, audiobooks are great.
Marco:
I mean, you can listen to them anytime, anywhere.
Marco:
audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook along with a 30-day trial go to audiblepodcast.com slash atp to get your free audiobook once again audiblepodcast.com slash atp now there's a book that we are supposed to have been reading but we haven't yet uh what is that book john for yourself i've been reading it yeah same here
Marco:
Well, I read the first few percentage points of it, but had I been listening to it in Audible, I probably would have gotten further.
Marco:
What book is this, John?
John:
God, is the title becoming Steve Jobs?
John:
I don't even know what the title is.
Casey:
That's right.
John:
It is the latest Steve Jobs biography that has been getting a lot of press.
John:
This is the biography that has gotten...
John:
fairly unprecedented access to apple executives and people who knew steve obviously it doesn't have access to steve himself anymore but it is written by someone who has had a many years relationship with steve as a as a journalist um and the apple executives who did talk uh to this author it's a two author book actually i forget who the other one is
John:
uh, who did talk to him have said, have been saying in the press that they like this biography and that they don't like the Walter Eisen biography.
John:
Anyone who has listened to hypercritical knows that I also don't like the Walter Eisen biography, but I'm also slightly uncomfortable with the idea of, uh,
John:
Apple executives endorsing a biography as being better than some other one.
John:
I mean, I guess it makes perfect sense.
John:
Like if you knew Steve Jobs, like if you actually knew him and you know he's being not well represented by another book and a new book comes out that does represent him well.
John:
it's natural for you to say this is the better one because this is more like the steve that i knew but it's very it's like you know the appearance of impropriety like it's it's a little bit weird to be endorsing a biography because then people might think uh this is just a raw apple is great kind of book i thought i'm only about 10 into this book i talked about it on the episode of upgrade i was recently on with jason snell i talked about the first 10 of the book he has read that jason had read the whole book so he talked about the entire thing and we went back and forth a bit
John:
uh but i am reading it and regardless of whether these two guys read it i'm going to talk about the book when i'm done reading it and i'm going to talk about it on atp so the reason you should get this book an audible is so that you unlike those other two guys hey hey hey hey hey i am like 110 pages in thank you very much i actually bought it on dead trees
John:
oh well that was a mistake probably but uh get all these ios devices all these different screen sizes to choose anyway whatever it takes for you to get if you buy an audiobook you can listen to it while you walk the dog or jog or whatever so that you the listener will have done your homework and when the time comes and i'm by the way a very slow reader so you have plenty of time to do this just go to audible get the free book uh when we talk about it you'll be prepared
Marco:
Perfect.
Marco:
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to start this book or any other one.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Audible for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I really am like 100 pages into that book, so don't lump me in with that Marco character who refuses to do any homework.
John:
He should get the audiobook.
John:
You never read books, do you?
Marco:
No, I read it on my giant iPhone on the plane on the way to Ireland and then promptly forgot to keep reading it once I got there.
John:
I think it gets better towards the end.
John:
Jason was saying that the beginning part, like the authors don't have much firsthand experience.
John:
They just rehash a lot of stuff.
John:
But towards the end, they get all the good interviews and new stuff comes out.
John:
So you should read it or listen to it.
John:
Yeah, I'll get there.
Casey:
Yeah, I have to agree with you, Marco, that the beginning up through around about the time when when Steve got fired, I didn't really care for it.
Casey:
But now I feel like it's getting a little more opinionated, which I like, and it's getting a little more interesting.
Casey:
But it was it was hard to get going for me.
Casey:
So I don't blame you for kind of forgetting to pick it back up.
Casey:
Okay, so now that we started to and then aborted talking about the watch.
Casey:
We tried.
John:
It almost happened.
John:
We're going to do it again.
Casey:
It almost worked.
Marco:
All right, well, that's the end of the show.
Marco:
We'll see you guys next week.
Casey:
Darn it, Marco.
Casey:
I was just going to have to make that joke.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right, so we should probably talk about the watch.
Casey:
I've talked about the lifted embargo in the reviews we've read.
Casey:
So I think we've all read a smattering of them.
Casey:
I've read some of the ones that Marco's read.
Casey:
I've not read some of the ones that Marco's read.
Casey:
John, I assume you've read all the things because you do homework even when we don't want you to.
Casey:
So the interesting thing to me about this, and we were talking privately about it, the three of us with a few other people, and Stephen Hackett said to us, it seems like a lot of the reviews are kind of disappointed a little bit
Casey:
especially about performance.
Casey:
And he had said, and I agree, we should have seen that coming, but it still feels a little bit surprising.
Marco:
That's to me the most worrisome but also unsurprising part because I'm all excited as everyone else is.
Marco:
Oh, which one do I get?
Marco:
And I guess we'll talk about that later.
Marco:
But like, you know, I want to get something that's going to be really awesome.
Marco:
And if I'm going to get like a nice steel one, I'm not getting an edition, but if I'm going to get like a nice steel one, maybe the link bracelet one, like go, you know, go nice and high end on that.
Marco:
I would really want it to be like an amazing thing.
Marco:
And it sounds like, from all the reviews, it's a first-generation device.
Marco:
And yeah, you're right.
Marco:
We shouldn't be surprised by that, but it's a first-generation device.
Marco:
And especially, the things that caught out to me, or that I really noticed, not only does everybody say it's a little bit slow sometimes, which is certainly disappointing, but you can see it in some of the videos.
Marco:
And one of the reviews, I forget which one, it might have been Neelai,
Marco:
Maybe it was Topolsky.
Marco:
One of the reviews said that you can see the air gap between the screen and the cover glass or the cover sapphire.
Marco:
And I saw it in one of the videos, too.
Marco:
And it's very clear.
Marco:
You can see the rectangle outline of the actual screen inside that nice big flat black top.
Marco:
And it does kind of ruin the illusion of this being one seamless thing.
Marco:
And so I look at things like that, like the screen air gap being visible and the slowness people are talking about.
Marco:
And I know also for the slowness thing, watch kit apps, you can see even in the simulator on watch kit apps, you can see that there's some inherent lag in this process of throwing the interface from the phone to the watch over Bluetooth, which is how watch kit apps actually work.
Marco:
That's probably going to be sluggish too.
Marco:
And so it seems like there's this kind of theme of, this is a really cool device with some really cool features.
Marco:
However, it's a little bit slow sometimes.
Marco:
Watch get apps are a little bit slow.
Marco:
And there's a couple of little niggling points, like the visible air gap on the display.
Marco:
So I see all these things, and I think, obviously, speed and display elimination, these are the kinds of things that Apple always improves over time.
Marco:
And so I know that version 2 is going to come out and be significantly better in some of these areas.
Marco:
Because that's what always happens.
Marco:
Probably only a year from now.
Marco:
It's probably not even going to be that far from now.
Marco:
And I think, too, the hardware... So we've all heard the same rumors, I think.
Marco:
The rumors that said that this was supposed to come out last fall.
Marco:
so we're kind of we're like six months later than that you know if that's accurate we're like six months late on on original release when it was shown to the public last fall it sure looked like the hardware was pretty much done yeah yeah it seemed like the software was probably what was holding it up all this time and that's you know as we know from engineering that's that's way more likely to be the case than the other than the other way around it seems like this was definitely like the hardware was fine the software needed more time right not not a big surprise
Marco:
So I kind of think that we might be seeing like half generation old hardware.
Marco:
If they were going to ship this hardware last fall originally, then what's the hardware going to be like next spring, presumably when there's Apple Watch 2 or whatever?
Marco:
I feel like we're going to jump ahead even further than we usually do in the first to second generation migration because we've had that extra six months.
Marco:
So rather than jumping ahead a year, we might jump ahead 18 months.
Marco:
Does that make sense?
Casey:
Yeah, it does.
Casey:
And you very well could be right.
Casey:
And I'm going to give John a chance to talk here in a second.
Casey:
But one of the things that...
Casey:
I was really looking forward to, once I realized today was Embargo Day, was hoping that I could really solidify my plans for what to do.
Casey:
Because I've talked on this show and on Analog about, well, maybe I'll get one, but maybe I won't, which typically in my history means I'm absolutely getting one, but I just haven't convinced myself yet.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, after reading these, I had been hemming and hawing between, you know, maybe I will get a spendy one because, God, that $1,100 one looks so good.
Casey:
The black one?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Or at least it does on screen.
Casey:
Who knows what it looks like in real life?
Casey:
But on screen, it looks so good.
Casey:
And so I'd been flip-flopping back and forth and back and forth.
Casey:
And the one thing that I think I've concluded based on all these reviews...
Casey:
is if I'm going to do it at all, which knowing me, I probably will, I should definitely get a sport because it sounds like I'm going to want to replace this in a year, just like you were saying, Marco.
Casey:
John?
John:
Yeah, I think for both of you who are planning on buying one, I imagine a lot of these early reviews are pushing them to the sport of saying, I had all sorts of plans about which one I was going to get.
John:
I was picking and choosing.
John:
I was matching things.
John:
But now I read these reviews, you know, for tech people who read five reviews about the watch, all of them are thinking, yeah, maybe I'll just go with sport.
John:
uh and you know hedge on bets because you still want one because it seems like it's cool but it's so clear that you're only going to want it for a little while uh a couple things on the watch reviews uh first is that due to knowing a lot of people who have had interactions with the watch um
John:
uh it was nice to see that there's nothing nothing surprising in their reviews if you know people who have gone to the press events who have touched the watches who are you know have experience with them everything that was in their reviews uh everything like sort of uh
John:
objective not like uh how does this fit into my life but like how does the device perform and what features does it have like we knew it already and i think part of that has to do with apple's big press push and this sort of long slow motion rollout where they just release information and you could go into the stores and mess with them you can do all like it was different than boy no one has ever touched one of these things before now i'm going to read about it and learn about it all these stories were all kind of on the same page and are all things that uh
John:
we kind of knew already so that's good to see the one aspect that maybe people who are aren't in as close touch with people who play with the watches might have been surprised about it was a marker just mentioned that they're a little bit slower than people expected and you didn't even see a lot of that even the press hands-on because it wasn't quite as hand-on as you would expect but
John:
The fact that it feels sluggish, I think, is catching people a little bit by surprise for a couple of reasons.
John:
First, that the first iPhone, despite, like, if you go back and look at it now, actually being more sluggish than, say, an iPhone 6, it didn't feel sluggish because...
John:
they had removed everything from that the original iphone except for like the bare minimum like the entire phone was concentrating as hard as it could on doing whatever it is that you just tap with your finger like hardcore it was you know it was like the old mac menu where you hold down the hold down the the button for to pull down a menu from the menu bar the entire machine stood still uh but you had really responsive animation when you were scrubbing through that menu and that was necessary on 128k mac uh it just carried over for way too long because
John:
apple couldn't get a software act together but that whole idea of like version one of this product interactivity above all stop everything else that's going on the machine and just do this one thing and then with the watch because the screen is so small and because it's a version one like there was an expectation i think they would do the same thing that because it's pushing so few pixels and because the watch does so little surely there won't be anything that can happen on the watch that would be sluggish i mean why would it uh but kind of like the you know the iphone sort of
John:
uh pushed back the level of abstraction by having incredibly weak hardware the hardware in in the watch is pretty darn weak i mean people talk about what the s1 might be based on which a series chip it might be based on regardless of which one it's based on it's surely underclocked right compared to what it was in whatever the top end ipad or phone that had the same cpu architecture did
John:
It is a relatively weak CPU and GPU in there.
John:
And unlike the original iPhone, the watch has to do all sorts of stuff.
John:
And that brings me to the second sort of realization after reading all these reviews is that I don't think things are going to get all that much better for the worst experience.
John:
case scenarios of performance when people talked about i launched a watch kit app and i just saw a spinner for a long period of time or lots of waiting screens and a lot of the video reviews you get to see the various waiting screens of the various apps one shows an animation of different modes of transportation one shows a little dot spinner one shows just a black screen sometimes the thing doesn't launch at all
John:
That's an architectural thing where WatchKit apps are really iPhone apps that are sort of projecting their interface onto the phone or interacting back and forth across a wireless connection.
John:
And there's nothing you can really do with either the phone hardware or the watch hardware.
John:
Make them both infinitely fast.
John:
Make them both have huge amounts of RAM.
John:
Make them have incredibly powerful CPUs and GPUs.
John:
If you're trying to do sort of this remote control interface...
John:
you know you're going to be constrained by opening and closing a connection communicating over bluetooth having interference problems because your phone is in your pocket and your your pockets are lined with tinfoil like whatever it is you can't that's like an architectural thing that version two of the phone is not going to fix that what's going to fix that is native phone apps and what's going to make native phone apps more feasible is going to be faster hardware more ram so on and so forth so the problem will fix itself but
John:
this particular model of doing third-party applications by having them projected from the phone onto the watch not literally as in display postscript or anything but like that whole model of two devices cooperating to to work on the ui together that puts kind of a ceiling on how nicely interactive this is and then that insult to injury even on the native apps it seems like in the video sometimes it's like a little stutter with an animation or with a swipe or something like that and i
John:
That could be solved by hardware and software.
John:
That could help.
John:
That could be resolved by a revision to iOS to make things smoother in the same way that they really hammered on smoothly scrolling table views on the original versions of what was then called iPhone OS for the iPhone.
John:
So I think not only is the version one product definitely kind of
John:
not not compromise but like uh well yeah i guess i would say compromise in in more way in different ways than the iphone was because the iphone the original iphone was compromised by having no third-party apps no multitasking no nothing right and so that was their compromise we're going to make the things that we have really responsive and the compromise is you lose all this functionality the compromise for the watch necessarily because of the way it's done and because of the way it interacts with the iphone is we can't sacrifice everything
John:
features and interactivity we have to have apps because it's just like we created the app store age and now we're living in it and we've launched things without apps it would be a big problem so you've got to have apps we got to have them in some way if we can't do native apps right away do this weird watch kit app type thing we've got to have uh wireless communication and things going on in the background because how do you know
John:
you tap a thing on the watch and then we have to tell a thing on the phone to launch maybe the app's not even launched on the app we have to launch the thing and load that code have that code projected display back here and while that's going like that's the that is their baseline functionality and it involves a lot more things going on at the same time than the original iphone did so it's a different set of compromises and i don't think that sluggishness is going to get better until they change and until native watch kit uh apps and what are they going to call i'm not going to call native watch kit apps they're going native watch apps get here
John:
until those get here and those aren't going to really be great until the hardware and software is revised so i would say wait two or three versions because i expect the next version to be the same physical form factor just maybe with a better cpu and a couple other tweaks and some software tweaks and then the third one
John:
that's where you'll get into something that works like they thought the first one was going to do.
John:
But that's true all the time.
John:
People say, we're not slamming it.
John:
That's the true of all of these products.
John:
I don't think anyone is shocked by this.
John:
When you say that, people think you're telling them not to buy an Apple Watch, but...
John:
That was true of the first MacBook Air or the first Retina MacBook Pro, first Retina iMac.
John:
That's how things work in the tech world.
Marco:
As a first-gen product, the things people are citing as issues or shortcomings...
Marco:
are not significantly worse than other first gen shortcomings from other product lines like it doesn't seem like there's like one fatal flaw here or you know one like really big problem it just seems like yeah you know it's kind of slow sometimes certain things aren't that smooth yet you know and some of it will be fixed in software as the software matures some of it will just be hardware limitations that you'll have to buy a new watch for
Marco:
And yeah, I guess we'll see.
Marco:
And I agree that the whole design of WatchKit being this Bluetooth projection with running on the phone back and forth, that is so fragile and complicated.
Marco:
And there's so much inherent latency and weirdness there that we really do have to wait for native watch apps.
Marco:
And it's kind of...
Marco:
It's worth asking.
Marco:
Let's suppose WatchKit apps really don't work very well in reality.
Marco:
Because it seems from the reviews that that might be the case.
Marco:
One of them, I think it was Neel Eye, was really just saying how slow... He seemed like you could take your phone out of your pocket and do it on there faster than you could do it on the watch.
Marco:
So let's assume that WatchKit apps, in reality, are a little bit iffy.
Marco:
Or at least not quite worthwhile.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Do you think people are going to judge the Apple Watch based on WatchKit?
Marco:
And any flaw or shortcoming that WatchKit apps have will reflect badly on the watch and on people's perceptions of the watch as a whole.
Marco:
Do you think releasing WatchKit the way they did now is better overall than if they hadn't released it at all and just said, no third-party apps yet except notifications?
John:
I think it's probably better to do what they did because I think there is a chance that people will get the watch, fiddle with the third-party apps enough to let them know that they're not as useful as they thought they were going to be, but they may still end up with a product whose functionality they're happy with.
John:
I'm not entirely sure that...
John:
the watch loses any value by not being able to have a giant world of applications.
John:
Like I think the core functionality of telling time, doing the fitness tracking, providing a small window into notifications, tapping you, you know, like that core set of functionality is,
John:
may be enough to to make this product worth its value because it is it's a novelty so there'll be something into that and to let people know do do i want to wear a smart watch is there a place for a smart smart watch in my life i don't think the answer to that question hinges on the performance of or even the existence of third-party apps i
John:
it will be nice if they worked and maybe there'll be one or two third party apps that work.
John:
And I think it's important for them to do it because for the one or two things where like, I mostly don't use third party apps, but, but I, I do use, you know, overcast when I go running and I do this, you know, like one or two that work well enough that they're willing to deal with the compromises, having them there adds value.
John:
The fact that a bunch of other apps are flaky or it would be faster to do on your phone.
John:
People will just be like, Oh, I'll just do it on my phone.
John:
Right.
John:
And they'll just move on.
John:
And yeah,
John:
I think this product lives or dies by the functionality that Apple is providing in terms of, is it a thing that people are going to want to do?
John:
And it will be a pleasant surprise, and it will open up new worlds of functionality in the watch when three years from now, third-party apps are really a thing and do interesting stuff and have access to like...
John:
you know the the speaker and the camera that's on the third model and uh the third generation models other stuff like this world will blossom but right now out of the gate i think just the core functionality is enough to uh to set this watch on its way
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think the built-in functionality from day one and this world of apps might even be too much stuff.
Marco:
It does seem, and a number of the reviews mention this, including Eli.
Marco:
I keep talking about his review.
Marco:
It does seem like there's almost a lack of focus.
Marco:
And maybe that's a good thing.
Marco:
Maybe, because this is very much going to have the 80% problem of 80% of the users are going to use 20% of the features, but it's going to be a different 20% of the features for each user.
Marco:
So I see why they gave us so many options of what this thing could do for us.
Marco:
And that also does support the idea of it should support third-party apps.
Marco:
Because what I'm going to do with it is probably going to use four of the built-in functions plus one or two third-party apps.
Marco:
It's not going to be a very large number of things I'm doing with it, but it's going to include at least one third-party app, at least my own.
Marco:
I'm going to use Overcast's app and maybe Clear when I'm shopping for groceries if they have an app.
Marco:
I hope they do.
Marco:
But I suspect the number of apps on the average person's watch is going to be pretty small.
Marco:
The number of apps they actually use is going to be probably certainly under 10 that they actually use on a regular basis.
Marco:
i would say it might even be under five it's i think it's going to be a small number like to me if you look at the watch the the the hierarchy the navigational hierarchy of you know you go through you can see a lot of these in their videos now um and you can see if you if you play with watch kit you can see some of the glance stuff and
Marco:
You can see the hierarchy here so that when you first unlock it, you see the watch face.
Marco:
So that's like environment one is the watch face.
Marco:
And you can get notifications from there.
Marco:
And then you can go to glances from there.
Marco:
And the glances are just in this page interface.
Marco:
You swipe through and you see your glance.
Marco:
And then you can tap on it to open the app or whatever.
Marco:
That's all right there.
Marco:
And then you hit the crown and then you go into the home screen.
Marco:
Then that whole environment zooms out and then you get the home screen, the home honeycomb thing.
Marco:
And then you can launch apps from there.
Marco:
What if the watch didn't have the home screen part of it?
Marco:
What if it was only the watch face with the notifications on top and the glances on the bottom, the way it is now, the whole interface the way it is now, but without a home screen so that the glances were your launchers?
Marco:
I think not only would that be an easier product to navigate, but I think that might even focus it a little bit and help people prune the list of what they want to do to make it easier and lighter weight and take up less space, have fewer things that need to be updated and need to be running and everything.
Marco:
I think that might be a better product, but I don't know.
Marco:
Time will tell once we actually have these things.
John:
I think the other aspect to reading, looking at all these reviews lined up here that we have to keep in mind is when people are reviewing a technology product, it's part of their job to sort of take it through its paces.
John:
They're going to dig into all the menus.
John:
They're going to try all the advertised features.
John:
They're going to evaluate, you know, here's the umpteen things Apple says this can do.
John:
It's good at this one.
John:
It's not so good at that one.
John:
It's going to go through every single one.
John:
That's not how regular people use products.
John:
That's how product reviewers use products.
John:
I think people are going to buy this thing and
John:
you know maybe fiddle around with it a little bit but mostly it'll sort of be like ambient feature discovery when a notification they'll pair it with their phone like when a notification appears they will discover the sort of contact sensitive replying things and how the wheel scrolls through things uh
John:
they'll when they hit that button on the side it will bring up the little you know contact thing and they'll say oh i can i can text my contacts so i can call them from the watch too like they will discover things as they do them but they're not going to go into every single menu and find every single feature and try them all out extensively like people who don't have any interest in fitness tracking may not even know that it's counting their steps because they don't even care like it will be
John:
You know, again, people, smartwatch is not a thing that most people have any familiarity with at all.
John:
They just, regular watches, just look at them for the time.
John:
This is like, all right, well, we're starting from there.
John:
Regular watch, I look at it from the time.
John:
Gruber's Review had a lot of good content concentrating on how well does it fulfill that job.
John:
The answer is not really that well because the screen can't be on all the time.
John:
But I'm sure that will get better as time goes on anyway.
John:
But that's where they're starting from.
John:
Like, well, I can tell time on this watch too.
John:
And it looks kind of nice.
John:
Apparently, you know, the one I bought, I bought the one I thought looked nice.
John:
and also i can get notifications and apparently i can text people oh look i can scribble things too like everything is a bonus above i can tell time on it right i don't think people are going to buy it and be like well it wasn't worth $350 because every single one of the apps that i tried it didn't work to it didn't meet my expectations like they're just gonna they're gonna use a small corner of the functionality slowly revealing itself all the time by the time people even make it at that home screen and get obsessed with like maybe they'll try a few of the apps like oh that didn't work here let me just go back to doing these things
John:
whether they'll regret purchasing it because they think there's not enough functionality i don't know but i i just i feel like people are not going to they're not going to use it like a tech reviewer they're going to use it like a regular person and if you see regular people use their phones even if you give a person an iphone and you don't like say oh you gotta have this apple you gotta have that apple yeah you don't if you don't have like a tech nerd setting it up for them you just give them an empty phone and let them use it it
John:
it may be a long time before they even tap one of the icons that comes on the phone could be months before that happens right that's how regular people use products and all that is you know is in apple's favor here because the longer people take to sort of take the watch through its paces the more equipped apple hopefully will be with its hardware and software stack and potentially its next model of watch to say oh that's actually much better now
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm really curious what to make of all of this because, like I was saying earlier, I feel like my anticipation, which was tempered but enthusiastic nonetheless, I feel like there's been some water poured on that fire and now I'm a lot less sure what I want to do.
Casey:
And
Casey:
i'm pretty darn sure unless i have some sort of epiphany tomorrow that come friday morning whenever it is i wake up i'm not going to be waking up in the middle of the night i think i'm just going to schedule a try on and then see where to go from there because my livelihood doesn't depend on it like marco's sort of does and i don't know if this is if it's really worth jumping in on the first generation and
Casey:
And you could consider all of that claim chatter to use against me in like three weeks.
Casey:
But for now, I'm really not sure what to make of it.
Casey:
And one of the things I wanted to discuss was a few of the more interesting things I've noted or that all of us have noted in these reviews.
Casey:
And one of the common themes I heard was, well...
Casey:
You know, it's being sold as a way to get back to real life.
Casey:
Oh, you can just quickly glance at whatever it is that's just come in.
Casey:
And then you can go back to the things that actually matter.
Casey:
And I was really looking forward to that because I don't have a lot of self-control when it comes to looking at my phone.
Casey:
And I thought, oh, well, maybe I'd be able to glance down at my watch and move on.
Casey:
And a lot of these reviews are saying, well.
Casey:
Maybe not.
Casey:
In fact, to quote Nile, so far, I've mostly used the watch either alone or in an office environment, but it's really different to have a smartwatch in a bar.
Casey:
Here, even small distractions make you seem like a jerk.
Casey:
Sony's trying to describe the project to me and find ways to work together, but I keep glancing at my wrist to see extremely unimportant emails fly by.
Casey:
It turns out that checking your watch over and over again is a gesture that carries a
Casey:
Eventually, Sony asked me if I need to be somewhere else.
Casey:
We're both embarrassed, and I've mostly just ignored everyone.
Casey:
This is a little too much future all at once.
Casey:
Now, in a large way, I think that's kind of a self-created problem, because if you allow all the notifications to come through, then that's what's going to happen.
Casey:
And I think we're going to have to be pretty good janitors and stewards of what...
Casey:
notifications come in.
Casey:
But it was kind of disappointing to me that it seems like the black hole that I'm so tempted to allow myself to get sucked into, it's just moved from my pocket to my wrist.
John:
You should never look for a product to change your habits in that way.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
There is a kernel of truth to that aspect of it.
John:
The kernel of truth is what we talked about when we were first entertaining the idea of an Apple Watch.
John:
What use could this thing possibly have?
John:
And
John:
The core kernel is that it really is much easier, better, lower friction, more convenient to just pick your wrist up to your face and look at something and deal with there than it is to fish your phone out of your pocket.
John:
By now, we are all experts at extracting our phone with whatever hand we prefer from whatever pocket we always put it in, whether that's our pants pocket, our jacket pocket, depending on the weather, whatever.
John:
We're all experts at doing that, right?
John:
But it's a pain right and there's a potential that you could drop the thing when you're trying to pull it out quickly That having a thing on your wrist.
John:
This is this is the big key killer feature of the like it is more accessible It is smaller.
John:
It's lighter weighted.
John:
It's there.
John:
You don't have to do anything.
John:
It's attached to you already You're not going to drop it right
John:
That's the core.
John:
Everything else is people projecting.
John:
Like, now I'm going to be better about, you know, not having notifications and paying more attention to people.
John:
And I'm going to pay attention to my family because I have a phone.
John:
Like, if your idea is that...
John:
you will be able to surreptitiously steal glances at notifications in a way that doesn't annoy people, whereas previously you had to more obviously fish out your phone or do that thing where you put your phone on your thigh and you glance down on it to the edge of the table.
John:
Like, that's you doing that, and you're going to do the same exact things with this thing, and it's just like, wherever you go, there you are.
John:
This device is not going to help you change your life in that way.
John:
But that story spins out from the kernel of truth about, yes, it really is way more convenient.
John:
In the same way that, like,
John:
small changes in screen size can be revelatory with the whole you know small iphone to the big iphone 6 plus and all that like small changes in form factor and i would say a watch is a pretty darn big change in form factor in a very fundamental ways from a little rectangle glass thing you hold can make big differences but you have a separate problem with how you balance people who are not there and their electronic communication with you and people who are there like that is a separate issue
John:
no product is probably ever going to change that for you and you can solve that problem or not with any set of products whether you have a flip phone that you're texting people on or a pager that you're looking at or if you're just daydreaming and you can't pay attention to people because you're thinking about a programming problem in your head while they're trying to ask you what you want for dinner like these are all problems that are does that happen to lunch just this is totally all hypothetical scenarios no no you know no resemblance to real person or events blah blah blah anyway those problems are going to be there no matter what so
John:
You shouldn't feel disappointed that this doesn't solve that problem for you.
John:
And even I would even say the fitness tracking thing as well, like the Fitbit or whatever, like if I get if I get a fitness tracker, it's going to help me exercise.
John:
They do like it can motivate you.
John:
It can gamify things.
John:
Right.
John:
But if your problem is that I had a Fitbit and I use it for a while, but then I got bored and I stopped exercising when I got the Apple Watch, then I'm really going to do fitness stuff because I'll be so excited about it.
John:
It's like if you already traveled that route, like the problem is not the fitness tracker.
John:
The problem is you.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And we're going to see this story unfolding over and over again over the next year of somebody getting an Apple Watch, thinking it will solve their overly distracted by notifications problem, and it just makes it worse or it doesn't have any meaningful improvement.
Marco:
Because this requires a level of presence and self-discipline that if you don't already have it, this is not going to give it to you.
Marco:
First of all, if you're getting notifications constantly, notifications should be meaningful.
Marco:
It should be actions or events that you need to or really want to be notified of immediately.
Marco:
Not something you can check when you have a chance.
Marco:
For example, almost nobody needs to be notified about a Twitter at-reply because that's something you can just check later when you have a chance.
John:
I think framing it the way as, like, need to or want to, like, that's going to be so different for people that it's probably not a useful definition.
John:
What it really comes down to is, are you serving the device or is the device serving you?
John:
Because framing it that way lets people decide for themselves, no, the device is serving me because I really need to know every single ad reply or whatever, right?
John:
You have to be honest with yourself about that.
John:
You have to say, well, like...
John:
i guess what it comes down to is if something happens on one of your electronic devices and you find yourself compelled to address that on those devices no matter what that thing is and you find yourself regretting while you're doing it like that you that you feel compelled that like
John:
You are being torn away from something else that you say to yourself, I would rather not be torn away right now, but I have to because whatever.
John:
Now, sometimes that's a real have to, like you have one of those jobs where your boss can call you at all our hours, in which case you should get a different job.
John:
But for the Twitter at replies, people like turn that on because they rarely get at replies.
John:
But if an at reply comes and they're in the middle of like a meaningful conversation with their spouse and they feel like they have to go get that thing and then their spouse gets angry,
John:
You will regret having gone to look at that notification, even though you set that up yourself.
John:
So at a certain point, you are serving the device like the device has a mastery over your life.
John:
You have given it more power than you really, really want to.
John:
And then you have to start to question like when whatever that thing was happened and I did it like sort of compulsively and instinctively and went to look at it.
John:
Was I being thoughtful about that?
John:
Did I think about the fact that did I weigh the potential importance of that Twitter at reply against what I was doing at this moment?
John:
because just having notifications twitter out replies yeah we it's not for most people i think but just having it in and of itself is a reasonable thing to do especially if you don't get a lot of them but feeling compelled to look at it in a context where if removed from the situation you would say that was a bad call uh now is not a time to look at twitter at mentions but you just do it compulsively that's when you know you have a problem and the way to address that problem is probably to turn off that notification and i think
John:
every individual person had to decide for themselves at what point they feel like the device is now in control of them rather as opposed to them being in control of the device yeah that's a really good way of looking at it and uh now i'm feeling terribly terribly guilty so thanks for the shaming because hopefully this will cause me to reform my ways well it's but i mean like that's why i want everyone to you know judge for themselves like do you feel that don't let other people tell you like you know you know he said don't let other people tell you that you're looking at your phone too much right but
John:
if someone tells you you're looking at your phone too much and you feel bad about it that means you agree with them right because then you know even if it's just like is is your phone making your life worse or better and only you can decide that but if enough people are annoyed at you them being annoyed at you is making your life worse so it's an indirect thing you know what i mean like that's that's how you have to balance this and and i want to get back to the kernel of truth about the phone about the watch being you know having it closer to you
John:
If you have a problem with notifications and electronic balancing with life that's happening in front of your eyes, the watch is probably going to make that worse because it gives you more vectors for the hardware to control you.
John:
If you don't have a problem with that...
John:
the watch has the potential to make it much much better because you're going to be doing the same things you know you're managing your notifications you're not dealing with electronic devices when you don't want to they're not controlling you you're controlling them it's just that one aspect of it now becomes more efficient now you don't have to fish your phone out of the pocket so like say you have 10 notifications during the day if six of them you don't have to fish your phone out of the pocket that's a big win and you think well who cares it's a big win it's like who cares if the phone screen on my phone is like a couple millimeters bigger does that really make a big deal
John:
Small changes like that can make a big difference.
John:
Uh, and that's that's the big win of the watch that like, you know, I think uh Panzerino had the article about uh
John:
giving you time back it will because it will if you take the same interactions you were going to have and make a whole bunch of them way more efficient and faster and like less less unlocking your phone and doing touch id and or entering your code if you don't have touch id and then swiping the notification and blah blah if you just turn your wrist up that is a huge win but if your problem is that your hardware is controlling you now you just took another piece of hardware you just took another eel and slapped it onto your wrist and brought our kind of line parlance and that's just going to make your life worse not better
Marco:
He didn't quite use that metaphor correctly, but I'll let it go.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Any other interesting bits that came from the review?
Casey:
The only other one that I saw was on Gruber's review.
Casey:
He was extremely effusive about the sport band, and I'll read a small segment here.
Casey:
The sport band is a downright revelation.
Casey:
I'd go so far as to call it the most comfortable watch band I've ever worn.
Casey:
I've rolled my eyes at Apple's use of fluorolastomer in lieu of rubber to describe the material of these bands, but it truly does have a premium, rich, supple feel to it.
Casey:
The way the end of the band tucks under the other side of the strap, a design Mark Newsom first used at Ikepod, is brilliant.
Casey:
Up until now, it struck me as odd that the $10,000 edition models came with the same bands as the entry model 349, 399 sport watches.
Casey:
Having worn it, it now strikes me the other way around, that the 349, 399 sport watches are equipped with straps that can genuinely be described as luxurious fluoroelastomer or not.
Casey:
That was pretty surprising because I have tried to dig and figure out from people who may have, you know, had one of these on at one point or another, whether or not the sport band was any good.
Casey:
And that seems to be...
Casey:
Nobody has said, oh, my God, it's the best.
Casey:
A lot of people have said no.
Casey:
And a lot of people have said, yeah, it's pretty good.
Casey:
But this was like really exciting.
Casey:
John was really excited about it.
Casey:
And that surprised me.
Casey:
And I don't know if you guys had any interesting thoughts to add on that.
Marco:
I've also been poking around with anybody who I can find, and I've heard all-over-the-map responses.
Marco:
It really does seem very polarizing.
Marco:
Some people just hate it.
Marco:
Some people love it.
Marco:
Some people think it feels good but looks bad.
Marco:
I've heard the entire range.
Marco:
It just seems very polarizing.
Marco:
I think this is going to be the case with a lot of the bands.
Marco:
And part of the reason why I've had such anxiety trying to figure out what the heck to pre-order at 3 a.m.
Marco:
if I do that, because like you got to basically pre-order something and then before you can even try it, then go try it and then maybe cancel or modify your order if you change your mind.
Marco:
And then who knows if there's going to be a four to six week delay on shipping, as some rumors say.
Marco:
I don't want to be without a watch for a while as people are getting my app and telling me all the ways it's breaking.
Marco:
So it is tempting to pre-order something at 3 a.m.
Marco:
And I don't really know which one yet because, again, the bands are going to be just all over the map with personal preference.
Marco:
Some people are going to think certain ones are ugly that other people think are beautiful.
Marco:
Some people are going to... You're going to think something will be good until you actually try it and then realize, oh, this either doesn't look good on me or I don't like the way it feels or I don't like the way it works or whatever.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It's going to be all over the map.
Marco:
I think we're not going to get a major consensus on banned opinions because it is really so up to personal preference.
Casey:
Yeah, I tend to think you're right.
Casey:
John, anything to add?
John:
Yeah, just the people... You would think that wrists are generally the same shape, right?
John:
You would think, oh, well, all that matters is maybe amount of arm hair or something like that.
John:
But in my experience, as someone with very strangely shaped wrists...
John:
Just variations in bone structure of the wrist can make one type of band so uncomfortable that it is not feasible.
John:
Or it can make one type of band feel really good.
John:
And so I think Marco's right that, like any watch, the fact that they have a million bands is good because...
John:
Some bands are going to look really good, but be uncomfortable or the opposite.
John:
And that's why I think for people who are thinking of buying one, you should probably try them on just to make sure because not only are these bands differently designed than a lot of watch bands that I've seen, but also...
John:
especially for if women are used to wearing a woman's watch which are very with a very thin band all these bands are pretty wide and the same type of uh strap that you liked on a when you had a very thin band you might not like that same material when it's thicker it might sit differently on your wrist and of course the watch itself is much larger than some ladies watches are like the even the small one it's a big rectangle of metal so by all means everybody please go to the store and try these on
John:
and spend some time with them.
John:
And the best, of course, is to find a friend who's an early adopter who bought their site unseen and try theirs on, because then maybe you can use it for like a day or a couple of hours instead of just trying it on for a few minutes in a store.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Any other thoughts on the watch reviews?
John:
If I was going to write a review of this, the angle that I would take is relevant to this whole, the idea of like a launch and the launch excitement.
John:
So the way Apple framed this, and Gruber mentioned this as well, is like,
John:
That slide they had about like, well, big revolutions in products.
John:
We had like the original Mac and the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad and the watch is the next one.
John:
And you see that grouping and it seems like a reasonable grouping of things.
John:
And they were talking specifically with the input methods of like the mouse and the click wheel and the iPod and the touch screen.
John:
and now the digital crown or whatever.
John:
Um, but I think the watch is more derivative than any of those.
John:
The reason the phone was so technology and input wise, the reason the phone was so exciting was because it was the, you know, it was a confluence of several events.
John:
It changed the form factor, made the phone all screen.
John:
What it put on that screen was a touchscreen that wasn't actually annoying to use.
John:
Like it was, it was a, you know, a genre defining interface.
Yeah.
John:
And so people were just excited about it because it was like the future.
John:
It's like, what is this crazy thing?
John:
I've never seen anything like this.
John:
You know, the famous story about the other phone makers thinking all the demos were faked because there's no way they can make a real thing like this.
John:
Like it was amazing.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's why the iPhone launch was big because people were just blown away by the tech and
John:
And it was just something they had never seen before.
John:
Incredibly radical and new.
John:
And even, you know, it was ridiculously priced.
John:
It was singular only, like it was a slow sales burn.
John:
But there was huge amounts of excitement about, you know, the whole snarky thing of calling it the Jesus phone, right?
John:
With the watch...
John:
touchscreens are not that new uh ios we've seen the app paradigm as you know we understand that in many respects it looks like a differently sized iphone that you can strap on your wish and more importantly wrist and more importantly it looks like other smart watches yeah it's a screen thing with a band around it looks like a watch there have been a bunch of other ones of those um
John:
there's not as much excitement in terms of everyone's got to be there uh you know on day one to get this thing at launch and i i what i'm saying is i don't expect i don't think this is going to be as big a bang pr wise launch wise as the phone was i'm it'll probably sell more than the phone just because apple is so much bigger now or whatever like but i think this will be a slow burn is what i'm getting at um and
John:
And it's because it doesn't have the it's not such a radical break as the other ones.
John:
The Mac was a big thing is like this crazy computer with a mouse and the graphical interface and bitmap displays and like just so much new all at once.
John:
I think the watch will be more like the iPod where it's like, oh, it's an MP3 player.
John:
I've seen those before.
John:
What's the big deal about this MP3 player?
John:
Oh, no, this is an MP3 player like the wheel.
John:
yeah it's a wheel i guess how does that change things what you know and it was like well you don't understand it changes things because we've got the hard drive and the firewire loading and the interface the integration with itunes and eventually we're gonna have the store and like it's a big story you don't see the whole picture now but eventually the ipad is going to be a big deal but the ipad was a slow the ipad the ipod was a slow burn right the watch is going to be like that well it looks like a smart watch kind of like the iphone i understand you got a little dial in there so what i guess you'll probably have apps but
John:
what you know what's the big deal and if all goes to plan this will be a you know the i think the launch is going as well as apple could have hoped it was and people are going to try them on and sort of come in and there'll be a big sales day or whatever and it's just it's going to have to gain momentum and build it's not going to be as big of a pr bang as the mac or the iphone was and i
John:
hopefully the press and the public will give the watch time to grow into what apple thinks it can be uh because if they like marco said before if they sour on it because of a bad version one it's much worse to have to dig yourself out of the hole the momentum of the the phone was such that even though the first one was kind of cruddy in retrospect the momentum was just so huge that it just carried us through the 3g 3gs and by the time people started really paying attention the phone was actually good right
John:
uh the watch may not have that luxury because the scrutiny is higher but i fully expect the watch to to reveal itself slowly to customers rather than to be a gigantic bang out of the gate and these reviews these crop of reviews for the first version fit into that idea of the watch revealing itself slowly
John:
because I feel like it's revealing itself to these reviewers slowly as well.
John:
And it will, you know, maybe this one, the version one won't, you know, I think these reviews are all accurate.
John:
They're an accurate reflection of the version one product, but I don't think that that reflection says much about the future of this product line as a, as a thing inside Apple.
Casey:
All right, so before we go, I have already spilled the beans and told you that I'm intending, as I sit here tonight, to simply schedule a try-on appointment and then regret not having pre-ordered one as I fall in love with the watch.
Marco:
What you've told us so far is that is everything from you're not getting the first version to you're getting the sport version to you're getting the black link bracelet, which is the highest end one that's not ridiculously gold.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And and the one that I'm sticking by is I'm going to make a try on appointment and see how I feel.
Casey:
But you're getting the link bracelet.
Marco:
hmm i hope not because god even though i am such a sucker for the look of it i think first gen is that's that's aggressive you might be able to reuse the bracelet with the next gen maybe yeah and that's that's an interesting point like that but the problem is that's still just a maybe or like that that's a pretty big problem i'm just trying to uh bring casey into uh his link bracelet destiny
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I mean, the reality is, Casey, when there is one that you really, really want, I think you should get the link bracelet.
Marco:
The question is whether this is that one.
Marco:
And I think that's where we're all hesitating.
John:
It's definitely not that one.
John:
You know, everybody knows this is not that one.
John:
It can't be.
John:
It can't possibly.
John:
It's the first version.
John:
You absolutely positively know this is not going to be like...
John:
You're not going to get this and be super happy with it for five years.
John:
Guaranteed, like you specifically, Casey, are not going to be super happy with this for five years.
John:
Because in five years, can you imagine how much better this watch is going to be?
John:
You're going to know how much better it is.
John:
And you're going to be looking at your old cruddy thing going, uh... So, yeah...
Marco:
Just, yeah, that's not going to happen, so buy accordingly.
Marco:
But at the same time, though, it's a balance.
Marco:
This is a fashion item, and many of us, myself included, Casey, I think you too, John, we'll see, but many of us, the fashionability to ourselves is important.
Marco:
To me, and I think, Casey, please let me know, but I bet you'll agree that
Marco:
it's less about how it looks to other people and more about how it looks to us, how it makes us feel.
Marco:
And so with a watch, with something like this, a lot of tech geeks like us are going to just go with the sport because it's cheapest and it does the same things as the other ones, and that's fine.
Marco:
Or they want to wait until version 2, and that's fine too.
Marco:
I still might go with the sport.
Marco:
We'll get to that in a minute.
Marco:
I'll see what happens.
Marco:
But you can't deny that a big part of the appeal of these devices at all –
Marco:
is the way they make you feel about seeing it on your wrist.
Marco:
And so I think you have to balance that with the realities of the technology and the realities of this being the version one.
Marco:
You shouldn't get something that you're going to really not like wearing.
Marco:
But at the same time, you should be cognizant of the fact that you're probably going to be replacing it in two years, say, or possibly less.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
And I think you guys both hit the nail on the head that if I was convinced that I was going to just fall in love with this device, leaving aside the aesthetics of it, but I knew I'm just going to freaking love this thing, then I would probably get the ridiculously expensive, what is it, space black, something black.
Marco:
Yeah, space black link bracelet with $1,100, right?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
If I was convinced that I was going to love this device, I would have to think long and hard about whether or not I really want to spend over $1,000 on this thing.
Casey:
But I would do it because I think it would make me happy every time I look down at my wrist.
Casey:
And Marco, you hit the nail on the head.
Casey:
The problem I'm having, though, is I'm getting less and less convinced that I'm going to really fall in love with this device.
Casey:
And if I'm not going to fall in love with the device, and if I were to get one at all, which I'm still telling myself is questionable, even though it probably isn't, then why not get a Sport and so I don't regret it down the road?
Casey:
Now, with that said, Marco, what's your plan?
Marco:
My plan changes like every day.
Marco:
Oh, that sounds familiar.
Marco:
Because as the new information comes out or as I think about some other consideration, like, oh, wait a minute, what about... My worries here, as somebody who has not worn a watch for 20 years, primarily for comfort and convenience.
Marco:
And so comfort includes both the weight and the type of band.
Marco:
And then convenience includes how easy is it to take on and off and the sizing that goes along with that.
Marco:
So like I said a number of times earlier, my ideal band would be one that is fixed in size so that I set it however fits me best.
Marco:
And then I can attach it and detach it without that size changing.
Marco:
So I don't have to like find my size every time I put it on and off.
Marco:
The only bands that do that are the Modern Buckle, which is too small for me, and the Link Bracelet.
Marco:
From that point of view, the Link Bracelet is tempting, because I think it'll be really convenient, because you're going to be taking this thing off every night, and possibly, if you're going to submerge your hands for some reason, you could take it off then.
Marco:
You're going to be taking these things on and off a lot.
Marco:
possibly more than other watches, depending on what your habits are with other watches.
Marco:
But either way, it's going to be going on and off a lot.
Marco:
So you want it to be as unannoying as possible during that process.
Marco:
So with that said, I think the link bracelet would be the ideal choice for that.
Marco:
However, I also am worried about comfort as a non-watch wearer and weight wearer.
Marco:
Uh, I'm worried.
Marco:
I kind of run hot compared to other people, I guess.
Marco:
So I'm worried about sweatiness and I'm worried about, um, just feeling really heavy.
Marco:
The link bracelet is the heaviest one.
Marco:
That's not an addition.
Marco:
I worry about that.
Marco:
Uh, and I also, again, like you, I don't want to have spent $1,100 on this first generation watch that
Marco:
And then in a year or at most two years, a much better one comes out.
Marco:
And then this thing is worthless.
Marco:
And I look back and I'm like, I was such a fool for spending that much money on version one.
Marco:
So, and also, you know, you got to figure out like, you know, from a non-watch wearer's point of view, there are other considerations.
Marco:
For example, if you ever type on a laptop, metal watches click against the wrist rest.
Marco:
It's not a wrist rest.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
The wrist area below your wrist that is made of metal that many people rest their wrists on, you can scratch the heck out of one of those things with a metal watch.
Marco:
It at least clicks and is very annoying.
Marco:
If you're resting your arm on a hard surface, a desk or a table, it can click there with metal.
Marco:
And you can get used to it over time like a wedding ring, but it's still like you will be clicking a metal thing against a surface a lot.
Marco:
Every single band they offer has something on the bottom.
Marco:
Even the sport band has a metal pin on the bottom that will hit whatever surface you're near except the leather loop.
Marco:
Every other one has something like that.
Marco:
So that is a concern as well.
Marco:
You know, sweatiness concerns.
Marco:
That's one of my worries with the fluoridastomer band is sweatiness.
Marco:
Having that rubber there, you know, against my skin, I think that would be a problem.
Marco:
And, for me, having all those considerations, the three that I'm considering finally are the Milanese loop, the leather loop, and the link bracelet.
Marco:
The link bracelet, I have basically ruled out for cost reasons.
Marco:
I also, like, other people love the way they look.
Marco:
To me, I don't have any association with that except for older men.
Marco:
Like, older men always seem to have watches with link bracelets.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't care either way on them.
Marco:
So I look at link bracelets and they kind of look old-fashioned to me.
Marco:
And because of the weight and the price as well, I'm ruling that out.
Marco:
And Milanese versus Leather Loop, they're very similar.
Marco:
Just one's made of metal and one's leather, really.
Marco:
They work the same way, basically.
Marco:
And I think between those two, I think I'm going leather loop because I believe it will be more comfortable on me, even though it might be slightly sweatier, but I think it'll be more comfortable.
Marco:
I think it will probably look better on me because I really dress very casually and the Milanese is a little bit formal.
Marco:
So I dress very casually.
Marco:
I wear a black t-shirt and jeans most of the time.
Marco:
So I think black leather loop, and sorry for this massive discussion, but this is actually all the thought I put into this.
Marco:
So anyway, what I will be pre-ordering will be the 42 black leather loop, and I'm going stainless steel.
Marco:
So one of the options that I could do instead, get one of the sport watches and then add a leather loop band separately for $150 more.
Marco:
You can do that with any of the bands except for the black link or the editions.
Marco:
And that would cost about $150 less if I did that.
Marco:
The problem is, I think, what I said earlier about balancing, how much will I be happy looking at this thing on my wrist?
Marco:
How much am I going to want to wear this thing as a fashion item versus not wanting to spend too much on Generation 1?
Marco:
I think the sport, I'm just not going to feel good about.
Marco:
I don't look at the sport and say, wow, I want that on my wrist.
Marco:
I just don't.
Marco:
That applies to both the bands and the appearance of the watch body itself, even though it would be lighter.
Marco:
I think the maximum comfort option for people who are very concerned about comfort, the maximum comfort option, I believe, will be the sport.
Marco:
And even if you don't like the sport band...
Marco:
then get a sport watch and get the leather loop.
Marco:
And you're still coming in cheaper than the steel with leather loop.
Marco:
And it's going to be lighter.
Marco:
But for me, to strike that balance between what I actually want to see on my wrist, what I actually think will look good on me, what I will be proud to wear, but not having spent too much money on it, I like the 42 steel leather loop black.
Casey:
That was meandering, but I hear you and it makes sense.
Casey:
And I'm with you.
Casey:
Now, John, as the hairiest of the three of us, who is probably most concerned about the status of your arm hair, what is your intention?
John:
well it would be nice if apple would just send me one to review and i would talk about and i would talk about it on the uh the show because like i'm not a watch why are you the only one i would like one too you guys are going to buy one anyway they don't need to send you one but i'm i'm not they have to woo you yeah i'm not a watch wearer i don't wear watches i'm really curious about about this device you have to get it because you're making an app for it like you have to get right um but
John:
i'm curious about the device i'm curious if this can make me wear a watch but it's very likely that if i were to get one it would end up in a drawer right like i would that it would not take there would be like i would try it out i would understand the experience it's providing and i would say you know what i still don't like ever wearing anything on my wrist uh because i don't generally like wearing things this is why i don't wear something on my wrist but i'm i'm willing to believe that this could change my mind about that so if i did get one i
John:
I think I would just have to get the cheapest possible one because I have no faith in this thing being a long-standing thing.
John:
I know the next versions are going to be better.
John:
I don't want anything that's sluggish.
John:
It's actually worse.
John:
If I did end up really liking the watch, like, oh, this is really now an integral part of my life for whatever reason, I would regret even more getting the crappy model.
John:
Yeah.
John:
or the fact that the version one is crappy i would be like man if i knew that the watch was going to be such an important part of my life i should wait till version two or version three hell i waited for the iphone six to get an iphone right and i probably would still be getting ipod touches if i had like i'd
John:
i just don't entirely see the place this fits into my life but because it's an interesting gadget i would like to play for it play with it for a week so it would be ideal if apple would send me one and then i would play with it for a week and then guilt-free when that week is over send it back to apple and say i've gotten the apple watch experience at the end of that experience i'll either know that i should go out and buy the sport model because i really like this watch and i'll buy the cheapest one now and i'll get a version two
John:
or i would know that i should go out and buy the sport model because that model is actually going to be sufficient for my needs and i could use it for a long period of time there's pretty much no world in which i pay a thousand bucks for one of these things uh without knowing first that it's and there's no way because i know that it's it's like sluggish and doesn't quite you know it's a version one product there's no way i can justify spending a thousand dollars on it even though i really hate the look of the sport models i don't like the
John:
the sort of non-shiny aluminum i don't like the fluorescent bands the fluorescent fluorescent or whatever it is fluorescent bands i don't like the colors i don't like the white the black is the only one i can tolerate i don't really like the sport band i have wrist shape and hair concerns like it just
John:
it's just you know i'm almost it's almost like i would buy the thing take off the straps and then like use it as a pocket watch or it's like the world's tiniest ipod you know i guess you have to strap isn't that an iphone oh no you know what i mean like i just i just not a watch guy i don't know so right now i really especially if you two get them i feel like we'll have the show cover that you guys can talk about them and i can you know i'll go to the store and i'll play with them but
John:
man i really don't see myself getting one of these although i would definitely like to play with one for a week so that's that's the situation i find myself in if i do get one it's going to be the cheapest possible one and then i look at the cheap ones i don't even know what the heck i would get i guess the gray aluminum with black which i don't find attractive at all but at least it's not day glow green or white or i don't know i really do like the stainless steel ones as a little piece of uh as a little piece of sculpture still wouldn't want it on my wrist but i think those look the nicest
Casey:
All right, so in summary, I definitely won't be getting the 42mm black link bracelet.
Casey:
Marco definitely will be getting the 42mm stainless steel with the black leather lube.
Marco:
Well, hold on.
Marco:
I said I would be pre-ordering that one, but that's going to be before I have a chance to try any of them.
Marco:
So I might change my mind, but I don't think so.
Marco:
I bet this is going to be the one I end up with.
Casey:
And John definitely, and when I say definitely, I really mean it this time, won't be getting the 42mm space gray sport.
John:
And I haven't even seen these watches in person either, by the way, in any context.
John:
Nor have I. I will look at them at the store in person.
John:
It could be that maybe I'll be won over by something that I think is ugly in pictures or vice versa.
John:
Either way, no plans to buy one.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Now, I think it would be silly of me not to ask, are our spouses looking into buying them?
Casey:
And I can tell you that Aaron is completely uninterested in every plausible, impossible way.
Casey:
So, Marco, what does Tiff think?
Marco:
um she is is interested in general in the concept but uh not that excited about version one and she she knows see she's playing it smart she said like she knows version two is going to be way better and so she she is going to wait she does she really actually doesn't want version one and she also has a little bit of skepticism about whether she wants to wear a watch at all because she also right now doesn't uh we are a watchless family right now
Marco:
So so she's going to at least sit out version one as far as she knows so far.
Marco:
And of course, you know, look, all of our opinions could change, you know, maybe once we see them, things will be different.
Marco:
But right now she is saying wait for version two.
John:
Well, version three, though, because like you imagine, do we agree that version two will have the same case as this?
Marco:
No, you don't think so.
Marco:
The iPad 2 didn't have the same case as the iPad 1.
Marco:
The iPhone 2 didn't have the same case as the iPhone 1.
Marco:
I know, but I think of the watch specifically.
John:
I mean, with the exception of possible changes to the error gap, I expect the second version, especially if it comes, like you said, as early.
John:
You know, if you consider this a six-month-delayed product, I think that the next version of this watch will...
John:
externally look more or less the same and just have an upgraded cpu and maybe a slightly better slash different screen and come out fairly shortly after this one that's that's my prediction there so if that's the case version three of the watch is the one you want because you're hoping at that point it slims down or it has a different look i guess it depends on how much you like this look
Casey:
See, I think that the next one, version two, will retain the same connections for the bands, but I think its physical dimensions may change.
Casey:
So it'll be a little thinner, but the bands will remain functional on the new one, on the second gen.
John:
They could shave a few millimeters if they did the screen lamination, I suppose.
John:
And in that case, it wouldn't strictly be exactly identical, you know, like that it would actually be thinner, but not, but like the same, same little Airstream trailer, same number of buttons, same digital crown design, like the whole, you know, that it would be recognizably the same watch.
John:
yeah maybe i i i don't i i wouldn't really bet confidently either way all right and then john what is tina planning i tried to pitch her on it like because it's it's better for me if i can convince someone else that they like they really want that like if she was super excited about it by all means we would get whatever one she's super excited about as long as it's not gold obviously um
Casey:
uh and then she would be the guinea pig and be like what do you think how is this working you know blah blah and i wouldn't have to have something on my wrist but she is not excited about it so she's not getting one either so only two of the six of us are getting one i i i'm not admitting it to myself and you're probably right but sitting here now no it's only you oh you're you're definitely getting one you know i think the only question is which one yeah we'll see remind me of all of this in like two weeks
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Igloo, Audible, and Hover, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it in
Marco:
I have no doubt that the best-selling one among nerds...
Marco:
Listeners of our show, among listeners of any tech podcast, possibly among listeners of any podcast, and definitely among attendees of WWDC this year, will be the 42mm space gray sport model with the black band.
Marco:
We're going to see a million of those things among people we know.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you're probably right, because of the sport, I think the Space Gray is far and away the best-looking one.
John:
They just sound like little inert ones, kind of like the empty... What were they?
John:
The empty Lifesavers iMac cases?
John:
Do you remember those?
John:
Like CompUSA?
John:
When the iMac came in a whole bunch of colors, they gave retailers empty iMac cases with no guts inside them, but just the case themselves to see what the different colors look like.
John:
I would like a watch that is a strap, the case, the glass...
John:
but nothing inside it.
John:
No screen, no internals, right?
John:
Just so you could have it on your wrist, occasionally, like, fiddle with the dial.
John:
I guess they would still have to have the dial connected to something or whatever.
John:
Press the button.
John:
Maybe they'd leave a vibration engine in there, too, and it would also occasionally vibrate, but nothing, you know, it doesn't actually function.
John:
Just to get you used to the idea of like, do you want something on your wrist?
John:
Because that's what I need.
John:
I need like a training bra for watches.
John:
I need something to get me used to the idea or whatever the equivalent is in like horse bridles or whatever.
John:
Someone who knows someone who plays polo can tell us all about it.
John:
Like just something to put on and get me used to the idea that something is going to be gripping my wrist.
John:
And if I get used to that, then maybe I'll pay the extra money to get the fully functional version.
Casey:
I find it a little weird that you're so stressed out.
Casey:
Both of you are so stressed out about having something on your wrist because I was a watch person for forever.
Casey:
And I gave it up for years.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you how many.
Casey:
I'd say maybe four or five years I gave it up.
Casey:
Probably more than that, actually.
Casey:
And I didn't wear a watch.
Casey:
And when I started wearing a watch...
Casey:
again which was maybe a year or so ago at first i was like oh god what is on my wrist and that lasted like two days and that was it and then suddenly i was extremely happy about having a super convenient timepiece right on my wrist so i john your your hair challenges aside i think that you're overblowing a bit you're overblowing a bit how difficult it is keep in mind that i don't even wear my wedding ring anymore and
John:
I wore my wedding ring for years after getting married.
John:
And you're right.
John:
You do basically get used to it.
John:
Eventually, I got unused to it again.
John:
And even the wedding ring went off.
John:
So, like, this type of thing where you do kind of get used to it, but it is still kind of slightly inconvenient and occasionally snags on things and occasionally pulls an arm hair and you got to, you know, remember it and deal with it.
John:
That's the type of thing that I say that I...
John:
i have antibodies against that that i will eventually say you know what yes it's not a big deal that i have my wedding ring all the time yes it's a very comfortable ring it's fine but every once in a while it annoys me so why am i doing this and so no i don't wear my wedding ring and i you know it this watch would have to earn its place to my wrist by doing something useful for me um i'm not even entirely sure that my phone has earned its place because if they honestly speaking if they continue to update the ipod touch i would probably still be buying them
Casey:
Now, when you go out, do you feel naked if you don't have your phone on your person?
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
Okay, now what about you, Marco?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
When I go walk the dog, I don't bring a wallet or usually any kind of keys or anything.
Marco:
No cash, no identification, but I bring my phone.
Marco:
I feel okay leaving the house without a wallet, on foot at least, but I would not leave without my phone.
Casey:
Yeah, see, and I think that, well, John is John, but Marco, I think that you will come to that point with the watch very quickly, much quicker than you expect.
John:
If it does something useful for you.
John:
I mean, like, think of all the times you saw me before I got my iPhone 6.
John:
It's not like I was carrying my other cell phone with me most of the time.
John:
It's like I didn't... A phone... I didn't care.
John:
I have to... Well, you were hiding it from us.
John:
Well, no, but like I was... How many times did you see me take or make a call on that phone?
John:
Most of the time, it wasn't with me.
John:
It wasn't with me.
John:
It wasn't doing anything.
John:
It would only be with me at like...
John:
Like that little thing you keep in the pocket by your door to break the glass in case your car goes off into the water.
John:
Like it's only there for emergencies.
John:
It's not there to actually be used or it doesn't have a place in my life.
John:
I have to remember to bring my wallet with me so I don't get, you know, pulled over and not have my license.
John:
Right.
Right.
John:
I travel light, and the watch, it has the advantage that I guess I would have to strap it to myself in the morning, and it would just always be with me, but I can imagine forgetting to do that and getting to work and going, oh, another morning I forgot to put on my watch, that thing that I bought for $300-something that I still haven't found to use for.