One Magical Wire
John:
I'm back
John:
You talking about your stupid cup thing that weevils wobble but they don't fall down technology is employed in.
John:
Yep.
John:
And I think you're kind of missing the point.
John:
The point is not to get a cup that if you knock it over on top of your computer will hopefully through the design of the cup not have any liquid fall out or some magical cup that is impossible to knock over that you could hit it with an oncoming freight train and this cup would not tip over.
John:
All of those things are fixing the problem in the wrong way.
John:
You have to accept the fact that the cup will tip over and spill water out.
John:
Even if you think your cup A won't tip over, B won't spill liquid.
John:
Just accept that both of those things, it's like servers.
John:
Servers will fail.
John:
Hardware will fail.
John:
Just accept it.
John:
And then build a system where when your cup falls over, starts dripping liquid, explodes, whatever.
John:
that the liquid what was that that was not the cup don't worry i'll show you in a second all right that the liquid that does come out will fall down with gravity away from your computer which is up higher than it so this is the system i implore you to get going on so i'm going to uh i'm going to tweet at at you too because i don't want to make a public a public public tweet
Casey:
um a picture of my setup at mom and dad's and let me show you something that will make you even more excited over my setup uh here at mom and dad so give me just a moment
Casey:
So is that what you mean, John?
Casey:
Put it up above the computer so it spills directly onto the computer?
Casey:
That's the idea?
John:
That's not it.
John:
That's kind of the worst setup I've ever seen, I think.
John:
I like the fact that you have to reach across both your microphone and the computer to get to the cup.
John:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
No, I put that there just temporarily.
Marco:
Why don't you maybe tie the microphone cable around the base of the cup?
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
No, I did that just temporarily just for you.
John:
Anyway, my point is don't put your faith in weird cups.
No.
Marco:
By the way, I love that we kick John out of the show for one episode and he goes and forms two new podcasts.
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
What do you mean two new podcasts?
John:
I didn't form two new podcasts.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
Robot or not?
John:
Oh, that wasn't when I was... Whatever.
John:
The timelines are all messed up.
John:
All these things happened way before last episode.
Casey:
All I'm saying is apparently it takes two podcasts, one with Merlin Mann and one with Jason Snell to equal the awesomeness that is ATP.
Marco:
Yeah, Reconcilable Differences is the other one.
Marco:
That's the one that launched today on Relay, which is awesome.
Casey:
Which actually, all snark aside, is unbelievably good.
Casey:
I am stunned at how unbelievably, well, I'm not really that surprised actually at all, but it is really, really, really good.
Casey:
And I absolutely love the first episode.
John:
Yeah, me too.
John:
Both of them are interesting and exciting and are using innovative scheduling technologies to fit themselves into my schedule.
Casey:
Yeah, I am genuinely surprised that you signed up for doing even one new podcast regularly, let alone two.
Casey:
Although my understanding is you've kind of cheated the system with Robot or Not a little bit.
John:
all of this like atb is the standard one every week we show up we record it goes out you know that's what people expect but the other ones are done in creative ways to fit into all of our schedules we're all busy people but we want to do new and interesting things and they're not podcasts about tech uh so it gives me an outlet aside from the incomparable which i continue to do to uh talk about non-tech stuff
Casey:
excellent all right so um we should probably do a little bit of follow-up and i might have skipped over a little bit that you might want to talk about john so feel free to take it away well now it's probably it's probably too late right we don't have to talk about it no it is not too late although you
John:
You skipped over a bunch of stuff last time, and you guys were so busy, like, patting yourselves on the back for getting through follow-up all fast.
John:
But look at the timestamp when you end follow-up.
John:
It was the same amount of time as usual.
John:
You just spent a lot of time complaining about follow-up and not doing follow-up until you said, okay, now finally follow-up is over.
John:
So it's not like you saved time.
John:
Anyway, all I wanted to do for all the various step tracker, GPS, phone accuracy, watch accuracy things was...
John:
To note, we'll put in this link to Apple's support article about this, and note that the interesting bit about tracking your distance when running with both a watch and a phone is that the reason it might be off is because the devices apparently, and hinted at by this Apple document, are trying to save energy by not using the GPS all the time.
John:
By trying to use the step tracker, by trying to calibrate the step tracker, either in the phone or in the watch or both, and just use the accelerometer to count your steps rather than having the GPS going the whole time tracing your route.
John:
Because a lot of people are asking, if you go with the watch and the phone, how can it be any worse or different in any way than a Garmin GPS watch?
John:
Wouldn't it be exactly the same as in GPS GPS?
John:
What is the big difference here?
John:
And the difference appears to be from...
John:
uh this knowledge base article and people's experience that the apple devices are trying to cheat to save battery and say well once we get calibrated uh stepping for the accelerometer everything we'll use that most of the time and maybe check in on gps periodically which is another interesting trade-off and i think something that apple will probably adjust with time as they get more battery strength and maybe if they want to be taken more seriously in the sort of uh
John:
hardcore sports fitness market, those type of people are like, look, just use my battery.
John:
The whole point I'm bringing you with me is because I want an exact route of where I ran.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, that was it.
Casey:
There's like two pages of this in the show notes.
John:
I know, but it's kind of old now.
John:
We had a bunch of people write in about it with links.
John:
We'll put them in the show notes.
John:
There's a couple of people tweeted about people's upcoming reviews, like sort of hardcore fitness device reviewers, review of the Apple Watch and the iPhone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
are in the same zone as Marco, where they're a slave to the Green Rings.
John:
They demand that their Green Rings reflect their activity, and so they're upset by it.
Marco:
Oh, man, the Green Rings are getting harder to fill.
Marco:
I had to walk for an hour today to get, I think, 25 minutes worth of credit on it.
Marco:
Oh, seriously?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, because, well, part of it might be the way it's measuring.
Marco:
A bigger part of it is that because I keep filling it every day, I'm getting into better shape.
Marco:
And so I think this is how things work.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I think my body is having to exert itself less to do the same hills every day.
John:
It scales it.
John:
It scales the amount.
John:
It starts you off with a small goal.
John:
You only have to do X amount of activity, and if you keep meeting that goal, it'll say, okay, now you've got to do X plus 2, X plus 3, X plus 4.
Marco:
Well, I don't think that's... First of all, I don't think it automatically adjusts.
Marco:
It prompts you to adjust.
John:
Yeah, I think it does automatically adjust.
John:
I remember reading that, but the people saying that the activity that you have to do starts off very easy, so you feel like you're achieving something, but if you repeatedly achieve it, it will push the goal farther out from you.
John:
And you're also right about the heart rate stuff.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
First of all, I question whether that's true.
Marco:
But the heart rate is 30 minutes.
Marco:
The goal is always 30 minutes.
Marco:
I don't know what the threshold is considered to be an elevated heart rate.
Marco:
Is it 120?
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
I'm estimating it's something around 120, but I really don't know.
Marco:
I can't really tell.
John:
And I think the only other follow-up item I had was from the episode I wasn't on where you were talking about the Johnny I of promotion or whatever you want to call it to, uh, from his, what was his previous position?
Casey:
Like chief senior vice president of design, I think, or something like that.
John:
Right.
John:
And now he's a collateralized debt obligation instead.
John:
Right.
John:
Um, so his, uh,
John:
His new title, I think the various articles written about this covered all of the points, but as always, it's like the mixture.
John:
And you guys, when you talked about the mixture of what to emphasize, I mostly agree that this change in title is making up for the fact that...
John:
He not that he wants to leave, but that he he wants to do different things.
John:
And that itch can turn into wanting to leave.
John:
But it just seems like what I keep thinking of is if you are Johnny Ive and you've done all the things that he's done, what do you have left to prove in the making electronic devices space?
John:
Maybe the car.
John:
It's like, again, if you're thinking of what would keep Johnny Ive around, what would keep him excited?
John:
Is he excited about laptops, desktops, airport things or whatever?
John:
Like, maybe he still is excited, but I'm just going to say that he has nothing left to prove in those categories.
John:
Like, if he never designs another thing, he's still going to be one of the most well-known designers of everything.
John:
the century he lived in right uh and so if you don't have anything left to prove but you are an artistic person and you you want new challenges interesting things that's why i think the whole thing is like he's going to participate in designing the stores i bet i bet he really wants to do that because that's slightly different than what he's been doing before uh and if they're doing a car i bet he's super into that and i bet he was super into the watch because it's a little bit different so
John:
I don't think he's like he was out the door and they had to do this to keep him around.
John:
But I do see this as a move.
John:
He's he's stepping towards the door slowly, finding interesting things to pick up on his way to the door.
John:
And I think that's fine.
John:
And the other thing is talking about this position of like, well, if you're delegating to these people, if Alan Dyer or whatever is doing the software and what's the other guy's name?
John:
Howarth or something.
John:
Richard Howarth.
John:
uh yeah he's and he's gonna do the hardware and it's like like you're just delegating everything and maybe you're gonna be looking at the store how how can you be the chief of design the design chief of anything if everyone else is doing the actual work uh and almost all the discussions except for uh good old gruber who always uh his article on this topic was one of those cases where he hit every single point i if i was writing a thing about this i was reading his thing i'm like okay yeah but he's gonna say this yeah okay what about this point yeah okay what he hit every single point i wasn't gonna hit it was like
John:
Just read that article.
John:
That is exactly my opinion.
John:
And the one point that I saw a few people hit, but he did was, CDO, who was the previous CDO?
John:
Steve Jobs.
John:
He didn't do anything.
John:
All he did was oversee other people doing the things.
John:
How can you have any influence on design if you don't design anything?
John:
That's basically what Steve Jobs did.
John:
He didn't like run the company.
John:
His COO, Tim Cook, did that.
John:
Right.
John:
And the other people did all the actual work of making the hardware, making the software, doing different mockups.
John:
You know, he was the chief design officer.
John:
That was his main job.
John:
And everyone says, oh, without Steve Jobs, I can't.
John:
But then when Johnny Ive moves into essentially the exact same position that Steve Jobs had, people like, oh, God, he can't have any influence.
John:
He's out the door with Steve Jobs out the door because he didn't do any of the work.
John:
Now, granted, Johnny Ive has the ability to do a lot of the work that Steve Jobs didn't.
John:
But I think it is perfectly possible for Johnny Ive in his current position to exert the same amount, if not more control than he did before, because he will have more authority.
John:
And this is a higher level position, even if it is a step towards the door.
John:
So and then, like you guys said, I don't I don't think it's the end of the world if he leaves, because I think at this point.
John:
uh he should go do more interesting things and if he wants to design uh thermostats or airplanes uh more power to him i think apple is in good hands and it's kind of like any car company that has a designer that sort of defines the signature look of the car company eventually the car company wants a different look and you just hope the next guy come who comes in isn't you know a bangle or whatever
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say Chris Bangle, though, everyone kind of wanted him out.
Casey:
And in this case, everyone wants Johnny to stay.
Casey:
So it's similar, but yet very different all at the same time.
John:
Well, like Bangle was a change from the old BMW look, which was very conservative.
John:
And so all the cars kind of look the same.
John:
And this was definitely, you may not like the new look, but it was a change.
John:
The same thing with Mercedes, which was from the other direction.
John:
They used to look like kind of boring cars.
John:
And then their new design direction was much more daring.
John:
Seriously?
John:
You think the new Mercedes look daring?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Much more dare.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
Go look at what they look like in the 80s and even the early 90s.
John:
Then all of a sudden they got swoopy and much more interesting looking designs.
John:
They don't look the same.
John:
And I like the new ones way better than the old ones.
John:
Yep.
John:
But anyway, regardless of your opinion, any sort of brand identity or design has to go through some...
John:
you can't use the same design forever and we've talked about this in terms of material science like aluminum and glass is probably going to last a really long time but at a certain point maybe three design revisions from now like three three look revolutions three decades or you know three sets of 20 years there'll be a materials revolution and actually now it's not a question of how we shape aluminum and glass and whatever into different things but it's entirely different materials that have different properties and johnny i've been long gone by them but anyway i don't see it as the end of the world if he leaves in a couple years
John:
All right.
John:
Any other follow-up?
John:
Jeff Williams is the Senior Vice President of Operations, not the COO, as previously stated on the program.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
My mistake.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
What's awesome these days, Marco?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And I actually had a call with Harry's this week, and we talked about this.
Marco:
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Marco:
First of all, that a pretty big portion of their customers are women.
Marco:
And when we talked about this on the show, we heard from lots of women in our feedback saying that they use Harry's too.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So not to take a page out of Connected's Playbook, but since we are also a photo management podcast, there's been some news.
Casey:
And Google Photos is a thing.
Casey:
So Google had IO, what was it, last week?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
It was the day after we recorded last week's episode.
Marco:
Of course it was.
Marco:
That was well planned.
Casey:
And so they released Google Photos, which, from what I gather, is what everyone wanted from photo management, maybe.
Casey:
And so what it allows you to do is it allows you to upload all of your photos.
Casey:
You can have an unlimited amount of storage, an unlimited amount of storage if you allow Google to recompress your pictures.
Casey:
It's very cheap if you want to give them money to store full-res pictures.
Casey:
And from everything I've heard, I haven't had a chance to try this yet.
Casey:
From everything I've heard, it has unbelievable search capabilities.
Casey:
So I think it might have been Russell Vanovich that had searched for sleeping or something like that.
Casey:
And there were a bunch of pictures of him and other people asleep.
Casey:
And I'm sure it was him.
Casey:
He searched for the Opera House in Sydney.
Casey:
And not only did it find pictures with the Opera House in Sydney in it, but it found a picture of a picture of the Sydney Opera House, which I guess in a lot of ways it makes sense.
Casey:
But it's just that's kind of crazy all at the same time.
Casey:
So it is supposed to be really, really good from everything I've gathered.
Casey:
Have either of you guys had a chance to try it?
Casey:
Marco, have you tried it?
Marco:
The world of tech is a really big place, and there's only so much you can reasonably try and put real effort and spend real time with.
Marco:
I never have tried everything that comes out, and I never will.
Marco:
I will never have time for that.
Marco:
Nor is that really interesting to me.
Marco:
So I have not tried this either.
Marco:
So I can comment on it as a person who uses Apple's version of this, as a person who uses Apple versions of most things, as a person who has a lot of photos.
Marco:
And to me, first of all, I think it's worth noting that this is basically the only thing anybody's talking about from Google I.O.
Marco:
This was the big announcement, I think.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think it's worth pointing out that Google is taking this year to mature things and do some less interesting but necessary improvements everywhere, which is exactly what we're hoping Apple will do, right?
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Marco:
So that I think is interesting, and I hope Apple takes the same opportunity.
Marco:
But anyway, so Google Photos, I think it's really interesting.
Marco:
I think the big things everyone seems to be talking about are what you said, are the pricing and the unlimited storage tier with the asterisk of recompressing and not supporting raw, but the unlimited storage tier and the really, really good intelligence of recognizing things and being able to search for things.
Marco:
Those are really nice.
Marco:
However, neither of those really appeal to me.
Marco:
I've never done like keywording or much metadata entry for my photos.
Marco:
And that's just, you know, some people do, some people don't.
Marco:
I just don't.
Marco:
So I browse things just by date.
Marco:
And I find I'm looking for that way very, very easily just by skimming the timeline view and everything.
Marco:
in Apple stuff.
Marco:
So the thing about being able to search for things, it's a very impressive technical achievement that solves a problem I don't have.
Marco:
And then the unlimited storage thing with the asterisk is nice.
Marco:
A lot of people will use that
Marco:
I don't want that.
Marco:
If I'm going to invest time and bandwidth and data and possibly money into a photo storage solution, I want it to store my originals.
Marco:
And that includes massive files and that includes raw files.
Marco:
Their limit right now is 16 megapixel, I believe.
Marco:
And it's using JPEG recompression to lower the rate even further.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That, to me... Again, I can see a lot of people will be just fine with that.
Marco:
But I'm about to... My camera for the last... Oh, God.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Six, seven years has been a 5D Mark II.
Marco:
And that's already from six, seven years ago.
Marco:
Granted, it was a high-end camera back then.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
that already is like 22 or 21 megapixels.
Marco:
That's already past the limit.
Marco:
Every camera on the market today that's really good usually starts at 16 megapixels.
Marco:
Like all the Micro Four Thirds cameras and the Fuji X system and the little Sonys that are not the Alpha 7 full-frame series, almost all of those are 16 megapixels starting.
Marco:
And many of them are now 24.
Marco:
Some of them are even 36 now.
Marco:
And Canon just released a 50 megapixel camera.
Marco:
So if you're buying nice cameras, then you will be classified as a quote pro.
Marco:
And all these consumer level solutions are going to either limit you or not appeal to you.
Marco:
And they seem to not care.
Marco:
They seem to be okay to give you up.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I kind of fall on that side of that line just by a little bit.
Marco:
So I fall on the Pro line just enough to want fancy editing controls like what Lightroom gives me and just enough to have a nice enough camera where I want to shoot 24 megapixel images, but not so far that I want to abandon these systems completely and give up all the cool sync stuff that they offer.
John:
have two minds on this uh this sort of asterisk recompression thing on the one side you say boy this is actually kind of dangerous because a lot of people ask when this came out oh hey can i use google photos to back up my photos and the answer is if you're using the free thing no because you're not really getting a backup what you're getting is a place where you can see your pictures but it is changing them it's recompressing them so it's not really a backup but on the other hand
John:
by making it free and unlimited it is way more attractive to people who would otherwise do nothing to organize their photos and therefore it does serve as hey it's a hell of a lot better than nothing kind of backup for the people who previously just left all their pictures on their phone for him for instance right like all just all their pictures are on their android phone and then they drop their phone in a lake and they're like
John:
oh yeah, where are my pictures, right?
John:
This is a great solution for those people because even though it recompresses, the fact that it's free and unlimited, they don't care about the asterisk and it's way better than what they were doing before, which is probably nothing.
John:
So I think this probably hits the sweet spot of...
John:
Google's target user which is the mass market and not people who have fancy cameras basically people who take pictures with their phones phones aren't yet 16 megapixels they will be in a few years but you know it I think it is the right solution for their audience and
John:
it also has the added benefit of making apple's pricing look terrible because even though it's not apples to apples nobody knows or cares about that if you were to explain to somebody no you don't you don't get it google recompresses their image and you try to explain what that means and they say okay show me the pictures they're like oh they look the same to me and realistically they do like we're not going to be zooming way in on someone's eyeball on a 16 megapixel image to show them see how google recompresses it and it looks like a mess they're like
John:
yeah but i look at them like this and they look they're fine they look the same so i think this is the the right compromise even though it was disappointing when i learned free and unlimited that that asterisk was there for me personally but for everybody else definitely a good deal uh real quick real-time follow-up the galaxy s6 is 16 megapixel there you go we're already there oh that's right the the nokia whatever had the super high megapixel camera a couple years ago so we're probably a
Marco:
There's also, I think we might be about to have a big megapixel spike because there's a couple of cameras in the market, and I think one or two phones that even do this, where, so, you know, we've seen over the last few years how many of the cameras and many smaller phones, or many phones, including the iPhone 6 Plus, has optical image stabilization.
Marco:
And they do this by sensor shift.
Marco:
They basically have accelerometers and they shift the sensor around really, really quickly and adjust for camera shake and motion.
Marco:
Well, somebody figured out recently that you can use sensor shift to basically interpolate a super high-resolution picture from multiple captures.
Marco:
So what they do is, in very quick succession, when you hit the shutter button in this special mode...
Marco:
Some of these cameras can basically use the image stabilizer system to shift the sensor very slightly in different directions over the course of a few seconds to kind of interpolate a higher megapixel mode.
Marco:
That can make a 16 megapixel sensor take like a 50 megapixel image.
Marco:
This could get, especially in the spec-obsessed, hyper-competitive, camera-obsessed smartphone market, it would not surprise me at all if this becomes a very, very common feature among smartphone cameras.
Marco:
And even though the optics will still be kind of crappy, and even though the sensors will still be kind of crappy with really tiny pixels, this will be a way for many phones and many cameras to claim ridiculous megapixel counts.
Marco:
And there is additional resolution to be had there.
Marco:
It isn't as good as if you actually had a giant sensor that big in most cases, but it's better than not doing this at all.
John:
I think people will use that for digital Zoom because I see people do that all the time.
John:
They don't understand the...
John:
quality loss inherent in digital zoom but if you have 50 megapixel because it's not you know why do you need 50 megapixels unless you're printing out something poster size or you're going to print it super high db like no one's going to do that they just want pictures that are like human size that are on their mantle you know eight megapixels is fine for that 16 megapixels is fine so if you have 50 what does that buy you that buy you buys you the ability to pinch while you're taking the picture to zoom in and out instead of like walking closer or farther away and still get a 10 megapixel image out of it
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Now, I think the key piece to me is what you had said, Marco, a little while ago, that I really – I personally love the idea of having this really robust search engine on my pictures.
Casey:
I'm not really interested in weighing the pros and cons of giving my pictures to Google.
Casey:
But –
Casey:
The problem I have with it is if I'm going to get into this position where I have all of my pictures on Google Photos, I'm going to want that to also serve as a backup in addition to being a really robust search engine.
Casey:
And I know I've talked about picture life quite a lot on and off over the last few months, but I really love picture life for a bunch of reasons, including them having a good search engine, mostly around dates or locations.
Casey:
Nothing is advanced as what Google Photos is doing.
Casey:
but also because they'll take every file as it sits on the computer, including raw files.
Casey:
And granted, you have to pay for it.
Casey:
And I think I pay 15 bucks a month for a limited storage.
Casey:
I think I might be quoting that wrong.
Casey:
But it serves not only as a nice repository, it does the time hop style thing where it says, oh, this day, one year ago, two years ago, three years ago, this is what you were doing.
Casey:
But it also allows me to search for pictures very easily.
Casey:
It allows me access to all of my pictures while I'm on the go.
Casey:
It does a lot of the stuff that Google Photos and actually Photos app and iCloud Photos, iCloud Photo Library, whatever, should and intends to do.
Casey:
But man, I would absolutely pay for and switch to Google Photos if...
John:
if i was confident if if i felt like it got me things that picture life didn't and right now it's it's getting me a search engine but it's not getting me i don't think a lot of the other stuff that i really love like the time hop it'll get you like better face recognition and it does some weird ai thing where it composes a nice picture for you and makes albums based on it goes up but anyway you can get this you can pay you can pay google you know it just goes to your google account storage if you pay for like terabyte of storage then it will back up whatever the hell you want like
John:
And that's that's the other thing is a shame about the asterisk is people might dismiss it.
John:
Then the nerdy people listening say, oh, I don't want it to recompress my images.
John:
That's just for the free one.
John:
If you pay Google money, you could store whatever the heck you want because they charge you for the amount of storage you use.
John:
And the rates for storage are not they're not cheap, but they're cheaper than Apple still.
Marco:
Yeah, it's about half the price.
John:
yeah i and you know as as many of the competitors are as we went over last time apple apple is still a little bit out of whack and the thing same as dropbox right 10 bucks a month for a terabyte that's that's dropbox right i don't remember their pricing but dropbox is still below apple uh for the big especially for the big tier yeah um
John:
And I tell you, I'm tempted by this Google thing because the features it has and more importantly, the performance characteristics that I assume it has based on all my experience with server side stuff that it's like, look, it doesn't matter how fast my computer is because most of the magic is happening on the server side.
John:
It's sort of like why I use Gmail.
John:
i have a ton of email ton of filters all i ever see on my screen is one set of email things so it doesn't matter that this label or folder or whatever has 60 000 emails in it i can switch to it and immediately see what's there because it just shows one screen full and i can i don't mind clicking next to go to the next screen full as opposed to clicking something in outlook and watching it grind and beach ball my thing so we can display a scrolling list view with 60 000 email messages right
John:
This is the advantage of server side versus client side.
John:
The disadvantage is you don't get a nice scroll bar to do it, but the advantage is everything is always responsive.
John:
So I would imagine that Google Photos, like Google Search, would let me find all the pictures of a particular person with its face recognition, which I have to assume is superior to Apple's.
John:
Even if just in that it doesn't grind my computer to death when it's detecting faces, it grinds Google's computers to death when it's detecting faces.
John:
And same for all the other stuff where you can just type in receipt and it'll find all your receipts.
John:
You can type in Sydney Opera House.
John:
You can type in statue.
John:
You can type in grass, like whatever, you know, they have lots of smarts behind this that are not going to be duplicated in a local computer.
John:
It's like Google's giant computing cluster and the fact that they share all the information about image detection and that it makes the whole system smarter and all that.
John:
All of these are features I like.
John:
And their rates are cheaper than Apple, and they were safely uncompressed stuff.
John:
But for photos, I'm going to give Apple's Photos app, despite it being super slow and everything, a little bit more time to mature because this is the 1.0.
John:
It's basically a complete rewrite.
John:
So far, it has been reliable, if only incredibly slow and maddening.
John:
And...
John:
There's one update on my Apple Photos complaints.
John:
There's one new behavior that's really pissing me off.
John:
In addition to being super slow when I'm going through pictures of like hit the right arrow, the left arrow, add a keyword, hit the period key to favorite.
John:
I'm trying to come up with like a nice keyboard only workflow for sort of going through my pictures after I take them to organize them and tag them.
John:
frequently i'll come upon one that i want to delete because it's crappy and i'm not doing like the one star thing anymore i just delete now because i have just have fave and non-fave so if i see something as one star just delete immediately delete of course takes forever fine take forever sit there for sometimes i count one two three four oh there it went i deleted right and then the next picture comes up and then i you know
John:
i'll i'll hit the hit the arrow key or hit delete i'll hit the arrow key and then i'll see the next picture i want to delete and i'll hit delete and i'll look up at the screen and i'll see what has happened is after i i went to the next picture i deleted one and then i went to the next picture now like my delete like icloud has caught up with my delete and it has moved sort of my cursor from the picture i was looking at to the one that was before the one i deleted
John:
So then whatever key I hit, like favoriting or whatever, applies to the picture before the one I just deleted instead of the next one.
John:
Like, like it doesn't preserve my position, my, you know, my selection state in the thing, because the collection view like reshuffles behind the scenes and I will find myself looking at a picture I wasn't looking at before.
John:
Like, that's a potential for... If someone was not paying enough attention, they might not realize what happened.
John:
They might not realize that you thought you were on the next picture.
John:
But really, after you hit next picture, it said, no, no, no, no.
John:
Here you are on the picture before you were deleted.
John:
And you might not realize that you tagged that wrong or deleted it or something else.
John:
And if it happened to do that delete fast enough when you were looking down, like...
John:
i can imagine that being a data loss bug waiting to happen and stuff like that in addition to being super slow it's like this is so slow and laggy that it is it is breaking the model of the ui like so it's like outlook 2011 all over again where the selection state is changing underneath my my cursor so i'm really not liking the experience with photos other than the fact that it is accepting all of my uploads and presumably preserving them and they're all in a cloud and blah blah blah
Marco:
Well, and to me, that I think is the most important part.
Marco:
If you have an Android phone and you use Google's stuff, then by all means, use Google's photo thing.
Marco:
That makes the most sense.
Marco:
My most frequently used camera is my iPhone.
Marco:
And the fact is that nothing integrates better with my most frequently used camera than Apple's photo storage thing.
Marco:
And so I like Apple's photo storage thing would have to be really bad for me to not use it and to instead go over to something else because the convenience aspect is really incredibly powerful of just having that, having the integration, having things like just instantly be over on my big computer or on different devices.
John:
Like, well, let's not say instantly because one of the complaints like performance eventually becomes a feature deficit.
John:
One of the complaints for people with large libraries is you take a photo with your iPhone.
John:
And then you, you know, maybe a couple seconds pass and then you want to see that photo in your photos collection and you go to photos and it's not there yet.
John:
And why isn't it there yet?
John:
You just took it.
John:
Why, why is it not there yet?
John:
Because you have a giant collection and it takes a while to, I don't know what the hell it's doing.
John:
Like you, I don't think it's going anywhere.
John:
You took it on the phone.
John:
Surely it should show up in your photos collection, but there's a lag if you have large photo collection and that's a lag that wasn't there before.
John:
Like this is one of my wife's complaints.
John:
You turned on this iPhoto library, whatever thing.
John:
because the photos are on her computer and because apple doesn't understand how families work the photos have to be on one computer and blah blah blah we've complained about this before so she gets to have them on her phone and all it has done is made her camera on her phone less pleasant and made her photo pickers in every single app way slower and so again 1.0 hopefully this will be addressed this is the perfect thing for them to do in ios 9 which we'll talk about when we get to wwdc predictions so i'm going to give the apple one a chance but i'm
John:
I don't have many hangups about Google Photos, especially the ones where I'm paying for the storage because I feel like that is a, I understand the relationship there.
John:
I give you money, you store my photos.
John:
I store more photos, I give you more money.
John:
And I love all the features they have for all their searching and face detection and organization and all that good stuff.
John:
So Apple better get its act together.
Casey:
Yeah, in a lot of ways, I feel like this is Google at its best because it's leveraging all of its machine learning, all of its humongous server farms and whatnot in order to get something that's really very impressive and really awesome to use as a consumer.
Casey:
So I'm curious to see where this goes, but I'll probably be checking it out at some point or another.
Casey:
With that said, what else is awesome, Marco?
Marco:
So our second sponsor this week is our friends, the nicest people in the world, really, our friends at Studio Neat.
Casey:
Oh, they're the best.
Marco:
Aren't they?
Marco:
They're such nice guys, really.
Marco:
I mean, genuinely nice people, and they make really cool stuff.
Marco:
So studioneat.com slash ATP is where you go to see all this cool stuff.
Marco:
studioneat.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Use code ATP for 10% off anything in their store.
Marco:
Now, order soon because they're going to probably have a big rush for Father's Day, if I could take a guess, because their stuff makes fantastic Father's Day and even graduation gifts.
Marco:
A lot of their stuff is cool iPhone things.
Marco:
A lot of their stuff is cool stuff about drinks, making drinks at home.
Marco:
Father's Day, graduation, really big holidays for the kind of stuff they make.
Marco:
They also have a new app.
Marco:
Before I get into their stuff, they have a new app for iPhone called Highball.
Marco:
It's a free app, and it's really made almost as a companion to their cocktail products.
Marco:
When you download the app, you can tap the plus button on the home screen, then add from library, and then you can actually find special cocktail recipes inspired by the three ATP hosts.
Marco:
So really cool guys.
Marco:
They listen to our shows.
Marco:
Cool inside jokes.
Marco:
So check out their iPhone app, Highball.
Marco:
Now, their regular products, I love this stuff.
Marco:
I have a lot of their stuff.
Marco:
They have the Glyph, which is an iPhone tripod mount and kind of like a built-in mini tripod.
Marco:
Really great.
Marco:
Very, very handy.
Marco:
It came out a while ago.
Marco:
They've updated it a couple times since then.
Marco:
And the new one is adjustable, so it can work with multiple phone generations, most likely.
Marco:
They also have the Cosmonaut, which is an iPad stylus or iPhone stylus, which I've tried a bunch of the various styli that exist for the tux screens.
Marco:
The Cosmonaut is by far my favorite one.
Marco:
It is so, so good.
Marco:
Now, their cocktail products are really interesting, too.
Marco:
They have the Neat Ice Kit, and this is what we were talking about a lot last time I sponsored, I believe.
Marco:
The Neat Ice Kit lets you create crystal clear ice at home.
Marco:
And this is another one of those things.
Marco:
I've tried a couple of other things that attempt to make clear ice, various Kickstarter projects and stuff.
Marco:
And none of them have been as nicely working and as easy to use as the Neat Ice Kit, which I also have.
Marco:
And it's so much better.
Marco:
And it's easy.
Marco:
It's friendly.
Marco:
The neat ice kit is very, very simple.
Marco:
All you do is they have this cylinder of water that you put in the freezer.
Marco:
And then it gives you this solid rectangle of ice.
Marco:
And one half of it is cloudy and one half of it is clear.
Marco:
And so you take the included chisel to just cut it down the middle, basically.
Marco:
And then you have a perfectly clear ice cube that you can then cut and shape however you want or just leave it as one giant cube.
Marco:
It is really, it is so easy to use.
Marco:
They also have the Simple Syrup Kit.
Marco:
Now, this is something, I make Simple Syrup all the time.
Marco:
I make Simple Syrup in the summer mostly for my iced coffee recipe, which I'll link to somewhere.
Marco:
Simple Syrup, you would think that making it without, you know, making it yourself without a custom kit, it's, you know, pretty straightforward.
Marco:
You combine water and sugar and mix it up and put it in a bottle somehow.
Marco:
So you would think your product like this wouldn't be necessary.
Marco:
I cannot tell you how good this is.
Marco:
I was smiling the whole time I was using it because it's like, yeah, you can make simple syrup without this.
Marco:
But there are parts of it that are annoying.
Marco:
There are parts of it that are kind of hard, kind of tricky to get right.
Marco:
And once you make it, you still have to have some kind of container to put it in and pour it out of.
Marco:
And really, they nailed it.
Marco:
Every part of the simple syrup kit, they completely nailed it.
Marco:
The process of making it is simple.
Marco:
They have this little jar that's labeled perfectly for the ratios.
Marco:
You really don't have to measure anything.
Marco:
You just pour it in until it goes to the line.
Marco:
You can swish it around with that.
Marco:
No utensils needed.
Marco:
The pour spout that they have on this bottle is perfect.
Marco:
It doesn't dribble.
Marco:
It doesn't leak.
Marco:
You can shake it and nothing comes out.
Marco:
They thought of everything.
Marco:
The bottle is exactly the right size to fit on any fridge shelf.
Marco:
They took every part of this process and they made it way better.
Marco:
So much so that I will never make Simple Syrup again without using their product.
Marco:
It's just so good.
Marco:
This also makes a great gift.
Marco:
holidays, wedding gifts, graduation, Father's Day, whatever you want.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
So check out Studio Neat.
Marco:
These are such cool things.
Marco:
They're just cool products made by cool people.
Marco:
I think I've tried most of their products now or even all of their products now.
Marco:
And they're all great.
Marco:
I can't point to anything they've made that's been a dud.
Marco:
Check it out, really.
Marco:
Great stuff.
Marco:
Reasonably priced.
Marco:
Great gifts for Father's Day, graduations, birthdays, whatever.
Marco:
StudioNeat.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's StudioNeat.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And use coupon code ATP for 10% off anything in their store.
Marco:
Thanks a lot once again to Studio Neat for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let me just pile on for two seconds.
Casey:
One, love the neat ice kit.
Casey:
Use it all the time.
Casey:
Two, you should check out the stop motion video they did for the Simple Syrup Kit.
Casey:
It's just very, very well done and very clever.
Casey:
And they had a blog post about it at some point or another about how they did it.
Casey:
And that's also very interesting.
Casey:
So you should check that out.
Casey:
In other news, so apparently we know what Thunderbolt 3 is and it looks just like USB-C.
John:
not just like usbc there's an important difference that we'll get to in a bit but yes uh if you didn't think it was uh confusing enough uh now we have two different things that use the same connector it's kind of like we finally got rid of the usb type a connector where it's uh symmetrical on the outside but asymmetrical on the inside so you have to try three times to get it plugged in the right way finally you know we talked about the usb type c connector
John:
That's gone.
John:
It goes in either way.
John:
It's perfect.
John:
No more cabling problems.
John:
We've now swapped that for plug in this adapter, plug it into the display.
John:
Does it not work?
John:
Oh, that must be the Thunderbolt one.
John:
It doesn't work with MacBook one.
John:
Try the other one.
John:
Plug that one.
John:
You have to try two different things to plug in.
John:
It doesn't matter which way you plug it in, but you have no idea if the one you're using is the right one for your device.
John:
This will be a transitional period too, but it is...
John:
A little bit frustrating that Apple actually shipped machines with USB-C connectors that are not Thunderbolt 3, and so they'll forever be this weird, not forever, but until they go away, there'll be this weird machine that has a connector that's not a Thunderbolt connector, but it looks like all the other machines that have a Thunderbolt connector.
Casey:
Yeah, it is a little bit weird.
Marco:
Yeah, it does seem like kind of weird timing to have released the MacBook 1.
Marco:
Because if you look, it's this brand new computer, this brand new line.
Marco:
There was not massive pressure for them to release the MacBook 1 when they did.
Marco:
And it seems like...
John:
six months away from when sky lake will be out most likely from when thunderbolt 3 which will come with sky lake in all likelihood when that will be available so it seems like they released the macbook one like six months too early yeah they should have just made a retina macbook air as we talked about that before and like oh i would have liked that machine better blah blah but now forget about who would like what machine better just in terms of product line planning and succession and like transition between ports it would have been better overall for everybody now knowing what we now know about
John:
sky like availability and thunderbolt 3 to have made retina macbook airs like in the exact form they are in now same connectors same everything same battery just put a retina screen on it put the lower power chips right because that would be it would be a more boring machine but then you'd have a clean transition from these were the old world laptops and then here are the new ones and they all have thunderbolt 3 and
John:
usbc connectors and it's all uniform this this machine this macbook one is looking more and more like this weird sort of transitional platypus thing that is uh you know and and like and you can't you can't tell the future it's like oh they should have known exactly what intel's availability it's like the the schedule has slipped when all these things were planned many months or years ago you can't exactly predict the future so it's kind of a shame uh we'll get over it but uh
John:
Yeah, that's what happens when schedules slip.
John:
You end up doing strange things.
Casey:
And apparently this supports 4K displays, two of them, in fact.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah, it's enough bandwidth to support two 4Ks at 60 Hz, which, if you do enough tricks, that is also enough bandwidth to support a single 5K display over one cable.
John:
But the weird thing is they keep saying it's DisplayPort 1.2, not 1.3.
John:
And I don't remember the limitations of the spec, but I mean, does that all fit together?
John:
A single 5K display over a display?
John:
I guess it's ganging two DisplayPort 1.2 connections over the single cable, right?
John:
Like technically speaking, that's what it's doing.
John:
You don't have to have two wires connected anymore.
John:
But under the covers, do you imagine that it is basically two DisplayPort 1.2 channels?
Marco:
That's certainly how the little information we have about it, that's how it reads to me.
Marco:
That's what it's doing, that it is doing dual DisplayPort 1.2s because it can do 4K at 60 hertz using DisplayPort 1.2.
Marco:
It can do two of those.
Marco:
So that certainly does seem like that's what it's doing.
John:
This is essentially what everyone's been talking about since the 80s or the 70s even.
John:
Someday there will be one interconnect to rule everything.
John:
That was some of the early hype about Firewire, if you can believe it.
John:
Those of us who were around back before Firewire was actually a thing, it was like...
John:
i know you got all these connections in the back of your mac um but this one bus is going to do everything forget about usb that's just for mice and keyboards uh this firewire thing because it's like peer-to-peer and daisy chainable and doesn't require the uh the then the then much weaker cpus to do work to get data along it's the best of all possible worlds and it's serial instead of parallel and the connectors are small and they're easy to plug and unplug and you know it didn't quite work out for firewire but
John:
the slow consolidation of all the differently shaped holes in the sides of our computers into a single kind of port.
John:
There's only one kind of hole and we can have multiple ones of them and it's uniform and they can do everything.
John:
That's what we're finally, finally getting to.
John:
And I think it was an incredibly wise, smart, forward-looking technology
John:
perhaps necessary move for thunderbolt to uh to to do both of the things that it did the first thing it did was we're not going to make a new connector for thunderbolt we're going to piggyback on many display port because by the way we support display so it was like you can connect your drives but also your display and also kind of your docking station or whatever it's kind of like a uh a parasite or uh one of those little uh
John:
Not lamprey, not eel, but the actual word for the little sucker fishy thing that stick on the side of sharks.
John:
We're going to hitch a ride on an already existing successful port.
John:
And so they hitched a ride on many display port because in that time, Thunderbolt was presenting itself as a cool bus to connect your high speed stuff, but also your display.
John:
And in fact, both at once.
John:
and now it has found a much more attractive host forget about mini display port there is usbc it's delicious it's an awesome connector we love it we're super jealous of that symmetrical connector it's smaller uh it's going to be everywhere we get on that train then finally we can legitimately have computers that just have one or more hopefully more on the pro machines uh usbc type connector that literally does everything that the computer can do with a series of adapters and all sorts of other stuff so
John:
that's still a little bit annoying but it is the the future that we expected the only difference is it is not one magical bus instead it is one magical wire over which we shove all the existing old stuff so display port is still going over there and you've got usb going over it and you've also got what you know the the pci express lanes for your graphics card or whatever other stuff you have externally so it's it's one cable but it's lots of different protocols and sort of channels and buses all going over that one cable which i guess is
John:
better than nothing it's still not quite the uniform world where we imagine everything would be speaking one protocol and they'd all be jumping on this one big beautiful bus that just powers everything but maybe we'll get there someday
Marco:
And it is definitely an improvement over what we have today, which is, you know, a Thunderbolt.
Marco:
First of all, I've and I think you agree.
Marco:
I've never liked the mini display port as a port, as a physical port and as a cable end.
John:
Better than SCSI.
Marco:
Yeah, but that's not a very high bar.
John:
I would say it's also better than USB type A because it is smaller and externally asymmetrical.
Marco:
Well, maybe, but it also doesn't feel like it's very securely inserted most of the time.
Marco:
It feels like it can slide out partially very, very easily.
Marco:
Whereas USB has always gripped in there pretty well.
John:
Well, I can't tell if that's like... Because I have... There are some USB Type-A things that feel very secure and some that feel loose or get looser over time.
John:
So it's hard to tell if that is a construction thing or it's the fault of the port itself.
John:
I believe it's possible to have a secure-filling Thunderbolt port.
John:
Just like I know that it's possible to have a secure feeling USB type A port and also a really loose one that feels crappy.
Marco:
Well, maybe.
Marco:
But regardless, I've never felt a Thunderbolt port that felt really secure to me.
Marco:
And the kind of stuff you're plugging in there, usually it's stuff like advanced drive arrays or a network adapter for the laptop or something.
Marco:
It's things where you really don't want it to just randomly fall out as you're using it.
Marco:
That would be inconvenient or cause problems.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That always kind of makes me feel a little weird about it.
Marco:
But USB-C really locks in place.
Marco:
USB-C is a very secure feeling connector.
Marco:
It does not at all have that problem, as far as I could tell from my brief time with one.
Marco:
So that, I think, is a massive improvement.
Marco:
um you know also now you know we have the 5k issue fairly solved it looks like um so that's that also helps um again i i think though you're right that the problem is now the the complexity of well this thing can be plugged into this usbc port but not that usbc port and there's no visual way to identify which is which and you're gonna have is it a usbc port what is the what how do you even call the port now
John:
because is it the thunderbolt 3 port do you call it by the name of the highest speed bus that can run over a wire that you connect into that port it's weird like when when the the presumed sky like macbook pros come out with ports whose connector is the shape of the usb type c connector will all those ports be called thunderbolt ports will we call them all usb ports
John:
Will we call them anything different when two DisplayPort 1.2 things change to two DisplayPort 1.3s and you can have four 4K displays on some future machine?
John:
Is it still a Thunderbolt 3 port or is it a Thunderbolt 3.1 port?
John:
Names become meaningless.
John:
It is just a wire over which we multiplex all sorts of signals.
John:
The standards and protocols of those signals advance over time and the maximum throughput of the wire itself advances over time.
John:
But we just keep calling them.
John:
Maybe we'll just call them ports.
John:
Maybe our grandkids will just be like, how many ports does your computer have?
John:
And how fast do those ports go?
John:
And it becomes less important to have a name for it.
John:
I don't even know.
Marco:
But it's going to make it very difficult for everybody.
Marco:
Especially non-super informed geeks like we hope we are.
Marco:
But it's going to be a big problem for everybody where like, okay, I have a computer that has this port on it.
Marco:
I want to buy this peripheral.
Marco:
Or I want to, you know...
Marco:
i i'm out of ports i want to buy a hub to give me more ports and then half your devices stop working because it's a usbc hub and half your devices are thunderbolt like and you and you have no way to know that really ahead of time like it things right now you can you can look at the ports that you have and you can look at devices and cables and peripherals and hubs and you and you could you just know oh this is a this is the shape port i have two of those on my computer i can plug that into that and it will probably work use your skills learned on a shape sorter when you were a toddler
Marco:
In this new world where we have one port that is most likely going to be very common and there's already tons of cables and hubs and devices on the market for USB-C now.
Marco:
There's already tons of them and
Marco:
All those hubs that exist now that everyone's buying now with their MacBook Ones, they're going to, you know, in two years, they're still going to have that.
Marco:
They're going to have a different laptop, maybe, and it's not going to work with half their stuff.
Marco:
It's going to be a weird situation that I'm not sure is a good thing overall.
John:
Well, as people in the chat room are pointing out, and as Intel has been pushing with the technologies that is trying to attach to Skylake or make part of the same sort of push for new products, we talked about in past shows, the whole idea of wireless connectivity, which maybe isn't here yet, maybe isn't up to snuff for Apple standards yet, but...
John:
going to a uniform connector everywhere with different protocols put over it as an improvement over the status quo.
John:
And eventually you would imagine that the things that can be wireless, sort of high speed, high bandwidth, near field, low power wireless.
John:
Can we get that to the point where the ports just stop being used for anything except for maybe power?
John:
Uh, you know, sort of the, the zero port thing that we talked about with it, with the Mac book one, uh,
John:
That's not, I don't think, that far in the future, in the order of, you know, the good old five to ten years thing.
John:
So I think this is a step up from where we were.
John:
We'll just deal with the confusion, and what comes out on the other side of it is not a final unification on a single protocol on a single wire, but rather the slow deterioration of the wire as an important thing that you plug into your devices for anything other than charging.
John:
I mean, we're already there with iOS devices.
John:
We've just convinced the entire world...
John:
you don't plug anything into this thing except for a cable to charge it everything else you do with it you do wirelessly even though that's not technically true you can plug all sorts of things into it i think people like the idea of the wireless stuff even as flaky and unreliable as it is now new versions of bluetooth new you know near fields for the apple pay stuff uh future protocols that do uh similar things for displaying you know doing doing air uh what is it air display what the hell is that called
John:
airplay airplay doing airplay over different protocols they'll keep calling it airplay but whatever the weird you know wireless uh high definition display standard that intel comes up with several years from now building that in instead of doing it the way apple does it now with h264 compression over a regular old wi-fi like that i think is the the long-term end state of this but in the
John:
I'm very excited about a future line of computers, period.
John:
Not just laptops, but I'm excited about a new trashcan Mac Pro with a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 ports on the back, whatever the hell you want to call it.
John:
The back of this machine will just be bristling with little tiny USB 3-shaped holes even more than there are Thunderbolt ports, and it'll have more capabilities, and it will be less of a hassle to plug things into it.
John:
This is the final point on Thunderbolt 3.
John:
they've finally uh seen the light on another thing which is the stupid thunderbolt cables that cost 50 bucks because they have chips in the connectors and it makes the connectors really long and like one inch one inch long stiff part they can't bend because that's where the chip is and they actually get warm when you use them they have a standard for passive wires it only goes half the speed 20 gigabits instead of 40 although that half speed that's the maximum speed of the current thunderbolt 2 isn't it 20 i'll take that right so basically for the for the current speed that you have now you can get cheap
John:
flexible wires that don't heat up when you use them with no chips in them and you get 20 gigabits.
John:
And so that's great.
John:
This is the fastest turnaround time I've ever seen on a interconnect standard learning from all the mistakes the previous iteration of this interconnect standard made.
John:
Because first of all, Thunderbolt's already up to version three and it's like barely used and only used on Apple computers.
John:
And it is already like correcting all of its past mistakes.
John:
Better connector, piggybacking on USB, a passive thing for people who don't care.
John:
while still pushing the envelope of like, actually, we have double that speed if you're going to use the chip connector things or whatever.
John:
So I'm really excited about next year's crop of Macs, one of which I may actually buy if my 2008 Mac Pro lasts that long.
Marco:
I wonder, because they're attaching Thunderbolt to USB, and we know that Apple is very unlikely, extremely unlikely, to ship a computer where these ports are USB 3, but these ports are USB 2.
Marco:
They're just going to go all out on one or the other.
Marco:
Thunderbolt requires direct PCI lanes right from the chipset, and it's...
Marco:
It's most likely, I would imagine, I don't know offhand, but I would imagine it's much more expensive to have a Thunderbolt port on a motherboard on a computer than a USB port.
Marco:
It might not be possible to have more than two USB-C ports on anything but a Mac Pro just because of the chipset limitations.
Marco:
So, like, you know, look at the iMacs today.
Marco:
iMacs have four USB ports in the back.
Marco:
Are they going to have four USB-C ports on the next version?
Marco:
I kind of doubt it because I would doubt that whatever chipsets Intel uses for the consumer level stuff, they might not support that many lanes for Thunderbolt to use.
John:
I think they listed the chipsets like they were going to make one super low power one.
John:
This is a lot of people writing in to explain the MacBook One, although it doesn't really make sense because the MacBook One doesn't use Thunderbolt 3.
John:
But anyway, they're going to have one low power chipset that can only support one of these ports.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the whole idea is like, we're only going to support one, but it is a true Thunderbolt three bolt that does everything on, you know, it's for the Mac book one class of machine and it really only does support one.
John:
So yeah, you could have a second one that like you said is, well, this one isn't Thunderbolt.
John:
I know it looks the same, but this one is actually just plain old USB.
John:
Um,
John:
they didn't have with the current macbook one they didn't have that problem you could you could have made them both identical but with the new one with thunderbolt 3 you can have one thunderbolt 3 port with this chipset because that's all we have the lanes for and then you can have other like plain usb ports which apple may or may not too but then the next step up with the sort of better laptop things i think it was like now you can have two thunderbolt 3 ports
John:
Do you know if that will qualify for the MacBook Air?
John:
The MacBook what?
John:
Do we think that machine is still going to be a thing?
John:
Not without a retina screen.
John:
I don't see a new iteration of the MacBook Air coming in 2016 unless they put a retina screen in it.
John:
not entirely convinced they're going to do that yet but but yeah and so they they you're right they will be faced with this problem especially for the imac because the imac you don't have the excuse of like well the imac you could just basically put an internal hub inside there and have one of the thunderbolt three things branching out into basically an internal usb hub and then you have one i mean they're still faced with the same problem you're going to have a bunch of connectors that are all shaped the same one of which has a little different symbol painted on it and tiny paint that no one can actually read because it's behind the computer and nobody could see back there because it's dark
John:
right but if you swivel it towards you it'll light up oh god yeah well now the mac pro the imac right they have plenty of room they have plenty of room inside the imac to have five ports on the back of it one of them is going to be like the good port like the thunderbolt port and all the rest of them are going to be these are just plain old usb and they can do that with a quote unquote two port chipset from intel right or just like i said they could have
John:
two thunderbolt three ports and then five usb but not that apple would ever do this because they're so stingy with ports but then five usb ports just running off like a plain old usb3 controller like they technologically this is all possible and all it comes down to is the confusion factor and on the back of the imac i think if you separated them even though they're the same shape if you separated them from each other like if you had a bunch in a row and then a big space on the other ones or even put them on separate sides of the machine i don't know i feel like
John:
If I had to make the choice, I would rather have more ports, even if some of them are only differentiated by a stenciled symbol like laser etched onto the aluminum.
John:
That's what I would want.
John:
But I'm not entirely sure that that's what Apple is going to want.
John:
I would imagine Apple is going to put a smaller number of ports on it and just, you know, deal with the short term griping.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, if you want a lot of ports of various mixing and matching of things, you're definitely looking at the wrong brand of computers.
John:
And the Mac Pro, you know, they'll do use whatever crazy chipset that has the most insane number of PCI Express lanes, and they'll put as many ports on the back of that thing as they can.
John:
uh and that'll just continue in its current form but the shape and size of the ports in the back will shrink who knows maybe they could even add ports to that thing on the mac pro that is the only model i can actually imagine them saying these are all thunderbolt 3 ports blank space these two are plain old usbc connect your mouse and keyboard here because why the hell not like they're all so tiny there's so much stuff inside that computer it wouldn't be a big deal to do that
John:
And it would free up the good ports for your crazy multi-SSD disk arrays or whatever the hell you're connecting to it.
John:
And you still won't buy one.
John:
I might.
John:
I've got to buy a new computer eventually, in theory.
John:
On an infinite timescale.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I don't know.
John:
That one terabyte SSD really did give this Mac a new life.
John:
When I sit down in front of this computer now, the only thing I notice is that
John:
you know my wife's screen is better than mine but other than that it feels great i suspect you're going to keep using it until until it drops os support for the latest os that would probably do it i'm i'm kind of glad that i've i've just in under the wire for the few updates and they haven't even been advancing that the first last few os's have all not changed the hardware requirements they cut off merlin's old mac pro and then just stopped cutting off old mac pros that's right there was the last one in the door and that's that's it
John:
Everything else is 64-bit Intel.
John:
You're good to go.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So is anything going on next week?
John:
From the late breaking rumors, it seems like a lot less is going on than we thought.
Casey:
You want to tell us what you're talking about there, John?
John:
Well, I have all this list that this is the WOC prediction section and have this list of like the hardware and software and things we're going to talk about.
John:
And the late breaking story from the New York Times is the what seems like the final in a series of stories about the
John:
ever rumored Apple TV replacement that was like, oh, it has a new remote.
John:
It's coming.
John:
It's going to have an SDK.
John:
Apple is working with companies to provide a way for you to watch first run shows by paying them money.
John:
Like the Apple TV dream is going to come true for everyone except for Gene Munster because it's not an actual television set.
John:
And then the final one posted in the New York Times shortly before recording began was, oh, looks like Apple TV, the new Apple TV is not going to be a WDC after all.
John:
This follows on the previous story, which was like, hmm, looks like Apple's having trouble setting up all those content deals that it wants to set up.
John:
And then I was like, well, even without the content deals, they can release new hardware.
John:
Still, the new remote might be cool.
John:
And they can always release the hardware now.
John:
And then later on, when they finally get all these deals ironed out with all these content owners,
John:
uh then they would just your hardware that you have would get better but if this rumor is to be believed no new apple tv hardware no apple tv sdk off the menu for wwc again it seems like the past three years that the apple tv has been like i don't know they could the current one is really old and well like this one was like oh they did a price drop on the old one that means a new one is coming and we were all ready for it and no and so i obviously entirely pessimistically believe these rumors that there will be no apple tv uh
John:
I hope I'm wrong and I'm really excited and pleasantly surprised because my current Apple TV is flaking out big time and I've switched to using TiVo for Netflix.
John:
That's how far it's gone.
John:
So yeah, what do you guys think about that?
John:
Are you basically crossing off the Apple TV in your hearts?
Casey:
Well, I had already kind of done that because at the recommendation of Dan Morin, and I think we talked about this on the show, I got an Amazon Fire TV stick, and I love it.
Casey:
It is the first thing I turn to to do any sort of media consumption when I'm trying to do that at home or when I'm traveling, if I choose to take it with me.
Casey:
It has been far more reliable than my Apple TV has been.
Casey:
Um, it works really, really well.
Casey:
Netflix is great on it.
Casey:
Uh, Plex actually exists on it, which is wonderful.
Casey:
And that works really well.
Casey:
Um, so I rarely use my Apple TV anymore, but the only thing I use it for is for airplay.
Casey:
Um, like we were talking about earlier.
Casey:
And even then in a pinch, I can do that using a really hacky third party app on the fire TV stick.
Casey:
So I,
Casey:
I would love to see a new Apple TV and see what they're going to do with it, but I don't know.
Casey:
I went from loving my Apple TV to kind of not really caring about it in the span of about a year.
Casey:
Now, maybe this is all Discovery D issues causing me to hate it, and it's really not the Apple TV at all.
Casey:
But one way or another, I just haven't really cared about the Apple TV in a while.
Casey:
Now, Marco, you had just posted something recently about yours not working for the 8 millionth time.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
First of all, it's hilarious that now we are all Gene Munster-ing Apple.
Marco:
Now everyone's like, oh, when are you going to do the Apple TV?
Marco:
It's a slight variation, but it's pretty much the same thing.
Marco:
Second of all, I think it's hilarious that the A5 just won't die.
Marco:
The A5, this chip that was released in 2011...
Marco:
is now still in the non-retina iPad mini, which is still for sale, the current generation of iPod Touch, which is still for sale, the current generation of the Apple TV, which is now also still for sale,
Marco:
The A5, and we don't even know what the watch is using.
Marco:
Maybe the watch is using an A5.
Marco:
This chip will not die, and developers keep having to support it forever.
Marco:
But anyway, and I think that's probably, honestly, why there's no Apple TV.
Marco:
I think the A5 became sentient and took over at Apple and has some dirt on Tim or something and is just holding the company hostage now.
Marco:
That's why there's no new Apple TV.
John:
Of all the things that are wrong with the current Apple TV puck,
John:
the incredibly weak CPU is actually, I think, not one of them.
John:
Because it's obviously strong enough to handle full-resolution HD video, which is basically what's expected of a puck-like device at this point.
John:
And everything we complain about is...
John:
bugs like it's not like oh everything is slow because the cpu is slow the responsiveness is it's okay as far as set up boxes go when things work and so you know we we desperately do need a new puck if they're like and the reason you know like you say oh we're gene mustering
John:
uh tim cook on this because he keeps saying where is the apple tv but it's not us doing that it's tim cook and apple speaking with the corporate voice saying we still believe in tv we're interested in tv like they're not just like not saying anything and then it's just left us to figure out that the ipod touch isn't coming back or whatever like they keep talking about tv and like how they're still pursuing that and i think there's a it's a venue for a possible future
John:
disruption and advancement and whatever that like they keep talking about it so if you keep talking about it and you drop the price in your system it's like all right so what are you talking about are you talking about the stupid $79 puck that we all hate now because it's buggy and old and slow and getting worse with time instead of better and messing up our networks because of discovery d or whatever
John:
uh it's it's they have to do something they're they're sending mixed messages here and one of the messages we really care about uh television and we're interested in the future television and the other message is what they're actually doing which is uh just keeping the same product around way past its prime and the only thing they've done is drop the price
Marco:
Well, you know, I think it's very clear that they are, you know, there's so much smoke around this.
Marco:
You know, they are definitely working on some kind of major update to it, but it's just not done yet.
Marco:
You know, that's very clear.
Marco:
And whether this was like a last minute slip or whether everyone was mispredicting the launch before, I mean.
John:
Or it could come out.
John:
Like, yeah, this is just a rumor.
John:
But it seems like we're all writing it off.
John:
It seems like we're saying we believe the New York Times story.
John:
Now we are completely prepared for there to be no Apple TV.
Marco:
Well, it has everything about a controlled leak written all over it.
Marco:
Like, this sure looks like Apple PR.
Marco:
This is a controlled leak.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
So, you know, I believe that it's been kicked out of the keynote.
Marco:
Whether it was there or not in the first place, we don't know whether this is setting expectations based on new information or just tamping down, you know, rumors that have gotten out of hand and would disappoint people.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Doesn't matter.
Marco:
The fact is, I believe these things to say it's not going to be there.
Marco:
Anyway, there's nothing saying that they have to release this at WWDC.
Marco:
Everyone always assumes that Apple has to release new platforms at WWDC that will have SDKs so that developers can get started on them.
Marco:
And that's simply not the case.
Marco:
Look at the Watch.
Marco:
The Watch was an entirely new platform that has now many apps for it.
Marco:
The Watch has not seen AWBDC yet.
Marco:
It's about to, but the entire WatchKit SDK was launched last November with no event.
Marco:
Well, with the Watch event, but no developer event, no developer gatherings of any sort, because the fact is...
Marco:
WBDC holds about 5,000 people.
Marco:
And there's hundreds of thousands of Apple developers.
Marco:
So they can never satisfy everybody at these events.
Marco:
So they have to do things online.
Marco:
They have to have these different systems and everything.
Marco:
So they can launch an Apple TV with an SDK whenever they want.
Marco:
They don't have to do it next week.
Marco:
So if something has slipped where it's not quite ideal timing for PR reasons, like...
Marco:
They're going to want to ship this device along with a really compelling customer story, a really compelling reason why people want to buy it.
Marco:
Besides, hey, we made a different box.
Marco:
You know, it runs the same crappy software that you're used to.
John:
Do you always need that reason, though?
John:
Because, you know, they release new Mac hardware.
John:
without a new os or any new capabilities like this is what happens if you if you neglect your products and just say well the apple tv have is fine like there's something to be said for yes just coming out with the new box with a faster cpu and gpu and
John:
with uh you know lower power less heat smaller size like just basic hardware advancement i'm not saying you got to do that every year for the apple tv because it's not maybe an every year kind of product but every once in a while that type of change you can't you can't put that off wherever you can't i understand they're like oh we want to have content deals we want to have a new remote we want to have an sdk like there's all these things that we see for the future of our little baby apple tv but
John:
But if those things keep getting delayed for whatever reason, that's fine.
John:
But in the meantime, it's okay just to do a hardware update.
John:
And they did when they bumped it to 1080p.
John:
But then they just said, that's it.
John:
It's like now they're being stubborn.
John:
We're not going to touch anything until we have everything to show you.
John:
Especially if this rumor is true that like...
John:
um you know the content deals were falling through it's and i can imagine someone going well why would we bother releasing that's like our headline feature like the sdk fine whatever but our headline feature is hey now you can be a cord cutter and you can actually use this to watch like quote unquote real tv and it seems like they're saving it all up to say you know imagine if they did it with the watch imagine if they said you know what we are not launching this without pulse ox right and the fda thing is holding it up fine we're just not going to go we'll delay it for another year
John:
They didn't do that with the watch because it's seen as a much more important product and there was no existing one.
John:
And at this point, the Apple TV is so long in the tooth that I just wish they would...
John:
you know they don't have to pull a macbook one and release something that might be weird and awkward and they really they replace it but like release the hardware that you know will work for your future software plans and at this point that hardware must exist uh and if the software is not ready for it like they should have if they had a contingency plan like let's just ship the new hardware with the old software and yeah now it'll have a showtime thing that you can pay 11 a month and get showtime just like you can with hbo go hbo now or whatever um
John:
That's still an okay product.
John:
Keep selling the $79 one.
John:
Sell this one for... Hell, sell this one for $149 or something.
John:
Maybe you don't sell a lot of them, but eventually you'll have a selling proposition where you can say, oh, if you have the new Apple TV, you can get all these amazing features and these new content deals and whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm just getting frustrated with the Apple TV, both my specific hardware product that I'm slowly using less and less and the fact that Apple won't put out a new one.
John:
And the reason for that, and this gets into a question I have for Casey...
John:
is I have a lot of stuff that I bought on iTunes.
John:
Why do I buy them on iTunes?
John:
I guess because it's really easy.
John:
I just go and press the button and the kids are watching a movie.
John:
But now, you know, we all know this.
John:
The best of us know it, but we still do it anyway.
John:
Didn't you know you were buying things you could only watch on Apple devices?
John:
Yes, I knew, but I always assumed there would be some passable Apple device that I could use to watch it.
John:
So now why do I go to the Apple TV?
John:
Because the kids want to watch a movie that we have purchased from iTunes.
John:
So Casey, do you have a lot of iTunes purchases?
John:
I guess not if you're abandoning it entirely for the Amazon thing.
Casey:
I have a fair bit of iTunes music purchases, but those were already abandoned in favor of Spotify.
Casey:
I know for some people that works, for some people that doesn't, but that's what I've done.
Casey:
I don't know that I've ever purchased a movie on iTunes.
Casey:
I do have a couple of ultraviolet movies, so I've gotten the Blu-ray, and that comes with a digital copy, and you can typically redeem that in one of several proprietary systems, and I've redeemed that copy within iTunes.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I will, if I'm buying a movie or if I want a movie for like my birthday or something, generally speaking, what I'll do is I'll ask for it on Blu-ray and then I will rip it and stick it on my NAS using Don Melton's scripts in order to get it so that it's accessible without the disc.
Casey:
Though if I were to sit down and watch a movie, just like Aaron and I, for example, I would put in the Blu-ray if I have it available.
Casey:
Which I know makes me weird in a lot of ways.
John:
As your bouncing baby boy gets bigger, I can imagine you will find yourself in a similar situation to most parents, which is kids want to watch a movie.
John:
You're sure as hell not going to order a DVD, get it, rip it to Plex and have them watch it later.
John:
You're going to pull up whatever you need to pull up to buy the movie now and start watching it.
John:
And maybe for you, that will be your Amazon, whatever, fire TV stick.
John:
like that apple you know that that your impulse purchases of movies that you're not interested enough in to watch on blu-ray but that you want your kid to see and want to be always available you'll buy them on the stick rather than buying them on the apple tv but for us we've already bought a ton of them on apple tv and i imagine marco has too like you know kids movies
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
John:
The vast majority of movies that we own through iTunes are Pixar movies.
John:
Those are important enough to me that I get the fancy Blu-rays for, but I'm just talking about other random stuff or even movies for myself.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Just like a Marvel movie that I'm not that into, but I want to see it.
John:
I'll just go and...
John:
buy it on itunes and i've even done itunes rentals which i thought i would never do because they're so expensive and i was look if you think the movie is important enough to rent like and i have netflix like why are you renting a movie from itunes it's just we're so incredibly lazy that you don't want to wait for a disc to arrive and if it's not available on streaming you're just gonna you know what let me just rent it on itunes it's 3.99 for two people to watch a movie it's way cheaper than going to the movies it's fine and then at this point we're never just buying them because if you rent it you rent it once and then the kids want to see it because it's a family movie then you rented it twice you should have just bought it anyway so
John:
i don't know anyway the point is all my movies are trapped in the itunes ecosystem so i desperately want apple to at least maintain some sort of confidence and update their hardware so i can continue to watch the movies that i paid for because unlike music they haven't gone drm free so i can't sort of take them out of their cage and put them someplace else
Casey:
Well, to put it in perspective, just a few days ago, I decided to buy the movie Sneakers from the early 90s, and it did not even cross my mind to look on iTunes.
Casey:
I immediately went to Amazon, found a Blu-ray, and shipped it to myself.
Casey:
That was the first thing I did.
Casey:
I didn't even consider doing anything else.
John:
Well, you should get sneakers on Blu-ray because that's an important movie.
Casey:
I agree.
Marco:
It's a wonderful movie that Marco hasn't seen or probably ever heard of.
Marco:
I've heard of it.
Marco:
I don't know if I've seen it.
Marco:
I might have seen it back when it was current.
Marco:
I might have seen it.
Marco:
It's a great, great movie.
Casey:
Have you seen War Games, Marco?
Marco:
Yes.
Casey:
okay you're not completely without hope then says pot to kettle no most of the movies i haven't seen came out like after 2002 well this was 92 so you don't really have any excuses right exactly yeah 90s i have i have covered pretty well yeah good deal uh what else do we think is happening at wwdc uh what are we getting on the watch are we getting complicated third-party complications i say no way
Marco:
There have been a couple of rumors that said yes.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Right now, I made my big post last week.
Marco:
I have so many questions about the Apple Watch native SDK.
Marco:
We know that we're getting it.
Marco:
That's been confirmed.
Marco:
So we know that we are getting the native watch SDK.
Marco:
We don't know...
Marco:
how limited it will be, what it will and won't be able to do, what it will and won't be allowed to do by policy.
Marco:
There are so many questions on that that all we can say is we're getting native SDK.
Marco:
But I have no idea, from my point of view, whether an Overcast app will be possible, whether it will not suck, whether it's possible to make one that doesn't suck.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to it.
Marco:
It's very impressive.
Marco:
To me, it sounds like very aggressive timing to have this all ready so soon after the launch of the watch.
Marco:
But hey, if they can do it, great.
John:
Is it kind of weird that they pre-announced the SDK?
John:
I mean, I'm trying to think, why bother?
John:
pre-announcing it like we all kind of expected it was coming but why not just save the surprise like is it so pressing that there was pressure on them to have to say no seriously it's coming because they told a they told us it was coming they said like this is what you have now you have watch get native xdk in the future they could have just said and that could have been the last you heard from it and we all would have assumed it's a wwc it would have been a wwc would it have been slightly more exciting for them not to have
Marco:
confirmed shortly before wwc oh by the way remember when we said we'll have the sdk in the future well the future is wwc that's exactly when you're going to see it why bother spoiling that minor surprise it yeah sure but you know like maybe maybe when they decided to say that publicly which is what about a week ago when they decided maybe that's also when they decided the apple tv wasn't going to make the cut or maybe they i i hope they knew by then whether the apple tv wasn't going to make the cut
Marco:
And so maybe that was maybe this is kind of a two stage PR management move where you're trying to, like, give people good news first.
Marco:
So then the bad news doesn't sting as badly.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But that's just a guess.
John:
I don't think it matters one way or the other.
John:
It's just it's like a difference of, you know, it used to be that Apple would keep every possible secret, could even when everybody knew, like, it's so obvious they were going to do something, they wouldn't say anything.
John:
I mean, and speaking of obvious.
John:
ios 9 and then a new version of os 10 everyone i guess assumes that those updates will exist apple is hasn't announced maybe they probably have like come see what's new in the next version of ios and that's probably in the wwc literature somewhere i didn't even bother looking but that's kind of an assumption based on their yearly schedules they won't tell you what they're going to be called their names there's still a little bit of surprise there uh but i assume we all agree that those two things do we think either one of those things are going off a yearly schedule or do we just assume there will be new major versions of both of those
Casey:
They'll be there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
So now what's in them?
John:
Let's start with iOS 9.
John:
What is what is iOS?
John:
What characterizes iOS 9?
Casey:
That's a tough thing.
Casey:
I don't know of any low-hanging fruit that I really, really, really want to see changed.
Casey:
For the life of me, I can't think of anything that irks me on a regular basis.
Casey:
And a lot of people have been calling for taking watch-style complications and putting them on the lock screen or even potentially putting them in springboard.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't know, maybe that's one of those things that once it arrives, I'll be like, oh, yes, I can't imagine not having this anymore.
Casey:
But I don't really feel like I want any of that stuff.
Casey:
And so to me, I just feel like I want everything to be a little less buggy and a little more reliable.
Casey:
And I don't know if I mean iOS specifically.
Casey:
I don't know if I mean iCloud since I've been burned by that over the last few days.
Casey:
But I would just love to see a slowed down release.
Casey:
And I think that's what we're going to get.
Casey:
I think we're going to get less whiz bang features than we do generally speaking, but we'll still get a handful.
Casey:
But I think that there will be a public admission isn't the word I'm looking for, but a public statement that this is about tuning things up and cleaning things out.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What do you think, Marco?
Marco:
I'm mostly with you.
Marco:
I do think that there's a lot of stuff they could do to improve things user-facing that wouldn't be totally out of the blue.
Marco:
Like last year, they introduced this amazing extension system.
Marco:
There are still a few places where extensions could be useful and welcome.
Marco:
So possibly new extension points.
Marco:
possibly enhancement to existing extension points, you know, things that you can extend from.
Marco:
And, you know, some small seeming but very helpful things such as apps being able to launch specific extensions from specific people.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Marco:
Or one of the big ones, mail app supporting extensions.
Marco:
That would be nice because it's kind of weird and really annoying that it doesn't.
Marco:
So if the Apple mail app could launch extensions, that would be amazing.
Marco:
So there's stuff like that.
Marco:
There's a lot of enhancements of things we already have generally, but they can make them better or they can expand them.
Marco:
Lots of that stuff is what I'm looking for, what I'm hoping for, in addition to the refinement.
Marco:
I mean, if you just look at what we're seeing over the last few days with the 10.10.4 beta replacing DiscoveryD with the old MDNS responder...
Marco:
I think, based on what I've read and the research I've done and what everyone else has been saying, I think that replacing DiscoveryD with the old reliable MDNS responder is going to solve more than half of the issues I face every day with Apple products.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I never really got as bugged by it as like you and Chalkenberry did.
Casey:
I mean, I certainly had, you know, caseyless MacBook Pro 1, 2, 3, 4.
Casey:
But it seemed to me that a lot of the issues that you guys had, like you had said, Marco, about your printer was constantly having issues.
Casey:
I don't have a fancy printer, so I never ran into any of that sort of thing.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Just my gut, and maybe it's because I've just listened to everyone talk about it all the time, but my gut tells me that some of these things that I can't really attribute what they're for, like Apple TV wonkiness, it's very rare that I can get my Apple TV to kick on when I try to airplay to it.
Casey:
I have to go over to it and turn it on, and then half the time when I turn it on...
Casey:
The darn thing won't be visible in my AirPlay devices.
Casey:
I'm starting to wonder if a lot of these little kooky, weird things that are starting to drive me up a wall are Discovery D and MD and S responder issues.
John:
Yeah, I don't know how widespread these problems are because from what I've seen from all the reports on them, the nature of the problems that makes them so incredibly maddening is that they're sort of like a poisoning of your environment.
John:
Like a lot of the fixes are like, look,
John:
Unplug your Apple TV, turn off your router, shut everything down, and then start them up in this order.
John:
Because if you don't, a feature of the new Discovery D thing or whatever are existing features of the various Apple devices, they will hang on to mappings between Mac addresses and names and other stuff.
John:
They will keep that information even when the machines from which that information originated are turned off.
John:
So merely restarting your Mac doesn't fix it because there's your Apple TV off in the corner that you forgot about that's holding on to those poisoned addresses and forcing your Mac to pick a different number or whatever.
John:
Like, I don't understand the details of it, but a lot of the analyses I've read have pointed to a sort of distributed problem where it's not just a local problem on your machine where some software that's behaving badly.
John:
It's that bad information spreads across your network.
John:
And if you don't sort of
John:
flush it out in the most heinous way possible uh you're screwed and that even if you do flush it out it could still come back or whatever so those problems are incredibly frustrating but it also means that i think there are a lot of people myself included who have never had any of these problems at all because the poison has not seeped into our network for whatever reason
John:
I remember when I had the loaner MacBook at WWDC last year with Yosemite on it, I immediately saw the two, three, four numbers going up just from using that computer machine alone by itself at WWDC, seeing my number increase.
John:
And I'm like, oh, well, that's a bug, right?
John:
uh but when i got everything home on my home network everything just seemed to work and with yosemite my entire usage of yosemite i haven't had any wi-fi problems i haven't had any printing problems i haven't had any networking problems uh
John:
I have seen the numbers every once in a while, but they've never gone over two or something.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Again, this is the nature of the problem.
John:
Like this is definitely a problem.
John:
And it's the worst kind of problem because the people who have it, it's like, I don't know, like an infestation of insects or something.
John:
You just burn the house down and then rebuild a new house.
John:
And even then they might come back.
John:
So.
John:
Yeah, this seems like a big misstep, and it's a shame because this type of move, like, why replace MDNS Responder with Discovery?
John:
Well, anyone who has spent a long time with OS X remembers the complaints about MDNS Responder being flaky and having to kill it and installing old versions of MDNS Responder because the old version was better than the new version.
John:
Like, that was a thing in many years past, that MDNS Responder was a source of all sorts of bugs and stuff or whatever.
John:
And eventually it shakes out, but it's like someone comes in and says, look,
John:
The reason MDNS responder was all buggy is because it's actually kind of the wrong design and the features distributed in the wrong way.
John:
And we really need a clean sheet approach here.
John:
And then discovery D is their clean sheet approach.
John:
It gets a new name.
John:
It does different things, but it's bugging.
John:
It's got some terrible bugs that manifest in terrible ways and everybody hates it.
John:
Right.
John:
And the wrong lesson to take from this is never try to radically change anything ever.
John:
I think you have to, and those are the type of moves from a core OS group that I want to see.
John:
That's why I wrote an entire section about LaunchD, which is a replacement for the init program, which is like old school Unix.
John:
How can you replace init?
John:
That's like, why would you get rid of that?
John:
It works perfectly fine.
John:
It's been around for decades, part of FreeBSD and BSD and Unix and everything like that.
John:
You're going to get rid of a nit and you're going to replace it with what?
John:
Some weird thing that sort of also does the same thing as Chrome, but also watches for IO and triggers jobs based on device.
John:
Like, I don't even know what you're doing here.
John:
You're biting off more than you can chew.
John:
It's second system syndrome.
John:
Uh, launch D is a stupid idea, but I totally applauded launch D. That's why I wrote about it.
John:
And I think it's great.
John:
And I think the launch D, you know, it had a bumpy start, but launch D is what's running all your Macs.
John:
Now that is a success discovery D not so much a success.
John:
So, uh,
John:
i hope apple's core os group or whoever is responsible for discovery d keeps doing things like discovery d because that's what that's what they should be doing they should not be resting on their laurels they should not accept the unix underpinnings as they exist they should always be trying to make something better just you know work on the execution all right i was gonna say one more thing on os9 as in like the
John:
This is the release where we, you know, focus on stability and make things nice and blah, blah.
John:
You know, and like Marco said, in addition to doing all the usual stuff, like a million bug fixes and all the frameworks and small new features and stuff like that.
John:
This is kind of not that they did it on purpose this way, but it is it is a beautiful, symmetrical PR win for Apple, because last year.
John:
We were all jazzed at WRC, like, look, whole new language, crazy new OS, all sorts of things that you couldn't do before.
John:
You know, last year was the keyboards, like new keyboards and stuff, right?
John:
That was an extensions, like, wow, just stars in our eyes, everything we always wanted from Apple.
John:
This is great.
John:
right and this year you know after the long year of bugs and weirdness and stuff like that this year everyone is kind of grumbly apple can get the same rounds of applause and good feelings from developers by saying the exact opposite this year we're gonna buckle down and make everything better and everyone will applaud and applaud like that they have that it's two totally different messages both years they're going to make developers happy and it's not like this evil plot to do it but it's like
John:
That's what you have to do.
John:
Like, what do we have to do to make developers happy?
John:
Last year, what they had to do was give them all the things that they had been withholding for a long time.
John:
This year, all they have to do is say, we've heard your complaints and we're going to really buckle down and we're going to make this like a polishing year and make everything better.
John:
And they'll get the exact same.
John:
amount of applause as they got last year uh so that's totally what i expect to happen i i want them to emphasize that they're working on stability and refinement and i want those to be the big applause lines from the disgruntled developers i can't imagine this year that they would say we're going even faster into the future and ios 9 is going to have more new features than ios 8 does and it's going to be crazy because developers will be like
John:
oh really can you just fix the bugs in the frameworks that you have like this is one of those years and so i think the cycle is natural and it just may be exaggerated because of the huge bonanza last year and what i imagine to be the the sort of doubling down on reliability and refinement and polish this year
Marco:
Well, and also they have the watch SDK to take some of the PR burden, to be a big part of the wow factor this year so that iOS and macOS can kind of rest for a second.
Marco:
They're not going to rest for long, but they can take a brief nap while the watch does its thing.
Casey:
An app nap?
John:
wow yeah yeah that'll be nice like the the watch i'll also be fun to see the the phone not be the hottest product at wwbc and how that how that affects the poor phone's ego you know the mac had to endure it they're like this used to be my conference and now it's ios this and i was that and they have more sessions than we do and everyone cares about the mac and now it's going to be like oh the watch is the new hot i guess the phone still goes along because it's like look watch you get nothing without me all your apps come from me um
John:
So that'll probably still work out.
John:
But, uh, and as for OS 10, uh, people are talking about, Oh, they did 10, 10.
John:
If they're going to change the, the X to an 11 or some bogus crap like that, this would be the time to do it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't, I don't,
John:
I don't think there's any pressure to rename that thing.
John:
I think it'll just be 10, 11.
John:
It'll be a different California place name.
John:
What will be in it?
John:
I think they can get away with the same thing of saying, you know, discovery D alone is enough reason that people in the room would applaud if they emphasize that the new version of OS 10 refines the existing features.
John:
Although I still feel like there's more pressure on OS 10 to have something new.
John:
Like every year they have something they want to show you.
John:
Uh, uh,
John:
if they're like last year, piggybacked on iOS eight so much, it's like, Oh, extensions and share things and whatever.
John:
And you can share a lot of the same code.
John:
Like it was, it was, as I wrote in my review, two OS is moving together forward.
John:
Like we all have the same features together.
John:
Handoff is a feature that we share extensions is a feature that we share.
John:
Like, even though they, they manifest in different ways, the feature that the abilities are the same and they only make sense together.
John:
If iOS nine says, this is, this is like a rebuilding polishing year.
Um,
John:
does os 10 say the same thing this is a rebuilding polishing year can you give os 10 features at this point without them having equivalents in os 9 uh i don't even know i can't other than obviously a new file system whatever but you know if that happens i'm gonna retire like i'm not gonna ever go to wwc again because i got one year to make a new language to go another year to make a new file system i should just never bother going again because it's all downhill from there
Marco:
Or you should go every year, see what else they come up with.
Marco:
I think with macOS, you have similar opportunities as you do with iOS for things like enhancements to the extension system, extensions in more places, different kinds of extensions, just stuff like that.
Marco:
There is lots of room for little things like that.
Marco:
I mean, a lot of times, as no one knows better than you, John, a lot of times with the OSs,
Marco:
uh the the the big headlining features of mac os are just like are things like enhancements to mail like you know enhancements to like some of the basic system apps that are built as os features and then there's also a bunch of you know underlying changes to to nice stuff or new apis like that's the kind of thing i would expect for mac os this year like
Marco:
A couple of marketing features like in some of the built-in apps or in Finder or something.
Marco:
Not like a really heavy-duty kind of thing.
Marco:
And then just a whole bunch of API enhancements under the hood and refinements to extensions.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
I'm not expecting big stuff.
Marco:
If they do a new file system, that would be amazing for you and for the show.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect it, honestly.
John:
Yeah, and I don't expect it either.
John:
Some people were asking about the file systems lab.
John:
I didn't check last year's schedule, but isn't that always a lab?
John:
Isn't that always one of the labs about file systems stuff?
Marco:
I think so.
John:
Yeah, like it's not – they're just there to talk about like how to use KQ or whatever to watch for file changes or all the different Cocoa APIs for monitoring file changes and dealing with extended attributes and how to copy files.
John:
Like that's just –
John:
I think that's just a standard thing they have every year.
John:
So I read nothing into it.
John:
I don't expect a new file system.
John:
I never expect a new file system.
John:
So whatever.
John:
Whatever, Apple.
John:
I'm not mad.
Casey:
Just disappointed.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I have a question.
Casey:
So in years past, it wasn't every year, but in many years past,
Casey:
We could kind of figure out what was coming with hardware based on what kind of got winks and nudges when they discussed new APIs.
Casey:
The classic example of this, and the only one I can think of off the top of my head, is auto layout and size classes.
Casey:
We're clearly indicating that you need to start, as a developer, thinking about sizes that aren't the one that we have now, or two if you include non-retina.
Casey:
And then the next thing you know, you know, in that fall, we got iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Casey:
I was thinking as I was driving around earlier today, you know, what is it that we're probably going to see in new APIs that indicates what new hardware might bring?
Casey:
And the thing that jumped to my mind was force touch.
Casey:
And what I was planning on asking you guys was, how do they tell us to develop for the potential for force touch without tipping their hand that the next iPhone will have force touch?
Casey:
And then it occurred to me.
Casey:
Well, to a degree, they already have that API in WatchKit.
Casey:
And so maybe what they'll do is there won't be any mention of it during WWDC.
Casey:
But when the time comes for this to be spreading across iOS, it'll be a very similar looking API.
Casey:
Hopefully that makes sense.
Casey:
So my question to you guys is, is there anything you can think of that would be like the canary in the coal mine for new hardware features?
John:
There's the split-screen thing where you divide the screen up into pieces for the big iPad.
John:
That code was in there for iOS 8, and someone found it in there for iOS 8, and you could actually execute it and watch it do its thing.
John:
I assume that code is still being worked on, and there's probably no reason for it to exist until a larger iPad appears.
John:
Or maybe it's a headlining feature of iOS 9, but that's a feature that...
John:
i you know i think they could put that in ios 9 and i'm like wait a second i thought ios 9 was a rebuilding year it's like yeah but we basically have this features ios 8 it just wasn't ready it didn't make the cut or it didn't make sense without larger hardware so i could see them releasing that um without telling you that they're also going to make a bigger ipad air and on from the force touch thing i think you nailed it i think that'll be the force touch apis for native watch things we all know force touch is coming to other devices when it does come they'll be like hey and it's the same api that you're used to from watch get uh done and done
Marco:
Well, the only trick about that, though, is first of all, I mean, you know, on the watch, it's probably going to be a really simple API.
Marco:
The big trick with that is that on the watch, force touch is only the entire screen.
Marco:
You don't force touch a location.
Marco:
You force touch the screen.
John:
But that's not a limitation of the hardware.
John:
That's how they've chosen to implement it, right?
Marco:
As far as we know, you're correct.
Marco:
On the Mac, the Force Touch is a positional thing.
Marco:
It's basically an alternate click at wherever the mouse currently is.
Marco:
On iOS, presumably, just because of the size of the devices, I would expect Force Touch on iOS to also be positional the way it is on the Mac.
Marco:
So I would actually guess it has very little to do with the watch implementation.
Marco:
That being said, it's also such a – you would expect it's not a very complicated API either.
Marco:
It's probably just another gesture or another touch event you can respond to.
Marco:
So that's the kind of thing that – like in previous years, like when Underscore wrote Pedometer++ –
Marco:
He wrote that entire app in like a week because Apple added the Motion API when they announced the new iPhones.
Marco:
Not at WWDC that year, but that September or whenever when the iPhones were announced that had the new M7 chip in them.
Marco:
That's when they added that.
Marco:
So they could do the same thing this year where they could totally leave it out of WWDC.
Marco:
And just in September, whenever they have the iPhone event, announce it then, release iOS 9.1 beta with that, or 9.1 GM even with that, and just have you submit apps within that week or two that you have, and that would be it.
Marco:
They don't really need to do it at this event.
Casey:
Yeah, I think, though, that the difference is for the M7, it was, and maybe you were kind of hinting at this, but it was a very, very simple API.
Casey:
Whereas, like you had said, the force touch API, while it's pretty simple on WatchKit, that may be less simple for when it hits iOS.
Casey:
And so I think that they could hold on to some things like the M7 until the 11th hour, something that's a little bit bigger and more complex or in again, auto layout and size classes are a great example of this.
Casey:
They had to at least tip their hat a little bit about it.
Casey:
And, and I don't know, I just thought it was an interesting thought exercise as to, you know, what, what might we see in the, what, what smoke might we see in the API that indicates a fire coming this fall?
John:
Well,
John:
Well, there's two aspects of it.
John:
One is like the different callbacks and delegate methods and event types or whatever, and they don't have to really reveal those.
John:
But the other is you would imagine when Force Touch comes to iOS devices, what it will come with is at least a handful of...
John:
places where the where ui kits native control set is responsive to force touch in some way like maybe is it a new controller or a new picker or some existing control that force touch has a function on because i also agree with marco that i believe it will be positional although it would be fun to have the toddler fist gesture for your ipad where they just smack the whole hand the whole screen with their fist and it says you know what i'm interpreting that like a watch force touch where i'm just saying whole screen like that should take you home or something you know back to home anyway um
John:
that type of thing where they're trying to show you what the hell is they're not going to force touch on their ios hardware and say we don't use this feature at all but you developers can figure it out for something like they're going to ship if they're going to ship force touch on an ios device it's going to have uses in ios in native controls in the apps that apple ships and by doing that they could be like well here's the api for the event and here are the the callbacks methods that you can get for on the the begin and end of these type of things and positions and
John:
and do all that stuff.
John:
But by the way, these native controls, these particular things or these OS features already use that.
John:
So if you want to make an app with this new control, this new control has the ability to do something special on force touch, you hook up your stuff to here to do that.
John:
And by the way, if they force touch here, it brings up the multitask switcher.
John:
And you may have to be ready that that could happen during this screen where previously it couldn't stuff like that.
John:
Uh, so I expect Apple to lead on, on the force touch on iOS devices.
John:
Uh, and I think it can do that leading without much pre announcement of an API, because I really do think that the vast majority of the new surface area of the API is hooking into, uh, OS related things and Apple standard controls and everything else is like, well, in your own thing, if you want to handle these events yourself, it's just a new kind of event and maybe some new callbacks and then do whatever the hell you want.
Marco:
I'm also, like, just in general with forced touch, and, you know, I said this about the Macs, too.
Marco:
Like, I'm not that excited about forced touch.
Marco:
I don't really see it changing things dramatically for the better for much.
Marco:
I see where it was necessary on the watch.
Marco:
And it isn't great on the watch, even.
Marco:
But I could see why.
Marco:
It seems like it's a compromise where you have a very, very small screen and not a lot of room for buttons or menus or anything.
Marco:
So this is, like, the compromise of...
Marco:
Well, you don't have room for buttons and menus in your app, so you can do the special gesture in most places and you'll get some additional options.
Marco:
On iOS devices, though, I think there's enough screen space and there's enough established UI paradigms there that you really don't need forced touch.
Marco:
You really don't need the secondary gesture.
Marco:
There's already so many weird hidden gestures and combos you can do on iOS devices to do certain things that almost nobody knows about and just serve to confuse people.
Marco:
I fear this might just be another one of those things.
Marco:
We really don't need this ability to basically right-click everywhere on iOS and search for functionality that is undiscoverable.
Marco:
It worries me a little bit.
Marco:
It seems like kind of a thing that is something cool that they figured out how to do in the hardware, but that has very limited usefulness.
Marco:
And it seems like it's going to be overused for a while in the short term.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But again, I'm also a skeptic about Force Touch on the Mac.
Marco:
I also think that it seems like it's this weird third click that is not a right click, that is about as discoverable as right click, and is this additional thing that does different things depending on what you click and how you click.
Marco:
It's just...
Marco:
To me, Force Touch seems like Apple's fad of the year, and I don't like it as much as they seem to.
John:
I think you're thinking of it too much as a binary thing, like it is on the watch.
John:
I don't know the limitations of the sensors, but I can imagine on something the size of an iPad or even a phone...
John:
that the sensors can be better and more sophisticated and it stops being a binary thing where it's either you're tapping or you're force touching.
John:
And it starts being, oh, can we approximate pressure-sensitive tablets or pressure-sensitive finger presses to make a finger painting app where a little kid can smoosh with their finger around and make thicker and thinner lines with their finger?
John:
Is it sensitive enough to do that?
John:
Because again, you have the position and you have the force.
John:
It's just a question of whether the sensors have that kind of resolution no matter where you press on the thing.
John:
If you stop thinking of it as a binary on-off thing,
John:
it makes actually the most sense on iOS devices because on the watch, it's like, yeah, the whole surface is forced touch because it's, you know, it's too small for you to be precisely doing or whatever.
John:
It's a decision they made there.
John:
It may be limited by the size of the sensors they have to have.
John:
On the Mac, same deal.
John:
Like it's, you're, you're not writing on the screen.
John:
You're not touching the screen.
John:
It's this other thing or whatever, but on an iPad or a phone, if forced touch can be, think of it instead of, instead of being forced touch, think of it as the screen is now pressure sensitive.
John:
That has lots of implications for any kind of interface where you want different degrees of pressure, not just on or off, but a whole gradation of, you know, I don't know, 256, a couple thousand levels of pressure, depending on how sensitive they are for drawing apps, for games.
John:
uh even for if they can come up with a control in the same way that the current standard controls for scrolling are sort of speed sensitive as in how fast you flick and how how long your path is a long slow swipe moves the thing differently than a short fast one and tapping it stops it like those are all gestures where velocity is used as an interface element and that velocity is not on or off fast or slow it's a gradation of speeds and
John:
So if they can use a gradation and pressure to provide interface elements that behave even more sort of in a way that is familiar to being under our fingers, like it feels giving a sort of weight to the controls or new gestures that involve pressing a little bit harder, a little bit lighter, influencing how how things move or maybe how much friction there is between your finger and the imaginary surface that's being simulated by the lights under the screen.
John:
I'm a little bit more optimistic about it, but it really all depends on... I don't know the capabilities of what they consider their Force Touch hardware.
John:
If it really is binary, then I still think they could use it to do stuff like in the interface, especially the stupid home button, which you can tap a million different ways.
John:
I don't know if Force Touch makes that worse or better, but it's clear that they're kind of overloading a lot of things with...
John:
multi-tap multi-finger gestures i would probably trade a couple of those for the hard press versus soft press but maybe that just makes it worse maybe they'll never give up things maybe they'll just keep adding more and more gestures this is like a hard three finger force touch in the upper left corner and that would be crazy but i'm really hoping that the capabilities and the sensors they can fit in a device that size have more capabilities and then it can finally be the sort of uh input device that reads different degrees of pressure and does smart things with them
Marco:
Well, and the Force Talks trackpad on the Macs, I think it does have... Because they talk about how you could draw the signature with pressure sensitivity and stuff.
John:
And the fast-forward on the video, even.
John:
You fast-forward slowly and fast-forward the harder you press.
John:
I just don't know how many levels there are.
John:
And it's a lot easier to do multi-levels on the trackpad than it is to do on a big iPad screen if I'm pressing exactly dead center with a certain amount of force.
John:
does that register the same as pressing in the lower left corner with the exact same amount of force?
John:
Maybe you need more sensors at the corners.
John:
Maybe you need sensors all around.
John:
I don't know the tech behind it.
John:
You would hope that it's going to be like one of those Wacom tablets or whatever where they put the pressure sensitivity in the pen, which is a clever way around this entire problem, but we need this to work with fingers or hot dogs or whatever people are using or cosmonauts, whatever they're using to poke at their capacitive touch screen.
Marco:
Also, I have a concern.
Marco:
I would not necessarily think that forced touch in iOS devices is a sure thing yet because if you look at the teardowns, the way it works, it basically puts strain gauges on the four corners of the glass surface that it's being put on.
Marco:
Glass flexes when you push it.
Marco:
And on the watch, whether it's glass or sapphire, it's a pretty small surface area and it's a pretty thick screen on top of there.
Marco:
So I wouldn't expect there to be any flex there.
Marco:
That would be a noticeable problem on these strain gauges.
John:
It's also arced, which helps the strength.
John:
The watch is like a tent that helps it stiffen it.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
On the Mac trackpads, you can see, when you see them in the store, if you have one, you can see the thickness of the glass.
Marco:
Like, if you look on the edge of the trackpad, you notice that, oh, this is actually a visibly thick piece of glass that I'm pushing here.
Marco:
And if you think about the sizing, the trackpads, these four-stacks trackpads are, I think they're all smaller than the iPhone 6+.
Marco:
And they're definitely smaller than iPads.
Marco:
So if you think about Force Touch coming to phones and iPads, the ratio of the thickness of the glass that covers phones and iPads to the relatively large surface area is very different.
Marco:
It's much thinner glass than the Force Touch trackpads or the Apple Watch screen.
Marco:
And so I wonder then, can you just put strain gigs on the corners of those things and have the natural... If you force touch in the middle of the display, I know strain gigs on all four corners, we are pretty far from them.
Marco:
Will it be able to reliably consider the flexing of the glass or will that be a problem?
Marco:
Not only will it, of course, might it be a problem for breaking the glass, but that's another problem.
John:
um so i wonder if they really can do this for say an ipad air or if they do make a 12 inch ipad that's the problem gets even worse yeah that's what i was saying like rather than just the four corners maybe all around the edges and you sort of take the average of them all and account for the flex or maybe you have sensors underneath the screen because you do have way more room to work with than the watch so you're i imagine you have more options especially on the ipad but i think also on the phone
John:
And on the phone, since the screen is smaller, it would flex less.
John:
And the glass on the phone is also a little bit curved or whatever.
John:
So I think this is technologically possible.
John:
But again, I don't know.
John:
The forced touch is a marketing term.
John:
So it could be that they have several different approaches to achieving this feature on the different devices.
John:
And that's what I'm hoping for, best case.
John:
And I really do think the next...
John:
if not the 6s or whatever the heck the revision of the six that we all expect is going to be certainly on the seven or whatever the one that way they really redesigned it of course people said that about nfc for years and it took forever to come too but i really do expect force touch to come even if it is the stupid right click that nobody uses just because i think they have the room to use it and it's on the watch and like you said you know like if it's a fad or why the hell not or whatever they seem pretty convinced that it is an important thing
John:
I mean, hell, they brought it to the Mac for crying out loud, so it's going to come to iOS.
Casey:
Can't innovate anymore, my ass.
Casey:
So I have a random question.
Casey:
Are we seeing code samples in Swift, Objective-C, or both in regular sessions?
John:
Both.
John:
Always both.
Marco:
Yeah, I would say knowing Apple, knowing how they work, I would say it depends on the session.
Marco:
You see them in C++.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
I would say you'll probably see one language per session, but that it will vary depending on what framework the team is working on, what department they're in.
John:
Don't you feel like I expect to see slides where they say, and the API looks like this, and again, if you have to do it in Objective-C, it looks like this, which is a little uglier.
John:
Or the reverse.
John:
And the API looks like this.
John:
And in Swift, it can look a little bit nicer.
John:
For the people who are on one side or the other, they're excited about how their API can be cleaner in Swift.
John:
They'll be excited to show you the two to compare and contrast.
John:
And which one is the primary?
John:
Which one do they show you the examples of and say, oh, by the way, this is how it looks in the other?
John:
I think that will vary from presentation to presentation.
John:
And in my experience...
John:
Apple does not speak with one voice at WWDC when it comes to low-level technical things that individual developers and teams have opinions about.
John:
Those opinions are expressed through subtle wording on slides or asides or expressions or snark or whatever.
John:
So I fully expect that each individual presentation and framework and team will take a slightly different approach to
John:
to how they mix their swift and objective c i think some will be uniform uh some will be a mix and some of the mix will be like uh we'll have a slant to the mix like you'll be able to tell is someone really excited about how this looks in swift are they annoyed that uh that you can also do it in swift and they have to show you that slide too
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like, I think that Swift is only one year old in the public eye, and a lot of Apple hadn't seen it before we saw it.
Marco:
And so, like, people were speculating, like, oh, will the watch native app SDK be Swift only?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Technically, there's no reason for that.
Marco:
They might do a policy thing to do that.
Marco:
I doubt it, but they might.
Marco:
But there's technically no reason for that because the watch is older than Swift.
Marco:
They started development on the watch before Swift was a thing.
Marco:
And so the watch's code that runs on the watch that Apple wrote is almost certainly using very little or no Swift.
Marco:
We also heard from a number of people
Marco:
that Apple's internal build system didn't even support Swift as of not that long ago.
Marco:
And maybe it does now, but that's a slow process to get that in there.
John:
And by the way, the watch isn't technically older than Swift.
John:
It is older than Swift's revelation to the wider Apple.
John:
That's what it's older than, right?
Marco:
Well, that's true.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Swift is going to come on slowly.
Marco:
It's not going to be like, oh, flip a switch and everything's now Swift.
Marco:
It's going to keep happening slowly.
Marco:
I am, though, very interested to see what Swift has become.
Marco:
What announcements do we see about Swift next week?
Marco:
How has it changed?
Marco:
They've done a number of revisions over the last year.
Marco:
So I'm wondering, like, you know, have we already seen most of the changes or is it going to be larger, larger changes that happen that are announced next next week?
John:
They teased it on Twitter, like the official Swift account was like, oh, exciting things in store.
John:
I expect to see bar graph showing compilation times being better.
John:
I expect to see some silly performance bake off showing how much faster Swift has become and maybe how much faster it is than Objective-C.
John:
I mean, they had those last year.
John:
They're going to have them again.
John:
Uh, and if there are any cool new features, especially involving, you know, all of the crazy stuff they've added to Swift to bridge the objective C world to, uh, all the sort of attributes and stuff they've added to work nicely with arc and the objective C APIs.
John:
Oh, here you can annotate.
John:
We, Apple will annotate all our objective C things and all our, our Swift bridges.
John:
So they all do the right thing.
John:
So you don't have to do all sorts of weird stuff with optionals.
John:
Um,
John:
they'll probably talk about how to do that how how to make your objective c api so that they are nicely callable and swift and vice versa so i imagine there'll be a lot of sessions about that but certainly swift has advanced so much in its one year of life certainly they've held back some cool new features uh to show off so i there'll be a lot of that of like look how much better swift is now than it was before look how much cooler playgrounds are here look at this demo of this thing you couldn't do in playgrounds before it
John:
Even though we all think we've seen it all, like, haven't we seen all that stuff?
John:
They've been releasing new versions of Swift all year.
John:
Like, what is there left to show us?
John:
I imagine there is enough left to show to make for some fun demos.
Marco:
And there's also going to be enhancements to the tools.
Marco:
You know, you mentioned playgrounds.
Marco:
There's almost certainly going to be Xcode Wi-Fi debugging just for the watch so you can do native watch apps.
Marco:
stuff like that.
Marco:
There's going to be enhancements to that.
Marco:
It's all going to be exciting.
Marco:
Oftentimes, what you hear in the platform State of the Union, which is the big session in the afternoon of the keynote day that's not live-streamed usually, oftentimes the things you hear there matter more to developers than what you hear in the keynote because that's where they usually talk about things like major Xcode improvements and stuff like that that just are really helpful in day-to-day work.
Marco:
So I'm just looking forward to all this stuff.
Marco:
Like even if there aren't a lot of major headlining features that are important to me, every year Apple does really useful things in the tools and the APIs that I benefit from.
Marco:
So I'm just looking forward to that.
John:
So no new car?
John:
Is that an appropriate WWDC announcement?
John:
I guess if you can't develop for it.
Casey:
Yeah, but you could drive it.
John:
I'm going to say no car.
Casey:
Worldwide driver's championship.
John:
Wow.
John:
Hey, they had a Ferrari at WOC last year.
Marco:
They did.
Marco:
Yeah, it was on the third floor somehow.
John:
How does it get there?
John:
I was so annoyed when that disappeared.
John:
I'm like, surely that will be here all week and I can go over and lovingly stroke it in between sessions.
John:
But it disappeared so quickly.
John:
I got one picture of it on my iPod Touch and then it came out of a session and it was gone.
Marco:
Well, can you imagine developers reaching into that big bowl of Skittles in the afternoon and then going over to touch the Ferrari?
Marco:
Yeah, they don't want that.
Marco:
Come on.
John:
They can wash the car.
John:
It's worth it.
John:
Come on.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Harry's, Studio Neat, and Warby Parker.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
And now the show is over.
John:
It didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
And it was accidental.
John:
You can find the show notes at ATP.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
John:
I forgot in the follow-up section, I forgot my other item of follow-up, which was the Velveeta shells and cheese tastes like melted PVC plastic.
John:
Kraft mac and cheese forever.
Casey:
I don't even know what to say here because Kraft mac and cheese has no taste.
Casey:
It doesn't taste like anything.
John:
Oh, in fairness, it tastes like salt.
John:
Keep in mind that I'm a super taster, Casey, so I don't have that problem.
Casey:
Oh, well, it just must suck to be you.
Casey:
It actually must suck to be you.
John:
Oh, it's great.
John:
Tastes like a thousand pears.
John:
Lex will tell you.
Casey:
Wait, pears in the fruit?
Casey:
That's a reference.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
Casey:
Oh, I should have known.
John:
What kind of pear?
John:
Because different pears taste different.
John:
It's a reference.
John:
I hope it's a reference.
John:
Now I'm going to Google it.
John:
I don't know why you two have me doubting.
John:
You shouldn't be able to make me doubt about my references.
John:
Bosque pears are the best pears.
Casey:
I just, I can't, I don't, I genuinely, like, obviously, taste is completely subjective.
Casey:
I'm not, as much as I joke, I'm not saying that you're wrong, especially if you are a super taster, but I just really don't understand, having had Kraft mac and cheese and Velveeta, like, I can understand if you said, well, maybe the consistency of Velveeta is not my thing, or perhaps...
Casey:
I don't know, maybe you just don't like the taste.
Casey:
But with Kraft, it's like there's nothing to taste.
Casey:
It's just there.
Casey:
It's the water of mac and cheese.
Casey:
It's just there.
John:
Velveeta, like, I was not joking with it tastes like melted plastic.
John:
It has a weird plasticky aftertaste, which maybe you're not picking up, but it is definitely there, right?
John:
It looks like, it smells like, and to me it tastes like plastic.
John:
And that's not a pleasant thing.
John:
Kraft mac and cheese is not high art.
John:
I'm just saying if you're going to pick your junk food, I would not pick junk food that has a weird aftertaste.
John:
It's like those Olestra potato chips.
John:
Just give me regular potato chips.
John:
The regular potato chips in this analogy is the Kraft one.
Casey:
uh yeah i would agree with that but i don't know just craft mac and cheese it's so bland you got all those recipes for putting chilies in it that our readers our listeners sent us yeah yeah i'm like it's i can understand i'm less bothered by people not liking velveta than i am about people swearing the mac that craft mac and cheese is so much tastier because it just doesn't taste like freaking anything
John:
It's not so much tastier.
John:
Velveeta is so vile.
John:
That's what it is.
John:
We're not moving Kraft up the continuum to say this is great food.
John:
We're just saying that we're pushing Velveeta down the continuum.
John:
And by the way, I did a Google for it.
John:
I was close.
John:
It's 100 pears and a million pears, not 1,000.
John:
So I was right in the middle there.
Casey:
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Marco:
I still maintain that busk pears are the best pears.
Marco:
Also, I don't understand hard pear people.
John:
Hard pear.
John:
Yeah, are there hard pear people?
John:
Yes.
John:
I'll eat a hard pear, right?
John:
I'm not against it, but you're saying people who don't like soft pears.
John:
It goes too soft, and they're like, oh, that's it.
John:
I can't handle it.
John:
Yeah, people who just basically treat pears like apples and just bite them when they're solid as a rock.
John:
I mean, I can do that.
John:
I'm not I'm not against that, but I agree that they they get it's like it's like banana ripeness.
John:
You've seen the variability in the ripeness of bananas people are willing to eat.
John:
Some people eat them super green where you feel like they're going to get a stomachache.
John:
Some people wait for them to go entirely brown on the outside.
John:
And some people are in between.
John:
I think pairs, maybe the continuum is more abbreviated, but.
John:
I will eat a pear when it's way too hard because it's better than not having a pear.
John:
And I will reject a pear when it's gone way too soft.
John:
But I'm probably more towards your opinion of what the sweet spot is, which is definitely on the soft end.
John:
I would rather not have a pear than have a hard pear.
John:
well this hard and then there's like i am having trouble biting this you know like apples apples you can always bite apple hardness i will eat the pear i will wait for for for a basque pear i will wait until it is almost as soft as a ripe avocado before eating it and it is delicious that way that's maybe a little too far for me
Casey:
I just don't like pears.
Casey:
I have nothing to add to this conversation.
John:
You don't like pears?
John:
Nope.
John:
What kind of person doesn't like pears?
John:
What is objectionable?
John:
Do you not like apples?
John:
No, I love apples.
John:
Like pears, what is objectionable about them?
John:
They're sweet and like, I don't understand that at all.
Casey:
I just, I don't care.
Casey:
I don't care for pears.
Casey:
I don't know what you want me to say.
Casey:
I just don't think they're very tasty.
John:
Don't like plums.
John:
Plums are weird.
John:
Plums look like a gel fruit.
John:
I can understand you being turned off.
John:
Pears are just like an apple, but taste different.
John:
But taste better, I think.
John:
And they're bigger, and they last longer.
John:
Everything about pears is better.
John:
Some of them are fuzzy on the outside.
John:
That can be turned off.
John:
What?
John:
I've never seen that kind.
John:
Pears, you know, they have a little, like, furry texture on the outside.
Marco:
I don't think I've ever seen a furry pear.
John:
They're out there.
John:
Crazy.
John:
all right accidental food podcast yay well you started it no you did with your damn no this was follow-up that was follow from last week with your big conversation talking about mac and cheese and and fast food chains and stuff i'm following up that doing follow-up for the world i saw i forgot i forgot it in the first part
Casey:
I think Declan's teething, and so I slept for like three or four hours yesterday, and I want to die.
Casey:
That's my sob story of the day.
Casey:
How's potty training?
Marco:
Yeah, I guess we were supposed to start that.
Marco:
Is this the royal we?
Marco:
Who is the we you're talking about here?
John:
The world was supposed to start that.
John:
You're expecting Adam to take some initiative in this area?
John:
Yeah, or the government.
John:
I don't know.
Yeah.
John:
They come in the night and potty train your child.
John:
If only that's how it worked.
John:
Potty training as a service.
Marco:
Is there like pee camp?
Marco:
Can you like send them to a camp to just learn?
Marco:
Your house is pee camp.
Marco:
Get ready.
John:
Your whole house is one giant toilet.