Digital Hearth
Casey:
So anyway, so yeah, so I posted my mega review of my beloved Tom Bin cadet, which I've just put in the chat.
Casey:
You may shower me with praise about how marvelous it is.
Marco:
Is this one of those bags that's just covered in like various like buckles and straps and nylon things and...
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
There's plenty of pro-level photography.
Casey:
If by pro-level photography, I mean, hmm, how would Sean Blanc and Marco take pictures of this?
Casey:
Well, this isn't it, because it's just not.
Casey:
But how would I take pictures of this when I'm pretending to be Sean Blanc and Marco?
Casey:
Oh, okay, that'll work.
Marco:
These pictures are actually pretty good.
Marco:
I mean, I can nitpick them if you'd like.
Casey:
One of them I didn't have the...
Casey:
The aperture was all wrong.
Casey:
The one where the bag is open, the big part of the bag, bits of it are out of focus.
Marco:
The very last one?
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
What's wrong with the very last one?
John:
No, no, no.
John:
I wasn't all the way down.
John:
Some of the bad photos aren't your fault because I was looking at these on my phone and the fabric pattern does that repeating pattern thing when it shrunk to small sizes and it looks crazy.
John:
I didn't realize until I looked at it on my Mac here that it actually is a uniform color and it is not like paisley or plaid.
John:
Right.
John:
Is that like, is it the Moray?
John:
Is that how you pronounce that?
John:
The Moray effect?
John:
Like when it scales it down?
John:
I cleverly avoided trying to pronounce it waiting for one of you suckers to fall on that sword.
Casey:
So if you want to do some follow up, we should probably do some follow up.
Casey:
We could start with Adam Luther, who wrote in to talk about 802.11ac.
Casey:
John, would you like to correct the error in your ways?
John:
Last episode, I mentioned that I didn't need to have 802.11ac in my house because I don't have any 802.11ac devices, but Adam Luther was the first person to point out that that's not true.
John:
My iPhone 6 does 802.11ac, so there you go.
John:
It was with me all along.
John:
Other than that, though, I think I don't have any because I don't think the 5S had it, right?
Marco:
I think the iPhone 6 was the first one.
Marco:
Well, also, how useful is that?
Marco:
Because typically transferring large files to the iPhone is limited by a lot of factors, including wireless, but also including the write speed of the flash.
Marco:
Can it really write any faster than 802.11n speed?
Marco:
Or is it just more like, well, if you have crappy range to the base station, or if you have a crappy signal, then you'll get a little bit faster on AC than you would under N.
John:
yeah i don't even know if that's true that's uh speaking of uh i guess we could put this in the section of the follow-up of my wi-fi base station uh story uh the wi-fi base stations have started arriving i say multiple because marco despite saying that he was going to get back to me on which exact base station he had he instead of getting back to me he just sent what he had yep you'd say no i wanted to get rid of it right and so it arrived and so i've got that uh that stupid tall tower
John:
thing apple's that's apple's current thing right like yours is the current generation did you enjoy the nexus 7 as well or whatever that is god took so long to charge the only charger we have that has that plug in it was like the kindle charger and it must be not like not high voltage enough so i left it plugged in for like a day and a half till it finally started up i tried this is the nexus 7 i tried out i was using the youtube app like maybe i can just use it to watch youtube videos it's just another little thing to toss around the house but the youtube app was like
John:
there's an updated version of this app available.
John:
And it was weird to be told that like inside the YouTube app in like in the, I guess with the little webpage it was rendering for the video.
John:
So I was like, all right, I'll tap the thing that it wants me to go to.
John:
And it took me to the Google play store or whatever it is.
John:
And then it says this version of the YouTube app is not compatible with your device.
John:
And I said, well, nevermind.
John:
so it was kind of disappointing i got them i got an email with it you forgot to delete all your accounts and i tried to delete them like swiping sideways on them and all my ios gestures are not working you know so i don't know how to use android uh but it's not bad for something to just maybe check your email i think i like the ios gmail app better than the android one which surprised me maybe i just need to get used to it or this could be an ancient version
John:
But it plays YouTube videos, so it will probably find some home in our house given to some child to watch YouTube on.
John:
I don't think that one's 802.11ac either.
John:
Hey, can you answer some of my support email while you're in there?
John:
Wow.
John:
And of course, a bunch of other people who saw my tweets are shipping me their old flat, like the flat airport extreme, the ones that I like.
John:
uh one of those arrived and i hooked it up and used it and i actually had to call verizon to get that to release the ip because i didn't feel like waiting a long time i just couldn't like i used to be able to with the verizon one get it to release before i disconnected uh and this time nothing i did would get it to release so i actually had to call them and it was pretty painless i didn't i talked to one person they knew what i was talking about you so
John:
knew what i was talking about immediately and they just did it and that was fine i mean it wasn't you know wasn't that painless i had to still wait for the on hold time of like uh five minutes or whatever and then anyway um so the flat one uh this is the model 1408 i believe a1408 works better than my other one the signal travels farther i can i you know because there's some rooms in our house that we just couldn't get the signal before and now we can um so that was exciting
Marco:
Well, because that one had, I think it had two revisions, and they looked the same identically on the outside, but the newer one, there were some tests maybe on Anantek a long time ago, and that's why I initially bought that one, because they had shown that the range was dramatically improved in the later version of it.
John:
Yeah, mine was really, really old.
John:
And these, in general, Apple's things are not known for having good range.
John:
And it was a big deal when Apple started improving.
John:
It was like, finally, the range is not horrendous.
John:
It's merely like, you know, middle of the pack.
John:
The Apple, you know, the Mac-oriented websites would review it in comparison to the old airports.
John:
And so compared to the old airports, it was a huge improvement.
John:
But compared to contemporary, even compared to just the Verizon router with the little...
John:
You know, that seven-year-old router that they gave me, that one had better range than any of the airports.
John:
But anyway, the new flat airport worked great.
John:
Then eventually Marcos arrived.
John:
I remember Marcos, the reason I didn't want it.
John:
Well, two reasons.
John:
One, it's like that big vertical tower thingy because it's the same case that they use to put the hard drive in for the time capsule.
John:
Uh, only the, the plain old router one doesn't have a hard drive in it, but it's got the same case with the place where the hard drive would be with just nothing in it, which is just silly.
John:
I mean, it's a, it's economies of scale.
John:
So they don't have to have two different, uh, you know, devices to manufacture, but anyway, uh, and it's really tall.
John:
And I like the place I have mine is, is, you know, I, I was envisioning it being kind of like the flat one, but gone up vertically.
John:
It's actually smaller than that.
John:
The footprint.
John:
So the footprint is smaller, but it's taller vertically.
John:
And the second thing is, of course, that this thing has a fan.
John:
And that offends me, you know, I don't want I don't want to have fans.
John:
I don't like the idea that it needs a fan because it means that it gets so hot that passive cooling isn't enough that it needs to have active cooling.
John:
And of course, the design of the thing doesn't have any holes on the top of the case.
John:
So if they had just made it a chimney case, then passive cooling would have been fine.
John:
Never mind all the empty space in there where the hard drive is supposed to be.
John:
And then there's a question, do they even need the fan?
John:
Is the fan only there for the hard drive?
John:
in a time capsule version and there's no point in it to the other one could you stop the fan with the thing overheat but you know of course the main thing is i don't want anything that makes noise anything else that makes noise around here especially since when i'm playing destiny it's you know within non outstretched arm's reach it's like right next to the monitor that i play destiny on so if it was going to make any noise uh i was going to hear it
John:
Well, let me tell you, the fan in this thing totally passes my 40-year-old ears test of silent.
John:
Wow.
John:
I am surprised.
John:
You could A, B test this thing behind a screen.
John:
Is it turned on?
John:
Is it not?
John:
I could not tell you.
John:
I could absolutely not tell you.
John:
Now, maybe if you were a younger person and you had better hearing, you could tell.
John:
But like, no one was home in my house.
John:
No cars on the road.
John:
Complete silence.
John:
I put it on and moved like, you know, an arm's length away from it.
John:
I can't tell that it's on.
John:
Put it right up to your ear.
John:
Yeah, you can hear it.
John:
It does make noise.
John:
Like there is noise there, but from from arm's distance, I am now old enough that I can't hear it.
John:
So getting old does have some benefits.
John:
Your hearing slowly starts to go.
John:
Nice.
John:
And so I was testing I'm testing the signal strength between like the flat one and the tall one and like AC and not AC and separate five gigahertz network and non separate five and non five gigahertz network.
John:
And it's kind of a wash.
John:
Like, it's hard to, without real devices for testing or whatever, if you just go up and do, like, speed tests and signal strength tests going by the number of bars, there's too many variables involved here for me to tell.
John:
I don't know what it is.
John:
Is it the neighbors?
John:
What their Wi-Fi is doing?
John:
Is it some neighbor using a microwave oven?
John:
Like, who knows?
John:
Both of them have much better signal than the previous one, but I can't definitively say that the tall one in my house anyway is any better than...
John:
uh the flat one so anyway i'm going to eventually decide decide on which one of the things they're going to keep they all work with my printer they all you know imported my router configuration just fine like they're all they all work and all the ones that i don't use i will just give away to someone else you can pack them all in a box with nothing between them and just make a big brick and send it to casey yep
John:
Yeah, like Apple, even with this tall one, I still don't think Apple is like at the top of the class in terms of signal strength and distance and stuff.
John:
Because every time they do a test of just the entire world of third party routers, there's always some other model that gets better signal strength and better distance than the Apple ones.
John:
But what the Apple ones have going for them is I can use Apple's apps to manage them.
John:
I can import my old configuration and it works with my printer plugged in via USB.
Marco:
I will also like to point out in the realm of very, very quiet fan technology.
Marco:
When Tiff got her 5K iMac last fall, in order to expand the storage, we bought a little Thunderbolt SSD enclosure.
Marco:
It holds four SSDs and it had this really loud 40 or 60 millimeter fan in it.
Marco:
I went online and did some research.
Marco:
I used to be a quiet PC nerd.
Marco:
I have purchased Dynamat before and it was not for my car.
Marco:
Anyway, so I did some research on what is the quiet fan to buy today, and I discovered Noctua fans.
Marco:
So all I did was I took out the old fan, it was a standard fan, standard plug, put in one of these Noctua things in there, and the sound difference is incredible.
Marco:
same airspeed really that i could tell like you know roughly i mean it is just incredible how quiet fans are today when they're designed to be quiet and it's kind of sad how many still aren't designed to be quiet like the one that came in this multi-hundred dollar thunderbolt enclosure for no reason at all is incredibly loud uh anyway so yeah not two fans good stuff
John:
That's another way.
John:
Speaking of bags and enclosures, and I don't know if I ever blogged about this.
John:
I probably should, but I'm sure I've talked about it in the show.
John:
One of the ways to build loyalty for any product that you're selling that is a physical good.
John:
over the long term it's not a good way to like get your company off the ground maybe but over the long term is to pick a few essential things about it that you won't compromise on mostly having to do with durability so if you're selling enclosures decide we're going to use the absolute most expensive fans we could possibly find and we are just going to either raise our price by the amount that that hurts us in terms of you know how much extra that fan costs
John:
um or take uh eat into our profit margins with it or like bags we are going to find the world's most reliable zippers and buckles and we're going to be like volvo like every time one of our bags gets uh damaged in some way we're going to replace it for free we're going to ask them to send us the the one that broke and we're going to look at the failure and try to figure it out and keep improving and improving so that eventually if your company stays in business
John:
And, you know, for a couple of years, you start getting a reputation of get blah, blah, blah enclosures.
John:
They're solid.
John:
Their power supplies never fail.
John:
Their fans are silent.
John:
Get blah, blah, blah bags.
John:
The seams don't rip.
John:
The zippers don't break.
John:
All the buckles work.
John:
And if they don't, they replace them.
John:
Like...
John:
This could be like, oh, you're just telling everybody to be high-end.
John:
It's isn't great to be high-end.
John:
Everyone needs to be snap-on, right?
John:
You need to be the world's most expensive, whatever you're going to be.
John:
But I don't think that's the case.
John:
I think you just have to have a reasonable reputation for quality.
John:
I mean, I think this does eventually push you upmarket, kind of like Weber Grills or whatever, or eventually you're kind of cashing in on your name, and even though your product may be reasonably good, you just keep charging more and more for it.
John:
You have to kind of try to stay in the middle, like I would say.
John:
uh craftsman tools not the best quality tools in the world but they are they have they gain their reputation for being if you break our tool you can bring it in and we'll replace it for free forever and we'll make it reasonable quality and i think they have a good reputation among customers i'm trying to think of other brands that are like ll bean is very similar i'd say
John:
Yeah, I mean, again, it starts to push high-end, but I'm trying to think of, like, I mean, Apple is one example, but, like, they've gone for something else.
John:
They've gone for, like, aesthetics and that type of quality.
John:
They haven't really gone for durability.
John:
Maybe, like, I don't know, I'm thinking of, like, that Sony Walkman that was, like, yellow with the big rubber gaskets all over it.
John:
Not that Sony ever had their reputation, but that particular thing had their reputation.
John:
Or I'm thinking more of, like, power tools and stuff like that.
John:
But anyway, in the world of computers, I wish there were more manufacturers who...
John:
uh more successful manufacturers who differentiated themselves on durability uh and i guess i mean it's been tough in the pc industry at least where even the phone industry with consolidation it's just been a cutthroat business and just if there were companies that distinguish themselves in that way they eventually got gobbled up because it wasn't enough to sustain them but i'm hoping as the insides of electronic components become more and more a commodity
John:
that there will be somewhere room to differentiate on this on these axes like not can you think of a phone with a reputation for durability i can't uh no i mean the samsung one that's waterproof i think is an interesting thing samsung changes what it does every year like you know they're they're just very they're they're not there's no coherent vision for uh the reputation they want to do except for the reputation as we make good phones that you want to buy
John:
please give us money and apple is so concentrated on thin and sleek and and uh beautifully designed and which is fine like that's the reason we like all their stuff and everything but they're not kind of like the ruggedized uh you know craftsman ll bean type of uh aesthetic there is there is no manufacturer that's like that for electronics
John:
I think there should be because we're kind of at that stage now where it's like maybe some people want that.
John:
I bet there is manufacturers like that for camping supplies, for mountaineering equipment, for car repair tools.
John:
I mentioned Snap-on.
John:
Those manufacturers do exist in the more sort of rugged manly fields, but I think there's a place for them in electronics because it's such a quality of license.
John:
Like I said, you buy that multi-hundred-dollar Thunderbolt enclosure and they have like a two-cent fan in there or whatever.
John:
It's like, please, just...
John:
spend the extra $15 for the expensive fan added to the price.
John:
If it's a multi hundred dollar thing, like I'll pay it.
John:
And if you keep doing that consistently, I'll say, hey, if you want to buy enclosure, same thing with power supplies.
John:
If you want to buy enclosure, buy this enclosure because the stupid power supply brick.
John:
Oh, that's speaking of power supply, you know, doesn't die.
John:
And speaking of that, my Wi-Fi routers, just as I was about to open up my Wi-Fi router with my son, which is a thing that we do when electronics dies, tear them apart.
John:
I thought, you know, before I crack this thing open,
John:
Why don't I try plugging it into one of the power supplies that came with one of the replacement ones to see if it was the power supply that died or the router that died.
John:
And it turns out it was the power supply that got fried, not the router.
Casey:
That's so sad.
John:
My old one, I mean, I didn't test it, test it, but my old one turns on the light.
John:
Before, the amber light wouldn't come on at all.
John:
Now it starts up, eventually turns green.
John:
So I'm pretty sure it was the power supply that died, which still means I would have been out of router because I knew I was going to buy a separate power supply for it.
John:
but we took apart the power brick apple's power brick you know what it looks like uh that's kind of like a what looks like everything else they make like a white rounded rectangle thing boy those are hard to open like i didn't look at the iFixit guide i'm assuming it involved the heat gun you know to loosen the adhesive but i don't have a heat gun all i have is pliers screwdrivers and other blunt instruments and that was difficult to get open
John:
Uh, but inside, uh, it looked, uh, pretty nice.
John:
Um, and that thing lasted, uh, at least seven years, probably longer before, uh, power surge, uh, when not connected to a surge suppressor killed it.
John:
So Apple usually picks pretty good power supplies.
John:
I've bought external hard drive enclosures that have gone through multiple of these power brick things.
John:
So those are usually the weak link.
Marco:
Yeah, in fact, power bricks are usually such cheap pieces of crap that I really have tried to avoid buying peripherals that use them.
Marco:
Anything that can be bus powered, I will almost always pick that option now.
Marco:
Because power supplies, either they die early or they start a whine or a buzz.
Marco:
I've had so many cheap, crappy power supplies.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
apple does well here like remember that article showing what it looked like inside apple's laptop power adapter and then inside like a knockoff it's supposed to made to look like and the knockoff they just showed all the components they were missing and and uh you know it's just the knockoff basically ran wires from one end to the other and apple's has filled with tons of like tiny surface mount resistors and trying to you know like apple does a good job with those things though i mean they're still you know getting healthy mark profit margins when you buy them from but that is
John:
That is a wise investment in money.
John:
They look silly on the outside.
John:
They're just these white, you know, rounded rectangle things with plugs and you think they're all the same.
John:
And it could be argued that Apple cheaps out on the wires themselves because they have to be thin and beautiful and the strain relief isn't there or whatever.
John:
But inside the actual brick parts of the power bricks, for the most part, Apple has done a good job with that over the years.
Marco:
well to be fair one of the reasons why the apple wires tend to die over time you're right part of it is they need more strain relief really and strain relief is ugly so they don't do it but also part of it is they they go on their environmental checklist they want to be like everything free and some of those things they've checked off the environmental checklist over the years are things that make really good long-lasting power cords but also might cause cancer or something
Marco:
So, you know, like, they have actually had to change the materials over time to be things that maybe are more brittle, like some of the soft plastics and rubbers are, like, more brittle now, and they're a little stiffer, and they crack, and yeah.
John:
Yeah, they change the material.
John:
Like, when you've got a collection of Apple hardware, particularly the cords, power cords, USB cables, lightning cables, 30-pin connector cables, if you have been buying Apple devices for a long time and you actually save this stuff like I do...
John:
There's two aspects of it.
John:
One, obviously, some of them might age differently because something that is 5, 10, you know, years old is like, was it always like this or did it just get like this because it kind of dried out over time so you can't really tell?
John:
But two, even when relatively new things, the difference in sort of...
John:
The bendability, the surface texture, if it holds a kink, like they're always wrapped up in that tight little bundle in the package when you unwrap it, how long does it take to get unkinked?
John:
I have some cables that are like a year old that are still kinked.
John:
Other ones curled right out into a smooth thing.
John:
Some of them feel smooth.
John:
Some of them feel rough on the outside.
John:
Some of them are stiff.
John:
Some of them are floppy.
John:
They're different thicknesses.
John:
I always wonder, is like...
John:
i guess it's probably intentional but it's like you said marco which part of this is we were removing harmful materials and this is the best we could do and the next year we figured out we can do even better than that still without the harmful materials which ones had the harmful materials in it and so they were like nice as nice as they can make them without the constraints of environmental uh correctness and everything uh so large variety in cables um from apple i'm assuming the insides are are similar like i was worried when they got rid of the uh
Marco:
whatever the lead and the solder or whatever because the alternatives are known to not be as uh as strong but so far so good on that front i guess our first sponsor this week is fracture go to fracture me.com and use code atp15 for 15 off your first order fracture is vivid color prints of your photos printed directly on glass
Marco:
And this is really cool.
Marco:
So I have a bunch of these hanging around our house here.
Marco:
Fracture prints.
Marco:
So, you know, they know we take so many photos these days and your photos usually end up trapped somewhere down, you know, an Instagram or Facebook feed somewhere.
Marco:
And, you know, they're on the feed for two seconds and then they scroll past and then they're gone.
Marco:
And yeah, you still have them, but you never actually really look at them.
Marco:
You never really enjoy them.
Marco:
You never really show anyone else those pictures.
Marco:
Once they're off the stream, they're gone.
Marco:
And so Fracture wants people to actually take some photos, take some special photos or some non-special ones.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Take some photos and get them printed and hang them up somewhere in your house or send them to loved ones as gifts.
Marco:
And it is so easy to do.
Marco:
Their website is great.
Marco:
You know, you upload the photos.
Marco:
They preview everything.
Marco:
You could scale or whatever, crop, whatever.
Marco:
So easy to do.
Marco:
And you get these beautiful prints.
Marco:
Now, this is really...
Marco:
vivid color photo prints printed directly on glass so here's how this works there's a very very thin piece of glass on the front the photos printed on the back side of it facing through facing the front so it can't scratch off and the front is nice and glossy glass so it looks great and it's so thin that it looks like the photo is printed on the top surface you know from any distance it looks like the photo is printed on the top and
Marco:
And because it's so thin, it also is extremely lightweight.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about some giant heavy pane of glass ripping the nail out of your wall and crashing down on the floor.
Marco:
These things are very lightweight for their size.
Marco:
And so behind the glass is a thin piece of foam board.
Marco:
And that has little holes in it, so then you can hook picture-hanging screws in that.
Marco:
They even give you one in the box if you need it.
Marco:
Or you can go to the hardware store and get $10 for a buck or whatever.
Marco:
But they...
Marco:
These things are nice, solid, lightweight pictures that hang on your wall and look great.
Marco:
Every time somebody's in my office and they see my Fracture prints, they always compliment them and they always ask about them.
Marco:
These make great gifts.
Marco:
Fracture vivid color prints directly on glass.
Marco:
Use code ATP15 at FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Code ATP15 for 15% off your first Fracture order.
Marco:
Prices start at just $15 for the small ones.
Marco:
They're like a 5x5 square.
Marco:
It's a
Marco:
about the size of a little smaller than a cd case um if anyone even knows what those are anymore do you guys remember the trick to open jewel cases properly you ever learned that is there a trick yeah the three finger thing what you just open them yeah no it's on on the right edge so have when you open a cd case does it like snap open after some force are you pulling from the middle
Marco:
i don't have this problem i just open them they hope they're a hinge on the back they open like books right no they they they snap open if you don't do it right so the way to do it right is so take your take your left hand take your middle finger straight up thumb straight down index finger kind of out so as if you're making like a three like a peace sign with your thumb out okay you take your middle finger up top your thumb you pull up the corners of the of the case lid from that as you're pushing down on the case with your index finger
Marco:
So you pull up the top and bottom while you're pushing down the center of the right edge.
Marco:
And then it swings right open.
Marco:
If you actually can find a jewel case to try this on, it'll change your life if you still ever open jewel cases.
Marco:
But you probably don't anymore.
Casey:
This is unbelievably useful information for 15-year-ago Casey.
Casey:
How did you not know this?
Casey:
No, I did know this.
Casey:
And I think that is how I opened a jewel case.
Casey:
But I didn't realize there was a right and wrong way.
Casey:
To John's point, I just kind of opened it.
John:
I've got a jewel case with me right here.
John:
And either, like, I don't see a wrong way to open it.
John:
I don't see what, like, I'm trying to open it in all sorts of wrong ways.
John:
Like, if I just take my finger and flick it on the set, it opens every time.
Marco:
Like, it's not... What most people will do is they will just take one finger, like the index finger, and try to pull up the center of the right edge.
Marco:
And then it kind of, like, snaps open.
John:
I've never seen that technique.
John:
I always have fingers on the top edge and fingers on the bottom edge, and the other hand crosswise on it.
John:
Pressing in the middle thing does disengage the little hooks, but even if you don't press in the middle, if you just pull up with your fingers that way, it comes off pretty much as easily.
John:
They're not stiff.
Marco:
Anyway, thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So we are in August, and we are in the slump, the doldrums of August, and we have little to nothing to talk about.
Casey:
So with that in mind, we're going to try to entice you to listen to the rest of this episode by discussing a couple of different things.
Casey:
And we thought we would start by me having an existential crisis about what kind of computer I want to replace my
Casey:
personal 15-inch high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And if you recall, I've just gotten a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro for work, but I've been telling myself that I'm waiting for the Skylake 15-inch refresh to get a new personal machine.
Casey:
But I was thinking about it recently, and I started to wonder why.
Casey:
What I use my personal computer for, my personal Mac, is almost nothing.
Casey:
It is unbelievably slow as compared to both the new work computer and even the work computer that the new one replaced, because my personal one is still using a platter hard drive, which is unusable.
Casey:
I don't know how anyone does this anymore.
Casey:
It's unusable.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
The reason I have both a work and a personal machine is because I like to tell myself that I'm keeping my personal files on my personal machine and my work files on my work machine, and they will never mix or anything like that.
Casey:
Do you want to guess how often I really do a good job of keeping my personal files off my work computer?
Casey:
Not at all.
Casey:
Everything in my Dropbox is on there.
Casey:
One password is on there.
Casey:
A lot of my pictures are on there.
Casey:
All of my music is on there.
Casey:
Everything is intertwined.
Casey:
So I'm wondering if there's what is the point in insisting on having a 15 inch laptop for my personal machine when really the only thing this machine consistently gets used for is as a Plex server.
Casey:
Which started me down the line of, do I even really need a laptop?
Casey:
And if not, what do I get?
Casey:
I don't think I want a Retina iMac for reasons I can't put my finger on, but I just don't think I want that.
Marco:
They still sell the non-Retina one.
Casey:
Well, okay, sure.
Casey:
But if I was going to get an iMac, I don't want an iMac is what I should have said.
Casey:
do i want a mac mini maybe you want a mac pro oh god that would be a hysterical turn of events but no i do not want a mac pro but i guess what i'm driving at is like what is the purpose in maintaining a personal machine that is portable that i could take places when i'm never ever ever going to take that machine places even if i had a unbelievably awesome personal machine
Casey:
In all likelihood, I'd probably take the work machine.
Casey:
So on the slim chance that I have to do work when I'm on this phantom theoretical vacation, I could do so.
Casey:
So why do I need a 15-inch laptop when really I could probably save $2,000 and just get a Mac Mini?
Marco:
Well, first of all, you couldn't because it is impossible to get a nicely configured Mac Mini for much under $1,000.
Casey:
I mean, we're still looking at... The Work computer that Work gave me was something like $3,100.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
But the difference between the base model, which is $2,000, and that is... I wouldn't say it's 50% better.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
So, number one... You answered this already.
Marco:
Number one is...
Marco:
Are you sure you don't need for it to be portable?
Marco:
And you said you just bring the work laptop, and that makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
What I recommend, if this works for you, I recommend whatever you get, consider that you will leave, if your job allows this, leave your work computer at work.
Marco:
If you bring your work computer at home, then obviously you're blurring a line between home and work.
Marco:
And as you said, that's something that's not ideal ideologically, if that's not a redundant phrase.
Marco:
And obviously, whether your job expects you to be working on the side, that's up to you and your job.
Marco:
But if you can leave your work computer at work most of the time, that's worth considering because that gives you really good isolation then.
Marco:
Then you can't bring your work home with you.
Marco:
You can leave it connected to the monitor and stuff at work and have all your windows stay in place, John.
Marco:
And it's really nice to have that separation, honestly, unless you have to be frequently doing work at home.
Marco:
Then it's different.
Marco:
But if that's not a frequent occurrence, if you can usually do work at work only, then that can be really nice.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think I could get away with it.
Casey:
I understand and completely agree with everything you just said, but I work from home often enough, even like in the evenings or occasionally on the weekends or just to, you know, quickly.
Casey:
Well, I guess I was going to say quickly fire off an email, but I could do that on any computer.
Casey:
That doesn't require a full bore work machine.
Marco:
Does the work that you occasionally have to do at home require that it be done on your work computer?
Marco:
Or can you log into the stuff you need to log into on any computer?
Casey:
i i was going to say i suppose i could like uh what was almost said rdp because i'm showing my windows colors now nice um but i could you know vnc into a machine at work if i can punch a hole through the firewall i suppose i could put the work vpn on my home machine this sounds like too much work exactly supposed to be saying ard if you want to get your mac crit up
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Apple Remote Desktop, right?
Casey:
Anyways, the point is I probably could do that.
Casey:
But in all likelihood, if I have a work laptop, I would almost certainly take it home in no small part because in this theoretical, I'm not going to have a laptop of my own.
Casey:
And I'm going to have either an iMac or a Mac Mini.
Casey:
And so I'm going to want a laptop to use in the house, even for personal things.
Casey:
And so I would want to have the work computer at home anyway.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So then that's the other question.
Marco:
So we know Aaron has a MacBook Air that is usually dry.
Marco:
Now, are there times when you take your work computer out of your home office and work around the house with it?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes, there are.
Marco:
That happens frequently?
Casey:
Well, for example, the blog post that we talked about earlier that may or may not have made it into the show, that was done sitting on the couch next to Aaron on my work laptop.
Marco:
As long as you're comfortable continuing to have the work laptop have this dual role of being the work computer and also your half slash even maybe primary home computer.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
If that's something you want to continue, then sure, get a Mac Mini for your home server.
Marco:
And consider running it headless.
Marco:
Because at that point, it's like, well, what are you really even doing with the Mac Mini?
Marco:
I have a Mac Mini here running headless.
Marco:
It's doing our live stream.
Marco:
It serves my iSCSI giant share from the NAS.
Marco:
And then it runs Backblaze to back it up over iSCSI.
Marco:
It runs a couple other task-type things.
Marco:
It runs Plex, which I never use because I hate it because it turns out you're the only person in the world who likes Plex.
Marco:
Please email Casey.
Casey:
Oh, you are going to get so much email, my friend.
Marco:
The truth is that I'm the only person in the world who doesn't like it.
Marco:
I think that is more accurate.
Marco:
That's more accurate.
Marco:
But anyway, the Mac Mini is fine for that if you plan to run it headless, but it is not a good deal.
Marco:
Performance-wise, a 15-inch comes very, very close to the performance of most of the iMacs and really the whole lineup.
Marco:
A 15-inch, even the base model, performs extremely well relative to the rest of the lineup.
Marco:
The Mac Mini is kind of the opposite.
Marco:
The Mac Mini, you pay, what is relatively speaking, you pay a lot and you kind of get a little for it.
Marco:
It's also very rarely updated.
Marco:
Obviously, the current model is very old.
Marco:
Even when it's updated, it still doesn't get to be a great deal.
Marco:
It just gets to be a less bad deal for a couple of months.
Marco:
But it is never a good deal.
Marco:
You look at what it actually costs to spec one out to be reasonable.
Marco:
For instance, I don't think you want a platter hard drive in that either.
Marco:
Because this is not a fast computer.
Marco:
What decade is this?
Marco:
You want this to be running 24-7?
Marco:
I would put an SSD in it.
Marco:
I did.
Marco:
I put the... I think the 256...
Marco:
I didn't go crazy with it because I didn't need that much space on it, but your mileage will vary with that.
Marco:
You have the NAS for your bulk storage anyway, so I don't know how Plex deals with that, but probably in a way that I hate.
Marco:
But if you want to actually do work on this new computer at home and really make it your home computer, I would say either get an iMac or get another 15-inch the way you've been doing it.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's the thing is that I don't know what it is.
Casey:
It's some sort of mental hurdle that I can't get over.
Casey:
But I think to myself, if I'm going to buy an iMac...
Casey:
I would always choose a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro over the iMac.
Casey:
And I wish I could explain why, but it's just the iMac for me seems so silly.
Casey:
It's so big and unwieldy.
Casey:
Maybe that's why I'm landing on the Mac mini is because it's not big.
Casey:
It's not unwieldy.
Casey:
I could run it headless if I so desired.
Casey:
And I guess if I'm going to get something that's such a physically large machine...
Casey:
I'm going to want it to be something I could take around the house.
Casey:
And you can't take an iMac around the house.
Casey:
I'm sure everyone has had that story of seeing... Yeah, everyone has seen that guy at Starbucks.
Casey:
But for the purposes of this conversation, you cannot move it around the house.
Casey:
And so I guess what we're saying then, and I'd like to hear John's two cents in a moment, but I guess what we're saying is...
Casey:
probably go ahead and get the 15-inch MacBook Pro, even if all it does is sit there and run Plex nonstop and do almost nothing else.
Marco:
Or if that really is the main reason you need it, just get a Mac Mini because a laptop is not always on.
Marco:
It is really, really nice having an always-on Mac server for roles like that.
Marco:
if you're really going to keep your main personal use on your work computer, if you're not going to be, like, using this computer much at home, then get a cheap Mac Mini and be done with it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But you have to decide, like, is that really what this is for?
Marco:
Because a Mac Mini is a better home Plex server than a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
I guess maybe transcoding, if it's doing heavy transcoding, it wouldn't be.
Marco:
But although it would do that in silence, and it has hardware Ethernet port.
Marco:
So keep that in mind.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
and you can even put it next to your tv and use hdmi and use a bunch of crazy stuff on there if you want i wouldn't but you can but anyway um you know mac minis are great for home servers if what you really want is a home server they're not good deals you can never find good deals on them used either because everybody wants a cheap mac mini so the used pricing on them is not that much cheaper than getting them new
Marco:
So it will never be a good deal.
Marco:
But for the role of a home server, it is really nice.
Marco:
And mine, it is as silent as the Mac Pro under load.
Marco:
It isn't as fast.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why it can be.
Marco:
Mine only has dual cores.
Marco:
I think they stopped selling the quad core ones.
Marco:
um so it these aren't amazingly fast machines but they're really small you can put them anywhere they have you know they're all hardware it's all hardware ethernet hardware sound ports hardware hdmi and everything you don't have to have like a bunch of dongles or thunderbolt adapters or anything and uh it'll just sit there in silence and not bother you whereas a laptop
Marco:
Like running a laptop headless or in clamshell mode rather is not a great idea for long.
Marco:
I know people do it.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
But it's not a great idea for long.
Marco:
They don't tend to last as long that way.
Marco:
And there's lots of like – like they kind of fight you on it.
Marco:
They don't really want to be run that way.
Marco:
And you have to always kind of like work around, oh, is the screen actually on or there?
Marco:
Is the OS trying to fight me and keep the screen on or just did it not see that I put it to sleep?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's always kind of a mess trying to get a 15-inch to run headless on a regular basis.
Marco:
And a Mac Mini will always just do that for you.
Marco:
It will serve that role better if that's what you really want.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And really quickly, I should point out, and the chat room has already given me grief about this justifiably, the right answer for a Plex server is absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, a really cheap PC that's just sitting there and doing nothing but serving Plex.
Casey:
No, then you have to manage a PC.
Casey:
Honest to God, that's exactly right.
Casey:
That is exactly why I do not want that.
Casey:
I'd have to manage the PC.
Casey:
I'd have to worry about it.
Casey:
Yes, I know a lot of people, PC fans are saying, you have to do all those with a Mac.
Casey:
Well, you know what?
Casey:
You're right, but I'm used to it.
Casey:
It's just another one that I have to think about.
Casey:
Whereas managing a PC, that would be the only PC in the house that's actively being used.
Casey:
It's making me think about a bunch of things that I really just don't want to have to worry about.
Casey:
I'm already worrying about, you know, the El Capitan upgrade for my machine, for my work machine, for Aaron's MacBook Air.
Casey:
It's not going to hurt me to worry about it for one more computer.
Casey:
So I understand that that is unquestionably the right answer.
Casey:
On paper, it is not the right answer for me.
Casey:
John, how would you handle this?
John:
Where are your photos?
John:
Where's your photo library?
Casey:
The Canonical photo library is on the 15-inch personal MacBook Pro on the spinning platter hard drive that never turns off.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't like laptops.
John:
I think this is...
John:
I think one of your things that you alluded to before is you don't like the idea, and a lot of people, I think, who are not, especially people who are on tech nerds, don't like the idea of a large piece of furniture, basically, in their house being a computer.
John:
Like, I think you like the idea that the laptop, when you close it, it's basically, you can't even see, it's just a little flat thing on a desk.
John:
When it's open, it's not that big.
John:
You don't want to dedicate, like, most tech nerds don't mind this.
John:
I mean, just look at Marco's computer room, or even mine for that matter.
John:
You don't want the thing where the dominant piece of furniture in a room or on a desk or whatever is computer related.
John:
Like I've got my big tower on the floor.
John:
I've got my monitor.
John:
I've got the speakers.
John:
Marco's got monitors and stuff all over the place.
John:
That's, that's what some people like, but it sounds like you don't want that.
John:
So that's why you're kind of resistant to the idea of an iMac or something.
John:
Cause it just, it's physically imposing and that you can't put it away when you're not using your iMac.
John:
It is still, especially the big retina one, still a big 27 inch screen that you just can't get rid of.
John:
And it's just blocking your view out the window and, and you know, whatever.
John:
But yeah,
John:
I would think of that for two things.
John:
I think every home, every tech nerd home anyway, needs to kind of have like a digital hearth, which is like the biggest, nicest screen where you can look at photos in movies and the family could gather around them if they wanted and look at them.
John:
That doesn't move, that is like sort of the main repository of the things that you care about in the home.
John:
So it's constantly connected to both network and local backups.
John:
It's got a really big screen.
John:
It's probably the fastest computer.
John:
And that's where you would...
John:
you know do all that you know you'd go there to uh i don't know like pay your bills uh look at sort through your photos edit your photos uh like look at a funny youtube video with the family or the kids or whatever you know watch a new movie trailer that comes out i guess you could do this all in front of your tv if apple got off its butt i mean its tv products worth a damn but anyway i wouldn't hold your breath on that yeah uh but that's what i'm thinking of like for the iMac but you're right that it is going to be a large imposing uh
John:
physical presence right and then i think you should have uh a very small light laptop like an air or the macbook one that you use for hey i don't want to be stuck on my desk i want to be able to run around the house but on that small light laptop you should not have your family photo collection you shouldn't have anything you really care about there it should just be like your dropbox and your other network connected stuff and if you drop it and it cracks in half it's not a big deal because the stuff that you care about is more stationary
John:
And then you should also have a Mac mini or something like that doing your data serving and a network attack.
John:
And it's like, it starts getting expensive at that point, right?
John:
So what you're trying to do is like, I don't want to have a big giant desktop computer with a big screen and a small light laptop and a little server.
John:
You're just trying to find one machine that's going to do it.
John:
right um and as far as that's concerned if you don't want a big imposing piece of furniture and yeah the iMac is out um i would not do any personal stuff on your work computers i would resist that urge because that just gets you into a bad pattern i think uh i don't like the idea of a family photo library being on a portable machine because then i'm like when are you going to remember to hook it up to your local hard drive to back up probably not as often as you want and and network backups are kind of trickling and happening over time but
John:
if you're not careful uh the machine could be asleep for a lot of the time or the lid closed or some other way where you're just not backing up as much as you should be and i don't feel comfortable with like your entire family's photos your main local copy as of like two or three days ago being on this thing that you could drop accidentally or something but uh
John:
But it sounds to me like that you basically kind of made up your mind and that you don't want a big iMac sitting on a desk and you want to be able to run around the house for whatever reason with a giant 15-inch laptop instead of a small, sleek, light one.
John:
So that's what you got to get.
John:
It just feels like a terrible compromise to me because it is a machine that is not really good at anything.
John:
Like you're just wandering around your house with it.
John:
You've already got a portable laptop just like that to go to and from work.
John:
And this one is just so you can wander around your house with it.
John:
I just feel like you would...
John:
You would separate your concerns better if you had a big, mostly stationary computer that looks nicer and performs better, and then a really small, thin, light one that you could take to WWDC with you.
Casey:
See, there's no chance that I'm going to rock a three-computer solution where one is work, one is an iMac, and one is an Air.
Casey:
It's just not happening.
John:
Well, you leave the work when it works, like Marco said.
John:
Like, I see no reason to bring that home.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
That has nothing to do with moving things.
Casey:
It's just that's stupid.
Casey:
There's no need for that.
Casey:
I would definitely choose a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro over a 27-inch iMac or whatever it is and a Air slash MacBook 1.
Casey:
That being said, the more we talk about it, the more I'm starting to come to grips with the idea that maybe an iMac is really what I'm looking for, even if I don't want to admit it to myself.
Marco:
Well, because here's the thing.
Marco:
An iMac can serve all the same roles the Mac mini serves because it's stationary.
Marco:
It's always connected.
Marco:
It can be always on or at least, you know, in the power nap kind of weirdo thing.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anybody use that?
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Mine's always on.
Marco:
It just has a screen turned off.
Marco:
so you know it can serve all those home server roles and also be your digital hearth as john said which is i love that that's a great analogy um another thing to consider and this could go either for or against it depending on how you look at it you you have this you're looking at this computer to be purchased now your kid is almost one so you will probably have this computer for what four years let's say four years you'll probably even have it for longer honestly if you're looking at like an apple desktop and
Marco:
you know, just knowing, you know, knowing that you're not me, you're probably going to have it for a while.
Marco:
So that means that whatever, whatever computer that you choose here, you're probably going to have from your kids ages, you know, one through five or something.
Marco:
And so you have to think when you have a three to five year old running around your house, are you really going to be getting a lot of work done on a laptop?
Marco:
yeah yeah that's a good point i doubt that severely like i mean i know i just know john you can tell us because you have twice the experience but i just know from having my one kid and him being three right now i can never get worked on on a laptop anywhere outside of my office i have tried it doesn't happen it like it just it's that's not that is not compatible with the reality of having kids at home and it's that's not you know a good or bad thing that's just how it is there's nothing you can do to change that
Marco:
So consider your next three to five years of the kind of work you'll be doing in your house and where in your house you'll be doing it.
Marco:
What kind of situations?
Marco:
Maybe you won't want a laptop because you'll recognize that you can't really use a laptop with a kid running around and get much done.
Marco:
Or maybe you'll want a laptop because your home office that you would have a desktop in is upstairs near your kid's bedroom.
Marco:
And maybe you won't want to be up there while your kid's asleep and you're trying to get work done.
John:
Yeah, where you do things is a big factor because if you're kind of, especially if you have the habits sort of like honed over years of having laptop use, like where do you find yourself doing your desktop web browsing, if at all?
John:
The answer is sitting in my bed with my laptop on my lap.
John:
Well, the iMac's not going to help you there.
John:
Like if you don't have the habits to think about where you use your laptop at home.
John:
Are you sitting on the couch?
John:
Are you sitting on your bed?
John:
Are you sitting in your favorite chair?
John:
and expecting to use a Mac in those locations, then those habits are going to be very difficult to break.
John:
If you've always been a desktop person, you know, when I want to use my serious computer, I go sit down at like, you know, with Marco set up in my computer chair, in my computer room, at my computer desk to use my computer.
John:
And then everything else is...
John:
iPads or phones.
John:
And then if you happen to have a spare laptop around, if you need it, that's fine.
John:
But mostly the laptops for travel or whatever.
John:
But if your habits are the reverse of that, you're going to be sad if you get an iMac because you're going to be like, oh, I was so used to sitting down in front of the TV and watching football, but also noodling around with Node on my laptop.
John:
Well, you're not going to be able to do that with an iMac, which is why you should also have an Air, by the way.
Casey:
And you're describing exactly the correct situation in that I have only ever had laptops since my junior year of college, I think.
Casey:
And so because of that, I'm used to sitting on the couch next to Aaron.
Casey:
And maybe we're watching TV.
Casey:
Maybe we're watching football.
Casey:
Maybe she's not watching TV while I am, but I'm also fiddling with Node.com.
Casey:
One way or another, if I have a laptop, I can be around Aaron, even after Declan goes to bed.
Casey:
Whereas if I have this iMac, I'm implicitly ignoring Aaron because I'm up in the office doing whatever I want to be doing.
Casey:
And she's downstairs maybe reading on the couch, maybe watching TV, maybe doing something else entirely.
Casey:
But that's...
Casey:
Probably where the iMac falls down the most is that I would be implicitly ignoring Aaron anytime I wanted to use the computer that I would want to use so very much.
Casey:
Because I'm sure that once I saw it, I would know how beautiful it was and how much I enjoyed using it.
Casey:
But I think I would end up hating it because I would be ignoring Aaron so much.
John:
Well, you can always do the setup I have here, which has had its bumps, but maybe it will get better going forward, which is a big, really nice Apple display hooked up to a really small, thin, light laptop.
John:
And so right now, my wife wanted to do stuff with her laptop, so she took it out of the room, and she's working with it upstairs.
John:
But most of the time, she does her work in front of a big, giant screen.
John:
The iPhoto library is on her computer.
John:
That's where we sort through all the photos on the big 27-inch screen.
John:
non-retina but yeah what can you do um but when she needs to she can detach and you have a thin light laptop to go into the kitchen uh and do stuff on the dining room table or go up in the bedroom where she is now and do whatever she's doing with laptop that's that's an interesting sort of hybrid setup it's i don't know how like the thunderbolt display i had some problems with flakiness and everything and it was a little bit annoying the usbc potential future apple display that supports all this stuff
John:
could be nicer or it could be just as flaky or is it or it could be worse but it's an interesting way to get you both to get you the big digital hearth which i really think if you're ever going to spend any time like sorting through your photos or editing your photos doing anything having to do with photos or movies i don't know how you live in a laptop like i just feel like it would be doing everything inside a phone booth right that marco
John:
And it probably feels the same way that like you just feel like to do any real computer, I don't even know how you do programming.
John:
I don't do anything with node.
John:
You got to have the web browser and then your text editor and then everything else all cramped under this little 15 inch screen.
John:
It's nice to be able to spread your stuff out, you know?
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
And that's why if I'm doing serious work,
Casey:
I'm up in my office where I am now where I have actually probably only 17, maybe 20-inch external display hooked up to my work computer.
Casey:
And so if I'm really getting serious about doing some node work or doing work work, then I'll be upstairs in the office hooked up to an external display.
Casey:
A very unremarkable external display, but an external display nevertheless.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I mean, when I was doing the blog post, that's why, you know, command tab is a thing.
Casey:
That's why spaces are a thing.
Casey:
And I'm used to it.
Casey:
This is what I'm used to.
Casey:
So the lack of real estate doesn't bother me.
Casey:
But this is the same reason why I could never have a 13-inch laptop ever again, because 15 is the bare minimum amount of real estate I can have without getting frustrated.
Casey:
And when I use Aaron's computer for anything more serious than just light web browsing, I get very frustrated very quickly because the screen is so small.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Don't get an iMac.
Marco:
Because, first of all, it'll ruin you for everything, ever.
Marco:
Second of all, your camera, I believe, is 16 megapixels, right?
Casey:
I think that's right, yeah, off the top of my head.
Marco:
It will not fill the iMac screen at one-to-one.
Casey:
Yeah, but you have a much more critical eye for that than I do.
Casey:
I think that'd be fine.
Marco:
I don't want your computer to ruin your camera.
Casey:
Well, I certainly don't want to spend $34,000 on a camera like you just did, so maybe you're right.
Marco:
And there's nothing between 16 and 42 megapixels.
Casey:
Yes, nothing at all.
Casey:
I have a genuine question.
Casey:
I went to spec out the iMac with Retina display just to see what it would come up to, and it's about the same money as a 15-inch, the way I would build it.
Casey:
It's roughly the same money as a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
Casey:
In the different options they have, you choose your processor, choose memory.
Casey:
Did you get 16 or 32, Marco?
Marco:
I got 32, but it doesn't matter because they're probably going to update them in the next few months.
Marco:
So whatever the options are now, you shouldn't buy a Mac right now.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, I wouldn't.
Casey:
I'm just, you know, I'm piddling for the fun of it.
Casey:
And what hard drive did you get?
Marco:
I went for the terabyte SSD.
Marco:
If you're going to go iMac, I'd say go 100% SSD, don't go Fusion.
Marco:
And so then just buy whatever you're willing to spend among the all SSD option.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anyway, so I'm bringing this up because I got down to number five.
Casey:
Choose mouse and trackpad.
Casey:
Apple Magic Mouse, which is what I would choose.
Casey:
Magic Trackpad for crazy people.
Casey:
There's a third option.
Casey:
Apple Mouse.
Casey:
What the hell is that?
Casey:
Is that the thing with the little ball in the middle?
Casey:
Is it?
John:
Yeah, I think so.
Casey:
I thought that was the Mighty Mouse.
John:
No, I think that's just what they call it now.
John:
It's the white one with the little ball that gets gunked up on the top of it.
John:
I think.
John:
Why do they... Who buys that?
Casey:
Yeah, I have no idea.
Casey:
I had no idea this was still a thing.
John:
The important thing is you want to get the Apple extended keyboard and not the stupid wireless one with the half-size arrow keys.
Marco:
oh god you're intolerable how yeah this was the one that was originally called the mighty mouse right i thought so yeah that thing was miserable yeah i was gonna say i didn't know anything about max back when this was a modern mouse and even i knew that it was a terrible freaking mouse oh my god that's that is horrendous oh sam the geek in the chat points out why you'd want this uh if you need to use it somewhere where you can't use bluetooth that is interesting that's weird for security reasons yep
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
That is a really good point.
John:
Sell to governments that you need to continue to have a wired mouse that doesn't work with Bluetooth, and why not sell them this finger lint collecting ball thing?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, of all the wired mice in the world, of all the wired mice that I've used, I would say this is worse than all of them.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
I used the puck mouse when I was in college, and that was as bad as people said.
John:
Here's the thing with like you have the mice, Apple's mice before they had a thing on top for scrolling.
John:
Those were like better because they didn't have a crappy thing on top that got gunked up.
John:
But worse, of course, because you couldn't scroll.
John:
So it's like choose your poison.
John:
So the Puck Mouse didn't have a scroll wheel on it.
John:
So you didn't have a scroll wheel.
John:
But then, you know, you couldn't tell which way it was orienting.
John:
But like the Apology Mouse, one of the best looking mice that Apple ever made.
John:
I think was one of their best mice period because it was in the days before max anyway, and PCs have scroll wheels forever, but it's in the days before Mac users were brought into the world of scroll wheels.
John:
And so you didn't know what you were missing and you're like, Oh, this is a, it's beautiful to look at.
John:
It's nicely shaped.
John:
It, it, it works very well.
John:
It matches the hardware and it is not circular.
John:
So I can tell which direction is up.
John:
It was great.
John:
But yeah, once they got into the scroll wheels, Apple never made a good scroll wheel until basically the Magic Mouse.
John:
And they said, well, we're not going to do a wheel.
John:
We're just going to have a swipey surface thing.
Marco:
Well, honestly, the Magic Mouse swipey surface is what convinced me to finally use an Apple mouse.
Marco:
Because before that, I was using the Logitech MX Revolution.
Marco:
And many of Logitech's high-end mice, I think, still have something like this.
Marco:
But it had this cool feature where it had a really heavy, like a flywheel kind of weighted scroll wheel.
Marco:
And so if you flicked really quickly, it would unlatch and just spin freely rather than having little detents along the way.
Marco:
And then you could stop it.
Marco:
And during that spinning, it would do similar to when you swipe.
Marco:
It would have the actual inertia of this weighty flywheel thing spinning around.
Marco:
It was great.
Marco:
um but now uh the magic mouse does that same thing with no moving parts and it's easy to easy to find and buy anywhere and doesn't have its own special proprietary charger and doesn't have its own proprietary receiver and doesn't uh have crappy software that fails constantly under max so it's better in every way to me so that's why i switched
Marco:
Going back for a second to the formerly Mighty Mouse, did you guys ever use the squeeze side buttons?
Marco:
Remember that?
Marco:
You could squeeze these side buttons as like a third mouse click.
John:
Yeah, they were pretty terrible.
Marco:
I remember I tried it a couple times when I used these, and you had to squeeze really hard, and it was kind of...
John:
it was too too awkward for me to use although something like that's the problem i have with most pc mice is they have buttons everywhere on them you can't grab them without touching a button and that's too many buttons for me um i can't use the magic mouse because it's too low and that's just a difference in mousing yeah like what you're trained on the mousing some people like a low mouse the puck mouse was made for low mouse people too it just was unfortunately circular but uh there's different ways that you can hold a mouse and for better or for worse my way of holding the mouse
John:
was trained on the original Macintosh mouse in 1984, which basically looked like a box.
John:
And the way my nine-year-old hands learned to use that mouse and all mice after it is I grabbed the sides of the mouse with my thumb and my ring finger.
John:
Yep, same here.
John:
Same thing.
John:
And with a low mouse, I find myself, especially with the Magic Mouse, because the sides are cut in a little bit.
John:
It's narrower on the bottom than it is on the top.
John:
and it's very low down i feel like i'm kind of grabbing it's like kind of grabbing a dinner plate by the sides and there's this big air gap where my like i don't my palm doesn't rest on it's terrible and i find it very uncomfortable it's a really nice mouse like it's high quality the swiping stuff i see the people who love that it's just not the way i hold a mouse so i'm forced to buy i've been using logic mice for years and i have the
John:
what I think is called the Logitech wheel mouse.
John:
It didn't even have like an MX designation, like MX 200, 300 or anything like that.
John:
It's just like the Logitech wheel mouse.
John:
It has two buttons on top and a scroll wheel that you can also press as a third button and no other buttons on it.
John:
It has flat vertical sides.
John:
that I can grab.
John:
And every other mouse that I've tried that shaped like a snail that has buttons all over it, I just can't find a nice way to grip it.
John:
I even bought, like, I have a series of wireless mice that we use on my wife's computer.
John:
And they have, like, grippy rubber edges on the side, but they all kind of, like, curve in or whatever, and just they don't feel right in my hand.
John:
So that's the thing about mice.
John:
They're very...
John:
So it's difficult to say like what's a good mouse and what's a bad mouse because it all depends on what your habits are.
John:
And it's difficult to break those habits.
John:
And if you try to use your mousing habits with a mouse that is not designed to work that way, it can be very uncomfortable.
John:
So a lot of these, the sort of snail ones, they want you to grip them in a particular way.
John:
And if that's how you do hold a mouse, then that mouse fits your hand and it's great.
John:
But if you fight against that, it will not feel great.
John:
So if you try to grip one of these weird snail mice from the side, it's just not the way it's meant to be used.
John:
And if you try to use the magic mouse without...
Marco:
i don't know how to how to low mouse people use it i guess they sort of rest their entire fingers long fingers over the thing i don't know no there i have like an air gap like so i do hold i hold the sides with my thumb and ring finger but then my my my index and middle finger kind of just like hover over like almost an inch like a pretty high over the mouse and it's like the same way like how like when you're taught to play piano you're taught not to rest your hands on the keys it has to like kind of arcs your hands up
Marco:
Same kind of thing, like that kind of grip, where you're holding the mouse with the thumb and ring, but then your first two fingers are really hovering pretty far above it.
John:
Yeah, I think that's not how that's sort of intended to be used.
John:
We should ask some of the low mouse men in yellow coats, another reference that Casey won't get, how they use their mice.
John:
I think I've seen people doing it where they, like even with the puck mouse, where they...
John:
where it's almost like they're just resting their fingers on it and their palm is not even, it's behind the mouse.
John:
And so they're just kind of resting, laying their hand on top of the mouse and kind of moving it around.
John:
Maybe their palm is even on the ground.
John:
But, you know, anyway, people, as I said last time, people have tweeted me pictures of it.
John:
People use mice in crazy ways, including the one where you use the mouse upside down and press the buttons with your palm.
John:
Did you see all the things that people were tweeting me, like the pictures of other?
John:
Yeah, there's a large variety out there.
Casey:
Yeah, for what it's worth, I would kill everyone I knew except my family if someone came out with a magic mouse that was more bulbous and had a place for like my palm to rest.
Casey:
I use the magic mouse because I cannot survive without the two finger flicks side to side to go between spaces.
Casey:
I'm a very heavy spaces user and I am completely useless at a computer if I can't flick between spaces.
Marco:
You would literally die.
Casey:
I literally can't even.
Casey:
But anyway, I wish so desperately that there was a more bulbous Magic Mouse because I would buy that instantly.
Casey:
So if anyone wants a Kickstarter idea, there you go.
Casey:
Make some sort of god-awful bulbous Magic Mouse that isn't just completely disgusting to look at.
Casey:
Good luck.
Casey:
And I will pay obscene amounts of money for it.
John:
Did you see this picture that someone put in the chat room of them trying to use the Magic Mouse like a traditional mouse, holding it from the side?
John:
Maybe this person has very large hands, but I'd forgotten just how darn small.
John:
The Apple Magic Mouse is a beautiful piece of industrial design.
John:
It looks like a piece of sushi, like a piece of fish laying on top of a bed of rice or something.
John:
It is a beautiful sculpture.
John:
It is not shaped like a mouse that works with my hand.
John:
I don't think you're supposed to grip it the way this person is gripping it.
John:
I don't think you're supposed to grip it the way you're gripping it, Marco.
John:
I think that is...
John:
an uncomfortable kind of keeping your hand just it just doesn't look like the way i imagine them when they made this product it's supposed to be used and i've seen people use them with the flat hand technique that looks more comfortable to me i mean you can get away with it doesn't bother your hand doesn't bother your hand it's fine it just doesn't seem ideal to me it does bother my hand like i having this sort of static contraction of having your muscles just sort of in that position for a long period of time i need them to relax and i need to have something supporting my hand
John:
And I need and I definitely need to feel a secure grip on the sides.
John:
A lot of my mouse movement is like for small movements, just moving my ring and thumb and having like the palm of my hand resting on the mouse or even partially on the table, moving fine adjustments on the mouse.
John:
And with a little piece of sushi underneath my hands, I just I don't know.
John:
And plus, that mouse is pretty darn heavy in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
Yeah, the heaviness is not great, especially if you switch to rechargeable batteries.
Marco:
Nickel-metal hot-dry batteries are pretty dense compared to other kinds, so that's no good.
Marco:
But one thing I find, it probably comes into a lot of what you're used to because you're citing what sound like ergonomic concerns, really.
Marco:
And for me, I actually like the ergonomics of it because...
Marco:
I can move it with my fingers.
Marco:
I'm not really moving my wrist as much.
Marco:
I'm doing most of the movements with my whole arm almost all stationary.
Marco:
And I'm moving the mouse around just with the thumb and the index finger kind of sliding back and forth.
John:
That's what I was just describing.
John:
I was doing with it with my mouse.
John:
It's just that like you don't have any support for the rest of your hand.
John:
There is no the mouse is doing nothing to support you.
John:
You are you are attacking the mouse with your fingers.
John:
You are gripping it and you are pressing it.
John:
But the mouse is not supporting any part of your body whatsoever.
John:
No part of your body is resting on the mouse.
John:
You are merely manipulating with the sides.
John:
Whereas if you have something like Casey that's more bulbous.
John:
You can rest some part of your hand and some of the weight on the actual mouse and still have your fingers in that position to, at a moment's notice, wiggle it back and forth with your ring and ringing your thumb.
Casey:
So real-time follow-up, Jelly in the chat room has given us a link to the Magic Mouse Fixed, which is at mmfixed.com.
Casey:
This is the exact problem.
Casey:
It is fixing the exact problem I want fixed in the most hideous possible way.
Casey:
What the heck is that?
Casey:
so it's apparently a piece of silicone that has a suction cup on the bottom that you just drop on top of your magic mouse and then magically all your problems go away it is fixing what i want fixed but that is unbelievably ugly i mean that's just that just goes to show like i think the
John:
the magic mouse was so clearly designed with a particular use case in mind like they wouldn't have made it so low profile if they expected you to grip it from the side so if you're coming at it trying to do the grip from the side you're fighting against the design as it was made and if you want something bulbous to be resting in the palm of your hand the magic mouse is not it it's not like they accidentally made it like that like it is not made to be like other mice other mice are bulked up for a reason there's just air in there there's not like
John:
you know they needed room for the batteries or anything this mouse is low profile it's meant to be used in a different way i'm not entirely sure what way it is because i don't use a mouse that way but it's not it's not like a mistake where they just made it a little bit too low it's super low with a purpose i think
Marco:
Well, and the purpose is definitely, you know, aesthetics.
John:
It could be aesthetics, but it could also be mousing techniques.
John:
Like, have you seen people use the puck where they would, part of the fix for the puck would be that people would creep their fingers over the edge and rest their two fingers around the wire so they could tell which end was up on the thing.
John:
And that led to a kind of mousing with like a kind of a flat hand mousing technique with your entire hand draped.
John:
It wouldn't work with the magic mouse because if your entire hand is draped over it, you have to pick your fingers up and get them over the swiping surface to do your gestures, you know?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else is awesome these days?
Marco:
Can you tell it's August?
Marco:
Yeah, for real.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Our second sponsor this week is Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online store.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
I know you guys are all programmers, or most of you at least.
Marco:
I'm a programmer.
Marco:
I know you can all write your CMSs.
Marco:
I've written CMSs.
Marco:
I write my own CMS.
Marco:
There are lots of occasions in life when you want to write it yourself.
Marco:
There's also a lot of occasions in life where you need to make a website or somebody you know needs to make a website or you need to make a website for somebody you know.
Marco:
And writing it yourself is really not a good idea.
Marco:
Either you don't have time or they need a lot of features that you really can't do that well or would take you forever or you just don't want to maintain it.
Marco:
Even if you could make it yourself, you shouldn't always make it yourself.
Marco:
Squarespace is here to save you from a lot of those times.
Marco:
Even if you can make your own CMS, we know you can.
Marco:
The listeners of this show, it's very likely you can make your own CMS.
Marco:
But it's also very likely there are better things you can be doing with your time than making another website CMS for yourself.
Marco:
Check out Squarespace.
Marco:
You can start a free trial, no credit card required at squarespace.com.
Marco:
And just try building a site.
Marco:
Next time you have to build a site for something, just try it there first.
Marco:
It'll take you like an hour.
Marco:
Let's say you get, you know, 90% of what you need in the first hour.
Marco:
Then just stop.
Marco:
And say, you know what, I can get that last 10% by scrapping the whole thing and writing my own CMS like I was originally planning to.
Marco:
Or I can just stop here and it's already done.
Marco:
And then I can go on with my life and I can do anything else with all this time I've just saved instead of write my own CMS from scratch.
Marco:
That's what Squarespace is for programmers.
Marco:
And I'm telling myself this as much as I'm telling you.
Marco:
You can get almost all or all of what you actually want out of a website with Squarespace with so little effort that even if you can make your own, you probably shouldn't most of the time.
Marco:
And that's where you can use Squarespace.
Marco:
So everything is simple and powerful.
Marco:
WYSIWYG tools for design and for editing.
Marco:
Plus, you can jump in and inject code if you want to.
Marco:
But again, you probably don't need to.
Marco:
The designs are beautiful.
Marco:
Professionally designed.
Marco:
You don't have to pay a designer.
Marco:
Everything's built in.
Marco:
It's all responsive, of course, because it's 2015.
Marco:
Come on, give them a break.
Marco:
2015.
Marco:
It's all responsive.
Marco:
They also have commerce functionality if you need it.
Marco:
This is something that is not necessarily easy to do yourself.
Marco:
Commerce functionality built in.
Marco:
If you want to have a store to sell digital or physical goods, it's all built into Squarespace if you need it at no additional charge.
Marco:
They have 24-7 support if you need it.
Marco:
Or, importantly, if the person who you're building the site for needs support, they can ask Squarespace instead of asking you.
Marco:
They have state-of-the-art technology.
Marco:
This powers your site to ensure security and stability, and it is trusted by millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world.
Marco:
Squarespace starts at only $8 a month.
Marco:
If you sign up for a year upfront, you get a free domain name.
Marco:
Start your free trial today with no credit card required at squarespace.com.
Marco:
When you want to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Squarespace, build it beautiful.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Marco, what did you do to the Overcast database?
Marco:
Oh, nothing.
Marco:
I did a Linode migration.
Marco:
I migrated to a bigger Linode.
Marco:
That's what it was.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So Linode, they upgraded their hypervisor or whatever, whatever, from whatever it was before.
Marco:
Zen, maybe?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
From Zen to KVM.
Marco:
And I don't follow any of this stuff.
Marco:
I don't know what the differences are.
Marco:
And they say it's faster by a lot.
Marco:
So I said, okay, great.
Marco:
Upgrade for free.
Marco:
So it's upgraded.
Marco:
You just have to... They have to turn off the VPS and then they have to migrate the disk images over to the new system.
Marco:
So you're basically waiting on disk images to migrate.
Marco:
And they do it at maybe 150 megs a second.
Marco:
So when you have like a 200 gig database, it's a pretty lengthy process.
Marco:
I think it was down for like 45 minutes or something.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That's what I was doing.
Marco:
I was upgrading all my servers to KVM from Zen, and I was also upgrading a couple of them to be higher capacity VPSs from Linode, which also requires the same migration to happen.
Marco:
that's it so i took everything down upgraded a bunch of them did it you know and i've been doing i've been doing a few over time without taking anything down but this one involved the master database and i know believe me i know more than you probably need more than i need to explain right now i know how to make databases that you can take on the master and the site stays up i know please don't tell me about that those schemes i know
Marco:
I even know that there are fancy new storage things where there is no master and you can just take anything down whenever you want and they're eventually consistent and they usually work and they usually don't need any maintenance and they usually perform well.
Marco:
Yeah, that's nice too.
Marco:
Please don't tell me about those either.
Marco:
Yeah, so that's what I was doing.
Marco:
Taking it on the master database, updating it to those things, making everything bigger and faster, and then turning everything back on.
Marco:
And with Linode, this is literally like you click a few links in the web interface and you wait.
Marco:
And then they tell you when they're done.
Marco:
It's really ridiculously easy.
Marco:
This is not an ad, but it should be.
Marco:
I love Linode so much.
Marco:
I have used so many other hosts.
Marco:
Everything that I can reasonably do on Linode, I do now.
Marco:
And before, I forget when it was, like last, I think it was last year when they upgraded, or maybe it was two years ago, when they upgraded to their like next generation hardware.
Marco:
And when they basically went to Xeon E5s, two really nice ones.
Marco:
And when they, before they did that, they still had like the nicest, easiest control panel of everything.
Marco:
And they had, you know, like just like, just good hosting overall.
Marco:
They were still very good, but they weren't a great deal before that.
Marco:
They were an okay deal.
Marco:
Ever since that upgrade, and I believe a lot of this was prompted by DigitalOcean because DigitalOcean is a very similar kind of service.
Marco:
I don't think it's as good.
Marco:
I think it's still good, but Linode has a number of advanced features that DigitalOcean doesn't offer, many of which I use and enjoy.
Marco:
And DigitalOcean is also just, you know, they're young.
Marco:
I tried them in the past.
Marco:
They're fine, but they're young.
Marco:
And when I tried them, they were going through some growing pains.
Marco:
I assume they're more stable now because that was like a year and a half or two years ago.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
Linode, right now, ever since they did that big SSD upgrade to match DigitalOcean's performance and pricing, I would say Linode is the best deal in the hosting business.
Marco:
Now, I have always loved going and leasing dedicated servers from cheap, unmanaged server vendors so that, you know, please, I don't need your tech support.
Marco:
I don't need you to install WordPress for me.
Marco:
I just want a cheap server that I don't have to manage the hardware for.
Marco:
You manage the hardware, I will do the entire software management, please.
Marco:
And Linode is now, for most things, even cheaper than going to a cheap dedicated host.
Marco:
So something like Limestone Networks or High Velocity.
Marco:
Linode is actually even cheaper than those for what you get a lot of the time.
Marco:
It's incredible.
Marco:
I still have no idea how it's so cheap, but it is.
Marco:
It's not perfect.
Marco:
No host is perfect.
Marco:
I've occasionally had network issues with them.
Marco:
But of all the hosts I've tried over the years, they are the one I am by far most happy with.
Casey:
So because it's August, this story that sounded like it would be so interesting and so salacious was I moved databases and I moved VPSs.
Marco:
It was literally I clicked a few links in the web interface and waited.
Casey:
You're not helping our August doldrums at all.
Marco:
It would have been a lot bigger of a deal had I actually been on dedicated servers and not VPSs.
Marco:
But this is one of the reasons why I use VPSs now.
Marco:
Now, the bad news is that I was upgrading from 8 gigs of RAM to 16 on my database.
Marco:
In dedicated server terms, unless you're somewhere incredibly expensive like SoftLayer or Rackspace, if you're somewhere reasonably priced for unmanaged servers, 16 gigs of RAM should not cost a lot of money.
Marco:
But for Lino, that's a big deal.
Marco:
But it's still only $160 a month for this VPS.
Marco:
And it's like, well, if you look at what can you get for $160 a month on dedicated host...
Marco:
You can't get much closer to this.
Marco:
I still can't believe how much you get for your money with these Linode VPSs.
Marco:
And again, this is not an ad.
Marco:
They've never sponsored me.
Marco:
I have a referral link, I think, somewhere.
Marco:
Yeah, I have a referral link for Linode.
Marco:
I'll put it in the show notes so that, I don't know, we can make some money off of this giant non-ad.
Marco:
But man, it is so good.
Marco:
I like it a lot.
John:
All right.
John:
Want to talk iPad Pro?
John:
Actually, I'm just looking for a little bit of a real-time follow-up on the last topic about mice.
John:
In the Wirecarders mouse review, they have this graphic that's from Razer actually showing the contact patch of these little hand diagrams for three grips of the mouse, one called the palm grip, then the claw grip, and then the fingertip grip.
John:
I wish they'd showed actual photos of hands doing it, but someone placed this link in the chat room.
John:
It's worth checking out that this review at least acknowledges the different ways that people hold mice, and I bet there is a much larger variety than just those three.
John:
I think they're just trying to capture the three most common, but...
John:
It really influences how you shape the mouse, how you're expecting people to hold it.
John:
And there's just there's not just one way.
John:
And that's before you even get into things like hand size, like before you even considering variations in hand size, just like within one hand size, you can be holding it in very different ways.
John:
So anyway, that's and I've put in more links, Casey, for the different mice that I own and pictures of them and stuff like that.
Marco:
Wait, so on this razor thing, this mouse on the left, is that a number pad on the mouse?
Marco:
What the heck is that?
John:
that's a gaming thing i don't know there's like this little like 12 button grid of buttons in the thumb area on this crazy gaming mouse oh my god it's a jaguar controller that's what i'm talking about like they have buttons everywhere like how can you even grab them without accidentally hitting a button especially when they put buttons on the side like that's where i hold it i don't want to have buttons on the side and then they have buttons they have buttons on top of the buttons so you can't even rest your finger on a button or else you accidentally hit another button oh my goodness
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
These people are crazy.
Casey:
Gamers.
Casey:
Yo, dog.
Casey:
I heard you like buttons with your buttons.
Casey:
Nice.
John:
Yeah, that's why I've never been able to get into the Razer mice.
John:
Some of it, like the first person shooter appeal for like the high resolution and like the whatever they're trying to do with low latency and all this other stuff.
John:
But it's just as a thing to grab and mouse around with, it just never looked particularly comfortable for me.
John:
And whenever I go into the store and see them and, you know, spread my germs by going up into the huge display of mice and grabbing each one of them and clicking around, that just never, nothing ever feels quite right to me.
John:
I don't know what I'm going to do.
John:
Like my mouse at work died.
John:
logitech wheel mouse thing that we'll put in the show notes like before they even had the mx numbering scheme it died and i bought a new modern one that i thought looked like it and i used it for a couple days and i just didn't like it so i had to go on ebay and find you know someone selling the exact old model of mice a mouse that i had before uh and i got it and it works and that's what i'm using now at work
Marco:
You can always get people to send in their gross old used mice to you.
John:
I know, but it's like a very specific model.
John:
But no, I bought it on eBay.
John:
It was like 20 bucks or something.
John:
I'm like, you know what?
John:
Let me just get that same, that age where I, I mean, there's probably a modern mouse out there that I would like, but I tried, like I tried my best.
John:
I like, I went to, you know, I like Logitech mice.
John:
I went to their website.
John:
I looked at a bunch of other things.
John:
I think I might even look at this Wirecutter review.
John:
I tried a bunch of mice in person and I'm like, you know what?
John:
Let me get this one.
John:
It's so close to what I get now.
John:
It's made by the same company.
John:
I'm sure it'll be just the same.
John:
And it wasn't.
John:
It was just different enough to annoy me, so I said, I'll just get the same mouse.
Marco:
Did they include an Android tablet when you bought from them?
John:
No, but what I'm always afraid of with buying things on eBay, I guess when people buy things on eBay, they're afraid of like someone, you know, it's a scam.
John:
They're just going to take my money and not send me anything.
John:
They're going to send me something that didn't look like it did in the picture.
John:
Like all the things that you're worried about when you do eBay, right?
John:
Are you afraid of secret fans?
John:
You know what I'm worried about when I do things on eBay?
John:
That it's going to be sent to me by someone who smokes.
John:
Because then the box will smell like smoke and the item will smell like smoke forever and ever and ever.
John:
And I just won't be able to use it because it will smell like an ashtray.
Marco:
Yep, that's a... In many online... So I've recently been selling some headphones and stuff.
Marco:
In a lot of these online marketplaces, you will see almost every ad say, non-smoking household, no pets.
Marco:
Smoking, that's a huge thing.
Marco:
I can always tell if a box was in somewhere that smoked or somewhere with cats.
Marco:
like i'm allergic to cats i don't have cats i am very sensitive to the smell of cat houses and i can always tell like you it's it isn't as strong as smoking but it's there you know anyway no smoking no pets
John:
I don't know if I've ever had one with a pet smell, because that... I mean, obviously, if it's something with fabric or something, but I'm thinking of something that is hard, shiny plastic or electronics or something.
John:
Maybe, I guess, if cat hair is sucked up into the thing.
John:
I can remember someone I used to work with had... It wasn't the wind tunnel.
John:
I think it was the mirror drive door.
John:
You guys don't remember these names.
John:
But anyway, one of the Tower Max that had, like, intake ports.
John:
It wasn't like the cheese grater.
John:
It was pre-cheese grater.
John:
It was back when they had the four handles on the sides of the things.
John:
It had an intake in the front.
John:
It would blow air out the back.
John:
And he opened up his computer to clean out one day and like the intakes in the front all led into this big like wedge type thing.
John:
And the wedge was just filled with a solid wedge of cat hair.
John:
They could just pull out and it was just like, it was like a perfectly structured, like taking a mold of the inside of the intake vent.
John:
So yeah, cat hair.
John:
I can imagine electronics smelling like a cat like that, but something like a mouse, like there's nothing, no place you can go inside it.
John:
There's no ball or anything.
John:
I can imagine that smelling like a cat.
John:
But the thing about cigarette smoke is it just permeates, especially if there's any kind of like rubber.
John:
Even if there's plastic, it just...
John:
It just never goes away.
John:
It's bad.
John:
Even Lego can smell like smoke if it's been in a smoking household.
John:
Gross.
John:
But anyway, my mouse I bought for work, non-smoking.
John:
It does not smell like anything.
John:
And pretty much brand new.
John:
Like it wasn't in the original blister pack, but if it was used, I couldn't tell.
Casey:
So, John, since you're not doing your review this summer, much to the sadness of all of us, what have you been spending your time on for the last, I don't know, two or three weeks?
John:
Yeah, every once in a while I remember that I have El Capitan installed, and I boot into it, and then I wait 45 minutes for the seven updates that I haven't installed to be installed, which, by the way, Craig Hockenberry already filed the radar on this, and I think it's kind of annoying, too.
John:
why is it that i can't just jump right to the latest beta why do i have to go through all the different updaters takes really long time if you are if the current beta is beta 7 and you have beta 4 then you have to install beta 5 and reboot install beta 6 and reboot install beta 7 and reboot and each one of these betas is like a gig or more download and then you got to wait for it to install i don't quite understand why they're doing that this year
John:
And I'm glad I don't really have to deal with it.
John:
I mean, I guess if I was doing the review, I would never have to do more than one update because I would be on the latest.
John:
But anyway, occasionally I reboot into it and fiddle around.
John:
And one of the things that came to my attention, I think Jason Snell brought it up in one of the Slack channels, was like,
John:
uh you know safari 9's new pinned tab feature that they demoed in the keynotes where you can same thing as like chrome and the other things ever you can take a tab and then pin it and it becomes a tiny icon in the left uh left hand side of your tab bar and it's there all the time when you do that apple has of course for whatever crazy reason a new way for you to specify what your icon is when it's pinned they don't just use your fav icon thing i don't know why they don't use it they just don't
John:
What they want you to use is to put an SVG, and apparently it has to be an SVG, somewhere on your site and then specify in this meta tag that there's two different versions.
John:
I'll put them both in the show.
John:
It says two different versions on Apple's site.
John:
One of them is developer.apple.com slash library slash Safari slash release notes.
John:
And the other one is developer.apple.com slash library slash pre-release slash Mac slash release notes.
John:
They disagree about what you're supposed to do.
John:
I put both of them in there.
John:
I think one of them does nothing, but whatever, until they get their acts together, put both of them in.
John:
And by the way, if you're going to try to do this yourself, people on Twitter are seeing me complain about this.
John:
They're having trouble doing it.
John:
Like anything, if you dealt with Safari before, you would know this, but if you haven't, it may be a surprise.
John:
Safari for fav icons or anything having to do with icons, once it downloads one or once it decides there is not one to download, you will not convince it that it needs to download it again.
John:
You have to go to tilde slash library slash Safari slash template space icons and delete everything in that directory and then relaunch Safari.
John:
If you don't do that, you'll spend an hour saying, why isn't it reading my SVG and keep reloading?
John:
It will never reload your SVG.
John:
Probably will like 30 days from now or something.
John:
Quit Safari, delete everything in that directory, relaunch Safari.
John:
That's the way you have to do this.
John:
Anyway, in my blog that I never update on hypercritical.co, my icon is this little pixelated original Mac that I drew way back when.
John:
And I wanted that to be my little pin tab icon.
John:
And there's a problem because the format is SVG and my thing is pixel art.
John:
And Apple nowhere in its documentation tells you even what size your SVG is going to be displayed at.
John:
So first I had to get it working at all.
John:
That took a little bit of noodling and everything and finding an app that can do SVG.
John:
I downloaded a trial of Illustrator for this, which is ridiculous.
John:
Isn't it incredibly mediocre?
John:
god i i had illustrator cs6 i have photoshop csx which i like for the most part illustrator cs6 i had a trial of no i was i was paying for it month by month remember when adobe let you do like one app per month like and you could pay like ten dollars and use illustrator for a month or whatever anyway it said oh your illustrator cs6 thing is expired um go renew it or whatever i could not for the life of me figure out how to pay another pay adobe another ten dollars to use illustrator cs6
John:
for a month i just couldn't figure it out all i all it could lead me to was signing up for some crazy subscription thing or just downloading a trial of illustrator cc which is what i did even if you do exactly what adobe wants you to do even if you say okay i will sign up for the subscription
Marco:
It is so incredibly difficult to navigate Adobe's site and their store and the whole creative cloud suite mess.
Marco:
Even if you do everything right, it's still miserable and confusing.
Marco:
Whoever designed all of that should really go back and rethink it.
Marco:
It's just a disaster.
Marco:
Not to mention, if you do want to do anything besides the ideal thing of signing up for everything, if you want one of the smaller subscriptions where it's only one app or it's one of the little bundles, that's even worse.
Marco:
I can't even imagine what you were trying to do, which is one app, an old version of that app, no less, trying to get a one-month subscription.
Marco:
Yeah, you didn't stand a chance.
John:
Well, see, here's the worst thing.
John:
The stupid Adobe CC menu bar icon that nags you about this stuff, like it shows you the big thing, you sign in, it shows you all your apps and whatever.
John:
Inside that thing, it said, Illustrator CS6, you know, whatever, like renew, need to renew or whatever.
John:
Like it had a link on it that was saying, click this link to go and pay us more money.
John:
But if you click the link, it didn't take you any place to get CS6.
John:
It took you like through three redirects to some Illustrator page where you could try to get Illustrator CC.
John:
So it's like...
John:
that your little menu bar thing is trying to tell me that i can somehow give you more money to keep using illustrator cs6 but when i click through the link that it provides to me it takes me to your website and makes it seem like it's not there and i search for a while and anyway that that's a tangent adobe stuff is weird that's one of the reasons i got cs6 it was like the last non-creative cloud version like it's just plain old software that you can install it's still phones home to check its authentication or whatever but anyway
John:
uh happy happy with photoshop not really happy with illustrator um and really i'm i'm drawing a little icon here so i had my uh my outline image here's the other thing they're gonna get into more of how terrible i am with the graphics apps my outline image that i used for my t-shirt if you bought a hypercritical t-shirt back in the day this is the little mac logo that's on top of it so all i did was take my t-shirt graphic which was you know a vector image and i deleted the text and i'm just left with the icon part of it
John:
And I thought I was all set, but apparently those vectors are weird.
John:
And SVG, like when I saved as SVG in Illustrator, I looked at the source because it's just an XML file.
John:
I could see it was doing all sorts of strange things.
John:
And I was like, this SVG is much more complicated than it needs to be.
John:
I'm not quite sure what Illustrator is doing, but apparently this outline that I used for the T-shirt
John:
uh is much more complicated than needs to be and honestly like the entire image is made of it's a pixel image it's made of squares basically or if you want rectangles that's all the entire thing is so i'm like i just need to set up a grid i can redraw this by hand i can draw this icon on graph paper for you like i know how many dots are in every dimension there's a certain number of dots i know exactly where they are
John:
Give me a piece of graph paper and I can color it in for you.
John:
So I'm like, that should be easy to do.
John:
But Illustrator is really not made for that type of thing.
John:
I am absolutely sure that you could do it in Illustrator.
John:
I'm sure an Illustrator expert, when it's seven keystrokes, have the grid set up the way, and then just go down.
John:
Oh, done, done, done.
John:
I'm not an Illustrator expert.
John:
The app was empowered for me.
John:
Last time I understood Illustrator was Illustrator 88.
John:
anything after that as in 1988 yes everything after that i was six with me just poking around and not knowing how to use it but anyway i got the job done eventually illustrator got the svg to something that was saying it worked um put it up on the site rebooted into lcap launched safari
John:
pinned my tab and saw the world's blurriest disgusting looking you know like nothing on a pixel edge boundary just a terrible blurry blob and then i was like all right well do i really care if it's blurry all i really care about is if it's clear in retina mode even though i have no retina max i know most people who are going to be uh you know pinning and no one's going to pin my set anyway this is the absurdity of all this the site never gets updated no one's going to pin the tab because why would you i just you know it's a diversion something i wanted to do
John:
So I tried to switch into Retina node, but high DPI mode wasn't available, and the Quartz debug thing also was not available, and the old version of Quartz debug didn't work, so I had to find the plist key to enable the high DPI setting.
John:
Anyway, eventually did that, turned on high DPI mode, put monitor into that mode, launched Safari, looked at the pin tab, and it was blurry in Retina too.
John:
So I was like, oh, I'm just...
John:
I gave up for a while.
John:
This was several weeks ago.
John:
I was like, all right, well, I've got the icon for it.
John:
Doesn't look great.
John:
Jason said it looked good in his retina iMac, but I think he has he's an old person with bad vision.
John:
I'm like, seriously, it's like nothing is on a pixel edge.
John:
It does not look good.
John:
Maybe when it's retina, you can't tell as much like on a real retina screen instead of like my, you know, 2x mode on my regular non retina screen.
John:
You can really see how blurry it is.
John:
But this weekend, I took another run at it, inspired by a couple of things.
John:
First of all, I was inspired by the release of Acorn 5, which is Gus Mueller's new version of his drawing application, which is way friendlier than Illustrator.
John:
And it was really easy for me to draw my icon.
John:
That's one of my tests now of drawing apps.
John:
Can I draw my icon really quickly?
John:
Because it's the easiest thing in the world to do.
John:
Just set up a grid, take a bunch of rectangles with a fill in, no stroke.
John:
I know how many dots it's supposed to be.
John:
This should be really easy to do.
John:
Make the canvas the size I want.
John:
It is really easy to draw an Acorn.
John:
Unfortunately, Acorn doesn't have SVG export, which made me sad.
John:
So I drew it in like two seconds.
John:
I was all excited.
John:
No SVG export.
John:
I think I complained about it on Twitter.
John:
It's the magic of Twitter.
John:
I got a bunch of suggestions.
John:
Someone suggested Affinity Designer, which I'd never heard of before.
John:
Have you guys ever heard of this app?
John:
No.
John:
It's a really impressive app.
John:
I've never heard of this developer or this company, but it's clear that they mostly understand the Mac.
John:
They're trying to be very Mac-like, but at the same time, they do a lot of custom UI.
John:
And you can say, how could that be the same?
John:
How can you be trying to be all Yosemite and Mac-like, but also use custom UI for all your widgets, like pop-up menus and everything?
John:
It's kind of the...
John:
The same way, I mean, you've all used Photoshop and Illustrator, or at least Margo has, but you know how, like, Adobe's got their own UI for their pop-up menus and their text fields and all that stuff, and you can even change it to different sizes.
John:
And they're all terrible.
John:
Right, and it's like, it's kind of, they're trying to be, like, cross-platform, so it looks the same everywhere, but there's a history of them doing their own widget toolkits, and you could change the color of the UI to be black or gray or, like, light color.
John:
You know how they added that option?
John:
I think around CSX they started adding that option.
John:
You could change the color of the UI and stuff.
John:
affinity is like that but their custom ui looks much better than adobe's first of all doesn't quite look like native ui but it looks like i mean it's kind of like final cut with the pro kit if you use final cut pro they have apple has its own custom widget toolkit that it used to use for final cut pro which also didn't look like the system widgets but look kind of like them this is like that but anyway affinity designer incredibly full featured application super confusing but not as confusing as illustrator so it's like this acorn and
John:
which is super friendly and you should get if you just want to draw something and be done and you don't need to export from SVG.
John:
I just would use Acorn if I could have gotten away with it.
John:
Then there's Illustrator, which defeats me because I'm not a professional designer.
John:
And then Affinity, professional designers were tweeting me and saying, I use this instead of Illustrator and I do my work in it.
John:
So I think it has the capability to be a full-fledged professional design app.
John:
but it is much more complicated and has lots of floating palettes and windows with tons and tons of options but the thing is i know which options i want i just need to be able to find them and an affinity designer i could pull up the giant they have a snapping manager and a separate grid manager i'm like yes snap to pixel edges no don't snap the shapes yes like every option that i could think of was there click click click click could draw my icon and then key
John:
snap to pixel edges and they have a mode where you can show what the pixels are going to look like and flip back and forth really easily between the vector and what the pixels are going to look like so there i could draw my icon and export it so there was stuck on pixel edges and the only thing i needed to know from there was how big is the actual display size in pixels
John:
And I tried making an entirely black SVG image to use as my little icon.
John:
But for whatever reason, Safari wouldn't display it.
John:
I think I was still fighting with the markup at that point with the two different versions.
John:
But I just, you know, went into Pixie, which is another I think Pixie comes with the Mac.
John:
You guys know about Pixie?
John:
well maybe it's in the graphics tools if you go to uh apple's developer tool section and look for the graphics tools download it comes with pixie and a bunch of other things anyway it just gives you a zoomed in version of the screen and i just manually counted the pixels and it was 16 by 16 or 32 by 32 in retina so i saved my svg at 32 by 32 um aligned on pixel edges
John:
exported and voila I tweeted the screenshot earlier I now have a exact pixel perfect SVG image of an icon as my pin tab icon in Safari 9 which I surely will break and become blurry in Safari 10 and probably won't look right in iOS either but for this brief moment in time I have defeated the pinned icon beast and I discovered a cool new application affinity designer and I got to play with some of the new features of Acorn 5 which is really cool too
Marco:
We'll see you next time.
Marco:
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Marco:
With an Igloo intranet, you can share news, organize your files, coordinate calendars, and manage projects all in one place.
Marco:
And everything can be social with comments and like buttons.
Marco:
And anyone can add content based on their permissions, of course, with drag-and-drop widgets and a WYSIWYG, which is what you see is what you get.
Marco:
Am I the only one who says WYSIWYG like that?
Casey:
You pronounce it slightly odd.
Casey:
To me, it's WYSIWYG.
Casey:
WYSIWYG?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
It's also a cool whip.
Marco:
oh god you're one of those the wood it's a reference marco just move along okay well anyway it's a wussy wig editor uh and igloo makes use of responsive web design so all this stuff works on all your devices it looks great on all your devices and even they have incredible technology here to do things like preview and annotate common office document formats all in html5 and that's all responsive
Marco:
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Sign up today.
Marco:
Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP for a free trial.
Marco:
In fact, if you have 10 or fewer people in your company or group, it's free for you.
Marco:
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Marco:
For God's sake, use Igloo.
Marco:
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Marco:
And above that, it is very reasonably priced.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
It is so hard to find a good intranet today.
Marco:
Basically, if you're not using Igloo, you don't have a good intranet.
Marco:
It's very simple, actually.
Marco:
Either you're using Igloo or your intranet sucks.
Marco:
So check out Igloo today, igloosoftware.com slash ATP for a free trial and get started today.
Okay.
Casey:
So I'm out of stuff to talk about.
Casey:
What else is going on?
John:
iPad Pro.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
Why are you sad about the iPad Pro?
Casey:
It's because it does nothing for me unless I'm bored.
Casey:
Just like the Mac Pro.
John:
It's not that it does nothing for you.
John:
We talked about this before.
John:
We should all be interested in the iPad Pro, even if it's not the specific iPad Pro.
John:
I guess unless you don't buy into the whole idea that tablet computing is...
John:
is part of the future of computing.
John:
That's the premise I talked about when we talked about the iPad Pro a long time ago.
John:
It was basically the idea that people can deal with tablets better than they can deal with PCs.
John:
And I think we all agree on that.
John:
Like, if you just throw a random person in front of a PC and ask them to do something useful versus throwing any kind of tablet in their hand and ask them to do something useful, maybe unless it's a Microsoft Surface.
John:
Sorry, Microsoft.
John:
That the tablet is less intimidating.
John:
Like, that you can get things done, that people can just poke their fingers on the screen and...
John:
and figure out with either Android or iOS applications, how to do stuff from installing an application to watching a video to even like, you know, sending a text message or writing an email or whatever.
John:
Whereas if you throw someone in front of a PC or a Mac and say, send someone an email,
John:
I mean, it's a higher barrier to entry.
John:
So I really believe that that usability difference in tablets versus PCs exists.
John:
And I believe that a lot of people can do everything they need to do on their phone, for that matter, but also on the tablets.
John:
And if you kind of buy into that, then what you're doing and looking at the tablet space is saying...
John:
Will they ever be able to compete with the phone?
John:
Maybe the answer is no.
John:
But will they ever be able to replace more of the things we do with PCs?
John:
I think the answer there has to be yes, because there's still just such a huge gap in friendliness and reliability and usability between personal computers and computers.
John:
tablets so i'm always looking for when we're going to take the next step towards tablets eating into a little bit more of the pc market and here i guess microsoft can come back in and say hey we're over here with the service what do you think we're doing over here but they're kind of doing it in a weird way where they're making the tablet have all the same abilities and compromises as the pc not all the same but close to it like hey it can work as a pc and as a tablet i'm looking more towards can you make something that is like a tablet
John:
but allow you to do one or two of the things that you could previously only do comfortably on a personal computer.
John:
And I think iOS 9 with the multitasking is kind of creeping into that area, but I think you also need a bigger screen and you probably also need a stylus.
John:
And that's basically the iPad Pro rumors, right?
John:
A bigger screen iPad, maybe with a little more computing grunt, maybe possibly with an officially supported stylus.
John:
Why does that make you sad, Casey?
John:
You should be excited about the future of computing.
Casey:
I guess it does make me excited as an exercise in trying to develop and discover the future.
Casey:
But as something that I would want or use, it doesn't strike me as something I would ever desire.
Casey:
I don't even think I would want a full-size iPad anymore, let alone one that's even larger than that.
Casey:
Although, if you could strap a keyboard to it, maybe this is the answer to my computing problems that we were talking about earlier.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I have nothing against using the iPad as a means to get work done.
Casey:
And obviously, we're all familiar with the ridiculous things that Federico Vittici has convinced his iPad to do and all the ridiculous things he's able to accomplish with his iPad.
Casey:
But for me...
Casey:
If I'm doing anything, even marginally complex, I'm going to put my iPad down.
Casey:
And I love my iPad.
Casey:
I'm going to put my iPad down and I'm going to go reach for my Mac.
Casey:
Because even if I could accomplish that thing, whatever the thing is, on the iPad, nine times out of ten, it is way faster and way easier to do on the Mac.
John:
That's how I feel about using a desktop computer with a real screen compared to your 15 inch little cramp thing.
John:
Yeah, I can get it done on the laptop, but geez, I got to use a track pan and a tiny cramp keyboard and this tiny screen is way easier to use with a real mouse, full size keyboard and a gigantic screen in front.
John:
But anyway.
John:
yes yes i see your point but like it's not particularly for your use case but i always think like what use cases can the tablet pull from the mac i think the tablet already has pulled web browsing i think it pretty much does that fine especially with like flash going away right and with the advent of of uh content blockers let's call them uh on ios or whatever i think so web browsing i think it's pretty solidly the tablet said hey do you want to browse a bunch of web pages
John:
tablet's got you covered there and it's probably better because you can sit in your comfortable chair you could pick it up and put it down like a magazine it's good uh reading twitter and emails yeah you probably use your phone for that as well probably okay they're sending emails now we're borderline because now you're like oh i gotta type something this is probably what you're thinking of casey when you say oh it's so much easier to do on a computer it's either if it uses multiple windows then forget it obviously on a
John:
Or if you have to type anything of significant length.
John:
I wonder about the typing for the generation of kids brought up typing on glass that it's not going to seem like such a big deal for them.
John:
But in the end, I think that's still going to be an issue.
John:
But where I'm thinking of pulling is once you can get something approaching multiple things going on in the screen.
John:
I don't know if Apple split screen thing is the answer with picture in picture in this two slidey things.
John:
Like maybe that's not really the answer, but at least we're moving in that direction.
John:
I'm thinking of graphics artists, because if you think of it as the world's most awesome Cintiq, right?
John:
where it's the whole thing you don't even have a computer and you are basically like for art purposes having a really good pressure sensitive stylus and multi-touch and a big screen and enough power to do graphical stuff and not being tethered to a large computer that you have to be near or whatever
John:
that is a device that you could say is the the most efficient way for you to do fine arts related things because it's you know it's a natural interface to like drawing on the screen with a with a stylus or whatever and you could be moving things around and making fine adjustments and using multi-touch gestures to zoom and rotate and do other stuff like that and there's not much text entry a lot of the stuff is using sliders and
John:
And with the stylus, I don't know.
John:
I don't know if we're at the point where it can pull from that.
John:
But I know a lot of digital artists that spend most of their time messing around with their stylus.
John:
And maybe they also have one other hand on the keyboard doing all the keyboard shortcuts of Photoshop.
John:
So maybe we're not quite there yet.
John:
But the first thing I think for professionals that it's going to pull from are things like that, where there's not a lot of typing, maybe even audio editing, where you can imagine...
John:
multi-touch and a stylus being a huge advantage over a mouse and a keyboard, offsetting the detrimental effects of having less power, obviously, because it's not going to be a big hunking CPU in your little tablet.
John:
And having less screen real estate because you're not going to have a 27-inch tablet or whatever.
John:
But I'm firmly in the camp that I want to see larger and more powerful tablets to advance that form factor.
John:
And I think it kind of gets us out of...
John:
the tablet doldrums where it's like everyone has decided that there's no point in an ipad when you have your iphone 6 plus or your big phone like that the phone is just you have to have your phone anyway and if i have to have my phone anyway i can pretty much do everything that i could do on the ipad on the phone and so the ipad is just a luxury rich people so they can read their magazine their glossy digital magazine articles and see bigger images
John:
and that's the only purpose it serves and so everyone else has a phone a few rich people have a big thing like the only way you're going to differentiate and say what is the point of the tablet is it's show me something i can do on the tablet that i can't do on my phone and you absolutely cannot do big graphical work on your phone you just can't it's the screen is too small you don't have a stylus that's a way it could differentiate the other way i could differentiate is like the surface where it's like hey it's actually your laptop too and you slap a keyboard on and it clamshells and it's weird and awkward because the heavy part is up and anyway i
John:
I think Apple's approaching that from the other direction with the MacBook One of saying we're just going to keep making the computer slow and slow.
John:
But in the meantime, I really want an iPad Pro.
John:
Apple should make one.
John:
Batita should buy one.
John:
And graphic artist should tell us whether Apple's as yet unreleased hypothetical really awesome stylus is actually all it's cracked up to be.
Casey:
Wait, so you want it for yourself or you just want it to exist in the world?
John:
I want it to exist.
John:
I might buy one because I like the big iPads.
John:
It depends on how big it is because too big would be kind of ridiculous for me.
John:
But yeah, I was attracted to the Kindle DX to give you the kind of mindset I'm in.
John:
Really?
John:
Yeah, because I like to read magazines.
John:
I still get paper magazines.
John:
I still get Edge magazine and Car and Driver magazine.
John:
I mean, Car and Driver and Edge at this point are probably not much bigger than my iPad, but Edge used to be really big.
John:
I like something that big when I'm reading sort of magazine-y style articles, even just looking at photos and stuff, especially if it's thin and light.
John:
That's what I like, and I think I would try it with a stylus.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe I would noodle around with something there.
John:
It just seems like an obvious evolution of the product.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think what's going to be interesting is I think Apple is at its best when it is a little threatened and a little hungry and maybe a little bit desperate.
Marco:
You know, that usually is when Apple does its best work.
Marco:
And with a lot of iOS stuff, it's on top of the world with the iPhone.
Marco:
And the iPhone is fine.
Marco:
It's doing very well.
Marco:
And they've all been pretty good.
Marco:
But it seems like a lot of the decisions Apple makes with the iPhone are out of complacency or hubris recently.
Marco:
And the Mac, I can say the same thing about.
Marco:
But the iPad is under attack.
Marco:
The iPad is being threatened.
Marco:
And not by competition, but by apathy.
Marco:
everyone's saying oh we don't know how long the upgrade cycle is but the fact is if you're there was somebody else who made this I think it was Lucas Mathis I have to look this up but the idea is like if you're relying on upgrade cycle already for a product that only came out five years ago that is a really bad sign for your growth that is suggesting that everybody who could use or want an iPad already has one and that's really not a good place to be
Marco:
Um, so what's going to be interesting here is that Apple is, is now getting desperate with the iPad.
Marco:
They're going to start trying crazy things.
Marco:
And that's why I think we're seeing, that's why I think we saw the mini a couple of years ago when that first came out.
Marco:
And that's why I think we're seeing now that they're going to be making this, this big iPad pro, uh, possibly with a stylus, possibly with God knows what else.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why the, the new cool keyboard cursor movement stuff, um,
Marco:
in ios 9 even though we saw in beta 1 it was enabled on the phone and then in later betas it was disabled on the phone because they're going to probably keep it for ipad only because they're desperate they need they need to push people to buy bigger ipads the one of the reasons why they're not going to allow split screen on any of the old ones if the air 2 is to drive new sales of ipads this is all going to be you know part of it part of these you know a lot of those things like the the split screen restriction that's also partly because of ram of course
Marco:
But we're going to start seeing these moves of Apple trying to revive iPad sales by doing kind of desperate things.
Marco:
And that isn't necessarily bad.
Marco:
My theory is that that's actually good because we're going to see them do things they wouldn't have otherwise done.
Marco:
Things like a big iPad, things like a stylus maybe.
Marco:
We're going to see these things that had the iPad continued on its initial trajectory of getting really big and becoming as big as the iPhone someday maybe, had it continued on that path, I don't think they would have been doing this kind of experimentation.
Marco:
I think they would have just kept doing what they were doing.
Marco:
We're going to see interesting things.
Marco:
That said, though, they're really going to be bumping up against limitations of not only the form factor, but of iOS.
Marco:
And those are both huge considerations for... If you're looking at the iPad as, quote, getting work done...
Marco:
Big thing is input methods, right?
Marco:
This has always been the issue.
Marco:
I think if you're going through the trouble, which I see a lot of people do, of attaching some kind of keyboard or keyboard case to an iPad, I think you could make a very, very good argument that you should probably be using a laptop at that point.
Marco:
Yes, you can do a lot of things on an iPad, but it seems like so many people who end up doing, quote, their work on an iPad, so many of them are fighting the iPad to get it to do that.
Marco:
They're kind of fighting what it is or trying to make it something it's not, either out of desire or necessity.
Marco:
They have to do those things.
Marco:
And that is...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
To me, there are lots of things the iPad is good for, but general purpose work at a computer, especially content creation work, I don't think is one of those things.
Marco:
I think you need a keyboard for a lot of stuff that people do, and you need...
Marco:
What computer pointing devices do, which is very high precision and fast pointing devices.
Marco:
That's what trackpads and mice and even the little track points, they all offer fast, highly precise cursor input.
Marco:
And touch is not that.
John:
You don't think a stylus is precise?
Marco:
a stylus is and we'll see how that actually works in practice because like you know we've seen tablet PCs we've seen the surface we've seen devices that use a stylus to control a desktop interface and at that point it is like a Cintiq it is just basically you know moving a mouse cursor with a pen on screen that's fine but
Marco:
That's not how iOS is going to work, though.
Marco:
iOS is going to be the system designed for big sloppy fingers.
Marco:
And, you know, so the stylus will help in certain content creation things like drawing and things like that.
Marco:
But you still, like, so often you need more precision than, you know, you need the keyboard commands, you need, like, the...
John:
I don't know.
John:
That's what I'm thinking about.
John:
The keyboard thing, when you see people using a Cintiq or any other kind of tablet-type thing on a desktop, very, very often you see one hand on the keyboard.
John:
Like, they have their setup so they can reach the keyboard, do all the modifiers and stuff.
John:
And that, I think, is kind of a vestige of the desktop age because it's not as if you need a keyboard.
John:
In fact, it's very awkward to have the tablet...
John:
And also the keyboard because the keyboard is so wide, but you only need to like get at the modifiers and people make these special key setups.
John:
So they only need like one half of the keyboard.
John:
Like it's very awkward.
John:
And the only way you're going to get yourself out of that is to have a piece of hardware.
John:
that is more purpose built to let you you know use your primary interface which is the stylus you still need all these modifiers and to do all these other things but they don't have to be done through a keyboard right if you had an application made for a fictional ipad pro with a really good stylus and everything
John:
that used on-screen touch elements or gestures to do all the same things that modifiers do it would take a while to you know because we have decades of of graphics application on the mac like oh i always know hold down at the option means the shape is going to go from the center option shift is going to constrain to a perfect square or circle like all these things that we just know from like decades of use of graphics applications we don't have that that interface language for
John:
tablet-based applications yet, but we can develop it.
John:
And I think if we do develop it a couple of generations from now, people are going to have the same kind of intuitive multi-hand gesture, like one hand has the stylus, the other hand is doing all sorts of weird things in the corner that would look just as alien to us today.
John:
As I bet if a non-designer saw an actual designer working Photoshop or Illustrator with a tablet with all the shortcuts, they would be like, what are you typing?
John:
What are you even doing there?
John:
Or even just like Final Cut Pro with all the colored keyboards with different keys.
John:
It looks very strange to the person that's not accustomed to it.
John:
I think that strange makes me believe that you can make an equally strange and perhaps even more efficient interface that just uses two hands on a big giant touchscreen.
John:
One is holding a stylus, the other one is doing who knows what in whatever corner of the screen.
John:
And that can actually be more efficient because the freeform nature of the things you can do with multiple fingers and multiple hands and a stylus on the screen opens up much more natural gestures for doing graphical manipulations than...
John:
knowing that if you hold down option and shift, you get a perfect circle from the center, right?
John:
Like that makes sense in our minds, only because they've been warped by decades of using desktop drawing applications.
John:
But I really want there to be a different language for doing creative things on a screen with a stylus.
John:
And the only way we're going to get that is by having hardware and people making software for it.
John:
And maybe it's not going to be Adobe.
John:
Maybe it's not going to be Illustrated.
John:
Maybe it's going to be companies like Affinity or whatever that don't have a history behind them.
John:
They just say, oh, well, I'm just going to make a...
John:
ipad pro native uh graphics environment and i'm going to make up my own conventions and maybe the first three people do that make dumb conventions but eventually everyone sort of hones in on things that they agree are efficient and useful to use and the old people who are used to illustrator never leave illustrator they just retire and go off into the woods and the young kids who grew up doing everything on ipads and you can that's the one place i see ipads kids are using them like crazy
John:
kids who grew up with that when you try to tell them what modifiers to hold down to do all sorts of different things and what key combos to press to uh switch the background and foreground and to do all these other things they're gonna be like well isn't there some touch screen thing i can use to do like it'll just say i'm unnatural to them so i am very whatever the thing is uh where you're optimistic that's bullish right yeah i am very bullish about
John:
the future of large tablets for using creative fields.
John:
And the sooner we start making the mistakes that we have to make to figure out what works there, the better.
Marco:
See, I don't know.
Marco:
I'm a skeptic.
Marco:
I think that... You'll be retired.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
I think tablets have a serious input problem and a serious problem of ergonomics while doing a lot of this kind of work.
Marco:
And yes, there are lots of things where they are good, but I don't see them ever even coming close to the general purpose usefulness of either a phone or a computer.
Marco:
I think they give up too much on both ends.
Marco:
They're not portable enough to replace where we like our phones so much because they're not always on our person.
Marco:
Our phones are always with us.
Marco:
They're always within reeks.
Marco:
They're usually in our pockets or our bags.
Marco:
They're always with us.
Marco:
Your tablet is not because it can't fit in your pocket or many bags.
Marco:
Your tablet is not always with you for most people.
Marco:
Your computer is that same portability class.
Marco:
Your computer is also not always with you.
Marco:
But if you're going to sit down and do a bunch of work, most people can get way more work done on a computer than they can on a tablet.
Marco:
Not everybody I know, but I think most people.
Marco:
And what you're saying, John, it makes sense that you're saying a lot of this is generational.
Marco:
You're right.
John:
um but i don't think all of it is i think there's certain realities of like well this device doesn't have room for physical you know keyboard and mouse and stuff or whatever the case may be trackpad well i mean even that like if you keep it if you keep spooling that out like as you're trying to think of your things oh you have to have a keyboard and stuff like that i start to think of more of a form factor that looks like like a 27 inch iMac laid down like a drafting table with a keyboard in front of it
John:
Right.
John:
And that's an ergonomic nightmare.
John:
Well, not really.
John:
People work on drafting tables all the time.
John:
Like, it's a touchscreen.
John:
It's a touchscreen with a stylus.
John:
Yeah, ask them about their neck and shoulder issues.
John:
Well, you could raise them up.
John:
It's not any more of an ergonomic nightmare than sitting in front of computers are.
John:
You can have an ergonomic setup in either way.
John:
The whole point is I'm saying, like, a touchscreen that is not completely vertical so you don't get arm streamed.
John:
Like...
John:
Before the computers existed, people did drafting and architecture on monks and scribes and stuff.
John:
And yes, they had RSI issues then as well.
John:
But I think we had more RSI issues with computers with vertical screens and keyboards and mice.
John:
Anyway, I think those things are all surmountable problems.
John:
But what you have there is you don't have any compromises.
John:
You have a really big screen.
John:
You have precision input device.
John:
You can have a mouse if you wanted.
John:
You can have a stylus.
John:
You can have a keyboard.
John:
But the primary interface is this big giant canvas that you have in front of it that you can use all five of your fingers on and both of your hands.
John:
And when you need to type, you can type on a keyboard.
John:
when you need to do voice recognition you can talk when you do video conversing the camera can see you when you need to use a mouse for something you can although i'm not sure if you would uh we're going to use a style so like that's the end game where it's like this is the new like it's the replacement for the pc somehow we we bridge the gap between here and there i don't think there's anything you can you can't do on that setup that you can do
John:
on a pc today because it would be it would be plugged in you don't have power constraints you could have like it's just it basically is a new pc all it is is a different pc right but you got there by coming from the tablet realm but you started out as something that looks like a big phone and you just kept getting creeping slowly and slowly towards the things that a pc can do and you started pulling over more and more until eventually nobody wanted to use a clunky old pc and everyone wanted to use those things
John:
We're far from that now, but I think that's the direction it has to go for the reasons you said, because the phone is always going to be the phone and the phones are already pretty big.
John:
So it's like, don't even bother going in that direction.
John:
What are you even going to do there?
John:
That was like the original iPad.
John:
It was as simple as an iPhone and as limited as an iPhone, but not an iPhone.
John:
So like that's a dead end.
John:
Don't go in that direction.
John:
You have to go in the other direction.
John:
So turn your attention to PCs, see all the things that they can do better and see if you can knock them down one by one.
John:
And we really need to start that process.
John:
Split screen is...
John:
the most timid possible move in that direction.
John:
But I think it's a good idea to be timid because if you just go full Microsoft Surface, like, hey, here's a start menu.
John:
Boom.
John:
Just all you're doing then is just abdicating.
John:
You're saying, see, I can be like you.
John:
Now I'm a PC and I'm a tablet and now you're
John:
kind of neither one you have you have to figure out how to uh absorb you have to become the preferred platform people want to do this thing on without bringing over the pc baggage and that's really really hard to do and it's going to take a long time um but let's let's start the process now um and in the meantime it's kind of lucky that uh companies like apple are doing it because apple can afford to noodle i mean how they can afford to noodle around the stupid apple tv for years and years um
John:
They can afford to noodle around with the iPad.
John:
It has a lot of economies of scale in terms of the CPUs, GPUs, the operating system.
John:
Like, it's not... That's the whole reason, you know, they've been getting away with coasting so long.
John:
It's like, well, we'll make an iPad version of everything, too.
John:
It's basically like an iPhone, a little bit different.
John:
As they start to differentiate, you have to invest in it more.
John:
They can afford to do that.
John:
On the other end of the spectrum, and all these stories about the iPad has been like...
John:
little tablets for kids to watch youtube on um 99 android tablets that are basically just like portable tv screens you hold in your hands that have wi-fi that's fine too that market will continue to exist apple's probably not interested in it but that i think it's worth mentioning you know you can't go towards phones apple should go towards pcs and then there's going to be a market that i don't think apple is interested in for basically a really flat
John:
Wi-Fi connected TV screen with a web browser that will also continue to exist and become so cheap that, you know, our grandchildren will like they'll come in cereal boxes with seven inch OLED roll up tablet thing that you can use to watch future YouTube and play Plants vs. Zombies 9000.
John:
apple better be well out of that area and it better have figured out a way to turn the tablet into the next mac by then because if it hasn't it will surely be completely out of the tablet market because apple does not want to sell you 79 seven inch tablet uh to play angry birds on
Marco:
So before we finish this topic, I also want to mention the software.
Marco:
I find the other thing I was thinking of earlier was it was indeed by Lucas Mathis.
Marco:
I put the link in the show notes at ignorethecode.net and I think grew up into it last week.
Marco:
So most of you probably saw it.
Marco:
But the idea, the title is I've had a consumption device after all.
Marco:
And he goes through a lot of these challenges and including the upgrade thing.
Marco:
But he also has this great section about iOS.
Marco:
So
Marco:
iOS is itself a major limiting factor in the ability to, quote, get work done on an iPad or an iPhone.
Marco:
But I think it's more of a glaring issue on an iPad as you're looking at, like, different ways that you want to expand this market as you want people to, quote, get more work done on it.
Marco:
How does this work within iOS?
Marco:
And iOS is, you know, while it's doing things like the window management, as you said, that is, like, kind of a baby step...
Marco:
There are still so many issues, much around things like file and document management and data sharing between apps and everything.
Marco:
These things are still really either still too walled off and too limited.
Marco:
Or there is a procedure now or the extension system.
Marco:
There is now a solution to some of these things, but it is itself limited or cumbersome or unintuitive or has other problems that makes it just harder to get a lot of kinds of work done on iOS than it would be on a computer.
John:
I haven't read this article, but rather than listing iOS, don't you think the App Store specifically is a barrier to these things just as much as the OS?
Marco:
Well, that's a third thing.
Marco:
So not only do you have issues with what is even possible to do on the OS, what limitations exist, what is really clunky.
Marco:
I was thinking earlier, one of my ideal pet projects would be to replace Logic, the audio editing app that...
Marco:
is designed for making music and that many podcasters myself included used to edit podcasts even though it is so painfully not made for that task and it never lets you forget that and uh and it is not i it is probably not even the best tool for that for even that job but the fact is a lot of us use logic i would love to replace it and i was thinking i think i could do it on an ipad i think i could i could make
Marco:
something that would do what i need logic to do of editing podcast i could make that on an ipad the hardware is definitely fast enough to do it now i know core audio very well i know i know ui kit very well i could definitely make it on an ipad but then then i started thinking okay well how do you get the files onto the ipad how do you get like the source files of what you recorded and
Marco:
to the iPad, to edit.
Marco:
What document format do you save?
Marco:
Where do you save that document?
Marco:
When you're done with a document, you want to export it out.
Marco:
Where do you put this?
Marco:
Where do you put these files?
Marco:
And there are answers to all those things, but they're all so clunky.
Marco:
Yes, I could make it saved to Dropbox, maybe, but then everyone has to use Dropbox.
Marco:
And then these files are really big sometimes, and you've got to blow all your Dropbox space on that.
Marco:
And then you've got to deal with sync and getting the files to and from it.
Marco:
And
John:
iCloud Drive.
John:
Yeah, exactly right.
Marco:
The answers to those questions are so often on iOS so cumbersome.
John:
You didn't think of how you're going to make money without being able to get upgrades?
Marco:
And that's step two.
Marco:
So step two is suppose I actually could make a good app like that.
Marco:
This is a great use.
Marco:
of an iPad physically because this is the kind of task where I do tons of scrolling pinch to zoom to change the scroll scale and tons of side to side scrolling I could so easily make a great touch interface that would basically be a giant scroll view and you would use your finger to tap on regions that you want to move around and you could move them around
Marco:
the interface to it would almost write itself.
Marco:
It would be not only so straightforward for the kind of use I have in mind, but it would be better than on the Mac.
Marco:
It would be easier to do it on Touch than it would be on the Mac.
Marco:
However, so suppose I actually get a useful app, but that also has all these hindrances brought on by the OS and the data and file and document model of the OS.
Marco:
then I have to go sell it in the app store.
Marco:
Now, it is hard enough to make money on the iPhone.
Marco:
I think it's even harder on the iPad for most kinds of apps.
Marco:
I mean, some kinds of apps do better on the iPad, but the iPad market is so much smaller in the iPhone market.
Marco:
And so many iPads are used in roles, like what you were just saying, like the kid YouTube thing.
Marco:
I think a lot of iPads are used in roles where people aren't buying a lot of new apps, if I had to take a guess.
John:
Right.
John:
you'd have to price it like a pro app like that's what i was getting at like you you how many people uh edit podcasts very few so you i mean that's the reason logic is like 200 bucks it's a pro app you're priced like a pro app but then you're dead in the water after you sell the first version because you're like oh now i have like pro apps are sustained by having an initial high uh price and then having upgrades and if you can't have upgrades and you have to buy a new like then you're going to release version two of your application as an entirely new app it's also for two hundred dollars
John:
but then the pro people want support like i don't know how you sell pro apps in ios maybe enterprise apps where they don't care that you just charge them again and again maybe you make them free and have subscription recurring things just the business model for pro apps in ios forget about ipad in ios period just doesn't seem to exist or work and apple does apple have any pro level ios applications
Marco:
Well, that's the other thing.
Marco:
I think upgrade pricing is a red herring.
Marco:
I think upgrade pricing is not a major part of the problem.
Marco:
Pricing is a major part of the problem in general, but upgrade pricing, I think, is a really small part, if any, because Apple has already shown that what they're doing with their modern pro apps is they cut the prices from where they used to be.
Marco:
Logic used to be hundreds, many hundreds of dollars.
Marco:
Now it's $200.
Marco:
Final Cut used to be over $1,000.
Marco:
Now it's, I think, also $200 or $300, something like that.
John:
uh you know apple's model is is simply we're going to make the price lower up front and then we're just not going to have upgrade pricing because we can't get eddie q's team to actually do it but but i don't think that's how most pro apps work like that's how apple's pro apps work but that's not how i mean photoshop has gone to subscription which is one way to do it it's like sustainable sustainable recurring revenue office the same thing unless not really like a pro app but it's an enterprisey type app i would say these days it is a pro app but that's separate discussion
John:
Things like Pro Tools or, you know, I mean, Logic is the example because it's an Apple's camp, but like, or Avid, stuff like that.
John:
They cost a lot of money and a lot of them have upgrade pricing and a lot of them have kind of like support expectations where you're going to do bug fixes up until this and then you have to pay more to get the next major version.
John:
Like maybe you can just come up with different business models related to it, but...
John:
It just seems difficult to me when your only option is you either get everything that I give you for free or you buy a whole new version.
John:
And maybe upgrade pricing is the old model.
John:
Maybe Apple's right that the new model should be just lower your price and then make them pay that every year.
John:
But then you're just creeping up on subscriptions in a weird way.
John:
It just I don't know that the point is that is an unknown.
John:
That is that is going to stop people from the unknown.
John:
You know, the the the uncertainty about it is going to stop people from even trying to do that.
John:
Uh, whereas at least on the Mac, there is an established history, which may be kind of archaic, but at least they know, well, this model kind of works and I can kind of roll with it as it evolves.
John:
But, um, iOS, I don't think there is any obvious example other than Apple's.
John:
And in Apple's case, you don't even know if they make money doing that.
John:
Does logic make money on its own for a $200?
John:
Did aperture make money on any of its price points?
John:
You really have no idea whether that is even profitable.
John:
So if you're an independent software maker, considering making a pro app for iOS, uh,
John:
I don't know what examples you have to go off of to say if we do this in this kind of model, we'll probably make money if it costs us this much to make it.
John:
And year after year, we'll be able to sustain our business on it.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a serious problem.
Marco:
I don't think I would tackle this problem.
Marco:
Seeing the way the App Store is now, especially on the iPad, where it seems like iPad economics are even less healthy than iPhone economics, just because of the market size difference.
Marco:
I really don't know...
Marco:
what apple could do to get really serious pro apps on the ipad more than you know for more than just the big companies like adobe and microsoft that can do these little like these little offshoot versions or like you know even good versions and just roll it into a subscription like but how you know how you get something that's more narrowly targeted like you know like you have pixel mater on there it's like five bucks
Marco:
Because they can't sell it at more than that.
Marco:
And we'll see how that goes.
John:
You remember there was Adobe Photoshop for iOS?
John:
Remember that?
Marco:
Briefly, right?
John:
Right.
John:
But it was an application that you could download from Adobe whose name, I believe, was actually Photoshop.
John:
That's about where the similarity between actual Photoshop and that ended.
John:
I think, like, it's kind of a chicken egg where no one wants to go first.
John:
There's uncertainty or whatever.
John:
Serendipity could help here.
John:
Apple could introduce pro hardware with a stylus.
John:
Then some small, naive developer could develop an application that really catches on in the same way that, like, VisiCalc did.
John:
The classic killer app or tractor app, right?
John:
That...
John:
It's just like, oh, you have to you have to get an Apple to because you can run a visit calc and or you have to get a Mac because you can do desktop publishing with, you know, page maker or whatever.
John:
Like that just becomes the thing that developer makes tons of money.
John:
Everybody buys the hardware to get the software and buys the software because that's the software you buy to do the thing.
John:
And they're the first one to do it.
John:
And it's a breakout hit.
John:
And hopefully that would let them work out what the business model is going to be riding on their giant success in time for other people who are going to be less successful to join in, but without some huge breakout success.
John:
And I don't even know what that would be like.
John:
Photoshop was a breakout success.
John:
Photoshop was a phenomenon for people bought computers so you could have a thing to run Photoshop on.
John:
And they didn't care what the computer was.
John:
When Photoshop for the Mac was crappy or behind, they bought Windows computers.
John:
I don't care.
John:
I need a machine to run Photoshop because Photoshop is what I do for a living and I need to do to use it.
John:
Where is the VisiCalc, QuarkXPress, Pagemaker, Photoshop for the iPad Pro?
John:
That could help sort of break the tie, break the logjam here and get that platform moving forward.
John:
But I don't think Apple should be counting on that.
John:
And certainly Apple doesn't seem to be doing anything on its own to make its own pro-level software and show that it can have a sustainable business because you can never tell because they have so much money.
John:
that they could basically do things, a lot of things like iWork, basically for free, that other companies can't do.
John:
But the first step is, I guess, Apple has to make the hardware.
John:
So at least we're going in the right direction, sort of.
John:
If any of these rumors are to be believed, which, by the way, these are all rumors.
Marco:
Well, also, even the hardware is... And even beyond, like, my theories about input methods and everything, there's even other problems that are more boring in nature, but that are problems.
Marco:
Things like...
Marco:
There's no USB ports or network ports or there's only one port at the bottom to plug anything in.
John:
There's no more room for any more ports, you know, Marco.
John:
It has to be exactly that size.
Marco:
Yeah, well, yeah, you can always... Yeah, but the thing is like...
Marco:
Some of the philosophical or physical decisions that Apple has made about no ports or restricting expansion or whatever over the years, that also restricts this kind of usefulness for the pro use like this.
Marco:
That is a problem.
Marco:
There are a lot of potential things you could do with iOS devices.
Marco:
but they don't have some kind of hardware feature you need, and there's no good way to add it.
Marco:
Like, what my Mac mini does for the live stream, like, you saw the crazy setups I've had in the past to try to get iOS devices to do live streaming, and it was a huge pain.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
The iOS devices had plenty of processing power to do what I needed.
Marco:
I didn't need a full-blown PC-type computer to do these things, but I needed a computer with an audio interface and power that was reliable and maybe an Ethernet jack.
Marco:
There's always going to be something like that where there's so many possible uses where iOS would be perfectly sufficient as an OS and the hardware would be perfectly sufficient CPU power-wise, RAM-wise...
Marco:
But there's something about the iOS device hardware, like the rest of it, that is restricted in some way or lacks some feature that could make this kind of use case a lot better.
Marco:
And there's so many use cases where that's true.
Marco:
Like, Apple has said no to so many things over the years.
Marco:
And most of that is what makes their product so good for general consumer consumption, if that's not redundant.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What makes the iPad and iPhone so good for browsing the web and reading Twitter and stuff like that is its simplicity and these nice, thin, light devices that last half of a day.
Marco:
And you can browse a lot on them.
Marco:
A lot of those things they've said no to are things that we actually did need for ProUse.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Fracture, Squarespace, and Igloo.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Casey:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it in
Casey:
KC's totally going to get.
John:
That's what you're going to get instead of a mini or an iMac.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
iPad Pro.
John:
It'll solve all your problems.
John:
It'll stop you from playing with Node because you won't be able to type anything.
John:
That's true.
John:
They can't run Plex.
Casey:
Well, the client.
Casey:
But it's funny you bring that up because a coworker, I haven't seen him around the office in a long time, and I've been at a client site on and off for a long time.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
A coworker was offered a new machine, and rather than getting the new standard-issue Dell or whatever, which, by the way, if you want a good laugh, take a look at the power brick for one of those Dells that's wide enough to have a numeric keypad on it.
Casey:
The power brick alone is like half the size of my laptop.
Casey:
It's unbelievable.
Casey:
If you had described it in perfect detail, I wouldn't believe you that a power brick is that big.
Casey:
But I assure you, it's that big.
Casey:
Anyway, he chose, instead of getting one of those stupid Dells with the ridiculous power bricks, or presumably he could have asked for a Mac...
Casey:
his work computer is going to be a Surface, which to me struck me as the most insane, dumb thing I've ever heard in my life.
Casey:
In no small part, because for the next three years, he will be using a computer that has eight gigs of RAM.
John:
I can see the appeal of the Surface for people who already know how to use a PC.
John:
If you're comfortable with a PC, but you mostly just want a tablet, except for those times you need a little bit of PC-ish, that's what the Surface is for.
John:
It still seems...
John:
very awkward to me and weird but i i see people using them work too for a certain use case uh it seems to be okay like they don't care about the compromises and they know what they're getting into it's like i know how to use a pc laptop i'm not intimidated or put off by any of the complexities that the service reveals about because it basically is a pc laptop but also a lot of times i just want to kind of a tablet thing i don't want to be able to touch the screen
John:
All right, here you go.
John:
Here's your Frankenstein monster.
John:
It's done.
John:
I mean, it's the same thing I described in that.
John:
I think it was my first macro column.
John:
I described something that was basically like a MacBook Air that could fold back on itself and become an iPad.
John:
Only my idea was when it's in iPad mode, it's an iPad.
John:
And when it's in Mac mode, it's a Mac.
John:
And the two are only rated insofar as maybe they share like iCloud Drive together.
John:
Otherwise, it's just basically like, hey, I don't have to bring two devices.
John:
I can just bring one and it's basically two devices.
John:
And you can do that today.
John:
You can totally do that right now.
John:
with with current technology would still be a frankenstein product that i don't think anybody would like but i was thinking about then how do you cross this divide because sometimes people mostly just want to use a tablet and it would be like you know i can see my email account from either one i can see it in apple mail or i can see it in the ios mail application it's still the same mail it's not like i'm splitting my data like because so much of your data is in the cloud
John:
Uh, but then you're like, then you have to deal with the PC when it's in PC mode and all the things that entails.
John:
And you're not really making any progress.
John:
All you're doing is let yourself carry one cleverly hinged device instead of one conventionally hinged device and one unhinged device.
Casey:
Wow.
John:
And that's what the surface is.
John:
One slightly cleverly hinged device.
John:
That's really awkward and difficult to use as a laptop.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, basically.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All my developer friends who have used Windows 10 swear that it's the best thing ever.
Casey:
I haven't barely touched it, but whatever.
John:
If you like Windows PCs, you can get a Windows PC and this other tablet-y thing all in one.
John:
neat yeah i still think the ipad pro is just the macbook one i tend to agree with you can't touch the screen give a macbook one to a kid and watch them put their little grubby paws all over your screen they'll say this is not an ipad this is useless to me what is this blank square here with no writing it on the bottom anyway i don't understand where that is at all and the screen doesn't work i touch it nothing happens
Marco:
If you want a computer that's small, ultra-portable, slow, and hard to type on, it's a MacBook One.
John:
Can't touch the screen.
John:
Screens you can't touch are broken.
John:
What did I do recently?
John:
I'm pretty sure that I either pinched a zoom or swiped something in car and driver when I was reading it.
John:
Nice.
John:
I do that all the time.
John:
I had a recent one, and I'm like, I hadn't done it.
John:
I had a two-month run where I hadn't tried to move a piece of paper to...
John:
Just scroll it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The problem is a lot of the times when I'm reading a magazine, I'm sitting in the same place as I would be reading something on the iPad.
John:
Only when it's a paper magazine, you, uh, you can't zoom.
John:
I think I tapped a link once too.
John:
Boy, people are dumb.
Yeah.