Uncomfortable in My Pants
John:
yeah and i'm listening to top four and it's driving me insane because marco is the worst podcast host of a show with top four ever oh my god i thought the same thing and i'm too nice a guy to say it i don't understand how tiff has the patience of a saint like just pick four things like make him write it down on a piece of paper everything is number five what everything can't be number five and then within the top four it's like this is my number one and then all these are tied for number two that's not how top four works
John:
the show is and i like the fact that the end of the episode you admitted it and like explain like i realized but i'm i'm not able to even follow the simple formula and tiff is like she's fine with it yep it's how she can live with you well she you know she tolerates me yeah she does it's like she's not even frustrated by it like the show is called top four pick four things and write them down
Casey:
I'm still f***ing bitter that you didn't bring up Transport Tycoon.
Casey:
I'm so angry at you for that.
John:
No, I mean, that's not what he picked.
John:
It's not your top four.
John:
It's their top four.
Casey:
Yeah, but I know it's his top four.
John:
Apparently it's not.
John:
That one was probably at number 15 with every other game in existence.
Casey:
But I couldn't agree with you more, John.
Casey:
Mark, you've got to get a grip on the top four.
John:
It's so easy to do.
John:
You write number one, two, three, and four, and then you write words next to each one of those.
That's it.
John:
so easy to do tiff does it tiff does it see how watch her do it if you need like to help she does such a good job she has a list of all the ones she considered she's got her top four she has reasons and you're just like i don't know tv shows i like some of them
John:
well i like i like this one a lot and then there's like these 34 other ones that are somewhere down below and def can like talk you into like like changing your mind halfway through the show and she's like she even called you on she's like you're just saying that because i liked it you're like no no no i've changed my mind at this moment boy good thing she's on that show she's really carrying you i agree oh my god it's so true oh john i love you i i enjoy it uh what is the next episode gonna be about
Casey:
All right, let's start with, we have learned that not only does this universe have many, many, many, many, many tap-to-click wizards, but as I believe John has phrased in the show notes, we have also found that there are quite a few CEC unicorns.
John:
Yeah, it's kind of an oxymoron because the whole thing of unicorn is like the one rare, the last unicorn.
John:
But there's a lot of them that are obviously not unicorns.
John:
But anyway, yeah, lots of CEC unicorns.
John:
The last show I expressed my general disdain for CEC and my frustration with it almost working.
John:
Like that's the thing about it.
John:
Like it almost works.
John:
It works some of the time.
John:
You can kind of get it to work.
John:
You're going to think you have everything set up and it's working perfectly.
John:
And then things will go wrong in a way that you can't debug.
John:
And maybe you'll never be able to get them to work again.
John:
That's been my experience with CEC.
John:
across many different manufacturers in many years so i asked anyone use cec and have good things to say about it and i did get a bunch of people tweeting that they have you know i have a mixed component set up with components from different companies and it works for me i have a complete panasonic setup and it works for me so uh probably maybe fewer than the tap to click wizards but a surprising number of people are using cec and are happy with it a lot of them
John:
They admittedly have fairly simple needs, like they're like, I turn this thing on and it switches my input and turns the other thing on.
John:
I think as the number of devices you connect increases and as you have greater expectations, like not only does it have to just auto switch inputs and, you know, turn on the television and stuff, but do a bunch of other things in terms of changing surround settings or whatever other things it can do.
John:
then maybe it goes more awry.
John:
And maybe it's gotten better since I bought my TV and receiver a couple years ago, so who knows.
John:
But anyway, if you want to be optimistic about CEC, there are people out there who are using it successfully and happily, and it's working for them.
John:
And Robert Engdahl wrote in to explain why CEC might be so terrible.
John:
He is an ASIC designer.
John:
What does that stand for, guys?
Casey:
That is... Oh, I don't remember offhand.
Casey:
Is it the shoe?
Yeah.
Casey:
Nicely done.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I can't believe I don't know this acronym off the top of my head.
Casey:
Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Application-specific integrated circuitry.
John:
There you go.
John:
How can I not pull that out?
John:
I'm getting old, guys.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway.
John:
He's an ASIC engineer with HDMI experience.
John:
And he says the CEC protocol is crappy because...
John:
Only a limited set of commands are defined in the protocol, and the rest is entirely up to the manufacturer of the device.
John:
So there's a small set of commands that are defined, and then device makers can make up anything they want.
John:
And so I assume Panasonic will make up a bunch of stuff that works with its own stuff, and Sony will make up stuff that works with its own stuff.
John:
And on top of that, the spec for CEC says even the defined commands, you don't have to implement them.
John:
They're not mandatory.
John:
So even though there are a small number of defined commands and you can extend them, you don't even have to implement the defined commands.
John:
You could, for example, implement your own volume up, down or input switching thing that works with your receiver and not implement the standard one.
John:
uh hdmi 2.0 apparently fixes this but hdmi 2.0 isn't out yet on a lot of hardware so cec could get better in hdmi 2.0 because they kind of learned from the past that if you let the manufacturers do whatever they want with your protocol they'll do uh things that are not conducive to mixing components and maybe not even conducive to mixing with their own components from uh from uh distantly separated by time
John:
and not having the defined commands be mandatory.
John:
I don't even know what kind of standard it is.
John:
If you don't have to implement the defined commands and you can make up your own commands, it's basically the Wild West.
John:
So that is the explanation for why people who have bad experiences with CEC have bad experiences.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on, we had yet another excellent post from dear friend of the show, underscore David Smith.
Casey:
My favorite David Smith blog posts are when he goes spelunking into data that he has gathered or can discover and figure out little tidbits or perhaps confirm little tidbits that...
Casey:
That people theorize or maybe don't even realize is true.
Casey:
And so the blog post that is in question, which relates to what we had lamented last episode, is entitled, 16 gigabytes is a bad user experience.
Casey:
And in this post, Underscore goes through his homegrown analytics that he has in his very popular app, Audiobooks.
Casey:
That's not a super duper nerdy app.
Casey:
And so it's got a really good kind of install base of regular people.
Casey:
And he has these graphs of reported free space.
Casey:
for 16 gig phones.
Casey:
And if you look at these graphs, it's abundantly obvious that almost all of these phones have almost no available free space.
Casey:
And that just doesn't seem good.
Casey:
So was it John that pulled out a couple of these choice quotes?
Casey:
Would you like to go over them?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the first thing is, like Casey said, these are just the customers of one application, but it's not a super nerdy application.
John:
But anyway, this is the premise of the discussion is this is just among people who bought this one app from this one developer.
John:
We're hoping it's representative and this is the best data we have.
John:
It seems like it could be representative.
John:
If anything, it might skew more nerdy.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, this is among iPhone 6 and 6 Plus customers only.
John:
43% of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus customers have 16 gig models.
John:
That's what I was getting at in the last show when I was saying it used to be that the most popular model of whatever Apple product was always the most expensive, fanciest one.
John:
And that started to change, I don't know, at this point, like a decade ago.
John:
But anyway, it changed.
John:
And now since Apple is a mass market company and sells tons and tons of things, obviously it's going to skew more towards how you'd expect.
John:
But even I was surprised to see that 43% of iPhone 6, 6 plus customers got the 16 gig model because, uh,
John:
That's the newest, fanciest iPhone.
John:
It's not like we're saying that the people buying last year's or the year before a phone are cheaping out.
John:
These are the people who want the new iPhone and just want it, like I said at the last show, want to find the cheapest possible way they can get it.
John:
So that's a 16-gig model.
John:
Now, among the people with a 16-gig iPhone 6 and 6 Pluses, 37% of them have less than a gig of space available.
John:
And less than a gig of space available is basically full.
John:
Like, less than a gig is...
John:
almost anything can happen and it could push you over the edge.
John:
You are, you know, that's the, at the point where OS 10 would start popping up dialogues in your face and saying, your disc looks like it's almost full.
John:
You'd, you know, do something about that.
John:
Um, and, uh, the other theory is like, okay, well fine, but I bet everybody fills up their phones.
John:
Well, uh,
John:
Among people who have 64 gig phones, only 1% of them have filled them to that amount.
John:
So it's not as if space, it doesn't matter.
John:
It's not like lanes on a highway where, oh, you just make the phone bigger, people are just going to fill it.
John:
There is a certain amount of stuff that people have or are expected to encounter during the useful lifetime of the phone.
John:
And according to these stats, if you have a 64 gig phone, only 1% of the people have basically filled it.
John:
And among 16 gig phones, almost 40% have filled it.
John:
And then finally, taking these customers, the ones who have the six and six plus, who have filled it up, you know, multiplying the percentages together, who have filled it up.
John:
This is 17% of the customers of this audiobooks application are basically walking around all day, as Underscore puts it with a, I'm not going to be able to pronounce this, Damoclean sword dangling over their head.
John:
Did I get that right?
John:
You know, the big sword that swings back and forth, a ground poe.
John:
Is it Damoclean?
John:
I don't know.
John:
i'm going out on a limb here sort of damocles anyway uh i don't even know what that was yeah you can look it up marco get some culture uh yeah so 17 of the customers now is this representative of all iphone users in the entire world we don't know this again it's one developers customers for one kind of general interest app only the iphone 6 6 plus things but these numbers do not look promising like i i
John:
Again, I would think that Underscores customers are skew even more nerdy because he moves in nerdy circles.
John:
He is nerdy.
John:
Some of the apps he sells are nerdy, but other ones are like Pedometer++ and the Weather App and Stop and the Audiobooks app are just general, you know, general and just applications.
John:
uh again apple we've said this before apple has the real numbers we don't have the real numbers so that impairs our ability to definitively shame them for selling 16 gig models but the little data that we have you know we're not apple and they're not sharing this information the data that we can glean here's some more support for the theory that a 16 gig phone is not a good experience for users
Casey:
Yeah, it seems completely obvious to me that this is a terrible, terrible, terrible decision.
Casey:
And just like you said, John, we don't have all the data that Apple has, but gosh, I would love to see what metric they're using to justify this.
Casey:
And if it's not something related to profit or...
Casey:
margins or something along those lines one of those businessy terms that i'm not very good with then money yeah money uh i don't money i want to know what what this metric is if it isn't just money because it seems so obvious to me that this is just a terrible terrible terrible decision
Marco:
I mean, look, I'm totally in agreement with you, Casey.
Marco:
I mean, you can look at all the different possible explanations of why they might reasonably have done this, but none of them are particularly strong, especially for a very high profit product like the iPhone, even at the 16 gig capacity.
Marco:
So the reality is Apple very well could ship that device with 32 or even 64 at that price point and barely affect the margins of that product at all.
Marco:
But I think the reason they do it, as we said before, is not because they can't afford to put 16 gigs in a $650 device.
Marco:
phone right is that what it is something like that yeah right it's not because of that it's because if they did that it would hurt sales of the one that's a hundred dollars more and so it would drive their average sale price down in all likelihood so that is why it's not done it's simple as that if there you know any other explanation is really just grasping at straws trying to make an excuse that is the real reason
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
I could go on forever about this, but I feel like we've kind of beaten this horse, I should say.
Casey:
Moving on, let's talk about the iPhone 6S battery.
Casey:
I guess we had talked about it getting a little bit smaller last episode.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
One way or another, it got smaller.
Casey:
And the numbers say that the iPhone 6 had 1,810 milliamp hour battery.
Casey:
The iPhone 6S has 1,715.
Casey:
So almost exactly 100 milliamp hour difference.
Casey:
And that is about a 5% loss in terms of the new iPhone's 6S battery.
Casey:
Or I guess that's just the 6S.
Casey:
I'm sorry, not the 6S+.
Casey:
which is a little bit of a loss, but presumably the different chips on the device, and they did a shrink, didn't they, on this one?
John:
Yeah, they did.
John:
Remember in the keynote, they wanted to say they did a shrink, but they did it in regular person speak instead of jargon.
John:
And so it confused all the nerds.
John:
Like, wait, are they trying to say shrink?
John:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did a shrink.
John:
And the other thing they do very often is,
John:
Reduce the number of chips.
John:
Get chips to combine functionality.
John:
They previously took two separate chips.
John:
I'm assuming that they can absorb this 5% loss combined with the shrink and the efficiencies of just a second crack at the same size form factor.
John:
So it probably should be fine.
John:
But again, I just wanted to put some hard numbers on, like, the last show.
John:
We're like, oh, it looks like that vibration taptic engine thing takes up a lot of room.
John:
Well, quantify it.
John:
And quantifying it, it looks like it's about 5%.
John:
And by the way, these numbers are pulled from...
John:
Apple's videos where they like pan over the innards and show the battery and on the battery is stamped the power rating.
John:
And of course, the iPhone 6, everybody knows from, you know, teardowns and stuff.
Marco:
So although this also leaked beforehand, this information leaked weeks before, actually, that and I believe the leak was right on.
John:
Yeah, they usually are.
John:
But, you know, I just want to give people the source because if it turns out that the video was wrong because someone photoshopped that number on there and leaks were wrong and the real battery is different, then, you know, anyway.
Marco:
I mean, one thing to consider, first of all, the 5% loss of raw capacity and saying it's the same battery life.
Marco:
That could also, even if you ignore any kind of component changes, they made iOS 9 more battery efficient.
Marco:
And so they could say, oh, it gets X hours just because it's a new OS.
Marco:
They do the same thing on the Macs with the laptops.
Marco:
They also, I don't know if they're including in their battery runtime estimates, if they are including the low power mode being turned on at 10% or whatever it is, 20 or 10 that it turns on.
John:
Does that... Is that automatically turn on?
Marco:
It prompts you to turn it on.
Marco:
And so... But I'm guessing if you want to fudge a number a little bit and really optimize your number, they would probably do that.
Marco:
And they could argue that that's fair because most people would do that.
Marco:
Anyway, so it could be including those things where it wasn't before.
Marco:
So keep that in mind when you read the official estimates.
Marco:
We'll see what happens in practice.
Marco:
I am still very skeptical.
Marco:
I...
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
I just went to XOXO, and I took the 6 Plus with me.
Marco:
And I've been using the 6 all year, except for when I took another trip, or another series of trips.
Marco:
But I went back to the 6 Plus for this trip for battery life, primarily, and wow, it is glorious.
Marco:
And then going back to the 6 after a week of the 6 Plus again.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It's so...
Marco:
Oh, it's so bad.
Marco:
I wish they would meaningfully improve the battery life, but it's very clear that they think this is good enough, and I don't, and so we just disagree on that.
Marco:
I will say one thing, though, on this battery topic.
Marco:
We've talked in the past about how the reason the phone might be this skinny and light and have a mediocre battery life is, John, I believe what you termed the naked robotic core theory, which is that the ideal phone is this really tiny thing that is so small that you can put it in a case if you want some other ability, whether it's more durability, more battery life.
Marco:
Whatever cases can offer, you can put it in a case to fix its shortcomings of being small.
Marco:
And then if you want a really small phone, you can just carry the naked phone.
Marco:
And so I looked after this trip over the last few days.
Marco:
I've been trying to research iPhone battery cases.
Marco:
And I had one in the past, and it was so big and clunky, I never really used it.
Marco:
And it doesn't fit my current phone now.
Marco:
But I look to see what's out there today, and they're just so, so terrible.
Marco:
And I feel like one of the biggest arguments against the Naked Robotic Core Theory is...
Marco:
just how bad all the other cases are like if you want to give this phone 50 more battery life uh you have to add so much bulk and so much size way more than if they would have just built it in to begin with plus it's this big like you know plastic thing with some stupid logo on the back that's so ugly and tacky that no one's heard of from some case company who cares right you have to carry on the stupid logo
Marco:
And then you have this giant plug on the bottom.
Marco:
The phone has to be extended by like a half inch just to have room for this plug.
Marco:
It's the bulkiest, most terrible decision ever.
Marco:
And so this is, I think, a huge strike against the naked robotic core theory is that by doing that, by going that direction, and by, let's say, you want more battery?
Marco:
Okay, buy a battery case.
Marco:
That argument falls apart when all the battery cases are varying degrees of terrible.
Casey:
So I generally agree with you.
Casey:
I do have a Lenmar battery case, which I'll put the link in the show notes for what I have.
Casey:
And I use it only when I know that I'm going to need some extra juice, which is almost never.
Casey:
The only time I typically use it is at like WWDC.
Casey:
And when I go to football games, when...
Casey:
My phone is just desperately melting its own battery trying to search for service.
Casey:
And it is exactly as you described.
Casey:
It is enormous.
Casey:
It is bulky.
Casey:
It was not cheap.
Casey:
I don't remember how much it was.
Casey:
It was cheaper than the Mophie was at the time.
Casey:
And I chose it for more than just frugality.
Casey:
I forget why else I chose it.
Casey:
Maybe the battery was a little bit bigger.
Casey:
It adds a crap load of bulk to a phone that I still think is a little bit big for my taste.
Casey:
But that being said, just today I got an email from Mophie where they have announced a new juice pack, which is their line of batteries, called the Juice Pack Reserve.
Casey:
And we'll put that link in the show notes, and I've just put it in the chat room.
Casey:
This one is a very, very, very slim line battery that does not look to add very much bulk at all.
Casey:
In fact, in the email, which I don't have in front of me, they had, oh, here it is down on the same page.
Casey:
They show that without the juice pack, it's 6.86 millimeters.
Casey:
And with this juice pack reserve, it is 14.79 millimeters.
Casey:
Whereas with the average, as they say it, or typical, as they say, a protective case, it would be 15 millimeters.
Casey:
So in other words, it is no thicker than a normal case you would put on your phone by whatever they define normal.
John:
um this actually looks extremely appealing to me and i would absolutely buy one if it wasn't for the fact that i already have a case um so this might be the exception that proves the rule generally speaking though i think you hit the nail on the head they are all terrible and huge and bulky and annoying they're just terrible and huge to people like us though like you i mean think forget battery cases just think cases we all see people with cases on their phones that we consider hideous and huge and ridiculous i've seen people with non-battery cases that are bigger than any battery case that i've seen
John:
that are colored like the rainbow that that might as well have like fins and wedges poking out of them and people love them so there's no accounting for taste right so that set that aside the other thing i would say is that uh as every time this comes up i say it there's a place in apple's line for a phone that is thicker and has more battery life that is not the six plus
John:
They don't currently make that, but if they keep diversifying, maybe eventually they will.
John:
And that would satisfy Marco's need for a Johnny Ived designed, hopefully non-Teflon coated, nice looking phone where he doesn't have to deal with someone else's thing slapping onto it.
John:
He doesn't have to deal with it extending the ports.
John:
He doesn't have to deal with a different logo and all the things that he finds distasteful about it.
John:
But I would say that people like him and people like me
John:
are in the vast minority based on what i see out in the world of how much people love their super ugly like wallet credit card uh you know car jack combined whatever like bottle opener iphone cases that people have on there like seriously i i of all the problems that that's i i would think that people consider that a feature like that is the one thing that the naked robotic core allows is allows people to exercise their different tastes let's say
Marco:
you can exercise your taste with a sticker oh please don't encourage stickers besides they'll probably like melt to the thing because it gets so warm as you noted when you used it without a case right yes yeah i think i mean i've turned into a case person with the six simply because uh and i choose the apple leather case because it's really slim and feels very good i always like the feel of leather um oh title
Marco:
Even that, the 6 is just such a bad phone to hold.
Marco:
And I've heard rumblings that the new phone is significantly grippier, but I have my doubts that just because of the shape, it's the same shape.
Marco:
And the 6 is a problem for two main reasons.
Marco:
One is the shape, one is the slickness of the metal.
Marco:
And so even if they've made the slickness of the metal better, the shape is such that it's still probably going to be very hard to hold.
John:
You tell me you didn't get the whole one at XOXO?
John:
You don't have to say who let you hold it.
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John:
So, before we get off this topic, one thing I meant to bring up earlier was the idea of an Apple-branded battery case.
John:
Apple has been making, it seems like, more and more accessories lately.
John:
Yeah, there's third-party everything, but there's also first-party a lot of stuff.
John:
They brought the dock back recently.
John:
The new one, I think, even has a headphone port on the back of it.
John:
You can get it in pink.
John:
I mean, excuse me, rose gold.
John:
It's so pink.
John:
Just own it.
John:
Just say it.
John:
It's pink.
John:
I haven't seen them in person yet.
John:
I assume it's pink in the same way that the gold one is gold, and the answer is like barely, but anyway.
Casey:
No, no, no.
John:
No, no, it's really pink.
Casey:
Yeah, so I haven't seen the phone, but I did go to the Apple Store Sunday.
Casey:
Oh, I should do this quick.
Casey:
Well, I'll get to that in a second.
Casey:
Anyway, I went to the Apple Store Sunday, saw the watch, the rose gold watch.
Casey:
It was pink.
Casey:
It was not rose gold.
Casey:
It was pink.
Marco:
It's very much pink.
Marco:
I mean, it does look like it's roughly the same saturation as the gold, but it is unquestionably, unashamedly pink.
Marco:
And I don't know why they don't just call it pink.
Marco:
You would never look at this color and say, that's rose gold.
Marco:
No, it's pink.
Marco:
And pink is great.
Marco:
I don't know why you wouldn't just own that.
Casey:
Yeah, I think it looks good.
Casey:
I really honestly do.
Casey:
So I agree with you.
Casey:
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Casey:
We totally hijacked your thought here, John.
John:
Yeah, I remember where it was my thought.
John:
I think what I was getting at was, oh yeah, Apple making battery cases.
John:
Apple makes a bunch of stuff.
John:
They make leather cases.
John:
They don't just make even one case anymore.
John:
They make a leather case.
John:
They have the silicone case.
John:
They have those weird things with the holes in them on the back of the old iPod Touches.
John:
They have the docks.
John:
They have, you know, why wouldn't they make a battery case eventually?
John:
And if they did...
John:
like the idea would be like well if apple made one marco would like it but based on the accessories that they've made lately i don't think that's guaranteed i mean i'm maybe they would have a higher chance of making a battery case that marco would not find objectionable but i mean just look at those docks where your entire phone is sitting on the lightning port that's not great it's kind of wobbly and you know it makes me a little nervous and
John:
The leather case is good.
John:
Most of their cases are okay.
John:
I always like the bumper.
John:
Remember the bumper they made?
John:
I thought that was a really nice case because it had like the shiny edges, but then it had rubber on the parts that you gripped and it had metal buttons in them.
John:
Anyway, if that ever happens, maybe it will help Marco with his battery woes.
Casey:
Yeah, I like the bumper as well.
Casey:
But I will say that for the 5S and the 6, I have been rocking the Apple leather case.
Casey:
I have gotten it in black because that's the way it should be done.
Casey:
And beyond that, it's probably the only one that doesn't eventually turn black anyway, because it's already black.
Casey:
um i quite like this apple leather case um if if i was brave enough i would roll without a case at all but i'm not that brave and although i have yet to break an iphone it is only a matter of time and now i've probably jinxed what i've purchased which we'll talk about in a minute
Casey:
So I will hopefully stick with this Apple leather case going forward.
Casey:
Before we talk about our purchases from this past weekend, I wanted to do a very brief, very quick follow-up with regard to my Crescent Moon on my iPhone 6.
Casey:
Again, if you haven't been keeping along...
Casey:
Keeping up and following along, that is, there was a crescent moon kind of thing in the front-facing camera.
Casey:
I believe they call that the FaceTime camera on my iPhone 6.
Casey:
I realized that we were running out of warranty time for those of us who purchased on launch day like I did.
Casey:
And so I took my iPhone into the local Apple store this past Sunday.
Casey:
I mentioned the Crescent Moon.
Casey:
The genius didn't even blink twice.
Casey:
He said, okay, we will get you a new screen.
Casey:
It'll take about 45 minutes.
Casey:
He took my phone from me.
Casey:
Interestingly, he forced me to turn off, like not in a jerky way.
Casey:
I should say he asked me to turn off, find my iPhone, which...
Casey:
I guess isn't a bad thing, but it struck me as a little bit odd.
Casey:
Like, if all they're doing is replacing the screen, why does that really matter?
Casey:
Maybe in case I screw something up and then need to replace the phone?
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
We had people write in about that, too.
John:
One person was super angry about having to, you know, being told to, like, enter his passwords and unlock everything and unencrypted and turn off the, like, whatever.
John:
I, I'm always nervous about what is actually going on.
John:
It's like when the Grinch takes your Christmas tree back to repair it, right?
John:
I'm giving you my phone.
John:
And then a little while later, you're going to emerge with another thing that you say is my phone.
John:
Uh,
John:
Are any part of those ones related?
John:
Am I just getting a new refurbished phone?
John:
Did you really replace the screen?
John:
Does this thing come apart and go back together in a way that is, you know, is it meant to come apart and go back together?
John:
Is it possible to even do that?
John:
Is it a one-way assembly?
John:
I'm always nervous about things like this.
John:
That's why I always just really hope I win the lottery again.
John:
and get something that doesn't have any problems it was like my old laptop like once i i opened up my old laptop to replace the hard drive and it's never been the same again i'm not good at doing that presumably they're better at the apple store where they do it over and over and over again but i'm always nervous about that and the smaller the thing gets the more yeah i don't know they've got to be better than i am but still
Casey:
As far as I can tell, I did get the same phone back.
Casey:
I mean, I didn't need to restore from backup all the... No, no, but if they have you turn off all that stuff, that's the whole thing.
John:
You don't, you know, like what you should have done is put like a tiny microscopic, you know, etching of your initials in some part of the case that they say they're not replacing and see if it's still there when you get it back.
John:
Put a hair across the headphone port and if it's me, you'll know.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I mean, it's hard to tell because this thing has lived in a case pretty much since day one.
Casey:
But it does look good.
Casey:
I'm not going to lie.
Casey:
I mean, I didn't inspect it for scuffs, as apparently the genius had noted that it had.
Casey:
I do know that where there was a little scratch in the screen, there isn't a scratch anymore.
Casey:
But that makes sense because they replaced the screen.
Casey:
But I had a couple of beta apps on my phone, and those still worked.
Casey:
All the stuff that was once on my phone is still on my phone.
Casey:
I mean, maybe Apple can do like a bit-for-bit restore of what's on the phone.
Casey:
But everything that I can see that indicates that all I got was a screen is what happened.
Casey:
It appears to me that all I got was a screen.
Marco:
No, that's very likely because that is the way most of them are fixed.
Marco:
Most of them are not swapped out.
Marco:
And that's how mine was fixed earlier this year for the same reason before you apparently caused like this global shortage of genius time by mentioning this on our show.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, we did get some reports in that some people went to the Genius Bar and were specifically asked, oh, do you listen to the Accidental Tech Podcast?
Casey:
Because we've gotten a lot of you in here lately, which genuinely, hand on heart, made me extraordinarily proud.
Casey:
I was very happy to hear that.
Casey:
But yeah, so I did get a replaced screen.
Casey:
My understanding is some people did get replaced phones.
Casey:
In fact, one person wrote in and said, well, I went in right around closing time and they didn't want to deal with it.
Casey:
So they just gave me a new phone, which I thought was pretty awesome.
Casey:
That's a good strategy.
Casey:
Which is a pretty solid strategy.
Casey:
I wish I thought of that.
Marco:
Well, it didn't work for me.
Marco:
I went in in the evening when I went to get MindFix earlier this year, and they just told me, come back tomorrow.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
They kept it overnight, and they said, come back tomorrow.
Marco:
When I go in there, I try to avoid having service done on my current active phone.
Marco:
And if I really do have to have it done, I will just switch to an old phone and wipe it.
Marco:
Because they told me too, you take off your passcode.
Marco:
They basically tell you, disable all of your security on your device.
Marco:
and i say no that's i'm not doing that that's that is not an option um so i guess i just wipe my devices whenever i have to get them serviced and and it's inconvenient but like that's it's terrible that they make people do that and whatever the reason is uh they should find a better way to do it that doesn't require that you know they they'll say oh well a certain tools won't run well then you're apple make tools that run like that's
Marco:
You can do that.
Marco:
There's no reason to get people to disable all their security while doing a hardware repair.
Marco:
That is complete BS.
John:
Well, I think there might be some legit reasons because the whole idea is that there's no secret backdoor key to get at your data that Apple has, right?
John:
And you say, well, why don't you just make something worth it?
John:
You're essentially asking them to put a backdoor.
Marco:
So at some point there has to be some... Well, no, I'm saying for a hardware repair, like if it's a screen replacement, why do they need access to the software on the phone for a screen replacement?
John:
They probably do want to do a full backup of your thing in case the guy slips with a screwdriver or something and, you know...
Casey:
cracks a chip in the thing and they have to give you a new phone and then you say but where's all my data I don't know I don't know if that's true though because he specifically the genius that I was speaking to specifically went to went into the settings on my phone went to the iCloud backup or I believe it was iCloud backup screen said whoa you know you haven't backed this up to iCloud in a while have you backed this up to your computer and I said yes last night and at that point he was completely satisfied but
Casey:
I think there would have been a little bit of a kerfuffle if I had said, no, I haven't packed this up in ages.
Casey:
Why do you ask?
Casey:
He also didn't, if memory serves, he did not expressly ask me to remove my passcode, but he was, well, the funny thing about it was he wasn't clear about why he wanted my Apple ID password and he handed me the phone to type it in.
Casey:
It's not that he needed it himself.
Casey:
But as I was typing it in, I looked at what he was doing and he was disabling find my iPhone.
Casey:
So basically, he just wanted to make sure that I had a backup.
Casey:
He wanted to make sure find my iPhone was not on.
Casey:
And then at that point, he was satisfied.
John:
Anyway, the tipster is frustrated that we're not listening to him.
John:
That is impossible.
John:
What he says, was it impossible to...
John:
ring out he says a repair if you don't find my iphone on to do the tool to use but i think what it all comes down to is that they want to be able to use your phone even if they're not making a backup which makes sense because apple doesn't usually care about your data they want to like when they're doing this screen repair i assume that when the screen repair is over they want to make sure everything works they want to be able to tap
John:
things on the screen and if your screen is locked and is gonna like erase itself after 10 you know like they they have to be able to get at your stuff somehow otherwise like can't they just do an iphone a hardware repair blind and just repair it and give it back to me and then when i turn it on i'm sure that it will work and i'm sure that you know i like like i said i don't i don't think it's possible for them to not ask you to undo some amount of security to
John:
to do a repair, any kind of repair, even just a hardware repair, just so they can verify that the hardware repair was successful.
John:
So it makes some sense.
John:
Maybe the geniuses aren't telling people because it's very difficult to explain why they might need to do this.
John:
Whenever I've brought a Mac in for repair, I've always just wiped the entire thing.
John:
I put it on a single account, username, Apple, password, Apple, on an entirely erased hard drive.
John:
I take out all my third-party RAM.
John:
Back in the day, if I brought something to the Apple store,
John:
it's just so much easier to do that then you don't have to deal with anything like it's like sometimes i would put in a new hard drive like you know most of my mac was still at home because of the part i was repairing was not that especially in the days where they were cranky about third-party ram like here you go here's a box stock computer with no data on it and a single account called apple apple have at it
John:
And Marco's Marco's basically doing that with his phones.
John:
And it is annoying.
John:
But it makes your repair experience smoother in exchange for you spending some time at home to do stuff.
John:
Just make sure you do like a actual encrypted local backup that will save all your passwords.
John:
And you see how to wait for your apps to restore over the course of several hours from the app store.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
No, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And one other quick piece of real-time follow-up from me to me.
Casey:
It occurred to me that one of the reasons I knew that I did not get a different phone was because my Touch ID was still working exactly as it was when I got my phone back.
Casey:
And if the secure element is really secure, then that means I must have gotten the same phone back just with a new screen.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Lynda.com courses are broken into bite-sized pieces so you can learn at your own pace, you can learn from start to finish, or you can just jump in and find a quick answer.
Marco:
Now, part of the quality here is that these include very high production, including things like transcripts that are totally searchable.
Marco:
So you can jump around to find exactly the part you need within a video, right using the transcript from the side, which scrolls as you view the video.
Marco:
It is really cool.
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There's even certificates of course completion, which you can publish to a LinkedIn profile.
Marco:
You can even learn while you're on the go with the lynda.com apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Marco:
They even have a premium membership if you want that will offer downloads of offline viewing for those mobile apps, as well as sample project files.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This is great if you just want to learn a little thing here, a little thing there, or if you want to learn on multiple different topics, or you just don't want to commit to say, well, do I want to buy each video pack separately for each thing?
Marco:
No, $25 a month for flat rate unlimited access to all of their video tutorials.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So we should recap what we bought this past weekend.
Casey:
I, for one, am in for two phones.
Casey:
I bought or pre-ordered Aaron a rose gold 64 gig iPhone 6S, and I pre-ordered myself a space gray 64 gig iPhone 6S.
Casey:
I am not part of the Plus Club because I actually know what I'm talking about.
Casey:
Marco, did you eventually give in and join the Plus Club?
Marco:
You know, one of the reasons I brought the 6 Plus 2XOXO was that the pre-orders were going to open up about in the middle of my trip.
Marco:
And so I figured I'd give it because I was on the fence.
Marco:
I give it one more time to see like, you know, because I really was undecided because I really, as I said, I really have not been happy with the 6 battery life.
Marco:
And I really do appreciate the larger screen during many of the things I do of the 6 Plus.
Marco:
So I was really on the fence.
Marco:
However, you know, so I moved all my stuff over the night before I left.
Marco:
Moved all my stuff over and started using the phone.
Marco:
And literally within 20 minutes, I was like, nope, I'm not buying this one.
Casey:
Attaboy.
Casey:
So Mike was wrong?
Marco:
For me, yeah.
Marco:
As I said, there are a lot of benefits to it.
Marco:
If you can use it and hold it comfortably, then more power to you.
Marco:
It is a great device for a lot of people.
Marco:
What didn't do it for me is two things.
Marco:
number one and it's not how big it feels in the hand i got used to that last time it's fine um what it is for me is the size in the pocket which is a big deal and like if you if you i'm not a phone on the table kind of person i keep my phone in my pocket if i'm sitting down somewhere so if i need to use my phone or check my phone for something i'm taking it in and out of my pocket all
Marco:
A phone that large, it's like taking a dinner tray out of your pocket.
Marco:
It's so big.
Marco:
It's very clumsy to insert or remove.
Marco:
And secondly, another thing that's weird about the 6 Plus...
Marco:
is that a lot of apps that don't normally rotate on the 6 do rotate on the 6+.
Marco:
And when they do rotate, they go into this weird miniature iPad, not iPad mini, I guess, this nano iPad mode where they will use a split view the way iPads do.
Marco:
And this is part of the whole universal thing.
Marco:
I know how it works on the SDK side.
Marco:
It considers it like a mini iPad.
Marco:
And so you'll have this cramped, weird, tiny iPad-like split interface in a lot of apps when you rotate them.
Marco:
And I found that it rotates more easily.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe it's just happier to do it.
Marco:
Maybe I just wasn't used to it.
Marco:
But whenever I use the 6 Plus, it's constantly rotating when I didn't want it to.
Marco:
And I try rotation lock, but then you go to look at a photo or watch a video and you turn it to the side and you got to undo it.
Marco:
It's a pain.
Marco:
um and i i found that even even you know i'm used to the iphone 6 and i don't have these problems on the 6 and i haven't had these problems on any previous iphone including ones i wasn't used to like like when i first got the 6 and it was i'm going up the size so i'm not used to holding it i didn't have these problems with that so i know it isn't just i'm not used to the 6 plus it's just that the 6 plus like springboard rotates lots of things rotate and i do it in a weird way and so i i just found i found it cumbersome in those two big ways so
Marco:
And so, those are important enough, especially the pocket size.
Marco:
Those are important enough that I couldn't do it.
Marco:
Now, in the future, Apple likes to make things thinner and smaller.
Marco:
So, if they can shave off more of the margins, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, it is heavy, but it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
If they can...
Marco:
If we ever get the borderless iPhone that loses the chin on the top and bottom, somehow, God knows how, but if they somehow do that, then I would consider it again.
Marco:
But as of now, it's just too big for me.
John:
gotta wait for a uh flexible one that's the thing that annoys me most about even the six i find then you gotta unfold your phone no just so it curves like the six i find uncomfortable in my pants pockets because it is so like it stays flat it doesn't conform to the shape of my leg or anything it kind of stretches the pants out a little bit so yeah flexible ones it's probably in our lifetime
Casey:
Hopefully.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Now, John, did your family buy anything?
John:
Nope, didn't buy anything.
John:
I didn't even know what people were all talking about staying up late at night in the beginning when people first started tweeting about it.
John:
No, I'm not.
John:
And here's the reason.
John:
Not just because I'm not getting... I mean, my wife is probably going to get a 6S, but we're not in a hurry.
John:
Actually, I think she's got a couple more months before she can actually get it.
John:
I'm going to go to the Apple store and look at it.
John:
But the final reason, and the same reason I always sort of hold off on these things with a few rare exceptions...
John:
is uh you get the first one you get crescent moons like anything any weird manufacturing defect a weak tapped a taptic engine in your watch or whatever like you don't want the first cars off the assembly line right you want everyone else to find all those problems i have a six but i didn't buy it on launch day i bought it not too far after launch but after everyone had gotten the first round of phones maybe the second round of phones and so mine was manufactured on a line where hopefully they had worked out more of the kinks and lo and behold i have no crescent moon and so far no other problems with my phone so
John:
That is my strategy, but I'm not even getting a six.
John:
My wife is going to get a six plus, but not imminently.
Casey:
Oh, six S or six plus.
John:
Oh, sorry.
John:
Six S. Yeah.
Casey:
Are these stupid names?
Casey:
They're killing me.
Casey:
I just want to make sure we all agree that Mike was wrong.
Casey:
I'm not participating in this.
Marco:
That's because you're a better man than I. John, are you a secret 6 Plus user?
Marco:
Is that why you just bring your flip phone to conferences?
John:
I am not a secret 6 Plus user.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
One thing I should note is that I had been kicking around the idea of getting the new iPad Mini.
Casey:
What is that called?
Casey:
iPad Mini 4?
Casey:
Is that right?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, the weird... Oh, by the way, a quick follow-up.
Marco:
I was wrong about the CPU in that.
Marco:
I had said last episode that there is now no difference between the iPad Air 2 and the Mini 4, except for screen size.
Marco:
That is wrong.
Marco:
The Mini 4 has an up-clocked A8 processor, so it is slightly faster than an iPhone 6 in benchmarks.
Marco:
And that's a dual-core processor.
Marco:
The Air 2 has the A8X, which is a triple-core processor.
Marco:
And so at various benchmarks and stuff that we've seen so far, the iPad Mini 4 is faster than the Mini 3.
Marco:
It is a nice chip, but it is very close to the performance of an iPhone 6 and not very close to the much higher performance of the Air 2.
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
And so I thought about replacing my beloved OG RetinaPad mini with a new iPad mini 4.
Casey:
And I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Casey:
And part of that is because I just spent $1,700 or whatever it was on two completely contract-free iPhones.
Casey:
And I did that because that's the way I wanted to do it.
Casey:
I'm not saying it was the best approach.
Casey:
I'm not saying it was the most frugal.
Casey:
It's just what I wanted to do.
Casey:
Please don't email me.
Casey:
So I've dropped all this money, and I probably shouldn't be spending any more.
Casey:
But the other reason I haven't done it is...
Casey:
I'm kind of bummed, not surprised, bummed that 3D Touch hasn't made it to the iPads yet.
Casey:
And I want to wait if I can.
Casey:
Now, the last time I said this was about the watch and we saw how well that worked out.
Casey:
But I want to wait if I can and see what 3D Touch is all about and see if I really like it and see if it's...
Casey:
See if it's like earth shattering and it just completely life changing.
Casey:
And if it is, then maybe I'll just hold out for hopefully next year when iPads get 3D touch.
Casey:
Although we'll see what ends up happening.
Casey:
Knowing me, I'll probably buy it for myself as like a Christmas present or something like that.
Casey:
But for now, for the next at least few weeks, I am holding off.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Any other thoughts about Saturday morning purchases?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Oh, the other thing, actually, I wanted to ask you guys, did you hear anything about really, really bad inventory issues like there were last year with the iPhone 6?
Casey:
Because I did not.
Casey:
It seemed like the inventory was considerably better for this year than last.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's because most people are not on the S cycle.
Casey:
I don't know if it's because last year we finally got the bigger phones that so many people have been clamoring for.
Casey:
But I did not hear any big grumbling about, oh, I really wanted the blah, but it was sold out by the time I got through.
Casey:
Did you guys hear anything?
John:
Sales numbers are bigger this year than last year.
John:
So it's not like what they're saying so far, rumors or whatever, is that they're selling even more than they sold last year.
John:
I think it's just that they had more lead time to build up inventory and...
John:
Why did they have more lead time?
John:
Because this is an S year and they're not making an entirely new phone in an entirely new shape.
John:
And, you know, so that's if they're going to have a year where they have more inventory, it's going to be an S year, I would imagine, because they're they're kind of used to making phones like this and they know what they're doing.
John:
And the scheduling just worked out.
John:
Yeah, I heard the same thing, although some people were saying that.
John:
If you went to a particular carrier's website, a lot of those had really crappy dates for like when you were going to get your phone.
John:
And that's just like however Apple is distributing the inventory they do make.
John:
And, you know, presumably they're keeping most of it for themselves.
John:
So, yeah, but that was speaking of staying up late and ordering a phone.
John:
I did see tweets from a bunch of people who were like, I didn't stay up late.
John:
I just woke up at my normal time in the morning and I got online and I ordered my phone and it was still in stock and it's going to come right away.
John:
And, you know, voila.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the morning after the launch, later that morning, nine hours later or whatever, I looked at all the configurations.
Marco:
I was curious.
Marco:
And the only one that was showing any delay, and it was only a small delay, was the 6 Plus in some of the colors, including the new pink one.
Marco:
The regular 6, even the pink one, was fine.
Marco:
And actually, so I just looked right now.
Marco:
If you go to Apple's site right now and configure the common boring geek phone, which is the 64-gig black 6S,
John:
uh that is still saying deliver is 9 25 which is the first day any of them are delivering so this is still delivering on day one yeah if you go right now so i didn't have to wake up at three in the damn morning nope you didn't see all those tweets about us part of the fun part of the fun of uh you know as as the tipster is saying in the chat room don't try to do that next year i don't know you never know it all depends on how many could they make before they went on sale and that's a factor of scheduling and and uh you know the timing of the whatever event they're gonna have and everything else they have to announce and
John:
And, you know, any glitches in manufacturing and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Anyway, so this is a good year for everyone to get their phones.
John:
I just hope you don't all have whatever the new iteration, whatever the new incarnation of the crescent moon is.
John:
Broken home button, weak tap to click, whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll say the taptic engine that may or may not work, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So speaking of new purchases, Marco, did you purchase anything recently that was very, very, very cheap?
Casey:
Did I?
Casey:
For $1?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
The Apple TV?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Damn it, man.
Casey:
Pay attention.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
The developer lottery Apple TV.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I registered for that.
Marco:
I won, I guess.
Marco:
I don't think I'm allowed to say anything about it.
Marco:
I agreed to something.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I agreed to not write about and talk about the actual device and what it's like.
Marco:
but I don't remember if that agreement included that I'm allowed to mention whether I have one or not.
Marco:
But I mean, heck, as of right now, I don't have one.
Marco:
So there we go.
John:
Yeah, I'm disappointed in my Twitter timeline, which I read exhaustively, that I didn't know that this lottery was even a thing until people were finding out whether they had won or not.
John:
Not that I would have entered because I'm not developing an Apple TV app, but how did I not even know about this?
John:
Was this just not a big deal?
John:
The lottery?
John:
Yeah, I heard about it.
John:
you know i i heard about it when people were saying oh i got one i didn't get one over like what are they talking about and i went to the website and looked at it it was a reference yeah no anyway on my twitter i think on my twitter timeline people were talking about it obliquely without anyone actually ever saying it or linking to a story or writing a blog post about it or doing anything like that uh so anyway a bunch of people who is it that had the uh
John:
i saw some number thrown out there for how many they gave away anyway they gave away a bunch of apple tvs i saw some people speculating that these were originally going to be wwdc style look under your seat uh free gifts for every attendee to wwdc but then of course apple tv wasn't launched wwdc that would have been cool i would have been excited to get one i'm buying one anyway so whatever doesn't make a difference
John:
um the tipster says the wwc thing is true uh i think i saw someone posting pictures of the packaging and it was all fancy packaging with like inspirational words all of which fits with the rumor of these were meant to be gifts for developers at wwc which is kind of out of character for apple because
John:
Since the Apology Mouse, I don't think they've given away any significant hardware at any of their events.
John:
That's totally a Google thing to do and lots of other conferences.
John:
I think when you went to Build one year, they gave everyone Xbox Ones and they gave them Surfaces and Android phones and all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
Everyone loves free hardware, Apple, so get with the program.
John:
Maybe next year.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing like giving a bunch of developers... I mean, the rumor that we heard is that there were tens of thousands of these given out.
Marco:
Giving a bunch of developers early access to hardware that they're very excited to develop for that has a really... Apparently, I haven't looked at it yet, but everyone's saying it's a very easy SDK because it is really very close to iOS.
Marco:
I mean, it is iOS, basically.
Marco:
And just with certain frameworks not available and certain new frameworks, but very, very close to iOS.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Giving a whole bunch of developers who are excited about this early access and making them feel special and letting them make their apps on a real device before it's available to the public, that is really valuable to get the app story started.
Marco:
Maybe they learn from the watch.
Marco:
The app story with the watch early on, and honestly still, is pretty weak.
Marco:
And a lot of that was because of just limitations of watchOS 1 and limitations of WatchKit.
Marco:
But a lot of that was also because the developers, for the most part, didn't have early access.
Marco:
A few did, but most didn't have early access to the hardware.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This, I think, is pretty cool.
Marco:
I think it's a smart move.
Marco:
It's the kind of move that you're right.
Marco:
We wouldn't have expected this from the Apple of even two or three years ago, but now it seems like Apple is making more of these, like, Apple would never do that kind of very pragmatic moves.
Marco:
And that's a good thing.
Marco:
I think everybody wins here.
Marco:
I don't think there's any downside.
Marco:
They've already announced it.
Marco:
No one's going to blow any secrets.
Marco:
They've already shown it off like crazy, so they don't have to worry about that.
Marco:
I think this is great.
John:
It's also the cheapest platform they sell.
John:
Like, if they're going to give you a device, you know, like, if you have to pick one to give, even the watch is more expensive.
John:
Like, this is, what, $150 for the small one?
John:
And there's no watch at $150.
John:
And, like, the free phones don't count because of, you know, plans and subsidies or whatever.
John:
So, yeah, if you're going to give something away, start with this one.
John:
And, you know, people... Here's the thing about, like...
John:
I think people were excited to make watch apps, and it seemed like for the TV, people were excited for other people to make TV apps.
John:
I would like there to be apps for the TV, but there's not a straight line from people who develop either watch, Mac, or iOS apps to say...
John:
And you could do it on a TV.
John:
It's like, well, it's not a touchscreen.
John:
It's not a mouse.
John:
It's not a keyboard.
John:
If I don't have video content to show, I'm not quite sure what I'll make.
John:
But if you give them free hardware, they're like, you know what?
John:
Let me try thinking of something.
John:
Maybe I can come up with something.
John:
Maybe I have some kind of idea.
John:
So I think this is just the kind of platform where the developers might need a little boost to get moving and get motivated about if you get free hardware, you're like, maybe I do have a couple ideas.
John:
Let me try this.
John:
Let me try that.
John:
You might surprise yourself.
John:
Whereas...
John:
If you don't have the free hardware, you're probably just convinced yourself that none of your existing applications or skills or ideas for apps are applicable to a big screen that you sit far away from and can't touch.
Casey:
That's pretty wild.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Speaking of Apple TV, we should note that last episode I had said, I don't know, maybe I'll get it.
Casey:
Maybe I won't.
Casey:
And I had said that my beloved Plex, if that was available on the Apple TV, I would probably insta-buy it.
Casey:
And in the time between last episode and this episode, IT World got in contact with the Plex, I think, CEO and has stated that, yes, they are developing a Plex client for the Apple TV.
Casey:
So that means I'll probably be buying one.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about clicks versus taps, John?
John:
yeah you skipped that one you noticed that huh so yeah last last week i looked at the like apple's developer documentation that had these animations showing uh showing the new apple tv remote and showing like a dot on it showing this is a click and this is a tap and they both look the same to me and i didn't understand how you could tell a difference or what was going on there so someone asked on uh apple's apple's developers from nda i can't even say can i
John:
uh only if it's like the red section right no i i pretty sure you can because i'm pretty sure i just hit it with yeah i'm not logged in so you're good to go so i want to know what the difference between a tap and a click was in apple's developer forums an url that we'll put in the show notes someone asked the very same question and someone with a little apple logo underneath their name
John:
said that um a click is when a user physically clicks down on the trackpad causing a select event and then i guess a tap is just tapping so what it sounds to me like is that the touchpad at the end of the remote moves in some way like physically moves uh and makes a click as opposed to just tapping on the touch surface and again none of us have this device yet
John:
And when Marco gets it, he probably can't talk about it.
John:
Nope.
John:
So we'll all find out.
John:
We'll find out when mine ships because I'm ordering that day one, basically.
John:
I'm going to accept whatever the equivalent of the crescent moon is for the Apple TV hardware because it's cheap and whatever.
John:
I don't care.
John:
But it seems like it's actually a physical button.
John:
And I still don't quite understand how that will work based on the pictures of the remote.
John:
What part of it moves?
John:
How does it move down?
John:
How far does it move?
John:
Is there a hinge?
John:
Does it just bend?
John:
I don't know.
John:
All these questions will be answered when we get it into our little hands.
John:
But it was interesting to see an actual response from an Apple person about this.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
What else do we have to talk about?
Casey:
We already talked about...
Casey:
Plex, do you want to tell us about 24p on the Apple TV?
John:
This is, I think, from the exact same Apple person in the Apple forum.
John:
Someone asked a question, said, will the new Apple TV actually output 24p video?
John:
And so 24p is a lot of movies, old movies and new movies are shot at 24 frames per second.
John:
24p is a video mode where it sends...
John:
24 piece for progressively scanned frames of video, just one frame, another frame, another frame, another frame, 24 of those every second.
John:
That's how the movie was shot.
John:
What you want to happen is if you are viewing a movie at home, you want 24 frames of video every second to be displayed on your television, one frame, then the next frame, then the next frame at exactly 24.
John:
If you don't do that, it's not going to look quite right.
John:
The most common situation is where your television or the device that's outputting something, for example, your computer, is going at 60 hertz.
John:
So it's got 60 frames per second.
John:
The computer you're looking at right now, and I think all iOS devices, except for maybe the new iPad Pro, which has the variable refresh rate.
John:
But anyway, 60 hertz is common for computers.
John:
unfortunately 24 does not go into 60 evenly so if you're going to display video content that originally has 24 different frames every second but you have to show 60 frames every second you have to divide them up unevenly and when the camera pans quickly it can kind of look weird they call it judder where you it can kind of look kind of herky-jerky because you have to figure out how to
John:
you know you're going to show the first frame how many times are you going to show the first frame and how many times you can show the second from you're going to end up showing some frames longer than other frames and when you have a smooth camera move you can kind of see it as a jerkiness in the motion so what you want is 24 frames all the way through this is the whole this video files are asking this so in practice in my setup anyway the only way i can see video like that is if i buy a blu-ray my blu-ray player and my television all do 24 frames
John:
So the Blu-ray puts out 24 frames.
John:
The television shows 24 frames.
John:
Again, I don't have an LCD.
John:
I have a plasma.
John:
It's all straight through, no image processing.
John:
It looks correct.
John:
It looks right.
John:
I don't have to worry about anything.
John:
Apple TV, according to this answer from this Apple person, does not do that.
John:
It says, no, the device output frame rate is fixed, and content is automatically converted during playback to match the selected device output frame rate.
John:
Apps do not have the ability to affect the device output frame rate.
John:
He says, if you have a scenario where you believe this would be required, please file a bug, blah, blah, blah.
John:
This is focused on application development saying, oh, I'm making a video app and I want to show video.
John:
Can I control the frame or whatever?
John:
The answer is no.
John:
Still unclear to me whether if you buy a movie on iTunes and the movie is 24 frames a second, does the Apple TV, is it also unable to send that natively over HDMI to a device that is able to display 24p?
John:
uh some theories i've seen thrown around amongst people who are disappointed in this decision is that apple doesn't want to incur the switching overhead of like switching modes and hdmi apparently can be wonky and take some time and blank your screen and stuff and you don't want to do that it's like a bad user experience like everything else involving hdmi uh so they're just gonna lock it at like a computer like a tiny little computer like a tiny little mac mini lock it at 60 frames and just up convert all video uh
John:
on the device presumably with nice scaling and trying to to deal with all these different problems to hide judder and image processing anyway video files hate all that so if you are a video file uh like me i guess you will probably want to continue buying the movies that you really care about in a format other than videos that appear on apple tv
Casey:
But if you are a videophile, there's hope for you because there's a good chance that something will come to the Apple TV.
Casey:
What would that be, John?
John:
Did we talk about on this show a long time ago about calibrating your television?
Casey:
A long time ago.
John:
Yeah, I'm heavily in favor of calibrating your television.
John:
It's not as super complicated.
John:
It can be super complicated, but even just very basic calibration...
John:
It can be done pretty easily, but the question is, how?
John:
How do I calibrate?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I just look at my television.
John:
I can't tell what looks right.
John:
Well, they sell iOS applications that can help you calibrate your television.
John:
There's also Blu-ray discs that help you calibrate them.
John:
It used to be that every THX DVD came with the calibration thing.
John:
Maybe a TiVo comes with the calibration thing built into the thing.
John:
Lots of different ways to do this, but iOS apps are ideal because, hey, it's an app and you can write a fancy app and whoever owns, I guess it's Disney now, whoever owns THX can make an app for it and stuff.
John:
And lo and behold, there is a THX app for iOS and you can use it, but you had to AirPlay to do it.
John:
And I'm always worried about that because what you're really calibrating is how AirPlay video looks.
John:
Like, well, maybe I calibrate my TV, but then when I play things off my Blu-ray player through a different input, is that calibration still valid?
John:
But with Apple TV, the Apple TV, if that's where you're watching your video, the apps can be right on the Apple TV.
John:
You're not AirPlaying this weird MPEG-4 compressed stream or whatever.
John:
It can be right on the Apple TV, so I'm excited about the prospect of native Apple TV.
John:
I'm the only person who's excited about calibration apps for the Apple TV, but it's perfect.
John:
It is perfect for the Apple TV because it doesn't help you with your Blu-ray player, but it does make you sure that what you're calibrating is the exact thing that you're going to watch movies on, which is if you have a bunch of iTunes movies on your Apple TV.
John:
But of course, the people who would be most into calibration are also now crushed that it doesn't do 24p.
John:
So I'm not sure if it's really the HDMI switching issue.
John:
I'm not sure Apple will ever fix that because I've seen that, you know, when your TV screen goes blank or goes gray or does this little glitchy fuzz, it's terrible.
John:
I would never want the Apple TV to do that.
John:
So I'm actually kind of in favor of this cheap little $150 box, never doing that and just, you know, putting out everything at 60 frames per second and let the audiophiles buy their Blu-ray players and we'll get along fine.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
What iOS games support MFI controllers, John?
John:
I don't know, but we got a list and we'll put it in the show notes.
John:
I think someone was saying that the list was only like 16 games.
John:
That seems way small to me.
John:
But I'm sure there's a huge number of games that support it because it's been around since iOS 7.
John:
uh this was uh offered up as uh the the potential base for games that could go to the apple tv but that's not really true because these games probably also have like a touch control and you know they're not going to have a touch equivalent let's get to our next follow-up item which is
John:
If you have a game that works with a controller and also works with touch controls, can you just bring that right over to Apple TV?
John:
Well, the controller port you can bring right over because I don't think they've changed anything involving the controllers there.
John:
But the touch part, obviously, you can't bring over.
John:
And you say, well, that's fine.
John:
I will just bring over the game and say it requires a controller to play.
John:
And last week, I think I went to their website and looked this up.
John:
And I think in the show, it was like, oh, you know, Apple says that you can have games that require controllers.
John:
So a bunch of people sent us links.
John:
And the great thing is a bunch of people tweeted to us and sent us email.
John:
with exactly the same url some people saying apple says that you can make apple tv apps that require a controller and other people saying apple says that you cannot make it and both point to the same exact url luckily someone on twitter actually screenshotted it right here's here's the screenshot and again you can fake screenshots but i'm pretty sure i read this on apple's site at one point this url that we will put in the show notes
John:
said pointed to a document that said had a heading that said you can require an extended game controller unlike ios apps apple tv apps can require the user to own a full game controller that supports the extended gamepad profile right but requiring a full game control is highly discouraged when you restrict blah blah blah right but bottom line is you can require an extended controller but the current version of that page says exactly the opposite your game must support the apple tv remote your game may not require the use of a controller
John:
So going by like the, you know, last one wins rule, although I should probably click on this link now to see what it actually says.
John:
I'm pretty sure that despite the waffling in the first day or two after the Apple TV was announced, right now it says your game may not require the use of a controller.
John:
And that spawned a whole bunch of stories on tech websites about everyone going crazy about how.
John:
Apple doesn't understand gaming.
John:
And if you can't require a controller, you're not going to be able to play insert my favorite genre of game here.
John:
And all of that is true.
John:
I think this rule is in keeping with how Apple has positioned all of its devices with respect to gaming.
John:
It seems kind of dumb to me, but on the other hand, was it the case that the next Call of Duty was going to come for Apple TV?
John:
If only Apple changes one rule.
John:
Nope.
John:
It was never coming.
John:
This is not the thing that's keeping it.
John:
It's kind of silly if Apple...
John:
What it does, people say this shows Apple doesn't understand games or isn't serious about games.
John:
What it shows is how Apple views games for its platforms.
John:
It wants games to be on its platforms.
John:
It wants a certain kind of games, the kind of game it wants.
John:
It wants you to be able to play without having to buy a controller.
John:
That's the product Apple is making.
John:
I don't think it shows...
John:
a lack of understanding because i don't think anyone in apple is under any illusions that they are going to you know have the same type of games that consoles have and appeal to the same people who buy console games and love them i think they're making a decision not to do that and so this is in keeping with that but it drives people who love console games crazy because they feel like oh you're so close if only you got serious about games and get serious by get serious they mean made games that appeal to the millions of people who buy the playstation 4 and the xbox one and even the wii u to some extent
John:
That's not what Apple's doing.
John:
Apple is not serious about game.
John:
But one of one of the ideas I have in my ideas file for hypercritical that code that I never update, I think it's one of the first ideas I put in there.
John:
I think I mentioned it before.
John:
It's like Apple in games.
John:
He's just not that into you.
John:
like apple apple doesn't feel the same way about games that those of us who have game consoles and have played mac and pc games feel about games like they're they have a different attitude towards games and their attitude is more common in the world of people who are going to buy their products than our attitude is and that is disappointing to a lot of people but that is just the case so this rule assuming it hasn't swapped back by now is in keeping with that uh
John:
I think it will cut down on the sophistication and interest of the type of games they're going to get.
John:
It might also cut down on shovelware, and maybe that's why they're doing it.
John:
It's really interesting to see this phenomenon of Apple having public documents that are not even behind a developer account password that one day say one thing and the next day say the entire opposite about a fairly significant feature having to do with gaming on their newly launched product.
John:
It's a little out of character for them to...
John:
go back and forth like that.
John:
Is it?
John:
Well, publicly, like, I mean, what can you think of?
John:
Carbon 64, resolution independence.
Marco:
I'm thinking more like the various app review controversies that usually crop up after a new ability is added to the SDK.
Marco:
So, you know, they might decide, you know, like similar to how with iOS 8, there was this big
John:
about what notification center widgets could and couldn't do or include and then what keyboards could and couldn't include and could you include a button in the notification center and all this crazy stuff well that's like rules lawyering though because someone will get rejected and they'll say well according to the rules it doesn't seem like it should have been rejected then they amend the rules to make their decision right but then people complain and they reverse it or like launch center pro where like you couldn't launch an app from notification screen they changed that but like two years later this was just like a black and white before anyone even started development
John:
Day one, one thing.
John:
And it wasn't even like it was in response to outcry.
John:
It's almost like they just forgot to update the public-facing docs, you know?
John:
Because no one even had probably... It was literally day one and day two.
John:
So that seems strange to me, that they just not have their acts together.
John:
Because I don't think anything happened between day one and day two that made them reverse this policy.
John:
There was no...
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, John, tell me about the Apple TV and WebKit.
John:
Before I get to that, I just want to point out that Neil Cronin in the chat room reminds me that the PS3 does actual 24p output.
John:
By the way, the PS3 is my Blu-ray player when I was saying that's where I watch movies.
John:
It's on the PS3.
John:
It's a pretty good Blu-ray player, albeit kind of noisy.
John:
But anyway, it is possible.
John:
It's not like it's impossible for a computer-like device to do this, but I'm pretty sure the PS3, when you launch Blu-ray, blanks the screen and switches HDMI modes and does all that stuff that I said the Apple TV probably shouldn't.
John:
So...
John:
What may be appropriate for a Blu-ray player, even if that Blu-ray player is essentially a mini computer like the PS3, is maybe not appropriate for a $150 fanless black puck.
John:
I know that I'm saying Apple shouldn't support it.
John:
If they can figure out a way to do it, that's fine.
John:
I'm just saying I kind of understand why it might not support it.
John:
Same thing with 4K, by the way.
John:
We didn't discuss this, but maybe briefly mentioned it last time.
John:
The new Apple TV is not 4K.
John:
um everyone who asks me you know they keep asking me if they should get a television or what they want to know what television to get and i tell them get no television because now is not a good time to buy tv because we're after the plasma times where four oleds have come uh into their own most of the oleds i keep seeing are curved too i really hope that goes away i really hope that goes away like 3d kind of went away because i do not want to curve tv anyway um
John:
it's a bad time to buy because 4k is on the horizon you can buy a 4k tv now but it would be kind of like buying uh one of the very early plasmas unless you get really lucky and got one of the the top end kuro elites things uh probably not the best time to buy a 4k television apple doesn't support it but a lot of people are saying why doesn't the new apple tv support 4k it's got enough grunt to support it in theory uh
John:
I don't know if the HDMI spec that it conforms to supports 4K to the degree that's needed, but I kind of agree that it seems like, well, it's an A8 in there, right?
John:
Maybe handle 4K, maybe, I don't know.
John:
Anyway, bottom line, it doesn't.
John:
That's not how this product is defined.
John:
I wouldn't count on this product being updated in any way to support 4K in the future, even if the hardware is technically capable of it, because that's just not kind of the thing that Apple does.
John:
I mean, they made you buy a whole new product when they went from 720p to 1080p, if that tells you anything.
John:
don't buy an apple tv if you're expecting it to magically have 4k support just resign yourself to spending under 150 bucks in a couple years when 4k finally matures
Casey:
All right, so tell us about WebKit.
John:
This is a big kerfuffle started, I think it was started by Daniel Pascoe.
John:
He's from Black Pixel, right?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Yeah.
John:
He wrote a thing called Apple TV, a world without web views, limiting or maybe just reporting the fact that you are not allowed to bring up a web view in your Apple TV application.
John:
And everyone is upset about that.
Marco:
So it's I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal.
Marco:
I mean one question is like which I think we don't really know the answer yet is how many of the apps that we have on our phone are going to be necessary to have on our TVs.
Marco:
How many are we actually going to want to have on our TVs.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a smaller and slightly different group.
Marco:
So a lot of the apps on your phone are just like for things that could have been websites, you know, like your bank app and like some of the stuff like it just could have been a website.
Marco:
And so they obviously web views are used very heavily in a lot of those things.
Marco:
And so, you know, it's, it's fine if a lot of those can't work.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
That being said, there are a lot of apps that use WebViews in smaller ways.
Marco:
Like I use WebViews in Overcast for the rendering of the show notes.
Marco:
On the playback screen, the scroll view on the playback screen that includes the artwork and the show notes below it, that is a WebView.
Marco:
It is a giant WebView because that way I can render HTML in the notes and it works just fine and it's great.
Marco:
So, stuff like that, that makes sense.
Marco:
Things like reading apps, Instapaper.
Marco:
Instapaper is a big web view as well.
Marco:
I don't think people are going to be reading on their TVs very often.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I mean, sure, somebody might want to try, but that's not going to be a very common request, I don't think.
Marco:
So, again, that's fine, too.
Marco:
I think it's going to be annoying for some people, but not nearly as big of a problem as what most people expect.
Marco:
Now, the other thing is, what about just web browsing on the TV?
Marco:
Obviously, not just using a web view in an app, but actually just browsing to arbitrary pages.
Marco:
Obviously, if you think about something like a Twitter client on the Apple TV or a newsreader, then those are going to be challenging to make compelling because
Marco:
Again, what are they going to do?
Marco:
Twitter is full of links.
Marco:
So if you are browsing a Twitter client on the TV and you can't tap any links, it's going to be kind of annoying.
Marco:
But again, it's like, are people really going to be browsing arbitrary web pages on TVs?
Marco:
Because one thing that people don't often talk about, but becomes obvious if you've ever tried to do this, like plugging a computer into your TV or anything...
Marco:
that tvs actually look terrible when you try to view like text and web pages and stuff like tvs are much lower resolution than you think uh weird contrast and color issues and limitations they really are not good screens to be reading text on so i don't think this is that big of a problem really
John:
Well, the screen quality, if you have a good TV and you're the right distance from it, it's not that bad.
John:
It's not as bad as it used to be in the old CRT standard deaf days.
John:
And if you have a 4K TV, even though Apple TV doesn't support it, you know, then I think those problems would be gone.
John:
It's kind of disappointing to me that they don't support it, mostly because every smart-ish thing that is not a computer that is connected to a television in the past, you
John:
has a web browser built in.
John:
I think my PlayStation 4 does, my Wii U does, I think my Wii does.
John:
Everything... I don't know if my TiVo does, but everything feels compelled to have a browser if it hooks up to a TV and has an internet connection.
John:
Because, hey, why not?
John:
The 3DS has a web browser, we're crying out loud.
John:
And...
John:
Every single one of those browsers is the worst browser ever.
John:
Like, they are terrible to use.
John:
You launch it once and you realize, like, maybe it uses, like, an old version of the Opera engine and can't render anything.
John:
It's really slow and they have these weird controls about scrolling the page and moving the cursor.
John:
And, oh, it's just terrible.
John:
And so you just never launch it again, you know.
John:
And the only reason I'm disappointed, the main reason I'm disappointed is that...
John:
If an iOS-powered device with an A8 in it, powered by WebKit, was hooked up to my television, and they put a web view on it, and I had a touch control in the remote to scroll around, it would actually be nice and responsive and fast and look good and render correctly.
John:
And that would be a miracle, because I've never seen that on my television.
John:
That said, I really have no urge to browse web pages on my television, and I think that's kind of...
John:
I'm not going to say it's a red herring because we'll get to like what the motivation to this might be.
John:
But Marco, when you're talking about like the show notes, that's coming from the web.
John:
And of course, Instapaper content is coming from the web.
John:
But I think there are a lot of perhaps a surprising number of iOS applications that use a web view to render content that does not come from the web.
John:
maybe it's just in the application bundle maybe it's like they want to just build a string on the fly maybe someone who is like a web developer and is more accustomed to doing that maybe it is served from their own private web server and parts of the ui or web views like you're not giving them arbitrary web browsing you're not even perhaps giving them links you're just using it as a more flexible or maybe just the way that people are more comfortable with way to lay out text and images in your ui which is
John:
probably not the appropriate thing to do but because web kit is so fast and because it's fairly efficient and if you have simple needs it is a pretty easy way to do you know to sneak a little bit of web development into your ios app and the fact that that's not possible uh i think is something that apple may have to end up backsliding on because
John:
Why is this happening?
John:
Is it happening because they couldn't get WebKit ready in time for Apple TV?
John:
That seems unlikely because all the TVML stuff surely uses WebKit or at least JavaScript core or something like that in there.
John:
And it's just an A8 and it's just an iOS variant.
John:
Getting WebKit to work is not rocket science.
John:
It could work.
John:
Is it because they don't want anyone to ever make a web browser app for the Apple TV?
John:
Couldn't they do that with app review?
John:
Like slap you down if you try to make something like a web browser or the final reason, the most popular one seems to be, they don't want you using web technologies to make a UI.
John:
They want you to make a native application.
John:
Um,
John:
that may be the case maybe that's getting back to what i talked about in the last show about the amc and the usa apps one of which was terrible and one of which was only merely so-so and i can't remember which was which uh but a lot of those seem like big giant web views with html5 video players is that why they're cruddy or is it cruddy because the servers wouldn't respond or is it cruddy because they have buggy javascript detecting whether i've seen a commercial or not i don't know where the blame lies but it's conceivable that that app was cruddy because it was done with web ui
John:
It was like a repackaging of their website inside an iOS container, and their website was crappy, and so was their iOS app.
John:
As usual, Apple is silent in this area.
John:
I haven't heard anything whispers from anybody about, is this something they're going to amend?
John:
Is it just we weren't quite ready in time, or is it an intentional thing where they're trying to send a message with a lack of WebKit support to tell you you're not allowed to use web technologies anywhere on Apple TV?
John:
I would love to know what the answer is, but right now I don't.
Casey:
Tell us about your early musings on the iPad Pro.
Casey:
Well, actually, before we do that, any other thoughts on the Apple TV?
Marco:
Honestly, I'm kind of looking forward to it.
Marco:
I mean, so one of the topics, I don't know how much I want to get into this now because I haven't really thought too much about it yet, but one of the topics that we kept hearing about, that I kept hearing about, is how could we in general, and usually me specifically, how can I be so pessimistic about all the stuff Apple announced?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And first of all, I don't think I was.
Marco:
I don't think I was unreasonably pessimistic.
Marco:
And I do think there's a lot of warranted pessimism or skepticism that I expressed about the various stuff.
Marco:
However, there are two things that I am more excited about this week than I was last week.
Marco:
Number one is 3D Touch, because after watching more of the videos and after maybe seeing some people using it,
Marco:
uh i it does look i i have not used it i have not felt it or touched it myself however um it does look like it's going to be really really nice as a shortcut mechanism to do a lot of quick things um i don't you know my concerns about its discoverability and everything remain however i do think for power users like us uh i i think it'll be really nice to have
Marco:
So we'll see how much it matters for regular people.
Marco:
I think it's going to matter about as much as things like multitasking gestures for regular people.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
And the other thing I am more excited about than last week is the Apple TV.
Marco:
I do, however... I said last week, my main concern with the Apple TV is not whether I would like it.
Marco:
It's whether people will buy it.
Marco:
Because it's a $150 box entering a market of very, very cheap things that people think are good enough...
Marco:
and they're still going to keep selling the old Apple TV, so it's going to have to compete with that, which is half the price.
Marco:
And I think it's going to be a tough sell for a while until the app store develops, if it does.
Marco:
That being said, I'm looking forward to it because, first of all, it'll allow me to consolidate our universal remote situation here, which will be nice.
Marco:
But also, I'm looking forward to it because...
Marco:
I like apps, and I think it'll be kind of interesting and kind of fun to play around with.
Marco:
So I am looking forward to both of those things.
Marco:
Whether the whole rest of the world is, we'll see what happens there.
Marco:
But I'm looking forward to them.
John:
Yeah, I didn't think, like, Apple TV was the one thing I said I'm definitely buying, and I was enthusiastic about it as well.
John:
Of course, I'm also enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, so I don't think, you know, maybe it's the hypercritical influence, but...
John:
Thus far, most of us, mostly on the show, we've found it more interesting to talk about the potential problems of products and think about what could go wrong than to just spend the entire time gushing about the things that we like.
John:
But there were things that we like.
John:
And if we end the show and a bunch of us say that we're definitely getting an Apple TV, that's probably... But anyway, who cares if we're getting one?
John:
We talked about the products, the good, the bad, and the ugly products.
John:
um i do agree that marco lately has been in a downswing in terms of being uh cranky about things that apple has is uh falling down about but it's not like he's just inarticulately he's written thousands of words about it like it's not it's not a vague notion that he just kind of has and just you know has got an axe to grind he's got specific concerns that he's expressed in various ways and so i think it's you know
John:
That's just his opinion, man.
Marco:
Well, and I think also there's a lot that I've been positive about.
Marco:
Now, the idea that I have to be equally positive and negative is, of course, totally wrong and BS.
John:
It's fair and balanced, Margo.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Let's get that out of the way.
Marco:
That is total BS.
Marco:
However, there's a lot of Apple stuff and Apple products that
Marco:
that have launched in the last couple of years that I really enjoy, that I use constantly.
Marco:
I've been very vocal about how much I really enjoy the Apple Watch.
Marco:
Even though I think the app situation is terrible, which it is, I think the rest of the product is great.
Marco:
And I keep saying that.
Marco:
Nobody hears it, but I keep saying it.
Marco:
I also really enjoy the rediscovery of MDNS Responder and the eviction of Discovery D from our operating system because...
Marco:
As I've written about and said on this podcast, the reliability of the things I do with my home network on OS X has skyrocketed.
Marco:
The reliability of my Apple TV and the things I do on there and AirPlay and things like that, those have all skyrocketed after MGNS Responder came back.
John:
discovery d is the new coke because like no but there was maybe you came into the mac too late but there was no love for mdns responder in the many years when it was introduced it was always a source of problems you always had to kill it people had problems with it whatever the only reason it gets any love is because they brought out new coke and nobody liked new coke and they brought back mdns oh it's mdns responder classic everybody loves it
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Anyway, so yeah, my world has been changed at home.
Marco:
The last year with Yosemite was really rough until that change was made a few months ago.
Marco:
And as I wrote about on my site when it happened, that has made a massive difference for me in the reliability of this stuff.
Marco:
However, there's still tons of things that need work.
Marco:
For instance...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There are still issues with the services.
Marco:
There are still issues with some of the applications.
Marco:
There are still issues with some of the hardware.
Marco:
There are still delays of things like Skylake, which granted is not Apple's fault, but it still affects Apple's products.
Marco:
There's been significant stagnation.
Marco:
in the laptop lineup recently because we're so late with these CPUs.
Marco:
So, you know, like there's stuff that is not perfect.
Marco:
And there is stuff like the iPhone 6 battery that I think is, you know, not the decision I would have made and not the decision that fits me.
Marco:
When I say things like that the product line is gaining more narrowly focused products and that the question of who is this for, the answer to that keeps getting narrower for a lot of these newer products...
Marco:
I don't think that's unfair or necessarily negative.
Marco:
But that is certainly an observation of the product line.
Marco:
But again, it's like I still use the iMac, which is this general purpose large desktop, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is the most general purpose laptop I think they have.
Marco:
Get a laptop that will serve anything you need to serve.
Marco:
That's the one.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I'm talking to you on this through a Mac, live streaming through another Mac with a room full of Apple gear.
Marco:
I still like a lot of Apple stuff.
Marco:
However, I don't think it's unfair or unwarranted to point out the areas in which they're kind of missing the mark for me or for everybody.
Marco:
And as they keep serving more and more and more areas, because what they have today with the product line is way more broad in just sheer number of products and services and apps that they have right now.
Marco:
It's so much more broad than it used to be.
Marco:
And the fact is, they're not doing all of them well.
Marco:
Apple has never been able to juggle too many things at once particularly well.
Marco:
And the number of things they can juggle at once well over time has gone up.
Marco:
But so has the number of things they try to juggle all at once.
Marco:
And so they really, you know, there's still always areas that can use improvement.
Marco:
And we on the outside, people like us who don't work for them, because people who work for them can't really say anything because they can get in trouble.
Marco:
But people like us on the outside who don't work for them and can say whatever we want can affect positive change within Apple and within its products by ranting about them when it's warranted, by giving them real, constructive, valid criticism when it's warranted.
Marco:
that actually affects positive change.
Marco:
Every time I complain about something about Apple that is a fair complaint, I hear from people on the inside of the company, either right then or soon after, I hear from people that whatever I said or wrote was circulated in some group and that helped that team argue for their point or make a change or whatever.
Marco:
And I hear this from everyone I know who writes about Apple or who talks about Apple.
Marco:
The people inside listen.
Marco:
Our complaints are ammunition for internal fights.
Marco:
And that complaining works in a way that filing bug after bug might not for me.
Marco:
Complaining works.
Marco:
And again, there's no reason to stop complaining just out of trying to be nice if things really are broken or could use improvement.
Casey:
Yeah, the thing that struck me about the feedback we got, and we did get several people writing in saying, oh my God, you're a bunch of curmudgeons.
Casey:
You know, maybe there's some truth to that, but I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think it does anyone any good for us to just be parrots that are saying, oh, this is the best.
Casey:
Apple's the best.
Casey:
Apple is flawless.
Casey:
Nothing Apple does is wrong.
Casey:
That would not be a particularly enjoyable show for us to make or for most people to listen to.
Casey:
So I feel like I speak for all of us in saying genuinely, I mean, if we came across Grumpy last episode, that wasn't our intention, but...
Casey:
You know, we're going to call it like we see it.
Casey:
And if we see things as being broken, then damn it, we're going to say that it's broken.
Casey:
And that's just how we feel.
Casey:
And, you know, if it doesn't work for you, then I'm sorry.
Casey:
But, you know, TJ Loma is saying in the chat, it was a three-hour negative-a-thon.
Casey:
Maybe we listened, maybe...
Casey:
What I said did not feel it was like a three-hour complaining festival.
Casey:
I didn't get a chance to listen back to the episode, but man, it certainly didn't feel that way when I was recording it.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure that you guys didn't think it went that way either.
Casey:
And if it came across that way, then we're sorry, but this is how we feel.
Casey:
And if you're looking for someone to just parrot about how amazing Apple is, you're going to have to look elsewhere.
Yeah.
John:
Point is, ladies and gentlemen, the criticism, for lack of a better word, is good.
John:
Criticism is right.
John:
Criticism works.
John:
Criticism clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
John:
Is this a reference?
John:
Yes, it is.
Marco:
I can tell that was your quote voice, but I couldn't figure out where it was from.
John:
That was my quote voice.
John:
And I was I was there's a double quote voice because I was quoting a thing in which I was quoting a thing.
Casey:
oh god we'll put it in the show notes speaking of quoting yourself why don't you tell us about what you said about the iPad Pro
John:
Yeah, speaking of quoting myself, I was just curious about this because we talked about the iPad Pro last week.
John:
I've wanted an iPad Pro for a long time, and I was like, how long?
John:
When did I first start talking about the iPad Pro?
John:
I thought it was on a podcast, and so I deployed the underscore David Smith, who has magical abilities to find out when people said things in the past, which we should all be frightened of because I don't understand it.
John:
where he gets these powers uh but if you've lost your car keys contact underscore david smith he will tell you where they are it's very convenient service as long as you've spoken about it on a podcast right uh well we don't know we don't know let's not just you know you're speculating by the limits of his power
John:
Anyway, I searched my own podcast for like a good 90 seconds before I went to the Slack channel and asked Dave to look it up for me.
John:
I feel kind of bad.
John:
Anyway, but I did search for it and I couldn't find it.
John:
He found it immediately.
John:
It was Hypercritical episode 58 in March of 2012, 31 minutes in.
John:
you'll hear my first musings about, my first public musings about, you know what Apple should do?
John:
They should make a bigger iPad and call it the iPad Pro and blah, blah, blah.
John:
So if you're interested in that or just want to hear a really old hypercritical where I sound really weird and talk about things in the past, we'll put that link in the show notes too.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Speaking of the iPad Pro, Dr. Wave, Michael B. Johnson from Pixar, tweeted at some point or another, or I believe it was a tweet.
Casey:
He said, my understanding is that the iPad Pro recognizes the stylus data from the Apple Pencil flowing in at 240 hertz, fingers at 120 hertz.
Casey:
And the Air 2 in general will do 120 hertz and all other iPads and iOS devices do 60 hertz.
John:
um my understanding is that his understanding is accurate that the ipad pro is 240 uh for the apple pencil 120 for everything else and all and the air 2 is 120 everything else is 60. yeah and that combined with the variable refresh rate is really interesting you know the technical lengths that apple either has to go or is willing to go or both to do a good job with like you know why don't you just add a stylus to the ipad well it's not that simple you you know you have to do like figure out how you can do pressure sensitivity and
John:
And also, you know, 60 hertz, again, very common for computery things, any kind of computery thing, whether it's hooked up to a TV or hooked up to a monitor.
John:
It's been a standard for many years and ever since CRTs went away.
John:
It's just 60 hertz.
John:
But that's not good enough for it to feel nice when you're drawing on it.
John:
I'm not sure why the Air 2 is 120.
John:
Maybe they just cranked it up because they could or I don't know what the technical reason behind that is.
John:
But 240 for the thing that supports the pencil makes perfect sense.
John:
And again, during the videos that they showed people drawing on the thing, I could see the lag.
John:
Like the lag, once you know what to look for.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i could do you know the lag is there but if you've ever you know used a wacom or wacom tablet depending on how you pronounce it or you know cintiq which is their thing where they where you draw on a screen that they provide to you there's plenty of lag there too we'll link for the umpteenth time that that uh video from the microsoft research thing that shows they have like an experimental display that shows different amounts of lag where they can just turn the dial and crank it up and down
John:
And boy, the difference between current technology and the best thing that we can do right now with unlimited money is dramatic.
John:
And as soon as you see the good one, you're like, oh, well, I want that.
John:
It's like, well, tough luck.
John:
You can't have that.
John:
But we'll get there eventually.
John:
And the only way we'll get there is by every new iteration of these type of things that you can scroll on with a pen, make it better, make it faster.
John:
So what I'm interested in, and I haven't seen, I think I have a link that we can put in the show notes from...
John:
somebody who wrote a blog post comparing the apple pencil to the top of the line uh tablet that artists use now and had nice things to say about the apple tablet but i guess we have to wait until these things are in people's hands and see like hands-on tests or whatever but i do know that every every tablet that i've ever seen anyone use to draw with
John:
or have drawn with myself, has had lag that I can see.
John:
Apple's thing also has lag that I can see.
John:
I can't eyeball it.
John:
I can't say which is worse or which is better.
John:
One point that was made... Is this in the show notes somewhere?
John:
I thought we had a link to it.
John:
Anyway, one point that was made in this article about comparing the Cintiq to the iPad Pro was that...
John:
uh the Cintiq makes it seem like where the images and where your stylus touches the screen are distant from each other like there's an air gap or like a you know sort of like a large gap so that depending on what angle you're holding at the parallax makes it seem like the ink or whatever is not coming out of the tip of your pen it's coming out of some point removed from the tip of your pen um and in the iPad that seems less because the whole thing is thinner and the glass is thinner and is laminated to the glass and all the other stuff
John:
And that makes sense to me tech wise, because Apple is surely better able to manufacture the fanciest sort of screen with the smallest gap and no air gap and great lamination and everything.
John:
Whereas a company that makes tablets for artists necessarily has much smaller volumes and not as not doesn't have billions of dollars in the bank and all the other stuff.
John:
So.
John:
There is the potential for the iPad Pro to be a really good tool for artists that is potentially as good as or better than all existing dedicated tools.
John:
But I think we just have to wait and see for the people to actually buy this and use it to do real work and they'll report back.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is another, by the way, another one of those things I was very positive about was the iPad Pro 4 pen input, the pencil itself, and the general notion of writing things on a screen with a pen.
Marco:
I like all those things.
Marco:
They just aren't things that I need to do.
Marco:
But I'm very positive on all of those things for people who use pens or who like to write or who like to take notes or who like to draw.
Marco:
That all sounds awesome for those people.
Marco:
However, I'm a computer geek in the old school sense of computer geekdom where I mostly just need a keyboard and a mouse and a big screen and a big powerful computer.
Marco:
So it's not really for me.
Marco:
However, good on them for the people who actually want to use it.
John:
you know if they if this ever does it'll go all the way down to an iphone 6 size device you would get a little stylus and scratch things out on it if only because someone would make like someone would bring out draw something again and people would forget that it previously existed and be like wow i'll try this great new game you draw pictures to each other it's really fun
Marco:
sure yeah i mean look if this was available even for you know even when as soon as it comes to an ipad size that i want to own i'll probably buy one i'll probably buy whatever you know if like if next year's ipad air supports the pencil uh then i'll probably get one of those i just or you know if there's some really compelling reason for me to get the ipad pro i will get it like i talked before like i'd love to make a podcast editor uh and you know
Marco:
If I'm going to do that, making it on the iPad Pro is certainly worth investigating.
Marco:
However, I'm not doing that right now.
Marco:
I'm doing other things, and I don't plan to do that anytime soon.
Marco:
By the time I would get to that, it'll probably be next year, and I'll get the second one.
Marco:
I also am worried with the current one.
Marco:
I think I mentioned this in last week's show, that forced touch on the iPhone is going to be so interesting and so compelling as a shortcut mechanism for
Marco:
that it's going to be weird getting used to that on the phone and then not having it yet on the iPads.
Marco:
So I would rather wait if I'm going to spend over $1,000 on a brand new, really high-end iPad that I don't really need right now.
Marco:
I would rather wait until next year to see if maybe it gets forced touch.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Casey:
I think you mean 3D touch, but I'm with you.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
Yeah, you're right.
Casey:
Even Federighi screwed it up.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Yeah, it's so true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you think anyone's going to make any money on apps on the iPad Pro?
Casey:
Because the friend of the show that we just mentioned, underscore David Smith, tweeted a link to a company.
Casey:
I don't recall their name, but the people who make Sketch, which apparently is a very popular app.
Casey:
They are basically saying, no freaking way we're going to touch the iPad Pro because we can't make any money on it.
John:
Yeah, that post kind of struck me the wrong way because we all know there are problems with the App Store and there are problems with the companies that have difficulty finding a way to make money and the price pressure.
John:
We've talked about these things a million times.
John:
But I think one of the least convincing...
John:
It's at least convincing because this app is Sketch and not Photoshop, I guess.
John:
But one of the least convincing things you can do is say this entirely new thing, like an Apple tablet with a pencil, which has not existed before.
John:
We are writing off because we assume it will be exactly like all of the other markets.
John:
And they're probably right.
John:
Like, I'm not saying they're wrong or anything like that.
John:
It's just...
John:
there are many reasons why it makes sense for them not to make the app uh maybe they don't have uh you know they have mac developers not ios developers you know that you can sell mac apps for more like all the things we've talked about or whatever but the idea that it is inconceivable and they're just entirely sure i guess they just they said what they're saying is that we can't risk it we think that there's not a market for a sustainable market for for ipad pro applications and we think that because we've judged there not to be a sustainable market for these applications on the previous ipads and on the phones and blah blah blah so on and so forth but
John:
It reads kind of like, you know, we understand the chicken egg situation.
John:
You go first and you go first with the hardware.
John:
And we say, yeah, no, I don't think so.
John:
Like someone is going to go first.
John:
Someone's going to try to make a go of it here.
John:
Maybe they're the suckers and they're going to all go out of business and not find out that they can't make money on the platform.
John:
But
John:
It's not particularly convincing to me for one company to say, because there are a bunch of good reasons for us not to make an app for the iPad Pro, it is a condemnation of the entire concept of there being a supportable pro application space.
John:
I think the iPad Pro has the best chance, maybe Apple TV is tied with that, the best chance to break through the thing that has caused the iOS pricing and business model to get pulled down so much.
John:
Because
John:
you can sell well there's two things here one you can sell more expensive things to professionals right that's what you're always looking for that's why if someone needs a mac app to do their job and they make a lot of money at their job they will give you a hundred dollars for this app that they use their job they will just do it even just for musicians people sell music applications even if these people don't make money doing music they love music
John:
They'll give you 50 bucks for a thing that lets them do something with their band.
John:
And, you know, like that will definitely happen much less so than trying to sell somebody like a little game or, you know, something more trivial or general interest.
John:
Right.
John:
So pro apps are good.
John:
And the second thing.
John:
This is a theory I've had for a while.
John:
I think it's still kind of true.
John:
The bigger the screen, the more money you can charge because bigger equals more money.
John:
I know that makes no sense logically, but in my experience, I've seen... It seems to me that people can be more convinced to... Maybe it's just a coincidence.
John:
Maybe it's not actually causation.
John:
It's just like...
John:
So it just so happens the computers have bigger screens and people use computers for their jobs and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But like what I was getting at was I'm thinking, can you sell an Apple TV app for more money because it's bigger?
John:
Setting aside things like video content where that's just, you know, you're not, it's not the screen as big as that you're buying video.
John:
Like I'm buying access to HBO.
John:
I'm buying access to the major league baseball or whatever.
John:
setting that aside can you charge more money because the screen is bigger or is it because apps that run on a bigger screen can have more features and people are going to pay for those features i don't know what the connection is but anyway i am not ready to entirely write off both the ipad pro and the apple tv as uh platforms where it is just as difficult to sell an application for more than a couple bucks as it is on ios
Marco:
Well, the big thing is going to be volume.
Marco:
It's will the iPad Pro sell in enough volume that it'll be worth developing high-quality apps for it?
Marco:
Because if it doesn't achieve really high volumes, and, you know, high volumes for an iPad are still very low volumes for an iPhone, but let's just say, like, you know,
John:
if it doesn't sell a lot if if a lot of these things don't sell by ipad standards it's going to be very hard for most companies to justify developing for it just on that basis alone before you even get to price don't you think volume works against it though because the high volumes is part of the reason why there's such downward price pressure because if you sell to almost everybody most people don't want to pay for software period but if you're selling a pro app you don't need like you know
John:
There are very few pros.
John:
How many people who are going to buy a $50 music app are there out there?
John:
For drawing applications on the iPad Pro, it's still chicken eggs.
John:
Someone has to make the software.
John:
Someone has to go first.
John:
Apple has made the hardware, and they hope someone makes the software.
John:
But how many professional artists are there in the world?
John:
How many people who use the styles to do their daily work drawing and designing things are there in the world?
John:
Not a lot.
John:
I think volume...
John:
That's not that you can't sell like 10,000 of them.
John:
I think you probably even need more of the Microsoft Surface numbers, but you don't need iPhone size numbers.
John:
So I don't know what the middle is there.
John:
If it just sells in merely normal iPad volumes, is that too few?
John:
But if it sells in merely normal iPad volumes, couldn't they sell...
John:
one to every designer of the entire world and still have tons left over.
John:
It's conceivable, I think, that it could sell.
John:
I mean, just look at the Mac.
John:
The Mac sells in vanishingly small volumes compared to the iPhone, and yet it is a sustainable platform for some companies to sell programs that people use to do their jobs on their Macs, and they pay astronomical amounts of money for them by the standards of iOS applications, like $20 whole for an application.
John:
It's unheard of.
Marco:
Well, that's true.
Marco:
However, Macs also have the advantage of an installed base already, where they don't sell as many units as before.
Marco:
However, suppose Apple made a new Mac with some interesting new screen shape or something, and you made an app that worked well on that.
Marco:
Well, there's also the millions and millions of other Macs that already exist in the world that can probably also run that app.
Marco:
So the sales volumes itself are a little bit of a bad example here.
Marco:
Also, I would argue that there's a lot more people who, quote, get their work done on a Mac than an iPad in these kind of content creation or professional kinds of fields.
Marco:
I don't know that offhand.
Marco:
However, that sounds very likely, if I can take a guess.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
um you know on the ipad pro to make a really good ipad pro app you need to really use that expansive screen space very well and also it would be nice if it worked well with the pencil i think that's going to be a huge differentiator because again i like the pencil idea i think that sounds very good and very compelling and very interesting however again there's going to be very few of these things in the market for a while so it's going to be hard just numbers wise now
Marco:
Assume they have a healthy install base.
Marco:
Assume it actually becomes reasonably possible to sell a decent number of $30 or whatever apps on this thing.
Marco:
Then the question is, can you actually build and sustain a business with the app store's pricing and trial and upgrade situation?
Marco:
And that is another question.
Marco:
You know...
Marco:
We've had iPads for five years now.
Marco:
Five and a half years now.
Marco:
And I know a lot of companies have struggled to bring that kind of business to the iPad.
Marco:
It's hard enough on the iPhone where you have tons of volume to make up for it.
Marco:
It's even harder on the iPad.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I don't think the iPad Pro alone can solve that problem.
Marco:
It can solve the first problem of, hey, let's get a bunch of people buying these things because they're really good.
Marco:
But how do you solve the second problem there if you're Apple?
Marco:
How do you solve the App Store pricing problem?
Marco:
Or do you not think that's enough of a problem to matter?
Casey:
I don't know what the right answer is.
Casey:
I do know that a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, wrote a really good piece about the Apple platforms becoming platforms rather than products.
Casey:
And I didn't get a chance to read it thoroughly, so now I'm assigning myself some homework to do so.
Casey:
But we'll put a link in the chat for both myself and for the listeners.
Casey:
I think that...
Casey:
I think that from what I did get to read of it, he made some really, really great points and that Apple seems to think that they can solve these problems by just creating new products.
Casey:
And that's not the case.
Casey:
Just like you said, Marco, creating a new product doesn't just fix all of these problems.
John:
Yeah, the reason the iPad Pro is interesting is because it's finally a new product with different features that, like, it changes a little bit of the equation.
John:
Like, if you're going to sell a $100 app for designers for the iPad without a stylus, good luck.
John:
Like, am I supposed to just swipe this with my finger or a big, smooshy ball of rubber or a hot dog or something?
John:
It's a non-starter.
John:
So suddenly things are more possible.
John:
This post from the sketch designers or sketch developers is so definitive.
John:
It's like,
John:
Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials.
John:
Like, they're just flat-out conclusion.
John:
The prices are unsustainably low, and the reason is no trials.
John:
And we all agree that, like, you know...
John:
based on the model that we know worked on the Mac, upgrade pricing, trials for very expensive applications, you can figure out if you like them, so on and so forth.
John:
That is a system that has already existed on the Mac that did work.
John:
Apple's contention, implicit contention with iOS has been,
John:
uh we can get rid of all the bad sides of that system uh while you know and make up for it by just being better in so many other ways make up for it in volume make up for it in an easier to develop platform make up for better user experience so more people buy your apps you know make up for it because people can just tap their finger on a piece of glass and buy your app really easily and we'll take care of the payments like
John:
And it's enough to be probably the most successful application platform ever created because it's so easy to buy applications.
John:
Far more people put apps on their phones than ever put apps on their computers volume-wise.
John:
It's just so easy to get an app.
John:
We talked about this before –
John:
There's lots of upside.
John:
But once you get into the realm of professional applications, applications that cost a lot of money to develop, applications that are always going to sell in smaller volumes, they're not Angry Birds, that you know there's only 700,000 people in the entire United States who even need this application, and I need to sell to 5% of them.
John:
And that's my entire user base.
John:
I'm going to charge each one of them $1,000.
John:
And I can't charge each one of them $1,000 every single year, I have to charge them $1,000 once and then $200 every year or two when I make major updates.
John:
And if I can't do that, it doesn't work for me and pick whatever numbers you want for the applications like
John:
I'm thinking back to the, the good old days of the I am rich application.
John:
Uh, in some ways that's kind of, I have a kind of nostalgia for the idea that, that that's how high the pricing would go.
John:
I know there are some high priced applications in iOS, uh, for very, very narrowly defined fields, but it's just, there's this big gulf like in the middle between free or almost free things and, you know, and things that are just really expensive and are being sold to companies that, that,
John:
It used to be on the Mac, there was and still kind of is a healthy place for applications that cost tens or hundreds of dollars that let people do their jobs better and let the developers support that application on an ongoing basis year after year after year, just working on that application, making it better, porting it to new platforms, knowing that their user base doesn't need to grow by leaps and bounds.
John:
So they will just continue to pay them a little bit of money each year for the new version of the whatever, because it helps them get their job done.
John:
um so i i sympathize with the sketch people but i really hope i really hope someone some poor sucker i guess uh runs the experiment and says uh well you know can i make a a business selling professional level applications for double digit or triple digit prices on the ipad pro not just like get an apple design award next year's wwc but five years from now still be selling the latest version of that application and have an actual company that runs with
John:
maybe more than one or two people selling an application that people really use that's what i think apple should be bragging about they always go up there and they brag about look at all these applications we have and look at this one it's beautiful and and uh you all love this app or whatever but
John:
Where are their success stories like, you know, Adobe Photoshop or BB edit for crying out loud or any application that's like this isn't just a flash in the pan popular application for a company that got bought by Facebook or Google or went out of business or got venture funding or whatever.
John:
But is it actually a sustainable business?
John:
And, you know, on the Mac, they have things like Omni Group at the very least.
John:
And on iOS, they have like, well, companies that can subsidize things like Microsoft and Apple itself and to some degree Adobe.
John:
And then a bunch of other one and two person shops who get really rich selling a game that sells to millions of people, which is great.
John:
Those games are great and everything.
John:
More power to them.
John:
but there's a dead spot in the middle for applications that could sell to a lot of people but are forced to sell for two dollars uh because of the real or imagined pressure to price that low and the platform is worse for off for it and uh i think users are worse off for it that's setting aside developers because developers can always do something else like i make a different application do you know developers are employable they'll be fine right
John:
It's just most disappointing for Apple and for users because users want better applications.
John:
And I think so does Apple.
John:
I think they would be able to brag more convincingly about the things that happen on their platform if it wasn't a new one every year.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have at least by the way the clock reads on the Skype call, we have had two hours of follow up.
Casey:
So I think we are pretty much tapped out.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Lynda.com and Automatic.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it in
Casey:
So Marco, did anything happen today?
Marco:
Barely.
Marco:
It almost happened tomorrow.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So you have a new thing.
Marco:
Yeah, I launched a new app.
Marco:
It's called Peace.
Marco:
It's an iOS 9 content blocker.
Marco:
And the big deal about it is... So it's an ad and tracker blocker.
Marco:
But the big deal about it is that I actually licensed the database from Ghostery.
Marco:
So this is powered by Ghostery, which is pretty cool, I think.
Marco:
I think it's the best database out there.
Marco:
Honestly, I tried a lot of them and really a lot over the summer.
Marco:
and I found them to be the best.
Marco:
So I went to them.
Marco:
I asked that they'd be interested in licensing it for a simple revenue share deal, and they actually said yes, which is amazing.
Marco:
And yeah, so we worked it out, and they're fun to work with and easy, which is, you know, they're a big company, so that was kind of a surprise for me.
Marco:
And yeah, great.
Marco:
All good stuff.
John:
If you couldn't have licensed the database, would you have made the app anyway?
Marco:
I had other databases in various stages of testing throughout the summer.
Marco:
And I had a really hard time finding one that was really, truly good.
Marco:
And not just some total mammoth thing, like massive number of rules, massive database size and complexity and everything.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
The bigger you make the rule set, the worse it impacts performance.
Marco:
And it is a pretty fast system, and you can do quite a lot of rules and have it not slow down too bad.
Marco:
But you do change things like how when you make a change to the rules, you have to send the system all of your rules again.
Marco:
So if you add a whitelisted site, you have to send all of your rules back to the system again.
Marco:
And that actually takes, with my rule set on an iPhone 6 with just the GoStreet database, that takes like two and a half seconds to do.
Marco:
The way you can tell how long it takes is if you use the open unrestricted extension, the way that works is it literally just sends an empty rule set, opens a Safari view controller, and then when the Safari view controller closes, it re-enables the regular rule set.
Marco:
And so you can tell when the SafariViewController closes, it says, restoring piece, dot, dot, dot, for a few seconds, and then that screen goes away.
Marco:
That is how long it takes to reload the content blocker rules.
Marco:
That is what that is waiting for.
Marco:
And so if you do a larger database, most of the big host files, the easy list, all the different sources of either ad block format or host format block lists...
Marco:
if you do those you tend to get like 10 000 entries for a good one and uh mine is 2 000 so it literally it loads for the most part pretty much five times more more quickly and then there is some you know some per page cost as well and even though the cost might be small it is still a per page cost to evaluate all those rules you know it tries to do smart things like building trees and you know building fast parsers and everything but
Marco:
It's still, you know, the fewer rules, the faster it is.
Marco:
So, um, I also found with the other rule sets, I had more compatibility problems.
Marco:
Uh, so, so like certain sites, like there's, there's a tracker, I think it's called Adobe Omniture.
Marco:
I don't know much about this stuff, about like the specifics of these things, but in the enterprise, exactly.
Marco:
It's also used on Apple site.
Marco:
And if you, if you don't, if you allow, uh, if rather if you block, uh, Adobe Omniture on Apple developer site, the site doesn't work.
Like,
Marco:
It's like you can't do provisioning profiles, stuff like that.
Marco:
It just doesn't work.
Marco:
Because certain sites will actually use various events triggered by these analytics packages to trigger page functionality.
Marco:
So if you disable some of these things, pages actually stop working, right?
Marco:
And Ghost3 does, you know, compatibility work.
Marco:
They're a big enough company.
Marco:
They have the resources to both hear about these things and to make exceptions.
Marco:
So their database is pretty sophisticated and like, you know, these rules should be exempted on these domains.
Marco:
Otherwise, things break, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
So, their data was just... It was better for me.
Marco:
It was just better.
Marco:
I did try... One of my crazy ideas, which I ran for about two weeks, was to just block all third-party JavaScript.
Marco:
Just all of it.
Marco:
And I found I had to already make a few little exceptions even just to make that work.
Marco:
One of the biggest ones was Squarespace sites.
Marco:
They would just break.
Marco:
Simple things like links and images.
Marco:
Squarespace hosts all of its scripts on a static Squarespace CDN domain, which is considered third-party if you look at our page template because we have our own domain.
Marco:
So any Squarespace site hosted on its own domain name would break without these certain exemptions made.
John:
And Google has jQuery hosting, and tons of people use that.
John:
So yeah, you can't blog all third-party because lots of stuff won't work.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And I even found so many sites that you wouldn't think... It was when I was trying to order my camera, and B&H, their site broke.
Marco:
The whole B&H site, you just can't view any product page on iOS with that enabled.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So there were so many things that broke with simpler rules like that.
Marco:
And then the bigger rule sets were primarily focused on hiding ads on PCs without regard to breakages, really.
Marco:
So they had a lot of those issues with breakages.
Marco:
They also just had these giant rule sets that were full of 5,000 entries for Russian porn sites.
Marco:
And it's like, do I really need that?
Marco:
Do I really need to waste thousands of entries on things like that?
John:
You need to block those ads to the X10 camera.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
I'm sure you saw that on a totally legitimate news site.
Marco:
So yeah, I mean, I tried lots of other databases and rule sets.
Marco:
I inquired about licensing because a lot of these things, like for instance, I saw a couple of the browser blockers.
Marco:
If you're free and open source, you can include a lot more host names and block list sources than if you are a commercial product.
Marco:
If you are a commercial app on iOS, there's a lot of these lists that you are not allowed to use by their license agreement.
Marco:
I did go to some of them and approach them for licensing.
Marco:
Most of them didn't respond.
Marco:
Some of them said no.
Marco:
Some of them said yes for X dollars a year.
Marco:
But I never found any that were both usable and were actually good enough, if that makes sense, except Ghostery.
Marco:
And that's why I went to them.
Marco:
I did not think they would say yes.
Marco:
I figured they're a big company.
Marco:
They have these plugins.
Marco:
They're going to want to do their own thing.
Marco:
turns out they don't want to do their own thing on iOS because the content blockers are so limited they can't do their core business function so they didn't really have anything ready for iOS 9 and I was and I had an app that needed a database and they had a database that needed an app so there you go
Casey:
That's pretty awesome.
Marco:
Yeah, it really worked out very well.
Casey:
To channel some friends of ours, I've been testing it for a couple of weeks now, and it is pretty darn good.
Casey:
And it's funny because I've been noticing that, especially at home when I'm doing more browsing for me rather than looking up things for work,
Casey:
I felt like my internet had been getting slower lately, and I couldn't put my finger on what it was or why it was.
Casey:
And between installing Ghostry on my Mac and installing Peace on my iOS devices, suddenly things seemed snappier again.
Casey:
And it very well could be that this is all in my head, but I feel like having these content blockers
Casey:
has really made things feel snappy like they did just a year or two ago.
Casey:
And so whatever content blocker you choose to run, whether it's a piece or something else, I strongly encourage you to run one because it really does make your browsing experience that much better, especially if you're on a limited data plan.
Casey:
You don't want to have to pull down all that superfluous information that really doesn't help you read what you're trying to read.
Casey:
So do what you got to do.
John:
we have more on this topic i think we'll save for the next show because i do want to talk more about things that marco had a post today about a piece but also kind of about the larger issue of ad blocking and uh tracking blocking all that stuff and of course he had posted previously about that as well so you should read those so you're ready as your homework listener for uh next week when we will probably talk more about uh ad blocking and all that stuff but uh
John:
In the meantime, I'm mostly upset that finally my iPad 3 has been left behind because none of the content blockers I've tried to work on it.
John:
They can't.
John:
They can't because of the, what is the requirement?
John:
A7?
John:
64-bit.
John:
64-bit.
John:
And is it just for content blockers 64-bit or does every submission have to be 64-bit now?
John:
It's content.
Marco:
The content blocker backend is 64-bit only.
John:
Oh, okay.
John:
So that's the, all right.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
what is the 64-bit they're finally accepting 64-bit only apps right but you can't you don't have to submit them that's just oh broadly speaking yep that's right okay anyway uh content blockers are all 64-bit if you have an ipad 3 like me you're sad uh which is kind of a bummer so now i really do need to get a new ipad
John:
oh my my ipad 3 is really showing its age now like when i i still do manual updates because i'm a nerd and i want to see what's updated and stuff uh so when i go to the app store updates tab and it's like five things need to be updated i hit update all and then i hit the home button and try to go to another app i don't know why i even bother because the ipad is going to be paralyzed while it's doing all those updates in the background even i'm just trying to browse a web page just everything is slow and creaky so yeah
John:
I need a new iPad, but yeah, I just installed a piece for, and we'll talk more about content blockers next week, but I am in favor of them.
John:
Short version.